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I stared up at the ceiling of white acoustic tiles and at the surrounding wonderland of tanks and glistening plastic sacks of fluid and monitors and things that ticked and wheezed, and wires and cables and broad shining tubes--and dark-haired, dark-skinned Replimoids with beautiful almond-shaped dark eyes above their surgical masks, their entire bodies wrapped so tight in white surgical drapery and plastic that they appeared to be bandaged. A syringe held high in the air. Tap, tap, tap. Tiny squirt of sparkling fluid.

My hands were strapped down. My fingers were strapped down. My neck was strapped down. But a crank suddenly raised the upper half of this deathbed and I was sitting up. Of course. She had to remove the top of my skull! And all the steel straps had been arranged to allow this maneuver which took me further and further from anything that I could conceivably understand.

I wished I had had a glimpse of the other body, the body covered up on the table with all the tubes filled with blood running into it. Was that thing already alive?

Over my eyes, someone put a blindfold, thick and soft. And there perhaps goes your ability to see forever. How can you know?

I was groggy, almost unable to speak. The sun was above the horizon.

Amel was weeping.

Say something, you idiot! At least tell me goodbye.

Lights snapped on, so bright they burned through the blindfold and my eyelids, but the old familiar darkness would take care of that. Scissors cutting. Never really liked this jacket and shirt all that much anyway. Needles piercing. I am extremely...extremely fond of this skin.

It wasn't a dream. It was a different place. And no sooner had I reached out my hand to open the door, then it was gone.

Just gone.

Next thing I knew I was sleeping on my side. Then I turned over on my back and I thought to myself, How hard is this bed, and the scents I'm picking up, what are they, these noxious chemical scents? I heard the noises of traffic and somewhere very close the sounds of people walking as in a busy street.

My eyes snapped open. I stared up once again at the acoustical-tile ceiling.

I am alive.

Dim electric light softly illuminated the ceiling, and the place where I lay.

I sat up and looked around the room.

Most of the equipment was gone. The other body on the other table was gone. I was alone, seated on a gurney, and I was fully dressed.

The linen shirt was new, the suit jacket was new, and the pants were new, but the spiffily polished black boots were mine. And the rings on my fingers, of course, were mine. My beloved violet-tinted glasses were in my breast pocket.

I felt of my hair; it was as it always was when I awoke, full and long. Yet I

felt delicate but hard seams in the flesh of my head. I looked at my hands and then at the rest of myself.

I climbed off the gurney and walked through the scattering of tables and stands and metal cabinets and other seeming debris, and opened the door.

Empty hallway of a modern building, and at the far end a doorway to a busy street. I put on my violet glasses and went out.

It was the Marais--one of the oldest sections of Paris. And it was just after sunset, and all the lights were coming on. I soon found myself walking on one of those very narrow sidewalks so common in old Paris, past a crowded bookstore and a cafe with steamy windows, past shops, past restaurants, and after a while I was wandering under the vaulted ceilings of an old stone arcade. All around me were mortals, coming and going, ignoring my shocking white skin, or curious wobbly manner, as I struggled to put one foot before the other, following one stone street into another stone street. The crowds grew thicker, and it seemed this was the most vital city in all the world.

The sky was winter white and the air was not so terribly cold.

At last I wandered into a great square with a high triple-decker fountain in the middle of it. But the fountain was turned off. And the snow lay light and fresh and pure over everything, and the leafless trees were glistening with thin ice, ice that might crack into a million splinters if you touched it, and the deep sloping roofs of the mansions all about the square were shining with snow.

I was alone.

Purely alone. I took a deep breath of the bracing air and looked up through the whiteness and gradually I penetrated the layers of lowering clouds and I picked out the stars.

Alone. No warm hand on the back of the neck, nothing living and breathing inside me that wasn't me. No voice that could speak to me or hear me if I spoke. Just alone.

Just the way I'd been over two hundred years ago when Richelieu's statue of Louis XIII on horseback had been in the middle of this vast place, and these mansions had been down at heel, no longer fashionable, and I had walked through here briskly after the coming of the vampiric Blood, fierce and strong and able to roam all Paris, it seemed, driven by my thirst.

Innocent blood. That was my thought. It hadn't come from someone else.

Still alive.