Shadow Unit 12
Author: Bull Emma (author)
Date: 1901-09-15 23:23:17+00:00
Keywords: diverse cast; bau; fbi
Description: Five Autopsies - by Leah Bobet Hope Is Stronger Than Love - by Sarah Monette Latency - by Elizabeth Bear aimforthe
Publisher: Distributed via Smashwords.

Shadow Unit

Book 12

•

Emma Bull

Elizabeth Bear

Leah Bobet

Sarah Monette

Table of Contents

Publishing Information

"Five Autopsies" - by Leah Bobet

"Hope Is Stronger Than Love" - by Sarah Monette

At the edge of Tennessee, November 2011

Ashton, VA, February 2012

"Latency" - by Elizabeth Bear

Arlington, VA, February 2012

"aimforthe<3" - by Leah Bobet & Emma Bull

Boston, MA, January 2012

Credits

Publishing Information

© 2007-2012 Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, Stephen Shipman, Amanda Downum, Leah Bobet, & Holly Black. Cover design and photo @ Kyle Cassidy.

First edition. Published by CatYelling.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

All seasons of Shadow Unit are available online at www.shadowunit.org.

Smashwords edition.

"Five Autopsies" - by Leah Bobet

Act I

Johns Hopkins Medical Center, Baltimore, MD, November 26, 2011

Madeline Frost, M.D. November 26, 2011, 9:13 p.m. Postmortem dissection of decedent Audrey Michelle Gillespie. Race: White. Age: 27. Sex: Male. Date of death: November 24, 2011.

There was steel, and light.

The steel was in her hand, and where it cut, it demarcated: a line between correct and incorrect, evidence and conjecture; a line fanned out around two chilly breasts. The air was cool and sharp with bleach. The scalpel moved. Stiff skin split.

Madeline Frost peeled back the chest flap and said, "Fractures visible on ribs eight and nine."

Another pathologist might have paused with the scalpel; lined it up against the cracks to catch the angle of the blow. Frost tracked it with her eye and saw one blow, long and sharp: a crowbar, or a straight tree branch.

Different from the face, she noted. The face had been beaten. Hard.

The scalpel moved twice, and she lifted the fractured rib cage clear.

The breast implants got in the way. Frost bent back the chest flap impatiently, secured it with a pair of medical clamps. They bobbled between the layers of skin like a pair of fatty tumors. Her breath hissed. Inconvenient. Not the most inconvenient thing people did to bodies, but nonetheless.

She had a pan for the organs. They came out tough and tenuous, lightly damaged: there was no fatal rupture, no leak of fluids. Frost again glanced at the decedent's face: the layers of bruising that had become shattered cheekbones, a buckled skull, teeth knocked free and glistening in the depths of the opened mouth. One eye was bloodied. The expression was the expression of every corpse: faint, blank surprise.

She weighed the organs rhythmically. Her scale was digital, and did not creak. Sliced from them deft samples, from the arteries, from the veins. Opened up the stomach, and found half-digested beans, pine nuts, brown rice, a smear of green avocado. Two pills, which she fished out with a sharp pair of tweezers and separated into glass. "Time of death," she said into the hanging recorder, "was no more than two hours after the final meal." They had found this one in an alley. There was likely a restaurant receipt among the personal effects. She would fix it definitively when the pills were identified, and their rate of dissolution.

She wiped the scalpel. Paused. Came back, again, to that face.

The lines were wrong. There were consistencies to punched-in faces—and it was most definitely a pair of fists; blow after blow, bruise after bruise, measured the same fingers'-width across—and this face did not have them. There were no concentrations of bruising on the sides, as the decedent tried to turn away. No defensive wounds on the arms, no ligature marks or round-gripped bruises. Just jagged breaks, flowering outward—

Ah.

She looked again at that line of breakage on the rib cage. The cracks spidered out at the bottom of each rib. She turned the whole structure, ran a hand along the eighth rib like a British matron checking, white-gloved, for dust: found them much rougher, jagged-edged.

The ribs had been cracked from the inside.

Frost frowned slightly and reached for her electric saw.

The brain was damaged: nearly pulped against the skull. She lifted it out with delicate fingers, charting the crushed pathways. Where they leaned against the skull, bone splintered just slightly. Outwards.

Autopsy was all about ruling out: what remained, no matter how improbable, as Conan Doyle and her first-year medical-school instructors had said, must be the truth.

Madeline Frost reached for her needle and thread, and thought how she might explain this to the FBI.

•

After the first trifecta of bodies Stephen Reyes and Solomon Todd delivered to Frost's autopsy suite, they had given her a cell phone. "Use this one," Reyes had said, "and we'll know it's you."

"Like the Batphone," Todd had added, and fell quiet when she just stared.

Madeline Frost hit the speed dial with finger-skipping precision; ten tones echoed uniform in her ears. The phone rang twice—once to fish it out of his pocket, or from a clip on his belt, and once for the hesitation—and then the line shocked to life.

"Reyes," he said, curt. As if she didn't know who she was dialing.

"Agent Reyes, this is Madeline Frost," she said, as if he didn't possess call display.

"Dr. Frost?" he said; needless repetition, but common enough to brush aside. "I have the rest of the team here. I'm going to put you on speakerphone."

"Very well," she said, and waited for the depth of the sounds in her ear to change.

"Go ahead," he said after a moment, hollower, lighter. She cleared her throat briskly.

"I will not have the toxicology reports for another two days," she said, and tallied, briefly, the vials and vials and jars with her eyes. "But your decedent likely died of blunt force trauma."

"Mm," he said, far away. Something rustled at the other end of the connection: a paper, perhaps. A crumpled coffee cup.

"The injuries, however," she said, "appear to have been inflicted from the inside."

"You mean internal trauma?" A light, gruff voice. Daniel Brady. A credible officer of the law, but not—and never—a doctor.

"No, Agent Brady," she said, crisp and clear, to ensure she was not misunderstood. "The trajectory of the blows is such that it indicates they were inflicted from the inside of the body outward."

There was a brief silence.

"The eighth and ninth rib are cracked with impact occurring on the inside of the ribcage," she added. "And the skull, while likely settled in transit, was impacted outward at a thirty-degree angle. The brain damage sustained is the most probable cause of death. The other injuries are comparatively minimal."

"And...nothing came out?" Brady said, slower than usual. "No holes, or...exit wounds?"

She could not have said what he was picturing, but it was certain he was picturing something. "There was no evidence of any foreign bodies, no. Just impact trauma, centered on the face."

This rustle of paper was perhaps more predictable. They would have photos in their files, just as she received an evaluation of each crime scene with the bodies. She rarely looked at them. They only biased the data.

"Maybe," another voice said—she sorted through mental recordings of gesture, pitch, syllable stress and decided Nicolette Lau—"the UNSUB was trying to prevent an ID of the body."

Lau was likely not talking to her; the tone was too quiet, too musing. "The dentition," Frost reminded, "is largely intact. And if one wished to prevent identification one would certainly remove the fingerprints."

The depth of the silence on the end of the line spread. Hopefully they would recruit another agent with medical training soon. They'd asked fewer foolish questions when Agent Worth was alive.

"There are Egyptian myths about that." Agent Villette's voice came, tinny, across the cellular connection. "That if you destroy a person's image, you destroy their afterlife."

"So that's mythology," Agent Brady said. "Or this is really, really personal."

Frost glanced at her dissection table. The drains were dark, lightly slicked under the bright, industrial lights.

"Those are my preliminary findings," she said. "I have to clean my table now."

Reyes's voice jumped in smooth after a moment. "Yes. Thank you, Dr. Frost. We'll be in touch."

"Yes," she said, and disconnected.

She would write up a more complete preliminary later that night, when the table was scrubbed and her instruments sterilized. The maintenance staff was not of the caliber of FBI special agents. They had repeatedly proved reluctant to clean an autopsy suite at 11:35 on a Saturday evening. After the third series of phone calls and forwardings and disagreements, Dr. Evans had provided her with three large bottles: detergent, sodium hypochlorite, 2% aqueous glutaraldehyde. The bleach went, dilute, to bathe the instruments. The glutaraldehyde went on the table.

Madeline leaned with both arms onto a fat yellow sponge. It scrubbed away the blood, germs, and dirt. Like a rush of soft dopamine working through a vein, order leaked slowly back into the world.

It was ten to midnight. There was an abnormal temporal lobe tumor waiting in the cooler, sent from a hospital in Tallahassee.

Surely, surely there was time for another.

•

It was not a very interesting tumor.

Madeline wrote Tallahassee about the tumor from her office: a cramped booth that opened direct into the autopsy suite. Most pathologists attached to Johns Hopkins had offices upstairs, in a wood-paneled and sunlit administrative wing, but she did not see patients. She did not entertain coroners, did not aspire to sit on the hospital executive staff. She kept an old brown desk and a set of Ikea lamps in the office, and her filing cabinets. The cabinets were light beige. She emptied them to storage every three years.

When she finished it was late: two-thirty in the morning, and the hall lights dim. Frost walked through them at habitual, efficient angles. Her flat shoes gripped the linoleum-tiled floors. The Pathology Building sounded distinct by night. The administration powered down diagnostic machines, autoclaves, lighting to conserve power, and from under them, the hum of the freezers emerged.

There was a young man at the security desk by the north door—Male, she catalogued, late twenties, Hispanic, brown eyes, black hair, approximately six feet two inches, two hundred and ten pounds. He wore a nametag: Ricky. The security officers rotated daily. It prevented familiarity.

"Would you like a walk out to your car, ma'am?" he asked. His eyes strayed to her badge, assuring himself she belonged here. Back up to her face. She did not have the kind of body young men's eyes lingered upon.

Madeline's assigned parking space was across the street from the Pathology Building. During daytime hours, she could take an indoor walkway right to the garage. In the evening it was locked. Crime was up in Baltimore since the economic crash. Most hospital entrances now shut down at six.

"Yes, thank you," she said, and Ricky's face muscles took an odd turn, and he stood and tucked his radio into his belt.

Ricky left her at her car door—a small grey Volkswagen, inoffensive and fuel-efficient—and she drove the thirteen minutes into Guilford, to the parking spot always left clear in front of her townhouse doorway. The porch light was on; an automatic timer. She locked the car door, unlocked the front door. Turned the porch light off with a flick of an inside switch.

From the inside, she thought as she shed her cushioned work shoes and placed them neatly on the shoe rack. Hm.

A flyer for sports equipment curled, solitary, on the floor underneath the mail slot. Madeline stooped to pick it up and carried it into the kitchen, to the stack of scrap paper on the rarely-set kitchen table. Put the already-full kettle on the spotless stove and turned the burner on.

Plucked the crime scene evaluation out from her black medical bag and flipped open the crisp brown folder.

It was a curiously empty crime scene: no blood spatter, no violence, no haste. A small stain darkened the brick of the building that bordered the alley, and that was all. Not much, she thought, to indicate a homicide if not for the extensive facial damage. Not much without knowing that the decedent was halfway transitioned, male to female, and that there had been a similar death three weeks prior.

She leaned back against the counter. Audrey Gillespie worked as a software developer. Two cats, divorced parents, one sibling, no human dependents. Neither lived nor worked in the neighborhood where the murder occurred. Crewed on refurbished tall ships as a hobby, and had sailed to seven countries.

Irrelevant, she thought with a sigh.

The kettle whistled. Madeline took it off the stove top, and reached into her cupboard for the bag of Sleepytime she would usually have had at the ready, if not for that crisp folder, the angle of those ribs, the rough catch of them on her glove as she caressed the naked rib cage.

From the inside, she thought again, and frowned.

Cause of death: Brain damage due to blunt force trauma.

Manner of death: TBA.

Act II

Madeline Frost, M.D. November 27, 2011, 11:32 a.m. Supplementary report to postmortem dissection of decedent Audrey Michelle Gillespie. Race: White. Age: 27. Sex: Male. Date of death: November 24, 2011.

It was bothersome.

She slept badly. Madeline did not, as a habit, remember her dreams, but she dreamed, and woke thick-eyed and uncomposed to her 7:30 alarm. She stirred an extra sugar into her morning coffee and sipped it at the kitchen counter, eggs in the frying pan and preliminary report atop the bread box. The calculations were good. There was nothing wrong with her math, her photos, her inferences.

The drive into Johns Hopkins was fifteen and a half minutes on Sunday mornings. Madeline flashed her pass to a new security guard—black female, thirty-five to forty years of age, fit, short brown hair, and conveniently labeled Jeanine—and followed the empty hallways to her lab. The morning light shut off like a faucet. There were no windows in the forensic pathology wing.

It took two hours and seventeen minutes to recalibrate all of her instruments. She did not begrudge it; keeping one's tools sharp was best practice in any case, and considering how often Greenwich Mean Time slipped, or the weight of the standard kilogram was revised these days, it was wise to ensure that one's most basic foundational assumptions hadn't shifted slightly leftward in the night. Foundations, after all, crumbled. The leaks that started their crumbling were born years and years beforehand.

She snapped on a fresh pair of nitrile gloves at the end—timed perfectly, timed exactly for the diener's arrival—and opened the cooler. Watched him lift the body with a light grunt and place it on the table.

There was nothing wrong with her calculations, and nothing wrong with her measurements. The angles of the wounds echoed the same degrees; the force cracked bone to the same depths. Her calipers clanged on the stainless steel tray. All her notes were correct. No details had been missed.

Madeline Frost closed up the body bag. Stripped off the nitrile gloves. Dialed the extension for the toxicology lab, and put a rush on the tests.

At two-thirty, an orderly tapped on the door. "Dr. Frost?" He glanced down at the charts, the photographs, the reference books spread all over her pristine autopsy suite counters. "You forgot the release form for Audrey Gillespie's remains. Can I get a signature?"

There were cases of severe internal trauma where no mark was left on the outside of the body: sports injuries. Blast damage. Car accidents, she thought, and shook the thought away. Bodies were often deceptive. Bodies outright lied. DiMaio had a case study—

"Dr. Frost?"

She looked up. "I didn't forget."

The orderly's forehead crinkled. Surprise caused certain involuntary movements in the face and forehead. One observed them frequently on decedents. "I'm sorry if I misplaced the form—"

"Hold the body, please."

"Doctor?

"I'm not finished with it yet," she said, and turned back to DiMaio.

Toxicology took two days in total. She had twenty-four hours.

There was little to do but wait.

•

It was a slow day in the laboratory, or she had frightened someone or impressed them. The toxicology results arrived a full nine hours early.

They materialized under her laboratory door in the eight short minutes it took to fix a coffee in the staff lounge on Monday morning. She returned to the sound of fading footsteps, a slight catch in the door's swing, and then the folder beneath it, damp with fading sweat. She juggled the coffee cup to her right hand and plucked the folder off the floor, spread it wide on her office desk: prostate antigen test negative, blood work a complicated cocktail of chemicals (marked up by the lab physician as consistent with hormone therapy in scrawled red felt-tip pen), no substances on the clothes or hair or skin that could not be found in an urban alleyway. The pills in the stomach were estrogen and Tylenol. No rape, no drugs, no evidence.

Madeline Frost put down her coffee, decapitated a sugar packet, and scowled.

•

Frost's acting supervisor was the assistant head of Johns Hopkins Pathology: Dr. Tenzin Dawa, male, forty-five years old, black hair, black eyes, Ph.D./M.D. University of Pennsylvania. He was regarded as popular, meticulous, and a highly ranked researcher in the subfield of gastrointestinal pathology. He largely left her alone. She largely returned the favor.

Dr. Dawa had one of the wood-paneled offices, six floors up, equipped with a long hallway and reception area, thick carpeting (entirely unsuitable for bodily fluids), and three administrative assistants. The one seated at the reception desk was tall, broad-shouldered, graying in a desultory sort of way. Frost straightened the dress jacket she kept in her office for occasions when she needed to go above stairs—the lining felt too slick on her forearms, and clinging cold—and said, "Dr. Madeline Frost to see Dr. Dawa."

To her credit, the administrative assistant did not ask if she had an appointment. She merely nodded smoothly. "Dr. Frost. I'll see if Dr. Dawa's free."

"Thank you," Frost said, and glanced around the reception. It was too formal and lush to have a magazine rack; this was not a level at which a doctor needed to exercise their power by leaving the patient waiting. The decorations were understated: photos of Johns Hopkins pathologists celebrating awards, milestones, and discoveries among a forest of conference centre podiums. The chairs in Dr. Dawa's reception were sturdy and thickly upholstered, brown against the green of the walls. She sat.

Dawa's receptionist was efficient: she returned after no more than seventy-four seconds, heeled shoes muffled by that carpet. "He'll be out in just a moment," she said, and he was; practically behind her, striding down the short hallway in his executive's suit, face pinched and expressionless.

"Dr. Frost," he said. "What seems to be the matter?"

Dr. Dawa was exceptionally polite. What did you do now? Frost translated.

It was not an unreasonable question. She had not come up to the pathology offices in over eight months. Generally, when she came up to the pathology offices, rather than remaining within the boundaries of her working environment, something was indeed the matter.

Frost held out the brown folder she'd stuffed the entire case into. "I'd like a second opinion on this."

Dr. Dawa's eyebrow rose. To his credit, the involuntary indicators of surprise cleared off his face almost quicker than they arose. "We should do this inside," he said, and motioned for her to follow.

She passed thick oak doors contrasted with door-length windows showing the head pathologist's office, empty and dark; a room lined floor to ceiling with installed file drawers; a kitchen nook, countered, with a microwave and commercial fridge. The door to Dawa's office was open, and she saw the edge of a grey-suited man—white, fifty or above, six-foot, no—drat—before he steered her into an empty small conference room by the simple expedient of blocking the hallway with his own lean frame.

He shut the door softly behind them, and pulled out a leather-backed chair to sit. She took the cue, and sat in her own. Put the folder down on the polished oak table and slid it across, within mutual reach.

"Anything in particular?" he asked.

"I'd rather not bias your opinion," Frost replied, and withdrew her hand.

"All right," Dawa said, slower than usual, and opened the brown file.

Frost controlled the urge to lean forward as Dawa's eyes skimmed the paper, the pictures; as he flipped through the charts and tests and police reports. The view outside was impressive, even on a cloudy fall day such as this: leaf-shed trees, and lawns, and the wandering paths of the medical campus, and then straight across the unfolding buildings and byways of Baltimore. She turned away from the window. Sat straight and firm, and watched the twitches of his fingers instead.

"I won't ask if you're sure," he said finally, looking up at her with a small, dry smile.

She inclined her head. "Thank you. I verified every measurement."

"And this is one of your FBI cases?" he asked. Her consultancy was a sideline, but it was a prestigious one for the department. Or so she was informed. She was not asked to meet with any donors, or give any lectures, and her photograph was not on the wall amid the podiums and plush. Thankfully.

"It is," she said. "The confidentiality requirements are rigorous. But if you're familiar with any case studies with similar findings, I would prefer to give a complete report."

Dawa nodded thoughtfully. His eyes strayed back down to the paper. "I'm going to ask Eunice to make me a personal copy of this."

Frost waited. The inquiring note, the allusion to permission, was social courtesy. He was not a boss who ruled through giving orders, but he was nonetheless her boss.

"If I find anything," he said, and shut the file carefully, and stood, "I'll get back to you."

"Thank you," she said, and meant it, and stood as well. Class dismissed.

Eunice, the receptionist—black female, five feet three inches tall, age approximately forty-five to fifty years, she filled in belatedly—vanished momentarily into the file room, and then handed her the original file, neatened and in order. "Thank you," she said again, and navigated through the sunshiny halls to the elevator. The jacket pulled across her shoulders. The hospital staff she passed slid their eyes past her, chattered over her head. The metal doors of the elevator opened before her and then closed behind her.

She pressed the second basement button. The jacket lining stuck to her elbow like dead skin. She reached up and peeled it, curling, away; felt the recycled air on her forearms, and reveled in the regained ability to breathe.

•

The phone was ringing when she opened the autopsy suite door.

Two rings, high and sharp: the FBI phone. Frost stalked across the room, shoes squeaking softly on tile—no one, at least, objected to a pathologist wearing sensible shoes—and reached her desk on the fifth ring. The cell phone had come with preprogrammed numbers. The call display spat up Reyes.

She had rarely been in a position where she was unsure what to say to Stephen Reyes. It was an uncomfortable proposition.

The sixth ring echoed off the tiled walls of her office, and she pushed the talk button hard.

"This is Dr. Frost," she said, and the line was buffeted by a blow, or a breath, or the wind.

"Frost?" Reyes said—and did not bother to identify himself, oddly enough—"Do you have a moment?"

"Yes," she said, mildly unnerved. Simple questions did not make her jump. The echoes of her own office did not make her jump. "I have the toxicology results from your decedent. There was nothing out of normal parameters, and no fiber or DNA evidence, and neither I nor my acting supervisor can explain the results."

"Your supervisor?"

"Yes," she replied, and awaited the barrage of questions.

But Stephen Reyes seemed to wave off the mystery as if it were an errant breeze. "Any sexual assault?" he asked tersely.

"None. There are some additional tests I might run—"

He cut her off before she could even draw breath to enumerate them. "That's fine. We have another body."

Eagerness flooded her mouth. "Send it," she answered.

Cause of death: Brain damage due to blunt force trauma.

Manner of death: Undetermined.

Act III

Madeline Frost, M.D. November 27, 2011, 2:42 p.m. Postmortem dissection of decedent Simone Stephanie Carter. Race: White. Age: 35. Sex: Male. Date of death: November 27, 2011.

The second body arrived early that afternoon, by air. It was escorted to Frost's autopsy room by a pair of uniformed federal marshals, jacketed in black nylon over crisp-pleated pants. One Hispanic male, thirty years of age; one black female, approximately forty-two years of age—she began, and then the staff attendant placed the body on the table, and there were more important things to do.

Frost had already scrubbed her hands clean. She tugged two nitrile gloves from a box of one hundred and pulled them snug; unzipped the body bag.

The decedent was fresh. Rigor mortis was just setting in, stiffening up muscles and limbs. She pulled the bag wide, opened its jaws to expose the face. It was bloodstained, nose-broken, wrecked. Just now darkening with bruises.

One of the federal marshals coughed. Frost looked up, impatient. He extended a brown folder in one tentative hand. The chain of custody form for the body, and the FBI's file. The useless file.

"On the counter," she said sharply, and inked her precise signature in the three denoted blanks. Turned, crisply, back to the body. White, and older. Dried blood splashed about the blouse, the loose skirt; the two-inch-heel shoes were muddy with it. No indication as to whether the involuntary mechanisms of surprise had taken hold on—she glanced at the tag—Simone Stephanie Carter. The decedent's face was destroyed.

She snapped three brisk digital photographs. Unbuttoned the blouse, neck to tails; then cuffs. This decedent's bra was stuffed with shaped prosthetics, soft breast forms like the ones made for cancer survivors. She strode to the counter and flipped open the file, avoiding everything but the medical history. There was no mention of cancer, but there was a plastic surgeon, and a listed therapist, endocrinologist, and GP.

Male-to-female transition, she read. Not as far along, then. Or hoping, through hormone therapy, to grow natural breasts.

At least I won't need the clamps, she thought, and took the next set of pictures.

The marshals stood at attention while she filled the pan she would use to wash the body clean with warm water, secured a clean cloth, laid out sample bags and vials, and turned on her digital recorder. She prepped until there was no more prep work to do, and then looked up at them with an impatient eye. The male twitched slightly. The female rubbed both hands down the uncreased hem of her jacket, and said, "We'll leave you to it, then."

"Thank you," Frost said—Get out—and turned on the recorder.

She noted the clothing, layer by layer: color, state, position. Moved her magnifier over every inch, its light blasting too-white onto bloodless skin, delicate tweezers held loose in her left hand. There was a fiber, here and there. She gathered every one.

There was something pasty on the eyelids: thick and clear and shining under the bright light of her lamp. Abrasions on the face, but too far away to have seeped there. She lifted one eyelid, then the other.

A pair of bloodied holes stared back at her.

No, she corrected, when she had adjusted her light, tamped down all the unprofessional, involuntary responses. The eyeballs were in there, just deflated; fluids had clumped the lashes together and dried in the corners of each socket. No wonder the lids had stayed so decorously closed, bouncing along in the body bag. Cautiously, so cautious, she scraped flecks of dried something off the eyelids, and into an evidence bag.

Went searching, hair by hair, for more.

She caught the second glint on the left-hand fingertips: dried, shiny fluid coating them like melted gloves. It had run down the fingers to the first joint. Ended there.

She scraped lightly under a fingernail; held the tip of her pick to the light. Blood, crusted dry. In half-moons along both hands, dug deep under the nails.

Aha, she thought, and grabbed for an evidence bag.

•

The tests did not take a day and a half this time. They came back after barely four hours. And not with an orderly, or slid under the door; with a technician, tall and ponytailed, still in her lab coat.

"That was quick," Frost said, and fought the urge to reach out for the wadded, pressed printouts. The technician guarded the packet of papers close, blithely unaware of the social cues inherent. Frost settled her hand on her counter, to keep the fingers from drumming.

"Dr. Dawa's fast-tracked your lab requests," the technician said, glancing around the autopsy suite. It was spotless: table clean and every jar, bag, and fluid in its proper place, no posters or pictures on the walls. The undisguised curiosity in her eyes shuttered, then went dark. "I've got tox, multiple blood test IDs, and fiber samples. The impact stuff will have to wait until tomorrow; Rashid's out with a cold."

Frost tipped her a sharp nod and took the packet of papers. Four hours. They must have pulled half their laboratory off of everything. The grain of those papers was so very thin.

Dawa's professional interest could be useful. If she didn't spend all the time she'd gain not waiting fending off administrative inquiries, deflecting scrutiny. Waiting for staff half her age from other departments to escort themselves off her doorstep.

The technician's gaze had fixed itself: on her desk, with its tidy in-and-out tray, its single lamp, its wall-mounted shelf of anatomy books. "Oh hey, you do origami?" she said.

"Pardon?" Frost asked.

The technician pointed. Ah. She'd seen the caribou, folded crisp, head high and scenting some papery invisible wind, perched on the base of Frost's desk lamp. The skin was brown, textured. Tissue-thin.

"Yes, that's mine," Frost said, and skimmed the first page. Similar hormones in play, but at lower levels. No intoxicants. No convenient way to say her decedent had slipped on the floor and cracked her face into pieces, or gouged out her eyes on a convenient loose tile.

Drat, she thought first, but easy answers were for simple people. So, then: Good.

"There's this great origami mobile in the kids' ward," the technician rattled on. "Oncology. With all these colors and a little green frog, and a raccoon that opens its mouth when you pull the tail—"

"Mm-hmm," Frost said, and flipped the printed page to read the second.

"—someone donated it and it's just a work of art, the kids love it," she said.

"It's not that hard," Frost said. Reread the page. Hoped the tech might stop talking.

"How do you learn to do that?" the technician breathed.

Madeline remembered distinct soft hands, large on hers. Long, concealing hair. The tip of an adult nose. Fold, and crease, and then gently, tug just so—

"My mother taught me," she said, and put the packet down. Hospital paper was blank, anonymous, efficient. It made impermanent figures at best: designed to be filed, tucked away, recycled. "The impact studies will be forwarded?"

The technician leaned back, just a little. "Yes, right away," she said, professional again, and crisp. Frost was not her boss, but one could still issue a dismissal.

Frost looked away when the shadow had faded down the hall; when the hum of her lights took over as the high note ringing in her ears.

One body could be an oddity. Two was much, much more.

She stood and went to her computer.

Agent Reyes, she typed in, above the digital document copies that were somehow slower in arriving than young lab technicians eager to snoop, here is your preliminary data. Please telephone as soon as possible.

Bodies had rules, even the ones that came by way of Stephen Reyes. And she was going to find out how these two had broken them.

•

They called within the hour.

"Dr. Frost," Reyes said, backed by a soft chorus of shifts and shuffles, echoes too close — indoors, then, and not alone. "We're all here if you'd like to brief us."

She did not want to brief them. She wanted to speak to him about tile floors, and circumstances, and crime scenes. She wanted information. "Very well," she said. One for one was a solid rate of exchange. It would present better than just asking.

"Your decedent," she started, "shows factors consistent with the previous subject: elevated hormonal levels consistent with gender reassignment, a cracked skull, and insufficient evidence of impact trauma. Although this one," she added, "had enough damage to the skull that it was unclear where the blow trajectory began. The fall to the floor destroyed it."

"But the blows should have come from the inside?" Daniel Brady pressed.

"There was one fracture," Frost said. "Left arm. And no evidence of impact with an object on that arm that was at all consistent with the angle of fracture."

No evidence of an impact with an object at all, actually. Just splintered bone and torn muscle, and no physical explanations.

Someone's breath whuffed out. "So. Definitely one of ours," Brady said.

Frost shifted in her chair. It turned noiselessly; it was old, but well-maintained. "Another thing," she added. "There were traces on the fingernails. Blood," she said, "and vitreous humor. Both belonging to the decedent."

"She tried to dig it out," Villette said, faint.

The thing in her head, yes, Frost filled in, and felt the disappointment resurface. There was a reason the pathologist's job was to merely report the facts, and not to pursue theories, causes, motives. They made you want things. They slanted your ability to observe and synthesize evidence.

Define, she asked herself, in anatomical terms, "the thing in her head."

"That's correct, Agent Villette," she said instead.

There was little else to tell them: old bleach on the skin, from the tiled floor of the washroom where the body had been located. The contents of one last meal. Scratches on the face. Eyelashes. Skin.

From their reaction, or lack of it: no new evidence.

"Well," Reyes said, taking the ends of the conversation smoothly in hand. "Thank you for your time."

"Agent Reyes," she said, and cleared her throat lightly. "Might I speak with you privately?"

Her cooler hummed. Someone's shoes squeaked down the hall, past her door, and away to parts unknown. A throat cleared on the other end of the line. "I don't see why not," Reyes said, and the echo of the telephone connection drew smaller, closer, as he switched off speakerphone.

"Is everything all right?" Reyes asked, and he did not appear to mean it as what did you do now?

"Agent Reyes," she said, and shifted the sheet of paper so the corners lined up right. "Tell me more about this case."

There was a short silence. "You don't usually ask that," he said.

That was true. She glanced over her shoulder, at the square door of the cooler where the body of Simone Carter lay. "Bodies have rules," she said—repeated, though he did not know it. "Even the ones you bring me."

"I'd be curious too," he said blandly. An attempt to lighten the mood. She ignored him.

"And remember I'm not a profiler, Agent Reyes," she said. "Please explain the terms as you go."

The breath he let out may have been annoyed or amused. It did not bear analyzing. "All right," he said, and cleared his throat. "We have a few things to go on. This UNSUB stays in a fairly small pool of victims: white, late twenties to early thirties, transitioning from male to female. The fact that he can find them means he's at least partially a member of their community, someone they're familiar and comfortable with—a restaurant waiter, a neighbor, a friend—and the narrowness of his victim pool tells us that he's thinking of someone in particular when he kills: someone he knows, or himself, who he wants to kill again and again."

The cadence of his voice had changed. There were fewer edges to it. Professorial, she decided; he had been a teacher. "Go on."

"You've told us there's no sexual component. No damage to the genitals."

"There's not," she confirmed. Remembered those false, rounded, inconvenient breasts.

"Then there's a strong chance this isn't purely a hate crime. There are stories about men who kill male-to-female transitioners because they find out they're not originally women, and either can't handle their own attraction or strike out from shock or betrayal. But there's no anger focused on those parts of the body; it's focused on the face. So this is probably more complicated than that."

"Probably?" she asked, and shifted the phone to her other ear.

"Probably," Reyes said. "Profiling's an inexact science. We draw from what's probable. Guidelines."

"You rule out the evidence that's not there," she said, suddenly comfortable, suddenly sure. Not so far away from autopsy after all.

"That's right," he said, a little surprised. "And the sexual element's not there. The crime scenes are also wrong for the kind of sustained privacy a hate crime suspect tends to want: They like dark fields and tall trees," he said dryly.

There was a space left for her to laugh in. She did not opt to take it, but she marked it as an offering, just as dry.

"The alley was plausible," Reyes continued. Unlike the younger agents, he did not wobble, did not ever lose stride. "The library washroom, and a neighborhood Laundromat with street-facing windows? They aren't: too high a chance of interruption, too many people around to identify them, and not enough time with the victim. These pattern more like blitz attacks: a lot of stalking and planning, and then a sudden, short amount of violence."

"Unexplained violence," she said. Violent force springing up quick, and quiet, and without DNA or fiber remains. The hole in her facts that was that violence.

"Anomalous violence," Reyes said, and she thought perhaps he was agreeing. "And the more we know about how he kills, the more we can figure out why, in his head, he kills."

And then catch him and put him in Idlewood, Frost finished. Or provide a specimen for her to examine. She scrunched up her nose. Either way, there could be more data at the end of the line. Data that would make sense, if she could help them find their suspect.

"He's also accelerating his timetable," Reyes continued. The emotional response he gets from each kill is wearing off quicker every time. He's going to get sloppier. And more violent."

And more people are going to die, she filled in. And those deaths, bodies sent to her autopsy suite to lie there as mysteries, as undetermined, would be useless.

"And what can I do to assist?" Frost asked.

To Stephen Reyes's credit, he did not smile indulgently at her; that pull of the lips would have been audible, or the seconds-thin slowing of the pace of the words that told you that no, you could not possibly handle this, and you were not needed here. Go back to bed, her memory whispered, and she shook it irritably off. "I'm not sure," he said, serious; thoughtful and thinking. "Right now what we're doing is trying to establish why these victims. Something else has to connect them: whether it's a place they've all been, or someone they all know. Geographic profiling and victimology. We've only come up with one thing, and"—he paused—"it's too intangible to pursue well."

"What's that?" she asked. Put the pen down.

"All three posted an It Gets Better video in the past six weeks."

Madeline's hand paused on the pen. "Pardon?"

"It Gets Better," he said, and maybe now a touch of that indulgence was there, but never mind it, never mind. "Video messages from gay adults to teenagers who are being bullied in high schools. It was on the news a few months back."

"I don't watch the news, Agent Reyes," she said. "Too many unpleasant stories."

Reyes made a noise that was something like a harrumph, and yet curiously unflappable. "I'll send you the specific links," he said. "Right now it's our main connection between the victims."

"That they were public as transgendered persons?" Frost said.

Reyes paused; the tone of his voice went low, surprised. "Perhaps," he said. "Or maybe just that they were happy."

•

"Hi," the speaker-flattened voice said, drawl-inflected, uncertain. "My name's Simone. When I was born I was Simon."

A slender arm reached out. Adjusted the camera. It slowly refocused, close: an anonymous blur of skin, and then eyes, nose, mouth.

"When I was in grade three I was getting picked on—I was getting picked on already in kindergarten. But this one day some kid called me a homo, a fag, a queer, and I just couldn't handle it anymore. I walked right out of the classroom, down the hall, no idea where I was going. I have no idea where the teacher was. There was this big window, and I stopped and looked out over the schoolyard and the street, not knowing where to go, what to do. And...they'd followed me out. They were right behind me. And this skinny guy, this wiseass nasty little kid, said, 'Hey, gonna jump? Why don't you jump?'"

A crimp of the mouth. The tiny digital lines of lips, tinted with reddish-brown lip gloss, pulling into fences.

Madeline Frost sat cross-legged at her kitchen table with her hand around a mug of cold tea, and watched.

(Hey there queer kids, Audrey Gillespie's reconstructed face, throat, lips said. My name's Audrey. Here you go, thinking, "Just some asswipe on the Internet telling me my problems not real problems," right? But I been there. My life from eight to eighteen was nothing, and I mean nothing, but sharks. I don't know how they knew. I didn't know. I just—I got that I was different. But I didn't know.)

"They say that suicide's contagious: that it's some kind of thought virus that you can spread around like AIDS. Well, I didn't stop thinking about it. I didn't stop hearing that little voice that asked me if I was gonna jump for years and years, every time something got bad. Every time I didn't know what to do there it was, whispering in my ear."

(Then, y'know—shift of the chair, of the chin; hair pushed out of the face—I got older, and I start growing all this hair on my arms and chest. And it doesn't feel like something to be proud of, becoming a man. A pause. It feels like filth. It felt like a tumor.)

Audrey Gillespie's bedroom was small, white-walled, darkened: the hump of a futon mattress off to one side, and the edge of a particleboard prefab desk clearly visible where her hand gripped and gripped the edge, turning the knuckles pale. Simone Carter sat on a couch, overstuffed green velvet. It was wreathed in pillows and fringe. The seat on one of the cushions was frayed. Secondhand, Frost noted. Well-loved.

"Here are the things you'll have to do to go into gender reassignment therapy. You have to go to a therapist for three months before you can get a referral for hormone therapy. Then they can refer you to a doctor. Then you need to get a lawyer, to help change all your ID and documents."

(I didn't want anyone to see my body. I wore long sleeves all summer for years. I think some of my teachers thought my parents were hitting me, and y'know? Crooked smile. That would've been easier to explain.)

"I spent two years going for electrolysis, so someone could burn the hair off my face and arms, one at a time, for an hour a week." A rueful grimace. "I lost forty pounds right up front, 'cause when you start taking the hormones it messes with your metabolism. I took voice lessons so I didn't talk so much like a man."

