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Gerard's burden to bear, as was everything else—as was this dark, frightening place, as was the black-clad, cold-eyed, brooding young man who followed them, as was even her sadness and worry about the friend who had openly rebelled and disappeared soon after that together with the old Mentor. As was the cold Factory, the lack of fire and food, and even the tiny seed of resentment, the one she did not even dare admit to herself—that there was always a master or a Master, that always someone was supposed to rule her and her mind, until she did not even know what her own thoughts were, but she wanted them still ...
    She stared at Dominick now, trembling. "You faded away for a moment," she only said, but he could read the rest on her face. She had felt him. She knew or at least suspected who or what he was.
    Dominick said nothing immediately, his hand and head pounding with such pain as he had not felt since the very first time they had implanted the detector in him. He had entered many minds, felt many thoughts, in the two years he had been a full-fledged Mentor. He had seen people love the Master, fear him, hate him, deny him, claim to themselves that he did not exist while still casting a glance above to check whether he was watching them.
    He had seen people swear to serve the Master or swear to destroy him—but always the Master was there, the image of what they thought him to be dominating their quintessences. Never before had Dominick seen a person immune to the Master's presence and his judgement. Never had he felt thoughts where the Master was present as naught but a comparison to a mere human boy; never before had he realized how shallow the image of the Master lay in people's minds, and how easily replaced it was.
    Or how artificially imposed. Dominick had never seen the mind of a concubine or a concubiner before, for such people were few and rare and not accountable to Mentors but to their husbands or wives only. A concubine was a relic from a distant past of inequality between genders, presently a result of a glitch in Mierber's laws, and the reason for not fixing this glitch for centuries was not explained to Mentors, if a reason there were at all.
    Don't go near her, lest you'd capture her virtue,
she'd be treacherous, she'd be a storm ...
    What was that now? Some stupid folk song he must have heard in peasantland, which, as stupid folk songs were apt to do, had become stuck in his mind. It went on to say that you could only trust " her " when she was fully yours, that only then would she care for you and your home. Interestingly, in Dominick's memory the voice singing the song was a woman's. What woman in her right mind would sing a song like this? But then, what women, or men, were ever in their right minds? If they were, the world would not need people like him.
    "Brother." Calia's voice, the voice of a woman definitely not in her right mind, but a sweet voice nonetheless, so much like Kalinka's. Dominick blinked. No woman who was not a Mentor had called him " Brother " for years. He lowered his eyes, suddenly, for the first time in his life wishing that he had not invaded someone's mind—that he had not hurt her.
    "Brother, who is it that you are looking for? Who is it that lead you to our place but still makes you doubt, so much that you would fade away and yet come back? No one else has ever come back after fading. Who is she, Brother? What is she to you? Why did you, a man whom I have never met, confuse her with me?"
    " ' Why? ' This is a question we do not ask lightly, Sister."
    It was a man's voice, but not Gerard's. Dominick jerked his head back, gripping the dagger hilt once again, and the man raised a hand at him in what looked like a pacifying gesture. An older man, his hair graying, but his body still vigorous and his face stern.
    "This is the one question we do not ask—even from a Mentor."

    Dominick
    Night 8 of the First Quarter, Year of the Master 706
    There were about thirty of them,