Someone picked me up, lifting me so that I fell over his shoulder. When the doors of the crypt opened I smelled the incense and recognized the soothing light. Down, yes, down, into the silk, on the silken bed.

Fareed knelt beside me. He pinched the skin on the back of my left hand and plunged the long thin silver needle of a syringe into the pinched flesh. I didn’t feel it but then I felt the blood leaving me. Such remarkable blood.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“Because I want her blood,” he said. “As much of it as I can get.”

He must have had more than one syringe. He turned my hand over and tapped on my wrist. I shut my eyes.

After a long moment, I opened my eyes.

I lay there like a dead man on display at a wake. Dim flickering light. Marble walls. A border of acanthus leaves running along the four sides of the rectangular ceiling of this little chamber. Stars painted in the deep blue of the ceiling.

Beside me sat Seth, still and quiet, on the long marble bench, his narrow dark face solemn as he regarded me.

“What have I done?” I whispered. “What have I revealed?”

“She was murmuring things, murmuring to them and to us,” said Fareed. “She said it was the luracastria which links us all, it’s a great web of subatomic luracastria but it’s alive….”

Quiet. Fareed was gone. They were all gone.

I lay alone in the semidarkness. A candle burned on the marble shelf by my coffin. I was dizzy and sick.

“…and so it comes,” I said, “from inside his brain, and the soul, the astral self of him that survives is the subtle form—nano-particles of luracastria—of that immortal brain of his, and nano-luracastria is its single most important surviving ingredient or element.”