Half-thoughts, emotions, snatches of memory. A mother’s face, the special smell of your own room, the sound of laughter. The forgotten past, the buried past, the warmth of the fireplace at home after a day in the snow, the fragrance of Father’s pipe, the satisfied purring of the soft-furred kitten in your arms.
Leaving home saying goodbye. Dad still unconvinced that you belonged in the Star Watch. Driving off with the captain, away from the house that was empty now. Fumbling, faltering through training, somehow passing. but always by the barest margin. Being the best, first in the ranks: best student, best athlete, best soldier. Always the best. Learning the real mission of the Star Watch:rotect the peace. Learning how to hate, how to loll, and above all, how to revenge yourself against Acquatainia.
Meeting and merging, spiraling together, memories of a lifetime intertwining, interlinking, brain synapses flashing, chemical balances subtly changing, two lives, two histories, two personalities melting together more completely than any two minds had ever known before. Hector and Odal, Odal/Hector—in the flash of that instant hen they met in the dueling machine they became briefly one and the same.
And when one of the Kerak meditechs noted the power surging through the machine and turned it off, each of the two young men became an individual again. But a different individual than before. Neither of them could be the same as beforeThey were linked, irrevocably.
“What is it?” Kor snapped. “What caused the machine to use power like that?”