“You… you’re taking me to view her?”
“Yes.” Hufman reached a gray metal door and opened it.
His eyes fixed on Nigel. “She died, Mr. Walmsley. Uncontrollable hemorrhage. The operating room was busy. There were other patients. We put her aside for the orderlies to carry away. A half hour passed.”
Nigel nodded dumbly.
“Then she began to move, Mr. Walmsley. She rose from the dead.”
Alexandria sat alone. She was in an elaborate diagnostic wheelchair; it bristled with electronics. Her white hospital smock was bunched above her knees and probes touched her at ankles, calves, forearms, neck, temples. She smiled wanly.
“I knew. You would return. Nigel.”
“I…I was…”
“I know,” she said mildly. “You. Spoke. To Shirley. You became. Frightened. By what was. Happening.” She spoke slowly, the words individually formed and separated by a perceptible pause. She had to work for each syllable.
“The New Sons …” Nigel began and then did not know how to continue.
“You need not. Have. Become. Excited. Nigel. He had told. Me. That you sensed it. Too. Briefly.”
“He? Who…”
“Him. What you felt. Before you. Rejected the Immanence.”
Nigel was aware of Hufman closing the door behind them, standing where he could hear but not interrupt. Alexandria seemed delicately balanced, fragile, suspended by some inner certainty. Encased.
“You felt Him. Nigel. My love. Perhaps. You did not. Recognize. Him. To you. For a long while. He was the Snark.”
Nigel was silent for a long, stunned moment. “The telltale,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, toward Hufman.
“Yes. Yes,” Alexandria said in a flat voice. “That is. How He entered me. But I. Recognized Him. For His true nature.”
She closed her eyes and her chest rose in shallow, rapid breaths. Nigel glanced at Hufman. His legs were numb and he felt pinned to this spot, unable to advance toward Alexandria or retreat. Her wheelchair readouts blinked and shifted.
“Can someone—something—do that?” he said in a quick whisper. “Transmit over that telltale circuit?”
Hufman’s voice was a resonant bass in the small room. “Yes, certainly. Hers has both acoustic and electric contact with her nervous system. It functions passively most of the time, but we can use it to send echo signals through the central nerves.”
“Is that what’s happening?”
Hufman moved to Nigel’s side and, to Nigel’s surprise, put an arm over his shoulders. “I believe so. I’ve told no one about this because, well, at first I thought I had made some awful mistake.”
“Something is going into her. Through that telltale.” “Apparently. You collapsed, didn’t you? At JPL? Probably an overload. Or whoever is transmitting shorted out your input and concentrated on her.”
“But she was dead.”
“Yes. All functions ceased. I estimate she suffered oxygen deprivation only five or ten minutes, at most. Somehow a stimulus through the telltale jolted her breathing. Restored it to function. Her renal overload has subsided, too.”
“I don’t see how…”
“Neither do I. There is work going on in the use of neurological startups, yes, but they are highly dangerous. And unreliable.”
“It’s bringing her back to life,” Nigel said distantly. “What is? Who’s doing this?”
“I can’t say.”
Hufman looked at him piercingly. “You won’t, you mean. You and that other woman have some—”
“What other woman?”
“The one I met. You introduced us earlier. Alexandria asked for her. I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I let her in, and—”
“Nigel?” Alexandria’s eyelids fluttered, mothlike, and she moved her right hand weakly in a beckoning motion. Nigel went to her.
“He is. Seeing. Through me. Nigel. He wants. You. To know that.”
Nigel looked back at Hufman helplessly.
“No, do not be. Afraid. He wants to see. To feel. To walk. In this world.”
“Who is he, Alexandria?” Nigel’s voice broke as he said her name.
“He is the Immanence,” she said, as though to a child. “I know. What He has done. You and the Doctor. Do not need. To whisper. I know.”
“He—it—brought you back.”
“I know. From the dead. To see.”
