Winterlong

Part One: The Boy in the Tree

Our heart stops .

I AM WITHIN HER , a cerebral shadow. Distant canyons where spectral lightning flashes: neurons firing as I tap in to the heart of the poet, the dark core where desire and horror fuse and Morgan turns ever and again to stare out a bus window. The darkness clears. I taste for an instant the metal bile that signals the beginning of therapy. Then I’m gone.

I’m sitting on the autobus, the last seat where you can catch the bumps on the crumbling highway if you’re going fast enough. Through the open windows a rush of spring air tangles my hair. Later I will smell apple blossoms in my auburn braids. Now I smell sour milk where Ronnie Abrams spilled his ration yesterday.

“Move over, Yates!” Ronnie caroms off the seat opposite, rams his leg into mine, and flies back to pound his brother. From the front the driver yells, “Shut up!” vainly trying to silence forty-odd singing children.

On top of Old Smoky

All covered with blood

I shot my poor teacher

With a forty-four slug …

Ronnie grins at me, eyes glinting, then pops me right on the chin with a spitball. I stick my fingers in my ears and huddle closer to the window.

Met her at the door

With my trusty forty-four

Now she don’t teach no more.

The autobus pulls into town and slows, stops behind a truck carrying soldiers, janissaries of the last Ascension. I press my face against the cracked window, shoving my glasses until lens kisses glass and I can see clearly to the street below. A young woman in rags is standing on the curb holding a baby wrapped in a dirty pink blanket. At her ankles wriggles a dog, an emaciated puppy with whiptail and ears flopping as he nips at her bare feet. I tap at the window, trying to get the dog to look at me. In front of the bus two men in faded yellow uniforms clamber from the truck and start arguing. The woman screws up her face and says something to the men, moving her lips so I know she’s mad. The dog lunges at her ankles again and she kicks it gently, so that it dances along the curb. The soldiers glance at her, see the autobus waiting, and climb back into the truck. I hear the whoosh of releasing brakes. The autobus lurches forward and my glasses bang into the window. The rear wheels grind up onto the curb.

The dog barks and leaps onto the woman. Apple blossoms drift from a tree behind her as she draws up her arms in alarm, and, as I settle my glasses onto my nose and stare, she drops the baby beneath the wheels of the bus.

Retching, I strive to pull Morgan away, turn her head from the window. A fine spray etches bright petals on the glass and her plastic lenses. My neck aches as I try to turn toward the inside of the autobus and efface forever that silent rain. But I cannot move. She is too strong. She will not look away.

I am clawing at the restraining ropes. The Aide pulls the wires from my head while inches away Morgan Yates screams. I hear the hiss and soft pump of velvet thoughts into her periaqueductual gray area. The link is severed.

I sat up as they wheeled her into the next room. Morgan’s screams abruptly stilled as the endorphins kicked in and her head flopped to one side of the gurney. For an instant the Aide Justice turned and stared at me as he slid Morgan through the door. He would not catch my eyes.

None of them will.

Through the glass panel I watched Emma Harrow hurry from another lab. She bent over Morgan and pulled the wires from between white braids still rusted with coppery streaks. Beside her the Aide Justice looked worried. Other doctors, all with strained faces, slipped from adjoining rooms and blocked my view.

When I was sure they’d forgotten me I dug out a cigarette—traded from Anna that morning for my dosage of phenothiazine—and lit up. I tapped the ashes into my shoe and blew smoke into a ventilation shaft. I knew Morgan wouldn’t make it. I could usually tell, but even Dr. Harrow didn’t listen to me this time. Morgan Yates was too important: one of the few living writers whose works were still sanctioned by the Ascendants.

“She will crack,” I told Dr. Harrow after reading Morgan’s profile. Seven poetry collections and two authorized Manifestos published during the last insurrection; an historical novel detailing the horrors of the First Ascension’s century-long Night; a dramatic recreation of the biblioclasm, performed before the new Ascendant Governors passed the Dialectic Malediction. Since then, recurrent nightmares revolving around a childhood trauma in the janissary creche, sadistic sexual behavior, and a pathological fear of dogs. Nothing extraordinary; but I knew she wouldn’t make it.

“How do you know?”

I shrugged. “She’s too strong.”

Dr. Harrow stared at me, pinching her lower lip. She wasn’t afraid of my eyes. “What if it works,” she mused, and tugged thoughtfully at her cropped gray bangs. “She says she hasn’t written in three years, because of this. She’s afraid they’ll revoke her publishing sanction.”

I yawned. “Maybe it will work. But she won’t let me take it away. She won’t let anyone take it.”

I was right. If Dr. Harrow hadn’t been so eager for the chance to reclaim one of the damned and her own reputation, she’d have known too. Psychotics, autists, Ascendant artists of the lesser rank: these could be altered by empatherapy. I’d siphoned off their sicknesses and night terrors, inhaled phobias like giddy ethers that set me giggling for days afterward. But the big ones—those whose madnesses were as carefully cultivated as the brain chemicals that allowed me and others like me to tap in to them—they were immune. They clung to their madnesses with the fever of true addiction. Even the dangers inherent to empatherapy weren’t enough: they couldn‘t let go.

Dr. Harrow glanced up from the next room and frowned when she saw my cigarette. I stubbed it out in my shoe and slid my foot back in, wincing at the prick of heat beneath my sole.

She slipped out of the emergency lab. Sighing, she leaned against the glass and looked at me.

“Was it bad, Wendy?”

I picked a fleck of tobacco from my lip. “Pretty bad.” I had a rush recalling Morgan wailing as she stood at the window. For a moment I had to shut my eyes, riding that wave until my heart slowed and I looked up grinning into Dr. Harrow’s compressed smile.

“Pretty good, you mean.” Her tight mouth never showed the disdain or revulsion of the others. Only a little dismay, some sick pride perhaps in the beautiful thing she’d soldered together from an autistic girl and several ounces of precious glittering chemicals.

“Well …”She sighed and walked to her desk. “You can start on this.” She tossed me a blank report and returned to the emergency lab. I settled back on my cot and stared at the sheet.

NAME & NUMBER : Wendy Wanders, Subject 117

Neurologically augmented empath approved for emotive engram therapy.

The pages blurred. I gripped the edge of my cot. Nausea exploded inside me, a fiery pressure building inside my head until I bowed to crack my forehead against the table edge, again and again, stammering for help until with a shout Dr. Harrow’s Aide ran to me and slapped an ampule to my neck. He stood above me until the drug took effect, his hands poised to catch me if I began head-banging again. After several minutes I breathed deeply and stared at the wall, then reported on my unsuccessful session with the poet.

That evening I walked to the riverside. A trio of retrofitted security sculls puttered down the river, colored yolk-yellow like dirty foam upon the water. I had always assumed the sculls kept watch over those of us at HEL ; but the Aide Justice had told me that their true business lay across the river, within the overgrown alleys and pleasure gardens of the dying City of Trees.

“Smugglers,” he had said, tugging at the bronze ear-cuffs that marked his rank and credit level. “The Ascendants trade with the City Botanists for opium and rare herbs. In return they give them precious metals and resins. And sometimes their generosity is overwhelming, and they leave us dying from some new plague.”

A tiny figure on one of the sculls raised an arm to wave at me. I waved back as the boat skidded across the water. Then I turned and wandered along the riverwalk, past rotting oak benches and the ruins of glass buildings, watching the sun sink through argent thunderheads.

A single remaining service ziggurat towered above the walk. It shadowed the charred ruins of a refugee complex built during the brief years of the Second Ascension. That was when there were still refugees and survivors, before the Governors began to fight the starveling rebels with the first generation of mutagens.

Or so the Aide Justice had said. He was from the City, and knew many strange things, although he spoke little of his people there.

“Do you miss them?” I asked him once. We were awaiting the results of a’ scan to determine if a woman I had been treating showed evidence of schizothymia.

He shook his head, then smiled ruefully and nodded. “Yes, of course I do,” he said. “But they are simple people, it’s not like here.…”

I could tell from his expression that he was a little ashamed of them. The idea excited me: shame was not an emotion I tapped often at the Human Engineering Laboratory.

“Are they smugglers?” I asked.

Justice laughed. “I guess some of them are.”

He told me about the City then, a history different from the one given us by Dr. Harrow and the sanctioned educational programs of the Fourth Ascension. Because at HEL we learned that after the Long Night of the First Ascension the abandoned capital had been resettled, set up as an outpost where a handful of researchers and soldiers stood guard over the Museums and Archives and Libraries of the fallen nation. But with the Second Ascension the City was forgotten. Those who had commanded the City’s few residents were killed or exiled to the Balkhash Commonwealth (even then its vast steppes and mountains saw the deaths of more prisoners than there were now people in the world). And those who lived in the City were forgotten, abandoned as the City itself had been after the First Ascension exterminated its inhabitants. They were not worth capturing or remanding, the few hundred researchers and soldiers and the prostitutes who had followed them to the City by the river. Their descendants were squatters now, living in the ruins of the capital, kept alive by cannibal rites and what they could wrest from the contaminated earth.

But the Aide Justice spoke with respect of the Curators. His own people he called the Children of the Magdalene. Only the lazars were to be feared, those who fell victim to the viral strikes of the rebels and the guerrillas of the Balkhash Commonwealth. Lazars and the geneslaves who haunted the forests and wastelands.

“It is beautiful, Wendy: even the ruins are beautiful, and the poisoned forest …”

But we had been interrupted then by Dr. Harrow, calling Justice to help her initialize the link between myself and another patient.

The riverwalk’s crumbling benches gave way to airy filigrees of rusted iron. At one of these tables I saw someone from the Human Engineering Laboratory.

