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  Across the lot, a couple of other doctor types were chatting together as they walked toward the hospital, and Nicole found herself gripping the steering wheel tighter. If the doctor decided to risk shouting a warning to them …

  Apparently, Bungie was thinking the same thing. “What’s your name, Doc?” he asked out the window.

  “McNair,” the man said. “Sam McNair.”

  “Got a family, Sam?”

  “No.”

  “So no one would miss you if I blew you away?”

  A muscle in McNair’s cheek tightened. “Take it easy,” he said. “I’m not going to make trouble.”

  They traveled the rest of the way in silence. Nicole kept the car beside the doctor, her brain and head throbbing. Had Bungie really killed someone?

  Maybe he had. It would explain the car and the gun. Probably his wound, too, if whoever he’d killed hadn’t gone quietly.

  And now he’d said it out loud, and in front of a witness. So where did that leave her?

  She didn’t know. All she could do was hope the doctor fixed Bungie well enough to travel, and that she could ditch him before the cops caught up with him.

  They reached McNair’s car. “My bag’s in the trunk,” he told Bungie. “Wait here and I’ll go get it.”

  “Better idea,” Bungie said with a grunt. “Stand right there—right there—where I can see you. Put it in park, Nicole, and give me a hand.”

  He seemed weaker than he’d been when they’d left Jasp’s place, staggering as Nicole helped him out of the backseat. But his eyes were wide-open and alert, and she could see by the strain in his jaw and neck that he had his teeth clenched. Running on pure willpower now.

  “Okay, Doc,” he said, keeping his gun pressed against his side where it wouldn’t be so visible to anyone passing by. “Nice and slow.”

  Not that there was anyone passing by. In fact, as Nicole glanced around, she realized that for the moment the three of them were completely alone in the parking lot, probably as isolated as it was possible to get in a big city.

  She hoped all that seclusion wouldn’t make Bungie feel secure enough to do something stupid.

  The voices were getting stronger.

  McNair led the way to the rear of his car and pulled out his key ring. For a second he seemed to hesitate, maybe wondering whether he dared risk hitting the panic button instead of the trunk release. Bungie didn’t say anything, but just took a step closer to him. The doctor’s cheek tightened, and with a quiet thunk the trunk popped and swung smoothly open. “Good choice,” Bungie rumbled. “Get it.”

  For a second the two men locked eyes. Then, McNair’s cheek twitched again and he reached into the trunk and pulled out a black doctor-style bag. With his free hand, he reached up to close the trunk.

  There was a puff of air on the back of Nicole’s neck, and a pair of arms slithered like snakes around her shoulders and locked together solidly across her chest.

  A startled scream tried to explode from her throat. But all her muscles were suddenly frozen in place. Bungie spun around to face her, snarled something disbelieving as his gaze jerked upward to something above her head. He grabbed at Nicole’s arm, his fingers tightening around her rigid flesh as he swung his gun to point over her shoulder.

  McNair gasped something and grabbed Bungie’s gun arm, either trying to wrestle the weapon away from him or else drag it off-target from wherever it was aimed. Bungie snarled and swung the arm back at him, slamming the side of the gun against the other’s forehead. McNair staggered, but managed to keep his grip. Bungie tried to bring the gun back around, but he was pulling against all of McNair’s weight, and it wasn’t working. The voices in Nicole’s head gave a sudden, shrieking gasp.

  And out of nowhere two more figures appeared, one behind Bungie and one behind McNair. The newcomers’ arms darted around the men’s shoulders and their hands locked together, just like the arms that were holding Nicole.

  But the attackers weren’t muggers or random strangers or security guards from the hospital.

  They weren’t even people.

  They were taller even than Bungie, at least six and a half feet tall, with thin bodies and arms and pure black eyes. They had no noses, their mouths seemed to be little more than wide slits, and their heads were completely bald. Their skin was a pale, silvery white that glistened in the early-morning sunlight. As Nicole stared in disbelief, the creatures unfolded large, shimmering butterfly-type wings from their backs. The wings stretched up and out into the morning breeze.

