“I must have been a little crazy,” she says. “To think I could actually kill her.”

“Not so crazy,” says Roz. “To want to kill her, anyway. She does that to people. You were lucky to get out of there with both eyes, is what I think:”

Yes, thinks Tony, checking”herself over. No obvious parts missing.

“Is the gun still in your purse?” Charis asks anxiously. She wouldn’t want such a dangerous object colliding with her aura. “No,” says Tony. “I went home after that, I put it back:”

“Good plan,” says Roz. “Now you go, Charis. I’ll be last.” Charis hesitates. “I don’t know whether I should tell all of it,” she says.

“Why not?” says Roz. “Tony did. I’m going to. Come on, we have no secrets!”

“Well,” says Charis, “there’s something in it you won’t like.”

“Heck, I probably won’t like any of it,” says Roz jovially. Her voice is a little too loud. Charis is reminded of the earlier Roz, the one who used to draw lipstick faces on her stomach and do the bump-and-grind, in the Common Room at McClung Hall. Maybe Roz is getting overexcited.

“It’s about Larry,” says Charis unhappily.

Roz sobers up immediately. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she says. “I’m a big girl.”

“Nobody is,” says Charis. “Not really.” She takes a deep breath.

After Zenia turned up at the Toxique that day, Charis spent about a week wondering what she should do. Or rather she knew what she should do, but she didn’t know how to go about doing it. Also she needed to fortify herself spiritually, because an’ encounter with Zenia would be no casual thing.

What she foresaw was the two of them locked in a stand-off: Zenia would be shooting out blood-red sparks of energy; her black hair would be crackling like burning fat, her eyeballs would be cerise, lit up from within like a cat’s in headlights. Charis on the other hand would be cool, upright, surrounded by a gentle glow. Around her would be drawn a circle of white chalk, to keep the evil vibrations at bay. She would raise her arms upwards, invoking the sky, and out of her would come a voice like tinkling bells: What have you done with Billy?

And Zenia, writhing and twisting and resisting, but mastered by the superiority of Charis’s positive force-field, would be compelled to tell.

Charis was not yet strong enough for this trial of strength. All by herself she might never be. She would have to borrow some weapons from her friends. No, not weapons; merely armour, because she did not see herself attacking. She didn’t want to hurt Zenia, did she? She just wanted Zenia to return stolen property: Charis’s life, the part with Billy in it. She wanted what was rightfully hers. That was all.

She went through some of the cardboard boxes in the small room upstairs, once a storeroom, then Zenia’s room, then August’s nursery and playroom, now a spare room, for guests if any. It was still August’s room really; that was where she stayed on weekend visits. In the boxes were a bunch of things Charis never used and had been meaning to recycle. She found a Christmas present from Roz—a horrifying pair of gloves, leather ones with real fur cuffs, dead animal skin, she could never wear those. From Tony she found a book, a book written by Tony herself. Four Lost Causes. It was all about war and killing, septic topics, and Charis has never been able to get into it.

She took the book and the gloves downstairs and put them on the small table under the main window in the living room—where the sunlight would shine in on them and dispel their shadow sides—and set her amethyst geode beside them, and surrounded them with dried marigold petals. To this arrangement she added, after some thought, her grandmother’s Bible, always a potent object, and a lump of earth from her garden. She meditated on this collection for twenty minutes twice a day.

What she wanted was to absorb the positive aspects of her friends, the things that were missing in herself. From Tony she wanted her mental clarity, from Roz her high-decibel metabolism and her planning abilities. And her smart mouth, because then if

Zenia started insulting Charis she would be able to think up something really neutralizing to say back. From the garden earth she wanted underground power. From the Bible, what? Her grandmother’s presence alone would do; her hands, her blue healing light. The marigold petals and the amethyst geode were to contain these various energies, and to channel them. What she had in mind was something concentrated, like a laser beam.

At work, Shanita notices that Charis is more absent-minded than usual. “Something bothering you?” she says.

“Well, sort of,” says Charis. “You want to do the cards?”

They are busy designing the interior for the new store. Or rather Shanita is designing it, and Charis is admiring the results. In the window there will be a large banner made of brown paper with the store name done on it in crayon, “like kids’ writing,” says Shanita: Scrimpers. At either end of the banner will be an enormous bow, also of brown paper, with packing-twine streamers coming out of it. “The idea is, everything needs to look totally basic,” says Shanita. “Sort of homemade. You know, affordable.” She’s going to sell the hand-rubbed maple display cabinets and have different ones made out of raw boards, with the nails showing. The orange-crate look, she calls it. “We can keep some of the rocks and herbal goop, but we’ll put that stuff at the back, not in the window. Luxury is not our middle name:” Shanita is busy ordering fresh stock items: little kits for making seedling-transplanting pots out of recycled newspaper, other kits for pasting together your own Christmas cards out of cut-up magazines, and yet other card kits involving pressed flowers and shrink wrap that you do with a hair dryer. Kitchenwaste composters with organic wooden lids are an item; also, needlepoint kits for cushion covers, with eighteenth-century flowers on them, a fortune if you buy them already made. Also coffee grinders that work by hand, beautiful wooden ones with a drawer for the ground coffee. Minor electrical kitchen items, says Shanita, are no longer the rage. Elbow grease is back. “What we need is stuff that makes stuff you’d otherwise have to pay a lot more for,” says Shanita. “Saving, is our theme. God, I know this junk backwards, been doing it all my life. Thing is, nobody ever told me what you can make out of a million rubber bands.”

She’s decided to change their outfits, too: instead of the flowered pastels they’ll be wearing canvas carpenter’s aprons, in beige, and square caps made of folded brown paper. A pencil stuck behind the ear will complete the look. “Like we mean business,” says Shanita.

Despite the admiration she’s giving out, because all creativity should be supported and this is certainly creative, Charis isn’t sure she’ll fit in. It will be a tight squeeze, but she’ll have to give it a try, because what other jobs are out there, especially for her? She might not even be able to get a job filing; not that she wants one, she doesn’t consider the alphabet to be an accurate way of classifying things. If she stays she’ll have to be more forceful. though; she’ll have to seize hold. Get a grip. Actively sell. Shanita says that service and competitive pricing are the watchwords of the future. That, and keeping down the overheads. At least they don’t have debt. “Thank God I never borrowed a lot,” she says. “Banks wouldn’t lend it to me, is why.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” says Charis.

Shanita tosses her hair—worn hanging down today in a single long shining curl—and gives her a scornful glance. “Three guesses,” she says.

They take a work break in the afternoon and Shanita makes them some Lemon Refresher from their stockroom and lays out the cards for Charis. “Big event, coming up soon,” she says. “What I see is—your card is the Queen of Cups, right? It’s the High Priestess crossing you. Does this mean a thing?”