Many things happened then, and quickly. Almost as soon as the voice had stopped speaking, the Ray in Jon's arms started to stir. She came to consciousness, but it was tenuous and weak; it was apparent that all her efforts had exhausted her.

Ndiaye and the Joint Chiefs immediately confirmed Protocol Neary and the President gave orders for Ray, Jon and Parry to be brought to private quarters and to have doctors sent up to tend to them.

"We shall hold a meeting as soon as she has recovered herself sufficiently," Parry heard Ndiaye telling Generals Rojas and Ghislin. "We'll assign her a liaison as well until we can establish an ambassador and negotiator to her people. Ghislin, Project: Lure is under the guidance of SOTAC; I want the project head and our top xenobiologist brought on board immediately. We'll- "

The rest Parry didn't hear, as they were ushered out of the conference room and deeper into the President's Confed bunker. Ray was walking with the help of Jon and her crutch, but she looked glazed and vacant-eyed. Jon gave Parry an odd look when she made no move to help Ray as he was, but said nothing.

So quickly did things move that by the time they were entering quarters, two of Ndiaye's own medical staff were waiting for them. One immediately headed to Parry, but she brushed him off. The other helped Jon get Ray to a low sofa in the main living space.

"I'm fine," she said quietly, and wandered some distance away, putting her back to the others. There were no windows, so she found herself staring at some random piece of artwork without even seeing it.

Her mind could hardly wrap around what she'd just seen. Ray wasn't human. She was- something else, a non-carbon lifeform from a place where the laws of physics didn't even apply. That was hard enough to swallow, but Parry was pretty sure she could get past that part fairly quickly.

What stuck in her craw the hardest was what Ray had said. When Parry had been captured, Ray had seen…everything. Her torture, her humiliations at the hands of Chiv, her conversation with Ara Chaz, her 'escape'; all of it.

I spoke to her. That voice in my head, right from the beginning-I wasn't hallucinating it or imagining it. It wasn't some delusion born out of shock and fear, it was her. It was real, she was really there. And I saw her.

That moment in the box, when the Akmanti had been smuggling them into the underground tunnels; had that been her too? For a moment, Parry had felt like Ray had taken her hand, spoken her name, but she'd written it off as being half asleep.

Had that been real?

That moment when I was dozing off back at the manor house, when I suddenly felt untethered, like I was falling, surrounded by chaos. Ray woke up just then, and what was it she said?

I'm sorry Parry. I didn't mean to.

She shook her head sharply. Her whole face felt on fire with shame. Ray had seen. She'd seen everything.

Parry had never felt more humiliated in her life.

Food was being brought into the room. Parry broke somewhat out of her thoughts as she smelled it, her mouth involuntarily watering. With nothing but MRE's and dirt to eat in God knew how fucking long, her entire body yearned toward that smell, and finally she turned around.

Ray was gone, as were the medics. An unfamiliar man and General Bastille were there instead, the man putting out trays of food. Bastille was talking with Jon, but as Parry started over the general excused herself from him and headed for her.

This was Parry's first good look at the General since leaving Houston, and she definitely looked worse for wear. Dark hollows under her eyes and a pinched cast to her lips told of many sleepless nights and long, intense days.

"Parry," she said, forgoing the use of her rank and thus silently dismissing the idea of it between them altogether- at least for this conversation. "Are you all right? Jon says you refused medical treatment?"

"I'm not hurt," she said. "There's nothing wrong with me a few good nights' sleep, some proper clothing, and hot food wouldn't fix."

Bastille's gaze was measured, but not lacking in compassion. "I do not believe that is true. You may not be physically unwell, but you have been through much, and are trying to adjust to information that, to be honest, has us all reeling. You had no idea that Caruso- "

"None," Parry said, a bit more tersely than she had intended.

