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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Patrick didn’t know…

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Tor Books by Steven Barnes

  Copyright

  Patrick didn’t know what dark inner cave had spawned that filth, endless twilight dreams of mutilation, dreams that refused to die at fawn, that crawled into his waking hours like rotting corpses clawing free of the grave. Waking, half-asleep in the middle of the night, afraid, tiptoeing to his mother’s room and easing the door open to see her multilated body sprawled across the bed, her breasts ripped off, the sheets clotted with blood, and then looking down at his own hands to see the dripping knife—

  Then waking again, knowing it was just a dream within a dream, and sitting awake till dawn, clutching the blankets to his chest, loathing the erection that pulsed insistently between his thighs, that forced him to fondle it until his fear and shame exploded into a galaxy of dying stars.

  He knew these terrible daymares boiled up from somewhere deep inside him, someplace where the iron bands of control were rusting, rotting away. And what would happen when they went? He didn’t know, but he did know that one day they would. That thought scared the piss out of him.

  For Steven and Sharlene: you make your uncle proud

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Arson maestro Noel Petansu, Dave LaFave, Jamie Charles, the staff and counselors of Wondercamp: Jennifer, Ocean, Deb and all the rest. The Wonderkids themselves, especially Lizzy, Michael, Jessica, Ryan, Jacob and the unforgettable Molly. And a special thanks to Dr. Al Siebert for his insights into both the psychopathic and survivor personalities.

  The Nine Principles:

  1) Do not think dishonestly

  2) The Way is in Training

  3) Become acquainted with every art

  4) Know the Ways of all professions

  5) Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters

  6) Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything

  7) Perceive those things that cannot be seen

  8) Pay attention even to little things

  9) Do nothing that is of no use

  —Musashi Miyamoto, 1645

  A choice, once made, creates its own path.

  —Alexander Marcus, 1984

  PROLOGUE

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, TUESDAY, MARCH 13, 2001

  Perversely, the closing minutes of Tanesha Evans’s life were among the happiest she had ever known. Her new Schwinn Aerostar was the color of strawberry lemonade, as responsive as a circus pony. The sidewalks were still damp from the pre-dawn shower that had scrubbed the air as clean as her face and hair. The sun had emerged from the clouds, warming the crisp morning air with a promise of summer days to come.

  She wheeled down Washington Boulevard past the deserted white two-story husk of an abandoned Ralph’s Grocery store. Three years ago it had been a living maze of shelves and bins, a forest of tastes and aromas. Tanesha had held her mother’s hand while they shopped, gazed wonderingly up at the vast shelves as if they were the jagged walls of the Grand Canyon. Now the windows were patched with weatherworn boards, the signs that once offered Charmin tissue two for four dollars or Oranges forty cents a pound were concealed by posters for the latest hip-hop album or gangsta film. In just thirty-six short months Tanesha had watched the neighborhood shrivel like that fabled raisin in the sun, hope draining away as commerce fled west to Culver City and north toward Hollywood and the Wilshire district.

  Washington was a major artery, a four-lane east-west conduit stretching from East L.A. through downtown and all the way to Santa Monica beach. Right through here, through Central L.A., it was starting to look like a scenic route through a war zone: the Disney Autopia, maybe, skirting the border of Ghetto World and Barrio Land. (Tanesha imagined happy Mouse-signs reading: don’t feed the natives!)

  She laughed at the thought, and focused enough attention to avoid a six-year-old girl lugging a brown paper bag of groceries half her own size. Tanesha zigged and then zagged without slowing down. Perfect timing. She was about two minutes from Mrs. Johnson’s shoe-repair shop when she spotted Jesse “Wizard” Cambridge running the shell game over by the number ten bus line. She braked up short enough to sniff rubber. Jesse was six-foot-five of knobby black knees and elbows, gifted with a loose-limbed grace that had, once upon a time, made him the lightning-fast power forward for the L.A. Romans high school basketball team. He was the golden boy then, swooping off to the University of North Carolina on a full athletic scholarship. Even with the generous leeway afforded athletes of his caliber, academic pressure had folded Jesse Cambridge in two short years. “Wizard” left the neighborhood with a parade, but snuck back under silent cover of night.

  Now here he was, wearing a satin vest with vertical rainbow stripes, bustin’ moves behind a little red folding table at the number ten, deep in th
e fleece when Tanesha rolled up. She watched with narrow, intensely interested eyes.

  Tanesha was thirteen years old, slender and dark-skinned with almond eyes and Asiatic cheekbones. Her hair was bound smartly with a red ribbon. The cheekbones were a gift from her mother, whose grandmother had been Korean. The bicycle was a gift from her stepfather Floyd, a reward for maintaining a 4.0 average. Tanesha could laugh. As if anyone would have to motivate her to study, or work hard, or turn her schoolwork in on time. For longer than she could remember, the urge to excel was as much a part of her as her bones. The Way is in Training.

