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+{"text":" \nAmalie Howard\n\nTHE ALMOST GIRL\n\nTo Valerie, because she couldn't be here.\nPROLOGUE\n\nTHREE YEARS EARLIER\n\nThe slight figure is lithe and quick, a shadow of a shadow in the darkness. It runs along the edgy gloom of the halogen-lit streets, flying over electric fences and scaling walls with the practiced ease of a skilled athlete. One would never suspect that it was being chased by an entire army of soldiers, but it was, several hundred of them.\n\nIn a fluid twist to gauge the remaining distance from its pursuers, the runner's profile is visible for a brief second. It is the face of young girl, barely fourteen, as she glides into a narrow alley. Blood drips from a self-inflicted gash in her arm, the silver implant she'd dug from the wound slipping from her fingers to the oily ground before it is crushed beneath her boot.\n\nGlancing at the gauge on her wrist, she sees a red flash that tells her that she's nearly at the eversion checkpoint. Her timing and positioning must be exact for the universe transition. She ducks into a crouch as the first of the small army reaches the dark alleyway; he is faster than the others.\n\nThey're always fast.\n\n\"Surrender yourself,\" a voice says. The soldier stands, weapon at the ready. He knows that she is there. The girl steps out from behind a crate. There is no fear on her face, just a silent calmness, an acceptance of the situation. The soldiers are programmed to obey and to subdue hostiles, but she tries to divert them anyway. She knows that nothing she says will deter the soldier \u2013 after all, she's been their leader for the better part of a year.\n\nAnd now, she is the traitor... the fugitive.\n\n\"Stand down, Lieutenant,\" she says firmly in a husky voice far too mature for her years. The soldier doesn't even acknowledge her words. \"That is an order.\"\n\n\"Surrender,\" he repeats, raising the electro-rod slightly. \"General.\"\n\nHis voice is dead, just like the rest of him, but he understands exactly who she is. He's half-alive but still far from a mindless drone. She sees a glimmer of blue sparks at the rod's three-pronged tip. He'd have it set to stun she knew, but she wasn't going back alive. She couldn't go back.\n\n\"OK. Have it your way,\" she says.\n\nThe girl lunges at him, barely half his size, to slide on her knees beneath the blunt edge of the metal rod swinging toward her head. Her hand snakes out, a fist thumping into the hard, cold flesh beneath his ribs lightning-fast, and the soldier grunts, doubling over at the dull crack. In a reverse motion, her fist slices past his Achilles tendon, the blade between her fingers a blur, and he crumples to the floor.\n\nThey may be immune to pain, but they're still made of flesh and bone.\n\nNot losing momentum, she jabs him in the back of the neck just above the top of his spine with the point of her knife. The strike is snake-like and true. A spark and the sharp smell of singed flesh, and in a matter of seconds, the soldier is lying prostrate on the ground, twitching slightly, disabled for the moment.\n\nGlancing around, the girl listens for sounds of the others before emptying the soldier's pockets quickly. As well as the rod, she sticks a communication earpiece, a long-handled knife, six packets of dried food dust, and two pen-like instruments into her own black knapsack.\n\nIt is more than she could have hoped for.\n\nThe soldier stirs with a whining noise, and the girl grasps his face between her hands, pulling open his eyelids with her thumbs and forefingers. His skin is cold and clammy but he's not dead; far from it. Her blow to his cortex chip would only have caused it to reboot, but the nanocells in his retina would still be relaying real-time to her pursuers. She wants the message to be clear and stares directly into his eyes, straddling his chest with her knees.\n\n\"Don't try to find me,\" she growls. \"Don't send anyone. If you do, they will end up like this one; that I can promise you.\"\n\nHer hands twist, tugging the soldier's chin upward and jamming his knife into the back of his neck. It is such a smooth motion of her hands that the soldier's body barely twitches as she severs his spinal cord, the critical connector between the brain and the body. Her face will be the last thing her pursuers see. The light in his eyes fades but it's only a trick of the shadowed gloom around them. There's no life in these creatures... only death.\n\nThe sensor on her wrist flashes to blue. Without a backward glance, she is away in an instant, swallowed up by the inky darkness, punching in a sequence on a flat computer-like device connected to the sensor. After a moment, all that's left in her wake is a brief shimmer in the fabric of space and air. She's gone.\nPART ONE\n\nTHE OTHERWORLD\nPRESENT DAY\n\nCOLORADO\n\nMy thoughts rain like spatters of blood against the colorless landscape of drab walls and wooden faces. A bell rings, and it is a mad rush as chairs are pushed back loudly. A tall woman with a no-nonsense face calls for silence.\n\n\"The class roster for the end-of-year projects has been posted in the hallway. You have been paired in groups of four with a different assignment based on what we have covered this semester. If you don't know your partners, I suggest you meet them quickly, as these projects will count for half of your final grade.\"\n\nA collective groan rolls its way across the classroom.\n\n\"But Mrs Taylor,\" a girl three rows across stands and complains loudly, \"why can't we pick our own groups? Wouldn't that be better for everyone?\"\n\n\"Miss Hall, in the future, if you'd like to say something, please refrain from yelling it across the classroom. The groups have been allocated according to last year's class standings.\"\n\n\"But\u2013\"\n\n\"The groups are final, Miss Hall.\" Mrs Taylor's voice brooks no argument, and the girl falls silent, although her face remains puckered with frustration as she exits the classroom.\n\nI sit huddled at the back, waiting until the classroom is almost empty before gathering my things and walking noiselessly to the front.\n\n\"Mrs Taylor?\" I ask. My voice is slightly roughened from a lack of sleep, and the teacher jumps, looking up questioningly. I paste a suitably contrite look on my face. \"Sorry to startle you, I'm... er... Riven. I transferred in last week. About the groups...\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, Riven, I do have a note about you, as a matter of fact,\" Mrs Taylor says, shuffling through a pile of papers on the desk. \"You have already been assigned. It's on the board along with the others. If you run into any trouble, let me know.\" Mrs Taylor pushes the wire-rimmed glasses up her nose, her dark eyes sharp. \"Anything else?\"\n\n\"No, that's it,\" I mumble, unable to hold back the yawn that overtakes my facial muscles.\n\n\"Are you alright? You look quite pale.\"\n\n\"I'm fine, just tired. Jet lag,\" I smile and hoist my backpack over my arm. \"Thanks, Mrs Taylor.\"\n\n\"Riven?\" I freeze at the door and turn my head in her direction. Her black eyes are still piercing, unsettling as if they can see right through me. I feel an odd, unwelcome shiver take hold at the base of my spine. \"Welcome to Horrow.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" I mumble and shift away from her impaling gaze. She's looking at me as if she knows who I am... an imposter, a stranger.\n\nA killer.\n\nI sneak a glance into the classroom once I'm in the hallway, and Mrs Taylor is back to studying the papers on her desk. I must have been wrong. I yawn again as exhaustion consumes me. In my tired delirium, I'm starting to imagine things. I've been pushing myself way too hard without enough rest intervals between jumps. It's foolish and reckless.\n\nBlack dots fill my vision. I'm disoriented as if the ground is tilting beneath my soles. I glance down, only to see the checkered tile floor undulating like a breaking wave. Gasping for breath, I haul open the first door I see.\n\nA janitor's closet.\n\nLeaning against the cool plastic of a recycling bin, I breathe in huge gulps of stale closet air. The fatigue is becoming worse, ever since the last jump. My fingers begin to shake uncontrollably as I smooth open the crumpled paper with my new class schedule.\n\nThirty class schedules in as many months, with time slowly running out. Trying to locate the boy here has been like looking for a drop in a bucket of water \u2013 near impossible. But I can't give up. I won't. Because in my gut, I can sense that there are already others here... others looking for him.\n\nAnd I have to find him first.\n\nSwallowing, I blink back the grit from my burning eyes and squint in the dim light at my schedule. I have Phys Ed and then lunch. I won't make it to lunch, it's an absolute certainty. My body slides down the side of the bin and I sit in the muted shadows as light filters from the cracks underneath the door. Maybe I'll just sit here for a second to catch my breath.\n\nMy eyelids droop heavily, and then there is only sweet aching darkness.\n\nWhen I open my eyes again, there is no longer any light seeping through the door and there is only silence beyond it. I must have slept through the entire day on the floor of this tiny closet. I inch my way up, hearing my joints creak painfully, and crack open the door. The hallway is deserted, the clock on the wall showing 4 o'clock in the morning. A chill sweeps along my skin as the fluorescent light flickers eerily. School hallways just aren't the same without kids in them. Suppressing a shudder, I exit through a side entrance onto one of the practice football fields as the door locks behind me with a soft click.\n\nEarly fall, and the night is dark and cold. I tug my black sweater down along my arms. It's only when I reach the empty parking lot where the Ducati is parked that I feel the first painful rumble in my stomach. I haven't eaten anything today. Swearing at my own carelessness, I unwrap a snack bar from my backpack with clammy hands and shove it into my mouth.\n\nIt's one of my few rules of survival \u2013 always eat. In my condition, hunger can bring on far worse things, things that you can't come back from, not in this world anyway, and my body is unstable enough already. The food slides down like hard cardboard along the soft sides of my throat and I gag, but force myself to swallow. There's a bottle of water in my backpack and I drink it so quickly that half of it spills down my sweater. I'm hoping that it isn't already too late. I throw on my helmet and take a deep breath. I have to make it back to the motel. It's only a few miles.\n\nTires squealing in protest against the cold asphalt, I pull out onto the main road and ride as fast as I dare over the speed limit. The last thing I need is to get pulled over. It happened once before when the sickness started. The cop ended up in the hospital that night, and I had to leave town quickly, trusting that what I'd been looking for hadn't been there. I couldn't risk anything similar happening, not again and not here.\n\nI stop at a red light, concentrating on taking slow mechanical breaths. But the pain in my belly only deepens as if in silent mockery of my efforts.\n\nYou can make it, I tell myself firmly, accelerating across the intersection.\n\nThe panic recedes but then returns in a wave so violent that I am gasping as my back arches like a bow. There's no way I can make it. How could I have been so foolish to think that I could beat the odds... beat time?\n\nToo late, too late, too late.\n\nA brutal wave of nausea drives me to jerk roughly on the Ducati's handlebars, the motorcycle's wheels protesting angrily on the asphalt, just as a lance-like pain stabs through me. My fingers jam reflexively against the throttle, twisting it. The bike lurches forward and careens across the two opposite lanes, my thighs burning from gripping the sides of the tank to steady it.\n\nThat's when the shakes start. Within seconds, I can feel my hands curl into hardened claws, my body spasming uncontrollably. My eyes roll back and I barely see the oncoming lights, as the bike swings precariously once more to the left, grinding off the road and spinning into gravel. My body is flung like a sack of rocks as the Ducati skids to a shattered halt on its side.\n\nThe sky above me is dark and wide with nothing in it. No stars, no moon, nothing. Just blackness. I suck in a shallow breath, keeping my jaw tightly closed, knowing how easily I can bite my own tongue off if I'm not careful. My chest aches with the strained intake of air, but I already know from years of training that it's mostly bruises, and nothing's broken. Hot white dots cloud my vision and I focus myself, searching for my backpack. It was flung from me upon impact with the ground, but it's just a foot away.\n\nReach out slowly, the bag is right there, I tell myself, but my body refuses to cooperate. Inside I know that it is too late, I can feel myself shutting down. I should have rested today, stayed in bed and given myself a chance to recuperate from the jump, but I'd been stupid, arrogant. I hadn't wanted to lose any time, and now I'm going to pay the price. My eyes slip shut.\n\nAs if from afar, I hear a rustling and then a loud banging. Someone yelling. Shadows flit across my closed eyelids. \"Help,\" I whisper. \"Help.\"\n\n\"Oh god! She came off a bike. Don't move her; she could have a concussion.\"\n\n\"Hey! Hey, you OK?\"\n\nThe voices are dull as if coming from far away. My thoughts won't even turn toward them. Noises followed by a dull thud as someone stoops beside me. Gentle fingers slip across my arm, moving upward to open my visor.\n\nBackpack. I try to say my single thought but my tongue is thick against my teeth. I can only open and close sticky lips that taste like metal.\n\n\"She's alive! Help me get this helmet off. Careful with her.\"\n\nMy head lolls backward as the helmet slips off, but I'm caught by strong hands and cradled gently. A bottle is placed against my lips and I feel cool water trickle into my mouth, washing away the coppery taste. It hurts to swallow, but I ignore the pain. The water moistens my gums and loosens my tongue.\n\n\"Injector... backpack...\" It won't be long before I go into shock. \"Have to... stick...\"\n\n\"Don't worry, I got it. I'm allergic, too,\" one of the voices says. I hear a rustle and feel the rough jab of the needle piercing into my skin through my jeans, and then soft fingers are brushing against my forehead. \"Hang on, it's going to be OK.\"\n\n\"Should we call 911?\" the other voice asks. \"What's with the needle?\"\n\n\"No hospital, please. Be OK...\" I direct my plea to the one who'd administered the auto-injector. \"Please, can't afford...\"\n\n\"Rest,\" the voice says. \"It's OK, Jake, looks like an allergic reaction. Could be peanuts, bees, anything, don't know.\" I hear the rustling of a wrapper. \"My aunt's off tonight. I'll take her home with me and see what she says. If she says to go to the hospital, I'll take her.\"\n\n\"What about her bike? We shouldn't just leave it, right? We can probably get it in the back of my truck,\" the voice belonging to Jake says. \"I can take a better look at it tomorrow.\"\n\n\"OK. Help me get her inside first. Careful, she may be hurt from when it went off the road.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" I murmur as they lift me gently into the backseat of the truck. They are the only words I can manage before my brain shuts down. I can feel the serum making its way through my body, stopping my cells from going into anaphylactic shock.\n\nThe boy's right \u2013 I am having an allergic reaction, just not to any food.\n\nIn some dark corner of my mind, I know that I should be worried or be afraid that I have fallen into the wrong hands, but somehow I know... I trust that I am safe. The thing, is I can't remember the last time I felt safe. Oblivion sweeps my remaining consciousness away.\n\nWhen I open my eyes again, I'm lying in a bed in an airy room. It's quiet and peaceful. A fan on the ceiling wafts cool air into my face, and for a second it feels as if I'm in some kind of dream. Then I see the boy slumped in the armchair in front of the window and instantly know that this is reality. He seems asleep, although I can't really tell from the way his hair is curling into his face. I search for my backpack. It's sitting next to him on the floor. Sitting up gingerly, I swing my left leg over the side of the bed and wince at the pain now radiating up my back and around my ribs.\n\n\"You shouldn't really move, you know.\" The boy is awake now and I can feel him watching me carefully. I ignore him and shift my other leg to the floor. The pain is excruciating, echoing along every nerve ending like fire.\n\n\"My aunt says you need to keep that leg up,\" he says and moves to stand next to me, his hand pressing onto my shoulder. With his free hand, he carelessly shoves the hair out of his face and sits beside me on the edge of the bed. \"You're pretty banged up.\"\n\nOur eyes collide and it is like I am being sucked into a vortex that I can't control.\n\nIt's him.\n\nThe boy I'm supposed to find.\n\nHis hair is lighter, almost golden brown, and swept to the side around his face, but his nose and chin are the spitting image of the one I know. And his eyes... those impossibly green eyes, filled with vibrant life. I'd prepared myself that he would look like him but they're so alike that it leaves me speechless.\n\nAnd he found me. He saved me.\n\nI shake myself hard. What are the odds? Searching for someone for nearly three years only to find them via an accident of fate? The questions make my head pound, and I blink, disoriented.\n\n\"Where am I... What happened?\" I croak. My voice is unfamiliar. Weak.\n\n\"Don't you remember? You crashed your bike and had some kind of crazy allergic reaction. You're at my house now. You didn't want me to take you to the hospital because you said something about money, so I brought you here,\" he says in a rush and then clarifies, \"My aunt's a doctor.\"\n\n\"How long have I been here?\" I say and try to stand, gasping at the soreness of my ribs.\n\nHis nearness is overwhelming, confusing me as thoughts of Cale race through my clouded brain. My throat is raw, and the effort to swallow makes my head pound. A wave of dizziness overcomes me and I fall back to the bed. A knife-like pain slices through my leg.\n\nThe boy leans forward to grasp my shoulder gently. \"Look, you really should\u2013\"\n\n\"Don't touch me,\" I snap, flinching away from the warmth in his fingers. My body may be beaten, but it's still poised to attack. The boy's offended expression throws me, and my anger fades as my brain struggles to keep up. \"Sorry, I'm still a little freaked out, and I don't like people touching me,\" I say by way of apology. He still looks miffed so I force a tiny smile to my lips. \"You go to Horrow, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, we're in the same Physics class,\" he says, the hurt look draining away slowly, \"and in the same project group. I only knew who you were because Mrs Taylor asked me to help you out if you needed a hand since you're new. You started last week, right?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I say, remembering the profile of a boy I'd barely given a second glance to. I grind my teeth together \u2013 that had been sheer carelessness on my part. Or maybe all those jumps are finally catching up to me; otherwise, why else would I be lying here in this bed, weak as a newborn kitten?\n\n\"I'm Caden, by the way,\" he says, sticking his hand out. Staring at his fingers as if they're snakes, I raise my hand in an awkward half-wave. My smile feels forced. His hand falls away, and the weird look returns to his face. \"You're not too friendly, are you?\"\n\nI breathe out the pent-up air in my lungs and feel the rush of adrenaline recede. I stare at the boy through the corner of my eye who could be Cale. No, not Cale. They may look the same, but they're entirely different people underneath their doppelganger skins.\n\n\"Sorry. I mean, I know who you are,\" I whisper under my breath.\n\nIt's not Cale, I remind myself for good measure.\n\nMy head still feels wobbly like some kind of horrible hangover. Only, I wouldn't know what that would be like \u2013 the only time I'd tasted spirits had been with Cale, celebrating the Winter Solstice when I was ten. It was an experience I never want to repeat. But I'd seen other people drunk enough to guess what a hangover would feel like.\n\nA tremor runs through my hands and I flex them automatically. My veins are blue against my skin, the tendons still corded and raised along the backs of my hands. Black and blue bruises mottle the length of both arms. My torso probably looks worse. A hollow feeling fills my stomach as I realize just how close the shakes had brought me to an irreversible outcome last night. Too close... and now that I'd found the boy, I needed to have all my wits functioning. Others would be close too. The ones who would also come for him.\n\n\"I like your tattoo,\" Caden says, interrupting the turn of my thoughts. Instinctively, my fingers touch the gold circular seal and the three black lines \u2013 two whole and one broken \u2013 beneath it on my neck. \"Does it mean anything?\"\n\nI almost want to laugh. A filial brand and a line for each traitor I'd killed? He'd be running away as fast as he could or calling the police if he even guessed what it meant.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"So, what's your name?\" Caden asks, shoving his hands in his pockets. I had to give him credit for trying. In that, he was just like Cale \u2013 neither of them took \"no\" for an answer.\n\n\"Riven.\"\n\n\"I thought that was your last name?\"\n\n\"Riven is my last name,\" I say, and bite back a grin at his immediate frown. \"I only have one name. Where I come from we don't have two names, just one.\" I see his frown deepen, and kick myself for my telling choice of words.\n\n\"Where you come from,\" he repeats slowly. \"Everyone has two names here, unless you're like Usher or Madonna.\" At my blank stare, he clarifies, \"You know, the singers?\"\n\nI nod quickly. I've seen them on the television. \"Just Riven,\" I say.\n\n\"Just Riven.\" He draws my name out slowly like he's trying to taste it or something. \"That's a weird name. I mean, unique,\" he says hastily. \"Does it mean anything?\"\n\n\"It means ripped apart.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" I can see that he's at a loss for words. I don't blame him. Back home, my name strikes fear into anyone who hears it \u2013 but that's more a factor of the reputation that precedes me than anything else.\n\nFrom his expression, I can see him wondering why someone would name a child with such an odd, violent name. I feel my lips curling in a smile \u2013 as far as names go, I like the fierceness of it, the simplicity. In a weird way, it fits me.\n\nAfter a couple minutes, Caden speaks. \"No idea what mine means. So, is that from Asia or Africa, then? You know, where people have one last name? Is that where you grew up?\"\n\nI can only manage a terse nod. At Caden's questions, I wish I could pull out the notebook in my backpack and leaf through it. Even after three years of blending in\u2014appearance, accent and behavior-wise\u2014I'm still not familiar with the exact geographical topography of this world. His questions are making my head spin, and I can't afford to make any more mistakes, not when I am almost home... now that I've finally found him.\n\nI shake myself mentally once more. If my body were stronger, I'd grab him and go, but in my weakened condition, that would be sure suicide for us both. I'd die, and he'd never make it without me. Not there.\n\nMy eyes fall to the glass of water sitting on the bedside table next to an alarm clock, and I take a slow sip. It's almost 11 on Saturday morning. I need to make some kind of exit and compose myself for travel. And the travel I'm talking about is not as simple as buying an airplane ticket and showing up at a mass-transit airport; it's way more complicated. Any number of things could go wrong, especially when there is more than one traveler \u2013 one of them a fugitive, the other a target.\n\n\"You don't look Asian,\" Caden continues his monologue, considering I'm barely participating in the conversation. \"I mean, you look like me, well, except the hair. Yours has green and blue in it,\" he points out. I touch the strands and remember that I'd dyed it four schools before, after the incident with the police. It was haphazardly chopped around my face except for a single braid that wound down one side.\n\n\"It's cool, your hair,\" Caden adds and then reddens. \"For a punk look, I mean.\"\n\nI'd butchered it myself when I'd been short on time, leaving only the slim blue and gold braid. I hadn't been able to let it go \u2013 the only reminder of my position, my rank. But overall, it was an edgy, fierce look that tended to make people stay away, which I'd liked.\n\nIt wasn't doing much to shut Caden up, though. \"You definitely stand out, especially at Horrow,\" he remarks. \"The girls are all pretty much vanilla. You meet any of them yet?\"\n\n\"No. I keep to myself.\"\n\nA wry smile. \"I get it. You don't like being touched, you want to be alone, and you're not looking for any friends.\"\n\nCaden moves to stand near the window and moves my backpack from the floor to the chair. He doesn't open it but just stares at it thoughtfully. It's a brief respite from the conversation, so I use the silence to figure out how to tactfully say thank you and leave.\n\nHe eyes me. \"What exactly happened to you last night?\"\n\nBut I'm saved from having to respond to Caden or tell him rudely to shut up, when a neatly dressed woman enters the room. She is no taller than I am but sturdily built; she looks like a strong woman. Her dark hair is pulled off of her face into a tidy bun at the base of her neck. She has kind eyes with lines at the corners, but there's something else in them, too... warning that her kindness shouldn't be mistaken for weakness.\n\n\"How's our patient doing this morning?\"\n\nShe glances at Caden, who is still flushed, and then back to me where I'm sitting on the edge of the bed with a frown on my face. A strange expression curls the corners of her lips upward, and I can feel my brows snapping together even more tightly. I don't recognize or like the amused look on her face, as if she thinks there's something going on between the two of us.\n\n\"I'm Caden's aunt,\" she says to me. \"He's been in here constantly. I've never seen him so solicitous of anyone.\"\n\n\"What? I wasn't.\" Caden flushes and stares at the ground.\n\n\"I hope you haven't been keeping her from resting, Caden. She needs to keep that foot elevated.\"\n\n\"It's fine,\" I say, and then more clearly, \"My foot?\" For the first time, I notice that I am wearing some sort of cotton pants, and I wonder whether Caden's aunt had removed my own clothes. Curiously, I don't feel any embarrassment, because I'm more worried about whether the injury will slow me down.\n\n\"Lay back,\" she tells me gently and places a hand against my forehead. \"That's good.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" I repeat, trying to pull the pajama material up to see. She stalls my hand.\n\n\"Try not to move, you have some badly bruised ribs, too. It's your ankle, nothing too serious. You must have torn a ligament from the convulsions or when you fell, but you do need to keep pressure off of it for now. I iced it and wrapped it last night. Let's have a look.\"\n\nCarefully unwrapping the bandage, I see that my ankle is a blotchy greenish purple and twice the size of my other foot. I am sure that it looks far worse than it is. I wiggle my toes slowly and I know from experience it's a good sign. It means nothing's broken.\n\n\"A lot of the swelling has gone down, which is good,\" Caden's aunt says. I can't imagine my ankle being any fatter, but it must have been because even Caden is nodding.\n\n\"It matches your hair,\" Caden remarks. I ignore him, more concerned with trying to calculate how much this injury will set me back.\n\n\"How long?\" I ask.\n\n\"A few weeks.\"\n\n\"A few weeks!\" I gasp. \"Can't you do anything to speed it up?\"\n\nA gentle smile while deftly re-wrapping the bandage across my ankle. \"No, honey. Best you can do to recover quickly is rest, ice, compression, and elevation. R. I. C. E. Simple enough to remember, right? If the pain gets any worse or it doesn't get better, you'll need to get it checked out. For now, I can give you some ibuprofen to help with the pain and the swelling.\"\n\n\"No meds. I can manage the pain,\" I say. \"I'm allergic to most medications,\" I add at her curious look. The truth is that anything that inhibits the functions of the brain is a risk, especially during eversion. I need to be clear.\n\n\"I guess that explains why you had such a high-tech injector in your bag,\" Caden chimes in, pulling the pen-like instrument from the front pocket of the backpack where he'd replaced it the night before. \"I've never seen anything like it. My emergency one is like a plastic piece of crap compared to yours. Bees are my nemesis,\" he reminds me, twisting the silver cylinder between his fingers.\n\nI smile, a cheap attempt at reassurance and normalcy even though my heart is pounding. I've never wanted to lurch forward and grab anything more than at that moment. Like the teacher earlier, I feel that Caden's aunt can see right through me. Her blue eyes are as sharp as Mrs Taylor's had been, and although there's no mistrust in them, I feel uncomfortable just the same.\n\nIt's one of the reasons that I don't like getting close to people. Too many questions. And too many that can't be answered. But I know that I owe them both some kind of explanation for my bizarre behavior... and for the injector that looks like it comes from some kind of super advanced robotics lab.\n\n\"Mine is a little more complicated,\" I say. \"I'm not allergic to bees or food. It's a... a genetic brain thing. If I don't take my medication regularly, like yesterday, things can go south pretty quickly, especially with the seizures. Sometimes something as simple as hunger can set it off.\" I glance up to test the waters. They are both watching me, but with more concern than any kind of disbelief on their faces. My lies are getting more convincing. \"The injector is custom-made for my condition. You couldn't use it,\" I say in Caden's direction. \"And it's really expensive so... \"\n\nI don't have to finish my sentence before Caden carefully replaces the injector in the backpack.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he says stuffing his hands in his pockets. \"So are you OK now?\"\n\nI nod slowly. I haven't had to use the injector before but it has definitely come in handy to say the least. I am alive. Each cylinder has six doses, so I have five remaining. I hope fervently that I don't have to use them. Even thinking about the pain makes my head spin. Caden's aunt pulls the sheet up and pats my forehead.\n\n\"You can stay here as long as you need to, Riven. Can I call someone for you? Your parents? They must be worried.\"\n\n\"No thanks,\" I say quickly. \"My father is out of town on business. He usually calls me to check in. You can talk to him then.\"\n\nShe frowns for a second but nods. \"You're welcome to stay as long as you like.\"\n\n\"I will. Thanks for taking care of me, Mrs...?\" I trail off realizing that I don't even know their family name.\n\n\"Just call me June.\"\n\n\"Thank you, June,\" I say.\n\nI'm overwhelmed at her generosity, letting some stranger into her home. I could have easily been one of the others looking for the boy. How easy would it be to kill him? One swipe of a knife, a pillow over the face, a twist of a finger? They're so trusting, these people. Back home, getting within an arm's length of another person is virtually impossible, much less getting into someone else's home. It's astonishing that the boy has survived for so long.\n\nThe odds weren't in his favor, yet here he was, unhurt and obviously thriving... hidden in plain sight. And I'd found him quite by accident \u2013 this town hadn't been on my list. I'd just stopped here on my way to Wyoming and randomly decided to stay for a few days to recuperate after the last eversion. It had been a spur of the moment decision.\n\nI glance at Caden, chewing on his thumb and staring at me out of the corner of his eye. He seems to be just like all the other kids of this world, so oblivious to everything but their immediate sphere of existence. Watching him, I know that he has been well protected, but he is clearly unprepared.\n\nHe thinks he's just a normal boy. But I know better.\n\nHe has no idea about anything \u2013 no idea of who is after him or what's coming for him. I frown. So how has he survived? How has he been able to stay here undetected and in the dark about who he really is for this long?\n\nThere is only one answer that I can think of. It is one that chills me to my bones.\n\nSomeone has to be helping him.\n\nSomeone who knows that I would be coming.\nBLACKOUT\n\nCaden and his aunt insisted I stay with them until late Sunday afternoon. Despite June's protests, I took a taxi back to the cash-only cheap motel on the outskirts of town as soon as I could. Due to her expert care, my injury is healing well, albeit slowly. In my world, muscle and tissue would be repaired in minutes in a laser lab. Still, I'm surprised that after just two days, I can bear weight on it. I sigh, frustrated. It couldn't have come at a worse time. Despite racking my brain for alternatives, I am a sitting duck. Attempting to evert with any kind of physical weakness is a death sentence. Eversion doesn't just mean physical stress \u2013 any kind of strain that sends mixed messages to the brain could upset the timing and the result. And no one wants to end up inside out with a jump gone wrong.\n\nHauling myself out of bed, I clear my mind and perform a series of meditational exercises that send energy flowing through my body. Despite the hollow ache in my ribs, it feels good. I stretch each muscle carefully until my movements are fluid and limber, taking care with my ankle, then move into a series of simple calisthenics that has a fine sheen of sweat coating my skin when I'm finished. It's a process that I repeat every morning without fail, with the exception of Saturday. I frown, redoing the exercises once more, a compensation of sorts for the missed interval. Even impaired, I can take on a couple of Vectors, but probably no more than three. I have to be prepared for the worst.\n\nI unfold the leather case lying tucked inside the back of my bag. Shiny silver knives and an array of weapons greet me, and I finger one of their edges carefully. They've never failed me. Without glancing behind me, I flick two toward the back of the motel door and they lodge with thick precision into the wood of the narrow doorjamb. Not much of a target, but I shrug and retrieve the blades. I repeat the knife throws, managing to get both in the same incision points as before. Better.\n\nGrabbing the crutches I'd borrowed from June, I hobble to the door, swearing under my breath. Having to move this slowly is worse than the pain. I hitch a ride to school in the back of a pickup truck, and before I can lose my nerve, I grit my teeth and awkwardly shuffle my way up the stairs to the doors. I'd like nothing more than to not have to attend another day of high school now that I've found Caden, but I also don't want anything to happen to him, either. I still have that feeling of things not being quite right, and vigilance and caution are two things that have kept me alive all these years.\n\nSo another day of Horrow High it is.\n\nTrudging to my class, I realize that I don't know anything about Caden. The little I do know tells me that he is nothing like Cale. It confuses me. Still, what did I expect? They're not exactly the same people \u2013 made even more dissimilar by the whole nature-versus-nurture thing. But the truth is, I don't need to know anything about him. Why should I care? He's a target, and one that I need to get back as quickly as possible.\n\n\"Hey, Riven! How's the leg?\"\n\n\"Thanks for the general announcement,\" I growl sourly just as Caden walks alongside me with two of his football friends in tow. \"It's fine.\"\n\n\"Guys, this is Riven. New girl,\" Caden says to his friends with a wide grin. \"But be warned\u2013\"\n\n\"Hey, I'm Jake,\" a redheaded boy interrupts with a smile. \"I was there the other night with Cade when you trashed your bike...\" Jake trails off at the dark scowl on my face.\n\nCaden laughs out loud. \"As I was saying, just don't mention her riding skills or ask her about anything personal; she gets a little touchy about that. And she's not interested in making friends, so forget I introduced her and move along.\"\n\nI shoot him a withering glare just in time to see a willowy blonde swing her arms around Caden from the back. Her demeanor is not friendly, nor is the acid warning look she launches in my direction. My body tenses immediately, and already my brain is calculating the distance to exits and casualty ratios of the dozens of kids swirling around me. I force myself to relax.\n\nShe's a kid, not a threat.\n\nThe adrenaline seeps from my system as the girl tosses an icy smile in my direction, her designer white pants like a second skin and a pink shirt unbuttoned enough to show a lacy pink bra, leaving little to the imagination.\n\n\"Who's your friend?\" the blonde says to Caden, her tone dripping venom. My hand hovers over the blade wedged into my belt. No metal detectors in this school makes it a hell of a lot easier to deal with threats, unlike the public schools in New York, which had been an eye-opening experience. I'd received detention for a week because of a concealed knife in my boot. Forcing my hand to my side, I try to act normal.\n\n\"Hey Sadie, this is Riven. She's new,\" Caden says and turns to embrace Sadie, who jumps up to wrap her very long cheerleader legs around his waist. I want to laugh at her overt territorial display, but something inside tells me that this will probably not be the best thing to do. Still, I can't quite help myself, and the side of my lips twitches into a smirk. Sadie's eyes narrow and I bend my head, biting my lip to stifle my amusement.\n\n\"Nice name,\" she drawls after a minute, her tone indicating that my name is anything but nice. A cutting response rises to my lips, but provoking this girl won't accomplish much, other than to serve my own ego. And I need to keep a low profile.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I say instead and quicken my step. \"Catch you later, Caden.\"\n\n\"It's just Cade, remember?\"\n\nI shoot a hand in the air and keep walking. Cade, Caden, it makes no difference to me.\n\n\"Where'd that one get dragged in from, juvie rehab?\"\n\nSadie's scornful words reach me as I walk into the classroom, but I don't hear Caden's response. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if he said that I was a foreign transfer. This time, I can't hold back my laugh, and it comes until I feel tears running down my cheeks and the sides of my stomach ache from it. They couldn't imagine just how foreign I actually am. I am still snorting even when class begins and Mrs Taylor's eyes laser me with a quelling look.\n\n\"Class, please sit in your designated project groups. We will be working on them during the second half of class today.\"\n\nGroans mix in with the noisy screech of chairs as students move around, shuffling to other tables, and for the first time I look around the classroom, staring at faces with interest instead of my usual detached assessment of potential danger. I see them as people instead of targets or threats, and I am surprised by how young they all are. Not that I am much older, but truth is, I feel older.\n\nHarder.\n\nHalf of these kids haven't felt the sharp edge of hunger or had to fight for anything in their lives. They are plump, satisfied, and ignorant. Where I'm from, our training begins the minute we are born, and we face survival tests far worse than a quiz on Shakespeare before the age of five. Education is mandatory, but so are other things \u2013 physical education, weapons education, life education.\n\nI realize that I'm judging once more and give myself a shake. Be fair, I think. It's not their fault that they are the way they are, and have evolved in a different world under a different set of rules and circumstances. They are people, the same flesh and blood as I am.\n\nWell, maybe not Sadie, I think with a grin, she's pure venomous angst.\n\nThe ones in my group seem likable enough: a girl, Charisma, who is quiet but friendly; Caden, of course; and another jumpy thin boy, Philip, with an overbite and fingernails bitten to the quick. His head is already buried in his physics textbook. Leafing mentally through my slang file, he is what most in this world would call a nerd or a geek, but where I'm from, Philip would be a coveted asset. Someone with his skills would be selected in a heartbeat. My father would have loved him.\n\nCaden opens his books on the table and leans back in his chair, grinning at me. \"Hey, Crutches, let me know if you need any help.\" He's joking, of course, knowing what my response will be. I shoot him a look communicating exactly what I will do with my crutches if he offers to help me again. His grin widens and I can't help smiling back at him, the acid thought of my father melting away.\n\nI feel eyes lasering into my back, but I refuse to give their owner the satisfaction of a response. Sadie is a nuisance, nothing more, and truth be told, I'd rather pass the next few weeks in anonymity instead of some full-on teenage feud with a hormonally-challenged seventeen year-old who thinks I'm after her boyfriend.\n\nAt seventeen, where I come from, you're a full grown contributor, responsible for a heck of a lot more than picking out a prom dress or fighting over a boy. If you have disagreements with another, you duel it out. It's that simple. If you need intervention for bigger disputes or feuds, you get it in front of the Royal Tribunal. Here, in the capricious world of high school, it's an entirely different story. I sigh. Needless to say, I've had enough of this version of high school to last me a lifetime.\n\n\"So what's the verdict?\" a low voice says. Caden is staring at me with a raised eyebrow and a half-smile.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Your analysis of us? Of me? Come on, be honest, what do you really think?\"\n\nIt is one of my few unguarded moments, and for a second, I see a flash of Cale's perceptiveness in him. My face composes itself into its normal emotionless mask, but Caden's knowing expression is so hauntingly familiar that it throws me. I feel an uncomfortable warmth seeping up into my neck and across my ear lobes. I don't like this feeling. It makes my response far sharper than it should be.\n\n\"You like being the center of attention, you're smart but lazy, you want to get out of this town as soon as you graduate, and your girlfriend is a bitch. How's that?\" The words snap like rubber bands to my lips, but as soon as I say them, I find myself wanting to take them back. My anger is directed at myself, not anyone else.\n\nCharisma is staring at me slack-jawed, and geek-boy has even raised his head from his book, looking nervously from Caden to me and back again as if expecting a full-on brawl right there in the middle of physics. But Caden's expression is measured, and he holds my challenging stare easily.\n\nA slow smile. \"Three out of four, so not bad.\"\n\nAgain, spoken so much like Cale. I know I shouldn't be surprised at the similarities, but nonetheless, I am. My teeth are ground together so tightly that my jaw aches. I don't want to feel anything for Caden other than as a means to an end. He isn't Cale.\n\n\"Your girlfriend isn't a bitch?\"\n\nA laugh. \"No, she is, but Sadie's harmless. Remind me to tell you about it later,\" Caden says just as Mrs Taylor raps on her desk. There won't be a \"later\" if I have anything to say about it. If our brief exchange is any indication of what the next few days will bring, I'll watch over him from a distance. I can't risk any rapport with him \u2013 my loyalty is to Cale, and this boy is nothing more than a target. I look away, pretending to listen to Mrs Taylor.\n\nNewton's laws of motion are a familiar subject, and while it's something that I learned long ago, that doesn't mean that I don't have to pay attention. I learned that lesson the hard way in Boston when I carelessly answered a question with an analysis worthy of a doctorate-level dissertation. They treated me like some kind of second-coming prodigy. Needless to say, I didn't stay at that school too much longer. Drawing attention tended to draw other bad things... way worse things.\n\nLike Vectors.\n\nI suppress an automatic shudder, and not even the workbook equations of motion can distract me. The Vectors are one of the most-feared and worst creations of my world. They are engineered creatures, made from human corpses... reanimated dead beings with one purpose. To hunt and to kill.\n\nOur technology is advanced, but we learned a hard lesson with artificial intelligence centuries before. While this world was embroiled in the French Revolution, my world was facing its worst crisis in history \u2013 the Tech War \u2013 a war that had devastated us to the point that topographical boundaries had been unrecognizable and continents reshaped. Whole oceans were destroyed. What had once been lush forests were now dusty plains of gray acid ash. Parts of my world are still black and oozing with toxic matter. But people survived, eventually reclaiming and rebuilding what they could.\n\nThe Vectors were a new kind of soldier, created after the laws were put in place against any kind of self-evolving robotic intelligence. Nanogen technology became the perfect combination of programmable robotics and human genetics, and the Vectors were bred to supplement human loss, to protect and defend those who survived. They had been the brilliantly sick creation of a madman.\n\nMy father.\n\n\"You OK?\" Caden whispers, distracting me. \"You look ill.\"\n\n\"I'm fine.\"\n\nBut I'm not fine. Everything inside of me feels like it's on fire. My ribs are splintering with alternating bands of hot and cold surging like rotating tides. There's a strange buzzing sensation in my head, and I can feel myself becoming light-headed and fuzzy with each passing second. What the hell is happening to me?\n\n\"Riven, can you hear me? Riven!\"\n\nCaden's face swims blurrily into my vision. And then it's Cale's. I reach toward him but he fades away, and I am left alone, terrified. There is nothing but darkness and the faces of the Vectors, inexorably closing in.\n\nWhen I awaken this time, I am lying in a sterile room with metal leads stuck to my chest and plastic tubing stretching across my face. White light stabs into my eyes and I lurch upright. Panicked, I pull against the tubes and wiring only to cause a frantic beeping. Someone in a white coat rushes into the room, and I shrink back, hands protectively curled in front of my chest.\n\n\"It's OK, Riven, it's OK. Calm down, you're safe. It's me, June.\" Caden's aunt is standing next to me, a soft smile on her face. \"We really need to stop meeting like this,\" she says as she checks the monitor and replaces the oxygen tubing under my nose.\n\n\"Where am I? What happened?\"\n\n\"You went into circulatory shock and you fainted.\" I eye the wires and she smiles again. \"They're just monitoring your heart rate. I took a look at your foot, and it's healing quickly, faster than I expected.\"\n\n\"I can't be here,\" I choke out as June uncaps a syringe and deftly injects it into my arm. \"What's that? I don't want any drugs!\"\n\n\"It's just a sedative. Riven\u2013\"\n\n\"No! You don't understand. I need to leave. They'll find me. They'll find all of you.\" My heart rate escalates with every breath, and concern crosses June's face.\n\n\"Calm down. You're not making any sense. Who'll find you? Your parents? Well, that's good. I meant to ask you. For some reason, none of the numbers listed on your file at school seem to work. We need to get in contact with them and let them know you've been admitted to the clinic.\"\n\n\"My dad is out of town.\" It's a programmed response.\n\n\"Cell phone?\"\n\n\"No. He calls me, remember?\" My mind is racing trying to assess the situation. Somehow, my body is failing. I know that something isn't right \u2013 I can feel it inside of me, the holes, and I clutch my chest. I need to get out of there. \"June, hospitals... I can't be here.\" I'm gasping for air with each word. \"Please. My mother... she died in a room just like this one... please!\"\n\nI am not even pretending at this point. White spots are exploding like clouds of mist behind my eyelids. All I can see are the memories I do have of my mother tied down in a white room with tubes embedded in every part of her, screaming her head off.\n\nWaiting to die.\n\nIt's all I can do not to rip out the ones attached to me, and then tears are running down my face, and I can't stop them, there's so much pain like everything is dying inside of me. Where did it all come from? What's happening? What is wrong with me?\n\nAnd then I am screaming, staring at the red dot on my arm. \"What did you do? What did you do to me? What kind of poison did you put in me? Get it out, get it out!\"\n\n\"Help me restrain her arms,\" I hear June say. \"Gentle with her.\"\n\nI fight like I have never fought before, as if I am fighting to keep my very last breath, scratching and scraping, kicking and punching. The full weight of a body collapses against me, and my arms thud, pinned to my sides against the bed. I am drowning in a sea of my tears, the salt of them covering my cheeks and my lips. My body stills and the world grows unnaturally quiet. Now I'm the one waiting to die.\n\nIn my mind, I see the Vectors. They're coming.\n\n\"Please,\" I whisper. \"Please, June. Don't let me die here.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, darling. You're safe now.\"\n\nSomething cool swirls around my veins, and then the world goes dark once more.\n\nVoices and colors fade in and out.\n\n\"Is she going to be OK?\" That one I recognize. It's Caden's. I want to tell him that I'm fine, but my lips won't cooperate. My bones feel like syrup, like there's nothing inside of the skin that's holding my body together. Darkness takes me again.\n\n\"... no consent for testing... can't draw blood...\"\n\n\"... levels stabilized...\"\n\n\"... take her home... haven't been able to locate her father...\" That last one is June's lilting voice.\n\nI sleep again.\n\nImages move along in an endless collage, bits of white and gray intermingling. Later on, there are bits of sky and swatches of green. The sound disappears. There's only the quiet of gentle voices murmuring around me, like the sound of rain.\n\nMy mind is quieter now, no longer so manic, allowing me to think and feel and process. A soft voice tells me that everything is going to be OK. Is it June or is it Caden? But I listen, and once more feel that sense of safety, of trust. And again, I know that I am breaking one of my own hard and fast rules.\n\nNever trust anyone. Especially the Otherworlders.\n\nBut do I really have a choice? Other than Caden and June, I've thought of them as nothing but a means to an end. Did I think of them as people? They aren't real to me. They're a parallel species that has nothing to do with me. But if trusting them means that maybe I can stay alive, then I'll have a sliver of a chance to get back home. A full-body internal scan will detect anything that is wrong with me in seconds.\n\nIf I can make it back.\n\nStrong arms are carrying me. My eyelids hurt but they open and close like heavy drapes. Within moments, I am back in a familiar room... the airy one with the fan and gauzy white curtains.\n\n\"Caden, don't stay too long. She needs to get some rest,\" June says as she props the pillows behind my head. I manage a weak smile. I can't even begin to express my gratitude, but something in her eyes tells me that she knows more than she's saying. Or is it just my constant sense of paranoia?\n\nCaden brushes the hair out of my face. His green eyes are soft and comforting.\n\n\"You're awake. How are you feeling?\" he asks.\n\n\"I've been better.\" My voice feels like I haven't used it in years and rubs against the inside of my throat like gritty sandpaper. Caden pours me a glass of water from the pitcher, and I sip gratefully.\n\n\"Has this ever happened to you before?\"\n\n\"No.\" Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I've never been sick or fainted a day in my life. I wonder if it has to do with the pills or the injector or being here this long. I stare at Caden and then say the words that are playing on the tip of my tongue. \"Thanks, by the way. That's twice now you've saved me. I don't know if I like it.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I don't like owing people.\"\n\n\"You don't owe me anything, Riven. You needed help and I was in the right place at the right time, that's all.\"\n\nWe are quiet for a moment. The edge of the bed dips under Caden's weight as he sits next to me and rests his head on his hands propped on his knees. A silky lock of hair curls into his face.\n\n\"I like your hair long,\" I murmur. \"I mean, I like it short, too.\"\n\n\"You've never seen me with short hair.\" Caden's voice is quiet, but I can see his eyes narrow. I want to kick myself. In the next moment, I decide that I am done with conversation. All it will lead to is confusion, and questions and doubt when the time comes. Caden is staring at me, waiting for an explanation. I shrug and take a big gulp of water.\n\n\"You look like someone I know. He has short hair.\"\n\n\"You mean Cale?\"\n\nI choke and almost spit water all over the room as a wave of shocked coughing overcomes me. \"What did you say?\" I whisper after several painful seconds.\n\n\"Cale. You said his name while you were unconscious in the hospital. I think you thought I was him.\" He pauses, watching me carefully. \"Now it all makes sense.\"\n\nI am overwhelmed by my own stupid carelessness. What else did I say? Did I talk about what I was doing here? About who Caden really was? I can't process the questions fast enough as ten more pop up in their place. What have I done? I should have just risked it and everted the minute I'd found Caden, and dealt with the consequences later. He was the important one, and he was healthy enough. That was all that mattered.\n\nYou're thinking crazy, Riven, I tell myself. If you everted from here, without you Caden wouldn't have half a chance in the Outers before he got to the city. The Outers would have swallowed him whole.\n\nCaden's voice interrupts the ominous chaos of my thoughts. \"So, who is he?\"\n\n\"A friend,\" I say.\n\nCale is far more than that \u2013 he's my best friend, my brother, my liege \u2013 but I know that explaining any of it won't make much difference. Caden won't understand our politics, or any of the intricacies of who I am to Cale. I'm bound to Cale in a way that these people could never fathom... one bred of steel and blood and undying loyalty.\n\n\"In the hospital, it sounded like he was a lot more than that, more like a boyfriend.\"\n\n\"Not that it's any of your business, but no, he's my best friend.\" I cough and take another sip of water. \"Did I talk about anything else? You know, while I was in there?\"\n\n\"Only about your mother and how she died. I'm sorry.\"\n\nI frown but I do have a vague recollection of begging June to let me leave. \"It was a long time ago. She had a brain tumor.\" I pause, hesitating. \"Did I say anything else? About... Cale?\"\n\nCaden shakes his head, and my relief is so great I can feel my entire body relax in my next breath. But it is too soon. He is struggling with the lie, I can see it in his eyes. The dread fills me again.\n\n\"Tell me,\" I say. \"I won't get mad, I promise.\"\n\n\"You said, 'I'm sorry I failed you. Sorry I didn't come back right away.' Or something like that.\" A pause, and then Caden's green eyes meet and hold mine. \"Is he OK?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nMy voice is so quiet that Caden strains forward to hear it. Unthinkingly, I tuck the lock of hair back over his ear. Something in his eyes flares at my touch. I hardly notice what I've done, but it doesn't matter. Suddenly everything is so clear that it feels like I can see for days... the clarity that comes after a fever breaks. I take a deep breath and things become even clearer.\n\nCaden isn't Cale.\n\nI know what I have to do.\n\nMy sense of conviction is so strong that Caden shies away instinctively, a far cry from the warmth I'd felt from him just before. My mask is back, my chilling words matching the icy hardness he must see on my face. It is a reflex action almost, the sudden shape of my purpose here. I don't question the calmness that settles into me; in fact, it feels like old, comfortable clothing. It's as if everything inside of me has somehow been magically reset... who I am, my duty, my mission.\n\nAnd my mission is to secure the target.\n\nI shake my head slowly. \"I was wrong before. I haven't failed him. I've found what he needs, and I will get it to him.\" The words are hopping on my tongue, burning to get out. \"There is nothing, dead or alive, that will stop me.\"\nSECRETS\n\n\"Riven, you look wonderful. I can't believe that brace is off your ankle already!\"\n\nJune's face is welcoming and warm at the door, but I steel myself against it. I am not here to make friends or have any further doubts as to why I'm here. Still, I don't want to be rude when she opens the door wide and invites me inside.\n\n\"Good genes,\" I acknowledge with a small smile, hovering near the entrance. \"I can't stay, but wanted to come by to say thank you, and also to get my bike. I'm OK to ride now,\" I assure her hurriedly as her brows begin to knit together. \"I'm really alright. I can walk, run, everything's back to normal.\"\n\n\"I'm not comfortable with you getting on a motorcycle this soon. Especially one that was in an accident barely a week ago. Not to mention what else happened \u2013 the shock and fainting.\"\n\n\"June, I'm fine. It was only stress, and I've been taking better care of myself. Plus, Cade told me that Jake checked out the bike already,\" I interject hastily. \"Really, I've been riding that thing forever, and I'm safer on that than in anything on four wheels. And my ankle's fine, I swear.\"\n\nJune shoots me a skeptical look. \"Just let me have a quick look to be sure. It will make me feel better.\" Knowing that getting out of there will be a lot easier if I just let her look for herself, I nod and sit on the chair closest to me. Her fingers are warm against my skin as she gently feels along the bones and then twists my ankle to the left and right. \"Any pain?\"\n\nI shake my head. \"It's been fine for a few days now.\"\n\n\"Good genes,\" she says repeating my earlier words and then frowns. \"Maybe I was wrong about the torn ligament; could have been just a mild sprain that looked worse than it was.\" She checks my eyes, heart rate, and blood pressure. \"All good, too.\"\n\nI can see June second-guessing her own doubt. She's too good of a doctor to have been wrong, and she knows it. Quickly, I say, \"I'm just glad I'm better now. Crutches are a pain. Being the local fainting gimp is even worse.\"\n\nThe truth is, I feel better than I have in years. Ever. I can't explain it, but it's as if a switch has been turned on inside of me \u2013 my body feels limber, my brain crystal-clear. Maybe I'm finally getting used to this place.\n\nA smile. \"I still want you to take it easy for a couple more days. There's no swelling, but with this kind of recovery, I wouldn't want you to overdo it just because it looks and feels OK.\"\n\n\"Got it.\"\n\nShe's silent for a while, then says quietly, \"Amazing,\" her fingers still resting against my foot.\n\n\"June? Caden said that my keys were in the kitchen,\" I suggest helpfully.\n\nAs if in a trance, June blinks and stands, but I can see that her brain is still furiously ticking. \"Oh, yes, of course. Caden isn't here; he's at a fencing meet at the school, I think,\" she says while she's looking for the keys in the kitchen. \"But I think he would have put them in one of these drawers.\"\n\n\"Fencing?\"\n\nJune shrugs. \"Don't look at me. I like chess myself, but he has a natural affinity for it, and while I'm not a fan of any combat-weapon sport, he does seem to enjoy it. I've only been to a few of his meets, but he's pretty good. Or so I see.\" She grins. \"Have you seen the trophy shelves in his room?\"\n\nI shake my head. No. \"Fencing,\" I repeat softly to myself.\n\nThe sport itself is beautiful to watch, as elaborate as dancing, with elongated parries and delicate thrusts. I know it well because we are all trained in the art of most hand-to-hand combat techniques by the tender age of five, and all manner of weaponry by seven. Swords, bows, knives, spears, axes, and guns... everything you could conceivably use to dispatch an enemy. The sword has always been my favorite. Cale always favored the crossbow. For a second, the memory of one of our first training sessions together flashes through my brain, and June fidgeting through the drawers in the kitchen fades into the background.\n\nWe had been assigned to one another for formal training, and had to face a mock obstacle course with various threats. I'd just turned eight. Though I was small for my age, I was lightning-fast and held the advantage of having held a sword before the age of two. Already, I was at the top of my age group in any kind of martial arts training.\n\nWhen we were paired up for the test before the final assignments on specialized-weapon training were made, we automatically sized the other up. His shock of glossy brown hair made him look impish, but the expression on his face was boldly confident.\n\n\"You're small,\" he said, his voice matching the arrogant expression. \"Looks like I'll have to pick up the slack.\"\n\n\"How come you're not paired with someone your own level?\" I blurted out.\n\n\"Guess they think you need babysitting.\"\n\nI'd felt like slapping him. My scowl was fierce, but he'd just laughed in my face as if I were nothing more than a kitten defending its toy. I found this boy's arrogance to be so grating and his overconfidence so irritating that I vowed then and there to teach him a lesson.\n\n\"Try to keep up,\" I snarled, and took off just as the whistle blew, jumping over fences and scaling walls. I didn't even look behind me to see if he was keeping up, even though part of the test was to protect your partner at all times. I was too angry. Irrationally, I wanted to show this rude boy exactly what I could do.\n\nTwo hologen targets jumped up in front of me, one a wild jaguar and the other some kind of bird. I shot them with the rifle slung across my back, both easy hits. It was then that I heard the shout of pain, and in that brief second, the red clouding my brain cleared. The boy was hurt.\n\nI could go back and get him, or I could leave him.\n\nJust as I was deciding to press forward \u2013 let him tough it out on his own \u2013 something niggled at the base of my neck. I couldn't leave him, it wouldn't be right. Resigned, I turned around and backtracked, only to find him leaning against a tree calmly chewing on an apple.\n\nI frowned. \"I heard someone cry out.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it was a new kind of hologen. It made human noises. I killed it.\" His nonchalant words were almost enough to make me miss the blood dripping from his sleeve. Almost.\n\n\"You're hurt?\"\n\n\"That's mostly the thing's blood. But it did break my leg. I can't walk.\" He finished the apple, tossing the core near the body of the dead creature. \"You should go on, I'll tell the trainers that I tripped. You should finish.\"\n\nI could feel the guilt at leaving him earlier ripping through me like acid. \"No, it's my fault. I shouldn't have left. I broke the rules and you got hurt.\"\n\n\"We could default.\"\n\n\"No!\" I shouted. Defaulting meant quitting, and a strike that would go on your training record, even if something happened that was no fault of your own. Failure was not an option, not for any of us. If you couldn't defend yourself in the field, you were as good as dead. It was as simple as that. \"We'll figure something else out,\" I said confidently despite the hole of anxiety in my stomach.\n\n\"I guess I shouldn't have teased you.\" It was the smallest offer of truce and barely an apology, but I took it anyway. He had been hurt because of me... because I deserted him.\n\n\"I'm Riven,\" I said, sealing the fragile truce. \"Can you walk if you hold on to me?\"\n\n\"You're half my size; we'll never make it. Just leave me.\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" I told him. \"I'm stronger than I look.\"\n\nAnd so, with me half dragging, half pushing him along, we inched through the rest of the course. When we ran out of bullets in my rifle, we stood back-to-back, sword and crossbow in hand to take out our enemies. I admired the boy's skill with his weapons, switching fluidly from longbow to crossbow and back before I could blink. Anything that got too close, I fought off capably with my sword and, occasionally, a short knife.\n\nIn the end, it wasn't the most graceful completion of the course, but we came out together panting, winded, and utterly exhausted. The medical team rushed out of nowhere so quickly that I didn't have a chance to say anything more to the boy before he was hover-ported away, surrounded by a team of elite guards. It was surprising but I didn't think too much more about it.\n\nIt was only afterwards that I learned that my partner was the son of the Monarch of Neospes. A prince. Mortified, I kept waiting for the soldiers who would surely come to arrest me for my heedless words and thoughtless actions in the holo dome, but I needn't have worried. From that point on, the boy who I would come to know as Cale always asked for me, and only me, to partner with him.\n\nOne day, when I asked him why he'd always chosen me, he responded flippantly, \"Someone needs to protect the little people.\"\n\nBut later in a rare moment of unguarded honesty, Cale told me that it was because I'd come back for him without knowing who he was, even after his intentionally provoking words. He'd liked that I had never even considered giving up or leaving him behind. I remember telling him that quitting would never be an option for me. It wasn't then, and it would never be now.\n\nAnd just like back then, Cale knows that he can count on me. And that can't change, not now, not ever.\n\n\"Riven?\"\n\nI jerk out of my thoughts so quickly that my fingers are on the hilt of a knife tucked into a side pocket of my pants before I can exhale the breath hitched in my lungs. I relax, my brain belatedly recognizing June's voice and release my hot fingers.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I breathe. \"Homework on the brain.\"\n\n\"The hospital just paged me and I need to go,\" June says pulling on her jacket. Her face is apologetic. \"Your keys aren't in here; they must be on Caden's desk somewhere. Can you have a look and lock the door on your way out? Take the stairs just past the room you were in. Second door on the left. You take care of yourself, OK?\"\n\nShe's out the door before I can even nod. But I am too grateful to speak \u2013 she's just given me the opportunity I've been looking for. An engine turns over, and I wait until I see her car pulling out of the driveway before I make my way upstairs.\n\nPictures line the hallway walls in a variety of colors and shapes with faces and landscapes filling their matte frames. They weave a story of vibrant life as I climb the staircase. Some of the frames are new and some antique, with some photos in black and white, while others are in color. Despite the hodge-podge, there's a beautiful artistry and a love beneath it all connecting it together. It's breathtaking.\n\nIt's only seconds later that I realize that Caden isn't in a single one.\n\nPushing open the door to the first room, I tell myself that I'm not snooping, merely familiarizing myself with the layout, but I still feel uncomfortable anyway. This room is obviously June's room, with cherry furniture and a large four-poster bed covered with a hand-quilted floral bedspread. The room is airy and overlooks the street. A thickly bound book and a pair of glasses are resting on the bedside table. The room is feminine yet strong, just as she is.\n\nCrossing the few feet to the right side of the room, I perform a cursory search. I don't know what I'm looking for... clues, weapons, anything that will tell me who June really is, because I know without a doubt that she isn't Caden's aunt, if only because of the photos in the hallway.\n\nWhy is she helping him?\n\nA fluttery feeling tingles along the back of my neck, and I spin around in attack mode. But there's nothing there. I can't shake the feeling that has now sunk into my bones, that feeling of being watched. I wonder if half of it is my own imagination combined with the events of the last few days.\n\nI give myself a mental shake. The house is empty; I would know instantly if it weren't. Turning my attention back to the job at hand, I make my way to June's dresser, sliding my hands along the walls and along its backside. The drawers are filled with clothes, nothing exceptional. Something snatches my attention on the bedside table. The heavy gold letters on the book are like a neon warning.\n\nQuantum Mechanics: Intuition or Theory?\n\nThis time, I can't control the realization that rushes through me. June knows a lot more than she's letting on. How much does she know? Did she know about me?\n\nNo. I've been careful. Haven't I? The self-doubt crawls in, cold and relentless. I haven't really been myself lately, getting injured, fainting, and ending up in a hospital. Being all too careless. I could have let something unintentional slip over the past few weeks.\n\nNo, my inner voice argues. You are meticulous. She doesn't know anything other than what she knew anyway. Otherwise, why would she have left you here alone if she thought you were dangerous? There's no way.\n\nMollified somewhat, I run my finger along the edge of the book. Quantum mechanics isn't exactly bedtime reading material. Hefting it up, I flip open the cover, skimming through the first quarter, and almost drop it to the floor. Instead, I sink to the bed and hold the book carefully on my lap. In a cutout hidden in its pages, in a bed of soft chamois, lies an innocuous-looking gun, barely palm-sized. I know instantly that it is loaded and it is lethal.\n\nThere's a magazine of bullets in a slim brown box next to the gun in the book. I examine them carefully. Custom hollow-points, meant to shred the inside of a target. The blue markings on the side of the box indicate that there's some kind of modified burst mechanism within the bullet. These have been specifically designed to annihilate whatever or whoever they come into contact with. I place the bullets back into the case and replace the book.\n\nBefore closing the cover, I stare for a long second. The gun is new. From the minimal residue and shiny oiled insides, it's probably only been fired a few times. If June, who for all intents and purposes is a civilian, is anticipating this level of danger, then I've been miscalculating things all along.\n\nShe's expecting someone. Or something.\n\nAfter I've smoothed the bed and verified that everything is back in its place, I exit the room quickly. Across the hall is another room. This room, unlike the rooms I've been in, is completely sparse, with a single bed with a metal frame and a slim desk sitting under the window. It appears to be unused, but still, instinct propels my feet to cross over to the nearest closet door. Empty. I release the breath I've unconsciously been holding. Maybe it's a spare room that June hasn't gotten to yet. Still, something about its sparse efficiency strikes a familiar chord inside of me. The clock on the wall is five minutes fast, which is curious because it matches the time on my own watch. Time can be your own worst enemy. I, too, prefer to always be ahead of it. Retracing my footsteps, I close the door behind me and make my way to the next door. A decent-sized bathroom.\n\nThe third door is Caden's room.\n\nI know it instantly but something holds me back, my fingers hovering on the doorknob. Why am I so afraid to open it? Caden means nothing to me. A shiver sweeps through me, tingling along the undersides of my arms and up my neck, and a forgotten sense of anxiety hits me full-force. Instinctively, my fingers draw back.\n\nDrawing a shaky breath, I check the other doors down the hallway. One leads to another bathroom, the next to a linen closet, and the third to a stairway to a shadowy attic that's filled with old furniture. On the attic steps, I sit staring at Caden's door as if the devil himself is on the other side. Why is my imagination suddenly running wild? Why am I afraid? There's nothing there, nothing that can harm me.\n\n\"Get it together, Riv!\" I tell myself harshly. \"He's just a kid like everyone else here, nothing more than that. Now find your keys and let's go.\" I catch a glimpse of myself in the long mirror at the end of the hallway, and I have to laugh.\n\n\"Keep talking to yourself and you know where you'll end up,\" I say to the fierce-looking girl, and watch her pitiful attempt to stare me down. I step closer. \"The loony bin,\" I inform her threateningly and then roll my eyes as she shakes her head and grins at me.\n\nI wonder briefly if losing your mind is a part of the eversion sickness that afflicts about fifty percent of the people who attempt it, because not only am I talking to no one in particular, but my hair is sticking out like a prickly bush, and my light gray eyes have a slightly desperate quality to their shadowy dark-circled edges. I look like a homeless runaway.\n\nI tug on the second-hand Grateful Dead T-shirt, some obscure music band that I'd never heard of, and hike my jeans out of the beat-up black combat boots. Not much I can do about the hair, but I try anyway, fingering the choppy locks lying on either side of the blue-and-silver braid hanging to my shoulder. Better, but not much. I may feel like a million bucks inside, but I definitely don't look it. I shrug. Once I get back, I can work on my appearance. Right now, I have a job to do.\n\nFind my stupid keys.\n\nWith a hiss of exasperation, I stride to Caden's door and shove it open. The room is painted in rich intertwining hues of blue creating the illusion of being submerged underwater. A large bed occupies most of the space, leaving room for little else, but I expect that's the point. It's an undersea sanctuary of sorts, and one that is only truly appreciated lying down. Complete immersion. It's beautiful and serene, not at all what I'd expected.\n\nAs I am crossing over to Caden's desk, my brain registers other details, like the shelves in the window alcove above it, covered in trophies. The majority of them are for fencing, but some, again not surprisingly, are for archery. A small sound escapes my lips, half gasp, half cry of some sort, and a knot immediately forms in my belly. With the bow, Cale had been an expert marksman. It shouldn't be so strange that they have so much in common, given what they are, but the similarities are still overwhelming.\n\nA tiny amateurish landscape painting above the bed catches my eye, and I lean against the mattress for a closer look. It is all I can do not to fall backwards as my weight dips into the bed in a very unnatural way, as if I am on some kind of strange floating device. Instead, I spring backward to compensate and bang my still-healing ankle into the desk chair next to the bed.\n\n\"Mother of...\" I mutter, launching the offending chair across the room, as a cloud of pain threatens to suffocate me. \"Ouch!\"\n\n\"I'd hate to know what that poor chair did to deserve such treatment.\"\n\nI blink the stars in my vision away. Caden is leaning nonchalantly against the door, his mouth twisted in a grin, and shaking his head in mock consternation.\n\n\"Hey,\" I blurt out. \"Sorry, June told me to look for my keys up here. She couldn't find them where you said in the kitchen. I hope you don't mind.\" The words blend together in a rush, and I'm not entirely sure why they sound a trifle defensive. I can't believe I hadn't heard him come in. \"She told me to come up.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I forgot that I'd moved them. They're in my desk drawer. In the back.\"\n\n\"What?\" Why would he have put my keys in there? I know I'm frowning.\n\nA shrug as he walks toward me. \"I thought you were going to do something stupid like try to ride right after the accident, so I hid them.\"\n\n\"I wasn't\u2013\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Caden says, his grin widening, and reaches around me. I feel my entire body freeze as his arms graze against mine, and suddenly I am holding my breath. Every second feels elongated as the smell of the sweat on his skin from his fencing meet seeps into my nostrils. He smells so much like Cale that my knees buckle... but that's impossible. There's no conceivable way that they should even smell alike. Is there? My confusion must be apparent because Cale \u2013 I mean Caden \u2013 grasps my arms.\n\n\"Riven? What's wrong? You're staring at me like I'm a ghost.\"\n\n\"I need to sit,\" I rasp, ignoring the keychain he's holding in one hand. \"Not on your bed,\" I say hastily. \"Something's wrong with it. It's... broken or something. Soggy.\"\n\nCaden's laugh rings through the room. \"It's just a waterbed. They're supposed to be soggy.\"\n\n\"A water what?\" The thought is inconceivable to me... a bed with water in it. When I think of the scarcity and the high cost of water where I come from, the thought of the overindulgence of Caden's bed makes me physically sick. I shake my head to cover my discomfort. \"I don't get it. Why don't you have a real bed?\"\n\n\"It is a real bed. Don't you know what a waterbed is?\" I shake my head, still mute. \"They're pretty common. I like the feel of it, and it's good for my back. Something about it is calming, and when I lie on it, in the silence, I really feel like I'm in the middle of the ocean. Come on, try it.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nBut I have to admit that I am intrigued. The whole notion of the sea and the ocean is as foreign to me as my entire existence probably is to Caden. He reads my hesitation \u2013 and my curiosity \u2013 easily.\n\n\"Here,\" he says, and turns my shoulders so that my back is facing the bed. \"Don't jerk down; just sit gently. Good. Now lie back.\"\n\nI comply until the top of the bed is literally cupping my entire body. \"It feels so weird,\" I say.\n\n\"One sec, check this out.\"\n\nI barely notice when Caden pulls the shades over his windows and presses a switch on a light in one corner of the room, so taken I am with the gently sloshing motion of the waterbed. But in the next moment, I'm transported to another world as white bands of light radiate against the blue mosaic of the walls, and the deep sound of marine life thrums into my ears from a box on the bedside table. I can't even speak, far less breathe, when I feel Caden lie on his back next to me, the movement from his weight sending a slow, rolling wave into my right side.\n\n\"This is...\"\n\nBut I can't find the right words for the magnitude of the feelings inside of me. I have never ever seen a real ocean other than in pictures, and this is as close to that as I have ever gotten, even if it is just an illusion of light and sense.\n\n\"Incredible, right?\"\n\n\"Amazing,\" I whisper in a childlike voice. \"Does the ocean really look like this?\"\n\n\"In the right spot, if the sun is shining down through the water, this comes pretty close. I think I've loved the ocean ever since I can remember,\" Caden says in a quiet voice. \"I don't remember much about when I was really little, but I do remember my mom taking me to this seaside village when I was eight years old, and she couldn't get me out of the water, even when it was so dark that I couldn't see two feet in front of me. Back then, I had to have my bedroom painted blue, too.\" Caden laughs, a sound halfway between humor and pain.\n\n\"Your mom? Is she here?\"\n\nCaden turns to face me, a shadow crossing his features, and shakes his head slowly. \"No. She died.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"When I was seven. Seizure, they said.\" His mouth twists. \"Some kind of brain or nervous system infection, but the doctors weren't really sure.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Thanks. It's OK. I miss her but it was a long time ago.\"\n\nI turn back to stare at the ceiling, the light and sound doing nothing to dissipate the sudden weight in my chest, but I remain silent. There's nothing I can say \u2013 death is a natural part of life for me, but knowing that Caden's mother had died from eversion sickness leaves me cold. I couldn't imagine how painful it would have been, or how hard it would have been for Caden to watch his mother die.\n\nCale's mother.\n\nA shiver runs through me, and warm fingers slide against my wrist. The shiver deepens. The waterbed shifts, rolling me upward as Caden turns on his side to face me. I can feel him staring at me, but I keep my eyes glued to the ceiling. His fingers skim downward to cover my closed fist in his hand.\n\nI can't move. My entire body is rigid at the light touch.\n\n\"Who are you really, Riven?\" he whispers, his right hand shadowing the blue swirls for a second before lifting to move the braid out of my face. He holds it for a second, studying it before releasing it. My breath catches. The sheer force of him imprisons me, as his fingers trail down my face, turning my chin toward his. \"You seem so tough on the outside, but you're not. Not really.\"\n\nMy eyes meet his. They are warm but unreadable. His thumb stirs against my temple.\n\n\"You don't know anything about me.\" The words are sticky on my tongue, clumsy. For some reason, I feel inexplicably awkward.\n\n\"I know you're not like other girls, but I know you aren't as hard as you pretend to be,\" Caden says, propping himself up on one shoulder and cupping the right side of my face in his palm. Caden's eyes are liquid like the imaginary water wonderland surrounding us, his irises mirroring shades of hazy blue. They are mesmerizing. His head bends toward mine, and all the breath steals out of me.\n\n\"I can't stop thinking about you,\" he murmurs. \"You're so different.\" His words slice through me like ice shards as I pull away. What the hell am I doing? I am different... more different than he knows. I jerk sideways and upwards, causing the bed to undulate violently, and wrench my hand out of his.\n\nHe's a mark, for heaven's sake. A mark!\n\n\"What's wrong? You OK?\" Caden asks quickly. An embarrassed look flits across his face for a second, but it's gone as quickly as it came. He hasn't done anything wrong, and I hadn't done anything to dissuade him. I'd been idiotic to ignore the obvious signals \u2013 the bed, the lights, his gentle touch \u2013 but my senses had been muddled by the magic of the ambient lights and sounds.\n\nFor the hundredth time since I've been here, I curse myself, but the truth is, I'm far better at fighting than I am at flirting... or clearly, even recognizing it. I glare at him.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I say, snapping the words through my teeth, struggling to compose myself as self-disgust rages through me \u2013 I'd been stupid to let myself go like that. But my self-loathing still boils over. It's poisoning my throat, the inside of my eyes, and I want to scream. My fingers curl into fists, but my voice when I speak is calm. It is inflectionless, emotionless.\n\n\"You are right about one thing. I'm not like other girls.\" I meet his gaze and hold it ruthlessly until his drops away. I grab my keys off his desk and walk to the door, glancing once more over my shoulder. \"I'm worse. Don't for a second delude yourself otherwise.\"\nPREPARATION\n\nIt is a tide of moving bodies, all flowing toward the door. Friday afternoon, and they all can't escape the confines of the classroom fast enough. I don't know why I even bother to continue going to Horrow anymore. I've already set the plan in motion \u2013 we're heading for Denver this weekend to see some play that June had gotten Caden tickets for. The timing will be perfect, and I need him to be willing, at least until we evert. There's really no reason to be at school, but I tell myself that it is for Caden's own safety.\n\nThe truth is that I'm enjoying high school for the first time in months, and in particular, this physics class. Something about Mrs Taylor's no-nonsense confidence reminds me of my teachers back home. Not surprisingly, given who my father is, physics has always been one of my strong suits. I like this class even if it is rudimentary.\n\n\"Riven, can you stay back a minute, please?\" Mrs Taylor asks just as I walk past her desk.\n\nI nod to Caden who's walking ahead of me. \"I'll meet you in the quad.\"\n\nSince the other day in his room, neither of us has spoken about what happened. But sometimes, I see an odd look in his eyes whenever he thinks I'm not looking, and he is quick to conceal it when I do. I don't know what to make of it, but it's not like it has any bearing on the job I'm there to do.\n\nOne thing I've learned about high school here is that it is a roiling mass of boys, girls, frenemies, and insta-crushes... in love one day and at loggerheads the next. I didn't expect Caden to be exempt \u2013 this was his world, after all \u2013 but for my part, what had happened was already forgotten. I rule my emotions. They do not rule me.\n\n\"Make that the gym,\" Caden tells me, hefting a large bag with his fencing gear. \"I have a meet, remember?\"\n\n\"OK, I'll come by when I'm done.\" I nod again and walk over to Mrs Taylor with a sense of foreboding born of following years of pure gut instinct. Did I repeat the mistake I'd made in Boston? Said something that is way beyond my supposed educational level? Written about some theory that doesn't already exist in this universe?\n\n\"Yes, Mrs Taylor?\"\n\nShe glances up, her eyes as dark and piercing as ever over her wire-rimmed glasses. \"Sit down, please. I want to discuss the last quiz.\"\n\n\"I had help,\" I blurt out before she can say anything else, but she stares at me with those obsidian eyes until I sit down. Stupidly, I realize that insinuating that I'd had help for a quiz meant that I'd been cheating. Still, Mrs Taylor doesn't say anything, and even with all my training I find that I can't read her at all, and my palms are clammy with sweat. She shuffles through the pile of papers and moves mine to the top. Even from where I am sitting, the huge circled letter \"D\" is glaring. D? That couldn't possibly be right. But still, I couldn't have done better if I'd planned it. I can't help the smile that sweeps across my face.\n\nMrs Taylor glares at me over her glasses. \"Obviously, you didn't have help,\" she remarks, her sarcasm stinging like a wet slap. \"And this is no laughing matter, young lady. May I remind you that if you fail my class, you will have to take it again in summer school?\"\n\nI almost laugh out loud. I definitely won't be around by summer. I compose myself. \"I'm sorry, Mrs Taylor. I will try to do better.\" I'm about to rise when I realize that Mrs Taylor hasn't quite finished with me.\n\n\"The thing that confuses me, Riven, is that your transcripts from previous schools are more than satisfactory, and you also seem to have an excellent grasp of the material during class-time and in discussion group, both of which suggest to me that you either weren't prepared for the quiz or, more likely, that you deliberately answered incorrectly.\"\n\nI'm at a loss for words. \"I wasn't prepared,\" I begin but the look on her face freezes any more lies from leaving my lips. My ploy, it seems, has drawn more attention than if I'd aced the test. Squirming inside at my gauche stupidity, I wait for her to continue.\n\n\"I also see from your transcripts from your last five schools that you have moved around quite a bit, more than usual for a girl your age.\"\n\n\"My father's job requires him to travel.\"\n\n\"Seems excessive. What field, if I may ask?\" Mrs. Taylor's mild expression suggests that she is merely curious, but I take nothing for granted, especially if it is something that can compromise my safety. Or Caden's.\n\nTrust no one. They were the last words that Cale said to me.\n\nI shrug and smile. \"Sales. He doesn't really talk about it.\" My smile turns calculating. \"Kind of like the mob.\" But Mrs Taylor doesn't take the bait, and instead regards me with an unreadable smile of her own. Something uncomfortable slides along my spine; apart from June, she's the first person to make me uneasy the whole time I've been looking for Caden, and I don't like the feeling at all. \"Can I go now?\" I say, more testily than I'd intended.\n\n\"In a minute. I want to ask you about one more thing. Your discussion group's project is the law of universal gravitation, correct?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The uncomfortable feeling digging into my spine spreads its fingers along my ribs and across my chest. It's Boston all over again. I can see it in Mrs Taylor's slightly fixated expression.\n\n\"Mr Perkins... Philip,\" she amends at my blank face, \"your group partner, mentioned the other day that you had an interesting contention regarding the laws of gravity.\"\n\nMy mind is racing now, trying to recall every bit of the offhand discussion I'd had with Philip. Bored out of my mind during one of the group sessions, I'd wanted to have a little fun, poking holes into Philip's vast amount of book knowledge and his theories. What's to say that this scenario couldn't exist? Or what about this principle? Have you ever thought about if this could happen? And the killer, what about sub-quantum gravitational distortion? Little did I know that he would have gone back to Mrs Taylor. I grit my teeth to keep from kicking myself.\n\nStupid, stupid, stupid!\n\nI paste a vacuous look on my face and twirl a strand of hair around my finger just as I'd seen Sadie doing earlier. It makes me sick to my stomach to be imitating someone that vapid, but I grit my teeth and twirl as if my life depends on it.\n\n\"Philip,\" I repeat in what I hope is a dreamy voice. \"I think he really likes me. I was only trying to impress him, Mrs Taylor. The thing is, I don't know the first thing about gravity except what they say on that television show, Star Trek. That's where I got the ideas. Did he say something bad about me?\"\n\nBy the end of my mini-tirade, my voice has degenerated into an irritating whine. I am sickened at the empty-headed sound of it, but know that I have no choice. Hopefully, Mrs Taylor will believe me, but the truth is I have no idea about Star Trek other than a couple reruns I'd seen at a motel in Philadelphia, which I'd thought hilarious. I can only hope that my impersonation of a vacuous valley girl will work.\n\n\"Which episode?\" she asks without batting an eye.\n\n\"I think it was called 'Gravity,' it was about some kind of gravitational distortion.\" Mrs Taylor's eyes are relentless but I force myself to look as clueless as possible. My relief is palpable when I sense rather than see her shoulders relax and her body tilts away from me.\n\n\"Sometimes the writers of those television shows deserve more credit than they're given,\" she says after a long moment.\n\n\"I wouldn't know,\" I say. \"Most of the time I have help... even at the other schools. People tend to feel sorry for me. Boys, in particular.\" Something tells me I'm pushing it, but I can't seem to stop the excessive overcompensation for my slip with Philip, even though I'm obviously in the clear.\n\nThe thoughtfulness in Mrs Taylor's eyes wanes to actual distaste, and I squirm in my seat. In a different world, I'm sure she and I could have had a scintillating conversation about sub-quantum theory and gravitational distortion.\n\nIt is the reason I am even able to come here, after all.\n\nI stare at the floor chewing on my lip until Mrs Taylor says briskly, \"Well, thanks for clearing that up. Star Trek aside, I will expect you to perform better on the next quiz. And try to take on your share of the work, will you, Riven?\"\n\nI'm almost home free, but for some reason, I stop at the door. Even though it shouldn't matter, it bothers me that she thinks I'm some sort of vapid idiot who would use others to get ahead. Failing is just not a part of who I am.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I'll do better next time. I just want you to know that this isn't who I am. I pull my own weight and I don't cheat.\"\n\nAware that I'm babbling for no reason, I'm already out the door, so I nearly miss the speculative glance she sends in my direction, but I've had enough interrogation for one day. Mrs Taylor will be no more than a distant memory in a few days. Maybe as a goodbye present, I'll leave her a paper on sub-quantum string theory and its practical application to move between universes. Then again, altering the course of history is a big no-no, as in strictly \u2013 we're talking punishable by imprisonment \u2013 forbidden.\n\nOutside, the day has waned to a cool, clear evening. I check my watch. Caden's meet will be in full swing... and full of more people. I have the biggest urge to race back to my motel room and lay on the bed in the dark for a while where it's quiet and I am alone, and where I can think. Instead, I sit on a nearby bench and close my eyes just for a moment.\n\nAll of this interaction is tiresome. Remembering what to say and what not to say takes a huge toll after a while, and I'm mentally exhausted, especially after the confrontation with Mrs Taylor. Before, I'd shift in and out, looking for Caden and then move on. Now that I've found him, coupled with my hindrance of an injury, I've had more interaction with these people than I'd ever intended. And it's literally draining.\n\nPlus, too much contact means bad things could happen. It means that my presence could unknowingly set something into motion... a disturbance in the natural course of events. It means that other people \u2013 not just the Vectors \u2013 could find me, but also the Guardians, who monitor such disturbances.\n\nI've never met a Guardian, but Cale's father told me that they were there to make sure that people on both sides stayed where they were supposed to be. For centuries, the Guardians have been an elite group bound to the same code on both sides, preventing people from shifting, under the Laws of Eversion after the Great Infection of 1927. They answer only to the Faction, a trio of leaders supposedly older than the monarchy of my world.\n\nYou evert, you die. It's as simple as that. If the environmental differences don't get you, the Guardians will.\n\nOnly with Caden, the Guardians had failed. Until recently, everyone thought that Caden was dead. But obviously, he isn't dead... he is very much alive, a secret that Cale only revealed to me a few months ago when he mysteriously became sick. So, somehow, Caden has managed to outwit them and survive all this time. I can't quite shake the feeling that there's something more, something I am missing that's right in front of my face... something essential to his survival here.\n\nHe told me that his mother had died here, from a seizure. She probably had the pills that my father had given her, but they didn't help. My father warned that the pills with their brain stabilization agents wouldn't work for everyone, and everting would only put more pressure on the body's central nervous system. But the plain truth is that we don't belong here, and the universe has its own way of righting wrongs, of fixing inconsistencies. Her seizure was just that... nature's way of dealing with cheaters.\n\nI take in a few deep breaths and complete a set of mental exercises to clear my head. A quick glance at my watch suggests that the meet should nearly be over, so I start to make my way across the quad. A part of me doesn't want to watch Caden fence \u2013 I don't want to see what a natural he is, just like Cale.\n\nCale.\n\nFor a second, I wonder how he's doing. Whether he's surviving in what has become a sea of snakes and traitors. They won't kill him, that I am sure of, because they need his name too much to control the people of Neospes; loyalty to the monarchy was too hard-won to be usurped by a single coup. We were too careful, too suspicious of sudden changes.\n\nPeople trusted Cale's family. They trusted his father, and now he was dead... assassinated in cold blood by his half-brother, a bloodthirsty man greedy for power. Without a doubt, I know that Cale was next. His life is collateral for the moment... collateral for support. His uncle will keep him alive for as long as it suits his purpose. I have to trust that he is somehow holding on; otherwise, everything I'm doing will be for nothing.\n\nFear for Cale's safety clouds my mind so much that I almost crash into a group of kids standing in a shadowy corner near the gym.\n\n\"Watch where you're going!\" shouts a slurred voice. A foul breath blows into my face, and I almost gag.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I say, and then belatedly recognize one of the faces in the crowd: Charisma, the other girl from my physics discussion group. The slurred voice belongs to a dark-haired guy she's leaning against... the one with the foul breath. He's obviously drunk or high on something, and she looks dazed but doesn't say anything.\n\n\"Hey, Charisma,\" I say, but she won't even meet my eyes, as if she's staring right through me. Something about the way the guy's arm is wrapped around her shoulders rubs me the wrong way and I hesitate.\n\nIt's not your problem, my inner voice hisses. None of these people, other than Caden, are. Keep walking.\n\nI listen, take two steps, and halt. Even though I've only had a few classes with Charisma, she's grown on me with her upbeat personality and her willingness to help others. She's one of those types of people I wish I could be more like \u2013 selfless and caring \u2013 but I am so far beyond that person, it's not even funny. Hardness and cynicism drives me. With so much loss in my world, allowing myself to care about anything other than my own survival is a death sentence. I guess a part of me feels drawn to Charisma for that reason. She seems untouched by anything ugly.\n\n\"Hey, you OK?\" I ask her.\n\n\"She's fine,\" the boy says, pulling her away from me in the opposite direction.\n\n\"I wasn't talking to you,\" I say to him, and grab Charisma's shoulders so that she's facing me. Her eyes are dilated, and she's looking at me as if she's trying to focus but can't. \"Charisma, are you OK?\"\n\n\"I told you she was fine!\" the boy snaps, pushing me backward with one hand. My brain registers two things in immediate succession. One, Charisma is drugged, and two, this boy is lucid enough to shove me backward. My body kicks into battle mode, and everything slows to the point where I can sense the movements of his friends behind me.\n\n\"She's not fine, and I am going to take her home. Back off; I don't want to hurt you,\" I say quietly. I figure I should prepare him for what's about to happen.\n\n\"You and what army?\" he jeers in a loud voice. Instantly, he has the attention of everyone within ten feet of us. \"Look, guys, we have a late addition to the party. Get her a drink before she hurts herself.\"\n\nHe laughs, and his friends join in. Someone thrusts a cup in my face, and even without tasting it, I know that there's something wrong with it. I can smell it. My eyes narrow and I bat the cup away with the back of one hand.\n\n\"You guys don't go here, do you?\" More slurred laughter. They must have come for the meet and then decided to take advantage of girls while they were at their drink fest. \"Don't you know it's a crime to drug people's drinks?\"\n\n\"Lookit, we got ourselves a deputy,\" one of the boys giggles. \"You gonna arrest us?\"\n\n\"Arrest me, arrest me, Ociffer. I'm underage!\" another says.\n\nI glare him into silence. Where I come from, there's no drinking age. Consuming spirits is a rite of passage, and considering it's cheaper and more accessible than water, people don't make that much of a big deal over it. It's mostly consumed in toasts and celebrations. And frankly, people are too busy to risk the effects on their day-to-day responsibilities.\n\n\"I don't want any trouble. I just want Charisma. Just pass her over, and you can go back to getting yourselves drunk.\"\n\n\"Charisma wants to stay,\" the dark-haired boy says and turns to her. \"Don't you, baby?\"\n\n\"Mm hmm...\" Charisma murmurs incoherently. A line of drool has made its way down her chin, and she's starting to teeter on her feet. The boy glares at me with a vile expression in his eyes and then kisses her while I am watching, his tongue slithering over her mouth. I don't flinch, not even when he grabs the front of her chest. \"You're my girl, aren't you baby?\"\n\n\"Touch her again, and it will be the last thing you do.\"\n\n\"You mean like this\u2013\"\n\nI break his fingers with a single flex of my own before he can even touch the front of her dress, and then I'm on the move, spinning backward and knocking two of the guys behind me off their feet. The fourth boy takes one look at me and flees in the opposite direction.\n\nI turn back to where Charisma is still standing near the dark-haired boy, who is screaming on his knees and clutching his mauled fingers. With his uninjured hand, he removes a switchblade from his pocket and brandishes it, weaving unsteadily to his feet. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that Charisma has teetered her way to a tree and has slumped down against its trunk. At least she's out of harm's way, but I know that I don't have a lot of time. She can't fall asleep before I can get her some help.\n\n\"You're going to be sorry,\" the boy snarls, pointing the knife at me.\n\nThis time, I can't stop from laughing. \"Someone once told me that if you point a knife, you'd better be prepared to use it,\" I inform him. His answer is to swipe at my face, an attack that I dodge easily. \"You should know that where I come from, I graduated the top of my class in hand-to-hand combat.\"\n\n\"What are you? Some kind of army grunt?\"\n\n\"Something like that. Bet you're wishing that you'd just let her go when I'd asked you, right?\" I know my lack of fear must be aggravating him, but honestly, it's like fighting an uncoordinated toddler. Given the odds, I could quite conceivably fight him blindfolded.\n\n\"Shut up. Who has the knife, anyway?\" he taunts lunging blindly at me.\n\nI spin again and clip the knife out of his hand with the heel of my boot so that it flies upward and lands in my own fist. \"This knife?\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter. I don't need it,\" he says with forced bravado. His eyes dart to the motionless forms of his friends. I can see the fear in his eyes and a dawning understanding of what he has gotten himself into, underscored by sheer disbelief that a girl is somehow getting the best of all of them. It is the same fear that makes him charge toward me in a football-type tackle.\n\nI dance out of the way and laugh again. I'm exhilarated. It's the first real combat exercise I've had in weeks, this coming from someone who typically trains three hours a day in a rigorous simulation mode and then another hour in actual combat. I should be sluggish, but I'm wired. Ever since the clinic, it's as if I can feel the neurons firing inside of me, getting stronger. And now, my body feels wired, like it's plugged in to a giant electrical outlet, every move charged with lethal fire. I am invincible.\n\nMy last move has brought me near to where Charisma is sitting, and I notice that her head is slumping forward onto her knees. She's nearly unconscious. A surge of anger rips through me and I advance on the boy. His eyes widen because now I am no longer laughing. My face is dead, emotionless. It is a look that has been partially responsible for the rank I hold in my own world.\n\n\"You like to take advantage of defenseless girls?\" His head snaps back as my fist makes contact with his right cheek. It's barely a touch, but he stumbles backward. \"You put something in their drinks, and then what do you do? Pretend to care about them? Then you hurt them?\"\n\nEach word is a staccato of fury. Fury at what girls here had to put up with over and over again. I've seen it at almost every school I've been to, and until now, I'd always walked away, telling myself that there was nothing I could do.\n\nWhere I come from, girls \u2013 women \u2013 know how to defend themselves from everything and everyone: human, animal, or machine. Drugged or not, any girl from my world would have had this guy, or one three times his size, on his backside before he could even lay a finger on her.\n\nIn this world, in neighborhood high schools, others like this boy prey on innocent girls, and more often than not get away with it because the girls are too ashamed or humiliated or aren't able to remember to do anything about it. It sickens me. Drugging another person in my world for something as revolting as sexual gratification is an offense punishable by exile \u2013 a fate more feared than death. Let's just say it doesn't happen too often. Exile is not a gentle end.\n\nSomeone needs to teach this boy a lesson. For Charisma, I'd be that person.\n\nI grab the boy by the front of his shirt and pull him close to me. He's a fair head taller than I am, but I am practically holding him off the ground. I press the butt of his knife against his crotch so deeply that I can see the water spring into his eyes. My voice is a low snarl. \"I ever see you near her, I will end you. Got it?\"\n\nWithout waiting for any acknowledgement, I spear my knee into his groin, feeling the immediate grunt radiating up through his entire body as he collapses against me, crying. I shove him away, a whimper from Charisma drawing my attention. The boy is curled into a fetal ball on the ground, but I still send his knife spinning behind me without a backward glance. I know without looking that it thumps right into the sliver of space on the ground between his stomach and his thighs. The sudden sour odor of urine permeates the night air.\n\nI lift Charisma easily. \"It's OK; you're safe now,\" I tell her. \"But you need to stay awake for just a few more minutes, OK?\"\n\n\"Mmm... OK.\"\n\nAfter I file a report with school security with a condensed version of the events and accompany Charisma in the ambulance to the local hospital, where she will stay overnight \u2013 apparently, the boy had used some kind of hypnotic sedative in an excessive amount \u2013 I catch a cab back to Horrow. But the parking lot is empty, and it looks like I've missed the whole meet, and Caden, too.\n\nA sense of exhaustion overcomes me, and I rest my head against the handlebars of my bike. I want to leave this place as fast as I can. Everything about it unnerves me. I want to go back to where I belong, where I feel whole. Here, I am starting to feel broken, the natural result of living in a broken world. Although they have more landmass, water, and people than we do, I have no doubt that this world is far more lost than mine.\n\nGritting my teeth, I rev the bike with one thing on my mind. Come hell or high water, we are leaving tomorrow. With a sense of rejuvenated intent, I ride to Caden's house. I don't let the fact that his car isn't in the driveway or that there aren't lights on in the house deter my new sense of purpose. I'll wait. Throwing a jacket across my shoulders, I make my way to the front porch, but there's already someone there.\n\nMy heart plummets to my stomach in a free fall that is magnified by the fact that time has slowed to abnormal proportions. My blood thunders in my ears like a solid force.\n\n\"Shae,\" I breathe.\n\nMy sister. My family. My enemy.\nCONFLICT ARISING\n\n\"I knew they'd send you sooner or later.\"\n\nThe breath that leaves my lips in response to the husky familiarity of her voice is deflating and harsh, taking with it every bone in my body.\n\n\"No one... sent me. I came alone,\" I manage in a shaky voice.\n\nShae looks more or less the same as when I saw her last, right before she caught me off-guard, armed with a double electro-rod, except that there's an oozing red gash across her face. Hair in blond dreadlocks, tanned face, if thinner, and eyes the color of a glacial sky. Those cold eyes were the last thing I'd seen before she'd everted.\n\nSeeing her now is like being dunked in a bucket of ice until my entire body feels like it's going to peel out of my skin. I want to run to her so badly it hurts, but underneath it all her betrayal is as fresh as it was thirteen years before, and the pain just as sharp. She left me with no regrets and no explanations. The monarchy had branded her a traitor, and I had to live with her shame until I built myself into something large and powerful enough to eclipse it.\n\nI hate her. That isn't going to change. Not now, not ever.\n\n\"So you're the one helping Caden,\" I say. \"I should have guessed. I learned everything I know about covering up the marks of eversion from you.\"\n\n\"And yet you found me.\"\n\nI laugh, a hollow sound made harsh with a coil of emotions I can't begin to unravel. \"It wasn't easy to track you, trust me. You were careful, I'll give you that... everting and then traveling by their transportation. Smart. But my coming here was just pure luck.\"\n\n\"Luck,\" Shae repeats, a small frown creasing her brow. I notice that there are more bruises and cuts along her arms, all of them fresh.\n\n\"Maybe I sensed you in my subconscious?\" I offer snidely. I can't keep the sarcasm from my voice. \"So who's June, really? Does she know who you are?\"\n\n\"No.\" Shae shrugs her shoulders, not giving up much. I raise a skeptical eyebrow, and Shae continues. \"She's part of an organization here that helps with supervised independent living until Caden turns eighteen.\"\n\nI return her shrug, thinking of the gun I found. It makes no difference to me whether Shae's lying about June or not. She's not my target. \"Is Caden here?\" I ask abruptly.\n\nShae's face is expressionless but her body is poised, anticipating an attack. \"I know why you're here, and I can't let you take him back,\" she says.\n\n\"You don't know anything,\" I snap, bristling. \"And I'm not a little girl anymore. You don't get to make decisions for me or tell me what I can and can't do.\"\n\n\"You don't understand\u2013\"\n\n\"That's what you said when you left. I'm older now. Try me,\" I say, folding my arms across my stomach and tapping a booted foot against the flagstone path. My fingers close comfortingly around the handle of a blade that's tucked into the waistband of my second-hand black fatigues. I don't trust anyone, far less Shae, who's deceived more than her share of people.\n\nShe stands, both hands in the air, and I back away a couple steps in instinctive response. \"If you take him back, they're going to kill him. The Vectors looking for him have drawn the attention of the Guardians on this side. We don't have a lot of time. I have to take him somewhere safe. All I'm asking is for you to trust me.\"\n\n\"Trust you?\" I sputter and laugh at the same time. \"Like that's going to happen.\"\n\n\"You think you can stop the Vectors? There's a dozen of them within hours, less even, of finding us. Where do you think I was? I was fighting them, trying to lead them away from Caden. They're coming here, Riven. For him. And for you.\"\n\n\"I can take care of myself.\"\n\n\"And Caden? Can you take care of him?\" Shae says staring at me as if she's trying to anticipate what I'm going to say. \"He's a prince, unless you've forgotten.\"\n\nI stare back. My voice is cold. \"No, he isn't. He's more than that, Shae. You know that. He has a purpose. And you must know why I have to take him back. Cale is dying.\"\n\n\"Then they will both die. What you're doing is suicide.\"\n\n\"Don't you even care that your home is about to be at the mercy of a madman if Caden doesn't go back? What's the alternative? That he stays here and lives out a life he wasn't meant for, while everyone we know, everyone we love, dies or is enslaved by Murek?\"\n\nShae sighs, the movement rippling wearily through her whole body, and interrupts my tirade. \"Riven, he doesn't know.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Caden doesn't know anything about who he is or where he came from, none of it. He had very little memory of his life in Neospes and what little he did remember, Leila erased. She never meant for him to go back, you know. They were going to kill him.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" I snap. \"He's needed there now.\"\n\nShae sits on the step again, her entire body slumping forward. Pain spasms across her face from the movement.\n\n\"Not that I care, but what happened?\" I ask, nodding at the gashes on her arms.\n\n\"Two Vectors. I took care of it.\" She sighs and leans against the railing. \"Did our father send them?\"\n\nI spit on the ground and nod. \"Yes. He's with them, but you knew that already, didn't you?\" I see the flare of pity in her eyes \u2013 meant for me \u2013 but I ignore it. \"Look, you haven't been back to the city in years. Neospes is on the brink of war, and more people will die if we allow Murek to take control of the monarchy. He has an army of Vectors at his back and he means to control our world, and this one too, I expect. It's why I have to help Cale. He's got no one he can trust, and he has to live, or we all die.\"\n\n\"I know more than you think,\" Shae says. \"But sacrificing Caden isn't the answer, Riven. I took an oath to protect him. What makes his life worth any less than Cale's? Or yours? Or mine? This is the only place he's safe.\"\n\nI take a deep breath, trying to calm the sudden rush of anger swirling inside of me at her blindness. \"Safe for what, Shae?\" I growl. \"Caden has a purpose, one which he is bound to fulfill. I took an oath too, to protect our king. You and I both know that this is what he was born for.\"\n\n\"You're wrong. Leila left because she loved her son too much to let him die.\"\n\n\"Cale's her son!\"\n\n\"Caden is, too.\"\n\n\"He's not her son,\" I mutter doggedly.\n\nWe're at an impasse, staring at each other with stubborn fury. I'm not above using force to get my way, but Shae's just taken out two Vectors. Alone. I'm not about to make any rash and stupid decisions about her combat skills or apparent exhaustion. The silence hangs between us like an impenetrable wall as we stare at each other across the five feet that could well be an abyss between us. After a few tense minutes, Shae clears her throat.\n\n\"Do you remember that day? When I left?\" she asks, and I give the barest of nods. It's a day etched into my memory so deeply that I couldn't forget it if I tried. \"I wanted to take you with me, but you wouldn't go,\" she says. Her laugh is empty. \"You remember what you called me?\"\n\nDefector.\n\nShe doesn't have to say it; we both know what I said.\n\n\"That was the day I realized that you were your father's daughter. He robbed you of anything close to love,\" Shae says. \"You chose to stay with him out of fear of him than out of love for me. He owned you then, and he owns you now.\"\n\n\"I am nothing like him,\" I grit out. \"No one owns me.\"\n\n\"He used to say that I could never be a killer, because I was too emotional. Said I loved too much. How can someone love too much? He said I was too much like Mom. Soft. I proved him wrong, even though I died a little bit inside every time I took a life.\" At Shae's words, my eyes feel like there's sand behind them, and a boulder settles in the pit of my stomach. \"But he was right about you, wasn't he? The stone-cold sister? The one who wouldn't be torn by emotion, the one who kills without feeling a thing? Servant to the monarchy... obeying orders without question... He's made you into their killing machine. So what? You're going to kill me now, Riven?\"\n\nHer words are like daggers, hardening every bit of resolve I'd lost over the last few weeks. Living in this world has softened me, made me forget who I am. But Shae's right. I am a killer. And I obey. It's what I do.\n\nShe wanted stone-cold? I step forward and pull a bone-handled sword from the underside of my backpack so that it lies flush down the length of my thigh. Her eyes narrow at my blatant challenge.\n\n\"If I have to,\" I say. \"I'm taking him whether you like it or not, Shae. He is nothing more than a target to me; you said it yourself.\" I stare at her with cold eyes, feeling nothing but icy purpose. \"You chose your path and I chose mine. And you are nothing but an obstacle that I am more than willing to remove.\"\n\nShae pulls herself to her feet, a slender double-edged sword materializing in her left hand. \"So be it,\" she agrees. \"But you know I can't let you do that.\"\n\n\"Can't let her do what?\" a familiar voice calls out. Caden is striding up the driveway with his bag of gear slung over one shoulder and carrying a trophy. I turn around, twisting my hand in a backwards motion so that my blade slides under my backpack into its sheath. His timing couldn't have been worse. Or maybe it's a blessing in disguise.\n\n\"Nice trophy,\" Shae says, discreetly pocketing her own blade. \"You win again?\"\n\nCaden dumps his bag on the grass and tosses the trophy on top of it with a grin and a thumbs-up. \"You're back,\" he says to Shae with raised eyebrows. \"Visiting?\"\n\n\"Checking in.\"\n\n\"My warden,\" Caden says to me still grinning. The cocky sideways smile reminds me so much of Cale that my breath hitches in my throat. I am beginning to hate these moments when I'm caught off guard, when the two of them start to merge into one, or worse, when Caden starts to become someone real on his own.\n\n\"Hey,\" I say tightly.\n\n\"Thought you were going to the meet?\" he asks, his shoulder brushing mine.\n\n\"I know, but I got caught up, something with Charisma. I'll fill you in later,\" I say, flicking an eye over to Shae, who seems to be watching us both with more than a little curiosity. Without thinking, I step away, and the immediate quirk of Shae's eyebrow irritates me. I know exactly what it's meant to say, mocking my earlier words.\n\nJust a target?\n\nI return her look evenly.\n\nCaden's gaze pans slowly from Shae to me, and back again. There's very little family resemblance between us, considering we're only half sisters, but we've been trained by the same people, a fact that's evident in the similar set of our shoulders and the stance of our feet. It's an environmental similarity, and obviously one that Shae hasn't lost, despite all her years here.\n\nBelatedly noticing Shae's appearance, Caden walks past me and sits next to her. \"You look like hell. What happened to you?\"\n\nShae smiles, and it is a smile that I haven't seen in a very long time. \"You should see the other guy,\" she jokes, and then says, \"It's no big deal. I tripped over my own two feet. You know how clumsy I can be.\" She says those last words with a fleeting look toward me.\n\nBut they have already drawn me into a near-forgotten memory.\n\nWhen we were little, Shae used to be constantly teased about how clumsy she was, tripping over furniture or nothing in particular. But the minute she got on the combat field, it was as if she transformed into the most graceful fighter. In the arena, no one could match Shae's skill. Rising quickly into the ranks of the elite, Shae's name became known by many, something that made her fall to disgrace \u2013 and our family's shame \u2013 even more noticeable.\n\nI had to bear the brunt of it after she left, but it had only made me stronger and compelled me to outperform every other kid in my training classes. By the time I was twelve, I was put into elite training \u2013 the youngest ever \u2013 and at fourteen, the coveted rank of general was mine. Of course, that made no difference now. At Cale's request, barely two months after my inauguration, I'd left to find Caden.\n\nThree years later, I'd finally found him. And her.\n\n\"That cut on your face looks nasty,\" Caden says, interrupting my thoughts. \"June has some antibiotic cream that you should put on it.\"\n\nGoing into the house with Shae is not part of my plan. It's confined and I'm not as familiar with the layout as she would be. In hindsight, I realize that the bare and spartan room would have been hers. I should have known... its austerity and the clock set ahead like mine should have been dead giveaways. Instead, I'd been blind.\n\nCareless.\n\nCaden pokes his head around the front door. \"You coming or what?\"\n\nI hesitate. The truth is, I feel much safer outside, even with the deepening twilight shadows already dappling the front lawn. Night isn't too far behind, but at least it's out in the open. But I don't trust Shae either, and I don't know whether she'd try to escape with Caden. Making a decision, I nod and walk up the porch steps.\n\nInside, while Caden cleans the cut on Shae's face in the kitchen, I sit at a stool beside the granite island separating us.\n\n\"So, Shae,\" I say casually, picking up an apple from a bowl on the countertop and biting into it. \"You don't live here?\"\n\nShae's eyes laser onto mine, but I keep my expression blank. \"No. I go to college a couple hours away.\"\n\n\"Funny that Caden never mentioned you.\"\n\nCaden laughs, pouring antiseptic cleaner onto a gauze cloth. \"What's to mention? She's sour, unfriendly, falls down all the time, and gets very pissed when I talk about her to anyone, like she's some kind of secret agent. So I just pretend she doesn't exist. Works for everyone.\"\n\n\"Shut up, Caden,\" Shae says grimacing. \"Ouch, ease up that stuff, will you?\"\n\n\"Stop being a baby,\" he shoots back, and winks at me. \"Shae's my unofficial warden. I swear she's got spies everywhere telling her my every move like I'm in witness protection.\"\n\n\"Caden...\" Shae growls in warning.\n\nI know that voice, but I draw the fire in my direction. \"Seems pretty safe here from what I can tell.\" I grin at Caden. \"Something you're not telling me? Like you're some kind of Princess Diaries royalty?\" If looks could kill, I'd be incinerated, but I deliberately don't look at Shae.\n\nCaden snorts and rolls his eyes. \"I wish. No, Shae's just Shae. Super protective ever since my mom died.\" Shae looks like she's going to explode and starts to get up, but Caden pushes her back down onto the stool. \"Look, you can't move while I do this, or it'll get all messed up and won't heal properly.\" I take another bite of my apple and watch as he deftly places tiny strips of surgical tape across the cleaned and medicated wound.\n\n\"How long have you guys lived here? With June?\"\n\n\"Ten years next February.\"\n\n\"You've been here this whole time?\" He shoots me an odd look, and I rush to clarify. \"I mean, I thought you'd lived on the East Coast and moved around.\"\n\n\"We moved here after my mom died. I told you, remember?\"\n\nNow I'm confused. I'd tracked them across fifteen states in the past three years. And then it hits me. I've tracked Shae... the decoy, not them. He's been here all along living a normal life while she's been everting back and forth to throw anyone looking for them off the scent. Our eyes meet and I know that my guess is right.\n\nI frown. Everting so many times at what cost? Genetically, human bodies aren't built to jump back and forth. Our cells start to break down, even with the pills reinforcing them.\n\n\"Cade, do you know if June's got any more of those painkillers in her medicine cabinet? My leg's killing me,\" Shae asks, glancing at Caden and breaking our connection.\n\n\"The ones for your migraines?\" he asks. I shoot Shae a sharp glance but she ignores me.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Think so. Be right back.\"\n\nAs Caden leaves the room, Shae and I stare at each other across the granite divider. The seconds stretch into silent agonized minutes. Migraines are the first sign of brain degeneration. Despite her betrayal, I wouldn't want anyone to suffer that kind of pain.\n\n\"Shae...\" My voice almost fails me. \"How long?\"\n\n\"A few months ago. Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere just yet.\" She leans forward, pressing her palms on the counter and correctly interpreting my frown. \"And I can still take you out if I have to,\" she warns.\n\n\"If you can't protect him, then at least give him a chance with me.\"\n\n\"I can protect him,\" Shae says. \"It could be years before anything more happens.\"\n\n\"But it could be less.\"\n\nThe onset of migraines is the beginning of the end; the only unknown is exactly how long it takes before the appearance of brain tumors and the fatal seizures, like the one that had taken Leila, Caden's mother. Sometimes it could be years, other times weeks. It depends on physiology.\n\n\"He doesn't belong there, Riv,\" Shae says.\n\n\"Don't call me that,\" I snap, ignoring the stab of hollowness in my belly. \"Once I get him to Cale, we will be safe.\"\n\n\"Safe?\" she hisses. \"You're taking him to his death.\"\n\n\"Shae, we've been through this; it's what he was born for. If you die, he's not going to survive much longer. Neither will Cale. At least let Caden fulfill his purpose.\" I move slowly around the granite island until I'm standing right in front of her. I grasp her shoulders gently. \"I know what you promised Leila,\" I say. \"But she made a promise too, seventeen years ago. If you don't let me do this, they're both going to die. Caden here and Cale there. At least if I can get Caden back, one of them has a fighting chance to live. Can't you see that?\"\n\nShae's eyes are wet with tears. \"What if that chance belongs to Caden?\" she whispers. \"What gives us the right to choose who lives and who dies?\"\n\n\"Shae, that choice was made years ago.\"\n\n\"But he's different. I know you've seen it, felt it. I saw the way you looked at each other today.\"\n\nMy fingers tighten of their own volition in denial, digging into the flesh of her arms. \"No, he isn't. He's nothing but a ghost.\"\n\nI can feel her body flinch under my hands at my biting words. She squares her shoulders. \"You and I both know that he's more than that. Caden is strong. He'll be fine with or without me,\" she says stubbornly.\n\nI step back, releasing her, and walk to the other side of the island. I pick up my half-eaten apple and study the browning parts of the white flesh. My voice is almost a whisper.\n\n\"And if you die, how are you going to tell him? That he's from another universe? That you've lied to him for his whole life? What's he going to do if he comes up against a Guardian? Or worse... Vectors? His blood and Cale's blood will be on your hands.\"\n\n\"He doesn't have to know about\u2013\"\n\nA loud crash and a scream from upstairs have us both bolting like a gunshot for the staircase. The fear on Shae's face is mirrored by the fear on mine, but her fear is rooted in losing Caden. Mine is tied to losing Cale. I take the steps up two at a time with Shae hot on my heels, weapons already in hand and prepared for the worse.\n\nBut what awaits us is more deadly than either of us can ever imagine. The odor is unmistakable; it's the smell of death.\n\nBlood, breath, and bones inside of me fall prey to an instant crippling fear.\n\nThe Vectors are here.\nDEAD MAN WALKING\n\n\"How many?\" Shae asks me.\n\nWe eye each other in silent truce for the moment, our only objective to see Caden safe despite our polar opposite endgames.\n\n\"At least two, I think,\" I say. Her eyes widen and I can see that she's thinking about running in there no matter the cost. \"Wait,\" I whisper urgently. \"Can you get around to the bathroom that connects your room to Caden's?\" Shae nods. \"OK, on my mark, in three.\" She nods but hesitates. I place a hand on her fingers and squeeze. \"Don't worry, Shae; they won't kill him. They have orders to take him back to Murek.\"\n\nShae shoots me a defeated smile, and I stare at the raw cuts on her hands for a second. Her fingers twist to squeeze mine, and a strange sensation chokes my chest. We both know that she's not at her fighting best, and if things take a turn for the worse, there's a very real chance that she'll die. The choking feeling spreads to my neck and paralyzes every muscle in my face. Time slows between us, and suddenly it's as if the years \u2013 and the betrayal \u2013 separating us no longer exist. My numb fingers tighten around hers.\n\n\"Wind at your back, sister,\" Shae says. My eyes are burning so fiercely that they feel like they will catch fire at any moment.\n\n\"And at yours,\" I choke out.\n\nBut she's already gone in a whisper of movement. I suffocate the useless emotion inside of me, knowing it will only help my enemy, and eye the time carefully on my watch. I know that Shae's doing the same. The seconds count down, and with a final short breath, I shove open the door. My just-drawn breath hitches at the scene before me.\n\nI was wrong.\n\nThere are four of them. One's holding Caden in a chokehold, the others are staring at us with merciless dead eyes. I haven't faced a Vector in years, and I'd forgotten how normal they seem. They look human: extra-large military-type people, but still people. But if you look more carefully, you notice things like the unnatural pasty pallor of their skin and the bluish tinge of their eyes... their very dead eyes. The Vectors aren't human. Not anymore.\n\n\"Riven,\" Caden wheezes. \"Look out!\"\n\nI duck and spin just as one of the Vectors slides in my direction, swinging an electro-rod to my head, and skewer him with one of my blades. For a dead creature, it's incredibly agile for its size. It barely twitches from the impact, lunging toward me again. I spin and scissor my blades across its waist, seeing fabric and skin split apart. But there's no blood, only a brackish gray-blue fluid.\n\nOut of the corner of my eye, I see that Shae has been cornered by the other two, but she's wielding her double-edged saber like it's a lethal piece of ribbon, wheeling and ducking with mesmerizing speed. I turn back to the Vector lurching toward me, its gashes healing before my eyes, but I follow Shae's lead and keep slicing, opening new wounds as quickly as the old ones regenerate.\n\nDespite how easily I'd fought the boys earlier, with this Vector it's only a matter of minutes before I'm out of breath and my newfound confidence wavers. The training exercises I've been doing are woefully inadequate, child's play compared to fighting these things. Three years is a long time to lose my edge.\n\nI grit my teeth \u2013 this is what I've worked for, what I was born for. Sparing a glance toward Caden, his body held paralyzed by the well-placed pincer grip of the Vector beside him, there's no way I'm going to give up. Not now.\n\nPain ricochets through me as the Vector's electro-rod catches me on the thigh, and I slam backward into another of the Vectors behind me. Without thinking, I clip my elbow backward, slamming into its head, before diving toward the first aggressor. Though I am far from out of shape, they are faster and smarter than I remember.\n\nThe one facing me seems to anticipate my every move, forestalling every turn and bend as if it can read my mind. I need to trick it somehow, take back the advantage. I swing my swords as if I'm possessed, spinning under the Vector's outraised arms until I see my opening.\n\n\"Game over,\" I hiss, slamming my heel against the back of its leg. The creature crumples to its knees, and I waste no time in crossing my arms together as hard as I can, the swords in each hand meeting to cleave the Vector's head completely off its shoulders. I watch, huge gulps of searing breath filling my chest, as it keels over with a sick clump.\n\nCaden is watching us with horrified eyes, his gaze swinging from Shae back to me in disbelief. But he's the least of my worries right now. The other Vector is now holding him immobile on the shoulder with one hand while tapping into a handheld computer with the other. The Vector isn't concerned with any of us, its mission different from the others. I gasp, recognizing the device in its hands. It sets the coordinates and parameters for eversion.\n\n\"Shae, he's going to eve\u2013\" I begin turning toward Shae and freeze. The two Vectors have Shae up against the wall, barely a hair's breadth from killing her. Her face is covered in blood, old wounds reopened and new ones oozing red. Her eyes lock with mine and I can see the regret in the curl of her lips. My head's already shaking before I dart forward, arms raised and weapons out.\n\n\"No!\" I scream. \"Cease! That is an order.\"\n\nTo my utter disbelief, both Vectors stop, turning in dumb submission toward me. Shae's shock reflects my own. My brain is spinning. These must have been sent here before I defected, and are still somehow programmed to obey my orders.\n\n\"Release her,\" I say quickly, not wasting a second. Shae slumps to the floor but still manages to swing her saber into the Achilles tendons of the one closest to her. Taking no chances, even before its body collapses, her sword is already buried in the back of its neck severing its spinal column. She's hurt badly. I can hear it in her labored breathing and see it in her eyes.\n\n\"Riven.\"\n\nThe soft voice behind me is a whisper of a warning, but the tiny hairs on the back of my neck are already standing at stiff attention. I turn to meet the eyes of the Vector restraining Caden whose attention had been on the eversion device. That attention is now riveted on me like a laser. Its eyes are a lightless black with the familiar blue halo surrounding the pupils.\n\nBut the similarities end there.\n\nThere's something different about this one, I can feel it deep in my bones. Like the others, its uniform is black, but there's a jagged swatch of red cloth across his chest in the shape of a crescent moon. Every part of me knows that it means something terrible.\n\n\"Kill them,\" it says in a guttural growl. \"That is an order, soldier.\"\n\nI blink. It's some kind of leader, then, a Commander. The command is directed at the remaining Vector, but its stare remains focused on me. It's impossible. Vectors don't speak. Speaking infers functioning brain capability, and they're dead. A shiver of cold dread runs down my spine.\n\nAren't they?\n\n\"Now!\" it growls again.\n\nBut the remaining Vector is motionless, staring from me to him as if confused. Its programming must not have been overridden to counter a direct order from me, its last leader, even with an order from its new one. The window of opportunity is no bigger than a sliver, but I grasp it without a second thought.\n\n\"Kill it,\" I shout, jerking my head in the big Commander Vector's direction.\n\nIt's all I can do to get out of the way as the Vector launches its considerable bulk toward its commanding officer. But within the blink of an eye, its body is flung back in our direction and crashes into a bookcase. Splintered wood peppers the air like wooden darts, and I shield my eyes instinctively, covering Shae's body with mine.\n\nThe big Vector is motionless, still holding Caden. It flicked its attacker off like a bothersome gnat with one finger.\n\n\"Again!\" I scream at the fallen Vector. \"Get up. Don't stop until it's destroyed.\"\n\nEven as the words drop from my lips and the creature launches itself once more in silent submission, I pull a silver instrument shaped like a four-leafed clover from my boot and fling it toward Caden. He's not the target; the fingers pinching into his shoulder are. My aim is true and the star clips off the Vector's fingers cleanly.\n\n\"Caden, get down!\" I yell, but he doesn't move even though thick grayish blue fluid is spraying into his face from the Vector's severed fingers. I gnash my teeth.\n\n\"Go...\" Shae wheezes as if sensing my hesitation to leave her unprotected, \"...be fine for a minute.\"\n\nThere's no time to think as I take Caden down in a football tackle that would rival any in this world's Super Bowl, rolling underneath the desk just as the two Vectors smash into the floor beside us. Even though the commanding Vector is pummeling the one below it, its stare is still fixated on me as if I'm the one it's punishing. I rip my eyes away with effort and kick it in the side so that the one fighting for us gets some leverage to twist over and above it.\n\n\"You hurt?\" I ask Caden urgently.\n\n\"No,\" he rasps. \"But my legs feel funny. What did that thing to do me? What is that thing? Are they going to kill us?\" His voice is rising with every second and I can see the terrified panic building in his eyes as they dart toward the two grappling on the other side of the desk.\n\n\"No. You're going to be fine,\" I say. \"Can you get over to Shae?\" He nods and I squeeze his hand. \"Pull her into the bathroom if you can and close the door. Here, take this.\" I don't look at him. I don't want him to see the panic in my eyes. Instead, I shove one of the swords that had fallen to the ground into his hands and push him toward Shae. \"Don't be afraid to use it.\"\n\nI take a deep breath and turn to the two remaining Vectors. The one that obeyed me is not going to last much longer. It doesn't have much of a face and its ribs are concave in a way that suggests imminent fatality. It's only a matter of time before the nanobes inside of it stop communicating, and I need it alive for questioning. If it's loyal to me, there's no way I can let such a windfall go.\n\nWith all the strength I can summon, I kick the Vector Commander in the face, hearing the crunch of bone as my blow dislocates its jaw. Blue liquid seeps down the side of its face as my boot tears away skin and tissue from its chin, exposing filed, jagged teeth. It turns toward me, a sick grin tugging the exposed tissue upward, and digs a heavily booted foot into the other Vector's chest until gray-blue fluid pools around his sole.\n\nEmotion? Impossible.\n\nBut it is a grin... a horrible mockery of a grin. Vectors are inanimate, robot-cell controlled hosts. They don't think for themselves, and they certainly don't smile.\n\nBut this one does.\n\n\"What are you?\" I whisper as it twists its head in both hands to realign its neck, staring at me with a knowing expression. I have never felt such fear, not even when I was running for my life to escape Murek's guard.\n\n\"A general,\" it answers. \"Like you.\"\n\n\"I am no general,\" I snap.\n\n\"Yes, you were a colossal failure, weren't you?\"\n\n\"You don't know what you're talking about. You're a machine. You're dead.\" I don't know why I feel the need to defend myself against the poisonous words of this thing, but something about it reminds me of my father... judging me, even now.\n\n\"That's where you're wrong,\" it says. \"Come home, Riven. Bring the boy. All will be well.\" The Vector bends its head in a conciliatory way, which only makes it seem more macabre without half its face, but I am mesmerized by its last words. And terrified.\n\n\"You don't want to kill him?\" The thing wavers as if reading something on my face and I deaden my expression, but it's too late.\n\n\"No,\" it says. The word is a lie. There's no way they'd keep Caden alive. Murek wants Cale dead. It made sense to reason that they wanted Caden dead, too. Unless... \"Why do you think I didn't kill this boy?\" the Vector says, distracting my ugly train of thought. It holds a black-gloved hand up that's easily twice the size of mine. \"It would be so easy,\" it says squeezing his fist.\n\n\"So why didn't you?\" I hide the fear sliding around inside of me with bravado, but I know without a doubt that I can't trust anything this creature says. But I need to buy time... time to think.\n\n\"Orders are orders. I don't ask questions.\"\n\n\"Why are you different from the others?\" I say. \"How can you talk?\"\n\n\"That is the question,\" the Vector says taking a step toward me. It's not aggressive, but I step back anyway and feel the bed frame against the back of my knees. I'm nearly trapped. The only way around the creature will be over the bed to the bathroom door or the window. \"Your father created me after you left.\"\n\n\"Are you alive?\"\n\nThat gruesome smile again. \"More than the others. Less than you.\" Its cryptic words irritate me. It's as if the thing is playing some kind of game, one that I'm sure has no rules.\n\n\"Why would they make you?\" I say. The Vector smiles again, and I can feel the bottom of my stomach drop even before it says the words. The sick pleasure on its face makes me want to retch.\n\n\"Because the Lord King is dead.\"\n\n\"You're lying.\"\n\nEverything inside of me feels like it's disappearing \u2013 bones, blood, air \u2013 until I'm nothing but a shell collapsing upon itself. I can't even breathe. In slow motion, I fall back against the side of the bed, legs buckling, but my senses haven't completely deserted me, and out of the corner of my eye, I see the Vector reach for a long-handled spiked weapon. On autopilot, I scramble across the bed and shove myself to the other side just as it lifts the entire bed frame with one hand and smashes it against the wall. Chunks of wood and steel explode into the exposed parts of my body.\n\nBefore I can move, the Vector's spike swings toward my head, and I dive forward, my swords cleaving into its calves before rolling to its left. It barely deters the creature, and I fend off another attack, sparks flying as our weapons meet in midair. The vibration echoes painfully down my arm, and I can see a detached metal spike protruding from the flesh of my upper arm. My shirt is sticky with blood. I don't want to bleed to death by trying to pull it out, so I grit my teeth and leave it, hefting my other arm high while protecting my body with my injured arm.\n\nScanning the room, I notice that the bed frame is blocking the bathroom door and the nearby window is locked, which means precious extra seconds lost trying to unlock it. The Vector's bulk shields the bedroom door. The window is the only choice I've got, and if worse comes to worse, I can go through it headfirst and hope for the best. Either way, it seems that I'm facing the possibility of broken bones. I need to distract the creature to buy some time.\n\nI lower myself into a crouch and sweep my leg out, but the Vector moves out of the way, fast for something of such size. I switch to words, hoping beyond hope that making it think will help slow it down.\n\n\"You know how I know you're lying? About the king?\" It watches me like a bird toying with a worm half-submerged in the dirt. \"Because people, important people, know about Caden. Cale's alive; otherwise, Murek would just forget about Caden and rule Neospes as he's always wanted.\"\n\nI pause again, snaking my uninjured arm out to catch it across his left flank. Blue liquid seeps through its clothing and drips to the floor. Now we're even.\n\n\"Did he teach you to lie?\" I continue my one-sided conversation, gaining confidence with each breath. \"My father? He's very good at lying. After all, he convinced me to lead your kind. But he had a hidden agenda, didn't he?\"\n\nI spin and jab at my opponent's body, but it anticipates my movements this time and dodges, only to return a blow that stuns me senseless. Something wet and warm plasters my hair to my scalp, but I can barely feel it beneath the hot welt flowering against the side of my face. I spit a mouthful of blood to the floor and lean against the wall. My vision begins to blur as the Vector morphs into three separate beings, each wavering like smoke.\n\n\"That all you got?\" I grit out, holding my sword across my body and praying that my shaking legs don't give out. The Vector pauses with another grin, as if sensing impending victory. My only comforting thought is that Shae and Caden are safe. She'll get what she wanted \u2013 Caden will never return to Neospes.\n\nAnd I would have failed... in my promise to Cale. But if the Vector is right, then it won't matter either way. I stare into its dead blue eyes, and smile. \"We will never let you take him.\"\n\n\"You have no choice, General,\" the thing says finally, removing the pocket device from his vest. \"The boy will go back, and so will you, dead or alive. Your father wants you alive, of course. But Lord Murek has no preference. Regardless, you cannot stop me.\"\n\n\"But I can,\" a voice says, just as the sound of a cannon tears through the room. The Vector pitches forward as gunfire rips through its bulk, June's hollow-points doing what they're designed to do. It's a volley of bullets as Caden holds June's semiautomatic gun with shaky calm.\n\n\"Aim for the head, Caden,\" I try to shout, but my voice is barely a whisper as I feel myself sliding downward against the wall. \"It'll only regenerate anywhere else.\"\n\nBut my words are lost beneath the sound of the exploding shells as the acrid smell of gunpowder fills my nose. I can feel my cells desperately trying to re-engage, when the incongruity of the situation hits me. Caden's the one protecting me. I want to laugh, but only a choked gurgle takes shape in my mouth as Caden empties round after round into the monster.\n\nAfter what seems like an eternity, Caden flings the spent gun to the floor and brandishes the sword I'd handed him earlier. My eyes are on fire, but I have to see if one of the bullets has miraculously hit the Vector in the head or in the spine. It's the only way to stop them. But instead, I watch in horrified slow motion as the Vector pushes off the wall, provoked to the point of rage, and hurls its bullet-ridden body toward Caden.\n\n\"Caden, run!\" It's all I can manage as black stars cloud my vision, unconsciousness threatening to sweep me away. But Caden ignores my warning, darting to the left and sliding to his knees, before reaching upward and back to pierce the sword's tip into the Vector's exposed back. The thing stumbles forward toward me, gurgling, as the sword lodges in its spine. Game over.\n\nFor a second, our eyes meet, and before I can even blink, the air in the room shimmers for a second, and without warning, the Vector disappears. The only memory of it is the red-hot end of Caden's sword, neatly lasered to half its size, and a blackened patch on the carpet. I'd forgotten about the eversion device.\n\nThe monster is gone. For now.\n\nBut it knows where we are, and it's only a matter of time before it comes back with more. It's my last thought before I slip into an unwelcome oblivion.\nTRUTH BE TOLD\n\nMy vision is swimming when I awake. The room is dark, lit only by a single flickering candle. It hurts to focus, and I am confused because Cale and Caden are both in the room, staring at me with wide frightened eyes.\n\n\"You OK?\" they ask me simultaneously. I lift my hand toward their faces.\n\n\"How is this possible?\" I rasp. \"Where... am I?\"\n\n\"You're safe, Riven,\" they both say. \"Drink this.\"\n\nA cold rim touches my lips and I sip the liquid gratefully. My throat feels like it is on fire when the liquid touches it, but I feel better and less woozy as it goes down. A small silver flask dances at the edge of my vision. \"What is that?\"\n\n\"Shae said to give it to you.\"\n\n\"Shae's here, too?\" My head is ringing, and the feeling that something isn't quite right slips around inside of it. \"Cale?\"\n\n\"No. Riven, it's me. It's Caden. Here, drink some more.\"\n\nI sip obediently, the liquid tearing a path again into my insides. It's bitter but warming. I sit up, pushing my elbows back against the pillows. Surprisingly, it takes very little effort to move, despite the pain in my head that would suggest otherwise. The room starts to take shape, and as I grow more and more awake, I realize that nothing else hurts.\n\n\"Where am I?\" I ask again after a couple minutes. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Don't you remember?\" Caden says. \"Those things that attacked us?\"\n\nAnd then it's like a tidal wave as the events from earlier come rushing back. My fingers curl into the scratchy blankets on the sides of my legs.\n\n\"How long have I been out?\"\n\n\"Only a couple hours.\"\n\n\"Where are we?\"\n\nCaden comes closer, and the metal cot dips as he sits next to me. \"We're in the basement. It used to be a tornado shelter back in the early fifties. It's why Shae picked this house out of all the others. She's a bit of a Miss Doomsday, but I guess she was right.\" He nods over to the far side of the room that's still shrouded in darkness. \"She's pretty hurt, but I gave her some stuff that June uses for head injuries. It's a mild sedative too, so she's sleeping now. She didn't want to call 911.\"\n\nNo, Shae wouldn't; too many questions. I hobble over to where she's lying on a cot similar to mine and stare at her bloodied face. Caden has cleaned off some of the blood, but her injuries are starting to blacken and swell. She looks far worse for wear than I. My fingers drift to her neck, and I can feel a faint but steady pulse. Her breathing is shallow and wheezy. Caden has cut off the legs of her pants to bandage some of her wounds, but his efforts are amateur at best. It won't be long before her cuts become infected. And the migraines... Those are the beginning of the end. The injector in my bag would help, but unless she gets real help from our doctors, it would only provide temporary relief at best.\n\n\"She doesn't look so good,\" I say.\n\n\"I used what we had.\" Caden's voice is apologetic. \"Riven, we need to get her to a hospital.\"\n\n\"No.\" I shake my head emphatically. \"No hospitals; too many questions that we can't afford to answer. They wouldn't be able to help her, anyway. I need to get my backpack. Does June have a medical kit upstairs?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I don't even know how to use half the stuff June has in there. It's hospital-grade stuff.\"\n\n\"Then we're going to need to figure it out,\" I say flatly, resting my hand against Shae's hot forehead. \"And fast.\" Infection has already begun to set in. I walk back to my cot, where Caden is still sitting, and squat to retrieve my boots.\n\n\"Riven,\" Caden asks quietly, \"what were those things?\"\n\nI stare at him, wondering how after all these years Shae could have singlehandedly protected him from ever coming up against them. I don't even know what she's told him, if anything at all. My guess is nothing. She's tried to protect him the only way she knew how \u2013 by keeping him in the dark, letting him have as normal a life as possible here with some kind of chance to be happy. Glancing over my shoulder at her sleeping form, I am unsure of what to say, but Caden is far from stupid, and he certainly isn't blind. I settle for something near the truth.\n\n\"They're called Vectors, a government experiment. Reanimated corpses.\"\n\n\"Reanimated? Like zombies?\"\n\nI shake my head, a faint smile at his childlike response curling my lips. \"Zombies are dead, period. And they aren't real. Vectors are very real dead bodies, controlled by nanobes. Tiny little microscopic robots that operate inside the hosts.\"\n\n\"Microscopic robots?\" His expression is skeptical. \"You're kidding, right?\" I shoot him a look and raise an eyebrow. \"Is that even possible?\" he asks.\n\nA dozen mocking responses slip to my lips, but I stifle them. I lace up my left boot and start on my right. \"Not everything's impossible. Remember the blue fluid?\" Caden nods. \"That's nanoplasm... the robots.\"\n\n\"I don't get it; why dead bodies?\"\n\n\"Easier to control than live ones, I expect,\" I say bluntly, and grab my weapons, walking over to the steel door. \"How do you open this thing?\"\n\nCaden grabs my arm. \"Where are you going? Those things, the Vectors could be up there. What do they want, anyway?\"\n\nI try to keep the fear slinking around deep inside my belly out of my eyes.\n\nThey want you.\n\n\"I need to check the bodies to see if there's anything we can use. And Shae needs something I have in my backpack. I'll be back; just sit tight.\" I watch as he unbolts the heavy door. \"Lock it behind me. When I come back, ask me who our physics teacher is, OK?\"\n\n\"OK,\" he says, squeezing his fingers, his hand still on my shoulder. \"Be safe, Riven.\"\n\nI climb the basement stairs carefully, hearing the heavy steel bolts fall into place behind me. The entire entrance has been reinforced with some kind of thick metal, and I trail my fingers across the shiny, cool surface. Shae has definitely made sure to be prepared for something. The door at the top leads into the kitchen. It's a narrow trapdoor-like entrance that I'd never noticed before, not any of the previous times I'd been in their kitchen. It, too, is heavily reinforced, with special seals and gaskets. There are no visible handles for re-entry, so I stick a nearby cookbook in the gap. I have no idea if it will hold or not, but it's the best I can come up with.\n\nIt's quiet, which isn't necessarily a good thing, so I'm cautious when I make my way back upstairs. The room is a shambles, furniture tossed and broken, blood and blue fluid spattered everywhere, with three dead creatures in various stages of decay gracing the floor. The smell is putrid, like a wall of rotting human compost curling against me, and I feel the answering bile rise in my throat. That's the thing with Vectors \u2013 when the nanoplasm dies, the bodies decompose rapidly. My father had once said that it was a disgusting but necessary element of control. As a society, we'd learned that the hard way.\n\nTrying not to breathe and careful not to touch any of the fluid, I methodically check each of the Vectors for weapons and anything else of use. I pocket an electro-gun, some rods, a couple metal golf balls that I'm sure are some kind of high-tech explosive devices, as well as any wireless communications headgear I can find. I'm onto the third in less than five minutes when I hear a faint sound. My weapons are at the ready before I'm even in a standing position. I tiptoe to the bedroom door, ears straining, but everything is quiet. I must have imagined the sound.\n\nThe low whine behind me catches me off guard and I swing around to an empty room until I realize that the sound is coming from the third Vector. It's not dead! I pull what's left of its head to face me, wincing at the stench of its wounds. If it's not dead, it will be soon.\n\n\"Soldier,\" I say urgently. \"Can you hear me?\" No response. I tug on its jacket and its head lolls forward. \"Answer me. That's a direct order.\"\n\nIts uninjured eye cracks open and the entire pupil is covered in pale bluish ooze. I doubt it can even see me, but somehow it's registering my voice.\n\n\"Who sent you?\"\n\nThe Vector's eyes roll back in its head. \"Is Cale dead?\" There's nothing, and I rephrase, desperate now. \"Is the Lord King dead?\"\n\nThe Vector's head moves slightly from left to right. It's a no! My relief is tangible, and I sink back onto my haunches. It's more than I could have hoped for. \"What does my father want?\"\n\nA single outstretched finger points to me. The Vector's eye rolls back into its head, and its mouth opens and closes haphazardly, as if choking. The hand thumps to the floor. Within seconds, its head lolls to the side, and the pungent smell intensifies as its internal organs degrade and liquefy. Swallowing past the sourness in my mouth, I release the jacket and finish my search of its body, pocketing a pair of infrared glasses and a silver pearl-like earpiece communications device.\n\nI move to leave but pause at the door, thinking ahead. I don't have a plan in place, but if any of us are to make it back to Neospes, we will need clothing. The Vector's uniforms are designed to keep their bodies protected and are made from a rare type of engineered fabric-like armor, which also provides warmth and heat depending on weather conditions, both of which are unpredictable in Neospes. It would be stupid to leave them.\n\nI frown at the task at hand but move quickly before I have time to think about what I'm doing. In no time at all, I have three sets of uniforms peeled off of the Vectors' bodies. They stink, but I can't help that. I put them along with the weapons in Caden's fencing bag and sling it over my back.\n\nNow for the medical kit.\n\nAt the door, I glance back into the room. Looking at their naked, decaying flesh is far more repulsive than seeing them clothed. Curved ribs and sharp hipbones protrude against their milky, opaque skin with grotesque prominence: the stuff of nightmares. Blue veins traverse their near-transparent skin to route the nanoplasm from their artificial central nervous systems to the rest of their bodies, like a ghostly blue spider web. They barely look human now. Instead, they look like rotting, dead wraiths. I shake my head, swallowing thickly \u2013 the Vectors are true abominations of my culture.\n\nThe sound of the front door jerks me out of my thoughts.\n\n\"Hello? Caden? Anyone home?\" It's June's voice. She must have come home early. I glance down at my filthy shirt and grab one of Caden's clean T-shirts off the dresser, shrugging into it. \"What is that horrific smell?\"\n\n\"Hey, June,\" I call out, taking the steps down three at a time. \"Sorry, we were doing an experiment for bio. Went bad. I wouldn't go up there if I were you for at least ten minutes.\" The last things I need her seeing are the three dead bodies in her house that look like something out of a science fiction movie. I fake an embarrassed grin and offer her an apologetic look.\n\n\"Why am I not surprised?\" she says slowly, after glancing with narrowed eyes to the stairs before putting her keys and bag on the counter. I hesitate \u2013 I still need to get the medical supplies.\n\n\"June, we were looking for your... medical bag?\" I ask in as casual a manner as I can manage.\n\n\"Why?\" So much for putting anything past her as her eyes meet mine, immediately full of concern. \"Are you hurt?\"\n\n\"Nothing major,\" I say quickly. \"I hurt my leg fooling around with Caden's foils earlier. I'm worried that it will get infected.\" It's not an outright lie, as one of the Vectors caught the back of my calf, but it's not like I've paid much attention to it with everything else going on.\n\n\"Well, let me just wash up, and I'll take a quick look. My bag's in my office.\"\n\n\"I'll get it,\" I say, and all but sprint to June's office. I grab the bag and a couple of the blankets lying on her couch, and go back to the kitchen where she's still washing her hands. June stares quizzically at the blankets and the medical bag in my arms, and her eyes flick to mine. She dries her hands slowly, her gaze drifting between Caden's gear bag, the blankets, and me. Then her eyes flit to the staircase.\n\n\"What's going on, Riven?\" Her voice is quiet, but there's something in it that raises the hairs on the back of my neck. It's an instinct that has kept me alive all these years. Her gaze settles on some fluid spattered on my collar peeking out over Caden's shirt. My stomach sinks. I can see something dawning in her eyes. Mistrust. Fear.\n\nGently placing the bag on the floor, I shift my balance from toe to heel and back again. There is no easy way to explain what I'm about to do, no lie that will make my actions any less terrible. She has to go down below, willing or not. And the fact is, I don't know June, which means I can't trust her. I edge closer and place my hands in the air in a non-threatening motion.\n\nNot missing a beat, June edges nearer to the kitchen island so that it stands between us. \"Where is Caden?\" she asks carefully.\n\n\"Caden's fine.\" My voice is inflectionless and slow. \"You have to trust me, June. But I need your help. Shae's hurt.\"\n\n\"Shae?\" A small furrow of worry shadows her brow, but she steels her expression almost immediately. \"Shae's not home. She'd have called to let me know.\"\n\n\"She came back today,\" I say. \"She had an accident.\"\n\nA sharp glance. \"And the dead Vectors upstairs?\"\n\n\"What?\" This time it's my eyes that rivet on hers. \"What do you know about Vectors?\"\n\nShe has taken me by surprise, and just as I'm considering leaping across the island and knocking her unconscious, a small voice has us both spinning around. Shae's leaning against the wall, her face a mottled collage of purples in the fluorescent lighting. Climbing the stairs from the secret room has her wheezing.\n\n\"June's a... Guardian, Riven,\" she gasps, besieged by a round of ugly-sounding coughs. A trail of bloody spit runs down her chin as her body slumps down against the wall. I stare at June's impassive face, incredulous.\n\nA Guardian! My hands grasp the hilts of the blades tucked into my waistband.\n\n\"Was a Guardian,\" June corrects, this time placing both her own hands in the air. She turns her head toward Shae, and I understand what she wants to do. I nod but don't release the handles of my weapons lying flat against my back. She cradles Shae's head against her. \"Can you pass me the bag?\" she asks me. Her eyes, so warm before, are now cold and expressionless.\n\nUnconsciously, I steel my expression to equal hers. \"You can't help her. She's everted too much. She needs more than the help you can give her.\"\n\n\"I can try.\"\n\nWith a glance at Shae, I push the bag across with the toe of my boot, ever cautious. I am the enemy here, the one who has come to take Caden back. I can't trust either of them, even after what happened with the Vectors.\n\n\"Was a Guardian?\" I ask, after a couple minutes watching her take out several glass bottles from her bag. \"I didn't think someone could stop being a Guardian.\"\n\n\"Well, I did.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Look at you; you're just a kid,\" June says softly, not answering my question.\n\n\"I'm not a child,\" I snap back.\n\nJune's eyes are gentle. \"But you are, Riven. Look around you, look at the children in your school: they're kids. The same age as you are. You're babies trained to kill.\" I can't stand the pity in her voice, and I bristle.\n\n\"They're useless and wouldn't last a minute in Neospes. Answer the question, June.\"\n\nA long, searching look as if she's trying to see inside my head. \"I didn't believe in executing innocent people... innocent kids.\" Now it's my turn to stare at her. \"The Guardians honor a code to protect the fabric of the universe,\" June continues. \"You know what would happen if people were to jump back and forth, don't you?\" It's a rhetorical question, so I remain silent. \"The threat of infection, of disease, is of course the worst, not to mention altering the course of a civilization's future. We honor an agreement between the worlds to protect each side from the other... more so to protect this world from the greed of yours. Eversion was never meant to be permanent. It was a mistake to let it go this far, to create an algorithm that allows abominations like the Vectors to come here.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, it was a mistake?\"\n\nJune answers my question with an equally blunt one of her own. \"Why do you think Murek wants Caden so badly?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" It's not a lie. I have many theories but none of them strike me as accurate. The truth is I have no idea why he wants Caden, especially if Murek wants to rule Neospes. Getting rid of him would be the easiest thing to do, after Cale is out of the way. It makes no sense that he would want him so badly. \"So why does he?\"\n\n\"Pass me the blankets,\" she tells me, and I comply automatically. She makes Shae, who keeps slipping in and out of consciousness, more comfortable on the floor. I glance at my watch, knowing that each second we remain here becomes more and more risky. June sends a sidelong glance in my direction and continues speaking while sticking a thermometer into Shae's mouth. \"It is a secret that many would kill to protect.\" She pauses as if assessing whether to tell me or not, and I wait, silent. Nothing prepares me for the next words that come out of her mouth. \"Caden, like Cale, is a hybrid. A product of both universes.\"\n\n\"That's impossible,\" I shoot back. \"I may not know Murek's endgame, but I do know what happens to any progeny that comes out of any union between universes. They are abominations and are all to be disposed of... by you, the Guardians, and the Vectors.\" I can hardly keep the vitriol out of my voice. \"It's the law. You track them, and the Vectors eliminate them.\"\n\nJune is calm. \"It's true. Caden's mother was from this world. She never returned, because of her children. It was only when Caden was in danger that she came back, but she couldn't survive. Her immune system had become too weakened to protect her. And that is the sole reason I stopped being one of them. Caden was an innocent child. And Leila, too...\" She trails off.\n\n\"I don't get it. Why do you care about either of them?\"\n\nAfter another searching look, June sighs. \"We grew up together. She was like my sister. My first mistake was to tell her what I was, and from then on, she couldn't let it go. We were barely your age, but it consumed her to the point of obsession. My second mistake was that she everted there because of me... all because I was careless and told her in the first place.\n\n\"She went so far as to major in quantum mechanics at school, and even though I wouldn't tell her anything I knew \u2013 I was terrified of the consequences \u2013 she was determined to find a way. And she did. That was the night she almost got herself killed trying to evert using some home-designed calculation that she must have stolen from my notes somehow. She almost succeeded too, but in the end, her body couldn't take the force and started to collapse on itself, half stuck in this world, half of it in yours. I panicked, and instead of going to my father as I should have for help, I everted us both to Neospes.\" She glances at me, breaking off to place a cold compress on Shae's head after cleaning off the remaining blood on her face. I keep my face composed despite my racing thoughts.\n\n\"Your father saved her. Her injuries were too great for us to return, and by the time she was well enough to make the jump back, it was too late. The Lord King was fascinated by her, and then she got pregnant. That was the last time I saw her until she came to me ten years ago with Caden.\" June shrugs. \"How could I say no to what she was asking? For help. For protection. It was my fault she went there in the first place. I broke the law, and she was the one who paid the price. I owed her.\"\n\n\"But she's from here,\" I say.\n\n\"The Lord King of Neospes doesn't answer to the law. He forbade her to return.\"\n\nI frown to cover my sense of shock at what she is telling me about Cale, about Cale's father... about who his mother is. I can't get my mind around it.\n\n\"That's a large debt,\" I say for lack of anything else. June shrugs again, her lips twisting in a sad, wry smile.\n\n\"It is what it is.\"\n\nDespite my shock, her story rings true as I think back to all of the times I'd seen Cale's mother. She always seemed so odd to me, as if her mind was always somewhere else, like she didn't quite fit in with everyone else in Neospes. She used to wear these long, flowing, brightly colored dresses \u2013 custom-tailored, Cale had once told me \u2013 instead of the standard black or gray tunic and leggings that most of us wore. I'd always thought the dresses fanciful and strange. And now I know \u2013 she had never belonged there at all.\n\n\"Did Shae tell you anything about me?\" I ask June abruptly.\n\n\"No,\" she says, checking Shae's eyes with a thin instrument. \"She didn't have to. I realized what you were after the clinic.\"\n\nMy eyes narrow. I voice the words pounding in my head. \"What I was?\"\n\n\"A soldier of Neospes.\"\n\n\"And yet you still trusted me with Caden?\" I couldn't help the derision in my voice.\n\n\"Not at first \u2013 I wanted to keep you close \u2013 but then I saw something there... something about the way you were with him. And he with you. I thought you cared about him. But I was wrong, wasn't I?\"\n\nMy teeth grind together, and what escapes my lips is little more than a snarl despite the unfamiliar tug in my chest her words provoke. \"You are wrong. I don't give a damn about him. Caden is a target, nothing more.\"\n\n\"Riven?\"\n\nWe both turn at the quiet voice behind us. The betrayal on Caden's face hits me like a slap. I meet his eyes and drop them just as quickly. I don't know how long he's been standing there, but I know it's been long enough for him to hear my last few words. I sling my backpack across my chest as if it's some kind of shield, a distraction maybe, and rifle through its contents until I find what I am looking for. I slide the silver case toward June. I won't need it anymore \u2013 when I return to Neospes, I won't be coming back.\n\n\"Give her this. It will help.\" I stand, slowly stretching my legs. I nod toward the stairs and grab the bags of gear I've piled together before leaning over the gas stove in the middle of the kitchen island to tuck one of the metal golf balls that I'd found on one of the dead Vectors in the middle of the grate. I'm business now, emotion tucked deep. \"More of them will come, if they're not here already. We need to move and seal the door. Either you come down with me or you can stay here to greet them. One way or another, there's not going to be much left up here. It's your call.\"\n\nI don't look at Caden as I push past him to the trapdoor above the basement stairs. Truth is, I can't even look at him. My curiously burning eyes won't allow it.\nUNDERGROUND\n\nBy the time I've carried Shae down the stairs along with a few extra supplies that June's thrown in, I've almost forgotten that Caden's even there. But I feel him staring at me, with heavy thoughtful glances that make me far more unsettled than if they were filled with anger. June has gone quiet as well, but I expected that. Knowing what she knows, I'd be the last person she would ever fully trust, but still, there's an uneasy understanding between us that at the moment we both need each other.\n\n\"Where does this lead?\" I ask her, noticing another steel door that opens to a dark tunnel behind it.\n\nShe stares at me before answering and throwing me a ratty map. \"Couple miles underground. This tunnel forks to the hospital and to an abandoned building near Horrow.\" She jabs at the map I've opened. \"See all the tunnels? There's an entire web of them down here, most of them collapsed and unusable. Used to be a safe-house for an old underground military base back in the Forties,\" June adds, noticing my expression as I peruse the piece of paper. \"It's why Shae chose it.\" She moves over to check on Shae. \"She's looking better,\" she murmurs more to herself than to me.\n\n\"It won't last,\" I blurt out before I can stop myself. I tuck the map into my back pocket. \"She's everted too much already. Her brain can't take the pressure.\"\n\n\"What pressure?\" The low voice belongs to Caden. He's sitting on the cot I was lying on earlier, pretending to sort through the gear in his fencing bag. \"What does 'everted' mean?\"\n\nI pause for a beat before answering him. \"Ever heard of the bends?\"\n\n\"Decompression sickness? Like when you come up too fast from a deep depth and pressurized gases are released into the body too quickly?\"\n\nI have to fight the instant urge to eyeroll. Caden's so technical even with the little things. \"Exactly. Well, it's like the bends, only it starts in the brain. Then it becomes physical because humans aren't built to evert\" \u2013 I spare a glance at Shae's twitching form, knowing she can still hear me \u2013 \"to jump between universes. Our bodies are too frail, and when they start to break down, they become susceptible to infection and disease.\" June's fists are clenched at her side, her eyes unreadable. \"It's why the Guardians were put in place. To stop any contamination.\"\n\n\"That makes no sense. Guardians? Contamination?\" Caden says, lurching to his feet, interrupting my quiet words. \"Listen to yourself. People don't jump between universes!\"\n\nI shake my head and amend my earlier thought. He may be good with the little things, but when it comes to the big picture, he can be pretty obtuse. \"Where did you think those things came from, Caden? From the zoo? They're from somewhere else, a world just like this one, only far, far worse.\"\n\n\"No,\" he says. \"How is that even possible?\"\n\n\"A lot of things are possible.\" I glare at June. \"Didn't you tell him anything?\"\n\n\"We didn't have to,\" June says. \"Until you got here.\"\n\nI stiffen at her tone, but Caden moves to stand in front of me. \"What are you talking about? What haven't they told me, Riven?\"\n\n\"Get out of my face, Caden. I mean it.\" I can hear the desperation in his voice even in the face of his bravado, but there's nothing I can say. Telling him anything at all means that I'd have to tell him why I'm there in the first place... that I'm as bad as the Vectors... that June is right about me. I push past him, pretending to study the crates of food along the wall. \"I thought you were into all of this scifi stuff? All those DVDs in your room about stargates and whatnot? You're the genius; you figure it out.\"\n\n\"Those are movies.\" Caden's words are slow and deliberate. \"They're made up, you know. Science fiction?\"\n\n\"More like science fact.\"\n\nThe only sound in the room is the shallow hiss of Shae's breathing. Caden is staring at me, disbelief, confusion, and anger written all over his face. I'm not surprised. When Cale first told me about the existence of this world, I thought he was been playing me. But in the end, I understood that technology and physics theory had made it not only plausible, but also possible. And the universe was far wider than any of us really knew. Cale speculated that hundreds of other universes existed, but ours was one of the few to come into parallel contact with another.\n\nI throw my palms into the air and raise an eyebrow. Caden faces my challenge with narrowed eyes, and I can see his mind ticking through the probabilities. \"Even if it were possible,\" he says grudgingly, \"are you saying that Shae \u2013 my cousin \u2013 is sick because she jumped from this world to another universe and back?\"\n\n\"Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying.\" I gesture at myself. \"She everted, just as I did. And just like June, once upon a time.\" Caden rocks back onto his heels, his face as white as a sheet, staring from June back to me as if we're ghosts. I know I'm being blunt, but I don't have time to sugarcoat secrets that Shae and June had concealed from him. \"And she's not your cousin. She's your warden. Your word, not mine.\"\n\n\"Are you serious, right now? I was kidding when I said that.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not. Look, I don't care if you believe me, or think we're on the USS Enterprise, or think you're dreaming. More of those things are going to come, and I need to think for a second without having to explain the nuts and bolts of quantum physics theory to you. Think about it for half a second and you'll see that it's not as improbable as it seems.\" I open the duffel bag and lay out all of the devices I took off the Vectors. I'm so rattled that I can't help myself when I pick up one of the golf balls and thrust it into Caden's face. \"Does this look like any technology you've ever seen? No? It's not from here. None of us are, except for June.\" I stare him in the eyes, my words like bullets.\n\n\"What are you saying? That I'm not?\"\n\nI turn to June, who's staring at me with a clenched jaw. \"Tell him.\"\n\nJune sighs but doesn't shy away from the task. \"She's right, Caden. What she says is true.\"\n\n\"No. No, that's impossible.\"\n\n\"It's true, Caden,\" June says. \"Shae would tell you the same.\"\n\n\"So you lied to me? All this time?\" Caden hisses to her before spinning to walk away and then twisting back around in the same step. \"Were you ever going to tell me?\" June doesn't answer, but her expression clearly says that they haven't planned to. \"I don't believe this,\" Caden mutters. \"This is insane.\"\n\n\"Believe it,\" I say flatly just as Shae turns heavily on the bed to face us, gasping. June was right. She's looking better after the injector, but she's clearly still in a lot of pain.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Cade,\" she wheezes, \"...my fault.\"\n\nCaden turns toward me, with a measured glance at Shae's tortured expression. His eyes are gentle. \"Still, it doesn't make sense. Even if I believed you, then why would Shae endanger herself, knowing the risks of doing it over and over? That she'd... die?\"\n\nI can't help the twist of my lips nor the snarl that slips from them. \"To protect you.\"\n\nJune is already on her feet at my tone, her body bridling and ready to defend Caden. I unclench my jaw and try to breathe the spiraling rage out of my body. June feels no such self-control and she's in my face before I take two breaths.\n\n\"It's not his fault! That was Shae's cho\u2013\"\n\nThe explosion takes us by surprise, even though I was the one who'd left the gas stove burning in the kitchen, and we're all slammed to the ground in different directions. Pain rockets through my head and along my sides as I thump against the steel door I've been standing next to. Despite the intense throbbing in my head, I jump to shaky feet. Years of training force me to do an automatic check of myself for injuries.\n\nThe Vectors are back.\n\nThey'd be the only things that could have triggered the gas. Everting generates minute pockets of electricity, but for some reason when the Vectors do it, the electrical fields are bigger... big enough to ignite a gas-filled room. The golf balls would have done the rest, and no doubt there won't be much left of the bodies, or anything else above ground, for that matter.\n\nA hazy memory drifts through my head \u2013 now I remember why the golf balls are called cleaners. Hot enough to incinerate bones and liquefy metal, such that anything in their path would be completely vaporized. The heat from the fire diffuses through the heavy trapdoor despite its thickness.\n\n\"What the hell was that?\" Caden grunts, following my lead to stand on shaky legs.\n\n\"A cleaner. One of those silver balls.\" I dust the grit from my clothes and blink the soreness from my eyes. A glance in Shae's direction confirms that she's unhurt; I can hear her labored breathing over the ringing in my ears. \"We need to move. It won't be long before they find that door. And they will. Murek won't stop now.