(Y'see, I'm not supposed to be a dude. Inside, I'm Audrey. And when I figured that out? It got better. I don't know how. I don't know if they could smell the knowing on me, or if I just walked different or what. I guess—sheepish smile—I don't know much. But I do know this.)

"And you know what?" A lean in, filling up the lens. "It was all worth it. And you know what?"

(It gets better, Audrey said, and reached out a hand to blank the webcam dark.)

"It gets better," Simone Carter said, and smiled a wide, shy smile Frost would not have been able to detect from the dental evidence. "I promise."

The video ended. Madeline Frost rubbed her arms, warding off an errant chill. Something crinkled in her palm. She looked down: she'd folded the sports equipment flyer from the top of the paper stack, unconscious, automatic, into a crease-edged paper crane.

(—soft, large hands; fingernails chipped. Hands showing her where to put her own on the paper, and a voice twice as soft. A voice that was never raised in all the time she could remember except for once, hoarse and feeble, outside a nighttime window.)

She closed her eyes. Put the garish-colored crane down, and laid her hands flat on the table. She was not going to go into this. She had decided, long ago, that there was no useful information to be had there, and she had signed the bodies away.

(—floral perfume. Light hair around her fingertips. Soft, bewildered, frightened voices calling and calling her name.)

A branch scratched at the kitchen window. She jumped. It sounded like thin fingers.

"It is nine thirty-five," she told herself quietly. "You are fifty-one years old, and you are in your house in Guilford, Maryland, in the United States of America."

Your mother is dead, she added silently, savagely. Your father is deader. You were only nine years old.

The screen of the laptop stared back at her. Play again? it queried, silently, flashing images of a dozen, a hundred earnest faces across the black space where those two dead ones had lived.

"No," she told it, and shut the browser down. The wind blew. The branches scratched again. She made a note to have the tree pruned, and to seal the windows against the cold that surely must be coming through the gaps between their panes. Observable facts. And evidentiary likelihoods. Those were the things one could work with.

You should have done something, the little voice whispered, like a clean, sharp cut.

Madeline Frost tugged at the crane's beak, sharp as a peck. The delicate paper wings bowed, and then dissolved.

Cause of death: Cardiac arrest due to circulatory shock.

Manner of death: Undetermined.

Act IV

Madeline Frost, M.D. November 29, 2011, 11:03 a.m. Postmortem dissection of decedent Vincent James Beach. Race: White. Age: 22. Sex: Male. Date of death: November 29, 2011.

The telephone woke her.

Madeline had been dreaming. She blinked her eyes, focused on the molded white ceiling of the house that had been hers for years; peeled away the overlay of another house she'd lived in, another time, another bedroom not much larger than this one. The phone trilled; not her landline, she realized, as her hand found the alarm clock, her handset, mashed buttons on both to no avail. It was the FBI cell phone.

She fumbled at her sparse brown wood nightstand and thumbed it on.

"Hello?" she said, surprised at how thick and old her voice was after all.

"Dr. Frost?" Agent Villette's voice came, higher, out of the phone. "I'm sorry, did I—"

She opted not to let him finish. "Yes," she said, limbs still locked and stiff, heart still racing. Adrenaline, she noted, detached. The body's response to perceived threat, even if no threat was actually present. Her mouth tasted tangy and sour.

It was an old dream. It no longer surprised her, and neither did the fear.

"It doesn't matter," she said, half to herself, into the phone. "What is it?"

"Well, ah—" he said, all poise gone. He was a kind man. She waited for him to recover it, fingers plucking at the bedsheets, grasping for the edges of her own. "We have another body. And Agent Reyes said I was"—another pause—"to brief you."

"That's correct," she said, and rubbed her eyes. "Please wait a moment. I need to get a pen."

Madeline Frost did not leave a pen and paper beside her bed. The notions she had during sleep were foolish ones, dead issues and old data, and anything sufficiently productive would not need to be written down. She swung both legs onto the small rug and padded into the hallway, checking, old as lifelong habit, that each door was as open as she'd left it; each room still dark and empty. The counter in the bathroom sparkled in the morning sun. The handles of her office desk drawers were positioned just so. She took a fresh yellow legal pad from one of them, selected a ballpoint pen. "Thank you, Agent Villette. Please proceed."

"We have another victim," he said, clipped; matching, tone to tone, her dredged-up professionalism. "Fitting the same profile as the last ones: white, young, and transgendered. She was called in two hours ago, from a city bus shelter, by one of the other commuters. The glass is shattered." He paused. "Nobody saw anything."

Impact damage, she thought, mind wakening. Savored the disjunct feeling of being briefed on a murder, instead of briefing another. "Send me photographs of the broken glass as well, please. And there were fluids?"

Villette's tone stayed unwaveringly neutral. Implausibly so. "There were."

"Samples from the scene as well. And the eyes? Is that consistent to the last decedent?"

He cleared his throat. "There, ah, isn't enough left of the face to tell."

She felt the odd urge to console him; Charles Villette, pale and wounded, wired in a hospital bed with his father's knife wounds on his back. "That's all right," she said. "I'll make do."

The space on the telephone was awkward; even tired, she could tell. Frost cleared her throat. "Is there anything else pertinent?"

"We're checking to see if she made an It Gets Better video. There are people down at the community center here who'll know. And we'll be looking into which doctors approved the surgery."

"Oh?" she said. That had not been a part of Reyes's investigation.

"Yeah," Villette said. "Something Agent Reyes thought of yesterday."

"Very well, then," she said, the indefinable sense of someone else's theory tickling at the inside of her skull. "I'll contact your team when the autopsy is complete."

"Yes," Villette said, awkward again. "Thanks," and hung up.

The sun came in the window, dappled with the shadows of oak leaves. The branches pressed up against the panes like fingers. She really had to do something about that tree.

Madeline showered and dressed slowly. The house was chill, and night tension made her limbs ache. Her sweater was utilitarian, and her pressed pants; she would change into scrubs at the hospital in any case, and likely wear them throughout the day. She did not taste her breakfast.

She disarmed the alarm system to unlock the door, and armed it again before leaving. The leaves were drifting onto her small porch. She dusted them away with one foot and locked both locks tight.

The car was slightly warmer. She tucked herself into the driver's seat, handbag stashed securely in the passenger's. Shut the door, reached down.

Her hand wavered on the seat-belt buckle—

(—a reach; a soft click; a yank of the wheel and then tuck the chin, surprised shouting drowning out the radio, curl up tight and brace One-Mississippi Two-Mississippi Three, brace for impact—)

—and clicked it shut. Joined the strap together. Put the keys in the ignition, and started her car.

•

The body was waiting when she arrived at the hospital, still just as discomfited. The late November sun streamed through the doorway and petered out along the hall. Two marshals were waiting in her doorway with an envelope, the appropriate forms. She took them and felt the stiffness of a cardboard folder. Directed the marshals to the cafeteria. There was nowhere in her hallway to sit.

Frost brought the files inside and left them on the counter. Opened up the cooler, and stepped inside.

It was impossible to miss the new cadaver. The drape of the body bag was wrong: two legs, two arms, and a dented, misshapen ruin. Frost circled it carefully; took hold of the gurney handles, and began to push. The dented thing flapped slightly with the motion. She watched it move over the smooth tile floor. Pondered asking for assistance in transferring the body to the table; in the end, just lined the gurney up gently, braked it at the edge of the table, and pulled.

The bag slid smoothly off the gurney and onto her bright-lit table.

The setup was mechanical: recorder, and tools, and buckets and bags. She went into her office and closed the door, and changed into the fresh pair of scrubs and goggles kept there.

It was waiting for her when she stepped back out. She donned new gloves, one after the other, and unzipped the bag.

The right side of the jaw was torn nearly off its hinge. Acceleration. Escalation, Frost thought—profiler word, motive word — and charted teeth automatically, marking which were stable, which were broken, which were knocked out of the jaw. The front incisors were bowed forward like broken white masts. Their roots shoved against the gumline. Bent from the inside, out.

Trajectories of force, spilling, shoving out of eyes and nose and mouth.

There is an order to this, she told herself, mildly shocked that she'd even thought to violate it. The teeth should, at the moment, be nonexistent. The teeth were secondary until she had taken her initial photographs; catalogued the clothing and trace evidence and examined every inch of skin.

She reached for her camera, and her hand hovered over the file, the prejudicing, irrelevant, useless file.

She opened it.

There were multiple angles to the pictures: back, side, above, below, all blurred with the distortion of thick industrial glass. Orange markers scattered like raindrops across the sidewalk, marking drops of blood, blue-edged shards of glass, crumpled dropped tissues. The break in the glass indeed qualified as shattered; chips crumpled and fell from a bull's-eye target broken clean through, and the remains were smeared with blood and skull fragments.

The body slumped through that broken pane, head lolling forward and still half-seated on the shelter bench, like a sack of drowned cats.

No witnesses, she reminded herself, and spread the lips of the body bag wide to give the camera enough light.

"This is the postmortem dissection of decedent Vincent James Beach," she said into the softly blinking recorder as the images on her digital camera stuttered and set—she had turned off the false shutter sound five minutes after its first use. "White male, twenty-two years of age, date of death November 29, 2011. Presiding pathologist is Madeline Frost, M.D."

She took six close-up angles of the ruined head, the mouth. They shivered silently in frame and blinked into bright-lit reality.

"Clothing," she said into the recorder, with a little cough. "One button-down shirt, purple, three-quarter sleeve; undisturbed. One pair black pants, zipper and buttons intact. One pair black socks. One necklace, blue glass charm hung from a black cord—"

The icicle teeth splayed out from behind red lipstick. She reached one-handed for her tweezers, and plucked carefully at a hair, matted in blood, on the black nylon cord of the necklace.

The upper right canine gave, and tinkled to the floor.

•

Afterward, she went to her computer and navigated to YouTube, her fingers wrinkled and cold from the grip of the gloves and the anti-heat of the body. There were whole channels of them, labeled and sorted and weighed by geography, by age and identity. It didn't take her long to find the video.

"Hi there," the face said, barely recognized, unrecognizable. "I'm Vin. I'm just turning twenty-two now, and"—hesitation—"this is my last day of looking like a man."

The high forehead tilted up. The face was angular and smiling; smiling like a getaway.

"Yeah, I know that this is gonna take years. I've been waiting ever since I was four years old for this, and I just got off probation at my new job today, and y'know what that means? It means I've got a salary for the first time ever. I don't have to keep waiting anymore."

"So here's my to-do list." One long hand held it up: black-marker block letters, neatly printed for the camera: electrologist, therapy appointment, insurance company calls, pretty new dress. "Here's all the things I'm going to do this weekend. And I'm kinda hoping you'll stick with me and watch while I do it, because just like our buddy Dan says, it gets better. And I'm going to prove it to you."

The list fluttered down. The eyelids fluttered, a slow blink.

"I'm not going to be trapped in here anymore," that smiling mouth said. "I'm planning the Great Escape. I'm getting out of here, and I'm going to be a butterfly. And I'm going to show you every step of the way."

She had no results. There was no reason to make a formal phone call. She was not a profiler, and whatever her experience with the anomalous, she dealt in facts and actualities, and not metaphor, theory, the workings of other people's thoughts. It was not a qualified suggestion to make.

She typed the address of the video into her FBI cell phone, and sent it, text-message, to Stephen Reyes.

The answer came three hours later: TY. Important. Will call. Stand by.

•

Shouting was usual. In the house, there was always shouting. Silence of this quality was not.

(It is January 20, 1969; there is no saying what time of night, because this is when Madeline learned to pay attention to time, its numbers dripping like fluid from an IV bag, like spit in the mouth, like blood. It is also the afternoon of November 29, 2011; an office door shut and locked firmly behind her, an hour of bleary desk-chair nap, and Madeline Frost has had this nightmare before.)

She sat up in bed. The silence had woke her, and not the shouting; the smell of something cold and unexpected, outside the parameters of her world. She sat very still and very quiet in bed, seeking with her eardrums. Listening for clues.

Shh, she told her heartbeat, just like Mama told her when she sent her upstairs on the bad nights, but it chattered noisily on.

There was a sound downstairs, finally; a click. A catch, and three heavy footsteps.

Madeline slid her feet out from under the blankets and set them on the floor. Her weight eased onto them, a little at a time. She crept to the bedroom door, and opened it, and peered outside.

Her parents' door was open. No lights were on in the bedroom, not in the bathroom, not in the hall. The hall light downstairs shone like a yellowed moon, and so she tiptoed to the banister, looked down through its rungs. Tried, hesitantly, a couple stairs.

Her father was in the living room, pulling down the blinds. Dust puffed out from their accordion slats; they had not been moved in a while, left wide open for the sparse light of winter to come in and touch the floors. He fumbled and tugged with his big fingers noiselessly, lips pressed together, face spotted on the cheeks with furious red. No swears, no complaints, no calling for Mama to clean this damn house, or fix this stupid shit, or even to bring him a rag for it. Utterly, absolutely silent.

The banister creaked. He turned around.

There were only two mirrors in the Frost household: one in Madeline's little bathroom, and one in her father's. She was close to neither. There was no way of telling what involuntary things her face spoke; how she succeeded, or failed, at schooling it to silence.

And silence was important. Silence was everything.

He regarded her, tight-wound, deliberate. She stared back, not sure where to go, not wanting to ask, Where's Mama? or What's going on?

"I had a bad dream," she said, lamely. She was a terrible liar. It was a terrible lie.

He looked at her a moment longer, and then wiped his hands on his jeans.

"Maddy," he said, rough as a splintered rib cage. "Go back to bed."

She watched his heaving, sweat-soaked shirt; his red face; the ruffle of cold air in his perfectly kept hair. The air was sharp with frostbite.

There was a vein pulsing in his fist, jumpy. Hungry.

It was thirty-one minutes past eleven. She went back to bed.

•

—and woke with a start, neck cramped and arm bloodless and tingling, in the blackness of her hospital office.

She fumbled at her desk for a light; pulled the cord of the lamp, and its green-tinged brilliance hurt her eyes. She squinted against it and rubbed her eyes. Twenty minutes past five.

Stephen Reyes's last text message sat there, fat and waiting. There was one missed call. Just seconds ago; the phone must have woke her. She hadn't recognized the noise. She rubbed her eyes, hit the redial button immediately, brought it up past short, mussed hair to her ear.

Stephen Reyes's phone rang, and he picked up immediately. His voice was thick and crackly, broken by bad signal and acres of noise. "Reyes," he said, sharp and automatic.

"Agent Reyes," she said, "It's Dr. Frost. I was indisposed for a moment—"

"That's all right," he said, and seemed to draw in a breath, backpedal. "We have a suspect. It was a good lead. We're performing the operation now."

Performing the operation, she thought, and it was a scalpel-thought: black-vested, fit, sharp people reaching into a small house in a small city in a small corner of the world and excising the cancer with a twist of the edge.

"His name is Leslie James," Reyes continued. "He's forty-one, white, works as a QA analyst for a computer company. And was turned down for gender reassignment multiple times by multiple doctors."

Profiler details, she thought. Unimportant things, while their suspect was still living and breathing.

"What sort of"—she paused—"operation are you referring to?" she asked.

Reyes breathed out, and there was something funny and grim in his tone on the heels of it. "He's barricaded himself in his apartment. Lau is trying to talk him out."

And there was a soft voice mixed in with all that crackle: a firm and kindly Leslie, we can solve this problem here— and soft shuffling, too much to be wind. It was Reyes's earpiece, interfering with the cellular signal held so close; blending and bleeding together.

A reply to it, high, thin, strained: The problem is I'm trapped. The problem is I can't get out.

The Great Escape, she realized, and shifted the phone in her hand. Not the probable rings and rings of police officers surrounding this unnamed building in an unknown city block. That body. That life. Her parents' house.

"And then he'll go to Idlewild," she said to Reyes still waiting on the other end of the line; Reyes who might cut off her channel to those soft voices if she did not provide him more questions.

"That's the goal," he said, distracted; just as distracted as she by the conversation whispering in the background. "We don't have the staff capacity for reassignment surgery, but Ramachandran can probably bring in a consultant."

All you wanted, right? Lau's voice ghosted across the line. To get out of your body.

Tired of being stuck. The reply came dark, hardened. Tired of hearing how I'd make a fucking terrible woman. They told me it was just a body, just a step. They said I could come out of it like a butterfly, they always say WAIT AND WAIT—

Idlewood; Frost considered it. Closed doors. Four thick walls. A house in the country, loveless, far away, where you could live under the microscope and never blend in. Never escape the scrutiny of the different or damaged.

What can I do to assist? she'd asked, and now there was an answer. Her throat went dry, and that still place, that quiet place in her head emerged, gently, guiding her through the next words like a steering hand. "That's a cruel bargain, Agent Reyes," she said.

"Yes," he replied.

The files lay stacked beneath her hand, the top folder slightly creased where she'd laid her head to sleep. She smoothed it; the crease would not come out.

Leslie, Agent Lau's garbled voice said.

And then the phone moved away from that breath, or the breath from the phone. There was a moment of silence, then a flurry of noise: steps and shouting and then the explosions lit her ear up, blotted out everything, turned it to static.

Five shots. Then a sixth, an afterthought, aftershot, ringing over the phone line loud and out of tune. Footsteps echoed, stampeding, on the other end of the line. There were shouts; a crack, blurred and dim as a skull breaking. The wind blew over the receiver.

She clutched the phone tighter. Stared at the wall.

And then—

"Frost?" Reyes said. He was panting.

"Is everyone safe?" she blurted. The adrenaline taste fluttered through her mouth. She stood straight and tall, irreproachable, unmoving. Hand tight around the phone.

"He charged the police line. He's dead. I'm sorry," Reyes said, after a moment. The buzz of noise, of activity, had slackened. The quiet crept back in.

"I—" she started, and wet her dry lips. "I expect to see the subject as soon as is practicable."

•

They found Charlotte Jane Frost (age thirty-five, white female, blond hair, brown eyes) in the snowbank the next morning, after her husband reported her missing; after the county officer noted the house slipper sticking out in the back field, well back from the county road; after, at dawn, Gerard Frost unlocked the door.

Autopsies were cruder things then. The county coroner—a coroner, not a pathologist—measured the blood alcohol level and the creep up arms and ankles of the blackened, staining frostbite, and declared the manner of death to be misadventure. Everyone in the county knew Charlotte Frost drank. Nobody said anything at the small, untidy funeral.

Madeline, nine years old, dressed in scratchy black, went home with her father.

The first six months were subdued. Her father folded in, kept low, said little; fixed her lunches and dinners with an elaborate flair that might have meant reward, or deniability, or the purchasing of silence. There was no guessing; her mother had tried to guess, tried to calibrate, tried to please, and it had done her no good.

Madeline Frost did not have the word for what she was either. But she knew that she was different, and patient. And she knew from the autopsy, the shape of her teachers' mouths, the silence in her household what would and would not work.

She stayed quiet. She gathered data. She moved through the house like a ghost, and watched, and waited for the Great Escape.

Cause of death: Brain damage due to blunt force trauma.

Manner of death: Undetermined.

Act V

Madeline Frost, M.D. November 30, 2011, 11:03 a.m. Postmortem dissection of decedent Leslie Mark James. Race: White. Age: 41. Sex: Male. Date of death: November 30, 2011.

The final body did not come with an escort. It came with Agent Daniel Brady.

"Dr. Frost," he said, with an incline of his big blond head, as the orderly behind him shuffled the necessary paperwork. He looked fatigued. There were thick, dark circles under his blue eyes.

"You will be observing?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, and reclined, lean and heavy, against the farthest wall she had. She pulled out a pair of nitrile gloves, ran a practiced eye over her tools. Queued up the recorder hung above the empty, metallic table.

They wheeled the body in for her at ten o'clock: white, late thirties to early forties, with a stocky build. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Unrelentingly male.

There was steel in her hand, final and clean. She cut.

•

"Do you want to know the story?" Brady asked. She cut. The scissors flashed, still bright, in the densely packed machinery of her decedent's chest cavity.

She might have ignored it, on another assignment. She might have turned her face away, or told Agent Brady, crisp and clear, that he was welcome to watch only if he did not interrupt the proceedings. Frost spread the skin of her decedent's chest wide, unwrinkled, smooth, and made another sharp, short cut, and nodded.

"Reyes told you he was turned down for gender reassignment," he began.

She nodded again. Worked her fingers between the arteries. Cut.

"We wasted two days looking at it as a hate crime. And once we put the profile together and thought, no, this is about someone else having what you want, we tracked him down through his medical history. He was turned down three times. The doctors felt he was too heavy to pass convincingly as a woman. Or too old. Or too something. He went to every reassignment doctor in the state."

Brady's voice was cold and acid. Frost lifted the heart out of Leslie Mark James's chest and set it in the metal pan atop her digital scale. "Heart," she said for her recorder, "three hundred and two grams." It was an average size for a heart: no greater and no smaller than the regular run of parameters. She set it aside, and located the gall bladder. A little heavy. She reached for a new tray.

"That's where the videos fit in," Brady said. "The first crack was the denial. The second was seeing everyone else get what he wanted, and seeing how happy it made them, and knowing he was never going to have it."

I'm going to be a butterfly, she remembered, one wild moment of uncontrolled conjecture. And voices buzzing around her own head, lying down in the back of an ambulance: Heart rate's high; nothing's broken, but she's not responding; it must be shock. Miss? Miss? Can you tell me where you were driving? Can you tell me your name?

The giddiness had paralyzed her entire. The feeling of lightness, of flight, of freedom so huge and bright and terrifying that she had stared past the paramedics, stared at her father's body lumped in the thick black bag, and thought Oh, no, this is too good. This is too bright.

I can never do it again.

And the feeling of reckless escape stopped pressing glorious on the inside of her skull, and the manic joy abated, and she could blink, and focus her eyes, and go: Officer?

She put the gall bladder off the scale and noted down the numbers; tucked the pan decorously to the side of the big stainless-steel sink. Last organ. Nothing to do but sew the body up, wash everything clean, close the file, and call it an end. "And how will you prove these things?" she asked.

Daniel Brady straightened, and blinked, and went, "Pardon?"

•

Her results were not fast-tracked. It was unimportant. She waited.

Tallahassee had a question about the tumor, one she'd set aside for three full days. She tapped an e-mail to them on her office computer, hunt-and-peck. There was an in-house consult to prepare for a child patient (thirteen years old, Cree, male; a leukemia that didn't look quite standard). A supplies requisition form for more hairnets, a replacement scale tray, and sample containers.

Work had a rhythm. Work was a series of small, indelible facts, and you could set them out like fences, or posts to hang the fences on. She gathered them, one by one, and waited.

There were no surprises in the laboratory reports: Early stages of organ failure. A preternatural amount of heavy foods in the stomach, digested erratically, with still more waiting in the lower intestines. Despite that, the brittle nails and hair and dry, flaking skin of the chronically malnourished. A sunken cast to the cheeks. Blood, that when tested was abnormally high in iron and trembling at the lowest threshold of glucose levels.

All the markers of one of Stephen Reyes's anomalous individuals.

The families of the anomalous rarely claimed their bodies, if there were families left standing. Even receiving an anomalous decedent sufficed, at this point, as permission. Frost prepared a large jar to house the brain and all its folds of evidence, and carefully wrote out the label.

She would dissect it later. When she was less fatigued. When the disquiet, the ache for theory and conjecture and bullshit had worn clean. She would dissect it and note down its abnormalities, its curls and quirks, its parameters in the cold, clean language of scientific fact.

•

Dr. Dawa arrived at her workspace late in the day, suitcase over one arm and a black wool trench coat over the other. It got dark early at this time of year. He stood shadowed against the false brightness of artificial lights and did not interrupt as she wiped down her table for the third time that evening.

"Dr. Dawa," she said when she looked up, and stood. He inclined his head, polite as ever.

"Dr. Frost. Hard at work, I see." He did not wait for a reply. He knew her habits better than that. "I wanted to touch base about that case you brought me."

Frost pushed the sponge, and felt that place in her head that made her different run truths, and lies, and numbers. "My consultancy on it has ended. The FBI were successful in apprehending their suspect," she said.

Dr. Dawa tilted his head down and met her eyes. "And medically?"

Her gaze didn't waver. She was not in the habit of lying, and that frequently made it easier to dodge the whole truth. "Medically," she said, "I have no further information. The families came forward to claim the bodies this afternoon."

All but one, she reminded herself; a jar, filled with fluid, in her cooler. All but one.

Dr. Dawa shifted his coat. He was not a preeminent pathologist for nothing, and he had not climbed the ranks to administration without reason. He knew she was withholding.

For this, she reflected, sudden and simple, I could get in trouble.

But: "Madeline," he said, surprisingly patient. "If it's classified, just tell me it's classified. It's not the answer I want to hear, but—" and he shrugged, short and fluid.

She let out her breath. Tucked her head. "I'm afraid it is."

Dawa nodded. The fluid on the sponge dripped, wended slowly down one gloved finger. "Do you expect we'll be able to follow up on this anytime soon?"

She was a pathologist, and not an investigator. She ruled out possibilities. She did not rule them in.

"I do not expect that we will," she said.

•

These were the facts: Charlotte Jane Frost died of exposure in the snow, half-drunk and furious, at exactly 3:32 a.m. Mountain Time on January 21, 1969. Her husband, Gerard Anthony Frost, had four hours prior locked all external doors to the residence, and taken away her keys. He went into his bedroom at five minutes past midnight, and did not emerge until dawn.

Her daughter, Madeline, failed to open her window, reachable by an adult climbing the old oak tree outside it. No investigating authority examined the physical evidence, including fingerprint marks, on the outside of said window in the twenty-four-hour period before they washed away.

Seven years later, after no incident witnesses could describe as a disagreement in the household, both Gerard and Madeline were involved in a multivehicle crash heading westbound, fifteen minutes outside of town. Gerard was not wearing his seat belt. He was propelled through the windshield at one hundred miles per hour and impacted upon the back of the transport truck in front of them. He died on impact. Madeline, sixteen, was wearing her seat belt. She survived.

•

"Pardon?" Brady had said, like a startled guide dog, and Madeline Frost peeled the gloves off her small, round hands and dropped them in the waste bin.

"You seem to be speaking primarily to motive," she said, and turned to face him fully. "I'd like to know what physical evidence you have on hand to assert the decedent's state of mind."

Brady's eyebrows rose like skyscrapers. "It's logic. His victims have what he doesn't, what he wants. They're happy. He's not. People don't kill each other for new reasons, you know."

"Perhaps they do," she said, and rummaged in the drawer for her needle. "Perhaps we don't find out because so many of them are in no condition for asking."

Brady stared at her a long, long moment. "You're baiting me," he said.

"I stick to the observable facts, Agent Brady," she replied, and threaded the needle taut. "Unless there was a confession of motive, I would not presume it, and it does not really matter."

He was still staring, vaulted up from what had been an easy lean on the edge of one of her counters. "So motive doesn't matter. Why doesn't matter. Aren't you even curious?"

"I am not," she said. Reached for a washcloth. For a bowl to fill with water, to wash the body clean. "I am curious about how, but that appears to be a dead issue."

"You can't be serious," he said.

"I am always serious," she replied. It got better. I don't know how, Audrey Gillespie's round ghost-voice said. I guess I don't know much. "It happened," she said. "It will not happen again. The facts are on the ground, and they can't be undone. Why, at this point, is immaterial."

"Oh, come on. Why people do things means something," he snapped.

A winter cold ghosted past her knuckles. She stopped, turned, fixed Daniel Brady in her stare. "No, Agent Brady," she said, unmoving, controlled as a fine bright scalpel. "It means nothing."

They stood there a moment, faced off, taut, until there was a tap on the door and a small, firm, "Excuse me?" The lab tech, her coat wrinkled and her long brown braid flopping over her shoulder, had opened the door and was frowning. "Everything all right here?" she asked.

Frost looked at Brady, at the decedent on her table, splayed and gutted and internally hollow, and nodded her head. "Yes," she said. "It is."

•

I didn't have a good home life growing up, the skinny black boy said, his voice fuzzed by the web camera, or the video quality, or her computer screen. Yeah; people have had worse ones. But what's that saying, about how each unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way? It was some pretty special unhappiness.

A long-haired, plump, bright Chinese woman tilted her head at the camera and said, I know it seems bad now. I know it seems like the worst thing in the world; like your whole universe is being carpet-bombed day after day after day. But it won't always be like that. All these things are going to mean less than nothing one day, compared to what you'll have.

A round-cheeked Southeast Asian boy sat on the lidded toilet seat of a dorm room bathroom stall, and leaned, fisheye close, into his laptop screen. I'm happy here, he said, and footsteps echoed past, and he bit his lip and smiled. I really am.

Madeline Frost closed her laptop and went upstairs.

Her toothbrush was tidy in the holder. She took it out, and the clean glass beside it, and brushed her teeth diligently for five minutes. Smoothed her short hair down into place. Shut off the bathroom light and left the door open behind her at the correct angle, and took three crisp strides to her bedroom to change into her long nightdress.

The branches of that oak tree were no longer rattling the windows. Arborists did not receive many pruning calls this time of year, and the young man they sent (Korean, five feet ten, approximately twenty-five to thirty years of age, black hair dyed with green tips, brown eyes) had been resistant to cutting back the branches with the temperatures finally falling. But he had, and her yard had the faint scent of chipped wood, and the night around her was quiet.

It was 1:23. She was fifty-one years old, and she was in her house in Guilford, Maryland, in the United States of America, the house she had bought with the insurance money; and the alarm system was armed, and every outside door double-locked and all the internal ones propped open, and every window could be opened from the inside, in case she needed to throw them wide at night.

Madeline turned down the blankets on her wide, white bed, and tucked herself beneath them.

The voice rattled softly in her head. Bruised her eyes. Pressed against her skull. Maddy, please baby, open the window, open up.

She closed her eyes. The body flitted across the backs of them, livid and stiff with cold. And then the other: crumpled, hurled, so surprisingly small on the slick roadway, her fingers tingling with the feel and smell of metal buckles and her head exploding with transformation.

It was a comforting lie. Madeline Frost was fifty-one years old. It did not get better. You grew older, and more able to deal with the things done to you, the things you'd done. Or you did not. But they were always bad. They were always the same terrible things, no matter if you were not the same person anymore.

You could slice into, weigh, examine your own past endlessly, and find no reply.

She grew tired of this, some nights. She was tired of doing this autopsy, over and over again.

"Put it away," she said aloud, huddled underneath the sheets and blankets. They slowly warmed. "It's over. It's done."

She reached to her nightstand. Turned off the light.

Closed her eyes, and fell familiar into that crashing car.

Cause of death: Multiple gunshot wounds to left vena cava; exsanguination.

Manner of death: Homicide.

"Hope Is Stronger Than Love" - by Sarah Monette

Act I

The Museum of the Free State of Franklin

Bell Creek, TN, November 2011

Everyone had had to bring a brown-bag lunch.

Patty's stepmother had grumbled about, What are we paying taxes for? the way she did whenever the school wanted her to spend money on Patty, and she'd provided baloney and French's Mustard on the whole wheat bread she bought because it was supposed to be healthier than white. Patty hated whole wheat bread, so she used the baloney to get as much of the mustard as she could and ate that.

"Aren't you going to eat your bread?" Stephanie asked.

"Nah," Patty said. "It's whole wheat. Whole wheat is gross."

"Can I have it?"

"Sure," Patty said, and watched while Stephanie ate two slices of bread in three bites. She'd already eaten all of her own lunch. "You want my apple, too?"

"Don't you want it?" Stephanie said, looking at the apple longingly.

"I'm not hungry," Patty said. It was sort of true, and anyway, Stephanie was her best friend.

"Thanks," Stephanie said, and the apple disappeared about as fast as the bread.

"Didn't you eat breakfast this morning?" Patty said.

"No, I did," Stephanie said. "I'm just really hungry. Do you think they've got vending machines here?"

Patty looked around dubiously. Everything was log cabins and wooden fences, and the closest thing she could see to a vending machine was a rusty old piece of farm equipment that she couldn't even imagine what it was for. "D'you wanna ask Miss Harrison if we can go look? Or we could say we need to go to the bathroom?"

"Yeah, maybe," Stephanie said. "I—"

"Hey, lookit the lezbos!"

Patty went cold. It was Chris Watson; he'd finished lunch and was bored, and everybody knew Patty and Stephanie were easy game. "You're sure sitting close enough together—why aren't you holding hands?"

"Shut up, Chris," Stephanie said. Her face had gone a funny color under the freckles, and she was looking at Chris like she was thinking maybe, if they couldn't find a vending machine, she'd just eat him next.

But of course, it was never just Chris. Mike Odell was smirking all over his ugly face and starting to singsong, "Patty and Steph'nie, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!"

Stephanie made a weird yowling noise and got up. Patty got up, too, although she wasn't sure why.

"Oooh, you gonna fight me, Slimer?" Chris said. "'Cause that's what lezbos do, you know."

"Fight!" somebody said—Annie Morales, Patty thought, but she was never sure, because the others took up the chant so quickly: "Fight! Fight! Fight!"

Patty looked around desperately, but she couldn't see Miss Harrison. Stephanie made another weird yowl. Chris was opening his mouth again, and the thought went straight through Patty's mind that she wanted Chris Watson to die.

All at once, his eyes were dripping blood. Even when she tried to think carefully later, Patty couldn't remember any warning, any sign that something was about to happen. Just Chris Watson with his mouth half open and blood pouring down his face.

And she'd wished it. Oh, Jesus, she had. It was all true.

Patty MacIntyre turned and ran.

Act II

Coriam, TN, August - October 2011

Patty had always known she was a witch.

One of her earliest memories was of her father showing her the pictures of Grandmother Whittaker, the old yellow newspaper clippings of what Grandmother Whittaker had done. Some of the earliest words Patty learned to read were "Woman Slays Seven, Then Self."

Her daddy explained it to her, how Grandmother Whittaker had made a deal with the Devil and the Devil had given her the power to kill just by wishing it. That part wasn't in the newspapers, but Daddy's cousin Lewis was a deputy sheriff, and Cousin Lewis told Daddy all about the witness testimony, and how Grandmother Whittaker hadn't had a gun or a knife or anything. She'd just looked at those people and they'd fallen down dead. And the first person she'd killed was her husband, which just proved (Daddy said) that it was the Devil in her.

For a long time, Patty had thought Grandmother Whittaker had killed Mama, too, and it wasn't until she got old enough to do the math that she realized that couldn't be right. Mama had been five years old in 1983, when Grandmother Whittaker killed seven people by wishing. She hadn't died until she was twenty-six, and that was in 2004, just after Patty's fourth birthday.

It had been a while before she got up the nerve to ask Daddy about it, because Mama was one of those things they just didn't talk about. There were a lot of things like that in the MacIntyre household, Patty was realizing. She'd made a list once, and when it got past ten items, she'd had to stop and burn it very carefully in the kitchen sink. Mom—as Patty was supposed to call her stepmother, and she didn't mind, much—didn't like it when anybody mentioned that Daddy'd had a wife before her, even if it was Reverend Miller saying how much better Mom was for Daddy. And Daddy'd give you the silent treatment if you tried to talk about things he didn't like.

But Patty really wanted to know. She'd looked through the scrapbook about Grandmother Whittaker when Mom and Daddy had gone off to her half brother Jeremy's first grade Parents' Night, and there was nothing except in Grandfather Whittaker's obituary that "Daniel Whittaker is survived by his two daughters, Lee (age 9) and Norma (age 5)," and Patty knew that already, just like she knew Mama and Aunt Lee had been taken in by Reverend Johnson, who'd been the church preacher before Reverend Miller. And Mama'd grown up and married Daddy, and Aunt Lee had grown up and gone off to Knoxville, where church gossip was she was living with a woman. Patty'd never met Aunt Lee; Daddy wouldn't let her in the house.

But there wasn't anything about how Mama had died, and finally, one Sunday afternoon when Mom had taken Jeremy to visit Aunt Cathy, Patty screwed up her courage and asked her father.

He'd given her a hard look, and she'd thought he wasn't going to answer, but he said, "It was the Devil. The Devil was trying to take her over, and it killed her."

"Did—did she say so?"

"I knew," he said. "I came home from work, and she was lying on the kitchen floor, stone cold and not a mark on her—but such a look on her face. She was going the same way as her mother, and I thank Jesus that she was not strong enough to bear the load. Just as I thank Jesus every night that you'd been playing with one of your little friends."

"Oh," said Patty.

"You have to guard against the Devil, Patty," her father said. "There's a strain of wickedness in the women of your family. Just look at your mother's sister. It's an abomination in the eyes of God."

It wasn't long after that that Chris Watson started calling her and Stephanie lezbos, and although Patty knew it was just Chris Watson being a stupid jerk, part of her couldn't help wondering if he was actually seeing the wickedness in her.

She'd told Stephanie the whole thing, one weekend that summer when her parents had finally, grudgingly agreed that she could sleep over at Stephanie's house. They'd lain in sleeping bags on air mattresses in Stephanie's basement under Stephanie's poster of North American snakes that her mom wouldn't let her hang in her room, and Patty had whispered one horrible truth after another, the first time she'd said any of them out loud. Stephanie had listened respectfully and when Patty was done, said, "Do you really think your grandma was a witch?"

