"I'd be like a shield around you."

"Would I be able to breathe?"

"That's exactly what we don't want-no flow of molecules across the membrane that could trigger the sensors. You'd have to hold your breath."

"Have you ever done this?"

"Are you kidding? How would you like someone to have your living heart, your very life, in their hands?"

"Don't you have a backup file somewhere?"

"Would you want a backup of you stored somewhere? Some clone? So if you died, an exact copy, but not really YOU, could be put in your place? When are you going to get it?"

"Yell at me later."

Her resolution dimmed a moment. "So are we doing this? That guard'll be back soon."

"Okay, what do I-"

"Hold your hands out, palms up."

I did. She stepped toward me, so the tips of my fingers were pressing against her abdomen just below her breasts. We locked eyes for a moment, and I realized how afraid she was.

She trusts me, I thought. With her very existence.

Then she became less solid and stepped forward. My hands slipped into her. I felt tingling. I could still see them within her sparkling iridescent form. Above floated a grapefruit-sized globe. It was silver, a giant ball bearing. It settled gently into my palms. I took a breath and pulled my arms back towards myself and cradled her heart against my chest.

The lights went out.

Suddenly my body was moving. My legs lifted, went down, ambulating by remote control. I felt smothered and for a moment bucked inside her. She fought for dominance. It took enormous will to relax and let her move me.

Time slowed. I felt strange, dislocated. I imagined that I could hear her thoughts, below the level of consciousness. They were shimmers of electricity, whispers in a grove of cypresses, the knowledge of circuit and sky. I didn't know if it was real or not. But they danced around me, fireflies of thought, and I was delighted to find that there was much in her that was made of joy and kindness. I wondered how I could have suspected her of throwing Hector out the window, and my hardness made me want to cry.

I came back to myself a little. The heart felt delicate in my grasp. I could crush it, and that would be it, no more Maggie. Despite how Elise and I had loved, neither would have permitted such a vulnerable moment, so complete a surrender. Survival instinct, maybe. Or the calluses of city life. This was as intimate with someone as I'd ever been.

The realization was like ice water. Guilt streaked through my head. But the whispers continued. I wanted suddenly to truly abandoned myself to them, give up my pain and simply merge into...

And then, like that, we were beyond the laser web, and I was myself again. I looked down at my own body, surprised to be separate. We glanced shyly at each other, and I felt absurdly like a kid who had just stolen his first kiss.

"Guess we didn't set off the alarm," I said.

"Guess not."

A silent moment. "That was... wild."

She nodded. "I felt you. Were you saying things?"

I didn't answer. I stepped forward and the outer doors hissed open. We entered the foyer, and they smacked closed behind us. No way back to the hall. Our choice was to satisfy the second lock and continue into the lab or be trapped here.

I examined the inner lock. A gene sampler. There was a button below three small icons: a drop of blood, a strand of hair, a bit of saliva.

This time I was prepared. I pressed the button. A tiny receptacle whirred from the wall.

"Please spit," it said.

"Gross," said Maggie.

"Would you settle for some hair?" I whispered. From my bag, I withdrew the tube Nicole had given me, extracted a few hair follicles and dumped them into the receptacle. They were sucked away and there was a whir.

"Thank you, Dr. Crandall."

The interior doors parted.

The lab was painted a bland beige meant to stay out of the way of any great thoughts. My flashlight played across smartscreens, centrifuges, quantum tunneling microscopes. A science geek's Disneyland. Computer servers big as Frigidaires sat in a row, blinking stupidly.

I threaded through the work stations. Opened drawers beneath the Formica tables. Nothing of value. Pens, notepads, accoutrements of the scientific method.

Maggie's hands were wrapped around her elbows.

"Cold?" I whispered.

"Terrified," she answered.

We moved to the back. The offices for the senior staff were glass cubes. The one labeled with Crandall's name was the biggest. It still had a yellow strip of police tape across the door.

The inside was spartan but disorganized. A plastic chromosome model hung on fishing line like a mobile. Books and papers were vaguely organized in tottering heaps. Data pebbles were strewn like M&Ms. This workaholic was a slob.

I rifled through papers on the desk. They all contained the same indecipherable jargon. I wondered what I had hoped to find without Maggie's help. "Can you access the database?" I asked. "We're looking for a journal, calendar, diary, anything personal."

The smartscreen came to life, bathing the room in blue. "Searching," she said.

I hated the fact that every piece of evidence in this world was on the inside of a computer. Even in my era, I'd been a dinosaur to the younger CSI guys. I was from the school where you searched with your hands, your eyes, your wits. When your case-breaker was a greasy fingerprint, dried blood on an andiron, a kilo of cocaine in a false-bottomed drawer. Not some data file in cyberspace.

As I waited, I looked around. The rear wall was dominated by an enormous dry-erase board system. When one of the four rectangular boards was filled, it could be lowered out of the way and a fresh one rotated down. Currently, all four sections were covered in equations dense enough to give Stephen Hawking a migraine.

"Whoa," said Maggie, behind me. "What's this?"

Imprinted in nasty red letters across the screen was: SURAZAL CORPORATION.

LEVEL ONE EYES ONLY.

PLEASE ENTER PASSWORD.

