Laenea and Radu dozed, wrapped in each other’s arms. Laenea’s hair curled around to touch the corner of Radu’s jaw, and her heel was hooked over his calf. She was content for the moment with silence, stillness, touch. The plague had not scarred his body.

In the aquaria, the fish flitted back and forth beneath dim lights, spreading blue shadows across the bed. Laenea breathed deeply, counting to make the breaths even. Breathing is a response, not a rhythm, a reaction to the build-up of carbon dioxide in blood and brain. Laenea’s breathing had to be altered only during transit itself. For now she used it as an artificial rhythm of concentration. Her heart raced with excitement and adrenaline, so she began to slow it, to relax. But something disturbed her control. Her blood pressure slid down slightly, then slid slowly up to a dangerous level. She could hear only the dull ringing in her ears. Perspiration formed on her forehead, in her armpits, along her spine. Her heart had never before failed to respond to conscious control.

Angry, startled, she pushed herself up, flinging back her hair. Radu raised his head, tightening his hand around the point of her shoulder. “What —?”

He might as well have been speaking underwater. Laenea lifted her hand to silence him.

One deep inhalation, hold; exhale, hold. She repeated the sequence, calming herself, relaxing the voluntary muscles. Her hand fell to the bed. She lay back. Repeat the sequence, and again. Again. In the hospital and since, her control over involuntary muscles had been quick and sure. She began to be afraid, and had to imagine the fear evaporating, dissipating. Finally the arterial muscles began to respond. They lengthened, loosened, expanded. Last, the pump answered her commands, as she recaptured and reproduced the indefinable states of self-control.

When she knew her blood pressure was no longer likely to crush her kidneys or mash her brain, she opened her eyes. Above her, Radu watched, deep lines of worry across his forehead. “Are you —” He was whispering.

She lifted her heavy hand and stroked his face, his eyebrows, his hair. “I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t get control for a minute. But I have it back now.” She drew his hand across her body, pulling him down beside her, and soon they fell asleep.

oOo

Later, Laenea took time to consider her situation. Returning to the hospital would be easiest; it was also the least attractive alternative. Remaining free, adjusting without interference to the changes, meeting the other pilots, showing Radu what was to be seen: Outwitting the administrators would be more fun. Kathell had done her a great favor, for without her apartment Laenea would have rented a hotel room. The records would somehow have been made available; a polite messenger would have appeared to ask her respectfully to come along. Should she overpower an innocent hireling and disappear laughing? More likely she would have shrugged and gone. Fights had never given her either excitement or pleasure. She knew what things she would not do, ever, though she did not know what she would do now. She pondered.

“Damn them,” she said.

Radu sat down facing her. The couches, of course, were both too low. Radu and Laenea looked at each other across their knees. They both wore caftans, whose colors clashed violently. Radu lay back on the cushions, chuckling. “You look much too undignified for anger.”

She leaned toward him and tickled a sensitive place she had discovered. “I’ll show you undignified —” He twisted away and batted at her hand, but missed, laughing helplessly. When Laenea relented, she was lying on top of him on the wide, soft couch. Radu unwound from a defensive crouch, watching her warily, laugh lines deep around his eyes and mouth.

“Peace,” she said, and held up her hands. He relaxed. Laenea picked up a fold of the material of her caftan and compared it with one of his. “Is anything more undignified than the two of us in colors no hallucination would have — and giggling as well?”

“Nothing at all.” He touched her hair, her face. “But what made you so angry?”

“The administrators — their red tape. Their infernal tests.” She laughed again, this time bitterly. “ ‘Undignified’ — some of those tests would win on that.”

“Aren’t they necessary? For your health?”

She told him about the hypnotics, the sedatives, the sleep, the time she had spent being obedient. “Their redundancies have redundancies. If I weren’t healthy I’d be out on the street wearing my old heart. I’d be nothing.”

“Never that.”

