With a sigh of relief, Isthia straightened.

Is she badly burned? Jeran asked impatiently, having waited outside Isthia's contact but aware it had been made.

Not burned but deeply hurt on several levels. Damia's been cut down to size, Isthia remarked ruefully, the terrible way only the very bright and confident are. She'll never forget that she underestimated Sedan's potential because she became infatuated with him.

For all of that, if she hadn't touched him first, where would we be with such a menace zeroing from space?

Isthia waved that aside as of incidental importance.

That won't matter to Damia, Jeran. Her initial lapse of judgment caused Larak's death and has seriously injured Afra.

Merciful God, Isthia, once the attack on Sodan began, nothing could have saved Larak, no matter where he was in the focus-mind. Death is far kinder than being burned out. She's not to blame.

Isthia shook her head sadly. No, she isn't to blame and I hope it never occurs to her that, in the crisis, instinct overrode reason and it was Afra she struggled to save.

Afra? What in hell? asked Jeran before he followed Isthia's thought to its source. So that's why Sodan struck to kill. He was after Afra.

He stepped back as Isthia signaled to the medics to administer deep-sleep drugs and intravenous nourishment to Damia.

With great reluctance they turned to Larak's silent shell. Because they had to, they opened it and saw with some little relief that there was no mark of his passing on the young face. A curiously surprised smile lingered on his lips.

Isthia turned away in tears and Jeran, too numb to display his own sorrow, put his arm around her to lead her away.

"Sir," the captain of the ship said respectfully when they entered the control room, "we have the location of the alien ship debris. Permission to recover fragments?"

"Permission granted. Isthia and I will return to the Tower."

"Very good, sir," the captain said, and stiffened to a rigid attention. The unashamed tears in his eyes and his very crisp salute expressed wordlessly his pride, his sympathy, and his sorrow.

Struggling against a will determined to keep her asleep, Damia fought her way to semi-consciousness.

"I can't keep her under. She's resisting," a remote voice called to someone.

As distant as the sound was, like a far echo in a subterranean cavern, each syllable fell like a hammer on her exposed nerves. Sobbing, Damia struggled for consciousness, sanity, and a release from her agony. She couldn't seem to trigger the reflexes that would divert pain, and an effort to call Afra to help her met with not only the resistance of increased agony but a vast blankness. Her mind was as stiff as iron, holding each thought firmly to it as though magnetized.

"Damia, do not reach. Do not use your mind," a voice said in her ear. The sound was like a blessing and the reassurance it gave her wavering sanity was reinforced by the touch of… Isthia's hands on hers.

Damia focused her eyes on the woman's face and clutched Isthia's hands to her temples in an unconscious plea for relief of pain.

"What happened? Why can't I control my head?" cried Damia, tears of weakness streaming down her face.

"You overreached yourself, destroying Sodan," Isthia said.

"I can't remember," Damia groaned, blinking away the tears so she could at least see clearly.

"Every rating in FT & T does."

"Oh, my head. It's all a blank and there's something I have got to do and I can't remember what it is."

"You will, you will. But you're very tired, dear," Isthia said crooningly as she stroked her forehead with cool hands. Each caress seemed to lessen the terrible pain.

Damia felt the coolness of an injection pop into her arm.

"I'm putting you back to sleep, Damia. We're very proud of you but you must allow your mind to heal in sleep."

" 'Great nature's second course, that knits the ravelled 'sleeve of care.' What's knitting, Isthia? I've never known," Damia heard herself babbling with a cool scalliony taste in her throat as the drug spread.

Again, after what seemed no passage of time at all, Damia was inexorably forced to consciousness by her indefinable but relentless need.

"I can't understand it," came Isthia's voice. This time it did not reverberate across Damia's pained mind like tympany in a small room. "I gave her enough to put a city to sleep."

"She's worrying at something and probably won't rest until she's resolved it. Let's wake her up and get the agony over."

Damia forced her mind to concentrate on identifying the second voice. With a grateful smile she labelled it "Jeff." She felt her face gently slapped and, opening her eyes, saw Jeff's face swimming out of the blurred mass about her.

"Jeff," she pleaded, not because he had slapped her but because she had to make him understand.

"Dear Damia," he said with such loving pride she almost lost the tenuous thought she tried to hold from him.

Her body strained with the effort to reach out only a few inches a mind that once had blithely coursed light-years, but she soon managed to communicate her crime.

I burned out Larak and Afra. I killed them. I linked to the Larak-focus and killed them to destroy Sodan.

I saved myself and killed them.

Behind Jeff she heard Rowan's cry and Isthia's exclamation.

"No, no," Jeff said gently, shaking his head. He placed her hands on his forehead to let her feel the honesty of his denial. "In the first place, you couldn't. You don't use others. You sort of shift gears into high speed to make other minds work on a higher level. You drew power from the Larak-focus to destroy Sodan, yes. But the killing thrust was yours, Damia; you were the only one capable of doing it. And every T-rating in the Federated Worlds will vouch for that. Your touch, my dear, is indescribable. Further, without you to throw us into high gear, Sodan could have destroyed every Prime in FT & T."

Damia heard an approving, admiring murmur from

Rowan.

"Will my touch come back? I can't feel anything," and in spite of her control Damia's chin quivered and she started to sob with fear.

"Of course it'll come back, dear," said the Rowan, who elbowed Jeff aside to kneel by her daughter and stroke her hair tenderly.

"You'd better go knit some more sleeves of ravelled care," Isthia suggested with therapeutic asperity. "You knit like this," and Isthia inserted a visual demonstration of the technique of knitting into Damia's mind. It was an adroit change of subject, but Damia, with a flash return of perception, saw the three were evading her.

"I must be told what has happened," she demanded imperiously. A wisp of memory nagged at her and she caught it. "I remember. Sodan made one last thrust." She closed her eyes against that recall, remembering too, that she had tried to intercept it and, "Larak's dead," she said in a flat voice. "And Afra. I couldn't shield in time."

"Afra lives," the Rowan said.

"But Larak? Why Larak?" Damia demanded, desperately striving to touch what she felt they must still be hiding from her.,

"Larak was the focus," Rowan said softly, knowing, too, that Damia would never absolve herself of her brother's death. "Afra was supposed to be the focus, being the experienced mind, but the old bond between you and Larak snapped into effect. You tried to shield Larak, but his mind was too unskilled to draw help from you. Jeff and I felt it because we were part of the focus, too, and we tried to help divert it. We could cushion only Afra in time. Sedan's was a very powerful mind."

Damia looked from her mother to her father and knew that that much was true. But another reservation hovered in their eyes…

"You're still hiding something," she insisted, fighting with exhaustion. "Where's Afra?"

"Okay, skeptic," Jeff said, lifting her into his arms. "Though why his snores haven't kept you awake, I don't know."