  An instant later, the world vanished.

  Not the way it disappeared when Nicole drifted off into a drunken sleep, going gradually blurry as consciousness faded away. This disappearance was sudden, complete, painless, and terrifying.

  Maybe not quite complete. She couldn’t see the car or the parking lot or the Philadelphia skyline or even Bungie and McNair. The whole world seemed to have turned a black so total that she felt like she could stretch out her hand and run her fingers through it. But she could still see the arms wrapped around her chest.

  With nothing else for her to look at, and with another scream trying desperately to escape her frozen throat, she forced herself to concentrate on the arms.

  Her attacker’s skin wasn’t silvery white, like she’d first thought. Instead, the skin itself was pure white, with an overlay of crisscrossing silver threads that gave it its metallic sheen. The fingers were interlocked together, but as she looked closely she could see that there were six fingers on each hand instead of five, and that the two on the ends both seemed to be thumbs.

  That would have freaked her out, she thought dully, if her mind hadn’t already been completely freaked out by all the rest of it.

  Don’t worry, Nicole. I won’t let you go.

  Nicole felt her breath catch in her still-frozen throat. Suddenly, for a single moment, the normally wordless voices in her head had spoken words.

  And they’d spoken the words to her. Not to somebody else, but to her, Nicole Hammond. Personally.

  The horrifying stories of voices telling people to kill themselves were running through her mind when the blackness in front of her was ripped away like that street magician she’d seen once pull the black cloth off his hat.

  But it wasn’t a pigeon that appeared in front of her, like it had from the magician’s hat. It was Bungie and Dr. McNair, standing exactly where they’d been when Nicole’s world disappeared. The silvery-white butterfly people were also there, one of them still standing behind each of them.

  But they were no longer standing in the hospital parking lot. They were in a tall-ceilinged round room with dim overhead lighting and hundreds of glowing or flashing colored lights dotting the room’s curved walls. Between the lights, the walls seemed to be covered in a crosshatch of the same kind of silvery threads that were on the butterfly people’s skin.

  From somewhere in front of her came a sudden whooshing sound, and a section of the wall that didn’t have any lights swung open, letting in a dazzling blaze of light. Through the ringing in her ears she heard the sound of footsteps, and as she squinted against the light she saw the black silhouette of a figure walking toward them. She couldn’t see a face in the glare, but from the way it walked she had the impression that it was a shortish, broad-shouldered human instead of another butterfly person.

  Abruptly, it stopped. For a moment it stood still, and Nicole found herself tensing. Then, with a snort, it stepped to the side of the opening and bit out a couple of words in some crazy foreign language.

  A moment later another shadow from outside the round room appeared and walked toward them, this one much taller and broader than the first shadow. As it came close, some of the reflected light bounced back from the walls onto its face and body and Nicole was finally able to make out some details.

  It wasn’t just a big person, like she’d thought. Nor was it another of the butterfly people. Its face was utterly unlike anything she’d ever seen, reminding her somehow of a squas
hed shark face, complete with sets of gills on its neck. Its body was even worse, looking like it had been made by pouring a thousand glass marbles into a mold. The shoulder and hip and knee joints didn’t seem quite right, and the creature’s hands were thick and broad, like the paws of some horrible movie monster.

  Nicole tried to shrink back, another scream boiling up inside her. But she still couldn’t move, and this scream was just as unable to escape her paralyzed throat as all the others had been. The marble monster stopped two feet away from her and reached out his hands.

  And for the second time that horrible, terrifying morning, the world went black.

  two

  There had been many times over the years when Nicole had looked forward to sleep. When the world was crashing down around her head, sleep had often been her only escape.

  But this sleep wasn’t an escape. It was restless, full of frightening dreams of glass monsters and giant butterflies and men and women staring down at her and babbling in strange languages.

  The worst part was that she wasn’t sure that all of those hazy images were, in fact, dreams.

