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work? “—but right now I’m checking her out of the hospital.”
    Asrani looked extremely unhappy. But she had no legal ground for keeping Lillie, and she and Keith both knew it.
    He said, “Something important, doctor. When she woke up, did she say to you, or to anybody, anything peculiar?”
    “Peculiar how?”
    “Did she happen to mention the word ‘pribir’?”
    “No. What’s a pribir?”
    “I don’t know. Nothing. Start the paperwork for me to take her home, doctor.”
    He found Lillie back in her room, looking out the sealed window at a parking lot and eating a bag of corn chips. Two candy bars lay on the windowsill. She’d already found her jeans and sweater in a closet and changed from the hospital gown. “Uncle Keith, I can’t find my shoes. Somebody might have stole them.”
    “We’ll get you new ones.”
    “They were Kleesons,” she said. “And I had them all broken in just right.”
    He couldn’t think of anything to answer. The situation was too surreal.
    The paperwork took longer than Keith thought necessary. Why didn’t a modern, on-line hospital have more streamlined systems? Lillie, barefoot, slouched in a chair and read an old movie magazine. The air smelled of chemicals and food and cleaning solvents, a typical hospital smell, but despite the “increased activity in her frontal lobe and olfactory glomeruli,” Lillie didn’t react.
    Finally they walked out of a side entrance toward the car. The sun had just set, replacing the afternoon’s warmth with a cool breeze. Warmth didn’t last in April, not even an April as hot as this one. Keith shivered and put an arm around Lillie, dressed in her cotton sweater.
    She pulled away. “Can we stop at McDonald’s on the way home? I’m still hungry.”
    “Yes, if you want to.”
    “Good. And oh, Uncle Keith — “
    “What?” He was trying to remember where, in his headlong blind haste, he’d parked the car, and if it had been a legal spot.
    “The pribir are coming.”
     

CHAPTER 4
     
    By the next day, the Troy Record had the story. One of the parents of a newly wakened child had evidently called them, full of joy at the “miracle” that God had brought about in order to return their son. The paper sent a reporter for a human-interest story, but the reporter was less intrigued by the religious angle than by the strange utterance that more than one just-coma-free child had made simultaneously: “The pribir are coming.” The reporter only had three names, and Dennis Reeder was furious that the parents had divulged those three, but the parents swore there were seventeen more. The wire services picked up the story, and suddenly it was all over the Net and the papers and the TV news.
     
    MIRACLE CHILDREN’ PREDICT COMING OF ANGELIC HOST!
    ARMAGEDDON TO ARRIVE SOON; COMA KIDS AWARDED VISION
    ALIENS TO INVADE, SAY MUTANT CHILDREN BACK FROM MYSTERIOUS TRANCES
    SPIRITS FROM THE OTHER SIDE CHANNELED BY CHILD MEDIUMS
     
    Nobody knew what the pribir were.
    “Well, they’re not angels or ghosts,” Lillie said with disgust. She had the TV on while she ate a bowl of cereal and a Fun Bun for breakfast. Hers was not one of the names on the Net.
    “What are they, Lillie?”
    “I told you. I told everybody, at the hospital. They’re people coming soon.”
    “From where?”
    “I don’t know. We’re out of Fun Buns, Uncle Keith.”
    Her nonchalance was, somehow, the part of the whole thing. She was so casual. Some information, some idea (posthypnotic?) had been planted in her brain, and to her it was as ordinary, as much a given, as breakfast cereal and rock music and warm spring weather.
    “The anomalous structure is now active,” Shoba Asrani had said when Keith took Lillie back to the hospital the next day.
    “It happened when we went outside,” Keith said.
    “That fits with it being olfactory activity,” Dr. Asrani said.
    “You mean she smelled something?” Keith said incredulously. “And it gave her some hypnotic