Rhita felt better, physically if not mentally. The despair faded with an odd sensation of hot chill that diminished with the overhead glow, now cinnamon. Other lights came on, vague and soothing, in the olive gloom.

“Am I on Earth?”

“You are within what you call the Way.”

Her breath shuddered and she suppressed a moan. That meant nothing and everything to her. Could she believe them? “Are my friends alive?”

“They are here with you.”

That, she decided, was evasive.

“Are they alive?” she asked again.

The shadow stepped forward, its face falling within a nimbus of light. She shrank back, sensing very strongly this was not a dream or an illusion, but a physical being. The face was masculine but without much character, smooth-skinned, narrow-eyed. Not a face she would look at twice in a crowd. It was neither godlike, nor some monstrous horror. It wore a jacket and pair of pants similar to that worn by the soldiers she had traveled with…years ago, if that wasn’t a lie.

“Would you like to speak with them?”

“Yes,” she said, breathing more rapidly. She held her hand up to her face; it felt the same. She had not been changed; why should she expect such a thing? Because her captor looked human?

“All of them?” the Jart asked.

She looked down for a moment, lips moving. “Demetrios and Oresias,” she said.

“Allow us some time, please. We discard nothing.”

36

Thistledown

“I hadn’t expected to see you again,” Suli Ram Kikura picted at Olmy, her symbols cool blues and greens. Olmy smiled enigmatically and followed Korzenowski and Mirsky into the corporeal meeting area reserved for Ram Kikura’s fellowship project. Befitting the Terrestrials’ home surroundings, the room had been decorated in mid-twentieth-century industrial boardroom—spare metal and wood chairs, a long wooden table, bare bone-white walls, with a display board on one end. “Excuse the primitive conditions,” Ram Kikura apologized in speech.

“Brings back memories,” Lanier said, catching the chill between the advocate and Olmy. Olmy seemed to take it in stride; but then, Lanier had never seen him nonplussed. “I spent many a long hour in rooms that looked like this.”

“Our Earth guests are still in city memory. We’re trying to repair a complete fiasco,” Ram Kikura said. “Karen will join us in a few minutes. From what she tells me, some unholy alliances have been forged the past couple of days. The Nexus has decided to re-open the Way?” She pointedly avoided Olmy’s eyes.

Korzenowski stood by one of the chairs, fingering it with a puzzled expression. “Yes,” he said, coming out of his brief reverie with a quick blink. “A Nexus advisory subject to Hexamon voting. Precints and Thistledown only.”