Down These Strange Streets

HELLBENDER by Laurie R. King

Here’s a riveting look at a not-too-distant future where, unfortunately, intolerance is not a thing of the past . . .

New York Times bestseller and Edgar® Award winner Laurie R. King is the author of the eleven-volume Mary Russell mystery series of novels, one of the most successful modern Sherlock Holmes homages, detailing the adventures of a young woman who meets a retired Sherlock Holmes in his role as a Sussex beekeeper; she becomes his apprentice, then partner, and, eventually, wife. The Mary Russell novels include The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, The Game, The Language of Bees, and seven others. In addition, King is the author of the five-book Kate Martinelli series of modern-day detective novels, consisting of A Grave Talent, To Play the Fool, With Child, Night Work, and The Art of Detection, and of the stand-alone novels A Darker Place, Keeping Watch, Califia’s Daughters, Touchstone, and Macavity Award winner Folly. Her most recent book is a Mary Russell novel, Pirate King.

I LOOKED ACROSS MY DESK AT MY NEW CLIENT, WONDERING WHAT SHE’D say if I fished out the bottle and offered her a drink.

Might be a little early in the morning, I decided. Might be a little straitlaced.

“Miss Savoy, I—”

“Ms.” The pretty sniff she gave didn’t really go along with the sharpness of the correction, but I let it pass, and turned my eyes to the sheet of paper. On it were eight names. Next to each was a date, stretching back eight months. The first seven lines were typed, a printout. The last one and its date, two weeks past, were handwritten.

“Ms. Savoy, I have to say, I’m not really sure what you’re asking me to do. Which of these people do you want me to find?”

“All of them!”

At that, I raised my eyes to hers. They were big and blue and welling with just enough tears to get the message across, but not enough to threaten her makeup. The color had to be some kind of an implant, I thought—although you’d swear her hair was a natural blond.

Interesting fact: People of her kind just weren’t born blond.

“I don’t do class-action suits, Ms. Savoy, and this many names will keep me busy for weeks. How about we start with one of them, and see how far we get?” I could see from her clothes that she didn’t have the sort of money we were talking about here—her shoes and coat had once cost her something, but that was a whole lot of cleanings ago.

“Well, that would be Harry. He’s the last one to go—the last one I know of—but I’ve known him the longest.”

And, she might have said, he was the one that mattered most.

“Okay, start with him.”

“Well, he disappeared two weeks ago. I was supposed—”

“Tell me a little about Harry, to begin with. How long have you known him?”

“Pretty much my whole life,” she said, sounding surprised. “Harry’s my brother. Harry Savoy.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, a noise that I tried to make noncommittal, but that came out a little disbelieving.

“No, really. We were both adopted, a year apart.”

I made the noise again, although this time it may have had a little more understanding in it. I knew the kind of people who adopt more than one of this woman’s kind: You probably do, too. And call them well-meaning or saints or just delusional, they’re usually very religious. Which is funny, considering that those who’d rather stamp her kind out altogether call themselves religious, too.

Anyway.

“I was two and a half when I was adopted, but Harry was almost five. I never knew exactly what his early life was like, except that it was hard. For one thing, he was more . . . that is to say, you can tell that I’m . . . ?”

“Yeah.” Although it was true, a lot of people might not’ve known with her, and certainly not right off. Still, I could tell the second she walked in. Makeup and surgery might hide the surface, but there’s a kind of all-over flexibility that just shouts out when you know what you’re looking at. And when you don’t know—well, let’s just say that a lot of this girl’s type make a good living out of how they move.

“Harry was more obvious than me. He even had little lines where his gills almost came up. And because he lived in a rough neighborhood, he came in for a lot of grief.”

I nodded, keeping my face straight.

“A social worker took him away from his family after his second broken arm. Mom and Dad heard about him, and first fostered him, then adopted him. So Harry was my big brother from the time I was three.

“Harry’s bright—really bright—but he decided early that he wasn’t going to take any more crap, from anyone. When he was a teenager he got into a lot of fights, although after he got big, the kids stopped trying to pick on him quite so much. But he refused to make any concessions, never had any treatments, wouldn’t even do The Surgery.

“Oh,” she said, with a pretty trace of blush rising across her cheeks. “I didn’t mean, that is, I didn’t intend—I’d never criticize what others choose to do.”

That drink was looking better. Might help with the room, which was suddenly feeling a little cold.

“Who would?” I agreed, giving a little shrug to show how disinterested I was.

A little frown line came into being between those pretty eyes. “But . . . I mean, surely you’re one, too?”

“One what?” A stupid thing to say, but she’d taken me by surprise. It’d been a long time since someone made me that fast. Most people took me for a young guy with a slight skin condition. I’d even perfected a stiff walk that made my heels jar all the way up to my neck and gave me a backache, but helped me pass.

“One of us. A . . . SalaMan.”

I WAS BORN IN THE SECOND DECADE OF THE MILLENNIUM. OH, I SPENT A few years in a freezer first, then a lot more years in legal limbo before the case finally wound its way through the courts to give me a birth certificate, but conception took place when that oh-so-clever shit-bastard of a grad student stirred up some DNA to see what would happen, and I figure conception is when I began.

When Elizabeth Savoy came to my office that Tuesday morning, I’d been breathing for thirty-one years, although I only looked twenty. And sometimes felt fifty.

Interesting fact: People don’t know just how many of us there are. Oh, you may think you do, and you can bet Uncle Sam does, but it didn’t take very many bombings and riots before even the government could see that playing things down might be a smart idea. Once the Supremes turned in their decision regarding our human status, the feds were ready, and pretty much everything about us went away: numbers, characteristics, identities. There’s even the occasional Web rumor that says we’re nothing but a myth, which is fine with me.

As far as the government is concerned, the only time we’re the least bit different from any other citizen is when we want to be. From the start, they swore up and down that they’d set up the records so even they didn’t know who we were unless we chose to come to them. Which was hard to believe, but at least they kept their hands off us. We’ve all been counseled; we all know that it’s a good idea to take any medical problem to one of their specialists rather than wonder if our local GP knows what he’s looking at; we’re all aware of the standing offer of money, shelter, and a lifetime of protection if that’s ever what we want. And if we don’t, well, we got a handshake and a wish for good luck, which is more than most of our fellow citizens get.

I had to wonder how my client had found me. I didn’t exactly have a shingle out saying “SalaMan Investigations.”

About a quarter of my own genes come from a species called Hellbender, a big guy that’s about as ugly as most of his kind (although at least the name was cool—what if our DNA came from mud puppies or—God help us—“seepage” salamanders?). That lunatic grad student Joey Handle had to’ve been a genius, because he tweaked and balanced and played God with the stuff of Cryptobranchus alleganiensis and Homo sapiens to make himself a race of Others, in a way no one else has yet.

