There was absolute silence when Natalie Young finally injected both Jeremiah and herself with the two different compounds of Meld and then moved her chair to face him head-on. Jeremiah closed his eyes and waited for the initial barrage of images he knew would come—snippets from her internal dialogue, odd bits of conversation with people he didn’t know, random yearnings and shadows of things she’d rather hide. But the first, fleeting image he saw from Natalie’s mind was something unexpected—a vague sense of shock. There was distinct hesitation from her. Almost the instant it appeared, she retrieved it and pulled it back. He didn’t understand what it was, what it meant, but Jeremiah was certain she’d been genuinely surprised by something she’d seen in his mind. Had she picked up so quickly on his suspicions about Scott? His desperation to warn Diana? Had those thoughts been that close to the surface? He fought to empty his mind, to think of something else, but before he could do it, she had already switched gears. She reined in her own emotions, and her mind began to bore into his as it usually did when they took the drug. He was helpless to do anything but give in to it. She was adept at this. The next thing he knew, he was cognizant, alone in his mind and free from the Meld’s hold. The panel filed back into the room and allowed him a few minutes to compose himself before rifling him with questions.

“How do you feel, Mr. Adams?”

“What do you remember?”

“Can you describe the experience for the viewers at home?”

“Do you feel any sudden depression?”

Jeremiah answered warily, saying all the things he was supposed to say, hitting all the buzzwords and, generally, behaving exactly as he was expected to. He tried to steal a glance at Natalie, to see if he could determine what she’d seen in him, but she took pains, it seemed, not to catch his eye. She answered every question directly to the interviewer.

“What I saw in Mr. Adams was a levelheaded, rational man,” she said. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing unexpected. I was able to probe his thought patterns, his self-perception, and see a bit of how he views the world. To me, he seems content. He is a perfectly normal man.”

Whatever she saw when she looked at his mind through the Meld, Jeremiah thought, it wasn’t that.

Once the cameras were off and the producers began guessing at the viewership, Jeremiah found himself in the middle of a group of ViMed executives. Charles Scott was at his elbow.

“Great job,” someone said to him. “I think this is going to work.”

“Let’s hope so,” a nervous older woman said. “We’ve got too much riding on this.”

Jeremiah nodded and shook hands with several people without saying much.

“Come, Mr. Adams,” Charles Scott said. “I’ll walk with you to your car.”

He was likely in a hurry, Jeremiah thought, to get back and hook him up to the clone. Jeremiah’s stomach turned at the realization he’d have to undergo the Meld twice in a single hour, and this time with his double. He didn’t even want to imagine what that would be like, seeing what was basically his own mind reflected back at him under the drug. He turned on his heels, said his goodbyes and followed Scott out of the room and into the hallway.