She glanced at him and nodded, then shook her head. "I don’t know. Nobody knows, but it seems so. And one day it all stopped, all of a sudden. People had been talking about martial law, about the militia coming out openly onto the streets… It was a crisis. I’m telling you it was horrendous. It arrived for no reason. It ruined our sleep and stole hundreds of peoples’ minds away-they were never cured-and then suddenly it went. For no reason."

She went on eventually. "After it quieted, there were rumors… There were a thousand rumors about what had happened. Daemons, Torque, biological experiments gone wrong, a new strain of vampirism…? No one knew. But there were certain names that came up again and again. And then in early Octuary, people I knew began to disappear.

"At first I just heard some story about some friend of a friend whom no one could find. Then, a little while later, there was another, and another. I wasn’t yet worrying. No one was. But they never reappeared. And they got closer to me. The first person to go I barely knew. The second I’d seen at a party some months before. The third was someone I worked with at the university, and drank with now and then. And the rumors about the Midsummer Nightmare, the names began to get whispered a bit louder, and I heard them again and again, until… until one name came out loudest. One person was being blamed; a person who linked everyone who was disappearing to me.

"His name was der Grimnebulin. He’s a scientist and a… a renegade, I suppose. There was money on his head-you know how the militia puts the word out, all hints and pass-it-ons, so no one knew how much or for what. But it was understood that he was gone, and that the government was keen to find him.

"And they were coming for the people who knew him: colleagues, acquaintances, friends, lovers." She held Silas’ gaze bleakly. "We’d been lovers. Godspit, four, five years ago. We’d not even spoken for probably two. He’d taken up with a khepri, I heard." She shrugged. "Whatever he’d done, the Mayor’s boys were trying to find him. And I could see it was soon my turn to disappear.

"I was paranoid, but I was right to be. I was avoiding going to work, I was avoiding the people I knew, and I realized I was waiting to be taken. The militia," she spoke with sudden zeal, "were fucking predatoryin those months.

"We’d been close, Isaac and me. We’d lived together. I knew the militia would want me. And maybe they did let some of the people they questioned go, but I never heard from any of them again. And whatever questions they wanted to ask, I had no answers. Gods knew what they’d have done to me."