The Birth of a new moon

It took a long time for the storm to pass, because every time Ana looked at Dulcie, one or the other of them would snort and set off the laughter, and when Ana put her bridge back in, Dulcie couldn't bear it, and demanded—in words—to be taken back to the shop to use the toilet again.

While they were inside, Ana brushed herself off and tore away (with her fingers) the now-crumpled and stuck-together length of tape, bringing on a fresh piece, which she wrapped tightly around the worn tubing and cut off with her pocketknife. She bent to replace it, deep in Rocinante's guts, and heard the tinkle of the shop bell behind her.

As the child's footsteps came to a halt behind her, Ana whirled around with her finger out and started to growl "Don't you dare laugh," when the words strangled in her throat at the sight of Dulcie stumbling backward in her panic to get away, her face twisted into a mask of sudden terror. Ana immediately took a step back and raised both her hands, palms out in a declaration of peace.

"Whoa, it's okay, Dulcie. I was just pretending. I'm not angry, not a bit, I was just acting fierce so you wouldn't laugh at my wet bottom." She turned and bent to point her forty-eight-year-old rear end at the child, a rear end with a perfect circle of dark denim where she had sat down on the wet street. She looked over her shoulder at the child. "It looks pretty dumb to have a wet butt."

The admission of adult frailty combined with the mildly rude word brought the beginnings of a smile to the child's face. Ana straightened up to look at her.

"I'm sorry, Dulcie. I didn't mean to surprise you like that."

Carla, who had lagged behind to fight with the lock and had missed the exchange, joined them with a puzzled look, knowing something had happened to change the mood so radically, but uncertain about asking. Instead, she gestured to the bus.

"Did you get it fixed, then?"

"Not really. It'll last for a bit and then die when I need it most. She's an old car, and parts are hard to get."

"Is that your only heater? I mean, don't you have a stove or something?"

"That's not very safe. I have some good warm blankets; I just crawl in and go to bed early."

Although Ana was prepared to go much further than that in laying hints, she did not have to say any more. Carla had been thinking hard about Dulcie's strange openness, and although she wanted to believe that she had been responsible for freeing the child, wanted Steven to look at her with respect and a word of praise, she had to admit that it wasn't her, but this woman who had somehow, unknowingly, pried Dulcie out of her shell. Five times Dulcie had spoken—and laughed! There was nothing to do but bring this odd woman with the ugly haircut and try to hang on to her until Steven returned home. He would want that.

"Why don't you come back with us?" Carla said. "We live in a community about forty-five minutes away. There's plenty of room. And lots of fireplaces," she added.

Dulcie did not say anything; she didn't need to, the way she stood gripping the lumpy bag, waiting for this lady to say yes.

Strangely enough, Ana was the one to hesitate. She had been prepared to spend days working her way into the community. Instead, she was slipping in after bare hours, but still she hesitated—for a brief moment, true, but a concentrated one..

She could only wish the child didn't look so much like Abby.

Chapter Nine

Cults Among Us 87

leads to the macho confrontational approach to resolving a standoff—what I think of as the "create-a-crisis" or "Look you little bastards, you can't mess with me" point of view. There is no denying the appeal of having a clear goal and definite action, following in the footsteps of the Israelis at Entebbe and performing a deft and forceful coup, rescuing the hostages and crushing the hostage takers.

However, frustrating as it may be to men hedged around by boredom, testosterone, and the pressures of media and their own higher ranks to DO SOMETHING, the coup de guerre does not work when there is no one to rescue, and one must always bear in mind that in a strong religious community, whether one calls it a cult or a sect or just a group of believers, there are no hostages; I repeat, there are no hostages wanting rescue. Typically the men, women and children of the community love and believe in what they are doing, and will die-willingly, freely die—before submitting to the perceived enemy, the hands of Babylon, the government representatives. This is as true now as it was in first century Palestine when the Jewish rebels at Masada committed themselves to their own blades rather than surrender their children to the Romans, or when the Russian Old Believers, who were

From Cults Among Us by Anne Waverly, Ph.D., Oxford University Press, 1996

As soon as Ana opened Rocinante's door, she knew that Carla had not misled her about the fireplaces. The air was sweet with piñon smoke, that incense of the high country, and the night moved across her face, smooth and cold and clear. It was a sort of night to make even a middle-aged woman with a bad knee want to do something mad, throw off her clothes and raise her arms to the stars, perhaps, or lift her face and howl at the young moon.

Reluctantly, she came back to earth and looked around to see what had happened to Carla. The woman was standing at the passenger door of her pickup truck, laden down with parcels and a bulging grocery bag, exhorting Dulcie to get down and come on. Ana closed Rocinante's door, thought about locking it and decided not to, and buttoned up her jacket while she walked over to see if she could help.

The child had been sleeping, she saw, and was still more than half asleep, fisting her eyes against the thin brightness of the pickup's cabin light and whining the inarticulate protest of the very young.

"Can I carry something?" Ana asked. To her dismay, Carla stepped back from the truck and nodded at Dulcie.

"Why don't you just carry her in?" she said with thinly concealed annoyance. "Otherwise we're all going to freeze to death out here." Carla turned and walked away.

Ana swallowed and stood where she was. Dulcie's arms came up in the natural, trusting gesture of a child waiting to be lifted up, her normally guarded expression rendered soft and vulnerable by sleep; it was all Ana could do to keep herself from bolting for the safety of Rocinante.

"Is something wrong?" Carla called.

Ana shuddered and felt the sweat break out under her hat and along her back, but she bent down and put her hands under the child's arms. "Come on, Dulcie," she said thickly. I'll give you a ride."

This was not by any means the first time she had held a child since her daughter had died. All the other contacts, though, had been casual, daytime hugs, pats, or rough-and-tumble play, and none of the children had resembled Abby. Not for eighteen years had a trusting young child reached up to slide her arms around Ana's neck, hitched herself up to perch on a maternal hip, and then dropped an utterly relaxed head against Ana's shoulder. The fierce and immediate response of her own body to the sensation of holding Dulcie took Ana by storm, and she could only stand stiffly, fighting for control.

Dulcie was too drowsy to be aware of Ana's reaction, but behind them Carla, impatient at the delay, had turned back to see what the problem was. Ana heard the crunch of her feet and stepped back quickly, kicked shut the door of the pickup, and hurried to join her, infinitely grateful for the poor lighting along the path.

The nearly unbearable luxury of the warm, limp body clinging to her made it impossible to concentrate on anything more complicated than placing her feet without stumbling, but she was peripherally aware of buildings around them, of spiny desert plants and low shrubs behind the light-colored rocks that lined the borders of the path, of a few lights behind windows. Then Carla was struggling to open a door, and they were inside.

Rough plaster walls, uneven red paver tiles underfoot, and exposed timbers over their heads placed them solidly in the Southwest idiom of architecture, even without the bright rug on one wall and a collection of Indian pottery arranged on a shaky-looking table, little more than lashed-together branches topped by unsanded planks. The scale of the hall and the rooms they passed was large, as if designed for the gathered community, but at the moment they were echoing and empty.

As if reading Ana's thoughts, Carla spoke over her shoulder as she led Ana down the hallway toward the back of the building and the sounds of clattering dishes.

"There's normally a lot more people around, especially right after dinner. But just at the moment we have a busload of kids and adults down in Tucson for a basketball game and to visit Biosphere, and some of us are off at the sister house in England. Steven's there, but he'll be back in a couple of days. I hope you'll stay—we've got plenty of room, and I know you'd love to meet him."

"Who's Steven?" Ana asked ingeniously.

"His name is Steven Change, but we just call him Steven. He's our spiritual counselor. He founded the community."

"Oh. Like your guru?"

"I don't know about that," Carla said disapprovingly. "He'sjusta very wise man. He sees things, and helps others see them. I hope you'll stay to meet him."

"I hope so, too."

One last door took them into the sudden brightness of the communal kitchen, a room Ana had seen dozens of times in her past: huge, battered stainless steel pans (never aluminum, no matter how cheap it was—the health risks were unacceptable) heaped precariously on open shelves from which hung ladles and spatulas and industrial-sized spoons; stacks of ill-assorted mixing bowls nested on other shelves, dented stainless steel resting inside peeling plastic inside hand-thrown pottery objects so heavy most people could not wrestle them from the shelf. The cupboards would be filled with cheap, chipped partial sets of department-store stoneware plates, graying, scratched Melmac cereal bowls, and all the handmade coffee mugs too lopsided or ugly to sell at the craft store in Sedona. The drawers would hold vast numbers of flat spoons, twisted forks, ill-suited knives, and all the odds and ends that collect in a kitchen, the balls of twine and meat thermometers, the toothpicks and egg separators and paraphernalia bought or brought by one cook or another, abandoned under the pressures of quantity food production or when the cook tired and transferred over to work in the vegetable garden or weaving shed. One of the drawers would be jammed solid with plastic bags from the grocery store.

It was familiar, as comforting and dreary as a homecoming, and Ana found she was smiling even before Carla started introducing her to the three women cleaning up the evening meal.

The names made less of an impact on her than did the warmth on her face (rubbery with the cold of the long drive in Rocinante's still-unheated interior), the smells of cooking on her stomach, and the weight of Dulcie on her arms. She nodded in acknowledgment to Suellen (a small woman with a pale blond bun on the back of her head), Laurel (tall, bony, glasses, and thick brown plait), and Amelia (round, glasses, a bad burn scar on the upper part of her forearm, and older than the others, perhaps a year or two older than Ana), and while Carla was easing her various bundles down to the counter and into the hands of the three women, Ana looked around for a chair, found a bench against the wall, and went over to it. She shifted Dulcie's legs to one side and sat down cautiously, but the bench seemed more sturdy than decorative, and she relaxed. Dulcie burrowed into Ana's jacket and gave a little grunt of contentment, a sound that reached straight out of Ana's past and gave her heart a hard twist.

"That sure smells good," she said loudly. "One of the drawbacks of living in a bus is that you find yourself eating the same one-pot meals all the time. And you never have really fresh bread."

The meaningless little speech succeeded in not only attracting the attention of the other women, but also woke Dulcie, who sat up, blinking crossly at the light. Amelia put down the red cabbage she had taken from a bag and came over to where Ana sat, bending to smile into Dulcie's face. She smelled of mint and perspiration and she had a small mole with a pair of dark hairs growing out of it on the side of her jaw. As she bent forward, Ana caught sight of a heavy silver chain under the edge of her blouse.

"Dulcie my sweet, did you have a big day helping Carla in the shop?" Amelia, a born grandmother, had an accent from somewhere in the south of England. "How about a bite to eat before you slip into bed? No? Well, just a glass of milk and a biscuit, then, how about that?"

Dulcie slipped out of Ana's lap without a backward glance to follow Amelia over to the big refrigerator, leaving Ana both relieved and longing to reach for her and pull her back. Instead, she stood up briskly and stripped off her gloves and jacket, dropping them on the end of the bench. She pulled off her hat, added it to the pile. When she turned back, running her fingers through the impossibly short hair on her head, she noticed that Amelia and Suellen were looking at her oddly, and then both of them quickly moved away to resume what they had been doing.

Both women seemed to have been taken aback by Ana's appearance, and she ran her fingers through her hair once more, to calm its apparent disorder. Funny, she reflected, I didn't think it was that bad.

Carla showed her where to scrub Rocinante's grease from her fingers, then gave her a bowl of thick vegetable soup and several slices of heavy bread. There was water to drink, tasting strongly of minerals, and the offer of dessert in the form of fruit crumble made with tinned peaches, or the healthy-looking cookies Dulcie had taken away with her, both of which Ana declined. When they had eaten, when the last of the pans was washed and the surfaces wiped clean, Carla began to dress again for the outside.

"I'll show you your room. Breakfast is next door to the kitchen from six to eight in the morning. I work the shop again tomorrow, but I'll be around until nine. I eat breakfast about seven-thirty, or Amelia and Laurel will be in the kitchen. Got your gloves? It's sure cold tonight—I'll be glad when winter's over. The spring up here is really beautiful."

They went out the same way they had entered, down the gravel pathways that seemed even more dimly lit than before. Ana stumbled once, but Carla did not notice, chattering inconsequentially as she led her charge past the vaguely seen buildings and back to Rocinante, where Ana retrieved her toothbrush, some clothes, and the big metal flashlight.

"Do I need to lock it?" she asked Carla.

"Well, you can," said the woman disapprovingly.

Ana left the keys in her jeans pocket. "I just didn't know if you had problems with intruders, kids in the neighborhood, that kind of thing."

"There isn't a neighborhood," Carla said, "and our own kids wouldn't steal anything, not once they come here."

Ana wondered at the confidence of this statement. The kids fostered out to the care of the Change community had often been the rounds of juvenile hall and a series of temporary homes, and many of them had police records; she couldn't believe there wasn't a certain amount of misbehavior when they came here. Change it might be, but a leopard's spots didn't fade overnight.

Still, she didn't imagine there was too much to worry about. The road out was gated and the only valuables inside Rocinante were hidden beyond the reach of the average delinquent. She did debate with herself whether she needed to pursue Carla's provocative statement "not once they come here", but she decided that she was too tired, and that Carla was insensitive enough not to notice her guest's lack of curiosity.

Besides which, they had reached their destination, and Carla was holding open a door, turning on a light, and leading her into a building considerably less imaginative and carefully built than the communal hall had been. The walls were simple painted sheetrock, the decorations desultory and mass-produced. Her bedroom, the third and last one to the right, was cold and sparsely furnished. It could have used Dulcie's brilliant rug on the floor, Ana thought. She was pleased, though, that when Carla went over to a motel-style heater under the window and turned a dial, warm air billowed out. Carla drew the curtains against the night, checked that the two narrow beds had sheets and that there were extra blankets in the closet, pointed out the towel hanging openly on the wall, and showed Ana the shared bathroom across the hallway.

"There's no one else here tonight, though," she said. "It's kind of early for casual visitors, and with Steven away, there aren't any retreats scheduled. Anyway, I hope you're comfortable, and I'll see you in the morning. Oh yes, let's see. We don't have a lot of rules, except basic things like no loud music and no drugs, but we appreciate it if you don't wander into the buildings, since most of them have people living in them, and I should warn you that the outside lights go out at midnight, so take a flashlight if you're going to be out after that. And there is a community rule that we don't wear any jewelry except wedding rings, and no extreme dress, and only small amounts of makeup, which don't look like they're going to be a problem for you. Okay? Good night, then."

Ana listened to Carla's retreat, easily followed through the flimsy walls, and fingered the hammered surface of her new necklace thoughtfully. In a moment she was alone, left in sole possession of the two-story building reserved, she thought, for unimportant guests and people outside the Change community—quite literally outside, in truth, perhaps half a mile down the road from the central compound.

The fan blew out its warm air; there was no other sound in the guest house. After a while she put her jacket back on and went to explore, but she found nothing unexpected, nothing of interest, just sixteen bedrooms, most of them with two beds, one desk, two chairs, a shared bedside table, and a rug or two on the floor. There were also six communal bathrooms, one tiny kitchen with stove and empty refrigerator, and two storage closets for bedding and cleaning materials. Only two other rooms were made up, ready for occupancy; the others had bare mattresses with folded blankets and pillows neatly stacked at their feet.

She found a heater in the bathroom nearest her room and turned it on to thaw out the chilly space, then went back to her room and sat for half an hour or so with her light out and the curtains drawn back, vague thoughts chasing themselves around her brain while her hands massaged her knee and her eyes watched the young moon. When she judged the bathroom warm enough, she took her towel and the sweatshirt and sweat pants she used as nightwear and crossed over the cold, empty hall to take the first shower she'd had since leaving Oregon.

She used a lot of lovely hot water.

She was wakened in the morning by the brisk crunch, crunch, crunch of a single person walking past her window on a gravel path. Although she lay waiting for something else, there came no other noise, and no one entered her building.

A look at the clock told her that breakfast would soon be starting in the main hall; she wondered if the members of Change drank coffee, and decided she should resign herself to something herbal or, at best, black tea. The things we do for our country, she thought, and then abruptly recalled the last time she had heard that phrase. She felt her face go red and then laughed quietly to herself, and threw back her blankets to face the new day.

Chapter Ten

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

The desert was still and clear, a morning so filled with promise that one could almost believe the internal combustion engine would never be invented. Ana knew she should wander up to the communal dining hall and begin the process, but the surrounding hills called to her, and she turned her back on breakfast. After all, she did need to get the lay of the land, didn't she? She dropped her compact bird-watching binoculars into her pocket and set out for the nearest hill.

The hill was farther than it looked, and there was no easy path leading to its top. Ana scrambled and panted and prayed that her knee and her bones would stand up to the demands she was making on them.

Finally she stopped, and if it was not exactly the top, it was close. She eased herself down on to a flat boulder, and looked out upon the Change compound.

It was bigger than Glen's aerial photograph had indicated. The seven round buildings of the central compound had looked like African huts in the picture, which threw off the rest of the perspective, but in fact each circular building was much larger than the guest quarters where she had been lodged. She wouldn't be surprised if sixty or eighty people could live in each one, given a propensity for cheek-by-jowl, monastic-style housing. Four of the outside buildings seemed to be complete as well as the even larger building at the hub. The remaining two were still under construction, one of them little more than a circle of foundation blocks.

It was also more beautiful. Seen from overhead, the layout had been flat, two-dimensional. From her angle, the buildings and gardens came alive and took on a relationship to the outlying fields and the hollow of red stone in which they were laid. It still looked somewhat otherworldly, did the compound, like something inspired by space aliens, but it was at the same time clearly of this earth.

She sat in her godlike perch and watched people come and go along the red gravel paths, into the hub building and out again to one or another of the outlying sheds and barns. A group of children accompanied by a couple of taller escorts burst out of a building and swirled along one of the pathways, bright and lively dots of motion, before disappearing into the doors of the building that held the communal dining hall, their adults following sedately behind.

She lowered the small binoculars and surveyed the whole. She was satisfied with how her introduction to Change was proceeding, the familiar patterns of Anne Waverly remaining in suspension, keeping her fears and her doubts locked away to herself while her alter ago and former self Ana Wakefield walked, wide-eyed and eager, into her new and exciting experience. It was not, as she had feared, proving difficult to usher Anne behind her door. Anne was no more real than Ana Wakefield was, and now that she was in place, she remembered how restful it had been each of the earlier times, to immerse herself in a passive role, knowing there was nothing she could do except absorb it all like a sponge. And when she was saturated, Glen would reach in, pull her out, and wring her dry, and she would put on Anne Waverly again and go back to the university and the trees and her dogs.

The only thing wrong with the comfortable playacting she was wrapping herself in was that child with the frizzy black hair. She always had an uncomfortable few moments when she first met the children of her newest community. The children were always the hardest part, a strong emotional tug reaching out from her past to threaten her equilibrium. She had occasionally wondered if this was why she had ended up teaching at a university, a community that contained very few small children—her way of touching young lives while avoiding the dangerous maternal responses set off by the very young. The surprise of Dulcie, her distressing resemblance to Abby, would no doubt fade with familiarity, but the thought of the child was a bothersome little itch in the back of her mind, an irritation that kept Ana's new skin from a complete and comfortable fit.

