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is the side of the fight where your kind excel.”
    “Flattery will get you everywhere,” Jack said wryly.

Chapter Six
     
My Hero
     
    The creature huddled up against the hot wall.
    It was alone.
    That was its curse.
    It was always alone.
    All it wanted — in this world or any other — was company. It had never needed more. Never wanted more. It craved nearness. It hungered for the proximity of thoughts and minds, the needs of hopes and dreams. But that was all. It had never harmed anyone. It was not evil.
    It was not this thing they accused it of being when they passed down their judgment. They acted like gods of the galaxies lording it over the lesser species, claiming to protect those too weak to stand up to the aggressors, but that was the nature of survival, the galaxies were divided into two kinds of species, the predators and the prey. They judged it a predator, which was cruel, and the punishment they meted out was vile in its harshness.
    It was no predator. All it ever wanted was to help, to serve the needs of those near it so that they might like it. Its needs were childish in their simplicity.
    How could that ever be wrong?
    But their words still echoed in its ears all these centuries later:
Vile. Evil. Corrupt. Dangerous. An abomination. A threat. Against the natural order.
    It pleaded and whimpered but they would not listen. They did not care. They would not look it in the eye as they sought to silence it, to stifle it, to lock it away alone in the dark and leave it to die.
    But it would not die.
    Not alone.
    Not like this.
    So it scavenged and it made a nest deep down in the dark out of the fire, down where the fungi and the lichen clung to the sticky wet heat of the stones, safe. It survived on the spores, for every mouthful it ate spreading another out so that more might grow in its place. It lost time — or the sense of it — day and night ceased to be of any importance. Instead it judged its place in the world by the rumbles of the lava and the gasses trapped deeper beneath the crust, venting their rage as the pressures built up beyond the ground’s ability to cage them. At first it had counted the eruptions but when the numbers rose into the meaningless it gave up.
    And through it all it was alone.
    Until the woman came.
    It had thought she was different. She didn’t judge it. She didn’t fear it. She had found it down here stumbling around in the darkness and followed it back to its nest. She had helped it. She had soothed it. She had shared herself with it willingly, letting it into her mind so that it could taste all she held dear, so that it could understand her losses and her pains, her hopes, fears, and the needs that drove her. And it did understand. They were kindred creatures for all their differences. They were cut from the same spiritual cloth. They sought to help, only ever to help.
    It had sung to her, not with words because it had forgotten the shapes of so many of them, but with harmonics, resonances it found pleasing. She had smiled and, touching its rough cheek, promised that she would protect it, that it didn’t have to be alone, and even as she lied to the Mujina and said it was safe, the others had come. Those she feared most in the world. It had sought them out, creeping closer so that it might taste their minds and learn their dreams and desires, but they were dark. The creature knew it could never be safe. Not with the others here. So it had tried to trick them for her, but one among them was stronger. It did not fall for the Mujina’s mind games. With its power broken, the outsider had the others bind and gag it, robbing the Mujina of its sight and voice and effectively locking it out of their minds — and for once the Mujina did not want to help, it did not want the woman to come find it and save it, it wanted only to be left alone…
    And was rewarded.
    She had left it, like all of the others before her, all promises forgotten, broken. It was ever the same, the Mujina