He walked her across the open courtyard to the service station the Gannagens had sneaked past not ten beats earlier. The guard was gone, and so was Rasalas – all she could see through his vision was the interplay of shadow through one eye as before, still moving past as if he were walking. But where was he?

"Get going," Jakko said, gesturing up the steep plank staircase that lined one side of the little building. Challis didn't obey right away, but kept just out of arm's reach as her breath came quick and steady. She let the tension slide over her and focus everything from head to toe into a ready position. It was true, this man had saved her life, but if he put her somewhere she didn't want to be, he would get a stubnicker to the brain.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Jakko went on, almost amused.

Challis stayed where she was. "Then what do you want?"

He leaned on the railing. "You're a Gannagen. Hell, you're the Gannagen. We've got an offer for you, if you'll just ease up long enough to hear it."

In the end, he agreed to go first up the staircase. Challis followed him through the door hangings onto a square platform five or six paces across, with no walls except for slatted blinds that were usually rolled up during the day and open to the air. Now, they were shut tight to keep in the glow of two lanterns hanging from the slat ceiling.

She closed and opened her eyes again carefully. Her own sight was brightly lit, while Rasalas' gave her a dim, flickering layer over one eye and a washed-out darkness over the other in a disorienting combination. But she would have to do her best.

The single desk was covered with heptocards and stacks of folders. Behind the desk, leaning over it without using the chair, was a taller man with a white tunic and shoulders of his own. A man in his early forties, maybe. He looked up when Jakko came in, then did a double take at the entrance of Challis.

She gripped the stubnicker a little harder.

Thick black tattoos covered the man's arms, at least what was visible under the cuffs and circunets. The red patch above his collar was a twin to Jakko's, and – she glanced silently between them – they shared the same bizarre hair color combo: a wide, platinum blond stripe running front to back, with the sides cropped close and dyed black. It was all sickeningly artificial, so much so that the face was the last thing Challis saw. And she knew she was in the right place.

"This is her," Jakko grunted beside her.

"Is it?" the other said after a stunned moment. "Why didn't you say so?" He came around the desk, extending a hand to Challis and gripping her arm in the other with almost giddy excitement. "Pleasure, it's a pleasure," he said in a resonant voice that rolled through the space. He had the same punchy accent as Jakko. "Challis, isn't it. What an opportunity. I would never have… Ah." He straightened and tilted his eyebrows over at Jakko. "Threatened you up here on pain of death, didn't he. I'm sorry about him, he thinks courtesy belongs in the chamber pot. Now tell me, is it true that you steal your own brother's eyesight?"

Challis drew back. The man was grinning.

She nodded, and her voice came out almost shy in the wake of his. "I have to. It's that or eventually just go blind and be stuck like that for the rest of my life."

He let out a short, guttural laugh. "And what about him?"

Challis just stood, her cheeks growing hot. Even more so when the man's eyes roamed over her mud-covered tunic and then back up to her face. He refrained from wiping off his hands.

"Drunnel Haske," he said belatedly, with a genteel salute. "As I said, a pleasure. Everything will be explained to you as soon as your brother joins us."

She jumped on that. "I'm not sure he knows to come here. I can find him, and quickly."

"I'll fetch him," Jakko spoke up. "Momentarily."

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Drunnel put on a slight frown and glanced between the two of them. At that, Challis almost relaxed. This was more like what she was used to around other people: uncertainty weighing on the air, a silence of unspoken questions. Very little eye contact.

Drunnel turned back to the desk. "I'm afraid I must finish this calculation. Energiconformatics is not a kind master. Sorry to keep you waiting, just a few ticks."

Challis stepped forward before she could stop herself. "That's EC formulae?" She could barely make out chemical diagrams covering the sheets of heptocard as Drunnel took up a pen and adjusted a few touch-activated sliding switches on one of his wrist circunets, looking back and forth between it and the heptocards. A complex system of physics, anatomy, physiology, and a unique overlay of what Challis decided must be straight sorcery, made up the study of energiconformatics – the big EC – that analyzed flux in the natural world and how to harness its energy.

"So is this," Jakko's eager voice stopped her, and despite her interest in Drunnel's documents, drew her complete attention to him in one smooth motion.

He reached up and pulled something out from under his collar. In that first instant, Challis thought it was a snake, sleek and reflecting the light. But then she saw that both ends were knotted, swinging out from where they had hung around his neck. At the same time, his patch stopped flickering and settled down to a gently muted pulse instead.

"Come over here," he smiled. "I want to show you something."

Challis did, her gaze on the wire. "It's so beautiful."

"Here." He lifted it out toward her.

She hesitated. But if Jakko wanted to hurt her, he would have done so already. And his brother was a charm of a man, just the kind you would want in the same room with you if Jakko was around. On the more complex side of things, these men could hold the solution to her six-year-long problem, based on what Rasalas had told her. Trust had to be built.

She reached for the wire. It was a color-faceted cable as thick as her thumb, thrumming with energy all along its length of about a meter. She ran it through her fist until it crackled between her fingers.

"What is it?"

He gestured. "Try it."

"But what does it do?" she asked, still staring at it. The other's voice eased into the space between them.

"It's an EC bionic flux conductor from the Institute, even better than cuffs and circunets. It can show you flux as you've never seen it before. Here, put it behind your neck, like I did."

She slid it under her hair and stood holding both knots in her hands. As soon as she did, a line of heat began flowing out from where the wire touched. Spreading down over her shoulders and up her neck, it thickened and tingled and sped up her blood flow until she could hear the rushing deep in her ears. Then it reached her brain.

Challis didn't remember much from her time at the Cormellican Institute. A daze of timeless frustration in one big whitewash: the vague forms of people and bright lights in big rooms, glaring into her grief and despair. Rasalas had been there, always there, in and out of her consciousness and trying to talk to her. Even when she could see nothing, his voice had been there.

But a haze of thoughts, and realizations, had slowly come together on their own before Rasalas had told her exactly what happened. And by then, weeks had passed since the accident that had damaged Challis and killed their mother.

She didn't even know half the words he – and the physicians – kept using. Diagrams and graphs upon graphs of the human brain were muddled confusions of lines and text that she couldn't read. Not until her brother closed his eyes for an extended period of time, dropping off to sleep beside her. Alone with her own sight again, Challis spent the night bombarded with fears. Was this her new life? Trading sleep and awake times with her brother? It was out of the question. A double-vision life, then: a combination of a nerve-ending scan of the visual cortex of Rasalas' brain with hers that somehow repaired her sight but also relayed his vision onto hers. It was beyond anything she knew was possible and was far past anything she would have chosen for herself, much less for Rasalas.

In the quiet of the room, the wire zapped up into her memories. Pressure to the back of her head reached deep into her midbrain and swarmed out through her nervous system. She gasped at the sudden clarity of vision: Jakko's face was a crooked, cunning grin, with slight beard fuzz of a natural blonde color that Challis never would have noticed otherwise. To her surprise, she liked it.

Then the detail faded, the blackout from Rasalas' half-vision falling over hers again. Something remained, a tingling warmth that put Challis on her tiptoes. She had never been on the receiving end of blending emotional fields – only Rasalas had. Until now. Jakko's excitement, and satisfaction, filled the space between them like a delicious secret.

"What is it?" she whispered. Jakko was leaning forward until his face was hardly a foot from hers. He showed no discomfort in staring directly at her eyes.

"Can you feel it?" he whispered back, his already-gravelly voice just a rasp. "What you've got there will change the world. Flux fields, and every efflux has its own flavor. That's what we have for you, Challis. Just don't tell your –"