There were nine children here, and three caretakers, and Jake. Eight of the children, ranging in age from one to eight years old, had been exposed to Nexus in the womb, most of them repeatedly. Once a mother felt her unborn child’s mind through Nexus, most felt a strong draw to take Nexus again, to touch the half-formed thoughts of the little being growing inside themselves once more.

The children were enchanting, vexing, confounding. Most of them were scarred in some way. They acted out at times, testing her, bickering with each other, being petulant or disobedient or just stubborn. But they were also radiant at a level that shone right through their scars and the trouble they caused. Their use of Nexus was instinctive, fluent in a way that Sam would never be. They communicated with each other more in thoughts than words, in blurs of impressions and ideas often too fast for her to follow. And she could hide nothing from them. They knew her inside and out. The touch of their minds made her spirit soar. She couldn’t get enough of them.

The ninth child, Sarai, was different. Twelve years old, she’d been four when she’d drunk one of the vials she’d seen her mother drink with one of the “uncles” who paraded through their lives. The drug had lodged in her brain just as surely as if she’d been exposed to it in the womb.

Sarai had had a hard life, her home a never-ending stream of men who paid to take her mother in body and mind, their brains flushed with Nexus as they fucked, or worse. More than once she’d lain in her bed, terrified as she felt men hurt her mother, use her cruelly with their minds connected so they could feel her pain and degradation.

She’d learned to shut it out. Mostly.

Sarai was nine when she first slipped, and a john noticed her mind, and wanted her too. Her mother had thrown the man out, yelling and screaming until neighbors had come to the door and he’d left. And the next day, Sarai’s mother took her to temple, and begged the monks for help for her special daughter. Four months later, the nine year-old Sarai had arrived here, the safe and loving home she’d never had before. She was more fluent with Nexus than Sam would ever be, but less so than the children who’d gestated with it. A bridge between generations.

And now Sarai was on the verge of becoming a young woman. She was the same age that Sam’s sister had been, when… when everything had gone to hell at Yucca Grove.

Sam loved Sarai most of all.