“Are you and Kimberly divorced?” I asked.

Aubrey blushed and looked down at his feet. Ex’s jaw actually dropped. I’d always thought that was just a figure of speech. Apparently he hadn’t known.

“Aubrey?” I said.

“We’re separated,” he said.

“Not divorced,” I said.

“No.”

“So then still married.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t tell me,” I said.

“No,” Aubrey said. “I should have.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’ve talked.”

I brushed past Ex and into the kitchen. It was probably only my own embarrassment and humiliation that made me read Ex’s expression as delight. When he and Aubrey followed me in a moment later, they were both perfectly sober. Midian was sitting at the kitchen table, the telephone handset to his ear.

“Jake,” he said, pointing at it. “He put me on hold. It’s okay, though. You two were loud enough back there I followed everything.”

“Good,” I said. “It’s Friday morning, almost ten o’clock. This time tomorrow, Randolph Coin’s going to be dead. Let’s try to focus on that, okay?”

“Fine by me,” Midian said, and then, into the handset, “Yeah. She’s back. Everything’s fine, or, well…fuck it, it’s close enough. Get your ass back to the ranch here, and we’ll finish up. Yeah, what?”

He paused, frowned, and shook his head.

“No. If they don’t have yellow onions, I’ll think of something else. Just bring me the rest of it,” he said, and then put the handset back in its cradle. “Since he was out anyway, I asked him to pick up some stuff. Didn’t figure we’d be going out for dinner.”

“Yeah, probably not,” I said. “Let’s go over the plan again.”

No one suggested anything else. I took out the maps and schematics, and Ex walked through the whole thing again, quizzing the three of us. Aubrey answered his questions in a clipped, hard voice and sat with his arms crossed. When Chogyi Jake appeared with a bag of groceries, Ex made him go through the whole thing by himself while Midian made ham sandwiches with fresh tomatoes and hot mustard for lunch. My brain was a storm of anger, betrayal, and humiliation, but I forced myself to follow the details of the plan. Midian and Chogyi Jake at the southeast edge of the property. Ex in his car to the north, me in among the railroad tracks to the west, and Aubrey in his minivan to the south. Three different angles, so that no matter where Coin stood, at least one of us would have a clear shot. When Chogyi Jake and Midian had drawn Coin out past his protections, Midian would give the signal by raising both hands. If for any reason he couldn’t do that, Chogyi Jake would drop to the ground. The plan to go out and look at the place physically seemed to have fallen by the wayside in the day’s drama. I didn’t bring it up.

The air between me and Aubrey should have bent with the tension, but Chogyi Jake either didn’t notice anything or, more likely, dedicated himself to ignoring it. Anything that Ex felt was covered by his drill sergeant attitude.

I felt my mind starting to get fuzzy at about one o’clock. I’d been up since eight in the morning the day before, too excited by the twin prospects of going shooting and my ill-fated date to sleep in. That put me at about twenty-nine hours awake.

“I’m going to crash for a while,” I said. “Knock if something happens.”

The silence that accompanied me out of the kitchen told me that the house would have to be on fire before anyone disturbed me. That suited me just fine.

I stripped and crawled into bed, one pillow under my head, one over it to block out light and sound. My muscles seemed to vibrate with fatigue. This time tomorrow, it’ll all be over, I told myself. I’ll be safe and rich and God as my witness, I’ll be straight the fuck out of this city. I could go back to ASU. Paying tuition out of pocket would be easy. I could get my degree. I could transfer to some other university. Hell, I could probably buy my way into the Ivy League with a few weighty donations here and there.

It was a strange thought. In a way, everything was ending tomorrow. The shot that took out Coin and broke the Invisible College also freed me. No more tattooed ninja hit squads breaking down my doors. No more need for bodyguards like Ex and Chogyi Jake. Or Aubrey.

I imagined myself going back. Driving up to the dorms in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, maybe. I pictured Cary’s reaction, seeing me rising like a phoenix from the ashes and salted earth I’d left behind me. I slid from that to going home, paying off the mortgage on my parents’ house, buying my mother a car, telling my father that I wouldn’t go to church on Sunday if I didn’t want to, and watching him realize that his power over me was gone. Even his power to drive me away. Somewhere in it, I had become the primary funding behind the hospital in Chicago, dressed in a good Armani suit with Nicole Kidman-esque Kimberly asking my permission to go ahead with her work. I didn’t notice the shift between daydream and dream until I found myself in the nightmare of wings and Coin’s massive eye and woke with a shout.

The door thumped, someone throwing a shoulder against it. Someone was calling my name. Ex, I thought, the last shreds of dream fading. Ex was screaming my name. But at least he was pronouncing it right.

“I’m okay!” I shouted back. “Leave the door alone. I’m fine.”

“What the fuck is going on in there?”

“Bad dream,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ll be out in a minute. Just calm down.”

I’d been asleep almost four hours. I hauled myself up out of bed, vague and hungover. My skin felt sticky with rank sweat. My period had started a week early. I needed a shower.

“You’re all right?” Ex’s voice sounded like he was expecting me to lie. “Was it Coin again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I said, the details of the dream already out of reach. “I’m fine. I’m just still waking up. I’ll be out.”

Ex’s silence seemed untrusting, but I ignored it and pulled myself into the bathroom. If he broke the door down to rescue me from a bad dream, I’d throw him out of my house. I was deeply weary of dealing with male bullshit. I felt tired and sluggish. Happily, I had my old leather backpack in the bedroom with me. Going out to hunt for tampons wasn’t something I particularly wanted to deal with at the moment.

The water helped. I washed my hair three times just for the pleasure of feeling the warmth running down my back. I prodded the wound in my side. It itched and felt odd when I tugged at the stitches, but it didn’t particularly hurt. The bruises on my knee and back were also starting to heal, going from storm-cloud blue to a deep green with yellow and brown at the margins. I got a glimpse of the tattoo, a remnant of my sixteenth birthday’s drunken binge, on the small of my back. In the mirror, it looked like oriental script, though I’d been assured by several people back at ASU that it wasn’t. I felt a sudden nostalgia for the days when keeping my parents from knowing I had a tattoo was the biggest risk I had to deal with.

I put on my own T-shirt, my old jeans, and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. I considered myself in the mirror, then without thinking, my hand reached out for the eyeliner. I didn’t give a damn what any of them thought, but looking decent made me feel better. When I came down the hall, the smell of steak, wine, and grilled onions greeted me like a friend. The windows were ruddy with the warm light of sunset. I had a momentary image, the memory of a dream I’d almost forgotten. A black disk like a sun that radiated like light, but different.

“Jayné.”

Ex was sitting alone on the couch. His blond hair was unbound and flowing over his shoulders. His expression was grim.

“Ex,” I said, folding my arms.

“I need you to make peace with Aubrey,” he said softly.

“I really don’t see how that’s any of your business,” I said.

He held up a hand, and his expression made it a request for silence instead of a command. I nodded my permission for him to go on. He stood up, his hands clasped in front of him in a way that made me think of prayer. He was taller than I was under normal circumstances, and I hadn’t put on shoes. I felt like a kid at the principal’s office.