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  Music had always been her refuge. When the pain got too bad, when even thinking hurt, she could turn to the discipline of music and wipe it all away. She’d even transposed some old Celtic Harp pieces to guitar, and her fingers moved automatically into one now. Silvery rills of music filled the office, painting a vision of a future in which she could be happy and free, where the person she’d always wanted to be and the person she was would match. Where she wouldn’t have to brace herself every time she caught sight of herself in the mirror.

  If T-Stroke works . . . if we can figure out how to keep it from killing people . . . what happens then?

  Would she take it? It was a long way from 16 to 31. She’d always thought her dreams hadn’t changed, but that was before they’d come within reach. Now the thing she’d hoped for most was about to happen, and the thought both frightened and delighted her. The goal that had obsessed her for more than half her life—having Power, real power, invincible power—was almost in her hands. She’d done what she’d always dreamed of doing. She’d found it. She’d found the key to do what the fantasy novels she’d devoured as a teen only hinted at—a way to unlock the Talent that would set her apart from everyone else, make her special.

  Give her revenge.

  The music in her hands turned darker, mocking and warning at the same time. What revenge would ever be enough for all the disasters of her life? Where could she begin?

  A sudden flood of light blinded her, and she pressed her hand against the strings, stifling the music into silence. Past and present jangled against each other, and she almost flinched before she remembered where she was. Jeanette had a lot of problems these days, but getting ambushed and beaten up wasn’t one of them.

  “I thought I’d find you here.”

  “It’s customary to knock,” she said icily. She winced at the light, squinting up through the glare to find Robert standing in the doorway of her office. She’d used to respect Robert in a way—he was so much more ruthless than she’d ever dared to be—but lately that respect had faded. She’d never really trusted him to protect her from prosecution the way he’d promised he would back at the beginning, but now she didn’t even trust Robert Lintel to have his own best interests at heart. He was in danger of believing his own publicity, she realized with a flash of insight.

  But he was still a dangerous man. And right now, he wanted something from her. She knew the look on his face, the one that told her he was going to try to talk her into something—but so close to her goal, Jeanette was feeling a little bit forgiving, and was pretty sure she’d agree to whatever he came up with. It was the easiest thing to do, and in her own peculiar fashion, Jeanette had always taken the easy way.

  “They’re packaging the stuff up now,” she said before he spoke. She set her guitar back in its case. Robert always made fun of her music. There wasn’t any power to be gained from music. Or so he thought.

  But a protest song can start a riot. End a war . . . or start one. Great musicians live forever.

  “That’s great,” Robert said warmly, oozing false charm from every pore. It must work on his bosses, whoever they were, but it’d never worked on her. And Robert was too self-obsessed to see that. “We’ll be able to start distributing the stuff tonight, and have our next batch of subjects rounded up by the end of the week. I wanted to talk to you about developing protocols for the second round of tests, the ones on the Survivors.”

  “Sure.” Jeanette grinned without mirth. “But don’t you think it should wait until we have guinea-pigs to test it on? Anyway, I’m not sure what re-dosing the Survivors will do. Maybe it’ll just kill them. In terms of practical applications you’ve got to remember that this stuff wears off fairly quickly. Twelve hours and it’s out of the system—and from what we’ve seen with the chimps and the first round of people, the overt effects only last for an hour or two.”

  Robert smirked at her, sure he knew things she didn’t.

  “Well, that’s just the thing. We could get started on that second round right now. We’ve still got that live one from the last round, and we’ve got plenty of T-Stroke. Why don’t you shoot her up again and see what happens?”

  The sadistic glee in his voice made her wince inwardly. Jeanette knew that all their human victims were going to be TTD—Tested to Destruction—and that none of them were going to be allowed to survive, but down deep inside somewhere she also thought that they should be treated with respect. Whether they’d chosen to be lab-rats or not, they were heroes. But Robert saw them as nothing more than toys.

