Barad, the agitator from the mines of Kidnaban, a rebel, a seditious, treasonous, poisonous barb in her side—a blind fool—was right. She was alone. She had been for years. Maybe she had been since the day she saw herself in the fingers of her dying mother’s hands so many years ago, when she was but a girl, when first she learned how callous the world was. That was then.

The things to come she could not do alone. She did not face the future for herself and she did not want to face it by herself. She did not have to. She just had to take from one place and give to another. In this case, she had to take from her family’s blood. She understood that better now. The voices helped her. The song made more sense now. The worm had a beauty as it turned and it helped her gain control. She was not a child anymore: awkward with her motions, clumsy, seeing a blurred world. Her hands were her own now. Each digit, each contour and wrinkle and blemish. They were her hands!

Confident in this, reassured by whispers from far away, she opened her mouth and let out the song that would make for her what she wished. Death was not so great a barrier. She had spent her life thinking it was the final, the absolute, the end, the horrible curse. But that was only part of it. The voices helped her understand this.

As she sang it just seemed more and more obvious. She had found a truth that escaped those with no knowledge of the Giver’s tongue. As she sang, she peeled back the barriers between life and death. As she sang, she searched among the vague forms on the other side of what she had believed to be life—though she knew the barrier was not the simple thing she had feared.

And there she found one of the ones she sought. At first he was as diffuse as a scent lofting on a breeze, spread thin and in communion with so much of the world. She drew the traces of him in. She sang, and the far-flung essence of him could not deny her invocation. For a time it was like her words were hands and the one she sought was sand draining through her fingers. But she sang the harder for it. She pulled him toward her, so forcefully that eventually …

He stood before her. He was there, upright, diaphanous, luminous at moments, but also tangibly physical. It was a he, and she knew him, though the details of his face moved and rippled and would not settle. Not yet.

“What have you done?” he rasped, like an aged man stirred from a dream of youth.