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Fifteen: Someone Else's Shoes

"We cannot allow this theft of our free will to continue. The government went too far when they forced us to accept their health care plan. They went too far when they brought back the barbaric draft under the guise of the National Security Act, which we all know is a different name for the same thing, and they went too far with last winter's stock seizure. The federal government _bought_Wall Street, but that wasn't enough for them, just like it wasn't enough when they told every American younger than thirty that they would become members of the military in times of crisis, whether they want to or not, and when they told every healthy citizen that they would pay for the sick and the elderly's exorbitant medical expenses, whether they want to or not.

"Now they want more control. They want to tell us that we have to put our children through their educational programs, whether we want to or not, whether our children want to or not. Under Congress's educational reform proposal, anyone more than twenty years old without a G.E.D. will be charged twice as much federal income tax than anyone else in the same job. _Twice!_We're not talking about business tycoons here, or lawyers or surgeons, who could afford a tax hike. We're talking about people without high school diplomas, people who are struggling to make ends meet as it is. I can promise you, if the bill passes, the nation's homeless count will skyrocket in a matter of months."

Tolinom scratched his human head distractedly, pulling his attention away from the passionate man on the hotel room's television when he once again surprised himself by scratching his itch away without unsheathing his claws. He would never get used to having fingernails! The blunt discs of thin horn capping his fingers and toes kept getting in his way, catching him off guard every time his digits touched anything.

He'd never thought much about it until he'd found himself in a human body, but since waking up in the hospital two days ago, he hadn't been able to figure out why humans had finger and toe nails in the first place. They weren't sharp enough to do much damage in a fight. If he ever had to defend himself before he found a way back to his own body, Tolinom supposed he would have to learn to punch with his fists due to his lack of claws.

He turned his attention back to the television from where he sat on the foot of one of the room's impossibly soft beds. Even though he seemed to have turned the television on in the middle of the man's rant, and had no real idea what the monologue was about, he couldn't help but listen.

"Education for everyone may sound like a great idea on the surface," the television was saying, "but consider the potential for corruption if the option to decline a high school education is removed, if those without G.E.D.'s are punished beyond their reasonable means to survive. Consider the potential for indoctrination if the public is told, 'Go to school or starve.' How long will it take before private political agendas worm their way into our children's education? How long will it take before students are required to pass a government appreciation class along with English and mathematics? How will our descendants be able to form their own opinions about politics, about philosophy, if they are required to get good grades in such a curriculum in order to earn the same God given rights as their peers?

"One other system of government has used mandatory education to pre-format its public's dispositions, and the fact that I have to mention it in order to get politicians' attention is, quite frankly, horrifying. The likelihood that most politicians won't so much as pause at the reference is far worse. But make no mistake about it. Nazi Germany had tremendous success in establishing government control over the country by requiring their youth to study subjects hand-picked by the government itself."

Tolinom leaned back on the bed with his hands behind him while the well-dressed man on the television paused, as if to let his point set in. Tolinom didn't recognize the details of the man's references, but he thought that he grasped the theme of his loud-spoken concerns. He thought that if those concerns were well founded, the man's life must have been in terrible danger since he was voicing them through a device that anyone in the world could listen to. Surely a government as corrupt as the man seemed to be suggesting wouldn't allow someone so outspoken to walk around free.

At that thought, Tolinom felt a twinge of uneasiness just for listening to the television's speech.

As the tall, balding man continued preaching, the hotel room's door opened, and a dark haired, teenaged girl walked in from the fifth story hallway. Even though she wasn't Oncan, Tolinom felt slightly embarrassed looking at her in her current state of dress; she wore a green, two piece swim suit that showed more skin than he had ever seen on a human before he was brought to this world, though the small swimwear seemed to be commonplace in the society Jiam had cast him into. The fact that the girl was supposed to be his sister made the situation all the more awkward.

"Hello, Julia," he said, as politely as he could.

"Holy crap, Marc, you're watching McKinley Perspective? I thought you hated this guy." She crossed the room and sat herself on the foot of the other bed without bothering herself with an attempted greeting.

It took Tolinom a moment to realize she was talking about the television show. "He's very passionate," he said cautiously. Without knowing exactly what the television's monologue was about, he wasn't sure how much he should say about it. Would she suspect him of being some sort of traitor to her government since she caught him watching such a show?

