Billy was sure that the now overtly hostile emotion of the crowd was being intensified somehow by an outside force, and that this force was centered somewhere within that small group of elderly councilors who stood by the throne. Whenever he tried to look directly at each member of that group, one of them always seemed to slide right out of his peripheral vision.

"Be scientific about this," he remonstrated to himself. "Yeah, right, just like you've been scientific ever since you were first teleported out of the Juice Bar into a world of morphers and zords and multi-transdimensional beings."

He looked towards Jason, who was now armed with the two curved daggers, twirling them around by the leather loops over his wrists. The whole crowd of soldiers began to press inward toward their lone opponent. The torches were unlit, but the room seemed smoky, hazy, oppressive.

"Jason can't defend against all of them. I've got to do something to help him," Billy thought, frustrated with his physical weakness from being sick, and with what seemed to be a fuzziness in his head not connected to his illness. "I feel like I'm almost under a spell, like the time Rita made me hand over the Dragon Dagger to Goldar."

"That's it," he realized. "If there is an evil spell at work here, maybe this haze has something to do with it. For starters, let's see if fresh air can have any effect."

As the soldiers moved inward, Billy began to work his way towards the barred door. He found the captain moving with him.

"We've got to get the door open," Billy said to the man. Strange how much he looks like Bulk, he thought.

The captain had a most puzzled expression on his face. "I know there is a foul stench in here, yet I can not smell anything."

They reached the door without being challenged. Even the torch guards had joined the seemingly single-minded throng josting towards Jason.

Billy and the captain lifted up the heavy log and threw wide the door. The cool air of the evening swooshed into the building like cold water on a hot face. The crowd of soldiers stopped their ominous inward advance, and then began to swarm around aimlessly.

It was late afternoon, and the suns were setting. The door faced westward directly towards where the solar disks were visible just above the treetops on the horizon. The red companion was positioned in its orbit so it appeared right between the two yellow stars. An orangish red ray of light blazed in, hitting Lord Maxim full in the face. He had changed from his earlier languid pose on the throne to an erect posture where he sat eagerly forward, hands on knees, as he watched the fight so heavily handicapped against Jason.

Billy tumbled out the door when it opened and fell to the ground, gasping and wheezing from the effort to lift the bar. The blanket slid off his shoulders as two soldiers pulled him up and dragged him back inside, through the milling crowd. This time the door was closed but not barred. The torches within were being lit.

The soldiers dropped Billy next to Jason, who was kneeling before the throne, seated back on his heels, hands on his knees, shaking his head as if he were woozy.

Billy saw blood dripping from a small cut on Jason's head, just above his right ear. Someone had managed to give Jason a serious whack. "Jase, you okay?" he asked quietly.

"Horrible headache," Jason mumbled, like he was still trying to regain his wits.

Lord Maxim was in a snit. When the suns' light had struck him, he had thrown his hands up to protect his face. Now he was stalking back and forth in front of the throne.

"How dare you let the rays of the star of death shine upon me at close of day!" he raged at Billy. "Just who do you think you are?"

Billy suspected that saying anything would only upset the apparently irrational Lord Maxim even more, especially any reasonable comment concerning the orientation of the door and the throne, not to mention that speaking always seemed to set Billy coughing. He bowed his head and kept silent.

Maxim stopped his pacing and stood before the two kneeling figures. "I am not impressed. Toss them in the pit," he pronounced.

Billy put up no resistance as the soldiers yanked him up by the shoulders again; indeed, he had no strength to resist.

Jason started to struggle against the soldiers grasping his arms, then stopped abruptly. A soldier had aimed a spearpoint directly at Billy's chest, and said succinctly to Jason, "You fight, he dies."

A dozen soldiers marched the two prisoners out of the door. Lord Maxim very deliberately stepped to one side of the throne so that the waning sunlight did not directly strike him when the door was opened. They marched about two hundred yards to a small clearing ringed by young trees. During the march, Billy kept stumbling. Jason caught him and helped him stay on his feet.

In the center of the clearing was a roughly circular opening in the ground slightly more than eight feet in diameter with a grating covering it.

