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long as there was even a remote chance that she was alive, he would not stop searching for her.
    To stop would be the same as walking through an open air lock into space.
    That Cherijo was more than a wife to Reever was something no one understood. He had never attempted to express what he felt for her to anyone but her. Even with her, words failed him.
    Why do you love me, Duncan?
    He felt the only adequate answer he had given her had been after another of her endless double shifts in surgery, when she had been too tired to strip out of her bloodstained scrubs. He had been obliged to undress her and help her into the cleansing unit.
    I'm an arrogant, bad-tempered —she brushed back some hair from her eyes to look at him— inconsiderate shrew, and that's on my good days . She placed one slim hand on his shoulder to steady herself as she stepped out of her trousers. You should work on your wish list. You know, just in case something happens to me .
    Aware that the intensity of their connection and his own feelings often frightened her, he hadn't told her that there would never be anyone else. She had frightened him, too. It was all there in his old journal files.
    The detail is astonishing; when I concentrate, I can feel the adrenaline pumping in her veins and the precise focus of her thoughts as she works. My limbs ache with the ghost weight of her exhaustion after she finishes a double shift in Medical. I can count her breaths, smell her scent, and occasionally—to my dismay—even taste what she eats.
    Through her, I have discovered needs that I never knew existed. They twist inside me, these peculiar, foreign demands—and I am almost certain they are not coming from her. The old priest Arembel, who cared for the injured after bouts in the arena, once told me how it could be, but I did not expect this.
    I did not expect her.
    His gaze drifted toward the end of the entry, where he had written, The good doctor dreams of me . To his knowledge, no one had ever done that—dreamed of him—and at first it had puzzled him.
    Does she still dream of me? Does she miss me? Does she wonder, every waking moment, if I am well? Is she frightened? Have they hurt her ?
    If nothing else, Reever at last understood the killing rage the Jorenians felt whenever their kin were threatened or harmed.
    He shut down the console and went to finish his last task. Halfway through his packing, the door chime rang. "Come in."
    Xonea Torin, a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall Jorenian and captain of the Torin HouseClan's ship the Sunlace , entered Reever's quarters and closed the door panel behind him. "Linguist."
    He had been expecting this visit. "Captain."
    "You will not find her."
    "I already have." Reever stowed another weapon in his gear pack and glanced through the viewport. Below the ship's orbit, the white-and-blue sphere that was the planet Akkabarr swelled like a bubble of ice. "She is down there."
    "You cannot know this. There has been no word of her on this world, or any other." Xonea, who was also Cherijo's adopted brother, came to stand beside him. "No one from the League will confirm that the slaver transport crashed here."
    The League had never confirmed anything since the Jado Massacre, which had occurred just after Cherijo had saved two worlds and had subsequently been sold to a pair of Rilken slavers. She had overpowered her diminutive abductors, had taken control of their ship, and had been flying to rejoin Duncan and Marel on the CloudWalk , HouseClan Jado's ship. While she was en route, the Jado That signal was the last thing Reever clearly remembered before waking up in medical bay on the Sunlace and being told that Cherijo's ship had vanished during the battle. The League placed Cherijo's name on the official list of those who had gone missing and were presumed killed during the Jado Massacre.
    "The computers salvaged from the transport were sold by the Toskald." Reever had personally hunted down and interrogated the Bartermen