The girl just snorted a laugh, though. "Yeah, that Spanish voiceover's pretty melodramatic." She gave him a quizzical look when the man on the television announced that he'd be joined by a provocative author whose name Tolinom would never be able to pronounce after a short commercial break. "Can you really understand what they're saying?" She nodded toward the television, which was now showing an advertisement for some drink. The commercial was full of bright colors and loud, energetic youths.

Tolinom just nodded without a word. He'd figured out soon after waking in the hospital two days ago that most people in Santo Domingo spoke a different language than the small group that claimed him as family, but no matter who he spoke to, he heard only Tsuravi. He'd been getting better at recognizing which language was being spoken by the unique accents of the two different languages. Moreover, it seemed that no matter what language someone spoke, when Tolinom talked to them in Tsuravi, they heard their own native tongue.

That was one of the reasons he had been spending so much time alone in the hotel room. He'd found that people became very upset when they discovered that the words they were hearing in their own language were being heard by other people around them in a completely different one. It was the only thing about Tolinom's presence that they couldn't dismiss as insanity, some delusional form of amnesia. He could think of no explanation for it except that Jiam had cast some spell on him. Or perhaps whoever the wizard had been speaking to on Falcon Wing just before Tolinom had blacked out had cast the spell.

Either way, he wasn't about to tell Julia that, as far as he could tell, both she and the television were speaking Tsuravi. She would either accuse him of playing some trick on her, or she would become intently curious and ask him far more questions than he would feel comfortable answering. Other than being Marc's sister, he knew almost nothing about the girl, but the way she and the rest of her family had been treating him since he'd awoken made him feel more like a prisoner than like family. He wasn't permitted to leave the hotel room without an escort, and any time he showed an innocent interest in any of the humans' fascinating devices or customs, they seemed to think he was trying to mock them.

So instead of giving Julia yet another opportunity to question him about his memory or his linguistic skills, he just asked, "Why did I hate the man on the television?" Pretending to be an amnesiac made people uncomfortable, too, but it was at least an explanation for his ignorance of the world around him that didn't force anyone to look too closely at their own understanding of how that world worked. After the last few days Tolinom had had, he could sympathize with anyone who wanted to preserve a simple outlook on life.

Julia, though, rarely seemed phased by anything he said or did. "Beats me," she said, gesturing vaguely at the television. "I always think McKinley has a lot of good points, but Dad just calls him a warmongering, political televangelist."

Tolinom blinked. That was another word that wasn't translated into Tsuravi for him. Despite the spell cast on him to let him understand foreign languages, he often had trouble following conversations, because any time someone said a word that had no match in Tsuravi, he heard it in its native tongue. He had no idea what a televangelist was, though the way Julia had used it made him fairly certain it was an insult of some kind. Maybe it was an oath. Foul language, for some reason, never translated out of its native tongue, either.

The girl was still talking, unaware or unconcerned that Tolinom had lost track of the conversation. "If you ask me, you don't like McKinley just because Dad doesn't like him. You're always following Dad's lead, but you know, one of these days you're going to have to grow up and start coming up with your own opinions about stuff."

Tolinom glanced at her askance. Was she trying to provoke him? "So you like this McKinley?" he asked, deciding to ignore the bait, if bait it was.

She shrugged again. "I try not to pay too much attention to politics, but sure, he seems smart enough."

"He speaks very strongly against your government. You're not worried at all about reprisals or anything along those lines for agreeing with him?"

"Reprisals?" Julia repeated with a short laugh. "Look at Mr. Smarty Pants, with his big vocabulary. You mean, like guys in suits blindfolding me and carrying me off in a van for undocumented questioning, something like that?"

"I guess so," Tolinom replied, though he didn't know what a van was. He couldn't figure out why she was making fun of his pants, either. The stiff, blue material felt strange around his furless legs, true, but he'd seen plenty of other humans wearing similar trousers.

"Maybe they do that kind of thing outside of the U.S., but back home we still have freedom of speech. That whole First Amendment thing, remember? They probably have something like that here in the Dominican Republic, too, but I don't know the first thing about politics and laws here. Besides, if they were going to arrest anyone, it would be McKinley, right? And maybe the show's producers. That would set off an uproar from everyone who watches his show. Well, unless you listen to my friend Tanya, who saw a web site that said that the entire cast and crew of some show that was cancelled last spring is being held captive out of the public eye for uncovering government secrets. Tanya's always been into crazy conspiracy theories like that, though. She believes in U.F.O.'s, too."