But she knew of people who had failed as pilots, who were reimplanted with their own saved hearts, and none of them had ever flown again, as pilots, as crew, as passengers.

“Nothing.”

He was shaken by her vehemence. “But you’re all right. You’re who you want to be and what you want to be.”

“I’m angry at inconvenience,” she admitted. “I want to be the one who shows earth to you. They want me to spend the next month shuttling from one testing machine to another. And I’ll have to, if they find me. My freedom’s limited.” She felt very strongly that she needed to spend the next month in the real world, neither hampered by experts who knew, truly, nothing, nor misdirected by controlled environments. She did not know how to explain the feeling; she thought it might be one of the things pilots tried to talk about during their hesitant, unsyncopated conversations with their insufficient vocabularies. “Yours isn’t, though, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes I come back to earth and never leave the port. It’s my home. It has everything I want or need. I can easily stay a month and never have to admit receiving a message I don’t want.” Her fingertips moved back and forth across the ridge of new tissue over her breastbone. Somehow it was a comfort, though the scar was a symbol of what had cut her off from her old friends. She needed new friends now, but she felt it would be stupid and unfair to ask Radu to spend his first trip to earth on an artificial island. “I have to stay here. But you don’t. Earth has a lot of sights worth seeing.”

He did not answer. Laenea raised her head to look at him. He was intent and disturbed.

“Would you be offended,” he said, “if I told you I am not very interested in historical sights?”

“Is that what you really want? To stay with me?”

“Yes. Very much.”

oOo

Laenea led Radu through the vast apartment to the lowest floor. There, flagstones surrounded a swimming pool formed of intricate mosaic that shimmered in the dim light. This was a grotto, more than a place for athletic events or children’s noisy beachball games.

Radu sighed; Laenea brushed her hand across the top of his shoulder, questioning.

“Someone spent a great deal of time and care here,” he said.

“That’s true.” Laenea had never thought of it as the work of someone’s hands, individual and painstaking, though of course it was exactly that. But the economic structure of her world was based on service, not production, and she had always taken the results for granted.

They took off their caftans and waded down the steps into body-warm water. It rose smooth and soothing around the persistent soreness of Laenea’s ribs.

“I’m going to soak for a while.” She lay back and floated, her hair drifting out, a strand occasionally curling back to brush her shoulder, the top of her spine. Radu’s voice rumbled through the water, incomprehensible, but she glanced over and saw him waving toward the dim end of the pool. He flopped down in the water and thrashed energetically away, retreating to a constant background noise. All sounds faded, gaining the same faraway quality, like audio slow motion. She urged the tension out of her body through her shoulders, down her outstretched arms, out the tips of spread fingers.

Radu finished his circumnavigation of the pool; he dove under her and the turbulence stroked her back. Laenea let her feet sink to the pool’s bottom. She stood up as Radu burst out of the water, a very amateur dolphin, laughing, hair dripping in his eyes. They waded toward each other through the chest-deep water, and embraced. Radu kissed Laenea’s throat just at the corner of her jaw. She threw her head back like a cat stretching to prolong the pleasure, moving her hands up and down his sides.

“We’re lucky to be here so early,” he said softly, “alone before anyone else comes.”

“I don’t think anyone else is staying at Kathell’s right now,” Laenea said. “We have the pool to ourselves all the time.”

“No one else at all lives here?”

“No, of course not. Kathell doesn’t even live here most of the time. She just has it kept ready for when she wants it.”

He said nothing, embarrassed by his error.

“Never mind,” Laenea said. “It’s a natural mistake to make.” But it was not, of course, on earth.

oOo

Laenea had visited enough new worlds to understand how Radu might be uncomfortable in the midst of the private possessions and personal services available on earth. What impressed him was expenditure of time, for time was the valuable commodity in his frame of reference. On Twilight everyone would have two or three necessary jobs, and none would consist of piecing together intricate mosaics. Everything was different on earth.

