“I can certainly understand why she missed it.” Another few taps, a different scan, and she abruptly crossed to the couch, where Lhyn was only now lifting her head.

  “I’m fine,” Lhyn said immediately. “She didn’t hurt me.”

  “I know that.” Dr. Wells sat on the low table in front of the couch. “Four different endorphins plus two neurotransmitters and another happy hormone—your brain is sloshing with compounds that should have you ready to fly without a ship. You feel fantastic, don’t you?”

  “Shippers, yes.”

  “This should be like water to a taggat for you. I’m not sure why it isn’t, unless it’s the fact that your body is producing these compounds on its own rather than metabolizing them from an introduced drug.”

  “Water to a what?” Salomen asked.

  “A taggat,” Ekatya said. “A little desert animal. They don’t need water other than what they get in their food. The first people who tried to farm them found out the hard way that they can’t be allowed near water. Taggats will drink until they die.”

  Salomen looked ill. “You just said it’s not that for Lhyn, yes?”

  “Yes, but the fact that it’s not chemically addictive doesn’t mean it’s not psychologically addictive.”

  “I understand,” Lhyn said. “But that part has nothing to do with you. I had this once and gave it up, remember? I was fine. It’s a love, not an uncontrollable craving.”

  Dr. Wells hesitated.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Ekatya said. “We’ve waited long enough.”

  Though clearly not happy, Dr. Wells acquiesced.

  The Sharing between Tal, Salomen, and Lhyn was quiet. Once again, Salomen took the direct Sharing position with Lhyn, while Tal completed the circuit by resting her hands on the backs of their necks. The glow reappeared as strongly as before, but it didn’t seem to affect the readings—or at least, not enough for Dr. Wells to make note of it.

  For the final Sharing, they stood in a square with Lhyn facing Ekatya and Salomen across from Tal. Ekatya stripped the lacing from her shirt, leaving her upper chest exposed, and Lhyn unsealed hers to just above her navel.

  Moving with care, Tal rested her hands on the skin over their hearts. Salomen laid hers on top.

  The glow did not gradually increase this time. It erupted—from Lhyn and Ekatya. In the blink of an eye it raced up Tal’s and Salomen’s arms, hit their bodies, and exploded into shifting curtains of gold. All four of them stood still, eyes closed and apparently unaffected.

  Micah took a shocked step back. “Great Mother of us all,” he whispered. How could two Gaians share the divine flame of Fahla?

  “Somebody had better tell me that’s normal.” Though Dr. Wells kept her voice low, she injected a surprising amount of force into it.

  “Ah . . .” Dewar looked at Micah, who had no answers. “I’ve seen it before. I’ve been part of it before. But that was in a group Sharing, where Lancer Tal and Bondlancer Opah were channeling the power of every high empath in the Lancer’s Guard.”

  “Dammit!” Dr. Wells glared at her displays. “I can barely keep up with this. If anything goes wrong—” She stopped and stared, then dove for her controls. “That has to be an artifact. There is—no, I don’t believe that.” She looked at the Sharing women, then the display, and slowly shook her head. “Guard Dewar. Are you seeing this?”

  Dewar and Micah both leaned forward to examine the spot she was pointing to. Unlike the rest of the image, which continually shifted its shapes and colors, this was an unmoving shadow.

  “It’s non-responsive,” Dr. Wells said. “Damaged brain tissue.”

  Micah turned, preparing to charge across the room and rip Lhyn out of that Sharing, but a strong grip on his arm stopped him.

  “Don’t you dare.” Dr. Wells had not taken her eyes off the display. “They’re not causing it. She had that before. But it’s shrinking.” She looked up then, shock written all over her face. “This is medically impossible. They’re regenerating her brain cells and neural connections. They’re healing her.”

  “I thought you said she was already healed.” Wasn’t that the whole point of waiting this long?

  “She was. This is the brain equivalent of a scar. She was never going to regain full function in this area. At least, I would have sworn that before now.”

  “Empathic healing,” Dewar said. “But neither of them are trained for it.”

