Nog Niet

The invitation was laminated.

That was the first thing wrong with it, and nobody could say why it was wrong, only that a laminated thing arriving in December 2041 was like finding a fresh flower in a drawer. Somebody had a laminator. Somebody had kept a laminator working for twelve years, and had kept the pouches for it, and had decided that this was what the pouches were for.

It came up the mountain in the hands of a boy from the coast road who would not come in, and it was read aloud in the long house at Querencia over dinner, by Mateo, standing on a bench, because that is the only correct way to read a laminated document.

"The Congregation of the Vigilant," he read, "extends its warm hand to the travelling players of the north."

"Warm hand," said Tibor, from the end of the table, with his mouth full.

"You are invited to a Gathering of Traders and Neighbors, to be held at the Hall of Vigilance, Ten-Bel, on the second Saturday of December."

"That's a market," said Yara. "That's just a market."

"There will be an evening of music, refreshment, and fellowship."

"That's not a market."

Mateo held up one finger and kept reading, and his voice did something complicated.

"In recognition of the distance travelled, participating traders will receive one hundred and twenty liters of biodiesel."

The long house went entirely quiet.

A hundred and twenty liters is not a quantity. A hundred and twenty liters is a season. It is the difference between a circuit that runs and a circuit that runs and gets to say yes when somebody in Anaga asks whether the puppet show might possibly come up the ridge. Everyone at that table did the arithmetic at the same time, and Saga watched the whole room lean forward about four centimeters.

Because here is the thing about the Vigilant Prophets of Ten-Bel, and it is not a small thing, and everybody on this island lives inside it whether they think about it or not.

They press the fuel.

Not some of it. There are four working presses on Tenerife and the congregation owns all four. Which means that every truck on the south coast, every generator, every pump, every boat that is not a sailing boat, and the entire travelling life of La Tropa, runs on a liquid that is made by four dozen families who believe the world is going to end shortly and would very much like to talk to you about it.

They have never once refused anybody. That is important. They sell to atheists, they sell to the Perdomos, they sell to Klaus. They are not cruel with it and they do not withhold it, and they would be genuinely wounded if you suggested they might.

They just set the price. And they set it in a room, among themselves, on a Tuesday, and then that is the price, and the island pays it and says thank you.

"A hundred and twenty liters," said Yara, "is them showing us what they've got."

"A hundred and twenty liters," said Mateo, "is also a hundred and twenty liters." He put the invitation down on the table. "So that's the hook, and everybody in this room can see that it's the hook, and let's all say it out loud now and get it over with."

"It's the hook," said Tibor.

"It's a hundred and twenty liters," said Ruymán.

"It's the hook and it's a hundred and twenty liters," said Yara, "and those aren't opposites."

They argued about it for an hour, pleasantly, over stew, in the way that family argues about everything, which is loudly and with food in their mouths and with anybody's opinion admissible including the eleven-year-old's.

Saga had her case ready before the bowls were cleared. She had three points and she had put them in order, and the order was: one, they needed somebody to work the crowd before the show, and that was her job and had been for two years; two, she had never seen the south in December; and three ⁓ and this was the one she had polished ⁓ if the congregation was going to try something, then the useful thing to have in the room was a person nobody thinks is listening, and she was the best one they had.

She got as far as "one."

"You're coming," said Linnea, from the other end of the table, not looking up. "You're working. Eat your dinner."

"I had three points."

"You can do them in the truck."

"Two of them were quite good."

"Then it will be a nice drive," said her mother.

It was Tibor who settled it, in the end, by putting down his spoon.

"I know these people," he said. "I have known them thirty years. They will feed us, they will be kind to us, they will talk at us for two hours, and they will try to save our souls, and then we will go home." He shrugged with his whole upper body. "It is not the first time somebody wanted my soul, and the ones who want it usually feed you first. This is not the worst arrangement in the world."

"And the fuel?"

"The fuel," said Tibor, "is real. They have never once lied about fuel. About the end of the world, constantly. About fuel, never."

