She stepped carefully over Ouellette and climbed up between the bucket seats. Two Hindian boys—one maybe six, the other verging on adolescence—stared in at her. She leaned forward and stared back. Two pairs of dark eyes widened in surprise; the younger boy emitted a tiny yelp. The next second both had scampered away.

"It's your eyes," Ouellette said behind her.

Clarke turned. The doctor was sitting up, hugging the back of the driver's seat from behind. She blinked, gummy-eyed in the morning light.

"And the suit," she continued. "Seriously, Laurie, you look like some kind of cut-rate zombie in that get-up." She reached behind her and tapped the locker in the rear wall. "You could always borrow something of mine."

She was getting used to her alias. Ouellette's unsolicited advice was another matter.

A half-dozen people were already lined up when they climbed out into daylight. Ouellette smiled at them as she strode around to the back of the vehicle and lifted the awning. Clarke followed, still sleepy; Miri's mouths opened as she passed. The throat's silver lining had withdrawn, exposing a grid of sensor heads studding the cylindrical wall behind.

Icons and telltales flickered across the panel on Miri's backside. Ouellette played them with absent-minded expertise, her eyes on the accumulating patients. "Everybody's standing, nobody's bleeding. And no obvious cases of ßehemoth. Good start."

Half a block behind the billboard, the two children Clarke had surprised pulled a middle-aged woman into sight around the corner of a long-defunct restaurant. She moved at her own pace, resisting her children as though they were eager dogs straining to slip the leash. Further down the road, picking his way across scattered debris and asphalt-cracking clumps of grass, a man limped forward on a cane.

"We just got here," Clarke murmured.

"Yup. Usually I blast the music for a couple of minutes, just to let people know. But a lot of the time it isn't even necessary."

Clarke panned the street. A dozen now, at least. "Somebody really spread the word."

"And that," Ouellette told her, "is how we're going to win."

Bucksport was one of Ouellette's regular stops. The locals knew her, or at least knew of her. She knew them, and ministered unto them as she always had, her omnipresent music playing softly in the background. The sick and the injured passed like boluses of food through Miri's humming depths; sometimes the passage would take only moments, and Ouellette would be waiting at the other side with a derm or injection, or some viral countervector to be snorted like an antique alkaloid. Other times the patients would linger inside while the MI knitted their bones back together, or spliced torn ligaments, or burned out malignancies with bursts of focused microwaves. Occasionally the problem was so obvious that Ouellette could diagnose it with a glance, and cure it with a shot and a word of advice.