"I don't know," Patty said. "Daddy says she was."

"Because I read a book once about witches," Stephanie said. "They used to burn them, you know."

"They did not!"

"Honest to God. And they used to throw them in lakes to see if they'd float."

"What does that have to do with being a witch?"

"I don't know," Stephanie said. "It seems like a weird thing to do."

"So were you a witch if you floated or if you sank?" Patty asked.

"I can't remember. Do you want to test it?"

So Saturday, they'd bugged Stephanie's mom into taking them to the pool, where first Patty had tried to float and then she'd tried to sink, and neither seemed to work very well.

"Maybe you're not a witch," Stephanie said.

"Maybe this is a stupid test," said Patty, and they both started giggling.

The first Wednesday of the school year, Stephanie came home with Patty after school, and they found Mom had had to go out. "EMERGENCY!" said the note. "NO TP!" Patty got the spare key from where the family hid it, and they went inside. Patty was about to ask what Stephanie wanted to do, when Stephanie said, "Hey, remember you told me about your grandma?"

"Yeah?"

"You said there was a scrapbook."

"You wanna see it?" Patty said, surprised.

Stephanie was beet red, but she nodded, so Patty went and stood very carefully on Daddy's recliner to get the scrapbook down from the top of the bookcase. "Let's take it up to my room," she said. "I don't think Mom will notice it's not there if she gets back, but if she sees it..."

"Okay," said Stephanie, and they sat side by side on Patty's bedroom floor and went through the whole thing. When they were done, Stephanie went back to the first page, where there was a portrait photo of Grandmother Whittaker, and looked at it for a long time.

"She kind of looks like a witch, doesn't she?" Patty said.

"Yeah," Stephanie said.

Then, since Mom still hadn't come home, Patty went downstairs and put the scrapbook back. She jumped off the recliner and gave a huge sigh of relief to make Stephanie giggle, and then said, "So, what do you wanna do?" By the time Mom finally came in with a long dramatic story about running into Patty's Sunday school teacher in front of the toilet paper, they were practicing catching pop flies in the backyard, and Patty felt like she'd gotten away with something huge.

And then, the first day of October, Patty started her period, and everything got really weird. She'd expected, and dreaded, the "you're a woman now" speech, but she hadn't expected Mom—who would discuss her own menstrual cramps with the mail carrier, for Pete's sake—to be so nervous about it. And she hadn't expected Daddy to care at all.

But he did. He wouldn't play catch with her anymore, even though she still hadn't learned how to catch his curveball or tell stories about the year his high school baseball team were state champions. Instead, he started watching Patty like he thought she was going to make a deal with the Devil right there in front of him, and when that got her wigged out so bad she started spending evenings in her room—with the door open because Mom and Daddy both pitched a fit if she closed it—he'd come upstairs two or three times an evening, as far as she could tell just so he could walk past her room.

And he started spending a lot of time with Cousin Lewis, which he hadn't done since he married Mom. Mom didn't like Cousin Lewis, and what was weird was, not only was Daddy inviting him over to watch football on Sundays and stuff like that, Mom wasn't complaining. Patty was so completely weirded out that she did something she'd never done in her life before and tried to eavesdrop.

It wasn't actually all that hard, since the living room was right off the stairs, and Daddy and Cousin Lewis both had deep voices that carried. The worst part was having to be ready to bolt if it sounded like Daddy or Cousin Lewis was going to come out of the living room or if Mom or Jeremy was going to come out of the kitchen. And to show how weird things had gotten, she was actually kind of comforted that Mom wouldn't let Jeremy in the living room, because it showed she still didn't like Cousin Lewis, even if she wasn't saying so anymore.

And there was Patricia Margaret MacIntyre, sitting on the stairs in the dark with her heart beating triple-time, eavesdropping. She wanted to die of shame. But she listened.

Mostly, what she heard was boring. Football and Daddy's work and Cousin Lewis's work, which you'd think would be interesting, him being a deputy and all, but it was just speeding tickets and drunk high school kids. But the third or fourth time Cousin Lewis came over, Patty got desperate, and she waited until Mom and Jeremy had gone to bed, and then she snuck back out onto the stairs, even though she was pushing her luck, because if Mom came out of the master bedroom for anything, Patty was totally caught. Even if she'd been any good at lying, which she wasn't, there was no lie she could tell. Eavesdropping.

So she was guilty and terrified and feeling kind of sick, but she crept down as far as she dared. Daddy and Cousin Lewis were watching ESPN, and Patty was really starting to hate the way sports announcers talked, like everything out of their mouths was the most exciting thing they'd ever said. But the second time the sound went off for commercials, instead of Daddy grumbling about Coach Fisher and everything he was doing wrong, there was this silence.

Holding her breath, Patty scooted down another step.

"I couldn't get a look at the memo," Cousin Lewis said, "but I talked to Carmen and she remembered it pretty good. Sudden changes in mood, increase in appetite, violent behavior—"

"Paula Whittaker sure had all those," Patty's daddy said.

"And then there was a bunch of stuff about the victims," Cousin Lewis said. "Carmen said it was mostly looking for cases where the cause of death didn't make sense."

"Like Paula Whittaker again."

"Yeah. Basically, Jerry, everything Carmen mentioned matched up with the Whittaker case. Even to it taking fifteen rounds to bring her down."

"So the FBI's hunting witches," Daddy said. "But they don't want anybody to know."

"That's sure what it looks like to me," said Cousin Lewis, and then they didn't say anything else, not until the game came back on, and Patty crept back up to her room, shaking so hard she couldn't even make it to her bed, but folded up on the floor, sick with fear and shame. She didn't get any homework done that night, and she couldn't sleep, lying there in bed with all her muscles tense, staring at the gray blotch of the ceiling in the dark and wondering when the Devil would come and if he'd find her before the FBI did.

She felt half dead the next day at school, and she couldn't even tell Stephanie what was wrong. When she tried, the words jammed in her throat, and even though she knew that was just a figure of speech, the block felt so real she almost couldn't breathe around it. Family history was one thing, but the FBI was...they were real. They were on TV. Being a witch was horrible, but it was also, horribly, kind of neat. Stephanie thought so, that was for sure, and Patty was ashamed of herself for being almost proud of the way the story about her grandmother made Stephanie pay attention to her. But being hunted by the FBI, God, they'd arrest her and put her in jail and she'd have to wear those orange overalls and be handcuffed all the time, and everyone would be so ashamed of her. They wouldn't talk about her, not just the way they didn't talk about Mama, but the way they didn't talk about Mom's brother Dennis, who'd gotten in some kind of trouble, although Patty didn't know what, and skipped out to Florida or somewhere, where he spent all his time drunk and doing drugs. Patty'd almost wanted to be a witch, if it would make her be like Mama, but she didn't want to be like Dennis. She didn't want to see that look on Mom's face, the one she always had when she got off the phone with Grandma Karen and Patty knew Grandma Karen had been crying about Dennis again.

Patty felt like crying herself a lot of that October, and she was a little sick to her stomach most of the time. At least it meant she wasn't hungry, so there was none of that increase in appetite Cousin Lewis had mentioned. And she knew Daddy was watching for it. There was nobody she could tell, and there was nothing she could think of that she could do. If she couldn't bring herself to tell Stephanie, she certainly wasn't going to tell any of the girls on her softball team, most of whom she didn't even like. She couldn't tell any of her teachers. She almost talked herself into going to Reverend Miller, but she didn't really trust him, and she was pretty sure the first thing he'd do was tell Daddy. And what could he tell her to do anyway, except pray? And she was already praying, every night and sometimes in the middle of the day if the sick feeling got too bad. Please, God, I don't want to be a witch. I don't want the Devil to make a deal with me. Please don't let him. And she had the horrible feeling it wasn't enough. Because surely Mama had prayed like that. Mama wouldn't have wanted to be a witch. Patty was as sure about that as she was about anything. And all it had gotten Mama was dead.

•

Patty knew her mother's gravestone by heart:

Norma Christine MacIntyre

1978-2004

Mother and Wife

God watches your rest

Act III

The Museum of the Free State of Franklin

Bell Creek, TN, November 2011

Patty ran as far as the parking lot, where the school bus was waiting. The door was open, and Mr. Kennedy must have gone for a smoke or something, so she dodged up the steps and ran to the back and threw herself flat on the very last seat, dark green shiny vinyl and that weird smell like raisins from being in the sun. And she lay there and shook and tried not to think about Chris Watson's face and tried not to hear anything, although she couldn't help hearing the screams. And the way they stopped. And then the new screams. Adults this time, and she thought that was Miss Harrison screaming "Oh God oh God oh God." Patty pressed her face harder into the vinyl and tried not to make any sound.

The police sirens, shrieking and wailing, made her chest hurt, like all that noise was getting lodged behind her ribs in a big hateful bubble, swelling and swelling. Finally, she pushed her face into the seat cushion and screamed as long and hard as she could without using her voice.

That was about when the sirens stopped, and when Patty could think again, she knew what she had to do. It made her feel sick, but she had to.

She got up and walked to the front of the bus, hanging onto the seat backs when it seemed like her legs weren't going to hold her up. She had to grip the rail on the steps with both hands, and even so she nearly ended up sitting on the asphalt when she took the last step and her knees just kept going.

Buckle up your guts, Patty, she said to herself, the way Mom did in the dentist's office. She had to do this.

There was an ambulance and two police cars, all still with their lights going, and the parking lot seemed ten miles long. The little group of adults standing by one of the police cars just wasn't getting any closer. Two policemen, the lady from the museum who'd taken them around, Miss Harrison, and two of the other fifth grade teachers, Mrs. Ledbetter and Mr. Phipps. Mr. Haines and Mrs. Armstrong must be watching the other kids. Patty was a softball pitch from the police car when one of the policemen noticed her. All of the adults swung around, and Miss Harrison screamed, "Patty! Oh thank Jesus!" She ran at Patty and hugged her so hard that Patty's face was jammed into Miss Harrison's reading glasses that she wore on a fancy chain around her neck.

Miss Harrison was normally kind of sarcastic and a lot of kids thought she was mean. Patty and Stephanie had thought she just didn't like fifth graders much. So if she was weeping all over Patty like this—Patty swallowed hard—things had to be about as bad as she thought.

"Judy," said Mrs. Ledbetter, "let her breathe." When Patty got free of Miss Harrison, she found that the other adults had come up around them. Mrs. Ledbetter and Mr. Phipps looked nearly as unstrung as Miss Harrison, and the policemen looked worried and serious. The lady from the museum had gone a horrible color, sort of greenish-grayish-white, and her blush stood out on her cheekbones like red paint.

Mrs. Ledbetter was the fifth grade teacher Patty liked best, and she looked like she'd give a straight answer. Patty asked her, "Is Chris Watson dead?"

The way Mrs. Ledbetter's face crumpled was answer enough—just as well, because the next second it seemed like everybody was yelling at her, Patty, did you see what happened? Were you there? Did you see who did this?

"Hold on!" It was one of the policemen; he had a good deep bellow. "Give the little girl some room here." He squatted down in front of her. His eyes were very dark, and they were kind. "What's your name, honey?"

"Patty MacIntyre," Patty said, and then wondered if she should have said Patricia.

But the policeman nodded and said, "I'm Officer Stanton. Patty, a lot of kids are dead—" Miss Harrison started to say something, but Officer Stanton shot this look at her over Patty's shoulder, and she shut up. He looked back at Patty and said, "We need your help, honey. We need to catch whoever did this."

Patty realized like a punch to the stomach that they didn't know. They didn't know it was her fault. For a wild, sick second, she thought about lying, about saying there was a man who came and...and what? It wasn't like she'd shot Chris Watson or anything else that just anybody could do. And she was no good at lying anyway.

"You have to arrest me," she said to Officer Stanton.

He rocked back on his heels. "Arrest you? Honey, why would we want to do that?"

"Because I did it," Patty said. "I killed Chris Watson and...and everybody else, I guess." And because she could see he didn't believe her, she said the rest of it, as heavy as rocks, "I'm a witch. I witched them to death."

And then Patty MacIntyre embarrassed herself very much by bursting into tears.

Act IV

Coriam, TN, October 2011

They were doing a unit in Social Studies on local history and using primary sources. It was really confusing, and neither Stephanie nor Patty nor anybody else understood why something was a secondary source when it was about the thing you were studying. But Patty and Stephanie had agreed that they'd better do their project the way Mr. Haines wanted, so they went to the Coriam Public Library one day after school and got even more confused by the librarian. Patty had a feeling this project wasn't going to get a very good grade.

But something the librarian had said stuck with her. She'd said that the library had all of the Coriam Gazette. All of it, from the very first issue. And that meant they'd have Mama's obituary, because the Coriam Gazette had everybody's obituary, old people and babies and people who didn't even die in Coriam. Everybody.

She didn't tell Stephanie. She didn't know why, and she was on the edge of telling her half a dozen times. But she didn't. It didn't feel like something she wanted to share. She went back to the library on her own. It was a different librarian, younger and nicer, and when Patty said she wanted to see the obituaries for 2004, the librarian didn't try to tell her she didn't, but took her down to the library's basement and showed her how to work the microfiche reader and told her how to find the obituaries in each week of the Gazette. And something about how she wasn't asking and wasn't trying to make like she knew better than Patty made Patty say, "It's my mama. She died when I was just little."

"Oh, honey, of course you want to see it," the librarian said. "You just come get me if you have any questions." And she left Patty there like she was an adult and trustworthy instead of a little girl.

It was hard to figure out the microfiche reader at first, but Patty got the hang of it pretty quick. And that was good, because she was into September 2004 before she found what she was looking for. It wasn't a very long article, not like some of the obituaries she'd skimmed through, just Norma MacIntyre, twenty-six, survived by husband and daughter, died Tuesday of an aneurysm.

Patty got out her notebook and wrote the word down, checking twice to be sure she'd spelled it correctly. "Aneurysm." Then she put the microfiche back in its box and turned off the machine, the way the librarian had said, and went back up the stairs.

"Did you find it, honey?" said the librarian.

"Yes, ma'am, thank you," Patty said, and she walked home. She was late, but Mom didn't ask any more questions after Patty said she'd missed the bus, just said, like she always did, that Patty had to get her head out of the clouds and pay more attention.

Patty waited until Mom went upstairs with the laundry before she dragged the dictionary out of the bookcase.

Looking up "aneurysm" led to looking up a bunch of other words, and then to looking things up on Stephanie's computer when Stephanie was busy finishing her math homework and couldn't lean over Patty's shoulder to see what she was doing, but in the end, Patty was pretty sure she understood. Something in her mama, probably in her brain, had broken and killed her. That was scary, because apparently there wasn't any way to know if you had an aneurysm until it killed you, but also it happened enough that it didn't get called "rare" or "unusual" or anything. You didn't have to be a witch to die of an aneurysm. Really, Patty thought, remembering her daddy's stories about how hard her grandmother was to kill, if you died of an aneurysm, it was almost proof you weren't a witch. She was pretty sure her Grandmother Whittaker wouldn't have let anything like a burst blood vessel stop her.

So maybe Patty's mama hadn't been a witch.

Maybe there was hope.

Act V

Bell Creek, TN, November 2011

They didn't believe her. Mr. Phipps and Miss Harrison scolded her for making up stories about something so horrible, and Mrs. Ledbetter tried to talk to her about "sometimes we believe things but they aren't true," and the museum lady and the other policeman just looked at her like she was crazy while it was like Officer Stanton thought he could find the truth—the man with the gun—if he just kept asking questions, like Patty'd just forgotten or something. But no one believed her, and all Patty could do was sit in the back of the police car and tell them what happened over and over again. "I wished Chris Watson was dead and he started bleeding from his eyes."

And then the FBI showed up.

They didn't look like FBI agents on TV. One was tall and skinny skinny skinny, and the other one was short and mostly bald and looked like Patty's favorite teacher ever, Mr. Donovan in second grade. But they weren't dressed in police uniforms and she saw the badge the skinny one showed Officer Stanton, and anyway she'd known the FBI would come for her. She'd just thought it would take longer.

The two agents talked together, the tall one sort of hunching down to listen to the short one, and then they split up. The tall one went off with the lady from the museum and the other policeman, while the short one followed Officer Stanton over to where Patty was sitting.

"Patty, this is Mr. Todd," Officer Stanton said. "He needs to talk to you for a minute, and he needs you to tell him the truth."

"I will," Patty said and hated the way her voice came out, all blaring and sullen.

"Hi, Patty," said the short man. "I'm Solomon Todd." Instead of crouching down next to the car to talk to her the way all the other adults had, he plopped down cheerfully cross-legged on the asphalt.

"Are you an FBI agent?" Patty asked, suddenly unsure again.

"I used to be," said Mr. Todd, smiling in a way that showed all the crinkles around his eyes. "I'm retired now, but they let me come on field trips sometimes."

"But the other one's an FBI agent," Patty persisted. She had to be sure. And Mr. Todd nodded.

"Then y'all are here to take me away," Patty said and managed not to ask, Can we just get it over with?

Mr. Todd had gone very still. "Are we, Patty?"

"Because I'm a witch." All at once, she thought she understood. "It's okay, Mr. Todd. I know the FBI is hunting witches. I heard Cousin Lewis explaining it to Daddy."

"Witches," Mr. Todd said under his breath, and for a second there was a really weird look on his face before he smoothed it out. "Patty, why do you think you're a witch?"

"Because I am," Patty said, and she told him about Chris Watson.

"There's something else, isn't there?" he said gently, and it all spilled out, Grandmother Whittaker and Mama and Daddy watching her and Stephanie saying they used to burn witches and Cousin Lewis saying the FBI was looking for witches and everything. And Mr. Todd listened and didn't interrupt and didn't tell her not to make things up and she could see he believed her like Stephanie had.

Stephanie.

"Oh God, did I kill Stephanie, too?"

"Stephanie Silmer?"

Patty nodded, but the fact that Mr. Todd knew Stephanie's name told Patty the truth even before he said, "I'm sorry, Patty."

"I didn't want to kill her!" Patty said. Her voice had gone all loud and flat again. "I didn't want to make a deal with the Devil!" She sniffed hard and wetly, and Mr. Todd pulled a packet of Kleenex out of his suit coat and handed it to her.

"Keep it," he said. "Patty, are you hungry?"

"Not really?" Patty said; she couldn't tell what answer he wanted.

"Huh," he said and pushed to his feet. "You sit tight for a minute, kiddo. Okay?" And he turned and jogged to where his tall skinny friend was just coming over the rise.

They walked back toward Patty, talking and gesturing. They were just to where she could hear them when the tall one stopped. "As in, 'they're coming to take me away, ha ha'?"

"Focus, Grasshopper," Mr. Todd said sternly, and then they both lowered their voices, glancing over at Patty, so she tried to look like she hadn't been listening. Their conversation only took another minute, and then they came over to her and Mr. Todd said, "Patty, this is Mr. Villette. We're going to ask you to come with us, but we're not taking you away, all right? We just want to talk to you somewhere more comfortable."

"And we'll call your parents," said Mr. Villette. "Is there an adult you'd like to come with you? Your teacher, maybe?"

She didn't want Miss Harrison, who would either be sarcastic or weepy. "Could you ask Mrs. Ledbetter?"

"Okay," said Mr. Todd. "We'll take our car."

Mr. Villette gave her a funny wrinkled-nose smile and held out his hand. She wasn't sure for a second if she should hold hands with an FBI agent, but she didn't want to make him feel bad. His hand was enormous, but he didn't squeeze at all.

He said, "Mr. Todd says Stephanie Silmer was your best friend."

"Yeah," Patty said.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That's really rough."

"I didn't want her to die," Patty said.

"I know," he said, and he sounded like he did know.

Mrs. Ledbetter got in the back of the FBI agents' car with Patty. "Are you doing all right, Patty?"

"Yes, ma'am," Patty said, hoping Mrs. Ledbetter wouldn't ask why it was her and not Miss Harrison Patty had wanted.

Mrs. Ledbetter didn't ask; she leaned forward to talk to Mr. Villette and Mr. Todd. About TVA and the economy and all the men in town like Stephanie's dad who didn't have jobs anymore. Patty stared out the window and tried not to think about Stephanie. She didn't want to start crying again.

They didn't have far to go, just to the Bell Creek police station where they went into a room with fake wood paneling and a worn-down, dark mustard-yellow carpet. There was a big window in one wall that looked into another room. Patty wondered if the other side was mirrored like in police stations on TV, or if the Bell Creek police officers didn't bother.

Mr. Todd sat at the end of the table farthest from the window and Mr. Villette sat next to him facing the door. Patty sat opposite Mr. Villette and Mrs. Ledbetter sat next to her. The police officer who'd led them to this room said, "Can I get y'all a Coke or anything?"

"Decaf coffee?" Mr. Villette said hopefully.

"You got it," the officer said. "You want anything, honey?"

"I'd really like a Coke," Patty said. Mom would have a fit, but right now that seemed like the least of Patty's worries.

"Sure thing. Anyone else?"

"Just water, please," said Mr. Todd, and Mrs. Ledbetter said, "Yes. Water, please."

"Just a moment," said the officer.

While he was gone, Mr. Todd got out a little recorder and set it up, testing it with his name and the date and "Bell Creek, Tennessee," just like the X-Files episodes Patty wasn't supposed to watch. And, oh God, that shouldn't be like a knife in the chest, but it was, because she'd watched X-Files at Stephanie's house, off Stephanie's parents' DVD box sets. Mr. Silmer had watched with them, sometimes, and those were the nicest memories she had of Stephanie's dad. And it was one more thing that was never going to happen again.

Mr. Todd played his date stamp back and smiled at Patty. "You wouldn't believe how mean my boss gets when I give him a .wav file full of static."

"Have you done that?"

"A couple times. Once was on purpose." He winked at her.

The officer came back with a cup of coffee in one hand and two bottles of water in the other, with a Coke can tucked under his elbow. He handed the drinks around, said, "Let me know if you need anything," and closed the door behind him on the way out.

Mr. Todd opened his water and took a swallow. Then he turned his recorder on, said, "Interview with Patty MacIntyre. Okay, Patty. I know you've told me this story before, but I need you to tell it again for my boss in Virginia."

"And for me," Mr. Villette said. He sounded kind of fierce, and Patty was startled into looking directly at him. He was watching her, almost staring, and she saw that his eyes didn't match. Nicky, her best friend in first grade, had had a dog with different colored eyes, but Patty hadn't known people could have eyes like that. She looked away. Even if he was staring at her, it was rude to stare back.

"Okay," she said and tried to sound like she meant it. "Wh-where do you want me to start?"

"Where do you think the beginning is?" Mr. Todd asked.

Patty swallowed hard and looked at the recorder so she wouldn't have to look at Mr. Villette or Mr. Todd or Mrs. Ledbetter. "My grandmother was a witch." She told the story again, but this time Mr. Todd asked questions. Lots of questions. He said it was okay if Patty didn't know the answers, but she wasn't sure if he meant it. When she mentioned the scrapbook, Mr. Villette started asking questions, too, and it got to where she wasn't telling the story at all, just sort of bouncing from question to question. They were asking a lot of questions about Stephanie, and Patty wished they wouldn't.

Then they started asking about the field trip. Mr. Todd wanted to know what the Free State of Franklin was and why there was a museum for it and why they were having a field trip, so Patty told him about the Tennessee Studies unit in the fifth grade Social Studies classes and how they were supposed to be learning about the history of where they lived, but everybody knew field trips like this were just a way to give the teachers a break. She caught herself too late, and felt her face flood red.

Mrs. Ledbetter, though, just laughed a little and said, "That's really not how we try to pitch it."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Ledbetter. I didn't mean—"

"It's all right, Patty. You're allowed to have opinions."

"Even if..."

"The Museum of the Free State of Franklin is an incredibly valuable historical resource," Mrs. Ledbetter said, "but it's never one of our more successful field trips."

"You have to keep trying," Mr. Todd said.

"Yes," Mrs. Ledbetter said, and she sounded tired and sad. "We keep—" Her voice broke, and she said, raw and watery and blaring, "Oh, God damn it."

Patty handed Mrs. Ledbetter the packet of Kleenex Mr. Todd had given her.

"Thank you, honey," Mrs. Ledbetter said, and she pulled back from the table a little. Patty wished she didn't have to know what Mrs. Ledbetter sounded like when she was crying.

"So you were all pretty bored," Mr. Villette said to Patty.

"Um."

"The truth isn't going to hurt anybody," Mr. Todd said.

"It's not a very interesting museum," Patty said apologetically. "Just a bunch of old farm equipment and maps and stuff. When we went to the museum in Oak Ridge, at least there was stuff to do, you know? And a machine that made your hair stand on end."

"A Van de Graaff generator," Mr. Villette said.

"Yeah," Patty said. "That was neat. But this was just old stuff."

"Is that why Christopher Watson started verbally harassing you? Because he was bored?"

"Probably," Patty said uncomfortably and shrugged. "But I don't know why Chris Watson does anything. Did anything, I mean." She swallowed hard. "I wished him dead, you know."

"That's what you told me," Mr. Todd agreed. "How did you do it?"

"What?"

"Tell us what happened," Mr. Villette said. "For our boss in Virginia."

So Patty told them about Chris Watson being mean and calling Stephanie "Slimer" and saying they were lesbians. "He was trying to get Stephanie to fight him, and I think she was really going to. And I wished he was dead. Just like that. Like..." She didn't know how to describe it. "And I looked at Chris Watson and there was blood pouring out of his eyes."

"Is that how your grandmother killed her victims?" Mr. Todd asked.

"She wished them dead," Patty said.

"No, I mean, bleeding from the eyes. Is that how she did it?"

"I don't know. I know there was blood everywhere. Daddy told me that."

Mr. Todd and Mr. Villette gave each other a kind of funny look. Patty wasn't sure what it meant, whether they believed her or whether they really didn't.

"Patty," said Mr. Villette, "are you hungry at all?"

"No," Patty said. But she took a long drink of her Coke, because she was thirsty after all that talking.

"What have you eaten today?" said Mr. Todd.

Patty looked sideways at Mrs. Ledbetter, who said, "Go on, honey," even though she looked as confused as Patty felt.

"Well, I had breakfast," Patty said. "Frosted Flakes, and Mom made me take a banana on the bus, but I gave half of it to Stephanie."

"And lunch?" said Mr. Todd.

"I gave most of it to Stephanie," Patty said, and her voice blared and broke because she was starting to cry again.

"Stephanie was hungry," Mr. Villette said, sort of half asking and half not.

Patty nodded convulsively and gulped and blew her nose with one of Mr. Todd's Kleenex. "Stephanie was really hungry. We were going to go look for a vending machine when Chris started being a jerk."

"Huh," said Mr. Villette. He and Mr. Todd exchanged another one of those looks, and Mr. Todd said, "Excuse me just a moment. I need to make a phone call."

He left the room, and Patty and Mrs. Ledbetter and Mr. Villette sat silently. Patty stared down at her hands so she wouldn't have to try to make eye contact with either adult. Her hands were filthy, she saw, with dirt grimed under the fingernails and big patches of dirt across both palms. Like she'd fallen down, although she didn't remember it happening.

Come to think of it, she didn't remember much of anything between pushing past Kelly Roberts and climbing up the stairs of the bus. So maybe she had fallen. Mrs. Ledbetter cleared her throat and said, "I don't want to tell y'all your job, but are you just about done with Patty? Her father should be getting here any time now."

Patty's stomach disappeared. "You won't let him burn me, will you?"

"Let him what?" said Mr. Villette.

"It's what they did to witches," Patty said. "He said it's what they should've done to my grandmother."

"Actually, in America, they hanged witches," Mr. Villette said, "and nobody's going to do anything of the sort."

"I'd really rather you arrested me," Patty said in a little voice.

"Honey, your daddy isn't going to burn you," Mrs. Ledbetter said, as Mr. Todd came back in the room. "He's just going to be so grateful you're alive."

Mrs. Ledbetter didn't know Daddy and how he felt about witches.

Mr. Todd sat down and said, "We'll talk with your father, Patty."

"Okay," Patty said, although she wasn't sure Daddy would pay much attention to Mr. Todd and Mr. Villette, one short, the other skinny, and both of them Yankees.

"Patty," Mr. Villette said, not mean but sharp, like a teacher getting somebody's attention, "I need you to help me with something before your dad gets here."

"Okay," Patty said. "If I can."

"You can," Mr. Villette said, and he smiled at her. It was a nice smile, and it made her feel a little better. He flipped his legal pad to a clean page. "I'm going to draw a map, and I need you to tell me where everybody was standing when Chris Watson's eyes started bleeding."

Mrs. Ledbetter made a noise like she was going to say something, but Mr. Villette looked up and met her eyes. "She's our only eyewitness," he said calmly. "And it's not like she doesn't know what happened."

"I'll do my best," Patty said, and questions to answer were better than having to sit and think about it inside her own head.

"Okay," said Mr. Villette, and he started drawing, neat, quick, precise lines that laid out the Museum of the Free State of Franklin like he'd been studying it all his life. He even sketched in the rusty farm equipment—a plow or a thresher or whatever it was—that Patty and Stephanie had been sitting near.

"Wow," Patty said, and he gave her a funny sidelong look.

Mr. Todd said, "Mr. Villette is a man of many talents."

"Shut up, Mr. Todd," said Mr. Villette, but Patty could tell he wasn't mad. "Now, Patty, where were you?"

That was easy, and she put a finger on his map to show him. He drew a circle and labeled it in tiny perfect capitals PMacI. "And Stephanie?"

"Right next to me," Patty said, and pointed. He drew another circle and labeled it SS.

"Good. Where was Chris Watson?"

"Just in front of Stephanie." And then she remembered he couldn't know which way Stephanie was facing. "Between her and the auditorium building."

"How close? Arm's reach? Could she have hit him without moving?"

"No, he knew better than to get that close. She punched him in the mouth last year. But—" She shut her eyes to remember better. "She looked like she was going to sort of lunge at him, and she could have reached him."

"Okay. We'll say there-ish," said Mr. Villette, and she opened her eyes to watch him draw another circle, CW. "You mentioned another boy."

"Odell," Mr. Todd said quietly.

"Right. Michael Odell. Where was he?"

That was harder. She hadn't been looking at Mike Odell; she'd been watching Stephanie. "He wasn't as close as Chris. Back behind to the right, I think."

MO on the map. "Who else?"

She squinched her eyes shut, trying to call back the ring of staring, gleeful faces. "Annie Morales was off to my left, and Olivia Schroeder was next to her, with Erin and Cammie and Amber. Brandon Chen was behind Chris, and Johnny Patterson must've been next to him because he always is." Her throat seized up for a moment before she could correct herself. "I mean, was. And everybody else was back kind of spread out between the auditorium and the parking lot. I remember I had to push past Kelly and Madison—Madison Becker, not Madison Petrie—when I...when I ran."

Her eyes came open, even though right then, she really didn't want to look at anybody, but it was like Mr. Villette had gotten there first, because he was already saying, "Patty, you did the right thing."

"But how come it didn't work?"

"What do you mean?"

"They all died. And if I witched Chris and ran, how come... I mean, what did I do? I didn't mean to!" She was about to start crying again, and she sniffed hard and pushed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

"You didn't," Mr. Todd said, and he didn't sound like Mrs. Ledbetter trying to tell her she'd just been playing make-believe; he sounded like it was a fact.

She looked at him. She wanted to believe him, but just because he looked like Mr. Donovan and was a retired FBI agent, didn't mean he wasn't lying. Or just wrong. Because adults were wrong sometimes.

"No," he said, like he understood all that, "you really didn't. We think it was your friend Stephanie."

"What was Stephanie?" Mrs. Ledbetter demanded. "What in the name of God is going on?"

Patty was glad Mrs. Ledbetter had asked. It sounded better coming from a teacher.

Mr. Todd and Mr. Villette looked at each other.

"Oh, I see," Mrs. Ledbetter said, and Patty hadn't known she had a voice that sarcastic. "Is this where you tell me it's classified and a matter of national security? Or, 'We could tell you, ma'am, but then we'd have to kill you'?"

"No," Mr. Todd said. "It's not like that."

Mr. Villette had his head bent over his legal pad. He said, "Well, it is, a little bit. I think you can understand it's not something we want all over the media."

"But why..." Mrs. Ledbetter's eyes got wide. "This has happened before. That's why the FBI showed up so goddamn quick. You were expecting it."

"No!" Mr. Villette said, like she'd accused him of murder. And in a way, Patty supposed she had.

"If we'd been expecting it, we could have prevented it," Mr. Todd said, more quietly. "We are not the kind of government conspiracy that kills children. And, no, nothing exactly like this has happened before. But, if we're right, Stephanie Silmer is a manifestation of a phenomenon we've been studying and tracking for almost twenty years. We can't predict it—"

"Yet," Mr. Villette said fiercely.

"Most of the time, we're damage control," Mr. Todd continued. "Because most of the time, the...the people this happens to are adults, and they kill serially. Not en masse."

"Oh my God," Mrs. Ledbetter said weakly.

And something still didn't make sense. "But if Stephanie was the witch," Patty said, "how come she's dead? I mean, my grandmother, it took fifteen rounds for the police to kill her, and nobody was even shooting today."

"Well, we don't know yet," Mr. Todd said, "but I can speculate, because we know that people like Stephanie—and it's not witchcraft, Patty. It's more like a disease. A virus. People like Stephanie burn energy very quickly, and particularly when they're just getting sick, they burn it faster than their bodies can replenish it. They need a lot of calories."

"Stephanie was really hungry," Patty said.

"Yes. She was...well, we use the word 'converting.' She was converting, and then she attacked Chris Watson and the rest of your class, and that used up even more energy, and my best guess, frankly, is that she starved to death in the space of about fifteen minutes. Maybe less."

Patty's entire insides shrank down into a cold sick lump in the pit of her stomach, and she wanted to scream again, the way she had in the bus, only this time not keeping silent.

"My God!" said Mrs. Ledbetter, shooting up out of her chair. "You have no right to tell a child something like that!"

Mr. Todd leaned back in his chair to look her in the eye. "And what do you suggest I do? Lie to her about her best friend's death? In the long run, that will do far more harm than telling her the truth now, no matter how ugly the truth is."

"It's okay, Mrs. Ledbetter," Patty said, even though it wasn't. It was never going to be okay. But the thing that was wrong wasn't Mr. Todd telling the truth. And he was right. She didn't want to be protected from knowing. "I wanted to know. I mean, I want to know. I want to know what happened. I mean, if it's a sickness, how come she got it and I didn't? Did my grandmother have it?"

"We don't know," Mr. Villette said, "although we'll be asking to look at whatever records the police have so that maybe we can find out. But as to why it was Stephanie and not you—we don't have any good answers to that, either. But we may be able to get some better answers if you'll help."

"Me?" said Patty.

"You probably knew her better than anyone," said Mr. Villette. "You'll know things she didn't tell her parents."

"But if she was sick, shouldn't you ask her doctor? She went to Dr. Barber, same as I do."

"Hamstrung by my own metaphor," Mr. Todd muttered, and said more clearly, "It's not that kind of sickness, Patty. It's something that affects the mind before the body. So we need to know about what Stephanie was thinking."

Patty looked helplessly from Mr. Todd to Mr. Villette. She didn't know what they wanted her to say, and saying anything felt like she would be betraying Stephanie, who'd punched Chris Watson in the mouth for calling Patty an ugly weirdo.

"It wasn't Stephanie's fault," Mr. Todd said, in that mind-reading way that was starting to get a little creepy. "We aren't trying to blame her, just to understand what happened to her."

"What kinds of things did she like to do?" Mr. Villette said. "What was she interested in?"

"Um," said Patty. "We watched the X-Files. She played catcher on her church softball team, like I do." It was the first thing they'd had in common, back when they were starting to be friends, that they both played catcher. They didn't talk about church, but they played catch and practiced their fielding all the time.

Had played. Had practiced.

Patty bit the inside of her cheek to keep from starting to cry again and thought of another thing about Stephanie. "She was really into snakes."

"Snakes?"

"Yeah. When we went to the zoo, she wanted to spend all our time in the reptile house looking at the poisonous snakes."

"Huh. Did she know a lot about them?"

"Yeah," Patty said. She remembered wishing Stephanie knew a little less, especially about snake venom. "She'd read all the books in the school library, and all the pages she could find on Wikipedia. She made me look at this horrible picture of a kid who'd been bitten by a snake in South America, and his leg was falling off. It was awful."

"What about her parents?" said Mr. Todd.

"Her mom's terrified of snakes," Patty said.

"What do they do?" said Mr. Villette.

"Mr. Silmer lost his job in 2009, and he hasn't really found another one," Patty said. "I don't know what it was exactly, some kind of accounting, because he used to tell accountant jokes all the time, and now he doesn't anymore. And Mrs. Silmer is a physician's assistant."

"Was Stephanie an only child?"

"Yeah." There was a pause. Patty shuffled frantically through her memories, trying to find something more, but Stephanie was just Stephanie, and it was silly trying to make her out to be some kind of crazy person. And then she did think of something. "Oh."