Or anyway, did so enough to prove to himself that he could. No one knows if he ever intended to warm up all his frozen embryos and see if we twitched, or just flush us all down the drain. I suspect the latter. But before the boy genius could decide, Reverend Tommy Bostitch’s mad followers took over the lab, not really knowing what was there other than it was something sinful. That’s where they found us, and before you know it, they’d gotten it into their well-meaning little brains that what God wanted them to do was give us life.

Reverend Tommy’s men were bad enough, but the women who fell for his spiel? I mean really: How nutso do you have to be to volunteer your womb to grow what for all you know will turn out to be a monster? Religious nuts just get my goat. Even though I owe them my existence.

Mom was one of the lucky ones, sort of. First off, I lived, which most of Handle’s Children didn’t. Then, she wasn’t one of Reverend Tommy’s direct followers, so she didn’t die with the others in the raid a few years later. And to top it off, I looked enough like a human baby that people didn’t shriek and run when they saw me. But she volunteered to be implanted only the one time. And she had to’ve blamed me for the divorce. In any case, hers and mine wasn’t exactly a cuddly relationship. I’d guess it’s hard for a pure mammal to feel all maternal toward a baby that feels a little bit cool and maybe a touch slimy—as my client said, some of us were more blatant than others.

But for some reason, the first round of implants didn’t put a complete halt to the birthing program. If it had, we’d be a lot fewer of us, and we’d all be the same age.

About a year after the embryo theft, the first of us were born. About a month after that, the government caught on that something weird was going on. And from there . . . well, by the time I was eighteen, the courts had decided that I was a citizen.

Once I’d had some work done, I could pass. I could even sleep with women without them freaking out, since I’d had what my client delicately called The Surgery (although I was still sterile, like all the others). And in the eight years I’d had my PI shingle out, I’d had only one SalaMan client, and he came in my door by accident.

So as you can guess, I wasn’t exactly happy about Ms. Savoy.

I JERKED OPEN MY DESK DRAWER AND TOOK OUT THE BOTTLE AND TWO shot glasses, filling both to the top. I tossed mine down and filled it up again. To my surprise, Ms. Savoy picked hers up and swallowed half of it without a blink.

Maybe she wasn’t quite as prim as she looked.

“Okay, so your brother Harry’s gone missing,” I said, bringing us back to the subject at hand. “Have you filed a missing-person report?”

“Yes, although the police really weren’t interested.”

“They told you that he’s a grown man, he can go away if he wants, I know.” My license meant that I had to pay attention to the rules of what a PI could and couldn’t do. I had a buddy in the department, but I didn’t like to ask Frank for too many favors. “You say your brother’s a guy who’s not at all interested in passing. You think that’s related to his disappearance?”

“One has to wonder,” she said. I had to agree, “one” did—every year or so there’d be another set of headlines about a SalaMan who pushed a Salaphobe’s buttons and got himself beat up, or worse.

“Yeah, activism can be a dangerous hobby. What was he into when he disappeared?”

“He had a friend, a woman, who—”

“A friend, or a good friend?” I interrupted.

“I think they were serious, but I’m not certain. I only met Eileen a couple of times, but he liked her a lot. And then about six weeks ago she just up and vanished. She texted him—not even a phone call—to say she couldn’t take it and she was going home. When he went to her apartment, most of her stuff was there but she wasn’t. He was convinced something happened to her. He’s been trying to find her—that’s her name on the list, right above his. And now he’s missing, too.”

Harry’s was the handwritten name at the bottom of the printed list.

“Who are the others?”

“I’m not altogether certain, but I think they’re all people like us.” I wished she’d stop putting it that way. “I found that piece of paper in Harry’s desk drawer two days ago. It was on the top, so I thought it might be something he was working on, a meeting or an article or something. And I recognized two of the names—other than Eileen’s, of course. Imogen and Barbara were girls I’d been to college with. So I tried to find them, to see if Harry had been in touch. But they were missing, too. Both of them.”

I had to agree, the odds of coincidence here were pretty thin.

So I took her check, and I got to work.

BROTHER HARRY HAD A THIRD-FLOOR APARTMENT IN A TIRED PART OF town near the water, which address alone would’ve made me wonder about him. And when I walked in, using the key his sister had given me, I’d have known for sure: The air was so moist the paint was coming off the walls, and you could smell the mildew despite the scrubbers. Which told me Harry had the kind of skin that needed to be damp. Humidity was one reason so many of his kind—okay, my kind—lived in San Francisco. (That, and the city’s hey-it’s-your-business attitude.) Which in turn was one reason I lived in Oakland where, being dryer and hotter, people didn’t automatically wonder if you were One of Them.

I stood in the neat little two-bedroom, listening to the low hum of the two opposing machines—one to make the air wet, the other to battle the effects of damp—and waited for the place to tell me about Harry. He was a tidy guy, I could see that. He liked bare floors and simple furniture, and color on the walls. Not too many books, but then, books didn’t like humidity, so that was hardly unusual.

More interesting, the place had been searched. So carefully that, unless you’d done a lot of cautious searches yourself, you wouldn’t have noticed it. And even I might not’ve caught on if the sun hadn’t been out, or if Harry liked sunlight a little less.

It gave me pause, for a minute. But in the end, I was here with the permission of the owner’s sister, and anyway, my presence was sure to be on a camera somewhere in the neighborhood. So I went ahead with my search, keeping an eye out for bugs, but either the guy who’d searched the place was sharper when it came to planting surveillance than he was at putting back the vases on dusty surfaces, or there weren’t any.

My client’s brother liked damp, but he also liked light, which was unusual, considering the sensitivity of most SalaMan eyes. His walls were painted a bright white, the bulbs in his lamps were full strength, and the thin curtains over the windows were designed to keep out eyes rather than glare. Moving to the kitchen, I could see he was a cook, with a bunch of Asian-style pans and spices, more knives than I’d seen outside a French bistro, and an espresso machine the size of a small car. His refrigerator’s sell-by dates didn’t narrow down his departure a whole lot, although I didn’t spot anything that was actually expired.

And his willingness to embrace the amphibious side of his heritage stopped well short of his palate—you wouldn’t believe the things some of his—of our—kind tried putting on their plates.

Or maybe you would.

His closet had a suitcase in it. His bathroom had a toothbrush, electric razor, and zip-up traveling bag in a drawer. The little closet near the front door had an overcoat, a raincoat, and a leather jacket, and its only bare hangers were half-hidden by occupied ones. All of which suggested that when Harry went out, he didn’t expect to be gone long.

I pressed a couple of buttons on the espresso machine, took the cup of black sludge that resulted over to Harry’s desk, and settled down to the drawers.