They went down on the Saturday, in the Santana, fuel tank in tow, at an hour that was not morning yet.

The drive south is three hours of the island changing its mind about what it wants to be. Querencia's wet green goes to pine, and pine goes to the wet shoulder of the mountain at the Erjos pass, down winding switchbacks until the eucalpytus grove in Santiago del Teide. Through the tunnel, then everything is rock and tabaiba and light on the other side. By nine the fog was a memory. By ten, they'd stopped in Callao Savaje, where Saga had taken off two layers, and were joined by Auxi, who at eleven years old had been permitted to come on the strict understanding that she was working, and who had brought her own bag of tadpoles. They were sitting next to each other on the tailgate, legs out.

Torbe rode in Yara's backpack with his head out of the top like a periscope with a lion cut. He was seventeen now. He slept most of the drive, which he did not use to do, and Yara had lifted him up into the truck bed instead of letting him make the jump, and neither of them had said anything about it.

Ten-Bel comes at you low and white.

It was built in the sixties by Belgians for Belgians ⁓ a whole holiday colony of flat-roofed bungalows in ranks, a communal pool, a clubhouse, all of it laid out on a grid on a dry slope facing the sea. It was beautiful once in an optimistic, master planned geometric kind of way. It had been going quietly strange for eighty years.

What Saga saw, coming in off the coast road with her legs hanging out the back, was this: bungalow after bungalow with the shutters shut and the paint gone chalky; and then, in among them, one with a garden so tidy it hurt, and then four in a row with vegetables where the ornamental gravel had been; and everywhere, on the low white walls, faded to almost nothing, the same painted phrase in three languages, repeated at intervals along the whole grid like a heartbeat.

WAAKZAAM. VIGILANTE. WATCHFUL.

"That is new," said Tibor, who had come up to lean on the cab. "Fourteen years. They did that in the spring I lost the ferries."

"They painted the whole town?"

"The whole town. In one week." He shook his head slowly, and he was not laughing. "You have to understand. These people have been announcing the end of the world since before your father was born. 1984. 1991. 2000. 2012, that was a big one, they had shirts. And in all that time, in all those years of being certain ⁓ " he held up a finger " ⁓ they never painted anything. Not one wall. Because you do not paint for a thing that is coming next month."

He looked out at the white grid going past, and the faded words on it, at intervals, like a pulse.

"And then the cables go, and the flights stop, and the shops empty, and everybody down here is frightened. And that is the week they went and got the paint."

"So they thought it was the real one."

"They knew it was the real one. They were completely sure." Tibor spread his hands. "It was the surest they have ever been about anything, and they put it on every wall in this colony where God could see it."

"But it did end," said Saga. "Sort of. Didn't it?"

Tibor laughed. It was not a kind laugh and it was not an unkind one.

"Nog niet," he said. "That is what they say. Not yet. Whatever happens, they look at it, and they check it against the book, and it does not match, so it is not the one. Twelve years the ships stop coming and the lights go out and half the island leaves, and they say" ⁓ and here he did a voice, a flat patient Flemish voice, and it was clearly an imitation of somebody specific ⁓ "'nog niet.'"

Saga thought about that for the rest of the way in.

She had grown up in a world that had already ended before she was born, which meant it had never ended at all, which meant it was simply the world. She had never once thought about it as an ending. And here were four dozen families who had been waiting eighty years for a thing that had already happened all around them, and had not noticed, because it had come in the wrong costume.

She got out her notebook and wrote: they missed it.

The Hall of Vigilance is the ugliest building Saga has ever loved on sight.

It sits at the top of the grid where the colony's clubhouse used to be, and it is a great gray concrete box with narrow vertical windows set deep, like a fort that has decided to be shy about it. Everything else in Ten-Bel is white and low and horizontal. The Hall is the opposite of Ten-Bel, and the opposite of Querencia too, where Saga had grown up in rooms that had no corners at all and doorways shaped like the space a person takes up.

You walk into that lobby and your shoulders come up. It is not a feeling you can argue with.

But Saga was not looking at the concrete. Saga was looking up.

