Then, he drew four circles of light. They hung in the air. I noted my own calm reaction to what was at the least a very convincing special effect or at most something very like a miracle. I had seen nothing but miracles since waking in a field of dead grass beneath a sentient mist.

The circles were blue, red, green, and a color that I could not name since it appeared to shift, never remaining anything identifiable.

“This,” he said, touching the blue circle, “is what you are given at birth: your physical self, including your brain.” Messenger next touched the red circle. “Here is what you have lived: your parents, your schooling, all that you have seen and felt in your sixteen years. Your experience.”

He drew the red circle across so that it partly overlapped the blue.

“This,” he said, touching the green circle, “is your free will, the decisions you make.” He drew this circle across to overlap the earlier two.

Then he waited, no doubt knowing that curiosity would compel me to ask, “And the final circle?”

“This?” He touched the variegated circle. “This is chaos and randomness. It is chance.”

He pulled this final circle into position so that it overlapped the configuration, touching what I was given, what I had experienced, and my free will in turn. At the very center of the pattern the overlapping circles formed a bulging rectangle. He touched it and it glowed with a bright white light.

“And that,” Messenger said, “is you. And me. And Samantha and Liam and Emma, and all human beings. We live our lives in a shifting matrix of what we are given, what we experience, what we choose, and what random chance does that we cannot control.”

“The game is randomness,” I said.

“The game is randomness,” he agreed. “It is the most ancient of forces. In the beginning was a moment when random chance turned nothing to something. Nonexistence to existence.”

I had many more questions, and perhaps sensing this, Messenger moved us, so that we were no longer in Samantha Early’s driveway, but once more in her school, standing, as Samantha herself was, beneath the banner that read, Congratulations Samantha On Your Suck-cess!!!

It is possible that a stronger person, a person less wracked by the self-doubt that comes hand-in-hand with the cruel loss of control of compulsion, might have found a way to laugh it off. Even as fingers were pointed, and cruelly comic faces were made, and braying laughter filled the hallway. It is possible that another person could have somehow found the strength to hold her head high even as the one success she had ever had in her life was discredited, ridiculed, and reduced to ashes.

But Samantha Early was not that person.

Kayla, alone for once, watched from behind her open locker door. I saw her there. I saw her eyes follow Samantha as she dropped her book bag, turned, and fled the school, chased away by sickening gales of laughter.

Kayla had triumphed absolutely.

I WANTED TO KILL HER. KAYLA. I DIDN’T KNOW the girl, had never guessed at her existence until the day before. But I felt a sickness inside myself watching her in her victory, her pointless, cruel victory.

“Call the Game Master,” I said through gritted teeth.

Messenger said nothing. He was back to his taciturnity, his . . . I was about to say indifference, but when I saw his face, what I saw there was not indifference. He was looking at me with pity, as though he regretted my words. Or perhaps as though he was sorry to have made this tragedy a part of my life.

“She deserves to be punished,” I said stridently. “She killed Samantha as surely as if she’d stabbed her with a knife.”

Messenger looked at me for a long time as if considering what he should do with me. What I had taken for earlier approval, and then pity, had turned flinty. But whatever he was planning to do next was stopped by the arrival of Daniel, who walked past Kayla and beneath the banner. In his casual clothing he looked almost as if he could be one of the students now rushing to disappear into their classrooms.

“Daniel,” Messenger said in curt greeting.

“Messenger,” Daniel said just as curtly. “A matter requires your attention.”

“Another case?”

Daniel nodded. “A very serious one, I am sorry to tell you.”

“I am with my apprentice,” Messenger said tightly.

“Your apprentice is meant to learn, is she not?”

“I would soften the shock with a bit more time,” Messenger said.

“You have a soft heart, Messenger. I admire your compassion. But we have our obligations. We do not serve ourselves or even our apprentices.”

From that statement, delivered in clipped, no-nonsense style, I learned two things: that I had been mistaken in seeing Daniel as easygoing and that for whatever unfathomable reason, Daniel saw Messenger as softhearted. It made me want to laugh. The Messenger of Fear might have moments of compassion, but he had summoned the Game Master to terrify Liam and Emma, and if that had been compassion or softheartedness, it was of a type so attenuated that I could hardly recognize it.

“Oriax has her eye on my apprentice,” Messenger said. “I wish to take the necessary time to prepare her.”

“Oriax and her folk are always busy, as you know. It is possible that while Oriax teases you, Messenger, knowing your vulnerability, she has been at work elsewhere.”

Messenger drew a sharp breath. He had not liked the implication that Oriax had an effect on him. “So long as Ariadne lives, Oriax will have no power over me.”