\"\n\n\"Who's Murek?\" Caden says.\n\n\"A dictator.\" I toss a pack toward him, hard. \"Get this on. Take only what you need.\"\n\n\"Where are we going? We can't leave. What about school?\" The inane question throws me for a second and I stare at him. He reddens and adds, \"Shae said\u2013\"\n\n\"School's out, Caden. And I'm in charge, not Shae.\"\n\nI know he's confused, but school is probably a comforting constant. I bring myself back to the task at hand, a part of my brain belatedly realizing that June hasn't gotten up.\n\n\"June, you OK?\" In the seconds that it takes to turn around, the quiet sense of knowing is already like a shiver across my neck. Shae, for her part, is sitting up and staring at June's inert body a few feet from where she's now sitting. The antidote injector has done its job \u2013 despite her bloody clothing and the unexpected force of the explosion, she looks nearly back to normal.\n\n\"June's dead,\" she says.\n\nHer voice breaks the silence and my sudden inability to move. Within seconds, I am at June's side with Caden not far behind me, and I gently pull her inert body toward me. She's been thrown against something sharp and her death was instant. The gash on her head is bloody, her sightless eyes wide open and looking right through me. Questioning... judging even in death. Hastily, I close them and turn to Shae with a deep breath.\n\n\"Are you OK? OK to go?\" I ask her, not hiding the urgency in my voice. We don't have a lot of time.\n\nShe nods, distracted, and I can see that her attention is on Caden. The broken look in his eyes reminds me of someone with little experience with death, but my words fade before I can speak them. In my world, death is an expected companion \u2013 whether in our brutal history or a foray gone wrong outside the city wall \u2013 and I've seen more than my fair share of it. Instead, my fingers find Caden's and I squeeze them, suddenly conscious of Shae's stare that is fluttering like a moth between our hands and my face. I wrench my hand away as if his fingers are on fire.\n\n\"We need to go,\" I growl, removing June's map from my pocket and opening it next to Shae on a small crate beside the bed. \"Have you been down all of these?\"\n\nShae ignores me with a glare to pull the blanket off her bed and tuck it carefully over June. I watch as she and Caden lift the body up to place it gently on the bed. Apart from the blood, June looks like she could be sleeping. Caden stands next to the cot as if he's in some kind of trance, and doesn't move until Shae grasps his shoulders with both hands, turning him to face her and shaking him.\n\n\"Caden, remember what I taught you \u2013 we take them with us in our hearts. Let her go, OK? There's nothing you could have done; it was just her time.\" Her voice is thready but grows stronger by the second as she pulls him into a tight hug. \"We will always carry her with us.\"\n\nThe pressure behind my nose and eyes is sudden, like a blow to the head at the sound of Shae's words, so achingly familiar. She told me the same thing when our mother died. The emotion flooding my body is hot and eviscerating. I swallow past the solid lump in my throat and meet Caden's wet eyes. He's staring at me over Shae's shoulder, and the moment is unending, the mirrored empathy in them acting like a salve on my ridiculous emotions. It is all I can do to tear myself away, grateful for the moment when Shae moves to break the silent and unexpected raw connection stretching between us.\n\nI compose myself, digging my nails into clammy palms so hard that it stings. \"Moving on,\" I repeat stonily. \"The tunnels?\"\n\n\"Haven't changed a bit, have you, Riv? Still as cold as ice.\"\n\n\"Occupational hazard,\" I toss back, smoothing the map on the crate. I'm clenching my teeth so tightly, it feels like they will shatter at any moment. I can't look at Caden even though I know he, unlike Shae, is looking at me and seeing right through my bluster. Thankfully, he says nothing.\n\nShae kneels beside me and jabs at a spot on the map. \"We're here.\" She traces her finger along a faded brown line. \"We need to get to here. It's a long way, about twenty miles.\"\n\n\"That's not too bad,\" I say. On foot and injured, that distance would take about six hours, give or take some rest time for Shae. On my own, it'd be a couple hours max, but I've trained hard, running large distances across unfriendly terrain for years. Shae's still hurt, despite her brave rallying, and Caden... well, there's no way he can maintain my speed without any training.\n\nShae disrupts my thought process. \"That's just the exit point of the tunnel. We still need to get to the Denver airport, which is at least another forty miles away. That's the closest eversion point. Above ground, I mean,\" she adds. \"There's a bus station not too far from where we get out. It's straightforward.\" I stare at her with narrowed eyes. It's the closest she's come to admitting that she'll trust me with Caden. She shrugs, understanding my skeptical glance, and jerks her head down toward her body, still wrapped in bloodstained bandages.\n\nShe doesn't have much choice. Without her, Caden only has me. And without me, he would be a sure thing for the Vectors. I can see the question in her eyes \u2013 whether I'll protect him \u2013 and there's only one answer I can give. I nod.\n\n\"Why can't we... evert from here?\" Caden says, interrupting our wordless exchange. \"I mean, those things, the Vectors did, like Riven said...\"\n\n\"They're dead, remember?\" Shae answers. \"They're designed to evert when and where as necessary. We're not. It doesn't hurt them because their cells are already dead. We have to find certain areas where there's a zero point gravitational field so we can pass through with the least amount of physical and mental aftereffects.\"\n\n\"But what about you? You're sick already. Won't that be bad? I won't leave you, Shae. I can't. Not after...\" Caden trails off to stare at June's body.\n\n\"Let's cross that bridge when we come to it,\" Shae says gently. \"Right now, we need to get out of here with everything we can carry, and fast. Can you get the food packs off that shelf and the gear from the trunks over in the corner?\"\n\n\"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"Somewhere safe. I promise I will tell you everything, but for now, we need to get our gear together and get out of here, or we're not going to have that chance. Remember what I told you back in New York? We have to be ready to leave at a second's notice. Nothing's changed. It's the same.\"\n\n\"But that's back when I thought we were minors not wanting to get separated,\" he argues. \"This is different. Isn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes, and I promise I will explain when I can. Right now, we need to move.\"\n\nShae's become the leader I used to know; the confidence in her voice has Caden in automatic reaction mode. She pulls June's medical bag toward her, tugging two dark turtlenecks and two pairs of black cargos from a nearby box, which she places on the bed, and begins to undress. I'm startled at the mottled colors of her skin, the bruises from her earlier fight fading into a shocking kaleidoscope of purple, yellow, and black, interspaced with bands of red, dirty bandages. Her body, despite its damages, is wiry with lean, corded muscle. I watch as she deftly changes the dressings, smearing antiseptic cream across any open wounds.\n\n\"I don't heal as quickly as you do, remember?\" Shae says with a wry smile, noticing my look. We'd always used to joke about that, my ability to heal quickly, and we'd always put it down to different fathers and the luck of genetics. I used to feel like a freak, but Shae was the one to help me see it for what it was \u2013 a gift, and one that I'd used to my every advantage in battle. \"Here, these are for you,\" she adds, throwing one each of the turtlenecks and pants in my direction. \"We're still close to the same size.\"\n\nI catch it one-handed, looking away as she tugs on her clothes, irritated by her thoughtfulness. Instead, I concentrate on cleaning the blood and pale blue gore from my twin ninjata blades with gun oil until they're as spotless as mirrored glass. Both deadly Artok weapons, they were a gift from Cale. Skilled assassins, the Artok are a tribe from the East, and what's left of them lives in sector seven in Neospes, one of the few areas on the periphery of the core. My mother's grandfather had been Artok. Cale liked the symbolism of it, and I liked his unexpected kindness.\n\nI put the ninjatas carefully to the side and line up all the other items from my backpack on the floor \u2013 sleeping bag, rope, tools, blanket, a collapsible tent, emergency food packets, a survival kit with various first-aid items including the silver case with the anti-eversion injector, which I open; only three left out of the five slots on the cylinder.\n\nDesigned to counter the physical effects of jumping between universes, they were yet another concoction invented by my father's medical team. I frown, staring at the syringes. They are effective, but they're only meant to be temporary fixes to combat cell degradation. The weekly pills are supposed to be taken during the jumps, and the injectors are meant for emergency purposes if anything goes wrong.\n\nI fish deeper into my backpack and pull out a circular silver case. Diligent about taking the stabilization pills \u2013 well, at least until lately \u2013 I've only had to use one of the injectors since I've been here. I have several years' worth of pills left \u2013 I've been prepared to be in this world for as long as it took to find Caden.\n\nBut now, Shae would need both cases, at least until we get back to Neospes, where most of the damage to her nervous system could be reversed with our medical technology. I slide the cases over to her with one hand. If she makes it...\n\n\"You keep these, in case we get separated or anything,\" I say gruffly.\n\n\"Won't you need them?\"\n\n\"I don't plan on coming back here.\"\n\n\"Riv\u2013\" she begins.\n\n\"Don't,\" I say. \"Just take them. You need them more than I do. And like you said, I heal quickly.\" I pause, and stare at the ground. \"Plus, I haven't taken the pills in weeks, and I don't feel any different. No headaches, nothing. It's like I've adapted or something.\" I shrug. \"After I crashed my bike, my body went supernova on me. Figure I nearly died and it wanted to live. Or something like that.\"\n\nShae's eyes narrow. \"You always did recover fast. That's weird, though.\"\n\n\"Don't you think I know that?\"\n\n\"Strong survival instinct.\" Her mouth opens and closes like she wants to say something more, but can't find the words. Her hesitation is grating.\n\n\"What?\" I snap.\n\n\"You ever wonder why... your body can do those things?\"\n\nI stare at her. \"No. Everyone's wired differently. I heal fast. You've known that for years. What's the big deal?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\" Her lips twist, her eyes dropping away from mine as she puts the cases into her own pack. \"Thanks.\"\n\nThe silence is like a web between us, sticky with so many things left unsaid over all the years. It's suffocating, the way she's been watching me when she thinks I'm not looking, studying me like I'm some kind of pariah. I can't stand it.\n\n\"No problem,\" I grit out, and pull the gear bag I'd packed upstairs toward me, removing the Vectors' uniforms. Luckily, they don't stink as much. They're designed with a special self-cleaning technology that eliminates body odors, meant for hours of prolonged use. I dab at some of the stains that look fresh with a rag and smooth them out in front of me just in case \u2013 who knows how long the Vectors had been wearing them?\n\nThey don't look like much, but are engineered for the rough terrain outside of the city wall, where the days are hot and the nights freezing cold. The solar panels on the back and shoulders store and diffuse heat through the suit as needed, and the ventilation pockets recycle sweat for cooling during hot weather. A multitude of pockets and utility latches hold anything from food to gear to weapons. I run my fingers from shoulder to cuff on one of the suits to skim lightly over the recessed keypad in the wristband indented with various symbols. The keypad controls the suit's special programming.\n\n\"What are those?\" I jump in surprise when Caden squats down beside me. \"Wait a sec! Are these the Vectors' uniforms? The dead things?\" I almost laugh at the unbridled disgust on his face. I nod. \"Nasty,\" he adds, and moves away to lug a couple more trunks over to Shae.\n\n\"Maybe, but you won't be saying that when your bones think they're shattering inside of you from the cold,\" I mutter under my breath, rolling up the suits into their reversible pouches sewn into the leg cuffs and tucking them into my backpack. I repack all of the other items, including the ones I also took off the Vectors, and refill the water pouches that fit along the sides of my pack with some of the jugs of drinking water lining the wall.\n\n\"Is there a bathroom down here?\" I ask Shae, who nods toward a door on the left side of the room.\n\nInside the cramped space that's little more than a closet with a toilet and a tiny sink, I remove my filthy torn shirt and wipe the blood from my neck and chest. I don't even bother to smooth the mess that's my hair, but I wash my face with the trickle from the tap, dabbing the cool water under my arms and along my sides. I remove my torn pants and twist over the toilet to examine the wound on my leg where the Vector had caught me with the electro-rod, but I'm surprised to see that it's barely a thin, blackened welt under the crusty blood. I frown \u2013 I've never healed this fast before. Must have felt worse than it looks. I clean it off and pull on Shae's clean clothes before walking out. The pants are a little snug, but they're clean and not ripped.\n\nIn the outer room, Shae and Caden are leaning over a case lined with all manner of weapons \u2013 guns, knives, chains, maces, spears, bows, and swords.\n\n\"Guns won't kill Vectors,\" Shae is explaining to Caden. \"They're programmed to dodge the trajectory of bullets. Something about the sound of the metal, I think.\" Brandishing a curved knife, she adds, \"The only way to kill them, as you saw, is a sharp blow to the head or severing the spinal column.\"\n\n\"But people are much slower than bullets,\" Caden argues.\n\n\"But we're less noticeable,\" I interject, heading over to them. \"That's our advantage over them. By the first bullet, they know where you are. If you miss, you're dead. It's a small window, but usable.\" I pull on the worn black leather harness over my shoulders and slip my short swords into their sheaths flat against my back. Choosing two short knives from the pile, I tuck those into my backpack along with a handful of four-pointed steel throwing stars. \"It's all about speed, flexibility and unpredictability. With a knife or a sword, you have to get in real close, but once you strike true, they go down.\"\n\nShae hefts a mini-crossbow in her hand. \"This is my favorite.\"\n\n\"I don't get it. What's the difference between that and a gun?\" Caden says. \"Plus, I got the one with bullets upstairs, remember?\"\n\n\"Like I said, Vectors can hear bullets coming a mile away. Arrows are a lot quieter. Half the time, taking out a Vector quietly is the biggest challenge, because who knows what else you can attract, or how many of them?\" Shae says. \"And you didn't kill the one upstairs. They can withstand a lot of physical damage as long as you don't touch their vulnerable spots. It's a waste.\"\n\n\"Which weapon should I use, then?\" Caden asks.\n\n\"The sabre,\" I say quickly. \"It's the perfect weapon for you. It'd be like fencing, only you're fighting for your life, not points.\"\n\n\"Super,\" Caden's droll response elicits a short laugh from Shae, and I, too, fight to keep the smile from my mouth, but the moment of levity is gone like a breath in the wind. They share a look that I ignore.\n\n\"We need to move,\" I tell them. \"Shae, how're you feeling?\"\n\n\"Good,\" she responds, hoisting her backpack on her shoulders. Her color is back, and she's standing in fighting stance. That's one thing about the anti-eversion injectors \u2013 they pack a combined punch of pain inhibitors, counteractive pressure meds, and a low dose of epinephrine to get the nervous system functional. Shae tosses a headlamp in my direction and looks at me expectantly.\n\n\"OK, we follow you. Let's go,\" I say, pulling the lamp over my forehead. \"Caden's in the middle, and I'll be behind him.\"\n\nWe make our way through the steel door, dropping the heavy bar across the back once it's shut. If the Vectors make it into the basement room, it won't be much of a deterrent to them, but it will still take considerable force to open it from the inside.\n\nThe tunnel smells musty, and it's dark, with the three beams from our lamps barely piercing the blackness. No one speaks as we make our way, walking as fast as possible. There's enough room for us to probably walk three abreast, but we remain in single file with Shae at the lead and me at the rear. After nearly forty minutes of hard walking, the tunnel forks. Shae takes the one on the left without missing a beat, and I have to force myself to not pull out the map in my pocket. I am flying blind and it's not a feeling I like. Nor do I like depending on a sister that lied to me in the first place, even if we are now working against a common enemy.\n\n\"Are you sure this is the right way?\" I can't stop myself from asking.\n\n\"Yes. I've done this dozens of times before,\" Shae shouts back.\n\nHer words do little to reassure. The tunnel walls are starting to close in, and all I want to do is sprint as fast as I can to the other end. I've never been good with being underground. Performing routine security checks in the belowground shelters back home used to have me breaking out in cold sweats. I practice my old trick, counting softly in my head backwards from one hundred and breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. It helps a little.\n\nOur pace is grueling, and the calming breaths I'm trying to take in are becoming more and more like shallow pants. I slow for a second to pull an ultrathin device from my pocket, one that I'd taken from one of the Vectors. It tells me how far we've already travelled \u2013 we're just past the halfway point of twenty miles. I pocket the electronic tablet and almost crash into Caden's back.\n\nIt's only at that moment that I realize there's a loud rushing noise coming from a ragged-edged vent in the ceiling, and we're in a wider band of rock. The space is a roughly hewn cave, its walls dotted with smaller caves and darker tunnels. Both Shae and Caden are standing in front of a three-fork tunnel at the far end, their heads together, staring at a piece of paper. They both glance at me.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" I ask. \"We're almost there; why are we stopped?\"\n\n\"The right tunnel may be faster, according to this map,\" Shae says. I nod impatiently. All I want to do is get out of here as fast as possible. It's only after I follow Caden's shadowy form into the tunnel that the thought occurs to me that Shae had said she'd done this trek dozens of times before.\n\nWhy would she suggest a new route? What had they been talking about in the seconds before I caught up with them in the noisy area? My brain jumps into overdrive as the pieces come together enough to make me freeze in my tracks.\n\nBut I'm a half-second too late.\n\nThere's no one ahead of me. In that exact moment, the silence drums into my ears and it's so dead quiet that I don't even hear footsteps. The only sound is that of my breathing. I curse my stupidity.\n\nMy eyes strain forward into the darkness, the beam from my penlight offering little clarity. There's no one there; they're gone. But they have to be close. Shae knows these tunnels inside out \u2013 there has to be some kind of alcove nearby, somewhere they're hiding. I close my eyes and exhale silently, letting my other senses do the work. But Shae knows me too well. There's nothing, no movement at all. I could be alone, even though every instinct inside of me screams that I'm not.\n\nClenching my teeth, I delve into my pack, searching futilely for the pair of infrared glasses I'd taken off the dead Vector in Caden's house. I hear an indistinct noise like the sound of some tiny animal rustling around behind me, and my hands grasp the hilts of my blades as I swing around. Nothing. The darkness surrounds me, heavy and dry, as I inch back the way we'd come. I release my grip on the swords, leaving them in their sheaths for the moment \u2013 I can't risk hitting Caden. Shae, I don't really care about one way or another. She has proven that she is still my enemy. I resort to words instead of blades.\n\n\"Shae? What are you doing?\" I whisper furiously into the dark. \"We need to stay together. You're hurt and you need me. Shae! Where are you?\"\n\nI'm still inching along when I sense the shift in the air and I swing around into a crouched stance, protecting my body instinctively with my forearms. The cold tip of an electro-rod presses against the soft spot just beneath my ear, and my body freezes. I forgot how quiet Shae can be, catching me unawares for years during training when we were little. I gnash my teeth in frustration. Her voice in my ear is soft with bittersweet notes of regret.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Riv. I can't let you take him. Don't try to find us.\"\n\n\"Shae, don't\u2013\"\n\n\"And I'm sorry for this, too.\"\n\nI feel a sharp zap against my skin, and then the darkness blinds me.\nTHE PREY\n\nLights blink in and out. Warm sun flickers against my eyelids. I can hear someone laughing, and I turn toward the voice from where I'm lying, hefting myself onto my elbows. Lights flash again, this time like popping light bulbs exploding behind my eyelids, as a searing pain lances through my shoulder.\n\nCoughing, I taste burnt blood.\n\nIt all comes back to me in a rush. Caden, the Vectors, the dark tunnel... Shae. There is no sunlight, no laughter. Instead, I'm breathing in the rank, dusty air of the tunnel where my sister has left me. Pulling myself to my knees, I'm still groggy from the electro-shock. Obviously, Shae had set it to stun, but it still hurts something fierce.\n\nGingerly, I touch the welt along the side of my neck and wince. She's been generous; this stun is more or less mild. I would have taken out an enemy \u2013 even if it were my sister \u2013 without a second thought. Those rods have a kill setting that could liquefy the insides of anything human, and melt the internal wiring of anything not human. But even so, one of the stun settings could knock a live person out for days at a time.\n\nI look at my watch quickly, noting that I've only been out for a few hours. A quick check of my body, other than the welt on my neck and a cut on my lip from where I'd fallen, tells me that I'm otherwise unhurt. My pack lies off to the side, hanging drunkenly off one arm, and I hoist it onto my lap. They haven't touched it. My blades are still snug against my back under my jacket. At least Shae hasn't left me with nothing to protect myself, even though I wouldn't have done the same.\n\nI haul myself up against the wall and stand, trying to get my bearings and ignoring the dizziness that threatens to make my knees buckle.\n\n\"Get a grip, Riven,\" I snarl to myself. \"It's not like you've never been on the wrong end of an electro-rod before.\"\n\nGrabbing my pack, I remove the first-aid kit and pour some cold liquid from a slim bottle onto a piece of gauze, careful not to let it touch my fingers. I dab it onto my neck, a shiver snaking through me as an icy sensation immediately dulls the raw ache of the welt. The liquid anesthetic hardens into a thin, flexible shell over the sore area, its under-layer seeping into my skin to deaden raw nerve endings and rebuild cells. Within seconds, the pain is gone, and within an hour I know my neck will be as good as new.\n\nNormally, I'd just leave my wounds to heal on their own, but now I have no time to lose. The cell-regeneration remedy is yet another of my father's inventions... and one that I'd steadfastly refused to use. Using anything of his makes me sick to my stomach, but now it's a necessity to find Caden quickly. It's a brutal reminder of what is at stake \u2013 I can't let my hatred for my father affect my decisions and actions now.\n\nPocketing the bottle, I try to reorient myself. I shine my flashlight down one end of the tunnel, and it's soon swallowed up by the blackness. I do the same down the other end. Eyesight isn't going to help me, so I close my eyes, engaging my other senses and letting the flow of the stale air in the tunnel waft around me. The changes are subtle, but they're there \u2013 the ones that tell me which direction has more movement in the airflow.\n\nWithout hesitation, I sprint down the tunnel on confident feet. Recalling the treacherous, veiny patchwork of the tunnel map, I know I can get lost with a single wrong turn, so I'm careful not to veer off the pathway. If I can make my way back to the place where the tunnels fork into three, I'll be able to figure out which way they've gone and track them from there.\n\nI run past several other tunnels and alcoves that I haven't noticed before, refusing to let any fear enter my mind. But it does, inexorably. And I know I've made the wrong choice.\n\nJust backtrack, I tell myself silently. Follow your feet, and trust your instincts.\n\nI can hardly help the next thought that follows that one \u2013 as my instincts had told me to trust Shae? But they hadn't; my emotions had. I grit my teeth and press on, clearing my mind of any thought but getting to the end of the tunnel. And within minutes, I do.\n\nOnly it's a dead end.\n\nI punch my fist into the wall and a shower of pebbles scatters at my feet. How could I have missed a turn? I stayed straight, didn't I? Could I have missed it somewhere?\n\nThink! I urge myself. I retrace the path in my head, then backtrack about half a mile before I see it \u2013 a barely discernable twist in the path. I had veered in the wrong direction into what was now clearly an offshoot from the main tunnel. I take a deep breath to calm my racing nerves. Things could be far worse. I could have ended up running in circles or gotten even more lost.\n\nBack on the right track, it's no time at all before I am in the area with the four tunnels \u2013 the one that we'd come from, and the three we'd chosen between. Squatting down, I notice faint scuffmarks in the dirt in front of the tunnel on the far left. A slight color change in the ground suggests that this tunnel has been used more than the others. I check my watch. Shae and Caden are probably near the other end, if not out already, but the window of opportunity isn't completely closed for me to track them. Still, I have to move, and fast.\n\nI'm just about to enter the leftmost tunnel when something stops me dead in my tracks \u2013 the sound of something heavy moving, something coming from behind me... something big. The hairs on the back of my neck stand at stiff attention, because I know that it can't be Caden and Shae. They would never have gone back.\n\nIt has to be Vectors. They've found us. Or more precisely, found me.\n\nI deliberate between making a beeline down the tunnel and facing them head-on. But I have no idea how many they are. For a second, my body feels like it is splitting down the middle with equal urges to fight and flee pulling me in opposite directions. It's not in my nature to run, but fighting an unknown number of Vectors in such an enclosed space will not be to my advantage, despite my skills.\n\nI decide to wedge myself into one of the many alcoves lining the walls of the cave. I'll get some idea of their numbers and assess potential attack options. And, at the very least, their tracking technology is far better than mine, and we are looking for the same thing.\n\nThe enemy of my enemy is my friend.\n\nNot that I'll ever align myself with Vectors, but I will use them however I need to, and then get rid of them when I don't. Hoisting myself up the cave wall, I find a recessed nook and crawl inside to wait, pressing my body back into the dark space until rocks are digging painfully into my flesh.\n\nMy eyes adjust slowly to the muted dark of the outer cave. I've covered my scuffmarks in the dirt and sprinkled myself with anti-tracking dust from the bottom of my pack. They probably aren't even looking for me, but I have to play it safe on the off chance that they are. My father has his own reasons for wanting me back in Neospes.\n\nIt isn't long before they enter the big cave: three of them, with one a familiar face, the ruthless commander from before. My teeth clench. The smell of them hits me like a rolling wave, the pungent scent of formaldehyde. Even though I'm used to it, it's something that automatically raises the hairs on my whole body. In Neospes, we cremate our dead, except for the Vector soldiers, who are put through an unnatural rigorous embalming-like process. They carry the smell of death like armor.\n\nHalogen lights on their uniforms illuminate the cave. I watch the commander carefully. It was a tough fight earlier, and its ability to speak had been unnerving. I can't help noticing that its bullet-ridden body has been completely repaired in a matter of hours. It's nothing for our reconstructive technology \u2013 the technological differences between my world and this one are like night and day. But then my mind flashes back to the abundance of water in this world and extravagances like Caden's waterbed. Limitless water over advanced robotics is a no-brainer. So is a world without creatures like these, without the Vectors.\n\nWith inhuman stealth, the Vectors move purposefully, examining the ground in front of the three tunnels. The big one turns to study the rest of the cave, and I imagine his eyes slowing and stopping at my alcove. I can hear the blood rushing in my ears and the shakiness of my breath in the dead silence. I'm barely breathing, and even though I know he can't possibly see me, for a split second, it feels like our eyes connect. Adrenaline rushes through my bloodstream, but then the moment is gone as he turns back to his subordinates, pressing a series of buttons on the wrist-pad of his suit to initiate the tracking device.\n\n\"Two trails,\" he says. His voice is guttural, and as before, it chills me to the bone.\n\nA red light streams from his wrist as it scans the entrances to both tunnels. Yellow markings spin through the red, more on the right than the left: heat readings. The commander moves over to that tunnel pressing another series of buttons, and the light switches to a pale laser-like blue. A long noise bleeps on his console, loud in the silence and almost making me jump.\n\n\"The tracks return,\" he growls and studies the device before stepping over to the far left tunnel to repeat the sequence. This time there are three short beeps, and he nods, satisfied. \"The boy went this way. Move out,\" he commands.\n\nThe other two nod and immediately obey, disappearing into the tunnel. For a moment, the Vector commander turns around and re-scans the room. His gaze doesn't stop at my hiding place this time, but I can feel his suspicion, and this, too, is unlike the traditional programming of the Vectors. They operate by computer rules and programming algorithms, not instinct. Can he somehow sense me? He punches another sequence of numbers into the wrist-pad, different from the ones he used before. Unconsciously, I press myself deeper against the wall and ignore the searing slice of stone against my skin.\n\nMy heart jumps into my throat as he flashes the same blue tracker in a slow clockwise circle. I can only hope that the anti-tracker dust will do its job. As the blue light filters into my cave, I can see the analysis data in the light discoloring its surface, and I hold my breath. These scanners are built to analyze individual scent \u2013 yet another advanced biometric profile weapon incorporated into the suits \u2013 almost like electronic sniffer dogs. Terrified, I wait for the beeps that will surely come if he's looking for me, but there's no sound.\n\nThe light moves past my cave, but I don't exhale until the Vector Commander has completed his scan and followed the other two into the tunnel. My muscles remain clenched until enough time has passed by, when I scramble out of my cramped hiding space. It takes only a couple minutes for my blood to recirculate through my body, but I am already moving, digging through the bottom of my pack and locating the infrared glasses I couldn't find earlier. There's no way I can see in the dark or use the penlight \u2013 they'll see me coming from a mile away.\n\nI head into the tunnel, walking as quickly as I dare. I am tracking on scent alone, the unique smell of their dead flesh wafting on the stale air in the tunnel. The sharp odor of it makes me remember the first time I saw one of them.\n\nIt'd been during a time when my whole family was still together \u2013 my father, my mother, Shae, and I \u2013 a time before betrayal and lies ripped us apart. At only six, and one of the youngest recruits, I'd been released from training early and called to my father's underground experimental lab. At the time, he was the head scientist in the advanced robotics and genetic testing facility, and already navigating the waters of reanimating the dead with cyborg technology.\n\nUsing my unrestricted passkey \u2013 being his daughter had its privileges \u2013 I found him on one of the lower levels in one of the test labs. Unnoticed in a corner of the outer office, I stared fascinated through the glass wall into the room beyond where my father had just finished decontaminating a corpse on a long silver table. Decontamination, my father once explained to me, meant getting rid of all internal bodily fluid and unnecessary organs, and preserving the remaining husk and heart with an electro-chemical solution.\n\n\"It's all biological,\" he said to me. \"The body is a capable host, even though it's no longer alive. With the nanoplasm, we can use and program these shells to operate almost as well as a fully functioning live person would. And they would make even better soldiers, as there's no emotion, just programming.\" He paused then to look at me with dark, narrowed eyes. \"And the beauty of them is that they're expendable. One command, and the nanoplasm shuts down. No loss, nothing compromised. Think of it as a type of recycling.\"\n\n\"How do they go to the bathroom?\" my perfectly logical, then six year-old self asked in all seriousness. My father smiled widely and lifted me onto his desk.\n\n\"Smart question,\" he answered. \"The simple answer is that they don't. We remove all the parts that we don't need, like the kidneys or the liver or the stomach. We keep the heart because it moves the nanoplasm around the body, and we keep part of the brain and spinal cord to process the information we give it.\"\n\n\"What makes it go, then? Like how does it work? What do they eat?\" I cocked my head and frowned. \"It's not a robot, is it?\" Even then I couldn't keep the trepidation out of my voice, having learned about our violent history in my civilization lessons. The Tech War had obliterated our world, leaving the sparse little we had now as a harsh lesson of the perils of artificial intelligence.\n\n\"No, princess. They're safe. This nanoplasm responds to programming only. It's not self-aware.\" He patted my head reassuringly, as only he could. \"And they don't eat anything; they have a special lithia core that keeps the heart pumping and the brain ticking. Once you compromise the spinal cord or the brain, it's an automatic kill switch. Don't worry, sweet; it's all under control this time.\"\n\n\"What are they called?\"\n\n\"Vectors.\"\n\nThe entire process disgusted and fascinated me at the same time. I couldn't imagine, even then, how a dead person could be used as a soldier, and watching my father at work was the first time I was able to see the process up close and personal. I remained crouched in my corner, thrilled and terrified of being caught, watching as my father and his team worked the corpse from top to bottom.\n\nMachines around the body beeped constantly, with long tubes of various sizes connected to the table. They were filled with metallic-colored fluids. Slowly, in succession, two of the tubes were emptied, and then combined into a larger tube before being injected into the dead man's body. Two of my father's assistants exited to another adjoining secure room filled with flashing computer screens. My father followed them just as the third tube with the silvery blue fluid slowly started emptying like the others into the body beneath it.\n\nHe punched some numbers into the keypad on one of the desktops. Something was starting to happen in the room. The corpse on the table bucked and began convulsing against the metal shackles connecting it to the table. I could see the bunched muscles of its arms and legs cording as if it were in terrible pain, even though my father had said that they couldn't feel anything. And then suddenly, it stopped moving, and the only noise was the flatline sound of a long beep.\n\n\"Dammit!\" I heard my father swear and punch the wall before stalking out of the room into his office, where I was hiding. He raked his hands through his hair as he studied some papers lining his desk, grinding his teeth in frustration. Not wanting to get caught in the crossfire of his anger \u2013 which could be nasty at times \u2013 I curled my body into as tight a ball as I could manage, pressing myself into the wall behind me, and prayed that he wouldn't notice me.\n\n\"We did the sequencing right. What did I miss? What did I miss?\" he muttered to himself before punching a button on the intercom and hissing to his assistants, \"Get me another prepped body. We go again in thirty minutes!\" Without even looking in my corner, he left his office through the outer door, slamming it behind him. A shaky breath left my mouth but I stayed curled tightly for several seconds before standing very carefully.\n\nThe area was empty... except for me and the Vector lying on the table. I couldn't help myself, knowing that I only had a few minutes before my father or his assistants returned, and without hesitation, I punched in the code on the inner door. My birthday. In hindsight, I always wondered how my brilliant father could be so clueless or predictable as to use his daughter's birth date as a code on one of the most dangerous areas in the facility. But the thought of it made me feel warm inside \u2013 he may not be the most demonstrative of fathers, but this was a sign, a sign that I mattered. Ignoring the warning clench of my stomach muscles, I pushed open the door.\n\nInside the room, I approached the body with trepidation, even though I knew it was not operational. The test had failed. My nose wrinkled against the suffocating chemical smell that caused my eyes to sting. Still, I inched nearer. Up close, the thing was huge \u2013 a dead giant of a man. His skin was a dull gray color, bleached out by all the compounds stopping it from decaying, but the metallic fluids now inside of him still gave his body muscular definition. Clad only in a pair of medical undergarments, his bare chest and arms were sleek and hairless, his head shaved. I moved closer to the table and placed my hand carefully alongside the hand caught by the metal shackle on the table. They were ten times the size of mine!\n\nA long red scar on the giant's side caught my attention and I bent closer. This was where the lithia cell my father had told me about would have been inserted to connect to the lower spine. I ran my finger along the cold line of flesh and shivered. It felt like clammy linoleum. The man also had a tattoo running along the top of his thigh that read, \"Test Specimen 74.\" Seventy-four of them they'd already burned through... no wonder my father had been so upset. It wasn't like we had dozens of dead people lying around; as a society, we valued life too much.\n\nI was so intent on staring at the number and thinking about how little of us were left in our tiny pocket of the world, that I didn't feel the yank on my head until it was too late, and the tears were already springing to my eyes in agony as something hauled on my braid with brute, uncompromising force.\n\nPanicked, I wondered whether my hair had gotten caught on the table somehow, and twisted despite the tearing sensation on my scalp to see what I was caught on. Instead, I found myself face-to-face with a milky-blue stare that was so devoid of any life that my terror made me freeze completely.\n\nThe giant was alive! But it wasn't possible. The experiment had failed.\n\nAt the exact moment that I realized that the experiment hadn't failed, the alarms in the room went off, and things galvanized into motion as the dead man broke through the steel shackle like it was butter \u2013 oblivious to the silvery-blue fluid that poured down its forearm from where the sharp steel edges had razored through flesh \u2013 and taking my head with it until I was half spread-eagled over its body. It was as if my head were on fire, my skin tearing off of my skull and my hair loosening in whole clumping handfuls.\n\nClose up, its eyes were even more terrifying, sucking the life out of me with their blank deadness, completely devoid of any soul. The thing opened its mouth, and I started screaming. I didn't stop screaming, not until hands pulled me back, and I felt someone cutting away its grip on my hair. Voices fluttered in and out. I could see huge steel needles being jammed into the thing's side as people tried to hold the giant in place, until it finally shut down. I glanced at its face once more, and even though it was completely lifeless; its colorless blue eyes still stared at me as if the creature wanted to swallow me whole.\n\nFor years afterward, I couldn't even look at them \u2013 their gray faces and milky-blue eyes, terrifying \u2013 a constant reminder of that moment when I'd been caught unawares. I'd never trusted them, not ever, not even when I'd led them. They were a means to an end, and Murek, the Legion Commander at the time, had loved them because of their absolute loyalty. Despite my own reservations, my father had been right. The Vectors had made excellent soldiers.\n\nFinding myself in a new open cave area underground, I bring myself back to the present, clearing my head from my memories to focus on the task at hand. They are great soldiers, but their allegiance is and will always be to Murek and the crown \u2013 a loyalty that is programmed into the very fluid that runs in their dead veins. Even though the one in Caden's house somehow recognized me as its general, I know that it had been a glitch \u2013 and one that will be quickly rectified. Nothing will stand in the way of getting Caden... not even me.\n\nThere's only one exit out of the space at the far end, and I make my way there on silent swift feet. I am so intent on getting into the tunnel that I don't sense the attack until it is too late, as something large and heavy tackles me to the ground. My night-vision glasses are jerked from my head in the collision, and I'm suddenly flying blind. Without losing a beat, I roll and kick upward with all the force I can muster, feeling my boots connect with a thick body and pushing it off of me. In a flash, I'm in a crouch, taking three steps back. I loosen my backpack and remove the swords from their sheaths against my back.\n\nI can't see it, but I know it's one of the Vectors. It has a slight advantage because it can see me. I say slight because part of our training means fighting blindfolded. All of our senses are honed to the point of razor-sleek sharpness, and facing an opponent in darkness is par for the course. I take a deep breath and pull it into my center, letting it fill me and closing my eyes. I exhale and wait.\n\nThe air shifts to my left and instead of spinning away, I move toward it, at the last minute grinding to my knees and slashing outward with my blades. They strike into something thick and heavy \u2013 a leg or upper thigh. The thing makes no sound, but now I can hear it moving as it drags one foot slightly. It lunges toward me once more, and this time I wait and take the hit on my left flank, moving out slightly so that I don't receive the full weight of the strike.\n\nWith Vectors, hesitation is the difference between life and death. Ignoring the pain, I whirl alongside the Vector's body until I am facing its back. My swords don't falter, swinging up and scissoring across the back of its neck in a smooth decisive motion born from years of honing the same move in training and in actual combat. I hear the thump of its head followed by the second thump of its body, and pull the thin penlight from my pocket, trying to filter the sharp light through my fingers. I'm still cautious. The creature had been waiting for me, but there's no other movement or noise.\n\nI retrieve my glasses quickly \u2013 they aren't broken, thankfully \u2013 and find my pack. In the muted green glare of the glasses, the Vector's shape is a dull outline. I quickly divest him of any of his gear that I can carry, including a wireless communications headpiece, which I tuck into my ear, and an electro-coil, a flexible strand of wire attached to a thick short handle, which I slip into my boot. I haul his body to the side of the area, and move toward the tunnel.\n\nThat's when the screaming starts.\n\nREVERSAL OF FORTUNE\n\nI bolt down the narrow passageway without any thought for my own well-being. All I can hear is Shae's bloodcurdling scream, and it chills me to the bone. It sounds as if she's being gutted while still alive. I'm flat-out running because I know the Vectors have no use for her, and while I am still upset at her betrayal, there's no way I'd want my sister to suffer or die at the hands of those things... and especially not the big one.\n\nBut as I draw closer, I can see that he's not there. And neither is Caden.\n\nI refuse to panic, or even imagine that somehow the big one has already taken Caden back. I take a deep breath \u2013 first, I have to help Shae. The infrared green vision of my goggles identifies thrashing movement down the tunnel in front of me, and I click a button on the side of the arm that magnifies the image \u2013 there are only two of them and I recognize Shae's wiry thinness immediately.\n\nThe Vector lifts her body and slams it into the side of the wall like a sack of potatoes. I dart forward, ducking my head and full-on tackling him to the ground. There's a dull thud as our bodies crash to the dirt, and I'm rolling, sword in hand, before I can even take another breath.\n\nThe Vector is just as quick and already on his feet facing me. I spare a glance at Shae. I can smell the rusty odor of blood in the cramped space. Dread makes me dash forward, but I misjudge the Vector's movement, as his fist catches me in the solar plexus and knocks all the air out of me.\n\nGasping, my knees buckle and I swing my blade weakly across its side, but not before its elbow catches me in the back of the head. My face smashes against the rough rock of the tunnel, and I can feel the sharp sting of my skin peel off against the stone even as stars blind my vision. The Vector is on top of me before I can move, bashing my weapons out of my hands. I curl into a ball to protect myself, because I can't get a strike in edgewise.\n\nShae claws at its body from behind, and distracted, it slams a heel in her direction. I hear a vicious thump \u2013 presumably her body against the tunnel wall behind us \u2013 before it swings back to me, blows crunching into my ribs like a jackhammer. The pain is excruciating, but I force myself to stay focused.\n\nSomehow, I have to get out of this, if only to find Caden. If I don't, we are all lost. The thought gives me a boost of strength as my hand slides down the side of my leg into my boot to grasp the handle of the electro-coil I took off the other Vector earlier. With a lurch, I flip my body around and jam my legs against the wall with all the force I can muster, wrapping one knee around the thing's head. In quick succession, I twist to the side and jerk my knee backward, but I'm not quick enough.\n\nI'm thwarted as the Vector's knee smashes into my skull, disabling my glasses... and suddenly, I'm blinking as my eyes adjust from infrared vision to shadowy darkness. In that second, it's on top of me, crushing the breath from my chest with its weight. Fingers close around my windpipe and I can only kick wildly, my strength seeping out of me, clawing at its face and head in desperation. But it's too strong and I can't find the leverage to get out from under it.\n\nSuddenly, the Vector crumples like a dead weight against me, its steel fingers loosening around my neck, and I'm wheezing long breaths of the stale tunnel air like it's the freshest I've ever breathed. A flashlight flicks on and Shae's there, a dripping electro-coil in her hand and the severed Vector's head a few feet away from where she's standing.\n\n\"Don't you think we're even, because we aren't,\" I rasp, squeezing out from beneath the creature. Shae smiles weakly and helps to kick the rest of the Vector's body off of me. \"Where's Caden?\" I ask her, and then say in the same breath, \"How badly are you hurt?\" Even in the dim light of the flashlight, I can see that her shirt is soaked with blood and she's holding her middle with one arm.\n\n\"Just a scratch,\" she says, but I know that she's lying \u2013 there's too much blood and a heavy, foul odor of charred flesh. \"Don't worry; Caden's safe. He's outside. The big one shot me... he got too close, and I couldn't slow Caden down, so I told him to go, and then I backtracked.\"\n\n\"Outside where?\"\n\n\"He's safe,\" Shae repeats resolutely, and I glare at her. There's nothing but mistrust left between us. My eyes narrow.\n\n\"Are you sure? What about the big one? Did you get it?\"\n\nShae's eyes darken with frustration. \"Just before you got here, it everted. I almost had it. One minute my blade was at its neck, and the next it was gone. It talked, too. About you.\"\n\nI stare at her sharply. \"What did it say?\"\n\n\"That you were a fugitive, that you would betray Caden, and me, that you weren't to be trusted.\" I keep my eyes fixed on hers, and her voice continues softly. \"But I knew that already. Then it said that it was sorry... sorry that it hadn't killed me when it had the chance.\" She pauses, and I know what she's going to say even before she finishes her story. \"That's what got me, the knowing in its voice, like it somehow knew me. I hesitated with the kill strike and then it was gone.\"\n\n\"It's father's latest creation,\" I say flatly. \"Thinking Vectors, as if they aren't terrible enough already. It's some new prototype, one with its own memories. Did you hear its voice? It's the same as his.\" Softly to myself, I say, \"A tribute to his vanity.\" My eyes connect with Shae's, and for a second, it's like we're trainees again, but the moment is gone in a breath, suffocated by everything since between us. \"We need to get out of here.\" I know that she isn't going to tell me where Caden is, but I can track him easily enough on my own once we get outside. \"Which way is out?\"\n\nShae nods back in the direction from where I'd come. \"That way. Look, Riv, I'm sorry... for back there.\"\n\nI don't look at her, and instead pocket the dead Vector's special terrain glasses, which are way more advanced than the night-vision ones I have. \"Forget it. You did what you had to. I would have done the same. Or probably worse.\" I shrug. It's no secret between us what I am or what I'm capable of. \"You're OK to walk at least until we get outside?\"\n\nShae nods and falls into step with me. \"It doesn't mean I'm not sorry. I just can't let anything happen to him.\"\n\n\"Well, you did a good job of that, didn't you?\" As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. She did the only thing she could have, short of killing Caden herself. \"I just mean he has no training and he's on his own.\"\n\n\"He has training,\" Shae says softly. \"Haven't you seen him fence?\"\n\n\"No.\" I'd missed his meet the one time I'd promised to go, helping to save Charisma from those predators. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I taught him. All the techniques I know. It's why he's so good; he's ranked number one in the state.\" Before Shae defected, she'd been a master swordswoman. Though her personal preference was the crossbow, she'd been chosen to instruct others, myself included, in the intricacies of sword martial arts. She'd been the best of the best, until she'd trained me.\n\n\"What did you fight against? Dummies filled with straw?\" I snicker.\n\n\"He fought me. He's good, Riv.\"\n\n\"Good enough to fight a Vector?\" I shoot back.\n\n\"Good enough to fight you.\" I remain silent, feeling the threat still thick in the air. I pick up the pace a bit, knowing that it won't be easy for Shae, but she doesn't complain, despite her slightly labored breathing. We've both been trained to withstand near-fatal injuries, and I don't feel any sympathy despite her being my sister. She'd simply refuse any offer of my help, anyway. \"The Vector also said there's a bounty on your head. They want you alive.\"\n\n\"I know. He wants me back.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Shae asks.\n\nI shrug. \"To punish me, I suppose. I did torch their biggest genetic research lab before I left.\"\n\n\"You didn't!\" I can hear the smile in Shae's voice, and I stifle the brief whisper of pride that flutters inside of me.\n\n\"That was years ago,\" I say flatly. \"Who knows what he's planning now?\"\n\nWe make our way out of the underground after a few more miles, and we end up in a deserted warehouse on the far outskirts of a neighboring town. I pull a couple bales of hay over the trapdoor that we just exited. It won't stop anything from getting out, but we'll at least have some notice if the hay starts moving.\n\nShae fumbles in her pack and jams one of my injectors into her leg before collapsing to the ground and closing her eyes. Two in the space of a few hours is not exactly what they're designed for, but I can see that our pace has cost her. Despite my reticence, I move to her side. I owe her my life, not that I would ever tell her that. She doesn't protest when I unbuckle her vest, only to see a gaping hole on her left side with singed, blackened edges. A shard of something shiny glimmers on the inside of the wound.\n\n\"Part of the electro-rod,\" she rasps, wincing as my fingers gently touch the sides of it.\n\n\"Why didn't you say something before?\" I grit out. My voice is angry, but it's directed at myself, not her. I can't think about how painful it would have been, and I feel even guiltier for not checking in the tunnel or at least offering some help.\n\n\"No time before. Just need to... get it out now.\"\n\nI nod and spray my hands with an alcohol solution from my med-kit. I can only imagine what had happened before I got there, when I'd first heard her scream. The Vectors are known for operating their electro-rods in open wounds. Even on the stun setting, the agony is brutal, like a laser on skinless tissue. It's one of their well-used torture techniques. The Vector must have wedged it so hard into her that the silver tip of it had shattered.\n\nMy body cringes with a phantom pain that isn't mine. The agony would have been excruciating. I shiver and assess the damage carefully. The good thing is that the electric shock somewhat cauterized the gash, which means that at least Shae won't bleed to death. Waiting for the adrenaline from the injector to kick in, as gently as I can, I pull out the sliver of silver and check carefully for any other stray pieces. By the time I'm certain there aren't any left, I've removed twelve shards.\n\nI glance at Shae. Her eyes are closed and her breathing is shallow but even. I use the rest of my father's numbing repair liquid to patch up the gaping wound, deftly taping a square of thick padded gauze from the med-kit over it. Tearing a strip from around the base of my shirt, I wrap the material as tightly as I can around her waist. I'm not entirely sure that the liquid and the bandage will do the trick, but it's all I can do.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Shae whispers, staring at me as I buckle her vest closed. \"Why are you even helping me? You should just leave me. You want me dead, remember?\"\n\n\"I don't want you dead,\" I say dully. Despite my anger at what she's done, I don't want her to be hurt at my hands. She is my sister, after all. Me wanting to kill her and someone else doing it are two totally different things. \"Shae, I don't want you dead,\" I repeat firmly, as if to convince her and myself at the same time, and slide down the wall to sit by her side. \"Look, I can't promise you anything, but trust me, I don't want to hurt Caden. The Vectors do \u2013 they want to kill him. For all I know, Cale could already be dead and Caden is going to be the last hope in his line. Either way, I need him. We need him. Don't you get it?\"\n\n\"He's a person, too. He's real. Surely you can see that?\" she says, countering my question with one of her own, and for a second, I'm afraid to answer. Because the truth is, for some reason when I think about him, my chest tightens in jerky response. And I know that Caden isn't just a target anymore. I don't answer Shae, but she sees the reaction in my eyes. \"I see you do,\" she says softly.\n\n\"What I feel doesn't matter.\"\n\n\"Yes, it does,\" she pauses, her voice quiet. \"Because it means I can trust you with him. And trust that you'll do the right thing. I thought I saw it before, but you were so cold, I just didn't know. You've always been so good at keeping your feelings hidden. But now, I see it. You do care about him. Don't you, Riv?\"\n\nI hate the way her words are making my feelings about Caden even more real than they already are. And I'm not ready to deal with them yet. I'm not ready to open myself up to anyone, especially not Shae. I don't look at her.\n\n\"They're not going to stop until he's dead,\" I say softly. \"Until we're all dead or taken.\"\n\n\"He's back at Horrow,\" Shae says after a while. She digs into her pack and takes out the circular case of stabilization pills. She pops a couple into her mouth. \"That's where he went.\"\n\n\"Horrow?\" I reply, ignoring the stab of immediate worry that twists through me at the sight of her taking more pills on top of the injector. The meds can turn toxic in the body with overuse. She must be more desperate than I thought, to risk dying. \"But that's the first place they'll look.\"\n\nShae shakes her head and smiles. \"That's the beauty of it. They won't. Vectors don't understand high school, or the concept of school in this world, because their programmers don't understand it.\"\n\n\"What?\" I say, confused.\n\n\"The idea of high school for kids this age doesn't exist in Neospes. It's a foreign concept to us. So, unless the Vectors were ordered specifically to look there, they won't. Make sense?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" I say. \"Won't they still track him there?\"\n\n\"Eventually, but we have a day or two at least. Caden won't lead them directly back there.\"\n\nBut the more I think about it, what she's saying makes an uncanny sort of sense. The Vectors follow orders \u2013 they don't have the intuitive sense to think for themselves. They tracked Shae back to their house. I think back to when I came here on my own years ago, and the concept of school was been so utterly alien to me that it'd been a huge adjustment to even try to pretend to be a high-school student. In fact, I still am not good at it, which is why more often than not I usually get the \"most likely to be a sociopath\" label.\n\n\"I don't get it. Why do we even have to go back there? Caden should meet us. We should stick to the plan and get to the eversion point. That's what we're\u2013\"\n\nShae's expression freezes the rest of my words on my lips. \"That's not an option anymore. I got a text before. It's crawling with Vectors. The minute they knew where we were heading, they swarmed it. They're waiting for us. It's a trap, Riven.\"\n\n\"So what are you saying? We can't get out?\"\n\n\"Not there, not anymore. We need to regroup and rethink.\" I stare at her, my eyes narrowed. Her last betrayal is still an open wound, and despite her earlier words about trusting me, I can't trust her for a second where Caden is concerned. \"What do you mean, you got a text? From who?\"\n\n\"A Guardian.\" Shae doesn't offer any more explanation other than those two words, but I continue to press. It's not enough for me. I need to know what her plans are and who her friends are... and whether they, too, will toss me over to the Vectors the first chance they get. I have no doubt they would know exactly who I am. Plus, Guardians are solitary in nature and spread out in this world. More than one in any one area is an anomaly.\n\n\"Another Guardian? At Horrow?\"\n\nA glare in response to my doggedness. \"Yes. Let's go.\"\n\nShae stands wearily. If she's in pain, she certainly doesn't show it, but I know that she's operating on pure will right now. The stabilization pills on top of the injector would have helped slow her heartbeat and numb most of the pain. People always used to say I was the tough one, \"the ice queen,\" they'd called me. But Shae's got a core of solid steel \u2013 she could probably outlast me ten times over on sheer will alone. Only, I remember now that Shae isn't operating just on will; she's got a body packed full of an explosive cocktail of meds.\n\n\"Shae, the pills\u2013\"\n\n\"I know what I'm doing,\" she growls.\n\n\"Do you?\" I say gently, and follow as she moves to the back of the warehouse to throw open a door to a small wooden shed that I had noticed upon my first look around. She pulls out a grungy half-rusted dirt bike and then another. Then she stops to look at me.\n\n\"I'm dying, Riven. My body is dying. I can feel it. It's been through too much.\" Her words are no surprise, but I'm shaken all the same. They echo in the sudden dead silence between us.\n\n\"We can go to a clinic, the one where June worked. They'll help you.\"\n\nA strained laugh. \"Are you kidding? And what will they do when they find strange fluids and medicine from the injector inside of me that don't even exist here? That's only going to draw more attention to us... to Caden. As far as I see, I've got about one more solid fight in me, and I'm not going to go down without it.\" Her eyes meet mine. \"Actually, I don't intend to go down at all if I can help it, and if by some miracle, I make it back to Neospes, maybe... he... Father or someone else can help...\"\n\nPerhaps it's the blunt admission that she's dying, but I have no idea what comes over me as I grab Shae so tightly that we both almost fall over. She stinks of blood and gore and Vector fluid, but all I can smell is the scent of lilacs and sunshine and horse-riding leather \u2013 the scent of our childhood \u2013 and it's nearly my undoing. Shoving her away roughly without daring to meet her eyes, I hoist myself onto one of the bikes and grunt over my shoulder, \"You OK to ride?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she says. I keep my eyes downcast. My thoughts are heavy and spinning. Wanting to kill an enemy, even if the enemy is my sister, is far different from knowing that I will lose her regardless... knowing that she's going to die and there's nothing I can do about it, even if I wanted to. Which I don't.\n\nDo I?\n\nA dull ache takes hold of my forehead and nose, and then my eyes are stinging with an unfamiliar soreness. I thought I had purged all emotion after the betrayal of my father, but the hot sadness snaking through my veins right now screams otherwise. I gun the engine, letting the roar of it dull my thoughts and the vibrations beneath me soothe my knife-edged anguish.\n\nEmotion is weakness, my inner voice says. She's just a person, nothing more.\n\nShe's my sister.\n\nOne who betrayed you.\n\nI would have done the same.\n\nShe'll betray you again.\n\nI don't have an answer. The argument bounces off the walls of my brain... the logical side of me saying that the odds are Shae will deceive me again. But this previously dormant side, this quiet feeling side, argues otherwise. Still, despite my unexpected compassion, deep down I know that it's too late for either of us. She's dying and I'll have to let her go when the time comes.\n\nShae's bike growls past me and I follow her down the dirt road that leads to a main road. It's deserted. I glance down at my watch. It's early, just before 6 in the morning on a Wednesday. Shae doesn't stay on the main road, and soon we're off on another circuitous gravelly road that winds up into the base of the Rockies. Even though there are barely any other people around, she isn't taking any chances of being tracked.\n\nThe view is overwhelming, and my breath stops in my throat at the sight of a deep lake-filled gorge on my left. The water is like glass, so reflective with the barest tint of the rising sun dancing across its surface that it's like looking at heaven and earth wrapped up in each other's arms. I have never seen anything so incredibly beautiful in my life. I haven't even realized that I've come to a stop on my bike until Shae backtracks toward me.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\nIt takes me a minute to find my voice, and even when I do, it's raspy and hollow with longing. \"I've never seen anything like this. Ever. Can you imagine having water like this back home?\"\n\n\"It's called the Horsetooth Reservoir, and we used to,\" Shae says softly. \"Before the war.\"\n\n\"It's so pure, so untouched... so beautiful.\" My voice trails off and I'm lost once more in a silent reverence that's so sweet, I am consumed by it. Watching the sun's rays dance across the surface as they shimmer over the tops of the mountains it feels like I'm in another world, one so perfect that all I have to do is breathe and believe. There's no war or hate or pain, just beauty. Soothed by the water's glittering depths, somehow I feel restored.\n\nAfter a few minutes, I gun the bike's engine and nod to Shae. We ride in silence until we reach the edges of Fort Collins. Time seemed to go a lot more quickly to get back there than when we had left, but in all fairness, we had been on foot in the underground tunnels. Things are starting to get a little busier. Ever careful, we stick to the lesser-known roads off the main street running through the town, but nothing seems different from the hustle and bustle of any other standard weekday morning. Still, I am diligent in assessing anything at all that looks out of place. We are very careful not to go anywhere near their old house, although by now it's probably razed to the ground. No doubt, someone will be watching.\n\nAfter a while, Shae pulls off to the side and I follow suit. \"What's up?\" I ask her. On both sides of us are quiet horse farms, and the only living things are two ravens circling overhead and a few grazing animals that look like horses off in the distance on the left. At the top of a small hill on the right side of the road, is a rambling farmhouse.\n\n\"Did you notice anything coming into town?\"\n\nI shake my head. \"No.\"\n\n\"I didn't see anything either,\" she says. \"Doesn't mean they aren't here, so we need to be extra cautious, just in case.\" Shae looks almost back to normal. The fresh air has put some color back into her cheeks, but I know that it's probably all still a fa\u00e7ade. I can tell by the slight hitch of her left side and from the way she's holding herself.\n\n\"How's your wound?\" I ask.\n\n\"I'll live,\" she says. \"We should split up.\"\n\nMy eyes narrow immediately. \"No way,\" I snap. \"You can't make it on your own, and the truth is, I don't trust you.\"\n\n\"Riv, we don't have a choice. We have a better chance of getting to him separately.\" Her voice wavers. \"And the truth is, do you really think I could outrun anyone \u2013 even you \u2013 in this condition? And you know that,\" she adds gently. \"Go to Horrow. You're still a student there. I'll meet you afterward in the parking lot next to the gym.\"\n\nA thought occurs to me, one that I hadn't followed up on earlier in the conversation, about the Horrow connection. A hazy recollection of Caden asking about school in the basement of his house flits through my brain. Maybe it'd been more than just a comfort. Is it some kind of safe house?\n\nI frown at Shae. \"We are running for our lives. Why is Caden in school, of all places?\"\n\n\"Like I said, it's the safest place he can be right now. Gym. After school. OK?\"\n\nI nod, my eyes burning into her face, daring her to betray me. But I know she's right \u2013 there's no way she could outrun me, not in her condition. \"What then? What's your plan? What's to stop me from just taking Caden and leaving the minute I get there?\"\n\n\"Because you need my help, and he won't go anywhere without me. We have allies, Riven. They will protect him.\" She moves over to stand near me, where I'm still straddling my bike. \"There's a lot you don't know, Riv. I didn't know if I could trust you, but now\" \u2013 Shae pauses, gesturing to her body \u2013 \"it seems like I have no choice. I'll tell you everything. 3 o'clock at the gym, I promise.\" I don't even notice as she slides her fingers along mine, hooking her little finger into the crook of mine. \"Sister-swear,\" she whispers, and all I can feel is the hot imprint of her skin against my own with the force of a hundred memories behind it.\n\nI may be a fool, but I trust her.\nREVELATIONS\n\nI stare down at my filthy shirt and the dried blue remnants of dead Vector under my fingernails. Shae's already left, and I'm standing on the road facing the farmhouse that I saw before. I can't see my face, but I can feel the dirt from the tunnels caking my skin. There's no way I can go to Horrow looking like I've just been at the wrong end of a rodeo bullfight gone bad. What I wouldn't give for a long hot shower!\n\nFor a brief second, I toy with the idea of heading back to the motel where I'd stayed before, but it's on the other side of town. If I waste any more time, I'll be far later than I already am. They take tardiness very seriously in high schools, I've noticed, as if it's some odd measure of teenage responsibility.\n\nAlthough I have a healthy respect for punctuality, being late has saved my life more than a few times. In Neospes, predictability is something that can get you killed. After a few more minutes of hemming and hawing, I decide to head up to the farmhouse to see if I can get cleaned up and swipe a fresh shirt. On the porch, I'm torn between breaking and entering, or just asking for help, which is another utterly foreign concept to me.\n\nI glance at the watch on my wrist \u2013 I can do it in five minutes. In and out. I try the handle of the door, and it opens inward with a loud creak. I sigh inwardly... looks like I'm going to have to play the damsel-in-distress role, and I almost laugh aloud. The thought of me being any kind of damsel is hysterical.\n\n\"Hello?\" I call out.\n\nNo one answers. Not wasting any time, I check the doors along the front hallway, encountering a closet and a kitchen before I find a small bathroom. My reflection greets me like a still clip from a horror movie. It's worse than I've even imagined. Blood, blue-gray ichor, and dark brown and black smudges streak my face like an artist's palette. My hair is clumped into a tuft on one side of my head and plastered to my scalp on the other. My clothes are disgusting, and my pants are ripped all the way down one leg. I'm probably going to need some other clothes, but first things first.\n\nI peel off my leather jacket, outer shirt, and ninjata harness, remaining in a thin tank, and dunk my entire head under the faucet, washing the grime from my face and shoulders with water as hot as I can manage. A couple minutes later, with a twinge of guilt, I'm toweling myself dry with one of the two pristine white embroidered towels from the towel rack, when I hear a sound behind me. Without thinking I swing around in fighting stance before I can blink, to see the face of a small boy. His blue eyes are merely curious, so I relax slightly.\n\n\"Hello,\" he says. \"Are you one of my sister's friends?\" I nod slowly and peer around his small frame to see if anyone else is there. The boy continues to chatter. \"She already went to school. I'm sick today. Don't tell that I'm out of bed, OK? I only wanted to get a drink. Mommy's out checking on one of the horses. It's having a baby!\" He starts coughing then until his eyes start to water. I follow him to the kitchen, where he helps himself to a cup of water. \"You're really dirty,\" he remarks. \"And you smell a little.\"\n\n\"What's your name?\" I say in a soft voice, glancing nervously to the back porch. A seven year-old I can handle, not a parent... especially one who would quickly recognize me as not one of her daughter's friends.\n\n\"Josh.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" I say. \"I was on my way to school, and I fell off my bike. Do you think you could help me? I don't want to be late. I need to borrow a sweater from your sister. Could you show me her room, and we can get you back into bed?\" My voice drops to a stage whisper. \"Don't worry; I won't tell if you won't tell. I don't want anyone to know that I fell into horse poop. You promise?\"\n\nJosh giggles and wrinkles his nose at my confession, but his face warms with a conspiratorial smile. \"Promise.\"\n\nAfter grabbing my pack and dirty clothes, we head up the stairs. Josh points to his sister's room and heads into his own across the hall without a backward glance. Looks like I've lost his interest for the moment, so I move quickly to the room he'd pointed to.\n\nIt is painted completely in shades of pink with pristine white furniture, and is the most delicate room I have ever seen. A canopied bed dominates most of the room. Pink and white floral curtains flutter at the window. The carpet is plush, and also pink.\n\nI'll be better off taking clothes from Josh!\n\nThe sound of a door closing from downstairs startles me into action and I open the owner's closet door. It smells like vanilla and roses, and everything inside it is also pink and white or pastel-colored.\n\nI sigh, resisting the urge to gag, and methodically search through the racks... full of dresses, skirts, and sweaters, all color coordinated. Doesn't this girl own any pants? More noises from downstairs have me moving faster, but starting to panic. After a second, I see a pair of dark-wash jeans on a hanger, and I pull them on only to find that they can't button and are six inches too long. This girl is not only a princess, she's a tall skinny princess.\n\nSo that eliminates pants, I think to myself. Someone is moving around near the stairs, and I grab the only dress I can find that isn't vile and fling it over my head. It's a bottle-green color with a lighter green-and-yellow pattern of vines that comes to my knees, but at least it isn't pink. There's a floor-length mirror in the adjoining bathroom.\n\nThe soft cotton feels good against my skin. The dress doesn't look half bad, and I'm spared from looking too girly, especially as it's paired with my worn black combat boots. I pat down my wet hair and grimace. I look good but still edgy... a motorcycle-riding badass in a dress. It's not that I haven't worn dresses before; they're just impractical.\n\n\"You look pretty,\" Josh says standing in the doorway of the bathroom. \"That's one of Sadie's favorites. It's from Grandma in New York.\"\n\nA moment of pure mirth bubbles against my lip. \"Sadie? Your sister is Sadie?\" Josh frowns and nods as if I've asked the dumbest question, and I bite my lips. Sadie? As in Caden's girlfriend? I shake my head rolling my eyes skyward... someone has a sick sense of humor. I think briefly about changing, but a voice coming up the stairs stops me.\n\n\"You better be in bed, young man,\" a lilting voice warns.\n\n\"Pinkie swear, I won't tell if you won't,\" I whisper with a wink, kneeling and locking my finger with his before Josh bolts to his room. \"See you around, Josh.\"\n\nAs Josh disappears across the hall, I swing my harness on, tuck in my blades, and pull on my jacket. I grab my backpack, stuffing my pants into it before stepping out of the window onto a narrow balcony. I'll get rid of them later. I shimmy down the apple tree leaning against the side. A few minutes later, I'm back on the bike and heading toward Horrow.\n\nBreathless at my sneaky entrance to the school through the locker rooms, I slide into my seat long after the last bell chimed down the hallway, but it must be my lucky day because Mrs Taylor is nowhere to be seen. A momentary panic grips me as I don't see Caden in his usual place in Physics. Shae had said that he'd be here. Then I notice that about half the class is missing.\n\n\"Where's Caden?\" I say.\n\n\"You're late. Nice dress, by the way,\" Philip says, and I glare him into silence.\n\n\"Where's everyone else?\" I snap.\n\n\"They're in lab. Group lab experiment today, remember?\" I can only stare dumbly at him. \"We go in for the second half of the class when they come back. It was the homework from last week?\"\n\n\"I was sick. What homework?\" Philip doesn't answer, but Charisma looks over at me shyly and slides over her notebook to my side of the table.\n\n\"It's about refraction and diffraction. Don't worry; I've got you covered,\" she whispers. In an even softer voice, she says, \"I never got to thank you properly. Thank you, Riven. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't been there.\"\n\n\"It's OK,\" I say, stunned into momentary silence by her gratitude. \"They had it coming.\"\n\n\"Where'd you learn to fight like that?\"\n\nBefore I can answer, Mrs Taylor walks into the room, her dark eyes piercing. They land on me immediately, and I feel myself shrinking down in my seat. The last thing I need is any kind of confrontation, to draw even more attention to myself. Her brows snap together as her eyes dart to the clock and back to me, but she doesn't say anything, just walks over to her desk for a folder and leaves the classroom. I'm grateful for the reprieve, as small as it is, and stare down at my textbook even though I feel her eyes flutter like a moth on me once more at the door.\n\n\"Did you hear about Caden?\" Philip whispers, confirming that she'd left.\n\n\"What about Caden?\" I say, suddenly alert.\n\n\"His house burned down. Electrical fire, they're saying. His aunt was in there. Everyone's talking about it. Where were you this weekend? Under a rock?\"\n\n\"I was sick,\" I repeat. \"Did they find her aunt?\"\n\n\"No,\" Charisma says. \"But she's missing. They're assuming the worst.\"\n\nI say nothing. It's likely that June's body will never be found in the hidden basement room. My guess is that the Vectors who tracked us into the tunnels torched it completely once they figured out where we went. \"How's Caden doing?\" I say.\n\n\"He seems really out of it, but I guess that's to be expected. He was at a travel meet when it happened, I think. I don't even know where he's staying. Maybe at Sadie's.\"\n\nI try to resist even thinking about Caden being in that frosting-colored room or lying on that pink ruffled bed covered in frivolous throw pillows, but it's useless as a sour feeling invades my stomach. I crush it with a hiss and make my mind blank. What Caden does with Sadie makes no difference whatsoever to me.\n\nMrs Taylor walks back in and announces that the rest of us should make our way to the lab. In the hallway, I see Caden a split second before he sees me. His eyes widen as they glance from my face to my boots, and I can hardly hide the answering scowl overtaking my face.\n\n\"Nice dress,\" he says, echoing Philip's earlier words as we brush shoulders.\n\n\"Yeah, if you're homeless,\" Sadie says, standing next to him with narrowed eyes. She's dressed in a pair of white pants and a pink sweater. I'm actually breathless with anticipation to see if she will recognize the dress as hers, but of course, she doesn't. Still, I can see her brain ticking over, considering the fact that somehow \u2013 as impossible as it seems \u2013 we own exactly the same dress. \"It's hideous.\"\n\nI can barely hold back the truth that stings my lips. Instead, I smile sweetly at her and say, \"Like you would know anything about fashion. I think it's from New York. It's designer.\"\n\nShe shoots me a look that would incinerate a building. \"Well, you should stick to pants. Dresses don't really suit dykes,\" she says nastily.\n\nI bite back a grin and shrug. \"Takes one to know one. And I'd rather be a dyke any day than look like a frosted cupcake without any imagination.\"\n\nI won't admit it to anyone, but it actually feels good to have a pissing contest with Sadie \u2013 if anything, to take the edge off everything that's happened during the last few days. In a weird way, it feels normal, and just the feeling of being able to flay Sadie with my tongue instead of my blade gives me great satisfaction.\n\nCaden's eyes are burning through me, even though he's remained quiet during the entire exchange. I feel his arm brush against the sleeve of my jacket, and then their group is past us. As we walk into the lab, I pull a piece of paper from my pocket. Shae must have given him a heads-up that I'd be back.\n\nMeet me in the boys' bathroom in ten minutes, it reads. I crumple it and tuck the paper back into my pocket.\n\nI fumble my way through the experiment, but Charisma is as good as her word, picking up my considerable slack. Philip doesn't volunteer anything, but I can see from his expression that Mrs Taylor will undoubtedly hear about it at some point. Although I'm familiar with the subject matter, I am too distracted to pay attention, which is probably for the best. I'd rather be noticed for being brainless than for knowing far more than I should. Refraction is something we learn as part of our weapons training, since some of our more advanced laser weapons harness refraction technology. Philip's eyes would likely bug out of his head if he knew that our technology could bend lasers around corners.\n\nAfter eight minutes, I excuse myself and bolt to the bathroom. It's empty but I wait in the last stall until I hear the outer door open and close. Caden is dragging the trashcan against the door as I step out of the stall. His eyes are clouded, and his face is tired. The last two days must have been a whirlwind for him.\n\n\"You OK?\" I ask.\n\n\"Is Shae OK?\" Our words merge into each other's at the same time.\n\nI nod. \"She's fine. She told me to meet her in the gym after school.\"\n\n\"Yeah, she texted me the same thing. Is she hurt? That thing almost got us. She told me to go, and the last thing I saw was her running toward it.\"\n\n\"She took care of it,\" I say.\n\nCaden stares at me awkwardly. \"Look, Riven, I'm sorry for what Shae did. I don't know why she did it. She didn't explain anything to me. But I wanted to say that I was sorry.\"\n\n\"It's OK. She did what I would have done.\" I tug with strangely clammy hands at the skirt of the dress. For some reason, being in it with Caden looking at me is making me feel edgy and uncomfortable. When I'm wearing my own clothing, it's like armor. I'm a soldier first and a girl second. Now the reverse feels true. I don't like it.\n\n\"I'm still sorry.\" Caden's voice is quiet and my heart is thumping like it's going to jump out of my chest as he steps closer until he is so near that I can see the downy fuzz on his cheekbones. I stop breathing as goose bumps break out along my arms. Thank the stars my jacket is covering them. \"I was really worried that one of those things would have gotten you.\"\n\nI clear my throat, the rough sound gritty in the short silence between us, and swallow. \"Don't you know? I can take care of myself,\" I say, desperately trying to sound nonchalant and only succeeding in sounding breathlessly weak.\n\n\"I know.\" Caden's fingers are soft as they trail down the side of my head, and it's all I can do to not lean into them. The soft caress is more than I've felt in a long time, and pressure builds behind my eyes and across my cheekbones.\n\nGet it together, I tell myself angrily, and step backward, only there's a sink in the way and there's nowhere else I can go. My eyes slide to Caden's chest and focus on a button, as I will myself to toughen up. Don't even think about crying!\n\nBut it's like trying to stop a dam that has too many cracks, and my tears are no match for Caden's aching gentleness. And so they come, hot and earnest, as I lean my head against him and feel his arms wrap around me. For the first time, I forget what I am and give in to just being a girl... not a soldier, not a grown-up, just a girl.\n\nI cry for myself, I cry for Shae, and I cry most of all for Caden. Deep down inside I know that no matter how much I love Cale and where my loyalty lies, there's no way that I could ever be the one to take Caden's life from him... even to save Cale. It's a realization that leaves a part of me numb. It's also one that terrifies me, because for the first time I'm confronted with some of the feelings I know I've been hiding. Shae's right \u2013 I do care about him.\n\nAnd it will be a problem.\n\nCaden's arms are tight, holding me so close it's as if we are one body. I hadn't realized that my arms are twisted around his, my fingers gripping his shirt. There's not even room for breath between us, and even though my tears stop, we still hold each other close. Truth is, I don't want to move, because I know that the moment I stir, things will be different. They have to be. There's no way I can let this thing blossoming between us get in the way of what I have to do... of who I am. But for one moment, I can pretend that we are somehow more than we are, that we are in a universe of our own making, that we are in love and the world is ours.\n\nCaden's breath brushes against my skin, and I feel his lips press into the hollow of my temple. It feels as if my entire body is disappearing into the imprint of his touch against me. My body tenses automatically, rejecting the light caress.\n\n\"Just let go,\" he whispers against my hair. \"You don't have to be strong every single second. Let go, Riv.\"\n\nFor one millisecond, it's the only thing I want to do, as I let my eyes find the deep green vulnerability of his. I can't even think around the knot in my chest at what I see there, and I know he's waiting... waiting for me to say something... to agree, to do something to make it all real. But I can't.\n\nLove is weakness, my father's memory hisses in my head. It infects your will.\n\nI close my eyes as the lessons of my childhood overwhelm me with barbed cruelty. We're taught early on to curb our emotions and to make decisions with sound logic. Love isn't something that's valued in Neospes. Families are engineered based on survival abilities and genetic compatibility, not love. It's a useless emotion that causes people to do stupid things in its name. Emotion is the seed of weakness, and making any more of this thing between Caden and I will lead to nothing but loss or pain.\n\n\"Riv?\" His voice is gentle and so beautiful that every cell in me bends toward it. But I can feel the cold chill of reason battling within me. Nothing good can ever come of this.\n\n\"I can't,\" I whisper, and push myself away with all the strength I can muster, the cold edge of the sink grazing against the small of my back as I twist past it. It hurts more than I can imagine to even look at him. \"I just can't... not with you. Not with anyone. I'm not built like that. You'll only get hurt, Caden. I don't know how...\"\n\nMy words trail off and I press my hot palms to the cold porcelain of the neighboring sink, my eyes falling away from his. My face is unrecognizable in the mirror above it \u2013 puffy eyelids and flushed cheeks. My hair is mussed, and I fix it automatically, sweeping away any evidence of Caden's fingers. I splash cold water on my face and feel better, more like myself. But I still can't face him, so I dart a look at his reflection.\n\nHe's standing quiet, his face open and vulnerable. The fleeting thought that Cale would never be this way flits through my brain. He's always been unreadable, the master of all emotion. Some call him cold, but I see it as a gift. Hardly anyone ever knows what Cale is thinking. In the same breath, I understand that maybe this is what gets to me about Caden \u2013 he's so different, so unguarded.\n\nOur eyes meet and he smiles, a deep gentle smile that unhinges any resolve I have. \"Don't shut down, Riven. Please. I know what you've been taught to be, but there is something real between us. I know you feel it, too.\"\n\n\"You're wrong.\"\n\n\"Am I?\" He's standing right behind me again, his gaze impaling mine in the mirror, daring me to lie. I don't answer. Instead, I swing around and shove my hands into his chest so hard that he crashes into the metal doors of the stalls behind us. I resort to the only response I know: combat.\n\n\"You're going to fight me, Riv?\" he gasps, hugging his chest with one arm.\n\n\"If I have to,\" I say. \"Just stop. Stop right there.\"\n\n\"What if I don't?\" he says, advancing once more toward me, one step, then two.\n\n\"You won't like what you get, Caden. I don't want to hit you.\"\n\nAnother step. \"That's a risk I'm willing to take.\"\n\n\"I'm not,\" I say, and drive a closed fist into his shoulder. But either I'm not committed to the blow or Caden's gotten faster than I'd given him credit for, because he deflects my strike with an easy dart to the right and grabs my arm, my own momentum spinning me with considerable force into the wall at the end of the bathroom. Caden's right there with me, his breath warm in my face. \"Let me go,\" I seethe through clenched teeth. I twist my knee up, but he presses his body into mine so hard that my limbs are glued to the wall behind me.\n\nIrritation courses through me in violent waves. But something else flows hotly too, and I feel my breath falter. The truth is, I don't want to move. The only thing holding us in place is the length of his body against every inch of mine. Something unfamiliar stirs in my chest. I wrangle my free arm up under my jacket to pull out one of my weapons, but Caden grabs it with his hand. My breaths get shorter and shorter, and suddenly his mouth is crushed against my lips.\n\nEvery thought in my brain fizzles into shocked silence. And then I'm kissing him back, following his lead, with an intensity that has our teeth grinding together. I don't even know where he begins and I end \u2013 my lips are part of his mouth, and his part of mine. My hands, now free, are twining in his hair, and his arms are locked around me. Every living part of me is caught up in him.\n\nThe grating sound of the trash bin grinding across the floor pierces through the fog encasing us both, and I open languorous eyes to see Sadie, her body shaking with rage.\n\n\"What the fuck is going on?\"\nSCARS\n\n\"What the hell happened to you?\" Shae blurts out as we meet her in the gym parking lot after school. Shae, for her part, is looking a lot better. She's clean and has on a pair of dark jeans and a green sweater. Most of the blood is gone from her face and she looks semi-normal.\n\nI, on the other hand, am a completely different story. After a trip to the school nurse and principal, the rest of the day had passed in relative quiet, despite the occasional censuring look from students and teachers alike. I touch the three claw marks on my face and grin. Caden stares at the ground, but I can see that the corner of his lips is twitching.\n\n\"Sadie happened,\" I say.\n\nShae's eyes narrow, jumping from me to Caden and back again. \"Caden's Sadie?\"\n\nEven though I bristle inside at the comment that Sadie was Caden's anything, I shrug. \"She's a little high-strung, if you hadn't noticed. Anyway, she attacked me for no reason,\" I say. Caden launches a hot look in my direction, but I ignore it. \"I took care of it; don't worry.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, you took care of it?\" The suspicion and patronizing edge of Shae's voice irritate me. I know that this isn't Neospes, and apart from what she may think about me, I do have half a brain in my head. I throw my hands into the air in exasperation.\n\n\"I drowned her in a toilet,\" I say, and then after seeing Shae's expression, \"Kidding! Look, Princess Pinkalicious is fine. She'll have to go to the salon to fix those curls, but a little toilet water never killed anyone.\"\n\n\"Don't look at me!\" Caden says as Shae turns the force of her glare on him. \"I got punched in the face. And I think she broke up with me.\"\n\nThe brief flutter of elation I feel at Caden's words disappears under the heavy weight of reality as Shae herds us toward a green car parked in the lot. Deep down, I know that Caden will probably be a hell of a lot better off with Sadie than with someone like me. Despite letting my guard down in the bathroom, I don't know the first thing about being anyone's girlfriend or letting someone get close to me.\n\n\"You're better off without her,\" Shae says, catching my attention. \"There's something about her that rubs me the wrong way, like she's too perfect. I never got why you liked her. She just didn't seem like your type.\"\n\n\"And yet you let me date her for a year?\"\n\nShae shrugs. \"I only protect you. I don't smother. If Sadie was your idea of a girlfriend, then that was your choice. Out of curiosity, though, why'd you go out with her?\"\n\nCaden flushes, embarrassed at the direct question, but he answers Shae. \"Because it was easy. I didn't have to think about anything. And you're right, she isn't my type. I didn't even know I had a type until recently.\"\n\n\"So what is it?\" Shae asks. She sounds as if she's only making conversation, but I'm listening very carefully.\n\n\"Not her,\" Caden says. His glance slips to me, and then falls to my lips before looking away. An immediate response sears through me, but I refuse to think about the kiss and the way it'd made me feel like a live electrical wire. I'd never even kissed anyone before, and now I can't look at him without my ears flaming or my pulse racing. I hate it. I hate how unpredictable it makes me feel, like I can't depend on myself anymore, like a part of me is caught up in someone else. It's unfamiliar and unwelcome territory.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" I snap gruffly to Shae.\n\n\"Somewhere safe.\"\n\nI nod to the dirt bike I left parked on the right side of the green car. \"I'll follow you guys.\"\n\nNot that I don't want to go with Shae, but I like having my options open, especially if I need a getaway ride. I also don't want to be in such close proximity to Caden. He makes me agitated for obvious reasons, and I need to have all my wits about me going into this blind. Shae's expression remains calm, but she flicks a raised eyebrow in my direction.\n\nAfter a couple seconds, Shae jumps into the car, and nods for Caden to get in. Instead, he walks over to me sitting on the bike. I tense immediately at his soft touch on my shoulder. \"What's wrong?\"\n\nI can feel Shae's heavy stare through the car window. Sighing, I look Caden full in the face, steeling my voice and my heart. \"It never happened, OK? This thing with you and me. It can't happen. Do you understand what I'm saying?\"\n\n\"Why? What do you mean?\" His voice is wounded, and my eyes fall away from his, unable to bear the pooling hurt there. \"I thought\u2013\"\n\n\"No, you were wrong, Caden. I didn't feel anything. I was testing to see how far you would go,\" I say without inflection. I know the words are like daggers to him, but I don't care. I have to end it before it grows into something worse, something that could endanger the both of us. So instead, I deaden any emotion inside of me with practiced ease. \"I'm sorry you thought it was something more. It wasn't. I just don't feel that way about you.\"\n\nThe pain in his voice is worse than I could imagine. \"You were testing me? For what? To lead me on? To see me make a fool of myself?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The word is like a gunshot, but it fulfills its purpose. Caden backs away, his eyes wide and angry. I can feel my betrayal eating away at him. And even though my insides feel like a pulverized mess, I know what I'm doing is right. Maybe in a different time, we could have been more, but not now... not with everything at stake. Wearing Sadie's dress has made me weak. It has made me just as selfish and as self-indulgent as she is.\n\n\"Shae was right, wasn't she?\" he whispers. \"I thought she was out of her mind when she called you the ice queen. But you are, aren't you? You're heartless, Riven.\"\n\nI flinch at his words, but I shrug, nonchalant. \"I've been called far worse. You'd do best to keep your distance from me, Caden. I'm no good for anyone,\" I say quietly. My voice is barely a whisper now. \"Shae knows me better than most. I don't know how to love. Just ask her. She'll tell you.\"\n\n\"How would she know anything about you? You just met.\"\n\nI stare at him sadly. \"Because she's my sister,\" I say, and gun the engine on the bike, pulling away as fast as I can from the shattered look on his face. At the end of the parking lot, I wait, watching as he gets into the car with Shae. He doesn't even look at me as they drive past, and I'm grateful for that even though it cuts through me like a hot blade.\n\nAs I follow Shae's car, my thoughts inexorably return to the kiss. It had been so unexpected and so fiery that even now my chest heats up just from thinking about it. I don't know what I feel about Caden and whether those feelings are indeed separate from Cale. The thing is that Cale is like a brother to me, but with Caden, there's something more. I was primed to love him just from knowing Cale, but I'm falling in love with him because he's Caden. I'm so confused that it's making me crazy, my thoughts whirling into a blurring jumble in my head. The only thing standing out from everything else is whether I'm being disloyal to Cale.\n\nBecause I can't help but feel like I am betraying him somehow.\n\nAhead of me, Shae slows down in front of a wide iron gate. I can't see the house from where we are, but I expect that there is one behind the imposing wall of metal. The gate is attached to a high stone wall, and for a second I wonder what whoever lived in there wanted to keep out. Or in.\n\nThere is a small camera on the right side of the gate, and I can feel its eye centered on me. After a couple seconds, the gate slides open. My pulse is racing, but I follow Shae inside onto a long and narrow driveway flanked by slender pine trees. The gates close noiselessly behind us, and the creepy silence of it is unnerving. The thought of an asylum drifts through my head and I shiver. Something isn't right. I don't know if it's nerves or adrenaline, but I'm on edge and my instincts are screaming.\n\nBefore I can accelerate to cut in front of Shae to voice my misgivings, we pull up in front of a looming stone house. It's as forbidding as the iron gate and stone wall surrounding it. Removing my helmet, I dismount and check to make sure all my weapons are in place, just in case. Even if they're Shae's friends, I still don't trust easily. Everyone is an enemy until they prove otherwise.\n\nThere's a person on the stairs in front of the giant double door, and Shae's shaking hands with him. I follow, intentionally tucking Caden behind me. His feelings toward me are obvious, but I ignore them. His safety is paramount. The person turns, and for a second, my breath halts in my chest as a pair of familiar obsidian eyes freeze my body in its tracks.\n\n\"Mrs Taylor?\" I say, dumbfounded. \"You're the Guardian?\"\n\nA tight smile. \"Riven,\" she says with a nod. \"Welcome to my home. Any friend of Shae's is a friend of ours. Please call me Era.\"\n\nCaden's eyes are as wide as my own, but he remains silent. I hide my own surprise with indifference as I walk past her through the door. Her home is dark on the inside with heavy shutters covering all the windows. My tension mounts a notch, and the hairs on the back of my neck are at stiff attention. It takes everything inside of me not to draw my weapons.\n\n\"Drinks? Food? Can I get you anything?\" Era asks as we follow her down a few steps into a long hallway that has no windows.\n\n\"No, thanks,\" Shae says. Caden nods that he didn't want anything either, and I stay silent. There's no way I'm eating anything in this house.\n\nShae and Era are at the front with Caden behind them. I'm bringing up the rear. In the narrow hallway, I feel my instincts kicking in, and not in a good way. I catch up to Caden and squeeze his arm. His eyes meet mine. For a minute, it seems like he's going to ignore me, but then he falls back alongside me.\n\n\"What's up?\"\n\n\"Look,\" I whisper. \"If anything happens, get behind me, OK?\"\n\n\"Why? What's wrong?\"\n\nI purse my lips and shake my head, any awkwardness between us forgotten for the moment. I pause, checking that Era and Shae are still far enough ahead of us. \"Something doesn't feel right. If Mrs Taylor knew about us, why didn't she say anything? It doesn't make sense.\"\n\n\"Maybe she didn't know,\" he says. I feel his eyes studying me. \"I didn't even know you and Shae were related, remember?\"\n\n\"Stop,\" I hiss at his potshot. \"Even if she didn't know about me, she had to know about you. And if she is a Guardian, why wouldn't Shae have warned her about me?\"\n\nThere's a long pause before Caden answers. \"I see your point.\"\n\nUp ahead, Shae and Era have stopped at a gray metal door at the end of the hallway. It reminds me of the door that June had in her house, the one leading to the secret room in the basement. Only on either side of this door, there are two recessed keypads with LED biometric pads. The lights in the corridor flicker and I frown. Era turns to me with a tight smile.\n\n\"It's nothing; don't worry. A power surge,\" she says, and nods to a white table in the corner. \"Please leave any weapons you're carrying over there.\"\n\n\"What's behind that door?\" I counter flatly, ignoring her reassurance that does nothing to reassure me one bit. Neither does the command to leave my weapons out here. The muscles in my neck remain as tight as coiled springs. A power surge? What's in that room that would affect all the power in the house? Some kind of electrical torture chamber? My frown deepens.\n\nEra smiles a smile that goes nowhere near her eyes. But it doesn't surprise me \u2013 she's a Guardian, and an active Guardian at that. They're chosen for their complete lack of reaction. They make decisions based on logic and reason, and they don't deviate from the jobs they're supposed to do.\n\nIt's hard to reconcile the two Mrs Taylors \u2013 the teacher at school and the uncompromising Guardian standing in front of me. Without a doubt, I know that she's a Guardian first and a teacher second. She isn't my friend \u2013 after all, I'd flaunted the Guardian's cardinal law by defecting to this universe. The only reason she's giving me the time of day is because she thinks I'm an ally of Shae's. I wonder just how much Shae has told her about me. Would she have told Era the truth? I take a deep breath to calm my panicked thoughts.\n\n\"I mean it. I'm not going in there,\" I repeat. \"Especially without my weapons.\"\n\n\"It's OK, Riven,\" Shae says. Then she grasps my arm, and leans in. \"You have to trust me. We'll be safe. Just do as she says.\"\n\nI shoot her a scathing look but remove my jacket and harness, tossing my backpack into the corner. Caden does the same. Era nods with satisfaction before she and Shae punch in some kind of simultaneous code on either side of the door and lean in for a retina scan. My unease spirals.\n\nWhat in hell is behind that door?\n\nAs the door swings open on noiseless hinges, I don't realize I'm gripping Caden's wrist so tightly that he winces and pulls away. But I can't even think to apologize. Instead, as pale blue fluorescent light and the nauseatingly familiar smell of formaldehyde rush out to greet me, I'm frozen into immobility.\n\nThe room is circular. The floor is metal. There are men in blue head-to-toe suits walking past us with steel trays and tablet computers. There are computer flat-screens everywhere full of trending data that I can't even begin to process, but I'm guessing that it's some kind of laboratory. My eyes take in the details, categorizing them in my head and assessing for danger. And there's a lot of it... that I know for certain.\n\nCaden pushes past me to follow Shae and Era inside, and I do the same only to be assaulted by what awaits me. I forget the men in the blue suits immediately. A row of Vectors stand in circular man-sized specimen tubes strapped vertically to the wall, a handful of them to the right of where I'm standing. My jaw drops to the floor and stays there.\n\n\"What is this place?\" I hear Caden say.\n\n\"It's a research facility,\" Shae responds. \"Era's been studying them for years, trying to recreate the parameters to evert as they do.\"\n\n\"But you have to be dead,\" I say automatically.\n\nEra impales me with an unnerving, piercing stare. I hold it this time and raise an uncowed eyebrow. \"Not necessarily,\" she says. \"We can reduce certain things to mimic the state of the Vectors, to put a body at rest if you will.\"\n\nSkepticism threads my voice. \"No, the bodies have to be dead to withstand eversion from anywhere. Anything less than a zero gravity point will pulverize us.\"\n\nA slow smile. \"Come now, Riven. Put that physics knowledge of yours to good use,\" she says in a patronizing voice that sets my teeth on edge. \"Why do you think the Vectors generate so much electricity when they evert?\" She waits, and I shrug. I never got into the technicalities with my father. All I knew was that they were dead things that could jump from anywhere and we could not.\n\nEra smiles. \"The electrical energy generated by the nanoplasm inside of them acts as a force field to protect the human tissue. Dead or alive, it doesn't matter. We can increase the electricity inside our neurons to jump as they do.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"We've developed a serum,\" Era says, her hand gesturing to the men walking around us. \"Come, let me show you.\"\n\nWe follow her past the Vectors, but I can't help staring at the darkly veined, translucent bodies on display. On close inspection, I can see the outline of their bones as well as the metal wires from the lithia core connecting the spine to the skull. I step closer. Numbers are inked into their skin. One reads 104. The one closest to me twitches, and I almost jump out of my skin.\n\n\"Are they active?\" I blurt out.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Era says. \"Don't worry, pet; you're safe. They can't hurt anyone.\"\n\nIgnoring her supercilious tone, my gaze falls back to the Vectors. They're all still functioning, but somehow they've been neutralized. I wonder for a second how they'd been able to deactivate them. It isn't like they have a kill switch, and all of my father's programming is strongly encrypted. But then I remember. Shae would have provided some, if not all, of that information.\n\n\"How did you get them?\" I ask, nodding at the five Vectors standing inside the glass half-tubes against the wall. I can't help the edge to my voice. \"And how did you deactivate them?\"\n\n\"With great difficulty.\"\n\nShae turns toward me. \"They were older, first generation. When we... left, I took any of Father's research I could get my hands on. I knew he'd send the Vectors after us, and I was hoping I could use it to avoid them. Era discovered that they were programmed with some kind of kill code.\"\n\n\"The Vectors all have self-destruct codes,\" I say slowly. \"It's in their operating parameters. If their objectives are compromised, the nanoplasm shuts down.\"\n\n\"That's where I come in.\" I dimly recognize the voice but not the face behind the blue mask.\n\n\"Philip?\" Caden asks, and his voice startles me. I'd forgotten that he was even there. But he's staring at the person removing the gaskets connecting a wide helmet to a blue safety suit.\n\n\"Wait, Philip?\" I echo.\n\n\"Extra credit,\" he says in a bland voice. \"And training. I'm next in line.\" He jerks his head toward Era. My brows snap together, eyes darting between Philip and Era. The resemblance had not been obvious before, but now I see the same long noses and the wide, angular cheekbones, even though Philip's hair is blond and not dark like Era's. I feel a flush redden my cheeks as I recall the strange look Era had given me when I'd lied saying that Philip seemed to like me. Cringing embarrassment hardens my voice.\n\n\"Wait, what? You're in training to be a Guardian?\"\n\nPhilip nods briefly and gets back to business, consulting an tablet he's holding in his left hand. He types in a sequence. \"I embedded a code to override the self-destruct programming. These three on the left,\" he says gesturing to the Vectors closest to us, \"have been completely deprogrammed.\"\n\n\"And the other two?\"\n\n\"They were the last ones we got. Still working on them. Their security has an additional layer that we haven't been able to get past, some kind of eleven-digit code. They're slightly more advanced. I've run different algorithms, and nothing.\"\n\nMy mind is racing. I still don't quite understand what they want to achieve by everting from any point like the Vectors, especially using first-generation Vectors from twelve years ago. My legion had been third-gen, and I'd bet anything that Vector Commander we had fought before was far more advanced than any I'd ever had under my command.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I don't get it. Why would you want to evert from anywhere? What's the point?\"\n\nPhilip doesn't answer and Shae avoids my eyes. Of course; I see it now. It's an exit strategy if anyone pursing them \u2013 like me \u2013 somehow manages to get too close.\n\nShae nods, confirming my guess. \"It was our way out if they sent anyone after us.\"\n\nHer voice is quiet, and I notice she doesn't imply that I'm one of the people chasing them. It occurs to me right at that moment that she hasn't told Era the truth about me. It seems odd that Shae would protect me, even after everything. \"I just didn't think it was going to take this long to get a workable serum.\"\n\n\"So how does the jump work?\" Caden's voice is small. He's been quietly listening all along and trying to put together the pieces, from what Shae and I had told him earlier to what he was hearing now.\n\nPhilip brings up a controller on his tablet and keys in some numbers. A picture forms on the flat-screens in the center of the room. It looks like an hourglass broken up into small squares. \"That is a two-dimensional drawing of a traversable wormhole. It's basically a bridge in space with two different end points. Think of the universe as made up of an infinite number of universes. Some of these universes are coupled by a gravitational field, which means that we can communicate between them. OK so far?\" Caden nods, and Philip continues, pointing to one side of the diagram. \"In this case, this is our world, and that is Neospes, where Shae \u2013 and the Vectors \u2013 are from.\"\n\nPhilip pauses to bring up another image on the computers, this time a series of numbers and symbols on a graph with moving waves. \"How it works is a whole other story. We're talking string theory and sub-quantum mechanics, basically the relationship between space-time, gravity, energy, and matter. OK?\"\n\n\"Not really. You lost me at string,\" Caden says, dazed. I bite back a smile.\n\n\"What Philip is trying to say,\" Shae explains, \"is that our physicists figured out a way to manipulate electrons and gravity to jump between one universe to the other. Like through a kind of passage.\"\n\n\"You mean like a stargate?\" Caden offers, remembering my earlier jibe. \"You know, the movie?\"\n\nPhilip sighs and rolls his eyes. \"Sort of, only there's no gate, but the transference is similar.\"\n\n\"OK, so why doesn't everyone know about this? I mean, it's amazing,\" Caden says. \"Can you imagine if everyone could do that?\"\n\n\"They can't.\" Era moves to the front screen and taps in some more commands that clear them all. Her voice is hard. \"Though the universes exist in parallel, we're not meant to go between them. We were breaking the laws of evolution and nature. And nature has a tough way of evening things out. Where do you think the bubonic plague came from that wiped out millions of people in Europe? We couldn't control it, so we closed the wormholes and founded the Guardians on this side.\" She nods toward Shae. \"They created the Vectors on theirs to police and deal with illegal jumpers.\"\n\n\"What about them?\" My voice is harsh in the vacuum of silence following Era's words. \"Why wasn't Leila or Shae dealt with for jumping illegally?\" I'm more curious than anything \u2013 the Guardians have such rigid laws that it doesn't make sense as to why they would allow Shae to remain here.\n\n\"Caden's mother was seeking asylum to return home with her son from the Lord King at the time,\" Era says. \"The Faction could not deny it.\"\n\nAt her words, Caden is already backing away, his face confused and betrayed, staring from Shae to Era to me. His anger finds an easy mark.\n\n\"I'm the target you were talking about in my house that day?\" he hisses in my direction. \"I'm what you were looking for? The next in line to your stupid monarchy?\"\n\n\"It's not what you think \u2013\" I begin, but he cuts me off.\n\n\"No. It's not what you think,\" he says. \"I don't belong there. I belong here. I'm not going with you. Not now, not ever. I could care less if your idiot boyfriend is dying.\"\n\nI'm flinching inside at the words he's throwing so carelessly at me, but the truth is, I am there to take him back. My voice is cold when I respond. My words are for everyone.\n\n\"That idiot boyfriend is your brother and the reason you're even alive. And you're going whether you like it or not.\" I turn to Philip, who's staring at me like I've grown a pair of horns on my forehead. \"Try these numbers.\" I reel off a series of numbers and he hastily enters them onto his tablet.\n\n\"What are they?\"\n\n\"My name and my birth date. Trust me, that's the code you're looking for.\"\n\nPhilip punches in the numbers and for a second, nothing happens. My father had been anything if predictable with the earlier versions of his pet project. Maybe I've got it wrong.\n\n\"I'm sorry\u2013\"\n\nBut the wailing of a loud siren \u2013 the sound of security being breached \u2013 cuts off my words. Philip's eyes are wide and horrified, focused on something behind me. Era is already diving for some kind of control pad on the computer desk, slamming her left hand down so that more alarms are shrieking. In her right hand, she's holding an electro-rod. In that millisecond, I notice that it's not set to stun.\n\nIt's set to kill.\n\nShae screams and pushes Caden to the floor as people in blue suits streak past us. Doors start closing, separating the room into smaller quarters. I turn in slow motion, only to meet the cold dead eyes of one of the Vectors that I had clearly just activated.\nTRACK OR TRAP\n\nFather had been predictable, all right.\n\nPredictable enough to know that one day I'd be the one to initiate the Vector spies that had gone missing in this world. I curse myself again, reaching for my ninjatas, but there's nothing there but bare skin. This time, I curse Era for making me leave them outside of the room that is now sealed behind a giant metal door. Scanning the space, I see another white door on the other side of the room that has a small window in the center of it. Caden's face is peering at me from the other side. His eyes are terrified, jumping from the Vector to me. I nod reassuringly \u2013 at least he's safe for the moment.\n\n\"Open that door,\" I shout.\n\n\"We can't; standard security protocol,\" Era says from behind me. Her voice is controlled and calm. She's holding two electro-rods in each hand, and one of them is pointed right at me. \"They'll stay closed until the situation is resolved. Who are you? How did you activate them?\"\n\n\"I didn't\u2013\"\n\n\"What the hell did you do?\" Philip says angrily. \"And why is it just standing there?\"\n\nPhilip is right. The Vector across from us is not moving, even though its eyes are open and staring at the three of us. Something's not right. Vectors don't hesitate \u2013 they follow a program, a very specific program. This one is waiting for a reason.\n\n\"Era,\" I say urgently. \"There were two of them, right?\" She nods, the electro-rod dropping slowly downward. \"Two. Where's the other one?\"\n\nIn slow motion, we both turn to the white door in the center of the wall at the same time that a bright swath of blood splashes across the window. My heart leaps into my throat, but neither of us can get to the door, as the one in our room darts to stand between us and the computer panel. I've never seen a Vector move that quickly. This one is different. For a second, I wonder if the other one in Caden's room is as quick. Shae will protect Caden, I tell myself. She has to. That thought is the only thing keeping me together.\n\nThe Vector moves again, this time delivering a blow to Philip's head and spinning behind Era. Her cry is loud even as she lunges toward it, but it's too fast, darting out of her way with incredible speed. I skid over to Philip. He's still breathing, and I shove him under the console in the middle of the room. \"Stay here,\" I tell him, and he nods woozily.\n\nEra has gotten in a couple good hits. I can see the charred skin from where she's shocked the Vector, but he's too quick for her to strike where it will disable him.\n\n\"Why isn't it fighting back?\" Era shouts, edging back to where I'm standing next to Philip. \"Do you see that? It's toying with us. What's it waiting for?\"\n\nIts movements seem vaguely familiar to me. I've seen one of these kinds of Vectors before. They're wiry and fast, and aren't programmed to fight. They're programmed for other things.\n\nI think back to the moment when Murek had planned the coup and killed his brother. He'd been with a Vector like this one. I remember thinking at the time that it didn't seem like much protection, but Murek had insisted that the creature accompany them. Then they'd been flash-attacked. Murek had miraculously survived, but his brother and most of the group had been killed, including the strange Vector. Whatever had attacked them had known exactly where they would be, because the attack had been strategic and swift. By the time the royal guards had gotten there, the attackers were already gone. Murek had said it had been doomed timing, but I'd known better.\n\n\"It's a shadow,\" I breathe.\n\n\"A what?\" Era's voice is suspicious. \"What the hell is a shadow?\"\n\n\"They're spies. They send out some kind of signal to call for more Vectors.\" Era doesn't answer but Philip does. He's holding his tablet in his hand and staring at it in horror.\n\n\"She's right,\" he whispers. \"There's some kind of radio wave that wasn't here before.\"\n\n\"You can track signals?\" I ask.\n\n\"We need to deactivate it right now,\" Era says, veering toward the thing before I can stop her. Just then an explosion rocks the wall in the back of the room, and I see chunks of colored plaster fly into the small window. But I can't even think about Caden and Shae. I have way worse things to worry about, staring from Era to the shadow Vector. She's going to make it worse.\n\n\"Era, no!\" I tackle her from behind, and we both roll crashing into the unresponsive Vectors on the far side of the room. She punches me in the face and I feel my head snap backward from the blow. Stars spin in my vision, but I manage to block her second strike. \"Stop!\" I scream. \"It's a trap; if you hurt it, it will explode. That's what just happened in the other room. I don't even know if the others are alive.\"\n\n\"But if we don't disarm it, we're dead either way,\" Philip yells.\n\nBut there is another way. That is... if the thing will listen to me as the other one in Caden's bedroom had. \"Let me try.\" I approach the Vector slowly, my hands in the air. It watches me but doesn't move out of my way. I glance back at Era and then Philip, both staring at me with wary expressions. \"Stand down, soldier,\" I say firmly. I can feel the hot lasers of Era's eyes on my back, but I have no other option. \"That is a direct order from your commanding officer.\"\n\nIts answer is to lurch forward and grab my neck in its cold hands, so fast that I can barely get my own hands up to block it. Black dots dance in my vision. And then everything goes eerily quiet. I don't know if I'm dead or dreaming when the big metal doors swing open, and Caden rushes in, sword in hand to cleave the Vector's head clean off its body.\n\nSomeone's screaming for us to get out, and I feel rough hands pulling me. Vaguely, I see Shae's face at the doorway holding it open with painted red arms. I have no voice. The metal door closes behind us and an explosion rocks the entire house, throwing us to the floor and plunging the entire hallway into darkness.\n\n\"Riven, get up. GET UP!\"\n\nMaybe I am dreaming. And we're all already dead. But Caden's voice in my ear is not a figment of my imagination. I feel his hands on my face, and then under my arms, lifting me. I stand on shaky feet \u2013 that thing had almost killed me. My breaths are long pants, but I'm starting to feel like maybe I'm not actually dead.\n\n\"Caden?\" I croak. \"You're alive. How\u2013\"\n\n\"No time, Riv. They're already here.\" Shae's voice comes from the other side of me. \"We have to move.\" She shoves something in my arms, and I realize that it's my backpack and my jacket. \"Let's go.\"\n\n\"This way,\" Era says. We navigate the dark hallway, holding on to each other, until we're at a narrow staircase. \"This will take us to the office on the third floor.\" Noiselessly, we make our way up, listening for sounds that we're being followed or something's waiting for us at the other end.\n\nBut we're safe for the moment. The office is empty, but the electricity works. There are only six of us now: Shae and Caden, Era and Philip, one of the research guys who looks like he's in some kind of shock, and me.\n\n\"Everyone OK?\" Shae whispers. She's once more covered in blood and gore, as is Caden.\n\n\"She's one of them,\" Era says glaring at me. \"An officer.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Shae says, surprising them, and me most of all.\n\n\"And you brought her here?\" Philip hisses. I throw a scowl in his direction and he scowls back just as fiercely. I am the enemy.\n\n\"She's with us now,\" Shae says firmly. \"Right, Riven?\" I notice Era says nothing, but I can feel her eyes on me, studying. I nod \u2013 I need their help if we have any hope of escaping the Vectors. For now, \"the enemy of my enemy is my friend\" is truer than ever.\n\n\"How many?\" I ask, glancing toward the office door.\n\n\"We got the one in the room,\" Caden whispers. \"Jim overrode the system so we could get out through an emergency hatch, but we lost two of the other guys in the explosion. We had to circle around to get to the door to your room. Shae got one of the other Vectors, and I took one out, but there's more. Those things told them exactly where we were.\"\n\n\"You mean she did,\" Philip says with an accusing look in my direction.\n\n\"Shut up, Philip,\" Shae says, but I still feel an unwelcome stab of guilt, knowing that I'd been the one to reactivate them. \"It's not your fault, Riv,\" Shae says softly in my ear. \"I was going to suggest the same thing. He played us both.\"\n\nI nod, silent. \"What now, then?\"\n\n\"We try to get out of here.\" She turns to Era. \"The exit tunnels, are they still usable?\"\n\nEra shakes her head. \"The explosion in the lab would have compromised them. We can't go back down there. The only way out is up to the third floor and then off the balcony to the back.\"\n\n\"We have to be very quiet, then,\" Shae says. \"There's too many of them for us to take them head-on.\"\n\n\"OK, let's go,\" Caden says, and I'm surprised at this side of him... a leader. In the last few hours, he looks older and harder. He said that he'd taken out one of the other Vectors \u2013 not bad for someone whose skill is based on sport fencing. My lip twitches, and then I remember that Shae had told me that she'd trained Caden, and that he was good enough to fight me. The beginnings of the smile fade away and I stare at him with a grudging respect.\n\nI follow them on silent feet as we make our way to the staircase leading to the third floor. There are crashing noises on the lower level, and it won't be long before they come upstairs. But we have some time. They are nothing if not methodical and will strip each floor completely before moving on to the next. Their programming gives us a tiny sliver of opportunity to escape.\n\nCaden's shoulder brushes mine. \"You OK?\" I whisper to him, and he nods. He looks uncomfortable for a second and then leans in.\n\n\"I'm sorry for what I said earlier,\" he whispers back. \"You know, in the room. About Cale. I didn't know.\" The sound of Cale's name on his lips is like a painful dart in my chest. \"Shae explained that he was sick and that I'm the only one who can help him.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" It's the only word I can manage. I can only imagine what kind of lies \u2013 or truths \u2013 Shae had told him about Cale or why I was there. But nothing prepares me for Caden's next words.\n\n\"She said it was up to me,\" he says quietly. \"She told me that she's dying and can't protect me anymore. But that I would be safest with you no matter what.\" He pauses to stare at me searchingly. \"So I'm in.\"\n\n\"Next door on the left.\" Era's voice drifts back to us, but we're both standing still staring at the other until we're alone in the hallway.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" I grit out. \"I can't promise you anything, Caden. And I don't even know that Cale is still alive. Maybe you're better off here with Shae and Era. Shae's going to be fine. Trust me, you don't know her like I do.\"\n\nAnother crash from downstairs makes us both jump. Caden links his hand into mine, and squeezes. \"All I know is that those things want to kill me, and with you I have a shot of survival, whether that's here or there. So I'm in, whatever you decide. I just wanted you to know that.\"\n\n\"You guys, come on!\"\n\nEra's hiss has us both moving, and we follow the others silently into the room. Shae's already got a rope tied to the balcony. Her gaze flutters to our hands, and she nods just once before hopping over the side. Jim, the research guy, has already gone, and so has Philip.\n\n\"You go after Shae, Caden. Then her,\" she says, nodding at me. Her glance slips to our fingers and something in it makes me pull away, self-conscious. \"I'll bring up the rear in case any of them make it up here. Go!\"\n\nCaden leaps over and shimmies down the rope. It's three stories up but he slides down easily and gives me a thumbs-up once he's on the ground. I turn around to let Era know that I'm going, but am completely blindsided from the blunt metal that crunches into my face. Something snakes around my wrist and pulls it tight against a hard edge.\n\nDazed, I feel warm wet blood trickling down my face and blink through the blood to see Era jumping over the side. Her black lifeless eyes meet mine for a brief second and I see nothing there, not even regret for her betrayal.\n\nI am still her enemy.\n\n\"Era, you're making a mistake,\" I gasp. \"Shae can't make it without me.\"\n\n\"You're with them,\" she shoots back. \"You were the one who brought them here.\"\n\n\"No,\" I say, desperate. \"I didn't. I'm against them; you don't understand.\"\n\nEra slides me a circumspect look. \"So you're not their general?\" I want to lie, to say anything that would make her release me, but I know that it would only backfire in my face. I had to take a chance that she would believe the truth.\n\n\"Yes; I mean I was but not anymore. I defected to find Caden. He's next in line for the monarchy.\" But it was the wrong thing to say. Her face hardens, and I gnash my teeth in frustration at my foolish mistake.\n\n\"Yes, for parts, correct?\" Her voice is acidic. \"You deserve to die with your kind,\" she spits toward me.\n\n\"No! You're wrong. I'll figure something out, please, Era!\" Pulling against the plastic tie tethering my hand to the metal screen door, I try to reach for her, but she's already gone.\n\nIn the room, I can hear noises of movement on the stairs. They're coming to this level. I know that I only have a couple minutes, if that, before the Vectors swarm. I swing myself onto my stomach, pulling against the plastic tie so hard that I can feel its edges slicing into my skin. But I take the pain for the moment, twisting my free arm up and back to get one of my swords. My fingers touch the bottom hilt and peel their way upward, but they're slick with sweat.\n\nI tilt my body and my fingers find a grip. The sword is in my hand just as the first Vector enters the room. The curtains to the balcony billow with the wind, but I know that it will search routinely unless I attract its attention. As quietly as possible, I slide my blade's edge toward the plastic shackling my wrist, wincing at the pain, and with a quiet snap, I'm free.\n\nBut I'm afraid to even take a breath as another Vector joins the first, and then a third. The smell of them is gagging. The rope is still tied to the top of the stone balustrade, but it's on the other side of the balcony from where I am. There's no way I could be quick enough to get to it and get safely down without drawing their attention, especially with the only cover being the sheer curtains and two double glass doors.\n\nSliding my blade soundlessly into its sheath, I step quietly to the edge and without hesitation fling myself over the side just as one of them comes through the doors. Without daring to breathe, I hang by the tips of my fingers on the lip of the stone's edge, hoping beyond hope that the Vector doesn't do any kind of heat scan. But luckily, it doesn't, and after a grunt, I hear its footsteps recede into the room.\n\nMy fingers feel like they're going to break off even though it's only been about thirty seconds, and I dig the points of my boots into the wall behind me to get some leverage. But it's no use; I feel my fingers start to slip from their precarious hold. And then I'm sliding down, panicked, until my feet slam into a three-inch decorative ledge of stone running around the side of the house. I hang on for dear life even though the skin on the pads of my fingers is red-raw from the sharp rock.\n\nThe scrabbling noises of my fall have two of the Vectors back out on the balcony. If they look over the side, they'll see me dangling like some kind of weird spider in plain sight, but fortunately for me they're distracted by the rope. One of their suits emits a series of loud, short beeps, and they all march back inside.\n\nI'll have to find another way down, and fast. I start inching toward the right corner of the house. I cling to the shadows along the wall and keep moving, hoping for a miracle. I squint in the darkness \u2013 there's something long and dark in front of me. A gutter pipe! I almost lose my hold in my haste to reach it, and then I'm moving downward without hesitation like a human-sized monkey, hand over fist.\n\nFloodlights illuminate the lawn just as I reach the bottom, and I flatten myself against the wall behind some shrubs. They're prickly and scratch my face and legs, but I don't feel any of it. My attention is riveted on the couple dozen Vectors flowing out of the house. Where had they all come from? The others wouldn't stand a chance against so many!\n\n\"Find them,\" I hear a guttural voice command, and my blood turns to ice. It's the same Commander, the one that had been tracking us, my father's number one. \"Bio sensors on.\"\n\nOne of the Vectors makes its way toward me, and I crawl backward, mindless of the sharp branches. Against the wall, I slide my swords out without a sound. I stop breathing as it comes within inches of me, and leap up to sever its spinal cord silently. Its body slumps backward, and I shove it under the bushes before swiping its bio sensor and communicator, and then I'm running into the cover of the trees as fast as my feet can take me.\n\nI have to find the others before they do.\n\nThe biometric readings on the device show Caden about half a mile away from my present location. I run hard, knowing that the horde of Vectors is right behind me, until my lungs are burning and my breath is coming in shallow, desperate pants. And then I hear them, crashing through the underbrush all around me. I'm too late.\n\n\"Riv! In here.\" I look around but all I can see are three big rocks and some bushes. \"Up here.\"\n\nThey're in some kind of cave on the top of the rock ledge. Without a second thought, I hoist myself up and climb into the brush, not looking back. I can hear the sounds of movement on my heels, but it only makes me climb faster. After a couple minutes, I see an arm and then Caden's face. Shae is leaning against him and her eyes are closed. My relief is tangible, even though Shae looks like she's on her last legs.\n\n\"Where are the others? Era and Philip?\" I whisper.\n\nCaden shakes his head. \"Philip lost it and took off. And then Era went after him, and that was the last we saw of either of them.\"\n\n\"How's she doing?\" I whisper with a nod at Shae.\n\n\"I'm fine, little sister.\" Her voice is barely a wheeze, but her grip is strong as she grabs my hand. \"It's time.\"\n\n\"Time for what?\"\n\n\"You know what: to go,\" Shae says. \"We can't last in here. They're already out there. There's too many, and the only way is to evert. Now.\"\n\n\"But we can't. We need an eversion point.\"\n\nShae wheezes again. \"Hand me my bag.\" She pulls out the silver case I'd given her. There's one injector dose left. She stabs it into her leg, wincing, and places the empty cartridge next to her on the ground. She pulls out a white bag and removes two more injectors. The liquid is a deep jewel blue color. \"It's the serum we've been working on.\"\n\n\"What if it doesn't work?\"\n\n\"It does. I've used it,\" Shae says with a smile. \"To get away from you. We were trying to refine it. The aftereffects were bad on the nervous system.\" Her smile turns sad, and something inside of me crumples. \"As you can clearly see. Someone had to be the test rabbit. I'm just glad it was me.\"\n\n\"Shae\u2013\"\n\n\"Riv, you promised, remember?\" A thin dribble of blood leaks out of the corner of her mouth. Her voice is urgent. \"When you inject it, evert right away. Run as fast as you can on the other side, because you'll be in the Outers. You have thirty minutes to evert back before the serum becomes compromised. That should be enough time to get you away from them in any direction. After thirty minutes, you'll need to find an eversion point to get back here. Whatever you decide, keep Caden safe.\" Her fingers clutch mine, and I feel her knuckles slide against my face. \"I believed in you, you know. I never stopped.\"\n\nAnd then before I can say anything, she shoves her backpack and an eversion device into my hands and pushes past us, jumping down to the clearing below. I'm already twisting to leap after her when Caden's hands haul me back. I can feel the tears on my face, hot and violent. I want to hurt them, the Vectors \u2013 him \u2013 for ripping us apart again. My rage is all-consuming until I'm nothing but fury.\n\n\"Riven, no,\" Caden says, grasping my shoulders. \"Don't make her sacrifice be in vain. We have to go.\"\n\n\"She's my family,\" I growl.\n\n\"She's mine, too. It's what she wanted. Please, I can't do this without you. There's nothing for me here anymore. My life is in your hands now.\"\n\nHis words are like a bucket of cold water. Inside I know he's right, but still, the agony is scalding my insides like acid. Going out there would be suicide, just as she'd known it would be. But she'd done it for him... and for me. Caden is the priority. He'd always been the priority, even if the rules had shifted and the playing fields flipped. I nod once and pick up the syringes.\n\n\"For Shae,\" Caden says.\n\n\"For Shae,\" I agree, swallowing past the grapefruit-sized knot in my throat. \"On the count of three,\" I say. \"One, two, three.\"\n\nWe stick the injectors into our legs at the same time. Caden's eyes are wide, and I smile reassuringly at him, even though I'm falling apart inside.\n\n\"I'm scared,\" he whispers. \"Will it hurt?\"\n\n\"Just hold on to me,\" I say dully, my voice breaking. Truth is, I don't know if it will hurt. But at the moment, it feels like nothing could hurt as much as the gaping hole inside of me. \"It'll be OK. Shae said we'll be OK. And she's never steered us wrong before.\"\n\nAnd then I pull Caden close, and we're both crying against each other for the sister we're leaving behind... the one who had surrendered herself to save us. I hit enter on the eversion device.\n\nHot white light glows around us in the small cave, and within seconds, we are gone.\nPART TWO\n\nNEOSPES\nOVER THERE\n\nWe're on a training ground, running back to back, the wind in our hair and glee on our faces. Our enemies fall gracefully to our weapons, because together we are invincible. I turn to Shae, the wind lifting her braids off her face, and laugh out loud. We are breathless with victory. But suddenly, something in her face shifts, and she backs away, her hands outstretched, warding off something horrible.\n\nI call her name over and over, but my feet are leaden and stuck to the ground, and she doesn't stop moving. In a few seconds, I am alone and the orange sunshine has disappeared behind a dark, ominous cloud. The ground crumbles beneath my feet, and I'm lying in a desert with a mouth full of sand. Something crawls into my eye and I can feel it moving inside me, feeding off me. I can't stop screaming, but no one hears me.\n\nMy mouth tastes like metal, dirty, sour metal. I spit and it's an odd blue color, dead Vector's blood. The caked, parched ground sucks it up greedily, like it's something precious. There's some kind of creature crawling toward me. It looks like a black scorpion, only it's shiny and metallic, and its eyes are glowing white orbs. It crawls up onto my arm and then digs its sharp forward claws deep into my flesh and starts to feed on me. I am disappearing into this thing's mouth until it's gigantic and sated on my flesh, and I am nothing but a speck.\n\nIt has eaten me, absorbed me. I have become the monster. And I feel drunk with it, exhilarated. Alive.\n\nAnd that's when I see Shae, running toward me and throwing herself into my arms as if she hadn't seen me in weeks. She smells so good that I can't help myself. She is sunlight in a world of darkness. My mouth opens and I take her into me without a second thought. She must die to feed the monstrosity I have become.\n\nI can't stop screaming.\n\n\"Shae, no. I'm sorry.\" The words feel like knives, tearing into the roof of my mouth, and I gag reflexively. Everything hurts. I don't know if I'm awake or asleep, or if I'm dead or alive. Wetness soaks my cheeks.\n\n\"Riven, wake up.\" A hand is shaking me. \"It's OK, it's OK. We're OK.\"\n\nI pry open my sticky eyelids, and Caden's worried face swims into focus. I'm shivering so hard I can almost feel my bones rattling. \"Whererewe?\" I mumble unintelligently.\n\n\"Neospes, I think,\" Caden says. \"But it's so desolate. I can't see a city. There's nothing for miles.\"\n\n\"How long have we been here?\" I try to sit up. I've never blacked out during eversion before. I don't even want to think about what that means. My blood feels hot, like it's on fire, but when I touch my skin it's icy cold. I rub my hands up and down my arms. The movement hurts.\n\n\"I don't know. A half hour, maybe more. I tried to wake you, but you weren't even blinking. Your eyelids were moving, so I knew you were alive, but your heartbeat was so slow. I wasn't sure whether you'd had some kind of reaction to the serum. But I felt OK,\" Caden rushes out. \"Then you started murmuring, and a couple minutes after, you woke up. Where are we?\"\n\nI look around quickly. We're in a barren stretch of land. There's not a tree in sight, but I know it's all an illusion. The scavengers would smell us. \"We're in the Outers.\"\n\n\"That doesn't sound good.\"\n\n\"It's not.\"\n\n\"So should we run a bit and then evert back?\" Caden asks. I shake my head and check my watch.\n\n\"We couldn't do it and be safe. If I've been out as long as you say, we're way past the thirty-minute mark that Shae was talking about. It'd be too risky. Plus, my blood feels like it's on fire; I don't think I'd survive another jump.\" I pause, staring at my skin. \"Maybe you're right and I did have some weird reaction to the serum.\"\n\n\"So what do we do?\"\n\n\"We make our way back to the city, but first I need to figure out exactly where we are.\" I open my backpack and pull out two of the Vectors' uniforms I'd stuffed in there. I toss one to Caden. \"Get undressed and put this on.\" I glance up at the sky that's still covered in a reddish haze. \"It gets really hot here during the day. We're going to have to find a spot to rest, quickly.\"\n\nCaden looks confused as he shrugs out of his clothes and into the Vector's uniform. \"Wouldn't it be safer to travel by day?\" His face reddens as he notices me stripping out of my clothes at the same time, and he turns away. I shrug. There's no room for propriety.\n\nMy reply is short. \"Not here.\"\n\nI zip up the second uniform, thankful that it doesn't smell, and throw Sadie's dress into my pack \u2013 cotton is rare here, and it would be unwise to leave it. My ninjata harness I slip on over the uniform, tightening the straps across my chest. I roll the leather jacket and tuck it in the top. The red power button on the suit's computer is blinking, indicating that it's already charging. Nearly all of the suit's power comes from solar energy. I tap the keypad on the forearm of the suit and type in a sequence of numbers, wincing at the pinch at the back of my neck. I repeat the same on Caden's. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Resetting the suit to calibrate to our bodies. Hang on a sec; this may hurt a bit.\" His eyes widen at the sting.\n\n\"What was that?\" Caden hisses, jerking away.\n\n\"It's OK. It won't hurt anymore. It's a wire that the suit connects to your nervous system. Works in tune with your biometrics.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"It may look like a piece of nylon, but it's really pretty advanced technology. This computer controls the whole suit; it records your heart rate, the amount of fluid in your body, and basically makes sure you stay alive. It's thermo-responsive, too.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" I smile this time at Caden's dazed response. \"What's thermo-responsive?\"\n\n\"Our daytime temperatures are very different from yours. It's boiling hot during the day, upward of a hundred and fifty degrees, and very cold at night, like negative sixty. The suit adjusts to each, keeping your body at a constant temp.\"\n\n\"It can do that?\" Caden's voice is still full of amazement. \"Wow, no wonder you wanted to take them off the Vectors.\"\n\nI raise my eyebrows. \"That's just the beginning of what they can do, but let's get moving. I'll fill you in later. The Outers isn't exactly the most friendly place, and we need to find somewhere safe to rest for the day before we fry,\" I say.\n\nOff to the right, there's nothing but more flat land, but on my left I can see the vague outline of some mountains. I type in a command on the suit keypad, and a hologram of a compass hovers in the air. Underneath the 3-D rendition is a map. Neospes is to the north. The map says that it's over sixty miles away. That's three days of hard hiking in very unfriendly terrain... extremely unfriendly terrain.\n\nI glance at Caden. He's poking through all the pockets on his suit.\n\n\"Here, take this,\" I tell him, handing over one of the two handheld crossbows from Shae's bag. I strap the other to a special hitch on my suit that has a retractable lead. \"Your sabre isn't any good against flying things. And they come from all sides here.\"\n\nI haven't gone through everything she has in there yet. I'm a little terrified of what I may find or not find. I have never been this unprepared for an eversion \u2013 no food, no supplies, no medical gear... nothing. All I have are the weapons \u2013 better than nothing! \u2013 and half-used supplies in the bottom of my backpack. But Shae was always prepared for any eventuality, and I can't help hoping that she somehow planned for this. I'll wait until I've found us somewhere safe to hide before doing a full tally of what we had, and pray that it will be enough.\n\n\"If anything moves, shoot it. Don't think, just shoot,\" I say to Caden. \"OK?\"\n\nCaden's eyes are dark, but there's no fear in them. It lifts me up a tiny bit. \"Are there Vectors out here?\"\n\n\"No, they don't come out this far, unless it's a raid or a search party. Out here\" \u2013 I gesture to the barren landscape around us \u2013 \"there are worse things than Vectors.\" I glance upward. \"And the worst thing of all is that sun, so let's move.\"\n\nWe jog in silence for a while, tracking north on the compass. Our pace is hard and it's already sweltering. The ground is covered in an oily red haze that makes it look as if it's shimmering, and I can feel the sweat slicking across my forehead. Glancing at Caden, his face is determined. I check the computer on the suit. The temperature gauge reads one hundred and ten degrees. The worst part is that it's not even 7 in the morning.\n\nI quicken my pace, and Caden follows without complaint. By my calculation we have about two hours before we get to the base of the hills on the map, and hopefully some cover.\n\nIf we make it...\n\nA noise overhead has me twisting around with my crossbow in hand. It looks like some kind of bird, but I know instinctively that it's not a bird. Sunlight glints off its wings as it drops lower, making a beeline in our direction. I wonder if it's some kind of tracking spy, and I toy between killing it midflight or figuring out exactly what it is. The things that exist out here live by no rules \u2013 they live to survive any which way they can.\n\n\"Caden, drop!\" I shout and Caden rolls to the ground just as the thing dives past his head, talons outstretched. It's far bigger than it looked at first, smaller now as it climbs into the sky. It's not going to attack again, I notice, but there's no way I can let it attract any more attention to us. I place the bolt and shoot. My aim is true and the thing drops like lead to the ground.\n\nMy crossbow remains at the ready, although blue sparks from my first arrow ripple across the bird's body, rendering it powerless. Up close, the bird's wingspan is about three feet across, and it reeks of rotten flesh. Metal wires crisscrossing and woven into bands of tissue make up the bird-thing's body. I can see the faint outline of a skeleton underneath between the gaping holes. Where the eyes should be are only two glowing white orbs. I feel the bile rising.\n\n\"Stay back,\" I warn Caden, but he ignores my words of caution.\n\n\"I want to see what I'm up against out here,\" he says pushing past me, and then freezes, his body like rock. \"What the hell is that?\"\n\n\"It's a hybroid. Half-android, half-something alive.\" I shrug. \"It's just one of the many things out here.\"\n\n\"Android?\" Caden repeats. \"Like a robot?\"\n\nI shoot him a glare. \"You know, like the Vectors? Only, they take whatever parts they can get out here. It's slim pickings in the Outers, and we are like Mecca, so let's go. I have no idea if there are any more of these floating around.\"\n\nI grind the heel of my boot into the thing's head, and it makes a sizzling sound. The eyes dull, but I'm not taking any chance. Sliding the short knife from my boot, I sever the wires connecting the head, cringing from the rot of decay.\n\n\"Come on,\" I tell Caden. \"We wasted ten minutes on this. Here, this will be better.\" I click a button on the neck of his suit and a hood with a thin transparent mesh unravels. I tuck it over his head, and the suit seals the closure. I do the same on mine, and at his look, I say, \"It's so your skin doesn't burn off. Let's run.\"\n\nBy the time we get to the base of the hill \u2013 which is more like a rock cliff than a hill \u2013 the sun has climbed high into the sky and is beating down on top of us with the force of a hammer. The edge of the hill is shrouded in pale shadow, but with every passing second, the line of sun moves inexorably toward it. If the sun catches us climbing that face, it will be a struggle.\n\nI'm wheezing, and I can hear Caden's labored breath behind me. My legs are burning and my heart is pounding. My mouth is so dry that every time I swallow, my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth and I have to peel them apart. One of the side pockets on my pack holds a thin root, and I break it in half, offering part to Caden.\n\n\"What is it?\" he asks.\n\n\"A root; chew it.\"\n\nThe root provides some reprieve, filling my mouth with spit. The more you chew it, the more saliva it releases. I look upward along the cliff face, shielding my eyes from the unrelenting sun, searching. And then I spot what I'm looking for, a dark dot under a ledge. \"Up there. You see it?\" Caden nods, and then we are climbing faster than we've ever climbed. We're racing against the line of sun burning a fiery path up the rock beneath us.\n\n\"Won't the suits protect us?\" Caden grunts.\n\nI don't answer because I'm not really sure. I haven't been back to Neospes in three years, and these suits are newer than the ones I'm used to. The earlier prototypes used to become unstable in really hot temperatures. I glance at the heat reading on my forearm: one hundred and nineteen degrees and mounting. I can't take the chance of any malfunctions, especially when the suit is directly connected to our bodies.\n\nAs we get nearer to the small cave mouth, I pause, signaling Caden to wait before grabbing a flare from my pack and throwing it inside. Other things would be looking for shelter, too. The flare hits the back wall and flames brightly for a second. Nothing happens, and then some kind of huge lizard-like creature shuffles out. My long blade is embedded in its head before it could even spit venom in our direction.\n\n\"Is that a hybroid?\" Caden whispers.\n\n\"No, it's like a komodo dragon,\" I say, kicking the carcass to the edge of the ledge. \"Only\u2013\"\n\nCaden interrupts me with a wry look. \"I know, worse.\"\n\nI grin. \"You're getting it. This one's pure. No metal. They're survivors through and through. And they're carnivores, so keep your eyes open for any others.\" I nudge its mouth, shuddering at the jagged shark-like, rust-colored teeth. \"They're poisonous and can spit their venom to paralyze their prey.\"\n\n\"Sick!\" We share a laugh that quickly evaporates to silence. Levity is a luxury right now. I squeeze his shoulder and shine a flashlight into the shallow cave. It's not bad for shelter, with the top ledge dipping down like a lip. The komodo must have just been resting there, because there's no sign of a nest or excrement. We should be safe enough from the sun or other predators.\n\nThe dead komodo is already starting to stink. Leaving it visible would be like putting up a \"free buffet dinner\" sign. I don't say anything to Caden, but if we run into a bind on the food front, it would be foolish to waste such a windfall, especially if Shae hasn't been as prepared as I hope. But I can't even look at it and think about eating it without gagging.\n\nIn Neospes, most of our food is powdered or in gel form and engineered. We don't grow crops or have farms. Our food is processed in factories underground in one of the sectors responsible for food production. Half the time, we don't even know what we're eating; all we know is that it has exactly the right combination of calories and nutrition to keep our bodies at top functioning capacity. The only time I've ever had the luxury of organic food is during the Solstice Games.\n\nOccasionally when we were younger, on raids to the Outers, Shae and I would trap some of the animals. For some of the poorer people on the outskirts of the city, that's all they had to eat. I remember one old Artok woman telling Shae and me that some of the Outers komodos used to be delicacies in the old days. She'd offered us some, and while Shae had gamely eaten the roasted beast, I hadn't been able to even stomach the abnormal, charred flesh. I'd thrown up immediately afterward.\n\nA smile twists my lips. My revulsion for cooked animals had shifted pretty quickly when I everted to the Otherworld. It was either eat or starve, or become what they called a vegetarian. In Neospes, food was not a pleasure; it was a means of survival. But that didn't mean anything in Caden's world. Food was celebrated and revered to the point of excess. It shocked me.\n\nI stare at the carcass and kick it with all the force I can manage off the ledge. It makes a wet thud near the bottom, and from where I am, I can see a thin line of black ant-like creatures mobbing it in seconds. Only thing is... they're not ants, and they're not small. I duck back into the cave and almost crash into Caden standing beside me.\n\n\"Was it poisonous?\" Caden asks me. \"You know, to eat? I mean, we have to eat, right?\"\n\n\"No. I just couldn't...\" But I have no explanation other than my own stupid disgust. I sigh. Caden's right.\n\n\"It's just meat, Riven.\" I stare at him, and after a couple seconds, Caden makes to leave the cave. \"I'll go get it. We don't know how long we're going to be out here.\"\n\nBut I stop him. \"You can't go down there. It's already gone.\"\n\nSure enough, the carcass has all but disappeared, picked clean to the bones, and even half of those, too, are gone.\n\n\"What the... \" Caden's voice is small.\n\n\"They're carrion eaters, scavengers. Those\" \u2013 I jerk my head to the ground below \u2013 \"are hand-sized burying beetles. They'll scavenge anything. Dead or alive. They can smell dead things from miles away.\" I turn to him. \"Which is why we're probably better off with the komodo down there.\"\n\nIt's boiling now. The temperature reading is a hundred and thirty-two, and the sun's arms are about halfway down the rock face. Soon, nothing will be out in the noon sun, not even the metals. The shade of the rock doesn't provide much relief from the heat, but it's a lot cooler and the suits do the rest. I unroll a flat black shade from my pack and run it along the cave's mouth. The powerful magnetic edges curve and seal to the rock.\n\n\"What's that? More fancy cloth?\"\n\n\"Yep, a holo-tube,\" I agree. \"Sort of. It's like a body tent. If I couldn't find any shelter, as an emergency, I could roll up in this, but it can't hold two people.\" For some reason, I'm blushing. The tube could hold two people but they'd be literally sandwiched together. Shae and I had done it once, and we'd been much smaller than Caden and I would be. I shake the unnerving image out of my head. \"It blocks out all UV light and heat. And it's holographic.\" I point to a tiny control pad on one of the edges. \"The outer side mimics the surrounding area. Like camouflage. So anything out there would just see rock face.\"\n\n\"Cool.\" Caden inspects the edges of the material and rubs it carefully between his fingers, frowning at the evenly spaced bars beneath it. \"What are these? Magnets?\"\n\n\"Yes. They stick to the lodestone.\" I raise an eyebrow. \"How's your geology?\"\n\n\"Naturally occurring magnetite in igneous rock,\" Caden says primly. \"Supposedly magnetized by lightning.\"\n\nI grin, impressed. \"Well, here it's from all the electrical fields during the War.\"\n\n\"Wait, what about our gear?\" Caden asks. \"Wouldn't the fields affect them, too?\"\n\n\"Nope, shielded.\" I say, leaving Caden to ponder the geological and technological wonders of my world, and head to the back of the cave where I empty out both Shae's pack and mine.\n\nI sort everything into three piles: food, medicine, and gear. Shae was prepared. There's a lot of food from the other world, including dried strips of some kind of meat and packets of dried fruit and grain, but Shae must have stockpiled a ton of our powdered food whenever she'd everted back here. There are a few dozen thin tubes, more of the water-root, and both water bladders on the inside of each of the packs are full.\n\nThe water we'll have to use sparingly, more so than the food. The suits will keep us from losing too much of our body water, but we will die faster without water than food. My guess is that the komodo would have had a water source not too far away. If we're lucky, maybe it will be on the way to the city.\n\nMost of Shae's bag contains more food than anything, but I still have my med-kit from before, so that will have to do. I remove all of the various weapons I stole from each of the Vectors and line them up in a row. Three night-vision goggles, two coiled electro-whips, one rod, my ninjata swords, the two crossbows with bolts, Caden's sabre, and a handful of throwing stars and knives. On top of that, I also have two communications headsets and the eversion device that brought us here.\n\nAll in all, we aren't in terrible shape. My fingers catch against something in the front pocket, and I pull out a tiny device that looks like an electronic thumb drive. I frown. There's a piece of paper on it that reads \"For Riven.\" I shove it back into the pack. I'm not ready to process whatever it is that Shae has prerecorded on there. I'm also not ready to admit to myself that she's really gone or to hear her voice and see her face.\n\n\"You OK?\" Caden says, watching me from where he's still sitting near the front of the cave. \"Need any help with anything?\"\n\n\"No, I'm OK. Just doing inventory.\"\n\n\"Then we should add my stuff in there, too.\" Caden crawls over and tosses the contents of his backpack into the mix, and I frown.\n\n\"What's that?\" I ask, pointing to a slim leather-bound case the size of a watch box that had fallen out next to June's gun, and a pile of miscellaneous junk looking vaguely like random Eagle Scout supplies. I don't say anything about the gun, because it could come in handy, but the box looks elegant and out of place.\n\n\"Something my mother left me.\"\n\n\"Your mother?\" I ask, startled. \"May I?\"\n\nCaden smiles sadly. \"Go ahead. It's some kind of chip. We couldn't read it, no matter what we did. I put it in there just in case.\"\n\nI open the box carefully. Inside, there's a silver-colored ring with a dark blue circular stone. The Neospes royal crest is emblazoned on it. The chip Caden's talking about is a pill-sized silver cylinder. I stare at Caden. \"Shae didn't tell you what's on it?\" I ask.\n\n\"No, she said she didn't know.\"\n\nBut Shae did know. We all did. She must have had some reason for not wanting to tell Caden what the chip meant. I slide it and his ring into an inside pocket on my vest. Caden doesn't object, and together we repack everything, including Caden's thermal blankets, fire-sticks, water packets, emergency food bars, flashlights, and snare wire.\n\n\"Where'd you get all this stuff?\" I ask, fingering an odd-looking multi-tool that will undoubtedly come in handy. I'm unwillingly impressed by his foresight.\n\n\"Online,\" Caden says with a grin. \"All I had to look up was survival gear for the zombie apocalypse.\"\n\n\"The zombie apocalypse?\"\n\n\"What can I say? We like to be prepared. Hurricanes, tornados, and zombies.\"\n\nI can't help the laugh that rolls its way out of my stomach, and I'm laughing until my sides feel like they're about to split. Go figure for a world that has instructions on how to survive a zombie apocalypse. Thinking about it sets me off again. I don't stop laughing, not even when Caden throws a water packet at my head.\n\nWe eat a couple strips of meat and dried fruit, saving the longer-life food items for later, and lie alongside each other on the rocky floor of our little cave. I haven't forgotten about the chip sitting inside my vest pocket. It's almost burning a hole into my skin.\n\nIt's time for Caden to tell me everything he knows.\nIN THE OUTERS\n\nWhen I awake, my throat feels gritty like I've chewed on sandpaper. Despite the hard ground, we've managed to both get some sleep. Caden is curled up on his side, something on a silver chain curled in his fist. He showed me the locket last night when he recounted everything he knew from his childhood. It was tarnished platinum with a photo of his mother inside wearing one of the flowing dresses that she'd loved. On the other side was a photo of Caden as a baby. Caden said that he never took the locket off.\n\nIt's boiling in the cave, but the temperature is already changing, lowering. Sometime during the day, I shrugged out of the suit and just slept under one of the thermal blankets. I stretch as quietly as I can, soothing the aches out of my muscles, and get dressed after taking care of minor bodily functions in a back corner of the cave. I smile, remembering that Caden asked whether the suit also took care of those kinds of needs.\n\n\"The human ones can inhibit waste,\" I told him, \"but these are designed for the Vectors. They don't need to use the bathroom,\" I explained. He stared at me like I'd grown two heads.\n\n\"They can do that?\" His eyes were wide. \"Do they process your pee so it's drinkable, you know, like in Dune?\"\n\nThen it was my turn to stare at him. I shook my head. \"That's gross. No, our suits are designed to inhibit those needs, at least until we take the suits off.\" I pointed to the neuron connector at the back of the neck. \"Remember? They're not designed for long-term use, although I'm sure they've probably figured that out by now. As you can probably guess.\"\n\n\"How do you know all this stuff? Like how it works?\"\n\nMy answer was a toss-up, but I chose the least complicated answer. \"My father designed them.\"\n\nI glance over at Caden as he turns in his sleep. He, for his part, had told me everything that he could remember, but it still wasn't a lot. His memories were sporadic, mostly centered around his life in the other world. His mother rarely smiled, Caden said, and when she did, it was always short-lived. It was as if a part of her had been missing, like she was living lost in a daydream somewhere else half the time.\n\nCaden hadn't known about Cale. Neither his mother nor Shae had told him anything of Neospes or where he was truly from. And yet, he faced the Vectors that had come in search of him, with innate courage and bravery. He accepted the near-impossible that I was from a parallel universe, just as Shae was. And I know he has more questions, but it seems like he is waiting... waiting for me to tell him the truth of who he is.\n\nMy mouth twists. I wouldn't even know where to start.\n\nHey, Caden, you're the son of a king in this world. Your father was murdered by his brother, your uncle, by the way, who now wants to kill the brother you never knew you had, and kill you before you can somehow save him so that he can assume the throne. Oh, and we live in a giant glass dome of a city, because everywhere else is contaminated because of an android war that pretty much killed off everything in the process.\n\nAnd by the way, I'm somehow falling for you.\n\nMaybe I'll leave out that last part. Love is the seed of weakness, as my father had always said. I'd be better off burying any feelings I have for Caden, and he'd be wise to do the same. I touch my fingers to my suddenly warm lips, thinking of our unexpected kiss in the bathroom at Horrow. It seems like eons ago instead of mere days. For a brief second, I allow myself to savor the feelings blooming inside my chest, if just for that moment.\n\n\"Why are you staring at me?\" Caden murmurs sleepily. An embarrassed flush invades my face and neck.\n\n\"I wasn't. I mean, I was but I was looking through you,\" I mumble.\n\n\"You were smiling.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well I was thinking of ice cream and donuts,\" I snap, irritated. \"Come on, we have to get moving. The sun's just setting and I want to get a head start.\"\n\nWe gather up what we've used, and tuck them into the packs. Caden has Shae's pack, since it's more lightweight and durable like mine. His sabre is in its sheath lying along his back underneath the pack. Caden stares at me and grins.\n\n\"We look like ninjas.\"\n\nMy mouth twitches. The description is appropriate. \"We'll need to fight like ninjas to get through the next two days.\"\n\n\"What about the wrappers and garbage?\" Caden asks looking around. \"Shouldn't we...\"\n\n\"Forget it. It's extra weight. Just leave it,\" I say over my shoulder as I'm repacking the holo-tube at the entrance. \"Don't worry; it'll get used by something out here. The things that live here use everything they can get their hands on. Think of it as natural recycling.\"\n\nThe landscape is still red, but a different kind of red with tinges of gray along its edges. It's seventy-nine on the temperature monitor. Here and there, we spot movement. I try not to let my tension show, but it's a guarantee that we'll run into some kind of trouble. Predators in the Outers are vicious. I wasn't kidding when I told Caden earlier that the creatures out here use everything they could get their hands on. I meant it \u2013 they'd slaughter each other for hair, teeth, and bone. They'd rip us apart for less. A shiver races across my back.\n\n\"Here, let's put these to work,\" I say, grabbing Caden's wrist and pressing one of the buttons on the keypad. \"It's a security protocol that identifies any metal, I mean, hybroids. You'll feel a vibration and this console will flash.\"\n\n\"How does that work?\"\n\n\"Sound waves.\"\n\nWe climb down the mountain quickly, moving across the terrain at a good pace. We keep our hoods off, as the warmth of the open air is comfortable for the moment. The sky is an odd mixture of crimson and gray and black. There's no blue in the Neospes sky, but it has its own unique beauty. I realize that I've missed it, but a part of me misses the blue, too.\n\nOur pace is grueling, but I'm relishing the chance to push my muscles hard, to run so that my heart is pumping like a piston in my chest. Caden keeps pace with me easily, and the realization that he's fitter and stronger than I thought is a delayed one. He's not as lean as Cale, even with their identical build, but I misjudged him. I wonder if he fights as easily as he runs... just as Shae boasted. She said that he could take me. I doubt that, but it doesn't mean I'm not curious. Cale was good, but he could never take me in a one-on-one fight, not even with all his years of training.\n\nI've always had a good sense of where people are going to be before they strike, like a fighting sixth sense. It gave me that extra edge that I put to good use in my unprecedented rise to the rank of general. No, Caden wouldn't be able to best me, especially not having been trained in our ways from the beginning.\n\nThe landscape starts to change as the sun disappears and the moon rises into the night sky, covering everything in an oily silver veil. Normally, moonlight is beautiful, but out here it has different implications. Moonlight is ominous, insidious. It means hunters are on the prowl and predators out for prey. And so we have to be extra vigilant.\n\n\"What is that?\" Caden huffs, his gaze drawn by something off to our right. I don't want to stop, but I look over and my breath hitches just as the console of my wrist-pad vibrates and the light flashes red.\n\n\"Stop,\" I hiss, and drop to the ground. Caden follows unbidden. Removing the infrared goggles from my pack, I stare silently at the group of six or seven raptor-sized creatures pawing and shoving into each other. They're about a mile away from where we are.\n\n\"What are they? More hybroids or real things?\" Caden whispers.\n\n\"Definitely hybroids. They're pack hunters. Reptiles.\" I'm hoping that they haven't seen us... or smelled us. They're machines that have taken on the most savage aspects of territorial beasts, and have fused themselves with horns and tusks, teeth and scales. Reptiles are notoriously hard to kill and even harder to outrun.\n\nI turn the goggles to the left of where we are crouched. There's a dip where the landscape shifts, a gorge of some sort. I hadn't planned on going in that direction \u2013 as much as the inhabitants of the Outers live aboveground, the worst of them prefer the underground. Or so it's rumored.\n\nIn the city, scary tales of the Outers filled our ears from birth. They were the stories that people whispered into children's ears: \"the monsters from the Outers will get you!\" or \"break the law and risk exile to the Outers.\" That one had been the worst one \u2013 to be banished from the city and forced to survive was a fate worse than death. Many traitors had killed themselves to avoid the outcome of the Outers. No one exiled there had ever returned.\n\n\"Follow me,\" I say to Caden, making a decision. \"We're going to crawl over there to where that drop is, got it?\" Caden nods. \"Just try to move slowly, without any jerky movements.\"\n\nCommando-style, we inch our way across the dusty ground. I can feel the dirt like grit against my teeth, clogging my windpipe. The fine dust is everywhere. I cough softly and spit to the side, and my saliva is rust-colored. My elbows and knees are burning from the scraping against the hard earth, but we're almost there. I can see that the cracks along the ground are starting to widen. Soon they'll be big enough for us to drop into and at least be safe if the hybroids do see us. Once we're out of sight, we'll be out of mind.\n\nI look back triumphantly to Caden, and he's a few feet away, his face screwed up and frozen. He looks as if he's just stuffed an entire lemon into his mouth.\n\n\"Don't\u2013\" I warn. But it's too late. The sneeze echoes across the open ground like thunder. In the next second, all we hear is the rumbling of distant hooves and screeching that could rival an oncoming hover-train. \"Run, Caden, run! To the chasm! Run!\"\n\nAnd we are sprinting for our lives as the thunderous rumbling draws closer. I don't want to look back, but I do. I have to see how close they are... whether we have a shot in hell of getting away from them. One we can probably take, maybe two, but definitely not six. With their breath hot on our backs, now I understand why anyone exiled to the Outers would prefer death. They'll capture us and take us back to whoever their tribal leader is, and then we'll be stripped for parts \u2013 skin, bones, organs, blood.\n\n\"Don't look back,\" I gasp to Caden, but his face is already a mix of pain and terror. Ignoring my own advice, I glance back again. One of them is faster than the others and gaining on us with every leap. It's the runner. All the pack reptiles have a runner \u2013 the quick one that snares the prey, and then the others follow to immobilize it. They're all fast, but the runners are faster.\n\nI run out in a wide arc veering away from Caden. \"Keep running to that gap, OK,\" I scream. \"No matter what.\"\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Trying to keep us alive.\"\n\nAnd then I can't think as I'm running into the reptile runner head on, ninjatas in both hands. I have thirty seconds before the others close the space between them and the runner. It's smaller than the ones I've seen before, about horse-sized, but I know it's no less lethal with its heavily muscled and metaled body. Its eyes glow white as its pointy snout gapes open, full of sharp, cracked teeth. Angled plates curve down its back and tail into some kind of pike.\n\nWe are seconds from head-on impact, and in full sprint I roll head over heels, slashing out with my blades at the same time, snapping through the intertwined wires and tissue at the base of its hooves. I don't stop. Momentum keeps me going, and I'm on my feet and running back toward Caden, but I hear the thump and screech of agony as it bowls forward onto its face. A grim triumphant smile graces my face for a second... It won't be running for a while, that one.\n\nI've earned us a sliver of time; the rules of existence in the Outers mean that the others will fight to pick the fallen apart. It's survival of the fittest and strongest. Sparing a look behind me, I see they're already converging on their fallen pack-mate. I dash harder, pumping my legs like pistons until I'm almost flying. I have no idea where my extra strength comes from; I just go, taking advantage of my second wind. The pounding of hooves behind me echoes the pounding in my chest.\n\nAhead of me, Caden barely squeezes into a tight gap, and I throw myself down behind him, crashing into his back and sending us both spiraling into the rock walls of the narrow grotto. We're both hauling stale air into our lungs and clutching each other with numb fingers, even as dirt, rocks, and sour saliva fall on us from the creatures already snapping their mouths above us, trying to get in. We crouch farther down into the shaft but we're safe. They're too big to follow.\n\n\"You OK?\" I gasp.\n\n\"What is wrong with you? You could have killed yourself!\" I'm startled at the reprimand and his snarky tone, but I smile a tired smile.\n\n\"Better me than you. Come on.\"\n\nCaden doesn't return my smile. He stands in front of me, staring at me with fiery eyes. \"Riv, you can't do that anymore, OK? I know you're way better than I am navigating this terrain, but moving forward, it's both of us or neither of us. Got it? We do it together.\"\n\nI nod, an involuntary smile curving my lips again. Something in his voice makes me feel funny deep down inside, like he wants to protect me. People don't tend to question my orders, especially here in Neospes. I lead and they follow. The smile grows into a full-on grin as I imagine what Caden will do once he finds out that I've been a general, commanding an entire legion here, or even worse that I'm now some kind of marked-for-death, dangerous renegade.\n\n\"It's not funny, Riven,\" Caden hisses, misunderstanding my expression. \"I already lost Shae. I can't lose you too.\"\n\n\"I know,\" I agree, his quiet comment slapping the grin from my face. \"Together, from here on out.\"\n\nAbove us, the reptiles are still scrabbling \u2013 they'll do anything to get in here as long as we remain this visible, including digging out a bigger hole, which they've already started to do. The foul steam of their breath swirls around us. I stare at Caden, and we both nod at the same time. We need to move. They'll give up eventually and move on to some other target once we're out of sight.\n\nThe gap opens out to a deep gorge, above which the reptiles are furiously digging, but underneath the crack to our right, the tunnel burrows downward, disappearing into darkness. We don't have much choice but to follow it.\n\n\"Let's go. Be vigilant,\" I whisper to him, switching on the halogen lights on our suits. I'm torn between taking the lead and having to worry about him behind me every step of the way, or letting him go ahead and having to face any dangers head-on. In the end, I decide to take the lead. \"Stay close, and don't stop for anything. Got it?\" Caden agrees and then we are off, moving as quickly as we can deeper into the gritty tunnel.\n\nI sigh inaudibly, feeling the weight of the dark earth on all sides of me. Why does it always have to be tunnels? They're everywhere \u2013 in Neospes, in the Otherworld. I'm no longer claustrophobic, but tunnels still irk me. I was locked in a box underground for hours at a time to learn to face and harness my fear of enclosed spaces. It sounds cruel, but it worked. A key part of our mental training means I had to face and understand all of my fears.\n\nShae had had a fear of heights, so she'd had to jump off the tallest point in Neospes every day for four weeks. The day she did it without crying was the day she overcame that fear. She was still be wary of heights, but it no longer weakened her. One of the trainees in my group had a fear of snakes. He ended up dropping out, unable to take the counter-fear measures.\n\nThe system is brutal, but it's effective. An initiate can always lie about their fears, but it's counterproductive. Facing fear in a controlled environment and trying to overcome it without any preparation in a hostile environment are two vastly different things. In Neospes, fear is the paper-thin difference between life and death.\n\nThe tunnel widens a bit and I drag my gloved hand along the oddly-hewn edges of the rock. It's curiously smooth in areas and roughly chopped in others. I frown. My instincts warn that it's probably because some combination of living tissue and metal had grated against it, but a part of me wonders whether I'm being overly paranoid after the run-in with the reptiles above ground.\n\n\"Cade, you OK?\" I whisper back. He's tucked his hood around his neck, and even though the temperature is dropping consistently, there's a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. His eyes are dark in the stark halogen lighting of our suits.\n\n\"Yeah. Where are we now?\"\n\nI consult the holographic compass and map, which works just as well underground. We're still making good time and heading in the direction of the city, about a quarter of the way there, but it's far slower now that we're not running. I squint at the map, noticing that it has now placed us below ground. The technology of the suit has dynamic virtual properties that allow its various operations to self-adjust, depending on external stimuli.\n\nCurious, I touch a spot on the base of the hologram that is highlighted with an \"S.\" The map is interactive and immediately shifts to show the entire network of the subterranean tunnels around us. Caden's gasp is soft beside me, but I'm still staring at the intricate web of tunnels that connect nearly to the edges of the city so many miles away.\n\nHave those always been there?\n\n\"Wow,\" Caden breathes. \"So I guess this means we can pretty much stay down here and not have to deal with those things up there.