They paddled in the shallow end of the pool, reclined on the steps, flicked shining spray at each other. Laenea wanted Radu again. She was completely free of pain for the first time since the operation. That fact began to overcome a certain reluctance she felt, an ambivalence toward her own reactions. The violent change in her sexual responses disturbed her more than she wanted to admit.

And she wondered if Radu felt the same way; she discovered she was afraid he might.

As they lay on the warm flagstones edging the pool, Laenea moved closer and kissed him. He put his arm around her and she slid her hand across his stomach and down to his genitals, somehow less afraid of a physical indication of reluctance than a verbal one. But he responded to her, hardening, drawing circles on her breast with his fingertips, caressing her lips with his tongue. Laenea stroked him from the back of his knee to his shoulder. His body had a thousand textures, muted and blended by the warm water and the steamy air. She pulled him closer, grasping him with her legs. This time Laenea anticipated a long, slow increase of excitement.

“What do you like?” Radu whispered.

“I — I like — I —” Her words changed abruptly to a cry. Her climax again came all at once in a powerful solitary wave. Radu’s fingers dug into her shoulders, and Laenea knew her short nails were cutting his back. Radu must have expected the intensity of Laenea’s orgasm, but the body is slower to learn than the mind. He followed her to climax almost instantly. Trembling against him, Laenea exhaled in a long shudder. She could feel Radu’s stomach muscles quivering.

Laenea enjoyed taking time over sex, and she suspected that Radu did as well. Yet she felt exhilarated. Her thoughts about Radu were bright in her mind, but she could put no words to them. Instead of speaking she laid her hand on the side of his face, fingertips at the temples, the palm of her hand against the scars. He no longer flinched when she touched him there. He covered her hand with his own.

He had about him a quality of constancy, of dependability and calm, that Laenea had never before encountered. His admiration for her was of a different sort entirely from what she was used to: grounders’ lusting after status and vicarious excitement. Radu had seen her and stayed with her when she was helpless and ordinary and as undignified as a human being can be; that had not changed his feelings. Laenea did not understand him yet.

They toweled each other dry. Radu had scraped his hip on the pool’s edge, and Laenea had raked long scratches down his back.

“I wouldn’t have thought I could do that,” she said, glancing at her hands. She kept her nails cut to just above the quick. “I’m sorry.”

Radu reached around to dry her back. “I did the same to you.”

“Really?” She looked over her shoulder. The angle was wrong to see anything, but she could feel places stinging. “We’re even, then.” She grinned. “I never drew blood before.”

“Nor I.”

They dressed in clean clothes from Kathell’s wardrobe and went walking through the multileveled city. It was, as Radu had said, very early. Above on the sea it would be close to dawn. Below only street cleaners and delivery carts moved here and there across a mall. Laenea was more accustomed to the twenty-four-hour crew city in the third stabilizer.

She was getting hungry enough to suggest a shuttle trip across to #3 where everything would be open, when ahead they saw waiters arranging the chairs of sidewalk cafés, preparing for business.

“Seven o’clock,” Radu said. “That’s early to be open around here, it seems.”

“I thought you said you didn’t have a communicator.”

“I don’t.”

“Then how do you know what time it is?” Laenea glanced around for a clock, but none was in sight.

He shrugged. “I don’t know how, but I always know.”

“Twilight’s day isn’t even standard.”

“I had to convert for a while, but now I have both times.” He shrugged. “It’s just a trick.”

“Useful, though.”

A waiter ushered them to a table. They breakfasted and talked, telling each other about their home worlds and the places they had visited. Radu had been to three other planets before earth. Laenea knew two of them, from several years before. They were colonial worlds, which had grown and changed since her visits.

Laenea and Radu compared impressions of crewing, she still fascinated by the fact that he dreamed.