"What is it, Patty?" Mr. Villette said, and his weird eyes were kind.

"Well, maybe it's nothing," Patty said.

"You can't hurt anyone by telling us," Mr. Villette said.

"Well, Stephanie... I told her about my Grandmother Whittaker because I was afraid I was a witch, and she was really interested. Wanted to see Daddy's scrapbook and everything. And, I mean, if she...if Grandmother Whittaker had this sickness you're talking about, and Stephanie got it..." She got the rest out in a lump: "Could she have got it by thinking about Grandmother Whittaker too much?"

Mr. Villette looked at Mr. Todd, and Mr. Todd looked back. "Mythology," Mr. Villette said softly, and Patty didn't understand what he meant, but the look on his face made her cold.

"That's a good idea, Patty," Mr. Todd said. "That is, no, just thinking about your grandmother wouldn't have made her get this virus, but it could have affected her, well, her symptoms, I guess you'd say."

"So she looked at people and they fell down dead, just like with my grandmother."

"Maybe," said Mr. Villette, and Patty was going to ask him what he meant when there was a noise out in the main part of the police station that was yelling and crashing all mixed together.

They all jumped. Patty knocked her Coke over, and then everything was crazy for a second while Mr. Todd grabbed for his tape recorder, and Mrs. Ledbetter nearly fell over trying to keep from getting Coke on her clothes, and Patty and Mr. Villette both grabbed for the Coke can and ended up knocking Mr. Villette's legal pad on the floor.

"Sorry!" Patty said. "Sorry!" She crawled under the table after it and saw as she turned it right side up and tried to straighten the crumpled pages that all the time they'd been talking, Mr. Villette had been working on his map.

He'd been drawing in the dead bodies, with neat shaded lines connecting them to the circles he'd marked with Patty's help, so that for some of them it really looked like the circle was the top of the head, if you were looking straight down at a person standing upright, and the dead body was the shadow. And others, like Olivia—she'd gotten almost all the way to the parking lot before she died.

"Oh God," Patty said, backing away from the legal pad as if it was on fire, crawling at first, and then standing up as soon as she was out from under the table.

"Patty?" said Mrs. Ledbetter. "Honey, what—"

"I'm sorry, I gotta—" She turned and dove for the door, clawing it open and half falling across the hallway to the women's restroom. She heard someone yell her name from the front of the building, but she couldn't even look around, all her attention focused tightly inward on not puking before she made it to a toilet. Not in front of Mrs. Ledbetter and the FBI agents and the whole Bell Creek police station.

She made it, just barely.

Act VI

The Knoxville Zoological Gardens

Knoxville, TN, May 2011

The reptile house at the Knoxville Zoo was dim and humid and creepy as all get-out. Patty had kind of liked the king snake the zookeeper had brought out and let everybody touch, even though Kelly and Olivia and Madison Petrie had been all stupid and shrieking and giggling about it. But it hadn't been slimy or rough, just dry and bumpy-smooth and moving endlessly beneath her fingers, and it hadn't seemed to mind being petted. That had been cool. But then Stephanie started asking questions, and she kept asking questions, even when everybody else had gotten bored and gone somewhere else, and Patty had to stay, because she was Stephanie's designated buddy, and she'd get them both in trouble if she left.

Stephanie was trying to persuade the zookeeper to show her how they milked the rattlesnakes for venom, and the zookeeper was kind of laughing, but there was no way he was going to let a nine-year-old girl near a rattlesnake, and Patty knew it even if Stephanie didn't.

"Come on, Stephanie," she said, interrupting Stephanie in the middle of something about hemotoxins and blood clotting that Patty didn't even want to know. "Let's go look at the red pandas."

The door opened, letting in another bunch of fourth graders, and the zookeeper looked glad to see them.

Stephanie gave Patty a disgusted look. "Yeah, let's go be girly and look at something cute."

"Well, okay," Patty said peaceably, "we can go look at the rhinos if you want. Just, enough with the snakes, okay?"

Stephanie glowered for a second, but she could never stay mad for long. "Okay," she said. "This place giving you the willies?"

"A little," Patty said. It was okay to admit it to Stephanie, now that they were moving. And Patty had touched the king snake, which she knew made Stephanie approve of her.

"Wouldn't you like to be able to bite anybody that made you mad?" Stephanie said, pushing the door open.

"It's called being a brat," Patty said, and came gladly out of the reptile house and into the sunlight. "And Mom said she'd spank Jeremy if he ever did it again."

"That's my point," said Stephanie. "It's not being a brat when you're a snake."

"And you want to go around biting people all the time?" Patty said.

"Not all the time. Just sometimes. You know."

"Yeah," Patty said, because she did, and Stephanie grinned at her.

And then Stephanie said, "Ooh! Lookit the fox!" and broke into a run. And by the time Patty caught up with her, they'd both forgotten about snakes.

Act VII

Bell Creek, TN, November 2011

No one came after Patty into the restroom, which was a relief, but it was weird, too, when Patty could think about it. Teachers never left you alone if they thought you were sick.

She flushed the toilet and washed her hands. Her reflection in the mirror looked awful, but there wasn't anything she could do about it. She splashed cold water on her face; it felt good, even if it didn't make her any less red or puffy.

And still no adult had come after her. She was already afraid when she opened the door again, and her father's voice echoing down the hall wasn't a surprise, just the confirmation of a horrible truth.

"I know that child is a witch," Daddy was saying. "Just like her mother and her grandmother before her."

Patty froze.

"And I'm telling you," Daddy continued, his voice rising into a shout, "I'm not having a witch in my house! I have a little boy!"

"You have a daughter," Mr. Todd said, and Patty hadn't imagined he could sound so stern.

"We know the government's hunting witches," Daddy said. "You can take her away. Tonight. I'll sign any papers you want."

"Mr. MacIntyre," Mr. Villette said, "we don't want to take your daughter away from you. There's no reason to. She's not a witch."

"That's what the government always says. I know about Roswell, too."

"Roswell?" said Mr. Villette, but he broke off sharply.

"Mr. MacIntyre," Mr. Todd said. "Your daughter is no danger to your son. Or to anyone else."

"Tell that to the Watsons," Daddy said. "Or the Pattersons."

She couldn't stand frozen in the hallway of the Bell Creek police station forever, no matter how much she wanted to. Slowly, lifting one lead-weight foot at a time, Patty started toward the front of the building.

"Patty hasn't hurt anyone," Mr. Villette said.

"Then how come she's the only one left alive?" Daddy said. "How come, out of a class of twenty-two kids, this girl you say isn't a witch is the only one left?"

It was a really good question, and she could hear that in Mr. Todd's voice when he said, "We aren't entirely sure yet, Mr. MacIntyre. But we know it isn't because Patty killed them."

They weren't telling Daddy about Stephanie, and Patty realized, as she came out of the hallway, that she couldn't blame them. They had to know that anything they told Daddy about witches, the whole county would know in a week's time.

"There you are," Daddy said. "Witch."

"Mr. MacIntyre, your daughter is not a witch!" Mr. Villette sounded angry.

But Daddy didn't even look at him when he said, "How can you be sure?" He was looking at Patty, and she felt like she'd never seen him before, like this man looking at her all cold and hateful was some stranger. Had to be. Those flat brown eyes and that turned-down, ugly mouth, those couldn't belong to her daddy.

"Patty," Mr. Todd said, starting toward her in a hurry, "why don't you go back and wait with Mrs Led—"

"We don't want you in our house," Daddy said over Mr. Todd. "Your mother—" He stopped and corrected himself. "My wife and I have talked about this. If we couldn't keep the evil from showing in you, we weren't going to let you poison Jeremy."

"I wouldn't!" Patty said.

"That's what your mother said," Daddy said. "And she died to prove it, too."

"She had an aneurysm!" Patty yelled. "I read her obituary in the library! She had an aneurysm and it killed her and you shouldn't be glad about it!"

"Patty," Mr. Todd said gently, trying to get her to turn around without actually touching her, like he was afraid she'd take a swing at him.

"We won't have you in our house!" Daddy shouted.

"I wouldn't go there if you asked me!" Patty shouted back. "Not if you got down on your bended knees and begged!" And then she was crying again, which was stupid, and also it hurt, because her eyes were already raw and her throat and chest hurt from all the crying she'd been doing over Stephanie and everybody else, and it wasn't fair of Daddy to make her start crying again.

She let Mr. Todd herd her back to the room where Mrs. Ledbetter was waiting. The adults talked for a moment over Patty's head, and Patty let them, because sometimes it was okay to be a kid. She managed to stop crying, finally, and heard Mrs. Ledbetter say, "Jerry MacIntyre never has had the sense God gave a goose." And it was horrible that somebody was saying that about her daddy, but it made her feel better, too.

"Come and sit down, Patty," Mrs. Ledbetter said as Mr. Todd left again. "Do you want another Coke?"

"No, thank you," Patty said. She swallowed hard. "Mrs. Ledbetter, what's going to happen to me? If the FBI don't want me, and Daddy says he won't—" She stopped and pinched the bridge of her nose, because this was seriously enough crying already.

"Do you have any other family?" Mrs. Ledbetter said. "Is there somebody we could call, maybe?"

Cousin Lewis was Patty's first, horrible thought. Then Grandma Karen—but she wasn't really Patty's grandmother, even though Patty loved her. But that made her remember Aunt Lee. "My mama's sister lives in Knoxville, I think," she said. "I don't know her. But maybe...do you think maybe she'd let me stay with her?"

"Mr. Villette is calling Children's Services," Mr. Todd said, coming back in the room. "But we can have them call your aunt, too. What's her name?"

"Lee," Patty said. "Lee Whittaker."

"Good," said Mr. Todd, making a note of it. "Don't worry, Patty. You're not going to be abandoned."

Except that's what Daddy just did, Patty thought, but Mr. Todd was already out of the room again, and she knew better than to argue with adults anyway.

She and Mrs. Ledbetter sat at the table and didn't say anything to each other until the door opened again, and Mr. Todd showed in a young woman with bright new-penny-colored hair who said she was Angela Gorham and she'd be Patty's caseworker and Patty could call her Angie.

She was another Yankee, and Patty'd never called an adult by their first name in her life. But she had a nice smile.

"Patty, are you going to be okay?" Mrs. Ledbetter said. "Only, I need to get going."

Patty nodded. "I'll be fine, Mrs. Ledbetter. Thanks for staying."

Mrs. Ledbetter looked at her for a moment. Then her mouth got grim and she said, "Don't let your daddy's nonsense poison you, Patty. You're not a witch." And she left, nodding thanks to Mr. Todd for holding the door for her.

Patty looked back at Miss Gorham just in time to see her mouthing the word "witch" at Mr. Todd with question marks all over her face. Mr. Todd didn't turn a hair, just said, "Patty, I need to talk to Miss Gorham for a moment before we leave. And I think Mr. Villette would like to talk to you."

"Okay," Patty said, and she got up and went into the hall where Mr. Villette was waiting.

"Patty," said Mr. Villette, crouching down so he could look at her, "you're in for a rough time, and there's nothing I can say that will make it easier. But there's one thing you should remember when you think about Stephanie."

"I know," Patty said. "It wasn't her fault."

"Not that," Mr. Villette said, "although you're right, it wasn't. But listen. Christopher Watson's eyes started bleeding, and you ran, right?"

"Right."

"You saw my map—" And he screwed up his face in what she guessed was an apology. "So you know how big her radius of effect was."

"Her what?"

"The distance she could kill people at."

"Yeah." Patty remembered Olivia Schroeder, who'd almost made it to the parking lot.

"So here's the thing. Stephanie could have killed you, too." He watched her anxiously as he continued: "She'd converted before you started to run, because she made Christopher Watson's eyes bleed. She could have killed you, and she didn't."

"Oh," Patty said. She thought about that, and he waited, still watching her. "Why didn't she? She killed everybody else, even people like Jessie Norris who never picked on us at all."

"We'll never know for sure," Mr. Villette said. "We don't know whether she could aim it, or whether once it started, she couldn't really control it. But either way, she held it off of you, Patty. And we know, from other people like Stephanie that we've been able to talk to, that that must have been very hard. Stephanie loved you. And I don't want you to forget that."

The word "love" was embarrassing, like Mr. Villette thought she and Stephanie really were lesbians or something. But she looked at him, still watching her and still looking anxious, and she knew that wasn't what he meant. That wasn't what he meant at all.

"Thanks," she said.

He nodded, and for a second he looked almost shy. "This is my card," he said, and handed her a business card. She took it, but she couldn't look away from him to read it, even though no one had ever given her their business card before. "If you need somebody to talk to, you can call me or e-mail me, okay?"

"Isn't that weird?" Patty said.

He grinned. "A little. But it's better than not having anybody. And I know about people like Stephanie. You may have questions, once you have a chance to think. And I don't want... I can't—we can't stay here, but we aren't abandoning you." He was really fierce about it, like it mattered to him, and that made Patty feel better.

"Thank you," she said. "I think Miss Gorham will be okay. And maybe my Aunt Lee will come."

"I hope so," he said.

There was a pause where Patty knew she should be saying something that would let him feel like he was off the hook, but she didn't know what.

He said, "Do you think you're going to be all right?"

"I don't know," Patty said. "I'm going to try."

"Me, too," said Mr. Villette, and then he stood up and put his adult face back on as the door opened. Mr. Todd came out, and Miss Gorham stood in the doorway.

But Patty still had his business card, and she held onto it tight as Miss Gorham said, "Come in here, Patty. We've got a lot to talk about."

She wasn't a witch. Stephanie was dead, and her daddy didn't want her in his house, but she wasn't a witch.

There was hope.

At the edge of Tennessee, November 2011

They were halfway home when Sol couldn't take it anymore.

"You're awfully quiet over there, Grasshopper," he said, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Chaz twitch.

"Just thinking about that little girl," Chaz said vaguely.

Deflection. Sol countered: "Which one? Patty or Stephanie?"

"Both, I guess," Chaz said. Ambiguity. But just before Sol set himself for another try—he had a momentary ridiculous image of the two of them as jousting knights—Chaz said, "Patty, mostly. I'm trying to get my head around having your parents tell you you're going to grow up to be evil."

"Mr. MacIntyre is a piece of work," Sol agreed.

Chaz shook his head, like a horse trying to shake off a biting fly. "My mom never—" He stopped, tried again. "She never made me feel like a freak, even though..."

Sol held his breath and tried to remember to keep his eyes on the goddamn road.

Chaz said, "I remember breast-feeding, you know? I remember the taste and her arm supporting my whole body and how I didn't understand the words she was singing. Not yet. I was twenty before I figured out that wasn't normal. Because my mom...everything I threw at her, and God there must have been some crazy shit, she just smiled and loved me and it was part of our world. Hers and mine. And I guess I thought... I mean, I know people abuse their kids and do horrible fucking things to them—I've always known that. But somehow I still thought my mom was... That that's what real parents did."

"It is," Sol said carefully. "But sometimes it seems like there aren't many real parents in the world."

"Yeah," Chaz said and rubbed his face tiredly. "Sometimes it does."

Ashton, VA, February 2012

At first, visitors arrived or didn't arrive based on some set of parameters that nobody explained to her. Someone—probably Ramachandran—would make the call, and either let people in to see the monster or tell them, sorry, the exhibit's closed. She just ate a keeper, but we think she's still hungry.

Then they started asking her, did she want to see anyone today? She got pissy the first few times, which wasn't as good a cover for fear as she would have thought. She'd said, "I'm delusional and psychopathic, how should I know?"

She knew it was part of her treatment, her re-education. The Bug told her to refuse to cooperate. But if she did, she'd be turning down even that lousy scrap of self-determination.

Since then she'd gotten pretty good at checking her mental state for nasty surprises and saying yes or no to visitors based on what she found. She could tell a good day from a bad day, and a bad day she could wrestle into some sort of submission from one destined to kick her ass.

Ramachandran and the rest called it progress. Hafidha called it being hyper-aware of her own repulsive fail.

Today was a bad day, of the sort she thought she could wrestle. So when the orderly said Chaz was there asking for her, and did she want to see him, she tightened the straps on the Bug's straitjacket and pretended it was just what she wanted.

Chaz settled into her plastic chair as if he didn't want to wake it up. He carried a manila folder—not an official one, just the office-supply kind. He set it on his lap, squared off with his thigh bones, before he met her eyes and did The Face: eyebrows raised, eyes round, lips pressed together with the corners trying to reach his jaw hinges on either side. The not-smile, the one that said, "You okay?" and "I'm okay" and "This is so not okay," all at once.

Fuck, he's freaky-looking. He's not half as smart as he thinks he is, or he wouldn't do that.

Shut up, Bug. You don't know shit. For now, it listened to her.

He looked tired, and even less brown than usual for wintertime. She was pretty sure it was still winter. She decided not to ask the date; that was the sort of thing that made him hurt, and with the Bug kicked into its corner, she didn't have to hurt him.

"Hey," she said. "This is totally unexpected."

"Hey." Some actual smile, before he looked down. "There's...this idea. If you hate it, we'll think of something else. Nobody's feelings will be hurt or anything."

"Aww. Bummer."

Chaz looked into her eyes again, in that way that could sometimes make the Bug back down. My little brother has squashed worse than you under his shoe and not noticed, she told it. What kinds of things did the Bug whisper to Chaz when his life hit the low end of the waveform? Hell, maybe Chaz's nightmares were about running out of orange juice. Maybe he had it easy.

Once they would have talked about it. That was before she went and wrecked it all.

"Okay," she said. "Got the terms. What's the idea?"

"You could move in with me."

Her insides tumbled like rocks under a big wave. She could get out. She could take a handout. He was the only person who could get a collar and leash on the Bug. She'd be leashed, and he'd hold the other end. She trusted him. She hated him more than anybody, ever.

Privacy—well, she didn't have any here, either. More illusion of it, though.

In his damned speaking face, she saw how much of that he understood, which was all of it. Bastard.

She laughed. It sounded brittle and ugly, even to her. "What, and sleep on your couch? Your place is slightly bigger than a refrigerator box."

He opened the manila folder. One by one, he took out printouts of photos and laid them on the plastic desk. Living room, kitchen, dining area, bathroom, bedroom, second bedroom, second bathroom. No furniture, wood floors, creamy walls, windows windows windows. Tree branches just starting to show buds outside some of them. It was like showing a pony to a six-year-old. "What is this?"

"It's a condo. It's mine."

She looked from the last photo to his face. He looked tired, and bad-thin. Oh, Smarty-boy, she thought, while the Bug purred and licked up the tears that might otherwise have made it to her eyes. "Roulette?"

He nodded.

He hated roulette. Roulette was just physics, not like poker, which was a puzzle and a game. Roulette, he'd said once, was like robbing banks without the illegal.

"How long did it take?"

"Three days."

He must have slammed neurons in every casino in Vegas to make that much in three days. "Get yourself banned?"

He lifted his boney shoulders and let them fall. "If I stay away for a while, I think I'm okay. Like a year. Or two." His mouth wrinkled, a sour smile.

She swallowed down the ache in her throat that made the Bug happy. She found herself running scenarios, looking for the hitch, for the trap, for the way around the trap, for a way to use it against the trappers. Because she wanted to use this. She wanted this.

Wanting was a weakness. It was like love that way.

Chaz's hands twitched over his knees, lifted, flopped into his lap again. "It's not— You won't be—"

She knew what he was trying not to say. "Free," she said as if the word weighed ten pounds. "What're we talking? Guards? Video surveillance? High-voltage doorknobs? Has Mr. Fantastic built me a force field?"

His face hardened. Oh, yes, her little brother could get pretty steely when he had to. If she wasn't going to play nice, he wasn't going to feel sorry for her. Good for him.

"You'll have to wear an ankle bracelet, or something like it. And yeah, you can probably hack one of those. If you do..." Somehow the tilt of his head encompassed her shiny cell, and suggested nobody would be in a hurry to dismantle it.

Her nails were short, but she pressed them as hard as she could into her palms to feel the sting. She counted seconds for her inhale and exhale, and made them even. "Can I think about it?"

She was crazy, not stupid. He knew what was in this contract. He'd signed it, figuratively speaking, or he'd never have offered it to her. She had to thread her way past the bad things in her head before she could tell if she could give him her word and have a chance of keeping it.

"Take your time. No expiration date on the coupon. Do you want the photos?"

God, like the stuffed rabbit at the dog track; pretty pictures to run after. She almost said no. But the dogs never got to catch the rabbit. The photos weren't bait; they were a promise. He was like that.

"Yes, please."

He tucked them back in the folder and settled it on the edge of the desk. Then he stood up and caught her guard's eye.

"You'll come back next week?" The plea in her voice made her gorge rise. A little self-respect, please, the Bug snarled.

"Anytime you want." He bookended the visit with The Face, as he always did.

When he was gone, the folder still lay on the white plastic desktop. It was proof that he'd really offered. Unless the photos weren't in there, had never been in there. Unless she'd imagined it all, because she wanted so, so much to— Because she wanted, that was all.

She was afraid to open the folder, and she wasn't sure what scared her more: that the photos wouldn't be there, or that they would. The Buddha was a smart cookie with that non-attachment shit. A shame she was never going to master it.

Jesus, maybe if she agreed to this, Chaz would stop doing that freaky thing with his mouth.

"Latency" - by Elizabeth Bear

"...there is no God. Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author..."

—Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade, Justine

Act I

New Richmond, WI, February 2012

Barry Petrewski lived in a hole in the ground. It was a fairly nice hole, as such things go, with many books, comfortable furniture, and a good kitchen—by Russian standards, a very good kitchen.

An American would have thought it ripe for replacement.

A house stood over Barry's hole, but it was just camouflage for the neighbors who would have thought it odd if Barry lived in a hole without a house over it. Not that the neighbors were close by. Barry's camouflage rose from a sweep of rolling countryside, tangled unworked fields and rows of battered windbreak trees. A tan van with a green plumber's logo occupied the cracked driveway. The bright chrome of its bumpers was pitted with rust, but the engine ran perfectly.

Once upon a time the hole had been a bomb shelter, but the Cold War was as dead as the Soviet Union, as dead as the automaton doctors who had made Barry an automaton too. The irony amused him—how wonderful that he should escape from the Russian automatons and come to rest in a shelter designed to protect people from the excesses of Kruschchev. Now it was Barry's shelter: a place to keep him safe.

Him, and all his pretty ladies, while he experimented and learned to make more automatons.

Now it was time to let one of the ladies go. Barry was sad about that, but excited also, because it meant soon he would get to start looking for a new one.

J. Edgar Hoover Federal Building, Washington D.C.

Hafidha Gates had a hole in her brain.

She tried not to think about that. It was counterproductive, and so she occupied herself with other things. Just now she was working late. Reveling, in fact, in the opportunity to work late. To work. To do something useful and relevant and powerful with her time. To maybe save a goddamned life or two. On her own schedule. Under her own power.

It was a sad kind of freedom. She could come here, to the Hoover Building. She could go home, to Arlington. There were a limited number of stops in between she was allowed to make, for food and exercise.

They didn't bother with a monitor anklet. It wasn't like anything electronic could chain this Prometheus, and small humiliations just gave the Bug that much more ammunition. But waiting at home for her was one Chaz Villette, with permission to read her mind...

...and not disappointing him was the strongest chain anyone could have placed on her. Stronger even than the pulses generated by the electrodes penetrating her skull, beneath scars hidden now by half-inch coils of hair she was still deciding what to do with. It's like a chance to start all over.

She'd call Chaz before she left. He'd have dinner ready when she walked in the door. Playing house, that was all it was... No. Bug, you don't get an opinion. He'd have dinner ready. And she could have some, as much as she wanted, off a real plate with real flatware—just as soon as she finished going over these Midwestern unsolved murders, hoping again that a pattern would emerge.

A pattern didn't... but Lisa Marshall from Down The Hall did. She poked her head in the door of Hafidha's Sanctum and cleared her throat. Hafidha had already caught the motion in her bicycle mirror.

"Hey, Hafs—"

Hafidha wondered who in Lisa's family was the schizophrenic, or if it was some other fairly dramatic and stigmatized disability. Whatever the source, Lisa was the only member of the BAU team who'd managed neither to flinch at all nor to be inobviously restraining herself from flinching when Hafs came back to work.

"I'm all ears." Hafidha spun her chair around and leaned it back for a better angle up at Lisa.

Lisa's broad cheeks wrinkled with her grin, but it fell away quickly. "Got something I think might be one of yours."

She held out a file folder.

Gingerly, Hafidha took it. There was never any telling what the contents of one of these things was, and paper copies were so damned slow. You actually had to look at the horrible photos instead of just assimilating them. The scene photos and descriptions hadn't used to bother her, but the Bug enjoyed them. Paper was slower, and so the Bug liked it more.

This didn't take long. The photos weren't so bad, until she got to the last one. And then she looked up. "Shit." She flipped the photo, her eyes on Lisa's face. "She's alive?"

"Alive," said Lisa. "Missing three years of her life. And, apparently—also missing a baby." She paused. "The investigating detective is a Saul Zingermann. Homicide guy? He knew about the—" her windmilling gesture took in the WTF, in all its seedy bureaucratic glory.

Hafidha, as it happened, knew about Saul Zingermann.

"I'll call Reyes," Hafidha said.

Woodbridge, VA

A twangy guitar pulled Danny out of the warmth of sleep and Gray's arm snugged tight around his middle. Behind the darkness of the bedroom blackout curtains, he couldn't tell if it was night or morning, but a squint at the clock said 11:15 pm. He'd barely been down a half hour—

"Shit!" he said, as it sunk in that the tune the Austin guitar was playing was Junior Brown's "My Wife Thinks You're Dead," and that it was coming from his phone. Hafidha wouldn't be calling this late out of idle companionship. Hell, he wasn't sure yet that he was comfortable with her calling at all—but he was a good enough actor not to let her see his unease.

Gray stirred as Brady lunged for the phone. "Hafs?"

"We've got a live one in Minneapolis," Hafidha said. "I've already run it past Reyes, and he said call in the troops. So I'm calling. But I can't raise Chaz—"

"Not answering his phone?"

"He's supposed to be home waiting for me to call," she said.

Her voice vibrated with strain. Brady wondered how good of an actor she was. She might be out, she might be managed—but he could never allow himself to forget that a monster lived inside of her now. There were some times when he still wondered...

It could be a trap.

It could be. And it could be genuine worry and need. "It's out of my way," he said. "I'll be late in."

"Dad won't run the briefing without both of you. Thank you, Danny."

"No problem. See you when I get there." He thumbed the red symbol and heaved his feet to the floor before he could think too much about it. He'd call Reyes and double check before he left. He trusted Hafidha. He just didn't trust the Bug.

"Work?" Gray asked, sliding a hand down Brady's side.

Brady grunted unhappily.

"Go." Gray pulled the covers up—and incidentally, away from Danny, who shivered as cold air stroked his skin. "Love ya."

"I love you," Danny said in reply. He ran a hand over Gray's dark hair to reinforce it. Just in case.

You never knew.

Arlington, VA

Chaz wasn't answering his phone, and Reyes was already walking in through the parking lot of the Hoover Building when Brady called him. That didn't stop Brady from parking his car in front of the wrong condo and walking across a square of winter-brown grass to reach Chaz and Hafidha's windows before he went to the door. You couldn't be too careful.

He peered through half-drawn curtains to see a cozy living room with a gas fire and one lamp burning, a tablet computer face-down on the sofa beside it. More lights burned down a hallway behind the stairs. Faintly, Brady heard music—the White Stripes—and the clatter of pots. He caught a glimpse of Chaz's coathanger shoulders and bent elbows as Villette moonwalked across the gap, his left hand protected by a pot holder where it clutched a saucepan handle.

Chaz's head came up as soon as Brady's gaze touched him. He turned to the window and nodded, though Brady would have bet his face was hidden by reflections from the better-lit inside. It was still creepy, even though it was Chaz.

A moment later and the music had dropped, and Chaz was at the door, rolling cuffs down over his wrists as he held the door open with an elbow. Chaz's shirt was white flannel, with thin red lines forming squares through the warp and weft of the fabric. It looked like an empty tic-tac-toe grid multiplied about a thousand times.

"Come in."

Brady stepped inside on a gust of spring chill and shut the door behind him. As soon as the latch clicked, Chaz said, "Hafidha?" with a worried crease down his brow.

"She sent me," Brady said. "We've got a go. You drop your phone in the john?"

Chaz's eyes widened. "Shit," he said, pushing a lock of hair curled and frizzed by cooking steam out of his eyes. "I left it plugged in in the bedroom—"

Brady said, "No foul. Grab your bag and I'll drive you."

"I've got to change," said Chaz, brushing ineffectually at a soup splatter on his front. "Come upstairs. You can brief me while I get a clean shirt."

Danny snorted. "Tell me that wasn't a come-on."

"Brady!" Chaz was already halfway up the stairs. "That's sexual harassment."

"Only because you need a promotion," Danny said. The stairs didn't creak under his weight. Nice place.

When he turned to the bedrooms, it was obvious which one was Chaz's. Towards the front of the house, and the door stood open. The walls were still eggshell white, and Hafidha wouldn't have stood for that in her own room for longer than it took to choose new colors. The fact that the downstairs walls were already fresh, sandy shades of rose and plum and gold confirmed his analysis.

Chaz stood by a pile of clothes on the bed, stripped to the waist. The scars beside his shoulder blades had faded to matching yellow-white slices; Brady bit his lip as he remembered long, liver-colored gashes, the gleam of bone at the bottom. A moment passed before he realized the salient point here: He's not hiding the scars anymore.

Chaz raised his arms, sliding a silk thermal undershirt over his head. The neck snagged on his hair; as he tugged, the angled ranks of muscles below his ribcage tensed. So that's what three percent body fat looks like.

At least the kid had muscle now.

He tucked the shirt into the waistband of his jeans and followed it with another base layer. This one was Smartwool; the one atop that was polypro. Then a turtleneck and a blazer. He kicked off shearling slippers and ducked under his bed for shoes. He was already wearing wool socks.

"Kitting up for Everest?"

Chaz snorted as he backed out from under the bed. "Whatever I gained, it doesn't keep me warm."

"Grab another layer," Brady said. "We're going to Minnesota."

•

Hafidha turned her head and glanced the length of the rectangular table. There was Chaz and Brady behind the table and Falkner standing alongside the door. Reyes in his usual spot at the head, and Sol and Nikki across from the boys. With Hafidha standing beside the whiteboard, they all fit now—even with Sol present—and she hated that as much as the Bug loved it. Her hand tightened on the dry-erase marker in her hand—one she had no intention of using—and she frowned at Reyes.

"Go ahead," he said.

Hafidha reached out with her mind—it felt good, so simple and clean—and flipped a photograph of a dark-haired white woman up on the screen. "Bethany Keene," she said. "Age 26, flight attendant, based out of Tampa. Or she was, until she disappeared out of a Minneapolis hotel three years ago, without a trace."

"Security cameras?" Lau asked.

"Showed her entering the building," Hafidha said. "And leaving the elevator to go to her room. And then nothing. No sign she'd ever left. But she was gone. Until three days ago."

The next photo. Hafidha avoided looking at it with her eyes—she'd already seen the copy in Doctor Lisa's folder—but it was just as easy for her to read the ones and zeros and know exactly what the image was. The same young woman, but wizened, glassy. With dry, frizzy hair, her olive complexion faded to a horrible greenish color—but not dead. Sitting up in an institutional bed, hunched forward in a hospital gown, her shoulders up to protect her throat.

"She was dumped outside a Minneapolis hospital emergency room. She was hemorrhaging from childbirth."

"Childbirth?" Lau rocked forward; a lesser agent would have been half out of her seat.

Sol swallowed and steepled his fingers. "Much as I hate to say this, it wouldn't be the first time a serial rapist kept a... dungeon. Or even forced women to conceive and give birth."

Lau folded her fingers around each other. "True. But what makes it one of ours?"

Hafidha looked at Reyes.

Reyes nodded and spoke. "Do you folks remember Detective Zingermann? The Tom and Betty Johnson case?"

Brady's shoulders rose like those of the young woman in the photo. "Do I ever."

"Good cop," said Falkner.

Reyes continued, "He'd been working her disappearance as a possible homicide. When Bethany Keene turned up alive, he was notified because he'd flagged her name at every E.R. and morgue in the Twin Cities. And once he got a chance to talk to her, he called us. Or rather, he called the BAU, and asked them to pass it down the hall. Bethany can't remember the last three years."

"Traumatic amnesia? Was she drugged?"

"My first thought too, Villette. And the hospital reports—of all things—traces of Phenazepam in her blood."

"That's not one of your standard date rape drugs," Brady said.

Chaz got one of his faraway expressions. Hafidha knew he was thinking—as she was—of Daphne. Of how Daphne would have been ready with chapter and verse of the pharmaceutical, ripped from the pages of the Physician's Desk Reference.

"It's an epilepsy drug," he said at last, slowly. "But not a common one, is it?"

"Not in the west," Hafidha said. "But they used a lot of it in Russia. And it can have side-effects on recollection, according to the doctors Zingermann talked to. Still, it wouldn't just obliterate this woman's memory of an entire pregnancy. "

"So he called us?" Brady asked.

"No," Hafidha said. "He called us because he said he got the impression that there was somebody else in Bethany's head with her. Sort of like, he said... sort of like how he felt when he was talking to Betty Johnson."

"Right," said Reyes. "Lau, I'm going to stick you with the scutwork, but you're the best for the job. See if you can get Tan seconded, and try to set up interviews with Keene's family and coworkers in Florida. The geography and timeline make me think it's probably a wild goose chase, but it's possible that this was personal, and somebody tried to make her look like a target of opportunity by taking her while she was in another city. Everybody else—wheels up in an hour. Except Hafs." His gaze rested on her with a physical weight. "You have the con."

"Reyes—"

He paused, regarded her out of coffee-brown eyes. Hafidha realized it was her voice that had spoken. She scrambled to make it seem like she hadn't been protesting being left behind. "I'll start with security films from the hotel, if Zingermann can have them shipped to me."

"Good idea," Reyes said.

New Richmond, WI

The new girl was so pretty. Before Barry unpacked her, he paused to admire the clean lines of her limbs, the way her hair fell across her shoulders and her face. She didn't move—usually by the time he unzipped them they were stirring a little—and the left hand reached under her nose to feel for breath. He would have slapped it back, but he was curious, too.

The left fingers curled. Barry saw disturbed hair flutter as if in a gentle breeze. Alive, then, and he snatched the left hand back before it could do more than give her cheek a gentle caress, brushing her hair away from her eyes.

He had to get her into her kennel before the drug wore off.

Act II

Somewhere over Virginia

On the plane, when they'd all retreated to their corners, Chaz slipped up beside Reyes and crouched in the aisle beside his chair. He spoke softly, angling his face so his hair hid him. "If he's a gamma and he's raping them to make them pregnant...you know what he's breeding. If any of them live—"

There was a pause. Their gazes met as Reyes turned, inclined his head.

"I know," Reyes said. He pushed a hand across thinning coils of hair, fingers flexing as if he resisted the urge to scratch. "Believe me. I've thought of it."

New Richmond, WI

Barry needed both hands to support the new girl down the hall. The first few times, he'd had to drag a girl, hurting her until the left hand cooperated. The left hand was weak. Sentimental. Evil and pathetic and not at all a proper automaton. It shook as he hauled the new girl past the two kennels that were still full. The girls inside withdrew to their beds as he went past. They knew better than to come up to the wire when he was bringing someone new in, no matter how much they wanted to.

He put the new girl in the third kennel and cut her ropes with a sheath knife he wore at his belt, careful to take both the blade and the rope pieces with him. The door stood open, and the concrete floor still smelled faintly of bleach. He'd made it very clean for her. She wouldn't get sick on him. He made sure her bubbler was connected and running, and that she couldn't reach anything but the welded, rounded parts she couldn't pull loose or hurt herself on.

He locked the door behind himself when he left.

He'd made mistakes with some of the early girls. He was very careful not to make the same mistake twice. His program allowed him to learn.

As he walked past the kennels on the way out, the left hand reached out to fondle the wire of the kennels as if comforting a sobbing child.

Minneapolis, MN

Chaz recognized Saul Zingermann waiting behind a line of barriers and orange cones on the tarmac before the plane rolled to a halt. The Minneapolis detective was a bulky shadow in a parka, backlit by floods, but no amount of weatherproofing could hide his awkward stance and the characteristic tilt of his head. He started forward as the stairs rolled up, and by the time the team was descending he awaited them at the bottom.

"Sure glad you came," he said, shaking hands all around. Chaz stood at the back of the group, shoulders hunched and hands shoved into his pockets. He knew he was shivering visibly; it was a good excuse.

Zingermann continued, "I heard about Agent Worth. I am—" He shook his head and finished helplessly. "She was a good cop. I'm sure I'm not half so sorry as you are."

"Thank you," Falkner said. "There's enough sorrow to go around."

Under the knit cap and the hood of the parka, Zingermann was medium-tall, spare, with smooth cheeks and a nose like Jean Reno's. Elizabeth Johnson had called him "funny-looking in a handsome sort of way," which Chaz supposed was the racist old bat's code for "Jewish." Chaz would have said he had a nice face, unassuming, that promised to grow craggy and weather well with age. It was a face you could trust; a face that encouraged you to confidences.

