You can't help the way your eyes keep flitting towards Riccin. They're stepping forward, ominous as a thundercloud, and the scratches on their face are bleeding three steady streams of gold.

There's no weapon in their mitts, but they're big enough they don't need a weapon!

"You need to focus." You can feel the tingle of your psionics on the back of your head as Castor pushes it down, gently. "Don't worry about them. Just think of hive."

"I can't focus," you whine, and Pheres is looking worried.

"Think of the thing you were making," Castor insists. "With the bones, and the hair, and the shells. And your collection. And your shelf. And.."

You spend so much time at your little table, working on your toys. They're not the sort of things you see in the shops, when Mardie takes you strolling through the aboveground city, but you're proud of them: of the little figurines with their joints and pinions, of the tools you use to make them, of the shelf cobbled together to hold them... it's always in the back of your mind, and it's easy now to pull it to the forefront.

You see, rather than feel, the moment that the picture clicks. Pheres's eyes widen, his eyebrows shoot up and he beams at you, hard enough that his eyes go all squinty. "You did it," he says, marvelling, and then: "Hold on tight."

The world goes white.