Damn, I thought, I blew it. I nearly had it, just forty-seven days left, and I failed. Fail, flail, frailed.

Maybe it’s okay if 2 Jeweled Skull goes back instead of me. I mean, instead of this me.

Except it’s not, is it? If he does go back he’s going to do something rotten. There’s just something bad about that guy. Maybe I was a bad influence on him. No, maybe he was always bad. I don’t know.

I was sure he wouldn’t do the right thing, though.

2 Jeweled Skull’s attendants put an ocelot-pelt cushion behind him and he sat back on it, nibbling a honey tortilla and watching us like we were TV. Trying to act casual. It’s not going to work, I thought. He’s worried something’s up.

“Ti ku ti bin xot u cal tumen,” 2JS said to Hun Xoc. “You (inferior) have shat in our house.” Suddenly he was all Chol court language again.

He’s not me, I thought, 2JS isn’t me.

I was pretty sure. I wasn’t running 2JS, or rather, the other copy of Jed 1 wasn’t running him. He was running himself. It wasn’t because he was being such a bastard and I was such a great guy or anything. It was just because I really would have handled everything a little differently. Maybe worse, even, but differently. It’s hard to explain. Somehow you could tell this guy was still thinking like a Maya ahau. Not like screwed-up little me.

“Please offer me, my father,” Hun Xoc said.

His arm was puffing up like a nuked hot dog.

“Your brother’s parasite came here to wreck us,”

2JS said. “It’s just a gut-snake speaking through

The mouth of Son Chacal’s decaying skin.”

“This blind, unworthy non-son didn’t know,” Hun Xoc said.

He said he didn’t know what he was being asked for or how he’d screwed up. No kidding, I thought. 2JS can’t really be expecting Hun Xoc to know much. They’d brought him here more for my benefit. What did Hun Xoc really understand about me, anyway? Not a lot when you got down to it. I’d really leveled with him, almost as much as I had with Koh. But he wasn’t the intellectual she was. I was sure he expressed it all to himself in terms of familiar concepts, wandering uayob and whatever. He thought I was still Chacal somehow, like Chacal’s disembodied spirit had visited this weird place during a night journey. He’d asked a lot about the seventy-eighth hotun but I’d always had to simplify my account. Certainly I’d never been able to really explain how engines worked or anything. He’d been interested in it but it was like Strange Tales of Another Dimension to him, he’d never apply any of it to his own experience 2JS signaled again. One of the teasers had a short wood-and-flint bone saw, and he positioned it on Hun Xoc’s forearm, just below the elbow, and pulled the first stroke. Purple deoxygenated blood sprayed up like beads, turning red in the air. His teaser twisted his arm slightly, directing the spray away from himself and into Hun Xoc’s face. I hadn’t been watching but my own teaser had gotten another mouthful of chili water and blew it up into me, farther this time, while someone behind me squeezed the enema bag again. Staccato sting-rolls spread out of my groin and through every micrometer of my earth’s-diameter-length network of arteries and veins and capillaries, and congealed into a mesh of razor wire. When I could think at all again I waited for the pain to slide onto its descending curve. It was the only part where you could get anything together mentally.

Okay. I retreated into chess mode. Next move. Other side. On track. Think. I visualized a pudgy little Hercule Poirot doll waddling around in my head, stroking his mustaches and pointing out inconsistencies.

What’s Koh doing?

Maybe she’d gotten herself killed somehow. Or maybe when she saw she was going to get captured she’d just cut herself with a poison ray spine. Maybe she didn’t want to be traded out to what was, after all, just another enemy. Maybe 1 Gila took control of her troops and didn’t tell her.

No, that’s ridiculous. They’re fanatically loyal to her. She has Unlimited Personal Power. Her armies are still out there somewhere, waiting for something.

Okay, Logic.

Koh hadn’t trusted 2 Jeweled Skull and she wouldn’t trust the Ocelots either.

She’d anticipated that 2 Jeweled Skull would sell her out once he’d used me to lure her to Ix. She never had any illusions about what would happen to her once she helped seat 2 Jeweled Skull on the Ocelots’ Emerald Mat. She knew he would have come after her next. Even if he wanted to promote the Star-Rattler cult after he came to power, he’d to do it through manipulatable venerators, not through a headstrong leader like Koh.

Okay. So she saw it coming. She knew he’d fuck her over, so she told the Rattler Children to stay away. No wonder we didn’t get any word from the twelve Harpy emissaries all that time, I’d bet a buck she issued orders for 1 Gila to kill them immediately so they couldn’t report back to 2JS.

For that matter, she’d probably set up 1 Gila’s idea to split the forces in the first place. That whole thing was just an act. Okay.

Koh’s still out there, with her army, or what’s left of it. Okay. So when Koh’s army didn’t show up, though, that actually surprised 2JS. Right? Right. He’d been counting on them to take the heat in the fight. The idea was to co-opt them and then sacrifice them once they put him in a good position. Even so, though, his blowgun squad carried the day.

Okay. So what about Koh’s long-range plan? What was she up to? Or more to the point, what was she up to with me?

Maybe I was only good to her for the well run. Koh couldn’t have sent her own squad to the well because then 2JS would have wondered what they were doing there. The most convincing story would be that I was trying to escape. It would keep him from thinking about where I was when I was captured “Where were you going when they took you?” 2JS asked Hun Xoc.

“The mainland,” Hun Xoc said.

“To do what?”

“To meet someone, that’s all I know,” Hun Xoc said.

Ah so, I thought. 2JS thinks we were going to meet Lady Koh. The teaser twisted off Hun Xoc’s forearm and started working on the other one. To my right they were peeling strips of skin off Armadillo Shit’s cheeks.

2JS walked over to me, reached out, and took my chin, like he was thinking of pulling my jaw off. His hand left little images of itself trailing after it in the air. Evidently I was still pretty messed up.

“So, Koh has something up her cunt, right?” he whispered in English.

“Sure, she’s heading for Kaminaljuyu,” I lied. “By a west-coast route. She’s going to regroup her force there and decide on the next move.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “If there’s one thing I know about it’s what’s going on in fucking Kaminaljuyu.” He reached out and touched my jaw with a sharpened index nail.

“Well, it is a secret,” I said.

“Listen,” he said. “Jeddy face. Buddy.”

“Yeah?”

“You know you can’t last, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

He was probably right. It’s not totally true that everyone cracks eventually. Hun Xoc would never crack, for instance. But I wasn’t that strong a character anymore. I wouldn’t hold out all the way through to a horrible death. I wasn’t Chacal, I was Jed, and Jed was just a mixed-up punk kid.

“So let’s not mess up the whole project just because you’re disappointed that you’re not going to be the one going back. You do want the project to work, don’t you? You do want to keep the world running. Jed?”

“Yes?”

“Are you following me?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He let go of my chin. He’s rushing, I thought. Even if my Jedness would weaken me it might still take hours to get me to talk. A couple of days if I was really motivated. And normally he would have expected to wait that long. The teasers might work on you for months, until they were sure you’d do anything to just be killed without another session. Everyone was so hard around here that if they were ever actually trying to get information out of someone, the levels of pain and time involved multiplied exponentially. And if you were the victim, the general wisdom was that the only thing to do was to be so maddeningly bland that they’d kill you ahead of schedule.