“You slept for two days,” Miriam said. She came down out of the light like a descending angel. She was dressed in bright white silk. Her hair was nearly grown back, and flowing golden blond across her milky shoulders. She was perfectly made up, looking absolutely ravishing. Her eyes were their usual ashy gray.

“We’re going to play this afternoon,” she said. “You’ll want to call your musical friends.”

Sarah took Leo’s hands. “Leonore, do you know what’s happened to you? Do you understand anything about this at all?”

“Look at my skin!”

How well Sarah remembered that miraculous discovery. A woman loves a pure skin, more than most realize—until she suddenly has something she never dreamed possible.

Leo shook her head. “And my hair!”

It was as pretty as Sarah’s, almost as pretty as Miri’s.

Perfection had transformed a pretty girl into a shockingly beautiful one. Leo smiled down at her. “I threw up all yesterday, but I’m better.”

“I used up all the antinausea stuff,” Miriam said. “She took to it more easily than you.”

“But now I feel—” Leo shivered her shoulders. “I feel fabulous!”

As Sarah went about the duties of her life, showering and washing her hair, Leo chattered away about herself. When should she feed? Should they hunt together or was that wise? On and on. It was utterly grotesque.

“Leo,” she finally said when she was dressing, “I usually take this time in my office.”

It was a lie and Leo knew it. But she understood and withdrew at last.

When Sarah arrived downstairs, Leo was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the library looking at Keeper books she’d never been allowed to so much as touch. She tossed one of the ancient volumes aside and rushed up to kiss Sarah, chattering about yet more sensations and symptoms.

Sarah picked up the book and replaced it in its box. “These are very fragile,” she said.

“Yeah, they’re in Egyptian! Are they from Egypt?”

“They aren’t in Egyptian. They’re in the Keeper language, which is called Prime. The book you were paging through is thirty thousand years old. It is made entirely of human parchment and is also the finest illustrated medical text on the planet. If it had a value, Leo, it would be, very simply, the most costly artifact in the world.”

Leo had the hangdog expression of a surprised hound. But then she tossed her coltish hair and asked, “What are the first signs of hunger? I don’t actually know.”

“You feel cold. Your skin starts to get cold. Then you become a bit less energetic. That’s how it begins.”

“Should I get my own fleam?”

She sounded very like a bride planning her trousseau, or a pregnant girl deciding the furnishings of the nursery.

“Use a fishhook.”

“Afishhook!”