Adam shifted his grip for slashing, and took one step forward, stamping his foot down as he did it. Davey retreated a step, then took two steps forward.

"He set the fires," Bentley said. "She's as good as dead. Cooked. Won't be long now, she'll be cooked."

Darren looked at him for the first time. "Oh, yes," he said. "That's about right. I never found you, no matter how I looked. You don't get found if you don't want to."

Brent shook his head. "He set the fire, he used gasoline. Up the stairs, so it would spread up every floor quickly."

Aaron growled and lunged forward, slicing wildly, but Davey's scurry was surprising and fast and nimble.

"You're going to stab me again, cut me again? What do you suppose that will get you?"

"He's weaker than he was, then. We got six years, then. He's weaker. We'll get ten years. Twenty." Billy was hopping from foot to foot. "*Do it*."

Alan sliced and stabbed again, and the knife's point caught Danny's little bandy leg, like cutting through a loaf of stale bread, and Danny gasped and hopped back another step.

"He gave you the knife, didn't he? He gave you the knife last time. Last time, he took me to the school yard and showed me you and your girlfriend. He explained all about girlfriends to me and about what it would mean once our secret was out. He taught me the words, taught me to say *pervert*. Remember, Billy? Remember how you taught me?"

Andrew hesitated.

"He taught me the ritual with your thumbtip, how to make the little you, and then he took it away from me for safekeeping. He kept it in one of his rabbit cages, around on the other side of the mountain. It's not there now. Have you seen it? Does he still have it?

"He never liked having a little brother, not me or the others, but he liked having that little thing around to torture."

Billy hissed. "She'll be dead in minutes," he said. "In seconds. Another one dead. His doing!

"Killed her, cut her up, buried her," Benny chanted. "Sliced her open and cut her up," he shrilled.

Alan let the knife fall from his hands. Benny leapt for Danny, hands outstretched. Danny braced for the impact, rolled with him, and came up on top of him, small hands in Benny's eyes, grinding.

There were sirens out front now, lots of sirens.

A distant crash, and a rain of gla.s.s fell about his shoulders. He turned and looked up, looked up into the dormer window of his attic, four stories up. Mimi's head poked out from the window, wreathed in smoke, her face smudged and eyes screwed up.

"Mimi!" he cried.

She climbed unsteadily onto the windowsill, perched there for a moment. Then she leaned forward, ducked her head, and slipped into the sky.

Her magnificent wings unfolded in the smoke, in the hot ash, in the smoldering remains of all of Alan's life in human society. Her magnificent wings unfolded and caught the air with a sound he heard and with a downdraft of warm air that blew his hair off his forehead like a lover's hand, smoky smell and spicy smell.

She flew.

The sirens grew louder and she swooped over the yard. She gave two powerful beats of her wings and rose higher than the roof, then she circled the yard in great loops, coming lower and lower with each pa.s.s. Davey and Benny watched her. Kurt watched her.

Alan watched her. She was coming straight for him. He held out his arms and she fell into them, enfolding them both in her wings, her great and glorious wings.

"Come on," she said. Kurt was already limping for the alley. Benny and David had already melted away. They were alone in the yard, and the sirens were so loud now, and there were the reflections of emergency lights bouncing off the smoke around them. "Come on," she said, and she put her arms around his waist, locking her wrists.

It took five beats of her wings to get them aloft, and they barely cleared the fence, but they banked low over the alley and she beat her wings again and then they were gaining alt.i.tude, catching an updraft from the burning house on Wales Avenue, rising so high into the sky that he felt like they would fly to the moon.

The day that Lyman and Kurt were on the cover of NOW magazine, they dropped by Martian Signal to meet with Natalie's boss. Lyman carried the pitch package, color-matched, polyethnic, edgy and cool, with great copy.

Natalie met them. She'd grown out her hair and wore it with bangs hanging over the scar on her forehead, just over her left eye, two punctures with little dents. Three surgeries had cleared all the bone fragments from the orbit of that eye, and she'd kept her sight. Once she was out of the hospital, she quickly became the best employee Martian Signal had ever had. She quickly became manager. She quickly undertook to make several improvements in the daily operations of the store that increased turnover by 30 percent. She slowly and reluctantly hired her brother, but his gimpy knee made it hard for him to bend down to reshelve, and he quickly quit.

Kurt and Natalie hugged, and Lyman formally shook her hand, and then shook her boss's hand.

It took less than an hour to convince her boss to let them put up their access point. On the way back, three different people stopped them and told them how much they liked the article, and swore that the first thing they'd do when they got home would be to open up their networks and rename them ParasiteNet.

Lyman handled the thank-you's for this, and Kurt smiled and fiddled with his PDA and watched the sky, looking for a girl with wings as wide as a house.

I went to the house,

(she said, as he tended the fire, turning the yams in the coals and stirring the pot in which his fish stew bubbled)

I went to the house,

(she said, resting up from the long flight she'd flown from Toronto to Craig's distant, warm sh.o.r.es, far away from Kensington Market and Krishna and Billy and Danny)

I went to the house,

(she said, and Andy worked hard to keep the grin off his face, for he'd been miserable during her long absence and now he could scarcely contain his delight)

I went to the house, and there was no one home. I had the address you'd given me, and it was just like you'd described it to me, down to the basketball hoop in the driveway.

It was empty. But it was as I'd remembered it. They'd lived there. I'd lived there. You were right, that was the house.

That was the house I'd lived in. I rang the doorbell, then I peeked in through a crack in the blinds. The rooms were empty. No furniture. Just blinds. It was night, and no one was looking, so I flew up to the third floor, to the window I'd stared out all those times.

The window was unlatched, and I slid aside the screen and let myself in. The room was empty. No carpet. No frilly bed and stuffed animals. No desk. No clothes in the closet, no hangers.

The only thing in the room was a small box, plugged into the wall, with a network cable snaking away into the phone jack. It had small lights on it, blinking. It was like the one you'd had in your attic. A wireless access point.

I remembered their names, then. Oliver and Patricia. They'd been my mother and father for a few years. Set me up with my first apartment. This had been their house.

I slept there that day, then, come nightfall, I set out again to come home to you.

Something woke Andy from his sound sleep, nestled in her wings, in her arms. A tread on Craig's inviolable soil, someone afoot on his brother.

Slowly, he got himself loose of Mimi and sat up and looked around.

The golem standing before him was small, and its eyes glowed red. It bent over and set something down on the earth, a fur-wrapped bundle of smoked meat.

It nodded at him. He nodded back.