Wary.

When she looked back, the wind had died and the flowing black core of it had coalesced into a figure, the silhouette of a woman. The Prophet had no face that Buffy could see, nor flesh, not even the diaphanous mist that gave Lucy shape. Instead, The Prophet was like a female-shaped hole in the center of the room, a black pit that lingered in the air like soot from a smokestack.

But it spoke.She spoke.

"Slayer. You summoned me. How may I be of service?"

Her voice was like the whisper of a lifelong smoker whose throat had been ravaged by cancer. Pained and ragged and knowing, in on the perversity of the joke.

Buffy spoke quickly. The sooner The Prophet was gone from the room, the happier she'd be.

"Lucy told me you'd seen something bad coming. Apocalypse-size evil, or at least the giant economy size. She also told me you thought it was going to be my fault. I need your help. Isn't there any way I can cut this thing off at the pa.s.s? Not make this mistake? And if there's no way to do that, then I need to know more about what this evil will be, what form it will take, and how I can combat it. There's a demon in town, an ancient, powerful -"

The Prophet laughed. Her obsidian form shimmered where it hung in the room, a wound between worlds. It was sickening to look at, though Buffy could not have said why.

"Not seeing the funny," Xander said abruptly.

Anya shushed him, and Buffy did not blame her. Dealing with beings like this, none of them should be inviting attention. But Buffy had no choice.

"You won't help, then?"

"Not won't. Cannot."The swirling shadow moved just the tiniest bit closer to Buffy then."The thing you fear has already been set in motion. The die is cast. Your mistake, Slayer, has already been made."

"What?" Buffy asked, horrified. Her mouth dropped open. Her lungs refused to work. For a moment, even her heart seemed to refuse to beat. Then, shaking her head, she gasped a tiny, plaintive cry. "But I haven't done anything. How can that be? And nothing's changed."

"But it will,"the Prophet told her."The future cannot be prevented now. Already the clockwork grinds on. But I can show you my vision, share with you the sight, so you may see what is coming and perhaps better prepare for it."

Reeling, Buffy glanced at Willow and Oz, then at Xander and Anya. They all seemed as stricken by the specter's words as she was. By the window, Lucy Hanover reached out both hands toward Buffy as though she wished to help, to somehow hold Buffy up so that she would not collapse under the weight of this news.

Prediction,Buffy told herself quickly.It isn't fact yet. We don't know it's true.

But it felt true. The words of The Prophet were heavy with finality. With doom.

Buffy swallowed, then looked at the oily silhouette again. "Show me."

"I must only touch you, and you may see."

"Do it," Buffy instructed her.

The Prophet's slick, shimmering form slithered forward. The tear in the fabric of the world extended toward her; fingers like tendrils reached for her.

"Buffy," Willow said cautiously, a tiny bit of fear tinging her voice. "Maybe this isn't such a good -"

The Prophet touched her.

Invadedher.

Buffy screamed.

Torn away.

Buffy hurtled forward, not propelled from behind but tugged, dragged, hauled, painfully and suddenly into a black and red abyss. It felt as though only her face had been torn away, pulled on farther and farther into the chasm of infinite black before her, but the rest of her left behind, all the weight that flesh and blood and bone added to the image she had of herself. What was she?

Mind and heart and soul. Face. Eyes and ears and mouth. Words.

Red whirlpools punctured the endless velvet shadow around her, flashing past as she was dragged by. As if the universe itself were wounded and bleeding.

Vaguely, in the fog that seemed to comprise her mind, a dark certainty overwhelmed her.

This was not a vision. Somehow, her spirit had been torn from her body and was now on a journey. Traveling. Hurtling out of control toward some unfathomable point in the distance.

Buffy felt her mind slipping away from her, felt herself shutting down as she was drawn through the void . . . and drawn . . . and drawn. Lulled into a kind of hibernation, aware and yet unresponsive to her surroundings.

