As Toloth re-entered the dining room, carrying Teresa's multi-colored rosary in her right hand, he had the sensation of walking into an Andalite encampment. He wasn't quite ready to agree with Malcar Seven-Four-Five that Christianity was a living and malignant thing, but he was coming to feel that Christians, at any rate, were a hostile force. Teresa, her family, Gef, Thomas à Kempis, maybe even Jesus himself: all were arrayed against him, all desirous (whether they knew it or not) to make him into something that he had no wish to be.

Perhaps this feeling was heightened by what Teresa knew about the object he was carrying. Christians seemed to speak of the rosary in improbably violent metaphors: "the scourge of Satan", they called it, and "the weapon against the evils of the world". A week before, Toloth would have thought that ludicrous – how could one fight the evils of the world with colored beads? – but it didn't seem silly at all to Teresa. She was utterly certain that Jesus heard her when she prayed – that she could present her wishes to the Maker and Governor of the universe, and, if they proved to be good and fitting, he would adjust the very fabric of reality to accommodate them. And she knew, also, that, in order for her wishes to be acceptable, she had to be acceptable herself; therefore, it was natural that the most powerful prayers should occur while her mind was fixed on edifying things. Hence the three series of "mysteries" taken from the life and actions of Jesus, which, by definition, were as edifying as anything could ever be. It was all horribly rational and compelling, when seen – as Toloth was now seeing it – from the inside.

"So what's the intention, Mom?" he said with an effort.

Mrs. Sickles sighed. "Your Aunt Missy called this afternoon, just before Nana arrived," she said. "Jasmine was arrested this morning for shoplifting."

Mr. Sickles's head jerked up. "What?" he said. "You didn't tell me anything about this."

"Not before dinner, no," said his wife, with a faintly ironic smile. "I put a lot of work into this meal; the last thing I wanted was for it to get cold while you analyzed the possibilities of the case."

"What were the circumstances?" said Mr. Sickles. "Could felonious intent be demonstrated? Stores are pretty busy this time of year; it's easy to pick something up and then forget to put it back down."

"Yes," Mrs. Sickles agreed, "but it's not so easy to pick it up, tear off the tag so the sensors can't detect it, and then stuff it in your purse and leave the store."

"Is that what Jasmine did?" said Mr. Sickles, aghast. "In the middle of the Christmas rush, she thought she could get away with a stunt like that? I know she has her clueless moments, but I would have expected her to have a little more common sense than that, at least."

Mrs. Sickles shrugged. "Well, when you raise a girl to think that the world already belongs to her, things like this happen, I suppose," she said. "I don't like to speak ill of your sister, but you have to admit that she did rather spare the rod where Jasmine was concerned."

"I suppose so," Mr. Sickles conceded. "Still, it's a shame that it had to happen now, of all times of the year."

"I agree," said Mrs. Sickles. "And that's why I told Missy that we'd say a Rosary for her and her family tonight after dinner. Now, let's all sit down and get to it, shall we?"

And so the session began. Mr. Sickles led it, as he had led the ritual of thanks at the beginning of the meal; the three women present (or, rather, two women and one human-Controller) confined themselves to joining in the latter portions of the prayers he recited.

Toloth, of course, had picked the basic plan of the thing from Teresa's brain before coming downstairs. After beginning with a statement of basic Christian beliefs (a more precise version, in statement form, of what Teresa had asked of Gef before she had baptized him), three prayers were recited: an act of praise and petition to Jesus's divine father; a slightly less grand such act, repeated three times, to his human mother (who seemed to have some particular importance in the Christian scheme of things); and a brief statement to the effect that God was glorious and worthy of all possible honor. After this, the leader announced an event in the life of Jesus, and all the participants were supposed to reflect on the significance of this event for as long as it took the leader to say the three prayers again, repeating the prayer to Jesus's mother ten times instead of three. This was then repeated for four more such events, which, along with the first, were supposed to express either the joy, the sorrow, or the glory of Jesus's life and deeds. (Toloth gathered that, since it was the third day of the week, the Sickles family would be focusing on that series of events that expressed the sorrow.) Then a few unofficial concluding prayers were recited, and that was that. It was, Toloth had had to admit to himself, a pleasingly precise and orderly structure; what he hadn't quite understood, through the carefully filtered memories that were all he was allowing himself, was the emotional effect it seemed to have on the participants.

But now, as his human fingers traveled along the chain of smooth, round beads, and the familiar phrases (familiar to Teresa, anyway) fell off his borrowed lips with barely conscious effort, he began to see. It was a liberating thing, in its way, this Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary: by providing the hands and the tongue with more or less automatic exercises, it freed the mind to act in its own sphere, without hindrance from the body. For creatures as sensual as humans, some such trick was probably necessary, if they were to pay any attention at all to the unseen and unimaginable powers behind the universe. This Saint Dominic had been a shrewd man; it was a shame he hadn't been born a Yeerk.

"Give us this day our daily bread," he murmured, in precise imitation of Teresa's unconscious inflections, "and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but…"

«…deliver us from evil.»

