"Thinking. I can't sleep. The war did something. The things I saw… The guerrillas. You don't want to go to sleep because they might attack. If you do sleep, you dream about the blood. Homes and fields burning. Animals and children screaming. That was the worst. The babies crying. I still hear the babies crying." He exaggerated very little. Each time he went to bed he had to get past the crying of babes.

He told most of the truth and wound it into an imaginative lie. Babies crying. The babies who haunted him were his own, innocents abandoned in a moment of fear of commitment.

"I know," Sweet replied. "I know. At Rust they killed their children rather than let us capture them. The hardest men in the regiment wept when they saw the mothers hurling their infants down from the walls, then jumping after them. I never married. I have no children. But I know what you mean. Did you have any?"

"A son," Corbie said, in a voice both soft and strained, from a body almost shaking with pain. "And a daughter. Twins, they were. Long ago and far away."

"And what became of them?"

"I don't know. I would hope they're living still. They would be about Case's age."

Sweet raised an eyebrow but let the remark slide past. "And their mother?"

Corbie's eyes became iron. Hot iron, like a brand. "Dead."

"I'm sorry."

Corbie did not respond. His expression suggested he was not sorry himself.

"You understand what I'm saying, Corbie?" Sweet asked. "You were noticed by one of the Taken. That's never healthy."

"I get the message. Which was it?"

"I can't say. Which of the Taken are where when could be of interest to the Rebel."

Corbie snorted. "What Rebel? We wiped them out at Charm."

"Perhaps. But there is that White Rose."

"I thought they were going to get her?"

"Yeah. The stories you hear. Going to have her in chains before the month is out. Been saying that since first we heard of her. She's light on her feet. Maybe light enough." Sweet's smile faded. "At least I won't be around next time the comet comes. Brandy?"

"Yes."

"Chess? Or do you have a job?"

"Not right away. I'll go you one game."

Halfway through, Sweet said, "Remember what I said.

Eh? The Taken claimed he was leaving. But there's no guarantee. Could be behind a bush someplace watching." "I'll pay more attention to what I'm doing." He would. The last thing he wanted was a Taken interested in him. He had come too far to waste himself now.

Chapter Twelve:
THE PLAIN OF FEAR

I had the watch. My belly gnawed, weighted by lead. All day dots had traversed the sky, high up. A pair were there now, patroling. The continuous presence of Taken was not a good omen.

Closer, two manta pairs planed the afternoon air. They would ride the updrafts up, then circle down, taunting the Taken, trying to lure them across the boundary. They resented outsiders. The more so these, because these would crush them but for Darling-another intruder.