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said his good-byes, and her parents were turning for a last word with Cadan.
    Elissa slid out of her chair and crossed to the window, her insides in knots of anger, waiting for them to finish with the good-byes, waiting for Cadan to get gone.
    “Okay,” said Bruce. “We’re off. Bye, Lis! Take care.”
    She looked around as briefly as she could, avoiding Cadan’s eyes, and lifted a hand in a wave.
    Their boots trod across the entrance hall. Cadan said something, and Bruce, indistinct, replied. Then the door shut out the sound of their voices.
    Elissa realized she’d closed her fingers so tightly around her glass of herbal tea that she was in danger of shattering it. As if the anger had let it in, there was a sudden hollow, falling sensation in her stomach. Four days. Four days and I’m going in for brain surgery .
    “Elissa? Are you all right?”
    Elissa looked around to meet her mother’s eyes. She could say how scared she was, but she didn’t dare. If she said it, if she spoke the words, she might lose all her nerve. And there was no other option. I have to have it. I have to .
    “I’m just completely tired,” she said, momentarily taken aback by how normal her voice sounded. “I guess I’ll go upstairs and shower.”
    She felt, rather than saw, the fractional relaxing of her mother’s posture. “All right, dear. You go up. Come down when you’ve changed if you need another drink. And, Edward, for goodness’ sake, lock those things up before something goes wrong.”
    Elissa left the room to the sound of her father’s quiet answer, and climbed the staircase to the top floor, where her room was. Her stomach was still swooping, and her hands were cold. She was never going to be able to sleep, not yet, but it was easier to be alone than having to keep up a brave face in front of her parents.
    I have to have it. I have to .
    Even a hot shower didn’t seem to warm her up; although once she was wrapped in her fleecy red bathrobe, the air-conditioning off and her window open to let in the warm night, she started to feel a bit better. She still wasn’t going to be able to sleep, though.
    She curled up on her bed and told her computer to come on. The mirror-screen woke immediately, angling itself toward where she sat. Welcome, Elissa , scrolled across the screen.
    There were a million distractions she could request: movies, funny videos, games. Even chat rooms she could hang out in—if she’d ever be able to forget that every one of the people in those chat rooms would react to her symptoms exactly the way her real-life friends had. She wasn’t in the mood for any of them.
    Bruce’s words scrolled across her mind. You haven’t been paying attention to the news.
    Freaking Bruce, with his perfect life and his golden-boy copilot. If his world was a nightmare of pain—hallucinatory pain, that her stupid brain was doing to itself —he wouldn’thave the attention to spare for the news channels either.
    “Breaking News,” she said, hearing her voice ring out defiantly in the quiet room.
    Images flowed out across the triple-leafed mirror-screen. Tickers sprang up at the top and bottom, and a little embedded talking face appeared at the side.
    They were broadcasting updates on the stuff Dr. Brien and her mother had been talking about earlier. The quarantining of an entire residential shelf in response to the Elloran superflu outbreak. The sentencing of the parents who’d had the illegal child. After that, a failed ecoterrorist attack at a major spaceport from the kitchen at the backArt on the other side of the planet. Then the eighteen-year-old nicknamed Lizard Boy who’d had body modifications that gave his whole body scales. That made the woman at her mother’s club seem pretty much no

“WHAT?” Elissa spoke out loud without meaning to, her mind blank, her body frozen in shock.
    The computer flickered, confused, then flashed up a command box.
    “Dismiss,” said Elissa automatically. She found she’d