Chapter 5
After the guard’s panicked announcement, the room became unbearable for Benayeem. The group of people turned into a seething mass of thoughts and emotions, and his gift caused him to hear them all as strands of sounds and music, all different, all insistent. Any large place with a lot of emotional people was hard for him, but a closed room with over a hundred people was excruciating. He wanted to curl up on the floor with his hands over his ears.
Instead he did what he had learned. He forced all the sounds, the clamor of music and the beating of drums into a room in his mind, and shut the door. They were quieter, though he could still hear them. He listened through the door in his mind for one specific, dear thread of sound. Auntie Teru.
Benayeem had not been at all sure that
