A memory, as insubstantial as gauze in water, came to him: a younger Cynthia, looking Midwest fresh, leaning against his desk and confessing her confusion with the term 'gestalt'. He remembered making a joke—something harmless and clever, he had thought—then immediately regretting it. How frightened she had looked! Bewildered and despairing. It was so easy to forget how vulnerable…

His mouse-hand shaking, Thomas scrolled through her record, afraid he would discover what he now thought he remembered.

She had failed. From the looks of her grade breakdown, she had simply dropped out without withdrawing, which probably meant she had dropped out of Columbia altogether. Just one more young, anxious face culled from the herd.

Thomas had failed her. He blinked, saw her licking a red-lacquered nail.

No wonder her image had nagged him with such violent regularity! He knew her. Knew without knowing.

But what did it mean?

With the exception of Frankie, Neil had picked his victims on the basis of a random and unwitting connection to him. He had ransacked his best friend's life searching for those single degrees of separation that would take him as close as possible to fame. A business magnate, a politician, a televangelist, a porn star. There could be no doubt he meant these relationships to be meaningless, accidental, like a scarf or glove 'accidentally forgotten' when visiting an estranged lover. But why? Was it simply part of his larger message? A crude illustration of the meaninglessness of all relationships?

No, Thomas realized. There was something horrifically personal in the impersonal nature of these connections. Something meant just for him. He was certain of it.

What was Neil after?

He obviously wanted an audience; the high-profile abductions and dramatic demonstrations had made that obvious from the beginning. He also wanted Thomas to suffer—Frankie and Nora were proof enough of that. But these other people—Halasz, Gyges, Forrest, and Powski—meant nothing to Thomas. Witnessing their pain had horrified him, certainly, but no more than their bit-parts in the script of his life warranted. They were strangers, after all, sharing, as Neil would say, no familial genetic material.

Thomas looked sidelong at Ripley lying on the floor, her heels bouncing against her bum, her head askew as she concentrated on coloring.

For the briefest of instants, she looked a stranger.

Horror. Control faltered, like paint crinkling in the heat of an unseen fire. His skin pimpled in dread.

'Have you an arm like God?' Neil had asked that night. 'Have you?'

All of it, Thomas realized—everything that had happened—was aimed directly at him. The FBI, the clumsy bids for publicity, even the prophet-of-the-semantic-apocalypse routine were simply lies that Neil had told himself, compensatory mechanisms meant to rationalize and conceal his real motive.

Hatred. Psychopathic hatred. Neil wanted his best friend to suffer. Nothing more. Nothing less.