Silence stretched out.

One could learn a lot from body language, but Kessa could not even guess what Serette was thinking or feeling. The girl’s face remained stony.

Kessa sighed. She didn’t want answers filtered through a proxy, but she did need to satisfy her curiosity. “Serette, are you willing to allow Mondoyo to speak for you?”

Serette gave a single, subtle nod.

“All right.” Kessa gestured for Mondoyo to float back within telepathy range of his partner, but Garrett interrupted.

“Hold on.” The old man stepped forward. “Before we move on to Serette, I want to know how the hell these two fooled the Torth Majority and escaped from a bunch of nuclear warheads aimed their way.”

Kessa allowed the question. The answer was probably complicated, so she might have saved it for later, but she was curious.

“Well?” she asked Mondoyo. “Answer that, please.”

In Torth fashion, the Twins seemed to reach an instantaneous unspoken decision.

“I got lucky,” Mondoyo said. “Zai was stationed aboard my ship.”

“And you persuaded her to go renegade with you?” Garrett’s tone was dry with sarcasm. “Was it easy?”

“Oh, not really.” Mondoyo laughed in a self-conscious way. “It took me weeks to persuade her. I had three round-the-clock guardians, and I didn’t even try it with the other two. I knew they would never be convinced. So I had to, uh, kill them.”

He made killing Servants of All sound like a mundane chore.

“I sensed deep-seated doubts buried in Zai’s subconsciousness,” Mondoyo said. “I took a chance, and wove little hints into her daily routines. Just subtle little clues, hinting that if she wanted to truly be in charge of her own destiny, she might find a way with me. I had to let the idea occur to her on her own.”

Kessa made a mental note about Mondoyo’s skillset. He might be more socially savvy than Thomas.

“When I judged that she was ready,” Mondoyo said, oblivious to Kessa’s assessment, “I presented her with my desperate plan.”

“But that was a huge risk.” Garrett sounded somewhat admiring. He liked bravery. “She could have gone into the Megacosm and told everyone that you were about to go renegade.”

“Uh, no.” Mondoyo gave a humorless laugh. “I overclocked my perceptions. If she had decided to ascend? In that nanosecond, I was prepared to trigger a hidden laser that was tracking the back of her head. It would have liquified her brain before she could emit a death scream in the Megacosm.”

Kessa’s beak fell open.

“I like contingency plans.” Mondoyo looked ashamed. “Sorry.”

“Right. Right.” Garrett seemed to struggle not to show his own reaction. “Makes sense. So you had Zai deliver insanity gas to your minders on the missile ship?”

“Exactly,” Mondoyo said. “I made sure it filtered through their ventilation system during a time window when I was supposed to be asleep.”

Kessa wondered how many Torth Mondoyo had killed that way.

And slaves. Had any slaves died as collateral damage? Kessa wasn’t sure she wanted to learn the body count. The Twins might be very useful as allies, but they were ruthless.

“So I get how you escaped,” Garrett said. “But what I really want to know is how you communicated with your partner? You two were torn apart.” He used his hands for emphasis. “How could you message each other without using the Megacosm?”

“Mostly,” Mondoyo said, “we didn’t.”

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Garrett arched a questioning eyebrow.

“I didn’t need to tell Serette where I was going.” Mondoyo shot his partner a fond look. “She knows me. She can anticipate just about anything that I would do.”

The girl Twin exhibited no warmth. She studied Kessa from afar, her eyes too knowledgeable and ancient.

“I didn’t mind giving Serette time to figure out a way to escape,” Mondoyo said. “It gave me a chance to chat with my slaves. I wanted to know them better. And of course, I also wanted them to get comfortable with the concept of me being a penitent instead of being their owner.”

Social savviness, indeed. Mondoyo had probably guessed that Kessa would question his newly freed slaves before anything else. He had purposely showed up with a bunch of people eager to vouch for him.

Pragmatic.

But also human, Kessa thought. Wasn’t that what friends were for? Mondoyo was basically saying that he had made friends.

“I aided Serette through proxy deliveries,” Mondoyo said. “No one else could have solved the encryption on my messages. It was enough for her to reprogram the warheads aimed at her lab vessel.”

Garrett gave a nod and stepped back. He looked thoughtful.

“All right.” Kessa indicated that the Twins should float closer together. “Mondoyo, I am ready to hear from Serette. Please act as her voice.”

