“They don’t mean to harm you,” Mrs. Erickson said, recognizing Sanabalis’s voice although she had heard it so seldom. “They have been here, waiting. Waiting in the dark. Waiting to be released.”

“Who are they?” Teela asked, her voice less sharp.

“I don’t know, dear. I won’t know until they tell me. I can see ghosts, but they’re like any other stranger when we first meet; they have to tell me who they are, and I have to listen.” Before Kaylin could speak, she added, “Jamal has been part of my life since I was born. I know those children as well as I know myself.

“But Amaldi and Darreno I met as strangers. We’ve become friends, who might not have been had they been able to interact with anyone else. You must let go of my hand.”

“Kitling.”

Kaylin glanced at Teela. She read the Barrani Hawk’s expression and shook her head. “Sanabalis will turn me to ash.”

“Terrano will be there,” Teela replied. “Terrano will accompany her.”

Kaylin shook her head again. “If Mrs. Erickson needs to approach the...ghosts, she and I will go together.” To Mrs. Erickson, she added, “Would that be all right?”

Mrs. Erickson nodded; she did not once look at Kaylin.

Severn was in the back of Kaylin’s head, his concern deep but wordless, as it so often was. She knew he considered this a poor idea. Teela was bristling, but Terrano was clearly less certain; his gaze drifted to Sanabalis’s occupied body, and then returned to Mrs. Erickson as if she was the answer to a puzzle he had not known, until that moment, he was trying to piece together.

He had no intention of being left behind, but he made no attempt to reach for, or touch, either Kaylin or Mrs. Erickson—as if the words that encircled them both were a barrier through which he couldn’t safely pass.

Kaylin had been in this room before. She had looked into the altar at the top of a far-too-tall pillar. She understood that what might have been considered water by those who viewed it was actually the spilled blood of the Ancients—blood that was not, as the blood of even Dragons or Barrani, red.

She had had no sense at that time that the Ancient had bled to death, which made the blood itself something that was alive in some fashion. The Ancients weren’t mortal, but they weren’t Immortal as Kaylin understood immortality, either.

There was no guarantee that the ghosts trapped here—just as Jamal and his friends were trapped—were in any way related to the Ancients. But Jamal had not possessed Kaylin, either.

“What do they look like to you?” Kaylin asked Mrs. Erickson.

“People, dear.”

“People like Amaldi and Darreno?”