“Anna or Andrew?” I called. By the time I was close enough for her to hear, I knew it was Anna this time, peacock feathers and long blue macaw quills studding the soft raised nodes on her shaven temples.

“Wendy.” She gestured dreamily at a concrete bench. “Sit.”

I settled beside her, tweaking a cobalt plume, and wished I’d worn the fiery cock-of-the-rock quills she’d given me last spring. Anna was stunning, always: brown eyes brilliant with octine, small breasts tight against her tuxedo shirt. She was the only one of the other empties I spoke much with, although she beat me at faro and Andrew had once broken my tooth in an amphetamine rage. A saucer scattered with broken candicaine straws sat before her. Beside it a fluted parfait glass held several unbroken pipettes. I did one and settled back, grinning.

“You had that woman today,” Anna hissed into my ear. Her rasping voice made me shiver with delight. “The poet. I think I’m furious.”

I shrugged. “Luck of the draw.”

“How was she?” She blinked and I watched golden dust powder the air between us. “Was she good, Wendy?” She stroked my thigh and I giggled.

“Great. She was great.” I lowered my eyes and squinted until the table disappeared into the steel rim of an autobus seat.

“Let me see.” Her whisper the sigh of air brakes. “Wendy—”

The rush was too good to stop. I let her pull me forward until my cheek grazed hers and I felt her mouth against mine. I tasted her saliva, the chemical bite of candicaine: then bile and summer air and exhaust.…

Too fast. I jerked my head up, choking as I pulled away from Anna. She stared at me with huge blank eyes.

“Ch-c-c-,” she gasped, spittle flying into the parfait glass. I swore and grabbed her chin, held her face close to mine.

“Anna,” I said loudly. “Anna, it’s Wendy—”

“Ahhh.” Her eyes focused and she drew back. “Wendy. Good stuff.” She licked her lips, tongue a little loose from the hit so that she drooled. I grimaced.

“More, Wendy …”

“Not now.” I grabbed two more straws and cracked one. “I have a follow-up with her tomorrow morning. I have to go.”

She nodded. I flicked a napkin at her. “Wipe your mouth, Anna. I’ll tell Harrow I saw you so she won’t worry.”

“Goodbye, Wendy.” A server arrived as I left, its crooked wheels grating against the broken concrete as it listed toward the table. I glimpsed myself reflected in its blank black face, and hurried from the patio as behind me Anna ordered more straws.

I recall nothing before Dr. Harrow. The drugs they gave me—massive overdoses for a three-year-old—burned those memories as well as scorched every neural branch that might have helped me climb to feel the sun as other people do. But the drugs stopped the thrashing, the head-banging, the screaming. And slowly, other drugs rived through my tangled axons and forged new pathways. A few months and I could see again. A few more and my fingers moved. The wires that had stilled my screams made me scream once more, and, finally, exploded a neural dam so that a year later I began to speak. By then the Ascendant funding poured through other conduits, scarcely less complex than my own, and led as well to the knot of electrodes in my brain.

In the early stages of her work, shortly after I arrived at HEL , Dr. Harrow attempted a series of neuroelectrical implants between the two of us. It was an unsuccessful effort to reverse the damage done by the biochemicals. Seven children died before the minimum dosage was determined: enough to change the neural pattern behind autistic behavior; not enough to allow the patient to develop her own emotional responses to subsequent internal or external stimuli. I still have scars from the implants: fleshy nodes like tiny ears trying to sprout from my temples.

At first we lived well. Then the Governors decided this research might lead to other things, the promise of a new technology as radical and lethal as that which had first loosed the mutagens upon the countryside nearly two centuries before. As more empaths were developed and more Ascendant funds channeled from the provisional capital, we lived extravagantly. Dr. Harrow believed that exposure to sensation might eventually pattern true emotions in her affectively neutered charges. So the Human Engineering Laboratory moved from its quarters in a dark and freezing fouga hangar to the vast abandoned Linden Glory estate outside the ruins of the ancient City.

Ascendant neurologists moved into the paneled bedrooms. Psychobotanists imported from the momentarily United Provinces tilled the ragged formal gardens and developed new strains of oleander within bell-shaped greenhouses. Empties moved into bungalows where valets and chefs once slept.

In an earlier century Lawrence Linden had been a patron of the arts. Autographed copies of Joyce and Stein and the lost Crowley manuscripts graced the Linden Glory libraries. We had a minor Botticelli, two frayed Rothkos, and many Raphaels; the famed pre-Columbian collection for which a little war was fought; antiquarian coins and shelves of fine and rare Egyptian glass. From the Victorian music room with its decaying Whistler panels echoed the peacock screams of empties and patients engaged in therapy.

Always I remained Dr. Harrow’s pet: an exquisite monster capable of miming every human emotion and even feeling many of them via the therapy I made possible. Every evening doctors administered syringes and capsules and tiny tabs that adhered to my temples like burdock pods, releasing chemicals directly into my corpus striatum. And every morning I woke from someone else’s dreams.

Morgan sat in the gazebo when I arrived for our meeting, her hair pulled beneath a biretta of indigo velvet worn to a nap like a dog’s skull. She had already eaten, but HEL’s overworked servers had yet to clear her plate. I picked up the remains of a brioche and nibbled its sugary crust.

“None of you have any manners, do you?” She smiled, but her eyes were red and cloudy with hatred. “They told me that during orientation.”

I ran my tongue over a sweet nugget in a molar and nodded. “That’s right.”

“You can’t feel anything or learn anything unless it’s slipped into your breakfast coffee.”

“I drink tea.” I glanced around the Orphic Garden for a server. “You’re early.”

“I had trouble sleeping.”

I nodded and finished the brioche.

“I had trouble sleeping because I had no dreams.” She leaned across the table and repeated in a hiss, “I had no dreams. I carried that memory around with me for sixty years and last night I had no dreams.”

Yawning, I rubbed the back of my head, adjusting a quill. “You still have all your memories. Dr. Harrow said you wanted to end the nightmares. I’m surprised we were successful.”

“You were not successful.” She towered above me when she stood, the table tilting toward her as she clutched its edge. “Monster.”

“Sacred monster. I thought you liked sacred monsters.” I grinned, pleased that I’d bothered to read the sample poem included with her chart.

“Bitch. How dare you laugh at me. Whore—you’re all whores and thieves.” She stepped toward me, her heel catching between the mosaic stones. “No more of me—you’ll steal no more of me.…”

I drew back a little, blinking in the emerald light as I felt the first adrenaline pulse. “You shouldn’t be alone,” I said. “Does Dr. Harrow know?”

She blocked the sun so that it exploded around the biretta’s peaks in resplendent ribbons. “Doctor Harrow will know,” she whispered, and drawing a pistol from her pocket she shot herself through the eye.

I knocked my chair over as I stumbled to her, knelt, and caught the running blood and her last memory as I bowed to touch my tongue to her severed thoughts.

A window smeared with garnet light that ruddles across my hands. Burning wax in a small blue glass. A laughing dog; then darkness.

They hid me under the guise of protecting me from the shock. I gave a sworn statement for the Governors and acknowledged in the HEL mortuary that the long body with blackened face had indeed shared her breakfast brioche with me that morning. I glimpsed Dr. Harrow, white and taut as a thread as Odolf Leslie and the other Ascendant brass cornered her outside the emergency room. Then the Aide Justice hurried me into the west wing, past the pre-Columbian collection and the ivory stair to an ancient Victorian elevator, clanking and lugubrious as a stage dragon.

“Dr. Harrow thought that you might like the Home Room,” Justice remarked with a cough, sidling two steps away to the corner of the elevator. The brass door folded into a lattice of leaves and pigeons that expanded into peacocks. “She’s having your things sent up now. Anything else you need, please let her know.” He cleared his throat, staring straight ahead as we climbed through orchid-haunted clerestories and chambers where the oneironauts snored and tossed through their days. At the fourth floor the elevator ground to a stop. He tugged at the door until it opened and waited for me to pass into the hallway.

“I have never been in the Home Room,” I remarked, following him.

“I think that’s why she thought you’d like it.” He glanced into an ornate mirror as we walked. I saw in his eyes a quiver of pity before he looked away. “Down here.”

A wide hallway ended in an arch crowded with gilt satyrs.

“This is it,” said Justice. To the right a heavy oaken door hung open. Inside, yellow-robed Aides strung cable. I made a face and tapped the door. It swung inward and struck a bundle of cable leading to the bank of monitors being installed next to the huge bed. I paced to the window and gazed outside. Around me the Aides scurried to finish, glancing at me sideways with anxious eyes. I ignored them and sat on the windowsill. There was no screen. A hawkmoth buzzed past my chin and I thought that I could hang hummingbird feeders from here and so, perhaps, lure them within reach of capture. Anna had a bandeau she had woven of hummingbird feathers that I much admired. The hawkmoth settled on the BEAM monitor beside the bed. The Aides packed to leave.

“Could you lie here for a moment, Wendy, while I test this?” Justice dropped a handful of cables behind the headboard. I nodded and stretched upon the bed, pummeling a pillow as he placed the wires upon my brow and temples. I turned sideways to watch the old BEAM monitor, the hawkmoth’s wings forming a mask across the flickering map of my thoughts.

“Aggression, bliss, charity,” droned Justice, flicking the moth from the cracked screen. “Desire, envy, fear.” I sighed and turned from the monitor while he adjusted dials. Finally he slipped the wires from me. The others left. Justice lingered a moment longer.

“You can go now,” I said, and tossed the pillow against the headboard.

He stood by the door, uncomfortable, and finally said, “Dr. Harrow wants me to be certain you check your medications. She has increased your dosage of acetelthylene.”

