Adele's only warning that the Princess Cecile had reached the surface of New Delphi came when the plasma thrusters shut off. There was no jolt, no violent buffeting—just silence and an end to the juddering vibration of ions expelled at high velocity to counteract the pull of gravity.
"Ship, this is the captain," Daniel announced over the common channel. "We've landed, but the surface here is sand, not water. We'll wait ten minutes for the site to cool before opening any hatches. I repeat, ten minutes—and I mean it, Sissies, I'm not having a bubble of molten glass pop and spit through a port. Captain out."
"We're on the ground already?" the Klimovna said, her tone mixing surprise with at least a hint of irritation. With the thrusters shut down, probably everyone on the bridge could hear her; certainly Adele could. "I thought this landing was supposed to be very dangerous!"
Adele unstrapped herself from her couch and sat up. Forcing a smile, she looked at her employers in the annex and said, "I'm sure many captains could have given you all the danger you could imagine on such a landing, mistress. Fortunately you were wise enough to hire a man with a talent for making the difficult look easy."
Daniel rose to his feet with a satisfied smile. "Loose sand is a better surface than I'd feared it might be," he said. "Though of course walking to the monastery is going to be a chore."
He cleared his throat. "Mistress Mundy?" he went on. "While we're forced to wait, would you please run through a description of New Delphi for me and the crew?" He bowed toward the annex. "And for our employers, of course, if they're interested."
"Yes, of course," Adele said. She settled back on her couch, thumbing electronically through images to pick the best sequence for the purpose. She didn't know whether Daniel was really interested in a presentation or if he simply wanted her to fill time that might otherwise permit awkward questions.
It didn't matter, of course. She'd been asked to provide information, so she'd do just that.
"There's no certainty of when New Delphi was discovered," she said, transmitting over an alert channel. The signal went to everyone aboard the Princess Cecile, but nobody else could respond by it. "It was settled and named three hundred years before the Hiatus by what appears in the beginning to have been a scientific expedition. They're now a religious order calling themselves the Service of the Tree. There've never been more than a hundred acolytes under a prior on New Delphi. They're volunteers from all over the human galaxy. The Service has extensive charitable works on many scores of planets, staffed by Lay Servants and funded from the fees charged for incubation within the monastery."
Sun looked at her with a worried expression. "Pardon, mistress?" he said. "But 'incubation'? There's disease here?"
There aren't even any brothels here, so you needn't worry about disease, Adele thought in irritation at being interrupted. But because Sun probably spoke for scores of spacers throughout the ship, she continued aloud, "Incubation means sleeping; in this particular instance it means sleeping in the Chamber of the Tree to receive dreams which are said to be prophetic."
She cleared her throat and added, "Some of those making the claims of prophecy are in fact scientific bodies of the highest repute. A delegation from the Academic Collections on Bryce made a detailed study thirty-three years ago. It concluded that the so-called Tree Oracle did in fact foretell the future in statistically-verifiable fashions."
It embarrassed Adele to repeat superstitious nonsense, but she was unwilling to suppress evidence simply because she was sure those listening would misinterpret it. There was some explanation other than godlike wisdom housed in a tree; it was just that no one had discovered it yet.
There was a general buzz of voices which Adele ignored as she selected visuals, of the planet generally and of the monastery a quarter mile away. In a commanding tone, Count Klimov said, "What is the amount of the fee the monastery charges, if you please?"
Adele looked expressionlessly into the annex. Over the alert channel she answered, "The fees are variable, according either to whim or to rules which have never been stated to outsiders. The only certainty is that they're very high."
Before somebody could interrupt with another question, Adele projected the images she'd picked from her files. She supplemented them with one which the Princess Cecile took from orbit and with a realtime display from the corvette's dorsal sensor pack.
"New Delphi is arid," she said, "with no surface water at present. There are significant stocks of water in deep aquifers, however, and in some locations plants which rooted before the onset of the final drought have been able to survive by tapping that water. One of these . . . oases is the wrong word, no seedlings have rooted for millennia. One of these existing plants is the so-called Oracle Tree, which has been growing out from its center to a present diameter of nearly six miles. We've landed beside it."
She highlighted the realtime display. A tangled mass of trunks and branches reached a hundred and twenty feet high. It didn't look like a single tree to her, but she accepted the opinion of the experts.
