“That has never been an option,” said Marius night after night as he addressed the company in the ballroom. “Even when they came to us, there were others hidden somewhere, likely multiplying beyond reckoning. While the embassy of Replimoids was with us, it multiplied. We know of nothing that limits their individual or collective ability to replicate. For all we know there are hundreds of them now, and possibly thousands. So whom are we to hunt down, and seek to destroy?”

Marius didn’t attempt to defend our conviction that we could not morally exterminate the Replimoids. But we, the inner circle, never wavered in this regard. Besides, they had done nothing yet. They had not even made a threat against us. And if and when they did, could we not protect ourselves?

Our vaults were so strong, it would require explosives in mass quantity to disrupt them during the daylight hours; and it was inconceivable that the Replimoid tribe, so distinctive physically, would come here with the strength of a battalion to breach the castle doors and crypts. The villagers would panic at the first sounds of explosives. They’d summon the forces of the mortal world from far and wide.

Whatever they were, and whatever they were destined to be, the Replimoids surely were fearing exposure just as we had always feared it; and though we had triumphed in hiding in plain sight in a world convinced we were fictional, the Replimoids, once captured, imprisoned, and examined, simply did not have our formidable gifts to help them escape from mortal bonds and literally burn up all traces of their cell matter that might remain in mortal hands.

“Why don’t we expose them?” asked the young ones. “Why don’t we turn the forces of the world loose on them?”

“Because they could in turn expose us,” said Marius, answering some form of this question almost every single night.

As for the vial of blood which Kapetria had given to Fareed, he could find nothing in it that was directly helpful to what he had to do, though its makeup puzzled him. He spoke of its having five times the density of folic acid as human blood. He talked of other chemicals, of breaking down the baffling DNA, of mysterious components for which he had to make new names. When, through me, he put the question to Amel as to what distinguished Replimoid blood from human blood, Amel wouldn’t answer. I don’t think Amel knew how to answer. Or something about the question aroused deep currents of feeling in him that he couldn’t bear.

Amel certainly had no idea as to how to solve the problem of the connection, that was clear. Whether he might ever be the great scientist of Atalantaya again, no one could know; but he was not the Great One now.