  “They’re probably not even aware of this. Not unless Lhyn showed them her scan, and I very much doubt she did. After she saw it the first time, she refused to look at it again.”

  “She’s a scholar,” Micah said quietly. Lhyn’s identity was built around her intellectual capacity. It must have been devastating for her to lose even a fraction of it.

  “Then it has to be instinctive.” Dewar watched the four women in their dancing column of fire. “They’re sensing it somehow. Something that’s not right in the Sharing.”

  For fifteen ticks, the dark spot on the display gradually shrank. Micah alternated between watching it and the Sharing women, waiting for the divine flame to dim. But this flame did not behave like the others. It simply shut off, as if Fahla herself had blown it out.

  Lhyn slumped forward, appearing half-conscious. Salomen and Tal leaped to catch her, while Ekatya clearly wanted to help but was swaying on her feet.

  In a few steps, Micah had his hands around Ekatya’s shoulders and was guiding her to the nearest chair. She felt so small in his hands, lighter even than Tal, though the two women were similar in height. Yet the power he had seen coming from her . . .

  She resisted as he tried to nudge her down, pushing at him with weak arms.

  “Sit down, you’re as wobbly as a newborn winden. Dr. Wells will make sure Lhyn’s all right.”

  She gave up and let herself relax into the chair. “There was a wrong thread,” she mumbled. “Black and sticky and . . . wrong.”

  Dr. Wells was bent over the couch, snapping a wide bracelet on Lhyn’s wrist and activating a readout. “She’s fine,” she said a few pipticks later. “Just very tired and in need of sleep.”

  Lhyn’s eyelids fluttered open. “What happened?”

  Dr. Wells reached out to brush a damp wisp of hair from her flushed face. “Remember that number you told me to never say to you again? It’s not eighteen percent any longer. It’s forty-three.”

  Lhyn looked blank. Then she sat upright, suddenly infused with energy. “Forty-three?”

  “Forty-three point two, but I rounded down.”

  She tried to speak and choked on her words. “Forty-three point two,” she managed. “Forty-three point two!” She covered her mouth with both hands, staring at Dr. Wells as if she were afraid the information might change if she looked away.

  A single nod seemed to be the assurance she needed, and she launched forward, laughing and crying at the same time. Dr. Wells looked startled as she caught her, then smiled and wrapped her in a warmron.

  “Forty-three point two,” Lhyn said in a rasping voice. “I felt it, but I didn’t know what it was. How high do you think it will go?”

  With one hand, Dr. Wells deftly deactivated the scanner, slipped it off Lhyn’s head, and set it on the table. Resettling her grip, she looked up at the others with shining eyes. “I don’t know. But I know you’re going to find out.”

  23

  Healing

  The next morning, Dr. Wells collected Rahel and flew to Whitesun, where she would pursue her research with Tal’s blessing. Tal hadn’t yet mentioned that to Micah, and when he appeared in her office before midmeal, she knew her time had run out.

  “Something has been bothering me,” he said, settling his large body in the carved wooden guest chair.

  “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable over by the windows? Can I get you a cup of shannel?”

  “No and no, and you’re stalling. Why did Dr. Wells take base scans of you and Salomen? That had nothing to do with Lhyn or the effects of Sharing on her and Ekatya.”

  She leaned back in her chair and crossed her hands in her lap. “Because that wasn’t about their Sharing. It was about ours.”

  His eyes glinted. “Please tell me you have safeguards in place to prevent her from passing that data all over the Protectorate.”

  “She promised confidentiality. And Ekatya vouches for her,” Tal added at Micah’s expressive eye roll. “She repeated that promise to me in person before you arrived last night. I can confirm her sincerity. She’s keeping her data out of the ship’s computers so it can’t be intercepted or requested by the government. This is her personal project.” Tal hesitated, knowing he was about to ask. “She’s helping us with our divine tyree question.”

  “Why is it necessary to bring an alien healer in on this?”

