I thought about it. "No. He’s not the hero type. But he was definitely interested in learning about Greenstrider weaponry."

"Best way to learn is firsthand," Festina agreed.

When the wall finally forced us out onto the bridge, I was holding the Muscle between us and the line of fire.

The wall stopped moving, right in the mouth of the corridor. That sealed off our only retreat, leaving us vulnerable and exposed on that narrow bridge across the abyss. Festina and I exchanged looks — one of those moments when you hope your eyes are saying something because you know speech won’t work. If we were about to be chopped to chutney by gunfire, I didn’t want to die with banal last words like, "If only we had more time together…"

At the far end of the bridge, the wall slowly dissolved into another doorway. A tall man in white stepped out: a perfect twin of the African android back in the other room. Another robot, naturally; he carried a jelly gun.

Behind him was a shortish woman with white hair. She stared straight at me, and said, "So, Faye, we finally meet. Bitch."

Maya Cuttack hailed from Indian ancestors — she’d made a point of daubing a blobby red caste mark in the middle of her forehead. Her brown skin looked crinkled and paper-dry, at least on her arms… which I could see because even in this chilly bunker, she wore a half-sleeved blouse, the kind that goes under a sari. The blouse was jade green silk; and on it, someone had hand-painted dozens of peacocks.

Talk about a deliberate statement.

But if you wanted a real statement, you had to look at Maya’s face. Her nose and chin might be the same brown as her arms, but the edges of her face had gone fish-belly white: chalky sickness seeping out from her hairline, creeping down her forehead, across her temples, in over her cheeks.

Hello, Pteromic C.

Her ears were now as yellow as butter, a jaundicey contrast with her snow-pure hair. But even that hair showed signs of the plague; it was frazzled wild, not just uncombed but unwashed and curdled, with enough head grease to hold scraggly bits as if they’d been moussed: cowlicks jutting out, churned into mad snarls.

Maya Cuttack: tico, nago, wuto. And diseased, diseased, diseased. Christ, hadn’t Mother and Voostor noticed? Or were all these outward symptoms recent, the final cataclysmic collapse of someone who’d been crumbling flake by flake for a long time?

"Aren’t you going to speak, Faye?" she asked me. "Bitch, bitch, bitch." Muttering the "bitch" stuff in an undertone, as if it weren’t really meant to come out of her mouth. A subconscious chant… but Maya couldn’t keep her subconscious as "sub" as it should be.

"You’re sick," I said.

"I’m afraid you’re right (bitch, bitch). And it’s all your fault, Faye (bitch), Faye (bitch)."

"How?"

"Because, Faye (bitch), you’re the great (bitch) evil of the world. Your father (bitch) was evil, and you, Faye, inherited it."

Her voice was delicately polite, all genteel and ladies-auxiliary… except for those guttural "bitches" that kept slipping their way in. Pteromic talk. Brain breakdown.

"What do you know about my father?" I asked, keeping my voice soothing calm.

"Your mother told me he glowed," she replied. "Possessed by an alien thing. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. I’ve studied this planet. People get possessed here. You’re possessed, Faye, I know you are. Your mother (bitch) told me all the evil things you did. She defended you (bitch), sometimes she did, but you hurt her so badly… I realized I had to kill you."

"How long ago was that?" I asked. "A month or so?"

"Perhaps. I have perhaps, perhaps, lost some sense of time." She smiled sweetly. "But not my sense of urgency. Your mother is my dearest (bitch), dearest (bitch), dearest friend, and you caused her so much pain you had to die. You see that, Faye, don’t you? Don’t you, Faye? Whatever it took (bitch), you had to die."

Whatever it took. Christ, that phrase gave me the chills. "Are you saying this was all about me? The robot attacks on the proctors…"

"Of course, of course, of course." Another of those sugary smiles. A teacher pleased with how fast her student catches on. "If I just killed you outright, the police would ask questions. (The bitch, the bitch, the fucking bitch.) They’d interrogate your next of kin, Faye. Perhaps they’d even accuse your mother, because she’d be so happy at your death. So blissfully, blissfully happy."

My mother blissfully happy to see me dead? No. Ma might have been appalled by the teenager I once was, but she wouldn’t dance on my grave. Look at the way she’d treated me when I suddenly turned up on her doorstep — wary but polite, ready to give me a chance. Perhaps even glad to see me, glad to find out I’d changed.

Maya was just a brain-sick madwoman who’d got a crazy idea into her head. Yes. Yes.

"You decided to kill me," I said, "but you didn’t want people to guess I was the specific target. So you knocked off a slew of proctors so it would look like a political thing. I was supposed to be one more corpse in the crowd."

"That’s right." She flashed me a proud-of-herself grin. "I could feel myself getting sick (bitch, bitch). Before I went, I wanted to give a present to my dearest, dearest friend. It wasn’t hard to post androids (bitch) all around the planet, ready to take on easy targets. Then I made friends with your supervisor, Faye, so I could track your movements."

Poor Chappalar: manipulated, then murdered. All because a poor plaguey lunatic intended to do my mother a favor poor Ma didn’t want.

"So what now?" I asked. "I suppose you want to walk us through this bunker… show off the fabulous things you’ve discovered." Actually, I doubted the idea ever crossed her mind; Maya just wanted to gloat till she’d worked herself into a lather. At some point, when she was keyed up enough, she’d tell the android to gun us down with acid. But maybe I could come up with some delaying step that would appeal to her tico mind. If she liked the notion of a guided tour, at least we’d get off this blasted bridge.

"It would be pleasant to show you things, Faye," Maya admitted. "I’m particularly proud of the control room (bitch) for this place. So much of it still works… and I’ve always had a knack for programming machines." She smiled and patted the shoulder of her android bodyguard. "Or maybe (bitch)… I could show you where your (bitch) father died." Her eyes twinkled, like she’d just told a joke. "Did you know this bunker stretches close to the Rustico mine? Or at least its outer defense ring does. And that so-called ‘gas explosion’ twenty-seven years ago (bitch)… the miners actually ran into an antipersonnel device intended to stop anyone from tunneling too near to the bunker’s wall. An explosive, Faye. The miners stepped on a mine in the mine."

She giggled. Or maybe I should say a giggle got away from her. Fell out uncontrolled. Giggle, giggle, bitch, giggle, bitch.

I wondered what she’d been like before the plague spackled her brain. Willing to trespass, to play fast and loose with the law… but not a bitched-up killer. Just a titch too ambitious for her own good. How could I hate her, seeing how pathetic she was now? Christ, it would have been nice to blame everything on some out-and-out monster. All the dead and wounded, Chappalar, Oh-God, even the Mouth. Wouldn’t it be fine to lay it all at the feet of a heinous villain? But in the Vigil I’d learned the universe is stingy with black-and-white wickedness. Even the devil has a story.

I stared at Maya with pity and horror. Which was a mistake — I shouldn’t have made eye contact.

"Bitch!" she suddenly screamed. All her placid conversation boiled off in a heartbeat. "You want to kill me, don’t you, bitch? That’s why you’ve chased me all over Demoth. That’s why you tracked me down here. You’re not human, no, you’re possessed… and you want to stop me because I know the truth. You destroyed the Green-striders, and you think you’ll destroy me."