'Where am I?' he tried to ask. But his voice refused to work and he sounded like a bullfrog.

'Don't try to talk,' she told him. 'You're in fieldbase Gamma Twelve. You're going to be fine, but it'll take a while to get you back on your feet. A few hours yet, I'm afraid.'

He croaked again and she leaned in closer, pressing his lips gently with cold fingers.

'Don't talk, I said.' When she was annoyed she looked a bit cross-eyed, which Fitz found very fetching indeed. She was doing something with her hands that Fitz couldn't quite see. Perhaps sticking something in the palm of one hand and peeling it back off. He realised she was touching his face and an overwhelming need to sleep swept through him.

'I'm Ayla Damsk,' she said, her voice drifting around in his head. 'You picked up some pretty comprehensive damage out there, but you're going to be fine.

You were very lucky I picked you up.'

93.Yeah, thought Fitz as he slid down the long dark tunnel to oblivion. Yeah Yeah. . .

Domecq went straight to the girl on his return, and having followed him on the sec cams Peron was only moments behind. He was sitting on the seat beside her bed, stroking the hair out of her eyes, peering into her face with a fierce longing. Peron suspected they might be lovers, going by the way he watched over her.

'Did she wake up?' he asked when Peron entered.

Peron shook her head. 'No. There's still quite a bit of work for the accelerators to do. I think she'll sleep for a while yet.'

'Who took off the ECG cap, then?'

He fixed her with the very same look she employed in the interrogation cells.

The fact that she was thrown off guard by the question must have been written all over her face.

'Her hair wasn't like this before. Look. The cap's been removed and replaced.'

'Oh,' Peron said suddenly. 'One of the staff must have made adjustments.'

Seeming satisfied, Domecq returned to the door. She watched him standing there, momentarily torn between Kapoor and whatever else he had on his mind.

He was a curious figure in those odd clothes. His shirt was still torn from his walkabout in the storm, and his coat still carried the stains from his burial.

The cuts and bruises on his face seemed to be healing fast, though, despite the fact that he'd spent no time at all on an accelerator. For a man who'd just gone through so much torment, he seemed full enough of energy, and she wondered for a second where the h.e.l.l he got his stamina. No doubt those internal enhancements were serving him well. Still, she thought, she wouldn't be too keen on experimenting on her own body to that degree. This man Domecq was pushing the boundaries of medical science into the Frankenstein arena, and that wasn't a place Peron would be happy to enter, however many storms it meant she could weather.

'I need to speak to Bains,' Domecq announced.

'Professor Bains is under deep anaesthetic,' she informed him. She remembered what Tyran had said about n.o.body contacting Bains. 'He'll be out for most of the day.'

Domecq seemed disappointed, then contemplative. Suddenly rubbing his hands together, he looked eager to get on, as if a switch had been thrown in his head.

'Is Dr Pryce still about?' he asked.

'I believe he's in his office,' Peron told him.

94.

Domecq gave her a questioning look.

'Down the corridor, first right, first door on the right.'

'Right. . . right. . . ' Domecq repeated, following an imaginary corridor with his hand. 'Right.'

He awarded her a huge grin. And then he was off. She watched him march past the window down the corridor, turning briefly to wave at her and grin again. As he disappeared from view she wondered about her Frankenstein a.n.a.logy. There was another that suited him more and came from the same literary era. He wasn't a Frankenstein monster at all, he was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Pryce jumped from sleep at his desk when the door buzzed open. He found Domecq standing there regarding him with an apologetic look.

'I'm sorry if I disturbed you,' Domecq said. 'The door was unlocked.'

Straightening himself up, Pryce waved Domecq in.

'No, come in. Please.'

Domecq dropped into the seat on the opposite side of Pryce's desk, making himself instantly at home. He seemed relaxed and amazingly awake.

'I hope you don't mind my saying so, but you look tired,' Domecq informed him.

'I'm due for a rest break. I haven't slept for nearly twenty-four hours.'

'I mean unnaturally unnaturally tired,' Domecq said. 'Like a man who hasn't slept for. . . tired,' Domecq said. 'Like a man who hasn't slept for. . .

two months.'

Pryce couldn't help but look up sharply, and Domecq gave him an amiable smile.

'You called them evil,' Domecq said suddenly, sustaining the pleasant expression.

'Yes.'

'I still think that was a curious choice of word for somebody of your. . . professional standing.'

'I called them evil because that's what they are.'

'They are?'

Pryce fixed him with a calculating look. 'They get into your head,' he told Domecq, tapping his temple meaningfully. 'You can feel them in there. All the time. They're a disease that eats away at your sanity.'

'From what I saw in that cell, that poor child's reaction when you appeared, I'm not surprised they treat you so badly. Perhaps they were using your own animosity against you,' Domecq suggested.

95.Pryce stared at him, momentarily dumbfounded.

'Just look at the conditions they're kept in,' Domecq went on, his smile now gone. 'They're treated worse than animals. And you call yourself a doctor?'

Pryce thought back to the days just after the babies arrived. He'd kept the Manni baby in his own apartment for two days while the annexe was added to Medicare Central. In those two days, he remembered clearly, he had regarded the baby as just that. A baby. A strange baby, yes, but he hadn't thought of it as a creature, or evil, or anything but a human being. It was only after they were all incarcerated together that the disquiet had started.

