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certification papers to prove it. But this was the third time she had worked with him in the past week and Orchid was willing to bet her next royalty check that he was far more powerful than his papers claimed.
    When she focused for him she could literally feel the self-control he was forced to exert in order to hold his talent to a class-six level. She sensed the hunger in him to use the full range of his power. She knew that the powerful prism she projected for him whetted his appetite.
    Three years ago she had known another strat-talent whose hunger had been just as powerful. Calvin Hyde’s talent, however, had also been tainted with the dark hint of evil. But after the first very cautious focus session with Rafe, Orchid had known at once that he was no Calvin Hyde.
    He could be irritating, arrogant, and maddening but there was no evil in his talent.
    She could feel other things besides the hunger in him and that fact was making her increasingly uneasy. After all, everyone knew that the focus link was supposed to be completely neutral when it came to the personal side of things.
    The indescribable rush of intimacy she experienced when she created a metaphysical prism for Rafe had to be a product of her own overactive imagination. There was no other logical explanation. But it was definitely not normal.
    Thankfully, thus far Rafe appeared to be blithely unaware of the sensations she experienced during their focus sessions. As far as she could tell, he seemed completely unaffected. Nevertheless, even though she was not afraid of him, Orchid was beginning to think that it might not be a good idea to work with him again in the near future. Something about their link was definitely weird.
    Suddenly Rafe moved closer to her, coming to stand directly behind her. He studied the book over her shoulder.
    “Most experts believe that Percy Morland was a very high-class vision-talent who suffered from periodic bouts of unaligned synergy on the metaphysical plane,” he said.
    “I’ve heard that,” Orchid murmured. She wondered if Rafe knew how irritating he was when he went into his lecture mode.
    “He refused treatment,” Elvira put in helpfully. “Apparently Morland was paranoid about the syn-psych labs. Seemed to think the experts might destroy his artistic visions if he allowed them to try to realign his metaphysical energy waves.”
    “Can’t blame him for steering clear of the labs.” Orchid reflected briefly on her own extremely unpleasant experiences in a synergistic psychology research lab three years earlier. Lately the old nightmares had returned in full force. She’d had two this week. “If I could make a fortune writing poetry like that, I wouldn’t want anyone messing with my para-energy waves, either.”
    Elvira chuckled. “An excellent point, my dear. I take it you are not a great admirer of the meta-zen-syn philosophical poetry?”
    “To be honest, no,” Orchid admitted.
    Rafe did not bother to conceal his exasperation. “Why not?”
    She wondered, not for the first time, why her opinion mattered to him. “I consider it at best to be a dead-end in literature. More likely it was a huge joke foisted on the literary world.”
    “I see.” Elvira raised her delicately arched silver brows. “How very intriguing to think that I risked so much just to steal a poetic joke.”
    “But I do admire the writers’ financial sense,” Orchid added. “Unlike most poets, they got rich. Their works still grace the shelves of every library in the tri-city-states and there was a time when they were the hottest thing in the bookstores. Everyone who was anyone read the stuff.”
    “I have three originals in my own collection,” Rafe said in a dangerously neutral voice. “A Morland, a Jenkins, and a Singh.”
    Orchid told herself that she should not allow him to goad her. But the man had an attitude and it made her reckless. She’d always had this problem, she thought. She could already hear a distinct sucking