The mass didn't even seem to be alive, but again Adele supposed the experts must know. The gray leaves were sparse and individually tiny, but presumably they proved sufficient to the tree's limited requirements.
"The monastery's built within the tree," she continued. "It's only the outer ring that's alive; the wood of the interior is dead and in the center has rotted away. There are extensive passages through the dead portion of the trunk and in the soil beneath, though five years ago—that's the latest report I could find—there were only forty-one acolytes on New Delphi."
"What kind of defenses does the monastery have, Mundy?" Daniel asked. "The wealth of the Delphi Foundation would be a tempting prize even in a more settled part of the galaxy. Here in the North I'd judge it'd be a race between pirates and the Commonwealth government itself as to who'd be the first to loot the planet."
"The Tree Oracle funds the operations of the Delphi Foundation all over the human galaxy," Adele said, remembering that she was speaking to members of the crew who couldn't hear Daniel's question. "Orphanages, hospitals, development schemes—nearly a thousand projects on several hundred worlds, and I doubt that's an exhaustive list. But none of the wealth is here."
Her wands sequenced through a dozen images of the monastery's interior: the bare walls were either rock or wood textured by its grain; individual rooms—cells—with a table, a stool, and a sleeping mat unrolled on the floor; and a dining hall in which acolytes wearing identical robes of coarse gray fabric filled their bowls from a common urn.
The only exception to the general starkness was the library containing tens of thousands of volumes and data consoles of advanced design. Adele smiled wryly as she flicked that image up, then replaced it with one of the Chamber of the Tree; its only furnishing was a couch carved into the trunk of the Tree itself.
Adele was probably the only person aboard the Princess Cecile to whom a library like that one suggested extreme wealth. Pirates would react much the way Sun did, with blank incomprehension.
"The acolytes live an ascetic existence, even by the standards of the RCN on active service," Adele said, allowing herself a strait-faced joke. "The oracle is open to all who pay the fee; the Foundation is wholly apolitical, acting for the betterment of Mankind without regard to government, religion, or any other factor save the perceived need of the recipients of the proffered aid. The combination of neutrality and poverty has preserved the monastery as no conceivable armament could have done."
She smiled coldly. "A cynic might believe that the poverty alone was sufficient protection."
"Six?" said Betts on the command channel. "There's people coming toward us. A little door opened in the side of the tree. Do you want we should let 'em aboard, over?"
Adele increased the magnification of the realtime display at the top of her screen. A young woman and an older man with white-trimmed hem and cuffs had walked from the tree and to within a stone's throw of the Princess Cecile. They were barefoot and bare-headed, squinting slightly against dust blown by the steady wind. Occasionally the man would wobble; each time the woman took his arm to steady him.
"I think," said Daniel, rising from his console, "that instead we'll go meet them. Ship, this is Six; all personnel may open the hatches in their area. Woetjans, meet me in the main lock with a twenty-strong escort; we're going to view the monastery of New Delphi. Mr. Chewning, you're in charge in my absence."
He looked at the Klimovs. "Your excellencies?" he said. "Would you care . . . ?"
"Yes," Valentina said as she and her husband rose stiffly. "Of course we'll come!"
Adele got up from her couch and twisted her upper body one way, then the other, to loosen her muscles. "Ah . . . ?" she said, catching the "Daniel" before it left her tongue. "Captain? I'd like to accompany you. To see the library."
"Yes, of course, Mundy," Daniel said with his usual bright smile. He buckled his equipment belt with the holstered pistol on over his utility uniform. "You'll be able to tell us what to look for."
The group from the bridge trooped down the echoing companionway. Adele frowned when she saw that the escort waiting in the entryway within the open main hatch was armed to the teeth. "Daniel?" she murmured in her friend's ear. "Do you think the guns are necessary?"
"No, I don't," he said, pursing his lips in thought. "But your most recent information is five years old, and there's no foreign ship on the planet so far as we could tell from orbit. The personnel Woetjans chose for our escort are well-disciplined, so we needn't fear accidents on our side . . . and I'd just as soon view the situation on the ground myself before I assume it's perfectly safe."
The air blowing in through the hatchway was cool and dry with the hint of a vegetable odor. Adele would've described the smell as cinnamon if she'd been forced to pick, but of course she wasn't.