She found herself reaching out to touch his hand, to emphasize a point or for the sheer simple pleasure of contact. He did the same, but they were both right-handed. Flowers occupied the middle of the table and kept getting in their way. Finally Laenea picked up the vase and moved it to one side, and she and Radu held hands across  the table.

“Where do you want to go next?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. I still have to go where they tell me to, when there’s a need.”

“I just…” Laenea’s voice trailed off. Radu glanced at her quizzically, and she shook her head. “It sounds ridiculous to start talking already about tomorrow or next month or next year… but it seems all right — it seems like I should.”

“I feel… the same.”

They sat in silence, drinking coffee. Radu’s hand tightened on hers. “What are we going to do?” For a moment he looked young and lost. “I haven’t earned the right to make my own schedules yet.”

“I have,” Laenea said. “Except for emergencies. That will help.” She smiled. “Besides,” she said, “we have a month. A month not to worry.”

oOo

Laenea yawned as they entered the front room of Kathell’s apartment. “I don’t know why I’m so sleepy.” She yawned again, trying to stifle it, failing. “I slept the clock around, and now I want to sleep again — after what? Half a day?” She kicked off her boots.

“Eight and a half hours,” Radu said. “Somewhat busy hours, though.”

She smiled. “True.” She yawned a third time, jaw hinges cracking. “I’ve got to take a nap.”

Radu followed her along the hallway and down the stairs to her room. The bed was made, turned down on both sides. The clothes Laenea and Radu had arrived in were clean and pressed. They hung in the dressing room along with the cloak, which no longer smelled musty. Laenea brushed her fingers across the velvet.

Radu looked around. “Who did this?”

“What? Straightened the room? The people Kathell hires. They look after whoever stays here.”

“Do they hide?”

Laenea laughed. “No — they’ll come if we need them. Do you want something?”

“No,” he said sharply. “No,” more gently. “Nothing.”

Still yawning, Laenea undressed. “What about you, are you wide awake?”

He was staring into a mirror. He started when she spoke, and looked not at her but at her reflection. “I can’t usually sleep during the day,” he said. “But I am rather tired.”

His reflection turned its back; he, smiling, turned toward her.

oOo

They were both too sleepy to make love a third time. The amount of energy Laenea had expended astonished her. She thought perhaps she still needed time to recover from the hospital. She and Radu curled together in darkness and scarlet sheets.

“I do feel very depraved now,” Radu said.

“Depraved? Why?”

“Sleeping at nine o’clock in the morning? That’s unheard of on Twilight.” He shook his head; his mustache brushed her shoulder. Laenea drew his arm closer around her, holding his hand in both of hers.

“I’ll have to think of some other awful depraved customs to tempt you with,” she said sleepily, chuckling, but thought of none just then.

oOo

Something startled Laenea awake. She was a sound sleeper and could not think what noise or movement would awaken her when she still felt so tired. Lying very still she listened, reaching for stimuli with all her senses. The lights in the aquaria were out; the room was dark except for the heating coils’ bright orange spirals. Bubbles from the aerator, highlighted by the amber glow, rose like tiny half moons through the water.

The beat of a heart pounded through her.

In sleep, Radu still lay with his arms around her. His hand, fingers half curled in relaxation, brushed her left breast. She stroked the back of his hand but moved quietly away from him, away from the sound of his pulse, for it formed the link of a chain she had worked hard and wished long to break.

oOo

The second time she woke she was frightened out of sleep, confused, displaced. For a moment she thought she was escaping a nightmare. Her head ached violently from the ringing in her ears, but through the clash and clang she heard Radu gasp for breath, struggling as if to free himself from restraints. Laenea reached for him, ignoring her own racing heart. Her fingers slipped on his sweat. Thrashing, he flung her back. Each breath was agony just to hear. Laenea grabbed his arm when he twisted again, held it down, seized the other flailing hand, partially immobilized him, straddled his hips, held him.

“Radu!”

