A puddle of water had formed outside the prisoner’s cell, the guard noticed angrily, and he hastened to open the door, inserting the key, pushing down on the lever handle, and stepping inside the cell.

The bitch had let the bathtub overflow. That was not the guard’s last thought, but it was among his last thoughts. He also had time for puzzlement at the way his hand was no longer just grasping the lever handle but was spastically clamped onto it. He wondered at what looked like a strip of twisted foil attached to the inside lever knob, connected to something high up, something he could not see. He knew that the puddle of water at his feet had indeed come from the bathtub faucet, and he even noticed the little blue logo on a paper packet of salt floating on the puddle he had stepped into. The perceptions arrived in a cluster, a panicked mob swarming a gateway; he could not have said what came first and which came after.

There were also many thoughts he did not have. He did not reflect on the fact that a tenth of an amp of current could cause a beating heart to defibrillate. He did not notice the fact that the doorway was darker than before, because the lighting fixture overhead had been smashed open. The searing, vibratory pain that swept through him, through his arm, his chest, his legs, swiftly cleansed him of consciousness. He could not see, therefore, that his limp body now kept the door from shutting, could not sense the woman leap over his body, could not hear her light footfalls as she raced down the monastery hall.

Andrea’s feet ghosted along the tiled flooring in great soft strides. The element of surprise was in her favor now; soon it would not be. She scarcely allowed herself to register the oddity of her surroundings, the round columns and the archways overhead like those of an old chapel. Stone, heavy beams, tiles. A faded gilt engraving on a wall, what looked like Cyrillic lettering beneath a bearded icon. It was an Eastern Orthodox monastery, then, but the guards were American, so what did that really tell her?

A man in drab khaki at the end of the long hallway: He had looked up, taken stock of the situation, was reaching for something on his combat belt, a weapon of some kind. Andrea darted into one of the side niches, some sort of sacristy. A dead end.

Or was it? She closed the door behind her, but the room did not darken much. There was a jumble of heavy wooden chairs, and she climbed on top of a stacked set of them until she could see a crawl space that led onto another tiled expanse. She sprang forward, her feet toppling the stack of heavy chairs even as her hands made contact with the stone ledge. Now she pulled herself up and clambered through the narrow space and onto a sort of breezeway.

Overhead, perhaps twenty feet above her, was a spandreled ceiling; to her right was a tall bricked half-wall—too tall to climb over—and yet she could feel the air move against her face, could hear the call of birds in the distance, the sound of rustling leaves. She darted toward where the outdoor light was most visible, and, as she rounded a corner, her lungs filled with air, her body seemingly weightless, fueled by adrenaline and hope, a lunging body, appearing from nowhere, crashed into her. She was slammed onto the hard floor.

The man was winded as he stood over her. “Like mother like daughter,” the man said, breathing heavily.

“Don’t touch me,” Andrea said, coughing.

“See, your mom was never with the program, either. She didn’t want to die, didn’t care that it was for a good cause. In the end, we had to inject the ethanol straight into the inguinal artery. A tiny puncture mark.”

“You killed my mother.”

“You say it like it’s a bad thing,” the man snorted.

Without warning, Andrea lashed her left leg out, trying to spring off the tiled flooring. The man reacted swiftly, and she caught his left foot in her abdomen. She collapsed again, winded, as he hammer-locked her neck from behind, his left knee jammed into the small of her back, his right leg wrapped around her ankles, clamping them. “One jerk and the spine snaps. A painful way to go.”

The veins in her neck felt distended to the point of bursting. “Please,” she gasped. “I’m sorry. Whatever you say.”

He lifted her to her feet and spun her around. He had a gun in his hand. Andrea took a fast look. The gun was black. The muzzle was blacker.

“Navasky,” the man barked into a miniature walkie-talkie. “On deck.” With contained brutality, he frogmarched Andrea along the breezeway. The guard with the waxy skin and pale pike’s eye—Navasky, it must have been—appeared at the other end of the tiled breezeway.

“Son of a bitch,” he drawled, and grabbed at his stun gun.

“Daughter of, to be precise,” said the first man.

“J-man ain’t gonna want to hear about this.”

“Maybe J-man won’t need to. We can jump the schedule, put her in a permanent coma now. She ain’t likely to run her mouth any.”

Each man grabbed one of her elbows. She thrashed mightily but their iron grip was unshaken.