\"\n\n\"We don't know that things exactly like that aren't down here,\" I say flatly. \"Or worse.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Caden agrees. \"But we haven't seen anything even close to any kind of life for the last couple hours.\"\n\n\"Doesn't mean they aren't there.\"\n\nI move the map with a swish of my thumb and forefinger, opening a wider subsection of the part nearest the city. It's not connected, but it's definitely close enough to get us to the east side \u2013 the least-policed side of the city. I trail my finger back toward the dot that indicates my current position, noticing several other tunnels below us that go deeper underground, but there's no way I'm going to risk heading down one of those.\n\n\"See here,\" I tell Caden. \"Here's what we're going to do. See this path, nearest the surface?\" He nods. \"We'll take that. It may take longer, but it could be safer. And that way, if we do run into trouble, we can always get out.\" I point to a few thin white lines marked at the surface by some odd red dots. \"I think these are cracks like the one we came in. It looks like this runs along the base of the Peaks.\"\n\n\"The Peaks?\" Caden repeats.\n\nI flip the map back to an over ground view, and show him the ridge of cliff-like mountains. \"We're running along the base of that.\" I frown. \"Actually, I think our path may even go under in parts. The inside of that mountain is literally pure volcanic glass. No metals can live there for some reason. Some kind of electromagnetic pulse.\"\n\nCaden echoes my frown. \"Volcanic glass.\"\n\n\"Ever see a mountain that has no caves, that looks like a sheath of sheer black glass? Well, get a good look, because that's one.\" I tap the map, switching the view to what the cliff mountains would look like at that moment on the hologram. \"Used to be an active volcano thousands of years ago that the metals pulverized. Now it's dead and impenetrable.\"\n\nI close the map and pull a food bar out of my pack, handing it to Caden. \"Now's as good a time as any. Let's rest for a second.\" We eat in silence and drink a water packet each.\n\n\"Can my suit do all that, too?\" Caden asks, and I flinch at the sound of his voice in the quiet between us. I nod and show him the control panels on his wrist. The overview is short, but Caden picks it up rapidly and is soon flicking through all the versions of the map. Just in case, I also quickly run through the security parameters of the suit that I initiated for both of us earlier.\n\n\"The suit is intuitive and attuned to you. It stores your data. Technically, we're not really supposed to interchange the suits \u2013 they're designed for each person \u2013 but Shae and I used to steal the Vectors' suits because they had way cooler tech. I developed an algorithm to erase the programmed data so we could use them.\"\n\nI blush and trail off, realizing that I'm showing just how much of a geek I am, but as Shae used to say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. My father knew what I was capable of at an early age and fed my brain a steady diet of bioengineering, physics, and advanced robotics.\n\nIt was a conscious act of rebellion on my part when I opted to train with the soldiers and become a part of Cale's personal guard. My father ranted and raved for days that I belonged in his lab with him. It incensed me to the point that I requested living quarters in the castle under the guise of protecting Cale, when it was only to escape my father's manic rages. In the end, he twisted it to suit him, because I ended up leading his greatest creations \u2013 the Vectors. I'd never understood why he was so pleased about that, but it got him off my back, and that was reward enough for me.\n\nCaden's voice makes me jump again. \"I think it's cool that you know all that.\"\n\n\"We learn different things than you do,\" I say, shrugging. \"But it doesn't make what you know any less important. We just evolve differently based on where we live.\"\n\nAn indistinct sound brushes gently across my ears, and for a second I think that I've imagined it. But then I hear it again, like a single note of something. It's some kind of bell-like sound. \"Did you hear that?\" I whisper to Caden.\n\n\"No, what?\"\n\n\"It's a chime or something. Listen.\"\n\nWe both sit in silence, our ears straining, waiting until the sound comes again. \"There it is! It sounds like music,\" Caden says, his eyes wide. \"Count it; it'll come back in six beats. Listen.\"\n\nCaden's right. The sound repeats, nearly inaudible as if it's coming from a long distance away. It's barely an echo of an echo, but we're both standing and staring at each other, our eyes shifting around us. I glance down at the security pad on my suit and check Caden's for good measure.\n\nNothing.\n\nIt doesn't beep, not even when the shadows materialize from the walls before us, with weapons pointing directly at our hearts.\n\nTHE OTHERS\n\n\"What the\u2013\"\n\n\"Shut up, Caden,\" I hiss, staring at the five men in dirty brown tunics. Despite the weapons pointed toward me, I shift slightly to the right so that Caden is standing behind me. My eyes slide down to the keypad at my wrist \u2013 the alarm is still silent, confirming that none of them are hybroids. One of the men steps forward, and I tense automatically, wishing that the empty water packet in my hand were one of my blades.\n\nHe holds a wand-like device in his hand, which he waves up and down our bodies. I realize quickly what it is \u2013 some kind of metal detection tool. But unlike our suits, it makes a harsh static-like sound, as if it's malfunctioning. The man bangs it against his side, staring at it and then our uniforms as if confused.\n\nDid he think we're Vectors?\n\n\"Come,\" he says, and I frown. His voice is non-threatening but firm. I have no idea who these people are, but it's clear that they want us to go with them. The fact is, I could take them all out easily without endangering Caden, but I'm curious. I've never heard of people living in the Outers. I stare at the men. They all look physically fit, if a little thin.\n\n\"Where?\" I ask.\n\n\"No questions,\" he says, and then jerks his head to two of the men behind him. They remove our packs and our weapons, and I let them. Nodding for Caden to do the same, I study the leader carefully. There are no marks on his face or any other distinctive characteristics giving any clue as to who he is, but it is clear that he's in charge. His body is lean with muscle, his eyes clear and bright. I need to know who these people are and what they're doing out here.\n\nThe men bind our wrists behind our backs, and we walk in single file down a tunnel offshoot that is completely concealed behind a bit of rock face right in front of where we had been sitting. I kick myself mentally, knowing that I should have investigated the tunnel maps in more detail when I found them earlier.\n\nThey don't blindfold us to conceal where they are going, and I understand the reason for that relatively quickly. I try to keep track of where we're heading, but it's difficult with all the twists and turns, and after a while, I realize that I have no idea where we are. Everything looks the same. Rock and more rock. Dirt floor. Dirt ceiling. The floor tilts slightly, and I wonder for a second how long we'd been walking downward. I hadn't even noticed.\n\nAfter a while, the tunnel widens into a large cave that's lit with some kind of sconces. There's a guard at the end of the space who eyes us ferociously. Caden tenses beside me, but I throw my shoulder into his and force a reassuring smile to my face. When I pass the guard, I glare so hard that I see the shock in his face. He's barely a boy, I notice with a grin. Good to see that my General mojo still works.\n\nIn the cave beyond the one we're in, the walls are black and shiny. The air feels cooler, as if there's some kind of draft coming from outside, but I know that that's impossible if we're as far down underground as I'm guessing we are.\n\nThere are a few more people now, dressed in the same brown garb. They stare at us with anxious, scared expressions as if we are somehow the enemy, and some of them even scurry away. A small face peeps from behind one of the people, and I feel my heart lurch. A child, barely three years old, stares curiously at me.\n\n\"What is this place?\" I ask, but the only answer I get is a burlap sack over my head. I struggle against the ties at my wrists and fling my head back so hard that it crunches wetly into bone.\n\n\"Stop!\" a voice yells, and then lowers at my ear. \"No one's going to hurt you, but we do not know who you are, and so we cannot trust you. If you are judged to be a friend, then we will remove the bag, but until then you must keep it on. Please do not struggle. There are ways for us to restrain you, or worse, sedate you.\"\n\n\"Where's the boy?\" I grit out, knowing I'm indeed at the voice's mercy. I don't know what kind of sedation techniques they use here, but I don't want either Caden or me to find out the hard way. \"I need to know he's with me, and you have my word that I will not struggle.\"\n\nSomething heavy and warm is thrust into my left side. \"Caden? Is that you?\" I say urgently through the bag. \"You OK?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I'm OK. Caught a hook to my chin, but can't say I blame them. I kicked out when I felt the bag on my head.\" He pauses and leans closer, led only by instinct. We're standing back to back at that point, and I can feel his head pressing into my shoulder. \"Where are we?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I answer honestly. \"I've never even heard of people, as in real live people, living out here.\"\n\nA prod, and we're walking again. I stay close to Caden, making sure that our arms are always touching at every step. His voice is nearly silent. \"Are they going to kill us?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" I whisper back. \"At least not right now.\"\n\nEngaging my other senses, I can feel the air change against my body. The space feels far more open than any of the others before. If I didn't know better, I would say that we were once more outside. It even smells different, but my sense of smell is a little undermined by the musty odor of the bag over my head. Once in a while, I'll also hear a gasp or a voice. More people? It baffles me that there's a whole community of humans living in the Outers, obviously by choice. The Outers is a place devoid of life, devoid of anything but metals left over from the war, and hybroids that scavenge to survive.\n\nA few minutes later, we stop walking and the bags are removed. I blink against the sudden light. Only three of the initial men are with us. We're standing in some kind of holding room, with a rough-hewn door barred with metal on one end and two thin cots on the other. They thrust us into it and swing the door shut behind them. Our packs are placed along the wall near the outer passageway. Our weapons are nowhere in sight.\n\n\"Wait!\" I shout, but they've faded into the darkness before I can take a breath.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Caden asks. He looks concerned but no worse for wear, other than a reddening bruise on his chin.\n\n\"That looks like it hurts,\" I say.\n\nHe grins wryly. \"The one who hit me was my age, I think. I saw it coming, but my brain said freeze instead of duck. Don't worry; I have my eye on him for a little payback when we get out of here.\"\n\n\"Cade,\" I begin. \"I don't know who these people are or what they're doing here, but you need to know that they may not want us here.\" I don't say that they wouldn't want me there, especially if they know anything about who I used to be. But if they are from Neospes, sooner or later one of them will recognize me. \"And if they don't, we need to do anything we can to get out, OK, even if they look like kids your age.\"\n\n\"I get it.\"\n\n\"No, you don't. In this world, we are taught how to kill before we even learn how to talk. They are not kids like you are. If they see you as the enemy, they will take you out without blinking.\"\n\n\"Riv, I said I got it,\" he snaps.\n\nI stare at him but he looks away. I can tell that it's bothering him. That kid had probably hit him out of pure gut instinct, and he maybe hadn't expected it to hurt quite as much as it did. I, for my part, was happy that it had only been a fist and not something worse.\n\nMy head feels fuzzy, and I'm not sure it's because we're underground. Something feels off but I can't quite put my finger on it. I lean against one side of the room and close my eyes for a second before taking stock of the cell we're trapped in.\n\nThe walls of our prison are the same dark, shiny rock from the first cave, and it's oddly warm and smooth to the touch. There are no openings, but I can feel airflow coming from somewhere against my legs. I push off the wall to follow the changes in the air to an inch-long vent carved into the floor. The air is cool and smells fresh, as if it's being piped in from the outside. I find that odd and am intrigued, because it seems like this whole place has somehow been constructed. Such an elaborate venting system hasn't happened by accident.\n\nSomeone enters the hallway beyond our door with a tray. It's a young girl. Her face is covered with a veil, but she doesn't look at us. She's been instructed to deliver whatever is on that tray and leave without any eye contact.\n\n\"What's your name?\" Caden asks, his hands wrapped around the bars of the door as she slides the tray underneath along the floor.\n\nStartled, she answers automatically. \"Sela, sir.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Sela, for the food.\"\n\nShe smiles despite herself at his gentle words, and then without warning, her eyes grow wide and terrified as she glances up into the far corner of the room. Realizing that I'm following her gaze, her eyes drop hastily to the floor. Sela shuffles out far more quickly than she'd entered, and is gone without another word.\n\n\"You scared her,\" Caden says reproachfully to me.\n\nHe pulls the tray to the middle of the room, and I squat next to him. There are two wooden cups of water and some kind of ground meal in a bowl. He stares at me.\n\n\"You think it's safe?\" he says. I frown. \"You said if they wanted us dead, they would have killed us by now, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, but killing by poisoning is far less messy than an arrow in the stomach.\"\n\nCaden rolls his eyes at me and stares glassily at the food. \"I'm starving. It feels like hours since I ate that food bar. And I'm so thirsty.\" He looks away from the tray with effort. \"The smell of it is killing me.\"\n\nFor a second, I stare at him mutely, wanting to answer but unable to. The outline of his body shimmers into two people as my vision flickers. Forming the words in my head takes energy. \"You can eat if you want to, Cade.\"\n\n\"Are you going to?\"\n\nI shake my head thickly. \"No, not until I find out where we are and who these people are. Force of habit.\"\n\n\"Are you OK?\" Caden asks me, frowning. \"You look a little woozy.\"\n\n\"I feel really tired. You?\" I ask. Caden shakes his head. \"Must just be me then.\"\n\nI stretch, circling and pumping my arms to get the blood flowing in my body. It helps a little. I study the tiny black spot on the corner of the wall. If Sela hadn't looked directly there, the spot would have been unnoticeable, as had obviously been intended, but now it bothers me. What exactly had she been so afraid of when she'd looked up there? The way her eyes had dropped to the floor right afterward makes me think twice about it.\n\nSquinting out of the corner of my eye, I study the dot. Something flashes \u2013 it's the barest hint of a reflection in a lens \u2013 and I belatedly realize that I am looking at a minuscule camera. Someone is looking at us right at that moment, and has been looking at us all along.\n\n\"Caden,\" I hiss. \"Don't even think about touching that food.\"\n\n\"But you just said\u2013\"\n\n\"I know what I said,\" I say exasperated. \"But I didn't know two minutes ago that we were being watched like rats in a cage.\"\n\nCaden's hand drops so quickly I almost laugh, but the shaken look on his face makes my humor fade instantly. He shoves the tray under the door.\n\nHis voice is a worried rasp. \"Where?\"\n\n\"Upper left corner of the room. Don't look now,\" I warn, grimacing as his eyes flick towards it.\n\n\"I see it.\" After several moments, he mouths. \"What's the plan?\"\n\n\"No plan. We wait.\"\n\nCaden frowns but I shake my head imperceptibly. If they can see us, I'm pretty sure that they can hear us. My guess is that they're waiting for the direction of some leader, some person who will decide what to do with us.\n\nI want \u2013 no \u2013 I need to know who that person is and what they're doing here outside the boundaries of the city, and building some kind of secret sector in the Outers. And most of all, how do they stay safe from the reptiles and the metals? It's baffling. Neospes, like other city pods around the rest of the world, was built on the knowledge that the Outers were uninhabitable. And yet, real people are living here.\n\nHave things changed that much in the three years I've been gone?\n\nThere's no doubt in my mind that the tiny camera has a full view of the entire room, and while they've taken our weapons, we still have the suits. I can at least try to understand the layout of where we are being held, and where we are on the map.\n\nI hold my arm up and press the map command. Nothing happens. I press it again but there's no response. Frowning, I tap in the security sequences to power up the suit but the entire thing remains unresponsive. I swear under my breath and try again. But it's no use. The suit has somehow been deactivated.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Caden asks.\n\n\"It's not working.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, it's not working? I thought you said the suits were automatic?\" Caden whispers. He averts his eyes hastily as I unzip and roll down my suit, separating the connection from my body and studying the microchips around the neural connector. But there's no light whatsoever.\n\n\"They've definitely been deactivated,\" I say quietly. \"Let me see yours.\"\n\nUncaring of the cameras or the fact that I'm clad in just a sports bra, I detach Caden's suit and roll it down to his waist, but it's the same as mine \u2013 completely unresponsive. He moves to shrug it back on, but I put a hand on his arm.\n\n\"Don't,\" I say. \"I don't know if the neural connectors are safe if the suit's been disabled.\" My fingers are still resting on his arm and I'm startled at the unexpected warmth of his skin. My eyes flutter to his leanly muscled chest, and my hand falls away along with my eyes. I step back, irritated at myself for being distracted. I've seen Cale shirtless countless times, but seeing Caden without a shirt bothers me far more than it should.\n\nThe buzzing in my head grows louder and my vision distorts once more, so much so that the floor starts to undulate beneath my feet. I shake my head roughly, trying to clear the static that seems to be crackling and coming from the inside my skull.\n\nI don't realize that I've slumped to the floor until I feel Caden's hands on my shoulders, shaking gently. \"Riven? Are you OK? You're freezing.\"\n\n\"Get off me,\" I say, shrugging him off. \"I'm fine.\"\n\nBut Caden is right. My body is cold, as if it can no longer regulate my internal temperature. My teeth are chattering so hard that it feels like they'll break at any second. And claustrophobia overtakes me \u2013 a feeling I'd conquered years ago. As if on cue, my heartbeat elevates rapidly and suddenly; I can't breathe.\n\nCaden whips one of the scratchy wool blankets off one of the cots at the end of the room and throws it around my shoulders. The fuzziness in my head gets worse, like some kind of high-pitched drill. The walls seem like they're closing in, amplifying the sound tenfold. I clap my hands against my ears, but if anything, the sound grows louder. Caden's shouting something but I can't hear him over the noise in my brain.\n\nFocus, I tell myself. Focus. Breathe. Focus. Breathe.\n\nIt's an old mantra that Shae had taught me when I'd been held underground during fear training. It calms the noise as my breathing evens out. My skin feels warmer to the touch already. I have no idea what caused the episode, but I'm sure it has to do with some kind of post-traumatic eversion stress or some weird extended reaction to the serum.\n\n\"Something's wrong,\" Caden is saying to the dot in the wall. \"Can't you see that? We need help!\"\n\nI'm about to tell him that his cries for help are useless when I see movement out of the corner of my eye coming down the passageway.\n\n\"It's about goddamn time,\" Caden says, and then stands back as one of the same men from before opens the metal-barred gate. He walks to stand next to me, his arms folded against his chest. \"I don't know what you guys did to her, but you better fix her fast.\"\n\nCaden's expression is stony like his voice, the realization that I could be in real danger hard-hitting. All traces of the boy Caden are now gone.\n\n\"I'm fine, Cade,\" I say weakly. \"I feel better.\" I try to smile reassuringly at him, but it fades as one of the men steps forward. As before, they are all dressed in the same brown clothing, their faces stoic and expressionless. Caden's hand comes to rest on my shoulder, squeezing gently. His fingers knead the muscles , releasing some of the built-up tension, and I let my eyes drift close, despite the risk.\n\n\"Who are you?\" The voice is soft and musical... a woman, then. My gaze snaps open. \"Who sent you?\"\n\n\"No one sent us,\" I say, keeping my voice modulated and my hands flat against my sides. But the woman squints at Caden and steps closer. I see the recognition dawn in her eyes, and my heart sinks. She stares from Caden to me, and again, there's an odd familiarity in her expression. Does she think he's Cale, as I'd done at first?\n\nStill, she's not too sure about me and steps close enough to touch the faded blue braid wound into my hair. My rank. Her fingers drift down to touch the inked seal on the side of my neck \u2013 the one that marks me as a general of Neospes \u2013 and lingers against the black lines beneath it.\n\n\"You're the general,\" she says. \"The one who defected three years ago.\" Her eyes narrow, but something in her voice tugs at me... a familiar tone, perhaps. Maybe I'm still fuzzy. I've never seen \u2013 or heard \u2013 this woman before in my life. \"Have you been here all this time?\"\n\n\"No,\" I say. I don't confirm or deny that I am whom she guesses. Caden is staring at me with wide eyes, but the understanding swirling in them is indisputable. Cat's out of the bag now, and there's no use pretending I'm not who I am.\n\n\"Who are you?\" I toss my own question in response back to the woman, who's studying me with an odd expression that makes me feel open and uncomfortable. Naked. I tug the blanket across my shoulders and stand. All the men behind the woman rest their hands on the hilts of their weapons, but I ignore them. \"Who are you?\" I repeat, my tone sharper.\n\nShe laughs at my posturing. It is a sound devoid of any humor. \"We're nobody. Exiles. Traitors. Enemies of Neospes. Defectors.\" She says the last word with the hint of a smile, but I am growing tired of this game. They're toying with us. I can take the five of them out blindfolded, even in my unfamiliar state. Without looking at Caden, I tighten my body into a state of readiness but freeze at her next words. \"You really don't know me, do you, Riven?\"\n\nAs before, I'm certain I've never seen this woman before, but then again, her hair is covered in a brown wrap. Her face is the same color as her clothing. Her eyes look dark in the light. She could be anyone.\n\nI shrug, arrogant, raising my palms upward in expectation.\n\nShe lifts a hand and removes the wrap, and her hair falls loose, so long that the silken waves reach past her back. It is so blond that it's nearly white, and I know without even seeing them that her eyes in the daylight are light gray. Silver.\n\nLike mine.\n\nThe only thing I inherited from her.\nA WEB OF LIES\n\n\"You're not her. You can't be her,\" I say in an emotionless voice. \"She's dead. My mother died years ago, strapped down to a bed in a lab. I saw her with my own eyes.\"\n\nThe words sting like poison barbs against my lips, scorching my insides on the way out, and I can't even look at this woman who makes my heart pound and my eyes burn. No one in Neospes has hair that color, but where she came from \u2013 one of the cities on the other side of the burned oceans \u2013 that hair color is common.\n\nIt's not her.\n\nMy heart argues otherwise, but my brain sees it for what it must be... a trick, some kind of lie to disable me. I cross my arms over my chest. My eyes narrow. \"Don't push me. Who are you?\"\n\n\"I did die that day,\" the woman says. Her voice is soft so only I can hear it. \"Just not in the way that you think.\"\n\n\"I don't know what game you're playing, and I don't care. You know who I am, and you know that if I choose, none of you will be left standing.\" The men once more bristle at my words, but I ignore them. All I can feel is the hot emotion welling up inside me like a tide, uncontrollable and violent. It's at odds with the coldness of my words. \"My mother is dead.\"\n\n\"Look again, Riven. Trust yourself, not what you've been told.\"\n\n\"I know what I saw,\" I say flatly.\n\n\"Look again.\"\n\nAt her gentle insistence, I struggle to keep myself in check, but it's too late. There isn't a shred of doubt on her face, no sign of untruth in her eyes, but I refuse to give in. I can't... because if what she says is true, then my whole life has been a lie. She has to be lying.\n\nHow dare this woman presume to be my mother?\n\nMy rage erupts like a volcano, burning my mind with lost memories and thoughts I want forgotten. Without thinking, I drop to my knees in a crouch and spin behind her. I clip one of the men with my boot and take another out with a jab to the jaw before anyone can blink. The other two lurch toward me with their weapons, but I'm spinning again, my feet and hands darting out with swift, lethal purpose. And they too join their brothers on the floor.\n\nThe woman hasn't moved or drawn any weapons, but I still let my fury pin her up against the wall, my forearm under her slim neck.\n\n\"Riv, no,\" Caden says from behind me. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" I growl to him. \"She's an imposter. An exile.\" I turn back to her. The compassion in her clear eyes irritates me even more. \"Otherwise, why would she and all her followers be hiding out here instead of in the city? And she's a liar. A fucking liar!\"\n\nMy voice breaks on the last word, but still the woman doesn't move, staring at me with those brilliant eyes and daring me to believe the impossible. I flinch against the light palm pressing along the base of my spine. \"Riven,\" Caden says again, his voice soft, \"Stop. You're not a soldier anymore. Calm down. What these people are doing here is anyone's guess, but it's not our place to judge. We need their help. Remember why we're here?\"\n\nHis words are tentative, but I can't see past the emotion storming inside of me. The fact that some stranger could elicit such a frightening response out of me because of the mere color of her hair or her eyes makes me furious... furious at myself, and furious at her for claiming to be someone that she isn't. Caden's foolishly timed words nudge me over the edge of my tenuous control on my anger.\n\nMy voice is calm. Deadly calm. \"It became my place to judge when they imprisoned us here.\" I turn to face him, my expression echoing my voice, releasing my hold on the woman so that she slumps back against the wall, clutching her neck but still silent. \"And don't you ever talk about me being a soldier, ever again. You know nothing of it. I will be a soldier until the day that I die. So don't presume to think that you know me or what I am, ever. Understand?\" I jab at the seal on my neck. \"You asked me once what this was. It's a seal, a brand. It marks me as theirs and I can never escape it as long as I'm alive. And the black lines\" \u2013 I'm spitting now, advancing on him, my words merging together \u2013 \"mark the lives I've taken, those I've killed. Still think I'm not so tough?\" I say, mocking his words from his bedroom, a lifetime ago.\n\nCaden is up against the other wall and I'm so close that I can feel his shallow breaths on my skin. But there's no real fear on his face; instead his eyes are wide and worried, focused on me. His hands are flat against my shoulders but non-threatening.\n\n\"I may not know who you were, Riven,\" he says quietly. \"But I know who you are now.\"\n\n\"Lady Aurela!\"\n\nI jerk and spin around at the shouts behind me, but it's the name that knocks the wind out of me. My mother's name. This has to be some kind of intricate plot. They're all in on it, trying to weave some convoluted web around me, but for the life of me I can't seem to figure out all the pieces. Why does my head feel so clouded, as if I can't think properly, like there's something blocking me, confusing my thoughts and weakening my resolve?\n\n\"Get off, Caden,\" I mutter, my anger at him draining away, and shoving his hands off my shoulders. \"You don't know anything about Neospes and you don't know anything about me.\"\n\nMy eyes are drawn to the blur of movement in the outer passageway, but the woman holds up a silent palm, and the men milling there stop. \"You're not angry with him. You're angry with me,\" she says, walking forward. \"Riven, it is me. I didn't die that day.\"\n\n\"I saw her die,\" I insist. \"On that table.\"\n\nAurela shook her head, her eyes darkening with pain and regret. \"You shouldn't have been there. He knew you were there, too. He wanted you to see it so you'd know what challenging him would cost.\"\n\n\"It's common knowledge that I was in that room, and what my father was capable of,\" I say softly, but my words have less conviction. \"It still doesn't make you her.\"\n\n\"Riven, please,\" she says. \"I know you've changed. You've had to, but I know that you know it's me. Listen to what your heart is telling you and not your reason. You and Shae\u2013\"\n\n\"Don't you talk about her,\" I hiss, pain seething through my voice, but Aurela continues despite my interruption.\n\n\" \u2013were everything to me. She asked you to come with her, but you didn't. She couldn't tell you about me, because he would have found out, and as you said, you know what he was capable of.\"\n\nDespite my mistrust, my mind is reeling. \"Shae never asked me...\" But my voice trails off as the memory snaps into my brain, followed by Shae's answer to why I had chosen not to go with her: He owned you then, and he owns you now. I stare at Aurela. \"She never said anything about you.\"\n\n\"She couldn't. The quarters were monitored. He would have killed her.\"\n\nI push past the growing knot in the pit of my stomach. My voice is cold and hard. \"So you left, and she left. You left me with him.\"\n\nAurela is in front of me now, her face constricted. \"If I could change that night, I would. I would go back to get you whatever the cost; you have to believe that, Riven. No matter what.\"\n\nEverything inside me wants to argue, to scream, to rail against this woman who had always told me she loved me in the dead of night when only my nightmares kept me company, but suddenly I am tired of fighting. I am tired of pushing away everyone around me. I am tired of loss. I'm wary of letting logic rule my every action when it's obvious that my heart knows it's her. The emotion of it is overwhelming... splintering all of my carefully constructed walls.\n\nCaden is watching me, and as I meet his eyes, he nods just once. He will support whichever path I decide. I shake my head tiredly and sit on the edge of one of the cots. The woman is quiet, waiting and knowing that my next words will decide how we leave this room. Truth and anguish and regret are written all over her face. I close my eyes for a long time.\n\n\"No, it would have been a suicide mission for anyone to come back,\" I say eventually. \"That was the night he activated the Vector program... because of Shae. There were kill orders on sight for all defectors of the realm.\" I pause, the bitter question burning a hole in my mouth. \"How did you survive?\"\n\nAurela's face is wet with silent tears but she answers. \"Annis.\"\n\nAnnis was my mother's research assistant. Like my father, my mother was a brilliant advanced genetics scientist. They were paired to lead the bioengineering and robotics programs, but when my father grew interested in reanimating the dead, my mother disagreed. She fought him tooth and nail on it, saying that it was a gateway mistake heading straight back to what they were just rebuilding from as a society \u2013 the Tech War. But my father was headstrong and arrogant.\n\nTheir intellectual arguments were epic, their fights shattering. Shae used to take me into our sleeping cell with her fingers covering my ears. Then one day, it went too far. In a fit of rage, he'd shoved her and she'd hit her head. Hard. Everyone at the hospital had said that her odds of survival were excellent, but somehow, she'd still died the next day.\n\nThey'd never been able to prove anything, but I knew. I'd seen the security footage that he'd stolen and hidden \u2013 saw him screaming at her in the dead of night alone in that hospital room, trying to force her to stay with him. She'd wanted to leave him and take us with her. In the end, he'd poisoned her. I saw him inject the poison himself into her intravenous tubing. If he couldn't have her, then no one else would. That was the day that I lost both my parents.\n\n\"Annis?\" I say weakly. \"But he poisoned you. I saw.\"\n\nA soft smile. \"She was there, hiding. She bled the poison out and then she helped me to flee Neospes before she returned to fake my death.\"\n\n\"Yes. I remember. She handled your organ reassignment and cremation.\"\n\n\"Someone else's, but there had to be a record.\"\n\n\"So where did you go?\" I ask. \"Here?\"\n\n\"Not immediately. I was too weak to survive the Outers, despite what little we'd heard about others surviving. So I went to Sector Seven where my great-aunt still lived. She concealed us, and then when I was well enough, we made our way out here.\"\n\nI nod slowly, shaken by the onslaught of memories. \"It never made sense to me after you died why Father still branded you as an enemy of Neospes. You were dead. Why sully your memory and what you had contributed?\" The realization is slow like icy water. \"So he knows you're not dead?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Aurela concedes. \"He never believed Annis, even though the data was all there. He sent waves of soldiers out to all the sectors, saying that I had been named a traitor and had stolen valuable crown research. He offered wealth and food and weapons, but the Artok are a proud tribe. They protect their own. I was never found. So for all intents and purposes, I am dead.\"\n\n\"But does he think you're dead?\"\n\n\"I honestly don't know,\" Aurela says.\n\n\"And Shae?\"\n\n\"Unlike your father, Shae never stopped looking for me.\" Her words unlock another memory, one of Shae telling me at night that my mother would always care for us no matter what, and that I'd see her again one day. But I never believed her. I cried and nodded but never believed. Once more, Shae was right. Aurela smiles again; this time, it's a proud smile. \"She's so tenacious. She made Annis tell her, and two days later, we found her wandering out here on her own, nearly half-dead.\" Aurela stares at me expectantly, and I feel the answering dread unfurl in my stomach. \"She's not with you?\"\n\nI try to speak but I can't. The words are lodged in my throat like sharp stones, choking me with their broken edges. I open and shut my mouth like a flailing fish, gasping. Caden answers from behind me.\n\n\"She didn't make it,\" he says. \"Shae's dead.\"\n\nWithout warning, Aurela falls back like a rock, and I find myself lurching forward to catch her. Her skin is warm and she smells the same as she did ten years before, of vanilla and earth. If I wasn't convinced before, I am now. Her silvery eyes find mine and then I'm hugging her so tightly, I can't even breathe. I'm sobbing and breathless, and I pull even tighter.\n\n\"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. She... died to save us. So stupid and so bullheaded.\"\n\nMy face is wet against hers. \"Shhh,\" she whispers, comforting me as if I'm still two years old, crying from a skinned knee. \"It's OK. Shae knew what she'd gotten into. Like you, she had a soldier's heart. I just... Nothing really prepares you to lose a child, does it? Don't worry; we'll get through this together.\"\n\nIt seems like forever that we've been lying on the ground, until I hear a suspicious sniff behind me and glance up to see Caden hastily wiping his face. I do the same and roll my eyes at him. Already, I can feel the cold numbness seeping through my body \u2013 my usual self-defense mechanism against emotion. Showing vulnerability is still not something I'm entirely comfortable with, despite my deepest tiny desire to stay in my mother's arms forever.\n\nI stand, pulling Aurela up with me, and step away as if it will erase the last few minutes. But this time, the deadening numbness is slower than usual. My regret cripples me, as do whatever feelings I have for this woman I haven't seen in a decade. My mother.\n\n\"This is Caden,\" I rasp.\n\n\"I know who he is,\" Aurela responds, pulling Caden into a long hug. She looks at me over his shoulder. \"Thank you for keeping him safe.\"\n\nI want to agree that that's exactly what I've done, but for some reason I can't hold her gaze. My eyes drop to the floor and I mumble something unintelligible. The truth is, I went to the other world to find Caden at Cale's request. Not to keep him safe at all. I haven't even been sure of what I'm going to do with Caden once we get to the city, but that's the thing that has been driving me. Complete the mission. Worry about everything else like feelings and casualties later.\n\nOnly, now we were stuck in some underground secret village in the Outers on the outskirts of the city \u2013 a flourishing city that isn't under the thumb of Neospes.\n\n\"How do you know who I am?\" Caden asks, quietly interrupting my thoughts, staring from Aurela and back to me.\n\n\"I've known you a very long time. Come,\" Aurela says, \"Let's go to my quarters, and we'll talk more.\"\n\nThe men in the passageway clear a path as we walk past in Aurela's wake. I grab our packs on the way out despite some hard stares from the men standing there. A quick search through the contents confirms that nothing of value has been removed, other than the missing weapons.\n\n\"Where are my blades?\" I ask.\n\n\"They're safe,\" Aurela responds. \"Come.\"\n\nAs we move away from the room, I notice that the rock composition of the wall shifts into something less glassy and more earthy, although still marbled with the black rock from the cave before. At the same moment, I feel something vibrate at my waist, where the shirtsleeves of my suit are wrapped underneath the blanket I still have slung over my shoulders. The lights on the keypad are blinking as if the suit's trying to reactivate.\n\nI frown, shrugging off the blanket and pulling the top half of the suit back over my shoulders, wincing at the slight sting of the neck connector plugging into my central nervous system. It's trying desperately to reboot, but something's still running interference.\n\nAurela turns glances at me out of the corner of her eye. \"It's not going to work,\" she says quietly.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The suits. Do you know why they didn't work? Especially in that room?\" Aurela waves a hand at the black-veined walls of the tunnel. Her voice is still careful and quiet. \"It's electromagnetically charged volcanic glass. It disables all computers, all robotics.\" I frown at her words. Volcanic? Are we near the Peaks? I'm still frowning as she continues. \"It's how we're safe from the metals and the hybroids. Even in here, where the pulse is less strong, it still interferes with any computer signals. We're virtually undetectable.\"\n\nI power down the suit, and remove the neural connector to ask the question heavy in my mouth. \"Are we near the Peaks?\"\n\nA laugh. \"Honey, we're in the Peaks.\"\n\n\"But how is that even possible...\" I gasp. \"The Peaks are impenetrable.\"\n\n\"To androids, yes,\" Aurela agrees. \"But not to us.\"\n\nShe ushers us into another room, this one veined with light blue quartz-like glass. Oddly, I feel like a huge weight is lifted off me. I don't know if it's the color of the walls \u2013 it reminds me of the sky in Caden's world \u2013 but I take a long deep breath and feel less muddled. The remaining cobwebs in my head clear as if by magic, just as my suit boots up. Aurela is watching me closely, a slight frown marring her forehead, but she looks away when I make eye contact.\n\nI turn to look around. A huge table surrounded by chairs dominates the room. In one corner, there's a long desk with several flat-screen computers, data flashing across all their screens. I turn to Aurela but Caden beats me to the punch.\n\n\"I thought you said no computers worked here,\" Caden says. He too had been listening quietly and paying attention.\n\n\"They do in this room. We have to have some means of communication with people outside and to keep up to date on what's going on in Neospes.\" She nods to my clothes. \"Those will work now.\"\n\nBut I'm already powering up the suit. I can see that the three men who have accompanied us all have their hands on their weapons. Obviously, the technology of the Vectors' suits is something they are wary of.\n\nAnd rightly so.\n\nThe suit just doesn't just control temperature or create awesome topological holographs. It's an advanced bio-weapon itself. At the touch of a button, bladed spikes rise from the fabric of the suit. It can harden like armor in less than a second, or change color to fade into a background. The suit is designed for espionage, insinuation, and attack, and its defensive and offensive properties are legendary. But as I'd showed Caden, the best thing about them is the neural connector that taps into the brain's signals to the body. Regardless of programmed or natural human impetus, the suit responds to flight or fight signals in a millisecond. In some of the later models, the suit calibrates to your very thoughts.\n\nI've never been a fan of the automatic-pilot mode. It's too unpredictable when tapped into humans. That technique works best with the Vectors, because they're emotionless and run by computers. Humans are too subject to emotional decisions, especially under stress. If the suit gets mixed messages, it will opt for the first directive, even if there's a later counter-command. It'll then have to be manually overridden, which in many cases means it's already too late.\n\nStill, limitations aside, short of flying, it's a super-suit, unmatched in design or abilities.\n\nDefense, I command silently, and feel the programming engage as the suit tightens against my body. The movement is barely noticeable to human eyes, but the slight smile twitching along the corners of my mother's mouth irks me. It's no surprise \u2013 she knows the suits better than anyone. After all, before she defected, she invented bioprogramming of the early prototypes.\n\nI stare at her with narrowed eyes.\n\n\"You still don't trust easily, do you?\" Aurela remarks.\n\nI'm hard-pressed to wipe my standard frown off my face. \"Not really. Where are my weapons?\"\n\n\"Why do you need them? Surely you're protected enough already.\" Her meaningful glance dips to my uniform, but in the same breath, she gestures to a cot against the far wall, and with some relief I notice my harness and scabbard on top of it along with our two crossbows. I walk over to inspect them, but they seem the same as before. If anything, my swords look like they've been cleaned and oiled. I frown but sling the harness over my arm.\n\nAurela sits at the table and inclines her head for Caden and me to do the same. I place the ninjatas carefully on the table and take a seat. At a glance from their leader, the men who had accompanied us leave the room. The last one \u2013 a boy near my own age \u2013 shoots a glare at me that could melt rock, but I just grin, baring my teeth at him in a mockery of a smile. It's a look that has scattered crowds. His glare fades quickly.\n\n\"Haven't lost your touch, I see,\" Aurela says, noticing the exchange. At my stare, she continues, her voice soft. \"There are many stories of you, even ones as a mother I wish I'd never heard. But you did what you were commanded to do, and you did it extraordinarily well.\" I remain silent. \"At fourteen, your reputation preceded you. Even grown men were terrified to face you. What made you leave? Defect?\"\n\nI knew the question would come. I spare a brief look to Caden but his face is carefully expressionless. He wants to know the answer, too. \"Cale ordered me to find Caden.\" I pause, searching for the right words. \"I was to bring him back alive.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You know why,\" I snap, evasive.\n\nAurela's return stare is measured. \"We need to trust each other, Riven. I know you feel you can't trust me, and that I will have to earn that from you. Even though I don't fully know your motives, you're here and he\" \u2013 she says with a searching glance at Caden \u2013\"is safe.\" She reaches her fingers across the table where my hand is resting, but I pull it away at the last second. She lets hers rest where mine had been. \"I know that my daughter is in there somewhere. I felt it before. I don't know what happened with Shae, but she would have moved heaven and earth to keep Caden away from you if she thought you were a danger.\"\n\n\"She did,\" I grit out. \"She failed. She didn't trust me, either.\"\n\n\"She didn't at first.\"\n\n\"How do you know that? Did she tell you?\"\n\nAurela nods, folding her hands in her lap. \"Whenever she everted back here to evade the Vectors or you, she appraised me on what was happening in the other world.\"\n\nI slam to my feet, anger coloring the inside of my skin with dull red flame. \"And you let her? You let her evert over and over again, knowing what it would do to her? How could you do that? Knowing it would kill her?\" The words are rushing out of me like a river of pain from between clenched teeth. \"What kind of mother are you?\"\n\n\"A fighter, like you.\"\n\n\"You sent her to die!\" I scream, fist curling at my sides.\n\n\"She was there to protect him from you.\"\n\nAll I could see is her face behind the fire now burning in my brain, inflaming me. And then I'm lurching toward her. Out of the corner of my eye, Caden jerks out of his chair, but I don't let it distract me. For an older woman, my mother is fast, darting out of my way and spinning across the top of the table like a gymnast. I leap over it. I don't know whether it's my rage that blinds me, but I don't see her strike until it's too late. Her arm catches me across my side, knocking the wind out of me. In her other hand, I see the glinting blade of my ninjata that had been on the table. Its point is pressed against my neck.\n\nCaden flings himself on top of me before I can move. \"Riven, stop,\" he growls. \"Shae was there for me. You know that. She told you that. Stop blaming yourself or anyone else for her death. It was what she wanted.\"\n\nAll the fury seeps out of me like the air in a balloon, and I close my eyes. My voice is strangled and bitter. \"She died for nothing.\"\n\n\"That's not true,\" Caden says. \"She died for us.\"\n\n\"Then she died for nothing.\" I open my eyes to meet his, and then Aurela's. The pity in hers is suffocating. \"It is true. My mission\" \u2013 I spit the words \u2013 \"was to bring you to Cale. He's the king here. And he's sick. He needed me to find you\" \u2013 my heart twists, but Caden has to know all of it \u2013 \"for parts.\"\n\n\"For parts?\" he echoes vacantly. Caden's eyes are horrified but I have to finish. I have to tell him what he is. He'll find out sooner or later, and either way, he'll hate me for it.\n\n\"Body parts. You're a clone, Caden. You're not real.\" \nCONFESSIONS\n\nAurela's incredulous laugh is long and hollow and cold at my bombshell. I push Caden off and stand slowly, dragging him up beside me. Aurela is wiping tears from her eyes, waving away the people who had rushed into the room at the crashing sound of Caden's chair.\n\nCaden jerks away from me, shrugging off my arm. \"What do you mean, I'm a clone?\"\n\nBut I don't answer, my eyes still resting on Aurela, who is shaking her head with an expression of complete disbelief on her face. Caden is a clone, I'm sure of it. I'd heard it from Cale's own mouth.\n\n\"You're no clone,\" Aurela chokes and then looks at me, her stare discerning. \"Is that what Cale told you?\"\n\nI flinch inwardly at her words but I nod, wary, studying her face for deception. But her eyes are clear and her voice even more so. \"He's not. Caden is the real prince of Neospes.\"\n\n\"That's impossible.\" Though I think them, they're not my words. They're Caden's. He sinks into the chair behind us with a stupefied expression. \"I'm not... not a... prince.\"\n\n\"You're wrong,\" I say to Aurela. \"He's not. Cale is.\"\n\n\"Am I? Think back, Riven. You know I'm telling the truth.\"\n\nHad Cale lied to me? Or is Aurela the one lying? But as quickly as I ask myself the second question, I'm replaying the events in my head, searching for anything that could have told me Cale was lying. Why should I doubt him now, if I hadn't then?\n\nUnless I hadn't seen it. I hadn't wanted to see it.\n\nCloning is an old technology, used only by the royals, and forbidden everywhere else. It has undesirable side effects \u2013 we learned the hard way that clones had odd frailties \u2013 like weakened immune systems or psychosomatic disorders. In a world rebuilt on utopian principles, genetic purity was critical to survival, and cloning was outlawed shortly after the Tech War. But clones were still commissioned as safeguards for the monarchy, an extra layer to protect the royal line from insurgents. When Cale confided that his clone had been taken, I was suitably outraged on his behalf. He said that he was sick and would die if I weren't able to locate and bring the clone back to Neospes. I was the only one he could trust.\n\nAfter his father was murdered, I was so eager to do Cale's bidding, so eager to save him that I agreed without a second thought. But in hindsight, I still don't see any deception. Was I been so gullible? Am I still?\n\n\"I'd rather be a clone,\" Caden says dully to no one in particular. \"I always knew I was different, but this just takes the cake.\"\n\n\"So there's no clone?\" I ask slowly, Caden's inane words piercing the sudden fog of activity in my brain.\n\n\"No,\" Aurela says. \"There is. It's just not Caden.\"\n\nThe realization hits me through the fog like a ton of bricks to the face. I feel my feet stagger backward, and my hip braces against the side of the table. Grasping the edges with numb fingers, I hold myself from sliding down.\n\n\"Cale's the clone.\" My voice is a monotone. Aurela nods, her expression compassionate. The realizations come more quickly after the first. I put two and two together quickly. Cale's mother had left when he'd been four. \"Their mother left to protect the prince,\" I muse quietly, sparing a glance at Caden, who still looks like he's in some kind of waking dream. I don't blame him. My mind is spinning like an unstoppable top. I can't imagine the confusion he's feeling.\n\nAurela nods. \"She suspected Murek long before. She knew he was collaborating with your father to assassinate the king. It was only a matter of time before they came for her son.\" Aurela stops, lowering her voice. \"They wanted to use him. Leila knew she was in danger when she realized she was in the way. When she took him, she went to the Artok. They brought her to us, but the only real safe place for her and the prince was her world.\"\n\nJune wasn't lying after all. Leila had always been from over there, and she took her son to the only refuge she knew. And that's why June and Era broke all the oaths they'd taken as Guardians to protect her. The puzzle is far more intricate than I've ever imagined. I shake my head. \"Even if she did switch them before she\u2013\"\n\n\"She didn't switch them,\" Aurela interrupts. \"That was your father's idea after she everted. They needed a puppet, so they made up this story that his mother had died. But Cale\u2013\"\n\n\"\u2013told me the truth. That she'd everted with the clone. I mean, that's what he thought. Or what he'd been told.\" I pause and half stand. \"By Murek and my father.\"\n\nIt all made sense. My father knew that Cale was the only person who I ever had any loyalty to, so when Cale got sick, he took the opportunity to tell him about the clone, and it was natural that Cale asked me \u2013 his most trusted confidant \u2013 to track down the clone, even if by obeying his orders in secret, it made me appear to be a defector in the eyes of everyone else.\n\n\"I see you now understand.\"\n\n\"Why would they send me?\"\n\n\"Because you were the best,\" Aurela says gently. \"You are the best. The Vectors reported that Caden was with Shae in the Otherworld, and Cale knew you were the only one who could fight or beat her.\"\n\n\"So is Cale really sick, or is that all a lie, too?\"\n\nAurela pours something black that looks like coffee into three mugs, and sets a steaming cup in front of Caden and then in front of me. I take a gulp, and although the bitter taste overwhelms me at first, the aftertaste is thick and mellow like butterscotch.\n\n\"No, our reports confirm that he is sick.\" Her words cause the cracks inside of me to widen into furious chasms that I can feel splitting me apart. Relief seeps in to flood the fractures as I realize that Cale didn't lie to me. He didn't send me on some fool's mission. He didn't betray me to my father. He sent me to help him live, even if it were part of some misguided plot of Murek's. I'm sure Cale would never betray me. He is as much a victim of Murek and my father as we are.\n\nSighing heavily, I glance over at Caden, who hasn't moved, sitting with his head in his hands, staring into the mug as if it holds answers only he can see. I can't even imagine what this must be like for him.\n\n\"You OK, Caden?\" I ask.\n\n\"What do you care?\" he rasps without looking up. \"You brought me here to die, didn't you?\"\n\n\"No!\" I say, pounding my fist on the table so hard that the shock runs up my arm and through my back. \"I didn't. I mean, at first you were a target, but now...\" My voice trails off, caught in the turmoil of what exactly Caden has come to mean to me.\n\n\"Now what?\" he says, turning around with eyes so green, they're like the grass in his world. It's like they're seeing right into me, past all the flesh and bone, deep down where there's nothing else but truth. \"Now what, Riv?\" he whispers.\n\nI stare at Aurela, but she can't say the words for me. Instead, her face is compassionate, as if somehow she already knows. She knows what I feel... everything I've kept buried under my orders. I owe Caden the truth, don't I?\n\n\"But now...\" My throat is clogged and my eyes are smarting. \"Now it's different. You're my friend.\" I can see that those words are not enough. Caden's gaze drops from mine to stare once more into the coffee mug.\n\nI'm struck dumb. My mouth won't move. Nothing is moving. A single tear weeps out of the corner of my left eye. I leave it, feeling its hot path meandering down my cheek. My tears are the words I cannot say.\n\n\"Come,\" Aurela says gently, interrupting the heavy tension between Caden and me. \"Let's get you two settled for the night. We'll talk more tomorrow, once you've had some rest.\"\n\nThe minute we leave the room, I feel disoriented again, as if I'm suffering vertigo. I take deep breaths as Aurela escorts us down some more dark passageways. It helps. I notice that the men fall into silent step behind us, guarding their leader at every moment. Even though I know how important she is in this small community, for the first time I start to question just how important she is. She holds herself with a quiet confidence \u2013 the same self-assurance I remember as a child. But there's no arrogance in her words or her manner. She is one of them even as she leads them.\n\nCaden has a room all to himself with an armed guard. Now that I know who he is, I'm not surprised. Aurela is taking no chances that word has already gotten out about Caden's identity or that some zealous defector will try to get back into Murek's good graces by offering up the runaway prince.\n\n\"Cade,\" I say at the entrance. \"I'll see you tomorrow. OK?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" But he doesn't look at me at all, not even when he lies back on the cot at the far end of the room and lays his head on his palms, staring up at the ceiling. I stand there for a moment, uncomfortable, before I hear Aurela gently calling my name. \"Night, Cade.\"\n\nHe doesn't answer as I turn to follow Aurela. She stares at me with a knowing expression. \"Don't worry; we're not far away. And he'll be different in the morning. It's a lot for him to have to take in; just give him some time.\" I know that she's right, but Caden's aloofness hurts more than I ever thought it would.\n\nThe thought of Cale pops into my brain, and I shove him away. I can't choose. I won't. I'll have to find some other way around all of this... some way to save them both. I'll give myself up to my father if I have to, if there's anything he can do to save Cale.\n\n\"This is where you are,\" Aurela says. She points to an adjoining room. \"My quarters are just over there.\" Glancing around, I see that people are taking notice of where I've been placed \u2013 a room adjoining hers. Aurela reads my expression easily. \"It's because you're the bigger threat,\" she says smoothly.\n\nBut inside, I know there's more to it than that. She could have left me in the cell we'd been detained in, surrounded by armed guards. Instead, I'm like some guest in her private quarters. It's a message.\n\nA message that I am important.\n\nFor some reason, I don't like it. I'm not sure that I've forgiven her for everything between us, for everything that Shae knew... that I did not. For leaving me behind with him. My voice is bitter. \"I'd rather stay in the first room.\"\n\n\"Riven, that is a holding cell. None of them trust you as I do.\"\n\nI narrow my eyes at her. \"Why? Why do you trust me? You know who I am. What I do. What I've done.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know all of that. But I also know that you are my daughter, and there's some of me still in there, no matter how much he's tried to weed it out of you all those years.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I snap.\n\nHer voice is quiet. \"Nothing.\" Aurela stares at me for a second, her white-blonde hair curling around her shoulders. \"Get some rest. Things will look better in the morning,\" she says, and then, \"Riven?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I lo\u2013\"\n\n\"Don't say it,\" I snap back, cutting her off midsentence. \"You don't even know me.\" I stare with dead calm into her silver eyes. \"And you're right. He did cut every last part of you out of me. Everything human, everything that should feel something. He made me emotionless just like him. And you know what? I like it.\"\n\nI am so proud of the strength and conviction of my voice, but her tiny smile is my undoing. She steps forward and I hold my ground. I don't even blink when she takes a strand of hair that is stuck to my cheek and tucks it behind my ear, nor when her fingers trail over the tattoos on my neck to rest on my shoulder with a reassuring squeeze. \"And yet you wouldn't tell me this if you weren't fighting it inside this very moment, would you? Sleep well, my little blackbird.\"\n\nAnd with that, she was gone.\n\nI stare at the wooden door between our rooms for a long moment. She called me little blackbird. The thought draws me backward, and I'm sitting in my room, crying my eyes out.\n\n\"Why'd you name me Riven? It's so horrible,\" I was wailing. \"It's not even pretty. It's ugly, like me.\"\n\n\"You're not ugly, darling,\" my mother soothed. \"Your name was supposed to be Raven, which is the name of a tiny blackbird that visits me from the gorge behind the house. It has the prettiest whistle. When you were born, you made that sound.\"\n\n\"Really?\" I asked, still sobbing but curious.\n\n\"Yes, but well, mistakes happen. And your name was recorded as Riven.\" She kissed me on the nose then. \"I have an idea. How about if I call you little blackbird, just you and me? It could be our little secret.\"\n\nAnd I nodded, thrilled with having a secret name that remained a secret between us until the day she died... I mean, until now. Even Shae didn't know. If I had any doubt that she was who she said she was \u2013 my mother \u2013 I didn't anymore. No one would have known about that name but the two of us. It was ours alone.\n\nI glance around at my quarters. From force of habit, I'd already taken inventory of the small, square-shaped room the minute we'd walked in, but it looks the same as all the others \u2013 spartan, with the exception of a small table and chair on one side, next to a cot. Nothing, except its position next to Aurela's, marks it as superior.\n\nThe flame of a small candle dances against the wall, illuminating the white quartz and onyx colors in the rock. I stare at the rock and tilt my head to one side. I don't feel as claustrophobic or as unbalanced in this room. It's odd how I feel more uncomfortable in some areas of the Outer underground than I do in others, almost as if the rock composition is tied to my ability to function, like the computers. I laugh \u2013 I must be more worn out than I think.\n\nI glance at the cot, but I can't sleep. Too much nervous energy is swirling inside of me. My mind still feels muddled, so I strip down to my underclothes, taking care to fold the suit over the chair. I sit cross-legged on the floor and pull energy into my center for a long period until my heartbeat is steady and my breathing full. I extend each arm forward, and then ease my legs out into a side-split, stretching my tight muscles. The sequence of calisthenics falls into place as I twist my torso over my left leg, and my mind goes blank, muscle memory kicking in.\n\nNearly an hour later, my body is dripping with sweat, but I haven't felt so alive since being underground. I'm wired, energy coursing through me and filling my cells with vibrant life. Without missing a beat, I grab my ninjata blades and start swinging them in a graceful arc, my legs extending outward at the same pace.\n\nThe exercise starts out slow and then gradually builds in speed until I'm gasping for breath and whirling the blades with incredible swiftness. I'm moving so quickly that the glossy blades are a blur in the room, the flicker of candlelight on them almost making them look like liquid flame between my fingers.\n\nThe swords are moving faster than I am, and my body strives to keep up, moving faster and faster and faster, until something hot nicks the back of my leg. I jerk to a halt, staring at the watery crimson trail that is welling against my skin. The voice at the corner of the room takes me by surprise.\n\n\"Getting a little rusty?\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" I pant, wiping the sweat off my face with my forearm. \"You should be sleeping.\"\n\n\"Like you are?\" Caden saunters into the room and pulls out one of the chairs at the table, straddling it with his legs on either side and his arms across the top. His dark hair is unruly as if he's been running his hands through it one too many times in aggravation. He rests his chin across his crossed forearms staring at me through squinty eyes.\n\n\"I need the exercise,\" I say.\n\n\"And I couldn't sleep,\" he tosses back. \"You know, a boy doesn't find out he's a prince from the magical land of Far Far Away every day.\" The sarcasm is heavy in his voice, and I bite back a smile at the reference to Shrek.\n\n\"At least you're not an ogre, and it's probably a lot less magical than the one you were in.\"\n\nHis stare is assessing, a lock of hair curling into one eye. \"So, tell me something. When you thought I was a clone, you were coming to get me to bring me back here, and Shae was protecting me from you?\" I nod, uncertain of the direction of his thoughts, but continue my movements, albeit more carefully now. \"So I was your target?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" I slow my pace further with the swords, lunging and stretching both my arms in an arc over my head before pulling them around to the front and twisting away from him.\n\n\"So am I still your target?\" His voice is louder than it was, and I whirl around. But his voice isn't louder, and Caden is no longer sitting. He's right in front of me. His hands grasp my wrists, halting them mid-motion.\n\nHe's so close that I can feel his warm breath feathering against my cheek. In a smooth motion, he removes the ninjata from my left hand, stepping back and swinging it in a slow circle. I take a slow breath.\n\n\"Don't hold a weapon\u2013\"\n\n\"\u2013that you're not prepared to use,\" Caden finishes. \"Shae told me.\"\n\n\"Cade...\" I begin.\n\n\"What? Are you so afraid to fight me?\" he asks softly. There's something in his voice that I can't identify, something painful and aching.\n\n\"I don't want to hurt you,\" I say. \"These are real swords, you know. Not fencing foils.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nAnd before I can think, all I see is the flash of a blade curving toward me. The clash of steel in the small room is like thunder as my blade meets his in a shower of sparks, but Caden is already sidestepping and striking from the underside.\n\nIn a few seconds, I'm aware that Caden is more than good. He's really good.\n\nShae wasn't joking about how easily he holds a sword. I sense that most of it is instinct, but he has the basics of what we are all taught in Neospes. He's taken that a step further with his own fencing training. Despite the fact that I've spent the better part of two hours practicing, Caden has me on my toes. Even though my body wants to go into full attack mode, I restrain myself.\n\n\"Why are you holding back?\" he taunts, reading my slowed movements accurately.\n\n\"I don't want to hurt you.\"\n\n\"We'll see about that.\"\n\nI drop to a crouch and jerk upward, only to find the top end of my sword crashing into the bottom of his on its way down. His ability to read responses is uncanny, almost as uncanny as my own, and I grin widely at the unexpected challenge.\n\nCaden's bare foot catches my heel and I fall backward, only to catapult to my feet in a crouch, my sword at his back. He fends me off capably, and then we are spinning to the discordant tune of crashing metal, until I am against the wall with his sword upon my neck. Caden's eyes are triumphant.\n\nBut so are mine.\n\nI tap the point of my sword against the inside of his hip, and as he looks down, I grin. And then I'm laughing, and Caden is laughing, until his fingers slide against my cheek, and the laughter slips from my lips. His eyes are so green, it feels like I'm drowning in them. I want to move, but my body won't listen. My arms drop to my sides, and my tongue slips out to moisten suddenly dry lips. I pull my lower lip between my teeth.\n\n\"Don't do that.\" The harsh whisper is Caden's.\n\n\"Don't do what?\" I say chewing unconsciously on the corner of my bottom lip.\n\nHis eyes darken. A storm-tossed meadow. \"That thing with your mouth.\"\n\n\"I didn't\u2013\" But his lips silence mine in mid-sentence, the soft warm pressure of them hugging the curves of mine like they'd known them forever. Our breaths mingle as we draw apart, and Caden is staring at me with those impossibly green eyes. I can't help myself. I lean into him, parting my lips and slanting my mouth against his. His hands are on the back of my neck and around my back, drawing me against him so tightly I can barely breathe. But I clutch him tighter, lost.\n\nThe second kiss of my life.\n\nKissing is an anomaly in Neospes. Couples are paired by genetic compatibility, not by what they feel about each other. But humans are social creatures, and sometimes love blooms after the pairing, although that is incredibly rare. I remember one boy in my training group who developed an affinity for another trainee. It'd affected his performance so clearly that within a day, the girl had been transferred to another sector.\n\nLove made us vulnerable, made us weak. Those were our rules.\n\nBut Caden's kiss makes me weaker and stronger all at the same time. And the way it makes me feel \u2013 like I am flame on the outside and liquid on the inside. It makes me feel alive, as if I can take on anything. And the only time I ever feel like that is when I'm fighting, when the adrenaline takes over and I'm only fire and fight.\n\nNow I'm fire and something else entirely.\n\nMy hands tangle in his hair, into the soft mess of it, and I draw him closer. Not even the clatter of the swords on the floor tears us apart. Eventually, we come up for air, and as we pull apart, my mind drifts to our first kiss in the bathroom at Horrow, so similar to this one but so intoxicatingly different. My fingers slide against the square line of his jaw and across the sharp rise of his cheekbone.\n\nCaden presses his lips into my hair and stays there for what seems like an eternity. I can't move, not even when he leans into me and rests his head on my shoulder, turning his face into my damp neck. In fact, every part of me is motionless as his lips find the curve of my collarbone, winding their way up to my ear, fanning the fire once more unfurling in my chest. My legs are unsteady.\n\n\"I love you.\"\n\n\"I love...\"\n\nFor a second, I imagine that's what I started to say. And then I'm splintering into an abyss of darkness and cold and pain.\n\nDECEPTION'S DAUGHTER\n\n\"Is she going to be OK?\"\n\nThere are white, bright lights everywhere, flashing. They hurt my eyes, even closed. I try to move, but my arms are restrained. So are my legs. I'm lying on a cold, white surface in what appears to be an emergency medical bay. I crack open an eyelid, squinting at the wave of agony that threatens to send me back into an unconscious stupor.\n\nA hologram of a human body is suspended in the middle of the room and surrounded by all kinds of shifting miscellaneous data. I blink. Everything is so white. Even the medical garments barely covering my torso are white. My lips are cracked and sore. My tongue is glued to the roof of my mouth, and when I try to talk, my voice crumbles like dust. I blink again, opening both eyes and trying to focus. Pain stabs through my head.\n\n\"Water,\" I manage to gasp.\n\nA shadow looms and the rim of a cold cup is held gently to my lips. The water is like ice, soothing the dryness inside my mouth. I want more, but the cup is gently taken away.\n\n\"WhereamI?\" The words merge into one. I try to sit up, but forget that I am restrained. The panic is immediate. \"Where am I?\" I scream, my throat seared raw.\n\n\"Sector Seven,\" a voice says. \"You're safe.\"\n\nMy brain registers only two things. I'm back in the city, in a Sector on the outskirts of Neospes. And there are no bioengineering facilities in Sector Seven. Where am I being held?\n\nFlashes of Cale and Shae and my mother wind their way through my mind, and then I see another face. It's Cale's but not Cale's. And he's looking at me with gentle eyes full of something that terrifies me. It terrifies me because my heart understands what his eyes are saying, and it feels the same. Who was the boy? A dream? A figment?\n\nMy mind is angry, squelching the tiny spark of emotion. I am two separate things. Memory and present. Frailty and strength. I have to be strong. The boy is nothing to me.\n\nBut he's not a dream. The shadow forms into focus, and I see him. His name is Caden, my brain whispers. He's the target. You brought him here. You have to take him to Cale, the Lord King. But not yet.\n\nWhy not yet?\n\nThe questions are overwhelming, dueling inside of me.\n\n\"Hey,\" the boy says with a crooked smile. \"You OK?\" I nod, and close my eyes, turning away from him.\n\n\"Caden,\" another voice says, a woman's voice. \"You need to get some rest. We're through the worst, and she's awake now. You'll be able to talk to her soon.\"\n\n\"What happened back there?\" I hear Caden ask. \"No one told me anything.\"\n\n\"Get some rest. I promise I will explain later.\"\n\nI hear the sound of the door closing as Caden leaves. The woman checks my arms and the neural leads that run from my chest and temple to the base of the metal table. It connects below to the row of computers monitoring my vitals. I realize then that the suspended holo body is mine.\n\nHer fingers are gentle. I stare at her through my lashes, surreptitious. She has long silvery blond hair that has been tied into a row of braids across the top of her head, and hangs thickly over one shoulder. Her eyes are clear, her face youthful.\n\nShe is your mother, my mind tells me. Aurela. But it is a piece of information, nothing more. I don't feel anything overwhelming, not like the rush I'd had with the boy earlier. I open my eyes to meet hers.\n\n\"How long have I been here?\" I ask hoarsely.\n\n\"Three days.\" Her hand brushes across my forehead. Her touch feels odd against my skin, tingly and tender. I shy away automatically. \"Do you remember anything?\" she asks but I only stare at her silently. \"What's your name?\"\n\n\"Riven. Legion General.\" I watch her face slide from relaxed to anxious to pained.\n\n\"Do you remember the Otherworld? The Outers? Anything?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\"\n\nAurela studies me, her eyes narrowed as she comes to some understanding in her head. It worries me, and I feel my brow furrow, uncannily matching hers ridge for ridge. \"What is your mission?\" she says slowly.\n\n\"To secure the target.\" I blink. The response is automatic, programmed in my brain, but something doesn't feel right. The feelings in my head don't match the words in my mouth. They're coming from somewhere else... some alternate source of information feeding answers to my lips. The thoughts are there but something tells me that they are not my own.\n\nThey're orders. Someone else's orders.\n\n\"No... I don't know,\" I say, pulling my arms against the steel manacles. \"Someone is in my head. It's not me!\"\n\n\"Riven, calm down,\" Aurela says. \"Let me get the doctors. Everything will be OK.\"\n\nBut my panic is swift, and I'm wrenching my arms on the table until the metal starts to cut through my flesh. Oddly, I don't feel a thing. The veins in my arms and neck are corded so tightly that they are raised and navy against my skin, and I'm mesmerized by the intertwined deep red and pale blue fluid oozing out of the lacerations at my wrists.\n\nRed. And blue.\n\nThe machines are beeping so loudly that they sound like some kind of terrible security breach. One hand breaks free, the twisted wrist bracelet still attached to the table, and I'm clawing at my other hand. I don't know where I'm finding the strength, but I rip off the leads stuck to my chest without even blinking. More machines bleat in immediate succession, but they've dulled to a low hum in the back of my mind as everything goes strangely calm. My only objective is to escape. It has ahold of me like a starving dog defending a bone, relentless.\n\nA team of people rushes into the room, and Aurela's face is hanging over mine. Something cold slides into the back of my neck and spreads through the rest of my body. Aurela's eyes are clear, holding my own. I can see the answers in them. The last thing I think before sedation grabs hold of me is that she knows. She knows.\n\nShe's always known.\n\nWhen I awake once more, I'm no longer in the operating analysis room. I'm in a small four-walled gray cube, lying on a thin bed. There are cameras in the ceiling and a metal stool and table in the corner of the space. Someone has dressed me in soft flannel clothing.\n\nI try to sit up, and surprisingly do so with little pain. It feels weird, like I am somehow back to normal. I stretch my neck in slow circles, but everything feels fluid and strong. It almost seems that everything I remember must be some sort of bad dream, but of course, I know that it is not. I run through my mental checklist in my head, confirming all of the factual information I know about myself and who I am.\n\nMy name is Riven. I am a Legion General. My target is Caden. I have acquired the target. Caden is my friend.\n\nThe last thought shoots into my head like an errant arrow, and I analyze it carefully like a piece of forensic evidence. I feel nothing for the thought itself, but it's an oddity that intrigues me. In Neospes, friends are a luxury and oftentimes, in my opinion, more of a hindrance. Unlike family, they complicate things. Lines become blurred, and I like being able to make decisions objectively. As a result, I have no friends, so it's odd that I would have a memory that a target had become my friend. My only \"friends\" have been Cale, and Shae once upon a time.\n\nShae.\n\nThe name is a bullet exploding inside of my consciousness... a part of my brain that I know is wholly mine. A wave of agony ripples through me, and my body folds in on itself, the memories flooding my head like boiling lava. My arms grip around my torso so hard that I can barely breathe. I can hear someone screaming \u2013 keening \u2013 and it takes a second before I realize that the sound is coming from my own mouth.\n\nShae is dead. She died to save me. My sister is dead. She died to protect Caden.\n\nCaden is my friend.\n\nThe waterfall of memories assaults me anew, and it all comes back in a rush \u2013 Cale, the Otherworld, the Vectors, Shae, Caden, the Outers, Aurela.\n\nAll of it.\n\nThe keening sound continues, and I'm rocking back and forth, curled over. I feel like I am being torn down the middle, between an overly rational part of my brain that doesn't even feel like me and the tiny insistent part that nearly does. Neither feels like who I am. Because I don't know who I am.\n\n\"Who am I?\" The words spit themselves from my lips like acid. I stand in front of the camera in the corner of the room and scream the words again.\n\nThe door opens and a man clothed in a black uniform walks in, his hand on the butt of an electro-rod sitting at his hip. He is a Legion Commander; I can see the seal on his neck clearly. I feel my eyes narrow, and I unconsciously sink my weight back into my haunches. His hand hovers over the weapon, correctly interpreting my movements. But he has no chance.\n\nMy reaction is instantaneous, despite my lack of practice. I run at the side of the wall, kicking off of it and somersaulting to land directly behind the man, my elbow around his neck and his left arm up against the middle of his back before he can even breathe. I jam the heel of my foot into the back of his leg, and he sinks to his knees.\n\n\"Move and you die,\" I say. \"Where am I?\"\n\n\"You're in Sector Seven,\" the man gasps. \"Please...\"\n\nSo I'm still in Sector Seven. That surprises me. Are we still in the bio-research facility?\n\n\"Where in Sector Seven?\"\n\n\"Underground research lab,\" he answers. \"Off the grid. Look, I can explain if you just let me up.\" I can feel myself wavering between wanting to eliminate the threat and getting answers. A fully stocked bio-research plant that's off the grid? In all my years in Neospes I've never heard of one of those. My arms tighten involuntarily. \"I'm... I'm Aurela's first-in-command,\" the man gasps. \"She left me to watch you.\"\n\nReleasing my hold a fraction, I remove the electro-rod from its harness and toss it away. Against my better judgment, I let him go, and he falls back to his haunches, his hands to his neck.\n\n\"Aurela's first-in-command,\" I repeat slowly. \"What do you mean, she left you to watch me? Where is she? Who are you? Why do you have a Commander rank seal on your neck?\" My questions are fired in immediate succession. The man smiles and removes his black beanie to run his hands through his white-blond hair.\n\n\"I'm Commander Sauer, an active soldier in Sector Seven,\" he begins. \"But I'm also Artok and your mother's guard,\" he adds.\n\n\"She never mentioned you,\" I snap unmoved.\n\n\"It was part of our agreement,\" he says quietly, his stare meaningful. I understand where he's coming from. He's her agent on the inside. If he'd been connected to Aurela in any way, especially after her defection, he would have been targeted and executed as an example.\n\n\"So you're a spy.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he says.\n\nI study the seal on his neck and the colors that mark him as Sector Seven. He is a Sector Commander, which would give him \u2013 and Aurela \u2013 unrestricted access to valuable information. Still, being an inside spy in a place like Neospes is incredibly risky, as in face-the-Vectors risky. I eye Sauer with a little more respect.\n\nAs the Legion General of the elite Vector task force, I never heard of him, but Neospes is a big place, with allotted sectors policed by different branches of the monarchy, so it isn't farfetched that we never met. Unless, of course, I had been the one to catch him being a traitorous spy. The old me would have fed him to the Vectors myself.\n\n\"How old are you?\"\n\n\"Twenty.\"\n\n\"Did you grow up here?\"\n\n\"I came here with my grandmother.\" Sauer is unfazed by my rapid-fire questions. \"Any more questions?\"\n\nHis cool attitude annoys me. \"Why is this place off the grid?\"\n\n\"Aurela started to build it before she left. She needed a base with the appropriate technology to face whatever your father was planning. We finished it. It's not a registered facility.\" Sauer smiles again. \"If Murek knew this existed, he'd probably torch the whole sector.\"\n\nI frown. \"So everyone in Sector Seven is a part of this?\"\n\nI think back to what I know of the area. Sector Seven has always been a peripheral colony and classified as non-confrontational. Their citizens have always lived on the outskirts, keeping to themselves. They'd been deemed artisans \u2013 despite some of their Artok roots \u2013 and weren't considered a threat to the monarchy. How wrong we'd been, I understand slowly. From the little I knew of the Artok, they'd been far from a placid tribe of people. There are obviously more of them than anyone had guessed living in Sector Seven, and my mother now leads them all.\n\nSauer nods. \"Not all but most of us. We're the liaison to the Outers, to Aurela. We keep tabs on Murek and the Lord King.\" He says the last words quietly, and I can feel his eyes on me. I keep my face expressionless. The doubt in his voice is easy to read. He doesn't trust me. And why should he? I don't even trust myself. I don't even know myself.\n\nSauer stands slowly and stretches his arms across his head. My body tenses, but I don't move. He hasn't made any offensive moves toward me, and even if he'd been lying, we would have been surrounded in seconds by scores of Vectors desperate to get their hands on their absconding general.\n\nI turn on my heel, giving him my back. It doesn't really mean anything, but I've learned that it implies a level of trust and vulnerability. It's a misconception, though \u2013 I've been trained to detect shifts of movement in the air by fighting blindfolded with steel weapons. If he pulls any kind of weapon to attack me, it will have the same outcome.\n\nI walk over to the cot and sit on it. Sauer, to his credit, hasn't moved an inch. \"Let's assume you've been telling me the truth all along,\" I begin. \"Why are we in Sector Seven now?\"\n\n\"That's for Aurela to explain.\"\n\n\"OK. So where is Aurela?\"\n\n\"She's... engaged at the moment.\" His evasive answer irritates me.\n\n\"OK. So where is Caden?\" My tone is patronizing, my anger under tight control but simmering just below the surface. I cock my head to one side and lean back on my arms, waiting. I am deliberately trying to provoke him, goading him into an answer. He is obviously under orders.\n\nSauer smiles tightly. \"In a room just like this one. Resting.\" His emphasis on the last word is clear, and I almost grin at his blatant suggestion that I should be doing the same.\n\n\"I want to see him.\"\n\n\"That's not possible.\"\n\nMy eyes narrow. \"You do know that I can leave this room at any point with or without your consent? And I can find Caden myself if I have to.\"\n\nSauer shrugs and nods. He knows exactly what I'm capable of. I showed him that clearly when he'd entered. He walks over to the chair on the side of the room and slides it out.\n\n\"May I?\" he asks politely, and then sits, crossing his ankle over the opposite knee. His eyes are penetrating, staring right through me. I don't say anything caustic at his expression, because I'm a little intrigued by him myself. The more I stare at him, the more I see the resemblance to Aurela's people, and the marks of the Artok tribe. Apart from his hair, which is the same distinctive silvery white, they have a similar angularity in their faces. Despite my caution, I'm fascinated by any connections to Aurela's past... to my past.\n\nSauer's voice is soft, interrupting my thoughts. \"I've always wanted to meet you, you know. My entire division recounted accounts of your fearlessness, of soldiers who cowered at the sight of you. A girl, far younger than I was, leading the Vectors. The Lord King's private guard.\" I hold Sauer's gaze without responding. \"Impressive record for one so young.\"\n\n\"If you say so,\" I return in an inflectionless voice.\n\n\"But of course, your father engineered you to be that way,\" Sauer muses. I frown, but remain silent. \"He built you to be the perfect soldier. What made you defect?\"\n\n\"I don't know that I have,\" I say carefully, my brain firing at his provocative words. I am no one's puppet, far less my father's. \"I was following orders from my king. My loyalty lies and will always lie with him.\" Sauer looks like he has something more to say, but doesn't. A sour expression crosses his face for an instant as he leans back in his chair. It fades after a moment, replaced by his former thoughtful expression.\n\n\"I knew Shae,\" he says. The mere mention of her name sends my stomach into a tailspin. I feel the tide of emotion surge inside of me. It's all still there, simmering. I shove the thoughts away, but my fingers clench into fists at my sides. \"She often told me that I would like you.\"\n\n\"Well, she was wrong. And she's dead.\"\n\nI'm unprepared for the naked ache that slashes across his eyes. My normally acute ability to read people has taken a beating over the last few weeks, but even Sauer can't conceal his feelings for my sister from me. Sauer has just gotten a lot more interesting.\n\n\"You were the reason she kept everting back here,\" I say slowly. Sauer doesn't answer, but his clear eyes are so pain-ridden that it's obvious. \"I knew it wasn't just to provide updates to Aurela or throw the Vectors off Caden's trail. He was safe. The Vectors tracked me there, not them. So she was coming back here for you?\"\n\n\"Yes. We were... in love.\"\n\nI laugh, and the sound in the room is ugly, echoing emptily against the stark walls. I can barely get my mind around it. My mother had been paired with my father because of their combined brilliance and what they could contribute together to the monarchy. People didn't fall in love. They didn't get to choose who they wanted to be with. Partnerships were allocated based on what was best for Neospes. I laugh again emptily. In the end, love had killed Shae.\n\n\"Love?\" I spit in his direction, launching to my feet. \"Do you know what you did to her? Did you see what you were doing to her? She was dead on her feet, but she still came back here for you!\" I'm in Sauer's face now, not even bothering to control the violence of my rage. \"You. Killed. Her.\" My finger jabs into his chest with each word. \"You made her weak.\"\n\nSauer doesn't even respond to my vitriolic words. Instead, he watches me with those same heavy eyes. I can see the regret \u2013 and his love for Shae \u2013 in them, but I don't want to see either. I don't want to see anything that reflects the feelings inside my own heart. I don't want to admit that somehow, somewhere, I'd let compassion or love weaken me, too. So I let my anger take over. I let my fury fuel me. They are the things I know, the mindsets I understand.\n\n\"Get up,\" I rage at him. I slap him across the face, and then a second time. \"Get up and face me like a man. She deserved that much, don't you think?\"\n\n\"I'm not going to fight you, Riven,\" Sauer says. His face is bright red from where I've struck him, but his voice is even. \"You're right. I failed her. I let her die. I deserve everything and more that you say, but she wouldn't want this. She loved you, too.\"\n\nSomething hot and responsive rushes inside of me at his soft words, and then something cold immediately floods my veins, suppressing it in seconds. I step back and then back again, until I feel the bed against the backs of my legs. My mind is clear one minute, and then fogged the next. Once more, the feeling of being two different people threatens to tear me apart.\n\n\"What's wrong with me?\" I say, clutching my head in my hands. \"What's happening? Every time I think about her, it hurts. I'm splitting in two.\"\n\n\"It's the programming,\" Sauer says gently, walking forward to fold me into his arms. I let him, shivering so hard that my teeth are rattling. Sauer's words sink in slowly.\n\n\"The what?\" I whisper.\n\n\"The programming,\" Aurela says from the doorway. I hadn't even noticed her there. \"I see you've meet Sauer. I'm sorry I wasn't here when you woke up, but I had to take care of something. How are you feeling?\" She tips my head back gently to peer at my face.\n\nMy brain is spinning, but somehow I already know. A hazy memory of the pale blue fluid combined with the blood on my wrist in the operating room fills my eyes. \"What programming?\"\n\n\"There's no easy way to\u2013\"\n\n\"Just say it,\" I whisper. \"Say it.\"\n\nAurela's face is tormented, her hands fluttering against my head like protective mother birds trying to safeguard their young. But she can't protect me anymore. The damage has already been done. She didn't protect me then... and she can't protect me now. Sauer's words fill my head: he built you to be the perfect soldier...\n\n\"I want to hear you say it,\" I repeat doggedly.\n\nShe nods, just once. \"Your programming. To control the nanoplasm inside of you.\"\nON THE BRINK\n\n\"So I'm a Vector?\"\n\nI'm amazed at how calm my voice is, but the truth is, somewhere deep down, I've always known that I was like them. There were too many inconsistencies, things that made me better than everyone else... things that made me less human. I could run faster, react more quickly, heal miraculously when injured. There's no way I could have been normal. I don't even feel any sense of violation that my own father experimented on me without my knowledge. Yet.\n\n\"I'm an android,\" I say.\n\n\"No,\" Aurela says. \"You're... a hybrid. Your father experimented with nanoplasm before the early success of the Vectors. He experimented on himself and then you when you were little.\" Aurela holds my face in her hands, but my eyes are unseeing. \"I never knew, but when I found out, that's when I knew I had to leave. I had to find a way to stop him.\"\n\nWhat kind of man experiments with an unproven technology on his own child? I feel the hate inside of me boil and metamorphose into something large and ugly. I'm not even human. No wonder he'd loved that I'd chosen to lead the Vectors. I'm one of them. Controlled, just as they are. Built. Engineered. A thing, like them.\n\nDead, just like them.\n\nThe self-disgust must be evident on my face, because Sauer's arms tighten around me. I've forgotten that I'm still caught in his grip. \"Let go of me,\" I tell him. \"I'm fine.\"\n\nBut he doesn't, so I shove him away easily. So easily, like his arms are nothing but string. I stare at my curled fists, for the first time aware of the tensile power in them... power that isn't mine. It's fake, engineered strength, driven by the robots in my blood. My hands drop to my sides in revulsion.\n\n\"Riven,\" Aurela says, and I jerk at the sound of my name. So apt, I think. My name means broken... it's a perfect name, after all. I raise burning eyes to hers. \"You're nothing like them,\" she says, correctly reading the thoughts rising to suffocate me with their poisonous intensity. \"You're different.\"\n\nI shake my head, struggling to reconcile everything I know about the Vectors and everything I know about myself. I'm not just different... what my father has done is impossible. I'm a live person made of flesh and blood and bone.\n\n\"I'm missing something,\" I say to Aurela. \"How is this even possible? I thought you couldn't combine nanoplasm with human DNA?\"\n\n\"I believe your father experimented on himself before you were conceived.\" Aurela pauses, as if thinking to herself. \"He planned it all from the beginning. His body eventually rejected the nanobes, but yours didn't, because your DNA had already transmutated as a result of his earlier testing. When you were conceived, the law of natural selection made your cells adapt. He'd hoped all along that they would have some sort of genetomorhic effect.\"\n\n\"Did you know?\"\n\n\"Not at first,\" she says, running a hand through her hair tiredly and sitting in the seat that Sauer vacated. \"But he would take you to the lab with him, even when I insisted that you didn't have to go. After a while, I started to suspect something untoward, but he denied it.\" Aurela stops, her face wet. \"Then I found contaminated blood samples he'd hidden. Yours. And I knew for sure. That was when I told him I was leaving with you and Shae. My mistake, of course, was to tell him at all.\"\n\n\"I thought you were fighting about the Vector tech?\"\n\n\"No, my darling, it was always about you. Then you had your first training op, and he was so proud that you, the youngest of all your peers, had finished way ahead of everyone else. Way ahead. You were a prodigy. His prodigy. After that, he never let you out of his sight.\"\n\nAurela is talking about the placement trials. At four, we are put through a rigorous series of mental and physical exercises to determine when we start our training and instructor assignments. I was placed in the elite section with children far older than I. My father was so proud. I bite my lip so hard that it bleeds, a metallic sourness filling my mouth.\n\nOf course he was proud \u2013 his creation, his abomination was a smashing success.\n\nBut even in his jubilation, he had to keep it all a secret, because what he'd done went against all our laws. After the War, any combination of human genetics and android technology had been forbidden. But my father had flaunted the laws, driven by his own pride.\n\n\"And the Vectors? Was it his plan that they'd be his own private army? Loyal to him because they were loyal to me? Was that in my programming?\" My sarcasm is acidic.\n\nAurela sighs. \"Only your father knows what he intended to create. Even now, we don't know where his loyalties truly lie.\" She glances at Sauer and then me, as if working out something in her head, something more that she has to tell me. \"So many things have changed since you left, Riven. The monarchy is unstable. Murek and your father have spies everywhere. The Vectors are stationed in every sector, even here.\"\n\nThe thought of the Vectors leaves a sour taste in my mouth. My stomach heaves nauseatedly. I don't want to be anything like them. The big Commander from the Otherworld fills my visions, and I remember the sound of my father's voice coming from its mouth.\n\n\"They're thinking now,\" I say, remembering the chilling words of the Vector that it was more alive than the others but less alive than me. Even it had known what I was... what I am. \"The Vectors. There was one in the Otherworld that spoke with his voice. He wants me back. Badly. I don't know for what but he does.\"\n\nAurela's face blanches at my quiet words. Understanding is in her eyes as she nods. \"He wants to replicate your genetic code.\"\n\nI feel a hot tear slide down my cheek, and I swipe it away viciously, furious at myself for even shedding a single tear for the monster that was my father. \"I'm just a thing to him. An experiment. A Vector.\"\n\n\"No,\" Aurela insists. \"You're not.\"\n\n\"Barely. I'm half-alive, and they're dead. But I'm the same... a thing.\" My voice is as lifeless as the words coming out of my mouth.\n\n\"No, Riven, you're alive. You control the nanobes, not the other way around.\"\n\nBut a troubling thought occurs to me as Aurela says those words. If I do control them, why is everything within me suddenly shutting down? Has something set them off within the parameters of their code? I frown, confused. \"So, what happened before? You know, with Caden, before Sector Seven, when I blacked out? What caused it?\"\n\n\"My guess is that it was some kind of failsafe in your father's programming, a phrase or something,\" Aurela says, and I feel myself flush, knowing instantly the phrase that had caused it all \u2013 Caden said he loved me and I returned the sentiment. It makes sense. My father despised weakness and anything that caused it, especially love. \"Whatever it was caused the nanoplasm to reboot, restoring a set of baseline defaults, which is why you were so confused about who you were and couldn't remember everything.\"\n\n\"Will it happen again?\" My question flies through gritted teeth. The last thing I need is anyone using some programming catch phrase that will stop me from doing what every bone in my body wants to do \u2013 make my father pay for what he did to me.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Aurela says. \"I worked with my engineers to erase and rewrite the default programming. We backdoored all the code. It's clear.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" It's the least I can offer. \"Did Shae know?\" I ask after several minutes of silence. So many things are falling into place... all of Shae's sidelong glances, her pointed questions about my healing ability, other things she wanted to say to me in the Otherworld and couldn't. She wanted to tell me; I see that now. But the sad truth was that I never would have believed her and she probably knew that, which was why she always stopped herself.\n\nAurela nods. \"That's why she tried so hard to get you to leave with her, but she knew that a part of you would want to stay with him. She was so afraid that you would tell him about her... about me, in spite of yourself. You were a risk, and one we didn't fully understand.\" She pauses, her face earnest. \"We didn't know how deep the programming went or whether it undermined your own thought.\"\n\n\"Does it?\" I blurt out.\n\n\"No, it's built to obey your commands.\"\n\nThe knowledge is overwhelming, but things are starting to come together in my head, like migrant puzzle pieces. \"So that's why I felt so sick in the Peaks. Because I have machines inside of me,\" I say. \"I should have known.\" I gesture at my body. \"You know why I used to feel so comfortable leading the Vectors? It was because deep down, I felt just like them. And I followed orders just like a good soldier, just like a good little reptile.\" I swing around to stare at Sauer who is standing near the far side of the room. \"Now you know why I was so good, because I was one of them.\"\n\nSauer shakes his head, a small smile darting around the corners of his mouth. \"No, Riven,\" he says in that soft drawl of his. \"You're better than they are. You're super strong, you heal quicker than any of us could ever hope to heal, you can think more quickly. And you're alive. You're still you. That has to count for something.\"\n\nHis words strike a chord inside of me, and realization dawns slowly but surely. As brilliant as my father is, he isn't a genetic scientist. I stare at Aurela. \"It was your genetic coding that made this possible, wasn't it?\" I say to her. \"You were the only one who could have found a way to string nanoplasm with live human DNA.\"\n\n\"Yes, you're right. I developed the bio-gen coding,\" she confesses sadly. \"He was working on a project to test the nanoplasm on live creatures and convinced me that he needed to test to see if it could operate within a live host.\" Aurela grabs my shoulders. \"I never would have done it had I known that he was going to use it on himself or you; you have to believe that!\"\n\nI nod, because I can't speak. My tongue is bonded to the roof of my mouth. I swallow painfully. \"So can you take them out? The nanobes?\"\n\n\"No,\" she says, \"they're part of you. Unlike the nanoplasm for the Vectors, which fire off a lithia core, yours are linked to your body. They fuel from food just like your blood does because they're tied in to your DNA. If we even tried to separate the strands, you would die. Your body has already adapted to coexist with them. You're unique, Riven. That's probably why he wants you so badly. You're the experiment that went viral. His biggest triumph.\"\n\nI'm at a loss. I don't even know what to think, far less say. I have live microscopic robots inside of me that can never be taken out. I can never be fully human, never be normal. Everything inside funnels into a tornado of fury against the man responsible for making me into a freak. The man who thought himself some sort of god. His arrogance would be his destruction.\n\nI would be his destruction.\n\n\"Hey, guys,\" a voice says, and I whirl around, only to collide with Caden. His hair is rumpled around his face and there are pillow lines creasing his skin as if he's only just awakened. He smells like soap and outdoors. I've never wanted more to fling myself into his arms and close my eyes, but I steel myself. \"Glad you're awake,\" he says to me, his eyes gentle. \"You scared me for a while.\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I snap more harshly than I intended. Hurt flashes in his expression as if I've slapped him, and his eyes pan slowly from me to Sauer to Aurela.\n\n\"What's going on?\" he asks.\n\n\"Nothing. We're talking logistics,\" I say dismissively, and turn to Aurela. \"Can we get out of here? This place is making me sick.\"\n\nThe rest of the bio-facility is the same as any I've been in with my father, a veritable maze of white walls and white doors. Once in a while, people dressed in white walk past us. They all nod or bow respectfully in Aurela's direction. She's more than a leader, I realize. She's their unofficial queen. Even Sauer walks a step behind her, I notice, in some kind of dutiful deference.\n\nWe enter an elevator at the far end of one of the corridors and make our way to the top. The elevator opens into a simple, nondescript two-story house. I look backward as the wall slides shut behind us, completely concealing the hidden elevator behind it. Aurela was right; there's so much I don't know about what has happened over the last three years.\n\n\"Make yourself comfortable. I'll be back,\" Aurela says, and walks downstairs.\n\nThe room we're in is simple, with a long dining table surrounded by wooden chairs. It's sparse but comfortable, and unlike the clinical austerity of the bio-facility beneath us, it's painted a peaceful yellow. Silvery moonlight filters through one side of the house, and the cool air and smell of civilization hits my face through the open windows. It's never smelled so good. Even in the outlying sectors, Neospes had a unique odor. It's not offensive or foul, just achingly familiar, like an odd combination of well-oiled machinery and bread. I breathe deeply, walking to one of the half-opened windows.\n\nIt's nighttime, but I can see the tip of the citadel rising in the distance. It has been my home for so long that a part of me twinges. I squash it as quickly as it fills me \u2013 it's been a cage, not a home, and all part of my father's plan. I push the shutters open and lean out slightly, watching the people bustle on the street below as the cool air rushes in. Even though it's night, it's nowhere near as cold as it was in the Outers. I look up at the giant glass perimeter of the dome spanning as far as the eye can see. It performs a double function. It protects us from any predators from the Outers, and it regulates the unpredictable temperatures of our atmosphere. So right now, the night air is crisp rather than freeze-blood-to-ice cold.\n\nBut any way I look at it, we are all still prisoners in a giant fish bowl, and a small part of me would rather be out there than in here. Sirens go off in the distance, and Sauer's voice from behind me jerks me from my thoughts.\n\n\"Be careful,\" Sauer warns. \"The Vectors are on high alert.\"\n\nMy eyes narrow. \"Why?\"\n\nHe shoots me a wry grin, putting some tableware and a pitcher of some liquid on the long table. \"Mostly rumors that you're back. Of course, since you removed your tracking chip, you're off the grid, too. But as much as the Artok are our allies, we can't stop people from talking, especially those loyal to the monarchy.\" He grabs my pack from a corner of the room and tosses it to me. \"Don't worry; I'm sure you're more than familiar with their search techniques. And if worse comes to worse, you can take care of yourself just fine.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" I say drily, but I shut the window carefully behind me. The contents of my backpack look the same, but I know that Aurela's guards would have been meticulous and careful in their search. \"What about you? Are you off the grid?\"\n\n\"No, they know where I am. But I'm off duty, and technically this is my house, so we're good.\" Sauer adds three different-shaped bottles to the table and pours himself a glass from one of them. After a pointed glance from Caden, Sauer slides him a glass across the table. Caden knocks it back in one swift shot as if he's done it a hundred times before. I can smell the alcohol from where I am standing. Sauer nods at an empty glass and then in my direction.\n\n\"No, thanks,\" I say. I've never mixed well with spirits of any kind, even though it feels like I probably should have a glass like Caden to calm the storm still simmering inside of me. I look away and haul two deep breaths into my lungs. I'm pretty sure that giving in to the temptation would only have a worse outcome... like me running off to confront my father in a blind rage or something equally stupid.\n\n\"Where's my jacket and blades?\" I ask sifting through my bag.\n\n\"They're still in the Peaks,\" Sauer says. \"Caden grabbed your pack when you passed out. Don't worry; Aurela sent some men to retrieve them.\"\n\nMost of the other, smaller weapons are in the bag. I notice that Shae's thumb drive is resting on the top of everything else. I still haven't been able to bring myself to see whatever she has recorded on there. In hindsight, I probably should have listened to it the minute we left the Otherworld \u2013 no doubt she would have mentioned Aurela or even the thing that I am. A shudder rips through me at the thought, and I slap the flap closed.\n\nSauer stares at me over the rim of his glass as I stretch the corded muscles in my neck. He bangs the glass on the table, making both Caden and I jump. \"Come on, I have an idea.\"\n\n\"What about Aurela?\" Caden says.\n\n\"She'll be a while, and we're not leaving the house,\" Sauer throws over his shoulder. \"We're just going to get some tension out.\"\n\nCaden and I follow him down the stairs to the main floor and then down another set of stairs into a wide room that's lit with overhead recessed lighting. I recognize the layout immediately \u2013 it's a training room. The floor is padded and two opposite walls are lined from top to bottom with mirrors. There are a few combat dummies on either end of the room, all of them battered, with chunks torn out of their torsos and faces. A vast array of weapons, from knives to spears to lances to pikes, lines one of the other two opposite-facing walls, but what takes my breath away is the antique collection of intricately carved Artok bows lining the near wall.\n\n\"Wow,\" I hear myself say.\n\n\"Shae's,\" Sauer says softly. \"She used to say that it inspired her.\"\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" Caden agrees.\n\nI agree wholeheartedly but I can't speak. The thought that my sister fought \u2013 trained \u2013 in this room fills me with an odd choking sensation that leaves me empty for words. There was so much of her life that I missed, so much that I didn't understand. If only I'd made the choice to go with her all those years ago, how different everything could have been. I'd have had a sister and a mother, instead of an egomaniacal father who cared more for his zombie robots than he did his real flesh and blood.\n\nBut \"what if\" never did anyone any good, far less me. I made my choice. I didn't go with them, and now my sister is dead. I feel the unspent anger swelling within me again like a monstrous tide, and I understand why Sauer has brought us down here.\n\nTraining is what he knows. It's what I know. I throw off my outerwear and join Sauer where he and Caden are standing in the middle of the room.\n\n\"Standard warm-up drill?\" Sauer asks as I windmill my arms.\n\nI nod and glance at Caden, who like Sauer is only wearing black fatigues. He isn't half as chiseled as Sauer, but the sight of his lean chest makes my stomach waver. A faint flush fills my cheeks, and I cover it up with gruffness. \"You want to watch first and then join in?\"\n\n\"Shae taught me,\" he says.\n\n\"It's not like fencing practice,\" I toss back.\n\n\"You just try to keep up.\" I almost snort out loud at his overconfidence, and then I remember our sparring back in the Peaks and his skill. Bowing mockingly in his direction, I take a deep breath and focus, centering my energy.\n\nIn a line, we bend and twist through a complicated series of rhythmic calisthenics, moving and breathing in silent unison. The movements are slow and long, extending to the edges of my center of gravity, strengthening my core. In the mirror, I can see that Caden is keeping up easily, his body as flexible as ours, as if he's been doing the exercises for years. Obviously, Shae taught him well.\n\nCompleting the first stage, we move sinuously into the second phase, which incorporates more jumping, kicking, and thrusting. Our training is built on a dynamic combination of hard and soft martial arts that focuses on energy and core strength as well as defensive and offensive strategies. I'm covered in a sheen of sweat, but it feels so good \u2013 every jab and shove helping to dissipate the raw tension in my body.\n\nNearly two hours later, Sauer retrieves three long, slender black staffs from the side and hands them to Caden and me. We're moving into the soft-weapon stage of the training, comprised of delicate and quick sparring movements against each other, the staffs acting as extensions of our bodies. We spin and lunge in unison, and in the mirror we are a blur of graceful but lethal movement. The staffs click against each other in a precise, dangerous staccato as we meet in various steps of the exercise.\n\nThe final phase of the training is actual sparring. We pair off for a sequence of moves and then spin back to the third opponent. Sauer is strong but occasionally leaves his flanks unprotected. If we were in actual combat, he would be a worthy opponent, but I know that I would eventually beat him.\n\nCaden is another matter altogether. His movements are graceful and catlike. He reads my strikes almost in advance of them, like a mind-fighter, nor does he expose many weaknesses. He doesn't falter in his offensive strikes, and his defensive moves flow like yin and yang. He knows when to attack and when to withdraw, which is something only learned after years of experience.\n\nI'm slowly realizing that Caden has mastered most, if not all, of our elite training techniques. With a grin, I understand now that Shae wasn't kidding when she said he could probably take me. Caden had been her final and best trainee. Preoccupied, I spin out of the way of his staff at the last minute, but it still catches me on the back of the shoulder.\n\nWincing, I see that Caden is grinning at me. \"Almost had you that time.\"\n\n\"I was distracted, and almost doesn't get you any points,\" I shoot back, and then incline my head. Credit should always be given where it's due. \"But yeah, you were good.\"\n\n\"Feel better?\" Sauer asks.\n\nI nod. \"That was exactly what I needed. I forgot how good it felt to do that from beginning to end. In the Otherworld, I only got to practice it in pieces, and finding an adequate sparring partner was difficult enough.\" I squeeze Caden on the back, ignoring the spark of electricity that shoots up my fingers at the damp touch of his skin. \"Shae taught you well.\"\n\n\"Thank you. She made me do it every day before school, rain or shine,\" Caden says. \"She was relentless.\"\n\nSauer hands us each a cup of drinking water. \"You were both good.\" He glances at me knowingly. \"But you, you were holding back. Why?\"\n\n\"I wasn't,\" I begin, but realize that Sauer is right. Despite my fatigue, my body still feels like it could go for several more hours. I shrug. Before knowing the truth, going all out was the only thing I knew. Now, it feels weird. It feels fake because of what I know I am... as if I'm cheating somehow. I stare at the ground, tension hovering against my shoulders, eager to weigh me down once more.\n\n\"Try this.\" Sauer walks to the wall and removes a thin longsword. The scabbard is blood red with black markings, and the sword's handle is black interlaced with silver. Sauer's face is solemn as he stands in front of me, slowly removing the elegant silvery blade, and only then do I see the inscription of my name near the hilt. I gasp.\n\n\"Shae had this made for you in the Artok way,\" Sauer tells me. \"The sword's name, like yours, is Riven. It means 'to cleave asunder.'\"\n\n\"I know what it means,\" I say for lack of anything else, taking the sword reverently in my hands. The craftsmanship is extraordinary, the weight of it perfect.\n\n\"So,\" Sauer says. \"Let's see you try it out.\" I frown at him, but he is staring at me expectantly. I glance at Caden, who agrees and moves to sit with Sauer at the far end of the room, giving me enough space with the deadly weapon.\n\nHolding the blade vertically between my palms in front of my face, I take a deep breath and then lay the sword flat out in front of me on both palms, as I sink into sideways lunge and bow. I close my eyes, letting my breathing and the movement of my body guide me.\n\nThe training studio fades away and I am alone. Flicking the hilt of the sword up, I grab it easily and spin into a complicated series of thrusts, jumps, and parries. This time I don't hold back as the sword flows in and out of my movements like a binding thread, a fluid extension of me.\n\nI'm spinning faster and faster, letting the power heating up within me take over, letting the part of me that isn't human lend me strength, until I am nothing but shadow and flashes of light. And still I go faster. I can feel my heart burning, a vortex of flame and liquid exhilaration. Perhaps Sauer is right \u2013 maybe I am better than the Vectors. My chest pounding, I finish with a final slash and bend into a forward lunge with the blade held over my head in perfect symmetry.\n\nI open my eyes. There is dead silence in the room. Self-conscious, I stand, only to find that it's no longer just Caden and Sauer standing there. Aurela is there too, accompanied by six people in hooded cloaks. I hadn't even heard them come in.\n\nI recognize four of them immediately as the Sector Leaders of Sectors Three, Four, Six, and Eight. The other two I don't know, but they're all staring at me with identical expressions of astonishment, awe, and something else I'm not quick to identify, despite seeing it thousands of times before.\n\nFear. \nREVOLUTION\n\nI wipe the grime off my skin with a washcloth, using a special cleansing oil. What I wouldn't give for one of the decadent showers of Caden's world. That's one of the things I treasured \u2013 that and the beauty of a world that hasn't been ravaged by war. For a second, I think of the lake in the mountains that I saw with Shae, and my heart aches. I won't see either of them again. They have become synonymous with beauty and loss.\n\nDespite the unexpected audience at the end, the training exercise was exactly what I needed to feel normal... to feel like myself again. Tugging on an undershirt and a pair of leggings, I drag a brush through my hair. It's gotten longer, but I haven't bothered to cut it. Staring at myself in the mirror over the water basin, I hardly recognize myself. Faded chunks of green intertwine with darker strands. I've lost weight, and my cheekbones ridge prominently on the sides of my face, but my eyes are bright and cheeks rosy.\n\nMy thin blue-weaved braid hangs over my left ear to my shoulder. Carefully, I unravel the braid, using my knife to hack off the strands to match the length of the rest of my hair. I don't know why I left it \u2013 but it's been a part of me for so long, a status of my rank. Of course, all that has changed. I am no longer a Legion General. I am no one.\n\nNo, I am worse. I'm a fugitive.\n\nLike my mother. Like Shae.\n\nThinking of her, I glance at the long blade resting in its scabbard on my bed and feel a tear slide down my cheek. I was on her mind even though I barely spent a second of thought on her. She was always the more compassionate of the two of us, and no wonder; I'm half a real person with little empathy for anyone. A flash of bitter self-loathing surges through me... for the thing that I am.\n\nGrabbing my backpack roughly, I rifle through it to take my mind off that train of thought. My hand is drawn to a slim rectangular object. Shae's drive. It's the last remaining piece of the puzzle. Swallowing hard, I plug it into a holograph port resting on the small table on one side of the room. Shae's face swims into focus. My stomach swan dives to my feet but I force myself to double-tap the play button.\n\nHello, Riven. My entire body flinches at the sound of her voice and the soft expression on her face. She could be sitting across the table from me. My fingers curl into my sides, bloodless, as her words continue. If you're seeing this, then I'm gone. And hopefully you and Cade are still alive and you found your way back to Neospes. There's so much I have to say to you, so much I need to explain, but finding the right words is a challenge in itself. First of all, I love you. I'm pretty sure you don't think I ever did, but it's true. I've always loved you and I always believed in you. The real you.\n\nI want to throw the drive and the hologram against the wall. I can't even bear to look at her beautiful face. Every cell in me is shaking with regret and grief. It's nearly more than I can take, but I force myself to listen despite the gut-wrenching anguish spiraling through me.\n\nYou're probably going to find out a lot about yourself if you're back in Neospes, things about your father and our mother. She's alive, Riven! I wanted to tell you that day when I came back for you, but it would have been too risky for her safety. She's been here all along. She's the one who got Caden and his mother out. She's the one who sent me to protect him. If you haven't found her already, find her. Go to Sector Seven and ask for Commander Sauer. He will take you to her. If you do see Sauer, tell him I'll see him again and he's always with me.\n\nI know you're being extra careful about staying off the grid, but trust no one.\n\nTRUST NO ONE. Shae's face and words are emphatic.\n\nOne last thing, my sister. Thank you for looking out for Caden. He's the real deal. Cale's the clone. I'm sure you already know this by now, but if you don't, I'm sorry about him and that you had to find out the truth this way. I know you were \u2013 are \u2013 close. But there are things underway in Neospes that make it hard to see where the real betrayal lies... with Murek, your father, or even Cale himself.\n\nPlease be careful, and watch out for Caden. I tried to train him in our ways as best as I could without having to reveal everything. I think he will be ready for whatever comes your way, whether that's in the Otherworld or in Neospes. How I wish I could have been there with you, to protect and fight with both of you, but everything happens for a reason, doesn't it? You're meant to be Caden's protector now. He's the future of everything. Don't fail him, don't fail us.\n\nI know you won't, because you don't know how to fail.\n\nOne other last thing. I smile at the tone in her voice, watching her eyes rolling and the sideways smile that was unique to her. You're probably going to learn some troubling truths about yourself. But you know who you are, Riven. You've always known who you are. Don't let that change you. You're strong. Stronger than I could ever be. So don't fight it; instead, accept it and take it for all the good things that make you so incredibly unique.\n\nLove you, Riv; don't ever forget that. Wind at your back, my sister.\n\nThe voice spins into silence, and the hologram grows fuzzy and then disappears. But I don't need it to hear her words that are replaying over and over in my head. What did she mean that Caden was the future of everything? It sounded so ominous. There's so much I don't understand, and it's not that I don't trust Cale. I trust him with my life. He hasn't lied to me \u2013 he has been sick. I've seen it with my own eyes. He sent for Caden because he thought he needed replacement organs, and my mission had been of the utmost secrecy because of Cale's mistrust of Murek and my father.\n\nA soft knock on the door jerks me out of my chaotic thoughts.\n\n\"Who is it?\"\n\n\"It's Aurela.\" I eject and throw the drive into the pack, sweeping a hand through my hair and tucking the freshly shorn strands behind my ear self-consciously. Maybe she won't notice.\n\n\"Come in,\" I say. \"I'll be done in a sec.\"\n\nShe has changed into a gilded blue tunic and wide skirt. She looks feminine and delicate, two things that I can never seem to master. I'm no spring flower, that's for sure, but then looks have never mattered to me. Survival has. Sighing, I smooth my plain tunic and leggings, and sit to pull on a worn pair of combat boots before standing to face my mother.\n\nShe smiles gently, her eyes landing with the touch of a butterfly on the side of my head where the braid had been, but doesn't say anything. Instead, she just nods. I can feel her approval, and for some reason, it warms me.\n\n\"I'm sure you have questions,\" she says. \"Ones that Sauer or I didn't answer earlier. I want you to be prepared before you go into that room.\"\n\nShe's talking about the room where all the other Sector heads \u2013 the ones who had been watching my performance earlier \u2013 are waiting.\n\n\"She told me to find you, you know,\" I say softly. \"Shae.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know.\"\n\n\"She knew about me.\" It's not a question, but Aurela nods, her eyes compassionate. For a long second, we stare at each other. Shae would have looked just like her the older she got, with the same features... the same eyes. There is grace in Aurela's shoulders, but there's hard strength, too. I swallow. She's at the head of this whole revolution, this whole coup against the Neospes monarchy. She's more than strong. I realize the core of steel I'm seeing in her is the very same core in myself that men have grown to fear here in Neospes. I'm more like her than I care to admit.\n\nDistracting my thoughts, I grab ahold of the black and gold wrap lying on a chest and tug it over my shoulders. Dress golds. It's a plain shift with a high collar and shiny black buttons, one of the more formal items of clothing usually reserved for award ceremonies or funerals. I smile at the irony. We aren't exactly going to either.\n\n\"Are you going to war against the monarchy?\" I ask, deftly fastening the over-garment's ties around my waist. The soft material drapes nearly to mid-thigh.\n\nAurela shoots a glacial smile in my direction. \"It's complicated, Riven. War isn't the answer for anyone. But what Murek is planning will undermine everything we have built, not just in Neospes, but also in the Otherworld.\"\n\n\"What exactly is he planning?\"\n\n\"If my intelligence is correct, he's building an army,\" she says. \"An army of Vectors to take to the Otherworld. Guardians have been assassinated. We believe that he means to make the people there into slaves and to control their vast resources. Water, to name one of the most important.\"\n\n\"He who controls water controls the world,\" I murmur. It's an old Neospes saying. Water here is traded like gold. If Murek somehow manages to control the Otherworld's resources, he would become more than a king; he'd be a god. \"But even if he were able to create a bridge, we can't survive in their world,\" I blurt. \"I mean, you and the others. Your immune systems are too different. You'd die.\"\n\nI flush, knowing that it was only because of my unique nature that I'd been able to survive, thrive even. Aurela stares at me, and for a second I see something like a flash of sympathy in her eyes.\n\n\"That's where you come in,\" she says softly. \"The next phase. It's why your father wants you so badly. You're the only living person who has ever adapted to the nanobes.\"\n\nMy words come out in a rush as I collapse back onto the bed. \"He wants to clone me?\"\n\n\"More specifically, replicate your DNA.\"\n\nMy breath is coming in short bursts, but her words are no surprise to me. As much as I hate what I am, I know that she is right. I am the blueprint to universe domination, because the laws of natural selection do not apply to me. No wonder I stopped having any side effects in the Otherworld. My body \u2013 my nanoplasm \u2013 was forced to adapt once I stopped taking the pills.\n\n\"Aurela, I know Cale's not involved in any of this. Shae\" \u2013 I nearly gag on her name \u2013 \"said that I shouldn't trust him, but I do. I'd been at his side every day before I left to find Caden. He is dying. Murek killed his father, and his mother left to protect her other son.\"\n\nAurela nods. \"We will protect him if we can.\" She pauses. \"But Caden comes first. He is the true crown prince; do you understand that?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Good, then let's go, unless you have any more questions.\" She stands and stares pointedly at me.\n\n\"Just one more question,\" I say, but my eyes drop to the ground as a rush of warmth races across and down my back. \"When you and father were paired together... did you ever feel anything for him?\"\n\nAurela's stare morphs into something pained. \"Your father was very different when he was younger. He was smart and vibrant, and I admired him very much.\" Her voice is at odds with the surge of painful emotion in her eyes. \"We were friends as children and often played together. Our partnership was a natural progression of that.\"\n\n\"But did you love him?\" I blurt out, and feel the heat of a thousand suns on my neck.\n\n\"I loved you,\" Aurela says gently. \"And Shae.\"\n\nI understand her restraint. How can one ever love someone who is a monster? And inside, I'm just like him. He's made sure of that.\n\nAurela moves to stand in front of me as if reading my thoughts and grasps my arms. \"Your father was driven by a desire to prove himself. He had no room in his life for love. You have me in you too, and we are Artok. Our choices, our lives are based on love.\"\n\n\"I'm not Artok,\" I say automatically.\n\n\"But you are.\"\n\nI ignore the tender look on her face and the gentle fingers that slide against my cheek. I've never felt connected to my Artok roots. The Artok do things differently than most other people in Neospes. Although they believe in the inherent value of genetic preselection, they also believe that emotions like love are important in relationships. Maybe I felt the disconnect because my mother had left, and the only love I'd ever known was from a father whose sole goal was to make me a monster.\n\n\"Did you love Shae's dad?\"\n\nAurela's eyes grow even sadder. \"Yes.\"\n\nShae's father \u2013 also Artok \u2013 was killed in the Outers when Shae was barely a year old. Shae told me the story when we were children. Her father was an atmospheric field technician who never returned from an Outer mission. His entire group was attacked by Reptiles, and everyone had survived but him. Shortly after, Aurela had been reassigned to my father.\n\n\"Did he do it?\"\n\n\"Did who do what, Riven?\" Aurela's voice is thick, and I know that she is lost in her own memories of the love she has lost... and the daughter she's lost.\n\n\"My father,\" I spit in disgust. \"Sounds just like him, so convenient. Did he arrange to have him accidentally left alone? Did the guards do it and blame it on Reptiles?\"\n\n\"It was an accident, Riven. The transport sensors were faulty, and there was nothing anyone could do.\" Her voice is calm but her words are monotone as if she's already thought through some other explanation herself and come to the same conclusion that I'd had. \"Your father would never\u2013\"\n\nI interrupt her. \"Never what? Destroy people to get what he wants? Right.\" Walking toward the door, I glance over my shoulder. Aurela is watching me carefully. \"The next time we meet face to face, I'm going to be the one to destroy him; that I promise you. He will pay for what he did to you, to me, and to Shae. Now let's go plan a war.\"\n\nThe room is deathly quiet, even though it's full of people. I stand like a shadow in the back, watching, listening, and waiting. The hood of my jacket obscures my face so that I look like half a dozen of the other soldiers dressed in similar uniforms in the room. Caden, too, is clad the same, with his hood covering much of his face.\n\nI stare at my mother, who has become this dynamic, tough-jawed person at the front of the room. She looks regal but stone cold, with eyes like slivers of ice. In a few minutes, I can see why they all defer to her. She's incredible.\n\nThey've already been over the plans and strategy, and the best way into the castle. Caden is standing to the left of me, half hidden in the darkness, and Sauer is on his left. We're all near the doors just in case things get disruptive \u2013 Caden has to be protected at all costs. But since he insisted on being present, Aurela wanted to keep him as inconspicuous as possible. I peep around the edge of my hood and Caden catches my eye.\n\n\"You look good in dress golds,\" he whispers.\n\nI roll my eyes at him. \"Too flashy for me.\" I glance at him, wearing similar colors to mine. \"You look good, too. Now shut up and pay attention. You asked to be here, remember?\"\n\n\"What do you think about what they want to do?\" Caden asks under his breath, but Sauer gives us both the eye of death and we fall silent.\n\nTruth is, I don't know that what they're suggesting will work. The Winter Solstice is around the corner, and it's one of the two times in Neospes that there are any festivities. The other is during the Summer Solstice. We celebrate Winter and Summer with Games \u2013 a combination of exhibition combat, dancing, and trading \u2013 when all the Sectors come together, even the Royals.\n\nFor the most part, each Sector operates independently, focused on its particular role. The scientists stick with scientists, the farmers with farmers, the builders with builders. The only common threads are the soldiers who are ensconced in every single Sector. It pains me to think it, but after experiencing the freedom of the Otherworld, Neospes is little more than a police state. Soldiers are everywhere, enforcing the rules \u2013 and the will \u2013 of the monarchy.\n\nBut even despite the fact that armed guards surround the celebrations, and more recently armed Vectors, people still love them. It gives all of the people from the different Sectors a reason to come together. They compete in friendly exhibition games like sword fighting and archery. They trade animals and goods. Parades of dancers and acrobats make their way to the castle for an all-night ball in the grand courtyard. But in spite of the revelry and the communal spirit of the Games, security is always tighter than normal.\n\nWhich makes what Aurela is suggesting so dangerous.\n\nShe is planning to stage simultaneous attacks \u2013 one to destroy my father's robotics facility and engage the kill switch for all the Vectors, and two to infiltrate the castle during the ball and reveal the corruption that has corroded the once-revered monarchy. I've added a third step \u2013 to save Cale from any fallout.\n\nCaden nudges me in the side, as if reading my thoughts. \"I don't get it,\" he whispers. \"Why would there be an actual kill code in the facility? That's like having a computer password written in a diary next to your bed.\"\n\n\"It's part of robotics security. During the Tech War, we couldn't shut them down, and the rogue droids executed the programmers who had all the kill codes. When we started developing the Vector technology, the king mandated a failsafe in case the unexpected happened again.\" My mouth twists in a rueful grin. \"So yes, dumb but necessary.\" My grin turns wider. \"Plus, it's not like it's going to be in a bedside diary... more like in a locked triple titanium-enforced room surrounded by around a hundred Vector guards.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Shhh!\" Sauer's hiss is loud, drawing the censorious stares of two people at the end of the long table. Caden and I shut up.\n\nOne of Aurela's commanders is showing something on a hologram that's hanging in the middle of the room. He's making things move and appear with his fingers, shifting diagrams and plans to either side of the screen. His fingertips hold and drag an image from the center that explodes into a hologram of the castle blueprints across the middle of the table. I hear Caden's audible gasp and bite back a smile. Our technology, despite the ravaged world we live in, is remarkable.\n\n\"Pretty cool, huh?\" I say to Caden under my breath with an anxious glance at Sauer.\n\n\"It's the same tech of the suits, just way more advanced, right?\" I nod and stifle a snort at Caden's slack-jawed expression. Luckily, Sauer doesn't hear me and instead moves to the front of the room, where he takes charge of the presentation. As Sauer launches into an advanced schematic of the castle's security, I find my gaze wandering again, this time around the room.\n\nI recognize a few soldiers, although I am unable to put names to any of the faces. I'm not surprised. Soldiers don't have a long life expectancy in Neospes. They don't comfortably retire. The strong survive, and the weak do not. It's that simple. Most of the others are high-ranking officials, and they, with the exception of the four Sector heads I recognized before, likely came into power after I left in search of Caden.\n\nMy eyes collide with a pair of steely black ones. A willowy girl at the far end of the room is watching me and making no attempt to hide that she is. At first glance, she is pretty, but then I see the scars... three long, ugly scratch marks marring her face. They are nearly white against her dark skin, and not even her thick curly hair can conceal them. The girl's face tugs at my memory. She is dressed in camouflage gray, the color of Neospes dust, and wears the stripes of a Commander. I frown, trying to place her face in my head but the memory evades me.\n\nAs if sensing my stare, Caden nudges me in the ribs again. \"Who's that?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The girl over there who looks like she wants to grind you into teeny tiny pieces with her eyes alone.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I answer automatically before glaring at him to stay quiet.\n\nI'm bored by the sudden political turn of the conversation, and I'm agitated by the offensive stare of the girl I can't quite recognize. I know I've seen her before, but I can't place where. Her face with her violent scars is making me edgy. And the fact that she's a Commander makes me crazy. I'm longing to ask Sauer, but he's still up near where Aurela is now sitting. Instead, I sink farther into the shadow of the wall and try to ignore the girl.\n\nWhat seems like hours later, Aurela finally announces the results of the vote. It is unanimous. Her plan will proceed as indicated. I'm still not convinced that they'll be able to infiltrate the labs and the castle, but I'm a spectator... a hired gun at this point, with no say in their martial strategy. I'm going along because any distraction they create will help me with my objective \u2013 to locate and kill my father.\n\nI turn to leave with Caden in tow, but Aurela's voice halts me in my tracks.\n\n\"General Riven will require some volunteers,\" she says, waving her arm in my direction. \"She's taking point on a side assault.\"\n\nAs all eyes converge upon me, the silence in the room is even worse than in the beginning. It is heavy with a dark undercurrent. They don't trust me, not because of what I am \u2013 no one really knows the truth other than a few \u2013 but because of who I am... my reputation.\n\n\"General Riven?\" someone hisses. \"We can't trust her.\"\n\n\"Where has she been all this time? How convenient that she's back.\"\n\nThe noise in the room escalates as pandemonium erupts. The dark-eyed girl is watching me with a smirk. My mouth curls down, and it's all I can do to tear my eyes away.\n\n\"Silence, please.\" Aurela's voice is quiet, but the voices recede. \"Our plans do not stop at removing Murek or exposing his endgame to the people of Neospes. It also extends to reinstating the true crown prince alongside his brother.\" The murmurs in the room rise again and once more regress at Aurela's hand. \"That is where General Riven has been, protecting said prince in the Otherworld.\"\n\n\"The Otherworld!\" someone else gasps.\n\n\"Still, she's the General,\" a voice argues. \"Loyal to the false prince. We know who she is.\"\n\n\"Yes, she is the General,\" Aurela agrees mildly. \"And no, she is bound to us and to Prince Caden. I trust her, and that should be enough.\"\n\nI feel Caden squirm next to me, at odds with all the sudden attention. But my mind is whirling at the fact that my mother and leader of the rebels has openly supported me \u2013 stating that anyone who doesn't accept me does not accept her. I'm at a loss for words, breath even, at her complete and utter trust.\n\nFor a brief second, I wonder whether that trust in me is misplaced.\n\nAnd in that same moment, I realize who the dark-eyed girl is. She's been someone I trusted. Once upon a time, I would have considered her a loyal teammate. But when she went against orders with a group of insurgents led by her brother, the King called for swift justice.\n\nI know exactly who she is. She's a Commander I exiled to the Outers four years ago; she is the single broken line tattooed on my neck.\n\nAnd now she is one of us.\nFATHER DEAREST\n\nDespite the fact that Loren, the soldier I'd exiled, was one of the volunteers, oddly enough, to be on my team, things were on track with Aurela's wishes. I was suspicious the minute Loren voiced her desire to come with me \u2013 she obviously had a bone to pick. After all, I executed her brother and exiled her.\n\nBut at the end of the day, I know that it doesn't matter. I don't trust anyone, and no one here trusts me either, for good reason. I'd been the worst of the worst, and a part of me is still that person. I was programmed to be emotionless, to obey orders, to kill without question. And because of the nanoplasm, I'm faster and fiercer than anyone else. I'm death in a girl's body.\n\nIt stands to reason that people will hate me.\n\nBut I have a job to do, and I can't let some soldier with a vendetta get in the way, even if she has every reason to want to stick an electro-rod through my guts the first chance she gets. We all have our demons.\n\nAnd the old saying about keeping your enemies close is true enough.\n\n\"Why are we breaking into your old house again?\" Caden asks, bringing me back to the present.\n\nWe are crouched behind a building, dressed in identical gray fatigues, the ones the soldiers on the streets wear. I stole them the day before once I realized what I needed to do as part of my plan to infiltrate the palace. I debated against bringing Caden, but leaving him behind wasn't an option. And it isn't exactly the most dangerous situation \u2013 my father will be at the lab \u2013 and we'll be in and out before anyone realizes that we've gone. We'll be safe as kittens. I hoped.\n\n\"I need something. Something important.\"\n\n\"Won't Aurela be pissed that we snuck out?\"\n\nExasperated, I turn to face him. \"Well, she's not going to find out, is she? If we hurry up, that is. Come on; we don't have all day. In and out, OK?\"\n\nMy father's home, the place where I grew up, is in Sector One. Naturally it's the closest sector to the castle, but, oddly enough, doesn't have that much security. People from other sectors don't voluntarily go to Sector One. Shae and I always joked that we needed guards to keep people in instead of keeping undesirables out. Sector One citizens didn't mingle with people from other sectors \u2013 they were the cream of the crop, the brains of Neospes.\n\nI borrowed Sauer's transport hover without his permission but I figured that's what they were for... emergencies. Caden and I had lugged the hover-bike near the side of a warehouse behind some crates and covered it with a tarp.\n\n\"Get changed,\" I snap to him, and toss him a silver oversuit.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nI wave a hand around us and shrug into my own jumpsuit over my clothes. \"Notice that everything in Sector One is silver? It's a sign of privilege. And we need to blend in. The fatigues were only to get us here.\"\n\nThere aren't many people walking around. Most of them are at work, and the younger ones are training in their chosen vocation or in the fields. The elite training fields are between Sector One and Sector Two, and most of the soldiers' families are housed in Sector Three. So Sector One is quiet.\n\n\"Stay close,\" I warn Caden. \"And be vigilant. There are cameras everywhere. If they scan us without a chip, we're toast.\"\n\nIt's a fine line between appearing casual to any onlookers and staying out of sight of the many electronic eyes in each Sector. In Neospes, peace isn't a result of freedom. It's a result of swift military action. Break the law and face the punishment. Those electronic eyes watch everything all the time \u2013 and freedom is the price we have to pay for the security of life in the dome.\n\n\"I thought you said this was going to be easy.\"\n\n\"This is easy. Come on.\"\n\nWe make our way along the side of a row of identical white and light gray-patterned housing cubes, staying out of sight of the main street and weaving in and out of smaller alleys, until we come to a house with tiny purple flowers planted along the edges. My heart trembles in my chest. Shae and I planted them when we were little, in defiance of all the gray and white. Surely my father would have destroyed them. Why has he kept them? As a memory of what? How much we hated Sector One? How much we both hated him?\n\n\"This is it. There shouldn't be anyone here, but be alert,\" I say. \"Quick, around the back.\"\n\nI don't want to draw any attention by going to the front, street side, especially for a wanted fugitive. Located on the far side of Sector One, my father's house backs onto a deep, rocky gorge.\n\nThe gorge appears bottomless and beautiful in a raw-nature kind of way, with a sheer, reflective rock face on one side and broken rubble on the other. The sun glints off the different colored minerals in the rock so brightly that it's like being inside a prism. Free of security cameras and prying eyes, the gorge was one of my favorite places to hide.\n\n\"Wow, so this is where you lived?\" Caden says. \"It's amazing.\"\n\nI allow myself a smile. \"See that ledge over there? Across the gorge? That's actually a cave; it used to be my hideout. My secret place to get away.\"\n\nThe mouth of the cave is barely noticeable. I can see him squinting, so I move closer to show him, lining my face up against his and pointing. Caden turns into me, and it brings back memories I don't want to think about. Not now, especially given what happened the last time. Despite the electric zing in my belly and my sudden breathlessness, I step away. A wounded look slashes across Caden's expression, but he hides it quickly.\n\n\"So it was like your tree house. What'd you keep in there, dolls and stuff?\"\n\nI snort. \"More like a stash of knives and electro-grenades.\"\n\nCaden's green eyes flash with humor. \"Come on, every little girl has to have dolls somewhere.\"\n\n\"So then,\" I toss back, \"where was your stash of dolls?\"\n\nA wide grin. \"Are you calling me a girl?\"\n\n\"Hey, if the shoe fits...\"\n\n\"I'll admit I played with dolls, only they were called GI Joes, so technically they were action figures. But if you still think I'm a girl, I'd be happy to prove otherwise.\" Caden's grin turns wicked and makes a hundred butterflies go aloft in my belly. A flash of his sweaty, defined abs in the training room at Sauer's jumps into my head, and this time I can't control the crazy blush that invades my entire body. He is definitely all boy.\n\n\"No, thanks, I'm good.\" I manage to sound normal, even though my heartbeat is on a rampage following the shameless turn of my thoughts.\n\nGet a grip, Riven, I hiss to myself. This isn't the time or place to be lusting after a boy like a slutty Sadie clone. But now that that door is open, it's kind of hard to get the images out of my head.\n\n\"Well, if you change your mind,\" Caden says, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively and sashaying his hips.\n\n\"You are such a freak,\" I retort, blushing. \"Come on, let's go. And keep it together, will you? We could get arrested or die any second.\"\n\n\"So you keep saying.\"\n\nPulling a small laser device from my pocket, I hold it up to the keypad sensor on the back door. A whine, and the locks click back. Inside, the house is exactly the same as I remembered. Not a little; exactly the same. My father, as brilliant as he is, has never been one for any kind of change. The small but efficient kitchen is spotless. So is the high table with its benches. Off the kitchen and dining area is a larger living space, but it looks unused. The sleeping quarters are on either side of the main area.\n\nCaden is behind me on silent feet. His eyes are wide and he's taking it all in. I know he has to be curious about where Shae and I used to live. After all, he'd been with her for years in the Otherworld, only to find out that he didn't know the truth about who she actually was all along.\n\nOr me either, for that matter.\n\n\"Try not to touch anything, OK? He can't know that we \u2013 or anyone \u2013 has been here.\"\n\n\"Aren't there security cameras in here, too?\" Caden asks nervously.\n\nI shake my head. \"No, my father is exempt from many of Neospes' laws.\"\n\nMy fingers curl into knots at my side, knowing exactly why he hadn't wanted to be seen. I don't bother to go to my parents' old room. I don't even want to think about him more than I already have. Instead, I push open the door to the room that Shae and I shared, my gloved fingers cold on the thin metal door.\n\nCaden's gasp behind me is audible. \"What the...\"\n\n\"Now you understand what we're dealing with?\" I say quietly. \"A psychopath.\"\n\nThe room is a shambles, littered with broken furniture. The top bunk, soldered into the walls, is now chopped into white and black remnants with bits of mattress strewn all over the floor. The bottom bunk hangs drunkenly off its remaining hinge. It looks like he'd gone after the room with a blowtorch. Huge black gashes discolor the walls.\n\nIt's the work of a madman... one consumed by unimaginable rage.\n\nHe'd torn holes in the thick carpet and ripped any of our remaining clothing to shreds. Not much of Shae's was there after she left, but he shredded my old uniforms until they were nothing but tatters. The only thing left intact in the room is the glass case with all my trophies won during the different Games. They meant more to him than they ever did to me.\n\n\"Wow,\" Caden breathes, staring at the garish display. \"You won... like everything.\"\n\n\"Robot blood. What can I say?\" I reply drily. \"Technically, I cheated, so I don't deserve any of those.\"\n\n\"He cheated,\" Caden reminds me. \"Not you. You were innocent.\"\n\nA deep guttural laugh that I recognize as my own crawls from my mouth. \"Don't make me into some kind of martyr, Caden. I was never an innocent, not for a second. Not after all I've done. I did all those things.\" I thump my chest emphatically. \"Me. Not him, not anyone else. Me.\"\n\n\"Riv,\" Caden says slowly. \"I understand you did all those things, but you did them because you were following orders, and you didn't question them, because you were compromised by your father.\" Caden grasps my shoulders, tugging me around to face him. I can't look at him but I do. I meet his eyes and it's like I'm standing at the edge of the gorge outside, on the brink of freefalling. \"You have to stop punishing yourself for something that was out of your control. Can't you see that? You have to see that.\"\n\nBut it isn't his voice that convinces me. It's the complete faith in his eyes... those green eyes that I've somehow known my whole life. And for the first time, I don't think of Cale.\n\nIt's only Caden... this boy who believes in me more than I believe in myself. And I'm terrified. I've never been more afraid of anything in my life. I shift backward but his arms tighten, drawing me against his chest. His chin rests on top of my head, his breath warm against my hair.\n\n\"Let it go, Riv,\" he whispers, so close that I can see the soft pulse beneath his skin. \"Let go of the past. It can't hurt you anymore.\"\n\nAnd then I'm weeping, long silent tears that soak my face and his shirt front... tears for all the years of pain and anger and loss. I cry until there's nothing but dry sobs racking my body, and still I can't stop. I cry for myself and my inability to love a boy who's clearly in love with me. I'll only hurt him. I'll destroy him, just like everyone else in my life.\n\n\"I'm scared. I can't lose anyone else.\" My voice is so soft, it's more of a rasp than words against his shirt. But Caden raises his head. His hands move to hold my face on either side.\n\n\"I know. But fear is just fear. It can only hurt you if you let it.\" His thumbs rub gently against my cheekbones. \"And I won't let you let it.\" His voice is hypnotic, weaving through all the broken parts of me and somehow bringing them back together. \"Look at me, Riven,\" he says, his eyes capturing mine easily. \"You think I don't know anything about fear? I know that if you let it, it can consume you.\" His voice is so soft I can barely hear it. \"You can't be afraid all the time, afraid to lose everything. Shae told me how you did it in your training. Faced it, confronted it head on. This is the same thing.\"\n\n\"I didn't save her,\" I say, my words distraught.\n\n\"You couldn't save her.\" His voice gentles. \"Stop beating yourself up for something that was also out of your control. You only control what you do. Not the actions of others.\"\n\nCaden is right \u2013 he's seen right through me, right into the core of me. And he loves me. Just as I love him. I started to say it before my internal programming went berserk. I've never allowed myself to feel anything for anyone, not when everything I've been taught is the opposite; love precedes weakness. Then why do I like knowing that Caden feels something for me?\n\nI like it. I like him.\n\nHis eyes widen as if he's reading my thoughts, the internal battle I'm waging with myself... the war between want and reason, between girl and soldier. And I'm losing. I'm losing myself to him. My eyes speak the words that my mouth cannot.\n\nYes, they say. Yes.\n\nCaden leans in as his right hand slides into my hair to the nape of my neck and brings my face toward his, his eyes never letting mine go. At the last minute before his lips touch mine, I close my eyes. The kiss is soft and featherlight, but I still slide my hands up his arms, gripping tightly, pressing myself against his body and demanding more.\n\nHe smiles against my mouth, and our kiss deepens into something fierce and frantic. Suddenly, I can't even think, standing there in my father's house as the pain and fear fall away. All I can do is feel... the soft contours of his lips against mine, the taste of his mouth, the strength of his body. My fingers clutch his clothing and I am overwhelmed, breathless. Weightless.\n\nCaden trails kisses against my temple, my eyes, my nose. His eyes are a stormy jade, dark with passion. He kisses me again, and this time everything around us disappears \u2013 my father's house, my destroyed life, my broken self. All that remains is Caden.\n\nFingers tangle in clothing and zippers as we fall to the floor together. My palms are flat against the taut planes of Caden's chest, and my breath is unsteady at the sheer beauty of him above me. His body is not bulky with muscle; instead, he's sleekly toned, his stomach and sides hard against my wandering fingertips.\n\nHe is kissing me again, and we stop only to pull my tunic over my head. A sudden shyness envelops me and I feel my face flush. No one has ever seen me this unclothed. No one. Not ever. My embarrassment must be obvious because Caden grins and grasps my chin.\n\n\"You're perfect, Riven,\" he whispers.\n\n\"No. I'm not,\" I say, my thoughts burning, my hands fluttering to hide the scars peppering my ribcage and stomach. \"But you make me feel that way.\"\n\nHis smile transforms his entire face and he bends toward me again, pushing away my embarrassed hands. His kisses grace my ear, and then my neck, and wander lower, kissing each raised welt, each ugly wound that I tried to hide with aching gentleness. My fingers thread their way into his hair and down his neck. Caden growls low in his chest as my hands slide down his shoulders and his muscled back, and lower still.\n\nWe are combustible, electric.\n\nI'd never kissed anyone before Caden, far less gotten half-naked with anyone, but this feels more right than anything I've ever done. He's the one who makes me feel less splintered, less shattered. I feel whole when I'm with him. That has to count for something, doesn't it? I have to tell him the truth about how I feel.\n\n\"Caden,\" I begin.\n\n\"Mmm,\" he says, trailing more kisses up my arm. But before I can continue, the sound of a door slamming jerks me into action. I shove Caden to one side and press my fingers urgently against his lips, my eyes wide. Someone is outside.\n\nHow could I have been so reckless?\n\nShrugging my arms into the white overalls, I crawl along the floor to the thin window of glass against the far wall and slide up to the right of it. A quick glimpse confirms that there's a vehicle outside. It's black and sleek and official-looking.\n\n\"We have to hide,\" I mouth to Caden who has already dressed. His hair is tousled and his eyes are still glazed from what we'd shared seconds before. I'm sure I must look the same.\n\n\"Where?\" he mouths back.\n\nMy father ripped the room apart in rage, but he still didn't find the secret space that Shae and I painstakingly built. Half of me wants to leap toward it to get what I came for and make a run for it, but the other half warns that getting caught would be foolish. I glance at Caden. I can't risk putting him in danger, not with my father.\n\nSo instead, I jerk my head toward the twisted bottom bunk bed. \"Under,\" I say. \"Now.\"\n\nI slide in behind him until we are both jammed up against the wall. Every inch of Caden's body is glued to every inch of mine, but there's no fire between us now... only cold dread.\n\n\"Don't breathe,\" I warn.\n\nSounds reach us from the other room. A door clicking, a staccato of footsteps on the floor, voices. He's not alone.\n\n\"Sir,\" a voice says. \"Reports came in of trespassers in the back.\"\n\n\"Any confirmation of what they looked like?\" My father's voice is mellifluous and just as loathsome as the last time I'd heard it. My stomach curdles like spoiled milk and lurches unsteadily. A cold sweat pinpricks its way along my back.\n\n\"No, sir. There's no sign of them. And no sign of forced entry on the perimeter. It's clear.\"\n\nThe footsteps draw closer, and I press myself even harder against Caden. I'm not even breathing by the time the door to the room slides open and a shiny pair of black boots come into view. His smell assaults me... still the same, a dark musky scent of spice.\n\nIt spins me back into a whirlwind of memories \u2013 my father and I playing chess in his laboratory, my father glowing with praise at my first-place trophies for archery and swordplay, my father pinning my rank of general to my vest. It's hard to reconcile the man I'd known as a child to the monster I now realize he is.\n\nThe seconds drag by and still the black boots don't move, but I can sense heavy eyes roving slowly over every inch of the space. I scan the floor in a panic, but nothing appears noticeably different from the overall chaos of the room. My eyes swivel back to the black boots. It's so silent you could hear an eyelash fall. Neither Caden nor I are breathing.\n\nI'm so sure that he's going to peer beneath the bunk that my pulse thrums and my blood rushes madly in my ears. My body tenses, and then I feel Caden's fingers, quiet against the small of my back, stroking, soothing. They slide over and intertwine with mine. My pulse slows and calms.\n\n\"All clear, sir,\" the other voice says. \"There's no one here, now.\"\n\nAfter a minute, the boots retreat and the door slides closed.\n\nStill, I don't breathe properly until I hear the hum of the engine outside. Tense, I crawl silently out from under the bed and press my ear to the door. There's no sound in the rest of the house, and the car is gone.\n\nWe're safe for now.\n\nI cross the room swiftly and pull the trophy case gently from the wall, sliding my hands along the floor. I pull back a portion of the carpet, and press the bare tiles gently, this time in a certain sequence. A soft click, and one of the tiles glides back to reveal a hidden compartment.\n\nInside, there's a box. I don't have time to sift through all the contents, even though my heart stings at some of the treasures Shae and I had hidden there. Bits of ribbon, silver stars, letters written to our future selves.\n\n\"What's in there?\" Caden asks.\n\n\"Stuff we didn't want anyone to find.\" I pull out the thing I'd risked our lives to come here to get.\n\nA Vector's uniform.\n\nOnly this one is different. This one, my father recalibrated to work with my own DNA. A wry smirk twists my mouth. We were so shocked and proud that the suit responded to me \u2013 thinking my father brilliant \u2013 and little knowing that the suit responded to the nanoplasm inside of me instead of pure human DNA. The suit was designed for me.\n\nHe knew. And he created the perfect defense for his perfect weapon. The suit is unmatched in its capabilities, offensive and defensive. No wonder he tore the room apart trying to find it, and then assumed that I'd somehow hidden it or taken it with me.\n\n\"Let's go,\" I say to Caden. \"We're done here.\"\n\nWe sneak out the back after checking carefully to make sure we aren't being watched, and make our way to where we'd hidden the hover bike. The journey back to Sector Seven is far quicker than the time it took to leave, and my stomach sinks as we pull into Sauer's garage.\n\nAurela's face is blacker than a thundercloud.\nTHE WINTER SOLSTICE\n\nAurela is still furious, even though I've assured her a hundred times that we hadn't encountered any danger. Of course, I hadn't mentioned our near-discovery by the man himself. She would have flipped her lid and put both Caden and me on lockdown. To his credit, Caden had followed my lead like a pro, and after only an hour of intense interrogation Aurela had relented.\n\nWe're back in the meeting room, going over the plans one last time. I toss a casual glance at Caden, who's sitting next to Loren. Caden's eyes meet mine meaningfully over the table, and I'm glad I'm sitting, because my knees suddenly feel like water. Earlier, he had told me that he'd have given anything for a few more minutes before my father showed up.\n\nEven though I feel far older at times, Caden has more experience in the relationship area than I do. I have exactly zero skill when it comes to boys, the not-beating-them-to-a-pulp kind, I mean. Caden's been with Sadie, and she's not exactly the unadventurous type. Sadie is a girl who calls the shots, especially in the relationship department.\n\nDragging my eyes away, I focus instead on Loren's piercing glare. We haven't spoken since she volunteered to be on my team, and it's clear that she doesn't trust me. Then again, I don't trust her, either. I agreed for her to join us because before I exiled her, she'd been one of the best. And now, with her skills honed in the Outers, she's only become more so. I'm not about to begrudge someone a chance to change, not after everything I've learned about myself.\n\nI turn my attention to Sauer's computer tablet in front of me, showing a schematic of the castle. Security is near impenetrable. There are four layers of guards, two sets outside on the perimeter and two sets inside. They are only the human line of defense. There are also Vectors at each entry point. I sigh, steepling my fingers in front of me, and meet Sauer's eyes. Getting in undetected will be a challenge for one person, far less four.\n\n\"What are you thinking?\" I ask him.\n\n\"The Winter Games are two days away, but we still have a lot to do,\" he says. \"To even get past the castle guards, we'd have to register by identity chip, and technically, you're already off the grid. So is Caden.\"\n\nI removed my implanted birth chip the minute I decided to leave Neospes \u2013 it was incredibly painful but a necessity. At the time, I hadn't known if the Vectors could track an implant even in another dimension, but I didn't want to take any chances. Given that all citizens of Neospes have to be accounted for at all times, Sauer explained that both Caden and I would require new identity chips, which means fake ones, and they aren't that easy to get. It's tricky, because if someone dies, the system automatically records it. You have to use the chip of someone who is still alive. If someone's chip is forcibly removed, it releases an alarm that goes straight to the Vectors. After Leila disappeared with Caden, those precautions were deemed necessary.\n\nCaden is frowning with a confused look on his face. \"I don't get it,\" he says, staring at me. \"You took your chip out three years ago. How come they didn't get you?\"\n\n\"They did, but I killed the Vector who'd caught me. Then I everted.\"\n\n\"So basically, I need a chip, and you need a chip?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Sauer says. \"And Aurela, but she already has a fake one she's been using for years.\"\n\nCaden's frown deepens. \"So what do we have to do, exactly?\"\n\nLoren answers. \"You get fitted with a new one. Aurela's people have been growing fake people for years. So technically, you'll get the chip of someone who's only alive electronically.\"\n\n\"Wow, fake people,\" Caden breathes. \"That's extreme.\"\n\n\"Extreme times call for extreme measures,\" Sauer says matter-of-factly.\n\nLoren leans forward. \"Aurela has been planning this for a long time, very, very carefully. She knew identity chips would be needed one day for those of us who'd been exiled, so she made sure we could be accounted for.\" Her voice is monotone, but I avoid her stare like it's the plague.\n\n\"So who do I get?\" Caden asks.\n\n\"They're all soldiers,\" Sauer says, and then looks at me with a weird expression, his face reddening. \"Well, most of them anyway.\"\n\nI don't hesitate. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Your identity is an... um... danseuse.\" His face dulls to a dark red. \"Loren was assigned the last female soldier chip.\"\n\nMy chair flies back crashing into the wall. \"A what?\" I scream.\n\nDanseuses are nothing more than paid female escorts, paid to entertain wealthy citizens of Neospes. Aurela's calm voice breaks through my fury as she walks into the room. \"It's the best disguise for you, Riven, to infiltrate the palace. If you look like a soldier, people will recognize you. Don't forget who you were... who you still are here.\"\n\nBut the thought of it fills me with disgust. \"I'm not using the identity of a freaking floozy! Pick something else. I'll be a cleaner, a goat trader, anything.\"\n\n\"We don't have any other female identity chips, Riven, and this is the best for you. Trust me,\" Aurela says. She walks to stand in front of me and turns me toward her. My chest feels like it's going to explode. I've never been asked to do anything more ludicrous. I'm a general, not some dancer dressed in a handkerchief! I don't even know how to dance.\n\n\"Aurela, I can't.\"\n\nAurela's voice is harsh, harsher than I've ever heard it. \"You have no choice. If you don't, we abort. It's that simple. You want to save Cale. Well, you are the only person who can ensure his safety if we get you into the castle.\" Aurela pauses with a long stare at me. \"You decide.\"\n\nI know she's right, but I can't reconcile wearing some kind of revealing costume with any of it. It's a huge strike against me \u2013 Riven \u2013 the name that strikes fear into the hearts of all men will now cause ridicule. But I know that's only my pride talking. I should do whatever I have to do to save Cale and Caden without being selfish. Being a danseuse for ten minutes is only a means to an end. A crappy, ridiculous means, but it will get the job done. I'll get into the castle unnoticed.\n\n\"Fine,\" I snap, stalking to the far end of the room, where I pour myself a shot of spirits. I drink it quickly, ignoring its hot path searing my stomach. Loren is laughing at me, her dark eyes mocking.\n\nHours later, there are three of Aurela's lackeys in my chamber, fussing over my hair and my face and my clothes. I have never felt more conspicuous or more ridiculous. Strange dark-gold extensions have been applied and braided intricately with sweet-smelling blossoms into my own hair. My skin has been oiled to a gilded sheen and colored shimmery dust applied to my eyes and cheeks. The women gesture for me to step into my costume \u2013 a filmy white and silver getup that looks like some kind of confection instead of a dress.\n\nThere's a knock at the door, and one of the women answers it.\n\n\"I'd hardly recognize you, Riven,\" Aurela says. She's dressed head-to-toe in black stealth gear, pretty much what I want to be wearing.\n\nInstead, I'm a porcelain doll. An ugly scowling porcelain doll.\n\nI turn to glare at her. \"That was the point, wasn't it?\" I gesture down at myself. \"I couldn't attack a fly and win in this dress. In fact, the fly would probably try to eat me, since I look like a giant frosted cupcake.\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\nBelatedly realizing I've mentioned a food from the Otherworld that doesn't exist here, I shrug. \"Never mind. It means a delicious but totally useless food... which is what I look like.\" One of the women draws me to the mirror, and my half-joking, self-deprecating words desert me completely. I don't recognize myself.\n\nThe girl staring at me in the mirror has glossy dark braids piled in rows along her head and draped artfully to one side. Her eyes are lined with kohl, making their normally dull gray depths vibrant and jewel-toned. Her cheeks are glittery and flushed with color, her lips glistening. The dress is impractical but undeniably lovely, falling in triangular swathes of chiffon to the ground.\n\nI am an imposter.\n\nIt can't possibly be me, but I blink and the girl does the same. I resist the urge to pick a fight with the first soldier I can find.\n\n\"You look beautiful.\" Caden's voice is hushed and awed, and I spin around only to find my swift retort cut off from my own mouth. He is resplendent in a silk moss-green shirt and black dress pants, complete with official-looking scabbard.\n\n\"So do you,\" I blurt out, and then immediately look to Aurela, who is busy addressing one of the women who had helped get me ready. Thank the stars she didn't notice my schoolgirl response to his appearance. I flush and Caden grins, reading me easily.\n\n\"Thank you, my lady. I'm supposed to be your... er... partner.\"\n\n\"My what?\" I splutter. \"But you were supposed to be a soldier.\" In a rush, I notice the lines of gold stars and royal stripes decorating his upper left breast pocket, marking his status as a lord of Neospes.\n\nAurela walks over with an approving smile at Caden's garb. \"Too obvious a disguise. This way, you can be near each other without too many questions. Caden's a wealthy lord and you're his entertainment escort for the ball.\" I can't help the blush that heats my face at the thought of being anyone's escort, far less Caden's.\n\n\"You know,\" Caden begins laughing at my obvious embarrassment, \"there's a name for that where I'm from\u2013\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" I say, swearing under my breath. \"Or you'll see exactly how entertaining I can be with two sets of blades.\"\n\n\"Oh, feisty. I like that in my women.\"\n\n\"Aurela!\" I protest weakly. \"Really? Can't he just be a soldier and go with Sauer? That way, I don't end up killing him by accident or something.\"\n\nBut Aurela rolls her eyes and throws me a sling pack for my gear. It's a form-fitting pack that I can wear around my waist under the dress. There isn't much room under there, but I'll be damned if I go anywhere without weapons. She also hands me some kind of frilly fan that I just stare at dumbfounded.\n\n\"It's a fan,\" she says helpfully. My scowl deepens as I grasp the offending object as if it's a snake. \"Ready to go in ten,\" she reminds us with a quickly concealed smile. I swear that she's laughing under her breath.\n\nSmoothing the ruffled skirt of the dress, I turn to Caden once Aurela is a few feet away and engaged in conversation with one of her maids. \"Joking aside, you don't think I look ridiculous?\"\n\n\"I hardly recognize you,\" Caden says honestly. \"I mean, I've never seen you out of cargo pants, unless you count the time when you wore Sadie's dress.\" He winks and I choke out a startled laugh.\n\n\"You knew about that?\"\n\nCaden smiles drily. \"I think Sadie knew about that, too, but she wasn't going to admit it in a million years.\" He shakes his head. \"You have no idea how pissed-off she was.\"\n\n\"Sorry, but she deserved way worse, and you know it.\"\n\n\"Well, I wasn't too upset. The last time you wore a dress, epic things happened, so win-win for me,\" Caden says with a meaningful look, clearly referring to our last day at Horrow. He leans in so only I can hear him. \"Can't wait to see what happens this time.\" At his whispered words, I can't control the tingle that weaves its way through my body, but I fight it just the same.\n\n\"Keep talking, my lord,\" I snap with a glare, \"and the only thing that's going to happen is your ass meeting the ground, dress or no dress. Now, go away.\"\n\nCaden backs away, hands in the air, grinning, and I stare at myself in the mirror again, blinking just to make sure it's still me. The top of the dress is lower than anything I've ever worn, and I tug at the bodice uncomfortably. \"Seriously Cade, I look like a stranger. This isn't me. And how the hell am I going to fight in this?\"\n\n\"Just because you're wearing a dress doesn't make you a different person, Riv. Plus, Sauer's got your suit and your sword for when we get inside. It's just clothes... wear a tunic underneath if it'll make you feel better. And you don't look like a stranger; your eyes are the same, and those I'd know anywhere.\"\n\n\"I am wearing a tunic and I still feel naked,\" I flash back. \"And these don't even look like my eyes. Mine are more dirt-colored than silver.\"\n\nCaden's glance is like velvet. \"Well, they always look like this to me.\"\n\nIt's all I can do not to melt inside, but I keep my face expressionless, then scowl slightly for good measure. I sneak one last look at the mirror and sigh.\n\nI have a job to do.\n\nSauer and Loren are ready and waiting by the time we get downstairs. Outside, the streets are already crowded with people heading to the training fields between Sector Two and One for the Games. When evening starts to fall, everyone will eventually find their way to the castle, the final event and celebration of the Winter Solstice.\n\nIt's a tradition dating back to the beginning of Neospes, one of the first decrees of the then newly crowned king. It used to be a celebration of our survival after the War. Now, its meaning has become far more mundane \u2013 merely a way for the monarchy to fawn over itself and its power. We've lost sight of what's important, as has our leadership.\n\nAurela is right \u2013 I see that now. And I understand why it has to change.\n\nI glance at Sauer, who nods curtly in my direction as we merge into the throng of people on the street. He's all business, a commander first and a friend second. His role as a double agent is about to end, once we wage our combined attack on the monarchy. Until today, I hadn't realized how deep the unrest reaches... and how many followers Aurela has, not just in Sector Seven but all the sectors. She has thousands of reserve soldiers on hand if things get ugly.\n\nBut that isn't Aurela's plan. She prefers a quiet, stealthy infiltration. She doesn't want hundreds of innocent people to die, especially at the hands of the Vectors. Our population is devastated enough without diminishing it even further. Which is why we split into three groups \u2013 me, Sauer, Caden, and Loren to safeguard Cale; Aurela's team to infiltrate the lab and locate the kill code for the Vectors; and finally, the third team to depose Murek.\n\nMy father will have to wait until Cale is safe. Then I have my own plans for him.\n\n\"You OK?\" Caden asks, jerking me out of my murderous thoughts.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I said, are you OK?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" I snap. \"Why wouldn't I be? It's just a mission. Stay as close to me as possible. I don't want to draw undue attention.\"\n\n\"I'm pretty sure that's the point of how we're dressed, but don't worry; I won't embarrass you. I'll just think of it like going to prom.\"\n\nI half-choke, half-snort on my retort. \"Prom?\"\n\nCaden grins at me. \"Yeah, you know... the whole life-or-death school dance thing in my world when girls murder each other with their eyes, and guys are expected to fall in line or face certain death. Don't worry; got it down pat.\"\n\nWhich is why I am grinning from ear to ear when Sauer announces that we are splitting from the rest of the other groups. Just before we jump into Sauer's hovercraft, I feel Aurela's hand on my arm.\n\n\"Riven, be careful,\" she says quietly. \"And please don't do anything rash. I'm trusting you.\"\n\n\"I know,\" I say. \"Cale and Caden will be safe, I promise you.\" She frowns at my evasive response, but I climb into the hover. There's nothing that will stop me, once Cale is with Sauer, from doing what I have to do where my father is concerned. And if the opportunity presents itself during the raid, I'll take it. But I know what Aurela is worried about. I turn around. \"Don't worry; I won't jeopardize the mission,\" I say. \"The code in his lab is my birth date. At least, it was until I defected. And Mom, you be careful, too.\" The hover accelerates, but not before I see the startled look on her face that I'd called her something other than Aurela.\n\nDriving is slow going, especially around all the people, but after a while Sauer pulls off onto a less major road where there's far less pedestrian traffic. The Games are well underway, and the training fields are packed with huge colored tents full of participants and street vendors selling wares and trinkets. People are laughing and dancing, and cheering on the various combatants.\n\nWe ditch the hover and make our way to the main tent in the middle. It's where the exhibition fighting is and where anyone important will be. Falling into my role, Caden and I separate from Loren and Sauer, pretending to be interested in a couple battling it out with swords in the middle of the tent. It's an exhibition match, so the opponents are clothed in protective padding. Still, it is amazing to watch. Their technique is faultless and perfect in its form.\n\nOut of the corner of my eye, I see Loren taking up her position near the entrance of the tent and Sauer making his way to the far end, where there is a raised dais, likely for any royal attendees and their court. Although I'm straining my neck to tell who's there, I can't quite see over the heads of everyone, so my attention swings back to the exhibition fight. Four Vectors are stationed around the ring like silent, dead pillars. There seem to be a lot more of them than usual, I notice, frowning. Has someone tipped them off about Aurela's plans? Or maybe I've just been gone too long from Neospes. Shaking my head, I let go of my heightened paranoia \u2013 this stupid dress is making me edgy.\n\nA fat man in a gaudy gold outfit jostles me, and my fingers curl into fists at his lascivious leer. He's staring at my chest like it's a giant pile of precious stones. My fists tighten. I've never wanted to smash in someone's face more.\n\n\"Not here,\" Caden warns in my ear, moving to stand between me and the man who's just been spared having my fist in his face. He turns to the offending man. \"The lady is with me,\" he says quietly. His words aren't threatening, but the low growl underscoring his words is.