And it would be so easy to plant a spy among these newcomers. Maya found it hard to trust them, sometimes. Could all of them be what they claimed to be? It was impossible to be sure of that, impossible. One night at a meeting with a lot of newcomers there was a young man in the front with a look she didn’t like, and after the meeting, which was uninspired, she had gone with Spencer’s friends right back to the apartment, and told Michel about it. “Don’t worry,” he said.

“What do you mean, don’t worry.”

He shrugged. “The members keep track of each other. They try to make sure they’re all known to each other. And Spencer’s team is armed.”

“You never told me that.”

“I thought you knew.”

“Come on. Don’t treat me as if I was stupid.”

“I don’t, Maya. Anyway, it’s all we can do, unless we hide entirely.”

“I’m not proposing to do that! What do you think I am, a coward?”“Putaine!” he roared. “Pourquoi ce ça? Pourquoi?”

A sour expression crossed his face, and he said something in French. Then he took a deep breath and shouted at her in French, one of his curses. But she could see that this was a deliberate decision on his part— that he had decided the fights were good for her, and cathartic for him, so that they could be pursued, when inevitable, as a kind of therapeutic method— and this of course was intolerable. An act, a manipulation of her— without another thought she took a step into the kitchen area and picked up a copper pot and heaved it at him, and he was so surprised that he barely managed to knock it away.

“I won’t be patronized,” she told him, satisfied that he was genuinely angry now, but still blazing herself. “You damned head-shrinker, if you weren’t so bad at your job the whole First Hundred wouldn’t have gone crazy and this world wouldn’t be so fucked up. It’s all your fault.” And she slammed out the door and went down to the café to brood over the awfulness of having a shrink as a partner, also over her own ugly behavior, so quick to leap out of her control and attack him. He did not come down and join her that time, though she sat around till closing.

• • •

And then, just after she had gotten home and lain down on the couch and fallen asleep, there was a knock at the door, rapid and light in a way immediately frightening, and Michel ran to it and looked through the peephole. He saw who it was and let her in. It was Marina.