A tunnel, a slightly squashed cylinder big enough for a body, pierced the MI from one side to the other—a pair of opposed oval mouths, connected by a sensor-lined throat. A pallet extended from the floor of the nearer mouth like a padded rectangular tongue. Taka's patient lay back on it; the van listed slightly under his weight. The pallet retracted with an electrical hum. Slowly, smoothly, the man disappeared into one mouth and extruded from the other. He was luckier than some. Some went in and never came out. The tunnel doubled as a crematorium.

Taka kept one eye on the NMR readouts, the other on the blood work. From time to time, both eyes flickered uneasily to the growing line of patients.

"Well?" came the man's voice from the other side of the van.

He'd been here before, she saw. Her sideshow tweaks had already taken hold in his cells.

And his Stage-One was still advancing.

"Well, you know about your melanomas, obviously," she remarked as he came around the corner. She drew a time-release raf-1 from the dispensary and loaded it up. "This'll starve the tumors on your skin, and a few others cooking inside you probably didn't know about. I take it you've been in a clave recently, or a PMZ?"

He grunted. "Came here a month back. Maybe two."

"Uh huh." The static-field generators installed in such places were a mixed blessing at best. Bathing in that kind of field for any length of time was guaranteed to set tumors blooming in the flesh like mushrooms in shit. Most people considered it the lesser evil, even though the fields didn't so much repel ßehemoth as merely impede it.

Taka didn't ask what had inspired this man to abandon that leaky protection for enemy territory. Such decisions were seldom voluntary.

He offered his arm: she shot the capsule sub-q, just over the bicep. "There are a couple of other tumors, I'm afraid. Not so vascularised. I can burn them out, but you'll have to wait until I'm a little less busy. There's no real hurry."

"What about the witch?" he said.

Firewitch, he meant. ßehemoth.

"Um, according to your blood work you've already taken the cocktail," Taka said, pretending to recheck the results.

"I know. Last fall." He coughed. "I'm still getting sick."

"Well if you were infected last fall, it's doing its job. You'd have been dead by winter without it."

"But I'm still getting sick." He took a step towards her, a big, big man, his bloody eyes narrowed down to red slits. Behind him, others waited with limited patience.

"You should go to Bangor," she began. "That's the closest—"

"They won't even tell you the wait at Bangor," he spat.

"What I can do here, what I—it's not a cure," she explained carefully. "It's only supposed to buy you some time."

"It did. So buy me more."