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she felt strangely empty, restless. As if, without someone else’s emotions to mirror, she was nothing at all.
    No. That can’t be true.
    But she thought it might be. That the tiny spark of individuality that called itself “Sinah” had already been ground away to nothing by the imprint of other minds, and that soon even the consciousness of that fact would be extinguished forever.
    No. That isn’t true. I won’t let it be true . There must be others like her here—others of her bloodline who had also inherited her gift.
    Unless they were all dead of the same “gift” that tormented her. Dead and gone and she was the last.
    Wycherly’s shout of primitive terror ripped him from his twilight dream and returned him to a world where the sun struck like a hammer, making the world dissolve into a redlit kaleidoscope of pain. But he did not fear the pain as much as he feared whatever lay below the surface of consciousness, and so he forced his eyes to open, feeling the shock of the pain as a thousand burning pulses through his body.
    When he sucked a deep lungful of air, he felt the sullen ache of blossoming bruises over his chest and ribs and the warning pressure of the dashboard against his thighs. The edges of the footwell were folded almost tenderly around his extended legs; there was a thick reek of liquor—the bottles had broken at last—mingled with the sharp, dangerous scent of spilled gasoline. With infinite care, Wycherly turned his head—and was stopped.
    His cheek came to rest upon the rough bark of a tree trunk that plunged through the center of the windshield. All around him the crumbled safety glass lay like thrown rice at a wedding, and the chrome and steel frame of the windshield
was twisted into a mere decorative ribbon. The headrest at the back of his seat had been torn away by the forward thrust of the trunk; the tree had passed just above his shoulder, a few inches away from his right ear, a raw splintered spike of wood as thick as Wycherly’s thigh.
    It could have killed him.
    For a moment his consciousness of every other pain vanished as Wycherly realized it had only missed his head by inches.
    I could be dead. For the first time in his life, the thought repelled him. Dead—here, now, with all his promises unkept and decisions unmade. He looked down the hill. The sun was just rising above the trees, but the summer heat was already beginning to build. Below, the valley was still in deep shadow, its floor was shrouded by mist, suggesting that water lay somewhere below. The alcohol, the waking dream, and seventy-two hours without sleep coalesced into a conviction that Camilla was waiting for him across the river of death, and that he must make his peace with her or face worse than death when the time came.
    The bizarre fantasy faded almost at once, leaving behind the odd, urgent feeling that there really was something he must do before he could safely die. Slowly, Wycherly began the painful process of prying himself out of the car. He found that he didn’t seem to be badly hurt—a bruise over his left eye, a gash along his leg from something that had sliced open his Dockers. It had bled freely but didn’t even seem to ache at the moment.
    The driver’s-side door was jammed shut, and it took him several painful minutes to pull himself backward across the trunk before he could slither free, only at the last minute remembering to grab his leather shoulder bag. Its surface was dark with spilled liquor.
    He rested his hands on the driver’s-side door while he looked around. The nose of the little car was pointed down the slope; the convertible was wedged securely between a large rock and a small stand of pines. The rock and several of the trees were smeared with the bright scarlet of the
Ferrari’s paint. It must have ricocheted off them before settling. The angle it was at now suggested it had still been airborne when it hit.
    Gasoline