The knock was loud and insistent. "Ignore it and it'll go away," Cofflin advised. The three couples tried, but it came louder and louder.

"I'll get it," sighed Martha. "The doctor says walking is good for me." She pushed herself to her feet, kissed Jared on the top of his head, and walked over to the curving staircase that led to the ground floor of the Athenaeum.

Marion Alston relaxed, tired after the long day at the beach, full from the clambake. She smiled with drowsy contentment, looking across the table at Swindapa. Her love life hadn't been much; the disastrous marriage with John, the even more disastrous affair with Jolene that had ended it… and since then the extreme discretion that someone in uniform had to practice, in her position. Discretion so complete it made any real relationship difficult to impossible.

Of course, Martha and Jared and Doreen and Ian were in the same boat. Had to leave the twentieth to find the right one. Truly odd. Even odder that now I am the one who sets personnel policy for the Guard. Now it's the bigots who have to keep their mouths shut for fear of consequences. That was intensely satisfying.

They were sitting at one of the tables in the lecture hall of the Athenaeum, a big room covering the second floor of the white neoclassical main building; a desk was to their rear, shelves of old books to either side, and at the head a stage where Frederick Douglass had once spoken.

Ian and Doreen were sitting side by side and holding hands, discussing anthropology or something of that nature. There were times when she was very glad she wasn't an academic.

"We're closed." Martha's voice came up, muffled by the distance to the front door. "Tomorrow."

"I know, Ms. Cofflin," a voice said from below. "Please let us in, though."

"I'll go down and help her run them off," Jared said, pushing himself upright and walking away with a sigh. "Damn, doesn't anyone realize we have to sleep too?"

Alston's mind divided between the final cargo loads that would have to be swung onto Eagle tomorrow and the way Swindapa was tickling her behind the knee with one bare foot under the concealing table. If humans could purr, I would, she decided. Love was wonderful; so was humping your brains out as an end to the perfect day, and when you put the two together…

Something in the voices from downstairs brought her back to full wakefulness with a cold jolt. She sat up and signaled Swindapa's suddenly alert face to silence with a finger across the lips.

"What-" Ian began.

"Quiet." He shut up as if she'd slapped him.

She didn't have a gun with her-nobody in the Guard wore one on the island except on duty, and that rarely- but their swords were bundled in a pair of blankets with the other things from the picnic, taken along to do a few kata. She slid the long steel free of its sheath.

"Wait here," she whispered in the blond girl's ear. "Be careful. Get help if things go wrong. Look after Ian and Doreen, and do not come charging in. Go that way."

She jerked her head at the sash window and drew the blade. "Understand?"

Unwillingly, Swindapa nodded. Just then a gun barked, a small flat crack; there was a cry of pain, and angry voices raised. Her mind clicked it off; pistol, very light caliber.

"Ian, Doreen, stay out of this," she said. Doreen had some training, Ian none. Damn, this would have to happen with civilians around.

She walked to the head of the stairs and looked down. Nothing. Down the stairs and the circulation desk's to the left. Main entrance to the right, only a few feet away.

She kicked off her sandals and padded barefoot down and out into the entranceway, the sword held in her left hand with the blade not exactly concealed, but not forcing itself on anyone's attention, either.

Pamela Lisketter was there, with her brother and a few more of her followers. Her brother had the gun. It was a.22 Hammerli auto target pistol, of all absurd things, looking oversized in his hand. His eyes glared behind the thick glasses, jumping from one point to the next, and the muzzle jerked around at her as she walked into view. A round cracked off, ricocheted somewhere to her right, and ended in a tinkle of glass.

Cofflin was down on the ground, swearing softly, and his big fisherman's hands squeezed a bleeding wound just above his knee. Either Dave Lisketter was a very good shot-unlikely-or he'd been dead lucky. Incapacitating a determined man with one light bullet was not easy, and from the way Cofflin was glaring at them he had all the determination you could want.

One of those little bullets between the eyes and you're as dead as if it was a rifled shotgun slug, she reminded herself. Everything was very bright and clear.

Martha was backed up against a desk, quivering with the anger she was keeping off her face, except for the two red spots on her cheeks. Pamela Lisketter looked out of her depth, but grimly determined to carry through. Her brother's twitching eyes and bared buck teeth gave him the look of a gopher on pure crystal meth, capable of anything, one way or another. Other figures moved behind Lisketter, taking boxes of books out of the Athenaeum.

"You'd better put that-there down, white boy," she said, conscious in some remote corner of her mind that the Gullah accent she'd fought so long and hard to control was back in full force. "Y'might hurt yoselfs wit it."

"Drop that sword!" he barked, shrill. She continued to walk forward, slow and soundless, then halted just beyond arm's reach. "Drop it."

"No, doan' think I'll do that thing," she said carefully.

"Drop it!" He looked bewildered and waved the gun. "You have to drop it!"

"That there's a gun, white boy. It ain't no magic wand," she said, and turned her head to Martha. "What's goin' on here?"

"Ms. Lisketter," Martha said, her voice frigid with contempt, "is going to- save the Indians-"

"Native Americans!"

"Native Americans. By taking them our guns and a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica."

Alston laughed deliberately, a deep rich sound. "Even crazier than Ah thought," she said. "Lisketter, tell your brother that if he puts that there gun down now, I won' hurt him." Much, she added to herself. These people didn't have any experience with violence, or much confidence in their use of it. If she could shake them enough…

Her senses expanded, taking in the room and the positions of everyone in it. One long controlled breath. Another.

Lisketter spoke: "Your own Lieutenant Walker is helping us," she said.

Alston laughed again. "Walker doan' help nobody but Walker," she said. "So…"

Lisketter wasn't going to back down. Her brother had so much adrenaline in his system he was on the verge of going berserk, which would make him an utterly unpredictable factor. Time to act.

A number of things about swords were surprising to those who'd never trained with them. The first was how far a yard-long blade at the end of an arm could reach. A drawing cut sliced through David Lisketter's flesh, through the radius and ulna of his arm, hardly slowing at all. He shrieked and whirled, the stump of his forearm sending up twin jets of deep-crimson blood halfway to the low ceiling as the hand clutching the gun spun away.

In the instant that followed, Marian Alston knew two things with angry certainty. The first was that her training had betrayed her; she stepped forward into stance and whipped the blade back and around for the finishing stroke in drilled reflex, leaving Pamela Lisketter a crucial moment to react. The second was that Pamela Lisketter also had a gun, and that she'd fired it through the pocket of her coat.

Blackness.

Isketerol smiled as he pushed through the door and over to the desk. The partition-the plastic partition-had been taken down; the Amurrukan who lived here year-round didn't fear each other much. There was only one police officer sitting there yawning. Probably feeling resentful that he wasn't off-duty and celebrating the harvest like most of the island. It was dark on the street outside, save for the noise and lamplight spilling down from the Ocean Cafe half a block away.