He remembered seeing the annexe for the first time, protesting bitterly to Peron that they couldn't keep the children in such barbaric conditions. He'd argued they should be returned to their parents. Allowed the chance of a normal life.

But Peron had reminded him of his debts and implied he could lose his job.

She'd convinced him that these things were aberrations and it was for everybody's good that they were caged and kept under strict supervision. Following that meeting, he'd gone to see the Manni baby in its new cell and, as he gazed at it, struggling to satisfy himself that Peron was right, a kind of subtle meta-morphosis had occurred. He'd seen for the first time a darkness in the eyes of the child, and for the first time he'd regarded it as something else. Something inhuman.

As Domecq waited for an answer, a kind of shuddering realisation dawned on him at that moment. Peron had planted a seed. The children had nurtured it. And Domecq was absolutely right.

Part Three

And I lie even among the children of men, that are set on fire: whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword. whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.

Psalm 57, v. 4

Josef was in the middle of a delicate operation when Veta's call came through.

The air above his desk teemed with multilevel lines of code on which he was running comparative diagnostics in an attempt to expose a rogue substructural command. The call had been bleeping annoyingly on his com for a few seconds when he allowed it through and Veta's head burst into the air in front of him.

She looked tired, with her dark eyes and face full of fretful lines.

'How long will you be?' she asked.

Puzzled, Josef answered, 'Why?'

'Come home now,' she said simply, and cut the call.

Josef stared at the strings of code that had rea.s.serted themselves in her absence. And instantly the dread hit him like a giant wave of cold water. Cancelling the readouts, he closed down his console, s.n.a.t.c.hed his jacket and rushed for the door.

As the elevator swept him homeward, his head was a jumble of worries.

All day he'd been haunted by the image of Veta standing in the middle of the nursery. The look in her eyes as she insisted she'd discovered subtle lies in the shadows around the baby's head. She was grasping at straws, of course.

Finding meaning where there was nonsense. And it tormented him to see her like that. To watch her crumbling daily, collapsing under the strain of their loss.

The few minutes home seemed to take an age. He couldn't imagine why she'd called him like that. She never usually called him at work, and lately she didn't seem to care what what time he came in at night. time he came in at night.

When he opened the door to their apartment, he found it in its usual state of clutter. Veta sat on the sofa, hands on her knees, watching him with a strange look in her eyes.

'What's up?'

'Sit down,' she said, waving at the seat beside her.

He did as he was told, not bothering to take off his jacket and perching on the edge of the sofa.

'There's something going on in medicare,' she told him.

97.98.

He observed the deep shadow round her eyes, almost black despite the bright lights in the room. The lines of anxiety etched into her features were even more p.r.o.nounced now than they had been before. He noticed that her hands were clenching sporadically, clasping and unclasping as if she were tugging an invisible cord.

'I wish you wouldn't do this,' he told her quietly.

'I'm not making this up,' she said.

He felt the irrational anger rising inside him, threatening to engulf him completely. He stood and marched across the room, turning on her fiercely.

'What did you find?' he demanded, 'More funny shadows? Fairy dust on his pillow? Did you enhance the image to discover a nebulous reflection of Beelzebub in the incubator gla.s.s?'

' Joe Joe ' '

'You're turning our life upside down for a trick of the light!'

She regarded him with fury that swiftly mutated into a sorry look. When she spoke, her voice was that of a frightened child.

'It's not just the shadows,' she told him. 'It's the dreams.'

He watched her in silence, feeling the tears that had pooled in his eyes. He wanted to tell her to stop, not to look back any more but to look to the future.

Heal the wounds and try to build a new life for themselves. Maybe try for another child. But he couldn't get the words out into the air. All he could say was 'Just. . . dreams. . . '

She shook her head. 'They're not just dreams. And the shadows were were wrong. wrong.

I just needed to know the truth, Joe.'

'We know the truth,' he said. 'Joby died.'

'Maybe he did,' she agreed. 'But what we saw was not our baby.'

He stepped back and knelt in front of her, grasping her hands and peering into those unsettled eyes.

'I don't believe what they showed us was a hologram,' he told her. 'But if it was, didn't you think there might have been good reasons not to show us the truth?'

'Yes of course,' she said. 'Joby might have been badly deformed. A terrible. . .

monster. I know they might have been trying to protect our feelings. But all that matters to me now is the truth about our baby.'

He gazed at her, not knowing what to say.

'I've been into the med comps today,' she announced. 'I did it this morning, when you left. And now I know know something odd was going on when our baby 99 something odd was going on when our baby 99 was born.'

He felt a stab of alarm. 'You can't just violate personal records. There'll be a trace on what you've done '

'Oh, don't worry,' she said. 'I was very discreet. Set up phantom IDs all over the place. I used substructural idiom. Closed all the gates behind me and covered my tracks. It's what we do, you and me. That's why we were employed here. n.o.body does it better.'

Clutching his hands, she pulled him gently on to the sofa again at her side.

'Two months ago there were staff changes made in Medicare Central. A handful of new people were listed on the personnel roster. I did some background checks. They were all military.'