The first thing I saw was a box of bullets. It was sitting next to a tin of oil and a cleaning rag. The box was half empty. I got up and went to look for all the likely places to hide a handgun: bedside table, behind the toilet, in the flour canister. No gun.

I had to wonder if he had a carry permit for it. Permits aren’t easy to get, here in California.

My tablespoon of espresso had gone cold, so I pressed the buttons again and let the powerful syrup dribble into the cup, then returned to the desk.

Four cups later, my nerves were singing and I knew a few more things about Harry Savoy. His sister had told me he was a kind of graphic artist specializing in architectural drawings, who worked from home. The room he used as an office was drier than the rest, probably because of the equipment—I’d gone there when I’d squeezed what I could from his desk, and found a desktop computer with a state-of-the-art drawing pad, a giant wall-mounted screen, and a printer fitted with paper three feet wide. Most of the stuff I didn’t touch, although I did turn on the desktop long enough to see that pretty much all the files were password protected. Which put it beyond my personal skill set, although I had a friend who could help me, if need be.

His paper files told me he made good money, and invested some. His machinery suggested that most of his friends existed online, through WeWeb, although he also had a Facebook page. I shut the computer down without logging on to either, and sat for a minute looking at the half-dozen framed pictures on the wall over the desk.

Harry was good-looking. My client hadn’t mentioned that, not a thing a sister would notice maybe, but the group photos had one person in common, a guy with a dark and intense look about him I figured would win him a lot of attention, even without the litheness he was sure to have when he moved. Gun, looks, money: maybe I didn’t have to look any further than old Harry’s personal life for a motivation.

But I would. If nothing else, I had to earn the check in my pocket. I made notes of his phone numbers from the bills on file, and made copies of the last few months’ statements on the credit cards he used. He had an address book, a tattered old thing that functioned as a backup to whatever phone he carried, but I wrote down a few of the addresses that looked more recent.

I didn’t find a laptop, or a pad, or the phone.

I did make one very interesting discovery, hidden in a place so clever I nearly missed it myself—inside the heater vent, under a false side that looked exactly like the other three. I pulled it out, and sat on the floor to look at it: a nine-by-twelve envelope of printouts and clippings, nineteen of them, that made my brain whir around for a while until a little voice told me it might be a good time to leave. Taking the envelope with me.

Maybe I needed to take a look at the other names on that list, after all.

WHEN I FINALLY SLIPPED BACK THROUGH MY OWN FRONT DOOR, LATE THAT night, I stood in the dark for the longest time, straining to hear over the pounding in my heart. Stupid, to leave my gun in the safe. Stupid, stupid, to let the habits of paranoia go rusty.

After the longest time, my eyes showed no motion. No intruder shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned me, and I heard nothing outside my own skin. When I forced my hand to flip on the light, the only thing that looked back at me was my wild-eyed reflection in the mirror—good thing I didn’t have a gun in my hand, I told myself, or I’d have blown a hole in the wall.

But just because there was no one waiting for me (and no one in the bathroom or in the closet) didn’t mean I was safe. In ninety seconds I had my gun, my hat, my go-bag of cash, and a clean shirt, and I was out the door.

I left my car where I’d parked it, and went away on foot.

Which took care of my own safety; now for that of my client. It always looks bad when a PI loses a client. And anyway, she was probably going to owe me plenty by the time I’d finished.

She was asleep, of course, since it was just shy of two in the morning. Anyway, I hoped she was only asleep. Her small house up in Sausalito (another place with damp air and tolerant attitudes) was dark, like all of its neighbors, so I fiddled with the lock on her front door and let myself in—if I knocked loud enough to wake her, I’d wake the neighbors as well, to say nothing of giving warning to any unfriendlies who might be listening. Her cat nearly gave me a heart attack, a flash of near-ultraviolet motion followed by a slapping noise from the next room, and I came maybe half a micron from squeezing the trigger into action before my brain translated the motion and screamed at me to lay off. I eased back the pressure, feeling a little shaky: lucky she didn’t have a Rottweiler.

I breathed in the air for a while, sniffing for any trace of death and blood and terror, but the house smelled good, like cooking and flowers. Like her, in fact. And only like her, which suggested that she lived alone.

So I cleared my throat and started talking in a low voice. “Ms. Savoy? Elizabeth? This is Mike Heller, the investigator you hired. Elizabeth, please, if you’re here I need you to wake up. This is Mike Heller, and I found out some things that make me think you’re not safe here. Sorry about breaking in like this, I sort of needed to. Um, Ms. Savoy? You there? This is Mike—”

The lights went on abruptly, dazzling my dark-adapted eyes. My right hand jerked again, and I blinked hard.

“Mr. Heller? What are you doing here?”

I blew out a breath. I was going to have to go someplace nice and quiet at the end of this damn case. Assuming I was still alive, of course. I let my gun drop to my side, although I didn’t put it away.

“Ms. Savoy, I’m afraid you may be in danger. I need you to throw a few things in a bag and come with me.”

“What, now? What time is it, anyway?”

“Time to go, if you want to live.”

Motion in the dark doorway resolved into a figure, dressed in slinky pajamas. Her hair was every which way, her face was bare of makeup, and she had a red pillow line across one cheek. She was absolutely gorgeous.

“It’s Harry, isn’t it? What did you find?”

“I’m leaving here in two minutes, with or without you. I can tell you about Harry later, once I’m sure we’re safe. You coming or not?”

“I can’t . . . How do you . . . You broke into my house!”

“I couldn’t be sure you weren’t being watched. Still can’t be sure.”

“Get out!”

I took a step back toward the door. “If that’s what you want, I’ll leave. But I won’t be able to keep you safe if you’re not with me.”

“I can’t just leave. And anyway, I have to be at work in a few hours!”

“Call in sick. Ms. Savoy, I really wish you would trust me on this. I swear, you’re honestly not safe here.” I could feel the seconds ticking away on the clock, but what could I do? Knock her out and carry her away? All I could do was try to look honest, and wait for her to make up her mind.

The way she did it shook me more than anything that had yet happened in that already busy twenty-four hours. She glanced at the gun dangling at the end of my arm, then undulated across the room in those slinky pajamas to stand in front of me, studying my face with her human-looking eyes. Then she reached up both hands to pull my face to hers, and kissed me.

Interesting fact: What’s unpredictable about genetic splicing is the distribution of each side’s characteristics. Salamanders have a whole lot of DNA packed into their cells—probably the reason they combine readily with others—but very few of us came out of our foster wombs looking like lizards (very few who lived, anyway). And only a handful of us have tails, or spots, or four fingers instead of five. And although I have heard of the occasional poor bastard whose tail insists on regenerating after that particular surgery, I’ve never believed that any of us actually shoot out our tongues or ooze poison from our skin.

