Working together, they forced the heavy elevator door and moved ahead. The floor was sheened with water, and white stalactites dripped from pipes that ran across the ceiling. A long lab bench stacked with electronics dominated one wall of the room. Against the other was a stainless steel examination table, and the moment he saw it, Mark recalled its coldness and hardness and saw the black straps hanging from it and knew that they once had restrained him. Hulking equipment stood nearby, an MRI scanner, and a functional positron-emission tomography imager fitted with a plasma screen.

“I remember this place. They made me look at pictures, Mark, hundreds and hundreds of them, for hours, for days.”

“Do you remember what they were?”

She went to the PET imager and laid her hand on its dusty whiteness. “My life. This is where I learned my life.”

Tears gleamed at the edges of her eyes. He reached out to her, but she pulled away from him. As she did, her light shone on another device.

When he saw it, a memory burst into his mind, searing and terrible.

He was a boy, maybe twelve. Sarge had him by the hand. They were approaching that device, a gurney enclosed in glass. In it a pale form floated that he at first thought was a fish. But then he had seen arms, blunt, incompletely formed hands, and staring eyes, the eyes of a goddess or an angel, and hair floating in the fluid that surrounded the incomplete body.

It was rotating slowly, and as the face—the most exquisite, the most perfect face he had ever seen—turned away from him, a great sob racked him and Sarge chuckled.

“She’s really pretty, eh,” he said, and clapped his big hand on Mark’s shoulder.

This memory of Gina as she was being grown was so staggering, so cataclysmic, that in that one, searing instant, it all but revised the meaning of his life.

She had not been born. She had never been a baby. When she first walked, first thought, first found her name and her spirit, she was already just a year younger than him.

She went to the case. With the exaggerated care that comes to people at moments of great tragedy, she laid her flashlight along its edge. She put her hands on it and leaned over, peering into the darkness where her life had begun.

So softly that he could not hear her, she said something.

“Gina?”

“I am a woman.” She gripped the edge of the case. “I am a woman!” She shook the thing, her great strength causing it to tremble on its moorings. “I AM A WOMAN!”

Then she sank down, her voice choking out tears she wanted to suppress. She turned, looking up at him out of eyes shadowed with a new and haunted darkness.