I slid across the bed to where a tiny refrigerator had been hung for my medications. I pulled it open and saw the familiar battery of vials and bottles. As a child first under Dr. Harrow’s care I had imagined them a City like that I glimpsed from the highest windows at HEL , saw the long cylinders and amber vials as abandoned battlements and turrets to be explored and climbed. Now I lived among those chilly buttresses, my only worship within bright cathedrals.

“Two hundred milligrams,” I said obediently, and replaced the bottle. “Thank you very very much.” As I giggled he left the room.

I took the slender filaments that had tapped in to my store of memories and braided them together, then slid the plait beneath a pillow and leaned back. A bed like a pirate ship, carved posts like riven masts spiring to the high ceiling. I had never seen a pirate ship, but once I tapped a Governor’s son who jerked off to images of yellow flags and heaving seas and wailing women. I recalled that now and untangled a single wire, placed it on my temple and masturbated until I saw the warning flare on the screen, the sanguine flash and flame across my pixilated brain. Then I went to sleep.

Faint tapping at the door woke me a short while later.

“Andrew.” I pointed to where my toe poked from a rip in a much-patched blanket. “Come in. Sit.”

He shut the door softly and slid beneath the sheets. “You’re not supposed to have visitors, you know.”

“I’m not?” I stretched and curled my other foot around his finger.

“No. Dr. Leslie was here all day. The Governors are angry. Anna said they’re taking us away.”

“Me too?”

He nodded, hugging a bolster. “All of us. Forever.” He smiled, and the twilight made his face as beautiful as Anna’s. “I saw Dr. Harrow cry after he left.”

“How did you get here?” I sat up and played with his hair: long and silky blond except where the nodes bulged and the hair had never grown back. He wore Anna’s bandeau, and I tugged it gently from his head.

“The back stairs: no one ever uses them. That way.” With his foot he pointed lazily toward a darkening corner. His voice rose plaintively. “You shared that poet with Anna. You should’ve saved her.”

I shrugged. “You weren’t there.” The bandeau fit loosely over my forehead. When I tightened it, tiny emerald feathers frosted my hands like the scales of moths. “Would Anna give me this, do you think?”

Andrew pulled himself onto his elbows and stroked my breast with one hand. “I’ll give it to you, if you share.”

“There’s not enough left to share,” I said, and pulled away. In the tiny mirror hung upon the refrigerator I caught myself in the bandeau. The stippled green feathers made my tawny hair look a deeper auburn, like the poet’s. I pulled a few dark curls through the feathers and pursed my lips. “If you give this to me …”

Already he was reaching for my hand. “Locked?” I glanced at the door.

“Shh …

Afterward I gave him one of my new pills. There hadn’t been much of Morgan left and I feared his disappointment would evoke Anna, who’d demand her bandeau back.

“Why can’t I have visitors?”

I had switched off the gaslight. Andrew sat on the windowsill, luring lacewings with a silver lighter tube. Bats chased the insects to within inches of his face, veering away as he laughed and pretended to snatch at them. “Dr. Harrow said there may be a psychic inquest. To see if you’re accountable.”

“So?” I’d done one before, when a schizoid six-year-old hanged herself on a grosgrain ribbon after therapy with me. ‘“I can’t be responsible. I’m not responsible.’” We laughed: it was the classic empath defense.

“Dr. Leslie wants to see you himself.”

I kicked the sheets to the floor and turned down the empty BEAM , to see the lacewings better. “How do you know all this?”

A quick fizz as a moth singed itself. Andrew frowned and turned down the lighter flame. “Anna told me,” he replied, and suddenly was gone.

I swore and tried to rearrange my curls so the bandeau wouldn’t show. From the windowsill Anna stared blankly at the lighter tube, then groped in her pockets until she found a hand-rolled cigarette. She glanced coolly past me to the mirror, pulling a strand of hair forward until it fell framing her cheekbone. “Who gave you that?” she asked as she blew smoke out the window.

I turned away. “You know who,” I replied petulantly. “I’m not supposed to have visitors.”

“Oh, you can keep it,” she said.

“Really?” I clapped in delight.

“I’ll just make another.” She finished her cigarette and tossed it in an amber arc out the window. “I better go down now. Which way’s out?”

I pointed where Andrew had indicated, drawing her close to me to kiss her tongue as she left.

“Thank you, Anna,” I whispered to her at the door. “I think I love this bandeau.”

“I think I loved it too,” Anna nodded, and slipped away.

Dr. Harrow invited me to lunch with her in the Peach Tree Court the next afternoon. Justice appeared at my door and waited while I put on jeweled dark spectacles and a velvet biretta like Morgan Yates’s.

“Very nice, Wendy,” he said, amused. I smiled. When I wore the black glasses he was not afraid to look me in the face.

“I don’t want the others to see my bandeau. Anna will steal it back,” I explained, lifting the hat so he could see the feathered riband beneath.

He laughed, tossing his head so that his long blond braid swung between his shoulders. I thanked him as he held the door and followed him outside.

On the steps leading to the Orphic Garden I saw HEL’s chief neurologist, Dr. Silverthorn, with Gligor, his favorite of the empaths as I was Dr. Harrow’s. Through the heavy jet laminate of his eyeshield Gligor regarded me impassively. Beside him Dr. Silverthorn watched my approach with distaste.

“Dr. Harrow is waiting for you,” he called out. He took Gligor’s arm and steered him away from us, to the walk’s border edged with tiny yellow strawberries. As he stumbled after him Gligor crushed these carelessly, releasing their sweet perfume into the autumn air. He waved blindly in our direction, his head swinging distractedly back and forth as he tried to fix me with his shield, like a cobra seeking a rat by its body’s heat.

“Wendy!” he said. “Wendy, I heard, it’s—”

“Hush,” said Dr. Silverthorn. As Justice and I passed he leaned back into the tall hedge of box trees until their branches snapped beneath his weight. But Gligor waited on the walk for me. He plucked at my arm and drew me to him. I smelled the adrenaline reek of his sweat as he brushed his lips against my cheek, his tongue flicking across my skin.

“Anna told me,” he whispered. “I’ll come later—”

I returned his kiss, my tongue lingering over the bitter tang of envy that clung to his skin. I ignored Justice waiting, and lifted my sunglasses to grin at Gligor’s keeper.

“I will, Gligor,” I said, staring into the dark furies of Dr. Silverthorn’s eyes rather than into the ebony grid that concealed Gligor’s own. “Goodbye, Dr. Silverthorn.”

I dropped my sunglasses back onto my nose and skipped after Justice into the Orphic Garden. Servers had snaked hoses through the circle of lindens and were cleaning the mosaic stones. I peered through the hedge as we walked down the pathway, but Morgan’s blood seemed to be all gone.

Once we were in the shade of the Peach Tree Walk I removed my glasses and put them into my pocket. Justice quickly averted his eyes. The little path dipped and rounded a corner humped with dark green forsythia. Three steps farther and the path branched: right to the Glass Fountain, left to the Peach Tree Court, where Dr. Harrow waited in the Little Pagoda.

“Thank you, Justice.” Dr. Harrow rose, tilting her head toward a low table upon which lunch had been laid for two. Despite their care in placing a single hyacinth blossom in a cracked porcelain vase, the luncheon servers had not bothered to clean the Pagoda. The floor’s golden sheath of pollen was chased with tiny footprints of squirrels and rats and their droppings. Justice grimaced as he stepped to a lacquered tray to sort out my medication bottles. Then he stood, bowed to Dr. Harrow, and left.

Sunlight streamed through the bamboo frets above us as Dr. Harrow took my hand and drew me toward her.

“The new dosage. You remembered to take it?”

“Yes.” I removed my hat and dropped it, shaking my curls free. “Anna gave me this bandeau.”

“It’s lovely.” She knelt before the table and motioned for me to do the same. Her face was puffy, her eyes slitted. I wondered if she would cry for me as she had for Andrew yesterday. “Have you had breakfast?”

We ate quenelles of hake with fennel and an aspic of lamb’s blood. Dr. Harrow drank Georgian champagne and permitted me a sip—horrible, like brackish water. Afterward a remodeled greenhouse server (still encumbered with its coil of garden hose) removed our plates and brought me a chocolate wafer, which I slipped into my pocket to trade with Anna later, for news.

“You slept well,” Dr. Harrow stated. “What did you dream?”

“I dreamed about Melisande’s dog.”

Dr. Harrow stroked her chin, then adjusted her pince-nez to see me better. “Not Morgan’s dog?”

“No.” Melisande had been a girl my own age with a history of tormenting and sexually molesting animals. “A small white dog. Like this.” I pushed my nose until it squashed against my face.

Dr. Harrow smiled ruefully. “Well, good, because I dreamed about Morgan’s dog.” She shook her head when I started to question her. “Not really; a manner of speaking. I mean I didn’t get much sleep.” She sighed and tilted her flute so that it refracted golden diamonds. “I made a very terrible error of judgment with Morgan Yates. I shouldn’t have let you do it—”

“I knew what would happen.”

Dr. Harrow looked at her glass, then at me. “Yes. Well, a number of people are wondering about that, Wendy.”

“She would not look away from the window.”

“No. They’re wondering how you know when the therapy will succeed and when it won’t. They’re wondering whether you are effecting your failures as well as your cures.”

“I’m not responsible. I can’t be—”

She placed the champagne flute on the lacquer table and took my hand. She squeezed it so tightly that I knew she wanted it to hurt. “That is what’s the matter, Wendy. If you are responsible—if empaths can be responsible—you can be executed for murder. We can all be held accountable for your failures. And if not …” She leaned back without releasing my hand, so that I had to edge nearer to her across the table. “If not, the Governors want you for themselves.”

