“I offered him a conduit, a moment’s escape from the Uau. Imagine a paper bag over your head and a single pinprick of light—that’s about as much as I can do to penetrate the spectrum. His mind belonged to the UausuaU; it was his price, you see, for the ecstasy, the knowing. I tried to steal that knowledge, appeal to his forgotten humanity.”

“What are you saying?” She couldn’t take her eyes off the bloodstain. “That some random elzi you clubbed and dragged into your torture chamber knows where this fucking girl is?”

“He knows what Uau know—and he knew where the girl was. That means the feasters know where she is, or have a good idea.”

“Well shit, that doesn’t help. I don’t know where to look even!”

“Yes, you do,” he said. He too was staring at the blood now. She looked at him and then back at the blood and then the skin on the back of her neck began to crawl. There was a sensation in the room, a feeling like she had had with ElilE when the day had gone suddenly to night.

“I…may…have gone too far this time,” Friar said. He hefted himself onto the operating table, right onto the pile of gore. It soaked into his pants, red stains climbing up the fabric. He unlocked the foot shackles, removing the scraps of flesh and fastening them around his own ankles.

“What are you doing?”

“I…have been…naughty.”

He tightened the shackles around his legs and then started on his arms; his neck bulged strangely. She saw under his earlobe where a player would be was another tiny satellite device identical to the first, its legs jammed into his skin. A spasm crossed his face and a sound like a hyena laugh squirted from his mouth. He tightened the shackles on his arms, and before she could even process what he was doing, he flicked the key down into the hole.

“No!” she screamed.

“Yes,” he said, calmly, and then there was another hyena laugh that set her skin crawling. “I’m afraid it is quite ne-necessary now. Please…if you have kindness in you, the syringe with the red label…please.”

She stood still. The spasms happened more quickly now, more hyena laughs; he was shuddering and then he looked at her and she felt again the feeling of the day going to night and a fear radiating from him like a wave. It forced her back and then she ran to the worktable and scrambled to find the syringe. There it was, in a special holster of its own, packed and ready. For a second she marveled at how neatly it had been placed, how ready amidst the clutter, how he had prepared for this inevitability while working through his experiments. She ran back to the table.

“The girl…” he said. The twisted smile was lasting longer on his face; his arms and legs were straining against the chains. She saw that if he was free he would hurt her now, hurt many people. “Look for the girl…in the fish.” His hand grabbed at her, stopped by the chains; she stabbed the syringe into his chest and pounded down the plunger, and then scrambled to the stairs. She stayed just long enough to make sure he was still, and then she flew up the stairs and out of the house.