hallucinations a person experiences under enforced, long-term sensory deprivation. Probably not the child's own experience, since the drawing was of a man with a beard, but possibly that of a father or friend who talked about it in the child's hearing, and frightened him. I think… I believe that Steven shut Jason into the alembic that's in the basement under the meditation hall, and I think there's a good possibility that the Japanese boy died in one just like it.'
'Hell. Have you seen this thing?'
'Last night.'
'Where did you say it was?'
'In a locked room underneath the meditation hall. You enter it by a door off the highest meditation platform.'
'Damn it, Anne, what were you doing there?'
'I wanted to see if Steven had some kind of alchemical laboratory in the basement. That's what I found, a complete alchemical workshop out of the Middle Ages. Plus a box of paraffin wax. There's also a computer in there with a modem, in case any of your pet hackers want to play with it.'
'You didn't open it up?'
'I didn't touch it.'
'No sign of anything else in that lab?'
'No dismembered clocks or clippings of wire, no nice, labeled bins of Semtex, or even fuel oil and ammonium nitrate. Those two harmless ingredients when combined had proved spectacularly deadly. No heaps of pretty little balloons or scatterings of mysterious white powder, no distinctive smells other than sulphur, and the lab equipment I saw couldn't possibly have been used to process any drug I know. Sorry—no bombs or drugs that I could see.'
Glen stood up and looked out over the rocky valley for a minute, thinking. Four days ago Ana had struck him as being far more healthy-looking than he had expected to find her, and he had been unable to get that unnatural cheerfulness out of his mind. It had not been like her, and this sudden venture into derring-do was not like her either. Besides which, the vulnerability and emotional involvement sounded more like Anne than Ana; it was all very worrying.
'I don't like the sound of any of this, Anne,' he said abruptly. 'I'm pulling you out,'
'My name is Ana, and it's gone too far for that, Glen,' she said flatly. 'The only way you can keep me from going back to Change is if you get out your handcuffs,' She looked at him, and Rayne was amazed to see on her boss's face a thing that on anyone else's she would have called a blush. She dismissed the unlikely thought immediately.
Ana turned back to the landscape while Glen thought about this unexpected shift in authority. When he spoke again, it was in a voice gone dead with the realities of his profession. 'Did you see any evidence that the boy Jason was locked into the thing against his will?'
'No,'
'Would he or anyone you can think of be willing to testify?'
'No,' said Ana. 'No,' God, she felt like moaning aloud at the thought of that beautiful, strong boy stuffed into a dark, smooth space with the door shut behind him, and here was Glen thinking about warrants and rules of evidence. She dropped her face into her hands and scrubbed at her skin, which felt thick and insensate. 'Jesus, you're a cold son of a bitch. No, there's no justification for a raid. You could argue that Jason is too young legally to have given his permission, but I'm sure you'd find he would refuse to testify. Nothing's changed, except a boy in Japan is dead. I'll go back to watching and listening, and if I need anything, I'll develop problems with the tooth and make another appointment with the dentist,' She felt so tired, and old, and sick. 'Go away, Glen. Christ, go away before I throw up on your foot,'
She tugged his coat away from her and held it out without raising her head. It was taken from her, and a hand rested briefly on her shoulder—Glen's hand or Rayne's, she could not tell—and then she was alone at the side of this sharp-edged concrete-and-glass building set down among the round red hills of Sedona. She leaned up against the side of the building, and in the darkness behind her eyelids she saw the dining hall mural, which held it all: The progress from the prime matter of the desert on the left to fully actualized human on the right, and in the middle, looking like an elongated version of a Native American bread oven, the power nexus, the instrument of the proclaimed transformation, an alembic. What she had taken for a symbolic journey was physical and literal, an actual vessel in which sensitive human beings were subjected to the pressure of their own undiluted minds.
Still, now she finally knew the shape of this community, the essence of belief that lay at its core. Knowing, she could watch over the two children; at least she could do that.
Ana opened her eyes, got to her feet, and trudged down the hill toward Rocinante.
Request for Child Emergency Assessment, signed May 14, 199-
It was difficult to return to Change. It was difficult that night, when she dozed off over the wheel and nearly overturned into a stand of cow-tongue cactus, but it was worse the next morning, when she had to force herself to walk to the dining hall, to eat breakfast, and to speak in her normal manner to Suellen and Dominique across the table from her. To her relief, Steven did not happen to cross her path, because she was not certain that she could conceal the violent agitation of her feelings about him that had been set off by the death in Yokohama—or by the image of Steven in meditation while below him Jason sweated and confronted his inner demons in the prison of the dark alembic.
Was it child abuse? Yes—but. But there was no sign of physical injury on the boy. And manipulation of belief is monstrously hard to prove compared with overt aggression or abuse. And even fourteen-year-olds have freedom of religion in this country. And despite any apprehension he might have felt when the two men came for him, Jason came out of the experience a willing participant.
Yes, but. Even at the moment when the truth of the alembic's purpose first struck her, she had known that a prosecution based on that alone would be futile and short-lived. Certainly if she informed the local Child Protective Services of what was happening with one of their charges, it would set Change on its ear, and might even lead to the end of the fostering program, but was the responsibility for that a price she wanted to pay? She loathed the idea of doing nothing, but she knew without question that if she were to stay on with this investigation, she had to accept that Steven had the right, not to lock Jason into the alembic, but to ask Jason to submit to it.
Still, she needed a day, or perhaps a bit more, to assume this attitude. She could sense Anne Waverly stirring in the back of her mind, wanting to step in, sweep aside Ana Wakefield's natural diffidence, and set things right. That would be disastrous, and she remained grateful as the day wore on and she did not meet Steven. She didn't even want to see Jason or Dulcie until her fury had a chance to subside.
Steven believed, she told herself time and again; therein lay the difference. She reminded herself of that until she nearly believed it, and thought that she might look at Steven again with equanimity.
She got through her teaching day, distracted but functioning, but as soon as school was out she fled for the solitude of the desert. This time she took a bottle of water and a wide-brimmed hat, and she sat among the rocks, listening to the wind blow.
Late in the afternoon, another human being entered the landscape in the form of a desert rat whom Ana had seen two or three times before, once close enough to exchange a brief greeting. He was a prospector of some sort, she supposed, since he carried with him a small rock pick and a canvas sack. Perhaps he was gathering arrowheads or small petroglyphs to sell to tourists and collectors. He looked, however, like any of the other desert creatures she had seen—dull, dusty, leathery, and intent on his own business—and seeing him working his way along the hillside a mile off was like watching any other wild creature going about its business, unaware of being observed.
It was restful, leaning up against some rocks in the shade of an ironwood tree and following the man's mysterious progress, his bendings and straightenings and the occasional long period when he stood, bent over something he had found, before either placing it in his sack or tossing it over his shoulder.
She could feel the tension ease from her body, the clamor in her head go quiet. She may even have slept briefly, or retreated into that inner place where there is no time, because she came out of her reverie to realize that the shadows across the dry wash were immensely long and the prospector was no longer there.
She stretched luxuriously and took a long drink of warm water, and then tentatively, as if touching a finger to
