That voice! It was as real as the wind he felt abruptly on his face. He knew then that he knelt on some dark ground with . . . with haze turning luminous blue all around. And he remembered, really remembered being picked up by a hylighter. Most precious memory: He nursed it as though it were his only child. Memory: a shimmering expanse of sea, narrow ribbon of coast winding itself out of sight, the most rugged mountains of Pandora lifting from the sea and plain—Black Dragon.

“Look up, Raja Thomas, and see how the child becomes father to the man.”

He tipped his head and saw ripplings of bright yellow and orange in the blue mist. A whistling song astounded his ears. It was a small hylighter directly overhead in the mist. Tentacles brushed the ground around him. The mist began to thin, pushed by the breeze he could feel on his skin. He smelled floral perfumes. Visibility moved outward through air thick and warm with water vapor. He looked right and left.

Jungle.

Without knowing how it came about, he understood his surroundings: a large crater nestled in black rock, a captive cloud layer creating an inversion with protected warmth beneath the crater’s rim.

One of the hovering hylighter’s tentacles snaked toward him, touched the back of his left hand. It felt as warm and soft as his own flesh. A small trickle of condensation ran down the back of his neck. He looked up at the hylighter. Another tentacle dripping condensation dangled directly above him.

Calmness fled.

What’s it going to do to me?

His gaze moved all around: warm blue mist.

Crack!

Far overhead, a bright flash of lightning flared horizontally across the haze. He felt the prickling presence of it along the hairs on the back of his neck and arms.

Where is this place?

“Nest.”

He felt that he was not really hearing that voice. No . . . it played on his aural centers the way Ship’s voice played, but it was not Ship.

Still, he sensed reality in what his eyes reported. A hylighter tentacle touched his hand; another hovered over him. The jungle remained right out there. Perhaps he was seeing what he desired most: the legendary refuge, the place of the horn of plenty, where there were no worries and no passage of time: Eden.

I’ve taken refuge in my own mind because of Ship’s decision to end us.

He ventured another look at the mist-wrapped jungle all around—mottled clumps of trees and vines with odd colors hidden in the green.

“Your senses do not lie, Raja Thomas. Those are real trees and vines. Do you see the flowers?”

The colors were blossoms—red, magenta, draping cascades of golden yellow. It was all too perfect, a delicate fiction.

“We find the flowers quite pleasant.”

“Who . . . is . . . talking . . . to . . . me?”