Here is a thing about Saga Reyes that her family finds funny and that she has never once found funny. At a show ⁓ any show, anybody's show ⁓ she does not watch the show. She watches the works. She has spent her whole life backstage in a family that is the stage, and what she loves is the machinery of the trick and not the trick: the tape on the floor, the sandbag on the line, the person crouched in the dark counting. When she was nine she made her father explain the difference between a lamp that floods and a lamp that spots, in the cave, in the middle of a set, and he did, and she has never stopped noticing since. Tibor's cave is fairy lights and seven layers of fluorescent paint. Ruymán's builds are salvage and prayer. The fire is Yara and nothing else.

She had never in her life stood underneath a real one.

Because bolted across that lobby ceiling, running wall to wall, was a proper steel truss ⁓ the kind you hang from, not the kind you lean on ⁓ and off it, in a row, at intervals, were six theater lamps, big ones, with shutters and barn doors and colored gel still in the frames, and cables running back along the truss and away into the dark toward a booth. Aimed at the doors. Aimed so that whoever came through those doors would walk into light.

Somebody had built this place as a theater, sixty years ago.

And somebody was still running it.

"¡Agüita!" said Saga, out loud, to a ceiling. "That's a proper rig."

"You'd be surprised," said a voice, "how much of it still works."

The girl was standing about a meter away, and had clearly been standing there for a while.

She was perhaps sixteen. She was in a long gray skirt and a cardigan buttoned to the throat, and her hair was in a plait so tight it looked structural, and her shoes were polished, and she had a pencil behind her ear and gaffer tape wrapped around her left wrist like a bracelet, which is what a person does when their hands are going to be busy for four hours and they cannot be carrying a roll around.

She looked exactly like every other girl Saga had seen since they came through the gate. Except for the tape. And except that while the rest of them had smiled at the visitors with their whole faces, this one was looking at the ceiling with Saga, at the same six lamps, with her head at the same angle.

"Which ones are dead?" said Saga.

The girl's eyes came down and landed on her, and something in her face opened about a millimeter and then shut again.

"Two and five," she said. "And four is on the wrong circuit, so if you kill the house lights, four stays on. Everybody thinks that's a fault." A pause. "It isn't."

"What is it?"

"It's four being on the wrong circuit," said the girl, "which I have never mentioned to anybody, and which nobody has ever asked about in eleven years."

Somebody called from across the lobby ⁓ "Ikea!" ⁓ and she was gone, walking fast, with the flat unhurried stride of somebody who has been walking that floor her entire life.

Saga stood in the lobby of a concrete fort with her mouth slightly open and her whole chest going off like a struck bell.

She got out the notebook and wrote: IKEA. And under it: 4 is on the wrong circuit. And under that, because she was thirteen and could not help herself, she drew a small box and left it unticked.

The Gathering was, for about two hours, completely lovely, and that is the part nobody expects.

They had set the trestles out in the hall itself. There were perhaps two hundred people, and about forty of them were the congregation and the rest were traders and neighbors and coast families come up for a market, and it was a good market. Doña Fefa would have approved of the tomatoes. La Tropa set up along the east wall and did what they do: Ruymán tuned the timple, the Chachos threw a rope over a beam and did the thing where they walk up it as though the rope were a staircase, and Auxi got her tadpoles out and had a queue of small children by the second song.

And the congregation fed them.

This is the thing that has to be said plainly, because it is what makes the rest of it hard. The food was extraordinary. There were four kinds of bread and a vat of something with rabbit in it, and there was Bier-Bel in ceramic jugs, the banana beer, sour and yeasty and cold from a cellar, and a whole table of small pale cakes that a very old woman had made for people she had never met.

Nobody preached. Nobody handed anybody a pamphlet. Brother Wouter ⁓ a heavy, sweating, immensely friendly man in his forties ⁓ went round every single trader in the room and shook their hand and asked about their families and remembered the answers.

