All of a sudden, Carl sounded like the darkest voices of her id coming out of the depths, and it was spooky. She’d wondered these things herself from time to time; it was easy to fall into despair in this situation and imagine every random thing that happened as a symptom of a nonexistent disease. The deadly thing was that if Carl convinced himself he wasn’t in control, what would he do? What couldn’t he do?

“Are you thinking about hurting yourself? Hurting someone else?” She was not qualified for this, she thought in a sudden, angry fit of despair; no one had trained her, given her a diploma in how to manage dead people’s fears. Not even her own.

His hesitation made her nervous, but then he said, “No, not really. I’m just—I think a lot, and that must be the nanites, right? That they’re working too hard or something?”

“Carl, that’s why we have the group—because by talking out these things, we find out that what we’re feeling isn’t so strange or uncommon, okay? I’ve had the same sensations, the same thoughts. You can’t get better if you don’t reach out to people, and I’m glad you called me about it. If you feel that there’s something wrong, I want you to call the Pharmadene hotline and report it. They can check you out immediately. Understand?”

“Yeah.” He sounded better, a little. Calmer. “Yeah, I forgot about the hotline. Sorry.”

“It’s all right. You’re anxious, and that’s really pretty normal.” She laughed, a little sadly. “As far as normal exists for us, anymore.”

“Okay. Thanks for saying that you’ve had these thoughts, too. I thought—I thought I was out there in the dark, you know? On my own?”

“I know,” she said. “If you need me, call back. I’ll be here.”

He hung up after a polite decompression moment of good-night wishes, and Bryn closed the call and took a deep breath. It wasn’t the first time she’d had the same conversation. All of them fell down the rabbit hole sooner or later; not everybody was able to climb out.

When I get home, I’ll get the group schedule, she promised herself. She knew how important it was for people to stick together, talk, connect.

Exactly what Pharmadene and the government didn’t want them to do, of course. But screw that.

Bryn walked through the gardens, breathing in the roses and the rich, damp smell of earth, and was almost sorry when she reached the parking lot. Her car was parked next to two of the limousines, and she headed in that direction, half her mind on what she needed to do when she reached the estate. Show Patrick the vids. That was the first thing. He’d have some perspective on it, some insight she didn’t. And she needed him to share this with her, help her process that helpless feeling of fear.

That was just about the time that she became aware that something was wrong out here in the darkness beyond the glow of the garden’s lights.

Bryn felt that indefinable prickle at the back of her neck. Ambush. That was an instinct that never really went away, even after taking off the uniform…the feeling that a predator was watching you, waiting for a chance to strike.

She wished for a gun, but the fact was, she hadn’t come entirely unarmed. As she walked on, Bryn fumbled in her purse as if searching for her keys and closed fingers around the solid weight of a collapsible riot baton that accounted for about half the weight of the bag. She thought about her cell phone, but she’d already dropped it back in its pocket, and even if she managed to dial 911, it wouldn’t help; any possible fight would be over—in her favor or against it—before help could arrive.

She felt a breath of air, something moving behind her, and lunged forward into a roll, yanking the baton out of her purse and flicking it out to full extension as she came back to her feet. The purse smacked to the pavement, and in the orange glow of sunset over the ocean, she saw two men dressed in plain clothes—jeans, work shirts, no identifying marks—who were wearing ski masks. They fanned out immediately, trying to work angles; she kicked the purse under the car to prevent it from fouling her footing and backed up between the car and the limousine on the other side.

She didn’t speak.

Neither of them moved toward her yet. They were assessing her position, and finding it tactically sound. After a few seconds they exchanged a glance, and one of them reached down to his belt and tugged free a stun gun, the kind that shot out darts. She gasped and dropped flat, rolled under the limo, and slapped her hands down to halt her momentum, then squirmed and rolled toward the tail of the long vehicle. She slithered out just as the man with the stun gun knelt down to peer underneath. He was temporarily distant from his friend, and she scrambled to her feet, lunged around between the cars, and hit him hard enough on the back of the head to knock him forehead-first into the metal of the limo door. He left a sizable dent.

He dropped, and she kicked the stun gun under the vehicle.

