But he had been touched by enough women in the past twenty-four hours. He was done with being betrayed by his natural reaction to physical touch. A bit of physical affection from his long-absent mother? It sent a thrill of relief through him. He wasn’t having any of it. He shrugged away and backed up a step.

“Touch me again and you’re out of here,” Danny said.

Mama gave something like a sob and stepped away, holding the hand that had held him in her other hand, as if she had been devastatingly wounded, as if the hand were pumping out blood and the injury could not be healed.

“We were proud of you,” said Baba, not even glancing at his wife’s reaction. “You were so clever. You understood your danger—not gatemage danger, but drekka danger. You kept your head down. You kept trying to find ways to survive. We saw it and admired you and respected you. I don’t know if I would have had the self-control to handle myself as you did. The trickster boy you were as a child disappeared completely, swallowed up in the careful, careful young man who finally found his power and used it to run away and save his life.”

“How nice of you to admire me from such a distance,” said Danny. But his father’s words of praise filled him with light and brought tears to his eyes.

We human beings are such machines, thought Danny. All the emotions are available at the flip of a switch. Predictable as robots.

“Danny,” said Mama. “I get it that you hate us. I do understand it.”

But Danny didn’t hate them. He was angry with them, had been hurt by them, but no, he didn’t hate them. After everything, all he really wanted was his mother’s affection and his father’s approval. Now they were offering exactly what he wanted. Only these things had been so long withheld that Danny refused to trust the fulfillment of his longing.

“Whatever you want from me,” said Danny, “I don’t have it. Or if I do, it’s not for you, not anymore.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” said Mama.

“I told her not to expect anything better than this,” said Baba.

For a moment, hearing such finality in Baba’s voice, Danny believed that this whole meeting had been a trap. That, having failed to win him over, they would now unleash whatever assassination they had planned for him.

So he gated fifteen feet away.

Mother burst into tears.

“We aren’t going to betray you,” said Baba coldly. “How could we, even if we wanted to?”

“Let’s go, Alf,” said Mama.

“Yes,” said Baba. He led her away toward the family pickup—which looked even more beaten-up now, having spent a short time buried in a crevice in the earth.