“As do we,” he said. “We can’t underestimate this man René. He’s impressive.”

“You admire him.”

“I admire what he did in that ballroom, how he took the winning cards right out of our hands. It was an intel failure on our part. We should have known what the man values and does not value.”

“Maybe,” Candy said, “he valued it all. He just valued some things over others.”

She studied his face, but it was like studying a dinner plate. She thought of him in that alley behind the old Crimean cannery, how when the girl had approached, he’d managed to shape his features into something human, into something requiring neighborly aid. We could use a hand with the trunk. I think it got warped in the crash. Candy pictured the girl’s one-shouldered shrug. Jaggers’s clawlike hand slapped over her mouth, the slim silver pen jabbing at her neck. The wet thrashing against the closed trunk. She’d been beautiful, that girl, and it was a sin to destroy something beautiful.

It struck Candy now that Jaggers had killed her not because it was prudent as he’d claimed but because he resented her beauty. He envied it. And he admired René not for the chess move of killing his young friend but for the ruthlessness of the act. To destroy something you cannot be is to embrace your darkest heart, to yield to an ungodly desire. It is to be hijacked by what you aren’t rather than nourished by what you are.

Because what you are is nothing.

Van Sciver’s mantra played in her head: It is what it is, and that’s all that it is. She heard it differently this time, not as a hard-boiled directive but as a shout into the abyss. Maybe ultimately that’s all they were, her and M and Y, untethered souls, parentless and brotherless, stripped of their humanity, forever echoing in the chasm.

What had she seen in Orphan X’s eyes when she’d revealed her mutilated back? Remorse? Whatever it was, it was not what she’d expected. She’d devoted every waking minute to tracking him down, hellbent on staring him in the face. Whatever she’d been hoping for, it certainly hadn’t been the glimmer of empathy she’d spied in his eyes. She hated him all the more for it. Didn’t she?

Or had she seen in X a reflection of what she herself had felt since her flesh had been defaced? The weakness of human emotion.

Orphan M had said something.

Candy blinked. “What?”

He glanced at his watch. “I said it’s time to make contact.”

Clearing her throat, she went into the bathroom, where she removed a contact-lens case from her toiletries bag. Leaning close to the mirror, she fingertipped a lens onto her right eyeball.