Voice-over by TBS senior news anchor Beverly Bragg:

This is Seattle's Midnight Action News July 7, 2055:

Three of the four actors injured in yesterday's Volcanic Studios fire have been pronounced in good condition by doctors at New Seattle's Skyway Memorial Hospital. One, thirty-five year old actress Emma Sloan, is still in critical condition.

Fire relief units were called to Studio Nine on the Volcanic Studios holo- play lot when a geothermal transformer overloaded. The resulting fire overwhelmed on-site fire controls.

The studio was occupied at the time by several actors and a holo-crew graphing Emma Sloan's new play, Unseen Faces. Two laser operators and a studio intern were burned, but were dismissed from the hospital with viable skin grafts.

The actors themselves were trapped near the rear of the holo-stage. Three escaped unharmed. The others, Jasper Belholland, Ron Kinney, Livia York and Emma Sloan herself were trapped behind a collapsing holo-array and badly burned.

Doctors tell us that with minimal surgery, popular newcomer Jasper Belholland will return to play the romantic roles that brought him to fame. This is Jasper's first romantic lead and a major coup to be paired with Sloan so early in his career. Media buffs were predicting a romantic match between the two despite denials from both parties.

Ron Kinney, three time Oscar winner in the Best Supporting Actor category, will be getting fewer roles if he remains in the business at all as doctors say they will be unable to remove all the scars from his hands and face.

On a brighter note, forty-three year old Livia York has already parlayed her new, tougher look into a contract to play the lead in an upcoming action play.

The darkest tragedy of the day is the loss of Emma Sloan, best known for her "summoning eyes." She remains in critical condition in the life-support unit with third-degree burns over eighty-percent of her body. Doctors say her injuries are so extensive, they have little hope she will ever leave the hospital, and even if she does, no miracle of plastic surgery will restore her face to holo-quality. Emma Sloan, the actress, is gone.

All night, Sloan fans have been in mourning. Com-techs are fighting to keep the mail networks from crashing under the weight of good-wishes.

Holo-views of the street in front of Skyway Memorial Hospital with the blasted peak of Mount Rainier in the background. Mourners in red block the street. They strew flowers in the streets and chant the actress's name. A sluggish procession chokes the street while on the sidelines men and women wearing red veils or armbands kneel with bent heads. Their lips move, but their words drown in the chant of the walkers. Wreathes and bouquets are piling up in front of the hospital.

More shots of spontaneous demonstrations in the US, China, the Russian states, The British Isles and Scandinavia.

Voice-over:

Sloan first made her mark when she mesmerized audiences as Civil War hero Christy Mink in the 2045 holo-play, Wild Footprints. Ever since, her fans have been enchanted by the sloe-colored eyes that convey so much force of character in every role she has played. Twenty-four holo-plays to her credit, ten years of drama, action, mystery and romance. Ten years of those summoning eyes breaking our hearts.

We'll miss those eyes.

Dr. Carmen Walters didn't usually take the night watch at Skyway Memorial. She disliked the dimmed lights and the desultory clicking of nurse's terminals, but Annalee Trescott was on maternity leave, and Paul Harding was at home with his son who was suffering through his immune boosters, so Carmen was filling in.

There wasn't much for a doctor to do two hours after midnight. Delta generators in the beds induced patients to sleep, and there were very few emergencies that the nurses couldn't handle from their terminals. She was on her way back to the doctor's lounge for a catnap, but she wanted to stop on her way to visit one of her patients. Not her favorite patient. Carmen didn't have favorites--not in a personal sense. This one was more of a project.

The patient lay in a single-occupancy room with no windows in the heart of the hospital. Her head was propped out of the tank of translucent yellow goo that supported her body. A gel-pack of the same stuff covered half her face. If Carmen had bent over the bed, she would have been able to peer through the cloudy gel and see the patient's undamaged eye, a deep, sloe-colored iris, staring back at her. The lids were gone.

She leaned the heels of her hands on the side of the tank and hunched her shoulders.

Soft shoes shuffled past the door behind her and stopped. Carmen didn't turn around. The soft footsteps came into the room. A man's voice, lowered to a velvet burr, said, "We've programmed delta rhythms. A little later, we'll try to coax her into REM, but she sure doesn't want to dream." The head nurse, Linus Castor, had been with the hospital for twenty years. There wasn't much he didn't know about the staff or the patients at Skyway. He wore his hair in a tail, and his short beard was turning grey faster than his hair.

Carmen indicated the artificial skin that covered most of the woman's body under the gel. "The grafts look saturated. She's rejecting them."

"Then you'll replace them. You've pulled worse cases back."

Carmen pursed her lips. "Lost some, too, that weren't this bad. She's fighting the machines."

Linus leaned his elbows on the edge of the tank and eased his feet in their red, canvas shoes. He looked down at the woman's body. "Remember her in False Reflection? My first Emma Sloan holo. They darkened her skin for the role and changed her features, but it was still her. I got chills every time she turned her eyes toward me."

Carmen let her weight sink down between her shoulders and rocked her head back. Her fingers tapped against the rim of the tank. "Replacing the grafts won't do any good. Not when she's fighting to die."

Linus shrugged. "Can't give her up."

Carmen said, "She needs more than grafts."

Linus started to shrug again. Then he understood what she was saying, and his face hardened. "No."

"It's that or watch her die. Do you want to see her die, Linus?"

"As opposed to the other?"

"She could do it. She's an actor. You said yourself, it never mattered how they changed her, she was still herself. She'd know how to handle it if anyone could."

"It's not compatible with humans."

"It would keep her alive."

"As a monster, possibly a psychopath as well."

Carmen shook her head. "Not her. She'd be the one to make it. She will be the one."

Birth

"She's coming out. I've got a waking pattern."

It was a male voice, unfamiliar to Emma, but it had a pleasant burr to it. She'd never worked with him before. Was he a director or an actor? She should know that. Was this the new play? She had a chilly, exposed feeling like the kind of dream in which she arrived at the studio wearing only her shoes. She didn't know what the new play should be. Where was her script?

A woman's voice, warm and brisk at the same time: "Ms. Sloan? Can you hear me, Emma? I'm your doctor--Carmen Walters. I want you to wake up now."

That wasn't right. She was starring in a new holo-play. But she had been in an accident. Something had gone wrong at the studio. She'd been hurt. She struggled with that for a few moments. How badly had she been hurt? Her face?

"Still a little sluggish." That was the male voice again: not an actor or a director, a nurse.

It was her face. She remembered pain, trying to cover her face with her arms. Everything else, she could lose. Her body could be covered with grafts, with makeup, with clothing. They could use body doubles, but nothing could replace the face and hands. They had to be perfect. Holo-recorders were too exacting. That had been the last thought she remembered. She had to save her face.

"Aam-my face," she said. Her mouth felt like it belonged to someone else. Was that good or bad? Maybe there were grafts.

"Her heart rate just jumped," the nurse said.

Emma felt the shift of a gel-bed underneath her and heard a creak. The doctor's voice sounded closer. "Relax, Ms. Sloan. We're glad to have you back. You gave us quite a bit of trouble."

The doctor hadn't answered her question. There was something wrong with her face. Emma tried to reach up, to feel her features and find out how bad it was. She couldn't move her arms. She jerked them.

A warm pressure on her left wrist. "We've got your arms restrained, Ms. Sloan. We didn't want you to hurt yourself by accident."

There were gloves on her hands. That explained the detached sensation.

The doctor said, "Emma, don't you think it's time you opened your eyes? Think about how it feels to open your eyes."

She didn't want to do that. She didn't know where she was. She didn't want to know.

"We really want you to open your eyes. We were a little afraid you would lose the vision in the right eye. We want to test it and make sure."

Blindness was a minor handicap for an actor, but properly managed, it needn't destroy a career. Amanda Moore was stone blind in both eyes, and you'd never know it by her work.

At first, her eyelids seemed to be stuck together, and she didn't know quite how to make them work. Then she blinked against a light that seemed very bright. It hurt for a moment until her pupils adjusted. She saw that she was actually in a darkened room. The light came from the nurse's terminal to the left of Emma's head.

Most of the room was in shadow, too dark to make out details. The blue light from the terminal outlined the face of the doctor in profile as she bent over the edge of the bed. It was a humorous face, softened into middle age with lines of strength around the mouth. Her hair was cropped close to her head. It was not flattering, but it would be convenient to wear under a surgical cap.

