It was becoming more difficult to distinguish between waking and sleeping, but Guide was fairly certain that he was awake when he noticed the change, and smiled.
The cleverman – fixer or healer or whatever he called himself, it amounted to the same thing – the one who identified himself as Ash... Guide normally ignored the irritatingly arbitrary sound-labels the humans put on themselves as not only meaningless but needless: Wraith, who spoke mind to mind, had no need of such artificial devices, even when dealing with non-telepathic races. One's identity simply was, there was no mistaking one for another. But the human cleverman's mental touch was by turns cool and warm, feather-light, the shape of his thoughts seeming firm until one attempted to touch them, when they crumbled to nothing but left a soft, clinging residue that was most troublesome to expunge. Yes, Guide grumbled to himself: Ash fitted the human's essence perfectly.
Since he had expelled the human from his mind with such force, Guide had idly tracked his now-familiar presence, sometimes fainter, sometimes stronger as he moved around the cave complex. There had been a long period when he could barely sense Ash at all, the human's mental activity unnaturally damped, and Guide guessed that he had taken some sort of sleep-inducing drug; the resulting sense of isolation had reminded him too sharply of his time in Kolya's prison, and he did not seem to have the strength to fight off the memories that pressed in to plague him.
Forcing himself to keep track of Ash helped keep his mind clear, up to a point. The cleverman was not often close enough for the Wraith to sense his mood, but at this moment, his rage and dismay were like a silent shout of outrage. Guide opened his eyes in the dark, his interest sharpening, and found the human's mind an undisciplined torrent of barely coherent emotions, the strongest of which held a bitter taste he recognised all too well. Guide smiled grimly, and his voice woke hissing echoes in the confined space. "And thus are we both betrayed."
"And thus are we both betrayed." Ash tapped a claw on the interface pad to freeze the video feed, and gazed speculatively at the image on the screen. The Wraith appeared to be staring directly at the camera, though that had to be an illusion – the medical datastream confirmed that its sight had not returned following the head injury – and the tips of its sharp teeth were visible in what he realised was a smile. He checked the time-stamp on the feed: two hours ago, give or take, right after he discovered Sanctuary's duplicity. He had been pacing around the eyrie, up and down the corridors, unable to settle, his head in a whirl of rage and self-recrimination.
Struck by a sudden sinking feeling, Ash ran the video back ten seconds, and let it run again, zooming in on the face. He wondered if it was simply imagination that made it appear more gaunt than before, the curve of closed lids in deep eye-sockets and the hollows of its cheeks pared to the bone so that the alien lying so still in the shallow pool resembled something carved in stone. The eyes opened suddenly, flickering a little from side to side, then the bony face twisted in that faint, ironic smile. The reaction was unmistakable.
Ash froze the feed with a trembling hand before he could hear the whispered words again. It had heard him... no, overheard his thoughts, his feelings, two storeys down through solid rock and locked in a soundproofed box. The realisation froze Ash where he lay in the chair, his heart hammering in his own ears, mouth gone dry with terror.
If the Wraith could hear his thoughts from this distance, what else could it do? When he had slipped into its mind yesterday, supremely confident in his own all but undetectable touch, it had sensed him instantly, rifled through his thoughts without a by-your-leave, forced him to witness its nightmarish memories then thrown him out of its mind like a bouncer kicking a drunk downstairs.
Remembering the offhand power of the Wraith's mental touch, Ash was gripped by a sudden, sickening certainty that it would be able to extend its compulsion beyond the Tank room. The instinct to put distance between them was instant and irresistible. He ported another floor up, landing on his backside in the sandy corridor, scrambled to his feet and ported again, this time to the topmost store-caves, and stood in the cool, damp-smelling dark for a long moment, fists clenched at his sides, all his senses bristling.
Nothing, only the sound of his own shaky breathing. After a minute, Ash drew a deeper breath, and let it go more slowly. His eyes had adjusted to the dark enough to show him a scatter of boxes, and he sat down rather sharply on the nearest as his knees gave way, and cradled his head in his hands, forcing down the panic by an act of will.
"Calm down, Ash." He had spoken out loud for the comfort of hearing a human voice, but the quavering whisper was hardly reassuring. He cleared his throat and tried again. "It can't find you up here, you're safe..." He trailed off. Who was he kidding? Sanctuary had left him with an impossible choice. Knowing what he now did about how it fed, he could not safely release the Wraith... but how could he keep it prisoner? Even if it was not able to invade his mind and compel him to release it, how could he, Ash, the fixer, the healer, knowingly condemn it to the agonies of solitary confinement and a slow death by starvation?