“I’m sorry,” Alicia said quietly as they walked along the dirt path.

“What for?” Jackie asked. “You didn’t do anything. Besides, I thought your explanation of hyperbolic acceleration was very… educational.”

“I’m apologizing because you got stuck with me instead of someone you could actually talk to,” Alicia explained, her face turning a little pink with embarrassment.

“I can talk to you just fine, Mom,” Jackie replied.

“Yeah, right!” Alicia replied, throwing Jackie’s attempted friendliness back in her face. “Like I even understood what you just said a minute ago!”

“You mean about hyperbolic acceleration?” Jackie asked, surprised.

“Yeah, that,” Alicia confessed, “and anything and everything else that comes out of your mouth. The words you use could knock over a skyscraper!”

“Mom!” Jackie said, actually laughing at her mother’s unbecoming, tormented posture. “You!” She laughed again. “I don’t know what to say! You have the ability to sway the opinions of the most powerful people just by deciding to. And you’re also much better at teleporting than I am.”

After another moment, Alicia stopped walking. She seemed to be studying something somewhere ahead of her. After a moment, Jackie realized that Alicia was dreamwalking while she was awake; something else Jackie couldn’t do yet. After another moment, Alicia raised her arm, feeling around behind her until her hand found Jackie’s shoulder.

‘Hold on…’ Jackie heard in her mind, then everything went dark.

‘We’re in one of their warehouses…’ she heard in her mind, again.

Her eyes slowly adjusted to the light. They had been in leafy sunlight. Now they were inside a long, narrow building with small slanted windows running along high overhead. The windows were either incredibly dirty, or they’d been lightly painted over at one time.

‘One of them? There are more?’

Image of six warehouses, perfectly lined up in a row.

Jackie could see better now. She suppressed a laugh as she saw more cans of Campbell’s soup than she could eat in ten lifetimes.

“Are we going to take them all?” she gasped aloud.

“Shhhh!” Alicia hissed. ‘There are others…’

‘Sorry!’ Jackie apologized silently with her mind. ‘Where are they?’

‘You’re supposed to be on guard!’ Alicia snapped into her daughter’s mind. ‘Just use what the Praetor taught you!’

‘That’s more like it, Mom!’ Jackie thought back at her. ‘You don’t whine worth a damn!’

Then Jackie closed her eyes, fearful that she would flub this simple (to anyone else) assignment, and concentrated. She was surprised at how easy it was to expand her awareness through the silent building and locate the two guards in what seemed to be a snack room. There were two other guards nearby, one approaching along the outside of the building and the other at the main entrance.

In addition, she could feel Alicia dreamwalking again as an image of the receiving platform on the Phoenix wavered transparently in front of the pair.