"I'll lead," Daniel said nonchalantly and strode down the boarding bridge. Hogg was directly behind him, and Woetjans with her armed band followed ahead of the Klimovs, Adele, and last of all Tovera. Because the Princess Cecile stood on solid ground, the entry port was some distance in the air. High enough to break a leg or your neck, Adele suspected; and there was enough wind to make a fall possible even for someone sober.
The ship's exhaust had fused the ground into coarse glass. There were similar patches at many places along the south side of the tree's vast circle. Archeologists could probably identify thousands of earlier landing sites, covered or broken up by ages of blowing wind.
The Service of the Tree had pointedly chosen not to encourage visitors by improving the facilities. Even the small vessel the Service kept for its own purposes stood in the open. Its only protection was a fence upwind which formed a berm of sand dumped on the other side of the slats.
Daniel had waited with his hands crossed behind his back until the Klimovs arrived. "Count and Lady Klimov," he said, "allow me to present the Prior of the Service of the Tree and Sister Margarida, a novice of the order."
Adele noted with amusement she was careful to hide that the Count didn't know whether to react to Margarida as an attractive young woman—which she certainly was, at least in the slightly plush fashion that Daniel favored—or as the religious figure which her title and gray habit suggested. In the end he bowed to both man and girl, without offering to kiss the latter's hand.
"Please come in with us," the Prior said, turning with the careful determination of age. "You'll find it more comfortable out of the wind, I'm sure."
He chuckled, adding, "And so will we, to tell the truth, though I don't remember it bothering me so much when I was as young as Margarida, here. That was a very long time ago, of course."
The door set into the rock was wooden, but it had weathered to such a degree that valve and jamb blurred visually from any distance. At ground level the Tree was a mass of trunks, surface roots, and low-hanging branches. The different portions were indistinguishable to Adele and probably confusing even to Daniel, whose knowledge of natural history was more than a dilettante's. Everything—bark, wood, and the underlying stone—was the same color: gray with tawny undertones.
Margarida opened the door. Before she could help the Prior through, Woetjans pushed inside with her stocked impeller pointed forward at waist level.
"Most of the Acolytes are at their duties in other parts of the monastery now," the Prior said with a faint smile. "I don't believe you'll find anyone in this section of corridor, but if you do I assure you that they'll be friendly."
Daniel bowed to the old man. "May I help you, sir?" he said. "I appreciate you inconveniencing yourself in order to greet us."
The tunnel within was eight feet wide and not quite that high. The ceiling was a mass of wood with a ropy pattern. Daniel, the Prior leaning on his right arm, looked up and said, "Is that a root, sir? It certainly appears to be."
Margarida closed the door behind Tovera. Glow strips on the walls cast a yellow-green illumination to which Adele's eyes quickly adapted, though she noticed that as soon as the spacers stepped inside they slid down their light-enhancing goggles.
"Yes, the tree's still alive in this section," the girl called in answer to Daniel's question. "You'll notice that the roots have grown over some of the lights a little way up the corridor."
She smiled pleasantly to Adele as she passed, moving up to the front with the Prior, Daniel, and the Klimovs. Adele thought there was something appraising in the glance Margarida gave each of the Sissies in turn, but she supposed that was natural enough for a member of a small community suddenly visited by strangers three times its number.
"This is the refectory," the Prior was saying as Adele entered a long room that grew from the tunnel rather than being served by it. "We eat twice a day here, though I should mention that our days are only nineteen standard hours. You're welcome to dine with us while you're on New Delphi, though please give us at least a few hours warning."
He smiled; he still had his hair, but it was so fine and white that his scalp shone through. Since the only light was that of the glowstrips, what would normally be pink had a disconcerting purplish tone.
"Normally two acolytes prepare each meal, a senior and a novice," the Prior explained. "I would wish to considerably increase the numbers in the kitchen if we're to feed all of you."
According to all Adele's sources, the acolytes ate cheese, gruel and dried fruit, all of them imported but nonetheless of the simplest sort. They washed their identical meals down with water drawn up from the same aquifers which fed the Tree; reportedly it had enough iron to stain cups after a week or two of use.
"I believe we'll eat aboard the Sissie rather than strain your resources, sir," Daniel said. Count Klimov looked vaguely irritated, probably by the fact his employee had spoken rather than the decision itself, but he didn't intervene. "His excellency the Count remarked that he'd like to see the incubation chamber. Is that permissible?"
"Why yes, of course," the Prior said. "Those of us in the Service of the Tree have no secrets. There are no secrets from the Tree, you see."
