Chapter Thirty
When Thaylia landed in Cascata on the return leg of her round-trip journey to Fortune, Tevera felt as though the near-Earth-normal gravity of the planet had somehow doubled during her time away. She knew it wasn’t physical weight she felt but the drag of memory and loss and betrayal. Here she had found Kriss, felt the rush of his emotions, helped him, been kidnapped, welcomed him into the Family . . . and now she had returned without him. On Thaylia, his name was never mentioned. The joy of his performance at the captain’s birthday celebration had been blotted out by the ineradicable stain of his desertion, first of his duties, and then of the ship.
She didn’t want to believe he had done what he had done, but Rigel had never wavered from his story . . . or so she supposed,