He was a damned good interviewer.

"Saul," Todd said as Zingermann's hand reached his.

"Sol," Zingermann answered, with a flicker of grin. "Let's get inside before our eyelashes freeze together."

The car waiting for them was a police 4x4, three rows of seats making room enough for everybody in the truncated team. Brady got shotgun in deference to his shoulders, while Chaz crunched himself up in the back row next to Todd. Falkner and Reyes rode in the middle.

"I got your message," Zingermann said, turning over his shoulder to Reyes briefly before starting up the engine. It was still warm, and a little bit of heat even filtered back to Chaz. "I've held off informing the family. You said Agent Lau was enroute?"

"We'll do it in person," Reyes confirmed. "It might be revealing."

Zingermann nodded. "If anybody can get something useful out of them, it's Nikki," he said.

Chaz didn't miss the admiration in his voice. Wonder Woman powers, activate.

"I sure didn't have much luck. It might be there's nothing useful to get." From another cop, it could have been a self-justification. From Zingermann, it was a wry acknowledgement that their job had a lot of dead ends.

"I'm assuming you'll want to go straight to the hospital?"

"Please," Reyes said. "We can get settled in once we've met Ms. Keene."

"I have identified three other possibly linked cases."

Chaz leaned between Falkner and Reyes so he could snake a hand forward. "Files go here."

•

Sol held the flashlight while Chaz bent over papers and photographs, rapidly developing a headache and a case of nausea from reading in the dark, in a moving car. The files were dusty and smelled of long storage.

Three dark-haired women, all missing persons in the Twin Cities over the past fifteen years. All vanished from inside hotels. Each never heard from again. There appeared to be no other connections between them.

"Detective," Chaz asked. "How many missing persons files did you go through to find these?"

"Don't ask," Zingermann answered, turning into the parking lot of a well-lit medical complex. "...all of them."

New Richmond, WI

Barry always saved the best for last.

The wailing in the kennels told him the new girl was waking up. He didn't worry too much about the crashing: she wasn't going to get out, and while she might bruise herself on the wire, there wasn't a lot more damage she could do to herself. She had water and a mattress and a drain: she'd be fine until he got back. It would take some time to tame her so he could safely see to her medical needs. He'd start once the sedation wore off. It was a chore, but soon she'd be as well-behaved as the others.

In the meantime, he let himself through the soundproofed doors to his own living quarters. He was careful to lock them, and to hide the key before he opened the interior set. She couldn't be allowed to find out where he kept it—or even that it existed. She had to think that the power to open the doors rested only with him.

It was good that he took precautions, because when he stepped into the living room she was sitting at the low table with a book open in front of her, a page pinched between her fingers. Three empty bags of chips were spread out around her; she was halfway done with the fourth. Orange cheese powder smeared her face, her skinny fingers, and the paper. She had to kneel up to see over the edge of the coffee table.

Barry paused before the door as it latched.

"Hello, Papa," she said in Russian.

"Hello, Zhenya," he said. "What are you reading?"

"Something from your shelf," she said. "It's called Justine. I don't understand it."

"It's about grown-up men and women," Barry said. "You don't need to understand it yet."

"Oh," she said. "But the protagonist is a little girl—"

"Much older than you," he said. "You are two. She is twelve. Someday you will be twelve, too, and you will understand. Are you hungry, Zhenya?"

Her face lit up. "Starving," she said.

Somewhere over Florida

Arthur Tan's head rocked gently against the oval window of a 737, haloed by the sunrise shimmering off myriad parallel scratches in the transparent plastic. Lau, in the aisle seat, watched a slender filament of drool explore his sculptured chin and tried not to think about how many compression cycles this aged piece of equipment had undergone.

The bump of the landing gear deploying opened his eyes. He blinked and pitched the bridge of his nose, then stifled a yawn.

"Sleeping on duty, Agent Tan?"

"My partner had my back," he said. He checked his watch and turned to glance out the window. His left thumb fiddled with his wedding ring.

"Padma's not happy about the midnight call?"

He rolled his eyes at her. "Are you?"

"You notice," Lau said, "I go home to... not even a cat."

"She's not taking it out on me. I just... well, I miss her when I travel," he said, ducking his chin.

"I judge your manliness positively for this admission." Lau winked.

Tan smiled—there and gone, like Jeremy Brett. "And Naima. Although Naima's—"

"Terrible twos?"

"Living up to the toddler reputation," he said. "But that's not what's bugging me."

If it wasn't marital pressure, then it was looking for comfort in the wedding ring. "Celentano."

A guess, but she said it with certainty.

Tan huffed, and did a creditable Joe Mantegna. "'Well, I have come to inform you that now it's your turn to do us a favor.' Wait, was that racist?"

Lau shrugged. "Probably. But Victor would make a pretty good mob boss."

"You're telling me." He winced, working his jaw to pop his ears.

"He's putting pressure on you."

"How did you guess?" He looked at his hands. "Reyes had better watch his back, Nik. Brutus is leaning in for that kidney shot."

Act III

Minneapolis, MN

First light was just beginning to gray the eastern sky, still too dim to compete with the puddles of light under the streetlamps, as Falkner and her team crossed ice-scarred asphalt and picked their way between the small heaps of plow scruff that marked the curb. "Hasn't been much of a winter," Zingermann said apologetically.

"Don't feel like you need to produce more on our account," Brady replied. Falkner gave him an assessing glance while his attention was distracted. Shoulders tight, jaw set. Cracking jokes reflexively. Probably feeling all the shame and dismay of their last trip out here.

But holding it together. Doing his job. She thought about the Brady of days past, simmering while they combed eastern Texas for any sign of Chaz—full of rage and fear that leaked out of him at any provocation. This was a stronger, saner man—more level and more healed. Some good things had come out of the past few years, and Falkner needed to hang on to that.

Especially when Celentano was calling her in early for closed-door conferences.

When they entered the hospital, Falkner sent Todd to start working through the medical reports. Brady took Zingermann and the car, intending to review the physical evidence and walk through the hotel where the abduction had occurred. An agent from the Minnesota field office would be by to deliver a second car for the team's use.

Falkner was relieved to see that Bethany Keene had been given a private room and some clothes slightly more dignified than a hospital johnny: scrubs and paper slippers, with a men's terrycloth robe to lend her warmth. She still sat in the bed like a schoolgirl waiting to be punished, an image that left Falkner equal parts homesick and infuriated.

Falkner came in with just Chaz. He was male, but unless he chose to turn it off he was also about as unintimidating as it was possible for an FBI agent to be—and all of Falkner's female agents were busy elsewhere. Worth would have been the right woman for this job, on so many levels. But Worth was a hole that couldn't be filled, so they'd just have to work around her.

Chaz stayed just inside the door, his back to the frame, effacing himself so effectively that Falkner was pretty sure he was using the mirror. She walked into the room alone, pausing at the edge of the bed curtain. Grant the victim as much agency as possible.

"Ms. Keene? May I sit down? I'm Supervisory Special Agent Esther Falkner, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and my partner is Special Agent Charles Villette. Detective Zingermann has asked us to become involved in your case—"

Keene blinked, her hands a little less white across her knees. "He believed me?"

"He called the FBI," Falkner said with a smile. She held up a tiny recorder, and when Keene nodded she laid it on the bedside table and switched it on. A formality only, when Chaz was present. "He's been looking for you for three years, Ms. Keene. We all want to find out who did this to you."

Keene hugged her knees even tighter, but only with one hand. She wasn't thin—wherever she'd been, she'd been well-fed, and probably hadn't gotten enough exercise judging by the slack flesh of her forearms—and she couldn't curl up as tightly as she obviously wanted to. Still, her left hand reached out, clutching the bed rail. She rocked back and forth, pulling against the rail and then slumping back. It reminded Falkner of a chimpanzee in a too-small cage, though the comparison shamed her as soon as she thought of it.

"I don't believe me," she said.

Falkner edged to the chair beside the bed, judging that Keene was too distracted to give permission, and that she'd be more comfortable if Falkner wasn't looming. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. She knew it showed the gun when her jacket gaped, but she wanted to make herself solid and nonthreatening. She thought about Bethany's mother, and what Falkner would want done if it were one of her own daughters in that bed.

"Your body believes you," she said, gently.

Bethany began to beat against the railing with her left hand.

She looked at it, brow furrowing, and made a grab with her own right hand to the wrist. The left hand strained, then went limp, fingers half-curled in what Falkner could read as despair—or frustration.

"I can't remember anything! How can I help you if I can't tell you where I was, or what happened to me?"

There was a sound from the door, and Falkner startled as she realized she'd forgotten Chaz was in the room. She turned in time to see a peculiar expression cross his face—a kind of transparency. He glanced left. His hand shot out and snagged a chair. He spun it, straddled it, and leaned forwards over the back, arms folded.

"I don't know about that," he said. "Tell me."

"Tell you what?"

"Tell me what happened to you."

Falkner opened her mouth and then made herself close it again. Bethany was staring at Chaz with a look of ferocious concentration. The left hand, still cradled in her lap, twitched spasmodically. Chaz nodded, eyes on Bethany's face.

She said, "I told you I don't—"

"You do," he said. "It's okay. Somebody just... hid the memories from part of you. The part that talks. But there's a whole bunch of parts of a human being, Ms. Keene. Usually they find ways to talk to one another—we call it intuition, hunches. The voice of our guardian angels. But something's happened to the part of your brain that translates between the other parts and your conscious mind."

"How do you know that?" Bethany asked, eyes wide. Her hands folded themselves in her lap now, almost primly.

"I'm a translator," Chaz said. He'd obviously planned this bit out in advance, because there was no hesitation. "I can do what the damaged bit of your brain does, normally. Do I have your permission?"

Bethany nodded, lip pinched between her teeth. "What do I do?"

"Just relax," Chaz said. "You understand that this may not be things you want to hear?"

She laughed like somebody rattling broken crockery in a box. "I miscarried a baby I don't remember existing, Agent..."

"Villette," Falkner supplied.

"Villette," Bethany said gratefully. "I was apparently held captive and r— raped, and I don't remember three years of my life. How can knowing what really happened be worse than whatever I—" she gasped, kept going. "—whatever I make up in my head?"

Chaz smiled in that way that rearranged his face from goofy Muppet to enchanting Muppet. Falkner wanted to push his hair out of his eyes. He said, "I think you're very strong. Are you ready?"

"What do I need to do?"

He shook his head. "Just remember. And don't worry if your conscious mind doesn't seem to be coming up with any details. Let it wander. I'll do all the work."

She gave him a dubious look, eyebrow raised. He nodded.

Bethany Keene closed her eyes, and Chaz Villette spoke with her voice.

•

"There are cages. Three cages. Like runs in a dog pound. There are girls in all of them. Me, and there's Amber and Brigit. We're not supposed to talk, to have names. But we talk when he's not there.

Brigit is a computer programmer. She had just come to St. Paul for a job and was living in a hotel until she found a place. Amber is a student from England. She is—she was—doing a year at the University of Minnesota.

Except Brigit... He takes her away in a wheelbarrow. And then there's Madison. Madison's older, she's thirty-one. She doesn't look it. She's in the kennel next to mine, and I have to watch while he—

On the digital recorder, Chaz's perfect version of Bethany's voice choked off. Reyes winced, his finger hovering over the kill switch. Falkner, across the desk in the unused administrative office they'd appropriated, let herself nod.

With an audible sigh of relief, Reyes pushed the button. "Just give me the précis for now."

Falkner reached down deep and found the detached, clinical part of her self she used for reporting bad news to superior officers, then and now. "He punished them if they talked, if they humanized themselves to him in any way. He fed them, kept them clean and warm. He had an accent. German or Polish, she thought. She's not very good with accents. Amber said Russian. He raped them on a regular schedule. Bethany said that his left hand... seemed to try to impede his actions. To comfort her."

"Alien hand syndrome," Reyes said. "It happens when there's damage to the corpus callosum and the left and right hemispheres can't talk to each other any more. They're left guessing what's going on in the other half of the brain." He snorted. "Like being married."

"Maybe for some people," Falkner said.

Reyes shot an amused look across the desk. "And he's somehow forced it upon his victims. Locked the knowledge of what he's done to them away inside part of their brain that can't communicate it."

"That's not a really dangerous manifestation, at least." Falkner said.

Reyes' scarred lips pressed thin. "Not unless he can do it at a distance," he said.

"Call Brady and Sol," she told him. "I'll go talk to Chaz."

Tampa, FL

"Ms. Alicia Keene?" Lau said, to the emaciated woman framed in the door of her house. Her complexion was as transparently pale as an English rose; Lau couldn't imagine how anybody could stay that white in Florida unless they never left the house. She shouldn't be more than fifty-five, but she dressed—and looked—ten years older. Lau watched her appraisingly. Skinny as she was—

"Yes," said the woman. Guarded. Eyes like a whipped dog's, waiting the next blow.

Lau held up her identification. "I'm Nicolette Lau. This is Arthur Tan. We're with the Federal Bureau of Invest—"

Alicia Keene staggered backward, fingers slipping from the doorframe. She sat down hard on the floor, blue slacks riding up blue-veined calves. White cotton socks slumped atop her orthopedic shoes. Her hand pressed her mouth, and as Lau jumped across the doorsill to crouch beside her, she struck ineffectually at Nikki. "No. No, no, no!"

"Bethany's alive," Lau said, grabbing the hand that pawed at her, holding Keene's attention. Keene's hand felt like sticks wrapped in tissue paper. Not a gamma: just somebody who couldn't remember or care enough to eat. "Ms. Keene! Look at me! Bethany's alive. She's at a hospital in Minneapolis. We've come to take you to her."

Tan was right behind Lau, just inside the door. Dividing his attention between interior and exterior. The cop's hard-learned understanding: just because they were on a mission of mercy didn't mean there was no danger.

"Alive?" said Keene.

"Alive," Tan confirmed.

She sat upright, wobbly but determined. "Let me tell my husband. And call a neighbor for the cat. I'll get my coat."

Minneapolis, MN

In the hall outside, Chaz leaned against the wall, arms folded in that pose that looked like he was hugging himself against a chill. Falkner stopped when she saw him, but let the door swing shut quietly and the knob latch. "You did good in there."

"Thank you." A pause while he looked for words. If he'd prepared this speech, it was deserting him. She gave him the time. He said, "How are you doing?"

She shrugged. "This is no worse than a lot of them."

"I meant Celentano."

"Oh."

"Do you think I don't know he wants a tighter rein, and whether... whether what happened to Daphne was a mistake or not, he's going to make it into one."

"I can handle it," Falkner said.

"You can handle anything," Chaz said, his taut body language uncoiling into earnestness. "Just donâ€™t forget that you don't always have to. Not alone, anyway. Not without help."

She stilled. He put a hand on her shoulder.

"God," she said. "Look at you, all grown up."

It just came out, and for a moment she was terrified she'd said the wrong thing, offended him. But he stilled too, and then he smiled and gave her a squeeze before letting his hand drop away. "One for all," he said. "All for one."

"Even if we're coming apart at the seams?"

He was really tall when he stood up straight. It was easy to forget that the rest of the time. "Especially then."

•

An average-sized hotel, even one that didn't keep particularly good track of its guests, still had a lot of security cameras, and Hafidha was getting a too-in-depth overview of all of them while she tried to remember not to scratch at her damned scalp anymore. Yes, Virginia. The Government does put microchips in your brain. Brady had been unable to get access to the actual room from which Bethany Keene had disappeared, but the hotel staff swore the one two doors down was an exact duplicate.

He was currently crawling under the bed, muttering into his headset that this should have been Lau's job, while Zingermann held the flashlight. Hafidha—her monitors flickering with images of people bored in elevators, people kissing in elevators, people staring irritatedly forward and trying to ignore their traveling companions in elevators—could just pick up Zingermann's dialogue.

"We did all that C.S.I. stuff," he said. "You know, stuff with Keene's cell phone. Stuff with the carpets. There was a clean glass in the sink, but it had been rinsed. Lip prints on the edge. We got to use all kinds of forensics stuff we can hardly ever break out."

"Missing White Woman Syndrome," Brady said tiredly. Rustling and scraping sounds told Hafidha that he was crawling back out from under the bed.

"Afraid so." Zingermann actually sounded apologetic. "Pretty one, too. I'm guessing you didn't actually find anything under the bed in the wrong hotel room, three years later?"

Bellhops and businesswomen, tourists and housekeepers paraded past on Hafidha's monitors—and behind her eyelids. Luggage carts and room service trolleys and housekeeping carts. Maintenance hauling a replacement fridge. Bethany Keene, riding an elevator up with a bellhop with a large rolling bag, another uniformed flight attendant, and a bored-looking businessman with a leather overnight bag. Bethany and her coworker got off at the same floor; the bellhop and the businessman continued up.

"Did anybody check on her fellow flight and cabin crew?" Hafidha asked.

"Spotless," Zingermann answered, after Brady consulted with him briefly.

Hafidha rolled her eyes. "Danny, please tell Detective Zingermann to put on his headset, if he has one? I'll patch him in."

She overheard Brady saying, "Just do it—she's got skills—" and a moment later she had conferenced Zingermann into the call.

"There. Much cozier. So, Brady, what did you discover under the wrong bed?"

"Well," he said. "I discovered that somebody could hide there. Or hide a body there, though we know that's not what happened to Bethany. But it's a useful data point."

"Huh," said Zingermann.

"It's a gift of his, Detective," Hafidha said. "What else?"

"I looked over the scene photos. Based on those, no signs of a struggle in the room—"

"No signs of a struggle at all," Zingermann said.

That silence would be Brady nodding. Hafidha heard the light thumps of his shoes on the carpet as he paced. "The room has a peephole and a security bar. Hafidha, say you're an attractive, slight young woman who travels for a living. Your coworker is next door. Is there any way a stranger gets into your hotel room without you making enough of a fuss that your coworker hears it, no matter how soundly she sleeps?"

The same bellhop was riding down again, this time in the company of two older women with expensive hair. He got off the elevator at Bethany's floor. Something caught Hafidha's attention.

"Suitcase," she said.

"Like lost luggage?" Zingermann asked. "I'd open the door for that."

"Flight attendants don't check bags," Brady said.

"No," said Hafidha. "You'd open the door for hotel staff, right? I've got a bellhop here who's been riding the elevators up and down with the same rolling bag. Now maybe he missed his floor—"

"Crap," Brady said.

"But the suitcase doesn't drag like there's anything in it. And Danny? It's a really... big... bag."

She heard the thrill of the chase in his voice. "Get me a screen cap of his face on my phone and I'll buy you three hot fudge sundaes."

Zingermann chimed in. "Can you find him leaving?"

"On it," Hafidha said. Her fingers were picking through her hair again, probing the beaded scars. She jerked them down and curled them around the arms of her chair.

Jellybeans. Something to do with her fingers that wasn't trichotillomania.

Act IV

New Richmond, WI

She shivered with nerves, not with cold. This place was warm, in spite of the concrete floor and the yellow cotton jersey nightshirt that brushed her bare knees. It was bright, too, from the overhead fluorescents on the other side of her chain-link ceiling.

She could smell the laundry soap in her shirt, and see the old faint stains on the front and the darker color at the seams where the fabric wasn't as faded. The garment had belonged to someone else before her. Or maybe the someone else was her; maybe she'd had it for years and years. But she couldn't remember what the stains were.

Me and a gun...

Her left hand clenched on the knitted collar and pulled hard. She didn't have anything else to wear, though. She cupped her right hand around the left and pinned it against her breastbone to keep it still.

The others wore the same kind of shirt: blue for the woman on the other side of the chain-link wall, and gray for the woman in the—the space—beyond. Room. Except rooms weren't made of fencing. These were like the enclosures where zoos kept animals when they weren't on exhibit. When they were sick or being—

Me and a gun...

She tried to relax, because the shivering made her teeth chatter, and she wanted to speak. She twisted her fingers in the wire that separated her from the woman in the blue shirt. "I have to pee," she said. "What do I do when I have to pee?"

The woman was dark-haired, and she sat on the bare mattress with her legs stretched out straight on the floor. She turned her head slowly, and her face seemed to come back to life. It was pretty now, instead of like a bad painting.

"The drain," she said.

There was one in the floor. "Just...like that?"

The woman in the blue shirt nodded. "What's your name?"

For one awful moment nothing occurred to her. "Marnie," she answered, and it felt true. "What's yours?"

The woman in blue frowned and closed her eyes. "Madison. My name is Madison."

The woman on the other side of Madison rose and clutched at the wire between them. "My name is Amber. I'm nineteen years old."

Amber sounded like someone on TV. Masterpiece Theater. England, that was it. Maybe that was why she seemed older than nineteen. "Why are we here?" Marnie asked.

"I don't know." Madison's far hand, her left, clawed at the mattress.

Me and a gun and a man on my back...

That was from a song, Marnie realized. Not even one she liked. Boys for Pele was her favorite Tori Amos album, not that one. Sometimes you got songs in your head for no good reason.

"We've been here a long time," Amber said.

"Are you sure?" The woman in the blue shirt sucked her lips in over her teeth. "No. I was home just last week. I had a conference to go to, so I packed—" She stopped and shook her head. "I'd remember you, I think. What's your name?"

The woman in the gray shirt blinked and looked down at her fingers tangled in the wire. She gave a little sob, then blurted out, "Amber! My name is Amber. I go to university. Oh, my god. What am I doing here?"

The woman in the blue shirt closed her hands hard over her knees; the skin paled around her fingertips. "And my name is Madison. What's your name?" she asked, turning.

"Marnie," she said, pretty sure it was. "I want to leave. I'm not supposed to be here. Please, tell me how to leave."

Outside Amber's cage (It's a cage! They trap things, put them in cages, and make them—) she could see a door set in a cinder-block wall. The latch rattled and clicked, as if a key was working the lock.

The other two women started backward. The one in gray stumbled over the edge of her mattress and half-fell against the wire. The one in blue pulled her legs in and yanked her shirt down over them, pressing her back to the wall.

Their faces were blank, but not empty.

"What is it?" Marnie whispered.

"I don't remember," said the woman in blue, and her voice came out high and thin with fear.

Marnie backed away from the door. "I've never seen Barbados," she said as the doorknob turned.

That was from the song, too. She wondered what it meant.

Minneapolis, MN

Chaz's phone shrilled the Looney Tunes theme, and his heart skipped in his chest. Beside him, Falkner startled and then smiled.

He slid the slider and said, "Hey."

"Hey," Hafidha said back. "I just uploaded a film to your phone. I need your best supervillain guess as to how much that rolling bag weighs."

"One moment." He switched the call to speaker and minimized it, then opened the email-waiting icon. A grainy security camera video showed a broad-shouldered bellhop heaving a rolling bag's stuck wheel out of the gap between an elevator floor and a hallway. "It's a small video..."

"You're magic."

"Hah," he said. A familiar pinch of headache between his eyes. "Hundred forty. Give or take."

"How much does Bethany Keene weigh?"

"She's gained weight since she was taken."

"Fine, you've seen photos. How much did she weigh?"

"Hundred thirty," Chaz said reluctantly.

"She's in the bag."

"She's in that bag," he confirmed, while Falkner leaned over his shoulder, her mouth pinched in dismay. "You got a good cap of that guy's face?"

"Brady's already showing it around the hotel staff."

Chaz heard Falkner's breath come out in a puff. "Good work, Hafidha."

Tampa, FL

August Keene was a bulky man with a drinker's nose. Sensitive as she tried to be to his grief and shock, Lau took an instant dislike to him—one that was not ameliorated by the dubious look he gave Tan and the twice-dubious echo that bounced off Lau. Her opinion wasn't improved on the way to the airport, in Tampa morning traffic, as she overheard him lean towards his wife and stage-whisper, "Both Oriental? Aren't they supposed to have a white guy? At least to drive?"

She would have rested her head in her hands, but it would have been unprofessional.

Tan caught her eye sideways. In Robocop's voice, he murmured, " Serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law. Even douchebags."

Her struggle with unprofessionalism dissolved into a tight-lipped sneeze of laughter.

"What?" Keene asked, leaning over the back seat.

Lau waved a hand beside her face. "Allergies," she said, indicating watering eyes. "Please excuse."

Minneapolis, MN

Falkner's phone rang ten minutes later. "He's not an employee," Brady said, his tone vibrating with suppressed excitement. "He never was."

"But you got something anyway."

"Reyes said the witness identified an accent? Eastern European?"

"Yes?"

"The hotel had a guest at the time. One Buryan Alexeivich Petrewski, naturalized citizen of the United States and, Hafidha tells me, resident of New Richmond, Wisconsin. Which happens to be about an hour from here, so why does he need a hotel room? But that's not all—"

The pause hung heavy, until Falkner realized they were all waiting for Daphne to fill it. Chaz must have figured it out a second sooner, because he said—

"Epilepsy! He was treated for epilepsy in the Soviet Union, wasn't he? They severed his corpus callosum to inhibit the seizures?"

"Brain surgery," Brady confirmed. "God damn, can they all be this clean?"

On the heel of his words, Reyes slammed through the door, bouncing with adrenaline. "Marnie Ericsen," he said. "Twenty-two, nursing student in town for a job interview. Did not make her flight home yesterday evening, and her mother can't raise her on her cellphone. Failed to check out of her hotel room, and all her bags are still in it."

"We know where he lives," Falkner said. Her fingers curled as if her palm itched. "When?" she said.

With every tick of the clock, a young woman could be—was—suffering horrible things. But they had a better chance of getting her back alive if—

She saw the black math happening behind Reyes' eyes, the equations the same as the ones she ran. But he was team leader. He was the one who had to open his mouth and say the horrible words.

"We wait for Lau and Tan."

•

In the elevator up to Bethany's floor, Ms. Keene kept touching her face. "Do I look all right?" she said. "I've lost so much weight. Will she recognize me?"

The door slid open and they emerged into the hall. Quick steps slowed, became reluctant... but the Keenes grasped each other's hands and rallied. Forged on.

Tan knew better than to offer her a verbal reassurance that might turn out to be a lie. He said, "Sometimes these things take a while. Agent Lau and I will make sure you have contact information for victim resources, a competent therapist—"

They were at Bethany Keene's door. Chaz stood beside it, silent and sunken-cheeked. He smelled like pancakes and acetone. As the Keenes hesitated before the door, he took Lau's elbow and drew her and Tan aside.

"Eat!" she hissed, glowering at him. He winced; Tan was profiler enough by now to read the unstated sentence that passed between them. What would Worth say?

Even unsaid, it struck home. But he squared his shoulders and said, "We've got your armor in the cars. Brady and Hafidha found him."

•

The armor for Tan was borrowed from the local field office. He was a tall-ish, medium broad guy, like a lot of agents; it fit respectably well. As he was fitting the chest straps, Brady came up beside him. They were of a height, but it looked bigger on Brady—maybe because he was twice as wide. "I'm sorry about this," Brady said. "But you're about to get a cold, sudden dunking into what the ACTF does for a living. You should know that if we corner this guy... we may not be able to take him alive."

Tan hoped Brady wasn't suggesting that this team looked for opportunities to put people down. The ACTF had a lot of violent resolutions, but Lau and Reyes were both rated among the best in the Bureau at conflict resolution—and when Tan had mentioned the high kill rate to Celentano, Celentano had just nodded and said, "It's an unfortunate side effect of what they do."

"Like snipers?" Tan had said.

With the memory of Celentano's ironic nod framed in his memory, Tan said, "I understand."

Brady said, "You will soon enough. For now... stick with me or Nikki. If it goes south—I won't tell you not to shoot unless somebody tells you, because I trust your judgment and I don't want you to hesitate. But bear in mind that things may not be what they seem. He may have... a weird kind of control over the minds of the hostages. Like Stockholm syndrome, but more of it. And if you start shooting, don't stop until you're sure he's not getting up again. Treat him like a fucking angel dust horror movie zombie. You won't be far wrong."

"Got it," Tan said, queasy to his core.

"Welcome to the arcane secrets of the WTF," Brady said. "Sorry about this in advance."

Act V

New Richmond, WI

Chaz picked his cuticles in a slowing SUV. The afternoon light reflected off a clapboard farmhouse with a tall porch and a fresh, unobjectionable coat of white paint. A band of trees would have shaded it in summertime, but now straggled naked across a rolling slope like a rank of exhausted refugees. It was a pleasant-looking place, outside of a little two-story brick town distinguished by a water tower of Midwestern proportions.

It commanded a view of the road, and in all directions. There was no way they were surprising Mr. Petrewski. The team had discussed their options on the way in. The ambulances and local P.D. stayed well back as the borrowed FBI Suburban Assault Vehicle pulled up beside the county highway. They would go hard and fast, and hope for the best.

"Oh, God," said Zingermann, over the noise of the engine. "We could have cracked this case three years ago."

"Hafidha could have cracked this case three years ago," Brady said, unexpectedly kind. "You worked it better than anyone else would. You preserved the evidence."

"On three," Reyes said, and whatever Zingermann might have answered was lost in the sound of helmet faceplates lowering and locking into place.

Todd, the civilian, stayed in the car.

"Hafidha," Falkner said into the headset. "Booby traps?"

"Nothing electronic."

"She can do that?" Tan said, incredulous.

"All the way from D.C., Artful," Hafs purred. "You haven't seen half my bag of tricks."

"Agent Tan," Falkner said. "You were bomb school."

"Yes ma'am."

"You know what an IED looks like?"

His helmet rasped on Kevlar as he nodded. "Anything at all."

"Well." Chaz could tell she was joking; he wasn't sure Arthur could. "Keep an eye out for that."

•

Because of the presumed presence of hostages, they hit the house like a SWAT team, front and back, amidst shattered wood and shattered glass. It looked like such a nice house.

So many of them... looked like nice houses. Chaz, following Falkner, should have been distracted by the hammering of his heart, the tunnel-vision of adrenaline, the dizzying pulse stretching his arteries. But there was nothing.

It was so... quiet in the house. The nice house, the dusty, uninhabited house. It looked like a hotel room, like a model home decorated by a blind time-traveler from the 1970s.

A chorus of "Clear!" rang through still air. Chaz heard his own breathing, saw it fog and vanish on the inside of his helmet. He and Falkner paused in the kitchen. He saw Brady, Lau, and Tan emerge from the basement, heard Reyes and Zingermann tromp down from upstairs.

"Nothing," Brady said. "No sign of anyone."

"No sign that anyone ever lived here, really," Falkner said. "But somebody pays to keep the power on—"

•

Barry heard the tromp of shoes across the floor of his camouflage, the shattering of doors as they were broken open. He crouched beside the new girl, who lay limp as knotted rags in his arms, squeezing liquid into her mouth from a water bottle. "Drink," he said. She swallowed, unwillingly, greenish fluid overflowing the corners of her mouth. He imagined her expression burned with rage, though—really—he could see it unfocused in the futile struggle to prevent his control of her.

She was just an automaton. He could make her do anything, and she wouldn't even remember it afterwards.

The left hand pushed her hair out of her eyes. Barry was too busy to slap it away.

•

"Hafs," Falkner said to thin air. "Help me out here."

Hafidha's voice came through the headset clear as glass. "Well, his electric bills are pretty high for a guy who never dusts and keeps the thermostat set at fifty. No phone, gas heat—hello."

"We're on the clock, Hafidha," Reyes said.

"It's too old for any building permits to be online, but the property was surveyed back in the seventies, and Dig Safe has the coordinates of a septic tank and gas line added in 1962. Guys. It's got a bomb shelter."

The words fell into sudden stillness. Two heartbeats, then Falkner snapped Find it and everyone scattered. Tan, too, moving as if somebody had slapped a sheaf of program cards into his reader. Falkner had the confidence of command in her voice, and people—even (or perhaps especially) trained agents—responded.

Except for Chaz Villette, who stood in the middle of the room turning like a statue on a rotating pedestal. Tan thought he was frowning, but it was hard to tell through the faceplate.

Villette lunged like a toy powered by a wound rubber band, dropping to both knees and ducking under the dusty, lineoleum-surfaced table. The floor was black asbestos tile, the kind that would leave a layer of gook on the bare feet of children who ran across it regularly. But Chaz ignored it, and instead dug his nails in to a particular spot on the wainscoting.

"Dammit," he mutterd, pulling back a bleeding hand, nail torn to the quick. "Brady!"

He didn't bother coming out from under the table or dragging it aside. He just stood, and Tan jumped eight inches in the air as the table crashed, upside-down, to the floor.

"Hidden door," Chaz said, pointing as Brady materialized silently beside them. Tan didn't jump again, but only because his nerves had snapped. "Get us in."

"It opens out," Brady said.

The hinges on the half-height door were countersunk and had been concealed by a table leg. There was no visible means by which to open it.

Brady punched them out of the wall by prying it open with a Halligan tool, splintering wainscoting and rending the wallboard behind. The lock on the other side of the door shattered as he grabbed the edge in a gloved hand and yanked. The door landed on top of the overturned table; Villette and Brady shared a glance.

In the resulting gap, the head of a metal ladder gleamed in a well-lit shaft. "You wouldn't want the cannibal post-apocalyptic neighbors breaking in and eating your canned goods," Villette said, his thin voice dripping with irony.

"Guys?" Tan barked into his headset to summon the rest of the team. "I think we got it."

•

The ladder was nerve-wracking. Tan was ashamed to find himself glad that Brady went first. His skin crawled at the thought of how horribly exposed the big agent was coming down, even though he kicked back off the ladder and dropped the last eight feet to land in a crouch. Lau landed behind him a half-second later, facing in the opposite direction.

"Clear," she said. And then, "We've got cages."

Tan found himself the fifth person into a clean, well-lit concrete space. Gray metal shelves of dry and canned goods lined one wall, and several doors led to what must be adjoining rooms or corridors. This was not just a bomb shelter. It was a bunker, an absolute monument to cold-war paranoia.

"Should turn this into a museum," Brady said.

"Like Auschwitz," Zingermann said—the first words he'd muttered in minutes, though Tan had heard him gag.

A sweet smell, sickly, filled the room. Tan didn't raise his faceplate to get a deeper whiff—but as he turned, he saw a dark-haired woman clutched the wire of a cage very much like a dog's kennel run—eight feet long, perhaps six feet tall and four feet wide. Two identical cages stood beside it, and a woman lay curled on a mattress in each.

"Antifreeze," the standing woman gasped. "He... somebody. Somebody drank..."

Reyes was on his headset to the paramedics. Brady crouched beside the wire. He put his hands beside the woman's, but did not touch her.

Her eyes closed with concentration. Her tone changed, became professional. She recited, as if from a textbook: "Symptoms of Stage 1 ethylene glycol poison... poisoning include: intoxication, nystagmus, headaches, incoordination, confusion—"

Tan came to stand behind Brady. Sweat stood in cold beads on the woman's brow despite the heat of the room. Somehow, whatever Petrewski had done to her brain, to her memories—the undamaged person inside of her was finding a way to communicate.

"Kidney failure," she said. Her eyes opened, her expression full of confusion, like a drunk who hears what he is saying but doesn't identify the words or the voice. "If it's not treated. Do you understand?"

Brady said, "Marnie Ericsen?" The student nurse.

She nodded.

"Daniel Brady. FBI. We'll get you out; we'll get you medical assistance." She'd never know that his calm demeanor, his reassuring professionalism, were one hundred percent grain-fed eleventh-grade acting. Tan only recognized it because he used the same trick himself. "Which way did he go?"

She shook her head. "I don't—"

But silently, her left hand pointed.

•

By then, Lau was moving fastest. She'd held back from the cluster by the cages, unable to force herself to move close. But she'd seen the captive woman's gesture, and her nervous system responded to it as if she'd been fired from the taut string of a bow. She could feel Tan and Brady behind her, Falkner staying behind with Zingermann to secure the other rooms, Reyes and Chaz at Tan's heels. They moved sideways, backs to walls, inching over one another like crabs.

The corridor wasn't long, and the door at the other end stood open. Lights were on inside. It was a living room, and there was another open door beyond.

Still, Lau almost tripped over the body. A white man in his late fifties or early sixties, hair cropped in close bristles around a balding pate. He was gaunt, his color yellowish—which wasn't just the light, or the gray maintenance coverall he wore.

He lay on his back, and his left hand was clutched around the hilt of a knife. The blade vanished up under his sternum; the blood had stopped pulsing minutes before. Slashes on the palm of his right hand might have oozed lazily still, but it was impossible to tell behind the rest of the blood.

"Gamma," Lau said, crouching to take his wizened wrist. No pulse; she hadn't expected one. The sticky wetness under her knee wasn't blood; it had spilled from a water bottle that still contained a puddle of greenish fluid.

"Old gamma," Chaz said. "I guess we were right about the evil hand."

He was thinking of Eddie. She knew because they were all thinking of Eddie.

"That's the opposite of an evil hand," Brady said.

Zingermann looked up from the dead man and stopped, gun half-risen again, striding towards that open door. "Hey guys? Look at this stuff, would you? This is a little kid's room."

•

Reyes found her, jammed between a bureau and the wall. She'd gotten herself in there; it didn't seem likely that she could get herself out. But it had kept her safe long enough for the sane part of Buryan Petrewski to do what he should have done long ago. Reyes felt his own judgment of the dead man, unprofessional and savage, and was not moved to censure himself for it.