I flounced back against the floor, “Andrew told me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Not you personally. Not necessarily. Anna, yes: they created Anna, they’ll claim her first. But the others—”

She traced a wave in the air, ended it with finger pointing at me. “Things are changing again in the world outside, Wendy. You are too sheltered here, all of you children; which is my fault, but I thought …”

Her voice drifted into a sigh, and I noticed that her fingers were trembling as she let go of my hand. “It doesn’t matter anymore what I thought,” she said. She stared up at me, her eyes glittering with such desperation that I yearned to taste it, know what it was that could terrify a woman like Dr. Harrow.

She took a deep breath and said, “There is a rumor that NASNA plans to strike against the Balkhash Commonwealth. They will never succeed. NASNA and the present Governors will be overthrown, and the Commonwealth will do to us what they did to Brazil and the Asian diarchy: more mutagens and viral strikes and burnings, until only the land remains for them to claim.”

I yawned. It had been decades since the last Ascension. The Commonwealth was on the other side of the world. To myself and the other empties at HEL it was nothing more than pink and crimson blotches on a map, separated from us by a blue sea that would take weeks and weeks to navigate. I reached for my glass and sipped, grimacing again at the taste. When I raised my eyes Dr. Harrow was staring at me, unbelieving.

“Does this mean nothing to you, Wendy?”

I shrugged. “What? NASNA ? The Commonwealth? What should it mean to me?”

“It means that NASNA needs new weapons. It means further intervention in our research, and misapplication of the results of the Harrow Effect. They’ll treat you like laboratory animals, like geneslaves …

“Don’t you understand, Wendy? If they can trace what you do, find the bioprint and synthesize it …”Her finger touched the end of my nose, pressed it until I giggled. “There’ll be nothing left of you except what will fit in a vial.”

She tapped her finger on the table edge. The westering light fell golden upon my head, and I shook my hair back, smiling at its warmth. From a peach tree outside the Little Pagoda came a mockingbird’s sweet treble. Dr. Harrow remained silent, listening.

After a few minutes she said, “Odolf Leslie was here yesterday. They are sending a new Governor—”

I looked up at that. “Here? To HEL ?”

“No.” She smiled wryly at my disappointment. “To the City. The Governors wish to monitor it more closely: the black market has grown too successful, and the Governors have professed a sudden interest in the Archives.

“Or so NASNA says; my sources say otherwise. There were stockpiles of weapons there once, within the City; weapons and secret things, things lost in the Long Night.”

I must have appeared dubious. Dr. Harrow gave a small laugh, a bitter rasping sound. “Did you think you knew everything about this place, Wendy? I assure you: you children know nothing, nothing of the world, even of the world across the river. That was a great city once, greater than any city standing now; and there are still things hidden there, things of great knowledge and power that the poor fools who live there now cannot begin to comprehend.

“But the Governors have decided it is time to look again at the City of Trees. I think they are searching for the engines that brought the Long Night; else why would they be sending an Aviator to govern the City?”

“An Aviator?” I repeated; but Dr. Harrow seemed not to have heard me.

“A hero of the Archipelago Conflict. Margalis Tast’annin: a brilliant man from the NASNA Academy. We knew him there, Aidan and I. He is to assume control of the City, set up a janissary outpost.”

I thought of what Justice had told me, of the people who lived in the Museums and the ruins of the ancient Embassies. “What about the people there now?”

Dr. Harrow tilted her head back and shut her eyes as the afternoon sun touched her face. “I suppose they will be killed if they resist, or enslaved. Although Margalis Tast’annin doesn’t seem the type to take prisoners.

“He arrived yesterday with Dr. Leslie, Wendy. Dr. Leslie told him about you, about Melisande and Morgan Yates and the others. He wants you for— observation. He wants this—”

She pressed both hands to her forehead and then waved them toward the sky, the unpruned fruit-laden trees, and the rank sloping lawns of Linden Glory. “All this, Wendy. They will have me declared incompetent and our research a disaster, and then they’ll move in. They’ve been looking for an excuse; the Wendy suicides will do nicely.”

The garden server returned to pour me more mineral water. I drank it and asked, “Is Dr. Leslie a nice doctor?”

For a moment I thought she’d upset the table, as Morgan had done in the Orphic Garden. Then, “I don’t know, Wendy. Perhaps he is.” She sighed and motioned the server to bring another cold split.

“They’ll take Anna first,” she said a few minutes later, almost to herself. Then she added, “For espionage. They’ll induce multiple personalities and train them when they’re very young. Ideal terrorists.”

I drank my water and stared at the gaps in the Pagoda’s latticed roof, imagining Andrew and Anna without me. I took the chocolate wafer from my pocket and began to nibble it.

The server rolled back with a sweating silver bucket and opened another split for Dr. Harrow. She sipped it, watching me through narrowed gray eyes. “Wendy,” she said at last. “There’s going to be an inquest. At Tast’annin’s request. It will probably be the last time I will supervise anything here. But before that, one more patient.”

She reached beneath the table to her portfolio and removed a slender packet. “This is the profile. I’d like you to read it.”

I took the file. Dr. Harrow poured the rest of her champagne and finished it, tilting her head to the server as she stood.

“I have a two o’clock meeting with Dr. Leslie. Why don’t you meet me again for dinner tonight and we’ll discuss this.”

“Where?”

She tapped her lower lip. “The Peacock Room. At seven.” She bowed slightly and passed out of sight among the trees.

I waited until she disappeared, then gestured for the server. “More chocolate, please,” I ordered, and waited until it creaked back across the dusty floor, holding a chilled marble plate and three wafers. I nibbled one, staring idly at the faux vellum cover of the profile with its engraved motto:

HUMAN ENGINEERING LABORATORY

OF THE

NORTHEASTERN FEDERATED REPUBLIC OF AMERICA

PAULO MAIORA CANAMUS!

“‘Let us raise a somewhat loftier strain,’” Gligor had translated it for me once. “Virgil. But it should be deus ex machina,” he added slyly.

God from the machine.

I licked melting chocolate from my fingers and began to read, skimming through the charts and anamnesis that followed. On the last sheet I read: “Client requests therapy in order to determine nature and cause of these obsessive nightmares.”

Beneath this was Dr. Harrow’s scrawled signature and the blotchy yellow star and triangle that was the Republic’s emblem. I ate the last wafer, then mimed to the server that I was finished.

We dined alone in the Peacock Room. After setting two places at the vast mahogany table the servers disappeared, dismissed by Dr. Harrow’s brusque gesture. We ate in silence for several minutes beneath the hissing gaslights.

“Did you read the profile I gave you?’ she asked at last, with studied casualness.

“Mmmm-mmm,” I grunted.

“And … ?”

“She will not make it.”

Dr. Harrow dipped her chin ever so slightly before asking, “Why, Wendy?”

“I don’t know.” I sucked my fork.

“Can’t you give me any idea of what makes you feel that?”

“Nothing. I never feel anything.”

“Well then, what makes you think she wouldn’t be a good analysand?”

“I don’t know. I just—” I clicked the tines of my fork against my teeth. “It’s like when I start head-banging—the way everything starts to shiver and I get sick. But I don’t throw up.”

Dr. Harrow tilted her head. “Like a seizure. Well.” She smiled, staring at me.

I dropped my fork and glanced around in impatience. “When will I meet her?”

“You already have.”

I kicked my chair. “When?”

“Fourteen years ago, when you first came to HEL .”

“Why don’t I remember her?”

“You do, Wendy.” She leaned across the table and tapped my hand gently with her knife. “It’s me.”

“Surprised?” Dr. Harrow grinned and raised the sleeves of her embroidered haik so that the early morning sunlight gleamed through the translucent threads.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, enviously fingering the flowing cuffs.

She smiled and turned to the NET beside my bed. “I’m the patient this morning. Are you ready?”

I nodded. There had been no Aides in to see me that morning; no report of my stolen dreams; no blood samples given to Justice. Dr. Harrow had wheeled in a rickety old wood-framed cot and now sat on it, readying her monitors. I settled on my bed and waited for her to finish. She finally turned to me and applied electrolytic fluid to the nodes on my temples, placed other wires upon my head and cheekbones before doing the same to herself.

“Justice isn’t assisting you?” I asked.

She shook her head but made no reply as she adjusted her screens and, finally, settled onto her cot. I lay back against the pillow and shut my eyes.

The last thing I heard was the click of the adaptor freeing the current, and a gentle exhalation that might have been a sigh.

“Here we stand …”

“Here we stand …”

“Here we lie …”

“Here we lie …”

“Eye to hand and heart to head,

Deep in the dark with the dead.”

It is spring, and not dark at all, but I repeat the incantation as my brother Aidan Harrow gravely sprinkles apple blossoms upon my head. In the branches beneath us a bluejay shrieks at our bulldog, Molly, as she whines and scratches hopefully at her basket.

“Can’t we bring her up?” I peer over the edge of the rickety platform and Molly sneezes in excitement.

“Shhh!” Aidan commands, squeezing his eyes shut as he concentrates. After a moment he squints and reaches for his crumpled sweater. Several curry leaves filched from the kitchen crumble over me and I blink so that the debris doesn‘t get in my eyes.

“I hate this junk in my hair,” I grumble. “Next time I make the spells.”

“You can’t.” Aidan stands on tiptoe and strips another branch of blossoms, sniffing them dramatically before tossing them in a flurry of pink and white. “We need a virgin.”

“So?” I jerk on the rope leading to Molly’s basket. “You‘re a virgin. Next time we use you.”

