She slipped a lot, thought Jase. A lota lot.

Kaldarren cocked his head to one side and fixed Jase with those eyes of his. “And I’m working hard to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” he continued. “But I’m sorry we’ve hurt you. I’m sorry for all the times you’ve been hurt and for all the times to come, in life, when you willbe hurt, by us or someone else. But I can’t pad the world’s corners for you, Jase. I wish I could, but I can’t. But we’ll…I’ll do my best not to let that happen again, but…I’m sorry, son.”

“Yeah,” said Jase, his lips wobbling. Now the tears did come. “Me, too.”

You hypocrite.Kaldarren stared at his reflection in the blank viewscreen, and he saw his lips curl with self-loathing. You’re a damned hypocrite.

Ven Kaldarren sat, alone. His son had left: to go for a walk, Jase said. Kaldarren let him escape. The ship (no name, no registry, the better to disappear with, my dear) was small, but Jase liked walking, and he’d done a lot of it when they lived on Betazed. Kaldarren remembered that when he and Rachel fought, Jason would leave and circle around a small lake close by the house. Kaldarren knew this lake—more of a large pond, really—and it had very blue water, alive with skating water bugs and fish that leapt after insects flitting over the water. In the center of the lake was an island carpeted with katarian emerald grass and feathered with tall rushes and frilled tassels. There were also trees on this very tiny island—Betazoid weeping willows, and strombolian firs that vibrated in the wind and produced a clear, clean melody, like bells.

Kaldarren suspected Jase enjoyed the lake because of a pair of flanarian birds that had staked out the island. The flanarians were a little like Earth’s Canadian geese, except their feathers were cobalt-blue, their faces starkly white like bald eagles, and their feet a bright ibis-orange. Flanarian birds, like geese and Vulcan mah-tor-pahlahs,mated for life, and this particular pair produced a new brood every year. Kaldarren had often sat on shore and watched as the parents tended their troublesome young, circling around in the water to pick up a straggler, or waiting for any that lagged behind.

“No one left behind,” Kaldarren whispered now. He sighed and felt his heart twist with remorse. “I’m sorry, Jase.”

Touching the boy while the air had been so charged with emotion had been a mistake, and a blessing. He’d felt Jase’s hurt flood through him like a sudden gush of scalding water. How sad his son was. Kaldarren’s heart tugged with pity. Physical contact always enhanced his telepathic abilities, and he knew what Jase did not: The boy’s empathic abilities were getting stronger. Eerie, sometimes, how on the mark the boy was, could be. What Jase had said to his mother, about Kaldarren’s anger and sorrow—it was uncannily accurate.

Have to watch that. He’s still just a little boy, and it’s up to me to protect him.

The thought made his stomach sour. What a self-serving hypocrite he was. If protecting Jase was his first priority, what was he doing with the boy on thisship?

No.Kaldarren walled off those thoughts, practiced a mental exercise of visualizing an airlock, in vacuum, and then shoving his secret thoughts in there: Telepathic Privacy 101. He couldn’t afford to think about these things around Jase. Jase might not be a telepath (or was he, could he be?), but Kaldarren worried that his secrets might leak around the edges for his son to pick up.

Or Rachel. She used to be very good at reading you, once, and you encouraged that, didn’t you? Much more intimate that way.Of course, such intimacy was normal between mates, and more so when one of them was a telepath, as if close proximity revealed new talents the nontelepathic partner had never been aware of. (How else to explain how long-term mates could finish each other’s sentences?) But seeing Garrett, even at a remove, always upset him. So many memories and feelings, and things past tangled with things in the present, like some crazy spider’s web. He wanted to hate her, just hateher, because pure, unadulterated hate would be so much simpler.

But you didn’t catch her in bed with another man. She was faithful in her way. You just figured out she was more in love with athing than with you.

And even if he hadfound her with a lover, would things have been different? Maybe: The idea of her body in another man’s arms made him ill. Yes, he’d hate her if that had happened, but he would love her still and so he did now. She was the only woman whose neck he’d love to break and whose lips he longed to press to his.

So why had he called? Just to torture himself? Her? Kaldarren rejected both, but he wondered all the same. Maybe it had been a mistake to call— look whatthat stirred up, threatening to drag her back to court—and, at the same time, he thought that perhaps he’d called because he wantedher to ask questions, maybe even stop him from following the course he was now. Rachel Garrett’s common sense was a universal constant, like the speed of light, and he could always count on her honesty in this, if not in everything else. (Except her emotions: She’d never been very good at staring her own emotions in the face, but Kaldarren allowed that everyone had a blind spot.) She was—what was that Earth expression?—sharp as a tack when it came to flaying an argument apart bit by bit. So maybe he’d called because he wanted her to talk him out of it; maybe he was hoping she’d ask why he was aboard an unregistered ship and just where was he going anyway….

Absolutely not.He gave his brain an irritated little slap. You hypocrite. And just what would you have said if she asked, hmmm? You wouldn’t have told the truth. Jase was right there, and the most you would have done was sidestep the issue, but Jase would know you were lying, and then he’d wonder why.

Truth to tell, Kaldarren wondered that himself—why? Why risk his reputation on something like this? For that matter, why risk his life? (No, he wasn’t really risking his life; he was being a little melodramatic, and that was because he was so stressed, all this secrecy, the little fact that they were—he was—about to come perilously close to breaking the law.)

So, why risk it? And why risk his son?What was he trying to prove, and to whom? That Garrett wasn’t the only one who went boldly off where only fools dared to go?

Ah, Rachel, I don’t know, and it’s too late.Kaldarren’s head sagged, and he rested the back of his head against his chair. He was so tired: of thinking, of disappointment. Better to think positively, he knew, and it was normal to have second thoughts, but he’d always known that his intuition was as strong a gift as telepathy.

And I’m committed, or maybe Ishould be committed, I don’t know. But it’s one of those irrevocable steps in life, like finding your lover in bed with someone else, or saying the worddivorce. Too late to turn back now.

And how complicated life had suddenly become.

Chapter 7

“You were lucky,” said Dalal, dipping a cloth into a basin of warm water and some sort of disinfectant. She was a tiny woman, swathed in a cream-colored chador. She had nut-brown skin and sharp black eyes set in a nest of wrinkles so deep they seemed etched with a diamond-edged stylus. Now, those eyes glittered at Batra, and the skin around Dalal’s mouth puckered into a scowl so the lines around her mouth knifed into her skin. “Both of you. Lucky to get away without new red necklaces, you catch my meaning.”