For a moment, she thinks about pretending to be ignorant. But the moment he says it, the moment he asks, she's sure, as sure as if she could see it through his powers.

"Planet Venus flared into a new life." She couches it in the half-mystical, half-astronomical terms. It says so much about what this means to her to note she doesn't pull away from that touch.

More than that, she sincerely doesn't know, and that's why, even as the pain of the light recedes, she is disquieted. She asks it more of herself than of him, "What happens next?"

Do they become hunters, perhaps even butchers, of a child? A baby? Unthinkable. Do they allow the girl to become a powerful threat, as surely her regrets from her last life would make her in this one? They cannot.

And so Mercury stands motionless, still.