Aidan stares at me, brows furrowed. “That won’t count,” he says at last. “Say it again, Emma.”

“Here we stand …”

Every day we come here: an overgrown apple orchard within the woods, uncultivated for a hundred years. Stone walls tumbled by time mark the gray boundaries of a farm and blackberry vines choke the rocks with breeze-blown petals. Our father showed us this place. Long ago he built the treehouse, its wood lichen-green now and wormed with holes. Rusted nails snag my knees when we climb: all that remains of other platforms and the crow’s nest at treetop.

I finish the incantation and kneel, calling to Molly to climb into her basket. When my twin yells, I announce imperiously, “The virgin needs her faithful consort. Get in, Molly.”

He helps to pull her up. Molly is trembling when we heave her onto the platform. As always, she remains huddled in her basket.

“She’s sitting on the sandwiches,” I remark. Aidan hastily shoves Molly aside and retrieves two squashed bags. “I call we break for lunch.”

We eat in thoughtful silence. We never discuss the failure of the spells, although each afternoon Aidan hides in his secret place behind the wing chair in the den and pores through more brittle volumes. Sometimes I can feel them working — the air is so calm, the wind dies unexpectedly, and for a moment the woods glow so bright, so deep, their shadows still and green; and it is there: the secret to be revealed, the magic to unfold, the story to begin. Above me Aidan flushes and his eyes shine, he raises his arms and —

And nothing. It is gone. A moment too long or too soon, I never know; but we have lost it again. For an instant Aidan’s eyes gray with tears. Then the breeze rises, Molly yawns and snuffles, and once more we put aside the spells for lunch and other games.

That night I toss in my bed, finally throwing my pillow against the bookcase. From the open window stream the chimes of peepers in the swamp, their song broidered with the trills of toads and leopard frogs. As I churn feverishly through the sheets it comes again, and I lie still: like a star’s sigh, the shiver and promise of a door opening somewhere just out of reach. I hold my breath, waiting: Will it close again?

But no. The curtains billow and I slip from my bed, bare feet curling upon the cold planked floor as I race to the window.

He is in the meadow at wood’s edge, alone, dark hair misty with starlight, his pajamas spectral blue in the dark. As I watch he raises his arms to the sky, and though I am too far to hear, I whisper the words with him, my heart thumping counterpoint to our invocation. Then he is quiet, and stands alert, waiting.

I can no longer hear the peepers. The wind has risen, and the thrash of the beech trees at the edge of the forest drowns all other sounds. I can feel his heart now, beating within my own, and see the shadows with his eyes.

In the lower branches of the willow tree, the lone willow that feeds upon a hidden spring beside the sloping meadow, there is a boy. His eyes are green and lucent as tourmaline, and silvery moths are drawn to them. His hands clutch the slender willow wands: strong hands, so pale that I trace the blood beneath, and see the muscles strung like strong young vines. As I watch he bends so that his head dips beneath a branch, new leaves tangling fair hair, and then slowly he uncurls one hand and, smiling, beckons my brother toward him.

The wind rises. Beneath his bare feet the dewy grass darkens as Aidan runs faster and faster, until he seems almost to be skimming across the lawn. And there, where the willow starts to shadow the starlit slope and the boy in the tree leans to take his hand, I tackle my brother and bring him crashing and swearing to earth.

For a moment he stares at me uncomprehending. Then he yells and slaps me, hits me harder until, remembering, he shoves me away and stumbles to his feet.

There is nothing there. The willow trembles, but only the wind shakes the new leaves. From the marsh the ringing chorus rises, swells, bursts as the peepers stir in the sawgrass. In the old house yellow light stains an upstairs window and our father’s voice calls out sleepily, then with concern, and finally bellows as he leans from the casement to spot us below. Aidan glances at the house and back again at the willow, and then he turns to me despairingly. Before I can say anything he punches me and runs, weeping, into the woods.

A gentler withdrawal than I’m accustomed to. For several minutes I lay with closed eyes as I tried to hold on to the scents of apple blossom and dew-washed grass. But they faded, along with the dreamy net of tree and stars. I sat up groggily, wires still taped to my head, and faced Dr. Harrow, who was already recording her limbic system’s response from the NET .

“Thank you, Wendy,” she said without looking up. I glanced at the BEAM monitor, where the shaded image of my brain lingered, the last flash of activity staining the temporal lobe bright turquoise.

“I never saw that color there before.” As I leaned to examine it an unfocused wave of nausea choked me. I staggered against the bed, tearing at the wires.

Eyes: brilliant green lanced with cyanogen, unblinking as twin chrysolites. A wash of light: leaves stirring the surface of a still pool. They continued to stare through the shadows, heedless of the play of sun and moon, days and years and decades. The electrodes dangled from my fist as I stared at the blank screen, the single dancing line bisecting the NET monitor. The eyes in my mind did not move, did not blink, did not disappear. They stared relentlessly from the shadows until the darkness itself swelled and was absorbed by their feral gaze. They saw me.

Not Dr. Harrow; not Aidan; not Morgan or Melisande or the others I’d absorbed in therapy.

Me.

I stumbled from ‘the monitor to the window, dragging the wires behind me, heedless of Dr. Harrow’s stunned expression. Grunting, I shook my head, finally gripped the windowsill and slammed my head against the oaken frame, over and over and over, until Dr. Harrow tore me away. Still I saw them: unblinking glaucous eyes, tumbling into darkness as Dr. Harrow pumped the sedatives into my brain.

Much later I woke to see Dr. Harrow staring at me from the far end of the room. She watched me for a moment, then walked slowly to the bed.

“What was it, Wendy?” she asked, smoothing her haik as she sat beside me. “Can you tell me?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said, biting the tip of my thumb. Then I twisted to stare at her and asked, “Who was the boy?”

Her voice caught for an instant before she answered. “My brother Aidan. My twin.”

“No—the other—the boy in the tree.”

This time she held her breath a long moment, then let it out in a sigh. “I don’t know,” she said. “But you remember him? You saw him too?”

I nodded. “Now. I can see him now. If I—” And I shut my eyes and drifted before snapping back. “Like that. He comes to me on his own. Without me recalling him. Like—” I flexed my fingers helplessly. “Like a dream, only I’m awake now.” ’

Slowly Dr. Harrow shook her head and reached to take my hand. “That’s how he found Aidan, too, the last time,” she said. “And me. And now you.” For an instant something like hope flared in her eyes, but faded as she bowed her head. “I think, Wendy,” she said with measured calm; “I think we should keep this to ourselves right now. And tomorrow, maybe, we’ll try again.”

He sees me.

I woke, my heart pounding so that for a dizzying moment I thought I was having a seizure and reflexively braced my hands behind my head. But no: it was the dream, it was him —

I breathed deeply, trying to keep the dream from fleeing, then slowly opened my eyes to my room bathed in the glow of monitors and a hint of dawn. In the air before me I could still see his eyes, green and laughing, the beautiful boy’s face adrift in a sea of young leaves more real than the damp sheets twisted around my legs. He reached a hand toward me, beckoning, and intense joy filled me as I smelled new earth, apple blossoms, the breeze carrying the promise of sun and sky and burgeoning fruit. I leaned forward in my bed, clutching the sheets as I began to reach for him, to take that white hand in my own—

When like the rind of some bright fruit peeled back to reveal squirming larvae, the boy’s skin shriveled and fell from him. A skeletal hand clawed desperately for mine. Beneath its shell of flesh the skull shone stark white. I screamed and snatched back my hand, then staggered from my bed to the window. He was gone.

I don’t know how long I knelt there, resting my forehead against the sill, blinking against tears: real tears, my own tears. Because it was not that awful cadaver that burned within my mind’s eye but the boy with green eyes and fair hair, heartbreakingly lovely, new leaves brushing his brow, and the cry of tiny frogs piercing the shadowy air about him. A sense of terrible desolation filled me at waking alone in this dark place. I thought of Aidan Harrow weeping: to have had the radiant promise of those eyes before him and then forever gone …

From outside came a sound. I lifted my head to see a phalanx of wild geese, black against the pale September dawn. Their cry held nothing but regret and sorrow for the summer gone, and a shrill hope for distant warmth. I watched until they disappeared, their grief fading into the rising wind, and fell asleep there with my head pillowed upon my arms. Hours later I woke to Dr. Harrow’s knock upon my door, and her announcement that we would not repeat the experiment that day.

Several days had passed since Morgan Yates’s suicide. As standard procedure Justice ran a standard post-trauma scan on me early one evening. I sat patiently before my window, staring out at the sun setting over the tops of the yellowing lindens while Justice ran the wires and stimulated the rush of recent memory.

Blood racing across dirty glass. The imagined thud of janissaries’ feet upon cracked macadam. A feathery explosion of bone and tissue from Morgan’s skull. I made my breathing quicken as I lingered over the memory of Morgan’s fury and held for a moment her words in my mind—

Bitch! Whore! How dare you laugh at me?

—recalled the poem in her datafile— Sacred Monsters —and her face as she screamed at me. Justice stared at the screen, finally nodded. Then he pressed a sedative to my neck, as I knew he would, and left me with an extra handful to be taken as needed. I nodded goodbye as he left the Home Room, and waited for the others to arrive.

“Hello, Wednesday,” croaked a voice. A triangular face hung upside down in the window, dusky black and pinched as a bat’s.

“Hullo, Gligor,” I said, and moved over on the bed to make room for him.

His hands scrabbled at the sill and I thought he might fall; but he caught his balance, sighting me or the lingering warmth of the monitors that showed up as bright blue pulses in his mind. He swung clumsily into the room, one hand grasping the edge of the sill while he paused to catch his breath. He twisted until he found me, waited a moment for his shield to set me on the grid. Then, suddenly graceful, he sidled onto the bed beside me.

