There was also that business of not actually being able to marry Darius, because his wife was the one he had to draw joy from. He would have to marry Prima, whose joy would never expire, and have Colene for his mistress. Yet that too might be problematical, because there were plenty of juicier girls than herself available, and Old Enough too. Darius loved the look and feel of young women, and who was she to deny him that? So their arrival at his home Mode would be a time of decision, in several ways, and she wasn’t yet ready for those decisions. As long as they remained on the Virtual Mode, those decisions could be postponed, maybe.
So they would breeze on by Julia, where Nona didn’t want to be queen, and see what they came to next. If it was Earth, well, they could breeze on by that, too, because there was nothing there for her, anymore. She had only just barely gotten away from there, last time; her folks had pretended to understand, then had tried to get rid of her anchor so as to trap her there. They had thought it was her shed next to the little dogwood tree, which she called Dogwood Bumshed, so they had taken that away. But an anchor wasn’t a thing, it was a place on a world, and also a person of that world. So she had to get together with her anchor place, on Earth; no other Earth resident could use it, and she couldn’t enter the Virtual Mode from anywhere else. But she remained mad as hell about her folks’ betrayal. They had had police there and everything staking it out. They might still have it staked out, since they had seen her pass through it and now knew it wasn’t any teenage flight of fancy. So she didn’t want to go there again, for sure.
Yet she was sorry, too, because on another level she did love her folks, and knew they loved her. Her mother was an alcoholic, and her father a philanderer, but they had both tried to straighten out when she, Colene, disappeared. Probably they wouldn’t be able to maintain the straight life for long, but their effort was touching. At least now they knew that Colene wasn’t dead, she was just elsewhere, and happier than she had been at home with her shell of a life. If she had had to stay on Earth, they would have lost her for sure, because she would have killed herself. Somehow. Eventually. She had been playing at suicide, really, scratching her wrists, but there were more effective ways.
When she got really serious about it, she would have found a way.
But here on the Virtual Mode she was—dare she think it?—happy. She liked the company she kept, even with problems. In fact, she sort of liked the problems too. When they worked together to get over a wall, or fend off attackers, she really felt with it and alive. She was part of a going concern, accomplishing something worthwhile. Her life counted. That was the key: it made a difference to the universe whether she lived or died, on the Virtual Mode. In contrast to how it was on Earth.
She got up. Darius was still asleep beside her, and Nona on his other side. The thing about Darius was that when he slept, he really did sleep. He didn’t try to feel her up in the dark, and he never touched Nona at all. Not even when Seqiro slept all the way, so that there was no mental contact. He had integrity, and it was his pride and her frustration. Because she knew how much he liked women. Because she knew that she lacked that fundamental honesty. She had proved it by checking on him, pretending to be asleep so she could watch him. Anything he did to her, he did openly while they were both awake, like tickling her on the butt to make her let go of him; and anything he did to Nona, he did in Colene’s presence, like helping her keep steady on the wall. She knew that he did not try to check on her similarly, and wouldn’t even if she were with another man. He was so damned straight she felt inferior. He was more of a man than she deserved. She would have felt really insecure about that, except that he said he loved her, and he wouldn’t lie.
She crawled out from the shelter. The dawn was forming, and it was such a splendor that she paused for a moment in awe. She had never been one to ooh and aah at the sunrise or sunset, but now she realized that she had never seen it in its wilderness glory. Other mornings had been cloudy or mixed, but this one was perfect, and shades of purple, red, and gold were spreading across the irregular pattern of clouds, with scintillating sunbeams between. This was a natural world, unpolluted by the smoke and light of man’s designs, and it shone with preternatural clarity in the cleanness of the new day. Maybe it was her fancy that made it so, but it was nevertheless wonderful.
She doffed the slip Nona had made for her, and walked down to the edge of the water. The piranhas were there, no longer repelled by broadcast fear, but she could handle them. She focused her mind and sent a blast of fear and rage dredged from the depths of her old, buried life on Earth. The fish scattered. She smiled, and dipped chill water to splash on her bare body. She could back the fish off only a few feet, compared to Seqiro’s few hundred feet, but she was just a toddler in telepathy. It was great even to have that little bit, and maybe it would grow if she kept practicing.
Just how far could she reach, if she tried her hardest? She had been able to communicate with others, one on one, when she had to, but that had been mainly in emergencies. She had gotten stronger, because at first her ability had been so slight she couldn’t be sure it was working at all. But she had never tried to measure it. Seqiro could even reach across the Modes, when he tried. He had done so when they first met, guiding her in to find him. Of all the things she could have dreamed of, a friendly telepathic horse was the best. When she was with Seqiro, she felt safe, not only physically but emotionally, because his mind constantly embraced her consciousness. That banished her suicidal aspect.
But the time might come when Seqiro wasn’t with her. If she settled down on some basis or other with Darius, and the horse preferred to keep traveling the Virtual Mode with Nona, Colene would have to let him go. She knew she was selfish, wanting man and horse, and she would have to chose. Nona would be a more than adequate consolation prize for whichever one Colene didn’t choose. Nona would rather actually have the horse. So Colene might have to get by on her own telepathy, and it was important to know just what its potential was.
She took a mental breath, oriented her mind, and hurled her thought out just as far as she could. ANYBODY OUT THERE?
She waited. Probably she had projected only about ten feet, not even crossing a Mode boundary. But it had sure felt as if she were hallooing across mountaintops.
Then there came an answer. HUNGER.
Colene felt a chill. She recognized that thought. It was the mind predator that had attacked Provos, and then later found Colene, probably because she had been with Provos. They had had to get her off the Virtual Mode to escape it. It had evidently gone elsewhere, thinking her forever lost to it—but now she had foolishly alerted it to her restored presence. And she wasn’t close to an anchor. Oh, folly!
What could she do? She didn’t know. She knew she couldn’t fight it; the thing was too powerful and awful. It fed on minds the way a cat fed on mice. She was lost.