The nurse was a dark man, somewhat older than the doctor, with a graying beard. He said, "Brain response is normal. Optic nerves are responding. She should be seeing."

The doctor said, "Are you seeing me, Emma?"

"Yes." That was an easier word to say. It didn't require her to use her lips.

"That's good. I want you to look into the light here." The doctor held an ophthalmic calibrator up to Emma's right eye. There was a red light, then the doctor shifted it, and Emma focused her left eye at the light.

"That's looking very good, Emma. Any double vision, spots, black zones where you should be seeing something?"

Emma shook her head slightly. She could see. It was what she looked like that mattered. It was hard to make her mouth shape a word. "Mirror."

The pressure of the doctor's hand on her wrist increased. "Believe me, Emma. I know what you want and what you are afraid of. That's why I'm not giving you a mirror right now. Don't bother trying to get up. I've had the staff remove or cover every reflective surface in the room.

"I'm your doctor. You can trust me, and I'm telling you that in time, you are going to be as good as new. That's what I want you to think about. When we're done with you, no one will ever be able to tell you had been in an accident."

"Heart rate is up again," the nurse said. "One-fifty."

Emma pulled against the restraints on her wrists. Why did her hands feel so numb? Had they been burned...burned away completely? A thin thermal blanket covered her from the neck down. She tried to splay her fingers under the covering. She saw something move, but she couldn't tell if the shape matched that of a hand.

"How bad?" she asked. Her lips still felt thick and numb. At least her tongue felt normal.

The doctor sighed. "All right, Ms. Sloan, I'm going to be completely honest with you. Nothing held back, no surprises."

The nurse glanced over his shoulder at the doctor with a frown printed lightly between his brows. He saw Emma watching him. He smiled reassuringly.

The doctor said, "You were in a fire at your studio along with several other actors. You were trapped, and by the time rescue crews were able to get you out, you had been very badly burned."

"Heart rate one-fifty," the nurse said.

Badly burned. Emma was having trouble breathing. She couldn't feel grief yet, just sickness. She'd lost her career.

"Calm down, Emma. You have been very lucky. We were able to save your life and stabilize you."

Her career was gone.

"Emma, I want you to get your heart rate down. Take a deep breath. That was the bad news. Take a breath now."

There was good news after this? Emma made herself breathe and didn't feel so dizzy, but the sick clench inside her wouldn't go away.

"Your injuries were too extensive to be repaired by artificial skin grafts. We've had to try a new therapy with you, and I'm happy to say it seems to be working."

Who knew what a doctor would call "working." How could a doctor appreciate what an actor needed? It wasn't enough just to be alive. She had to have a face and hands that would look good in a holo-field.

Carmen Walters leaned over the side of the bed and looked down into Emma's face. "I know what you are thinking, Ms. Sloan, but you have to trust me. You can be exactly what you were before the accident, but it depends on you. That's why I'm not letting you look at yourself in a mirror yet. I want you to concentrate on being exactly as you were before the accident."

The doctor wielded a maternal sternness that was hard to fight. Emma nodded.

The nurse said, "I'm seeing sleep spindles. I'm going to augment her delta waves."

The doctor said, "Good. Emma, you'll sleep a good deal during the next few days. I want you to promise that you will not try to remove your covers or look at yourself. You are going to make a complete recovery. That's all that matters."

Emma didn't want to sleep. She wanted to scream, fight against the restraints that held her arms down, kept her from getting up. The probes that linked her brain to the nurse's terminal beside the bed imposed sleep rhythms on her.

She was half drowsing when the nurse locked down his terminal and rose. "We'll be watching from the nursing station. We'll know what you need before you do."

They were back when she swam out of a shallow, dream-laden sleep. The nurse's terminal rattled as it opened. The doctor sat by the head of the bed. Emma smelled chicken soup.

The lighting was still dim. Emma could see only shadows and forms. Then her eyes adjusted, and she could make out more detail. The doctor watched her curiously. "Sleep well?"

"Dreams." Emma licked her lips. They felt dry and pulpy. She bit her lower lip. It tasted wrong.

"Yes, you had a few good REM episodes. Anything you want to talk about?"

Emma shook her head. What was wrong with her lips? She bit harder, trying to break through the numbness. "They all stopped in the middle."

The nurse said, "We broke in whenever your pulse and respiration suggested you might be moving into a nightmare."

The doctor leaned her elbow on the side of the bed. "I'm afraid you're in for some nightmares eventually. You'll need them to help you fully integrate the trauma, but we don't want you to frighten yourself out of recovery. Are you hungry?"

Emma wasn't, but she nodded.

Carmen chuckled. "Enough to eat hospital food?"

Emma tried a smile for courtesy's sake. Her muscles seemed stiff.

The doctor tilted the bed and held a cup and straw to Emma's lips. It took her a moment to get her lips tight enough around the end of the straw to create suction. When she did, she was relieved that at least her sense of taste was unaffected. The broth was comfortably near body temperature, salty and sweet, thick with creamed protein and slightly metallic with supplements. Taste and sensation triggered her appetite, and she sucked the cup down to rattling dregs before she released the straw.

"Good job," Carmen said.

Doctors did not generally make a habit of feeding patients themselves. There should be orderlies and attendants. The darkened room didn't only protect Emma's eyes. It hid her. Doctor Walters and the bearded nurse were the only people she had seen, the only people who had seen her.

"Why are you hiding me?" Her speech was still slurred, but her face felt more her own.

"We're not hiding you," the doctor said smoothly. "Everyone in this wing knows all about you and your treatment. We felt you would do better in privacy for a little while, that's all."

"How long?"

"A few days. It is very important for now that you concentrate on thinking of yourself exactly as you have always been. Other people would only distract you."

"I want to see myself."

"You will. Right now, that is not what you need."

"Pulse rising," the nurse murmured.

Carmen shook her head. "Emma, you must trust me. You have nothing to fear." Her hand slipped under the covering sheet and clasped Emma's hand where it rested on her stomach. She felt at first as though she were wearing gloves, then the roughness of a callous brushed her fingers, and she felt the lines and creases in the doctor's palm, a slight dampness, the oiliness of a moisturizing lotion.

"Getting a good response from the nerves," the nurse said.

The doctor smiled. "See that? Your hands were badly burned, but they're healing well now."

The doctor stroked each of Emma's fingers in turn. There were five. Emma closed them around the doctor's hand. Skin grafts would leave numb patches where the nerves did not fully grow back, but Emma could feel. Her hands had been burned, but they were all right now.

The nurse said, "That's better. Limbic arousal is down."

Carmen squeezed Emma's hand.

A small, shrill chirp from her wrist unit changed her expression to annoyance. "Get that, Linus."

The nurse worked his hand in the waldo field and opened a window in his terminal. He made a worried sound. "This isn't good. The oversight committee is calling a board of inquiry."

"Blast it. I'm sorry, Emma. I have to go, but I'll send a physical therapist to help you get back in touch with your skin. Above all, don't worry."

Emma lay in the dark after they left. No one came. Gradually, the elation of feeling another human touch faded, and she felt uneasy. Only one hand. She could feel it, feel the smoothness of the blanket on the backs of her fingers, a thin covering of woven cotton between her fingertips and the skin of her stomach, but her left hand was still numb. She tried to move it, wasn't sure she had succeeded. She tried to touch her left hand with her right, but her hands were restrained too far apart.

Emma pulled at the restraints, twisted her hands around, trying to feel the straps. There were no buckles or catches within her reach. She raised her head and shoulders from the mattress. They had put a strap across her ribs. Her knees were restrained, too. She jerked hard against the restraints on her wrists, and the strap on her right hand parted softly like silk against a sharp knife.

Her upper arms were held against the mattress by the strap that crossed her ribs. Emma pulled the blanket from her chest and examined the strap holding her left hand. There was a catch at the back of the wrist. With her right hand free, she was able to reach it. She worked herself out of the restraints and swung her feet to the floor.

Leaning against the side of the bed, she waited for the vertigo to pass and held up her hands. Spreading them before her, she could see they were intact, but there was something wrong with the color. Emma was fair-skinned. Her hands looked dark.

There was a light in the hallway. It had hurt her eyes when Doctor Walters came and went. Emma pushed off the side of the bed and shuffled toward the door. She was weak, and her feet, encased in warm, cotton socks, felt clumsy and numb.

