"Yes," Roger said, turning back to face the others. "Sorry."

"It started about six months ago," Zenas said. "Melantha had gone to the library to do some research for a school project, and was on her way home when a half-dozen toughs decided she looked like someone they could pick on. Fortunately for her—" he looked over at the young Gray who had opened the door for them earlier, now seated quietly on the floor beside Jonah "—it happened that Jordan here was passing by and took exception to their lack of manners."

"Had he also been at the library?" Roger asked.

"Nothing so respectable," Ron said dryly. "He didn't feel like studying that day and had cut school and gone into Manhattan."

"For the third time that month, I believe," Stephanie added, sending a slightly threatening look at her son.

"He's always getting in trouble," Jonah murmured to Roger.

"Like his brother before him," Ron added pointedly. "At any rate, he had his hammergun with him, so he masked and got up on a wall and proceeded to beat the toughs silly. Eventually even they figured out that something weird was happening and headed for higher ground."

"Melantha, of course, realized instantly who it must have been who'd just rescued her," Zenas said.

"She'd learned about Grays and hammerguns from the Pastsingers, and she took off as soon as she had a clear path and headed for home. She was pretty shaken, she told us later."

"But by the time she got home, she'd had time to cool off and think about it," Laurel picked up the story. "She'd been taught the Grays had hated us, but she also recognized that Jordan's actions on her behalf didn't fit that pattern."

"Maybe he just hadn't realized she was a Green," Roger suggested.

"I hadn't," Jordan confessed. "There are a lot of people in the city who look kind of like Greens."

"And we don't teach Green recognition nearly as well as the Greens teach their children what Grays look like," Ron said.

"Comes from our differing teaching methods," Zenas explained. "Pastsingers can transfer fairly clear images directly to their students, which naturally include images of Grays from the Great Valley time. We wouldn't want you to think we deliberately prime our children to be on the lookout for Grays."

"And in fact, Melantha did conclude that he hadn't recognized her," Laurel added.

"Which was a big relief to her," Zenas said. "But at the same time, she found herself intrigued. It's not every day you see a real, live fossil walking the streets of New York. She decided not to tell anyone, but see if she could track him down herself."

"Sounds risky," Roger said, frowning. "Not to mention kind of needle-in-haystackish."

"Melantha's always enjoyed challenges," Laurel said, blinking back tears. "If she'd just left things alone—" She broke off, daubing at her eyes.

"She decided to start where he'd first appeared," Zenas said, taking his wife's hand. "As Ron said, he'd been masked while he was shooting, but she remembered seeing a boy with a red-and-blue backpack running for a nearby doorway as the gang moved in on her and guessed that had been him.

On the assumption that he lived nearby, she started haunting the area waiting for him to show up again. Eventually, he did."

"She came over and thanked me," Jordan said in a quiet voice. "At first I didn't know what she was talking about—I'd mostly forgotten about it. But then I remembered... and then I realized who she really was."

"Were you frightened, too?" Roger asked.

There was a play of emotion across his face, which settled quickly into the groove Roger would have expected from a twelve-year-old boy. " 'Course not," he said with a touch of bravado. "She was only one Green, you know."

He looked over at Melantha's parents, and the bravado faded. "Mostly, I was kind of flattered she'd gone to all that effort to find me," he admitted. "I figured—well, she offered to buy me a soda, and I said yes."

Roger shook his head. "Sounds right out of Shakespeare," he commented.

"It's not like that," Jordan insisted. "We're just friends." He lowered his gaze. "Really good friends. I don't want to lose her."

"I'm sorry—I didn't mean it that way," Roger apologized, looking back at the two couples. "How did the rest of you get involved?"

"The kids had been meeting secretly for a couple of months before Melantha finally told us," Zenas said. "We found out later they'd decided they couldn't keep sneaking around and had made a pact to tell both sets of parents on that same night. Needless to say, we were pretty shocked." He looked a bit guiltily at his wife. "We may actually have yelled at her a little, in fact."

"It was the kind of yelling you'd do if you'd just learned your child had been spending her afternoons swimming with alligators," Laurel added, a bit defensively.

"Speaking as the mother of Jonah and Jordan, I know that yell quite well," Stephanie said dryly, throwing a fond look at each of her sons in turn. "And we didn't react any better when Jordan broke the news at our house."

"You didn't yell at me, though," Jordan pointed out helpfully.

"Trust me, son, we were yelling on the inside," Ron assured him. "And then, of course, when we finally started to calm down, what did this audacious little nugget do but casually invite us to go out to dinner with Melantha and her family."

"We got the same invitation," Zenas said. "I think we may have yelled a little more at that point."

"But you obviously went," Roger said.

"Not that time we didn't," Zenas said. "Or the second or third times she asked us, either. We finally gave up on—what was it?"

"The eighth time," Laurel said. "And that was only because we decided it was the only thing that would shut her up."

"That's about the conclusion we came to, as well," Ron said. "Which isn't to say we didn't still have serious reservations about the whole thing."

"Serious enough, in fact, that they detailed me to stand watch outside, just in case," Jonah volunteered. "I figured with a quick dinner and maybe dessert, it'd be over in an hour, hour and a half tops." He reached down and squeezed his brother's shoulder. "I was stuck on that stupid wall for almost three hours. I was starting to think my whole family had been conked on the head and smuggled out the back by the time they finally came out."

"We'd been wrong about the Greens," Stephanie said simply. "We'd been so very wrong."

"Us, too," Zenas said. "After that, we started getting together on a fairly regular basis, probably once a month, and talking on the phone at least once a week. Melantha and Jordan, of course, saw each other a lot more often than that."

His face turned grim. "And then, apparently, someone bumped into someone else on the street... and suddenly our whole world came apart."

"We still don't know which side came up with this insane Peace Child plan," Ron said contemptuously. "Knowing Halfdan, my guess is that it was him. An attempt to bring parity to the two sides, or some such learned nonsense."

"Someone at Torvald's told me it was Cyril's idea," Roger said. "Not that it matters, I suppose."

"Not really," Ron said. "It was bad enough when the warnings and alerts first started, having to bury our relationship with Zenas and Laurel even deeper than it already was, never knowing what was going to happen or when we might suddenly be called on to fight each other. We kept trying to get news about this peace conference that was rumored to be going on, hoping against hope that somebody would realize that we weren't in the Great Valley anymore and that we didn't have to reopen all the old wounds."

"Unfortunately, the people doing the negotiating were still in the Great Valley, at least in spirit,"

Roger murmured. "They all had personal memories of the other side's supposed treachery and their own losses. And nobody was interested in forgiveness and a new start."