Tolinom let Julia talk uninterrupted through the commercial break, only half listening to what she was saying. Little of it made any sense to him, and he wasn't sure if it was intended to. When she began explaining some of her friend Tanya's less likely theories, he fumbled with the television's remote control until he found the button to turn it off, and smiled at the small triumph of making the screen go blank. He was paying as little attention to the commercials as he was to the human girl, but found himself unable to think clearly with both the television and her trying to talk to him.

"Why'd you turn off the T.V.?" she asked mid-monologue. "Tired of pretending to understand Spanish?"

"Did you come in here just to pester me?" he asked, ignoring her own questions. He tried to make the jibe sound lighthearted, but as bored and irritable as he'd been feeling, he didn't think he had much success. "I thought everyone was down at the pool."

"They still are." Julia stood at the foot of the other bed and made her way back to the room's door. "Samantha got a call from Henry, and it turns out he's going to be at the Embassy most of the day, so Mom sent me up to see if you wanted to come with us to the beach. If you're going to be all snippy about it, though, I'll just tell her you're not interested."

He considered letting the girl do just that, to see if they would actually leave him at the hotel unattended, if for no other reason. He quickly dismissed the idea, though. Knowing as little as he did about that world's laws and customs, it would be a mistake to sneak away when his "family" was no longer looking after him. The best he would be able to hope for would be to make a fool of himself. He tried not to imagine the worst that might happen. He could break some law and get arrested. He could take a wrong turn into a dangerous part of the city and get murdered for money that he wasn't even carrying. Beyond that, what if they had slave traders in this world? He could find himself in the same situation his ancestors had spent decades trying to escape, if he left the hotel without someone to warn him of what not to do.

"Wait," he told Julia as she was stepping out into the hallway. "I'll come."

Julia looked him up and down pointedly from head to toe. "Are you going to get changed first?"

"What's wrong with what I'm wearing?" Tolinom asked, lifting his arms to his sides and looking down at himself.

"Well, nothing, if you don't mind raising the sea level another inch with your sweat," she said, and with a grimace, he turned and crossed the hotel room to Marc's suitcase. Sweating was another of the reasons he'd been spending so much time indoors over the last two days. He didn't think he would ever get used to even the lesser differences between being a human and being an Oncan, like the strange shape of his face, or having fingernails. Having moisture flow through your skin from your insides, though, was beyond bizarre. "Besides," Julia was saying, "as soon as you step outside, you're going to want to be in the water. I don't get why you're wearing jeans in the Caribbean in the first place."

Tolinom was wearing jeans because the sight of his legs covered with a mere dusting of hair was very disconcerting, but he wasn't about to tell the girl that. He'd told Jake, Marc's father, that he wasn't really human when he'd first gained enough consciousness to speak back at the hospital, but Jake had warned him that it would be best if he kept that sort of thing to himself. With what little he'd learned about the world he'd been sent to, Tolinom thought that seemed like sound advice. If humans really were the only sentient species in this world, they probably wouldn't take well to hearing that he missed having fur.

He bent over his suitcase, nearly falling on his face without a tail to counterbalance him. Tolinom could never quite get used to that, either. Sometimes, he could swear he could feel his tail swaying behind him, or flicking its tip at his side when he was sitting, but as soon as the thought came to him fully, he would realize that nothing was there. Combined with having odd feet whose heels constantly touched the ground, Tolinom oftentimes had to concentrate just to stay upright when he walked.

Fumbling with the suitcase's complicated buckles and latches, he tried to ignore Julia's amused snicker. He'd used to wonder what it would be like to have a younger brother or sister, but after only two days of the human girl's confounding blend of affectionate animosity, he had to wonder if he wasn't better off as an only child. She seemed to think that his supposed amnesia was just a complex ruse meant to annoy her.

Remembering what Jake had shown him about its metal clasps the previous night, Tolinom was able to open the suitcase without too much trouble. Marc's simple clothing was folded neatly from one corner of the suitcase to the other, and Tolinom was amazed at how many garments his body's proper owner had managed to stuff into the relatively small container. There had to be at least seven complete outfits in the suitcase. Fortunately, there was a pair of colorful shorts sitting on top of the pile's edge, so he didn't have to rummage through all of the clothing to find what he needed.

"Geez, don't go overboard. You're going to want more than a pair of boxers," Julia said when he stood with the small garment in his hand. "You were headed to Australia, so you must have packed some swimming trunks, right?"

"What are swimming trunks?" It probably sounded like a ridiculous question to her, but Tolinom was getting tired of keeping all of his questions to himself.

