He laughed without humor. “I don’t think there’s anything simple about this situation.” He cast about. “I need to get on the Internet. I’ll see if there’s a dataport in here, or maybe a phone socket. And I could use a coffee,” he called over his shoulder, pulling his laptop out of his bag.

I walked up to Daniel. “You’re pacing like an expectant father.”

He looked at me sourly. “Bad joke.”

“Yes. Sorry. Look, do you have any change? …”

Down the hall we found a machine that would dispense Starbucks-sized polystyrene beakers of coffee in return for euro coins and notes. We walked back to Peter, who had tucked himself into a corner seat and was pulling Daniel’s hacked medical file off the floppy. He accepted the coffee without looking up, flipped open the little drinking flap in the plastic lid, and took a sip, all without ceasing to work at his keyboard.

“The man’s a professional,” I said to Daniel.

“Yeah.”

We sat down. Daniel was full of nervous energy. He tapped the arm of his chair, and his legs pumped up and down in tiny, violent movements, as if he were ready to flee.

“I guess you haven’t had much experience of hospitals,” I said.

“No. Have you?”

“Well—”

“You have kids of your own?”

“No, I haven’t,” I admitted.

He turned away. “Look, it’s not the hospital that bothers me. In fact, I enjoy being surrounded by people speaking English, or at least Italian with an American accent.”

“The Order? That’s what you’re scared of?”

“Damn right.”

“They can’t harm anybody here.” I pointed to a beefy security guard, who stood by the door, hands folded behind his back. “Lucia will be fine. We’re in the best place she could be …” And so on.

“Yeah.” He didn’t sound convinced.

A typical adult-kid response came to my mind: Yes, everything will be fine, she will be okay, we can all go home. But I thought I should respect him more than that. “I really don’t understand what’s going on here, Daniel. You know more than I do. And I have no idea if she’s going to be okay.” I felt a stab of anger. “I don’t even know what okay means, for a fifteen-year-old girl who will have had two kids by some guy whose name she doesn’t even know.”

“They had no right,” he said.

“No. Whoever they are.”

“I should be at school.” He spread his hands. “What am I doing here?”

“Look — you did the right thing,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve lived a quiet life. What do I know about how to deal with situations like this? You saw a kid in trouble — a human being — and you responded on a human level. Your parents will be proud.”

He grimaced. “You don’t know my parents. When they find out about this I am toast.”

A junior doctor approached us. About thirty, she was short, brisk, competent, with severely cut hair. She had a yellow notepad in her hand.

Lucia was fine, the doctor said, in accented English. The girl was in the late stages of pregnancy, and it was possible she would soon go into labor. But the doctor looked a little puzzled as she said this, and I realized that she was keeping stuff back from us. Well, they had had only a few minutes to examine Lucia, and if even a fraction of what Lucia and Daniel had told us was true, they had a right to be baffled.

Peter hit the doctor with questions. “What about her breathing? Her metabolism, pulse rate? …” She was startled enough to try to answer him, referring to her pad a couple of times, before her customary doctor’s mask of nondisclosure slid back into place. “We’ll let you know as soon as there is more news.” And she turned and walked briskly away.

Daniel said, “What use was that? She doesn’t know what she’s dealing with.” He returned to his seat, fuming, pent up.

I murmured to Peter, “Wish I hadn’t encouraged him to drink caffeine. What about those questions you were firing at the doctor?”

He looked at me. “When we were helping her to the ambulance — didn’t you feel her pulse? Boom … boom … boom. Given the state she’s in, and given that she’d just thrown up her breakfast, it was bloody slow — I estimated less than fifty a minute — slower than a top athlete’s resting rate. And she was cold. The quack’s first test results confirm it, I think. George, it kind of fits with what you told me of the Crypt. The air down there must be dense, with high humidity, high on carbon dioxide, low on oxygen.”

I nodded. “Which is why I felt breathless.”

“With low oxygen levels, you get a low metabolic rate, low body temperatures. A slow pulse, cold skin.” He rubbed his nose. “I’d like to get a look at any urine tests they do.”

“Why?”

“Because in animals, one way of getting rid of excess cee-oh-two is through your piss, in the form of flushed-out carbonates and bicarbonates. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve come up with some such adaptive mechanism.”

“ Adaptive. You’re saying she’s adapted to the Crypt.” I thought it over. “Like her pale skin. Her eyes. Those thick sunglasses.”

“It does all fit together, sort of. And there’s more. With a low metabolic rate, you’d grow more slowly, mature later. Live longer, too.”

“Could that explain the sterility?”

“I don’t know. You know, those people must have been down that hole for a very, very long time.”

“Peter — what are we dealing with here?”

He glanced at Daniel, and beckoned. We moved a few seats away from the boy.

Peter unfolded his laptop and showed me some images, which I could barely make out for the glare from the big windows. “What do you know about orangutans?”

As far as Peter could tell the file Daniel had given him on Pina was genuine. When Pina went into hospital for her broken leg, the doctors who examined her had been concerned enough by her appearance to insist on giving her more extensive tests.

“George, I think the kid was right. Pina had an imperforate hymen, and quiescent ovaries.”

“Quiescent?”

He shrugged. “Not producing eggs. Never had produced eggs. There’s a brief note here, where one doctor speculates about the mechanism—”

I waved a hand. “I’m not going to understand any of that.”

“Anyhow they never did the conclusive tests before she was sprung. I’ve been onto the search engines and looked wider. The biologists call this ‘arrested development.’ It can happen for genetic reasons — for instance, a mutation in the receptor for a certain growth factor can cause a form of dwarfism. Or if food is short — say if you’re an anorexic — puberty can be delayed. It makes a certain evolutionary sense, because if you can’t feed yourself it makes no sense to waste calories on bone mass and fatty tissue for sexual characteristics until your body can be sure it will survive. It’s actually quite common among the animals. Sometimes subordinate males don’t develop sexual characteristics. Tree shrews. Mandrill monkeys. Elephants.”

“And orangutans—”

“Even orangutans, even apes.”

“Get back to Pina. You’re saying she has this ‘arrested development,’ too.”

“It looks that way. The tests weren’t conclusive.” He sighed, closed up his laptop, and massaged the bridge of his nose. “But suppose it’s true, George. Suppose that poor kid really has gone through a pregnancy that mushroomed in three months. Suppose there are neuter women down that hole in the ground, a horde of them. Suppose Lucia’s other peculiarities — her paleness, her slow metabolism — are adaptations to living underground. And suppose it’s true — it seems fantastic, but just suppose — that Lucia had sex with this guy Giuliano just once, but she’s going to continue to get pregnant, over and over …”