His breath hitched, his heart stuttered. How's your head, Ramus? He blinked and the weight was there, it was always there, the extra weight behind his eyes that he should never have been carrying.

How's your head, Ramus?

Nomi glared at him. She looked as if she had just stepped from a cliff, and the fall would be a long, long way.

NOTHING CAN BE unsaid, Nomi thought. No backing out of this one. Perhaps if Timal had come back to me after he saw Ramus, we could have undone what he said. The lies. The cruel lies.

But not this.

“Does it ache?” she asked.

Every beat altered things, but this was when the world changed forever. For both of them.

“Have nightmares that don't feel like yours?”

His shock cut her, but the pain in her soul was not bad. It didn't feel like vengeance, not exactly. But the guilt she had suffered was breaking free, being shredded and whittled down by what Ramus had revealed to her.

“Something heavy, Ramus? Behind the eyes?”

But this all happened before Timal, she thought. She drove that down. It didn't matter. The vagaries of time had no place juggling with such sins.

“What do you know about what's wrong with me?” he said slowly, quietly.

Nomi sensed the Serians listening again, and she glanced right through the heat haze above the waning campfire. Beko was there, and the way he looked at her now was nothing like earlier.

“Nomi!” Ramus shouted. He stepped toward her and she stumbled back, expecting a blow that did not come. “What do you know?”

“I think you know already,” she said. “You're the one with the brains.”

He frowned, putting his left hand to his temple as if to question the thing growing in there. The cancer. “You gave me this?” His frown smoothed out, his hands fell to his sides and he grew terribly still. “How?” he asked. Not why, or when, but how. Ramus, ever the seeker of knowledge.

“I caught it from a steam vent in Ventgoria,” Nomi said. “I was tracing the track of an old vine-hanging field when the vent erupted. No sign of it one second, and the next . . . an explosion. Mud, rock, steam and gas, and something else from the ground. I didn't see or sense it at the time, but later I heard about these things from the Ventgorians. They're the eggs of giant mind-worms, things that twist up and down from and to the heart of Ventgoria. I . . . didn't understand. Still don't.” She was aware that she had an audience, but her words were only for Ramus. And herself. Expressing what she knew, putting it into order, made real what she had been living with for two years. It was like dragging a ravenous beast from the depths of a black pool and up into the sun. Revelation, realization and perhaps understanding. But at the same time, its full horror would be appreciated.