Like a vengeful sword, her mind, freed from the infatuation Sodan had artfully fostered, gathered and sprang with the others to destroy the aggressor. For Damia now understood the purpose behind Sedan's impersonality. The battle was waged in the tremendous space between two heartbeats. Sodan, his mind fortified by the nuclear power of his ship, was stronger than their conservative estimates. And almost negligently, he held the Larakfocus at bay, his mind laughing at what he considered their puny efforts.

Then Damia's pressure increased as she stripped away the veil of her romantic illusions to align herself with the Larakfocus to defend her Sector. Sodan called for more power within himself. The scorching blaze that fed through Damia's growing catalystic mind flashed through and stripped him bare, lashing beyond to trigger the atoms of the ship into instability. Involuntarily, and for a microsecond, Sedan's past nickered.

Once, generations ago, embodied, he had breathed an alien air, walked an alien road; until his brain had been chosen to undertake the incredible enterprise of crossing the galactic rift.

In my fashion have I loved you, he cried to Damia as he felt her reach the fuel mass. But you never loved me, he added with intense surprise as her mind, vulnerable in the instant of that massive thrust, was open to him. And he shall not have you either!

With his last strength, Sodan sent out one final jealous mental blast just as the ship exploded.

Frantically, even as she felt herself blacking out from the tremendous drain on her resources, Damia tried to deflect that blow.. As a kingpin flattens a row of its fellows, so Sedan's blast, striking through the Larakfocus, caused a wave of mental agony to roll backward to Auriga where Station personnel grabbed at their skulls in anguish, to Earth and Callisto where Tratings cringed in pain, and on to Deneb and even Altair. Horrified crews found Jeffrey Raven and the Rowan unconscious in their Tower couches. Jeran, head aching, was hastily summoned, for FT & T command devolved to him in the emergency. Jeran took time out to assure himself that with sufficient rest his parents would recover, then he informed the Federated World Government of the event. He was requested to proceed with the defensive fleet to Auriga.

Isthia appeared at Earth Headquarters at his urgent bidding and, with her help, he was able to extract gently from Jeff's taxed mind the position of the three personal shells.

As they approached the orbit, they could "hear" nothing.

It is possible, Isthia said hopefully as they could find no discernible aura, that all three have gone into very deep shock. The power in Damia's final thrust!

Damia cannot be dead, Jeran tried to convince himself. Sodan may have been powerful, but is there a Trating in the galaxy who didn't feel her hit him? We cannot lose her! He had already resigned himself to other losses.

"Ah!" Isthia gave a sharp gasp. 7 have them.

Jeran reached with her, signaling the flagship's T3 to assist.

"She's alive," he cried in relief. / thought I felt them all die.

"Afra lives, too, but he's very faint. Larak..." and Isthia's voice faded. Why did the focus have to snap through him?

They brought Afra's capsule in first, and Jeran, who was at the head as the shell was opened, pressed fearful hands against the man's temples. Afra's body was drawn up in the fetal position of complete withdrawal.

"He's badly hurt, Isthia. God, will we save him? Should we, if he'll be psionically numb for the rest of his life?"

Isthia moved his hands aside, and applied her own, her touch naturally more delicate than Jeran's.

"I can't tell more than that he wants to die. The spark of life is very faint." She gave rapid mental orders to the medics standing by so that, within seconds, Afra's body was receiving emergency injections to stimulate the failing life signs.

Divorce your emotions Jeran, Isthia told him sharply. Help me reach him. He wants to die. We must pull him back.

Jeran shook himself and, holding his breath, placed his hands above Isthia's on Afra's head.

Together they probed, ignoring the mental anguish they experienced at having to touch so torn a mind. Uppermost was the thought that both Larak and Afra had shared: Sodan striking at them and Damia, exhausted, trying to block it.

He'll kill her, he'll kill her, was the repeated cry of terror, a curious melding of both Larak and Afra, swirling in the pain of Afra's mind. No, Damia. Don't try. I waited too long. No, Damia. Then the enigmatic sequence was repeated.

Damia lives, Damia lives, Jeran and Isthia told him.

Damia lives, damia lives damia lives, whispered the essence of Afra.

Isthia caught Jeran's eyes with surprised confusion. Hopeful now, they reinforced the will to live.

Afra, Damia lives. She rests. She waits for you, Isthia murmured soothingly.

Sleep, Afra, rest. Damia lives, Jeran urged.

Damia lives? Damia lives!

With a shudder, Afra's body untwisted from the fetal curl. For one terrifying moment, he was still. Gasping, Isthia dipped way down into the suddenly tranquil mind only to be reassured that Afra had merely slipped into deep sleep.

"He's very badly hurt, Jeran," Isthia admitted sadly as they watched the medics wheel Afra away to a tightly shielded room.

They opened Damia's capsule together. She lay on her side, looking very young, but there were marks that showed the effects of that meeting of minds. She had bitten through her underlip and a trickle of blood ran in a scarlet line across her cheek. Her fingernails had cut into her palms when she had clenched her fists and her face was streaked with tears.

With infinite compassion, Isthia turned the girl onto her back and laid both her hands lightly on Damia's temples.

