There were no visible holes in the mesh. It was impossible. McFeen, cold sober now, knelt down beside the cage and inspected the mesh centimeter by centimeter. Everywhere it was whole and unbroken; he didn't think a flea could have got out through it.
He turned on the floodlights and gave the hold an equally thorough scrutiny. No, no Hyra. Not a Hyra anywhere.
Leaving aside the question of how they had got out through the mesh, where had they gone to? Number two hold, like the others, was hermetically sealed. And he knew no Hyra had gone past him when he had broken the seal on entering. The whole thing was impossible. He must be imagining it. After all, he hadn't counted them.
McFeen leaned against a bulkhead and pressed his fingers to his head. The pain in his frontal sinus was jumping again. Maybe he was still a little bit buzzed. He didn't think he was, but it was possible. That would account for a lot.
He looked at the cage once more. Wait, now, he had it. The reason it looked so much emptier was that the Hyra (ugh, how he loathed them—he'd never let Alice see how much) were all jammed together at one end, heaped up on one another, like a pile of oozing, pupilless eyes. Naturally the cage looked bigger when the Hyra were piled up like that. McFeen almost laughed in his relief.
He sealed the hole up carefully and went back to the cabin, his footfalls ringing unevenly. Alice was sitting up in her bunk. She had washed her face and pushed her hair out of her eyes. She nodded shortly at him when he came in. After a while she got up and began opening some soup.
They both felt better when they had eaten. Alice revived sufficiently to comb her hair and spray some make-up on. The pain began to die away in McFeen's head. He'd been a fool to get so excited over nothing. All the same, he was going into the hold and have another look at the Hyra. He pushed back his chair.
"Where you going, Mac?" Alice asked. She was gathering up the remains of their meal and putting them in the disposer.
"Two hold."