didn’t actually wake up, because she hadn’t slept. She’d lain there with her eyes closed, worrying, primarily about David. She had a letter for him written by Herbert Acton, but it was not to be handed to him until he remembered his past, and to her that meant remembering their time together, their shared innocent life.
Herbert Acton had warned about this period right at the omega point, that it was too unsure for him to see into it clearly, so his instructions about these final days were vague.
Beyond the borders of history, which is where mankind was now, nothing was certain, and as the evil came to understand their fate, their efforts to escape it were going to make them incredibly dangerous. Many of them would actually want all of mankind to be destroyed, if they were destroyed.
David had remembered a lot, she could sense that. But if he did not remember her, he was not on mission, and time had run out.
Intending to confront him late last night, she had gone to his bedroom. She had hoped to feed him some of the potent white powder gold they had created in the arc furnace, and see if that helped.
Oddly, the door had been unlocked. When she slipped inside, she had discovered why: Katrina Starnes had come in before her, and was sharing his bed. Carelessly—or perhaps out of an unconscious desire to broadcast her conquest—she had failed to pull the door closed.
She had never been warned about him falling in love with anybody else, and she was appalled and deeply saddened.
She had stood there, her face flaming with embarrassment, her heart wretched, her mind at a loss as to what to do now. They were too involved with each other to notice her, and she had quietly retreated.
When she’d returned to her room, all she could do was cry into her pillow.
The first thing she’d done waking up this morning was to arrange an appointment with him. “We’ll need to squeeze you in,” Katie had said in concealing, velvet tones, “but I think I can get you fifteen minutes.”
Katie was no fool. She sensed a rival, and no way was Caroline getting any more of his time than that.
Well, Katie was going to be hurt and there was nothing Caroline could do about it. She’d been hurt herself last night, hurt terribly, watching them in their pleasure.
She had been assured by her father that David would remember everything the moment he laid eyes on her. If there were any gaps, she could show him his trigger, which was an image of Quetzalcoatl.
Neither thing had worked, and she was no longer able to contact her father for further advice, not unless the phones returned, which they had not. So she waited now, sitting with her hands folded, watching Katrina bring David his morning coffee.
As Katie crossed the room, her body spoke to Caroline of its conquest. And by the way she laid the cup near his hand, with a too-furtive glance toward his lower extremities, she knew that she was remembering him in his passion.
She fought back her anger and jealousy, but Katie sensed her feelings and her eyes darted at her, and there was between them a moment of daggers. Then Katie went flouncing out, her cheeks brushed with rose… and Caroline was horrified to glimpse, just above the edge of the young woman’s neckline, a telltale shadowy darkness from a mark concealed below.
Katie was judged! Caroline felt actually queasy—physically ill. This was the first person she’d seen with a mark, but there were going to be a lot of them, she knew that.
At the omega point, bodies ceased to conceal souls, and some became like light and others like darkness and others—workers like her and the rest of the class—shouldered the burden of life and kept on.
It was hard to be so evil that there could be no redemption, so what terrible things had Katie done? She looked like a sweet young nurse, the last person you’d expect to see in such a situation.
She didn’t seem in the least uneasy, so maybe she hadn’t yet noticed the discoloration or didn’t understand it. But she would notice it, and come to understand it, and when she did, the evil that she was concealing was going to explode to the surface, because this woman could not be what she seemed. Hidden beneath that pretty surface, there lurked a monster.
Then she was face-to-face with David.
“Thank you for granting me my freedom,” she said to him, after Katie had gone. “How is Linda?”
“She had a mild heart attack. She’ll be fine.”
“Will she?”
“You think not?”
“I don’t think anything. I asked a question.”
“Which had implications.”
“I don’t do implications. I say what I mean.”
He sipped the coffee. His prop, in lieu, she supposed, of a pipe.
“David, do you have any idea who I am?”
“Caroline Light.”
“Why did I come here?”
“The same reason people usually come to the hospital. You were suffering and you wanted relief.”
“You know more than that. Do you know we were childhood sweethearts?”
“I know about the class. I know who you are and I know about… something. The gold. Sort of. But I’m lost. And I don’t know you. You’re like a stranger who’s sharing a compartment on a train or something.”
“I need you to wake up,” she said.
He gestured with the coffee cup. “I’m wide awake.”
“I’m going to say something,” she told him, “and you can take it however you’re going to take it.”
“Okay.”
“I dreamed you made love with Nurse Katie last night. I dreamed I watched you.”
So much blood drained out of his face that he seemed to turn to wax.
“You feel a need to tell me this?”
She decided to force the matter even further.
“I saw you tangled in blue sheets, in the light of a beautiful Tiffany lamp—so sexy, I didn’t know he did erotics—and, oh, God, I felt such incredible jealousy, because, David, you need to face the truth, and the truth is that even though we were children when we made our vows, they counted, and even though you don’t remember right now, last night you were cheating on me!”
The waxen face slowly filled with the color of a deep flush. He blinked rapidly. He picked up his pencil and put it down. Then his chin lowered, his fingers stopped toying with the pencil and grasped it tightly. There was an odd sense that they were moving down a tunnel, racing away from each other. She feared that she had made a major mistake.
He jumped to his feet, came out from behind the desk, and stood over her.
She felt the menace in it. She said, “I’m sorry I slapped you.”
“I am, too. It hurt.”
“I’m a punisher. It’s a fault. But you’re hurting me, David, you’re hurting me terribly.”
He loomed and she could feel him suppressing his own violence. Then he strode across the room and threw himself down in one of the sumptuous chairs that stood before the fireplace. He was muttering, and she could not hear the details.
“I’m sorry,” she said, going toward him. “I’ve touched a nerve and I’m very sorry.”
Slowly, his head turned toward her. His face was sunken and gray now, skeletal with fury.
“Will you please tell me which member of my staff allowed you access to my bedroom?”
“I—nobody. The door was unlocked.”
“Damn you!
She tried another sort of shock. “You have a mission, David. Face it! You have to lead us out of this mess.”
As if the chair was burning him, he leaped up and strode away again. She realized that he knew. Inside himself, he knew it all. It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember, but that he couldn’t face it.
“Were you also out the first night you were here?”
What should she say? One of their fellow classmates had released her from her looked room, and she had gone to fetch the tiny amount of ancient white powder gold she had brought with her. She had hidden it near the gate until she was sure she wasn’t walking into a trap. That gold was star stuff, what NASA had found when they