"Damn," I said. "I'd hoped personal stuff might not be protected. Can you hack it?"

Maggie chewed her lip. "It's a risk. I don't know their security architecture. If I try, and set off alarms, we won't know it until we see them pointing their guns."

I could feel the Dean looking down again. When faced with the choice of extra risk or leaving empty-handed, pros also took the cautious route. Patience and control was how you stayed on the street instead of playing checkers in lock-up. But I wanted something for my trouble, even if it was a computer file. "Crandall told Nicole about a breakthrough the night he disappeared, right? It could be here."

"Even if it is, we might not be able to make heads or tails of it."

"What else do we have?"

"Bupkus."

"So do it."

Maggie broke apart into a firestorm of glowing embers. Her nanobits swarmed her metal heart, lowering it onto the desk. They flitted away, dissolving. The globe just sat there, looking inert, and I almost panicked. Then her voice issued from the computer's speaker: "It's going to take a while. Hang loose."

Right. Hang loose. I eyed the doors.

For all the crimes I'd seen, all the scumbags I'd dealt with, I'd thought it would've been harder to cross the line. But I'd taken to the shadows with an ease that was scary. I'd thought that bon mote about cops and crooks being only a hair's breadth away from each other was bullshit, but here I was, my mind working like both at the same time. I wondered where that put me.

I wandered to the boards. The equations might as well have been Martian. I examined the buttons that controlled the boards, ran my finger over the green one. It must have been more sensitive than it looked, because with a whisper, the top panel rotated down into third place, the lowest one swung up to cover the second, and I found myself looking at the bare drywall beneath.

Something about it looked wrong.

Then a printer rattled to life and I went back to the desk. Pages pumped out. Maggie's globe swarmed with fireflies again. A moment later she was back in the flesh, so to speak.

"You make a great inside man," I said. Then I saw the look on her face. "Maggie?"

She went to a stool and sat, staring into space. "Bastards," she whispered. She pointed to the pages issuing from the printer: SURAZAL CORPORATION.

LEVEL ONE EYES ONLY CLEARANCE.

PROGRESS REPORT:.

August 17, 2054 ***************************

** NORM YOUTHING PROJECT **

And like that, I understood.

I understood what was so important about Dr. Morris Crandall. Why Gavin had been unwilling to talk about what Surazal had discovered about the Shift. Why Nicole had come to me, instead of an experienced gumshoe.

It was, quite simply, the other side of the coin. A DNA retrovirus appears with the ability to bring people back from the dead and make them grow younger. So why couldn't that same DNA be harnessed? Finessed a little? Engineered into a treatment for norms?

A treatment to keep them young?

The only thing that had ever leveled the playing field between kings and peasants was death. It didn't matter how rich you got, or how powerful, or how many empires you built or stole, you couldn't conquer death. Alexander, Caesar, Hussein, Rockefeller or Gates-all had to die and give the next despot his shot at the pie.

Until now. This changed everything, literally everything. Forever.

A medical solution to death would be the single most valuable product in history. Whoever controlled it would have power unlike any that had come before. Benevolently used, it could be an incredible gift. Imagine Salk, Einstein or Da Vinci continuing their work for centuries instead of decades. But Stalin killed over ten million people in twenty-four years. Imagine if he had a thousand years to work with.

What would Surazal do with a millennia?

"They don't want to cure the Shift," said Maggie. "They want to control it. For themselves. And they've got carte blanche," said Maggie. "Nobody knows what they're doing."

She was right. The city was their Petri dish. They had a global monopoly on reborn DNA. The rest of the world had literally walled themselves off from it in terror. There'd be no competitors. No international scientists racing for the same prize. Worse, there'd been no oversight as well, no congressional committees or U.N. boards of review.

Then something turned in my mind and another piece fell into place.

"Almost," I said. "Somebody decided that Surazal having control over the aging process ain't such a great idea."

Then Maggie got it too. "Whoever's killing the scientists! That's the motive! They're trying to stop the research!"

"That's why Surazal tried to handle it quietly. They can't risk the exposure."

"Guess it also explains Nicole's visit," said Maggie.

I thought about Bart. My friend might've been pressured into throwing the gig my way, or he might have honestly thought he was doing his old partner a favor. Either way, he'd been played as much as I had.

Maggie was reading the report. "They've got a prototype. 'Retrozine.'"

"Catchy. Does it work?"

"It's still unstable."

There was a rustle behind us. Crandall's papers had shifted in a breeze. I rescued some pages dangling precariously on the edge of the desk.

Maggie's brow darkened as she read more. "They've been testing it on people, Donner!"

"The homeless and addicts, I'll wager. People no one will bother looking for."

"God! If I'm reading this right, these test subjects..." She looked at me. "Some of them youthed so fast, Donner, they practically melted."

Another rustle, and this time the papers toppled to the floor. Irritated, I snatched them up and looked for a makeshift paperweight to keep them in place.

Then I stopped.

"What?" said Maggie.

"Don't move." I waved my palm in the air over the stack of papers.

"Who you waving to?"

"Air," I said. "There's a breeze."

"So?"

"So where's it coming from?"

"Donner, now's not the time to investigate the building's ventilation system."