At the crash site, I saw nothing helpful at first. A good portion of the ship was in tact but life support would have been destroyed as she blazed through the exosphere, like a shooting star. But inside the ship, there was no body, no frozen corpse version of Jessica.
> Tiss tried to encourage me, but her efforts didn’t make a dent in my mounting cynicism.
If Jessica had survived, where did she go? I didn’t do enough to quiet that thought. Morpheus placed a hand on my back.
>
Tisiphone interrupted my misery by gasping as she took readings from her environmental scanner.
>
>
>
> Morpheus expressed what we were all thinking. Something wasn’t right about this rock. Despite the fact that I’d been in the throes of battle and tackled more terrifying monsters, I couldn’t escape the sensation that there were eyes in the darkness, and those eyes were watching us.
The only light we had was generated from our lamps, strapped to our heads with a range of a few hundred feet. The moon was grey, with no bodies of water, nothing but grey rock and large craters. Without light, it would have been easy to fall into one just relying on sensors alone. The magnetic field sent our scanners into a fritz, but Tiss could continue to pinpoint the directions of the life signs, so we followed.
As our headlamps swayed, scanning the desolate wasteland of frigid rock, I caught sight of something.
>
Our telepathic communication lagged between each other. For once, verbal might have been faster, but Tisiphone and Morpheus were stuck in the Devoran habit, despite the unusual lag in our thought transmissions.
> Tiss asked.
I shone my light again. Morpheus grabbed my arm. I could feel all of their surprise and my own. Jessica.
She stood in the middle of the grey patch of rock, her back to us, completely naked. Her hair whipped in the wind and I wanted to call out to her, but the three of us were frozen in place. This was impossible — a human being, standing naked on the frozen moon.
She turned to face us, her belly, protruding forward with our twins. They’d grown too quickly, faster than what was natural. None of this was natural. When Jess saw us, she just kept standing there, her long black hair whipping around her naked body, apparently unaffected by the lack of oxygen, or the cold.
>
>
I couldn’t wait another minute longer to find out. I left the other two behind and ran to Jessica as fast as my legs could take me.
FIFTEEN
JESS
I convincedthe Fengari that if they didn’t release me, their secret home world would become widespread knowledge throughout the galaxy. When they heard the wordDevoranand they climbed into my mind to see how many were so close to their secret, underground home, they had to let me go.
I resisted them at first. They didn’t speak much to outsiders and when they touched me, their telepathic fields were so strong that my head ached and rumbled instantly. An incident with Fryx caused me to bleed from my right ear. I was too weak for their form of telepathy, despite the telepathic children in my womb.
They put me under into some kind of hypnotic trance. I was in control of my body in ways I’d never been before, yet my awareness was dull, my mind’s efforts focused entirely on Fryx’s voice and the others. They took my clothes and replaced them with strength, a resistance to the icy winds and desperate chill of the moon’s darkest side. Their telepathy could even control parts of my nervous system. They grew the young ones in my womb so they could survive the chill as well.
They opened my mind so I could see the way they saw. Then they sent me to the surface. On the surface, I walked. I heard them. I heard their thoughts. I heard them coming. I heard everything. More than I ever thought possible. And my head didn’t hurt. My nose didn’t bleed.
Kronos ran toward me and I melted into him. He wrapped his arms around me, so warm. So perfect.
>
He held my face, close to his.
>