Mondoyo scooted his hoverchair close to Serette. He looked gratified.

Serette continued to look like an aloof Torth.

“Serette.” Kessa hesitated, and decided to start with her least important question, just to satisfy her own personal curiosity. “What does your name mean? Why did you choose it?”

Mondoyo bowed his head. When he spoke, it was very strange, because Serette mouthed the words. Mondoyo’s voice went higher in pitch. He sounded colder as well.

“Serette is the goddess of wisdom among the yinn cloud people. Their cosmology places knowledge at the apex of power. It suited me.”

Penitent Torth were supposed to be humble. Kessa disapproved of them taking the names of gods. This was not an acceptable penitent attitude. The whole point was to get Torth to quit thinking of themselves as godlike beings.

“What about you?” Kessa shifted her focus to the boy Twin, disparaging. “Is Mondoyo also the name of a superior being?”

He looked embarrassed. “I named myself after a legendary runaway slave. The original Mondoyo stole knowledge from the gods and brought it to his people, the volcanic nussians of Husharai, so they could thrive.” He gave an apologetic shrug. “I know it’s grandiose. I just wanted to match Serette’s theme. She usually shows me the right path. We work best when we’re on the same, uh, wavelength.”

As Kessa studied how the Twins floated next to each other, she saw their comfort with each other. They were like a mated pair.

“Okay.” Kessa focused on the girl Twin. “Why did you come here, Serette? Tell me why you decided to leave the Torth.”

She expected an answer similar to that of Zai and Mondoyo. Serette probably wanted the freedom to feel emotions and to make true friends.

Instead, the girl Twin’s reply was a shock.

“I did not wish to leave the Torth Empire.” Serette’s lips moved in sync with Mondoyo’s cold partner tone. “I am a Torth.”

The troops straightened, on alert. Ariock looked stormy, Evenjos looked deadly, and Kessa bitterly wished that Thomas was present. No doubt he would have picked up on implications that everyone else missed. He would have said something to calm the mood down.

Mondoyo cleared his throat. “Serette has very good reasons for leaving,” he assured everyone, using his friendly tone of voice. “I came here for the freedom to feel emotions. But Serette came here for the freedom to explore science. She wants intellectual freedom.”

He gazed at Serette with an unmistakable expression: Adoration.

Serette nodded, and Mondoyo spoke in that creepy altered pitch. “This is Serette speaking. I had everything I wanted, as a Torth of Indigo Blue Rank. I was content. Until.” Her weak hands curled into fists. “The Majority began to remove tools that I need. They took away my colleague.” She glanced towards Mondoyo. “They aimed nuclear warheads at my lab. They threatened to end my experiments.”

There was no anger in Serette’s face or her proxy voice. Nevertheless, Kessa imagined a volcano of suppressed rage. This was a super-genius who had a logical, practical, and fully Torth reason to hate the Torth Empire.

“I used to think Mondoyo was crazy for wanting to leave,” Serette-by-proxy went on. “I asked him, in private—before the Majority tore us apart—to reconsider. Many times. But. It was I who began to reconsider, when the Majority put me in a prison vessel. And forced me to work on a project I had lost interest in. At gunpoint.”

The troops looked captivated. Perhaps they also heard Serette’s unspoken thirst for vengeance.

“Still,” Serette said through Mondoyo’s voice, “I would not betray the Majority. Then Mondoyo vanished. And I knew where he would go. I thought of him working with the Conqueror. Inventing things. Living to adulthood. Working in taboo fields of science. They might do anything. They had more freedom than any super-genius in history. And I was stuck.” Serette indicated her frail, concave chest. “Dying.”

Her conclusion was inevitable.

“The Torth pretend to value knowledge,” Serette-by-proxy said. “Instead, they destroy it. They pretend to value scientists. But they shackle us. I was never free among them. They don’t value super-geniuses. They give us early promotions, but their gifts are appeasements. So we won’t complain. They would have used me. Then killed me. Because my knowledge, and my work, is nothing to them.”

Mondoyo’s voice smoothed out, becoming his original tone.

He said, “Serette belongs here. I know she’s not a conventional penitent, and she may have trouble adapting, but she is willing to learn. I promise.”

Kessa had heard enough to make a decision. “Freedomland welcomes you, Mondoyo and Serette.”