  And Robert liked breaking toys. She already knew that.

  “She’s the one who healed herself, right? Fat lot of good that is, for your purposes,” Jeanette said grudgingly. She couldn’t resist slipping the needle in, even if only a little. What if the only thing this stuff was actually good for was healing impossible-to-cure diseases? Not much power for Robert in that. Too bad if that’s true, party-boy.

  “Yeah. Ram says she had stomach cancer. I was thinking a higher dose might, I don’t know—do something else,” he said, too casually.

  If there was anything Life had taught her, it was that trying to save anyone else only got you hurt. She’d sold folks down the river before. One more couldn’t matter. Jeanette shrugged. “Worth a try, I suppose. And if her head explodes we can dump her somewhere like all the others. Okay. Tell Beirkoff to get her prepped and bring her down to my lab and we’ll see what we can do. Oh, and Robert? Strap this one down real good, okay? I don’t want to spend tomorrow cleaning the place up.”

  Robert grinned and saluted her from across the room, a faux-macho gesture he’d picked up from some movie or other. Jeanette grimaced—she’d always particularly detested it. But Robert didn’t notice. He’d already gotten what he wanted.

  After he left, she rummaged through her paper files until she found the one she was looking for: the intake report on Ellie Borden, the sole survivor of the first run of trials. The black hooker’d had the lowest body weight of any of the test subjects, and so the dose she’d gotten in the cells had been proportionately higher.

  Was that the reason she’d survived? Would a small dose of T-Stroke kill, but a large one liberate the mind from its fetters?

  We’re going to get a chance to find out, aren’t we? Jeanette thought with grim humor. Her headache was worse than it had been all day. See? You’re going to do someone else down. And it doesn’t hurt at all, does it?

  They had to let her go. God had given her a second chance, and Ellie Borden didn’t intend to waste it.

  She knew she was in some kind of trouble. Her head was clear for the first time in many, many months, the disease wasn’t hanging over her head like a flaming sword, and she knew that wherever this place was, she was not in the hands of the police.

  Everyone she’d met here had treated her with distant kindness. A little while after she’d woken up whole and well, alone in that padded cell, a woman wearing a black uniform had come and escorted her to a bathroom with a shower, given her a rolled towel that contained a toothbrush and soap, and told her to wash. When she’d stripped, she found two disks glued to her skin—one under her ribs, another high on her back—but try as she might, she could not pick them free, and the guard had ordered her to get into the shower and stop wasting time. The water was hot, and beneath its stream Ellie had luxuriated in being clean, really clean, for the first time since she’d been turned out onto the streets.

  She might still have been in the shower if the woman hadn’t told her to come out. When she had, she’d found her clothing was gone, and she’d been given a set of blue surgical scrubs to wear, and a pair of soft slippers for her feet. The connection between these clothes and those given to prison inmates did not escape her.

  “Where am I? Can you tell me that? I know this isn’t the Tombs4 . . . I need to get out of here. I promise I won’t cause any trouble.”

  But the woman had only stared at her with hard-eyed pity, and refused to answer any of her questions. />
  After her shower was over, Ellie was taken down a long white corridor to yet a third cell. It was an improvement on the first two: it had a fold-out table, a chair bolted to the floor, a bunk, and a sink and toilet, like an upscale designer version of a prison cell. There were cameras in all four corners of the ceiling, and an overhead fluorescent light protected by a metal grid. The room had no windows, and she heard the heavy sound of multiple locks being thrown as the door closed behind the guard.

  That was when she really began to be afraid. Because this place was like a prison, but it wasn’t a real, official prison. And that meant that the people running it could just make people . . .

  Disappear.

  After awhile—not more than an hour, Ellie thought—an Indian man in a white lab coat came in, accompanied by another guard and a trolley full of medical equipment.

  “Where am I?” she’d asked them, hating the sound of terror she heard in her own voice. “I know this is . . . could you just tell me what you want? Please?”

