She leaned over the railing, staring out at the starlight on the still water. The cool night breezes tugged at her braids, and the lanterns behind her cast her shadow out over the surface of the ocean. She reached out with one hand in a futile effort to touch her reflection.

"Can you keep your friend from doing something stupid?"

She pulled her hand back abruptly, trying not to blush. "My friend?" she repeated, not turning around.

"The telepath," Sanaro's voice prompted impatiently. "Can you keep her from doing something stupid?"

She frowned a little. "Her name is Aura," she said, looking over her shoulder at him. She tried not to let her disappointment show when she realized he was alone. "And no, probably not."

He nodded curtly and turned away without another word.

"Wait," she said, starting after him automatically. "Why? What's going on?"

"She challenged Delphinius," Sanaro answered. He vaulted over one of the loading gates, not bothering to unlatch it. "They're already gone."

She pushed the gate open and followed him. She hesitated when he settled into one of the student flits, but when he started the engine and disengaged the clamps she could see he had no intention of waiting. She invited herself on board, catching the back of his seat as the flit shook itself free of its moorings and started to turn toward the open ocean.

"Where are you going?" she demanded, half-falling into the seat beside him as the flit leapt forward. Her words were drowned out by the roar of the engine, and she flinched as they barely avoided colliding with a returning craft.

Eyes straight ahead, Sanaro handed her a headset and motioned for her to put it on. She did, somewhat awkwardly, and she saw him tap his earpiece. She mimicked the gesture, and suddenly she heard his voice in her ear. "I'm going after them, of course."

"Why?" she asked, surprised at his matter-of-factness.

"Because Delphinius isn't that good," he answered tightly. "And Aura is reckless."

She felt a twinge of nervousness. "You think he might get hurt?"

"I don't see how he could not."

He said nothing else, and the only other thing she wanted to know was something he couldn't answer anyway. They rode in silence save for the noise of the engine and the rush of the wind, and after a few minutes away from the lanterns of the surface party her eyes began to adjust to the darkness. It was then that she realized she could make out the cliffs silhouetted against the horizon.

She glanced over at the controls, hoping for a glimpse of the racers, and she heard Sanaro swear. "What?" she asked, looking up automatically. She could see nothing but sea and shadows, so she returned her attention to the scanning field on the pilot's console.

"They're at Rey." Sanaro, too, was looking ahead as though he could make something out in the starlit darkness. "There's no moon, and he agreed to a challenge at Rey. Sometimes I wonder that Delphinius has lived as long as he has."

Now she could see the single craft symbol on his display, but she didn't understand what it meant. "Why is there only one? Where's the other flit?"

"That's not them. That's probably Cen, at the finish line."

She hadn't heard Sanaro sound so serious since she'd met him. Deadpan, yes, but genuinely serious? She wondered absently how he and Delphinius had come to know each other.

She heard a strident tone coming over her headset just as the engine noise started to diminish a little, and she finally caught sight of another flit, approaching fast from somewhere dead ahead. As their flit slowed further, though, she realized that the other was stationary and it was only they that were coming up on it at such a tremendous rate of speed.

She saw Sanaro reach up to touch his earpiece again, and then she heard him saying something that clearly wasn't directed at her. "Give me their coordinates."

She fumbled with her headset, locating the wideband selector just in time to catch the end of Cen's response. "--can't interfere."

"The hell I can't," Sanaro retorted. "I'm not going to let my friend be bullied into getting himself killed!"

"I'm sure he'd be glad to know you have so much confidence in him," Cen's voice replied.

"He's a fighter pilot!" Sanaro practically shouted. "He's not used to a flit!"

"Then he shouldn't have accepted the challenge."

Despite his words, two sets of coordinates appeared on Sanaro's display, trailing two flit symbols. Specs appeared on the tracking readout, too, but they didn't mean much to her.

Apparently, however, they meant something to Sanaro. He hesitated over the engine controls, his features twisting into a frown in the dim light of the faintly glowing screen. "Cen," he began.

