Gremt smiled. Pandora laughed softly under her breath as she glanced at Arjun, but then she fell silent again, thinking, gazing up at Gremt.

She weighed all this calmly. Nothing he’d said shocked or surprised her.

“And you, Gremt … why is it that you want the best for us?” asked Arjun. He rose to his feet. “You have been so kind to me. You have comforted me. Why?”

Gremt hesitated. He felt a knot loosened inside him.

“I love you all,” he said in a low confidential voice. He wondered if he looked cold to them as he spoke. He was never entirely sure how his emotions registered on this made-up human face, even when he could feel the blood in his veins rushing to his cheeks, feel the tears rising in his eyes. He never knew for sure if all these myriad systems that he so well controlled with his mind were truly working as he wanted them to work. To smile, to laugh, to yawn, to weep—this was nothing. But to truly register what he felt inside his own true invisible heart—well, that was another matter.

“You know me,” he said to Pandora. The tears were indeed rising in his eyes. “Oh, how I have loved you.”

She sat in the peacock chair like a queen on a throne gazing up at him, the soft black silk hood making a dark frame around her radiant face.

“It was long, long ago,” he said, “on the coast of Southern Italy, and a great man, a great scholar of those times, died on that night in a beautiful monastery that he had built called Vivarium. Do you remember these things? Do you remember Vivarium? His name was Cassiodorus, and all the world remembers him, remembers his letters, his books, and most truly what he was, the scholar that he was in those days when darkness was closing over Italy.” His voice was rough now with his emotions. He could hear it breaking. But he went on, staring into her placid unwavering gaze.

“And you saw me then, saw me, a bodiless spirit, rise from the beehives in which I’d been slumbering, extended, and rooted through a thousand tentacles in the bees, in their energy, in their collective and mysterious life. You saw me spring loose at that moment and you saw me embrace with all my power the ludicrous figure of a straw man, a scarecrow, a thing of ridicule in a beggar’s coat and pants, with an eyeless head and fingerless hands, and you saw me weep in that form, weep and mourn for the great Cassiodorus!”

Red tears had risen in her eyes. She had written of this not long ago, but would she believe now that he was the one she’d seen? Would she remain silent?