Roger grimaced. "Oh."

"In fact, I agree with Jonah that he has to be eliminated," Laurel went on. "I'm just worried that Torvald would take the opportunity to finish us off once and for all."

"Tell me about these Others you used to live with," Fierenzo said suddenly.

Roger frowned at him. "Why do we care right now?"

"Humor me," Fierenzo said. "You said they looked a lot like humans. What was their culture like?"

"The ones we lived near were mostly pastoral," Laurel said, sounding as confused by the sudden change in topic as Roger. "They farmed and kept flocks."

"Cities? Technology?" Fierenzo asked.

"Not much of either," Laurel told him. "They were supposed to have some cities, but we didn't live near any of them. Where we lived was mostly farm and pasture and small villages."

"What about you, Jonah?" Fierenzo asked, shifting in his seat to look back at their passengers. "Were your Others like that?"

"There was farming and herding, sure," Jonah said. "The ones who lived by the ocean also did a lot of fishing."

"How about marauding?" Fierenzo asked. "Did they like to raid other parts of the coastline?"

"I suppose," Jonah agreed slowly. "They were a rowdy, clan-driven bunch who did their fair share of fighting, both among themselves and with their neighbors. And with those long oceangoing sailing ships—sure, they must have done some plundering."

"I'll be damned," Fierenzo said, very quietly.

"What's the matter?" Roger demanded, throwing a quick look at him.

"The Greens and Grays," Fierenzo said. "They didn't come from some unknown planet a dozen lightyears away. They came from right here on Earth."

"What are you talking about?" Laurel asked, sounding startled. "Our world was wooded and primitive, nothing at all like this."

"What I'm talking about is the legends of our ancestors," Fierenzo said. "Specifically, the mythology of the ancient Greeks."

"The what?" Roger asked.

"The mythology of the Greeks," Fierenzo said tartly. "Come on, Whittier, your high school days aren't that far behind you. You can't have forgotten all of it already."

"I remember it just fine," Roger said. "But what do myths have to do with—?"

And suddenly, horribly, it clicked. "You're not saying... wood nymphs?"

"You've got it," Fierenzo confirmed. "One of my daughters dragged me through her mythology unit last year, and this whole thing has been bugging me ever since Jonah told me their history. I think the Greens are the real-life basis of the wood nymph legend."

"That's crazy," Roger protested. "Anyway, Velovsky told us they did come from somewhere else."

"Sure they did," Fierenzo agreed. "But their world and ours weren't separated by space. They were separated by time. A jump of four or five thousand years, I'd guess, into the future. After a gap that big, they might as well have been on another planet."

"The Greek Oracles," Laurel murmured. "They could have been Visionaries or Farseers."

"Falls right into place, doesn't it?" Fierenzo agreed. "Your Warriors might have inspired some stories, too, like the stuff about Hercules or Odysseus."

"What about us?" Jordan asked.

"What about you?" Fierenzo countered. "What direction were you heading when you hit the Great Valley?"

"South, I think," Jordan said, looking questioningly past Laurel at his brother.

"Yes, it was south," Jonah confirmed. "They traveled pretty far, too, before they met up with the Greens."

"There's your answer," Fierenzo told him. "The Greens became part of Greek myth; you Grays got worked into Norse myth."

"Norse myth?" Roger echoed, struggling to dredge up the long-neglected details from that high school mythology unit. "You mean as in Odin, Asgard, and the Frost Giants?"

"And the dwarves, the smiths of the gods, who made wondrous gadgets for them," Fierenzo said.

"Including their masterpiece, the weapon of the god of thunder."

Roger's throat suddenly tightened. "Oh, my God," he murmured. "Thor's hammer?"

"A hammer with an unusually short handle," Fierenzo said. "A hammer that could be thrown into something and then come back to his hand. A hammer that could knock the top off a mountain. Stop me when this starts to sound familiar."

"I'll be cursed," Jonah murmured.

"But we don't actually throw the hammerguns," Jordan objected.

"You call it throwing when you bring them out of the wristbands," Fierenzo pointed out. "Besides, a primitive Norseman watching from the sidelines could certainly be excused if he misread what happened. You point the thing, a rock a hundred yards away explodes into dust, and when your observer opens his eyes it's back in your hand. What other conclusion could he come to?"

"Wait a minute, this is going too fast," Roger said. "Are you suggesting one of the Grays was the basis for the Thor legend?"

"Either that or some Norse warrior finagled himself a hammergun," Fierenzo said. "He'd have made quite a name for himself before he finally hung up his cleats." He hissed a sigh. "Which makes things just that much more awkward."

"Why, were you thinking of sending them all back home?" Roger asked.

"As a matter of fact, that's exactly what I was thinking," Fierenzo said bluntly. "That was my fallback position if all else failed: throw everyone back aboard their transports and kick them the hell off Earth. A moot point now."

"A moot point anyway," Laurel said. "We needed all our Farseers and Groundshakers to make it work the first time."

"All of them except Damian," Jonah countered ominously.

Laurel sighed. "Apparently so."

The car went silent. Roger looked over at Fierenzo, found the other staring hard out the windshield.

"So what do we do now?" he asked.

Fierenzo shook his head slightly. "We'll think of something."

37

"Okay," Smith said, running his eyes down the printout. "LUDs show just one hit on Fierenzo's cell phone after he disappeared, a one-minute call to the Whittiers' apartment. About two hours after that we have a call from Whittier's cell to Fierenzo's cell. No other activity on either phone since."

Powell grunted. He'd tried Fierenzo's cell a hundred times in the nearly forty-six hours since the detective's abduction. If he'd tried one more time during that two-hour window, he might have been able to at least hear the voice of whoever was using his phone now. "Anything on the Whittiers' car?"

Smith shook his head. "We've checked all the garages around their apartment. I've got an APB out on it, but after that triple carjacking in the Bronx last night the uniforms have more plates to look for than usual."

"Did you make it clear this one was related to a missing cop?"

"Actually... at the time we didn't have a solid connection," Smith hedged.

Powell locked a glare on him. "You think maybe we've got one now?"

The other's lip twitched. "Yes, sir."

"Then upgrade the hunt."

"Yes, sir." Smith turned to go.

"Hold it," Powell said, feeling slightly ashamed of himself. Smith was doing the best he could, after all. "Sorry—I didn't mean to jump on you that way."

"That's okay," Smith assured him. "You think the Whittiers are involved in whatever happened to him?"

"I don't know what to think," Powell admitted. "Either they had nothing to do with it, or else they're the strangest pair of idiot savants I've ever run across. You can't be smart enough to convince Fierenzo you're an innocent bystander and at the same time be stupid enough to grab him and then walk around using his own cell phone."

"I suppose," Smith said. "Did the Gang Task Force have anything on these Greens and Grays?"

"They've never heard of them," Powell said. "They're guessing we've got brand-new players in town."