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“Yes,” she admitted. “Wherever he is going, it is becoming harder for me to follow him.”

And suddenly it was as if Chakotay had yanked on her heart. She gasped in pain. “Stag…I don’t know if I can keep this up much longer….”

Agony blossomed and she screamed.

“Her heart is slowing even further,” Kaz said, starting to become alarmed despite Moset’s dismissal. “Brain activity—damn it, she’s flatlining!”

Sekaya couldn’t feel the earth beneath her feet. She was drifting; she, the anchor, suddenly had no anchor of her own. Misery flooded her. She and her brother would be lost, wandering aimlessly, mindlessly, in the world of spirit. They would become like the colonists, mad things who had one foot in each world and a soul in neither.

A soft sound penetrated her haze of terror. She knew that sound; sweet, haunting, clear. A flute. She gasped and drew breath into her lungs even as a gentle touch on her hand guided her back into herself.

She opened her eyes. Stag was gone. Instead, a man regarded her with a dark, intent gaze. As she blinked, reorienting herself, he smiled.

“Hello, Sky,” said Blue Water Dreamer.

“What did you do?” Moset cried.

“Nothing,” said Kaz, as baffled by the sudden development as Moset. They had lost Sekaya for a moment. She had died. But she’d been gone for only an instant. There hadn’t been any time to perform any emergency revival procedures before her heart had begun to beat again. It was a stronger heartbeat now, too—slow, yes, but steady. Her brain activity had stabilized as well.

“Well,” said Moset, “I guess we just count our blessings, then.”

Sekaya dragged her eyes away from Blue Water Dreamer’s and saw the cord stretching off into the distance. It was a vibrant gold again, not the pale, almost translucent yellow it had become.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

She drank in the sight of him. In a thick voice she said, “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

He smiled his sweet, soft smile. “I have been in love with you all my life, Sky. Of course I would come when you needed me.”

She wanted to ask him so many things. What had really happened to him? Was he real? Could she see him every time she spirit-walked if she wanted to?

Her heart lifted at that last. There was so much between them that was unfinished. A whole life, she thought, with a stab of pain. A whole life together, taken from us by Crell Moset.

He frowned a little. “I wouldn’t do that, Sekaya. Look at the cord.”

She obeyed and saw that the cord was turning a dull bronze shade.

“Its purity is fading because of your hatred,” he said. “You have to keep your spirit pure, or else you’ll taint the cord that binds you to your brother.”

“I can’t help it,” she said. “I do hate Moset for what he did to us—to you. I miss you so much. I would give anything to be with you.”

He had been sitting across from her, his legs crossed in the so-called “Indian style.” Now he rose and settled down beside her.

“Then be with me,” he said. He opened his arms and she leaned into him, feeling the cord brighten and strengthen as their lips met.

Pure.

There had been a moment of terror, but it had faded quickly, and now Chakotay soared in delight. He raced through the cosmos, no longer a fragile physical being but a mighty thing of spirit, like Black Jaguar who flew beside him. He had always loved the colors of space; now it was as if he saw them with fresh eyes, and their beauty was almost too much to bear.

“This is what it means to be like us,” said a voice beside him. After what had happened to him thus far, Chakotay was not surprised to see that Black Jaguar had disappeared. Soaring beside him now was a Sky Spirit alien, a sweet smile on his chalky white face.

“The colonists were like you,” Chakotay said, “but they didn’t know how to be like you.”

“Well said,” the Sky Spirit replied. “And even now you are not able to grasp all of what it means. We possess tremendous mental powers, developed and honed through millennia. We have telekinesis, telepathy.