“She got spirit,” said the Southerner. “So tell me, Justin, you being the expert and all, can she still get wet if she’s a vegetable?” His breath was dank.

“Sex is pretty much a hindbrain thing,” the other man said. “Don’t need a functioning cerebral cortex for that. So the answer’s yes, if we do the job right.”

Andrea thrashed again with all her strength. Nothing. It did nothing.

“What are you doing here?” the man at her left, the man named Justin, called out to another man who had now appeared at the end of the walkway. “Thought you were a foundation boy.”

“Got your distress signal,” the man called back. He held up a miniature walkie-talkie like theirs, returned it to his trouser pocket. “New protocol.”

“Good timing,” said the Southerner, sounding relieved.

Andrea stared, her sense of horror escalating. Twenty yards away was a powerfully built man in a well-tailored gray suit. The nameless man who had visited her in Carlyle, and who had seemingly dogged her steps since then. The thug who had warned her to keep silent with his blandly cryptic threats.

She felt the grip of the two others relax slightly in the presence of another armed man, and—a sudden erratic impulse—she once again lunged forward, this time twisting from their grip, and raced forward, because she could move in no other direction. As if in slow motion, she saw the gray-suited man pull out a heavy revolver from beneath his jacket and hold it perfectly level. Better a quick death, she thought.

She stared at its borehole, now just fifteen feet away, stared like a prey animal mesmerized by a cobra, and saw the tongue of blue-white fire pulse from it as the man squeezed the trigger, twice, in rapid succession.

At the same instant, she saw, in his eyes, the serene confidence of a marksman who seldom missed.

Yale University, the third oldest university in the United States, had been founded in 1701, but most of its physical structure—including the collegiate Gothic buildings that it was invariably associated with in the mind of the public—was less than a century old. The newer buildings typically housed science departments and research laboratories, and tended to be further from the oldest parts of the so-called “Old Campus,” like the ring pattern of a classic European city. So it was a point of pride among the university’s computer scientists there that they were housed in a building that dated back to the nineteenth century, however extensive the interior renovations may have been. The Arthur K. Watson Building was a redbrick structure with arched facades that honored Victorian ambition and a Victorian sense of grandeur. It stood opposite the Grove Street Cemetery, and there were some who claimed to find the Arthur K. Watson Building itself somewhat sepulchral.

Belknap himself felt a sense of foreboding as he and Walter Sachs stood on the sidewalk opposite it. Once again, he had a faint sense of being observed. But by whom? His field instincts and his field skills contradicted themselves: If he really were being shadowed, his own maneuvers should have confirmed it. Professional wariness was surely pushing at the boundaries of paranoia.

“Tell me your friend’s name again,” Belknap said tensely.

Sachs sighed. “Stuart Purvis.”

“And remind me how you know him.”

“We were classmates, and now he’s an assistant professor in the computer science department.”

“You really trust this guy? He’s fifteen minutes late. You sure he’s not on the phone with the campus police?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Sachs hefted the nylon knapsack in his arms. “Dude, bottom line is that we’re dealing with a gargantuan storage tape. An ocean of data, okay? Your pissant little desktop from Dell isn’t gonna help. Stu, on the other hand, helped set up the Beowulf clusters at Yale. That’s, like, two hundred and sixty central processors seamlessly linked in a massively parallel architecture. That’s power. We need to hitch a piggyback ride on it.” He perked up. “Ah, there he is.” He waved. “Yo, Stu!” he shouted to a man in a white guayabera shirt, black pants, and leather sandals.

The man, in his late thirties, turned and waved back. The thick black frames of his glasses were fashionable or the opposite of fashionable, depending on the degree of irony with which they were worn. He smiled at his old friend, revealing a fleck of green lettuce between two incisors. The opposite of fashionable, then.

Stuart Purvis led them around the front of Watson Hall to a green enameled custodial entrance at the rear of the building. It led directly to the basement, where the main computer laboratories were situated. Belknap noticed that the junior professor’s neck was spotted with reddish bumps of ingrown hairs, his jaw and upper lip smooth-shaven but shadowed with the greenish-gray of what would have been a heavy beard.