The second attacker stared at her for a second, figured his chances of getting to the stun gun, and backed up instead. She held the baton ready. The guy she’d put down wasn’t unconscious, just immobile. If the second one had a gun, the fight was over.…

He didn’t. He did, however, have a knife. It was a nice one, matte finish combat model, and he obviously knew a thing or two about how to use it.

Bryn felt a bit underdressed. And wished she hadn’t gone with the heels for the office. Cargo pants and boots would have been…better. She considered for a second, then kicked off her shoes to stand barefooted and backed away. He moved forward, taking the bait, and stepped over his supine, weakly moving friend. For just an instant, he was off-balance and wrong-footed.

She instantly sprinted around the limo, up through the gardens, and shattered the glass window inset in the front door.

Lights blazed on, and alarms began to shriek.

She stood there, balanced on the balls of her feet, as the knife man stumbled to a halt a few feet away. “Five-minutes-or-less response,” she said. “You think you can get me, subdue me, get your friend, retrieve the stun gun, and be out of here by then? Because I’m going to make it hard.”

Out on the road, a passing truck slowed down, drawn by the lights and sirens. Others would be calling in alarms.

And he knew it.

He pointed his knife at her in a catch-you-later motion, backpedaled, and scooped up his woozy friend. The friend had the car keys, which delayed them further.

They left the stun gun and ran for a nondescript black sedan parked out on the side of the road, almost hidden in the shadows of the hill.

Two and a half minutes, and they were gone in a smoking shriek of tires.

Bryn kept the baton out. She was shaking too hard to put it away, and she badly wanted to sit down. Instead, she stayed on guard, tense as a guitar string, until the first flashing lights appeared below, and sirens climbed up to meet her.

Then she sat down on one of the ornate decorative cast-iron benches, collapsed the baton, put it down beside her, and tried to draw in a breath that didn’t shake. They might have been robbers, she told herself. Or garden-variety perverts. Serial killers. Any of that was preferable to what she thought they were really after. She couldn’t stop the visions: strapped down on a gurney, shot, shoveled into a furnace as her flesh and muscle sizzled off her bones, and screaming and screaming.…

“Ma’am?”

She’d somehow lost track of time, and the adrenaline that burst into her bloodstream made her shoot to her feet and simultaneously flick the baton out to its full, most dangerous reach before sanity kicked in, and she realized that she was planning to hit a police officer standing there with his hand on the butt of his pistol.

Bryn dropped the baton and raised her hands over her head. “Sorry,” she said, or tried to say, just as the shouts of down on the ground, down on the ground! deafened her, and one of the cops grabbed her, shoved her face down, and held her there as he kicked the baton away.

Well, she’d earned that. And as the cuffs snapped on her wrists, she didn’t struggle in any way.

In ten minutes, she told them her story, and in twenty, the police had found her purse and the stun gun both under the limo, just where she’d left them. They also found a dent in the limo’s passenger door where one of her attackers had banged his forehead, and some blood drops. And her shoes.

It still took another hour for the necessary repetitive interviews and paperwork.

“Sorry about that,” said the patrolman as he removed the restraints from her wrists. “Your security consultant is here to look at the damage to the building. We’ve verified your identity, Ms. Davis. Next time, leave the baton on the ground when the police show up, okay? Wouldn’t want any misunderstandings.”

Security consultant? She looked up and saw Patrick McCallister standing near another of the cops, chatting as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He smiled, traded a handshake with the man, clapped him on the back, and strolled their way. He stopped at the bottom of the steps and said to the cop, “Is Ms. Davis free to leave now?”

“She’ll need to come to the station and sign the reports.”

“Any injuries?” he asked—the cop, again, as if she weren’t even there.

“Not a scratch,” the cop said. “Lucky lady. Two against one, both armed. Could have gone real bad for her.”

“Lucky,” Pat agreed without any expression at all, and for the first time looked at her directly. “Very lucky.” He helped her to her feet. He’d brought her shoes over, and she stepped into them. Amazing, how much better she felt with footwear on—how much less vulnerable. “I’ll make sure she’s available for any additional interviews you need. Oh, and there’s a company on the way to replace the window, should be here any moment. Ms. Davis’s assistant director is on his way to supervise.”

Joe Fideli. Bryn could imagine how much fun that conversation had been around his home dinner table.…Honey, sorry, I have to go back to the office; there’s an alarm going off. If his wife didn’t believe by now that he was having an affair, they must have the best marriage in the world.