I wiped my forehead. I’d never really attempted to come to grips with all the fine details of our existence. I’d always preferred to let the research team rack their brains over that . . . All these theories are infinitely distant from real life in any case.

So . . . why do beings who are dead have an aura? And those who don’t radiate any “life energy” at all? And why are they alive . . . horrifying as it was to put vampires and Nadya in the same category, I forced myself to do it and tried to view the question in the abstract. Without life energy, it’s impossible to live . . . but the dead and “zero-temperature magicians” don’t produce it . . .

Stop! It’s all very elementary. They don’t radiate it, but they consume it. Other beings’ Power is what allows vampires to exist after death. So it turns out that’s what keeps Nadya alive too. To refine the analogy . . . my daughter is like a person whose body doesn’t produce blood. And she lives on constant, continuous transfusions . . .

I winced and squirmed in my seat. Even just thinking about it was unpleasant. Maybe that was why I’d never gone into the details of how Power, aura, and life were interconnected?

Okay, that was all idle conjecture. So Nadya lived on other people’s life energy. She was alive and she was just fine. But how was it possible to take away a man’s Power and still leave him alive? Not kill him, not turn him into a vampire—but transform him into a strange kind of talking puppet?

I didn’t know

“You’re lost in thought,” said Las.

“Uh-huh,” I confirmed.

“Listen, I’ve got a question . . . Higher Others—can they see the soul fly out of the body?”

“The soul?” I asked, mystified. “Fly out?”

“Well, yeah. The aura’s the soul, right? So when someone dies, can you see where the aura flies off to? What I’m getting at is that you could figure out where heaven and hell are. If you take two people dying simultaneously at opposite ends of the globe and pinpoint the direction the souls fly off in, then you could triangulate—”

“Las, the aura is not the soul!” I objected. “The aura is life energy.”

“Ah, and I thought it was the soul,” said Las, upset. “So the soul can’t be seen?”

“No,” I replied. “And when someone dies, the aura doesn’t go flying off anywhere, it just stops glowing.”

But there was something to all of this. Las’s question, my answer . . .

But I couldn’t understand what it was, and I ran out of time. We drove under the boom that had risen obligingly to allow us into our car park—and stopped right in front of Gesar.