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looked like Robert Goulet. The rathead nurse was the only one present who wore no weapon that Susannah could see.
    Eleven in all. Eleven in this vast and mostly deserted infirmary that wasn’t, she felt quite sure,under the borough of Manhattan. And if she was going to settle their hash, it would have to be while they were occupied with Mia’s baby—her precious chap .
    “It’s coming, doctor!” the nurse cried in nervous ecstasy.
    It was. Susannah’s counting stopped as the worst pain yet rolled over her. Over both of them. Burying them. They screamed in tandem. Scowther was commanding Mia to push, to push NOW!
    Susannah closed her eyes and also bore down, for it was her baby, too . . . or had been. As she felt the pain flow out of her like water whirlpooling its way down a dark drain, she experienced the deepest sorrow she had ever known. For it was Mia the baby was flowing into; the last few lines of the living message Susannah’s body had somehow been made to transmit. It was ending. Whatever happened next, this part was ending, and Susannah Dean let out a cry of mingled relief and regret; a cry that was itself like a song.
    And then, before the horror began—something so terrible she would remember each detail as if in the glare of a brilliant light until the day of her entry into the clearing—she felt a small hot hand grip her wrist. Susannah turned her head, rolling the unpleasant weight of the helmet with it. She could hear herself gasping. Her eyes met Mia’s. Mia opened her lips and spoke a single word. Susannah couldn’t hear it over Scowther’s roaring (he was bending now, peering between Mia’s legs and holding the forceps up and against his brow). Yet she did hear it, and understood that Mia was trying to fulfill her promise.
    I’d free you, if chance allows, her kidnapper hadsaid, and the word Susannah now heard in her mind and saw on the laboring woman’s lips was chassit .
    Susannah, do you hear me?
    I hear you very well, Susannah said.
    And you understand our compact?
    Aye. I’ll help you get away from these with your chap, if I can. And . . .
    Kill us if you can’t! the voice finished fiercely. It had never been so loud. That was partly the work of the connecting cable, Susannah felt sure. Say it, Susannah, daughter of Dan!
    I’ll kill you both if you —
    She stopped there. Mia seemed satisfied, however, and that was well, because Susannah couldn’t have gone on if both their lives had depended on it. Her eye had happened on the ceiling of this enormous room, over the aisles of beds halfway down. And there she saw Eddie and Roland. They were hazy, floating in and out of the ceiling, looking down at her like phantom fish.
    Another pain, but this one not as severe. She could feel her thighs hardening, pushing, but that seemed far away. Not important. What mattered was whether or not she was really seeing what she thought she was seeing. Could it be that her overstressed mind, wishing for rescue, had created this hallucination to comfort her?
    She could almost believe it. Would have, very likely, had they not both been naked, and surrounded by an odd collection of floating junk: a matchbook, a peanut, ashes, a penny. And a floormat, by God! A car floormat with FORD printed on it.
    “Doctor, I can see the hea—”
    A breathless squawk as Dr. Scowther, no gentleman he, elbowed Nurse Ratty unceremoniously aside and bent even closer to the juncture of Mia’s thighs. As if he meant to pull her chap out with his teeth, perhaps. The hawk-thing, Jey or Gee, was speaking to the one called Haber in an excited, buzzing dialect.
    They’re really there, Susannah thought. The floormat proves it . She wasn’t sure how the floormat proved it, only that it did. And she mouthed the word Mia had given her: chassit . It was a password. It would open at least one door and perhaps many. To wonder if Mia had told the truth never even crossed Susannah’s mind. They were tied together, not just by the cable