"The shorts with the weird net in them, doofus." Yet another word that he didn't understand. Julia seemed to have quite a few colorful insults at her disposal in her native language. "Now quit messing around. Mom will throw a gasket if you make us miss our bus."

Sighing, he crouched again on the balls of his feet in front of the suitcase, replacing the "boxers," as Julia had called them, and rooting around for the netted shorts she'd described. When he found them after disrupting most of the neat stacks of folded clothes, he stood again and showed them to the girl. "Do these meet your approval?"

She rolled her eyes at him. "Yeah, because my standards are so high for expecting you to go out in more than underwear. Just get changed, will you?"

Tolinom supposed he would take that as a yes. Walking into the small bathing room and pulling the door closed behind him, he reached for the tail clasp of his trousers before he remembered that he no longer needed one. Hand hesitating over the waist band of his jeans, he couldn't help but stare at his reflection in the long mirror covering the wall behind the sink and bathing room counter. He shook his head in wonder, a part of him still unable to believe the human staring back at him could be anything other than a dream. He had to laugh to himself at the thought of what Dola would say if she could see him then, but he couldn't stay amused for long when he thought about Dola.

Four days he'd been away from her, and only during two of those had he been awake, but he was amazed at how much he missed his friend already. He supposed he just missed home in general, but he couldn't think about home without thinking about Dola.

Gritting his teeth, he traded his jeans for the swimming trunks as quickly as he could, stumbling twice due to his clumsy human feet and catching himself both times on the counter. He had to find a way home, and he wasn't going to be able to do so while cooped up in a luxurious hotel.

With his shorts on and his jeans slung over his elbow, he opened the door to the main hotel room, but hesitated when he saw Julia sitting on the foot of a bed again, her back to him and her head hanging between hunched shoulders. "Are you all right?" he asked, making his way around the bed back to his suitcase.

She tensed for a brief moment, and he thought he heard her sniff, but when he walked in front of her, she just said, "Of course. Why wouldn't I be?"

Tolinom didn't look at her except for a quick glance as he returned the pants to the open suitcase. He suspected she had been crying. He knew that Julia and her family were all struggling to cope with a situation they couldn't hope to understand, just like he was. They were trying as hard as they could to convince themselves that they hadn't lost a brother and a son, and in every moment Tolinom fought an inward battle, trying to decide if he should bring the truth crashing down on their heads, or if it was less cruel to play along, to pretend he was just an amnesiac whose comatose dreams still plagued him.

"Okay, let's get going," Julia said, fully recovered from whatever private emotions she'd been indulging. "And don't forget your shoes," she added as she made her way back to the hallway door. "We'll probably eat at some restaurant or another while we're out."

Tolinom dubiously eyed the odd shoes sitting beside his suitcase. He still couldn't figure out what material the shoes were made from, but that wasn't what made him pause. Shoes and boots were human creations that he'd never fully understood. He knew they protected humans' feet from injury, but they only worked as long as they were worn. The human feet Tolinom now had were still soft and vulnerable even as mature as his body was since Marc had worn shoes any time he'd walked on uncomfortable ground. Oncan newborns' feet were soft as well, of course, but cubs' paws quickly toughened as they ran and played through the forests of Bandarethe. Surely human feet would do the same if they weren't so coddled by shoes.

Nonetheless, Tolinom reluctantly plucked the white footwear off the carpet and followed Julia into the hallway with the shoes still in his hands. He didn't intend to stay in that world and that body long enough to toughen his human feet on their proper owner's behalf, but he'd wait to put the things on until he absolutely had to.

Julia led him to the metal double doors of the hotel's elevator, and he set his jaw, determined not to make as big a scene as he had when Jake had led him into the hospital's elevator the day before. It was one thing to admire the humans' innovations from a safe distance. It was quite another to step straight into one and let it raise or lower you dozens of feet in a matter of seconds. Julia behaved as if there was nothing at all unusual about stepping into a big metal box that would transport her to the tall building's ground floor, though, so Tolinom tried to imitate her nonchalance.

He still jumped in his skin when the elevator lurched downward. Butterflies tried to escape his stomach at the disconcerting feeling of suddenly being lighter.

"Calm down, Marc," Julia admonished without looking at him. "You're jittery enough to make _me_nervous."

Taking a deep breath, Tolinom made himself relax the death grip he had on his shoes. He had to resist the urge to ask the girl to explain how the elevator worked. After the peculiar look Jake had given him in the hospital when he'd asked how many men were working at the elevator's pulleys to raise and lower it so quickly, he'd decided it would be best if he tried to figure that sort of thing out without asking anyone.

