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“What?” I asked.

You’ve always wondered why I changed, why I was willing to turn away from Starsight?

“I pled with the others,” I said. “Like I pled with you. I asked them to see the noises as people.”

And how did you see the delvers?

How…

You saw a person in me,he responded.I could sense that. It changed me. Or rather, it made me willing to change.

I looked upon the vast sea of delvers again. An ocean of white pinpricks of light, tiny eyes, trembling.

So…do we strike?M-Bot asked.The thirteen in the somewhere are moving again, Spensa. They’re sending swarms of stone to attack our friends. If we attack those in here, I believe they’d return to the nowhere to try to help. You could trap them too, Spensa. What do we do?

I…

I had to try something first.

I stepped away from Chet. I somehow relaxed my grip on him,and our souls began to separate. He grabbed hold of me like a child might a parent leaving them alone for the first time. But I soothed him, and he eventually accepted it.

We separated, and he became a glowing light next to me. Brilliant and white, but with a warmth within that I could only see as red.

“Look,” I said to the others.“See.”

His light hovered there. I could see the pain inside him as if it were a visual thing, a black wrinkle like a small crack. Small. The others were shattered by it, consumed by it, but his had decreased.

“It can be better,” I told them. “It cangetbetter. You tried to hide it, but that doesn’t work. Not with mortals, and not with immortals. Look at him. See how he’s grown by living in the somewhere.”

The others continued to cower in their agony, and they pulled away from him. Refusing to see growth as a solution. There were too many of the delvers, unfortunately, for my still-mortal mind to comprehend. So I picked one of them, a lump—like a stone from the floor of one of the caverns I explored. A quivering white light fractured by black lines. I knelt beside it, then gestured to Chet.

“You can overcome it,” I whispered to the delver. “He is the same as you.”

No. He changed.

“You can change.”

No. Never. Change is pain.

“Change is pain that fades,” I said. “You have only pain that is eternal.”

I…can’t. I can’t.

“You can.”

The delver retreated farther, the light dimming. We might not need to freeze them in agony. Because I had the feeling this pain alone would kill them. In here, where thoughts were reality, paincouldkill.

I should have let it. But instead I reached out to the taynix.

You are hurt?they asked, envisioning me—as always—as a slug.

No, but this one is,I said, indicating the delver.

Of course, the minds of the taynix pulled back in fear. I wasn’t sure, but I felt that they’d evolved over the past centuries to avoid the delvers. Or at least to avoid something like them—something that hunted using cytonics. The slugs could pass through here unseen, and they saw delvers as predators.

I tried to change that. I projected to the slugs how I now saw the delvers. The truth. These were not monsters, or predators. They were people.

Like you saw me,Chet said in my mind.