Then, suddenly, some sense that the void was not endless, the abyss not infinite. Somewhere ahead was a barrier, a wall, and she was hurtling toward it, bound for collision. She peered into the darkness ahead but all had become black now, as though she were blind. But blind or not, she could feel it, sense its proximity as she was whipped along a course toward inevitable impact.

Collision.

Cold water splashed her face.

Shocked, Buffy stared at her fingers, splayed before her. At the grimy, cracked porcelain of the sink and the water running from the faucet. Instinctively she looked up for a mirror over the sink but there wasn't one.

Of course there isn't one. They took it away the first day,she thought. She flashed back to that time, five years before, when Clownface and Bulldog had thrown her, beaten, b.l.o.o.d.y and barely conscious, into this cell for the first time.They didn't want you to cut your wrists.

Like a cornered animal Buffy spun and her eyes darted around the room. The cell. Bars on the two high windows barely allowed the tiniest bit of light from the outside. Ten-foot stone walls all around. A steel door with rivets driven through it and neither handle nor k.n.o.b nor even keyhole on this side.

Built for me. This was built for me.

Her hands went to the sides of her head and she squeezed her eyes closed. Then she opened them wide and gazed around the room, hugging herself tightly. Buffy knew things. She did not know how, but she knew.

Impossible.

But inescapably true.

She had been here, in this cell, for a very long time. Reluctantly, afraid of what she would find, she looked at her hands again. Rough, hard hands, with lines that had never been there before. She stretched, felt her body,looked at herself.

No thinner than before. But harder. Tighter. Rippled with muscles she remembered seeing in magazines and on television whenever they showed women who were Olympians, whose very life was exercise, exertion, sport.

But there was nothing sporting about this.

Buffy's body was taut and dangerous. She felt it, even in the way she moved. She felt like a weapon.

Gathering dust.

This cell. Endless days and nights alone, with only these four walls and the ruthless way she forged her body into this steel thing. Vampires with tattooed faces and orange flames in their eyes; they fed her, kept her alive, but nothing more. No talking, not even threats or taunts. Only the toning of her body kept her sane, that focus on the day she would escape.

And in time, even that focus blurred and there was only the routine of exercise. Hope dimmed.

These aren't my memories. Can't be my memories. I remember yesterday. They took Giles.

Camazotz is preying on Sunnydale. Lucy Hanover came in my dreams and Willow summoned her and . . .

Buffy stared down at her hands again. And theywere her hands. Just as the memories of this room - month after month becoming intimate with these four walls, eating the awful slop they fed her, and waiting for an opening - just as those recollections were hers.

Lines on her hands.

Five years since she had been put into this room.

"No," she whispered.It's impossible.

"No!" she screamed.

With a roar of fury and hatred surging up from her chest, Buffy ran full tilt at the door. Though her body still felt foreign to her, she loved the way it moved. Fluid and powerful and deadly. She launched a drop kick at the steel door, slammed into it hard enough to rattle her jaw, then fell to the ground and banged her head hard on the stone floor. Adrenaline screamed in her, and she pushed the pain away. With a flip, she was up on her feet, and she kicked and punched at the door with only the echo of her own grunts in the room to accompany her.

Several minutes pa.s.sed. She slowed, breathing heavily.

The adrenaline subsided. The ache in her skull and the pain in her b.l.o.o.d.y, ravaged knuckles was real.

The skin on her fists was sc.r.a.ped raw. Buffy reached up to touch the back of her head, where she'd struck the floor, and her fingers came back streaked with blood.

She would heal quickly. After all, she was the Slayer. But the wounds were real. This was real.

Even as her mind recoiled in horror at these thoughts, even as she examined her body and her surroundings, she felt her memory of the battle with Camazotz begin to dim. Desperate to save Giles, they had summoned Lucy Hanover. Lucy had called upon an ent.i.ty known only as The Prophet, who promised Buffy a vision of the future, a vision that might help her prevent it and save Giles's life.

The Prophet had touched her.

But this was no vision.

Whatever The Prophet had done, somehow she was not nineteen anymore. Buffy Summers was twenty-four, at least. Maybe twenty-five. Somehow, the ent.i.ty had torn her spirit from her body that day, years ago, and thrust it into the future, into this body.