He'd seen so many marvels since waking up that he had more questions than anybody could hope to answer, anyway.

With a quiet, ringing bell noise, the elevator doors slid open, and even though he knew what to expect, Tolinom was amazed to see the short hallway leading to the ground floor's lobby rather than the fifth floor hallway they'd come from. He followed Julia without a word, though, as she casually crossed the lobby, clearly unimpressed with the elevator. She led them to another hallway at the side of the vast room rather than out its glass front doors, their bare feet slapping on the floor's square tiles. Julia must have left her shoes at the pool.

They walked out through one of the hotel's side exits into sweltering, tropical sunlight, and hastily followed a tile path to the edge of a small, artificial lake, in which a number of humans were splashing around playfully, and around which more people were lounging in strange looking chairs, basking under the sun. Tolinom gritted his teeth against the heat scalding the soles of his feet, wishing they weren't so pampered, until Julia and he moved onto poolside tiles that were cooled by occasional splashes from the swimming humans. He looked around for Julia's family, but hadn't yet memorized their faces well enough to pick them out of the crowd.

Fortunately, Julia seemed to know exactly where she was going. She led the way to the deep end of the pool, where older children and several adults played and swam. Once he saw where they were headed, Tolinom finally recognized the man sitting in one of the poolside chairs. Jake was the only person there other than Tolinom wearing a shirt.

"Hey, Marc," the man said when he saw them approaching. "How are you feeling?"

"Well enough, I suppose," Tolinom said, but he had to fight back a grimace. He couldn't help but feel like he was being deceitful whenever he answered to Marc's name.

"Do we have time to swim some more?" Julia asked, but Jake shook his head.

"We're headed to the bus stop as soon as Suzan gets back."

"Suzan left?" the girl said, but went on before her father could answer her. "Oh no, she didn't go to her room to invite Tim, did she?"

"Yes, she did. And if he comes, I know I can count on you not to be rude."

Julia plopped into a chair beside her father, pouting slightly. "Great. This is going to be loads of fun."

Julia might not have been subtle about it, but she was only voicing the mutual opinion her family seemed to have about Timothy Davis. Tolinom had seen for himself that the man had a negative outlook on just about every matter that came to his attention, and he always seemed able to find the least polite ways to voice his opinions. Julia and the others seemed to hold something against Tim beyond mere irritation, though, even if they tolerated his presence. Tolinom imagined they must have had some grievance against the man that he didn't know about.

"Why don't you put on some sunscreen while we wait, Marc?" Jake suggested, tossing a soft bottle to him. "It only takes a few minutes to start burning out here."

Tolinom caught the bottle nimbly in his free hand and examined it as he sat slowly in the chair on Jake's other side, feeling distractedly surprised when the strips of material that made the chair's bottom shifted slightly under his weight while he set his shoes on the ground. There was a bright yellow picture on the bottle that he decided was supposed to represent the sun with a large "40" written underneath it, followed by a name he didn't recognized written in perfectly legible Tsuravi runes and sigils. The spell that translated everything Tolinom heard into Tsuravi worked on text as well. It hadn't taken him long to discover that, as often as the humans of this world wrote on everything they came in contact with.

Nothing he read on the front of the bottle told him what it was for, though, and so much Tsuravi text had been crammed onto the back of the bottle that it would take him several minutes to read it all. Instead, he looked up at Jake expectantly. "Put it on what?"

Jake looked at him out of the corner of his eye while still facing the pool. "Your skin, Marc," he said in a lower tone than before. "Just slather it on over any part of your skin that's showing. It'll protect you from burning under the sunlight."

Tolinom remembered the many humans he'd seen while traveling across Eyralia with Dola. Their skin had all ranged through shades of bronze and brown, darkened by many hours of working under the summer sun, and only a few had been as pale as many of the humans he'd seen in this other world. Those had mostly been merchants and minor nobles, men and women who spent most of their time indoors.

He eyed the bottle in his hands skeptically. In a way, he suspected that the sunscreen was like shoes. It protected human skin from sunlight while they were wearing it, but once it wore off, they were as vulnerable to the sun as they were before they'd put it on. Yet as with his feet, Tolinom didn't want to suffer due to Marc's self-pampering. He flipped the bottle's cap, squirted the thick liquid over his exposed forearm, and rubbed it into his skin while his expression fought between an amused grin and a disgusted grimace. It was slimy, and as warm as the air around him, since the bottle had spent so much time in the sun beside Jake's chair, but at least it didn't smell as bad as Tolinom had expected.