Toloth was momentarily startled to hear Teresa's mental "voice" gain such sudden intensity. He had been aware that she was following along with the Rosary from inside her psychic oubliette, but he hadn't been paying her much attention. Now, hearing her "speak" the last four words of the Pater Noster with such passion, he was almost amused. Beg your God all you want, Teresa, he thought. Your deliverance will not be coming anytime soon.

But then he realized that that wasn't what Teresa was asking for. The undertones of her thought were perfectly plain, and they took the "us" quite literally. "Deliver us from evil" – that is, the two persons occupying my body. Deliver me, certainly, from the evil that has robbed me of my freedom, my privacy, and my happiness – but also, and more importantly, deliver my Controller from the evil that has ruled his heart from the day of his spawning. Let him not die in the thrall of that evil; let him not choose to follow it rather than You; let it not lead him forever away from the endless peace and joy for which You made him. Deliver us, O Lord.

The impact that this made on Toloth can hardly be overstated. He had already seen several dramatic examples of the effect of Christian love, but that was nothing compared to the glimpse he now got of the thing itself. Teresa loved him. She hated the Empire, but she loved him. Indeed, she hated the Empire all the more because she loved him – because to love someone means to desire his good, and the Empire could only remove goodness from Toloth, never give it to him. Toloth was meant to be something of which the Empire had no conception – something of which Toloth himself, as a subject of the Empire, had no conception. And Teresa, with every fiber of her being, wanted him to be that. That was what she meant by love.

But did Toloth want that sort of love? And, in particular, did he want it from a human? That, he now realized, was the question – the unavoidable question that anyone who infested Teresa Sickles had to face. Malcar Seven-Four-Five had said no; Oliss Three-Eight-Three, it seemed, had said yes; and he himself – well, he simply and terrifyingly wasn't sure. In one sense, it seemed logically impossible not to want it; how could he reject someone's desire to see him prosper? By definition, if Teresa's love remained true to itself, it could do him nothing but good. But, then, if to love was to do good, then to accept Teresa's love was to acknowledge her as his benefactor – and benefactors were owed repayment. All civilized beings understood that, even the Taxxons. If someone saved your life, you owed him that life; if someone did you a favor, you owed him a favor in return (Toloth thought of Lissim); if someone loved you… well, presumably you owed her love. And how, Toloth asked himself, could he owe Teresa love and still live as he had always done?

While he pondered this, the Sickleses – Teresa included – continued with their meditations. They contemplated Jesus's fear and distress as his death had approached, the whipping he had received at the hands of another Empire's soldiers, the mockery that those soldiers had made of his claim to universal kingship, and the final indignity that had forced him to carry the instrument of his own execution to its place of erection. And, as they contemplated these things, Teresa wove them all effortlessly into her plea for Toloth's soul. You went through so much to redeem us, ran the tenor of her thoughts. Don't let it all go for nothing in his case.

Then, when her father announced "the Fifth Sorrowful Mystery, the Crucifixion", Toloth felt Teresa's mind give a sort of guilty start, as she realized that the Rosary was nearly finished, and that she had barely spared a thought for her cousin's predicament. As she hastened to reorient her intentions, her memory rebuked her with other occasions of this sort; it was, it seemed, a characteristic failing of Teresa's, this neglect of what was expected of her when private considerations intervened. She remembered, in particular, a time when, as a fourth-grader, she had deliberately missed the school bus so she could bring a gift to the man who had saved Chris – then only a puppy – from being hit by a car.

Toloth was unsure whether he appreciated being thus compared to the savior of that hideous brute he had met outside. He let the matter slide, however, and the rest of the rosary proceeded without incident; beads clicked, prayers were uttered, and Yeerk soldier and human child each pursued his own thoughts, until the session concluded with a plea that all those present might imitate the events that they had just contemplated, and thereby attain the promise that was implicit in those events. Then, with a symbolic gesture that traced the shape of Jesus's death on their own bodies, the four free agents at the table rose, put away their tools of prayer, and resumed the more mundane tasks of life.

"You've cleared a path to your bed, right, Teresa?" said Mrs. Sickles. "Nana isn't going to trip and kill herself if she has to get up in the night?"

"I think it's okay," said Toloth.

Mrs. Sickles raised an eyebrow. "You think so?"

"Um… maybe I should go back and check."

"You do that," said Mrs. Sickles. "And, Clarence, I told Missy you'd call her after we prayed, so you should probably do that before they go to bed. Mama and I can keep ourselves entertained for an hour or so while the two of you look for loopholes in the petty-theft laws."

And so, within minutes, every member of the Sickles household was busy with the same sort of things that any unbelieving family of similar size and conditions might have been busy with. There was nothing, externally, to hint that, just minutes before, they had been soliciting the attention of a limitless, self-existent Being of unimaginable power and glory.

But the mind of Toloth Two-Nine-Four, as he returned to Teresa's bedroom, was filled with strange thoughts indeed.