  And whether she was dreaming or lying half-awake, through all of it she could sometimes hear the faraway voices, once again wordless.

  When she finally came fully awake, she found herself alone in a small room, squarish like a normal room instead of the round one she’d first seen after the parking lot disappeared. She was lying on a mostly comfortable bed, with a soft light coming from small gaps in each of the corners. The walls and ceiling were a pale gray, with a sheen that seemed to imply they were made of metal. A pair of tall white racks stood beside the bed, one on each side of her, with three boxes loaded into each of them. The boxes were connected with wires and clear plastic tubing, and from the upper box on each side another tube came out and into a taped-over spot on the inside bends of both her elbows. It was sort of like the IV setups she’d seen, only with boxes instead of plastic bags like they used in hospitals. Across the room were a chair and a small desk with a built-in computer screen.

  Nicole looked around, listening to her heart thudding in her chest. It was a hospital room, obviously. Probably in the VA hospital where Bungie had tried his insane kidnapping stunt.

  But why was she in a hospital at all? Had she been shot? She couldn’t remember anything like that happening.

  Unless the butterfly people, the round room, and the marble monster had been dreams. Hallucinations, maybe, after hospital security jumped her and Bungie. Maybe during the struggle someone had shot her.

  But then shouldn’t she hurt somewhere? Packer had told her about a guy he’d patched up once who’d been shot ten years earlier and still wasn’t able to move his arm without it hurting.

  Maybe one of the machines was pumping in drugs. That could explain why she wasn’t hurting. But shouldn’t there at least be a whole bunch of bandages somewhere on her?

  She lifted her head and looked down at her body. To her surprise, she was no longer dressed in her jeans and sweatshirt, but was instead wearing a blue jumpsuit sort of thing with a black belt and low black boots. There were no bandages anywhere that she could see, or any indication that there’d ever been any.

  On the plus side, she didn’t smell like booze and vomit anymore.

  She was still gazing down at her new clothing, wondering when hospitals started using jumpsuits instead of those flimsy robe things, when there was a softer version of the whooshing she’d heard in the round room and a door half-hidden behind one of the racks slid open.

  Nicole tensed, her mind flashing back to her nightmares about butterfly people and marble monsters. To her relief, it was a normal woman who stepped into the room. Her face was cheerful and heavily freckled, her reddish hair tied back in a tight ponytail. She was wearing a jumpsuit like Nicole’s, except that hers was red instead of blue.

  “Good morning, Nicole,” the woman said. Her voice was melodious, with the kind of pleasant English accent that Nicole had always liked. “It is Nicole, correct?”

  It took Nicole two tries to get her voice working through an unexpectedly dry throat and mouth. “Yes, I’m Nicole,” she confirmed cautiously.

  “My name’s Allyce,” the woman said. She crossed to one of the racks beside Nicole and peered at something on one of the sides that Nicole couldn’t see. “I’m your doctor. How are you feeling?”

  Nicole’s first instinct was to say she was fine. People who complained about feeling bad got left behind on jobs and didn’t get a share of the take.

  But there was something in Allyce’s voice that made Nicole think that maybe she really did want an honest answer. “My throat’s kind of dry,” she said, taking a quick mental inventory of her various body parts. Surprisingly, especially so soon after a binge, her head wasn’t hurting. Had they found a new cure for hangovers? “My stomach hurts a little, too.”

  “Probably hunger.” Allyce pointed to the tubes running into Nicole’s arms. “We’ve been feeding you and filtering out your wastes intravenously, so your stomach hasn’t had a lot to do lately.” She smiled. “I know what you’re thinking, that dialysis usually means a lot of discomfort. Fortunately, this system is completely painless.”

  Nicole looked at the tubes again, her stomach tightening around the empty hole inside it. That hadn’t been what she’d been thinking at all. “Was I sick?” she asked anxiously. “Was I hurt? What happened?”

  “No, no, you’re fine,” Allyce assured her. She did something to the box, then stepped around the rack and started unfastening the tube connected to Nicole’s right arm. “We just needed you to be under for a few days while we fitted you with your neural-link translator.”