One soldier opened a small square barred gate in the center of the grating, and another pushed Billy in. Billy dropped about eighteen feet, somehow landing on his feet. Jason started to struggle again. But, with a dozen spears ready to prod him, he knew he did not have much of a chance. His head throbbed so he could not think straight anyway. He dropped into the pit, hoping that Billy was not in his direct line of flight.

Billy apparently had the same thought, for he had pressed himself back up against the curved wall, which was cold, damp, and faintly luminous. After Jason landed, none too gracefully, Billy took a step away from the wall and turned to examine it. "Phosphorus must be causing the illumination. This pit, well, or oubliette appears to have been drilled by mechanical means," he observed in his typical manner, and then promptly started coughing.

Jason's head was finally beginning to clear from the blow it had taken. He looked up as the gate clanged shut. "We've got to get out of here," he said.

Billy nodded in agreement as he ripped a strip of cloth from the hem of his jacket and had Jason lean over so he could tie it around Jason's head like a ninja headband to cover the cut. "Not too deep, clotting already," he rasped reassuringly, though Billy wished he had something to clean it to prevent infection.

Jason straightened up and started checking the smooth wall for any possible handholds. He stopped abruptly, and called to Billy with a sense of bafflement in his tone, "Oubliette. Oubliette? Where DO you come up with stuff like that?"

"Jim Henson movie, Labyrinth," Billy replied absently, as he circled the other side of the pit also looking for climbing holds.

Jason shook his head in wonder at Billy's eclectic sources of reference. He remembered the movie now. It was one of Emily's favorites, with a plot about a girl on a quest after her baby brother who was stolen by goblins. Emily was a sucker for fantasy adventure videos, and Jason was a sucker for anything that let him sit on the couch for a couple of hours with his arm around her shoulders.

Jason gave a little sigh. Watching fantasy adventures on video while snuggling with your girlfriend was a whole lot more comfortable and fun compared to living them, especially when your head was aching as badly as his did.

"Too bad we don't have any helping hands here, either going up or down. Wonder if I can do a full body chimney-climb?" Jason pondered aloud.

But even with his body stretched out full length, the diameter of the pit was far too wide for Jason to wedge his feet against one side and his hands against the other and push himself up that way.

"It gets slightly wider too, as you go up. What if we try back to back?" Billy suggested.

"You got the strength?" Jason asked.

"Anything to get us out of here," Billy replied, but added a small cough to his comment.

Even with their elbows intertwined and legs stretched out in opposite directions, the diameter of the pit was still just too far across to wedge their bodies for such a climb. Jason could feel Billy shivering as they disentangled themselves from that effort.

"There has to be another way," said Jason. And soon, he added to himself. If he was freezing, the cold had to be really bothering Billy.

Billy peered upwards. Through the wide openings in the grate, he could see the dark blue of the sky being pricked by the bright pinpoints of the early evening stars.

"How far do you think you can push me up on your hands?" Billy asked Jason, as he started unlacing his leather boots. He removed his jacket too, leaving only a thin pale sleeveless undershirt covering his chest, and goosebumps covering his arms.

"Far enough," Jason replied. He squatted slightly, raising his arms backwards over his head, crossing each one over to the opposite shoulder.

Billy grasped Jason's forearms and scrambled up Jason's back to stand on his friend's shoulders, gracefully stretching out his arms to balance himself.

Jason carefully stood upright, sliding his hands down from where he had been supporting Billy's calves to cup his hands under Billy's feet positioned on his shoulders.

"Ready?" Jason called. Billy did not reply because he did not want to start coughing. But, from the tenseness of the muscles in the feet that Jason held in his hands, he sensed that Billy was set.

"On the count of three. One, two, three," Jason shoved his arms straight up. Billy pushed against Jason's upward thrust and leaped, swinging his arms straight up towards the grate. But their efforts did not quite get him far enough.

Somehow, when Billy came back down, he managed to land upright on Jason's shoulders. Jason grabbed Billy's legs and steadied him.

"How far?" Jason asked.

"Just a little further. Let's try again," Billy rasped heavily.

