"Stop it," whispered Vincent, his voice the only thing in the room apart from the growing grumble of the machine. "Stop it," he whispered again to no one in particular, as if there was anything anyone could do. "Stop it."

The light rising from the machine, a light of burning, a light of parts starting to melt, was rapidly becoming stronger than the glow of the emergency blues. I looked around at a room of frozen rabbits, of collective terror, and with the level-headed attitude of a man who spends his day calculating how much toilet paper a facility might need, I barked, "Radiation! Everybody out!"

"Radiation" was a good enough word, and people scrambled for the door. There was no screamingascreaming would have required an energy which now had to be entirely focused on getting as far away as possible from the rising flood of gamma waves spilling into the observation gallery in deathly silence. I looked at Vincent, and saw that the badge on his shirt was also turning black, oil-black, deathly black, so I grabbed him by the sleeve and hissed, "We have to go!"

He didn't move.

His eyes were fixed on the quantum mirror, reflecting the spreading heat now bursting out of its surface. I could hear the metal singing and knew what was coming next. "Vincent!" I roared. "We have to get out of here!"

He still didn't move, so I swung one arm across his throat and dragged him backwards, like a swimmer saving a drowning man, towards the door. We two were the last in the room, the light in the chamber beyond now too bright to look at, the heat rising, suffocating, pushing its way through the glass. I looked up and saw the paint begin to blister on the metalwork around the room, heard the computers fry, giving up any attempt at staying intact in the face of the rising everything blasting through the room and our bodies like a gale through a cobweb. I heard the glass of the viewing gallery crack and knew with an absolute certainty that the explosion which was about to take place would kill us both, that we were already dead. I shoved Vincent out of the door of the gallery; he landed on his hands and knees, groggy, half-turning to look back at me. The light was unbearable now, blinding, more than just the visible spectrum eating through to my retinas. I fumbled for the emergency handle on the door, felt the metal burn through the skin on my hand with an ironing-board hiss, pulled it down and, as the door began to descend, dived beneath it.

"Run!" I screamed at Vincent, and he, bewildered and staggering, a mere shadow in the tortured static of my vision, ran. I crawled down beneath the bulkhead door as it slammed into place, scrambling out into the darkness of the corridor beyond, got three paces away, and felt the world behind me explode.

Visions of a rescue.

There was metal in my skin, embedded deep.

Stone on my belly.

Dirt in my mouth.

The rescuers wore lead-lined suits, and before they removed me from the smoking wreckage of the corridor, they hosed me down for nearly half an hour. The water ran red for a very long time, before it ran clear.

Darkness.

An anaesthetist asked me if I knew of any allergies.

I tried to reply and found that my jaw was swollen lead.

I don't know what use the question was, or if they asked me any more.

Vincent by my bedside, head bowed.

A nurse changing tubes.

I knew, by the quality of the air, that I was no longer in a cave.

I saw daylight, and it was beautiful.

Vincent sat in a chair at the end of my bed, an IV drip connected to his arm, though he appeared unbloodied, sleeping. Had he left my side? I didn't think so.

I wake, and I feel nauseous.

"Water."

Vincent, there, immediately.

"Harry?" His lips are cracked, his skin is pale. "Harry, can you hear me?"

"Vincent?"

"Do you know where you are?"

As he talks, he checks my vitals, carefully, effectively. He, like most ouroborans, has had some medical training. My vitals are not good, but this Harry August mustn't know that.

"Hospital?" I suggest.

"That's rightathat's good. Do you know what day it is?"

"No."

"You've been asleep for two days. You were in an accident. Do you remember that?"

"The... quantum mirror," I breathed. "What happened?"

"You saved my life," he replied softly. "You got me out of the room, told me to run, closed the door. You saved a lot of lives."

"Oh. Good." I tried to lift my head, and felt pain run up my back. "What happened to me?"

"You were caught in the blast. If I'd been any closer I would have been... but it was mostly you. You're still in one piece, which is a miracle, but there are some... some things the doctor will need to discuss with you."

"Radiation," I wheezed.

"There was... there was a lot of radiation. I don't know how it... But that doesn't matter now."

Doesn't it? That's new.

"You OK?" I asked, knowing the answer.

"I'm fine."

"You look a little pale."

"I... I got a lot of radiation too, but you were... You saved my life, Harry." He kept coming back to this, incredulity in his voice. "Thank you doesn't begin to cover it."

"How about a pay rise?"

A little laugh. "Don't get cocky."

"I'm going to die?" I asked. When he didn't immediately answer, I gave a small nod. "Right. How long?"

"Harry..."

"How long?"

"Radiation sickness... it's not pretty."

"Never seen myself bald," I admitted. "Did you...? Are you...?"

"I'm still waiting on test results."

