Dads glared at me, just on general humphy principles, then turned back to Zillif. "We start by getting as much information about you as we can — your health history, personal details…"

"Names of my next of kin?" she asked.

My father chewed on that a second, obviously reconsidering whatever tack he’d intended to take. If he could help it, he never flat out talked to patients about the possibility of death; he’d assembled a thesaurus full of phrases that gave the required message when absolutely necessary ("prepare for the worst." "put your affairs in order") without actually having to admit he couldn’t save everybody from the Abyss. Dads hated patients who wanted to contemplate their own mortality.

"All right," he told Zillif in a low voice, "we both know the prognosis is unfavorable." Unfavorable: another willy-word from the Dads book of euphemisms. "But," he continued, "people are working on this. We never know when there’ll be a breakthrough."

"In the next two weeks, do you think?"

I bit my lip. Once again, Zillif proved she had canny sources of information: two weeks was the median survival time for an Oolom with her degree of paralysis.

"No one can guess when a breakthrough might come," Dads answered, his voice all prickly. "It could take some time; but then again, it might have happened this very second, somewhere in the world. In the meantime, we’re doing our best. We’ll put you on an experimental medication—"

"What medication?" Zillif interrupted.

Dads glowered at me as if I were the one who’d annoyed him, then undipped a notepad from his belt. He pressed a touch-square on the pad, but I could tell he didn’t need to look at the result; he always knew what "treatment" he’d scheduled for the next patient to come in.