“Take me down there,” Josepha said, looking at the patches of land in the storm’s path, and realizing that she had to know what had become of Ondro. “We must get them out.” She imagined Ondro and Jason in the green hollow, sitting on the grass, marveling at the sun that stood still at one end of the enclosed sky.
Voss was silent.
“They can’t return to the mainland,” she continued, still afraid that an earlier storm had taken their lives. “They have been condemned, but the authorities won’t kill them. They want to believe that God will carry out their death sentence. I’ve seen enough of your world to guess that you would never put people to death.”
Voss still did not respond. Maybe she was wrong about that, maybe these people hid their failures. No, she told herself. Even in her brief glimpses of this world, she had seen no police or civil authority waiting to restrain and imprison evildoers. Were there any evildoers? It seemed that there had to be other ways to deal with people who went wrong, perhaps through the Link. But as she watched the dispassionate way in which Voss considered her plea, she felt that this world simply grew better people from the start, people who had not seen much evil in a long time, but who would not stand idly by and watch evil do its work.
“Can we bring them here?” she asked nervously.
Voss said, “Those islands cover a vast area of ocean.”
“Paul will tell us where to go,” she said, hoping as she searched Voss’s face for a clue to his feelings.
“The danger is real,” he said. “How many are there?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “A thousand, I think. Can you rescue that many?”