October 1968 Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria Sandy sat alone and poured another inch of Scotch, but didn't pick up the glass. Tonight was a night for getting drunk, but she hated hangovers. Too many over the years.

"Sarah, I need to talk to you."

Sandy heard the words as if it were now, not that day in her white-and-blue bedroom back home in Indiana. Twenty-four years ago.

Her mother had looked nervous, folding a bit of her pleated gray wool skirt between her fingers. Sensible fingers with only a glaze of nail polish. Sarah had thought she would find something much more fashionable with a cheerful modern color when her parents finally let her choose her own nail color. Mother sat down on the bed and it startled Sarah. Mother had always said that beds weren't for sitting. Chairs were for sitting.

"You've been seeing Tommy Blackton at school, haven't you?"

"Yes." There was no point in lying in such a close town. "But he gets good grades and he's very polite and you like his mother."

Her mother smiled as though it hurt and Sarah began to pay attention. She didn't know why, but she felt tension between them that was none of her doing. Did her mother know she'd given Tommy a kiss on the cheek for a caramel?

"Mom, what's wrong? Have I done something?"

"No, dear. You haven't done anything. Oh, I wish your father had been willing to talk to you too. I need to make it clear," her mother said. "You know we love you very much, your father and I. He says I should have said something long ago. But how could I?"

Sarah couldn't speak. Maybe her father was an escaped convict. Maybe her parents weren't properly married. Maybe they were getting a divorce. Maybe she had a sister in an insane asylum.

"When you were born, Sarah. The doctor came and told us that you weren't right. Your parts," she said. "They weren't natural."

"Parts? What are you talking about?"

"They did everything they could," her mother said. "They moved things with surgery to make it all right. You had some male parts. It doesn't show now. It doesn't make a difference for some woman things. But you see, Sarah, you'll never be able to have children. Your girl parts don't connect through to your womb. That's what's important. You need to know that, because having children is what marriage is for. It's why God made us the way he did, why he created us different from men. For procreation."

Sarah couldn't hear Mother over the noise in her own head, though her mother kept talking. Her breathing had become ragged. Some of the words had begun to come through.

"You're twelve years old and you've probably heard something from the other girls about having their times of the month. But you won't. You aren't normal down there. In every other way you're fine. Only not that way. You're so smart, too. I was always relieved you don't really like babies, unlike some of your friends, and you never wanted to baby-sit for your cousin's kids...But you see, no one will want to marry you so you mustn't get in the habit of leading the boys on. You simply mustn't."

Sandy shivered. She drew herself up in the chair. It wasn't worth thinking about. She heard something in the next room and looked up in the fading light when the door opened again.

"I have closed down the house for the night," Oroko's calm voice said. "The doors are locked."

He came over to her and stood in front of her chair a moment before he knelt.

"I'm not right," Sandy said.

"I'm not right either."

He didn't speak or move, and she could hear her own breathing.

"You have women." She wondered if the statement would protect her. Protect her from the quickening of her heart and the feeling like alcohol that burned deep in her body. She watched his mouth when he answered.

"None I can trust," he said. "I don't want what I'm supposed to want. What we want isn't what other people want. I can't and you can't. But I don't want to do you harm."

"This from an assassin."

"Yes. I do not want to hurt you."

"But you will," she said.

"Yes."

And he did, later, though for her it seemed right that pain was the payment for such violent intimacy, racked upon his body in the night.

"You will not speak of this," Sandy said. Dressed, her white shirt neat, her pants precisely creased to the cuffs, now she plaited the long rope of her red hair and tied it, flipping the length back over her shoulder.

She watched Oroko settle his wire-rimmed glasses in place.

"No. Nor will you."

"And Lindsey?"

"She will not notice. We fit into her life as necessary mechanisms, but she'll see nothing because she doesn't look at us. She does not hear us."

"Then we can have this. I can."

"Yes."

