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skeptic. I nestled into a corner of the couch, closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing. It took time, because Dame Okra snorted like a horse, and then Viridius kept tinkling away on the harpsichord until Lars stepped over and gently asked him to stop.
    I finally found my garden, and then Loud Lad’s ravine in the middle of it. Loud Lad sat upon the lip of the chasm, as if waiting for me, a beatific smile on his round face. I prodded him to standing, and then concentrated on myself. I always imagined myself bodily present in the garden; I liked feeling the dewy grass between my toes. When I had tried this before—with Jannoula—I had needed to imagine that the grotesque and I were immaterial.
    With effort, Loud Lad began to blur around the edges, then turn translucent in the middle. I could make out shapes through him. My own hands grew transparent, and when I was insubstantial enough, I stepped into Loud Lad to join my mind-stuff with his.
    I passed through him as if he were fog. A second try gave the same result.
    “It’s like trying to travel through a spyglass,” said a voice behind me in the garden. “If we could do that, I’d step through and visit the moon.”
    I turned around to see Fruit Bat—Abdo’s double—animated by Abdo’s consciousness. He could speak in my garden, unhindered by his scaly throat; this was how he spoke in my mind.
    “I’ve done this before,” I said.
    “Yes, but your mind may have changed since then,” he said, his dark eyes solemn. “It has changed in the time I’ve known you. I walked out of this garden and into your wider mind once—do you remember?”
    I did. I had been depressed, and then a door had appeared in the undifferentiated fog of … of the rest of my mind. He hadstepped through to comfort me, but I’d taken him for a second Jannoula. “I made you promise to stay in the garden after that,” I said.
    He nodded. “That’s not all you did. You took precautions. There used to be an Abdo-sized hole in the wall, but you bricked it up.”
    Not intentionally, if so. The garden’s edge was in sight; I pointed crossly. “Bricked? It’s a woven willow fence.”
    “Ah, madamina. I know you call this place a garden, but it doesn’t look like one to me. I see us confined to a narrow gatehouse, with no admittance to the castle of your larger mind.”
    I looked around at the lush vegetation, the soaring blue sky, Loud Lad’s deep ravine. “That’s absurd,” I said, trying to laugh, but deeply confused. This place had been created by my imagination, of course, but was its appearance so subjective?
    This wasn’t solving our mind-threading problem. “Even if I can’t reach out to Lars,” I said, “can you reach out and thread your mind-fire to mine? Make me a bead on the string?”
    Abdo bit his lip and darted his gaze about. “Maybe,” he said slowly.
    “Go ahead and try it,” I said.
    There was a pause and then a blinding flash of pain, as if my head would split in two. I screamed—in my head? in the real world?—and scrabbled around the garden, looking for the egression gate. I found it and returned to myself, my throbbing head cradled in someone’s hands.
    Abdo’s. He was leaning over me, his brown eyes brimming with regret.
Did I hurt you, Phina madamina?
    I sat up straighter, shakily, blinking against the glare from Viridius’s windows. “I’m all right now.”
    I should have listened to my instinct
, he fretted, patting my cheek and then my hair.
I can enter Fruit Bat, but I can’t go any further into your mind than that. I can’t see, let alone touch, your soul-light, not even from your garden. I don’t know what else to try
.
    I took a juddering breath. “T-try with Lars. The Queen won’t let me go looking for the others if we can’t make this work.”
    Lars’s sea-gray eyes had grown enormous, watching me; he ran a nervous hand through his bristly blond hair. Abdo must have spoken reassuringly in his head, because Lars joined him