"They are not pretending," said Tibor, watching him. "That is what people get wrong. This is not a performance of kindness. This is kindness." He drank his beer. "And it is also the door of the trap, and they do not experience those as two different things, and that is the whole problem with these people, and I have never worked out how to explain it to anybody."

It was somewhere in the middle of the afternoon that Saga met the grandmother.

She came through the market on an electric scooter, the two-seater resort kind with a basket on the front, going at walking pace and not stopping for anybody, and the crowd parted for her the way a crowd parts for weather. She was seventy-something and built like a door. She had a cigarette going. In the basket were a stack of pamphlets and a bottle of Trappist beer, the good Belgian stuff, the actual monastery stuff, twelve years after the ships stopped, which meant it was the last of something and she was drinking it anyway on an ordinary Saturday.

She pulled up in front of La Tropa's trestle, looked at the whole company for a while, and said, in an accent that had spent forty years failing to become Spanish:

"You are the north ones."

"We are," said Mateo.

"Mm." She handed him a pamphlet without appearing to look at it, the way you hand somebody a napkin. "The tall one with the fire. She was at my grandson's wedding."

"That's Yara."

"I know what she is called."

She drank some beer. Nobody said anything. Saga, who had been raised among adults who talk, found that she was fascinated.

"And you," said the old woman, and Saga realized with a jolt that she was being addressed, "are the little one from up there. From Querencia."

"Saga."

"Mm."

She looked at Saga for slightly too long, with an expression Saga could not read at all, and which she thought about for a long time afterward, and which was not unkind.

"Is she well?" she said at last.

"Who?"

"The one up the mountain. With the ⁓ " and the old woman moved one hand in the air, sketching something, a house or a hill or a life, and did not finish it. "My son's ⁓ "

She stopped.

She put the beer back in the basket, and put her hands on the scooter's grips, and said, to the middle distance, in a completely different voice:

"There are pamphlets. Take one each, it costs you nothing to take one."

And she drove off at walking pace through the market without waiting for an answer, trailing smoke, and Saga stood there holding a pamphlet about the coming world and understood that she had just watched somebody decide not to say a name.

She wrote it down the second she was out of sight.

Saga watched Brother Wouter cross the room to Mateo and shake his hand for eleven full seconds.

"So what do we do?"

"We eat their food," said Tibor, "and we are kind back, because we are kind, and then we go home." He looked at her sideways. "And you keep your notebook in your pocket for two hours, please, because you are thirteen and you look like a girl writing down evidence, and it is rude."

Saga put her notebook in her pocket for two hours.

She got it out again at seven o'clock, when they took everybody's clothes.

It did not happen the way you would think. Nobody demanded anything. There was no moment where it turned. It happened because they opened the pool.

Ten-Bel has a pool. It is twenty-five meters long and it is the reason the colony exists, and it is the single most extravagant object Saga had ever stood next to in her life. Querencia has a cistern that becomes a swimming hole for six weeks in August when nobody needs the water. This was a pool. Tiled. Filtered. Warm, because they had run black pipe over the whole clubhouse roof in some year nobody mentioned and the sun down here does what it is told.

They opened it at five, and they opened it for everybody, and the sound that went up out of that market was not a polite sound.

Saga was in the water within four minutes.

She is not going to apologize for this. There were fifty children in that pool and about eighty adults and it was the best hour of the entire year: Auxi doing handstands, the Chacho brothers immediately and inevitably attempting something off the diving board that got them shouted at by a woman with a whistle who had clearly been waiting eleven years to shout at somebody off a diving board, Mateo floating on his back in the middle with his eyes shut and an expression of complete religious peace. Somebody's grandmother did four slow lengths of an immaculate breaststroke and got a round of applause. The congregation's own kids ⁓ who Saga had seen all afternoon standing at the edges with their arms folded ⁓ were in there screaming like anybody.

And in the changing rooms, on benches, with a smiling sister at the door handing them out, there were towels for everybody, and folded white bathrobes, and hooks and baskets for your things.