Simultaneously, Cen swore. "Aura!" The other didn't bother to localize the broadcast. "Get out of there!"

"What--"

Sanaro pointed, as though it would do her any good. "Flit malfunction," he said tersely. "Her engine balance is way off."

Beside them, Cen's flit sprang to life, and Sanaro smiled grimly. "It's not so funny when it's his girlfriend," he muttered under his breath. Their craft chased Cen's around the edge of the Rey field, heading for the racers as fast as they could go.

It wasn't fast enough. Only seconds later one of the flit symbols on the forward display flashed orange, then red, and then, to her horror, the symbol disappeared altogether. "Sanaro?" she asked uncertainly.

"Flit's gone." His earlier alarm was gone, and he seemed almost nonchalant. "Must have overloaded the engine. Hope she didn't hit anything when she ejected."

She frowned worriedly, not liking that pronouncement no matter how calmly it had been delivered. She tried not to fidget, knowing the flit was already going full out. The time-to-intercept countdown on the tracking readout seemed to slow down the closer they got.

Finally, though, the glint of a flit in the distance caught her eye, and Sanaro cut their speed quickly as their flit dove into the field. Cen reached it first, and the few seconds after their delayed arrival were nothing but a blur.

Aura was standing in Delphinius' flit, her long wet hair defying the wind's attempts to lift it away from her shoulders. Cen's flit had latched onto the side of Delphinius', and he was demanding an explanation that neither of them seemed concerned with providing. Delphinius was beside Aura, his arms folded as he gave whatever she was saying his full attention.

In that first moment as they slid across the water and came to a stop within touching distance of the other flits, she couldn't help noticing that neither Delphinius nor Aura seemed particularly shaken by what had happened. They were so collected that they might have been out for a leisurely ride rather than picking up the pieces of a race that had ended disastrously.

She lifted her chin, trying to suppress the feeling of being hopelessly out of place. *They're just students,* she thought fiercely. They weren't that much older than her, no matter that they seemed to have a daunting degree of self-possession.

"You would have won," Delphinius said, his voice penetrating her thoughts at last.

"Yes," Aura agreed without rancor. She regarded him with what might have been the smallest amount of respect, and Cetaci couldn't help wondering what had happened. "But the fact remains that I did not. I concede the challenge."

"It was incomplete," Delphinius reminded her. "I didn't win anymore than you did, and I won't accept a concession."

"Someone tell me what happened," Cen demanded. "I suppose we're going to have to come up with an excuse for losing this flit, too, so I might as well have something to go on."

Cetaci's eyes widened. She hadn't even thought about explaining the disappearance of the flit... but Cen sounded as though they might have had to do it before. She didn't have any idea how often Aura raced, though it was apparently more often than Delphinius.

"Student flits," Aura said disgustedly. "Mine would have taken half again that speed."

"The engine overloaded," Delphinius offered, his gaze suddenly settling on her. He looked startled and even a little embarrassed to see her there, though she couldn't imagine why. "The flit slammed into a hazard just before it went up. I hope it wasn't a reef, or we're going to hear about that."

"Boulder," Aura corrected. "Don't forget to erase that log."

Delphinius looked a little uncomfortable at that. "That's a small problem, actually. I already tried."

Aura just shook her head, leaning past him to touch the recorder feed. It didn't respond, and she tried it again. "You're right," she said, sounding surprised. "It's stuck."

"Short of destroying the recorder," Sanaro said, not sounding terribly concerned, "is there anything we else we can do to delete it?"

"I can do it." She surprised herself by speaking up, but when four pairs of eyes turned toward her she only hoped it was the truth. All of them but Sanaro had reason to know how little experience she had with flits.

"Ci's good with computers," Aura agreed at last. She held out a hand to help her bridge the distance as Cetaci perched hesitantly on the edge of Sanaro's borrowed flit.

Even with stabilizers, the craft bobbed a little, and she felt Delphinius catch her other arm as she stumbled onto the deck of his flit. She pulled away as soon as she regained her balance, remembering his touch in the laser arena and not wanting him to know she was still thinking about it.