  “Because we’ve disabled ourselves by keeping it such a damned secret!” She sat up straight, resting her forearms on her desk. “The High Council is making a mistake. I agreed with the secrecy at first, but we’re up to ten divine tyree pairs. This isn’t an isolated phenomenon. Something is causing it. The longer we put off making it public, the worse it will look when we finally do. And all our secrecy means we haven’t turned the scholar caste loose on the question. We could have had answers by now.”

  “We do have scholars researching it.”

  “We have templars researching it.”

  Micah’s head went back. “I hope you don’t use that tone with Lanaril. I’ve never seen her angry, but that might do it.”

  Tal was tempted to say she’d had the privilege of seeing Lanaril angry, and it was a sight to behold. “Of course they’re scholars, too. But their research is built around the belief that this is Fahla’s plan. Dr. Wells won’t work that way.”

  He frowned. “It is Fahla’s plan.”

  And that was why she didn’t want to have this conversation. It was also why the issue of public knowledge was so sticky.

  “Perhaps it is,” she said carefully, “but Fahla may be using methods we can detect. Which would lead to answers, and I would much rather have reasons and answers than faith.”

  Micah’s spine went stiff, and his close-cropped hair seemed to bristle more than usual. “This from the first person Fahla has touched in one thousand cycles? Since when are answers and faith mutually exclusive?”

  “They’re not. But faith doesn’t lead to answers. Faith is an answer, and that’s not good enough for me. As Lancer,” she added, heading off what was sure to be an outburst. “As a private person, I’m more than happy to accept this gift and not question it. As a Lancer, I have to make decisions based on facts, and we don’t have any.”

  “Then open the question to the scholar caste.”

  “And watch it blow up when someone talks? We’ve kept the secret too long. If it’s going to go public, we should have some answers to offer.”

  Micah rubbed a hand over his hair. “Why is Dr. Wells going to Whitesun?”

  “Rahel talked to her mother and . . . Sharro, I think her name is. Her mother’s bondmate. They offered themselves as test subjects for a Sharing between Alseans with no tyree bond. They also have friends who are normal tyrees. Dr. Wells is studying Sharings in different types of bonds to see if she can isolate the source of the divine spark.”

  “So an alien healer is going to gather data on our most intimate and sacred exchange. Helped in her endeavor by a warrior you would have given anything to kill half a moon ago.”

  Tal couldn’t help it; she began to laugh. “When you put it that way, it does sound rather unlikely.”

  He wasn’t laughing, but at least his spine had softened. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  She hoped so, too.

  Sharing with Ekatya and Lhyn was the most beautiful thing Tal had ever experienced, until she Shared with Salomen.

  Sharing with all three of them was sublime.

  She had not expected it that first time, not with witnesses and brain scanners. But the moment she and Salomen connected with Ekatya and Lhyn, it was as if the pent-up power of a fusion reactor had found an outlet. It roared out in a mind-bending rush, effortlessly pushing the four of them into a state of unity. Tal and Salomen’s empathic range rocketed outward, surpassing what they could achieve themselves by an order of magnitude.

  The explosion reversed, and they fell into the single, combined mind created in their Sharing. But something wasn’t right. Something vibrated at the wrong frequency, a sour note in an otherwise glorious symphony. None of them questioned the overwhelming need to find and fix it. None of them knew what it was when they did find it. They simply obeyed the compulsion to change the frequency of that vibration and bring it into harmony with the rest.

  They poured out their need and hope and love, watching it vanish into a black crack that took all they had and wanted more. Yet it slowly began to seal itself. The tone of the vibration shifted, and they knew it was right.

  Then they ran out of power, emerging from their Sharing with an abruptness that left Tal and Salomen dazed even as they scrambled to catch a toppling Lhyn.

  When Dr. Wells explained what they had done, Tal’s first thought was a joyous one: miracle.

  Her second was not.

  Lie.

  From their first meeting, Tal had known one overarching truth about Lhyn: her words matched her emotions. She was the most open person Tal had ever met, never concealing a thing, always eager to learn and equally eager to share her knowledge. She had shared even the most horrific details of her kidnapping and torture, not wanting to bear the burden of secrecy.

