Something had changed in him. He couldn’t focus on what he was doing as well as he once had. His mind kept drifting. Fear without cause came and went, as did sharp spasms of anger. Dramatic images of violence and brutal sex, none from Henry’s personal experience, quivered through his mind as vividly as if they were things that he had done.

He’d driven only a mile when a new voice rose in the whispering room, this one female. Simultaneously furious and frightened, ridden by hungers she could name and others for which she knew no words, she transmitted incoherent chains of words, hatred and desire, a threat and a challenge. Images, too. A blue stucco house with a white metal roof. Shaded by shabby palm trees. She wanted sex and blood, wanted to quell her fear by instilling terror in others, wanted the thrill of exercising her power and inflicting pain, wanted to scream into the void that she sensed yawning beneath her and, by sheer ferocity, prevent it from enfolding her into oblivion.

She was like a siren on night reefs, singing ships to their wreckage, and her enticing song appealed to some part of Henry that he didn’t understand, to a secret second heart that beat a tempo different from his first and that held within its throbbing chambers a blackness darker than death.

He knew the blue stucco house with the white metal roof. And even in his current condition, he knew how to get there.

For now, he had forgotten the boy, and the conscience that wasn’t a conscience could no longer control him.

The female voice was irresistibly alluring, calling to some self-destructive aspect of Henry Lorimar, but it was also savage and so venomous that he might need a weapon. He pulled the car off the road long enough to get a combination long-handled lug wrench/pry bar from the SUV’s tool kit.

3

TWO DIRT RUTS, stubbled with dead weeds, led past the abandoned blue stucco house and the ragged queen palms, past the yard of pea gravel and specimen cacti. Luther drove around behind the place and parked beside the attached one-car garage, which shielded the Chevy Suburban from the sight of anyone passing on the county highway.

“Come civilian, leave official,” Luther said. “Still the plan?”

“I don’t see any reason to change it. It’s been smooth so far, but maybe not much longer. You know what to do.”

“I know what to do,” he agreed. “Go to your boy.”

She walked along the weedy driveway for about seventy or eighty yards, to a turnaround in front of the dilapidated barn, which she knew was not only what it appeared to be.

The hot desert air vibrated with the sawing of insects that busied their bowstring legs, cars buzzing past on the distant county road, and an airplane whisking the day with turboprop blades. An aircraft had droned past when they were unhitching the Suburban from the motor home. Maybe this was the same one, seeking to seine her voice and location from the sky when she used a burner phone.

She stood before the weathered man-size door with its worm-eaten sun-split boards and rusted hinges, looking up where Gavin Washington had told her a concealed camera would be focused on her.

Hidden motion detectors had alerted Cornell Jasperson to her presence. The electronic lock opened with a buzz and a clunk.

Jane stepped into a white-walled vestibule where a camera surmounted a metal door. The door behind her closed automatically, and the one before her opened.

Lamplit in jewel tones, shadowy in places, lined with thousands of colorful spines, before her lay the fabled library for the end of the world, as magical as Gavin had described it.

At some distance stood Cornell: almost seven feet tall, knob-jointed like a mechanical construct, misshapen, a figure of fright on a dark street, but with the face of an angel, awkward and clearly shy.

Nearer stood Travis, utterly still, as if he thirsted for the sight of her and could not move until his thirst was slaked.

She saw in this precious boy not just her child, but the best of herself and the best of her beloved husband. She saw the most cherished part of her past, too, all the years of happiness with Nick, and her future in its entirety, for there could be no future worth having if Travis wasn’t in it. When they weren’t together, she thought of him as bigger than he was, perhaps because she had all of her heart and hope invested in this boy, and in spite of her dire situation, her hope was no little thing. Now he seemed so much smaller and more fragile than she remembered, vulnerable and as easily taken from her as Nick had been, as her mother had been.

She approached him and dropped to her knees, and he flew into her arms, clutching her with something like desperation.

The dogs whined, seemed to debate the proper protocol, and settled on the floor to comfort each other.

Just then, neither Jane nor Travis felt a need to speak. The substance of him, the warmth of him, the sweetness of his breath, the rabbit thump of his heart as he pressed against her were worth more than all the words in this vast library. She kissed the top of his head, kissed his brow, and when he put one small hand to her face, she kissed the fingers, the palm.

The words love you passed between them, the only words that seemed important enough to speak, though by speaking them, Travis lost his composure. Tears flooded his eyes, and he revealed that, even at his age, he held no illusions about the fate of his former guardians, the Washingtons, though he had concealed his certainty until now. “They’re gone. Aunt Jess and Uncle Gavin, we’re never gonna see them again. They woulda come back by now. They’re dead, aren’t they dead, Mommy?”

When they had gone on the run from their house in Virginia, he’d begun calling her Mom, as if aware that he needed to grow up faster than nature intended. Sunday night, when she took a call from him on her burner phone, he’d reverted to Mommy. Now again.

She had many reasons to hate the people aligned against her, these arrogant self-named Techno Arcadians, not least of all because they took her boy’s father from him, but also because they stole his innocence. They forced on him an awareness of the darkness of this world that he otherwise would have discovered slowly over the years, with his parents’ guidance, in a manner that would have made it easier for him to come to terms with the harder truths of life.

On Sunday, speaking with him on the phone, she’d thought Travis feared that Jessie and Gavin had been killed, but she had seen no compelling reason to confirm his fear. Not while he was feeling so vulnerable. Not while she was hundreds of miles away from him and could not take him in her arms.

He was in her arms now, and among the many things she owed him was the truth. She knew from hard experience that too little truth in any family led to enduring pain. If her mother had not concealed the serious marital problems between her and Jane’s father, if the great pianist Martin Duroc had known his daughter was aware of his affair and might testify to her mother’s distress, perhaps he would not have dared to kill one wife to get another.

“Yes, sweetie, Jessie and Gavin are gone. They were very brave. They were very brave all their lives. And they loved you as if you were their own child.”

His voice was thick, tremulous, choked with tears. “What can we do? What can we do?”

She held him tight and rocked with him there on the floor. “We can remember them always, sweetheart, never forget how brave they were, how wonderful and kind and giving and funny. We can love them always, and every night in our prayers we can say thanks for having had them in our lives.”

He spoke into her throat, which was wet with his tears. “It’s not enough. They won’t know.”

“But they will know, honey. They will know every night. They will hear you every night, and they will know you loved them as much as they loved you.”

Her grief was now doubled by his grief. She wondered how many heartbreaks a child so young could endure.

4

CORNELL STOOD by one of his favorite armchairs, in the warm golden light of his prettiest stained-glass floor lamp, surrounded by the consolation of his books, and he knew no comfort, only misery.

He could not bear the boy’s grief, the tears. He wanted to do something to soothe this child, comfort him, but there was nothing he could do. He dared not hug Travis as the mother did. A mere hug would plummet Cornell into an anxiety attack, and he would be no good to anyone, a big strange ugly man curled in the fetal position and shaking with fear, unable to stand, hardly able to speak, a burden to them, not a comfort.

He stood wringing his large hands, ceaselessly shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as if he needed to go someplace at once but didn’t know where. He had long been at peace with his limitations, at peace with the hard road that was his only route through life, but he was not at peace now. He did not remember ever having wept before, but he was weeping.

5