"If it's from them."

 

"It is," said Bean. "It's what I'd do. Get word out. This picture is like a virus. It goes everywhere and gets its code into a million places, but nobody knows it's a code because it looks like something that most people think they already understand. It's a fad, not a message. Except to me."

 

"Almost thou persuadest me," said Carlotta.

 

"I'll crack it before I go to bed."

 

"You're too little to drink that much coffee. It'll give you an aneurysm."

 

She went back to her own mail.

 

Since the words weren't separated, Bean had to look for other patterns that might give things away. There were no obvious repeated two-letter or three-letter patterns that didn't lead to obvious dead ends. That didn't surprise him. If he had been composing such a message, he would have dropped out all the articles and conjunctions and prepositions and pronouns that he possibly could. Not only that, but most of the words were probably deliberately misspelled to avoid repetitive patterns. But some words would be spelled correctly, and they would be designed to be unrecognizable to most people who weren't from the Battle School culture.

 

There were only two places where the same character was apparently doubled, one in each line. That might just be the result of one word ending with the same letter that began another, but Bean doubted it. Nothing would be left to chance in this message. So he wrote a little program that would take the doubled letters in one word and, beginning with "aa," show him what the surrounding letters might be to see if anything looked plausible to him. And he started with the doubled letters in the shorter line, because that pair was surrounded by another pair, in a 1221 pattern.

 

The obvious failures, like "xddx" and "pffp," took no time, but he had to investigate all the variants on "abba" and "adda" and "deed" and "effe" to see what they did to the message. Some were promising and he saved them for later exploration.

 

"Why is it in Greek now?" asked Carlotta.

 

She was looking over his shoulder again. He hadn't heard her get up and come over behind him.

 

"I converted the original message to Greek characters so that I wouldn't get distracted by trying to read meanings into letters I hadn't decoded yet. The ones I'm actually working on are in Roman letters."

 

At that moment, his program showed the letters "iggi."

 

"Piggies," said Sister Carlotta.

 

"Maybe, but it doesn't flag anything for me." He started cycling through the dictionary matches with "iggi," but none of them did any better than "piggies" had.

 

"Does it have to be a word?" said Carlotta.

 

"Well, if it's a number, then this is a dead end," said Bean.

 

"No, I mean, why not a name?"

 

Bean saw it at once. "How blind can I be." He plugged the letters w and n to the positions before and after "iggi" and then spread the results through the whole message, making the program show hyphens for the undeciphered letters. The two lines now read

 

---n--------g---n---n---n---i----n --- g

            -n-n-wiggin--

 

"That doesn't look right for Common," said Carlotta. "There should be a lot more i's than that."

 

"I'm assuming that the message deliberately leaves out letters as much as possible, especially vowels, so it won't look like Common."

 

"So how will you know when you've decoded it?"

 

"When it makes sense."

 

"It's bedtime. I know, you're not sleeping till you've solved it." He barely noticed that she moved away from behind him. He was busy trying the other doubled letter. This time he had a more complicated job, because the letters before and after the double pair were different. It meant far more combinations to try, and being able to eliminate g, i, n, and w didn't speed up the process all that much.

 

Again, there were quite a few readings that he saved-more than before-but nothing rang a bell until he got to 'Jees." The word that Ender's companions in the final battle used for themselves. "Jeesh." Could it be? It was definitely a word that might be used as a flag.

 

h--n--jeesh-g-_en--s-ns--n ---- si --- n --- s--g

-n-n-wiggin --

 

If those twenty-seven letters were right, then he had only thirty left to solve. He rubbed his eyes, sighed, and set to work.

 

It was noon when the smell of oranges woke him. Sister Carlotta was peeling a mexerica orange. "People are eating these things on the street and spitting the pulp on the sidewalk. You can't chew it up enough to swallow it. But the juice is the best orange you'll ever taste in your life."

 

Bean got out of bed and took the segment she offered him. She was right. She handed him a bowl to spit the pulp into. "Good breakfast," said Bean.

 

"Lunch," she said. She held up a paper. "I take it you consider this to be a solution?"

 

It was what he had printed out before going to bed.

 

hlpndrjeeshtgdrenrusbnstun6rmysiz4Ontrysbtg

bnfndwigginptr

 

"Oh," said Bean. "I didn't print out the one with the word breaks." Putting another mexerica segment in his mouth, Bean padded on bare feet to the computer, called up the right file, and printed it. He brought it back, handed it to Carlotta, spat out pulp, and took his own mexerica from her shopping bag and began peeling.

 

"Bean," she said. "I'm a normal mortal. I get 'help' and is this 'Ender'?"

 

Bean took the paper from her.

 

hlp ndr jeesh tgdr en rus bns tun 6 rmy siz 40

n try sbtg

bn fnd wiggin ptr

 

"The vowels are left out as much as possible, and there are other misspellings. But what the first line says is, 'Help. Ender's jeesh is together in Russia-' "

 

"T-g-d-r is 'together'? And 'in' is spelled like French?"

 

"Exactly," said Bean. "I understood it and it doesn't look like Common." He went on interpreting. "The next part was confusing for a long time, until I realized that the 6 and the 40 were numbers. I got almost all the other letters before I realized that. The thing is, the numbers matter, but there's no way to guess them from context. So the next few words are designed to give a context to the numbers. It says 'Bean's toon was 6'-that's because Ender divided Dragon Army into five toons instead of the normal four, but then he gave me a sort of ad hoc toon, and if you added it to the count, it was number six.

 

Only who would know that except for somebody from Battle School? So only somebody like me would get the number. Same thing with the next one. 'Army size 40.' Everyone in Battle School knew that there were forty soldiers in every army. Unless you counted the commander, in which case it was forty-one, but see, it doesn't matter, because that digit is trivial."

 

"How do you know that?"

 

"Because the next letter is n. For 'north.' The message is telling their location. They know they're in Russia. And because they can apparently see the sun or at least shadows on the wall, and they know the date, they can calculate their latitude, more or less. Six-four-zero north. Sixty-four north."

 

"Unless it means something else."

 

"No, the message is meant to be obvious."

 

"To you."

 

"Yes, to me. The rest of that line is 'try sabotage.' I think that means that they're trying to screw up whatever the Russians are trying to make them do. So they're pretending to go along but really gumming up the works. Very smart to get that on record. The fact that Graff was court-martialed after winning the Formic War suggests that they'd better get it on record that they were not collaborating with the enemy-in case the other side wins."

 

"But Russia isn't at war with anybody."

 

"The Polemarch was Russian, and Warsaw Pact troops were at the heart of his side in the League War. You've got to remember, Russia was the country that was most on the make before the Formics came and started tearing up real estate and forced humanity to unite under the Hegemon and create the International Fleet. They have always felt cheated out of their destiny, and now that the Formics are gone, it makes sense that they'd be eager to get back on the fast track. They don't think of themselves as bad guys, they think of themselves as the only people with the will and the resources to unite the world for real, permanently. They think they're doing a good thing."

 

"People always do."

 

"Not always. But yes, to wage war you have to be able to sell your own people on the idea that either you're fighting in self-defense, or you're fighting because you deserve to win, or you're fighting in order to save other people. The Russian people respond to an altruistic sales pitch as easily as anybody else."

 

"So what about the second line?"

 

" 'Bean find Wiggin Peter.' They're suggesting that I look for Ender's older brother. He didn't go off on the colony ship with Ender and Valentine. And he's been a player, under the net identity of Locke. And I suppose he's running Demosthenes, too, now that. Valentine is gone."

 

"You knew about that?"

 

"I knew a lot of things," said Bean. "But the main thing is that they're right. Achilles is hunting for me and he's hunting for you, and he's got all the rest of Ender's jeesh, but he doesn't even know Ender's brother exists and he wouldn't care if he did. But you know and I know that Peter Wiggin would have been in Battle School except for a little character flaw. And for all we know, that character flaw may be exactly what he needs to be a good match against Achilles."

 

"Or it may be exactly the flaw that makes it so a victory for Peter is no better than a victory for Achilles, in terms of the amount of suffering in the world."

 

"Well, we won't know until we find him, will we?" said Bean.

 

"To find him, Bean, you'd have to reveal who you are."

 

"Yes," said Bean. "Isn't this exciting?" He did an exaggerated wriggle like a little kid being taken to the zoo.

 

"This is your life you're playing with."

 

"You're the one who wanted me to find a cause."

 

"Peter Wiggin isn't a cause, he's dangerous. You haven't heard what Graff had to say about him."

 

"On the contrary," said Bean. "How do you think I learned about him?"

 

"But he might be no better than Achilles!"

 

"I know of several ways already that he's better than Achilles. First, he's not trying to kill us. Second, he's already got a huge network of contacts with people all over the world, some of whom know he's as young as he is but most of whom have no idea. Third, he's ambitious just like Achilles is, only Achilles has already assembled almost all of the children who were tagged as the most brilliant military commanders in the world, while Peter Wiggin will have only one. Me. Do you think he's dumb enough not to use me?"

 

"Use you. That's the operative word here, Bean."

 

"Well, aren't you being used in your cause?"

 

"By God, not by Peter Wiggin."

 

"I'll bet Peter Wiggin sends a lot clearer messages than God does," said Bean. "And if I don't like what he's doing, I can always quit."

 

"With someone like Peter, you can't always quit."

 

"He can't make me think of what I don't want to think about. Unless he's a remarkably stupid genius, he'll know that."

 

"I wonder if Achilles knows that, as he's trying to squeeze brilliance out of the other children."

 

"Exactly. Between Peter Wiggin and Achilles, what are the odds that Wiggin could be worse?"

 

"Oh, it's hard to imagine how that could be."

 

"So let's start thinking of a way to contact Locke without giving away our identity and our location."

 

"I'm going to need more mexerica oranges before we leave Brasil," said Carlotta.

 

Only then did he notice that the two of them had already blown through the whole bagful. "Me too," he said.

 

As she left, the empty bag in hand, she paused at the door. "You did very well with that message, Julian Delphiki."

 

"Thanks, Grandma Carlotta."

 

She left smiling.

 

Bean held up the message and scanned it again. The only part of the message that he hadn't fully interpreted for her was the last word. He didn't think "ptr" meant Peter. That would have been redundant. "Wiggin" was enough to identify him. No, the "ptr" at the end was a signature. This message was from Petra. She could have tried to write directly to Peter Wiggin. But she had written to Bean, coding it in a way that Peter would never have understood.

 

She's relying on me.

 

Bean knew how the others in Ender's jeesh had resented him. Not a lot, but a little. When they were all in Command School on Eros, before Ender arrived, the military had made Bean the acting com mander in all their test battles, even though he was the youngest of them all, even younger than Ender. He knew he'd done a good job, and won their respect. But they never liked taking orders from him and were undisguisedly happy when Ender arrived and Bean was dropped back to be one of them. Nobody ever said, "Good job, Bean," or "Hey, you did OK." Except Petra.

