"Okay," he said, "she's controlled. Now, Caroline, can you hear me?"

She continued her act. "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!"

"All right, all right. You're angry and I would be, too. Now, I want you to get yourself together, Caroline. Can you do that?"

Despite all that she knew, she could not help being genuinely furious, if not at his ignorance, then certainly at his condescension. "I'm not one of your patients," she wanted to say, "I'm part of your heart."

She managed a choked, "Yes, Doctor."

This was hideous, to see him like this.

"I'm going to have Katrina here release you. Is that all right? Are we able to calm down now?"

"I'm calm! So get me out of this d.a.m.ned thing!"

"Uh, Doctor, is this wise? She's very agitated."

"Do it. But step away. Step behind behind her." her."

"I'm not going to do anything," she said as Nurse Katrina freed her. "Just keep that other guy away from me. Sam. I mean, what is that, a giant dwarf? A troll?"

"The h.e.l.l ..."

"Leave it, Sam. Caroline, we'll address all of these issues in our intake interview."

"I thought we did that."

"No. No, not entirely. We did not." David pranced toward her, all officious professionalism. He took her elbow and in a moment they were in a small room, spa.r.s.ely furnished with a cot and a recliner that took up far too much of the s.p.a.ce.

"Now," he said, "you can collect yourself. Get in the recliner, it's great! I mean, you talk about relaxing, these things-all the patients just really love them."

"It's a chair, for G.o.d's sake." But she sat down. After a moment, she pulled the lever and leaned back. She noticed that the ceiling lights were protected by wire cages.

"What is this, one of the cells? Am I a prisoner, because I better not be. I did a voluntary commitment, remember that."

"This is a safe room. We call it a safe room. Now, close your eyes." He began rubbing her temples and she let herself drift, let the distant sounds of the inst.i.tution die away, let the world drift and drift ... on a quiet ocean ... ocean of silence.

"I have a little something," he said.

"I don't want anything."

"You're very agitated."

"Oh, it's just this sun business! I can't quit thinking about it."

"Take deep breaths, let it go, let the trembling go."

She was trembling? Yes, actually shaking like a leaf. She could feel the dark G.o.ds coming, smelling her weakness, coming with their jaws clicking, their obsidian eyes flickering with inner fire. Xipe Totec, the Flayed One, skinned by the sun, dead but alive, and coming out of the b.l.o.o.d.y mouth of Mack the Cat.

She was aware of movement in the room, the clink of gla.s.s. When she opened her eyes, a nurse was there with a small paper pill cup and a gla.s.s of water.

"What is it?" she asked David.

"A mild sedative."

"No."

His hands were gentle, insistent. She felt his subtle power and liked the feeling. She saw plumes of red and blue around him, feathers in the wind.

"And he will descend into h.e.l.l and gather the bones of men, and he will spread them on the earth, and his wisdom will make them dance."

"And that is?"

"The work of Quetzalcoatl. The bringer of peace, the builder of heaven." She saw him in David's eyes, just as she had when they were children, and she had thought him the most beautiful creature that G.o.d had ever made.

He touched her temples again. "Take it easy, Miss. Right now, you're agitated. Let's cross this bridge first." He took the pill cup from the nurse and handed it to her.

She pretended to take what she recognized as a Xanax. She did not take it, though. She needed her wits.

"Good. That'll help."

"David?"

"Dr. Ford. I'm Dr. Ford."

"Okay," she said, fighting to keep the pain out of her voice. "Dr. Ford, I want you to humor me. Indulge a little innocent paranoia. Don't tell anybody my last name. Can you do that?"

He blinked as if surprised, and she wondered immediately how much he did remember. Clearly, he wasn't entirely clueless.

"Patient surnames are confidential. n.o.body gets your surname except from you."

His hands caressed her temples so gently, so firmly, that this time when she closed her eyes she did indeed drift away.

Then, seemingly without more than a moment pa.s.sing, she came to understand that he had not been rubbing her temples, not for some time. In fact, not for a long time.

With a shocked gasp, she opened her eyes. At first, she couldn't see anything at all-and then she could, a line of light floating ahead of her. A line of light ... which she moved toward.

She understood that she was on a low bed. And naked, she was also naked, or rather, in one of those loose hospital gowns that tie in the back. She leaned down and touched the line of light, running her fingers along it. A faint coolness brushed them-air, she realized, from outside.

Once she understood that this was the door, her disorientation resolved itself and she stood up, feeling for the doork.n.o.b. She found it and turned it, but it was locked tight.

She called, "h.e.l.lo, I'm awake! h.e.l.lo!"

Not a sound came in reply.

She tried to look at her watch, but couldn't find it on her wrist. Taken. Not stolen, of course, she didn't think that.

They'd overdone this, and she saw a chance to put on a performance.

"Hey! HEY!" She shook the door, then hammered on it.

Nothing.

She felt the walls and found a quiltlike surface on them. She ran her palms along it. Soft. So was the floor, soft, quilted. There was no window. The ceiling no longer had caged lights on it, but rather flush gla.s.s fixtures that emitted a faint nocturnal glow.

He'd doped her with something more than Xanax, that clever David, good at every job he'd ever done. And she'd thought she hadn't swallowed the pill. She hadn't been meant to-or rather, it hadn't mattered. Whatever had done this to her had been in the water.

So, okay, here we go. He wanted crazy, he was going to get crazy.

She backed up, then took in a deep breath and screamed her lungs out.

And-wow, that was something! Her heart was hammering, her body flushing with adrenaline. She did it again, then threw herself against the door.