Her hand closed on the door latch. It felt cool and smooth. She tasted metal in the back of her throat. She thumbed the catch, pulled the door inward and stumbled into the light.

Her dark-adapted eyes burned painfully. She squeezed them shut, turned her face away from the source of the light and waited for the pain to fade.

Something clattered on the floor. Emma heard a human gasp, almost a yelp of surprise.

She squinted toward the sound on her left.

An orderly in a striped uniform stood with her hand over her mouth. A metallic tray lay at her feet. Emma saw the red and white of the orderly's uniform reflected in its surface.

She stumbled toward the makeshift mirror with hands outstretched, blind to everything but the need to see herself. The orderly shied away from her approach. Emma dropped to her knees. The tray was within reach. She could almost make out something in its reflective surface.

A red, canvas shoe struck the tray. It skidded out of her reach.

A man's voice with a familiar velvet texture said, "Ms. Sloan, you shouldn't be out of bed. Let me help you."

He had nice hands now that she could see them, dark and fine with blunt nails. Emma reached for his hands and saw her own for the first time in full light.

She screamed and shook them violently as though she had touched something foul. A mottled, rubbery substance crawled over her hands, outlining the fingers and knuckles in sluggish blotches of dull red and blue. She tried to scrub it off on her thin robe, but it clung, and she realized with a shock of loathing that she could feel the texture of the robe, the fine weave and the slight roughness of the seams through the stuff on her hands.

The nurse caught her wrists and locked his arm around her shoulders, pressing her against his chest with her hands captured between them. "Calm down, Ms. Sloan. There's nothing wrong with you."

A pair of male orderlies in red uniforms stepped out of the elevator and jogged toward Emma. The nurse said, "Who called you? You aren't wanted."

The duty nurse stood pale and trembling at his station, and Linus said, "Cancel that emergency code right now." The nurse hurried to obey.

The inside of Emma's room was still dark. Now it seemed safe, a retreat from hostile eyes. She reached for the bed and curled into it with her legs under her on the heated mattress. She hid her hands under the sheet.

"What did you do to me?"

The nurse removed the padded straps from the sides of the bed and folded them in his hands. He fingered the edges of the strap that had split to release Emma. The break was straight and sharp as though something had cut it.

The nurse sat down at the bedside and slid his hand under the sheet to take her hand. He glanced at the monitor to his right. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry you had such a shock."

The smoothness of his fingertips contrasted with the roughness of very fine hairs on the back of his hand. The sensation was so strong Emma thought she could taste the bitterness of the antiseptic soap he used.

Emma felt a creeping sensation from head to toe. Her thighs prickled, and something tightened like hairs rising in a cold wind. What had they done to her and why? Why would anyone do this? How could they imagine she could live with this?

The warm hand continued to hold hers, and the nurse's voice said, "The strange sensations you are experiencing are the symbiont learning to interact with your nervous system. You should stop getting inappropriate information in a few days--tasting things with your hands, things like that."

"How do you know?" Emma demanded.

The light from the monitor limned his beard in blue. "You aren't the first person on whom we've used this particular technique. The other subjects have given us a lot of information."

"You've done this to other people?"

"Volunteers. People with untreatable skin cancers or other ailments that could not be corrected."

Emma snatched her hand out of his grip. "I didn't volunteer."

He dropped his eyes. "I'm sorry you didn't have that chance. You were dying, determined to die. Your body was rejecting skin grafts that should have taken, and Dr. Walters felt this was the only way to force you to live."

Emma wanted to laugh and scream at the blindness, the sheer stupidity. "Live for what? You took away my career. Of course I wanted to die." She pressed her palms to her face and jerked them away again at the meaty, alien taste that flooded her mouth.

His tone now was the cool, detached voice of the professional nurse. "Your career was already gone. The fire took it. Dr. Walters saw this as a chance to help you get it back."

She shoved her hands under his nose. "Like this?"

He drew her hands down to the metallic-tasting thermal blanket. "Not like this, Ms. Sloan, but in time, there's no reason you couldn't come to look perfectly normal."

"How?"

He rubbed his fingers through his beard. "Unfortunately, that's the part we were hoping you could tell us."

Dr. Walters explained it to Emma when she came back early from her meeting--summoned by the emergency code from the duty nurse's station. "Cole Avery, the gengineer who designed it, calls it a skin. His goal was a mobile life- support unit for extra-planetary exploration, but he got more than he bargained for. The organism doesn't just exchange oxygen and conserve water and temperature. It turned out to be parasitic. No, don't cringe. What I mean is that it can't survive without food and vital chemicals from its host's body. In return, it reinforces the host's immune system and eliminatory functions. It can replace or repair damaged organs, and we have seen it re-grow tissue, even entire limbs."

Emma stared at her hands. She didn't dare touch anything for fear of tasting it.

The doctor said, "It isn't conscious or self-aware even in the limited way an animal is, but it interacts with the host's nervous system. That is why we think you can eventually look normal again. One of the organism's adaptations is the ability to alter its surface color and texture. Would you like to grow your hair back?"

"The nurse told me you didn't know how to control it."

Dr. Walters hesitated a fraction of a second. "Not to that degree, not yet, but that isn't because we haven't seen it done. Several animal hosts have adapted successfully. Would you like to see them?"

"What about humans? The nurse said there were other humans."

The doctor's eyes flickered. "The other humans don't seem to be interested in their external appearance."

"They like looking like this?"

"The point is that they can alter their appearance when and how it suits them, except that for some reason, they seem unable to adopt a normal, human appearance. My theory is that the humans think too much. Skin isn't intelligent enough to read the host's mind. It responds to subtler cues--bio-feedback, adrenaline, trial and error. When the host's impulses are clouded by self- awareness, the symbiont can't react appropriately. That's why I didn't want you to see yourself. I hoped if your feelings, your conscious response to your condition, did not distract it, the organism would be able to reproduce your original appearance."

"Did the studio give you permission for this? I'm not allowed to have any radical surgical procedures while I'm under contract to them."

The doctor rubbed her chin with her fingertips. "They don't know about it. When you qualified for the skin program, you were declared dead."

The last word fell on Emma's chest, and the skin crawled and tightened over her back.

Carmen rattled on. "When some of the skin's capabilities became evident, the program was adopted by the government. Their aim is to see if the organism can be safely adapted to use in covert operations." Her mouth twisted. "You should have seen the fit Avery threw when he found out what they were doing with his work."

"You declared me dead."

"The project is classified. We couldn't let anyone know what had happened to you."

"This didn't happen to me. It was done to me."

"I'm sorry. That was an unfortunate turn of phrase. Emma, believe me, I wouldn't have done this to you if I didn't believe you could beat it."

Emma raised her eyes to the doctor's face. Carmen was a handsome woman in the way that women in their forties gained distinction as they lost the shallow gloss of youth. She had high, round cheekbones under gold-bronze skin.

Emma said, "You did this to me."

Carmen's face was sympathetic, but there was nothing of apology in it. "Yes. I did this to you."

Emma looked down again at her hands. They lay in her lap like vermin. "Show me the animals."

* * *

The horse pulled playfully at the hay in the rack, tossed its head and dropped the strands to the rubber mat underfoot. It shuffled through the pile of fallen hay, sniffing for something more interesting to eat. It was a pretty, glossy white with brown on its head and chest. Skewbald, the attendant had said, savoring the word. He watched Emma's face now, his lined features drawn up with anticipation of her reaction. He couldn't contain his enthusiasm. "Wouldn't ever know she was dying, would you? Tumors in her lymph nodes. Inoperable."

Emma turned to Dr. Walters. "How long did it take her to return to her original appearance?"

Carmen leaned her hand on the windowsill. "What was it, Arthur? Two weeks?"

The attendant beamed. "Fifteen days, seven hours from the time she woke up after the surgery. Tail was the first to grow back. That was three days after the surgery. Old girl wanted to switch flies, not that there were any in the compound," he added severely as if Emma had challenged his management.

"The rabbits took a little longer, didn't they?" Carmen said.

The attendant nodded. "Seventeen days; that was the smartest of the bunch, thirty days and thirty-three for the other two from the first batch."

Carmen said to Emma, "Several of the rabbits never did adapt, but all the rats did. The unsuccessful subjects either weren't able, or just didn't have the motivation."

Emma wasn't interested in the rats. They trundled through the shavings on the bottoms of their cages or climbed the wire sides and poked pink noses through the gaps. They all looked ordinary to her: grey, or white with brown spots.

