The sound was heart-wrenching. She was terrified.

I had to stop short as Megan immediately took two quick steps toward me and plunged through the next doorway. This one had a poster of a band of young men on it I didn’t recognize. One looked rebellious and sullen, one wacky and lighthearted, one sober and stable, and one handsomely vogue. Another Monkees reincarnation, basically.

I went to the door and saw Megan, with her clinging moppet, sit down on the bed and start gently shaking the shoulder of a girl with her mother’s hair, presumably Kat. She was screaming, too, but she broke out of it a moment later, the instant her eyes fluttered open.

The moppet, presumably Tamara, stopped screaming, too, and at exactly the same time. Then they both burst into less-hysterical tears and clung to their mother.

Megan’s face was anguished, but her voice and her hands were gentle as she touched them, spoke to them, reassured them. If she was an empath as sensitive as her file and her reaction to my test suggested, then she had to be in terrible psychic pain. She pushed enough of it aside to be there for her kids, though.

“Dammit,” I heard Yardly breathe from the hall behind me. It was a tired oath.

“Interesting,” I said. “Excuse me.”

I turned and paced down the hallway to the younger child’s room, and nearly tripped over a dark-haired child, a boy who might have been eight. He was wearing underwear and a T-shirt with a cartoon Jedi Knight on it, which raised my opinion of his mother immediately. The kid’s eyes weren’t even open, and he raised his arms blindly.

I picked him up, and carried him with me into the little bedroom.

It wasn’t large-nothing about Megan’s house was. One of the beds was pink and festooned with the same three big-eyed girls. The other was surrounded in the plastic shell of a Star Wars landspeeder. I plopped the young Jedi back into it, and he promptly curled into a ball and went to sleep.