Second Wave by Anne McCaffrey

said.
    “I think I do,” Narhii told her. “I’ve seen the Friends do it. I think I even know how to tell where to go. And Hruffli, if I chose a wrong time and we landed among monsters, I would never leave you to fight them. I appreciate your wanting to defend me, but you have family here and mine is there. I would not feel right if you come with me and then I’d never know if you safely returned to this time again.”
    “Couldn’t be that much to it,” the old stallion grumbled. But he nosed her neck, and she felt his relief in his touch. He was brave, he was willing, but he did not truly wish to leave.
    She knew all about the timer, however. There was no need to involve him or the others. It looked very easy when she saw the Friends use it, but she had never had reason to try until now because she had not known before that she had family. All she had to do was find them.
    There was another problem, she realized, once she left the Others and returned to her little cell off the laboratory. They could read her thoughts, but she couldn’t read theirs. They would know what she was planning. Or would they?
    They weren’t ever interested in what she wanted to think about, only in what they wanted her to think about. Otherwise, they were preoccupied with their own much more important concerns. She didn’t think she’d be able to hide the revelation the Others had given her, but unlike everyone else, she wasn’t concerned about the mating aspects of finding her people. She only wanted to be among others like her, to belong. Still, it would be best if she could make her move before the next interrogation.
    If only she could read their minds, too! Then she’d know exactly how to time travel and where to find her people. Why was it she could understand the thought-talk of the Others and not that of the Friends? Why couldn’t the probing work two ways? It was so unfair!
    Then, looking up at the ceiling, she saw something looking back. An eye. A viewer that had never been there before, in the one space that they had given her to be her own. She groaned. Why was she surprised? But inside her anger began to burn. The more they tried to see her, the more they erased her. And she did not want to be erased, especially when she felt for the first time that she might be somehow enlarged when others like her taught her more about what she was, why she was, other than an object of study for the curiosity of the Friends.
    She leaped from her cot and charged to her closed door, which she could not lock from the inside. As she stormed into the empty laboratory, looking for someone to complain to, not that it would do any good, she was startled to hear voices.
    Not hear with her ears, exactly, but hear in the way she heard the Friends. The voices were inside her head, muttering and murmuring, even counting sometimes. She walked through the lab to the outer chamber where the great skein of water and energy twisted upward through the ceiling. She had observed enough to know that this was the power generator of the time device, and that it pierced the entire building and spread outward to catch the rains and downward, thrusting out into all of the waterways of the world.
    Why? she wondered, and received a distracted answer. “Because time and water flow, of course.” Four technicians tended the timer, calibrating, tabulating, charting, and making adjustments she didn’t understand.
    The person who answered her seemed to think that her question came from one of his colleagues. “Interesting,” she thought, unconsciously mimicking the response she often received from Akasa or Odus.
    That, too, was taken to be the comment of one of the time technicians.
    When they did see her, they ignored her without thinking about it. She had been among them since she was a baby. Unaccustomed to children, for the Friends did not seem to have any, they assumed she was as stupid and harmless now as she had been as a baby. During her toddler period, when