 

She had done for him on Eros the same thing that Nikolai had done for him in Battle School-provided him with a kind word now and then. He was sure that neither Nikolai nor Petra ever realized how important their casual generosity had been to him. But he remembered that when he needed a friend, the two of them had been there for him. Nikolai had turned out, by the workings of notentirely-coincidental fate, to be his brother. Did that make Petra his sister?

 

It was Petra who reached out to him now. She trusted him to recognize the message, decode it, and act on it.

 

There were files in the Battle School record system that said that Bean was not human, and he knew that Graff at least sometimes felt that way because he had overheard those words from his own lips. He knew that Carlotta loved him but she loved Jesus more and anyway, she was old and thought of him as a child. He could rely on her, but she did not rely on him.

 

In his Earthside life before Battle School, the only friend Bean had ever had was a girl named Poke, and Achilles had murdered her long before. Murdered her only moments after Bean left her, and moments before he realized his mistake and rushed back to warn her and instead found her body floating in the Rhine. She died trying to save Bean, and she died because Bean couldn't be relied upon to take as much care to save her.

 

Petra's message meant that maybe he had another friend who needed him after all. And this time, he would not turn his back. This time it was his turn to save his friend, or die trying. How's that for a cause, Sister Carlotta?

 

 

GOING PUBLIC

 

To:Demosthenes%Tecumseh@freeamerica.org, Locke%erasmus@polnet.gov

 

From: dontbother@firewall.set Re: Achilles heel

 

Dear Peter Wiggin,

 

A message smuggled to me from the kidnapped children confirms they are (or were, at the time of sending) together, in Russia near the sixty-fourth parallel, doing their best to sabotage those trying to exploit their military talents. Since they will doubtless be separated and moved frequently, the exact location is unimportant, and I am quite sure you already knew Russia was the only country with both the ambition and the means to acquire all the members of Ender's jeesh.

 

I'm sure you recognize the impossibility of releasing these children through military intervention-at the slightest sign of a plausible effort to extract them, they will be killed in order to deprive an enemy of such assets. But it might be possible to persuade either the Russian government or some if not all of those holding the individual children that releasing them is in Russia's best interest. This might be accomplished by exposing the individual who is almost certainly behind this audacious action, and your two identities are uniquely situated to accuse him in a way that will be taken seriously.

 

Therefore I suggest that you do a bit of research into a break-in at a highsecurity institution for the criminally insane in Belgium during the League War. Three guards were killed and the inmates were released. All but one were recaptured quickly. The one who got away was once a student at Battle School. He is behind the kidnapping. When it is revealed that this psychopath has control of these children, it will cause grave misgivings inside the Russian command system. It will also give them a scapegoat if they decide to return the children.

 

Don't bother trying to trace this email identity. It already never existed. If you can't figure out who I am and how to contact me from the research you're about to do, then we don't have much to talk about anyway.

 

Peter's heart sank when he opened the letter to Demosthenes and saw that it had also been sent to Locke. The salutation "Dear Peter Wiggin" only confirmed it-someone besides the office of the Polemarch had broken his identities. He expected the worst-some kind of blackmail or a demand that he support this or that cause.

 

To his surprise, the message was nothing of the kind. It came from someone who claimed to have received a message from the kidnapped kids-and gave him a tantalizing path to follow. Of course he immediately searched the news archives and found the break-in at a high-security mental hospital near Genk. Finding the name of the inmate who got away was much harder, requiring that, as Demosthenes, he ask for help from a law enforcement contact in Germany, and then, as Locke, for additional help from a friend in the Anti-Sabotage Committee in the Office of the Hegemon.

 

It yielded a name that made Peter laugh, since it was in the subject line of the email that prompted this search. Achilles, pronounced "ahSHEEL" in the French manner. An orphan rescued from the streets of Rotterdam by, of all things, a Catholic nun working for the procurement section of the Battle School. He was given surgery to correct a crippled leg, then taken up to Battle School, where he lasted only a few days before being exposed as a serial killer by some of the other students, though in fact he had not killed anyone in the Battle School.

 

The list of his victims was interesting. He had a pattern of killing anyone who had ever made him feel or seem helpless or vulnerable. Including the doctor who had repaired his leg. Apparently he wasn't much for gratitude.

 

Putting together the information, Peter could see that his unknown correspondent was right. If in fact this sicko was running the operation that was using these kids for military planning, it was almost certain that the Russian officers working with him did not know his criminal record. Whatever agency liberated Achilles from the mental hospital would not have shared that information with the military who were expected to work with him. There would be outrage that would be heard at the highest levels of the Russian government.

 

And even if the government did not act to get rid of Achilles and release the kids, the Russian Army jealously guarded its independence from the rest of the government, especially the intelligence-and-dirty-jobs agencies. There was a good chance that some of these children might "escape" before the government acted-indeed, such unauthorized actions might force the government to make it official and pretend that the "early releases" had been authorized.

 

It was always possible, of course, that Achilles would kill one or more of the kids as soon as he was exposed. At least Peter would not have to face those particular children in battle. And now that he knew something about Achilles, Peter was in a much better position to face him in a head-to-head struggle. Achilles killed with his own hands. Since that was a very stupid thing to do, and Achilles did not test stupid, it had to be an irresistible compulsion. People with irresistible compulsions could be terrifying enemies-but they could also be beaten.

 

For the first time in weeks, Peter felt a glimmer of hope. This was how his work as Locke and Demosthenes paid off-people with certain kinds of secret information that they wanted to make public found ways to hand it to Peter without his even having to ask for it. Much of his power came from this disorganized network of informants. It never bothered his pride that he was being "used" by this anonymous correspondent. As far as Peter was concerned, they were using each other. And besides, Peter had earned the right to get such helpful gifts.

 

Still, Peter always looked gift horses in the mouth. As either Locke or Demosthenes, he emailed friends and contacts in various government agencies, trying to get confirmation of various aspects of the story he was preparing to write. Could the break-in at the mental institution have been carried out by Russian agents? Did satellite surveillance show any kind of activity near the sixty-fourth parallel that might correspond with the arrival or departure of the ten kidnapped kids? Was anything known about the whereabouts of Achilles that would contradict the idea of his being in control of the whole kidnap operation?

 

It took a couple of days to get the story right. He tried it first as a column by Demosthenes, but he soon realized that since Demosthenes was constantly putting out warnings about Russian plots, he might not be taken very seriously. It had to be Locke who published this. And that would be dangerous, because up to now Locke had been scrupulous about not seeming to take sides against Russia. That would now make it more likely that his exposure of Achilles would be taken seriously-but it ran a grave risk of costing Locke some of his best contacts in Russia. No matter how much a Russian might despise what his government was doing, the devotion to Mother Russia ran deep. There was a line you couldn't cross. For more than a few of his contacts there, publishing this piece would cross that line.

 

Until he hit upon the obvious solution. Before submitting the piece to International Aspects, he would send copies to his Russian contacts to give a heads-up on what was coming. Of course the expose would fly through the Russian military. It was possible that the repercussions would begin even before his column officially appeared. And his contacts would know he wasn't trying to hurt Russia-he was giving them a chance to clean house, or at least put a spin on the story before it ran.

 

It wasn't a long story, but it named names and opened doors that other reporters could follow up on. And they would follow up. From the first paragraph, it was dynamite.

 

The mastermind behind the kidnapping of Ender's "jeesh" is a serial killer named Achilles. He was taken from a mental institution during the League War in order to bring his dark genius to bear on Russian military strategy. He has repeatedly murdered with his own hands, and now ten brilliant children who once saved the world are completely at his mercy. What were the Russians thinking when they gave power to this psychopath? Or was Achilles' bloody record concealed even from them?

 

There it was-in the first paragraph, right along with the accusation, Locke was generously providing the spin that would allow the Russian government and military to extricate themselves from this mess.

 

It took twenty minutes to send the individual messages to all his Russian contacts. In each message, he warned them that they had only about six hours before he had to turn in his column to the editor at International Aspects. IA's fact-checkers would add another hour or two to the delay, but they would find complete confirmation of

 

Peter pushed SEND, SEND, SEND.

 

Then he settled down to pore over the data to figure out how it revealed to him the identity of his correspondent. Another mental patient? Hardly likely-they were all brought back into confinement. An employee of the mental hospital? Impossible for someone like that to find out who was behind Locke and Demosthenes. Someone in law enforcement? More likely-but few names of investigators were offered in the news stories. Besides, how could he know which of the investigators had tipped him off? No, his correspondent had promised, in effect, a unique solution. Something in the data would tell him exactly who his informant was, and exactly how to reach him. Emailing investigators indiscriminately would serve only to risk exposing Peter with no guarantee that any of the people he contacted would be the right one.

 

The one thing that did not happen as he searched for his correspondent's identity was any kind of response from any of his Russian friends. If the story had been wrong, or if the Russian military had already known about Achilles' history and wanted to cover it up, he would have been getting constant emails urging him not to run the story, then demanding, and finally threatening him. So the fact that no one wrote him at all served as all the confirmation he needed from the Russian end.

 

As Demosthenes, he was anti-Russian. As Locke, he was reasonable and fair to all nations. As Peter, though, he was envious of the Russian sense of national identity, the cohesiveness of Russians when they felt their country was in danger. If Americans had ever had such powerful bonds, they had expired long before Peter was born. To be Russian was the most powerful part of a person's identity. To be American was about as important as being a Rotarian-very important if you were elected to high office, but barely noticeable in most citizens' sense of who they were. That was why Peter never planned his future with America in mind. Americans expected to get their way, but they had no passion for anything. Demosthenes could stir up anger and resentment, but it amounted to spitefulness, not purpose. Peter would have to root himself elsewhere. Too bad Russia wasn't available to him. It was a nation that had a vast will to greatness, coupled with the most extraordinary run of stupid leadership in history, with the possible exception of the kings of Spain. And Achilles had got there first.

 

Six hours after sending the article to his Russian contacts, he pushed SEND once more, submitting it to his editor. As he expected, three minutes later he got a response.

 

You're sure?

 

To which Peter replied, "Check it. My sources confirm."

 

Then he went to bed.

 

And woke up almost before he had gone to sleep. He couldn't have closed his book, and then his eyes, for more than a couple of minutes before he realized that he had been looking in the wrong direction for his informant. It wasn't one of the investigators who tipped him off. It was someone connected to the I.F. at the highest level, someone who knew that Peter Wiggin was Locke and Demosthenes. But not Graff or Chamrajnagar-they would not have left hints about who they really were. Someone else, someone in whom they confided, perhaps.