You see how it works. Nobody asked anybody to undress. You undress to swim. Everybody on this earth undresses to swim. The baskets were for your clothes because that is what baskets in a changing room are for, and the robe was because you cannot walk about wet in December, and the sister at the door had baked some of the cakes.

They came out of that water at half past six, warm and loose and happier than they had been in a year.

The baskets were gone.

Not stolen. Nothing so crude. There was a girl of about fifteen standing exactly where the baskets had been, apologizing to everybody, explaining that the sisters had taken everything down to the wash-house as a kindness, because the traders had been on the road since before dawn in this heat and it was no trouble at all, and everything would come back clean in the morning, and did anybody need another towel.

She was so sorry. She meant it. She had been given a job and she was doing it well.

And a hundred and ninety people out of two hundred said ah, that's kind, and went in to dinner in a white robe.

Brother Eugen came round the tables while the soup was going out.

He was young ⁓ late twenties, thin, very clean, with the hands of a man who has never done a day's work outdoors and the manner of somebody bringing you good news about a drainage scheme. He said, at each table in turn, that the congregation would of course be hosting everybody overnight, in the bungalows, which were prepared and aired; that the coast road after dark was no place for children and no place for anybody's axle; and that the wash would be back before breakfast.

It was a generous offer. It was, in fact, plainly the correct thing to do at nine o'clock at night on an unlit road in December, and every trader in that hall would have made the same offer at their own house.

He was genuinely, absolutely, completely sincere. Saga disliked him on sight and could not have given one reason for it.

Saga stood in a doorway with her hair dripping down her back, in a robe with sleeves that came over her hands, and did the arithmetic of the evening in about four seconds, and it went like this: my clothes are three rooms away in a building I have not seen, and I am not going to be rude enough to go and get them, and neither is anybody else, and that is the whole of it.

She watched La Tropa look at each other.

It took perhaps ninety seconds, and it was done entirely with faces. Mateo looked at Tibor. Tibor looked at Yara. Yara looked at the doors, and then at the corridor the baskets had gone down, and then back at Mateo, and gave a very small shake of her head that meant not yet and also meant I see it.

And Tibor, alone in that entire building, was fully dressed.

He had not gone in the water. He had been asked four times and had said, each time, with enormous courtesy, that he was Hungarian, that he had grown up swimming in a river that froze, that he had done his swimming, and that a man of his years sits by a pool in the way other men sit by a fire. He had spent the whole hour on a plastic lounger with a jug, shouting encouragement at the Chachos and abuse at the diving board.

So he sat down to dinner among two hundred people in white bathrobes, in his own trousers, his own boots, and his own shirt with NEM across the front, and nobody said one word about it, and Saga looked at him and understood that there was now exactly one person in the Hall of Vigilance who could walk out of the front door.

And Mateo ⁓ who had one rule, and whose one rule was about consent and knowing and daylight ⁓ smiled at Brother Eugen across the hall, and raised his jug an inch, and said, quietly, to the four people nearest him:

"Nobody drinks any more. Nobody goes anywhere alone. Saga stays where I can see her."

"Papá ⁓ "

"You can be furious about it later and I will listen for an hour."

Here is what makes it clever, and Saga worked this out standing in a concrete hall in a white robe that came down over her hands.

They had not been locked in. Nobody had locked one single thing. The doors of the Hall of Vigilance stood wide open all evening onto the warm dark, and any person in that building could have walked out of them at any moment they liked.

In their underwear.

Three hours from home. In December. Past four dozen families who had just fed them.

Nobody was going to do that. Not one adult in that room was going to walk out past a woman who had baked them a cake, half naked, in front of their own children, to make a point about something that had not technically happened yet. It was not a cage. It was manners, and manners hold better than a lock, because a lock can be picked and a lock does not make you feel like a bad guest.

Saga looked across the hall for Ikea and found her at once, standing at the side door where the baskets had gone out, in a white robe of her own, watching Saga back.

Ikea held her gaze for about two seconds.

Then she looked, deliberately, up and to the left ⁓ at the lighting bar over the stage.

And then back at Saga.

And then she walked away.

Brother Wouter did two hours.