"How can you do anything with it if the whole interface is inactive?" Cen wanted to know, watching her crouch down in the pilot's seat.

"I'm not going to do anything with it," she said, trying to ignore the way Delphinius was leaning on the back of her seat. He was probably just watching to see what she would do, but she didn't dare glance back and find out. "I'm just going to wipe it."

"How?" Delphinius inquired. His tone was only curious, not disbelieving.

She smiled a little to herself, rerouting the scanner controls so that they looped in on themselves. Her sister had shown her how to erase the tamper-resistant diver logs once, and it had seemed a useful thing to know. "Same thing that happened to Aura's engine. I'm going to overload it." She turned the scanner up to maximum gain and listened to the feedback whine louder and louder until it broke off and the scanner screen went blank.

"In other words," Sanaro said, sounding amused, "you destroyed it."

"Just everything that was in the recorder." She tried to sound casual rather than defensive. "The recorder will still work, once someone replaces the data chip." She broke the makeshift routing loop, and a moment later the scanner came back online.

"Thanks, Ci." Aura sounded genuinely appreciative. "I really don't need another flit violation this month."

"You don't need another violation this *year*," Cen informed her. He was helping her into his flit when Cetaci turned around, and she was just in time to catch Aura's smile.

"You're just jealous," she told Cen. "You haven't done anything remotely exciting in... how long, now?"

"I still love you," Cen reminded her. "Doesn't that count?"

"Want a ride?" Delphinius offered, interrupting her none-too-subtle eavesdropping. "It's the least I can do, after you blew out the log for me."

Her attention diverted, she frowned at him.

"What?" he asked, when she didn't answer. "What did I say?"

She was momentarily prevented from replying by the noise of Cen's engine as it powered up. Sanaro's flit echoed it a moment later, and she waved absently at him. Delphinius followed her gaze and nodded, apparently responding to some gesture his friend had made. The other flit turned away, disappearing into the dark just after Cen and Aura had gone.

As the sound of other the other vehicles faded into the distance, their isolation was suddenly an inescapable reality. They were actually standing out under the stars, in the middle of both the ocean and the night, alone. She supposed, somewhat idly, that if nothing else she would find out whether his motives were as innocent as they seemed.

"So," he said at last. He sounded a little awkward, and he made no move toward her. It occurred to her then that she was staring at him, and that he seemed a little disconcerted by it, but she didn't look away.

"I'm not speaking to you," she informed him abruptly.

"Really." He gave her an odd look that bordered on a smile, and she frowned again. He could be terribly condescending every now and then, and she hadn't decided yet whether she found it charming or irritating. "And why not?"

Irritating, she decided without hesitation. "Because that was stupid!"

He blinked. "What?"

"Rey is the most dangerous field at the Falls!" Even she knew that, from things her sister had said and the way Sanaro had reacted when he realized where they were. "A little less luck and Aura could have been killed tonight!"

He actually laughed, which only annoyed her more. "Luck?" he repeated, grinning at her. "She's ten times the flitter I am. If you were going to worry about someone, you might as well have worried about me."

She glared at him. "What makes you think I didn't?"

He hesitated, his grin fading a little as he returned her stare. "That... was nice of you," he said uncertainly, as though he wasn't sure whether she meant it or not.

"No," she replied firmly, determined not to let the adorable look of confusion on his face overwhelm her. "It's not nice. It's aggravating. She's my sister's best friend; you're just some guy I met at graduation."

"I'm glad I made such an impression on you," he said wryly.

Spreading her hands to the sides, she pointed out, "Well, I am here."

He just looked at her for a moment, then finally he just smiled and dropped into the seat next to her. "I don't understand you," he admitted, not taking his eyes off of her. "But I really like you."

She couldn't repress her smile at that, and for just a moment she thought she could see her reflection in his eyes. It was odd, but the image she saw there was prettier than the one she'd seen in the water earlier.