I can't reach them. I can't get there in time. I hurt. I've got to try. I hurt. Oh, will I lose them both? Isthia could hear the words faintly, deep in the tired mind.

With a sigh of relief, Isthia straightened.

Is she badly burned? Jeran asked impatiently, having waited outside Isthia's contact but aware it had been made.

Not burned but deeply hurt on several levels. Damia's been cut down to size, Isthia remarked ruefully, the terrible way only the very bright and confident are. She'll never forget that she underestimated Sedan's potential because she became infatuated with him.

For all of that, if she hadn't touched him first, where would we be with such a menace zeroing from space?

Isthia waved that aside as of incidental importance.

That won't matter to Damia, Jeran. Her initial lapse of judgment caused Larak's death and has seriously injured Afra.

Merciful God, Isthia, once the attack on Sodan began, nothing could have saved Larak, no matter where he was in the focusmind. Death is far kinder than being burned out. She's not to blame.

Isthia shook her head sadly. No, she isn't to blame and I hope it never occurs to her that, in the crisis, instinct overrode reason and it was Afra she struggled to save.

Afra? What in hell? asked Jeran before he followed Isthia's thought to its source. So that's why Sodan struck to kill. He was after Afra.

He stepped back as Isthia signaled to the medics to administer deepsleep drugs and intravenous nourishment to Damia.

With great reluctance they turned to Larak's silent shell. Because they had to, they opened it and saw with some little relief that there was no mark of his ?1 passing on the young face. A curiously surprised smile lingered on his lips.

Isthia turned away in tears and Jeran, too numb to display his own sorrow, put his arm around her to lead her away.

"Sir," the captain of the ship said respectfully when they entered the control room, "we have the location of the alien ship debris. Permission to recover fragments?"

"Permission granted. Isthia and I will return to the Tower."

"Very good, sir," the captain said, and stiffened to a rigid attention. The unashamed tears in his eyes and his very crisp salute expressed wordlessly his pride, his sympathy, and his sorrow.

Struggling against a will determined to keep her asleep, Damia fought her way to semiconsciousness.

"I can't keep her under. She's resisting," a remote voice called to someone.

As distant as the sound was, like a far echo in a subterranean cavern, each syllable fell like a hammer on her exposed nerves. Sobbing, Damia struggled for consciousness, sanity, and a release from her agony. She couldn't seem to trigger the reflexes that would divert pain, and an effort to call Afra to help her met with not only the resistance of increased agony but a vast blankness. Her mind was as stiff as iron, holding each thought firmly to it as though magnetized.

"Damia, do not reach. Do not use your mind," a voice said in her ear. The sound was like a blessing and the reassurance it gave her wavering sanity was reinforced by the touch of... Isthia's hands on hers.

Damia focused her eyes on the woman's face and clutched Isthia's hands to her temples in an unconscious plea for relief of pain.

"What happened? Why can't I control my head?" cried Damia, tears of weakness streaming down her face.

"You overreached yourself, destroying Sodan," Isthia said.

"I can't remember," Damia groaned, blinking away the tears so she could at least see clearly. 52 "Every rating in FT & T does."

"Oh, my head. It's all a blank and there's something I have got to do and I can't remember what it is."

"You will, you will. But you're very tired, dear," Isthia said crooningly as she stroked her forehead with cool hands. Each caress seemed to lessen the terrible pain.

Damia felt the coolness of an injection pop into her arm.

"I'm putting you back to sleep, Damia. We're very proud of you but you must allow your mind to heal in sleep." " 'Great nature's second course, that knits the ravelled 'sleeve of care.' What's knitting, Isthia? I've never known," Damia heard herself babbling with a cool scalliony taste in her throat as the drug spread.

Again, after what seemed no passage of time at all, Damia was inexorably forced to consciousness by her indefinable but relentless need.

"I can't understand it," came Isthia's voice. This time it did not reverberate across Damia's pained mind like tympany in a small room. "I gave her enough to put a city to sleep."

"She's worrying at something and probably won't rest until she's resolved it. Let's wake her up and get the agony over."

Damia forced her mind to concentrate on identifying the second voice. With a grateful smile she labelled it "Jeff." She felt her face gently slapped and, opening her eyes, saw Jeff's face swimming out of the blurred mass about her.

"Jeff," she pleaded, not because he had slapped her but because she had to make him understand.

"Dear Damia," he said with such loving pride she almost lost the tenuous thought she tried to hold from him.

Her body strained with the effort to reach out only a few inches a mind that once had blithely coursed lightyears, but she soon managed to communicate her crime. / burned out Larak and Afra. I killed them. I linked ?3 to the Larakfocus and killed them to destroy Sodan.

I saved myself and killed them.

Behind Jeff she heard Rowan's cry and Isthia's exclamation.

"No, no," Jeff said gently, shaking his head. He placed her hands on his forehead to let her feel the honesty of his denial. "In the first place, you couldn't. You don't use others. You sort of shift gears into high speed to make other minds work on a higher level. You drew power from the Larakfocus to destroy Sodan, yes. But the killing thrust was yours, Damia; you were the only one capable of doing it. And every Trating in the Federated Worlds will vouch for that. Your touch, my dear, is indescribable. Further, without you to throw us into high gear, Sodan could have destroyed every Prime in FT & T."