  She could no more be satisfied with a mere “C” than she could levitate. As Tanesha often said, “Grades are a way of understandin’ thatcha understand, getting thatcha got it.” Too many of her contemporaries seemed to think they earned grades to make their parents happy, or worse still, to pave the road for college. What crap! You do it because you do it. But since Tanesha was only thirteen, and maintaining those grades meant kick-ass perks, she wasn’t about to tell Floyd (who was a little slow, even if he did own a chain of dry cleaning shops) that she would have done it for zip.

  “Hey hey hey, it’s time to get paid!” Bullion flashed in Jesse’s mouth. He grinned blindingly, switching the little red plastic shells around more swiftly than the eye could follow. Faster than most eyes could follow. Tanesha’s followed just fine, thank you ladies and gents. More important than seeing, she observed, and as she did she remembered something very important indeed:

  Jesse’s brother Mickey attended Mt. Vernon, her junior high school. Three months ago, on Career Day, Jesse had, at his little brother’s request, brought his magic act to fourth period class. She didn’t believe for a minute that he could ever make it as a professional magician. Oh, “Wizard” could do some kick-ass card tricks, and some scarf magic that had the other kids ooh-ing and ahh-ing, but what she remembered most was the way that he made coins and handkerchiefs, a basketball and even a little stuffed canary disappear.

  Perceive those things that cannot be seen.

  It took about eight minutes for Tanesha to detect Jesse’s shell-game pattern. It was like bim-bam-boom. He would lose and lose, and then win. Then he’d lose some more. He didn’t do this rigidly, either: his win-loss ratio was keyed to his audience, calculated to keep pedestrian interest and gullibility high, suspicion low. When the foot traffic began to drift away, he would lose a dollar or three. When the pot got weighty, what do you know!, his luck magically improved.

  In the middle of his hey-hey-hey spiel, Jesse winked at her. Just idle flirtation, sure. He didn’t recognize her. She thought he was cute, though, in a roughneck kind of way.

  That made her decision more difficult.

  On the one hand, there was the money. God, there was so much money on the table, such a crazy cluster of ones and fives and silver coins. She knew she could take it all, because she knew just what Jesse was doing. Tanesha knew that when the money got high enough, he just palmed that little ball right off the table, using the same quick hand trick he’d used that day at Mt. Vernon.

  But if she dropped the dime, exposed Jesse as a cheat, something way nasty could happen. Her grandmother had told her about an old schoolmate, a man named Beaumont, Rudy Beaumont, a local thug who got shot in his own pool hall, caught cheating at cards. Shot through the chest and laid there on the floor and bled out before an ambulance could arrive. “Blood fanned out around him like a big old valentine heart.” Grammy had said it with a bland, distracted kitchen-talk voice, just something to do as she pried hot buttermilk biscuits up out of the pan. “Boy wasn’t never no good, no how,” she added philosophically. “Biscuit, baby?”

  Tanesha didn’t want Jesse to get shot or anything. She just wanted to print a little paper. So the girl fussed, and figured, and found herself an answer.

  All she needed was the nerve to bet Mama’s ten bucks. That particular pair of Lincolns had been heading for Johnson’s shoe-repair shop, to pay for new soles and heels on two pairs of her mom’s nursing shoes. If she were wrong, a whipping would be the very least of the consequences. But if she were right, if she won, and brought all that money home (and there had to be at least fifty dollars on that table!), maybe Mom would reconsider about summer camp in Arizona, let her miss the stupid old reunion in Kalamazoo or wherever.

  “Hey hey hey. Time to get paid!” Jesse chanted again, golden teeth gleaming. The crowd was thick, and the money heavy. Her heart pounded in her chest. She just knew that this would be it.

  Jesse’s hands were a feathery blur, juggling those red cups around and around, slowing and then speeding, deliberately letting the ball “accidentally” show. Then a disarming awshucks of a Fort Knox grin, followed by another burst of speed. Then he leaned back, the lean bundles of muscles flexing in the long black neck, his smile a dolphin’s smile, fixed and meaningless. He searched the crowd, seeking a challenge.…

  Tanesha slammed her money down.

  Jesse’s answering smile was brotherly. “This ain’t for you, little lady.” Jesse spoke the words out of the side of his mouth, almost stage-whispering. Those eight syllables represented, for a hustler like Jesse, an almost saintly gesture.

