But she knew it was useless. All lines on the monitor had gone flat. All at the same time. Which was not how it happened. Heart, brain, everything suddenly and irreversibly dead.

“You’ll find the other one’s gone, too,” Major Onyx said calmly, consulting his phone. “Francis. Something pulled his plug, as well.”

“Are you going to tell me what you’re talking about?” Dr. Chandiramani snapped.

The major jerked his head, indicating that the other doctor and the nurses should get out. They didn’t argue.

Major Onyx closed the app and put his phone away. “The people who were ejected when the dome was created? They came out clean. So did the twins. The rest, the ones who’ve appeared since? They’ve always had a sort of . . . umbilical cord . . . connecting them to the dome. J waves, that’s what we call them. But don’t ask me what they are, because we don’t know. We can detect them, but they are not something encountered in nature.”

“What does ‘J wave’stand for?” the doctor asked.

Major Onyx barked out a laugh. “Some smart-ass physicist at CERN called them ‘Jehovah waves.’ According to him they might as well come from God, because we sure don’t know what they do or where they come from. The name stuck.”

“So what just changed? Did something happen with these J waves?”

The major started to answer but, with a visible effort, and a last appalled look at Mary, stopped himself. “The conversation we just had? Never happened.”

He left and Dr. Chandiramani was alone with her patient.

Four months after her ghastly appearance, Mary Terrafino was dead.

Fear, Outside (2)