“Isn’t this awful,” Mama Laura said.

Mumbai. Amanda had relatives there. There were Tau communities there, too, not to mention countless people who would have qualified as Taus had they ever taken the test. Relatives of a different kind.

I took a candle and navigated my way to the bathroom, where I tried to call Trev. But my phone was as dead as Jenny’s. Which meant I was out of touch with my team. Which created a whole new set of problems, and I needed to talk to Jenny about that.

*   *   *

Fortunately for our chances of having a private conversation, Jenny was a smoker. Mama Laura wouldn’t allow a cigarette to be lit in the house, so Jenny excused herself to step outside. Geddy and I followed her onto the back porch, but Geddy hurried back inside as soon as she took out her pack of Marlboros—he hated the smell of burning tobacco. I waited for the screen door to swing shut behind him.

Jenny gave me a careful look. The night was cool but windless, and her face was softened by the light of the rising moon. She could almost have been her younger self, Jenny Symanski and Adam Fisk, just hanging out. She said, “Okay, so what now?”

The plan had been admirably simple. What Jenny wanted from Tau was protection. Not just from Aaron but from the media shitstorm that would follow her release of the video. One official press conference, one official statement, a signed affidavit, then she wanted to disappear. Because, as she had said when we first discussed this, “It’s not just a career-killer for Aaron. It’s an embarrassment to me. I look at myself in those videos and all I see is someone—what’s the word? Cowed. Cringing. Like a whipped dog! It’s fucking humiliating. Not exactly what I want to show the world.”

“But you weren’t cowed,” I told her. “That’s why the video exists, because you weren’t cringing, you aren’t letting him get away with it.”

At the end of the weekend I was supposed to take Jenny to a Tau enclave in Buffalo, with Trev and his security detail for escort, and after a prearranged press conference we would drive her over the border into Canada. She wanted a clean break with her past life, and that was what we promised her: our own version of the Witness Protection Program. A new name with all ancillary credentials, a new home in a pleasant university town out west. A job, if she wanted one. The sodality had ways of quietly and invisibly ensuring the employment of fellow Taus—and fellow travelers, in this case. Once the video was public she might be recognized, but I doubted it; Jenny had the kind of pleasant but commonplace looks that could be rendered utterly anonymous by a bottle of L’Oréal and a change of clothes.

“We should proceed as if nothing’s changed,” I said, though much had changed. For one thing, the international crisis might cause the vote on Griggs-Haskell to be postponed. For another, we wouldn’t be releasing any videos or staging any press conferences until power was restored. “We leave here Monday morning and head for Buffalo. By then we might have a better idea what’s going on in the rest of the world. In the meantime I’m going to have to find a way to contact my friend Trevor out at the Holiday Inn.” I didn’t mention the contingent of Het enforcers Trev had spotted earlier. No need for Jenny to worry about that. “And we need our own copy of the video.”

“Okay,” she said softly. “Now?”

“As good a time as any.”

She looked into my eyes as if she were hunting for some kind of reassurance there. Then she rummaged in her purse until she came up with a cheap thumb drive, which she pressed into my hand.

She smoked her cigarette and we listened to the night. In neighboring houses, candles moved like restless ghosts behind darkened windows. The backyard opened onto a stretch of marshy, unimproved land where bullfrogs croaked out what Mama Laura used to call “that jug o’ rum noise.” Jenny and I had caught a huge bullfrog there, a year or so before puberty began to complicate our relationship. The frog was six inches snout to tail—I had held it still while she applied a tape measure from her mom’s sewing box. The frog had croaked all night in a box in Jenny’s garage, and in the morning her parents had made her turn it loose.

“Must be strange for you,” she said, “being back here.”

I shrugged.

“It is for me,” she said. “So many memories kind of overlapping, you know, like a multiple exposure. Things we did back in the day. I look at Geddy and I still see the chubby, awkward kid he used to be. All the crazy enthusiasm he couldn’t keep inside himself. You ever think about that stuff?”

“Sometimes.”

“About your family?”

“Sure. Sometimes.”

“Because I think it must be strange, coming back here, your father on his deathbed or close to it, and you and me about to hand Aaron a nasty ticket to obscurity.”

I almost wished I could tell her I had spent sleepless nights worrying about it.

“I have a different family now,” I said. “I hope it doesn’t sound callous, but whatever love I got in this house, I got mainly from Grammy Fisk, and she’s been gone a long time. I’m sorry for my father. I really am. But I was never much more to him than an afterthought and a distraction. He fed me and he tolerated me and he allowed me a place in his house. And I guess that’s worth thanking him for. But it’s nothing like love, and I can’t say I ever really loved him.”

Jenny looked at me as if from a great distance. “Actually,” she said, “yeah, that does sound a little callous.”

“The first people who took me into their home with genuine love were two old women with a big house in Toronto. I expect my father would call them a pair of rich old dykes. I still live in that house when I’m not on the road. I love everyone who lives in it with me. One of those women—Loretta—died a couple of years ago. Cancer, not very different from my dad’s. I cried when she passed, and I feel her absence every day, even now. I know what grief is, Jenny. I know where it comes from, and I know how people earn it.”

She sighed a plume of smoke to the starry sky. “Okay,” she said. “The funny thing is, that’s how I used to feel about this house, back when my folks were drunk or arguing or both. I came here because Grammy Fisk was nice to me, and Mama Laura never yelled, and I liked being with you, and Geddy was pretty entertaining. And if Aaron ignored me, that’s just because he was older and so good at everything. Some nights the only way I could get to sleep was by pretending this was my family, and that the only reason I had to go home was because I’d been born at the wrong address.”

It was a memorable phrase. Born at the wrong address.

“So maybe I think about those days more than you do,” Jenny finished.

“Maybe so.”

“But I doubt it, because some things you just don’t walk away from.”

“I walked away from here a long time ago.”

She smiled, a humorless compression of her lips. “Well, one thing hasn’t changed. You’re still a lousy liar.”

“I hope that’s not entirely true. The work I do these days, I’m a kind of diplomat. I help Tau negotiate deals with other Affinities. I need to lie from time to time. I’m one of the best liars we’ve got.”

She stubbed out her cigarette on the rim of one of Mama Laura’s big ceramic planters. “Then God help Tau, and God help us.”

*   *   *

I tried twice more to call Trevor Holst, without success. I needed to talk to him, but it looked like I wouldn’t be doing that before morning. It was late now. Mama Laura was tidying up the kitchen for the night, and the rest of us huddled around the radio, learning nothing. Geddy began to yawn.

Then there was a terse knock at the front door. “I’ll get it,” Mama Laura called from the kitchen. Twice tonight we had had visitors come to the door: neighbors who were running portable generators, offering to let us join them if we needed anything. Probably more of the same, I thought, until I heard Mama Laura’s stifled screech of alarm.