He led them between the long tables to one of the several doors opening off the left sidewall. An older woman in the robes of an acolyte entered the refectory, bowed to the party, and went out through the opposite side on an errand of her own. The large room could seat hundreds, but only two tables at the far end appeared to be in use.
"In fact, I'd like to hire a dream myself," the Count said, his voice needlessly loud with nervousness. "How much will it cost me?"
The Prior, leaning against Daniel while Margarida hovered close to his other side, glanced at Klimov but continued his careful shuffle to the door. "We can discuss that at a later time, if you choose, your excellency," he said. "It will not be possible for us to accede to your request immediately, but perhaps in a few days. . . . If you wish to remain on New Delphi, that is."
"Look, if you're concerned that I may not be able to pay your fees . . . ," the Count said on a note rising toward real anger.
"Georgi!" snapped his wife. "They said nothing of the sort. And if they want to check our bona fides, well, that's only common sense, no more than you'd do yourself before entering a card game with strangers. Not so?"
"It's nothing to do with yourself or your credit, Count Klimov," the Prior said calmly. "The Oracle isn't available to you or anyone else at present due to a matter of scientific concern. Since you're not in the Service, it might appear to be a matter of religious scruple. Either way, please accept my apologies."
"Father, perhaps we can show our guests the library?" Margarida said. "It's really the only part of the monastery that's present in the material plane. All the rest is spiritual."
She glanced at Daniel, then colored and looked at the floor of living rock. "I hope some day I'll be able to fully appreciate the marvelous spiritual world in which I'm permitted to live."
"Of course, child," the Prior said as he shuffled up the corridor. "You're young, dear. Enlightenment requires time; and I fear, looking back on my own youth, that it may require age as well. When one is young, no matter how deeply he may believe in the truth of the spirit the body has a certain insistence which the spirit cannot deny."
He looked at Daniel as they moved along together. "Perhaps you feel that also, Captain Leary?" he said.
"I'm afraid I'm unfitted to discuss religion, sir," Daniel said with seeming nonchalance. "I wonder, is the door by which we entered the monastery the only entrance there is?"
The Prior laughed. "Oh, goodness, no," he said. "How many entrances would you guess there were, Margarida?"
She trilled a laugh also. "I know of thirty-seven," she said. "That's inside as well as outside the circle of the Tree. But the corridors run for scores of kilometers and we only use a fraction of them. In former times the Service was larger and there was also an extensive lay community on the northern rim."
"There've often been groups and individual hermits living within the Tree," the Prior said, sounding somewhat apologetic. "Apart from our Service, that is. There are hand-dug wells from ages before we have record. A sufficiently dedicated person can raise his or her own crops by carrying buckets up to where there's light. I suspect there are some such people now, drawn by a less structured form of the same impulse that brought me and Margarida."
He and Daniel led the group into a cavern. The corridors and refectory had been cut into the rock; the Tree formed only their ceilings and portions of the walls. It took Adele a moment to realize that this great room was entirely wood. Ages of humans, most of them barefoot acolytes, had worn the floor into troughs weaving toward the couch in the center.
"This is it!" the Count said in an insistent tone. "This is where you dream!"
"Yes," said the Prior. "After preparation that includes drinking an infusion brewed from the berries of the Tree, the querent sleeps here. The querent and the Tree become one during the night, and the querent rises with a full awareness—as full as a human mind can retain—of the questions he or she wanted answered."
"Part of the preparation involves focusing your mind properly before going to sleep," Margarida said. She smiled broadly at Daniel. "There are stories of querents rising with a certain understanding of how they should rearrange their reception room—but nothing about the political situation facing the planet they rule."
"I'd like to say that story was apocryphal," the Prior said with a faint smile. "It isn't, but that was an extreme example. We of the Service have been more careful in preparing the querents since that day, however."
Adele stopped listening to the discussion among the others present. Her eyes had finally penetrated the opposite side of the huge room. She walked toward it, guided by the floor the way wild beasts follow the paths their ancestors' hooves have hammered into the soil.
"Adele?" Daniel called. Then, insistently, "Adele."
"The library's here, Daniel," she said. "I hadn't realized it was the same room as the incubation chamber."
The imagery in Adele's database suggested the two functions were physically separate. That was untrue and close enough to being a lie that Adele felt her anger blaze. There probably wasn't a conscious intention to deceive, but the photographer hadn't shown a sufficient concern to encompass the truth either.
