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"… on a tip, police this morning found the body of medical re-

searcher Dr. James Fielding in his home in Middle Village, Queens. Cause of death appears to have been strangulation. Police have no motive or suspects yet. In other news …"

Jack hit the MUTE button and stared at her. "What the hell?"

But Kate couldn't speak. Her throat had locked. Last night's dream hadn't been a dream. The Unity had murdered Jim Fielding, and she'd been there, could still feel the handles of the garrote against her palms.

"Jack, I'm infected!" she blurted.

He stared at her, wide-eyed. "What? How?"

"Jeanette."

As ill as he was, something fearsome flashed in his eyes and contorted his features. "I'll kill her!"

"No, Jack. It's not her fault. She—"

"How do you know you're infected? Are you sure?"

"Because…"

And suddenly Kate felt a surge within her, an invisible hand reaching through her mind and clamping down on her tongue, trying to paralyze it. The Unity was back—or maybe it had never gone away, maybe it had sat quietly within her, eavesdropping, monitoring her conversation, ready to react if she intended to say or do anything that might threaten it. And now it was pouncing.

Kate fought back, managing to push the words past her lips.

"Because the part of your dream about the hive mind is true."

"Can't be. That was fever. I was delirious."

"No, Jack. The hive mind spoke to me yesterday. Jeanette, Hold-stock, and half a dozen more of Fielding's other patients are part of a single mind. And they're pulling me in too. They're in my head right now, trying to keep me from telling you this, but I guess I've still got enough uninfected brain cells left to resist."

Jack stared at her from his recliner, the rage in his face shifting to disbelief.

"They killed Fielding, Jack. They were afraid he might come up with a vaccine or a way to kill the virus."

"How… how can you know that?"

"Because I was there! I witnessed it through Holdstock's eyes."

That odd look on his face, worried for her, wondering no doubt how someone can seem sane one day and then suddenly lose her mind. She had to convince him, had to make him believe. Because if they killed Fielding, they just might kill Jack too.

"And Jack… that Russian lady… whether a dream or not, she was right. You're infected too."

3

Kate had lost it. That, or he was still ru

Or it was true.

A year ago Jack would have snickered at the idea of a hive mind. But since last summer he'd come face to face with too many things he'd once thought impossible, so he couldn't just write this off. Especially when the source was someone as thoroughly anchored as Kate.

And even if this hive mind was a fantasy, he still did not want to be infected with Fielding's virus.

He felt lousy, too weak for a long, drawn-out discussion. Had to move this along.

"Okay," he said carefully. "First things first: if we're infected, how did we get that way?"

"With infected pins. Jeanette punctured my palm and Holdstock scratched your hand when he was here the other day."

The coffee went cold and bitter on Jack's tongue. He had never mentioned that scratch to Kate.

"How did you know about that?"

"The Unity told me."

She went on to describe yesterday's hand-holding session with Holdstock and Jeanette and the rest.

"You weren't imagining it?" he said finally, shaken because this was so much like his dream. "They were really talking to you… in your brain?"

Kate nodded. "Not just talking, showing me images of the future they envision for humanity."

"And you couldn't block them out?"

"No. In fact they're in my head right now."

Her words were a cold knife between Jack's shoulder blades.

"You mean they're here, listening to us?"

Kate's expression was bleak as she nodded. "Through me. And trying to keep me from telling you all this."

Revulsion stirred and crawled through Jack's gut as he tried to imagine the horror of what that would be like. He couldn't. His mind… invaded, violated, raped, and dominated… unimaginable.

"But Kate… you were never sick."

"That's because my immune system is like everyone else's, I guess. This virus can slip past the perimeter defenses and take control before it has time to react. But not in your case."

"What's so special about me?"

"That's what I'd like to know. Because…" With knitted brows Kate stopped and turned her head, as if listening.

"Something wrong?"

"The pressure just let up."

"What pressure?"

"The pressure to silence me… it's gone." Her eyes widened. "The Unity wants the answer too. You beat the virus, Jack."

"How do you know it wasn't some other virus I picked up—a summer flu or the like?"

"Oh, the Unity knows, Jack. Believe me, it knows. And it's afraid of you. You're a wild card, an aberration, an unexpected glitch in their master plan. Maybe you shouldn't say anything."

"Listen, we're related, so if I've got something inside me that can fight this, maybe you do too. You want to test my blood, it's yours."

"I don't have the equipment or the knowledge, but NIH and CDC do—you'll be invaluable to them. But the why still remains. Immune systems react to invading substances like viruses and attack them. It's a 'me' / 'not-me' reaction. Anything classified as 'not-me' must go."

"I like that."

"Sometimes it can overreact to i

Jack squeezed his eyes shut. Aw, Kate. I can't stand this.

He said, "Why not me then?"

"I can't say. I can only guess that sometime in the past your immune system has battled something similar to, but not exactly like, the Unity virus."

"Why do you qualify it?"

"Because if you'd fought off something exactly like it before, you'd be fully immune and your system would have wiped out the virus as soon as it entered. Remember when you had chickenpox as a kid? The infection left you with permanent immunity: cellular guns loaded with varicella-seeking bullets. Should you get too close to a poxy kid and pick up some of the varicella virus, it's gobbled up the instant it hits your bloodstream, without your having an inkling it was there at all."

"But I got sick as a dog, so that means my guns were not loaded for the Unity virus."

"Right. But unlike my immune system, yours got put on alert by something about the Unity virus. My guess is a minor antigenic similarity. Maybe because of a previous infection, it recognized just one or two base sequences in its protein coat; whatever it was was enough to trigger an immune response, and your T-cells declared war."

Love those T-cells, Jack thought, but why should mine be special?

"The thing is, Kate, I'm almost never sick. I don't even get the usual infections, let alone special ones."

"Gia told me you were terribly ill last summer—just as sick as you were yesterday."

"Oh, that. That wasn't a bug I caught, that was from some infected wounds."

"Wounds?" Kate's brow furrowed. "Who wounded you?"

Jack was about to say, Not who—what, when it all came together, whipping his head around like a backhanded bitchslap.

"Holy shit!"

"What?"

How could he tell her about the creatures that had almost killed him last August, about how the gouges one of them had torn across his chest became infected, leaving him fevered up for days after? If some contaminant from those things had primed his immune system, allowing it to recognize the Unity virus, then that meant the virus was linked to them.