'What's wrong, professor?' Sam asked. Just then, the elevator chimed open.

'Cynthia Powski,' he said, as the doors closed. 'Do you think she might still be alive?'

What have I done?

'Might… But we doubt it.'

'Why's that? He spared Gyges, didn't he?'

'In a living-death sort of way, I suppose he did. But you missed the rest of Cynthia Powski's performance this morning.'

Thomas swallowed. It hadn't occurred to him there might be more. 'What do you mean? What happens?'

Sam hesitated—her face looked all the more beautiful for its concentration. 'There's a break, and when he starts shooting again, Cynthia's still in the throes of passion, but something's changed. The neurologists we consulted think he somehow attached a transmitter to the primary pain pathways to her brain—'

'The spinothalamic and spinoreticular pathways?'

'Exactly, and used it to replace the pleasure control panel or whatever the hell it is he uses in the beginning of the BD.'

Thomas could only stare.

'Then he hands her a piece of broken glass.'

Images of Cynthia—memories from this morning—flashed before his mind's eye, her writhing now soaked in blood and scored by weeping gash after weeping gash.

Sam continued. 'The pain input generated by the resulting tissue damage, they told us, was probably stopped before it reached her brain, and translated into a signal that directly stimulated her pleasure centres. He rewired her like a basement rec-room, professor, then watched her slice her way to ecstasy.'

'My God,' Thomas whispered.

He made her cut herself. He made her want to cut herself…

Sam blinked rapidly. 'Wait till you see it, Tom. There's no God, trust me.'

Churning in his gut.

What the fuck is happening? Wake up… Wake up!

'But then that's Cassidy's point, isn't it?'

Thomas clutched his hands to keep them from shaking.

The Field Office was smaller than he expected, and except for cleaners, apparently abandoned.

'Hard to believe I run the FBI, isn't it?' Sam said, as she gestured to her cubicle.

Thomas smiled, cataloguing—as much out of habit as anything else—the various identity claims and behavioral residues that every workspace sported. The things that said I belong to this; this is what I do. Nothing surprised him, except, perhaps, the blue-headed pins arranged in the shape of a heart on her tackboard. He nodded to a NY Rangers cap hanging from a tack. 'You a fan?'

'Fucking A,' she said, settling into her chair. She cracked her knuckles, then began tapping at her keyboard. 'You?' she asked.

'Too much heartbreak.'

'One of those, are you?'

'One of those who?'

Sam sorted through a succession of bright windows on her flat screen. 'One of those who think games are about winning.'

'I guess I—'

'Here it is,' Sam interrupted. 'Neil Cassidy's brain.'

The screen was tiled with neural cross-sections, day-glo colored and shaped like chestnuts. For an instant, it seemed impossible that these images could be in any way related to his best friend, let alone to what he had seen on the BD earlier this morning. They seemed too abstract, too clinical, to be the engine of today's events.