The rabbits had bigger cages in a separate room. They lifted their ears when Emma entered, and several came to the doors of their cages, working their noses. Dr. Walters pointed out a small, grey doe with a thick, gleaming coat that looked so soft, Emma wanted to stroke it. "That's Sniffles," the doctor said, "the first of the rabbits to adopt a normal appearance." She frowned. "She's changed since then. How long ago was that, Albert?"

The attendant reached into the cage, and the little doe pounced on his hand. She shoved her nose under his palm. When he started to stroke her, she made a sound like a bad case of asthma and stretched out flat on her shavings. Albert said, "Thirty-seven days ago is what I'm thinking. I didn't notice it at first, so I didn't put it in the logs until about two weeks ago, but I figure she liked a little extra attention, and she found a way to get it."

Emma's hands itched to touch the rabbit's fur. She reached out.

The doctor caught her wrist and drew her away. "These are Sniffles's offspring over here. She was pregnant when she came in with a bad case of pasteurella. The skin saved her and the kits, but it had an unexpected side effect. The kits were born with symbionts."

Five little, grey rabbits with short, round ears crowded the door of their cage. They were miniature replicas of their mother.

Dr. Walters moved down the row of cages. "This is the one that should interest you the most. His name is Buster. He's made a perfect adjustment to the symbiont except that he can't or won't grow hair."

A big rabbit with bony hips jutting sharply under the red and murky blue leather of its artificial skin, hunkered in the furthest corner of his cage and stared straight ahead with a listless gaze. Carmen said, "He'd been abused and neglected; never handled very much, I suspect. He used to attack Albert when he came to feed and water."

The attendant said from his post by the doe's cage, "Got used to me in the end. He stopped attacking, but won't let me touch him yet. Takes time with some. We should introduce him to Sniffles."

"The last thing I want is to have Sniffles tainted with Buster's temperament."

They came next to a cage that had obviously been recently used, but was now empty. Dr. Walters tapped the wire and made a soft clicking noise. There was a shuffle in the shavings, and a pair of brown and white rabbits appeared like automatic blinds closing over a window. They sniffed through the wire at the doctor's hand and licked her fingers.

"The camouflage trick seems to come more-or-less naturally to the animals that can control their coloring. Bugs picked it up from Roger, but we've seen rats and guinea pigs learn it independently. Most of these animals only use it when startled, but for some reason, Bugs and Roger hide about ninety percent of the time."

Arnold, the attendant, said, "For fun, that's why. They've got a sense of humor."

Emma said, "I'd like to touch one of the successful animals."

Carmen shook her head. "I don't think that's a good idea, Emma. Not yet anyway. Give yourself more time."

More time in the crawling sack that clothed her? "What am I supposed to learn from these if I can't touch them?"

"What makes you think that touching is the way to learn from them?"

Emma didn't know.

The doctor said, "These are the possibilities. Sniffles and her kits, Roger and Bugs, the rats, the horse, they've all reverted to their original appearance. There is nothing keeping you from doing the same."

"Unless I'm like Buster. The other humans couldn't do it, either. Let me touch one." She wanted to touch a rabbit. Her whole skin hungered for it.

The doctor said, "The other humans reacted badly to contact with other skins. We can't afford to risk you."

Emma shook the doctor's hand off her arm. "You're crippling me. You show me that it can be done, but you won't let me learn how." She was angry, angrier than she should be. The skin crawled up her spine, and blades erupted like gooseflesh on her arms.

Doctor Walters recoiled. "Emma, don't get excited."

Bugs and Roger appeared in their cage bald and purplish with serrated knives rising from their backs. Buster growled and scuffled in his shavings. His teeth were long and sharp.

A shrill noise spiked Emma's ears. The emergency alarm. Emma clapped her hands to the sides of her head as one of the rabbits opened its mouth and shrieked, adding its animal terror to the already deafening noise. Buster and Bugs joined in. Shortly, all the rabbits were screaming in a weird, siren wail.

The doctor slapped her wrist speaker. "Security breach. Linus, I need an armed guard in the animal labs."

Emma felt the skin grab at her. She turned in a circle, looking for a threat she knew could not be in the room with her. She was panting. "What is that?"

The doctor said, "Stay calm, Emma. There's no threat to you."

But Emma felt her skin creep up and down her back, twitching its anxiety.

A pair of young guards skidded into the room and leveled heavy-muzzled stun rifles at Emma. The attendant, Arnold, knocked the weapons aside. "Don't point those things around in here," he shouted over the weird shrilling of the rabbits.

"Come, Emma." Dr. Walters took Emma's hand where the skin was hard and horny, but not serrated and drew her toward the guards.

They were young women, wide-eyed and ashen. The big, square-faced blond said, "They've escaped from the security wing, Dr. Walters. I heard they're killing everybody down there."

"Don't spread rumors. This is Emma Sloan. I don't think the others know she's here, so they won't be looking for her, but if you see them, keep them away from Ms. Sloan at all cost. They must not be allowed to touch her."

The smaller of the guards, a compact brunette with tilted eyes said, "Yes, Ma'am. Ms. Sloan, you can come with us back to your room. You'll be all right."

Knives were still rising and disappearing up and down Emma's arms. She could feel them on her back as well, guarding her spine like the bony plates of some prehistoric monster. The sensation of anger had not faded. If anything, it was stronger.

She balked. "Who's escaped? What are the guns for?"

Emma heard the squeal of straining metal--less rending than the ululating, up and down shrilling of the rabbits themselves--and looked over her shoulder. A yawning head gaped full of backward-curving fangs and forced its way out between broken wires with sharply cut edges. It was Buster, and he was no longer screaming. He was snarling.

A second rabbit used claws grown long and sharp as razors to tear at the wires of its cage and force its armored head out. In the moment Emma stood watching, Buster pushed his shoulders through the gap in his own cage. His eyes fixed on the humans near the door, and he redoubled his efforts.

Emma forgot to argue. All she wanted now was to get out of the room, out of captivity, and she wasn't going to let anyone stop her. She'd kill if she had to. She stopped outside the door. Kill who? How could she possibly kill anyone, and why would she?

Carmen Walters locked the door of the rabbits' room behind them, "I don't understand it. They never handled these animals."

Emma heard the heavy thud of something hard striking the walls of a room down the hall and felt the racing prickle of terror in her skin. "Look out," she cried senselessly, then the polymer glass window of the horse's paddock shattered with a crash.

Scaled hooves armed with curved blades rang on the glass-covered floor of the hallway. A nightmare head covered in mottled, red and bluish-grey armor shook glass from its horns. Plated nostrils flared. The horse gathered its haunches and pulled its hind legs through the shattered window. Its tail whipped behind it.

One of the guards fired her weapon, but the target was beyond the range of the stun rifle. The bolt hissed and moaned and died meters short of the enraged animal. The weapon attracted the horse's attention. It jerked its head up and glared at the people in the hallway.

Dr. Walters said, "Emergency exit. Walk."

The guards closed ranks between the horse and the humans. Emma was crowded back toward the emergency doors. Seeing the horse covered in horns and thick armor down its back, Emma could feel knives sprouting on her own elbows, and heavy, jointed plates forming over her forehead.

The horse took a few steps toward the slowly retreating humans and lowered its horned head.

Arnold, the assistant, had the emergency doors open. He waved Emma through, but he couldn't touch her for fear of cutting himself on the bony plates growing out of her skin. She hesitated in the doorway. The horse had come closer. It raked its hooves in the air and shook its head menacingly.

"Emma, go," Carmen said in a low, smooth voice.

Emma squeezed to one side of the doorway. "Go ahead."

"It's not safe here, Emma."

Emma said impatiently, "I'm right behind you."

Behind the doctor, the horse squealed and lunged with its horned head.

The guards fired in unison. This time, the animal was in range. Stun rifles spat. Writhing bolts of coherent energy knocked the horse back on its haunches and crackled over its cringing skin. Emma jumped and thought she could feel the itching crawl on her own skin.

"Come," Doctor Walters said. She sent the guards ahead and took hold of Emma's sleeve where the cutting blades of her skin had not entirely shredded it.

Unnerved by her skin's sympathy with the mare's symbiont, Emma followed a few steps in the doctor's wake. Then hooves rang on the floor, and she heard a rumble, low and menacing. Emma turned.