“So, my man, when you called for a favor, I thought you meant a job recommendation,” the junior academic said. “But I guess you want a ride on Big Bertha here. Totally out of bounds, you know. If the supervisor were to find out—wait, I am the supervisor. We’ve got ourselves an infinite loop here. Or maybe it’s just a self-nested operation, like a distributed autoregression function. Hey, you hear the joke about Bill Gates and the screensaver?”

Sachs rolled his eyes. “As a matter of fact I did, Stu, and you just gave away the punch line, numb nuts.”

“Shit,” said Purvis. He walked along the concrete floor with an odd sort of stutter step, and it was only then that Belknap realized he had an artificial leg. “So, Walt the Whiz, how many terabytes you talking about?” He turned to Belknap. “We used to call him Walt the Whiz when we were undergrads.”

Sachs grinned. “Because I was so good at getting digits from the honeys.”

Purvis gave him a look. “The honeys? Please. You were lucky if you got Fembots.” He turned to Belknap, sniggering through his nose. “And all he got was their serial numbers.”

The basement of the Watson building was vast and cavernous, evenly illuminated with diffuse fluorescent lights that had been positioned to minimize screen glare. They could have been in a morgue, Belknap decided, with all those banks of stainless-steel drawers. A thousand small fans cooled powerful chips, creating a wash of white noise.

Purvis knew exactly where he was going: halfway down a central walkway, then a quick right. “I’m assuming that’s four-millimeter digital linear tape,” he said to Sachs, suddenly businesslike.

“Well, SDLT.”

“We can do super digital. Ultrium 960’s what we prefer, but the Quantum SDLT is totally reliable.” Sachs lifted the heavy spools from the nylon bag and Purvis mounted them on an autoloader that looked like an old-fashioned videocassette player. He pressed a button and the tape started spinning with a high-pitched squeal.

“Step one,” Purvis said, “is reconstruction. We copy the data onto a rapid-access memory format. A hard drive, basically.” He was speaking for Belknap’s benefit. “We use a data-correction algorithm I wrote myself.”

“Which means it probably has more bugs than features,” Walt gibed.

“Contents may have settled during shipping,” Sachs said wryly. “In other words, expect some data expansion because of encryption.”

“Never gets any easier, does it, Walt?” Purvis pulled out a keyboard from a rolling drawer at midriff level and started typing. The screen filled with numbers, and then the numbers gave way to what looked like the jagged graphics of an oscilloscope. “Jeepers creepers! See, we run basically a statistical probe, which classifies the code according to certain frequencies that are characteristic of different cryptosystems.” He shot Belknap a look. “It’s just a statistical analysis. It can’t read it, but it can tell you what language you’re looking at.” Under his breath he murmured, “Come to papa. Okay. I’m feeling you now.” Now he turned to Sachs. “The tape starts with the sixty-four-bit key. The actual data is there underneath block encryption. It’s just a parameterized algorithm. Put your right foot in and your left foot out, you do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself about. Or, more precisely, you do a little bitwise XOR and variable rotation. And Bob’s your uncle. Well, more like your second cousin’s wife’s uncle on his mother’s side twice removed. But that’s where the Beowulf cluster comes in. I gotta say, I’m impressed by what I’m seeing. It’s great security, actually. Phenomenal. So long as somebody doesn’t, like, steal your backup tape.”

“Can I key in the search parameters?” Walt asked.

“We script in Prolog. But we can switch to Python if you like. You still a Python partisan?”

“You know it.”

Purvis shrugged, stood up. “Knock yourself out.”

Walt sat at the keyboard and began to type.

“Nobody’s interested in your cockamamie analogies, Stu,” Walt grumbled. “We just want answers.”

“That’s life, isn’t it? We all arrive on Earth wanting answers. And we have to content ourselves with inane analogies.” He peered over Sachs’s shoulder. “And…we’ve got a bite! Or a few thousand bites, if you’re thinking of actual binary digits.”

“Any way to speed this up?” Belknap asked.

“Are you kidding? This system’s like a cheetah on Dexedrine. Feel the G-forces, man.”

“Can we print out the file?” Sachs asked.

Purvis snorted. “Like, on paper? You are so old school, Walt. Haven’t you heard of the paperless office?”

“I think I crumpled up that memo before I read it.”

“Fine, Mr. Eaton Twenty Pound. I’m sure we’ve got some monks in the scriptorium.”

“You probably wipe your ass with virtual paper,” Sachs growled.

