That what? A new daddy Passenger was threatening my Passenger? I had run into many people in my life who had the shadow of something similar to mine hung over them, and nothing had ever happened with them except mutual recognition and a bit of inaudible snarling. This was too stupid even to think about-Passengers didn't have daddies.

Did they? "Dexter," Astor said. "You're scaring us."

I admit that I was scaring me, too. The thought that the Passenger could have a parent stalking it with lethal intentions was appallingly stupid-but then, after all, where had the Passenger really come from? I was reasonably sure that it was more than a psychotic figment of my disordered brain. I was not schizophrenic-both of us were sure of that. The fact that it was now gone proved that it had an independent existence.

And this meant that the Passenger had come from somewhere. It had existed before me. It had a source, whether you called it a parent or anything else. "Earth to Dexter," Astor said, and I realized that I still stood in front of them frozen in my unlikely, foolish openmouthed pose like a pedantic zombie.

"Yes," I said stupidly, "I was just thinking."
"Did it hurt a lot?" she said.

I closed my mouth and looked at her. She was facing me with her look of ten-year-old disgust at how dumb grown-ups can be, and this time I agreed with her. I had always taken the Passenger for granted, so much so that I had never really wondered where it had come from, or how it had come to be. I had been smug, fatuously content to share space with it, simply glad to be me and not some other, emptier mortal, and now, when a little self-knowledge might have saved the day, I was struck dumb. Why had I never thought of any of these things before? And why did I have to choose now as the first time, in the presence of a sarcastic child? I had to devote some time and thought to this-but of course, this was neither the time nor the place.

"Sorry," I said. "Let's go see the planetarium."
"But you were going to tell us why lions are important," she said.

In truth, I could no longer remember why lions were important. But happily for my image, my cell phone began to chatter before I could admit it. "Just a minute," I said, and I pulled the phone from its holster. I glanced at it and saw that it was Deborah. And after all, family is family, so I answered.

"They found the heads," she said. It took me a moment to figure out what she meant, but Deborah was hissing in my ear and I realized some sort of response was called for. "The heads? From the two bodies over at the university?" I said.