The horse was standing. Its whip tail whistled and cut a mark in the wall behind it with a razor-edged tip. The hideously-armored head tossed.

Drawn by a perverse compulsion, Emma held out her hand. The horse snorted and bared its teeth.

Doctor Walters realised that Emma was no longer following. She turned. "Emma, don't."

The horse squealed its rage, lunged for Emma. It was like the accident in the holo-stage. She was frozen by panic, and it was already too late. Almost in her face, the horse gave a snort of surprise and braced barbed hooves against the floor on either side of Emma's feet. Its breath misted her face, and it threw itself back on its haunches.

Before Emma could collect her wits, the horse got its feet under it and backed away from the emergency doors. It shook its head as though puzzled, lashed its naked whip of a tail and retreated down the corridor.

Doctor Walters tugged Emma's sleeve again. "That was very stupid, Emma, very dangerous."

Emma let herself be drawn up the stairs. "You said they were normal."

Carmen didn't answer. She was speaking into her wrist communicator. Emma heard her use the head nurse's name several times as they climbed the stairs from the basement. The alarms broke off before they reached the fourth floor, but the nervous twitching of Emma's skin did not diminish.

The doctor was winded by the time they reached the eighth floor of the secure wing. A guard met them at the doors. He greeted the doctor with a nod and waved them through, although the hard, up-and-down look he gave Emma made the skin thicken again over her spine.

Emma wasn't the only one with hackles raised on the eighth floor. The orderlies were wide-eyed, and the nurse at the duty station snatched at his emergency summons when he saw Emma.

The head nurse came to meet Dr. Walters. "Relax, Clive, this one is ours," he said to the duty nurse. "Carmen, I have holos from the breakout in your ready- room."

"Where are they now?" the doctor asked.

"Pinned down at the far end of Two."

"So they'll have to come all the way to this end and up to Four to get an outside exit. What are our security measures in that section?"

The nurse said, "Explosive projectiles, force bolts, tri-aminide gas in the walls."

Carmen snorted with exasperation. "There has to be a humane way to contain them."

Emma felt her scalp prickle with horror. "You're talking about the other humans. The other...." She indicated the red and grey mottled skin that crawled and shifted like a live thing under her tattered robe.

Carmen glanced at her and back to the nurse. "I'm going down there. Put Ms. Sloan under guard in her room."

Emma protested, "I haven't done anything."

Neither Carmen nor Linus was listening to her. The nurse said, "They've killed two orderlies and a guard already, and their symbionts are adapting faster than we can subdue them. They've got to be put down before they're too powerful to be stopped."

"I'll be damned if I let them be butchered." She sounded as though she meant it. "Keep Ms. Sloan safe until I get back."

She was already backing away down the hall. Now she turned and jogged to the elevator with her wrist unit raised to her lips.

The nurse watched Dr. Walters go with his mouth tight around a clenched jaw. When she disappeared behind the elevator doors, he seemed to remember Emma. His mouth softened. "I'm sorry, Ms. Sloan. You'll be more secure in your room."

Emma balked. She didn't want to be confined. She needed to get out. Her neck and shoulders sprouted coarse barbs like hair.

Linus seemed to understand her reluctance. He said to the duty nurse, "Forward control of this floor to Ms. Sloan's room, then lock down your station and get out of the building." To the guards, he said, "I want you right outside her door. If you see anything that shouldn't be here, kill it."

He guided Emma into her room with feather touches on her barbed skin. The defensive blades flattened under his touch. The room was dark.

The shorter guard pulled the door half shut and looked back at Emma. "Lock this from the inside, Ms. Sloan, and don't open it for anybody but me or Dr. Walters."

The closing door cut off the light from the hallway. Linus turned the lock.

"The light," Emma said.

He was already sitting down at the terminal beside the bed. "Leave it dark. Let's try to look like nobody's home."

Emma paced the room from the door to the far wall. She wanted to see out, but there were no windows. The nurse was working rapidly at the bedside terminal. His fingers flexed and jerked in the waldo field. Outside the room, the floor was quiet but for the muffled conversation of the guards outside. A hair-thin strip of light showed under the door. Emma's skin twitched and crawled.

Far below, something crunched, and the floor jumped under Emma's feet.

Linus swore soft but profoundly, and his fingers walked in mid-air, calling up frames in his terminal.

Someone tapped on the door, and the guard's voice said, "Everything's all right out here. What was that?"

Linus said, "Something just took out part of the ceiling on the second floor. The symbionts are loose in the hospital."

"They won't come this high, though, will they? They can't get out above Four."

"Don't count on them doing anything predictable. Stay alert."

"We're on it. Hang tight," the guard answered.

The rattle of gunfire made Emma jump even muffled as it was by the intervening walls.

Linus cocked his head and listened. "Explosive bullets. They've given up trying to take them alive." He went back to his terminal.

"What does that mean?" Emma demanded.

He was wrapped in his work. "They've moved up to Four, but they're at the wrong end. They'll have to get all the way through the building and rush the exit." He was silent for a long, breathless minute while Emma came to stand behind him. She couldn't read the diagram or the codes scrolling up the left side of the field. Then Linus cursed. "What are those idiots doing?" He keyed in a voice pickup. "They're moving up to Five. Cut them off. Contain them."

Through the speaker, Emma heard gunfire echoing by the far-off rattle coming through the walls, but the distant shots didn't sound so far away now.

Tinny voices coming through the speaker said, "Got one. He's down."

"Shit, is it a he or a she?"

"It's still moving."

Then they heard a yelp and more swearing followed by frantic gunfire.

"They're on Five," someone said.

Lights were appearing on Linus's view of the hospital. He opened the intercom again. "This is Linus Castor, head of nursing in the experimental surgery division. I want to talk to Dr. Carmen Walters."

The speaker crackled for a moment, then a male voice said, "Dr. Walters is dead. This is Major Tercel."

"Shit. Shit." Linus dug his fingers into his beard and bent over the board.

Emma leaned toward the microphone. "Hello? What happened? Who is coming up here?"

"Who is that? Get off this line."

Linus pulled himself together. "Major, listen to me. I'm up on Eight, and I've got lights on Six and Seven. They're headed for Eight; they may be thinking of escaping from the roof."

"What are you still doing there? Everybody was supposed to be cleared out of this wing."

"There's a patient up here who's in a very delicate condition. You know the one I mean, and I don't want those escapees anywhere near her. They could severely impair her recovery."

"I'll take it under advisement, nurse. Now clear my line."

"Asshole." Linus closed the terminal and locked it. He went to the door and thumped it with his fist. "They're coming up, maybe headed for the roof, maybe not."

"We're on it." The guard's voice was tight.

The nurse guided Emma further back into the room. "There's nothing more we can do," he said, but his hand fell on a chair by the side of the bed. He swung it around between them and the door.

"What would they want me for?" Emma asked. "Won't they go straight to the roof?"

"They have no way of even knowing you exist. There's no reason they shouldn't go straight past this floor to the roof, but if they don't--this is important-- don't let them touch you. Avoid touching them no matter what you have to do."

"Why? What could they do to me?"

Linus hushed her. Outside the door, they heard muffled thumping. One of the guards said, "Shit, there they are," and stun rifles spat.

The nurse's eyes widened. "No. Not stun." He lunged at the door. "Get out. You don't have the weapons. Get out."

One of the guards screamed. Something struck the door with the dull thud of rag-doll limbs falling. Linus backed toward Emma. "Where the hell are the security teams?"

Emma said, "But they can't get in. The door is still locked." Suddenly, she wasn't sure whether she wanted to keep them out or not. How did she know they were a threat? She had never met them, never touched them. She took a step toward the door.

Something hissed outside. Emma smelled acrid fumes. Barbed spurs formed on the backs of Emma's hands and shrank away again.

Linus coughed and retreated toward the wall.

The lock clicked. The latch wobbled on the inside. Emma reached for it to hold it firm or open it. She wasn't sure which.

Behind her, Linus said, "Emma, remember: you must not touch them."

The latch jerked. The door flew open and rebounded against the wall.

Emma couldn't make out details in the figure silhouetted in the light from the hallway, but she could see that it was male and big, over six feet tall, heavy in the chest and shoulders and slim-hipped. The light behind him threw him into shadow. She couldn't tell if his skin was the same mottled color as her own, but when he turned his head to glance back into the hall, she could see the beautiful lines of his profile--full-lipped with a shallow nose and round jaw.