A girl roughly Julia's age climbed a ladder out of the pool in front of them and trotted across the wet tiles to stand dripping in front of Tolinom. "Hi, Marc," she said, fiddling distractedly with a green bracelet around her wrist. "I mean, good morning."

He stared at the girl's face, needing a moment to remember her name. "Good morning, Alex," he said, even though the sun was already nearing its apex. He could hardly consider the time of day "morning" this late.

Alex and her parents had arrived the previous afternoon, meeting Tolinom and his caretakers at a restaurant near the hotel where they were staying. They were somehow related to Tim and Suzan, he'd gathered, but he hadn't yet figured out exactly who claimed each other as family.

"It's good to see you out and about," Alex went on. She had a strange accent, slightly different than Julia's and Jake's. The only way Tolinom had of knowing that she spoke the same language as the others was the fact that his "family" never appeared confused when the girl spoke. "I guess that means you're feeling better, huh? Are you coming to the beach with us?"

Tolinom nodded while rubbing sunscreen into his other arm. "The hotel room was beginning to feel rather confining." He would let them take that as they saw fit. He didn't think any of them meant to make him feel like a prisoner; he just wasn't used to being unable to go where he wanted, when he wanted. Perhaps he was somewhat pampered in his own way, being the heir of Bandarethe.

He turned back to Jake, leaving Alex to retrieve a towel and gossip with Julia. "Any word about Brandon?" Tolinom asked.

Jake sighed. "Nothing new. The crew members from your flight still insist that they saw Brandon with you up until the time you fell unconscious. All the people in charge are assuming that the flight crew was somehow mistaken and that the flight manifest is wrong, too, since no one could possibly have just disappeared in the middle of a flight. He couldn't have jumped out of an emergency exit without setting off all kinds of alarms. Whether the flight crew or the inspectors are right, Brandon must have gotten lost in either the Atlanta airport, or the one here in Santo Domingo."

Jake darted a few glances around the pool and courtyard as if making certain someone in particular wasn't within earshot. "Henry seems to think that Brandon is just running away from home. We all know how smart Brandon is. I wouldn't put it past him to find a way to sneak into a plane's cargo bay and onto another flight once the plane landed. He'd have to have forged a passport, I guess, and I have no idea where he'd have gotten enough money. If he did somehow figure out those details, though, he could be anywhere in the entire world by now."

Jake paused, and leveled an intent stare at Tolinom's face. "Henry has his own theory about you, too, Marc."

Tolinom recognized the warning in the older man's expression. "He doesn't think I've lost my memory, like everyone else believes?" He regretted the way that came out. It made it sound like Henry was justified in his skepticism about Tolinom's, or Marc's, supposed amnesia.

If Jake noticed Tolinom's near admission, though, he made no sign of it. The man just shrugged a shoulder, appearing somewhat uncomfortable. "You and Brandon are best friends," he said. "And let's face it, any of us would have helped Brandon get away from Tim if he'd asked us to." He lifted an eyebrow pointedly. "The tests they ran on you at the hospital couldn't find any toxins in your system, nor any trauma that could have knocked you out for two days. You can't blame Henry for wondering if you might have been faking it."

"I guess not," Tolinom admitted. The truth of the matter was that he didn't care very much whether the people around him thought he was crazy, or just a liar. Still, he was curious. "So what do you believe?"

Jake shrugged his shoulder again. "No offense intended, son, but you're really not the best actor. Maybe, if Brandon told you what to do, you'd have been able to pull something like this off, but..." The man hesitated, then rolled his eyes at Tolinom. "Well, just look at that sun tan lotion. Somehow I doubt Brandon coached you on that," he said with a bark of a laugh.

Tolinom paused while rubbing a large blob of the lotion into his knee. "What am I doing wrong?"

Jake laughed again. "If you can still see white after you're done putting sunscreen on, you've used too much, and you, Marc, look like you've fallen arms first into a giant marshmallow."

Tolinom looked down at his forearms, which were indeed so smothered in sunscreen, they looked like they were wearing long, bright white sleeves. Embarrassed even though he couldn't have known exactly how much lotion was needed to protect his furless skin, he began scraping the excess off of his arms and using it to coat his shins and calves. "So no one has any idea where Brandon could have gone?" he asked, trying to hide his chagrin.