Maybe Petrewski should get credit for protecting a child. Maybe he should be pitied for having to spend his life locked in a skull with... God, there weren't even words. Abductor? Rapist? It was inadequate.

Reyes couldn't help but feel that if Petrewski had found the strength to sacrifice himself on behalf of the half-dozen or more adult women he'd tortured over... well, they'd find out. Sooner or later. How long he'd been at it. How many there had been.

If they ever found all of them.

For now, Reyes smoothed his face and held the little girl's warm hands to steady her until Brady got the dresser hauled gingerly aside. She didn't cry; she didn't fuss over the dead body or the room full of scary strangers.

Reyes picked her up, an arm under her bottom. She wore a frilly blue dress and white socks, patent leather shoes that looked like a memory of a different era. She might have been two. Reyes turned to look for Falkner or Tan—or even Chaz. Somebody with some child-rearing experience. And if she was a gamma? A beta? She certainly wasn't acting like a normal child, but like one of those creepy children from historic literature. Young MacDuff. Pearl.

A problem for tomorrow.

Until the little girl raised her chin and looked at him with huge, dark eyes fringed with seal-brown lashes, and said very seriously, in Cuban-accented Spanish, "I'm Zhenya. Will I have to get a job? Who will take care of me now?"

"Villette," Reyes said.

"I don't speak Spanish," Villette replied, shaking his head as if he had a fly in his ear.

"Is that Spanish?" the little girl said. "I've never spoken that before. The music in it is very pretty."

Minneapolis, MN

Reyes leaned against the observation window of the examining room, watching Amber Silsbury's reunion with her daughter. He didn't shift as Todd came up on his left.

"All three of the women are going to make it," Reyes said. "Let's hear it for hemodialysis and Fomepizole." He didn't mention their psychological state.

Todd didn't ask. He nodded to the window. "How's Zhenya?"

"Autumn," Reyes said.

"Winter, actually," Todd said. "Use your verbs, Steve."

Reyes snorted. "Her name is Autumn. Her mother is left-handed. She wrote it out for me." He was proud of himself, that he said it completely without irony. "Amber named her daughter Autumn. I think we should call her that."

"She's a beta."

Reyes nodded slowly. He couldn't take his attention from the young woman and the child. There was no bond there, no affection. Amber held her daughter with... revulsion. Resignation. Her left hand would not touch the girl at all.

"Yeah," Reyes said. "I noticed."

Todd laid a hand on his shoulder. "Vaya con dios."

Reyes finally dragged his gaze off the victims to glare at his old friend. "That's my line."

Todd said, "You don't believe in God."

"When it comes to you, I don't think He cares too much about who believes in Him."

•

Reyes knew it was coming, of course. He would have guessed on the plane; actually Villette walked up beside him at the creamer counter of the airport coffee shop. Reyes hadn't even attempted the tea.

"You can't put her in care," Villette said. "She's a little girl. Idlewood—"

"She can stay with her mother."

An incredulous bark of laughter. "Did you see them together? Her mother can't even touch her. Can she raise a little girl with the intellect of a thirty-year-old genius, who can speak any language you can? No matter who you are?"

"Her mother is going to stay with me." Reyes slopped coffee onto his hand. It was hot. He set the cup down with exaggerated care despite the burning, thinking about the gom jabbar, and pressed his fingertips to his mouth. "Kay and Casey have already agreed to offer support services."

"You can't do that," Villette said. "Ethics—"

Their gazes crossed. Reyes knew he smiled.

"Fuck ethics," Reyes said. "I quit. I retire, more precisely. Amber is willing to stay in my spare room with the girl for a while. We'll see if they connect. If Amber can learn..." He shrugged.

Stephen Reyes, at a loss for words. Who are you?

"Reyes—" A breath, and Villette choked on it.

"Don't," Reyes said. He turned; he put his back to the coffee counter and ignored the irritated stares of a delayed customer who was probably mistaking this for a lover's quarrel. "Don't. I know what I did wrong, and I can't fix it. But I don't have to make the same mistake again."

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C.

Silently, Chaz handed the book to Hafs, its shiny jacket slick against her dust-smoothed fingers. She glanced at the dust jacket: Murder in the Second City, by Rupert Beale. She already knew it, but she opened the book anyway and read the epigraph aloud: "...there is no God. Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author... —Donatien Alphonse FranÃ§ois, marquis de Sade, Justine.... Why'd you bring me this?"

"It's from Petrewski's bunker."

Hafidha tossed the book on the floor. "Barry was trying to understand himself."

"Aren't we all?"

"I've been going through his files—" —thousands and thousands of hours of writing, on 3.5 disks. Many of them hopelessly decayed, and she was having to machine-translate them from the Russian, and hand over the sections that looked important to the Bureau's linguistics people. "You want the worst first?"

"The Anomaly maximizes pain," Chaz said.

She looked at him. The Bug would take it as a dig. But Hafs knew better, and the twitch of his lips told her he knew it too. "Ovulation charts for the captives. He was taking their temperatures."

"Jesus," Chaz said.

"Good thing his swimmers were apparently as fucked up as the rest of him, or there would have been an army of baby betas in that hole. Also, he seems to have been obsessed with the idea that he'd been made into an automaton. Surgically, in the Soviet Union. That they'd taken his family from him and made them automatons too. He wanted his son back. He wanted everybody else to be an automaton too."

She tried to flip her braids. They weren't there. "He wanted to own everybody."

"I could have told you that from the antifreeze." Chaz crossed his arms, uncrossed them. Hugged himself the other way round. "So something bugs me."

"'Bugs' you, Baby Bro?" It could have had an edge to it. Even she wasn't sure, and from the lift of his eyebrows, neither was he.

"Yeah," he said. "How did Petrewski figure out what he needed to do to make Autumn happen? Or was she just..." he flinched. "...an accident?"

•

What is this fascination with the monsters of the past? Are we so pathetic, we twenty-first century humans, that we can conjure at this late date no horrors more compelling, more appalling, than de Sade, Vlad Dracula, the wretched Jack the Ripper? The petty devils of another age are safely quarantined by time. But to examine our own demons with open eyes requires a fortitude not all possess.

—Rupert Beale, Ph.D., Murder in the Second City

Arlington, VA, February 2012

The crumbs of potting soil trailed from the patio door through the living room, up the carpeted stairs, and down the hall to the back bedroom. The door was open, but inside it was more dark than light, from the closed curtains.

"Hafs?" Chaz called. "Can I come in?"

His heart rate jumped and sweat prickled under his arms. But not because It might be lying in wait for him. He strained his ears for breathing, for movement. He wanted to use the mirror, but he'd made a promise. Even now, he wouldn't use it on her without cause, without telling her.

Finally he heard Hafidha whisper, "Yeah."

She was sitting on her bed, hands between her knees, head bent, her feet together on the floor. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom the colors of the walls and fabrics rose out of it like koi surfacing in a pond: cranberry, gold, violet blue.

He sat down beside her. He smelled thyme, rosemary, basil, tarragon, mint over the lingering plastic-y odor of paint.

"I'm sorry." Her voice was so low it was barely more than her lips moving. "I tried."

Her arms were striped with long welts, oozing blood in spots. She'd tried.

Chaz wasn't scared because It might get him. He was scared because It might get her, sometime when he wasn't there to help.

He swallowed hard and touched her near arm lightly. "Save this for when you really need it. It's just plants. I'll have a whole new batch in by tomorrow."

She made a wet strangled sound in her throat and held out her cupped hands, raised her head. "I saved one."

Cuban oregano. Plectranthus amboinicus. The one he'd grown in his old apartment, the same plant his upstairs neighbor had given him five years ago, transplanted to his new life. A little the worse for wear, but still with roots and soil around them.

"Chili verde," she said. "You wrote about it on LiveJournal. I remembered." She swallowed, sounding so tight it hurt Chaz's throat, too. "It helped."

He took the drooping bit of leaf and dirt from her and nodded. "Good save." He was pretty sure trying to say more would be a mistake.

The tears ran steadily down her face as if they might empty out the entire seventy-eight percent of her that was water. The Thing inside her loved that. He wasn't going to give It any of his tears as well. That was part of how he helped; if he didn't show hurt in front of her, It couldn't control her through him.

"I'm so... It wanted them. The fucking Bug was just... Oh, god, it made me sick, the whole time..." Her soil-crusted fingers scrabbled at the thighs of her jeans.

"It's okay. Honest. Renewable resource. You throw me over the balcony, it might be different."

"Don't say that. Don't let it—" She clenched her hands on her knees.

He was pretty sure It had already thought about the possibility. He never worried about giving It ideas. It was always going to be better than him at that sort of thing.

"I'm the reason we can't have a cat," she said bitterly.

"No, we can't have a cat for the same reason as always: we don't know when we'll have to leave town." No. They couldn't have a cat because Chaz was terrified of what she might do to protect it from herself.

Her shoulders lurched and she hunched forward again, coughing on tears. Cautiously he touched her cropped hair, brushed his fingertips everywhere except over the scar on her scalp. The implant couldn't hold off the Bug by itself; they both knew that. Chaz tried not to be angry at the thing for letting the anomaly get to her. Just as he tried not to blame himself because he hadn't been here.

She leaned into him, and he put his arm around her, cupping the little plant in his other hand. She'd saved one. She'd saved the one she knew would mean the most to him, and she'd done it without help. She was getting better.

"aimforthe<3" - by Leah Bobet & Emma Bull

Act I

Boston, MA, January 2012

The moment before their faces crumple is where the magic is.

"What do you mean?" she says, and she's Lucy: chin-length black hair, soft brown eyes, lips open just wide enough to let out one short breath. She'll feel like that breath was punched out of her. It'll move up through her chest and into her throat, leaving everything behind it shock-stiff and cold.

You met up with Lucy at a party: a Christmas event in Harvard Square. You leaned against a wrought-iron rail under mistletoe and cheap lights that swayed in the wind, and talked movies and politics together until last call. By the next Saturday you were spending more nights together than apart. By Thursday you had toothbrushes at each other's walk-up apartments. By Tuesday she didn't hesitate anymore when you reached out for her hand.

And now it's Friday again. Now it's time.

Her head's tilted just an inch to the left. You could take it in your hand, lean her face against your palm. Instead: "You're perfectly lovely," you say, hands carefully by your sides; body language kept far, far away. "But I'm just not feeling it, you know?"

Her arms wrap around herself, reflexive; holding that heat in. Holding in that thing she can feel ripping out of her, roots trailing. Holding in her soul.

"I'm sorry," you say, as if it's an afterthought.

And her eyes widen, and her mouth opens, and—

—there.

Washington, D.C., April 2012

Hafidha Gates was early for her lunch date. Even so, her date had beaten her there.

Virginia Greenwood sat at one of the outdoor tables, beside the black iron railing that divided the restaurant patio from the sidewalk. Her sherbet-orange shoulder bag filled her lap, and her arms folded tightly over it. Her gaze skittered over pedestrians, passing cars, the double doors leading inside. But since surveillance wasn't part of Ginny Greenwood's skill set, Hafidha spotted her first, before she could adjust her face or body language.

Scared, honey? But you're the one who invited me.

She resisted the temptation to sneak up from behind, because she really did want to know why Greenwood had called her and not, say, Reyes. Instead she angled herself into Greenwood's line of sight and smiled and waved, then cut into the restaurant and came out the patio doors.

"Professor Greenwood," she said. "Nice to see you again."

Greenwood had herself under wraps now, smiling, shaking hands. "Thank you for coming. I... I asked the waiter to bring appetizers right away."

Feed the jammer. She's got one in the family, after all. The ACTF had put poor little Susannah Greenwood in a pretty cell in Idlewood almost four years ago.

Sure enough, the waiter brought boiled edamame, spring rolls, a tray of sashimi, and miso soup. Hafidha popped a slab of oily-rich, bloodred tuna in her mouth while Greenwood said, "I'll have the vegetable tempura."

In Idlewood, no one was surprised at the amount anybody ate. Hafidha was a little spoiled now; she'd forgotten the glazed look the waitstaff got when she did things like order the tempura and the chef's choice nigiri for two and a few kinds of maki on the side. After the waiter had pressed his lips tight, written it all down, and left, she said to Greenwood, "Don't worry. We're going Dutch."

"No. I asked you to meet me. The least I can do is buy you lunch." But Greenwood was squeezing her purse again, and Hafidha didn't think it was to protect her wallet.

"You want to ask me something," Hafidha said, and claimed a spring roll.

Greenwood looked down at her empty plate. "My daughter—Susannah—she's making progress. She's young, and she doesn't have a history of psychological issues. Dr. Ramachandran says those things make her more responsive to behavioral therapy and emotional counseling than...than some of the patients."

"I don't know anything about her treatment plan—"

"She's a good candidate for the...the implants. According to Dr. Ramachandran." Greenwood lifted her gaze to meet Hafidha's and kept it there as if she'd fallen overboard and Hafidha were a lifeboat.

Deep Brain Stimulation. The chip in Hafidha's head. Zap. "You want to know what it's like."

Greenwood nodded and swallowed visibly. "It's not an easy decision. Oh, of course, you know that. But she's all we've got, and we're weighing the possibility of permanent loss of brain function against a cure—"

Hafidha must have done something to stop Greenwood in mid-breath. An expression, maybe, or a movement. "A cure? Did Dr. Casey say that?"

"You've been released, and gone back to your job..."

Hafidha speared a piece of yellowtail with her chopsticks and held it up admiringly. "A diabetic with an insulin pump is still diabetic." She nibbled the end off the raw fish and watched Greenwood for the moment when comprehension happened. Not until she saw it did she say, "Trust me, Professor. I'm still a monster," and suck the rest of the yellowtail into her mouth.

J. Edgar Hoover Federal Building, Washington, D.C., April 2012

"Charles," Hafidha Gates said, and she was angry.

She was; not the Bug. Chaz Villette didn't need the mirror to tell the difference. There was a thin, bright viciousness in Hafidha's familiar brown eyes when the anomaly shoved its way forward, and today, hands crossed across her chest, chin tipped, glaring down at him in his desk chair, she was nothing but flat frustration.

Nicolette Lau quieted, just for a moment, at her desk. Reprocessed air blew through the bullpen up above: across Daphne Worth's empty workstation, and Solomon Todd's abandoned one.

Chaz tabbed away from the report he was stringing together, and took his hands off the keyboard.

"What's up?" he asked. Careful to keep his voice even and friendly. To not react to the sarcastic twist to Hafidha's mouth as if it were a shark fin broaching water.

"I can't," she said, deliberately, "find my picture."

Right, he thought, and sucked in his breath, and knew she saw his chest constrict. The picture.

They had all cleaned up Hafidha's office together, on a Monday afternoon: undoing three years' worth of dust and neglect, the kind that happened when no one quite wanted to open the door. The picture of Erik sat where she'd left it before leaving for North Dakota: in a black glittery plastic drugstore frame snugged next to her dead computer monitors. The glitter had long since fallen to the dusty desk and atrophied.

Chaz had weighed it in his hand, stared down at the face inside it, let the shock of its forgotten familiarity wash over him and away. He hadn't known what to do with the picture. That grief. That crack.

He'd looked up, and Falkner had been watching him, with the photo in his hand.

"Want me to take it?" she'd asked, and he shook his head. Walked it to his desk and put it in the bottom drawer.

Suspects did things when they were primed to remember the location of an object. He knew his eyes had flickered to that drawer handle. Lightning-fast. And back.

Chaz reached down and opened it. Felt through the papers, the spare socks, the nothings until the prickly picture frame came into his hand and he could lift it out. He wiped the dust off the cheap pane of glass. Erik Holt's face emerged, faded, smiling.

"I wasn't going to keep it," he started, awkwardly.

"Don't," Hafidha said. She held out her hand and took the thin black frame. Her fingers closed around it for a second, too tight. And then she turned and walked back to her office, Doc Martens squeaking softly across the institutional floor.

Lau did him the courtesy of not letting out her breath.

Chaz looked at her; got the standard-issue federal poker face in return. "Just say it," he said tiredly.

She snorted softly. "It wasn't a bad decision."

Chaz looked over at the door to Hafidha's lair, firmly shut. Ostentatiously shut. "It wasn't a good one." He paused. The air system droned on. "I didn't think she'd want to see it again."

Lau flipped hair out of her face, turned a crisp page. "Because she wouldn't want to? Or because if you were in her place you wouldn't want to?"

Profilers, he thought, ruefully. Rueful and not angry. Rueful and not bitter, and that spoke volumes all by itself, didn't it? "Yeah," he said when she paused to look up at him. "Yes. Column A and B."

"I don't have to tell you," Lau said, and turned back to the file she was thumbing.

"You don't," he agreed. People coped in different ways. People wanted different things.

You could still be a good profiler, and mean well, and be a shitty friend.

Chaz leaned down and pushed his desk drawer shut.

When he sat up Esther Falkner was there in the door of her office, and who knew how long she'd been there? She gave him a small nod—nothing to say she'd overheard that little mess, but she wouldn't have tipped that hand anyway—and cleared her throat. "We're almost ready?"

"Yes'm." Lau turned the last page of the file she was going through, closed it, and held it up. "Briefing room, five minutes."

Falkner and Lau exchanged a look. Cast it, together, at the door of Hafidha's office.

"I'll go," Chaz said, and pushed out of his chair.

There was no latch on the door to Hafidha's Sanctum Sanctorum, but there might as well have been: that, two KEEP OUT signs, and a rope ladder pulled up as high as it would go. He tapped on the door with two knuckles. Again.

No response.

"Wabbit," he said through the crack between door and frame.

The answer was muffled by the thick wood door. "Not. Now."

"Wabbit," he repeated, and let out a breath. "We've got to work."

Hafidha yanked the door wide after a long moment, her face tight, lips pressed into one fat line. She brushed past him into the bullpen, strode long and lanky to the conference room without one look back.

Chaz shut the door behind her, behind him. Not before he saw the picture frame, face down, on her desk.

•

The photo of the girl was already on the briefing room screen when Chaz stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. Beachside, a woman in her late twenties: light brown skin, bright eyes, a small and pointed chin. The classic young urbanite vacation picture: margarita in one hand, and the other arm wrapped around someone who had been cropped out of the picture. It was unfair that every happy smile that crossed his desk inevitably belonged to a cadaver.

"So, this is Lucy Jones-Mercado," Lau said, nodding to him slightly. Hafidha was in the seat nearest the front. She did not turn his way. "She was found in her apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, three months ago. The local coroner confirmed ingestion of a whole extra-strength bottle of painkillers and no signs of a struggle."

"Suicide," Falkner said from the back corner of the room, and Lau nodded.

"Three weeks before, Lucy ended a relationship with a man her sister Tessie says she met on an online dating site. And said sister is alleging that Lucy was targeted and controlled in some way, because she never would have taken her own life otherwise."

Reyes straightened a barely perceptible half inch. "That's a common attitude with friends and family after a suicide. That it must have been someone else's fault."

"Sometimes it's true," Chaz said. "William Melchert-Dinkel was convicted in Minnesota last year for targeting people in chat rooms and encouraging suicide."

"Usually," Reyes replied curtly, "it's not."

Chaz glanced at him. Wondered who in Stephen Reyes's life had danced with a bottle of pills.

Not much time left to find out, now. The job posting for ACTF chief had gone up two weeks ago on the Bureau intranet, because federal law required open posting of jobs within the agency, even when the job description was necessarily incomplete and there was only one ideal applicant. He'd read it with a guilty fascination, and then five minutes later reality kicked in: Whether he was a good or bad parent, Dad was leaving the building.

"In this case, though," Lau put in, "she may have a point. Our White Collar Crime Unit's investigating said dating site for illegal acquisition and release of personal information. Apparently they've been data mining in places they didn't belong: credit reports, medical records, all sorts of wonderful stuff."

In front of Chaz, Brady blinked. "Why?"

Hafidha snorted. "I'll bet you five dollars it's for targeted ads."

Brady scowled. "Where'd we even get this?"

"Special Agent Pavelko of White Collar Crimes brought it to our attention," Falkner said.

Brady's face fell. "And you didn't make him do the class presentation himself?"

Falkner fixed Brady with an intense lack of expression which probably meant, I don't know what you're talking about, but if I did I bet I'd disapprove.

Hafidha clasped her fingers demurely in front of her. "It's fun to work with White Collar. They're terrified of us."

Brady shot her a grin, as if, just for a second, he'd forgotten what she was now. Chaz watched him; watched her. There were still flecks of a very human darkness behind her smile.

The sober dignity on Lau's face looked as if it was cloned from one of Falkner's expressions. Mom in training, Chaz thought. Mini-Mom. If I said that out loud, she'd fill my desk drawers with rubber cement. She said crisply, "Agent Pavelko has seen us in action, more or less. Sol consulted on the Tampa pyramid scammer case, which was why the agents in the field knew they had to open fire on Drummond."

Hafidha's lower lip stuck out like a cash register drawer. "White Collar hates the shooty bits."

"The point," Falkner said, stepping up to herd the cats, "is that Pavelko is aware of our brief. When he reviewed Jones-Mercado's death, he thought it was suggestive. He gave it to us to evaluate."

"Lucy's sister claims that the site must have leaked certain pieces of information—their mother's death a year ago, Lucy's treatment for depression after that—that marked her as a target for a predator. And they did have that information when White Collar seized their servers. And apparently," Lau paused, "Tessie Jones-Mercado has been extremely insistent on her story."

"So we got it because they don't do murder," Brady said.

"And because I bet they don't have the first idea how it was done," Hafidha replied.

"If it was done," Falkner added. "We need to stay with the chain of evidence here. 'If' is going to be our big question."

"Which means we don't have an official invitation," Lau said. "Special Agent Pavelko's vouched for us to Boston PD, but as far as they're concerned, it's an open-and-shut suicide. There's no crime."

"Go Fish," Reyes murmured, and she nodded.

"Everything White Collar gave us is in the files," Lau said, and Chaz flipped his open: a basic stats sheet, age and build and job description. That photo again, clipped to it, of a pretty dead girl, smiling. A small sheaf of correspondence between White Collar's liaison agent and the pretty dead girl's sister, which was only small, he realized, because it was double-sided.

A printout, not unlike the stats sheet, of Lucy Jones-Mercado's online dating profile.

Falkner stood. "All right. Lau, Hafidha, Brady, Villette: We're heading to Boston once the jet's ready for us."

Hafidha stood up—reflex; stopped, and blinked.

Chaz didn't need the mirror to double take right with her.

Falkner looked around the cramped room; quirked an eyebrow at the fully shocked Hafidha Gates. "I hope you didn't think you could stop packing a go bag," she said, not unkindly, and strode efficiently out of the room.

•

Esther Falkner tapped on Reyes's open door and let herself in without waiting. He was perched behind his desk like a graying gargoyle, one hand on the keyboard and the other pinning paper down against his standing fan's roaming breeze.

"All set," Falkner said, heels together, still ingrained with the habits of crisp speaking, crisp living even after years out of the military. "We're going wheels up in half an hour."

Reyes brushed away a stack of paper like specks of dandruff. It scattered white across his desk. Retirement apparently involved paperwork: reams and stacks of it. All notarized. "And you're bringing Hafidha," he said.

"It's the kind of case where she'd be useful on the ground," Falkner said carefully, and Reyes just nodded.

He looked tired. Falkner supposed it had been a long time since he had looked anything less than tired, but it had been better concealed, once. He's made the decision, she thought, grimly. And now there's nothing left to pretend for.

She loosened her posture slightly. Rubbed the old ache in her back. "How are the girls?"

Reyes leaned back with a long, thin sigh. "Settling in. Amber's starting at Georgetown in the summer semester. And Autumn—" His fingers strayed to the bridge of his nose.

"And Autumn," she repeated, gently.

"I've never had to find an elementary school for a beta with the mind of a thirty-year-old," he said, and raised a weary eyebrow. "I'd homeschool her myself, but socialization is important. It's especially important, given her first few years. And the kind of school she needs? You thought heart transplants had a long waiting list."

"Montessori? Waldorf?"

"Both," he said.

Falkner tucked herself into one of the once-plush, now just functional chairs opposite. Right. Three marriages come and gone, but Stephen Reyes had never once been a father.

The stakes were always the highest when it was a child placed in your hands: all the responsibility for who, what, how they were going to be, sitting every day in your throat. But it was worse when they'd already been hurt.

It was worse when they had the capacity, already, to do unspeakable harm.

"We went through this with Deborah," Falkner said carefully. Remembering that cautious kid who alternated like clockwork between greedy, enthusiastic affection and pulling all the way back into a shell that was much too hard, too young. "She was in two schools before she settled into this one."

Reyes leaned forward, steepled his fingers. "What did you do?"

Argued with administrators. Sat in on classes. Applied for transfers. Did exhaustive research, night after night, on where in a small, high-income school district there might be resources for a shy and traumatized kid. "Everything we had to," she said, "to find her a safe place. But not so safe that she'd never learn to build her own safety."

Reyes regarded her for a long moment. Nodded, slowly. "I don't know why I thought this might ever be easy."

"I'm sorry," Falkner said. "It's never going to be easy again."

He snorted, sharp and dry. "So Kay keeps telling me," he said, and straightened up. "We'll be at the ready once you're on the ground."

"Thanks," she said, and meant it. "I'll check in when we land."

"No, it's your show," Reyes said, and Falkner caught his eye. She tucked her head in acknowledgment, and walked the U-turn loop out his door and into her own, darkened office.

Her go bag was underneath the desk, tucked trimly behind the footrest she'd had to put in last year. She tugged it out in three practiced jerks. Your show.

"It is nothing," she told herself, quiet and firm, "compared to a child."

Falkner hefted her go bag onto her shoulder. If she hurried, there was just enough time to call Ben and the girls before she left, so she could tell them, once again, that she loved them.

Act II

Boston, MA, April 2012

"Hi," he says, and softly, uncertainly, smiles.

He's tall, skinny, balding in a way that dips down the sides of his crown and which he's tried to hide with buzzed-short hair. New blue jeans; a checked shirt open casually over a ribbed white tee. The folds in it are too crisp: It's the illusion of carelessness at work. The illusion that means he cares all too much.

First-date jitters. The smell, faint and unmistakable, of someone who really, really wants this.

You vault yourself up from the wall where you're leaning: brick, half-height, surrounding a park next to the coffee shop where you'd said you two would meet. Peer at him. Shuffle your feet once, deliberate.

"Brad?" you ask, and beam your brightest, happiest smile. "Hi."

•

The Boston field office curved tall and red-brick bright through the center of downtown, one bridge and a tangle of streets away from Logan Airport. Lau uncurled from the backseat of the Bureau's motor pool car and stretched the cramps out of her legs. She knew better than to sit behind Chaz Villette. Even for fifteen minutes.

She had spent the thirty minutes before takeoff on a few quick phone calls, and here were the results: a stocky, brown-skinned, navy-suited field office agent, regulation haircut and regulation shoes, awaiting them at the front desk, her posture one of casual attention. She straightened as they approached; took Lau's hand.

"S. A. Kim Bollinger," the field office agent said. Her handshake was strong and professional: one of the top five things they taught you in Unofficial Law Enforcement School for Women. Lau returned it in kind: an assertive squeeze and a smile. "I'll be your tour guide."

Lau felt her polite smile widen. "We'll try to be good sightseers. Sorry for the short notice."

Bollinger gave a little shrug; a fractional relaxation. "Crime fighting doesn't wait on us," she said, and offered that hand to Falkner.

"I did a little more background on your possible victim," Bollinger said, leading them through halls and past cubicles that looked about as different from city to city as the local IHOP. "Ms. Jones-Mercado was a bit of a go-getter: worked in the IT department at Boston U., and was active in a few volunteer organizations. She was taking salsa dancing."

Lau nodded. Falkner shot an inquiring glance her way. "Salsa lessons are to singles what soccer is to moms," she explained.

"Ah," Falkner replied, with a little chuckle. "I always knew I was a bad mother. I put them in softball."

"Football," Brady added.

"All I got was rowing," Hafidha put in dryly.

"In the Pacific. Poor baby," Lau said. Hafidha was cracking jokes again. That was a good sign.

Lau deliberately didn't turn to gauge Chaz's reaction. Nobody liked a busybody. Or at least a busybody who wasn't courteous enough to pretend to cover their tracks.

Bollinger stopped at yet another anonymous wood door, and pushed it open. "Here's your home base," she said.

The Boston field office had followed the whole rider: conference room, dedicated internet access, a whiteboard, and coffee on the boil—more than enough, for a unit flying in on a few hours' notice, with no official invitation from local law enforcement. Table, PowerBars, whiteboard markers lined up on the ledge below the wide blank board. Every room Lau had ever worked from, in every city.

"Thanks," Lau said, and dropped her bag onto the first chair.

Bollinger lingered beside the door. "I also took the liberty of calling up Tessie Jones-Mercado. I assumed you'd like an in-person interview."

Lau caught Falkner's quirked eyebrow: the Oh? model, and not the You have disappointed me very much. "That's helpful," Falkner said, mild and professional. "When's she available?"

"She's here now," Bollinger replied. "Interview Room Two."

Falkner glanced at Lau. She nodded, and pressed two hands down the front of her regulation Woman in Law Enforcement black suit. "Just let me get a coffee first," she said.

•

Tessie Jones-Mercado didn't seem to have minded the waiting. She perched straight-backed on an interview room chair with a half-full, lipstick-stained cup of coffee within reach, and she had brought a box.

Falkner glanced over the jumble visible inside: a bright blue wallet with a big-eyed anime something on the fold. A tiny, disoriented school of crocheted sharks, with magnets glued inexpertly to the bottoms. A darkened, deactivated smartphone. Framed photographs.

Lucy Jones-Mercado's things. Her leftovers.

"I'm Agent Falkner," she said, holding out a professional hand. "This is Agent Lau. Thanks for being willing to come in on such short notice."

"You've come to talk about Lucy," she said, flat as the gray table, the gray walls. Restraint, Falkner decided. Restraint so she didn't appear too eager. Restraint in case the FBI agents weren't actually here to help.

"We have," she replied, and slid gratefully into the chair opposite.

Lau followed suit, resting her arms gently on the table. "We've read your correspondence with Special Agent Pavelko, but we'd like to hear the whole thing from you."

The flat defenses in Tessie's eyes wavered. "Lucy always—she took things harder than me. We both got picked on in school, racist mixie come-be-my-nanny bullshit." Tessie's hands closed, briefly, around the corners of the box. "But she took things harder. So she took it worse when mom died."

"And that was last year?" Lau said, quietly. "Yeah," Tessie answered, and for a moment she looked the tiniest bit lost. "A year and three weeks."

"What did Lucy do?" Falkner asked in her most encouraging, active-listening voice.

Tessie sighed; her shoulders came down. Her hands held on to that box like it was a parachute. "Went nose-diving into her own life. Started volunteering at this canning group. Took dance lessons. She was always talking about how busy she was, all these things she was involved in. But," she said, and looked up, and there was a glint of something sad in her eye, "there was always this edge to it, y'know?"

Lau nodded. Falkner reminded herself again of how many months it had been since Nikki Lau's father had died; how many volunteer hours she'd racked up since at that women's shelter, or the progress of the carefully covered circles under her eyes. How many push-ups little Esther Falkner had learned to do the month her Bubbie Yetta had passed away.

There was a kind of busy you forced yourself to stay so you didn't stop, or think. So the despair at your back never had a chance to catch up.

"And that didn't change until she met this Brian guy. Brian Casey. She was happy," Tessie said, and the echo of a dead woman's bewilderment leaked through into her voice. "That's the thing I don't get: It was only a few weeks, but she was so happy again. Just deep down, quietly. She was finally starting to think that maybe the other shoe wasn't going to drop this time."

"And then he left," Lau said.

Tessie nodded. "She said he said he wasn't feeling it or something, some bullshit reason. And I thought, okay, asshole doesn't know what he wants. He jumped in too fast and dragged her with him, and then he sits up, looks around, and freaks out. And then I found the toothbrush, and the stuff he gave her, and the text messages..."

She reached into the box and lifted the smartphone out. Set it on the table. "He was texting her every day. Talking like when she met his parents, not if. After a whole week." Reached in, took out the card from a florist's shop. "And that's when I got thinking: What if this wasn't just some asshole not knowing what he wants? What if it was one of those sick bastards who picks out people who are depressed and pushes them over the edge?"

Out came the pictures: Lucy's familiar bob haircut on a ballroom floor. Holding up a wineglass in what looked like Faneuil Hall. Candid snaps of a happy woman. But the person she was with must have been on the other side of the lens.

"And that," she said, "started to make more and more sense."

Tessie Jones-Mercado, Falkner admitted to herself, would have a bright future as a trial lawyer if she ever wanted it. She had the presentation skills down. She unpacked the box slowly, ending two-handed with the last thing: a white, slim laptop, charger plugged in and coiled on the lid.

"Her laptop?" Lau said. Her ears visibly perked.

"I took it to a friend who's good with computers," Tessie said. "We read all the e-mails they sent each other. But the stuff on the dating site we can't get."

"If you'll consent," Lau said, "we have someone on staff who can access Lucy's files on the offsite servers with the laptop. It would go a long way to helping us reconstruct what may have led to her state of mind."

Tessie still needed to work on the courtroom poker face: Falkner watched her grasp onto their interest, hang up on the word may, think about being insulted, and come right back to hope again. "You can have it," she said, sharp and quick.

"I'll draw up the paperwork," Lau said, and ducked out of the room. Practically dancing, if you knew what to look for.

"Tessie," Falkner said, not at all professionally now, "no matter what happens with this? I want you to know that you should be really proud of yourself. You've been the best advocate your sister could have had. The best sister."

All that sharpness and poise wavered for a minute, and then crumpled like a missile crater. "Thanks," she said, barely audible; chin tucked so suddenly behind her hair that Falkner had to look for the moving of her lips. "I— Thank you."

Falkner swallowed. "We'll be in touch," she said, and left Tessie Jones-Mercado to her box, and her grief.

•

It turned out Hafidha's hands could forget things, given enough time and not enough practice. She hadn't even finished setting up her rig when Nikki Lau came back through the conference room door, scanning like a searchlight. "Any idea where Bollinger got to?"

"Sorry," Brady said, busy with a squeaky green whiteboard marker. "Your interview get all uncooperative on you?"

"Got super-cooperative," Lau said smugly. "She brought the entire contents of Lucy's desk and wallet, including her cell phone and laptop."

"Jackpot," Chaz said, wrestling with a map of the city of Boston and environs on the other side of the table. The map was winning this round. Hafidha tried not to cheer it on. "If it's still got her receipts, I can narrow down what neighborhood he might have lived in."

"Unless he paid," Brady added.

"Unless he paid," Chaz acknowledged. Hafidha untangled her monitor cords, combed through them with long fingers until she hit a snag, and swore.

"Need a hand?" Chaz said. The room went abruptly quiet. She connected laptop to dock, dock to monitor, and said absolutely nothing.

Brady glanced at them sidelong. Lau didn't move. "I'll get Bollinger," Chaz said, thin and closed, and left the room.

Hafidha stabbed the power button with one finger. The laptop whirred moodily. Both of her monitors flickered to life.

"Hey," Brady said, capping his whiteboard pen. "We need to chat about anything?"

Fifteen answers snarled through her head, each worse than the last. Hafidha reached back, rubbed her scalp. Pretended she could feel the chip embedded somewhere deep below. "I'm still allowed to get mad," she said, and slammed her computer cases shut.

Brady obviously agreed. Because he most intelligently left her alone.

I want sugar, she decided. Chocolate. Caramel. Bad, bad tooth-destroying substances. She could send Brady to fetch. Was he supposed to stay and keep an eye on her? Brady didn't know the good stuff from a damned Hershey bar, probably.

"Be right back!" she called, and whisked out the door before he could make a discussion of it.

She could find a break room by following her nose, but she needed a vending machine. Would they be in the same place?

Before she had time to decide if accessing the building floor plan was a violation of the terms of her parole, she spotted Bollinger walking toward her down the long gray aisle between gray cubicles.

"Can I help you... I'm sorry, I don't remember your name."

"I'm Special Agent Hafidha Gates, Special Agent Bollinger. My, we're all so special."

Bollinger's eyelids fluttered, which might be a sign of surprise. "Now I'm really sorry. I hadn't realized you were an agent."

"What didn't tip you off? That I dress too well, or that I get to play with the really good toys?"

Bollinger's grin flashed out. "I'd say the boots were my first nonclue."

Hafidha looked admiringly down at her mid-calf black patent Docs. "They ought to be standard issue. Engineered for kicking ass. Not that I will be doing that here."

"You don't think this case will pan out, then?"

It was Hafidha's turn to be startled. "What? Oh, no. There's a bad man out there, and we'll find him if we have to live in your conference room till the end of time. But I'm not allowed near asses with my kicking boots on at the moment."

Bollinger studied her while trying to pretend otherwise. Hafidha realized she'd posed the nice Fibbie an insoluble puzzle. Administrative leave? Suspension? No, or Hafidha wouldn't be in the field.

She relented. "I need a large quantity of good chocolate. Preferably with other sugary substances mixed in."