"Just a moment," Jason said. He took a deep breath. Allowing his muscles to relax and balancing his friend on his broad shoulders, he tried to reach deep inside himself to tap that force within to give him the strength needed to succeed.

Jason bent his knees slightly. "Ready? Okay, one, two, three!" He tossed Billy heavenward.

Billy reached up and grabbed onto the bars of the gate. He hung on with both hands. Slowly, he began bending his body until his torso was at a right angle to his thighs. He kept his legs together and straight with toes pointed, as he pulled them upwards in an attempt to lodge his feet in openings in the grating.

His toes were almost level with his head when, "no-o-o!" Billy cried out suddenly, as he lost his handholds, first the right hand, than the left. He dropped like a stone on Jason, who had tried to spot him. Together they collapsed onto the stone floor.

Shaking from the cold and from his efforts, Billy curled and uncurled on the bare floor. His limbs thrashed wildly as he gasped for breath, coughing, wheezing, and gagging. Jason sat up and grabbed for Billy's jacket. He wrapped it tightly around his friend and cradled him in his arms.

"I'm sorry, Jase, my hands, so cold, I'm so cold," Billy rambled. Billy may have felt cold, but Jason could feel the heat of the fever rampaging through his friend's body, inadvertantly warming his own.

"I guess I always knew it would end this way, that I just would not be able to pull it off one last time, no deus ex the Billy machina this time," Billy ranted.

"Sh, sh," Jason tried to calm him. "It's all right, you tried your best."

"You don't understand. I failed, again. The others always acted as if I were a miracle worker, as if I would always be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat at the last moment. But I can't. I didn't. I couldn't. They were always depending on me. There were so many times they didn't know about, that I would try something that didn't work. Every device I constructed to hydrate the Aquitian Rangers, Zedd found a way to destroy. And then, then the Command Center was destroyed. I should have prevented that. And once I nearly got Kat killed -- Rita was able to capture her because one of my not-so-clever devices failed."

"Billy, we all knew there were risks," Jason said reassuringly. "When you're fighting as a Ranger, nothing is for sure. You've got to be willing to take chances, even if you mess up now and then."

"You don't understand. The worst, the worst thing, is that I should never have come back from Aquitar, from that first visit. But I thought, I thought I would be a Ranger again. That I could call upon the Power. That somehow I, smarty-pants little Billy, could find a way to access the Zeo crystal. I should have known better, but I was greedy, too greedy. To morph again, to call upon my own zord, to feel the Power within my body, and to have such force available at my command was too great a temptation. I succumbed to selfishness. I shouldn't have tried. I'm a fraud." Billy was wheezing out every breath, but he could not seem to stop his desperate monologue. It was almost as if he were struggling against some kind of mental attack.

"When I grasped Trey's staff, every molecule in my body started screaming and repulsing the Gold Ranger Power. And then, then to watch you come in and receive what should have been mine.... it wasn't fair."

"No, it wasn't," Jason agreed, rocking Billy's body in his arms, and smoothing his friend's tangled sweaty hair back from his hot forehead. "But you did stay, Billy, you stayed and helped the team. We couldn't have defeated Mondo without you. That's not being selfish. And all those times before, back to the very beginning. You were so young, younger than any of us, and you had to grow up so fast. The decisions you made, the things you did. If you had never tried, never taken the chances you did, how would you have known what you were capable of? The opportunity was there -- you had to go for it -- even knowing there were risks. But you are right, it wasn't fair for me to receive the Gold Ranger Power instead of you."

"No, no, that's not what I mean by fairness." Billy rattled out painfully. "I wasn't fair to me, I wasn't truthful to me. I lied to the one person you must not, can not, lie to -- myself."

"Are any of us really truthful to ourselves?" Jason asked, more to himself than to Billy. He sat cross-legged holding his friend. Rocking back and forth on the floor in the luminous cold, he remembered back to when he had first noticed Billy.

