Jedao also goes still, but it's a coiled, catlike stillness, light on his feet, tense in his shoulderblades, poised to spring. His head turns slowly, eyeing a fissure of darkness slanting away to one side.

You don't need to come this way, Jedao murmurs, through tiny gravitational ripples, in case the huge, elongated creature shifting its weight in the tunnel below can understand him. For a moment, he hopes he's been heard - then he feels it move, horribly fast for something so massive, with a sleek slithering eel-like scrabble through the thin stone passage, moving too fast for Jedao to risk running back and hoping to get past the intersection in time.

"This way," he yells, and springs forward, grabbing Eiffel's wrist as he all but flies farther down the path, toward a mess of branchings up ahead. One of them has to be too small for it.