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Like a spectral parasite, she affixed herself to that mind, forging a connection, drawing energy out of it and the body that sustained it. She could not draw that energy into herself, though she badly needed sustenance now; she could feel her own body begin to shake from the strain. But she could, and would, put the energy to use.

Finally she flowed into the distant Quarren’s mind, flowed out through its memory of its surroundings…and she could see.

She hovered above the Quarren. The amphibious female was dressed in medical scrubs and leaned across a desk, sleeping there. This was a small office packed with, and lit solely by, computer displays. A window looked out over a facing wall of building fronts, and there were, for once, no traffic streams to be seen. A door, ajar, led into a brightly lit corridor.

Lumiya got to work. Into the woman’s sleeping mind, she whispered, “Open your eyes. Stand up. We have work to do. Records to read. Instructions to issue.”

And the Quarren rose, her eyes glazed, her face-tentacles twitching.

Minutes later Lumiya restored the Quarren to her desk and true sleep, then drifted from the chamber to find someone. A very useful someone.

GALACTIC CITY, CORUSCANT, VETERANS’ MENTAL CARE HOSPITAL

Matric Klauskin, former commander of the Second Fleet’s Corellian task force but for the last several weeks a patient in this too-sympathetic prison, awoke. The small room he’d been given was, as always, dark and quiet, its few items of furniture reflecting white gleams from the city lights filtering in through the transparisteel viewport. Everything was as it should be.

Or perhaps not. The door was open.

He frowned. The door opened only when the doctors or nurses came for him, or when his caseworker from the Alliance’s naval administration visited to reassure him that all was well; they hadn’t forgotten him.

But now the door was open and no one was entering.

He sat up, his sheet falling from his chest, and realized that someone was standing beside his bed. He looked up.

It was Edela. Of course it was Edela. His treatment here was all about his wife. Now she smiled down at him, patient and loving as always. Tonight she wore a shimmering synthsilk gown of burgundy.

She had lost weight, diminishing from the pretty but distinctly overweight woman she had been the last time he’d seen her to a figure he could describe as “pleasingly plump.” The gray was gone from her hair, too, and he realized belatedly that she wasn’t just slimmer, she was younger—she looked as she had a mere five or ten years into their marriage.

“Hello, dear,” he said. “You realize you’re dead.”

Her smile broadened. “Of course I’m dead. I’ve been dead for years. But it doesn’t mean I don’t exist.”

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? The doctors all say that you don’t, that your very existence rests only in my mind. But they say I’m getting better.”

“I don’t exist just in your mind. I exist in fact. Phantoms of the mind can’t open a door and free you, can they?”

Klauskin looked again at the door. It remained resolutely open. “That just means I’m dreaming again. It’s really not open.”

“It is, as you’ll find out in a moment.” Her voice became urgent. “Darling, you’ve been lied to, we’ve all been lied to. The Corellians have been in the right all along, and we’ve betrayed our own people by opposing them.”

Klauskin frowned. He knew his thinking was muddled, but he couldn’t see how he was harming his homeworld of Commenor by opposing Corellia. True, Commenor’s government had offered words of encouragement to Corellia, but that was just politics at work.

Edela continued, “Commenor and Bothawui are coming into the war on Corellia’s side. And you, darling, have been imprisoned here and convinced that you’re ill…just so the Alliance can keep you from helping our world.”

Klauskin sighed. Truth was such a slippery concept these days that he found it hard to trust—even his dead wife. “You’re either here or not.”

There was a little curiosity in