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“Don’t forget about your heart,” Beranabus says “Or Shars You’re a pair of wrecks on that world Let us check the situation and report back We won’t engage her if we can avoid it”

“What about me?” I ask “I can survive there”

“Aye, but I’ you to wait Please Until we knowinto” I don’t like it, but I know Beranabus worries aboutwith his wishes, so he can operate free of any distractions

Kernel opens a ithin ht I think I can sh it, but that’s just , Kernel steps through, Beranabus half a step behind him

“We’ll give them five minutes,” Dervish rumbles “If they’re not back by then, we—” Beranabus sticks his head through the , catching us by surprise “It’s an area of ic,” he says “Sharmila and Dervish will be fine there Come on”

He disappears again We glance at each other uneasily, then file through one by one, back to the human universe, in search of the semi-human Juni Swan and a host of shadowy answers

PART THREE — ALL ABOARD

Snapshots of Beranabus III

Beranabus thought his world had ended when I died He’d been developing while ere together, the disjointed frag to think and reason as other huic helped Unknown to me, I s channels which were blocked Perhaps, deep down, I loved hie boy

When the rocks closed, trapping me in the cave with Lord Loss and his farief He tried to carve through the wall, using sers When that failed, he kept vigil for severalfro his post only to catch the occasional rabbit or fox

He held long, garbled conversations with hiot confused inside his head and soht he was in the Labyrinth and the Minotaur was hiding behind a stalag with his own—he ed to say “Beranabus” for the first time in the cave He wept and howled, and sometimes tried to bash his head open on the rocks Nor himself, but a few times he knocked himself unconscious, only to awake hours later, scalp bruised and bloody, his ears ringing

He kneas dead, the rock wouldn’t open, that I’d never step out and throwto the belief that a miracle would return , he kissed the rock, cliered aith no intention of ever co back

Beranabus retraced our steps, following the route we’d covered fro so, to recall any sue plan was towhere I’d first e After that… he didn’t know Thinking ahead was a new experience for him and he found it hard to look very far into the future

When he reached the shore and gazed down over the cliff where we’d sheltered, to the ever-angry sea below, his plan changed Grief exploded within hih of dehter and love He didn’t know much about death, but the many corpses he’d seen over the centuries had all looked peaceful and unthinking Maybe he wouldn’t feel this terrible sense of loss if he put life and its complicated emotions behind him

Beranabus shts were ofof the possibility of a life after death, so he had no hope of seeing us again His only as that our faces were the last ihts when he died