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girl to her, smoothing her hair and shushing her. She was the only one who could hold Jo like that.
    The sheet didn’t quite cover Agatha. She lay on her side, legs bent, white knees poking out. As they wheeled her to the doorway one of the EMTs leaned across her body to lift her knees out of the way while his partner backed the gurney out. The wheels dropped onto the second step with a clank, and the sheet slipped from her face.
    Agatha hadn’t been a beautiful woman. Too much like a naked bird: wiry body, hawk nose, a pinched, smoker’s mouth. Now her skin was salt white, the new skull and jaw stretched into a permanent scream. Blood soaked her nightgown where the growth of the new bones had outpaced her skin.
    The first wave of transformations and near-transformations would follow the course Agatha had set. First fever, then the parched skin like dried clay. After a couple days the bones would begin to stretch and rearrange, the body churning all available fat and protein into new growth, sometimes two inches a day. They’d call it Argillaceous Osteoblastoma, but that designation would be made obsolete a couple weeks later when the beta transformations began. In late August the symptoms would morph again, and all the victims would be charlies.
    Argos, betas, charlies. Those names hadn’t been in use yet, of course. Only at the end of the summer, after the Changes halted as suddenly as they began, would the scientists and newspeople settle on Transcription Divergence Syndrome. TDS-A, then B and C.
    The EMTs tugged the sheet back over Agatha’s face andcarried her to the ambulance. Deke and Pax were too stunned to talk. “Shee-it,” Deke whispered.
    In a week the same change would be coming for him.
    “I got hit by this wave of, of emotion,” Pax said. He sat across from Deke at his kitchen table, elevated on a barstool they probably kept around just for visitors his size. “I looked at my father and I just felt…”
    What? Love, or something like it. Connection. The eggshell had cracked open, and for a moment everything had run together; he’d forgotten who was Paxton and who was Harlan. The feeling was exhilarating and suffocating at once. A child’s emotion: love indistinguishable from total immersion.
    Pax shook his head, laughed to cover his embarrassment. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was very weird.” He rolled a near-empty Coke bottle between his hands. He’d slept for nearly four hours and woken up thirsty. Even now he was still deeply freaked out.
    “I’m so sorry,” Deke said.
    Pax smiled. “You can stop saying that now.”
    “Your daddy’s stuff must be pretty strong,” Donna said. She stood at the counter, chopping green onions and red peppers and scraping them into a huge stainless steel bowl. “It hit you pretty hard.”
    Pax laughed. He couldn’t help it. She was chopping vegetables and talking about this … stuff that was oozing out of his father’s body as if it were no stronger than an extra-strong shot of whiskey.
    “So this has happened before, then?” Pax asked. “Not just with my dad?”
    “It happens with all of the charlie men,” Deke said. “The old ones, anyway. There’s only about twelve of them in town. But your dad, I’d been told he was dry. He hadn’t … produced like that before.”
    “Produced,” Pax said flatly.
She wants to milk me like a cow
. “Produce what?”
    Deke shrugged. “Nobody knows what it is,” he said.
    Donna said, “The charlies call it the vintage. Usually only the younger charlie boys handle the old men, they don’t seem to be as affected.”
    “Though even they use gloves when they’re siphoning,” Deke said. “Good thing you didn’t swallow any. Usually a touch doesn’t do much. When I got some on me—”
    “Wait a minute,” Pax said.
    “—I just got a little nauseous. But your daddy’s stuff really knocked you on your ass.”
    “Wait—they’re
sucking
this stuff
out
of him?” He didn’t try to hide his