Everyone but Doc—snoring quietly on a cot in the darkest corner of the hospital—had gone away hours ago. Some to bury the host body we’d lost. I cringed, thinking of his bewildered question, and the sudden way his face had gone slack.

Why? he’d asked me.

I so much wished that the soul had waited for an answer, so I could have tried to explain it to him. He might even have understood. After all, what was more important, in the end, than love? To a soul, wasn’t that the heart of everything? And love would have been my answer.

Maybe, if he’d waited, he would have seen the truth of that. If he’d really understood, I was sure he would have let the human body live.

The request would probably have made little sense to him, though. The body was his body, not a separate entity. His suicide was simply that to him, not a murder, too. Only one life had ended. And perhaps he was right.

At least the souls had survived. The light on his tank glowed dull red beside hers; I couldn’t ask for a greater evidence of commitment from my humans than this, the sparing of his life.

“Mary? Margaret? Susan? Jill?”

Though Doc slept and I was otherwise alone, I could feel the echo of the tension the others had left behind; it still hung in the air.

The tension lingered because the woman had not woken up when the chloroform wore off. She had not moved. She was still breathing, her heart was still beating, but she had not responded to any of Doc’s efforts to revive her.

Was it too late? Was she lost? Was she already gone? Just as dead as the male body?

Were all of them? Were there only a very few, like the Seeker’s host, Lacey, and Melanie—the shouters, the resisters—who could be brought back? Was everyone else gone?

Was Lacey an anomaly? Would Melanie come back the way she had… or was even that in question?

I’m not lost. I’m here. But Mel’s mental voice was defensive. She worried, too.

Yes, you are here. And you will stay here, I promised.

With a sigh, I returned to my efforts. My doomed efforts?

“I know you have a name,” I told the woman. “Is it Rebecca? Alexandra? Olivia? Something simpler, maybe… Jane? Jean? Joan?”

It was better than nothing, I thought glumly. At least I’d given them a way to help themselves if they were ever taken. I could help the resisters, if no one else.

It didn’t seem like enough.