She dissected around the entry wound, opening it wider and wider, snapping orders. “Spreaders!” she called when she reached the rib cage. “Clamp!” she said when she found torn blood vessels.

She could not entirely save the lung, but she managed to isolate the bleeding enough to resect. Time disappeared for her. She concentrated totally, remembering her training and her work experience from so many years ago. Her fingers worked sometimes almost by magic, but for the most part it was her careful training that saw her through this terribly challenging procedure without—she hoped—a serious error.

When she could at last close him up, his blood pressure had risen to 80 over 50 and his pulse was 160. A temperature of just 99 suggested that he was tolerating the transfused blood well. She put him on an electrolyte drip, then got her prescription pad. She wrote for some time, then handed it to Leo. “They’ll have all this in the drugstore at Riverside Hospital.” “What’s the situation?” Miriam asked. Her blood-spattered robe still hung off her naked body. Her face was hollow, her skin gray.

“He’s hanging on.”

Miriam’s face twisted, and she threw herself sobbing into Sarah’s arms.

“Oh, baby,” Sarah said, “baby, I’m so sorry. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know . . .”

“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.