“What did they give you?”

I handed him a sedative. He pressed it to his temple, waited a few moments before making a face and discarding it.

“Nothing else?” he whined. “Merle said she saw Dr. Harrow here yesterday with the NET .”

I started to nod, then stopped. Suddenly I didn’t want to share Emma’s memories with Gligor or Anna or anyone else. Reaching beneath the bed, I withdrew a hand-rolled cigarette and lit it. I went to sit on the windowsill and stared moodily down at the lawns where servers were clipping the grass.

“So?” Gligor prodded. He sniffed hungrily.

“Leave me alone.” I blew smoke out the window, refusing to look at him or offer him a cigarette.

From the other end of the room echoed a faint creak, a muted giggle. Gritting my teeth, I glanced back. The door swung open. Andrew slipped into the room.

“Hah! Merle was following me but I took the back stairs, the secret way, and now she thinks I’m in the north turret. What’s the matter, Gligor?”

He flopped onto the bed next to him, breathing on the smooth surface of Gligor’s eyeshield and then drawing a squiggle in the condensation.

Gligor took his hand and nipped at his bare shoulder. “Mmmm,” he murmured. He leaned back, drawing up the shield so that I could see the empty white balls of his eyes, and licked his lips. I knew he was trying to annoy me. I snorted and stared at Andrew.

“What’s the matter?” he repeated. He leaned over the little refrigerator at my bedside and rifled its contents.

Gligor snapped the shield back down. “Wednesday won’t share,” he said petulantly. “Harrow did something with her yesterday and now she won’t share—”

I took a last long drag on my cigarette and flicked it out the window. “Nothing happened,” I said, glaring at the back of Andrew’s head.

Abruptly he turned around to stare at me. His eyes widened. He blinked once, very deliberately, and lowered his head. The face that lifted itself to me a moment later was dark with cunning, and Anna’s huskier voice rang out.

“I know,” she said triumphantly. “Something about the poet, something about the suicides!”

Gligor hissed admiringly. I stiffened, tightening my grip on the windowsill where I sat. Anna grinned. Then, before I could dart away, she lunged at me and pulled me to the floor.

“Come on, Gligor!” she barked, pinning down my arms and kneeing me viciously when I tried to push her back. “She shared with me the other day and it was wonderful—

“No!” I protested, kicking at Gligor as he slid behind Anna and slapped ineffectually at my feet. “It wasn’t the poet, I swear—”

“That’s it, get her feet,” she ordered Gligor. She straddled my chest and looked at me, grinning, her face flushed with delight just as mine had so many times before in the same circumstances. “Now, Wendy, hold still—”

Anna’s strong hands gripped my head and held me steady. She lowered her face to mine and kissed me, her tongue probing my mouth before she nipped my lower lip gently and then bit it, hard enough to draw blood. She shut her eyes and threw back her head, letting out her breath in a long sigh. I waited several seconds to be sure her rush had begun. Then I shoved her from me and kicked at Gligor, taking him by surprise so that he sprawled onto the floor with a groan. I turned back to Anna, furious.

There was nothing I could do. It was too late to revoke whatever response the neurotransmitters in my blood now carried to her brain. I could only hope that there had not been enough blood, or enough of the resonant chemicals within it, to satisfy her hunger for sensation.

I glared, waiting to see how she reacted. Beside me, Gligor rubbed his leg and watched too. Occasionally he darted furtive glances at me, so that I saw my sullen face reflected in the matte surface of his shield.

“Look, Wednesday,” he whispered.

Anna had sunk back on her heels, eyes closed. A rapturous expression crept over her, making her face seem remote and otherworldly. I watched, fascinated, wondering if she saw the same unearthly figure I had, or if she was still tapping in to Morgan Yates’s death. Gligor moved his head back and forth, back and forth, his eyeshield tracing some invisible pattern in the heat emitted by Anna.

Suddenly her eyes opened. She stared at a point some distance above her head and smiled in delight, as though she greeted some beloved friend in the empty air. I caught myself leaning forward to grasp her hands as she reached for whatever it was she saw. But before I could touch her, her expression changed. She snarled and wrenched back her hands as though someone had tried to grab them, then turned to me blindly.

“Oh, Wendy,” she breathed, awe tingeing her disbelief. “What have you done?”

Then she began to scream.

I tried to muffle her cries and yelled for Gligor to help. But he had immediately jumped onto the bed and now sat there whimpering while I restrained her. She swung at me wildly, clipping the side of my head so that I reeled back but did not let go.

“Him!” she shrieked over and over, her jaws snapping each time so that she bit her tongue and blood covered my hands. “Him!”

I shouted at Gligor to get one of the sedatives from my bedside, but still he refused to move. And then I heard voices and running feet in the hall. Several Aides and Dr. Silverthorn rushed into the room.

They restrained her, though not without a fight. The Aide Justice swore fiercely when Anna bit him. Dr. Silverthorn pushed him away before administering a sedative to her. It wasn’t until after they carried her out that he noticed Gligor cowering on the bed. “Gligor!” Dr. Silverthorn shook him gently until the boy stopped whimpering. “What happened?”

“Something was there—” He gasped, clutching at his head. Dr. Silverthorn put his arm about him and drew him close. To me he turned eyes so cold that for a moment I forgot my own anger and disappointment.

“What the hell were you doing, Wendy?”

I shrugged. “Anna tapped me. I warned her—”

“Don’t you know what this means?” he shouted. Gligor winced and tried to pull away from him. “They’ll take him away, they’ll take all of you—”

“But it’s true,” said Gligor. “It wasn’t Wendy’s fault—but I’m so tired, Dr. Silverthorn. Can I go to my room?”

Dr. Silverthorn nodded and helped Gligor to the door, all the time regarding me with icy revulsion.

“I’m going to recommend that you all be forbidden to see each other. But I’ll let Dr. Harrow handle you, Wendy,” was all he said as they left.

“Didn’t you hear anything I told you the other day, Wendy?”

Dr. Harrow paused in front of my window, eyeing with disapproval the cigarette ashes blown into the corner in a small gray heap. She fixed me with a probing stare. “Don’t you understand what’s going on, why we need to be careful while they’re here?” She motioned toward the outdoors, where Dr. Leslie led a group of Governors and their accompanying janissaries on a tour of the grounds.

I sat on the bed, playing with the wires she had carefully arranged on the frayed counterpane in preparation for our session. “Yes,” I replied.

She continued to watch me closely. “I don’t think you do, really,” she said at last, then sighed. She glanced at the door. It had been fixed with a new lock. “Anna’s resilient, though. She’ll be fine.”

I shook my head indifferently. I hadn’t asked after Anna because I knew she would be fine. Empaths were always fine.

Dr. Harrow’s gray eyes narrowed. “You don’t really care, do you? None of you really care at all about each other.”

I yawned. Fruitless to point out that our lack of emotive response was due to the expertise of the staff of the Human Engineering Laboratory. My main concern had been that Dr. Harrow would learn that Anna had somehow tapped in to the same memory that had haunted Dr. Harrow’s dreams for most of her life, and that as punishment she would not permit me to continue with the empatherapy—or, worse, that Dr. Harrow would perversely choose to continue it with Anna. But Dr. Harrow had shown up once again with the NET , and wheeled the splintering cot from its closet, and otherwise behaved as though we were going to proceed as planned.

“Are we ready to start?” I asked.

She sighed again, pushed her hair behind her ears, and removed her pince-nez. “Yes, I suppose so.”

And though her hands were steady as she initialized the BEAM , I could smell the dreamy odor of absinthium on her breath, and fear like a potent longing in her sweat.

“Emma,” he whispers at the transom window. “Let me in.”

The quilts piled on me muffle his voice. He calls again, louder, until I groan and sit up in bed, rubbing my eyes and glaring at the top of his head as he peeks through the narrow glass.

From the bottom of the door echoes faint scratching, Molly’s whine. A thump. More scratching: Aidan crouched outside the room, growling through choked laughter. I drape a quilt around me and lean forward to unlatch the door.

Molly flops onto the floor, snorting when she bumps her nose and then drooling apologetically. Behind her stumbles Aidan, shivering in his worn kimono with its tattered sleeves and belt stolen from one of my old dresses. I giggle, gesturing for him to shut the door before Father hears us in his room below.

“It’s fucking freezing in this place,” Aidan exclaims, pinning me to the bed and pulling the quilts over our heads. “Oh, come on, dog.” Grunting, he hauls her up beside us. “My room is like Antarctica. Tierra del Fuego. The Balkhash steppes.” He punctuates his words with kisses, elbowing Molly as she tries to slobber our faces. I squirm away and straighten my nightshirt.

“Hush. You’ll wake Father.”

Aidan rolls his eyes and stretches against the wall. “Spare me.” Through the rents in his kimono I can see his skin, dusky in the moonlight. No one has skin like Aidan’s, except for me: not white but the palest gray, almost blue, and fine and smooth as an eggshell. People stare at us in the street, especially at Aidan. At the Academy girls stop talking when he passes, and fix me with narrowed eyes and lips pursed to mouth a question never asked.

Aidan yawns remorselessly as a cat. Aidan is the beauty: Aidan whose gray eyes flicker green whereas mine muddy to blue in sunlight; Aidan whose long legs wrap around me and shame my own; Aidan whose hair is the purest gold, where mine is dull bronze.

“Molly. Here. “He grabs her into his lap, groaning at her weight, and pulls me to him as well, until we huddle in the middle of the bed. Our heads knock and he points with his chin to the mirror.