But there’s no doubt, many of us do things differently from your average Homo sapiens.

Now, a major side effect of that Supreme Court victory was that we had as much right as anyone else to keep out of the hands of scientists (which is the reason you sometimes see ads on WeWeb and Facebook, begging for SalaMan volunteers). Science eyes us with a longing that verges on lust. It offers us considerable sums to participate in studies, then gleefully writes learned papers about our every oddity from pheromones and internal sex organs (science being as fascinated by our pre-Surgery organs as the tabloids are) to the ability to stretch the visible realm into the ultraviolet. Any of us who can prove that we’ve lost a scar or regenerated a finger, and don’t mind spending the rest of our lives under a microscope, would never have to work another day.

But one thing I’ve never read about in the literature, probably because the scientists never thought to ask about it, is the odd uses of some SalaMan mucous membranes.

Elizabeth Savoy was not kissing me, she was tasting the truth on me. She took her time about it, and for sure both of us enjoyed it, but we both knew what she was doing. And we both knew what she tasted.

Without a word, she walked back into the bedroom. I heard a drawer open.

I turned off the overhead light that she’d switched on with some kind of remote, and went into the room where the cat had disappeared. A neighbor’s outdoor light gave shape to kitchen cabinets, and I opened them until I found a bag of kibble, which I set on the floor with the top open. I took a big bowl and filled it with water, setting it next to the bag. My client’s feline responsibilities taken care of, I pressed my face to the windows, studying the possibilities. Wondering if what I’d found at Eileen Jacobs’s house was just brother Harry’s coffee having its way with my nerves. But I didn’t think so.

It was more than the two minutes I’d given her, but less than three, when I heard the toilet flush and feet wearing shoes coming across the room. My client fished a jacket out of the front-door closet, put it on, and picked up the small bag.

“Did you bring whatever cash you have?” I asked her. “Necessary pills, glasses, your ID?”

“Cash, a bit of jewelry, and my license and passport. No pills or glasses.”

“Turn off your cell phone. Better yet, take out the battery.”

She took out a pricey-looking slip of plastic, thumbing open the back and dropping the battery and the now-inert machine back into the bag’s pocket.

We went out her back door, around the tiny garden, through the gate, and up the winding stairway leading away from the water, to the place I had left the motorcycle I’d borrowed from an unwitting friend in Berkeley. On two wheels, and later four, I took my client out of the Bay Area, doubling back, going as invisibly as I knew how, spending all my attention on the rearview mirror and giving out just enough information to keep her with me. Finally, late that afternoon we went to ground in a middle-of-the-road motel in Sacramento, registering as a husband and wife, in a room with two beds.

She turned on me the instant the door was shut. “Okay, all day you’ve been putting me off about this because you needed to concentrate on our backs. So are we now, finally, safe enough that you can answer one or two damn questions?”

“Yes,” I said, “but—”

“Oh, Christ!”

“Look, Elizabeth. I’m tired and I’m cranky. Even you look like you could stomp a puppy. You go take a shower, I’ll rustle up some food, we’ll have a drink, and after that we’ll talk as long as you like.”

She wavered, but she was honest enough with herself that the call of the shower overcame her impatience.

I phoned a nearby Chinese place that delivered, and told the guy I’d add a hefty tip if he’d pick up a cold six-pack and something chocolate and girly on his way. The food and drink arrived as my client was finishing her long, steamy shower; I paid him cash, keeping my head a bit down in case someone out there flashed around a picture of my face. When she came out of the bathroom, I went in; as I closed the door, I heard the sound of a beer cap coming off.

I’ll admit it: I spend most of my life pretending I don’t feel the tightness of my skin and the sandpaper dryness of the air, but sometimes I can’t help reveling in the luxury of water. This was one of those.

I was only half dry when I heard her call my name, in a voice that had me out of there with the gun in one hand and the corners of the towel in the other.

She was staring at the television, tuned to the six o’clock news. The young reporter stood in front of a place I did not at first recognize, and only partly because I’d just seen it at night. The main reason was, the house that had been there, wasn’t.

“. . . called 911, but by the time the vehicles could get up the narrow hills of this community of artists and bohemians, the house was already engulfed with flames. Neighbor Alison Stanford describes the scene.”

Neighbor Alison Stanford was a petite Japanese woman of about sixty wearing artistic clothing and a thrilled expression. She earnestly described waking to sirens, seeing the leap of flames (she actually used the phrase) from the street, and was now waiting to see if the nice woman who lived there had survived. “I found her cat in my backyard,” said Ms. Stanford. “It took a while before it would let me come near, but I picked it up and took it inside. I hope the owner’s all right.”

Ms. Stanford seemed more excited at the brush with fame than she was worried at her neighbor’s safety. I stepped back inside the bathroom to exchange the towel for my trousers and add the clean shirt, then came out and took the remote control from my client’s grip, pressing the power button. Silence fell.

Elizabeth drew a shaky breath, then lifted her eyes to mine. “Harry’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know yet. Finding that out comes second on my list of things to do. First is keeping you alive.”

“But why would anyone want to kill me?”

“Your brother’s place was searched. So was Eileen’s.” I handed her the envelope of printouts. “Harry hid these, really well.”

She pulled the pages out, fourteen printouts and three actual newspaper clippings, all news articles from across the country. It didn’t take long for her to get the gist of them, since all the stories followed the same lines: Someone died, or someone disappeared, or someone disappeared and was later found dead.

Four of the names had been on the list my client had given me in my office the previous morning.

The stories ranged from two column inches to half the front page of a small-town paper. She read three, then read sections of the next five, and after that she just skimmed them. At the end, she folded them together and looked up at me. She looked lost—and scared. Which was good.

“They’re all . . . us, aren’t they?”

“SalaMen? Hard to be sure, but I’d guess so.”

Only two of the stories said it openly, but three others described the victim as “private” (meaning: nervous about inviting people home) and five of them had quotes about the missing or dead person’s unconventional beauty: that sinuous appeal doing its subliminal work.

“But, so many? How could the police not know?”

That was the real question. The cops, I could understand not catching it, since any database of crimes needs some point of similarity to send up a warning flag, and these were just eight unrelated people, from all over the country, who’d disappeared. The only thing that linked them was—if Harry and his sister were right—their genetic makeup. And if the feds raised that flag themselves, they were admitting that their hands-off policy toward the SalaMan community wasn’t quite as complete as they said.

It wouldn’t be the first time a governmental agency had chosen coldblooded self-protection over humanitarian concerns. Especially when a lot of the population wouldn’t exactly consider us human.

My client sniffed. I looked over and saw her staring down at her beer bottle, one tear snaking down her cheek. “At least my cat is okay,” she said.