 

But no one from the I.F. had turned up in the information about Achilles' escape. Except for the nun who found Achilles in the first place.

 

He reread the message. Could this have come from a nun? Possibly, but why would she be sending the information so anonymously? And why would the kidnapped children smuggle a message to her?

 

Had she recruited one of them?

 

Peter got out of bed and padded to his desk, where he called up the information on all the kidnapped children. Every one of them came to Battle School through the normal testing process; none had been found by the nun, and so none of them would have any reason to smuggle a message to her.

 

What other connection could there be? Achilles was an orphan on the streets of Rotterdam when Sister Carlotta identified him as having military talent-he couldn't have had any family connections. Unless he was like that Greek kid from Ender's jeesh who was killed in a missile attack a few weeks ago, the supposed orphan whose real family was identified while he was in Battle School.

 

Orphan. Killed in a missile attack. What was his name? Julian Delphiki. Called Bean. A name he picked up when he was an orphan ... where? Rotterdam. Just like Achilles.

 

It was not a stretch to imagine that Sister Carlotta found both Bean and Achilles. Bean was one of Ender's companions on Eros during the last battle. He was the only one who, instead of being kidnapped, had been killed. Everyone assumed it was because he was so heavily protected by the Greek military that the would-be kidnappers gave up and settled for keeping rival powers from using him. But what if there was never any intention to kidnap him, because Achilles already knew him and, more to the point, Bean knew too much about Achilles?

 

And what if Bean was not dead at all? What if he was living in hiding, protected by the widespread belief that he was dead? It was absolutely believable that the captive kids would choose him to receive their smuggled message, since he was the only one of their group, besides Ender himself, who wasn't in captivity with them. And who else would have such a powerful motive to work to get them out, along with the proven mental ability to think of a strategy like the one the informant had laid out in his letter?

 

A house of cards, that's what he was building, one leap after another-but each intuitive jump felt absolutely right. That letter was written by Bean. Julian Delphiki. And how would Peter contact him? Bean could be anywhere, and there was no hope of contacting him since anybody who knew he was alive would be all the more certain to pretend that he was dead and refuse to accept a message for him.

 

Again, the solution should be obvious from the data, and it was. Sister Carlotta.

 

Peter had a contact in the Vatican-a sparring partner in the wars of ideas that flared up now and then among those who frequented the discussions of international relations on the nets. It was already morning in Rome, though barely. But if anyone was at his desk early in Italy, it would be a hardworking monk attached to the Vatican foreignaffairs office.

 

Sure enough, an answer came back within fifteen minutes.

 

Sister Carlotta's location is protected. Messages can be forwarded. I will not read what you send via me. (You can't work here if you don't know how to keep your eyes closed. )

 

Peter composed his message to Bean and sent it-to Sister Carlotta. If anyone knew how to reach Julian Delphiki in hiding, it would be the nun who had first found him. It was the only possible solution to the challenge his informant had given him.

 

Finally he went back to bed, knowing that he wouldn't sleep long-he'd undoubtedly keep waking through the night and checking the nets to see the reaction to his column.

 

What if no one cared? What if nothing happened? What if he had fatally compromised the Locke persona, and for no gain?

 

As he lay in bed, pretending to himself that he might sleep, he could hear his parents snoring in their room across the hall. It was both strange and comforting to hear them. Strange that he could be worrying about whether something he had written might not cause an international incident, and yet he was still living in his parents' house, their only child left at home. Comforting because it was a sound he had known since infancy, that comforting assurance that they were alive, they were close by, and the fact that he could hear them meant that when monsters leapt from the dark comers of the room, they would hear him screaming.

 

The monsters had taken on different faces over the years, and hid in comers of rooms far from his own, but that noise from his parents' bedroom was proof that the world had not ended yet.

 

Peter wasn't sure why, but he knew that the letter he had just sent to Julian Delphiki, via Sister Carlotta, via his friend in the Vatican, would put an end to his long idyll, playing at world affairs while having his mother do his laundry. He was finally putting himself into play, not as the cool and distant commentator Locke or the hotblooded demagogue Demosthenes, both of them electronic constructs, but as Peter Wiggin, a young man of flesh and blood, who could be caught, who could be harmed, who could be killed.

 

If anything should have kept him awake, it was that thought. But instead he felt relieved. Relaxed. The long waiting was almost over. He fell asleep and did not wake until his mother called him to breakfast. His father was reading a newsprint at breakfast. "What's the headline, Dad?" asked Peter.

 

"They're saying that the Russians kidnapped those kids. And put them under the control of a known murderer. Hard to believe, but they seem to know all about this Achilles guy. Got busted out of a mental hospital in Belgium. Crazy world we live in. Could have been Ender." He shook his head.

 

Peter could see how his mother froze for just a moment at the mention of Ender's name. Yes, yes, Mother, I know he's the child of your heart and you grieve every time you hear his name. And you ache for your beloved daughter Valentine who has left Earth and will never return, not in your lifetime. But you still have your firstborn with you, your brilliant and good-looking son Peter, who is bound to produce brilliant and beautiful grandchildren for you someday, along with a few other things like, oh, who knows, maybe bringing peace to Earth by unifying it under one government? Will that console you just a little bit?

 

Not likely.

 

"The killer's name is ... Achilles?"

 

"No last name. Like some kind of pop singer or something."

 

Peter cringed inside. Not because of what his father had said, but because Peter had come this close to correcting his father's pronunciation of "Achilles." Since Peter couldn't be sure that any of the rags mentioned the French pronunciation of Achilles' name, how would he explain knowing the correct pronunciation to Father?

 

"Has Russia denied it, of course?" asked Peter.

 

Father scanned the newsprint again. "Nothing about it in this story," he said.

 

"Cool," said Peter. "Maybe that means it's true."

 

"If it was true," said Father, "they would deny it. That's the way Russians are."

 

As if Father knew anything at all about the "way Russians are."

 

Got to move out, thought Peter, and live on my own. I'm in college. I'm trying to spring ten prisoners from custody a third of the way around the world. Maybe I should use some of the money I've been earning as a columnist to pay rent. Maybe I should do it right away, so that if Achilles finds out who I am and comes to kill me, I won't bring danger down on my family.

 

Only Peter knew even as he formed this thought that there was another, darker thought hidden deep inside himself: Maybe if I get out of here, they'll blow up the house when I'm not there, the way they must have done with Julian Delphiki. Then they'll think I'm dead and I'll be safe for a while.

 

No, I don't wish for my parents to die! What kind of monster would wish for that? I don't want that.

 

But one thing Peter never did was lie to himself, or at least not for long. He didn't wish for his parents to die, certainly not violently in an attack aimed at him. But he knew that if it did happen, he'd prefer not to be with them at the time. Better, of course, if no one was home. But ... me first.

 

Ah yes. That was what Valentine hated about him. Peter had almost forgotten. That's why Ender was the son that everyone loved. Sure, Ender wiped out a whole species of aliens, not to mention offing a kid in a bathroom in Battle School. But he wasn't selfish like Peter.

 

"You aren't eating, Peter," said Mother.

 

"Sorry," said Peter. "I'm getting some test results back today, and I was brooding I guess."

 

"What subject?" asked Mother.

 

"World history," said Peter.

 

"Isn't it strange to realize that when they write history books in the future, your brother's name will always be mentioned?" said Mother.

 

"Not strange," said Peter. "That's just one of the perks you get when you save the world."

 

Behind his jocularity, though, he made a much grimmer promise to his mother. Before you die, Mother, you'll see that while Ender's name shows up in a chapter or two, it will be impossible to discuss this century or the next without mentioning my name on almost every page.

 

"Got to run," said Father. "Good luck with the test."

 

"Already took the test, Dad. I'm just getting the grade today."

 

"That's what I meant. Good luck on the grade."

 

"Thanks," said Peter.

 

He went back to eating while Mother walked Father to the door so they could kiss good-bye.

 

I'll have that someday, thought Peter. Someone who'll kiss me good-bye at the door. Or maybe just someone to put a blindfold over my head before they shoot me. Depending on how things turn out.

 

 

BREAD VAN

 

 

TO: Demosthenes%Tecumseh@freeamerica.org

From: unready%cincinnatus@anon.set

Re: satrep

 

Satellite reports from date Delphiki family killed: Nine vehicles simultaneous departure from northern Russia location, 64 latitude. Encrypted destination list attached. Genuine dispersal? Decoy? What's our best strategy, my friend? Eliminate or rescue? Are they children or weapons of mass destruction? Hard to know. Why did that bastard Locke get Ender Wiggin sent away? We could use that boy now I think. As for why only nine, not ten vehicles: maybe one is dead or sick. Maybe one has turned. Maybe two have turned and were sent together. All guesswork. I only see raw satdat, not intelnetcom. reports. If you have other sources on that, feed some back to me?

 

Custer

 

Petra knew that loneliness was the tool they were using against her. Don't let the girl talk to any human at all, then when one shows up she'll be so grateful she'll blurt confessions, she'll believe lies, she'll make friends with her worst enemy.

 

Weird how you can know exactly what the enemy is doing to you and it still works. Like a play her parents took her to her second week back home after the war. It had a four-year-old girl on the stage asking her mother why her father wasn't home yet. The mother is trying to find a way to tell her that the father was killed by an Azerbaijani terrorist bomb-a secondary bomb that went off to kill people trying to rescue survivors of the first, smaller blast. Her father died as a hero, trying to save a child trapped in the wreckage even after the police shouted at him to stay away, there was probably going to be a second blast. The mother finally tells the child.

 

The little girl stamps her foot angrily and says, "He's my papa! Not that little boy's papa!" And the mother says, "That little boy's mama and papa weren't there to help him. Your father did what he hoped somebody else would do for you, if he couldn't be there for you." And the little girl starts to cry and says, "Now he isn't ever going to be there for me. And I don't want somebody else. I want my papa.

 

Petra sat there watching this play, knowing exactly how cynical it was. Use a child, play on the yearning for family, tie it to nobility and heroism, make the villains the ancestral enemy, and make the child say childishly innocent things while crying. A computer could have written it. But it still worked. Petra cried like a baby, just like the rest of the audience.

 

That's what isolation was doing to her and she knew it. Whatever they were hoping for, it would probably work. Because human beings are just machines, Petra knew that, machines that do what you want them to do, if you only know the levers to pull. And no matter how complex people might seem, if you just cut them off from the network of people who give shape to their personality, the communities that form their identity, they'll be reduced to that set of levers. Doesn't matter how hard they resist, or how well they know they're being manipulated. Eventually, if you take the time, you can play them like a piano, every note right where you expect it. Even me, thought Petra.

