And now Kate, in a middle-aged woman’s body, is moving down a grassy slope toward Jack. The younger man he was talking to has moved away, and that seems to have set the woman in motion. Jack’s back is to her as he slouches on the bench.
Turn around! she screams.
But no cry is heard as she moves silently forward.
A dozen feet from Jack and picking up speed, the woman’s right hand pulls a long, slim knife from her pocketbook.
Get up, Jack! Move! Get up and go! Anything but sit there!
But to her horror Kate senses another part of her urging the woman on, glorying in the imminent demise of a threat to the Unity.
No! That’s not me! It can’t be! I won’t let it be!
The woman holds the blade low, pointed toward the left side of Jack’s mid-dorsal region, ready to slip between the wooden slats of the bench and the bony slats of his ribs and into the posterior wall of his heart. She’s almost to him now, the arm swinging back, preparing to thrust—
Jackieeeeee!
“Look out!”
A cry from somewhere behind, a man’s voice, faint, distant, but enough to alert Jack. He leaps up from the bench and whirls just as the woman strikes, but her thrust stabs only air, and her momentum carries her forward, bending her over the back of the bench as Jack’s foot lashes out, catching her under the chin.
A deafening crunch! and a blaze of pain in her throat and then Kate is unable to breathe. It’s as if someone has clamped a vise on her trachea—no air moves either way. She sees Jack moving away as an impossible pressure builds in her chest and black and purple splotches swell and coalesce in her vision, and then she’s falling backward and she wants to call out to Jack because she is dying…dying…