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cry wordlessly until he himself got the hint, brought it up, then move on from there. But all her ideas lay straitened and immured behind brick, immovable, inert, unactable on, as her mother’s soft rant rose in her mind’s ear, Hunts never do the D-thing. No they don % Katt, and don’t you forget it.
    Outside where unseen a duck pond lay, a slash of bird sound tore down across the evening sky. As the geese came in, a far-beached splash flared up and subsided. Katt was kneeling beside Marcus’s body on the bed, low to him as he lay there. Her fingers were entangled in his hair and the tips touched scalp, thumbs upon his brow, octopod of eight digits settled in to harm him. She shrank at the thought. Tension drained from her fingers, but she kept them there. Foolish notion, she told herself; she could never hurt her husband. But she could find the spot inside him that kept his disease wound tight, cure him, put his worries forever to rest. Then she’d tell him what she’d done, do likewise for Conner; and at last draw upon her newfound strength to find the courage to ... ah but she could never do the D-thing, Hunts never do the D-thing. That’s right, Katt, as right as rain and as certain as raindrops. The D-thing is something we Hunt women never do.
    Find it, at least. No harm in that. Maybe even some good. That quelled her misgivings, though she knew it was a trick. Still, she shut out the clocktick, the moonglow, the distant ache of a train passing through the night, and focused on bone beneath her fingers. Her awareness passed beneath it, his skullbone a dumb thudding numbness quickly noted as healthy and sunk through, meninges next, followed by a brunt of brain, deepened through layer on layer until she arrived (remembering now a drawing in the medical book on HD) at the caudate nucleus, and slowed to probe. There was something not right here—not a softness in the actual tissue, but that’s how it presented itself, a readiness to crumble, to dry up, to desiccate.
    She realized she was shaking, almost as if she needed to urinate, though her bladder was empty. Warring visions held sway: Marcus the man, whom she had no right to harm; and this place in a coolly detached brain, this place that held the key to her
    freedom, that wanted only the smallest twist of intent to activate. They’d shared so much, these many years. How could someone be your best friend and yet no longer be any friend at all? How could so convincing a closeness exist and yet be all lies, the distance so great and unspeakable and unspoken of? She didn’t know, but her hands tensed upon him and his sleeping fatality lay inches below them, so easy to tip into imbalance. Katt’d rightly be called a murderer, unprovable but she would always know it had been so, and there would be Conner to remind her in case she forgot. But there surged now her secret strength and she knew what so often she’d told herself, that in the planning of them, some actions that resonated deep in your soul took on an inevitability. This wrenching was her one escape route—now was the time and here was the place, and she inflected her will to urge it forward.
    A thought-ripple.
    Had it happened? She knew and didn’t know. Like the trick of the eye upon a trickle of tapwater, did the twist shift or not as you watched? Her fingers eased. A flurry of wings below taunted her ears. She trembled, indeed had been shuddering for some time, she now realized. When Katt looked at her hands, they would not hold still. A passage from a library book came to mind. A silly feel-good book. But one notion had made her cry: Picture your worst fear, it said, as a wailing baby. Lift it up. Hold it. Soothe it. Talk to it. Katt’s throat tensed and her eyes teared up. Then she was crying, tamping it down, but her breaths inward were audible and there was Marcus, sixteen years of mostly good times and real connection, lying there, and she had done something horrendous to him. But if she had,