\n\n\"I wasn't going to do anything,\" I grit out as the man moves away with a lingering glance at me. \"I'm fine.\"\n\nIgnoring the low burn that Caden's possessive tone had ignited in my belly, I turn my attention back to the exhibition match and notice that the combatants have switched to double-edged Artok weapons similar to mine. The one on the right is half a step slower than the one on the left, but they are evenly matched. Again, their combat technique is brilliant.\n\nI wish I could see who they are, but they're both wearing antique decorative facemasks. The truth is, I probably wouldn't know them, anyway. Our mortality rates aren't that great, and they're probably up-and-comers in the ranks. The fighter on the left drops into a low crouch, spinning to the left to catch the other unawares, and wins the point.\n\n\"He's good,\" Caden comments. \"The one on the left.\"\n\n\"Not that good,\" I say snarkily, still semi-peeved to be in a dress. To tell the truth, a part of me wants nothing more than to be in that ring, showing off and strutting my skills. Winning meant everything to my father, so I won everything I could, including all of my exhibition matches, which didn't technically have winners. His approval used to mean so much.\n\nI turn away, unable to watch, and catch Sauer's eye. He's gesturing to someone on the dais. Caden gasps, his eyes connecting with the four Vectors standing on either side of it. But I knew they'd be there. I want to see who they're protecting so vigilantly.\n\nWe inch our way forward, the throng of people thinning the closer we get, and I recognize the gaunt face and the bulbous, fish-like eyes immediately. Instinctively, my fan opens in front of my face, concealing my own features from view as a hollow feeling spreads in my stomach. My disguise may fool most people, but there's one person who could see right through it... a master manipulator and schemer himself.\n\nMurek.\n\nUsurper. Traitor. Murderer.\nTHE WINNER TAKES IT\n\nTwilight is falling as the last of the Games wrap up, and people are already starting to take the revelry to the castle courtyard for the Midnight Ball. The streets are lit with multicolored halogen lights with shiny decorations draped over storefronts and houses. Everyone is laughing and dancing... well, everyone except us.\n\nI want to leave but am at the mercy of Sauer's lead. I still haven't seen Cale. He's nowhere to be found in the main tent or the surroundings, and Murek did the presentation of the Games' trophies in his stead as if he were already acting in the position of king. I wonder for a moment whether Cale is already dead and hidden away somewhere deep in the castle where no one would ever find him. Murek is twisted like that.\n\nMy father is also mysteriously absent. Not that I expected that he would attend the Games, but he'd been present at every single match I'd ever won. His pride would keep him away, I realize. My only hope is that he isn't in the lab \u2013 he is my prize, not Aurela's. I have to be the one to make him pay for what he'd done to all of us.\n\n\"Riven,\" a voice rasps in my ear. It's Sauer, standing with his back against mine. \"Remember the strategy. We separate after entry and regroup thirty minutes later. You take point to extract Cale, and Loren and I watch for Vectors. Here's your comms.\" He palms two tiny skin-colored devices into my hands. \"Stick to the plan, and remember your cover. Code word for help is reptile.\" There's a clear warning in his voice. \"Clear?\"\n\n\"Clear.\" My own voice is terse, ready.\n\nThe wireless comms device is a tiny bean-shaped pod that tucks snugly into my ear. I hand the second one to Caden, who does the same. Together, we join the crowd walking toward the first security checkpoint. Loren and Sauer fall in a little way back behind us.\n\n\"Scan, please.\"\n\nCaden goes through first without any problem. I hold out my wrist underneath the scanner, and for a second my stomach lurches as the screen flickers before validating my identity as Tania, a danseuse. The electronic words are tiny, but they may as well have been on a neon banner over my head. Inside, I'm cringing at the appreciative look the soldier tosses my way, but instead of punching him in the face, I smile coquettishly, thinking of Sadie, and play the part I'm supposed to play.\n\n\"Bravo,\" Caden says. I purposefully stomp on his toe as I walk past him. \"Ow! What was that for? I was paying you a compliment.\"\n\n\"You know what for,\" I hiss back. \"And I was only channeling Sadie; so glad to see her ridiculously simpering ways still work on you.\"\n\n\"What\u2013?\"\n\n\"Come on,\" I snap, inexplicably angry. I'm a soldier, not a seductress. The pretense does not come easily.\n\nThe next security checkpoint is at the entrance of the courtyard beyond the tall and forbidding gilded gates. Cale and I used to scale them as children \u2013 a fair feat, given that they are over eight feet tall and spiked, but we were inventive and determined. I glance up at the parapets overlooking the grand courtyard that are decorated with brightly colored banners and flags, hoping to see a glimpse of Cale's face, but he's not there.\n\nMy body freezes at the sight of the two Vectors stationed with the guards at the checkpoint. Just seeing them standing there, their milky blue eyes staring at nothing, sends a chill deep into my bones. To think I used to command them without a second thought! Now I'm the enemy.\n\nFollowing in Caden's footsteps, I flick my wrist through the scanner, and the screen flickers and then fades to snow. The guard frowns and taps the scanner lightly. One of the Vectors swivels his eyes toward me, his gaze heavy. Feigning a bored look, I hold my wrist out even though my heart is racing. The guard scans my chip again. This time, it goes through.\n\nI feel the Vector's eyes on me all the way to the middle of the courtyard.\n\n\"What happened?\" Sauer's voice is tinny inside my ear. I can barely hear him over the loud music.\n\n\"I don't know,\" I reply, touching my ear gently. \"I think the nanobes are attacking the chip. They must think it's something foreign. There was a lot of electronic interference on the scanners. I'm not sure that it will work again.\"\n\n\"OK,\" Sauer says. \"Be careful. Those two were the main ones Aurela knew about so we'll figure out any others. And Riven?\" His voice is quiet, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. \"You have a Vector on your tail. He's been with you since the checkpoint.\"\n\nSauer's right. I can still feel the Vector's oily, wet gaze on me. So I do the only thing I can do. Half-dragging a bewildered Caden to the platform in the center, I throw my arms on his shoulders. I giggle loudly, a flirtatious sound that sounds grating and false to my own ears, and wave my fan teasingly in front of my face. Caden's eyes widen.\n\n\"Put your arms around my waist,\" I hiss urgently from behind the fan. \"Don't you know how to dance?\"\n\n\"I thought you didn't do dancing.\"\n\n\"I don't, but we have company, and I need it to not consider us a threat.\"\n\n\"Happy to oblige.\" Caden's hands slip around my waist to the small of my back, pulling me close. He has that smile on his lips again... the one that makes me breathless. He raises an eyebrow.\n\n\"Oh, get over it,\" I snap, watching as his smile turns into a full-fledged knowing grin. \"Really, Cade? We're on a mission, remember?\"\n\n\"I know, but we're dancing, so let's at least try to enjoy it.\"\n\n\"Why do you do that?\" I ask. \"Play around when you're supposed to be serious?\"\n\n\"Because life's too short. Even if one of those guys\" \u2013 he gestures to the Vector watching us \u2013 \"wants to kill me, I'd rather die with a smile in my heart. Life is for the living, and death is for the dead.\"\n\nThat shuts me up.\n\nWe make a few showy turns, not realizing that others on the dance floor have given us a wide berth. Apparently, hardcore martial arts and weapons training give a person an edge in the dancing arena. I feel as if there's wind beneath my soles, and although I know that most of it is probably due to Caden's expert partnering, I have no trouble keeping up.\n\n\"You're a good dancer,\" I tell him.\n\n\"Fencing,\" he says. \"Half dancing, half fighting. Oh, and Shae made me take ballroom. Don't laugh,\" he says at my incredulous expression, twirling me around him. \"It was either ballroom or singing, and since I can't hold a tune, well, I didn't have much choice.\"\n\n\"Did she say why?\" I ask, mirth in my eyes.\n\nHe shrugs. \"Something to do with being well-rounded. Honestly, I was seven at the time, so it was just something interesting to do. All old-school, too, like waltzes and the foxtrot.\" As if to demonstrate his point, Caden twirls us into several complicated loops, my toes barely grazing the floor.\n\n\"Well, you do it very well,\" I say.\n\nCaden's grin is wicked as he spins me outward and pulls me back toward him so quickly that my body snaps into his like a rubber band. \"Constantly surprising you, aren't I?\"\n\nI am breathless.\n\nBeing this close to him in front of so many people is sweet torture, flashes of two days before tormenting me. His dancing is as masterful as his... kissing. I realize that I'm staring at his finely-shaped lips and drop my eyes hastily.\n\n\"I want to, too,\" he whispers in my ear, lowering me into a graceful dip.\n\n\"Want to what?\"\n\n\"Kiss you right now.\"\n\nI almost lose my grasp on his shoulders, but Caden slips his free hand around my back and brings me back up. My cheeks are flaming and my heart is bursting. The music stops and Caden bows with a flourish to the loud sound of cheering. I sink into a dazed half-curtsy, and we move off the dance floor.\n\n\"The Vector's gone,\" Caden says, handing me a thin, fluted glass of something misty.\n\n\"What?\" Again, he has caught me unawares. I flush dully. I'm still thinking of him kissing me. \"Oh, right.\"\n\nThe ice-cold vapor in the glass helps to slow the burn in my chest, bringing me back to reality and some semblance of self-control. If I don't get it together, this is going to be an extraction gone horribly wrong. I shove any thoughts of Caden and kissing out of my head.\n\nMoving along the edge of the crowd, we walk to the stone terrace that branches off into the castle's lush rose gardens. I don't know why I never noticed it before: so many people without water in Neospes, and here it's indulgently wasted on roses. My time in the Otherworld has changed me, made me appreciate the little that we do have. We walk casually into the garden.\n\n\"Anyone see us?\" I ask.\n\n\"No,\" Caden says. \"And even if they did, they'll just think we came in here to finish what we started out there on the dance floor.\"\n\n\"You're disgusting,\" I say, but my cells are firing at the very thought.\n\nGritting my teeth and ignoring Caden, I locate the duffel bag that Sauer has managed to stash under a bench in a shadowed corner of the gardens. The sky is a deep bluish purple, and the faded moonlight barely illuminates the small square.\n\n\"Turn the other way,\" I say primly to Caden, who of course grins even more widely but complies. Stripping off the offending white gown, I pull on the black Vector suit I retrieved from my house. I don't link the neck connector to my nervous system just yet. Instead, I clip some weapons onto the suit's belt and throw my star-shaped sheath over my shoulder to fasten it over my suit, flush against my back. My ninjata blades scissor into the bottom of it, and the long sword Shae gave me slides in down the middle from the top. Finally, my pack goes over everything.\n\n\"OK, your turn,\" I say to Caden. \"I'll keep watch.\"\n\n\"You can watch.\"\n\n\"You're so annoying. I said keep watch. Just hurry up!\"\n\nBut Caden is already slipping off his shirt just as I'm finishing my last words, and my breath slams against my lips. Every curve is as chiseled as I remembered and looks even better in the moonlight. I drag my eyes away and stare at a point on the castle wall so hard that my eyes ache. He's a distraction... and one that could get us killed, get me killed.\n\nI slow my mind and focus on the task at hand, each breath hardening my resolve. Caden fades into the background as my body readies itself for action, my brain sharp and thoughts fluid. An icy sensation slips through my veins, and for the first time I recognize it for what it is \u2013 the android side of me, readying itself for battle, too.\n\n\"Time to go,\" I say, my voice rigid. \"You good?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nIt's as if Caden, too, has flicked a switch inside of him. Now the teasing smile is gone. In its place is a look of grim determination. He's also dressed in black gear similar to Aurela's and has stuffed the duffel out of sight. I pinch the collar of the suit against my skin and feel a small jolt as the suit powers up.\n\n\"Radio silence,\" I say to Sauer, pressing my earpiece. \"On my mark.\"\n\n\"Clear.\"\n\nAnd Sauer is gone.\n\nThere are guards patrolling, but security doesn't seem any tighter than usual. Like shadows, we cross the rest of the garden, keeping ourselves pressed against the bushes until we reach the far wall. There's a little-used passage in the back. All of the servants will be on full duty tonight, so we shouldn't encounter anyone.\n\nCaden and I split up, approaching the entrance from opposite sides. There's a guard to the right of Caden. He takes the guard out effortlessly with two jabs to the temple. We've all agreed to minimal casualties, so the guard is only unconscious.\n\nThe crumbling stone staircase is narrow and smells musty with disuse, but we're still careful not to step on anything that could draw unwanted attention to us. Noises and voices filter through as we pass a part of the kitchens, continuing upward until I've counted four floors and stopping at the back of a heavy wooden slab.\n\n\"Where exactly are we?\" Caden asks softly.\n\n\"East wing, fourth floor. It's the library.\"\n\n\"How do you know for sure that no one's on the other side of this door?\"\n\n\"Cale and I used to sneak out without anyone knowing, using this passage,\" I whisper to him. \"I don't think anyone knows that it exists anymore. Come on.\"\n\nThe slab cracks open, and as expected, there's no one in the room. We slip out and the other side of the door \u2013 an actual bookcase \u2013 slides back into place with a low click.\n\n\"This way,\" I say.\n\nAurela was right that everyone would be outside during the ball. We haven't encountered a single person, not even a guard. As soon as the thought crosses my mind, a shiver flutters across my neck. Why aren't there any guards? Where is everyone?\n\nSignaling to Caden to stop, I creep around a tall pillar and peer down into a section of the hall on the floor below. Not a body in sight.\n\n\"Something's wrong,\" I whisper. \"Something's not right. We have to find Cale now.\"\n\nMoving with urgent purpose toward the west wing with Caden close behind, I slip into Cale's old room. I'm unprepared for the onslaught of memories, especially of the last day I saw Cale... sick and weak. He begged me to find Caden so that I could save him.\n\n\"Cale?\"\n\n\"Riven, no,\" Caden warns in a low voice behind me, but I'm already moving toward the canopied bed. There's someone sitting behind the curtains \u2013 I can just see his outline.\n\n\"Cale? Is that you?\"\n\nThe figure turns moving into the light. \"No, but it is good to see you again, General.\" It's the Vector Commander, the one with the terrible voice. \"Your father said you had returned.\"\n\n\"My father?\" I blurt out.\n\n\"Of course,\" the Vector said. \"Your mother told him.\"\n\n\"You lie!\" I spit, but then compose myself in the next breath. \"My mother is dead. If you had your facts correct, you'd know that.\" The Vector stands, and I hear Caden's short hiss of indrawn breath behind me. I forgot how big the giant was, but I ignore the thrum of panic in my abdomen. \"Where's Cale? Where's the Lord King?\"\n\n\"Indisposed.\"\n\n\"What did Murek do with him?\" But even as I ask the question, I know I'm not going to get any answers. That thing is there for a sole purpose \u2013 for me. I shift into a battle stance, but the creature just watches me, its milky gaze fluttering to land on something just beyond my shoulder. In the next instant, I realize that I'm dead wrong.\n\nThat thing is there for Caden.\n\n\"Looks like they fixed you up good after the last time we met,\" I taunt, knowing it won't elicit any kind of response. It's what makes them the perfect killing machines \u2013 they don't feel, they just obey. \"There won't be much left of you this time, that I can promise you.\"\n\nMy ninjatas are in my hand and I'm springing toward the Vector with lethal precision before the last word leaves my lips. It meets me with a swift sidestep and an elbow to the back of the head that has me reeling. It moves fast, faster than the last time I'd seen it. I'm operating on old data \u2013 this thing has been recalibrated.\n\nCaden circles around the back to jab with his sword, but the Vector deflects the strike easily with its armored forearm. We attack it full-on from either side, slashing and weaving between offensive and defensive moves, but despite the double attack, we don't land any lethal blows. Frowning, I see that the Vector has been programmed to protect its vulnerable spots... or maybe it had somehow learned our tactics from our last fight.\n\nAs if reading my mind, the thing speaks. \"Let me have the boy.\"\n\n\"The boy's right here if you want him,\" Caden says defiantly, and I shoot him a glare. This is no time to be flippant. We could be stuck here in a never-ending fight with this thing preempting our every move while Cale inches closer to dying. The insidious way the Vector said \"indisposed\" makes my skin crawl.\n\nWe need backup.\n\n\"Reptile,\" I say urgently touching my ear. \"Reptile!\"\n\nBut there's no response. We're on our own.\n\nWithout wasting time, I tuck my body into a spin crouch, slashing at the Vector's sides. I connect, but the damage once more is just minor. The giant dances away, light on its feet. Its face slashes open in a grimace, baring broken, stained teeth. I can only imagine it's some kind of macabre grin. It's toying with us.\n\n\"Don't make this harder than you have to, General. You don't have a choice.\"\n\n\"What's it doing?\" Caden mouths, confused as I am by the Vector's cavalier attitude toward us. \"Why isn't it attacking?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Orders. I think it's waiting.\"\n\nI don't bother to hide what I'm saying. We're probably already surrounded. Pressing a button on my arm, I engage the suit's internal armor. Time to piss the big brute off while we still have a fighting chance. Caden and I attack simultaneously, slamming into the Vector from both sides. It only has two arms and we have four between us. Caden bears the brunt of the defense \u2013 slamming into the side of a bedpost like he's fluff \u2013 but it gives me the opening I need.\n\nPropelling my body toward the creature, I leap, my foot pressing off of the Vector's thigh, and I twist my torso in midair, slamming my blades forward. A row of spikes on the outside of my leg rips into its arms just as my ninjata blade sinks itself hilt-deep into the back of the Vector's thick neck. I wrench with all my might, ripping upward through the corded muscle. It grunts loudly, trying to shrug me off, but I'm hanging on to the hilt protruding from its neck with everything I have left.\n\nMy second blade, as sharp as it is, won't penetrate the Vector's uniform in armor mode. Instead, I swipe at its arms as they claw at me, trying to get me off its back. My strike is true as three of the creature's fingers fall like stones to the floor. Blue fluid sprays me in the face.\n\nI spare a glance to Caden, who is still lying on the floor. He's alive but dazed from the blow. He won't survive another hit like that, even if the Vector wants to keep him alive. Time to end this. Swinging my legs up, I literally crawl up the Vector's back and throw myself around and over its neck so that my thighs are straddling its head.\n\nAnd then I twist, throwing us both to the ground and hearing the sick crunch of bone as its neck dislocates. My attack won't kill it. It will only disorient it for a minute, if that. I land hard on my shoulder and the pain rockets through my bones, but I lurch to my knees, conscious not to waste the precious little advantage I have. The nanobes do what they're supposed to, assuaging the painful areas immediately and repairing any internal damage, so only seconds pass before I grab Shae's sword and swing it with both hands... right at its head.\n\nOur eyes meet in the nanosecond it takes for its android brain to recognize its imminent destruction. The Vector's hands still crunch into my sides and grasp at my neck. But it's already over \u2013 the blade slides through tendons and wiring like they're nothing but paper. Its body crashes to the ground.\n\n\"Try fixing that, asshole,\" I growl.\n\nVery carefully, I remove the ninjata that was spiked into its neck and jam it into the base of its cerebral cortex, where any thought processing function would likely be. Cutting open a flap of skin and ignoring the blue foul-smelling fluid oozing out, I dig my fingers in until I find the small square.\n\n\"Riven...\" Caden's voice is thready but I don't turn around until I've destroyed the chip. \"Riven!\" His voice is more insistent.\n\n\"What?\" I snap in irritation, spinning around and freezing.\n\nA dozen Vectors or more line the far perimeter of the room. They stand, unmoving, in a silent, deadly line. I glance back at the open balcony doors. Even if I grab Caden and escape, it's a four-story drop to the bottom, and there's no way I can take them all on my own, even if I am a super advanced hybrid humanoid.\n\nThe devil we do and the devil we don't \u2013 we're dead if we don't do something.\n\nI inch my way slowly toward Caden, who's only a couple of feet away. The Vectors watch me carefully but don't take any action. Unlike the commander I just pulverized, as soldiers, they're operating on direct orders only. I hope.\n\n\"You OK?\"\n\n\"Yeah, feel like I got hit with a sledgehammer,\" Caden whispers back, rubbing his head. The side of his face is covered in blood, but it looks like it's only from a long cut at his temple instead of a cracked skull.\n\n\"You did,\" I say with a grimace. \"Look, we have no chance against all of them, and it looks like they want to keep us here, not attack us. So we're going to make a run for those doors. We need to find Sauer.\"\n\n\"Riv, it's a long way down.\"\n\n\"Do you trust me?\"\n\nHis eyes are wide. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Good. Now hold on to me and don't let go!\"\n\nAnd then we run like hell for the doors. The noise behind us is sudden and thunderous, but I don't look back. As I'm running, I unwind a length of black cord that's hooked to my belt. The end of the cord opens into a metal three-pronged device, and I throw it just before flinging myself over the balustrade and grabbing Caden with one hand.\n\nWe're freefalling in space for an eternity before the rope snaps tight and we swing to the parapet that's just below us. Releasing the rope, we roll to the ground, unhurt. My blood feels hot, but I'm energized with adrenaline, my heart pounding in my ears.\n\n\"Move,\" I yell to Caden. \"There's an entrance on the far side.\"\n\nOutside, the noise is deafening with music and shouting and singing below us. We run the length of the parapet, the same one I looked up to when we went through the security checkpoint. The courtyard is packed with people, but no one's looking up at us. Half of it is shrouded in shadow, and the other is brightly lit from the castle floodlights.\n\nI still can't shake the feeling that I've missed something... that despite our escape, we're somehow being herded.\n\nThe Vectors, including the commander, were prepared for us in advance, which explains why we aren't being treated as trespassers and why they aren't attacking us. Someone in control wants us alive. Murek? My father?\n\n\"Hey!\" a voice shouts from behind us. It's Loren, running as if her life depended on it. She doesn't slow down until she reaches Caden, who's a couple feet behind me, closest to her.\n\n\"Where's Sauer?\" I yell.\n\nThe smile that breaks across her face is full of malice as she slams an electro-rod into Caden's side. His eyes widen and I lurch forward instinctively, but I'm too late as she presses a button on the rod.\n\n\"Yes, you know what that is, and it's not set to stun. Weapons down, General.\" My hands lower, releasing the ninjatas to the ground.\n\n\"Loren, what're you doing? We're on the same side,\" Caden gasps weakly.\n\n\"I was never on your side,\" Loren laughs, spit flying from her mouth. \"The minute I found out who Aurela's daughter was, I knew I'd do anything to take her down. It was fate that you returned.\" Her eyes are manic, staring at me. \"You destroyed my family, as I will destroy yours.\"\n\n\"Caden has nothing to do with that,\" I say softly. \"That's between you and me.\"\n\nHer laugh is hollow, but something in it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand at nervous attention. \"He has everything to do with it.\"\n\nI whip around at the sound of another familiar voice behind me. \"All in good time, Loren, all in good time.\"\n\nMurek.\n\nHe isn't alone. A squadron of Vectors and armed guards is fanned out behind him. We are hosed. I swing back to Loren. My instincts were correct about her, but it went far deeper than I ever thought. I thought she'd want to get even and it would come to blows at some point, but I never suspected that she was some kind of spy for Murek.\n\n\"Aurela trusted you.\"\n\nAnother satisfied smile. \"She did. I wanted her to. I was going to bring her down... all of it, her plans to infiltrate the palace. She deserves to die just as my brother died. And then you came back, and things couldn't get any sweeter. Two for the price of one.\"\n\nI need to antagonize her, to get her to drop Caden. \"What do get out of this? Vengeance? Your brother's still dead.\" Her eyes flash with anger, but I continue to push forward, sick inside at the vitriol spilling from my lips. \"You couldn't save him then, and you can't save him now, because you're weak.\"\n\nWith a cry of fury, Loren dives toward me, but I'm ready for her attack, sidestepping swiftly and swinging my elbow up and outward into the back of her head. She stumbles to the ground, but I'm already moving toward Caden. Together, we back away from Murek.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he says nastily. \"She was a loose end that needed tying up.\"\n\n\"But she's still alive!\" Caden blurts out.\n\n\"She isn't now,\" Murek says, watching as one of the Vectors electrocutes her with the butt of his weapon, the smell of singed flesh hot in the air. Loren's body arches upward twice and collapses. Caden's eyes are wide with horror. \"There isn't a way out, General. You know that. Surrender, and you'll live.\" Murek's voice is low and compelling, and as slick as I remembered. \"We have Commander Sauer. We have your mother. It's over. Hand over the boy.\"\n\n\"I can't do that,\" I say.\n\n\"Then we have no choice.\"\n\n\"Enough,\" a soft voice says from behind us. Caden stiffens as I turn around in slow motion, disbelieving. My heart beats with impossible hope that he is somehow still alive and that my mind isn't playing tricks on me. He was sick and near death when I'd left.\n\nBut it is he, and he looks better than before. Emotion clogs every part of me. Strong, healthy... and dressed in exhibition clothing.\n\nCale, the Lord King of Neospes.\nSIBLING OF FLESH AND BONE\n\n\"That was you in the ring?\" I demand through clenched teeth, recalling the Vectors who stood at stiff attention during the exhibition fight. I'm kicking myself \u2013 I should have recognized Cale's fluid style immediately. But in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter. There's nothing I could have done differently.\n\n\"I'm surprised you couldn't tell,\" Cale says.\n\n\"Are you better? Why didn't you send word? I would have come back.\"\n\nI'm ranting now, with Cale watching me from the corner of his private salon. Caden stands in silence by the window, his glance flitting from us to the two guards standing on either side of the door. For all intents and purposes we haven't been restrained or disarmed, and I still have my weapons. If push comes to shove, I can get both Caden and Cale out of there without breaking a sweat. But I'm too angry to consider alternatives. I continue my tirade.\n\n\"Do you have any idea what I've been through? I thought you were dead and Murek was in control.\"\n\n\"Riven,\" Cale begins gently. \"He is. It's the only reason I'm not dead yet.\"\n\n\"What? I don't get it.\" I'm stunned. \"But you're alive, Cale. You're strong again. How could you let someone like him take control?\" Cale remains quiet, his eyes more distant than I've ever seen them. He hasn't even given Caden more than a cursory look after we were ushered into his private room. In fact, he's doing his damnedest not to pay him any attention at all, which is odd, considering that they are mirror images of each other. Wouldn't he be curious? Frowning, I remember what Loren was saying.\n\n\"Did you know about Aurela? That my mother was alive?\"\n\n\"And that she was planning some kind of coup?\" I flinch at the acerbity in his voice. \"Of course I did. It's my job to know about those who want to usurp me.\"\n\n\"Usurp?\"\n\nHe ignores my outburst and leans back in his chair. His manner is indolent, scratching against my rattled senses like nettles. \"That's why I sent Loren in. When she first approached our soldiers in the Outers, I realized it was my chance to find out exactly what your mother was planning. And then when you came back with him, no less, it was perfect.\"\n\nA cold feeling makes its way through me. \"So did you know she was alive before you sent me to the Otherworld?\"\n\nHe doesn't answer, but I see the truth in his eyes. \"You were the only one, Riven. The only one who could find him and bring him back.\" Only then do Cale's eyes drift to Caden \u2013 his exact likeness \u2013 and remain there, cold and unflinching. \"He has something of mine. Something that my mother stole, and I need it back.\"\n\n\"What?\" Caden bursts out from behind us. \"I don't have anything of yours. I didn't even know about you or any of this\u2013\" he says gesturing into the air with his hands, \"\u2013until a few weeks ago!\"\n\nI'm shaking my head slowly as understanding filters through my brain. \"You lied to me?\" Cale shrugs, opening his hands wide, palms upward. \"You're not really dying, are you?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. Your father fixed me, gave me an electronic lung. But I needed you to believe that I was dying so you'd go.\" He cocks his head to one side like a bird, his gaze speculating, switching between Caden and myself. Calculating. \"Did they tell you what you are?\" Cale says slyly to Caden.\n\nCaden looks to me, confused. \"But Shae said...\"\n\n\"Let me guess,\" Cale says, ridicule tainting his words, \"Shae said that you're the heir, and I'm the byproduct? Well, you're wrong. I'm the only heir. Give me the chip, brother.\"\n\n\"Chip? What chip?\" Caden says, but I can hardly hear him. I completely forgot about the chip I pocketed from Caden in the Outers. That and the blue signet ring.\n\n\"Come now, don't play dumb. She would have given it to you \u2013 it's the only way for you to prove who either of you are. By the way, my condolences; I heard that she died, quite painfully as it were. It would have been something to see, I'm sure.\"\n\n\"Cale!\" I've never seen this cruel side of him, and every instinct in me is reacting to it. Caden's eyes are stormy, his fingers clenching into fists at his sides at Cale's ugly, provoking taunts.\n\nAurela was right. Cale isn't who I thought he was. He's changed. How could I have not seen the malevolence eating away at him earlier? Have I been so blind to Murek's evil influence? Or have I changed after my time in the Otherworld... after my time with Shae and Caden?\n\n\"I don't have it,\" Caden grits out. \"I lost it in the Outers.\"\n\n\"He doesn't have it, Cale,\" I say, stepping forward. Out of the corner of my eyes, I see the guards' hands drop to their weapons. I raise an eyebrow to Cale, who shoots me a look in return that clearly says his security comes first. \"I have it,\" I say. I feel Caden's panicked glance, but I can't even look at him. I need to be the general, not the girlfriend. \"What's so important about it?\" I toss back at Cale.\n\nI can see the wheels in Cale's head turning, as if he's trying to figure out how much he can tell me. For my part, I've never underestimated anyone more. \"Like hell you don't know, Riven. That chip is a record of my birth. It does not belong to him,\" he says, jerking his head toward Caden.\n\n\"And you need it to prove that you're the rightful king.\" And now I have something he wants desperately. \"Or the people will always question your right, especially if they know Caden has returned.\"\n\n\"Yes, your mother took care of that when she and her rebels sowed the seeds of dissent in Neospes.\" Cale is scowling now, but the dark expression vanishes from his face in seconds, replaced instead by something more conciliatory. \"Riv,\" he says, placating. \"You know me. You know who I am, don't you? Don't you trust me anymore? Can't you see they're lying?\"\n\n\"I don't know who to trust, Cale,\" I answer honestly. \"Everyone has lied, even you. The only one who hasn't lied to me is Caden. I don't know what's truth or not.\"\n\n\"I knew you'd take his side,\" Cale sneers, his face twisted in an ugly grimace. \"He told me, you know, your father. About what you were doing in his house. With him.\" I feel myself color, heat blooming in my cheeks, followed by horror that my father knew I was there, somehow saw what Caden and I did. I should have known that he'd have cameras in the house. He is far more paranoid than he used to be. I kick myself mentally for the tenth time for being so foolish and reckless.\n\nMy eyes narrow. \"Where is he?\"\n\n\"Taking care of some personal business at the lab,\" Cale responds in a sly tone. \"I am sure it will be a very sweet family reunion, don't you think? Now give me what I want, Riven, or I will take away what you want.\" He jerks his head in Caden's direction, nodding to the guards, who step forward obediently to restrain him.\n\nMy heart slides downhill at the betrayal. I've been such a fool.\n\n\"So Murek isn't after the throne?\" I say in a soft voice. Cale smiles widely, shaking his head. \"He's your tool,\" I breathe. \"You use him just like you used me.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Cale murmurs conversationally so only I can hear him. \"Father and I had different ideas about the monarchy. I thought he was far too soft with the people. When my lungs started failing, he started asking questions. Pointed questions. I think in the end, he knew that I wasn't his real son.\" He spreads his hands wide. \"So I took care of him.\"\n\n\"You murdered your own father?\"\n\n\"Technically, my uncle did it, but yes, it was at my behest.\" His eyes are cold and dead like the monster he had become. \"Don't worry, the reptiles took care of him quickly, I heard.\"\n\n\"You're insane,\" I whisper.\n\n\"Ah, the dreaded insanity,\" Cale mocks. \"That's another thing I need your friend for. As brilliant as your father is, it's not like he can create a whole new perfect brain for me.\"\n\nAppalled, I can only stare at him. \"What does he get out of helping you?\"\n\n\"Why, you, of course.\" Cale rolls his eyes skyward. \"Must be some skewed father-daughter thing.\"\n\nDespite his sordid insinuation, I breathe a sigh of relief. Cale doesn't know about me... about what my father had created. And of course my father didn't say anything, because he had something to hide... something he knew that others \u2013 like Cale or Murek \u2013 would desperately want.\n\nMe.\n\nA part of me prays that Aurela circumvented whatever confrontation awaited them, but I know it's a hope beyond hope. If he knew she was coming, he would have been prepared with a thousand Vectors. She's probably already dead. The only tangible thing left to negotiate is Caden's safety.\n\n\"Cale, if I give you the chip,\" I begin, \"will you promise to let Caden return unharmed to the Otherworld?\"\n\n\"No!\" Caden hisses, wrenching against the unbreakable grip of the Vectors.\n\n\"Yes,\" I say. \"You belong there. You never belonged here.\"\n\n\"Riven, I have nothing to go back to. I belong with y...\" He falters. \"Here.\"\n\nLoud clapping interrupts our exchange. \"Isn't that so touching? The captive fell in love with the captor.\" Cale turns to me. \"You've done your job well, General. So yes, you have my word that he will be allowed to leave unharmed as soon as I have the chip.\"\n\nSaccharine treachery drenches his words. If he can murder his own father without a second thought, he will never let Caden go once he gets his hands on the only proof of any claim to the throne. We're at an impasse \u2013 Cale staring at me with persuasive eyes and Caden staring at me with fury in his.\n\n\"I'll tell you where the chip is right now if you let him go.\"\n\n\"No, Riven!\" Caden shouts, but I ignore him. \"Don't do this. Don't let him do this.\" My heart feels like it's splintering inside my body but I know it's the only way. It's the only way for me to keep Caden safe from Cale's insanity.\n\nI'm so sorry, Cade.\n\n\"So where is it?\" Cale snaps waving his arm impatiently.\n\nI deflect his question with one of my own. There's no way I can give him the chip here in the castle with us under Vector arrest. Neither Caden or I would have a chance. \"What happened to you, Cale? Things used to be different. You believed in Neospes and rebuilding what your ancestors started.\"\n\nA hollow laugh. \"Didn't you get the memo? They aren't really my ancestors. I'm merely a by-product of him.\" Cale's hands are shaking with rage as he points to Caden. \"That doesn't mean that I'm any less than he is, but the sad truth is, everyone will think that way. As soon as I understood what I was, I knew that I had to get rid of him for good.\" His face is tortured, and my chest fills with an unfamiliar ache. He is my best friend \u2013 one for whom I'd sworn a blood oath to protect. \"Do you know,\" he continues bitterly, \"my father tried to banish me? Murek was the one who told me, who saved me. So my father had to die. It was him or me.\"\n\n\"Cale, you can't trust Murek. He's a snake. He's always been a snake. You know that. You know what he's planning with the Vectors and the Otherworld?\"\n\nA slow, cunning smile rolls over Cale's face. \"Of course I do. It was my idea.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I will be greater than any king of Neospes, and when we take the resources from the Otherworld, I will rule them too.\"\n\n\"Listen to yourself, Cale. This is madness. The Guardians will never stand for it. You know what happened before, when people jumped back and forth centuries ago. We were decimated by disease. Our very existence was nearly derailed.\" I'm almost screaming now. \"There's a reason the anti-eversion laws are in place... a reason the Guardians exist.\"\n\n\"The Guardians?\" he mocks me, laughing cruelly. \"What Guardians? What do you think the Vectors have been doing all this time? Surely you didn't think they were only looking for either of you?\"\n\n\"What have you done, Cale?\" I say. I can't keep the horror from my voice as I remember what Aurela said about Guardians randomly dying. \"The Guardians are neutral. Untouchable.\"\n\n\"By whose authority? The Faction?\" Cale scoffs venomously. \"Some obscure group of universe overseers from a thousand years ago?\" His face is contorted with malice. \"They're just humans whom the Vectors have killed with no penalty whatsoever. The Faction or whatever they're called is a made-up entity. I'm the king. I call the shots.\"\n\nHis face is manic, and it's clear Cale has completely lost his mind. His thirst for power has consumed him. But even though I know it will be of no use, I still try one more time. \"Cale, what you are doesn't define you. It's who you are inside, who you make of yourself. Trust me, I know.\" I want to tell him the truth about me, but I know that I can't. \"Being the master of two universes won't make you happy. It won't make you whole or feel any less broken. You are what you are. The choices you make are the things that define you, and this isn't you. I know you.\"\n\n\"You know a ghost.\" Cale's jaw clenches and his eyes darken to a stormy green. \"We're done here. Where's the chip?\"\n\n\"I can't give it to you,\" I say. \"I know you'll never keep your word. I could always tell when you were lying, and you are now.\"\n\n\"So be it,\" Cale says, his face hardening even more. He nods to the guards, who escort Caden through the door into the main hall. \"They kill him if you so much as twitch toward me, Riven,\" he warns. He glares at me to follow, a twisted smile curving his lips in warning. He knows that I'm itching to take him out now that we're alone. But there's too much at stake, and with Caden's life hanging in the balance, I can't risk it. I grit my teeth and follow Caden through the doors.\n\nThe great hall is full of Vectors, and the chemical smell of them all is almost suffocating. Murek is standing next to a bloodied but alive Sauer, and staring at me with a self-satisfied smirk on his bulbous face. I send him a clear message of my own \u2013 if I get within an inch of him, his life will be mine. This time, I smile.\n\n\"You see,\" Cale whispers in my ear. \"I know you just as well, Riven. I knew you would say no to me, so I have something very special planned for you.\" Cale walks to the throne at the end of the hall, where the two Vectors are waiting with the restrained Caden. I don't meet his eyes. I can't meet them, because I need to be strong for whatever is coming next. Murek bows respectfully as Cale takes his place on the throne.\n\n\"Lord Murek, please bring out our special guest.\"\n\nI am prepared to see Aurela bound and gagged, because there's no one more important to me than Caden other than her, and for the moment, he's safe. It would be amusing if they had somehow put back together the commander I'd destroyed earlier. Folding my arms across my chest, I paste a bored expression on my face.\n\nBut nothing prepares me for what comes through those doors.\n\nMurek walks back into the hall with a malicious, triumphant smile. At his side is a Vector, but it's not just any Vector. This Vector is slim in stature and has the face of someone I love.\n\nSomeone I loved.\n\nShae, my heart breathes her name. What have they done to you?\n\nMy stomach plummets and the world spins out from beneath my feet. I'm backing away with an outstretched arm, my other hand clapped to my mouth. My eyes are burning. As if from a dense fog, I hear Sauer's pained shriek. I feel wetness on my cheeks \u2013 everything hurts, and I'm choking.\n\n\"No,\" I gasp.\n\n\"Yes,\" Cale shouts, clapping.\n\nMy sister is a Vector.\n\n\"Come on, Riven; let's see those infamous skills of yours,\" Cale crows.\n\n\"You are a monster. You'll never rule Neospes. I will kill you first. I'll kill you all.\" I'm screaming as I'm keening, my rage and pain making me berserk. Now I understand why he'd let me keep my weapons. I can hardly see through the cloud of fury that's flaying me, but somehow my eyes meet Caden's. Although his pain is as great as mine, maybe even greater, there's something else there... a silent glance that slivers through the haze in my brain.\n\nDo what you must.\n\nAnd everything disappears \u2013 all the anger, the hurt, the aching sadness \u2013 all of it, and it's just Caden anchoring me to him. Caden is my past, my present, and my future. He is my world. He's the only whole thing in all of this broken madness, reminding me of everything that's true... everything that is real.\n\nMy sister died in the Otherworld. I grieved. I mourned her.\n\nThis is not my sister.\n\nCale and my father have made a mockery of what she was. They'll pay for that too. They all will. I leave the war paint of tears on my face \u2013 they're for her.\n\nGrimly, I turn to face my opponent, ignoring the long dark-blonde braids and the curve of her cheekbones. Instead, I focus on the milky eyes that are nothing like her vibrant full-of-life ones. Her arms are long and slender, no longer full of caring. They wield a deadly staff with double-edged blades at both ends.\n\n\"Hello, Riven,\" it says in her voice.\n\nReeling, I don't see the first blow coming until the last second, and I duck, but the edge of the blade clips my temple and forehead, just missing my eye. Blood splatters along the floor following the arc of the staff flying upward, and drips down my neck.\n\nShe's a talking Vector, like the Commander earlier, nothing more.\n\n\"Miss me?\"\n\nThis is not my sister.\n\nGritting my teeth, I pull out the sword \u2013 the Artok sword my real sister had made for me \u2013 from its sheath, swinging it upward just in time to meet the blow of the staff coming toward me. The force of it ricochets up my arms. She's strong... stronger now. I have to tell myself again that this is not Shae. It's a Vector... a tough Vector that has her face and her voice, but one that will never fight with her heart, or her skill.\n\nSo we dance.\n\nMost of my moves are defensive. I'm watching her movements, learning what's been programmed. We circle each other, the violent sound of steel clashing echoing in the huge hall. We could be exhibition sparring in the training field. I need to change the game, to get her to slip up. I step in, ducking under one of her strikes, my foot colliding with her chest so hard that she staggers backward, but it doesn't stop her. Advancing, I whip the sword up to catch her across the chest, but her Vector suit is in armor mode and deflects the strike harmlessly. She lunges toward me as I spin and crouch, throwing my leg out to catch her in the back of her knee. She stumbles but rights herself with the inhuman grace only a Vector has. She smiles, cocking her head to one side.\n\n\"You left me to die,\" she says. \"You didn't even try to fight. You wanted me to die.\"\n\nHer words are worse than her blows. Guilt chokes me.\n\nI left my sister to die.\n\nGrinning, she comes at me again, swinging that staff of hers in a circular motion like a fan. I weave and bob, but I can feel the air of the blades whipping far too close to my face. I'm disoriented, disabled by her barbed taunts. At the last second, she stops, the weapon in one hand, her dead eyes holding mine.\n\n\"You killed me,\" she whispers, and then twists to kick me in the ribs. Payback. The sick crunch of bone snaps wetly and I double over, only to feel the flat of her weapon crashing against the back of my head.\n\nI drop like a sack of stones, pain rocketing through my body. The sword skids across the room. Everything is swimming through my blurred vision as I crawl to my knees. It feels like I'm moving through quicksand, and the booted foot comes far too quickly, smashing me in the side of the face. Color explodes like fireworks inside my eyelids, and blood fills my mouth as my entire body flips up and over from the force of her kick.\n\nI cough, spluttering blood through loose teeth.\n\nCacophonic laughter echoes around me. It's Murek, his face lit up with glee. Cale is sitting on the edge of his throne, something hungry in his expression \u2013 his desire to punish me is more than personal. All eyes are on us, even the rest of the dead Vectors standing silently around the hall's perimeter, but the only ones I care about are fixed on me. I can feel Caden's strength, willing me to get up.\n\nI can't.\n\nYou can, his eyes say.\n\nI shake my head. She's too fast, faster than any Vector I've ever fought. She's invulnerable.\n\nYou're faster than any human.\n\nIt feels like the words are Caden's words, but I know the conversation is entirely in my head. Still, he's right or I'm right. I'm faster than any human. I'm like them, only better, a reverse-engineered reptile.\n\nI turn over, spitting a mouthful of blood to the floor and pulling my arm underneath me. The suit's armor is already on, but I enter a sequence on the wrist-pad engaging synchronous mode. The suit will attune to me, and I with it.\n\nI'll fight fire with fire.\n\nSomersaulting to my feet, I feel myself powering up, the nanobes inside of me responding to the energy from the suit. I am reptile. The smile that opens across my face is the Vector's only warning before I launch myself toward her, running at full speed and drawing my ninjatas from the harness.\n\nOne I toss in Cale's direction, and I see the momentary shock on his face. But it's not meant for him. I don't even turn around to hear the satisfied thud of steel into flesh or the thump of Murek's dead body on the ground. Instead, I'm leaping, launching myself like a missile to the abomination in front of me.\n\nHer staff goes flying and we both fall to the ground, rolling. The smell of her and formaldehyde fills my nose as I straddle her chest. This time I stare into the milky blue eyes.\n\n\"You are not my sister,\" I hiss, and slam the remaining ninjata up through her chin into her head. Blue fluid spurts out.\n\nHer leg swings up and over my neck, thrusting me forward, but I jump easily to my feet. So does she, her staff back in hand. The blade is still stuck in her neck, the hilt of it protruding outward. She starts the spinning trick again, but this time I stand my ground. The blade whips so close to my hair that I see wisps of it falling to the ground. I bare my teeth in a grin.\n\n\"No,\" I say, grasping the staff in the middle and stopping it mid-motion, my gloved fingers closing on hers. The armored suit is a fluid extension of me, unbendable and unyielding. The Vector tries to pull it away, but now I am as strong \u2013 or stronger even \u2013 than she is. I move closer, looking deep into the Vector's eyes that once belonged to my sister, because I know he's watching remotely.\n\n\"I'm coming for you, Father.\"\n\nAnd then I lean back and kick the hilt of the ninjata sideways so that it rips across the Vector's spinal column and clatters to the floor in a spray of blue. There's dead silence in the hall for an instant as the Vector falls to the ground. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Caden flip up and over, twisting the arms of his captors. He slams their heads together, and they crumple to the ground. Grabbing the wounded Sauer and tossing him over his shoulder, he darts toward me in the center of the room.\n\n\"Restrain the prisoners!\" Cale screams to the Vectors surrounding us, and suddenly pandemonium erupts as we're rushed on all sides.\n\nThere's no way in hell we can win. But we won't go down without a fight. I'm going to take as many of them as I can with me. I feel Caden's fingers slip into mine, and I squeeze. We lock eyes, and I know that we're in this together. Sauer stands weakly next to us, the crossbow in his hand already firing into the oncoming horde. With a deep breath, I raise the staff I took off Vector Shae and prepare to do battle.\n\nBut then the unexpected happens.\n\nEvery single one of the Vectors stops in their tracks, their arms and weapons falling to their sides, eyes going blank and dull. The remaining human guards back away in confusion. There's no way they will take us on without the Vectors.\n\n\"What happened?\" Caden asks, his voice loud in the unnatural silence. Even Cale is staring at us in the middle of an unmoving mob with his jaw on the floor.\n\n\"Aurela,\" I breathe. \"She's done it. She's deactivated them.\"\n\nOnly then do I notice the row of red-clad masked fighters surrounding Cale's throne. Where did they come from? Who are they? As if in response, the doors to the great hall open, and a woman walks in, followed by more of the same ominously garbed warriors. I recognize her immediately, and this time, my jaw drops to the floor.\n\nEra Taylor.\nLONG LIVE THE KING\n\nWhy is my physics teacher from the Otherworld in Neospes? What is she doing here? Caden's eyes are as wide as I'm sure mine must be, so I know I'm not seeing ghosts. Era Taylor \u2013 a Guardian \u2013 is here in Neospes.\n\n\"Era?\" I say warily. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nHer dark eyes are as piercing as I remembered. \"We are the Faction\"\n\n\"What?\" I repeat dumbly. The Faction is here? And Mrs Taylor is a part of it? Which means that the scarlet-clad warriors are the Faction's infamous Red Guard. \"But you're a Guardian.\"\n\nEra smiles a humorless smile. \"A Guardian and also the leader of the Faction, an order far older than your young king standing over there.\"\n\n\"How dare you?\" Cale shouts back. \"I am the King of Neospes! What have you done with my guards?\"\n\n\"He's not my king.\" I glance at him dispassionately and turn my attention back to Era, who is still assessing a murderous Cale with her eyes.\n\n\"You will be tried and judged for your crimes,\" Era says calmly to him. \"Your guards must obey the Faction first and the Neospes monarchy second. At least they, if not you, still understand the chain of rule.\" Cale falls silent.\n\n\"Era, how did you get here?\" Caden asks quietly. \"We thought you were dead. Did Phillip refine the serum you were working on?\"\n\n\"Yes, he did,\" Era answers. \"And I'm not dead, as you can clearly see. We tried to find you after we got separated but only discovered dead-end tracks. We found the cave later, but there was no trace of you.\"\n\n\"We everted,\" Caden gulps. \"Shae died.\"\n\n\"I gather that, and I'm sorry for her loss. She was a great asset.\"\n\nOf their own volition, my eyes fall on the nearly-decapitated body of my dead sister. It wasn't her before, but it's her now. It's her body. My rage resurfaces. My father has gone too far this time, defiling her for his and Cale's own nefarious ends. How he must have loved punishing her and pretending it was me.\n\nI walk over to where Cale is still sitting. The red ninja-clad warriors restraining him are silent, only their glittering eyes visible through their masked hoods. \"You are despicable,\" I say. \"I trusted you. How could you let him do that to Shae? You made her a monster just so that you could hurt me?\"\n\nCale's eyes are as dead as the metal lungs in his chest. \"You betrayed me.\"\n\n\"I did what you asked. You're the one who lied.\"\n\nCale's eyes flick to Caden. \"You were mine. You betrayed me with him.\"\n\n\"I was never yours,\" I say. \"As flawed as you are, I believed in you, and there was a time that I did love you. I would have done anything for you, and I did. I went to another universe for you... just so that you could find someone you wanted to kill. You betrayed me. You want to know the truth?\" I lean in so that my lips are nearly touching his ear and only Cale can hear my words. \"Caden is everything you are, and more. He's more of a king than you will ever be.\"\n\nRage reddens Cale's face. \"Shae got what\u2013\"\n\n\"Don't!\" My open palm collides with his face. \"That's for my sister. I hope you get everything you deserve for what you've done. Either way, you are dead to me.\"\n\nI walk back without a backward glance to Era, who nods to her guards to take Cale away. He'll be held until Era decides what his punishment will be. Caden's arm drops across my trembling shoulders, and he gathers me close. We both ignore Era's raised eyebrows.\n\n\"What happens now?\" he asks her.\n\nThis time her smile is real. \"Now the rightful Lord King of Neospes takes his place.\"\n\n\"What? No, I couldn't\u2013\"\n\n\"Yes, Cade,\" I say, pulling out of his hug. \"She's right. You have to. This is what you were meant to be, why your mother risked everything for you. Why... \" my voice breaks, and I glance over to where my sister's corpse is lying, \"...Shae protected you with her life. You were always the rightful heir.\"\n\n\"Why didn't my mother ever tell me who I was?\" Caden's voice is small.\n\nEra flicks her hand to two of her guards, signaling them to take Shae's body to the mortuary, and folds her arms across her chest. \"I'm sure she meant to someday, but she didn't get the chance; her immune system was too weak. You survived because you were young and strong.\" Her gaze flits to Murek's dead body still lying near the throne with my ninjata buried in his chest. \"She was right to take you away.\" Era's eyes have a faraway look in them. \"I was young then, newly part of the Faction. When she came to me, desperate for help, I agreed to let her evert. You would both be safe there, and when the time was right, you would return. But things changed. Murek grew more cunning \u2013 he knew what Cale was, and he was the one who told the King that your mother had taken his real son, not the clone, and that you were both dead. Your father was consumed by grief and refused to recognize Cale as anything but an imposter. It began to eat away at Cale, and he turned to the only person who seemed sympathetic: Murek.\"\n\n\"So Murek was playing both sides?\" I say, and Era nods.\n\n\"But he was still his son,\" Caden whispers. \"I mean, he was me, wasn't he? He couldn't help what he was.\"\n\n\"The King didn't see it that way,\" Era says gently. \"Royal clones are meant as a failsafe to the line, not meant to be recognized as part of it.\"\n\n\"But I saw him. He was still real. He's still a person.\"\n\n\"One who ordered the murder of your father after I left,\" I remind him quietly. \"He was my friend, remember? But Cale is twisted. He's not the same person I once knew. His bitterness killed him from the inside out. Clone or not, he's still broken inside.\"\n\n\"And Murek couldn't have planned it more perfectly \u2013 he had what he wanted nearly in his grasp. His own kingdom,\" Era says, walking out of the hall and indicating that we should follow her.\n\nCaden looks to me, and I nod. It's her show now. A few of the Red Guard fall in line with us, the majority remaining behind to sequester the Vectors. Before we leave, I retrieve Shae's sword and my ninjatas, wiping them clean and re-sheathing them.\n\nIn the hallway, Era continues speaking, her voice low. \"Even Cale didn't understand the complexity of Murek's cunning. He told Cale about the chip that would disprove his place as heir, and that Caden was indeed still alive. Cale's plan was to kill Caden and destroy the chip, but Murek had other plans. He wanted the chip to dethrone Cale, and he knew that Cale would send Riven.\" Her black eyes meet mine. \"You were the only one who could hinder his plans.\"\n\n\"And me? Why did you leave me for the Vectors?\"\n\nEra's glance turns into a thoughtful frown. \"I didn't know then that you'd turned. But Aurela vouched for you... her life for yours. I found it curious. I found it even more curious to learn that your father almost killed Murek for using you to find Caden.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I am careful to hold Era's stare. I don't know if she knows the truth about me, but it wouldn't surprise me. The Faction seems to have eyes and ears everywhere, based on what she's telling us about the whole Murek mastermind show.\n\n\"Murek and Cale needed your father to build an army of Vectors, so they gave him free rein to experiment and play around with unsanctioned robotics.\"\n\n\"So the Faction knew?\" I toss back. \"Why didn't you stop him?\"\n\n\"It's not our duty to interfere in the politics of each universe. We protect the Guardians and maintain the separation of the two worlds,\" Era returns calmly. \"But once we learned about their plot to bridge the worlds, then we were oath-bound to act.\"\n\n\"So my father basically got carte blanche to do whatever he wanted?\" My voice is bitter. \"Hurt whomever he wanted, take whatever he wanted, destroy whole lives.\"\n\n\"Your father was driven by his creations... by his ego.\" The voice comes from behind us, and I jerk around to see Aurela entering through a door.\n\nI can't help myself; my feet are already racing toward her. She's dirty and weary and limping slightly, but her face is victorious. We embrace, her fingers grazing the oozing cut on my temple, and I search her eyes.\n\n\"Did you see him?\" She nods silently. \"Is he dead?\" She shakes her head. For a second, I wonder why she's avoiding my questions, and then I realize that all eyes are on us, including Era's and the Red Guard. Sighing, I say, \"I'm glad you found the kill switch for the Vectors. It got a little hairy in there.\"\n\nAurela squeezes my hand as we walk back toward the others, and gives Era a brief recap of what happened at the lab. Era nods in satisfaction and walks to a pair of heavy wooden doors. It's Cale's old bedchamber. We enter the room, where servants are already waiting to attend Caden.\n\n\"Time to look the part,\" Era says to him.\n\n\"I'll be waiting right outside, OK?\" I smile reassuringly, wishing we'd gotten the chance to speak privately. His green eyes meet and hold mine. This time, he's the one reassuring me. I smile and walk outside.\n\nTwo guards station themselves inside the door, and two outside of it. Era stops to give them instructions, and I use the opportunity to speak to Aurela.\n\n\"So he's not dead?\" I ask urgently.\n\n\"No,\" she says. \"He everted at the last minute.\"\n\n\"Everted?\" I gasp. \"To the Otherworld?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Did you talk to him?\" I ask.\n\nShe stops to squeeze my shoulder, her eyes pained. \"He's not going to let you go, Riven. He's never going to let you go.\" Her voice fades to a barely audible whisper. \"He's lost it, he's so consumed by what you are. In his eyes, you belong to him, and he'll kill you if he can't have you.\" Tears are falling down her face. \"I tried to reach him, to see if there was some part of the man I knew still in there, but he's gone. There's nothing in there now. He's as dead inside as the Vectors he creates.\"\n\n\"Then there's only one thing I can do; I have to find him first, before he finds me.\"\n\n\"Riven, there's something else. We need to let the Faction know about you,\" Aurela says. \"About what you are and why he wants you so badly. They can protect you. If he gets his hands on you, who knows what he's capable of? We can't risk it.\"\n\nI know that she's right, even though a part of me wants to hunt him down in silence on my own terms, but I also know that that's my ego talking. I still want to be the one to punish him, but I also know now more than ever that I cannot underestimate him. He is devious and brilliant... and utterly insane.\n\nEra joins us, and I excuse myself, nodding to my mother to do what she has to do. Outside, the revelry is loud. I can't imagine that they have any clue as to what has happened inside the castle \u2013 that a false king has been replaced by the true heir, that people have died, that Neospes is finally about to enter a new phase... one not undermined by a king with his own selfish interests.\n\nI hope that Caden will be a good king and that he'll be a true leader to our people. I have no doubt that he will be. After all, he is forgiving to a fault. He is smart and will take the time to listen and learn. Although he has been shaped in the Otherworld, his heart is here. He is everything that is the best of both worlds. I find myself smiling, watching all of the joyful faces below me. His mother would have been proud of what her son had become.\n\n\"Hey,\" Caden's voice is soft.\n\nI turn slowly, my eyes widening, butterflies causing havoc in the pit of my stomach. It's still not a feeling that I'm comfortable with... that any one person could make me feel so shattered and whole at the same time. Caden is magnificent in monarch purple and black, his long overcoat trimmed in sable. His hair has been combed back off his face, and his eyes are a sparkling green. He looks beautiful, perfect.\n\nI find my voice. \"You clean up good.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\n\"You look like a prince.\"\n\n\"I feel like a weirdo,\" Caden says with a grin. \"I mean, have you seen this cape?\"\n\nI grin back. \"Sadie would definitely approve.\" The look in Caden's eyes drives any other words about Sadie from my mouth.\n\n\"Do you approve?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I say. \"I definitely approve. You belong here, Cade. This is where you were meant to be; this is who you are.\"\n\n\"I thought you wanted me to go back to my world,\" Caden says, stepping forward to brush a strand of hair out of my face.\n\nHis light touch makes the butterflies take flight, and unconsciously, I lean into his caress. \"At the time, it was the only place where you would have been safe from Cale. But everything worked out, didn't it?\"\n\n\"Riven,\" Caden says, moving to stand directly in front of me, both his hands pressed to the sides of my face. \"None of this could have happened without you, you know that, right? I mean, you're the reason I'm here and alive. You're the reason I even know who I am and what I'm meant to do.\" Caden pauses, staring out at the throng of people below us. \"The only reason I don't feel like I don't belong here is because of you. You made me fall in love with Neospes just like I've fallen\u2013\"\n\n\"Cade,\" I interrupt him, blushing furiously. \"You always had Neospes in your heart. It's in your blood.\"\n\n\"Will you let me finish?\" he says, bending his head to graze my lips so softly that it's barely a touch, but it silences me effectively.\n\n\"You know what happened the last time,\" I breathe, my eyes fluttering closed, and tilt my face up to his, pressing my lips against his mouth. His hands slide into the hair at the nape of my neck, and he deepens the kiss, opening his mouth against mine. My fingers curl into the fur of his collar, pulling him closer. I never want to let him go.\n\nThat kiss says everything that Caden wants to say and more, and I kiss him back, leaving him with no doubt of my own feelings. Because now, more than ever, he needs to know how much I do love him, especially with what I know I have to do.\n\nThe loud sound of cheering breaks us apart, and we glance down to see the crowd below staring up at the parapet with their hands in the air.\n\n\"Go do your thing, Cade,\" I say, drawing away from the edge of the stone balustrade. \"I believe in you. And I will always be here.\" I clutch my fist to my heart, the tears burning a pathway behind my eyelids and down my cheeks.\n\n\"Wait, why are you crying?\" he says.\n\n\"Because I love you, and I'm so proud of you. Now go, address your people,\" I say with a laugh, swiping my face with the back of my hand. \"And stop making me say such reckless feeling things.\"\n\nWatching Caden address the crowd, I have no doubt that he will be a great leader, and with people like Aurela and Sauer at his side, he will unite the people of Neospes. I walk back to where Era and Aurela are standing. Era stares at me and I shift uncomfortably, but her stare is curious instead of anxious.\n\nEven if she is Faction, I still don't quite trust her. Maybe it's the way her eyes seem to pierce right through me, or the fact that she is one of the most powerful women in our combined universes. No one person should have that much power. That said, it's not like she ever abused her power. She stepped in where she had to.\n\nAnd I know I'm going to need her help if I am to track down my father.\n\nI feel Aurela's arms encircle me from the side, and I lean into her, inhaling the scent of my childhood. My arms cross over my mother's arms and I squeeze.\n\n\"Take care of him,\" I tell her.\n\nI punch in a sequence on the arm of my suit and pull out an eversion device from the pack at my side. Time is of the essence, and every second I delay here means my father will get further away. I meet Era's eyes with a wry grin. I don't need her serum \u2013 I can evert from anywhere just as the Vectors do.\n\nJust another one of the perks of being a half-human, half-robot hybrid.\n\n\"Guess I'll see you in physics class,\" I say to her with a forced grin, even though it feels like my very bones are splintering inside of me.\n\nMy eyes flit from Aurela to Sauer to Caden... my family is no longer broken. It's beautiful and it's more real than anything I can imagine. I never thought it would be so hard to leave anyone, because I never had anyone to leave before.\n\nNo wonder people say that love begets weakness. It hurts like a beast. But I know that it isn't weakness; it's might. It takes far more strength to care. It makes you want to fight harder... to live for something worth believing in.\n\nIt makes you more.\n\nAs if he can sense what I'm about to do, Caden turns around, his eyes widening in delayed understanding. I smile to reassure him, but my lip quivers. I can't even lie to not hurt him... all I can see is the pain in his eyes, those intense green eyes asking me why, pleading for me to stay.\n\nBut there's no time for answers, no time for reasons. I can only smile and weep.\n\nEverything fades to black, the fabric of time and space shimmering around me, but I hold on to Caden's face. I hold on to his green eyes. I hold on to him and the weightless way he makes me feel. I hold on to the touch of his lips upon mine and the salt of his tears in our kiss. I hold on to love.\n\nI know I will see him again. \nACKNOWLEDGMENTS: THE ALMOST GIRL\n\nTo my fabulous and feisty Strange Chemistry editor, Amanda Rutter, who saw so much potential in The Almost Girl that she bought the duology, thank you so much for collaborating with me and letting me share this story with the world. It's such an honor to be inducted into the nefarious ranks of the Strange Chemists! This book could not have found a more perfect home at Strange Chemistry, and for that I have to thank my warrior princess agent, Liza Fleissig of the Liza Royce Agency. I honestly cannot thank you enough for everything you do\u2014your foresight, your enthusiasm, your drive and your passion are all astounding. I'm so grateful to have you in my corner.\n\nTo Kristi Cook\u2014critique partner, friend, therapist, sidekick and partner in crime\u2014thank you for being awesome. That is all. To my writing retreat group\u2014Cindy, Danielle, Angie and Kate\u2014who keep me full of inspiration and in good humor, thanks for your generous words of wisdom and your friendship. Without you, I'd be a hotter mess than usual. To my friend and fellow author, Kim Purcell, thanks for all the sanity checks and energetic conversations. To Jenny, thanks for the lunches, the brainstorming and the plotting\u2014I'm starting to think we may need some super-villain masks. A big shout out to Julie, Marissa, Sami and Grace at JKS for their superhuman publicity efforts\u2014thank you! To all the bloggers, booksellers and readers who spread the word about my books and humble me with their unwavering support, I wouldn't be here without you. Thanks for doing all that you do.\n\nTo my extended family, friends and fans, a heartfelt thank you for being such amazing champions. Much gratitude to my parents, who always encouraged me to fuel my voracious imagination and to push the boundaries of possibility. Thank you for never holding me back. To my brothers, thanks for always looking out no matter what. Lastly, to the loves of my life\u2014Cameron, Connor, Noah and Olivia\u2014thank you for making no other universe equal this one.\nABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nSeventeen Magazine Summer Club author Amalie Howard grew up on a small Caribbean island where she spent most of her childhood with her nose buried in a book. Twenty-two countries, surfing with sharks and several tattoos later, she has traded in bungee jumping in China for writing the adventures she imagines instead. She isn't entirely convinced which takes more guts.\n\namaliehoward.com\n\ntwitter.com\/AmalieHoward\n\nStrange Chemistry\n\nAn Angry Robot imprint\n\nand a member of the Osprey Group\n\nLace Market House,\n\n54-56 High Pavement,\n\nNottingham\n\nNG1 1HW\n\nUK\n\nAngry Robot\/Osprey Publishing\n\nPO Box 3985\n\nNew York\n\nNY 10185-3985\n\nUSA\n\nAngry Robot\/Osprey Publishing,\n\nwww.strangechemistrybooks.com\n\nStrange Chemistry #22\n\nA Strange Chemistry paperback original 2014\n\nCopyright \u00a9 Amalie Howard 2014\n\nAmalie Howard asserts the moral right to be\n\nidentified as the author of this work.\n\nCover art by Steven Wood\n\nDistributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nAngry Robot is a registered trademark and Strange Chemistry, the Strange Chemistry icon and the Angry Robot icon are trademarks of Angry Robot Ltd.\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.\n\nSales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as \"unsold and destroyed\" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.\n\nUS ISBN: 978 1 90884 480 4\n\nUK ISBN: 978 1 90884 479 8\n\nEbook ISBN: 978 1 90884 481 1\n\nSet in Meridien and Dirty Headline by Argh! Oxford\n\nPrinted in the United States of America\n\n9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n\n# Contents\n\n  1. Title Page\n  2. Prologue: Three Years Earlier\n  3. Part One: The Otherworld\n  4. Present Day: Colorado\n  5. Blackout\n  6. Secrets\n  7. Preparation\n  8. Conflict Arising\n  9. Dead Man Walking\n  10. Truth Be Told\n  11. Underground\n  12. The Prey\n  13. Reversal of Fortune\n  14. Revelations\n  15. Scars\n  16. Track or Trap\n  17. Part Two: Neospes\n  18. Over There\n  19. In The Outers\n  20. The Others\n  21. A Web of Lies\n  22. Confessions\n  23. Deception's Daughter\n  24. On the Brink\n  25. Revolution\n  26. Father Dearest\n  27. The Winter Solstice\n  28. The Winner Takes It\n  29. Sibling of Flesh and Bone\n  30. Long Live the King\n  31. Acknowledgments\n  32. About the Author\n  33. Imprint Page\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\nWhat Others Are Saying About  \nREBOOT YOUR LIFE\n\n_\"Reboot Your Life_ is a wonderful guide for reconnecting with the dreams we gave up to become adults.\"\n\n\u2014 RON ANDREWS,  \nVice President, U.S. Businesses,  \nHead of Human Resources, Prudential\n\n\"While taking a sabbatical may sound deceptively simple, making time for oneself can be a difficult task in today's busy society. Some companies, including ours, have found however, that people thrive as both individuals and as employees when they are given a sabbatical opportunity and can set aside real time to reflect, refresh, and re-energize. _Reboot Your Life_ provides valuable advice, wisdom, and tips to help readers both make their sabbatical dreams become a reality and reap as much value and benefit from their sabbatical time as possible.\"\n\n\u2014 TAMI GRAHAM,  \nDirector of Global Benefits Design, Intel Corporation\n\n\"It's a tough lesson to learn: Time is more valuable than money\u2014because all the money in the world can't buy you time. And that's the lesson to be learned in these pages\u2014how to appreciate and make the most of that uncertain and precious commodity, the time you are given to live a fulfilled life.\"\n\n\u2014 TERRY SAVAGE,  \nNationally syndicated _Chicago Sun-Times_  \nfinancial columnist and author of _The New Savage Number:  \nHow Much Money Do You Really Need to Retire?_\n\n\"In a world that has gone from 9-5 to 24\/7 in a generation, our ability to lead a professionally productive yet reflective life is increasingly challenged. A time of professional disengagement offered by a sabbatical is invaluable. The chance to cultivate personal interests and family and friends free of the demands of the office and Blackberry leads to a richer life and thereby a refreshed perspective when returning to work. These four writers understand this and offer wise counsel. Take their advice and take a sabbatical.\"\n\n\u2014 PETER H. DARROW,  \nSenior Counsel, Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton\n\n\"During my 25 years at IMG, I witnessed professional athletes returning to competition after a needed break with re-honed skills and a fresh outlook. When i left IMG in 2006, i wanted to do the same but there were no roadmaps. _Reboot Your Life_ walks you through how to plan your sabbatical, what to expect and how to reenter the work place. it's a fun, practical guide to exploring this life-changing experience.\"\n\n\u2014 STEPHANIE TOLLESON,  \nFormer Senior Corporate VP, IMG and  \n(current) Chair of the Board, Women's Sports Foundation\n\n\"Talk about discovery! _Reboot Your Life_ gives the inspiration, insight, and practical tips to take a work break for a breather or a real life change.\"\n\n\u2014 WONYA LUCAS,  \nExecutive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer,  \nDiscovery Communications\n\n\"This gem of a book is from four authors who are role models of lives well lived. They provide a motivational, yet practical, blueprint for that 're-boot' that any busy person can use and apply. A must read!\"\n\n\u2014 PHYLLIS J. CAMPBELL,  \nChairman, Pacific Northwest, JP Morgan Chase\n\n\"Taking a sabbatical to grow, expand and explore is so essential to your ability to create and innovate. But most of us don't think it's possible until we retire. _Reboot Your Life_ gives you a road map as well as tips and stories from those who have done it. I highly recommend it for anyone thinking about making themselves, as well as their organizations, more open to innovative and creative thinking.\"\n\n\u2014 CLAUDIA B KOTCHKA,  \nFormer Vice President, Design, Strategy and Innovation  \nProcter & Gamble\n\n\"I don't care how good you are at your work. All of us need time off to refresh and recharge. Until recently I had never taken more than one contiguous week off from work. I wish I had taken a Reboot Break earlier in my career. _Reboot Your Life_ gives you the courage and the tools to do so.\"\n\n\u2014 GREG JOSEFOWICZ,  \nFormer CEO, Borders, Inc.\n\n\"We all need time off from our careers to prepare for the next phase of our lives. Whether it is to regroup when we are \"burned out,\" take care of our families when they need us most, or to explore new passions and opportunities, taking a sabbatical allows us the journey. _Reboot Your Life_ is the roadmap!\"\n\n\u2014 SUSAN C. KEATING,  \nPresident & CEO, National Foundation for  \nCredit Counseling & former President & CEO  \nof Allfirst Financial\n\n\"Peter Drucker, the father of management, often encouraged readers to take the time to examine their accomplishments and objectives. In his seminal Harvard Business Review article, 'Managing Oneself,' he wrote, 'To stay mentally alert and engaged during a 50-year working life, one must know how and when to change the work one does.' _Reboot Your Life_ makes for a friendly, thought-provoking companion along the way.\"\n\n\u2014 ELIZABETH HAAS EDERSHEIM,  \nAuthor of _The Definitive Drucker_ and Founder  \nand Director, New York Consulting Partners\n\n\"The shocks of the last decade are reminders that there is more to life than livelihoods. In this new world, the more diverse our experiences and knowledge, the more connections our brains and hearts can make. _Reboot Your Life_ is a practical, relevant, inspiring easy-to-read guide on the journey for growth, rest, and renewal. The Sabbatical Sisters retreats are also an enjoyable and actionable way to give yourself the \"gift of time.\"\n\n\u2014 SUSAN SCHIFFER STAUTBERG,  \nPresident of PartnerCom and Co-Founder  \nof Women Corporate Directors (WCD)\n\n\"Taking a sabbatical was one of the best things I ever did for my life! _Reboot Your Life_ covers every aspect of that adventure\u2014the fears, the money, the big dreams, other people and everything else in between. Get the book.\"\n\n\u2014 ARIANE DE BONVOISIN,  \nAuthor of _The First 30 Days: Your Guide to Making Any Change Easier_\n\n# Reboot Your Life\n\nENERGIZE YOUR CAREER AND LIFE BY TAKING A BREAK\n\n| THE SABBATICAL SISTERS |\n\n_Catherine Allen_  \n _Nancy Bearg_  \n _Rita Foley_  \n _Jaye Smith_\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2011 by Catherine Allen, Nancy Bearg, Rita Foley, Jaye Smith\n\nReboot Your Life\u2122, Sabbatical Sisters\u2122, and Reboot Break\u2122, are used throughout this book, as US trademarks owned by Reboot Partners LLC and are used with Reboot Partners' permission.\n\nFIRST EDITION\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nReboot your life : energize your career and life by taking a break \/ The Sabbatical Sisters, Catherine Allen . . . [et al.].  \np. cm.  \nIncludes index. ISBN 978-0-8253-0564-1 (alk. paper)  \n1. Leave of absence. 2. Sabbatical leave. 3. Quality of work life. I. Allen,  \nCatherine A.  \nHD5255.R43 2011  \n650.1\u2014dc22\n\n2010050686\n\nFor inquiries about volume orders, please contact:\n\nBeaufort Books  \n27 West 20th Street, Suite 1102  \nNew York, NY 10011  \nsales@beaufortbooks.com\n\nPublished in the united States by Beaufort Books  \nwww.beaufortbooks.com\n\nDistributed by Midpoint Trade Books  \nwww.midpointtrade.com\n\nPrinted in the united States of America\n_We dedicate this book to our families._\n\n## **| CONTENTS |**\n\nIntroduction\n\n[ CHAPTER 1  \nGiving Yourself the Gift of Time](ch01.html#ch01)\n\n[ CHAPTER 2  \nTypes of Sabbaticals: The Why and What](ch02.html#ch02)\n\n[ CHAPTER 3  \nIt's All in the Planning](ch03.html#ch03)\n\n[ CHAPTER 4  \nFunding Your Freedom](ch04.html#ch04)\n\n[ CHAPTER 5  \nPhases and Navigating the First Thirty Days](ch05.html#ch05)\n\n[ CHAPTER 6  \nThe Heart of the Reboot Break: Reconnection and Exploration](ch06.html#ch06)\n\n[ CHAPTER 7  \nRenewed, Recharged, Now What?](ch07.html#ch07)\n\n[ CHAPTER 8  \nDeflecting Sabbatical Robbers](ch08.html#ch08)\n\n[ CHAPTER 9  \n\"You're Taking a _What_?\" Life with Someone on Sabbatical](ch09.html#ch09)\n\n[ CHAPTER 10  \nLiving the Lifelong Sabbatical](ch10.html#ch10)\n\nConclusion\n\n APPENDIX\n\nPlanning Checklist\n\nFunding Your Freedom\n\nOrganizations That Get It\n\nResources\n\nIndex\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nOur Sabbatical Stories\n\nAbout the Authors\n\n## **| INTRODUCTION |**\n\n\"I always knew that one day  \nI would take this road, but yesterday  \nI did not know today  \nwould be the day.\"\n\n\u2014Nagarjuna\n\nTIME OFF. TAKING A BREAK. Going on sabbatical. Being between gigs. These phrases describe a growing need among some of us to step out of the working world for a while. That need may be motivated by a desire to reset the balance in our lives, follow a creative dream, make a difference, give back to society, or explore something different. It may also be driven by less positive causes\u2014job burnout, disillusionment with a career, or a life-changing event like death, illness, or divorce.\n\nWhatever the reason, millions of us are ready for change\u2014for a \"Reboot Break\"\u2014for taking several months away from our everyday work in order to refresh and renew.\n\nUnfortunately, most of us don't know how to do it. Or we feel we can't. Or we think we need permission. Fears about not having enough money, losing the respect of colleagues, being out of the \"game,\" or altering that self-image keep many of us from expanding our horizons.\n\nWhen we had a farm economy, natural breaks provided time to renew. As recently as the 1980s, people spent more time at home than they do today\u2014time having dinner with their families and watching television, reading, or playing board games. There was more time for relaxation, exploring, thinking.\n\nToday we rarely have time for rest. We have lost even our short breaks. Technology\u2014pagers, PCs, laptops, the Internet, cell phones, BlackBerrys, and smartphones\u2014beckons us to be \"on\" 24\/7. Even when we're supposedly \"off\"\u2014on weekends or in the evenings\u2014we are \"on,\" and it is taking a toll.\n\n**We're a nation on the verge of burnout.** We need to take a break. We need to regroup, renew, and reinvigorate our lives. We need to give ourselves the \"gift of time.\"\n\nAccording to a 2009 Gallup Poll and statistics from Monster.com, the numbers underscore the stress people are feeling in the workplace and the desire for change. American workers are working more hours than they did twenty years ago, with men averaging 49.9 hours and women 44 hours per week. Eighty-six percent of workers are experiencing job stress, and half describe their stress as \"extreme fatigue\" or \"feeling out of control.\" Sixty percent of workers feel pressure to work too much, and 83 percent of employees want more time with their families. Over 50 percent of employees are either somewhat or completely dissatisfied with their jobs, and 83 percent of workers plan to look for a new job when the economy improves.\n\nWhat a testament to the need for taking time off!\n\nTo be competitive as a nation and thrive as individuals in the twenty-first century, we all need time to refresh and recharge. To be creative and productive, we must be nourished, too.\n\nIt is time to give ourselves a break and \"reboot our lives.\"\n\nMost would agree that Americans don't know how to take a real break, and many of us long to modify work to recapture our evenings, Saturdays and Sundays, and our vacations. Those who have taken sabbaticals have found that when they return to work, they are far more likely to take breaks in the future. They are able to acknowledge that they need them. They've seen the benefits of time that is truly \"off\" and the importance of pacing themselves. As one engineer told us after a six-month break, \"A sabbatical actually resets our 'beingness,' making us aware of the need to check in with our inner selves.\"\n\nThis book is about regaining that time and creating a more desirable cycle of work, relaxation, and personal growth, and about the self-discovery and acceptance that comes from exploration and rest.\n\nWe've talked to more than two hundred people who have taken a Reboot Break\u2014men and women from their twenties to their seventies, from a variety of ethnic, socio-economic, and professional backgrounds\u2014to learn why they decided to take time off from work, how they did it, and what they learned.\n\nThis includes, of course, those who have had to take unexpected sabbaticals because they were laid off in a down economy. Rather than taking the first job they're offered, many people spend three to six months or more stepping back and reassessing their goals and their opportunities.\n\n**Taking time out from work to reboot your life is not just a new and enduring trend; it's a necessity in our stress-ridden world.** This book will give you the guidance and resources to negotiate a Reboot Break, whatever your age and stage of life and even in tough economic times. Meaningful time off can be an important path, not only to personal development, but also to career advancement. What's more, you deserve it!\n\nIn addition to interviewing sabbatical takers about their experiences, we wanted to understand how employers are viewing sabbaticals. To that end, we have examined more than fifty corporations, law firms, non-profits, small businesses, and educational institutions that provide funding for sabbaticals, allow their employees to take unpaid leave, or support the concept in some other way. Many organizations see sabbaticals as a recruitment and retention tool that helps create a resilient and loyal workforce. Later in the book, we help you make the case to your employer for your Reboot Break and for instituting a Reboot Break policy.\n\n### **SOME COMMON THEMES**\n\nOne of the key themes that emerged in our interviews with men and women who took time off was the importance of planning. We spend two chapters on this (Chapters 3 and 4), one of which is entirely devoted to financial planning and the consideration of things like health insurance and retirement savings.\n\nA second major theme was that there are at least four phases to a sabbatical:\n\nI. Creating Space\u2014Putting your life in order\n\nII. Reconnection\u2014Revitalizing connections to people, places, activities, and self\n\nIII. Exploration\u2014Learning new things, especially through travel\n\nIV. Reentry\u2014Starting a new chapter of your life\n\nWe devote three chapters to these phases, Chapters 5, 6, and 7.\n\nA third major theme was that all the people we interviewed, no matter the experience, felt that their lives had improved after the sabbatical. They experienced better career opportunities, or enhanced personal relationships, or a new sense of self-respect. We use their stories throughout the book to illustrate this.\n\nOur mission is to empower overworked Americans and others to plan for and take much-needed career intermissions in order to rest, recharge, stimulate new thinking, and come back better prepared for the challenges and opportunities they face.\n\nWe hope to broaden your horizons by encouraging you to give yourself the \"gift of time\" to find your real interests and explore them. In the pages ahead, we address common hesitations and fears head-on and provide practical, easy-to-read, and actionable ways to plan, prepare for, and actualize the life-changing break from work that we call rebooting your life. Each chapter has exercises that will help you with your plan, and the Appendix is rich in worksheets and resources.\n\nThe book is designed to allow you to skip around, find topics and exercises of interest, and take what is relevant to you now. It is also designed to take you step by step through the planning and implementation of time off from work . . . what we call the Reboot Break. We hold retreats across the United States to help people think about, and plan for, their time off. The Appendix has more information about the Reboot Your Life Retreats.\n\nWe invite you to use this book as your companion, friend, advisor, and support group, all rolled into one. Our message to you is simple: _By taking time out to reboot, personally and professionally, you too can live the better, richer, fuller life you've been seeking._\n\n## |CHAPTER 1|\n\n## _Giving Yourself the Gift of Time_\n\n\"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  \nBoldness has genius, power, and magic in it.  \nBegin it now.\"\n\n_\u2014Johann Wolfgang von Goethe_\n\nWhat would you do if you only had one year to live?\" That's the question Jaye asked Nancy, Cathy, and Rita the first time we talked. It was 2006, and we were seated around a table on a veranda in Vieques, Puerto Rico. We were at the annual conference of a group of women CEOs and senior business and public policy executives who network, support each other, and give back to the community\u2014as well as have fun. One of the ways we get to know each other better is through \"table topics\" at lunch.\n\nWe four had chosen the table with the topic \"Dreamweaving: Following Your Dreams.\" Each of us wondered as we sat there awkwardly how much we would reveal of our dreams and ourselves. Who were these other women? None of us thought of ourselves as \"touchy feely\" or \"new age,\" so we didn't know what to expect of the others.\n\nIt turned out we were all contemplating a sabbatical or integrating the benefits of one we'd taken. We began to realize that our dreams had everything to do with taking time off to discover what they really were or to make them happen. If we had a year to live, we each agreed, it might just be a sabbatical year.\n\nAt the end of the lunch, we agreed to check back during the year to see where we were in achieving our sabbatical dreams. \"I left feeling I had a support network that would cheer me on,\" said Rita. \"It was an unexpected result of the lunch and taught me again about how small risks are ways to open the mind and heart.\"\n\nThe four of us stayed in touch after the conference but did not see each other again until a few months later at a crowded New York City event. Cathy called across the room to Rita, \"Hey, Sabbatical Sister, I'm going to do it\u2014I'm going to take my sabbatical!\" Rita, with a huge smile, called back, \"Hey Sabbatical Sister, I just started mine!\" The name Sabbatical Sisters stuck.\n\nThe book was born the next year at our conference in Ecuador, and we went on to coin the term Reboot Break as an updated term for sabbatical.\n\n### **WHO TAKES REBOOT BREAKS**\n\nIf you bought this book on your own, you must be thinking about taking time off. If someone else bought it for you, it may be to nudge you in the direction of a needed break. In any case, as you contemplate your own dream of a Reboot Break, your age may have a great deal to do with the kind of break you're looking for and the way you decide to go about it.\n\n#### IF YOU'RE IN YOUR TWENTIES AND THIRTIES\n\nYou, who are just starting out, have multiple reasons for taking time off. You may find you need a \"course-correction\" in your career or in the way you've balanced your life. You may feel you chose the wrong career and want to continue your education in order to switch to something more suited to you. You may want to start a family or spend more time with loved ones. Or you may just be bored with your job. Because you're young, you are probably less encumbered and more able to travel, explore new interests, give back to your community, or just try something new.\n\nIn your twenties and thirties there are many real and perceived barriers to taking some time off, but there are ways to get around them.\n\nThe three greatest fears at this age are:\n\n\u2022 You can't afford it financially.\n\n\u2022 You won't be taken seriously in your career.\n\n\u2022 You won't be able to come back to your job or employer.\n\nLater in the book we go into more detail on the real and perceived barriers to taking time off, how to deal with these barriers, and how to make time off a possibility by planning for it.\n\nThe chapters on planning and ways to fund a Reboot Break address the financial concerns. In our chapter on planning and what organizations are doing to create programs to attract and retain employees, you'll see how to convince your employer that it's in his or her best interest, as well as your own, to allow you to take time off.\n\nMany people your age have \"set themselves apart from the pack\" by taking time to volunteer, upgrade skills or education, explore and travel, and come back refreshed.\n\n#### IF YOU'RE IN YOUR FORTIES AND FIFTIES\n\nPeople in their forties and fifties tend to be mid-career and may need a break to recover from job burnout or stressful events in their personal lives like illness, death of a family member, or divorce. Or they may want to explore a totally new career, or take time to volunteer and give back. In this age group, the need to renew, refresh, and become more creative is often paramount.\n\nYour key fears may be:\n\n\u2022 If you leave, a peer may get your promotion or job.\n\n\u2022 You have clients, employees, or partners who you think can't cope without you.\n\n\u2022 You need the benefits for your family.\n\n\u2022 You wonder if you step away whether you will ever find work again.\n\nThese fears and the others we talk about later in the book are all manageable. It just takes planning. There will always be peer competition in large organizations, but the stories from our interviewees show that taking the risk paid off. They came back to the same organizations refreshed and invigorated. They were often promoted. Or they were approached by other organizations because of their confidence and risk taking. **To be competitive, organizations are seeing that they need to retain the experienced and knowledgeable people in this age group.**\n\nWe have a discussion in Chapter 3 on how to take time off if you are an entrepreneur, a small organization employee, a partner in a law firm, or any other position where clients, customers, and employers may be significantly impacted. We show you how to do it. And we share the stories of those who have done it.\n\n#### IF YOU'RE IN YOUR SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES\n\nPeople in their sixties and seventies are showing interest in taking a Reboot Break as they increasingly reject traditional models of retirement. Many are starting new careers, exploring non-profit involvement, or launching their own businesses. They are spending time exploring their passions, from art to travel to grandparenting. Some are taking a \"pre-retirement break\" to explore what they want to do when they eventually leave work.\n\nAt this age, the fears may be more philosophical than just juggling finances and responsibilities. But there are still concerns that must be addressed:\n\n\u2022 You are stepping off the career track. Can you get back on if you want?\n\n\u2022 Have you saved enough for retirement, and will this impact finances and benefits negatively?\n\n\u2022 What will you do with all that time?\n\nBaby Boomers hate the \"R\" word (retire) and want to do something different, but don't know what. Taking time off at this juncture of your life gives you time to explore different options and plan for the next phase of your life. Baby Boomers are likely to live well into their eighties and nineties, and be far healthier than their parents. There is much you can do, and rebooting may help you figure out what you want to do for the next twenty to thirty years.\n\nWhy is it we often undervalue one of our most valuable assets\u2014time? Anyone over sixty will tell you how important it is, but at twenty or thirty, we think we have all the time in the world to do what we want. We willingly spend time working and planning our finances, our careers, or our vacations, but we rarely spend time planning how to step back for a while and decide what we really want to do. People contemplating sabbaticals worry, \"What will I say when people ask what I'm doing now?\" or \"What do I put on my business card?\"\n\n**We in the United States are so tied to what we do that leaving our jobs, even temporarily, is a scary proposition.**\n\n### **THE GIFT OF TIME**\n\nRemember the play and movie _Stop the World\u2014I Want to Get Off?_ We have all felt that way. Our days are full of obligations, demands, and details. From the time the alarm goes off to when we collapse in bed at night, we bounce from activity to activity.\n\nFor most of us, our busy schedules are what enrich our lives. We love coaching basketball while we tap at our BlackBerrys in between plays. We like pushing ourselves at our jobs and crossing things off our lists. Being busy is a way of life, and most of us like it that way\u2014at least until we don't.\n\nDo you ever find yourself thinking:\n\n_Why do I do this to myself all the time?_\n\n_What if I could clear my schedule for a week, a month ... a year?_\n\nInwardly, many of us are yearning to take some meaningful time off from work, to give ourselves the gift of time.\n\nThink forward. Imagine a period of richness and fulfillment. Imagine floating in your own time\u2014fast if you want, slow if you want. Imagine responding to your own internal rhythm more than to external stimuli and requirements. How would that feel?\n\nImagine some more: You are getting things done that you've left undone for years, trying new things, spending real time with friends, being with family, stretching yourself mentally and physically, and filling your mind with something other than cell phone messages and schedules.\n\nDream along with us some more. Here's the end game: You're back from your sabbatical. You are refreshed and reenergized. Your mind is clear and focused. So are your priorities. You've rebooted.\n\nNow, flash back to where the journey begins: deciding that the benefits of a sabbatical are right for you, and then going through the essentials that will get you there.\n\nThe decision to take a sabbatical\u2014to answer that call to oneself\u2014is a huge step. There's no question about it. The worries that can cloud people's minds and tighten their guts as they contemplate taking a break are real and practically universal. At the same time, **sabbaticals are as old as time and are a natural rhythm of life.** Knowing that and learning a little more about sabbaticals\u2014like their cultural context and great outcomes\u2014may make it easier to decide to take one. So let's get more comfortable with the concept and explore how taking a sabbatical is a natural human desire and can make a big difference in one's life.\n\n### **A LITTLE HISTORY**\n\nThe Bible's Old Testament tells the story of the Sabbath. It teaches that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. The Bible tells us that the work-rest balance, the fourth of the Ten Commandments, was handed down by God to Moses and from Moses to his people. This idea is probably familiar to you, even if you're not religious. The concept of the Sabbath recognizes the universal need for a renewal break.\n\nWe just call that \"rebooting.\"\n\nIn Biblical times, the practice that left fields fallow in the seventh year was called Shemitah. Also during Shemitah, individual debts were forgiven, and slaves were released from bondage. Similar to a sabbatical period, Shemitah was a time of release and freedom, symbolic of returning to oneself.\n\nLike taking a Reboot Break today, the decision to live freely was a difficult one. Some Hebrew slaves remained slaves even though they had the legal right to become free. For them, the known was more comfortable than the unknown. Perhaps they told themselves, \"Seven years from now, I'll take my freedom,\" postponing that challenge and its potential gifts, just as many of us now say, \"Someday I will take real time off from my job. Someday I'll take time for myself.\" Perhaps the indebted even listened to the inner voice so many of us have heard, whispering that they did not deserve the freedom.\n\nEuropean culture has managed to preserve a modified version of the sabbatical practice. It's not uncommon for some Europeans to get (and take) six to eight weeks of vacation each year. That's their rebooting period. Americans, on the other hand, have a worldwide reputation for their short vacations, or for taking no vacation at all. And most Americans tend to work longer hours than people in most other developed countries. So we start from a personal time deficit each year and keep building the time debt to ourselves year after year. It takes a sabbatical to step away and recharge.\n\nAmerican universities have been ahead of the rest of American society. They have long recognized (beginning back in 1880 with Harvard) that professors need to get away from teaching every few years to refresh and renew. Most academic institutions grant faculty members a sabbatical of several months to a year every six or seven years for research, study, or writing. The late computer science professor Randy Pausch, famed for his \"last lecture\" and book by the same name, took an academic sabbatical to fulfill his lifelong dream of working as an Imagineer at Disney.\n\n### THE NEW SABBATICAL (REBOOT BREAK): IT's NOT JUST FOR ACADEMICS\n\n**The new sabbatical\u2014what we call a Reboot Break\u2014is based on the same historical theories of rest and renewal as the academic sabbatical, but it offers _all_ working people the opportunity to refresh and come back to the working world stronger and more creative.**\n\nThe Reboot Break can be done in agreement with one's workplace, or by separating from it. It may include pay and benefits, or it may not, thus requiring a plan for financing and insurance. Taking a break entails a little thinking outside the box, but not more than most people can handle when armed with information, creativity, and determination.\n\nHow long is a Reboot Break? Ideally, it is a period of at least three months. People need at least that much time to truly benefit. With more time, the reward becomes deeper, so a year is even better. Whatever its length, a sabbatical is the gift of time, and it cannot be crammed into a night or weekend or even a one- or two-week vacation.\n\nWhat is the formula? The Reboot Break has no precise formula. It takes many forms, and anyone at any stage in his or her adult life can take one.\n\nWhat are some of the benefits? Time is precious, and time spent with yourself is especially precious because it allows you to examine your assumptions, habits, career choices, priorities, and purpose in life. For the more than two hundred people we interviewed for this book (what we like to call \"the Reboot Break chorus\"), the break provided the opportunity to think and reflect in a way they could never do in the rush of their everyday lives. All interviewees said they were personally and professionally better for their Reboot Break\u2014in their work, in relationships, mentally, and physically.\n\nOne member of our Reboot Break chorus, Kate, thirty-five, tells her story:\n\n_I now work forty to forty-five hours a week, see friends, eat dinner with my kids at least four times a week, have dates with my husband, and am happy\u2014and very productive\u2014in my work. I have a ton of energy, and my creativity is back._\n\n_A year or so ago, I was in a very different place. I was lucky if I ate one dinner a week with the kids. My cat couldn't even depend on eating before 10 pm if I was feeding him. The plants in my office were dying, and I hadn't had sex in six months. By the time I realized that I was too stressed even to like my job anymore\u2014much less enjoy my life\u2014my family already knew that I was unhappy and unfulfilled. But their disapproving looks barely registered on me._\n\n_Then my company\u2014a maturing startup\u2014instituted a sabbatical program and I qualified. Actually, I was sort of nudged toward it by management, and they were helpful in providing my full salary and benefits. Together we created a plan for covering my work while I was away, and it turned out to be great training for more junior members of the team._\n\n_I had fought tooth and nail for that job, and I wanted to keep it and to love it again. The sabbatical was the answer. On my four-month sabbatical, I cleared some of the clutter from my house and life, reassessed my priorities, traveled first with my family, then alone on an adventure, and worked on my relationships. When I returned to work, the company welcomed me back and\u2014armed with my sabbatical lessons\u2014I became a better, more focused employee who really does love her job._\n\n* * *\n\n### REBOOTING YOUR LIFE: TWO PATHS\n\nFor most people, the first and most important questions in preparing for a Reboot Break are: Do I want to take a break from my current job and then return there? Or will I leave my position and, when the sabbatical is over, look for something new?\n\nThese are the two sabbatical paths:\n\n\u2022 A **workplace sabbatical,** in which you leave your job for a time of renewal and then return to the same job.\n\n\u2022 A **between-gigs sabbatical,** in which you leave your current job and take a break before moving on to a new job or different line of work.\n\nWhich may be right for you?\n\nOf course, not everyone's time off fits neatly into one category or the other. Some people leave their jobs with every intention of going back, and then decide not to return. Some people arrange their next job before leaving their current one, scheduling the sabbatical for the months in between. Some even retire and then figure out that they want to go back to work, creating an unexpected sabbatical.\n\n#### THE WORKPLACE SABBATICAL\u2014FREEDOM WITH A SAFETY NET\n\nAre you ready for a break from your job, but committed to the organization and want to return to do bigger and better things there? Are you happy with your career choice and want to stay in the track you are on, but with time out for personal renewal, or more education, or an adventure? Are you a few years from retirement and want a break to explore what you'd love to do in retirement?\n\nIn all of those scenarios, it may be that a workplace sabbatical is right for you.\n\nEach year, thousands of Americans leave their jobs temporarily for a much-deserved break of months, a year, or longer. How do they do it?\n\n##### _Formal Programs_\n\nBecause relatively few of us work for companies with formal sabbatical policies or know someone who's taken substantial time off\u2014and because our culture tells us that two weeks of vacation is enough\u2014we tend to think it's impossible. **In fact, scores of organizations, from multinational corporations to tiny non-profits, offer sabbatical programs. And those that don't have official policies are making deals with their employees that allow them much-needed time to reboot their lives.**\n\nThe Families and Work Institute, a non-profit research group, surveyed 1,100 companies with fifty or more employees for its 2008 National Study of Employers and found that 24 percent of companies with fewer than one hundred workers and 14 percent of companies with one thousand or more workers allowed paid or unpaid sabbaticals of six months or more.\n\nIntel, based in Silicon Valley, California, has had a sabbatical program for fifteen years. More than 69,000 employees have taken time off to date. Everyone in the firm is eligible after seven years, regardless of level. It is a two-month program to which employees may add four weeks vacation time, so many end up with three months off. While people are on sabbatical, their colleagues take up or redistribute their work.\n\nKeith took two sabbaticals at Intel and benefitted greatly from both. The first gave him time to be with his family and travel. The second helped him make some decisions about the next phase of his life.\n\nHenry, also an Intel employee, said, \"It is a great break. No one checks email and even if you do, you don't have to solve the problem. It is a great way to free yourself from the responsibilities of work for reinvigoration.\" Both Keith and Henry feel the program keeps people coming back to Intel and broadens the skill set of the workforce. The process of delegating responsibilities and empowering others to do the job of the person on sabbatical has led to a much more diversified and effective employee group.\n\nIntel employees are no different from the rest of us. Their jobs are demanding. Their co-workers depend on them. And Intel is the same as any company: competition is intense; it can't afford to let projects go undone.\n\nSo how does it work? It's not as hard as it sounds. First, the employee has to plan. He tells his manager of his intention to take advantage of the program. Together, they decide on the length and timing of the sabbatical. He works with management and co-workers to ensure that his job gets done while he's out. He commits to a date when he'll return.\n\nThough sabbaticals certainly make employees happier, companies don't grant sabbaticals to be nice. They do it because sabbatical programs make good business sense. They make companies stronger. Employees come back refreshed and recharged, with new energy and creativity and gratitude to the company that gave them a sabbatical. Organizations get a periodic infusion of new blood while retaining the work experience and wisdom of their seasoned employees. And staff members who cover for those on leave have opportunities for meaningful professional growth.\n\nCommonfund, an asset management company based in Connecticut, has about 170 employees and a paid sabbatical program that allows for eight weeks off. The first sabbatical is given after ten years of service, and then one is given for every seven years after that. Vacation time can be added to the sabbatical time. Employees must complete forms that describe the purpose of the sabbatical, and they must create a corporate coverage plan for while they are gone.\n\n\"The employees are great at covering for each other,\" Alyssa Kraft, Managing Director of Human Resources, says \"because they work as teams.\" Commonfund is instituting changes to the program to make it mandatory for all US-based employees, from secretaries to the CEO, and to require that sabbaticals be taken within thirty-six months of earning them to encourage more employees to see the benefits of time off. \"All employees have come back,\" Alyssa says, \"They found out it was a great way to rejuvenate themselves, to refresh, and to return to work with new insights and ideas.\"\n\nSabbaticals are also great recruiting and retention tools. They breed employee loyalty, which begins with the attraction of the sabbatical program and is reinforced by the sabbatical experience.\n\nConsider Andy, a marketing manager at a mid-sized biotech company. He took a company-approved sabbatical to travel. After six months hiking the Himalayas, exploring Eastern cultures, eating exotic foods, and meeting new people, he was excited to return to work. He missed his co-workers, whom he considered friends.\n\nWhen he sat down at his workstation that first day back, Andy found that he could see the problems his team faced with fresh eyes. During his first few days, he was able to break through several challenges that had stumped his teammates and his boss. When a new project landed on his desk, he found his creativity was heightened. He worked more quickly and noticed that he was enjoying the intellectual stimulation. Work didn't feel like work.\n\nAndy's boss, Eleanor, loved his new energy and ideas. But most exciting was that Andy wasn't a new employee. He held all the valuable knowledge, work experience, and wisdom of a seasoned worker. When Eleanor commented to Andy on his improved performance, he said he thought the whole team had been improved. Eleanor agreed. While Andy was out, she had seen his co-workers take on new responsibilities, making the whole department stronger and more flexible. Now Andy could delegate more work, giving him more time to be creative and strategic.\n\nEveryone knew that Andy had been on a company-approved sabbatical. Because they were working with someone who had actually done it, new employees who were told about the program when they were hired became more interested in it. In his review, Eric, an administrative assistant in Andy's department, told Eleanor how important it was to him to work for a company who understood people's need for time off. He said he was committed to staying with the company long enough to do what Andy did.\n\n* * *\n\n##### _If There Is No Formal Program_\n\nBut what if your employer doesn't offer a formal sabbatical program? You're not alone: most companies don't. The majority of people who take sabbaticals are granted them informally.\n\nWhen there is no formal program, the onus is on you to convince your boss to let you go. The key is to be able to make the business case: articulate how your sabbatical will benefit the company rather than focusing on why you need time off. (For more on this, see Chapter 3, \"It's All in the Planning.\")\n\nOnce the time off is granted, you'll have to negotiate the details. Approach the conversation as carefully as you would the terms of a new job. Know how much time you want to take. If you would like to be paid and receive benefits while you're gone, ask for them up front. If you don't think you're getting the amount of time you need, consider taking some of the leave without pay. (Read more about this in Chapter 4, \"Funding Your Freedom.\")\n\nMary described her sabbatical in equally glowing terms. \"At forty-three and just after 9\/11, I was trying to juggle a high-pressure career in commodity trading with my roles as wife and mother. Twenty years in the white-hot intensity of the trading floor had exhausted me and burned me out. And I was on emotional overload. My father was dying. I knew I needed to take time off for my own good, personally and professionally.\"\n\nMary took the scary step of asking for a three-month sabbatical, knowing no one at her company had ever taken one. To ease her anxiety, she first approached the company's human resources department for advice and confirmation that what she wanted to do was possible. With their encouragement and support, she went to her manager, who immediately approved her request. She was relieved, though she had been prepared to quit if they had not granted her the time off. \"Otherwise, I would have had a breakdown,\" she said.\n\nShe took the sabbatical without pay and had to cover her own benefits at the company rate, but her job was guaranteed when she came back. A woman came down from the office to do her work on the trading floor during her absence. Planning and preparation were important to insure that her reentry would be as smooth as possible with her clients, so she let them know by newsletter about her impending sabbatical. They were surprised, but in a positive way. Some were even jealous.\n\n\"I came back energized and better prepared to deal with the stress and pressures of the job and environment. The job used to own me, but now I'm in control of it. I'm a better performer, and I enjoy my work more.\" Her career stayed on track, and she was thrilled to soon be promoted to senior vice president. On the personal front, too, the sabbatical was a resounding success, as Mary learned to balance her life better. Her experience inspired her husband to take a sabbatical the following year, and together they have created a much more satisfying and fulfilling family life, individually, as parents, and as a couple.\n\nUnlike Mary's case, it may take a bit of convincing to get your boss or co-workers to agree to let you take a sabbatical and to negotiate the details to your satisfaction. This can be a challenge, but it can be managed, as described further in the planning chapter.\n\nThe other category of sabbaticals is a bigger leap than the workplace sabbatical but no less popular and no less feasible, once you decide to do it.\n\n#### THE BETWEEN-GIGS SABBATICAL: DECLARING YOUR INDEPENDENCE\n\nWhen people ask Kim what she's doing these days, she just smiles and says, \"I'm between gigs.\" People who know her know this means she's left one job and is taking time out before starting another. She loves the freedom, the excitement, and the anticipation of having unhitched herself from what for so long has defined her: her job.\n\nYou may want a between-gigs sabbatical, too. Are you ready for a job change? Maybe you are burned out where you are, or dissatisfied with your career choice? Maybe you want to go back and fulfill an old dream or explore new career ideas. Have you retired and are now restless and starting to think about an encore career? Maybe you are out of a job\u2014not at your choosing\u2014and need time to figure out what to do next.\n\nBeing between gigs is about untethering from a job, either to figure out what to do next or to take a break before starting a new gig. Some people leave to search for an entirely different career that will satisfy them more deeply. The sabbatical provides the luxury of time to step back, relax, reassess, and figure out where and what you really want to be or do.\n\nA between-gigs sabbatical offers a real sense of freedom. The job has been left behind and there are new fields to find and adventures to discover. One can spend time on special personal projects and activities before turning attention to the next gig, whether it is in the same field or a whole new endeavor.\n\nHow much time, you ask?\n\nIt varies by person (and financial circumstances), but sabbatical veterans agree that it's sensible to wait at least several months or even a year before actively looking for the next gig.\n\nIf the sabbatical taker doesn't know what the next gig will be, or even what field she or he will be in, a between-gigs sabbatical can have more of an open-ended quality than a workplace sabbatical: \"Carry me away. Let the tide take me where it will. Let's see how long it takes to figure out my next career step.\"\n\nBeverly needed more than just a break from working. A California pediatrician, she was becoming more and more disillusioned with the healthcare system, which was preventing her and her colleagues from giving their patients the attention they needed. So she left her practice.\n\nIt was a wrenching decision that took years to make, but she finally did it.\n\nBeverly used the time off to get a master's degree in public health. She also traveled, visited friends, and connected with her grown children. She honed her medical skills and stayed current professionally through committee work at the local children's hospital.\n\nToday Beverly is back at work, consulting and working on committees. She's still looking for a full-time job, but she's awaiting the right opportunity that will allow her to truly make a difference in healthcare policy.\n\nBetween-gigs sabbaticals also can bring surprises. Jason, as the manager of an art-framing store, was uninspired in his work, and he was willing to sacrifice income for a job that made him happy. While he was between gigs, he spent time with his brother, who was very ill. One day when he was massaging his brother's shoulders, a light bulb went off. He could be creative with his hands through massage. Not long afterward Jason enrolled in massage school.\n\nToday, Jason makes less money as a massage therapist than he did as an art framer. But he knows his sabbatical led him to a happier and more satisfying life. \"Life's too short to work every day at a job that you don't like,\" he said. \"And you can't think about what you want to do next while you're working. Being between gigs without a set job to go to can be daunting. But it can be exhilarating, too.\"\n\n### THE UNEXPECTED SABBATICAL: LEARNING TO LOVE YOUR LAYOFF\n\nBecause of ups and downs in the economy and employment trends that have made it much less likely that a person will work forever (or for many years) for the same employer, many of us will experience some kind of unexpected layoff or furlough in the course of our careers.\n\nLosing a job can be like having a life raft snatched away. Your first reaction is survival: grab another job, quick! Within a few hours of getting the news, you're dusting off your resume, making calls, looking at the want ads. The search is on, and it is overlaid with extraordinary worry about what comes next.\n\nThousands of good, talented people find themselves in this situation. It is one that often raises a lot of questions: Should you get more schooling or training to enhance your credentials? Should you move to a city with more job opportunities in your field? Should you use this opportunity to change fields?\n\nThe best solution might be to take a short time out. You probably have been working since you were twenty-one or younger. If you build in a few months to reassess and figure out what to do before you start looking, you may be more likely to end up in a job you find rewarding.\n\nHow you use that time-off period will affect the longer-term success of your career and life. Many employers provide outplacement services for their employees to assist them with the sudden transition, but outplacement firms we interviewed say that many of the people entering into their programs and the job market are unfocused and not ready, and therefore they don't present themselves in a confident way. They agree that many are in need of an emotional break and a time to reflect on what they really want and need to do next. Jumping at any job is not the answer. It wastes time, tarnishes your resume if it doesn't work out, and reinforces any negative feelings you might have about being unexpectedly out of work.\n\nYou also may need time to heal wounds. On a Wednesday in June, Barbara was dismissed as president of a corporate division, leaving her feeling hurt and humiliated. In shock, she moved to her country house, deciding to put off any serious job hunting until the end of January.\n\n_The beginning period was very hard. I don't know where the time went. I got up early every day and went to the gym every morning. If I got one thing done in a day, it was a lot. I was very weepy. I had lost my identity, and I went through a people-controlling stage. I was in their faces. If I couldn't control what was around me, I was going to control others. I had such anger over the loss of my job._\n\n_Then I read a book on the five steps of transition, and it led to a lot of soul searching. The key question was, \"What would make you click for the next stage of your life?\" I needed to move from making my mark to doing something that made me happy._\n\n_Gradually, I got my ego back. I traveled to Italy and France for two weeks to see good friends. I reworked my bio and began using the services of an outplacement company. I formulated my strategy, talked to people, assessed my opportunities, and connected with retailheadhunters and women entrepreneurs. Almost a year after I lost my job, a recruiter who received my resume said that I would make a great recruiter. After a trial run in that company, I decided to take a risk and go into this totally new field._\n\n_I am comfortable in my own skin in this new place of self and work. My sabbatical was a gift. Here's my advice: Do it. Time goes by very quickly. It takes three to six months to decompress from the rat race. It then takes three months to feel normal, especially after a job loss._\n\nLisa was a computer programmer who had worked for the same company for seven years. Her job had become more and more stressful, and she knew the company was reorganizing and cutting costs.\n\nEven though she had seen it coming, Lisa felt angry when her manager told her they were cutting her position. She had worked hard and liked her job. She had been a good employee. It didn't seem fair.\n\nAfter a few weeks, the dark clouds that had been hanging over Lisa began to clear. For the first time in years, she stayed at home for hours at a stretch, giving much-needed attention to the fixer-upper she had bought five years before. She started to sleep more and eat healthier foods. She began to feel relaxed and more in touch with who she really was.\n\nLisa had always had a strong spiritual side, and she used her newfound freedom to study Buddhism with a well-known teacher. She traveled with him to Italy, Africa, and then Vietnam, deepening her practice.\n\nHer time off let Lisa detox from the bad feelings of being laid off, explore a long-held interest, and focus on a new goal: changing careers. Today, she's left programming behind and works in corporate giving. She continues to practice Buddhism and take occasional trips with her teacher. She says she's never been happier.\n\nIf you are laid off without an economic cushion\u2014such as a buyout or at least six months of severance pay\u2014the economic worries stemming from job loss can be frightening. How do I pay the bills, the college tuition? Do we cancel our family vacation? How long can I go on without a salary? Chapter 4, \"Funding Your Freedom,\" will show you ways to buy yourself a few months if you didn't receive adequate severance pay or a buyout.\n\nJoe's company was taken over, and the new company had its own person for his job. Joe had just bought a new home, and his son was about to start college. There were more bills to pay than ever. Naturally, Joe's first impulse was to grab for that life raft.\n\nBut two months into his job search, Joe had to admit that he had no interest in finding another job in human resources. He realized he wanted something totally different.\n\nInstead of sending out resumes, Joe shifted gears. He bought himself a few extra months by selling one of the family cars and making other adjustments. He used his time to learn how some of his skills might transfer to a different career, public relations. \"I was more scared than I've ever been,\" Joe said. \"But reinventing myself was exciting. I love my new job.\"\n\nLosing a job may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, providing you with the impetus to make the changes you may not have realized you wanted to make. The key is to shift your mindset from feeling like a victim to taking charge.\n\nJim had found himself with unexpected time off a couple of times in a short period. Each time his instinct was to find a new job as quickly as possible. He jumped into two different jobs, one after the other, with little thought about what he really wanted. After the second job change, he stepped back and decided to pursue his long-term dream of co-owning and running a bed-and-breakfast on Cape Cod.\n\nFinances were the biggest issue, but he was able to live on severance and accrued vacation pay while using a home equity loan to pay for the renovation of the bed-and-breakfast he bought with a friend.\n\nNot everyone is as certain about what he wants to do as Jim, but many, forced by a sudden change in their working environments, realize that taking a step back is the only way to move forward.\n\nIn summary, leaving a job unexpectedly can be the impetus to make the changes you have always wanted to make. Shifting your mindset from a victim of circumstances to taking charge and using the unexpected time to redirect your life can also be seen as an unexpected gift. The key is to take control of your life!\n\n### IS A SABBATICAL REALLY FOR ME?\n\nTaking a sabbatical sounds great, right? Why, then, do so many people stand at the edge of a divide between doing a sabbatical and not doing it, wondering if they should take the leap? They are so tempted as they stand there looking at the possibilities, but they are rooted to the ground in deep thought and a certain amount of turmoil. There are decisions to make and details to handle. They think it may be easier not to take the big step. They wonder if they will lose their identity while not working, and lose their edge when they return to work. Somewhat like the Hebrew slaves mentioned earlier, people today sometimes choose to continue working simply because it's easier than taking up the challenge of freedom.\n\nMaybe this sounds like you. It was certainly us.\n\nSome skeptical onlookers may question why someone would step out of a job, especially a job they like and value, for a few months or a year, for some loosely defined purpose, and then return.\n\nOne might ask the same of a parachutist: \"Why would someone jump out of a perfectly good airplane?!\" To the sport parachutist, the answer is obvious: he or she doesn't doubt that the experience is worth the leap from the security of the plane. Careful planning has preceded the jump. There is always some risk, but the exhilaration, confidence, and focused determination gained from this experience are larger and more important than the risk. In fact, without the risk, the meaningful experience sought cannot be found.\n\nNo one can tell you when the time is right to reboot your life. What we can tell you is this: **whenever you decide to do it, it will be worth it.** When you begin to live your life differently after your time off, spending more time doing what you love, you'll feel its power in your life. When you start a new career that you'd never dreamed of when you walked out of your old job, you'll know it was the greatest gift you ever gave yourself. When you return to the office brimming with energy and ideas, you will see what a difference rebooting your life can make.\n\nThe trick is to believe what the parachutist knows: it's worth the risk.\n\nAll you need is to give yourself permission to take the leap.\n\nYOU MAY SAY, \"My life doesn't need rebooting. It's fine. I'm a multitasker, and I enjoy my long days and the rush I get from pressure.\"\n\nYes, but ask yourself: \"Am I as strategic and successful as I could be in my work? Am I as thoughtful to my family and friends as I might be? Am I too focused on one area of my life?\" Taking time out to change and do new things can bring a whole new perspective on how to approach your work\u2014and your life.\n\nOur experience and research show that life can be better after a break to refresh, get some space, and recharge. Furthermore, in today's workplace, people who take a sabbatical have an edge. They have figured out how to balance their life and be better at what they do.\n\n###   EXERCISES\n\n##### _Exercise 1-1: Thinking It Through_\n\nUse a journal or notebook for answering these exercises and those at the end of each chapter. Try to answer quickly, almost stream-of-consciousness, to get your ideas down on paper.\n\n\u2022 What prompted you to read this book?\n\n\u2022 Why do you think you need to take time off? Write down what stresses, desires, or pressures are driving this decision.\n\n\u2022 Which kind of sabbatical (workplace or between-gigs) is right for you?\n\n\u2022 What are your fears, obstacles, and anxieties about taking time off?\n\n## | CHAPTER 2 |\n\n## _Types of Sabbaticals: The Why and What_\n\n'Don't be too timid or squeamish about your actions.  \nAll life is an experiment.  \nThe more experiments you make, the better.\"\n\n\u2014 _Ralph Waldo Emerson_\n\nSabbaticals, or Reboot Breaks, typically fall into seven types:\n\n\u2022 Career enhancement\n\n\u2022 Course-correction or reinvention\n\n\u2022 Family-related\n\n\u2022 Emotional healing\n\n\u2022 Volunteering\n\n\u2022 Life-enhancement\n\n\u2022 Pre-retirement\n\nThese categories are not hard and fast, though, because **behind every sabbatical decision are uniquely individual motivations, and the mixture of motivations for sabbaticals makes them hard to fit into tidy boxes. As you read, you'll probably recognize yourself in one or more ofthe types and find yourself thinking about your own situation and motivation.** The idea is not to choose a type\u2014though that may happen. The idea is to begin to understand why a sabbatical appeals to you and just how ready you are to reboot.\n\n### CAREER-ENHANCEMENT SABBATICAL\n\nA career-enhancement sabbatical may be right for you if:\n\n\u2022 _You need a graduate degree or special training to move ahead._\n\n\u2022 _You want to explore something new or a new aspect of your current specialty._\n\n\u2022 _You enjoy learning and want to take your knowledge to the \"next level\" or to learn something new and interesting._\n\nNancy's first Reboot Break was for career enhancement.\n\n_I was thirty and had been working for seven years. At that point, I was on Capitol Hill, where I first worked for the Senate Armed Services Committee, then moved to the Congressional Budget Office. I needed an advanced degree to move ahead in my career, and my boss suggested that I get a master's degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. I was thrilled to be accepted and to get a student loan. I resigned from my job and left Washington DC behind temporarily. I returned to find a job at the Pentagon directing an office and working on Middle East\/Persian Gulf issues. My Reboot Break was a wonderful ten months and a great career boost._\n\nA career-enhancement sabbatical can be taken from the workplace or between gigs, to burnish credentials for the next career move, like Nancy's. The motivation may be higher pay, more job satisfaction, or a climb up the ladder to a position with greater responsibility. It can also be an excuse to take time off to come back a better, recharged employee. Inevitably, people who take these Reboot Breaks add personal experiences to their time off, such as travel or more time with the family.\n\nSandra is a grade school teacher in the Bronx, New York, who took a one-year educational sabbatical at age forty-seven to increase her salary and spend more time with her young son. She had been working for seventeen years in the New York school system, which allows a one-year sabbatical with partial pay after fourteen years of service.\n\nTo obtain her master's degree, Sandra took three classes each semester, concentrating the classes all on the same day so that she would have the other days free. She wanted to be at home for her fourth-grader and be his class parent. Also, her husband had some health issues, and for several months he was at home out of work. She told us, \"I was so glad to be completely free to take him to the doctor and be there with him. Our family life and bonds benefited so much from this break.\"\n\nCareer-enhancement sabbaticals can be very satisfying, as they offer a real change of lifestyle\u2014away from work\u2014that encompasses more than just professional improvement. Instead of squeezing in night classes while they work during the day, people who take career-enhancement sabbaticals are able to engage fully in the academic experience.\n\nLauren's Reboot Break and MBA were fully paid by her corporation. She said of this time, \"It was wonderful being a full-time student and being able to separate who I am from the job I do. Not having a work identity while I was in school was very empowering.\"\n\nSome corporations let their up-and-coming executives spend time in Washington DC for a stint in the corporate affairs office. Others allow employees to spend time in the government, such as being a White House Fellow. John, a former executive with Bethlehem Steel, spent time in Washington DC when it was important for the steel industry to understand and influence policy in Congress. \"It was one of the best experiences I had in my career, enabling me to see how policy was developed and influenced. It was valuable not only in my Bethlehem Steel career, but later when I moved into other industries.\"\n\nSometimes a break is essential to creating the space to concentrate and make the career enrichment actually happen. As people learn and explore more, they often become more insightful about what they really want to do.\n\n### COURSE-CORRECTION OR REINVENTION SABBATICAL\n\nYou may be looking for a course-correction sabbatical if:\n\n\u2022 _You are bored with your job and dream of doing something else._\n\n\u2022 _You were discouraged when you were younger from following your passions and doing what you really wanted to do._\n\n\u2022 _You feel that you have a \"calling\" but you're not sure what it is._\n\nCathy's first Reboot Break was a course-correction from the academic to the corporate world in the 1970s.\n\n_I had always thought being a professor would be the ideal position for me. I would teach subjects I loved to students who were attentive in a bucolic setting with like-minded people._\n\n_The reality was much different. As an assistant professor, I did like my subject (management and marketing) and my students. But the pettiness and politics of academic life came as a huge surprise. So much time was spent on things of so little importance. So little was accomplished when there were so many major issues to address. Most disappointing was the lack of resources and time for research, which was what I really wanted to do._\n\n_My first Reboot Break, which included traveling and lecturing in Asia for a year, was planned as a way to get some time and space to decide whether I wanted to stay in the academic world and consult, or take the leap to the corporate world. I had sent out my resume to several corporations before I left for the year. Dun & Bradstreet, for whom I had consulted, was one of them. When I got back, they had a position waiting for me. They told me that my confidence in taking a year off demonstrated to them that I was exactly the kind of person they wanted to head a new entrepreneurial division of the company._\n\n**Many people go to work every day with a terrible secret: they know they've chosen the wrong career, but they don't know how to get out of it.**\n\nA course-correction or reinvention sabbatical can help you explore possibilities for change and lead you in a new or even unexpected direction. In some cases, the change is returning to an old dream. Maybe you always wanted to be a painter or a writer, but your parents steered you toward law because it was more practical. Or maybe you wanted to run your own small business, or be a school teacher, or use your foreign language talents, but ended up doing something else.\n\nBrian always loved music. He played drums in high school and in college, where he majored in music. After college, Brian discovered he had a talent for stocks. He became involved in finance and moved from Virginia to New York City. But he never forgot his dream. \"I was successful, but I wasn't fulfilled,\" he said. \"Music was calling me.\" So he took a Reboot Break to figure out how to bring music back into his life. Today, at twenty-nine, he is a substitute music teacher in the Virginia public schools, gives private percussion lessons, and does gigs with orchestras. The next step toward his dream of performing with world-class orchestras is a graduate degree in classical music.\n\nOf course, not everyone is like Brian. Many people aren't sure what they really want to do. They just know that it is not what they are doing. Time off for course-correction helps you leave behind the dull ache of doing a job that you just don't like and make room for a new passion. It creates the time and space to discover what kind of work feels right, and it can lead you in a direction you never expected.\n\nMarco, a young lawyer, knew law wasn't his passion. After just one year, he left his high-powered law firm for a Reboot Break. His time off allowed him to explore his interest in business. Not long after the break, he founded a tech company. But his work wasn't done. Two years later he took another course-correction sabbatical. This time he followed his new dream of working in foreign policy. Today he's a policy analyst in Washington DC.\n\nSome people try something new on their Reboot Break only to return to what they had been doing before. That doesn't mean the time was wasted. The opportunity to explore a passion can go a long way toward reducing the stress of feeling as though you've missed an opportunity or that you really should be doing something else.\n\nLinda, a therapist, used her Reboot Break to live overseas and write, then start a small business. The business didn't succeed, but she loved trying it. Today she's returned to her work as a therapist, and in her free time she writes plays and travels.\n\nIf you are feeling as if you've handed your life over to your job, or you are resentful because you think your job is keeping you from fulfilling your dreams, a course-correction sabbatical can help you feel more satisfied or find a new direction. You might find that what you needed wasn't a career change, but the freedom to expand your life outside of work. When a passion has been ignited, sometimes the old job doesn't seem so bad, especially if it helps pay for your new hobby.\n\n### FAMILY-RELATED SABBATICAL\n\nA family-related sabbatical may be right for you if:\n\n\u2022 _You are finding it more and more difficult to balance your work and home life._\n\n\u2022 _You wish you had more time to spend with a loved one who has special needs or is ill or dying._\n\n\u2022 _You have family goals you aren't able to meet while working full-time._\n\nNancy took a family-related sabbatical at thirty-five to have children.\n\n_My U.S. Army husband was being transferred from Washington DC to Europe, and I agreed to leave my White House national security job to accompany him. My number one goal was to start a family. Much toour delight, we had two daughters in the next three years. I was at home with them for their earliest years in Germany and Japan, so I had the wonderful gift of time to bond with them._\n\nA family-related sabbatical allows you to let go of the guilt and devote time to the people who need you most. It may not fix all the problems, but it can give you some relief when you're feeling pulled in too many directions. It can let you listen to your heart when it tells you that nothing is more important than being there for the ones you love when they truly need you. Unfortunately, our loved ones' timing isn't always ideal. Maybe you're up for a promotion when your father becomes ill, or your teenage daughter is failing school right after you win the big account.\n\nAlison took a workplace sabbatical in 1994 at age forty-eight from her financial services firm, where she was one of the highest-ranking officers. The primary purpose was to be more involved with her son during the summer before he started high school. John, a high-functioning autistic teen, was completing junior high. It had been a tough time for him. Alison and her husband wanted to help their son prepare to enter high school. She wanted to be with him to help work on his coordination, self-confidence, and self-sufficiency, which would in turn help his ability to make friends and fit in.\n\nShe took her Reboot Break as family leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (See Chapter 3). Her bosses were reluctant to give her the time, but she knew they had no choice because of the law, which was new at the time, and they ultimately agreed. Alison's summer with her son was precious. She was with him every day, just spending time together or doing special projects. One interesting project they did involved sorting their closets and drawers, which hadn't been done in years. She turned the task into a fun, joint activity of 15-30 minutes each day to get rid of stuff as a team. She even taught him to cook.\n\nJohn blossomed into \"more of a guy\" as he became more coordinated and better at sports under the tutelage of a trainer. Alison worked with him in other ways too, such as his independence skills and how he dressed. They took a trip to visit her dad in Nebraska, but she had John stay longer and then navigate his way home alone through two flights and a plane change. He became more self-confident and knew that he could master the change ahead of him called high school.\n\nReturning to work, Alison felt refreshed and energized. She looks back on the Reboot Break as one of the highlights of her career and a key to a burst of energy and productivity. And, most importantly, it helped her son. Alison says, \"The Reboot Break was really the right thing at the right time.\"\n\nWhile family-related sabbaticals provide the flexibility to do what is necessary for a family member, they may also benefit the sabbatical taker. Many find the experience life changing, an impetus to reorder priorities.\n\nAfter Jimmy's wife died, he and his children took a Reboot Break so they all could heal, travel, and just be together to re-establish their lives.\n\nSometimes people don't take their Reboot Break for family reasons, but life circumstances bring the family more into focus. Leena was on a Reboot Break when her father suffered a stroke. It was a blessing that she had the flexibility to be able to crisscross the Atlantic Ocean several times to be with him and help manage his care.\n\n### EMOTIONAL HEALING SABBATICAL\n\nYou may need an emotional healing sabbatical if:\n\n\u2022 _You recently lost a spouse, partner, parent, child, or other loved one._\n\n\u2022 _You are divorced or separated from a spouse or partner._\n\n\u2022 _You are a survivor of an illness or situation that was traumatic or life-threatening._\n\n\u2022 _You recently experienced an upsetting job loss._\n\nDifficult emotional times are a natural part of life. Romantic relationships fall apart. People we love die. Life deals us a hand that we didn't expect, and we do our best to cope.\n\nAll the while, we're plugging away at our jobs, rushing to meetings, traveling, pushing papers. Sometimes the work is therapeutic, distracting us from our crisis. Other times we wonder how we can keep smiling at our co-workers, customers, and clients, acting as though things are okay. We need to take time off.\n\nAn emotional healing sabbatical is about nursing one's wounds and transitioning to a new \"place\" with lessons learned. The wounds may not be entirely gone at sabbatical's end, but time and a new understanding of life will have made them more bearable.\n\nIn her popular book\u2014now a movie\u2014 _Eat, Pray, Love,_ Elizabeth Gilbert set out to find balance in her life by taking a Reboot Break. Gilbert plumbed the depths of her soul and told the world about it. Readers are the beneficiaries of her struggles and insights, of her pain when she left her marriage and suffered through the stages of divorce. Also, she was seeking her own truth about her place in society and how she would live her life. She took refuge and sought answers in food, prayer, and love in three different countries, and eventually she found inner peace and a new understanding of herself.\n\nIn the classic book _Gift from the Sea_ (1955), Anne Morrow Lindbergh's insights from her time away at the beach to seek balance are about understanding how recognizing and embracing the emotional threads of life will weave in more strength, texture, richness, and clarity. Her lessons are strikingly similar to those we have gleaned from our own Reboot Breaks and from our many interviews with both women and men.\n\nLeena shared the story of her time on a Reboot Break. Her twenty-month sabbatical journey combined emotional healing, searching for her next job and place to live, and surprises along the way.\n\nLeena had not planned on taking a Reboot Break, but at thirty-six, when she sold her Internet-based food delivery business in London, she realized that she needed to take time off to heal from a broken heart. So, a professional circumstance and an emotional need came together and spelled \"Reboot Break.\" Now, she would have time to heal the wound and to figure out her next professional calling. She even called into question where she lived. Untethered from her business, she was moving into a period of being open to what could happen next, both personally and professionally.\n\nShe first returned for several months to Lebanon, where she had grown up. She had been away for fourteen years, except for short visits, and longed for the beautiful Lebanese mountains and exciting Beirut. Leena wanted to catch up with the family and friends she missed so much. She hadn't realized how low she had sunk emotionally and was thankful for the time away from daily routine and work pressures to heal. It helped so much to be back in the nurturing bosom of family and friends. She read self-help books, practiced yoga, and worked on moving past that \"dark place.\" She began to feel more hopeful about the future.\n\nLeena traveled to Madrid to stay with friends. There, she took a painting and drawing class, which she had always wanted to do. She worked on improving her Spanish, too, which enabled her to start meeting new people and building new relationships. The more time she spent in Madrid, the more she began to see that this would be a good place for her to live. An interesting work idea came along, and she began to make concrete plans to move to Madrid.\n\nWith this newfound direction and plan, Leena returned to London to sell her apartment and gather her things for the move. As luck or kismet would have it, she met someone while back in London. His name was Jos\u00e9. She found herself facing the kind of situation that happens to many a sabbatical taker. Because she had opened herself up to life in a new way, she now was presented with a new opportunity\u2014and the challenge of thinking deeply about what was truly important to her. She felt torn and had to decide what she was going to do: continue in an orderly fashion with her plan to move to Madrid, or explore her relationship with Jos\u00e9.\n\nLeena, the former \"strictly business\" businesswoman, followed her heart. It helped that she was still on her Reboot Break. She had the flexibility to shelve the Madrid plan and extend her time away from work. The relationship blossomed and, after a time, she and Jos\u00e9 married and now live in the Washington DC area.\n\nLeena's experience demonstrates that taking the time to reflect and allow for new thoughts, ideas, and experiences can enrich life with new possibilities. In more dramatic terms, one could say that taking time off can nudge the unfolding of one's destiny, one's future. Leena is certain that without her Reboot Break, she would not have been open to building a relationship with Jos\u00e9. First, her heart may not have healed. Second, she would have been tied to a job that would not have afforded her the time to explore and pursue the relationship and discover what she really wanted and needed.\n\nLeena also transformed her view of work and changed her career direction. She now works at a non-profit organization, and her life's work\u2014her found passion\u2014is promoting better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims and being involved in peace projects in the Middle East.\n\n### VOLUNTEERING SABBATICAL\n\nA volunteering sabbatical may be right for you if:\n\n\u2022 _You long to make a difference in the lives of others._\n\n\u2022 _You have a particular skill you'd like to use to make the world a better place._\n\n\u2022 _You want to travel to distant lands, but traveling as a \"tourist\" doesn't appeal to you._\n\nRita says that volunteer work has always been one of her passions. It took a Reboot Break to satisfy her desire to become more deeply involved.\n\n_In the past several years when I was working eighteen-hour days and traveling constantly, something had to give, and it was my ability to commit time to volunteering. Though I contributed financially to several non-profit organizations and was on the board of one, I started to crave spending more time on work that seemed so important to me. I was quickly coming to the conclusion that I needed to make volunteering my work, rather than having it be the thing I did on top of a full day. Whenmy company announced that it was moving its headquarters to another part of the country, it was the perfect time to take a Reboot Break._\n\n_I used the time to immerse myself in microfinance, a field where the results are immediate, tangible, and scalable. I was soon asked to become chair of Pro Mujer, a non-profit organization that gives $170 loans to women in Latin America whose families earn under $2 a day. Pro Mujer also provides business and self-esteem training and health services for the whole family. The 99.9 percent repayment rate shows that there is a real need._\n\n_I felt good about my efforts and contributions. I was able to bring my business knowledge and experience to bear on several strategic areas for the organization. But I felt even better when I traveled to our banks. Before doing so, I enrolled in Spanish classes so that I could converse with our clients. I complemented the classes at home with Spanish immersion weeks in Antigua, Guatemala, and Oaxaca, Mexico. I traveled to our existing programs in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Peru, and Mexico and went with the founders to Argentina to set up a new program._\n\n_My life is so much more enriched by all the women I have had a chance to meet. I cried when hearing their stories, with tears for the hardship of their lives and tears of happiness for their successes._\n\nMany people long to spend time volunteering. They want to contribute in some personal way to making the world a better place, to making a difference in the face of relentless problems. Many of us take a weekday night or Saturday afternoon to mentor a child or clean litter from a highway or debris from a rundown part of town. But some of us want to spend more time and have a stronger engagement. A volunteering sabbatical can be the answer.\n\nFor us and many of our interviewees, the break was a time to give back, in small ways and large. Some of us served on non-profit boards, while others wanted the more hands-on experience of feeding the homeless in their own communities, providing medical care in Africa, or establishing schools at home or abroad.\n\nVolunteering sabbaticals can change people in profound ways. Sometimes the transition back to your old life can be jarring. When Nigel returned to his law firm in the UK after volunteering with his wife in Trinidad and Tobago and Ecuador, he deeply questioned his priorities and those of his colleagues. Sitting at his desk, he couldn't help but think, is all this really that important? Others were so changed by their volunteer experiences that they quit the corporate world altogether for a life of non-profit work and volunteering.\n\nA number of corporations encourage their employees to take volunteering sabbaticals, which gives the employees rewarding experiences and the company a way to contribute to social responsibility.\n\nThe \"new volunteerism\" is a rapidly growing industry of customized travel programs and accommodations in places around the world where you pay to volunteer. It combines cultural and learning experiences with making a positive impact. Many websites offer listings of meaningful volunteer opportunities for people who want to give back during their Reboot Break. (See Resources in the Appendix and further discussion of volunteering in Chapters 3 and 6.)\n\n### LIFE-ENHANCEMENT SABBATICAL\n\nYou may be ready for a life-enhancement sabbatical if you:\n\n\u2022 _Feel uninspired by your work or your life._\n\n\u2022 _Feel out of touch with your dreams and interests._\n\n\u2022 _Feel the need to connect to life's deeper meeting through spiritual exploration._\n\n\u2022 _Just crave meaningful time for yourself._\n\nAlthough Jaye's Reboot Break captures elements of several sabbatical types, life-enhancement was her primary objective.\n\n_I had started and built a company with three partners. Four years later, one of them retired, which caused me to take on roles and responsibilities that I didn't enjoy. And I enjoyed doing it twelve hours a day even less! After six years of forcing myself, I finally raised my hand to make amajor change. Not only was I unhappy with what I was doing, I had lost touch with those I cared most about, and especially myself. I needed a break. On sabbatical, I was able to have enriching experiences that were otherwise elusive: see long-lost friends, spend quality time with family, and travel a lot to reconnect and to rediscover myself._\n\nReboot Breaks don't have to be motivated by a deep need or noble purpose. There may be no trauma to recover from or ambition to follow. Sometimes a Reboot Break happens just because you want to take some time for yourself and see what it feels like to stop working for a while.\n\nGeoff told us about his experience.\n\n_My Reboot Break was a journey within myself. I had taken time off of work in my thirties to search for a better work\/life balance. I started to think about how I wanted to structure my life in the future. In my travels, I met up with an old friend who had moved to Australia. I proudly told this self-made man who had retired at thirty-five that I had just been made a vice president. He responded, \"That's great. So tell me, are you happy?\" I spent the rest of my break working on how I could be certain to answer that question \"Yes.\" I don't have all the answers, but I'm closer. I learned that you don't need to come out of a Reboot Break with all the perfect answers. It's okay to just recharge your batteries._\n\nLife-enhancement sabbaticals often have an important dose of spiritual enlightenment as people seek ways to nourish their souls and get to know themselves better. It can be in small doses or as a major focus. On Marco's two course-correction sabbaticals, he felt that introspection was the most important activity. \"Without logging a lot of time with myself on sabbatical, I never would have been able to figure out the career that will sustain me through my life. I learned about how I want to live my life and conduct my relationships by undertaking a search for my own spirituality. That was important and satisfying.\"\n\nMany sabbatical takers find their path to self-discovery through yoga, meditation, and participating in weekend or longer programs that guide them through a process of self-reflection and spiritual exploration. **Many people are hungry for a connection to a part of themselves that is untapped and under-celebrated.** Some also want to feel connected to a larger spiritual community of like-minded people to help support them.\n\n### PRE-RETIREMENT SABBATICAL\n\nA pre-retirement sabbatical may be right for you if:\n\n\u2022 _You want to \"test the waters\" of retired life._\n\n\u2022 _You know you'll need to work during retirement and want to figure out what kind of work you'd like to do._\n\n\u2022 _You know what you want to do during your retirement\u2014you're going to start a business or build a house or become a yoga instructor\u2014and you want to get a head start on your plans._\n\nCathy's sabbatical in 2007 was a pre-retirement sabbatical.\n\n_I, like many Baby Boomers, was not ready to retire. Rather, I see myself working well into my seventies, but with more time for other things. I wanted more control over my work life and to follow some of the passions and dreams I had left behind in my last career phase._\n\n_I used the eight months off to get more involved with philanthropy and work behind the scenes on fundraising and policy development for a presidential campaign. I continued to give presentations in the financial services and technology fields so that I kept up connections and continued to learn._\n\n_The most exciting parts of the time off were closer to my passions of travel and design. I was building a new guest house on my property in Santa Fe and loved every minute of the planning. I also traded houses with an acquaintance and spent a month in France with friends, some from my business connections. What gelled from those two experiences was how to use my guesthouse and house in Santa Fe as places for talented and engaged people to meet and work on some of the problemsfacing the United States in its need to be globally competitive. I'm back at the Santa Fe Group now, working on how to turn that thought into a business opportunity._\n\n**As people approach retirement age, they often begin to think about what they will do in retirement and want to position themselves for it.** A pre-retirement sabbatical in your fifties or sixties can help you explore what to do later. You may look forward to the extra time and freedom of retirement and want a taste of it in advance. Or you may contemplate retirement with some trepidation and want to lay some groundwork for it. A pre-retirement sabbatical can be used to try volunteering, take a class or an extended trip, start a hobby, or anything else that offers a taste of what may be in store after leaving a fulltime career. A pre-retirement sabbatical can be taken either from the workplace or between gigs.\n\n### PHASED RETIREMENT: THE NEW WAY\n\nBaby Boomers and others are foregoing old-fashioned retirement. Instead of ending their careers only to spend their time in leisure, they are increasingly spending their post-retirement years working part-time or volunteering. There are seventy-eight million Baby Boomers in their sixties now, at or near traditional retirement age, but polls indicate that only about thirty percent actually plan to quit work. And the number of those who plan to keep working at least part-time is growing, according to a 2008 Gallup poll. Some of this is financial necessity, but some of it is simply not wanting to retire.\n\nWe call this new lifestyle that pairs traditional retirement's relaxation and discovery with rewarding work \"phased retirement.\" It's a term we have borrowed from law firms, which have a long and enlightened tradition of allowing their older associates and partners, like Sam, to cut back their work without leaving the firm. An attorney in his sixties, Sam is still a partner but he spends most of his time working on pro bono cases and mentoring the firm's younger employees.\n\nFor some, phased retirement means leaving an old job behind for new, more interesting work. Dick \"retired\" from an active legal career at sixty-five. After some time off, he became a volunteer with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Today he heads the orchestra's youth outreach program.\n\nThe new gig may be the realization of an old dream (even a reinvention), or a different incarnation of the previous career. Often, it fulfills a desire to use one's lifetime of personal and work skills in volunteering. Roberta, a retired banker, volunteers her financial skills, helping young entrepreneurs prepare their taxes. Frank, a retired government worker, donates his legal expertise at a nearby homeless shelter.\n\nMany people don't realize they want a phased retirement until after they retire. They have the idea that being on vacation\u2014for the rest of their life!\u2014will be nothing but bliss. And for some it is.\n\nBut after six months, a year, or maybe two, many think to themselves, _Is this all there is?_\n\nKevin, an Idaho entrepreneur and professor, knew he wasn't ready for traditional retirement. But he was ready to find a better balance between his work and personal life. At sixty, he resigned from his last full-time job and took time off to figure out the right balance of work and personal time, as well as the kind of work he could do that would be satisfying. Today Kevin spends three days a week counseling small business entrepreneurs and teaches one college-level business course. He also manages an \"angel fund\" that he created to help entrepreneurs who want to start new companies and serves as a governor of the Rotary Club.\n\n\"I'm doing these things because I have the time now,\" Kevin said. \"The angel fund keeps me connected to that community. Being the Rotary Club governor is a labor of love, and I have talent to bring to it. It's a gift that I have time to do all of this.\"\n\nPhased retirement can take many different forms. And it is truly changing the way people live their lives in their older years. Marc Freedman, in his book _Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life,_ talks about what we all have to gain from people who seek active and purposeful lives long after our parents stepped off life's stage.\n\n###   EXERCISES\n\n##### _Exercise 2-1: Your Motivations_\n\n\u2022Which type of sabbatical(s) do you identify with most?\n\n\u2022Write down the issue or motivation driving you toward one or more of the types of sabbaticals.\n\n\u2022Think about the direct impact a Reboot Break break could have, and make lists of the pros and cons.\n\n## | CHAPTER 3 |\n\n## _It's All in the Planning_\n\n\"A goal without a plan is just a wish.\"\n\n_\u2014Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry_\n\nCongratulations! Now that you've decided to take a Reboot Break, it's time to put together a plan to help you to make the most of it. Whether you are a non-planner, a great planner, or an over-planner, this chapter will provide you with helpful insights on:\n\n\u2022 The crucial role that planning plays.\n\n\u2022 How to pre-empt potential emotional hurdles about planning.\n\n\u2022 How to prepare for conversations with bosses, spouses, and children.\n\n\u2022 The tactical steps you will need to consider in advance for a successful break.\n\n\u2022 How planning can also enable entrepreneurs, sole practitioners, and small business owners to take time off.\n\n\u2022 Resources that will help in planning and giving you the \"gift of time.\" (Understanding the ways in which you can fund your time off is so important that we have dedicated a full chapter\u2014Chapter 4\u2014to the multitude of options and resources available to anyone considering taking time off.)\n\nNo sabbatical dreams come true by happenstance. Each dream is unique and needs first to be imagined, then planned and implemented by the one person who can do it . . . you!\n\n### WHY PLANNING IS IMPORTANT AND WHY IT's SOMETIMES HARD\n\nPlanning is the key for everyone taking a Reboot Break. It enables you to fulfill your goals, expectations, and needs for this time-off period. It lays the groundwork, ensuring that you will get the most from the sabbatical experience. It helps determine the resources needed, the things that need to be put in place, and at what stage. It leads one to think about contingencies and to be better prepared.\n\nWe recommend starting six months to a year ahead of your Reboot Break, but many people plan successfully on shorter notice. Others choose to plan several years ahead. Every situation is unique. The trick is to leave enough flexibility to be spontaneous and open to learning lessons along the way, but at the same time to think through enough details in advance to make sure opportunities are not lost.\n\nEileen planned a year in advance of taking a twelve-month Reboot Break, starting with a list of her goals, which included travel and reconnecting with friends. Although she had a terrific time and enjoyed her trip to France and Switzerland, she later regretted that she hadn't planned more of the specifics. She had wanted to take cooking classes in France, for example, but missed the opportunity because it needed to be researched and reserved in advance.\n\nThere is creative tension between planning and not planning, being over-programmed and not being programmed enough. The objective is to have structure to achieve your goals but also leave lots of downtime and room for flexibility and opportunity. Planning also does not come easily to everyone. What keeps us from planning?\n\n\u2022 Many of us are procrastinators.\n\n\u2022 We have lingering emotions of fear or guilt about taking time off.\n\n\u2022 It feels easier to us to just let things happen.\n\n\u2022 We just don't know how to plan.\n\nAll of these circumstances are normal, but they must be overcome. Push past these inhibitors and get started.\n\n### PLANNING BASICS\n\nHere are some basics for anyone starting to plan for a time away:\n\n\u2022 Identify your major goals.\n\n\u2022 Decide how much time to take. If it is an unexpected sabbatical, figure out how flexible you can be with time off.\n\n\u2022 Figure out what financial and other resources you will need.\n\n\u2022 Decide what you will need to do ahead of time to be able to take time off.\n\n\u2022 Determine whom to tell, who will be impacted, and how you will deal with that.\n\n\u2022 If you are an entrepreneur or sole practitioner, decide what planning is needed well in advance.\n\n\u2022 Decide whether travel is included, and if so, what advance planning is needed.\n\n\u2022 Do a plan outline and timelines for the Reboot Break period.\n\n\u2022 Identify fears that might get in the way and how to address them.\n\n\u2022 Schedule down time for yourself. If your goal is to get off the racetrack and smell the roses, then carving out time for yourself to think, reflect, and feel can be enough of a plan, at least for the beginning of a Reboot Break.\n\n* * *\n\n### GETTING STARTED: IDENTIFYING GOALS\n\nHere are some preliminary steps you might take in identifying your major goals and outcomes:\n\n1. Think and daydream about your time off.\n\n2. Write about it, which makes it more real.\n\n3. Talk about it to others to get reinforcement.\n\n4. Write down steps to take toward those dreams.\n\nYou know yourself. Think carefully about what you need to do to feel afterward that you made the best use of your break and special time off. What are the categories of things you would like to do? Do you have a major, overarching goal, like getting an MBA, traveling to Asia, or running a marathon? If so, what do you need to do to accomplish that? What are some of your other goals, large and small, and how might you reach them?\n\nLaura needed a break from her high-stress job. She and her husband had dreamed about traveling internationally during the ten years of their marriage. He had found a summer project assignment in Australia, and now here was their chance to realize those dreams. She jumped at the opportunity to take a leave of absence and join him. Together they planned what they would do and how they would do it. That was half the fun. They got their kids involved and planned places they wanted to see, activities they wanted to do, and what their budget might be. The kids each had research assignments around those activities and places, and Laura and her husband used the time to broaden their kids' knowledge as well as their own.\n\nWe suggest several techniques for helping the creative process:\n\n**Visualize** \u2014Movement assists in thinking more creatively and boldly because it allows the mind to shift from the left side of the brain to the right side, which enables you to be open to new possibilities. We recommend taking a walk in a calm and peaceful place, such as a park or by the water\u2014somewhere where you won't be distracted\u2014to contemplate your time off. Spend at least thirty minutes permitting your mind to go to a place that allows it to stretch and imagine the ideal. Assume there are no barriers. Let yourself imagine what your ideal break would look and feel like. Make a point of not talking to anyone while on this walking\/visualization exercise. Later, when you return to a place where you can write, get those ideas down in a journal uncensored.\n\nJaye used the visualization technique to plan her Reboot Break. It included how she would tell her partner she was leaving the business, what she would say to clients, and, more importantly, what she wanted to do when she had the time off. This included everything from addressing health issues to exploring a new career path. It worked for her.\n\nOn the other hand, Ned didn't take the time to visualize before he began his six-month sabbatical. All he knew was that he was tired and overwhelmed and needed an emotional break. He began to realize when his time off was coming to an end that he never did the things he would have liked to do. He hadn't planned for them. He is now a strong advocate for planning and is, in fact, planning his next sabbatical.\n\n**Think Boldly** \u2014Zoe at age twenty-five left her job at an environmental organization after months of dreaming of doing the St. James pilgrimage in Spain. After discussion with colleagues, plus a lot of planning, she embarked on a complex ten-month travel sabbatical. Her planning included where she wanted to go, what it took to do the pilgrimage, whether her friends would be available to visit, what experiences she wanted to have, and a budget. She did the pilgrimage in Spain, hiking the Pyrenees Mountains along the famed 480-mile Camino del Compostela, also called the Way of St. James. Then she stayed on in Spain for a few months, taking Spanish classes. Next she traveled to Germany, living with friends for two months. Then she was off to northern Thailand before trekking in Nepal. She finished her travel living on a French farm for the last three months. The experience led her to the field of conflict resolution, a master's degree, and a new career.\n\nWithout a bold step in life, some things would never be. Surround yourself with pictures, articles, books, and inspiring quotes. Make a collage with images of all the places you want to go and things you want to do, and hang it by your desk or bed to remind you of your dreams.\n\n**Talk to Others** \u2014If you don't have a clear idea of your life goals or Reboot Break goals, you can talk to others. By verbalizing your thoughts and ideas, especially with someone who will give you encouragement, you make them more real and achievable. Beyond family and friends, blogs are one way to do this. Please join us at our blog on _www.reboot yourlifebook.com._ Another way is creating or joining a community, such as our Reboot Your Life groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Another example is the community we have created through the retreats we hold, with the attendees staying in touch afterward.\n\n**Write It Down** \u2014Putting pen to paper is another way to start to turn dreams into reality. Journaling about your thoughts right from the start is an excellent way to capture ideas, fears, and wishes\u2014all a significant part of the planning process. Maybe you already write in a journal daily, or maybe you never have. Grab your journal or a handy notebook or go out and buy a blank book for writing, and then sit in a quiet place to think and write. Research has shown that there's a greater connection between the paper and the mind when writing by hand as opposed to using a computer.\n\n### DECIDING HOW LONG TO TAKE OFF\n\nIf you are taking a between-gigs sabbatical or are out of work on an unexpected sabbatical, you still need to plan a timeframe for your sabbatical and for returning to work. The length of time you stay on your Reboot Break most likely will relate to your financial resources. We advise making a conscious decision to plan a Reboot Break after losing a job and not to seek a new job right away. We recommend planning at least a three-month break, if possible, plus having an additional three months in financial reserves in case the job search takes longer than anticipated once you begin it. If you can take a longer break, such as six months to a year, go for it.\n\nIf you are working, your company's policies will influence how long you can take off. Does the company have a sabbatical or leave-of-absence policy, and would it work for you? How long does it allow? Is it paid or unpaid? If there is no policy, has anyone else ever asked to take a sabbatical? Has anyone taken time off without pay and been able to return to the company and his or her same job? These are questions your human resources department can help you to answer. You might also speak to longtime employees who may have taken advantage of some of these benefits.\n\nOther factors in deciding how long a Reboot Break to take may include:\n\n\u2022 How long you think it will take to achieve all you dream about doing.\n\n\u2022 How much time you need to accomplish a specific goal, such as an academic program.\n\n\u2022 How much time your company provides.\n\n\u2022 How much time you can afford to take off financially.\n\n\u2022 A season or specific period of time, such as summer when the kids are out of school.\n\n\u2022 Requirements of a specific program, such as the Family and Medical Leave Act, or any other program in which you might be participating.\n\nThe Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is designed to assist people needing time to tend to medical issues for a family member. Should your Reboot Break be focused on caring for an ill family member, you can take up to three months off, intermittently or all at once. You must have proof of the illness and the relationship to get approval.\n\nDorothy's daughter, Shanna, gave birth to her first child. All had gone well but the baby was born prematurely. Shanna was living at home at the time, with Dorothy and her husband. While Dorothy was thrilled to have her first grandchild come into the world, she knew that her daughter was not prepared to care for her new baby alone. With Dorothy's very demanding job running a child welfare agency, there was little time for her own family and to support her daughter. Dorothy researched and discovered that she could take advantage of the FMLA to assist her daughter and new grandchild.\n\nDorothy was able to take two weeks at first and then three weeks intermittently over the next two months to spend time with her new grandchild. She was thrilled to have this special time with him, to support her daughter, and to get away from the distractions of her busy job.