 

All alone, day after day. Working on the computer, getting assignments by mail from people who gave no hint of personality. Sending messages to the others in Ender's jeesh, but knowing that their letters, too, were being censored of all personal references. Just data getting transferred back and forth. No netsearches now. She had to file her request and wait for an answer filtered through the people who controlled her. All alone.

 

She tried sleeping too much, but apparently they drugged her water-they got her so hopped up she couldn't sleep at all. So she stopped trying to play passive resistance games. Just went along, becoming the machine they wanted her to be, pretending to herself that by only pretending to be a machine, she wouldn't actually become one, but knowing at the same time that whatever people pretend to be, they become.

 

And then comes the day when the door opens and somebody walks in.

 

Vlad.

 

He was from Dragon Army. Younger than Petra, and a good guy, but she didn't know him all that well. The bond between them, though, was a big one: Vlad was the only other kid in Ender's jeesh who broke the way Petra did, had to be pulled out of the battles for a day. Everybody was kind to them but they both knew-it made them the weak ones. Objects of pity. They all got the same medals and commendations, but Petra knew that their medals meant less than the others, their commendations were empty, because they were the ones who hadn't cut it while the others did. Not that Petra had ever talked about it with Vlad. She just knew that he knew the same things she knew, because he had been down the same long dark tunnel.

 

And here he was.

 

"Ho, Petra," he said.

 

"Ho, Vlad," she answered. She liked hearing her own voice. It still worked. Liked hearing his, too.

 

"I guess I'm the new instrument of torture they're using on you," said Vlad.

 

He said it with a smile. That told Petra that he wanted it to seem like a joke. Which told her that it wasn't really a joke at all.

 

"Really?" she said. "Traditionally, you're simply supposed to kiss me and let someone else do the torture."

 

"It's not really torture. It's the way out."

 

"Out of what?"

 

"Out of prison. It's not what you think, Petra. The hegemony is breaking up, there's going to be war. The question is whether it drives the world down into chaos or leads to one nation ruling all the others. And if it's one nation, which nation should it be?"

 

"Let me guess. Paraguay."

 

"Close," said Vlad. He grinned. "I know, it's easier for me. I'm from Belarus, we make a big deal about being a separate country, but in our hearts, we don't mind the thought of Russia being the country that comes out on top. Nobody outside of Belarus gives a lobster tit about how we're not really Russians. So sure, I wasn't hard to talk into it. And you're Armenian, and they spent a lot of years being oppressed by Russia in the old Communist days. But Petra, just how Armenian are you? What's really good for Armenia anyway? That's what I'm supposed to say to you, anyway. To get you to see that Armenia benefits if Russia comes out on top. No more sabotage. Really help us get ready for the real war. You cooperate, and Armenia gets a special place in the new order. You get to bring in your whole country. That's not nothing, Petra. And if you don't help, that doesn't do a thing for anybody. Doesn't help you. Doesn't help Armenia. Nobody ever knows what a hero you were."

 

"Sounds like a death threat."

 

"Sounds like a threat of loneliness and obscurity. You weren't born to be nobody, Petra. You were born to shine. This is a chance to be a hero again. I know you think you don't care, but come on, admit it-it was great being Ender's jeesh."

 

"And now we're what's-his-name's jeesh. He'll really share the glory with us," said Petra.

 

"Why not? He's still the boss, he doesn't mind having heroes serve under him."

 

"Vlad, he'll make sure nobody knows any of us existed, and he'll kill us when he's done with us." She hadn't meant to speak so honestly. She knew it would get back to Achilles. She knew it would guarantee that her prophecy would come true. But there it was-the lever worked. She was so grateful to have a friend there, even one who had obviously been coopted, that she couldn't help but blurt.

 

"Well, Petra, what can I say? I told them, you're the tough one. I told you what's on offer. Think about it. There's no hurry. You've got plenty of time to decide."

 

"You're going?"

 

"That's the rule," said Vlad. "You say no, I go. Sorry."

 

He got up.

 

She watched him go out the door. She wanted to say something clever and brave. She wanted some name to call him to make him feel bad for throwing in his lot with Achilles. But she knew that anything she said would be used against her one way or another. Anything she said would reveal another lever to the lever-pullers. What she'd already said was bad enough.

 

So she kept her silence and watched the door close and lay there on her bed until her computer beeped and she went to it and there was another assignment and she went to work and solved it and sabotaged it just like usual and thought, This is going rather well after all, I didn't break or anything.

 

And then she went to bed and cried herself to sleep. For a few minutes, though, just before she slept, she felt that Vlad was her truest, dearest friend and she would have done anything for him, just to have him back in the room with her.

 

Then that feeling passed and she had one last fleeting thought: If they were really all that smart, they would have known that I'd feel like that, right that moment; and Vlad would have come in and I would have leapt from my bed and thrown my arms around him and told him yes, I'll do it, I'll work with you, thank you for coming to me like that, Vlad, thank you.

 

Only they missed their chance.

 

As Ender had once said, most victories came from instantly exploiting your enemy's stupid mistakes, and not from any particular brilliance in your own plan. Achilles was very clever. But not perfect. Not allknowing. He may not win. I may even get out of here without dying.

 

Peaceful at last, she fell asleep.

 

They woke her in darkness.

 

"Get up."

 

No greeting. She couldn't see who it was. She could hear footsteps outside her door. Boots. Soldiers?

 

She remembered talking to Vlad. Rejecting his offer. He said there was no hurry; she had plenty of time to decide. But here they were, rousting her in the middle of the night. To do what?

 

Nobody was laying a hand on her. She dressed in darkness-they didn't hurry her. If this was supposed to be some sort of torture session or interrogation they wouldn't wait for her to dress, they'd make sure she was as uncomfortable, as off-balance as possible.

 

She didn't want to ask questions, because that would seem weak. But then, not asking questions was passive.

 

"Where are we going now?"

 

No answer. That was a bad sign. Or was it? All she knew about these things was from the few fictional war vids she'd seen in Battle School and a few spy movies in Armenia. None of it ever seemed believable to her, yet here she was in a real spy-movie situation and her only source of information about what to expect was those stupid fictional vids and movies. What happened to her superior reasoning ability? The talents that got her into Battle School in the first place? Apparently those only worked when you thought you were playing games in school. In the real world, fear sets in and you fall back on lame made-up stories written by people who had no idea how things like this really worked.

 

Except that the people doing these things to her had also seen the same dumb vids and movies, so how did she know they weren't modeling their actions and attitudes and even their words on what they'd seen in the movies? It's not like anybody had a training course on how to look tough and mean when you were rousting a pubescent girl in the middle of the night. She tried to imagine the instruction manual. If she is going to be transported to another location, tell her to hurry, she's keeping everyone waiting. If she's going to be tortured, make snide comments about how you hope she got plenty of rest. If she is going to be drugged, tell her that it won't hurt a bit, but laugh snidely so she'll think you're lying. If she is going to be executed, say nothing.

 

Oh, this is good, she told herself Talk yourself into fearing the absolute worst. Make sure you're as close to a state of panic as possible.

 

"I've got to pee," she said.

 

No answer.

 

"I can do it here. I can do it in my clothes. I can do it naked. I can do it in my clothes or naked wherever we're going. I can dribble it along the way. I can write my name in the snow. It's harder for girls, it requires a lot more athletic activity, but we can do it."

 

Still no answer.

 

"Or you can let me go to the bathroom."

 

"All right," he said.

 

"Which?"

 

"Bathroom." He walked out the door.

 

She followed him. Sure enough, there were soldiers out there. Ten of them. She stopped in front of one burly soldier and looked up at his face. "It's a good thing they brought you. If it had just been those other guys, I would have made my stand and fought to the death. But with you here, I had no choice but to give myself up. Good work, soldier."

 

She turned and walked on toward the bathroom. Wondering if she had seen just the faintest hint of a smile on that soldier's face. That wasn't in the movie script, was it? Oh, wait. The hero was supposed to have a smart mouth. She was right in character. Only now she understood that all those clever remarks that heroes made were designed to conceal their raw fear. Insouciant heroes aren't brave or relaxed. They're just trying not to embarrass themselves in the moments before they die.

 

She got to the bathroom and of course he came right in with her. But she'd been in Battle School and if she'd had a shy bladder she would have died of urea poisoning long ago. She dropped trou, sat on the john, and let go. The guy was out the door long before she was ready to flush.

 

There was a window. There were ceiling air ducts. But she was in the middle of nowhere and it's not like she had anywhere she could run. How did they do this in the vids? Oh, yeah. A friend would have already placed a weapon in some concealed location and the hero would find it, assemble it, and come out firing. That's what was wrong with this whole situation. No friends.

 

She flushed, rearranged her clothing, washed her hands, and walked back out to her friendly escorts.

 

They walked her outside to a convoy, of sorts. There were two black limousines and four escort vehicles. She saw two girls about her size and hair color get into the back of each of the limos. Petra, by contrast, was kept close to the building, under the eaves, until she was at the back of a bakery van. She climbed in. None of her guards came with her. There were two men in the back of the van, but they were in civilian clothes. "What am 1, bread?" she asked.

 

"We understand your need to feel that you're in control of the situation through humor," said one of the men.

 

"What, a psychiatrist? This is worse than torture. What happened to the Geneva convention?"

 

The psychiatrist smiled. "You're going home, Petra."

 

"To God? Or Armenia?"

 

"At this moment, neither. The situation is still ... flexible."

 

"I'd say it's flexible, if I'm going home to a place where I've never been before."

 

"Loyalties have not yet been sorted out. The branch of government that kidnapped you and the other children was acting without the knowledge of the army or the elected government-"

 

"Or so they say," said Petra.

 

"You understand my situation perfectly."

 

"So who are you loyal to?"

 

"Russia."

 

"Isn't that what they'll all say?"

 

"Not the ones who turned our foreign policy and military strategy over to a homicidal maniac child."

 

"Are those three equal accusations?" asked Petra. "Because I'm guilty of being a child. And homicide, too, in some people's opinion."

 

"Killing buggers was not homicide."

 

"I suppose it was insecticide." The psychiatrist looked baffled. Apparently he didn't know Common well enough to understand a wordplay that nine-year-olds thought was endlessly funny in Battle School.

 

The van began to move.

 

"Where are we going, since it's not home?"

 

"We're going into hiding to keep you out of the hands of this monster child until the breadth of this conspiracy can be discovered and the conspirators arrested."

 

"Or vice versa," said Petra.

 

The psychiatrist looked baffled again. But then he understood. "I suppose that's possible. But then, I'm not an important man. How would they know to look for me?"

 

"You're important enough that you have soldiers who obey you."

 

"They're not obeying me. We're all obeying someone else."