After a moment searching her face, Bastille said gently, "I understand. Right now, you and Jon have special dispensation as ambassadorial delegates; technically right now you even outrank me. However, there will be a full debriefing when you two have had time to rest and eat. I won't keep you from your food any longer, but there is one thing I must ask. The others who did not make that final Jump when we left the Front, were they not- "

"They were taken to a prison camp," Parry said. Her already wrung out and exhausted emotions took another slight wrench; she did not relish the idea of being the one to tell Bastille her daughter was probably dead. "Colonel Rochester, Jon, and I were taken separately. They intended us to go to the Emperor for public execution but the Kilrathi resistance intervened. I'm sorry, I really have no other information for you regarding the others save to say this: Merlin Killdare died trying to protect everyone when the Kilrathi finally found us."

Bastille's eyes were soft and aggrieved, but showed no real surprise; Jondell must have told her at least that much already.

"And my daughter?"

"I can't say for certain, not honestly," Parry said, then reluctantly added, "Ray-…seemed to think that she…that she was gone as well."

For a mother, even a military one, she took in this information with a strength and grace Parry wasn't sure she herself could ever match. However the grief in her eyes moved eons deeper, and there was an almost imperceptible droop of her shoulders, the faintest of trembles in her lower lip.

"I understand," she said quietly, before Parry could say more. "I will leave you to your food. We will talk again."

With that, she turned and left the room, and despite her starving stomach, Parry suddenly had no desire to eat.


A blur of people kept coming and going, bringing clothes and sundries. Guards stationed outside their quarters could be seen momentarily with each opening and closing.

The last came in less than an hour after Bastille had gone, in the form of a neat little woman in a tailored suit. She introduced herself as Jean Forbes, and explained that she had been assigned as the Confed liaison and pro tem negotiator to Ray's people. Upon finding out that Ray was still asleep in one of the private rooms off the main quarters, she did not press the issue but indicated she would be back in the morning to speak with her, and by then their xenobiologist should also be available.

Parry, starving but unable to eat, exhausted but with no desire to sleep, brushed off Jon's attempts at conversation or to at least get her to have some of the food, and eventually retreated into her own small room, and the shower. There she stood for what seemed like years, letting the hot water scald every trace of Kilrah off of her skin, and hide the tears that she could no longer keep back.

When they had run dry, she emerged and dressed in the new clothes that had been stacked on the bed, not even looking at the Kilrathi clothes she had discarded in the corner. She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes, but all she could see was Rafe and the others they had left behind, curled up on stone or dirt floors- and opened them again. She turned onto one side, closing her eyes again, and this time she was back in that hot, miserable little cell on Chiv's ship. Ray, slowly bleeding bullet holes in her chest, sat kitty-corner to her in the same position, as if she were a mirror reflection of the ache in Parry's chest.

Parry opened her eyes again, decided to abandon sleep, and sat up.

Her eyes fell on the clock and she blanched- somehow, five hours had slipped by. It was just after midnight.

Stepping out into the common area again, she saw that Jon had gone in to get his own rest. The food he hadn't eaten still stood on the table where it had been placed. It would be cold, but she started to walk toward it knowing she should at least attempt to eat. That's when she realized she wasn't alone.

Jon wasn't there, but Ray was. She was sitting in a miserable little ball on one end of the sofa, her knee drawn up. Cradled between her hands and knee was an entire pitcher of what looked like apple juice. If it had been full when she'd picked it up, she'd downed a good half of it already.

At first Parry froze, unsure what to do. Ray was looking down into the pitcher as if it contained the unsolved mysteries of all creation, and didn't seem to have seen her. Parry thought for a moment of going back into the room, cursed herself for a coward, and went to the table instead.

She gathered some of the bread, cheese, and chunks of cold chicken, and assembled a crude sandwich. Instead of sitting at the table, she made herself go to the sofa, sitting down on the other side of it. Ray did not lift her head, and neither of them said a word while Parry began to eat.