He extended his hand to Emma and said gently, "Come."

Linus said, "If you go with him, the security guards will kill you along with the rest of them."

The beautiful figure in the doorway snorted. "Come with us."

Emma felt the barbs and armor plates of her skin relax into suppleness. He was no threat to her. Carmen and Linus were wrong. She needed to touch him. She reached out.

"No." Linus struck her hand aside and threw his weight against the intruder.

Fast as a whip, the big man lashed the back of his hand across the nurse's head and sliced it open to the bone even as they stumbled out into the corridor. The security teams had finally arrived. Guns filled the corridor with thunder and the metallic pang of bullets.

The big man staggered, rocked by the impact of bullets against flesh that was now covered in dull, mottled armor. He stretched to his full height, exposing his armored belly to the weapons, and raised his arms.

Like quicksilver, he flowed up and out of Emma's view. A moment later, the weapons fell silent. Someone said, "Where the fuck did he go?"

Linus lay on the floor in the hallway. His blood pooled under him and spread in a widening circle to mingle with the blood of the guard who lay nearby with her throat torn out. Emma crept toward him. She waved her hand to attract the attention of the people in the hallway and shouted, "Don't shoot me. I'm a patient."

She recognized the voice of the major who had spoken to them on the intercom. "Come out slowly with your hands up." Heavy footsteps were already shaking the floor.

Still crouching, Emma stepped into the hall with her hands raised.

"Holy shit," someone yelped. A rifle cracked, and a bullet cut a chip of concrete from the wall near Emma's head.

She dropped and covered her head.

The major said, "Lower your weapon."

Linus hadn't moved. His face and neck were so slimed with blood that Emma couldn't tell whether his throat had been cut like the guard's. She felt his throat for the pulse. His skin was still warm, and she tasted with her fingers the salt metal of his blood.

"I think he's dead," she said to the soldiers spreading out to circle her.

"No shit," someone muttered.

The major with the familiar voice cocked a dull, grey handgun and set its muzzle on Emma's forehead. "Back off, or I'll shoot you myself."

Nick Archer had seen the holos on the breakout at Skyway Memorial. None of the symbiotic organisms had appeared where the 'corders could catch them, but he'd seen short lab recordings of humanoid figures wearing what looked like very baggy jumpsuits of mottled leather. He'd wondered what could possibly move someone to put on one of the things. That was before he'd learned the last remaining skin in captivity belonged to Emma Sloan.

Control had asked him if that was a problem.

"No." He'd shrugged. "I mean, I was a fan, even thought about sending a condolence mail when I heard she'd died. I guess that would have been premature." You didn't lie to Control. It was reading pupillary and capillary response as he answered its questions, and it would detect a lie, but a cagey agent could get away with a half-truth, a "little, white one" as it was called on the rare occasions when people in Archer's line of work got together to talk shop. "But it's not as though I knew her. No reason she shouldn't be just other target."

Archer had got the assignment--which was what he wanted because in fact it wasn't just any target. It was Emma Sloan.

Skyway Memorial was buttoned up like a prison with soldiers keeping gawkers from lingering on the sidewalk across the street. Archer presented his government ID which described him, innocuously enough, as a public relations liaison. The officer let him through the barricade.

He crossed the street to the front entrance and showed the badge again at the door. The guard there took Archer's badge for a closer inspection. "What's a public relations liaison? Nobody said anything about this to me."

Archer plucked his badge from the guard's fingers. "I'm the guy they call when the job's too tough for the army."

The soldier gave Archer the official Army civilian-intimidation stare. "Are you trying to be funny?"

"I'm never funny. Are you going to let me in or not?"

The soldier couldn't think of any excuse to detain Archer. He stepped aside, but he didn't hold the door.

Skyway wasn't much like a hospital anymore. Nurses and orderlies had been replaced by uniforms and weapons and all pretty busy-looking considering the horses had already left the barn. All but one.

He waited inside the doors for someone to meet him, but he wasn't attracting much notice. He rarely did: six-foot-five, medium fair skin, dark blond where his hair wasn't retreating from his forehead. He'd been leaner when he was younger. Now he was forty-two, and softening some in the middle. He was practically invisible: good for jobs where discretion was the better part of valor, not so good for getting served in busy restaurants.

After a minute-and-a-half of non-entity, Archer gave up and headed for the inner doors where the lobby let into the hospital proper.

He finally got a response. A cool, female voice said, "Sir, you can't go in there."

Archer kept moving.

A slim-hipped soldier in an Army uniform and her hair in a brunette chignon stepped into his path. "Sir, you are approaching a restricted area." Archer put his badge in her extended palm and entertained a brief fantasy about that satiny, brown hair turned stringy with sweat and spread across his pillow. Not that he preferred younger women in general; he just didn't believe in discriminating against them.

She frowned over the ID for a moment before she realized what "public relations liaison" meant. Her demeanor took on a slightly less pugnacious edge. "Excuse me, sir. I gather you are here to see the prisoner."

"Where can I find her?"

"Currently in the debriefing room with Major Tercel. He has asked not to be disturbed."

As if the orders of any garden-variety major carried a gram of weight with Nick Archer. He smiled amiably at the little lieutenant. "I assume there's a holo-view set up nearby?"

"For the research team, yes."

"That will do for now, if you will be so good as to lead the way." He probably could have found it himself. He excused his imposition on the grounds that regular army needed to be reminded of his authority, but it didn't hurt that the young officer's uniform fit snugly over her backside. Every job had its perks.

She brought him down to the basement of the high-security wing and showed him into a small amphitheater. Half the seats in the first two rows were occupied by people in white coats--the uniform of the professional scientist. They scrawled notes into data-pads held on their knees. The holo-stage below projected a half- dark room and a handful of people. The field was too small to show the entire interrogation room. Every so often a new figure drifted in or out of the field around the two central characters.

Archer sat in the third row behind the white-coated research team and caught the young soldier's arm as she turned to leave. "Are there transcripts of the other interviews?"

"Yes, sir. Do you want them?"

"If you have the clearance, I'd appreciate that."

"Yes sir."

Archer turned his attention to the holo-stage on the floor of the auditorium. One of the two central figures sat behind a small desk with one elbow resting on its surface. That would be Major Tercel. Archer had skimmed the man's file. He was a competent officer, frequently commended for his courage and his strategic instincts. He had distinguished himself in small skirmishes on the Chinese border and in the Middle-African states. He had every reason to think he would retire with the rank of Colonel at least.

The creature in the other seat was a different story. She wore a blue hospital gown, the kind that opened in back and exposed a hell of a lot of the wearer's dignity. Where the shabby gown exposed her to view, she was sheathed in what could have been a baggy, leather coverall except that it covered her bald head and her face as well as everything else. The skin seemed to crawl over her body, sprouting spikes and bony-looking plates, even, at one point, something that looked like gills. The motion was unnerving, unexpected, confusing to the eye. It raised Archer's hackles to watch it. On the holo-stage, the scene played like a very amateur fiction except that it was Emma Sloan's unmistakable voice coming over the speakers.

"I don't know how he found me."

Tercell's lip curled. "He and five other strangers risked exploding bullets, tri- aminide gas and electrocution to bypass the only available exit and reach the eighth floor where he took a detour all the way down the hall, went directly to your room and burned open your door, and you want me to believe you knew nothing about him." He leaned over his desk. "How fucking stupid do you think I am?"

Tercell was playing the bad cop. If this were a real holo-drama, there would be a good cop stepping in at any moment to give her a way out, suggest that Jackson and his gang had heard about Ms. Sloan from careless gossip among the staff and identified her room by the fact that it was the only one on the floor with armed guards at the door. No-one spoke up. Tercell was playing the scene solo.

The pretty, young lieutenant was back with a reader and a disk. He took them from her with a nod of thanks.

She said, "Is there anything else?"

"One thing. What's your name?"

Her back stiffened. "Lieutenant Sally Mills, sir."

"Career army?"

"Yes, sir."

She definitely suspected him of designs on her person. Served him right for ogling her backside. Somehow, women always knew. He said, "Thank you, Lieutenant, you've been very helpful."

She hesitated, still spoiling for a confrontation. "Is that all, sir?"

"I'll look after myself from here."

"Yes, sir." She saluted and removed herself from the amphitheater. She might have been offended by his sudden lack of prurient interest. Sometimes women were like that. A man was damned either way.