He did not smile, but she felt as though his attention touched her with a physical heat, his eyes large and intent.

"We do not want what other people want," he said again.

He nodded to her, a nod more like a bow, before he closed the door. A separate thing, a secret to be kept, hoarded. Treasured. Sandy felt herself wanting to cry and smiled to herself. Every other secret seemed to be for someone else, but this one was for her.

Chapter 54: Gilman.

November, 1968 Uli Area, Biafra "Tell me why you're in Biafra." Jantor in T-shirt and fatigue pants propped himself against the pillow and wall, leaning on his elbows, his naked feet hanging over the end of the bed.

"It's boring." She settled back next to him to lean her head against his shoulder. He shifted so that one hand could untuck her shirt from her shorts.

"No, I want to hear. Tell me a story. I want a long slow story. I want to be somewhere else with you for a bit, Kath. Not here."

"What's to tell? You've got more stories than me."

"Tell me about Wilton and Lindsey and all your strange friends."

He seemed serious. She took his hand, slowed it in her grip and stroked the fingers.

"We met at Wellesley College. Beautiful place for rich bitches. A handful of charity cases too and I suppose that's how Wilton ended up there, because she's not wealthy. Never saw how bright and beautiful Wellesley was, full of trees and silence, flowers and gray stone archways, until now that I'm not there.

"Especially Wilton's room. My oasis. Never found her too busy to talk and she never pushed my buttons talking about academics. Almost everyone else did, all competitive except Wilton, who seemed to know that something bigger and more important existed. Something more urgent."

Gilman glanced up at Jantor. His hazel eyes, far from sleep, narrowed at her. She lost her smile under his intent look and went on.

"I bet you're curious about Wilton. You should be. First time I saw her room it pissed me the hell off. Everything in it was a boast. Desk piled with notes and manuscripts, poems and novels, half-finished canvases of great masters copied for art class and caricatures of friends. Plants on the windowsill, erupting with green, the antithesis of my dying ivy in a pot. Dried mushrooms and stones, like some alchemist's studio. And her goddamned shelves bulging with novels that I later learned she'd freely recommend and lend. She wanted a foothold in every mind she met."

Jantor had an odd smile on his face as though he could picture it. She felt his hand slide away from hers and then under the edge of her shirt. His fingers stroked her skin quietly, without demand, but it made the rest of her body feel how close and warm he was.

"Paintings everywhere, a dragon on the wall, a Nigerian marketplace, birds. But it wasn't a pose. She'd read the books, she'd painted those paintings, written all that stuff. Wilton earned good grades, though how, I never learned. I used to tease her about having a pact with the devil until I learned that she believed in him. I did have enough wit to know she studied us all like an anthropologist with a theory to test.

"Once I caught her taking notes on Sandy's speech patterns. Weirded me out. I gave Wilton hell. I said it was a violation of trust between friends. She listened politely and nodded, until I had the feeling she was taking notes on me next, to add to the ones on Sandy."

"So you never told her anything more about yourself?"

"Not so," Gilman said. "It's like I wanted to tell her even more after that. Never figured out why."

"Damned weird," Jantor said.

"I waited for the day she'd write some story about me that exposed my psychology. Never happened. And d'ya know, I'm disappointed."

"The day is young."

"You think? If any of us ever get out of here."

"Tell me how she got you to Africa. She was a good friend, but there's got to be a story."

"What I remember is one night in the middle of finals and me sure I was failing Organic Chem. Studied till my eyes crossed. Like I said, Wilton never seemed too busy to talk, so I headed over hoping for chocolates."

Jantor snorted.

"Yeah, haven't changed much. She was reading a blue aerogram from Nigeria. 'Bad news?' I asked and she nodded. I tossed her the book she'd lent me-The Three Musketeers. 'Wish there was more,' I said, but next thing I knew I was pacing."

"You do that a lot."

"Yeah. Always have. 'I'm bored,' I said to Wilton."