Bollinger lit up all over. "I don't know about the boots, but around here that's a crime-fighting essential, girl. I've got a box of my sister's homemade chocolate almond toffee in my desk. Will that do?"

"Lead the way, Very Special Agent."

Bollinger's sister knew her way around a candy thermometer. Hafidha crunched down on her second piece of toffee as Bollinger said, "So you don't think this was suicide."

"I'm sure it was suicide. I also think somebody messed so hard with Miss Lucy's little head that she couldn't help herself."

Bollinger sighed. "Proving it will be a bitch."

"Depends on whether he did it the old-fashioned way, or if he just stuck his nasty fingers in her brain and stirred."

"I'm...not following that at all," Bollinger admitted.

I think I'm making her nervous. Hafidha licked chocolate off her fingers and tried to decide how she felt about that. At the very least it was a lousy return for the candy.

That was when Chaz found her. He had a sheaf of receipts in his hand and a hitch in his breathing, and Hafidha thought he was showing a bit more white around the eyes than usual.

"Ooops!" she chirped. "Time to get back on my treadmill. Thanks for the yummies!" She slid past Chaz at the cubicle entrance and swept back to the conference room.

Chaz came in two minutes later with Bollinger. Did you grill her about me, Platypussy? His face was neutral, professional. She couldn't even guess at his composure.

Deep in her head, the Bug giggled.

"Thing is," he was saying to Bollinger, to whoever, "I don't understand why Jones-Mercado would be a target. I mean, it seems like she was out there, doing things she enjoyed, all the usual advice. And she sounds like a catch."

"The problem with this city," Bollinger answered dryly, "is that everyone's a catch."

Lau snorted—and that wry edge to Bollinger's smile surely wasn't just imagination. Hafidha glanced down, surreptitiously, the way you learned to after a few years of being terminally single: no wedding ring. "L.A.'s like that," Lau said. "The town that invented the model/actress/whatever."

And now Bollinger was doing the glance: to trim, accomplished, gorgeous Nikki Lau's bare ring finger.

Lau caught it. Of course she did, but she wasn't the sort to get her shorts in a knot about that, or to show it. "Agent Bollinger, where d'you keep your property forms?" she asked instead, and Bollinger beckoned her down the hall. Chaz trailed after them like Linus's blanket.

Doesn't want to be in the room with you.

Shut it, she thought right back. Hafidha massaged her own fingers, joint by joint—around chunky plastic rings, nail polish about to chip—and logged into her mobile office. "What do we want first?" she asked cheerfully, instead of all the other things moving through her head like eels. "Victimology, or straight to our possible gamma?"

"Not sure how we'll get to either," Brady said. "The problem is, White Collar seized the whole company. Everything that even beeped. It's all offline now. No getting to those profiles without an interdepartmental request and a three-page book report on what kind of airplanes we plan to fold the printouts into."

Hafidha shot him an amused glance. "Baby, that isn't even work," she said. "If we can't go to that server, we'll go right around it. There'll be footprints all over the place."

"In official records?" Brady crinkled up his forehead. "Nobody actually gets 'broken heart' on their death certificate unless they're in Little Women."

Hafidha resisted the urge to stick out her tongue at a professional colleague. "Nobody dies from falling, either. It's landing that's the problem." He snorted. "Sadness doesn't leave much of a paper trail," she added, "but even try to commit suicide and there's bureaucracy all over your shit."

"That, then," he said. "We'll start with pulling hospital records."

Hafidha flicked open her browser with the bat of one eyelash. "And may I just say that sadness leaves a trail of ones and zeros all over the place? The Internet is one big damn Lonely Hearts Club."

Brady waved a hand: fine, fine. "How do we cut our gamma out of that herd?"

Hafidha laced her fingers together and stretched them lazily. "Oh, you leave that to me, my pretty."

But of course it wasn't as easy as she pretended. Pretty colors didn't pop every time gamma fingers hit keys. If her prey wasn't using his superpower on the Internet, she was screwed.

Except she wasn't.

She knew how it felt, the soul-dead-in-the-body sensation. She knew how the pit opened up, kept opening as you fell, so there was never any bottom, just less and less light. Until you forgot what light looked like.

Fear, physical pain, sorrow, anger, those were tasty Bug-snacks, and it wouldn't turn them down. But that black despair was its true, perfect food. She knew it from the inside.

That's what she was looking for.

Chaz shouldered back into the conference room, balancing a tray of hot coffee. Hafidha reached out for one without speaking; drained half the mug in one long swallow. Put her fingers on the keys.

Death records, autopsy filings, hospital admissions. Cross-referenced with credit-card billing for X-Seeking-Y personals in the free weeklies, membership dues in singles clubs, and yes, online dating sites that served the greater Boston area. Which was all of them. Bollinger was right; this town was full of people who, anywhere else, would have a date for every Saturday night from now until world's end, and here were just part of the sparkly shoal of fishies.

She tried to think about what she was doing the way a real person would: Information was either relevant or not, available or unavailable, connected to another fact or a dead end. But the data itself was a delicious immersion, nourishment and environment and indulgence all at once. She could strain that data through her gamma teeth and taste the misery-flavor she was hunting for.

You're in a Fibbie conference room in Boston. Don't go all supervillain now.

Or ever, ever, but you could only swear to one day at a time, to now, because saying you'd never be bad again was like promising to dig up your backyard with a spoon, and you'd get one square foot done and fall off the wagon in despair. Just do the job. Worry about being evil on your own time.

And there, shining on her laptop screen, were three names.

Hafidha pushed back from the table a smidge and announced, "Rhonda Castellano. Admitted to the ER six months ago, attempted suicide. Neighbor smelled gas walking by her apartment door. She lived, though. Elizabeth Kline. Arrested for reckless endangerment when she walked into the street in front of a taxi. And Pavel Breslov, law student at the Big H, who drove his motorcycle into a tree. Blood alcohol level of point-oh-nine, but he told the medics he meant to do it, and to leave him alone. Smashed his pelvis all to hell."

Lau spoke up from where she hunched over the property forms. "And they're all—"

"Lonely Hearts Club. Castellano had signed up with Precious Yoke, which ought to be about B 'n' D, but is in reality a Christian online dating service. Kline subscribed to StrikeAMatch, a site so admirably open-minded they almost scare me. And Breslov was listed with New In Town, which does both social and romantic meetups."

"Three very different sites," Falkner observed.

Brady made a tiny growly sound in his throat. "Three very different victims. Not likely they're all ours, is it?"

Lau dropped the forms in a wire basket beside her. "Let's go ask."

•

Rhonda Castellano had short, dark, curly hair, olive skin, and enormous hazel eyes that widened even farther when Falkner and Lau introduced themselves and mentioned that ER visit. From the way her thin fingers clutched the frame of her apartment door, the Bureau might have been a division of Hell, Incorporated.

"May we come in?" Falkner asked, and Lau had to admire the way she projected confidence in spite of clear signs of Will Not Cooperate.

"No." Castellano shook her head, as if the word might be misconstrued. "I'm sorry. It's not something I'm comfortable talking about."

Lau shifted slightly, emphasized the contrast between Falkner's military authority and her own lack of it. Hard cop, soft cop. "Ms. Castellano, we understand how painful this is for you. But we're trying to find someone who may have caused a woman to take her own life, and who may be targeting others."

"Despair is a sin, Miss..."

"Agent Lau."

"If you despair, you're doubting God. I sinned, but He stretched out his hand and rescued me. That's all anybody needs to know."

God, your neighbor, and the paramedics, Lau thought irritably, but kept it off her face. Humans were usually how miracles got done. "You were a client of an online dating site at the time of your hospitalization."

Castellano's lips pressed together, bleached with the pressure. "What I did had nothing to do with anyone else. I made a mistake, but I was saved to become a better Christian. I'm trying."

Falkner tipped her head lower—a recognition of virtue, and a gentle admonishment. Lau would have bet Falkner's daughters could recognize that head tilt. "You may have information that could help us save lives, Ms. Castellano. You're not in any trouble. You won't be called on to testify..."

But as Falkner spoke, Castellano's head swung slowly back and forth. "I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do for you." She didn't wait for a response. She just stepped back and closed the door. They could hear the safety chain slide home.

They walked all the way down the stairs and out the building door, into soft light and the scent of the narcissus ranked along the pavement, before Lau said, "This is me not commenting on other people's religious beliefs."

Falkner seemed to be studying something in the middle distance. "She's internalized the blame for what happened. Not just the suicide attempt—whatever prompted it, as well."

"She tried to kill herself because she was a bad person." Lau let out a low whistle before she could stifle it, but Falkner didn't seem to think it was an inappropriate reaction.

"If her faith can convince her otherwise..."

Lau shook off the gloom that threatened to fall on them. "Let's see if our next person of interest gives us treats."

•

Pavel Breslov used a cane.

He used it to walk, now, and he used it as a crutch: Even sitting, he grasped for it the moment Brady and Villette showed their badges at his office door. Blond hair fell untidily across his pale, sharp-boned face in what was, nonetheless, a professional and expensive haircut. Not taking care of yourself anymore, Brady noted, and pocketed the badge. "Might we speak with you a moment?"

Breslov blinked rapidly. Straightened up, his hand hard on the cane. "Officers, do you have a warrant?"

Brady bit back the should I get one? just in time. Jumpy as a squirrel, he decided. No, as a white-collar embezzler.

"Mr. Breslov, we're hoping to speak to you as a witness," Chaz said soothingly, and dammit, it was gonna be his day to be Bad Cop again.

"What is this regarding?"

"A possible identity fraud case. It may have led to a young woman's suicide."

Brady watched the skin stretched over Breslov's architectural face go white, then red.

"I don't think I know... That does not sound familiar."

"You probably didn't know the woman in question," Brady said, sneaking a little self-satisfied drawl into his voice. "We believe you may have met the con artist, though."

"I will help, of course. If I can. Please, come sit, and close the door."

Brady imagined this was an archetypal Ivy League T. A.'s office. It barely held Breslov's desk and chair, a pair of metal folding chairs for guests, and a cheap MDF bookcase with sagging shelves. It would have looked bigger if Breslov had ever returned a book or a piece of paper to wherever it belonged. Also, from the smell, Breslov ate half a tuna salad sandwich for lunch three days ago, threw the other half out, and hadn't emptied his trash can since then.

Brady dropped onto the metal chair as if it were an oak church pew. The chair whimpered, and Breslov winced. "From the way you're using that cane, you must be in a world of hurt. What happened?"

"I had an accident with my motorcycle." In spite of the pain, he said it proudly. I ride a motorcycle.

"Those things'll kill ya," Brady said, and Breslov paled and flushed again.

Chaz didn't frighten his chair, or their host. Yet. "Mr. Breslov, you joined an online dating site not long before your accident."

Brady didn't think Breslov's face could have closed harder. It must have had storm shutters tucked away somewhere. His hand tightened around that cane like it was a shotgun. "Not a dating site. It was for meeting friends. Maybe going to a ball game, or to find a workout partner. Just for making friends."

Brady cocked his head. "Did you make any?"

"No." Breslov met his eyes and looked down. "Not really."

Chaz looked thoughtful. "I'd have thought you'd meet lots of people here on campus. You must work with interesting people."

"I was new to the city. The department is competitive. I was looking to make friends." There was a crackle to his voice that Brady recognized, and it had nothing to do with a new town, or not being able to bond over study group.

This was not going to go well.

Breslov shot a sudden, pleading glance at Brady. It said, You wouldn't know how it is. Put yourself in my place. But that wasn't a place Brady wanted to visit again. "Pavel, we need you to help us, as a witness. We think you met the guy we're looking for. If you can give us his name, his address, phone number, where he liked to hang out, anything you remember about him, we might be able to keep him from hurting anyone else."

Breslov perked up at the use of his first name, but the rest of the speech brought the shutters back out. "I didn't meet anyone. I didn't find anyone who was built to be a good friend for me. That's all."

"That's all," Brady echoed.

"And when you told the paramedics at the scene of your crash that you meant to hit the tree, and they should just let you die?" Chaz said quietly.

The kid was getting awfully good at this.

But Breslov just changed color again. "I think it's time for you to leave."

Brady leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. "Pavel, what will we find if we get a search warrant for your dating site records?"

As soon as the sentence was out of his mouth, Breslov's face did something that told him he'd fucked up. "Agents, I am a law student. To get a search warrant, you must show probable cause of evidence in a crime. What crime will you cite?"

After that, there really was nothing to do but leave.

"He's lying," Chaz said, as they paced through the hall, down the stairs, to the door that led back to campus parking.

"Thank you, Great Detective," Brady said, and pushed the door wide open.

"He's ashamed," Chaz added.

Brady snorted. "Well, yeah. You know why they keep saying gay men go into interior design?"

"Will I be sorry if I bite, here?"

"Because we've seen the inside of enough closets to last a lifetime," Brady said. "Our boy there spent that whole interview denying he had anything like a feeling for our UNSUB and I don't think his eyeballs moved once from my ass."

"You were sitting down."

"Then he was imagining my ass."

"More than that, though," Chaz said. "It's about being rejected. Everybody's been shot down, but nobody likes to talk about it. It makes them feel—" he paused, hopped onto a curbside planter to dodge someone's front bumper and dropped down to the asphalt, "—vulnerable. Unloved."

"I don't get rejected," Brady said blandly, and sauntered around to the driver's side.

"Mm-hmm," Chaz replied, and opened the passenger door of the black SUV.

•

"His name was Mike," said Elizabeth Kline. "Mike Darrow."

She was small and pretty in a rounded Victorian way, with nearly colorless skin that flushed with every change of emotion and dense tawny-red hair. In her straight back and edge-of-chair perch, Falkner saw a woman determined to watch life's worst moments come at her and not blink.

And yes, she was expecting the worst.

"We met at a museum for our first date. I thought that was...perfect. Maybe that was my first warning, huh?"

"Why so?" Falkner asked.

"There's no such thing as perfect. And if you do meet someone who's perfect—well, why is he hanging around with you?"

"You don't think you deserve a perfect guy?" Lau spoke quietly, gently, as if she were trying to talk a feral cat out from under a house.

Kline sighed slow and deep. "You know I was arrested, right?"

Falkner nodded.

"Probably saved my life. I thought Mike was wonderful. And when he broke it off—the things he said, it seemed like he was still wonderful, but he'd realized the truth, that I wasn't. I could have had wonderful, but I wasn't good enough to keep it. I was just... I felt like a stain. On his life, on the planet."

"So you stepped out in front of a taxi," Falkner said, so Kline wouldn't have to.

But Kline met her eyes. "I can't believe I didn't think. I hurt so much it was all about me, and I didn't think about the driver or the passenger."

"When you broke up, did Mike mention hurting yourself, or suicide?"

Kline leaned back, putting her maybe an inch farther away from them. "No! He was nice about it. Which made it ten times worse, you know? Like even then, he was being such a sweet guy."

Lau clasped her hands in her lap. "Why are you glad you were arrested?"

"I got probation, and the court ordered me to get counseling. I've been in group therapy for eight months. Sometimes I still feel like I'm not worth anything, but when it happens, I've got things I can do, people to call. I'm getting better."

"Did Mike ever talk to you about other people he'd dated?" Lau asked.

Kline shook her head. "It sounded as if I was the first person he'd ever been serious about."

"Do you have his address or phone number?"

"I did. But the number was disconnected, and when I went to his place, his name was off the mailbox and nobody answered the bell."

Single life in the big city—it was so easy to appear and disappear, and the neighbors wouldn't remember who'd lived next door.

"If you can find his old phone number and address, we might be able to use them." Falkner looked around the room, at the untidy, overstuffed bookshelves and the bright slipcovers and the lamps from Ikea. "Do you have a photograph of Mike?"

Kline frowned down at her kneecaps. "I'm not sure. I had a bunch on my computer, but I deleted... No, I know where I have one." She sprang to her feet, as if they'd given her energy by asking, and hurried out of the room toward the back of the apartment.

"I think," Lau said softly as they waited, "that I'd kind of like to beat this guy with a two-by-four."

Falkner thought she wouldn't mind doing it, either, but it wouldn't do anyone any good to say so. "We still have no evidence of a crime."

"Inciting people to suicide is a felony."

"But he didn't do that, as far as we know."

Kline came back with a sheet of photo paper and a one-gig thumb drive. "You can keep the stick; we buy them by the gross at work. Here's his picture."

The man Elizabeth Kline knew as Mike Darrow stood close beside Kline; one arm circled her back and cupped her opposite elbow, supporting it. He was maybe six-two, towering next to Kline, with brown hair flying in cheerful disarray around his forehead and ears. His face was smooth-shaven and lightly tanned, his eyes were clear, and his wide mouth was parted to show straight white teeth. His extreme slenderness made his cheekbones melodramatic and his fingers scalpel-sharp.

He was smiling, beaming into the camera, proud and happy, while Kline held a full-grown Canada goose in her arms.

"We volunteered doing wildlife rescue," Kline said, looking down at the print. "We got to release that one back into the wild. That photo was in a folder that... I just really loved doing that."

The man she called Mike looked as if he loved it, too. As if he loved her.

"You know that thing people say? 'It's not you, it's me?' It doesn't matter. What matters is that happily-ever-after just died. Whose fault it is doesn't change how that feels." Kline twisted her hands together. "You think Mike is the guy you're looking for. That he's done this to other people, not just me."

Falkner weighed the look in Kline's eyes, the tension in her shoulders. "We do. The person we're looking for may have hurt a lot of people, including a woman who committed suicide."

Kline shut her eyes; for the first time since they'd arrived, she didn't want to see. But she said, "That could have been me. I don't understand, though. Why would he do that? He didn't want money..."

Falkner watched Kline struggle with the idea, and knew she couldn't tell her, He just wanted you to hurt. "We won't know until we talk to him." Falkner slipped her card out of her pocket and laid it on the coffee table in front of Kline. "If you think of anything else that might help us find Mike, call me, please. Day or night."

"I will. But everything we did, or talked about... I mean, we liked to go to used book stores. But maybe he only did that because that was what would make me love him. How do I know what will help?

Lau's voice sounded tight in her throat when she answered, "You let us worry about that."

•

"Jeremiah Brown." Hafidha snapped her fingers idly at the printer in the corner of the conference room, and it coughed to life.

"That sounds like a bourbon." Brady half-turned where he stood at the coffee maker. He'd made a straight line to it as soon as he'd come in, as if he needed to get the taste of something else out of his mouth. Chaz was still somewhere out in the offices. Hunting and gathering, Hafidha hoped. She didn't need to talk to him to take a donut out of his hand.

"It's another potential victim, Bubba-man."

Brady padded over and picked up the pages as the printer spat them out: printouts of a driver's license, LinkedIn profile, home address. And then the dating site, complete with pictures of a young black man with a tipped bowler hat.

"Oh ho. This is not a just-friends kind of site."

"Ah, no." She blinked forward in Brown's records. "Oh, hell. We won't be interviewing Jeremiah. Took him off life support last week."

They shared a moment of silence for a man they'd never met, and hadn't heard of five minutes ago. Dying really wrecked the mood of a room.

"Our guy's definitely playing for both teams, then." Brady said, thoughtfully. "There's a nasty kind of logic to that."

Hafidha looked up at him. Quirked her eyebrow. "If you say 'predatory bisexual,' I'm going to go looking for where the pod people stored your real body."

Chaz banged the conference room door open with his hip; his arms were full of bags with tasty-looking grease stains on them. Hafidha smelled pasta and garlic and something seafood-y and resisted the urge to just reach.

Brady snorted and waved her off with one big hand. "It's like a rape profile," he said, ruffling the pages. "The payoff here has nothing to do with sex or who he likes to sleep with. This is all about power and pain."

Chaz winced, faintly. "Which means we throw out race, gender, orientation. He's aiming for the widest victim pool he can get." He plunked the packages down on the conference table, too hard for the health and welfare of tasty soft contents. The look on his face was readable in fifteen languages, plus Braille: This is going to suck.

"Targets of opportunity," Brady said thoughtfully, and drummed his fingers on the table. "But he's selecting them somehow."

Chaz picked open a greasy paper bag and lifted a warm takeout container from its clutches. The smell of delicious fresh, hot things redoubled. Hafidha's stomach growled. "How do you feel about a breakup?" Chaz said.

Brady shrugged. "Depends on the breakup."

"Miserable? Relieved? Angry? Helpless? Offended?"

"Any or all of the above?"

"But all our victims feel the same way," Chaz said. His long fingers laid out plastic forks, plastic knives, plastic cups. "Devastated. Crushed. None of them are healthily pissed off. Why is that?"

Hafidha's voice sounded like a cracked bell in her own ears. "Because anger doesn't hurt enough." Two heads turned. She swallowed, and went on: "Because the point is maximum damage. So he's picking targets based on whether he can do that much damage by walking away. He's picking targets entirely because they're not healthy."

Silence puddled in the room like leftover grease.

"Dating's all about building profiles," Brady said. "That's why every piece of stupid first-date advice in the world gets repeated: Don't talk about your exes, because it makes people think you're not over them. Don't drink, because they'll think you're a cheap lay. Don't dress too sexy, same. Everything you do on a first date is a profiling countermeasure. It's a short trip down the road to looking for people who apologize for their own damn opinions and take every kindness you give them as proof of a loving God."

"Where did you even get all that?" Chaz asked.

Brady blinked, blandly. "Cosmo."

"Good Lord," Chaz said, and went looking for the napkins.

Hafidha took off her glasses; rubbed the bridge of her nose between two fingers. Her stomach hurt. Her rewired cyborg brain hurt. Whatever she had for a soul hurt. "I'm not the only one who can go hunting for the sad online. He's your store-brand, generic-ass, cheap-shit abuser. All he wants is people who're gonna respond when he kicks. And because we all tell ourselves this story about true love where you know it when you see it, and if you think it's something else, you were fooling yourself, or stupid, or wrong, he just goes from victim to victim."

"And they blame themselves," Chaz said, quietly.

"And they don't talk," Brady added.

Hafidha let out a breath. The thing in her head boiled over and hissed: Filthy world. Filthy people. Wipe his ass off the map.

"I need," she said, to no one in particular, "something to eat."

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C.

Reyes knew who was at his office door without looking up. That was the knuckle-rap of a superior on formal visitation, one who preferred to be the destination and not the traveler in the hallways. Well, impending retirement had its perks as well as its obligations. This time Celentano could afford to come to Reyes. And Reyes could afford to be nice about it.

"Come in," he called across his layers of sorted files.

Celentano stepped in, smiling genially under the glare of the fluorescents off his bullet-head scalp. "You know, if you change your mind and stay, you won't have to finish all that paperwork."

"Have a seat and watch me suffer." Reyes waved him toward a chair. Falkner had sat in it last, to have a conversation nothing like this one. He hadn't had to look cheerful for Esther. "Did you come to say you'll miss me?"

Celentano lifted his chin, square under the softness creeping up on his jaw and neck. "Since when do I have to say it out loud? You created this job. No one can do it like you."

Which was probably a relief for Celentano. "Victor, I hope that's not true for all our sakes."

The chair creaked as he settled into it. Under the light veiling of chin and belly fat, Celentano still had a lot of hard, heavy muscle. "If you're really worried, don't retire yet."

Reyes had a new job, and there really was no one else who could do it. The ACTF had been part of his apprenticeship for it. "I'm not worried. Esther Falkner could have taken over any time in the last three years without a hitch. If she turned it down today, Lau or Brady could run the show; they've got the authority and the experience to make it work."

"So your legacy is safe," Celentano said, smiling.

"Maybe safer. You trust them. You'd hesitate to pull the plug on them."

Celentano's foursquare seated posture, with his feet flat on the carpet and his hands braced on his thighs, said more than the bland arrangement of his face.

So Reyes went on, because his boss had not, in spite of himself, pretended to ignore that last speech, bid him a happy retirement, and left. "I know Falkner was tasked with holding my leash. I know Nikki Lau was under orders not to release certain information when acting as liaison to law enforcement and the public, even when that information could help apprehend suspects. In spite of the limitations theyâ€™ve had to work under, they've committed everything they had to the job, and performed beyond what could be expected of any six ordinary agents. They'll accomplish as much or more than I did, and they'll spend less time fighting with you. I'd say we both win."

Celentano held Reyes's gaze for a long breath, in and out. Then Reyes saw his neck muscles relax, and his fingers stretch and loosen on his legs. "You and I only seriously disagreed on one position."

"I could hand you files from these stacks with names in them of people who would be alive if we had been able to release information about the anomaly."

"And I can't show you the reports on the deaths of people caused by the misunderstanding and misuse of that information. Because there aren't any."

"If we hadn't intervened in Tennessee, you'd have had a report on Patricia MacIntyre. And it would have been the result of too little information, not too much."

"You think I should judge policy on the basis of its implementation by one hick deputy sheriff?"

Reyes leaned back hard in his chair; it smacked the wallboard behind him. "Do you believe that's why we're keeping everyone in the dark? Because there'll be a panic? Is that the only reason why shit will rain down on us if we have a press conference?"

Victor Celentano had perfect control of his expression and his voice when he said, "I have my orders, Stephen. The people who give them to me have their reasons."

Reyes felt he was allowed the exasperated exhale; he was retiring, after all. "I'm still an agent of the FBI, and I'm still faithful to the job, the chain of command, and the safety of the nation. So in service to all that, I'll make you one last big speech. Get out in front of this, Victor. Go public about the ACTF and what it does, and make it clear to the world that this is a public safety issue we're already handling. The facts about the anomaly are going to come out. The myths will be hard on their heels. Once that happens, you'll never catch up. If you don't control the release of the information, it will control you."

Celentano nodded—thank you for your input—and rose. It was a surprisingly smooth action for such a big man, one who couldn't be too many years from retirement himself. "Good luck, Stephen. And don't be a stranger."

Oh, I won't, Reyes thought behind a blank face. I most decidedly will not.

Act III

Boston, Massachusetts

It's warm for April; doubly warm beneath your tangled cotton sheets. Good warmth; soft as the breath you let out against the back of his stubbly neck, and the way its humidity splashes back at you, full of another person's smell.

"You're so damn sweet," he says, soft and sweaty and glowing. Not just from the sex; with a half-smile on his face that you've seen so many times before.

You pitch your voice just right: happiness and awkwardness and wonder. "I didn't exactly plan on this," you say, all rushing hesitation. I'm not just a dog. I was swept up. You're just too incredible.

"Neither did I," he replies, not turning. Plants a lazy kiss on the join between your wrist and hand.

"We should get some sleep," you say. Say without saying, I am not kicking you out.

Stay. Stay as long as you want to.

You feel the short exhale through his back, against your stomach, when he smiles. The first little tendrils of affection, safety, trust sprouting from wherever inside we keep our breakable hearts.

The second you care about something, you're opening up your belly; you're fusing their body to yours, side by side, on the most tenuous of joins. And all the naturalness of reaching for their hand, or their hip bumping yours and staying, doesn't make up for the fact that when that join's ripped apart your guts will be wide open. Exposed to the stinging air. Falling to the floor.

What most people don't understand is that the second you care about something, truly care about it, you die.

"And done," you murmur to yourself, with a rising, piqued satisfaction.

"Hm?" he asks. Perfectly sleepy. Perfectly content, balled up with his knees to your knees; his back warm against the curve of your chest, your stomach.

"Nothing," you say, and wrap him in your arms.

•

"Here," Nikki Lau said, slapping a printout of a photograph on the table, "is our guy. Maybe."

Hafidha looked up from her mess of destroyed lobster fettuccine. "Maybe?"

"Probably," Lau said, and pushed the picture toward her.

It was a tall man, white, broad-shouldered, curly dark hair just messy enough to be wildly charming. Straight nose. Big friendly grin. The kind you'd see on a dating site and wonder how in the Good Lord's name he was still single. "Figures," Hafidha muttered.

Lau raised an eyebrow.

"It's always the hot ones who are possessed by brain-eating evil," she said. "And yes, I am including me."

Lau didn't flinch. She loved how much Lau didn't flinch.

The Bug hated it.

Falkner and Brady stepped into the conference room as Lau pulled the photo back. "Elizabeth Kline said his name is Mike Darrow. At least, for her."

Hafidha rolled her chair back to the laptop. "Aaaand I'm finding his profile on StrikeAMatch. Oh, look here: 'Somewhere out there is the person I'm meant for. I want to banish her sorrows and shelter her with love.' When we find him, can I puke on him?"

"Can you find him in meatspace?" Lau was twitching like a greyhound with a stuffed bunny just beyond her nose.

The profile was archived; the linked credit card was dead. But she knew some of his on-line tells now, and could start worming back to an ISP, previous or current. "On it."

Chaz stood at her right hand; she had no idea where he'd come from. He set a foam clamshell on the desk beside her laptop and opened it. Not one, but two cannoli.

"Those'll come in handy."

Falkner picked up the photo of Mr. Lying Liar Who Lies. "Meanwhile, Brady, Lau, go back to Breslov and Castellano. Show them this and see if it jogs their memories."

•

Rhonda Castellano seemed stern and self-possessed, defending her apartment doorway with her body. Until Lau held up the photo.

Her grip on the door frame slipped, and her hand rose to press against her mouth. Keeping in physically the words she didn't want out in the world.

"You know him."

Castellano just stared at the photo.

"Rhonda. You dated him, didn't you? Then he broke it off. And the way he did it made you feel like no one could love you. That was when you tried to kill yourself, wasn't it?"

Somewhere in the apartment behind Castellano, music was playing. A woman sang, sweetly, inoffensively, though Lau couldn't make out the lyrics. The singer got through what sounded like a whole verse, and Lau's hopes for the interview were melting like summer hail.

"His name is...Adam. Adam Bonaventure. He said—" Castellano swallowed, made a glottal sound, swallowed again. "He said he couldn't be with someone who...who loved him more than she loved Christ."

By the time she finished the sentence, her voice was faint and frail as a deathbed confession.

•

When Brady showed the photo to Pavel Breslov, it snapped the girders in his face. The whole structure collapsed on itself, and he turned his back on Brady.

"I guess this means you did meet someone through that Internet site," Brady said, but it came out gentler than it had sounded in his head. "Why did you lie to us, Mr. Breslov?"

Breslov ignored him. Fair enough; it was a dumb question.

"Will you tell me now what you know about the man in the photograph?'

"Hugh Morgan." Breslov's voice was tight and unsteady. "What you want to find him for. This fraud and a woman dead. He would never do something like that. He was honest even when it wasn't good for him. We found a wallet once with money in it, and he took it back into the restaurant so they would call the man who lost it. He worried all night about that man he didn't know."

After enough years on the job, some statements gave you a feeling. "Where did you find the wallet?"

Breslov slumped into his chair, but he was at least willing to look at Brady now. "In the parking lot, by the car. We had dinner. I found it when we came out."

"His car? He drove?"

Breslov frowned, confused. "Yes."

Fussing with getting the car keys back in a jacket pocket in a dark parking lot... "Was there ID in the wallet? Do you remember the name?"

"A driver's license? I didn't see one. I think...there was an airline card, for miles, you know. And I think the name was like the one, the railway engineer in the song."

Not John Henry, damn it, who— "Casey Jones?"

The thing that moved Breslov's mouth almost counted as a smile. "Casey. I think it was."

Brian Casey was the name of Lucy Jones-Mercado's demon lover.

•

Lau and Brady came into the conference room together, with Bollinger close behind. Hafidha searched their faces and found the mixture of gotcha and disappointment in their species that meant Breslov and/or Castellano had had a change of story.

"Looks like our boy's name should be Legion," Brady said, and sank into a chair.

Lau laid a page of notes on the conference table and veered off toward the coffeepot. "He was Brian Casey to Lucy Jones-Mercado, and Elizabeth Kline insisted his name was Mike Darrow. To Pavel Breslov, he was Hugh Morgan. And Rhonda Castellano knew him as Adam Bonaventure."

"Hugh Morgan," Hafidha said, and brushed through layers of encryption like they were her hippie mother's beaded kitchen curtain. The profile flickered onto both screens. "Apparently a cocky fucker who does not shut his burned identities down."

"Or knows enough to realize that might tip his marks off after the fact," Bollinger added, and Hafidha tilted her a nod: point, the local kid.

She pried the locks loose on Hugh Morgan's on-site inbox and rifled through it one-handed. Whistled low through her teeth. "Look at all the people he messages," Hafidha said. "There are dozens of them. Ten a day on this site alone. And most of them, he never tries to meet."

Brady huffed. "We were right: He's screening. He's looking for anyone breakable."

She skimmed; stopped. Stopped hard. "Oh, God. 'As much as I wanted to continue our conversation, I was let down by the "tell me about yourself." It's a question I dread hearing in interviews and shows the other party was too lazy or boring to construct a real one. It is late and not that I know you well but from what I read thus far, I know you can do better; call it tough love but I'll give you another chance for creative questions.'"

"You're kidding me," Falkner said.

"I wish," Hafidha spat. "And the worst? She answered."

"Set him," Chaz added, "on fire."

"Is this that Game thing?" Bollinger said icily. "Insult the woman you're trying to pick up and see if she comes back anyway?"

"Or he," Brady added. "That's a universal test for not actually liking yourself enough."

"It's Go Fish," Chaz said, brooding. "The same way everyone else does online dating. Why does that disappoint me?"

"Because it makes finding out where he is now that much harder," Lau said, and leaned over Hafidha's shoulder in a way that only halfway made her want to snap at the air. "Who else has he been talking to?"

Hafidha yanked up the cluster of dating sites she'd been incubating in her bookmarks file. "This guy has hundreds of online profiles. Not just on the dating sites—he has backup web presence for all those identities." Hafidha rubbed her too-short hair and huffed out a breath. "Blogs, Facebook, Goodreads—hell, they all have Amazon wish lists."

"But they're all him?" Falkner asked. "You can identify them?"

She nodded. "They're all the same IP address, and some of the same pictures. He's not hiding from law enforcement. He's hiding from his victims-to-be."

"And we still can't find him in meatspace," Bollinger growled. "Dating sites are designed to be just anonymous enough. They don't even ask for proof of identification."

"Which brings up a point," Falkner said. "Lucy Jones-Mercado died three months ago. If these profiles have been active since, we are probably on a clock right now."

Chaz's breath hissed out. "Right. Regular, repeating trail of victims. There's a new one. Someone he's working on right now."

"And probably one we've missed," Brady added grimly.

Falkner was hoarse when she said, "Check any new activity on the identities we've got. Maybe we can get ahead of him."

She'd already begun to scoop that data. But there was no reason to think he'd be using one of the profiles she'd spotted so far. Even if they lucked out, they'd only have one of his fake selves by the tail.

"Oh, screw this," Hafidha said, and wiped one screen blank with a swipe of her hand. Reached out the better way, her way.

Photos, numbers, data flowed through her head. Flickered on the screen like an afterimage aquarium. Went careening through the cable between monitors, through her left brain and her right, matching up names and addresses and pictures and sorting them away.

Far away, over her shoulder, she heard Brady's voice say, "Agent Bollinger, will you show me what you have on-site for surveillance gear?"

Oh, right. Don't blow our cover. Now Brady puts on his shades and hits her with the neuralyzer.

It didn't matter. What mattered was the data stream. Push it. Sieve it. Quicker.

"What's that?" Chaz said quietly.

"Massachusetts DMV," she snapped, and leaned in harder. DMV, and library cards, and loyalty cards, and everything else in the world. The photos scrolled faster, her left hand spidering for dummy profiles, snatching and matching them with every piece of ID that bore Evil Romeo's face. Took every hit and threw it right out.

You're gonna burn out, the Bug whispered. She gritted her teeth and moved faster.

Until there was one.

One piece of ID that didn't match up with an online piece of bait. One state driver's license with no Amazon, no LinkedIn, no thinly veiled Twitter account leaving a bright deadly trail for whoever was guaranteed to find it.

"His name," she said, "is Drew Pennicuik." The arm of the chair dug in under her rib cage on the right side. She should sit up straight, maybe. "And he lives in Somerville."

The printer sputtered. Spit out a tiny sheaf of pages: Drew Pennicuik's license, photos, 2011 tax return. "Onward, Keystone Kops," she said, and grabbed the armrests of the chair with both hands. The room seemed too far away for her to be inside it.

Lau made a noise like someone's disapproving mother. "Dammit," she said. "Food."

"Food," Hafidha agreed; caught the edge of Lau's shoes bolting out the door in search of Boston field office's finest and closest leftovers.

"You all right?" Chaz said quietly. She waved him away. He hovered for another second before stepping back, somewhere out of view. Before Lau came back in with a double handful of protein bars and unwrapped one in a shower of crinkling foil wrapper.

"I got this," she said, and pressed it into Hafidha's hand.

Falkner was by the printer, looking over their spoils. "This is close in. We might be able to catch him at home."

"Suit up, then?" Brady asked, with a thoroughly unprofessional eagerness. Hafidha put the protein bar in her mouth and bit. Tried to not think about it too hard, or too much.

"We'll go in soft. He doesn't get his hands dirty. Brady and Chaz in front, and I'll grab some of the locals to back you up. Lau, get an interview room ready for us."

Brady nodded and went out the door. Probably to find Bollinger and some vests.

"Right," Falkner said, brisker than your average drill sergeant. "Let's bring him in."

