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however, Malja had her do-kha become hard as metal.
    “Ow!” Reon said and tumbled to the ground.
    Before she could stop, she groaned. Malja leaped on the spot she heard the sound come from and straddled the woman. Without pause, she punched four times to where she expected Reon’s head to be. On the fourth hit, Reon became visible. Malja had knocked her unconscious.
    Fawbry walked over. “You know I could’ve helped.”
    To hide the tremors in her hands, she laughed. “Did you really want to?”
    Fawbry shrugged. “Not really. I don’t like invisible enemies.”
    “She wasn’t invisible. Just camouflaged.”
    “She looks young.”
    Malja checked over Reon’s still body. Fawbry was right. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty. And the do-kha — why had it let her become visible? Malja’s do-kha would have done everything it could to protect her. It was as if Reon’s do-kha didn’t know what to do for her. But Malja could not consider herself anything close to an expert on do-khas. She barely knew her own. For that matter, she hadn’t known until now that they could become camouflaged.
    “She might be like me — another lost Gate that doesn’t know about Gate,” Malja said. “But she’s certainly Gate. The do-kha is the evidence.”
    “I agree,” Fawbry said. “And no matter what else she said, she knows Harskill.”
    “That’s the worst of it. Because she seemed to think he was a god, and she thought I would think like she does — consider myself a chosen one of Harskill.”
    “What’s he doing?”
    A horrible sensation crawled over Malja. “I don’t know exactly. But if he’s getting people like this to follow him, not just rule over them but really follow him, then maybe he’s building an army.” She looked at Fawbry. “That means we’ll need an army too.”
    “Unless you suddenly have the power of the Brother Gods, how are you going to build an army that can fight Gate?”
    She kicked a glop of mud at the pipe. “We have to go get Tommy and the Artisoll.”

Chapter 6
     
    Reon
     
    Reon’s eyes fluttered open. At first, she thought she lay in her bed and had awoken from a long dream, but then the muddy ground wetting the back of her head and the noxious odor of the broken seed pods brought her back to the real world. She had failed in her fight. She had failed.
    She did not move. She stared at the drifting sky, listened to the buzzing insects, and wondered what would become of her now. Only her second test and she already had failed. The throbbing bruise on her face underscored the pain in her heart. All those years of training. For what?
    She punched the ground and sat up. Look at where I am, she thought. The Lord Harskill dropped me here, in this nothing. No way out except through my success or failure — and I have failed.
    She thought of the Middleland — the Dulmul afterlife waiting ground between the infinite joys of Dulmul’s Higher Kingdom or the darkest suffering of the Demon’s Den. Her mother had often said that when she died, she prayed she would never end up in the Middleland. To be stuck there would be worse than the Demon’s Den because there would always be that hope of somehow pleasing Dulmul and gaining access to the Higher Kingdom. And hope would bring pain.
    But Reon did not even see hope. She had failed, and that word burned in her mind. She could not escape it.
    “It’s not fair.” She jumped to her feet, took two long strides over to a nearby leaf, and grabbed a couple of its seed pods. Grunting, she hurled them at the pipe. They splat with a satisfyingly wet noise. She threw three more before the strong stench hit her. It smelled like vomit baking under the summer sun.
    She whirled around and her do-kha shot out its blade once more. It sliced through what remained of the leaf and seed pods in one swift stroke. Reon froze. She stared at the long blade as it receded back into the shape of her sleeve.
    During her fight, she had been unable to