The backs of a dozen consoles—all reasonably new and built either on Cinnabar or one of the advanced worlds of the Alliance—were set in a row so their blank backs formed crenellations between the stack area and the couch. Adele stepped between two of the machines and switched them on without thinking to ask permission. They came up promptly; she'd used virtually identical equipment in the past. A male acolyte working at the console on the far end glanced up, nodded, and returned to his display.
The hardcopy books were shelved in ranks which ran back to the dim reaches farther than Adele could follow without borrowing goggles from a spacer. The pedestals had been shaped from the wood of the Tree, but the shelves and their supports were of structural plastic tinted to match the natural ruddy gray.
The volumes were arranged by height and size; most had no spine title. Adele picked one at random, a Pre-Hiatus work on homiletics. It had been printed on Earth in the inconceivably distant past but at some point rebound in stiff, yellow-gray vellum. The book next to it was also very old, but it was printed—by letterpress!—in a script and language which she couldn't identify without the help of her handheld.
She started to draw the little unit out of her pocket, then remembered her surroundings. She turned and found the eyes of everybody in the large room—except the acolyte at the console—focused on her.
Adele's lips spread in a flat line that was as close to a smile as she could come when she was embarrassed. "Ah . . . ," she said. "I'm very sorry to have wandered off like this—"
She hadn't moved far physically, but her mind and soul had been in a different universe. It was a better universe, in her opinion, but she knew there were other viewpoints on the matter.
"—but, ah . . . this is a very interesting collection."
The Prior smiled affectionately at her. "Would you care to stay in the monastery, mistress, while your vessel is on New Delphi?" he asked. "I understand that our life here wouldn't be attractive to many of those living in the wider universe, but I think you're an exception. You can eat with us and I'll find you a cell. If you like, that is."
"Yes," said Adele. "I would like that very much. If . . . ?"
She looked at Daniel, now standing between the Prior and Margarida. His expression was momentarily grave, but he sounded affectionately cheerful as he said, "Yes, of course, Mundy. There hasn't been a great deal to attract your interests on this voyage. I'm glad we've finally made a landfall with more to offer you than it does those of us with less intellectual tastes."
Hogg snorted. "You can say that again," he said; but as he did so, he eyed Margarida sidelong.
"Shall I bring some kit for the two of us from the vessel, mistress?" Tovera said. She didn't speak loudly, but when she wanted to be heard—as now—everybody in the big room heard her.
Most of them probably understood the implications of what she was saying: Adele would be well protected. The Prior did, given the knowing smile he offered as he nodded first to Adele, then to Tovera.
"Yes, do that, Tovera," Adele said crisply. Then she turned back to the stacks, in part to avoid the eyes of the others. She'd never found it hard to sink into that better personal world in a library, after all.
The note in Daniel's pocket read:
Beloved Daniel—
I could withstand you, but I cannot withstand myself. There is an entrance two-thousand nine-hundred and twelve feet counterclockwise from the foot of your gangplank; it is known to no one living save myself and now you. If you come there at our midnight, I will be waiting.
Please, beloved, destroy this note and never mention its contents whether you decide to come or stay. If anyone were to learn what I am doing, I would be expelled from the Service at the cost of my very soul. Please, if you are a gentleman—preserve the honor of one who has loved you from her first glimpse of your face.
Margarida
"Attention!" snapped Norton, the Tech 1 commanding the guards in the main hatch, when Daniel appeared from the companionway. She and two of her contingent hopped to their feet quickly, but the fourth—a Purser's clerk named Hilbride, dropped his sub-machine gun with a clatter more frightening than anything likely to come out of the darkness on this planet.
"Carry on, Norton," Daniel said as Hilbride skidded the dropped gun twice across the deck plating without managing to get control of it.
Daniel bent to pick the weapon up, clicking the safety on and handed it back. He'd burn a new asshole in whoever'd issued a gun to Hilbride without sufficiently explaining about the safety, but that was for the morning.
Now he said pleasantly, "Keep it switched off till you have a reason to shoot, spacer. And Norton—you might make sure he understands that. I don't want one of you to accidentally blow me in half when I come back from my little walk."
"God help me, sir!" Norton said, her face red and sweating. "Sir, it was my fault, but it won't happen again!"
