I couldn’t stop seeing Mekare’s empty shell of a body. Was it all luracastria? And does the subatomic luracastria transform the cells to a more resilient and ever-perfecting luracastria that becomes at last immune to the sun, almost entirely immune, except for me, the host of the brain of Amel?

Inside me, he made no response to this.

Carefully cradling Rose in my arms, I rose to my feet and placed her carefully on the settee. I kissed the top of her head.

“Whatever happens,” I said as I looked from her to Viktor and finally to Louis, “I will fight for us and who we are. We are the strange flowers of this entity, but it is through us that he’s discovered himself, and he knows that I love him, and I love him all the more with every discovery about him, and I know that he must love us, must know—.”

Love you.

“And there is no reason,” I went on, “for this to end for us. There is no way right now that Kapetria or the other Replimoids could conceivably want it to end for us; they are not waiting with scalpels in hand to free him from me because they have no place to put him.”

This is true.

“Now, I’m going to go back upstairs and work with the others towards some sort of solution.”

“Where have they gone?” Louis asked. “When I woke, I was told some of them left the village at about two o’clock, and that the others remain here to await some action against Rhoshamandes.”

“That’s correct,” I said. “Twelve of them left. Twelve. And the elder four remain.”

“You mean they increased their numbers in the space of one day?” asked Louis.

“Apparently,” I said. “I suspect each one of them generated another. That would make a total of sixteen. Subtract the four elders and you have the twelve who left, two of whom were women, and all the rest males. I was getting word on all this earlier while I was still in the crypt.”

I could see the mingled revulsion and alarm in their faces.

“They don’t suffer anything when they multiply, do they?” asked Rose. “They simply do it.”

“How can we know?” I asked. “But what is the point of becoming alarmed about this? The fact is they could have done this anytime easily. What do they require but a safe room in which the process can take place?”

I had thought when I first awakened that it would be our task to communicate what had been said in the conference room to others within the Court, but Marius and Gregory had already done this. And the news had been traveling fast.