Her memories of that day faded, now. Though she knew in her heart that in some way it had happened only moments before, she remembered it as though years had pa.s.sed. But there was a blank spot there as well . . . a period of days she did not remember at all . . . the time during which she had been captured. A gap in her memory existed between The Prophet touching her and the day when Clownface and Bulldog threw her into her cell.

For more than five years, she had wondered what had happened in that dead s.p.a.ce in her memory, that blackout.

No. It isn't me. I haven't been here. It never happened,she reminded herself. And yet there was no longer any doubt that this was real. She could feel every muscle, every scratch, every sensation. This was her own body, her own life, and yet somehow her nineteen-year-old mind had been fast-forwarded into an older body, a dark, horrible future.

And all she could do was pace the cell. Work her body. Train for the day the vampires let their guard down.

Days pa.s.sed. She trained and slept and washed and trained. They brought food before dawn and after dusk, always armed, always in groups of three or more. Made her stand in the far corner, afraid to have her come too close, as though she were a wild animal.

It made her smile.

Perhaps two weeks later, they brought the girl.

It was dark when they threw her into the cell, bruised and b.l.o.o.d.y but conscious. Alive. The girl was a brunette, dark and exotic. Italian, maybe, Buffy thought. Tall, but young. Even through the blood, when she looked up with her defiant, crazy eyes, Buffy could see that she was just a kid. Not more than sixteen, maybe less.

For a moment Buffy only stood there staring at her, five years without human contact having built up a callus on her heart and soul. She was two people in one, two Buffys at one time, the hardened prisoner and the young warrior. Then suddenly it was as though the part of her mind that was still nineteen simply woke up. It was as though she had been frozen in this body from the moment she had realized what had happened to her.

Now she thawed.

Ice melted away from her true self.

Buffy went to the girl, reached down for her. "Are you all right?"

The girl's eyes changed then. She blinked and her mouth opened with an expression of absolute astonishment.

"Oh my G.o.d," the girl whispered, voice cracking. "You're . . . you're her, aren't you?"

"I'm not tracking."

The girl backed away, stood up slowly, painfully, and stared at her. "You're Buffy Summers. I've seen pictures."

"Yeah? How do I look?"

Beaten, bleeding, the girl actually laughed. A discordant sound, but a welcome one just the same. "Like h.e.l.l," she said. "You look like h.e.l.l."

"Who are you?" Buffy asked.

But she thought she already knew the answer.

"I'm August."

Buffy frowned. "You're a month?"

"It's my name," the girl said, annoyed. She wiped blood from under her nose but it was still bleeding.

"I'm the Slayer now."

Buffy closed her eyes. Shook her head to clear her mind. She felt a little unsteady on her feet. So many questions. But if this girl was a Slayer, what did that mean for - "Faith?"

August nodded. "Six months ago. They tried for years to catch her, the way they . . . the way they did you. If it weren't for her they'd have the whole West Coast by now, maybe more. At least that's what my Watcher says. They caught her outside of L.A., I heard."

Wary, maybe even a little afraid, the girl gave Buffy a cautious look. "Have you been here all along? All this time?"

No. I just got here. A couple of weeks ago. I'm not supposed to be here.Those were the first thoughts in her head, but even as they flickered through her mind she knew they weren't really true.

"All this time," Buffy told her. She turned her back on the girl and began to pace the room. "And now I've got company."

"But haven't you tried to -"

Buffy spun to face her, nearly growling. "Every day. What the h.e.l.l do you think I am? I'm the Slayer."

"You'rea Slayer," August corrected. "Not even the main one anymore. Not for a long time. The Council, they just call you the Lost Slayer now. Not even your name."

Buffy took that in. In her mind she reached back to the moment she knew was truly hers, where her mind belonged. Her soul . . . where her soul had been pushed away, into the here and now, and her body left behind. Hijacked.

What had happened between then and now? Where were they all? What had happened to Giles?