She sighed and drew away from him. "I tried it once," she said. "I wanted to go home, to my sisters. I cried and cried, and that didn't help. I could see the lights, and knew they were just a few hundred feet away. I ran at first, then I began to feel strange, faint, I guess. I had to stop. I was determined to get to the dorm. I walked then, not very fast, ready to grab something if I started to faint. When I got closer to the off-limits line—it's a hedge, you know, just a rose hedge, open at both ends so it's no trouble at all to go around. When I got close to it, the feeling came over me again and everything began to spin. I waited a long time and it didn't stop, but I thought, if I kept my eyes on my feet and didn't pay any attention to anything else, I could walk anyway. I began to walk again." She was lying rigidly beside him now, and her voice was almost inaudible when she went on. "And I started to vomit. I kept vomiting, until I didn't have anything left in me, and then I threw up blood. And I suppose I really did faint. I woke up back in the breeders' room."

Gently Mark touched her cheek and drew her close to him. She was trembling violently. "Shh, shh," Mark soothed her. "It's all right. You're all right now."

No walls held them in, he thought, stroking her hair. No fence restrained them, yet they could not approach the river; they could not get nearer the mill than she was now; they could not pass the rose hedge, or go into the woods. But Molly did it, he thought grimly. And they would too.

"I have to go back," she said presently. The haunted look had come over her face. The emptiness, she had called it. "You wouldn't know what it means," she said, trying to explain. "We aren't separate, you see. My sisters and I were like one thing, one creature, and now I'm a fragment of that creature. Sometimes I can forget it for a short time, when I'm with you I can forget for a while, but it always comes back, and the emptiness comes again. If you turned me inside out, there wouldn't be anything at all there."

"Brenda, I have to talk to you first," Mark said. "You've been here four years, haven't you? And you've had two pregnancies. It's almost time again, isn't it?"

She nodded and pulled on her tunic.

"Listen, Brenda. This time it won't be like before. They plan to use the breeders to clone themselves through implantations of cloned cells. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

She shook her head, but she was listening, watching.