"How did I get here?" I asked.
Daphne sat on the edge of the bed where I was lying, and I could see she had somewhere to be, duties waiting, the normal rhythm of her day already running. She sat anyway.
"A woman," she said. "Mid-thirties. Dark hair. Knocked on my door late last night." A pause. "You know I was still awake."
Mary Stam, I thought. She had promised to find me if she made it. She made it.
She had tracked me through the mark she'd put on my spine during the capital chase, followed it across the city and into the forest and then across the campus to a teachers' apartment she had somehow identified as the right door to knock on. That was how Mary Stam operated. Quietly and completely and without waiting for acknowledgment.
"What did she say?" I asked.
"That you had sent her to me." Daphne said it with a particular quality, the quality of someone who found meaning in being the name a person produced when they were dying.
