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With a quick tug, she pulled back her hand and rubbed the sweat from it. “I’d never heard of anyone dying from a broken leg before that.”
    The Keeper’s eyes blinked, slowly, then shook his head. “I see I will have a lot of work to do with you.”
    â€œYou’ll have nothing to do with me.”
    His hairless eyebrows rose at her tone. “You emerged from a burning building without a mark on you, child. You survived an attack from a Quor’lo—”
    â€œA what?”
    The large man rose, a frown added to his list of expressions. “A Quor’lo. Moves, acts, smells just like it would alive, but its body is given life by a living person elsewhere.”
    â€œDoes the captain know? If this has—”
    â€œHe knows.” At the front of her bed, he met her eyes. “Bau already informed Heast what it was, though I imagine that the captain’s meticulous mind would have found it quickly enough. You needn’t worry about the Quor’lo. Right now I am sure they are discussing it, wondering where it is hiding, and if they can capture it. I can only imagine that the man who pulled you out of the fire is helping them greatly.”
    â€œZaifyr?”
    â€œThat’s his name, is it?” The Keeper’s tone suggested familiarity, though not friendly in nature.
    â€œWho is he?” Ayae asked.
    â€œAt this moment, I am sure he is nothing more than a man employed by Captain Heast.” Fo’s scarred fingers laced together. “However, you have changed the subject. I am here to talk about you. You emerged from a fire without a burn today, but should I hold your hand again I would feel it smolder.”
    Her hands slipped under the blankets, falling warmly against her legs. “I was just lucky.”
    â€œThere’s no such thing.” She met his strange gaze, but said nothing. “I imagine, since you live on this mountain, you think anybody with a touch of power in them is cursed by the gods.”
    â€œI don’t want any of that,” she said, quietly. “I just want to be able to tell my partner that I am just who I am. I just—I don’t want this.”
    â€œYou think you can give up what is inside you?” Fo’s scarred hands dropped to the metal end of the bed. “What remains of the gods finds us. In wombs, in childhood, in the summers and winters of our lives. Once it has found us, only death can drive it out. If that two-bit copper healer told you she could do that, she has done nothing but lie to you.” His long fingers curled, one at a time, over the bed frame. “But you have nothing to fear, child. Not from this. Trust me. Trust us. My brothers and sisters and I study the remains of the gods. They lay around us as they lived: on our land, in our oceans, and in our skies, the power that made us originally still there, wishing to create.”
    â€œWishing to create?” Ayae met Fo’s disease-scarred eyes. “What is it that you’re implying? That I have been infected by a god?”
    â€œPossession is not infection.” His smile was faint. “I can tell you that on a number of levels, child.”
    â€œThen what?”
    â€œWe are being recreated, reborn. The power in the gods does not wish to die with its host. It is searching for escape, for a new home, and it has found you, just as it found me. With it, you and I are in evolution to take back what was once ours.”
    A laugh escaped her mouth at the ridiculousness of the statement, but a second did not follow. The bar beneath Fo’s hands had bent and she waited for him to lash out. What did he expect? She had grown up hearing stories of men and women who were cursed, stories of wives taking children away from fathers who melted, of lovers devoured by their partner with teeth made from stone, and of blindness and deformity that resulted in abuse. In the orphanage, children had teased others with the term,