"I do not know. As you say, Kira did what we would have done. Even waking us to explain might have cost too much time when they had to get as far from here as they could before the Urth ship realized what Jason had taken." Alain gazed around the room, at the many objects that his daughter had left here, remembering her so much smaller and younger, feeling another pang of fear for the girl who like all children had grown up seemingly overnight.

And as he looked around, an image appeared before him. He stared at it, trying to fix every detail in his memory before it quickly faded.

"What was it?" Mari asked. "I know that look. Your foresight showed you something."

"I saw Kira, running along the flank of a mountain, her Mechanic weapon in her hand," Alain said, still looking at the spot where the vision had briefly appeared. "Someone was with her. A young man. Jason, I think. I cannot be sure."

"She was being chased?" Mari stared at him. "There aren't any mountains nearby. Could you tell which range she was at?"

"No. It was not the rough areas in the inland of Altis," Alain said. "But the mountains could have been anywhere else except for those around Ringhmon."

"Kira isn't crazy enough to go anywhere near Ringhmon! How long do we have, Alain? Can you guess from the vision?"

"It did not feel far into the future," Alain said. "Months, I think. Not years. Kira had not aged that I could tell. It is odd…"

"What's odd?" Mari demanded.

"The boy with her…at first I thought he did not feel like the boy Jason, but then I think he did have the feel of that boy. If it was Jason, there was something different about him."

Mari nodded. "If he's with Kira, he'll either change for the better, or she'll kill him."

"You are joking," Alain said, not sure if that was so. "What will we tell the people from Urth when they come seeking Jason?"

Mari did not answer, turning her head to look out the window again. "Speak of the Dark One. Here they are. No time to come up with a cover story. We'll use our usual plan while we're talking to them."

"The plan where we make it up as we go along? It has served us well for twenty years." Alain nodded toward the outside. "The people from Urth do not fear us. They will try to overawe us."

"I've seen that, too," Mari said. "I've had experts try to overawe me, without much success on their part. As for fear, if anything happens to Kira because of them, they may find out just how much they should fear us." She picked up the note from Kira, folded it carefully, and placed it in an inside pocket of her jacket.