Feeling self-conscious, he relaxed his hands, letting her peel back every finger.

“We’re looking for a slayer,” Rima was saying. “Named Merit.”

Merit was Father’s name.

There was a quick pause before another new voice spoke, the words slurred and too soft to be understood.

“I don’t see it,” said Elata.

Diamond didn’t react.

“What are you looking for?” Seldom asked.

“He cut himself,” she said. “I saw a hole in his thumb, and blood.”

“You made a mistake,” Seldom said.

“Maybe,” she said. Then with a defiant tone, she said, “No.”

Somewhere down the hall, a door was closed and latched. Now even Rima’s voice was muffled, unintelligible.

“Who are they talking to?” Elata asked.

Seldom shrugged.

“Go listen,” she suggested.

“We’re supposed to stay here,” Seldom said.

Elata stood anyway. She stared at Diamond, as if committing him to memory. Then she walked into the hallway and vanished.

Diamond watched the floor again.

With a quiet, impressed voice, Seldom said, “You’ve never gone to school.”

He shook his head.

“I go to school. I started when I was eight hundred, which is very early.”

“Oh.”

“I can read anything,” Seldom boasted. “I learned how before I was nine hundred, in fact.”

Diamond looked at the boy.

“I’m different,” Seldom said, flashing a confident smile.

Diamond kept seeing Rima in that face. His color was darker than his mother’s. He had smooth hair and wide ears that poked out of the hair, and his mouth was narrow and his golden teeth were crooked. But the eyes dominated his face. There was a gleam to them, to their blackness, that made them seem like the brightest objects in the room.

The boy took a breath and let it out slowly. “You know, Karlan told me what he did to you.”

Diamond said nothing.

“He told me after he came home, after Mom was finished screaming.” Seldom’s voice fell away, and his eyes narrowed. “He said that he’d met you. Karlan said you were tiny and odd looking and you didn’t talk much. He said the knife was an accident. He was just trying to have some fun.”

Diamond looked at the smooth, uncut thumb.

“My brother’s different too. But not like me.” The boy straightened and smiled again, sadness in his face. “Something’s broken inside his head, his brain. That’s what I think.”

“What’s broken?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to describe.” The boy didn’t want to look at Diamond anymore. Staring at an overhead light was better. “Karlan told me that he wanted to make you scream. Just to scare everybody. He loves scaring people, kids and adults. Mom says that in that one little area, he’s a genius.”

“What’s a genius?”

“Smart.”

Diamond closed both of his hands.

“He stuck you. He told me about it. He expected you to shout out. But you didn’t. The rest was an accident, pushing the knife that deep inside you. ‘If that kid was a monkey, he’d be a dead monkey now,’ he told me.”

Someone was walking in the hallway, approaching slowly.

“My brother knows about killing monkeys,” Seldom warned. “But Mom says that’s better than the other choices.”

Diamond wrapped his arms around his waist.

“Is the scar ugly?”

“What?”

Seldom was horrified but fascinated too. He couldn’t stop himself. “Can I see the scar?”

Diamond said, “No.”

The boy shrank back, embarrassed by what he had requested.

Then Elata returned, and looking at Seldom, she asked, “What’s going on in here?”

“Nothing,” Seldom said, sitting farther away. “We were just talking.”

Elata entered the room and spoke to Diamond. “Seldom’s mom is talking to your father’s bosses. I heard pieces of that. Merit is still out on his hunt, they say. He hasn’t passed through on his way home, which he always does. Then the boss said something about the big rain and maybe that’s why he’s been delayed.”

Diamond concentrated, trying to make sense of the words.

The girl grew quieter, more serious. “And now my mother’s talking to a police officer.”

Seldom sat up. “Really? How come?”

Elata was quiet, her face tight and simple.

Nobody spoke.

Dropping beside Diamond, she stared at him until he returned her gaze. “Be honest. Until today, have you ever gone outside?”

“No.”

“And you’ve always lived inside the same room?”

He nodded.

Elata looked at his hands again. Her mouth closed tight, teeth grinding. Then talking to the hands, she explained, “Sometimes parents have trouble with kids. My mom knows somebody, never mind who. But her parents tied her up when she was little, trying to keep her under control. Which is wrong and illegal, and if anybody had found out, her parents would have been huge trouble. And the girl would have been taken away from them.”

“Who got tied up?” Seldom asked.

“Nobody.”

“Somebody was,” he said.

“Nobody you know.”

Seldom put his hands under his legs, frowning.

“Anyway.” She looked at Diamond again. “My mother is talking to the police, explaining what she found inside your house, about the mess in the kitchen and that dark little room of yours.”

“The monkey made the mess,” he said.

“I can believe that.”

He had been scared for a good portion of this day, but this was worse. Diamond breathed in long sore gulps, and he wished that he could fly home to yesterday, starting everything over again.

Elata looked at Seldom. “My mom was talking, but then your mom took the receiver from her.”

“Did she?” Something about that was worth a laugh.

She looked at Diamond again. “Rima’s talking to the officer now. You’re a sick kid, she says. You’ve got a fever.”

“I don’t.”

“She says you need is a doctor, not the police. Otherwise you’re going to get even sicker and die.”

“I’m not sick,” said Diamond.

Seldom jumped up. “Let me touch your head.”

“No,” Diamond said. “Don’t.”

Both studied him. Then with a grim voice, Elata said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Somebody’s going to get in trouble,” Seldom said with an expert tone. “That’s what’s going to happen.”

Diamond stood.

“What are you doing?” Seldom asked.

Elata jumped up. “I think he wants to go home.”

That was Diamond’s intention, yes. Nothing was more important than returning to his own room, to loyal and silent Mister Mister. He would wait there for his parents. This long awful morning had brought so many new faces and troubles, and he craved what he knew best. Police officers and new doctors should be met inside his walls. That’s what he was thinking as he left the greeting room, making for the main door.

Elata walked beside him.

From another room, Rima told someone, “Hurry, please.”

“I’ll help you,” Elata promised.

“We don’t want to be late for school,” Seldom said.

Elata didn’t react.

They passed through the iron-braced door. Slits of daylight sliced through gaps in the heavy purple curtain. Seldom was trailing, saying, “I want to go too.”

“You’ll be late for school,” Elata said.

With a big voice, he said, “Oh, I don’t care.”

Elata went through the curtain first, and once more she used that hard little word that Diamond didn’t know. Quietly and fiercely, she said, “Shit.”

Karlan was standing at the landing’s far end, his back to the curtain and feet apart, arms dangling at his sides. He was dressed in a brown school uniform like the one his brother wore, but the shirt was too small for his growing body, fabric straining across his broad back, sleeves squeezing his thick wrists. The air was filled with a new rumbling, harsher and closer than the falling water. A vast silvery ball was pushing past Marduk, fins and whirling blades stuck to its skin. Karlan might have been watching that ball, but he just as well could have been observing things nobody else could see. Either way, as Diamond stepped outside, the older boy turned, showing everyone his big odd smile.