The first bite was the hardest. After that, her ravenous appetite would no longer be denied by embarrassment or grief, and she wolfed the rest of the sandwich down in six huge bites. Picking the crumbs off her napkin, she looked at a space on the floor between her and the other woman.

"May I have some of that juice?" she asked.

Ray unfolded from her curl and wordlessly handed the pitcher over. Without bothering for a cup, Parry took two long swallows from its rim, then passed it back.

Parry wiped the napkin over her mouth, then began to methodically fold it. Finally, she said, "You saw everything?"

"Yes," Ray replied. Parry winced a bit, brows knitting tightly.

"Ara Chaz? My escape?"

"Yes."

"How is that possible? You woke up back on Houston days before I managed to escape."

"Our space…time does not matter there. Time is a concept they're only starting to learn, one they only found out about when all this began. It's kind of like-…like a big chessboard."

Parry looked at her. "I don't understand."

"Imagine you're hovering over a giant chessboard," Ray said. "One that goes on in every direction for infinity. Every square on that chessboard is a single moment in time. In material space, you see a single square at a time and can't see past the square, and you can only go from one square to another in a single direction; from the moment before to the next moment. But there, in that other place…you can't see every square of course, because you can't perceive infinity, but you can see millions of squares all at once, see every one of those moments all at once. They're all happening at once, all those squares. You can go from one to another that isn't even touching the first one, just by shifting your eyes. It's…a pretty poor analogy I know but, it's the only one I can think that even comes close to describing it."

"So, you could see what was happening several squares ahead, things that- to me, going one square at a time- hadn't happened yet?"

"No…" Ray said slowly, drawing out the word with an almost constipated expression. It was as if the idea she wanted was right there in one corner of her head but she couldn't quite reach it. "Not then. I was…damn it."

She blew out a frustrated breath and sat up, swinging her leg off the sofa and leaning forward. She set the pitcher on the floor, then looked at her hands. "I just need to start at the beginning. When that missile hit me, I was knocked out of this physical body. The real me. I was there in the cockpit with that body but, I mean, what would you have thought if that happened? You had a sudden catastrophic injury and then found yourself both sitting in your pit and lying there slumped?"

"I suppose I would think I was hallucinating, that I had a brain injury."

"Yeah, and that's what I thought. My eyes were closed, but obviously they weren't because I could see. I thought I was just hurt badly. I kept thinking that. Even when I was standing outside my ship and could see myself- this…this meat- still in the cockpit. I couldn't process what was happening, so subconsciously I guess I just assumed I was dreaming."

She went on to tell Parry about how things unfolded from her perspective; how she was there with her but kept finding herself in a sudden and inconceivable chaos. How she simply clung to the idea she was dreaming and eventually, and even more subconsciously, to the idea that she actually was dead. That she realized later that much of the chaos was just when she- when her body- was momentarily conscious in the infirmary.

At last she told her about what it had been like before she'd woken in the infirmary that final time. Where she'd gotten further away, had thought she'd snapped that connection to her body altogether; that final overwhelming roar of stimulus and feeling that culminated in one ringing explosion of HOME.

"For that moment, that's where I was. I actually crossed back to our space. It was just for a split second from my perception, but for that second, I remembered. I remembered who I really was, where that place really was. Then, it was gone again, and I woke up for good in the infirmary. I was back in the body."

"And forgot?"

"That part, yes. Drugs, and shock, I think. The rest was like a dream that you only remember parts of. Then when you came back, when I realized what you were telling me of your escape matched that dream, I started to realize I couldn't have been dreaming. And I knew you were lying; guessed you had been told to lie, that what really happened was classified. But I didn't want to remember. I didn't want to think about it, because all of it was so…so horrible, so confusing. And seeing you like that- "

Parry's face heated again and she looked away. Ray leaned over and put her hand on Parry's hand gently. Parry didn't pull away, but every muscle seemed to tense.

"You haven't got anything to feel ashamed about," she started to say, then blinked owlishly when Parry snapped at her.

"Stay out of my head."