  “Whassa matter?” She deliberately drawled the words, trying to make herself seem slower, and younger. And dumber. “’Fraid I might break your bank?” He glared at her, and looked around, as if seeking a way to avoid the confrontation. The crowd had swelled, murmuring its appreciation of her bravado, and wishing her luck.

  For a long beat nothing happened, just the sound of cars cruising the Boulevard.

  Then some silent communication passed between the two of them, and Jesse nodded. You want the whole load, little sister? You got it.

  His hands blurred. Jesse chattered like a chimp, rattling his rap at a pace designed to dazzle, hypnotize, and intimidate. “Round and round it goes, watch the hands, not the toes. Under one’s the fun, and under two is what’s for fools. Choose right, set tight. Pick wrong, sad song.” Her eyes glued to the shells as they slipped and slid, glided and jittered. Then the shells stopped, as if pausing to catch their breath.

  “All right, little lady,” Jesse the wizard said. “Where is it?”

  The crowd was silent, waiting, some of the older kids elbowing each other. Somebody was about to lose, but who would it be? The con man or the cocky kid? And when it came right down, as long as it wasn’t their money, nobody gave a rat’s furry behind which it was.

  “I tell you what,” she said finally. “I tell you rock solid where it ain’t.” And tapped the two outer shells.

  Before he could protest, she flipped both over. Both were empty. Tanesha pressed her finger against the top of the middle shell. “So it must be here, right, Jesse?”

  His smile was bronzed into place. An ugly whisper crept through the crowd. Bad juju. Somebody was about to put two and two together and get .22.

  Then Jesse swept the shells off the table. He jammed the cash into her hand. His eyes and the line of his mouth were as cold and sharp as a straight razor.

  The red and white number ten MTA bus was trundling toward them. He swept the little red table up, folded it until it fit snug under his arm. “I see you again, Little Bit.”

  “Hope so,” she said, and gave him a little curtsey. The crowd roared.

  But as he got on the bus, Jesse swept his vest back, exposing the butt of a gleaming little steel-handled automatic. She couldn’t tear her eyes from its dark, ugly weight. It was the first time that she had seen a real gun, and she knew its reality without examining it, without counting bullets or peering down the barrel’s single cold eye. Something about Jesse, something about the way that the gun, tucked into the side of his belt, seemed to be the center of his body. She knew, could feel, that Jesse was angry enough to hurt her right now, hurt her bad.

  It would be good not to encounter Jesse while she was alone. For a while. Say, like the next twenty years.

  Then the closing doors cut him off from view.

/>   * * *

  Tanesha pocketed her loot and jumped back on her bike, weaving through the crowd of backslapping well-wishers. A light touch on the Aerostar’s handlebars was all she required to maintain balance. The Schwinn was a part of her body, rubber-tread feet and spoke-wire legs streaking the sidewalk like a wheeled breeze. Its basket was stacked with library books: Tony Rothman’s Instant Physics, Sun Tsu’s The Art of War, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Each would occupy her for about two days. Then, next week, she would dig back into Shakespeare. Maybe Antony and Cleopatra. She liked love stories.

  The other kids called her a brainiac when they thought she wasn’t listening, and sometimes when she was. Hell with it: she could dance circles around the best of them, and found it ridiculously easy to get elected to any student office she chose. She knew what people wanted to hear, but didn’t say it unless it was true and suited her purposes. She knew who they really were, but didn’t reveal her knowledge, and never used it against them. While the other kids struggled to be popular, to be noticed, Tanesha just settled for being herself, and seemed to generate a crowd wherever she went.

  She could feel it in her bones, heard the voices whispering in her ear: She was special, she was different, and the rosy red glow of a future waiting just beyond the horizon was hers for the taking.

  She felt a twinge of anxiety as she wheeled away. That curtsey had been kinda stupid, a deliberate rubbing of Jesse’s nose. Do nothing that is of no use, she thought. Making money was business. Making enemies was stupidity.

  A little snatch of music plucked at Tanesha from an open shop door. Not top forty. Some bluesy jazz: Oscar Brown Junior, she thought. She bobbed her head to Dime Away from a Hot Dog as she rolled past, keeping perfect time.

  She zipped down Washington Boulevard toward Rimpau. She passed a thrift store, a blacked-out storefront, then O-Jaye’s Barbershop, where the scent of hair oil and the sound of Marvin Gaye drifted out to the sidewalk.

  Poor dead Marvin was crooning something about sexual healing. Tanesha was certainly aware of sexual issues. Lessons from her Human Development classes had been supplemented with library trips to dig into the Kinsey report, and a fascinating series of Scientific American articles. That had led her to questions of pregnancy and communicable diseases, which in turn had led her to the World Wide Web, and the page hosted by the National Institute of Health.