It has to be recorded properly, because Saga has never been able to describe it to anybody at home without them thinking she was exaggerating, and she was not exaggerating.

He came out in the white robe with a Sankyo MelodyMate MM-3 hanging off a strap around his neck, which is a small plastic keyboard from about 1998 with sixteen rhythm presets, and he had it running through the Hall's actual sound system, which was powerful and enormous. He stood in the middle of the brutalist concrete stage under four working lamps out of six. And for two hours, sweating through a white robe, in front of two hundred people, Brother Wouter rapped about spiritual warfare.

The preset he had chosen was called BOSSA 2.

He was terrible.

He was so terrible that it looped all the way around past funny and out the other side into something Saga has never had a word for. It is important that you hear some of it, because everybody she has ever described it to has assumed she was exaggerating for effect, and she was not.

He opened by putting one hand up for quiet, in a silent room.

Yo. My name is Brother Wouter and I come to bring the news.

I am not here to sell you nothing. You have got nothing to lose.

This is not a sales pitch, brothers. This is grace, and grace is free ⁓

and if you want to leave right now you can leave. It's fine. No pressure. Honestly. Please stay.

The last line had eleven more syllables than the bar had room for. He got through it by accelerating, the way a man runs downhill to stay under a falling ladder.

Now the adversary prowls and he prowls just like a lion,

but the Word is a shield and the shield is what I'm buyin' ⁓

no. Not buying. It is free. It has always been free.

It is free for you, my brothers. And it's free. For. Me.

He could not rhyme. That was the first thing. When a line would not fit he said it faster, and when that failed he said it slower, and when that failed he stopped rapping and explained the line, out loud, at conversational volume, over the bossa nova.

"The adversary is a lion in the sense of a lion," he said. "He is not a lion. There are no lions here. There have never been lions on this island. That is a simile, and I want the young people especially to know that I know that."

Then he came back in on the two.

He has got a plan for you and the plan is very long.

He has meetings. He takes minutes. And his minutes are all WRONG.

Somewhere behind Saga, Yara made a small strangled noise and had to look at the floor.

He did a section for the young people. He announced it first, so that they would know it was for them.

Now I know what you are thinking. You are thinking this is old.

You are thinking Brother Wouter is not fresh and is not bold.

But the message is eternal and the message is, in fact ⁓

and I am told this is the word ⁓ the message, friends, is sick.

He paused.

"Which means good," he said. "It means good."

Down at the back, along the wall, thirty teenagers in white bathrobes stood with their arms folded and their faces absolutely still, and not one of them moved a muscle, and Saga understood with total clarity that they had all watched this man do this many, many times, and that somewhere in there was affection, and that it was buried extremely deep.

He tried a call and response.

Can I get a witness?

Nothing.

Can I get a witness.

He said it the second time flatly, as a statement, having decided to accept it.

"Thank you, Sister Godelieve," he said, to the one hand that had gone up.

He tried, once, at about the fifty-minute mark, to make the rhythm with his mouth. It is not clear why. The MelodyMate was at that moment already making the rhythm, at volume, into a professional sound system. Brother Wouter leaned into the microphone anyway and went puh. puh-tuh. puh, three times, with his eyes closed, and then opened his eyes and carried on as though it had not happened, and it was never referred to again by anybody.

You can rest in the Lord but the Lord does not rest.

He is watching, he is watchful, he is vigilant, he's ⁓ blessed ⁓

he has not got a standby mode. He is not an appliance.

And THAT, brothers and sisters, is what we mean by vigilance.

Two hundred people nodded.

He addressed several of them by name. This is the part that Saga found hardest to sit through, and she has thought about why, and she thinks it is because it was not cruel and was in fact the opposite.

I see you at the back there with your arms across your chest ⁓

I have known you since a baby, Tycho, and I want what's best,

and your mother does not know where you go on a Friday,

and I know, and I have not said, and I am saying it this way.

Tycho, at the back, in a bathrobe, aged about sixteen, went the color of a brick and did not move.