Archer slotted the disk into the reader, crossed his legs and divided his attention between the reader on his lap and the holo-field on the floor of the auditorium.

They were making Emma nervous, and that was making the skin nervous. It kept forming itself into plates and spikes, and that was making them nervous, which made Emma nervous. She was tired, and she'd answered all the questions over and over with the same replies.

Major Tercell slammed his hand on the top of his desk. Emma jumped, and the skin prickled up and down her back. He said, "Who killed the nurse, you or Jackson?"

That was a new question. She'd grown so used to the monotony, she couldn't adapt at once. "He's dead?" she said stupidly. She'd asked repeatedly in the beginning whether Linus Castor had survived. Tercell had refused to tell her.

"Along with Dr. Walters. Your friends killed her when they pulled down the ceiling on the second floor."

She'd known about Dr. Walters. She said nothing.

Major Tercell's lean face was oiled with sweat. He turned to the enormous woman who stood impassively on Emma's left. "Give her another dose."

"The symbiont clears it from her system as fast as I can administer it."

"Then raise the dose."

"The Medical League guidelines...."

Tercell raised his voice. "Is there anything in your guidelines about this organism?"

The doctor shrugged and turned silently to the table and her tray of drugs and needles.

Emma hated the drugs. They terrified her as did the big doctor with the iron- grey mat of curls on her head and eyes that never met Emma's. She could hear the doctor moving vials, opening a sterile capsule to expose a needle. Emma refused to look.

The doctor moved into Emma's line of sight and held the syringe up to the light. She depressed the plunger, let a trickle of honey-thick fluid run down the needle. It was the biggest needle they had used yet, and Emma felt nauseous. The doctor approached Emma's left side, and Emma tried to pull away despite the steel mesh bands that bound her arms to the chair.

"Hold still." The doctor wiped a sterile pad on the meaty part of Emma's upper arm. She poised the needle. Emma could already feel the skin thickening where the antiseptic tingled. Then the doctor stooped and jabbed the needle into Emma's thigh.

Rather, she tried to. They'd used that trick before. This time, the skin was prepared for the maneuver. The thick needle encountered a layer of bone-hard chitin. The needle broke. The skin didn't.

The doctor, expecting to encounter only yielding flesh, lost her balance. Her bare hand clutched Emma's shoulder. Emma had tasted the doctor's hands through the skin before: antiseptic, chemicals and something that didn't make sense directly to her mouth. She could have identified this woman in the dark by touch alone. Where the thick fingers pinched Emma's flesh, the skin finally struck back. Emma's neck and shoulders erupted in a mane of wire-thin quills that sprang straight through the doctor's meaty palm and emerged from the back of her hand.

The doctor shrieked first from surprise, then clutched her wrist and screamed in earnest. She tried to pull away, but the quills were barbed along their length. They clung to flesh and couldn't be dislodged.

The doctor's considerable weight pulled Emma off balance. She recoiled. The quills transfixing the doctor's hand snapped off at the base, and the rattling mass of them which had not taken hold of flesh melted back into the skin that spawned them.

The doctor backed off screaming and shaking her hand and spattering droplets of blood on the floor.

Major Tercell was livid. "That was stupid."

"I don't have any control over it," Emma said, still tautly aware of the weapons trained on her and the very nervous guards.

"You think I've been tough? I'll show you what tough really is." A soft, but piercing chirp cut through the major's words. He ignored it. "You're a lab rat, Sloan. I've been coddling you, but that ends now."

The gentle chirp persisted, and the major turned to his aide with a jerk. "Answer that, lieutenant."

The young man who operated the portable terminal shook his head. "I'm sorry, sir. I can't."

"What do you mean you can't?"

"It has a priority eight security code, sir."

Major Tercell activated his wrist phone with more force than was necessary. "What is it? I'm in the middle of something."

Emma heard a sharp, male voice over the speaker. It wasn't the one Major Tercell expected. His face paled. "Yes, sir....Sir, I was given discretion...yes, sir. I understand, sir. Right away."

He disengaged the phone. "Return the patient to her room."

Archer was waiting outside the door when Major Tercell emerged. "What's the point of terrorizing that poor woman, Major?"

Tercell knew better than to cross a "public relations liaison" with a level eight security encryption, but that didn't mean he was intimidated. "Did you see what that 'poor woman' did to Dr. Grubbenberg? She's about as helpless as a bear."

"That's not what I asked."

"She had to have some kind of contact with the others. She wasn't able to get away with them, but she may know their plans--where they were going, how they got down off that roof without anybody seeing them."

Archer said, "I've read the transcripts of her debriefings. She gave you everything she knew in the first ten minutes and repeated it twice while the drugs were still having an effect on her system. I appreciate determination, Major. I don't like bullies."

Tercell flushed. "I have a job to do. Sure I know who Emma Sloan was, and you may feel sorry for her, but I lost six good soldiers to her friends, and to me she's just another skin."

Tercell had a reputation for caring about his people. It was understandable he had lost some of his objectivity, but the fact was that Emma Sloan didn't know what Tercell wanted to believe she knew. "I appreciate your feelings, Major. That's why I'm leaving you in charge of hospital security. You're to stay away from Ms. Sloan. I've called in my own people to provide her personal protection."

Tercell hated it. He was noticeably heated when he said, "That suits me perfectly. She's your problem from now on. Sir."

"Major, Emma Sloan is the least of my problems."

When he finally stood outside her door, he tried to hold the picture in his mind of the woman on the little hospital holo-amphitheater. The woman in the baggy, mottled leather skin was someone he was prepared to deal with. Unfortunately, the other Emma Sloan kept creeping into his head--the one he'd watched in one holo-play after another, a woman with a handsome face and dark eyes and a way of looking out of the holo-field right into you. The first time he saw her use that look, he'd almost stood up in the middle of the theater.

He knocked on her door.

No one replied until he knocked a second time.

"Who?" It was her voice, a little sharp with temper and clouded with surprise.

"Ms. Sloan, I'm with the government. May I come in?"

There was another long silence. "Can I stop you?"

"It would not be in your best interest to do so."

"Suit yourself," she said.

Archer opened the door and entered the presence of Emma Sloan and her summoning eyes.

He didn't know what he had expected. A fanfare would have seemed appropriate. A soundtrack, at least, with full orchestral scoring. She might as well have been anyone in the world curled on her side on a hard bed with neither pillow nor blanket. She propped herself up on her elbow and looked at him without interest.

Archer was shocked. A wattle of the skin organism hung from her jaw to her shoulder and sagged in lops and wrinkles down her right side. The reports hadn't mentioned the extent of her deformity. He felt the involuntary tightening around his mouth and knew he'd given away his revulsion.

The woman sitting up now on the bed looked down at herself. She couldn't blush, but she jumped like someone exposed in a public restroom. "Excuse me," she said. The mottled skin moved of its own accord, creeping, tightening. In the next moment, the appearance of deformity disappeared. She looked merely flayed alive. She said, "They told me I'd learn to control it, but if I don't pay attention, it just seems to forget."

"I've read something about the trouble the first human hosts had with the symbiont. I gather you're not unique." He extended his hand. "I'm Nicholas Archer, public relations liaison assigned to you for the time being."

The woman recoiled. "I prefer not to shake hands," she said.

After the incident with the doctor, Archer couldn't blame her. He'd have spared her the whole thing if he could have found Tercell's private wrist number sooner. "I don't work with anyone who won't shake my hand."

She sounded harassed. "I'm not being rude or unfriendly, but I still taste things with my hands sometimes."

"Afraid I'll taste bad?"

Her lips twitched, and she turned her face aside as though she didn't want him to see her smile. In a moment, she looked straight into his eyes and clasped his hand.

Archer was so stunned, he almost didn't register the velvet texture of the skin against his. She hadn't looked right at him until she took his hand. Now he saw the eyes were still hers: purple--almost black--and something indefinable that made him want to cross a crowded room to get to her, only he was standing right in front of her. How the hell had Tercell sat across from those eyes hour after hour?

His mouth must have been divorced from the rest of him. He said, "So how do I taste?"

She laughed, and he'd have done anything for her. "You had a bratwurst on white bread with sweet-hot mustard for lunch."

He blushed. "Thought I'd washed my hands."

"I can taste the soap, but it's been--seems like a long time since I had bratwurst."