 

"And who is that?"

 

"If, through some misfortune, you were retaken by Achilles and his sponsors, you won't be able to answer that question."

 

"Besides, you'd all be dead before they could get to me, so your names wouldn't matter anyway, right?"

 

He looked at her searchingly. "You seem cynical about this. We are risking our lives to save you."

 

"You're risking my life, too."

 

He nodded slowly. "Do you want to return to your prison?"

 

"I just want you to be aware that being kidnapped a second time isn't exactly the same thing as being set free. You're so sure that you're smart enough and your people are loyal enough to bring this off. But if you're wrong, I could get killed. So yes, you're taking risks-but so am 1, and nobody asked me."

 

"I ask you now."

 

"Let me out of the van right here," said Petra. "I'll take my chances alone."

 

"No," said the psychiatrist.

 

"I see. So I am still a prisoner."

 

"You are in protective custody."

 

"But I am a certified strategic and tactical genius," said Petra, "and you're not. So why are you in charge of me?"

 

He had no answer.

 

"I'll tell you why," said Petra. "Because this is not about saving the little children who were stolen away by the evil wicked child. This is about saving Mother Russia a lot of embarrassment. So it isn't enough for me to be safe. You have to return me to Armenia under just the right circumstances, with just the right spin, that the faction of the Russian government that you serve will be exonerated of all guilt."

 

"We are not guilty."

 

"My point is not that you're lying about that, but that you regard that as a much higher priority than saving me. Because I assure you, riding along in this van, I fully expect to be retaken by Achilles and his ... what did you call them? Sponsors."

 

"And why do you suppose that this will happen?"

 

"Does it matter why?"

 

"You're the genius," said the psychiatrist. "Apparently you have already seen some flaw in our plan."

 

"The flaw is obvious. Far too many people know about it. The decoy limousines, and soldiers, the escorts. You're sure that not one of those people is a plant? Because if any of them is reporting to Achilles' sponsors, then they already know which vehicle really has me in it, and where it's going."

 

"They don't know where it's going."

 

"They do if the driver is the one who was planted by the other side."

 

"The driver doesn't know where we're going."

 

"He's just going around in circles?"

 

"He knows the first rendezvous point, that's all."

 

Petra shook her head. "I knew you were stupid, because you became a talktherapy shrink, which is like being a minister of a religion in which you get to be God."

 

The psychiatrist turned red. Petra liked that. He was stupid, and he didn't like hearing it, but he definitely needed to hear it because he clearly had built his whole life around the idea that he was smart, and now that he was playing with live ammunition, thinking he was smart was going to get him killed.

 

"I suppose you're right, that the driver does know where we're going first, even if he doesn't know where we plan to go from the first rendezvous." The psychiatrist shrugged elaborately. "But that can't be helped. You have to trust someone."

 

"And you decided to trust this driver because ... ?"

 

The psychiatrist looked away.

 

Petra looked at the other man. "You're talkative."

 

"I am think," said the man in halting Common, "you make Battle School teachers crazy with talk."

 

"Ah," said Petra. "You're the brains of the outfit."

 

The man looked puzzled, but also offended-he wasn't sure how he had been insulted, since he probably didn't know the word outfit, but he knew an insult had been intended.

 

"Petra Arkanian," said the psychiatrist, "since you're right that I don't know the driver all that well, tell me what I should have done. You have a better plan than trusting him?"

 

"Of course," said Petra. "You tell him the rendezvous point, plan with him very carefully how he'll drive there."

 

"I did that," said the psychiatrist.

 

"I know," said Petra. "Then, at the last minute, just as you're loading me into the van, you take the wheel and make him ride in one of the limousines. And then you drive to a different place entirely. Or better yet, you take me to the nearest town and turn me loose and let me take care of myself."

 

Again, the psychiatrist looked away. Petra was amused at how transparent his body language was. You'd think a shrink would know how to conceal his own tells.

 

"These people who kidnapped you," said the psychiatrist, "they are a tiny minority, even within the intelligence organizations they work for. They can't be everywhere."

 

Petra shook her head. "You're a Russian, you were taught Russian history, and you actually believe that the intelligence service can't be everywhere and hear everything? What, did you spend your entire childhood watching American vids?"

 

The psychiatrist had had enough. Putting on his finest medical airs, he delivered his ultimate put-down. "And you're a child who never learned decent respect. You may be brilliant in your native abilities, but that doesn't mean you understand a political situation you know nothing about."

 

"Ah," said Petra. "The you're-just-a-child, you-don't-have-asmuch-experience argument."

 

"Naming it doesn't mean it's untrue."

 

"I'm sure you understand the nuances of political speeches and maneuvers. But this is a military operation."

 

"It is a political operation," the psychiatrist corrected her. "No shooting."

 

Again, Petra was stunned at the man's ignorance. "Shooting is what happens when military operations fail to achieve their purposes through maneuver. Any operation that's intended to physically deprive the enemy of a valued asset is military."

 

"This operation is about freeing an ungrateful little girl and sending her home to her mama and papa," said the psychiatrist.

 

"You want me to be grateful? Open the door and let me out."

 

"The discussion is over," said the psychiatrist. "You can shut up

 

"Is that how you end your sessions with your patients?"

 

"I never said I was a psychiatrist," said the psychiatrist.

 

"Psychiatry was your education," said Petra. "And I know you had a practice for a while, because real people don't talk like shrinks when they're trying to reassure a frightened child. Just because you got involved in politics and changed careers doesn't mean you aren't still the kind of bonehead who goes to witch-doctor school and thinks he's a scientist."

 

The man's fury was barely contained. Petra enjoyed the momentary thrill of fear that ran through her. Would he slap her? Not likely. As a psychiatrist, he would probably fall back on his one limitless resource-professional arrogance.

 

"Laymen usually sneer at sciences they don't understand," said the psychiatrist.

 

"That," said Petra, "is precisely my point. When it comes to military operations, you're a complete novice. A layman. A bonehead. And I'm the expert. And you're too stupid to listen to me even now."

 

"Everything is going smoothly," said the psychiatrist. "And you'll feel very foolish and apologize as you thank me when you get on the plane to return to Armenia."

 

Petra only smiled tightly. "You didn't even look in the cab of this delivery van to make sure it was the same driver before we drove off."

 

"Someone else would have noticed if the driver changed," said the psychiatrist. But Petra could tell she had finally made him uneasy.

 

"Oh, yes, I forgot, we trust your fellow conspirators to see all and miss nothing, because, after all, they aren't psychiatrists."

 

"I'm a psychologist," he said.

 

"Ouch," said Petra. "That must have hurt, to admit you're only half-educated."

 

The psychologist turned away from her. What was the term the shrinks in Ground School used for that behavior-avoidance? Denial? She almost asked him, but decided to leave well enough alone.

 

And people thought she couldn't control her tongue.

 

They rode for a while in bristling silence.

 

But the things she said must have been working on him, nagging at him. Because after a while he got up and walked to the front and opened the door between the cargo area and the cab.

 

A deafening gunshot rang through the closed interior, and the psychiatrist fell back. Petra felt hot brains and stinging bits of bone spatter her face and arms. The man across from her started reaching for a weapon under his coat, but he was shot twice and slumped over dead without touching it.

 

The door from the cab opened the rest of the way. It was Achilles standing there, holding the gun in his hand. He said something.

 

"I can't hear you," said Petra. "I can't even hear my own voice."

 

Achilles shrugged. Speaking louder and mouthing the words carefully, he tried again. She refused to look at him.

 

"I'm not going to try to listen to you," she said, "while I still have his blood all over me."

 

Achilles set down the gun-far out of her reach-and pulled off his shirt. Barechested, he handed it to her, and when she refused to take it, he started wiping her face with it until she snatched it out of his hands and did the job herself.

 

The ringing in her ears was fading, too. "I'm surprised you didn't wait to kill them until you'd had a chance to tell them how smart you are," said Petra.

 

"I didn't need to," said Achilles. "You already told them how dumb they were."

 

"Oh, you were listening?"

 

"Of course the compartment back here was wired for sound," said Achilles. "And video."

 

"You didn't have to kill them," said Petra.

 

"That guy was going for his gun," said Achilles.

 

"Only after his friend was dead."

 

"Come now," said Achilles. "I thought Ender's whole method was the preemptive use of ultimate force. I only do what I learned from your hero."

 

"I'm surprised you did this one yourself," said Petra.

 

"What do you mean, 'this one'?" said Achilles.

 

"I assumed you were stopping the other rescues, too."

 

"You forget," said Achilles, "I've already had months to evaluate you. Why keep the others, when I can have the best?"

 

11 Are you flirting with me?" She said it with as much disdain as she could muster. Those words usually worked to shut down a boy who was being smug. But he only laughed.

 

"I don't flirt," he said.

 

"I forgot," said Petra. "You shoot first, and then flirting isn't necessary."

 

That got to him a little-made him pause a moment, brought the slightest hint of a quickening of breath. It occurred to Petra that her mouth was indeed going to get her killed. She had never actually seen someone get shot before, except in movies and vids. Just because she thought of herself as the protagonist of this biographical vid she was trapped in didn't mean she was safe. For all she knew, Achilles meant to kill her, too.

 

Or did he? Could he have really meant that she was the only one of the team he was keeping? Vlad would be so disappointed.

 

"How did you happen to choose me?" she asked, changing the

 

"Like I said, you're the best."

 

"That is such kuso," said Petra. "The exercises I did for you weren't any better than anyone else's."

 

"Oh, those battle plans, those were just to keep you busy while the real tests were going on. Or rather, to make you think you were keeping us busy."

 

"What was this real test, then, since I supposedly succeeded at it better than anyone else?"

 

"Your little dragon drawing," said Achilles.

 

She could feel the blood drain from her face. He saw it and laughed.

 

"Don't worry," said Achilles. "You won't be punished. That was the test, to see which of you would succeed in getting a message outside."

 

"And my prize is staying with you?" She said it with all the disgust she could put in her voice.

 

"Your prize," said Achilles, "is staying alive."

 

She felt sick at heart. "Even you wouldn't kill all the others, for no reason."

 

"If they're killed, there's a reason. If there's a reason, they'll be killed. No, we suspected that your dragon drawing would have some meaning to someone. But we couldn't find a code in it."

 

"There wasn't a code in it," said Petra.

 

"Oh yes there was," said Achilles. "You somehow encoded it in such a way that someone was able to recognize it and decode it. I know this because the news stories that suddenly appeared, triggering this whole crisis, had some specific information that was more or less correct. One of the messages you guys tried to send must have gotten through. So we went back over every email sent by every one of you, and the only thing that couldn't be accounted for was your dragon clip art."

 

"If you can read a message in that," said Petra, "then you're smarter than I am."

