"I gave him a dose of fast-penta," Rowan reported stiffly, "to try to jog his memory. It works sometimes, for cryorevivals. But he had a reaction. His blood pressure shot up, he went paranoid, and he took off like a whippet. We didn't run him down till he collapsed in the park." She was still catching her own breath, he saw as his agony started to recede.

The old Dr. Durona sniffed. "Did it work?"

Rowan hesitated. "Some odd things came up. I need to talk with Lilly."

"Immediately," said the old Dr. Durona—not-Lilly, apparently. "I—" but she was cut off when his shivering, stuttering attempt to talk blended into a convulsion.

The world turned to confetti for a moment. He came back to focus with two of the women holding him down, Rowan hovering over him snapping orders, and the rest of the Duronas scattering. "I'll come up as soon as I can," said Rowan desperately over her shoulder. "I can't leave him now."

The old Dr. Durona nodded understanding, and withdrew. Rowan waved away a proffered hypospray of some anticonvulsant. "I'm writing a standing order. This man gets nothing without a sensitivity scan first." She ran off most of her helpers, and made the room dim and quiet and warm again. Slowly, he recovered the rhythm of his breath, though he was still very sick to his stomach.

"I'm sorry," she told him. "I didn't realize fast-penta could do that to you."

He tried to say, It's not your fault, but his powers of speech seemed to have relapsed. "D-d-d-I, diddi, do. Bad. Thing?"

She took far too long to reply. "Maybe it will be all right."

*    *    *

Two hours later, they came with a float pallet and moved him.

"We're getting some other patients," Dr. Chrys of the wing-hair told him blandly. "We need your room." Lies? Half-truths?

Where they moved him to puzzled him most of all. He had visions of a locked cell, but instead they took him upstairs via a freight lift tube and deposited him on a camp-bed set up in Rowan's personal suite. It was one of a row of similar chambers, presumably the Duronas' residence floor. Her suite consisted of a sitting room/study and a bedroom, plus a private bath. It was reasonably spacious, though cluttered. He felt less like a prisoner than like a pet, being smuggled against the rules into some women's dormitory. Though he had seen another male-morph Dr. Durona besides Raven, a man of about thirty whom Dr. Chrys had addressed as 'Hawk.' Birds and flowers, they were all birds and flowers in this concrete cage.