On the table, what had once been a Dracaena palm seedling was a full-grown plant. And if Doctor Po had been right, it would have a stemful of dragon's blood. So it was time to rehearse, on his own plant, what Hi had to do that day at various points on the compound: extract the lethal nectar. He had to hope he would have enough of it, and that meant tapping every plant that he could. Assuming, of course, that there was something to extract. Hi was confident that there would be. He had raised perfect-looking plants. But he knew Murphy's Law--if something can go wrong, it will--and he expected to encounter it, perhaps more than once, before sunrise tomorrow.

Hi took his syringe and a vial from the loose lining of his coffin where he had hidden them, and set them on the table. He rubbed his hands together, then rubbed them on his black shirt, as he nervously regarded the plant. It was make-or-break time. Picking up the syringe, he carefully stuck its needle into the stem of the plant. He then pulled slowly on the plunger to extract what was there. This was not a dry run, of course, because every drop counted. And it worked. The barrel of the syringe nearly half-filled with the Dracaena palm's bright red secretion.

"I could kiss you, Po," Hi said.

He transferred the liquid into the vial. The vial was still more than half empty. Taking two more vials from the coffin, he put the vials in his pockets. Slightly loosening his tucked-in shirt, he hid the syringe inside of it. He adjusted the vials to make the bulges as unnoticeable as possible in his SS breeches. Steeling himself, Hi looked again at the plant. "Tonight is the night," he said. He turned, left the room, and walked quietly out of Gebäude Zwei.

He headed first for the Weinberg. In his four months at Neuanfang, Hi had become a familiar sight, going about to check on his plants as they steadily grew, and to work (supposedly) on the memoirs stored in Gebäude Drei. So Hi moved freely on the compound in the performance of his duties. But moving about in the day could easily draw attention, whatever the purpose. It was like prowling at night in the land of the living. And though Hi didn't know it, on this crucial occasion he drew the attention of Müller, who was sitting up late, clad only in his underwear, reading a book entitled Health Care in Your Amazon Home, at the window of his Gebäude Ein quarters.

Müller wondered why Hi, at this time of day, was going into Gebäude Vier.

Müller got up to dress and find out.