“He was the mastermind. He assembled the clique, and convinced them they would be humanity’s saviors. The clique, hubris-ridden idiots, have made permanent amends. Now there’s only Mad Tom.”

Mick put one unsteady hand behind him, found the wing chair, and sat in it. “It would have been Worecski. My God.”

The teakettle was rumbling, I realized, and I stepped toward the camp stove to turn it off.

“No,” said Frances. She took hold of a lock of my hair and pulled me to a halt. “We just got to the good part.”

I stood very still as she fingered my hair, tugged it lightly, tucked it behind my ear. I would not tremble like a nervous dog.

“As I was saying about our specimen here, all the conveniences. The apparent genetic inheritance, for instance. The ruddy tan, the black hair and dark eyes, the bone structure” — she tapped my cheek under my right eye — “nothing there to raise an eyebrow anywhere from Oklahoma to Tierra del Fuego. Indigenous Western Hemisphere genes. Just what you’d want for sneaking around down below Texas.”

Mick Skinner’s eyes were on us, but I wasn’t sure they were seeing anything. I wondered if his mind was somewhere in drowned Galveston.

“Another handy thing about those genes is that they’re commonly associated with a lack of facial hair in males.”

My resolve was all for nothing; I was shivering in little, uncontrollable bursts. Frances was studying my face as if I were a painting, or something else that couldn’t stare back. She prodded my jaw lightly. I was more aware of her hand than the rifle.

“And there, Mick,” she said, “we come to the real artistry. This face, this pleasing architecture that would be handsome on either sex. The gothic arches of the eyebrows and the nostrils and the lips, echoing each other. That’s a work of art, that is, a work of trompe l’oeil.”

“He hates to be touched, Fran,” said Mick.

“A nice balance of bone to flesh, too. Seems a bit sturdy one minute, a bit frail the next. The Adam’s apple, that was tricky. See?” She pushed lightly with her thumb to raise my chin. “There isn’t one, but there’s sort of a suggestion in the angle of the neck. Marvelous. There’s a lot here that’s done with suggestion, in fact.”

Mick said, “Stop it.”

“The silhouette of the torso, for instance.” She drew a line with her index finger, slowly, from my collarbone to my stomach. I closed my eyes. “Tapered, but not excessively; narrow at the waist, but not too much. The tits weren’t a problem; within tolerance for a flat-chested woman, as long as the shirt never comes off.”

“Frances,” Mick said in a voice that would have stopped a train. It stopped her hand on the first button of my shirt. “Yes?”

“I got real tired of watching people be tortured. Give me another thirty years to work up a taste for it. He hasn’t done anything to you.”