Alowi had walked home from the clinic feeling nervous and uncertain about what she had done.  Nearing the place where she and the Dillians were staying, essentially a huge tent struck on some deserted landfill north of the city, she began to feel light-headed, and by the time she was inside, she had the start of a serious headache.  Dizzy and sick, with a throbbing head, she lay down on the pillows in the rear area of the tent and pretty much passed out.

More concerned and suspicious of everything were the Dillians, who found her out cold and decided that there was no purpose to rousing her.  Some of this was to be expected from a radical injection, but as Doctor Drinh had feared, they were also quite suspicious at what Alowi had told them about the capabilities of the process.  While Tony took care of some business at the port, Anne Marie put in a call to the capital.

While embassy operations on the Well World were best handled within Zone, most hexes had small offices whose function was to pass messages to and from Zone via Well Gate couriers.  Reciprocity gave any race the right to use the service of any hex at all, and under diplomatic seal.  It wasn't beyond being compromised, but it was effective, and any hex found compromising the system would of course lose its own rights and privacy.

Anne Marie had no intention of giving an oral report but used a recording cube of the type standardized by and Zone and put it under a password that was known on the other end only to the Dillian ambassador.  She dispatched the cube via messenger service on the next train to the capital, where someone alerted by her call would pick it up and stick it in the next courier pouch.  She had no idea who would ultimately hear the report and no real hope that those bureaucrats could decide on whether they had to go to the bathroom, let alone anything important, but it was worth trying.

In the message she had simply summarized Alowi's experience to date and related the claims of Drinh and his reputation and voiced her suspicions with hope that all this would be relayed to the inner council committee that was in charge of the "immortals problem," as they so euphemistically put it.

At least the committee had proved honest and reliable.  While it had been next to impossible to sit on the rumor that the ancient and legendary Nathan Brazil might be back, the fact that Mavra Chang might be an immortal equal to Brazil had been suppressed to a remarkable degree.  The most that seemed to have leaked was that Chang was wanted because she had known Brazil and might prove useful in motivating the mysterious man to make a deal.  Brazil, however, remained the real target for all the factions out there nervous about either his possible powers or his potential; Chang's cover story had been increasingly reinforced to the point where no one outside the council took her as more than a minor player, of no great advantage unless one had Brazil and perhaps not even then.