And in the third quarter of an hour he ran out of line entirely in the middle of a bar, with the bossa nova going underneath him and nowhere at all to put his hands, and filled the hole by saying "and, and, and," four times, and then found his way back in, and his face when he found his way back in was the face of a man cresting a hill.

And the calendar is nothing! And the year is not a wall!

And a thief in the night does not telephone at all!

And they laughed at Brother Noah! Allez, they laughed a lot!

And they were laughing, they were laughing ⁓ and then, brothers. They were not.

That one landed. Saga watched it land. Forty people said mm at the same time, and the old woman who had made the cakes put her hand flat on her chest, and for about four seconds Brother Wouter of Ten-Bel was, genuinely and without any qualification, good.

He finished at ten to nine, sweating through a white robe, with his hands out.

The Word does not fade. The Word does not run in the rain.

The Word is not a paper you can tear up in your pain.

It is sealed and it is clear and it will never come apart ⁓

it is LAMINATED, brothers. It is laminated in your heart.

And he stood there in the light with his chest going, forty people applauding, a hundred and sixty people being polite, and thirty teenagers along the back wall not making a sound.

And Saga sat on the floor at the front and thought: ah. That's what the laminator is for.

Auxi, eleven years old, laughed until Yara put a hand on the back of her neck.

Brother Eugen came and sat down next to her about forty minutes in.

He did it nicely. He asked first, with a gesture, and waited for her to shift over, and then folded himself down onto the floor beside her with his robe over his knees, and watched Wouter for a while without saying anything, which was worse than talking.

"He works very hard at that," he said eventually, warmly. "Every week. For years. People can be unkind about it."

Saga said nothing, because agreeing felt like a door.

"You're Saga," said Eugen.

"Yes."

"Reyes. Mateo's daughter, and Linnea's, the Swedish one with the coffee." He said it comfortably, the way you'd recite an address you post to often. "You do the frog puppet. Ten fingers. And you're the one who talks to everybody before the tarot, which is very clever, and which I don't think most people have worked out."

Saga's stomach did something cold and slow.

Nobody had worked that out. Not down here. That was a thing you would only know if you had asked somebody, and then asked somebody else, and then put the two answers together and kept them.

"You're thirteen," said Eugen.

"Yes."

"That's the good age," he said, kindly, and turned to look at her, and his face was completely open, and there was nothing behind his eyes but goodwill. "That's the age where a person starts wanting a use for themselves. Everyone gets it and almost nobody gets to have it. You're going to feel it very soon, if you haven't, and it feels like being hungry in a room with no food in it."

Saga could not have explained, then or now, why that sentence was the most frightening thing anybody had ever said to her. It was true. That was the trouble with it. It was completely true, and he had handed it to her the way you hand a child a sweet, and he was still smiling, and behind them two hundred people in white were nodding along to BOSSA 2.

"We have a use for people here," said Eugen.

"I've got one," said Saga.

"You have a show," he said, gently, and patted the floor twice beside him as if settling a dog, and got up, and went away to be kind to somebody else.

She sat on the floor at the front in a robe with her arms inside it, next to her father, in a concrete hall three hours from home with her own clothes in a wicker basket somewhere behind a door, watching a sweating man rap about the armies of heaven over a bossa nova preset, and she was not frightened, exactly, and she was not laughing either.

She was working.

Because there were six lamps on that bar, and two of them were dead, and one of them was on the wrong circuit, and a girl with tape around her wrist had made absolutely certain that she knew it.

Saga leaned back on her hands, in the dark at the front, and looked up past the lights at the ceiling of the Hall of Vigilance.

There was a catwalk up there. There was a fly system, with ropes tied off at a rail on the stage-left wall. And set into the boards of that stage, about two meters from where Brother Wouter was at that moment explaining, at length, and in rhyme, why the calendar is not a wall, there was the unmistakable seam of a trap door.

Nog niet, Saga thought.

Not yet.

She got out her notebook, under the robe, where nobody could see it, and she did not write a single word. She just turned to a clean page and left it open on her knee in the dark, ready.