“I’d like to make things right between us,” he said.

She wriggled around to face him. Her eyes, suddenly very close to him, were, as always, startlingly blue, even in the dim light.

“I would like that, too.”

“Well—what can I do?”

Looking almost pained, she said, “That’s the problem. I don’t know.”

“But …”

“You resumed your relationship with Sheridan the moment you two were together again in Laisha. Then, even after all she had done, you saved her life.”

“I saved her for—”

“For Ani. I know. But was there not another reason, too?”

“Yes. There was.”

“Which was?”

He put on what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Because I’m a doctor. It’s what I trained to do. What I’ve sworn an oath to do. To save lives if I can, no matter my own personal feelings.”

“It’s those feelings I’m worried about.”

“Don’t be.”

She let out a breath; he felt its warmth on his cheek.

“I’m sorry, Francis,” she said.

“We could die anytime. I don’t want to go with regrets.”

“We all go with regrets.” She shook her head, just slightly, her blond hair spilling over a sculpted cheekbone.

“But you think there’s still hope for us?” he said.

“Maybe. I just need more time. After losing Frederick, the last thing I need is to lose you, too. This way, if I don’t have you, I can’t lose you. When I’m sure, though ... maybe.”

She leaned forward and kissed him. On the cheek. It would have to do. Retreating into his own corner, Avery’s mind turned over his relationship with Layanna for a time, then moved on, not to the task ahead, the harvesting of the ghost flower nectar, but to Ani. He wondered if she was settling in all right with the Voryses and smiled to imagine her drinking tea out of finely-cut porcelain while Hildebrand hooted and jumped about on a silken tablecloth and Idris—Lord Idris, if he had his way—gaped. Ani, Avery thought. Be well. Be safe, and be well.

That night he dreamed of her again, being carried away from him by a dark wave. He ran toward her down the beach, but suddenly the wave she was being carried on was eclipsed by massive shapes bursting from the water, a whole line of them, stretching from horizon to horizon. Lightning crackled off them, gas oozed from their orifices, and the earth quaked when they moved. Huge forms, blotting out the stars, blotting out reason, they drove toward him. Toward him, closer and closer, so slow and yet so fast, and he threw back his head and screamed, and screamed.

*   *   *

The next evening the villagers showed Avery and the others how they collected the ghost flower nectar. They could only do so at night, as that was the only time the flower could be seen, so they had encouraged Avery’s party to rest as much as they could during the day. Then, using armor made from the exoskeletons of various fauna, the villagers, with Avery and the others in tow in the armor they’d brought with them, ventured into the jungle in a small group to locations where the flower was known to grow, visiting them one after the other. The locals claimed the flower sprouted from a vine—a single, solitary vine with a thousand branches, each shifting and changeable. It made no sense to Avery and conformed to no law Atomic Sea phenomena he was aware of.

“Where does the vine originate from?” Avery asked the leader of the expedition, a squat village woman with patches of vibrant green fish scales on her face and torso.

“No one knows,” she said, by way of Mailos, and a look of dread crossed her face. “Only that the vine’s shoots come from ... that way.” She gestured in what Avery thought of as the north.

“What’s that way?” he asked.

“The Gomingdon.”

Mailos frowned and said something to her, then turned to Avery when she had replied. “I’m not exactly sure what the word means, only that it means something like ... ‘the Corruption’. When I asked her about it, she said it was the Holy Place.”

“Coleel mentioned the name of the region,” Avery said, “but I don’t understand. How can it be both holy and a place of corruption?”

“I don’t know, only that that’s what she said. She won’t speak about it further.”

It took them half the night, but eventually they located one of the shoots of the mysterious vine, which, like bamboo, grew underground, only the flowers emerging. At first Avery could see nothing, but then one of the moons came out from behind a cloud and the flowers shone like polished glass, graceful and translucent, with a milky fluid running through their veins. The flowers resembled orchids, with the same sort of eerie, fleshy petals, but with a central tube containing the nectar. Puncturing the tube in the wrong way caused the plant to release deadly spores, thus the villagers had developed special tools, and a special technique, to drain the nectar from the tube. In ancient times the nectar had been heavily diluted and used as a hallucinogen, but this had proved toxic over time, rendering repeated users paralyzed. By then the locals had found other uses for the plants.

The villagers harvested the nectar of several blooms and returned to the village, where Layanna and Avery broke out the rudimentary in-field science kits they’d brought with them, along with their samples of the Starfish tissue. Testing the nectar with conventional equipment availed nothing. As they’d suspected, though, the fluid, once Layanna had ingested it, enabled her to connect with the tissue even more strongly than it had in Ghenisa, the fluid being so much fresher. Disappointingly, however, the fluid was not powerful enough to do what she needed it to do.

“I must invade a psychic net designed to keep me out,” she said, sounding piqued. “I must have more potent nectar, and lots of it.”

“Can’t you just eat more?”

“It would take truck loads, and we don’t have truck loads. What’s more, I’m not even sure that would work.”

“Shit,” Hildra said, after Avery and Layanna had related their findings. “So we’ve come all this way for nothing?”

“Layanna and I believe that if we can venture into this ‘Gomingdon’, this Holy Place, we can take a sample of the vine’s originating point—seed, root, trunk, whatever. It will likely have a higher concentration of the energies needed to combat the Starfish tissue. What we have almost works, and at its source …  It’s our best chance.”

Hildra snorted. “Good fuckin’ luck getting the locals to take you there. They don’t even say the name of the Holy Whatsit without looking like they’re about to puke.”

“Hildy’s right,” Janx said. “And I don’t fancy goin’ there on our own.”

“Neither do I,” Avery said honestly.

“There is no alternative,” Layanna said. “We have soldiers with us. They’ll have to protect us while we harvest the root.”

“What news is there of Private Xarris?” Avery asked. Janx and Hildra had been circulating among the locals while he and Layanna had worked on the fluid.

“They say he’s about to ‘Become’,” Hildra said.

“Become what?” Avery said, but in his mind’s eye he saw the man the priests of the Restoration had brought with them to the temple of the Sisters of Junica—the man who had killed himself, then risen to don a cloak of his own.

Hildra merely shrugged.

“I just thought of something,” Janx said. “Shit. Only priestesses can go into the Hall of the Chosen, right? Priestesses and the sick. And those poor bastards with the maggots are chosen, right—by what? Gotta be gods. That’s why only priestesses tend to ‘em. Because they’re holy. The sick ones.”

“Yes,” Avery said. “I think you’re probably right.”