  “If you’ll just cooperate, I’m sure all your questions will be answered later. This is just a routine medical examination, Ellie. We want to know how you’re doing,” the doctor answered. His voice was soothing, professional, but Ellie had taken a look at the sleepy-eyed guard standing behind the man in white and stopped asking. The guard was a tall bronze-skinned man, in the same black uniform the guard who had taken her to the shower had worn. The nametag on his shirt said Elkanah—a Biblical name, a good name, but she didn’t think Elkanah was a good man. He had a full equipment belt—nightstick, walkie-talkie, gun, pepper spray, handcuffs—and there was something about him that made Ellie submit to the doctor’s examination in passive silence. It had been very thorough and puzzling to her, though she was drearily familiar with medical procedures from the time she’d started getting sick. The doctor removed the two silver disks—spraying the places they were stuck to her with something very cold first—and somehow that frightened her even more, as if she’d suddenly lost whatever value she might possess in these strangers’ eyes.

  Once the doctor was finished—he’d taken blood samples, hooked her up to an EEG and an EKG, and a few other things—he let her dress again.

  “Someone will feed you soon.”

  The words were meant to be kindly, she knew. He hadn’t had to say anything, after all. But they’d only made her feel even more like an animal in a cage. She hadn’t been able to look at him when he left.

  In a few minutes, another of the hard-faced guards had brought her a sandwich and coffee, obviously from a local deli. She’d taken one sip of the creamed and sweetened coffee but found it gaggingly bitter and poured it into the sink, using the cup for water instead. She’d thought she was too frightened to eat, but instead she was ravenous, finishing the sandwich in only a few bites and wishing there were more.

  Then all there was to do was pray, huddled up on her bunk with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, hoping against hope that what she feared so much wasn’t the truth.

  The sound of her cell door opening jarred Ellie awake—somehow, despite everything, she’d fallen asleep. What she saw in the doorway made her cringe back against the far wall. Elkanah was back, this time with a white guard who looked just as intimidating. They were wheeling a hospital gurney with them. Four thick leather straps were laid loosely across it.

  “Please . . .” she heard herself whimper.

  “Get on the table.” The white guard spoke. His voice was harsh and indifferent. Ellie shook her head, too frightened by the sight of the straps to comply. “Do it,” he said, a thread of irritation coloring his voice.

  “Hey, Angel. You gotta understand people’s limitations,” Elkanah said. “Now, Miss,” he went on, speaking to Ellie for the first time. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. We have to take you somewhere. You have to get up here on this gurney. Can you do that?”

  To Ellie’s horror, she began to weep. She shook her head, trying to explain how afraid she was, how unfair it was that this should happen now, just when a miracle had turned her life around—had given her a life instead of the death she had expected.

  Elkanah took no notice of her tears as he approached her. He pulled her gently to her feet and removed the blanket from her shoulders, then led her over to the gurney. Before she could react, he had scooped her up in his arms and laid her down on it, and the man he’d called Angel was buckling the straps across her legs.

  She began hopelessly to struggle, but Elkanah held her shoulders down and stared into her eyes. “There is no point to this,” he said firmly. “Do you understand?”

  She’d turned her head away then, giving up, letting them do what they would. Uncontrollable shudders racked her as all four straps were buckled tight. The leather creaked as she breathed. She knew better than to ask for mercy. The streets had taught her that much.

  Once she was strapped down, the two men wheeled her quickly through a disorienting series of corridors, until she arrived at a brightly-lit room that smelled of chill and disinfectant. There were two people there waiting for her.

  One was a white man in his forties. He wore an expensive three-piece grey suit and looked to Ellie like a lawyer, one of those irritable important people who had inhabited the fringes of her world in the days when she’d been a good citizen. He was frightening, but his companion scared her even more—a short dumpy woman with mouse-colored hair wearing a rumpled lab coat, sneakers, and jeans. She had the pasty complexion of someone who spent all their time locked away from the sun. The woman’s eyes were the flat pale blue of the winter sky, and there was no humanity in them.

