"Don't worry, it was last night, when there wasn't anything we could tell him," Roger said. "But he told us a Persuader couldn't actually order people to do anything."

"Interesting," Zenas murmured. "What exactly did he say?"

Roger closed his eyes for a moment, trying to visualize the scene. "He said a Persuader doesn't order people to do anything," he said, opening his eyes again. "That all he does is try to talk the other person into his point of view. He said the other person still has the power to make up his own mind."

"Is that wrong?" Fierenzo asked.

"Not entirely," Zenas said, slowly. "But it's not quite as benign as he makes it sound. A Persuader does have a certain degree of power, particularly if he can call to a person by name."

"Could he force Melantha to come to him?" Jordan asked anxiously.

"They seem able to do it with humans," Fierenzo muttered. "The super in Roger's building opened up their apartment without any fuss at all."

"Different situation," Zenas said. "Normally, humans have no idea what they're up against, and therefore don't have any chance to resist. Melantha, on the other hand, would know exactly what he was trying." He looked at Roger. "Especially if, as you say, she'd already resisted a Persuader's order once. She knows now what to listen for, and how to fight it."

"She's always had a mind of her own," Laurel said, smiling at Jordan. "Otherwise she wouldn't have set off to track down a Gray in the first place."

"It's still interesting that Aleksander spent Friday evening with Roger and Caroline," Fierenzo mused. "You'd think it would have been more worthwhile to at least try to smoke Melantha out."

"Are you suggesting Aleksander has her, not Nikolos?" Stephanie asked.

"Or he and Nikolos might be in collusion," Fierenzo told her. "Or Damian really is alive and well in the Catskills and Aleksander had a leisurely dinner because he doesn't really care whether they find Melantha or not." He shrugged. "Or it could be I'm misreading the clues entirely. But no matter which way you slice it, we still need to check out that hideaway."

"I agree," Zenas said. "Which of us do you want, Detective Fierenzo?"

"Whichever one's less likely to be missed," Fierenzo said. "I doubt even Nikolos would have the chutzpah to search a cop's car, but that might change if he gets a tip that one of Melantha's family is suddenly and suspiciously AWOL."

"That would be me, then," Laurel said in a voice that allowed for no argument. "Zenas has his job to do, but I make a couple of shopping trips each month that take me out of range of anyone else.

Tomorrow can be one of them."

"Will they believe you'd go shopping with your daughter still missing?" Roger asked.

Laurel smiled wanly. "My husband and I still have to eat."

"Don't worry, she can pull it off," Zenas said, clearly not thrilled with the idea but just as clearly recognizing that it had to be done. "You two just take care of her. I mean good care of her."

"We will," Fierenzo promised.

"Is there anything we can do to help?" Jonah asked.

"Nothing I can think of," Fierenzo said. "On second thought, yes, there is. You can lend Roger one of those hand phone things in case we get in trouble and need to let someone know what's going on.

How far will they reach?"

"Several miles," Jonah said. "Though without a booster setup in place, the Catskills may be a little of a stretch. We call them tels, by the way, not phone things." He looked down at his brother. "Come on, Jordan. On your feet, and let's see your hand."

Jordan made a face, but obediently stood up and held his left hand out to his brother. "You did want the private family line, as opposed to the general-purpose tel, right?" Jonah added, picking at the heel of Jordan's hand with thumb and forefinger.

"Unless you think Torvald would come charging to our rescue if we called," Fierenzo said dryly.

"How come you have a spare, anyway?"

"Blame it on another of my old school-cutting buddies," Jonah said. "He wanted us to be able to chat while we were skylarking around Queens without the rest of the community listening in. He was a whiz at tech stuff, and he figured out a way to build a tel that worked on a different frequency couple from the rest of them."

"It's not on any of the radio bands we already use, is it?" Roger asked, staring in fascination as Jonah got a grip on what looked like a sheer film on Jordan's hand and began pulling it carefully off.

"It doesn't work the way your radios do," Jonah assured him. "We basically take a pair of normal radio frequencies, but instead of modulating them, we run a harmonic coupling between them. There are only a half-dozen frequency pairs that are convenient to use, and he picked the one as far away from the usual band as possible so that there wouldn't be any chance of interference between them."

"What happened to the one your friend had?" Fierenzo asked. "He doesn't still have it, does he?"

Jonah shook his head. "He gave it to me when he thought his parents were closing in on us and told me to get rid of them."

"We assume he didn't want to get caught with the evidence," Ron added.

"Right," Jonah said, grinning tightly. "For all his private defiance against authority, he tended to panic over the possibility of getting into real trouble."

"Why didn't you toss them like he told you?" Fierenzo asked.

Jonah shrugged. "I liked having them, so I took a chance and hid them away instead. No one ever came down on me, so I guess the whole thing was a false alarm. Anyway, when we started getting to know Melantha's family, I dug them out of storage and gave one to Jordan so I could keep in touch with him while he was in Green territory."

"Too bad you didn't give one to Melantha," Roger murmured.

"Actually, we did discuss that possibility at one point," Zenas said. "We decided it would be better for Jonah and Jordan to be able to keep in touch. Jordan and Melantha were already pretty adept at keeping their time together private, and we didn't want Melantha getting caught with a Gray tel." His lips compressed briefly. "Though I wish now we'd done it that way."

"We also didn't know whether you could take a tel inside a tree without damaging it," Jonah pointed out. He had the film nearly pulled away from his brother's hand now, with only the fingertips still attached.

"That really looks weird," Roger commented. "Like a snake shedding his skin."

"Or Peter Pan trying to get his shadow back on," Fierenzo said. "How hard is it to work?"

"Not very," Jonah assured him. "I can run him through the manual in five minutes." With one final tug, he pulled the last fingertip free. Holding the tel dangling in front of him, he turned and squatted down beside Roger's chair. "Let's have your left hand."

Gingerly, Roger held it out. Jonah draped the tel into position on top of it, smoothing and prodding at it to get the various sections lined up along the fingers. "Just relax," he advised. "It won't hurt."

He began pressing the tel onto the skin of Roger's palm. "One other thing that might or might not mean anything," Roger said. "The day after Cyril tried his Persuasion trick on Caroline, she found out she could sense Green communications. It was only at close range, and she couldn't understand what was being said, but she could definitely tell when one Green was talking to another."

"Interesting," Zenas said. "I've never heard of anything like that before."

"Not even with Velovsky?" Fierenzo asked.

"If it happened, I've never heard anything about it," Zenas said.

"Me, neither," Laurel seconded.

"Maybe it seemed so natural he never thought to comment on it," Roger suggested as Jonah finished with his palm and started massaging the tel into his fingers. "He told us he'd had a telepathic crash course in all things Green from Leader Elymas. Maybe sensing your communication was part of the same package."