Would Nara detect his thoughts—half-thoughts, really—about possible intimacy between them? Zai knew that most synesthetic abilities were exaggerated by the gutter media. How keen were hers?

Zai decided to show his curiosity, which at least would have the advantage of distracting Nara (and himself) from his other thoughts. So he pursued a question he’d pondered since they’d met.

“What was it like to be empathic as a child? When did you realize that you could…read minds?”

Nara laughed at his terminology, as he’d expected.

“The realization was slow,” she said. “It almost never came.

“I was raised on the pleinhold. It’s very empty there. On Vasthold, there are prefectures with less than one person per hundred square kilometers. Endless plains in the wind belt, broken only by Coriolis mountains, constructs that channel the winds into erosion runnels, which will eventually become canyons. Everywhere on the plains you can hear the mountains singing. The wind resonances are unpredictable; you can’t engineer a mountain for a particular sound. They say even a Rix mind couldn’t do the math. Each plays its own tune, as slow and moaning as whalesong, some deeper than human hearing, with notes that beat like a drum. Hiking guides can tell the songs apart, can distinguish the different sides of each mountain with their eyes closed. Our house faced Mount Ballimar, whose northern-side song sweeps from thudding beats up to a soprano when the wind shifts, like a siren warning that a storm is coming.

“My parents thought I was an idiot at first.”

Zai glanced at her, wondering if the word had a softer meaning on her planet. She shook her head in response. That thought had proven easy enough for her to read.

“Out there on the plains, my ability went undetected. I suffered no insanity in the hinterlands; the psychic input from my large but isolated family was manageable. But I had less need of language acquisition than my siblings. To family members I could project emotions as well as empathize. It was so effortless, my communication; my family thought I was a dullard, but a very easy one to get along with. My needs were met, and I knew what was going on around me, but I didn’t see the need to chatter constantly.”

Zai’s eyebrows raised.

“Strange that I became a politician, then. Eh?”

He laughed. “You read my mind.”

“I did,” she admitted, and leaned forward to poke at the fire. It burned steadily now, and was hot enough to have forced them to a meter’s distance.

“I could talk, though. And contrary to what my parents thought, I was smart. I could do spoken lessons with an AI, if a reward was coming. But I didn’t need speech, so the secondary language skills—reading and writing—suffered.

“Then I took my first trip to the city.”

Zai saw the muscles of her hand tighten on the poker.