But the stranger didn't take Xantcha's bait, and Xantcha returned to her chosen place. Days were longer beside the rock. Sitting was less strenuous than walking and despite her suspicions, Xantcha slept soundly with the stranger nearby. They had a conversational breakthrough on the fourth day of unrelenting boredom when a line of black dots appeared beneath the lowest cloud layer.

"The others?" Xantcha asked. She would have soared off in the sphere days earlier and over her companion's objections, if the cyst weren't still churning and awkward in her gut.

The stranger stood up, a first since Xantcha had

returned from her walk. Gray eyes rapt on the moving specks, she walked into the unbroken grass. She reached out toward them with both arms stretched to the fingertips. But the specks moved on, her arms fell, and she returned to Xantcha, all sagging shoulders and weariness.

In this world without night, it finally dawned on Xantcha that she might have leapt to the wrong conclusions. "How long have you been here?" A friend's concern rather than a prisoner's accusation.

"I came with you."

Still a circular answer, but the tone had been less aloof. Xantcha persisted. "How long ago was that? How much time has passed since we've both been here?"

"Time is. Time cannot be cut and measured."

"As long as we've been sitting here, was I lying under the rock longer than that, or not as long?"

The stranger's brow furrowed. She looked at her hands. "Longer. Yes, much longer."

"Longer than you expected?"

"Very much longer."

"The air sustains us, but otherwise we've been forgotten?"

More furrowed brows, more silence, but the language implanted in her mind had words for time and forgetting. Meaning came before words. The stranger had to understand the question.

"Why are we both here, beside this rock and forgotten? What happened?"

"The angels found you and another-"

"Urza? I was with Urza?"

"With another not like you. His eyes see everything."

Xantcha slouched back against the rock. Raw fear drained down her spine. "Urza." She'd been found with Urza. Everything would be resolved; it was only a matter of time. "What happened to Urza?"

"The angels brought you both to the Lady's palace. The Lady held onto Urza. But you, you are not like Urza. She said she could do nothing with you, and you would die. The Lady does not look upon death."

"I was stuck out here to die, and you were put here to watch me until I did. But I didn't, and so we're both stuck here. Is that it?"

"We will wait."

"For what?"

"The palace."

Xantcha pressed her hands over her mouth, lest her temper escape. A newt, she told herself. The gray-eyed stranger was a newt. She listened, she obeyed, she had no imagination and didn't know how to leap from one thought to another. Xantcha herself had been like that until Gix had come to the First Sphere, probing her mind, making her defend herself, changing her forever. Xantcha had no intention of invading the stranger's privacy. She didn't have the ability, even if she'd had the intention. All she wanted was the answers that would reunite her with Urza.

And if her questions changed the stranger, did that make Xantcha herself another Gix? No, she decided and lowered her hands. She would not have poured acid down the fumarole to Gix's grave if he'd done nothing more than awaken her self-awareness.

"What if we didn't wait," Xantcha asked with all the enthusiasm of a conspirator in pursuit of a partner. "What if we went to the palace ourselves."

"We can't."

"Why not? Urza gave me a gift once. If you could tell me where the palace is, it could take us both there."

"No. Impossible. We shouldn't be speaking of this. I shouldn't be speaking with you at all. The Lady herself could do nothing with you. Enough. We will wait... in perfect silence."

The stranger bowed her head and folded her hands in her lap. Her lips moved rapidly as she recited something- Xantcha guessed a prayer-to herself. No matter. The wall had been breached. Xantcha was a conspirator in search of a partner, and she had nothing else to do but plan her next attack.

Within two days she had the stranger's name, Sosinna, and the certainty that Sosinna considered herself a woman. Two days more and she had the name of the Lady, Serra. After that, it was quite easy to keep Sosinna talking, although the sad truth was that Sosinna knew no more about Serra's world than Xantcha had known about Phyrexia when Urza first rescued her.

Sosinna was a Sister of Serra, one of many woman who served that lady in her palace. If Xantcha had not walked for three days straight and found herself back where she'd started, she would have laughed aloud when Sosinna described Serra's palace as a wondrous island floating forever among the golden clouds. But it did seem true that Serra's world had no land, not as other worlds where men and women dwelt had great masses of rocks rising from their oceans. Xantcha had already learned that she couldn't walk to the edge of the floating island where she and Sosinna sat in exile, but once she had the thought of a floating island in her mind, Xantcha could see that many of the darker clouds around them weren't clouds at all but miniature worlds of grass and stone.

The others Sosinna had mentioned were angels, winged folk who did Serra's bidding away from the palace. Angels had found Urza and Xantcha, though Sosinna didn't know where, and angels had brought Xantcha and Sosinna to their exile island because the Sisters of Serra were unable to leave the floating palace on their own. The angels' wings weren't like Urza's cyst-the idea of having an artifact reside permanently in her stomach appalled Sosinna so much that she stopped talking for three full days. Nor were the wings added in some floating-island equivalent of the Fane of Flesh. That notion roused Sosinna's anger.

"Angels," she informed Xantcha emphatically, "are born. Here we are all born. The Lady reveres life. She would not ever countenance that-that-Fane. Filth. Waste. Death! No wonder-no wonder that the Lady said you could not be helped! I will have nothing more to do with you. Nothing at all!"

Sosinna couldn't keep her vow. The woman who'd sat silently for days on end, could not resist telling Xantcha in great detail about the perfect way in which the Lady raised her realm's children.

Births, it seemed, were rare. Incipient parents dwelt in the palace under the Lady's immediate care, and their

precious children, once they were born and weaned, went to the nursery where the Lady personally undertook their education. Sosinna's voice thickened with nostalgia as she described the tranquil cloister where she'd learned the arts of meditation and service. Privately, Xantcha thought Lady Serra's nursery sounded as grim as the Fane of Flesh, but she kept those thoughts to herself, smiling politely, even wistfully, at each new revelation.

On the twentieth day of forced smiles, Xantcha's conspiratorial campaign achieved its greatest victory when Sosinna confessed that she was in love, perfectly and eternally, with one of her nursery peers: an angel.

"Is that permitted?" Xantcha interrupted before she had the wit to censor herself. The notion of love fascinated her, and spending most of her life in Urza's shadow or hiding her unformed flesh beneath a young man's clothes, she'd had very little opportunity to learn love's secrets. "You don't have wings."

Xantcha's curiosity was ill-timed and rude. It jeopardized everything she'd gained through long days of patient questions, but it was sincere. On worlds where mankind lived side by side with elves or dwarves or any other sentients, love, with all its complications was rarely encouraged, more frequently forbidden. She hardly expected love between the Sisters of Serra and winged angels to flourish in a place where the mere appearance of the sun would have spoilt the perfection of the sunrise.