Matt shook his head, and smiled. “She’s not dead, Jamie,” he said. “She’s awake.”

Jamie stepped out of the airlock on Level H and walked quickly along the cellblock, his footsteps echoing, his heart heavy in his chest.

For several long minutes after leaving Matt and Natalia in the hangar, he had stood outside the Level 0 lift, unable to decide what he should do. The news that Kate was awake was wonderful, almost wonderful enough to pierce the grief that had settled over him so completely that he had already begun to wonder whether it was a permanent fixture, and a huge part of him had wanted to go straight to her room at the back of the Lazarus Project lab and hug her and tell her how glad he was that she was OK. But he was not quite able to convince himself that she should be his priority at this particular moment in time.

Despite everything that had happened since her unexpected return, not least her blunt, crushing admission that she had not come back for him, it had still taken all of Jamie’s strength not to go and find Larissa. He had never doubted that her oft-stated desire not to be a vampire had been genuine, but if he was right about why she had come back on her own from France at the earliest possible opportunity, then it was one of the many things he was now realising he had not taken as seriously as he should have. Before she left, it would never have occurred to him to be anywhere other than at her side if, as he suspected, she was in the infirmary, but things were different now.

It’s none of your business, a voice in his head had whispered. You’re just assuming that she’ll want to see you. What if you’re wrong?

Jamie had listened to the voice, and made his decision. Both Larissa and Kate could wait; there was one person in the Loop who he knew, with absolute certainty, wanted to see him more than anybody else in the world.

He stepped out in front of the purple wall of his mother’s cell. With her supernatural senses now a thing of the past, she was as unaware of her surroundings as any other human; as a result, the expression on her face when she looked round was a perfect mask of shock.

“Hello, Mum,” he said.

She got slowly to her feet, a hand pressed over her mouth, her eyes wide and instantly full of tears.

“It’s OK,” he said. “I’m OK, Mum. Honestly.”

She walked across the cell and stepped through the ultraviolet barrier into the corridor. Jamie stared at her, a lump rising in his throat, his mind blanked by exhaustion.

His mother reached out and placed her hand on his shoulder, as though she didn’t trust her own eyes, and was checking to see whether he was genuinely real.

“Say something, Mum,” he managed. “Please say something.”

She didn’t. Instead, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms round him as she began to cry, great sobs of relief that reverberated through him as he held her.

Larissa shut the door of her quarters behind her, unzipped her uniform, and let it fall to the floor. She had hated having to put it back on when the doctor had told her she was being discharged from the infirmary, but she had hated the idea of walking through the Loop wearing only a hospital gown even more.

She opened the bag that she had twice carried across the Atlantic Ocean and pulled out a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. She put them on, slid her feet into shoes that felt like velvet compared to the standard-issue Blacklight boots, tied her hair back in a loose knot, and examined herself in the mirror above her desk. She didn’t think she looked any different, a prospect that had entered her mind as the doctor brought the plastic bag of bright blue liquid; she had momentarily wondered whether the five years in which she had aged almost imperceptibly slowly would suddenly present themselves in her face, changing the reflection she was used to seeing. But she looked the same, at least as far as she could tell.

How she felt was something else entirely.

The last eighteen hours had been a blur; she had drifted in and out of consciousness as the cure worked its way through her system, her thoughts scattered and insubstantial, until she had sunk down into unconsciousness so deep and absolute that not even dreams could penetrate it. Now, eight hours after she had woken up a fundamentally different person, what she mostly felt was weak.

Some of it, she knew, was the aftermath of the cure’s radical transformation of her body, but most of it was simply the weakness that came with once again being human; she had forgotten how many aches and pains you just got used to, how easily tired you were, how dangerously vulnerable to heat and cold and hunger. Her life had changed beyond all measure since she had last experienced such things – she had been a teenager with horizons that stretched no further than the small town she had been born and raised in – and the feeling was unsettling, to say the least; her adult self had never really encountered anything like it.

There were also practical considerations that she had never really thought through; she had become accustomed to a freedom that was now gone, to the ability to live her life without any real limitations beyond the need to stay out of direct sunlight. Now, if she went back to Haven – when, she told herself, not if, when you go back – she would have to buy a flight to New York and sit in a plane for seven hours and wait in line at airport security and hire a car and drive up the Hudson River Valley and hope the traffic wasn’t too bad, rather than simply glide across the ocean and land on the veranda of the big house.

She could no longer fly.

She could be hurt.

She would grow old, and one day she would die.

But she would never again need to drink blood, she could walk freely in the sun, and she could create a life that would have meaning, real meaning.

She could be a human being again.

And that was all that mattered.

Almost, she told herself. Almost all that matters.

She picked her uniform up off the floor, pulled the console from its belt, and started typing a message on its screen.

The door to Larissa’s quarters swung open before Jamie had even finished knocking on it, and he smiled as soon as she appeared.

“So you did it then?” he said.

She nodded, and smiled back at him. “Did someone tell you or can you tell?”

“I can tell,” he said. “You smell different. Not worse or anything, just … different.”

“Different.”

He nodded. “Your message said you needed to see me. Can I come in?”

“Of course,” said Larissa, and stepped aside. “Sorry. I’m a bit out of it.”

“Understandable,” he said, and walked into her room. “Did you hear about Kate?”

“I did,” she said. “I tried to go and see her when they discharged me, but the doctor looking after her told me I have to go back in the morning.”

“That saves me a trip then,” he said. “I’ll go tomorrow. Does she know you’re back?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“I guess you’ll find out tomorrow.”

Larissa nodded. “We can go together, if you want,” she said. “It might be better for Kate to have all her visitors at once.”

Jamie nodded. “Sounds good.”

“Have you seen your mum?”

“I was just there,” he said.

“How pleased was she to see you?” asked Larissa. “On a scale of one to ten?”

“About twenty-five,” said Jamie, and grinned. “I asked them to let her know I was all right before we left Carcassonne, and someone had told her, but I don’t think she believed them.”

“She probably needed to see you with her own eyes.”

Jamie nodded. “I guess so,” he said. “So what did you need to see me about?”

Larissa looked at him for a long moment, the expression he knew all too well on her face, the one that meant she had something serious to talk to him about. Then it disappeared, replaced by a smile so beautiful it momentarily took his breath away.