\n\nBen's mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He wanted to help her to get her life in order and get her settled somewhere where she would feel well taken care of and comfortable. He asked for, and received, a three-month FMLA leave. He used the break to spend quality time with his mother but also to clean out her house, sell it, and get her settled somewhere safe. He loved being with her and was able to take care of her proactively while also giving himself the \"gift of time\" with her. It gave him a sense of relief and peace to know that she was where she needed to be.\n\nSometimes people end up extending their Reboot Break if they can, either because they aren't ready to return to a more structured routine, or because they feel they just haven't yet accomplished what they set out to do. For those with the flexibility, extending the time away is a great option.\n\nMary Pat had originally planned to take eight months off when she resigned from her senior-level marketing position. She planned a number of things to do during this time of healing and exploration. As she approached the eight-month mark, she realized that she had much more to do and that the doors had just started opening up for her. Going back to a full-time work routine felt counterproductive and premature; she had already invested considerable time to get where she was. While on her Reboot Break, Mary Pat was approached by a number of recruiters. Since she still wasn't ready to return to full-time work, she turned the opportunities into some consulting assignments to rebuild her financial resources. Then she joyfully continued her break. Today, Mary Pat is consulting and still leaving more time for herself. She integrated what she learned from her time off to move into a career that gave her more control over where she lived, what she did, and how much time she worked.\n\n#### WHAT IF YOU WERE TAKING A YEAR OFF?\n\nSusan started charting her course in her late twenties, twelve months ahead of the year-long sabbatical she planned to take from her job in banking. Susan knew that she was planning for the next stage of her life and wanted to be thoughtful about what she was doing. She applied to a six-month academic program in England, then requested and received permission from her employer to attend and extend the time off to a year. \"I knew that I needed a full year,\" she said, \"and I know that when I have things planned, I am more productive and get more out of my time away. If you don't plan, time escapes you and the things you had dreamed of fade away.\"\n\nMore and more people are taking a full year off in order to achieve a longer-term life shift. Many people travel for a year and leave their creature comforts behind. Some volunteer during their time away. Studying often requires a commitment of at least a year for career enhancement or to acquire enough knowledge for a career shift and to be more credible.\n\nWe recommend a year or more break to truly get the impact and lasting benefits of being away, but any amount of time away is nourishing and recharging. For those of you still uncertain about taking a longer break, mini-sabbaticals are a good way to test the waters.\n\n#### STARTING OUT SMALL: TESTING THE WATERS\n\nStarting with a long Reboot Break can be daunting, in terms of planning, financing, or facing fears. In a down economy, small steps may seem more palatable. Although we recommend that Reboot Breaks ideally last several months to a year, one suggestion is trying a shorter \"mini-sabbatical,\" to pave the way. You can try taking a break for a few days to a month. Structured the right way, a weekend, a week, or a month can give you a glimpse of what a real stretch of time can do.\n\nSome people try something or someplace new for a short time and then decide whether they want to pursue the activity on a more sustained basis or go back to the place for longer.\n\nFor some people, taking a long weekend to unplug from the BlackBerry and computer and be alone with no schedule offers a small test of what it would be like to take a Reboot Break. A mini-sabbatical can also test the logistical and emotional planning required with one's family or significant other, the financial resources needed, how the office will get along without you, whether you can handle simply being alone for a period of time, and ways of overcoming feelings of guilt.\n\nWill left his work as a photographer in New York City for the month of March to refresh his soul, mind, and spirit. \"It was an imperative for me. I had to do it. You have to do this kind of thing for yourself. You have to work it out financially and figure out how long you can take. I scheduled my photography jobs so I could be gone, and I went to Texas with my camera in hand just for pleasure. I drove for one month all over the state, loving not working, listening to music, taking pictures.\"\n\nWhen Cathy traded houses to spend a month in Italy in 2006, it went so smoothly with her staff in her absence that she realized her real sabbatical could be much longer than the three months she had planned.\n\nCathy and others offer some good advice about planning mini-sabbaticals:\n\n\u2022 **Unplugging can be the hardest part.** Tell your office and others ahead of time that you are not going to be available electronically. Then try to stick to that plan to get the most out of your time off.\n\n\u2022 **You can do a lot in a month.** It's twice the time of a two-week vacation and twice the opportunity to get away from it all and relax or try something new. Planning helps you make the most of it.\n\n\u2022 **Involve your family in the planning and\u2014if it fits the plan\u2014 in the mini-sabbatical itself.** It should be a time to get away from normal chores and routines.\n\n\u2022 **You can be creative without spending huge amounts of money.** For example, some people trade houses or even house-sit for a short period of time. That gets them away from their routine and into position to explore new places. The web can be helpful in identifying opportunities.\n\n\u2022 **Plan ahead, starting with making a list of things you have been wanting to do.** Figure out how to make it happen.\n\nIn Chapter 10, Living the Lifelong Sabbatical, we talk more about ideas and tips for mini-sabbaticals and how they can be a lifelong practice.\n\n### WHOM TO TELL AND HOW: PLANNING CONVERSATIONS\n\nMake a list of all the people who will be impacted by your taking time off. Start with your family members, friends, and others who count on you. Then list employers, colleagues, clients, and customers. Include any corporate or not-for-profit boards you may be on or community projects in which you are engaged. Plan what to tell them, and when.\n\n#### TALKING TO YOUR SPOUSE\/PARTNER, CHILDREN, AND FRIENDS\n\nYour transition will be smoother if you include, early in the planning process, the people who will be affected by your taking a Reboot Break. They can be sounding boards and challenge you to think more\u2014or less\u2014broadly. Fearing the reactions of others and thus avoiding those potentially difficult conversations will cause more problems than dealing with them up front in a calm and confident way. If you are convinced of your decision, others will get on board more quickly, especially if you ask for their help, support, and ideas. If you receive some pushback from naysayers, don't let them rain on your parade. (We talk more about reactions of loved ones in Chapter 9.)\n\nWhen a spouse or partner is a co-sabbatical taker, it is even more important to share each other's goals and expectations and to find alignment and build a plan that suits both of you.\n\nBarry wanted to take three months off from his position as leader of a synagogue. He felt it was important to take time to reflect and learn something new to bring back to his congregation. He started planning for the time off with the help and involvement of his wife, Sarah. She worked as a teacher and needed to plan long in advance if she was to participate in any way. Together they made a list of what they each wanted to accomplish during this time away. It was important for both of them to come back refreshed and armed with a fresh outlook and new perspectives. They each took courses that had been on their list and took three two-week vacations away together. Their unexpected gift from this time together was that it reinforced their own relationship and strengthened it.\n\nChildren, too, need to be a part of the conversation, once you are clear and have a plan. They will want to know what to expect and how it will affect them. At the same time, you can leave room for their additions and suggestions. From the mouths of children can come creative, unfettered thoughts, ideas, and possibilities.\n\nTalk to your friends. They may provide just the encouragement, support, and ideas you need.\n\n#### GETTING YOUR EMPLOYER ON BOARD\n\nNow that you have decided to take a Reboot Break, you need to get your employer on board. Employers want to have energized and productive staff members, so there is something in this for your boss as well as for you. You might approach it that way in your discussions.\n\n\"Are you crazy?\" you ask. \"You don't know my boss. This would be impossible at my company.\" Well, you may just be surprised, and you'll never know if you don't ask. If you are working for a small company or a start-up and you and your colleagues are in the throes of launching the company, new products, or a new line of business, then the timing may not be right for you. It's up to you to pick the right time, communicate it, and plan well in advance for it.\n\nBill was the VP of a major business line at a top computer company, and he was planning to start a two-month sabbatical within days of the most important product launch in the company's history. As the head of this major business, the lifeline of the company, how could he disconnect completely for two months when the product had to be flawless and there were major customers and analyst meetings to be had? Besides that, the company had no sabbatical program and no one had ever taken a sabbatical.\n\nBill explained to those who wondered how he could do it that he had made a personal resolution to take two months off to be with his family every three years in the summertime. He started communicating his resolve three years ahead of time, telling his boss, the CEO, and co-workers that \"in three years time I will be taking two months off.\" Of course, no one paid any attention to him for something that was so far off. Every six months he reminded everyone of his plans. As the time got closer, he reminded people every month and created a plan so that his employees were empowered and prepared to run the business. The launch went off flawlessly and catapulted the company. He had a wonderful time refreshing himself and reconnecting with his wife and his teenage children as they traveled and explored Europe.\n\nMaybe you work for a very small company and you and your co-workers are each doing the work of three people. Again, timing is everything. This may simply not be the time to ask, but that doesn't mean that you give up your dream. The people who get the most out of a Reboot Break dream about it and plan for it a year or more ahead of time. If you were suddenly taken ill or if you are a woman and became pregnant, even small companies would give you time off\u2014six weeks in the case of a maternity break\u2014and they survive. You may want to start with a mini break of two or three weeks, but share with your boss your desire and your resolve to be able to take a longer Reboot Break someday.\n\nWe've spoken to many lawyers who have said there is no way a lawyer can take a sabbatical or Reboot Break. They claim that their clients depend on the individual client-attorney relationship and would never accept a replacement. Others point to the partner revenue sharing as an obstacle, feeling that it wouldn't be fair to take off two or three months. But many well recognized and well run law firms successfully offer sabbatical programs. They have found a way to handle these objections and claim that their programs work well for lawyers and for the clients. For a list of some law firms and other entities offering programs, see the Appendix \"Organizations That Get It.\"\n\nBe sure to prepare for your conversation with your boss. It is important to be clear that this is something you want and need to do, that you have thought through how your work can be managed during your absence, and that you have a reentry plan that will enable you to transition back with little or no interruption in the business. Thus, the benefits will clearly outweigh any negative concerns.\n\n##### _Making the Business Case_\n\nWe suggest scripting the conversation so that you don't miss valuable points in presenting the business case, not just your case. As you approach your conversation, it might be helpful for you and your boss to know that many successful companies and organizations are offering sabbaticals. We have researched or talked to 150 corporations, law firms, non-profits, trade associations, government agencies, and small enterprises that offer sabbaticals or otherwise support employees who want to take time off. Some of these organizations have formal sabbatical programs with paid leave, and some just allow people to have a job waiting when they return. Some organizations cover their employees' healthcare benefits while they're not working or offer the insurance at the company rate.\n\nEmployers are more willing to help those desiring a Reboot Break because they see the value to the organization's culture, recruitment, retention, and capacity to innovate. Sabbaticals are also fundamental to building the breadth and depth of employees within the organization, both those who take them and those who fill in. The latter become more experienced and flexible by standing in for the absent colleague, and the organization builds resilience.\n\nIn 2009 there were nineteen companies on Fortune's \"100 Best Companies to Work For\" that sponsored sabbatical programs, a 36 percent increase on 2008. Our research suggests that the trend is in fact on the rise. Some companies\u2014such as AARP, American Express, Charles Schwab, Deloitte, eBay, Intel, McDonalds, Newsweek, Random House, Inc., Scholastic, and Text 100\u2014all offer one- to three-month paid sabbaticals. Others, like the consulting firm Accenture, help employees set aside part of their paychecks to finance a three-month leave, with a continuation of benefits.\n\nThe trend toward sabbaticals has remained true even during the economic downturn, with the added innovation of furloughing to keep employees but cut costs. Furloughing is somewhat common, with employees being asked to take a month or even a year off with reduced pay or even no pay. They get to refresh and come back reinvigorated and rededicated as even stronger employees. Some law firms are encouraging first-year associates to delay coming to the firm and instead do volunteer work for three to six months, and most firms are paying them partial salaries to do so.\n\nGiven the business advantages of granting sabbaticals to employees, you can make a strong business case to your employer. Here are some points you might want to make:\n\n\u2022 **Sabbaticals and taking time off are the state-of-the-art way to energize talent and build leadership skills.** Leaders and managers need to take a step back and away to refuel themselves to bring that renewed energy back to the organization.\n\n\u2022 **Sabbaticals enhance staff capabilities and succession planning for those who remain behind.** These employees get the opportunity to step up and stretch their capabilities. They can have more visibility and lay the groundwork for their own future advancement in the organization.\n\n\u2022 **Sabbaticals induce loyalty.** Employees who are allowed time off for rebooting are more likely to stay in the organization longer, lowering turnover and recruitment costs.\n\n\u2022 **Returning employees are usually healthier and happier,** improving company morale and lowering healthcare costs.\n\nWhen asking for the time off, be prepared to talk about why it is important for you to take the time off, what you plan to do, and then\u2014 more importantly for your employer\u2014the benefits to them. When going in to negotiate your time off, be prepared to discuss what your ideal break would include. Can you get salary continuation? How will health benefits be covered? If they are not paid for by your company, make sure that you personally contribute so that your health insurance is not interrupted. Check that this Reboot Break is treated as a leave of absence and does not create an interruption in years of service for things like future vacation accrual, pensions, 401(k), etc.\n\nHaving a conversation with employers and managers doesn't have to be difficult. Mary, who you may recall from Chapter 1 was desperate to take a break, approached the human resources department at her commodity-trading company first to test the waters. There was no sabbatical leave policy, and no one would dream that a trader would ask for time off. But, they were supportive and gave her some valuable advice about how to approach her manager. Following their suggestions, she offered to help train someone to step temporarily into her shoes, thereby increasing that employee's abilities. She explained why she needed a sabbatical and the benefits she hoped to gain from it. The manager wasn't thrilled, but considering the costs of finding someone of Mary's caliber to replace her, the manager decided she was worth waiting for and gave her the go-ahead. (Chapter 1 has other relevant examples and information on workplace sabbaticals.)\n\nYou can prepare your employer by making a strong argument for yourself and for the business case. The more in tune you are to what is in it for them to agree to your taking this time away, the more likely they are to agree. At the same time, once employers or business partners see your commitment, it is harder for them to turn down the idea. Think about whether you want to return to the same job in the organization or have flexibility to move to something new, and be prepared to discuss that.\n\nGo into the meeting with a well thought-out plan about the delegation of your work load, the timeframe, the benefits to you, and the potential benefits to the company. Including other managers in your decision and in the design of how to handle things during your sabbatical will help smooth the transition. Acknowledge their advice and make sure they feel heard, but never let them derail the plan. Reinforce the benefits to them, the employees, and clients.\n\nIf the business case doesn't work, there is always the business proposition approach. Dale says she got time off from her job in New Zealand for her sabbatical by \"striking a deal\" with her boss on how the work would get done:\n\n\"I had to produce two major reports before leaving (a huge task) and one when I got back. I basically worked a few seventy-hour weeks before going and on my return. I also arranged for a friend of mine to work part-time to cover me while I was away. But it was worth it in the end. The time off really energized me.\"\n\n#####  _Announcement_\n\nMake your boss's life easier. Here is a sample email announcement to your organization regarding your planned time off. You can decide with your boss if the letter comes from you or from your boss. There are a number of ways to approach this; this is one option:\n\nDear colleagues and staff,\n\nMany of you are aware that I will be taking advantage of the company's sabbatical program this summer. I will be away from xxxx to xxxx. While I am away you will be able to speak to xxxx, who has been fully brought up to speed on all the projects in which I am involved and can answer any of your questions to help move things forward in my absence. You will find him\/her insightful and well prepared. I appreciate your support of our mutual projects during my absence and look forward to returning in xxx, energized and ready to jump back in to carry on our work together. I am available for questions or concerns up until my leave begins on xxx.\n\nThank you.\n\n#### TALKING TO CO-WORKERS, PEERS, BOARD MEMBERS\n\nThis needs to be handled with care. Some co-workers may be resentful or jealous and might in some way try to undermine your plan. Being sensitive to their feelings is critical for the success of the plan. They will want to feel included and considered, and they will want to know what part they will play in your absence.\n\nReactions vary. Many people reported that although their co-workers were a little jealous, they also cheered them on and felt encouraged that they too could take time off later.\n\nMake a personal call to all of the critical people in groups with which you interact regularly to share the plan for your time off and to answer any questions they might have. You don't want to surprise anyone. A clear memo to everyone a week or two before your departure, outlining who will be handling what, how to reach key people, and reassuring them that the business will be well handled during this time, is very important for maintaining your reputation and keeping the organization and your responsibilities moving forward.\n\n#### TALKING TO CLIENTS AND CUSTOMERS\n\nPlanning ahead is critical in making a smooth transition both out of your role and then later back into it, whether you are working in a corporation or have your own business. Your clients and customers need to know with confidence that their needs will be met, so providing them with information in advance will ease their minds and help insure that they will be there when you return.\n\nMost people have had very positive reactions from clients and customers. Many have built even better relationships as a result because of how the sabbatical period was communicated, planned, and handled throughout the process. Unknowns breed fear and concern, so communicate in advance and make it clear when you will return and reenter their lives and businesses.\n\n### PLANNING FOR ENTREPRENEURS AND SOLE PRACTITIONERS\n\nDoctors, accountants, and other professional specialists face their own unique set of issues. Many we interviewed were daunted at first at even considering a sabbatical. \"How will customers, patients, and clients feel if I am not available?\" \"Will I lose my business if I am not there to captain the ship?\" \"No one will do it the way I would do it.\"\n\nA striking number of people we interviewed fit into this category of having no obvious replacement during a time of leave. They all overcame their fears, took successful Reboot Breaks, and were able to return to their business or practice.\n\nThe good and bad news is that someone _can_ do what you do, maybe even as well. Think of colleagues who could take your patients or customers temporarily in your full role or perhaps a reduced role. Consider hiring someone to do it as a freelance employee, asking people you trust for recommendations.\n\nTwo friends who each ran very small businesses made a deal with one another. They didn't know each other's business, but they were both successful entrepreneurs and knew how to service customers, listen, solve problems, and keep employee morale high. The two agreed to take a Reboot Break a year apart. Each would be the guardian\/mentor to the person or team left in charge while the boss was away. They did so by occasionally attending meetings, as a board member might, and then during their friend's break they talked to the manager in charge at least once a week. Good leaders know how to ask good questions regardless of industry and business. They made sure they each had a good number two who could step up to run the day-to-day part of the business.\n\nAs you consider who will carry out or support your functions while you are away, plan how to train and empower them as necessary. It will be a test of your succession planning\u2014and ability to take future Reboot Breaks\u2014if you can work this out.\n\nIf you cannot figure out someone to take over while you are away, think about whether your customers, clients, or patients can get along without your services for a while until you return. Notify them well in advance that you are closing the office for a specific period of time.\n\nOther things to think about to prepare you and your business while you are away:\n\n\u2022 Document your work flow and processes for those who will be supporting you during your break.\n\n\u2022 When possible, take care of unfinished business issues.\n\n\u2022 Prepare backup for anything that may come along, such as new business.\n\n\u2022 Keep up liability and other insurance.\n\n\u2022 Let everyone know important contact information, including accountants, lawyers, technical support, building maintenance, etc.\n\n\u2022 Communicate in advance to all of your customers and clients about your plan and back-up plan so they know what to expect and whom to call.\n\nBetsy, a hand surgeon in North Carolina, took a one-year break from her medical practice to volunteer in one of the poorest parts of South Africa. At first she doubted that she could leave her solo practice, but with her two employees leaving and a necessary move out of her medical building, she felt the time was right. She arranged for a new orthopedic doctor just moving to town to handle her patients for several months and was able to take the sabbatical of her dreams. Though she was in single practice, she was still part of a larger, twenty-three-physician corporation. They had to vote to keep her in the corporation. She said that she still would have gone on sabbatical even if they said no. They didn't, but some believed she would not return.\n\nOthers in the local medical community were interested and positive. After she sent out letters to the larger medical community announcing her sabbatical, she was surprised to hear back from several doctors saying what a novel idea a sabbatical was in medicine and that they were envious. Her patients were very supportive and believed that she was coming back, which she did, and today she still has a thriving practice.\n\nGlenn, an independent financial planner, worried that his clients would be unhappy when he told them about his plan to take three months off. Instead, they were impressed by his commitment and applauded his decision. Some even admitted they were jealous. His careful planning for covering their interests in his absence\u2014 offering to transfer accounts to another financial planner\u2014was thorough and much appreciated. When he returned, some clients told him he was a role model and inspiration for them. Glenn's practice flourishes today.\n\n### PLANNING TRAVEL\n\nMost people we interviewed included some form of travel as part of their sabbatical experience. Once you have identified where you want to go, you will need to research what is needed to enter the countries you would like to visit. Some have special visa requirements that might take from a week to three months to be processed. Although some people prefer to just head to a place and see what happens and make plans as they go, other types of travel require more advance planning. Reservations for travel, housing, rail, etc. might need to be made in advance. More importantly, make sure your passport is not only up to date, but will not expire within six months of entering any country.\n\nFor those looking to study while they are away, there is usually an application process with deadlines for enrollment. Researching everything you can and speaking to people who have done what you are planning to do will save time and aggravation and make the travel experience richer and more fulfilling. Plan early and ahead, when you can.\n\nThe Appendix includes a long and thorough list of things to consider and plan for before traveling as part of your Reboot Break, and Chapter 4 is also rich in travel planning information.\n\n### PLANNING TO VOLUNTEER\n\nA desire to \"give back\" drives people to volunteer, and it may you as well. Volunteering can be part of a company's sabbatical program or sponsored by a church or community group. Other times it is part of the \"new volunteerism,\" where you pay to volunteer in interesting places overseas or at home.\n\nWhen Larry Fish accepted his job as Chairman and CEO of Citizens Financial Group in 1991, his predecessor said he could come on board whenever he liked. He decided to take a six-month sabbatical before he started. \"I went to a social services housing agency and said, 'Look, I would like to help, but I don't want to do a strategic plan or raise money or fix the accounting department. I will scrub floors, mentor kids, work the food bank, and be here as early and late as you want.'\"\n\nSo that's what he did, literally, for six months. \"I got much more out of it than I gave,\" Fish said, \"And I took the experience and started the sabbatical program at my institution.\" Citizens offers its full-time employees who have been with the bank for at least three years and are in good standing the opportunity to volunteer at a non-profit of their choice. They get full pay and benefits and a guarantee that the same job or better will be available when they return.\n\nOther firms encourage volunteerism as well. Antonia talked of the experience of Shearman & Sterling LLP, a major New York law firm, giving its employees two to three months off to volunteer. \"It makes us a better firm and makes us better lawyers as well as people.\"\n\nTwo organizations that list opportunities for volunteering abroad are Working Abroad and Greenforce. Working Abroad provides a scheduled report on volunteer activities across the world for a small fee. Greenforce, a London-based organization, runs volunteer programs in ten countries. Other resources are listed in the Appendix. Confirm that the organization is a registered 501(c)(3) at _www.guidestar.org_.\n\nBefore you sign on with a volunteer program, research the operator, the prices, and the environment. Some tour operators charge for organizing trips that you could do for free directly with the not-for-profit.\n\n### THE PLAN OUTLINE\n\nThe task now is to take the elements of your Reboot Break and plan step by step for each part. At this point, you know your goals and timeframe, have consulted with important people, including your boss and\/or colleagues, and can now look into the details of what you will do on this well-deserved break. This is the fun part because it brings you closer to the reality of your coming adventure.\n\n#### PLANNING GRID FOR A SUCCESSFUL REBOOT Break\n\nUse the grid on the next page or make your own as a way to organize your thinking around each goal you want to achieve during your Reboot Break. First think about the bigger goals, i.e., improve your health, travel, spend time with the family, learn something new. As you drill down in any one of those larger sabbatical dreams, you will need to think through the various steps to make them happen. With each goal in mind, what will you need to do first? Build from there. Add who can help you realize your goals and by when.\n\nBe as detailed and specific as possible, giving yourself timelines to ensure that you actually get it done. You can continue to add to the grid and change things as you learn from each step you take.\n\nIn the Appendix of this book is a simple planning checklist, plus more detailed planning tips, organized by timeframe starting at one year out. The steps can be compressed into a shorter timeframe as necessary, and not all steps apply to everyone.\n\n### READY FOR TAKEOFF\n\nHaving a solid plan and taking steps day-by-day toward the sabbatical dream will calm the jitters and keep the path clear for takeoff. Keeping your goals in mind, you can explore ideas and make choices. If your plan isn't working, that's okay, because you can always change it.\n\nYou are now armed with some of the tools and steps that can lead to a successful Reboot Break. It is the planning that makes it so. Look within yourself for what you really want to do and think through what it will take to get there. Everyone needs a break; you wouldn't be reading this book if you didn't think you needed one too. Planning is important, it can actually be fun, and it will lead to a more satisfying and successful Reboot Break.\n\n###   EXERCISES\n\n##### _Exercise 3-1: Building Your Dream Reboot Break_\n\n\u2022 Make a list of all the things you would ideally like to do while on your Reboot Break. Don't leave anything out; this is the time to throw in everything you have always thought about doing but never had the time to do.\n\n\u2022 Now go through and prioritize the top 5, top 10, and top 15 things you would like to do.\n\n##### _Exercise 3-2: Taking Your \"Business Case\" to Your Employer_\n\n\u2022 Draft a sabbatical plan \"business case\" to take to your employer, including responses to questions the employer might ask and a list of the ways your time off would benefit the company or organization.\n\n##### _Exercise 3-3: Create Your Own Planning Checklist_\n\n\u2022 Review the Reboot Break Planning Checklist from the Appendix and the list of things to do when preparing ahead of time.\n\n\u2022 Compile a list of what you need to get done and when before starting your Reboot Break, with timeframes to keep you on track.\n\n## | CHAPTER 4 |\n\n## _Funding Your Freedom_\n\n\"Good fortune is what happens when  \nopportunity meets with planning.\"\n\n_\u2014 Thomas Edison_\n\nOne of the greatest challenges people face in taking time off is how to finance it. Maybe you're concerned about the current economy. Maybe the market crash has sucked your retirement funds dry. Maybe you are afraid to leave a job for fear of not finding another. Or maybe you are already on an \"unexpected sabbatical\" because you have lost your job. Maybe you fear that tapping into your savings will leave you vulnerable or that you need the health insurance that your employer provides. Or maybe you fear criticism from your family for being \"frivolous\" with hard-earned money. In this chapter, we offer creative ways of funding your freedom without putting your financial health at risk.\n\nFinding the money to buy your freedom and nourish your soul is often the single biggest roadblock to getting away. Your goal should be time off free of financial concerns so that you can focus on new learning and experiences. That means, ideally, untouched retirement funds and stable home finances.\n\nMarco, who took two course-correction Reboot Breaks in his twenties (Chapter 2), put it well: \"Financial worries\u2014fear of financial insecurity, uncertainty, and instability\u2014threaten one's identity. People have a fear of being in limbo, especially financial limbo. It takes an inner strength to set that period of uncertainty in place.\"\n\nIn this chapter, we'll show you:\n\n\u2022 How to separate the misconceptions about financing Reboot Breaks from the reality.\n\n\u2022 How to save for time off.\n\n\u2022 How to plan your finances, including anticipating unexpected expenses and special considerations for the period when you are returning to work.\n\n\u2022 Resources you may be able to draw on to help finance your break.\n\n### CLEARING UP THE MISCONCEPTIONS\n\nYou hear many misconceptions about funding and the ability to take time off from work, such as:\n\n\u2022 Sabbaticals are only for middle- and upper-income people.\n\n\u2022 A Reboot Break will bankrupt your savings.\n\n\u2022 Taking time off will ruin your career.\n\n\u2022 It's irresponsible to take a sabbatical, especially in bad economic times.\n\n**You don't have to be rich to take time off.** We interviewed people from every income group who have taken time off. How much money someone makes is not the best predictor of who takes a sabbatical. It has more to do with the stage of life people are in and their dreams and goals. Teachers, nurses, ministers, construction workers, and other individuals have found ways to take a Reboot Break.\n\nThree age groups tend to be the most interested in taking sabbaticals, and they fund them in different ways. The twenty- to thirty-year-olds we interviewed were able to pack up their apartments and leave stuff with their parents, if they had anything, and be free to take off on little money. The thirty- to fifty-year-olds had mortgages and other expenses, but were most likely to get some support from their employers or their own savings or find work while off work. The sixty-plus-year-olds tended to use savings for their time off.\n\nOne of the most important misconceptions is about the costs associated with taking time off. Yes, it does cost something to do what you'd like on sabbatical, but it doesn't have to break the bank.\n\nPeople fund their time off using their retirement, vacation, education or travel funds, or funds from an account created specifically for a Reboot Break. We call this the \"Reboot Break account,\" and it is an important vehicle for realizing your dreams. You can direct your own savings, as well as gifts from others, to help fund your time off in the future.\n\nSome may use full or partial pay from a company sabbatical program (if there is one) and\/or accumulated vacation time. Others tap severance packages, bonuses, family gifts, inheritances, or tax returns to fund their freedom. There are many financial possibilities and ways to begin imagining how you might finance your break.\n\n#### FINANCIAL IMPACT ON YOUR CAREER?\n\nOne of the most common fears we heard from people of all ages centered on the impact taking time off would have on their career. Many worried they would not be taken seriously or would be passed over for promotions and bonuses and thus suffer financial consequences. They wondered how to explain the employment gap in the future.\n\nSome were concerned about colleagues who were competitive with them, and what they might do to take over their positions. In a shaky economy, where people have seen much of their gains in the stock market evaporate, their companies downsize, and their neighbors out of work, there is an understandable reluctance to do something risky. Some were concerned that their jobs would not be there when they returned.\n\n**We found you do not have to sacrifice your career and financial stability to take time off.** Of the 200 people we interviewed, over half went back to their current employers, and every one of them ended up feeling that they were more valued by their company. Those who didn't go back or severed the relationship before going on sabbatical ended up in positions they liked as well. It turns out that career breaks can be good for your financial as well as your personal life.\n\nOver 60 percent of Generation X employees, born between 1964 and 1978, want to take an extended leave or sabbatical, according to a 2001 survey quoted by _American Demographics._ Many progressive employers see it as a sign of drive and initiative. Travel abroad builds interpersonal and cultural skills. Our interviewees learned new languages, talents, and work-related knowledge on their time off. Being in new cultures made them more flexible, adaptable, and tolerant.\n\nMany people prepared for their return before taking off by doing speeches before and during the sabbatical, going to industry conferences, staying current on the literature of their industry, and checking with recruiters on how they would be perceived on their return, even going so far as to revise their resumes to explain the time off before they left, and sending them out a month or two before their return.\n\n#### THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MONEY AND SABBATICAL GOALS\n\nResearch by psychologists and economists indicates that people see money as a source of security, freedom, prestige, power, and reward.\n\nTaking time off is viewed as a source of freedom\u2014the freedom to do what you want, enjoy a more balanced life and still feel secure about your future and that of your family. The burden of making a living often keeps us from stepping back and re-evaluating our lives. A Reboot Break allows us that time.\n\nInterestingly, sometimes the wealthier people are, the more they fear taking time off because they are so tied to a certain level of income and spending. The thought of breaking the tie between money and happiness, or at least questioning it through a sabbatical, is too frightening. All of us at one time or another _need_ time out to question our beliefs. We talk more about how to define success beyond money in Chapter 10, Living the Lifelong Sabbatical.\n\nNo one can predict what will happen with the economy or financial markets for the next few years. All of us have been impacted by living through the dramatic changes in home values, retirement accounts, and jobs in this economic downturn. But you can be proactive and take steps to get your finances under control. Hard-earned savings can go quickly if thought isn't given to what you want to do and how to do it.\n\n#####  _Living Light_\n\nOne new notion includes the concept of \"living light\"\u2014saving as much as you can, spending wisely, and letting go of material things in exchange for more true freedom. Let's walk through what this means.\n\nLeena, whose story you first read in Chapter 2, had a beautiful home in London but gave it up when she decided to take time off. \"I had to let go of certain attachments. I had an exquisite flat in London. I decorated it but only lived there for three years. In order to take time off, I had to rent it out. My friends were horrified that I would leave this place I had just designed and furnished. **By letting go of material attachments, though, I was able to have my freedom.\"**\n\nFor decades, America has been a \"more is better\" society: more food, more fashion, more money, and more spending. The global financial crisis has curbed our profligate tendencies and struck fear in consumers' hearts. With housing values plummeting and 401(k)s shrinking, saving for tomorrow makes sense.\n\nMore Americans today are \"living light\"\u2014lightening up on debt, forgoing excessive spending, and spurning showy, expensive brands. This is not only necessary for most; it's also appealing. More and more, we are looking beyond conspicuous consumption to find meaning in life's more prosaic pleasures, such as spending time with family and friends.\n\nLiving light is a fundamental of a Reboot Break. Few of us can afford to maintain an extravagant lifestyle while we're working, never mind while taking time off from work. Instead, many sabbatical takers free themselves in the same way Leena did: by forgoing material possessions in exchange for more authentic personal fulfillment.\n\nKevin, like many others we interviewed, learned to live on less and to become much less attached to material things. He found ways to travel more inexpensively and live more authentically. He consciously chose on his Reboot Breaks to find ways to simplify his life to give him the breathing room to think.\n\n#### CASH OUT YOUR RETIREMENT SAVINGS, HOME, OR BUSINESS?\n\nA sabbatical is meant to give you time away from work to refresh, renew, reflect, and then come back to your same employer or business or decide to do something else. Cashing in your retirement fund or selling your home or business may put undue financial or emotional pressures on you. If you're thinking of doing this, be sure you've given yourself time to think seriously about what you want to do next. You may be surprised that after your time off, you wish you had kept the house or business, and certainly want the security of your retirement savings. Few people taking a career break cash in everything and take off. Keeping a tie to your home, work, non-profit board, or family is important. Having a place to come back to at the end of the journey may be critical to your happiness on your Reboot Break.\n\n### CREATING A BUDGET\n\nNothing works better than creating and adhering to a budget when you need to plan or when money is tight. While some people think of budgets as a chore, they are powerful tools for realizing goals. So start with your goals and include the amount of time off you want to give yourself before you go back to work. Your career break may be voluntary or not, but in tough economic times, we all worry. Having a structure for your budget is critical to using this time between jobs or careers. The basics of budgeting for a sabbatical include:\n\n\u2022 Determining your current spending needs and cash flow.\n\n\u2022 Determining the approximate amount of time you want to take off.\n\n\u2022 Listing the bills that will need to be paid, such as mortgage, insurance, college tuition, etc., on an ongoing basis.\n\n\u2022 Determining specific financial needs while on sabbatical, such as travel funds.\n\n\u2022 Brainstorming ways to cut costs or earn money, such as renting your home or apartment during your period away.\n\nTo understand how you spend money, plot out the previous year's monthly expenditures. Include tax statements, credit card statements, check registers, and other documentation you have on hand. If you don't have all these records, get financial planning software, such as a spreadsheet, or get a notebook and record all expenditures each day, week, and month for a few months. Include credit purchases, as well as cash, debit, and direct payments. Use a spreadsheet or notebook or online software to create categories going forward for revenue and expenses. Start tracking now in preparation for your time off as well as during the sabbatical. Just the process of writing things down or recording them daily is enlightening.\n\nYou will begin to see ways to save automatically. We tend to spend more freely with credit cards, and often don't realize how much we spend on snacks, coffee, and other things we really don't need. Identify areas of spending where you can cut back before and during your time off\u2014from gym fees to gifts\u2014as well as those expenditures that remain constant, such as the mortgage or car payments.\n\nWhen Rita started planning for her most recent leave from work, she started keeping track of daily expenses and income to help understand better how to budget. \"I was shocked at how much I was spending daily on frivolous things. By recording them, I knew just where to cut back without much pain.\" She continues to monitor her spending in this way today.\n\nNext, draw up a monthly budget that allows for realizing your financial goals: saving for a sabbatical, spending on sabbatical, paying down all credit cards, saving money for a down payment on a house, putting money into the retirement fund, etc. Microsoft Money and Quicken have excellent budgeting and cash flow planning forms. Or search online for other budgeting software. (In the Appendix is a listing of some resources to help you develop and track a budget.) The budget process should include not only what income you have to draw on and expenses you can cut, but also other resources you can tap in an emergency. These might be savings, loans, rental income, or sale of a major asset.\n\nIn addition to being one of the most rewarding experiences in your life, taking a Reboot Break may also teach you financial planning skills and practices. The process of planning, saving, budgeting, and controlling spending before and during the time you take off will serve you the rest of your life. An added benefit may be learning that you can take risks and succeed.\n\n### WAYS TO FUND YOUR FREEDOM\n\nLet's start with some of the ways you might fund your freedom, categorized into four types:\n\n\u2022 Saving ahead of time\n\n\u2022 Getting your employer to pay\n\n\u2022 Getting paid for work done while on sabbatical\n\n\u2022 Using a windfall\n\n#### SAVING AHEAD OF TIME\n\n**The more you save ahead of time, the more stress-free your time off will be and the more options you will have.** Using \"found money,\" like a severance or inheritance or a large tax return, can be the initial basis for that savings, as can be regular contributions to a \"Reboot Break account.\" Saving is a commitment to yourself and to your goals. Putting even small sums away each week or month creates momentum.\n\nWays to Save:\n\n\u2022 **Automating savings from your paycheck** through direct deposit with your employer or via your bank. You pay your Reboot Break account first and adjust your spending accordingly. Once you start, you may find it's not as hard as you think, so review the amount you're saving every few months and consider saving even more.\n\n\u2022 **Asking your friends and relations to contribute** to a Reboot Break account in lieu of giving you holiday, birthday, and other types of gifts.\n\n\u2022 **Earning more** through a raise, bonus, overtime, extra job, or investment and putting those extra earnings into your Reboot Break account. This allows you to continue with your current spending habits while you build a reserve for the time off.\n\n\u2022 **Renting out your home or apartment,** your office space, your second home, or anything else that might be of value to others in order to offset your living expenses.\n\n\u2022 **\"Cashing out\" or liquidating any assets** you no longer want or need. Use eBay, consignment shops, garage sales, auctions, and other venues and reserve the returns for your time off.\n\n\u2022 **Putting your money out of easy reach** of your ATM card, debit card, or checkbook. Make it a savings account, CD, or other account where it is out of mind and less accessible.\n\n\u2022 **Changing jobs or building your business** to give yourself more earning power, and then saving the difference for your break.\n\n\u2022 **Asking your employer to defer your income or pay 75 percent of your salary now and the rest when you are \"rebooting your life.\"** Learning to live on less before the sabbatical is good practice for living light.\n\n\u2022 **Managing your credit cards** by trying to pay off your balances each month, which will save you interest and fees.\n\nWhile you are contributing to the Reboot Break account, don't forget to max out (contribute as much as is possible to) any 401(k)s, especially if they are matched by your employer. Many employers will match what you put into savings anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent. You are leaving money on the table if you do not continue to fund any matching program your employer has while you are taking time off. If you are over fifty, you can contribute more than the stipulated $15,000 as a way of catching up, and it is prudent to do so. The 401(k) savings will continue to grow your retirement and back-up \"emergency fund\" as you take time off from your career.\n\nBuild a safety net or \"emergency fund\" by putting money into savings, like a high-yield money market fund or laddered short-term CD, with at least six months income to cover monthly expenses. This is your safety net to be used and replenished for emergencies, such as car breakdowns, repairs to the house, to cover unexpected loss of income, or if it takes you longer to find a position when you return from your between-gigs sabbatical. Always replenish it.\n\nSome other advice, depending on your age and financial situation, that helps in planning your finances for a sabbatical:\n\n\u2022 Save at least 15 to 20 percent of your income for long-term goals, such as owning a house, college tuition, and retirement.\n\n\u2022 Keep your debt-to-income ratio at no more than 30 percent.\n\n\u2022 Look at refinancing when rates are at least one percentage point lower than your existing rate.\n\n\u2022 Invest no more that 5 percent of your stock portfolio in your company stock, or any single stock.\n\n\u2022 Keep discretionary spending under 20 percent of your take-home pay.\n\n\u2022 Keep your FICO\/credit score high.\n\nSaving for time off gives you the freedom to do what you want without having to tap family resources or worry how you will impact your finances. Bruce, who worked for a financial analysis division of a large institution, spent several years planning for his time off, budgeting for expenses, living on his salary alone, and banking his bonuses in a savings account. His good saving habits allowed him to take an entire year off.\n\nRita consciously chose to leave her position as President of Mead-Westvaco's Consumer Division to take time off, then start a \"portfolio career.\" She worked with her financial advisor ahead of time to plan for the transition. She prepaid many expenses, including her mortgage, used stock options for savings, maximized her deferred income while she was working, and chose to live a more simple lifestyle after leaving her full-time job.\n\n#### WHAT IF I HAVEN'T SAVED FOR MY SABBATICAL?\n\nIf you need time off now and haven't saved enough, the next best thing is to \"borrow\" from your existing savings. Your home equity line of credit (HELOC) is a good place to start, as interest on a loan up to $100,000 is tax deductible, usually at a reasonable rate. However, HELOCs are harder to get if the value of your home has gone down. (The average American home lost 13 percent to 20 percent of its value between 2005 and 2009.) The ratio of equity required has gone up as well. Shop _www.bankrate.com_ for example rates for home equity lines of credit. While we don't advocate taking money early from your 401(k) or any account that might carry a penalty for withdrawal, some people have done just that with a plan to replenish the account.\n\nBorrow only when it makes good financial sense for you. By 2007, US households owed $1.33 for every $1 of disposable income. Look at your debt-to-income ratio (monthly debt payments divided by monthly pre-tax income) and stay under 30 percent.\n\nHere are some questions to ask when considering borrowing to finance your break:\n\n\u2022 Are you investing in yourself\/your career to enhance your value as an employee or entrepreneur, and ultimately add to your net worth?\n\n\u2022 Is your credit score high enough to qualify for the lowest rates?\n\n\u2022 Will you be able to afford the payments if you're out of work for six months?\n\n\u2022 Will your debt repayments remain under 30 percent of your pre-tax monthly income when you return to work?\n\nWhen your preparation timeline is short, there are still some things you can do to set the stage for time off. First, try to pay down your credit card debts as much as possible. Transfer credit card balances to lower-interest cards or call your issuer to lower the interest rate. (Call your credit card companies to negotiate, since more than half of them will reduce interest rates when a customer calls and makes the request.) If you can, pay off the cards with higher interest first, then the next higher. Mortgage and home equity debt (up to $100,000), however, are tax deductible. If your interest rate is low, you're better off paying the minimum amount due and paying out over time. Payments on student loans are also tax deductible, so pay them off last.\n\nTo get the best credit terms, you need high credit scores. The best rates go to those with scores of 760 or higher out of a possible 850. Boost your score by paying bills on time, reducing credit card balances to less than 20 percent of your limits, and correcting any errors on your reports. Order your credit report from _www.annualcreditreport.com._ You get one free from each credit bureau every twelve months. Buy the Equifax version of your FICO scores for $8 at their website.\n\nThe factors lenders look at in a credit report are:\n\n1. How many inquiries you have made. (It's better to shop for loans in a fourteen-day window to have them recorded as only one.)\n\n2. What you are juggling. (Having a mix of types of credit is considered an indicator of credit-worthiness.)\n\n3. How much credit you are using. (Aim to use less than 20 percent.)\n\n4. How timely you've been in paying bills: thirty to sixty days is yellow, which means they have the account on watch, and over ninety is red, which means in arrears and will impact your rating.\n\n5. Whether you've ever really messed up: foreclosures, bankruptcies, liens, and other major problems will stay on your report for seven to ten years.\n\nSome people borrow from family members or their regular savings. Most said they hoped to repay the amounts in the future, either to the family member they borrowed from, or to their savings. But many borrowed from their savings without worrying about paying it back right away because they understood the importance of the time off and that, regardless of finances, they had made an excellent return on their investment\u2014their investment in themselves.\n\n#### GETTING YOUR EMPLOYER TO Pay\n\nLooking to cut costs without laying off employees in 2009, the New York law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP began offering associates worldwide the option of accepting one-third of their base salary to take a year off, especially to volunteer and do pro bono work. As part of the offer, they were guaranteed job security: if there were layoffs while they were away, Skadden assured them, they would be immune.\n\nAlso as a cost-cutting measure, KPMG has offered employees paid sabbaticals at 20 percent of their salaries, keeping their benefits intact and guaranteeing their jobs upon their return.\n\nAcademic sabbaticals are the norm because colleges and universities recognize that professors need to be refreshed and renewed periodically, in order to return to the classroom excited and invigorated. Academics are paid during their time off by the university or college for research or teaching in another area, geographically or intellectually.\n\nTo apply for a sabbatical, academics are usually required to have taught at the institution for at least seven years. In their applications, instructors set out a plan for what they will do and usually make a presentation to the faculty upon their return. The time off may be a semester, half year, or year.\n\nIncreasingly, nonacademic organizations, such as corporations, churches, non-profits, and legal and consulting firms, are providing financial support of some type for their employees to take time off to renew as well, as described in Chapters 1 and 3. We offer several examples of the types of programs and the benefits to the organization.\n\nIf you plan to stay with the same employer, the ideal situation is to convince them to pay you your salary while you are taking the sabbatical, or work out a special deal. Geoff told us about a creative approach someone took of getting his employer to pay half his salary for six months and defer the income to the next year. Then he took the next year off at 70-80 percent salary, so that he had income all along and tax advantages as well. This is just another example of deferred income that many highly paid executives use. You have the organization spread out your salary over a longer period of time, especially into years where you might not have as much income normally.\n\nWhen planning for a break where you expect to return to the same company, it is important to negotiate explicitly that the time off is for \"retooling\" or \"renewal\" that will benefit the company and should contribute toward service, options, restricted stock, 401(k) matching eligibility, prior years' service, long-term disability, etc. Ask your employer how they will consider the time off in terms of vesting for retirement or stock options. We recommend negotiating with your employer for continued health insurance coverage paid by them, paying it yourself by reimbursing your employer, or finding some interim coverage. Even though health insurance can be expensive, you don't want to have it as a worry when you are taking time off.\n\nExplore with your human resources department the option of going back to school for undergraduate or graduate work and\/or coursework that would help you in your career. Often corporations will reimburse all or part of employee tuition costs. While this isn't exactly your employers paying for a sabbatical, it does pay for your education and expenses related to it when on your break. There are many programs that go unused because employees do not know of them.\n\n#### GETTING PAID WHILE TAKING TIME OFF\n\nWe found many creative ways people made money while on sabbatical by being inventive as well as persuasive. Here are some examples:\n\n\u2022 **Rent your house,** office space, second home, or other real estate so you will have income coming in despite your taking time off.\n\n\u2022 **Freelance your skills** in other environments\u2014graphic design, teaching, doing artwork, babysitting, doing bookkeeping, cutting hair, travel writing\u2014all while you are on sabbatical.\n\n\u2022 **Apply for a grant or fellowship,** as there are many in the arts, writing, government service, and corporate world that are underutilized. It takes some digging, but they are there.\n\n\u2022 **Apply for an internship** and learn a new field of work, industry, or set of skills. Many pay a small stipend or offer other benefits.\n\n\u2022 **Be a travel companion** and learn about compassion as well as a different perspective on travel.\n\n\u2022 **Explore opportunities to give lectures abroad** and represent your country, company, or industry. At least the expenses may be covered.\n\n\u2022 **Try out a passion by getting another job,** such as being a sous chef or getting part-time work in a field you want to enter. (Get a job that is not too demanding so that you can do other things.)\n\n\u2022 **Write your own blog** or articles for travel magazines, special interest magazines, or other publishers. Get a sponsor for your blog.\n\n\u2022 **Start a business that you can do minimally from home or while traveling.** Internet-based businesses are more amenable to this.\n\nRemember, Cathy and her husband paid for much of their eleven-month journey through Asia by lecturing for the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) on how Congress works and how to market to the United States. USIA paid for hotels, meals, transportation, and a small per diem when they were giving lectures sponsored by embassies, academic institutions, or newspapers. \"It was a fabulous experience and paid for much of our time in those countries.\"\n\nRick, a potter, found a two-month visiting artist program at Arizona State University, which allowed him to explore new techniques and types of clay work. While it did not provide a stipend, it did provide housing, a place to work, and access to resources at the university.\n\nJan used a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to return to university for a master's program and upgrade her skill set. She had been a reporter before and returned to the journalism field after her sabbatical, this time as a newscaster. Her time off not only gave her new skills, but the confidence to be front and center with her audience.\n\nThe caveat, however, is not to get so focused on making money that you defeat the purpose of taking time off. While working, albeit differently, during a sabbatical may ease your financial concerns, it may also deter you from the reflection and breaking away time you need. Disconnecting from work is one of the most important things to do, our interviewees say. That's what allows you to get perspective. If you work during your time off, be sure to put enough boundaries around it to leave yourself free time. Make the work fit into your overall goal, rather than the other way around.\n\n#### USING A WINDFALL\n\nSome of the people we interviewed used windfalls that came their way to pay for their time off. They ranged from inheritances to severance payments to bonuses and large tax refunds. Sometimes they were annual gifts from family members.\n\n#### UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS\n\nUnemployment benefits can be used to fund sabbaticals too. Amy, an attorney who was let go from her law firm because of the collapse of the corporate litigation department, used her unemployment check while doing an internship at a winemaking organization. The unemployment benefit allowed her to do the internship for no pay and was granted by the state because she was improving her chances for a new position.\n\n### CUTTING BACK ON EXPENSES\n\nLooking closely at all your current spending patterns can help you find ways to cut costs and reallocate spending while on your Reboot Break. It's a matter of being open to changing your patterns of spending and saving. Acknowledge that there is flexibility in your budget, and you are off on the right foot! All of us have had to do this, but most of us only do so when forced.\n\nYour sabbatical need not be an expensive proposition. Being flexible in what you want to do and how you do it takes more of the pressure off. As Bruce, whom you met earlier in this chapter, said, \"Think about your expenses realistically and make sure you are comfortable so that stress about money does not interfere with your plan. Have good control over your expenses.\"\n\nIf you plan to travel for all or most of the time, think about what you won't need to spend money on during that time period: your home or apartment, your car, your office space, cable TV, housekeeper, car insurance, dry cleaners, gym membership, etc. Cancel or re-negotiate memberships until you return from your break. Try for a zero cost, or at least costs at one-third to one-half of normal living. One interviewee had great advice for the sabbatical period: \"Just stay out of the stores!\"\n\n#### CUT YOUR HOME EXPENSES\n\nCutting your home expenses while you're taking a Reboot Break can turn it into independent bliss. Sabbatical costs are, and should be, different from everyday life costs. Be inventive, imaginative, and thoughtful in what you do. Your savings will deplete quickly if your ongoing home expenses continue at the current level.\n\nBefore you take time off, prepay expenses such as taxes, insurance, contributions to retirement plans, and fees that may come up while you are off work. Do your regular medical and dental checkups before you leave employment. Ask a friend or your accountant or financial advisor to pay bills while you are gone, and give them power of attorney for any emergencies that come up. Housing costs and maintenance are often the largest expenditures per month. Some ways to cut housing costs are:\n\n\u2022 **Renting your apartment or home** at a rate that covers mortgage and utilities payments. Ideally, rent it furnished to save on storage and moving costs. Use a rental agent or do it yourself, but get references and credit checks and write out a contract for the renters, even if they are friends or family.\n\n\u2022 **Getting a house sitter** who can watch the house, take care of pets, pay bills, take care of repairs, etc. while you are away. Create a contract for this, to make the house sitter more like a professional. This eliminates the cost of paying someone to do these things for you.\n\n\u2022 **Trading or swapping your apartment or home** through an Internet business, such as _www.homeexchange.com ,_ or a network of your friends who have houses in desirable places. This at least mitigates the costs of a new place.\n\n\u2022 **Selling your home,** but only if you are looking to buy elsewhere or that is part of your sabbatical plan. There are costs to doing this, and the market should be right.\n\nWe'll expand on the concept of trading your house or apartment, because it is becoming a major trend and many opportunities are emerging. Are you planning to travel to a foreign country? Do you want to have some time to write your great American novel, but do it on the coast of California?\n\nMany people interested in living in a different area for a period of time are looking to trade or rent houses and apartments for that short period. There are websites that vet potential candidates for you and provide you with choices of homes and apartments elsewhere. Some of those sites are listed in the Appendix.\n\nThere are also listings at universities and colleges, where professors who take sabbaticals look for short-term rentals. If you live in the New York or Washington DC areas, there are diplomats who are always looking for short-term rentals or stays. The same goes for cities all over the world where there are large diplomatic communities.\n\nTalk to your accountant or financial advisor about possible tax implications of what you are doing, from renting your house to what can be deducted for education or career enhancement. Even if you don't earn money during your time off, if it results in the publication of a book or research for a project, there may be tax relief opportunities.\n\nIf the sabbatical involves a legitimate professional activity, everything (within limits, of course) may be deductible as a business expense if you leave your home. In case you're ever audited, keep excellent records so that you'll be able to demonstrate how the expenses contributed to your business or career enhancement. If you stay away for a year or more, up to $80,000 in foreign income can be excluded from your federal income taxes. Renting your house and any repairs that are made while it's being rented are tax deductible, too. Talk to your tax advisor!\n\n#### BUDGET TRAVEL\n\nWhile some of you may be accustomed to staying at nice hotels and eating at good restaurants as part of your business or regular life, traveling on a budget during your time off can open you to the real life and culture of a country.\n\nWhen Cathy and Gary traveled in Asia for a year in 1985, they tried to live on $50 a day. \"We often did so by saving on transport,\" Cathy says, \"and that is where we really had some fabulous experiences, such as riding from Karachi to Peshawar, Pakistan in a brightly colored, patterned bus with people, poultry, and potatoes. Another was riding on a junk around Hong Kong with a Chinese family, rather than taking the tour boat. We visited the outer islands of Japan by traveling on a mail boat. In all cases, they were safe modes of transportation and quite clean . . . but not the expected way for tourists to travel. A highlight was traveling through the jungles of Thailand on an elephant, by boat, and on foot.\"\n\nThe point is, open your mind to new adventures on your Reboot Break!\n\nHousing can include hostels, bed-and-breakfasts, guest houses, or a friend's apartment. For those more outdoor-oriented, there is camping or caravan hires. And then there's always the overnight train that combines transport with housing. The real treat of staying in places like these is the people you meet, and it is those people and experiences you tend to remember, not the fifteenth Hilton hotel room you've stayed in.\n\nAnother advantage of budget travel is that you spend more time walking, exploring free sites, just \"being\" rather than spending money on shows, events, paid museums, etc. You have more time for reading, writing, hiking, and reflection. Don't exchange busyness at work for busyness in travel.\n\nOne way Cathy saved money on her sabbatical in 2007 was to trade her house in Santa Fe for a house in Dordogna, France, owned by a friend. Both were big enough houses to accommodate friends or family for three weeks, and the costs were minimal\u2014cleaning people, tips for the overseers, and utilities. It gave Cathy and her friends three weeks in France for the cost of getting there. Saving on eating out by cooking in breakfasts and some dinners was a plus. In fact, they would have missed out on the fabulous food markets had they stayed in a hotel. She still dreams about the good breads and pure butter from the markets. The fact that both houses were comfortable, attractive, and located in key tourist areas was fundamental to the reason for choosing those places for travel centers.\n\nDavid, an entrepreneur who lost his business and was in mourning for the time and effort down the drain, took off for Prague, where it was less expensive to live. \"I lived for four months on $1,000. I had saved some money, rented my apartment, and scaled way back financially. It was one of the most interesting times of my life. I learned things I could never have learned the way I lived before. Being free of the 'material stuff' allowed me to explore what life had to offer.\"\n\nOne way to travel free is to save up your frequent flier miles and use them for travel during the sabbatical. Use credit cards that help you to earn points, and try to concentrate them on one or two airlines.\n\nOther considerations include how long you want to be gone and whether you are willing to rent or trade your home. Do you need rental income, or will a trade work for you? Who could look after your property while you are gone? Do you have a place to store valuables? What kind of a place are you looking for? What would you have to do to your house or apartment to make it attractive to trade?\n\nAt the very least, you need to give someone the responsibility for looking after your home or apartment, paying bills, picking up mail, and having power of attorney for emergencies. You can automate many financial payments through direct deposit and bill payment with your bank or through a bill payment service.\n\n#### OTHER WAYS TO SAVE MONEY\n\nGet your family in on the planning on ways to save money. A 2009 _USA Today_ survey on the economic downturn showed that 74 percent of children were worried about, and 67 percent wanted to talk to their parents about, the family finances.\n\nBeth, a vice president of a major manufacturing firm in New York, enlisted her husband and children in the planning a year ahead of their family sabbatical. They took a year off, home-schooled their four kids, and traveled all over the United States in a retrofitted bus with a car towed behind. They tapped in to savings and sold some stock options to fund the year off. The kids were told they would have no spending money unless they earned it themselves. Each was told to create a job or find ways to raise money. At the time, they were two, six, nine, and eleven. The three older kids got into it and had jobs, such as pet sitting and lawn care, to raise their spending money for the year they took off. The whole family went through things to sell and had a huge garage sale, plus cleaned up their house! Everyone agreed not to buy new clothes for the year except at secondhand stores. They agreed not to order but one drink at restaurants and to eat healthy snacks along the route. While they had originally planned to sell their house, they decided to rent it and were glad they had it to come back to at the end of the sabbatical.\n\nYou don't have to travel far or spend much money at all to enjoy your time off. Many of the people we interviewed treated their hometowns as places to explore and acted as if they were tourists in their area, visiting museums, shops, schools, theatres, farms, and other places on long weekends or daily jaunts. It's time to realize it has been years since you went to some of the places your houseguests love.\n\n#### THE UNEXPECTED SABBATICAL SURVIVAL PLAN\n\nIf you have been let go by your employer, can you still fund time off without being worried about finances and finding another job when you return? The answer is yes, if you take a breath and think about it.\n\nFirst, see what can be negotiated with your employer. Is there a severance package? Outplacement services? Continuation of benefits? Use of company facilities? Payment for attendance at conferences? Payment for financial planning?\n\nApply for unemployment benefits as soon as possible. While it is not in any way a replacement for your salary, it is something and will help you get through. Look at applying for social security or company pensions if you are over sixty. You may find it worthwhile to begin drawing them earlier.\n\nSit down with your family and go over what has happened and what resources you have. By making them part of the process, they will worry less and you will all face the challenges together. They can also be a resource for you to explore new job and career opportunities.\n\nIf you have never created a budget, now is the time to do so. Treat the unexpected sabbatical as you would a regular sabbatical. Look where expenses can be reduced and where assets you may have can be rented or traded or sold.\n\nTake at least a couple of weeks to a month to do nothing but mourn the job loss, get yourself organized, and take time to reconnect with your family, your friends, your body, and your mind. Chances are it has been stressful leading up to the job loss, and you need the time to recoup mentally and physically before you start a job hunt.\n\nGive yourself time even when you are in the job hunt process. Even those on an unexpected sabbatical found ways, after taking a month or two to reboot, to contain their job hunt to three or four days a week to give them downtime to think more strategically.\n\nTHIS CHAPTER IS just the beginning of thinking about funding your freedom . . . there are many stories and good ideas to come in the next few chapters. The Appendix has a list of resources and a sample financial planning list that will help you think through what you need to do. There are myriad ways to fund your time off and enjoy the insights that brings. View it as one of the best financial investments you will ever make!\n\n###   EXERCISES\n\n##### _Exercise 4-1: Facing Your Fears_\n\n\u2022 What are your biggest fears about money and taking time off from work? Write them down. Write potential solutions next to the fears.\n\n##### _Exercise 4-2: Figuring Out What You Need_\n\n\u2022 Write down how much money you think you will need to maintain your ongoing financial obligations and expenses during your Reboot Break.\n\n\u2022 Write down potential sources of funds you might tap in to to finance your time off.\n\n\u2022 What is the gap and how will you fill it?\n\n(Note: the Appendix has a sample budget checklist.)\n\n##### _Exercise 4-3: Cutting Back on Expenses_\n\n\u2022 Write down ten ways you can cut back on expenses before and during your sabbatical.\n\n1 \"The New Consumer Value: 'Living Light.'\" _www.santa-fe-group.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/NewConsumerValueNov2008.pdf_\n\n## | CHAPTER 5 |\n\n## _Phases and Navigating the First Thirty Days_\n\n\"Go confidently in the directions of your dreams!  \nLive the life you've imagined.  \nAs you simplify your life,  \nthe laws of the universe will be simpler.\"\n\n_\u2014 Henry David Thoreau_\n\nEvery Reboot Break is unique, but our interviews revealed a common pattern of how sabbatical takers allocated their time. Most tended to divide time into major blocks, each with a different quality and feel to it. Many people think about their break in quarters. The character and length of the phases vary, but in general they describe the rhythms you can expect during your time off. The next three chapters explore these four phases of a Reboot Break. This chapter introduces the phases and covers the first phase in more depth, especially the first thirty days.\n\n### PHASES OF A SABBATICAL\n\nI. Creating Space\u2014Putting your life in order\n\nII. Reconnection\u2014Revitalizing connections to people, places, activities, and self\n\nIII. Exploration\u2014Learning new things, especially through travel\n\nIV. Reentry\u2014Starting a new chapter of your life\n\nPhase I, the \"Creating Space\" stage, often involves sorting, cleaning, and simplifying one's environment. This is a time of regrouping, of clearing and \"getting your house in order\" so that the time spent can be as free and uncluttered as possible. Many people don't know what to do with themselves in the beginning. It's not uncommon to experience work withdrawal or contact withdrawal.\n\nIn particular, **the first thirty days are crucial\u2014they set the stage for the rest of the time off.** They are also, for many, a shock to the system, going from a busy work life to time off.\n\nOnce the Creating Space period is done, sabbatical takers feel comfortable expanding their horizons. They tend toward activities in their town or city that they enjoyed but hadn't done for years. We call this stage \"Reconnection.\" Reconnection is a time of reaching out to others and enjoying personal growth. During this period, people broaden their horizons by trying new things, renewing old connections, and rediscovering passions long left behind.\n\nThis is a time to explore new or old or forgotten activities\u2014from new foods to taking a dance class to picking up a new sport. The adventure of Reconnection is often coupled with the comfort and fun of reaching out to friends and family, especially people sabbatical takers have not had time to see during their busy everyday lives. They are able to enjoy the little pleasures in life, like reading the newspaper cover to cover, cooking dinner for a friend, going to a play, taking a walk, or writing in a journal.\n\nAfter a period of fun and revitalization, sabbatical takers are ready to test the waters with more adventure and greater risks, often farther from home. We call this stage \"Exploration.\" Whether traveling to Asia, taking Spanish classes, exploring your spiritual side on a retreat to the American Southwest, or embarking on a volunteer project in Africa, external adventures can lead to internal journeys and explorations of the mind and self, giving birth to new and unexpected interests and passions.\n\nAfter a time of Exploration, people are refreshed and exhilarated, and ready to consider their next gig. Reflecting on their experiences, ideally over a period of months, they are able to \"reenter\" and begin to shape a new stage in their personal and work lives. This fourth stage of the sabbatical, \"Reentry,\" is where a new chapter of your life begins. This is one of the most exciting and satisfying parts of rebooting your life, as you assimilate what you have experienced and make time for reflection. It is a time of new ideas, new possibilities, and new perspectives.\n\nWhile not everyone goes through the four stages in the same way, this last phase, Reentry, is one that should not be rushed. Too often, people try to predict what they will do at the end of the sabbatical before they've even started. We encourage readers not to feel pressure to answer when your families and colleagues ask what you're going to do at the end. The answer will come when it's time.\n\nTime for reflection is so important at this stage because it is where the activities and experiences, the emotions and feelings, and the wants and needs come together to pave the path to post-reboot life. Reentry is usually about coming to terms with the end of a wonderful period in your life and figuring out how to incorporate all those wonderful experiences in the future, as you set about to return to work or to start a new profession.\n\nThe next three chapters describe how we and those we interviewed divided and navigated our time off. This chapter is dedicated to the first phase\u2014the first thirty days and how to think about a daily schedule. The next chapter will segue into the Reconnection and Exploration stages, and Chapter 7, on Reentry, will address the process and potential fears of seeking that new career or returning to work when you're moving to a new chapter in your life.\n\n### THE FIRST THIRTY DAYS\n\nOne would think that the first day of a Reboot Break would be the happiest of one's life. No work, no worries, and a whole bunch of free time. What could be better?\n\nFor many, it is wonderful from the beginning, but others experience anxiety about the change. And don't be surprised if you even feel unwell in the early days. You might feel nauseated, have headaches, or find you can't eat. Some find that their bodies need to \"detox\" as the stress dissipates. As Lori shared:\n\n_I had a physical reaction. I was literally dizzy. My head was spinning from having operated at such a pace that my body had a hard time slowing down. All that adrenaline had no place to go. This was the most dramatic time. My euphoria was muted by confusion about my physical reaction._\n\nMany report that they did not know what to do with themselves in the beginning. It's not uncommon to experience work withdrawal or contact withdrawal. Rita said: I found during my second break that I suffered from email withdrawal.\n\n_For me, email was like brushing my teeth; it was one of the first things I did each morning. After getting over 100 emails a day and needing to check email multiple times a day, it felt strange not having this ritual or habit in my daily life._\n\nOthers reported sleeping until noon. Fear was common, too. Susan said she woke up on the first Monday and was terrified. She was so used to being scheduled all her life. Jason felt guilty not going to work. Jerry also said that at first he had trouble not being in a routine. He told us, **\"Starting a Reboot Break is a shock. It's a loss of rhythm, rhyme, and reason.\"**\n\nDr. Roberta Lee knows a lot about decompressing. As the Medical Director of Beth Israel's Continuum Center for Health and Healing in New York City, she has seen hundreds of people suffering from stress and burnout from work. She has written a book called _The SuperStress Solution_ and is a frequent speaker on the topic of how to relieve stress in our lives. She believes that stress frequently implies that you have gotten out of touch with what is comfortable in work.\n\nAnd she thinks Reboot Breaks are a great idea. \"They afford time to immerse yourself, to step out of your work self, and to see the totality of how stress got you where you are. The first thirty days need to be a time of recovery. Each person has his or her own rhythm. Everyone goes through different phases; there is usually a period of regrouping, and a period of the body recovering and recouping.\"\n\nStress manifests itself in different ways. For some it's in stomach problems, while others have neck or back problems. And for others their immune systems are more vulnerable. Some people are much more affected by stress than others.\n\nThere is also a difference in how men and women handle stress. Often women in high-powered careers give up friendships. Tending and befriending can help them recover. A distinct pattern of recovery with women is the need to talk issues out. Some career women have become so masculine that they assume the way to reduce stress is by finding quiet time, when in reality they need relationships. Men, on the other hand, tend to seek quiet time, \"cave time.\" But they need relationships too.\n\nDr. Lee believes the first thirty days offer an important time and space to ask yourself: Are you living well, and what helps or hinders you? How many friends and loved ones do you have around? How many have you pushed away? This is particularly an issue for men.\n\nShe recommends staying in touch with your dreams. Every life that sparkles is a much more stress-resilient life. It's good to have five- and ten-year goals and dreams.\n\nDr. Lee also recommends keeping a journal so that you can get in touch with parts of you that you have tended to ignore while you were in the highly focused part of your job. \"There are lots of things going on in our heads that we don't even know about. Journaling is a great way to get in touch with the ticker tape in our head. If you have the option of a sabbatical, I would encourage you to do it. It's a way of valuing your life and yourself.\"\n\nIn addition to journaling, we recommend treating the first week or even month of your break as a time for indulgence. Get a massage. Read junk novels. Make a schedule and fill it with activities that you enjoy. Jason, who turned from art framing to massage therapy, spent the first month learning the natural rhythms of his body for sleeping and waking, which helped to clear his mind.\n\nOne UK couple chose to spend their time off mostly traveling. They spent the first three weeks of their first month in the United States \"doing nothing\" in a remote, secluded cabin. \"It was fantastic,\" said Nigel. \"We did a bit of skiing, a bit of walking, and chilled out. It was a nice, relaxing way to start our year off.\"\n\nVictor found he needed two or three months to decompress. \"Not having a preconceived time schedule is very smart. Letting go of all the tension from work is a great thing.\"\n\nBeverly said, \"I loved the joy of not having to be in any one place at a certain time.\"\n\nJerry agreed, adding, \"There were fewer rules and less fitting in required. I didn't feel I had to be in places. I could sleep or exercise or not.\"\n\nAriane de Bonvoisin, reboot veteran and author of _The First 30_ _Days,_ said:\n\n_The first thirty days can last 10 or 200 because it's related to the mindset with which you approach change. There is external pressure to have a plan, but for me it was best not to have one. There were 100 books that I wanted to read and 10 countries that I wanted to go visit. I said to myself, let's just go have fun._\n\nWe advise all sabbatical takers to give themselves a break if they don't get everything done on their list right away. Nancy did just this at the beginning of her break.\n\n_After two years of working until 10 pm most nights and just generally having no balance between work and life, I left my job as president and CEO of an international non-profit development organization. It had been teetering between life and death when I took the job and was now going to survive. I had given it my all enthusiastically and was ready for someone else to steer it into the future._\n\n_The first thing I did was sleep. In fact, I would sleep long into the morning every day and still be tired. I had various ambitions related to going through boxes from the office and organizing other things around the house, but I didn't have the motivation. I worried that my whole break would be wasted on sleep and doing odds and ends around the house. The only energy I expended was on planning a trip, which gave me something to focus on. I knew the trip would inspire and recharge me. After the first thirty days I was off to Argentina and already feeling better._\n\n### CLEAR\/ORGANIZE\n\nWhen leaving the hectic pace of work and before launching into something new, we and other sabbatical takers found the need to clear our heads, clear the clutter in our lives, organize our dwellings, and organize ourselves. The first stage is a time to put things in order. Some decided that they wanted to take care of doctors' appointments, clean out that cluttered room, organize three years of loose photos, paint the kitchen, repair a broken bike, or visit relatives. This is a period of letting go, part of a major transition in which one is leaving an old life behind and preparing to be open to new experiences, change, and renewal.\n\nMany people reported gleefully charging ahead with a list of all the things they wanted to organize, clean up, or do. It didn't faze them that the list covered ten years of neglected chores.\n\nNancy and others sold their homes and handled all the necessary work associated with moving. Nancy says she has never gotten out of this phase and feels like she is in the movie _Groundhog Day._\n\n_I'm not the best person to tell a clearing-out story. You won't hear: \"Here's how I did it, and now I'm done.\" I'm a pack rat, and it seems like my clearing-out never ends. Boxes from two previous non-profit organization jobs. Old financial files (what to throw away, what to keep?). They all cohabited in my previous house and somehow ended up in this one too when I downsized. I did downsize many things to move into mycurrent house, mostly furniture and old luggage, and did it pretty efficiently, but it just didn't all get done. I even hired an organizer to help clear out before the move, but I hired her too late in the process to finish. She came for a few hours at a time for several days. I didn't rehire her for the new house\u2014silly me. The moving-in process meant newly organized drawers and closets, which was great, but many boxes found their way into the extra room._\n\nSome people use part of this organizing time to prepare for the next phases, Reconnection and Exploration. As you have read, Cathy spent the first part of her first break planning, packing, and organizing for an eleven-month trip through Asia, including spending time reading about each country she planned to visit.\n\n#### EMPTYING THE EMOTIONAL CLOSET\n\nMany sabbatical takers reported needing time to heal from the breakup of a romance, a divorce, or another sad or stressful experience. Whether it was having time in their own place for the first time in a very long time or setting up a new home, people talked about \"getting settled.\"\n\nLeena, whose main story of change and new love was in Chapters 2 and 4, began her sabbatical after her heartbreak by spending a few months in her home country of Lebanon. She focused on relaxation, catching up with old friends, and exploring lost relationships. She did lots of yoga and read several self-help books about mind, body, and spirit.\n\nFor her third Reboot Break, Regan had just returned to the United States from Bosnia where she was in diplomatic service. \"I came home totally fried,\" she said. Regan returned to New York just after the 9\/11 attacks. \"I needed time to find my home and how I would relate to it. Besides, I was really tired.\" So she decided to build a Japanese garden.\n\n_It became a mental vacation. I was away from political and environmental stress. It was a project meant to create beauty rather than workto build a nation. Whereas Bosnia was about the macro, the garden was about the micro. It was one of the ways I was able to refresh myself. The garden brought me home in a very concrete way._\n\nMary, the woman in Chapter 1 who was the first person to take a sabbatical at her workplace, took four months off in the summer from June until September. Who would have known that this perpetually smiling and cheerful friend was being torn apart inside? As a trader on the floor on Wall Street, Mary had witnessed 9\/11 firsthand and had lost many friends. She had been grieving over them for the past eight months, and at the same time bearing the burden of other family issues. On top of that, juggling taking her children to school, working under the pressure of a trading floor, cooking dinner, and being a good wife, mother, and friend just got to her.\n\nJust before she started her break she went to a spa for a long weekend. \"I needed to start my detox,\" she said. Then she and her family rented a home in the Berkshires. Her kids went to summer camp while she explored the area and started to explore her inner self. She started to explore many of the deep issues inside that she had never addressed.\n\n_I used to drive around the countryside and just cry a lot. My sabbatical was about opening up all the things that I had inside. I was emotionally drained. I needed to do personal therapy, which I had never done before. I never had the time to do it. I was leading such a busy life that I never stopped to feel. I had a lot of issues to face. For years I kept stuffing feelings and emotions into my emotional closet. I kept adding and adding things, and then one day the closet door just wouldn't shut anymore._\n\nThe other analogy that Mary used is what she called \"plaque.\" Plaque builds and builds. You can floss, but until you go to the dentist for a deep cleaning, you don't address the issue. She said that for the first couple of days you may feel crazy. It hurts while you're getting rid of all those germs, but then you feel great afterwards.\n\nThis might be a good time to step back and acknowledge the things that have been on your mind. It often helps to write them down and make a list of steps you could take to empty your emotional closet. Don't force it. You might want to take small steps and set yourself up for success along the way. And remember to congratulate yourself. If you take steps forward and then backward, you are normal. Just keep at it. Remember that you deserve to be able to open space in your mind for new things. Emotional baggage does not have long-term residential rights.\n\n#### A DAILY APPROACH\n\nLet's turn to how you might approach a typical day. Time and time again people we interviewed said that one of the challenges was the tendency to over-schedule vs. just relaxing. We recommend starting the day with a reflection period. Greg said, \"The first two hours of the day are my thinking and reading time. I still get up at the same hour, but I haven't used an alarm clock since starting my sabbatical.\"\n\nSome people identified the beginning of their break and the lack of a daily schedule as their low points. Susan, the banker you met earlier, realized how structured her life had become by her workday.\n\n_On Monday, the first day of my break, I woke up and felt that I should go to the office. My dad had coincidently started his retirement on the same day. I called him up and asked him if he was struggling with that first day as much as I was. We met for breakfast._\n\nAn ultra-organized person, Susan found it hard not to have a schedule, so she made one for herself. Regan felt similarly. \"This amorphous state, without the requirement to structure my day, left me shiftless and disoriented. It took me three months to leave unstructured time for myself. Afterward it was an irreversible insight.\"\n\nA friend of Rita's and former CEO who had taken a Reboot Break recommended reading _The Artist's Way at Work,_ a twelve-week self-reflection and writing course.\n\n_The book introduced me to the concept of writing 'morning pages,' three of them the first thing in the morning. I have been writing morning pages\u2014some call it journaling\u2014ever since. For someone who likes to charge into the day, stopping and reflecting on what happened the previous day\u2014what was significant, how a certain situation was handled\u2014was important. It also caused me to think ahead about that day's activities, which in turn allowed me to mentally prepare for and relish the activities even more. By the simple act of writing the date at the top of the page of my journal, I suddenly remembered that it was someone's birthday. Had I done my normal charging ahead, I would have missed that wonderful opportunity to call that friend or drop them a note on their special day. Which room or outdoor space I chose to write in was also a treat each day. It allowed me to appreciate my environment so much more, to hear the birds at 6 am, to feel the breeze through the trees, to sit in bed as if it were my throne._\n\nMornings are always a challenge for Rita because they are her favorite time in the day, and there are so many activities that she wants to do in a given time. Writing, yoga, reading the newspaper, reading a novel, gardening, studying Spanish, and other things could all take up four to five hours. During her time off work, she tried to divide her days so that she had reflection time, time for emails or general paperwork and bills, cooking, and one sports activity a day, whether it was yoga, tennis, golf, swimming, kayaking, skiing, Pilates, or hiking. She even snuck in the occasional nap, as many others reported doing. Cathy said, \"Each day my goals were to write my morning pages, exercise, reach out to friends, do something career-related, and enjoy downtime.\"\n\nAnother concept in the book _The Artist's Way at Work_ is about taking an \"artist date\" once a week, usually alone. It could be walking in a beautiful field or looking up at the architecture in a city. The date could be drawing, visiting a museum, or going to a show, a dance performance, or a concert. It is anything that awakens your artistic sense. Even those who are not artists have come to love their \"artist dates\" and ensure that they have at least one a week.\n\nMark, who left his high-stress New York job for Brazil and working in non-profits, spent his days reading three newspapers first thing in the morning, one to three hours of physical exercise, cooking, exploring, and lying on a beach. In between, he did volunteer work for various NGOs. He liked keeping a schedule of activities, but he also made sure that he left spaces of free time for himself. \"The high point of the day was waking up every morning feeling as good as I did, remembering the day before and what I did, what I said, and to whom I said it.\"\n\nAnother common refrain from the people we interviewed is the enjoyment of things that they hadn't done in years. \"I read the paper and watched the news, which I had never done.\" \"I spent more time on the beach than I had in the twenty-five years I lived there and enjoyed it more than before.\" \"I could go to dinner without having to be on call.\" \"I had the joy of not having to be someplace at a certain time.\"\n\nEveryone's definition of what fun is or what they want to clear or organize in their life is different. There is, however, the common theme of taking time for oneself and rediscovering the joy that exists in doing little things. After an initial adjustment, people basked in their freedom. Several people we interviewed actually used the same phrase to sum up how they felt starting their Reboot Break: \"It was terrific!\" And it gets even better in the Reconnection and Exploration phases.\n\n###   EXERCISES\n\n##### _Exercise 5-1: What I'll Accomplish_\n\n\u2022 List five things that you hope to accomplish during the beginning phase of your Reboot Break. Whether it is cleaning out the closet, making overdue doctors' appointments, or whatever you may have been putting off due to your work schedule, tackling these will allow you time to organize yourself and free you up for the next stage of your time off.\n\n##### _Exercise 5-2: Clearing My Emotional Closet_\n\n\u2022 List the emotional areas that need to be addressed and cleared out in the first phase of the break so you can be open to new exploration and possibilities for your future.\n\n## | CHAPTER 6 |\n\n## _The Heart of the Reboot Break: Reconnection and Exploration_\n\n\"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.\n\nExplore. Dream. Discover.\"\n\n_\u2014 Mark Twain_\n\nYou have come through the first phase of the Reboot Break. You've stepped off the work treadmill and cleared away some of your clutter. Order may have been restored in closets or the garage, old emails have been purged, and you've worked on your online photo albums. (Or\u2014for those of us of a certain age\u2014precious photos have been moved from a stack of shoeboxes to family albums.)\n\nNow you are headed into the heart of the Reboot Break: the Reconnection and Exploration phases. This period is what you went on sabbatical to experience, and it is usually the most satisfying part of the process. Go in search of your dreams. During the Reconnection phase, sabbatical takers tend to stay closer to home, as they strengthen relationships and go back to old or forgotten but beloved activities. Reconnection is about getting more comfortable in your reboot skin. And once that happens, it's time for Exploration, which is often a time for new challenges and adventure away from home territory.\n\nKim's break unfolded in a way that clearly illustrates the two stages. At fifty-nine, she left her executive job at the Portland, Oregon, mass-transit system. She had logged eight years there and nearly thirty in other public roles, and she was ready for a break. When she reached the Reconnection stage of her between-gigs sabbatical, she had already organized the basement and done those photo albums. Then she hosted a family reunion, went skiing with friends, and took on new volunteer roles in public service. She and her husband also decided to downsize and move into the city, so she orchestrated the process of selling the house and the complicated move, while also fitting in regular trips to the gym and taking time for herself. Like many sabbatical takers, she wondered how she ever had time for a full-time job.\n\nMoving to Exploration, Kim and her husband traveled to Africa to go on safari and visit their son in the Peace Corps. It was a decided drain on the family savings, but she convinced her husband that it was a \"once in a lifetime\" chance. Then they ended up moving again, this time from their cramped temporary apartment to another house. Kim was in such a reboot rhythm at that point that she fit the move in around knee surgery, a trip to the Galapagos with her other son, and a jaunt to Washington DC to represent a non-profit at a political event.\n\n### RECONNECTION\n\nDuring her Reboot Break, Jaye was so excited to have time to herself that she was giddy with all the possibilities before her.\n\n_After I had settled into a new sleeping and exercise routine, I started calling and surprising old friends. What a thrill! We planned lunches and some weekend getaways to renew our relationships and catch up on years of our lives. Some were divorced, parents had died, illnesses had transformed us, and now we could finally support each other. I was quickly forgiven for not being there as much as they and I would have liked. I also tried to travel somewhere new each month._\n\nReconnection is a time of expansion too. What does it mean to expand? According to _Webster's Dictionary,_ expanding is unfolding, enlarging, opening, or spreading. When you expand yourself, you feed your mind, your heart, your soul, and your spirit.\n\nReconnection is a time for serious personal growth. Many rebooters described feeling like they were being revived during this period\u2014being brought back to life, to consciousness, or renewed strength.\n\nMost people find that they want to try something new during this phase, from taking up a new sport to art lessons to volunteering. But they also love doing the fun or satisfying things that were crowded out of their working lives. Maybe it's reading a historical novel or the latest magazines, seeing the Picasso exhibit at the local art museum, or spending a summer afternoon hiking with the kids.\n\nMarvin had a blast during the Reconnection phase. He did home renovation projects he'd put off for years, skied on weekdays, read, and learned French. Having the freedom to do nothing or a lot, depending on their mood that day, is a common pleasure of people we interviewed. **Having the freedom to set your own schedule is a gift of time,** and it is one of the most important parts of the Reboot Break, especially in the Reconnection and Exploration stages.\n\n#### FEEDING THE BODY\n\nIf you've been neglecting yourself physically, the Reconnection phase is a good time to establish new habits and even set goals for your health. That might mean jogging or swing dancing, or just getting into the fresh air each day. It can also be a time to test yourself physically by running a road race or trying rock climbing. Rita started her Reconnection phase by taking a yoga class.\n\n_Having spent so much time on airplanes, my back was killing me, and I was very stiff. To feel good mentally, I first needed to feel good physically. I soon added a twice-weekly tennis game to my yoga routine. I hadn't played tennis since I was a child. It was a little embarrassing picking upa racquet some thirty-five years later, but I had always loved the sport and the time was right._\n\nJan is the journalist you met in the funding chapter. Over the years, she had stopped paying attention to her health. She ate too much junk food, she hardly exercised, and she was lucky if she got six hours of sleep most nights. On her year-long Reboot Break, Jan's first goal was to build some form of exercise into her life. She chose swimming because she could tag along with a friend and use her friend's routine to help establish her own. Twenty years later, Jan is still a regular swimmer.\n\nFeeding the body can mean finally getting rid of a nagging health problem like backaches. It can also mean being kind to your body by having a massage, seeing an acupuncturist, or quitting smoking.\n\nFor some people, feeding the body simply means spending more time in the produce department and less in the junk food aisle. Just by changing your diet, getting enough sleep, and getting a little exercise, you'll be happier and more energetic, leaving you in great shape for everything else you'll be doing during the rest of your time off.\n\n#### FEEDING THE SOUL\n\nJust as feeding the body prepares your physical self for other adventures, feeding the soul gets your mind and spirit in shape. Food for the soul comes in three varieties: having choices, enjoying the moment, and clarifying goals.\n\n#####  _Having Choices_\n\nReconnection can be all about choices. You choose how to spend your time, and you can try new things\u2014or not. Rita says:\n\n_I visited at least ten museums during this period. It wasn't that I was an ardent art lover. Just the opposite. But given the time and freedom to choose, I wanted to know what I was missing during all those years of non-stop work when my friends were visiting art galleries. Learningabout art became a personal goal. As important as the activity itself was, the ability to choose to do it was more important._\n\nA new-found sense of spontaneity can be one of the best rewards during the Reconnection phase. For most of our everyday lives, what we do and how we do it are in large part determined by our bosses, customers, spouses, children, and other important people in our lives. A Reboot Break can provide the simple freedom to decide what you want to do and when and how you want to do it. It can take some getting used to, but we found, as others did, that it can lead to personal discovery and growth.\n\nGail took time off from her executive bank job to figure out how to move into not-for-profit work. During her Reconnection phase, she watched _The Today Show_ every morning and went to the gym every afternoon. But the rest of her time was open to whim. She often had lunch with friends on the spur of the moment. \"I was willing to be very spontaneous, and I was unscheduled most of the time.\"\n\nGail spent a lot of time on her own. She wouldn't hesitate to go alone to a movie in the afternoon or a Broadway matinee. She visited all the museums in Manhattan and thought nothing of hopping on the subway just to shop at a specialty food store downtown. Her friends said they had never seen her so happy. So many people we interviewed told us they had no idea before taking a sabbatical how much stress they carried all the time. Sabbatical takers are often told they look ten years younger.\n\nMany people choose to add community service or work with nonprofit organizations to their schedules during Reconnection.\n\nBetsy, the forty-five-year-old North Carolina orthopedic surgeon introduced in Chapter 3, always felt she had missed out on a key part of community living. As a successful doctor, she never had the time to do volunteer work on a regular basis between medical school, residency, and her long office and hospital hours. It was important to her to serve the community during her time off. \"I wanted to see what it was like to be part of my community without the conflicts of work all the time,\" she said.\n\nJust before taking time off, she had been elected president of the local medical society for a one-year term. During her Reboot Break, she led the organization in creating Project Access, in which each physician in the county agreed to see a certain number of uninsured patients each year. Also, as you'll read later, during the Exploration phase, Betsy deliberately chose to travel to faraway places where she could participate in deeply meaningful and important volunteer projects.\n\n#####  _Enjoying the Moment_\n\nBuddhists have been preaching mindfulness, or being in the moment, for thousands of years. It means being fully aware of what is going on inside and outside yourself at any given moment. Mindfulness is all about training yourself to put the brakes on all those thoughts running through your head, so you can enjoy what's going on right now\u2014to stop the past and future from stealing your present.\n\nIn his book, _The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment,_ Eckhart Tolle emphasizes the benefits of being present in your life now and creating greater consciousness. He talks of how to access our own power and inner resources to integrate more fully who we are, so we can create a more authentic future.\n\nAriane, the _First 30 Days_ author you met in Chapter 5, experienced significant internal growth during her sabbatical: **\"My sabbatical totally changed me\u2014physically and in terms of my energy,\"** she says. \"I developed a lightness. The biggest change was inner reliance. I have a deep, intimate relationship with myself now. The sabbatical made me softer, more flexible, more 'in the flow' of life, and less fearful.\"\n\nIn our time-starved environment, we often spend more time planning than doing and don't take the time to just be. Reboot Breaks allow the time and perspective for just being and not doing. It might be sitting on the beach enjoying the sunset or the sound of the waves. It might be listening to the conversations around the dinner table with no interruptions. Or it might be painting a still life and keeping your own thoughts still.\n\nNancy wrote about a time of being in the moment in April 2007.\n\n_I scheduled a trip to the Bay Area for my daughter Rachel's last college lacrosse home game and her twenty-second birthday. The best airfare meant traveling on a weekday and staying an additional day and a half before flying back home to Washington DC. Being on sabbatical, I had time flexibility, so I bought that flight. Once I was in California, I decided to use the extra hours to wander up the California coast._\n\n_I write this on a perch overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with waves crashing below me onto a Stonehenge-like rock formation, then subsiding into turquoise and white froth before pounding again. I've come from a wonderful time with Rachel and her teammates and friends, and am now deep into my own time._\n\n_Last night, I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and continued north. The spectacular drive at sunset flooded me with unexpected emotions of release and thankfulness. This morning I've loved climbing across rocks, walking a flowered field, and now sitting here quietly. Within seconds, I will put my pen down to just \"be\" here. Later, I will drive through the peaceful wine country. What a joy. It is giving me such a peaceful moment to reflect._\n\n#####  _Clarifying Goals_\n\nWho says January 1st is the only day you can make a resolution? Reconnection can be a time to set goals for your sabbatical, or for your life. Think of it as an extended New Year's Day. It can be a period of stretching and testing yourself, physically or mentally.\n\nAlong with getting regular exercise, Jan, the journalist we met previously, decided to use her time away from work to explore the concept of \"enough.\"\n\nJan had always been driven. She was, in fact, a perfectionist. In her line of work, she had to be. Every day she dove into details and worked long hours, digging until she had the full scoop.\n\nJan had all the skills she needed to be a great reporter. But what she didn't know, especially after so many years of ambitious work, was when to stop. She decided the most important goal of her break would be to learn when she had done enough. \"I wanted to let go of my need to always push myself to do more,\" she said.\n\nJan applied and was accepted for a fellowship for journalists at Columbia University. Though she was away from work, she was immersed in classes and studying. So she set rules for herself: she felt herself wanting to study all night, but she forced herself to close the books and just go to sleep. Pretty soon she saw she could get a good night's rest and still get her work done.\n\nEvery day, Jan became more conscious of the choices she was making. Over time, she learned that \"enough\" was really about priorities. Is getting a little more work done more important than a good night's rest? By making everything a priority, Jan was leaving an important element out of her work: herself. When she was able to pull off the superhighway of her career and look around, Jan could see that a little more work definitely wasn't more important than sleep. Quite the opposite.\n\nWhen she went back to work, Jan became a national assignment editor at CBS, and then an off-air reporter at ABC. Her workload grew and grew. She was bombarded with more information than ever before.\n\nEvery day, though, she used what she had taught herself during her break. Instead of making everything a priority, she switched off her autopilot. She still worked quickly, but now she checked in with herself. After a careful evaluation, she pursued some stories and let other less compelling or interesting ones go. Over time, what had been prioritization grew into that all-important reporter skill: instinct.\n\nJan went on to become a TV anchor, one of the most demanding jobs in the business. \"The 'art of enough' is one that you have to learn and use all of the time,\" she said. \"It's not a matter of getting extra credit. It's all about doing something well, mastering it, and moving on.\"\n\n### EXPLORATION\n\nNancy tells an Exploration phase story that combines a dream and travel time with her younger daughter:\n\n_The phone rang in early June, 2008. \"Mom, I've got from June 23 to July 2 if you want to go on a trip. Did you say you wanted to go to Morocco?\" It was Rachel. She would graduate in a week, and we'd been talking about having a mother-daughter adventure before she started a new job at a solar power startup._\n\n_Within two weeks, we were having our own solar power experience on camelback in the hot Moroccan sand dunes. I had had one last major goal on my sabbatical during the Exploration phase before going back to work, and this was it: the African desert. Now I was looking for inspiration as a Berber guide was leading our camels across the impossibly beautiful desert sands at dusk. Our heads were wrapped in bright cloths against the wind and blowing sand. That night we slept outside under the stars before heading back across the dunes\u2014this time bathed in morning light and total stillness\u2014and on to Marrakech and the rest of our Moroccan adventure._\n\n_It was an exotic exploration trip, but it could have been a trip to a national park or Boston or Disneyland. The point is that I was on a Reboot Break and had the flexibility of schedule and mind to plan a spontaneous trip with my daughter._\n\nThe Exploration phase deepens the personal enrichment and growth of Reconnection. Choices, reflection time, personal challenges, family, and friends all remain part of the picture. This is a period of pushing yourself by trying or learning more new things and traveling to new places, and it is likely the time when you achieve major goals of your sabbatical.\n\nYou may find that you use the Exploration period to explore intensively new places in your own mind and self. Rita says, \"I am scared of heights, but in Belize a friend convinced me to go zip-lining, swinging through very high trees on a wire, connected by a harness. It was exhilarating. That day I bought a tee shirt that has become my favorite. It reads: **When was the last time you did something for the first time?**\n\n#### EXPLORING THE WORLD\n\nMany cultures encourage people to take time off for travel. Australians traditionally take a month off each year, often using that time to travel. Young Israelis who have finished their military duty often take a year off to see the world. In the United States, though, few people get more than two weeks of paid vacation a year, and not many can afford to use all of their vacation time for travel. In May 2009, _Digital Journal_ reported that the number of Americans who said that they were going to take a vacation in the next six months was at a thirty-year low, according to an April survey. Expedia also found in their 2009 survey that one-third of employees don't take all of their vacation time.\n\nGiven the statistics, it's hardly surprising that so many Americans use their Reboot Breaks to travel. Greg, a former CEO, echoed the sentiment of many when he described the first trip he took in his sabbatical: \"A month of walking in the English Cotswolds was the longest consecutive time off I had taken in twenty years. It was the only time I can remember when I didn't have to do something else.\"\n\nSome people hop in a car or rent an RV to crisscross the landscape of their own country that they've never explored. More often, sabbatical takers choose to go farther afield. Trips are as diverse as one can imagine\u2014walking tours in England, foreign language immersion classes in Germany, cooking classes in Thailand, windsurfing in Australia, skiing in Norway, becoming a registered tour guide in Brazil, teaching English as a second language in Guatemala, and visiting the African desert, to name just a few.\n\n#####  _Volunteering_\n\nSome people incorporate volunteer work into their travel. Betsy, the orthopedic surgeon you read about earlier, wanted to give back during her Reboot Break, even as she was traveling. Her parents had reinforced this value when she was growing up, and two close friends her age had just died. \"I felt my mortality,\" she said quietly. \"I felt I needed to do things that were important to me before I died.\"\n\nAt the top of the list was a month-long medical volunteer project in South Africa for Health Volunteers Overseas. Her orthopedics assignment was in an area with no water or electricity. Betsy was deeply struck by the poverty of the area, juxtaposed with the people's generosity and gratitude and the beauty of the countryside. She loved putting her medical skills to use with these people. \"The work of this trip was the reason I went into medicine.\"\n\nTravel often gives people a new perspective on life, and volunteering can bring that new perspective into sharper focus. As part of their year-long sabbatical, British lawyer Nigel and his wife Sarah worked in Trinidad for two months doing environmental conservation work and coaching village children in soccer. They found that their perspective was broadened by living in a new country where everything about daily life was different from back home.\n\nNigel felt this even more strongly later in his time off, volunteering in Ecuador. He and his fellow volunteers arrived to create a summer camp program for children in a remote village. The village had just been damaged from excessive rainfall, so the group spent the first three days clearing out a mudslide and creating fields and areas for sports.\n\nThe camp was a huge success, and for Nigel it offered an important window into village economic realities, fears, and hopes. A little girl, Isabella, especially caught Nigel's attention. She was usually off by herself and seemed awkward with the other children. When Nigel asked about her, the response was, \"Oh, she's that way because her family can only afford to send one child a year to school. Schools are free, but the books and other necessary materials add up to $20 a year. Her brother goes one year and then she goes on the alternate year.\"\n\nNigel was profoundly moved. His perspective has shifted forever. Back in his law firm, when someone demands a rush turnaround on something, Nigel frequently thinks of Isabella and the $20 annual school fee. \"Yes,\" he thinks, \"it's important to you and I'll do my best, but this is not the most important issue in life.\" Today, Nigel continues to financially support those needier than he and to find ways during his free time and vacations to volunteer. And the summer sports camp set up by a handful a people during their time off from work continues today.\n\nSometimes it's hard to explain these experiences and their profound effects to others. Mark and Margaret traveled to the Sudan to volunteer with victims of famine. They set up a medical and feeding clinic and later a project for homeless street kids. Clearly what they experienced firsthand was different from most people's everyday experience back in their hometown.\n\nWhen they returned home, they thought their friends and family would want to know all about their travels and what life was like in a country so different from their own. Instead they discovered that people gave them little time to describe their extensive experiences and volunteer work.\n\nWe and other sabbatical takers who traveled to faraway places had similar experiences. Somehow, there is just a little less enthusiasm for seeing those hundreds of photos or hearing minute details about a story that you still feel in your bones, but that is just too remote for others. In time, Mark and Margaret learned to value their experience for themselves and to accept that others wouldn't be able to understand it in the same way.\n\n#### EXPLORING THE MIND\n\nMany people devote the Exploration phase to learning. Some take language courses. Some enroll in degree programs. Some do it to change careers. Some want to learn new skills that will bring higher pay.\n\nThose who opted out of work to study for a higher degree or more skills training got a bonus: more pay. Some chose further education as a mid-course-correction. Kevin says that at forty-five he was done with the business world and wanted to teach. And he went off to Texas to get his PhD.\n\nLeslie, at thirty-five, says \"I'm done with being a secretary who gives all her friends fabulous home decorating advice. I'm going to get a degree and start my own business.\"\n\nSeveral people liked their work and planned to return to their positions but felt unchallenged and needed a change. Learning a new skill or language got them excited again.\n\nChauncey turned a traditional academic sabbatical into an international networking and learning opportunity. He went from an assistant professor of marketing at a business school to someone on a super-charged Reboot Break having exciting and diverse experiences. At the same time, he was enhancing his academic work and benefiting his university.\n\nHe began his time away teaching at Beijing University for the fall semester. It was the start of an enduring academic relationship that would enhance his school's China study tours and international curriculum development. In the spring, he taught at the university of Split in Croatia. While there, he initiated an effort to build a center for the multi-disciplinary study of sustainability on the Croatian island of Vis.\n\nThen he got involved with Starbucks to fulfill another of his reboot objectives, completing and publishing a corporate social responsibility (CSR) case study. He also used this opportunity to publish a manuscript on advertising fair trade coffee.\n\nChauncey summarizes, \"Having new and exciting experiences rejuvenated my teaching. Among the other benefits, I got to build a unique laboratory for students to discover and learn global aspects of sustainable management practices. And it provided me access to hard-to-find research data for meaningful academic publishing.\"\n\nIt is less common for teachers in elementary or secondary schools to take sabbaticals, yet the bold ones do, enhancing their skills and their pay.\n\nWyatt, a high school physics teacher, used his one-year sabbatical to go to graduate school to enhance and complement his existing knowledge. For him, the free time was as important as the time he spent earning his master's degree in environmental science at Brown University. During the winter recess, he traveled to Thailand for one month, a trip he would not have been able to take without his educational sabbatical. He also used some of that time to explore a career change. He went back to teaching for a year, and then moved to a job in environmental policy. This kind of exploration is not uncommon among sabbatical takers. It's a great time to test the waters of change.\n\nWyatt wasn't burned out. He just wanted to take a year to do something that he couldn't have done otherwise and enhance his skills and perspective as a teacher. And, of course, the pay increase for the new master's degree wasn't bad\u2014either as a teacher or in his new career!\n\nMany non-academics in the Reboot Break chorus used their breaks for intellectual exploration. The young banker Susan felt stale and unchallenged at work. At thirty, she was the youngest in her group of fifteen at the bank, and the only woman. It was depressing to her that her co-workers had spent thirty-five years at the same desks. That was not what she wanted, so she set out to enrich her credentials.\n\nSusan applied for and was accepted into a study program at the London School of Economics. She found the course material and discussions very stimulating, but equally stimulating was the travel that she was able to do every weekend, using London as her base. Then she traveled to new places for the rest of her year. Susan returned to her company refreshed and rebooted. She has since been promoted twice and is thrilled that her company relocated her back in London for her next assignment.\n\nSometimes the education on a Reboot Break is less formal. Gary was a senior public relations and communications coordinator who aspired to be a published author of children's books. During his time off, Gary wrote, took a writing course, attended writers' conferences, and searched for a publisher. He also joined a professional writers' organization to meet other aspiring writers and stay abreast of events and opportunities in his area.\n\nA surprise came in the form of photography and a course-correction. Gary had always had an interest in photography, but during this period it blossomed into a passion. He never expected to uncover another creative outlet, but there he was, taking photos all day long. Today he has created a website and has even sold some of his photos. What was a hobby is becoming a new career expression. \"It's hard to describe the lightness, the serenity, joy, and creativity I felt\u2014and still feel,\" said Gary about his Reboot Break.\n\n#### EXPLORING THE HURT\n\nRobert Frost once said that \"the best way out is always through.\" Sometimes the most important work of exploration is to acknowledge a painful situation, face up to it, and let it run its course. That's not as much fun as learning French or hiking in the Himalayas, but if you're hurting, sometimes it's the only way to heal.\n\nDavid, the entrepreneur in Chapter 4, found his once-very-successful business suffering from stiff competition from cheaper labor sources overseas. He spent all of his own money trying to stem the company's losses. Instead, he lost everything. Soon afterward, his partner died. When it was over, he was financially ruined and emotionally drained. David thought about finding another job, but in his heart he knew he needed a break, one that would take him to a world totally different from the one he had left behind. He went to Prague.\n\n_I spent my days waking up whenever I wanted to and hanging out with whomever. I just spent the time doing nothing but looking at life through conversations with people I would never have met under normal circumstances: people working for Radio Free Europe, bar owners from Benin and Nigeria who were trying to make it in the West, Czech people caught up in the transfer of the country into the European Union. In Prague, time stopped. Whenever anyone offered me an opportunity to do anything, I said 'yes,' whether it was touring the countryside, going to a beer fest, or visiting a castle. My trip felt like something I should have done when I was younger, but I never took time off after college. Not a day off. My time in Prague felt unnatural after working so hard for so long, but it was completely natural._\n\nDavid had no definite end to his break. He was very much between gigs. He took comedy classes back in the United States and kept working on a book he had started writing in Prague. He was still recovering from the feeling of failure about losing his business.\n\n_It takes as long to come out of something as it takes to go in. People give far too short a time to grieving. Same with my company. I had spent two to three years invested in making it happen, building it up, and watching it crumble. It took two to three years for me to come back. What finally ended this for me was the book. It gave me the external validation of a success, which allowed me to say, \"I really am good at something and I can now go to my grave with that.\" No one can take that away from me. And if I had never gone away, I never would have had that. I would have kept spinning my wheels._\n\nNow David is a freelance corporate consultant on technology-related topics, specifically business continuity and \"disaster recovery.\" He is writing his second book.\n\n#### EXPLORING THE SELF\n\nThe Exploration phase can sometimes bring isolation and loneliness. Whether your journey is physical, intellectual, emotional, or all three, being far away from your normal network or experiencing a major life change can be scary and lonely. But it can also be a gift, allowing for profound self-discovery and growth.\n\nDavid, as we mentioned, moved to Prague. \"Leaving the country was important,\" he said. \"I had to get as far away as possible so I wouldn't be able to reach into my old life and fall into old habits. The time zone difference helped, as did the physical isolation of the city.\" For David, being removed from everything familiar freed him to do the things that he had always wanted to do.\n\nSusan, the banker who took time off to study in London, felt similarly, saying, \"My time in London was the only time in my life when I had no connections and was so completely by myself. The first week I thought that I had put myself way too far out there. But once I started to meet people and to create a new social structure, I was fine. I started to travel, too. I had felt totally disconnected, but my new environment allowed me 'think time.'\"\n\nLike many of the people we interviewed, Susan is a doer. She's smart, efficient, hardworking, and usually takes on several activities at once. But all this \"doing\" hadn't allowed a lot of time for reflection and getting to know herself. When Susan was forced to be alone, she was able to discover the things that were truly important to her. Susan returned to the same company after her year off, but she switched from portfolio management to hedge funds because of the insights she gained about herself and her needs.\n\nFor some people, self-discovery means spiritual exploration. Many begin keeping a daily journal. Some decide to go to a place or participate in a process that will help them get more in touch with their spiritual side. We know people who took classes in meditation and built that into a daily practice. A few stayed in an ashram to learn the benefit of deeper thought in mediation, and others visited spiritual centers or listened to spiritual leaders. Lorraine, a conflict resolution expert, retreated into silent meditation for a week at a monastery in the beautiful Virginia countryside. Speaking with no one but herself and the universe, immersed in the simplicity of her surroundings, she got back in touch with herself and what is important to her.\n\n#### EXPLORING RELATIONSHIPS\n\nJaye was looking for an opportunity during her break to get to know her brother's two children better. They were already eight and twelve years old.\n\n_Fortunately my brother provided the perfect opportunity to spend a few weeks with his kids while he and his wife spent time together and had their own reconnection. I jumped at the chance. We had a wonderful time together getting to know each other in a way quick family visits would never allow. It was a gift of time for us all._\n\nIf alone time is the yin of exploration, relationships are the yang. A sabbatical is a perfect time to connect with the people you love, whether it's traveling across the globe to meet a long-lost parent or getting reacquainted with your spouse of twenty-five years. The extra time is precious, whether with children, siblings, parents, or friends. It can be planned or spontaneous\u2014a family reunion you host or a pickup softball game.\n\nMichael took his first Reboot Break of three months from corporate work at thirty-five. For three weeks he traveled through northern Europe with his new girlfriend. The trip cemented their relationship, and they ended up getting married a year later. When his girlfriend had to return to work, Michael invited his younger brother to join him. Michael explained that they had never really gotten along well because of their age difference, yet they both found that this time together created a great bonding experience.\n\nMichael's other objective for his time off was to meet his biological father. His mother had remarried when he was very young, and he had never gotten to know his biological father. So he traveled to Germany, where he knew his father still lived. He found his number through relatives and called. \"Hi, my name is Michael and I think I'm your son.\" After a long pause, the response was, \"Yes, you are.\" Michael and his father spent four days getting to know each other and sharing stories of their lives. They have become close friends. Michael now goes to Berlin every two years to visit his father and half-brother, another new friend.\n\nJerry, an executive recruiter in London, had hoped to use his time away from his job to build a second home and get back to competitive sailing. Then he found out that he and his wife were expecting. Sailing would have required spending twelve weekends away from his wife and newborn baby, so he changed course and spent his sabbatical doing things around the house and immersing himself in parenting.\n\nFor some, a Reboot Break brings the bittersweet gift of time with a dying parent or loved one. You have the time to say goodbye meaningfully, doing things you might not otherwise have had time for, such as making a scrapbook of your father's life or listening to your grandmother's favorite music with her.\n\nRod was let go as part of a corporate restructuring. When his father, who lived in a different town some distance away, became seriously ill, Rod was able to travel there often. When he was home, he found he had more time with his grandchildren.\n\nFriends can be an important part of exploration, too. Regan, the diplomat who returned from Bosnia, devoted her three-month break to traveling **\"Reconnecting with my friends energized me in ways I never expected,\"** she said. Her friends helped her understand what she wanted from her life and her work. \"They reminded me of my passions, my skills, my talents, and my dislikes,\" she said. \"My friends reminded me of who I was.\"\n\nBeing with family and friends can be the most reaffirming part of your Reboot Break. Its importance was mentioned by every person we interviewed. It solidifies the base of who we are and what we care about.\n\n#### KEEPING IT SIMPLE\u2014PACKING LIGHT\n\nYou cleared space and put things in order in the first phase, but this phase goes more deeply into simplifying your life. Clearing away more of life's clutter can open you up to new experiences and tune you in to the things that really matter.\n\nCathy's first Reboot Break was a time of freeing herself and packing light.\n\n_It was 1984 and my mother had died the year before. I had spent many trips back and forth to Missouri to care for her and her affairs. I was exhausted both mentally and physically, and felt I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders\u2014in fact my back started hurting, symbolic of that. I also had been working on my doctorate, having finished the comprehensives and coursework, and I was having difficulty with my dissertation advisor, who was always giving me veiled hints that if I slept with him, the process would go smoother, never mind that I was married._\n\n_Then there was my marriage and problems there that needed focused attention. Everywhere I turned, responsibility piled on. I dreamed of being free, of leaving problems behind until I could get my head cleared. I dreamed of freedom and packing light, both mentally and figuratively._\n\n_When my husband and I decided to take a year-long Reboot Break, using some of the money I inherited from my mother, that's just what I did, taking the time to mourn, reassess my career objectives, and be free. We packed one suitcase each\u2014a Kelty frame suitcase that turned into a backpack\u2014and one small backpack, and took off to travel in Asia for nearly a year. It was one of the most freeing times of my life, and I learned the value of \"packing light.\"_\n\nLeena, whom you met before, rented out her apartment in London to finance her break. In addition to the joy and enrichment of traveling, Leena discovered the pleasure of \"traveling light,\" telling us, \"I liked not having lots of baggage that could weigh me down and being free of the obligations of my home and belongings. It allowed me to focus more on the people in my life and the direction of my life.\"\n\nThis notion of \"packing light\" or \"traveling light\" can refer to emotional baggage, too: letting go of a schedule, going with the flow, or being unburdened. By packing a small \"emotional suitcase,\" Cathy, Leena, and others left room for more important travel essentials, such as confidence, belief in themselves, a sense of humor, happiness, and a complete openness to adventure.\n\nAriane was thirty years old when she left her corporate job to take a year-long Reboot Break.\n\n_The job I was in just wasn't what I wanted. I thought that being in charge of venture capital for a major media company would make me happy. I realized in the first thirty days that it wasn't right for me, but I stayed for two years anyway. I had a nudge from the universe when my company merged with another, and I was told I would have had to move to another state. Around that time, I woke up with a rash from head to toe that lasted for a couple of days. All the tests for allergies came backnegative. It was then that I first spoke the words to myself, \"I am allergic to my life.\"_\n\n_One of the first things I did was to go to Italy, which I thought of as a warm and friendly place. I took only a few things with me, mostly books. I also packed light mentally. I lowered my expectations. Everything in New York is big, important, and serious. I wanted to get away from all that._\n\nAriane didn't have a plan. Her attitude was that things would show up and that the universe would fill the void. For her, it was a real journey of stepping out of control and away from what was expected of her. Change can be scary and threatening. But when you face change head on\u2014as everyone must do on a Reboot Break\u2014something good comes from that change, even if the reward isn't immediate. In her suitcase, Ariane replaced material treasures with what she calls the five L's: Live, Laugh, Love, Learn, and Lighten up. She went on to found a company and write her book, _The First 30 Days,_ about how to navigate change. Both draw on the lessons she learned on her sabbatical.\n\nTime alone, time caring for one's physical and mental health, time with friends and family, spontaneity, being in the moment, reaching out to help others, exploring, learning\u2014these are all the pieces of the natural threads of a sabbatical quilt, the pieces of the sabbatical dream.\n\nAll these wonderful experiences are individual and yet universal, and they are only a few examples of the endless possibilities. Renewed and enriched, you are ready for the next phase. In our experience, as you turn to looking for a new job or preparing to return to your workplace, the activities of Reconnection and Exploration will continue as part of your sabbatical rhythm\u2014accompanied by a new sense of self-confidence and direction.\n\n* * *\n\n###   EXERCISES\n\n##### _Exercise 6-1: Reconnecting to Your Life and Yourself_\n\n\u2022 Make a list of four or five things you'd like to do during the Reconnection stage of your Reboot Break.\n\n\u2022 If one or two items had to come off the list, what would they be?\n\n##### _Exercise 6-2: Exploring_\n\n\u2022 Make a list of four or five things you'd like to try during the Exploration stage.\n\n\u2022 If one or two items had to come off the list, what would they be?\n\n##### _Exercise 6-3: Packing Light for Exploration_\n\n\u2022 If you plan to travel during the Exploration stage, what is the bare minimum that you need to take with you? List the things that you will absolutely need during your journey.\n\n\u2022 What are the things you would like to have on your journey within you? (By within you, we mean qualities such as courage, a sense of adventure, joy, curiosity, enthusiasm, and strength.)\n\n\u2022 Is any emotional baggage\u2014a romantic relationship gone bad or self-limiting ideas about your life\u2014holding you back from achieving your sabbatical or its goals? Write it down.\n\n\u2022 Review the \"emotional baggage\" list in a week. What might you be ready and willing to let go of?\n\n## | CHAPTER 7 |\n\n## _Renewed, Recharged, Now What?_\n\n\"The unexamined life is not worth living.\"\n\n\u2014 _Plato_\n\nThe fourth stage of the Reboot Break, what we call \"Reentry,\" marks the start of a new chapter of your life. This is one of the most exciting and satisfying parts of rebooting your life, as you assimilate all that you have experienced during your time off and now make time for reflection. It is a time of new ideas, new possibilities, and new perspectives.\n\nYour adventures have ended and reality has set in. What now? You've expanded your time to include things that bring you satisfaction. You've gotten out and explored, reconnected with old friends, and hopefully allowed plenty of time for rest and introspection. To others, it may seem that you have been on a vacation, especially if you traveled to your dream spot in the Exploration phase, but behind all this wonderful time off, there has been some inward caretaking. Now it's time to bring all those experiences together and determine what's next.\n\n**Don't rush yourself. Too often, people try to predict what they will do at the end of their time off before they've even started.** When your family asks, don't rush to answer. The answer will come when it's time.\n\nReentry is usually about coming to terms with the end of a wonderful period in one's life. Take the time to absorb the best parts of your break and figure out how to incorporate those experiences into your post-Reboot Break life. You may be getting a little antsy about your financial situation and what you are going to do next. Or you may be thinking about what it will be like to return to your job or begin a new one. This is a time to start to talk to others about work and to go on job interviews. In this chapter we will explore some ways to think about reentering the work world and give examples of how others handled the transition.\n\nRita had taken a between-gigs break and was now entering the Reentry stage. An old school acquaintance approached her about a full-time job. Rita didn't think she was interested in the opportunity, but the day before she was going to turn it down, she woke up in the middle of the night with the idea of turning the offer into a two-month consulting engagement. It provided her intellectually stimulating and challenging work while still allowing her the flexibility she had grown to love during her Reboot Break. It also gave her more time to figure out what she really wanted to do.\n\n### TRANSITIONS\n\nReentry is a transition. In fact, the whole reboot process can be understood as a transition between your former work and a new lifestyle. Even if you return to the same company, a transition takes place.\n\nThe author William Bridges has written extensively about transition. He made his own course-correction when he left his career as an English professor for the field of transition management. Then he experienced an even more profound transition with the death of his wife. His book, _The Way of Transition,_ is based on the deeper learning and understanding he forged during that second transition. Bridges describes a three-stage process, starting with the necessity of ending a chapter of your life and leaving something behind. No matter what the circumstances are\u2014the need for a change, the death of a loved one, the birth of a child\u2014the first step of a transition is \"letting go.\" It involves realizing a phase of life is over and that you are moving away from it and into something else.\n\nLetting go is followed by a \"neutral zone,\" an in-between time of self-examination and discovery. This can be an empty and lonely time, or a very creative time, or both. Bridges describes it as a time of reorientation, personal growth, (self) authentication, and creativity. It is similar to the Reconnection and Exploration phases in this book.\n\nThe third stage Bridges describes is \"beginning again,\" with all the attendant uncertainty and exhilaration. For us, it is Reentry.\n\nUltimately, transition results in renewal. Bridges talks about life's imperative to renew itself and says renewal is possible only by going through the process of transition. \"Just what causes the timing of these turnings is beyond our knowing,\" he writes. \"All we know is that periodically, some situation or event deflects us from the path that we thought we were on and, in so doing, ends the life-chapter we were in. In order to continue our journey, we are forced to let go of the way we got that far. Having let go, we find ourselves in the wilderness for a time, and not until we have lived out that time can we come back around to a new beginning.\"\n\n**Part of a successful sabbatical is recognizing, accepting, and celebrating transition and change.**\n\n### REFLECTION\n\nTime for reflection is so important at this stage because it is where the activities and experiences, the emotions and feelings, and the wants and needs come together to pave the path to post-sabbatical life. If you learn only one thing from your sabbatical, it should be to take time regularly and frequently for reflection. We as individuals all too often move from our head to our feet, from thought to action, without spending time contemplating how we really feel about something.\n\nAbout half of the people we interviewed returned to their same jobs. And of those, about half were burnt out, frustrated, and fed up with their jobs before taking their Reboot Break. It was only by taking time off and going deep inside that they realized that they actually liked their jobs but just needed more balance. Their Reboot Break gave them renewal and an awareness that there were ways to enjoy life and have balance while still being fully engaged in their work.\n\nSusan, the thirty-year-old banker you've read about in past chapters, never doubted that after her year-long break, she would return to the same company. She liked the company and its values but knew that she would quickly get bored doing her old work. She handled her reentry well and shortly after returning was able to negotiate a rotation into a new department where she could be more innovative. Susan credited her time by herself in London:\n\n_I had never been so alone in all my life. But that was good for me and allowed me to figure out what I wanted to do next. Without all of my reflection time I would have never been able to create a plan to return to my same company, but in a new city and in a whole new area that offered a lot more creativity._\n\n### EXPLORING NEW OPTIONS\n\nWhen Barbara was ready to think about work again after losing her job and taking a Reboot Break, she chose to go to an intensive three-day session with a life coach. First, she spent a week answering a questionnaire. The coach raised a lot of intense questions that caused her to think about what was important to her. He also gave her the William Bridges book on transitions.\n\n_We talked about the free fall, separation, anger, healing, etc. We talked about what made me click. I did a lot of soul searching. I asked myself,\"What would make me click for the next stage of my life?\" I needed to move from making my mark to doing something that made me happy. It had to encompass entrepreneurship and creativity, but I knew that I also needed structure._\n\nBarbara decided to kick off her Reentry phase by contacting people and asking them to write testimonials about her. She explained that she was going through a transition and period of self-exploration and that she would appreciate their points of view on what was special about her.\n\nBarbara sent out about forty emails and thirty people responded. That's an incredible response rate. Barbara found their responses not only very informative but also moving and emotional. By providing friends and previous business colleagues the time and space to give her honest feedback, she was able to hear what made her good at her job, what made her special.\n\nBarbara found her ego again. Now she was armed with the right ammunition and clarity to recreate her bio and start talking to recruiters. She spent time formulating her strategy and assessing various opportunities.\n\nShe connected with headhunters and women entrepreneurs. In the process of sending her resumes out to recruiters, one of them said that she would make a great recruiter. Barbara thought to herself, \"I am a negotiator and a deal closer, and I am flexible.\" She decided to take a risk and go into this totally new field. She said that the worst that could happen was that she would choose to leave. Plus, her Reboot Break had armed her with better clarity about her own strengths and where best to use them.\n\nElizabeth is another person who loved her work and lost it in a company restructuring. When she had been let go from a company several years prior to this time, she was scared of being in her home alone all day. She admitted to feeling a bit panicky each time her husband left in the morning. She therefore went straight to job searching without giving herself the gift of time. She quickly found employment, but not her dream job. This time, rather than jumping right back to work, she turned a crushing event into a gift of time. For the first couple of months, she exercised, traveled, reconnected with college roommates, and enjoyed sailing before breaking out to a new chapter in her life.\n\nAfter much soul searching, Elizabeth reaffirmed to herself that she really liked training sales forces, and it would therefore be a good idea to connect directly with other people who did similar work. Rather than making individual calls or appointments, she attended a Strategic Account Management Association conference.\n\nWhen she arrived, the name of her former company was printed on her badge. She had to cross it out and handwrite her name. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone was asked to introduce him\/herself. She said \"A few months ago, I was the VP of Global Accounts for my company. I am no longer with them, and I now contribute to the unemployment statistics. What you see on my badge is code for saying I am trying to figure out what to do next.\"\n\nEveryone laughed. Elizabeth said it was very extemporaneous and that she didn't know what was going to come out of her mouth. During the first coffee break and throughout the remainder of the meeting, several people approached her, offering ideas and brainstorming about next jobs. It probably helped that she exhibited a sense of humor and confidence as she handled that difficult introduction. She left the conference with several leads. Today she works with one of the firms that she met there.\n\nUpon returning to work, she looked great and was calmer and more confident. It was only after spending reflection and reconnection time during her break that she realized how many people thought that she now displayed a totally different personality. When she talked or even just thought about work, she had always tensed up. With newfound knowledge, she committed to leaving some of that intensity behind as she entered her next career phase.\n\nMany people worry about how they will explain their Reboot Break to prospective employers, especially in a down economy. Professional recruiters confirm our strong belief that it is not a problem, depending on how you describe your time off. **Remember, this is not \"time off\" but in fact \"time on\" to invest in yourself.** Employers might be turned off by negative explanations like \"I was totally burnt out and just needed time to be by myself and in nature.\" However, talking about how you bettered yourself, what you learned, and how you expect your new perspective to lead you to be more creative and innovative will work. One hiring manager said, **\"The person who has traveled or tried new things and who is open to different experiences and views is exactly the person we want in our company.\"**\n\nSome other tips for searching for a new career after your Reboot Break:\n\n1. Polish your resume and bio. There are professional services that can help you with this if needed.\n\n2. Remember to do a financial assessment of your current situation and what you need from your next job to help you negotiate.\n\n3. Put your best foot forward by selecting clothing that portrays the image of a confident, put-together person.\n\n4. Think about how you are going to explain your time off. Get your answers ready for other predictable questions, especially any that might worry you.\n\n5. Prepare questions for the interviewers. Remember, you can now choose a job that fits who you are and the quality of life you want to continue to lead.\n\n6. Send thank you notes after each interview.\n\n7. Google yourself. You may be surprised what is out there about you, and you should know.\n\n### NETWORKING\n\nAfter Rita fell into that first consulting gig, she went on to do two more short consulting engagements for other companies. She liked the flexibility it provided her as well as the mental stimulation, but still wasn't sure if it should be her next full-time career move. During her time off, she met with as many consultants as she could to ask what they liked and disliked about their work. How did she find those people to talk to? Networking the old-fashioned way\u2014picking up the phone. First, she called friends to ask them whom they might know. Then she called professional groups with whom she had been associated in the past and asked which members were consultants who might be willing to speak with her.\n\nHere are some tips for Networking:\n\n\u2022 Ask all the people you come in contact with if they can suggest an expert who works in a given field that you want to explore.\n\n\u2022 Tap in to your parents, friends, neighbors, fellow churchgoers, people you meet at the gym, etc.\n\n\u2022 Send emails to friends asking if they know someone in the field you've selected.\n\n\u2022 Make your request hassle-free by drafting a paragraph that they can send on your behalf. A sample is \"David, a very good friend of mine, is exploring changing careers and is very interested in knowing more about the consulting world. Since you too made the switch from working for a large corporation to consulting on your own, I was hoping that you might be willing to speak with him about the challenges and rewards of doing so.\"\n\n\u2022 Don't forget to tap in to the power of social media for networking. The one most used for work-related discussions is LinkedIn. Enter your profile and remember to add all the key words to cover your new areas of interest. You can say what you are looking for under \"status updates.\" You can read job opportunities there too. Ask former colleagues and bosses to write a recommendation for you. You can also see who has been reviewing your background and looking at your profile under \"who's viewed my profile.\"\n\n\u2022 You don't always need introductions to approach people. You can do research online and even write to people you don't know, asking for a brief conversation. Tools such as Google or LinkedIn may be of help. There is a wealth of knowledge out there.\n\n\u2022 Once a connection has been made, ask to schedule a brief phone call or meeting, and do not take too much of their time. We find that people are usually willing to give a helping hand.\n\n\u2022 Invite the person out for a meal or a cup of coffee. Let her choose and you pay. A face-to-face meeting is preferable.\n\n\u2022 Before the meeting, do online research into his or her background and organization. Come to the meeting prepared with knowledge of the field and questions to ask. Remember, you have asked for the meeting, so take the lead. Sample questions might include: How did you get into your field? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? What are your biggest challenges? What additional research should I do if this were the next job for me? Are there others to whom I should speak? What have I not asked you that I should have asked?\n\n\u2022 Think what you can do for this person in exchange. Is there a book or piece of research that you have that you can send to him? Is there a contact you can set up for him to help him in his endeavors?\n\n\u2022 Immediately after the meeting, write or type a note to yourself on what you learned in your meeting. Later, after you have met with several people, it will be helpful to be able to refer back to all the notes and to pull out common themes.\n\n\u2022 Remember to send thank you notes.\n\nUtilizing this networking phase of her Reboot Break, Rita determined that consulting was not for her. \"It was only after I talked to several people that I better understood the challenges of scaling up a consulting business. And more importantly, I realized that at that stage in my life, I liked to be the implementer of recommendations and that I wanted to stay and see people grow and organizations morph.\"\n\nTo her friends' shock, after swearing that she would never work for a large organization again, Rita went to work for a Fortune 500 global company\u2014the one for which she did the first consulting gig. She would not have done so if it were not for her time off and the very deliberate time she took during the Reentry phase to network and then deeply reflect upon what she valued.\n\nVictor is a consummate networker. Victor had taken a between-gigs break, and it was time to focus on what he really wanted to do. He reflected on who he was, what he was good at, and what gave him the most satisfaction. He thought that he wanted something in the nonprofit field. He knew that the best way to do research was to go to the primary sources and get answers firsthand.\n\n_I reached out to people I hadn't seen in years. I reached out to some I never knew before. People were really helpful and very willing to talk and to give me their time. From each meeting I got a gem of an idea. Talking to all sorts of people was invaluable. Finding out what others valued in work and what they did was key. I listened hard._\n\nThen, when Victor was close to choosing a job with a not-for-profit group, a friend challenged him by asking, \"Is that really what you want to do?\"\n\n\"I had to admit that I wasn't ready to give up the money one can earn in the corporate world,\" Victor said. As they talked further, Victor realized that he could have a bigger impact volunteering for a not-for-profit and having money to give to them. Victor would not have come to this realization without reaching out to friends and asking for their advice.\n\n### MINI-TRIALS AND INTERNSHIPS\n\nAfter you have done your research and talked to several people, you may be perfectly clear about your next career move. However, if you still have some open questions, one of the best ways to \"try out\" a career is to ask one of those people you called if you could shadow someone at their company for a day or a week. If longer, perhaps it could be an unpaid internship.\n\nAmy is the young attorney who was let go from her law firm because of the collapse of the corporate litigation department during the recession. She decided that she wanted to explore something totally different from law. She took a two-month Reboot Break to live in Italy and study the language, as well as the foods. She also explored career opportunities via the Internet. One intriguing idea was doing an internship to segue into a different field. She approached a wine-making company about doing an internship with them. The experience included all aspects of winemaking, from crushing the grapes and blending the tastes to bottling to marketing. The internship was unpaid, but it allowed her to parlay her legal and business skills into a new career field. She was offered a full-time position at the end of the internship and is now happily working as head of compliance and the commercial division in the profession she sought during her time off. Also, she has created her own wine and labeling . . . soon to be commercialized!\n\n### ONCE YOU ARE READY TO START BACK\n\nNow that you have decided to reenter the workplace, we recommend that you spend some time thinking through how you are going to react to being back in a work environment. If you are returning to your previous job, call your colleagues to find out the highlights of what has happened while you were out. Start to look at emails and key reports that will bring you up to speed so that you do not feel totally out of it when you return. By the way, don't be surprised if you return after several months off feeling as if very little has changed. That happens frequently. Also, think about what you are going to share about your time off and what you don't want to say. Moderation is the key. You want people to be happy for you and to see your new level of energy and passion, but you don't want to sound like a broken record, describing every detail of your time off and making them jealous.\n\nIf you are starting a new job, learn what you can about the culture before starting, and set the tone for what people can and cannot expect from you right from the start. Focus on building new relationships and setting boundaries where you can to enable better balance. It is all too easy to get back into old bad habits, staying late every night, working on weekends, giving up personal time when the work can most likely be managed or staffed better. Don't let people begin to expect that you will always be available no matter what. Setting clear expectations is important to do right from the beginning, and perhaps you can be a good role model for others to do the same.\n\nIf you are an entrepreneur running a small company or the boss of a larger organization, think about how you might return to your old title but with a more strategic focus. Your employees or key managers have probably gotten along fine without you. After all, haven't you been preparing them for more responsibility all along? Now is the time to let them handle the day-to-day activities so that you can reflect more on what new strategic directions the business could take.\n\nWhether you are reentering your old place of work or beginning a new career, your sabbatical has made you a new person. Think through the ways your priorities have shifted. Take care to protect the insights you have gained. Take time for your friends. Take time for yourself. Take time for reflection.\n\nSusan is one of those people who has a natural tendency to charge into things. Upon returning to work she felt that she had to deliberately schedule \"reflection time\" as if it were an appointment in her day. So she asked her secretary to block off time weekly to do so. \"It made me a better leader and a more strategic thinker.\"\n\nDuring your break, you most likely chose to spend your time only with people you enjoy. We all know the workplace is not like that, and you may be reminded of that as you return. You may have an overly demanding boss, a cranky customer with a deadline, or a colleague who just does not seem supportive of you. The beauty of the workplace is that it brings together a mosaic of different personalities, backgrounds, and thinking styles. In fact, diversity among these elements can encourage a culture in which innovation can flourish.\n\nBut sometimes people's work styles go beyond a healthy difference in thinking and processing styles. Cathy Allen, in her research for _The Artist's Way at Work_ coined the phrase \"a crazy maker\" to describe a person in the workplace who is long on problems, short on solutions, and drains his co-workers' creative energy. Rather than getting sucked in, take a deep breath, think of one of those picturesque, peaceful places where you spent time during your Reboot Break, and set some clear boundaries.\n\nSABBATICALS ARE LIFE CHANGING. Make the best use of this last phase of your Reboot Break. Take time to consider how your priorities may have shifted, what you've learned, and how you will use your new knowledge and self-awareness in the next phase of your life.\n\n###   EXERCISE\n\n##### _Exercise 7-1: Exploring Career Paths_\n\n\u2022 Make a list of five possible career paths you might take, including staying with your current job or field. Prioritize the top three. How would you explore these?\n\n\u2022 Make a plan to learn more through networking. To whom might you reach out? Try to meet with at least two people a week, and afterward write down the key takeaways from each conversation.\n\n##### _Exercise 7-2: Assessing Opportunities_\n\n\u2022 When assessing a work option, first reflect upon your ideal work and make a list of what is important to you. Then make a list of the pros and cons. Under pros, list all of the things you perceive as the positives about a particular career\/work option, and under cons list all the negatives or potential drawbacks.\n\n\u2022 What is missing? Often people think they only have one choice. By doing this little exercise you can often approach the opportunity and ask, up front, for a few other things that are important to you.\n\n##### _Exercise 7-3: Returning Mindset_\n\n\u2022 As you prepare to return to work, write down at least three characteristics of your ideal mindset. For example, \"I will take time for reflection, friends and family, self, and patience.\" This is the time to think about how your priorities may have shifted.\n\n## | CHAPTER 8 |\n\n## _Deflecting Sabbatical Robbers_\n\n\"Knowledge is learning something every day.  \nWisdom is letting go of something every day.\"\n\n\u2014 _Zen Proverb_\n\nNow you've made a plan and know about the phases of a Reboot Break. You have goals, timetables, intentions, and you are in charge of it all. Experienced sabbatical takers know this is where the rubber meets the road. Will you really do all those things\u2014and do them on the schedule you laid out? What will interfere with your plans? For every good intention there are as many \"Sabbatical Robbers\" and traps to lure your attention away. This chapter will describe some and outline how to overcome them.\n\n### WHO AND WHAT ARE SABBATICAL ROBBERS?\n\nThe actors in this chapter are you and everyone else in your environment\u2014your family, friends, colleagues, and other professional acquaintances. They all can have a role in slowing your progress toward your goals\u2014usually unintentionally\u2014by making demands on you or causing you to use your time less effectively.\n\nSabbatical Robbers come in two categories: internal (you) and external (everyone else). Here are a few examples:\n\n#### ROBBERS THAT YOU CREATE:\n\n\u2022 You spread yourself too thin by taking on too many commitments.\n\n\u2022 You let day-to-day things (household, etc.) take up the time.\n\n\u2022 You can't say no.\n\n\u2022 You procrastinate.\n\n\u2022 You are having too much fun to do the more serious things you planned.\n\n#### EXTERNAL ROBBERS:\n\n\u2022 **Everyone wants a piece of your time because you aren't working.**\n\n\u2022 You are a target for helping out with charitable causes or your children's school.\n\n\u2022 Your family expects you to babysit because you have so much time on your hands.\n\n\u2022 You are the reliable relative in every emergency or need.\n\n\u2022 The house needs work, and you are in charge.\n\n\u2022 \"What about me? I'd like you to spend more time with me.\"\n\nRecognize these robbers and deal with them!\n\nIt should be clear, though, that **one person's Sabbatical Robber may be another person's sabbatical objective or joy.** For example, Jack loved going to the park every afternoon with his grandson while his daughter went to class. One of Jack's sabbatical goals had been to spend more time with his grandson, which was far more important to him than having that time to himself. If his daughter had pressured him to watch the child, and it really wasn't what he wanted to do with his time, Jack might have viewed it as a Sabbatical Robber rather than a sabbatical joy.\n\nSometimes, too, there are unintended intrusions\u2014the inevitable unplanned life impositions that simply happen, and you can't prevent them. It may relate to you, such as a time commitment that has to be rescheduled from before or after your Reboot Break to the middle of it. Or it might be something that happens to someone close to you, such as your spouse breaking a leg. These circumstances become not so much robbers as incidents to treat with flexibility and good humor.\n\n#### WHEN YOU'RE THE ROBBER\n\nMany of you have overcome much and accomplished much to reach this point. Most of you are having a positive experience, already benefiting from unfettered time to relax, enjoy nature, clear away clutter, explore and try new things, see friends, be spontaneous. Whatever stage you are in, some of you may be experiencing a gnawing continuation of some of the feelings you encountered when you were contemplating this Reboot Break, and those feelings may be interfering with it.\n\n**Guilt often is the biggest culprit, in particular, cultural and family guilt.** You may feel guilty not to be working, not to be earning money, not to be volunteering more, or not to be taking on a larger role in your family, since you now have time. This manifests itself in your spending more time than you envisioned on professional activities, volunteering, and family support. Some of the activity is self-initiated; some is in response to requests or expectations.\n\nIt is inevitable when you are on a break from work that people will think that you have unending free time and ask for more and more of it. Sometimes they just assume that you have the time and want you to spend it as they expect.\n\nYou are more vulnerable to others' requests for your time when you are carrying guilt about what you should be doing or simply feeling that you should be doing more. There is also the danger of inadvertently being flattered into what you really don't want to do.\n\nHere is our prime list of Sabbatical Robbers in this category:\n\n\u2022 _You,_ who can't say \"no\" to the people who think you have unending free time and keep asking you, even though their requests pull you off your reboot goals.\n\n\u2022 _You,_ who feel that since you aren't working and have more time, you should take on expanded volunteer roles, even though these roles conflict with your sabbatical plans.\n\n\u2022 _You,_ who keep working, even though you are supposed to be between gigs. During Martha's academic \"half sabbatical,\" she cut way back on her teaching time but remained at the university, and the space filled up with so much job-related activity that she says, \"The sabbatical was really dreadful.\"\n\n\u2022 _You_ and your inability to deal well with lack of structure, and as a result either waste time, procrastinate, or let time drift away.\n\n\u2022 _You,_ who feel that you shouldn't be paying that nanny or babysitter or caregiver or house cleaner or lawn mower since you are no longer working at a job outside the home.\n\n\u2022 _You,_ who take on the reliable relative role because you have the time to do it, even if it pulls you off the track you set.\n\n\u2022 _You,_ who are enjoying the luxuries of downtime so much that you don't get to the meat of your reboot goals.\n\n\u2022 _You,_ who treats your break like a job, rigidly holding to the schedule and asking, \"What did I accomplish today?\"\n\nSome people found that they traveled too much, which made it more challenging to find downtime and to get to other sabbatical goals. Nigel, a UK solicitor, and his wife scheduled a whole year of travel, but in retrospect would have cut that down, as it got too tiring and all-consuming. You need downtime. Schedule it. Leave enough time for yourself and what you enjoy.\n\n#### EXTERNAL ROBBERS\n\nAnd beware of those external robbers:\n\n\u2022 _Your children and\/or spouse or partner_ who think you aren't performing up to standard because they haven't adjusted their lenses to the fact that you didn't take time off to add on household chores and family responsibilities.\n\n\u2022 _Your grown children or others_ who expect you to be available for babysitting, driving kids around, and other such tasks. As Marie's retirement sabbatical approached, a relative noted multiple times how nice it would be that Marie would be able to look after her young nephew Jason when his mother had meetings in town. Laments Marie, \"I wish they would ask me if this is something I'd like to do rather than making the plan for my time. I want to make my own plans.\"\n\n\u2022 _Bosses or colleagues_ who want you to continue expending effort on your former job, or possibly want you to start early with a few tasks leading up to your new job.\n\n\u2022 _Acquaintances_ who ask you to apply your professional skills to their non-profit organization pro bono.\n\n\u2022 _Your child's school_ that wants you to head a committee.\n\n\u2022 _Your bowling league,_ which wants to put you in charge.\n\n\u2022 _Your friends, former colleagues, and former bosses_ who can't imagine what you do with all that time. Nancy tells the story of when she saw then-Vice President George H. W. Bush a few months after leaving her job as his National Security Advisor to move to Germany in hopes of having kids with her Army general husband. He asked her, \"Nance, what do you _do_ all day?\" \"Well, I study German, go to German-American discussion groups, explore Heidelberg, cook good meals, try to get pregnant . . . \" It can be hard to explain what you are doing every day to someone you admire so much, professionally and personally, who has always known you in a work context.\n\n### RESPONSES TO YOURSELF\n\nHere's where we tackle how flexible or rigid you want to be regarding your schedule, activities, and goals. It is so easy to get caught up in myriad day-to-day things or to keep saying yes.\n\nCathy observed ruefully partway through her Reboot Break, \"I still haven't done art lessons or painting, although I have my studio space cleaned up.\" The rest of the Sabbatical Sisters heartily congratulated her for cleaning up the studio and pointed out there was still time for art. Indeed, before the sabbatical ended, she had explored her own artwork fantasies and is still dabbling in art.\n\nIt is worth it at the beginning and at times during the sabbatical to consider how one stays on track, but said, \"Don't keep poking at it. You don't have to keep asking yourself where you are going.\"\n\nYou can congratulate yourself and think about where you are and what you have accomplished to get to this point, even in the face of daily distractions. Of course, you can make course-corrections too, if you wish. As a Latin proverb pronounces, \"It's an ill plan that cannot be changed.