The first time Jeremy died, his body was mangled almost beyond recognition in an airliner crash on an isolated mountainside. But something found him there, something that had fallen to a lifeless earth billions of years ago.

It entered him. It studied him. It repaired him. And, slowly, it began to...improve him. The second time Jeremy died, the repair took only minutes. And Jeremy began to realize that, in a way he couldn't possibly understand, he could repair others, just as he himself had been repaired.

An aging aunt, dying of cancer in the farm home where she had raised him. A dog, struck down by a car. A girl he had known in high school, suffering from cystic fibrosis.

"Healing," others called it. A "gift." But healing-even resurrecting-others was neither easy nor painless. Nor safe, either for himself or his friends. And it was leading inexorably toward his third-and final-death...