"You're our local expert on this mental stuff, Kressa. What do you think we should do?"

Kressa looked at the man who spoke with an expression combining surprise and disbelief. "Me, an expert?"

Jonathan Westlex, captain of Stingray One, met her look, a serious expression on his handsome features. "You."

She shook her head and looked around the table where she, Jonathan, General Halav Kamick, and Keth B'Okhaim—the father of Aron and Zac—had gathered in Halav's quarters for one of their informal late-night conferences and card games. But the cards had sat untouched in the center of the table since the beginning of the meeting when Kressa began to relate what happened in Keth and Saunorel's quarters earlier in the evening, with occasional comments and clarifications provided by Saunorel.

Sauni was gone now, having returned to her quarters with Zac some time ago. She did not regularly attend these meetings, but, as she explained when she first arrived, she had hoped the small gathering of friends would have a calming effect on Zac—especially the presence of Kressa and Jonathan, for the children were particularly fond of both of them, much to Jonathan's bewilderment.

Despite Saunorel's hopes and her attempts to prevent it, Zac tried to scan the minds of Jonathan, the general, and even the general's adopted nine-year-old son, Nico. Sauni stopped Zac, but his behavior upset Aron, making him as fussy and irritable as his twin. Saunorel finally decided to take Zac back to her quarters to give everyone, including Aron, a chance for some peace.

At least that part of Saunorel's plans was working. On a large, overstuffed chair across the room, Aron lay wrapped in a blanket, sleeping soundly, with Nico curled around him. Nico's head rested on his bare arms as he tried to follow the conversation of his elders, but from the sleepy look in his green eyes, Kressa suspected he would soon be joining his young charge in dreamland.

She looked back at Jonathan. "A few years' training on Ilek hardly qualifies me as an expert. Any th'Maran on this base knows a hundred times more about 'this mental stuff'—as you put it—than I do."

"That may be true," Jonathan replied, his blue-green eyes watching Kressa steadily, "but you've told me more than once how your work with the th'Maran has improved your abilities. And, besides, it was you who discovered what the children wanted, not a th'Maran."

"I told you I don't know why Aron did that," Kressa said.

"Maybe he feels you have the answer," Jonathan suggested.

"But I don't," she said. "I don't know what we can do to help them."

"Is it possible this fear is ungrounded?" Halav's tawny eyes settled on Kressa. "Maybe just something they picked up from us and expounded on?"

Kressa looked at the general.

"That would almost make sense," she said slowly, "except I don't think any of us have ever worried about them losing control of their powers. Most of our concerns are for what other people's fear of those powers would do to the children." She paused for a moment, thinking. "Still, I suppose they could have picked up bits and pieces from different people and put them together into—"

The remainder of Kressa's words were lost as Aron awoke and let out an unhappy wail.

Half asleep, Nico nearly leaped off the chair at the sudden piercing sound. He picked up the unhappy child and cradled him in his lap.

Aron quieted almost instantly, but continued to fuss and squirm.

Keth looked at the two children, concern for his son showing plainly in his eyes. "Is he all right, Nico?"

The boy glanced up with a nod. "He must've had a bad dream or something. He's okay now." He looked down to where Aron held the index finger of his left hand in one pudgy fist. Nico shook his finger, playfully trying to dislodge the child's grip. Aron stopped his muffled crying long enough to give a half-smile.

"Zac's really got him upset." Keth glanced at those gathered around the table, his dark features apologetic. His gaze came to rest finally on Kressa. He looked at her as if seeking reassurance.

Kressa sighed inwardly and wished the three men would stop looking to her for answers. Why should she know any more than they did?

She looked to where Nico sat, keeping Aron occupied with childish games.

"I'm sure they'll both be fine," she said to Keth.

She continued to watch Aron, amazed at how much like any other baby he seemed now, at play with Nico, compared to what she had experienced earlier that evening.

"Do you think Zac will stop his attacks on everyone's mind?" Keth asked.

Kressa pulled her gaze—and her thoughts—away from Aron, and returned her attention to Keth.

"I'm sure Sauni can teach him to stop," she said. "Or he might stop on his own, once he realizes no one has what he's looking for." She sighed. "Unfortunately, that doesn't do much to solve their problem."

"Then you think the problem is real?" Halav asked.

"It's real to them. That's good enough for me," Kressa said.

"What can we do to help them?" Jonathan reiterated his earlier question.

"I suppose we could take them to Ilek for training like I had," Kressa said. "Some of the Psi-Masters are damned powerful, and it would give Aron and Zac a non-th'Maran perspective on their abilities. Maybe that's all they need. The th'Maran can help them, too, especially a Triad. But after they've exhausted all that training—which shouldn't take more than a few years, considering what they've accomplished already—I don't know where to go from there." She sighed. "They need the Om-Mar, and it's gone."

