Vyrus messiah.

He shakes his head. —I don't know for sure. Have to meditate on that shit some more. Anyhoo.

He snaps his fingers.

—Some others, a few, they don't believe in a need for speed, they think were going too fast. They think Daniel would disapprove. And that, that just causes all kinds of fucking problems. So having a guy like you, with Daniel-cred behind him, that's always a help. In this case, you can help big-time with a particular problem. But there's more to it. Like that's a surprise in our world, yeah?

He strokes his bald scalp, watching as one of the sparring Enclave below has his jaw shattered.

—These guys, when they go out as a force, once they start smelling the blood out there, they could go a little over the top. And that's not the point. We don't want a bunch of random spastics launching themselves into crowds and going off like bombs, rending folks limb from limb till the SWAT bullets take them down. The whole point is, this is a crusade; when Enclave kill, it's not like a retribution thing, it's a cleansing. And not just cleansing the world, but cleansing the people who get killed. So it needs to have some order to it. So to keep the warriors that go out in line, Joe.

He sidles very close. —I'm gonna need a field general.

I poke the barrel of my gun into his ribs.

He looks at it.

I look at him.

And I ask the only thing that matters. —Is she alive?

He looks up, rolls his eyes. —is she alive? Dude, have you been listening to me at all?

The hand of one of his bodyguards whisks between us and takes the gun from me.

The Count bugs his eyes. —Whoops! Whered that go?

He laughs.

—Yeah, so anyway, dude, is she alive? Like, that's the whole point here. The tension I'm talking about. Old-school attitudes versus new-school attitudes.

He looks at me.

I look back.

He sighs. —No comprehension at all, huh?

He takes my arm. —Come here.

He pulls me to the corridor that runs the length of the loft, between rows of cubicles.

—The rest of this shit, the field-general gig and all that, well sort that out later. For now.

He points at the end of the corridor where four Enclave stand outside a closed door. —For now, you go have your reunion.

He gives me a shove in the back.

—Do me a favor while you're at it and try and talk some sense into fucking Joan of Arc for me, will ya?

He turns, heads down the stairs to the floor below.

I look at the door.

Legs like stilts, holding me wobbly ten feet above the ground, I walk to the

end of the hall.

These Enclave are a little on the beefy side. Looking like maybe they've only been in a concentration camp one year instead of five. They stand back from the door, one of them knocking before pushing it open.

I go in.

She's sitting on the floor, holding a little cup in her left hand, eyes gliding over the handwritten pages of a book lying open in her lap.

Her eyes stop moving.

Her finger marks a spot on the page.

And she looks up.

She's sitting on the floor, like the last time I saw her, but everything else is different. Then shed just got over being about to die. Withered and hollowed out by AIDS and the chemo they'd pumped into her, red hair falling out in fistfuls. A fading ghost.

And look at her now.

All bones and alabaster skin, freckles bleached away, hairless.

Vibrant.

She looks back down at her book.

—Hey, Joe. Come to try and kill me again?

—It was hard. Of course. And I thought I was crazy. I thought they were all my hallucinations. This whole place. Like it was the pain medication. Then I thought, and it was probably all the white clothes they wear, I thought that maybe I was dead. And this was like a test or something. It took a long time.

She flips a couple pages in her book.

—That was why they started paying attention to me. Because I went so long before I tried it.

She shakes her head. —Blood.

She bites her lower lip.

—Its funny to think how long I waited. Cause I was never religious. But I thought, What if the second I try the blood I get sent to hell? It was too weird to be real. But whatever I was thinking, they thought I was special, for fasting so long right after infection. And then I couldn’t hold off anymore. I'd smell it when they all broke fast. And it smelled so damn good. And then I thought, This is bullshit. This isn’t real. I'm on a morphine drip and I'm never waking up and I'm gonna try some of that. I'm not going to hell. And I tried it.

She shakes her head. —And after that, I didn't care if I went to hell.

She looks into the cup in her left hand, the few tablespoonfuls of blood it bears. —Do you think were going to hell, Joe?