They approached Pau Seco a little after dawn. Keller saw the plume of dust on the horizon feathering toward the south. “Pau Seco?” he said, and Ng nodded. Within an hour they had reached the outskirts of the old town, the endemic poverty of Brazil but on a grander scale. Shacks rolled up and down these bread-loaf hills, all nearly identical, random configurations of corrugated tin, tarpaper, cardboard. Keller gazed at the emaciated men gathered by the road, who returned his gaze without curiosity as the big rig rumbled past.

“Formigas,” Ng said. “Unlicensed miners. Most of them are not even that, actually. They come in the hope that they’ll be hired into the mine. The garimpeiros are the men who own the land. They hire the formigas to do their work for them. For wages, or more likely a share of the income. If there is ever any income. But there are more of these people than there is work for them. Most of them spend their days in the laborers’ compound hoping someone else dies. It’s the best way to get work.”

And then they topped a rise and Keller saw the mine itself.

Pau Seco, he thought. The ugly center of the world.

Ng pulled the truck into the bay back of a cinderblock building and climbed out, dusting his shorts with his small hands. He led Keller to the crest of a hill and gestured almost proudly at the pit of the mine. “Hell,” he said.

It might have been hell. It was an open canyon of red mud and white clay so immense that the trees on the far rim were gray with distance. Keller did a professional pan, sweeping the mine east to west so that this vista could be reclaimed from his AV memory. There was so awesomely much of it.

“This was a plain once,” Ng said. “A plain covered with jungle. Then the garimpeiros came, and the foreigners, and the government to take their twenty-five percent. When they burned off the trees, the ashes fell for miles around.”

It was a vista from another century, formigas creeping up the inclines like the ants they were named for, deafening with the clangor of hand tools and human voices. This was how the Aztecs must have mined their gold, Keller thought, and he felt a moment of giddy vertigo: an abyss here, too, of time.

Ng occupied a shack in the old town of Pau Seco with a view commanding the mine and the sprawl of the workers’ compound. After nightfall the old town came alive. The town of Pau Seco, Ng explained, was a concentration of whorehouses, banks, and bars. Every day one or two of these thousands of garimpeiros would come into money; the town existed to extract it from them. Periodically there was the sound of gunfire.

Keller sat out on the wooden vestibule of the shack, drinking cautiously from a bottle of white cachaca and listening as Ng explained the trouble they were in.

His English was easy, flat, American in inflection. “I don’t know Cruz Wexler.” He shrugged. “Cruz Wexler means nothing to me. Two months ago I was approached by a man, he said he was a surveyor working for SUDAM. A Brazilian. He had SUDAM credentials, he had a nice suit. He said there was a buyer interested in acquiring a deep-core stone and was it possible I could set this up?” He stretched out across the three risers that connected his wooden shack to the mud, plucked at a hole in his T-shirt. “Well, it isn’t easy. Security is very tight. They named a figure, the figure was attractive, I said I would do what I could.”

“It’s arranged?” Byron asked hopefully.

“You should have the stone tomorrow. The thing is best done quickly. But you have to understand… you came here as couriers, right?”

Byron said, “We take the stone, we carry it out of the country…”

“Nobody told you it might be dangerous?”

“We have documents—”

“Paper.” Ng shrugged. “If it was that easy, any forao with brains would be walking out of here wealthy.” He grinned. “There’s not much smuggling because the military is in charge. Mostly, you can do what you want in the old town. But the military is there, and they carry guns and they use them. The official penalty for the crime we’re discussing is death. What it means is summary execution. A trial would be”—and the smile widened—“very unusual.”

“Son of a bitch,” Byron said. “It’s a walk, he says, it’s a fucking vacation^. It’s a walk through the fucking cemetery is what it is!”

Teresa said quietly, “It’s all right.”

“He fucked us over!”

“Byron, please—”

“Goddamn,” Byron said. But he sat down. She turned to Ng. “If it’s so dangerous, why did you agree to get involved?”

Ng sat back, hugging his knees. “I’m easily bored,” he said.

2. Oh, but I can feel it now, Teresa thought.

In the midst of this brutality it was so close. She felt it like a pain inside her, like the poignancy of old loss, a kind of melancholy.

She lay in the darkness of Ng’s small shack, curled on a reed mat at the heart of the world.

Melancholy, she thought, but also—she could begin to admit it—frightening. She was not as naive as Byron seemed sometimes to think, but the mine had taken her by surprise … the brutality, the squalor of it, the lives that were lost here. It was not meant to be this way, she thought.

She sat up in the darkness. Through the paneless window she could see Pau Seco sprawling at the foot of this moonlit hill. Oil-can fires burned sporadically like stars in the darkness.

She thought of the Exotics, the winged people she had seen so often in her ’lith visions. She was not afraid of them; the impression of their benevolence was strong and vivid. But they were different. There was something essentially unhuman about them, she thought—something more profound than the shape of their bodies.

They would not have created Pau Seco. They would not have expected it to be created.

She lay back in the darkness, weary and confused.

It had not been wholly her own idea to come here. It was an imperative she felt more than understood, a kind of homing instinct. Her own history faded back into darkness, lost in the fires that had swept the Floats fourteen years ago. Her childhood was a mystery. She had come into the Red Cross camps scalded and smoke-blinded and nearly mute. She had been cared for—adopted, though it was never legal—by an extended family of Guatemalan refugees; they fed her, clothed her, and practiced their English on her. They named her Teresa.

She was grateful but not happy. She remembered those days as a haze of pain and loss: the searing conviction that something valuable had been stolen from her. She became attached to a rag doll named Amy; she screamed if the doll was taken away. When Amy fell into a canal and disappeared beneath the oily seawater, she wept for a week. She adjusted to her new life in time, but the nameless pain never went away… until she discovered the pills.

One of her Guatemalan family, a hugely fat middle-aged woman named Rosita—whom the others called tia abuela—brought the pills home from the public health clinic. Rosita suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and took the pills for, as she put it, “ree-lif.” They were narcotic/analgesics keyed to the opiate receptors in the brain; Rosita was frankly addicted but, the clinic told her, the pills did not create a tolerance … the addiction would not get worse, they said, and that was good, because the arthritis would not get better.

Teresa, alone one afternoon in their antiquated houseboat, stole a pill from Rosita’s bottle and hid it under her pillow. The act was impetuous—partly curiosity, partly a dim intuition that the pill might work for her the kind of magic it worked for Rosita. In bed that night she swallowed it.

The effect was instantaneous and profound. Inside her a huge and unsuspected tide of fear and guilt rolled back. She closed her eyes and relished the warmth of her bed, smiling for the first time in years.