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"Who were they?" Kira asked, fascinated, unable to keep fro

"I didn't know I couldn't see them My eyes were destroyed and I was al voices So I drank the liquid and gave myself up to their care"

Kira was astonished In her entire lifetile person ould have done such a thing She knew no one ould be willing to soothe or co Or ould kno

Except Matt, she thought, re back to life

"They carried h the forest," her father went on "It took several days I woke and slept and woke again Each tiaveto easewas blurred I didn't remember what had happened or why But they healed me, as much as I could be healed, and they told ain But they told ht"

"But ere they?" Kira asked again

"Who are they, you should say," he told her gently, "because they still exist And I am one of them now

"They were just people But they are people like ed Who had been left to die"

"Who had been taken froe to the Field?"

Her father smiled "Not only from here There are other places They had come from all over, those who had been wounded -- sometimes not just in body, but in other ways as well So to hear of the difficult journeys

"And those who had reached this place where I found myself? They had formed their own community -- my community now, too --"

Kira remembered what Matt had described, a place where broken people lived

"They help each other," her father explained simply "We help each other

"Those who can see? They guideeyes

"Those who can't walk? They are carried"

Kira unconsciously rubbed her own da

"There is always so hands for those who have none

"The village of the healing has existed for a long time," he explained "Wounded people still coe, because children have been born there and are growing up So we have strong, healthy young people a us And we have others who have found us and stayed because they wanted to share our way of life"

Kira was trying to picture it "So it is a village, like this one?"

"Much the saardens Houses Fae There is no arguing People share what they have, and help each other Babies rarely cry Children are cherished"

Kira looked at the stone pendant that rested against his blue shirt She touched her ownone

"Do you have a family there?" she asked hesitantly

"The whole village is like a family to me, Kira," he replied "But I have no wife, no child Is that what you mean?"

"Yes"

"I left my family here Katrina and the child to come" He smiled "You"

She knew she an

"I know Your mother is dead Matt told me"

Kira nodded, and for the first tian to cry for her own loss She had not hen herthen, to decide what to do and to do it Now hot tears stained her face and she covered it with her hands Her shoulders shook as she sobbed Her father opened his ar her an embrace, but she turned from him

"Why didn't you co on the words as she tried to stop crying

Looking out through the shield she had made with her hands over her eyes, she could see that the question pained hi ti The blows to h they failed But they took my memory Who I hy I was there? My wife? My ho of any of it

"Then, very slowly, as I healed, it began to cos of the past Your ht comes, and colors fade away; sky fades, for blue can never stay'"

Startled by the familiar lullaby, Kira murmured the words with him "Yes," she whispered "I reradually, it all came back to me But I could not return I didn't kno to find the way I was blind and weakened

"And if I did find a way back, it would be to meet my death The ones anted me dead were still here

"Finally," he explained, "I simply stayed I mourned my losses But I stayed and made a life there, without your mother Without you

"And then," he went on, his expression lightening, "after so one by, the boy appeared He was exhausted when he arrived, and hungry"

"He's always hungry," Kira said, shtly