Ray's hand darted back from her, and in a soft and miserable voice she said, "I-I wasn't in your head."

Taking a deep breath, Parry shook her head once and cleared her throat. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just…the idea of you seeing all that- "

Ray said nothing, and Parry finally looked at her again. "When I saw you, in that cell-…you didn't look like a…that light whatever-it-was we saw on the conference table."

"That 'whatever it was', was me," Ray said, but Parry ignored this.

"You looked like you. Like you are now. Or like you had been the last time I'd seen you. In your flight suit, and- "

"Shot?"

Parry winced, but Ray nodded. "Yeah, I know. That's because that's how I saw myself. You saw me the way I saw me. I think the only reason you could see me at all is because by then you were so mentally exhausted, so physically stressed; somehow being at that point let you see me when otherwise I'm invisible in this space. At least to human and Kilrathi eyes."

"You weren't invisible on the conference table," Parry said. "And I wasn't the only one to see you there; everyone did. How? We weren't all so mentally and physically exhausted as I was back in that cell."

"I had help," Ray said. "Concentrated help from my space, and still, we could only make me visible weakly, and for so short a period of time."

"Wait- the others helped you? The others of your kind?"

Ray nodded. "They helped me open the wormholes as well."

"How?"

"After Karfa took me, he kept trying to probe my defenses," Ray said. "I knew that you and Diane, Jondell-…I knew that you three hadn't died. That Elie and Zuhn helped you escape, faked your death."

Parry's eyes widened ever so slightly in realization. "I did hear you in that box, didn't I?"

"Yes. And I really did take your hand."

Parry swallowed but said nothing and after a moment, Ray continued.

"I was terrified that Karfa would see what I knew- that you were still alive- so I had to come up with new ways to keep him out of my head. When that didn't work, I did what I could to keep the truth disguised from him. Otherwise, he would have known you weren't really dead, and he'd tell the Emperor, a-and I couldn't stand the thought that they'd catch you again, that you'd be tortured again. I couldn't stand the idea that you'd be killed.

"But Karfa was smug. He thought I was weak, that all 'Apes' were weak, and he knew I was untrained. He didn't think I could possibly hide anything from him, so that made it easier for me to fool him. Even so, it was hard to keep him out, hard to keep him distracted. That last time I knew he was going to break through, to see the truth. So in a panic I threw myself at him. Not this body, but- "

"But the real you inside it," Parry said.

Ray nodded. "And I knocked him out. For just a moment, I knocked him out."

"I'm guessing you don't mean you knocked him unconscious," Parry said, and without realizing she was doing it, she reached out and gently started to rub Ray's shoulder.

"No. He thought that's what happened, but I literally knocked him out of that body. Just for a split second, but it was enough.

"When he took me from the prison, I saw him knock a guard back without using his hands, without even being near the man," Ray said, leaving out the reason that he had done so was to stop the guard from killing Blade and Hammer. "So, I practiced. I practiced trying to do the same thing."

"Telekinesis," Parry said, but Ray shook her head firmly.

"No. Telekinesis, telepathy; that's not what I can do, not what we were doing at all. I cannot use my mind to move an object across the room, you see? Like that cup over there."

She gestured at the table that was still covered with the detritus of the meal that had been brought up for them. She squinted at one of the empty cups for a long moment, and nothing happened. She let out a breath, as if she'd been holding it while concentrating.

"You see? It doesn't move when I just will it to move. The same as if you tried. What I can do, though, is just get up out of this body, walk over there in my real form, and physically move the damn thing."

At that, her head dipped forward for the briefest moment, and the cup suddenly lifted in the air, drifted over a foot, and set itself down again. Parry's eyes went wide as she watched it. Just that fast, Ray's head was lifting again.

"You see? Not telekinesis, just the real me moving it."

"And telepathy?"