Speaking of children, where was Dulcie now? she wondered idly, and then, What time is it, anyway? She did have a supply of food in Rocinante, but a solitary meal was hardly the best way to begin her relationship with Change. Taking a last glance at the view, she set about climbing down to the valley, and gained the bottom unscathed by dint of never raising her gaze from her feet.

Hurrying up the road, she exchanged waves and smiles with the occupants of several exiting cars. Once past the parking area, she greeted Change members with words instead of a wave: Good morning. Beautiful morning, isn't it? How are you? and nearing the main building, Is there any breakfast left?

When she got to the main hall and pulled open the heavy door, she had to step back briskly and give way to a dozen or more waist-high members of the Change community, all of them chattering away at the tops of their voices and pulling on brightly colored jackets and sweaters. They took the opening door as permission, or opportunity, and washed past her as a unit, breaking into a run and sweeping out of sight around the building toward the playground noises coming from a distance. One of the lagging adults, a woman in her early twenties busily trying to fasten a buckle on a soft baby pack worn on her chest, gave Ana a quick and apologetic smile as she, too, ducked through the conveniently open door.

"The swings are calling," she said in brief explanation, and followed the children in the direction of the playground.

There was breakfast left, though only of the cold cereal, canned fruit-or-bananas, and sour yogurt variety. There was no coffee, though she could have had a cup of black tea if the big urns hadn't been cleared away. She satisfied herself with a small glass of goat's milk and orange juice made from an inexpensive concentrate.

Ana gathered her bowl in one hand and the two glasses in the other, and surveyed the room for a minute before choosing her seat. There were only nine people sitting down, in three groups. She decided against the young couple, who appeared too wrapped up in each other to welcome an intruder, and the four men who had obviously already put in two or three sweaty hours of dirty physical labor. Instead, she gravitated around to the three women nursing their cups of tea. One of them was Laurel from the night before, who recognized Ana as and moved over a fraction to welcome her to the bench.

Introductions were made—Teresa Montoya, pretty and silent, and Dominique Picard, who had an accent and an appearance as French as her name. Ana greeted them, sat down, and made a comment about the beautiful morning; with that simple prime, the well of conversation began easily to flow, even when Laurel excused herself to begin her kitchen duties.

Teresa and Dominique, it seemed, were teachers. All of the older students currently being off to basketball and Biosphere, the two women were free to bring their record books up-to-date and have a leisurely consultation over an extended breakfast. They were interested to hear that Ana was herself a teacher, and asked her about her experience.

"Well," she said, "I used to teach the little guys—I started with kindergarten, then third grade for several years. Then I wanted a change so I upgraded my certificate and taught high school in a private alternative school—history, English lit, and even beginning Spanish for a year," The two women did not go so far as to exchange significant glances, but Ana could feel that they were definitely paying attention. "Tell me about your school here. How many kids are there?"

"We have about a hundred kids in the community, eighty-seven of them in the school," Dominique told her.

"Really? That's quite a good-sized school. How many people in the community in all?"

"Two hundred seventy, two hundred eighty, something like that. A high percentage of children, you are thinking, no? Do you know anything about us, Ana?"

"Not a thing, really. Carla took pity on me last night in Sedona when she saw me working on my bus's heater, but we didn't have a chance to talk. I did gather that this is a religious community."

"Please, whatever you do, do not think of us as a cult. We are a community of people brought together by a common interest in spirituality and responsible living—personal transformation leading to a change in society as a whole. Steven is first among us here, but he is no cult leader." Ana smiled to show her sympathy, and Dominique, mollified, went on.

"We have a high percentage of children here because one of the ways we take responsibility for our existence on this earth is to nurture young people who have been abandoned by their families. We take in so-called problem children—children who have been rejected by a series of foster homes, who are being released from juvenile detention centers, children too old or too ill-behaved for the adoption agencies—and we give them structure in their lives, the firm hand and good example of mature adults, healthy food for their bodies, fresh air and open space for their spirits, education for their minds, and, when they are ready for it, the skills to personally transform their souls,"

"And basketball games," said Ana.

Dominique looked puzzled for a moment, then grinned. "Basketball, yes—and we have a killer baseball team as well. Kids need focused relaxation, and a little friendly competition teaches them how to use aggression, not be used by it—a lot of the boys who come to us have real problems with aggression, learned from their fathers, continued by their peers. Besides which, an all-American team sport is a way we can demonstrate to the community and the state that we're not a bunch of weirdos about to start shooting at the FBI and BATF." The colloquial familiarity with governmental agencies was disconcerting, particularly as Dominique had hit on the very purpose of Ana's presence here, but it was also amusing to hear the phrase "bunch of weirdos" rendered in a French accent. Ana laughed. "I met a child named Dulcie yesterday, who I assume is being fostered here,"

"Dulcie is a sweetheart. But why do you not think she was born here?"

Without pausing to consider, Ana said, "Because she acts like an abused child," Oh God, she then thought, what if Dulcie is actually one of their own? But both Teresa and Dominique were already nodding.

"She has only been with us about six weeks. She speaks only to her brother, who is also here, but she has begun to respond to outsiders by gestures, nodding, or pointing, and occasionally she uses a few words. That is progress,"

"Dulcie?" said Ana. "Do you have more than one Dulcie here? The girl I met last night was talking just fine,"

"Dulcie was?" It was the first time Teresa had contributed; both women were leaning across the table as if to seize Ana by the collar.

"Yeah. When she and Carla saw me working on the engine, she asked me what I was doing. And what was the other thing? Oh yes, when I pulled a length of duct tape from the roll using my front teeth, she was a good little mother and told me I shouldn't use my teeth like that, they'd come loose and fall out. And then she got the giggles when I actually pulled my teeth out. I have a dental plate," she explained.

Teresa and Dominique looked at each other thoughtfully.

"Well," said Dominique. "Interesting. Would you like to see the schoolrooms?"

"Sure," said Ana. "Let me just take the dishes back." She piled up her things and took the empty cups of the two women, turned to carry them over to the kitchen, and then nearly dropped her burden in astonishment.

"Good… heavens," she said. It was the first time she had faced the high half-wall that dropped down to divide the high-ceilinged dining hall from the kitchen. Last night she had merely glanced in as she went past, and this morning she had come in at the far door, taken her food from the buffet, and walked over to the tables to sit with her back to the kitchen. Now, however, she stared at the high wall and at the ten-foot-high mural that stretched the full sixty-foot width of the room.

The theme of the painting was proclaimed in foot-high gold letters smack in the middle: TRANSFORMATION. At the left side of the mural a highly realistic portrayal of the untouched desert that Ana had contemplated from her high perch that morning gradually gave way to the gentle civilization of fields and crops from which tumbled baskets of fruit, tomatoes, eggplants, and grain that spilled into the central image, the kitchen. Five figures stood with their backs to the painter and their arms raised, giving praise to a fiercely glowing homo, the womb-shaped bread oven found behind native dwellings throughout the Southwest, its top slightly elongated by the artist's perception into something closer to a pear in shape. To the right stretched an abundance of cooked dishes, breads, casseroles, and pots of soup that nourished a long row of identical people, again shown from behind, and then a row of people marching renewed to the fields while in the background children played on a slide and a set of swings. The people were followed by a jagged, half-raised circular stone building, and finally, seated in a lotus position, a meditating man surrounded by a shimmering golden aura.

Ana laughed in pleasure at the sight of it, and felt that really, she might as well climb into Rocinante and ride away: Any group with sufficient sense of humor and sheer exuberant joy to paint that mural above the entrance to their communal kitchen was not about to twist itself in self-loathing or paranoia.

She walked with Teresa and Dominique to the schoolrooms in the central building. On the way she looked curiously at her surroundings. The buildings were impressive and original, massive circular objects slapped together of rock and cement that somehow managed to look crudely primitive and wildly modernistic at the same time.

The garden, however, was the real delight. Xeriscape landscaping at its most austere, the carefully scattered cactuses, boulders, and desert plants had the look of modern sculpture in the courtyard of an art museum, softened only by the rises and falls of the ground and the sprinkled clumps of delicate grasses. There was even, Ana was charmed to see, a boojum tree at least twelve feet high, its glorious blue-gray trunk straight and tall in its cloud of tangly, tiny-leafed branches.

"For the Snark was a boojum, you see!" she exclaimed. Teresa looked at her as if she were mad, and Dominique blinked. "A poem," she explained. "By Lewis Carroll."

"Ah," said Dominique.

Ana decided not to attempt further explanation, and as they continued on she turned her attention to the buildings themselves. All of these in the central compound were made in the same fashion, comprising great, rough-hewn hunks of rock held together by reddish concrete. The rocks were not laid so much as tumbled, with the spaces filled by the concrete varying wildly and including a lot of gaps. It was a pleasing technique, looking both massive and delicate, but Ana had to wonder if it wouldn't fall in on itself in an earthquake.

"I don't think I've ever seen buildings like this," she commented.

"Then you haven't been to Taliesen West."

"Frank Lloyd Wright's place? That's in this area, isn't it? No, I haven't been there."

"It's down near Scottsdale. Beautiful. Inspired. Needs a lot of muscle, though. We build the forms, lay in miles of reinforcing bar, heave in the rocks—we have a forklift for the bigger ones—and shovel in yards and yards of very stiff concrete. After a couple of days we take the forms down and do the next section.".

"That explains the muscle on the men in the dining hall," Ana commented.

"Steven calls it 'sweat meditation'," Teresa volunteered seriously.

Ana decided that this was one Change member who had not contributed to the humor in the TRANSFORMATION mural, but she said merely, "I'm looking forward to meeting Steven," and followed the two teachers into the central building.

Ana spent the morning with Dominique, exploring the classrooms, shelving books in the nascent library, helping fill out a stack of evaluation forms, all the endless process of running a legally recognized school under the state's watchful eye. They took lunch in the hall, where Ana met more strong, happy young men and women than she had seen gathered together in one place for a very long time. Then, in the afternoon, Ana met the children of the Change community.

Many public schools, Ana knew, had gardens for the students, "life labs" where the elementary classrooms' bean-seed-in-a-milk-carton could be carried through to its fullness, giving the children actual edible beans to harvest. Concepts of biology and ecology were given solid form, and the students learned cause-and-effect by seeing their own plants wither or thrive.

The students here were put in the gardens for pedagogic reasons, but also as a basic lesson in responsibility. Change was as nearly self-supporting as a desert community could be, and the earlier the children learned to become active contributors to the whole, the better, for themselves and for the community.

Today was dedicated to the beginning of the year's cycle. Ana was assigned to a group of six five- and six-year-olds, and the subject was the planting of beans. Instead of small waxy milk cartons salvaged from the lunchroom and bags of sterilized potting soil from the local hardware store, they used rough pots formed out of recycled newspaper and scoops of rich, fragrant soil from a compost heap mixed with the sandy earth of the desert, but other than these surface differences, the effect was the same as any other classroom bean-planting. Clumsy fingers, chubby still with baby fat, spilled more soil than the pots received and either thrust the beans so far into the soil the seeds would be hard put to reach the light or else left them so close to the surface they would be unable to stand upright. Each child then drowned his seeds with water. Muddy, wet, and thrilled, they placed each already disintegrating pot onto flats, and then she herded them out of the potting shed toward the beds where the beans would be planted when the survivors had their first three leaves.

These children knew what was going on, that was clear, even if few of them could handle the gardening implements with any dexterity. They squatted down along the side of the weedy bed and plunged their trowels enthusiastically into the soil as they tried to emulate Ana, who was loosening the soil with a garden fork before she pulled the weeds and tossed them into a nearby bucket. Most of the children overestimated the motion required, and clots of dirt and weed flew all over.

Ana kept them at it for twenty minutes, abandoning the bed with the ravaged edges only when the next group stood waiting to take over the trowels. They then went to scrub hands, brush ineffectually at knees, and gather eggs at the henhouse.

She began to relax in their company. She had only experienced one bad moment, a brief blink of an eye when she seemed to be standing not in Arizona, but long ago in Texas, and it was Abby digging at her side with similar enthusiasm, unearthing an enormous worm and holding it up in triumph. But the memory was gone in an instant and she was again Ana Wakefield in Arizona, and the worst part of meeting the children, the early moments of extreme vulnerability, were past, she was sure of it. Now she could get on with the business of saving them.

Once the kids were delivered, tired and dirty, back to the schoolrooms, Dominique took Ana back in hand. They wandered through the farm sheds and admired the goats, looked at the ongoing projects in the crafts barn, the pots, mugs, and weavings due for sale in the Sedona gallery, saw the bare orchard and the plowed fields and the wide, mulched-over vegetable beds, mature brothers of the beds the students played at, which in the summer would surely resemble the left-hand side of the TRANSFORMATION mural.

At about three o'clock, Dominique excused herself, saying that she had her meditation period now. Ana went back down the road to the dull guest quarters, but stopped there only long enough to fetch her camera and her journal, and took them up to the red-rock perch above the compound.

It was only to be expected that a woman like Ana Wakefield would keep a journal, the daily thoughts and meditation of a life-long inhabitant of the New Age, her inner thoughts, reflections, and a record of her dreams. In it she recorded descriptions, personal details, speculations, and interesting asides. She could even make detailed if amateurish sketches of her surroundings, and anyone going through her things would see only an innocent diary of events. In truth, it was Ana's means of reporting to Glen.

It was small enough to take with her at all times, and she tended to stick it in a pocket and leave it there even when she had no intention of writing or sketching. That way she would have it with her on trips to town, where she could divert into a library or copy shop and in minutes have the pages photocopied and either into a stamped envelope or faxed to Glen and discarded, before anyone noticed she was gone. She felt like a teenager sometimes, but she kept a diary.

The climb up the hill was not much easier the second time, but she had at least discovered some of the hazards among the boulders, and this time she located a natural seat, shaped for comfort. She took a few photos with her trusty old 35mm, then opened the journal.

Over the years she and Glen had developed a series of code phrases, words that could be used naturally in the journal or a postcard to "Uncle Abner", or even in a conversation, but which had specific meanings to indicate, for example, that things were going either so slowly or so smoothly that she thought Glen might as well go do something else for a while, or that she needed someone to hang around the prearranged meeting place until she could get free, or that she was feeling nervous and wanted to get out soon.

The word used to show this first state of affairs was, appropriately, "placid", and she used it now, twice, in describing the compound with a third of its population missing and then on the following page in speaking about the goats in the field. She did not know if Glen would appreciate the nuances of the mural (though he sometimes seemed to have a sense of humor), so she spent some time on that, reflecting on its hidden meanings without giving too much away herself. She closed the entry immediately after the second "placid", for emphasis, read what she had written (checking to be sure that she had not by accident made use of other, contradicting code words), and climbed back down the hill to see if she could lend a hand in the kitchen.

After dinner, when the dishes were clean and the small children in bed, Ana was invited to join the community in its group meditation. She accepted with the appropriate eagerness, hung up her damp dishtowel to dry, and waited while her new friends Laurel and Amelia checked on the breakfast provisions and shut down the lights. They took coats from an entire room dedicated to rolling metal clothes racks hung with hundreds of bent metal hangers, and bundled up fully before stepping out into the frigid night air. The three women walked quickly from the dining hall to the hub building, their breath steaming clouds around their heads, and joined several others just entering the foyer.

This time, however, instead of going left into the school offices or right into the circular corridor that connected all the classrooms, Ana followed the others straight ahead, through a set of double doors that looked so like the walls around them as to be invisible, given away only by the slight discoloration of the wood where a hundred hands every day pushed them open. Inside the doors was another, smaller foyer, this one with a solid wall on the inward side and swinging doors to the right and left, forming a baffle to keep those outside from seeing in. Amelia went through the right-hand door, Laurel through the left. After a moment's hesitation, and aware that Laurel was standing and waiting for her, Ana followed Amelia.

Her first thought on setting foot into the circular meditation hall was how amazing it was that such a room could be concealed in plain sight, surrounded as it was by one of the busiest, most public places on the entire compound, the school.

There were two stories to this building, the school below and the residences of Steven Change and his oldest companions above, but the domed roof made this central part taller yet. The top of the circular skylight was nearly forty feet above the floor. The actual diameter was not great, but full use had been made of the volume by the simple, dramatic device of a pair of circular ramplike steps winding up the walls, forming an external double helix of platforms, each roughly four feet square, many of which were occupied already by seated figures, settling into poses of meditation. Some of the platforms were empty, at irregular intervals, but mostly in the middle section, which made Ana wonder if perhaps the seats weren't specifically assigned, and their owners absent.

That was later, though. At first all she noticed was the sense of constricted space below, underscored by the near-black carpeting on the floor and the sheer, high walls rising on all sides that gave way to warm reds and gathered light above until at the very top, where outside spotlights shone down through the glass, there was an explosion of warmth and movement and golden light.

Just under the glass was suspended a shimmering golden cloud, a sparkling, breathing entity made up of dozens of fine gold rods held horizontal to the floor and turning freely in the rising air. Ana had seen something like it once in a San Francisco cathedral. That sculpture, though, had served to evoke the cool splendor and ethereal magnificence of the Holy Spirit. This one made a person yearn to be closer, to rise up from the dark commonality and strive for light and entrance to the dazzling gold cloud.

Ana was not the only one to feel the pull. She was bumped twice in the jostle near the door as others paused to throw their gaze upward. For some there was awe, for others an almost ritual throwing back of the head that reminded Ana of the pause at the font when a Roman Catholic entered a church. She watched two of the ritualists, both of whom came in the right-hand door, and saw them climb the rampways to take up seats raised above the rest. Among them, she saw, were Amelia, Suellen, and Teresa. Teresa's platform was high up enough that it would have given an acrophobe problems. Ana settled into a place on the floor with her back against the wall, tucking her knees in with care, and gave herself over to a close examination of this holy of holies at the very center of Change.

The golden mobile and the double helix of meditation steps were not the oddest thing about this room, although they were the most immediately impressive. In their shadow, an observer could easily overlook the peculiar structure that took up the center of the hall, forming a sort of axis device around which the circular room might be visualized as turning.

The axis rose out of the floor in what Ana had no doubt was the precise center of the hall, a dull black pipe about fifteen inches in diameter that ran straight up and through the middle of a circular fireplace with an overhanging hood until it divided into a Y about two-thirds of the way up the hall's height. The two arms disappeared into the dome roof just below the edges of the skylight. In the arms of the Y a circular platform had been set, connected to the walls by six narrow walkways.

The more Ana looked at this weird structure, the stranger it seemed. It was as if some mad engineer had decided to cross a huge chemical apparatus with the rat-guard of a ship's ropes and turn the result into a tree house. That it was deeply symbolic for the builders she had no doubt—nobody would go to that amount of work for mere decoration—but what that symbolism might be, and if it had any actual function aside from holding the fireplace to heat the room, she could not tell.

What she did know, what she hadn't been sure of until she had walked into this room, was that behind all its apparent oppenness, Change was full of hidden secrets.

