There'd always been murmurs, abnormal heart sounds, as long as she could remember, so what did this mean? Had the damaged valve already begun restoring and strengthening itself? While she slept? Or was this just more of some dream? Why was she in this hospital anyway, hooked up to monitors? She still couldn't remember exactly. "What . . .?" She tried to rise up out of the bed. Again she wondered, was Grant real or some chimera? Then she realized she was strapped in, though the straps were held only with black Velcro. As she started to pull them open, she noticed she had an IV needle in her arm, with a plastic tube that led to a bag of liquid suspended from a hook above her head. More annoying, however, was the checkerboard of taped-on sensors on her upper body, for the ongoing phonocardiogram. She looked at all the tubes and connected wires and felt like a laboratory animal in the middle of an experiment. "Ally, you're at the Dorian Institute, remember? Dr. Van de Vliet's stem cell clinical trials. Nina's here too." "Oh." That rang a bell, sort of. "What . . . what day is it?" He told her. "You've been under sedation since late yesterday, Ally. But Dr. Vee says your test data show you're responding--" "Mom's here, right?" Now things were starting to come back. "How's she doing? Is she--" "He's talking about discharging her by the end of next week, even before the NIH clinical trials are officially over." Grant tried a smile. "By then, he thinks the procedure will have replaced enough tissue in her brain that she might not even need a caregiver. She's doing crosswords again. Need I say more." "My God." Now she remembered how on-again, off-again Nina's mind had been when she brought her out to the institute. Had she really been given a second chance? And so quickly? If so, it was truly astonishing. But now she found herself staring at Grant, mesmerized. Something about him seemed oddly off. "Grant, what... what's going on with you?" "I've . . ." He was hesitating. "I've been thinking about everything. Now I really wish I hadn't done what I did." "What are you talking about?" This kind of revisionist remorse didn't sound like the Grant she knew. "Have you seen Kristen? They said you know about her, were asking about her." Then he stepped back. "Do you know about her?" Kristen. She tried to remember. Is that the woman everybody . . . Her mother had come to the institute with a pistol trying to find her? Then she was kidnapped. . . . "It's the Syndrome," Grant went on. "She wanted the Beta procedure, and Dr. Vee finally agreed. But nobody expected anything to happen like what eventually did. That's why W.B. went ahead and had it too." Beta. Now she remembered that Kristen had mumbled something about that word. "Ally, I got you into . . . When I told W. B. that I thought you and he had the same rare blood type, AB, he wanted to bring you into the program." "You mean for my heart?"