“Okay, okay. We’ll laser it out, you Gutenberg geek.” Purvis rubbed his irritated neck, then moved to another console, tapping out some instructions. At the adjacent alcove, a large office-sized copier hummed and ejected a single page.

“That’s it?” Belknap asked.

It was identical to the page given to him by Senator Kirk’s chief of staff, except for a longer header.

“Looks like it’s hashed out,” Purvis said.

“Gonna run a traceroute on this,” Walt said urgently. “Then print that out, too.”

“Stu,” Sachs balked, “my friend here isn’t going to be submitting a teacher-evaluation form. We just need the numbers.”

Soon three more pages slid from the laser printer.

“Yowza,” said Purvis, looking at the top sheet. “So we’ve got thirty-eight-byte packages, each making thirty hops. Oh, the places you’ll go.” He circled several of the strings of numbers. “We’ve been to the Perth Academic Regional Network, at AS7571. We’ve swung around Canberra RNO and Queensland, stopped off at the Rede Rio de Computadores at Brazil, Multicom in Bulgaria, EntreNet in Canada, Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria in Chile, Ropácek and SilesNet in the Czech Republic, Azero in Denmark, Transpac in France, SHE Informationstechnologie AG in Germany, Snerpa ISP in Iceland—brother, I am dizzy! Somebody’s playing catch-me-if-you-can.”

“The more hops, the more middlemen, the harder to follow,” Sachs said.

“Don’t recognize this one.” Purvis keyed in another number. “Ah, so! MugotogoNet in Japan! ElCat in Kyrgyzstan! It’s a wonder this lil’ packet didn’t pick up traveler’s diarrhea.”

Sachs turned to the last page of the traceroute printout, his eyes bright. To Belknap, it just looked like another list of cryptic alphanumeric strings:

“So what does this tell us, Walt?” Belknap said. His voice was hard with impatience. “Where in the world is this Genesis?”

Sachs blinked several times. “Point of origin should be here, but…I mean, I can tell you it’s New York State,” he said. “Stu? Check the terminal ISP code.”

“They say it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive,” Purvis said. “You remember that ex-girlfriend of mine who used to read the last pages of a novel first, so she knew how it ended? She found that comforting somehow.”

“Stu, goddammit!”

“Ah,” said Purvis as the UNIX machine flashed a response. “Just a few hours away. Bedford County.”

“That’s where Katonah is,” Belknap said softly. “That doesn’t make any sense.” Yet even as he spoke he remembered something he had been told at Senator Kirk’s office, something about Genesis burrowing into the Bancroft Foundation. Had Genesis burrowed in so far that it was actually inside it?

“Does not compute?” Purvis snorted. “Well, shit, we’ve got a BIOS serial number, too. Basically the license plate of the machine. Can’t do any better than that.”

“He’s right, Todd,” said Sachs. “That’s degree-zero as far as the trace goes.”

“Can I put the Beowulf back online, now?” Purvis yawned. They’re gonna be pissed off at Yale–New Haven Medical Center. They’re trying to get it to read MRI scans, you know.”

“Katonah,” Belknap said to Sachs. He felt suffused with a bewildering mixture of hope, desperation, urgency. “Anything more we can do with that license plate? I need the physical location of that unit.”

“This isn’t the goddamn Salvation Army, Walt.”

“Just do it. You’ll get it back.”

Purvis sighed resignedly and unplugged one from a nearby workstation. “Don’t do Internet porn on it,” he told Belknap with a sullen glare. “We’ll know if you do.”

“Hope I’ll see you again one day,” Sachs told Belknap. “I’ll call you as soon as I have anything useful to report.”

“You’re a good man, Walter Sachs,” the operative said with genuine warmth. Then he winced at his own carelessness. “Dammit. Almost forgot. My cell phone was destroyed in Dominica.”

Sachs nodded. “Take mine,” he said, handing him a small Nokia. “And take care.” A half-smile. “You don’t get bonus lives in the game you people play.”

“Maybe that’s because it’s not a game,” Belknap said grimly.

Andrea stared at the blue-white flame that pulsed from the gun muzzle, and screamed in terror. The shots were loud, deafening, as they echoed in the stone breezeway. Impassively, the man reholstered his revolver; despite its bulk, it disappeared beneath his perfectly tailored jacket, leaving no visible bulge.

