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  “Attention.” It was the bored airline hostess voice again, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It made all three of them jump. “Extensive monitoring shows a fracture in the OneMind of your triumvirate,” the voice continued. “Your projections are substandard in the extreme. Though we deeply regret it, you will now be put through a series of tutorials in an attempt to heal these rifts.”

  “Is that right?” Truth growled, clearly not expecting an answer. “And I suppose we’re going to be booted out if we don’t agree to go through your damn tutorials?”

  “Failure to comply will result in your ultimate termination from the Mindscape,” the voice said, almost as though it was answering Truth’s sarcastic question.

  “Perfect!” exclaimed Becca. “Then we’ll finally get out of here.”

  “As well as the dissolution of your physical bodies within the slime tanks,” the voice continued blithely in that same, slightly bored tone.

  “Mother of God!” Becca breathed. “Does that mean what I think it means?” Oh, we’re in trouble here, a little voice in her brain whispered. So much trouble…

  “I’m afraid so.” Far’s face was pale.

  Truth muttered a curse under his breath. “I knew we should not have come!”

  “Tutorial one begins now. You are being monitored. Good luck,” the voice said and then fell silent.

  “What are we going to do?” Becca whispered, her lips numb with fear.

  She’d been afraid earlier when she learned they were going underground and even more frightened when she’d thought she had lost Far and Truth in the gray fog. But now she knew what true terror was.

  They were about to go through some alien test they didn’t understand—one that would probably be painful in some way—and if they didn’t pass they would die.

  And so far we’ve failed every single thing we’ve tried to do here—how is this going to be any different?

  “What are we going to do?” she repeated.

  “Well, to start with, I suppose we’re going to go through that door.” Truth nodded at a strange curtain made up of long strands of hollow wooden beads which was suddenly hanging in midair, right beside the bed.

  “What is that?” Far asked. “And where does it lead?”

  “As for where it leads, I don’t know,” the dark twin growled. “But it looks like the door to my bedroom when I was a child.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The room they stepped into was dreadfully familiar to Truth. It was high at the apex of the tree-top lodge where his father and step or second mother had lived when he was a child of eight or nine cycles. Because of their monthly transformations, the Rai’ku built their dwellings in the branches of the vast, solid boadab trees that grew at the base of the high, snow covered peaks of Pax’s main mountain range. The trees grew together, their branches intertwining, until they were almost one entity. Several such dwellings could be built side by side in a kind of regular neighborhood but for some reason, no one had chosen to build on either side of their lodge.

  Truth knew the reason for that—his father came home drunk too often. Drunk and raving about the past. The Rai’ku were adamant about minding their own business—privacy was not just respected but enforced. And no one wanted a neighbor who shouted his personal business, who could be heard swearing at his mate and children or perhaps beating them…

  Truth shut down the painful thought at once. Gods, why did they have to come here? What kind of sadist was running this Mindscape place anyway?

  A large wooly glow worm, one of the few non-carnivorous animals native to Pax, was hanging from the wooden beams, shedding a pale, diffuse blue light over the front part of the room. Truth was at the back of the room, where the roof sloped steeply upward. He took a step and felt the floor sway ever so slightly under his adult weight. Yet, somehow, he wasn’t all there. He felt…fractured in some way. Cut in two, which didn’t make any sense. And then he saw the reason why.

  Lying in the small hammock strung to the ceiling with twisted rope and just visible by the wooly worm’s light, was the younger version of himself. Truth remembered the hammock bed well. It was old and lined with the vast, leathery boadab leaves that felt ice cold to the touch until they finally warmed to your skin. His younger self was huddled in the center, covered by a ragged blanket and shivering.

  The temperatures were cold on Pax—colder than was natural to a Twin Kindred, he supposed. But since none of his brothers or the other children in his learning pod seemed to mind the chilly weather, he had learned to say nothing of it, even if he felt he was freezing to death. The blanket was a shameful secret—something he had scavenged out of the refuse heap to use on particularly chilly nights. He kept it hidden beneath the wide boadab leaves during the day and only took it out at night, when he could no longer stand the bite of the wind, which whipped through the cracks in the wooden lodge.

  Gods, was I ever so small? Truth looked at his younger self in wonder. The outline of the child’s body beneath the thin, ragged bit of cloth looked scrawny and malnourished. The pale eyes that peered out from under his wild thatch of black hair looked huge in the small, thin face.

  “Truth, where are we? And why is it so cold here?” Becca’s voice drew him out of his reverie and he realized that she and Far were standing beside him, looking around the bare wooden room curiously.

  “This is nowhere,” he said roughly. “Just a…a place I remember from childhood.” He scowled. “As to the temperature—it’s always like this on Pax.”

  “This isn’t just a place you remember from childhood—it is your childhood, isn’t it?” Far asked. “Is that you?” He raised an eyebrow and nodded at the shivering child.

  Truth felt his scowl deepen. “I suppose.”

  “You were so little.” Becca sounded surprised.

  “I didn’t begin to get my growth until later,” Truth snapped.

  “I didn’t mean it as an insult,” she protested softly. “It’s just—you and Far are both such big guys. It’s hard to imagine you as ever being anything else.”

  “Yes, well…” Truth gestured tersely. “As you see, I once was.”

  “Can you, uh, I mean, can he see us?” Becca asked. The three of them were standing in the back of the room, out of sight of the small figure and the wind was whistling loudly enough to hide their murmuring voices. How they had entered through the front door of the room and yet wound up in the back, Truth had no idea. Must be another trick of the Mindscape.

  “I…do not know if I—if he—can see us or not.” He felt strangely reluctant to risk speaking to his younger self. He was older now—a grown male who was able to fend for and protect himself. It was painful to see the scrawny, scared, vulnerable child he had once been. Painful in the extreme.

  “I think—” Far began but just then the sound of heavy, deliberate footfalls could be heard on the wooden steps leading up from the floors below.

  The small figure in the hammock bed stiffened immediately, his pale eyes growing round with fright. The glow worm picked up on his heightened tension and the soft light bathing the room turned from calm blue to a warning orange.

  Truth found himself holding his breath, right along with his younger self. Please, Father, don’t come up, he thought. Please not tonight. Stay on the second floor. Go to sleep and in the morning you’ll feel better. You always feel better in the morning…

  But the heavy steps reached the second floor landing, paused a moment, and then continued up. The small figure in the hammock bed gathered himself into an even smaller, tighter ball and his eyes squeezed shut in a desperate parody of sleep. The glow worm’s light gave him away, however, by going a deep, alarmed scarlet, casting the room into red and black shadows.

  The door, the same curtain of hanging wooden beads they’d come through, rattled as a huge figure filled the doorframe. Gar-berry ale fumes flooded the air like poisoned gas.

  Truth sucked in a breath as fear flooded him. He couldn’t help himself�€