“But by the time we reached the center of town, it was too much for me. I was raw and unprotected, a thousand times more sensitive than I am now. The stray thoughts of passing strangers hit me like revelations, the noise of the city obliterated my own young mind. My reflex was to strike out, I suppose, to physically retaliate. I was brought into the hospital bloody, and it wasn’t all my blood. I hurt one of my sisters, I think the story goes.

“They left me in the city.”

Zai gaped. There was no point in hiding his reaction.

“Why didn’t your parents take you back home?”

She shrugged. “They didn’t know. When your child has an unexplained seizure, you don’t take them into the hinterland. They had me transferred to the best facility possible, which happened to be in the largest city on Vasthold.”

“But you said you haven’t seen them since.”

“It was in Vasthold’s expansion phase. They had ten children, Laurent. And their silent one, their retarded child, had become a dangerous little beast. They couldn’t travel across the world to visit me. This was a colony world, Laurent.”

More protests rose in Zai, but he took a deep breath. No point in battering Nara’s parents. It was a different culture, and a long time ago.

“How many years were you…mad, Nara?”

She looked into his eyes. “From age six to ten…that’s roughly age twelve to nineteen in Absolute years. Puberty, young adulthood. All with eight million voices in my mind.”

“Inhuman,” he said.

She turned back to the fire, half smiling. “There are only a few of my kind. A lot of synesthetic empaths, but not many survivors of such ignorance. Now they understand that synesthesia implants will cause empathy in a few dozen kids a year. Most live in cities, of course, and the condition is discovered within days of the operation. When the kids blow, they ship them off to the country until they’re old enough for apathy treatments. But I was desensitized the old-fashioned way.

“Exposure.”

“What was it like in those years, Nara?” No point in hiding his curiosity from an empath.

“I was the city, Laurent. Its animal consciousness, anyway. The raging id of desire and need, frustration and anger. The heart of humanity, and yes, of politics. But almost utterly without self. Mad.”

Zai narrowed his eyes. He’d never thought of a city that way, as having a mind. It was so close to the Rix perversion.

“Exactly,” she said, apparently having plumbed the thought. “That’s why I’m anti-Rix, for a Secularist.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cities are beasts, Laurent. The body politic is nothing but an animal. It needs humans to lead it, personalities to shape the mass. That’s why the Rix are such single-minded butchers. They graft a voice onto a slavering beast, then worship it as a god.”