"'In the middle of finals?' She was snappy."

"'Bored, born in the wrong century,' I told her we'd no excitement. No sword fights, no duels, no true camaraderie or honor. No more musketeers."

"'Gilman you've overdosed on fiction. You forgot your finals this week?' Made me mad. I thought she knew how hard I'd been pounding the books."

"How'd you do on the chem.?" Jantor asked.

"I aced it, actually."

"See?"

"Yeah, well. She hurt my feelings. I wasn't used to old Wilton doing that. I felt safe with her. She must've seen the look on my face. She never missed much except for the things she wanted to miss."

"She lit into me about how could I wish for a world of war, where people fought and died in the streets. How could I prefer ignorance-a return to days when we knew nothing about disease? Duels. 'Next thing you know Sandy'd come back from class run through her liver. And you wouldn't be able to fix her.'"

"Of course it was selfish, asking the world to turn backwards for my amusement."

"I wasn't about to let her win. She ought to admit it would be a more interesting world. Better to be killed in a duel than a stupid car accident or eaten alive by cancer. Death would have meaning. That's what we don't have now. Meaningful death. Everyone has to die, so it might as well be as glorious and bloody as possible, for principle. For God and King George."

Jantor felt still against her back, as if she touched too close on something and he waited to hear what came next. Yeah, Gilman thought. Digging deep. Watch it. Don't dare sound like you think you know what's in his head. Presumptuous.

"I laughed," Gilman said.

"'Modern,' Wilton said. She relaxed a bit, challenged me to come to Nigeria. Leprosy, plague, yellow fever, cholera and old-fashioned famine. More than half the live-born infants dying in their first year.'"

"'Seems like the starving hordes could get it together and overthrow the government,' I said."

"'It isn't like that,' she said. 'Colonial government, and masses of different tribes having a hard time getting along together. Tradition fighting modern learning, witchcraft against Christianity.'"

"'Oh, God,' I said. I'd guessed she was religious but we avoided talking about it."

"I pissed her off with that. 'I know you love your atheist pose and being a badass against Christianity, but tell me what could help glue all this together better than a religion that believes all are born equal before God? You can do better than that?'"

"I wasn't going to go there."

"So you call yourself an atheist," Jantor said.

"Well yes. Maybe. Or I did then." Gilman knew she fumbled. Talk about something she didn't want to discuss with Jantor. Was he an atheist? After everything he'd seen how could he be anything else? But what was that old saying about foxholes?

"I looked around her room and realized a person whose creativity made a room like that had no choice. Of course she believed that there was a Maker. We'd agree to disagree. But I also wondered if that was why she and Lindsey, the good Christian, got along on a level I felt I'd never join. Made me jealous, Tom. I wonder how much that has to do with Lindsey never approving of me."

"You could always convert," Jantor said. "But it's not important. Here you are in Biafra and there she is hundreds of miles away in Lagos playing government spook."

"God yes. Do you suppose that's why Wilton made sure we were so far apart? I get along great with Sandy, you know. You'd like her. But Lindsey..."

Nope, Gilman didn't want to talk about Lindsey either.

"So I said, 'We'd take over Nigeria. Look at the talent. You'd make a splendid Minister of Propaganda, I'd be the great medicine man. Lindsey-God what a splendid dictator she'd make with Sandy as her trusted assistant.'"

"You know what Wilton did? She grabbed her notebook, flipped pages and started scribbling."

"'Great,' I told her. 'Take notes. What an idea for a story.'"

"'Yes,' she said, 'a story. Tell me more.'"

She felt Jantor shift again against her, stroke her shoulder.

"'Then she asked me, 'who could you trust with your life?'"

"Hah." Jantor's hand paused.

"Yes, exactly. Hah. When I talk about a Wiltonesque question, that's what I mean," she said. "I had to stop and I didn't like what came out next but it was true. 'No one,' I said."