The room began to quiet, until Ana could hear the low crackle of the fire burning behind its circle of screen. After a minute, high over her head, a man stood up. His was the highest occupied platform on his run of the helix, although three higher than his were unoccupied. (Steven and his right-hand man, Mallory, Ana wondered, off in England? And what of the third one?) This man now picking his way cautiously along the nearest walkway to the central platform was someone Ana had met during the day, in the workshop where he was working on a set of chairs. David Carteret, his name was, a big man with scars on his face that looked as if he'd gone through a window. He seemed to be in charge of leading the meditation from his high perch directly above the fireplace. Ana wrenched her mind from speculation and her gaze from the extraordinarily beautiful cloud of gold, and prepared to give herself over to meditation.

David began with a greeting sent from Steven and a couple of brief announcements from the English sister house. He then moved quickly, and with the relief of a person taking refuge from public speaking, into a chant Steven had set for them. "I am Change," said David; "Change am I."

Ana dutifully joined the others, listening to how the voices rose and rang through the dome overhead, hearing the hundred voices slowly become one. It had been a while since she had joined in a group meditation, and it took her some time to immerse her voice in the others, to lose herself in the words. Gradually, imperceptibly, she let go, and as the chant evolved from two statements into the slow two-beat rhythm of "I am change am I am change," she moved along with it.

Silent meditation followed, although by this time the protests of Ana's knee were loud and interfered with the purity of her contemplation. The ninety minutes seemed endless, and when finally people began to get to their feet, she followed them out gratefully, stumbling down the road on a leg that felt as if hot gravel had been inserted into the joint. All she could think about was a shot of cortisone from Rocinante's locked cabinet, a jolt of whisky from her illicit stores, and many hours stretched straight in bed.

An ancient school bus rumbled past her as she approached the guest quarters: the older children and their teachers returning from Tucson. She wished them a silent good night and took her creaking middle-aged body to bed.

Chapter Eleven

From FBI documents relating to the Change case

Ana walked into the dining hall the next morning and found the community restored to itself, voices raised in a wall of sound, dishes clattering, excited teenagers calling to each other across the room. The energy embodied in the TRANSFORMATION mural no longer seemed unlikely.

The hub building, too, was transformed. What had yesterday been a half-empty nursery school was now a purposeful seat of learning. Halfway through the morning Ana was dragged out of the office to help Teresa with her fifteen eleventh and twelfth graders, who were finding it difficult to settle back into the classroom after two days of freedom.

"I just need another adult today," Teresa told her as they hurried around the circular hallway. "You don't need to do anything—they'll settle down if you just go and stand next to them while I'm trying to teach."

Not a terribly flattering judgment of Ana's abilities, perhaps, but it was true that the repressive presence of an adult—any adult—goes far to smooth down youthful high spirits. Ana dutifully stood, and drifted, and saw the classroom gradually cool off from the near-boil. By lunchtime, concentration had been achieved.

The kids exploded out the door, and Teresa dropped down into her chair with her head thrown back. Ana noticed idly that despite Carla's version of the community regulations that specified no jewelry, this woman too (whom Ana would have classified as an ardent follower of rules) was wearing a necklace, in her case a delicate gold chain. Teresa sat forward and the chain disappeared under her collar. Perhaps the rule meant only no necklaces on top of clothing?

"It is always so difficult for them to focus when they have been away," Teresa said. "I've come to dread field trips."

"Sitting in a bus for all those hours," Ana said. "Maybe they need some 'sweat meditation' when they get in."

Teresa looked surprised, then thoughtful. "You could be right. Perhaps I'll mention it to Steven."

"Do you have any idea when he'll be back?"

"It was supposed to be tomorrow, but we heard this morning it will be three or four days. Well, let us go and have some lunch."

Three or four days. Ana was seized by an abrupt spasm of boredom at the thought of it, because it would then be three or four more days while the great man settled in and found the time to exchange a few words with the newcomer, plus two or three more before the community got back into its normal functioning.

She told Teresa she had things to do, and excused herself from lunch, going instead to her room to change into her oldest clothes. She spotted the silver moon that she had bought in Sedona and obediently removed the night before, and after a moment she picked it up and dropped it over her head, tucking it under her shirt. She felt obscurely comforted by the small weight, and by the minor rebellion against the rules.

Rocinante's cupboards provided some stale bread and a piece of cheese for lunch, and soon Ana was elbow-deep in the bus's engine, red-faced and muttering, with the ancient, much-taped-together repair manual propped open at the heater section. Forty minutes into it she heard footsteps approach and stop behind her; she looked around and saw Dulcie's serious and disconcertingly familiar face.

"Hello, Dulcie. I wondered where you'd gotten to. I think you must be my good luck, because I just this minute found what's wrong with Rocinante's heater. You see this little switch? Well, you can't tell it's a switch, but the book says it is, and says it's supposed to flip on to let the heat in, and it isn't. You probably shouldn't touch it," she said, drawing it back slightly from the child's inquiring finger. "It's really filthy. So am I, in fact. How've you been? How's the rug coming along?"

"Can you fix it?"

"What, the rug? Oh, you mean the switch. I don't think I can fix it, but now that I know what the problem is, I can buy another one and replace it. I hope."

"Why do you call your car Rosy Nante?"

"Rocinante? That's her name. Have you ever heard about Don Quixote, the Knight of La Mancha?" She rolled the name on her tongue with magnificence and raised her eyebrows at the child.

Dulcie shook her head.

"Don Quixote was a great man, although he was a little bit crazy." Ana reached for the small screwdriver and settled herself into the story while she put the engine back together.

"Don means 'sir', or 'lord', so it's like calling him Sir Quixote. Anyway, Don Quixote lived a long time ago, in a country called Spain, where he spent all his spare time reading exciting adventures about knights who rode out and rescued maidens and punished bad guys. Could you hand me that roll of skinny black tape? And I promise not to bite it with my teeth." Ana pulled her head out far enough to exchange grins with the child, accepted the tape, and returned to her task. "Where was I? Oh yes. Don Quixote loved to read stories about knights and their squires—that's the person who helps the knight, bringing him food and polishing his armor. Are you reading yet, Dulcie?"

The child nodded. Ana paused to scrabble through the toolbox for a stub of pencil she kept there, and printed the name QUIXOTE in clear letters along the upper margin of the manual on repairs, saying the letters aloud as she wrote them. She dropped the pencil stub into the fold; many weeks later Glen McCarthy would find the tattered manual, open it at the pencil, and wonder over the inscription.

"That's what it looks like, with a Q and an X, which aren't letters you get to use very often. Anyway, one day Don Quixote got it into his head that he, too, would be a great knight. He was by this time more than a little bit batty from all his reading, so he really believed that he could do this. He made himself a helmet out of an old bucket and climbed onto an ancient old nag of a horse he called Rocinante, imagining it to be a magnificent steed trained as a warhorse. He talked one of his neighbors, a man named Sancho Panza, into becoming his squire by saying that he would make Sancho the governor of an island when they returned, and Sancho believed him.

"Now would you hand me the crescent wrench? It's that flat metal thing with the shape like a moon on the end. No, I think I need the bigger one. Thanks.

"Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rode forth, Don Quixote on his bag-of-bones Rocinante, Sancho on a donkey, and the first thing they did was come out onto a flat plain, where they saw two or three dozen windmills. Do you know what a windmill is?" Dulcie looked uncertain. "There's one here, though it's a very modern one. You know that thing on the high tower up on the hill past the barns, with little arms that turn really fast when the wind blows? That's a windmill for making electricity; these windmills Don Quixote saw were shorter but wide as a shed, and instead of little metal blades that fly around fast, they had four huge arms stretching almost to the ground, made out of wood and cloth like the sail of a boat, and they went around and around slow and strong, turning a stone that the people used to grind their wheat into flour."

Most of this would be beyond the child's comprehension, but that didn't matter. Ana stuck her head back into the engine and went on with both repairs and story.

"The windmills that poor old confused Don Quixote saw looked to him like an army of giants, each of them with four enormous arms turning around and around. Of course, Don Quixote immediately decided that he would attack them all, wiping this scourge of giants from the face of the earth. Can I have that smaller crescent wrench now, Dulcie?" She waited a minute, caught in a tricky bit and unable to look around. "Do you see it? The one on the top?" she prompted, and was preparing to back out, when the wrench nudged her outstretched hand. She wrapped her fingers around it and continued.

"Don Quixote pulled down the visor on his bucket helmet, stretched out his lance, and jabbed his spurs into poor Rocinante's sides. Off they pounded, straight at the nearest windmill, while Sancho Panza sat on his donkey and covered his eyes so he didn't have to watch.

" 'Cowards and vile caitiffs,' shouted Don Quixote." Ana stuck her arm out behind her to gesture swordlike with the crescent wrench, then reapplied it to the task. " 'One knight will conquer you all!' And he flew across the field at them and charged into the nearest giant. The wind was turning the sail, and it caught Don Quixote's lance, broke it to pieces, and flipped both Don Quixote and his horse over and over, rolling across the ground.

"Sancho was so frightened. He came running up and helped Don Quixote to his feet. 'Master,' he cried, 'what are you doing? These are not giants, they're windmills. You can't destroy them!' And Don Quixote, groaning from his injuries, looked again and saw that they were indeed windmills, and he shook his head 'My great enemy, the magician Preston, has robbed me of my victory by turning these giants into windmills before our very eyes. But never fear, dear Sancho; my sword will prevail.'

"And off they went to the inn, to bind their wounds and eat their supper."

Ana had timed her conclusion carefully, to coincide with the end of the temporary repair. She emerged from the engine, dropped her tools into the box, closed Rocinante's engine cover, and turned to look in triumph at her audience.

Except that her audience had grown, and was no longer just a quiet five-year-old girl. Standing behind Dulcie was a dark, well-muscled, devastatingly good-looking young man with his hands in his jacket pockets and suspicion in his eyes.

"This is Jason," Dulcie said proudly.

Ana felt simultaneously fourteen and eighty-four, clumsy, awkward, stupid, and ugly, and could only hope that none of it showed on her face. She picked up the screwdriver and tape and dropped them into the box, got to her feet, brushed off her trousers, removed her fingerless gloves and looked at the state of her hands before deciding that she ought not to inflict her grease on the young man. He looked nothing like Dulcie, except perhaps the eyes. His hair was as black as her tangled mop, but his lay slick against his head, gathered into a short ponytail at his neck, and his skin was a couple of shades lighter.

"Hello, Jason, I'm Ana. I heard that Dulcie had a brother. Did you have a good time down in Tucson?"

"It was okay," he said, a typical teenager's reaction, and although it was not accompanied by a shrug, something about the gesture made Ana wonder if he wasn't younger than the eighteen or nineteen he appeared.

"You're an artist, I think Carla told me," In an instant, she could see it was the wrong thing to say: His face, already closed in, went completely blank. She hastened to create a diversion by clearing up the tools and chattering. "I was in the shop in Sedona and bought a coffee mug, and Carla told me that Dulcie's brother had sketched the bird on it. My favorite cup got broken when I had to slam on my brakes the week before—I got coffee all over the car and broke the handle off the cup, but I missed the deer,"

She pushed the tools down and snapped the top shut, flipped the manual closed, and put tools, book, gloves, and ground cloth into their place beneath Rocinante's seldom-used passenger seat.

"I think I better go clean my fingernails before I offer to help with dinner. Good to meet you, Jason. See you later, Dulcie,"

"Good-bye, Ana. Bye, Rocinante," said Dulcie. Her hand snuck out and surreptitiously stroked the bus's faded paint, and then she and her protective, self-contained, aloof, unconsciously handsome and unbelievably sexy older brother walked away up the road to the main compound.

Ana let out a deep breath as she watched them go. He walked like a young athlete, or a street tough, with straight spine and a slight swagger to his hips. However, his head was ever so slightly bent to listen to the now-chattering Dulcie, and when the child's hand came up to his, he allowed it to stay there.

Again, Ana wondered how old he was.

That night after dinner a basketball game was held in the dining hall. While the pans were being scrubbed and the smallest children put to bed, the tables and benches were pulled back to the walls and two men with a roll of masking tape measured off the sidelines and laid out two keys around the baskets that other men were bolting to the walls. It was a practiced exercise, finished before the cleanup was, and when Ana came out of the kitchen, she stepped into a basketball court compete with a facsimile of bleachers and two teams of wildly mixed players warming up by doing passes and lay-up shots. One of the players was Jason.

Ana worked her way around the room to where Dulcie sat.

"Hey there, Sancho," she said. "Why aren't you out on the court?"

"Hi, Ana. They said I could stay up to watch my brother. Do you want to sit down?"

The woman at Dulcie's side stared at Dulcie, stared harder at Ana, and turned to whisper to the woman next to her. Ana joined them and sat down.

"How is Rocinante, Ana?"

"My trusty steed? Ready to tilt at a hundred windmills, Dulcie. Hey, I forgot to tell you something. You know how I said that Don Quixote thought of himself as the perfect knight. Well, a knight has to have a lady to defend and to dedicate his victories to. And do you know what the name of Don Quixote's lady was? Dulcinea. Dulcie."

The child thought about it, and after a minute she ducked her head and said to Ana in a voice almost too low to hear, "My name isn't really Dulcie."

Ana answered in a near whisper out of the corner of her mouth, "That's okay. Don Quixote wasn't really a knight, either."

Dulcie wriggled her body in a settling-in gesture and ended up leaning into Ana a bit more than she had been. After a minute, Ana placed her arm gingerly around the child's shoulders and turned her attention to the players on the floor.

The game was a contest between the students wearing T-shirts in various shades of yellow and the men of the community in green. At first glance this division seemed unfair, since the men were taller and heavily muscled, and presumably the pick of adult players came from a larger pool than that of the teenagers.

The kids were good, though, and fast. Of the five on the starting team, two were as tall as the biggest adult, four were unusually muscular for teenagers, and all of them looked like they wanted to win.

The two teams assumed their positions in the center of the court, the referee tossed the ball up, and the lanky blond boy rose up and tapped it into the waiting hands of the shortest member of his team, who immediately shot it over to Dulcie's brother. Jason pivoted and began moving down the court in an odd hunched-over stance that looked clumsy but moved him along faster than anyone else on the court. A guard in green swooped up in front of him and without a break Jason switched hands, ducked under the man's outstretched arms, and accelerated for the basket. Up he went in a sweet, easy lay-up shot seven seconds into the game, and the cafeteria erupted. Everyone in the hall was on his feet shouting, Ana no exception. Even the foiled guard grinned and slapped Jason's shoulder as they jogged back up the court.

Jason heard none of it. A glance at the man was his only acknowledgment of anyone outside his own skin, although he was quite obviously aware at any given moment just where his teammates and his opponents were on the court.

So it went for the whole game. Other players laughed, grimaced, raised a fist in a victory punch; Jason did his job, scored his points, and turned his focus onto what came next.

It was a shortened game, four ten-minute quarters, and from the first play, Ana could not take her eyes off Jason.

He was a superb player, shambling along in that deceptive way like an elongated chimpanzee and then suddenly shifting gears to streak through the crush near the basket, fast and slippery and untouchable, rising up free of the guards to nudge the ball in with his fingertips. Time and again he did this, and the men in green seemed unable to come up with a strategy to counteract him.

He was no team player. He hunted up and down the back of the court like a lone wolf until he either saw an opportunity to snatch the ball from a green player or until one of his teammates could get free to pass to him, then he was off. Only once did he voluntarily relinquish possession of the ball, when he was trapped in the corner and time was running out before the half was called. The pass he made, a single bounce beneath the flailing arms of the tallest man, was successful, but the boy he passed it to, the lanky blond kid who had jumped at the game's opening, took three steps and had it snatched in mid-dribble. The only emotion Ana saw him show the whole game was right then: a twist of irritation passed over Jason's face, more at himself, Ana thought, than at his teammate, and then he was back to his normal unruffled, ruthlessly focused self.

After halftime a pattern began to develop out on the court, or perhaps Ana was only now beginning to see it. The blond kid, whose name was Tony, had apparently had enough of Jason's successes and decided to start keeping the ball to himself. Four times in the third quarter he ignored obvious opportunities to pass to Jason for an easy score. Twice his strategy succeeded. The third time an opposing player snatched the ball from midair and barreled down the court to score. The fourth time, with Jason, two other players, and most of the audience screaming "Pass it!" Tony chose for a long shot, with the same result. Most of the audience was watching the middle-aged English teacher take off down the court for his two points, but Ana glanced over at Jason and saw the narrowed eyes of a pure, cold rage, so instantly wiped away that she had to wonder if she had actually seen it.

She leaned over to ask the woman on the other side of Dulcie the question that had been puzzling her all afternoon. "Do you by any chance know how old the boy Jason is?"

"Fourteen," she said promptly.

"Fourteen? No."

The woman shrugged and went back to her conversation with her neighbor. Dulcie took her eyes off the game long enough to tell Ana, "He had his birthday just before we came here."

Good Lord.

Jason now had the ball and he was moving back and forth outside the key, watching and waiting for the opening he needed. He had taken the ball from Tony (whom Ana could easily imagine behind the wheels of a series of stolen cars, grinning in the pleasure of the joyride) and was waiting for the stocky kid to delay one of the guards and open the key. (That boy, on the other hand, had a mean streak, and used his elbows when the ref wasn't watching. He would be the perpetrator of harsher crimes, and on his way to being a career criminal.) Jason would be too serious to joyride, too cautious to commit the obvious crimes.

Perhaps, she speculated, it would be that brief, white-hot rage that was Jason's downfall, a sudden and disastrous loss of control resulting in a vicious and no doubt very efficient act of violence, instantly over, constantly guarded against. Would he regret it? Perhaps, perhaps not, but certainly he feared it. Clearly, too, Carla and the other women were a little bit intimidated by him, Carla with her loud and uncomfortable laugh when Ana had suggested that Jason might be her son, the dryness in Dominique's voice when she spoke of him. The only person Ana had met who did not seem slightly uncomfortable around the boy was Dulcie, and Dulcie, Ana felt sure, need never fear her brother's anger.

Yes, a person could tell a lot about the players by watching a game.

Fourteen years old; the phrase kept running through Ana's head as she left the impromptu gymnasium and walked through the cold night to her room. Fourteen years old, with the angular face of a man five or six years older and the ropy muscles of a laborer under his sweat-soaked yellow jersey, walking across the court with the wary self-confidence of a felon and the unconscious grace of a dancer. He moved through the community in a state of splendid isolation, shifting easily to avoid contact with others, always keeping a distance.

Except for Dulcie. Dulcie could touch him; for Dulcie he would bend his straight spine and dip his head to hear her childish rambles. For Dulcie he would walk through a hundred and more admirers, politely acknowledging their appreciative remarks after the game was won, until he was standing in front of Dulcie, looking down into her dancing, worshipful eyes with something very near a smile on his face.

God almighty, Ana mused. What the hell has that boy been through, to turn him into what he is now?

