“There was an attempt to cross the species, recorded in the Books ten conclaves ago. Keepers trying to escape from the need to eat human blood. The result wasn’t good. We’d created human beings with the speed and power of Keepers. So we destroyed all the family lines, except one. We found a last survivor about forty years ago. He was destroyed. Apparently he had a son.”

“I don’t think this is true, Miri. There’s no way we could interbreed. We’re as different as tigers and cattle, except on the surface.”

“You have no idea what our science was capable of—when we had a science.”

“What happened to your science?”

Miriam regarded her. She laughed a little, and Sarah sensed a whole hidden history in that laughter, a history of secrets that would never be told. “It was so good to be with him; it was like going back to the one time in all my life that I was truly and deeply happy. Oh, Sarah, I love him so!”

Sarah found herself hoping that the pregnancy was real. Because if this was true, and it was a healthy fetus, then maybe the great hope of Miriam’s life was being realized.

But still Sarah saw Paul to be mortal danger, and Leo was stationed to watch his monitors.

“How about your hunger?” Miriam asked her.

“I got some blood,” she said. But Leo’s hollow expression told them both that it had not been enough.

Sarah took Miriam back upstairs, to their private room. They turned on the video system so she could watch the infirmary every moment.

She lay back on the little sofa where she so often read and worked. Sarah knelt beside it. “Please forgive me, Miri.”

Miriam gazed at her. “I forgive you, child,” she said. “But you must help me with this.”

“Miri, he hates you. And he’s a killing machine.”

“He has a heart, Sarah, a huge heart. I want my chance to try to reach his heart.”

“When he wakes up, Miri, God knows what’ll happen.”

“I want you to help me. Both of you.”

“Of course we will. That goes without saying.”

Miriam went over and picked up the encaustic painting of her lost Eumenes. “I left my happiness in another world.”

“We have happiness.”

She smiled a little.“I’m the last of my kind, you know—the last Keeper.”

“There are others.”

Miriam looked at her. “Living in holes? That’s not being a Keeper—a true ruler of mankind.” She gazed at the portrait of the handsome young man in his white toga. “I’m lost in time.” She put it down and came back to Sarah. “But I have a baby. I have hope.”

Sarah did not know what Miriam had in her belly, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out. If this much-shattered heart took another blow, it was even possible that Miriam would join her peers in the shadows, living like an animal and waiting—no doubt hoping—to die.

“I want a pregnancy test.”