Chapter 8

Here's what I do remember: Screaming in silence as a dagger twisted in my flesh, as my skin buckled and peeled, as the fever flared at me worse than any sunstroke I'd ever had, as I felt body sticky with blood and bile and foul fluids.

Occasionally attendants would take me to a bathtub and scrub me, washing away the filth, forcing bitter herbs down my throat.

My mind gone away to a far-away place of nightmare images and obsessive thoughts: Zuri, the mindtouch, aruna.

Pain.

Yes, I do remember it. Some of it. But not all.

After three days it was thankfully over. I awoke in a clean bed, not knowing if it was night or day. The room was darkened; I suppose they had turned the light off to let me sleep. Peering into the shadows I didn't seen ether of the attendants, which filled me with a sudden sense of relief. I would have time to myself -- time to discover what had happened to me.

The fever had completely gone and I could tell that my body was through with whatever tortuous process it had just been through. It felt solid, no longer burning or melting or breaking apart.

Tentatively ran my hands over my arms and chest. My skin was smooth and whole, sealed after seeming to had shed like a second skin. I drew up my legs and felt that they were tired but completely well.

Finally I reached down and felt for the one thing I knew would have changed. I was pleasantly surprised; it felt something like what I'd had before only... no, it was indeed different. Strange sensations stirred in me as I touched myself, and in that moment I thought that perhaps Thiede was right and I was a virgin. That old body was in the past; this one was all new.

It was just after I was done exploring that my attendants appeared, turning up the lights and smiling at me for the first time I could remember. I was grateful they had brought me through it all. In the moment they gestured for me to get up and follow them to the bath, I realized how much I had changed already, for I followed them wearing nothing but my hair. They had already seen me naked and worse than that, so what was the point of vanity or modesty?

Not until I entered the bathroom did I become the least self-conscious. One of the two attendants had gone ahead to draw the bath while the another had led me down the hall, steadying me as I swayed slightly, my body still settled into itself. We had just come through the door when the har at the tub looked over to me and did a double-take, bursting out some exclamation and pointing.

It was obvious what he was looking at. My ouana-lim. I looked down myself and did a double-take myself. There was the instrument of which Thiede had spoken, the exotic new treasure. That wasn't what the attendant had gaped at, however. It was the color. Of course, it was bright white as my hair. Albino.

At that point I jumped into the bath, which seemed ready enough, and hid under the soap bubbles. I closed my eyes and let the two hara chatter as they gave me the last bath before... what came next.

Thiede's confidence in Zuri had not been misplaced. From the moment he sauntered up to the bed to the moment, hours later, when I had him exhausted beneath me, he handled me beautifully, patiently. He showed me that what I had experienced in the rape had been nothing but violence, while what we were giving one another was pure pleasure.

Best of all, it wasn't only our bodies, white and burnt mahogany, that were tangling together, it was our very beings. We felt one another. Holding him close in my arms or writing beneath him, I felt his essence, that sense of Zuri, and my heart swelled with joy, sensing strongly this was just the beginning. I was yet untrained and but already I had the power of a fifth sense, not a sixth sense, for of one sense I was still and forever lacking.

We didn't talk at all, of course, for there was nothing to say and anyway, pens and paper would have been most unbefitting of the evening. Thus it wasn't until afterward that he delivered to me the true revelation.

We had both taken a bath in the downstairs bathroom, brushed our hair, and gotten into robes. Zuri led me up the basement stairs and down the hall to the back, where we slipped out into the yard. It was nighttime as we climbed the hill a little further until we found a cluster of rocks and sat down on it together. Overhead the sky was half-filled with murky silver clouds. At the end of the sky, rising with the night, hung the moon.

"Moon," Zuri said to me.

At first I didn't know what had happened. I'd registered a sensation of some kind and I'd felt it came from somewhere nearby but...

"Moon." I turned to ask Zuri about it and found him staring at me quite intently.

I watched his lips as he spoke. "Moon." Then he said it again.

Even as I recognized the shape of the word, I felt the sensation pulsing in my head. Was it...? Was it...?

Zuri waved up at the sky and then there it was again, only stronger: "MOON."

He was saying my name and I was hearing it -- inside my head!

It wasn't his voice, it was his mind, but it was enough.

As I said, that was just the beginning.