Daniel nodded, acknowledging the apology without suggesting that the business was closed. "I can't sleep, so I'm going to walk for a few hours," he said. "I have my recall plate—"
He tapped his breast pocket, then his pistol holster.
"—and in case I'm attacked by a ravenous bark mite, I have this."
"Isn't Mr. Hogg going with you, sir?" Hilbride asked doubtfully. He held the sub-machine gun with the care worthy of a poisonous snake which had already bitten once.
"Mr. Hogg is playing poker with the Count," Daniel said, smiling engagingly. He was breaking his own rules; he knew it and the guards knew it. But there was nobody present who'd stand up to the captain the way Hogg or Woetjans certainly would. "They're also drinking a bottle of what the Count calls Calvados and Hogg says is smooth applejack."
Everybody chuckled. Daniel touched his fingers to his brow in a friendly salute, then strode down the boarding bridge into the night. He wasn't wearing his helmet, but he slid his light-amplifying goggles over his eyes. Starlight brought the whorled wonder of the Tree into sharp relief. Oracle or not, it was a remarkable plant and a unique habitat—not least for the humans burrowing into its fabric like so many adoring beetles.
Grinning, Daniel began to whistle "Cruising Round Pleasaunce" and stopped in a moment's confusion. Margarida seemed a shy girl, even in the note she'd written. A song like that wasn't for the ears of a decent child like her.
He grinned still broader. Perhaps in the morning he'd teach it to her. . . .
Daniel kept his eyes on the Tree as he walked along its vast curve. He switched his goggles from light enhancement—which did a better job of showing the ground—to thermal imaging in order to pick up the higher body temperature of animal life.
He'd allowed himself plenty of leeway before local midnight, so occasionally he paused to examine some creature crawling on the bark. None of them were bigger than his little fingernail. According to the database all native species were wingless and multi-legged, but when he cued the goggles to caret movement he caught a few swoops from branch to branch, even after he'd filtered out fluttering leaves. Imported species, he supposed; like the humans on New Delphi.
He walked on more briskly. The wind among the gnarled branches formed a chorus as thin and cold as the stars singing.
Machines could have measured the distance for Daniel, but he chose instead to pace it—a countryman's skill he'd learned, like so much else, from Hogg while he was growing up on Bantry. 2,912 feet would be just around the curve of the tree from the Princess Cecile. That was fortunate, because Daniel knew that the guards in the main hatch were watching him if only because they had nothing better to do.
Margarida was an adult and anyway Lieutenant Daniel Leary wasn't her keeper, but though it wasn't his business to protect her honor, he would as a gentleman keep the bargain she'd offered: nobody would learn about the affair through Daniel's action or inadvertence. Instead of destroying the note, he'd hand it back so that she could be certain of its destruction.
This should be. . . . Daniel glanced over his shoulder as though looking up at the Tree's overhanging mass, a thing he'd done several times since he left the ship. The Princess Cecile was out of direct sight, as he'd expected. In a niche at the juncture of two separate trunks of the Tree was an arched doorway. In daylight it would've been invisible, but thermal imaging showed the panel to be minusculely warmer than the mass of living wood into which it was set.
Daniel removed the goggles and dropped them into a cargo pocket. He was wearing a utility uniform since anything else would've sent quite accurate rumors racing about the Sissie, but one didn't greet a potential lover looking like a creature peering up from the surface of a pond.
He knocked softly on the panel. A bar whispered; then the door opened outward, catching on blown sand. Daniel quickly brushed the obstruction clear with the side of his boot.
"Daniel?" a voice whispered from the darkness.
Daniel stepped toward the blurred shadow in the doorway. "Ah, Margarida?" he said.
She threw herself into his arms, whispering, "Beloved!" before crushing her lips against his. He embraced her, noting that her robe slid smoothly over flesh with no sign of undergarments.
Margarida pulled her head back. "Come," she whispered, leading him inside and tugging the door to behind him. "There's a room here, nothing fancy but . . ."
They walked together down the narrow corridor, Daniel's left arm around Margarida's waist while her right hand toyed at his hairline. She was very warm and soft enough that the side of her body molded perfectly to his.
Something pricked at the back of Daniel's neck. An insect? he thought, frowning slightly.
His legs gave way. He was conscious, but everything around him happened behind a wall of glass. Margarida tried to hold him upright, but his weight bore her down until the dozens of robed legs scurried to help her. Arms lifted Daniel carefully.
The glass grew even thicker.