He did not respond. Laenea called his name again, then shouted for help. She could feel his pulse through both his wrists, and she felt his heart as it pounded, too fast, too hard, irregular and violent.

“Radu!”

He cried out, a piercing and wordless scream.

She whispered his name, no longer even hoping for a response, in helplessness, hopelessness. He shuddered beneath her.

He opened his eyes.

“What…”

Laenea remained where she was, leaning over him. He tried to lift his hand. She was still forcing his arms to the bed. She released him and knelt beside him. She, too, was short of breath, and hypertensive to a dangerous degree.

Someone knocked softly on the bedroom door.

“Come in!”

One of the aides entered hesitantly. “Pilot? I thought — pardon me.” She bowed and backed out.

“Wait — you did the right thing. Call a doctor immediately.”

Radu pushed himself up on his elbows. “No, don’t, there’s nothing wrong.”

The young aide glanced from Laenea to Radu and back at the pilot.

“Are you sure?” Laenea asked.

“Yes.” He sat up. Sweat ran in heavy drops down his temples to the edge of his jaw. Laenea shivered; she was sweating, too.

“Never mind, then,” Laenea said. “But thank you.”

The aide departed.

“Gods, I thought you were having a heart attack.” Her pulse began to ease in rhythmically varying rotation. She could feel the blood slow and quicken in her temples, in her throat. She clenched her fists. Her nails dug into her palms.

Radu shook his head. “No, it wasn’t illness. As you said — we’re never allowed this job if we’re not healthy.”

“What happened?”

“It was a nightmare.” He lay back, his hands behind his head, his eyes closed. “I was climbing, I don’t remember what, a cliff or a tree. It collapsed or broke and I fell — a long way. I knew I was dreaming and I thought I’d wake up before I hit, but I fell into a river.”

Laenea heard him and remembered what he said, but knew she would have to make sense of the words later. She remained kneeling and slowly unclenched her hands. Blood rushed through her like a funneled tide, high, then low, and back again.

“It had a very strong current that swept me along and pulled me under. I couldn’t see banks on either side — not even where I fell from. Logs and trash rushed along beside me and past me, but every time I tried to hold onto something I’d almost be crushed. I got tireder and tireder and the water pulled me under — I needed a breath but I couldn’t take one… Have you felt the way the body tries to breathe when you can’t let it?”

She did not answer, but her lungs burned and her muscles contracted convulsively, trying to clear a way for the air to push its way in.

“Laenea —” She felt him grasp her shoulders: She wanted to pull him closer, she wanted to push him away. Then his touch broke the compulsion of his words and she drew a deep, searing breath.

“What —?”

“A… moment…” She managed, finally, to damp the sine-curve velocity of the pump within her. She shivered. Radu pulled a blanket around her. Laenea’s control returned slowly, more slowly than any other time she had lost it. She pulled the blanket closer, seeking stability more than warmth. She should not slip like that: Her biocontrol, to now, had always been as close to perfect as anything associated with a biological system could be. But now she felt dizzy and high, hyperventilated, from the needless rush of blood through her brain. She wondered how many millions of nerve cells had been destroyed.

She and Radu looked at each other in silence.

“Laenea…” He still spoke her name as if he were not sure he had the right to use it. “What’s happening to us?”

“Excitement —” she said, and stopped. “An ordinary nightmare —” She had never tried to deceive herself before, and found she could not start now.

“It wasn’t an ordinary nightmare. You always know you’re going to be all right, no matter how frightened you are. This time — until I heard you calling me and felt you pulling me to the surface, I knew I was going to die.”

Tension grew: He was as afraid to reach toward her as she was to him. She threw off the blanket and grasped his hand. He was startled, but he returned the pressure. They sat cross- legged, facing each other, hands entwined.

“It’s possible…” Laenea said, searching for a way to say this that was gentle for them both, “it’s possible… that there is a reason, a real reason, pilots and crew don’t mix.”

