The Chosen

cranked on some heat. A few minutes later, the secluded little bungalow burst quietly into flames, flooding the grove with wavering orange light and heat. Lemi jogged back out and climbed in. “Let’s googie, Zy.”

“Boogie, Lemi. Let’s boogie—”

“Googie, boogie, I don’t give a shit. Let’s go home.”

Zyra wheeled the van down the long gravel drive. The flaming house shrank in the rearview, crackling.

Yeah, let’s go home. The main road took them toward the mountainside, into darkness, while the darkness took Zyra’s thoughts away into a silent, inexplicable joy. Every end is a new beginning, she pondered. It made her feel ageless.

“You know,” Lemi remarked, “I really like your hair that way. Glazed.”

“Not glazed, you idiot. Frosted. ” All she could do was shake her head and smile. It was hard to believe that men, however uniformly stupid, ruled the world.

“I can’t wait till things get started again,” he said, and relaxed back in the van seat.

Neither can I. The gagged girl in back shrieked in her throat. Zyra paid it no mind. It was a sound, among many others, that she’d long grown accustomed to. As she drove on, she got lost in more personal wonderings. It was a beautiful night. Crisp. Clear as crystal. The stars looked like a smear of luminous, cosmic spillage. There was beauty everywhere, if one looked closely enough…

Every end is a new beginning.

Indeed, this was their lot. They were always ending, and always beginning again.

The moon disappeared beyond the ridge when she turned up the narrow mountain road, toward home.

— | — | —

_{THE OFFER}

^{CHAPTER ONE}

The kitchen was a madhouse.

Busboys fought with waitresses over racks of hot silverware. The hostess double-timed, coming in for water glasses and bottles of Evian, while full garbage cans were quickly dragged away and replaced with empty ones. “Get me some clean broil pans sometime this year!” one prep cook yelled. “Eat me!” the beer-bellied dishwasher yelled back. Cute waitresses bustled in and out, lost in the deep concentration of wine-list memory, the specials of the day, and the perpetual balancing act of carrying six entrees on one tray one-handed. “These salads have been up for five minutes!” the cold-line cook yelled. “Get ’em out of here before I start throwing them!” More preps shucked oysters, made hollandaise from scratch, and butchered lettuce heads to bits simultaneously. The swingdoors banged open and closed with equal simultaneousness, flushing the kitchen’s hot confines with periodic wafts of cool, reviving air.

It’s a madhouse, all right, Vera Abbot thought. She stood at the end of the hot line in a three hundred dollar vermilion evening dress. But it’s my madhouse.

In a sense it was. The Emerald Room was the best restaurant in town, and Vera Abbot was its queen. A year ago they were lucky to do twenty dinners on a weeknight, now they were doing a hundred plus. It was more than good fortune—Vera had used her foresight, her management skills, and good hiring sense to turn the place inside out. She’d also worked her ass off. The kitchen was like a multipart machine where the failure of one component would shut down the entire works. It was Vera who kept the machine properly tuned. If you wanted the best restaurant in town, you had to find the best people, bring in the best food, and offer the best facility. Vera had done