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been almost a
year since they went into World’s End. I don’t know what happened to them. I
don’t even know if they’re dead or alive. But they’re all the family I have
left. I have to find them; if I have to go into hell itself and drag them
back—” I broke off, filled with sudden anger.
    “Yes,” she
murmured. “Yes. You understand.” Her callused hands clutched at her sleeves. “The need for proof.”
    I frowned
at her peculiar choice of words. “What do you want to prove? Whether she’s all
right? Whether she’s dead?”
    She stared
at me. She shook her head again. “That I love her.”
    I felt my
face go empty. I crouched down, pointlessly adjusting a dial on one of my
instruments. I only looked up again when I was sure of my expression. And,
looking up at her, I wondered what had drawn or driven her daughter into
World’s End.
    “She isn’t
dead. I’ve had messages from her. But she ... she isn’t all right. Her mind
...” Hahn’s hand moved in vague circles, and her mouth pinched. “She says that
Fire
Lake
speaks to her, through her. I can’t bear knowing that she’s out there, helpless
....” Her eyes were full of pain—and the one other emotion I always recognized. Guilt. “I want her brought back to me, if she can be
made to come.”
    I sighed.
“Why haven’t you gone after her yourself?”
    She looked
away. “I can’t. I’m needed here. The Company needs me, they wouldn’t let me go out there. And besides, no one wants to take me.”
    Afraid , 1 thought. “What about her father?”
    “Her father
is dead.” She looked down, and for a moment her face was bleak with memory. “He
was so much like her. Neither of them ever understood .... I’m a sibyl, Gedda . And so is she.” Hahn unfastened
the high collar of her coveralls, and showed me her trefoil tattoo.
    The shock
of recognition left me speechless for a moment. I haven’t been near a sibyl
since ... since I left ...
    The memory
of another face, a young, shining face above that same tattoo, transfixed me.
Snow, stars, the teeming streets of a city at Festival time—another world
filled my eyes. Tiamat . One stolen night, on a world I would never see again, came
back to me in an excruciating moment of loss and longing. And as I remembered I
felt the sweet, yearning body of Moon, who was as fair and as untouchable as
her name, pressed against my own. She belonged to another man, I belonged to
another world ... and yet that night our need had fused our separate worlds and
lives into one—
    When I
recovered my wits, Hahn was staring at me with open concern. I remember
mumbling something, turning away to hide the sudden hot surge of desire the
memory aroused in me.
    Her hand
reached out to me, drew back again, as if she were afraid that I feared her
touch. Everyone knows there is no cure for the man-made Old Empire virus that
turns a sibyl’s brain into a biological computer port. And everyone knows the
infection can drive an unsuitable host insane.
    “It’s all
right ... I’m not afraid,” I whispered. Only her blood or saliva in an open
wound could infect me. But I understood suddenly why Spadrin had reacted so violently—out of superstitious fear. And I saw Hahn through
different eyes, now that I knew the Old Empire’s eternal sibyl machinery had
chosen her above all others for her humanity and strength of will. She was not
like other human beings. If she was afraid to go after her daughter, it wasn’t
for the reasons I’d first imagined. “You know where your daughter is out
there?” I asked finally, because I had to say something.
    Hahn nodded, her face filling with relief as she saw that I was
not rejecting her. “There’s a—a place, a ruined city called Sanctuary, by
Fire
Lake
.
She’s there.”
    “It really
exists?” I’d read about the lost city, the way I’d read of Fire Lake itself—as
a thing shimmering on the edge of reality, lost in a haze of legend. Supposedly
it was a haven for criminals