“What is that supposed to mean?” Park had asked, coldly.

“In the animal kingdom, you would be neofelis nebulosa,” Glenn had answered.

Whatever that meant. Park had never looked it up; she was afraid to find out exactly what it was. But she got the idea. An elusive, enigmatic thing. Ultimately what Glenn was saying was something she had always known: that she was not a social animal; that she was not meant to be wedged into close contact with other people. That she belonged to a single-cat home. People like her—people turned inward, people solitary and on the fringes of society—were best encountered from afar. Those on the outskirts could not understand the problems of those in the center of things. They couldn’t really bridge the gap. She understood this.

But she’d taken the test again anyway.

Park thought about that now, as she helped Hunter sedate the hysterical Elly Ma. On her other side, Natalya was sealing the wound in Elly’s arm with a kind of medical glue.

“What kind of nightmare?” Park kept asking Elly, as the woman’s eyes flickered under a wave of tab-induced drowsiness. “What were you dreaming about, Elly?”

The climatologist shook her head. “I wasn’t in control of myself,” she slurred with an effort, as if struggling to speak across a great distance. “There was some other—force guiding me. Controlling me. Making me do things I didn’t want to do.”

“What things?”

For a moment Elly didn’t answer. “I was so cold,” she said. “My eyes weren’t my eyes. There was no blood in my body. I didn’t have a tongue.”

God, Park thought. Her blood thumped hard once in her throat. She said, “It was just a dream.”

“But it was so real.”

“It wasn’t.” She brushed Elly’s brow dry with a cloth. “It was only a dream, Elly. Do you understand?”

She attached another sedation tab to the woman’s neck. Elly shook her head. “No . . .” she murmured. “No . . . I think that it was really happening. It is really happening. I’m going to turn into that. I’m going to die!” She pressed her palms to her temples. Then, in a sudden cry: “Don’t put me to sleep again!”

She went limp.

Elly Ma is sick, Park thought. Her heart felt like a burnt walnut; she was cold with a dreadful, unfeeling clarity. Holt and Reimi are sick. I don’t know how to help them. How can I? I’m too different. Apart. I’m nebulosa.