Saying all that out loud… it made him feel like a loon. Maybe he had a fever or something.

Ray sat down across from Max and studied his face intensely. "Is this the first time anything like this has happened?" he asked.

"On the way here something weird happened, too. All the sounds got incredibly loud. I thought my eardrums were going to explode. And then it just stopped. Everything sounded normal again," Max told him. He lowered his voice. "I thought at first maybe it was an alien thing. But maybe it's-"

"You thought right," Ray jumped in. "Have you had any spells of extreme fatigue?"

"Uh, I guess, sort of. Once or twice," Max admitted, thinking back over the past few weeks. He hadn't really thought anything about those spells.

Ray nodded, his expression grave. "You've just described the first stage of the akino."

"And that would be?" Max asked. He struggled to stay calm and rational, even though there was something in Ray's tone that made Max's anxiety level spike. Not to mention the streaks of sickly yellow invading the blue-and-green whorls of Ray's aura.

"Our race has a… collective consciousness," Ray explained. "It's like a psychic Internet. All the knowledge, all the life experience, all the emotions of all of our people are there in the consciousness. When a young person reaches maturity, he or she is able to make the connection to the consciousness for the first time. This rite of passage is called the akino. The physical symptoms you've experienced-the bursts of heightened sensation, the fatigue-are signals that it is time for you to make your connection."

Max breathed a sigh of relief. "So, it's a good thing, right?" Actually it sounded more than good. It sounded awesome. The collective consciousness would hold the answer to every question Max had about his home planet, his people.