"This is where we'll be living for the next little while," her mother had told her when they moved here from California. But to Lise it was never "my house," even when she was talking to friends at the American school. It was "where we're staying," her mother's preferred formulation. At thirteen Lise had been a little frightened of the foreign places she had seen on television, and Port Magellan was all those foreign places jumbled together in a single overbrimming gumbo. At least at first, she had longed for lost California.

Now she longed for—what?

Truth. Memory. The extraction of truth from memory.

The roof of the house was dark with ash. Lise could not help picturing herself on the veranda in the old days, sitting with her father. She wished she could sit there with him now, not to discuss Brian or her problems but to speculate about the ashfall, to talk about what Robert Adams had liked to call (inevitably smiling as he said it) the Very Large Subjects, the mysteries that lay beyond the boundary of the respectable world.

It was dark when she finally got home. The apartment was still in disarray, the dishes unwashed in the sink, the bed unmade, a little of Turk's aura still lingering. She poured herself a glass of red wine and tried to think coherently about what Brian had said. About powerful people and their interest in the woman who had (perhaps, in some way) seduced her father away from home.

Was Brian right when he said she should leave? Was there really anything meaningful left to extract from the shards of her father's life?

Or maybe she was closer than she realized to some fundamental truth, and maybe that was why she was in trouble.

* * * * *

Turk guessed there was something wrong when Tomas failed to answer the second and third calls he placed from the car. Tomas might have been drinking—he still drank, though rarely to excess—but even drunk, Tomas usually answered his phone.

So Turk approached the old man's trailer with some apprehension, snaking his car through the dust-choked alleys of the Flats at a cautious speed. Tomas was a Fourth, hence fairly hearty, but not immortal. Even Fourths grew old. Even Fourths died. Tomas might be sick. Or he might be in some other kind of trouble. There was often trouble in the Flats. A couple of Filipino gangs operated out of the area, and there were drug houses scattered through the neighborhood. Unpleasant things happened from time to time.

He parked his car by a noisy bodega and walked the last few yards to the corner of Tomas's muddy little street. It was only just dark and there were plenty of people around, canned music yammering from every other doorway. But Tomas's trailer was dark, the windows unlit. Could be the old man was asleep.

But no. The door was unlocked and ajar.