Jason would observe the shy boy with the square thick glasses, always the youngest and smartest in any class, become so excited about some topic, eagerly raising his hand to ask a question or to supply additional data, oblivious for the moment to everything but finding out information, wanting to share what he knew, to find out what someone else knew about something. Again and again, his open and honest enthusiasm would be squelched or ridiculed by the cynical facade of people who could not admit to the flaw of curiosity, to the fact that they did NOT know everything, and to the truth that learning is a joy. Despite the mean and hurtful remarks, the sarcasm directed at him, making him shyly duck his head, Billy would not give up. He would return to tackle whatever the subject was with unbridled tenacity until he understood it.

Tenacity. Jason smiled to himself. That was a personality trait he understood all too well, though people more often ascribed it to him as "stubbornness."

But there was something more about Billy....

Long before their current predicament, Jason had more than once meditated on the reason he, Zack, Trini, and Kim had been initially picked by Zordon. Given all his talents, Billy's selection seemed to Jason to have been a foregone conclusion.

"Teenagers with attitude," that's what Alpha had told him had been the requirement for recruitment. But just what kind of attitude? Had the choice of the others been predicated on their emotional proximity to Billy; how protective Jason and the others felt about Billy, even while they were in awe of his intelligence? Jason hoped that each of them had been selected because of their own special qualities. And yet, why them? Why this particular group of friends? Was it because Zordon had noted such a unique individual in their midst? Because there was so much more to Billy than just his incredible mental abilities. He displayed such a willingness to do what was right and necessary and required.

He had talked with Kat and Tommy about this very subject not long ago, shortly after Billy left for Aquitar. They were discussing the time when the Rangers had been reversed in age. Kat had described to Jason about how Billy, Powerless and without his coin, the only Ranger to regain his true age, got set to tackle by himself the monster that Zedd had created out of Billy's device to reverse the aging process. This highly unequal confrontation was prevented only by Alpha suddenly teleporting the young Rangers and Billy to the Command Center.

Then when the Command Center blew up, Kat observed, Billy had felt the loss of Zordon and the Power coins more deeply than any of them, for he had been a Power Ranger the longest, had worked closely with Alpha, had known intimately the workings of the Command Center. Time after time, thanks to his knowledge and abilities, he had come up with an invention or suggestion that enabled them to counter first Rita, and then Zedd.

As remarkable as it had all been, and that he knew that to be so, Billy had confided to Kat that he felt it wasn't enough, that somehow with the destruction of the Command Center, he had let all of them down. And while he knew it was not true, Kat had noted, yet Billy still felt a tremendous sense of inadequacy that kept driving him to work even harder for the team.

If only he had recognized sooner the depth of Billy's feelings, Jason remembered thinking, feeling a little stab of guilt that perhaps he had been too wrapped up in his own selfish pleasure at receiving the Gold Ranger Power.

But, Jason now wondered, did Billy really still feel such inadequacy so deeply after all this time? Or was this feeling being intensified somehow by something else, something evil, something that preyed upon emotions, manipulating them, as he felt his own emotions had been manipulated during that recent "demonstration" for Lord Maxim? Was that "something" focusing particularly on Billy now because of his weakened and ill state?

Jason rocked back and forth on the chill stone floor, holding his friend. He tried to rub some human warmth into Billy's feet as he laced his friend's boots back on.

"No, Billy," he murmured softly, "I don't believe you could really lie to yourself even if you tried." Then he recalled something else from that earlier conversation concerning Billy and the young Rangers that had been said, somewhat surprisingly, by Tommy.

Good old solid-as-a-rock absent-minded Tommy, who had so often fought his own personal demons of self-worthiness and self-esteem, the chinks through which Rita would cast spells over him. Sometimes, Jason had wondered affectionately, if Tommy would run right into a brick wall if it wasn't pointed out to him that it stood in his way, especially if he was running late, as he typically was. On the other hand, there was no one, no one in this universe or any other, whom Jason felt was more determined to do the right thing than Tommy was, and to help guide others to do the same. Jason's certainty of that was why he had felt that the team had been given the best possible leadership when Tommy was given the Power of the White Ranger by Zordon, the act which allowed Jason the freedom to accept the opportunity of going to Geneva for the peace conference.

