put on it, but I could show him my own scar. «If my father knew that I deliberately put myself here,
in this situation, for the sake of another person, he would consider himself a failure.»
Jim looked at me. «Why?»
«Because ever since I could walk, he taught me to rely only on myself. To never build a
relationship or to attach myself to a human being, even to him. He used to send me out to the woods
for several days with nothing except a knife. When I was twelve, he dumped me in the Warren. I
ran with the Breakers for a month. Was beaten several times, almost raped twice.» I braided my
fingers into the Breaker gang sign. «Still remember how.»
Jim just stared at me.
«Friends are a dangerous thing,» I told him. «You feel responsibility for them. You want to keep
them safe. You want to help and they throw you off balance, and the next thing you know you're
sitting there crying, because you didn't make it in time. They make you feel helpless. That's why
my father wanted to make me into a sociopath. A sociopath has no empathy. She just focuses on her
purpose.»
«Didn't quite work out that way,» Jim said quietly.
«No. His training had a fatal flaw: he cared. He asked me what I wanted to eat for dinner. He
knew I liked green, and if he had a choice between a blue sweater and a green one, he'd buy the
green one for me even if it cost more. I like swimming, and when we traveled, he made it a point to
lay our route so it would go past a lake or a river. He let me speak my mind. My opinion mattered. I
was a person to him and I was important. I saw him treat others as if they were important. For all of
his supposed indifference, there is a town in Oklahoma that worships him and a little village in
Guatemala that put a wooden statue of him at the gates to protect them from evil spirits. He helped
people, when he thought it was right.»
I shook my head. «I have this picture of what my dad wanted me to be, and I can never measure
up. And I don't want to. I have my rules. I stick to them. That's hard enough as it is. If that means
my dad would spit in my face, so be it.»
ALMOST TWO HOURS HAD PASSED BEFORE SAIMAN made it to the room. He strode
briskly inside, his face flushed.
«The bug?»
Jim held out a small, flesh-colored disk the size of a quarter. «A transmitter,» he said. «The
deeper into the body you shove it, the better. Make him swallow it. We don't want it found.»
Saiman accepted the transmitter and crossed the floor to the door in the opposite wall, swiping
the bundle of canvas on the way. He entered and shut the door behind him.
Minutes stretched by. Behind the closed door something thumped.
«Think he can do it?» Jim asked.
«Nope. But we don't have a choice.»
We sat some more. Above us something howled in the Pit, sending a dull hum of resonance
through the ceiling.
«Cold,» Jim said.
A moment later I felt it too, a dry, intense cold emanating from the door that hid Saiman. I rose.
«I'll go check on him.»
I knocked. The wood of the door burned my fingers with ice. «Saiman?»
No answer.
I pushed the door and it swung open, admitting me inside. The room curved to the right and I
saw only a small section of it, illuminated by the bluish glow of the feylanterns: a shower stall, its
curtain pulled aside. A long icicle dripped from the metal showerhead.
«Anybody home?»
A layer of frost slicked the floor under my feet. I turned to the right, moving slowly. My shoes
slid a little. I caught myself on the wall and saw him.
He sat slumped on the bench, his enormous back knotted with hard clumps of muscle beneath
skin so white and smooth, it seemed completely bloodless. Coarse hair fell down his back in a long
blue-green mane. A fringe of hair trailed the vertebrae of his spine, disappearing into ragged pants
of wolf fur. Sitting, he was taller than me, too huge to be a man.
«Saiman?»
The being turned his head. Piercing eyes stared at me, distant, pale blue, yet lit from within with
power like two chunks of ice that somehow stole the fire of a diamond. He had the face of a fighter
carved with exacting precision by a master sculptor: terrifying, forceful, arrogant, and touched with
cruelty. His eyes sat sunken deep into their orbits, guarded by a thick ridge of blue eyebrows. His
cheekbones were pronounced, his nose wide, and the line of his jaw so strong he could have bitten
through bones with little effort. Gone was the philosopher, the urbane erudite, who pontificated on
the meaning of luxury. Only a primitive remained, hard, cold, and ancient as the ice that hugged the
bench on which he sat.
I wanted to raise my hands to shield myself from that gaze. Instead, I made myself walk to the