\"\n\nKim overcame her guilt regarding Sabbatical Robbers by realizing that \"if I served in all the causes that ask for some of my time, I couldn't have the psychological space to do what _I_ needed. If you get too many things on your plate, it's like being at work.\"\n\nOther helpful tips:\n\n\u2022 Remember the wise Japanese saying that you need to take 15 percent of your energy for yourself in whatever you do. If you run yourself dry, you will not have the reserves necessary to do what you need to do.\n\n\u2022 If you've come from a highly scheduled work life, you might need a plan (at least at the outset) for how you'll spend your time. To suddenly have totally unstructured time and more time alone than usual can be \"like being in a foreign country, and you don't speak the language,\" observed Margaret. Schedule only half the day and leave the other half open, allowing time for the unintended. There are ways to learn to become more \"in the moment.\"\n\n#### LOOK HOW FAR YOU'VE COME\n\nIf you are overly self-critical and restless about what you are accomplishing, you may want to perform this exercise to take stock. Some will never feel the need to do it, and others will need to do it more than once.\n\n\u2022 Title a blank paper or a journal page _Look How Far I've Come_ and date it.\n\n\u2022 Write the date you decided to take a Reboot Break, the reasons why, and your sabbatical goals.\n\n\u2022 Make a header called _What I've Done to Get Here_ and write the steps you took to make the sabbatical a reality. This includes financial preparation, steps to leave a job, living and lifestyle changes, etc.\n\n\u2022 Write the feelings or naysayers you confronted successfully to go on your break. Those two sets of things are _big_ accomplishments.\n\n\u2022 Now, make a header called _What I've Done on My Sabbatical Thus Far_ and write those things down, including everything, even the smaller things. Here are some examples:\n\n\u25aa Simple pleasures like reading the newspaper every day or calling someone special more often\n\n\u25aa Spending more time with your mother or children or friends\n\n\u25aa Cleaning out even one drawer\n\n\u25aa Trying something new like yoga, art, metalwork, or carpentry\n\n\u25aa Getting more exercise\n\n\u25aa Saying no to various demands on your time, or increasing your volunteer work\n\n\u25aa Finding yourself letting go of the work or situation you left behind\n\n\u25aa Traveling\n\nYou will be amazed at how long a list you can produce, and most likely your list will have some bigger things on it than the examples given. For example, you may already have decided to sell your house or moved or made other major decisions.\n\n\u2022 Now, look at your sabbatical goals again and consider whether you are being true to those goals. If you are lagging or off track or want to change the goals, be gentle with yourself as you consider how you are spending your time and whether you want to change it.\n\n\u2022 Write these changes in a section called _Adjustments_ or _Potential Adjustments._\n\n\u2022 Set it aside and go back to it in a few days to see if you still feel the same way and want to pursue the changes you have suggested to yourself. Be sure to read the entire document you have created.\n\n### RESPONSES TO OTHERS\n\nHere are suggested some responses to external Sabbatical Robbers. These have worked for others and may work for you.\n\n\u2022 **Have an elevator speech or cocktail party statement at the ready about your sabbatical.** Develop a great way of describing your time off that makes it more understandable to others and gets you off the hook of being called upon to help out. Take Rita's great line: \"You can't imagine all the projects I'm involved in.\" Or you can say, \"I'm on a sabbatical between work gigs (or jobs) and I'm taking time off to explore new things.\" Mark just likes to say, \"I'm an activist.\" We prefer the response: \"I'm taking a Reboot Break!\"\n\n\u2022 **Make up titles for chunks of time to explain how busy you are.** You can say you've got a conference call, which may be a call with yourself. We suggest being able to straightforwardly say what you are doing, but for some period of time or for some interlocutors, this approach might help.\n\n\u2022 **It can take time to fully separate from the job you are leaving, but you may want to give it a limit and stick to it so you can get on with your break.** Martha says stay away from your former workplace. On the other hand, Margaret, whose previous sabbatical took her and husband Mark to Sudan, left her job at the non-profit Snake River Alliance after fourteen years but joined the board to \"keep her finger in\" and remain supportive.\n\n\u2022 **Don't over-schedule your kids just because you have more time to drive them around.** One sabbatical mother we know only schedules two ongoing activities per child, which leaves more time for her, but it also leaves more time to be closer to the children and have more quality time with them.\n\n\u2022 **Learn to say \"no.\"** Have a response ready and practiced for the times you will want to say \"no.\" \"I'd love to join your board, but I'm really concentrating during this break on xyz, and I need to stay focused on that.\"\n\n### SABBATICAL ROBBER OR GIFT?\n\nMary Pat gave voice to a worry, saying, \"I live in fear that someone I know will get sick or will need me and will take me away from these lovely days and my peaceful pattern.\" But, as the next story shows, what may seem like a Sabbatical Robber can turn out to be a gift.\n\nLeena's father fell ill in England with a stroke while she was on sabbatical, and she was greatly relieved to have the flexibility to travel and spend precious time with him and help him contend with the labyrinth of the British medical system. Her siblings were working and couldn't do it. Also during this time, Leena met Jos\u00e9 as she was preparing to move to a new job in Madrid. She thought of not giving the relationship a chance because it could take her off the track she had already set for the next chapter in her life. Instead she said, \"Why not give it a chance?\" She turned down the job in Madrid, extended her sabbatical, and is now married to Jos\u00e9, the love of her life. For Leena, \"Both meeting a new man and tending to my father were gifts.\"\n\nKim spent a chunk of her break hosting big family events, but, she says, \"I was happy to get all these things scheduled when I wasn't working. I looked forward to hosting the family reunion without having to do it at a fever pitch. Some would call it a Sabbatical Robber, but it wasn't for me.\"\n\n### LESSONS LEARNED\n\n**Give yourself permission to say \"no.\"** Don't be flattered into accepting roles you don't really want. \"Keep your ego out of it,\" says Marvin. Kim's advice is to look for your gut reaction when the request comes. You may be flattered at first, but does your stomach tighten or your subconscious signal a warning about overload? Have a clear set of goals and stick to them.\n\nFor her Reboot Break, Kim left one non-profit board, joined another, and turned down several more. The most difficult conflict was being asked to play a major role in organizing an environmental conference that would have national impact. \"I knew they needed skills like mine to get it done,\" she says. \"But I didn't want to do it because it would be 24\/7. It is important work, and it would have been wonderful to be part of it, but at a different stage of my life. My time off has taught me that I don't want to go back into all that stress. I'm seeing this from the standpoint of how hard it is to do it, rather than the challenge and glory that I would have loved before.\"\n\n**Make time for yourself and realize that it's okay to take the time.** You've earned it. You are doing something important. It's part of a life cycle. In the book _How to Get What You Want and Want What You Have,_ author John Gray talks about having to be happy in all aspects of your life to be happy overall. You need a balance, which includes time for yourself, especially on a sabbatical. Absorb this and make it your own.\n\n**Keep your goals clearly in mind.** You may choose not to stick to those goals, but that should be a mindful decision.\n\n**Reframe feelings of cultural and family guilt.** One solution is to give family members a role in your sabbatical. Ask them to do something they are good at, such as researching travel on the Internet. Negotiate with your spouse about your time away. Cut a deal on chores. Share your time off with your family: take them with you to museums, on trips, or on other adventures.\n\n**Learn to do the rockwork first and fill in with the sandwork.** Linda, a therapist, tells her clients to envision a big jar into which you must put a pile of rocks and a pile of sand. If you start with the sand, there won't be room for the rocks. If the rocks go in first, the sand can be filled in around the rocks and there will be space for both. Brandon does his writing in the morning when he is fresh and saves routine tasks for the \"least desirable part of the day.\" He says, **\"I save the best parts of the day for myself.\"**\n\n###   EXERCISES\n\n##### _Exercise 8-1: Identify Your Potential Robbers_\n\n\u2022 Name the people or forces who might intrude on your sabbatical plans.\n\n\u2022 Think through what their requests might be and whether you want to agree.\n\n##### _Exercise 8-2: Practice Saying \"No\"_\n\n\u2022 Write down a gracious \"no\" response to each request you would refuse.\n\n\u2022 Practice saying the responses in front of a mirror.\n\n##### _Exercise 8-3: (Tell Yourself) Look How Far I've Come_\n\n\u2022 As described in this chapter, write down your sabbatical goals, then _What I've Done to Get Here,_ then _What I've Done on My Sabbatical Thus Far._\n\n\u2022 Assess whether you are being true to your goals. If you are lagging or off track, consider whether you want to change the goals or how you spend your time.\n\n\u2022 If you do want to change, write down the changes.\n\n## | CHAPTER 9 |\n\n## _\"You're Taking a What?\"  \nLife with Someone on Sabbatical_\n\n\"The person who says it cannot be done  \nshould not interrupt the person doing it.\"\n\n\u2014 _Chinese Proverb_\n\nRachel found her mother's Reboot Break a little stressful. Nancy started flying all over the country to attend Rachel's college lacrosse games with other dedicated parents and fans\u2014a treat for both mother and daughter. But Rachel soon found she had to remind her mom constantly that she, not Rachel, was the one on a Reboot Break.\n\nNancy was excited to spend time with her daughter and suggested a mother\/daughter trip every week. Meanwhile, Rachel's academic and athletic schedule left her no time for an adventure in Chicago, a drive up the New England coast, or a trip to visit Great-Aunt Ginny.\n\n\"Mom!\" Rachel would explain, \"I have to go back with the team, and I can't just take a day or two off with you just because you have time to spare.\"\n\nRachel did like having her mom at the games and hated to ask her to restrain her enthusiasm, but Nancy's free time sometimes evoked in Rachel a sense of uncomfortable responsibility. Nancy wanted Rachel's constant attention, and Rachel couldn't always comply. Rachel felt some of her twenty-year-old independence threatened as she tried to balance her time between her mother's newfound freedom and her own life as a college student.\n\n**It can be challenging to live with someone on sabbatical. It also can be delightful.** From the moment of the announcement of the break until the end, some of life's normal rhythms and patterns are changed, and adjustments are necessary by everyone in the family.\n\nThis chapter is for both the sabbatical takers and those closest to them. It contains observations, stories, and advice for all. We urge you to share it with your spouse or partner, children, and others who live with you or are very close to you.\n\n### FIRST REACTIONS BY LOVED ONES TO YOUR ANOUNCEMENT\n\nReactions when the intention to take a Reboot Break is first announced may be \"You're taking a _what?\"_ accompanied by surprise, jealousy, shock, worry, happiness and support, anger, or all of these. These emotions are normal, and in every case everyone wonders how the sabbatical will go\u2014both for them and their loved ones.\n\nDale, a New Zealander in her late twenties, planned to leave her office job for four months to travel to India. When she announced her plan at home, her parents were shocked. They could hardly disguise their discomfort and disapproval. Their professionally successful and normally responsible daughter was walking out on a small company that depended on her. She had a future there. What was she doing? \"That's not how we raised her,\" they lamented.\n\nDale tried to tell them that this time off from work was something she needed and longed for, and that she had cleared it with her boss and figured out with him how her work would get done. The company could manage. She would come back as a better, more committed employee. Her future was intact. Her father was unconvinced and quite upset.\n\nDale's boyfriend, on the other hand, was very supportive. \"Tama, my boyfriend at the time, was really keen on my going,\" she says, \"He thought that I worked too much and that my life was imbalanced. Perhaps he just wanted me to get a life!\"\n\nWhen Mike announced his Reboot Break to his wife Myra, she smiled broadly. She knew what it meant: they would be planning an extended community service trip to Costa Rica. As a biology teacher, she had summers free, but Mike worked in real estate. The only holdup in their plans had been Mike's reluctance to ask for time off. Now he had done it, and they could go.\n\nConstance lost her job and decided to take a meaningful break before looking for another. She and her husband were within ten years of retirement, and she wanted to explore possible ideas. She told her husband the news, somewhat proudly, certain that it was a mature approach. Her eyes shone as she talked about the fun she would have and the trips she would take sleuthing out places.\n\nHer joy met stony silence. He was jealous. He would be toiling while she played and worked on their future. Furthermore, he was hurt that she hadn't consulted more with him.\n\nWhat reactions do you think you will encounter when you announce your Reboot Break? How will you respond to these emotions?\n\n#### YOUR FIRST RESPONSES\n\nCommunicate with and include your family. **Early communication with loved ones can help set the Reboot Break on a positive course and determine its success.** One needs allies and supporters, not surprised naysayers or Sabbatical Robbers.\n\nTo prevent a rocky start, contemplate out loud taking a Reboot Break, so it's not a complete surprise. When you announce your decision, be as comprehensive and clear as you can about your plans and goals, and how your family or significant other will be included. Be open to ideas and changes you could make that still meet your goals.\n\nTalk about expectations on all sides. You will run up against a brick wall if you make it sound like the agenda is entirely yours. By the same token, you don't want to hear relief from your loved one that you can now take over childcare or another major task. At least you want to be able to talk it out when that is suggested. Whatever the initial reaction, you will want to be ready to talk about your ideas and get advice. You will need to plan well for this discussion. Do some of the planning in Chapters 3 and 4 so you can respond to initial concerns about finances, what you will do, what they will do, what you will do together, and your future after your time off. For example, you may need responses like these:\n\n\u2022 _Here's how we can do it financially._\n\n\u2022 _No, I'm not going off by myself for the whole time. There will be lots of family time._\n\n\u2022 _Yes, Mom, I'm being responsible in giving up my job. Lots of people do this and end up in jobs they like much better._\n\n\u2022 _Yes, I know what I'm doing. Even though I've lost my job, I am taking time to figure out how I can move into a more satisfying line of work._\n\n\u2022 _Yes, I'm going to take a sabbatical and I want you to do it too, so we can travel together. Now is the time._\n\n\u2022 _Yes, I'm going to take time off now to take a breather before my last years of work. It's time to lay the groundwork for the move to Florida we've discussed._\n\n### SETTING EXPECTATIONS\n\nYour assumptions about what a Reboot Break is and what it can include may differ from those of your partner, spouse, or family members\u2014particularly when it comes to his or her role.\n\nWhen Alexandra told her husband that she had been let go from her job in education administration, she was understandably hurt and angry. But when she told him, \"I'm leaving in two days for three weeks in St. Lucia in the Caribbean so I can do yoga and relax and figure out what to do next,\" he was shocked.\n\nAfter Roger recovered a bit, he started to get into the spirit of things and said, \"That sounds great. I'll make the arrangements to go with you. We can get someone to stay with the kids. I may join you a day or so after you get there, but I won't be far behind with my swim fins in hand. We'll have a wonderful time together.\"\n\n\"Not so fast,\" came the reply. \"I'm going alone. I need this time by myself to decompress and get over this blow. You need to stay home with the kids.\"\n\nSabbatical takers plan activities to fulfill _their_ needs. If there is no early and explicit communication about developing the plans and describing the role of the spouse or partner, the spouse or partner will naturally have his or her own ideas of what it means. Roger thought it meant he was going too.\n\nSudden job loss can upset normal communications. Alexandra usually consulted with Roger on travel and other issues, and they planned together. But, in this case there was less communication than usual.\n\nAlexandra ended up going to the Caribbean alone, but she extended her stay by a week and Roger joined her for the second part of her trip. They figured out that she could continue to take a break from work rather than start looking for a new job immediately, and he encouraged her to think about starting her own business. She did just that a few months later by establishing a consulting firm, and she has been thriving in the change and new challenge.\n\nWhen asked to describe the most stressful thing for him about his then-girlfriend's, now wife's, break, Paul replied, \"I wanted to be with Cathy to travel and explore new things with her, but I had a business to run. I also had my own routines, being one of the 'regular guys' playing tennis. My routines were disrupted, and I was conflicted. I had my own life to live. We had to work at keeping things in balance.\"\n\nCathy relates that Paul had those concerns about his time because he envisioned that Cathy would be totally free from other obligations and wanting to spend every day with him. The dilemma was soon solved when Cathy set forth a very busy schedule for her Reboot Break that had less \"Paul time\" than he expected. He was taken aback at first, but Cathy's written schedule set the expectations, and it worked out well for both of them. The highlight was a month-long trip to France that turned out to be a mini-sabbatical for Paul.\n\nSometimes there is an expectation\u2014as described in the Sabbatical Robbers chapter\u2014that the person taking a break will have plenty of time to take over childcare and extra household duties. The break taker often has an entirely different expectation of how his or her time will be used. They both see it as free time to be filled, but their agendas are far apart. The only way to deal with this is to get it out on the table upfront and talk it through.\n\nThen there's the expectation of travel and adventures together. We talked to Carol about her husband, Mark's, academic sabbaticals. As a professor and ordained minister, he is fortunate to have taken two sabbaticals and has another one coming up. Clearly, Mark and Carol had differing expectations. Here's a bit of the interview with Carol:\n\n**Question:** Tell me about when Mark is on sabbatical. How is it for you?\n\n**Answer:** Every time he takes a sabbatical, I can't wait for it to be over.\n\n**Question:** Why?\n\n**Answer:** He says, \"Where's my lunch?\" I don't do lunch. I have my own schedule. He is underfoot. Also, he never plans for us to go somewhere special. I think of being on sabbatical as being in a special place. We just stay home.\n\n**Question:** Does he involve you in planning the time off?\n\n**Answer:** Never.\n\nCarol's answers were somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but they do provide insight into some of the issues for family members that can be assuaged with planning and discussing expectations.\n\n#### RESPONSES\n\n**It is exceptionally important to discuss expectations on both sides.** The sabbatical taker must set forth his or her goals and what that means in terms of practical, everyday activities. He should talk about expectations for himself and family members. It should be a discussion, not an ultimatum. It is good to talk about what you will and won't do. For example, \"I will spend more time with the kids, but I will not take over their childcare. Please do not cancel those arrangements.\" Or, \"I expect to clean the attic and would love to have your help and advice on a couple Saturday mornings.\"\n\nThe family members should be clear about their expectations and assumptions as well, and ask as many questions as necessary. The idea is to avoid frustration by having open, specific communication from the beginning. This may sound like drudgery, but it can lay the groundwork for similar conversations as the Reboot Break develops. It will certainly help avoid misunderstanding and disappointment over differing expectations.\n\n### VOICES OF FAMILY MEMBERS\n\nIn our interviews, we heard stories with a range of scenarios\u2014both highs and lows\u2014that illustrate what those close to someone on a break may be feeling. The next story is a best-case scenario, in which assumptions about the Reboot Break matched and worked out well.\n\nSteve was downsized in March from a technology company in Boise, Idaho. His whole unit's jobs went to Taiwan. The workers were let go in groups, and he was the second to last group, so he and Teresa had known that he would soon be out of a job. In fact, Teresa had been looking forward to having Steve home for awhile. He had been in maintenance before he turned to microchip manufacturing, and he was very handy around the house. She wasn't anxious for him to find another job immediately.\n\nFortunately, Steve had the same idea. He had so many projects at home and at their small cabin that he couldn't wait to get started. He decided to take a break and not look for work right away. Also, he wanted to think about what kind of work to seek next. Teresa thought that was great.\n\nWe asked if Steve was underfoot at home, and Teresa said, \"Not at all. I loved having him at home. It was terrific that he could do all the little things and also the big projects we had been talking about for years.\" Steve was most appreciative of how supportive Teresa was of his not working. She kept telling him that he didn't need to rush back to work, that she was very comfortable with his work break. They had the income from her job and could get along, at least for awhile.\n\nIn the summer, he started a new job, but it was a false start. Teresa welcomed him back home full time with open arms. She still had the attitude that his being home was highly valuable to the family, not just for the handyman aspect, but also everything related to family logistics, including having family and young grandchildren nearby. \"I always thought he'd make a great house husband,\" said Teresa, smiling. Steve's view, also expressed with a smile, was, \"I liked the role for a time, but not that title.\"\n\nSteve figured out in the course of his Reboot Break that he wanted to return to maintenance, his original field. In November, he started a new job maintaining the dorms at the university. He counts both the layoff and the Reboot Break as positives in his life. Teresa agrees.\n\n#### YOUR LOVED ONES' WORRIES AND FEARS\u2014SOME COMMON THEMES\n\nIt is not uncommon for worries and fears to creep in during a Reboot Break, not to ruin it, but just to be there as a tension sometimes, often related to how the expectations are playing out. Worries and fears fall into two categories: family members may worry about their loved ones taking time off from work, and they may worry about themselves. Sometimes they express these feelings openly, sometimes they do not. So it is important to be sensitive to both spoken and unspoken worries. Some common ones follow.\n\n#####  _Concerns for the Sabbatical Taker_\n\n**Boredom.** _\"What will she DO all day?\"_ Angus agreed that it was time for Kim to leave her current job, but he wasn't so sure about her not taking another. They could manage without the income, but wouldn't she get frustrated or bored without the daily challenge? The boys were in college, so demands at home had diminished. Then they moved\u2014 downsized from a home and yard sized for two boys to a house with half the space and in need of serious remodeling. Now it seemed fortunate that Kim wasn't working. She coordinated the moves and the contractors over fifteen demanding months. Angus continued his job responsibilities and schedule as the founder of a non-profit energy business and foundation.\n\nThey agree it couldn't have been done if both had been working full time\u2014at least not while keeping their relationship and their collective sanity intact. \"We'll never have a leisurely marriage; we're neither of us wired that way,\" Angus says. \"Kim operates at full throttle, whether it's a paying job, a string of non-profit boards, the house remodels, managing a social calendar during the holidays, or all of it at once. I just relax\u2014well, tense up a little less\u2014and hang on.\"\n\nKim told him, \"This is a very deliberate decision for me to learn and have time to reflect. I have goals, and I intend to meet them. I'll be plenty busy. Don't worry about me. This is the gift of time I'm giving myself.\"\n\n**Career.** _\"Will she be okay? Will her career be ruined?\"_ Dale, the New Zealander who went to India on her break, had had a variety of reactions from her parents and boyfriend, both immediately and as the planning developed. Though she continued to receive pushback from her parents, they understood better after she explained, and even became supportive. On the eve of another Reboot Break to India from her job in Washington DC, Dale tells about the first one:\n\n_My Dad grumbled and groaned and gave me many long lectures about facing up to my responsibilities and letting people down at work. It was a sermon once a week for the four months I was planning my trip. Aaahhhhhh! Just quietly though, I know he was proud of my loyalty to the friend I was going over to India to spend time with. I guess he was worried that I would damage my career by taking time off at a critical juncture. He was also worried that I would get sick in India. He's a doctor.My Mum didn't say too much but was quietly supportive. They gave me some money toward my ticket for my birthday, so they couldn't have been too badly opposed._\n\nDale did a great job of easing her parents' concerns and staying in touch. She emailed them frequently, kept a blog about her activities, sent postcards from every city. She filled them in on communications from her office so they'd know that all was well there and that her boss looked forward to her return. She reassured her parents that she wasn't being irresponsible. And she never failed to remark on her continuing good health in communications to her doctor dad.\n\n**Happiness.** _\"Will he like it? Will it work out for him?\"_ Victor's son Benedict warily watched his father plan his time away from work. His father was a workaholic, and Benedict only knew him as such. Sure, they had family time, and he got attention from both of his parents, but his dad was a banker and worked seriously long hours. Benedict worried that his dad wouldn't be happy on his Reboot Break. What would he do with all that time? Would he be frustrated or short tempered? Would he plan major projects to reorganize everything in the house and make him help? Benedict just didn't know what to expect.\n\nBenedict was pleasantly surprised. He had underestimated the power of the gift of time, coupled with both planning and spontaneity. Victor really did stay away from the office and endless hours on the computer and on conference calls. And Benedict was the beneficiary! Victor was very happy, and one of his priorities was to spend time with his son. They had a great time skiing, watching special programs on television, and just being together. Also, Victor acknowledges that Benedict's early concerns reinforced his intention of making the Reboot Break truly a time away from work.\n\n**Fulfillment.** _\"Is he doing what he set out to do and taking advantage of this time?_ Another worry is whether the sabbatical taker is doing enough on sabbatical and living up to his or her own dreams.\n\nKurt had an unexpected but welcome Reboot Break. He had worked for over ten years as a psychiatrist specializing in medications. His division at a prominent university medical school closed, and he found himself with the time he craved to remodel the house he owned with his partner, Perry.\n\nPerry's days off were Monday and Tuesday. That time alone at home was precious to him, but now Kurt was there. It caused a little problem, in that he didn't have his time alone, and also he felt that Kurt was becoming too narrowly focused. Kurt had begun to focus on every detail of the house and the dogs, not\u2014as Perry thought he should\u2014visiting with friends and family, going to the museums he had long wanted to visit, or even planning a great trip.\n\nThe moment that Perry absolutely knew that Kurt needed to broaden his horizons was when Kurt said, \"I'm so glad you are home. The dogs have been following me around and need so much attention. I need a break.\" Of course, the dogs were acting the way they always did, but their needs had become magnified by Kurt as he felt more and more responsible for everything that went on in the house. Perry said that even his chores were taken over by Kurt. Yes, it was nice that he didn't have to clean on his days off and that Kurt always had dinner ready when he got home, but things had gotten out of balance.\n\nAnother story:\n\nPeter, a university professor, took a sabbatical, and his wife thought he was squandering it. He still went to the office and to various university meetings. She worried that he would wake up a few months after the sabbatical and say with unhappiness and regret, \"What did I do with all that time?\"\n\nThis can be delicate. The family member may be dealing with Sabbatical Robbers, mainly that inner voice saying it's not good to be too carefree when others are still working. Or maybe the sabbatical taker hasn't planned well enough and is procrastinating. It is frustrating for the family member, who wants the sabbatical taker to be happy. (Or of course, there's the possibility of simply wanting the loved one less underfoot.) In such cases, it's time to check in about expectations. Is it going as planned? Should there be changes? Is it time to plan something special together?\n\n#####  _Personal Concerns_\n\n**Change.** Life changes when someone is on a Reboot Break. It can impact normal roles and even household tasks, as with Perry and Kurt. It might take the form of a lot of attention all of a sudden, as in the Nancy and Rachel story at the beginning of this chapter. And it can create new demands.\n\nRachel and her sister Sarah thought it was good that their mother had shed the job that kept her at the office such long hours. They loved seeing her happier and loved the rewards. Both girls benefitted from several lengthy mother-daughter trips and lots of wonderful times in between.\n\nBut then there were the matters of Nancy's reboot goals and the roles of her daughters, especially Rachel. Nancy had a few clear goals for her time off, including establishing an exercise regimen and setting up new technological devices. Rachel had not realized that she would be called upon in this regard, but she became, as she tells it, her mother's fitness coach and technology consultant. (\"Rachel, how do I email pictures from my phone and computer?\" \"What are the best exercises for increasing strength in my legs and training for skiing?\")\n\n\"I had to learn how to manage that, \" Rachel says, \"All of a sudden I had to complete all these manual labor tasks that accomplished my mom's cleaning goals and provide what were essentially technology manuals and fitness regimens for her. Then I heard about all the successes and newfound joys: 'Look what I can do now!' At some point, getting hundreds of photos emailed to me after I taught her how to do it made her accomplishments start to seem less thrilling.\"\n\nThere was also the matter of the move. Nancy decided her break was a perfect time to sell the suburban family home, downsize, and move to the city. The downsizing process, which found Rachel making numerous trips to eBay sellers and the Salvation Army, and performing many feats of manual labor, like packing and carrying numerous boxes, convinced Rachel that she'll never buy another non-essential item in her life.\n\nBoth girls were great sports about it all, but a general rule is to be clear in advance about your goals and expectations. It normally doesn't work well to spring major responsibilities or time demands on the people in your life.\n\n**Self-confidence.** _\"Where do I stand?\"_ There was a bit of this in Paul's reaction earlier in this chapter. The partner wants to be supportive and keep up with time-off activities, and may be a bit anxious about how to accomplish that. Or there may be issues of inclusiveness. \"Is my loved one trying to get away from me or just have a growth experience alone? Will I be forgotten in the rush of new learning, new rhythms, and newfound passions? Can I keep up with my partner's new dimensions and explorations as I continue my job and daily routine?\"\n\nThe sabbatical taker needs to be inclusive. Plan special occasions. Call frequently when away. Email may not be sufficient for reassurance, as it can feel less personal.\n\n**Resentment.** Spouses and partners who still must work every day may be envious or angry. They may make more demands of the sabbatical taker to do the household chores, run errands, or take care of the kids. Friends may be envious too that they are not on a Reboot Break.\n\nThe sabbatical taker who gets this kind of pushback may need to have another conversation about expectations.\n\n#####  _A Word on Guilt_\n\nWe addressed guilt in the Sabbatical Robbers chapter, but it comes up here too. The emotional reaction of those at home can cause guilt and anguish for the person on a break, even to the extent of impacting the quality of the Reboot Break. Again, reassurance and communication are crucial so that the family reaction will be less likely to be emotional and engender guilt. If it involves children and a spouse, the spouse can play a key role in explaining the situation to the children.\n\n#####  _Unanticipated Events_\n\nJanie's husband, Scott, was grateful that his wife was on a Reboot Break when he was taken ill, but he was concerned that it would ruin her break. \"I was so worried, but Janie was wonderful about it. She postponed a special trip that was to have kicked off her leave, and it became something to look forward to as the scheduled time off wound down. It was so great to know that Janie was there for my initial hospitalization and all my doctors' appointments without her having to arrange to be away from work. It was always so uncomfortable for her when she was working to take time off for family matters. I know she would have done it, but it was just better this way. Though it was a down time for us with my uncertain health, we were close and less stressed than if she had been torn between work and being with me. Janie's focus, lack of stress, and time\u2014just the gift of time\u2014brought us through the crisis of my heart attack in beautiful shape.\"\n\nReboot Breaks\u2014just like life\u2014have surprises. You need to be able to make adjustments along the way and sometimes change priorities, while still holding on to your goals as much as possible. The best way to accommodate change is to be in open and honest communication with your loved ones and others who are affected.\n\n### ADVICE FOR THE SABBATICAL TAKER\n\nThese points summarize what you can do during the Reboot Break to make it a positive experience for your loved ones. Remember that, while your spirit is high, your loved ones are facing the same old pressures at work and home.\n\n\u2022 Keep talking, informing, sharing, and asking opinions. Respond to resentments or any other reactions. It's a time to be patient and generous.\n\n\u2022 Remember to check in with how your loved ones are feeling. They won't always express themselves openly without being asked.\n\n\u2022 Anticipate worries loved ones might have about you, about themselves and their role, or about your relationship.\n\n\u2022 Make a regular \"date\" with your significant other.\n\n\u2022 Call and email frequently if you are away.\n\n\u2022 Involve them in the learning you are experiencing, and share as much as you can. This can be a great time for family trips that are longer than normal vacations, if that is possible. Everyone grows and creates memories when time allows it.\n\n\u2022 Be considerate of their time and responsibilities. They don't have the flexibility you have, and they may not always want to do what you want to do. Let them know if you plan to lean on them for major or minor sabbatical goals.\n\n### COPING SKILLS FOR FAMILY MEMBERS\n\nAnd here are some thoughts from us that could be helpful for your loved ones.\n\n\u2022 Say how you are feeling, as positively as possible.\n\n\u2022 Don't lose self-confidence. Your loved one is not deserting you, but just going on a journey of self-discovery.\n\n\u2022 Discuss demands that you think are reasonable to make upon your sabbatical taker as spouse, fellow parent, or significant other, while respecting the reboot goals.\n\n\u2022 Ask to be part of the planning and the plan, but give breathing room.\n\n\u2022 Ask to be part of changes along the way.\n\n\u2022 Plan your own Reboot Break!\n\n\u2022 Be understanding and encouraging.\n\n\u2022 Enjoy the time together.\n\n\u2022 Enjoy the attention\u2014if your parent overly dotes on you and your activities, try to accept it. If you are ill and are able to be with your loved one more than expected, relish it. If you are able to develop a relationship that otherwise might have faltered or been squashed by the everyday rush, bask in it.\n\nTo summarize, the sabbatical experience should be positive for everyone involved. We have given lots of advice here, but the main thing to remember is to communicate, which means listening as well as talking. Remember, the other person has a life too. And you can both enjoy the Reboot Break.\n\n###   EXERCISES\n\n##### _Exercise 9-1: Important Others_\n\n\u2022 List family members, friends, colleagues, and others who might be affected by your sabbatical.\n\n##### _Exercise 9-2: Addressing Concerns_\n\n\u2022 Write about the concerns those people might have and how you would address them.\n\n## | CHAPTER 10 |\n\n## _Living the Lifelong Sabbatical_\n\n\"Learn as though you will live forever;  \nlive as though you will die tomorrow.\"\n\n\u2014 _Mahatma Gandhi_\n\nWe have come to the last chapter, and one we think is most important. **Why would we take time off unless we expected it to change us in some positive way, so that we could truly keep living the lifelong sabbatical,** or at least reap the benefits from it?\n\nIn this last chapter, we come back to our own stories\u2014how the four of us are using what we learned during our sabbaticals in our everyday life. We include other examples as well. We also give you ways to take mini-sabbaticals of a week or a month until you can plan your next Reboot Break.\n\nWe shared with you earlier some of the statistics about the U.S. workforce, but here are more that are relevant to why we need to incorporate permanent changes into our lives, not just a one-time leave or time off from work. The Conference Board, an independent economic research and membership organization, released an extensive report in January 2010 indicating that job satisfaction is at its lowest level in two decades. The report shows that only 45 percent of those surveyed are happy with their work, down from 61.1 percent in 1987, when the survey was first conducted. Through economic boom and bust, the statistics on satisfaction indicate a consistent downward trend.\n\nThese latest statistics on job satisfaction point to the need for us to renew and refresh our perspectives, even if it is in short doses. Most of us cannot just leave our positions or change our bosses, but we can change our attitudes. This chapter will focus on how we can build into our daily lives ways to keep perspective, to be grateful for what we have, and plan for what we need.\n\nClearly, you are not alone. We all are over-committed, over-worked and over-tired\u2014especially if we are trying to balance a career, a family, and our personal lives. And most of us seem to have lives that are unbalanced. This chapter is about keeping our lives in balance and finding ways to enjoy all aspects of life to the fullest.\n\n### TEN THINGS TO TAKE WITH YOU FOR LIVING THE LIFELONG SABBATICAL\n\nJohn had spent six months on a break after leaving a high-pressure corporate position in New York. When he started his Reboot Break, he was burned out and overweight. He vowed that he would change the way he lived his life, if only during the six-month period he was taking off, and he did that. He started playing tennis again, worked out, lost twenty pounds, started eating healthfully, and took time to get to know his family and friends better, as well as taking time to rethink what he wanted to do next. Before he began his next job hunt, he wrote down several things he wanted to keep in his life after he started back to work. One was to stay in shape and the other was to be home for dinner with his kids at least three nights a week and hold Saturdays as family days, no matter what.\n\n_I learned a great deal about myself, as well as my family, during my time off from work, and I wanted to keep that knowledge in my heart. I have changed the way I work and am as a person for the better. It is possible to do if you remember how important the lessons were when you had the time to reflect._\n\nSo what can we do to change our lives for the better? Following are ten things we found that can make a difference. We learned them from our own experiences as well as from the stories of others. These may work for you, or there may be ten other things that work better. **The important thing is to spend time thinking about what is important to you, and then schedule it into your life, just as you do business meetings or visits to the doctor.**\n\n1. **Start journaling** every morning to capture your thoughts, dreams, concerns. It will help you observe yourself on that \"inner journey\" and keep you focused on what's really important to you.\n\n2. **Use the Goals Circle Exercise** at the end of this chapter to identify goals you want to achieve in at least six areas of your life. Do the Goals Circle annually and spend time each year assessing where you are with those goals. Carry the short version of the Goals Circle with you.\n\n3. **Schedule time for yourself into every day, every week, every month.** It can be down time to just listen to music uninterrupted. It can be an \"artist date\" with yourself to explore a museum or park. It can be time to follow your passion. But put it on your calendar just as you would any meeting or appointment.\n\n4. **Practice saying \"no\" to things you really don't want to do.** It is a skill to learn. It is often hard to do so because of guilt or obligation or fear of being rude. Say \"I'll think about it\" or \"I'll get back to you\" if you can't say no right away. Don't say yes right away, even if you want to do something. Practice giving yourself the time to set your priorities, rather than having others set them for you.\n\n5. **Plan longer weekends and evenings out with friends and family.** Get the chores and errands done at other times so when you can take time off, you use it for yourself and doing things you want. Get your family to help out so you're not doing laundry, grocery shopping, or fixing the gate during those times. Alison told us how she set a timer for twenty minutes and got her daughter and son to help sort and organize a closet each day as a family project. Even if it means working late during the week or on other nights or one weekend a month, organize, consolidate, then delegate the tasks.\n\n6. **Plan longer vacations.** Take at least two weeks together and try to do a month every three to five years\u2014or better yet, every year, if you can. Structure it so you are using your time off like the mini-sabbaticals described in Chapter 3.\n\n7. **Simplify, simplify, simplify.** Your office, your closets, your house, your car, your lifestyle. We live at such a hurried pace. And we have too much stuff! Engage your family in this. You can work on one room at a time. Hold a garage sale, sell stuff on eBay. Put the proceeds in your Reboot Break fund. Give things to charity. Don't buy something if you don't need it. Clear the clutter. It will give you the space you need, physically and mentally, to enhance your life.\n\n8. **Pack \"light\"\u2014both physically and mentally.** Practice carrying on luggage for trips on planes. Do one thing at a time. Use less and carry less with you. Leave the baggage behind. This goes along with simplifying your life.\n\n9. **Try one new thing and take some small risk each week.** By taking baby steps, we build the courage to do more. It can be trying a new food or restaurant, taking a course, calling an acquaintance for lunch. It can be wearing something different, walking a new route to work, or exploring a new neighborhood. Try a new sport. Just do something that stretches you. Not everything will be great or even good, but that is part of the learning too.\n\n10. **Nourish yourself during stressful times.** Ask for help. Don't be afraid of what's ahead. Think more about creating your support network\u2014family, friends, colleagues, church members. Give to get. Be generous with yourself and reach out to others. They need you and you need them.\n\n### STORIES OF LIVING THE LIFELONG SABBATICAL\n\n#### OUR STORIES\n\nCathy still writes in her journal every morning to keep her focused and to get her ready for the day. She schedules \"artist dates\" every week to try something new or go to a new place, whether she is home in Santa Fe or on business travel. She carries a \"List Book\" with her goals and adds to or deletes from it to be sure she is doing some of those things she has wanted to do. The categories include Career, Health, Relationships, Creative, Friends and Family, Philanthropy, Finances, and House Design and Maintenance. She also carries her Goals Circle with her in her purse.\n\nCathy spends approximately two days a week on The Santa Fe Group, her strategic consulting company, one day a week on philanthropy and non-profit board work, one day a week on creative pursuits, such as writing, and the rest on fun and time with family and friends. She has empowered her employees to do the day-to-day administration and focuses her efforts on ideas, client generation, and strategic senior-executive-level consulting, which affords her more flexibility.\n\nShe is, of course, at a phase in her life where she can enjoy such freedom, but still continually has to make sure her work and nonprofit involvement doesn't encroach on her creative and relationships time. Learning to say \"no\" has to be practiced every day!\n\n_I plan to trade my house in Santa Fe each year for a house abroad to learn new cultures, languages, and food. Like my fellow Baby Boomers, Idon't really plan to retire. I just want more control over my time and the ability to continue to explore and learn, to spend time with my family and friends, to live life to the fullest._\n\nWhen Rita returned to work from her third sabbatical, it was to be president of a major division of MeadWestvaco, with over 6,000 employees working for her. The challenge was how to manage the responsibilities of the company and still have time for herself. On her time off, Rita had taken up tennis again, learned yoga, spent more time with her family, and reprioritized what she wanted to do with them.\n\nWhen she reentered everyday life, she had her assistant schedule a half hour between appointments to give her time to reflect, scheduled tennis on Friday mornings for an hour on a regular basis, and did yoga on planes and when she was on conference calls and no one could see her. She also put her family first, asking her boss if he was willing to put her on early in the board meeting agenda so she could make it to her son's teacher meeting, for example, which is rarely done in the corporate environment. In an effort to bring more fun into her workplace, she used the holidays as a reason to have everyone dress in costume for an employee luncheon and lots of laughs.\n\nToday, Rita has a portfolio career. One-third of her time is spent serving as a director on corporate boards and coaching clients on how to find their first board position. A second third is dedicated to her passion\u2014giving back. She is involved in numerous not-for-profit activities. The one for which she spends most time is as past chair and board member of Pro Mujer, a microfinance organization dedicated to helping women and children in South and Central America. The last third is for having fun, and that part includes new activities, such as learning Spanish and salsa dancing, as well as writing this book.\n\n_I am working hard at learning to \"be in the moment\" and enjoying the little things in life. I have gone to a lot more shows, plays, museums, and walks this past year. Most important has been the time I have had to spend with friends and family. Each day I think of my favoritequestion: \"When was the last time you did something for the first time?\" Yes, I've had incredible firsts, including trips to Ecuador, Jordan, Spain, and Cuba, attending a sound healing conference in Santa Fe, and snowshoeing and kayaking. But that quote has a much more profound meaning for me. Seeing or doing things for the first time includes how I look at a building that I may have walked by 100 times or how I look at the quality of the sky. Every day is an adventure and a new learning opportunity for me._\n\nIt isn't easy to change our lifelong work styles, and outside factors often intervene. Nancy went back to work with the intention of including important habits from her sabbatical in her new lifestyle. She vowed to take a lunch break every day to get outside in nature and do errands, and to leave the office by 6 pm every day so that she could have a full evening. She also set aside special events on the calendar with her family and friends to keep sacrosanct and looked forward to relaxing weekends. But she has struggled with keeping these promises.\n\nOne big work project derailed her from what was otherwise a successfully balanced lifestyle. Her workaholic tendencies have returned, but less strongly than before, and she has kept to her schedule of special events, like her college reunion and trips with family and friends. Weekends are sometimes relaxing and sometimes taken up with work or other time-consuming responsibilities\u2014the \"keeping up with everything else\" that we all have to do. She's relearning firsthand the importance of putting personal activities on her calendar, such as going to museums and concerts, exercising, and dinners out. She knows she needs a better balance between work, other obligations, and play, and she is striving to achieve it, starting with rereading this chapter periodically!\n\n_You have heard the old adage \"practice what you preach\"! Well, I am trying to do that. But it isn't easy to change habits when external situations make you revert to old ways. It takes courage, consistency of motivation, and a promise to yourself to keep giving yourself the gift of time. I do think it is important to have a clear set of priorities, and to knowhow to say \"no\" to requests for your time. I love doing my Circle Goals in January, then revisiting them from time to time during the year. I still keep my daughters, Sarah and Rachel, as my top priorities. I'm doing volunteer projects in Washington DC, and going to the theatre regularly. One of my main goals is to continue to get out West several times a year, where I experience renewal through the beauty and open sky._\n\nJaye was very concerned about not losing the calm and peace of mind she gained from her time off, along with a sense of connectedness to her full self. Deciding not to go back to a structured corporate job enabled her to have more flexibility to build in the things that were important to her. Jaye increased her involvement with the Harlem Dowling Westside Center, a foster care and adoption agency in New York City, and now serves as vice president. She spends more time with her family, especially her younger nieces and nephews, and sees them every Wednesday for dinner, to keep up with their busy lives. Jaye spent time on her Reboot Break thinking about what really makes her happy, and travel was at the top of the list. She now travels three to four times a year with friends. She schedules events with friends on a regular basis. Her work is intense, so she needs to balance her life with more \"fun\" things to do.\n\nJaye is incorporating the work we've done for this book\u2014the research, learning, forums, community building, websites, and blogs\u2014 into her consulting practice, Breakwater Consulting.\n\n_Seven years ago I took a five-day course on living the life you want. I was obviously ready in many ways to change my life, but I needed the time away to really look at my work and life and clarify what I wanted it to look like going forward. I learned through that process and then the subsequent year off that it is so critical for me to build in little breaks on a regular basis. I try to take some time off every month to renew and refresh myself. If I don't, I feel it and suffer the consequences. This has been one of the most important lessons so far. Seven years later, I am continuing to do it. I find that, for me to be the best person, consultant, and colleague I can be, I must take a step back to learn new things,refresh my thinking, and stimulate my creativity. It shows up obviously in the work I do._\n\n### MINI-SABBATICAL\n\nWe talked about the concept of mini-sabbaticals earlier in the book. While a week, or even a month, doesn't count as a Reboot Break from our point of view, these can serve as shorter refresher breaks to build up to taking more time off. The problem is that most of the week, two weeks, or month you take off can get eaten up by doing pragmatic things or stressful travel or too much activity. In a short time period it is also very hard to detach from work. You still carry your cell phone, PDA, and laptop, and invariably use them. The tips in Chapter 3 should be helpful in this regard.\n\nFollowing are some ideas of what to do with short periods of time off.\n\n#### THINGS TO DO IF YOU ONLY HAVE A WEEK\n\n1. **Don't travel anywhere\u2014vacation at home** and take day trips to explore the area around you so you do not have the added stress of travel involved.\n\n2. **Don't do errands or chores\u2014structure the time off to do just what you want to do:** read, take a class, go to a museum, host a dinner party, go on a hike, go to movies, write in your journal, have lunch with friends, but DON't DO CHORES.\n\n3. **Take an immersion course in a culture, language, or art technique, or go to a spa** \u2014ideally close to home with very little travel.\n\n4. **Take an \"inner journey\" and devote the week to exploring yourself** \u2014see a therapist, a palm reader, an astrologer; read self-help books, meditate, go on a retreat, write in a journal; do yoga, take long walks.\n\n5. **Plan your next Reboot Break** \u2014read this book again, do the exercises and checklists, explore your employer's policies, talk to people who've taken time off, plan what you will do when you take a Reboot Break, get your financial planning started.\n\n**Keep in mind that giving yourself the gift of time has no boundaries.** It can be that quiet moment in a park or a day at the beach or a week devoted to following your dreams. Time is our most precious commodity. Use it wisely.\n\n\"It was actually taking a month off to rent a house in Umbria with friends on my birthday that gave me the impetus to do a Reboot Break,\" said Cathy. She had never taken more than two weeks of vacation at a time since joining the corporate world in 1986. Even then, she always had her BlackBerry with her and called into the office regularly.\n\n_The most enlightened experience I had during the month off in Italy was how well my staff did, once empowered. I told them I wouldn't be calling in or checking emails. I prepared them for what issues might come up and I empowered them to make decisions. I said I would not second-guess them or punish them if I didn't agree with their decisions, and I didn't. They were fabulous and professional, and the experience did two things: It changed the way I managed to be even more collaborative, and it made me realize I would still have an effective, functioning business even when I wasn't actively involved for a while. It did wonders for the staff as well._\n\n#### THINGS TO DO IF YOU ONLY HAVE A MONTH\n\n1. **Rent or trade your house for a house in a different part of the country or world** \u2014anything to get you out of your known environment and the temptation or guilt to do chores or follow your regular routine.\n\n2. **Minimize your contact with work.** Arrange it so you do not have to check emails, call in, or go to meetings. Disconnect. If it is absolutely necessary to connect, make it only one time a week for one hour. Guess what? They can get along without you for that time period. If that is what you fear, reread Chapter 3!\n\n3. **Don't plan a stressful schedule at home or even traveling.** Make time for yourself. Schedule downtime and do different things. If you have to do chores, concentrate them on one day a week. Use the other time to explore, expand, learn\u2014about yourself and the things you've wanted to try.\n\n4. **Plan your time off, or you will end up frittering it away.** Yes, it is nice to sleep late, watch old movies, and read, but don't make that your primary activity. Set goals for what you want to experience and learn. Take risks to do things you've never done. Structure your time so that you get outside your comfort zone, yet give yourself downtime.\n\n5. **Think of taking a month off every year or at least every three to five years.** Make it part of your life.\n\n### THE GOALS CIRCLE EXERCISE\n\nHow many of us have talked about or written New Year's resolutions only to forget them about two weeks later? Then we go right back to our habits, whether they relate to our health, finances, relationships, or work, which results in lives that are not balanced and are therefore unfulfilling. The Goals Circle exercise is about changing your life and putting it back into harmony and balance.\n\nIn the exercise section of this chapter, we're going to ask you to complete a Goals Circle project that will serve as your guide for integrating all aspects of your life and being sure you create a more balanced approach to life. Cathy created this and wrote about it in her book, _The Artist's Way at Work,_ after having used it for several years. Now all the Sabbatical Sisters are creating Goals Circles and sharing them with each other at the beginning of each year. The purpose of the exercise is to balance your life around the most important aspects of it for the coming year. The simple chart is just a circle divided into six or eight pie slices of equal size to remind you to give equal time, or at least mental thought, to them.\n\nLabel the pie slices on the chart with six to eight aspects of your life. Examples might be: career, philanthropy, spirituality or religion, creativity, friends and family, romantic relationships, health and exercise, education, house renovation, or whatever you have on your horizon for the next year. The categories may be for that year only, such as renovating a house, or ongoing, such as health and exercise. Cathy says:\n\n_I usually do this on New Year's Eve or Day, or at least that week. I find a comfortable, quiet place to sit, build a fire, and get my cup of tea and journal or notebook. I first look at what I had said I wanted to do for the past year . . . and I usually have not looked at it for six months. I am always amazed by how much I have accomplished in many areas of my life . . . never 100 percent, but usually 60 to 80 percent, which is great. Somehow, \"lose fifteen pounds\" keeps reappearing on my lists and never quite makes it off! After reflecting on what I had done and what made me happy, I look to see if I want to include any of the existing categories or goals in the new Circle. I then draw my new Circle and begin to first flesh out the categories, then the goals. Some years I have had as many as twelve pie slices, but I havelearned that fewer are better and keep me more focused on what is really important. It doesn't mean that other things are not part of my life or responsibilities, but these six to eight areas should be my real focus for a happy and serene life._\n\nOnce you have decided on the aspects or categories, write five goals for each one that are measurable and obtainable in the next year. They may be as specific as \"redo my resume\" or directional as \"travel to a new country,\" but you should be able to sit down and know at the end of the year whether you obtained them or not.\n\nHere are some example categories and specific goals:\n\n#### FINANCES:\n\n\u2022 Get all financial records entered into a software program like Quicken or Money Management.\n\n\u2022 Read three books on financial management.\n\n\u2022 Meet with a financial planner.\n\n\u2022 Set up a Reboot Break fund and contribute at least $200 to it each month.\n\n\u2022 Pay off credit card balances each month.\n\n#### TIME FOR SELF:\n\n\u2022 Schedule an \"artist date\" each week for an hour.\n\n\u2022 Play basketball or tennis once a week.\n\n\u2022 Go to a concert or music event twice a month.\n\n\u2022 Have a massage once a month.\n\n\u2022 Take a golf weekend to learn or improve my game.\n\nIt may take you a couple of hours, or even days, to come up with five goals for each category, but it is important to do so to stretch yourself. When you are finished, go back and pick out the one goal from each category that is most important for you to do this coming year and put those on another circle. This circle is one you might carry with you and refer to every once in awhile.\n\n\"I recommend putting the larger chart, with five goals each, away for six months, then reviewing it,\" Cathy says. \"Don't try to update or change it . . . just look at it and see where you are against your goals. It is at the end of the year that you want to take the time to reflect.\" What we have learned from doing this for several years in a row is that most people accomplish more of their goals because they have taken the time to think about them and write them down. The process makes one think about all aspects of life and consider how to keep the parts in better balance. Having five goals in each category makes people think about what it would take to achieve their goals. By spending time planning what we want from life, we are more in control of how we realize those goals. We call it \"being present and open\" to what comes along. As we mentioned, the Sabbatical Sisters have taken this a step further by sharing our goals with each other at the beginning of the year. The extra step of verbalizing the goals in a supportive environment makes the goals even more attainable. You might try sharing your Goals Circle with a group of friends or family members whom you trust. You can help each other achieve them!\n\n###   EXERCISES\n\n##### _Exercise 10-1: Ten Things to Do_\n\n\u2022 Write out ten things you want to include in your life on a regular basis.\n\n\u2022 Schedule them into your calendar each week or month.\n\n\u2022 Keep the list in your wallet or purse.\n\n##### _Exercise 10-2: Goals Circle Exercise_\n\n\u2022 Draw your circle with six to eight equal pie slices and categories.\n\n\u2022 Put five goals under each category.\n\n\u2022 Review it every six months.\n\n\u2022 Create a second circle with just the categories and one key goal in each.\n\n\u2022 Put that in your wallet or purse and look at it every once in awhile.\n\n## _Conclusion_\n\nWe have learned a great deal not only from our own sabbaticals but from talking to so many others who have given themselves the gift of time. Below we share some of the best lessons we've learned about planning for and taking time off. To reboot your life, you need perspective, time for growth, rest, and renewal. You need to be in concert with the natural cycles of life.\n\n**Here are some favorite lessons learned by us and those we have interviewed:**\n\n\u2022 Give yourself permission to take time off\u2014don't be afraid.\n\n\u2022 You are not alone; this is emerging as a major trend.\n\n\u2022 You will receive many personal and professional benefits.\n\n\u2022 There are many benefits to your employers and society as a whole.\n\n\u2022 You will want to do this several times.\n\n\u2022 You can incorporate what you learn into your everyday life.\n\n\u2022 Financial planning is critically important.\n\n\u2022 It is important to plan how to handle naysayers, the unexpected, and time robbers.\n\n\u2022 Time is precious; don't waste it.\n\n\u2022 You will know yourself better after your Reboot Break. The inner journey continues.\n\nReading this book is just the beginning of the journey. Join us and other sabbatical takers on our blog to share your thoughts and experiences. You can reach us by going to _www.rebootbreak.com_ to blog and learn about our upcoming retreats held across the United States. Our email address is on the website as well.\n\nGood luck on your journey!\n\nThe Sabbatical Sisters:  \n _Catherine Allen_  \n _Nancy Bearg_  \n _Rita Foley_  \n _Jaye Smith_\n\n## | APPENDIX |\n\n### _Planning Checklist_\n\n#### **PRE-PLANNING**\n\n__ Make the decision to take time off to reboot your life.\n\n__ Begin to keep a journal of your thoughts, ideas, and dreams; write what you want to accomplish.\n\n__ Identify and prioritize your sabbatical dreams and goals.\n\n__ Determine how much time you need on the sabbatical.\n\n__ Tell your spouse, partner, significant other, or friends what you are thinking and include them in the process.\n\n__ Select dates to start and end your sabbatical.\n\n__ Plan when and how to tell your manager, business partner, staff; prepare a script.\n\n__ Have the conversation with everyone who needs to know your plans and discuss the arrangements for the time away.\n\n__ Train staff and make sure there are backups and alternative arrangements for all of your responsibilities.\n\n__ Begin to save and to prepare a budget for your time off.\n\n__ Speak to a financial advisor.\n\n__ Cut unnecessary expenses.\n\n__ Explore alternative ways to generate income (rental properties, selling things on eBay, part-time job or consulting opportunities, etc.).\n\n__ Prepare your house or apartment for rental if leaving on an extended trip.\n\n__ Have all medical exams and doctors' visits before you leave.\n\n__ Sign up for classes that you will want to take.\n\n__ Research places to volunteer, visit, travel.\n\n__ Make sure your passport is up to date if you will travel outside the country.\n\n__ Make flights and other travel arrangements.\n\nYou can set up a section in your notebook for plans that you develop. Include a timetable. For example, you might include the category of Reconnecting with Family and Friends. Part of that may be phone calls as well as dinners together. Part of it may involve travel. List these things separately with rough dates.\n\nCreate two calendars, starting with a wall calendar to write in your main events, such as travel, classes, and big projects, so you can visualize the main events. The second calendar is the planning calendar, which will be full of planning reminders and event activities. It can be online, on a white board, or whatever works for you. Just develop a system that helps in your process and doesn't end up stressing you out. You need to be able to organize tasks and information for the outcome you seek.\n\n#### **DETAILED PLANNING CHECKLIST**\n\nHere are more detailed planning tips that have been taken from scores of sabbatical takers. We recommend, if possible, that you start planning one year in advance of a Reboot Break, but it can be compressed as time dictates. Create your own list that meets your needs. This is just an example.\n\n##### **Planning: One Year Before**\n\n  _Goal Setting and Research_\n\n\u2022 Build a wish list of all the things you would ideally like to do.\n\n\u2022 Begin to log and journal your plans, hopes, and dreams. Capture them so that you do not forget. This will be fun to look back over as you get closer and after you have returned.\n\n\u2022 Include your spouse\/partner in the decision-making process by sharing ideas, hopes, and dreams.\n\n\u2022 Involve family and friends in the research of aspects of your sabbatical to share the experience and help to ease their and your anxiety.\n\n\u2022 Speak to others who have taken time off or done some of the things you would like to do.\n\n\u2022 Map out a plan of what needs to get done and break it into manageable chunks over a year's time.\n\n  _Travel and Educational_\n\n\u2022 Develop criteria for picking where you want to travel, if you want to travel. This can be to see nearby friends and family, explore a new place in your country, or travel abroad.\n\n\u2022 If traveling abroad, research all you can about the country, the culture, and the people.\n\n\u2022 Look at websites that offer options for volunteering or working abroad in countries of your choice. (See Resources in this Appendix.)\n\n\u2022 Family travel planning is important to start early\u2014 _www.suite101.com_ can help you with a wide range of options and information to help you think through the many steps of preparing yourself and your family and selecting places to go.\n\n\u2022 Learning about all the possible travel options in itself is a fun project. A good place to start is _www.thetravellerslounge.co.uk._\n\n\u2022 Begin studying a foreign language at home or build that into your plan. There are many options where you can live with a family in country or in reasonable accommodations that the language schools will provide. To get started, you can check out _www .languagelearningabroad.com,www.abroadlanguages.com, www.cesalanguages.com, and www.language-learning.net._\n\n  _Work_\n\n\u2022 Find out what your company's sabbatical or personal\/family leave policies are.\n\n\u2022 Talk to colleagues who have taken a sabbatical from your company.\n\n\u2022 Begin to build a plan for transitioning your work while you are away.\n\n\u2022 Identify who will step into your shoes.\n\n\u2022 Document what you are currently working on and what needs to be tracked during your absence.\n\n\u2022 Plan what you will say to your manager and when.\n\n\u2022 Prepare an email (or draft one for your boss) communicating your plans to your team, your organization, and your clients.\n\n  _Financing_\n\n\u2022 Explore options to finance your time off if you are not getting paid while away.\n\n\u2022 Speak to your financial advisor and begin putting things in place.\n\n\u2022 Begin a Reboot Break fund.\n\n\u2022 Consider what costs can be cut now.\n\n\u2022 See the Funding Your Freedom section in this Appendix.\n\n  _Home_\n\n\u2022 If traveling for an extended period of time, prepare your house for rental or sale. Plan longer-term projects and repairs. Consider house-swapping for a while, as another option. (See Resources for home-swap websites.)\n\n##### **Eight Months Before**\n\n  _Travel and Educational_\n\n\u2022 Contact and apply to academic programs.\n\n\u2022 Apply to special volunteer programs at home or abroad that require an application process and advance deposits to hold your place.\n\n\u2022 Look at career sites to get you thinking more about how you will be using your time while away. Some fun career sites include _www.escapefromcubiclenation.com_ and _www.gapyearforgrownups.co.uk._\n\n\u2022 Research travel sites to help you book inexpensive housing, such _aswww.hostelbookers.com._\n\n\u2022 Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) is a popular way to see the world and earn as you go. You will need to get certified; _www.online-education.net_ can help, as can _www.transitionsabroad.com._\n\n  _Work_\n\n\u2022 Cleaning can begin at work. It might be helpful to get rid of unnecessary piles and old project folders to clear the way for others to use your office during your absence. It will also make your office more welcoming when you return, paving the way for new ideas, projects, and energy.\n\n  _Financing_\n\n\u2022 Contribute to your Reboot Break fund.\n\n\u2022 Continue cutting expenses.\n\n  _Home_\n\n\u2022 Clear clutter and get your house ready for others or identify projects that you may want to do during your sabbatical.\n\n\u2022 If renting or swapping your home, there may be things that need to be repaired or adapted for your temporary house guests. It's a good time to do some of the things that had been waiting to be done anyway.\n\n  _Other_\n\n\u2022 Practice taking a mini-sabbatical for a week or even just a weekend. Disconnect from your computer and BlackBerry.\n\n##### **Six Months Before**\n\n  _Travel and Educational_\n\n\u2022 Update all passports and necessary travel documents. Most countries will require that your passport be valid for six months past your entry into their countries.\n\n\u2022 Check to see if a visa is needed.\n\n\u2022 Make extra copies of your passport; carry one with you and ask someone else to hold a copy as a backup.\n\n\u2022 If needed, arrange for your children's schooling when traveling abroad or elsewhere in the United States.\n\n  _Work_\n\n\u2022 Speak to your boss\/manager about your desire to take a sabbatical. Present a well-thought-out, positive plan covering what you want to do, why you want to do it, and the advantages and opportunities for the company. Describe your ideas and suggestions about how you will make sure that your work is covered and how others will benefit from the new experiences and responsibilities. Get buy-in from your boss, and after the meeting send an email to both of you that summarizes all that was discussed.\n\n\u2022 Begin to implement a training plan for those who will be covering for you while you are away.\n\n\u2022 Keep a printed copy of the company's sabbatical policy in case you need to refer to it while you are away.\n\n  _Financing_\n\n\u2022 Meet with your insurance broker to make sure you have the insurance you need to protect you during your time away.\n\n\u2022 Continue adding to your Reboot Break fund.\n\n\u2022 Research and prepare to have your bills paid online or through a trusted friend or professional.\n\n  _Home_\n\n\u2022 If needed, begin your research on storing options for furniture or other personal items you would feel better about storing for safety. While away, you don't want to have to worry about your personal valuables.\n\n##### **Three Months Before**\n\n  _Travel and Educational_\n\n\u2022 Get in touch with people you want to visit if you have not yet done so.\n\n\u2022 Begin to think about what you want to pack to take with you on any travels. (Remember to \"pack light.\")\n\n\u2022 Register for any courses or programs that you want to participate in while on your sabbatical.\n\n\u2022 Get an international driver's license.\n\n\u2022 Buy a railway card for the countries you are visiting.\n\n  _Work_\n\n\u2022 Train staff who will be taking over during your absence.\n\n\u2022 Plan for how your work will be handled and by whom, arrange for and train any temporary help you need while you are away, and make sure your liability insurance will be in effect during your absence.\n\n  _Especially For Business Owners, Entrepreneurs, and Sole Practitioners_\n\n\u2022 Figure out who will be running the show and how the work will be handled.\n\n\u2022 Arrange for and train any temporary help you need while you are away.\n\n\u2022 Make sure your liability insurance is in effect while you are away.\n\n  _Financing_\n\n\u2022 Make a will or update your existing one, and let people know where you will be and when.\n\n\u2022 Set up systems for personal finances and for paying monthly bills.\n\n  _Home_\n\n\u2022 Work on identifying ways to rent your house or apartment. Start by checking with local real estate agents. Also see listings in the Resources section of this Appendix.\n\n\u2022 Prepare your house or apartment for rental by identifying what should be packed and what stays.\n\n\u2022 Make doctor and dentist appointments, make sure you are up-to-date on your checkups to avoid any unnecessary health issues.\n\n\u2022 Clarify your health coverage for traveling locally and abroad.\n\n\u2022 Identify a place to store your car.\n\n\u2022 Identify someone to care for pets, and perhaps plants, while you are away.\n\n##### **Two Months Before**\n\n  _Travel and Educational_\n\n\u2022 Arrange for an international calling card. (Once there, get in-country calling cards.)\n\n  _Work_\n\n\u2022 Build and implement a communication plan for staff and customers\/clients.\n\n\u2022 Begin to transition things to those who will be working on your behalf and test out the new approach and process.\n\n  _Financing_\n\n\u2022 Speak to the bank about how to access your money while abroad.\n\n\u2022 Automate paying your bills.\n\n\u2022 Identify friends, family members, an accountant, or small business services to pay your bills if they cannot be automated, and to handle affairs when you are away. Bills can be sent directly to them.\n\n\u2022 Sign and designate a power of attorney.\n\n\u2022 Make arrangements for paying taxes if you will be away during tax time.\n\n  _Home_\n\n\u2022 Pack the house.\n\n\u2022 Look into voicemail services so you can retrieve calls while away or arrange for an international cell phone.\n\n\u2022 International calling options also might include SKYPE or resources like MagicJack or Vonage. Research and secure a service that is easily accessible and works with your budget.\n\n\u2022 Speak to your doctor about getting a six-month supply or more of your medications, and research sources for getting it while away from home, should that become necessary.\n\n\u2022 Find out about getting an absentee ballot for voting, should you plan on being away during any election.\n\n\u2022 Set up a blog and learn to post pictures and stories there or on sites like _www.snapfish.com or www.flickr.com._\n\n\u2022 Get your camera in working order and get extra memory cards and batteries.\n\n##### **One Month Before**\n\n  _Travel and Educational_\n\n\u2022 Look into and sign up for local classes and activities, such as yoga.\n\n\u2022 Get a library card!\n\n\u2022 Pack light. You want to be free to move around and not be encumbered by heavy bags and items you don't really need.\n\n\u2022 Make sure you have a list of phone numbers and email addresses for all your friends, family, and important contacts, including your lawyer, accountant, plumber, electrician, and anyone you might need to speak to while you are away.\n\n\u2022 Check that all of your camera, computer, and telephone equipment is ready to go and charged for action.\n\n\u2022 Make sure you have the right adaptors for different electric power if you are traveling.\n\n  _Work_\n\n\u2022 Introduce the person taking on your role or working in your company to clients and staff to ease the transition.\n\n  _Financing_\n\n\u2022 Cancel or suspend your newspaper or magazine subscriptions, gym memberships, and any other unnecessary expenses while you are going to be away. Suspend your phone service.\n\n  _Home_\n\n\u2022 Arrange for mail hold or redirection to a friend's or family member's address.\n\n\u2022 Arrange for plumbers, electricians, and handymen to be available while you are gone.\n\n\u2022 Notify your utility company if services should be suspended for a period of time.\n\n\u2022 Do all the grooming you typically like to do (hair, nails, etc.).\n\n## _Funding Your Freedom_\n\nFollowing are some financial checklists that can help you plan for, and fund, your Reboot Break. Use them to capture where you are today financially and where you want to be while on your break.\n\n  Monthly Fixed Expenses: _(Create columns for current spending and planned changes)_\n\nMortgage #1\n\nMortgage #2\n\nAuto Loan\/Lease #1\n\nAuto Loan\/Lease #2\n\nOther Auto\/Truck Loans\n\nHome Equity Loan\n\nDebt Consolidation Loan\/Payment\n\nStudent Loan(s)\n\nRent\n\nCondo or Homeowner Association Fee\n\nElectricity Oil or Gas Heat Water\n\nGarbage Collection Sewer\n\nPhone (land line)\n\nCell Phones, Pagers, PDA\n\nCable\/Satellite TV\/TiVo Boxes\n\nInternet Access\n\nCar Insurance\n\nHealth Insurance\n\nChild Support\n\nAlimony\n\nMedical\/Dental Payments\n\nRetirement Savings\n\nEmergency Fund Savings\n\nOther\n\n**Total Monthly Fixed expenses:**\n\n  **Money to Set Aside for Recurring expenses:** _(Create columns for total amount, monthly savings amount, and planned changes)_\n\nProperty Taxes\n\nSchool Taxes\n\nState and Local Taxes\n\nQuarterly Income Taxes (Local, State and Federal)\n\nHome Insurance\n\nLong-Term Care Insurance\n\nLife Insurance\n\nCar License Renewal\n\nCar Maintenance\n\nHome Repair\n\nVeterinarian\n\nGifts\n\nVacation\/Travel\n\nTuition and School Costs\n\nTithing\n\nMemberships\n\nCharitable Donations\n\nOther\n\n**Total Monthly Savings for Periodic Expenses:**\n\n  **Monthly Variable expenses:** _(Create columns for current spending and planned changes)_\n\nCredit Card #1\n\nCredit Card #2\n\nCredit Card #3\n\nCredit Card #4\n\nOther Credit Cards\n\nStore Cards\n\nGas Cards\n\nOther Credit Lines\n\nGroceries\n\nEating Out\n\nSchool Lunches\n\nHousehold Supplies\n\nGas\/Tolls\/Parking\n\nPublic Transportation\n\nHealth Club Membership\n\nDaily Coffee\/Snacks\n\nLaundry\/Dry Cleaning\n\nPet Care and Supplies\n\nBaby Items\n\nChildrens' Allowances\n\nHaircuts\/Grooming\/Manicures, etc\n\nCosmetics\n\nClothes\n\nEntertainment (movies, rentals, on-demand, sports events, theatre, concerts, day trips)\n\nCDs\n\nClub Dues\n\nDaycare\/Babysitters\n\nLessons\n\nField Trips\n\nATM Fees\n\nComputer\/Online Expenses\n\nDonations\/Tithes\n\nLawn Service\n\nHousekeepers\n\nEmergency Savings\n\nTobacco\/Alcohol\n\nSubscriptions\n\nPostage\n\nOther\n\n**Total Monthly Variable expenses:**\n\n  **Monthly Income Sources:**\n\nNet Income #1 (income less taxes, Social Security, Medicare)\n\nNet Income #2\n\nNet Income #3\n\nRental Property\n\nAlimony\n\nChild Support\n\nPensions\n\nRetirement Income\n\nSocial Security\n\nInvestment Income\n\nOther Income\n\n**Total Take-Home Income:**\n\n## _Organizations That Get It_\n\nSabbaticals have long been associated with universities and religious organizations. Over the last decade there have been a rising number of corporations, law firms, service organizations, and not-for-profit organizations that embrace the benefits of sabbaticals or Reboot Breaks.\n\nBelow is a list of companies and firms that have implemented some form of a sabbatical program for their employees. The majority of programs were created to offer a fully paid Reboot Break after five, seven, or ten years of service and with an average duration of one to three months. Some programs offer six months to a year. Many other organizations do not have formal programs, but, when approached by employees in good standing, will allow them to customize a personal Reboot Break\u2014while holding their jobs for their return. Hewlett Packard (HP), for example, does not have a formal program, but employees can create their own. At Citibank, one can request up to one year unpaid leave.\n\nIn times of economic difficulty, some firms implement temporary programs to help them manage costs while still retaining key talent. Furlough programs offer employees the opportunity to take time off, unpaid or partially paid, but with a guarantee that their jobs will be waiting for them upon their return. Accenture offered such a one-time program. Workers who agreed to an 80 percent pay cut were allowed a six to twelve month sabbatical with benefits. Cisco staffers who accepted a two-thirds pay cut were offered the chance to volunteer at one of twenty-nine pre-selected not-for-profit organizations. Cisco management expected thirty people to take advantage of this program; 300 signed up. In the recent economic downturn, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, along with other law firms, paid newly hired lawyers one-third of their starting salaries not to show up for a year. They retained talent while giving their new employees a gift of time. Some were expected to work pro bono for nonprofit organizations, build experience, and meet potential contacts and future clients.\n\nFor more on organizations that offer formal sabbatical programs, visit our website, _www.rebootbreak.com._\n\nHere is a list of some companies and firms that have implemented some form of a sabbatical program for their employees:\n\nAA Appointments\u2014www.aaappointments.com\n\nAARP\u2014www.aarp.org\n\nAbacus Planning Group\u2014www.abacusplanninggroup.com\n\nAccenture\u2014www.accenture.com\n\nActel\u2014www.actel.com\n\nAddleshaw Goddard\u2014www.addleshawgoddard.com\n\nAdobe Systems\u2014www.adobe.com\n\nAdvanced Micro Devices (AMD)\u2014www.amd.com\n\nAlston & Bird\u2014www.alston.com\n\nAmerican Century Investments \u2014www.americancentury.com\n\nAmerican Express\u2014www.home.americanexpress.com\n\nAmmex\u2014www.ammex.com\n\nAnderson ZurMuehlen\u2014www.azworld.com\n\nApple\u2014www.apple.com\n\nAppRiver\u2014www.appriver.com\n\nArco Construction\u2014www.arcoconstruction.com\n\nArrow Electronics\u2014www.arrow.com\n\nAutodesk\u2014www.autodesk.com\n\nAvalonBAY Communities\u2014www.avalonbay.com\n\nBAIN & Co.\u2014www.bain.com\n\nBarfield, Murphy, Shank & Smith\u2014www.bmss.com\n\nBingham McCutchen\u2014www.bingham.com\n\nBKD\u2014www.bkd.com\n\nBlast Radius\u2014www.blastradius.com\n\nBoston Consulting Group\u2014www.bcg.com\n\nBrogan & Partners Consulting Group\u2014www.brogan.com\n\nBureau of National Affairs\u2014www.bna.com\n\nCapital One\u2014www.capitalone.com\n\nCDW\u2014www.cdw.com\n\nCharles Schwab\u2014www.schwab.com\n\nCirque du Soleil\u2014www.cirquedusoleil.com\n\nCisco\u2014www.cisco.com\n\nCitibank\u2014www.citibank.com\n\nCitizens Financial Group\u2014www.citizensbank.com\n\nCitrin Cooperman\u2014www.citrincooperman.com\n\nClark Nuber\u2014www.clarknuber.com\n\nCleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton\u2014www.cgsh.com\n\nClif Bar & Company\u2014www.clifbar.com\n\nCMS Cameron McKenna\u2014www.cms-cmck.com\n\nCoblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass\u2014www.coblentzlaw.com\n\nCommonfund\u2014www.commonfund.org\n\nContainer Store\u2014www.containerstore.com\n\nCredit Suisse First Boston (CSFB)\u2014www.credit-suisse.com\n\nDaxko\u2014www.daxko.com\n\nDeloitte\u2014www.deloitte.com\n\nDeutsche Bank\u2014www.db.com\n\nDoubleday Broadway Publishing Group\u2014doubleday.knopfdoubleday.com\n\nDrivers Jonas Deloitte\u2014www.djdeloitte.co.uk\n\nDurfee Foundation (finances sabbaticals for non-profit executives)\u2014www.durfee.org\n\neBay\u2014www.ebay.com\n\nEdelman\u2014www.edelman.com\n\nEdward Jones\u2014www.edwardjones.com\n\nEhrhardt Keefe Steiner & Hoffman\u2014www.eksh.com\n\nEide Bailly\u2014www.eidebailly.com\n\nEpic Systems\u2014www.epic.com\n\nFarella Braun & Martel\u2014www.fbm.com\n\nFedEx\u2014www.fedex.com\n\nFleishman-Hillard\u2014www.fleishmanhillard.com\n\nFoley and Mansfield\u2014www.foleymansfield.com\n\nFoster Pepper\u2014www.foster.com\n\nGuardian Media Group\u2014www.gmgplc.co.uk\n\nGenentech\u2014www.gene.com\n\nGeneral Mills\u2014www.generalmills.com\n\nGoldman Sachs\u2014www2.goldmansachs.com\n\nHallmark\u2014www.hallmark.com\n\nHammonds\u2014www.hammonds.com\n\nHewlett Packard\u2014www.hp.com\n\nHLB Tautges Redpath\u2014www.hlbtr.com\n\nHopping Green and Sams\u2014www.hgslaw.com\n\nHotel Equities\u2014www.hotelequities.com\n\nHutchinson Black and Cook\u2014www.hbcboulder.com\n\nInfosys\u2014www.infosys.com\n\nIntel\u2014www.intel.com\n\nJohn Lewis Partnership\u2014www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk\n\nJoie de Vivre Hospitality\u2014www.jdvhotels.com\n\nJones Hall\u2014www.joneshall.com\n\nKatten Muchin Rosenman LLP\u2014www.kattenlaw.com\n\nKetchum\u2014www.ketchum.com\n\nLinchris Hotel Corporation\u2014www.linchris.com\n\nLinear Technology\u2014www.linear.com\n\nLinklaters\u2014www.linklaters.com\n\nLogos Research Systems\u2014www.logos.com\n\nMacdonald and Company\u2014www.macdonaldandcompany.com\n\nMcDonald Jacobs\u2014www.mcdonaldjacobs.com\n\nMcDonald's\u2014www.mcdonalds.com\n\nMcGladrey & Pullen\u2014www.mcgladrey.com\n\nMen's Warehouse\u2014www.menswearhouse.com\n\nMenlo Innovations\u2014www.beta.menloinnovations.com\n\nMicrosoft\u2014www.microsoft.com\n\nMITRE\u2014www.mitre.org\n\nMortenson Construction\u2014www.mortenson.com\n\nNet Atlantic\u2014www.netatlantic.com\n\nNew Leaf Community Markets\u2014www.newleaf.com\n\nNewsweek\u2014www.newsweek.com\n\nNike\u2014www.nike.com\n\nNorton Rose\u2014www.nortonrose.com\n\nNRG\u2014www.nrgenergy.com\n\nPatagonia\u2014www.patagonia.com\n\nPeace Over Violence\u2014www.peaceoverviolence.org\n\nPerkins Coie\u2014www.perkinscoie.com\n\nPlante & Moran\u2014www.plantemoran.com\n\nPricewaterhouseCoopers\u2014www.pwc.com\n\nProcter & Gamble\u2014www.pg.com\n\nQuad\/Graphics\u2014www.qg.com\n\nQuikTrip\u2014www.quiktrip.com\n\nRalston-Purina\u2014www.purina.com\n\nRandom House\u2014www.randomhouse.com\n\nRecreational Equipment (REI)\u2014www.rei.com\n\nReznick Group\u2014www.reznickgroup.com\n\nRobert W. Baird\u2014www.rwbaird.com\n\nRossetti\u2014www.rossetti.com\n\nRSM McGladrey\u2014www.mcgladrey.com\n\nRussell Investments\u2014www.russell.com\n\nSatyam Technologies\u2014www.satyamtechnologies.net\n\nS.C. Johnson & Son\u2014www.scjohnson.com\n\nScholastic\u2014www.scholastic.com\n\nSchroder Investment Management\u2014www.schroders.com\n\nSeattle-Northwest Securities\u2014www.snwsc.com\n\nSegal\u2014www.segalco.com\n\nSeventh Generation\u2014www.seventhgeneration.com\n\nShearman & Sterling\u2014www.shearman.com\n\nSilicon Graphics\u2014www.sgi.com\n\nSkadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom\u2014www.skadden.com\n\nStanding Partnership\u2014www.standingpr.com\n\nStayner Bates & Jensen\u2014www.stayner.com\n\nStrategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE)\u2014www.saje.net\n\nThe Sun\u2014www.thesun.co.uk\n\nSybase\u2014www.sybase.com\n\nText 100\u2014www.text100.com\n\nTimberland\u2014www.timberland.com\n\nUnicef UK\u2014www.unicef.org.uk\n\nUnited States Navy\u2014www.navy.mil\n\nVauxhall\u2014www.vauxhall.co.uk\n\nWaggener Edstrom\u2014www.waggeneredstrom.com\n\nWilliam Mills Agency\u2014 www.williammills.com\n\n## _Resources_\n\n#####   _Books:_\n\nBach, David. _Smart Women Finish Rich: 7 Steps to Achieving Financial Security and Funding Your Dreams._ New York, NY: Broadway Books, 1999.\n\nBishop, Kimberly, Dale Burg and Ginendolyn Penner. _Get Down to Business and You'll get the Job!_ Canada: Gemma B. Publishing, 2010.\n\nBonvoisin, Ariane de. _The First 30 Days: Your Guide to Any Change._ New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.\n\nBridges, William. _The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments._ Jackson, TN: De Capo Press, 2001.\n\nCameron, Julia. _The Artist's Way._ New York, NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher\/Putnam, 1992.\n\nCameron, Julia, Mark Bryan, and Catherine Allen. _The Artist's Way at Work._ New York, NY: William Morrow and Company, 1998.\n\nClements, Dan and Tara Gignac. _Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple._ Canada: Brainranch, 2007.\n\nDlugozima, Hope, James Scott, and David Sharp. _Six Months Off: How to Plan, Negotiate and Take the Break You Need Without Burning Bridges or Going Broke._ Gordonsville, VA: Henry Holt, 1996.\n\nFerriss, Timothy. _The 4-Hour Workweek._ New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 2007.\n\nFreedman, Marc. _Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life._ New York, NY: Public Affairs (Perseus Group), 2007.\n\nGilbert, Elizabeth. _Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia._ New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 2006.\n\nGray, John. _How to Get What You Want and Want What You Have: A Practical and Spiritual Guide to Personal Success._ Scranton, PA: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.\n\nLee, Roberta. _The Superstress Solution._ New York, NY: Random House, 2010.\n\nLevine, Robert. _Power Sabbatical: The Break that Makes a Difference._ Scotland: Findhorn Press, 2007.\n\nLindbergh, Anne Morrow. _Gift from the Sea._ New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday, 1955.\n\nSavage, Terry. _The Savage Number: How Much Money Do You Need to Retire?_ New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005.\n\nSedlar, Jeri, and Rick Miners. _Don't Retire, Rewire: 5 Steps to Fulfilling Work That Fuels Your Passion, Suits Your Personality, or Fills Your Pocket._ New York, NY: Alpha Books, 2003.\n\nSmith, Jaye, and Dina von Zweck. _Venus Unbound: A Guide to Actualizing the Power of Being Female._ New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1989.\n\nStanny, Barbara. _Secrets of Six Figure Women: Surprising Strategies to Up Your Earnings and Change Your Life._ New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2002.\n\nTolle, Eckhart. _The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment._ Canada: Namaste Publishing, Inc., 1997.\n\nTracy, Brian. _Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time._ San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2006.\n\n##### **White Papers:**\n\nAllen, Catherine, Leslie Mitchell, and Janey Place. \"The New Consumer Value: Living Light.\" White paper by The Santa Fe Group, 2008. See _www.santa-fe-group.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/\/2010\/07\/NewConsumerValueNove2008.pdf._\n\nAllen, Catherine, Nancy Bearg, Rita Foley, and Jaye Smith. \"Job Loss: Turning Downtime into Your Time.\" White paper by The Santa Fe Group, 2009. See _www.santa-fe-group.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/\/2010\/07\/SFG-WhitePaper-Sabbatical-Mar2009.pdf._\n\n#####   _Sources of Information on Financial Planning and Budgeting_\n\n#### **Magazines and Newsletters:**\n\n_Consumer Reports Money Advisor_  \n _Smart Money_  \n _Money Magazine_\n\n#### **Websites:**\n\n_www.bankrate.com_\n\n_www.betterbudgeting.com_\n\n_www.billshrink.com_\n\n_www.consumerreports.org\/cro\/money\/index_\n\n_www.mint.com_\n\n_www.money.cnn.com\/tools_\n\n_www.myfico.com_\n\n_www.nfcc.org_\n\n_www.savingforcollege.com_\n\n_www.smartmoney.com_\n\n_www.terrysavage.com_\n\n#####   _Sources of Information on Planning for Time Off:_\n\n_www.encore.org_\n\n_www.first30days.com_\n\n_www.gapyearforgrownups.co.uk_\n\n_www.rebootbreak.com_\n\n_www.retiredbrains.com_\n\n_www.thecareerbreaksite.com_\n\n#####   _Sources of Information on Renting\/Trading Homes and Apartments:_\n\n_www.cyberrentals.com_\n\n_www.homeaway.com_\n\n_www.homeexchange.com_\n\n_www.rentvillas.com_\n\n_www.sabbaticalhomes.com_\n\n#####   _Sources of Information on Volunteering:_\n\n_www.abroaderview.org_\n\n_www.crossculturalsolutions.org_\n\n_www.enkosiniecoexperience.com_\n\n_www.vocationvacations.com_\n\n_www.volunteervacations.com_\n\n## | INDEX |\n\nacademic sabbaticals, ,\n\nage at time of Reboot Break, \u20135\n\nAllen, Catherine, \u2013122, \u2013172, \u2013214\n\nannualcreditreport.com,\n\nartist dates, ,\n\n_Artist's Way at Work, The_ (Cameron, et al.), \u2013100, \u2013137\n\nart of enough, developing, \u2013110\n\nbankrate.com,\n\nbarriers to planning, \u201343\n\nbarriers to time off, \u20135,\n\nBearg, Nancy\n\nAfrican desert exploration,\n\non being in the moment,\n\ncareer-enhancement break,\n\non clearing clutter, \u201397\n\nfirst 30 days, \u201396\n\nlifelong sabbatical journey, \u2013174\n\nsabbatical story, \u2013216\n\nbetween-gigs sabbaticals, \u201317\n\nblogging,\n\nBonvoisin, Ariane de, , , \u2013123\n\nBridges, William, \u2013127\n\nbudgets and budgeting, \u201373, \u201386, \u201388. _See also_ living light\n\nburnout, xii, , \u201399,\n\nCameron, Julia, \u2013100\n\ncareer-enhancement sabbaticals, \u201326, ,\n\nCircle Goals, , \u2013181\n\nCitizens Financial Group,\n\nclients, talking to about your plans, \u201359\n\nCommonfund,\n\ncommunicating about your plans\n\nwith clients and customers, \u201359\n\nwith co-workers, peers, and board members,\n\nwith employers, \u201358\n\nwith family and friends, , \u201352, , \u2013157,\n\noverview,\n\ncourse correction sabbaticals, \u201324, \u201328\n\nco-workers, telling your plans to,\n\nCreating Space phase\n\nclearing and organizing, \u201397, ,\n\ndaily approach, \u2013101\n\nemptying the emotional closet, \u201399\n\nexercises, \u2013102\n\nfirst 30 days, \u201397\n\noverview, \u201392\n\ncredit cards\n\npaying down, , , ,\n\ntravel rewards from,\n\ncredit reports, \u201378\n\ncustomers, talking to about your plans, \u201359\n\ndebts, paying down, , , ,\n\ndebt-to-income ratio, \u201377\n\ndeciding on a sabbatical, \u201322\n\ndeferred income,\n\ndreams and dreaming\n\njournaling and, ,\n\noverview, \u20132,\n\nreturning to an old dream, \u201328\n\nstaying in touch with,\n\nwalking\/visualization exercise, \u201345\n\n_See also_ goals; journaling\n\n_Eat, Pray, Love_ (Gilbert),\n\neducational sabbaticals, \u201326, \u201337, \u2013117, \u2013188,\n\nemotional closet, clearing your, \u201399, \u2013118\n\nemotional healing sabbaticals, \u201324, \u201333\n\nemployment. _See_ workplace sabbaticals\n\n_Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life_ (Freedman), \u201340\n\nentrepreneurs, sabbaticals for, \u201361, ,\n\nexpansion,\n\nexpectations, \u2013157,\n\nExploration phase\n\nexercises,\n\nexploring relationships, \u2013121\n\nexploring the hurt, \u2013118\n\nexploring the mind, \u2013117\n\nexploring the self, \u2013119\n\nexploring the world,\n\noverview, \u201391, , , \u2013112\n\npacking light, \u2013123,\n\nvolunteering, \u2013114\n\nexploring new options, \u2013131\n\nexternal sabbatical robbers, , , \u2013150\n\nFamilies and Work Institute,\n\nfamily\n\ncoping skills for, \u2013166\n\nexercises,\n\nof laid-off workers, \u201388\n\nmoney saving and, \u201387\n\npersonal concerns of, \u2013164\n\nreactions to your sabbatical, \u2013153, \u2013162\n\nsabbaticals related to needs of, \u201324, \u201330, \u201348, \u2013121\n\nsupporting your, \u2013165\n\ntalking about your plans with, , \u201352, , \u2013157,\n\n_See also_ relationships\n\nFamily and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), , \u201348\n\nFICO scores, ,\n\nfinancing your sabbatical\n\nbudgeting, \u201373, \u201388\n\nbudget travel, \u201386\n\nemployer support, \u201379\n\nexercises, \u201389\n\nfinancial checklists, \u2013196\n\nfinancial impact on your career, \u201369\n\ngoals and, \u201370\n\nfrom home equity, \u201378\n\nliving light, \u201371, \u201384, \u201387\n\noverview, \u201347, \u201368, \u201381\n\nplanning checklist, , , , , ,\n\nfrom savings, , \u201376\n\ntraveling light, \u201386\n\nunemployment, \u201382\n\nunexpected sabbaticals, \u201388\n\nwith windfalls, \u201374,\n\n_First 30 Days, The_ (Bonvoisin), , ,\n\nFoley, Rita, \u201334, \u2013173, \u2013218\n\nformal programs in the workplace, \u201313,\n\nFortune's \"100 Best Companies to Work For,\"\n\nFreedman, Marc, \u201340\n\nfrequent flyer miles,\n\nfurloughs, . _See also_ unexpected sabbaticals\n\n_Gift From the Sea_ (Lindbergh),\n\nGilbert, Elizabeth,\n\ngoals\n\nclarifying goals, \u2013110, , \u2013180,\n\nfinancing your sabbatical and, \u201370\n\nidentifying, \u201346,\n\n_See also_ dreams and dreaming; journaling\n\nGoals Circle exercise, , \u2013181\n\nguilt, \u2013142, , \u2013164\n\nhome\n\ncutting expenses, ,\n\nrenting out or trading, , , \u201384, \u201387,\n\nrenting out or trading planning checklist, , \u2013190, , , ,\n\nselling your, , , \u201397, , \u2013163\n\nhome equity line of credit (HELOC), \u201377\n\n_How to Get What You Want and Want What You Have_ (Gray), \u2013149\n\nindulging yourself, \u201395\n\ninheritance, \u201374,\n\nIntel, \u201312\n\ninternal sabbatical robbers, \u2013142, \u2013146\n\ninternships and mini-trials, \u2013135\n\ninteroffice announcement, \u201358\n\njob stress, xii, \u2013168\n\njournaling\n\nfor connecting with self,\n\nas lifelong sabbatical,\n\noverview, , ,\n\nquieting self-criticism with, \u2013146\n\nlaid-off employees. _See_ unexpected sabbaticals\n\nlawyers and sabbaticals,\n\nlearning as goal, \u201324, \u201337, \u2013117. _See also_ Exploration phase\n\nLee, Roberta, \u201394\n\nlife-enhancement sabbaticals, \u201324, \u201337, \u2013117\n\nlifelong sabbaticals\n\nauthors' examples, \u2013175\n\nexercises,\n\nGoals Circle exercise, , \u2013181\n\noverview, \u2013171\n\nLindbergh, Anne Morrow,\n\nliving light, \u201371, \u201384, \u201387. _See also_ budgets and budgeting\n\nmindfulness, \u2013109\n\nmini-sabbaticals, \u201351, , \u2013177,\n\nmini-trials and internships, \u2013135\n\nmotivations for sabbatical decision, \u201324, . _See also_ sabbaticals, types of\n\nmultitasking, ,\n\nnetworking, \u2013134\n\noutplacement services,\n\npacking light, \u2013123,\n\npeers, talking to about your plans,\n\npersonal regrowth\n\nallowing time for, , , ,\n\nauthor's stories, \u2013220\n\nclearing your emotional closet, \u201399, \u2013118\n\ndeveloping mindfulness, \u2013109, \u2013171\n\nemotional healing sabbaticals, \u201324, \u201333\n\nguilt vs., \u2013142, , \u2013164\n\noverview,\n\nreflection during Reentry, , \u2013131\n\nself- exploration, \u2013119\n\n_See also_ goals; journaling; lifelong sabbaticals; Reconnection phase\n\nphases of a sabbatical, \u201391. _See also_\n\nCreating Space phase\n\nExploration phase\n\nlifelong sabbaticals\n\nReconnection phase\n\nReentry phase\n\nphysical healing, \u2013106\n\nplanning\n\nand age at time of Reboot Break, \u20135\n\ncommunicating your plans, \u201359\n\nfor entrepreneurs, \u201361,\n\nexercises,\n\nidentifying goals, \u201346\n\noverview, xiii\u2013xiv, \u201343, \u2013177, \u2013183\n\nplan outline, \u201364\n\npre-planning checklist, \u2013186\n\nresponses to questions, \u2013147,\n\ntimeframe choice, \u201351\n\nvolunteering plans, \u201363\n\n_See also_ travel plans\n\nPlanning Checklist, \u2013194\n\nPlanning Grid, \u201364\n\n_Power of Now, The_ (Tolle),\n\npre-retirement sabbaticals, \u201324, \u201338\n\npriority clarification, \u2013110\n\nReconnection phase\n\nclarifying goals, \u2013110\n\nenjoying the moment, \u2013109\n\nexercises,\n\nfeeding the body, \u2013106\n\nfeeding the soul, \u2013108\n\noverview, \u201391, , \u2013105\n\nrecruiting and retention tool, sabbatical as, xiii, ,\n\nReentry phase\n\nexercises, \u2013138\n\nexploring new options, \u2013131\n\nmini-trials and internships, \u2013135,\n\nnetworking, \u2013134\n\noverview, \u201391,\n\nplanning for, , , \u2013137\n\nreflection time, \u2013128\n\nreflection during Reentry, , \u2013131\n\nreinvention sabbaticals, \u201324, \u201328\n\nrelationships\n\nexploring new, \u2013121\n\nrejuvenating, , , , , \u2013213\n\n_See also_ family\n\nresources, \u2013204\n\nretirement\n\nBaby Boomers and, \u20135\n\nphased retirement, \u201340\n\npre-retirement sabbaticals, \u201324, \u201338\n\nsavings for,\n\nrockwork and sandwork,\n\nsabbatical gifts, , \u2013148\n\nsabbatical robbers\n\nexercises, \u2013150\n\nexternal robbers, , , \u2013147\n\ninternal robbers, \u2013142, \u2013146\n\noverview, \u2013140, \u2013149\n\nsabbaticals\n\nage at time of, \u20135\n\nhistory of, \u20138\n\nas necessity, xiii\n\nsabbaticals, types of\n\ncareer-enhancement sabbaticals, \u201326, ,\n\ncourse correction sabbaticals, \u201328\n\neducational sabbaticals, \u201326, \u201337, \u2013117, \u2013188,\n\nemotional healing sabbaticals, \u201333\n\nfamily-related sabbaticals, \u201330\n\nlife-enhancement sabbaticals, \u201337, \u2013117\n\noverview, \u201324\n\npre-retirement sabbaticals, \u201338\n\nreinvention sabbaticals, \u201328\n\nvolunteering sabbaticals, \u201335\n\n_See also_ unexpected sabbaticals\n\nSanta Fe Group, \u201338\n\nsaving for your sabbatical, , \u201377\n\nsaying \"no,\" , , ,\n\nself-discovery paths, \u201337\n\nself- exploration, \u2013119\n\nself-healing. _See_ personal regrowth\n\nShearman & Sterling LLP, \u201363\n\nSmith, Jaye, \u2013175, \u2013220\n\nsole practitioners, sabbaticals for, \u201361, ,\n\nstress, xii, , \u2013168,\n\n_SuperStress Solution, The_ (Lee), \u201394\n\ntaxes\n\nbenefits from sabbaticals,\n\ndeduction for HELOC interest, \u201377\n\ndeduction for student loans,\n\ndeferred income and,\n\ntimeframe choice, , \u201351\n\nTolle, Eckhart,\n\ntransition, \u2013127\n\ntravel plans\n\nbudget travel, \u201386\n\noverview, \u201362,\n\npacking light, \u2013123,\n\nplanning checklist, \u2013188, , , , ,\n\ntuition costs, employer reimbursement of,\n\nunemployment benefits, \u201382,\n\nunexpected sabbaticals\n\nfinancing your sabbatical, \u201388\n\noverview, \u201320\n\nreassessing goals and opportunities, xiii\n\nunemployment benefits and, \u201382,\n\nvolunteerism\n\nguilt-driven,\n\nplanning to volunteer, \u201363\n\nvolunteering sabbaticals, \u201324, \u201335, \u2013114\n\nwalking\/visualization exercise, \u201345\n\n_Way of Transition, The_ (Bridges), \u2013127\n\nwindfalls, \u201374,\n\nworkplace sabbaticals\n\nbusiness proposition approach to getting time off,\n\nconversation with the boss, \u201357\n\ndeciding to take time off, \u201354\n\nemployer's financial support, , \u201379\n\nformal programs, \u201313, , \u2013201\n\ninteroffice announcement, \u201358\n\nno formal program, \u201315\n\noverview, xiii, \u201311\n\nplanning checklist, , , , \u2013192, ,\n\nReentry phase, \u2013137\n\nwork-rest balance,\n\nyear-long sabbaticals, \n\n## | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |\n\nWE HAVE GAINED SO MUCH from the help of others in creating this book as well as our Reboot Your Life Retreats. We are grateful for the support, insights, editing, advice, introductions, and research that our friends, colleagues, and relatives have provided us. We are particularly grateful to our interviewees, who shared with us their experiences as well as lessons learned, and the retreat attendees, who have shared their dreams and their fears.\n\nA special thank you to Susanna Space, Julie Kline, Penny Peters, Margot Atwell, Eric Kampmann, Candace Ishmael, Julie Koch-Beinke, Lynn Coppotelli, Sandra Poirier Diaz, Linda Lowenthal, Linda Cashdan, Amy Friedman, Carol Carlisle, Robin Slade, Paul Rooker, Sarah Born, Rachel Dyke, Michael and Nathaniel Buckley, Susan Stautberg, and the wonderful members of the Belizean Grove.\n\n## | OUR SABBATICAL STORIES |\n\n#### CATHY'S STORY\n\n_Cathy has taken two sabbaticals, one for eleven months when she was in her thirties, and the most recent one when she was in her late fifties._\n\nThe earlier sabbatical was a travel tour of Asia with my then-husband, giving lectures for the United States Information Agency (USIA) and traveling for pleasure. That sabbatical was motivated by my mother's death, a strained marital relationship, and disenchantment with the academic world, where I was an assistant professor of business administration. I had been taking care of my mom from a distance. I lived in Washington DC, and she was in Missouri. She died in September 1983, and I was exhausted and overwhelmed from taking care of her. My husband and I had married in 1980, separated in 1982, gotten back together in 1983, and were dealing with financial and infertility challenges. I was teaching at American University and working on my doctorate. I was growing increasingly disenchanted with the academic world because of the pettiness of the politics. And then there was the implied threat by my dissertation lead advisor that if I slept with him, I would get my dissertation accepted, and if not, well . . .\n\nMy first sabbatical was harder to justify to others than the later one. In 1985 sabbaticals were mostly academic-driven, and the go-go corporate world couldn't conceive of the concept. I was mid-career, as was my husband, and people said we were crazy. (\"You'll never get corporate jobs.\" \"You are wasting money.\" \"You will end up divorced.\")\n\nAs it turned out, the sabbatical was one of escape, relief, and renewed focus on our relationship. We planned to take nine to twelve months off, tour Asia, and come back to new jobs. We traveled in Asia for eleven months, lecturing for the USIA on trade with Asia and the United States, how Congress works, and how to market to the US. Between lectures, we traveled throughout fifteen Asian countries, absorbing the culture, arts, scenery, history, and lifestyles.\n\nFor each country, we read fiction, history, economic development, and cultural publications and met with people in the diplomatic, corporate, academic, and arts worlds. We also traveled by every mode, spent time in villages and small towns, visited tourist sites, and ate native food. We challenged ourselves to learn new skills, such as eating with chopsticks the whole time we were in Japan. We tried new foods, learned local languages (at least some basics), and studied cultural protocols.\n\nThat first 1985 sabbatical ended in November. I didn't know what would be waiting when we returned. I had sent my resume to a number of contacts before I left on the sabbatical and told them approximately when I would be back. I had a job interview with Dun & Bradstreet waiting for me\u2014a job I took and which propelled us to move to the New York area from Washington DC, and from the academic world to the corporate. From the 1985 sabbatical I learned that taking calculated risks was good, that taking a sabbatical mid-career was not hurtful to my career, that Asia was going to be a substantial economic power in the future, and that I had confidence from the experience that served me well in the corporate world.\n\nThe most recent sabbatical was planned as well. I had taken early retirement from my position as founding CEO of a major financial services consortium. I didn't know what would be next, except that I would be managing my consulting firm, The Santa Fe Group, when I returned from my time off.\n\nThis time around, it was a natural break. People understood the reasons I wanted time off\u2014personal and professional\u2014and wished me well. There were no naysayers, except my internal voice saying, \"Can you really forego the income for a year?\"\n\nThe planning for both sabbaticals included setting goals of what I wanted to accomplish, how I might finance it, what steps were needed to take care of the house, finances, work, etc. I am a planner by nature, and I found it almost as much fun to plan and dream about what I would do as it was to go on sabbatical.\n\nFor the earlier sabbatical, I spend 10 percent of the time planning, packing, and organizing for the trip, 20 percent reading about the country, 20 percent speaking at USIA events, and 50 percent traveling, touring, and enjoying the culture. The 2007 sabbatical was less specific in time. I spent most of the first month and a half sorting and organizing stuff in Santa Fe, working 20 percent of the time on Santa Fe Group\/career issues, exercising, reading, and traveling and being with my soon-to-be husband. We spent the month of July in France sightseeing with friends. Each day my goals were to write, exercise, reach out to friends, do something career-related, and enjoy downtime and reflection.\n\nIn this recent sabbatical, I was mostly relieved, happy to be free and not in Washington DC, and excited about the journey. I had twinges of worry about finances\u2014mostly because I was building an addition to my house\u2014but I felt confident I'd find a way to earn more when I returned to work.\n\nHad I not taken the time off to reflect, learn, travel, and renew, I would not be where I am today, spiritually, emotionally, and in terms of health. The sabbatical helped me focus my career goals for the next phase of my life.\n\nFrom the recent sabbatical I learned that planning is important, and having goals and checking in on them makes you prioritize your time. I learned that the hardest thing to do is say \"no\" and maintain time to just reflect. I am busier than I've ever been, albeit doing things I want to do. I just need to remember to make time for reflection.\n\n#### NANCY'S STORY\n\n_Nancy has taken several sabbaticals during her career in international security and foreign policy. In each case, she resigned from a job to take a break without knowing what the next job would be, and it always turned out well._\n\nAfter marrying at age thirty-three, when I was in a Pentagon job during the Carter Administration, and then going to the White House to serve as then-Vice President George H. W. Bush's national security advisor, I left Washington to accompany my Army general husband on an overseas assignment. I was thirty-five and wanted to have kids, and it meant leaving the best job in the world after only eighteen months. I missed my career, but I knew I could go back to it. As the two-year Army assignment lengthened into three years in Germany and another three in Japan, so did my sabbatical. It was a time full of discovery and fulfillment: new adventures, travel, language learning, many new international and American friends, public service using my professional skills\u2014and two beautiful baby daughters.\n\nUpon returning to the United States, I took one of those more-than-full-time White House positions at the National Security Council for four years. The girls were then in grade school, and the impetus to take a sabbatical to spend more time with my family was my daughter Sarah's plaintive, \"We want you to walk us to and from school like the other mothers do.\" I did just that, along with volunteering, doing a bit of professional writing, and actually having the time to send out Christmas cards.\n\nThen I mentioned to a friend that I was ready to take on a part-time job, and the non-profit world beckoned with a job that quickly became full-time, as they always seem to. Seven years later, I was still directing the program I founded on International Peace, Security and Prosperity at the Aspen Institute but badly needed a break as a result of the pressures of a divorce, coupled with trying to make it to all the kids' sports games plus everything else. There wasn't enough time and energy (physical and emotional) for work, kids, and a divorce, so I took another sabbatical.\n\nIn retrospect, the break from work was too short to get enough recharge and renewal because, after only a few months, I took on a new challenge as president and CEO of a struggling international development non-profit organization. After two years, the organization was on an even keel and I had promises to keep to my family, specifically overseas trips with my daughters, who were now in college, and I wanted to spend time with my mother and with a childhood friend who was struggling with breast cancer. And I wanted to return to the policy world in conflict prevention after taking some time off for myself. So I began another career break at age fifty-seven.\n\nThis break was truly one of giving myself the gift of time. There were so many possibilities for family time, friends, travel, some consulting work, non-profit boards, and teaching a university course. I dove into the smorgasbord, though I was living mostly on savings. A major highlight was being with my daughter Sarah in the Balkans where she was studying. Amid it all, the biggest project was moving the family from the suburbs to urban Washington DC, which I believe couldn't have been done if I were working. The time flexibility was fabulous, and it even led to writing this book to share sabbaticals with others.\n\n#### RITA'S STORY\n\n_Rita has taken four sabbaticals over her career. Here is one of her stories._\n\nFour days on the West Coast, three on the East, that is, when I wasn't in Europe or Asia. That is how I had spent the better part of the one and a half years before my second sabbatical. I lived on planes. It was exhilarating, and it was exhausting.\n\nI had been working for a computer company for seventeen years when an opportunity came along to take a software company public. The problem was that I was living in Boston, had a home in Brooklyn, and the job was in California. My husband, children, and I determined that it was a too good a job to pass up. They moved back to Brooklyn and I flew home on as many weekends as I could, except for the summer when one son went to camp and the other came out with a friend to live and work with me in California.\n\nI asked myself, could I handle that type of crazy schedule? Yes, for a while. My life was so segmented between work and family that I threw myself into both. In California my work days started at 7 am after a walk on the beach. They usually ended around 11 pm after a working dinner. I read and did my strategic thinking on planes. Back in Brooklyn, it was cooking and doing family activities.\n\nIt was an exciting time to see a young software company grow, to work with a very energized workforce, to be able to conduct business globally, and to be admired by your customers. Yet my life felt schizophrenic. I had a reputation for enormous work capacity and being able to multitask. But inside, my two worlds were tearing me apart. As time went on, I discovered that the founders were having trouble with growing pains and they were learning what it took to be a public company. Our management and strategic views collided. We agreed to part ways.\n\nThat was the beginning of October. I knew that once word leaked out that I had left, the phone would start ringing. And it did. But I had determined ahead of time that I needed at least three months to refresh and to reconnect with my life in New York. I politely told headhunters that I was taking a break and would be glad to speak with them after January 1st.\n\nSo what did I do? Nothing and everything. My goal was to enjoy the simple things in life, all those little things that my hectic schedule never allowed. First on my list was reading the _New York Times_ from cover to cover in the relaxing environment of Starbucks. After that, I either played tennis or went to a yoga class. I did lots of walking, cooking, visiting museums, and reconnecting with friends and family.\n\nIn January, the calls began and I did meet with several people. I thought before my sabbatical that my next position would most likely be as a CEO of a technology company or an Internet start-up. But I had lots of reflection time during my time off, and I found that inside I was rebelling from the insidiousness of the Internet and software boom. Make your millions, sell, and get out was not a work model that I had grown up with. It offended my sense of responsibility and business ethics.\n\nI fell into consulting when an old school acquaintance approached me for help with a specific business need. I turned our discussion into a two-month consulting engagement, which gave me more time to reflect and network. I enjoyed consulting and went on to work with other companies. But I soon realized that if I wanted to keep doing what I was doing I would have to scale up my practice and hire help. I met with as many consultants as I could to ask what they liked and disliked about their work.\n\nThese discussions helped me realize that consulting was not for me. I like to be the implementer of recommendations. I enjoy seeing people grow and organizations morph. To my friends' shock, after swearing that I would never work for a large organization again, I went to work for a Fortune 500 global company\u2014the one for which I had done the first consulting gig. I would not have done so, were it not for my sabbatical and the very deliberate time that I took to reflect upon what I valued.\n\n#### JAYE'S STORY\n\n_After seven years as an independent consultant, Jaye was unfulfilled and unchallenged. She was in a rut, and she didn't know how to get out._\n\nMy sister was gravely ill and terminal. I knew I needed to find something that was fulfilling but would also enable me to support her three children. After much deliberation, self-analysis, and networking with colleagues who knew me well, I created a new vision of a consulting firm focused on corporate consulting, called Partners in Human Resources International. I quickly found collaborators in that vision. As we built the business plan, we began writing our own ideal job descriptions. Because of the diversity of our skills, we were able to design the company structure around each of our strengths, interests, and goals. I was head of quality control in the delivery of services, consultant selection, and project management, and also in charge of new business.\n\nThe company grew quickly. By year five, we had reached $7 million in revenue. One of my two partners decided to retire. That's when things started to change for me. I was thrust into the role of president of the firm, a role more focused on operations, which was not my passion, but where I had capability. As a good partner, I took on the role enthusiastically. I was determined to succeed. We continued to grow.\n\nAfter four more years, the needs of the company had changed. I began to feel I was no longer the right person for the job. I found myself frustrated and unsatisfied. It seemed unthinkable that I would leave a company I had created, yet I was increasingly unhappy. Then a catalyst occurred that began to move me into a new direction: I was diagnosed with an immune-related illness that was potentially serious. Reducing stress was critical to my living a long and healthy life. I faced my own self-limiting beliefs and fears. I needed to leave the firm, and my role as president, to find the space to reconnect and take care of myself. My sister's children were now grown and more independent. I was able to take more risks. I took my own coaching advice and began an internal journey, and at age forty-eight, I began my first sabbatical. I had just purchased my first home, so I had a place to rest and recuperate. My lifestyle required a steady income, so I negotiated a buyout that gave me a year.\n\nFirst I did all of the things that I had longed to do over the last ten years that I never had time for. I spent leisurely time alone and with my family. I visited friends I had neglected. I traveled a lot, which opened me up to new possibilities. Everything I did stimulated ideas, and I matched those against the backdrop of what I knew about myself. I found a new inner peace that was, however, mixed with the anxieties and pressures of the unknown.\n\nI began reading and attending conferences on emotional intelligence. I thought about how I could incorporate these new ideas into my work as an executive coach and team facilitator. I also did other fun things I had always wanted to do, like learning to play the Conga drums. As time passed, the ideas for using all of these new elements in my work came together. I designed Team Beat, a team-building facilitation technique, using drumming and rhythm as a metaphor for teams working in sync. Little by little, a new direction began to emerge for the consulting practice I would build.\n\nI was surprised at how long the process took. I wanted answers quickly. I wanted a plan. I wanted to take action. After one year, I still felt that I had more work to do on self-reflection. I realized that I would carry this continued self-analysis and learning with me, probably for the rest of my life. I learned that I had changed over the past ten years, and I got to know my new self better. As I emerged from uncertainty and began to understand what I had and what I wanted to become, I felt more alive and connected to myself, and certainly more healthy.\n\nNow I'm doing what I want, where I want, and how I want. I rebuilt my expertise in corporate coaching and team building, integrating new techniques and ideas I developed during my time off. I have my own practice and can manage my work\/life balance more successfully. My work is incredibly rewarding, and my clients are diverse. I've maintained a good relationship with my former partner and company, so I haven't had to lose what I built there.\n\nMy work is focused on coaching senior executives. I design and facilitate team processes and events, very often using music. I'm growing every day. I make a point of surrounding myself with supportive friends and family to keep me on track with this new way of living. Without my sabbatical, and the time and space it provided, I would not be where I am today.\n\n## | ABOUT THE AUTHORS |\n\nTHE SABBATICAL SISTERS are four successful senior executives with careers in diverse fields. When they met, they discovered that they were all sabbatical veterans, joining thousands of men and women who have taken time out from their careers to reflect and renew. The four started calling that a Reboot Break and dubbed themselves the Sabbatical Sisters. Because they found it so important to their own professional careers and personal lives, they wanted to share the concept of \"rebooting your life\" with others, so they decided to write a book. They talked to over 200 people who have taken time off and researched well over fifty firms that help their employees take sabbaticals in some way. In 2009, they began holding retreats to help people plan and create support systems for taking a sabbatical. Their mission is to help others give themselves the \"gift of time.\" For more information, see their website, _www.rebootbreak.com ,_ and find them on Facebook, and LinkedIn.\n\nCATHERINE ALLEN is a co-author of _The Artist's Way at Work_ (William Morrow) with Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan and _Smart Cards: Seizing Strategic Opportunities_ (McGraw-Hill Inc) with William Barr. She is known as an innovator and expert in financial services and technology. Her career includes executive positions at Dun & Bradstreet and Citibank, and assistant professorships at several universities. Most recently, she was the founding CEO of BITS, the industry consortium made up of the CEOs of 100 of the largest financial services institutions. Today she owns and manages The Santa Fe Group, a strategic consulting firm of financial industry and technology experts. She sits on the boards of Stewart Title Guaranty, El Paso Electric Company, and Citibank Global Transaction Services, plus the boards of two foundations, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Museum of New Mexico, and several non-profits. Recently, she was appointed by Governor Bill Richardson to the New Mexico State Investment Council. Catherine has taken two Reboot Breaks. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.\n\nNANCY BEARG has had a forty-year career in international security policy. Her early career was in government at the Department of Defense, National Security Council (White House), Senate Armed Services Committee, and Congressional Budget Office. She was the National Security Advisor to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and later served on the National Security Council staff when he was president. After one of her Reboot Breaks, Nancy changed gears and moved into the not-for-profit world, directing the International Peace, Security and Prosperity program for the Aspen Institute and then as President and CEO of EnterpriseWorks\/VITA, an international development organization. Today Nancy works in the area of conflict prevention and post-conflict peacebuilding, consults on national security, and teaches a university course on leadership. She published five books on national security while at the Aspen Institute. Nancy has taken five Reboot Breaks. She lives in Washington DC.\n\nRITA FOLEY is a corporate director, retired Fortune 500 Global President, and a committed leader in numerous organizations dedicated to improving the health and lives of individuals. Rita sits on the boards of the publicly traded PetSmart and Dresser-Rand, plus two not-for-profit boards: Pro Mujer, a not-for-profit microfinance and health organization operating in Latin America, and The HealthCare Chaplaincy, a leader in palliative care. Rita is an advisor with Crenshaw Associates, leading their board services practice. These appointments follow a very successful business career, which culminated at MeadWestvaco as Global President of the $1.1B Consumer Packaging Group. Prior to that, Rita held various leadership positions at QAD, Digital Equipment Corp, and Harris Lanier. Rita began her career at Polaroid in St. Albans, England. She has taken four Reboot Breaks. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.\n\nJAYE SMITH is the resident expert on the topic of navigating careers, with more than twenty-five years of experience in the field. Jaye is co-author of _Venus Unbound_ (Simon & Schuster, Inc.), a guide for building balance in women . Jaye took a Reboot Break after being the President of Partners in Human Resources International, a consulting firm she co-founded. Today, Jaye continues to work closely with her former firm and is also CEO of her own firm, Breakwater Consulting, where she coaches executives on renewal and leadership as well as designs and facilitates team and organizational effectiveness programs for corporations, not-for-profits, and universities. She is an honored adjunct faculty member at New York University's Center for Career Planning and on the board of Harlem Dowling Westside Center, a foster care and adoption agency. She lives in New York City.\n\nLeft to right: Jaye Smith, Catherine Allen, Nancy Bearg, Rita Foley\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nAustralian Screen Classics\n\n# Wake in Fright\n\n# Tina Kaufman\n\nCurrency Press \u2022 Sydney\n\n# Table of Contents\n\nTitle Page  \nCopyright Page  \nAuthor's Biography  \nAustralian Screen Classics  \nAcknowledgements  \nIntroduction\n\n1 - How the Film Came About  \n2 - How the Film Got Made  \n3 - How the Film Got Lost\u2014and Found  \n4 - How the Film was Received\n\nThen...  \nOut of sight, but not out of mind  \n... and now\n\nNotes  \nBibliography  \nFilmography  \nCredits\n\nwww.currencypress.com.au\nFirst published by Currency Press Pty Ltd and the National Film and Sound Archive in 2010.\n\nCurrency Press Pty Ltd   \nPO Box 2287   \nStrawberry Hills NSW 2012   \nwww.currencypress.com.au   \nenquiries@currency.com.au\n\nNational Film and Sound Archive   \nGPO Box 2002, Canberra   \nACT 2601   \nwww.nfsa.gov.au\n\nCopyright \u00a9 Tina Kaufman, 2010\n\nFirst electronic edition published in 2012 by Currency Press Pty Ltd.\n\nCopying for Educational Purposes\n\nThe Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be reproduced and\/or communicated by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. For details of the CAL licence for educational institutions contact CAL, Level 15, 233 Castlereagh Street, Sydney NSW, 2000. Tel: (02) 9394 7600; email: info@copyright.com.au\n\nCopying for Other Purposes\n\nExcept as permitted under the Act, for example a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review, all rights are reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.\n\nPrinted book ISBN: 9780868198644\n\nePub ISBN: 9781921429071\n\nTypeset by Currency Press. Cover design by Emma Vine, Currency Press. Front cover shows Gary Bond as John Grant. Back cover shows Chips Rafferty as Jock Crawford and Gary Bond as John Grant.\n\n# TINA KAUFMAN\n\nTina Kaufman is a freelance journalist who writes on film, media and communication issues. She was editor of the independent film newspaper, Filmnews, for seventeen years, until its much-lamented demise in 1994. Since then she has been writing for various film, media and art publications; regularly for Metro magazine, for which she is a contributing editor, occasionally for RealTime, and more recently and more regularly for Screen Hub, the online journal for film professionals. A board member of the Sydney Film Festival for twenty-five years, and a founding member of the Film Critics' Circle of Australia, she is now an honorary life member of both organisations.\n\n# AUSTRALIAN SCREEN CLASSICS\n\nJANE MILLS\n\nSeries Editor\n\nOur national cinema plays a vital role in our cultural heritage and in showing us at least something of what it is to be Australian. But the picture can get blurred by unruly forces such as competing artistic aims, inconstant personal tastes, political vagaries, constantly changing priorities in screen education and training, technological innovation and the market.\n\nWhen these forces remain unconnected, the result can be an artistically impoverished cinema and audiences who are disinclined to seek out and derive pleasure from a diverse range of films, including Australian ones.\n\nThis series is a part of screen culture which is the glue needed to stick these forces together. It's the plankton in the moving image food chain that feeds the imagination of our filmmakers and their audiences. It's what makes sense of the opinions, memories, responses, knowledge and exchange of ideas about film.\n\nAbove all, screen culture is informed by a love of cinema. And it has to be carefully nurtured if we are to understand and appreciate the aesthetic, moral, intellectual and sentient value of our national cinema.\n\nAustralian Screen Classics will match some of our best-loved films with some of our most distinguished writers and thinkers, drawn from the worlds of culture, criticism and politics. All we ask of our writers is that they feel passionate about the films they choose. Through these thoughtful, elegantly-written books, we hope that screen culture will work its sticky magic and introduce more audiences to Australian cinema.\n\nDr Jane Mills is an Associate Professor at the Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of NSW. She is the Series Editor of Australian Screen Classics, a former Head of Screen Studies at AFTRS (1995\u20132000) and a founder\u2013member of 'Watch on Censorship'. She is the author of several books including _The Money Shot: Cinema, Sin and Censorship_ (Pluto Press) and _Loving and Hating Hollywood: Reframing Global and Local Cinemas_ (Allen & Unwin).\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nThanks to Jane Mills for pushing me to do something I was initially so reluctant to take on, to all the people who talked to me about their early filmmaking and filmgoing, and especially to Howard Rubie and Richard Brennan, for being so generous with their memories and their time. The series editor and the author would like to thank Graham Shirley for his valuable comments on the manuscript.\n\nTina Kaufman\nFor Silvia, Max, Viveka and Alfie,   \nwith the hope that the love of movies carries on.\n\n# INTRODUCTION\n\nWake in Fright is a film that plays an important role in Australia's recent cinema history; it's a film that people remember vividly no matter how long ago they saw it. And yet it's a film that was made at a time when Australian audiences were indifferent to local production, a film that disappeared from view for many years and was only restored to its proper place by the amazing diligence and sheer determination of one man. For someone like me, who loves films and who has written about the ups and downs of the Australian film scene for many years, the story of Wake in Fright is one that is both intriguing and mysterious, a story that demands to be told.\n\nFilms have always been part of my life. I grew up at Bayview, on Pittwater in Sydney's northern beaches, where I was one of a gang of local kids. It was a great place to grow up; we spent most of our leisure time outside, swimming, riding and climbing trees. But we did go to Saturday matinees at the local cinemas at Narrabeen and Collaroy, and even as far afield as Manly when there was something particularly enticing. It was a good hour's bus ride to Manly, but there were four cinemas there, including the Metro by the beach which showed wonderful MGM musicals, such as Singin' in the Rain (1952) and all those ones with the diminutive all-singing, all-dancing Jane Powell, as well as swashbuckling films like Scaramouche (1952). But it was at another cinema, the one in the Manly Corso, where I remember seeing a thrilling double bill of Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise's The Curse of the Cat People (1944), an early introduction to the joys of producer Val Lewton's subtle and creative take on the horror genre. Yet another Manly cinema, the one around near the Manly ferry wharf, was where my mother took me to see James Stewart in Anthony Mann's great western, Bend of the River (1952), although I wouldn't have realised then how stark and implacable a tale it was. These are films I've never forgotten\u2014and have seen many times since.\n\nIn my last years at high school I'd take the odd day off, especially if I was running late or hadn't done my homework, and I'd go into the city for a couple of sessions at the city cinemas. Although it was mainly Hollywood fare that enticed me, I did take in the occasional British film. Once I left school I started working in the city, where I not only kept up my diet of contemporary films but started attending screenings of a quite different kind\u2014at the Sydney University Film Group, the Realist Film Group, the National Film Theatre of Australia\u2014and very soon I started going to the Sydney Film Festival. All these screenings introduced me to a wide range of national cinemas, genres and filmmaking periods and really expanded my film knowledge and understanding.\n\nAustralian film, however, came a bit later. As is well known, there wasn't visible filmmaking activity at this time, in the early to mid-1960s. But I moved in a social milieu that included people involved in all sorts of creative activity, from art to publishing, from acting to music. Several friends were involved with showing American surfing movies in halls and surf clubs up and down the coast and soon started talking about making their own films; other friends were working at the ABC and the Commonwealth Film Unit (later to become Film Australia) and were also venturing into filmmaking.\n\nThen I moved into a big share house where a friend, Albie Thoms, not only screened experimental films in the front room, but shot footage on the stairs. Albie, together with David Perry, Aggy Read and John Clark, was setting up UBU Films, and I watched from a front-row seat as Sydney's small but active underground film movement began to grow and become more visible. Taking its name from Alfred Jarry's absurdist 1896 play, Ubu Roi, UBU Films became a Sydney-based independent filmmaking co-operative dedicated to making, exhibiting and distributing experimental films. From the mid-1960s the UBU circle took in many young film-makers who in later years became prominent mainstream film-industry figures, including Peter Weir, Phillip Noyce and Bruce Beresford, as well as artists who experimented with filmmaking, like Garry Shead, Mick Glasheen and Peter Kingston. These filmmakers, and many others, would become members of the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op when it was established in 1969.\n\nThe films that UBU produced were extraordinary, highly inventive and always a challenge to the mainstream. I spent a lot of time driving around the city with Aggy in his battered Mini Minor, delivering bundles of Oz, the soon-to-be-notorious libertarian magazine produced by Richard Neville, Martin Sharp, Richard Walsh and others. Aggy had used lots of magazines to make his very short and for a time quite famous film, Boobs a Lot (1970), which simply, but startlingly, cuts together numerous short shots of women's breasts to The Fugs' pop song of that title. Produced by Albie and photographed by David Perry was Tobias Icarus Age Four (1968), a short but moving film about the mother-and-child relationship made by my friend Clem Weight, the first of us to have a child. It actually travelled successfully to several overseas film festivals. In fact, a number of UBU films screened at overseas festivals; as Albie Thoms later observed, in those early years they were taken much more seriously outside Australia.\n\nBut filmmaking for many at that time was more like painting or acting or playing in a band: it was another expression of a rich and lively local art scene. Painter Garry Shead put together lots of home-movie footage and some especially-shot sequences to make Ding a Ding Day (1966), which chronicles his life as an art student, including his early involvement with Oz magazine, and I'm actually in it, along with many friends. Budding artists Peter Kingston, Johnny Allen and Mick Glasheen made what can be looked back on as a really early underground movie, Who Plus Live Equals Home (1963). Friends lived in the now legendary Yellow House in Kings Cross, where film was just one of the many art forms that were being wildly experimented with, and film screenings were held spontaneously. And practically everyone I knew was involved with Chris McCullough's Vision for a New World (1968), a rather enigmatic tale of a suicide that might not have happened, which went on to win an Australian Film Institute (AFI) Award.\n\nAnother friend, David Price, constructed a sort-of documentary called Surfing Roundabout (1965), featuring a group of surfies who, driving around to various surfie hangouts in their old bomb, rarely managed to get wet, let alone catch a wave. This sly look at the surfing scene starred Jenny Kee (later a celebrated designer), my gorgeous friend Anou Kiisler, and our favourite local band, The Missing Links, with a title song by another friend, Stephen Little. It had a breathless narration written and spoken by Oz editor Richard Neville and, as Albie Thoms says in his book Surfmovies: the history of the surf film in Australia,'it purported to be a serious examination of the surfing craze, but took every opportunity to ridicule the claims... made for the sport'.\n\nAnou also featured in another surfing documentary, The Surfing Years, made by Peter Thompson (brother of actor Jack, and who would later become the resident film critic on Sunday, a long-running current affairs program on the Nine network). The film followed a group of young surfers up the coast where Anou and Peter's soon-to-be wife Victoria, who went along for the trip, spent a lot of time running up and down deserted beaches with rather a lot of dogs. (It was going to movies with Anou that made an unexpected but dramatic difference to me; she was short-sighted, so we had to sit in the front stalls, and I suddenly discovered how much more immersed in the film I would become sitting there. I've been sitting there ever since, and strongly recommend it to all serious film-lovers; an added advantage is that being less crowded, it's easier to sit in the centre of the row, the ideal viewing position.)\n\nAs this all suggests, filmmaking for most of us at this time seemed mainly to be about having fun, something you or your friends did as a group, as others might go dancing or support a footy team. Most of the films were influenced by what we knew of the largely amateur European and US avant-garde and surrealist cinema, using techniques that included hand-drawn animation and images and shapes produced by directly scratching onto the celluloid itself. And until UBU Films, and then the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op, started distributing and exhibiting in the late-1960s (and by the early 1970s there were a number of coops Australia-wide, making over 600 films available around the country), you could really only ever see them in the living room, or at the occasional group screening in a hired cinema.\n\nWhile many of the filmmakers would go on to play important roles in the development of cinema in Australia, at the time my feeling was still that 'real' filmmaking, either the mainstream Hollywood fare or the exciting work we were seeing at festivals and film societies, was something that was done elsewhere. Albie Thoms, however, thought differently; he told me recently that the UBU mob always thought they could make a successful cottage industry out of their sort of filmmaking, completely separated from the hierarchical Hollywood model.\n\nGetting married, having a child and spending some time in England diverted my attention somewhat from cinema, but in the mid-1970s my love of film and my work as a journalist suddenly came together when I was offered the job of editor of Filmnews. For seventeen years in that role, and since then as a freelance journalist, I've written about many aspects of film in Australia. Filmnews was the ideal starting point for me: coming out of the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op, it initially concentrated on Film Co-op issues, representing the voice of the newly active independent Australian film and video maker. As the local industry grew, Filmnews widened its brief, covering the areas of media production and practice, media policy and film culture and theory, always endeavouring to make links between these areas. Through its pages we interviewed filmmakers, policymakers, film bureaucrats and broadcasters, and wrote about the changing institutions, funding regimes and media policies that were the backbone of the emerging industry. Over this period one of my particular interests, both in Filmnews and in other publications since its demise, has been writing about the discovery and restoration of missing films, about the search for lost films, and about both the work and the complicated history of the National Film and Sound Archive.\n\nI wouldn't have seen Wake in Fright when it was first released. I was still in London, only returning late in 1972, just in time for the election of the Whitlam government. So I probably first saw it at the Sydney Film Festival in 1975, when it was screened as part of the festival's Salute to Australian Film, a retrospective that was quite an eye opener, I have to admit, as it introduced me to a range of Australian filmmaking that I'd never really known about. But while I don't remember clearly when I first saw it, I do remember the impact it had. When I saw it for the second time, at a conference in 1999, I was surprised not only by how well the film held up, nearly thirty years after it was made, but by how vividly I remembered it, how many striking sequences had stayed with me. Seeing it again in 2009, and hearing more about how it was lost and found, only added to my interest.\n\nYes, Wake in Fright is a powerful, challenging film that held up what many saw as an unwelcome mirror to Australian society at a time when it just wasn't ready for it. I'm intrigued by how well people remember it, even if they haven't seen it for over thirty years; it's as if scenes have been imprinted in their memories. And not just the bloody, messy, kangaroo shoot, but the claustrophobic scenes in the two-up school, in the RSL, and in the pubs, all that relentless drinking, and that initially playful, friendly wrestle between the two drinking and shooting buddies Dick and Joe, that goes on and on and on...\n\nWhat a film is 'about' and what its plot is can be quite different. I don't think I'll be spoiling it for those who've never seen it if I briefly outline the plot of Wake in Fright, because what the film is 'about' is far more complex and far more interesting than its storyline. It's also shocking, savage, and amazingly contemporary, but to get the full measure of that you need to see it. If you really don't want to know the plot, please skip the next paragraph which I quote from the Australian Screen website:\n\nJohn Grant (Gary Bond) is the bored teacher at a one-room school inTiboonda, a tiny railway junction on the far western plains of New South Wales. On his way to Sydney for Christmas, he stops overnight in Bundanyabba, a frontier mining town. The local policeman, Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), introduces him to after-hours drinking and a two-up game where he loses all his money. At the pub next morning, businessman Tim Hynes (Al Thomas) takes pity and invites him home for lunch. After a disastrous sexual encounter with the man's voracious daughter Janette (Sylvia Kay), Grant gets drunk again with the enigmatic'Doc'Tydon (Donald Pleasence) and his two roughneck pals, Dick (JackThompson) and Joe (Peter Whittle). He wakes up in Tydon's dishevelled shackto a breakfast of kangaroo, hash and pills. Tydon is a disbarred doctor, describing himself as an alcoholic tramp who lives without money or pretence. He taunts Grant over his sexual failure with Janette Hynes. That night, Grant joins Tydon and his friends on a kangaroo-shooting trip. He learns how to kill a wounded kangaroo with a knife. They trash an outback pub and he is sexually assaulted by the drunken Tydon. He tries to get away the next day by hitchhiking, but the truckie just brings him back to 'The Yabba'. In a fury, he goes to Tydon's shack to kill him, but succeeds only in wounding himself. After discharge from the hospital, Grant takes the train back to Tiboonda for another year of teaching.\n\nAs I've said, what the film is 'about' extends far beyond its plot. Critics occasionally reach for hyperbole when discussing it, but this could be an indication of just how powerful a film it is. Here's Paul Byrnes, a former Sydney Film Festival Director and a regular critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, and his Curator's note from Australian Screen:\n\nWake in Fright is Australian cinema's Paradise Lost. It is probably the most unflattering depiction of the country that has ever been filmed, but it remains a profoundly ambiguous work, suspended between disgust and a kind of admiration for the honest depravity of what it shows... John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1667, tells the story of the fall of Man, and his temptation by Satan. Wake in Fright is virtually the same story. At the core of both is a question of free will, the freedom to choose. No-one forces John Grant into depravity; all they do is offer him the chance to choose it.\n\nFor me, Wake in Fright is a film that, despite its initial rejection by Australian audiences, still managed to give encouragement to young and emerging Australian filmmakers at a time when both they and the nascent industry needed it; it's a film that now can be seen and appreciated both for its qualities as a film and for the role it played in the development of that industry. And it's a film with a fascinating history. As a journalist who has written about the ups and downs of most aspects of this growing and very complex screen community, what I find I want to write about Wake in Fright is the story behind the film: how it got made, how it got lost, how it got found, and how it was restored. And, importantly, how it was received both on its first release, and on its much more triumphant re-release.\n\n# 1\n\n# HOW THE FILM CAME ABOUT\n\nThe late 1960s and early 1970s were the years of what has come to be called the 'rebirth' of the Australian film industry, although at the time nobody could ever have imagined how much that industry would grow over the next forty years and what films would come to be made. It's fascinating that in 1971 both Wake in Fright and Walkabout screened at the Cannes Film Festival: two films made by outsiders\u2014a Canadian and a Brit\u2014that have come to be seen as enormously important in that rebirthing process. Both films are unlike anything that had previously been made in Australia, but of the two, Wake in Fright is perhaps the stronger, more savage and harder-hitting film. The more I discover about it, the more intrigued I am by how such a film got made, at that time and in such an unlikely fashion.\n\nIn his book on Nicolas (Nic) Roeg's film Walkabout, Louis Nowra talks about the barren cultural landscape out of which the two films emerged. But even if it appeared barren, there must have been something there to provide the fertility for such an energetic, striving plant to germinate and eventually to thrive. Was that barrenness an illusion? Were there were little patches of vegetation and, underneath, many young shoots getting ready to sprout? Was there dormant and emerging filmmaking life in what would appear to future commentators as a wasteland?\n\nAustralia had been making films (it could only occasionally have been called an industry), since almost the beginning of cinema in the 1890s, but it had always been a very stop-start affair. In the heyday of production in the 1920s and 1930s, between ten and fifteen features were made a year, but in the years leading up to 1970 production had slowed to something less than a trickle\u2014more an occasional splutter. Of course, there were the overseas productions. In fact, 1959 saw a veritable flurry of activity, with Stanley Kramer making On the Beach in Melbourne, Harry Watt directing The Siege of Pinchgut in Sydney, and Leslie Norman making Summer of the Seventeenth Doll also in Sydney. And in 1960 Fred Zinneman made The Sundowners with Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum. But not one of these directors was Australian; indeed, as critic and former Sydney Film Festival Director David Stratton says in his Afterword to the new edition of Ken Cook's original novel Wake in Fright:\n\nthe high-profile 'Australian' films made during this period weren't Australian productions at all. Most of them, including The Overlanders, Eureka Stockade, Bush Christmas, The Shiralee, Smiley, The Siege of Pinchg ut and the 1957 version of Robbery under Arms, were British films, often shot in studios in the UK with Australia used only for the location work; others, including Kangaroo, On the Beach and The Sundowners, were mainstream Hollywood productions made on location here.\n\nAnd as Stratton also comments in his book, The Last New Wave: 'Australian stories were being filtered through foreign eyes, and a strange variety of foreign actors were [sic] pretending to be Australians.'\n\nBut if very few Australian features were made, by the mid-1960s there was an active production sector making newsreels, television programs, and television commercials, while government-funded films were being produced at the Commonwealth Film Unit. Newer, lighter cameras helped the filmmakers who were making surfing, travel and adventure documentaries to go up the coast and into the bush and the outback in search of stories. There were six small studios with sound stages in Sydney, another in Melbourne, and there were about a dozen laboratories to do the processing and post-production. In Australian Cinema: the First Eighty Years, film historians Graham Shirley and Brian Adams refer to 'more than fifty film production companies employing from five to over a hundred people each' and comment that 'among these various film production bodies, along with the television studios, underground filmmakers, filmmakers returning from abroad, and individual film critics, the desire for a reborn film industry grew.'\n\nIn fact, as legendary filmmaker Ken G. Hall wrote in 1967 in the short-lived theatre and film journal Masque:\n\nthere is an Australian film industry at this moment and it is keeping more people in regular employment than ever before. There are available to prospective producers ten times the facilities\u2014studio space, modern equipment\u2014than was available to, say, Charles Chauvel and myself in the 30s and 40s. The days of one camera and, at best, two microphones, together with some equipment made out of Meccano parts and literally tied up with wire, are no more. Much more footage is being shot than in that production heyday and there are more laboratories, including many excellent colour laboratories, than were ever dreamed of then. The trouble is that these people, this studio space and facilities, are not being used to make what most interested people would want them to be used for\u2014feature film production.\n\nOf course, this supposes that the production of feature films is the ultimate goal of any film industry, an issue raised by Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka in The Screening of Australia (Vol 1). 'Why is feature film production assumed to be the real point of an industry?'they ask, and continue:\n\nThe assumption goes back to the phase of film history, from the silent period to the peak audiences of 1946, when movies were the dominant popular art, when people 'went', on average, two to three times a week, when the industry was the third or fourth biggest revenue-earner in the United States, and there was no television. That's part of the answer. Another part is that the marketing of films (to paying audiences, rather than to client groups, as is the case with educational films or broadcasting interests) is organised around the event of the feature, which must be large, emphatic and powerful enough to warrant travel, ticket-price and several hours of voluntary attendance in the dark.\n\nWhile it is the feature film that attracts that paying audience, its production is also what many filmmakers see as their ultimate goal, and even in these bleak years some determined filmmakers did manage to make features. One was Tim Burstall, who made Two Thousand Weeks in 1969, a semi-autobiographical tale about the frustration and isolation of an artist in the Australian wasteland. Actor and writer Graeme Blundell, who was in the film, writes about the experience in his very entertaining memoir of those early years, The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts, describing it as 'a subjective view of a writer's crisis when he calculates he only has 2000 weeks in which to express himself.' It was, as David Stratton (who programmed it in that year's Sydney Film Festival) says in The Last New Wave, 'a remarkably ambitious film'.\n\nTim Burstall had made a short children's film, The Prize, which won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1960. He'd then made some documentaries and a children's TV series, had been working in the US film industry for two years on a Harkness Fellowship, and thought he was ready for his first feature. Released in Melbourne in March 1969 with high (probably too high) expectations, it was reviewed badly and taken off after eleven days, while the Sydney Film Festival screening some months later was a disaster. 'Burstall was devastated', reported Graeme Blundell, 'and developed a deep hatred for what he called \"the intelligentsia\". They were \"highbrows and ABC types\" and they seemed affronted by the simple decency of the film.' In 1971 Burstall made Stork and he had to pay for the first screening in Melbourne. It did so well that it got picked up by mainstream distributors Roadshow, becoming not only the new Australian cinema's first box office success, but reinvigorating Burstall's career, and scooping the pool at the 1973 AFI Awards, the year he made the highly successful Alvin Purple. In that film Blundell let everything hang out, shocking some of the more straight-laced critics but nevertheless delighting the cinema-going public and delivering a very large profit. But Burstall never forgot or forgave the treatment given to Two Thousand Weeks.\n\nBehind the scenes, many of those working in film and television had been lobbying the government for years for some form of government support for production; broadcaster Phillip Adams, then both a successful advertising man and prospective filmmaker, and his friend, historian and Labor Party stalwart Barry Jones (who had been unofficially advising then Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton on cultural issues), proposed to Gorton the setting up of a national film school. In 1969 a screening for federal parliamentarians of Anthony (Tony) Buckley's documentary, Forgotten Cinema, an account of the rise and fall of the Australian feature film pioneers, was given some credit for pursuading Gorton to finally give some assistance to the industry. (Tony, we'll discover, will play an important role in the story of Wake in Fright.)\n\nIn 1969 the commonwealth government announced a three-part program of assistance: an investment corporation to support feature films and television programs, a national film school, and an experimental film fund to assist in the making of low-budget films and encourage emerging filmmakers. While the film school didn't come into being until 1973, the Australian Film Development Corporation was set up in 1970, as was the Experimental Film and TV Fund, initially administered by the Australian Film Institute.\n\nFor many of those who have since written about the period prior to government support, in the numerous takes on how the industry got going again, it may have seemed a very insular, bleak and unrewarding time. For those who were there, however, it was different: their memories reveal a screen culture buzzing with activity and ideas, infused by commercial enterprise, by television and commercials, and energised by popular, classic and foreign films. Nor was it a one-way street: just as the Australian industry was open to ideas from overseas, Australian ideas, energies and talent also flowed abroad.\n\nTake Producer Richard Brennan, for example. As he wrote in early 2009 just after his retirement as a project officer from the federal government funding body Screen Australia, he has been in love with cinema since he was ten: 'I have read about films, watched them, and studied them. And since I was seventeen I have worked on them.' That all started when he met Bruce Beresford at Sydney University in 1960, 'both dreaming of being filmmakers', and they made a short film called The Devil to Pay. Richard then made several other short films and, upon graduating, went on to work as, first, a production assistant at the ABC, and then at the Commonwealth Film Unit (later Film Australia). In 1970 he produced and directed a documentary in support of the May moratorium which launched the anti-Vietnam war movement in Australia, Or Forever Hold Your Peace, which was the first film financed by the newly created Experimental Film and TV Fund. He then produced Peter Weir's short drama Homesdale, which won the rarely-given Grand Prix at the Australian Film Institute Awards.\n\nSo, for Richard and others like him, it was a time of terrific optimism. He recalls vividly how cinema opened up the rest of the world for him, telling me:\n\nWe'd just seen two locally-made features in release, The Naked Bunyip and Nickel Queen, and at Film Australia we were working on two more, Brian Hannant's Flashpoint and Cecil Holmes' Gentle Strangers. We actually saw a future in filmmaking. And we were inspired by the films we were seeing; that year, at the Sydney Film Festival, I'd seen Truffaut's Bed and Board, Peter Watkins' Punishment Park, Pasolini's Teorema, Bunuel's Tristana, Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee, and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist.\n\nRichard's immaculately-kept diaries, which have become a great source of information for friends whose memories or record-keeping aren't nearly as reliable, record that he thought Wake in Fright 'outstanding, Donald Pleasence's performance very impressive, and he notedwhat a star Jack Thompson is going to be'. They also record what novelist Frank Moorhouse told him on 3 November 1971\u2014that Wake in Fright'gave him a thirst, an interest in homosexuality and an itchy \"trigger finger'\".\n\nThe next month Richard was off to London to work as production manager on The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, written by Barry Humphries and directed by his old friend Bruce Beresford.\" Thirty or so films later, some as production manager, many more as producer (and occasionally as actor), Richard remembers this as 'one of the highlights of my life; it was my first feature and my first time overseas'.\n\nHoward Rubie, who would be the first assistant director on Wake in Fright, is another who remembers the early years of the Australian film renaissance\u2014and even those before, in the 1950s and 1960s\u2014as a highly productive period. In 1954, aged sixteen, he had started working at Cinesound as a camera assistant, working on newsreels, short documentaries for cinemas, corporate documentaries and, later, on news footage for Channel Nine. He started about the same time as a young editing assistant, Tony Buckley, and by 1967 they were both working for Ajax Films. 'We were making a lot of TV commercials, especially cigarette commercials', Rubie told me, continuing:\n\nThere was an incredible amount of activity in the non-feature area, and commercial production was the cornerstone of that activity. Even in the mid-sixties everyone was aspiring to features. We talked about the UK productions that were being made here by Harry Watt and Ealing Studios. And we talked about Charles Chauvel's Sons of Matthew and about Lee Robinson and Chips Rafferty's films as showing the way. There was a feeling of disappointment that the Australian industry had declined so much, but there was always a hope that it could be revived.\n\nInvolved in that possible revival was the company that would co-produce Wake in Fright, NLT Productions, so named after its entrepreneurial partners, Jack Neary, Bobby Limb and Les Tinker. The company had been making 'family' shows for television since the early 1960s, centred around the successful weekly variety show. The Bobby Limb Show featuring Limb, who was at the time a popular personality, a singer and comedian who'd made his name and reputation on radio and in the clubs. Jack Neary, his manager and agent, also owned nightclubs, while Les Tinker was a Leagues Club manager who had financed the company.\n\nIn 1968 this small Australian company got involved with the US company Group W, a division of the major US multinational Westinghouse, which at the time operated a small US television network, and signed a co-production deal to make ten features in five years. This was an incredibly ambitious undertaking even for an experienced production team. There is some uncertainty about how these two companies got into bed with each other but Howard Rubie thinks it had something to do with the Channel Nine connection. As explained by film historians Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper in their book Australian Film 1900-1977:\n\nNLT was supported in the venture by Motion Picture Investments, a company directed by prominent Australian businessmen, including Sir Reginald Ansett. Investment was on a major scale and the budget for the first film was $750,000.\n\nThat first feature, Squeeze a Flower, was a comedy about a secret recipe for a liqueur known only to an Italian monk, played by Italian actor Walter Chiari, who comes to Australia to work at a Hunter Valley vineyard. The film was made quickly, with the principal members of cast and crew imported and everyone else Australian. The director, Mark Daniels, was American. Released in February 1970, the reviews weren't good and it flopped.\n\nBut by this time NLT was getting ready to make their second feature\u2014Wake in Fright.\n\n# 2\n\n# HOW THE FILM GOT MADE\n\nAustralian painters, writers and filmmakers have long been fascinated by the outback, the never-never, the back of beyond; that great Australian emptiness has been a continuing theme. Over the years white Australians have invented many names for the arid country that few ever visit and even fewer really understand. It has become much more than a location; whether it's hostile, indifferent or even, very occasionally, welcoming, it has an identity that is palpable. And it's been a part of our national cinema almost from the start; myths have vied with reality in stories that have been told and retold in ever more dramatic ways.\n\nFrom the early silents, through the films of the 1920s and 1930s and into the lean years of the 1940s and 1950s, there had been stories about white settlement, about farmers and settlers taming and being shaped by the land, of desperation and the never-ending struggle against the natural world, of the physical and mental hardship of their lives, of the ravages of drought and fire; there are films of explorers, convicts and bushrangers challenging or taking refuge in the desert or the bush. In all of these the great Australian emptiness has played a major role. From the postman with his long and isolated mail run on the Birdsville Track in John Heyer's wonderful documentary Back of Beyond (1954), to the pioneering families of Charles Chauvel's Sons of Matthew (1949) and the cattle drovers of Harry Watt's The Overlanders (1946), those who take on the outback bears the scars of isolated living on their character and behaviour.\n\nWhen Ted Kotcheff, an outgoing, energetic, and naturally positive man, was given the task of portraying the outback in Wake in Fright, it was a challenge he took on with mixed feelings.\n\nI was trepidatious about depicting a culture I didn't know\u2014but I did recognise some coincidences. Canada and Australia are both ex-British colonies, both big countries with vast empty spaces where life is hard. Remote area mining, forestry, and construction industries serve as a powerful backdrop to very masculine societies where there is lots of drinking. Women, when present, are marginalised by the hard drinking culture.\n\nKotcheff believed that the experience of people in the Australian outback would be similar to those in the Canadian North. 'Our north is vaster than your outback', he explained, 'but you have that same sense of brooding, empty landscapes that don't liberate you, they scare you and entrap you. That whole masculine ethos was also very true of the Canadian north, so I had some sense of that.'\n\nBroken Hill is a mining town near the NSW-SA border, whose tourism brochures even today describe as 'in the breathtaking Australian Outback... and an extreme amount of pubs!' Researching and shooting the film there, Kotcheff came to understand better why violence was such a part of life in a town where men outnumbered women by three to one. He came to believe that the roughness and violence was, for men so deprived of female company, a way of getting some sort of physical contact. Later he speculated whether it needed an outsider to see the harshness of life in this remote mining town; indeed after the Sydney Film Festival screening in the State Theatre in 2009 a member of the audience said to him that no Australian would have dared to make the film in the 1970s.\n\nWake in Fright was Kenneth Cook's first successfully published novel. It drew on his time as a journalist in Broken Hill and was first released in 1961 when he was 32. It was published in the UK and in the USA, translated into several languages, and was added to school reading lists in Australia. The story tells of an indentured schoolteacher John Grant (played by Gary Bond in the film) who, on his way to Sydney for his summer holiday with his girlfriend, gets trapped over one weekend in a nightmare of gambling, never-ending drinking, kangaroo shooting and dark sexual encounters in the outback mining town of Bundanyabba. The novel's bleak atmosphere of isolation and menace, of hellish immediacy, has been translated into the film.\n\nHow and why NLT Productions acquired such a tough and challenging project is something of a mystery. The English actor Dirk Bogarde had purchased the film rights in 1963 and wanted to make it with his chosen director Joseph Losey, with whom, by the late 1960s, he had already established a strong working relationship in Sleeping Tiger (1954), The Servant (1963), King and Country (1964),and Accident (1967). Ken Cook actually told the Australian media that the Bogarde-Losey production would start shooting in December 1963, but it didn't eventuate. British screenwriter Evan Jones, who worked with Losey on The Damned in 1961 and wrote the original script for Wake in Fright, surmised that it was never really a prospect as the money was not there. Australian writer Morris West, a friend of Cook's, bought the rights from Bogarde in 1966, worked on it again with Evan Jones, then sold the project to NLT in a deal reported at the time to be worth $49,000. As a project for NLT it was completely different from their previous feature, the light comedy Squeeze a Flower, or from anything they had done for television.\n\nKotcheff believed he could make the film of the book and the script (which followed the book closely). When he arrived in Australia he consulted with Ken Cook who filled him in on a lot of the background to the novel. He then went to Broken Hill and spent much time with the locals, doing his research and learning about the ways of the bush and the outback. He admits to spending a lot of time in the pubs and bars. He later recalled one incident from a location survey:\n\nWe came across the pub (that appears in the film) with the giant beer bottle on top. It's real! There were about thirty cars outside, each with a woman sitting in it, and inside the pub the men were having a great time. First I have to explain that at the time I had a handlebar moustache and hair down to here. I said, 'Let's go in'\u2014and location manager John Shaw, who's built like a rugger player, is afraid to go in with me\u2014but we do. One guy looked at my hair and said 'Shee-it', looked at my moustache, and said 'Sheee-it', and then said, 'Hello, Stalin'. I didn't answer, and he repeated it. I said, 'I'd love to talk to you, but I'm dead'. There's was silence for a bit, and then he burst out laughing, saying, 'I love a bloke with a sense of humour.'\n\nIt's a sentence that appears word for word in the film, although from the lips of Chips Rafferty it has a certain malicious twist. But for Kotcheff it set up a relationship in Broken Hill that would prove useful. When he wandered around the pubs at night he'd often encounter people who would want to pick fights with him, but luckily, 'some of the blokes from the beer-bottle pub followed me around and protected me'.\n\nBroken Hill proved hospitable to almost all of the film people. While the town would usually be closed up tight by eight o'clock, the dining room in the RSL club was kept open especially so they could get something to eat late, without having to request it in advance. (Of course, behind closed doors the drinking and pokies were going on illegally long into the night, as in the film.) The film used many of the Broken Hill locals as extras and the school children in the opening scene of the film were local kids from farms around the town. There was only one minor incident: a camera assistant taking cans of film to the plane was set upon by some locals and a can rolled into the gutter. We got it back and it was OK, but the thought of what could have happened to that precious can of film was a bit concerning', remembers assistant director Rubie.\n\nKotcheff, now a vigorous 78, has shed light on why he, a Canadian who knew nothing about the Australian outback, got to direct the film. He grew up in Toronto, but with no film industry in Canada, his only chance to make feature films was to go somewhere else. So in 1958 he gravitated towards England, eventually directing stage plays and some television as well as feature films. 'I didn't start making films in Canada, I only directed television there', he says. 'In London, there's theatre, film and television all in the same city, so I went to England and that was where my film career really started.'\n\nAfter making Tiara Tahiti in 1962, Kotcheff directed the much admired Life at the Top (1965) with Lawrence Harvey and Jean Simmons. This, he recalls, was followed by\n\nanother good film about the racial situation in London in the 1960s, Two Gentleman Sharing (1969). The writer of that film, Evan Jones, said to me, 'Ted, there is this great book you would be perfect for. It's by Kenneth Cook and it's called Wake in Fright; it's a lost weekend of self discovery. You should read it. I'm going to start an adaptation and, if you like it, you can go to Westinghouse (who were half financing the film and had an office in London) to see if they'll hire you and we'll work on it together'. I read the book and loved it, and I went to Peter Katz, who ran Westinghouse's Group W Films, and said,'Look, Evan and I would like to work together on this project. He'll write it and I'll direct it'. Peter Katz gave me the job.\n\nFor Kotcheff, 'the best part of directing is creating characters. To create interesting characters is the fun for me in making films'. He had empathy for the main characters in Wake in Fright, whom he thought of as musical instruments: 'Most of the time there's only four characters\u2014Doc, John and the kangaroo men (Dick and Joe)\u2014so you had to pay attention to every little detail in their behaviour. It wasn't a symphony. It's a piece of chamber music.' He was particularly taken with a line early in the script, when John Grant is talking about the aggressive hospitality in the town, and Doc (Donald Pleasence) says, 'It's death to farm out here, it's worse than death in the mines; you want them to sing opera as well?'\n\nThe film was shot on location in and around Broken Hill for eight weeks, following a four-week studio shoot in Sydney. NLT appointed another company, Ajax Films, to set up the production and, as with Squeeze a Flower, brought in an overseas director, Kotcheff, and the UK cinematographer who had shot Squeeze a Flower, Brian West. The rest of the crew was Australian, most of whom had worked on at least some of the features made locally in recent years. Kotcheff was impressed with this young, enthusiastic crew; even at the time, he recalls, there was a feeling that 'they were making something special, something important'.\n\nHoward Rubie was working at Ajax Films as a television director, and he enthusiastically joined the production as assistant director. 