Yeah… I'm revising the chapter layout, as I am encountering numerous problems uploading new ones.

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"Oh, thank you, Dream Dancer," she cried, looking at the portal that had opened by her. Colors and things that were almost colors swirled across it's surface in a gentle wave, enticing her to walk through. The only thing that held her from dashing through was her sense of gratitude to the being that had created it for her.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" She repeated, her happiness temporarily overwhelming her ability to be any more erudite. She tried to think of anything else to say, but her joy was so simple that only the simplest of words seemed to fit. She took a step towards the portal, and another, then turned to face the being again.

"Thank you!"

The being just nodded its head and smiled at her.

She turned again to look at the portal, savoring the moment. As soon as she passed through the rainbow before her, she would be in a land where all her dreams would come true. All the struggles of her life were about to pay off. All the pain she had gone through, all of the horrors she had witnessed and been a part of, what lay beyond this glistening door would sweep them all away. In this new world she would find love, and peace.

A small fear crossed her mind and she turned to the being again.

"How will I know him when I see him?" she asked.

*Dear child,* the being replied, *he will be the first person you see.*

Her last, final fear assuaged she stepped boldly through the curtain of light.

A moment of disorientation later she found herself in a hallway. The air was musty and smelled strongly of electronics and oil. It was a bit chilly, but not too bad she decided as goosebumps formed on her arms. She had known worse. It was very quiet, and there were no sounds of life. There was the sense of ventilation, and of machines working somewhere. . . that wasn't close, but she couldn't be anymore specific then that. She looked around, trying to make some sense of where she was. Behind her was only a wall, as blank and featureless as all the rest. That was not to say that there was nothing to see, as there were many wires, and many floor tiles, and even the walls looked to be sheets of something, but it is to say that they held no clues for her.

She reached out and touched the wall on her right. Cool metal lay below her fingertips, and told her nothing of where she was. She felt a moments unease, but shoved it aside with logic. Dream Dancer sent me here, she reminded herself. It will be safe.

Logic still didn't make the dimly lit corridor in front of her seem any more inviting, but it did give her enough courage to walk forward in search of -- well, whatever she might find. Love, she reminded herself firmly, and peace. That's what I was promised. She trusted that Dream Dancer knew what was best for her, or at least that's what she told herself as she reached the end of the corridor and found herself at a crossroad.

Or a cross corridor, at least. The one she was following continued ahead, but the one that bisected it was larger and much more well lit. It was more likely that the new corridor would lead her to people, and her one true love, she thought hopefully. But what if Dream Dancer had put her in this particular corridor for a reason, she wondered? Should she continue on?

She looked carefully to her left and to her right as she tried to make a decision. She was getting a bit nervous. Why had Dream Dancer introduced her to this world so far from anyone? This place seemed so big and empty. She still could not see any sign of life.

Not wanting to sit there forever, she turned to her left, making the choice at random. But making the choice didn't dispel the butterflies in her stomach. Every step seemed only to make them a little worse, as she could sense no one around.

And then suddenly she did sense someone up ahead. She found her pace quickening, her stride lengthening until she was running. And soon enough she could see someone up ahead, although he was still far enough away that she had to strain to see who it was. Pale blonde hair. . . tall. . . All of a sudden, she knew who it was, and cold fear swept through her. Her knees locked, and she stumbled to a stop, backing up as fast as she could.

"Shit. . ." she breathed, getting up to run back the way she had come. "Knives!"

It had only been a second, but he had come so close that she could see the surprise in his eyes as he realized she knew who he was. That was the only warning she got before he tried to tear her apart with his mind.

She more felt his surprise then saw it as his attack met the carefully constructed shunts that had been set up in her mind. She felt him stumble and slow and she sprinted away from him, cursing foully in her mind. Knives? The love of her life was supposed to be Knives? She felt her dreams turn to ashes and ran as fast as she could, back to where she had started.

Knives attempted to stop her with his mind again, this time by blocking the corridor with a solid wall of air, but she forced her way through without even slowing.

Knives Knives Knives her brain repeated as she ripped through every little mental trick he erected to stop her. She could feel his frustration building, and she panicked as she could sense him getting closer, running faster and faster as his frustration fueled him.

She reached the corridor she had emerged from and barely slowed as she made the turn, careening off the far wall as she shot around the corner. All too soon she was back at the dead end, and no welcoming portal shimmered in the air as she approached. She started pounding on the wall, demanding that Dream Dancer take her back, that it was a mistake, that she didn't belong here, and not Knives, dammit! Feeling Knives coming close only increased the volume of her cries, but nothing she did garnered a response.