  Yet she had hidden this. It was so counter to Lhyn’s character that Tal could not face her after their Sharing. She and Salomen had left as soon as courtesy allowed.

  Salomen had no patience for Tal’s reaction. Lhyn owed that information to no one, she pointed out. It had nothing to do with truth and everything to do with identity. But her persuasion met stiff resistance until she brought up the fact that not even Lhyn had known what that wrong vibration was.

  Only then did Tal understand, and her heart hurt with the realization. Lhyn had been so wounded by the knowledge of her brain damage that she had walled it off, determined to forget. Even when faced with it, she could not see.

  When they met the following evening, Lhyn led off with an apology.

  “There’s no need,” Salomen said.

  “I think there is. That Sharing . . . there were residual effects. Ekatya and I could still feel you for a few ticks afterward. I felt—” She cast a glance at Tal.

  “You felt my anger. It’s not always a wonderful thing to sense emotions, is it? You don’t always enjoy what you feel.”

  “No,” Lhyn said quietly, and Tal waited no longer to sweep her into a warmron, absorbing her relief with the weight of shame.

  “I’m sorry you felt that. I cannot apologize for the emotion, because we cannot help what we feel. I’d be apologizing to Salomen twenty times a day.”

  “Forty,” Salomen said in an undertone.

  It broke the solemn mood, bringing smiles to everyone’s faces.

  “You gave me the gift of knowing you,” Tal said. “You gave it so freely that I came to see it as a right, and the first time you didn’t give, I felt betrayed. That’s my fault, not yours.”

  “I didn’t want you to think less of me. You were all so worried and ready for me to shatter, but . . .” Lhyn lifted her hands. “You didn’t know about the real damage.”

  Tal heard what she was not saying: that she had chafed at their careful treatment of her, and how much worse would it have been if she had told them about the brain damage?

  Worse, she admitted to herself. She remembered Prime Builder Eroles in the shuttle, telling her that she didn’t know Lhyn. During a five-tick confrontation at the top of the shuttle ramp, Anjuli Eroles had learned something about Lhyn that Tal had willfully not seen for seven moons.

  “You don’t look happy,” Lhyn said. “Are you sure you’re not still upset?”

  Tal smiled up at her. “Shall I show you how I feel? And we’ll see about finishing the job we started last night.”

  They did not finish the job that night or the next. On the fourth night, however, they watched the black crack shrink into a thin line, then a barely perceptible shadow, and then—

  The symphony rang out around them in perfect tune, suddenly richer and impossibly vibrant, a glorious gift straight from the hand of Fahla. They did not fall out of this Sharing in exhaustion, but eased out with the greatest reluctance, all four of them leaning together in a laughing, euphoric group warmron.

  When Dr. Wells and Rahel returned from Whitesun two days later, Lhyn submitted to her brain scan with barely restrained glee. “I don’t need it,” she said. “But I know you want to see for yourself.”

  “Not having the advantage of godlike powers of perception, yes, I do.” Dr. Wells activated the scan, this time with Ekatya, Tal, and Salomen standing behind her.

  “I don’t know what I’m looking at,” Tal said as shifting shapes and colors appeared on the display.

  “Nothing.” Dr. Wells stared at the display, then shook her head with an incredulous laugh. “You’re looking at nothing. She’s completely healed. One hundred percent functionality.”

  “Told you,” Lhyn said from her chair. “Can I take this off now?”

  “Yes, Dr. Impatient Rivers, you can take it off.”

  Lhyn stood up, passed the scanning ring to Dr. Wells, and reached for Ekatya’s hands. “I’m ready,” she said. “It’s time.”

  Ekatya flashed a dazzling smile. Without breaking their gaze, she said, “Andira, Salomen, Dr. Wells—we’d like to formally invite you to our bonding ceremony.”

  24

  Bonding

  Lanaril had watched Lhyn and Ekatya put off their bonding ceremony too many times. Lhyn wanted to wait until after the trial, which took far longer than Lanaril expected. Protectorate trials moved like tree sap in winter compared to their Alsean equivalent, where empathic scans could verify or even replace witness testimony.