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there was nowhere I’d ever belonged?
    I started back the way I’d come, head down and shoulders
hunched, shivering with cold and praying I’d make the right combination of
turns to get my miserable ass out of there before curfew.
    At last I saw the bridge lights, somewhere in the distance
up ahead; heard the sound of human voices moving toward me. I turned another
corner, breaking into a jog—slammed into someone running, so hard that we
almost went down together.
    A woman’s voice cried out as my hands caught her falling
body. I felt something drive into my brain like a knife of thought. My mind
blocked her instinctively at the same moment that I realized she was holding a
child in her arms.
    She cried out again— shock, fury —as my mind turned
back her attack She gasped out words in a language I didn’t know, and all the
while I kept shouting, “It’s all right, I won’t hurt you, it’s all right!”
trying to make her listen and understand. “What’s wrong? Do you need help—?”
    She stopped struggling, as if my words had finally
penetrated. Suddenly her body went limp in my grasp. The child trapped between
us didn’t make a sound as the woman collapsed against me, panting. I felt her
body’s fever heat even through my clothing.
    She looked up at me then, and I finally saw her face: A fey,
green-eyed Hydran face, golden-skinned, framed by a wild tangle of pale hair ....
A face out of a dream, every alien, haunted line of it; and yet every curve and
plane was somehow as familiar as the face of a lost lover.
    “I ... I know you?” I whispered, frozen in the glare of
impossible prescience. “How—?” A trapdoor opened under my thoughts, and I fell
through—
    The woman made a small sound, almost a whimper, of disbelief.
One hand rose, tentatively, to touch my face. (Nasheirtah .. . ?) she
breathed. (You. You—) Her expression became equal parts wonder and terror,
mirroring my own, as I slowly raised my hands to touch her face.
    (Anything ...) I murmured as my entire life telescoped into
that single moment’s contact. (Anything at all.)
    (Always. Forever ...) Her eyes filled with tears, her hand
dropped away. (Nasheirtah—)
    “What—?” I whispered, uncomprehending.
    She looked down suddenly, as if my eyes were a searchlight. “Help
me,” she said, in perfect Standard, but with her voice just barely under
control. “Please help me—they want to take my child!” She looked over her
shoulder. Light-echoes danced across building fronts in the distance down the
street.
    “Who does?” I asked.
    “They do!” she cried, shaking her head at me, with a look
that was half desperation and half incomprehension. “The Humans—”
    And in the depths of her green eyes, their black slit pupils
wide open to the faintest hope of light, I saw another midnight: Another
Hydran woman and her child ... light-years away, a lifetime ago — with no
one they could turn to, no one to save them from that Oldcity alley where their
world was ending in blood and pain ....
    “Please—” she said, and pressed something into my open hand.
    My fingers spasmed shut. I nodded, not looking at it, and
let her go. She disappeared down a side street I hadn’t even noticed.
    I stood frozen a few heartbeats longer, with my stupefied
mind trying to follow her into the night and my body begging me to get it out
of there. And then suddenly the ones who’d been after her were in front of me,
shouting; I saw lights, I saw weapons—I ran like hell.
    Behind me I heard someone bellow, “Corporate Security!”
    Shit —I ran faster.
    Lights appeared ahead of me, dropping out of the sky, as a
CorpSec cruiser landed in the street.
    Before I could even slow down something invisible slammed
into me like a tidal wave, and I drowned ....

Three
    I opened my eyes again to the blinding glare of an
interrogation room. I squinted them shut. “Shit,” I said. But that wasn’t what
came out of my mouth. The sound that came out of my mouth