Act IV

You've just sent him the text when the doorbell rings: Hey, is it okay if we grab a coffee tomorrow? Grab a coffee; not your place, not mine. Hesitant. Stripped of endearments.

He'll already know something's wrong.

The door goes again, followed by a hard triple knock. Impatient, you think, irritable, sharp. Someone selling something. Someone you don't want. You peek through the peephole at the two men outside. You've never seen either before.

You open the door with your smile fixed in place: bored and terribly charming. "Can I help you?"

"Special Agent Daniel Brady, FBI," the tall blond thing says, all shapes and textures to your eyes: here a half-masked discomfort with his masculinity; there the hangnail handhold of a vicious, lashing privacy, years of keeping secrets and the terror of having them revealed.

The angular one next to him is harder. You stare a moment too long, prying around for focus: Everything about him is bright and blank and hard. "Special Agent Charles Villette," he says crisply, and you give up. Not worth it. Apple too high up the tree. "Mr. Drew Pennicuik?"

You smile at them both: bewildered, bemused, affable. "Yes, that's me."

"We need you," the big one says tightly, "to come with us."

•

Interview Room One was the classic cop-shop model: one door, no window, a table bolted to the floor with a discreet but sturdy bar beneath the tabletop where a shackle could be threaded, two flimsy stacking chairs. All it lacked was the one-way glass, but a video camera in each corner corrected for the shortage.

Drew Pennicuik wasn't shackled; at least, not beyond the restraints of the room itself, which were mostly psychological. Even those didn't seem to weigh on him. He sat at the table with the bored patience of someone waiting for his number to be called at the Motor Vehicles Division.

Brady gave voice to what Falkner was thinking. "Innocent guys in interview rooms are not relaxed."

Pennicuik was, strictly speaking, innocent of a crime, at least as far as they were aware to date. But it took a deep-seated ruthlessness to face the justice system and not squirm, even a little, at the memory of a red light run, a fence tagged, an act of trespassing or minor theft or property damage.

"He doesn't know about us," Lau said suddenly, staring at the center monitor.

Falkner turned to look at her, drawn by the aha in her voice, and saw that the rest of the team had turned, as well.

Hafidha finished Lau's thought. "Cops look for motive. He thinks he's safe, because why would anyone do what he does? But we know why."

Falkner considered Hafidha's half-focused expression and half-dreaming tone. Chaz, she saw, was considering it, too. How much incentive did he need to use the mirror? Which side would he err on?

She trusted him to judge, because she had to. "Villette, I want you to question Pennicuik."

Chaz blinked. "My, ah, particular brand of evidence isn't admissible."

"You don't need to use that—not yet, at least. I want to see how he reacts when he finds out we know what he does. That he's not the only one."

•

They watched the monitors as Chaz came through the single door, an unmarked manila folder under his arm. Pennicuik gave him a single swift evaluating look. Then he raised his eyebrows and smiled, and lifted his hands a little above the table surface with the palms halfway to up. Universal gesture of question and supplication.

"Am I under arrest for something?"

Falkner wondered what Pennicuik had seen when Chaz came in. She knew too much to see Chaz as other than he was. But had Pennicuik seen the competent, relentless professional, or the awkward, wounded feral child? And which had Chaz wanted him to see?

"No, Mr. Pennicuik." Chaz sat in the chair across the table, centered the closed folder in front of him. "But we are engaged in an investigation you might be able to help us with."

"Sure." Maybe Pennicuik relaxed, but it was hard to tell.

"You use a number of online dating sites, correct?" When Pennicuik only frowned and tucked his chin, Chaz continued. "StrikeAMatch. Heart to Heart. Precious Yoke. New In Town. Date Nite. Randy's Place." He rattled them off, ostentatious in his lack of anything like a list to refer to. "And quite a few more."

Hafidha had found twenty-six sites so far, and over two hundred personal profiles.

A muscle twitched in Pennicuik's jaw. He wasn't much thinner than he should have been, even given the width of his shoulders. Did he have a manifestation? He didn't seem to use one to get what he wanted. If he weren't noticeably underweight, she'd wonder if it was possible to feed the anomaly and never ask anything of it.

Anthropomorphizing. Reyes would say the metaphors block the view of the real thing.

"That's private," Pennicuik snapped. Chin up and thrusting in righteous outrage. "There's no law against signing up at multiple sites."

Chaz grabbed the advantage he'd been given. "As I said, Mr. Pennicuik, you're not under arrest. I notice none of your memberships use your own name."

"Those sites can attract scammers and creeps. It makes sense to be careful, at least at first."

"You're worried about identity theft."

"Among other things, yeah."

"Other things?"

"People who are searching for intimacy can be very vulnerable, Agent..."

Chaz's smile was small and slow. "So to protect yourself, you used pseudonyms. Adam Bonaventure. Mike Darrow. Hugh Morgan. Brian Casey. But why so many?"

To Falkner's surprise, Pennicuik blushed. "Sometimes... Agent, maybe you wouldn't understand this. But you don't always...want the same things all the time. It's easier, sometimes, to just pretend to be somebody else than it is to find one person who can give you everything you want."

At the other end of the row of monitors, Hafidha gave a short, angry twitch, and Falkner recalled Hafidha's last romantic relationship.

Chaz didn't react at all. "And what is that?"

"Pardon?"

"What you want. From these sites."

"I really don't think that's any of your business."

Chaz leaned forward confidingly. If he was doing anything anomalous it didn't show up on the monitors. "Humor me, Mr. Pennicuik, please. This will help our investigation."

Pennicuik's face softened; his eyes widened and focused somewhere past Chaz's shoulder. "I want...a real connection. It sounds hokey, but I want true love." He laughed, and sounded nervous and embarrassed. "Man, I hope you're not taping this. I meant it, but that doesn't make it sound less like a greeting card, you know?"

"Is that what you were looking for with Lucy Jones-Mercado?" At last Chaz opened the folder and slid a photo across the table to Pennicuik. "She knew you as Brian Casey."

Pennicuik stared down at the photo and nodded. "She was awfully sweet."

"But the connection wasn't there."

"You can't force it to happen."

"Did you and she ever discuss suicide?'

Pennicuik reared back in his chair, lip curled. "What, like a...a pact?"

"Did you ever say anything to her about suicide?"

"Why the hell would I? And how did we get from falling in love to, to suicide?"

"That was the progression for Ms. Jones-Mercado."

Pennicuik's face was fixed and blank. "Lucy killed herself?"

Chaz slid the photo back into his folder. "You didn't know Lucy Jones-Mercado committed suicide?"

"No. After we broke it off, I never saw her again. There wasn't any point." Pennicuik seemed baffled that he had to explain it.

Chaz thumbed another photo out of the folder and pushed it toward Pennicuik. "What about Jeremiah Brown?"

Pennicuik shot Chaz a quick sideways glance. Looking for judgment, Falkner realized. Revulsion, disapproval. He didn't see any, of course, so he allowed his face to soften as he looked down at the photo. "Jer and I—"

Falkner could almost hear the click as Pennicuik matched the previous subject to this one.

"Wait. Did Jer... Him, too?"

"Him, too, what?" Chaz sounded genuinely confused, but Falkner knew he wasn't.

Not like Pennicuik. He hadn't known.

"Goddamn," Pennicuik breathed, staring down at the photos. "They killed themselves. Goddamn."

It might have looked and sounded like regret to other people. But with a deep dismay Esther Falkner heard newborn wonder beneath those words. In the instant before Pennicuik schooled it away, she saw his expression: avid.

Chaz caught it, too. "Mr. Pennicuik, I'm sorry to have misled you. We know why you created so many profiles on so many dating sites, and why you chose the people you did."

"I told you—"

"You have an illness. You're not the only one who has it. It makes you want to hurt people."

Pennicuik sat with his mouth open for a moment. "That's... Excuse me? If I have some kind of psychosis, I'll get diagnosed by a doctor, not a glorified beat cop."

"There are physical symptoms, as well. You have trouble keeping weight on, don't you? No matter how much you eat. And you eat a lot." Chaz stretched his own bone-sculpture hands in front of him. "That gets worse over time. Eventually the metabolic stresses lead to chronic organ failure. Dialysis is a turnoff for a lot of dates, I hear."

"You can't prove a word of this," Pennicuik growled.

"I don't need to. You already know I'm telling the truth. You couldn't always feel other people's pain the way you do now. It didn't always feel so very good. To someone else this would sound crazy. But to you and me, it makes sense. Doesn't it?"

Pennicuik's fingers closed around the table's edge, and the knuckles were white.

Chaz leaned in across the table, so kind and confiding that Falkner half expected him to touch the other man. "Drew, you're not controlling this. It's controlling you. And it'll kill you quick if you don't know what to do about it. But we can save your life. Let us help."

Falkner felt light-headed; she realized it was because she was holding her breath. Pennicuik's handsome features twitched with one aborted expression after another: fear, outrage, anger, lust. He would break. He had to. The only life Pennicuik cared about was his own. He would do anything to save it.

He had to surrender. He had to.

Drew Pennicuik shoved himself back from the table, making the chair screech along the floor. His voice shook as he said, "I have no fucking idea what you're trying to do. Charge me with something or let me out of here." He folded his arms across his chest.

Chaz took his time getting out of his chair, tucking his folder under his elbow, and walking out of the room.

"Jesus fuck a truck," Brady muttered fiercely. Lau slumped and raked both hands through her hair. Hafidha sat staring at Pennicuik in the monitors, opening and closing her hands.

When Chaz came in, his first words were, "I'm sorry."

"Sorry?" Hafidha burst out, then bit her lower lip and turned away.

"You almost had him," Falkner said. "It was a good strategy. He just couldn't be sold."

"So, what do we do now?" Brady asked.

"There's not much we can do," Falkner said. "Mental cruelty is grounds for many things, but not, last I heard, an FBI investigation."

Brady leaned across the table. "We can't walk away. That guy in there? That's a gamma."

"One who hasn't committed a crime. Even if I thought we should lock people up because they might break the law, there's no practical mechanism for doing it."

"But think of the best part, kids," said Hafidha suddenly, bright and brittle as chrome plastic. "We just showed him how to level up."

Esther Falkner could keep her face immobile under trying circumstances. She kept it still now, in spite of the pain in her throat. She watched Chaz.

"Hafs?" Lau frowned. "We what?"

"He didn't know about the suicides," Chaz answered. He could have been a recording. "As soon as he heard about them, he wanted them."

"And it's just that easy, boys and girls." Hafidha smiled at Lau, at Brady, and finally at Chaz. Chaz stared back, but he looked away first.

"No," Lau snapped. "No, no, no. We can't let him walk."

"We can't charge him." The words seared Falkner's throat.

"Fuck this," Brady spat out. "We stick these motherfuckers in Idlewood like it's Guantanamo for gammas, and nobody kicks. It's where he belongs." He flushed and turned to Hafidha. "Sorry. Present company and all."

"No problem, sugar cookie." She seemed almost pleased.

Falkner clenched her hands on each other, because she was afraid if she closed them on anything else she'd break it. "We belong to the Justice Department. That still means something. And maybe Celentano or the assistant director or the director or someone else up the chain of command would be prepared to whittle away a little more of that integrity. But don't ask it of me."

Lau turned back to the monitors where Pennicuik's image sat, impatient but unperturbed. Brady's face was closed and dark. Hafidha drummed her fingers on her knee, back and forth, back and forth, in some indecipherable rhythm. Chaz stared at the gray commercial carpet as if he could read it.

Falkner pushed her chair away from the monitors and stood. "We can't hold him," she said, surprised at how calm she sounded. "Let's turn him loose."

"Great." The word was an explosion from Hafidha's mouth. Her lips curled as if she'd bit down on an aspirin. "We can be home before the cherry blossoms are done."

Falkner spread her hands on the back of her chair and leaned forward, watching Hafidha across the four-pane flat-panel window of the lit monitors. "Do you have a suggestion?"

Hafidha's face worked for a second more, a wrestling match between expressions or lack thereof. Suddenly she covered it all with her hands. Falkner had never seen her do that before in just that way, and she sent a question-glance at Chaz. All his attention was on Hafidha.

"I just don't have to like it. All right? I could wash the bastard out of the Internet like the itsy-bitsy fucking spider because it's the thing I'm made for, but I'm not going to. And I'm not fucking happy about it." Hafidha's breath sucked past her teeth and hit the back of her throat, an audible blow. Her fingers curled as if reaching for her eye sockets.

A water cooler stood in the corner by the door. Falkner filled a paper cup with water and set it on the table in front of Hafidha.

"Fuck you," she groaned without taking her hands away from her face.

"You wouldn't like that, either," Falkner replied, mild as milk.

Hafidha dropped her hands, picked up the cup, and drained it.

•

Chaz had said, "Set him on fire," and he'd meant it. Looking now at Hafidha's shaking hands and set jaw, he wanted something worse than fire. She'd forged herself a chain to contain the Bug, and that was the right thing to do. But he wanted to destroy the person who was making her throw her weight against the links.

He knew how that felt. He'd had a real chain, after all.

He scrabbled in his head for something to say, something she wouldn't fling back at him. After all, if Pennicuik had caved, she wouldn't have to hurt. He'd failed her.

He touched three fingers to the top of her wrist. A turn of her hand, and her wrist wasn't there anymore.

Falkner straightened slowly, as if her back needed consideration. A muscle jumped in her jaw. "All right. Nikki, would you bring Agent Bollinger in here, please? I'd like her to be up to speed on this."

Lau flicked a glance around the room, and Chaz knew what she was looking for: Anyone know what "this" is? Chaz couldn't help her, either. She slipped out the door.

Brady stood up and stretched. "I'll book us a ride to the hotel from the motor pool."

"No," said Falkner. "I want you here, too."

"For...?"

Maybe Brady would have had an answer. But Lau ushered Bollinger into the observation room and closed the door.

"Thank you, Agent. I'll be back in a minute." And Falkner left the room.

They were interrupted in their universal exchange of What the fuck expressions by movement on the monitors.

Falkner walked empty-handed into Interview Room One.

Pennicuik tipped his head to one side and gave her an undisguised once-over. Could he see through Falkner's highly refined stone face? No way to tell from his reaction.

Falkner didn't sit down. "Mr. Pennicuik. I'm Supervisory Special Agent Esther Falkner of the Anomalous Crimes Task Force. I'd like to thank you for coming in today. In a few minutes someone will come to escort you out of the building. Before you go, I'm going to share some information you should know."

Pennicuik donned a politely curious expression. But he didn't reply. He's off balance. He has no clue what's next, Chaz thought. Hey, join the club.

"We know who you are, where you are, and what you are, Mr. Pennicuik. We will never lose track of you. That's the job of Anomalous Crimes: to recognize and monitor people like you."

Pennicuik's teeth worked behind his lips. No, it wasn't just the freaky-looking skinny guy who thought there was something wrong with him. The woman who might be able to kill him with a paper clip was on board with it, too.

Falkner continued. "We have the list of your identities online. If you create more, we will know them before you stop typing. We know your methods and your preferences. Should you resort to even more dangerous behaviors, like inciting to suicide, well, we call that 'escalation.' We'll know about that, too. And your first criminal act will be your last.

"If you're careful and use your...talents as little as possible, you may live to see fifty. I should warn you, that's not the way to bet. Not without help. But as long as you're a law-abiding citizen and a very good person, Mr. Pennicuik, you will never see us again. And that's the way you want it."

Esther Falkner turned with military precision and left the room.

Pennicuik stared after her, at the shut door, for a long moment. Then his head swiveled, his eyes at once searching and blank. He clasped his hands on the tabletop and lowered his gaze at last. Maybe he was looking for a sign that he was the exception to everything.

It was Bollinger who broke the silence in the observation room. "What did she mean, that bit about talents? What makes this guy special, and what kind of special do you folks track down?"

Hafidha was still staring into the monitors, not quite focusing. Chaz didn't want to take his eyes off her. So he was grateful when Nikki Lau drew a long breath and said, "Agent Bollinger, I'm going to tell you as much as I'm allowed to." At the corner of his vision, Chaz saw her glance back at the monitors and straighten her shoulders. Not unlike Mom. "And then I'll tell you a little bit more."

Falkner came in as Lau was leading Bollinger out. If they exchanged anything significant, Chaz missed it. "Brady," Falkner said, "you can call the motor pool now."

Hafidha swiveled her chair and gazed up at Falkner. "Es. Thank you." Calm face, cracked voice.

Chaz owed her a thank-you, too. He'd get it out later, when he didn't have to force it past the truckload of jealous.

•

Hafidha was supposed to be packing up her rig. Disconnecting cables. Breaking her prosthetic senses, her Voltron, down.

It wasn't enough.

She wanted to hurt him.

She paced the small washroom one more time. Somewhere, deep in the bowels of the FBI, specially trained agents were wondering exactly how long it took that twitchy girl to pee. Her shoes landed with an echoing thump; good acoustics. Bathroom acoustics.

Prison cell acoustics.

"You are not," she said to the thing inside her head, "going to do anything about this."

It doesn't have to be now. It doesn't have to be here.

And on the back trail: Crazy girl talking to herself in bathrooms.

"I said I didn't have to like it," she told it bitterly, and turned on the faucets on both the sinks, to drown out the noise of her muttering through the crack in the locked washroom door. The intangible pressure in her head shifted. Satisfied. Damn.

You also wanted to wipe him right off the Internet. Wipe it clean.

"I was wrong," she told it. Her hands on the side of the white chipped sink wavered.

He was wrong, the Bug snipped.

"Well, there's more than enough damn wrong to go around, isn't there?" she told it, and shut off the tap. If James Singh had been willing to say, "I was wrong," and live with the consequences, Daphne would be beside her. Cracking wise about how technically heartbreak had nothing to do with the circulatory system. Breathing, messy-haired. Alive.

But living with the consequences was always the bitch part, wasn't it?

Right. She was a peace officer. She was there to enforce the peace; to reduce harm.

There was more than one way to reduce harm in this situation.

•

Hafidha strode into the conference room, jaw set, and put her fingers on the keyboard keys.

Chaz's chin clicked up from the files, maps, debris he was packing away like a safety coming off. "What're you doing?"

"Looking something up," she snapped back. Her hands flew over the keys, hunting through snags and tangles of Internet traffic: of those hundreds of dating site profiles, one of them would have been active most recently. One of them would have a blot of messages exchanged, and a meeting time, and a place. One more twist of colors, visible across the cables, of someone lonely enough to die.

Peace officers weren't supposed to avenge. They weren't supposed to murder. But they could find them some law-abiding citizens and move them right out of the way.

Dating sites were designed to be anonymous. And Brady had called for the car, and there wasn't much time. She had to be quick.

"Hafs?" Chaz said, tightly.

"Everything all right there?" Brady asked from the corner.

She opened the door in her head and let the numbers flood in.

—and there. There.

Bradley McClellan, thirty years of age, a journeyman carpenter living in Burlington, Massachusetts. License and registration; a tug sideways to address; somewhere, somewhere in that thicket, a working phone number—

She saw the mirror go up.

There was supposed to be no telling when Chaz was jamming; no telling if he was pointing it at you. But she'd been under the microscope enough to see it: the afterimages of her every emotion registering on his face nanoseconds after they leapt onto hers. Surprise. Violation. Betrayal.

Chaz's face abruptly twisted: purest outrage.

Hafidha stood up hard; knocked the chair back spinning and careening across the carpet. Sound, light crackled in her ears: the snapped strands of data fading out. "Chaz," she said, "Turn. That. OFF."

Brady was on his feet. Hands out, and she didn't want to find out what they were out for. Chaz's mouth pinched; his face flushed. His own expressions, not hers. He reached out a skinny hand to Brady, waved him off. "It's not. It's fine."

Hafidha stared at him levelly. "It's fine," Chaz repeated, and looked away.

The conference room door opened, and Agent Bollinger came three steps in before screeching to a stop. She looked at Chaz, at Brady, at Hafidha all on their feet, and took her first step back.

"Agent Bollinger?" Hafidha said, edged and sweet. "One more person we can bring in, if you wouldn't mind. As fast as we can."

"Right," Bollinger said, her forehead crinkling with confusion, and strode quickly through the door and into the hallway.

Hafidha closed her eyes and resisted the urge to look for any stray surveillance cameras near Bradley McClellan's office. To make sure they were in time.

•

Unlike his lover, Bradley McClellan looked around Interview One nervously; the jumpy terror of the pure-hearted. Hafidha wiped her hands on her pants. She hadn't done an interview in years, now. Hadn't interacted with people who weren't law enforcement officers, or medical staff, or family.

Ooh how you'll fuck him up, girl. How you'll eat his little heart.

"Shut up," she mouthed to the Bug, and rubbed her head over the spot where that microchip lay asleep against her grey matter. Opened the door, and went inside.

He looked up abruptly as she entered: afraid and eager, all at once. If that's how he'd looked at Drew Pennicuik the first time they'd met, or the second, or the third, then he'd been doomed. It was written all over the poor guy.

"Officer," he said, staring apprehensively at her folder. She didn't bother to correct him. "Is everything all right? I don't understand what's—I don't understand," he finished awkwardly.

"You're not in any trouble," she told him in her best unused soothing voice. Not from us, anyway. "We asked you here to talk about a person of interest in an ongoing investigation. As a witness."

The flutter of emotions over his face was genuine: worry, anxiety, sheer relief. "I don't know what I might have seen," he said, and she opened up the folder.

"It's to do with a man going by the name of David Lucas."

"I've only known Dave a few weeks," he said, and even under the alarm, he couldn't hide the edges of the smile. The way his chin tucked just a little.

In love. Head over heels. Besotted.

"That's not his real name," she said, and oh man, here we go. "It's Drew Pennicuik." And she lays down Exhibit A: that printout of his driver's license, complete with picture.

"That's not—" he said, and stopped cold. Reached out a finger to trace the lines of that wildly curly hair, the chin. The nose.

"It's him," she said, and hated herself. "He isn't telling you the truth."

Bradley McClellan looked up at her urgently. Like a kicked puppy. Like a beaten child. "But we were—" he said, and his mouth shaped something further. Something inaudible, inexpressible: a hand reaching out to hold another, and finding only dead air.

"Bradley," she said, firm and urgent. "Brad. He has a history. Every month or so he picks up someone new and drops them the second they get comfortable. This was the last one." She slapped down Jeremiah Brown's driver's license picture in front of him like a poker dealer. "And this was the one before that." Lucy Jones-Mercado. "These here were all last year's batch."

"People have exes," he said uncomfortably.

"Bradley," Hafidha said, in her mother's voice; the voice you didn't gainsay. "Drew Pennicuik's last two exes are dead."

He caught his breath.

Not quick enough. He wasn't surprised. Hafidha sat back for a second, before she realized: He'd been waiting for the other shoe to drop; waiting all along. And now that it had, now that it was here, he was finally, in some terrible way, safe.

You're hurting him, she realized, and it wasn't the nasty little voices this time. It was her.

God. She had to finish it. Just finish it.

"They killed themselves. He finds people who are lonely," she said, looking directly into his eyes; looking so he would not dare to look away. "He sweeps in and romances them, treats them like gold, waits until they fall in love. And then he leaves."

The young man's mouth worked. Young indeed; so damned young. "Why?" he said, like a six-year-old child.

"Because, honey," Hafidha said gently, "he likes to hurt people."

There was nothing to describe the look on his face. She kept her eyes open, and watched it. She owed him at least that.

The tiny monster in her head wanted, needed that.

"I'm sorry," she added miserably, even though he would never, ever know why.

Bradley McClellan looked at all the profiles, all the identities, all the suicide reports spread out on the table in front of him. He spread his thick hands wide. His thumb blocked out Lucy Jones-Mercado's face.

"Oh," he said, softly. The sound of a face going slack. Of something ripping out, sharply, by the roots. "Oh."

•

They'd be wheels up from Logan in half an hour and Chaz was pushing his belongings into his duffel before the thing that muttered uneasily at the back of his mind finally spoke up.

It was the hotel's laundry bag that did it. He snagged it off the closet floor, found the exposed bits of the plastic draw tape, and pulled them. The bag wrinkled...

...and there he was, the loop of plastic stretched between his two hands, the plastic bag constricted by it. Strangled.

The law could do nothing to Drew Pennicuik. But the person who'd strangled Viv Paliotto in Seattle, who'd caught up with Hope Mitchell when the ACTF couldn't—

Their very own jammer housecleaner. Now that they'd found Pennicuik, the housecleaner would, too.

And they couldn't protect Pennicuik any more than they could charge him with a crime.

He fumbled his phone out and speed-dialed Falkner. Even though there was nothing she could do, either.

•

Esther Falkner got back to the office at three in the afternoon. She kicked her go bag under the desk and checked the mail tray on her desk. A slim white envelope, sealed and thick enough to block the most dedicated snooping, lay lonely inside. The return address was the FBI seal, and Office of the Director.

The seal ripped satisfyingly under her thumb. The paper inside was thick too, and heavy; embossed official letterhead on the very top.

To: Supervisory Special Agent Esther Falkner

From: the Office of the Director

This communication is to offer you the post of Agent In Charge of the Anomalous Crimes Task Force, reporting directly to SSA Victor Celentano within the Behavioral Analysis Unit. Your federal employee grade and reimbursement will be increased commensurately.

I know you will continue to show the high standards of duty and performance the people of the United States expect from those who uphold the law.

Sincerely, et cetera, et cetera.

Falkner swallowed. Walked slowly down the hall, one door over, to Stephen Reyes's office.

He was at his desk as usual, as always. Surrounded by stacks of unending things to be done, and wearing a focused frown. He looked up at the sound of her shuffling footsteps, and put his pen down. "You're back," he said.

"We're back."

He studied her. Eyebrows knitting just slightly together. "How did it go?"

Falkner let out a thin breath. "It," she said, "was terrible."

Act V

They used to burn love letters. Back when we still exchanged physical things just to talk, to reach across the distance, there was something left after to burn.

Deleting his e-mails, his text messages, his number from your phone doesn't feel even close to the same.

The first day or two aren't terrible. The shock insulates you. You throw yourself into your work, your friends, all the things you've neglected restlessly, thinking, in those moments when you let yourself do any thinking, Actually, I might be all right. I didn't need him. I didn't want him.

It's the third day, and after, that the ache sets in. He didn't want me. I will never smell him in my hair again. I will never see that smile and get to kiss it, corner to corner.

After that, you don't sleep.

•

For the first time since they moved in together, taking up uneasy space and building their uneasy routine, Hafidha does not come straight home after work.

Chaz picks his nails and frets and tries not to glance at the clock more than three times a minute. It could be a delay on the metro. It could be she's finishing her paperwork, documenting for the less-technical in the room—read: Victor Celentano—the web of names and impostures and impact wounds that Drew Pennicuik created in such a short time. Or tagging each and every one of them with some string of code like an informer, to let her know immediately if they're ever touched again.

He could call her at the office. He could call Falkner. He could call building security, and have them surreptitiously check for a line of light at the bottom of her closed door.

"You need to not do this," he mutters to himself, and continues to wait.

She doesn't get home until ten past eight, her short hair spangled with fallen petals and spring rain. Puts down her big purse by the door, nonchalant; hangs her keys ringing on the rack above it. Play it cool, Chaz tells himself, and then promptly and totally fails: "Where have you been?"

Hafidha stops mid-step; slowly, deliberately sheds her lace-up boots. "I went to see the cherry blossoms," she says coolly. "They won't be out for much longer."

He swallows. And can't make it come out not accusing, not plaintive, not scared to death. "You didn't call," he says.

Hafidha sizes him up. A Bug look. A look that's fight-or-flight, measuring the distance between his feet and hers.

"Charles," she says, "we have to talk."

•

You're not new at this. You know all the tricks: don't look at his Facebook profile. Don't look at his Twitter. Don't think about what he's doing, or who he's talking to, or why his dating site profile was reactivated three days after it ended, and then went dark a scant week after. Don't think about what you could have done better, or right, or different. Don't rewrite those conversations in your head.

Talk to your friends if you need to. Don't talk about him if you don't.

The ache lives like a bear cub under your ribs. It gnaws at you all day and worse at night, looking for an escape from behind those bone bars. You lie awake in too-cold, empty sheets, having wild arguments in your head with anyone, everyone who's ever wronged you. You go through your daily activities with heavy eyes and heavy feet; with what online depression tests call "less than normal enthusiasm." You hurt.

You hurt.

Your friends notice the absence of his name from your conversation and turn away, or watch you sidelong, or tell you tentatively that they're there if you want to talk.

You don't want to talk. You don't want to talk to anybody. You'll never utter a sound ever again.

•

"We've got a problem," Hafidha says, and Chaz nods, is nodding, although he's not sure the problem he thinks is there and the one she's putting on the table are the same problem at all.

Luckily she's not finished; she's going to tell him what the problem is anyway. "We've got a problem with how you and I are acting toward each other. 'Cause Baby Brother, I'm resenting you like fuck right now, and that means this is going wrong."

A lump solidifies in his throat like a handy internal garrote. He thought he could do this. He thought they'd pull through this together, that he could be enough support and keep what's left of his family, his real family, alive—

"Because y'see, I keep thinking about that pretty little boy I talked to before we left Boston," she says.

"Bradley," he says faintly.

"Bradley," she says, and nods. "And how much he didn't want to know that someone was using him. How much he decided it was okay to be hurt if he might get some scrap of love."

"He cut Pennicuik off," Chaz said.

"We think," Hafidha snapped. "Who knows? He might go back. He might wake up one night and decide he doesn't care what the cost is, he wants that pretty fantasy back. People sell out for half-assed love all the time."

Chaz has been the person who laid awake at four in the morning. Who hid his cell phone to keep from texting exes for whole days at a time. He just nods.

"And the thing is?" Hafidha says, rubbing that spot on her head she always touches when she's really, truly upset. "If I decide it's okay to live with someone always checking up on where I am or what I'm thinking, where we assume that I'm always wrong, then I'm just as bad." She heaves a breath, lets it out. Her hands, Chaz notes clinically, are shaking. "I'll be just as bad as those poor sad bastards who Loverboy Drew sucked in and spit back out."

He doesn't need her to pull that subtext out into the plain air: And then you're just as bad as he is. He's had lots of practice at keeping that flinch from surfacing; from giving the thing in his Wabbit's head any satisfaction. That's just the Bug talking. But it isn't. It's not. Hafidha's eyes are calm and mild and utterly resolute. Hafidha Gates is in the building.

"It's not like that," he says, although he knows how stupid, how stereotypical it sounds. Yeah, that's what every piece of nasty caught with their fist all over someone else's face says. He backs up. Tries again: "I'm not trying to do that."

"Yeah," Hafidha says, "but we're gonna be doing that soon if this ride keeps riding." She looks up at him, jaw set. "Y'know what happened last night?"

"What?" Chaz asks faintly.

"I had a dream where he was holding me," she says. "He just picked me up like a kid and put me in his lap and kept telling me how it'd be okay. He rocked me 'til I woke up."

Chaz swallows past a dry throat. He's never had those dreams. When the people he loves are gone, they're gone away for good. "That sounds...really wonderful."

She smiles, and it's not a smile: it's a parody, thin and sad. "Honey," she said, "I didn't want to wake up. Not ever. I've lost him," she says, and looks down at her hands. "He's gone."

Chaz clenches his hands tight. Resists the urge to comfort. To say he'll make it right. To take her space away. To protect. To smother.

Hafidha looks up again, and her eyes are bright and hard. "I'm not losing you too, Baby Brother," she says. "And I'm sure as hell not losing any more of me."

•

The worst of it is you don't want him. All the wanting in you withered and died the second you saw those photos, those faces, understood deep down that the love you felt coming from his eyes, his mouth was just a shallow reflection of what you were aching to give.

He was never the one for you. He never will be. He was a dream.

You go back on the online dating scene while you're too needy, while you're not ready, and you still don't want him back. You sleep with a bearded, slick-mouthed grad student from MIT who's not looking for anything but a thrill, and it doesn't fix the hurting, and you still don't want him back.

A week goes by. Two weeks. You were together barely three.

It isn't fair how the hurt's still haunting you. You don't even want him back.

•

Chaz Villette is rooted to his own hardwood floor. Chaz Villette is, rare as it is after years of practice, onion-layers of professional training, scraps of maturity, in tears.

Hafidha doesn't have a mirror. You broke him, the Bug says gleefully. And she can't tell if it's lying, telling lies just to feed on her, or if it's entirely true.

The panic starts to rise like hangover in her throat.

"What," he says, controlled and ragged, "do you need me to do?"

Name your terms, she hears. She spent all night walking, practicing for this. She thought she was going to be ready.

"I need you to not hover over me," she says. It comes out right: good and strong. "And not check up on me. And not—not keep from me what is mine because you think it might maybe, somehow, somewhere make me cry. I'm thirty-six years old, Chaz, and I'm not dying of Victorian consumption, and I might be full of God knows what in my head, but I'm still a person."

He says nothing. He's as pale as Chazzes get. He does nothing but nod, once, sharp.

"If you're going to trust me," she says, weakly, frustrated, "you need to actually trust me. That's it. That's all."

When he speaks, she can barely hear him. It takes a second for the words to register, untangle themselves in her ears: "I can do that."

Hafidha's breath ghosts out, slow. It's not true, the Bug says, leaden in the space between her throat and collarbone. Or maybe not the Bug. Maybe just the voice you always hear when you're brokenhearted, knowing quiet that you'll never be loved again.

But Chaz Villette is a mind reader. Or doesn't have to be: Maybe it's just the way people you've loved, hated, cried with, mourned beside know what it means when that light goes out of your eyes.

"I can do it," he says, again.

"Yeah?" she says.

"Yeah."

"Okay," she says. And then shakier, hardest of all. Like pushing a rock all the way uphill with the anomaly and anger and habit and her own lifelong pride pushing from the other side: "I forgive you."

•

They used to burn love letters, and maybe you'd heal quicker if you had something left to burn. Some symbol, something representative. Some way to leave him too.

You don't want him back. What you want back is yourself.

You're not okay. You're not going to be okay until some invisible timer goes off; until some statute of limitations is up, and you can't see the clock, and the schedule is blank. But there's a clock, and there's a schedule. And somewhere ahead you will be better, and whole, and sane, and throw yourself wholeheartedly into some shy-smiling man's arms like you've never, ever known pain.

Chin up, you tell yourself, day after day. Morning after morning. Every time it hurts. Keep moving.

You're not okay. But you will be.

•

"We're not okay, are we?" Hafidha says, and her hands interlace, worry at each other like they haven't since she was very, very young.

"No," Chaz says, drained. Turns his head to watch her, over one bony shoulder, scarred-up beneath his shirt. "But we'll make it okay. I swear." And extends a hand, pinky out, like it's teatime. Pinky-swear. He wants to pinky-swear.

Peace officers, FBI agents, are trained to never make a promise they're not dead sure they can keep.

Hafidha nods, once, slowly. Takes his pinky in hers. Feels the tug of his bony finger on hers.

He goes into the kitchen, hides under the clatter of pots and the thunk of a chef's knife on wood. And Hafidha lets him go. Away from her need for comfort, and away from the thing in her head that likes so very much to hurt people. To gash itself like a dirty blade into her own skin.

She wraps her arms around herself. Conjures up a dying smell, a dying voice, and rocks herself like a child.

Boston, MA, January 2012

The Boston field office was a place of veritable riches. No hot-plate coffeepot for them: the floor the ACTF was situated on had a kitchen, and the kitchen had a Keurig machine.

"Look. At. This," Chaz Villette breathed as Nikki Lau passed by, on her way rapidly to somewhere. A whole stand of instant coffee pods stood before him on the counter, in a round retail-rack dispenser. "I was just supposed to grab everyone coffee."

"Wasteful," Lau noted. "Think about all the plastic islands that plastic's making out in the ocean."

Chaz ran a finger down the rows of labels. "Van Houtte butterscotch or Big Easy Bold, vouched for by none other than Chef Emeril Lagasse?"

Lau pulled a face. "I have never put garlic in my coffee."

"Breakfast blend it is," Chaz said, and plucked one out. "Bam."

"Stick to the basic stuff," Bollinger said, lingering in the doorway behind Lau. "Whatever they use for vanilla flavor in those things, it's terrible."

"Imagine the betrayal," Lau said gravely. "The king of spices goes to the Dark Side."

Bollinger tipped her head like a sparrow. "Vanilla is the king of spices?"

Chaz blushed. "It's something I say."

"Then it's like The Prisoner of Zenda," Bollinger said, and took a big blue mug off the shelf. "He may look like the king, but he ain't him."

Credits

Executive Producer: Emma Bull

Co-Executive Producer: Elizabeth Bear

Producer: Sarah Monette

Art Director: Amanda Downum

Technical Director: Stephen Shipman

Cover Artist: Kyle Cassidy
www.shadowunit.org

Table of Contents

- Publishing Information

- "Five Autopsies" - by Leah Bobet

- "Hope Is Stronger Than Love" - by Sarah Monette

- At the edge of Tennessee, November 2011
- Ashton, VA, February 2012
- "Latency" - by Elizabeth Bear
- Arlington, VA, February 2012
- "aimforthe<3" - by Leah Bobet & Emma Bull
- Boston, MA, January 2012
- Credits