Hayden laughs. "Shucking corn can kill any relationship." Then he finds himself getting uncharacteristically serious. "So what's next?" he asks, because his plan for the Stork Brigade only went so far as Starkey's removal.

"I have storks working on finding us somewhere safe," Bam tells him. "There are lots of places to hide. We'll find one, hunker down, and make it work."

"I wish you luck," Hayden tells her.

She eyes him with the old suspicion. "You're not coming with us?"

Hayden presents her with an overexaggerated sigh. "As much as I would enjoy being eminence gris to your striking figurehead, it's time I left for greener pastures. Actually, I've been considering setting out with a small crew of my own and reestablishing my broadcast radio show, since the podcasts keep being squelched by the Juvenile Authority a few hours after I post them."

Bam laughs at that. "Hayden, your broadcast never reached beyond the Graveyard, and even then, no one was listening but you."

"Yes, I do love to hear myself talk-but I think I can get a wider audience with the help of Jeevan and a few choice members of a special-ops team. We'll be the Verbal Strike Force. VSF, for short, because initials are always much more impressive."

Bam shakes her head. "You're an odd bird, Hayden."

"This coming from a stork named Bambi."

Bam offers him a genuine smile. Something he's rarely seen. "Call me that again," she says, "and I'll deck you."

30 * Starkey

It's night when he regains consciousness. The tranqs stole the whole day from him. He's shivering from a mild but constant rain and is near hypothermia, but he forces clarity to his thoughts. He knows his actions now are crucial if he's going to overcome this new dire circumstance. He borrows heat from his burning emotions to drag warmth into his body. The adrenaline of anger.

One would think that to be dethroned-to be torn from power-would bring unbearable humiliation . . . but not to Mason Michael Starkey. Perhaps because the core of his being has taken on a potent yin-yang of ambition swirled into righteous indignation. Those driving forces have become the essence of who he is, and they leave no room for humiliation. All Starkey can feel is fury at the betrayal, and a burning desire to reclaim the leadership that is rightfully his. The leadership he has earned. Treason is the highest crime of any culture, and he is determined to make the traitors pay.

He will lead the storks once more. Maybe not today, but soon. He'll have to bide his time. He has the money and the power of the clapper movement behind him, and he knows how to contact them, so he is not without hope, or friends. Dandrich gave him a phone number to use in case of emergency, and he can think of no emergency greater than this.

But first things first. Right now, he's got to get himself out of the cold. He must find some sort of shelter. In his darkest moments, he never dreamed he'd be thrust back into basic survival mode again. They've taken everything away from me, he thinks, but he strangles the thought before it can take hold. He despises those who feel sorry for themselves. He will not stoop so low.

He knows it won't be easy for him now. He's America's most wanted. There's nowhere he can go where he won't be recognized instantly. He'll be prey for anyone with a phone, looking to cash in on the huge reward being offered for his capture. Now the price on his head is far greater than the value his adoptive parents ever saw in him.

His future will all come down to a phone. The first one he sees will be either his salvation or his ruin depending on who gets to dial it first: him or the phone's owner, who will most certainly be calling the police.

Still dizzy from the tranqs, he makes his way through the woods to a highway, forcing his stiff legs to walk at a brisk pace, generating body heat, but still shivering with every step. A mile and a half up the road, he comes to a service area and hurries into the glorious warmth of a convenience store. He quickly sizes up the people there. A grisly looking clerk, a family deciding on snacks, and an old man in filthy jeans trying to scrounge up enough coins for a lottery ticket. No one looks at him as he slips into the bathroom and locks the door behind him. He sits on the toilet, fully clothed, too dehydrated to even pee, and gets his shivering under control. It takes longer than he thought it would, and finally the clerk bangs on the door.

"You okay in there, dude?"

"Yeah, I'll be out in a second."

He takes another minute, flexing the fingers of his good hand, and stands, noting that the last of his tranq vertigo has worn off. Then he steps back out into the convenience store, where another family argues about snacks, and a woman baffled by the coffee machine tries to figure out which is decaf and which is regular. The clerk is busy ringing up a fat man's gas, and Starkey gets down to business.

He goes outside, where the fat man's car waits, the gas hose still in the tank. Lo and behold, there's a phone plugged into a charger on the console inside. Starkey opens the door, but as he reaches for the phone, a kid in the shadows of the backseat yells, "Hey! Get outta here! Dad! Help!"

Starkey flinches, but it's too late to abort.

"Sorry, kid." He grabs the phone, disconnecting it from the charger, but the kid continues to scream, and the father bursts out of the shop.

Starkey curses himself for the clumsiness of the theft. As a magician, he always prided himself on his ability to slip things like watches, wallets, and phones in and out of pockets without being noticed. It's demoralizing to be so desperate that he must steal so inelegantly.

With the man taking chase, Starkey sprints into the dark brushy field behind the convenience store, continuing to run long after the cries of the kid and his furious but ponderously slow father can no longer be heard.