Chapter Twelve

You are all law enforcement professionals. You have all been trained in what to do in a hostage situation. You talk, right? Sure, you're also finding out the shape of the building where the people are being held, who the hostages and their takers are, what weapons are involved, all that. However, you also have to know what the beef involves--if it's terrorism, well, that's something very different from a kidnapping for ransom gone bad, and still farther from a dispute over custody of the kids or a guy who lost his job, his wife, and his car all in the same week. And the only way of finding this out, while you're also trying to let the situation come off the boil, is to let the people talk.

But what if you're not speaking the same language? We've all heard the stories about cops who have pulled over an erratic driver who didn't speak English and couldn't understand the order to "Get out of the car, sir" and reached into the glove compartment and got shot. A terrible accident, maybe; the cop had no choice but to suspect the driver was going for a gun. Of course, the truth of the matter is, it probably never happened, it just makes a great story. [laughter]

But you see what I'm saying? Sure, there are times when the only response is the immediate one; but the great majority of times the situation can be resolved peacefully, if only you have enough time, and if only you can find the key to the situation.

A group of religious believers speaks a different language from the majority of citizens. It sounds like English, but you will be making a real mistake if you assume that it is. To take a fairly obvious example, when David Koresh talked about "the lamb", he didn't mean what he ate for dinner; he meant "Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world." What I want to do today is give you some suggestions for dealing with a so-called "cult" situation, in the early hours before the

Excerpts from the transcription of a lecture by Dr. Anne Waverly to the Northern California Sheriffs' Association, January 16, 1992

It had become clear that nothing could be done, no decisions made concerning Ana's presence until Steven returned. She could be given no permanent position, nor even a room in the central compound, until he had approved her sincerity. She wanted to work in the school, had come prepared for it, and knew there was a need for the skills Ana Wakefield brought, but she had to settle for drudgery in the kitchen and around the barn and buildings.

Two days after the basketball game, on Ana's fourth day at Change, she drove into Sedona to order the switch for Rocinante's heater and to fill a shopping list of incidentals that Amelia gave her. "Just a few odd things" nearly filled the bus, and Ana could only be grateful she hadn't been asked to do a week's shopping.

She also mailed a packet of photocopied pages from her journal, sent a roll of film off to a mail order film developer that was actually a branch of the FBI, arranged at the post office to have general delivery mail forwarded to Change, and finally wrote a note to the mail service in Boise to give them her new address.

She had found it disconcertingly difficult to write in her journal about Jason, knowing the attention Glen and others would devote to it. She was very aware of how her unexpurgated reaction to the boy would sound: like some strange, distasteful, even bizarre infatuation of a middle-aged woman for a handsome young boy. Leaving him out entirely would have made for a suspicious gap, but writing about him naturally, about an interesting young male person the age of a grandson, was remarkably difficult.

In truth, though, Jason was interesting, even intriguing; the fact that she was a woman on the brink of menopause did not negate who he was. Still, she downplayed the intensity of her reaction to him, took care to include descriptions of the other boys as well, and trusted that neither Glen and his people nor any potential snoop sent by the Change community to look through her things would notice the difference.

She took dinner in Sedona, in a quiet restaurant with white linen on the tables. She had red meat and red wine, and two cups of dark coffee with her dessert, then she drove back down the long, narrow, unlighted road to the Change compound.

At the first hint of morning, Ana rose and set off for her red-rock viewing post.

It had rained the day before, and the morning felt soft against her face. Her footprints had been wiped clean from the sand, but she had been this way several times now and she knew the places where she needed to walk around rather than go straight and be forced to turn back, and she remembered the narrow break between the shrubs that seemed to go down but then turned and took a shortcut to the top.

The last part was a bit of a scramble, around the back of the flat boulder and pulling herself up the top: it was there that she met Steven. She came up, puffing and grunting with the effort, to find a man sitting on the other side of the rock—seated in her place—in full lotus position, watching her appear bit by bit over the edge of the stone slab. She did not notice him at first, since her eyes were watching for handholds and sleepy reptiles, but she plunked herself down in triumph, kneaded her bad knee two or three times to encourage it, and then suddenly became aware of a presence behind her and whirled around, narrowly avoiding precipitating herself backward off the cliff she had just come up.

"Good heavens," she said breathlessly. "You startled me."

"I apologize," he said in a voice as calm as his posture. "You're just in time for the sun."

It had been light for some time, but the high rocks to the east of the compound kept the sun at bay for twenty minutes or so after the shadows stretched long across the adjoining desert. Ana had discovered this her first morning, and had come to anticipate this second, private sunrise into the compound below. Slightly disappointed, but reassured that this man was not a threat, she took a seat at the other edge of the rock from the stranger and waited for the show.

The first thing to light up was the three-bladed wind-powered electrical generator on the ridge of hills west of the compound. The light traveled steadily down the metal struts of the tower until it hit the base and spread, flowing along the low hills and bringing to life the brilliant red rock and dark vegetation, and for a couple of minutes a bright spot of light reflecting a piece of discarded glass.

Now the compound itself was touched. The first part of Change to be illuminated was the peak of the glass dome that capped the hub building. Sunlight spilled gradually down it, round and full and red as the hills, and then the other buildings were lit, and the paths, and the darkness crept away, loosing its hold on the parking area, the square guest quarters, and finally retreating to the very foot of the hill below them. The sun was up. Ana let out a small sigh of satisfaction. The man seemed inclined to agree.

" 'Truly the light is sweet,' " he said in a voice that rolled the syllables, " 'and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.' "

Beginnings are crucial, first impressions far-reaching, and Ana was alive to the knowledge that her success or failure in the Change community began at this moment. A quotation from Ecclesiastes, that crusty Old Testament compiler of epigrams and wisdoms, was not what Ana would have expected, and she ransacked her memory for a worthy reply. She decided on Psalms, to be safe.

" 'Light dawns for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart.' "

"The righteous?" the man said in what she hoped was mock disapproval, and called on Luke," 'There were certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others.' "

" 'When one rules justly over men,' " she told him, " 'he dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining forth upon a cloudless morning.' "

"You're Steven, aren't you?" she added.

It was the man's turn to sigh, and although his was a noise of faint regret, as if at a burden resumed, there was a smile at the corners of his eyes. His voice changed as he dropped the game of quotations, becoming lighter and more clearly American.

"I am. And you, I believe, are Ana Wakefield."

"How did you get up here?" she asked curiously. "I didn't see any footprints."

"I levitated."

Ana could not tell if he expected her to believe this flat statement or if he was making some subtle joke. She smiled uncomfortably, but he seemed occupied with the process of unwrapping his limbs, stretching hard with his hands on his ankles and his face pulled down to touch his knees, and then rising. He stood for a moment, surveying his domain and allowing Ana to run her eyes over his tall, muscular body, and then turned his head to look at her.

"Shall we go down and see if they've kept any breakfast for us? You could probably use some after your excesses of last night."

"What do you mean?" Ana demanded.

"Meat, alcohol, and strong coffee have a tendency to leave a person needing more the next day. Part of the cycle, of course," he said with a smile, and turned to go.

The steep climb down left plenty of opportunity for Ana to assemble her thoughts. He was waiting for her at the bottom, and politely let her come up beside him before he set off for the road.

"I hadn't realized that there was a Change member working in that restaurant," she said.

"Which restaurant is that?"

"The French place on the road to Cottonwood."

"La Rouge? As far as I know, none of us work there."

"So how do you know what I had for dinner?"

He bent his head around and presented her with a grin of pure boyish mischief. "People like you always have a last meal of meat and booze before they confront the decision of whether or not to join us. A last fix of toxins before the threat of the purity regime."

"People like me," Ana repeated.

"Seeker Ana? Isn't that how you think of your role here?"

Ana fought to conceal the deep shock she felt. Did he know who she was? Or was his analysis general? God, she'd never thought her mask could be ripped off so early in an investigation, but the double meaning of Steven's words was frighteningly close to the truth. It triggered panic alarms and the too-vivid recollection of the last time her duplicity had been suspected.

"My role," she managed to choke out.

"You're, what, closing in on fifty? And here you are, still wandering around in your Volkswagen bus, still experimenting with this and that. Don't you get tired of it?"

The massive relief Ana felt when she realized his seeming knowledge of her was mere speculation made her want to sit down suddenly. It also served as a sharp warning against complacency: He could not have been back in the compound for more than a few hours, yet he knew all about her, one insignificant woman who happened to wander in off the street. The man's intelligence-gathering service was as efficient as it was inconspicuous; she must never let down her guard.

"I haven't found what's right for me yet."

He heard the quaver in her voice, if not the cause for it, and his smile deepened.

"So you thought you would try Change, to see if we are 'right for you.' "

"Actually, I came here more or less by accident. If there are any accidents," she added dutifully. "I was in Sedona and I met Carla at the craft gallery. She invited me to stay here for a couple of days while I fixed the heater in my bus. I've been trying to help out in the kitchen and filing papers in the office, so as not to be a burden."

"But you will be on your way when you have warmth again." It was not a question.

"Well, I thought I would. I don't really have any definite plans."

He ignored the implied request for an invitation to stay. "The real reason Carla asked you here was because of Dulcie. She doesn't talk much for anyone but her brother. And now you."

"I gathered that, afterward; Teresa said something about how disturbed Dulcie had been when she and her brother first came here. I don't know why the child decided to talk to me."

"She may simply have been ready, and you were there," Steven said. Ana would have liked to claim credit for an ability to restore the voluntarily mute to speech, but she had to admit that he was probably right.

"She seems an intelligent child."

"It is her brother who interests me," he said bluntly, a sweeping statement that managed to discount not only Dulcie, but Ana and even Carla at one strike. She stifled a protest, realized what she was doing, and stifled, too, her sudden amusement at the exchange. Steven did not notice, just kept walking and talking. "Have you met Jason?"

"Briefly."

"I think that is the most that can be said for any of us, that we've met Jason briefly. He came to us on a court referral last month, some minor brush with the law but with no parental presence or relatives to assume custody. The boy has been handed a bucket of shit by life, and he's managed to turn it to pure steel. It will be interesting to see what he can make now that he has been given the proper tools."

They were nearing the compound now, and very shortly their private conversation would end. Ana turned over her options. She needed to do something that would make an impression on Steven, set her apart from all the other Ana Wakefields who drifted in to sit at his feet. This was a natural human urge, to demonstrate one's superiority to the masses, but it was also essential for Ana's more covert progress. She caught at the phrase he had used concerning Jason and cobbled it together with an assortment of hints and images that Change had set floating through her subconscious, and came out with a lucky hit.

"Funny how some kids are burned up by life, while others in the same situation are just hardened."

Somehow they had come to a halt and were standing face-to-face. And a very beautiful face it was, too, Ana realized, strong, square, and brown, with deep brown eyes, sun-streaked hair curling down onto the collar of his jacket, and a closely trimmed beard with faint flecks of white in the mustache. A lot of religious men, be they cult leaders or ordained ministers, cultivated the Jesus look, but this one was Jesus the carpenter, not Jesus the wimp, a six-foot-three-inch workingman, with an emphasis on man.

The sheer masculine power of Steven's personality set off all kinds of alarms in the back of Ana's mind, even as Seeker Ana was melting into a pliable mess willing to sign away any part of her soul the man might desire.

Hold on Ana, she told herself sharply. Watch your ass, you dumb female.

Something changed in the back of Steven's eyes. There was a slight but definite shift from aloofness to interest in his manner toward her, perhaps even a hint of respect.

"That is very true," he said, and then, "You've taught kids, I think?"

"I've been a teacher on and off during my life. And a student."

"I think you ought to stay with us for a while, Seeker Ana," he said with the air of making a pronouncement. "You might learn something here. You might even have something to teach us."

She had to be satisfied with that, because David Carteret, the woodworker and shop teacher, was coming out of the hub building, had spotted them, and was approaching with purpose in his stride.

But before David reached them, Steven paused to drop one more little bombshell.

"I hope your knee isn't too sore from the climb."

To give the impression of omniscience, a person had only to pick up some small clue (a slight limp or a wariness toward the community) and present it casually as a known fact with long-understood implications. Palm readers and sideshow telepaths did it all the time, but Ana had never known a spiritual leader better at it than Steven.

"First levitation, now mind reading," she replied. "Are you going to tell me how I hurt the knee, too?"

"You would probably call it an accident," he answered thoughtfully.

He was really very good; naturally she would call it an accident, if nothing other than to deflect interest, though whether it was an automobile or skiing mishap, the act of an assailant, or an accident of birth, only she—and by implication, Steven—would know.

Yes, Ana would have to be very careful around this man, but at least he represented a worthy adversary.

David came up to them then, with a problem for Steven, but before he turned to go, Steven paused to look deeply into her eyes. "I hope you stay with us, Ana. If you do, you will be expected to strip yourself of the ornament you are wearing around your neck."

When Ana got back to the compound, she removed the moon from her neck and added it to the contents of the buckskin medicine pouch hanging from Rocinante's rearview mirror. That afternoon Ana moved into a room in the central compound; the next morning she was given a job.

IV

Sublimatio

sublime (vb) To cause to pass directly from the solid to

the vapor state and

condense back to solid form

If thou can make thy Bodys first Spiritual,

And then thy Spirits as I have taught corporal

Chapter Thirteen

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

From the beginning, when Anne Waverly had first opened Glen McCarthy's manila envelope, she had been struck by just how much of an anomaly the school at Change was; now, seeing it in action, it puzzled her even more. In Ana's considerable experience, religious communities tended to regard the education of their children as the touchiest area in their belief system. The single biggest perceived threat to the community's future and purity was usually the interference of governmental agencies of various stripes in how they chose to raise and educate the next generation of believers.

The same touchiness, of course, applied to the opposition as well: Governmental agencies and the general populace will shrug their collective shoulders at the oddities practiced by adults, even when they have to raise their collective eyebrows. A belief in aliens, strange meditative practices, even a bit of discreet drug use are not enough to bring an official hand down on the community's shoulder, but start interfering with the innocent, especially with young children, and hell will break loose. Literally. Most of the truly disastrous confrontations with "cults" have been sparked by the perceived (if often groundless) maltreatment of children.

However, Change was different. Here, not only their own children, but some thirty outsiders in addition attracted the attentions of the school boards and child protective services, the welfare, social security, income tax, and housing agencies, the courts and probation officers, and a dozen other suspicious bureaucratic entities to lay hands on this cult in the desert, to say nothing of the parents and relatives of the children who had been taken from their tender care.

All of those busybodies were welcomed. Not just borne as a necessary evil, but actively welcomed, greeted with smiles and treated as co-workers in the task of raising children. Books were laid open, problems freely admitted and discussed, suggestions welcomed.

The school, Ana knew, did represent a sizable income for the community. Once the state had been convinced that here was a group willing and able to assume the burden of some of the system's incorrigibles, it had tentatively given Change a grant. When results began to appear, when a handful of hardened young troublemakers were tugged free of the cycle that normally led to the prison door, the money came more freely. And after a particularly noteworthy triumph involving a gangbanger who had lived at Change for two years and then been accepted at U.C. San Diego, the name of Change was heard on the lips of state senators and money was increasingly found, even from the private sector: The hardwood floor in the dining hall had been given by a chain of sporting goods stores based in Phoenix, a computer company donated machines and software, a new roof was provided by a local contractor looking for a tax writeoff.

All of which explained why the Change members should appear to welcome inspectors and pen-pushers, but not why they should actually do so. Ana found it puzzling.

It was, oddly, the reticent Teresa who gave Ana what she later found to be an important clue to understanding Change doctrine.

Except in the classroom, Teresa was almost pathologically silent. In front of her kids she was quiet, although she had a considerable talent for dropping a brief phrase that set the students into action or brought them into line, depending on the need at any given time.

Teresa was the widow of a drunken and abusive husband who killed himself and three others when his truck drifted over the centerline straight into a family that was on its way home from a niece's quinceañera celebration. Two months after the accident, Teresa, who when her husband was alive had ventured out only to shop and make the rare visit home to her mother and now was almost completely withdrawn into her house, happened to see a program on the local cable television channel about Steven Change and his community.

She wrote him a long, agonized letter. Three days later Steven was on her doorstep, coaxing her out, bringing her back to life.

Ana learned all this from Dominique, who liked to talk while she was involved in meaningless tasks such as filing or folding brochures for mailing. Ana decided it might be a good idea to listen carefully to whatever utterance Teresa might care to make. As with Dulcie, words issued sparingly were intended to count.

Teresa's clue came after Ana had been involved in a particularly harrying telephone roundabout, an attempt to find someone who could tell her where the father of one of the Change foster kids could be found, after the boy had said in a revealingly offhand manner he wouldn't mind if his dad happened to visit for the boy's birthday the following week.

With forty minutes of argument, cutoffs, and being kept on hold behind her, Ana slammed the receiver down and grabbed at her barely grabbable hair.

"God!" she exclaimed. "Don't they want these kids to get their lives together? I don't know how you guys do it, day after day of keeping your patience with the bureaucrats." Teresa was typing fourteen reports for the sheriff's department. Dominique was writing letters to parole officers across the state.

"Steven says, 'the most blessed thing you can swallow is your own spittle,' " Dominique commented sympathetically, although he did not seem to have mentioned that he was quoting the Prophet, Ana noted.

Teresa added, "Heat and pressure are necessary to the transformation process."

"Does Steven say that, too?" Ana asked. Teresa nodded. "Then it must be true," Ana said grimly, and reached again for the telephone.

During the day she caught three glimpses of the child who could have been her daughter. The first was through the open door of the kindergarten room, where Dulcie sat on a tiny wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap and her hair in two thick, short, lopsided braids, while the teacher read her class a story. Two hours later, she again saw Dulcie, sitting on a boulder in the open desert garden between the compound buildings, waiting patiently. When the main door of the school building opened, the child jumped to her feet in anticipation, and when Jason appeared she ran to him—and then dropped in at his side and reached out a hand for his, almost shyly. He rumpled her hair and tweaked one stubby braid, and casually tugged her over so that they walked along with her shoulder bumping against his hip, heading to the dining hall for an after-school snack. And then later still Ana spotted them a last time, on their way toward bed. Dulcie was up in her brother's arms, limp and looking not far from sleep. Jason's proud head was bent, ever so slightly, to fit over hers. It was a gesture Ana could feel in her own neck, the warmth of two bodies reaching out to each other, and she was smiling as she entered the meditation hall.

Inside the hall a number of the formerly empty platforms were now occupied by the Change members returned from England. Ana saw with interest that Steven sat, not on the highest platform, but the second highest. Below him was a man whose muscular body and scowling brows contrasted oddly with a weak mouth that his aggressive moustache could not quite hide. This must be Thomas Mallory, long-time friend of Steven Change, second in command, and occasional dealer in illegal firearms. He looked the sort of small man whose touchiness over his size drove him to pump iron and collect guns; a man who thought of himself as dangerous, and might actually be if he was pushed too far. She studied him for a minute, but found her eyes drawn to the empty space at Steven's right. If the highest place was not Steven's, whose was it? Or was its emptiness permanent and symbolic—a place set at the table for God?