It was blinders-on Tommy who had so perceptively added to the conversation with Jason and Kat that even more illustrative of Billy's nature was that his ninjetti spirit guide was the wolf, strong and cunning and smart, true; but loyal, too, committing to a mate for life and displaying tremendous fealty to its pack.

How Jason had wished he had experienced the ninjetti power for himself, as he had watch Tommy smile introspectively while describing Billy watching protectively over the young Rangers as if they were wolf cubs. No one member of the team was any less vital than any other, but Billy had the faithful heart of the wolf, Tommy had declared fervently, and if there was a heart to the team that was the Power Rangers, Tommy believed that it beat forever true blue.

"And I've got to keep this true heart beating somehow," Jason thought. "You've got to survive. And now I'm being the selfish one, Billy, for I have a promise to keep to Tommy, and I'm not going to let him down ever again." He didn't say this out loud, for his continuous rocking had seemed to settle Billy.

"The Power protect you, the Power protect you," he began to chant in a low slow voice, wondering if the mantra was for himself, for Billy, or against whatever alien evil it was that ailed and bedeviled this poor world.

He tapped on his communicator. It was still unresponsive. No deus ex machina there either, he thought, as he chanted and rocked his feverish friend on his lap.

Jason didn't know for how long he chanted, but the sound of the grating's gate opening stopped him. The end of a long rope slithered down, and something else fell as well. Medgwin's jacket landed on the floor next to him. Jason looked up to see several figures silhouetted against the brilliantly starlit sky.

"Jaysen of Erth, climb up and let's talk," whispered the captain's voice.

"I can't leave my friend," Jason called up.

"This is your only chance," the captain replied in a warning tone.

Jason gently laid Billy down on the stone floor, wrapping the second jacket around him. Billy curled up into a ball and appeared only semi-conscious. Jason was shivering from the cold as well, but the exertion of pulling himself up the rope by his arms warmed him a little.

"Well?" he asked bluntly, as he hopped off the grating and stood facing the captain.

"Come, serve with me," the captain offered. "I could use a man like you, and I would learn those moves of yours."

"You would have me answer honestly under such duress?" Jason asked. He was picking up on Zairian phraseology very rapidly. A coughing fit by Billy could be clearly heard in the night air.

The captain studied Jason's features in the bright starlight. He sighed his by now familiar sigh of a man reluctantly trying to do what is right, and ordered two of his men to fetch a ladder.

He turned back to Jason. "You should know before you answer that I am considered very much persona non grata around here. We will be leaving immediately, and perhaps not be back for a long time, as my troop has been ordered to be stationed in the mountains to the north."

"And if I choose not to go?" Jason asked.

"Your options are very limited," replied the captain, nodding towards the pit.

Jason looked up at the sky dotted with the light of so many stars. "Could there be a reason why we were swept here," he pondered to himself. "Beyond the whimsy of Dialeteker; that perhaps we were drawn here to accomplish something? Well, if rational, logical Billy can trust his intuition, then whacked over the head Jason can trust his."

Aloud he said, "I give you my word that I will go with you. But, please, is there some help we can get for my friend?"

The narrow ladder had arrived, along with a stretcher carried by two more soldiers. They climbed down and retrieved Billy by tying him onto the stretcher and ferrying him back up the ladder. He only mumbled and moved restlessly against the restraints when Jason shook his shoulder to rouse him.

"I am sending your friend somewhere where they will care for him and, I hope, where he will remain unnoticed by Lord Maxim," the captain said, "but he is very, very ill. Now, please follow me."

Jason still stood for a moment longer, watching as Billy was carried away on the stretcher. The stretcher bearers had disappeared from sight when Jason noticed starlight glinting off a small squarish object in the dirt. He stooped, and picked up the force field generator device, which must have fallen out of the pocket of Billy's jacket. Jason sighed as he slipped it into his own back jean pocket. He was sending Billy -- sick, unconscious, unprotected -- off alone into the unknown.

"I am not going home without you. I am not," he vowed, fists clenched at his side, as he looked up at the countless stars. Then he turned to follow the captain, walking away in the opposite direction from the one that Billy had traveled.

*****