Andrea Bancroft was bewildered. She was still alive. Unharmed. It made no sense. She whirled around, saw the limp, lifeless bodies of the two men who had taken her captive. A small dark hole, like a third eye, appeared on the forehead of each.

“I don’t understand,” she breathed.

“That’s not my problem,” said the man, his expression formal, almost studious. “My instructions are to take you away from here.”

“Where?”

“Where are we?”

“About ten miles north of Richfield Springs. Maybe five miles south of Mohawk.”

“Where?”

“Upstate New York. Town’s called Jericho. Theta bought it from the Eastern Orthodox Church about a decade ago. Too few brothers for the space. The usual story.” He helped her onto a small helicopter, belted her in, and handed her a set of ear protectors. Stenciled on the helicopter, white on royal-blue, was the logo ROBINSON and the model number, R44: trivial details that caught in her mind like burrs.

“Listen,” Andrea started. “I’m kind of at a loss here…” Her whole body stated to quake. “My mother—”

“Was a very special person.” The man reached over to her, put his hand on her forearm, gripping it firmly. “I once promised your mother I’d look out for you. The two of you. Only, I let her down. I wasn’t there when she needed me.” There was a faint catch in his voice. “I can’t let that happen twice.”

Andrea blinked hard, trying to take in the meaning of his words. “You said you had instructions,” she said abruptly. “Whose? Who gave you these instructions.”

He met her eyes. “Genesis,” he said. “Who else?”

“But at the Bancroft Foundation—”

“Let’s just say I got a better offer.”

“I don’t understand,” she repeated.

There were only two options. She could try to hide from Paul Bancroft or she could try to confront him. She could go to Katonah or as far away from Katonah as was possible. She did not know which was more prudent. She did know that she was tired of running, tired of being chased. In an instant, she made up her mind.

“You got enough gas to reach Bedford County?” she asked.

“And back,” he assured her.

“I’m not coming back,” Andrea said.

A small smile broke into his solemn expression, a crack in the ice. “Hold on to that thought, too.”

Another rented car. Another paved roadway. Framed by the windshield, the highway was an endless current of concrete, ornamented only by small tar-daubed fissures and battered, rusting guardrails. To either side, blast-carved shale sloping upward like the banks of a river. The road before him was taking him where he needed to go. The road before him was the distance he still had to traverse. It was foe and it was friend. Like Genesis?

He had passed the exits to Norwalk, Connecticut, before his cell phone rang. It was Sachs with an update.

“I did what you said,” Sachs told him, his voice tight with excitement. “I just got off the phone with Hewlett-Packard customer service. Pretended to be a computer-repair guy. Called in the BIOS number, they ran it through the sales records. Purchaser was the Bancroft Foundation. But that’s not a surprise, is it?”

Acid splashed at the back of Belknap’s throat. “I guess not,” he said. Yet what did it mean? That Paul Bancroft was Genesis after all? Or simply that Genesis had infiltrated the foundation? “Good work, Walt. Look, you’ve got Senator Kirk’s private e-mail address, right?”

“It’s the destination point on the traceroute, sure.”

“First, I want Senator Kirk to send a message from his private e-mail address.”

“You mean, you want me to send a message as Senator Kirk.”

“That’s it. Say you’ll be using a masking system to preserve confidentiality on your end.”

“I can use an opaquing VPM system.”

“Fine. Say it’s urgent that they set up a chatroom in ninety minutes. Ask why someone named Todd Belknap came to ask questions about Genesis.”

“I get it,” Walt said over the phone. “You’re trying to keep Genesis online, so to speak. You want him at the actual machine, right? In meat space.”

“Meat space, did you say?”

“Yeah,” Sachs grunted. “It’s what they used to call the real world.” He paused. “You think this will actually work?”

“I don’t know if it will work. All I know is that it has to work.”

“You know what they say, buddy. Hope is not a plan.”

“That’s true,” Belknap returned in a hollow voice. “But it’s the only plan we’ve got.”

Midtown Manhattan

Mr. Smith was puzzled and, though he prided himself on keeping an even keel, even a little irritated. The instructions had arrived on his PDA in unusually bare-bones form. Normally he got a complete profile of the target. This time, the directive contained merely a location and a handful of visual specs.

Did they no longer trust him to use his best judgment on assignments? Had his controller changed, the result of some personnel shakeup he hadn’t heard about yet? Was there to be a permanent change in procedures?

