would be. Behind him she could see a great city of stone and spires, with a brilliantly colored moon hanging in the sun-filled magenta sky. She stopped and stared in awe at a world that no human had seen and survived except Reza. He held his hand out to her, and she took it, barely noticing the talons on her hands and the blueness of her skin, for that was the way she had been born, a daughter of the Empress. And within her, she felt the endless chorus of voices that sang the melody of Her will and love. She felt the power of her own spirit there, a tiny but wondrous drop in an endless ocean of souls.
“Our Ways again are one, my love,” she said, feeling as if sunlight bathed her heart, as if the Empress had caressed her soul with kindness.
“In Her name, may it always be so,” he said, tenderly kissing her on the lips. “Yours shall my heart always be, Esah-Zhurah.”
She smiled as he spoke her name, and walked with him toward the great gates and the wonders that lay beyond.
“Nicole!”
Nicole sat up at the vaguely familiar voice, blinking at the light that illuminated her surroundings. She fought to say something, but her body did not understand the words her mind wanted to form. Her lips moved, but no sound came.
“Nicole,” Jodi said urgently, “are you all right?”
“Nicole?” Jodi asked again, her hands on her friend’s shoulders, her eyes wide with concern. “Say something, will you? Do you need the surgeon?”
“
“You look like hell, Nikki,” Jodi said, reluctantly releasing Nicole to sit up on her own. “My God, you were having some kind of wild dream, woman, let me tell you.”
“Did I say anything?” Nicole asked, her mind still in a deep fog. She caught fleeting glimpses and sensations flashing across her memory that seemed totally alien, yet somehow familiar…
“The only thing I could understand was when you said Reza’s name,” she replied quietly. “The rest was gibberish as far as I could tell.”
Nicole looked at her palm. Where there should have been a bloody gash from the knife there was only a scar that looked as if it had been there for a long, long time.
“Jesus, Nicole, how did you get that?” Jodi yelped, taking hold of Nicole’s hand to get a better look at the scar. She knew her friend’s body fairly well from living together for so long, and knew that this had not been there the day before. But if that was so, she thought, confused, how could there be a scar now? They didn’t just form overnight.
“A long time ago,” Nicole mumbled noncommittally, pulling her hand away. She was still dazed, confused, and wanted only to be alone to think. She looked at the clock. It was almost oh-seven-hundred. Time to get up. She groaned, feeling as if she had run a full marathon. No, she corrected herself. She felt as if she had lived a lifetime in a single night. The only problem was that she did not remember now whose life it had been. “A long time ago,” she repeated absently as she pushed herself out of bed and headed toward the bathroom and a long shower, wondering silently what had really happened last night.
“A long time ago?” Jodi murmured after Nicole had closed the door between them. “Bullshit.”
“Reza,” Eustus puffed as he ran with his friend through the obstacle course that took up nearly three hours of their morning every other day, “you know Commander Carre, right?”
“Yes,” Reza replied as he led Eustus over a water obstacle. Both of them cleared it with room to spare. They were almost halfway through the course, with about half their classmates ahead of them. Reza chose to pace Eustus, for he himself had never found the obstacle course particularly challenging. He was breathing now only slightly faster than normal, which was practically not at all. “I knew her when we were children. She was… special to me then. And she is a good friend now.”
“Oh,” Eustus grunted as he leaped up and heaved himself over a ten-foot wall that shook as if it was undergoing a perpetual earthquake. Scrabbling like a rat, he gripped the top and hurled himself over and down the other side, rolling as he landed.
Reza was already on the ground waiting for him, as if he had simply walked through the wall. “Why do you ask?” he said.
“Well,” Eustus breathed as he fought to keep up with Reza’s relentless pace, “I heard some of the instructors talking when I was passing by their table in the mess, when the commander wasn’t around.” He paused as they navigated a series of barbed wire mazes. They were very primitive, but very effective for focusing one’s attention on one’s surroundings. “They said she’s been acting a lot different than she normally does.”
“How so?” Reza asked, curious. The training schedule had been so busy that he and Nicole had not had a chance to speak to one another since she had come to his room three nights before. Sharing himself with her had somehow released him from the horrible pain that came with thoughts of Esah-Zhurah, the furious burning in his blood. He had not realized what agony it had been until, later that night, after he had led Nicole back to her room and put her to bed, he had dreamed of Esah-Zhurah in his sleep. He had awakened in tears, longing for her, but the pain was no more than a dull throb, as if Nicole had taken away the bulk of the pain by sharing his burden. Nicole, in her turn, had seen and felt the world he would forever call home, voyaging through Reza’s spiritual memories as Esah-Zhurah, viewing it as she might, knowing his love for her. But those memories would only visit her in her dreams – she would never be able to relate them to another soul.
Eustus blushed slightly, not knowing how Reza would take what he had overheard. How did you tell someone like Reza that one of Nicole Carre’s colleagues said she was acting “like she’d found a really good lay”?
“Well,” Eustus said, searching for a somewhat more tactful phrase than the original version, “I guess she seems abnormally cheerful and outgoing, like she’s suddenly taken normal pills and stopped being so, you know, aloof, I guess.” The two of them sprinted across a worn wooden log laid over a mud-filled bog. “They think she’s sleeping – you know, having sex? – with someone, but they can’t figure out who it is.” He cast a sideways glance at Reza. “It wouldn’t happen to be you, would it?”
Reza did not answer, instead throwing himself and Eustus to the ground as the brush nearby erupted with a volley of liquid “bullets” fired by patrolling robots at the trainees running the obstacle course. Any trainee having the telltale red stain on his or her fatigues at the end of the course was in for remedial reaction training and two dozen pushups per “hit.” The technique was an effective attention-getter.
Satisfied that Reza and Eustus had reacted properly by quickly rolling into the nearby foliage after hitting the ground, the two rovers moved out of their temporary hiding spot and further back down the trail in search of other victims.
“Damn, but I hate those things,” Eustus muttered, again thankful that Reza usually ran with him. He always seemed to know exactly where the lunatic machines were. Eustus only worried about what would happen in combat, when Reza probably would not be by his side.
They went on running, gaining speed for the next set of obstacles – the surprise set – that was different every time and lay around a few more bends in the trail, still out of sight.
“You haven’t said no,” Eustus said, trying to pick up where he had left off.
“I have not had sex with Commander Carre,” Reza replied quietly, almost toying with the truth. While their bodies had never touched in that way, the cache of memories she held in her subconscious included the times he had lain with Esah-Zhurah. In her dreams, Nicole would remember them as had Esah-Zhurah herself after they had
