Jakob shook his head sadly. "Terrible, terrible," he said.

Their eyes were suddenly intrusive, trying to excavate my pain. I fired back an angry look, in default mode, using the mask-shield of rage I'd forged in all those foster homes. Until age sixteen, that is. When I'd bolted again and Children's Services, worn down, hadn't bothered to look for me anymore.

Bart's voice echoed in my head: "Do you know what it's like to lose all your landmarks in a day?" I knew. I knew the gray tension stitched through the fabric of the world. The dread that comes with the night. The noises that turn a child's young mind into a cornered animal.

"Were you... well-treated?" she asked.

I didn't answer. I counted to ten, willing my muscles to uncoil. Maggie and Jakob waited for me, as though they understood. Which they never could.

"Let's talk about the Lifetaker," was what I said.

"The Life-!" Jakob went ballistic. To Maggie: "Are you insane, to tell a human of this?"

"I had no choice, Jakob," she said stoically. "He's returned to Necropolis."

"Impossible!"

"It's true!"

"Even if it were, it would still not be for human ears!"

"We're beyond all that, goddamn it! He's killing Surazal scientists. Do you understand? He's raised the stakes, not us. His existence won't remain hidden much longer, no matter how desperately you desire it."

Jakob stroked his beard furiously, pacing. "He can't be back. Oh God!"

"Tell me what you know." I said.

The room thickened with his anxiety. "I was part of the group that... took action... when his crimes became known to us." If Jakob had been human, the beard would've come away in clumps.

"The banishment?" said Maggie.

"We couldn't destroy him. That would make us as bad as he was. So we changed him. We changed him so that he could not survive contact with sentient beings in any way. If he couldn't be near them, he couldn't destroy them."

"Including us?" asked Maggie. "Oh god, you banished him from smarties as well?"

"We feared he could pollute us somehow with his deviancy."

Outcast. Unclean. The smarty reaction hadn't been much different from humans. "How did you change him?" I asked.

"A fail-safe program in his core DNA. Proximity to another person would create a complete cascade failure," Jakob said. "His mind would fragment, he'd break down and die. To survive, he must remain alone. He cannot even communicate from a distance."

I saw Maggie shudder. Total isolation.

"He killed people!" said Jakob. "For the dark pleasure of it! He was an abomination!"

"Where was he banished to?" I asked.

"The Blasted Heath."

"The wasteland surrounding Necropolis," Maggie explained.

"I remember."

"A corny name, true," said Jakob. "Who would spot a reference to H. P. Lovecraft?"

"Or Shakespeare," I said. They looked at me. "Macbeth. 'Upon this blasted heath you stop our way.'"

"Where on earth did you find this man?" Jakob said to Maggie.

"I know."

"Extraordinary."

"I know."

"I'm right here," I said.

"Pretentious or not," said Jakob, "it captures the soulless quality of the place."

"What was that poem?" asked Maggie. "Remember? About the Lifetaker? The one you used to recite when I was a kid?"

Jakob nodded, and his eyes went distant.

"Upon the scorched and blasted heath He stands his post of endless hate A pallid stain of what's beneath When Death lays claim to hope and fate.

His cloak of shimmer and of rain Flows wild in the bleached-out skies He howls his song of rage and pain And chaos pours from out his eyes.

Alone he'll stand until you're dust And laugh aloud at love's dark rot.

He'll watch the turn of worms and rust For he is one whom Time knows not.

He needs no warmth, he needs no lair For he is one whose power lies In every creature's bleak despair As chaos pours from out his eyes.

Love will rise, and so will fall He'll gnaw its bones with sharpened teeth And stand his post as Time claims all Upon the scorched and blasted heath."

"Delightful," I said.

"He can't have returned," Jakob repeated. "It'd be suicide."

"He's found a way," said Maggie.

With that, Maggie unfolded the tale of the shiny shadow seen by herself and Sharon, and the murder of the scientists who worked on the Retrozine formulas. Jakob dropped weakly into one of the leather armchairs. Without his passion, he looked frail.

"How could this be?"

"More important is why," I said. "What's its agenda?"

Maggie gave me a sharp look. "Please don't say 'it.' Even if he is a monster, he's not an 'it'."

My patience was thin as spandex on a fat hooker. "Alright, why would he try to stop the drugs?"

No one had an answer. Jakob shuffled over to Maggie. He put his hands on her shoulders, patting a rhythm of comfort. "You were right to come to me with this. You've done the best you could." He turned to me. "I'll make inquiries. Perhaps someone has heard something. In the meantime, we need a way to track him. A daunting task."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Well, Mr. Donner," said the old smarty, showing me his gray teeth, "how do you track a shadow?"