She didn't stop her harangue until she was forced to. Knives, having learned that nothing he tried to do mentally was stopping this strange female, tried the more direct approach. A swift slap to the side of the head and she was thrown into the wall, then slid down it to lie unconscious at his feet.

Ignoring her for a moment, he ran his hand over the wall she had been pounding on, feeling the small dents from her fists but nothing more. He looked around cautiously, sniffing the air and listening for anything out of the ordinary. Aside from the breathing of the unconscious body at his feet, there was nothing. He shrugged, but mentally marked the corridor for further study.

Looking distastefully at the human body at his feet, he contemplated his dilemma for a moment. She was not small, for a human. Over five and a half feet, he judged from what he had seen while she was running away. Her brown hair was short, only a few inches long at its longest near the back, and it did nothing to hide the red mark from where he had hit her. She was dressed oddly, in pants of a strange blue fabric and a loose, long sleeved off-white shirt. And what had she been screaming, and to who? All in all, she was quite a puzzle.

If I kill her now, he thought, I may never know what is going on. He knew that he probably should, but his life had been boring lately. Here, at least, was a puzzle. While she was quite likely only crazy, the fact that she had not been stopped by his mind powers was worth a closer examination.

He lifted her limp body and threw it over his left shoulder, and walked back the way they had come. Upon reaching the main corridor he paused for a moment and looked to his right.

If she had continued running that way, he thought, she would have made it out of the ship. He pondered that for a while, but shrugged. It was just another mystery to be solved when she wakes up.

He turned to the left and continued to take her to a safe place.

Knives deposited the woman in an empty room. He dropped her on the ground in an untidy pile, and stepped back. The red mark from his slap to the side of her face was beginning to fade already, which surprised him. He reached down and grabbed her chin, pivoting her face to look at it more closely. The woman whimpered as his fingers gripped near the bottom of the mark, but he ignored her. He decided it didn't look like there was going to be a bruise. A frown appeared briefly as he wondered about a blow that could knock her out and yet leave no mark.

Abruptly he let her go and turned to leave. Her head thumped on the floor as he released his grip and she whimpered again. Knives turned off the lights as he stepped through the door. He locked it behind him and left.

His next destination was the monitor room. The ship was set up to monitor every inch of its interior and exterior. He would find where and when she entered, and figure out what she did to disable the entry alarms. Seating himself in a chair, he called up the records of the past day and looked through them for her entry.

An hour later he was still searching. He had gone back through the records of the past week and found no sign of entry. There was no possible way for her to have been in the ship longer, he knew. He would have had to have sensed her presence. But he still could find no means of entry. He had checked and rechecked every single breach in the hull, from doors to exhaust vents and found nothing. He even ran a check of structural integrity, but there had been no new holes added to the hull.

Giving up on that part of the search, he switched to figuring out what she did once she had gotten in. Finding her this time was easier. He linked to the time that he first sensed her presence and checked the records.

And there she was, caught on tape. He had almost hoped that she had found some way to keep the sensors from recording her image, but seeing her now made that unlikely. It would have provided an explanation for her ability to get into the ship, but no such luck. He rewound the tape in real time, starting from the moment she saw him.

After the first viewing he sat back for a moment to think. Then he started from the moment she saw him.

She had been running, and then spoke. Whatever she had said was too quiet for the recorders to pick up, but the look of recognition that flashed across her face told him all he needed to know. Somehow, she knew him. How would one of these vermin know who he was? His brother had never been one to spread their story around widely, and he certainly never told random humans his name. Only his handpicked Gung Ho Guns ever knew, and they knew better than to gossip about him.

And she had been surprised to see him. Who else would she expect to see here? It was his ship. If she knew enough to know his name, one would assume that she would know that he lived in this ship. A puzzle.

He went back in time to the next puzzle. She had been walking along at a steady pace, when all of a sudden she broke into a run. There was no way for her to know that he was coming, but there was no other reason for her to begin to run. She actually began to run at the same time that he sensed her, which raised an interesting question. Could a human somehow have some sort of mind power similar to his own? He had never seen such a thing in all his years of watching the vermin, but it seemed the best answer to his question. Still, a very odd thing indeed.

He paused for a moment to watch her uncertainty as she left the corridor he cornered her in. It seemed she didn't know where she was, but that was the only entrance to the corridor. Surely she had seen it before. He shrugged, and continued.

