“When you begin to combine man with machine, surely that is tantamount to you handing them a slice of ambrosia and saying, “here, now you are as God?”

— Sarah Weiland, President of the Preserve Terra Society, 2039

Please, ignore me if I scream.

“Tor!” I shouldn’t have been yelling. Someone could’ve heard me and come looking for us, but I didn’t know what else to do. He’d gone off hunting by himself. We’d been awkward around each other all morning, avoiding eye contact and answering with only single words. Part of it was the tension that had lain thickly between us since yesterday, and part was the desire to leave. Well, my desire anyway.

Though Tor felt the pull as keenly as I did, he was suspicious of it. I wanted to follow it. Tor suspected it was a trap, and I didn’t blame him. In fact, a small part of me agreed. But what if it wasn’t? I wouldn’t admit it to him, but another part of me wondered if my father was at the end of it, that it was his way of trying to find me. And if not that, what if others like us were there? In a safe place? It was getting harder for me to ignore.

“Tor!” Where was he? He wouldn’t have gone far. He wouldn’t have left me. Would he? “Tor!” My throat was beginning to ache in the cold.

He came then, flying through the woods on the far side of the clearing. He’d left everything he’d been carrying behind. As he got closer, I expected to hear the snapping of dead wood and the crunching of frozen leaves, but the air around him was impossibly silent.

He slowed to a swift walk when he saw me. Slow, steady breaths wreathed his face in the cold air. He pushed his hair back from his forehead as he peered around me. “Ailith?”

“Tor, he talked to me. He said my name. He said his name was Pax. He knew I was there.”

His hand froze midair, snarls of hair sticking up between his fingers. “What are you saying? Someone spoke to you? In a memory?”

“I’m saying that this wasn’t a memory, Tor! There’s a woman named Cindra with him. They’re being held captive. What’s happening to them is happening right now.”

“How can you know that?”

“He spoke to me. He knew about what happened to us the other day. It happened to them too. He called it a homing signal.” The heat rose in my face. “Tor, we have to go and find them.”

“Can you talk to him now?”

“I don’t know.” It hadn’t occurred to me to try to contact whomever the memories, or whatever they were, belonged to. I’d considered them something that was happening to me, not by me. I reached out with my mind, trying to find the thread that led to him. Nothing. “I think he’s unconscious. I can’t…it’s like he’s present, but not.”

“Ailith, look, if what you’re saying is true—” He held up a hand as I began to protest. “What I mean is that we’re not sure what these visions are. It might be a lure, Ailith, like that damned…homing signal. And if what you’re seeing is true, and it’s happening right now, we can’t simply go running into the middle of an army of Terrans. You do remember who the Terrans are, right? People who want you dead solely because you exist. Look around you! They did this. We have no idea who this Pax is, except that he’s with them.”

“Tor, they’re being tortured. We can’t abandon them. They’re like us.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know who they are, or what’s happening. You can’t trust this.”

I felt small and impotent. And pissed off. I closed my eyes to concentrate. My mind was a field of darkness; I waited until I spotted it at last, a slender golden thread. I slid along it until, suddenly, I was looking at myself through his eyes.

At first I was surprised: Tor saw me differently than I saw myself. I was a precious thing he wanted to keep safe. He needed to keep me safe; I stood between him and a precipice. Light coiled around me, solid and powerful. His feelings toward me were mixed: fear, longing, desire; something unfurling itself to the sun.

“Tor?” He didn’t respond. The fear in his mind was growing, the thread becoming brittle and cold. He felt me inside him, and he was losing control.

“Stop!” he shouted.

Suddenly, I was back inside myself.

He stared at me with wild eyes. “Stop,” he said again, quieter. He pivoted on his heel and walked away.

“Tor! I’m sorry.”

He spun and came back toward me, seeming to grow larger with each step. “Never do that again.” He was flushed, his hands clenching convulsively at his sides. “You can’t… You can’t just go into my head like that. It’s too intimate.”

He was obviously upset, but I was too excited about what it meant. “But, Tor, this means it could be true! And if it is, we have to go and help them. I don’t know what the other visions mean, but this is real, and we—”

I was in the darkness again, hurtling down a thread.

“Ailith? Are you there?”

“Hello? Pax? How do you know me?” I was in the darkness again, our thread wrapped around me. Tor’s hands gripped my shoulders, keeping me anchored.

“Yes, it’s me. I knew you’d come. We’ve been waiting for you. We’re in trouble.”

“I know. I saw. Where are you?”

“You mean you’re not here? You’re not going to rescue us?” He didn’t sound panicked, only sad.

“No, we’re coming, Pax. We’re coming! Where are you?” Tor’s fingers dug in, making my bones creak.

“I don’t know. In a house. In a town. There is a river. Follow us.”

“Can you be more specific?” The silence was long. Had I lost him again?

“There is a…a windmill? I…”

“Pax? Pax!” He was gone.

“Are you trying to break my back again?” I snapped at Tor. He dropped his hands. My insides churned with nervous energy. “Tor, we have to go. We have to leave here and find them. They need our help.”

“Ailith, look, I want to help them, but we need to be careful. In my opinion, we should wait, try to speak to him again. Find out more information.”

“We don’t have time. We... No, I don’t care. I’m going. You want to stay here? Fine. I’m going, with or without you.” I didn’t want to do that.

The look in his eyes told me he knew I was telling the truth. Knew it and resented it.

He dug his knuckles into his eyes. “Okay. I admit, I’d like some answers. We go, but we don’t rush in blindly, okay? We need to find out what we’re walking into.”

“Great. Let’s go.”

“What? Now? I was thinking more in a few days, once we’ve gathered supplies. We don’t even know where we’re going, do we?”

“No, but I can feel the general direction. We’ll worry about the rest when we’re closer.”

The next connection happened before I saw it coming.

Tor’s voice cut out and another sliced its way in.