Steven rose smoothly and strode across the narrow walkway to the high platform beneath the golden cloud. He folded himself into a lotus position, took a few deep and slowly exhaled breaths, and opened the evening's session of meditation with a brief but carefully worded sermon on the necessity of discomfort on the road to Transformation. He then gave them the mantra, "Great heat, great change."

They chanted for a while and then came silent meditation, and Ana's mind wandered back from Steven's words to the earlier statement by Teresa, and beyond that to the things he had told her walking back from the red rocks. He had spoken of being put through the tempering fires during the search for enlightenment—what he called Transformation—but she had taken it for a metaphorical reference to inner struggles. If his community interpreted this as a command that they should welcome the pressures and irritations of meddling outsiders because it helped to build character, it explained a great deal. Surely the hair shirts of the early Christian monks, their fondness for mortification of the flesh and embracing of bodily torments and martyrdoms might find modern psychological equivalents in automated telephone systems and the barbs and torments of red tape?

It was actually quite funny, once she thought about it.

Teresa had not thought it amusing, though. Ana began to wonder what other forms of heat and pressure might be applied in the search for transformation. This was not, all in all, a comforting thought. Nor very amusing.

What else had Steven said, according to Teresa? It was something about the arduous building project. "Sweat meditation," she had called it.

Come to think of it, that had an uncomfortable sound to it as well.

The days passed, five of them, during which Ana saw Dulcie half a dozen times and Jason up close twice and three times at a distance, in the school or walking across the compound, and once she saw him setting out on a morning run. Steven she saw any number of times, but of the three, the only one she exchanged words with was Dulcie.

She lived in the community and she worked alongside the others, but Ana could feel that she was not a fully accepted member. She remained an assistant in the classrooms, people gave slight hesitations before some answers, as if considering her status, and polite demurrals when she offered to help with some project or other.

This clear sense of boundaries indicated a degree of suspicion that Ana could not afford to let stand, but she knew that not until Steven gave the word would she begin to be integrated into the Change community.

She knew why he was witholding his blessing, too. He had accused her at their early-morning interview of a lack of commitment, of flightiness and an unwillingness to dig in, and she had not denied it. He would be waiting for her to ask him for the next stage in her transformation.

Very well, she would ask. But not tonight. Tomorrow she would give her pledge to commit herself to Change—or, rather, give the nonexistent Ana's meaningless pledge. Tonight, though, was hers—not to drive into Sedona and gorge on meat and wine, not even if Steven hadn't already spoiled that pleasure. No, tonight she would take a solitary walk, playing hooky from the group meditation and wandering by herself through the near-empty compound.

The moon lay on the horizon, past full now but still large and heavy with gathered light. The night was cold and cloudless, the white stones lining the edges of the path luminous in the light. Ana left her flashlight in her pocket and wandered the compound by moonlight and the lights from the windows.

In and out the paths zigzagged, into the hub and back to the edges, each of the outside buildings connecting with each other and with the center. It would make a neat geometrical pattern from the air, she thought, a cat's cradle of pathways strung between the seven buildings. Why hadn't Glen's aerial photo showed it? Were the paths of crushed gravel too like the desert soil in color or the white stones too far apart to form a solid line? Or had she missed it? And if so, what else had she missed?

They were chanting in the meditation hall, not the "I am change am I" rhythm or the 4/4 beat of "Great hope, great change," but something slower and choppier, four beats and a pause, four beats and a pause. She listened, and heard the word: trans-for-ma-tion.

Into change in a big way, was Steven.

Ana continued on out to the bare site where the sixth and final building would go, back to the still-chanting hub, and up to the oldest of the surrounding structures, the dining hall.

Ana let herself in, thinking to look again at the lovely Indian pots she had seen the very first night and looked at with pleasure every time she had passed by. One in particular was stunning, a glossy black-on-black bowl worth more than Rocinante and all she contained.

She heard a sound, deep in the building. Not a kitchen noise, but a high, sharp squeak. She followed the hallway back to the dining hall, and soon the echoing thuds of a bouncing ball joined the squeaks: Someone was playing basketball.

Jason.

Chapter Fourteen

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

The boy was practicing crossovers, dribbling the ball up the court for a few steps and then shifting his body and taking the ball in the other hand for the next few steps, dodging imaginary opponents. As he neared the end, he lowered his body and speeded up, springing up beside the basket for a lay-up shot. He veered outside the unmarked end line of the court to catch up the ball and started back up the other end again, alternating hands as he dribbled.

He was very beautiful, a young human male as he was meant to be, rejoicing in perfect strength before his body discovered that there were things it could not do. For some reason the phrase "I sing the body electric" ran through her mind, and she refused to feel like a voyeur.

He traveled the court three or four times while Ana stood leaning in the doorway with her hands in her pockets. She knew that he was aware of her presence—she had seen the faint falter and sideways glance when he first turned to go back up the court—but he ignored her, concentrating on the rhythm and on the use of his left hand.

She could certainly sympathize. Privacy was a rare enough commodity in a communal enterprise, and it would be a gift of kindness if she were to back away and leave him to the echo of the ball and the squeal of his shoes on the polished floor. Instead, she hardened her heart and began to pluck off her outer garments until they lay in a pile on the bench and she stood in her jeans, long-sleeved T-shirt, and bare feet. She pushed her sleeves up to her elbows and went out onto the floor.

"It's very pretty," she said to him without preliminary, "but it's too slow. You get some kid out there with quick hands, you're going to lose the ball every time you go past him."

Jason had stopped, and stood now with the ball balanced against his hip, his chest rising and falling beneath his sleeveless T-shirt, just watching her, expressionless.

"Here, I'll show you what I mean," she said. Settling down as far as her knee would permit, she stretched out her arms in the guard's position and wiggled her fingers to indicate that he should come at her. He simply stood there. "Yeah, yeah," she said. "I know old women like me don't play basketball, but there's nobody here to see you, and who knows? You might learn something. At the very least you'll embarrass me so that I go away and leave you in peace."

She waited, so long that she was beginning to think that she had underestimated the depth of his need for dignity and credited him with more curiosity than he actually possessed. He waited until her knee was protesting and her doubt was building, and then he dropped the ball to the floor and came at her, driving fast straight down the court until the very last instant, when he shifted and went to the side.

But he did not take the ball with him. Instead, it was traveling back down the court in the hands of this woman with the almost-shaved head, who furthermore came to a halt well outside where the key would be and shot the ball toward the basket. It dropped neatly in. She trotted forward to retrieve the ball and turned back toward him, laughing.

"Now, there was a lucky shot," she said. "I haven't done that in years." She tucked the ball under her left arm and put out her right hand. "Call me Ana. The shortest member of the women's varsity team in high school, tied for second highest score for the season. Couldn't guard, never made a rebound, and slow on my feet, but I had a talent for long shots and I had quick hands. Once upon a time, years before you were born," she added with a grin.

Reluctantly and briefly, Jason let his fingers brush hers. She passed him the ball and moved down the court, taking up a position in front of her basket.

The rhythm of the ball smacking up against the boards started up again slowly, while he considered things, and then more rapidly when he began to move toward her. He was no longer trying to intimidate her, Ana was glad to see, and he no longer discounted her entirely as a human being. Not that he took her seriously yet, but he was determined to prove to himself that what she had done was a fluke.

It was not. The only difference this time was when Ana tried for a basket, the ball bounced off the backboard and flew into the stacked benches. She talked as she retrieved it.

"You're good, Jason; you don't need me to tell you that. But I don't think you've had much chance to play against very many top-rank players, and I doubt you've had any really good coaches. I was always a second-rate player, but I learned a lot from the good people around me, and I was lucky to have a coach who was a retired professional with a love for girls' basketball. We had four or five of our players go on to university scholarships—this at a time when there was no money at all for girls' sports, when girls did cheerleading or synchronized swimming or gymnastics, period. You want to know how not to get your ball stolen by a pair of quick hands? Come here."

She took him through it in slow motion, so he could see precisely how he was leaving himself open, then she showed him how to pace himself, how to move the ball to the free hand just a shade earlier, so it would already be on the downward trajectory when his opponent was reaching out, and how to extend his elbow and shoulder as he swept the ball aside, blocking the other's outstretched fingers and giving the ball a boost of speed at a vital moment.

He was a fast learner, and after a dozen or so tries, Ana was only occasionally able to snatch the ball away from him. Four times in a row he dodged around her, and she could only brush her fingers across the rough surface, although once she would have had it, had her knee given her enough speed. It did not, and she did not, and she stood grinning and applauding as Jason scooted past her, stopped outside the key, and shot—missing the basket.

She wiped her forehead with the back of her arm and watched the boy move. She was drenched with sweat, her muscles were quivering, and her knee felt as if she were walking on a red-hot steel rod, but she was more than satisfied. Contact had been made. Not conversation, perhaps—Jason's only words to her had been monosyllabic answers to direct questions—but a beginning. To what, she did not know, nor did she wish to ask. She could only tell that the physical exertion with a boy she had no real excuse for approaching had been deeply satisfying, an antidote to the cerebral jousting she had done with Steven.

Ana gathered up her clothing and limped away. The thuds of the ball and the squeals of shoes on floor started up again as soon as she was out of the dining hall.

The following morning, she went to see Steven.

Ana rose early and walked out into the desert, a ritual that had already become a necessary part of her day, half an hour when the world was hers alone, when she did not need to watch herself, think of every word, consider each gesture. She walked and breathed and took joy in the early-morning life of the high desert, the skunks and wild pigs, the tiny pygmy owl returning to its home in a saguaro, and once a family of coatis flickering along the floor of a wash, tails high and long noses snuffling. Snakes were too lethargic to be a concern, scorpions were still asleep, and for some reason, few Change members ventured out of the compound.

This morning, however, one person was at large aside from those residents heading for a car or the milking sheds, a person dressed in shorts and a sweatshirt, running easily along the side of the road. She knew, without pausing to think, just who it was, knew even though she could not make out anything other than his dark hair in the dim light. Jason was on another morning run, trying to get rid of some of that energy that burned in him.

He ran fast, his head bent, and she watched him for a moment. Who would be the more embarrassed, she wondered wryly, if he were to find out that he had a forty-eight-year-old admirer? She shook her head and turned her back on him; she needed to concentrate on the coming interview.

Steven Change, she had decided, was a natural and unconscious manipulator rather than a deliberate one, more a distorting mirror than a calculating plotter. He was very quick to pick up hints and intimations, turn them around, and give them back in their reworked form to their owner, but Ana was not convinced that he considered what he was doing. As far as she could see, Steven believed in himself, was convinced that this showman's knack was the pure manifestation of his religious authority.

This made him more dangerous—a messiah convinced of his own divinity was always the least likely to listen to reason—but it also made him easier to get around for a person able to match his abilities, precisely because he would be unaware that for others the gift of prophetic speech could be a conscious and deliberate means of manipulation: a trick.

He was not by nature a cynical or suspicious man, but he was highly intelligent, which meant that Ana had to be extremely careful. As always in these situations, her biggest problem was concealing her knowledge. She might have left her personality behind, but she could not lose her brain, and Anne Waverly was, after all, a historian with a specialty in alternative religious movements, qualified to offer instant analyses of the roots and precedents of pretty much anything resembling a religion. Early Church heresies, doctrinal controversies, the influence of Islam, the contributions of Judaism, and the effects of the Reformation were all at her fingertips, and beyond Christianity, the modern influences of the East, from Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky to neo-Hinduism, the Reverend Moon, and the Heaven's Gate comet-seekers.

Ana Wakefield, though, did not know all this. Ana Wakefield's concept of religious inquiry was experiential and personal, not academic, and if she knew anything at all about Theosophy, it was because someone had once given her a book on Krishnamurti.

Ana Wakefield knew a little bit about a lot of religious traditions, but the only one she knew intimately was the Christianity of her fictional Midwest childhood, a revelational, New Testament Christianity supplemented by her own early rebellious excursions into the foreign territory of the Old Testament. In dealing with Steven Change, Ana could not know too much or come on too strong. She must somehow suggest to him an immense and untapped potential beneath her innocence. She must present herself as an undiscovered, unspoiled treasure ready and willing to respond to his teaching. Ana Wakefield: every teacher's dream student, a seed ripe and wanting only soil and water to burst into lush growth.

She walked for an hour, trying to think herself into the person she needed to be and finding it inexplicably difficult. She had done it before. Four times, in fact, had she presented herself behind a new mask. In North Dakota, twelve years ago, she had been a lone woman needing to be taken in hand by the protective men of the survivalist community Glen was interested in. Three years later she went to Miami to inquire happily about Satanism, trying hard to make her amusement at their antics look like the pleasure of enlightenment. Then on the heels of that case… Utah. In Utah she had never really been able to construct a plausible persona, because the social dynamics of that community had already begun to turn inward, and whatever she did, she could only be an outsider, forever a source of distrust. It had proved disastrous, fatal for five adults, two children, and nearly her.

In Kansas, though, with Martin Cranmer, she had slipped easily into the household, a potentially useful female damaged and made prickly by the ills of a corrupt society, wanting only the right man—Cranmer—and the right message to make her a good woman once more.

This time it ought to be easy. Here she was, a New Age seeker faced with an exciting community and hints of an intriguing religious experience. She fit here far better than any of the other four places she had entered. The face she was about to present to Steven Change was close enough to her own to be comfortable, nearly natural.

Yet she was distracted. A bare ten days ago she had come into the compound not really caring if she succeeded or not—half wanting, if the truth be told, to fail and prove Glen wrong. Then she had met Dulcie, and her brother, and for some reason as she walked, attempting to picture the face she needed to be, she saw theirs instead. It was disconcerting at first, then annoying. Finally she just threw up her hands and decided the problem must be that she really was too close to being Ana Wakefield, that it was futile to work at constructing something that already existed.

She went to find Steven in his office just inside the entrance to the building that held the kitchen and dining hall. Thomas Mallory was there, too. Ana had consigned Steven's second in command to the category of Professional Shadow, one of those attracted to leadership but incapable of it. It showed a great deal of sense on Steven's part not to have given Mallory a permanent Change center of his own, as his temporary leadership in Los Angeles had demonstrated any place given to him would have fallen apart in a matter of months.

Instead, Mallory accompanied Steven, whenever the Change leader left the compound acting as secretary, calling himself bodyguard (for which role he dressed all in black, wore dark wrap-around sunglasses, and taught a class in karate in the evenings—wearing a black belt). Mallory delighted in stirring up discontent among the other potential shadows, his inferiors in the hierarchy. Ana had spoken to him twice, and thought that he would not recognize her in a lineup. He only glanced at her this time, too, before saying, "He's on the phone. It's an important call, and he may be a while."

She sat down. "I can wait."

It annoyed him, as she had known it would, although there was not much he could do about it. He hunched his muscular little body over his paperwork, lips pursed tight. She sat and waited.

She could hear the sound of Steven's voice, though not the words. He seemed to listen a great deal, and contribute only brief phrases, for a long time. Fifteen, twenty minutes crawled by, and though she was careful to show no impatience, she could feel Mallory's growing satisfaction in this small vengeance.

Eventually, Steven seemed to have outlasted the speaker on the other end of the line. His answers grew longer, his tones sharper, until one stretch of perhaps three minutes, when he spoke continuously. He stopped, listened, said a few words, went silent again, and finally launched into the truncated rhythm of farewells. Silence fell. After a minute the inner door opened and Steven came out, already speaking to his right-hand man.

"Jonas is getting all worked up about—" He saw Ana and caught himself. "Good morning, Ana."

"I wanted to have a word with you. I can come back later if this isn't a good time." But, damnation, how she wished he had finished that sentence first.

"This is fine," he said. "Thomas, remind me to give Jonas a ring before dinner, see what's happened during the day. Come on in. A cup of tea to warm you up after your morning walk?"

"Thank you, that would be nice." She took a chair in front of the open fire, placed the armful of heavy outerwear on the floor at her side, and planted her sandy hiking boots on the floor in front of her while Steven went over to a small sink-and-electric-kettle kitchen arrangement in the corner. He asked her two or three general questions while waiting for the water to boil, and she gave him general answers while studying the room.

This was a public room, intended for consultations not only with Change members but with outsiders as well. The bookshelves were impressive, their contents generic and little used, with many titles on psychology, educational theory, and the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. The art was a combination of Western landscapes and small sculptures from the East, with a nice bronze nataraj taking pride of place above the fireplace. She wondered briefly whether the statue depicting Shiva dancing amid the flames of the earth's destruction meant anything to him other than a decorative piece of tourist art.

"Milk?"

"Please," she said, and reached out for the mug. When she took a sip, she nearly choked: the tea was Earl Grey.

Fortunately, Steven had turned to lower himself into the chair across from her, for he could not have missed her look of shock as Antony Makepeace flitted through her mind and was gone again.

"I'm glad you came to talk with me, Ana. I always like to get to know new members. Teresa tells me you've been helping out in the school. What do you think of it?"

"It is impressive. The kids are impressive."

"Yes. Ironic, considering how grateful society is to get rid of them. We couldn't have a stronger bunch of kids if we had the entire school system to pick from, rather than a handful of castoffs."

"You're allowed some choice, then?"

"Well, in a sense. There are more kids than we could possibly absorb, so we only take those who we feel would most benefit by the structure of Change. I don't encourage them to send us hard-core drug users, for example. There're too many peripheral problems with druggies that we're not equipped to deal with. Have you ever taught special-need kids?"

"Not exclusively, but I worked for a while in a tough urban school where half the kids were nodding in their seats and the others were bouncing off the wall. I didn't last long, but I sure learned a lot."

"Why didn't you last long?"

"I was young. I took it all too personally, couldn't distance myself enough. The kids were far tougher than I was. I burned out."

"The kids had no choice but to stay; I imagine that was the primary difference between you and them. They burned out by retreating into drugs and violence. Like the ones presented to us, ninety percent of whom are brain dead by the age of fifteen."

"And you take the remaining ten percent?"

"I grab them for the valuable resource they are, kids who have been, as you yourself put it the other day, through the fires of hell—abuse, neglect, violence—and come out toughened. Purified, if you will."

"Transformed."

"Precisely."

"But not easy kids to handle."

"Give them a goal and a reason to reach for it and they handle themselves."

Ana thought it was not quite as simple as that, but then, Steven did not work inside the classrooms, and might not realize how much the teachers did.

"It all comes down to transformation," she commented, casting around in growing desperation for a lead that would take her to the heart of this conversation.

"Transformation is the only goal that matters," he replied.

"But do the kids understand that?"

"All of nature understands it. All of nature—rocks, trees, animals, human beings—yearns toward becoming greater, even if only to become the seed of a new generation. It is our duty, as beings somewhat further along in the work, to aid and direct the yearnings of those in our care. Teaching is a sacred occupation, Ana. A great responsibility."

She took a deep breath. "Is that why I've been kept from it? Until I prove myself worthy?"

He studied her over the rim of his cup. "What do you mean?"

She crossed her fingers and launched her shot across his bow, praying fervently that it wasn't a dud, or didn't blow up in her face. "I don't feel a part of the energy here, somehow. Like there's a secret handshake or something and I don't have it. Of course, I'd expect that from the people who wear the necklaces, but even the people who have been here only a few weeks are—" She broke off, seeing his expression.

