He’d wanted to know what it did—”What is all this shit, anyway?” as he put it—and she’d told him. Why not? She didn’t care who knew. She just wanted to keep him distracted from her, and herself distracted from the bodies on the blood-spattered floor.

Thomas was gone. So quickly. One moment he’d been standing there talking, the next he was dead. She tried to dredge up some grief, but could find none. Compassion… where was her compassion for someone who shared half her genes, even if it was the wrong half?

Gone. Like Thomas. And what did genes mean anyway? Why should you care for a poor excuse for a human being just because you share some genetic material?

But even Thomas deserved better than to be shot down like a dog.

“Wireless electricity,” Baker said, rubbing his jaw. “Christ, that’s got to be worth—”

A moan snapped Alicia’s attention to the floor. The Arab, the one Thomas had called Kemel, was moving, curling into a fetal position as he clutched his bloody abdomen.

“Please,” Kemel moaned, his voice barely above a whisper. “I must have a doctor.”

Baker waggled his pistol at Alicia and then the Arab. “You’re a doctor, right? Fix him.”

“With what? He needs a hospital.”

“Check him, dammit!”

“All right.”

Alicia stepped over to Kemel and knelt beside him. From this angle, she could see Thomas’s gun on the floor next to his body. Baker couldn’t see it from where he stood. But it was far beyond Alicia’s reach. Still, it was good to know it was there.

She stiffened as she saw one of Thomas’s hands open and close. She glanced at his face and saw his eyes open, stare unseeingly for a moment, then close again.

Still alive, she thought, but not for much longer.

The Arab cried out when Alicia tried to roll him onto his back, so she was forced to examine him on his side. Gingerly—all her experience with infectious diseases screamed warning at the very possibility of contacting blood—she pulled his hands away from his wound. She saw the hole in the crimson wetness of his shirtfront, saw the blood oozing from it, caught the fecal odor.

Her mind ran the probabilities: perforated intestine, internal bleeding but aortic and renal arteries probably intact or he’d be dead by now. And there was absolutely nothing she could do to help him.

Kemel let out another agonized moan.

“He’s critical,” she said.

“I could’ve told you that,” Baker said. “I’ve seen gut shots before. Ugly way to go. What can you do for him?”

“Nothing here,” she said, rising. “He needs emergency surgery.”

“Well, then,” Baker said with a shark’s smile as he pointed the pistol at her. “I guess that makes you pretty damn useless, doesn’t it?”