At the moment when Kapetria had described the explosion of Bravenna, I saw the same images that I’d seen repeatedly in my dreams. Others at the table had seen the same.

And at that point, the point where Amel in Kapetria’s story had cried out, I felt a searing and inexplicable pain in my head.

That pain had leveled somewhat but it was still with me, and it produced a deep sense of alarm in me that I tried desperately to conceal from everyone else. I could not recall Amel ever causing physical pain in me. Yes, he’d tried to move my limbs more than once, and I’d felt a tingling and cramping in the limb. But that had not been pain. This was pain. And I knew perfectly well that the human brain had no pain receptors, and that brain tumors cause pain in humans because of the pressure they create on pain-sensing blood vessels and nerves inside the human brain.

So how was my invisible friend causing this pain? I wasn’t going to ask him because others at the table would know that I was asking him, and I just didn’t want them to know what was going on.

Amel gave me to know now—pain or no pain—that he wanted to ask Kapetria a question and to talk to her.

But Fareed immediately started to ask her any number of questions about luracastria and generating Replimoids that I didn’t understand. The others all seemed absorbed in this—a discussion of thermoplastic and genomes, of the absolutely remarkable strength of spider silk in the natural world, and so forth and so on. Kapetria clearly loved it, this pure scientific talk replete with abstractions of dizzying opacity, and I could see Seth loved it and to some extent so did David. Gregory too was enjoying it. But I wanted to speak.

“Interrupt,” said Amel, “and now.” There was a sudden pain in my right hand, and then my hand jumped on the table. Kapetria stopped in midsentence and turned to me.

“Amel wants to ask you a question,” I said uneasily.

She was riveted. “Please, what is he saying!” she asked. She seemed hardly able to contain herself. Derek, Welf, and Garekyn were equally eager to know.

“There’s something I have to tell you first,” I said. “This spirit sometimes doesn’t tell the truth.”

A searing pain behind my eyes nearly blinded me. I tried to lift my right hand to cover my eyes, and I couldn’t. The pain intensified so that I found myself rising out of the chair, and pushing the chair backwards. I’d never known a pain inside my body of this intensity, and I was forced to close my eyes! I made some involuntary sound.

“All right, you scoundrel!” I whispered. “Stop it, or I won’t tell her the question! You understand?”