That remains to be seen, she told herself.

She went to the bathroom, then put on a bathrobe and headed out into the hallway. The nurse's station was not occupied. Marion was still in the kitchen on the first floor, presumably.

Good.

She was feeling shaky, not nearly as strong as she'd initially thought she was, but she pressed on, taking the elevator, her first use of Grant's Gerex master key. She bypa.s.sed the first floor and an instant later she was stepping into the bas.e.m.e.nt's laboratory area.

At the moment it appeared to be entirely deserted, though the fluorescent lights bathed the s.p.a.ce in a stark, pitiless light.

Down the hall was Dr. Van de Vliet's office and the examining room, where she and her mother had gone when they were being admitted. At this time of night, everything was closed and probably locked.

She turned and looked at the forbidding entryway to the gla.s.s-enclosed laboratory. Through the transparent walls she could see the dim glow of CRT screens and incubators filled with petri dishes. And there at the back was--could her eyes be trusted?--the outline of an elevator door.

She hadn't noticed it until this minute. It seemed to be built with a nod toward camouflage.

It could lead to Kristen, she told herself. Find out what Grant is so freaked about. He can wait a couple of minutes.

She was starting to feel even weaker, but she pressed on. Next to the heavy steel, high-security air lock leading into the laboratory was a card reader and she swiped the white card through the slot.

The air lock opened silent and perfunctory. When she went through, the door behind her automatically closed and then the hermetically sealed door in front of her opened. She was in.

Next a bright fluorescent light clicked on, all by itself.

"Jesus!"

Maybe it was connected to a motion sensor. Or on a timer.

Then she looked around. This, she thought, is the place where the Gerex Corporation has supposedly changed medical history. What was created in this very room had if Grant was telling the truth, saved her mother's sanity. And if she could believe the monitors she had looked at in her room, her own heart condition had begun to be reversed after a lifetime of progressive decline.

Yet something about it had been pushed too far. Somewhere in the midst of this miracle, the Gerex Corporation had done something so obscene no one could even talk about it.

She looked around the laboratory, wishing she could understand what she was seeing. It smelled like solvent, acetone, with a mingling of more pungent fumes. The black slate laboratory workbenches were spotlessly hygienic and equipped with several large microscopes that featured flat-panel screens. She noticed a heavy server computer at the back, presumably networked to all the terminals in the building, and then she remembered that Van de Vliet had once spoken of computer simulations.

Someday soon, she told herself, she was going to understand what really was going on here, but for now she headed for the elevator.

Another zip of Grant's white card and the door opened. There was indeed a floor below the laboratory, and she pushed the b.u.t.ton. The Dorian Inst.i.tute was all about security, but this subbas.e.m.e.nt area was doubly secure.

After a quick trip down, the elevator door opened onto another air lock chamber, this an exit from the pressurized environment of the laboratory.

Why, she wondered, had no one spotted her yet? Perhaps this part of the clinic was such a lockdown that nurses and guards weren't necessary.

As she stepped from the air lock, she was in a hallway. She walked down and tried the first unmarked door. It was locked, but then she saw the slot for her card. She slipped it in and the door opened automatically.

The room she entered had a row of beds, each shrouded in a curtain. As she walked down the center aisle, she realized that only one of the beds was occupied.

And, yes, it was Kristen. She was lying there and when Ally slid back the curtain, her eyes clicked open, startled.

"Hi, don't be afraid. I'm a friend." She quietly finished drawing the curtain aside.

Now the once-breezy Kristen Starr was staring at her with angry eyes, the false bravado of a frightened child. And she looked much younger than she had in the head shot she'd attached to the walls of her town house with steak knives. She said nothing for a moment; then she mouthed, "Who are you?"

"I talked to you on the phone a couple of days ago," Ally said, not sure herself exactly when it was, "when you went down to your place on West Eleventh Street."

"I don't know you," she mouthed again, this time with a slight whisper.

"My name is Ally Hampton." She moved next to her so she could keep her voice down. "I'm an interior designer. I once did an apartment for you in Chelsea."

"I'm about to go on a journey," she whispered. "I don't remember you, but maybe you're the one who's going with me.

There was something otherworldly and chilling about her voice.

"What journey do you--"

"We were going to go away. That's what he promised. Just us two. Well, I'm ready. I want to go out and play. But he doesn't care anymore. He just wants me to disappear. So that's what I'll do. Only we'll do it together, you and me." She reached up from her bed and ran a finger across Ally's face. "Will you take me out of here? He promised me everything, that I could get it all back. But now I know he didn't care. He was just using me." She stopped, then gave a cruel laugh from the back of her throat. "But now it's going to happen to him too. I can tell. That's why he doesn't want to see me anymore. He doesn't want to see what's in store for him."

What has happened? Ally wondered. It sounds like some kind of bizarre experiment gone wrong.

"Won't you come with me?" Kristen went on. "We'll go to a place n.o.body has ever been to before. It'll be just us."

Her seductive eyes, at once plaintive and demanding, would have lured anyone toward wherever she wanted to go. For a careless moment Ally found herself wanting to follow them.

No, this is madness.

Or, Ally thought with horror, is she seeing something in me that I can't see?

"Kristen, listen to me. Please. I think it's very possible I've just had a stem cell procedure. For my heart. I don't know if it's like what you had, but I want to know what happened to you."

"Don't do it," she mumbled, seeming to come back to a kind of reality.

"Just get out of here now. After ... it starts, he gives you shots and things, but nothing works."

Ally felt her consciousness start to wobble. She reached out and seized the edge of the bed for support.

"Kristen, talk to me."

Her eyes went blank again, and Ally could just barely make out what she mumbled next. In fact, all she could catch were random words, words that only drifted through her consciousness and failed to stick or make any sense. It was as though Kristen were in a stance and sleepwalking among the words of some alien language.

"Young," Kristen seemed to say. "You want to be ... to stay. Old is so horrible. Time. You're young and then suddenly you're old and it turns out you can't ..."

Ally heard the words, but they didn't make any sense.

"I'm sorry, Kristen. I'm feeling a little dizzy."

"It's started," she said, abruptly coherent again and focusing in on Ally. "That's how it began with me. At first they said everything was okay and then it wasn't."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's happening throughout my body." She sobbed. "I've stopped having periods and I'm getting acne. Everything is ... changing."

The words drifted through s.p.a.ce, and Ally felt like she was hallucinating, in a place where time was sliding sideways. The images were all retro, things from her past that floated through her vision in reverse chronological order.