"That one is a bit creepier. Pretty much what I could do is poke my 'real' head- of course, we don't have an actual head- into someone else's and literally look at your brainwave patterns. I can turn those into cohesive pictures. Memories only, or something you're really devoting your brain power to; active thought processes are too chaotic to make sense of. I don't like doing that and I will never do it to you. Ever. As for seeing something happening a really far way away, that's just me going over there too. Doesn't matter how far- when I'm out of this body, space and time don't constrain me. I can't see the future or the past- to do that I'd have to go back to my space completely and look down at that chessboard I was talking about- but events happening right now, piece of cake."

"So, you knocked that Karfa right out of his body, but he thought you only momentarily knocked him unconscious?"

"Yeah, because he'd never been badly hurt, like I was. He'd never been jarred out before, or for any length of time. Just like I didn't understand what was happening at Little Ippy and afterward, he didn't understand what was happening either. I realized what I'd done though. For a moment I actually saw the real him, out of his body, and I knew then what I'd done. I couldn't stop laughing. They thought I was screaming, that I'd lost my mind."

"Why did he carry you to the tunnels where we had been?" Parry asked, not sure she wanted to know.

"He didn't," Ray said, and from the grimace of miserable distaste on her face, she wasn't relishing telling Parry how either. "After I realized I could knock him out, I did it again. Before they came for me in my room I 'stepped out' of this body a little; just enough. That left it looking catatonic, with minimal brain activity. I waited until Karfa showed up, until Retov was distracted, and then I jumped all the way and knocked him out again. Harder, this time. And I knew what to look for; that connection, the one that looks like a little silver cord. It's what anchors us to our bodies- sever that and the body dies and we go back to our space with no feasible way to return."

"So when you threw him out that time, you severed the connection as well?"

"Yeah. In that moment of shock where he didn't realize what was happening, I tore it apart, ripped it loose of the body. The body died, Karfa fucked off back to our space, and I- "

Now Parry couldn't help a grimace of her own. "Got into his body and what, started driving it around?"

Now it was Ray's turn to blush. "Yeah," she said. "It was really hard. I wasn't connected to it, and to even move it was so much harder. Instead of driving a car, I was trying to push one uphill with a dead engine and no power steering. I killed Retov, picked up my body, and headed for the tunnels. It was the last place I'd seen you, and I got the way there from Retov the night before. When I knew that the Akmanti scout had spotted me I just left Karfa and got back into my own body."

"And he dropped dead."

"He was already dead. But yes. Hard as it was, I wasn't expecting it to be so exhausting. I was completely wiped out the moment I left him, and didn't quite have the energy to get back in. I was so exhausted, in fact, that I ended up bouncing back into our space- like I had for that brief moment back in Houston's infirmary. That's when I was able to talk to the others of my people, remembered who I was, and was able to tell them everything I had learned."

"You said Karfa was there too. At that other one, that had been in…your cousin?"

God, Parry thought. How fucking surreal is this conversation?

"Yeah. They told them everything too."

"Karfa wasn't pissed you killed him?" She asked, and Ray gave a weak but genuine laugh.

"Oh, no. He was actually quite horrified at himself. Karfa -the original Karfa, the one whose body it was when it was born- was what we would call a sociopath. Well, as you know we have no memory of who we really are the moment we take over a body and enter your space, and we can only work with what we have. A young brain is a lot more plastic than an adult brain so we can successfully adapt and learn, but if there's a defect in that brain there's not a damned thing we can do about it."

"So, if you were to go into a body that was naturally blind, for example- "

"We'd be blind, and wouldn't know any different from any other material being who was born blind. Yeah. The 'real' Karfa had a defect that made him a sociopath, so 'our' Karfa was a sociopath- he couldn't make the brain do something it was incapable of doing, and didn't have enough context to know that wasn't how normal healthy brains worked. When he came back to 'our' space and remembered everything and realized, he was…" She shrugged.

"Horrified," Parry said, and Ray smiled faintly at her.

"Yeah. Some fucking kind of luck, huh?"