"You mean, they're gone," Jonathan said.

Kressa gave him a weak smile. "It. They. Whatever. I never really got that straight." She thought back to that day on Marasyn, a year and a half earlier, when she, Jonathan, Saunorel, and a handful of other th'Maran and humans had met the Om-Mar face to face—or mind to mind—only to have it vanish soon afterward, perhaps forever.

Her feeble smile melted to a frown. She did not like to think about that day, about what the Om-Mar revealed of the existence of humans, about the eons-long plan they had followed to create and use their bodies.

For most of her life, she had wondered—as did many others—about the mystery of mankind's existence on so many worlds. She had even once jokingly told Jonathan she thought it would be interesting to be around when the mystery was solved. Her encounter with the Om-Mar had solved that mystery, but had raised many more, at least for her.

As the first non-th'Maran to encounter the Om-Mar, she had been granted access to its vast communal mind and experienced its knowledge of the universe. What she saw at that moment had been almost completely incomprehensible to her limited human mind.

Since that day, she'd had dreams of that brief moment, dreams in which she seemed to make sense of some of the things she saw. More than once, she had awakened with images that might have been actual memories from her encounter with the Om-Mar, or might have simply been her own imagination—although she doubted she had the imagination to come up with some of the things she experienced.

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She never talked to anyone about it, hoping the memory and the dreams would fade, but they never had. And now this. As if the Om-Mar's revelations about the existence of the human race weren't disturbing enough—with or without the Om-Mar's almost immediate departure with little explanation of themselves, their history, or their motivation—now this new problem with the legacy of their grand plan for the human race, this threat to the very existence of the children they strove for so long to create.

"Isn't it possible that the Om-Mar still exist?" Halav's question pulled Kressa's attention back to the room. He looked between her and Jonathan. "I've heard both of you talk about what happened on Marasyn, but I was never very clear on the fate of the Om-Mar."

"That's because we're not very clear on it," Jonathan said.

"Sauni says it—they—still exist," Keth volunteered. "At least she believes a part of them lives on in her." He looked at Kressa. "You've talked to her about it, right?"

Kressa nodded. "She's mentioned it, but…"

She struggled to find the right words for what she wanted to say. Saunorel had tried to speak to her about that day on Marasyn more than once, but Kressa liked to talk about it even less than she liked to think about it.

As for Sauni's feelings about the fate of the Om-Mar, Kressa put them down to the fact that Sauni, as a th'Maran, had come from a deeply religious culture and had been taught to worship the Om-Mar as her creator. Of course she felt the Om-Mar lived on in her after they disappeared. How else could anyone as sensitive as Saunorel reconcile the teachings of her past with what had been revealed that day?

"I just don't know," she said finally.

"You know, Sauni may be right," Jonathan said into the brief silence that followed Kressa's discouraging answer.

All eyes turned toward the captain.

"I could be wrong about this, but…" He shook his head. It was obvious he was thinking as he went. "See if this makes any sense. The Om-Mar was made up of tens, if not hundreds of separate beings. They were joined together to take advantage of their combined strength, but even that was fading. By the time we got to Marasyn, they were so weak they needed Kressa simply to escape from the temple. She'd shown them their plan wasn't going to work—they couldn't take over human bodies—but they could exist inside a human body, or inside its mind, without the human knowing about it. They'd been doing that since before they created the th'Maran."

Kressa nodded. Jonathan himself had been a host for a remnant of the Om-Mar until it rejoined the others shortly before they disappeared.

"So, they knew they didn't have the strength to exist on their own any longer," Jonathan continued, "and they knew they couldn't have the bodies they made for themselves. But would they just allow themselves to fade away? To die?" He caught Kressa's eyes and held them. "Or would they find bodies to at least inhabit, if not control? After all, they wanted to use humans to continue experiencing the universe. Even if they couldn't control what was happening, at least with a human host they'd be able to know what was going on."

"You think they moved into bodies?" she asked. "Whose?"

"Yours, Sauni's, everyone who was there."

"Everyone in the link?" she asked, referring to the mental connection the Om-Mar formed with every mind within reach before revealing their plan and the fact they had decided to abandon it. "Including you?"

Jonathan frowned at that last question, as Kressa knew he would. Like many people, Jonathan was wary when it came to anything having to do with psi abilities. Besides the link she shared with him and the others on Marasyn, Kressa had experienced only the most fleeting of mental contacts with him, and he allowed those only at the most intimate of times.

He sighed. "Including me," he agreed unenthusiastically. "But also including Cody—and Devin Tyler."

Kressa sneered, not at the mention of Cody, the Terran street kid she'd befriended and brought into the Guard, but at the mention of Tyler.

