PROLOGUE
                  (April 29-30: Night & Morning)

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            There were cracked places amid the ruin's
            stones, and the droppings of small beasts
            who tried to use the cracks to hide from
            their hunters.  The hunters didn't bother
            with the cracks.  They knew how to wait.
                          --In the Memory of Ruins

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                            --- 1 ---

     Cold in the light, her thoughts shrieked.  It's so cold in the
light; I don't wanna go in there.

     But they were rolling in the corridor and she knew where it ended.  
She knew how it ended.  Her legs were spread, strapped down and she
couldn't move them, couldn't close them.  The table beneath her was
wet and slick as a glacier, and pain ached in her back from the metal
chill against it, and from the needles.  She lifted her head, fought 
the drugs that chained her mouth.

     Don't make me go in there.  I can't live in there.

     White faces hung over her in the disinfected air, crisp and
shaven, and voices murmured soothing things that did not sooth.
Someone put a hand on her stomach, patted her chest where it
rose and fell.  She wanted to scream at them not to touch her.

     None of us can live in there.

     Doors slapped open then, at the end of the corridor.  Banks 
of white and blue incandescents bloomed overhead.  Livid faces
seemed to drip and run in that fire, seemed to grow halos of
rainbow spikes.  She felt herself being lifted from one table to
another.  This one was padded and stank of old sweat.  It was no
less cold.  The lights were worse though, feathering their touch 
down on her skin and crawling across it like tiny live wires.

     "For your own good," she heard them say.  "...sterilize...your
skin."  She didn't think her skin would sterilize.  She thought it 
would suppurate, begin to rot if she didn't get free of the light.

     A plastic mask was placed over her face.  She heard the cool
hiss of anesthetic gas, did not want to breathe but could not fight
the urge.  A lassitude began to coat her muscles, her lips and
thoughts.  Something slipped between her legs, a hand with a
tool that glittered.  The object slid inside of her, began to 
unravel and move.  She tried to arch her back to push the thing
out again, but no part of her body would obey her.  Even her
mind began to slow, despite her steady fight to stay alert.

     Behind her the door exploded inward off its hinges.  She
heard a sound like a zipper being closed.  Gunfire!  She smelled
the powder burning.  Lights shattered, spilling multicolored glass
down around her in a rain.  There was still enough illumination
to see.

     The man who had his hand between her legs seemed suddenly
to sprout wings as he was picked up and thrown by some thing
moving incredibly fast.  The oiled voices were no longer
murmuring; they were loud with hoarse-throated shouts.  The
zippering sound was there again, and then again.

     A scarecrow man came from nowhere to dance madly in a
hail of bullets.  In a moment he was gone and the wall where
he had stood began to stitch itself with holes.  Above the  
holes lay a filmed window that shattered outward, and behind  
that opening she saw the sapphire tints of evening, of a   
jeweled dark that seemed to glow before her eyes.

     The night is warm, she thought.

     A black shape came up beside her carrying a rifle, three
lighter shadows humped behind.  They were all males, but it
was the biggest and closest male who ripped away the straps
that bound her legs to the operating table.  He put his hand
over her mouth and pulled off the anesthesia mask.

     She saw that hand clearly before it moved around under her
shoulders to lift.  Its three, razor-nailed digits glistened dark 
with blood, and the burrowing spike growing from the right side of 
the hand looked curved and deadly, and used.  She felt herself  
being raised, being wrapped in roughened cloth and tucked against  
a massive body that throbbed with heat.  She closed her eyes and
let the lassitude take her.

     She was safe now.