"I was nineteen years old, Lise. I was pissed off and I wanted to do some damage to my old man."

She said as gently as possible, "How come?"

He allowed another silent moment to pass, looking at the desert, his instruments, anywhere but at her.

"There was this girl I'd been seeing. We were going to get married. It was that serious. But my old man and my uncle didn't want it to happen. They were old-fashioned about, you know, race."

"You're girlfriend wasn't white?"

"Hispanic."

"Did you really care what your father thought?"

"Not at that point, no. I hated him. He was a brutal little shit, frankly. Drove my mother to her grave, in my opinion. I didn't give a fuck what he thought. But he knew that. So he didn't say a word to me. What he did was, he went to my girlfriend's family and offered to pay a year's tuition on her college education if she would stay away from me. I guess it sounded like a good deal. I never saw her again. But she felt bad enough to send me a letter and explain what happened."

"So you burned his warehouse."

"Took a couple cans of paint stripper out of the garage and went down to the industrial district and dumped it on the truck bay doors. It was after midnight. The place was three-quarters in flames by the time the fire department got there."

"So you had your revenge."

"What I didn't know was that there was a night guard in the building. He spent six months in a burn ward because of me."

Lise said nothing.

"What made it worse," Turk said, "was that my old man covered it up. Cooked up some arrangement with the insurance company. He tracked me down and told me that. How he'd taken this huge financial hit in order to save me from legal action. He said it was because I was family, that was why he did what he did about my girlfriend, because family mattered, whether I knew it or not."

"He expected you to be grateful?"

"Hard as that is to believe, yeah, I think he honestly expected me to be grateful."

"Were you?"

"No," Turk said. "I was not grateful."

* * * * *

He landed the Skyrex where he had landed it for Sulean Moi some months before, on a little strip of pavement that appeared to be in the middle of nowhere but was, Diane insisted, less than a mile from Dvali's compound, a hikeable distance.

They hiked, carrying flashlights.