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was seeping out of her and she had to force herself to stay upright in the chair and not slump with fatigue. Unfortunately, she was sitting on an amazingly comfortable chair, so maybe he didn’t do interrogations on a regular basis in this room.
    Most interrogations took place in uncomfortable environments.
    She didn’t look around but she’d observed enough to know that it was a comfortable room, pleasant even. Interrogation rooms weren’t supposed to be pleasant, they were supposed to be austere and forbidding. Sort of like a jail cell, which is where you went if you lied.
    What time was it? It must be close to midnight. She’d slept badly the past night, unnerved by Patient Nine.
    Patient Nine—Lucius—had been so desperately insistent, the force of his will had simply washed over her, prickling her skin. The images coming from him had been so very strong, the strongest she’d ever had. As if the barriers between them had dissolved and she was in his damaged head. There were images there, true, not words, except for that one name, murmured brokenly over and over again. Tom McEnroe. Mac. Mac. Mac.
    The images were clear. The mountain. Lonely, broken roads. Obstacles. A dead car.
    And, horrifyingly, his own death. Cold stillness, his body on a steel gurney with runnels. A body laid out for an autopsy.
    Lucius Ward was ill but not at death’s door. His EEG was pathological but his heart and lungs functioned well. But the image was insistent. He expected to die soon.
    He had been agitated yesterday, trying desperately to talk, clinging to her arm with an emaciated hand that still held surprising strength. His throat clicked, over and over, words that weren’t coming out, only a thin trickle of air escaping from his mouth, with a short hum. His eyes bulged, the cords in his thin neck stretched. His mouth opened and closed with a clatter of teeth.
    His efforts to speak were so heartbreaking, she couldn’t stand it. Bending down to him, fixed in his wild, desperate gaze, she bent her ear to his mouth.
    He managed one word.
    “Run,” he whispered, and she’d broken out in goose bumps.
    Troubled, Catherine had gone home. She couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep, and finally the next morning she decided to follow the pictures in her head. Something about the wild fear he had instilled kept her from calling in sick. She simply left.
    The man in black stood up suddenly and looked down at her. “Stay here,” he commanded, and walked out.
    Stay here . Well, where would she go? The door opened for him and closed behind him before she could even think of making a break for it.
    She looked down at the tabletop. The grain of the wood was unusually fine and she fixated on it until her head drooped. She jerked upright. She’d nearly fallen asleep in the chair.
    Were they going to keep her here all night? There were only two chairs. Maybe she could use the other chair for her legs and try to catch a few hours of uncomfortable sleep.
    She shifted uneasily, stiff and sore, exhaustion seeping into her bones. Hunger and thirst were added to the discomfort of exhaustion. She turned her head to eye the door. There was no doorknob. It had somehow swished open for the man in black and swished closed again with no visible command having been given. There was no keypad, and even if there were, she didn’t have the code.
    The door whooshed open again unexpectedly and she turned in her chair, heart pounding, muscles tensed for danger.
    But it wasn’t danger, it was only a teenage boy holding a big tray. She was so surprised that by the time she thought to react, to engage the boy in a conversation, to try to pry some information out of him, he was gone, the door whooshing open and closed for him as if invisible genies inhabited the place.
    A cornucopia lay before her. Her stomach rumbled loudly, the wonderful smells sparking some kind of intense endocrine reaction.
    Her hand trembled as she picked up the first thing close to her hand. A