When he's sure he's too far away to be seen or followed, he checks the phone. For a moment, he thinks its interface is locked and he won't be able to use it, but luckily, the man was not expecting his phone to be taken from the safety of his vehicle. Starkey pulls up a dial screen and keys in the emergency number he'd been given. It rings twice, then a nondescript voice answers the phone with a standard, "Hello?"

"This is Mason Starkey," he says. "Something's happened. I need help."

He quickly explains the situation as best he can in a single breath. And calmly the voice on the other end of the line says, "Stay where you are. We'll come to you."

Following the instructions he's given, Starkey keeps the phone powered on, to be used as a homing beacon, and within an hour, a helicopter descends from the night sky like the proverbial stork to carry him to a place of greater safety.

Starkey has no idea where he's been taken. It's a city. That's all he knows. He's not so sophisticated as to know the silhouettes of a skyline at the earliest hint of dawn. All he knows for sure is that it's near a large body of water, and that it's colder than where he was, as evidenced by the blast of chilly air when they open the helicopter door and escort him from the rooftop heliport. It's a tall building, but not the tallest. Average, as far as skyscrapers go.

He knew the clapper movement was well funded and well organized, but to have such headquarters in plain sight gives Starkey pause for thought. In his own imagination, the clapper movement was far grittier and more counterculture. Hiding, perhaps in the dangerous backrooms of questionable clubs. That they have their own office building, however, is somehow more unsettling. The logo on the building-he saw it as the helicopter approached-is a simple design he did not recognize. It featured the initials "PC," which seem fairly generic and could stand for a great many things.

He's escorted down a flight of stairs and into an elevator by two men in dark suits with chests too well developed for them to be anything but security boeufs. The elevator takes him down to the thirty-seventh floor, and he's brought to a conference room with black leather chairs and a long table of blue marble. No one is present.

"Wait here," one of the guards says. "Someone will be along shortly."

The room has only one door, which the men lock as they exit, leaving him alone. There are east-facing floor-to-ceiling windows, but they're made of the kind of frosted glass that diffuses light while denying a view. Translucent rather than transparent. The rising sun is little more than a golden haze.

He was alone in the helicopter, too. The pilot, sequestered in the cockpit, never spoke to him after letting him into the craft, other than to say, "Buckle in." The fact that they sent him a rescue craft so quickly, and that they've placed him in such a richly appointed room of their inner sanctum, tells Starkey that he's respected and valued. And yet, there's unease in him as diffuse and ill-defined as the light coming through the frosted windows.

No one comes.

After an hour, he tries, without luck, to jimmy the door lock using a paper clip he found on the floor. Despite his skill with locks, he can't pick this one.

"Hey!" he yells. "I'm still here in case you forgot! Someone get your ass over here and let me out!"

He begins pounding on the door, trying to create enough of a commotion that someone will come to shut him up. Nothing. It's as if the entire floor is deserted. Or maybe soundproof. Furious, he begins knocking over chairs, making a racket, but if, indeed, no one's there to hear him, all the sound and fury will signify nothing. Finally, not wanting to be found the author of this particular chaos, he sets the chairs back where he found them and, exhausted, sits down and cradles his head in his arms on the table. He falls asleep in moments.

He dreams of Bam. She's laughing at him. She's goading the others to laugh at him as well, and although he fires a machine gun at her, nothing comes out but flower petals and jelly beans and popcorn, and that just makes everyone laugh even more. Then Hayden grabs the machine gun away from him and shoves the muzzle so far up his nose he can feel it in his brain. "That'll clear your sinuses," Hayden says, and the laughter all around feels like it can fill a stadium.

He's gently shaken awake by a hand on his shoulder and pulled mercifully out of the dream.

"Mr. Starkey?"

He looks up bleary eyed to see a well-groomed man with a tightly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. Dandrich.

"About time," Starkey croaks.

"I gave orders that you be taken somewhere to rest until I arrived," he says kindly. "Orders, however, are often left to interpretation."

"Someone should be fired."

Dandrich considers it. "Or at least reprimanded. Be that as it may, I hope you got some rest. You must be exhausted from your triumphant efforts."

Starkey rolls the kink out of his neck while the man pours him a glass of water from a crystal pitcher that wasn't there before. "What is this place?"

Dandrich hands him the glass. "It's what is commonly called 'an undisclosed location'."

"It seems pretty disclosed to me if it's right in the middle of a city."

"It's not only AWOLs who can disappear in an urban environment, my friend," he says, sitting down casually beside Starkey. "To city dwellers, most buildings, no matter how large, are merely obstacles between home and office. In a city, convenience and anonymity go hand in hand. But we're not here to talk about our headquarters, are we?"

"There's a team of traitors." Starkey says, getting to the point. "We need to take them out if we're going to save the Stork Brigade."

Dandrich does not seem troubled. "A coup is always an unfortunate thing. Unless, of course, you are the one staging it."

Starkey thinks of the coup he staged at the Graveyard. What goes around comes around, but the timing couldn't have been worse "It's not a surprise that after the festivities at Horse Creek Harvest Camp, a number of storks would become disenchanted," his benefactor says.

