The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,63

him until that afternoon. Jedra had cleaned out the rest of the storeroom while Kitarak showed her how to melt glass, and he had floated a cushion from the main room into it for a bed. Since he was momentarily free to relax, he decided to try the bed for a short nap, the way he used to spend hot afternoons at home, but he had just lain down when Kayan stepped into the room.

He sat back up. “How did it go?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I evidently don’t have any telekinetic ability at all.”

“Oh.”

She didn’t come in and sit down, didn’t react at all, so he stood up and held her in his arms. “I’m sorry.”

She laid her head against his shoulder. “Me too.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can do it, and you’ll always have me.”

“Jedra, that’s not the problem. I don’t like knowing there’s something I can’t do.” She pulled away from him, then crossed her arms over her chest.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, not knowing what else to do.

She sighed. “I’ll get over it,” she said, then she turned away and went into the library.

But she didn’t get over it. Not that day, nor any thereafter. Each passing day only produced another frustration for her as Kitarak tried one method after another to teach her what he knew of psionics. Some things she could pick up instantly, especially those powers that dealt with healing or metabolism in some way, and she was a quick study in the telepathic arts as well, but anything to do with telekinesis remained beyond her ability. It didn’t matter to her that Jedra couldn’t heal so much as a minor scratch, or that neither of them could teleport or even dream-travel the way Kitarak had done; no, all that mattered to Kayan was that Jedra could move things with his mind and she couldn’t.

Kitarak held their training sessions in the central room, the “great room” as he called it. The three of them spent most of their time there, sitting on cushions while they learned how to manipulate light and sound, how to read minds and blank their thoughts from other mind-readers, and how to enhance their other senses. At least once a day he also took them outside into the dry canyon bottom and showed them how to fight with their minds and how to defend themselves from attacks both mental and physical.

After so much time together, they tended to seek out privacy during their few hours of free time. Kayan took to spending most of hers in the library, reading old books and ignoring Kitarak and Jedra whenever she could. At night she slept on the same bed with Jedra, but she might as well have been on the other side of the house for all the affection she showed. Jedra found himself wishing they were back in the desert again; at least it got cold enough there to require snuggling to stay warm.

Only when they joined minds did they have any kind of rapport. That was as good as ever, but it ultimately led to even more frustration because every time they did it they felt as if they’d resolved their problems, only to come down and find that they hadn’t. They learned much about psionics that way, for Kitarak found teaching them easier when they were linked, but they both came to dread the long drill sessions, especially when the tohr-kreen focused on something they couldn’t each do separately. And since Kitarak didn’t need sleep, he drove them to exhaustion every day, which didn’t help their frayed emotions either.

Jedra remembered thinking how wonderful it would be to mind-merge with Kayan just for fun, sometime when they weren’t under attack. Kitarak’s tutelage occasionally felt like an attack, but Jedra knew he was just trying to drive them to excel. All the same, the constant stress was becoming hard to take. It would be nice to relax for a while, maybe try to work things out with her.

Finally one night, nearly two weeks after they had arrived at Kitarak’s home, Jedra waited for Kayan to come to bed from another late reading session, and as she undressed in the dark he said softly, “Kayan?” He would have mindspoken, but even with practice in narrowing his focus, he didn’t trust Kitarak not to listen in.

“Hmm?” Kayan paused in midmotion, a black silhouette against even greater blackness.

Jedra could have amplified the light reaching his eyes until he saw her as