And just like that, Archer had to get out of the room. He let her fingers slide through his. "I'll be back to talk in more depth very soon, Ms. Sloan. For now, I wanted to introduce myself, let you know I'll be looking after you from now on."

After what she'd just been through with Tercel, Archer wouldn't have blamed her for clinging to his hand or begging for some reassurance. She merely rose to her bare feet in her immodest hospital robe and walked him to the door. "Thank you for coming," she said.

He waited until he turned a corner before he leaned against the wall and exhaled hard. He was in trouble. He should damn well dial the emergency number on his wrist phone and have Control send a replacement.

Everything had been fine. Even the eyes hadn't thrown him. He'd half expected them; he was a fan after all. He'd seen every holo she'd ever been in, even the early ones where her name hadn't appeared until way in the back with the closing credits. He could live with her as a stage presence. Then she'd admitted a wistful longing for a bratwurst, and for a moment, he'd seen an ordinary woman that he might soon be called on to kill.

Whoever they sent next might be immune to Emma Sloan and her summoning eyes, and that was why he wasn't going to make the call.

She was afraid she'd made a mistake mentioning what he'd had for lunch, or maybe it was just her ugliness. She'd been terrified he would not be back, even after he had sent a pair of orderlies to her. They brought her a set of almost- comfortable chairs, a blanket that Emma didn't really need, and a red-checked, paper tray containing one cheddar bratwurst on white bread with sweet-hot mustard.

Emma ate slowly, snorting through the scalding mustard vapors. The door opened again. Emma looked up, hopeful. She was disappointed. She recognized the young officer with the dark hair. Not that she'd ever known the girl's name, but she was one of Major Tercell's aides. Emma lost her appetite. Had Tercell been reinstated over her? She put the sausage down on the seat of the chair beside the bed.

The young woman carried a bag from a moderately expensive women's clothing chain. She placed the bag on the end of Emma's bed. "From Mr. Archer with his compliments, Ms. Sloan."

So he hadn't forgotten her. Emma wiped her fingers on her gown. "Thank you," she said. As she was opening the bag, the young officer turned to leave. Emma said hurriedly, "Is he coming back? Today, I mean?"

The young woman hesitated. Her distaste for Emma's company was almost an odor. "I don't know, Ma'am. He has arranged for me to be transferred temporarily to his command. My orders are to see that you have anything you might need to be comfortable until he is able to see you again."

She was clearly unhappy with the arrangement, but whether from antipathy to Emma herself or distaste for Mr. Archer was unclear. Had she been a little older, and Emma her old self, Emma would have thought it was jealousy. Emma felt softness like clouds against her fingers. She lifted a black dress with the silvery- grey sheen of angora. "It's lovely. Did you choose it?"

The girl nodded once.

Emma rubbed the fabric up and down her arms. It tasted nice. "Thank you."

The young officer looked stiff and uncomfortable. "Should I bring you a mirror?"

"I don't think so. The thought was kind."

The girl was stiff as a young actress with her first case of stage fright. "You're welcome," she said as if the words were being wrenched from her jaws like teeth.

Alone again, Emma knew there were holo-corders on her. Strangers watched from a security station somewhere in the building. To wear the dress, she would have to remove her shabby hospital gown. Of course, she'd disrobed on stage before, but that was when she'd had skin like gold and a body that people wanted to look at. Then again, the people watching her now deserved to get a good look.

Emma untied the back neck of the cotton gown. She shrugged the sleeves down her arms and dropped it to the floor. Oddly enough, she didn't feel naked, even the conscious nakedness of working a nude scene. The watchers weren't seeing her, only the skin. She hoped it turned their stomachs.

Emma gathered up the dress by the hem and dropped it over her head. It swept her body to her ankles and draped her hips in softness. Long sleeves hid her arms to the wrists, and a cowled neck concealed her throat.

She looked at her hands at the ends of the sleeves. The stiff, little lieutenant had good taste. The skin on her hands didn't look so bad against the black fabric. She could almost forgive them their vile appearance.

The man, Nicholas Archer, came back later. She knew who it was when she heard the knock at her door. He was the only person who had asked her permission for anything since she woke up in the hospital.

She sat up on the bed with the skirt of the black dress swinging around her legs. "Come in."

He said nothing about why he had left her so abruptly before. "Ms. Sloan. I'm sorry to keep you waiting. I hope you haven't been uncomfortable."

She took his hand easily this time. "Better. Would you like to sit down?" She remembered that neither the furniture nor the room was hers, but he merely nodded and sat down.

"I'm afraid we scavenged the chairs from the hospital lobby. Not too comfortable. I'd like to tell you we were moving you to better quarters, but for the time being, you're safer here."

"I don't understand." Emma took the other chair and curled one foot up under her thigh.

He propped his elbows on his knees. "This room is as secure as any place in the hospital. The corridor is the only way in, and it's heavily guarded. There's just no bloody way for anything to slip through."

"You mean anyone. Specifically anyone like me."

"That's exactly what I do mean, Ms. Sloan. You're the best chance we have to recapture them, and I don't want to lose you."

Foreboding stirred the skin, made it tighten. She caught her breath and remembered she mustn't shred her dress. At the moment, the dignity afforded by real clothing was immensely important to her. The skin churned with confusion for a moment, then settled. "I don't know where they are."

"I know that, Ms. Sloan. I'm also damned sure they knew about you, and by now, we're equally sure they didn't hear about you from some loose-mouthed intern or lab assistant."

She didn't want to be strapped into that chair again, didn't want needles or the muddy, sweating feeling of drugs in her blood. The dress. She concentrated on the downy softness of angora on her skin. She was breathing faster. "But I didn't know about them."

"They're older. That is, their symbionts are mature, whereas yours is still in infancy. The oversight committee in charge of this project is looking at all the data from the beginning of the program, and they've formed a theory. They've always seen that the skins are attracted to one another. Now it's looking like the skins have some way of detecting each other over distance. The other human hosts may have been aware of you from the moment of implantation."

Emma stiffened. "They knew all along I had nothing to do with it? Then why was I strapped to a chair and poisoned with drugs for three days?"

Archer looked genuinely sympathetic. "Because Major Tercell didn't grasp the full implications of the research, and the oversight committee was so unnerved by the escape, they gave him more latitude than they should have. They were frightened, Ms. Sloan. I don't know if you realize how much damage these people could do out there, but the committee has good reason to be afraid."

Emma stared at her hands in her lap for a moment. Archer sounded sincere. She almost resented his decency which made it so much harder to judge his words on their own merit. She'd trust him if she let herself.

His round face had a boyish, unfinished quality like a grown-up Huck Finn. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands loose between them. His fair brows were drawn down over his eyes. "I don't expect you to trust me, Ms. Sloan, but I do want to help you. I wish I could tell you it would be easy."

He reached into his jacket and brought out a portable holo player. "I've got something you need to see." He unfolded the projector. A fan of light splayed out with the first image.

Emma gulped. The field was only twenty centimeters across and somewhat flattened by the single projection lens, but the resolution was sharp enough for Emma to make out a human form. Blood darkened its red hospital uniform. Its face was half crushed. "Dr. Walters," Emma said.

"That's right. They've got some kind of corrosive venom they can spray from their mouths. They burned out the supports and collapsed the ceiling on the second floor. It fell on Dr. Walters who was trying to talk them down, save their lives. They didn't need her help as it turned out." He tapped the projector, and the image changed.

The next victim was unrecognizable. It was covered with blood, and the face was gone.

Archer said, "They burned his face off. If its any comfort, the venom is very toxic. He was dead before he knew what happened to him. They got two more the same way."

He cycled through the images in the projector file. "These three were killed in more or less conventional ways: this one's throat was cut. This one suffocated. That one's neck was broken. She died before they could get her to life- support."

The last victim, a slight female, sprawled on a blood-stained stairway with her neck grotesquely askew.

Archer leaned back in his chair. "They got all the way up to the eighth floor, killing these six people on their way. There, five of them escaped onto the roof while their leader somehow got to your room on Eight, killed one of the hospital security guards outside your door and hurt the other before killing Linus Castor and escaping through an air vent that shouldn't have admitted a cat let alone a two-hundred pound man. All six disappeared without a trace from the roof and haven't been seen since. Damn right, the committee is scared. Tercell is scared. I'm scared, too." He cycled back to the holo of the guard with his face burned away by acid.

"You just agreed that had nothing to do with me."