  Nicole stared at her. “A few days?”

  “No worries—the implantation went fine,” Allyce continued. “How’s your head, by the way?”

  With an effort, Nicole dragged her mind away from the idea that she’d been lying here for days instead of just a few hours. No wonder her hangover was gone. Only—“My head?”

  “Yes.” Allyce finished with the tube and drew a circle in the air with her forefinger above Nicole’s right temple. “Specifically, this area right there.”

  Nicole frowned, focusing her attention on that part of her head. It did feel a little strange, now that Allyce mentioned it. And the breezes from Allyce’s movement were strangely cold right there. Carefully, she reached up and touched the spot.

  And jerked her hand away. All the hair from her temple to her right ear was gone. In its place was a slightly lumpy grid that seemed to be made up of slender, stiff lines, circles, and spirals.

  “It’s all right,” Allyce said quickly. “The procedure’s finished, and it went fine. And there are never any side effects.” She turned her head and pointed to the same place on herself. “See?”

  Nicole stared, her stomach tightening even harder. Partially hidden beneath Allyce’s hair was the same grid thing Nicole could feel on her own head. Allyce’s threads were bright silver, and there were small globules at most of the intersections. It was like a strange tattoo, only made of metal instead of ink. “What is it?”

  “As I said, it’s your neural-link translator,” Allyce said. She leaned over and started removing the tube from Nicole’s other arm. “It’s so that you can understand all the different languages that are spoken here.”

  “You mean foreign languages? Like Spanish and French?”

  “Spanish, yes,” Allyce said. “I don’t think there are any French speakers here at the moment. But there are others. Plato speaks Greek, for instance, and there are one or two even stranger ones.” She finished with the tube and stood up. “Come. It’s time for proper introductions.”

  Slowly, Nicole eased herself off the bed. For having spent several days not moving, her muscles seemed in reasonably good shape. Unless Allyce was lying about how long she’d been there. “Where’s Bungie?” she asked. “Is this the veterans hospital?”

  “Your two friends will be joining you shortly,” Ally
ce promised. “As to where we are, I’ll let Plato explain that.”

  She reached for Nicole’s arm. Automatically, Nicole twitched away. Allyce took the hint and let her hand fall back to her side. “Come—I’ll take you to them,” she said instead. She walked to the door and touched a small plate beside it. The door opened with another whoosh, and she stepped out into a gray-walled hallway.

  Not sure she wanted to do this, but with no better ideas, Nicole followed.

  The hallway was like a longer version of the room they’d just left. Its walls and ceiling were made of the same gray metal, with the same kind of indirect lighting glowing from the corners and from a few spots along the edges where the walls and ceiling met. The floor, fortunately, wasn’t just more bare metal, but was instead covered with a slightly bouncy wall-to-wall mat that reminded her of dark red pizza crust. There were other doors along both walls, and ahead she could see a couple of gaps that probably led into other corridors.

  Oddly enough, there were no windows or skylights or any other natural lighting. The handful of hospitals she’d visited over the years had all had lots of windows. Even their hallways had had some light coming into alcoves or waiting areas.

  Were they in one of the hospital’s inside work areas? Or maybe down in a basement?

  “Unfortunately, the translator is audio based and can’t help with these,” Allyce commented as they walked past the first closed door. “But you’ll catch on quickly enough.”

  “Catch on to what?” Nicole asked.

  “These,” Allyce said, pointing to the next door.

  Nicole frowned, slowing to a stop. There was a small white plate beside the door, right about eye level and a foot or so above the same sort of touch switch that Allyce had used to open that first door. She’d seen plates like that before in hospitals, with the room’s name or identifying number on it.

  Only the black characters etched into the plate weren’t any sort of letters or numbers she’d ever seen. Some of them were curvy and complicated, like the letters on Chinese take-out menus. Others were sharp-angled with maybe something curly added on. “What are they?” she asked.