“‘Did you never see the picture of We Three ?’” he warbles. Then, shoving Molly to the floor, he takes my shoulders and pulls the quilt from me.

“‘My father had a daughter loved a man

As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,

I should your lordship.’ ”

He recites softly, in his own voice: not the deeper drone he affected when we had been paired in the play at the Academy that winter. I start to slide from bed but he holds me tighter, twisting me to face him until our foreheads touch and I know that the mirror behind us reflects a moon-lapped Rorschach and, at our feet, our snuffling mournful fool.

“‘But died thy sister of her love, my boy?’” I whisper later, my lips brushing his neck where the hair, unfashionably long, waves to form a perfect S.

“‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house, And all the brothers too; and yet I know not.’”

He silences me with a kiss. Later he whispers nonsense, my name, rhyming words from our made-up language; then a long and heated silence.

Afterward he sleeps, but I lie long awake, stroking his hair and watching the rise and fall of his slender chest. In the coldest hour he awakens and stares at me, eyes wide and black, and turning on his side he moans, then begins to cry as though his heart will break. I clench my teeth and stare at the ceiling, trying not to blink, trying not to hear or feel him next to me, his pale gray skin, his eyes: my beautiful brother in the dark.

After this session Dr. Harrow’s red eyes met mine when I first came to, but she left quickly, advising me not to leave my chamber until she summoned me later. I fell soundly asleep until late afternoon, when the rush of autumn rain against the high casements finally woke me. For a long time I lay in bed staring up at a long fine crack that traversed the ceiling. To me it appeared like the arm of some ghastly tree overtaking the room. It finally drove me downstairs, despite Dr. Harrow’s warning to stay in the Home Room.

I paced the long glass-roofed corridor that led to the pre-Columbian annex, brooding. I almost wished that Justice would see me and stop me, send me to my room, and arrange for my medication to be changed or schedule me for tests that might reduce this strange unease. But today the Aides would be meeting with Margalis Tast’annin and his staff. HEL ’s senior personnel would be in their private quarters upstairs having tea, and the other empaths would be playing at furtive pastimes where they could not be easily monitored. I paused to pluck a hibiscus blossom from a terracotta vase and arranged it behind one ear. Then I went on, until I reached the ancient elevator with its folding arabesques.

The second floor was off limits to empaths, but Anna had memorized a dead patient’s release code and she and I occasionally crept up here to tap sleeping research subjects. No Aides patrolled these rooms. Servers checked the monitors and recorded all responses. Their creaking wheels and the monotonous click of their datachambers were the only sounds that stirred the drowsy air. At the end of each twelve-hour shift, doctors would flit in and out of the bedrooms, unhooking oneironauts and helping them stumble to other rooms where they could fall into yet another, though dreamless, sleep. I tapped the pirated code into the first security server I saw, then waited for it to read my retina imprint and finally grant the access code that slid open the false paneled wall.

Here stretched the sleeplabs: chambers swathed in yellowed challis and moth-eaten linens, huge canopied beds where masked oneironauts (most of them unfortunate survivors of the previous Ascendant autocracy, or captives taken during the Archipelago Conflict) turned and sighed as their monitors clicked in draped alcoves. The oneironauts’ skin shone glassy white. Beneath the masks their eyes were bruised a tender green from enforced somnolence. I held my breath as long as I could: the air seethed with dreams. I hurried down the hall to a room with door ajar and an arched window columned with white drapes. A woman I did not recognize sprawled across a cherry four-poster. Her demure homespun shift, yolk-yellow and embroidered with a five-digit number, was curiously at odds with the mask that rakishly covered her eyes. I slipped inside, locking the door behind me. Then I turned to the bed.

The research subject’s hair formed a dark filigree against the disheveled linen sheets. I bowed to kiss her on the mouth, waiting to be certain she would not wake. Then I dipped my tongue between her lips and drew back, closing my eyes to unravel strands of desire and clouded abandon, pixie fancies. All faded in a moment: dreams, after all, are dreams. I reached to remove the wires connecting her to the monitors, adjusted the settings, and hooked her into the NET . I did the same for myself with extra wires, relaying through the BEAM to the transmitter. I smoothed the sheets, lay beside her, and closed my eyes.

A silvery dome shot with sunlight. Clouds mist the dome with a scent of filters and stale air. In the distance I hear the click of solex panels rotating as the NASNA station moves silently through the atmosphere. Turning, I can see a line of stunted gray-green trees planted in a straight line. We walk there, the oneironaut’s will bending so easily to mine that I scarcely sense her: she is another engineered breeze.

The trees draw nearer. I stare at them until they shift, stark lichened branches blurring into limbs bowed with green and gentle leaves. Now they are great and verdant trees that would never grow within a station. I sense the oneironaut’s faint puzzlement at this change, but in another moment we are beneath their heavy welcoming boughs.

I place my hand against the rough bark and stare into the heart of the greenery. Within the emerald shadows something stirs. Sunlit shards of leaf and twig align themselves into hands. Shadows shift to form a pair of slanted beryl eyes. There: crouched among the boughs like a dappled cat, his curls crowned with a ring of leaves, his lips parted to show small white teeth. He smiles at me.

Before he draws me any closer I withdraw, snapping the wires from my face. The tree shivers into white sheets and the shrouded body of the woman beside me.

My pounding heart slowed as I drew myself up on my elbows to watch her, carefully peeling the mask from her face. Beneath lids mapped with fine blue veins her eyes rolled, tracking something unseen. Suddenly they steadied. Her mouth relaxed into a smile, then into an expression of such bliss that without thinking I kissed her and tasted a burst of ecstatic, halcyon joy.

And reeled back as she suddenly clawed at my chest, her mouth twisted to shout; but no sound came. Bliss exploded into terror. Her eyes opened and she stared, not at me but at something that loomed before her. Her eyes grew wide and horrified, the pupils dilating as she grabbed at my face, tore the hibiscus blossom from my hair, and choked a scream, a shout I muffled with a pillow.

I whirled and reset the monitors, switched the NET ’s settings, and fled. In the hallway I hesitated and looked back. The woman pummeled the air before her blindly; she had not seen me. I turned and ran until I reached the stairway leading to the floors below, and slipped away unseen.

Downstairs all was silent. Servers creaked past, bringing tea trays to doctors in their quarters. I hurried to the conservatory, where I inquired after the Aide Justice. The server directed me to a chamber where Justice stood recording the results of an evoked potential scan.

“Wendy!” Surprise melted into dismay. “What are you doing here?”

I shut the door and stepped to the window, tugging the heavy velvet drapes until they fell and the chamber darkened. “I want you to span me,” I said.

He shook his head, nervously fingered his long blond braid. “What? Why—” I grabbed his hand as he tried to turn up the lights, and he nodded slowly, then dimmed the screen he had been working on. “Where is Dr. Harrow?”

“I want you to do it.” I tightened my grip. “I think I have entered a fugue state.”

He smiled, shaking his head. “That’s impossible, Wendy. You’d have no way of knowing it—you’d be catatonic, or—” He shrugged, then glanced uneasily at the door. “What’s going on? You know I can’t do that alone, especially now.”

“But you know how,” I said, stroking his hand. “You are a student of their arts, you can do it as easily as Dr. Harrow.” I leaned forward until my forehead rested against his, and kissed him on the mouth. His expression changed to fear as he trembled and tried to move away. Sexual contact between staff and experimental personnel was forbidden and punishable by execution of the Aides in question, since empaths were believed incapable of initiating such contact. I pinned both of his hands to the table, until he nodded and motioned with his head toward the PET unit.

“Sit down,” he said. I latched the door, then sat in the wing chair beside the bank of monitors.

In a few minutes I heard the dull hum of the scanners as he improvised the link for my reading. I waited until my brain’s familiar patterns emerged on the screen.

“See?” Relief brightened his voice, and he tilted the monitor so that I could see it more clearly. “All normal. Maybe she got your dosage wrong. Perhaps Dr. Silverthorn can suggest a …”

His words trickled into silence. I shut my eyes and drew up the image of the tree, beryl eyes and outstretched hand, then opened my eyes to see the PET scan showing intrusive activity in my temporal lobe: brain waves evident of an emergent secondary personality.

“That’s impossible,” said Justice. “You have no MP s, no independent emotions … What the hell is that?” He traced the patterns with an unsteady hand, then turned to stare at me. “What did you do, Wendy?”

I shook my head, crouching into the chair’s corner, and removed the wires. The last image shimmered on the screen like a cerebral ghost. “Take them,” I said, holding out the wires. “Don’t tell anyone.”

He let me pass without a word. Only when my hand grasped the doorknob did he touch me on the shoulder.

“Where did it come from?” He faltered. “What is it, Wendy?”

I stared past him at the monitor with its pulsing shadows.

“Not me,” I said at last. “The Boy in the Tree.”

They found the sleep researcher at shift-change that evening, hanging by the swag that had decorated her canopied bed. Anna told me about it at dinner.

“Her monitors registered an emergent MP .” She licked her lips like a kitten. “Do you think we could get into the morgue?”

I yawned and shook my head. “Are you crazy?” Anna giggled and rubbed my neck. “Isn’t everybody?”

Several Aides entered the dining room, scanning warily before they started tapping empties on the shoulder and gesturing to the door. I looked up to see Justice, his face white and pinched as he stood behind me.

“Margalis Tast’annin has ordered evacuation of all senior staff to the provisional capital. They’re bringing in new personnel for reevaluation of the Harrow Project. You’re to go to your chambers,” he announced. “Dr. Harrow says you are not to talk to anyone until Tast’annin has seen you individually.” He swallowed and avoided my eyes, then stared directly at me for the first time. “I told her that I hadn’t seen you, Wendy, but would make certain you knew—”

I nodded and looked away. In a moment he was gone, and I started upstairs.