 

"On the contrary," said Achilles. "You're smarter than I am, at least about strategy and tactics-like evading the enemy while keeping in close communication with allies. Well, not all that close, since it took them so long to publish the information you sent."

 

"You bet on the wrong horse," said Petra. "It wasn't a message, and therefore however they got the news it must have come from one of the other guys."                 

           

Achilles only laughed. "You're a stubborn liar, aren't you?"        

 

"I'm not lying when I tell you that if I have to keep riding with these corpses in this compartment, I'm going to get sick."               .

 

He smiled. "Vomit away."                    

 

"So your pathology includes a weird need to hang around with the dead," said Petra. "You'd better be careful-you know where that leads. First you'll start dating them, and then one day you'll bring a dead person home to meet your mother and father. Oops. I forgot, you're an orphan."

                       

"So I brought them to show you."                     

 

"Why did you wait so long to shoot them?" asked Petra.           

 

"I wanted it set up just right. So I could shoot the one while he was standing in the doorway. So his body would block any returning fire from the other guy. And besides, I was also enjoying the way you took them apart. You know, arguing with them like you did. Sounded like you hate shrinks almost as much as I do. And you were never even committed to a mental institution. I would have applauded several of your best bon mots, only I might have been overheard."   

 

"Who's driving this van?" asked Petra, ignoring his flattery.                    

 

"Not me," said Achilles. "Are you?"      

 

"How long are you planning to keep me imprisoned?" asked Petra.                   

 

"As long as it takes."                

 

"As long as it takes to do what?"           ."

 

"Conquer the world together, you and 1. Isn't that romantic? Or, well, it will be romantic, when it happens."      

 

"It will never be romantic," said Petra. "Nor will I help you conquer your dandruff problem, let alone the world."            

 

"Oh, you'll cooperate," said Achilles. "I'll kill the other members of Ender's jeesh, one by one, until you give in." 

 

"You don't have them," said Petra. "And you don't know where they are. They're safe from you."          

 

Achilles grinned mock-sheepishly. "There's just no fooling Genius Girl, is there? But, you see, they're bound to surface somewhere, and when they do, they'll die. I don't forget."                     

 

"That's one way to conquer the world," said Petra. "Kill every body one by one until you're the only one left."

 

"Your first job," said Achilles, "is to decode that message you sent out."

 

"What message?"

 

Achilles picked up his gun and pointed it at her

 

"Kill me and you'll always wonder if I really sent out a message at all," said Petra.

 

"But at least I won't have to listen to your smug voice lying to me," said Achilles. "That would almost be a consolation."

 

"You seem to be forgetting that I wasn't a volunteer on this expedition. If you don't like listening to me, let me go."

 

"You're so sure of yourself," said Achilles. "But I know you better than you know yourself."

 

"And what is it you think you know about me?" asked Petra.

 

"I know that you'll eventually give in and help me,"

 

"Well, I know you better than you know yourself, too," said Petra.

 

"Oh, really?"

 

"I know that eventually you'll kill me. Because you always do. So let's just skip all the boring stuff in between. Kill me now. End the suspense."

 

"No," said Achilles. "Things like that are much better as a surprise. Don't you think? At least, that's the way God always did it."

 

"Why am I even talking to you?" asked Petra.

 

"Because you're so lonely after being in solitary for all these months that you'd do anything for human company. Even talk to me/"

 

She hated that he was probably right. "Human company apparently you're under the delusion that you qualify."

 

"Oh, you're mean," said Achilles, laughing. "Look, I'm bleeding."

 

"You've got blood on your hands, all right."

 

"And you've got it all over your face," said Achilles. "Come on, it'll be fun."

 

"And here I thought nothing would ever be more tedious than solitary confinement."

 

"You're the best, Petra," said Achilles. "Except for one."

 

"Bean," said Petra.

 

"Ender," said Achilles. "Bean is nothing. Bean is dead."

 

Petra said nothing.

 

Achilles looked at her searchingly. "No smart remarks?"

 

"Bean is dead and you're alive," said Petra. "There's no justice."

 

The van slowed down and stopped.

 

"There," said Achilles. "Our lively conversation made the time fly by."

 

Fly. She heard an airplane overhead. Landing or taking off?

 

"Where are we flying?" she asked.

 

"Who says we're flying anywhere?"

 

"I think we're flying out of the country," said Petra, speaking the ideas as they came to her. "I think you realized that you were going to lose your cushy job here in Russia, and you're sneaking out of the country."

 

"You're really very good. You keep setting a new standard for cleverness," said Achilles.

 

"And you keep setting a new standard for failure."

 

He hesitated a moment, then went on as if she hadn't spoken. "They're going to pit the other kids against me," he said. "You already know them. You know their weaknesses. Whoever I'm up against, you're going to advise me."

 

"Never."

 

"We're in this together," said Achilles. "I'm a nice guy. You'll like me, eventually."

 

"Oh, I know," said Petra. "What's not to like?"

 

"Your message," said Achilles. "You wrote it to Bean, didn't you?"

 

"What message?" said Petra.

 

"That's why you don't believe he's dead."

 

"I believe he's dead," said Petra. But she knew her earlier hesitation had given her away.

 

"Or else you wonder-if he got your message before I had him killed, why did it take so long after he died to have it hit the news? And here's the obvious answer, Pet. Somebody else figured it out. Somebody else decoded it. And that really pisses me off. So don't tell me what the message said. I'm going to decode it myself. It can't be that hard."

 

"Downright easy," said Petra. "After all, I'm dumb enough to end up as your prisoner. So dumb, in fact, that I never sent anybody a message."

 

"When I do decode it, though, I hope it won't say anything disparaging about me. Because then I'd have to beat the shit out of you."

 

"You're right," said Petra. "You are a charmer."

 

Fifteen minutes later, they were on a small private jet, flying south by southeast. It was a luxurious vehicle, for its size, and Petra wondered if it belonged to one of the intelligence services or to some faction in the military or maybe to some crime lord. Or maybe all three at once.

 

She wanted to study Achilles, watch his face, his body language. But she didn't want him to see her showing interest in him. So she looked out the window, wondering as she did so whether she wasn't just doing the same thing the dead psychologist had done-looking away to avoid facing bitter truth.

 

When the chime announced that they could unbelt themselves, Petra got up and headed for the bathroom. It was small, but compared to commercial airplane toilets it was downright commodious. And it had cloth towels and real soap.

 

She did her best with a damp towel to wipe blood and body matter from her clothes. She had to keep wearing the dirty clothing but she could at least get rid of the visible chunks. The towel was so foul by the time she finished the job that she tossed it and got a fresh one to start in on her face and hands. She scrubbed until her face was red and raw, but she got it all off. She even soaped her hair and washed it as best she could in the tiny sink. It was hard to rinse, pouring one cup of water at a time over her head.

 

The whole time, she kept thinking of the fact that the psychiatrist's last minutes were spent listening to her tell him how stupid he was and point out the worthlessness of his life's work. And yes, she was right, as his death proved, but that didn't change the fact that however impure his motives might have been, he was trying to save her from Achilles. He had given his life in that effort, however badly planned it might have been. All the other rescues went off smoothly, and they were probably just as badly planned as hers. So much depended on chance. Everybody was stupid about some things. Petra was stupid about the things she said to people who had power over her. Goading them. Daring them to punish her. She did it even though she knew it was stupid. And wasn't it even stupider to do something stupid that you know is stupid?

What did he call her? An ungrateful little girl.

 

He tagged me, all right.

 

As bad as she felt about his death, as horrified over what she had seen, as frightened as she was to be in Achilles' control, as lonely as she had been for these past weeks, she still couldn't figure out a way to cry about it. Because deeper than all these feelings was something even stronger. Her mind kept thinking of ways to get word to someone about where she was. She had done it once, she could do it again, right? She might feel bad, she might be a miserable specimen of human life, she might be in the midst of a traumatic childhood experience, but she was not going to submit to Achilles for one moment longer than she had to.

The plane lurched suddenly, throwing her against the toilet. She half-fell onto it-there wasn't room to fall down all the way-but she couldn't get up because the plane had gone into a steep dive, and for a few moments she found herself gasping as the oxygen-rich air was replaced by cold upper-level air that left her dizzy.

 

The hull was breached. They've shot us down.

 

And for all that she had an indomitable will to live, she couldn't help but think: Good for them. Kill Achilles now, and no matter who else is on the plane, it'll be a great day for humanity.

But the plane soon leveled out, and the air was breathable before she blacked out. They must not have been very high when it happened.

She opened the bathroom door and stepped back into the main cabin.

The side door was partway open. And standing a couple of meters back from it was Achilles, the wind whipping at his hair and clothes. He was posing, as if he knew just how fine a figure he cut, standing there on the brink of death.

 

She approached him, glancing at the door to make sure she stayed well back from it, and to see how high they were. Not very, compared to cruising altitude, but higher than any building or bridge or dam. Anyone who fell from this plane would die.

 

Could she get behind him and push?

 

He smiled broadly when she got near.

 

"What happened?" she shouted over the noise of the wind.

 

"It occurred to me," he yelled back, "that I made a mistake bringing you with me."

 

He opened the door on purpose. He opened it for her.

 

Just as she began to step back, his hand lashed out and seized her by the wrist.

 

The intensity of his eyes was startling. He didn't look crazy. He looked ... fascinated. Almost as if he found her amazingly beautiful. But of course it wasn't her It was his power over her that fascinated him. It was himself that he loved so intensely.

 

She didn't try to pull away. Instead, she twisted her wrist so that she also gripped him.

 

"Come on, let's jump together," she shouted. "That would be the most romantic thing we could do."

 

He leaned close. "And miss out on all the history we're going to make together?" he said. Then he laughed. "Oh, I see, you thought I was going to throw you out of the plane. No, Pet, I took hold of you so that I could anchor you while you close the door. Wouldn't want the wind to suck you out, would we?"

 

"I have a better idea," said Petra. "I'll be the anchor, you close the door."

 

"But the anchor has to be the stronger, heavier one," said Achilles. "And that's me."

 

"Let's just leave it open, then," said Petra.

 

"Can't fly all the way to Kabul with the door open."

 

What did it mean, his telling her their destination? Did it mean that he trusted her a little? Or that it didn't matter what she knew, since he had decided she was going to die?

 

Then it occurred to her that if he wanted her dead, she would die. It was that simple. So why worry about it? If he wanted to kill her by pushing her out the door, how was that different from a bullet in the brain? Dead was dead. And if he didn't plan to kill her, the door needed to be closed, and having him serve as anchor was the secondbest plan.

 

"Isn't there somebody in the crew who can do this?" she asked.

