"That’s enough, Tut," I said. But even his aura showed no response. It had taken a flat, damped-down appearance, like a gas fire on its lowest setting… and it had gone that way so quickly I’d been slow to notice.

"There’s company coming, grr-arrh. They’ll have us all humming, grr-arrh. We’ll all become gods, and we’ll all shoot our wads…"

"Enough!" I dropped my metal cutters and grabbed him by the shoulders. The instant I touched him, his aura flared with anger… and the same anger burst in every direction, echoed by hundreds of hidden EMP clouds watching from cover. For a moment, I thought I was seeing something new: pretas reflecting a human’s emotions. They’d never before been affected by what we were feeling — for example, when Li and Ubatu were getting on each other’s nerves inside the shuttle, the pretas hadn’t reacted. But the second Tut got angry, the clouds responded as if he was one of their own…

Then the truth struck me. Tut’s own aura was still flat and withdrawn; the anger that poured off him didn’t belong to Tut himself but to EMP particles inside his body. I hadn’t noticed them till they flared with emotion… and now that they were blazing, I could barely detect Tut’s dull life force amidst their fierce glow.

An army of pretas had invaded Tut. Trying to possess him… just like they’d possessed the Rexy who attacked us. Maybe Tut’s insanity made him vulnerable — his inability to resist any impulse that crossed his mind — or maybe the clouds simply targeted him at random. One way or another, they’d entered him so smoothly my sixth sense hadn’t noticed.

Tut wasn’t entirely under preta control — not yet. Otherwise, he’d be doing something far more drastic than chanting doggerel. But if I couldn’t help him fight the clouds’ mental influence, how long before he succumbed completely?

"Tut!" I said, shaking him. "Snap out of it!"

"What’s wrong?" Li called from inside the ship. He and Ubatu had been watching our progress through the small opening in the hull.

"Tut!" I slapped his face, denting the thin gold surface with my blow.

"Youn Suu! Leave him alone." That was Festina, somewhere behind me. I ignored her and hit Tut again, denting his mask some more.

"Stop, Youn Suu, or I’ll shoot." Festina had drawn her pistol. If she fired, I wondered if it would have much effect. When Tut shot me on Cashleen, I’d only gone down for a few minutes… and that was when the Balrog was new to my body. Now that I’d been more thoroughly assimilated, I suspected the stunner would barely slow me down.

"Wake up, Tut!" I yelled. One more slap to his face. Festina began to pull the trigger… but in that instant, Tut’s aura flicked back to life. Immediately, clouds streamed out of him: erupting from his mouth, his nose, his ears, pouring like steam off his skin, surrounding both of us with fury-filled fog before it gusted away beyond normal sight. My sixth sense followed it a few seconds longer; then I turned my attention back to closer surroundings.

Festina still had the gun pointing at me, but her aura showed no intention to shoot. In the shock of seeing clouds gush from Tut, she’d simply forgotten to holster her weapon. Li and Ubatu hadn’t had a clear view through the hole in the fuselage, and they knew nothing about pretas, so they were babbling questions that I didn’t bother answering.

Tut himself was dazed, either as an aftereffect of being occupied by aliens or because I’d hit him hard several times. I eased him down to the ground. As I did, I couldn’t help notice what I’d done to his gold-plated face: three strong slaps with my right hand had caved in his golden left cheek, opening a rip halfway between nose and ear. Blood trickled out of the jagged slit; when the metal buckled under my blows, a sharp edge must have gashed the flesh beneath.

Hey, Tut, I thought, I’ve given you an oozing left cheek. It seemed so ridiculous, I didn’t know why I started to cry.

Samsara [Pali]: The ordinary world. Also, the ordinary condition of human life, filled with fixations and dissatisfaction. Samsara is the opposite of nirvana… but they aren’t different places, they’re different ways of experiencing the same place. Samsara is the sense of being messed up; nirvana is being free of clutter.

Festina nudged me aside and took care of Tut. All she did was dribble disinfectant into the golden crack — the wound underneath was only a nick. Then she used a scalpel from the first-aid kit as a delicate pry bar, lifting the jagged edges of gold and bending them away from Tut’s face so they wouldn’t cut him again. Meanwhile, she gave Li and Ubatu a minimal rundown of what we’d found out so the two diplomats would stop plaguing us with questions. Festina told how the Fuentes had botched their ascension and turned themselves into EMPing creatures of smoke… but she failed to mention the same would happen to anyone who stayed on Muta too long.

All the time she was speaking, I sobbed: quietly, trying to make no noise. Crying as much for myself as for what I’d done to Tut. Crying because I’d reached the limit of what I could repress. It wasn’t so much emotion as a physical need — something my body had to do. I couldn’t stop it any more than I could stop my heart beating. But I felt detached from my wet cheeks and runny nose; as I fought to silence my snuffles, my mental awareness continued to view the world more clearly than my teardrop-blurred eyes.

So I saw Ubatu take back the tools and finish widening the hole in the ship’s hull. I saw Li clamber out into the late-afternoon sunshine. I saw Ubatu climb out too, her eyes on me as if appraising whether I was now ripe for attention from Ifa-Vodun. I saw the two diplomats lean over Festina’s shoulder for a few moments before they lost interest in Tut and his injuries. I saw them gaze for a moment at their surroundings, then begin ambling toward the city. I heard Festina yell at them to stay put, and I saw both their auras flash with annoyance as they slowed but didn’t stop their casual walk along the highway. They went another ten paces, just to show they didn’t have to do what Festina told them. Then they turned around and came back.

By then, I’d got myself under control. Tut was coming around. "Whoa!" he said. "Whatever I drank, I want more."

"The cloud-things got inside you," Festina replied, still kneeling beside him. "Do you remember?"

"Nope. But I forget lots of stuff… which works out pretty well, cuz the memory gaps let me stretch my imagination."

I gave my nose a final wipe as Festina turned toward me. "What about you? What tipped you off something was wrong?"

"He was chanting," I said. "Bad poetry. He did the same at Camp Esteem while he was wearing a bear mask. I thought he’d fallen into a trance… like in a Unity mask ritual. Did you ever go to a mirror dance, Tut?"

"Hundreds," he said. "Now there’s where you don’t remember stuff."

Festina frowned. "And you’re good at going into trances?"

"I’m a natural-born expert."

"Lovely." She rocked back off her knees and onto her feet. "I have no idea if you were really possessed, but I don’t want a repeat performance. Who knows what you’d do?"

"Aww, come on, Auntie, I wouldn’t hurt a gnat."

"Some things I prefer not to test."

She raised her gaze to the sky. Clouds had begun to build above the southern horizon. They weren’t active storm clouds, but they were the leading edge of the front that carried the storm with it. We had maybe two hours left before bad weather hit.

"Let’s find a place for the night," Festina said, raising her voice so Li and Ubatu could hear. "Somewhere we won’t get drenched in the downpour. Come morning, we’ll see what we can do about getting off this planet."