“If you want anything,” said the flutist, “just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen that one,” I said.

“You ain’t seen nothin’, kid. Just whistle. You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone, but accept no substitutes. Just put your lips together and blow. Don’t let your deal go down.”

“You know, that almost made sense.”

“It will pretty soon. Or you’re dead meat.”

“Where are the others?” I asked it.

“That’s all we have time for! Tune in next week!”

I might be dead next week, I tried to say, but it was too late.

I opened my eyes on the ground, where I’d landed in what I recognized in hindsight as a boneless, uncontested faint. No one in the cluster of people around me seemed to think I ought to be embarrassed. I had a vague impression of some ritual things being done quickly; then Josh and Kris put a shoulder under each of my arms and half carried me back to the farmhouse. Not long after they’d stretched me on my bed, Sher poked her head, then the rest of her, in the door. She was back to the torn leggings. I felt much better.

“I don’t know if that will help,” she said. “But it was a damn good try. You take a mean initiation.”

“Thank you. I think.”

“There’s usually pronouns in it, though.”

It was a moment before I figured out what she meant. Then I laughed.

“We tried to fix your identity to your body, so that you’d be more likely to hold out against Tom. And we made this.” She lifted up an oblong glass bead, the size of the end of my thumb. “It’s not exactly a govi. It’s sort of your doppelganger.”

“Strong family resemblance,” I agreed.

“Your psychic doppelganger, dipshit. The idea is that you buck Tom off, and this doesn’t; you trap him in this and break it. It’s a decoy body.”

“Do you think it’ll work?”

She sat down, hard, on the edge of the bed. “No. But I can’t think of anything else to do. Santos, I wish we had more time.”

“We’re available for a limited time only,” I said, three-fourths asleep.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“They’ve got the turbine; the note came from Theo an hour ago. He says he’ll see you in Oz.”

“Ha ha, Theo. Sher? In the… thing, this evening. There wasn’t anything from Frances.”

“She said, in — I think it was an Irish accent — that there was only one thing you’d ever given her that she could hold in her two hands, that she hadn’t eaten. And that the one thing would be perfect for the pot, but it was also the first thing you’d given her, and she thought the sentiment would be more use to her than the identification would be to you.”

I laughed again. “That’s very Frances-like of her. Sher, why does China Black have silver eyebrows?”

“She got in trouble once, she says, because her eyebrows moved. She was afraid it would happen again.”