"That's why Henry's spending all day at the U.S. Embassy. He told us this morning that he's had Brandon's description sent to every English speaking international airport in the world, since he's likely to go somewhere that he can speak with the locals, but that's a really big net with a lot of holes in it. Henry was hoping that you might regain your memory enough to give us a clue where Brandon might be headed, someplace he may have mentioned to you that he always wanted to visit, or something else along those lines."

"Believe me," Tolinom said, "if I had any idea where he might be, I'd tell you."

That, at least, was the truth. Finding Brandon was the only thing Tolinom could think of that might lead him to a way to get back home, back to his own body. He'd heard all about the way in which Brandon had vanished from within one of the humans' flying machines without leaving any signs of his departure. No one Tolinom had met could explain it. Even though they never used the word, he could tell that many of Marc's and Brandon's family members felt as though the young man had somehow performed magic.

When time had stood still on Captain Lebram's ship just before Tolinom had been sent to this strange place, two others had been trapped within the frozen time with him. He didn't know what could have happened to the sailor, but Tolinom had little doubt that Jiam would have been able to disappear from within a flying machine without much effort.

If Jiam was in Brandon's body in the same way that Tolinom was in Marc's, then all Tolinom should need to do to return home was track the sorcerer's new form down and make the man send him back.

That was, of course, if Tolinom had a body to return to. He remembered what Jiam had hastily told the sailor and him back on Falcon Wing, that since they had moved while time stood still, their souls would be severed from their bodies once time began moving again, and that they needed to grant some unnamed force their consent to have their souls transported to different vessels. That explained, at least vaguely, how Tolinom had come to occupy Marc's body, but it didn't tell him what had happened to his own body, or to Marc's soul.

All the more reason to find Jiam as quickly as possible so that the sorcerer could explain what had happened and set matters to rights. Tolinom could only hope he was correct in his assumption that Jiam had possessed Brandon's body.

Samantha and Crystal had climbed out of the pool while he was lost in thought, and he gave them both an inattentive greeting, unable to bring his mind out of the circles it was running around Jiam and Brandon. By the time he finished applying the sunscreen to his legs and face, getting a circumspect nod of approval from Jake while no one else was looking, Alex and the older women had finished drying themselves with the large towels that had been stacked on a nearby chair.

"Oh, good, here comes Suzan," Julia announced, then went on in a tone too quiet for the woman in question to hear from where she walked alongside the pool. "It took her long enough. At least Tim's not with her."

"Julia," was all Crystal needed to say to convince her daughter to reign in her caustic tongue.

As Suzan came closer to their group, they all realized that something was wrong. The timid woman was chewing on her lower lip, and tears were streaming down her cheeks with no effort on her part to hide them.

As soon as she noticed that Suzan was weeping, Samantha hurried to the other woman's side, throwing an arm around her waist to escort her the rest of the way to the end of the pool. "Suzan! Are you okay? What happened?" Like her daughter, Samantha had a unique accent that Tolinom couldn't place. Its inflection was similar in some ways to Alex's, but there was still a distinct tone that separated it from the girl's accent in some way that he couldn't define.

When he looked at Suzan more closely, Tolinom sat upright in alarm. The skin on the left side of her face was redder than the rest of her complexion, and a hand sized bruise was darkening along her left forearm. She looked like she had been assaulted. "I...I told Tim that I want a divorce," Suzan said once Samantha had brought her close enough to the others that she could be heard without raising her quiet voice.

For a short while nobody said anything. Tolinom wasn't sure what a divorce entailed in this foreign culture, but the mere mention of it had struck everyone else speechless. Then Crystal unexpectedly rushed forward and embraced the crying woman. "Oh, Suzan, that's great!"

With her arm already around Suzan's waist, Samantha joined the hug easily. "It's a good thing Henry's not here. If he saw those bruises, he'd march straight up to your room and throw Tim out the window." She didn't sound like she considered the notion a particularly bad idea. "He didn't take the news very well, I take it?"

Suzan shrugged. "He got a little emotional."

"You mean he got violent," Samantha corrected with a tone of admonishment. Suzan just nodded meekly.

While Julia and Alex joined the women's compassionate huddle, Jake turned to Tolinom and gestured toward his shoes. "Go ahead and get your shoes on," he advised quietly. "We'll have to head to the bus stop soon unless we want to wait for the twelve-thirty."

Tolinom took the man's advice, knowing that it would be a good idea to struggle with his shoe laces while everyone's attention was elsewhere. He had a difficult time concentrating on what he was doing with the drama unfolding in front of him, the girls and their mothers all offering Suzan comfort and support by turns. Tolinom had to trade the left shoe for the right, only to find he had been correct the first time when he tried to shove his bare foot into its tight confines. He frowned as he switched them back around and crammed his feet into the proper shoes. They really should have been labeled!