No, you're not, Vincent. "I hope it's... I hope you're OK."

"You saved me," he repeated. "That's all that matters."

Radiation sickness.

It's not pretty.

You will be experiencing the worst of it, as you read this. Your hair will be long gone, and the nausea will largely have passed to be replaced by the continual pain of your joints swelling up and internal organs shutting down, flooding your body with toxins. Your skin will be peppered with ugly lesions, which your body is incapable of healing, and as the condition progresses you will start drowning in your own bodily fluids as your lungs break down. I know, because this is precisely what my body is doing, even as I write this for you, Vincent, my last living will and testament. You have, at most, a few days to live. I have a few hours.

"Stay with me," I said.

Vincent stayed.

After a while the nurses brought another bed in for him. I didn't comment on the drips they plugged into his veins as he lay down beside me until, seeing my stare, he smiled and said, "Just a precaution."

"You're a liar, Vincent Rankis."

"I'm sorry you think so, Harry August."

In a way, the nausea was worse than the pain. Pain can be drowned, but nausea eats through even the most delicious opiates and cutting chemicals. I lay in my bed and tried not to cry out until at last, at three in the morning, I rolled on to my side and puked up into the bucket on the floor, and shook and sobbed and clutched my belly and gasped for air.

Vincent slipped out of his bed at once, coming over, entirely ignoring the bucket of puke at his feet, and with hands on my shoulders held me and said, "What can I do?"

I stayed curled up in a bundle, knees tucked to my chest. It seemed the least uncomfortable position I could assume. Vomit ran down my chin in thick, sticky bands. Vincent got a tissue and a cup of water and wiped it off my face. "What can I do?" he repeated urgently.

"Stay with me," I replied.

"Of course. Always."

The next day the nausea began for him. He hid it well, sneaking out of the room to puke up in the toilet, but I hardly needed nine hundred years of experience to see. In the night the pain began to take him too, and this time I staggered out of the bed to hold him, as he puked and retched into a bucket on the floor.

"I'm fine," he gasped between shudders. "I'll be fine."

"See?" I murmured. "Told you you're a liar."

"Harry," his voice was acid-eaten, ragged between breaths, "there's something I wanted to say to you."

"Was it 'Sorry for being a damn liar'?"

"Yes." I didn't know if he sobbed or laughed the word. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"It's OK." I sighed. "I know why you did it."

The lesions, as they broke on my skin, didn't hurt so much as itch. They were a slow splitting, a gentle peeling away of flesh. Vincent was still going through nausea, but as my body began to break down, the pain grew intense again, and I screamed out for comfort and morphine. They dosed us both, perhaps considering it rude to only fill up one patient, least of all the one who wasn't paying for this extensive medical care. That evening a box arrived for Vincent. He crawled out of bed and unlocked the padlock on the front, pulling from the inside of the box a crown of wires and electrodes. With shaking hands, he held it out towards me.

"What is it?" I asked.

"It... it will make you f-forget," he stammered, laying it down on the end of my bed as if it was a little too heavy for his tastes. "It will... it will take away everything. Everything you are, everything you... It will take away this memory. Do you understand?"

"What about me?" I asked. "Will it take away me?"

"Yes."

"Bloody stupid then, isn't it?"

"I... I'm so sorry. If you knew... if you knew some of the things..."

"Vincent, I'm not in a confessional mood. Whatever it is, I forgive you, and let's leave it at that."

He left it at that, but the box with its crown of wires stayed in the room. He would have to use it on me, I concluded, before I died, and before he grew too weak to operate it.

In the night we were both in pain.

"It's OK," I told him. "It's OK. We were trying to make something better."

He was shaking, at the limits of his pain meds, and still in pain.

Tell me a story, I said, to distract in this hour of need. Here, I'll begin. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scot walk into a bar...

For God's sake, Harry, he said, don't make me laugh.

Then I'll tell you a storyaa true storyaand you tell me one in reply.

Fair enough, he answered, and so I did.

I told him of growing up in Leeds, of the bullies at the school, of B+ grades and the tedium of studying law.

He told me of his wealthy father, a good man, a kind man, entirely under his son's thumb.

I spoke of trips on to the moor, of flowers in spring and the heather by the side of the railway lines which caught fire in summer and burned down to a black crisp as far as the eye could see.

He spoke of a garden with rhododendron bushes in it, and the whooping of the whistles from the trains on the other side of the hill.

Was this southern England?

Yes, just outside London.

I told him about my adopted parents, and how they were more to me than my biological father, wherever he was, whoever he was. How I wished I had the courage to say, You are everything, and he is nothing, and it was not the food on my plate, nor the roof over my head, but that you never let me down which makes you my father, my mother.

He said, "Harry?"

His voice was choking with pain.

"Yes?"

"I... I want to tell you something."