Mara Vell got the call at her kitchen table, the small crystal house she rented humming faintly under a winter sun. A fourth one. Still breathing. The dispatcher said the name of the hospital and the word episode, which meant the broadcast was still inside the patient's head. Mara grabbed her field case and ran. Three people had already walked into traffic listening to a signal she could not record, could not name, and could not shut down. She wrote hush-laws for a living. Hers were failing. The hospital was a black-spired thing on the north hill, ribbed and tall, its windows lit a sick blue. Mara had been inside once, for a soil-conductivity hearing. She had not liked it then. She did not like it now. At the front desk she showed her clerk's seal and asked for the patient's floor. The intake nurse did not even look up. No hush-law staff past triage. Doctor's order. Family's order. Pick one. Mara argued. She named the three dead. She said the survivor was a recorder, a living instrument, the first chance anyone had to map the signal at its source. The nurse slid a printed notice across the counter. Hush-law clerks were considered a broadcast risk near unstable patients. Her own regulation, written two years ago, was being used to keep her out. She went back to her car and set up in the lot. From the trunk she pulled the listening rig she used for field work, a squat console with a tall ringed antenna she bolted to the roof. She could not get to the patient. She could still get to the silence around him. She tuned the rig to the hospital's upper floors and watched the gaps. On the third sweep she found it, a soft-edged hole in the noise, shaped like the bruise she had charted twice before. It was pulsing. The patient was still receiving. A wheeled cart rolled past her window, pushed by an orderly, one of those long-legged shell-bodied haulers the hospital used for linens. Mara flagged him down and paid him forty in cash to carry a sensor patch upstairs and stick it to the outside of the patient's monitor housing. He shrugged and took the money. Twenty minutes later her console lit. The patch was sending. She could see the console at the patient's bedside as a second shadow inside the gap, a tall guarded shape with the signal threading through it. Then the gap closed. Flat line on her rig. A minute later the hospital's intercom called a code to the floor she was watching. Mara sat in the cold car with her hand on the dial. The fourth one was gone. But the patch was still live, and in the last forty seconds of readable data she had something none of the other deaths had given her. A direction. The signal had come from the south.