He moved back to one of the more interesting moments of the tape. He stopped the tape five seconds before she appeared at the end of the maintenance corridor, and moved it forward at a frame by frame rate. At the time she appeared, he switched back and forth between the frames for some sort of discrepancy, something that might explain how one moment she was there and one moment she wasn't. There was nothing, no blurriness, no fading, nothing. The time stamps on the frames were correct. There was nothing to contradict the impression that she had just appeared out of thin air.

He was left with more questions then he had started with. He still didn't know how she had gotten in the ship, but it looked more now like she was not alone. Someone needed to be manipulating the records system. Who that someone was, and where, were his next questions. And the answers were not going to be found here.

He left and went back to the room he had locked her into, wary along his trip for more unexpected guests but he found no trace of anyone. He stopped for a moment, leaned against a wall, and rested his chin on his chest. He closed his eyes and sent his senses out into the desert, searching for any trace of vermin. There was nothing, which unsettled him even more. He opened his eyes and took a moment to collect himself before continuing to her cell.

He opened the door to her room, and was surprised to see her awake. She had turned the lights back on, and had seated herself on the bed. She was looking at him as he opened the door, a sensation he found unsettling.

"Hello, Knives," she said. "I bet you have a few questions."

Her head was propped against the wall, and her legs were drawn up on the bed, her arms loosely crossed atop her knees. She didn't move as she addressed him.

This wouldn't do.

The insolence of the vermin was annoying Knives. How dare she remain in such a casual posture in his presence? She should at least be showing some of the respect that was his due as a superior being. Standing to attention was the least she could do. Abject fear and groveling would not be amiss. But this? No movement at all, just a casual acknowledgement of his presence? This was entirely wrong; the whole situation was beginning to offend him.

He decided not to waste his time with niceties that would be lost on the vermin anyway. He reached out with his mind, preparing to rip the information he wanted out of her mind. He smiled grimly at her and was rewarded by seeing her blanche. All the vermin should fear him. He was their exterminator.

Then it was his turn to pale, although he felt anger instead of fear. As his metal touch got close to her mind it was stopped by a wall of--something. He could see it with his talent, now that he was close enough, and he could feel around it, but there seemed no way that he could get into it. Her mind lay tantalizingly close behind that strange barrier, and he could not figure out how to reach it. He grappled with the whatever-it-was, but could neither break it or get around it. He tried for a few minutes, but was unable to make any headway, either in breaking it or even figuring out how she had such a barrier in the first place.

Frustration has never been kind to Knives, and in this case he responded no differently then he ever did. As his anger grew, so did the amount of power he threw at the problem, and in equal measure did his finesse decrease. In the end he threw all of his power behind one attempt to break through the barrier around her mind, but he still had no luck. The force of his blow was reflected around his target, dissipating harmlessly behind her.

Through the entire process she sat impassively. She knew what he was trying to do, but trusted that her mental defenses would be strong enough to withstand even his most determined assault. She could feel him trying to find some way into her mind, and every attack he made against her shield. The last attack almost overwhelmed the barrier, and she sat up a bit later as he finished it. The power that the plants possessed was much greater then her own, and she was afraid that her barriers would not be strong enough to keep him out of her mind. She stared at him impassively, waiting to see if the next attack would break through.

Knives glared at the female. This was not the way he had imagined this confrontation would go. He was exhausted already, and still she sat there, inscrutable and maddeningly quiet. Nothing he had done had made her change her expression in the least bit, and as he finished he watched her sit up straighter. He stood straight, betraying no signs of weariness and said nothing. What does she want, he wondered. In her eyes he imagined he saw contempt, and his anger grew even more. He watched her watch him, and the silence stretched between them for a second, then five, then ten.

Suddenly, with all the speed that a plant possess, he reached forward and snatched her off the bed, throwing her to the floor. Aside from the huff of breath that escaped her as she hit the floor she made no sound. Knives place one booted foot on her shoulder and stepped down, slowly applying more and more pressure, trying to make her cry out. At least her eyes were facing the floor, away from him. Although the pain in her gaze would have been gratifying, he didn't think he could stand it her eyes were still impassive.

The female did not comply with his wishes. What was wrong with her? Could she not feel pain? He could feel the bones grinding together and still she made no sound. He debated the benefits of crushing the bones of her shoulder beneath his toes, and found no good reason not to. Just as he began to apply more pressure to her shoulder, she pivoted beneath him, slipping her shoulder out from under his foot and somehow managing to kick him between his legs.

Knives found himself dropping to the floor, the agony radiating through his body overwhelming reason for an instant, and an instant was all it took for the female to scramble out the door. He made it to his knees before she managed to lock it, but it did him no good. He attacked the door, pounding on it with his fists and his mind, but he had exhausted himself earlier when he tried to break her mental barriers. He passed out before he even realized through his anger that he had depleted all of his energy.

