Rats scurried from the burning building, their tails on fire.

Three teenagers leaped through a ground-floor window, sprawled on the ground for a moment, bleeding, then ran toward their parents. Jenkins intercepted them, whipped them back, the tips of his beard smoldering, pinpricks of red light surrounding his face as the flail rose and fell. Police joined in, pushing the girls back into the flames.

Rakkim worked his way around to the opposite side of the building, the east side where the smoke was thickest. No crowd here, no security cameras, just a few women huddled in the shadows, wailing and fingering prayer beads, and two burly policemen, their eyes watering from the smoke. An eight-foot chain-link fence surrounded this side of the madrassa, the links glowing in the heat.

A blond girl stumbled out of one of the lower windows, her nightgown smoldering. She sprang onto the fence, but fell back, hands scorched. She spit on her palms, started climbing again, ignoring the pain, her bare legs golden in the firelight. She had almost made it to the top when one of the cops ambled over, zapped her with his stun-stick. She fell back inside the fence, twitching.

Rakkim killed the cop with a single blow to the base of his skull, dropped him like a bag of wet cement. The other cop charged, but Rakkim dodged the stun-stick, crushed the man's windpipe with a thrust of his hand and kept moving. Rakkim walked into the oily black smoke, slashed the fence with his Fedayeen knife, the carbon-polymer blade slicing through the metal links as though they were cobwebs. Rakkim slipped through the gap, grabbed the blond girl and carried her through, the girl clutching at his chest, still dazed. She smelled of smoke and pine tar soap. Rakkim set the blond girl down, then rushed back for the others, who were staggering out of the madrassa.

He gathered up three of them like a bouquet of flowers, brought them through the fence. Women beckoned from the shadows, and the girls ran to them, disappeared into the night. He was going back for the others when the madrassa groaned as though it were alive, one whole side erupting in a ball of blue fire.

Face stinging, Rakkim ran forward, snatched the remaining two girls off the ground. He looked behind him, saw more girls stumbling down the stairs, fire everywhere, and then the whole madrassa collapsed-sparks erupted like fireflies rising up into the night, followed by a wall of heat that blistered the back of his neck. He turned as he fell, protected the girls from the worst of it, then passed them on to the women…who took care not to touch him, this man who was not part of their family. He watched them go. The women would hide the girls as best they could, but it wouldn't be enough. Rakkim hadn't really saved them, merely postponed their fate. The girls were still breathing, but they were already dead, condemned by the imam's decree.

He glimpsed the crescent moon low over the city, bloodred through the haze, which probably meant something, but he didn't know what, or care, either. Omens, signs and portents…that was for weaklings looking for some sort of edge. Like Allah was signaling his intentions in code, with only the initiated privy to his will. No…God didn't play games. He wasn't a co-conspirator. God either hit you hard and fast, and that was that, or he sat back and watched things spool out, laughing all the way.

Rakkim dragged the bodies of the two dead policemen to the gutter, pushed them into the sewer below. Then he circled the site, knife nestled in his hand, rage in his heart. He eased through the crowd, barely stirring their awareness, until he stood beside Imam Jenkins, stood right there on his left side, a half step behind. A blind spot.

Jenkins watched the burning madrassa as Rakkim stepped forward, his knife cutting through the coarse material of Jenkins's robe, sliding just under the imam's armpit. A gentle stroke would sever the man's brachial artery, bleed him out onto the cobblestones in a gush. Rakkim felt the imam shiver against the blade, but the man didn't shout for help or try to escape.

"The molten torments of hell await the one who harms a servant of Allah," Jenkins said quietly, looking straight ahead.

"I'll take my chances." Rakkim stepped closer, blocking anyone's view as the knife caressed the man's flesh. "How about you?"

"You smell of fire…and the soap used in the madrassa," whispered Jenkins.

"Your senses are sharp as ever. It's a burden sometimes, isn't it?"

"Rakkim?"

Rakkim's lips brushed the man's ear. "You're going to give new orders, old friend. You're going to declare the girls who escaped the flames innocent of immorality."

"Why…why are you doing this?"

Rakkim twisted the blade ever so slightly.

Jenkins kept his gaze on the burning embers. "So my choice is to be murdered by you…or executed by the Grand Mullah for encouraging lust?"

"Not at all," murmured Rakkim. "Wonder of wonders, imam, it was the grace of Allah that led them through the fire. Is this not a clear sign of God's intention?" He felt Jenkins tremble, a trickle of blood running warm across Rakkim's fingers. "The Grand Mullah will applaud your decision, imam. Think of the babies these girls will someday present to Allah, the future warriors and wives of warriors."

"You don't know the Grand Mullah."

"A man of your talents," said Rakkim, "you could convince the stones to sing."

Firefighters hosed down the wreckage, steam rising, red in the firelight.

"Give the proclamation," said Rakkim, the blade cutting deeper with every beat of Jenkins's heart. "Declare the girls innocent."

"Hear me!" Jenkins's voice echoed across the site, the command voice that cut through outside noise and reached directly to believers.

Rakkim listened as the imam spoke of the girls spared from the flames and the infinite mercy of Allah. Listened as the crowd blessed this news, women weeping with joy, men falling to their knees. The firefighters continued to spray down the embers.

Jenkins remained standing as the crowd dispersed, letting the night close in around them before he turned to Rakkim. "A shadow warrior who brings attention to himself," said Jenkins, as the wreckage popped and hissed. "Threatening me…playing the hero…and for what? Schoolgirls." His mouth twisted. "You're a disgrace to the Fedayeen."

Rakkim slipped the knife free, wiped Jenkins's blood on his black robe, the stain shiny in the moonlight. "Alas, I had a poor teacher."

Sarah glowered at the wallscreen in Spider's bedroom, watching a news conference from earlier today-Aztlan's Presidente Argusto at his hacienda outside Tucson; chair tilted back, silver-heeled boots on the desk as he lectured the press. Sarah was glad the sound was off; she couldn't stand hearing that strutting popinjay's voice. The narco-billionaires who had formerly ruled Mexico had been morally reprehensible, but at least their concerns were money and power, not territorial expansion. Not so the Aztec militarists like Argusto who had ousted the drug lords and resurrected the empire. El Presidente had already peeled a chunk of Texas off from the Belt; now he had turned his attention back to the Republic, and he wasn't going to be happy until he gobbled up the whole Southwest. Reclaimed it, while President Brandt dithered in the Oval Office, more concerned with the state of his hair than the state of the nation. She looked over at Leo, Spider's son, who slumped in a chair. "Are you sure of your information?"

"I don't make mistakes," Leo sniffed, a teenage brainiac with a pale pudding face and soft hands, awkward and arrogant and allergic to everything from dust mites to roses.

"Encryption was nine levels deep, Sarah, they don't waste that kind of effort on trial balloons," explained Spider, propped up in bed, head lolling on the pillows. The room smelled faintly of ozone from the static generators that prevented eavesdropping. The house was a run-down two-story box in a Catholic neighborhood of Seattle, a ramshackle Craftsman with buckled floors, peeling paint and state-of-the-art security. "The memo Leo decoded said the president will issue an executive order on water rights next week."