Ma-ah lay down on her couch and closed her eyes. Will power alone wouldn’t get her anywhere, yet she didn’t want to fall asleep and drift into a dream, either. Instead, she started saying mentally: “I want to go outside, to the precise spot where I entered this place.” Nothing happened. She wasn’t being clear enough, she thought. She tried saying instead: “I want to stand outside, on the other side of the hidden rock door.” At the same time she tried to visualize the spot as clearly as she could, from her hazy memory of it.

Suddenly her body felt as if it was rocking from side to side. Then she felt as if she was rocking inside her body. There were odd rustlings of sound, like words scrambled or backward, then loud whooshing noises like wind. “Be calm. You have to stay calm,” she told herself, even while the sounds became louder. What caused them? Later she’d ask Sumpter. The wind became a roar, the rocking motions quickened. Something snapped at the back of her skull with an almost sickening thud—

And her eyes snapped open. Everything was quiet. She was outside; it had worked. At first she just stood there, staring. So much, yet nothing. The area was full of prickly shrubs and dry high grass. There were no high trees, just cliffs on one side, behind her, and mountains in the distance. The mountains contained caves—she and Rampa had used them for shelter often.

Her eyes stung—her dream-body eyes, she reminded herself. Her physical body was on the couch, back inside. She and Rampa had traveled from one full moon to another many times without meeting any of their own kind. Why hadn’t they ever been in one of the tribes of men, women, and children? They’d been alone together as long as either of them could remember. Then so suddenly—they fell apart from each other when the Speakers found them! Why? How dreary everything looked, she thought.

She took a few hesitant steps. She could stay on the ground easily enough if she simply told herself that she would, she found. But if she forgot, she’d begin to float upward. But she wanted to walk, to feel the Earth against her feet. She stopped: she wasn’t doing something right because while she could see and hear, she wasn’t feeling; not the air against her face, or the grass against her feet.