Steven had gone very still. "Who told you about the necklaces?"

"Nobody. Why, what is there to tell? I saw people wearing them and assumed they were a sign of rank."

"Rank," he repeated.

"Or accomplishment or time here. Apparently I was wrong." She allowed a thread of curiosity to creep into her voice.

Steven moved quickly to squelch it.

"No, you weren't wrong. It's just that in Change we try to keep any signs of… rank to ourselves. The pendants we wear are meant as a private reminder and acknowledgment of accomplishments, not a badge to be flaunted."

"Nobody's flaunted anything, not that I've noticed. In fact, I've never even seen what's on the end of the chain, just the chains themselves."

He looked relieved, then moved to lead her away from the topic. I'm sorry you feel we are being aloof, Ana. I will speak to some of the members about it. And I also think it's very probable that Teresa is about to turn her class over to you on a permanent basis."

"Really? But what about her?"

Teresa will go back to the administrative job she was doing before she had to fill in, which is more to her taste. She'll thank you for showing up."

"Oh. Well, thank you. I'll enjoy teaching again."

"And learning?"

"Oh yes. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for the possibility of learning."

"You who have spent all her adult life in the pursuit of learning?"

Ana did not think she was imagining the faint mocking tone in Steven's voice, nor the tiny quirk in one corner of his mouth. He would allow her to teach children because the school needed her, but unless she did something right now, he would forever see her as yet another middle-aged butterfly flitting from one spiritual flower to the next. She had to be taken seriously, yet without stepping outside her persona. She stared into the depths of the empty mug on her knee as if it would give her the words she so desperately needed to convince him.

"All my life," she began, "I have been, as you called me the other morning, a seeker. I've lived in half a dozen communities, followed the yoga sutras and done zazen, learned a little Chinese and a little more Sanskrit, and sat at the feet of any number of men and women who I thought could teach me something. I have never stayed with one discipline because none of them seemed to me complete: I found them either all ritual or all philosophy, negating the body or discounting the mind, either bogged down in their own tradition or else rootless and shallow, and none of them succeeded in integrating everyday life with the search for enlightenment, or Oneness, or revelation.

"Here, I get the feeling that you are trying to do just that. There's the day-to-day, gritty reality of raising kids and growing food, but not at the expense of nurturing the flame of spirit. Change is a flourishing plant with strong roots deep in the earth. I would like to be a part of that."

Ana did not look up from her cup. She had thrown out a number of hooks here, from her linguistic background to the use of loaded words like "ritual" and "integration" to just plain flattery, and she held her breath to see what he would respond to.

"In what way do you see us—how did you put it? 'Nurturing the flame of spirit'?" he asked.

A wave of relief swept through her—she was right, fire was central to the belief system of Change. Perhaps on his trip to India Steven had picked up the Zoroastrian dualism of light and dark, good and—but there was no time for that now. She had to keep the tenuous upper hand, and impress Steven with the potentialities of his new convert. Keep it general; keep it provocative. Ana raised her eyes to look, not at Steven, but at the fireplace.

"The Hindu god of fire is Agni, depicted as a quick and brilliant figure with golden hair. He is young and old, eternal and ephemeral, friendly as a domestic fire and ferocious as the flames of sacrifice. The human spirit is the same—you can see it in those kids. Easily quenched but waiting to be rekindled, flaming out of control but wanting to be brought in to the hearth."

She could spout this noble bullshit for hours; it was one reason why Anne Waverly was such a popular teacher. That she had not actually answered his question was beside the point, to Steven most of all. His face had gone rapt.

"Have you ever walked through flames, Ana?"

"Do you mean actual flames, as in Nebuchadnezzar casting the three young men into the fiery furnace?"

"Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. 'The hair of their heads was not singed, their mantles were not harmed, and no smell of fire had come upon them.' "

"Well, no."

"I have, Ana. I went in bare feet across a stretch of burning coals, and I was not harmed. On the contrary, I came out a new man."

Firewalking, Ana thought—found in cultures as diverse as Polynesia and Greece, and closer to home as well among the New Age.

"I saw it once in the desert outside San Diego," she told him with enthusiasm. "It was unbelievable."

"Believe, Ana."

"Oh, I do believe. Maybe not enough to commit the soles of my feet to it." She laughed in deprecation of her cowardice; he looked at her with pity.

"Perhaps you will," Steven said portentously. "Perhaps you will."

" 'The fire will test what sort of work each one has done,' " she returned, venturing into the New Testament to follow his line from Daniel.

" 'When you walk through fire you will not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.' "

Isaiah, she thought. Then before he could launch off on the burning bush, Elijah's chariot, or the fiery Day of the Lord, she asked, injecting her voice with earnest solemnity, "That's what you're saying happened with the kids here, isn't it? That they have been through hell already, and some of them were merely hardened."

" 'Behold, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction,' " he quoted, adding, "Like your young friend Jason has been tried."

Ana kicked herself mentally for assuming that anything she might do would be overlooked by Steven's eyes and ears. She hoped to God that she wasn't blushing.

"He's a fine young man."

"I agree," said Steven in his all-knowing voice. "I have great hopes for that boy."

Chapter Fifteen

Men and women seeking a time of reflection and spiritual renewal have always sought out the empty places. From time immemorial, God has spoken in the desert or in the mountains, away from the hustle of everyday life. Contemplative religious communities have established themselves outside of the towns, in places where the living is harsh, because the simplicity pares things down to the essentials.

There is a tendency to think of all such communities as slightly odd, if not dangerously antisocial, to see their choice of environment as a flight from rather than a seeking out. And it is certainly true, many of the souls who choose to live out in the desert are damaged, even unbalanced.

However, we must guard against our assumptions. A close analysis of the Branch Davidian community in Waco in the period before the FBI and BATF entered the scene reveals it not as a tightly self-isolated group of fanatic believers, but as an independent community with regular interactions with the neighboring individuals and communities. Branch Davidians came and went, held jobs in the area, formed friendships with outsiders. With the raid and the long standoff that followed, a community with roots and branches in the outside world was abruptly truncated, stripped down to an edgy leader and his isolated followers.

The Branch Davidians might eventually have withdrawn from the world on their own decision, but as it was, before that time came they found themselves walled up away from it. They were kept from communication with anyone but the FBI, they were not allowed to come and go, they were forced into an irrevocable choice between staying and leaving, forever abandoning their home and family inside what was now a compound.

Self-chosen isolation may be a positive thing; being cut off from all contact with the outer world is not, and must in a "cult" situation be avoided at all costs,

From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly

In the days that followed, the sun grew marginally warmer, the nights fractionally shorter, and the community considerably more welcoming; slowly, Ana grew to have a deeper understanding of Change and how it functioned.

It did not take her long to verify that Change was indeed built around secret teachings, that initiates worked their way into the higher levels, moving by steps upward into greater knowledge and proximity to Steven. This was represented not only by the necklaces that certain initiates wore and the position each had in the multi-leveled meditation hall, but it extended to living quarters as well—the room Ana had been given was in a building populated almost entirely by newcomers. The only person in the building who had lived at Change for more than a few months was a young man with a vile temper, who had been demoted by Steven after getting angry at another member and hitting him. The young man stormed around furiously for a couple of weeks before he finally left, to the unvoiced relief of all.

Steven himself lived in the central building over the meditation hall, in the northern quadrant of the upper floor. The other upstairs rooms were all filled with the oldest, closest Change members. Most were men. The building to the northeast of the center was the communal dining hall with the kitchen and several offices, including Steven's, and upstairs the quarters for the youngest children. Walking around the circle counterclockwise, the next building housed older members on the ground floor and older kids above, then came a building filled with earnest but inexperienced members, and finally the recently completed building where Ana was housed.

It was a bit worrying: Ana had no intention of staying out her promised year, but in a hierarchical organization where secret doctrine is given out in slow degrees, it would not be easy to speed her trip to the inner circle. All she could do was keep her ears and eyes wide open, and hope for a chance to bypass the preliminaries.

It helped, being a teacher, particularly as she convinced the others that she was best placed with the older students where her background of history could be used and her less-complete but still broad familiarity with English literature might assist in preparing the students for the state's standardized tests. Even in an alternative community, test scores mattered.

Within a couple of weeks, Ana was well on her way to becoming an accepted member of the Change community. She taught her kids, she participated in group meditations, and she listened intently to Steven's nightly talks.

One morning when Ana went in for breakfast, small, blond Suellen was not at her usual place behind the serving tables. When she did not appear again for lunch, Ana asked casually if anyone had seen her, and received only tight lips in answer. At the very end of dinner the young woman walked in, making an entrance into the dining hall, her hair wet from the shower, her body moving as if it ached all over, a small blister on the inside of her left wrist and the light of a radiant vision in her face. Ana watched thoughtfully as Suellen made her way proudly through the room, nodding regally at the respectful greetings her passage earned. Steven came in a short time later, and over the next ten minutes, Ana noticed three high-ranking Change members approach him, exchange a few words, and then glance at the radiant Suellen with knowing smiles—expressions that were affectionate, experienced, and not the least bit lewd. Whatever test the woman had faced during the day, she had obviously passed it, and Ana would have sworn that it did not involve sleeping with the leader.

Ana added Suellen's religious glow and the smiles of the others to her growing store of Change evidence. She studied the novels in the library and the paintings on the walls, she asked questions of the older members (most of whom were younger in years than she) and listened for the hidden references and intonations behind their words. She looked at the architecture and the arrangement of the buildings, at the TRANSFORMATION mural over the kitchen and the shape of the meditation hall, at the intriguing, glittering gold sculpture that was suspended over the hall and the way Steven and the higher initiates gazed at it, and she began to have some interesting ideas.

From the first she had seized on Steven's continual references to heat and fire and the presence of the round suspended fireplace at the center of the meditation hall. Fire was not, she decided, merely one metaphor among many; as a symbol, it lay at the heart of the Change process.

That suspicion had led her to consider the phenomenon of fire worship, which was why she had talked about Agni at the crucial meeting in Steven's office, and not Shiva or Jesus or any of the other figures she found present in Steven's theological vocabulary. Steven and his three friends had spent time near Bombay, where they would easily have met Parsi thought and begun to develop a kind of neo-Zoroastrianism, fire-reverence with the Parsi tendency toward secrecy and appreciation for the metaphysics of change.

However, wouldn't she then see more tangible signs of Steven's preoccupation with fire, like a continuous flame in front of each building, or a ritual involving the meditation hall's fireplace? Still she remained convinced that fire entered the religious equation in some way.

And then one evening during Steven's talk he used a word that sent a shudder throught the ranks of the higher initiates, and it all fell into place.

The chant that night was "Great heat, great hope", which started out with four beats and ended up being little more than "heat" and "hope" with a brief pause between the words. That night Steven spoke not before the chant, but after. As usual, his subject was change, and specifically some problems the community had run into with a building inspector.

"I want you to regard the rules of the world," he said, "not as the work of an enemy out to thwart you, but as the vessel for our transformation, and from our personal and communal transformation to the transformation of the world. If the world brings pressure to bear, if it turns up the heat of tribulation, do not hate it, do not seek to escape it; welcome it as the means whereby change is effected. We are tried in the furnace of affliction, refined by the flames of daily torment. We do not turn from it—no, we enter into it freely, as the alembic of our own transformation, the power nexus of our change."

He continued in this vein, but Ana was too busy with her own thoughts to listen. The word "alembic", the ancient chemical apparatus used to heat and distill, had jolted the people nearest to Steven, all the men and women on the platforms; she had felt their sudden intake of breath and the straightening of their spines, could still see it in their faces and their posture. She could feel it in her own. Because with that single noun it all came together in her mind, and she knew with certainty what Change's hidden doctrine was all about.

Alchemy.

Good heavens, she thought in amazement—alchemy. Is there nothing new under the sun?

It was, she had to admit, the ultimate in transformational processes, extending beyond the spiritual to transmute base physical matter into pure incorruptible gold, never to be tarnished, more valuable than any other metal. Her knowledge, unfortunately, was sparse: From a hodge-podge of roots and the earliest stages of chemistry, in China and through India and Arabia and finally to Europe, great minds had worked to develop a sort of physical philosophy, a method of intellectual and spiritual inquiry reflected in solid results. Base material such as lead was put through an elaborate series of processes (all of them involving, as Steven had said, heat) that led to its perfection into gold, while the alchemist, struggling over the years to perfect the process, was simultaneously being refined, purified, and ultimately transmuted into a being of untarnishable wisdom and immortality. And didn't a branch of alchemy seek to make not just gold, but the philosopher's stone—a tincture of immense power capable of changing any base substance it might touch into gold?

There was no doubt that charlatans abounded in this burgeoning science, but the mere possibility that a person might have a recipe for gold put that person into danger; for centuries, alchemists were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for their formulas. As a result, the secret doctrine became even more so. Rich symbolism and heavily allegorical writing served to obscure the process to all but those who were already in the know. Poetic imagery rather than clear description was used for speaking of the stages the metals went through within the alembics: the Peacock for the rising up of colors from the substance being heated, the Dragon for the fighting of the elements. Zodiacal symbols were used to refer to chemical substances, drawings of men with suns for their heads and women with moons for theirs represented gold and silver, and a king and queen in connubial embrace showed the joining of opposites that was necessary to the success of the Work.

Beyond that, Ana's knowledge began to dissipate, becoming thin and frayed around the edges. Deadly explosions in alchemical laboratories—fulminate of mercury?—Roger Bacon—Alexandria and the Arab Jabir, all bubbled up and burst in her mind, along with the conviction that Jung had written at some length about the symbolism of alchemy, and the clear memory of an illustration by Arthur Rackham that showed a dark and cluttered workshop peopled by a squat gnome of an alchemist, holding up a small glass vessel in which the gleam of gold provided the only light in the shadows; the alchemist was gazing at his miraculous creation in astonishment and dawning awe.

Ana felt a bit like the gnome in his workshop herself, all her discomfort and distraction swept to the side as she held up her shiny discovery, studying it from different angles. It was truly a beautiful thing, this pure knowledge of the distilled essence of Change, but as with any treasure, possession was not enough. How could she use it? And even more urgent, how could she add to it? Knowledge here was both the key to authority and a resource doled out in tiny dribbles. She had no intention of waiting years to earn her right to a silver chain around her neck. One obvious shortcut was Glen, but as a member of Change, she could no longer just climb into Rocinante and drive into town without attracting too many questions, and the US Mail or the telephone system were far too vulnerable to Change eyes and ears.

Still, she had to reach Glen somehow, both to show him her treasure and to request a heavy dose of additional information about the alchemical process. Retrieving his gathered information, then finding a means of studying it in private, was a problem she would face when she came to it. Now, however, how could she free herself up to reach Glen?

The next day a slim opportunity came up. In a moment Ana had seized it, wrenched it wider, and ruthlessly pushed her way through it.

One of the many advantages of working with a relatively small group of students is the ease of combining parts of the curriculum. Math lessons can spill over into English, a practicum such as filling out an income tax form or balancing a checkbook can be worked into government classes, and economics can be made to include family planning (Just how much does it cost to raise that failure to use a condom up to college age?).

A few days earlier, Ana had been making her way along the circular hallway, the classrooms opening off to her right and to her left the blank wall broken only by displayed notices, papers, and assorted pieces of student artwork, and she had idly thought what a waste of a long, unbroken stretch of wall it was.

She had mulled it over during the morning and at lunch she had turned to Teresa.

"You know that inside wall of the hallway? Has anyone thought about having the kids do a mural on it?"

"A mural?"

"Yeah. Each class could have a segment, maybe the one across from their doorway, and it could be along a theme like the one in the dining hall, only longer. I was thinking that it would be kind of fun to have the kids trace the historical development of Arizona, from dinosaurs to Anasazi cliff dwellings and settlers to now. It would be a great history lesson for them, and even useful for kids in the future. Of course, there are lots of themes they could work up, but it would be interesting to have the entire wall an integrated unit."

"It would be an enormous task," Teresa said dubiously, but Ana had made sure before she began that there were others within earshot, and she pressed on, aware that they were listening.

"It would take a lot of organization, but once it was done it could be left in place for years. Or painted over, if teachers wanted to do their section over again. We could ask about getting the paint donated. The biggest problem I can see would be covering the floor so the carpet didn't get trashed, but I think we could manage that."

Dominique had been one of those listening in, and she spoke up.

"I think it is an excellent idea. We probably wouldn't finish it before June, but we could stretch it out—or even let the kids work on it over summer vacation if they wanted to. Which they would."

It was discussed some more and tentatively approved, depending on the cost. The school buzzed, preliminary sketches were made, themes were hammered out.

In the meantime, the business of school went on, and Ana prepared the other half of her plan.

For convenience and interest, Ana had combined her two high-school-level history groups into one. At this time they had been working on the idea of colonialism, with the eleventh graders covering the historical and social aspects and the seniors concentrating on economics and governmental choices. When the topic of the mural came up, she brought the discussion around to their own backyard, as she tried to do with regularity, and asked them what effect colonialism had had on the local inhabitants, the Navajo and Arapaho, the Hopi and Zuni peoples.

She was not actually surprised when few of them could think of any particular effect offhand, nor that fewer of them, even those of minority blood, thought of the white intrusion as colonialism. She professed astonishment, however, and again during lunch she told the story to her colleagues, exaggerating slightly both the ignorance of the students and the consternation of their teacher.

"You know," she said to Dominique as if the thought were suddenly occurring to her, "we really ought to take these kids down to the ethnology museum in Phoenix, not only for this but as research for the mural. It's possible to do field trips, isn't it? Just for the day?"

Ana knew it was possible; after all, the students had all been on a field trip when she first arrived. Dominique objected that they had just gotten back from a trip, and Ana retorted that soon it would be too late in the year, that they needed to get the future muralists started in the right direction, and furthermore, she pointed out, they would soon all be so concerned with the end-of-the-year testing that the opportunity would be lost. She kept on, stubbornly finding more reasons that it was a good idea, convincing two or three of the other teachers to join in, until suddenly all opposition collapsed and the trip was set, in ten days' time.

She had forced open the door to an opportunity to make contact with Glen; the delay made her impatient, anxious to get to the heart of this community, get the information Glen needed, and get out again. On the other hand, she did not have a lot of time to fret over the delay, since in addition to planning the mural and her other duties of teaching and taking turns in the manual labor of the community (chicken shed, kitchen, and clean-up crews—gardening and building duties were still on winter status) she had also to prepare herself and her students for the field trip, which involved numerous telephone calls to the museum docents and the school district.

Dozens of times during those days she would look at the telephone sitting on the desk in front of her and think how simple it would be just to phone Glen. She could punch in the familiar numbers and in thirty seconds tell him what she needed and when she would be accessible, but in the end she did not, because she was fairly certain that she would be found out, and that the repercussions would be heavy.