By Radu’s expression Laenea knew he had thought of that explanation, too, and only hoped she could think of a different one.

“It could be temporary — we may only need acclimatization.”

“Do you really think so?”

She rubbed the ball of her thumb across his knuckles. His pulse throbbed through her fingers. “No,” she said, almost whispering. Her system and that of any normal human being would no longer mesh. The change in her was too disturbing, on psychological and subliminal levels, while normal biorhythms were so compelling that they interfered with and would eventually destroy her new biological integrity. “I don’t. Dammit, I don’t.”

Exhausted, they could no longer sleep. They rose in miserable silence and dressed, navigating around each other like sailboats in a high wind. Laenea wanted to touch Radu, to hug him, slide her hand up his arm, kiss him and be tickled by his mustache. Denied any of those, not quite by fear but by reluctance, unwilling either to risk her own stability or to put Radu through another nightmare, she understood for the first time the importance of simple, incidental touch, directed at nothing more important than momentary contact, momentary reassurance.

“Are you hungry?” Isolation, with silence as well, was too much to bear.

“Yes… I guess so.”

But over breakfast (it was, Radu said, evening, so perhaps it was really dinner), the silence fell again. Laenea could not make small talk; if small talk existed for this situation she could not imagine what it might consist of. Radu pushed his food around on his plate and avoided looking at Laenea. His gaze jerked from the sea wall to the table, to some detail of carving on the furniture, and back again.

Laenea ate fruit sections with her fingers. All the previous worries, how to arrange schedules for time together, how to defuse the disapproval of their acquaintances, seemed trivial and frivolous. The only solution now was a drastic one, which she did not feel she could suggest herself. Volunteering to become a pilot might be as impossible for him as returning to normal would be for Laenea. Piloting was a lifetime decision, not a job like crewing that one could take for a few years’ travel and adventure.

Radu stood up. His chair scraped against the floor and fell over. Laenea looked up, startled. Flinching, Radu turned, picked up the chair, and set it quietly on its legs again. “I can’t think down here,” he said. “It never changes.” He glanced at the sea wall, perpetual blue fading to blackness. “I’m going out on deck. I need to be outside.” He turned toward her. “Would you —”

“I think…” Wind, salt spray on her face: tempting. “I think we’d each better be alone for a while.”

“Yes,” he said, with gratitude. “I suppose… ” His voice grew heavy with disappointment. “You’re right.” His footsteps were soundless on the thick carpet.

“Radu —”

He turned again, without speaking, as though his barriers were forming around him again, still so fragile that a word would shatter them.

“Never mind… just… Oh — take my cape if you want, it gets cold on deck at night.”

He nodded once, still silent, and went away.

In the pool Laenea swam hard, even when her ribs began to hurt. She felt trapped and angry, with nowhere to run, knowing no one deserved her anger. Certainly not Radu; not the other pilots, who had warned her. Not even the administrators, who in their own misguided way had tried to make her transition as protected as possible. The anger could turn inward, toward her strong-willed stubborn character. But that, too, was pointless. All her life she had made her own mistakes and her own successes, both usually by trying what others said she could not do.

She climbed out of the pool without having tired herself in the least. The warmth had soothed away whatever aches and pains were left. Her energy returned, leaving her restless and snappish. She put on her clothes and left the apartment to walk off her tension until she could consider the problem calmly. But she could not see even an approach to a solution; at least, not to a solution that would be a happy one.

oOo

Hours later, when the grounder city had quieted to night, Laenea let herself back into Kathell’s apartment. Inside, too, was dark and silent. She could hardly wonder where Radu was; she remembered little enough of what she herself had done since he left. She remembered being vaguely civil to people who stopped her, greeted her, invited her to parties, asked for her autograph. She remembered being less than civil to someone who asked how it felt to be an Aztec. But she did not remember which incident preceded the other or when either had occurred or what she had actually said. She was no closer to an answer than before. Hands jammed into her pockets, she went to the main room, just to sit and stare into the ocean and try to think. She was halfway to the sea wall before she saw Radu, standing silhouetted against the window, dark and mysterious in the black cloak, the blue light glinting ghostily off his hair.

