25. Trouble Follows

Bob and his group arrive at the town of Elbow during a festival, but discover they've been deliberately led into an ambush by armed Quinlans with trank guns. They escape by using superhuman speed and parkour abilities to reach a rooftop, then escape the town by diving underwater and swimming to the next segment boundary. They surface in a different segment with inverted day-night cycles and proceed to the town of First Stop to regroup and investigate.

The group arrives at Elbow and notices oddly long directions from a helpful local. Garfield's map sense confirms they were led in a circle. When they attempt to leave, more than a dozen armed Quinlans emerge from alleys and doorways, some carrying trank guns. The group jacks their mechanical bodies into overdrive, leaps over the armed Quinlans with superhuman jumps, and flees at maximum speed through the streets. They escape by climbing a building and reaching its roof, where they deploy roamers to monitor their pursuers. After the ambushers leave, they descend through the building and escape via an alley. In their VR meeting, they deduce they were specifically targeted, suggesting either the Administrator, Skeve and his contacts, or Skeve's attackers are responsible. They discuss whether to allow capture to gain information but decide against it as too risky. The group escapes by swimming underwater at high speed toward the segment boundary. They pass through narrow straits in mountains housing diaphragm doors at the segment boundary and emerge in a segment with inverted day-night cycles. They dock at First Stop, a sizeable city, and split up to avoid detection. Bill watches the docks, Garfield finds lodging, Bridget searches for a library, and Bob frequents pubs for information. Bob discovers the town has meat other than fish. They reconvene and share findings: the pub crawls yielded nothing about a Resistance, but Bridget's library research reveals the Quinlans believe they originally overpopulated a bounded world and were scattered by a god. She learns of an Administrator and 'Crew' who maintain order through scattering violators, suggesting a secret government structure. They plan to leave First Stop for Three Lagoons on the next river system. While traveling via riverboat with other sabbaticals, Bob encounters Kar and his companions, who represent a faction content with Heaven's River's paradise and dismissive of both the Resistance and concerns about losing civilization. Bridget theorizes that without selection pressure, Quinlan intelligence could degrade through mutations favoring smaller brains, a possible unintended consequence of the Administrator's design. Bob internally wrestles with whether he can simply ignore this civilizational risk while pursuing his mission to retrieve Bender.