Blood Pact

her temples. One more sympathetic word, one more word of any kind, would destroy the fingernail grip she had on her control. Moving blindly, she stood and hurried toward the bedroom. "I've got to get dressed. We've got to look for Henry.”

    At 10:20, Catherine lifted the lid of the isolation box and smiled in at the woman who had once been Marjory Nelson. "I know; it's pretty boring in there, isn't it?" She pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and deftly unhooked the jack and laid it, gold prongs gleaming, to one side. "Just give me half a sec and we'll see what we can do about getting you out of there." Nutrient tubes were tugged gently from catheters and tucked away in specific compartments in the sides of the box. "You've got amazingly good skin tone, all things considered, but I think that working a little estrogen cream into the epidermis might be in order. We don't want things to tear while you're up and moving around.”

    Catherine hummed tunelessly to herself as she worked, stopping twice to make notes on muscle resilience and joint flexibility.
    So far, number ten proved her theory. None of the others, not even number nine, had responded to the bacteria quite so well. She couldn't wait to see how Donald, number eleven, turned out.

    Had she seen the girl before? Why couldn't she remember?

    The girl was not the right girl, although she didn't understand why not.

    Hooking her fingers over the side of the box, she pulled herself up into a sitting position.

    There was something she had to do.

    * * *

    Catherine shook her head. Initiative was all very well but at the moment a prone, immobile body would be of more use.

    "Lie down," she said sternly.

    Lie down.

    The command traveled deeply rutted pathways and the body obeyed.

    But she didn't want to lie down.

    At least she didn't think she did.

    "You're trying to frown, that's wonderful!" Catherine clapped gloved hands together. "Even partial control of the zygomaticus minor is a definite advance. I've got to take some measurements.”

    Number nine watched closely as she moved about the other one like him. He remembered another word.

    Need.

    When she needed him, he'd be there.

    Just for an instant, he thought he remembered music.

    With number ten measured, moisturized, dressed, and sitting at the side of the room, Catherine finally turned her attention to the intruder. She'd heard no sounds at all from what had been number nine's box since she'd returned to the lab and she rather hoped he hadn't died. With no brain wave patterns and no bacteria tailored, it would be a waste of a perfectly good body, especially as, if he'd suffocated or had a heart attack, there wouldn't even be any trauma to repair.

    "Of course, if he has died, we could use Donald's brain wave patterns and the generic bacteria," she mused as she lifted the lid.
    "After all, it worked on number nine and he wasn't exactly fresh. It'd be nice to have a little backup data for a change.”

    She frowned down into the isolation box. The intruder lay, one pale hand curled against his chest, the other palm up at his side.
    His eyes were closed and long lashes, slightly darker than the strawberry blond hair, brushed against the curve of pale cheeks. He didn't look dead. Exactly. But he didn't look alive. Exactly.

    Head to one side, she pushed his collar back and pressed two fingers into the pulse point at his throat. His flesh responded with more resilience than she'd expected, far more than a corpse would have but, at the same time, it seemed his body temperature had dropped too low to sustain life. She checked to make sure that the refrigeration unit had, indeed, been shut off. It had.

    "How very strange," she murmured. Then things got stranger still for just as she was about to believe his heart had stopped, for whatever reason, a single pulse throbbed under her fingertips. Frown deepening, she waited, eyes on her watch as the seconds flashed by. Just over eight seconds later, the intruder's heart beat again. And then eight seconds after that, again.

    "About seven beats a minute." Catherine drummed the fingers of both hands on the side of the isolation box. "The alternation of systole and diastole occurs at an average rate of about seventy times per minute in a normal human being at rest. What we have here is a heart beating at one tenth the normal rate.”

    Brows knit, she carefully lifted an eyelid between thumb and forefinger. The eye had not rolled back. The pupil, rather than