'Wake in Fright was one of the few screenplays I'd read, and I'd already read many, that I couldn't stop reading. It was a real page turner', he recalls. He was concerned that the $800,000 budget was inadequate (and was duly chastised by producer George Willoughby for questioning it) because\n\nwe had a slightly bigger crew [than usual], and there was a lot of location shooting, a lot of extras. Some sequences had to be dropped, [so] there was a bit of cutting and rewriting of the original shooting script. For logistical and financial reasons all the pub and house interiors were shot on location or in the studio in Sydney, all exteriors in Broken Hill. But the cinematographer Brian West was excellent; he seemed to adapt very well to Australian conditions and like most overseas cinematographers he was amazed at the quality and clarity of the light\u2014he used to bounce a lot of light off white card to get the glare.\n\nThe shoot had its ups and downs, but on the whole it went smoothly. Film is a collaborative medium and one advantage for Kotcheff was that many of the crew had worked together before, and at a faster pace than US or UK crews. Rubie, however, recalls one problem they encountered on location:\n\nWe did have to reshoot the fight scene, because Donald Pleasence decided he'd act better if he was a little drunk and badgered the props boy into giving him real beer. While Ted would rarely go beyond four takes for a scene, we had to do so many takes for that scene that Peter Whittle and Jack Thompson were physically buggered\u2014they'd have to drag themselves into another take.\n\n'There were 47 takes', recalls editor Tony Buckley, 'although we ended up using take eight, with a bit of take ten.'\n\nWhile Kotcheff believes Australians are natural actors because they are so exuberant and extroverted,the production company insisted on casting an English actor as John Grant. It had been hard: every eligible British actor, it seemed, had turned down the role. Kotcheff had initially wanted Michael York, who was intense, intelligent and blonde (and who told Kotcheff years later how he came to regret not doing the film), but finally chose Gary Bond, a strong stage and television actor with some film credits who had something of the same look (and who would be promoted as the'new Peter O'Toole'). While the casting of a British actor could be seen as unnecessary, Bond's Englishness actually highlighted his difference and contributed a naivety that strengthened his fine performance.\n\nKotcheff had seen Chips Rafferty in several of the Ealing films about the Australian outback, (The Overlanders, Eureka Stockade and Ralph Smart's Bitter Springs (1950)), and says:\n\nEven back then I had thought he was a wonderful type. It was when we were casting that I was told about his iconic status in the Australian film industry. But I had always liked him and thought he would be perfect for the role of the policeman.\n\nKotcheff saw this character as a local petty tyrant, the king of this particular circle of hell. 'I always felt there was a sinister side to him when, at the end, he takes a certain sadistic pleasure from John's mental and emotional demise.' And Chips Rafferty shows an edge, adding an undertone of menace to his portrait of the outwardly genial and friendly local cop.\n\nBroken Hill was Chips Rafferty's birthplace, and Wake in Fright would be his last feature film. In his biography, Chips:The Life and Times of Chips Rafferty, Bob Larkins says,'Chips gave the finest performance of his career, displaying a subtlety of characterisation rarely evident before. But then, he had never had a better part to play, or, with the exception of Fred Zinneman and Lewis Milestone, a better director...'\n\nRafferty was able to add his own element of authenticity to this very authentic looking film: there was a lot of beer drinking in the film, and of course the production provided a non-alcoholic beverage for the actors, but there was one actor who would never drink it\u2014Chips Rafferty.\n\nJack Thompson says he learned much from the film and from Kotcheff in particular.\n\nHe'd say, 'Don't act, just think!' It was my first major film role and it was a wonderful experience because it was an extraordinary film, and a very disturbing film. For me it was a great thing to be involved in, and what I learned making it I carried for the next couple of years of my career.'\n\nDonald Pleasence was another mentor. 'We were discussing very earnestly the difference between stage and film acting, and he said, sotto voce, \"Feed the camera, Jack.\" It's something I've followed ever since.' Thompson also talks about\n\nthe incredible energy that Ted brought to the whole shoot. In those bad days before health and safety issues brought in strict regulations, when we did all that driving madly about, there was an unseen companion. Ted was lying (in the ute) down at our feet, yelling directions!\n\nKotcheff had gone down into the mines when he was on the location search and found it'a nightmare down there'. He particularly wanted to include a scene showing the two roughnecks, Dick (Jack Thompson) and Joe (PeterWhittle), at work in the mines but the budget couldn't didn't stretch to that. It's something he regrets to this day:\n\nUnfortunately, it became a victim of the budget because it was very complex to shoot down in the mines and it was going to take another whole day. Afterwards I was always sorry I didn't shoot it, because you would have seen them working in this God-damned hellish hole and you would have understood why they went crazy and drank and gambled and shot.\n\nKotcheff grew to love the outback, what he saw as'its unearthly colours, extraordinary shapes and totally exotic vegetation,' and for years looked for a subject that would allow him to return to film it, but neverfound one. His major concern was to recreate in the studio what he had found in the outback. He'd compiled many notes on the colours of the landscape and told art director Dennis Gentle to use only the hot colours of red, orange and brown to convey the oppressive heat. He'd also noted that every surface and object was covered in a layer of fine red dust.'What I did was to bring barrels of earth that was the same colour as the outback, put it into fly pumps and before every take I would have it sprayed into the air so that it would hang there for a while and then create a film of dust over everything.' And, of course, they needed flies. The science department at Sydney University produced thousands of sterilised houseflies and a swarm was released before each take for the scenes in Doc's shack. 'I went to infinite pains to never let the audience be free of the heat, the dust, the flies', Kotcheff says.\n\nThen there were the scenes that have attracted so much attention and outrage:the kangaroo shoot in which kangaroo after kangaroo is chased, spotlit and shot in an orgy of driving, drinking and slaughter. The footage was shot on a professional cull and brilliantly edited into the scenes of the four men driving and spotlighting kangaroos. It was, and still is, important for Kotcheff that not one kangaroo was killed specifically for the purpose of the film; he has never forgotten the brutality so disturbingly captured for the film.\n\nJackThompson believes the controversy over the kangaroo-shooting scenes belied the truth of Australian life in the outback, which he, for one, had already experienced. 'When I was sixteen I wenton a kangaroo shoot. What really disturbed me about it was the adrenalin. There was a sense of danger and a sense of excitement about it that I tried to portray in those scenes.' Kotcheff seems to agree; despite shooting images to disturb even many years later, he describes that day in the back of the ute, bumping and bouncing around with camera operator John McLean, as 'the most exhilarating day of my life!'\n\nThere is another kangaroo scene Kotcheff is much happier about, however. When they filmed the scene in which Joe (Peter Whittle) boxes with a kangaroo, they first tried the kangaroos they had been using for other scenes in the film, but these, as Kotcheff explains\n\nwere mainly pacifists. We tried everything to get them to fight, but nothing was happening; I thoughtto myself, 'This is the nightmare I thought it was going to be. How am I going to do this sequence?' Then Howard Rubie came back with the biggest roo I'd ever seen, about eight feet tall. Someone had shot his eye out, so we called him Lord Nelson, and he hated humans, wanted to smash, kick, kill any human being he saw. When we put him upto fight, he just went for Peter, and what guts he had to face this demon! Nelson wanted to destroy him, grab him in a hug, raise his hind legs and smash every bone in Peter's body. Peter was trying to lift his tail to put him off balance, but Nelson would not let him and would swing around and go in for another attack. We finished the whole sequence within three hours, and somewhere I have a great photograph of Peter and Nelson, exhausted and embracing each other. At some point during those three hours, Nelson had understood that Peter wasn't actually trying to hurt him, and at the end of it they were leaning against each other's shoulders for support.\n\nWhen he was sure that they had all the footage they needed, Kotcheff turned to Nelson and told him:\n\n'You were great!'The whole crew applauded him. He looked around, puzzled. I said,'Open the gates! Alright Lord Nelson, you can go.' But he looked at me still puzzled and again I said,'You can go. Leave!' He hopped away about five steps, turned around and looked backat me. 'I mean it', I said.'You did a great job and now you can go', and then he hopped off into the darkness.\n\nNelson was a wild kangaroo but he got his own credit as 'Nelson, the fighting kangaroo'. Every film needs a bit of luck sometimes and to have the one kangaroo in the whole of Australia who was like Moby Dick was my amazing bit of luck.\n\nWhen the shoot was finished Kotcheff cut the footage with editor Tony Buckley at Ajax Films, where, he says, the relatively inexperienced Buckley 'did an absolutely superb job in editing'. He recalls that producer George Willoughby,\n\nlike all old Brits, thought that they do it better in Britain and said to me, 'Ted, do you mind if I bring in a British editor called Tom Noble?' (Tom, by the way, won an Oscar for Witness, and he has edited a lot of my films, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitzand First Blood.) I said to George, 'It's cut brilliantly, what you want him to do with it?'George said, 'I only want him to lookat it with a professional editor's eye. Humour me, Ted, humour me.' So I screened the film for Tom and when the lights went up I looked over and said, 'Well, Mr Noble?' He said, 'Ted, I wouldn't touch a frame of it. This editor is brilliant and he's done a superb job for you'.\n\nKotcheff also especially remembers sound editor Tim Wellburn doing a fantastic job:\n\nHe told me that he didn't like the tracks we had, and so what he did was to take the vehicle we'd used, and I think he also took Peter Whittle with him, and went back into the out back and re-recorded the car turning and speeding and screeching and spinning, accelerating, decelerating, crunching and banging into things. They spent days out there. I was present at the mix after they got back and I thought it was the most superb sound track I ever heard.\n\nAll in all, the production was a good experience for everyone involved, especially the director. As JackThompson said, 'at the end of the shoot I asked Ted if there was anything he'd like to take back with him, and he said, \"the crew'\".\n\n# 3\n\n# HOW THE FILM GOT LOST\u2014AND FOUND\n\nFilms disappear all the time. Distributors dispose of unwanted prints, filmmakers leave prints on top of cupboards, producers forget or fail to lodge their original material with the National Film and Sound Archive, companies change hands or get taken over, and stuff just gets lost or thrown away. To an extent this might be expected with short films, or unsuccessful films, or films that people have forgotten about, but it happens with many more. As film archivist and historian Ken Berryman wrote in 1999 in his entry on 'Lost Films' in the Oxford Companion to Australian Film,more than ninety percent of Australia's silent films, and a large slice of our film production since then, has probably not survived'.\n\nThere is an International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) whose members are national institutions dedicated to the rescue, collection, preservation and screening of moving images, valued both as works of art and culture and as historical documents; it now comprises more than 140 institutions in over 77 countries\u2014a reflection of the extent to which the preservation of moving image heritage has become a world-wide concern. Australia's National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA)\u2014a co-publisher of this book\u2014was established in 1984 (although its antecedents go back to 1935) and, after years of being attached, in one form or another, to other institutions, in 2008 it finally became a permanent, autonomous national institution with its own statutory base. Despite its complex history it has grown into one of the world's larger and better-recognised audiovisual archives; its role is to collect, store, preserve and make available screen and sound material relevant to Australia's culture, and it is the repository of much of Australia's film heritage. But, while films made with government support are obliged to lodge preservation material with the NFSA, it is not obligatory for the many other films made every year. And certainly films made in earlier periods were not required to lodge such material.\n\nIn the 1980s the NFSA initiated the Last Film Search in response to the urgent need to recover missing nitrate films. Nitrate film stock was used in all pre-1951 professional productions, but not only was it highly flammable and sometimes self-igniting, it also decomposed if not stored in optimum conditions. So if old films were to be preserved they had to be transferred to safety film. While by the 1980s many early films were already irretrievably lost, it was believed that many were still out there waiting to be found. And they were.\n\nThe Last Film Search, well-supported by the media, encouraged people to contact the NFSA with information about the location of any film reels they happened to know about. And happily for Australian film culture citizens from all around Australia responded; in addition to much nitrate feature film footage, home movies, newsreels, actuality footage, cinema advertisements and trailers were also discovered. This resulted in the NFSA acquiring another ten percent of pre-1930s cinema and much more of our more recent film history. Highlights from the search included a 1926 two-hour documentary on New Guinea (this 16mm actuality footage was recorded during the filming of two back-to-back feature films\u2014The Hound of the Deep on Thursday Island and The Jungle Woman at Merauke in Dutch New Guinea), a very good original print of Charles Chauvel's 40,000 Horsemen, home movies from as early as 1910 and, most excitingly, three hundred feet of Australia's first feature, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), found by teenagers on a rubbish tip.\n\nWhile filmmakers are advised to locate their original negatives and lodge them with the NFSA, many don't. They might leave it at the lab thinking it will be safe there, but labs close or change hands. Films that have been sold into foreign territories sometimes have their original negative or intermediates sent overseas to make additional prints; that material can be very hard to locate and recover. Despite the Last Film Search campaign and the automatic lodgement of government-supported films, many films remain missing from the national collection, including the eighty percent of pre-1930s production, most of which will never been found as many silent films were deliberately destroyed with the coming of sound. Many later films are also missing, while much of the commercial television production from 1956 to 1962 was never preserved.\n\nWhile films continue to disappear all the time, some are also found. After its release in 1971, Wake in Fright screened in Australia in only a few city cinemas, never reaching the suburbs before it gradually faded from view. In 1996 Bobby Limb, the middle initial of NLT Productions, became increasingly concerned over the fate of the film that his company had made over twenty-five years earlier, and to which he believed it still owned the rights. Where, he wanted to know, was the negative and soundtrack of Wake in Fright? While a handful of increasingly damaged 35mm and 16mm prints were still around, no-one seemed to know where the original material was.\n\nWake in Fright was made as a co-production; despite a warm reception at the Cannes Film Festival and by critics in Australia and overseas, its release, both domestically and overseas, was unsuccessful. This, combined with a history of rights-holding companies changing hands, parent companies being taken over and smaller companies being deregistered, made it more than possible the film would be mislaid. When Bobby Limb contacted the film's editor, Tony Buckley, by now an eminent producer and a leading member of Australia's screen community, and asked him to help locate the missing negative and soundtrack, Buckley proved to be exactly the right person. In Ted Kotcheff's words, Buckley was'the relentless lead detective on this hunt'.\n\nIn his detailed description of his detective work in his memoir, Behind a Velvet Light Trap: A Filmmaker's Journey from Cinesound to Cannes, Buckley describes how initially he didn't think it would be at all difficult to trace the negative of Wake in Fright: 'I confidently tell Bobby that it would be in London, at one of the laboratories... where I know a lot of Australian films had been sent for their overseas sales requirements to be serviced'.\n\nBut when he contacted the laboratories, remembering to say the film may be labelled by its international title Outback, it couldn't be found. And so began the hunt that took him from the UK to France, Germany and Spain (where a Spanish-dubbed print was found, but with no supporting material). In 1998 he visited the vault in London where the reels were thought to be stored, only to learn they had been sent to the US the previous week. For a while the trail went cold. Then, in 1999, the Dublin Film Festival found the only Technicolour print in existence. This was sent back to Australia and screened at the 1999 Australian Screen Directors' conference, to much excitement and acclaim. But Buckley was still not satisfied: 'It's not a bad print, but it had some very nasty joins'. The hunt was still on.\n\nHe finally succeeded in tracking down Harvey Rappaport at the US TV network CBS (which had inherited much moving-image material when it merged with Westinghouse, the original parent company of the film's co-producer, Group W). Rappaport eventually found some 16mm prints of the film, but this wasn't enough for super-sleuth Buckley: his holy grail was the film negative from which clear, clean prints could be struck. He implored Rappaport to have one final search for the negative. In his book, Buckley tells the rest of the story:\n\nRappaport got so fed up with my pestering him about the film that he agreed to go to Pittsburgh to look for it. And he found it in this big container marked 'For destruction'. There were more than 200 reels there, virtually a complete set. According to the foreman at the warehouse, the container had been about to go to the tip. We don't know how close we were to losing it but it might have been a matter of days.\n\nWith the help of Ausfilm (a government and industry partnership), all these reels were then repatriated to the NFSA in Australia. They arrived in September 2004, more than eight years after Limb first asked Buckley for his assistance. As Kotcheff said, it is only because of Buckley's 'commitment and years of dogged pursuit that this film has survived'.\n\nWhat kept him going? Buckley thinks he 'got a bug in my head that it had to be found, although I nearly gave up in 2002; of course I didn't think it would be the trial that it became, or that it would be discovered so close to being destroyed'. Recovering the film after such a long search was 'a relief more than anything. Like any national treasure, once it's gone, it's gone; and it would have been a terrible thing had it been lost. We were so close that I didn't dare ask what the dates were for that crate's destruction!'\n\nLike many a good film narrative, this story has a subplot, and in this case it's one that reveals just how important the history of film is to a nation's screen heritage, almost as important as the existence of the film itself.\n\nWhile Buckley was searching for the film, entertainment lawyer Raena Lea-Shannon was conducting her own search. Buckley had rung and asked whether she'd be interested in clarifying title to the film on a pro-bono basis. As NLT Productions Pty Ltd was deregistered in September 1990, she had to make an application to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), seeking their agreement to transfer the rights in the film on behalf of the de-registered company. This involved locating the documentation that proved NLT Productions was the maker of Wake in Fright, and had done all the right things in terms of legal contracts. Upon learning from film historian Nick Herd, who was researching the history of Australian commercial television, that he had discovered about twenty boxes of papers in the Mitchell Library relating to NLT Productions, and other related companies, and that they included two boxes connected with Wake in Fright, she spent much spare time going through all the (very dusty and dirty) papers looking for the documentation. In a bizarre echo of the search for the film's negative, all these boxes had been found in a building slated for destruction, and the builder, who thought they could be important, decided to save them at the last minute.\n\nMost of the papers relating to Wake in Fright are photo and carbon copies, not originals and not signed. However, because they are the only ones known to exist, they have been relied on by the ASIC to establish that NLT Productions made the film. Because NLT Productions was deregistered, ASIC became owner of the copyright. It was decided on advice from Lea-Shannon that a nonprofit Trust should be established to receive the film rights from ASIC. Lea-Shannon set up the Wake in Fright Trust in January 2009 and ASIC transferred the copyright to the Trust, whose aim is:\n\nto preserve and promote public awareness of the motion picture Wake in Fright and the general public awareness of the significance of Australian-produced feature films and to support the cultural development of the Australian Film Industry as the Trustee sees fit.\n\nIn time those boxes of papers may also provide more information on how the Australian company, NLT productions, got together with its co-producer, the US company Group W owned by Westinghouse. They include copies of letters from NLT's Jack Neary to the celebrated Australian dancer, actor, director and choreographer Robert Helpmann (later Sir Robert), who was very interested in playing Doc; there are also copies of letters from Helpmann giving Neary contacts for possible co-production partners. When Helpmann learned the part had gone to Donald Pleasence, Lea-Shannon reports that he was not at all happy. Jack Neary was no longer considered a friend.\n\nThis paper search, which has already taken over five years so far, isn't finished; the details of the co-production agreement with CBS (inherited from Westinghouse) are in the process of being retrieved by CBS. Once those rights are settled Wake in Fright will be available for distribution worldwide.\n\nThis legal history of its loss and recovery offers the sort of detailed information that film historians need in order to understand how and why films do or don't get made, why and where audiences go to see them or not, and why a film is or isn't a success.\n\nAnd so the next stage of the process began: the restoration of the film. Restoration is another part of the story of our national screen heritage: the expertise and dedication needed to restore a film, the costs involved in restoration and preservation, and the priorities that have to be established. After the original negative and other material arrived at the NFSA in Canberra, an initial inspection confirmed that the images and sound negatives were virtually complete and reasonably intact. The NFSA, together with Deluxe Australia (formerly Atlab), the film laboratory with which it has an ongoing print restoration program, then had to determine how to preserve the film and the method that would best restore its image and sound closest to its original state.\n\nWhen Atlab made a print from the negative, it was discovered that, as well as the expected dirt and scratches, the colours were badly faded, and that conventional film grading methods would probably not restore them. Anthos Simon, General Manager Creative Services for Deluxe Australia, thought they could do a better job through their recently launched digital facility, EFILM. 'We did some tests on some of the worst shots', Simon has said, 'and Tony Buckley and the [NFSA] were blown away by the improvements. The colour was back, it was clean and there were details that simply weren't visible before\u2014such as a dartboard over Chips Rafferty's shoulder in a pub scene'.\n\nAlthough the cost for such a process was much higher than had been anticipated for the film's restoration, it was determined that Wake in Fright was a crucial part of Australia's screen heritage, and Deluxe and the NFSA formed a partnership to do the full digital restoration. The work proceeded slowly, utilizing laboratory down-time as far as possible. Painstakingly, often manually, often frame by frame, the colour was corrected, the dirt and scratches removed, the image stabilised. Buckley was able to direct much of the process; as the film's editor he knew exactly how it had looked at its first screening in 1970. Digital technology meant that alterations made for the US version were easily corrected to the original, and even a couple of problems from the original edit were fixed. Several shots with nudity had been censored for the US release, and replaced with alternative, clothed takes; now copies of the original shots from the Australian version were inserted back into the negative and digitally colour-graded to match.\n\nAfter more than a year's work, the completed digital master was transferred to 35mm camera negative stock, and new prints made from this negative. For the soundtrack, Danny Roberts from NFSA Audio Services, working with then NFSA Film Specialist David Noakes, spent much time transferring the many different components that were used to remaster the soundtrack. These were pieced together digitally by Soundfirm, the sound post-production company, to create the restored and remastered Dolby soundtrack. Finally, a pristine durable 35mm negative was struck to be preserved by the NFSA.\n\nAfter the restored film's first public screening in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival 2009, with some of the crew and a delegation from Broken Hill in attendance, Ted Kotcheff said:\n\nI thought the film was pretty damn good\u2014I haven't seen it for so many years, and of course even if you've got something ninety-eight percent right, you only see the two percent wrong\u2014but I thought the restoration was amazing. I kept looking at the texture. And the performances\u2014they were so good!\n\nSo, one film, a very important film in Australia's cinema history, has been found and restored. At this point it feels important to say that many films are still missing; the NFSA is currently searching for the original materials for two other important films from the same period, Jim Sharman's strange first feature, Shirley Thompson vs the Aliens (1972), featuring bodgies and widgies, visitors from space, madness, and Sydney's Luna Park, and the Margaret Fink-produced film of David Williamson's play and screenplay, The Removalists (Tom Jeffrey, 1975). There are prints of both, but nothing more. As Ken Berryman writes,\n\nwhile Australian film culture and our heritage awareness have come a long way in recent decades, it is still possible for more recent films to slip through the preservation net. Without effective compulsory-deposit legislation, final responsibility for lodging original negatives and release prints with the NFSA rested with producers who often lack[ed] the time, energy, finance, or motivation to attend to the proper storage of a just-completed film.\n\nIn 1980 UNESCO adopted a Recommendation for the Safeguarding and Preservation of Moving Images, a document of historic importance, in which UNESCO called upon its member states and the international public to treat moving images, because of their educational, cultural, artistic, scientific and historical value, as an element of national culture. It furthermore called upon nations and their citizens to protect and preserve their films for transmission to future generations. Audiovisual archives all around the world, some at vastly different stages of development and funding, all strive to carry out this work for their own national screen collections. In recent years, however, with the enormous changes in technology and the emergence of digital media, the responsibilities of an audiovisual archive have become more complex and demanding. The concept of national cinema is harder to define in an age of globalisation and of international co-productions, while the issues of copyright, the diversification of delivery technologies, and the increased marketing opportunities for archival material, all need to be taken into account.\n\nIn Australia, the NFSA has an obligation to collect, store, preserve and provide access to Australia's ever-growing heritage of moving images and recorded sound, and it's an obligation that carries with it much responsibility. I've been writing about the NFSA for years, sometimes very critically, but I believe that the role it has played in the discovery and restoration of Wake in Fright is one that provides guidance for the future.\n\n# 4\n\n# HOW THE FILM WAS RECEIVED\n\n# Then...\n\nWake in Fright opened in Sydney on Saturday 9 October 1971 at the Embassy (the dark and luxurious cinema where I used to see British films when I bunked off from school; now gone, like so many cinemas from the Sydney CBD\u2014and from towns and cities across Australia). The reviews were good, although they pulled no punches. 'It's a harsh, jotting movie with an almost physical impact, though its vitality and rough humour prevent it from descending into resigned despair', wrote Beverly Tivey in the Sunday Australian, adding that it was'a startlingly accurate visual translation of Ken Cook's novel; andabsolutely wonderful cinema'. Martha Dubose, an American critic living and working for a time in Sydney as the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer, said that when she left the cinema she felt somehow 'blood-spattered and dirty,' and described the film's achievement as 'characterising a borderless human condition in particularly Australian terms. It succeeds in going beyond the Aussie types it utilises to portray the senseless codes that all men concoct to justify themselves'. 'Bawdy, brutal, cruel\u2014and a masterpiece', ran the headline in the Daily Mirror. Colin Bennett in the Age called it'the most savage comment on Australia ever put on film'. (Bennett, who David Stratton describes in his book The Last New Wave, as a'highly respected contributor to the Age, and just about the only writer earning his living in Australia as film critic', was the reviewer who had so savaged Tim Burstall's 2,000 Weeks two years before .)\n\nPerhaps the most perceptive comment came from Sylvia Lawson, writing in the Australian, who did not see it as either caricature or realism: 'It is more in the nature of one man's bad dream, told with a dream's intensity and a dream's apparent illogic.' She continued, 'Ken Cook's tight, terrifying little story is of course absurd, but when you take it as an imaginative concentration of horrific real-life elements, it makes full sense and impact'.\n\nAnd impact it most certainly had. I've talked to many friends about their memories of seeing the film on its original release, and I've had widely differing responses but, as I've mentioned earlier, none could forget it. One confessed that the film was such an awful, traumatic experience that he couldn't even consider seeing it again. Another went with her mother, who had grown up in the country, and who found its portrayal of the treatment of women bore out what she remembered from her own experience. For me, what is most interesting is the clarity with which people remember the film, retaining vivid images not only of the kangaroo shoot, but many other scenes.\n\nJack Thompson, speaking at the premiere screening at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2009, recalled hearing reports that during its first release, people were apparently yelling out in the cinema, 'That's not us. That's not Australia. That's not how we are'. But, he said, 'it was, and still is. I think it was more that we hadn't made any films about us for a long time. We'd not seen that image of ourselves on the screen, and Australians were terribly confronted by what they saw'.\n\nMichael Thornhill was writing about films and filmmaking for the Australian at that time. He'd made a short film, The American Poet's Visit, in 1969, would make his first feature, Between Wars, in 1974 and go on to enjoy the same sort of bumpy career that many Australian filmmakers have, all the while remaining an active, critical, and very vocal member of the screen community. On 27 January 1970, reporting on his visit to the set of Wake in Fright when they were shooting the two-up sequence, he described'the euphoric experience' of watching a film being made, but concluded rather ominously:'The producers of Wake in Fright seem to be aiming somewhere in between Easy Rider and If on the one hand and Hello, Dolly! on the other. They may well do it. Wake in Fright will have to gross about $3 million at the box office to break even'.\n\nHe was even more concerned in March the next year, reporting on 23 March that\n\nUnited Artists claim they are making top plans for the release of Wake in Fright in Australia. This was contradicted by another United Artists source, who said that Wake in Fright would have to compete for theatre space with Fiddler on the Roof and the new James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever.\n\nWhen the film was released in October he was quite impressed. 'If Wake in Fright is not the definitive film about Australia', he wrote on 12 October in the Australian, 'it will do as thought-provoking entertainment, warts and all, until some such masterpiece is forthcoming.' He was less positive about its chances at the box office, saying,'it will be interesting to see if this relatively expensive international potpourri is commercially successful... it is unusual to find an Australian company involving itself in a film that purports to treat seriously an aspect of the Australian social ethos'. In this he was prescient. Despite the strong reviews the film did not perform well at the box office, closing in Brisbane after only a week. And in Sydney, although Tony Buckley recalled that word of mouth was working and audiences were slowly growing, six weeks into the run the film was taken off to make way for more mainstream fare.\n\nGraham Shirley and Brian Adams wondered whether the film 'was perhaps too uncomfortably direct and uncompromising to draw large Australian audiences', and they quote one of the film's two executive producers, Bill Harmon, as saying the film had been treated badly by its local distributor, United Artists' Australian branch. Harmon had said in the Australian, 'It almost seems nobody wants anything to succeed here. Here we are, wanting to do pictures here, and it's terribly important for the investor to get his money back. But if a good movie can't get any money back here, who the hell's interested?'\n\nWhen Wake in Fright opened in Australia it had already screened as the official Australian entry in the 1971 Cannes Film Festival in May, where it gained what Ted Kotcheff remembers as 'ecstatic reviews... One said that there was so much heat and dust (on screen) he had to go home and have a shower afterwards.' It was released in Paris as Le Reveil dans la Terroir (Waking in Terror), received great reviews from French critics, and ran for nearly five months. Kotcheff remembers\n\nOne French critic thought it was a masterpiece and interviewed me two or three times, on television and on radio. The French really loved that film. They loved the idea of people under great existential stress, and were attracted to the dust and heat and the powerful rawness of it.\n\nUnited Artists had completed a deal with NLT Productions and Group W for global distribution, but they changed the title of the film to Outback for its international release. This version of the film was slightly different: both the opening and end titles were changed, and a scene in which Gary Bond appeared naked now had him in underpants. In October 1971 Outback was released in Britain, and four months later in the United States.\n\nThe overseas advertising played the originality of the film to the hilt by dwelling on the strangeness of the outback location, declaring: 'Outback. Drama of Despair. Filmed in Australia' and went on,\n\nOutback derives its title from the setting of its story, the 'outback' area of Australia. It is a violent section of the down-under continent: violent in color, violent climate, violent gambling and violent drinking. The 'Outback' cages [John Grant], strips him bare, and tortures him, but in exchange it gives him, on his brief, destructive stay, a new understanding of his own humanity.\n\nDespite its relatively brief releases and lack of success in the UK and in the US, the film did get written about. In Britain it was reviewed in The Times, the Telegraph and the film buffs' bible, the Monthly Film Bulletin, while in the US it was mentioned quite a few times in Variety, and reviewed in the Village Voice and Vanity Fair. Roger Greenspun wrote in the New York Times of 'a sense of general foreboding that crystalizes often enough into particular terror and that is not quite like anything else I can remember feeling at the movies'. He went on,\n\nscarier for me is a scene in one of the city's great sprawling saloons, a moment of hushed, terrifying solemnity when in a kind of lunatic praise of long-departed soldiers, sailors and airmen, the drinkers are admonished overa spectral loudspeaker, 'Lest We Forget!' I suspect that these scenes are real, too, and to have discovered them is a filmmaker's coup.\n\nThe film critic once described as 'a national treasure', Pauline Kael, treated the film very seriously in the New Yorker: 'There's talent and intelligence in the Australian film Outback. More remarkably, it has a subject\u2014the crude comradeship among the white men in the vast desert areas, and their erratic destructiveness... it records the same kind of senseless destruction that in recent American movies has been blamed on the corruptiveness of American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war'. The film's strength, she continued,\n\nis that, unlike the American films in which vengeful, hypocritical (usually middle-class) whites destroy mercilessly, slaughtering Indians, or animals, or both, Outback is fair-minded. And because the mindless violence you're shown isn't attributed to what you know damned well didn't cause it, you can't shrug it off; you're stuck with it, trying to understand it, trying to figure out what, if anything, can be done about it.\n\nKnowle wrote that you come out of the cinema 'with a sense of epic horror'. Not all overseas reviewers, however, were so impressed by the film. Writing in the British tabloid the Sun, Fergus Cashin commented 'anybody who emigrates to Australia after seeing this must need treatment'.\n\nIn 1975 the Sydney Film Festival presented a 'Salute to Australian Film', an 'Australian Feature Film Retrospective 1911-1971'. The special program explained that,\n\nnearly seventy years since the release of the first Australian feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, in 1906... and now that local production is at a higher level than it has been for many years, it seemed a very appropriate time to take a long view at some of the most important films produced here in the intervening period.\n\nThe Salute included almost seventy productions from 1911 on, culminating in Wake in Fright, which was described in the program by the Festival's then Director, David Stratton, as 'the most uncompromising film on the Australian mateship ethos'. The retrospective, which screened throughout the festival, was enthusiastically attended and Stratton remembers Wake in Fright receiving a very positive response. And this was only four years after that first disappointing release.\n\nIn the years after its theatrical release Wake in Fright gradually disappeared from view. It did, however, screen on Channel 10 at 8.30 pm one night in 1988, where it was presented with some passion by film presenter Bill Collins, who said that it held a mirror up to life, and that 'it should be considered one of the best films ever made in this country'. Advising readers about this screening, Walter Sullivan in the Daily Telegraph wrote that no-one could describe Wake in Fright 'as an attractive film, but there is no denying it is effective', and went on to say that some of the men set out to show John Grant's character what Australian mateship is about. 'What it is, in fact, about, the film suggests, is booze. Booze in quantities beyond belief, booze whether you want it or not, booze while you are still conscious and more of it as soon as you wake up.'\n\n# Out of sight, but not out of mind\n\nIn the intervening years, as the film itself gradually slipped from sight, its reputation and importance grew. In his book Australian National Cinema film academic Tom O'Regan credits Wake in Fright and director Ted Kotcheff as one of the films and directors to which the post-1970s revival is particularly indebted, preparinglocal and international audiences for the Australian films that followed'. What he says, it seems to me, is insightful and undeniable:\n\nWake in Fright's prototypical middle-class male school teacher experiencing a vernacular working-class male regional culture fashioned the male ensemble film. With its dystopian view of mateship and misogyny, Wake introduced the idea of endemic and structural evil to Australian cinema... The preparedness to accept, exploit, entertain and at times exaggerate this possibility provided an important maturity to Australian film-making and undoubtedly aided its circulation in the international festival market. It helped create... an unsavoury Australian past and present centred largely on the deeds, misogyny, limited horizons, and xenophobia of white [Anglo] males. Kotcheff's film prepared the way for that mix of hyperrealism, excessive masculinity, ambiguous sexuality, and misogyny so insistently present in subsequent Australian cinema.\n\nIn The Screening of Australia Volume 2, the first serious analysis of the Australian film revival, Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka are also astute, describing the film as:\n\nan outsider's essay, a kind of Australian heart of darkness, but at moments a deeply perceptive and unadorned one, without either false politeness or undue reversion to gross stereotype... The adaptation of Kenneth Cook's novel helps to anchor this co-production in this culture; it is also worth speculating that Ted Kotcheff's Canadianness presented less of a problem of cultural difference than would have been the case if an American or British director had been used. Dominion provincialism, a geography of extremes and great isolation, and a similar sense of a cultural coming of age in the seventies: Canada and Australia had a lot of common ground.\n\nAs it happens, this prefigures much of what Ted Kotcheff has said on how he felt about making the film. Indeed, as he said at Wake in Fright's screening at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2009, 'The truth is, I felt I knew these people. Australia, like Canada, is huge, open and claustrophobic. The vastness of both places is imprisoning. And I'd seen men doing bad things in my own country. They weren't strangers to me'.\n\nThe critic and cultural commentator Meaghan Morris wrote something similar back in 1980 in The New Australian Cinema:\n\nWake in Fright places its harrowing vision of ruthless sexual segregation and violent repression in the context of an industrialized desert hell. The environment is a brutalizing one; but there is a difference between the lethal monotony of the tiny settlement at the beginning of the film , and the crazed violence of the mining town, which is purely man-made\u2014the cruel conditions of labor which underlie the town's sense of amusement.\n\nShe went on to point out that Grant, the young teacher in the film, 'is marked by his outsider status, which brings upon him a fearful education in the ways of the \"here\" of the mining town. Otherness can be a source of both attraction\u2014offering something which cannot be realized in a here and now\u2014or a source of repulsion, an occasion for persecution'.\n\nAndrew Zielinski pursues this further. Writing about four films directed by overseas filmmakers, in an article entitled 'Australia from the Outside In' in Issue 49 of Screen Education, a journal for media teachers, he comments:\n\nWake in Fright can be taken as a journey through hell. The film populates the outback with aggressive males who unleash violence on the landscape, interrogating the male myth of mateship. Any positive aspect of landscape and the settler or battler is totally subverted. Instead of harmony between the landscape of the bush and the inhabitants we have a strong dislocation. The inhabitants willingly abuse themselves, women, the bush and kangaroos. As intruders are welcomed to this male clique, the hospitality becomes an aggressive beer-swilling odyssey. Survival here is to dominate and lower any standards to a basic instinctual drive.\n\nIn 1999 I attended my favourite conference, held annually by the Australian Screen Directors Association (now the Australian Directors Guild). That year, the print recently discovered by the Dublin Film Festival was screened to highlight the theme of the conference: 'Australian Stories in a Global Industry'. Ted Kotcheff gave a video introduction from New York and Tony Buckley was on hand to discuss the film; it was received enthusiastically and un-nostalgically, and recognised for its important place in the ongoing battle for a sustainable and strong local industry. Seeing it again, and especially in this context, made both its historical significance and its contemporary relevance equally clear.\n\nIn a prescient article in Quadrant in 2006, entitled 'The Best Australian Film You've Never Seen', Simon Caterson describes Wake in Fright as 'a treasure of the Australian cinema, a film which like all classics in any art form has dated only in ways that don't matter'. Having somehow heard of the recovery of the film's negative, and recognising its high critical reputation, he tracked down a (apparently pretty awful) DVDcopyfrom a Canadian media company. Despite its inferior quality, he wrote that the film's reputation is'richly deserved'. Commenting that 'no other Australian film prepares you for Wake in Fright', he goes on to speculate 'that a kind of unconscious self-censorship\u2014a sort of cultural amnesia\u2014has allowed Wake in Fright to all but disappear, while other, \"nicer\" films of the period... have been cared for and canonised'.\n\n# ... and now\n\nIn April 2009, the film's rediscovery and restoration was announced in a flurry of press and radio comment, with the ABC's 7.30 Report doing a detailed story, which featured a brief clip of Bill Collins' impassioned introduction to that single TV screening over twenty years earlier.\n\nA month later it was once again screened at the Cannes Film Festival, this time in the Cinema Classics section, and was once again acclaimed. In June, when Ted Kotcheff arrived for the Sydney Film Festival screening and to record (with Tony Buckley) the commentary for the DVD, he embarked on a short but very effective publicity tour. A number of follow-up stories and interviews appeared, the most detailed and thoughtful of which appeared in the online cinema journal Senses of Cinema's May '09 issue, conducted by Raffaele Caputo (although, having just read so many of the reviews of the film, both then and now, I take issue with his comment that it was originallyunkindly received' by critics). Caputo makes the following interesting comment:\n\nThe main criticism levelled at the film when it was released in Australia was its uncompromisingly scurrilous view of Australians, exposing a dark side to the mateship myth that, as JackThompson had said to you, people felt was unrealistic. Yet, a question I have always asked myself is why John Grant, near the end of the film when he boards the train that's taking him back to Tiboonda, and after all that he has been through, graciously accepts a beer that's offered to him? It tells me that what we have seen prior to this moment\u2014the brutality, the menace, the aggressive hospitality of the Australian character\u2014was not meant to betaken realistically, but that it's John's heightened, surreal, distorted point of view of that world.\n\nKotcheff agrees, responding that'this guy is an outsider and does not really understand what is going on in that world and has a kind of distorted vision of it'.\n\nThe film made international waves: after the Sydney screening, Toni O'Loughlin reported in the British paper, the Guardian,\n\nlast month the 1971 Australian horror film Wake in Fright was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and now it is finally being accepted at home in Australia after years of neglect... amid the crowd of long-time fans who attended the film's screening at the Sydney Film Festival on Saturday were some from Broken Hill, the New South Wales town where much of the film was shot. One couple, too young to have seen the film when it was released, were curious to see the film that had riled so many in their town. They laughed along with the rest of the audience, who guffawed at the laconic dialogue and brutal behaviour as if they were watching a caricature.\n\nThe restored film was given a limited but well-attended and profitable Australian release from the end of June, and reviews this time around were if anything even stronger and more positive, with many critics referring to the film's (and often their own) history. Evan Williams in the Weekend Australian, after asking himself why he hadn't remembered to include Wake in Fright in his list of the five best Australian films some months earlier, then gave a glowing commendation:\n\nAt a technical level, the film is masterly. The dusty, heat-throbbing outback landscapes are beautifully caught in Brian West's cinematography,and (Tony) Buckley's editing has wonderful fluidity and power... in more ways than one, this is Buckley's film.\n\nSeveral critics and commentators recalled the first time they had seen the film. Paul Byrnes in the Sydney Morning Herald commented,\n\nrediscovering Wake in Fright is less like running into an old friend than someone you feared as a child. There has never been a more savage and scabrous film about Australia. Unfortunately, it was also uncomfortably true, which was one reason Australians didn't go to see it... in 1971. It was just too confronting. Its power has hardly diminished in the years since.\n\nAnd in the Age Brigid Delaney wrote that she first saw Wake in Fright\n\nas a child, and fragments have never left my consciousness\u2014the bright, slanting light, the frenzied gambling and drinking, the roo shoot. The film was assumed by some to be a dystopian, exaggerated and nightmarish version of Australia, almost like a horror film. Last week I saw the re-release at Nova. It was just as horrible and brilliant as I had remembered. But the horror and brilliance resided not in the violence\u2014but in something else\u2014the truth. The truth ofTed Kotcheff's 1971 film is even more startling for its endurance. What it says about some isolated parts of Australia is as true now as it was then. The film also throws a bright light on this nation's great disconnect; mainstream or urban Australia's lack of engagement with its more isolated parts\u2014that myth that we are one nation.\n\nThe Age's reviewer, Jake Wilson, young enough not to remember the film from an earlier screening, was less overwhelmed, but he did think\n\nthe casting of Pleasence as the Yabba's resident pervert turns out to be Kotcheff's masterstroke. Long typecast as a whiney runt, he couldn't be further from the stereotype of the bronzed working-class Aussie. Yet he's wholly persuasive as a demonic variant of a figure beloved of Australian storytellers from Henry Lawson to David Williamson: the ratbag intellectual who stands both inside and outside a dominant male group. Giving his high, nasal voice an Australian twang, Pleasence makes Tydon a recognisable, strangely pathetic monster. Perhaps only Graham Kennedy could have matched his ability to convey abject need through overdone mateyness and a confiding gleam in the eye.\n\nPerhaps younger reviewers have a slightly different take. Dave Hoskin, in Metro magazine, while believing that it's a'classic and unparalleled movie', was more interested in the fact that for him, at least, 'the film positively screams that it's the product of a bygone era'. But, as he says, compared to the 'safeness' of contemporary films, this iswild filmmaking, scary filmmaking, classic filmmaking'.\n\nIn 2009 Sylvia Lawson revisited the film in the online journal Inside Story where she described the film as\n\na version of the Australian inland, about the injuries of isolation, and the gulf between the country and the city. It operates a particular way of seeing the desert, opening with a high-level pan around flat, sandy emptiness, before coming down into the one-room schooihouse\u2014and the room full of kids, mixed ages, under orders to keep silent until the clock ticks three o'clock and they can race off for the holidays. (I haven't seen anyone remarking on the way John Grant, being a bitterly discontented teacher, is also a pretty bad one.)\n\nBut, as she goes on to say,\n\nsince Wake in Fright was made thirty-eight years ago, there have been massive shifts in general consciousness on the nation's deeply bicultural nature, on Aboriginal people, the inheritance of dispossession, the crucial idea of country in the Indigenous sense\u2014and also on country towns, complicated places as they are, and now places which, more than ever, understand themselves historically. Watching now, but notthen, it's possible to think about the Bundanyabba milieu as a pack of blokes who, simply, didn't know where they were.\n\nThe Sydney Morning Herald even used the film in its editorial about local film distribution, saying 'The re-release of Wake in Fright is a reminder of just how powerful Australian film can be, and also how fleeting', before going on to say 'we are still producing good films... and they are still not finding a large audience', and making an argument for putting more effort into'ensuring our good films find an audience'. This is an aim with which I entirely agree, while recognising that it's not something to which there are any easy answers.\n\nAfter making Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff directed The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), which, based on Mordecai Richler's important Canadian novel, is probably his favourite film. He made a number of other films in the 1970s and 1980s, then went on to direct a lot of TV in the 1990s. Now well in his seventies, he's an ebullient, active man, who shows no sign of slowing down; since 2000 he has been executive producer and occasional director of the USTV series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. When in September 2009 he introduced a special screening of Wake in Fright at the Toronto International Film Festival, Greg Quill, writing about the event in the Toronto Star, reported that New Zealand-born actor Sam Neill, who was there, remarked, 'I was stunned when I first saw it. It confirmed my worst fears about Australians'. Quill grasped the reason for the film's original reception in Australia, writing,\n\nWhen Wake in Fright so cruelly exposed the slimy underbelly of the nation's hidden psychoses\u2014brutish misogyny, racism, bloodlust, alcoholism, a rampant gambling streak, xenophobia and a fear of the emptiness of their own landscape\u2014it was a shocking revelation most Australians weren't prepared for, not a family portrait Australians were happy to hand around.\n\nHe further reported that Rachel Ward, in Toronto for the screening of her feature film Beautiful Kate, sawWake in Fright soon after moving to Australia from England in the early 1980s, and acknowledged its role in the development of a defining vernacular among her peers. As he says,\n\nIndeed, Beautiful Kate, a Gothic mystery about incest, suicide and misplaced love in a decaying family in the South Australian bush, owes much to the harsh visual language and uncompromising honesty Kotcheff introduced. 'If I had seen it before I decided to settle there, I might not have gone', [Rachel Ward] said. 'It was challenging... and uncomfortable. And people don't want to go to the movies to be made uncomfortable... But I like stories that are morally ambiguous, where there's no clear idea of what's good and what's evil, or of what's forgivable and what's not.'\n\nQuill also reported Kotcheff as saying, 'I just know I'm very pleased with Wake in Fright. It shone a light into the dark corners of the human psyche. And it's one film that I never thought, \"If only I'd done this or that another way'\".\n\nIn its two commercial releases, thirty-eight years apart, Wake in Fright has attracted many reviews, and while most have been favourable, they haven't tried to gloss over the film's almost visceral impact. In the years between, its reputation has grown and what has been written about it has multiplied. Although I've barely scratched the surface, I've tried to give a sense of how critics, reviewers, film historians and commentators have regarded this strong, tough film, this film about survival that has managed to survive.\n\nThe film now seems set to become a permanent part of our screen culture heritage. Just before I finished writing this I had dinner with an old friend, writer and editor Marsha Rowe, who has lived in London for many years. Interestingly, the dinner was also attended by some friends of those early, light-hearted filmmaking days, including Albie Thoms and Richard Neville. I told them about the book, and we remembered those times, and we talked about Wake in Fright, which Marsha, so far away, hadn't heard about. A few days later I got an email from London. Amazingly, she had seen the film on the flight back'in the middle of the worst last leg of the flight, from Bangkok to London, and was transfixed. It's fantastic that the film is not lost.'\n\nIn the last weeks as I was finishing this book, ABC Radio National, by another amazing bit of timing, was repeating the book reading of the novel of Wake in Fright. Every morning, as I sat at my computer, I heard another chapter; it was bleak and spare and almost cold, and frightening in its very matter-of-factness. And as I listened to the words I could see the images that were crafted by the people and through the processes that I've tried to convey in this book. And I'm very glad to have had the chance to do my own piece of investigation, in a story filled with searches and detection, into just how such an important film was made and lost and found again.\n\n# NOTES\n\nMore information about these and many other such films of this period can be found in Peter Mudie's book, Ubu Films: Sydney Underground Movies, 1965-1970, Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 1971.\n\nThe Fugs werea satirical-political New York rock band named from a euphemism for 'fuck' used in Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead.\n\nWomen, of course, didn't actually ride surfboards in those days, and rarely even got wet (in the movies, at least). It wasn't until Puberty Blues that this situation was revised, cinematically. For more about this, see Nell I Schofield Puberty Blues, Currency Press & NFSA, Redfern, 2004.\n\nYounger and newer Australians and other readers who have little idea what 'two up' is will find an excellent history of this very Aussie gambling game at the Australian War Memorial website at http:\/\/www.awm.gov.au\/encyclopedia\/two_up\/index.asp. Retrieved on 14 September 2009.\n\nhttp:\/\/aso.gov.au\/titles\/features\/wake-in-fright\/notes.Retrieved on 31 October 2009.\n\nhttp:\/\/aso.gov.au\/titles\/features\/wake-in-fright\/notes.Retrieved on 31 October 2009\n\nSee Catherine Lumby, Alvin Purple, Currency Press & NFSA, Redfern, 2008.\n\nScreen Hub, 16 February 2009.\n\nThe first Australian moratorium protesting the Vietnam War was held in May 1970 when over 200,000 people across Australia marched in peaceful demonstrations. The movement's aims were to force a withdrawal of Australian and other foreign troops from Vietnam and to repeal the National Service Act 1964. Six months after the third moratorium was held in June 1971, the newly-elected Labor Party abolished conscription, freed imprisoned conscientious objectors and announced the withdrawal of all Australian troops from Vietnam.\n\nAll quotes from Richard Brennan are from interviews conducted by the author.\n\nSee also Tony Moore, The Barry McKenzie Movies, Currency Press & NFSA, Redfern, 2005.\n\nAll quotes from Howard Rube are from telephone interviews conducted by the author. England's Ealing Studios produced several films in Australia in the 1950s including The Overlanders (1946) and Eureka Stockade (1949) both directed by the British Harry Watt and starring Chips Rafferty. Lee Robinson directed the iconic Rafferty, his partner in the production company Southern International, in a series of films in the 1950s, using exotic locations to sell Australia to a mainly overseas market. The films, which included The Phantom Stockman (1953), King of the Coral Sea (1954), and Walk into Paradise (1956), did quite well, but a number of factors, including the difficulty of getting financing and problems with local distribution, contributed to the company getting out of feature production. The arrival of television didn't help.\n\nAdrian Martin's monograph on the Mad Max movies in this series is a good starting point for more information on how the outback has been treated cinematically in the years since 1971.\n\nQuotes by Ted Kotcheff throughout this book have come from his appearances at the Sydney Film Festival screening and discussion, and from a number of informal interviews conducted with the author.\n\nIn 1952-54 Cook worked for the Australian Broadcasting Commission at Broken Hill\u2014a town he apparently loathed\u2014and then at Rockhampton, Queensland. While in Rockhampton he wrote a novel that was subsequently considered libellous and pulped. He moved to Brisbane and then moved back to Sydney in 1954. In 1961 his novel Wake in Fright was published.\n\nQuotes from Jack Thompson are from the discussion following the screening of the film at the Sydney Film Festival in 2009.\n\nThe exception was France, where it ran for five months at a Paris cinema.\n\nLimb died in 1999, never knowing whether the film would be found.\n\nAll the reviews quoted here were published at the time of the film's release in 1971.\n\nAnother 'lost and found'story is attached to the history ofThe Story of the Kelly Gang, which is now available on DVD. For more information on the film seethe NFSA webpage at http:\/\/australianscreen.com.au\/titles\/story-kelly-gang\/\n\n# BIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nBlundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2008.\n\nBuckley, Anthony. Behind a Velvet Lighttrap: A Filmmaker's Journey from Cinesound to Cannes. Prahran: Hardie Grant Books, 2009.\n\nDermody, Susan and Jacka, Elizabeth. The Screening of Australia (Vol 1): Anatomy of a Film Industry. Sydney: Currency Press, 1987.\n\nDermody, Susan and Jacka, Elizabeth. The Screening of Australia (Vol 2): Anatomy of a National Cinema. Sydney: Currency Press, 1988.\n\nLarkins, Bob. Chips: The Life and Films of Chips Rafferty. South Melbourne: Macmillan Company of Australia, 1986.\n\nMcFarlane, Brian, Mayer, Geoff, and Bertrand, Ina (eds). The Oxford Companion to Australian Film. Oxford University Press, 2000\n\nMoran, Albert and O'Regan, Tom (eds). Australian Film Reader. Sydney: Currency Press, 1985\n\nMoran, Albert and O'Regan, Tom (eds). The Australian Screen. Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1989.\n\nMudie, Peter. Ubu Films: Sydney Underground Movies, 1965-1970. Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 1971.\n\nMurray, Scott (ed). The New Australian Cinema. West Melbourne: Nelson, 1980\n\nO'Regan, Tom. Australian National Cinema. London: Routledge, 1996.\n\nPike, Andrew, and Cooper, Ross. Australian Film 1900-1977. Oxford University Press, 1980.\n\nShirley, Graham, and Adams, Brian. Australian Cinema:The First Eighty Years. Sydney: Angus and Robertson in association with Currency Press, 1983 (revised edition 1989).\n\nStratton, David. The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival. Australia: Angus and Robertson Publishers, 1980.\n\nThoms, Albie. Surfmovies: The History of the Surf Film in Australia. Noosa Heads: Shore Thing Publishing, 2000.\n\n# FILMOGRAPHY\n\nAccident, Joseph Losey, 1967\n\nThe Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Bruce Beresford, 1972\n\nAlvin Purple, Tim Burstall, 1973\n\nThe American Poet's Visit, Michael Thornhill, 1969\n\nThe Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Ted Kotcheff, 1974\n\nThe Back of Beyond, John Heyer, 1954\n\nBeautiful Kate, Rachel Ward, 2009\n\nBed and Board, Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, 1970\n\nBend of the River, Anthony Mann, 1952\n\nBetween Wars, Michael Thornhill, 1974\n\nBitter Springs, Ralph Smart, 1950\n\nBoobs a Lot, Aggy Read, 1970\n\nBush Christmas, Ralph Smart, 1947\n\nCat People, Jacques Tourneur, 1942\n\nClaire's Knee, Eric Rohmer, 1970\n\nThe Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1971\n\nThe Curse of the Cat People, Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise, 1944\n\nThe Damned, Joseph Losey, 1961\n\nThe Devil to Pay, Bruce Beresford, 1962\n\nDiamonds Are Forever, Guy Hamilton, 1971\n\nDing a Ding Day, Garry Shead, 1966\n\nEasy Rider, Dennis Hopper, 1969\n\nEureka Stockade, Harry Watt, 1949;\n\nFiddler on the Roof, Norman Jewison, 1971\n\nFirst Blood, Ted Kotcheff, 1982\n\nFlashpoint, Brian Hannant, 1972\n\nForgotten Cinema, Tony Buckley, 1969\n\n40,000 Horsemen, Charles Chauvel, 1941\n\nGentle Strangers, Cecil Holmes, 1972\n\nHello, Dolly!, Gene Kelly, 1969\n\nThe Hound of the Deep, Frank Hurley, 1926\n\nIf... Lindsay Anderson, 1968\n\nThe Jungle Woman, Frank Hurley, 1926\n\nKangaroo, Lewis Milestone, 1952\n\nKing & Country, Joseph Losey, 1964\n\nLaw & Order: Special Victims Unit, US TV series, 1999-\n\nLife at the Top, Ted Kotcheff, 1965\n\nThe Naked Bunyip, John B Murray, 1970\n\nNickel Queen, John McCallum, 1971\n\nOn the Beach, Stanley Kramer, 1959\n\nOr Forever Hold Your Peace, Richard Brennan, 1970\n\nThe Overlanders, Harry Watt, 1946\n\nThe Prize, Tim Burstall, 1960\n\nPunishment Park, Peter Watkins, 1971\n\nRobbery Under Arms, Jack Lee, 1957\n\nScaramouche, George Sidney, 1952\n\nThe Servant, Joseph Losey, 1963\n\nThe Shiralee, Leslie Norman, 1957\n\nThe Siege of Pinchgut, Harry Watt, 1959\n\nSingin' in the Rain, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1952\n\nThe Sleeping Tiger, Joseph Losey, 1954\n\nSmiley, Anthony Kimmins, 1956\n\nSons of Matthew, Charles Chauvel, 1949\n\nSqueeze a Flower, Marc Daniels, 1970\n\nThe Story of the Kelly Gang, Charles Tait, 1906\n\nStork, Tim Burstall, 1971\n\nSummer of the Seventeenth Doll, Leslie Norman, 1959\n\nSurfing Roundabout, David Price, 1965\n\nThe Sundowners, Fred Zinneman, 1960\n\nThe Surfing Years, Peter Thompson, 1966\n\nTeorema, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968\n\nTiara Tahiti, Ted Kotcheff, 1962\n\nTobias Icarus Age Four, Clemency Weight, 1968\n\nTristana, Luis Bu\u00f1uel, 1970\n\nTwo Gentleman Sharing, Ted Kotcheff, 1969\n\nTwo Thousand Weeks, Tim Burstall, 1969\n\nVision for a New World, Chris McCullough, 1968\n\nWalkabout, Nicholas Roeg, 1971\n\nWho Plus Live Equals Home, Peter Kingston, John Allen, 1962\n\nWitness, Peter Weir, 1985\n\n# CREDITS\n\n# Key Cast\n\nJock Crawford\n\nChips Rafferty\n\n'Doc'Tydon\n\nDonald Pleasence\n\nJohn Grant\n\nGary Bond\n\nJanette Hynes\n\nSylvia Kay\n\nDick\n\nJack Thompson\n\nJoe\n\nPeter Whittle\n\nTim Hynes\n\nAl Thomas\n\nCharlie\n\nJohn Meillon\n\nAtkins\n\nJohn Armstrong\n\nJarvis\n\nSlim DeGrey\n\nReceptionist\n\nMaggie Dence\n\nJoe the cook\n\nNorm Erskine\n\nFirst controller\n\nOwen Moase\n\nSecond controller\n\nJohn Dalleen\n\nCharlie Jones\n\nBuster Fiddess\n\nStubbs\n\nTex Foote\n\nStockman\n\nColin Hughes\n\nVan Driver\n\nJacko Jackson\n\nRobyn\n\nNancy Knudsen\n\nJoyce\n\nDawn Lake\n\nHiggins\n\nHarry Lawrence\n\nPig Eyes (as Bob McDarra)\n\nRobert McDarra\n\nPoker player\n\nCarlo Manchini\n\nMiner\n\nLiam Reynolds\n\n# Key Crew\n\nProduction company\n\nNLT Productions Pty Ltd, Group W\n\nFilms\n\nDirector\n\nTed Kotcheff\n\nScreenplay\n\nEvan Jones\n\nbased on the novel\n\nWake in Fright by Kenneth Cook\n\nProducer\n\nGeorge Willoughby\n\nExecutive Producers\n\nBill Harmon, Howard G. Barnes\n\nAssociate Producer\n\nMaurice Singer\n\nComposer\n\nJohn Scott\n\nDirector of Photography\n\nBrian West\n\nEditor\n\nAnthony Buckley\n\nArt Director\n\nDennis Gentle\n\nFirst Assistant Director\n\nHoward Rubie\n\nCamera Operator\n\nJohn McLean\n\nPost-Production Coordinator\n\nThom Noble\n\nLocation Manager\n\nJohn Shaw\n\nSound Mixer\n\nHugh Strain\n\nSound Recording\n\nJohn Appleton\n\nSound Editors\n\nKeith Palmer, Tim Wellburn\n\nContinuity\n\nRita Cavill\n\nProduction Secretary\n\nVivian Holmes\n\nProduction accountant\n\nPhilip Moylan\n\nGaffer\n\nTony Tegg\n\nMakeup Artist\n\nMonica Dawkins\n\nHairdresser\n\nRobert Hynard\n\nWardrobe\n\nRon Williams\n\nCasting Directors\n\nJill Dempster, John Merrick\n\nTitles by\n\nEllis-Wright\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nTable of Contents\n\nAbout the Author\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright Page\n\nDedication\n\nCHAPTER 1\n\nCHAPTER 2\n\nCHAPTER 3\n\nCHAPTER 4\n\nCHAPTER 5\n\nCHAPTER 6\n\nCHAPTER 7\n\nCHAPTER 8\n\nCHAPTER 9\n\nCHAPTER 10\n\nCHAPTER 11\n\nCHAPTER 12\n\nCHAPTER 13\n\nCHAPTER 14\n\nCHAPTER 15\n\nCHAPTER 16\n\nCHAPTER 17\n\nCHAPTER 18\n\nPraise for _The Crow Road:_\n\n'Brilliantly done' _Daily Mail_\n\n'Tight with detail and close observation and creates a strong sense of a particular period of growing up' _Independent_\n\n'Banks has woven a warm and funny story, rich with characters and adventures ... an utterly enchanting piece of fiction' _New Woman_\n\n'Magnificent... a poignant, very funny study of life growing up in Banks's native Scotland. At times as wonderfully light and colourful as its setting on the west coast of Scotland, and as darkly comic as _The Wasp Factory ...' For Him_\n\n'This substantial novel indicates a restless author very firmly in the driver's seat, back on what appears to be a Scottish route with intriguing potential destinations' _The Scotsman_\n\n'What makes Banks a significant novelist is the love and effort that go into his works, and his acute sense of the ways in which people can suffer ... this is Banks's finest novel yet' _Independent on Sunday_\n\n'Prentice is a most engaging narrator, self-deprecating, funny and hopelessly self-deceiving' _Daily Telegraph_\nIain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, _The Wasp Factory_ , in 1984. He has since gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels.\n**_Also by lain Banks_**\n\nTHE WASP FACTORY\n\nWALKING ON GLASS\n\nTHE BRIDGE\n\nESPEDAIR STREET\n\nCANAL DREAMS\n\nTHE CROW ROAD\n\nCOMPLICITY\n\nWHIT\n\nA SONG OF STONE\n\nTHE BUSINESS\n\nDEAD AIR\n\nTHE STEEP APPROACH TO GARBADALE\n\nTRANSITION\n\nSTONEMOUTH\n\nTHE QUARRY\n\n**_And as Iain M. Banks_**\n\nCONSIDER PHLEBAS\n\nTHE PLAYER OF GAMES\n\nUSE OF WEAPONS\n\nTHE STATE OF THE ART\n\nAGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND\n\nFEERSUM ENDJINN\n\nEXCESSION\n\nINVERSIONS\n\nLOOK TO WINDWARD\n\nTHE ALGEBRAIST\n\nMATTER\n\nSURFACE DETAIL\n\nTHE HYDROGEN SONATA\n\nThe Crow Road\n\nIAIN BANKS\n\nHachette Digital\n\nwww.littlebrown.co.uk\n\nPublished by Hachette Digital 2008\n\nCopyright \u00a9 lain Banks 1992\n\nThe right of lain Banks to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.\n\n_All characters in this publication are fictitious_   \n_and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,_   \n_is purely coincidental._   \nAll rights reserved.   \nNo part of this publication may be reproduced,   \nstored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any   \nform or by any means, without the prior   \npermission in writing of the publisher, nor be   \notherwise circulated in any form of binding or   \ncover other than that in which it is published and   \nwithout a similar condition including this   \ncondition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.\n\nA CIP catalogue record for this book   \nis available from the British Library.\n\nISBN 978 0 7481 0993 7\n\nThis ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE\n\nHachette Digital  \nAn imprint of  \nLittle, Brown Book Group  \n100 Victoria Embankment  \nLondon EC4Y 0DY\n\nAn Hachette UK Company\n**Again, for Ann,**   \n**And with thanks to:**   \nJames Hale,   \nMic Cheetham,   \nAndy Watson   \nand Steve Hatton\nCHAPTER 1\n\nIt was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.\n\nI looked at my father, sitting two rows away in the front line of seats in the cold, echoing chapel. His broad, greying-brown head was massive above his tweed jacket (a black arm-band was his concession to the solemnity of the occasion). His ears were moving in a slow, oscillatory manner, rather in the way John Wayne's shoulders moved when he walked; my father was grinding his teeth. Probably he was annoyed that my grandmother had chosen religious music for her funeral ceremony. I didn't think she had done it to upset him; doubtless she had simply liked the tune, and had not anticipated the effect its non-secular nature might have on her eldest son.\n\nMy younger brother, James, sat to my father's left. It was the first time in years I'd seen him without his Walkman, and he looked distinctly uncomfortable, fiddling with his single earring. To my father's right my mother sat, upright and trim, neatly filling a black coat and sporting a dramatic black hat shaped like a flying saucer. The UFO dipped briefly to one side as she whispered something to my father. In that movement and that moment, I felt a pang of loss that did not entirely belong to my recently departed grandmother, yet was connected with her memory. How her moles would be itching today if she was somehow suddenly reborn!\n\n'Prentice!' My Aunt Antonia, sitting next to me, with Uncle Hamish snoring mellifluously on her other side, tapped my sleeve and pointed at my feet as she murmured my name. I looked down.\n\nI had dressed in black that morning, in the cold high room of my aunt and uncle's house. The floorboards had creaked and my breath had smoked. There had been ice inside the small dormer window, obscuring the view over Gallanach in a crystalline mist. I'd pulled on a pair of black underpants I'd brought especially from Glasgow, a white shirt (fresh from Marks and Sparks, the pack-lines still ridging the cold crisp cotton) and my black 501s. I'd shivered, and sat on the bed, looking at two pairs of socks; one black, one white. I'd intended to wear the black pair under my nine-eye Docs with the twin ankle buckles, but suddenly I had felt that the boots were wrong. Maybe it was because they were matt finish ...\n\nThe last funeral I'd been to here \u2013 also the first funeral I'd ever been to \u2013 this gear had all seemed pretty appropriate, but now I was pondering the propriety of the Docs, the 501s and the black biker's jacket. I'd hauled my white trainers out of the bag, tried one Nike on and one boot (unlaced); I'd stood in front of the tilted full-length mirror, shivering, my breath going out in clouds, while the floorboards creaked and a smell of cooking bacon and burned toast insinuated its way up from the kitchen.\n\nThe trainers, I'd decided.\n\nSo I peered down at them in the crematorium; they looked crumpled and tea-stained on the severe black granite of the chapel floor. Oh-oh; one black sock, one white. I wriggled in my seat, pulled my jeans down to cover my oddly-packaged ankles. 'Hell's teeth,' I whispered. 'Sorry, Aunt Tone.'\n\nMy Aunt Antonia \u2013 a ball of pink-rinse hair above the bulk of her black coat, like candy floss stuck upon a hearse \u2013 patted my leather jacket. 'Never mind, dear,' she sighed. 'I doubt old Margot would have minded.'\n\n'No,' I nodded. My gaze fell back to the trainers. It struck me that on the toe of the right one there was still discernible the tyre mark from Grandma Margot's wheelchair. I lifted the left trainer onto the right, and rubbed without enthusiasm at the black herring-bone pattern the oily wheel had left. I remembered the day, six months earlier, when I had pushed old Margot out of the house and through the courtyard, past the outhouses and down the drive under the trees towards the loch and the sea.\n\n'Prentice, what is going on between you and Kenneth?'\n\nThe courtyard was cobbled; her wheelchair wobbled and jerked under my hands as I pushed her. 'We've fallen out, gran,' I told her.\n\n'I'm not stupid, Prentice, I can see that.' She looked up at me. Her eyes were fierce and grey, as they always had been. Her hair was grey now, too, and thinning. The summer sun cleared the surrounding oaks and I could see her pale scalp through the wisps of white.\n\n'No, gran, I know you're not stupid.'\n\n'Well, then?' She waved her stick towards the outhouses. 'Let's see if that damn car's still there.' She glanced back at me again as I wheeled the chair round on its new heading, towards the green double doors of one of the courtyard garages. 'Well, then?' she repeated.\n\nI sighed. 'It's a matter of principle, gran.' Stopping at the garage doors, she used her stick to knock the hasp off its staple, pushed at one door till its planks bowed slightly, then, wedging her stick into the resulting gap, levered the other door open, a bolt at one corner scraping and tinkling through a groove worn in the cobbles. I pulled the chair back to let the garage door swing. Inside it was dark. Motes swirled in the sunlight falling across the black entrance. I could just make out the corner of a thin green tarpaulin, draped angularly about level with my waist. Grandma Margot lifted the edge of the tarp with her stick, and flicked it away with surprising strength. The cover fell away from the front of the car and I pushed her further into the garage.\n\n'Principle?' she said, leaning forward in the chair to inspect the long dark bonnet of the car, and pushing the tarp back still further until she had revealed the auto up to its windscreen. The wheels had no tyres; the car rested on blocks of wood. 'What principle? The principle of not entering your father's house? Your own family home?' Another flick of the cane and the covering moved up the screen, then fell back again.\n\n'Let me do that, gran.' I stepped to the side of the car and pulled the tarpaulin back until it lay crumpled on the boot, revealing that the car had a missing rear window. More dust revolved in the light from outside, turning Grandma Margot into a seated silhouette, her almost transparent hair shining like a halo.\n\nShe sighed. I looked at the car. It was long and quite beautiful, in a recently-old-fashioned way. Beneath the patina of dust it was a very dark green. The roof above the missing rear window was battered and dented, as was the exposed part of the boot lid.\n\n'Poor old thing,' I whispered, shaking my head.\n\nGrandma Margot sat upright. 'It or me?' she said sharply.\n\n'Gran ...' I said, tutting. I was aware that she could see me very well, sunlit from behind her, while all I could see of her was a dark shape, a subtraction of the light.\n\n'Anyway,' she said, relaxing and poking at one of the car's wire wheels with her walking stick. 'What's all this nonsense about a matter of principle?'\n\nI turned away, rubbing my fingers along the chrome guttering over a rear door. 'Well ... dad's angry at me because I told him I believed in ... God, or in something, anyway.' I shrugged, not daring to look at her. 'He won't ... well, I won't ... We're not talking to each other, so I won't come into the house.'\n\nGrandma Margot made a clucking noise with her mouth. 'That's it?'\n\nI nodded, glancing at her. 'That's it, gran.'\n\n'And your father's money; your allowance?'\n\n'I \u2013' I began, then didn't know how to put it.\n\n'Prentice; how are you managing to survive?'\n\n'I'm managing fine,' (I lied.) 'On my grant.' (Another lie.) 'And my student loan.' (Yet another lie.) 'And I'm doing some bar work.' (Four in a row!) I couldn't get a bar job. Instead I'd sold Fraud Siesta, my car. It had been a small Ford and kind of lazy about starting. People used to imply it looked battered, but I just told them it came from a broken garage. Anyway, that money was almost gone now, too.\n\nGrandma Margot let out a long sigh, shook her head. 'Principles,' she breathed.\n\nShe pulled herself forward a little, but the wheelchair was caught on part of the tarp. 'Help me here, will you?'\n\nI went behind her, pushed the chair over the ruffled canvas. She hauled open the offside rear door and looked into the dull interior. A smell of musty leather wafted out, reminding me of my childhood and the time when there was still magic in the world.\n\n'The last time I had sex was on that back seat,' she said wistfully. She looked up at me. 'Don't look so shocked, Prentice.'\n\n'I wasn't \u2013' I started to protest.\n\n'It's all right; it was your grandfather.' She patted the wing of the car with one thin hand. 'After a dance,' she said quietly, smiling. She looked up at me again, her lined, delicate face amused, eyes glittering. 'Prentice,' she laughed. 'You're blushing!'\n\n'Sorry, gran,' I said. 'It's just ... well, you don't ... well, when you're young and somebody's ...'\n\n'Past it,' she said, and slammed the door shut; dust duly danced. 'Well, we're all young once, Prentice, and those that are lucky get to be old.' She pushed the wheelchair back, over the toe of my new trainers. I lifted the chair clear and helped complete the manoeuvre, then pushed her to the door. I left her there while I put the tarpaulin back over the car.\n\n'In fact some of us get to be young twice,' she said from the doorway. 'When we go senile: toothless, incontinent, babbling like a baby ...' Her voice trailed off.\n\n'Grandma, please.'\n\n'Och, stop being so sensitive, Prentice; it isn't much fun getting old. One of the few pleasures that do come your way is to speak your mind ... Certainly annoying your relatives is enjoyable too, but I expected better of you.'\n\n'I'm sorry, Grandma.' I closed the garage door, dusted off my hands, and took up my position at the back of the wheelchair again. There was an oily tyre print on my trainer. Crows raucoused in the surrounding trees above as I pushed my gran towards the drive.\n\n'Lagonda.'\n\n'Sorry, Gran?'\n\n'The car; it's a Lagonda Rapide Saloon.'\n\n'Yes,' I said, smiling a little ruefully to myself. 'Yes, I know.'\n\nWe left the courtyard and went crunchily down the gravel drive towards the sparkling waters of the loch. Grandma Margot was humming to herself; she sounded happy. I wondered if she was recalling her tryst in the Lagonda's back seat. Certainly I was recalling mine; it was on the same piece of cracked and creaking, buttoned and fragrant upholstery \u2013 some years after my gran's last full sexual experience \u2013 that I had had my first.\n\nThis sort of thing keeps happening in my family.\n\n'Ladies and Gentlemen of the family; on the one hand, as I don't doubt you may well imagine, it gives me no great pleasure to stand here before you at this time ... yet on the other hand I am proud, and indeed honoured, to have been asked to speak at the funeral of my dear old client, the late and greatly loved Margot McHoan ...'\n\nMy grandmother had asked the family lawyer, Lawrence L. Blawke, to say the traditional few words. Pencil-thin and nearly as leaden, the tall and still dramatically black-haired Mr Blawke was dressed somewhere in the high nines, sporting a dark grey double-breasted suit over a memorable purple waistcoat that took its inspiration from what looked like Mandelbrot but might more charitably have been Paisley. A glittering gold fob watch the size of a small frying pan was anchored in the shallows of one waistcoat pocket by a bulk-carrier grade chain.\n\nMr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows that time is on his side. I _thought_ he had looked oddly comfortable in the presence of the undertakers.\n\nI sat and listened to the lawyer and in short order wondered (a) why Grandma Margot had chosen a lawyer to make the address, (b) whether he'd be charging us for his time, and (c) how many others of my family were wondering the same things.\n\n'... long history of the McHoan family in the town of Gallanach, of which she was so proud, and to which she so ... usefully and, and industriously contributed throughout her long life. It was my privilege to know and serve both Margot and her late husband Matthew well, in Matthew's case first as a school friend, back in the twenties. I well remember ...'\n\n'Grandma, I mean; good grief.'\n\n'What?'\n\nMy grandmother drew deeply on the Dunhill, flicked her wrist to close the brass Zippo, then put the lighter back in her cardigan.\n\n'Grandma, you're smoking.'\n\nMargot coughed a little and blew the smoke towards me, a grey screen for those ash-coloured eyes. 'Well, so I am.' She inspected the cigarette closely, then took another drag. 'I always wanted to, you know,' she told me, and looked away, over the loch towards the hills and trees on the far side. I'd wheeled her down to the shore path at Pointhouse near the old cairns. I sat on the grass. A soft breeze disturbed the water; seagulls flew stiff-winged, and in the distance the occasional car or truck disturbed the air, making a lazy throat-clearing noise as they emerged from or disappeared into the channel the main road drove between the trees. 'Hilda used to smoke,' she said quietly, not looking at me. 'My elder sister; she used to smoke. And I always wanted to.' I picked up a handful of pebbles from the path-side and started throwing them at the waves, lapping against the rocks a metre below us, almost at high tide. 'But your grandfather wouldn't let me.' My grandmother sighed.\n\n'But gran,' I protested. 'It's bad for you.'\n\n'I know.' She smiled broadly. 'That was another reason I didn't ever take it up, after your grandfather died; they'd found it was unhealthy by then.' She laughed. 'But I'm seventy-two years old now, and I don't give a damn.'\n\nI chucked a few more pebbles. 'Well, it isn't a very good example to us youngsters, is it?'\n\n'What's that got to do with the price of sliced bread?'\n\n'Eh?' I looked at her. 'Pardon?'\n\n'You're not really trying to tell me that young people today look to their elders for an example, are you, Prentice?'\n\nI grimaced. 'Well ...' I said.\n\n'You'd be the first generation that did.' She pulled on the cigarette, a look of convincing derision on her face. 'Best do everything they don't. That's what tends to happen anyway, like it or lump it.' She nodded to herself and ground the cigarette out on her cast, near the knee; flicked the butt into the water. I tutted under my breath.\n\n'People react more than they act, Prentice,' she said eventually. 'Like you are with your dad; he raises you to be a good little atheist and then you go and get religion. Well, that's just the way of things.' I could almost hear her shrug. 'Things can get imbalanced in families, over the generations. Sometimes a new one has to ... adjust things.' She tapped me on the shoulder. I turned. Her hair was very white against the rich summer green of the Argyllshire hills and the brilliant blue of the sky beyond. 'D'you feel for this family, Prentice?'\n\n'Feel for it, gran?'\n\n'Does it mean anything to you?' She looked cross. 'Anything beyond the obvious, like giving you a place to stay ... well, when you aren't falling out with your father? Does it?'\n\n'Of course, gran.' I felt awkward.\n\nShe leaned closer to me, eyes narrowing. 'I have this theory, Prentice.'\n\nMy heart foundered. 'Yes, gran?'\n\n'In every generation, there's a pivot. Somebody everybody else revolves around, understand?'\n\n'Up to a point,' I said, non-committally, I hoped.\n\n'It was old Hugh, then your grandfather, then it was me, and then it got all confused with Kenneth and Rory and Hamish; they each seem to think they were it, but...'\n\n'Dad certainly seems to think he's paterfamilias.'\n\n'Aye, and maybe Kenneth has the strongest claim, though I still think Rory was more clever. Your Uncle Hamish ...' She looked troubled. 'He's a bit off the beaten track, that boy.' She frowned. (This 'boy' was nearly fifty, of course, and himself a grandfather. It was Uncle Hamish who'd invented Newton's Religion, and who had taken me in when my father and I had fallen out.)\n\n'I wonder where Uncle Rory is,' I said, hoping to divert my gran from areas that sounded portentous and daft with the familiar game that anybody in our family can play; making up stories, conjectures, lies and hopes about Uncle Rory, our one-time golden boy, professional traveller and some-time magician, whose most successful act had been his own disappearance.\n\n'Who knows?' My gran sighed. 'Might be dead, for all we know.'\n\nI shook my head. 'No, I don't think so.'\n\n'You sound certain, Prentice. What do you know we don't?'\n\n'I just feel it.' I shrugged, threw a handful of pebbles into the waves. 'He'll be back.'\n\n'Your father thinks he will,' Margot agreed, sounding thoughtful. 'He always talks about him as though he's still around.'\n\n'He'll be back,' I nodded, and lay back in the grass, hands under my head.\n\n'I don't know, though,' Grandma Margot said. 'I think he might be dead.'\n\n'Dead? Why?' The sky was deep, shining blue.\n\n'You wouldn't believe me.'\n\n'What?' I sat up again, swivelled to face her, looking over the much-scribbled-upon grey-white cast (as well as signatures, get-well-soon messages and silly drawings, there were at least two shopping lists, a recipe copied down from the radio and detailed instructions on how to get by car to the flat I shared in Glasgow).\n\nGrandma Margot pulled up her sleeve to expose her white, darkly spotted right forearm. 'I have my moles, Prentice. They tell me things.'\n\nI laughed. She looked inscrutable. 'Sorry, gran?'\n\nShe tapped her wrist with one long pale finger; there was a large brown mole there. Her eyes were narrowed. She leaned closer still and tapped the mole again. 'Not a sausage, Prentice.'\n\n'Well,' I said, not sure whether to try another laugh. 'No.'\n\n'Not for eight years, not a hint, not a sensation.' Her voice was low, almost husky. She looked as though she was enjoying herself.\n\n'I give in, gran; what are you talking about?'\n\n'My moles, Prentice.' She arched one eyebrow, then sat back with a sigh in her wheelchair. 'I can tell what's going on in this family by my moles. They itch when people are talking about me, or when something ... remarkable is happening to the person.' She frowned. 'Well, usually.' She glared at me, prodded me in the shoulder with her stick. 'Don't tell your father about this; he'd have me committed.'\n\n'Gran! Of course not! And he wouldn't, anyway!'\n\n'I wouldn't be too sure of that.' Her eyes narrowed again.\n\nI leant on one of the chair's wheels. 'Let me get this right; your moles itch when one of us is talking about you?'\n\nShe nodded, grim. 'Sometimes they hurt, sometimes they tickle. And they can itch in different ways, too.'\n\n'And that mole's Uncle Rory's?' I nodded incredulously at the big mole on her right wrist.\n\n'That's right,' she said, tapping the stick on one footrest of the wheelchair. She held up her wrist and fixed the raised brown spot with an accusatory glare. 'Not a sausage, for eight years.'\n\nI stared at the dormant eruption with a sort of nervous respect, mingled with outright disbelief. 'Wow,' I said at last.\n\n'... survived by her daughter Ilsa, and sons Kenneth, Hamish and Roderick.' The good lawyer Blawke had helpfully nodded at my dad and my uncle when he mentioned them. Dad kept on grinding his teeth; Uncle Hamish stopped snoring and gave a little start at the mention of his name; he opened his eyes and looked round \u2013 a little wildly, I thought \u2013 before relaxing once more. His eyelids started to droop again almost immediately. At the mention of Uncle Rory's name Mr Blawke looked about the crowded chapel as though expecting Uncle Rory to make a sudden and dramatic appearance. 'And, sharing, I'm sure, in the family's grief, the husband of her dear late daughter, Fiona.' Here Mr Blawke looked very serious, and did indeed grasp his lapels for a moment, as he nodded, gravely, at Uncle Fergus. 'Mr Urvill,' Mr Blawke said, completing the nod that had developed pretensions to a bow, I thought, and then clearing his throat. This genuflection completed, the reference to past tragedy duly made, most of the people who had turned to look at Uncle Fergus turned away again.\n\nMy head stayed turned.\n\nUncle Fergus is an interesting enough fellow in himself, and (of course) as Mr Blawke knew to his benefit, probably Gallanach's richest and certainly its most powerful man. But I wasn't looking at him.\n\nBeside the thick-necked bulk of the Urvill of Urvill (soberly resplendent in what I assumed was the family's mourning tartan \u2013 blackish purple, blackish green and fairly dark black) sat neither of his two daughters, Diana and Helen \u2013 those long-legged visions of money-creamed, honey-skinned, globetrotting loveliness \u2013 but instead his niece, the stunning, the fabulous, the golden-haired, vellus-faced, diamond-eyed Verity, upwardly nubile scionette of the house of Urvill, the jewel beside the jowls; the girl who, for me, had put the lectual in intellectual, and phany in epiphany and the ibid in libidinous!\n\nSuch bliss to look. I feasted my eyes on that gracefully angular form, just this side of her uncle and sitting quietly in black. She had worn a white quilted skiing jacket outside, but now had taken it off in the unfittingly chilly crematorium, and sat in a black blouse and black skirt, black ... tights? Stockings? My God, the sheer force of joy in just imagining! and black shoes. And shivering! The slick material of the blouse trembling in the light from the translucent panes overhead, black silk hanging in folds of shade from her breasts, quivering! I felt my chest expand and my eyes widen. I was just about to look away, reckoning that I had gazed to the limits of decency, when that shaven-sided, crop-haired head swivelled and lowered, her calm face turning this way. I saw those eyes, shaded by her thick and shockingly black brows, blink slowly; she looked at me.\n\nSmall smile, and those diamond eyes piercing, marking me.\n\nThen the gaze removed, refixed, directed somewhere else, once more facing the front. My neck felt un-oiled as I turned away, blasted and raddled by the urge of that directed consideration.\n\nVerity Walker. Eating my heart out. Consuming my soul.\n\n'And dad's mole?'\n\n'Here,' Grandma Margot said, tapping her left shoulder. She laughed a little as we went along the path between the shore and the trees. 'That one itches fairly often.'\n\n'And mine?' I asked, plodding after the wheelchair. I'd taken my biker's jacket off and it lay now on my gran's lap.\n\nShe looked up at me, her expression unreadable. 'Here.' She patted her tummy, looked forward again. 'Pivotal, wouldn't you say, Prentice?'\n\n'Ha,' I said, still trying to sound non-committal. 'Could be. What about Uncle Hamish? Where's he at?'\n\n'Knee,' she said, tapping the plaster on her leg.\n\n'How is your leg, gran?'\n\n'Fine,' she said tetchily. 'Plaster comes off next week. Can't happen soon enough.'\n\nThe wheels of the chair sighed through the grass on either side of the narrow path. I remembered something I'd been meaning to ask.\n\n'What were you doing up that tree anyway, gran?'\n\n'Trying to saw a branch off.'\n\n'What for?'\n\n'To stop those damn squirrels using it as a diving board to get to my bird table, that's what for.' She used her stick to whack a crumpled drinking-yoghurt bottle off the path and into the water.\n\n'You could have asked somebody else.'\n\n'I'm not totally incapable, Prentice. I'd have been all right if that hoodie hadn't started dive-bombing me; ungrateful wretch.'\n\n'Oh, it was a bird's fault, was it?' I had a mental picture of some beetle-eyed carrion crow swooping on my gran, knocking her off her ladder. Maybe it had seen _The Omen._\n\n'Yes, it was.' Grandma Margot twisted in her wheelchair and raised both her stick and her voice. 'And a few years ago I'd only have been bruised, as well. Brittle bones are one of the things that make getting old such a damn nuisance, too, especially if you're a woman.' She nodded brusquely. 'So think yourself lucky.'\n\n'Okay,' I smiled.\n\n'Damn birds,' she muttered, glaring at a stand of ash trees on the edge of the plantation with such severity that I half expected to hear a parliament of crows cry out in answer. 'Ach well,' she shrugged. 'Let's head back to the house; I need to go.'\n\n'Right you are,' I said, and wheeled the chair around. Grandma Margot lit another cigarette.\n\n'That branch is still there, by the way.'\n\n'I'll deal with it.'\n\n'Good lad.'\n\nA lark trilled, high overhead.\n\nI wheeled my gran back along the path by the water, over the main road and up the gravel drive, through the sunlit cobbled courtyard towards the tall house with the crow-stepped gables.\n\nI cut the offending branch down that afternoon, before I went back to Gallanach, to my Uncle Hamish's house, for tea. My dad arrived while I was up the ladder, sawing away at the sappy oak and swatting at flies. He stopped and looked at me when he got out of the Audi, then he disappeared into the house. I kept on sawing.\n\nMy great-great-great grandfather, Stewart McHoan, was buried in a coffin made from black glass by the craftsmen he had commanded in his capacity as manager of the Gallanach Glass Works (a post now filled by my Uncle Hamish). Grandma Margot had gone for the more conventional wooden model; it slid away into the wall as Bach's Mass reached one of its choral climaxes. A wood-fronted door slid back up to block the hole the coffin had disappeared into, then a little purple curtain lowered itself over the doorway.\n\nThe head honcho of the undertakers supervised us as we all formed up for what was obviously the important and formal business of Leaving The Chapel. My father and mother left first. 'I told you we sat in the wrong place, Tone,' I heard my Uncle Hamish whisper behind me. (Aunt Tone just went 'Ssh!')\n\nOutside it was a calmly sombre day, chill and a little damp. I could smell leaves being burned somewhere. The view down the crematorium's birch-lined drive led towards the town and the ocean. In the distance, through the haze, North Jura was dark pastel and flat-looking on the unruffled grey blanket of sea. I looked around; dark-dressed people were everywhere amongst the parked cars, talking quietly. Their breath rose in clouds through the still air. Uncle Hamish was talking to the lawyer Blawke; Aunt Antonia to my mother. Dad was with the Urvills. The wonderful Verity was mostly hidden by my father, her snow-white ski jacket in eclipse behind the old man's tweed coat. I considered shifting my position so I could see her properly, but decided against it; somebody might notice.\n\nAt least, I thought brightly, she was here alone. For the last two years that I'd been worshipping Verity from afar she'd been going out with a gorm-free creature called Rodney Ritchie; his parents owned Ritchie's Reliable Removals in Edinburgh and were keen on alliteration. My father had met them once and coined a new collective noun: an embarrassment of Ritchies.\n\nAnyway, Urvill family gossip had it that Verity might be coming to her senses regarding Rodney's removal, and it was a positive and encouraging sign that she had turned up here without the geek in tow. I thought about approaching her. Maybe when we got back to the castle.\n\nI also thought about talking to James, but little brother was leaning against the crematorium wall looking bored but cool in his borrowed great-coat, earplugs in, getting his Walkman fix at last. Still mainlining The Doors, probably. For a moment I almost missed my elder brother, Lewis, who hadn't been able to make it back for the funeral. Lewis is better-looking, smarter and wittier than I am, so I don't miss him often.\n\nI was standing beside Uncle Hamish's Jaguar. Maybe I should just get into the car. Or find somebody else to talk to. I could feel that an attack of awkwardness \u2013 the kind of episode I am unhappily prone to \u2013 was imminent.\n\n'Hi, Prentice. You okay?'\n\nThe voice was deep and throaty but female. Ashley Watt strolled up, put her hand on the side of my shoulder, patting. Her brother Dean was just behind. I nodded.\n\n'Yeah. Yeah; fine. How's yourself? Hi, Dean.'\n\n'Hi, man.'\n\n'You just back for this?' Ash asked, nodding her head at the low grey granite of the crematorium buildings. Her long fawn hair was gathered up; her strong, angular face, dominated by a blade of a nose and a pair of large round-lensed glasses, was concerned and sad. Ash was my age, but she always made me feel younger.\n\n'Yeah; back to Glasgow on Monday.' I looked down. 'Wow, Ash; I don't think I've ever seen you in a skirt before.' Ash always wore jeans. We'd known each other since we'd used to crawl around on the same carpets together, but I couldn't remember seeing her in anything else but jeans. Yet there were her legs all right; pretty good-looking ones too, under a knee-length black skirt. She wore a big naval-looking jacket with the cuffs turned over, and black gloves; medium-high heels made her the same height as me.\n\nShe grinned. 'Short memory, Prentice. Recall school?'\n\n'Oh, yeah,' I nodded, still looking at the legs. 'Apart from then, though.' I shrugged, smiled warily at her. I'd gone through a protracted Unbearable stage while I'd been at high school \u2013 it had lasted from my first day through to about fourth year \u2013 and the most vivid memory I had of Ash from that time was when I and her two brothers had carried out a highly successful snowball ambush on her, her sister and their pals as they'd walked back from school one dark evening. _Somebody's_ snowball had broken that long sharp nose of Ashley's, and I suspected it had been one of mine if for no other reason than because as far as I knew nobody else had been deploying snowballs whose ballistic properties had been enhanced by the judicious reinforcement of their cores with moderately sizeable chuckie stones.\n\nHer nose had been reset, of course, and we'd got on better since we'd each left school. Ash frowned a little, her slightly magnified grey eyes searching mine.\n\n'I was sorry to hear about the old lady. All of us were.' She swivelled briefly to Dean, standing lighting up a Regal behind her. He nodded; black jeans and a dark blue crombie that looked like it had seen better decades.\n\nI wasn't sure what to say. 'I'll miss her,' I said eventually. I'd been trying not to think about it, ever since I'd heard the news.\n\n'Was it a heart attack, aye, Prentice?' Dean inquired through his cloud of smoke.\n\n'No,' I said. 'She fell off a ladder.'\n\n'I thought she did that last year,' Ash said.\n\n'She did; off a tree. This time she was clearing the gutters. The ladder slipped and she went through the conservatory roof. She was dead by the time they got her to the hospital. Shock from blood-loss, apparently.'\n\n'Oh, Prentice, I'm sorry,' Ash said, and put her hand on my arm.\n\nDean shook his head and looked mystified. 'Ah thought she had a heart attack.'\n\n'She did have one,' I nodded. 'About five years ago; got a pacemaker fitted.'\n\n'Maybe she had a heart attack while she was up the ladder,' Dean suggested. Ash kicked his shin. 'Oo-ya!' he said.\n\n'Excuse Mr Sensitivity here,' Ash said. 'But like I said: we were all really sorry to hear, Prentice.' She looked around. 'Haven't seen Lewis here; could he not make it?'\n\n'He's in Australia,' I sighed. 'Being funny.'\n\n'Ah.' Ash nodded, smiling faintly. 'Well, that's a shame.'\n\n'For the Australians, perhaps,' I said.\n\nAsh looked sad, even pitying. 'Aw, Prentice \u2013'\n\nDean prodded his sister in the back with the hand he wasn't rubbing his shin with. 'Hoi; what was that about yon guy ye bumped into in that jacuzzi in Berlin? Said ye were goantae tell \u2013'\n\n'Oh yeah ...' Ash turned from frowning at her brother to frowning at me, took a breath, then let it out. 'Hey; you fancy a pint later, Prentice?'\n\n'Well, maybe,' I said. 'I think we're ordered up to the castle for drinks and a bite to eat.' I shrugged. 'This evening?'\n\n'Okie-dokie,' Ash nodded.\n\n'A _jacuzzi?'_ I asked, looking at Dean and Ash in turn. _'Berlin?'_\n\nDean grinned broadly and nodded.\n\nAsh said, 'Aye, Prentice; watchin the wa' come doon. And a shocking and decadent tale it is, too, let me tell you. See you in the Jacobite about eight?'\n\n'Right you are,' I said. I leaned close and nudged her. 'What jacuzzi?'\n\nI saw the expression on Dean's face, then heard the noise, then watched Ashley's gaze rise from my face to fasten somewhere over my left shoulder. I turned slowly.\n\nThe car came screaming up the crematorium drive, leaves swirling into the air behind. It was a green Rover, and it had to be doing sixty. Probably exceeding the previous speed record within the crematorium grounds by a factor of at least three. It was heading more or less straight for us, and braking distance was running out fast.\n\n'That no Doctor Fyfe's car?' Dean said, as Ash grabbed my sleeve and started to pull me back, at the same time as the Rover's engine note fell from its wail, its nose dipped and the rear end wavered as the tyres tried to bite the moist tarmac.\n\n'I thought he had an Orion,' I said, as Ashley pulled Dean and me past the rear of Uncle Hamish's car and onto the grass. Everybody in the crowd outside the crematorium was watching the green 216 as it skidded to a stop, avoiding a head-on collision with the Urvill's Bentley Eight by only a few centimetres. The tyres rasped on the tarmac. Doctor Fyfe \u2013 for indeed, that was who it was \u2013 jumped out of the driver's seat. He was as small, rotund and be-whiskered as ever, but today his face was red and his eyes were staring.\n\n'Stop!' he yelled, slamming the door and running for the chapel entrance as fast as his little legs would carry him. 'Stop!' he shouted again; a little unnecessarily, I thought, as everybody had quite entirely stopped whatever they'd been doing some time before his car had even begun braking. 'Stop!'\n\nI still insist that I heard a muffled crump at this point, but nobody believes me. That was when it happened, though.\n\nThe sensitive morticians who run the Gallanach Corporation Crematorium usually wait until night before they burn the bodies, to avoid the possibility of resulting smoke-plumes sending overwrought relations into unsightly paroxysms of grief, but Grandma Margot had specified that she wanted to be incinerated immediately; her cremation was therefore genuinely under way as we stood there.\n\n'Ah!' said Doctor Fyfe, stumbling just before he was intercepted before the door of the chapel by a concerned undertaker. 'Ah!' he said again, and crumpled, first into the undertaker's arms and then to the ground. He was on his knees briefly, then turned and sat down, clutched at his chest, stared at the granite flagstones outside the chapel, and to the assembled, still stunned and quieted crowd of us announced, 'I'm sorry, folks, but I believe I'm having a coronary ...' and keeled over on his back.\n\nThere was an instant when nothing much seemed to happen. Then Dean Watt nudged me with the hand holding his Regal and said quietly, 'There's a funny thing, eh?'\n\n'Dean!' hissed Ashley, as people crowded round the doctor.\n\n'Oo-ya!'\n\n'Call an ambulance!' somebody shouted.\n\n'Use the hearse!' yelled my dad.\n\n'Och, it's only a bruise,' Dean muttered, rubbing vigorously at his shin. 'Oo-ya! Will ye quit that!'\n\nThey used the hearse, and got Doctor Fyfe to the local hospital in ample time to save his life if not his professional reputation.\n\nThe muffled crump \u2013 which I still maintain that I heard \u2013 was my grandmother exploding; Doctor Fyfe had neglected to ask the hospital to remove her pacemaker before she was cremated.\n\nLike I say, this sort of thing keeps happening in my family.\nCHAPTER 2\n\nThese were the days of fond promise, when the world was very small and there was still magic in it. He told them stories of the Secret Mountain and the Sound that could be Seen, of the Forest drowned by Sand and the trees that were time-stilled waters; he told them about the Slow Children and the Magic Duvet and the Well-Travelled Country, and they believed all of it. They learned of distant times and long-ago places, of who they were and what they weren't, and of what had and what had never been.\n\nThen, every day was a week, each month a year. A season was a decade, and every year a life.\n\n'But dad, Mrs McBeath says there is so a God, and you'll go to a bad place.'\n\n'Mrs McBeath is an idiot.'\n\n'No she's no, dad! She's a teacher!'\n\n'No she's not, or better still, no she _isn't._ Don't use the word \"no\" when you mean \"not\".'\n\n'But she's no a niddyott, dad! She is a teacher. Honest.'\n\nHe stopped on the path, turned to look at the boy. The other children stopped too, grinning and giggling. They were almost at the top of the hill, just above the Forestry Commission's arbitrary tree line. The cairn was visible, a lump on the sky-line. 'Prentice,' he said. 'People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots ... in fact I think they have to be ... a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.'\n\nSeveral of the children giggled.\n\n'Uncle Kenneth,' Helen Urvill sang out. 'Our daddy said you were a commie.' Her sister, alongside her on the path and holding her hand, gave a little squeal and put her free hand up to her mouth.\n\n'Your father is absolutely correct, Helen,' he smiled. 'But only in the pejorative sense, and not the practical one, unfortunately.'\n\nDiana squealed again and hid her face, giggling. Helen looked puzzled.\n\n'But dad,' Prentice said, pulling at his sleeve. 'Dad, Mrs McBeath _is a_ teacher, really she is, and she said there is so a God.'\n\n'And so did Mr Ainstie, too, dad,' Lewis added.\n\n'Yes, I've talked to Mr Ainstie,' McHoan told the older boy. 'He thinks we should send troops to help the Americans in Viet Nam.'\n\n'He an idiot too, dad?' Lewis hazarded, decoding the sour expression on his father's face.\n\n'Definitely.'\n\n'So there isnae a God, eh no Mr McHoan?'\n\n'No, Ashley, there isn't.'\n\n'Whit aboot Wombles, Mr McHoan?'\n\n'What's that, Darren?'\n\nThe Wombles, Mr McHoan. Of Wimbledon Common.' Darren Watt was holding the hand of his little brother, Dean, who was staring up at McHoan and looking like he was about to burst into tears. 'Are they real, Mr McHoan?'\n\n'Of course they are,' he nodded. 'You've seen them on television, haven't you?'\n\n'Aye.'\n\n'Aye. Well then, of course they're real; real puppets.'\n\n'But they're no _really_ real, naw?'\n\n'No, Darren, they're not really real; the real creatures on the real Wimbledon Common are mice and birds and maybe foxes and badgers, and none of them wear clothes and live in nice well-lit burrows with furniture. A lady made up the Wombles, and made up stories about them, and then people made the stories into television programmes. That's what's real.'\n\n'See, ah told ye,' Darren said, shaking his little brother's hand. 'They're no real.'\n\nDean started to cry, face screwing up, eyes closing.\n\n'Oh, good grief,' McHoan breathed. It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child's face could turn from peach to beetroot. His own youngest, James, was just leaving that stage, thank goodness. 'Come on, Dean; up you come up here and we'll see if we can get to the top of this hill, eh?' He lifted the howling child up \u2013 after he'd been persuaded to let go of his brother's hand \u2013 and put him on his shoulders. He looked at the little up-turned faces. 'We're nearly there, aren't we? See the cairn?'\n\nThere was a general noise of agreement from the assembled children.\n\n'Come on, then! Last one there's a Tory!'\n\nHe started off up the path; Dean was crying more quietly now. The other children ran round and past him, laughing and shouting and scrambling straight up the hillside, over the grass towards the cairn. He quit the path and started after them, then \u2013 holding Dean's legs \u2013 turned to look back at Diana and Helen, who were still standing quietly, hand-in-hand, on the path. 'You two not playing?'\n\nHelen, identically dressed to her sister in little new green dungarees and staring out from under her precisely-trimmed black fringe, shook her head, frowned. 'We better go last, Uncle Kenneth.'\n\n'Oh? Why?'\n\n'I think we're Tories.'\n\n'You might well turn out to be,' he laughed. 'But we'll give you the benefit of the doubt for now, eh? On you go.'\n\nThe twins looked at each other, then, still hand-in-hand, started up the grassy slope after the rest, earnestly concentrating on the business of clumping one foot in front of the other through the long rough grass.\n\nDean was starting to cry loudly again, probably because he thought his brother and sister were leaving him. McHoan sighed and jogged up the hill after the kids, shouting encouragement and making sure he trailed the last of them to the top and the cairn. He made a great show of being out of breath, and wobbled as he sat down, collapsing dramatically on the grass after setting Dean to one side.\n\n'Oh! You're all too fit for me!'\n\n'Ha, Mr McHoan!' Darren laughed, pointing at him. 'You're the toerag, so ye are!'\n\nHe was mystified for a moment, then said, 'Oh. Right. Toe-rag, Tuareg, Tory.' He made a funny face. 'Tora! Tora! Tory!' he laughed, and so did they. He lay in the grass. A warm wind blew.\n\n'What for are all these stones, Mr McHoan?' Ashley Watt asked. She had climbed half-way up the squat cairn, which was about five feet high. She picked up one of the smaller rocks and looked at it.\n\nKenneth rolled over, letting Prentice and Lewis climb onto his back and kick at his sides, pretending he was a horse. The Watt girl, perched on the cairn, bashed one rock against another, then inspected the struck, whitened surface of the stone she held. He grinned. She was a tyke; dressed in grubby hand-me-downs like the rest of the Watt tribe, she always seemed to have a runny nose, but he liked her. He still thought Ashley was a boy's name (wasn't it from _Gone With The Wind?),_ but then if the Watts wanted to call their children Dean and Darren and Ashley, he supposed that was up to them. Could have been Elvis and Tarquin and Marilyn.\n\n'D'you remember the story of the goose that swallowed the diamond?'\n\n'Aye.'\n\nIt was one of his stories, one he'd tried out on the children. Market research, his wife called it.\n\n'Why did the goose eat the diamond?'\n\n'Please, Uncle Kenneth!' Diana Urvill said, holding up one hand and trying to click her fingers.\n\n'Yes, Diana.'\n\n'It was hungry.'\n\n'Naw!' Ashley said scornfully from the cairn. She blinked furiously. 'It wiz fur teeth!'\n\n'It _swallowed_ it, smarty-pants, so there!' Diana said, leaning towards Ashley and shaking her head.\n\n'Hey!' McHoan said. 'You're both ... sort of right. The goose swallowed the diamond because that's what geese do with things like pebbles that they find; they swallow them so that they go into their ... anybody know?' He looked round them all as best he could without disturbing Lewis and Prentice.\n\n_'Gizzltrd,_ Mr McHoan!' Ashley shouted, waving the stone she held.\n\nDiana squealed and put her hand to her mouth again.\n\n'Well, a gizzard is part of a bird, too, that's right Ashley,' he said. 'But the diamond actually went into the goose's crop, because, like lots of animals and birds, geese need to keep some wee stones, like pebbles or gravel, in their crop, down here,' he pointed. 'So that they can grind their food up small and digest it better when it goes into their tummy.'\n\n'Please, Mr McHoan, Ah remember!' Ashley shouted. She clutched the stone to her chest, getting her ragged, thin grey jumper a little dirtier.\n\n'Me too, dad!' Prentice shouted.\n\n'And me!'\n\n'Me too!'\n\n'Well,' he said, rolling slowly over and letting Lewis and Prentice slide off his back. He sat up; they sat down. 'Way back, a long long time ago, there were these big enormous animals that used to live in Scotland, and they \u2013'\n\n'What did they look like, dad?' Prentice asked.\n\n'Ah.' McHoan scratched his head through his brown curls. 'Like ... like big hairy elephants ... with long necks. And these big huge animals \u2014 '\n\n'What were they called, please, Uncle Kenneth?'\n\n'They were called ... mythosaurs, Helen, and they would swallow rocks ... big rocks, way down into their crops, and they used these rocks to help crunch up their food. They were very very big animals, and very heavy because of all the rocks they carried around inside them, and they usually stayed down in the glens because they were so heavy, and didn't go into the sea or the lochs because they didn't float, and they stayed away from marshes, too, in case they sank. But \u2013'\n\n'Please, Mr McHoan, did they up climb trees, naw?'\n\n'No, Ashley.'\n\n'Naw, ad didnae think so, Mr McHoan.'\n\n'Right. Anyway, when they were very very old and they were going to die, the mythosaurs would come to the tops of hills ... hills just like this one, and they'd lie down, and they would die peacefully, and then after they were dead, their fur and their skin would disappear, and then their insides would disappear too af \u2013'\n\n'Where aboots did their fur and their skin go, please, Mr McHoan?'\n\n'Well, Ashley ... they turned into earth and plants and insects and other wee animals.'\n\n'Oh.'\n\n'And eventually there would just be a skeleton left \u2013'\n\n'Eek,' said Diana, and put her hand over her mouth again.\n\n'Until even that crumbled away and became dust, and \u2013'\n\n'And their tusks, Mr McHoan?'\n\n'Pardon, Ashley?'\n\n'Their tusks. Did they go intae dust as well?'\n\n'Umm ... yes. Yes, they did. So after a while everything was dust ... except for the stones that the big animals had carried in their crops; those lay in a big pile where the mythosaurs had laid down to die, and that,' he turned and slapped one of the larger stones protruding from the base of the rock pile behind him. 'That,' he grinned, because he liked the story he had just thought up and told, 'is where cairns come from.'\n\n'Ah! Ashley! You're standing on stuff that's been in a animal's gizzurd!' Darren shouted, pointing.\n\n'Eaurgh!' Ashley laughed and jumped down, throwing the stones away and rolling on the grass.\n\nThere was a deal of general tomfoolery and wee high squealing voices for a while. Kenneth McHoan looked at his watch, and wound it up as he said, 'All right, kids. Time for your dinner. Anybody hungry?'\n\n'Me!'\n\n'Me, dad!'\n\n'We are, Uncle Kenneth.'\n\n'Ah could eat a missasore, so ah could, Mr McHoan!'\n\nHe laughed. 'Well, I don't think they're on the menu, Ashley, but not to worry.' He took his pipe out and stood up, filled the bowl and tamped it down. 'Come on, you horrible rabble. Your Aunt Mary's probably got your dinner ready for you by now.'\n\n'Will Uncle Rory be doing tricks, Uncle Kenneth?'\n\n'If you're good, and eat up your vegetables, Helen, aye, he might.'\n\n'Oh good.'\n\nThey trooped down. Dean had to be carried because he was tired.\n\n'Dad,' Prentice said, falling back to talk to him while the rest whooped and yelled and capered on the slope. 'Are miffasores real?'\n\n'As real as Wombles, kiddo.'\n\n'As real as Dougal in _The Magic Roundabout?'_\n\n'Every bit. Well, almost.' He drew on the pipe. 'No; just as real. Because the only place anything is ever real is inside your head, Prentice. And the mythosaur exists inside your head, now.'\n\n'Does it, dad?'\n\n'Yes; it used to just exist in my head but now it exists in your head too, and the others'.'\n\n'So is God in Mrs McBeath's head, then?'\n\n'Yep, that's right. He's an idea in her head. Like Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy.' He looked down at the child. 'Did you like the story about the mythosaur and the cairns?'\n\n'Was it just a story then, dad?'\n\n'Of course it was, Prentice.' He frowned. 'What did you think it was?'\n\n'I don't know, dad. History?'\n\n'Histoire, seulement.'\n\n'What, dad?'\n\n'Nothing, Prentice. No, it was just a story.'\n\n'I think the story about you meeting mum's more better, dad.'\n\n'Just \"better\" will do, Prentice; the \"more\" isn't required.'\n\n'Still a better story, dad.'\n\n'Glad you think so, son.'\n\nThe children were entering the forest, funnelling into the path between the pines. He looked away then, across the rough geography of bough and leaf, to the village and the station, just visible through the trees.\n\nThe train chuffed off into the evening, the red light on the final carriage disappearing round the bend in the cutting through the forest; the steam and smoke climbed into the sunset skies beyond. He let the feeling of return wash over and through him, looking across the deserted platform on the far side of the tracks, down across the few lights of Lochgair village to the long electric-blue reflection that was the loch, its gleaming acres imprisoned between the dark masses of the land.\n\nThe noise of the train faded slowly, and the quiet susurration of the falls seemed to swell in recompense. He left his bags where they lay and walked to the far end of the platform. The very edge of the platform dropped away there, angling down to the deck of the viaduct over the rushing water beneath. A chest-high wall formed the furthest extent of the rest of the platform.\n\nHe rested his arms on the top of the wall and looked down the fifty feet or so to the tumbling white waters. Just upstream, the river Loran piled down from the forest in a compactly furious cataract. The spray was a taste. Beneath, the river surged round the piers of the viaduct that carried the railway on towards Lochgilphead and Gallanach.\n\nA grey shape flitted silently across the view, from falls to bridge, then zoomed, turned in the air and swept into the cutting on the far bank of the river, as though it was a soft fragment of the train's steam that had momentarily lost its way and was now hurrying to catch up. He waited a moment, and the owl hooted once, from inside the dark constituency of forest. He smiled, took a deep breath that tasted of steam and the sweet sharpness of pine resin, and then turned away, went back to pick up his bags.\n\n'Mr Kenneth,' the station master said, taking his ticket at the gate. 'It's yourself. Back from the varsity, are you?'\n\n'Aye, Mr Calder; that's me done with it.'\n\n'You'll be coming back then, will you?'\n\n'Aye, maybe. We'll see.'\n\n'Indeed. Well, I'll tell you now; your sister was here earlier, but wi' the train bein late an that ...'\n\n'Ach, it's not far to walk.'\n\n'Indeed not, though I'll be shutting up shop very soon now, and I could offer you a lift on the back of my bike if you liked.'\n\n'I'll just walk, thank you.'\n\n'As you will, Kenneth. It's good to see you back.'\n\n'Thank you.'\n\n'Ah ... that might be her, actually ...' Mr Calder said, looking down the curve of the station approach. Kenneth heard a car engine, and then headlights swung white light across the iron railings holding the rhododendrons back from the tarmac road.\n\nThe big Super Snipe growled into the car park, heeling as it turned and stopping with the passenger's door opposite Kenneth. 'Hello again, Mr Calder!' a voice called out from the driver's seat.\n\n'Evening, Miss Fiona.'\n\nKenneth threw his bags onto the back, settled into the passenger seat and accepted a kiss from his sister. He was pressed back into the seat as the Humber accelerated off down the road.\n\n'Okay, big brother?'\n\n'Just grand, sis.' The car skidded briefly as it swung onto the main road. He clutched at the grab handle on the door pillar, looked at his sister, sitting hunched over the big steering wheel, dressed in slacks and blouse, her fair hair tied back. 'You have passed your test, haven't you, Fi?'\n\n'Course I have.' A car, coming in the opposite direction, honked at them and flashed its lights. 'Hmm,' she said, frowning.\n\n'Try the dip switch.'\n\n'Ah hah.'\n\nThey swept off the main road and into the house drive, roared up between the dark masses of the oaks. Fiona took the car grinding over the gravel, past the old stable block and round the side of the house. He looked back over his shoulder. 'Is that a wall?'\n\nFiona nodded as she brought the car to a halt in front of the house. 'Dad wants a courtyard, so he's building a wall by the stables,' she said, turning off the engine. 'We're going to have a conservatory overlooking the garden, if mum has her way, which I dare say she will. I think your room's all right, but Hamish's is being redecorated.'\n\n'Heard from him?'\n\n'Getting on famously with the piccaninnies, apparently.'\n\n'Fi; really. They're Rhodesians.'\n\n'They're little black Rhodesians and I shall always think of them as piccaninnies. Blame Enid Blyton, say I. Come on, Uncle Joe; you're just in time for supper.'\n\nThey got out; there were lights on in the house, and a couple of bikes lying against the steps curving up to the front door. 'Whose are those?' he asked, taking his bags from the back of the car.\n\n'Couple of lassies camping over there,' Fiona pointed, and he could just make out a dim orange shape, lit from inside, under the elms on the west side of the lawn.\n\n'Friends of yours?'\n\nFiona shook her head. 'No; just turned up, asked to camp; think they thought we were a farm. They're from Glasgow, I think.' She took his briefcase from him and bounded up the steps to the opened double doors of the porch. He hesitated, reached into the car and took the keys out of the ignition, then glanced at the tent. 'Ken?' Fiona called from the door.\n\nHe made a tutting noise and put the keys back, then shook his head and pulled them out again. Not because there were strangers around, and certainly not just because they were from Glasgow, but just because it was irresponsible to leave keys in the car like that; Fiona had to learn. He pocketed the keys and picked up his bags. He glanced over at the tent, just as it flared with light.\n\n'Oh!' he heard Fiona say.\n\nAnd that was when he first saw Mary Lewis, running out of a tent in her pyjamas with her hair on fire, screaming.\n\n'Christ!' He dropped the bags, ran across the gravel drive towards the girl haring across the grass, hands beating at the blue and orange flames crackling round her head. He leapt down to the lawn, pulling off his jacket as he went. The girl tried to run past him; he tackled her, bringing her down with a ragged thump; he had the jacket over her head before she properly started struggling. After a few seconds, while she whimpered, and the stink of burning hair filled his nostrils, he pulled the jacket away. Fiona came running; another girl, dressed in too-big pyjamas and a fawn duffle coat, and holding a small flat kettle, followed her from the house, wailing.\n\n'Mary! Oh, Mary!'\n\n'Nice tackle, Ken,' Fiona said, kneeling by the girl with the burned hair, who was sitting quivering. He put one arm round her shoulders. The second girl fell to her knees and put both arms round the girl she'd called Mary.\n\n'Oh, hen! Are you all right?'\n\n'I think so,' the girl said, feeling what was left of her hair, and then burst into tears.\n\nHe extracted his arm from between the two girls. He brushed his jacket free of grass and burned hair, and put it round the shoulders of the crying girl.\n\nFiona was pulling bits of hair away and peering at her scalp in the gloom. 'Think you've been lucky, lassie. But we'll call the doctor anyway.'\n\n'Oh no!' the girl wailed, as though this was the worst thing in the world.\n\n'Now, now, Mary,' the other girl said, her voice shaking.\n\n'Come on, let's get into the house,' Kenneth said, rising. 'Take a look at you.' He helped the two girls to their feet. 'Maybe get you a cup of tea, eh?'\n\n'Oh, that's what caused all this in the first place!' Mary said, standing pale and shaking, eyes bright with tears. She gave a sort of desperate laugh. The other girl, still hugging her, laughed too. He smiled, shaking his head. He looked into the girl's face, finally seeing it properly, and thought how bizarrely beautiful she looked, even with half a head of frizzy, whitened hair, and eyes red raw with crying.\n\nThen he realised he was seeing her \u2013 and seeing her better all the time \u2013 in the light of a flickering glow that was blooming in the west of the garden, under the elms. Her eyes widened as she looked past him. 'The tent!' she howled. 'Oh _no!'_\n\n'And I missed it! Damn damn damn! I hate going to bed this early!'\n\n'Shush. I've told you; now go to sleep.'\n\n'No! What happened next? Did you have to take all her clothes off and put her to bed?'\n\n'No! Don't be ridiculous! Of course not!'\n\n'Oh. That's what happened in this book I read. 'Cept the girl was wet from being in the sea ... she's fallen in the water!' Rory completed the latter part of this sentence in his Bluebottle voice. 'She's fallen in the water!' the wee voice said again, in the darkness of the room.\n\nKenneth wanted to laugh, but stopped himself. 'Please shut up, Rory.'\n\n'Go on; tell me what happened next.'\n\n'That's it. We all came into the house; mum and dad hadn't even heard anything. I got the hose going eventually but by that time it was too late to save much of the stuff in the tent; and anyway then the primus really blew up, and \u2013'\n\n'What? In an explosion?'\n\n'That's the way things normally blow up, yes.'\n\n'Holy smoke! Oh damn, hell and shite! I missed it.'\n\n'Rory; mind your language!'\n\n'Weeeellll.' Rory turned over in the bed, his feet prodding Kenneth in the back.\n\n'And mind your feet, too.'\n\n'Sorry. So did the doctor come or not?'\n\n'No; she didn't want us to call him, and she wasn't badly hurt; just her hair, really.'\n\n'Waa!' Rory gave a squeal of excitement. 'She's not bald, is she?'\n\n'No, she isn't bald. But she'll probably have to wear a scarf or something for a while, I expect.'\n\n'So they're staying in the house, are they? These two lassies from Glasgow? They're in the house?'\n\n'Yes, Mary and Sheena are staying in my room, which is why I've got to sleep with you.'\n\n'Ffworr!'\n\n'Rory, shut up. Go to sleep, for Pete's sake.'\n\n'Okay.' Rory made a great bouncing movement, turning over in bed. Kenneth could feel his brother lying still and tense beside him. He sighed.\n\nHe remembered when this had been his room. Before his dad had unblocked the fireplace and put a grate in it, the only heating during the winter had been that ancient paraffin heater they hadn't used since the old house, back in Gallanach. How nostalgic he had felt then, and how distant and separated from Gallanach at first, even though it was only eight miles away over the hills, and just a couple of stops on the train. That heater had been the same height as him, at first, and he'd been told very seriously never ever to touch it, and been slightly frightened of it at the start, but after a while he had grown to love the old enamelled heater.\n\nWhen it was cold his parents would put it in his room to heat it up before he went to bed, and they would leave it on for a while after they'd said good-night to him, and he'd lie awake, listening to the quiet, puttering, hissing noise it made, and watching the swirling pattern of flame-yellow and shadow-dark it cast on the high ceiling, while the room filled with a delicious warm smell he could never experience after that without a sense of remembered drowsiness.\n\nIt had been a precious light, back then; must have been during the war at first, when his dad was using the probably illegal stockpile of paraffin he'd built up before rationing began.\n\nRory nudged him with one foot. He ignored this.\n\nHe ignored another, slightly stronger nudge, and started snoring quietly.\n\nAnother nudge.\n\n'What?'\n\n'Ken,' Rory whispered. 'Does your tassel get big sometimes?'\n\n'Eh?'\n\n'You know; your tassel; your willy. Does it get big?'\n\n'Oh, good grief,' he groaned.\n\n'Mine does. It's gone big now. Do you want to feel it?'\n\n'No!' he sat up in the bed, looking down at the vague shape of his brother's head on the pillow at the other end of the bed. 'No, I do not!'\n\n'Only asking. Does it, though?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Your willy; get big?'\n\n'Rory, I'm tired; it's been a long day, and this isn't the time or the place \u2013'\n\nRory sat up suddenly. 'Bob Watt can make stuff come out of his; and so can Jamie McVean. I've seen them do it. You have to rub it a lot; I've tried but I can't get any stuff to come out, but twice now I've got this funny feeling where it's like heat; like heat coming up as if you're getting into a bath, sort of. Do you get that?'\n\nKenneth sighed, rubbed his eyes, rested his back against the low brass rail at the foot of the bed. He drew his legs up. 'I don't think it's really up to me to have to go into all this, Rory. You should talk to dad about it.'\n\n'Rab Watt says it makes you go blind.' Rory hesitated. 'And he wears glasses.'\n\nKenneth stifled a laugh. He looked up at the dim roof, where dozens of model aircraft hung on threads and whole squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes and ME 109s attacked Wellingtons, Lancasters, Flying Fortresses and Heinkels. 'No, it doesn't make you go blind.'\n\nRory sat back, legs drawn up too. Kenneth couldn't make out his brother's expression; there was a soft glow from the small nightlight candle on Rory's desk, near the door, but it was too weak to let him see the boy's face clearly.\n\n'Ha; I told him he was wrong.'\n\nKenneth lay back down. Rory said nothing for a while. Then Rory said, 'I think I'm going to fart.'\n\n'Well, you'd better make damn sure it goes out the way.'\n\n'Can't; got to keep it under the covers or it might ignite on the nightlight and blow the whole house up.'\n\n'Rory; shut up. I'm serious.'\n\n'... 'sail right.' Rory turned over, settled down. 'It went away.' There was silence for some time. Ken fitted his legs round Rory's back, closed his eyes, and wished that his father had concentrated on restoring more rooms in the old house rather than building courtyard walls.\n\nAfter a while, Rory stirred again and said sleepily, 'Ken?'\n\n'Rory; please go to sleep. Or I'll kick you unconscious.'\n\n'No, but Ken?'\n\n'Whaaat?' he breathed. _I should have beaten him up when we were younger; he isn't scared of me at all._\n\n'Have you ever shagged a woman?'\n\n'That's none of your business.'\n\n'Go on; tell us.'\n\n'I'm not going to.'\n\n'Please. I won't tell anybody else. Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die I won't.'\n\n'No; go to sleep.'\n\n'If you tell me, I'll tell you something.'\n\n'Oh, I'm sure.'\n\n'No, really; something dead important that nobody else knows.'\n\n'I'm not buying it, Rory. Sleep or die.'\n\n'Honest; I've never told anybody, and if I do tell you you mustn't tell anybody else, or I might get put in the jail.'\n\nKenneth opened his eyes. _What's the kid talking about?_ He turned over, looked to the head of the bed. Rory was still lying ' down. 'Don't be melodramatic, Rory. I'm not impressed.'\n\n'It's true; they'd put me in jail.'\n\n'Rubbish.'\n\n'I'll tell you what I did if you tell me about shagging.'\n\nHe lay there, thought about this. Apart from anything else, the horrible and ghastly truth was that at the ripe old age of practically twenty-two, he had never made love to a woman. But of course he knew what to do.\n\nHe wondered what Rory's secret was, what he thought he had done, or what story he had made up. They were both good at making up stories.\n\n'You tell me first,' Kenneth said, and felt like a child again.\n\nTo his surprise, Rory said, 'All right.' He sat up in bed, and so did Kenneth. They waggled closer until their heads were almost touching, and Rory whispered, 'You remember last summer, when the big barn burned down on the estate?'\n\nKenneth remembered; it had been the last week of his vacation, and he had seen the smoke rising from the farm, a mile away along the road towards Lochgilphead. He and his dad had heard the bell sound in the ruined estate chapel, and had jumped into the car, to go and help old Mr Ralston and his sons. They'd tried to fight the fire with buckets and a couple of hoses, but by the time the fire engines arrived from Lochgilphead and Gallanach the old hay barn was burning from end to end. It stood not far from the railway line, and they'd all assumed it had been a spark from an engine.\n\n'You're not going to tell me \u2013'\n\n'That was me.'\n\n'You're joking.'\n\n'Promise you won't tell, please? Please please please? I've never told anybody and I don't want to go to jail, Ken.'\n\nRory sounded too frightened to be lying. Kenneth hugged his young brother. The boy shivered. He smelled of Palmolive.\n\n'I didn't mean to do it, Ken, honest I didn't; I was experimenting with a magnifying glass; there was this wee hole in the roof, and this beam of sunlight, and it was like a sort of searchlight falling on the straw, and I was playing with my Beaufighter; not the Airfix one, the other one, and I was melting holes in the wings and fuselage 'cos they look dead like bullet holes and you can melt a big long line of them and they look like twenty millimetre cannon holes, and I pretended the sunshine really was a sort of searchlight, and the plane crashed, and I'd thought I'd see if I could make the straw go on fire, just a little bit, round where the plane had crashed, but I didn't think it would all burn down, really I didn't; it just all went up dead sudden. You won't tell, will you, Ken?'\n\nRory pulled back, and Kenneth could just make out the boy's eyes, shining in the gloom.\n\nHe hugged him again. 'I swear; on my life. I'll never tell anybody. Ever.'\n\n'The farmer won't have to sell his car to buy a new barn, will he?'\n\n'No,' he laughed quietly. 'It's old Urvill's farm anyway, really, and being a good capitalist, I'm sure he had it well insured.'\n\n'Oh... okay. It was an accident, honest it was, Ken. You won't tell Mr Urvill, will you?'\n\n'Don't worry; I won't. It was only a barn; nobody hurt.'\n\n'It was an accident.'\n\n'Sssh.' He held the boy, rocked him.\n\n'I was that frightened afterwards, Ken; I was going to run away, so I was.'\n\n'There now; sssh.'\n\nAfter a while, Rory said, groggily, 'Going to tell me about shagging, Ken, eh?'\n\n'Tomorrow, all right?' he whispered. 'Don't want you getting all excited again.'\n\n'You promise?'\n\n'I promise. Lie back; go to sleep.'\n\n'Mmmm. Okay.'\n\nHe tucked the boy in, then looked up at the dull crosses of the planes, poised overhead. Young rascal, he thought.\n\nHe lay back himself, toyed briefly with his own erection, then felt guilty and stopped. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but couldn't stop thinking of the girl whose hair had gone on fire. He'd seen quite far down her pyjama top when he'd put his arm round her shoulders.\n\nHe forced himself to stop thinking about her. He reviewed the day, the way he often had since childhood, trying to fill the time between the light going out and his brain finally relaxing, letting him go to sleep.\n\nWell, so much for his plan to tell his parents as soon as he got home that he too wanted to travel, that he didn't want to stay here, or get a job at the factory, managerial or not, or become a teacher like Hamish. Maybe something settled and bourgeois like that could come later, but he wanted to taste the world first; there was more to it than this wee corner of Scotland, more to it than Glasgow and even Britain. The world and his life were opening up before him and he wanted to take full advantage of both (apart from anything else, there was always the Bomb, that lurking presence forever threatening to close it all back down again with one final, filthy splash of light that heralded the long darkness, and made a nonsense of any human plan, any dream of the future. Eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow we blow up the world).\n\nHe had intended to tell his parents all this as soon as he got in, but the incident with the girls and their tent and that poor, shocked, bonny lassie with her hair on fire had made it impossible. It would have to wait until tomorrow. There would be time. There was always time.\n\nHe wondered what her skin would feel like. It had been the colour of pale honey. He wondered what it would feel like to hold her. He had touched her \u2013 he had been sprawled on top of her, dammit \u2013 but that wasn't the same thing, not the same thing at all. She had been slim, but her breasts, soft globes within the shadows of those silly pyjamas, had looked full and firm. There had been something fit and limber about the way she'd moved, even when she'd been shivering after her ordeal. He would have believed she was an athlete, not a student of \u2013 what had she said? \u2013 geography. He smiled in the darkness, touching himself again. He'd like to study her geography, all right; the contours of her body, the swelling hills and deep dales, her dark forest and mysterious, moist caves ...\n\nThe girls stayed at Lochgair for another six days. The McHoans were used to keeping open house, and wouldn't hear of the girls just packing up what was left of their possessions and cycling or taking a train back to Glasgow.\n\n'Och, no; you must stay,' Margot McHoan said, at breakfast the next morning. They were all sat round the big table; Mary with a towel round her head, looking prettily embarrassed, her friend Sheena, big-boned, blonde and apple-cheeked, happily wolfing down sausage and eggs, Fiona and Kenneth finishing their porridge, Rory searching for the plastic toy concealed somewhere in the Sugar Smacks packet. Dad had left for the glass factory earlier.\n\n'Oh, Mrs McHoan, we couldn't,' Mary said, looking down at the table. She had only nibbled at her toast.\n\n'Nonsense, child,' Margot said, pouring Rory another glass of milk and smoothing the _Herald_ on the table in front of her. 'You're both very welcome to stay, aren't they?' She looked round her three children.\n\n'Certainly,' Fiona said. She had already found Sheena to be a kindred spirit when it came to Rock 'n Roll, which might provide her with a valuable ally when it came to displacing dad's folk songs and Kenneth's jazz on the turntable of the family radiogram.\n\n'Of course.' Kenneth smiled at Mary, and at Sheena. 'I'll show you around, if you like; much better to have a local guide, and my rates are very reasonable.'\n\n'Muuuum, they've forgotten to put the wee boat in this box,' Rory complained, arm deep in the Sugar Smacks packet, face dark with frustration and ire.\n\n'Just keep looking, dear,' Margot said patiently, then looked back at the two girls. 'Aye; stay by all means, the two of you. This big house needs filling up, and if you feel guilty you can always help with a bit of decorating, if there's any wet days, and if my husband gets round to it. Fair enough?'\n\nKenneth glanced at his mum. Margot McHoan was still a striking-looking woman, though her thick brown hair was starting to go grey over her forehead (she had dyed it at first, but found it not worth the bother). He admired her, he realised, and felt proud that she should be so matter-of-factly generous, even if it might mean that he had to keep sleeping in the same bed as his young brother.\n\n'That's awful kind, Mrs McHoan,' Sheena said, wiping her plate with a bit of fried bread. 'Are you sure?'\n\n'Totally,' Margot said. 'Your parents on the phone?'\n\n'Mine are, Mrs McHoan,' Mary said, glancing up.\n\n'Good,' Margot said. 'We'll call them, tell them you'll be here, all right?'\n\n'Oh, that's awfully nice of you, Mrs McHoan,' Mary said, and flickered a wee nervous smile at the older woman. Kenneth watched her and the smile ended up, albeit briefly, directed at him, before Mary looked down, and crunched into her toast and marmalade.\n\nHe drove the two girls round the area in the Humber when his dad wasn't using it; sometimes Fiona came too. The summer days were long and warm; they walked in the forests south of Gallanach, and in the hills above Lochgair. A puffer captain let them travel through the Crinan canal on his boat, and they took the family dory puttering over to Otter Ferry for lunch one day, over the smooth waters of Lower Loch Fyne, one windless day when the smoke rose straight, and cormorants stood on exposed rocks, wings held open like cloaks to the warm air, and seals popped up, black cones of blubber with surprised-looking faces, as the old open boat droned slowly past.\n\nThere was a dance on in Gallanach Town Hall that Saturday, the day before the two girls were due to return to Glasgow; Kenneth asked Mary to go with him. She borrowed one of Fiona's dresses, and a pair of his mother's shoes. They danced, they kissed, they walked by the quiet harbour where the boats lay still on water like black oil, and they sauntered hand-in-hand along the esplanade beneath a moon-devoid sky full of bright stars. They each talked about their dreams, and about travelling to far-away places. He asked if she had given any thought of maybe coming back here some time? Like next weekend, for example?\n\nThere is a loch in the hills above Lochgair; Loch Glashan, reservoir for the small hydro power station in the village. Matthew McHoan's friend, Hector Cardle, a Forestry Commission manager, kept a rowing boat on the loch, and the McHoans had permission to use the boat, to fish the waters.\n\nRory was bored. He was so bored he was actually looking forward to school starting again next week. Back in the spring, he had hoped that Ken being back home would make the summer holidays fun, but it hadn't worked out that way; Ken was either up in Glasgow seeing that Mary girl, or she was here, and they were together all the time and didn't want him around.\n\nHe had been in the garden, throwing dry clods of earth at some old model tanks; the clouds of dust the clods made when they hit the hard, baked earth looked just like proper explosions. But then his mum had chased him out because the dust was getting the washing dirty. He hadn't found anybody else around to play with in the village, so he'd watched a couple of trains pass on the railway line. One was a diesel, which was quite exciting, but he'd soon got bored there, too; he walked up the track by the river, up to the dam. It was very warm and still. The waters of the loch were like a mirror.\n\nHe walked along the path between the plantation and the shore of the loch, looking for interesting stuff. But you usually only found that sort of thing down at the big loch. There was a rowing boat out in the middle of the little loch, but he couldn't see anybody in it. He was banned from making rafts or taking boats out. Just because he'd got a bit wet a few times. It was unfair.\n\nHe sat down in the grass, took out a little die-cast model of a Gloster Javelin, and played with it for a while, pretending he was a camera, tracking the plane through the grass and over the pebbles and rocks by the loch side. He lay back in the grass, looked at the blue sky, and closed his eyes for a long time, soaking up the pink-ness behind his eyelids and pretending he was a lion lying tawny and sated under the African sun, or a sleepy-eyed tiger basking on some rock high over a wide Indian plain. Then he opened his eyes again and looked around, at a world gone grey, until that effect wore off. He looked down at the shore; little waves were lapping rhythmically at the stones.\n\nHe watched the wavelets for a while. They were very regular. He looked along the nearby stretch of shore. The waves \u2013 hardly noticeable, but there if you looked \u2013 were coming ashore all along the lochside. He followed the line they seemed to indicate, out to the little rowing boat near the middle of the loch. Now he thought about it, it was _very_ odd that there was nobody in the boat. It was moored; he could see the wee white buoy it was tied to. But there was nobody visible in the boat.\n\nThe more carefully he looked, the more certain he became that it was the rowing boat that all these little, rhythmic waves were coming from. Hadn't Ken and Mary been going fishing today? He had thought they'd meant sea-fishing, in Loch Fyne, but maybe he hadn't been paying attention. What if they had been fishing from the rowing boat and fallen overboard and both been drowned? Maybe that was why the boat was empty! He scanned the surface of the loch. No sign of bobbing bodies or any clothing. Perhaps they'd sunk.\n\nAnyway, what was making the boat make those waves?\n\nHe wasn't sure, but he thought he could see the boat moving, very slightly; rocking to and fro. Maybe it was a fish, flopping about in the bottom.\n\nThen he thought he heard a cry, like a bird, or maybe a woman. It made him shiver, despite the heat. The boat seemed to stop rocking, then moved quite a lot, and then went totally still. The little waves went on, then a few slightly bigger, less regular ones lapped ashore, then the water went still, and was as flat as a pane of glass.\n\nA gull, a white scrap across the calm sky, flapped lazily just above the blue loch; it made to land on the prow of the little rowing boat, then at the last second, even as its feet were about to touch, it suddenly burst up into the sky again, all panic and white feathers, and its calls sounded over the flat water as it flapped away.\n\nWhat sounded very like laughter came from the little rowing boat.\n\nRory shrugged, put the model plane in the pocket of his shorts and decided to go back down to the village and see if there was anybody around to play with yet.\n\nKenneth and Mary held hands at tea that evening, and said they wanted to get married. Mum and dad seemed quite happy. Fiona didn't seem in the least surprised. Rory was nonplussed.\n\nIt was years before he made the connection between those tiny, rhythmically lapping waves, and that blushing, excited announcement.\nCHAPTER 3\n\nGaineamh Castle, home of the Urvills once again, stands amongst the alders, rowans and oaks that cover the northern flanks of the Cnoc na Moine, due south of the carbuncular outcrop that supports the First Millennium fort of Dunadd, and a little north-west of the farm rejoicing in the name of Dunamuck. The castle, a moderately large example of the Scottish Z-plan type, with cannon-shaped stone waterspouts, has a fine view through the trees and across the parkland and fields to the town of Gallanach, which spreads round the deep waters of Inner Loch Crinan like some slow but determined beach-head of architecture somehow landed from the sea.\n\nThe sound of gravel crunching beneath a car tyre has always meant something special to me; at once comforting and exciting. Of course the one time I tried to explain this to my father he suggested that what it really signified was the easy rolling pressure the middle and upper classes thought it was their right to exert upon the multitudinous base of the workers. I have to confess that the entire counter-revolution in world affairs has come as something of a personal relief to me, making my dad seem no longer quite so remorselessly well-clued-up, but rather \u2013 if anything, any more \u2013 just quaint. It would have been sweet to tackle him on that subject at the time, especially given that Gorby's unleashed restructuring had just resulted in the spectacular and literal deconstruction of one of the age's most resonantly symbolic icons, but at the time we weren't talking.\n\n'Prentice,' rumbled the slightly bloated Urvill of Urvill, taking my hand and briefly shaking it, as if weighing my mitt. I felt for a moment the way a young bull ought to feel when the man from McDonalds slaps its haunch ... but then probably doesn't. 'So very sorry.' Fergus Urvill said. I wondered whether he was referring to Grandma Margot's death itself, her detonation, or Doctor Fyfe's apparent attempt to up-stage the old girl. Uncle Fergus let my hand go. 'And how are your studies going?'\n\n'Oh, just fine,' I said.\n\n'Good, good.'\n\n'And the twins; are they both well?' I asked.\n\n'Fine, fine,' Fergus nodded, presumably allocating his two daughters a word each in his reply. Ferg's gaze went smoothly to my Aunt Antonia; I took the hint, and (like Margot) passed on. 'Antonia,' I heard behind me. 'So very sorry ...'\n\nHelen and Diana, Uncle Ferg's two lusciously lissom daughters, sadly couldn't be here; Diana spent most of her time either in Cambridge or the least touristy part of Hawaii, which is the bit thirty kilometres away from the beaches \u2013 four of them vertically \u2013 at the Mauna Kea observatory, studying the infra-red. Helen, on the other hand, worked for a bank in Switzerland, dealing with the ultra-rich.\n\n'Prentice, are you all right?' My mother took me in her arms, held me to her black coat. Still splashing on the _No. 5,_ by the smell of it. Her green eyes looked bright. My father had been at the head of the reception line; I had ignored him and the compliment had been returned.\n\n'I'm fine,' I told her.\n\n'No, but are you really?' She squeezed my hands.\n\n'Yes; I'm really really fine.'\n\n'Come and see us, please.' She hugged me again, said quietly, 'Prentice, this is silly. Make it up with your father. For me.'\n\n'Mum, please,' I said, feeling like everybody was looking at us. 'I'll see you later, okay?' I said, and pulled away.\n\nI walked into the hall, taking off my jacket, blinking hard and sniffing. Coming from cold into warmth always does this to me.\n\nThe entrance hall of Gaineamh Castle sports the business end of a dozen or so beheaded male red deers, perched so high up on the oak-panelled walls that attempting to utilise them for their only conceivable practical purpose in such a location \u2013 hanging coats, scarves, jackets, etc. on their impressively branched antlers \u2013 only exposes them as the venue for a kind of non-returnable sport rather than a sensible amenity. Rather more prosaic brass hooks, like smooth unsuitable claws beneath the glass-eyed stares of the stags, accepted our garments in their stead. My much be-zippered black leather pretend-biker's jacket seemed a little out of place amongst the sober wools and furs; Verity's snow-white skiing jacket looked ... well, just sublime. I stood and stared at it for a second or two longer than was probably fit; but it really did seem to glow in the dark company. I sighed, and decided to keep my white silk M\u00f6bius scarf on.\n\nI entered the hammer-beamed Solar of the castle; the great hall was filled with a quietly chattering crowd of McHoans, Urvills and others, all nibbling canapes and vol-au-vants, and sipping whisky and sherries. I suspect my grandmother would have preferred pan-loaf sarnies and maybe a few slices of ham-and-egg pie, but it had, I suppose, been a kind gesture of the Urvill to ask us back here, and one should not carp. Somehow the McHoan home, still bearing the scars of grandma's sudden, unorthodox and vertical re-entry into the conservatory following her abortive attempt to de-moss the gutters, seemed unfitting as our post-cremation retreat.\n\nThere! I caught sight of Verity, standing looking out of one of the Solar's tall mullioned windows, the wide grey light of this chill November day soft upon her skin. I stopped and looked at her, a hollowness in my chest as though my heart had become a vacuum pump.\n\nVerity: conceived beneath a tree two millennia old and born to the flare and snap of human lightning. Emerging to emergency, making her entrance, and duly entrancing.\n\nWhistling or humming the first phrase of Deacon Blue's _Born In A Storm_ whenever I saw her had become a sort of ritual with me, a little personal theme in the life lived as movie, existence as opera. See Verity; play them tunes. It was in itself a way of possessing her.\n\nI hesitated, thought about going over to her, then decided I'd best get a drink first, and started towards the sideboard with the glasses and bottles, before I realised that offering to refresh Verity's glass would be as good a way as any of getting talking to her. I turned again. And almost collided with my Uncle Hamish.\n\n'Prentice,' he said, in tones of great import and sobriety. He put one hand on my shoulder and we turned away from the window where Verity stood, and away from the drinks, to walk up the length of the hall towards the stained-glass height of the gable-end window. 'Your grandmother has gone to a better place, Prentice,' Uncle Hamish told me. I looked back at the vision of wonderful-ness that was Verity, then glanced at my uncle.\n\n'Yes, Uncle Hamish.'\n\nDad called Uncle Hamish 'The Tree' because he was very tall, moved in a rather awkward way \u2013 as though made out of something less flexible than the standard issue of bone, sinew, muscle and flesh \u2013 and (so he claimed, at any rate) because he had seen him act in a school play once, and he had been very, well, wooden. 'Anyway,' my dad had insisted when he'd originally confided this private piece of nomenclature, only half a decade earlier, on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday, when we'd got drunk together for the first time, 'he just lumbers about!'\n\n'She was a good woman, and did little that was bad and much that was good, so I'm sure she has gone to a reward rather than a punishment, living amongst our anti-creates.'\n\nI nodded, and as we strolled amongst them, looked around at the various members of my family, the McGuskies (Grandma Margot's maiden-family), the Urvill clan, and sundry worthies from Gallanach, Lochgilphead and Lochgair, and pondered, not for the first time, what on Earth (or anywhere else for that matter) had given Uncle Hamish the idea for his bizarre, home-made religion. I really didn't want to go into all this right now, and anyway found the whole subject a little awkward, because I wasn't actually quite as gung-ho for Hamish's personal theology as he seemed to think I was.\n\n'She was always very kind to me,' I told him.\n\n'And therefore your anti-create will be kind to her,' Uncle Hamish said, still with one hand on my shoulder, as we stopped and looked up at the stained-glass monstrosity at the far end of the hall. This showed in graphic form the story of the Urvills from about the time of the Norman conquest, when the family of Urveille, from Octeville in Cotentin, had crossed into England, percolated northwards, swirled briefly around Dunfermline and Edinburgh, and finally come to rest \u2013 perhaps afflicted by some maritime memory of their ancestral lands on the seam of the Manche \u2013 in what had been the very epicentre of the ancient Scots kingdom of Dalriada, losing only a few relatives and a couple of letters on the way. Swearing allegiance to David I, here they have stayed, to mingle their blood with that of the Picts, the Scots, the Angles, the Britons and the Vikings who have all variously settled, colonised, raided and exploited this part of Argyll, or maybe just arrived at one time and forgotten to leave again.\n\nThe peregrinations and subsequent local achievements of the clan Urvill make interesting history, and would make fascinating viewing if the giant window telling the tale wasn't so badly done. The fashionable but untalented son of one of the previous head Urvill's school pals had been commissioned to execute the work, and had taken the brief all too literally. Deadly dull and eye-squintingly garish at the same time, the stained glass window made me want to grit my teeth.\n\n'Yes, I'm sure you're right, uncle,' I lied.\n\n'Of course I am, Prentice,' he nodded slowly. Uncle Hamish is balding, but of the school that believes long wisps of hair grown on one side of the head and then combed delicately across the pate to the other edge look better than naked skin exposed to the elements. I watched the coloured light from the stained glass window slide over shiny skin and hardly less luminescent oiled hair, and thought what a prat he looked. I inadvertently found myself humming the appropriate piece of music from the Hamlet cigar adds and thinking of Gregor Fisher.\n\n'Will you join me in worship this evening, Prentice?'\n\nOh shit, I thought. 'Perhaps not, actually, uncle,' I said, in tones I hoped sounded regretful. 'Have to pop down the Jac to talk to a girl about a jacuzzi. Probably go straight from here.' Another lie.\n\nUncle Hamish looked at me, the grain-like lines on his forehead bunching and tangling, his brown eyes like knots. 'A _jacuzzi,_ Prentice?' He pronounced the word the way the lead in a Jacobean tragedy might pronounce the name of the character who has been his nemesis.\n\n'Yes. A jacuzzi.'\n\n'That's a form of bath, isn't it?'\n\n'It is.'\n\n'Not meeting this young lady _in_ a bath, are you, Prentice?' Uncle Hamish's lips twisted slowly into what was probably meant to be a smile.\n\n'I don't believe the facilities of the Jacobite Bar run to such a thing, uncle,' I told him. 'They've only recently got round to installing hot water in the gents. The relevant jacuzzi is in Berlin.'\n\n'The German city?'\n\nI thought about this. Could I have mis-heard Ash and she have been talking about the briefly famous chart-topping band of the same name? I thought not. 'Yes, uncle; the city. Where the wall was.'\n\n'I see,' Uncle Hamish nodded. 'Berlin.' He stared up at the violently clashing leaden imagery of the great stained-glass window. 'Isn't that where Ilsa is?'\n\nI frowned. 'Aunt Ilsa? No, she's in Patagonia, isn't she? Incommunicado.'\n\nUncle Hamish looked suitably confused as he contemplated the garish gable glass. Then he nodded. 'Ah yes. Of course.' He looked back down at me. 'However. Shall we see you for supper, Prentice?'\n\n'I don't know,' I admitted. 'Just as likely to end up with a kebab, I imagine. Or a fish supper.'\n\n'Well, you have your key with you?'\n\n'Oh yes. Thanks. And I'll be ... you know; quiet, when I come in.'\n\n'Right.' Uncle Hamish gazed back up at the crass glass. 'Right. We'll probably be off in a half-hour or so; let us know if you do want a lift.'\n\n'Surely.'\n\n'Right you are, then.' Uncle Hamish nodded, turned, then looked back with an intensely puzzled expression. 'Did I hear somebody say mother _exploded?'_\n\nI nodded. 'Pacemaker. That's what Doctor Fyfe was rushing to tell us; told dad in the ambulance. But it was too late by then, of course.'\n\nUncle Hamish looked more baffled than ever, but nodded eventually and said, 'Of course,' and walked off over the parquet with a startlingly tree-like creaking noise which I realised \u2013 with a small but welcome surprise \u2013 was issuing from his black brogues.\n\nI made straight for the sideboard with the drinks, but a quick inspection of the casement of the relevant window on my way there revealed that Verity the Comely had gone.\n\nFortingall is a modest hamlet in the hills north of Loch Tay, and it was there in the winter of 1969 that my Aunt Charlotte was determined to consummate her marriage. Specifically, she wanted to be impregnated beneath the ancient yew tree that lies in an enclosure within the graveyard of the small church there; she was convinced that the tree \u2013 two thousand years old, according to reliable estimates \u2013 must be suffused with a magical Life Force.\n\nIt was a dark and stormy night (no; really), the grass under the ancient, straggling, gnarled yew was sodden, and so she and her husband, Steve, had to settle for a knee-trembler while Charlotte held onto one of the overhanging boughs, but it was there and then \u2013 despite the effects of gravity \u2013 that the gracile and quiveringly prepossessing Verity was conceived, one loud night under an ink black sky obscuring a white full moon, at an hour when all decent folk were in their beds and even the indecent ones were in somebody's, in a quaint little Perthshire village, back in the fag end of the dear old daft old hippy days.\n\nSo my aunt says, and frankly I believe her; anybody wacko enough ever to have bought the idea that there was some sort of weird cosmic energy beaming out of a geriatric shrub in a back-end-of-nowhere Scottish graveyard on a wet Monday night probably hasn't the wit to lie about it.\n\n'Naw, she's great, I mean really _really_ great. I'm in love. I love her; I'm hers. Verity; take me; put me out of my misery. O God ...'\n\nI was drunk. It was getting on towards midnight in the Jacobite bar and at my normal rate of drinking that meant I'd had about ten pints of export. Ash and Dean Watt, and another couple of old pals, Andy Langton and Lizzie Polland, had all drunk about the same as I had, but then they'd been home for their tea and they hadn't been swilling back the Urvill's whisky for a significant part of the afternoon.\n\n'So have you told her, Prentice?' Ash said, putting down another set of pints on the pocked copper table we were hunched around.\n\n'Ah, Ash,' I said, slapping the table. 'I admire a woman who can carry three pints at the same time.'\n\n'I said, have you told this lassie you love her, Prentice?' Ash said, sitting down. She took a bottle of strong cider from one breast pocket of her navy shirt, and a glass of whisky from the other.\n\n'Wow!' I said. 'Ash! I mean, like; wow! Wicked.' I shook my head, took up my old pint and finished it.\n\n'Answer the lassie,' Dean said, nudging me.\n\n'No, I haven't,' I confessed.\n\n'Ya coward,' said Lizzie.\n\n'I'll tell her for you if you like,' Droid offered (there is an entire generation of Andrews with the shared nickname of Droid, post _Star Wars)._\n\n'Na,' I said. 'But she is just fabulous. I mean \u2013'\n\n'Why not tell her?' Liz asked.\n\n'I'm shy,' I sighed, hand on heart, eyes heaven-ward, lashes fluttering.\n\n'Get out a here.'\n\n'So tell her,' Ash said.\n\n'Also,' I sighed. 'She's got a boyfriend.'\n\n'Ah-ha,' Ash said, looking at her pint.\n\nI waved one hand dismissively. 'But he's a wanker.'\n\n'That's all right, then,' Liz said.\n\nI frowned. 'Actually, that's the only flaw Verity seems to have; her lousy taste in men.'\n\n'So you _are_ in with a chance then?' Liz said brightly.\n\n'Yeah,' I said. 'I think she's going to chuck him.'\n\n'Prentice,' Ash insisted, tapping the table. _' Tell_ her.'\n\n'I can't.'\n\n'Why not?'\n\n'Because I wouldn't know how to,' I protested. 'I've never told anybody I love them before. I mean, how do you? The words sound so corny, so devalued. It's so ... it's just such a cliche.'\n\nAsh looked scornful. 'What rubbish.'\n\n'Well, smarty-pants,' I said, leaning over to her. 'Have _you_ ever told anybody you love them?'\n\n'Hundreds of times, darling.' Ash said in a deep voice, pouting. Dean guffawed. Ash drank from her pint, then shook her head. 'Well, actually, no.'\n\n'Ha!' I said.\n\nAsh leaned over to me, her long nose almost touching mine. 'Tell the girl, you idiot.'\n\n'I can't,' I said, sitting back. 'I just can't. She's too perfect.'\n\n_' What?'_ Ash frowned.\n\n'Infallible. Too perfect; ideal.'\n\n'Sounds like misogynist romantic shite to me,' snorted Liz, who's always taken a hard line on such things.\n\n'It is,' I admitted. 'But she's just incredible. D'you know where she was conceived?'\n\nDean and Ash exchanged looks; Andy spluttered into his beer while Lizzie rolled her eyes. 'Aw yeah,' Dean said, nodding and looking quite serious. 'Doesn't everybody?'\n\nI was shocked, and almost cut short my next gulp of beer. 'You don't really, do you?'\n\n'Course not, Prentice,' Ash said shaking her head. Her long fair hair spilled from over one shoulder. 'What diff \u2013'\n\n'Aw, it's just incredible,' I told them. 'Her mum told me; Aunt Charlotte. Bit of a nutter, but okay. I mean totally aff her heid really, but anyway \u2013' I took another gulp of beer, '\u2013 she had this thing about psychic energy or some crap like that ... and about Scottish history \u2013'\n\n'Aw; runs in the family, does it, Prentice?' Dean asked.\n\n'Naw; she's not a McHoan ... anyway; she'd married this English guy called Walker and they hadn't consummated the marriage, right, not on their wedding night; she wanted to wait, and when they did get it together she made sure it was in this wee village called Fortingall, right? Near Loch Tay. Thing is, she'd heard something about Fortingall being where Pontius Pilate \u2013'\n\n'Wait a minute,' Dean said. 'How long was it between them getting married and them humping?'\n\n'Eh?' I scratched my head. 'I don't know; a day or two. Oh! I mean, they'd done it before, like. It wasn't their first time or anything. It was just Aunt Charlotte's idea that it'd be more special if they hadn't done it for a while, and then did it under this tree. But they had been fucking before. I mean; good grief, this is the love generation we're talking about here.'\n\n'Right,' Dean said, apparently mollified.\n\n'Anyway; Fortingall is where some people say Pontius Pilate was born, and \u2013'\n\n'Whit?' Andy said, wiping his beard. 'Away ye go.'\n\n'So they say,' I insisted. 'His dad was in the ... shit ... the seventh legion? The ninth? Damn ...' I scratched my head again, looked down at my trainers (and thought with some relief that at least tonight I would not have the long struggle to undo the buckles and untie and then loosen the laces on the Docs, which were my usual drinking gear these days). 'Or _was_ it the seventh legion?' I pondered, still staring at my Nikes.\n\n'Never mind if it was the fuckin' foreign legion,' Droid said, exasperated. 'You're no trying to tell us Pontius fucking Pilate was born in Scotland!'\n\n'Well maybe!' I said, spreading my arms wide and almost spilling Ash's whisky. 'His dad was in the legion stationed there! Apparently! I mean, the Romans had a military camp and Pontius Pilate's pa was stationed there, maybe, and so young Pontius could have been born there! Why not?'\n\n'You're making this up,' laughed Ash. 'You're just like your dad; I remember those stories on a Sunday afternoon.'\n\n'I am not like ma dad!' I yelled.\n\n'Hey, shoosh,' Lizzie said.\n\n'Well, I'm not! I'm telling the truth!'\n\n'Aye, well,' Ash said. 'Maybe. People get born in funny places. David Byrne was born in Dumbarton.'\n\n'Anyway; Pontius Pi \u2013'\n\n'Whit?' Dean grimaced. 'The guy that wrote _Tutti Frutti?'_\n\n'Listen; Pontius \u2013'\n\n'Na; that was John Byrne,' Lizzie said. _'David_ Byrne; the guy in Talking Heads, ya heidbanger.'\n\n'Look, anyway, forget Ponti \u2013'\n\n'Anyway, it was Little Richard.'\n\n'Will you shut up? This isn't about Pon \u2013'\n\n'What? In Talking Heads?'\n\n'Shut up! I'm telling you; Po \u2013'\n\n'Na; that wrote _Tutti Frutti.'_\n\n'I give in,' I said, sitting back. I sighed, supped my export.\n\n'Aye, the song; but no the film.'\n\n'It wasnae a fillum; it was a series.'\n\n'Ah _know;_ you knew what ah meant.'\n\n'I hate these drunken, rambling conversations,' I breathed.\n\n'Aye, but I've heard worse.' Ash nodded.\n\n'Anyway, it wasnae fillum at all; it was video.'\n\n'It was naawwwt!' Dean drawled scornfully. 'Ye could _see_ it was fillum! What sort a telly have _you_ got?'\n\nI crossed my legs, crossed my arms and swivelled to look at Ash. I rubbed my rather greasy face and focused on her. 'Hi. Come here often?'\n\nAshley pursed her lips and studied the ceiling. 'Just the once,' she said, frowning at me. 'In the toilets.' She gathered my shirt lapels in her fist and pulled me close to her face. 'So who talked?'\n\n'Fnarr fnarr,' I breathed over her. Ash's face wrinkled, quite attractively, actually. But then it was late.\n\n'Hi youse,' a deep voice said, bending over us. 'Yer oan.'\n\n'On what?' I asked the very large fellow with very long hair who had spoken.\n\n'The pool table; PM and AW; that's youse, is it no?'\n\n'Shit, aye, right enough.'\n\nAsh and I went to play pool.\n\nI'd been just about to ask her about the jacuzzi in Berlin, but now didn't seem like the right time.\n\nUncle Fergus had the observatory built back in 1974 (when the heavenly Verity was four). The idea was two-fold. First of all \u2013 according to my father \u2013 Fergus wanted a bigger and better telescope than he had. Dad had a three-inch refractor in a shed in the garden at Lochgair. Fergus ordered a six-inch reflector. Also, it was a business sample. The lenses and mirror were to be made in the new Specialist Glass Division of the Gallanach Glass Works, the Urvill-owned factory which even yet provides the town with a significant proportion of its employment. Not only, therefore, would Uncle Fergus have a fascinating and unique additional feature for his not-long restored castle, it would be both an advertisement for his Glass Works _and_ tax-deductible!\n\nThe fact the telescope was a wee bit close to Gallanach itself, and so possibly prone to light pollution from the town's sodium vapour lamps, was less of a problem than it might appear; with Uncle Fergus's connections he could have the offending lamps shaded at the council's expense. So Uncle Fergus was prepared if necessary \u2013 and only selectively, of course \u2013 to dim his home town.\n\n(His niece had already bettered that; when the diminutive, bloody and bawling form of Verity Walker had appeared on the scene, the lights had actually gone out.)\n\nI'd met the sublime Verity for the first time in some years in the observatory, one coal-sack-black moonless night in 1986, a few days before I left to go to University, when I was already full of the exhilaration and fear of departure and independence, and the whole huge world seemed to be opening up before me, like some infinite blossom of opportunity and glamour. The twins had taken to having star-gazing parties in the cold, cramped hemisphere which protruded from the summit of the compact castle, and I'd arrived late after being out on the hill with little brother James during the afternoon and then suffering a delayed tea because some friends of dad's had showed up unannounced and had to be catered for.\n\n'Aye, it's yourself, Prentice,' boomed Mrs McSpadden, informatively. 'And how are you?' Mrs McSpadden was the Urvill's housekeeper; a rotundly buxom lady of perpetual middle-age with a big baw-face that gave the impression of being freshly scrubbed. She had a very loud voice and dad always told people that she hailed from Fife. A ringing noise in one's ears after a close encounter with the lady tended to enforce the impression this was literally true. 'The rest are up there. Will you take this tray up? There's coffee in these pots; you just turn the wee spot to the front here, ken, and \u2013' She lifted the corner of a heavy napkin smothering a very large plate. '\u2013 there's hot sausage rolls under here.'\n\n'Right, thanks,' I said, lifting the tray. I'd come in through the castle kitchen; entering through the main door after it had been shut for the night could be a performance. I made for the stairs.\n\n'Here, Prentice; take this scarf up to Miss Helen,' Mrs McSpadden said, flourishing the article. 'That lassie'll catch her death of cold up there one night, so she will.'\n\nI bowed my head so that Mrs S could put the scarf over my neck.\n\n'And mind them there's plenty of bread, and some chicken in the fridge, and cheese, and plenty of soup forbye, if you get hungry again.'\n\n'Right, thanks,' I repeated, and jogged carefully upstairs.\n\n'Anybody got any roach paper?'\n\nI squeezed into the brightly-lit dome of the observatory; it was about three metres in diameter, made from aluminium, the telescope took up a lot of it, and it was cold, despite a wee two-bar electric heater. A modestly proportioned ghetto-blaster was playing something by the Cocteau Twins. Diana and Helen, bundled in enormous Mongolian quilted jackets, were crouched round a small table with Darren Watt, playing cards. My elder brother, Lewis, was at the telescope. We all said our hellos. 'This is cousin Verity. Remember her?' Helen said, as she draped the scarf I'd brought her over Darren's head. Helen pointed at a cloud of smoke, and as it blew towards me and cleared I saw her.\n\nThere was a sort of cubby-hole in the non-rotating part of the observatory, built into the attic of the castle's main block. It was just a long cupboard really, but you could coorie down into it to make more space in the dome proper. Verity Walker was lying in a sleeping bag there, only her upper half protruding into the dome; she was smoking one joint and rolling another, on the cover of a pictorial atlas of the universe. 'Evening,' she said. 'Got any roach paper?'\n\n'Yeah; hi,' I said. I put the tray down, searched my pockets, pulled out some stuff. The last time I'd seen Verity Walker, maybe five or six years earlier, she'd been a scrawny tyke with a mouth full of orthodontic brace-work and a serious Shakin' Stevens habit. Now \u2013 once seen through the smoke \u2013 she had short, pure blonde hair, and a delicate, almost elfin face which tapered to an exquisite chin that looked like it had been made to be grasped lightly in three fingers and pulled closer to your lips ... well, to my lips, anyway. Her eyes were the blue of old sea-ice, and when I saw her complexion all I could think was: _Wow; Lloyd Cole city!_ Because she had perfect skin.\n\n'That'll do.' She took something from my hand. 'Thanks.'\n\n'Hey! That's a library ticket!' I grabbed it back. 