So tattered, so torn, so abused! Her mind was there, and she knew that he was there too, she knew because insight was all she had left. Her apparatus of consciousness had been slashed and shattered, the psychic bridges that were used to cross from pure spirituality to thought burned by something now absent. Trey pushed and sent comforting thoughts on ahead, trying to calm Alishia wherever she may have hidden away. Her mind was a deep, wide, expansive place, much more so than any he had seen before, and the light of her existence was like a candle in the great night sky; small, spluttering and all but invisible.

He pushed farther and crossed chasms. She saved me, he thought. He passed through gulfs that would have driven him mad, had he looked or extended his senses to feel them. She saved me.

And then he found Alishia, cowering behind the remnants of her own intellect.

Is it gone? Is it gone? Am I alone? Will it come back?

Alishia, it’s me.

Has it gone? It’s foul, it smells it hurts, has it gone? Will it come back?

Alishia, Rafe is a good person, he gave out no harm. He has magic in him, real magic!

Not him, it. It. Has it gone? Its hurts so much, it burns where it touched me and kills me, kills parts I never knew I had. Has it gone, Trey? Will it come back? Will it?

Alishia . . .

But he was losing her, she was dispersing and fleeing and hiding again, deeper down than he could ever go. She sounded like a little girl, afraid of the dark and being swallowed by it.

Trey pulled back, reigning in his senses until he was out of her mind and a mere observer again. He saw his own body slumped against the side of the cave, Alishia twitching on his lap, and at least now her eyes were closed.

Perhaps his presence had brought some measure of comfort.

Or maybe now she was dying.

Trey moved away quickly and passed by Rafe, resisting the temptation to reach out. He was terrified of what he would find in a mind such as his. The boy stared into the rain, stretching out his hand now and then to touch the curtain of water dripping down across the cave entrance, testing it, piercing it as if it were a shield between two realities.