“Twomoons?” Jase frowned. “But Naxera’s only got one, and it never gets dark, anyway, not with two stars, and all.”

“Except at Braque-Efram when Pica eclipses both the Brother Stars. I know,” said Pahl. “That was what was so strange.”

The ship gave a little jolt, and the lights flickered then flared back to life. Dropped out of warp.Jase spared a glance out the portal and saw that the stars had returned to normal. Pahl was right. Must be nearly there.“Was the place somewhere on Naxera?”

“I don’t think so. This place was a large lake, not a sea, and it was,” Pahl’s ice-blue eyes squinted, looking into the memory, “it was like the lake was in a bowl made by a circle of mountains. It wasn’t like a real place that I know.”

“But your mother jumped in the sea.” They’d talked about Pahl’s dreams enough and Pahl had told Jase how his mother died, so Jase felt comfortable talking about it.

“I know.” Pahl scratched at the frills feathering his right cheek. “But it was my mother in the dream, all right. Only here’s the strange part, the one that wasn’t like all the other dreams. One minute I was at the bottom of the cliff, looking up at her, and even though it was night—night, Jase, like where there are lots and lots of stars, so it wasn’t Naxera—I could see her face. She was very sad. I could see it in her eyes and the way she looked down at me. She reached out her hand and then, all of a sudden, I was up there with her, on the cliff. There was a very strong wind, but it was cold and full of light, almost like clouds swirling around us. There were voices, too, very strange, singing in a language I didn’t understand, or maybe I just couldn’t hear them well enough. It was like they were talking to me, calling. Wanting to get inside.”

“Inside. Like in your brain?”

“Yes.” Pahl’s silken whisper again. “Like they wanted to slip inside, look through my eyes.”

A flash, like silver lightening zig-zagging against a dark sky, or a jagged white crack streaking through black glass, sparked in Jase’s mind, and then he saw them, the images from Pahl’s dream. Just for an instant, but they were there: luminous, white, shifting into bizarre shapes, and a woman, a man with the body of a lizard? snake? and the wings of a bat.

Looking through Pahl’s eyes.Jase’s mouth went dry. The longer Pahl talked in that queer whispery voice, the more Jase felt his mind slipping away a little bit, as if part of what made him Jason Garrett was gone and something of what made up who Pahl was had wriggled its way into his mind. He couldn’t explain it any better than that; he barely knew how to find the words to describe it. But Pahl’s words—his thoughts, what he’d seen (seeing through Pahl’s eyes)—seemed to snake their way into Jase’s brain so that Jase felt dizzy, a little unreal. Frightened. He felt his fear like a cold finger tracing its way down his spine, and he shivered.

“And then,” said Pahl, his whispery voice lilting in a singsong chant, like a lullaby, “my mother took my hand. She turned to me and held out her hand, and I reached for her. I touched her, and her skin was cold like stone, and I looked into her face, and she was crying, but they were tears of blood.”

“Blood?” Jase’s voice was hushed. “Blood?”

“Yes,” said Pahl. “And I should have been scared. But I wasn’t, and then I couldn’t pull away either, and it seemed to me that all those cold white cloud-things had circled round us, tighter and tighter, like a rope, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Jase, I knew I was going to die.”

“Pahl…”

“No!” Pahl’s voice came in an urgent whisper. “I need to finish. I need to say this.”

Pahl stopped and, turning away, put his forehead upon the viewing portal. Jase looked down and saw the surface of a planet slide into view: gray, pocked by meteor strikes. No trees, no water. Cold. Lifeless.

“Pahl,” he began, “Pahl, maybe you need to stop, maybe you need…”

“My mother,” whispered Pahl, “she took my hand, and then…then she jumped.”

Mind spinning, Jase focused on Pahl’s breath steaming, condensing against the tensor-glass, and then evanescing. Like the ice cloud-creatures, like the woman with the wings of a bat and the body of a snake.

“She jumped,” Pahl said, “and then we were falling through the air, only it wasn’t air, I knew then. It was something thick and black and evil. But we fell through it, tumbling and falling, like the way you read about birds shot down from the sky. Then we hit the silver water, and then I was under the water, and I held my breath. I held my breath for as long as I could, and I remember I looked up and saw the underside of the water, bright and silver, and I knew that I needed to get away. I knew that as much as I wanted to be with my mother, I needed air. Only I couldn’t get away. She was in the water, and she dragged me down, down, down like a stone. And when I looked over at her, her skin seemed to peel away, little by little, until I saw bone and her teeth and…”

“Pahl,” said Jase, not able to bear hearing this anymore. Below, on the planet, he saw a ring of ruddy-colored mountains— not gray, but red like old blood—and then saw a wide, black chasm gaping like a huge mouth. A crater? Jase’s mind snagged on the thought, the way a drowning man grasps a slim branch that can’t possibly support his weight. Maybe a dried-up sea, or a meteor strike…Jase felt his mind spiraling, as if he were caught in a black whirlpool, being dragged deeper and deeper.

“Pahl,” said Jase. He brought his hands to his head, felt his fingers dig into his scalp. “Pahl, don’t. Stop.”

“But you see, I couldn’t,”Pahl rasped, his voice ragged, “I couldn’tstop her, and I couldn’t get away, and then I knew I couldn’t hold my breath anymore. So I opened my mouth and all my air rushed out in silver bubbles that burst in front of my face, and then the water, so cold and dark, filled my mouth and gushed down my throat, and I was dying, I knew I was dying….”

“Stop!” Crying out, Jase ducked his head, screwed his eyes shut. He was choking, drowning, he was going to die…. “Pahl, stop, please, let me go, let me go!”

With an effort that was almost physical, Jase wrenched his mind free, not even knowing that this was what he did. Dimly, he heard Pahl’s tortured cry. But there was nothing Jase could do for his friend at that instant. He felt a great ripping and tearing in his mind, as if his brain were made of fabric and had been held, too tightly, between fingers as un-yielding as steel, and so had simply shredded in two.

Reeling, Jase slammed back against an exposed conduit. The metal bit into his side, and Jase arched, cried out again as pain shivered down into his pelvis. But the pain was good, because then he had something to focus on instead of the throbbing in his head, the sense of something alien slithering into his mind. Jase’s knees folded and his back slid down the bulkhead until he felt metal beneath his thighs and knew he sat on the deck. Jase gulped air. His head spun with vertigo, and he blinked away the blackness edging his vision. After a few moments, when his breathing had slowed and he felt better, Jase let his head fall back against the bulkhead. He looked over at his friend.

Pahl had slumped to the corridor alongside Jase. His face had gone ashen, and his ice-blue eyes were so dark they looked like sapphires.

“Pahl,” said Jase. His brain hurt. A line of sweat beaded his upper lip. He swiped at it with the back of his hand. “Pahl, are you all right?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I don’t know what…” Pahl closed his eyes. His frills trembled. “I’m sorry.”

Jase swallowed back a wave of nausea. “What was that? What happened?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know…”

“That was awful.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I don’t know…”

“Your dream, what happened just now…”