Virgil simply stared.

“However,” she continued when she realized he would not return her smile, “it can be physically dangerous to you in your atrophied condition. So let’s proceed slowly, all right?”

Large bandage scissors went to work on his head, guided by Delia’s graceful, strong fingers.

“How long has it been since they changed these?” she muttered. “A month? Two?”

Kinney shrugged, or tried to. “Maybe a year.” His voice was weak, creaky.

Trine’s hand inadvertently withdrew from him. Regaining her composure, she continued to snip away. “Nice to hear you speak.”

She pulled the clipped gauze from around his head. A shock of sweaty, oily yellow hair clung to the fabric. She tugged gently. Most of the hair remained on his head, though some stuck wetly to the greasy fabric.

She frowned. “At least you’re not completely depilated. A good wash and it should be back to normal.”

“Thanks.” Virgil basked in the warm feeling of her hand against his skin. So long since a touch. Maybe she’s not working for Master Snoop. Could she be a free agent? Maybe Master Snoop and Nightsheet aren’t conspiring anymore. Maybe they’re enemies again. I need more information. Listen. Hold back the roar.

His right arm fell limply to the couch. Deathly white, translucent, and almost entirely devoid of muscle, it looked like a skeleton wrapped in a thin coating of papier-mâché.

Delia shook her head. His other arm looked just as bad. Worse-a hideous burn scar ran its length.

“Why didn’t they fix that?” she muttered, continuing to snip down his torso.

Kinney’s chest, freed from restraint, heaved to suck in great gulps of air.

“Don’t,” she said. “You’ll hyperventilate.” She held the scissors at a fixed angle and ripped them through the cloth around his waist, thighs, and legs. Pulling the fabric away, she gazed at the naked form beneath.

Her crimson lips formed a gentle smile. “Well, you’re a real blond, all right.”

His sudden bark of laughter startled her. Jumping back from the couch, she watched in amazement as his arms waved heedlessly about, bouncing off the sides of the couch before coming to rest on his flat stomach, the only part of him that had any musculature at all.

After waiting a moment for him to calm down, she said, “Hold still, Virgil.” She put down the scissors and laid a hand on his narrow thigh. “This may hurt.” Her long fingers grasped the waste cycling tube that snaked between his legs up into his rectum. With a gentle-but-firm tug, she twisted and removed it.

Virgil moaned, hovering somewhere between pain and relief.

She deflated the urine catheter. “You go on light solids and muscle food tomorrow. And you begin your training.”

“And if I don’t want to?” A sneer flashed palely across Virgil’s lips.

She pulled out the catheter with a smooth, firm motion.

He screamed.

“Then,” she said, “I guess we’ll have to wrap you up again.”

He whimpered, doubling over to clutch at his savaged member.

Somewhere deep within Virgil’s searing pain rose one coherent thought. It echoed over and over in his mind, creating its own nearly infinite loop.

The roar’s coming back.

As he folded in on himself, so did his thoughts. He fought the urge.

Nightsheet drags me down down down. Master Snoop shrieks in joy at the burning in my center. Back. Down. Don’t. Don’t back down.

He forced his eyes open, forced his reverberating mind to focus on the woman in the aqua coat. The color soothed him. The red noise subsided in his mind.

“What’s your name?” he asked after a few moments. “What’s your true name?”

She tilted her head a bit in curiosity at both his question and his quick recovery from physical pain.

“My name’s Dee.”

“Dee? The necromancer?”

She shook her head, smiling. “That’s my first name. Short for Delia.”

“What’s the rest?”

“My name is Delia Trine.”

Death Angel bares her fangs in a glee without hunger. I cracked part of her code. Good. Press on.

“Did you spring me just to give me that physics lesson?”

Delia thought it remarkable that he adjusted so well to sudden change. She suspected that the braindump from Jord might be aiding in his stabilization.

“Actually, Virgil, you’re here because the Brennen Trust made a mistake. A fatal mistake with a man named Jord Baker. You’re going to help us find out why he died. We’ve given you some preliminary theoretical data on a new concept of interstellar travel. The RNA-PT injection and subliminal instructions-”

Aha! Virgil smiled at the confirmation of his suspicion.

“-have stored inside your brain everything Jord Baker knew up to the point of his death. When we begin training, you’ll remember things you never knew before. You may be experiencing memories right now as you listen.” She paused. Virgil looked up at her and shrugged weakly.

“Well,” she said, “your mind needs to recall the information and refile it. That may take some time.” She slid the stool closer to the table and sat near Virgil’s naked form.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

He shook his head. His long golden hair had dried to a stiff, dull mess. His eyes watched her with relentless intensity.

She took a deep breath. “Here’s the whole story. Jord Baker was a test pilot for the Brennen Trust’s spacecraft division. He was testing out a teleportation craft when he killed himself. We can’t figure out why. We’ve-”

“Teleportation?” Kinney asked. He searched his memory. His, and what fragments arose of Jord Baker’s.

Trine nodded. “It’s a method that could make every other form of space travel obsolete. It was just ten years ago that Ernesto Valliardi developed a mathematically provable theory of pandimensional translocation. Without a device that could generate the field collapse, though, the theory was nothing more than a curiosity. Until two years ago. That’s when Brennen Trust researchers, using portions of Valliardi’s research to develop a multidimensional method of non-destructive metallurgical testing, accidentally teleported a small steel pellet three meters across their lab. It appeared in midair and exploded.”

She leaned on the soft sudahyde. “If it had appeared in something more solid, the blast would have left nothing but a crater where the building stood.” Her grin was almost feral with joy at retelling the tale. “It seems that if the nucleus of a teleported atom appears within the same space as that of an atom at the destination, they mutually annihilate.” She lowered her chin onto her clasped hands. “The resulting explosion was still big enough to kill a dozen people in the lab. Including Grigori Felitsen, the inventor of the process. Computers and video captured all the info, though, and we refined the process in hard vacuum at Brennen Orbital.”

Virgil nodded. Thoughts began to rush to him without summon. Topological images of six- and twelve-dimensional space flickered at the edges of his consciousness. Mental constructs of an intricately folded universe made sense to him even though he had never studied anything more complex than calculus.

Can this, he thought, be what Master Snoop feels, sucking the minds of all around, a constant flood of incoming knowledge, sights, sounds, facts, ideas?

Delia continued, noting Virgil’s facial reactions with professional excitement. Her gaze also drank in the rest of his form. She noted that his flesh responded to the rush of knowledge by pricking up the blond hairs on his arms, shoulders, and legs.

“Finally,” she said, “Brennen engineers built a small ship that could teleport by remote control. The most important aspect of the Valliardi Transfer is that it requires no receiving station.”

“It’s not teleportation, really.” Virgil frowned in amazement at the authoritative manner of his speech. “It’s a concept in many-dimensional theory. Every point in a lower-order dimension is in contact with a point in any higher-order dimension.” His frown transformed itself into a weak grin. “It’s all coming back to me.”