Maya shrugged him off and said, “We blew up the machine they had Sax hooked into. I don’t know if we managed to wreck any records. Probably not. And they know they had him, and that someone took him back. So there’s no reason to celebrate. They’ll come after us now with everything they’ve got.”

“I don’t think they’re that well organized,” Art offered.

“You shut up,” Maya told him.

“Well, okay, but look, now that they know about you, you won’t have to hide so much, right?”

“Back in business,” Coyote muttered.

• • •

They drove south together through that day, as the dust torn up by the katabatic storm was enough to hide them from satellite cameras. Tension remained high; Maya was in a black fury, and could not be spoken to. Michel handled her like an unexploded bomb, trying always to get her focused on the practical matters of the moment, so that she might forget their terrible night out. But with Sax lying on a couch in the living compartment of their car, unconscious and looking like a racoon with all his bruises, this was no easy thing to forget. Nirgal sat beside Sax for hours on end, a hand placed flat on his ribs, or the top of his head. Other than that there was nothing to be done. Even without the black eyes he wouldn’t have looked much like the Sax Russell whom Nirgal had known as a child. It was a visceral shock to see the signs of physical abuse on him, proof positive that they had deadly enemies in the world. This was something Nirgal had been wondering about in recent years, so that the sight of Sax was an ugly, sickening thing— not just that they had enemies, but that there were people who would do this kind of thing, had always been doing it all through history, just as the unbelievable accounts had it. They were real after all. And Sax only one of millions of victims.

As Sax slept, his head rolled from side to side. “I’m going to give him a shot of pandorph,” Michel said. “Him and then me.”

“There’s something wrong with his lungs,” Nirgal said.

“Is there?” Michel put his ear to Sax’s chest, listened for a time, hissed. “Some fluid in there, you’re right.”

“What were they doing to him?” Nirgal asked Spencer.

“They were talking to him while they had him under. You know, they have located several memory centers in the hippocampus very precisely, and with drugs and a very minute ultrasound stimulation, and fast MRI to track what they’re doing . . . well, people just answer whatever questions they are asked, often at great length. They were doing that to Sax when the wind hit and they lost power. The emergency generator kicked in right away, but—” He gestured at Sax. “Then, or when we took him out of the apparatus . . .”