"So that's it, right?" Julia was saying excitedly. "You don't have to cry any more, Mrs. Davis. I mean, Suzan!" she hurriedly corrected herself at a warning glance from her mother. "You're free now. Tim can't do anything to you ever again."

"I don't know," Suzan said, shaking her head uncertainly. "He said he would find me wherever I go. He said that if I left him, he would hurt Brandon once we find him." She shot a panicky look back toward the huge hotel, as if she was afraid Tim was watching her from one of the balconies lining the building's side even though their rooms were all roughly in the hotel's center. "At the end, he told me that he would kill himself while we're at the beach, if I left without telling him that I'd stay with him. Maybe I should go back and make sure--"

"No!" four female voices cut in urgently at the same time.

"Don't you worry about anything he said," Samantha went on reassuringly. "Tim's too lazy to hunt either you or Brandon down, and he's too much a coward to take his own life."

"You can't know that," Suzan protested fearfully. "I've been his wife for eighteen years. You don't know him like I do."

Samantha gave the distraught woman another hug, ignoring the curious stares they were drawing from the other people in and around the pool. "Suzan, hon, I love you, but if you were able to stand being married to that man for eighteen years, then you haven't let yourself know the first thing about him."

It was a bold accusation, but Suzan made no attempt to argue against it. She still didn't look convinced, though. "But what if--" she began.

Her voice stammered to a stop when Jake slowly got up from his seat. "You girls and Marc go ahead and enjoy the beach," he said. "Go relax and unwind. I'll stay behind. I'm not dressed for it, anyway."

"You'll make sure Tim doesn't do anything rash?" Suzan asked anxiously.

Jake nodded, but only said, "I'll keep an eye on him."

Suzan swallowed back a sob and reached for Jake's hand, squeezing it gratefully in both of her own. "Thank you," she said, and extended her gaze to include Crystal. "Thank you both. You've always been such good friends."

"No, Suzan, we really haven't been," Jake said. He and Crystal glanced at each other, and some communication seemed to pass between them, as if that glance was an unspoken signal between husband and wife.

"But starting today," Crystal finished for her husband, "we will be."

"Now, you had all better get a move on if you don't want to miss your bus," Jake said, gesturing for Tolinom to stand up.

Tolinom did so, his shoes finally tied to his satisfaction. He handed Jake the bottle of sunscreen, which the older man deposited into a large, burlap bag full of towels and an assortment of other items that Tolinom imagined were supposed to be useful at a beach. Jake promptly shoved the bag into Tolinom's arms, and though he didn't smile, his eyes narrowed in a semblance of amusement.

"Have fun at the beach, son," he said, then murmured quietly, "You'll be fine," before turning and walking around the women toward the hotel.

"Oh, Jake's right!" Samantha exclaimed after looking at the back of a strange, wide bracelet on her wrist. "It's almost noon. We'll have to hurry." With that, she swung an arm around Suzan's shoulders and led the way down a side path that arced away from the pool toward the front of the hotel.

Tolinom was somewhat disappointed that Jake wouldn't be joining them. The older man was the only person in that world who seemed to realize just how little Tolinom knew about its culture and etiquette, and he would be hard pressed to blend in without Jake's occasional hints. Still, with the women distracted by Suzan's unexpected escape from Tim, Tolinom was in a good position to observe other people's behavior without being noticed himself. Even if he felt rather like a servant, carrying the heavy towel bag while the women went empty-handed, and even though he had begun to sweat profusely under the hot sun, he was looking forward to the chance to learn more about the world he'd been sent to.

"Do you think we could find a hair salon while we're out?" Suzan asked while they passed through a fence's gate and began walking along a sidewalk with a noisy street to one side, dozens of the humans' amazing cars speeding past so quickly that Tolinom had to keep to the sidewalk's far edge in order to feel safe. "Tim never let me cut my hair short," Suzan went on, apparently at complete ease with the big metal contraptions rushing back and forth so close beside them. "He says it makes me look like a lesbian."

Crystal laughed. "Suzan, you can shave your head bald now if you want. Tim can't keep you from doing anything any more."

When she looked back at the other woman, Tolinom could see tears in Suzan's eyes again. This time, though, she was smiling, and even he was caught by surprise at how unexpectedly radiant Suzan looked when she smiled.

Tolinom shifted the bag from one shoulder to another and followed the women without a word.