 

"There's just the pilot," said Achilles. "Can you land a plane?"

 

She shook her head.

 

"So he stays in the cockpit, and we close the door."

 

"I don't mean to be a nag," said Petra, "but opening the door was a really stupid thing to do."

 

He grinned at her.

 

Holding tight to his wrist, she slid along the wall toward the door. It was only partially open, the kind of door that worked by sliding up. So she didn't have to reach very far out of the plane. Still, the cold wind snatched at her arm and made it very hard to get a grip on the door handle to pull it down into place. And even when she got it down into position, she simply didn't have the strength to overcome the wind resistance and pull it snug.

 

Achilles saw this, and now that the door wasn't open enough for anyone to fall out and the wind could no longer suck anybody out, he let go of her and of the bulkhead and joined her in pulling at the handle.

 

If I push instead of pulling, thought Petra, the wind will help me, and maybe we'll both get sucked right out.

 

Do it, she told herself. Do it. Kill him. Even if you die doing it, it's worth it. This is Hitler, Stalin, Genghis, Attila all rolled into one.

 

But it might not work. He might not get sucked out. She might die alone, pointlessly. No, she would have to find a way to destroy him later, when she could be sure it would work.

 

At another level, she knew that she simply wasn't ready to die. No matter how convenient it might be for the rest of humanity, no matter how richly Achilles deserved to die, she would not be his executioner, not now, not if she had to give her own life to kill him. If that made her a selfish coward, so be it.

 

They pulled and pulled and finally, with a whoosh, the door passed the threshold of wind resistance and locked nicely into place. Achilles pulled the lever that locked it.

 

"Traveling with you is always such an adventure," said Petra.

 

"No need to shout," said Achilles. "I can hear you just fine."

 

"Why can't you just run with the bulls at Pamplona, like any normal selfdestructive person?" asked Petra.

 

He ignored her gibe. "I must value you more than I thought." He said it as if it took him rather by surprise.

 

"You mean you still have a spark of humility? You might actually need someone else?"

 

Again he ignored her words. "You look better without blood all over your face."

 

"But I'll never be as pretty as you."

 

"Here's my rule about guns," said Achilles. "When people are getting shot, always stand behind the shooter. It's a lot less messy there."

 

"Unless people are shooting back."

 

Achilles laughed. "Pet, I never use a gun when someone might shoot back."

 

"And you're so well-mannered, you always open a door for a lady."

 

His smile faded. "Sometimes I get these impulses," he said. "But they're not irresistible."

 

"Too bad. And here you had such a good insanity defense going."

 

His eyes blazed for a moment. Then he went back to his seat.

 

She cursed herself. Goading him like this, how is it different from jumping out of the airplane?

 

Then again, maybe it was the fact that she spoke to him without cringing that made him value her.

 

Fool, she said to herself. You are not equipped to understand this boy-you're not insane enough. Don't try to guess why he does what he does, or how he feels about you or anybody or anything. Study him so you can learn how he makes his plans, what he's likely to do, so that someday you can defeat him. But don't ever try to understand. If you can't even understand yourself, what hope do you have of comprehending somebody as deformed as Achilles?

 

They did not land in Kabul. They landed in Tashkent, refueled, and then went over the Himalayas to New Delhi.

 

So he lied to her about their destination. He hadn't trusted her after all. But as long as he refrained from killing her, she could endure a little mistrust.

 

COMMUNING WITH THE DEAD

 

To: Carlotta%agape@vatican.net/orders/sisters/ind

From: Locke%erasmus@polnet.gov

Re: An answer for your dead friend

 

If you know who I really am, and you have contact with a certain person purported to be dead, please inform that person that I have done my best to fulfill expectations. I believe further collaboration is possible, but not through intermediaries. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then please inform me of that, as well, so I can begin my search again.

 

Bean came home to find that Sister Carlotta had packed their bags.

 

"Moving day?" he asked.

 

They had agreed that either one of them could decide that it was time to move on, without having to defend the decision. It was the only way to be sure of acting on any unconscious cues that someone was closing in on them. They didn't want to spend their last moments of life listening to each other say, "I knew we should have left three days ago!" "Well why didn't you say so?" "Because I didn't have a reason."

 

"We have two hours till the flight."

 

"Wait a minute," said Bean. "You decide we're going, I decide the destination." That was how they'd decided to keep their movements random.

 

She handed him the printout of an email. It was from Locke. "Greensboro, North Carolina, in the U.S.," she said.

 

"Perhaps I'm not decoding this right," said Bean, "but I don't see an invitation to visit him."

 

"He doesn't want intermediaries," said Carlotta. "We can't trust his email to be untraced."

 

Bean took a match and burned the email in the sink. Then he crumbled the ashes and washed them down the drain. "What about Petra?"

 

"Still no word. Seven of Ender's jeesh released. The Russians are simply saying that Petra's place of captivity has not yet been discovered."

 

"Kuso," said Bean.

 

"I know," said Carlotta, "but what can we do if they won't tell us? I'm afraid she's dead, Bean. You've got to realize that's the likeliest reason for them to stonewall."

 

Bean knew it, but didn't believe it. "You don't know Petra," he said.

 

"You don't know Russia," said Carlotta.

 

"Most people are decent in every country," said Bean.

 

"Achilles is enough to tip the balance wherever he goes."

 

Bean nodded. "Rationally, I have to agree with you. Irrationally expect to see her again someday."

 

"If I didn't know you so well, I might interpret that as a sign of your faith in the resurrection." Bean picked up his suitcase. "Am I bigger, or is this smaller?" "The case is the same size," said Carlotta. "I think I'm growing." "Of course you're growing. Look at your pants." "I'm still wearing them," said Bean. "More to the point, look at your ankles."

 

"Oh." There was more ankle showing than when he bought them.

 

Bean had never seen a child grow up, but it bothered him that in the weeks they had been in Araraquara, he had grown at least five centimeters. If this was puberty, where were the other changes that were supposed to go along with it?

 

"We'll buy you new clothes in Greensboro," said Sister Carlotta.

 

Greensboro. "The place where Ender grew up."

 

"And where he killed for the first time," said Sister Carlotta.

 

"You just won't let go of that, will you?" said Bean.

 

"When you had Achilles in your power, you didn't kill him."

 

Bean didn't like hearing himself compared to Ender that way. Not when it showed Ender at a disadvantage. "Sister Carlotta, we'd have a whole lot less difficulty right now if I had killed him."

 

"You showed mercy. You turned the other cheek. You gave him a chance to make something worthwhile out of his life."

 

"I made sure he'd get committed to a mental institution."

 

"Are you so determined to believe in your own lack of virtue?"

 

"Yes," said Bean. "I prefer truth to lies."

 

"There," said Carlotta. "Yet another virtue to add to my list."

 

Bean laughed in spite of himself. "I'm glad you like me," he said.

 

"Are you afraid to meet him?"

 

"Who?"

 

"Ender's brother."

 

"Not afraid," said Bean.

 

"How do you feel, then?"

 

"Skeptical," said Bean.

 

"He showed humility in that email," said Sister Carlotta. "He wasn't sure that he'd figured things out exactly right."

 

"Oh, there's a thought. The humble Hegemon."

 

"He's not Hegemon yet," said Carlotta.

 

"He got seven of Ender's jeesh released, just by publishing a column. He has influence. He has ambition. And now to learn he has humility-well, it's just too much for me."

 

"Laugh all you want. Let's go out and find a cab."

 

There was no last-minute business to take care of. They had paid cash for everything, owed nothing. They could walk away.

 

They lived on money drawn from accounts Graff had set up for them. There was nothing about the account Bean was using now to tag it as belonging to Julian Delphiki- It held his military salary, including his combat and retirement bonuses. The I.F. had given all of Ender's jeesh very large trust funds that they couldn't touch till they came of age. The saved-up pay and bonuses were just to tide them over during their childhood. Graff had assured him that he would not run out of money while he was in hiding.

 

Sister Carlotta's money came from the Vatican. One person there knew what she was doing. She, too, would have money enough for her needs. Neither of them had the temperament to exploit the situation. They spent little, Sister Carlotta because she wanted nothing more, Bean because he knew that any kind of flamboyance or excess would mark him in people's memories. He always had to seem to be a child running errands for his grandmother, not an undersized war hero cashing in on his back pay.

 

Their passports caused them no problems, either. Again, Graff had been able to pull strings for them. Given the way they lookedboth of Mediterranean ancestry-they carried passports from Catalonia. Carlotta knew Barcelona well, and Catalan was her childhood language. She barely spoke it now, but no matter-hardly anyone did. And no one would be surprised that her grandson couldn't speak the language at all. Besides, how many Catalans would they meet in their travels? Who would try to test their story? If someone got too nosy, they'd simply move on to some other city, some other country.

 

They landed in Miami, then Atlanta, then Greensboro. They were exhausted and slept the night at an airport hotel. The next day, they logged in and printed out guides to the county bus system. It was a fairly modem system, enclosed and electric, but the map made no sense to Bean.

 

"Why don't any of the buses go through here?" he asked.

 

"That's where the rich people live," said Sister Carlotta.

 

"They make them all live together in one place?"

 

"They feel safer," said Carlotta. "And by living close together, they have a better chance of their children marrying into other rich families."

 

"But why don't they want buses?"

 

"They ride in individual vehicles. They can afford the fees. It gives them more freedom to choose their own schedule. And it shows everyone just how rich they are."

 

"It's still stupid," said Bean. "Look how far the buses have to go out of their way."

 

"The rich people didn't want their streets to be enclosed in order to hold a bus system."

 

"So what?" asked Bean.

 

Sister Carlotta laughed. "Bean, isn't there plenty of stupidity in the military, too?"

 

"But in the long run, the guy who wins battles gets to make the decisions."

 

"Well, these rich people won the economic battles. Or their grandparents did. So now they get their way most of the time."

 

"Sometimes I feel like I don't know anything."

 

"You've lived half your life in a tube in space, and before that you lived on the streets of Rotterdam."

 

"I've lived in Greece with my family and in Araraquara, too. I should have figured this out."

 

,,That was Greece. And Brazil. This is America."

 

"So money rules in America, but not those other places?"

 

"No, Bean. Money rules almost everywhere. But different cultures have different ways of displaying it. In Araraquara, for instance, they made sure that the tram lines ran out to the rich neighborhoods. Why? So the servants could come to work. In America, they're more afraid of criminals coming to steal, so the sign of wealth is to make sure that the only way to reach them is by private car or on foot."

 

"Sometimes I miss Battle School."

 

"That's because in Battle School, you were one of the very richest in the only coin that mattered there."

 

Bean thought about that. As soon as the other kids realized that, young and small as he was, he could outperform them in every class, it gave him a kind of power. Everyone knew who he was. Even those who mocked him had to give him a grudging respect. But. . . "I didn't always get my way."