She was fully aware that she was being watched. It was only to be expected. All of the newcomers were under careful scrutiny. She suspected that she was more closely watched than the others simply because she was involved in teaching the children, and Change authorities needed to be certain that she could be trusted not to introduce subversive outside ideas. Her classes were monitored, the papers the students wrote for her gone over by Dominique or one of the others, her reading list vetted, her computer time observed. She took care to stick to the syllabus, and allowed only those diversions and creative ideas that fit with the community beliefs. She kept a tight lid on her personal thoughts, was careful not to voice too much criticism of the outside authorities, and left religion in the realm of sociology. She did not think her rooms had hidden microphones, but she took no chances. She wrote in her diary, she meditated with the others and by herself, she walked out into the desert each morning to watch the sun rise, and she took no chances.

Her main goal was the gathering of information and worming her way into Steven's confidence, and in both of these the school became her focal point. At first it seemed an ordinary enough teaching institution, despite its setting, with very little Change doctrine working its way into the curriculum. Gradually, this picture deepened.

Ana had been given Teresa's class—or, as she discovered, the class Teresa had been forced to assume when Change had lost two teachers, one to apostasy, the other to Boston. It seemed to Ana that her colleague stepped back into her former role as the school's administrator with a trace more relief than a seeker after psychological hair shirts ought to display.

Teresa's removal from the classroom after five months inevitably created a great deal of reorganization and makeup work, and many after-school meetings with the other teachers. It seemed to Ana that the number of these requiring the presence of one particular instructor, Dov Levinski, was quite high, although as he was responsible for the math and science side of the curriculum, it made sense. Still, Ana was intrigued. When Steven began to come down for those meetings as well, although she recalled that Steven too had been trained in the hard sciences, she thought she might take a closer look.

So it was that one afternoon two days before the museum trip was planned, she walked into Teresa's office with an administrative problem she had been saving up and found the three of them sitting at the round conference table. Teresa looked irritated at the disturbance and Dov surprised, but Steven merely wore his customary look of mild interest and wise inner amusement.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Ana said, coming farther into the room. "I needed to give you something, but I didn't realize you were busy. I'll just stick this on your desk."

Teresa nodded coldly and closed the file she had on the table in front of her, which may have hidden the specific information inside but at the same time revealed the cover to be PROPERTY OF THE ARIZONA STATE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION. Seven such files lay on the table, four of them stacked in a pile to one side, the others distributed between the occupants of the conference table.

"Anything I can do to help?" she asked brightly on her way past the table.

"No thank you, Ana," Teresa said repressively. Dov had closed his folder, too, and was patently waiting for her to leave the room, but Steven sat back in his chair and pushed his own file a couple of inches in her direction.

"Yes," he said. Teresa's mouth dropped open and Dov looked equally startled. "Let's see what Ana makes of this decision."

Ana stood and looked the situation over with care. She wanted to see what the files were, but she did not wish to alienate the two teachers, and although Dov was merely surprised at Steven's words, Teresa's dark cheeks had flushed. However, she couldn't very well withdraw the offer once it had been accepted, so she walked over and sat down in the chair next to Steven's, pulling the folder over in front of her.

It consisted of the brief biography and not-so-brief criminal record of a fifteen-year-old boy named Edgardo Rufina, who three years earlier had gone to live with an alcoholic aunt in Kingman with two charges of prostitution in her past. He had been in and out of trouble ever since. In school he was getting one B, one D, and the rest Cs, and had spent at least a week in custody every term. His violent acts were escalating, with his last offense the serious one of assaulting a police officer.

She read to the end and looked up. Steven reached across the table to retrieve the two folders from in front of Teresa and Dov and pushed them over to her. As she opened the first, Teresa stood.

"Does anyone else want something to drink?" she asked in a taut voice. Dov did, Steven did not, and Ana thanked her and said no. Teresa took her time in the lounge, and returned with two glasses of iced tea as Ana was nearing the end of the third and last file. They waited until Ana closed that one, which like the second had concerned a young boy with few offenses but those serious and escalating, who had a family but one that was broken and itself marked by legal wrongdoings. Gabe Martinez, the boy of the second folder, had dropped out of school in Tucson, and the third boy, Mark Gill, was in the process of flunking out in the border town of Nogales.

"Which of the three?" Steven asked.

Ana had been a teacher long enough to know a test when she heard one.

"Well, it sort of depends on what you want," she replied immediately, although keeping her voice casual, even diffident. "If your goal is to get a bad kid off the streets for a while, then by all means take Gabe or Mark and do society a favor. On the other hand, if you're looking for a bright boy who's acting out an impossible home situation and might respond to a positive environment, whose troublemaking has been spontaneous and emotional rather than premeditated and self-serving, then I'd say grab Edgardo. He's even bright enough to keep up in school despite his brushes with the law."

"He's not bright enough to avoid being caught," Dov pointed out.

"Some kids find the structured setting of being in custody a nice change compared to their home life," Ana suggested mildly, and stood up. By the smug expression on Steven's face she seemed to have passed his test, and nothing would now be gained by outstaying what small welcome she'd been given. On the contrary, enigmatic statements and tantalizing glimpses of Ana Wakefield's abilities were precisely the effect she was striving for. A game, yes, but one she had to win.

Chapter Sixteen

To: makepeace@duncanpt.com

From:

Subject: Homecoming

August whatever, 1995 (That's still the year, isn't it??)

Dearest Tonio, just a short one to let you and Maria know I'm out and okay, as okay as I ever am at this stage. I'm off to the boys in Virginia for a couple of weeks for debriefing (which always makes me think of male strippers, most inappropriately) so let Eliot know he needs to stay on for a bit longer. I don't know if I'll then be directly home or if I'll go somewhere for a few days to let my nerves jangle—Glen says they have a safe house somewhere in Wisconsin that's not being used, but I'm torn between peace and quiet (God, communes can be noisy) and putting my head down and getting back to work to take my mind off everything. I'll let you know. It'ss probably a good thing I don't have any decisions to make for a while, since the choice between tea and coffee reduces me to tears. Poor Glen.

Anyway, I will be back in time to open up shop, so don't let anyone cancel my classes like they did last time. I'll send you confirmation of the reading list for the bookstore, when I can concentrate on it, and if you'd get in touch with those three people whose names I left with you, and tell then I'll definitely want them each for a guest lecture or two.

Tell Maria hello. Give her my love, tell her I look forward to many long sessions.

The children are the worst, walking away from them and not knowing if I should be doing anything else for them. I hear their voices in my sleep, over the sound of the water when I take a shower, when the kettle is coming to a boil. Absolute silence is tolerable, or noises loud enough to drown out anything in the back of my ears, but in between is difficult. Funny—you'd think I'd be grateful for the absence of children's racket, the arguments and continuous uproar, but I suppose one gets used to things. God, I hope they will be all right.

Enough. I'll let you know when I'm home.

—Anne

Letter via e-mail from Anne Waverly to Antony Makepeace, August 25, 1995

The drive to the Heard Museum in downtown Phoenix took a little over three hours, so the bus carrying twenty-nine students and the twelve adults necessary to keep them in line left at seven in the morning. This would be the first time some of the students had been off the compound in months, and excitement was high. The adults, scattered throughout the bus, were kept busy asking them to sit down, changing seat partners who in some way or another rubbed on each other, and deflecting teenage misbehaviors.

Ana was sitting toward the rear of the bus, looking four rows forward at the back of Jason Delgado, who, along with about half of the other eighth graders, had been included in this high school outing. He was rigid, staring out the window and radiating animosity, and the source of his discomfort was not difficult to determine: It was seated right beside him.

The boy in the aisle seat was an overweight blond boy with bad skin and a worse attitude. Bryan was two years older than Jason, looked younger, and resented the fact—and Jason—mightily. Ana already knew him as a troublemaker, although the school avoided that judgmental term, and she could see that he was deliberately provoking Jason with regular excursions of elbow and shoulder into the younger boy's space and the odd muttered phrase, inaudible in the next row over the noise of the bus but causing Jason to stiffen further.

After an hour and a half, the bus stopped to allow the cramped passengers to stretch and use the toilets. Ana walked her way over to the two teachers sitting in Jason's section, one of whom was Dov Levinski, and suggested that either he or Bryan be moved.

"We can't, sorry," said Dov.

"Why not? Just trade seats with somebody—Bryan gets along okay with Marcos; put him there."

"Bryan and Jason have to sit together," he said. "Steven's orders."

"Steven? But that's—" Ana caught herself before she committed the offense of criticizing Steven, and changed it to "He must not be aware of the problems between the two boys."

"He knows," Dov said curtly, and moved away to suggest that two girls might not want to squirt each other from the drinking fountain.

Strange, Ana thought. Why would Steven force two boys who hate each other to sit together? And particularly when one of them was a boy in whom he had expressed an interest?

They got through the rest of the trip without a scuffle and were met at the museum by three strong and determined-looking docents, who divided them up into groups with the big, scar-faced wood worker and shop teacher David Carteret in charge of the first group, Dov Levinski the second, and Teresa Montoya the third. As they went inside, Ana glanced at the map in her hands, looking for the location of the public telephones, and found one under some stairs near a rest room on the other side of the courtyard. It was very exposed, but she needed only two minutes to make the call. There didn't seem to be much choice but to leave her group when everyone was safely in the depths of the museum and make an emergency bathroom break, hiding her diary and a brief note for Glen somewhere—in the towel dispenser perhaps, or the toilet seat cover case—and make the call. No time to find a photocopy machine; Glen would have to arrange the journal's return somehow.

Accordingly, halfway along the tour and deep in a lecture on Navajo building techniques, she sidled up to Dov and told him "You guys'll have to watch the kids by yourselves for a couple of minutes. I have to go use the rest room."

Dov looked annoyed. "Can't you wait for twenty minutes?"

"I don't need to pee," she whispered cheerfully. "It's this menopause business; a person has really hard flows at the weirdest times."

He turned scarlet and pulled away from her as if it might be contagious, and Ana strode off toward the ladies' room.

To her irritation, there were two women already in the rest room and another followed her in the door. Even worse, there was no seat cover dispenser in the stall she entered, and the toilet paper holder was too small for her diary. The women left, Ana flushed (Her period was quite regular, and not due for a week), and went out to see if she could jimmy the towel holder, and there stood the woman who had followed her in, waiting for her.

"Agent Steinberg, FBI," the woman said, and flashed a badge in front of Ana's startled eyes before making it vanish into a pocket. "Glen McCarthy told me to follow you around the museum, to see if you had anything for him."

For a moment, Ana could only stand and gape at this evidence of the FBI man's all-seeing and omnipotent presence, but then her brain kicked in. Of course—with all the activity involving the school board to set up this trip, the news had leaked to Glen's ears somehow. She yanked her diary out of her bag and thrust it at Agent Steinberg.

"Photocopy all the pages after the marker and give them to Glen. Tell him I need information on alchemy. Got that? In two days—not tomorrow morning but the next day—I'll walk down the road at dawn. I need this diary back along with any material he can get together; have him put them underneath the big rock with the white chip out of it exactly half a mile outside the gates, on the east side of the road. Now go."

"Alchemy," the woman said. The diary was already hidden.

"Go." Ana turned to wash her hands, and Agent Steinberg was gone before she could reach for the towels.

The half-closed door was pulled open and Teresa walked in.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Just fine," Ana answered, and left to find the others.

The trouble erupted over lunch.

Jason and Bryan were in the group behind Ana's, the last to finish. When the assorted students and teachers spilled into the small courtyard behind the bookstore where the others were already settled with sandwiches and drinks in hand Teresa and the other woman chaperone were looking extremely apprehensive, and the two men, whom Ana knew only as Dean and Peter, were trying to position themselves between the two boys, with limited success. Bryan's sneers and feint pokes were kerosene to Jason's smoldering anger. Watching them, she could see the meaning of the slang term "mad-dogging". The two boys glared at each other, daring the other to be the first to move, encouraged by the low remarks and glances of the other students.

Steven be damned, Ana cursed to herself; those two have to be separated.

She grabbed Teresa by the arm and hissed in her ear, "Do you want a fistfight right here in the museum? Wouldn't that make Change look really good? I know Steven said to keep those two together, but Steven isn't here. Split them up, and we can settle it with him later."

Teresa looked over at the two boys and decided to agree with Ana. She went over to speak urgently into the ear of David Carteret, who then moved his six-feet six-inch bulk over to the table where the sandwiches had been set out.

"C'mon, man," he said to Bryan. Time to cool down,"

Ana went to stand next to Jason, who was positively vibrating with repressed fury. She spoke his name, picked up a wrapped sandwich, and thrust it into his hand, trying to distract him, make him focus on her and return him to himself. He glanced at her distractedly, but then from behind her came Bryan's voice saying something she barely heard but which sent Jason's control through the roof. He dropped the sandwich, whirled, and reached out for Bryan, roaring his fury straight into Ana's face. She was caught up in a swift whirl of movement. Her shoulder slammed against some hard object, men were shouting, a woman shrieked—she shrieked—pain shot up from her knee and then a shocking impact spun her face around and she was buried beneath two furious and very strong young men. She cried out again when a shoe ground down hard across her fingers, and then just as suddenly as it had begun it was over, leaving her crouching on hands and knees, waiting for her body to report its injuries. Her head spun, her hand throbbed, her mouth hurt, and she watched the drops of bright red blood splash regularly down onto the courtyard tiles and across her bruised knuckles.

Hands tentatively touched her back, heads were bent to hers, shocked voices came from nearby, and at a distance a man, full of rage and disgust, harangued.

Jason, she thought suddenly. Where—?

She raised her head, grimacing at the taste of blood in her mouth, and tried to see him through the legs.

"Ice," a voice said. "Get a wet cloth," said another, and "Who's got the first aid kit?"

A dripping towel appeared; Ana took it with her right hand and put it gingerly to her mouth, which seemed to be alarmingly full of sharp pieces of tooth. No—not teeth.

She sat down on the pavement and pulled out the remains of her two front teeth, which caused a quick frisson of horror to run through the crowd of onlookers until they saw the broken plate of the bridge and the wire bits that were attached, and the tight laughter of relieved stress replaced the horror. Several of the girls began to giggle uncontrollably, and Ana was reminded of Dulcie. Great icebreakers, missing front teeth, she thought. Well worth all the trouble of getting shot up and crashing your face into a steering wheel.

Ice was brought and wrapped in the gory towel. After a minute, Ana decided the ground was too hard and her injuries too light to continue sitting where she was, so she allowed a couple of the men to help her to her feet. Her knee functioned, her left hand was scraped and already swelling but all the fingers seemed whole, and the bleeding from the cut lip was slowing down. She no doubt looked a sight, but what did that matter?

"I'm fine," she said indistinctly to the people fluttering around her. "I'm fine. It was an accident, and the only thing damaged is my bridge, and that can be replaced," She lisped and enunciation was difficult, but calm communication was reducing the anxiety level. Time to move on. "Would somebody go and buy me a T-shirt in the shop so I don't go around looking like an escapee from the emergency room? I'll pay you back. And did somebody tell the museum people they don't need to call in the riot squad?"

A babble of voices started up, and she squelched them. "No, I do not need to see a doctor. There's no point in even seeing a dentist until the swelling goes down. Finish your lunch, I'm going to go wash my face,"

She pushed through the would-be Samaritans until she could see Jason. Both he and Bryan were unscathed other than a small, already dried cut on Jason's knuckle where it had connected with her mouth. His face was taut and pale, and not, she thought, because of the infuriated woodworking teacher looming over him. The sight of her blood-smeared face emerging from the crowd brought a look of mingled relief and horror to his features, and he took in a great gulp of air. He looked ill.

"I'm okay, Jason," she said as clearly as she could. "It looks worse than it is. And it wasn't entirely your fault."

She came out of the rest room still looking as if she'd fallen in front of a truck, but cleaned up, wearing a shiny new T-shirt with Anasazi pot designs printed on it and beginning to see the humor in the situation.

And the benefits: This would mean at least two trips into Sedona to see a dentist, great opportunities to contact Glen. Silver linings, she told herself, and would have chuckled if it hadn't hurt so much.

The first group had already been taken away by their highly reluctant decent. The second group, her own, was assembling near the door, but she saw that neither Bryan nor Jason had joined them. Without hesitation she marched up to Jason, took his arm, and moved him over to her group. There was one tentative objection, inevitably from Dov.

"Look, Ana, we were specifically told—"

"I'll talk to Steven when we get back," she interrupted him, wishing it didn't have to come out Thteven. "I want you with me Jason." Jathon.

The authority of her shed blood shut them up, and the tour resumed. Ana felt distinctly unwell, and would have opted out but for the strong need to maintain her poise before, and because of, Jason. She absorbed not a word of the lecture and demonstration by a Hopi carver on fetishes, and when the bus doors opened before her, she staggered for the opening as if for a lifeboat. The only thing she had accomplished was keeping Jason safe, and with her. It was enough.

Jason had not appreciated her protection. He was firmly back in his shell, refusing to meet her eyes, sitting at the window hunched away from her. She might have been an arresting officer. Ana slumped back in her aisle seat, her mouth, hand, and knee radiating sharp pain and the rest of her just sore, hoping that a degree of energy and wits would seep back before Jason had shut himself away for good. Ah, Jason my lad, she said silently, I've opened harder clams than you.

It was afternoon, and the traffic out of the sprawl that was Phoenix seemed endless. Ana had been to the city half a dozen times before, but she always forgot how big it was and how long it took to cross it. The occupants of the bus had fallen silent by the time the driver finally shook the suburbs off, exhausted by the trudging and the thinking and the emotional surge over lunch. A few people talked, several fell asleep on each other's shoulders, but most simply sat, rocking with the motion of the bus. She still felt ill and old, but if she was to reach the boy, it had to be now.

"What was it Bryan said to you?" she asked Jason quietly. He sat up straighter and seemed intent on melting holes in the window with his gaze. "It was something about Dulcie, wasn't it? Something about her being retarded."

The side of the young jaw was clamped down hard, working against her words. Ana had dredged Bryan's shouted sentences out of the back of her mind, and she thought that what he had actually said was a criticism of Jason, and indirectly of Dulcie: "He's a retard like his sister."

Ana did not for a moment believe that Jason had resented the derision against him, but a threat, or even a mere insult, aimed at his sister would easily have the power to pry the lid off his self-control.

"Well, do you think she is retarded?" she asked.

Had she been any other person on the bus, he might well have hit her. She knew what his reaction would be, though, and she braced herself against his surge of emotion, instantly repressed. The moment his face was closed again, she leaned toward him and said urgently, "Think, Jason, think. Would I call Dulcie retarded? Me?"

She watched his hackles go down and she drew a relieved breath. "You know I wouldn't, because she's no more retarded than you or I. Of course, Bryan's vocabulary is about as extensive as his moral sense, so he may have meant not that Dulcie is mentally deficient, but that she is unbalanced. Ill. What Bryan would think of as crazy. In which case, Jason, do you think Dulcie is crazy?"

Fury mixed with fear instantly welled up in his eyes, fear for Dulcie and fear that Ana might so readily see it, fear that her saying it must make it true and fury that he could not change his own fear. She smiled at him.

