She searched the salle de bains, looking for makeup, but also trying to determine if more than one person lived here. The results were ambiguous. There was a man’s razor, also two toothbrushes.

Somebody moved. She glimpsed in the shadows a strange, dark creature. She reeled back out of the tiny room, raising her arms, preparing to defend herself.

But nobody came leaping after her. The only sound was her own breathing, that and a trickle of water from the toilet.

She turned on the light and saw in the mirror a Miriam Blaylock so profoundly changed that she’d thought herself a stranger. The head was bald, the face sunken, the eyes black sockets. She raised a finger to her cheek, felt the skin. It ought to be pink and soft right now, glowing with the life she had just consumed. But it revealed another surprise. She was not sallow, but covered with fine gray ash. The outer layer of her skin seemed to have been carbonized, at least on her face.

She splashed some water on it, then dried it with a serviette. It came up muddy white. The sink was full of gray. She stripped off her clothes and looked down at herself. She had sustained tremendous damage, more than she had realized. There were great rifts in her skin, filled with raw, angry flesh. Her hips were scraped almost to the bone. In one place, she could see actually see some bone.

She drew a bath, watching as the wonderful, steaming water gushed into the big tub. When she sat in it, the ash clinging to her body soon turned the water dark gray, tinged pink with the blood of her wounds.

Soon her whole body was tickling as her blood raced to repair the damage. She closed her eyes. How lovely. How much she needed to sleep. So easy it would be, so warm was the water.

No! No, she had to find stimulants—coffee, pills, anything—and she had to locate the woman’s passport, call an airline, and buy a ticket to New York, go to the mines, warn the other Keepers.

She rose from the tub and threw open the medicine chest. There were three bottles of pills—vitamins, an herbal remedy for colds, nothing of any use. The poor young creature had been healthy and clean of even simple drugs. Miriam could not avoid a sense of waste when she destroyed a vital, young life like this. The girl had been not unlike her Sarah.

She had given up telephoning Sarah. All that mattered now was getting home. She was afraid that the disaster had already crossed the Atlantic and that was why Sarah couldn’t respond. Would she find her beautiful home in Manhattan a ruin, just like the Castle of the White Queen, and Sarah’s very bones burned to ashes? There was no way to know that. It was not given to her.