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“Why not? I would like to see where you lived your life before coming to Ikmal.”
She hugged herself and rubbed her arms. “It…” She sighed. “It would only make me sad.”
That’s when I realized my mistake. After all, she was a Prize now, and to see her home planet like this, with everything the way it’d been when she’d been taken…
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought it would make you happy. I’ll remove it.”
I raised a hand to wipe it clear but Lily placed her hand on my shoulder before I could.
“No,” she said. “This is nice. It’s enough. It’s just tough knowing I’ll never see it again. Not for real, in person, I mean.”
I felt like a fool. I’d wanted to make her happy and instead, I had only done the opposite. But for now, at least, she seemed at peace.
We walked the park and Lily pointed out various shops that ran along the perimeter. Then, she asked me:
“Do you think you can conjure us up some clothes? I’m feeling a little exposed here.”
I chuckled and did as she asked, summoning the clothes we wore back in Ikmal.
“So, is this how you defeated Druin? By controlling his mind? That’s how you made him do those things?”
“I don’t control others’ minds,” I said.
“Sure you do. I saw you do it with Druin.”
I shook my head. “What you saw was me putting Druin into a situation where he believed he was a zilaz.”
“Believed?” Lily said. “How do you do that?”
“By putting him in a situation where that is the only possible explanation. What the mind believes is what is real. It doesn’t matter what anyone says or does, it is real to that person.”
“And you can do that? Make people believe whatever you want?”
“Not everything. And not everybody. Druin is very concerned about what the other inmates think of him. His greatest fear is others thinking he’s weak. By playing on that fear, I can make him believe he’s the weakest thing in the galaxy. A zilaz.”
Lily shook her head in wonder. “Well, I think it’s pretty amazing. Everyone who saw what you did does.”
I shrugged. “It’s something all Nor can do — with practice. Each day, for just five minutes, we close our eyes and imagine a new setting, a new place, a new behavior, and then send it out, like radio waves, toward whoever we want to see those things.”
“Five minutes?” Lily said, curling her face into an expression of disbelief. “It takes a lot more than five minutes a day to do what you did.”
“I swear to the Creator, just five minutes,” I said, raising my hands. “The thing most creatures don’t realize is that with five minutes a day, every day, you can achieve pretty much anything.”
“Huh. I suppose that’s true. It’s how anyone gets good at anything, I guess. Lots of practice. Well, you’re never going to need to use your ability with me.”
I cocked my head to one side. “Why’s that?”
“Because I will do anything you want me to. You just need to tell me.”
I lifted her chin with a finger. “Lily,” I said softly, “you’ve got it exactly the wrong way around. You will do anything you want to do, and that will make me happier than anything else you could ever say or do.”
Lily beamed at me and went up on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around my neck and kiss me.
I felt the warmth and softness of her beneath me and couldn’t remember a time in all the past ten years when I’d felt anywhere near as good as I did with her.
It all seemed like a haze, as if it hadn’t really happened at all. There was precious little I wanted to remember about this place, and less still that I actually could remember.
It was the one place that I would never relive, never conjure from my memories. Never… except this moment.
