Key Out of Time · Chapter 10 (2/2)

She nodded. “Yes, they made very sure that only the dead remained. But I had gone to the Shrine of Phutka, since it was my day of duty, and Phutka’s power threw its shade over me. So I did not die, but I saw⁠—yes, I saw!”

“Not those like me?” Ross dared to speak to her directly.

“No, not those like you. There were few⁠ ⁠… only so many⁠—” She spread out her five fingers. “And they were all of one like as if born in one birth. They had no hair on their heads, and their bodies were of this hue⁠—” She plucked at one of the coverings they had heaped around her; it was a lavender-blue mixture.

Ross sucked in his breath, and Torgul was fast to pounce upon the understanding he read in the Terran’s face.

“Not your kind⁠—but still you know them!”

“I know them,” Ross agreed. “They are the enemy!”

The Baldies from the ancient spaceships, that wholly alien race with whom he had once fought a desperate encounter on the edge of an unnamed sea in the far past of his own world. The galactic voyagers were here⁠—and in active, if secret, conflict with the natives!