for long shots and I had quick hands. Once upon a time, years before you were born,' she added with a grin.
Reluctantly and briefly, Jason let his fingers brush hers. She passed him the ball and moved down the court, taking up a position in front of her basket.
The rhythm of the ball smacking up against the boards started up again slowly, while he considered things, and then more rapidly when he began to move toward her. He was no longer trying to intimidate her, Ana was glad to see, and he no longer discounted her entirely as a human being. Not that he took her seriously yet, but he was determined to prove to himself that what she had done was a fluke.
It was not. The only difference this time was when Ana tried for a basket, the ball bounced off the backboard and flew into the stacked benches. She talked as she retrieved it.
'You're good, Jason; you don't need me to tell you that. But I don't think you've had much chance to play against very many top-rank players, and I doubt you've had any really good coaches. I was always a second-rate player, but I learned a lot from the good people around me, and I was lucky to have a coach who was a retired professional with a love for girls' basketball. We had four or five of our players go on to university scholarships—this at a time when there was no money at all for girls' sports, when girls did cheerleading or synchronized swimming or gymnastics, period. You want to know how not to get your ball stolen by a pair of quick hands? Come here.'
She took him through it in slow motion, so he could see precisely how he was leaving himself open, then she showed him how to pace himself, how to move the ball to the free hand just a shade earlier, so it would already be on the downward trajectory when his opponent was reaching out, and how to extend his elbow and shoulder as he swept the ball aside, blocking the other's outstretched fingers and giving the ball a boost of speed at a vital moment.
He was a fast learner, and after a dozen or so tries, Ana was only occasionally able to snatch the ball away from him. Four times in a row he dodged around her, and she could only brush her fingers across the rough surface, although once she would have had it, had her knee given her enough speed. It did not, and she did not, and she stood grinning and applauding as Jason scooted past her, stopped outside the key, and shot—missing the basket.
She wiped her forehead with the back of her arm and watched the boy move. She was drenched with sweat, her muscles were quivering, and her knee felt as if she were walking on a red-hot steel rod, but she was more than satisfied. Contact had been made. Not conversation, perhaps—Jason's only words to her had been monosyllabic answers to direct questions—but a beginning. To what, she did not know, nor did she wish to ask. She could only tell that the physical exertion with a boy she had no real excuse for approaching had been deeply satisfying, an antidote to the cerebral jousting she had done with Steven.
Ana gathered up her clothing and limped away. The thuds of the ball and the squeals of shoes on floor started up again as soon as she was out of the dining hall.
The following morning, she went to see Steven.
Ana rose early and walked out into the desert, a ritual that had already become a necessary part of her day, half an hour when the world was hers alone, when she did not need to watch herself, think of every word, consider each gesture. She walked and breathed and took joy in the early-morning life of the high desert, the skunks and wild pigs, the tiny pygmy owl returning to its home in a saguaro, and once a family of coatis flickering along the floor of a wash, tails high and long noses snuffling. Snakes were too lethargic to be a concern, scorpions were still asleep, and for some reason, few Change members ventured out of the compound.
This morning, however, one person was at large aside from those residents heading for a car or the milking sheds, a person dressed in shorts and a sweatshirt, running easily along the side of the road. She knew, without pausing to think, just who it was, knew even though she could not make out anything other than his dark hair in the dim light. Jason was on another morning run, trying to get rid of some of that energy that burned in him.
He ran fast, his head bent, and she watched him for a moment. Who would be the more embarrassed, she wondered wryly, if he were to find out that he had a forty-eight-year-old admirer? She shook her head and turned her back on him; she needed to concentrate on the coming interview.
Steven Change, she had decided, was a natural and unconscious manipulator rather than a deliberate one, more a distorting mirror than a calculating plotter. He was very quick to pick up hints and intimations, turn them around, and give them back in their reworked form to their owner, but Ana was not convinced that he considered what he was doing. As far as she could see, Steven believed in himself, was convinced that this showman's knack was the pure manifestation of his religious authority.
This made him more dangerous—a messiah convinced of his own divinity was always the least likely to listen to reason—but it also made him easier to get around for a person able to match his abilities, precisely because he would be unaware that for others the gift of prophetic speech could be a conscious and deliberate means of manipulation: a trick.
He was not by nature a cynical or suspicious man, but he was highly intelligent, which meant that Ana had to be extremely careful. As always in these situations, her biggest problem was concealing her knowledge. She might have left her personality behind, but she could not lose her brain, and Anne Waverly was, after all, a historian with a specialty in alternative religious movements, qualified to offer instant analyses of the roots and precedents of pretty much anything resembling a religion. Early Church heresies, doctrinal controversies, the influence of Islam, the contributions of Judaism, and the effects of the Reformation were all at her fingertips, and beyond Christianity, the modern influences of the East, from Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky to neo-Hinduism, the Reverend Moon, and the Heaven's Gate comet-seekers.
Ana Wakefield, though, did not know all this. Ana Wakefield's concept of religious inquiry was experiential and personal, not academic, and if she knew anything at all about Theosophy, it was because someone had once given her a book on Krishnamurti.
Ana Wakefield knew a little bit about a lot of religious traditions, but the only one she knew intimately was the Christianity of her fictional Midwest childhood, a revelational, New Testament Christianity supplemented by her own early rebellious excursions into the foreign territory of the Old Testament. In dealing with Steven Change, Ana could not know too much or come on too strong. She must somehow suggest to him an immense and untapped potential beneath her innocence. She must present herself as an undiscovered, unspoiled treasure ready and willing to respond to his teaching. Ana Wakefield: every teacher's dream student, a seed ripe and wanting only soil and water to burst into lush growth.
She walked for an hour, trying to think herself into the person she needed to be and finding it inexplicably difficult. She had done it before. Four times, in fact, had she presented herself behind a new mask. In North Dakota, twelve years ago, she had been a lone woman needing to be taken in hand by the protective men of the survivalist community Glen was interested in. Three years later she went to Miami to inquire happily about Satanism, trying hard to make her amusement at their antics look like the pleasure of enlightenment. Then on the heels of that case… Utah. In Utah she had never really been able to construct a plausible persona, because the social dynamics of that community had already begun to turn inward, and whatever she did, she could only be an outsider, forever a source of distrust. It had proved disastrous, fatal for five adults, two children, and nearly her.
In Kansas, though, with Martin Cranmer, she had slipped easily into the household, a potentially useful female damaged and made prickly by the ills of a corrupt society, wanting only the right man—Cranmer—and the right message to make her a good woman once more.
This time it ought to be easy. Here she was, a New Age seeker faced with an exciting community and hints of an intriguing religious experience. She fit here far better than any of the other four places she had entered. The face she was about to present to Steven Change was close enough to her own to be comfortable, nearly natural.
Yet she was distracted. A bare ten days ago she had come into the compound not really caring if she succeeded or not—half wanting, if the truth be told, to fail and prove Glen wrong. Then she had met Dulcie, and her brother, and for some reason as she walked, attempting to picture the face she needed to be, she saw theirs instead. It was disconcerting at first, then annoying. Finally she just threw up her hands and decided the problem must be that she really was too close to being Ana Wakefield, that it was futile to work at constructing something that already existed.
She went to find Steven in his office just inside the entrance to the building that held the kitchen and dining hall. Thomas Mallory was there, too. Ana had consigned Steven's second in command to the category of Professional Shadow, one of those attracted to leadership but incapable of it. It showed a great deal of sense on Steven's part not to have given Mallory a permanent Change center of his own, as his temporary leadership in Los