The padding absorbed the blow without the slightest effect, which was genuinely disturbing and isolating, and made it quite easy to scream more, so she screamed and screamed and screamed, and roamed the cell, hurling herself against the walls, against the door, dropping to the floor and rolling and screaming, and screaming and screaming and screaming. But, then again, that's what a padded cell is for.

She stopped. This was all well and good. She was putting on what must be a convincing performance. But she was also here for serious reasons. She needed to get the arc furnace running. There was a lot of gold to make and only a little from Guatemala to start the process, far less than she had expected to find. And there was the matter of the painting. It would be a meticulous, difficult process, enormously intimidating, and all of it needing to be done on a very tight and very precise schedule.

The whole world had arrived at the border of an unknown country, a rare shadow land that few men ever enter and fewer recall. Already, they were advanced into it, for the death of Aubrey Denman, an incalculable disaster, had not been predicted in any of the writings of Herbert Acton.

This was because he had not foreseen it. Her father had told the cla.s.s, "There is a period at the end of a cycle of time that we call its omega point, where life itself enters the unknown. An omega point is a dark labyrinth from which only the few will escape." He had smiled then, this gentle and compa.s.sionate man, a smile filled with hope and pain. "Be among the few," he had said.

She rattled the door again, and this time it was no game. "Let me out," she shouted. But there was only silence in reply.

This time, when she screamed, it was no act, and she screamed and screamed and screamed.

DAVID FORD'S JOURNAL: THREE The staff is alerting me about poor Caroline again and again, but I sense that she's taking advantage of the situation to do a little playacting, and I keep thinking that I need to let her do that. Somebody needs to be convinced, I feel sure. But I don't want her to pretend so well that I have to put her in a jacket or shock her.

Caroline is brilliant. But how did she get here through all that mayhem on the outside? Was she helped, perhaps, by the resources of the Seven Families?

I wish that I could have proof that she is the real Caroline Light.

I have about convinced myself to take the risk of opening up to her. Despite the fact that I don't have any recollection of her, I am tremendously drawn to her, and perhaps that is a sort of memory. If we were children when we last met, she would look entirely different, would she not?

After she drank the sedative, I held her in my arms and she felt as light as air, her body slack with sleep, her sangfroid gone. Her vulnerability broke my heart even as it filled it.

Glen turned up nothing unusual in her belongings. Her driver's license seems genuine, for example, but what does that mean?

If she's the real person and she isn't in amnesia, I need her desperately.

Last night, there were monstrous, flaring, leaping auroras. Today, half the face of the sun is covered with gigantic sunspots.

The Internet, TV, and all telephone systems have more or less failed. Even the patient families we have relied on for food deliveries are not supplying us at this time, and we cannot reach them to find out what's happening.

What happens when we eat our last food and burn our last fuel? And when the solar flares get worse, then what? What I need to know is how we survive.

At least Katie Starnes is becoming more at ease around me. She isn't a problem like Caroline, and I would really welcome some development in our friendship. Just friends, though, s.e.xual friends like we had in med school. No commitments, and I don't think she's looking in that direction, either. I hope not, at any rate, because this is no time to involve oneself in hopes for the future.

What's my next step? Where do I turn? I don't have a religion, not even some childhood thing to fall back on. My parents were scientists and atheists, just as I am. But right now, there are only three words that come to mind, that haunt me, that never leave my thoughts for long: G.o.d help us.

6.

THE SOUND OF BLOOD.

Again Mack heard them, pulsating out of the dark, long cries of human anguish. He could open neither his window nor his door, and he wasn't absolutely sure that they were coming from inside the facility. With all the mayhem these days, they could be from the distant streets.

As scream after scream pealed out-but so faint, why did they use all this soundproofing?-his whole body was set to vibrating.

He pressed his intercom b.u.t.ton.

"Yes, Mack?"

"Somebody's upset."

"It's the new intake. She's struggling again. We're calling one of the residents for her."

He threw himself on his bed. d.a.m.n, what did this mean? He would have sworn she was an actress, no more crazy than he was. But this was one h.e.l.l of an act, d.a.m.n her eyes.

He did not want to sweat over some worthless loony, he wanted to sleep. But there would be no sleep, they doled out their G.o.dd.a.m.n pills nowadays like they were gold f.u.c.king bars. Worse. Everybody around here was crawling in gold bars, but they d.a.m.n well were begging for Lunesta. d.a.m.n f.u.c.king cheap bureaucrats.

"What's her name?"

"You can ask her when she's in the population."

"Sweet Caroline, I already got that much. Also, the fact that she's a b.i.t.c.h. That came through loud and clear." After tonight's transmission, General Wylie had come back inside of a minute. "Get me the name."

At this point in time, any new arrival was important.

"She might be a b.i.t.c.h, but she's suffering now, Mack."

"Caroline ... who?"

"Ask her!"

Well, the h.e.l.l with it, the screaming had stopped, and thank you, G.o.d. He turned out his light-and, d.a.m.n, the flickering out there was incredible. He went to his wire-enforced window. The sky was a flaring, jumping curtain of multicolored light.

He was not making the kind of progress that was needed. They should have put a whole team in here. He hated to admit it, but that was the truth of it. Too late now.

In Mexico City, in the emba.s.sy's garden, he had watched the G.o.ds dancing in the night sky, watched Tezcatlipoca shift from man to jaguar to serpent, taunting and raging at his brother Quetzalcoatl. In Egypt, Quetzalcoatl was Osiris, the G.o.d of resurrection, and Tezcatlipoca was his brother Set, who cut him into small pieces. The Bible called them Cain and Abel. In Judea, the light and dark brothers had been Jesus and Judas.