With that, I realized that I was holding the neck of my beer bottle so hard my fingers were going numb. I was mad, madder than I’d been in a lot of years. If the feds could’ve stopped this and didn’t—if the feds sat back while Elizabeth Savoy went onto some Salaphobe’s dirty little list . . .

I put down the bottle and handed my client a box of the takeaway and a pair of chopsticks. “Eat,” I ordered, and sat down to do the same.

When we had both slowed down a little, I said, “Okay. Tell me again how you know the people on Harry’s list.”

“As I said, I only know Eileen and Harry. Two of the others, Imogen and Barbara, I went to college with, although I haven’t seen them for years. And now I think about it, the guy named Hal Andrews? Imogen dated a guy named Hal for a while, and his name might have been Andrews, although I’m not sure. And the guy named Benny? Well, I vaguely remember Harry mentioning someone with that name from when he lived in L.A. The others don’t ring any bells.”

“You kept in touch with people from college, but didn’t see them?”

“Oh, we lost track of each other a long time ago, but then they joined Harry’s group on WeWeb, and we reconnected.”

“Tell me about Harry’s WeWeb group.”

“If you’re thinking that some hate group is targeting us through that, I don’t think so. Harry was—is—very careful. Anyone who applies for membership has to wait until they have a face-to-face meeting. He has to be sure. No, it would be really tough to crash that party.”

I pinched up a few more bites of cold kung pao beef, reflecting that, no, crashing a party wasn’t precisely what I had in mind.

I could feel in my pocket the two printouts I’d removed from Harry’s envelope before handing it to his sister.

They were both page captures from the social networking site WeWeb. One of those belonged to Eileen Jacobs and followed a discussion about a movie she’d been working on, doing set design. The other belonged to a guy named Bill Mayer, who posted mostly about a kids’ baseball team that I guessed he coached.

But the reason I’d taken them out of the envelope before handing it to my client, and the reason I thought they were in Harry’s secret collection to begin with, was not the brief chats the two WeWeb members had posted. It was the advertisements in the two sidebars. The first one, from Bill Mayer’s page dated the previous fall, read:

SALAMAN? $500 AN HOUR FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION IN A STUDY. EASY, QUICK, UNOBTRUSIVE, PRIVATE, YOU CAN HELP OTHERS AND EARN HARD CASH FAST.

The ad ended with a linked contact address. The second page, taken from Eileen’s page two months ago, had the same wording except for one thing.

The payment offered had gone up tenfold, to $5,000.

I FED MY CLIENT ANOTHER BEER, THEN THE CHOCOLATE. BEFORE LONG HER eyelids drooped into the relief of sleep. I pulled the covers over her, dropped the empty boxes into the wastebasket, and stretched out on the adjacent bed.

“Thank you, Mike,” she said, her voice drowsy.

“Sure, honey. Hey, tell me something?”

“Hmm?”

“How’d you find me? When you came to my office?”

“Saw you in a bar, about six months ago. Someone I was with pointed you out, said you were a private investigator. One look, and I knew.”

“Took you all that time to come up with an excuse to hire me, huh?”

“Hmm,” she mumbled, and a minute later she was snoring into her pillow.

The kiss she’d given me had nothing to do with romance. I knew that. Still, I couldn’t help the memory of it on my mouth as I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, six chaste feet away from her.

THE NEXT DAY, MY FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS WAS TO STASH MY CLIENT someplace safe. It took me twenty minutes driving in circles before I found that endangered species, a pay phone, but once I’d made a call, it was only a matter of a few hours before one of the two guys I’d trust with my life showed up and took her away. She didn’t want to go, but in the end, she did.

Step two, a public computer.

I’m a big fan of libraries: information, comfort, and safety, all in one place. And over the years, library associations have fought hard for privacy rights, which makes them more secure from snoops than any cyber café. This library even had a coffee bar attached to it, which was good because what I was doing wasn’t going to be quick.

But before the place shut down that night, a targeted ad had popped up on the side of the shiny new WeWeb page for my made-up SalaMan, Julio Rogers. Julio was new to WeWeb for undisclosed but hinted-at reasons (“I been away, if you know what I mean . . .”) and had lousy writing skills, some ill-disguised anger, and a considerable interest in SalaMan rights.

The targeting algorithm had caught Julio’s SalaMan references and sent him an offer for QUICK, UNOBTRUSIVE, PRIVATE cash.

Julio’s offer had gone up to $7,500. Which could mean they had come into serious funding, or that they were getting desperate. Either way was fine with me. It was fine, too, with Julio, who shot off an e-mail to the address.

I slept in a different motel that night, and had a dream about blue eyes.

The next morning I went to another library, logged on to Julio’s page, and sat back with a smile on my face.

Thank you for your interest in SalaMan Research Enterprises (SRE). If you hold SalaMan heritage, welcome! Our researchers are affiliated with the University of California, Stanford, Yale, and other medical schools, and are thoroughly trained in the protection of privacy rights. Our project is aimed at helping the particular health needs of the SalaMan community, and in the preliminary stages requires only a fifteen-minute questionnaire and a simple blood test. If you are interested in hearing about our work and how you can help us, we have public meetings across the country, for which you will be paid to attend, without making a commitment to participate further.

(PLEASE NOTE: Applicants’ DNA will be tested immediately on arrival, before any payment is made. False applicants will be reported to WeWeb.)

The form e-mail was signed by a man with a lot of letters sprinkled after his name, and the list of public meetings included—surprise, surprise—one at two o’clock Saturday afternoon, the day after tomorrow, at a big conference hotel less than thirty miles from the library Julio had been working at.

Julio sent his acceptance of the offer, then logged off and left that library in a hurry, never to return.

I spent the rest of that day and most of Friday moving from one library to another, putting on a lot of miles between each one, as I tried to duplicate Harry’s research about the people whose names ended up in his envelope.

Saturday afternoon I was at the conference hotel, looking forward to that SRE information meeting, wondering whether they intended to pull a gun first, or just go with the tranquilizers.

I HADN’T BEEN ABLE TO GET A CAMERA INSIDE THE MEETING ROOM ITSELF, but the one I’d tucked behind the hallway flower arrangement worked fine. At half past one on Saturday, three men came down the hallway, their faces nice and clear in the camera, their heights marked by a tick I’d put in a picture frame on the wall. Two of them were clearly muscle, one a boss type. One of the big guys carried a notice board with a tripod, which he set up facing the other way, although I’d seen when he was moving around that it was the sort of corporate intro you’d expect to see when you came toward a public meeting room. The other big guy was carrying a carton, no doubt filled with the kind of meaningless forms and equipment that would reassure a sucker and get him inside the doors.