 

"Graff told me some of the outrageous things you did," said Carlotta. "Climbing through the air ducts to eavesdrop. Breaking into the computer system."

 

"But they caught me."

 

"Not as soon as they'd like to have caught you. And were you punished? No. Why? Because you were rich."

 

"Money and talent aren't the same thing."

 

"That's because you can inherit money that was earned by your ancestors," said Sister Carlotta. "And everybody recognizes the value of money, while only select groups recognize the value of talent."

 

"So where does Peter live?"

 

She had the addresses of all the Wiggin families. There weren't many-the more common spelling had an s at the end. "But I don't think this will help us," said Carlotta. "We don't want to meet him at home."

 

"Why not?"

 

"Because we don't know whether his parents are aware of what he's doing or not. Graff was pretty sure they don't know. If two foreigners come calling, they're going to start to wonder what their son is doing on the nets."

 

"Where, then?"

 

"He could be in secondary school. But given his intelligence, I'd bet on his being in college." She was accessing more information as she spoke. "Colleges colleges colleges. Lots of them in town. The biggest first, the better for him to disappear in . . ."

 

"Why would he need to disappear? Nobody knows who he is."

 

"But he doesn't want anyone to realize that he spends no time on his schoolwork. He has to look like an ordinary kid his age. He should be spending all his free time with friends. Or with girls. Or with friends looking for girls. Or with friends trying to distract themselves from the fact that they can't find any girls."

 

"For a nun, you seem to know a lot about this."

 

"I wasn't born a nun."

 

"But you were born a girl."

 

"And no one is a better observer of the folkways of the adolescent male than the adolescent female."

 

"What makes you think he doesn't do all those things?"

 

"Being Locke and Demosthenes is a fulltime job.

 

"So why do you think he's in college at all?"

 

"Because his parents would be upset if he stayed home all day, reading and writing email."

 

Bean wouldn't know about what might make parents upset. He'd only known his parents since the end of the war, and they'd never found anything serious to criticize about him. Or maybe they never felt like he was really theirs. They didn't criticize Nikolai much, either. But ... more than they did Bean. There simply hadn't been enough time together for them to feel as comfortable, as parental, with their new son Julian.

 

"I wonder how my parents are doing."

 

"If anything was wrong, we would have heard," said Carlotta.

 

"I know," said Bean. "That doesn't mean I can't wonder."

 

She didn't answer, just kept working her desk, bringing new pages into the display. "Here he is," she said. "A nonresident student. No address. Just email and a campus box."

 

"What about his class schedule?" asked Bean.

 

"They don't post that."

 

Bean laughed. "And that's supposed to be a problem?"

 

"No, Bean, you aren't going to crack their system. I can't think of a better way for you to attract attention than to trip some trap and get a mole to follow you home."

 

"I don't get followed by moles."

 

"You never see the ones that follow you."

 

"It's just a college, not some intelligence service."

 

"Sometimes people with the least that is worth stealing are the most concerned with giving the appearance of having great treasures hidden away."

 

"Is that from the Bible?"

 

"No, it's from observation."

 

"So what do we do?"

 

"Your voice is too young," said Sister Carlotta. "I'll work the phone."

 

She talked her way to the head registrar of the university. "He was a very nice boy to carry all my things after the wheel broke on my cart, and if these keys are his I want to get them back to him right away, before he worries.... No I will not drop them in the mail, how would that be 'right away'? Nor will I leave them with you, they might not be his, and then what would I do? If they are his keys, he will be very glad you told me where his classes are, and if they aren't his keys, then what harm will it cause? ... All right, I'll wait."

 

Sister Carlotta lay back on the bed. Bean laughed at her. "How did a nun get so good at lying?"

 

She held down the MUTE button. "It isn't lying to tell a bureaucrat whatever story it takes to get him to do his job properly."

 

"But if he does his job properly, he won't give you any information about Peter."

 

"If he does his job properly, he'll understand the purpose of the rules and therefore know when it is appropriate to make exceptions."

 

"People who understand the purpose of the rules don't become bureaucrats," said Bean. "That's something we learned really fast in Battle School."

 

"Exactly," said Carlotta. "So I have to tell him the story that will help him overcome his handicap." Abruptly she refocused her attention on the phone. "Oh, how very nice. Well, that's fine. I'll see him there."

 

She hung up the phone and laughed. "Well, after all that, the registrar emailed him. His desk was connected, he admitted that he had lost his keys, and he wants to meet the nice old lady at Yum-Yum."

 

"What is that?" asked Bean.

 

"I haven't the slightest idea, but the way she said it, I figured that if I were an old lady living near campus, I'd already know." She was already deep in the city directory. "Oh, it's a restaurant near campus. Well, this is it. Let's go meet the boy who would be king."

 

"Wait a minute," said Bean. "We can't go straight there."

 

"Why not?"

 

"We have to get some keys."

 

Sister Carlotta looked at him like he was crazy. "I made up the bit about the keys, Bean."

 

"The registrar knows that you're meeting Peter Wiggin to give him back his keys. What if he happens to be going to Yum-Yum right now for lunch? And he sees us meet Peter, and nobody gives anybody any keys?"

 

"'We don't have a lot of time."

 

"OK, I have a better idea. Just act flustered and tell him that in your hurry to get there to meet him, you forgot to bring the keys, so he should come back to the house with you."

 

"You have a talent for this, Bean."

 

"Deception is second nature to me."

 

The bus was on time and moved briskly, this being an off-peak time, and soon they were on campus. Bean was better at translating maps into real terrain, so he led the way to Yum-Yum.

 

The place looked like a dive. Or rather, it was trying to look like a dive from an earlier era. Only it really was rundown and under-maintained, so it was a dive trying to look like a nice restaurant decorated to look like a dive. Very complicated and ironic, Bean decided, remembering what Father used to say about a neighborhood restaurant near their house on Crete: Abandon lunch, all ye who enter here.

 

The food looked like common-people's restaurant food everywhere-more about delivering fats and sweets than about flavor or nutrition. Bean wasn't picky, though. There were foods he liked better than others, and he knew something of the difference between fine cuisine and plain fare, but after the streets of Rotterdam and years of dried and processed food in space, anything that delivered the calories and nutrients was fine with him. But he made the mistake of going for the ice cream. He had just come from Araraquara, where the sorvete was memorable, and the American stuff was too fatty, the flavors too syrupy. "Mmmm, deliciosa," said Bean.

 

"Fecha a boquinha, menino," she answered. "E nao fala portugues aqui."

 

"I didn't want to critique the ice cream in a language they'd understand."

 

"Doesn't the memory of starvation make you more patient?"

 

"Does everything have to be a moral question?"

 

"I wrote my dissertation on Aquinas and Tillich," said Sister Carlotta. "All questions are philosophical."

 

"In which case, all answers are unintelligible."

 

"And you're not even in grad school yet."

 

A tall young man slid onto the bench beside Bean. "Sorry I'm late," he said. "You got my keys?"

 

"I feel so foolish," said Sister Carlotta. "I came all the way here and then I realized I left them back home. Let me buy you some ice cream and then you can walk home with me and get them."

 

Bean looked up at Peter's face in profile. The resemblance to Ender was plain, but not close enough that anyone could ever mistake one for the other.

 

So this is the kid who brokered the ceasefire that ended the League War. The kid who wants to be Hegemon. Good looking, but not movie-star handsomepeople would like him, but still trust him. Bean had studied the vids of Hitler and Stalin. The difference was palpable-Stalin never had to get elected; Hitler did. Even with that stupid mustache, you could see it in Hitler's eyes, that ability to see into you, that sense that whatever he said, wherever he looked, he was speaking to you, looking at you, that he cared about you. But Stalin, he looked like the liar that he was. Peter was definitely in the charismatic category. Like Hitler.

 

Perhaps an unfair comparison, but those who coveted power invited such thoughts. And the worst was seeing the way Sister Carlotta played to him. True, she was acting a part, but when she spoke to him, when that gaze was fixed on her, she preened a little, she warmed to him. Not so much that she'd behave foolishly, but she was aware of him with a heightened intensity that Bean didn't like. Peter had the seducer's gift. Dangerous.

 

"I'll walk home with you," said Peter. "I'm not hungry. Have you already paid?"

 

"Of course," said Sister Carlotta. "This is my grandson, by the way. Delfino."

 

Peter turned to notice Bean for the first time-though Bean was quite sure Peter had sized him up thoroughly before he sat down. "Cute kid," he said. "How old is he? Does he go to school yet?"

 

"I'm little," said Bean cheerfully, "but at least I'm not a yelda."

 

"All those vids of Battle School life," said Peter. "Even little kids are picking up that stupid polyglot slang."

 

"Now, children, you must get along, I insist on it." Sister Carlotta led the way to the door. "My grandson is visiting this country for the first time, young man, so he doesn't understand American banter."

 

"Yes I do," said Bean, trying to sound like a petulant child and finding it quite easy, since he really was annoyed.

 

"He speaks English pretty well. But you better hold his hand crossing this street, the campus trams zoom through here like Daytona."

 

Bean rolled his eyes and submitted to having Carlotta hold his hand across the street. Peter was obviously trying to provoke him, but why? Surely he wasn't so shallow as to think humiliating Bean would give him some advantage. Maybe he took pleasure in making other people feel small.

 

Finally, though, they were away from campus and had taken enough twists and turns to make sure they weren't being followed.

 

"So you're the great Julian Delphiki," said Peter.

 

"And you're Locke. They're touting you for Hegemon when Sakata's term is over. Too bad you're only virtual."

 

"I'm thinking of going public soon," said Peter.

 

"Ah, that's why you got the plastic surgery to make you so pretty," said Bean.

 

"This old face?" said Peter. "I only wear it when I don't care how I look."

 

"Boys," said Sister Carlotta. "Must you display like baby chimps?"

 

Peter laughed easily. "Come on, Mom, we was just playin'. Can't we still go to the movies?"

 

"Off to bed without supper, the lot of you," said Sister Carlotta.

 

Bean had had enough of this. "Where's Petra?" he demanded.

 

Peter looked at him as if he were insane. "I don't have her."

 

"You have sources," said Bean. "You know more than you're telling me."

 

"You know more than you're telling me, too," said Peter. "I thought we were working on trusting each other, and then we open the floodgates of wisdom."

 

"Is she dead?" said Bean, not willing to be deflected.

 

Peter looked at his watch. "At this moment. I don't know."

 

Bean stopped walking. Disgusted, he turned to Sister Carlotta. "We wasted a trip," he said. "And risked our lives for nothing."

 

"Are you sure?" said Sister Carlotta.