He’d been full of gloomy pronouncements back in the old days, sitting in lawn chairs outside their trailer as the carnival shut down for the night. They would sit there, the two of them, the man and the child, as the lights went out on the Mad Mouse and the Ferris wheel. They would sit and sip their drinks—bourbon for her father, unsweetened iced tea for her—and acknowledge the nods and the weary greetings as the other carnies headed for their own digs.

The nights had almost always been warm and muggy. The carnival mostly played the south: Baton Rouge, Bogalusa, Hattiesburg, Vicksburg. She’d seldom been cold, which was maybe why the cold attracted her now. Cold was clean. Hot was sweaty and dirty.

Back then, back before the train wreck that was in her future, Lystra had wanted two things: For her mother to come back. And to be able someday to take over a couple of the sideshow games. An old man named Sprinkle operated the coin toss, the dart throw, the water pistol, and the ring toss. He let his games get shabby, refusing to spring for so much as a few cans of paint.

Lystra thought she could do better. She could make the games livelier and more profitable. The key was to make them a bit easier. Let the marks take home a teddy bear occasionally; it was good advertising. Run an honest game, attract more players, pay out more in prizes—but offer more levels, more depth, and make more money in the end.

“Yeah!” Lystra said to no one. It made her smile to think how even then, even when she was a lonely seven-year-old, she was ambitious.

But yes, lonely. She had always wanted a younger sister. Someone like Plath, maybe. Someone to look up to her. Someone to talk to and play with.

Even a brother would have been welcome.

Interesting thought.

“A game within a game?” Lystra muttered under her breath.

Would it add spice? Yes. Would it complicate the overall plan? She walked it through step-by-step in her mind and concluded that it would have only a small downside risk.

It would be good to have someone to appreciate what she had accomplished. It would be good to have someone to watch it all play out with her.

“Minions,” she said, and laughed. “I need minions. Yeah.”

SIX

“No. Vincent is not ready to resume control.” This was from Anya Violet, and spoken in a whisper. “He may never be ready.”

Plath was making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the kitchen of the new Manhattan safe house. One for herself and one for Keats. And seeing Billy’s level of interest she pulled out two more slices of bread for him.

They were in the kitchen: Plath, Keats, Billy the Kid who really was a kid, and Dr. Anya Violet. Anya was of undetermined age—perhaps in her thirties, perhaps she had edged into her forties—but to Plath, at least, she seemed beautiful, sophisticated, and effortlessly sexy in a way that she decided must come only with some age and some experience.

Anya had not yet chosen a nom de guerre. She thought it was a silly affectation. Of course, she understood the thinking behind choosing the name of some mad or at least seriously unbalanced person: it signaled acceptance of the core reality for BZRK members. It signaled a break with the past. It signaled a chin-out acknowledgment of the fact that madness was very likely in their future.

She understood all that, but Dr. Anya Violet was not a child and was not interested in following the rules of the clubhouse. Nor was she sure she wanted to accept the authority of a sixteen-year-old girl. Yes, Plath was the daughter of Grey McLure, Anya’s former employer, and Plath had proven herself in battle. And it had become clear that she was a bit more … stable … than Nijinsky, who had been in charge during Vincent’s recovery.

But Anya was suspicious of money. She could call herself Plath, but Anya knew who Sadie was. She was rich, that’s what she was. Worse yet, she’d always been rich. She’d had life handed to her. Anya would rather have seen Keats in the top job, because there was a boy who had never been handed anything, and Anya instinctively trusted working people. She herself had come from nothing and nowhere to earn a PhD. She shared with Keats an emotional knowledge of hard times and hard choices.

But Keats was totally loyal to Plath.

Billy was a child. Wilkes was … well, she was Wilkes. Nijinsky had to a great extent lost the confidence of the group. And that left two people to run things at the New York cell of BZRK: Vincent or Plath.

Plath, who saw a great deal when she paid close attention, saw all this in Anya’s smoky eyes. Vincent might or might not still be damaged, but Anya loved him and would never admit he was ready to take charge again. Not if it meant risking his life and sanity.

In the matter of safe houses things had improved quite a bit. Plath had access to most of her own money now, and she had Mr. Stern and the McLure security apparatus to arrange things. So BZRK New York was quite nicely established in a five-story townhouse not far from Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side.

They had obtained it through numerous cutouts and guys-who-knew-a-guy, and bought it for cash for nine million dollars.

Just twelve blocks away was a second safe house. This had also been purchased for cash, but this time the cutouts had been just a bit less well managed. Not so poorly managed as to seem obvious; just a few scant clues left here and there for those who were watching the movements of Plath’s money.

The fake safe house was above a bankrupt dry cleaner. A sound system played ambient noise from within—TV, music, the sound of laughter, occasional yelling. A timer turned the lights on and off. And random people delivering handbills were hired to enter and leave the place at odd times of day and night. It wouldn’t stand up to in-depth surveillance, but it would do as a diversion. It was already, according to Stern, drawing the attention of Hannah Thrum, the chairwoman of McLure Holdings, the parent company of McLure Labs. Thrum was almost certainly working for the Armstrong Twins as well, but that was all right, so long as Plath knew where all the players were.