“I saw Dr. Leslie before,” Anna commented before she walked outside toward her cottage. “He smiled at me and waved.” She hesitated, biting her lip thoughtfully. “Maybe he will play with me this time,” she announced before turning down the rain-spattered path.

Dr. Harrow was standing at the high window in the Home Room when I arrived. In her hand she held a drooping hibiscus flower.

“Shut the door,” she ordered. I did so. “Now lock it and sit down.”

She had broken the hibiscus. Her fingers looked bruised from its stain: jaundiced yellow, ulcerous purple. As I stared she flung the flower into my lap.

“They know it was you in the sleeplabs,” she said. “Dr. Silverthorn matched your retina print with the masterfile. How could you have thought you’d get away with it?” She sank onto the bed, her eyes dull with fatigue.

The rain had hung back for several hours. Now it hammered the windows again, its steady tattoo punctuated by the rattle of hailstones.

“I did not mean to kill her.” I smoothed my robe, flicking the broken blossom onto the floor.

She ground the hibiscus beneath her heel, then picked it up and threw it out the window. “Her face,” she said, as if replying to a question. “Like my brother Aidan’s.”

I stared at her blankly.

“When I found him,” she went on, turning to me with glittering eyes. “On the tree.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dr. Harrow.”

Her lips tightened against her teeth when she faced me. A drop of blood welled against her lower lip. I longed to lean forward to taste it, but did not dare. “She was right, you know. You steal our dreams …”

“That’s impossible.” I crossed my arms, shivering a little from the damp breeze. I hesitated. “You told me that is impossible. Unscientific. Unprofessional thinking.”

She smiled, and ran her tongue over her lip to lick away the blood. “Unprofessional? This has all been very unprofessional, Wendy. Didn’t you know that?”

“The tenets of the revised Nuremberg Act state that an Ascendant should not perform upon a subject any research which she would not undergo herself.”

Dr. Harrow shook her head, ran a hand through damp hair. “Is that what you thought it was? Research?”

I shrugged. “I—I don’t know. The boy—your twin?”

“Aidan …” She spread her fingers against the bed’s coverlet, flexed a finger that bore a heavy ring set with cabochons spelling NASNA . “They found out. Instructors. Our father. About us. We were betrayed by another— promising student. Do you understand?”

A flicker of the feeling she had evoked in bed with her brother returned, and I slitted my eyes, tracing it. “Yes,” I whispered. “I think so.”

“It is—” She fumbled for an explanation. “A crime. They separated us. Aidan … They sent him away, to another kind of—place. Tested him.”

She stood and paced to the window, leaned with a hand upon each side so that the rain lashed about her, then turned back to me. “He went mad.

“You see, something happened that night in the woods.” Shaking her head, she pounded the wall with flattened palms. “He was never the same. He had terrible dreams, he couldn’t bear to sleep alone—that was how it started—

“And then they let him come home for a visit, in the spring. He wouldn’t leave his room. We went out one morning, Father and I. And when we returned, I looked for him, he wasn’t there, not in his room, not anywhere …

“I was the one who found him. He had—” Her voice broke and she stared past me to the wall. “Apple blossom in his hair. And his face—”

I thought she would weep; but her expression twisted so that almost I could imagine she laughed to recall it.

“Like hers …”

She drew nearer, until her eyes were very close to mine. I sniffed and moved to the edge of the bed warily: she had dosed herself with hyoscine derived from the herbarium. Her words slurred as she spoke.

“Do you know what happens now, Wendy? More janissaries arrived tonight. They have canceled our term of research. We’re all terminated. A purge. Tomorrow they take over. New personnel. Representatives of the Governors. Specially trained NASNA medics, hand-picked by Margalis Tast’annin.”

She spat the name, then made a clicking noise with her tongue. “And you, Wendy. And Anna, and all the others. Like the geneslaves: toys. Weapons.” She swayed as she leaned toward me. “You especially. They’ll find him, you know—dig him up and use him—”

“Who, Dr. Harrow?” I asked. Sweat pearled on her forehead. She stretched a hand to graze my temples, and I shivered.

“My brother,” she murmured.

“No, Dr. Harrow. The others—who. betrayed you, who—”

“I told you, we were friends,” she cut me off. “Aidan trusted him—”

“Who?”

“Margalis.” Her hand rested on mine now, and I felt her fingers tightening about my wrist.

“And the other—who was the other, the Boy in the Tree?”

Smiling, she drew me toward her. She reached for the NET ’s rig, flicking rain from the colored wires.

“Let’s find out …”

I cried out at her clumsy hookup. A spot of blood welled from her temple and I touched my face, drew away a finger gelled with the fluid she had smeared carelessly from ear to jaw. Then, before I could lie down, she made the switch and I cried out at the dizzy vistas erupting behind my eyes.

Aniline lightning. Faculae stream from synapse to synapse as ptyalin floods my mouth and my head rears instinctively to smash against the headboard. She has not tied me down. The hyoscine lashes into me like a fiery bile and I open my mouth to scream. In the instant before it begins I taste something faint and caustic in the back of her throat and struggle to free myself from her arms. Then I’m gone.

Before me looms a willow tree shivering in a breeze frigid with the shadow of the northern mountains. Sap oozes from a raw flat yellow scar on the trunk above my head, where, two days before, our father had sawed off the damaged limb. It had broken from the weight. When I found him he lay pillowed on a crush of twigs and young leaves and scattered bark, the blossoms in his hair alone unmarked by the fall. One hand lay upon his breast, the Academy ring glittering in the sunlight. Now I stand on tiptoe and stroke the broken willow, bring my finger to my lips and kiss it. I shut my eyes, because they burn so. No tears left to shed: only this terrible dry throbbing, as though my eyes have been etched with sand. The sobs begin again. The wrenching weight in my chest drags me to my knees until I crouch before the tree, bow until my forehead brushes grass trampled by grieving family and friends from the Academy. I groan and try to think of words, imprecations, a curse to rend the light and living from my world so abruptly strangled and still. But I can only moan. My mouth opens upon dirt and shattered granite. My nails claw at the ground as though to wrest from it something besides stony roots and scurrying earwigs. The earth swallows my voice as I force myself to my knees and, sobbing, raise my head to the tree.

It is enough. He has heard me.

Through the shroud of new leaves he peers with lambent eyes. April’s first apple blossoms weave a snowy cloud about his brow. His eyes are huge, the palest purest green i n the cold morning sun. They stare at me unblinking, harsh and bright and implacable as moonlight, as languidly he extends his hand toward mine.

I stagger to my feet, clots of dirt falling from my palms. From the north the wind rises and rattles the willow branches. Behind me a door rattles as well, as my father leans out to call me back to the house. At the sound I start to turn, to break the reverie that binds me to this place, this tree stirred by a tainted wind riven from a bleak and noiseless shore.

And then I stop, where in memory I have stopped a ‘thousand times, and turn back to the tree. For the first time I meet his eyes.

He is waiting, as He has always waited; as He will always wait. At my neck the wind gnaws cold as iron, stirring the collar of my blouse so that already the chill creeps down my chest, to nuzzle there at my breasts and burrow between them. I nod, very slightly, and glance back at the house.

All the colors have fled the world. For the first time I see it clearly: the gray skin taut against granite hills and grassless haughs; the horizon livid with clouds like a rising barrow; the hollow bones and nerveless hands drowned, beneath black waters lapping at the edge of a charred orchard. The rest is fled and I see the true world now, the sleeping world as it wakes, as it rears from the ruins and whispers in the wind at my cheeks: this is what awaits you; this and nothing more, the lie is revealed and now you are waking and the time has come, come to me, come to me. …

In the ghastly light only His eyes glow, and it is to them that I turn, it is into those hands white and cold and welcome that I slip my own, it is to Him that I have come, not weeping no not ever again, not laughing, but still and steady and cold as the earth beneath my feet, the gray earth that feeds the roots and limbs and shuddering leaves of the tree …

And then pain rips through me, a flood of fire searing my mouth and ears, raging so that I stagger from the bed as tree and sky and earth tilt and shiver like images in black water. Gagging, I reach into my own throat, trying to dislodge the capsule, Emma Harrow has bitten; try to breathe through the fumes that strip the skin from my gums. I open my mouth to scream but the fire churns through throat and chest, boils until my eyes run and stain the sky crimson.

And then I fall. The wires rip from my skull.

Beside me on the floor Dr. Harrow thrashes, eyes staring wildly at the ceiling, her mouth rigid as she retches and blood spurts from her bitten tongue. I recoil from the scent of bitter almond she exhales, then watch as she suddenly grows still. Quickly I kneel, tilting her head so that half of the broken capsule rolls onto the floor at my feet. I wait a moment, then bow my head until my lips part around her broken jaw and my tongue stretches gingerly to lap at the blood cupped in her cheek.

In the tree the Boy laughs. A bowed branch shivers, and, slowly, rises from the ground. Another boy dangles there, his hair tangled in golden strands around a leather belt. I see him lift his head and, as the world rushes away in a blur of red and black, he smiles at me.

A cloud of frankincense. Seven stars against a dormer window. A boy with a bulldog puppy; and she is dead.

I cannot leave my room now. Beside me a screen dances with colored lights that refract and explode in brilliant parhelions when I dream. But I am not alone now, ever …

I see Him waiting in the corner, laughing as His green eyes slip between the branches and the bars of my window, until the sunlight changes and He is lost to view once more, among the dappled and chattering leaves.