The woman felt him pass out on the other side of the door, and she slumped to the ground in relief. Tears ran streaming down her face but dripped to the floor in silence. She had been well trained to make no sound when in pain, to steal even that satisfaction from the enemy. But no training could make the pain go away. She placed her good hand on the floor and pushed herself to her feet. Her knees were weak and threatened to give out on her. She convinced them that here was not a good place to pass out, and stumbled up the passageway, looking for some way out before Knives woke up and broke out of his temporary cell. She didn't know how much time she had, but was afraid that it was going to be less than she needed.

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She moved quickly through the halls of the ship, wandering but rarely having to retrace her steps. Her vision was unfocused, her mind evaluating data without much thought. This way, then this way, then this one, and she gradually got closer to where she really wanted to be. She was looking for a way out, but even more she was looking for supplies. Visions of Meryl and Millie reaching a town parched and praying for water urged her towards caution. The whole world was a desert, and didn't seem to be amicable towards human life. Preparation would save her life, assuming Knives left her alone long enough for the desert to try to win. Of course, he had no way of knowing that she didn't know how to live in a desert. After all, how could you be born on this planet and not?

She finally found her way into a room full of computers. She didn't know it was the monitor room Knives had used before visiting her, but she would have appreciated the irony. She spent a few minutes trying to figure out how the system worked, but thankfully it was easy to operate. As she booted up the system, she sent out a prayer for the souls of the designers who had tried to make the operating system idiot proof. She wouldn't qualify herself as an idiot, but it takes time to learn how to use a new OS, and she knew that she was time-poor. She knew that after driving herself to mental exhaustion it would take her at least twelve hours to regain consciousness, but she wasn't a plant. His recuperative powers were bound to greatly surpass hers.

She figured she had only six hours at best before Knives was awake and looking for blood. He didn't strike her as one to take defeat well. The look in his eyes as he threw her to the floor. . . it was enough to send chills down her spine, and it had been a long time since someone could do that to her. There was such a loss of sanity, an overwhelming loss of the mind to the emotions that she wondered how he had stayed functionally sane enough to plot his revenge. She felt a moments anger towards what had driven him to his insane rage, but put the emotion aside as a distraction she didn't need at the moment. She pulled up a schematic of the ship and pulled it to the side.

She wasn't here to psychoanalyze Knives, or empathize with his childhood. He wouldn't spare a moment's pity for her, and if she wanted to survive this game, she was going to have to play by his rules. Running from the ship wasn't going to be much of an escape. She didn't know the planet, she didn't know the people, and she didn't know where to go. She didn't have any money, she didn't have any supplies, and she didn't have any idea how to go about getting some. If she allowed herself to think of all the things she didn't have, she might get depressed. Then again, there had been times in her life when she had survived with less, but having lived through horror she wasn't thrilled with the idea of getting to repeat it.

She drummed her fingers impatiently by the monitor as she waited for it to finish a search. Caches of supplies were highlighted on her saved ship map, and she memorized the location of the most promising three that were on the way out of the ship. With any luck she could grab some food and water before heading out in the desert. Without luck, well, she would have to make her own.

She paused, then smiled at a nicely-timed thought. She closed out the ship data section and pulled up a map of the local area surrounding the ship. She adjusted the scale until she could see a few of the closest towns to the ship. A moment was spent pondering the merits of each town, but it was a short moment. The closest town was over ten miles away. The next closest was about thirty-four, and after that was forty. Her fingertip touched lightly down on what was her only real choice, and she turned to leave the ship, powering down the computer and turning the rooms lights off. She started to jog through the corridors, feeling the time slipping away from her. She found food and a canteen at the first place she looked. The food bricks didn't look gourmet but the water was wet and the canteen didn't leak. It was enough to satisfy, and anything more would weigh her down too much. She piled some bars in a backpack, blessed whoever had made things so easy for her, and rushed out of the room. A few turns later she was back on the main corridor, and soon found her way out of the ship.

The bright light of the sun reflected off of everything, the glare momentarily causing her to squint before her eyes adjusted. She took a quick minute to orient herself, then took off towards town at a lope. Her speed wasn't spectacular, but she could cover at least six miles every hour. Months of regular conditioning and a job that had called for peak physical fitness stood her in good stead now, as she faced the desert with a devil at her back. She knew she could keep this pace up for hours, and she just hoped she had them. It had taken her twenty-seven minutes to get out of the ship. With luck, she could disappear. Without luck, well, that she would handle when she had to.