“Or from habit,” said Danny. “Look, I don’t understand this yet, we just saw something and I tried something.”

“But I’m clean,” said Wheeler. “I got none of them anymore?”

“No,” said Pat. “Already you’ve picked up some new ones. Maybe they were strays, maybe they came from somebody else.”

“So … my pure-thoughts phase was, like, ninety seconds long,” said Wheeler.

“Your thoughts were never pure,” said Pat. “You still had your full dosage of testosterone.”

“He’s only got half a dose,” said Hal. “I thought you all knew that.”

“Not true,” said Wheeler, “but funny.”

“You mean they didn’t know?” asked Hal.

“When you say something mean to a friend,” said Pat, “you can pretend you’re joking, but you thought of it, you had the mean idea, and then you chose to say it. Laughing doesn’t erase that. Not your laughter and not Wheeler’s.”

“Can you take them away from all of us?” asked Laurette. “Because you have no idea how many bitchy things I’ve thought of to say in the last three minutes.”

“And I’m just dying to say, ‘You mean besides the ones you did say?’” said Sin.

“Very busy Sutahites,” said Pat.

“I don’t know that it does any good to take them,” said Danny. “More come anyway. I think there are probably millions. Billions maybe. I don’t know if I can gather them all. I sort of hear them, they do to me whatever they were doing to you. Probably not as strongly, maybe because they don’t know me as well as they got to know you. I’m just saying … it won’t necessarily do you any long-term good.”

“Because they can’t become a part of you,” said Pat, “people can’t take these Sutahites with them when they pass through a gate. Or a Great Gate. They get stripped away and left behind. I think what the Gate Thief fears about Great Gates is that Set will get through, and if he gets through, he can bring all the Sutahites with him, and the people of Westil have never had to deal with them. They really might become slaves.”

“Not that they haven’t been perfectly capable of coming up with horrors and evils on their own,” said Danny.

“Seriously,” said Hal. “We’re supposed to believe that our heads are surrounded by a cloud of gnats that tell us to do bad things.”

“Let’s see,” said Laurette. “We’ve seen people disappear in one place and appear in another. Injuries healed in an instant. Kids flying up a mile above Buena Vista and coming back down not dead. A girl we’ve known half our lives suddenly being able to whip up dust devils and tornados. But you’re right—clouds of tiny creatures around our heads is way too much to swallow.”

“It just feels so childish,” said Hal.