“Uh-huh. This person’s about nineteen, a tallish good-looking redhead?”

Lola stared at him, dumbfounded. “Yes. How did you know?”

“Her name’s Jennifer Simpson and the cops are looking for her. She was snatched off the street a couple of nights ago by a Colombian gang. I need to call Tito on this.”

“My God! Are you sure it’s the right girl?”

“Unless there’s another redheaded teenaged epileptic who’s recently been tied hand and foot wandering around Miami. The other thing is…well, the bad guys are going to be looking for her.”

“But nobody but us knows she’s here.”

“Not at this second, but they’ll think of hospitals right away and put some money on the street. Hospitals are full of low-wage Latinos. It won’t take long. Let’s take a peek at Jennifer now-maybe she’ll talk if we show her we know who she is.”

They went down the hall to one of the small rooms where they kept ER patients, with Amelia trailing behind them, temporarily unregarded.

The girl was in bed with the covers pulled up high and her red-gold hair spread wide on the pillow, like a dead girl in a Victorian painting. Lola stood over her and said, “Jennifer? Is that your name? Jennifer Simpson?”

Jenny opened her eyes. She saw a pale blond woman in a white lab coat over green scrubs, and a dark man. They were looking at her with concern, and saying a name, which was strange at first, just nonsense syllables, and then the sounds popped the little switches in her empty mind and she knew it was her own. Memories returned, first trickling in, then a flood as she reoccupied herself,all the memories, including the recent ones from the garage. Another face appeared, lower down in her field of view, a little girl, dark-haired, with skin colored a tone just halfway between those of the two adults. These people were covered in sparkly lights like sequins. Waves of color burst from their heads and fell with slow grace to the floor, and the cool waves rolled down from the region of her heart to her groin, really quite delicious this time, and she was gone from there.

When she could see again she found herself not in the hospital room but in a gray place with no horizon lit by a cool light that seemed to come from nowhere at all. The only real color came from the bright-feathered cape and headdress worn by her companion, who was Moie. For some reason none of this surprised her.

“Hey, Moie,” she said. “What’s up?”

He answered in a language she did not know, yet the meaning of his words was perfectly clear to her. “Jaguar has taken you to the other side of the moon,” he said, “where the dead have their being. I mean the real dead, not thewai’ichuranan. This is a great thing, because I don’t think that he has ever let one of you here. I think it’s possible because you have theunquayuvmaikat, the falling gift. It’s how the god reaches you, even though you have no training at all.”

Jenny accepted this as reasonable and wondered for a moment why she had never thought of it before.

“He breathed in my face.”

“Yes. This is another thing that has never been done to one of you. I have no idea of what it means.”

“Me neither. Maybe I’ll be able to turn into a jaguar, too.”

“Possibly, but, you know, it’s not a turning into. It’s hard to explain. You know how animals mark their territory?”

“Like dogs peeing on trees?”

“Yes, and in other ways. So, those who serve Jaguar are his marks in this world. He can smell them as he passes through theajampik, the spirit world, and then he makes a door through and changes places with thejampiri, me. Then I am here until he calls me back again.”

“Is he going to do that with me now?”

“All things are possible, but it usually takes a lot of training and practice to walk through the worlds, and you have none. I am the last of my people who can do this, and it would be very strange if you could also do it. If we had many hands of seasons, perhaps I could teach you, but we don’t. My time in the land of the dead is nearly over.”

“Are you going home?”

“I don’t think so. Being with so many dead people is harder than I thought it would be. Father Tim was right-you are as many as the leaves on the trees. If one dies, another takes his place. And I feel myaryu’t draining out, like water from a gourd with the small crack in it. It’s hard to remain a human being without real people around me.”

“You could go home. I bet Cooksey could get you back. You wouldn’t have to paddle your canoe either.”

“I know this. And it would make me happy to go home, as Cooksey has told me, in the flying canoe of thewai’ichuranan. But now I am part, and Jaguar is part of a…a part of a…thing. I could say the word, but even if you knew what it meant, you wouldn’t know, because there is no place to hold it in the minds of the dead people. It is like a place where many, many paths come together, and the choice made there determines what roads we travel and everything that will or won’t happen to us after we take that road. And also for some reason Jaguar wishes to take this girl-that’s part of the…thing.Only this one girl. When I first saw you, I thought that you were the one that was necessary, but it’s not so. Then I thought perhaps because she is the grandchild of the man that Jaguar took, Calderón, but that’s not it, either. I’ve served Jaguar all my life, or nearly all, and I still have no understanding of his ways. Why should I? He’s a god and I’m not. I don’t care about that-this is the life I was chosen for. But I’m curious about what he wants with you.”

“Me, too,” said Jenny, who was not particularly curious. Perhaps that was why Jaguar had chosen her. She had often noticed that most of the people she met had some kind of motor in them or a compass-they knew where they were going or what they wanted, but she thought that she had never had anything like that in her, or not a very strong one, whatever it was. From her first memories she had been an inert being, ready to go along with whatever was happening, learning how to vanish as an individual that anyone else was obliged to consider. She had gone along with the various weirdness or blandness of her foster homes, had been docile at school, had agreed cheerfully with whatever the other kids wanted to do, had participated in sex when it was time for that to happen, had picked up the environmental radical business from Kevin and the science business from Cooksey, although she considered this last to be a little different, because it was a lot closer to having something real, a real talent or desire within her void. Now there was another thing inside her, not at present making any demands, butthere; and it had something to do with her disease, if it was a disease at all. Moie certainly didn’t think so.

She found he was looking at her with interest, as if at a newly discovered plant. He rarely smiled but now he did, as at a silly joke. She observed for the first time that his incisors had been filed to sharp points. She wondered what was so funny and was about to ask him when bright light flooded the dim scene and she found she was in the hospital room again.

That doctor, the blond one, was filling her field of vision and she had a finger on Jenny’s eye, as if she had been about to pry an eyelid open. Jenny twisted her face away from the annoyance.

“You’re back with us,” said the doctor. “Do you know where you are?”

“A hospital.”

“Right. South Miami Hospital. Do you know your name?”

“Sure. Jenny Simpson. I had a seizure, right?”

“More than one,” Lola Wise said, and asked a number of other questions pertaining to her condition, after which Jenny asked, “Can I go home now?”

“That’s not a good idea, Jenny. You could seize again. We’d like to keep you under observation for a while, see what drugs work best for you and-”

“I don’t want any drugs. Dilantin makes me sick.”