That day’s only sucker, it would appear, was Julio. Whose last act on this earth was to send an e-mail at 2:04 to say that he was sorry, he’d changed his mind, maybe in the future . . .

At 2:12, the three men came out, looking considerably less friendly than they had going in. One carried the carton, now jammed every which way with stuff. They walked away from my viewpoint, and then the boss man jerked his thumb back and the other big guy whirled around and went back for the tripod sign. If I’d been standing behind the flowers instead of my camera, he’d have smashed the sign over my head.

At 2:14, the three men came out of the hotel’s side doors, dumped their armloads into the trunk of a shiny black car, and drove away. I hit the send button on the laptop I’d been watching all this on, tossed it onto the passenger seat, and put my own car into gear.

Interesting fact: Cops pay attention when you send them traceable evidence of what you claim is a crime in progress. Phone calls can be about anything, post office letters can disappear, but when you tell them you’re sending them an electronic file, and then you send it, that makes a trail they hesitate to ignore entirely.

The e-mail with the video attachment was to Frank, my cop . . . well, maybe not friend, but we’d worked together a couple times, and drunk together a few more times. I liked Frank fine, and I knew he was honest, but I also wanted a little insurance. No cop wants to go into a courtroom against a lawyer who has evidence of a murder the police could have prevented.

Mine, for example.

I followed, keeping well back thanks to the little blip on the GPS screen. While they were waiting for Julio, I’d had plenty of time to press a bug under the fender. Ain’t technology great?

But not so great when the people you’re following change cars, and leave your clever blip standing at the same point until the transmitter’s battery runs down. Which was what I thought was happening when they went five miles and pulled into a coffeehouse.

But I lucked out. The two goons did take their equipment from the trunk and got into a second car, but my shiny black target pulled immediately out of the parking lot, signaled for a right, and in two minutes was on the freeway north.

After two hours, we’d left the freeway far behind, traffic on the smaller road was so thin I didn’t dare come closer than half a mile, and it looked like the guy was planning to drive up the backside of Nevada without even a coffee break. I, on the other hand, was yawning fit to break my jaw, my bladder had gone past uncomfortable to the brink of needing attention, and the pink blip on my screen had hypnotized me into stupidity.

I only noticed it had stopped moving when I was already too close to do anything but barrel on by.

The driver—still wearing both the jacket and tie—was just getting back into the car after unlocking a gate at the side of the road. He glanced at me, seeing only a dusty car whose bored driver was rubbing his eye. In the rearview mirror I saw him pull ahead into the side road, then get out to go back and close the gate. My foot didn’t move on the pedal until he had disappeared around a curve, at which time I swerved to the side and killed the engine.

I grabbed the knapsack from the seat and forced my stiff legs and screaming bladder up the nearby rise until the dust plume from the once-shiny car came into view. I kept a naked eye on it for a couple of minutes and then, when my hands were free and my bladder happy, I took a pair of binoculars from the knapsack. Just in time to see the car vanish behind some low hills.

This far from civilization, I did not expect to find a connection, and I was right. However, I wrote an e-mail on the laptop, hit send, then closed its lid and locked the thing in the trunk. If I failed to make it back, someone would eventually find it, and when it was fired up, Frank would learn where I had last been.

I pushed some things I thought I might need into the knapsack, then walked across the road in the direction of the black car.

FOR A DIRT ROAD IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, IT HAD A SURPRISING amount of traffic. By the time darkness fell, I had seen three vehicles go past: a white van, delivering some cartons and full grocery sacks, then leaving; a small red Jeep, driven at speed by a thin man with white hair; and an hour later, at dusk, the black car on its way out.

Their goal was a wide, single-story building made of poured concrete with a faded blue steel roof. The only windows were on either side of the front door, although when I circled the place, I found two other doors, one on the back and the other on the western side. All three doors were steel, and solid looking. I wouldn’t know if their locks were as good until I got my hands on them.

The two windows were covered from within, by slatted blinds on the left and curtains on the right. The blinds went dark about ten o’clock; the curtains snapped out of sight around half past eleven.

At one in the morning, I slipped out from the trees facing the western door. I couldn’t see any security cameras, and although the light over the door was on, a quick poke with a branch changed that.

It took me a while, even with my illegal-to-own, cutting-edge cracksman tool. When the lock finally gave, I vowed to write the guy who’d invented the thing a personal letter of thanks.

I took out my gun and moved forward. Before I was fully inside, I knew: there were SalaMen inside. The air was damp, and carried on it the stink of fear and suffering.

I let the door whisper shut and went in search of them. Went in search of—okay, damn it—of my people.

Hellbender isn’t a salamander that spends its life underground, so its eyes aren’t as sensitive as some. Still, I had no trouble making out the shapes of the hallway and the doors, some of which were standing open. And I wasn’t too surprised to find one leading to stairs, since I’d figured there might be as much of this building underground as there was above.

It wasn’t a new building, although sometime in the last year or so the walls got a coat of paint and the linoleum was scrubbed. I couldn’t tell what the place had been in a previous life—out here, it probably wasn’t anything legal.

It wasn’t now, either. That ad in WeWeb promised easy money, but what the SalaMen who answered it got wasn’t money, and there was nothing easy about it. My recent library crawl, hunting down Harry’s names, had given me some things they had in common beyond their genetic structure.

For one thing, an awful lot of them were strapped for cash. A couple had lost their jobs, others had mortgage problems or a divorce or kids to support (adopted kids, but still family). And as near as I could tell without going into Harry’s home computer, they’d all belonged to Harry’s WeWeb group. Every one of them was on WeWeb—which meant nothing in itself, most of the country was on WeWeb—but every one of Harry’s names had a page where portions were blocked from view.

If his sister was right, it would be tough to infiltrate the group. However, I had no doubt that a clever and patient person could come up with an ad targeting customers of a brand of lotion soothing to SalaMan skin, or supporters of certain political candidates, or any of a hundred other possible arrows and send them the ad.

And when the poor bastards responded to it, they’d ended up here.

A research facility.

At the bottom of a flight of metal stairs was a door. It was closed, although the stink that came around it made my eyes water. I took a deep breath and went through it.

Another long corridor, with steel doors on both sides. Every door had a small barred window in it. Eyes glistened from behind some of the bars.

I took care of the camera above the door, then eased forward to the first door and breathed, “Are there any guards down here?”

“Who . . . who are you?” A man’s voice, hesitant.

“Answer me!”

“Guards? No, but there’s a camer—”

“Where are the keys?”

“Keys?” He was either confused or frightened by the question. It occurred to me that his captors might have played games with him, and he was afraid this might be one of them. But I didn’t have time to pat his head.

“I came to get you all out of here, but you’ve got to help. Harry’s sister sent me,” I tried.

“Lizzie?”

