“Tell them what may happen if they seek to harm us,” said Derek. He stared directly at Seth, then at Gremt. His right hand was shaking as if palsied. His eyes flashed over all those across from him and then at me. “Tell them what might happen if they try to destroy us. They think they have us at their mercy here. I know they do. Well, they don’t.”

“You’re in no danger of us trying to hurt you!” Marius said. “No one here wants to hurt you. No one here wants to be hurt by you, either.”

“No, no danger at all here,” I said. “We would never attempt to destroy you. That’s the last thing we want. We felt that inviting you here like this would convince you of our trust.”

“No, there isn’t the slightest danger,” said Seth.

“We can’t be destroyed,” said Derek. His voice was uneven. He was clearly struggling in ways that hadn’t been easy to see before. “We can’t be destroyed unless you want to destroy everything in this world that is of value to you.” He clutched at Kapetria’s hand and held it tight. “You tell them.”

Kapetria was obviously unprepared for all of this but she seemed neither angry nor offended. She studied Derek for a long moment. Her eyelashes were thick and beautifully black and her beauty overall was distracting me as beauty so often does. If her beauty was incidental, if it wasn’t rooted in something profound inside of her, well, it could be mighty misleading, I thought.

“What Derek says is probably true,” Kapetria said. “If you hurt us, you risk hurting countless others. You risk hurting the world. I’m not trying to sound dramatically apocalyptic. Our bodies may contain elements that, once released, might destroy the whole world. Derek is not exaggerating. But why don’t I tell you the whole story?”

Every being present registered this, but the hard expression on Armand’s face did not change. He looked at me. Faint telepathic whisper: Containment, from which they can’t escape.

“Yes, please,” said Seth to Kapetria. “The whole story. We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. We need to know—.”

Welf, the silent one, nodded, those big drowsy eyes of his flashing for a moment, and his full sensuous mouth yielding to a small agreeable smile.

“It’s only seven o’clock now,” Kapetria said. “I can tell you everything before sunrise, if you’re ready to listen, and by the end you’ll understand what Derek means. We cannot be physically destroyed without considerable harm being done to everyone here and people who are not here. And by the end we will be prepared to go forward together.”

“I think this would be splendid,” said Marius. “This is what we want. I’m moved by your trust, that you want to tell us everything.”