I closed my eyes and leaned back in the chair. It was a hot day, and a damp one, and inhaling was like breathing soup. “I don’t have anything to be rude to you about. And if I’ve locked anything up, it’s more than I know.”

She sighed. “Maybe that’s true. Maybe you don’t know you’ve done it. In which case, you did it because some part of you had to. In which case, you have an even screwier sense of personal property than I thought you did.”

“That’s a non sequitur,” I said, smiling.

“The hell it is. What do you think you own?”

Sweat trickled under my shirt, cold as ice water. “Nothing.”

After a moment she said, “That’s what I mean. You own exactly what everybody else owns. Your body, for starts. Nobody can make any claims on it but you. You can choose to give control of it to somebody else, temporarily, like you did back in the City. Which, by the way, took more guts than sense. But it took a lot of guts. But when that’s over, your body’s still yours, you haven’t given a bit of it away.

“And you own your mind. Everything you think is your property, and it’s yours whether you build a fence around it or not. Nobody can cross into it, nobody can make you change anything in it, and nobody can hurt you there, unless you let them. Whatever Beano did to your body, he bounced clean off your mind and didn’t even leave a dent. Unless you put him inside the property line yourself.”

I’d opened my eyes, and was looking at the porch ceiling. “You should bring all this up with Frances. A Horseman’s perspective is probably a little different.”

“I did bring it up with Frances,” Sher said caustically. “I thought somebody ought to. Funny thing is, she agrees with me. According to Frances, her victims’ minds are bulletproof. She can replay their memories, but those are just recordings. They’re not the person, they’re just what the person draws on sometimes. She says if she wanted to make someone hate blue, or like rhubarb, or want to shoot the dog, she couldn’t do it. She can kill minds, but she can’t change ’em.”

“But she can steal bodies. That’s hard on the first part of your theory.”

“And I could strangle you dead, right this minute. That would be stealing, too. I’ll give you half an exception for the Horsemen, but after that I’ll say it again: They can kill ya, but they can’t own ya. And until you’re dead, you belong to you and nobody can change that. You don’t have to lock your brain in a box to be sure of it.”

She stopped, and I dropped my gaze from the ceiling to her face. “Okay,” I said.

She threw her mug at the lawn and stomped off the porch.

As my endurance came back, and my flexibility, I began to walk instead of sit. Outside the second ring of houses (my estimate had been low; there were thirty-nine), I found barns and sheds and stables and workshops. Beyond those were pastureland and cultivated fields. Grain did its foot-rooted wind dance there; corn thrashed its jungle leaves; beans waggled long green or purple or yellow fingers; summer squash ripened furiously in a pinwheel of tropical-looking vegetation. Here, too, there were always people, cultivating, hoeing weeds, spreading things, raking things, trimming, harvesting. It all seemed as ritual as a pre-Bang Catholic mass, and as intelligible to outsiders.