I might as well have said Jesus and the Virgin Mary for all his astonishment. “The keys, man!”

“One key for all, on a ring near the door,” he shot back.

I leaped for the door, found the simple key, and stabbed it into his door. I thought I might have to drag him out, but he came willingly enough. I shoved the key at him. “Let the others out,” I started to say, but the key fell to the floor. I snatched it up, cursing his clumsiness. Then he held up his hands for me to look at.

His hands looked strange in the dim light, more like stubs. And in growing horror I saw that they were stubs. He had no fingers. No fingers at all.

“Regeneration experiment,” he said, in a voice so tight, it didn’t sound human.

My skin suddenly felt a size too small. I swallowed, and turned to open the next door.

There were eleven prisoners in that cellar. All of them were missing something. One woman had fingers about an inch long; God knows how many months she’d been down there. Another woman had a face that even in the near dark I could see was beautiful, but for her ruined eyes—

A thin man whose beard was either blond or gray shoved past me to embrace the blind woman, who jerked away and then cried “Bill!” and flung herself at him.

“Quiet!” I ordered, and to Bill I whispered, “Take her over to the door, we’ll all go up at once.”

I got the last two cages open, but one of the prisoners did not emerge. When I stepped in, I could see why.

I don’t know how long I stood there, torn between abandoning a person who was going to slow us down dangerously, and the impossibility of leaving anyone in this terrible place. But eventually I became aware of someone standing next to me. It was the first man I’d freed.

I said, “You’re Harry?”

“That’s right. You?”

“Mike Heller. Your sister hired me. Did you find your girl here? Eileen?”

“She died.”

“Ah. I’m sorry.”

“Before I got here. Do you want me to carry her?” he asked, gesturing at the girl on the cot.

“Can you?”

“I’ll sure as hell try.”

He’d been down here only a couple of weeks, which gave him a lot more reserves than some of the others. I helped lift her onto his back, and although he let out a sound when his hand brushed her knee, he clamped his arms against her legs and turned to the door.

Eleven of them—no: twelve, of us—gathered at the door. I lifted the gun, and whispered, “There’s stairs up and then a hallway. Go down it to the left about thirty feet, and the outside door’s at the end. Keep to one side in the hallway so I have a clear line of sight. If you head out the door at the angle of two o’clock you’ll be in the trees quickest. Up the hill and down, my car’s on the road with a key in a lockbox near the driver’s tire. If we’re discovered, I’ll keep these bastards in place and you move as fast as you can. Don’t worry about me, just go.

“And when you get closer to town, take my laptop out of the trunk and turn it on. The last e-mail it sends will give you a safe contact in the police department. Tell him to get someone here, fast. Now, ready?”

At least six of them started talking, with questions or protests, but Harry interrupted them. “There’s no time for this. We’ll do as he says.”

And they did. My gun leading the way, I crept up the steps, wincing at all the creaks and groans the crew behind me made. At the top, I had them all stand very still and got the door open, again sticking the gun out first, then my nose.

No one there.

I went into the hallway, and they came after me, limping and stumbling. I kept to the right, trying to look both ways at once, my heart in my throat. I mean, I’ve been in tight places before, even been shot at, but with eleven innocents on my back? That was a whole different ball game.

The damned door creaked as I opened it. Why, I don’t know, it hadn’t on my way in, but maybe I was a little more impatient this time. Anyway, it creaked, and then they were pouring past me into the darkness, little cries of disbelief and pleasure, surprise that it was dark, shuddering gasps of clean, night-scented air.

And then the lights went on.

“Go!” I said. Harry was last, with the woman on his back, and he hesitated. “Go, get her out of here!” I shoved him into the night, and then reached forward to slam the door shut, closing him out. Closing me in.

I jumped for the nearest side door, which was closed but not locked. An office of some kind, windowless of course, nice and dark. I left the door open a crack, pressing my ear to it, and about three seconds later I heard voices.

“—like the outside door.” A man, his voice high, by nature or with tension.

“I’ll check it.” This man sounded big, his voice deeper and slower; younger, maybe. I heard footsteps approaching; they sounded heavy; my hand got ready on the gun.

“Not the door,” snapped the first one. “Downstairs first, so we know if any of them are loose.”

The footsteps paused; a door opened and I heard a pair of feet descending the metal stairs. The older man stayed at the top, but the voice that rang up from below was perfectly clear:

“They’re gone! All of them!”

The older man’s curses retreated down the corridor until they were drowned out by the racket his partner made, pounding up the steel stairs. When he reached the top, he shouted, “You want me to go after them?”

“Get a shotgun, and wake up Andrew and Mannie. Christ,” he said in a lower voice, “I knew we should have a dog.”

I was glad about the dog, not so happy about the shotgun. I shifted to put my eye to the crack, and eased it slightly wider until I could see a large back going away from me. My legs twitched with wanting to dive for the door, but I stayed put.

If I was on the outside, I couldn’t know how many of them there were. Outside, I could keep them from coming out that one door, but there were two others, and in no time at all, they’d circle around me. Outside, I’d be safer, but the others wouldn’t.

Oh hell, admit it: I’d shut the door to force Harry and the rest to run.

I’d shut the door because I wanted to climb down the throats of these animals and tear them apart from within.

In fact, although I hadn’t exactly been thinking clearly when I made my choice, it wasn’t altogether idiotic. There was a good chance these guys would all make a dash for the door at once, allowing me to pick them off, or at least pin them down. I’d brought enough bullets to keep things hot for a while.

And for a minute, it looked like it would be okay. A clot of men appeared at the far end of the corridor, milling around and shouting at each other. Then they started in my direction.

I waited, counting heads: four. It was hard to tell exactly where they were in relation to the building’s front door, but I could see enough to know when they passed the door to the prison stairs. I gave it a few seconds, then opened the door wide enough to fit my gun arm through.

I’d hoped the older voice, the guy in charge, would be first, but I figured he was probably the man I’d seen drive up in the red Jeep, and sure enough, the head of white hair was barely visible past various shoulders. The big guy whose back I’d seen was at the front, carrying a shotgun. The two other guys, both with that rumpled look of being dragged out of bed, seemed like people who spent their days in a lab torturing mice, more at home with scalpels and microscopes than with the weapons they carried.

Didn’t matter: They were all targets.

I opened fire. The big guy saw me a split second before my finger went down and dove through a doorway—I thought I winged him, but it was one of the scientists behind him who fell. The white-haired guy and the skinny assistant on the left vanished into other doorways.

A shotgun went off, spattering the hallway but not making it through my wooden door. There was a lot of shouting and cursing, and finally a sharp order from that first voice I’d heard. Silence. Then: “Who is there?”

“Guess,” I called.

“Which one of you is that?”