"What does that bastard have to do with any of this?" she asked.

"Remember what Atkins said about him during our, er—interviews?" Jonathan asked. "He thought Tyler might have developed some kind of mental abilities. And Cody developed some, too. Maybe it isn't your work with the th'Maran that's improved your abilities so much as it was your encounter with the Om-Mar."

"What about you, then?" Kressa asked. Jonathan could be right, but she was not sure she liked the idea. "And Keth's father was there, too."

Jonathan glanced across the table to where Keth sat.

The younger man shrugged. "I've never talked to him about it."

Kressa wasn't surprised. There wasn't much Keth and Thellan B'Okhaim did talk about.

"It could explain why the children like you two so much," Halav said, looking at Kressa and Jonathan. "And, as I recall, they're rather fond of Cody as well."

"What about Thellan?" Kressa asked Keth. "Are Aron and Zac particularly fond of your father?"

Keth gave a wry smile. "He's their grandfather; he spoils them rotten. Of course they like him."

She looked at Jonathan. "You still haven't answered my first question, Jon. What about you?"

He met her eyes. "I really don't know."

"Should we find out?" she asked.

"How?"

She looked to where Aron sat playing quietly on Nico's lap. "We'll let Aron do to you what he did to me."

Jonathan looked troubled at the suggestion.

"Then what?" he asked. "Ask them to come out and help us teach the children?"

"Maybe," Kressa said, although she couldn't begin to imagine how to do such a thing. "At least we'd know what happened to them."

Jonathan continued to balk. "I don't see what good—" He stopped suddenly, and sighed. "All right. I started this, I might as well see it through." He looked at Kressa again. "What do I need to do?"

She smiled reassuringly. "Just relax." She stood and crossed the room to Nico's chair.

Aron perked up immediately at her approach. He smiled and reached out to her—both physically and mentally—as she bent over to pick him up. As his mind joined to hers, she quickly relayed what she wanted from him. She tried to conceptualize her request as much as possible, to make it easier for the child to understand.

Aron gurgled happily in response. His silver eyes met Jonathan's as Kressa returned to the captain's side, and she felt Aron's mind beginning to reach out to Jonathan's.

Not yet, she told the child.

"Here, Jon." She held the child out to him. "You hold Aron, I'll direct what he's doing."

Jonathan took the baby, holding him gingerly, as if he might break.

Kressa sighed and helped position Aron comfortably on his lap.

"He doesn't bite," she admonished with a laugh as the man's nervousness continued unabated, and then she sobered and met his apprehensive gaze. "I won't let him do anything that will hurt you."

Jonathan nodded and took a deep breath. "Fine, what do I do?" he asked again.

"I told you. Relax." She gave him a quick kiss, and then moved to stand behind him. She rested her hands on his shoulders, kneading gently. "Just don't fight us."

He craned his neck to look back at her. "How could I do that?"

Kressa shot him a crooked smile. "You'll know as soon as we're in your mind," she said, and then hurried to add, "But don't worry. Even if you do fight, it won't hurt us—or you. Now, close your eyes and try to relax."

He turned to face forward again.

Kressa waited a few moments. Keth, Halav, and Nico looked on with interest.

Once she decided that she'd given Jonathan enough time to prepare, she slid her awareness back along the mental cord that bound her to Aron, and then followed him into Jonathan's mind.

She had no idea what they were looking for, wasn't even sure Aron knew, but she let the child's phenomenally powerful and controlled mind lead the way.

Almost immediately, she felt Jonathan's natural shields come up. She was not surprised at the resistance—all but the most mentally inept humans had shields, most simply did not realize it.

That is how you fight us, she whispered gently in Jonathan's mind, and then paused a moment with Aron to let him find the way to lower them.

He did so with surprising ease and completeness, and Aron slipped deeper into his mind, Kressa in tow. But Aron did not go far before stopping suddenly to turn his attention inexplicably to Kressa's mind.

What? she asked.

The child's only answer was to brush the fringes of her awareness, as if searching for something. He touched something there, something Kressa could almost feel, then he was back in Jonathan's mind, pulling Jonathan's attention into his own, showing him the power—and the fear—he had shown Kressa earlier in the evening.

Jonathan reacted physically, almost pulling out from beneath Kressa's hands as he stared down at the child in his lap.

"My god!" he gasped. "I didn't realize—"

Abruptly, Aron jerked Kressa and Jonathan's full attention back into the link. He tapped into their mental energy to extend his range as he reached outwards for something, searching desperately. But, no matter how far he reached, there was nothing at the other end.

And then Kressa realized what he was searching for.

"Zac! Saunorel!" she called into the silence of the room, putting into words what Aron could not. "Something's happened to them!"

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