Blame this one on Nancy. This is the second of two stories that came from her questions: “How does this affect her in the short, medium and long term? Does she feel that she's learned and grown or does she feel as though she's damaged?”

This takes place about a year after the events in “Song of Silence” on the home world of the Kimpel twins. Rather than take up a lot of time explaining the differences between their units of time and distances, I have used the English equivalents.

Thank you to my sister, Sharon, for doing the beta on this. It was not a fun piece to write but in a way, I felt it needed to be done.