The first high window offered reading couches and a clump of wide-eyed figures silhouetted against a full-wall screen on which howling pundits alternated with the smoking rubble Utopia had made of so many seats of science. Haste could not tempt me to enter here. I would choose my entrance as an epicure chooses the fig whose navel, just starting to part and leak a drop of sweetness, proves the flesh within will be crimson and perfect. I climbed the outside of the hospital, level to level, freezing whenever the curve of a turret or a security bot came into view, waiting for a shot from one of Martin’s Masons to make them still. Rooms with closed doors were nothing to me, whether empty or full of staring faces. I sought damage, and found it, a door smashed open, and the carcass of a table whose sharp steel legs had been harvested for a more primal purpose than standing.

The security glass sang as we cut through it, and a smell of cleanliness and chemistry welcomed us to the first room in our maze. I snatched a shard of window, since I had not had time to kit myself with a periscope. The ghost of the hallway reflected in the glass showed upturned carts and stillness, and, beyond, the branching hallways which the blueprints told me led, one to the recreation wing, the other to the hospital’s secure heart. I charged. Quiet hallway, turn, quiet hallway, turn. That must be Martin panting behind me, not quite equal to this speed. And what is this, a sense of fullness flanking me, like the barely perceived caress of an air vent but a breath too warm? Delian Huxley and the lion, one on either side of me, invisible—such was their synchrony and softness that I could not tell which was which.

A stock-still startled stare was the first face I found, a skinny figure in pajamas standing in a hallway opposite a door which was jammed shut with boxes and hastily angled chairs. She spun and aimed an apparatus at me, a chemical extinguisher perhaps or safety foam, but the tautness in her shoulders promised defense, not offense, and the swirl of her leg as she turned spoke of habituation to a Cousin’s wrap. “We’re extraction, not a hit squad,” I barked at once, as gently as my racing breath would let me. “Is there anyone in Security HQ?”

Her neck straightened with the sudden realization that she held power. “Who sent you?”

“Romanova,” I half lied.

She looked us over, but we wore nothing recognizable, not here. “There were noises from that way recently,” she said. “I didn’t look.”