44.

"JAKOB"

After Donner and Maggie left, Jakob paced for a while with his troubled thoughts, then finally gave up and returned to his vessel to rest and recharge.

It had listened in the shadows.

Now it moved to the far side of the library, to the carved wooden box that sat on a reading table. It lifted the mahogany lid and withdrew Jakob's heart. It rotated the silver orb in the lamp light as though trying to read a crystal ball.

Its eyes closed, and it absorbed everything. Its form changed in a twinkling.

"Thanks for the memories," it said.

And dropped the orb onto the floor, crushing it beneath his heel.

45.

MCDERMOTT.

The moon undulated beyond the Blister like a dissolving seltzer tablet. Outside the Church of the Holy Epicenter, newspaper skittered across the asphalt. An occasional vehicle hummed overhead on cooling morphinium, but for the most part, the area was as deserted as the Blasted Heath.

A rat scuttled out from a cluster of garbage cans with a prize: a gristly chicken bone. Halfway across the alley it froze, its whiskers twitching. It sensed a new, less empty kind of silence on the street. The rat abandoned its prize and bolted for cover, its tail rigid as a pencil.

It had seen something obscuring graffiti on a far patch of brick. A shadow on top of a shadow. The kind of thing that makes you rub your eyes to clear them, look again harder, then nervously dismiss it as a trick of the light.

It was a trick of the light, but it was also real. Real and not wanting to be seen.

The street went back to being dead.

Eventually, the darkness moved, and in its motion resolved into a shape. A human shape. The shape gestured with its hand, two abrupt downward thrusts of an upturned fist. Four more phantoms crept forward out of the gloom. They took equidistant positions around the Church's delivery doors, holding penumbral weapons.

The first shadow adjusted his optical mask, zooming to the shops across the street. He focused on an empty storefront window. Within, an Ender sentry was at his observation post. The shadow couldn't see his own man entering-the team's polymer body armor absorbed light and energy. So he waited for the signal that the sentry had been neutralized.

There. A discreet flash of green. They were go.

Bolt cutters appeared. The lock was cut. The shadows filed silently down into the Church basement, weapons tight against their chests.

The team found him huddled on his cot, his legs tucked under an Indian blanket.

No longer a shadow, McDermott put a hand over the man's mouth and woke him with a nudge from his weapon. The eyes came awake, then alive with panic. McDermott pulled his visor up. He wanted the man to know who he was. The eyes widened farther, the fear deepening into despair. All struggle seemed to have been sucked from the man's bones. The man whimpered and tried to scramble backwards, but there was nowhere to go except the cold stone wall behind him.

McDermott torched him.

Outside, a second team converged on the Transtar Deluxe. A second Cadre sentry slept within. Had he been awake and on duty like he was supposed to have been, things might have been different. But now it was too late. White lightning arced from their weapons. The vehicle shrieked as its frame superheated. It seemed to swell a moment, the atmosphere inside reaching the ignition point, then it erupted. The heat wave roiled out in all directions, catching wood and metal on fire. The sides of the buildings were instantly scorched. Chunks of cement rained down. The little rat, who'd hidden well, became a knot of roasted bones, a gristly prize for the next scavenger.

The men kept moving, their suits absorbing the energy that washed over them, no more hazardous than a summer breeze.

Sounds of battle came from within. The men's ear buds crackled with McDermott's voice: "Packages in place. Subjects are trapped in tunnel. All units, withdraw to primary. Repeat, withdraw to primary."

Within a minute, both squads were back out on the street.

Now, the sounds of explosions. First, muffled deep within the building, then a growing cadence of WHU-WHUMPS that culminated in the eruption of the church's face. Green flame billowed. Blacktop belched upward like a tar bubble, then collapsed in on itself. The loading doors were blasted from their moorings, cartwheeling across the street and through the storefront window. A homeless woman who'd gone unnoticed beneath her newspapers began screaming, her hair on fire.

Then it was over.

Of the Church of the Holy Epicenter, formerly Maury's Deli, there was nothing left but rubble, steam and ash. The only sounds were distant car alarms and the hissing of cooling cement-and a few blocks further, the faint gurgle of the Hudson, which moved serene and uncaring about the violent actions of men.

McDermott stood in the street, the optical mask around his neck, his need for stealth gone. Moonlight glistened on his scar.

"Let's see him come back from that," he said.

46.

DONNER.