Sit at the table closest to the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street, he had been instructed. The target would appear at the low stone ridge that ran across the park, separating the concession area from the back lot of the New York Public Library. He was to use the pen.

The man appeared at the appointed time, six feet tall, lean, sandy-haired—just as described.

Mr. Smith decided to get a closer look at his target, and he ambled toward the stone ridge with a genially distracted air. The target looked up at him.

Mr. Smith blinked. The man was no stranger.

On the contrary.

“Why, Mr. Jones,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“My dear Mr. Smith,” said his sandy-haired colleague. “Does this mean we’ve been given overlapping assignments?”

Mr. Smith hesitated for a moment. “It’s the damnedest thing. The truth is, you’re my assignment.”

“I am?” Mr. Jones seemed surprised. But not very surprised.

“I must assume so. I wasn’t given a name. But yes, you match all the assignment indices.” His target, he knew, was someone whose identity had been revealed to the Kirk Commission. How the slipup had happened was unclear. Some error on Mr. Jones’s part? In any event, security dictated the elimination of an asset who had been “burned,” exposed.

“You know what’s just as strange,” said Mr. Jones. “You match all my assignment indices. Simply a matter of a compromised identity, I’m told, but you know the security protocol.”

“It’s quite possibly a mix-up, don’t you think?” Mr. Smith shook his head amiably.

Mr. Smith had to agree, it was a possibility. But given the high level of operational security and oversight, surely not a probability. And he was a professional.

“Well, my friend,” said Mr. Smith. “We’ll get to the bottom of this together. Let me show you the message I got on my Treo.” He placed a hand in his breast pocket, but what he pulled out was an object that resembled a steel-barreled pen. He clicked on one end and a tiny dart shot out.

Mr. Jones looked down. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” he said, pulling out the spent dart from his chest and handing it to Mr. Smith. “That’s chironex venom, I assume.”

“Afraid so,” said Mr. Smith. “I am sorry. You shouldn’t experience any symptoms for another few minutes, I’d say. But as you know, it’s irreversible. Nothing to be done once it’s in your bloodstream.”

“Darn,” Mr. Jones said in the tone of mild annoyance usually provoked by hangnails.

“You’re being awfully dignified about this,” said Mr. Smith. He was feeling almost sentimental. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Please believe me.”

“I do believe you,” said Mr. Jones. “Because I’m sorry, too.”

“You’re…sorry.” Mr. Smith was suddenly aware that he had been sweating profusely for a few minutes, and he was not given to perspiration. The outdoor light was beginning to hurt his eyes, as if his pupils were dilated. And then there was a growing sense of vertigo. All were symptoms of an anticholinergic reaction, characteristic of many poisons. “The cappuccino?” He choked out the words.

Mr. Jones nodded. “Do you think me a rule stickler? I am sorry.”

“I don’t suppose…”

“No antidote, either. It’s a methylated derivative of ciguatera toxin.”

“The one we used in Kalmikiya last year?”

“That’s the one.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Believe me, if they somehow kept you alive, you’d wish they hadn’t. It ravages the nervous system permanently. You’d be a twitching, spasmodic imbecile on a ventilator. No kind of life, really.”

“Well, then.” Mr. Smith was experiencing flashes of hot and cold, as if alternately blasted with fire and encased in ice. As for Mr. Jones, he noticed that his face was turning gray, the first sign of a diffused accelerated necrosis.

“It’s weirdly intimate, isn’t it?” Mr. Jones said, reaching over to the railing in order to steady himself.

“Being each other’s murderers?”

“Well, yes. Not the word I would have chosen, of course.”

“We need a thesaurus,” said Mr. Smith. “Or…what’s another word for ‘thesaurus’?”

“Perhaps we’re both the victims of a practical joke,” said Mr. Jones. “Though I don’t quite see the humor in it. Truth is…I don’t feel so good.” Mr. Jones slid to the ground. His eyelids started to flutter and twitch uncontrollably. His extremities were beginning to jump and jerk in cascades of convulsions.

Mr. Smith joined him on the paving stone. “That makes two of us,” he wheezed. The light no longer bothered him, and for a moment he wondered whether he was starting to recover. But that wasn’t it. The light wasn’t bothering him because he was shrouded in darkness. He could smell nothing, could feel nothing, could hear nothing. Nothing at all.

There was only a sense of absence. And then there was no sense of anything at all.