“Oh, I’m a whole new nightmare for you.”

Silence again.

“I don’t know what you want, young man, but—”

“What do I want? I want you to die, in a whole lot of pain.”

Silence, longer this time.

“Well,” he said at last. “You can probably understand that we don’t wish to oblige you.”

“Tough.”

“Apart from our deaths, why did you come?”

“Because you’re a monster, and monsters need to be slain.” I don’t know why I said that. Probably because it didn’t matter what I said: The longer he talked, the farther his lab rats could scurry.

“And you are our modern-day hero, rescuing the creatures?”

“They’re people. Unlike you.”

“They’re valuable resources, whose unique heritage could save countless lives. Think of all the soldiers whose limbs might be regrown, the blind who might see, the—”

“Yeah, and because Hitler’s doctors and dentists learned things in the concentration camps, that justifies Dachau and Buchenwald? What say we put you in a lab and pull you apart, see if we can find a cure for evil?”

Jesus, I thought; stay here any longer and I’d start singing “Kumbaya.”

He answered, his voice all sad and patronizing. “I can see your mind is made up. Although I’m sorry your little friends have abandoned you here.”

“My choice.”

“And now you’re trapped.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Oh, very well. Andrew, you get ready to shoot our visitor when he puts his head around that doorway. Jonah, you’re on his blind side of the hallway: when I give the word—”

My gun went off, six times. The first tore up the floor next to the nose of Andrew’s gun and made it jerk back; the rest of them took out the four lights overhead, leaving a couple down at the far end.

I slapped in another clip and risked putting my eye to the crack, but nobody was moving.

“There,” I said. “Now it’s nice and dark, like creatures prefer.”

“Um, boss?” Andrew said. “What do we do now?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said the boss man. He sounded annoyed, more than anything, which made me nervous. I strained to hear, but I couldn’t tell what he was up to—until his voice came again, talking. On a phone.

“Manny? Dr. Curtis here. We have an intruder, with a gun. He’s in the office just inside the west door, the first room to the left. If you open the door, you and Jack can stand back in the darkness and blaze away, you can’t possibly miss him. But make sure you take care, we’re right down the hallway. How long? Okay. Yes, we’re not going anywhere, but then, neither is our intruder.”

That put a whole different picture on the situation.

I sighed, and reached for the knapsack.

When I was ready, I watched Andrew’s doorway. I didn’t figure him for a patient man, and indeed, after a minute the end of his shotgun eased around the frame. I let it come four inches, and then fired, at his door and at the other two for good measure. And once they had all ducked back in their holes, I stepped into the hallway, and threw.

Andrew’s curses almost hid the first sound of breaking glass. But my second bottle, aimed ten feet farther down the hallway, made an unmistakable noise, and the third one as well.

Dr. Curtis figured out what it meant first. I could feel him staring at the dim hallway, looking at the liquid and smashed glass, and then he must have smelled it.

He waited just long enough to see that the bottles had all landed on the far side of his door, long enough to figure out what I had in mind, long enough to make his choice between a chancy bullet and a sure burning to death. The old guy came out of his doorway so fast I almost wasn’t ready.

Almost.

The lighter in my hand snapped into life, the rag in the top of my last bottle flared, and I backhanded it into the corridor. Before the bottle hit the wall, the corridor exploded into a wall of flame.

The doc screamed as he ran, and he might have gotten the door open if I hadn’t managed to get off a couple of shots in that direction. A slightly more solid shape among the flames went down, and although I had to slam my own door shut then, I could hear him screaming for a while before he went still. A few minutes later, the others stopped, too.

And some time later, so did I.

EXCEPT . . .

If I died, who is telling this story?

Interesting fact—a last one: Some of the myths about salamanders are more or less true.

The room burned around me, my hair and clothing crinkled and burned, the beams overhead groaned and burned. The fire department got there, snaked their hoses into the inferno, and found five dead people. Or so they thought.

Then one of them moved.

Myth has it that a salamander can extinguish fire with the cold dampness of its body. Aristotle believed it, and some of the other old Greeks. Nonsense, of course, as even Pliny pointed out—but strangely enough, not entirely.

I lost my fingers, three toes, my voice, and most of my skin. A normal man would have died. They kept me in a coma for weeks. My looks disturbed hardened nurses for months.

But that was a year ago.

By the time I was in any shape to be questioned, there were really no questions left. They sent Frank to do the interview, even though he’d had nothing to do with the case other than passing on what I sent him. I don’t know, maybe I made them nervous.

Anyway, Frank told me a lot more than he asked me.

I knew about the scandals and the headlines, of course—when you’re in the hospital, they leave the television on a lot. So I’d sort of vaguely heard about the police raids and the government shake-ups; I’d heard the outraged speeches and the wild rumors and the dueling news stations. Even wrapped in my blanket of pain and drugs, I was aware of the shift of public opinion that made every SalaMan into a hero.

WeWeb closed down, after nine out of ten users canceled their pages, even though WeWeb did nothing but sell the ads.

A bill went in front of Congress to ban targeted ads, although no one thought it would pass.

What was expected to pass was a slew of bills reforming how science was done. Labs across the country were shut down or raided because of the links Dr. Curtis had formed with organized crime—nothing glues people to headlines like a modern-day Mengele: high-ranking scientist hires thugs to kidnap the raw material for his experiments; thugs go on to search the victims’ houses for more raw material; thugs set fires to discourage snoops.

And there’s nothing that makes the lawyers drool like a case linking universities and government agencies and organized crime and weird, mostly beautiful people like the SalaMen. It’s going to make the Nuremberg Trials look like squirrel food.

And you want to know the thing that astonishes me most, in all this? That Uncle Sam had in fact done exactly what it said it would: lock the door on the SalaMan files and make sure no one knew who we were. Which would’ve been a good and fair thing, except it meant that when we started disappearing, the FBI didn’t notice, since there was no reason to tie the disappearances together. The police didn’t notice, because the victims were so spread out. The media didn’t catch it, because even if they’d heard, who would believe it? Nobody noticed but Harry Savoy, and Harry was too paranoid to trust the FBI, the police, or the media.

Me? I kept out of everything. I had to shut my office, although I could’ve been busy a thousand hours a week if I’d been in any shape to work. I’m thinking that when I open again, I may actually call myself SalaMan Investigations. I might even try just working for my own people for a while.

But when might that be? Well, last night, while Lizzie and I were . . . well, as we were occupied with things that married people do, she said “Ow!” and sat up, rubbing her ribs. When she pulled her hand away, we both saw the red welt, up the side of her pale skin. I held the stubs of my fingers under the light, and studied them.

Sure enough, there among the scar tissue was a tiny rough protuberance. It looked for all the world like a baby’s fingernail.