She started to run. Her footsteps whispered on the pavement; the sneakers deadened the sound. But not the fear: she grasped her hands over her head and crouched low.

Great wings seemed to rise into the sky.

Hallucination.

Abruptly, the needle mark came to mind. That was, of course, what it was. Not an insect bite or some other innocent wound. Miriam had given her something with a needle.

The pale thing moving, rubber tubing, blood packs, red blood—

Dark-red blood, like that of a reptile.

Sarah ran wildly through the park, passing the motionless swings, the places where children played ball, the slides, the sandbox, the tall dripping trees.

‘I’ve been infused. She gave me blood. Her blood.’ Memory: Miriam drawing blood from her own vein with a primitive catheter.

Sarah unable to move. A voice, Miriam’s voice, saying again and again, you cannot move, you will not remember, you cannot, will not.

But the voice did not come from Miriam. It came from that strange unhuman creature, the statue with the catheter in its arm, the catheter that led to a blood pack.

When it was bulging with black blood it had been applied to Sarah’s arm. She had watched it go in, the warmest, most delicious feeling making it impossible for her to stop it, impossible to pull out the needle.

Help!

She was in the streets now, running through familiar intersections, past stores she knew well, but also through a strange and unfamiliar world, a planet of the dead that was also this planet.

She stopped, suddenly winded. Her heart was knocking, her breath was coming in gasps. ‘I’m not meant to know this,’ she thought. ‘This is unbelievable. But it’s true, it must be true.’ She felt her arm, could feel the hard knot of tissue where the needle had entered. When she pressed, it hurt.

It was real.

Right now, this moment, Miriam’s blood was in her veins, mixing with her own.

Black blood? A hideous thing with Miriam’s voice? A nightmare? Some kind of trick?

There were a hundred desperate questions, and at the moment not a single clear answer.

For example, it could be that her mind had broken through a hypnotic block, but it could also be that the block was meant to come down.

She tried to calm herself. Breathe deeply, remember your own strengths. She could think, she could apply reason and science to the situation. She could save herself with her knowledge.

Her first impulse was to get home as quickly as possible, get Tom, and go over to Riverside for some tests. But instead she sat down on the curb. To do this right she was going to have to collect her thoughts, organize her mind. If she wasn’t careful it was all going to come across to others as some kind of irrational aberration.