They sat at the rickety table, eating their sandwiches as an awkward silence settled around them. At length, Bravo wiped his hands on a paper towel and placed on the table the pair of glasses he'd found aboard the Steffi.

It lay between them, a symbol both of what drew them together and what had set them against one another.

"Tell me-"

"We can't go on, unless you commit." She shook her head. "It's no good, you know, blaming me or the other Guardians for mistakes we've made. Now-this moment-is all that matters, whether we go on or leave it here. If we leave, then all is lost. To you, I may sound terribly melodramatic, but the truth is I'm being as forthright as I can. The continuation of the Order, the safeguarding of the secrets that have been entrusted to us for centuries, is on your shoulders. Only you can find the cache, your father made sure of that." She took a breath. "It all boils down to whether he was right about you, or whether he made a fatal mistake."

In that moment, Bravo heard again his father's voice as if he was sitting beside him. "A 'mistake' is something mechanical-a wrong way of acting, maneuvering, thinking. A mistake is a surface thing. But beneath the surface-where loss manifests itself-that's where you must begin."

He gazed down at the glasses, trying to sort out the welter of feeling swirling inside him. As if from a distance, he saw his hand reach out, pick up the glasses and feel the weight of them in his palm.

"Jenny, I want to know something," he said slowly. "Why did you choose to join the Order? Was it because of your father?"

"My father?" A small, bruised sound escaped her lips. "My father did everything he could to stop me, because I was his delicate daughter. He even had someone picked out for me to marry, a nice, dull guy from a prominent family inside the Beltway. It sounds positively medieval, doesn't it? But there you go." She swept a wisp of hair off her face. "When he saw he couldn't dissuade me, he made things so difficult-my training would have broken a lot of men. I fractured my left ulna twice and my right tibula once, and so many bruises… It was torture."

"Why did you persevere? Was it out of spite?"

She laughed. "It so easily could have been, but, no, it was something else."

"What?"

"My faith in what the Order represents: a group of sane men working in an insane world for the betterment of mankind." Her eyes flashed. "I suppose that sounds insipid to you."

"No, but it does sound idealistic."

"Maybe it is." She shook her head. "I don't know about you, Bravo, but I have to have something good to believe in. I have to believe that what I do in the world is going to make it better."

So it all boiled down to faith.

Glancing up, he saw Jenny's pale eyes regarding him steadily, curiously. There was a fervor in her voice-a tiny tremor-he recognized as coming straight from her heart. She believed every word she said to him; now it was up to him to have faith that what she had told him was the truth. It made sense to him. He knew that more than anything his father had wanted to make the world better, despite the odds-or perhaps, knowing Dexter, because of the odds. He knew it because it had been instilled in him.

It seemed to him now that he faced a looking glass that showed him how the world really worked, that shone a different light onto his life up until now. Everything he had experienced, everything that had come before was prelude, had led him to this moment.

He put the glasses gently down. "You said something before about an initiation. I think we'd better get on with it, don't you?"

"You know what 'cupping' is, I imagine."

"Of course," Bravo said. "Medieval physicians believed that illness-what they called 'humors'-resided deep inside the body, that they need to be brought to the surface to be expelled."

Jenny nodded. They were sitting on the folding chairs, which they had brought over to the stove, along with the card table. Apparently, she had turned on the stove some time ago, possibly when he was in the shower, for there was a pot on it, filled with water at the boil.

"Put your right arm on the table," she said, "so the inside of your forearm is exposed."

When he had done as she asked, she took up a pair of long metal tongs. Dipping them into the boiling water, she withdrew three glass items that looked like nothing more than diminutive egg cups. These she set one by one on a paper towel to dry.

"Wouldn't an autoclave be better?" he said.

Jenny gave him a dry smile. "Sometimes the ancient ways are the best ways." She brought the three cupping devices over to the table and sat down beside him.

"Ready?"

Bravo nodded.

She put one of the cupping devices onto the inside of his arm, struck a long wooden match and held the flame to the bottom of the glass. The heat from the air inside began to draw, and the skin inside the ring of glass gradually turned red.

"It isn't 'humors' we wish to draw out of you in the initiation, but obligation. Once you are a part of us there is no changing your mind, no going back. You're a part of the Order for life."

She snuffed out the match just as the cupping was beginning to burn him, he watched as she rose and, opening a drawer beneath the sink, returned with a pewter phial. Unstoppering it, she turned it over. Three seeds fell out into the center of her palm.

"These are the seeds of three trees-cypress, cedar and pine, all evergreens and in their way symbols of eternal life." She placed them one by one in his mouth. "When Adam lay dying, his son Seth placed beneath his tongue seeds from the cypress, cedar and pine that had been a gift to him by an angel. Chew them and swallow," she instructed. As he did so, she said, "It is said-and members of the Order have seen the proof of it-that the cross on which Christ died was made of wood from these three trees. This, the first of the three rites, is a symbol of your death-the severing of yourself from society, the world that you knew. Do you swear that once you enter the Voire Dei you will never seek to leave?"

"I swear," Bravo said as a wave of dizziness rushed through him.

With a deft corkscrew motion, Jenny plucked the cupping glass from his aching arm and, in almost the same gesture, placed the second one in a spot three inches from the first. She lit its bottom as she had the one before.

As his skin again grew angry and red, she said, "In the Book of Revelation, it is written: 'Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle, the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.' The medieval map of the world found in Hereford Cathedral shows the world as a perfect circle with Jerusalem in its center, like a navel. Near one edge is depicted a legend that tells us that Alexander the Great, in his conquest of the world, encountered the forces of Gog and Magog. He defeated them but could not exterminate them. Instead, he locked them away in the Caspian Mountains, defying what the prophets wrote in Revelations."

She kept the flame against the bottom of the cupping glass even though Bravo's flesh was raised and puckered. The length of the cupping was three times that of the first one. "This, the second part of the rite, symbolizes resurrection, for our most sacred vow is to be standing between Satan's hordes and mankind when the day of Revelation arrives. Do you swear this?"

"I swear." The dizziness returned, more insistent this time. He was beginning to feel like a Sanguinati, the twelfth-century cathedral monks subject to tempora minutionis, periodic bloodletting.

Again, Jenny switched the glasses, removing the second, replacing it with the third, three inches from where the second had been. She opened another drawer beneath the sink, snapped on a pair of latex gloves. This time she returned with a stone mortar and pestle and three tiny glass containers, the contents of which-white, yellow and gunmetal-gray-she deposited into the bottom of the mortar where she began to grind them together.