Damia heard an approving, admiring murmur from Rowan.

"Will my touch come back? I can't feel anything," and in spite of her control Damia's chin quivered and she started to sob with fear.

"Of course it'll come back, dear," said the Rowan, who elbowed Jeff aside to kneel by her daughter and stroke her hair tenderly.

"You'd better go knit some more sleeves of ravelled care," Isthia suggested with therapeutic asperity. "You knit like this," and Isthia inserted a visual demonstration of the technique of knitting into Damia's mind. It was an adroit change of subject, but Damia, with a flash return of perception, saw the three were evading her.

"I must be told what has happened," she demanded imperiously. A wisp of memory nagged at her and she caught it. "I remember. Sodan made one last thrust." She closed her eyes against that recall, remembering too, that she had tried to intercept it and, "Larak's dead," she said in a flat voice. "And Afra. I couldn't shield in time."

"Afra lives," the Rowan said.

"But Larak? Why Larak?" Damia demanded, desperately striving to touch what she felt they must still be hiding from her., "Larak was the focus," Rowan said softly, knowing, too, that Damia would never absolve herself of her brother's death. "Afra was supposed to be the focus, being the experienced mind, but the old bond between you and Larak snapped into effect. You tried to shield Larak, but his mind was too unskilled to draw help from you. Jeff and I felt it because we were part of the focus, too, and we tried to help divert it. We could cushion only Afra in time. Sedan's was a very powerful mind."

Damia looked from her mother to her father and knew that that much was true. But another reservation hovered in their eyes...

"You're still hiding something," she insisted, fighting with exhaustion. "Where's Afra?"

"Okay, skeptic," Jeff said, lifting her into his arms. "Though why his snores haven't kept you awake, I don't know."

He carried her down the hall. Pausing at an open door, he swung her around so she could see into the room. A night light hung over the bed, illuminating Afra's quiet face, deeply lined with fatigue and pain. Denying even the physical evidence, Damia reached out, touching just enough for reassurance the pained mental rumble that meant Afra still inhabited his body.

"Damia, don't do that again," Jeff said, carrying her back to her room.

"I won't but I had to," she replied, her head ballooning with agony.

"And we'll see you don't again until you're well enough. Out you go, missy," and she slid into blackness.

An insistent whisper nibbled at the corners of her awareness and roused Damia from restoring sleep. Cringing in anticipation of the return of pain, she was mildly surprised to feel only the faintest discomfort. Experimentally, Damia pushed a depressant on the ache and that, too, disappeared. Unutterably pleased by her success, she sat up in bed. It was night and she was in her family's home. She stretched until a cramp caught her in the side.

Heavens, hasn't anyone moved me in months? she asked herself, noting that her mental tone was firm. She lay back in bed, deliberating. Poor Damia, she said in a selfderisive tone, ever since that encounter with that dreadful mindalien, she's been nothing but a T4, T9? T3? Damia tried out the different grades for size and then discarded them all, along with her histrionics.

You idiot, you'll never know till you try.

Tentatively, without apparent effort, she reached out and counted the pulses of three... no four, sleepers. Afra's was the faint one. But, Damia realized in calm triumph, it was there. Which brought her face to face with the second fact.

She slid from her bed to stand by the window. Beyond the lawn of evergrass, beyond the little lake, to the copse of evergreens her glance traveled. And stopped. Instinct told her that Larak was buried there and the thought of Larak buried and his touch forever gone broke her. She wept in loneliness, biting her knuckles and pressing her arms tightly into her breasts to muffle the sound of her mourning.

Out of the night, out of the stillness, the whisper tugged at her again. She stifled her tears to listen, trying to identify that sliver of sound. It faded before she caught it.

Resolutely now, she laid her sorrow gently in her deepest soul, a part of her but apart forever. No matter what Jeff and Rowan said, she had caused Larak's death and maimed Afra. Had she been less preoccupied, less selfcentered, she would not have been so dazzled by the fancy that Sodan was her Prince Charming, her knight in cylindrical armor.

Such a pitiful thing she was: a spoiled, rottenhearted child, demanding a new toy to dispel boredom when all the time...

The whisper again, fainter, surer. With a startled cry of joy, Damia whirled from her room, running on light feet down the hall. Catching at the door frame to brake her headlong flight, she hesitated on the threshold of Afra's room.

She caught her breath as she realized that Afra was sitting up. He was looking at her with a smile of disbelief on his face.

"You've been calling me," she whispered, halfquestioning, halfstating.

"In a lamebrained way," he replied. "I can't seem to reach beyond the edge of the bed."

"Don't try. It hurts," she said quickly, stepping into the room to pause shyly at the foot of the bed.

Afra grimaced, rubbing his forehead. "I know it hurts but I can't seem to find any balance in my skull," he confessed, his voice uneven, worried.

"May I?" she asked formally, unexpectedly timid with him.

Closing his eyes, Afra nodded.