While his people circulated, Thompson leafed through several of the newsjournals that seemed to be an inevitable part of every waiting room. He started with the oldest, published about six weeks ago, discovering that the Archbishop's basic facts were accurate. There had been riots, all right, when some kind of laboratory accident and explosion had released the pseudo-virus and created the first Kins of the Dragon. They'd called themselves that from the very beginning, it seemed, which Thompson found intriguing--and it was discovered almost immediately that they had to drink blood to survive. Preferably human blood, taken directly from a donor's carotid, though they could manage for short times on packaged or even animal blood. Normal food made them violently ill, and strong spices caused anaphylactic shock, usually fatal. To balance those limitations, they developed great physical strength and endurance, as well as the responsive and projective forms of empathy the detective chief had mentioned. Unfortunately, the first reaction to the Kins had been horror. Thompson could understand that, though he didn't share it; psych tests kept people who couldn't overcome such feelings out of Imperial service. He was more intrigued than frightened by the idea of a Kin drinking some of his blood, and according to the journals, most Narvonese had felt the same way after the initial shock had worn off--especially those who'd had friends or relatives affected. But there had been enough whose horror had persisted to cause the trouble that had inspired the Archbishop's appeal. Riots had broken out in all but the smallest towns, Kins had been brutally murdered by impalement, decapitation, poisoning, incineration--but that trouble had tapered off dramatically, starting about a week after the Archbishop's call, when all three Planetary Barons and the System Count announced that they had been infected and become Kins themselves. Thompson found that amusing, if almost inevitable; once Imperial nobility embraced something new, most of the people in their fiefs followed suit. By now, attacks on Kins were down to scattered incidents, and it looked like they'd taper off to almost nothing soon.