"Jason, your sister is fine. Whatever it is you and your sister have been through, Dulcie is working it out. You being there, you being strong and stable and loving, makes it more certain. She's not sick, not nuts, not disturbed. She is a true individual, and I for one cherish her for that.

"Personally," she added, "I think she's a hoot. Did you hear about Dulcie and my bridge, the day I met her?" Jason shook his head, so Ana settled down and told him the whole story, drawn out and decorated with extraneous details.

And he laughed. Jason Delgado, tough guy and basketball star, first snorted and then gave forth a brief guffaw of laughter. It startled half the bus and was instantly stifled, but it was there between them, and it remained in his eyes, that picture of his silent little sister almost peeing herself giggling at the lady who took out her own front teeth.

That short, unguarded laugh was to sustain Ana through some hard days ahead. That laugh bound her to Change far more closely than she had intended or anticipated. She knew she would sell her soul for that laugh, if it came to that.

In the deep, still dark of the desert night the bus came into the compound. The weary travelers climbed stiffly down (Ana more stiffly than most). The adults staggered off to the dining hall behind the revitalized teenagers, and respectively sat in silence or in excitement over the meal that had been kept warm for them.

Ana managed a few mouthfuls of soup and a glass of goat's milk, and looked up to find Teresa standing next to her.

"I'll take your classes tomorrow," she said. Ana protested feebly, then allowed herself to be talked into spending a day doing paperwork. She thanked Teresa, helped herself to a tureen of ice cubes, and went to her room, where she arranged one ice-filled washcloth on her mouth, another one on her left hand, and lay with her right arm thrown over her eyes, aching and thinking.

What was she doing? What the hell was she doing? She had no business becoming involved in the lives and affections of two orphaned or abandoned kids. Let's make another joke about menopause, Ana, with the hormones running wild and the old brain melting in a hot flash. She acted as if she were falling in love with a boy of fourteen, a tough, swaggering child who shaved once a week whether he needed to or not. Hell, who was there to kid here? She was falling in love with him. Oh, it was not a physical thing, she was not out to seduce him, not even tempted to fantasize about him, but God, this felt like a high school crush, looking for The One across a crowded room, studying him from a distance, casually meeting and flirting and making him—yes—making him laugh.

That laugh.

She really should get out of here before someone got hurt. Glen would insist, if he figured out what was happening.

But she knew she wouldn't go.

Chapter Seventeen

Let's say one day you discovered that your next door neighbors were in the habit of slitting open live chickens and watching them run around the back yard. What would your reaction be? If this family was of your everyday middle-class Anglo-Saxon background, if the people doing it were young boys, and if everyone there seemed to be drinking beer and having a fun old time, you'd be more than justified in locking the doors, shutting up the cat, and ringing every emergency number you could find from the police to the SPCA, because the chances of that being pathological behavior would be very high.

But what if you found out that the offending family was freshly arrived from, say, Haiti, and if the people doing the slaughtering were grown adults with not a breath of hilarity in the air? What if you knew that the sacrifice and reading of auguries was a deeply ingrained part of the family's society and religious heritage? You might still check on the whereabouts of the family pet, you would no doubt still be disgusted, and you would still have a problem on your hands, but the phone calls you made would probably have less panic in them and more concern for long-term socialization efforts.

Cultural relativity is the acknowledgement that what your Caribbean neighbors were doing was in their eyes a valid religious expression. After all, a hundred years ago it was absolutely acceptable that my great-great grandmother married at the age of thirteen, and for a large part of the Muslim world today, circumcision is a thing for eight to twelve year-old boys.

Are these seekers of auguries wrong? Was my female ancestor old enough to become a wife and, ten months later, a mother? Are these boys mature enough to make the decision to submit to the knife? Or are my grandmother's marriage and the circumcision of fourteen year-old boys both examples of child abuse, and the inhumane slaughtering of chickens strictly a legal matter?

Excerpt from the transcription of a lecture by Dr. Anne Waverly to the Northern California Sheriffs' Association, January 16, 1992

Ana slept fitfully and woke early, imagining she had heard a scratching at her door. She lay for a minute, waiting for the sound to be repeated, and then dismissed it. She had not yet regained the immunity from external noises one needs in communal living, and she tended to hear every closed door, every toilet flush and cough.

She eased her legs over the side of the bed and groaned herself upright. Her face ached but her hand was on fire, and she reached over and turned on the bedside lamp to examine the damage.

It looked surprisingly normal, though it was scraped from the bits of gravel embedded in the shoe that had come down on it and the fingers were as fat and immobile as sausages. Tomorrow the whole hand would be black, but today it was only darkly suffused with blood. She forced herself to bend each fingertip and wiggle each sausage; they all worked, but maybe she would go see the nurse about it after all.

Now for the mirror. She gained her feet, and the scratching noise came again from the door.

She tottered over and pulled it open: Dulcie sat shivering on the floor outside, her arms wrapped around the canvas bag full of bright yarn rope.

"Dulcie?" Ana exclaimed. "What on earth—? Come in, child, let's warm you up." She bent down, but with only one usable hand she could not lift the girl. "Dulcie," she said in a clear voice, "you'll have to help me. I hurt my hand yesterday and I can't pick you up. Come on, sweetheart, stand up and come inside, where we can get you warm. That's a girl. Good, good. Now let me get a blanket—you'll have to let go of my hand for a second, Dulcie. Okay, let's just sit over here and warm each other up."

Ana whipped the blankets from her bed and sat down in the room's soft chair, pulling Dulcie onto her lap and wrapping the still-warm blankets around them both. The child's shivering seemed more like shock than mere cold, but in either case warmth seemed the best treatment. Dulcie put her thumb in her mouth and nestled down between Ana's breasts; in two minutes she was asleep.

Memory was a terrible and intensely physical thing. Unlike guilt, it lost none of its power over time, and if it hit less often than it had in the early years, it still hit hard and unexpectedly: The sight of a furry infant skull would trigger the warm, round sensation of cradling Abby's head in her cupped palm, all of her daughter's humanity and future in her hand; a blend of fragrances on a street would jerk her back to a particular mad evening with Aaron in New York before they came west; a certain kind of tree-lined street in the fall would evoke the heady beginnings of graduate school.

Now it was her breasts that betrayed her, heavy and warm, tingling with the gush of nonexistent milk down to her nipples for Abby's greedy mouth. Dulcie slept on, unaware of the turmoil within the woman she knew as Ana, aware only of the rare and dimly remembered bliss of being held in comforting arms, aware that Ana must be trustworthy, since Jason had told Dulcie to go to her if she needed anything while he was away "helping Steven". She was aware only that she felt safe.

Dulcie's thumb dropped from her slack mouth and half woke her, so that she turned against Ana's chest, nuzzling like an infant until sleep pulled her down again.

It was agony, it was sheer delight; eighteen years after the fact, Ana had been given back her daughter. Dulcie was not Abby and Dulcie would never be Ana's daughter, but Ana's arms craved the child and the bone-deep love of a mother tugged at her, and she knew she had only two choices: she could put Dulcie on the floor and walk away from her, or she could permit the indulgence of her body's yearnings. It was no choice. She wrapped herself around the sleeping child and rocked her in the ageless rhythm of mothering, and when Dulcie woke fully an hour later, Ana more than half expected to find the front of her T-shirt drenched with leaking milk.

Her shirt was dry, but Dulcie was frowning at her face.

"I had a little accident yesterday, Dulcie. It really doesn't hurt very much, but those teeth of mine that come out got broken right in two, so I'll have to have them fixed. Looks funny, doesn't it? Thounds funny, too. Remind me not to smile, okay?"

Dulcie's only response was to turn and look at Ana's hands. Ana held the left one up. This one does hurt. I don't think anything's broken, but it'll be sore and ugly for a few days.

"Now tell me, Dulcie: Where's your brother?"

She was unprepared for the extremity of Dulcie's response. The child wailed and flung herself against Ana, curling up to make herself small, burying her face in Ana's T-shirt.

Ana's immediate urge was to burst out of the door and find what had happened to Jason, but she forced herself to sit and calm Dulcie with drivel first.

"Okay, we'll talk about that later. Dulcie sweetie, let me tell you about the time we had in Phoenix yesterday. There was a display in the museum that showed all these beautiful clothes the Indian women used to wear, all covered with beads and stuff, and the house they used to live in made of logs and mud, with a fire built right in the middle of it. You ever seen one of those? Maybe you can go on a trip with the school next time. It's a long drive but it's fun. You know, I'm feeling a bit hungry. I think I'll get dressed and go have some breakfast. Do you mind coming with me down to the dining hall? I think I'll have a bowl of porridge with lots of brown sugar on top, that'll be nice and soft to chew on." She waited until Dulcie had given her a small nod, and then worked herself out from under the child. She went to the closet and chose clothing with loose cuffs, pulled on her boots and pushed her untied laces into their tops, and eased on her jacket.

Dulcie was more of a problem: She was dressed, but she had no shoes on. Ana had her climb onto the arm of the chair and propped her awkwardly on her right hip. Fortunately, it was not far to the dining hall.

Once inside the building, Ana could loose her precarious hold and let the child slide to the floor. They walked hand in hand toward the breakfast noises. The instant they came in the door, Teresa leapt to her feet and scurried over to intercept them.

"Dulcie! Where on earth have you been? We've been looking all over, we were so worried about you. Come along and let's get properly dressed."

She reached for Dulcie's hand, and the child twisted around behind Ana to avoid her. Despite Ana's protests, Teresa pulled the child's hand away, and Dulcie naturally reached up for Ana's other hand and grabbed it hard.

The pain was literally blinding. Ana sank to her knees with a breathless squeal, and with infinite tenderness tried to peel the little fingers from hers, all the while chanting "No, no no no no no, Dulcie, oh please, no no no." The grip suddenly dropped away as the horrified child realized what she had done. She stepped back, looking ready to bolt, but Ana scooped her around the shoulders with her right hand and pulled her back, murmuring all the maternal phrases of condolence while the agony in her left hand subsided and her right hand stroked the back of Dulcie's hair. The child threw her arms around Ana's neck and began to weep. The pain retreated and became bearable; when Teresa saw the change, she started to fuss again. Ana took a deep calming breath, and let it out.

"Dulcie, it's over," she said firmly. "It's uncomfortable here on the floor, I feel stupid with everyone staring at us, and I want my breakfast. What say we eat?"

Teresa started to say, "Yes, Dulcie, let's let Ana—" when Ana gave her a glare that instantly silenced her.

"Dulcie is going to eat breakfast with me. We'll talk to you later."

Teresa opened her mouth, closed it, turned on her heel, and left. Ana persuaded her limpet to let her free enough to rise, and the two of them continued their interrupted journey to the breakfast line.

With Dulcie holding firmly on to her jacket, Ana carried their tray over to an unoccupied table. Dulcie seemed uninterested in food, so in the end Ana spooned oatmeal into the child's passive mouth. It was like feeding a baby, down to the close-lipped shake of the head to let Ana know she'd had enough. Ana finished the bowl, drank her herb tea and the remainder of Dulcie's juice, and piled their dishes on the tray. No doubt about it; the brain functioned better with food.

She took Dulcie's hand and bent down until she was looking into the young face. "Dulcie, would you please tell me now where Jason is?"

Dulcie was feeling the stabilizing effects of breakfast as weigher lip quivered and her eyes filled, but she did not wail and fling herself at Ana. Neither did she answer her.

"Dulcie, I want to help you find Jason. Did he tell you where he was going?" Dulcie gave her a tiny nod, dislodging the tears from one eye so that they spilled down her face. "Can you tell me? Please?"

"He went to help Steven," she said in a tiny voice. "Two men took him."

At first Ana refused to hear the meaning of Dulcie's words. Even when the horror of what it might imply was roaring through her, she tried hard to remain objective, sensible. Eventually, rationality won out. Had there ever been any indications, in the weeks she had lived here, that Steven was a sexual predator? Any record indicating that he might be a pederast, straight or gay? Any sign of ongoing sexuality among even the abused outsiders in the school? No, no, and no. It was possible, yes, but it was also possible that something else was going on—some kind of initiation, perhaps, or a punishment for yesterday's fight, or a hundred other things. She needed to find out, but she also needed to keep her head. As she'd said to Jason: Think!

Her first responsibility was to Dulcie, temporarily bereft of her brother and clinging mightily to the only other support she could find. There was no possibility of abandoning her.

"First step," she said to Dulcie. "We get your shoes and your coat, brush your hair and your teeth.

"Second step," she said, in answer to the unvoiced objection of the small person, "we find out where your brother is. Okay?"

Dulcie nodded, content that Ana was not proving herself yet another untrustworthy adult. This time Ana carried Dulcie piggyback to the room in the next building where she and Jason slept. Teresa went with them, but she did not try to interfere, she just tied Dulcie's shoes and put her hair into braids after Ana had demonstrated her inability to do either of those things. She even tied Ana's flopping boots for her, to Ana's embarrassment and gratitude.

When Dulcie was dressed and scrubbed, Ana asked her to sit down and work on her rug for a few minutes while she talked with Teresa. She reassured Dulcie that she was not going to leave her, just step out in the hall and talk privately for a minute, and led Teresa out, shutting the door.

"I need to talk to Steven," she said.

"You can't."

"Is he here? In the compound?"

"Yes, but he's busy."

"Teresa, be sensible. I don't know what that child's background is, but it's obvious that it was pretty hellish. Jason is all she has. She's accepted me, heaven knows why, as a substitute, but I have to know what Steven is doing with Jason in order to help Dulcie. She's too fragile to be kept in the dark."

"I know, but there's nothing anyone else can do. Jason will be back when he's… when he's ready."

"You know where he is."

Teresa would not meet her eyes.

"Is it a punishment for yesterday? It wasn't his fault."

"A consequence is not a punishment."

"That sounds like Steven."

She didn't answer, but Ana could see it was true.

"Where is Steven now?"

"Meditating. You can't—"

"I sure as hell can," Ana said, and pushed her aside to yank the door open. "Come on, Dulcie. Let's go ask some questions."

She did find Steven, and she did ask questions, but he did not answer them. He did not even respond, but merely sat in the full lotus position, unseeing and unhearing on his high seat in the very center of the meditation hall, the golden sparkles from the mobile directly over his head moving slowly across the wall.

Thomas Mallory, inevitably, was there. She entered the meditation hall and saw Steven, and addressed him in a loud voice. Steven did not react. Telling Dulcie to stay where she was, Ana started for the rising platforms on the side of the room, intending to clamber over to the platform and seize Steven by the shoulders, shaking him from his trance, but Mallory stopped her, his scowling eyebrows nearly meeting over his nose. She knew better than to resist physically, not when Dulcie was looking on. She also suspected that Steven's assistant would have picked her up bodily and put her outside the meditation hall had it not been for Dulcie's presence.

"Steven!" she shouted. The hall had excellent acoustics, but Steven did not move. She retreated from the platforms and angrily hammered her fist against the great black pipe that rose out of the floor to support the fireplace and Steven's platform. It was metal, and oddly warm, but it gave out only an unsatisfactory dull thud instead of the clanging echoes she had hoped for, and then Thomas Mallory came up behind her and grabbed her shoulders, whirling her about effortlessly and propelling her toward the exit. She retreated, but at the door she turned to plead with the man.

"Look, Dulcie is worried about her brother. She just wants to know where he is and when he'll be back. Surely you can tell us that."

Mattory studied her, and then the child, and his petulant mouth softened a fraction.

"Her brother is in meditation with Steven," he said. "He'll be back in a day or two."

That was all he would give them. Strangely enough, it seemed to reassure Dulcie, whose level of anxiety went down a great deal, although she refused to venture from Ana's side. All that day, wherever she went, Dulcie was her shadow, a silent and determined presence working eternally on the cumbersome bulk of her yarn rope.

Ana's own concern for Jason, her unresolved anger against Steven, and Dulcie's presence, silence, and absolute trust all began to prey on Ana, and the bright, aggressive cheeriness of Dulcie's rope began to rub on her nerves.

Three times in the course of an hour Ana got up and left the desk where she was doing paperwork; three times Dulcie put her spool into the bulging canvas bag and followed her: into the supply room, into the computer room, and to the bathroom, where she stood outside the door, waiting for Ana to come out.

Patience was a good thing, Ana decided, but at times did not go far enough. Dulcie was beginning to look like a miniature Madame Defarge, knitting as the heads rolled.

"Dulcie, don't you think it's time you started to make your rug out of that? I'm sure you have enough there for a nice big rug."

The child nodded, and went back to looping the bile-green yarn over the nails on the spool, one stitch at a time, around and around.

"You could set it out here on the floor and get it started," Ana suggested. "I'll be here for another hour or so."

Dulcie dropped her hands into her lap. "I don't know how," she said, sounding sad to the point of despair.

Ana turned and looked at her. "You've never done this before, have you?" she slowly.

Dulcie shook her head.

"Did Carla get you started?" Dulcie nodded. "But she hasn't shown you how to make the actual rug?"

Dulcie looked up at Ana, her eyes not far from tears with her anguish. "I don't know how to stop," she cried.

The pathos in the child's manner made Ana's lips quiver for a moment. "You poor thing," she said. "Did you think you were going to knit away on this thing forever? That one day we'd go to look for you and all we'd find would be a pair of feet sticking out from under a gigantic pile of brightly colored rope?"

Dulcie's own lips quivered, but not from amusement. "It's very bright," she agreed sadly.

"You mean—Didn't you choose those colors?"

Dulcie's head went back and forth, slowly and emphatically. The two of them sat looking at the dirty canvas bag with the pink loops and the orange coils and the green tail emerging to dip along the floor and disappear into the wooden spool in Dulcie's fist, and Ana began to laugh at the tragedy and the absurdity of the whole situation. She gathered Dulcie into her arms and the two of them howled and howled.

When that was over, she found some tissues and she and Dulcie sat up and dried their eyes, and she helped the child blow her nose. Then, with great ceremony, she took a large pair of scissors from the drawer of the desk and laid them in the center of the desktop.

"Bring me the spool," she ordered Dulcie.

"If you cut it, the whole thing will fall apart," Dulcie said quickly. "Carla told me."

"Not if you tie the end off first," Ana replied grimly, hoping it was true. Perhaps she should tie two knots, just to be sure.

Dulcie hopped down from Ana's lap and fetched the spool, the instrument that had produced all those yards and yards of rope. Ana did not know if it had functioned as a meditation device or as a form of penance, but be it rosary or hair shirt, she was declaring it finished.

She snipped the yarn that led from skein to spool, tucked the end in, and set the unused yarn to one side. Working slowly because of the awkwardness of her left hand, she looped the rope below the spool into a knot, and had Dulcie pull on the rope to help her tighten the knot. They then repeated it to make a second knot beside the first, and she picked up the scissors and offered them to Dulcie. They were too big for the child's hand, but Dulcie took them with two hands and chewed with them at the rope until it parted, and Ana was touched by a brief vision of Aaron with a pair of obstetrical scissors in his hands, his face showing mingled revulsion at the effort of cutting through the tough flesh of Abby's umbilical cord and dawning wonder at the separate new person lying in red, angry splendor on his wife's breasts.