"They invented an incriminating recording, but with your help I can convince everyone it's a fake. Send me back there with more firepower. I'll get control again, and rally them to the cause."

"No need." Dandrich says. "Your last few attacks have been so successful, we've decided that no further action on your part is needed."

"But what about Mousetail?"

"Unnecessary. It would be anticlimactic after what you did at Horse Creek. You were brilliant there," he says with a smile. Then his smile drifts neutral. "You were brilliant, but now you're done."

Starkey shakes his head. "There are still ninety-two harvest camps out there. You need me to take them down."

"Mason, you forget that it's not our purpose to take down every harvest camp."

Starkey stands up. "Well, it's my purpose!"

Now Dandrich's expression becomes icy. "We are not in the business of indulging adolescent power fantasies."

Even though the man is scrawny and at the weak end of middle age, Starkey finds himself intimidated by his unflinching gaze.

"So that's it? You're done with me? You're just going to cast me out into the street?"

Dandrich laughs at the suggestion, and his expression softens again. "No, of course not. We would never abandon someone as valuable as you. You can still serve our cause."

"To hell with your cause! What about my cause?"

"A wise general knows when his campaign has run its course." Then he raises his hands in broad sweeping gestures as he speaks. "Look at what you've done! Be satisfied that you made yourself the legend that you always dreamed you could be. That you freed hundreds of Unwinds. That you saved so many storks and struck a blow for what you believe."

Maybe he's right, but Starkey can't stand the thought that he was cast out, and now is being denied the right of vengeance. He slams his fist on the table. "They need to pay for what they've done!"

Dandrich never loses his cool. "They will. In time."

Starkey calms himself down. Patience was his strongest asset at the Graveyard. When did he lose it? He takes a deep breath, then another. If he can belay his thirst for revenge, it will be all the more satisfying and devastating when it comes. The betrayal has not undone his good work. He has to remember that. And in this strange organization that espouses the virtues of chaos and mayhem, he will find his place. Here, too, he will find ways of setting gears into motion, just as he did at the Graveyard.

"You've been the subject of much discussion," Dandrich says, "and we've decided that your greatest potential lies in our fund-raising division."

"Fund-raising?"

"There are people who would like to get to know you on a close, personal level," he says. "Important people. Some very wealthy, some very powerful."

"So . . . you're going to introduce me to these people?"

"Not personally, but I assure you, you will be in good hands." He opens the door, where two more beefy men in suits await. "My associates here will escort you to your new assignment." Then he shakes Starkey's hand. "Thank you for all you've done. I'm glad that our paths crossed, and that, for a time, our objectives complemented each other. Take care, Mason." And then he leaves Starkey with the two burly men, who lead him back to the elevator.

"Where am I going, if you don't mind me asking?" he asks the more intelligent-looking of the two guards as the elevator rises toward the rooftop heliport.

"Uh . . . from what I understand, you're going lots of places."

Which is fine with Starkey. He could get used to traveling in style.

31 * Grace

There are simply too many envelopes to mail for this to be a single postal excursion. Grace decides to make three trips-and not all to the same place. She plans multiple trips to multiple zip codes and finds an oversize unmarked shopping bag to carry them in-big enough and sturdy enough to get it done in three trips.

"Less suspicious this way," she tells Sonia. "So's if the postmaster general or something gets it into his head to trace all these letters back to a single place, they won't know where to look 'cept Akron in general, and Akron in general is big-not New York big, but big enough."

Sonia waves her hand. "Just get it done and don't talk my ear off." Which is fine with Grace, who likes being left to her own devices, as long as those devices don't have too much electronics, like that organ printer. She knows it will take her all day, but that's okay. It's something to do, something important, and it gets her out of the basement for a whole day.

Her first two sets of drops go off without a hitch. It's Sunday, so post offices are closed, but that hasn't stopped her from paying visits to various mailboxes in strategically random locations. By dusk, she's hit twelve mailboxes in three different zip codes.

It's while on her way back to empty out the trunk and mail the last batch of letters that things take a turn. It's already dusk, closer to the night side than the day, and she begins to think that the third batch will have to wait until tomorrow. The streetlights come on, making the dusk plunge into night-and there beneath a streetlight at the corner, just a few doors away from Sonia's shop, stands someone who looks familiar. Very familiar. She can see only his profile, but it's enough.

"Argie?" she says, before she can stop herself. "Argie, is that you?"

At first she's excited, but then she remembers how things were when she last saw her brother. He won't have forgiven her. Argent is not the forgiving type. As she gets closer, she can sense that there's something off about him. Something different in the way he carries himself, like it's not Argent at all . . . and yet clearly it's him. She only has to look at his face to know. . . .

Then he turns to her and smiles. "Hello, Grace."

And she begins to scream. Not because of what she sees but because of what she doesn't. She doesn't even feel the tranq dart hit her, because she's so committed to the scream. She's still screaming as her legs buckle beneath her and she hits the pavement. Still screaming as her peripheral vision fades. Still screaming as the tranqs drag her down into unconsciousness.

Because when he turned to look at her, Grace didn't see the other half of Argent's face. That other half was someone else entirely.