“Radu —”

He did not turn. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the dimness, Laenea saw his breath clouding the glass.

“I applied to pilot training,” he said softly, his tone utterly neutral.

Laenea felt a quick flash of joy, then uncertainty, then fear for him. She had been ecstatic when the administrators accepted her for training. Radu did not even smile. Making a mistake in this choice would hurt him more, much more, than even parting forever could hurt both of them.

“What about Twilight?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice unsteady. “They refused” — he choked on the words and forced them out —”they refused me.”

Laenea went to him, put her arms around him, turned him toward her. The fine lines around his blue eyes were deeper, etched by distress and failure. She touched his cheek. Embracing her, he bent to rest his forehead on her shoulder. “They said I’d never even make it through the training. I’m bound to our own four dimensions. I’m too dependent… on night, day, time… My circadian rhythms are too strong. They said…” His muffled words became more and more unsure, balanced on a shaky edge. Laenea stroked his hair, the back of his neck, over and over. That was the only thing left to do. There was nothing at all left to say. “If I survived the operation… I’d die in transit.”

Laenea’s vision blurred, and the warm tears slipped down her face. She could not remember the last time she had cried. A convulsive sob shook Radu and his tears fell cool on her shoulder, soaking through her shirt.

“I love you,” Radu whispered. “Laenea, I love you.”

“Dear Radu, I love you too.” She could not, would not, say what she thought: That won’t be enough for us. Even that won’t help us.

She guided him to a wide low cushion that faced the ocean; she drew him down beside her, neither of them really paying attention to what they were doing, to the cushions too low for them, to anything but each other. Laenea held Radu close. He said something she could not hear.

“What?”

He pulled back and looked at her, his gaze passing rapidly back and forth over her face. “How can you love me? We could only stay together one way, but I failed —” He broke the last word off, unwilling, almost unable, to say it.

Laenea slid her hand from his shoulders down his arms and grasped his hands. “You can’t fail at this, Radu. The word doesn’t mean anything. You can tolerate what they do to you, or you can’t. But there’s no dishonor.”

He shook his head and looked away.

Laenea wondered if this were the first time he had ever failed at anything important in his life, at anything that he desperately wanted. He was so young… too young not to blame himself for what was out of his control. Laenea drew him toward her again and kissed the outer curve of his eyebrow, his high cheekbone. Salt stung her lips.

“We can’t —” He pulled back, but she held him.

“I’ll risk it if you will.” She slipped her hand inside the collar of his shirt, rubbing the tension-knotted muscles at the back of his neck, her thumb on the pulse-point in his throat, feeling it beat through her. He spoke her name so softly it was hardly a sound.

Knowing what to expect, and what to fear, they made love a third, final, desperate time, exhausting themselves against each other beside the cold dark sea.

oOo

Radu was nearly asleep when Laenea kissed him and left him, forcibly feigning calm. In her scarlet and gold room she lay on the bed and pushed away every concern but fighting her spinning heart, slowing her breathing. She had not wanted to frighten Radu again, and he could not help her. Her struggle required peace and concentration. What little of either remained in her kept escaping before she could grasp and fix them. They flowed away on the channels of pain, shallow and quick in her head, deep and slow in the small of her back, above the kidneys, spreading all through her lungs. Near panic, she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until blood-red lights flashed; she stimulated adrenaline, until excitement pushed her beyond pain, above it.

Instantly she forced an artificial, fragile calmness that glimmered through her like sparks.

Her heart slowed, sped up, slowed, sped (not quite so much this time), slowed, slowed, slowed.

Afraid to sleep, unable to stay awake, she let her hands fall from her eyes, and drifted away from the world.