  “Well, this is an improvement over chimps,” the man in the suit said. His companion smiled thinly and ignored him.

  “Hello, Ellie,” she said. “I’m Jeanette Campbell. Do you know why you’re here?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Campbell. You don’t need to talk to her,” the man snarled.

  “Of course I do, Robert. That’s the whole point of this, isn’t it? Lab rats that can talk? If you want data from her, she’s going to need a context.”

  Campbell turned back to Ellie, coming closer to the side of the gurney. Elkanah and Angel had backed away like respectful servants, going to stand beside the door.

  “When you were brought in here, you had cancer, and you were addicted to something. What was it?”

  “P-Percodan,” Ellie managed to stammer. Her mouth felt dry as salt.

  “Okay. Percodan’s a good drug. Highly effective, highly addictive. But you haven’t had any in about four days. How do you feel now?”

  “I feel—oh, please, let me go! I haven’t done anything!” Ellie pleaded, hating herself for begging when she already knew it would change nothing.

  “But you have done something, Ellie. You’ve contributed to Science. You see, when you were first brought in, you were given an experimental drug. And now you don’t have cancer any more. And you don’t need Perc. And we want to know what happened to you. So we’re going to give you some more of what we gave you before—intravenously this time. And I want you to tell me everything about what happens to you then.”

  “If I— If I do that, will you let me go? I won’t tell anybody about this, I promise, oh, just let me go, please, let me out of here and I’ll never tell, I swear—”

  “Now, Ellie.” Campbell’s voice was remote, faintly chiding. “You know we aren’t going to let you go. But you don’t have any place to go anyway. That’s why we picked you. If you cooperate you’ll be well treated for the rest of your life. That’s more than you could expect on the streets.”

  But I’m well now! I have my life back! Helplessly, Ellie began to struggle against the straps. Campbell reached into her pocket and produced a needle and a bottle of milky fluid. She swabbed down Ellie’s arm with cool efficiency and began probing for a vein.

  “How do you know you’ll get the same effect with an injection?” Robert said.

  “I don’t.” Campbell sounded almost amused.
“What I do know is that this will work faster and more of the drug will reach the brain. And that’s sort of the whole point here, wouldn’t you say?”

  The needle stabbed into Ellie’s arm with a lancing pain that seemed to strike at the roots of her soul. Eyes tight shut, she could only moan in protest as Campbell gently squeezed the plunger home, injecting the drug directly into her bloodstream. She felt a rush of warmth so intense it was as if she’d been lowered into a hot bath, and when she tried to open her eyes again, she couldn’t.

  Once Ellie passed out from the drug, Jeanette glued contact pads to her temples. Their wires led to an electro-encephalograph—an EEG—and instantly the displays lit up, displaying the rhythms of deepest sleep, a sleep verging on coma.

  “What do we do now?” Robert asked edgily. “Wait six hours for her to wake up?”

  Jeanette leaned back against the counter, watching the green waves of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta roll across the EEG display behind Ellie’s head. Something was happening there, down inside where she couldn’t see.

  “It should go faster this time,” she said absently. “And I gave her twice the dose. What I want to know is, what’s she going to be able to do when she wakes up?”

  Less than fifteen minutes later, Ellie’s eyes opened. She stared around herself wildly, as if she’d forgotten where she was.

  “Ellie?” Jeanette leaned over her.

  She saw Ellie’s eyes widen, as if she were seeing things no one else could. Jeanette reached out to touch her forehead, and in that moment a pulse—Jeanette had no other word for the sensation—passed between them.

  Jeanette recoiled, and suddenly realized that the nagging headache she’d been fighting since she got up this morning was gone as if it had never existed. “Robert,” she said thoughtfully, “come over here. Touch Ellie.”

  “Why?” Robert said suspiciously.