'Here.' I handed her half a book token my mother had given me.\n\n'Thanks.' She started cutting it with a little pair of scissors.\n\n'It's just a tokin' token,' I told her, squatting down beside her.\n\nShe grunted with laughter, and my heart performed manoeuvres that the connecting plumbing makes topologically impossible.\n\n'All set for the big move, bro?' Lewis grinned down from the wee seat under the eye-piece of the telescope. He reached over to the table where I'd set the tray down and started pouring coffee into the mugs. My big brother has always seemed more than two years older than me; a little taller than my 1.85, and a little more thick-set, he looked bigger still at the time thanks to a beard of the burst-sofa persuasion. Back then, it was his turn to be in disgrace with my father, because he'd just dropped out of University.\n\n'Yeah, all set,' I told him. 'Found a place to stay.' I nodded at the telescope. 'Anything interesting tonight?'\n\n'Got it on the Pleiades just now. Take a look.'\n\nWe took turns star-gazing, playing cards, crouching round the little electric heater, and constructing joints. I'd brought a half bottle of whisky, and the twins had some brandy, which we used to beef up the coffee. The munchies struck again an hour or so after we'd polished off the last of the sausage rolls; the twins mounted an expedition into the depths of the castle in search of the mythical Soup Dragon (we spoke in Clanger while they were gone) and returned with a steaming tureen and a half-dozen bowls.\n\n'Where're you staying in Glasgow, Prentice?' Darren Watt asked.\n\n'Hyndland,' I said, slurping my soup. 'Lauderdale Gardens.'\n\n'Ah, that's no far from us. Going to be around on the thirtieth? We're having a party.'\n\n'Oh, ah, yeah; probably.' (Actually, I'd been going to come home that weekend, but I could juggle things.)\n\n'Ah well, come along; should be fun.'\n\n'Thanks.'\n\nDarren Watt was in his last year at Art School and \u2013 for me, at least \u2013 had been the epitome of cool since New Year two years earlier. After the bells, mum had driven Lewis and me into Gallanach; we went to a party Droid and his chums were giving. Darren had been there; blond, lean, drop-dead bone structure, and exuding style. I'd admired the looped silk scarf he'd worn over a red velvet jacket that would have looked silly on most people but in which he looked totally poised. He'd given me the scarf, and \u2013 when I'd tried to demur \u2013 explained he was growing bored with it; better it went to somebody who would appreciate it, though he hoped I'd hand it on too, if I ever tired of it.\n\nSo I took it. It was just an ordinary silk scarf, given a half twist and the ends carefully sewn together, but that, of course, made it a M\u00f6bius scarf, the very idea of which I just thought was wonderful. I thought Darren was pretty wonderful, too, and for a while wondered if maybe I was gay, too, but decided against it. In fact, a large part of the attraction of an invite to a party at Darren's place was due to the fact his flat-mates were three salivatingly attractive and reputedly enthusiastically heterosexual female arts students (I'd met them when he'd brought them to Gallanach on a day trip the previous year).\n\n'You still making models of these wave-powered hoodjie-ma-flips?' I asked him, finishing my soup. Darren was wiping his plate with a bit of bread, and I found myself copying him.\n\n'Aye,' he said, looking thoughtful. 'Looks like I've found a sponsor for the real thing, too.'\n\n'What? Really?'\n\nDarren grinned. 'Big cement company's interested; talking about a serious money grant.'\n\n'Wow! Congratulations.'\n\nFor the last eighteen months or so, Darren had been making these tenth-scale wood and plastic models of sculptures he wanted to build full size in concrete and steel one day. The idea was to construct these things on a beach; he'd need planning permission, lots of money, and waves. The sculptures were wave-powered mobiles and fountains. When a wave struck them a giant wheel would revolve, or air would be forced through pipes, producing weird, chest-shaking, cathedral-demolishing bass notes and uncanny howls and moans, or the water in the waves themselves would be channelled, funnelled, and emerge in a whale-like spout of spray, bursting from the top or sides of the sculpture. They sounded great, perfectly feasible, and I wanted to see one work, so this was good news.\n\nI went downstairs for a pee, and came back to a good-natured but confused argument. 'What do you mean, no it doesn't?' Verity said from her sleeping-bagged cubby-hole.\n\n'I mean, what is sound?' Lewis said. 'The definition is; what we hear. So if there's nobody there to hear it ...'\n\n'Sounds a bit anthro-thingy to me,' Helen Urvill said, from the card table.\n\n'But how can it fall without making a sound?' Verity protested. 'That's crazy.'\n\nI leaned over to Darren, who was sitting looking amused. 'We talking trees falling in forests?' I asked. He nodded.\n\n'You're not listening \u2013' Lewis told Verity.\n\n'Maybe you're not making a sound.'\n\n'Shut up, Prentice,' Lewis said, without bothering to look at me. 'What I'm saying is, What is a sound? If you define it as \u2013'\n\n'Yeah,' interrupted Verity. 'But if the tree hits the ground that must make the air move. I've stood near a tree when it's felled; you feel the ground shake. Doesn't the ground shake either, when there's nobody there? The air has to move; there must be ... movement, in the air; its molecules, I mean ...'\n\n'Compression waves,' I provided, nodding to Verity, and thinking about Darren's wave-powered organ-pipe coast sculptures.\n\n'Yeah; producing compression waves,' Verity said, with an acknowledging wave at me (oh, my heart leapt!). 'Which birds and animals and insects can hear \u2013'\n\n'Ah!' Lewis said. 'Supposing there aren't \u2013'\n\nWell, it got silly after that, dissolving into the polemical equivalent of white noise, but I liked the robustly common-sensical line Verity was taking. And when she was talking, of course, I got to stare at her without anybody thinking it odd. It was wonderful. I was falling in love with her. Beauty _and_ brains. Wow!\n\nMore sounds, more spliffs, more star-gazing. Lewis did his impression of a radio being tuned through various wavelengths; fingers at his lips to produce the impressively authentic between-stations noises, then suddenly putting on silly voices to impersonate a news reader, compere, quiz contestant, singer ... 'ttttrrrrsssshhhh ... reports that the London chapter of the Zoroastrians have fire-bombed the offices of the Sun newspaper for blasphemy ... zzzoooowwwaaanngggg ... athangyou, athangyou, laze an ge'men, andenow, please put your hands together for the Siamese Twins ... kkkkrrrraaasshhhwwwaaaassshhhaaa ... uh, can you eat it, Bob? Ah, no, you can't. I'm afraid the answer is; a Pot Nooddle ... bllbllbllbl ... Hey hey, we're the junkies! ... zpt!'\n\nAnd so on. We laughed, we drank more coffee, and we smoked.\n\nThe gear was black and powerful like the night; the hollow aluminium skull of the observatory tracked the 'scope's single eye slowly over the rolling web of stars, or \u2013 hand-cranked \u2013 swivelled the universe about our one fixed point. Soon my head was spinning, too. The music machine played away \u2013 far away \u2013 and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked. The stars shone on in mysterious galactic harmonies, constellations like symphonies of ancient, trembling light; Lewis told weird and creepy stories and bizarrely apposite jokes, and the twins \u2013 hunkered over the little card-table in their quilted jackets, their night-black hair straight and shining and framing their broad-boned beautiful faces \u2013 looked like proud Mongolian princesses, calmly contemplating creation from the ribbed dome of some fume-filled yurt, midnight-pitched on the endless rolling Asian steppe.\n\nVerity Walker \u2013 professed sceptic though she was \u2013 read my palm, her touch like warm velvet, her voice like the spoken ocean, and in her eyes each iris like a blue-white sun stationed a billion light years off. She told me I'd be sad and I'd be happy and I'd be bad and I'd be good, and I believed all of it and why not, and she told me the last part in Clanger, the tin-whistle pretend language from one of the children's programmes we'd all watched as youngsters, and she was trying to keep a straight face, and Lew and Dar and Di and Hel were snorting with laughter and even I was grinning, but I'd been singing happily along to the Cocteau Twins' other-worldly words for the past hour, and I knew exactly what she said even though she might not have known herself, and fell completely in love with her iris-blue eyes and her wheat-crop hair and her peat-dark voice and the peach-skin fuzz of infinitesimally fine hairs on her creamy skin.\n\n'What was all that stuff about Pontius Pilate, anyway?' Ash said.\n\n'Aw ...' I waved my hand. 'Too complicated.'\n\nAsh and I stood on a low little mound overlooking what had been the Slate Mine wharf, at the north-west limit of Gallanach where the Kilmartin Burn flows out of the hills, meanders without conviction, then widens to form part of Gallanach Bay before finally decanting into the deeper waters of Inner Loch Crinan. Here was where the docks had been, when the settlement had exported first coal then slate then sand and glass, before the railway arrived and a subtle Victorian form of gentrification had set in the shape of the railway pier, the Steam Packet Hotel and the clutch of sea-facing villas (only the fishing fleet had remained constant, sporadically crowded amongst its inner harbour in the stony lap of the old town, swelling, dying, burgeoning again, then falling away once more, shrinking like the holes in its nets).\n\nAshley had dragged me out here, now in the wee small hours of what had become a clear night with the stars steady and sharp in the grip of this November darkness, after the Jacobite Bar and after we'd trooped (victorious at pool, by the way) back to Lizzie and Droid's flat via McGreedy's (actually McCreadie's Fast Food Emporium), and after consuming our fish\/pie\/black pudding suppers and after a cup of tea and a J or two, and after we'd got back to the Watt family home in the Rowanfield council estate only to discover that Mrs Watt was still up, watching all-night TV (does Casey Casen _never_ sit down in that chair?), and made us more tea, and after a last wee numbrero sombrero in Dean's room.\n\n'I'm going for a walk, guys, okay?' Ash had announced, coming back from the toilet, cistern flushing somewhere in the background, pulling her coat back on.\n\nI'd suddenly got paranoid that I had over-stayed my welcome and \u2013 in some dopey, drunken excess of stupidity \u2013 missed lots of hints. I looked at my watch, handed the remains of the J to Dean. 'Aye, I'd better be off too.'\n\n'I wasn't trying to get rid of you,' Ash said, as she closed the front door after us. I'd said goodbye to Mrs Watt; Ash had said she would be back in quarter of an hour or so.\n\n'Shit. I thought maybe I was being thick-skinned,' I said as we walked the short path to a wee garden gate in the low hedge.\n\n'That'll be the day, Prentice,' Ash laughed.\n\n'You really going to walk at this time of night?' I looked up; the night was clear now, and colder. I pulled on my gloves. My breath was the only cloud.\n\n'Nostalgia,' Ash said, stopping on the pavement. 'Last visit to somewhere I used to go a lot when I was a wean.'\n\n'Wow, really? How far is it? Can I come?' I have a fascination with places people think powerful or important. If I hadn't been still fairly drunk I'd have been a lot more subtle about asking to accompany Ash, but, well, there you are.\n\nHappily, she just laughed quietly, turned on her heel and said, 'Aye; come on; isn't far.'\n\nSo here we stood, on the wee mound only five minutes from the Watt house, down Bruce Street, through a snicket, across the Oban road and over the weedy waste ground where the dock buildings stood, long ago.\n\nThe dock-side was maybe ten metres away; the skeletal remains of a crane stood lop-sided a little way along the cancered tarmac, its foundations betrayed by rotten wooden piling splaying out from the side of the wharf like broken black bones. Mud glistened in the moonlight. The sea was a taste, and a distant glittering that all but disappeared if you looked at it straight. Ash seemed lost in thought, staring away to the west. I shivered, un-studded the wide lapels of the fake biker's jacket and pulled the zip up to my right shoulder so that my chin was encased.\n\n'Mind if I ask what we're doing here?' I asked. Behind and to our left, the lights of Gallanach were steady orange, like all British towns, forever warning the inhabitants to proceed with caution.\n\nAsh sighed, her head dropped a little. She nodded down, at the ground we stood upon. 'Thought you might know what this is, Prentice.'\n\nI looked down. 'It's a wee lump of ground,' I said. Ash looked at me. 'All right,' I said, making a flapping action with my elbows (I'd have spread my hands out wide, but I wanted to keep them in my pockets, even with my gloves on). 'I don't know. What is it?'\n\nAsh bent down, and I saw one pale hand at first stroke the grass, and then dig down, delving into the soil itself. She squatted like that for a moment, then pulled her hand free, rose, brushing earth from her long white fingers.\n\n'This is the Ballast-Mound, the World-Hill, Prentice,' she said, and I could just make out her small thin smile by the light of the gibbous moon. 'When the ships came here, from all over the world, for whatever it was they were shipping from here at the time, they would sometimes arrive unladen, just ballast in them; you know?'\n\nShe looked at me. I nodded. 'Ballast; yeah, I know what ballast is; stops ships doing a _Herald of Free Enterprise.'_\n\n'Just rocks, picked up from wherever the ship last set sail from,' Ash said, looking to the west again. 'But when it got here they didn't need it, so they dumped it \u2013'\n\n'Here?' I breathed, looking at the modest mound with new respect. 'Always here?'\n\n'That's what my grampa told me, when I was a bairn,' Ash said. 'He used to work in the docks. Rolling barrels, catching slings, loading sacks and crates in the holds; drove a crane, later.' (Ashley pronounced the word 'cran', in the appropriate Clyde-side manner.) I stood amazed; I wasn't supposed to be getting ashamed at my lack of historical knowledge until Monday, back at Uni.\n\n' \"Hen,\" he'd say, \"There's aw ra wurld unner yon tarp a grass.\"'\n\nI watched from one side as Ashley smiled, remembering. 'I never forgot that; I'd come out here by myself when I was a kid, just to sit here and think I was sitting on rocks that had once been a bit of China, or Brazil, or Australia or America ...'\n\nAsh squatted down, resting on her heels, but I was whispering, '... Or India,' to myself just then, and for one long, swim-headed instant my veins seemed to run with ocean-blood, dark and carrying as the black water sucking at the edges of the tumbledown wharf beneath us. I thought, _God, how we are connected to the world!,_ and suddenly found myself thinking about Uncle Rory again; our family connection to the rest of the globe, our wanderer on the planet. I stared up at the broken face of moon, dizzy with wonder and a hunger to know.\n\nWhen he was younger than I am now, my Uncle Rory went on what was supposed to be a World Trip. He got as far as India. Fell in love with the place; went walk-about, circulating; to Kashmir from Delhi, then along the hem of the Himalayas, crossing the Ganga at Patna \u2013 asleep on the train \u2013 then zig-zagging from country to coast and back again, but always heading or trying to head south, collecting names and steam trains and friends and horrors and adventures, then at the very hanging tip of the subcontinent, from the last stone at low tide on Cape Comorin one slack dog-day; reversing; heading north and west, still swinging from interior to coast, writing it all down in a series of school exercise books, rejoicing in the wild civility of that ocean of people, the vast ruins and fierce geography of the place, its accrescent layers of antiquity and bureaucracy, the bizarre images and boggling scale of it; recording his passage through the cities and the towns and villages, over the mountains and across the plains and the rivers, through places I had heard of, like Srinagar and Lucknow, through places whose names had become almost banal through their association with curries, like Madras and Bombay, but also through places he cheerfully confessed he'd visited for their names as much as anything else: Alleppey and Deolali, Cuttack and Calicut, Vadodara and Trivandrum, Surendranagar and Tonk ... but all the while looking and listening and questioning and arguing and reeling with it all, making crazed comparisons with Britain and Scotland; hitching and riding and swimming and walking and when he was beyond the reach of money, doing tricks with cards and rupees for his supper, and then reaching Delhi again, then Agra, and a trek from an ashram to the great Ganga, head fuddled by sun and strangeness to see the great river at last, and then the long drift on a barge down to the Farakka Barrage a train to Calcutta and a plane to Heathrow, half dead with hepatitis and incipient malnutrition.\n\nIn London, after a month in hospital, he typed it all out, got his friends in the squat where he lived to read it, called it _The Deccan Traps And Other Unlikely Destinations,_ and sent it to a publisher.\n\nIt very nearly sank without trace, but then it was serialised in a Sunday newspaper, and suddenly, with no more warning or apparent cause than that, _Traps_ just was the rage, and he was there.\n\nI read the book when I was thirteen, and again four years later, when I understood it better. It was hard to be objective \u2013 still is \u2013 but I think it is a good book; gauche and naive in places, but startling; vivacious. He went with his eyes open, and, not having taken a camera, just tried to record everything on the pages of those cheap exercise books, straining to make it real for himself, as though he could not believe he had seen and heard and experienced what he had until it was fixed somewhere other than in his stunned brain, and so he could describe walking towards the Taj Mahal \u2013 ho-hum, thinks the reader, immediately in the realm of the tacky postcard \u2013 and still give you a wholly fresh impression of the exact scale and actual _presence_ of that white tomb; delicate but powerful, compact and yet boundlessly imposing.\n\nEpic grace. With those two words he encapsulated it, and you knew exactly what he meant.\n\nAnd so our Rory became famous, at that moment on the very lip of the escarpment of his fame, the rosy cliffs forever at his back as he wandered on.\n\nAsh squatted down, resting on her heels. She tore a piece of grass from the mound, ran it through her fingers. 'And I'd come here when my daddy-paddy was beating the living shit out of my mum, and sometimes us too.' She looked up at me. 'Stop me if you've heard this one before, Prentice.'\n\nI hunkered down too, shaking my head as much to clear it as to deny. 'Well, not exactly, but I knew it wasn't all sweetness and light, _chez_ Watt.'\n\n'Fuckin right it wasn't,' Ash said, and sounded bitter. The blade of grass ran through her fingers, was turned round, passed through again. She looked up, shrugged. 'Anyway, sometimes I came out here just because the house smelled of chip-fat or the telly was too loud, just to remind myself there was more to the world than 47 Bruce Street and endless arguments about fag money and which one of us got a new pair of shoes.'\n\n'Aye, well,' I said, at a loss really to know what to say. Maybe I get uncomfortable being reminded there are worse backgrounds than coming from a family of mostly amiable over-achievers.\n\n'Anyway,' she said again. 'They're levelling the lot tomorrow.' Ash looked back over her shoulder. I followed her gaze. 'That's what all that plant's for.'\n\nI remembered the Triffid jokes we used to make about Heavy Plant Crossing, and only then saw the dim outlines of a couple of bulldozers and a JCB, a little way off down the piece of waste ground.\n\n'Aw, shit,' I said, eloquently.\n\n'An exclusive marina development with attractive fishing-village-style one\u2013 and two-bedroom flats with dedicated moorings, double garages and free membership of the private health club,' Ash said, in a Kelvinside accent.\n\n'Fffuck,' I shook my head.\n\n'What the hell,' Ashley said, rising. 'I suppose the Glasgow middle classes have to go somewhere after they've braved the treacherous waters of the Crinan canal.' She gave her hands one final dust. 'Hope they're happy there.'\n\nWe turned to leave the mound, me and the Ash, then I grabbed her arm. 'Hi.' She turned to me. 'Berlin,' I said. 'The jacuzzi; I just remembered.'\n\n'Oh yeah.' She started walking down the slope, back to the weeds, the junk and the ankle-high remains of old brick walls. I followed her. 'I was in Frankfurt,' she said. 'Seeing this friend from college? We heard things were happening in Berlin so we hitched and trained it; met up with ... Well, it's a long story, but I ended up in this fancy hotel, in the swimming pool; and had a big whirl-pool bath in a wee sort of island at one end, and this drunken English guy was trying hard to chat me up, and making fun of my accent and \u2013'\n\n'Cheeky basturt,' I said as we got to the main road.\n\nWe waited while a couple of cars sped north out of town.\n\n'That's what I thought,' Ashley nodded, as we crossed the road. 'Anyway, when I told him where I came from he started saying he knew the place well and he'd been shooting here, and fishing, and knew the laird and \u2013'\n\n'Do we have a laird? I didn't know. Perhaps he meant Uncle Fergus.'\n\n'Maybe, though when I asked him that he got cagey and said no ... but the point is he was acting all mysterious about something, and he'd already said there was somebody here who was having the wool pulled over their eyes, and had been for a long time, and he thought their name was ...' Ash stopped at the snicket that led up to Bruce Street. My route back to Uncle Hamish's house went straight along the main road.\n\nI looked up the wee path, lit by a single yellow street lamp, half way up. Then I looked back into Ashley Watt's eyes.\n\n'Not McHoan, by any chance?' I asked.\n\n'Yep,' Ash nodded.\n\n'Hmm,' I said. Because McHoans are fairly thin on the ground around here. Or anywhere, for that matter.\n\n'Who was this guy?'\n\n'Journalist. There to cover the big knock-down.'\n\n'What was his name?'\n\n'Rudolph something, I think somebody called him. He wouldn't say.'\n\n'You might have used your feminine wiles.'\n\n'Well, at the time they were more or less fully employed on a systems analyst from Texas with shoulders wide as the prairie sky and a gold company Amex card, to be perfectly honest, Prentice.' Ash smiled sweetly.\n\nI shook my head. 'Saucy bitch.'\n\nAsh grabbed my balls through my 501s and squeezed gently. My breath baled out.\n\n'Language, Prentice,' she said, then released, covered my mouth with hers, wiped my teeth with her tongue, then swivelled, walked away.\n\n'Wow,' I said. The old testes were complaining, but only slightly. I cleared my throat. 'Night, Ashley,' I said, cool as I could.\n\nAsh turned, grinning, then reached into her big, naval-looking jacket with the brass buttons and fished something out; threw it.\n\nI caught the projectile; a little lump of grey concrete, smooth and dark on one side.\n\n'Die Mauer,' she said, walking backwards. 'Actually from the section near the Brandenburg Gate where it said, \"Viele viele bunte Smarties!\". The red paint on one surface used to be in the middle of the dot in the last \"i\". Bit of the world that used to be between Germanies.' She waved. 'Night, Prentice.'\n\nI looked at the grainy chunk of concrete in my hand. 'Wow,' I breathed. Ash's fair hair flared briefly under the street light, then dimmed as she walked away. 'Wow!'\nCHAPTER 4\n\nHe looked round the Solar of the castle. The big new window at the gable end of the hall was still covered with a translucent plastic sheet which rustled in the wind and crackled as the rain blew onto it. A shifting grid of dark lines was the shadow of the scaffolding outside. The high-ceilinged hall smelled of paint, varnish, new wood and drying plaster. He walked over to one of the mullioned windows, and stood there, looking out at the low clouds as they drifted over Gallanach, soaking the dull town with the curving veils of rain they dragged beneath them, like the train of some vast grey gown.\n\n'Daddy, daddy! Uncle Fergus says we can go up on the roof with mum if we're careful! Can we? Please can we? Promise we won't jump off!' Lewis skipped into the hall, dragging little Prentice behind him. Lewis had his anorak back on, and Prentice was dragging his behind him over the shining parquet floor.\n\n'Aye son, I suppose so,' Kenneth said, sitting on his ankles to pull the younger boy's jacket on and zipping it up. Lewis went leaping and whooping round the hall while this was going on. 'Not so loud, Lewis,' Kenneth said, without much conviction.\n\nPrentice smiled at his dad. 'Daddy,' he said in his slow, croaky voice. 'Need the toilet.'\n\nKenneth sighed, pulled the child's hood up, then pushed it back down again. 'Aye well; your mum will take you. Lewis!' he shouted. Lewis darted guiltily away from the paint pots he'd been examining at the other end of the hall, and came running over.\n\n'This is great, daddy! Can we get a castle too, aye?'\n\n'No. We can't afford it. Take your brother back to his mum; he needs the toilet.'\n\n'Aww,' whined Lewis, staring accusingly at his young brother, who just grinned at him and wiped his nose on one cuff of his anorak. Lewis prodded Prentice in the back. 'You're always spoiling things!'\n\n'Do as you're told, Lewis,' McHoan said, straightening. His knees complained as he did so. 'On you go. And be careful on that roof.' He waved them both towards the double doors they'd entered through.\n\nLewis made a show of plodding off, clumping one foot in front of another, body swaying exaggeratedly. He was pulling Prentice by one toggle of his anorak hood.\n\n'By the _hand,_ Lewis,' Kenneth said wearily.\n\n'You're a pest, boy,' Lewis told his younger brother as they reached the doorway.\n\nPrentice turned and waved to his dad with his free hand. 'Bye, daddy,' the wee voice said. Then he was pulled out of the room.\n\n'Bye, son,' McHoan said, and smiled. Then he turned back to the window and the rain.\n\n'It's a bit damp still.'\n\n'Ach, yer no afraid of a bit a wet, ur ye? Yer no a girrul ur ye?'\n\n'No I'm _not_ a girl. But if I get my clothes mucky \u2013'\n\n'Your dad's rich; he can buy you new clothes.'\n\n'Aye; yer paw's rich. You could probably have new claes every day if you wantit.'\n\n'Don't be ridiculous. All I'm saying \u2013'\n\nKenneth could see both points of view; Lachy, in a grimy shirt held together by odd buttons and a safety pin, and tattered, patched short trousers that drooped below his knees and had probably belonged to at least two elder brothers, was already grubby (and sporting the vivid remains of a black eye no one had mentioned because it had probably been his dad who gave it him). Fergus had nice, well-fitting clothes on: grey serge short trousers, a new blue jersey and a tweed jacket with leather patches sewn on the elbows. Even Kenneth felt a little dowdy in comparison. His shorts had been darned at the back, though he was getting a new pair when the next clothes rations came through. The girls all wore skirts, blouses and jerseys; their socks were white, not grey. Emma Urvill had a coat with a little hood that made her look like a pixie.\n\n'Are we playing this game or not?' she asked.\n\n'Patience,' Lachy said, turning to the girl, still standing holding her bike. 'Patience, lassie.'\n\nEmma looked skywards and made a tutting noise. Beside her, Kenneth's sister, Ilsa, also on her bike, shook her head.\n\nThe castle stood on the side of the hill. The tall trees around it were still dripping, and its rough, uneven stones were dark and wet from the rain that had not long stopped. A watery sun gleamed on the dark leaves of the ivy that clung to one side of the ruin, and in the forest behind, a wood pigeon cooed softly.\n\n'Oh, what the heck,' Fergus Urvill said, and rested his bike against a tree.\n\nLachy Watt let his bike fall to the ground. Kenneth lowered his to the damp grass alongside. The girls propped theirs against the wooden rails at the start of the bridge. The short wooden bridge, about wide enough for a cart, crossed a steep, bush-choked gully about thirty feet deep. At the bottom of this tiny, dank glen a burn splashed and foamed; it rushed out of the woods, curled round three sides of the rock and grass knoll the roofless castle stood upon, fell over a small waterfall, then progressed gently afterwards, joining the River Add near the main road, so that eventually its waters flowed through and beneath the town of Gallanach and into the bay near the railway pier.\n\nSun came suddenly, making the grass bright and the ivy leaves sparkle; the wind pushed through the forest with a quiet roar, releasing drops of water all around. Kenneth watched a train on the viaduct at Bridgend, about a mile away; the west wind was keeping its noise from them, but he could see the steam rising quickly from the dark locomotive and whipping back over the half-dozen burgundy coaches in little white clouds that spread and were torn apart and flung away by the wind.\n\n'Right,' Lachy said. 'Who's het?'\n\n'Het?' Fergus said. 'You mean \"it\"?'\n\n'You know what ah mean; who's goin het first?'\n\n'Do One potato, Two potato,' suggested Emma.\n\n'Oh Goad, all right,' Lachy said, shaking his head.\n\n'And you shouldn't take the Lord's name in vain,' Emma told him.\n\n'Christ, Ah'm sorry,' Lachy said.\n\n'You did it again.'\n\n'You a Tim or sumhin?'\n\n'I'm a Christian,' Emma said primly. 'And I thought you were, too, Lachlan Watt.'\n\n'Ah'm a Protestant,' Lachy said. 'That's what am are.'\n\n'Can we get on with this, please?' Ilsa said.\n\nThey all lined up, fists clenched; Lachy ended up being it, much to his own annoyance.\n\nKenneth had never been inside the old castle; you could just see it from the house, if you knew what you were looking for, and you could see it quite well if you used dad's binoculars, but it was on the Urvill estate, and even though their families had been friends for years \u2013 generations, dad said, which meant even longer \u2013 Mr Robb, on whose farm the castle stood, didn't like children, and chased them off his fields and out of his woods whenever he could, threatening them with his shotgun. He couldn't chase Fergus and Emma Urvill off though, so they were all safe. Kenneth had wondered if Mr Robb was secretly a fifth columnist or even a Nazi, and was hiding men washed up from a sunken U-boat, or preparing a place for paratroopers to land, but despite him and some of the other children watching Mr Robb very carefully from the woods a few times, they had never been able to prove anything. But they had explored the hidden garden a bit, and decided the castle looked worth investigating.\n\nThe castle had dark, intact dungeons at ground level, and a stone stair-case in a circular tower that rose to the open heart of the ruin, where a few jumbled stones and a floor of earth and weed looked up to the sky. The stairs wound further up inside the corner tower, pausing at each long-collapsed floor above, where a doorway looked out onto the central well. Another stairway pierced the walls themselves on the far side of the shell of the keep, rising through their thickness past another three doorways hanging like internal balconies, to a couple of small rooms at the top of dark chimneys which led to the base of the walls outside.\n\nThe castle held a variety of other dark nooks and shadowy crannies you could hide in, as well as windows and fireplaces set high in the thick walls, where you could climb if you were good at climbing, and if you were really good you could climb up from the circular stairs to the very summit of the ruin, where you could walk, if you dared, right round the thick tops of the walls, over the weeds and the ivy, sixty feet or more above the ground. From there you could look out to sea, over Gallanach, or into the mountains to the north and the forested hills to the south. Closer, there was the overgrown walled garden, across another bridge behind the castle, where tangles of rhodies crowded under monkey-puzzle trees and a riot of exotic flowers attracted buzzing clouds of insects in the summer.\n\nThe rules were that you could hide anywhere in the castle; Kenneth and the others left Lachy at the track side of the bridge, counting slowly. They laughed and squealed, bumping into each other and shushing each other as they tried not to shout too loudly while they dithered and giggled over where to hide.\n\nKenneth climbed up into a high window and crouched down.\n\nEventually, Lachy came into the open hall of the castle, looking around. Kenneth watched him for a moment, then ducked back in, flattened himself down as close to the stone sill of the window as he could.\n\nHe was the last to be found, and for a while delighted in the fact that none of them could find him, even after Lachy had caught the rest and they were all shouting at him to come out so they could have another go. He lay there, feeling the damp breeze coming through the window and tickling the hairs on his bare legs. He listened to the shouts of the others, echoing in the castle's emptied shell, and to the voices of the crows and the wood pigeons in the trees, and he smelled the dark, wet smell of the moss and weeds that had found a foothold amongst the ruin's grey stones. He kept his eyes tightly closed, and as he listened to them search for him and call on him, there came a strange, tight, quivery feeling in his tummy which made him want to clench his teeth and bring his knees together and made him worry about wetting his pants.\n\nI love this here, he thought to himself. I don't care if there is a war on and Fergus's uncle got killed in North Africa, and Wullie Watt got killed in the North Atlantic and Lachy gets hit by his dad and we might have to move to another house because Mr Urvill wants ours back and I don't understand trigonometry and the Germans do invade us; I love this. If I died right now I wouldn't care; wouldn't care at all.\n\nLachy climbed right up onto the top of the walls eventually, and only then did he see Kenneth. Kenneth came down, yawning widely and rubbing his eyes and claiming he had fallen asleep. He'd won, had he? Oh, jolly good.\n\nThey played some more, and made fun of Fergus after he'd won a game because Kenneth had worked out what the two little rooms at the top of the second set of stairs were; they were toilets, and that was why the chimneys led down and went out of the castle; it was so all the number one and numbers twos could fall down there. Fergus had hidden down a latrine! And him worried about getting his clothes dirty, too! Fergus denied they were toilets; they were completely clean and didn't smell at all and they must be chimneys.\n\n'Chimneys, ma arse!' Lachy laughed. 'They're shite-holes!'\n\n(Emma tutted, but couldn't help smiling.)\n\n'Chimneys!' Fergus insisted desperately, blinking hard. He looked at Kenneth as though expecting him to agree. Kenneth looked down at the tramped-down earth under his feet.\n\n'They're shite-holes, so they are,' laughed Lachy. 'And you're just a big jobbie!'\n\n'Chimneys,' Fergus protested, his voice rising, his face going red.\n\n'Big jobbie, big jobbie; big smelly jobbie!' Lachy chanted.\n\nKenneth watched Fergus shake with anger while Lachy danced round the interior of the keep, singing out, 'Big jobbie, big jobbie; big smelly jobbie!'\n\nFergus stared angrily at his sister and at Kenneth, as though betrayed, then just stood and waited for Lachy to get bored with his taunting, and as Kenneth watched, a blank, emotionless expression gradually replaced the anger on Fergus's face.\n\nKenneth had the fleeting, extraordinary impression of seeing something buried alive, and felt himself shake suddenly, almost spastically, shivering.\n\n'... jobbie, jobbie; big smelly jobbie!'\n\nIn the last game, Kenneth hid with Emma Urvill in one of the dungeons, showing her how to turn her back to the light and put the hood of her coat up to hide her face, and sure enough when Ilsa came to the door of the dungeon \u2013 and he felt that quivering, scary, glorious feeling in his tummy again \u2013 she didn't see them, and they hugged each other once she had gone, and the hug was warm and tight and he liked it and she didn't let go, and after a while they put their mouths together and kissed. He felt a strange echo of that terrifyingly wonderful sensation in his belly and his heart, and he and Emma Urvill held onto each other for ages, until all the others were caught.\n\nLater, they played in the tangling undergrowth of the walled garden, and found an old over-grown fountain with the stone statue of a naked lady in it, and an old shed at one corner where there were ancient tins and jars and bottles with Victorian-looking writing on them. The rain came on for a while and they all stayed in there, Fergus complaining about his bike rusting, his sister and Kenneth exchanging the occasional sly look, Ilsa staring out at the rain and saying there were places in South America where it hadn't stopped raining for hundreds of years, and Lachy mixing various sticky, treacley subtances together from the shelves of old bottles and tins, trying to find a combination that would explode, or at least burn, while the rain hammered then whispered then dripped on the tarred roof overhead, and plopped through holes onto the springy wooden floor of the shed.\n\n'Of course, we haven't moved all the bottles yet,' Fergus said, pointing with his pipe at the still unfilled racks that covered the wall of the cellar. The cellar was painted white, and lit by naked bulbs; wires hung and there were un-plastered holes for cables and plumbing leading through the walls and up to other floors. The wood and metal wine racks gleamed, as did the two hundred or so bottles that had already been stored.\n\n'Should keep you going for a bit, eh, Fergus?' he grinned. 'Once you've filled this lot up.'\n\n'Mmm. We were thinking of touring a few vineyards next summer,' Urvill said, scratching his thick chin with his pipe. 'Bordeaux; the Loire, that sort of thing. Don't know if you and Mary fancy making a foursome or not, hmm?'\n\nFergus blinked. Kenneth nodded. 'Well, perhaps. Depends on holidays and that sort of thing. And the kids, of course.'\n\n'Oh,' Fergus said, frowning as he picked a little sliver of tobacco off his Pringle sweater. 'We weren't thinking of taking the children.'\n\n'Ah, well, no; of course not,' Kenneth said, as they went to the door. Fergus switched the lights out in the various cellars and they went up the stone-flagged steps towards the utility room and kitchen.\n\nIt was that cellar, he thought to himself as he followed Fergus's Hush Puppies up the steps. That was where I hid with Emma Urvill, and kissed her. That cellar; I'm sure it was that one. And that window I was looking out earlier; that was the one I hid in that day, nearly thirty years ago; I'm certain.\n\nHe felt a terrible weight of time and loss settle on him then, and a slight feeling of resentment at the Urvills in general and Fergus in particular, for having \u2013 with so little thought \u2013 stolen part of his memories from him. At least malice might have acknowledged the value of his nostalgia.\n\n'Ferg, this dishwasher's like a Chinese Puzzle,' Fiona stood up from the recalcitrant machine, then saw her brother and smiled broadly, came towards him, hugging.\n\n'Hiya, Ken. Been getting the guided tour, have you?'\n\n'Yes; very impressive.' Kenneth kissed his sister's cheek. How old had she been when he'd come out here with Fergus and the rest? About two, he guessed. Not old enough to come all this way on a bike. He must have been eight or nine. He wondered where Hamish had been; ill, maybe. He'd always been taking colds.\n\nFiona Urvill, n\u00e9e McHoan, wore old flared Levis and a loose green blouse knotted over a white T-shirt. Her copper-coloured hair was tied back. 'How're you?'\n\n'Oh, I'm well,' Kenneth nodded; he kept an arm round her waist as they walked over to the dishwasher, where Fergus crouched, consulting the instruction booklet. The door of the dishwasher was hinged open like a drawbridge.\n\n'Appears to be written in code, my dear,' Fergus said, scratching the side of his head with his pipe. Kenneth felt a smile form on his face as he looked down at the man. Fergus seemed old before his time: the Pringle jumper, the Hush Puppies, even the pipe. Of course, Kenneth could remember when he used to smoke a pipe; but that had been different. Looked like Fergus was losing his hair already, too.\n\n'How's school?' Fiona asked her brother.\n\n'Och, getting on,' he said. 'Getting on.' He had been promoted to Principal Teacher in English the previous autumn. His sister always wanted to know how things were going at the high school, but he usually felt reluctant to talk about work around her and Fergus. He wasn't sure why, and he suspected he probably wouldn't like acknowledging the reason, if he ever did work it out. He was even more chary about revealing he was writing down some of the stories he'd told the kids over the years, hoping to publish them some day. He was worried people might think he was trying to out-do Rory, or \u2013 worse still \u2013 think he hoped to use him as a contact, an easy way in.\n\n'No, I tell a lie,' Fergus admitted. 'Here's the English bit. Well, American, anyway.' He sighed, then looked round. 'Talking about English-speaking furriners, McHoan; you still all right for the International next Saturday?'\n\n'Oh aye,' Kenneth nodded. They were meant to be going to the Scotland-England rugby game in a week's time. 'Who's driving?'\n\n'Umm, thought we'd take the Morgan, actually.'\n\n'Oh God, Fergus, must we? I'm not sure I can find my bobblehat.'\n\n'Oh, come on man,' Fergus chuckled. 'Thought we'd try a new route: down to Kintyre; across to Arran, Lochranza to Brodick; Land Ardrossan and then the A71 to the A of the N. Strikes and power cuts permitting, of course.'\n\n'Fergus,' Kenneth said, putting one hand to his brow. 'It sounds enormously complicated.' He refused to rise to the bait about strikes and power cuts. He guessed that 'A of the N' meant Athens of the North. 'Are you sure the Lochranza ferry runs outside the high season, anyway?'\n\nFergus looked troubled, stood up. 'Oh, it must, mustn't it? Well, I think it does.'\n\n'Might be best to check.'\n\n'Righty-oh, will do.'\n\n'Anyway, couldn't we take the Rover?' Kenneth wasn't keen on the Morgan; its stiff ride hurt his back and gave him a headache, and Fergus drove too fast in the ancient open-top. Maybe it was the sight of all that British Racing Green paint and the leather strap across the bonnet. The Rover, 3.5 though it was, seemed to calm Fergus a little.\n\n'Oh, come on man, where's your sense of occasion?' Fergus chided. 'The hotel won't let us into the car park if we show up in the Rover,'\n\n'Oh God,' Kenneth sighed, and squeezed his sister's waist. 'The Morgan it is then.' he looked at Fiona. Those green eyes sparkling. 'I'm getting old, sis. Do you think I'm getting old?'\n\n'Positively ancient, Ken.'\n\n'Thanks. How're the twins?'\n\n'Oh, glowing.'\n\n'Still taking them to Windscale for their hols then, are you?'\n\n'Ha! Oh, Ken, you're still so comparatively witty.'\n\n'Have you tried switching it on?' Fergus suggested, squatting on the floor in front of the dishwasher again. His voice echoed inside the machine as he tried to stick his head inside amongst the racks.\n\n'Don't be catty, Ferg,' Fiona told him. She smiled at her brother. 'Haven't seen young Rory out here for a while, and he never calls us; he okay?'\n\n'Still in that squat in Camden, last we heard, living off his ill-gotten sub-continental gains.'\n\n'A _squat?'_ Fergus said, words muffled. 'Thought he made a packet on that ... travel book thingy.'\n\n'He did,' Ken nodded.\n\n'About India, wasn't it?'\n\n'Yep.'\n\n'Ferg,' Fiona said, exasperated. 'You bought the book, remember?'\n\n'Of course I remember,' Fergus said, reaching into the dishwasher to fiddle with something. 'Just haven't read it, that's all. Who needs to read a book to find out about India? Just go to bloody Bradford ... What's he doing living in a _squat?'_\n\nKen ground his teeth for a second, looking appraisingly at Fergus's ample rear. He shrugged. 'He just likes living with the people there. He's a social animal, Ferg.'\n\n'Have to be a bloody animal to live in a squat,' Fergus muttered, echoing.\n\n'Hoi, don't be horrible about my brother,' Fiona said, and tapped Fergus's backside with her foot.\n\nFergus glanced quickly round and glared at her, his plump, slightly reddened face suddenly grim. Kenneth felt his sister stiffen next to him. Then Fergus gave a little wavering smile, and with a quiet grunt turned back to the opened machine and its instruction booklet. Fiona relaxed again.\n\nKenneth wondered if things were really all right with the couple. He thought he sensed a tension between them sometimes, and a couple of years earlier, not long after the twins had been born, he'd thought Fergus and Fiona had seemed distinctly cold towards each other. He had worried for them, and he and Mary had discussed it, wondering what might have caused this unhappiness, and if there was anything they could do (they had decided there wasn't, not unless they were asked). Still, he had tried broaching the subject with Fergus once, after a dinner party, while they nursed whiskies in the conservatory of the old Urvill house and watched the lights of the navigation buoys and lighthouses scattered around and through the Sound of Jura as they winked on and off.\n\nFergus hadn't wanted to talk. Mary had had no more success with Fiona. And anyway it had all seemed to come gradually right again.\n\nMaybe I'm just jealous, he thought to himself, as Fiona pulled away from him and went to the big new Aga, sitting squat, cream and gleaming against one wall of whitewashed stone. She put a hand over part of the cooker's surface, gauging the heat. The silence in the kitchen went on.\n\nKenneth had never given Freud much credence; mainly because he had looked as honestly into himself as he could, found much that was not to his taste, found a little that was even just plain bad, but nothing much that fitted with what Freud's teachings said he ought to find. Still, he wondered if he did resent Fergus, at least partly because he had taken his sister away, made her his.\n\nWell, you never knew, he supposed. Maybe everybody's theories were right, maybe the whole world and every person, and all their relationships within it were utterly bound up with one another in an intricate, entangled web of cause and effect and underlying motive and hidden principle. Maybe all the philosophers and all the psychologists and all the theoreticians were right ... but he wasn't entirely sure that any of it made much difference.\n\n'Mary and the kids with you?' Fiona said, turning from the Aga to look at him.\n\n'Taking in the view from the battlements,' Kenneth told her.\n\n'Good,' she nodded. She glanced at her husband. 'We're getting an observatory, did Ferg tell you?'\n\n'No.' He looked, surprised, at the other man, who didn't turn round. 'No, I didn't know. You mean a ... a telescope; an astronomical observatory?'\n\n'Bloody astronomically expensive,' Fergus said, voice echoing in the dishwasher.\n\n'Yes,' Fiona said. 'So Ferg can spend his nights star-gazing.' Mrs Urvill looked at her husband, still squatting in front of the opened machine, with an expression Kenneth thought might have been scorn.\n\n'What's that, my dear?' Fergus asked, looking over at his wife, an open, innocent expression on his face.\n\n'Nothing,' his wife said brightly, voice oddly high.\n\n'Hmm,' Fergus adjusted something inside the dishwasher, scratched above his ear with his pipe again. 'Jolly good.'\n\nKenneth looked away then, to the windows, where the rain spattered and ran.\n\nConceived in a howling gale, Verity was born \u2013 howling \u2013 in one, too. She came into the world a month before she was due, one windy evening in August 1970, by the shores of Loch Awe \u2013 a birth-place whose title, Prentice at least had always thought, could hardly have been more apt.\n\nHer mother and father had been staying at Fergus and Fiona Urvill's house in Gallanach for the previous two weeks, on holiday from their Edinburgh home. For the last night of their holiday the young couple decided to visit a hotel at Kilchrenan, an hour's drive away to the north east up the side of the loch. They borrowed Fergus's Rover to make the journey. The bulging Charlotte had that week developed a craving for salmon, and duly dined on salmon steaks, preceded by strips of smoked salmon and followed by smoked salmon mousse, which she chose in preference to a sweet. She complained of indigestion.\n\nWell \u2013 if in Charlotte's case rather monotonously \u2013 fed, they began the return journey. The evening was dull, and although there was no rain a strong warm wind was blowing, waving the tops of the trees and stroking lines of white breakers up the length of the narrow loch. The gale increased to storm force as they drove south west into it, down the single-track road on the western shore.\n\nThe narrow road was littered with fallen branches; it was probably one of those that produced the puncture.\n\nAnd so, while her husband struggled with over-enthusiastically-tightened wheel-nuts, Charlotte went into labour.\n\nBarely half an hour later a stunning blue flash \u2013 the colour of the moon and brighter than the sun \u2013 burst over the scene from the hill above.\n\nThe noise was thunderous.\n\nCharlotte screamed.\n\nAbove, on the hillside, stood the lattice forms of two electricity pylons, straddling the heather like grey gigantic skeletons wreathed in darkness. The black wind howled and there was another blinding flash and a titanic concussion; a line of violet incandescence split the night mid-way between the two huge pylons as energy short-circuited through the air between the wind-whipped power-lines.\n\nCharlotte screamed again, and the child was born.\n\nThe tail end of Hurricane Verity passed over the British Isles that night; it had been born in the doldrums, cut its teeth flooding bits of the Bahamas, flirted with the coast of North Carolina, and then swept off across the North Atlantic, gradually losing energy; a brief encounter with the angle between a cold front and a warm front just off Ireland refreshed it unexpectedly, and it trashed numerous pleasure boats, rattled a few acres of windows, played frisbee with a multitude of slates and broke many a bough as it passed over Scotland.\n\nThe stretch of the national electricity grid down the western shore of Loch Awe towards Gallanach was one of the storm's more spectacular victims, and Charlotte always claimed that it was right on the stroke of the final massive arc between the thrashing cables \u2013 which tripped circuit breakers in the grid to the north and plunged all of Gallanach into darkness \u2013 that her child (wrinkled, blood-flecked and salmon pink) finally slid out into her father's hands.\n\nThey named her Verity, after the hurricane.\n\nWhen she was eighteen, Fergus Urvill gave his niece Verity a very special present made from one of the exhibits in the museum attached to his glass factory. For the child born to the blaze and crack of human lightning, her entry into this world marked by the same brilliant arcs of short-circuited energy that plunged Gallanach into powerless gloom, he had a necklace fashioned which was made from fulgurite.\n\nFulgurite is a natural glass, like another of the museum's minor treasures, obsidian. But while obsidian is born purely of the earth, formed in the baking heat and furious pressure of volcanic eruptions, fulgurite is of the earth and of the air, too; it is made when lightning strikes unconsolidated sand, and fuses it, vitrifies it in long, zig-zag tubes. God's glass, Hamish McHoan called it.\n\nThe Gallanach Glass Works Museum contained a collection of tubular fulgurites, plucked from the sands of Syria by Walter Urvill \u2013 Fergus's grandfather \u2013 on a visit there in 1890, and transported back to Scotland with great care and not a little luck so that they arrived intact. One of the crinkled, gnarled little tubes was over a metre long; another just a fraction shorter. Fergus had the smaller of the two sent to a jeweller in Edinburgh, to be broken, the pieces graded and ground and polished and threaded together like dark little pearls, to create a unique necklace for his niece.\n\nHe presented the result to the lightning-child during her birthday party, at her parents' house in Merchiston, in Edinburgh, in August 1988 (it was, perhaps unfittingly, a perfectly fine, warm, clear and calm night, on that anniversary). Fergus \u2013 always a rather dour, prematurely elderly figure, characterised by those collar-contacting jowls \u2013 improved immensely in the eyes of both Kenneth and Prentice McHoan with that single, elegant, and rather unexpectedly poetic act.\n\nVerity had the grace to accept the necklace with a particular gratitude that acknowledged the thought behind the gift, and the taste to make it a regular, even habitual, part of her wardrobe.\n\nThe upholstery of Fergus's Rover was cleansed of the debris and stains associated with Verity's birth and the car continued to serve the Urvill family for another five years or so until 1975, when it was traded in (for what Prentice would thereafter maintain was a scandalously small sum, considering that the thing ought to have been preserved as some sort of internationally-recognised shrine to Beauty) for an Aston Martin DB6.\n\nIt was once Prentice's dream, shortly after he'd passed his driving test, to find that old Rover \u2013 lying in a field somewhere, perhaps \u2013 and to buy it; to own the car his beloved had been born in; to drive it and to cherish it. He realised, of course, that it had almost certainly been scrapped long before, but that had not prevented him harbouring the perhaps irrational notion that somehow a little of its recycled metal must have found its way into at least one of the three old bangers he'd owned.\n\nThe defiantly thunderous and lightning-fast Aston Martin DB6 was the car that Fergus and Fiona Urvill were travelling in on the night they were involved in a crash at Achnaba, just south of Lochgair, in 1980.\nCHAPTER 5\n\nRight, now this isn't as bad as it sounds, but ... I was in bed with my Aunty Janice.\n\nWell, actually, in one sense it's exactly as bad as it sounds because when I say I was in bed with her, I don't mean I was in bed with her because we'd gone hill-walking together and been caught out in a snow storm and eventually found shelter in some exceptionally well-appointed bothy that just so happened to have only one bed and we had to get into it together to keep warm; nothing like that. We were fucking.\n\nBut (phew), she wasn't a real aunt; not a blood relation, not even an aunt by marriage. Janice Rae had been Uncle Rory's girlfriend, and I just called her Aunty. However she had been my father's brother's lover, and \u2013 perhaps more embarrassingly \u2013 it had been her daughter, Marion, who had initiated me into the whole sticky, smelly, noisy, potentially fatal, potentially natal, sordid and sublime act in the first place, on the dry, cracked green leather surface of the garaged Lagonda Rapide Saloon's back seat, one hot and musty summer's afternoon, eight years earlier.\n\n(We brought the house down.)\n\nBlame Lewis.\n\nThe voice has gone quiet, deep, almost gravelly now. A light \u2013 harsh and white \u2013 shines from one side, so that his lean, clean-shaven face looks hard and angular, even cruel.\n\n'I have this door in my house,' he breathes, then pauses. 'It's a very special door.' He looks to one side. The way he does it, you get the urge to look that way too, but you don't. 'Do you know what I keep on the other side of that door?' He raises one eyebrow, but there is silence in the darkness. You wait. 'Behind the door I keep ...' (He leans forward now, towards us, somehow confiding and threatening together.) '... the rest of the Universe.' A wintery smile, and if you were prone to that sort of thing, your skin might crawl.\n\nThere is a little nervous laughter. He waits patiently for it to subside. 'I have a special name for that door,' he says, eyes narrowing. 'Do you know what I call it?' (This is the dangerous bit, where it could all end in disaster, but he holds the pause, and the silence is eloquent.) 'I call it ...' he pauses again, looks into the darkness to one side, then towards the light again. '... my Front Door.'\n\nThere is more laughter, like relief. He smiles for the first time; a thin, unimpressed expression. 'Perhaps you have one like it, in your house.' He steps back, the lights go up, and he makes a sort of half nod, half bow. 'My name is Lewis McHoan. Good night.'\n\nHe walks off to loud applause; cheers, even.\n\nI look from the television to my flatmates.\n\n'Aye, he's no bad,' Gav says, pulling open another can of cider.\n\n'He's okay,' agrees Norris, and drinks from his. 'That last bit was a bit weird but. He really your brother, aye?'\n\nI glare at the screen as the MC appears, signing off. Lewis had been the last act. 'Yes.' I say, taking my empty Export can between both hands, and crushing it. 'Yes, he is.' The credits roll. I throw the squashed can at the litter bin, but it misses, hits the wall, rolls across the floor and dribbles flat beer onto the threadbare carpet.\n\nI stood in the bookshop, reading the story about the magic dressing gown, tears in my eyes.\n\nA hand tapped me on the shoulder. I put the book down quickly on the pile and hauled my hanky from my pocket, bringing it up to my face as I turned. I blew my nose.\n\n'Come on, slow-coach,' mum said, smiling down at me. Her gaze flicked to the book-pile. 'Reading your dad's stories at last, eh? What's brought this on?' Not waiting for an answer, she put one arm round my shoulders and guided me out onto the Departures concourse. 'Come on; let's go and wish your Uncle Rory _bon_ voyage, shall we?'\n\n'All right,' I said, sniffing.\n\nMum frowned down. 'Prentice, have you been crying?'\n\n'No!' I said vehemently, shaking my head and stuffing the hanky back into my trousers. Mum just smiled. I felt the tears try to come again, prickling behind my eyes.\n\n'Prentice!' Uncle Rory said, picking me up. 'God, you're getting big. I'll soon not be able to lift you.'\n\nGood, I thought; this is embarrassing. I hugged him, as much to get my face out of sight as to express any regret at his leaving.\n\n'Aye,' I heard my mum saying. 'I think we had a wee tear or two, there.'\n\n'We didn't, did we?' Uncle Rory laughed, bringing me back round in front of him, holding me there. His big face, entirely framed by curly auburn hair, looked happy and kindly. I wanted to hit him and my mum, or maybe burst into tears and hug them; either would do. 'Ah, dinnae greet, laddy,' he laughed, lapsing into the working-class Scots I had grown ashamed of because my beautiful cousins Diana and Helen didn't speak like that, and those coarse Watt children did.\n\nStop it! I beamed at him (I was trying to develop a technique for aiming my thoughts at people to get them to do things for me; there were promising developments, but it was early days still, and I was suffering a lot of teething problems. That bastard George Lucas hadn't had the decency to reply to my letter about The Force yet, either).\n\n'I have not been crying, honest I haven't, Uncle Rory,' I said, sniffing.\n\n'Of course you haven't,' Uncle Rory grinned, winking at my mum.\n\n'That's right,' I said. Now put me down!\n\nUncle Rory put me down with a grunt. 'That's better,' he said, roughing up my hair. 'Ah; a wee smile!'\n\n_Of course I'm smiling, you big fool; you are prey for my thoughts!_\n\n'Will you be away awful long, Uncle Rory?' I asked.\n\n'Yes, I dare say I will, Prentice,' Uncle Rory said. The PA system shouted that the Heathrow flight was boarding. The voice mentioned something about a gate, but I doubted it would be anything as interesting as a stargate. Uncle Rory picked up his shoulder bag and the three of us started to walk towards a big crowd of people. A loud roar outside the glass expanse of one wall sounded excitingly like a crash ... but it was only a plane landing.\n\n'If you're in Hollywood and bump into George Lucas \u2013'\n\nUncle Rory laughed mightily, and exchanged one of those infuriatingly knowing adult looks with my mum. 'I don't think that's very likely, Prentice, but if I do ...'\n\n'Will you ask him if he got my letter?' I said. We reached the place where everybody was standing around and hugging, and we stopped. 'He'll know what it's about.'\n\n'I certainly will.' Uncle Rory laughed, squatting down. He made a worse mess of my hair and gripped both shoulders of my blazer. 'Now you be a good boy and I'll see you all in a few months.' He stood up. Him and mum had a brief cuddle, and she kissed him on the cheek. I turned my face away. I was glad my father wasn't here to see this. How could they do that sort of thing in public? I had a look round to see if my dad was watching from behind a potted palm or through holes cut in a newspaper, but he didn't seem to be.\n\n'Bye, Rory; safe journey.'\n\n'Bye, Mary. Tell Ken I'll call when I can.'\n\n'Will do. Take care now.'\n\nUncle Rory grinned. 'Yeah.' He squeezed one of her shoulders and winked at her _again!_ 'Bye love; see you.'\n\n'Bye.' We watched him show his ticket to the man at the gate, then with one last wave he was gone.\n\nI turned to mum. 'Mum, can I have some more money for the Star Wars machine?' I pointed at the video games. 'I got through three stages last time and I almost got to the fourth; I think I know how to deal with the big towers now and I'm getting really good at \u2013'\n\n'I think you've had quite enough of that machine, Prentice,' mum said, as we walked away through the people. We were heading for the stairs. I tried to pull her towards the row of video games.\n\n'Aw, mum, please; come on; I'll let you watch if you like.'\n\n_You will let me play the machine. You will let me play the machine._\n\nShe had the nerve to laugh. 'That's very kind of you, Prentice, but I'll pass on that. We have to get back home.'\n\n'Can I go home on the train mum, please can I?'\n\n_You will let your son take the train home. You will let your son Prentice take the train home._\n\n'Something wrong with my driving, you wee rascal?'\n\n'No mum, but can I please?'\n\n'No, Prentice; we'll take the car.'\n\n'Aww, but mum ...'\n\n'Will I buy you a book?' Mum stopped near the bookshop. 'Would you like that?'\n\n'There's a Judge Dredd annual out,' I said helpfully.\n\nShe _tssked._ 'Oh, I suppose, if it'll keep you quiet...'\n\nWhile she paid for it, I went to the pile of dad's books, and when nobody was looking I tore a couple of pages in one book, then put a load of somebody else's books over the top of dad's, so that nobody could see them.\n\nHow _dare_ he take the stories he'd told me and Lewis and James and the others and tell them to other people, to strangers? They were ours; they were _mine!_\n\n'Come on, terror,' mum said.\n\nA hand between my shoulder blades propelled me from the shop. But at least it wasn't the Vulcan Death Grip.\n\n_You will change your mind about letting your son take the train._\n\n_Mrs Mary McHoan, you will change your mind about letting your son Prentice take the train home ... and about playing the Star Wars machirie ..._\n\n'I mean, nobody tells you sex is going to be so noisy, do they? I mean, they can be quite specific about the actual act itself; there is no gory detail, no technical nuance that is not gone into, by teachers or parents or books about sex or the Joy of LURVE or television programmes or just the boys or girls in the year above you at school telling you behind the bike sheds, BUT NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT THE NOISE!\n\n'They don't! The first time I ever got laid it was the summer, it was hot, we were doing it naked in the old missionary position, and there I was, trying to pretend I'd been doing this for years, and thinking am I doing this right? Was that enough foreplay, did I devote sufficient time to going down on her or did it look like I was doing it because I read you ought to in _Cosmopolitan..._ and I did want to spend more time down there, but my neck was getting sore ... and I'm thinking should I start chewing the other earlobe now, and should I sort of pull back so I can get my mouth to her nipples, because I'd like to suck them; I would, but my neck's still sore, and just as I'm thinking about all this, and _still_ trying to think about putting this MFI kitchen unit together to stop myself from coming too soon but it isn't working any more more because I keep thinking of screws and pre-drilled holes and male and female parts and I'm stroking her and it's great and she's panting and I'm panting and then, just then, from in between our two naked, heaving bodies, THERE IS A NOISE LIKE A RHINOCEROS FARTING!\n\n'There is the noise of a fart the like of which you have never heard in your life before; it echoes off nearby tall buildings; it leaves your ears ringing; little old half-deaf ladies three streets away run to the broom cupboard and start hammering on the ceiling and threatening their upstairs neighbours with the Noise Abatement Society. I mean, a Loud Fart, okay?\n\n'And she is laughing and you don't know what to do; you try to keep going but it happens again and she's in hysterics and it is all deeply, deeply, _deeply_ embarrassing, and you keep going but there's this constant farting noise caused by all the sweat and it just isn't the same any more and you're thinking why didn't they tell me about this? Why wasn't I told? I mean, do other people put a towel in between them, or what?\n\n'... And you come eventually and after a cuddle and you've whispered a few sweet somethings, you withdraw, holding the old johnny on because that's what it says on the packet after all, and you go to the loo to dispose of the horrible dangly greasy thing and you have a very full bladder by now and you think you'll have a pee ... Ha ha ha ha ha; WRONG! You _think_ you'll have a pee, but you _can't!_ ...'\n\nI shook my head, remembering the times Lewis had ranted away like this in the past; in pubs, amongst friends, at parties. I'd enjoyed it usually, back then; I'd felt almost privileged to witness these chaotic fulminating tirades, and even been proud that Lewis was my brother ... But then I'd come to my senses and decided that my elder sibling was in fact a vainglorious egomaniac with a runaway sarcasm-gland problem. Now he was taking what had been relatively amusing examples of a private wit and exposing them to everybody, to make money and amass praise. My family are always doing this sort of thing to me.\n\nI looked at Gav. Gav was standing at my side, clutching his pint glass up near his shoulder and howling with laughter. He was sweating. He had tears in his eyes and his nose was running. He was having a great time. Gavin \u2013 one of my two flatmates \u2014 is a chap of the world; he has been there, he has done all this, he has had everything that Lewis was describing happen to him, too, and he didn't mind who knew it; this was the comedy of recognition; it was mature, it was happening, it was ideologically correct in terms of sexual politics, but it was also extremely _rude,_ and Gav just thought it was all totally hilarious. He was spilling what was left of his pint down his coat, but I suspected he wouldn't have cared even if he had noticed.\n\nI shook my head again and looked back at the low stage, where Lewis was still stalking back and forth like a caged hyena, grinning and sweating and gleaming under the lights and shouting into the microphone and flinging one arm about and smiling wickedly and striding side to side, side to side, talking to individuals at the front, to the people at the side and in the middle of the crowded audience, talking to us standing here at the back, talking to everybody.\n\nLewis was dressed in black jeans and a white tuxedo over a white T-shirt which had three enormous black letters on it; FTT. In much smaller letters underneath, it read: (have carnal knowledge of the conservative and unionist party and their supporters). You could buy these T-shirts at the door. Gav had one, wrapped in polythene and stuffed in one pocket of his coat.\n\nWe were upstairs in Randan's, the latest incarnation of a bar that had previously traded under the name Byre's Market, and before that had been called Paddy Jones's; premises forever apostrophised. That original appellation was before my time, and I confess to a degree of yearning for an age when bars had, in the main, sensible names, and did not pride themselves on serving their own creakingly-titled cocktails, a Choyce Selection of Our Eftimable Home-Made Pies, Hotpottes And Other Fyne Dishes, and twenty different designer lagers, all of which taste identical, cost the earth and are advertised on the tellingly desperate Unique Selling Points of having a neat logo, a top that is difficult to open or a bottle neck whose appearance is apparently mysteriously enhanced by having a slice of citrus fruit rammed down it.\n\nBut if this is the price we have to pay for all-day opening and letting women into public bars, then I admit it may well be churlish to carp. I used to think dad was kidding about bars closing in the afternoon, and at ten in the evening (TEN, for Christ's sake; I don't go out until midnight sometimes!), and about some not having women's toilets at all ... but apparently it's all true, and scarcely a decade and a half gone.\n\nI looked at my watch, wondering how long Lewis was going to keep this up. Telling conventionally-structured jokes uses up material appallingly quickly and if that had been what Lewis was up to I might not have had the prospect of enduring too much more challenging, non-sexist, politically aware, near-the-bone (well, near the bone-head, at any rate) alternative humour, but this observational stuff \u2013 telling people things they already know and getting them to pay you for the privilege (sort of the light entertainment equivalent of psychoanalysis) \u2013 can go on virtually indefinitely. Indeed, I felt like it already had.\n\nLewis was moderately big all of a sudden, after a series of appearances on that late-night TV show. The programmes had been recorded at a Comedy Festival in Melbourne, Australia, which Lewis had been invited to (hence his inability to make old Margot's funeral). Tonight was the premiere date on his first solo UK tour, and it looked depressingly likely that it would be totally sold out, thanks to the advertising power of television. If he hadn't given me the complimentary tickets I doubted that Gavin and myself would have stood any chance of getting in (but then if he hadn't given me the complimentary tickets a troop of wild Clydesdales on speed wouldn't have dragged me here).\n\nI looked at my watch again. Half an hour gone. So far he had said exactly one thing I found even slightly amusing, and that was right at the start: 'At one stage I thought I was a complete asshole.' (There followed the inevitable pause for effect). 'But I passed through that.'\n\nLaugh? I almost.\n\n'... about my family, ladies and gents, because I come from this very strange family, you know; very strange family indeed ...' Lewis said.\n\nGav turned, big red face beaming; he nudged me. I didn't turn to look at him. I was staring \u2013 glaring \u2013 at the stage. My mouth felt dry. He wouldn't dare, would he?\n\n'There's my Uncle Alfred \u2013'\n\nI started to relax. We do not have an uncle Alfred. Still, maybe he was going to use some true or embroidered slice of family history and just disguise it with a false name.\n\n'Uncle Alfred was a very unlucky man. He was so unlucky we actually called him Unlucky Uncle Alfred. We did. Unlucky Uncle Alfred was so unlucky, he's the only man in history ever to have been killed by an avalanche on a dry ski-slope.'\n\nI relaxed a bit more. He hadn't dared. This was just a joke.\n\n'No, really. He was skiing down when it sort of started to come undone at the top and roll down ... crushed to death by three hundred tons of nylon tufting. Haven't been able to look at a Swiss Roll the same way since.'\n\nAnother nudge from a highly amused Gavin. 'That true, Prentice, aye?'\n\nI gave what I hoped was a suitably withering look, then turned back to the stage. I drank my heavy and shook my head.\n\n'Prentice,' Gav insisted from my side, missing the first part of Lewis's next mirth-infused effusion. 'Zat true, aye?'\n\nObviously my withering look needed more work in front of the mirror. I turned to Gavin. 'Every word,' I told him. 'Except his real name was Uncle Ethelred.'\n\n'Aw aye.' Gav nodded wisely, took a sip from his beer without significantly moving the glass from near his right shoulder, and frowned as he tried to catch up with what Lewis was saying, only to succeed in catching the predictably below-the-belt punch-line. Everybody else laughed, so so did Gav, no less enthusiastically than anybody else, and, interestingly, no less enthusiastically than he had at any other part of Lewis's act, when he'd heard every word. Remarkable. I watched Gav for a while from the corner of my eye, wondering, not for the first and \u2013 barring serious accidents and justifiable homicide \u2013 almost certainly not for the last time, what I was doing sharing a flat with somebody whose cogitative powers I had last had cause to ponder only a few hours earlier, when I had discovered \u2013 while watching the news with Gav \u2013 that he had believed up until then that the Intifada was an Italian sports car.\n\nIn a way I envied Gav, just because he found life such a hoot. He also seemed to think that it was \u2013 like himself, perhaps \u2013 comparatively uncomplicated. As is the way with such things, these subjectively positive qualities tend to have precisely the opposite effect on the temperaments of those in close proximity to the person concerned.\n\nThis was a man, after all, who had not yet mastered something as fundamental and as linear in its properties (for the most part) as running a bath at the correct temperature. How many times had I gone into the bathroom in our flat to find that the bath was full almost to the brim of hot, steaming water? This was an indication that Gav was planning to bathe in an hour or so. Gavin was of the opinion that the way to draw a bath was to fill it entirely from the tap that had the little 'H' on it (thereby reducing the flat's supplies of immediately available hot water to zero), then leaving the resulting body of liquid to cool to something approaching a state in which a human body could enter it without turning instantly the colour of a just-boiled lobster. This normally took about thirty minutes in the depths of winter, and sometimes well over an hour in high summer, during which time Gav was inclined to amuse himself watching television \u2013 soap operas and the less intellectually taxing game shows, preferably \u2013 or eating, say, banana and Marmite sandwiches (just one example from Gavin's extensive repertoire of unique snackettes that entirely substituted culinary originality for anything as boring as tasting pleasant).\n\nMy attempts to explain the subtle dialectics of utilising both hot and cold taps \u2013 consecutively or concurrently \u2013 to produce a bath that could be used immediately without recourse to the Western General's burns unit (with the resulting benefits of freeing the bath for the use of others earlier and in the process using a great deal less electric power, which both we and the planet could ill afford), fell not so much on deaf ears as on open-plan ones. In automotive terms, if Lewis was a motor-mouth, then Gavin was a cross-flow head.\n\nI drained my glass, studied the flattening dregs of foam at the bottom.\n\n'Nuther beer, big yin?'\n\n'No thanks, Gav; I'll buy my own.'\n\nGavin, I had long ago concluded, believed that life revolved around rugby and beer, and that \u2013 especially under the influence of too much of the latter \u2013 sometimes it just revolved. Perhaps it might be a mistake to match him pint for pint.\n\n'Ah; go on. Heavy, aye?' He grabbed my empty glass, and with that he was gone, shouldering his way through the pack of bodies for the distant dream that was the bar. He was still grinning inanely. Probably a good point for him to mount an expedition to the bar. Lewis was in the middle of a long, right-on, faux-na\u00efve spiel about post-isms which Gav probably found a little bewildering. ('I mean, what is post-feminism? Eh? Answer me that? What do they mean? Or have I missed something? I mean, was there a general election last week and nobody told me about it and half the MPs are now women? Are fifty per cent of the directors of all major industries female? Is it no longer the case that the only way to hold on to your genitals if you're brought up in Sudan is to be born a boy? Don't Saudi Arabian driving licences still have a section that says Title: Mr, Mr or Sheik, please delete?')\n\nI really had been going to buy my own drink; anybody who has ever been hard-up will tell you it's the easiest way to regulate one's finances while still remaining nominally sociable, but Gav, profligate though he may have been with the heat plumes from his baths (and kettles; Gavin's determination to wreck the ecosphere through the generation of copious volumes of unnecessary hot water extended to never boiling a kettle that was less than brim-full, even if only a single cup was required), was equally generous when it came to buying drink. At such moments it was almost possible to forget he was also the inventor of custard and thousand-island dressing pudding.\n\nMy brother seemed to be thinking along the same epicurean lines. However, to my horror (emulsified with a small amount of schadenfreudian delight), he appeared to be proposing to sing.\n\nI closed my eyes and looked down, ashamed not just for Lewis but for my whole family. So this was the cutting edge of British alternative humour. Finishing with a song. Good grief.\n\nI shall draw a veil over this performance, but let history record that this pretended paean of praise for Mrs Thatcher \u2013 comparing her to various foods, with only a hint of sarcasm most of the way through ('as English as Blueberry pie') \u2013 ended with the couplet 'Maggie, you're a Spanish omelette, like an egg you just can't be beaten, \/ Maggie, you're all the food that I eat ... twenty-four hours after it's eaten.'\n\nThe puzzled patrons of Randan's, who had been worriedly thinking that perhaps Lewis wasn't quite so right-on after all, and had had his head turned by a sniff of fame and a glimpse of the flexible stuff, suddenly realised their man was still okay (phew), and it had all been an elaborate joke (ha!) as well as a knowing dig at more conventional comedians (nudge), and so duly erupted with applause (hurrah!).\n\nI breathed a sigh of relief that at last it was all over \u2013 barring encores, of course \u2013 clapped lightly, looking at my watch as I did so. A glance revealed that the besieged bar was under further pressure now that the attacking forces had been reinforced following the end of Lewis's act. I suspected that for all my scorn I might yet be grateful for Gav's rugbying skills that evening, not to mention his Neanderthal build (perhaps that was why he found rugby so attractive; he was a throw-back!).\n\nI looked at my watch again, wondering if Lewis would be unduly insulted, and Gav overly disappointed, if we didn't go back-stage to see the great performer afterwards. Things had gone so appallingly well that Lewis would undoubtedly be on a high and hence unbearable.\n\nPerhaps I could plead a headache, if that wasn't too un-butch for Gav to accept. ('Ach, have another few beers and a whisky or two and it'll soon go away, ya big poof,' would be the sort of reply my flat-mate would favour, as I knew to my cost.)\n\n'Excuse me, are you Prentice? Prentice McHoan?'\n\nI'd noticed the woman sidling through the crowd in my direction a few seconds earlier, but paid no real attention, assuming I just happened to be on her route.\n\n'Yes?' I said, frowning. I thought I recognised her. She was short, maybe early forties; curly brown hair and a round, attractive face that looked run-in without being worn out. I coveted her leather jacket immediately, but it wouldn't have fitted me. A glint in her eyes could have been animal lust but was more likely to be contact lenses. I tried to remember where I'd seen her before.\n\n'Janice Rae,' she said, offering her hand. 'Remember?'\n\n'Aunty Janice!' I said, shaking her hand. I suspected I was blushing. 'Of course; you used to go out with Uncle Rory. I'm sorry I knew I recognised you. Of course. Aunt Janice.'\n\nShe smiled, 'Yeah, Aunt Janice. How are you? What are you doing?'\n\n'Fine,' I told her. 'At Uni; last year. History. And yourself?'\n\n'Oh, keeping all right,' she said. 'How are your parents, are they well?'\n\n'Fine. Just great,' I nodded. I looked round to see if Gav was on his way back; he wasn't. 'They're fine. Umm ... Grandma Margot died last month, but apart from that \u2013'\n\n'Oh no!' she said. 'Margot? Oh, I'm sorry.'\n\n'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, well, we all were.'\n\n'I feel terrible; if only I'd kept in touch ... Do you think it would be all right if I, if I wrote ... to your mum and dad?'\n\n'Oh, sure; yeah; fine. They'd be delighted.'\n\n'Even if I'd just made the funeral ...' she said, downcast.\n\n'Yes ... Big turn-out. Went ... not with a whimper.' I nodded at the empty stage. 'Lewis couldn't make it, but everybody else was there.'\n\nHer eyes widened; it was like a light went on beneath her skin, then started to go out even as she said, 'Rory, was he \u2013?'\n\n'Oh,' I said, shaking my hand quickly in front of her, as though rubbing something embarrassing out on an invisible blackboard. 'No; not Uncle Rory.'\n\n'Oh,' she said, looking down at her glass. 'No.'\n\n''Fraid we haven't heard anything for, well, years.' I hesitated 'Don't suppose he ever got in touch with you, did he?'\n\nShe was still looking at her glass. She shook her head. 'No; there's been nothing. No word.'\n\nI nodded my head, looked around for Gav again. Janice Rae was still inspecting her glass. Broke or not I'd have offered to buy her another drink, but her glass was full. I was aware that I was sucking in my lips, trapping them between my teeth. This is something I do when I'm feeling awkward. I wished she would say something more or just go away.\n\n'I always felt,' she said, looking up at last, 'that your dad knew more than he was letting on.'\n\nI looked into her bright eyes. 'Did you?'\n\n'Yes. I wondered if Rory was still in touch with him, somehow.'\n\n'Well, I don't know,' I said. I shrugged. 'He does still talk about him as though ...' I had been going to say as though he were still alive, but that might have hurt her. 'As though he knows where Uncle Rory is.'\n\nShe looked thoughtful. 'That was the way I felt, when I was down there, after Rory ... left. There was one time when ...' She shook her head again. 'I thought he was going to tell me how he knew; let me in on his secret, but ... well, at any rate, he never did.' She smiled at me. 'And how is Lochgair? Your parents still in that big house?'\n\n'Still there,' I confirmed, catching sight of Gav making his way through the scrum of bodies, concentrating on the two full beer glasses in front of him.\n\nJanice Rae looked warm and happy for a moment, and her eyes narrowed a little, her gaze shifting away to one side. 'It was a good place,' she said softly. 'I have a lot of happy memories of that house.'\n\n'I guess we all do.'\n\nUncle Rory had met Janice Rae at some literary do in Glasgow. She was ten years older than him, a librarian, divorced, and had a ten-year-old daughter called Marion. She lived with her mother, who looked after Marion while Aunt Janice was at work. I could remember the two of them coming to the house for the first time. Uncle Rory had brought various women to the house before; I'd ended up calling them all aunty, and I was calling Janice that by the end of the first weekend they spent at Lochgair.\n\nDespite the fact that Marion was a girl and a couple of years older than me, I got on well enough with her. Lewis \u2013 also two years older than me \u2013 was going through an awkward stage during which he wasn't sure whether to treat girls with scorn and contempt, or sweeties. James, born the year after me, liked what and who I liked, so he liked Marion. She became one of The Rabble, the generic and roughly affectionate term my father applied to the various kids he would tell stories to on a Family Sunday.\n\nA Family Sunday was one when either the McHoans or the Urvills played host to the other family, plus that of Bob and Louise Watt. Aunt Louise had been born a McHoan; her father was the brother of Matthew, my paternal grandfather and husband of Grandma Margot, she of the heart that broke only after she was safely dead. Bob Watt was brother of Lachlan, whose taunting of Uncle Fergus concerning the matter of hiding inside a medieval lavatory led to the unfortunate incident with the display case and resulted in Lachlan becoming the man with four eyes, but who did not wear glasses.\n\nBob Watt never turned up for Family Sundays, though Aunt Louise did, often wearing thick make-up and sometimes dark glasses. Sometimes the bruises showed through, all the same. Now and again there'd be something she didn't even try to hide, and I can recall at least two occasions when she turned up with her arm in a sling. I didn't think very much about this at the time, just assuming that my Aunt Louise was somehow more fragile than the average person, or perhaps excessively clumsy.\n\nIt was Lewis who eventually told me that Bob Watt beat up his wife. I didn't believe him at first, but Lewis was adamant. I puzzled over this for a while, but at length just accepted it as one of those inexplicable things that other people did \u2013 like going to the opera or watching gardening programmes \u2013 which seemed crazy to oneself but made perfect sense to the individuals concerned. Maybe, I thought, it was a Watt family tradition, just as Family Sundays and at least one person in each generation of our family managing the Gallanach Glass Works seemed to be two of our traditions.\n\nMum and Aunt Janice became friends; she and dad were much closer in age to Janice than Rory, and they were parents, too, so perhaps it was no surprise they got on. Whatever; after Uncle Rory disappeared, Aunt Janice and Marion still came down to the house every now and again. It was the year after Rory vanished that Marion, then about fifteen, got me into the garage where the car was. We'd been out on our bikes, riding round some of the forestry tracks one hot and dusty September day; everybody else was in Gallanach, shopping, or \u2013 in Lewis's case \u2013 playing football.\n\nMarion Rae had the same curly brown hair her mother did. She had a round, healthy-looking face which even I could see was quite pretty, and was about the same height as I was, though a little heavier (I was of that age and body-type concerning which adults help to ease the difficult journey through the age of puberty by making remarks about disappearing if you turned sideways, and running around in the shower to get wet). We'd seen some old burnt-out wreck of a car abandoned in a ditch, up in the hills; I'd said something about the sports car under the covers in the courtyard garage back at the house; Marion wanted to see it.\n\nI still maintain I was seduced, but I suppose I was inquisitive as well. Girls were still less interesting to me than models of the Millennium Falcon and my Scalextric set, but I had conducted a couple of masturbatory experiments which had set me thinking, and when Marion, exploring the warm, dim, tarpaulin-green gloom of the old car with me, said, Phew she was hot, wasn't I? and started unbuttoning her blouse, I didn't say No, or run away, or suggest we get out of the stuffy garage.\n\nInstead I blew on her.\n\nWell, she was sweaty, and I could see moisture on the top of her chest, above the little white bra she was wearing, trickling between the white swells of her breasts. She seemed to appreciate the gesture, and lay back and closed her eyes.\n\nI remember her asking if I wasn't hot, and feeling my leg, and her hand running up to my thigh, then there was some silly line like, 'Oh, what's this?' as she felt inside my shorts, expressing what even then I thought was probably fake surprise at what she discovered there. My own words were no less inane, but something \u2013 either the heat of the moment or just retrospective embarrassment \u2013 seems to have wiped them and most of the subsequent relevant details from my memory. Still, I recall being pleased that everything seemed to fit, and work as well, and if our (now I think about it, ridiculously fast) mutual thrusts hadn't unsettled the car on its blocks, that sense of having successfully risen to the occasion and worked out what to do with relatively little guidance would have been my abiding impression of the proceedings.\n\nInstead, just as I was both coming and going (going; 'Wow!'), and Marion was making some extremely interesting noises, the car collapsed under us.\n\nIt shuddered and fell onto the concrete floor of the garage with an apocalyptic crash. We'd shaken it off its blocks. Some bizarre sense of symmetry had made me insist that we should not lie across the back seat, but that I should instead squat on the transmission tunnel, with Marion half on the rear seat, and half on me. As a result, the Rapide fell backwards off its wooden supports and its boot rammed into a load of drums and cans stored behind it, crushing them in turn against an old Welsh dresser that had been consigned to the garage years earlier; this \u2013 loaded up with tins and tools and spare parts and junk until it was top heavy \u2013 proceeded to over-balance. It leant, creaking, towards the car, and \u2013 although it did not actually fall over \u2013 distributed most of its load of paint, spanners, plugs, bolts, spare bulbs, bits of trim, hammers, wrenches and assorted boxes and tins all over the tarpaulin-covered boot, rear window and roof of the Lagonda.\n\nThe noise was appalling, and seemed to go on forever; I was dead still, my orgasm \u2013 more quality than quantity \u2013 completed, and my mouth hanging open as the cacophony reverberated through the garage, the car and my body. Dust filled the car's interior; Marion sneezed mightily and almost squeezed me out of her. Something heavy hit the rear window, and it went white all over, crazed into a micro-jigsaw of tiny glass fragments.\n\nEventually the noise stopped, and I was about to suggest that we ran away very soon and to some considerable distance before anybody discovered what had happened, when Marion grabbed both my buttocks with a grip like steel, stuck her panting, sweat-streaked face against mine, and snarled those words with which I \u2013 in common with most men, I suspect \u2013 would eventually become relatively familiar, in similar, if rather less dramatic situations: 'Don't Stop.'\n\nIt seemed only right to comply, but my mind wasn't really on what I was doing. Another precedent, perhaps.\n\nMarion seemed to have some sort of fit; it coincided with \u2013 or perhaps was the cause of \u2013 the rear window falling in. It showered us both with little jagged lumps of glass, green under the tarpaulin-light, like dull emeralds. We both stayed like that for a bit, breathing heavily and brushing crystalline fragments out of each other's hair and laughing nervously, then started the delicate business of disengaging and trying to dress in the back of a tarpaulin-covered car full of gravelly glass.\n\nWe completed dressing outside the car, in the garage, shaking bits of glass out of our clothes as we did so. I had the presence of mind to put these fragments back into the car, and spread the glass more evenly over the seat, removing the shard-shadow of Marion from the cracked green leather (there was, I noticed with a little pride and considerable horror, a small stain there \u2013 probably more Marion than me, to be honest \u2013 but there was nothing I could do about that beyond wiping it with my hanky). We closed the garage, grabbed our bikes and headed for the hills.\n\nIt was a week before dad discovered the disaster scene in the garage. He never did work it out.\n\nLewis threatened to tell him, but that was only because I'd been stupid enough to blab to my brother, and then been incensed to discover he'd screwed Marion too, twice; on the two previous weekends she'd been down. I immediately threatened to tell the police because Lewis was older than she was and that made it Statue-Tory Rape (I'd heard of this on TV); he said if I did that he'd tell dad about the car ... and so there we were, me barely a teenager and already arguing over a woman with my brother.\n\n'It was good to meet you again, Janice,' Lewis said, shaking Aunt Janice's hand, then taking her elbow in the other hand, kissing her on the cheek. 'You should get in touch with Mary and Ken again; I'm sure they'd love to hear from you.'\n\n'I will,' she said, smiling, then fastened the collar of her glove-leather jacket.\n\nLewis turned to me. 'Bro; sure we can't tempt you?'\n\n'Positive,' I said. 'Got a lot of work to do. Enjoy yourselves.'\n\n'Aw, come on, ya big poof,' Gav said, breathing beer. He put one arm round my shoulders and hugged. From the amount of pressure involved, I gathered he was trying to fold me in half. ''Sno even wan yet!'\n\n'Yes, Gavin, the night is yet senile; but I have to go. You have fun, all right?'\n\n'Aye, okay.'\n\n'Taxi!' shouted Lewis.\n\nWe were standing on Byres Road, outside Randan's, which would be closing soon. Lewis, some guy he'd been friendly with at Uni, a girl who may or may not have been Lewis's girlfriend, and Gav had all decided to head for some bar in the centre of town. I had demurred, as had Janice.\n\n'Prentice; see you at the weekend.' Lewis hesitated as he pulled the taxi door open for the maybe-girlfriend, then came up to me, hugged me. 'Good to see you, little brother.'\n\n'Yeah; you take care,' I said, patting his back. 'All the best.'\n\n'Thanks.'\n\nThey left in the taxi; Janice and I walked up Byres Road to where she'd left her car. It started to rain. 'Maybe I will take that lift,' I told her.\n\n'Good,' she said. She pulled a small umbrella from her shoulder bag, opened it as the rain came on heavier. She handed it to me. 'Here; you'd better hold this; you're taller.' She took my arm and we had to lean towards each other to keep even our heads dry under the little flimsy umbrella.\n\nShe smelled of Obsession and smoke. She, Gav and I had gone to meet Lewis, holding court in the small dressing room. Later we had all gone to the downstairs bar, then Lewis had announced he wanted to keep on drinking after they called time. Janice had had a couple of fizzy waters, and seemed totally sober, so I reckoned it was safe to accept a lift.\n\n'You don't really like your brother that much, do you?' she asked.\n\n'Yes, I do,' I told her. The traffic hissed by, heading up Byres Road. 'He just ... annoys me sometimes.'\n\n'I thought you seemed a bit reluctant when he suggested going back home this weekend.'\n\nI shrugged. 'Oh, that's not Lewis; that's dad. We aren't speaking.'\n\n'Not speaking?' She sounded surprised; maybe amused. 'Why not?'\n\n'Religious differences,' I said. It had become my stock reply.\n\n'Oh dear.' We turned onto Ruthven Street, away from the bright shop fronts and traffic. 'Still a bit further to go,' she said.\n\n'Where are you parked?'\n\n'Athole Gardens.'\n\n'Really? Not a good place to live if you had a lisp.'\n\nShe laughed, squeezed my arm.\n\nHello, I thought. I switched the umbrella from one hand to the other and put my arm lightly round her waist. 'I hope I'm not taking you out of your way. I mean, I could walk. It isn't far.'\n\n'No problem, Prentice,' she said, and put her arm round my waist. Hmm. I thought. She gave a small laugh. 'You were always thoughtful.' But somehow, the way she said it, I thought, No, she's just being _friendly._\n\nWe got into the Fiesta; she dumped the brolly in the back. She put both hands on the wheel, then turned to me. 'Listen, I've got some ... some papers Rory left with me. I did mean to send them to your father, but to be honest I lost track of them, and then didn't find them again until mum died and I was clearing stuff out ... I don't suppose it's anything ... you know, that the family needs, is it?'\n\nI scratched my head. 'Dad has all Rory's papers, I think.'\n\n'It's just old poems and notes; that sort of thing.' She started the car; we put our belts on. She took a pair of glasses from her shoulder bag. 'All a bit confusing, really.'\n\n'Hmm,' I said. 'I suppose dad might want a look at them. Wouldn't mind looking at them myself, come to think of it.'\n\n'Do you want to pick them up now?' She looked at me, her round face soft-looking in the orange blush of the sodium vapour. Her hair was like a curly halo. 'It isn't far.'\n\n'Yeah, okay. I guess so.'\n\nI watched her face. She smiled as we pulled away. 'You sound just like Rory sometimes.'\n\nJanice Rae was the last person known to have seen Uncle Rory, one evening in Glasgow. Rory had been staying with friends in London for the previous fortnight. He had talked to his agent and seen some television people about doing some travel series, but whatever deal he'd been trying to set up with the BBC, it had fallen through.\n\nAt the time Rory was still \u2013 just \u2013 living off Traps, which was attracting a trickle of money even then, when he'd spent everything he'd got for later travel books and occasional articles. He was sharing a flat with an old pal called Andy Nichol who worked in local government; according to Andy, Rory had moped around their flat for a couple of days, shut in his room mostly, supposedly writing, then when Andy had come back from work one day, Rory had asked if he could borrow Andy's motorbike for the night. Andy had given him the keys, and Rory had set off; he'd stopped briefly at Janice Rae's mum's place, and said something about having an idea; some way of saving the project he'd been working on; adding some new ingredient.\n\nHe'd given Janice the folder that she now wanted to give me, eight years later, and then rode off into the sunset, never to be seen again.\n\nHer flat was on Crow Road, not all that far away, down near Jordanhill. As she showed me into the place, down a hall lined with old movie posters, I asked her if she'd ever heard Grandma Margot use the saying: away the Crow Road (or the Craw Rod, if she was being especially broad-accented that day). It meant dying; being dead. 'Aye, he's away the crow road,' meant 'He's dead.'\n\nJanice looked away from me when I said those words, mumbled about the papers and went to get them.\n\nIdiot, I told myself. I stood in the living room; it was full of heavy old furniture that looked as though it belonged somewhere else, and some limited edition modern prints. On a sideboard, there was a photograph of Janice Rae's dead mother, and another of her daughter Marion and her husband. Marion was a police-woman in Aberdeen. I shook my head, grinning and feeling very old and very young at once.\n\n'Here,' Aunt Janice said. She handed me a cardboard folder stuffed with loose papers. On the spine it said CR in black felt-tip. The folder was burgundy but the spine was faded to grey.\n\n'CR?' I said.\n\n_'Crow Road,'_ Janice said quietly, looking down at the folder in my hands.\n\nI wasn't sure what to say. While I was still thinking, she looked up, bright-eyed, glanced around at the walls of the flat and shrugged. 'Yeah; I know. Sentimental of me, eh?' She smiled.\n\n'No,' I said. 'It's ... it's \u2013' The words sweet and nice suggested themselves, but didn't seem right. '\u2013 fitting. I guess.' I stuck the folder under my arm, cleared my throat. 'Well ...' I said.\n\nShe had taken off her jacket; she wore a blouse and cords. She shrugged. 'Would you like some coffee? Something stronger?'\n\n'Umm ...' I said, taking a deep breath. 'Well ... aren't you tired?'\n\n'No,' she said, folding her arms. 'I usually read way past this time of night. Stay; have some whisky.'\n\nShe took my jacket, poured me a whisky.\n\nI sat down on a huge, surprisingly firm old couch. It looked like brown leather, but any smell it had had was gone. I held the whisky glass up. 'Won't you?' I said. This is like playing chess, I thought.\n\n'Well, not if I have to drive you home, Prentice.'\n\n'Oh ... I could ... walk,' I smiled bravely. 'Can't be more than three or four miles. Less than an hour. You'd lend me a brolly, wouldn't you? Or there might be a night bus. Please; have a whisky; sit down, make yourself at home.'\n\nShe laughed. 'Okay, okay.' She went to the table where the bottles were, poured herself a whisky. Somewhere in the distance, that sound of the city: a siren warbling.\n\n'Stay here, if you like,' she said, slowly putting the top back on the bottle. She turned, leaning back against the table, drinking from her glass, looking down at me. 'That's if you want to ... I don't want you to think I'm seducing you or anything.'\n\n'Shit,' I said, putting my glass down on a rather over-designed coffee table. I put my hands on my hips (which is rather an unnatural thing to do when you're sitting down, but what the hell). 'I was kinda hoping you were, actually.'\n\nShe looked at me, then gave a single convulsive laugh, and right until then I think it might still have gone either way, but she stood there, her back to the table, set her glass down upon its polished surface, put her hands behind her back, and looked down, her head forward and a little to the left. Her weight was on her left leg; her right leg was relaxed, knee bent in slightly towards the left. I could see she was smiling.\n\nI knew I'd seen that stance before, and even as I was getting up from the couch to go over to her I realised she was standing just the way Garbo does in _Queen Christina,_ during the Inn sequence, when she's sharing the best room with John Gilbert, playing the Spanish ambassador who doesn't realise until that point the disguised Garbo is a woman, not a man. She starts to take her clothes off eventually, and gets down to her shirt; then Gilbert looks round, does a double take and looks back; and she's standing just like that, and he knows.\n\nIt had \u2013 I recalled, even as I went over to her \u2013 been one of Uncle Rory's favourite old films.\n\nIt was one of those wonderful first nights when you never really do more than drowse between bouts of love-making, and even when you do think no more; that's it, finito ... you still have to say good-night, which itself means a kiss, and a hug; and each touch begets another touch more sweet, and the kiss on the cheek or neck moves to the lips, the lips open, the tongues meet ... so every touch becomes a caress, each caress an embrace, and every embrace another coupling.\n\nShe turned to me, during that night, and said, 'Prentice?'\n\n'Mm-hmm?'\n\n'Do you think Rory's ... away the crow road? Do you think he's dead?'\n\nI turned on my side, stroked her flank, smoothing my hand from thigh to shoulder, then back. 'I really don't know,' I admitted.\n\nShe took my hand, kissed it. 'I used to think, sometimes, that he must be dead, because otherwise he'd have been in touch. But I don't know.' There was just enough light seeping in past the curtains to let me see her head shaking. 'I don't know, because people sometimes do things you'd never have thought they would ever do.' Her voice broke, and her head turned suddenly; she pushed her face into the bedclothes; I moved over to hold her, just to comfort her; but she kissed, hard, and climbed on top of me.\n\nI had, up until that point, been performing an agonising re-appraisal of the indignant signals of total, quivering, painful exhaustion flooding in from every major muscle I possessed. My body's equivalent of the Chief Engineer was screaming down the intercom that the system just wouldn't take any more punishment, Jim, and there was no doubt that I really should have been pulling out and powering down just then ...\n\nBut, on the other hand, what the heck.\n\n' \"... all your nonsenses and truths, your finery and squal-adoptions, combine and coalesce, to one noise including laugh and whimper, scream and sigh, forever and forever repeating, in any tongue we care to choose, whatever lessened, separated message we want to hear. It all boils down to nothing, and where we have the means and will to fix our reference within that flux; there we are. If it has any final signal, the universe says simply, but with every possible complication, 'Existence,' and it neither pressures us, nor draws us out, except as we allow. Let me be part of that outrageous chaos ... and I am.\" '\n\nHer voice was sleepy; the hand that had been quietly ruffling my hair had now gone limp. The litany subsided, the quiet words not echoing in the dark room.\n\nUncle Rory's words, apparently. At first just thought; a mantra to delay ejaculation \u2013 a slightly more civilised, if narcissistic, alternative to brother Lewis's thoughts about constructing MFI kitchen units. Then, once, she had asked him what he thought of when they made love (and smoothed over his protestations of eternal in-head fidelity) to discover that \u2013 purely to prolong her pleasure \u2013 he sometimes recited a piece of his own poetry to himself. He was persuaded to repeat it, for her, and it became a shared ritual.\n\n'Always ... always liked that,' she said quietly, shifting a little to fit her body to mine. 'Always...'\n\n'Hmm,' I said, and felt her breathing alter. 'Good-night, Janice,' I whispered.\n\n'Night, Rore,' she murmured.\n\nI wasn't sure what to feel. Eventually I yawned, pulled the duvet over the two of us, and smiled into the darkness.\n\nI went to sleep wondering what on earth had possessed Uncle Rory to write a miserable, incomprehensible line 'your finery and squal-adoptions'.\n\nWhat in the name of hell was a squal-adoption, for goodness' sake?\n\nThere was something else nagging me; my conscience. The embarrassing truth was that despite having taken a sort of policy decision years ago, the gist of which was: no condom, no sex, Janice and I had not been using one. She'd emplaced a cap, but that, as the leaflets will tell you, don't provide no AIDS protection. So here I was indulging in casual \u2013 if intensive \u2013 sex with a woman I hadn't even heard anything about for eight years; hell, she could have been up to anything! But she had claimed the opposite, and I'd believed her. It was probably the truth, but it was exactly such instances of casually misplaced trust that were undoubtedly going to kill better men and women than me over the next decade or so.\n\nStill, it was done. I drifted away.\n\nI swear I was asleep when my eyes flicked on their own and in a burst of dark certainty I thought: _squalid options!_ that's what he wrote: _Squalid options,_ before going instantly back to sleep again.\nCHAPTER 6\n\nThey sat, stood or lay within the shattered cone-stump of the old broch, looking out over the more recent, but just as empty, equally abandoned, and even more forlorn square crater of the never-used production-platform yard. Above, a lark \u2013 just a speck against the blue \u2013 sang, its shrill voice jetting fluid bursts of song.\n\n'Aw, tell us, Mr McHoan; please.'\n\n'Yeah, dad; what is it?'\n\n'Please, Uncle Ken. Pleeease.'\n\n'Yeah, come on, Mistur McHoan. Tell us. Whit is it?'\n\n'What's what?'\n\n'The sound you can see!' Prentice shouted, jumping down from the broken wall of the broch; Ashley was climbing higher.\n\n'The sound you can see?' he said thoughtfully. He leant back on the sun-warmed stones, looking across the grass circle inside the old ruin, over the spray of grey stones downhill where the broch had fallen or been torn away, over the sharp green tops of the pines to the waters of Loch Fyne. A white-hulled yacht ran gull-winged before the wind, heading north-east up the loch towards the railway bridge at Minard point; perhaps heading for Inveraray. In the distance, a few miles behind, he could see another boat, its spinnaker a tiny bright bulb of pure yellow, like a flower on a gorse bush.\n\n'Well,' he said. 'You can't see it from here.'\n\n'Aw naw!'\n\n'Where can you see it from then, uncle?'\n\n'Well, where we were when I told you about it; we could see it from there.'\n\n'In the Old House?' Diana said, looking puzzled.\n\n'That's right.'\n\n'It isn't the wind, then,' Helen Urvill said, and sat down beside him.\n\nLewis snorted derisively. 'The wind!' he said. 'Don't be so stupid.'\n\n'Aunt Ilsa said it might be breeze block, but I wasn't to say anything until ... aw ... _heck!'_ Prentice flattened his hand and struck it off his forehead with a loud slap; he fell over backwards into the long grass.\n\n'Very amusing, Prentice,' Kenneth sighed.\n\n'Hi, Mr McHoan; look at where I am!'\n\n'Good grief, Ashley; be careful.' She was at the top of the wrecked broch wall, rising into the sky like a grey sine on a sheet of blue paper; Ashley a point.\n\n'I'm no scairt, Mr McHoan!'\n\n'I bet you aren't, but I didn't _ask_ you whether you were scared or not, Ashley; I told you to be careful. Now get down here.'\n\n'I'll come down if ye tell us whit the sound ye can see is, so ah will, Mr McHoan.'\n\n'Get down here, you wee monkey!' he laughed. 'I was about to tell you, before you started hollering. Down; now.'\n\n'Aw, dinnae get yer knickers in a twist, Mr McHoan,' Ashley said, shaking her blonde-haired head and starting to climb down the curved edge of the wall.\n\n'I won't, young lady,' he said. Diana and Helen looked shocked, then giggled. Lewis and Prentice sniggered quietly.\n\n'She said knickers, Mr McHoan,' Dean Watt said.\n\n'Ah'm tellin mum,' Darren told his sister as she made her way, feet and bum first, down the slope of stone.\n\n'Ach, away and bugger yourself, Darren Watt,' the girl said, checking on her next footstep.\n\n'Haaaw!' gasped Diana.\n\n'Ashley!' Kenneth said, exasperated.\n\n'Oh, Mr McHoan, did you hear whit she said! Did ye! Yur a wee bissum, so ye are, Ashley.'\n\n'Yes, I did, and \u2013'\n\n'That's very rude you know, young lady,' Prentice said, wagging his finger at the girl. ('Oh shut up, Prentice,' said Lewis.)\n\n'Ah'm no a bissum \u2013'\n\n'Uncle Ken: what's a bu \u2013'\n\n'Waa! She said \u2013'\n\n'Knickers knickers kni \u2013'\n\n' \u2013buggerlugs.'\n\n'All right, all right!' Kenneth said, raising his voice over a high-pitched babble of Childish. 'That's enough! Do you want to hear the answer or not, you horrible rabble?'\n\n'But-'\n\n'She \u2013'\n\n'Ah'm \u2013'\n\n'Stop it!' he roared. He jumped to his feet and shook one fist in the air, dramatically pirouetting so that the gesture included each of them. 'You're all acting like children! If I'd wanted this sort of treatment I'd have stayed a teacher!'\n\n'But dad, we _are_ children,' Prentice said, rolling his eyes and shaking his head and falling over in the grass again, sighing loudly.\n\n'Innocence is no excuse, Prentice McHoan!' he roared, shaking one finger at the prone child. 'That was the motto of my old school and you'd all better remember it!'\n\nLewis was the only one not amused by the performance. He played with a bit of grass. The others were either laughing outright or sat, bunched up, heads down between shoulders, arms tense by sides, making snorting, guffawing noises and exchanging nodding, wide-eyed looks.\n\n'Oh dear lord!' Kenneth shouted to the bare blue sky, his arms wide, head thrown back. 'Look down upon this awful stupid bairn of mine and teach him some common sense before the world gets him!'\n\n'Ha, Mr McHoan! You dinnae believe in the lord!' Ashley roared from half-way up the wall, almost level with his head.\n\nHe swivelled to her. 'And that's enough of your old buck, Ashley Watt! I don't believe in Santa Claus but Prentice still gets presents at Christmas, doesn't he?'\n\n'Ah!' Ashley said, pointing at him. 'That's different, Mr McHoan; there's hunners of them!'\n\nHe took a step back, looked shocked. 'You little barrack-room barrister; what sort of extra-mural comment is that?' He threw his arms out wide again. To his shock, Ashley jumped right into them, yelling,\n\n'Jurmonimo!'\n\nThe girl slammed into his chest, clunked her head off his chin, little arms whacking round his neck, knees hoofing into his stomach. He put his arms out to hold her, staggered back, almost fell, aware that behind him were the twins, sitting on the grass.\n\nHe bent his knees, flexed his back, and did not collide with or fall over the twins. He wobbled upright with Ashley still clinging to him, legs round his waist now. She smelled ... sweaty, was probably kindest. 'Well,' he wheezed, winded. 'Thank you for that contribution, Ashley.' The others were relatively quiet. Ashley was rubbing her forehead vigorously with one hand. He frowned, lifted the girl away from his chest so he could look at her face. Apart from being grubby, it looked all right. _'What_ did you shout, Ashley?'\n\n'Please, Mr McHoan,' the wee rough voice said, 'Ah said JURMONIMO!'\n\nHe started to laugh and had to put her down. He went to his knees, then sat down and rolled over. All the rest joined in except Ashley, who stood, arms folded, bottom lip stuck out fiercely.\n\n'This isnae funny,' she said, turning away. 'Ah'm away tae get fed.'\n\n'Ha ha ha ha,' Kenneth McHoan said, holding his tummy. 'Ha ha.'\n\n'Were your classes this hilarious?'\n\nKenneth opened his eyes.\n\n'Uncle Rory!' Prentice said, and ran for the man; the boy jumped up onto him rather the way Ashley had leapt down onto his father. Rory laughed and caught him, swung him around, let go an arm and grabbed a leg, whirling the boy round once. 'Wheee!' Prentice yelled. Rory landed him one-handed.\n\nKenneth went to Rory, hugged him. 'God, man, it's good to see you.'\n\n'You too, Ken.'\n\n'You just get back?' Kenneth laughed.\n\n'Ten minutes ago.'\n\nThe two men separated; Kenneth looked his brother up and down.\n\n'Uncle Rory! Uncle Rory! Do some magic; do a trick!'\n\nRory's chestnut curls had been cut back to what was almost a crew-cut; his face was tanned, clean-shaven. Rory pursed his lips, took a coin from his pocket, bent down to the children, made the coin progress across the knuckles of one hand, then disappear into his fist; he waved over it, and when the fist became hand, the coin was gone. Squeals.\n\nRory looked lean and a little tired; his jeans were white with wear, and frayed at one knee. He wore a cheesecloth shirt and smelled vaguely of patchouli.\n\nThe coin re-appeared behind Diana's ear. She put one hand to her mouth, eyes wide. The others went, 'Yaaayy!'\n\nKenneth grinned, shook his head, as Rory straightened, a little stiffly. 'More! More! Do it _again!'_\n\n'Later,' Rory said, looking serious, mysterious, and winking.\n\n'So,' Kenneth said. 'How's the world?'\n\nRory shrugged, 'Still there.'\n\n'Back for long?'\n\nAnother shrug, and an easy smile. 'Dunno. Maybe.'\n\n'Well,' Ken said, putting one arm round his brother's shoulders and starting to walk towards the path, where the still-frowning form of Ashley Watt stood, arms crossed tight as her brows. Ken smiled broadly at her, glanced at Rory. 'Better get all the family in the one place before you start answering questions; otherwise you'll get fed up telling the same stories all the time.' Kenneth turned round, waved to the rest of the children. 'Come on, rabble; your Uncle Rory's back from exotic places and he's got much better stories than me!'\n\nThe children started after them. The two men came up to Ashley; Rory ruffled her hair. She frowned. Kenneth lifted her up with a grunt, held her dangle-legged in front of him. 'Sorry if I upset you, Ashley,' he told her.\n\n'Huh, okay, Mr McHoan,' she said. 'Ah'm sorry ah swore.'\n\n'Okay,' he set her down.\n\nShe looked down the hillside to the forestry track that led back to Lochgair, glanced up at him, then back at the other children, and said loudly, 'Ah bet ah can be back at the hoose first, though but.' She turned and ran.\n\nThe rest raced after her, whooping and hollering past Kenneth and Rory.\n\nKenneth shook his head. 'Preprandial stampede; traditional,' he told his brother. He made a show of squeezing Rory's boney shoulder. 'Woa; feels like you could do with a bit of feeding up yourself.'\n\n'Yeah,' Rory said, looking down at the heather. 'Well, my stories might be a bit thin, too; maybe I should tell them to you first. Let you re-tell the kids.' He gave a small laugh. 'You're the professional fictioneer in the family. I'm just a glorified hack.'\n\n'Hey, is that false modesty or even a note of jealousy there, young Rore?' Kenneth laughed, squeezing his brother's shoulder again. 'Come on, man; I stayed here and had weans and taught weans and you were off getting famous; consorting with tigers and wandering through the Taj Mahal and then wowing us all; fucking celebrity; toast of the town and plenty of bread; literary festivals, awards \u2013'\n\n'Travel writing awards,' Rory sighed.\n\n'Nothing wrong with that. Jeez; last time I _saw_ you, you were on TV. What was that line? \"Better lionised than mauled.\"?' Ken laughed as they walked down the hill.\n\nRory made an exasperated noise, shook his head. 'Ken, don't you remember anything?'\n\nKen looked nonplussed. 'What? Did I get it wrong?'\n\n'No, but that was your line. _You_ said that. Years ago. One night. We were drunk; I don't know ... but you said it, not me.'\n\n'Did I?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\nKen frowned. 'You sure?'\n\n'Positive,' Rory snapped.\n\n'Good grief. I'm wittier than I thought.' Ken shrugged. 'Well; you're welcome to it. But anyway; let your poor old brother have his turn. Don't begrudge me for being able to distract the odd pre-adolescent from the TV for the odd half-hour.'\n\nRory shook his head. 'I don't, Ken,' he said, and sighed again. 'I'm not jealous.' He looked at his brother; bearded, hair still dark, face cheerfully lined but still young-looking. 'Just those end-of-ramble blues.' Rory shrugged, the thin shoulders moving under Kenneth's arm. 'But it's good to be back.'\n\nKen smiled. They saw Prentice walking back up through the grass and fern towards them, panting. The others were kicking up a cloud of dust on the forestry track; a small and highly noisy storm heading Lochgair-ward.\n\n'What is it, Prentice?' Kenneth called.\n\n'Dad!' the boy gasped from some distance off.\n\n'What?'\n\n'What _was_ the sound ...' He took a deep breath. 'You can see?'\n\n'The Sound of Jura!' he yelled. 'Now keep running or you'll get no dinner!'\n\n'Okay!' Prentice called. He jogged off, shaking his head.\n\nThe rain fell with that impression of gentle remorselessness west coast rain sometimes appears to possess when it has already been raining for some days and might well go on raining for several more. It dissolved the sky-line, obliterated the view of the distant trees, and continually roughened the flat surface of the loch with a thousand tiny impacts each moment, every spreading circle intersecting, interfering and disappearing in the noise and clutter of their successors. It sounded most loud as it pattered on the hoods of their jackets.\n\n'Ken, are you sure fish are going to bite in this weather?'\n\n'Course they will, Prentice. Have some faith.'\n\n'Well that's good, coming from you.'\n\nKenneth McHoan looked at his son, sitting looking suitably miserable in waterproofs in the bows of the little boat. 'Just a phrase. I could have said, \"Trust me,\" I suppose.'\n\n'Huh.' Prentice said. 'That's no better. Who was it used to say \"If someone says 'Trust me' ... don't\"?'\n\n'Na,' Kenneth said, shaking his head. 'That was Rory. I never said that.'\n\n'You did!' Prentice said, then seemed to realise he was sounding petulant, and looked away again. He plonked the rear end of the fishing rod down in the bottom of the boat, watched the thin end waggle up and down for a while. He folded his arms, leaned forward, hunching up. 'God, I'm depressed.'\n\n'Cheer up,' Kenneth said, falsely hearty. 'Have some more coffee.'\n\n'I don't want coffee.'\n\n'Well, you forced me into it; I was saving this for later, but ...' Kenneth opened the poppers on the Berghaus jacket, unzipped and dug into the deep internal pocket, pulled out a hip-flask. He offered it to Prentice.\n\nPrentice looked at it, looked away. 'I don't think that's going to solve anything.'\n\nKenneth sighed, put the flask away again, completed reeling in, cast again, and slowly wound the lure in once more. 'Prentice; look, we're all sorry about \u2013'\n\nDarren Watt was dead.\n\nHe'd been on his motorbike, driving to Glasgow one bright day. He was overtaking a truck on the long straight at the start of Glen Kinglas; a car pulled out onto it from the Cowal Road. Darren had assumed the driver had seen him, but the driver had only looked one way; hadn't thought to check there was nothing overtaking on his side of the road. Darren's bike hit the wing of the car doing eighty; he might have survived being thrown into the open road or the heather and grass at the road-side, but he had started to turn as he saw the car coming out in front of him, so hit it at a slight angle; he was catapulted across the road and into a lay-by; he hit the big concrete litter bin full on, and was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.\n\n'It's not just Darren,' Prentice said. 'It's everything; it's ... it's Uncle Rory; Aunt Fiona, and ... shit, it's even doing History, dad. Jesus; do human beings ever just get on with each other? Why are we always at each other's throats?'\n\n'Well, I wouldn't worry about Rory,' Kenneth said quietly.\n\n'Why shouldn't I? He's dead. He must be; it's been six years; we could probably have him legally declared dead.' Prentice kicked the rod. 'Good excuse for a wake; and we wouldn't even have the expense of a coffin or anything.'\n\n'Prentice ...' Kenneth said.\n\n'Well!' Prentice shouted. 'You're always so fucking smug about Rory being alive! What do you know? What makes you so smart?'\n\n'Prentice, calm down.'\n\n'I will not! Christ, dad, do you realise how insufferable you can be? Mr Omniscience. Jeez.' Prentice looked away at the grey landscape of water, cloud and dripping trees.\n\n'Prentice, I don't know for certain Rory's alive, but I'm fairly sure. In a round-about sort of way, he keeps in touch. I think. That's all I can say.' He started to say something else, then stopped himself. 'Oh, I don't know what to say. I want to say, \"Trust me,\" but ... looks like Rory himself has ruled that out. Can't say he isn't right about that ... It's true, most of the time. But I'm not lying to you.'\n\n'Maybe not,' Prentice said. He looked back at Kenneth. 'But you might be wrong about the things you're so busy telling us the truth about.'\n\n'I did say I wasn't certain.'\n\n'Yeah? What about Darren?'\n\nKenneth looked puzzled. He shook his head. 'No, you've lost me; what do you \u2013'\n\n'I can't believe he's just ... gone, like that, Ken. I can't believe there isn't something left, some sort of continuity. What was the point of it all, otherwise?'\n\nKenneth put the rod down, clasped his hands. 'You think Darren's ... personality is still around, somewhere?'\n\n'Why not? How can he be such a great guy, and clever and just ... just a good friend, and some fuckwit forgetting to look both ways cancels out all that ... probably not even a fuckwit; probably some ordinary guy thinking about something else ... How ...' Prentice shoved his hands under his oxters, rocked forward, head down. 'God, I hate getting inarticulate.'\n\n'Prentice, I'm sorry. Maybe it sounds brutal, but that's just the way it is. Consciousness ... goodness, whatever; they haven't got any momentum. They can stop in an instant, just snuffed out. It happens all the time; it's happening right now, all over the world; and Darren was hardly an extreme example of life's injustice, death's injustice.'\n\n'I know!' Prentice put his hands up to the jacket hood, over his ears. 'I know all that! I know it's happening all the time; I know the death squads are torturing children and the Israelis are behaving like Nazis and Pol Pot's preparing his come-back tour; you keep telling us; you always told us! And people just scream and die; get tortured to death because they're poor or they help the poor or they wrote a pamphlet or they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time; and nobody comes to rescue them, and the torturers never get punished; they retire, they even survive revolutions sometimes because they have such fucking useful skills, and no super-hero comes to save the people being tortured, no Rambo bursts in; no retribution; no justice; nothing ... and _that's just it!_ There _has_ to be something more than that!'\n\n'Why?' Kenneth said, trying not to sound angry. 'Just because we feel that way? One wee daft species, on one wee daft planet circling one wee daft star in one wee daft galaxy; us? Barely capable of crawling into space yet; capable of feeding everybody but ... nyaa, can't be bothered? Just because we think there must be something more and a few crazy desert cults infect the world with their cruel ideas; _that's_ what makes the soul a certainty and heaven a must?' Kenneth sat back, shaking his head. 'Prentice, I'm sorry, but I expected better of you. I thought you were smart. Shit; Darren dies and you miss Rory, so you think, \"Bugger me; must be a geezer with the long flowing white beard after all.\"'\n\n'I didn't say \u2013'\n\n'What about your Aunt Kay?' Kenneth said. 'Your mum's friend; she did believe; must be a God; prayed every night, went to church, practically claimed she had a vision once, and then she gets married, her husband dies of cancer within a year and the baby just stops breathing in its cot one night. So she stops believing. Told me that herself; said she couldn't believe in a God that would do that! What sort of faith is _that?_ What sort of blinkered outlook on the world is it? Didn't she _believe_ anybody ever died \"tragically\" before? Didn't she ever read her precious fucking Bible with its catalogue of atrocities? Didn't she believe the Holocaust had happened, the death camps ever existed? Or did none of that matter because it had all happened to somebody else?'\n\n'That's all you can do, isn't it?' Prentice shouted back. 'Shout people down; skim a few useful anecdotes and bite-sized facts and always find something different to what they've said!'\n\n'Oh I'm sorry! I thought it was called argument.'\n\n'No, it's called being over-bearing!'\n\n'Okay!' Kenneth spread his arms out wide. 'Okay.' He sat still for a time, while Prentice remained hunched and tense-looking in the bows. When Prentice didn't say anything, Kenneth sighed. 'Prentice; you have to make up your own mind about these things. I ... both your mother and I have always tried to bring you up to think for yourself. I admit it pains me to think you ... you might be contemplating letting other people, or some ... some doctrine start thinking for you, even for comfort's sake, because \u2013'\n\n'Dad,' Prentice said loudly, looking up at the grey clouds.'I just don't want to talk about it, okay?'\n\n'I'm just trying \u2013'\n\n'Well, stop!' Prentice whirled round, and Kenneth could have wept to see the expression on the face of his son: pained and desperate and close to tears if he wasn't crying already; the rain made it hard to tell. 'Just leave me alone!'\n\nKenneth looked down, massaged the sides of his nose with his fingers, then took a deep breath. Prentice turned away from him again.\n\nKenneth stowed the fishing rod, looked round the flat, rain-battered waters of the small loch, and remembered that hot, calm day, thirty years earlier, on another fishing trip that had ended quite differently.\n\nHe took up the oars. 'Let's head back in, all right?'\n\nPrentice didn't say anything.\n\n'Fergus, darling! You're soaked! Oh; you've brought some little friends with you, have you?'\n\n'Yes, mother.'\n\n'Good afternoon, Mrs Urvill.'\n\n'Oh, it's young Kenneth McHoan. Didn't see you under that hood. Well, jolly good; come in. Take off your coats. Fergus, darling; close that door.'\n\nFergus closed the door. 'This is Lachlan Watt. His dad works in our factory.'\n\n'Oh, really? Yes. Well ... You've all been out playing, have you?'\n\nMrs Urvill took their coats, handling Lachy's tattered and greasy-looking jacket with some distaste. She hung the dripping garments up on hooks. The rear porch of the Urvill's rambling house, at the foot of Barsloisnoch hill, beyond the north-west limits of Gallanach, smelled somehow cosy and damp at the same time.\n\n'Now, I dare say you young men could do with some tea, am I right?'\n\nMrs Urvill was a tall, aristocratic-looking lady Kenneth always remembered as wearing a head-scarf. She wasn't that day; she wore a tweed skirt, sweater, and a pearl necklace which she kept fingering.\n\nShe made them tea, accompanied by some slices of bread and bramble jelly. This was served at a small table in Fergus's room, on the first floor.\n\nFergus had one slice of bread, and Kenneth managed two before Lachy wolfed all the rest. The war was only over a few months, and rationing was still in force. Lachy sat back, belched. 'That was rerr,' he said. He wiped his mouth on the frayed sleeve of his jumper. 'See the breed in our hoose; it's green, so it is.'\n\n'What?' said Kenneth.\n\n'What rot,' Fergus said, sipping his tea.\n\n'Aye it is,' Lachy said, pointing one grubby finger at Fergus.\n\n'Green bread?' Kenneth said, grinning.\n\n'Aye, an' ah'll tell ye why, tae, but ye've goat tae promise no tae tell anybudy.'\n\n'Okay,' Kenneth said, sitting forwards, head in hands.\n\n'Hmm, I suppose so,' Fergus agreed unenthusiastically.\n\nLachy glanced from side to side. 'It's the petrol,' he said, voice low.\n\n'The petrol?' Kenneth didn't understand.\n\n'Load of absolute rot, if you ask me,' Fergus sneered.\n\n'Na; it's true,' Lachlan said. 'See the Navy boys, oot oan the flyin boat base?'\n\n'Aye,' said Kenneth, frowning.\n\n'They pit this green dye in thur petrol, an if yer foun wi that in the tank uv yer motor car, ye get the jile. But if ye pit the petrol through breed, the dye comes oot, an ye can use the petrol an naebudy kens a thing. It's true.' He sat back. 'An that's why we huv green breed in oor hoose, sometimes.'\n\n'Woof,' Kenneth said, fascinated. 'Bet it tastes horrible!'\n\n'That's illegal,' Fergus said. 'My mother knows the C.O. at the base; if I told her she'd tell him and you'd probably all be arrested and you _would_ get the jail.'\n\n'Aye,' Lachy said. 'But you promised no tae tell, didn't ye?' He smiled thinly over at Fergus, sitting on the other side of the small table. 'Your maw always call ye \"Darlin\", aye?' .\n\n'No,' Fergus said, sitting straight and drawing a hand across his forehead, moving some hair away from his eyes. 'Only sometimes.'\n\nKenneth got up and went to stare at a big model ship in a glass case on the far side of the room. It was an ordinary steamer, not a warship, unfortunately, but it looked magnificent, like one of the ones he'd seen in the big museum in Glasgow when his dad had taken him there. The ship was wonderfully detailed; every stanchion and rail was there; every tiny port-hole, even the oars in the tiny shore-boats behind the tall funnel, their seats and internal ribs thinner than match-sticks.\n\n'You her darlin, ur ye?' Lachy said, wiping some crumbs from the plate. 'You her wee darlin, that right, Fergus?'\n\n'Well, what if I am?' Fergus said sniffily.\n\n'Weyl, whort if a eym?' Lachy mimicked. Kenneth looked round from the gleaming, perfect model.\n\nFergus's face looked pinched. 'At least my mum and dad don't hit me, _Master_ Watt.'\n\nLachy sneered, stirred in his seat. 'Aye, great fur some,' he said, standing up. He walked round the room, looking at some wooden aircraft models on a desk, tapping them. 'Very fancy carpet, Fergus darling,' he said, going up and down on his heels on the thick pile of the intricately-patterned rug. Fergus said nothing. Lachy picked up some lead soldiers from a couple of trays ranked full of them, then stood inspecting some maps on the wall, of Scotland, the British Isles, Europe and The World. 'They red bits aw ours, are they?'\n\n'No, they're the King's actually,' Fergus said. 'That's the Empire. They're not red because they're _commie_ or anything.'\n\n'Ach,' Lachy said, 'Ah ken that; but ah mean they're British; they're ours.'\n\n'Well, I don't know about \"ours\", but they belong to Britain.'\n\n'Well,' Lachy said indignantly. 'Ah'm British, am ah no?'\n\n'Hmm. I suppose so,' Fergus conceded. 'But I don't see how you can call it yours; you don't even own your own house.'\n\n'So whit?' Lachy said angrily.\n\n'Yes, but, Fergus,' Kenneth said. 'It is the British Empire and we're all British, and when we're older we can vote for MPs to go to parliament, and they're in power, not the King; that's what the Magna Carta says; and we elect them, don't we? So it is our Empire, really, isn't it? I mean you when think about it.'\n\nKenneth walked into the middle of the room, smiling at the other two boys. Fergus looked unconvinced. Lachlan rolled his eyes, looked at the small single bed, then at a couch in one corner. 'You got this room all tae yerself?' Lachy said, voice high.\n\n'Yes, so?' Fergus replied.\n\n'Bi Christ, it's all right for some, eh, Ken?' Lachy said, winking at Kenneth and walking over to the model ship in the glass case. 'Aye,' he said, tapping the glass, then twisting a little key in a lock at one end of the case; the side panel of the case opened. 'Ah bet ye can get up tae all sorts aw things in here by yourself at nights.' He started trying to haul the model out of the case.\n\n'Stop that!' Fergus shouted, standing up.\n\nLachy shifted the whole glass on its stand, reached in and lifted the model out of its two wood and brass cradles. Kenneth saw the rear mast bend against the top of the case. The black threads of the radio wires sagged.\n\n'How can ye play with it in here?' Lachlan protested, straining to pull the model out.\n\n'Lachy \u2013' Kenneth said, starting over to him.\n\n'It's not a toy!' Fergus said, running over. He swatted Lachy's arm. 'Stop it! You'll break it!'\n\n'Ach, all right,' Lachy said. He slid the model ship back in. Kenneth noticed with some relief that the mast flexed back into shape, hauling the radio antennae taut again. 'Keep yer hair on, _darling.'_\n\nFergus locked the door of the case and pocketed the key. 'And don't call me that!'\n\n'Sorry, _darling.'_\n\n'I said stop it!' Fergus shrieked.\n\n'Ach, dinnae wet yer knickers, ya big lassie.'\n\n'You disgusting little \u2013'\n\n'Oh, come on, you two; act grown-up,' Kenneth said. 'Fergus,' he pointed over to the window, and a slope-topped display case standing under it. 'What's all this stuff?'\n\n'That's my museum,' Fergus said, glaring at Lachy and walking to the window.\n\n'Oo, a museum,' Lachy said in a pretend posh voice, but came over too.\n\n'Things I've found, locally,' Fergus explained. He stood over the case, pointing. 'That's a Roman coin, I think. And that's an arrowhead.'\n\n'Whit's that green thing?' Lachy said, pointing to one corner.\n\n'That,' Fergus told him, 'is a fossilized pear.'\n\nLachy guffawed. 'It's a bit aw bone, ya daft bugger. Where'd ye get yon? Back a the butcher's shop? Find it in the dug's bowl, aye?'\n\n'No I did not,' Fergus said indignantly. 'It's a fossilized pear; I found it on the beach.' He turned to Kenneth. 'You've got some education, Kenneth; you tell him. It's a fossilized pear, isn't it?'\n\nKenneth looked closer. 'Hmm. Umm, I don't know, actually.'\n\n'Fuckin bit a bone,' Lachy muttered.\n\n'You filthy-mouthed little wretch!' Fergus shouted. 'Get out of my house!'\n\nLachy ignored this, bent down, face over the cabinet.\n\n'Go on; get out!' Fergus screamed, pointing to the door.\n\nLachy looked sourly at the pitted, vaguely green exhibit labelled 'Fossilized Pear, Duntrunne Beach, 14th of May 1945.'\n\n'I'm not kidding! Out!'\n\n'Fergus \u2013' began Kenneth. He put a hand on the other boy's arm. Fergus hit it away, face white with fury.\n\nLachy wrinkled his nose, which was almost touching the glass of the cabinet. 'Still, whit dae ye expect frae a laddy that hides in a lavvy?'\n\n'You _pig!'_ Fergus screamed, and brought both fists thudding down on the back of Lachy's head. Lachy's face crashed through the glass, into the display case.\n\n'Fergus!' Kenneth yelled, pulling him away as Fergus kicked at Lachy's legs. Lachy screamed, jerked back, spilling glass, arms flailing, face covered in blood.\n\n'Aah, ya basturt!' he wailed, staggering. 'Ah canny see!'\n\n'Lachy!' Kenneth shouted, hauling his hanky out of his pocket. He went to Lachy, grabbed his shoulders. 'Lachy; stand still! Stand still!' He tried to wipe the blood from the other boy's eyes; it was all over his jumper, dripping onto the carpet.\n\n'But ah canny see! Ah canny see!'\n\n'What on _earth_ is going on in he \u2013 Oh my God!' Mrs Urvill said, from the doorway. 'Fergus! What have you been letting him do? And get him off that carpet; it's Persian!'\n\nLachlan lost an eye. The Gallanach Glass Works, Ornaments Division, made him an artificial one. Fergus was soundly beaten by his father, and not allowed out for a fortnight. The Urvills granted the Watt family the sum of one thousand guineas in full and final settlement of the matter, the papers drawn up by the firm of Blawke, Blawke and Blawke.\n\nLachlan was still growing, and perhaps because of that during his mid-teens the eye kept falling out, so another, slightly larger, was made; Lachlan was allowed to keep the old one. He had a third glass eye, which he'd got from the hospital when the first one had been lost for a week (it was eventually discovered, months later, under a chest of drawers in Lachy and Rab's bedroom, where presumably it had rolled during the night), but it was of inferior quality; duller and less lifelike, and he kept it as a spare.\n\nHe was the boy with four eyes, and he didn't even need glasses. Or rather a monocle.\n\n'Keep an eye out for us, Lachy!' and variations thereof became a popular phrase amongst his school-mates, though not to his face after the first boy to say it within Lachy's earshot, if not sight, was held down by a half-dozen powerful young Watts and forced to swallow the brown-irised orb, and then to bring it back up.\n\nMary McHoan sniffed the air. 'Prentice, you smell of petrol.'\n\nPrentice collapsed into a seat in the living room. 'Sorry,' he said.\n\nHis mother looked over the top of the _Guardian_ at him. On the television, a game of snooker was proceeding silently. Prentice sat and looked at it. Mary put the paper down, took off her reading glasses.\n\n'Where's Ken?' Prentice asked. He still had his black leather jacket on.\n\n'In bed, reading,' Mary told him. She folded the paper, went over to her son, and sniffed the air above him. 'And smoke! You smell of ... of non-pub smoke,' she said, going back to her seat. 'What have you been up to?'\n\nPrentice leaned towards her. 'Promise you won't tell dad?'\n\n'No, Prentice,' she said, smoothing her skirt. She took a coffee mug from the small table at her side and sipped from it. 'You know I'm terrible with secrets; not like your father.'\n\n'Hell's teeth. Oh, well,' Prentice said. 'Whatever; we got let off, so \u2013'\n\n'Let off what?' Mary said, alarmed.\n\n'We were in the Jac and Bill Gray said he'd heard the Watts saying \u2013 well, it was Ashley, he said, which was why I didn't believe him at first \u2013 but he'd heard them ... they were all sitting, all the young ones; the Watts, anyway, sitting there being antisocial and morose, cause of Darren getting killed, and anyway, Bill heard Ash saying there was only one way to deal with it, or they'd never get over it properly, and they should all get sledgehammers and stuff \u2013'\n\n'Sledgehammers!' Mary said, clutching at her elbows.\n\n'That's what I said!' Prentice said, sitting forward, unzipping his jacket. 'Sledgehammers? And Bill said yeah, he was sure; and crowbars, that sort of stuff; they were going to get it out of their system, and I believed Bill because he's so straight; no side at all, and I looked over and they were all standing up and putting their coats on and drinking up, and I tried to talk to Ashley, but they were out the door, and Ash said something about coming along too, and it was Bill had the car, and he'd dashed for a pee, and by the time we got out to the car park they were tearing off in Dean's Cortina, and then Bill couldn't get his car started and we headed for the Watts' house, but by then they'd been there and they passed us; we turned round, followed their lights, caught up with them at those new houses out by Dalvore, but they were just throwing stuff in the boot. I shouted to them, but they got back in and screamed off again, so we followed.\n\n'Jeez, I thought they knew where that guy lived that hit Darren, but Bill said he was from East Kilbride, and I said but we're heading that way! And they just kept going; past here and up to Inveraray, and then I thought, God, I hope I know what they're really going to do, and I told Bill, and he said Shit, let's hope so.'\n\n'Prentice.'\n\n'Sorry. Anyway, I was right. They drove to Kinglas; Glen Kinglas, with us following, and they got parked in the lay-by, and we did too, and we all got out, and we all stood there for a while, and nobody said anything. Then they got the sledgehammers and the crowbars out, and we turned the cars and left the engines running so we had plenty of light, then Bill and I sat on the bank and watched them ... Oh, wow! Mum; you should have seen them! They smashed that fucking litter bin \u2013'\n\n'Prentice!'\n\n'Sorry. But they did; they pulverised the mother. They whacked and smashed and blasted the damn thing to smithereens then tore them to shreds too; hammered the metal bins inside flat, turned the concrete shell of the thing to dust, and I'd asked Bill if it was okay, and he'd said, In the circumstances ... so I went to his car and got his spare can of petrol, because Bill's really organised that way, and said, Was it all right? And they were all standing there, sweating and panting and looking just so _drained,_ and Ash just sort of nodded, and I emptied the petrol all over the remains of the bin and Dean threw a match at it and Whumph! up it went, and we just stood there.\n\n'And then this cop stopped! I couldn't believe it! What were the chances? And like only a couple of cars had passed; hadn't stopped, though one had slowed down, certainly, but it had gone off again. And this enormous fu \u2013 great sergeant got out and he was, like _incandescent!_ The bin was nothing on this guy! And we all just stood there, and I thought, Oh no, this really could end badly, because there was just him by himself, and he was cursing us up and down and the Watts weren't taking it too well and I thought I could hear Dean starting to growl, and I finally managed to get a word in edgeways when he said who'd set it on fire and I said me and stepped forward, showing him the petrol can, and told him what it was all about; about Darren hitting the thing and it being like \u2013 well I tried not to use too many long words, but like, expiation ... and he listened, and I was like in that way when you're really nervous where once you've started you can't stop, and I was probably repeating myself all over the place and rambling and not making much sense, but I just kept on going, and he just stood there with this look like thunder on his face, all lit by the fire, and I stopped and said we knew it was wrong and we'd accept having to be punished for it \u2014 even though I heard Dean growling when I said it \u2014 but even so, although we might be sorry we'd done it, we were glad too, and that was just the way it was, and if we didn't normally have respect for public property, it wouldn't mean so much to us to destroy it like we had.'\n\nPrentice swallowed. 'And I shut up at last, and nobody said anything, and the fire was nearly out by this time, and the big sergeant just says, 'Get on your way and pray I never haul any of you up for anything else.' And I'm like, Yessuh, massa, and kicking dirt over the wee bits of the fire that's left and the Watts are still surly but they're putting all the stuff back in the boot of the Cortina and the big guy's just standing with his arms folded watching us, and I'm thinking; Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, hell; there's still a few good apples left, and we just got into our cars and drove away, with the big sergeant still standing there glowering like Colossus in our tail lights.' Prentice spread his hands. 'That's it.'\n\n'Well,' Mary said. 'Good grief.' She shook her head, glanced at the snooker, then put her glasses on and took up her paper again. 'Hmm, well, I probably won't tell your father that. Away and wash your hands, try to get rid of that smell. There's plenty of milk in the fridge if you want cereal.'\n\n'Right-oh, mum.' He came over to her, kissed her hair.\n\n'Yuk; what a stink. Go and wash, you vandal.'\n\n'Thanks for listening, mum,' he said, on his way to the door.\n\n'Oh, I had a choice, did I?' she said, pretending primness.\n\nPrentice laughed.\nCHAPTER 7\n\nWe passed the lay-by near the Cowal Road junction doing about ninety. I watched as we went by. Nothing; it was just a damp, deserted parking place with a big new concrete litter bin (replaced with unusual alacrity, in less than six months). We swept past, trailing light spray. It was a dim, grey day; light drizzle from the overcast, mountains hidden past about a thousand feet. We were on dipped-beam; the instruments glowed orange in front of the delicious, straight-armed, black-skirted, Doc-shoed, crop-blonde, purse-lipped Verity; my angelic bird of paradise, driving like a bat out of hell.\n\n'Yo; Prentice. Get you out of bed?'\n\n'Oh, you guessed.'\n\n'It's a gift. Pick you up at one?'\n\n'Umm ... Yeah. Where are you, Lewis?'\n\n'At the Walkers', in Edinburgh.'\n\n'Oh ... Is Verity there?'\n\n'Yeah; she's coming.'\n\n'Eh?'\n\n'She's coming; to Lochgair. Charlotte and Steve are off to the States this morning, skiing, and Verity \u2013'\n\n'Skiing, to the States? Sheesh, that pack-ice gets \u2013'\n\n'Shut up, Prentice. The upshot is Verity's going to be Festival Perioding with the Urvills. She's going to drive us there.'\n\nAnd me insane, I thought.\n\n'Great,' I said. 'No Rodney?'\n\nLewis laughed. 'No Rodney. Verity is finally a Rod-free zone.'\n\n'Couldn't have happened to a nicer chap.'\n\n'Agree grade and comments. See you thirteen hundred hours.'\n\n'Yeah; see you then.' I put the phone down.\n\nThere was a dartboard above the phone with a picture of Thatcher taped over it. I kissed it. 'Yeeeeee-HA!' I shouted, leaping back into the bedroom.\n\n'Shut up, Prentice,' Gav moaned, muffled, from his bed. He was invisible under a heap of duvet. My bed was on the other side of the room, away from the window, and so not quite as cold as Gav's in the winter. I fell into it, bounced. (Technically I should have Norris's solo room because I've been in the flat longest, but that room's small and noisy; also, Gav doesn't snore and he's quite happy to retreat to the living room couch if I have female company ... That's another thing; there's only room for a single bed in Norris's room). 'Put the heater on, ya bastard,' Gav mumbled.\n\nI leapt up, ninja'd over to Gav's bed and wheeched the duvet off.\n\n'Aw ya \u2013!' He grabbed the duvet back, cocooned himself again. '\u2013 bastard!'\n\n'Gavin,' I told him. 'You are a skid-mark on the lavatory bowl of life. But I respect you for it.' I turned, grabbed my dressing gown and made for the door; with one mighty ninja kick, the side of my right foot connected with all three switches of the fan heater at the same time and it hummed into life. 'I shall make some tea.'\n\n'Dunno about tea; fuckin good at makin a noise.'\n\n'Thank you for sharing that with us, Gav. I shall return.'\n\n'What's the weather like?'\n\n'Hmm,' I said, staring at the ceiling, one finger to my lips. 'Good question,' I said. 'The weather's like, a manifestation of the energy-transfer effected between volumes of the planet's gaseous envelope due to differential warming of the atmosphere at various latitudes by solar radiation. Surprised you didn't know that, actually, Gavin.'\n\nGavin stuck his head out from under the duvet, giving me cause once more to marvel at the impressive way the lad's shoulders merged into his head with no apparent narrowing in between (this appeared to be the principal physical benefit bestowed by the game of rugby; the acquisition of an extremely thick neck, just as the most important thing one could take to the sport was a thick skull, and from it an intact one still in satisfactory two-way communication with one's spinal cord).\n\nGav \u2013 who probably epitomised thick-skulledness, though admittedly would not be amongst one's first fifteen when it came to offering proof of heavy traffic within the central nervous system \u2013 opened one bleary eye and focused on me with the same accuracy one has grown to expect from security forces aiming baton rounds at protesters' legs. 'What the fuck's made you so unbearable this morning?'\n\nI clasped my hands, smiled broadly. 'Gavin, I am in a transport of delight, or at least shall be shortly after one o'clock this afternoon.'\n\nThere was a pause while Gavin's duty-neuron struggled to assimilate this information.\n\nThe intense processing involved obviously exhausted too much of Gav's thinly stretched grey matter to allow speech in the near future, so he contented himself with a grunt and submerged again.\n\nI boogied to the kitchen, singing, 'Walking On Sunshine'.\n\nI watched the orange-white needles swing across their calibrated arcs. Ninety. Jeez. I was sitting behind Lewis, who was in the front passenger seat. I kind of wished I'd sat behind Verity; I wouldn't have seen so much of her \u2013 not even a hint of that slim, smooth face, frowning in concentration as she barrelled the big black Beemer towards the next corner \u2013 but I wouldn't have been able to see the speedometer, either. Lewis seemed unperturbed.\n\nI shifted in my seat, a little uncomfortable. I pulled the seat belt tight again. I checked Verity wasn't watching and adjusted my jeans a little. The folder containing Rory's work lay on the seat by my side; I lifted the file onto my lap, concealing a bulge. There was a reason for this.\n\nWe'd been on the bit of fast dual carriageway between Dumbarton and Alexandria, not long after Verity and Lewis had picked me up. Verity made a sort of wriggling motion a couple of times, straining back against her seat. This force was applied by those long, black-nyloned legs, and though most of the pressure was provided by her left limb, some residual effort pushed her right foot down as well, and on each occasion we speeded up, just momentarily, as her amply-soled Doc Marten pressed against the accelerator.\n\n'You okay?' Lewis had asked, sounding amused.\n\nShe'd made a funny face. 'Yup,' she'd said, shifting down to fourth as a car she'd been waiting to pass pulled back into the slow lane. We were all pressed back into our seats. 'Problem of wearing sussies, sometimes; they sort of pull a bit, you know?' She flashed a smile at Lewis, then me, then looked forward again.\n\nLewis laughed, 'Well, no, can't claim I do know, but I'll take your word for it.'\n\nVerity nodded. 'Just getting things sorted out here.' She strained against the back-rest again, her bum lifting right off the seat. The car, already doing eight-five, roared up to over a hundred. The rear of a truck was approaching rapidly. Verity wiggled her bottom, plonked it back down, calmly braked and shifted up to fifth, dawdling along behind the green Parceline truck while she waited for it to overtake an Esso tanker. 'Parceline, parceline ...' she breathed, tapping her fingers on the thick steering wheel. She made it sound French, pronouncing the word so that it rhymed with 'Vaseline'.\n\n'That better?' Lewis inquired.\n\n'Mm-hum,' Verity nodded.\n\nMeanwhile I was fainting in the back seat, just thinking of what that tight black mid-thigh skirt concealed.\n\nIt had taken until the long, open left-hander that leads down into Glen Kinglas before my erection had finally subsided, and that had been mostly naked fear; Verity had lost it just for a second, the rear of the car nudging out towards the wrong side of the road as we whanged round the bend. Sitting in the rear, maybe it had felt worse, but I'd been petrified. Thankfully, there'd been no traffic coming; the concept of striking up an intimate \u2013 indeed potentially penetrative \u2013 relationship with the rocks on the far side of the road had been bad enough; but even the prospect of a head-on with another lump of metal travelling at anything remotely like the sort of speed we were sustaining might have resulted in me making my mark in the most embarrassing fashion on the leather upholstery of the Bavarian _macht-wagen._\n\nVerity just went 'Whoa-yeah!' like she'd accomplished something, jiggled the steering wheel once and accelerated cleanly away.\n\nAnyway, it's one of the minor unfortunate facts of life that a detumescing willy is prone to trap stray pube hairs under the foreskin as it scrolls forward again, and that was why I was adjusting my clothing as we braked for the bend above Cairndow.\n\nI opened the _Crow Road_ folder lying on my lap and leafed through some of the papers. I'd read the various bits and pieces a couple of times now, looking for something deep and mysterious in it all but not finding anything; I'd even done a little research of my own, and discovered through mum that dad had some more of Rory's papers in his study; she'd promised she'd try and look them out for me. I took a sheet of paper out of the folder and held the page of scribbled, multi-coloured notes up, resting it on one raised knee, gazing at it with a critical look, wondering if Verity could see what I was doing. I cleared my throat. I'd rather been hoping Lewis or Verity might have asked me what the file contained by now, and what I was doing, but \u2013 annoyingly \u2013 neither of them had.\n\n'Sounds?' Lewis asked.\n\n'Sounds.' Verity nodded.\n\nI sighed. I put the sheet back in the folder and the folder back on the other rear seat.\n\nWe rounded the top of Upper Loch Fyne listening to an old Madonna tape, the Material Girl singing 'Papa Don't Preach,' which raised a smile from me, at least.\n\n... Back to Gallanach, for Christmas and Hogmanay. I felt a strange mixture of hope and melancholy. The lights of on-coming cars glared in the dull day. I watched the lights and the drizzle and the grey, pervasive clouds, remembering another car journey, the year before.\n\n'Sounds daft to me, Prentice,' Ashley said, lighting another cigarette.\n\n'It sounds daft to _me,'_ I agreed. I watched the red tip of her cigarette glow; white headlights streamed by on the other side of the motorway, as we headed north in the darkness.\n\nDarren had been dead a couple of months; I had fallen out with my father and I'd been in London for most of the summer, staying with Aunt Ilsa and her long-term companion, whose only name appeared to be Mr Gibbon, which I thought made him sound like a cat for some reason ... Anyway, I'd been staying with them in darkest Kensington, at Mr Gibbon's very grand, three-storeyed town-house in Ascot Square, just off Addison Road, and working at a branch of Mondo-Food on Victoria Street (they were trying a new line in Haggisburgers at the time and the manager thought my accent would help shift them. Only trouble was, when people said, 'Gee, what's in these?' I kept telling them. I don't believe they're on the menu any more). I'd saved some money, grown heartily sick of London, fast food and maybe people, too, and I was getting out.\n\nAsh had been in London for a programming interview with some big insurance company and had offered me a lift back home, or to Gallanach anyway, as I'd exiled myself from Lochgair. Her battered, motley-panelled 2CV had looked out of place in Ascot Square, where I think that anything less than a two-year old Golf GTi, Peugeot 209 or Renault 5 was considered to be only just above banger status, even as a third car, let alone a second.\n\n'Sorry I'm late, Prentice,' she'd said, and kissed my cheek. She and Lewis had been out for a meal the night before. Big brother was staying in Islington, making a living from TV comedy shows by being one of the twenty or so names that zip up the screen under where it says Additional Material By:, and trying to be a stand-up comic. I'd been invited to dinner too, but declined.\n\nI'd hoped she'd just pick me up and we'd be on our way, but Ash hadn't seen Aunt Ilsa for a long time and insisted on exchanging more than just pleasantries with her and Mr G.\n\nAunt Ilsa was a large, loud woman of forbiddingly intense _bonhomie;_ I always thought of her as being the most remote outpost of the McHoan clan (unless you counted the still purportedly peripatetic Uncle Rory); a stout bulwark of a woman who \u2013 for me at least \u2013 had always personified the dishevelled ramifications of our family. A couple of years older than dad, she had lived in London for three decades, on and off. Mostly, she was off; travelling the world with Mr Gibbon, her constant companion for twenty-nine of those thirty years. Mr Gibbon had been an industrialist whose firm had employed the ad agency which Aunt Ilsa had worked for when she'd first moved to London.\n\nThey met; he found her company agreeable, she found his a new slogan. Within a year they were living together and he had sold his factory to devote more time to the rather more demanding business of keeping Aunt Ilsa company on her peregrinations; they had been on the move more or less ever since.\n\nMr Gibbon was a grey-haired pixie of a man, ten years older than Aunt Ilsa, and as tiny and delicate as she was tall and big-boned. Apparently he was quite charming, but as the basis of his charm seemed to rest upon the un-startling stratagem of addressing every female he encountered by the fullest possible version of her name (so that every Julie became a Juliana, every Dot extended to a Dorothea, all Marys became Mariana, Sues Susanna, etc. Sorry; etcetera) as well as the slightly perverse habit of calling all young girls 'madam' and all old women 'girls,' it was a charm to which I at least was quite prophylactically immune.\n\n'And you are ...?' he asked Ashley as he welcomed her in the hallway.\n\n'Ash,' she said. 'Pleased to meet you.'\n\nI grinned, thinking Mr Gibbon would have a hard job finding a convincing embellishment for Ash's uncommon monicker.\n\n'Ashkenazia! Come in! Come in!' He led the way to the library.\n\nAsh turned back to me as we followed, and muttered, 'He's a pianist, isn't he?'\n\nTotally misunderstanding what she meant, I sneered slightly at Mr Gibbon's back, and nodded. 'Yeah; isn't he just.'\n\nAunt Ilsa was in the library; she had a heavy cold at the time and I am tempted to say we discovered her poring over a map, but the inelegant truth is that she was searching the shelves for a misplaced book when we entered.\n\nShe spent most of the next half hour or so talking about the extended holiday to Patagonia she was planning, in an extremely loud voice and with an enthusiasm that would probably have embarrassed the Argentinian Tourist Board.\n\nI sat fretting, wanting to be away.\n\nBy some miracle, the 2CV hadn't been towed away when I'd finally dragged Ash out; we'd made it to the M1, picked up a hitcher and \u2013 rather beyond the call of duty, I'd have said \u2013 dropped him where he was going, in Coventry. We got lost in Nuneaton trying to get back on the M6, and were now heading through Lancashire at dusk, still an hour or more from the border.\n\n'Prentice, there are a lot of better reasons for not talkin to your dad, believe me.'\n\n'I believe you,' I said.\n\n'What about your mother?'\n\n'No, she's still talking to him.'\n\nShe tutted. 'You know what I mean. You're still seeing her, I hope.'\n\n'Yeah; she came to Uncle Hamish's a couple of times, and she drove me back to Glasgow once.'\n\n'I mean, what's the big argument? Can't you just agree to disagree?'\n\n'No; we disagree about that.' I shook my head. 'Seriously; it doesn't work that way; neither of us can leave it alone. There's almost nothing either of us can say that can't be taken the wrong way, with a bit of imagination. It's like being married.'\n\nAsh laughed. 'What would you know? I thought your mum and dad were pretty happy.'\n\n'Yeah, I suppose. But you know what I mean; when a marriage or relationship is going wrong and it's like everything that one person says or doesn't say, or does or doesn't do, seems to rub the other one up the wrong way. Like that.'\n\n'Hmm,' Ash said.\n\nI watched the red tail lights. I felt very tired. 'I think he's angry that having given me the freedom to think for myself, I've not followed him all down the line.'\n\n'But, Prentice, it's not as though you even believe in Christianity or anything like that. Shit, I can't work out what it is you do believe in ... God?'\n\nI shifted uncomfortably in the thin seat. 'I don't know; not God, not as such, not as a man, something in human form, or even in an actual thing, just ... just a field ... a force \u2013'\n\n' \"Follow the Force, Luke,\" eh?' Ash grinned. 'I remember you and your Star Wars. Didn't you write to Steven Spielberg?' She laughed.\n\n'George Lucas.' I nodded miserably. 'But I don't even mean anything like that; that was just background for the film. I mean a sort of interconnectedness; a field effect. I keep getting this feeling it's already there, like in quantum physics, where matter is mostly space, and space, even the vacuum, seethes with creation and annihilation all the time, and nothing is absolute, and two particles at opposite ends of the universe react together as soon as one's interfered with; all that stuff. It's like it's there and it's staring us in the face but I just can't ... can't access it.'\n\n'Maybe it isn't accessible,' Ash said, fag in mouth, holding the steering wheel with her knees and making a stretching, circling motion with her shoulders (we were on a quiet stretch of motorway, thankfully). She took her cigarette from her mouth again, put her hands back on the wheel. I hoped she wasn't getting sleepy; the drone of the wee Citro\u00ebn's engine was cataleptically monotonous.\n\n'How not?' I said. 'Why shouldn't it be accessible?'\n\n'Maybe it's like your particle; inevitably uncertain. Soon as you understand one part of what it means, you lose any chance of understanding the rest.' She looked over at me, brows furrowed. 'What was that routine Lewis used to do? About Heisenberg?'\n\n'Oh,' I said, annoyed now. 'I can't remember.'\n\n'Something about being at school and bursting into this office and saying, look, are you Principal here or not, Heisenberg? And him going, weellll ...' She gave a small laugh. 'Mind, it was funnier the way Lewis told it.'\n\n'A little,' I conceded. 'But \u2013'\n\n'Lewis seems to be making it in the old alternative comedy scene, doesn't he?' Ash said.\n\n'So we're told,' I said, looking away. 'I don't imagine Ben Elton or Robin Williams have considered early retiral quite yet, though.'\n\n'Aye, but good for him, though, eh?'\n\nI looked at Ash. She was watching the road as we roared down a slight incline at all of seventy. Her face was expressionless; that long, Modigliani nose like a knife against the darkness. 'Yeah,' I said, and felt small and mean-spirited. 'Aye, good for him.'\n\n'It true you've not seen much of him in London?'\n\n'Well, he has his own friends, and I was usually too tired after work.' (A lie; I wandered art galleries and went to films, mostly.) 'And I couldn't have paid my way, either.'\n\n'Ach, Prentice,' Ashley said, chiding. She shook her head (the long mane of fair hair was tied up, so it did not swish and fall over her shoulders). 'He'd have liked to have seen you more often. He's missed you.'\n\n'Oh, well,' I said.\n\nI watched the lights again for a while. Ashley drove and smoked. I felt myself nodding off, and shook myself awake. 'Ah, dear ...' I rubbed my face with both hands, asked, 'How do you keep awake?'\n\n'I play games,' she told me.\n\n'Oh yeah?'\n\n'Yeah,' she nodded, licking her lips. 'Like Name That Tail-Light.'\n\n'What?' I laughed.\n\n'True,' she said. 'See that car up ahead?'\n\nI looked at the two red lights. 'Yeah.'\n\n'See how high up the lights are, not too far apart?'\n\n'Yo.'\n\n'Renault 5.'\n\n'No kidding!'\n\n'Mm-hmm. One it's over-taking?'\n\n'Yeah?'\n\n'Horizontally divided lights; that's an old Cortina; mark 3.'\n\n'Good grief.'\n\n'Here's a Beemer. New five series, I think ... about to pass us; should have lights that slant in slightly at the bottom.'\n\nThe BMW passed us; its rear lights were slanted in slightly, at the bottom. We overtook the old Ford and the 5 a little later.\n\n'Course,' Ash said. 'It's more fun in a fast car when you're doing all the overtaking, but even just sitting at seventy you'd be surprised how much you pass, sometimes. Now.' She held up one finger. 'Listen and feel as we pull back into the slow lane.'\n\nAsh swung the ancient 2CV to the left, then straightened.\n\n'What?' I said.\n\n'Nothing.' She grinned. 'Missed all the cats' eyes. Bump-free lane-changing. A great skill, you know.' She glanced at me, mock-serious. 'Not so easy in a Ferrari, or whatever; the tyres are too wide. But skinny wee tyres like this thing's got are just about ideal.'\n\n'Allow me to sit back in amazement, young Ashley,' I said, crossing my arms and twisting in my seat to face her. 'I had no idea it was possible to extract such multifarious enjoyment from a simple night-time car journey.'\n\nAshley laughed. 'Cobbled streets are even more fun, if you're a girly.'\n\n'Huh. Trust you to lower the tone of the whole conversation _and_ introduce a note of clitoris envy at the same time.'\n\nAsh laughed louder, ground the cigarette butt out in the ashtray, flipped it closed. 'Och, it's a gift; I'd be ashamed of myself if I wasn't just so fucking nice with it.' She put her head back and roared with laughter at this, before shaking her head and restoring her attention to the road. I laughed a little too, then stared out of the side window, wondering suddenly if Ash had slept with Lewis last night.\n\nShe clicked the indicator on. 'Ye Olde Motorway Services. Come on; yer Aunty Ashley'll buy you a coffee and a sticky bun.'\n\n'Gee, you sure know how to show a boy a good time.'\n\nAsh just smirked.\n\nWhen I woke, about mid-day in the flat on Crow Road, Janice Rae had gone. To work, I assume. There was a note, on a small blue sheet of writing paper: 'You're the better stand-up. Call me, sometime, if you want. J.'\n\nI looked at that qualified second sentence with an odd feeling of sadness and relief.\n\nDrying off after a shower, I stood looking at two framed movie posters on the bathroom wall. _Paris, Texas_ and _Dangerous Liaisons._\n\nI had a coffee and some toast, washed up and let myself out. I'd put the _Crow Road_ folder in a Tesco bag, and walked back to our flat under grey skies and through a mild and swirling wind, swinging the carrier to and fro, and whistling.\n\nOur flat was in Grant Street, near St George's Cross (and just off Ashley Street, funnily enough). My flat-mates were out when I got back, which was fine by me; I did not relish the prospect of facing the single-entendres that were Gav's best approximation of wit, and which inevitably followed any sexual adventure of mine or Norris's \u2013 real or imagined \u2014 Gav ever found out about. If I was lucky, Gav would be so shocked at the very idea I had had carnal knowledge of an aunt \u2013 even one of the not-really-an-aunt variety \u2013 that he would just pretend it hadn't happened. Hell, if I was _really_ lucky he might stop talking to me altogether, I thought ... but that didn't seem likely. Or preferable, to be honest; part of me rather looked forward to such taunting. I'd caught a glimpse of my face in the hall mirror once, when Gav was berating me for such rakish tendencies, and I'd been smiling.\n\nI made myself another coffee, extended myself on the sofa \u2013 my legs quivery with fatigue \u2013 opened the folder, pulled out the sheets of paper and started to read.\n\n_Crow Road_ seemed to be the title of Uncle Rory's Big Idea. From the notes, he seemed unsure whether its final form would be a novel, a film, or an epic poem. There were even some pages discussing the possibility of it being a concept album. I lay there on the couch and shuddered at the very thought. So _seventies._\n\nThe material in the folder seemed to fall into three basic categories : notes, bits of descriptive prose, and poems. A few of the notes were dated, all between the early and late seventies. The notes were on a mixture of papers, mostly loose-leaf; ruled, plain, squared, graph. Some were on cartridge paper, some on pages torn from what looked like school exercise books, and some on folded, green-lined computer print-out. Napkins and old cigarette packets did not, sadly, put in an appearance. The notes were scribbled in a no-less motley variety of different-coloured pens (ball, felt and micro-liner) and used a lot of abbreviations and compressions: H _crshd twn carige & tr? Erlier proph. by Sr: 'kld by t. livng &_ t. _ded((?)) H Chrst-lk figr (chng nm to start with T!!???); fml Chrst fr new times? Scot mrtyr? Or Birnam wd idea \u2013 disgsd army??? (2 silly?) ..._ and that was one of the more comprehensible bits.\n\n2 silly, indeed.\n\nThe prose was mostly about places Rory had been; they read like out-takes from his travel pieces. _San Jos\u00e9, Ca: Suddenly, the Winchester House itself seemed like a emblem for the restless American soul...._ about some weird house Rory wanted to use in his story, judging by some cryptic notes at the end of the passage.\n\nThen there was the poetry:\n\n... We know this life   \nis merely a succession   \nof endless brutal images,   \npunctuated,   \nfor effect,   \nby relative troughs   \nwhose gutsy heaves   \nat first disguised   \nbut power us to the next disgrace.\n\n'Not applying for a job with Hallmark cards, then,' I muttered to myself, sipping at my coffee.\n\nBut I kept on reading.\n\nMy head wasn't really in the right state for assimilating all this stuff, but as far as I could gather, Uncle Rory had been trying for years to come up with something _Creative_ (his capital, his italics). Something that would establish him as a Writer: script-writer, poet, lyricist for a rock band, novelist, playwright ... it didn't matter. Being recognised for having kept a glorified diary while wandering through India when he was young and naive wasn't enough for him. It wasn't _serious._ This work, _Crow Road,_ would be Serious. It would be about Life and Death and Treachery and Betrayal and Love and Death and Imperialism and Colonialism and Capitalism. It would be about Scotland, (or India, or an 'Erewhon???') and the Working Class and Exploitation and Action, and there would be characters in the work who would represent all of these things, and the working out of the story _would itself prove the Subjectivity of Truth._\n\n... There were pages of that sort of stuff.\n\nThere were also pages of poems forced into some sort of rhyming structure so that they might conceivably have worked as songs, several paragraphs of references to critical works (Barthes, especially; _Death of the Author!_ shouted what looked like a headline over one entire page of notes devoted to ideas about a _loose-leaf novel\/poem??_ There were location notes for a film and sheets about the physical appearance of the characters and the sort of actors who might play them, these surrounded by doodles, mazes and uninspired drawings of faces. There was a list of bands that might be interested in doing an album (a musical tone-scale running all the way from Yes to Genesis), and a sheaf of sketches for the sets in a stage presentation. What there wasn't was any indication whatsoever that Rory had actually written any part of this great work. The only things that might have been classed as narrative were the poems, and they didn't seem to have anything to do with each other, apart from the fact a lot of them seemed to be vaguely about Death, or Love. Tenuous, was the word that came to mind.\n\nI looked in the folder again to see if I'd missed anything.\n\nI had. There was another small sheet of blue writing paper, in Janice Rae's hand. 'Prentice \u2013 had a look at this \u2013' (then the word 'while', crossed out heavily, followed by the word 'before', also nearly obliterated) '\u2013 Can't find any more; R had another folder. (?) If you find it and work out what it's all about, let me know; he said there was something secret buried in it. (Gallanach)?'\n\nI bobbled my head from side to side. 'Gallanach?' I said, in a silly high-pitched voice, as though quoting. I stretched, grunting with pain as my leg muscles extracted their revenge for having been ignored twelve hours earlier.\n\nI reached for my coffee, but it was cold.\n\n'Dear God, we beseech ye, visit the reactive wrath of their own foulness upon those nasty wee buggers in the Khmer Rouge in general, and upon their torturers, and their leader Pol Pot, in particular; may each iota of pain they have inflicted on the people of their country \u2013 heathen or not \u2013 rebound upon their central nervous system with all the agony they originally inflicted upon their victims. Also, Lord God, we ask that you remember the dark deeds of any communistic so-called-interrogators, in this time of great upheaval in eastern Europe; we know that you will not forget their crimes when their day of reckoning comes, and their guttural, Slavic voices cry out to ye for mercy, and ye reward them with all the compassion they ever showed to those unfortunate souls delivered unto them. Prentice?'\n\nI jumped. I'd almost fallen asleep while Uncle Hamish had been droning on. I opened my eyes. The Tree was looking expectantly at me.\n\n'Oh,' I said. 'Umm ... I'd just like to put in a word for Salman Rushdie. Or at least take one out for old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ...' I looked at Uncle Hamish, who was making quiet signals that I should clasp my hands and close my eyes. We were in the front lounge of Uncle Hamish and Aunt Tone's Victorian villa in the attractive Gallanach suburbette of Ballymeanoch, facing each other over a card table. I closed my eyes.\n\n'Ah,' I said. 'Dear God, we pray that as well as suffering whatever part of the general physical unpleasantness involved in the Iran-Iraq war you may judge to be rightly his, you can find a spare area in his suffering, er, anti-create, for Mr R. Khomeini, late of Tehran and Qom, to experience at least some of the, umm, despair and continual worry currently being undergone by the novelist Mr S Rushdie, of Bombay and London, heathen and smart-alec though he may well be. Amen.'\n\n'Amen,' echoed Uncle H. I opened my eyes. Uncle Hamish was already rising from his seat, looking positively twinkly with health and good cheer. He rubbed his hands. 'Very good,' he said, moving in that oddly stiff and creaky way of his for the door. 'Let us repair for some repast,' he chuckled as he held the door open for me. 'I believe Antonia has prepared something called Cod Creole.' He sniffed the fishy air in the hall; we crossed to the dining room.\n\n'Not Lobster Creole? Or Kid?' I inquired.\n\nBut I don't think Uncle Hamish heard me. He was humming something sombre and looking pleased with himself.\n\nUncle H has developed a fascinating heresy based on the idea that exactly what you did to other people while you were alive gets done right back to you once you're dead. Torturers die \u2013 in agony \u2013 hundreds, maybe thousands of times, before their ravaged souls are finally dropped from the jaws of a fearsome and vengeful God. Those who authorise the dreadful deeds carried out by the torturers (or whoever) also share whatever proportion of this retrospective agony the deity \u2013 or his angelic cost-benefit-calculating representatives \u2013 deem they deserve. Having quizzed The Tree on the details of this scheme, it would appear that said burden of transferred pain is debited from the account of the guy at \u2013 or rather wielding \u2013 the sharp end of the original action, which seems only fair, I suppose.\n\nApparently Uncle Hamish is awaiting divine inspiration on the knotty problem of whether the good things one has accomplished in one's life are also re-lived from the other side (as it were), or simply subtracted from the nasty stuff. At the moment he seems to be veering towards the idea that if you did more good than bad during your life you go straight to Heaven, an arrangement which at least processes the merit of simplicity; the rest sounds like something dreamt up by a vindictive bureaucrat on acid while closely inspecting something Hieronymus Bosch painted on one of his bleak but imaginative-days.\n\nStill, it has its attractions.\n\nAunt Tone and the family's two children, Josh and Becky, and Becky's infant daughter, Iona, were already in the dining room, filling it with bustle and chat.\n\n'Said your prayers?' Aunt Tone said brightly, depositing a steaming dish of potatoes on the table.\n\n'Thank you, yes,' Hamish replied. My uncle worships alone these days, and has done ever since his son left home to become a devout Capitalist (neither his wife nor his daughter had ever bothered with my Uncle's unique brand of condemnationist Christianity; as a rule, the McHoan women, whether so by blood or marriage, have displayed a marked reluctance to take their men-folk's passions seriously, at least outside the bedroom). I think that was why Uncle Hamish had been so delighted when I'd come to stay with the family, and also \u2013 perhaps \u2013 why he was in no hurry to help effect a reconciliation between me and my father.\n\nWe dined on spicy fish which repeated on me for most of the evening in the Jac, meeting pals, until I drowned it in an ocean of beer.\n\n'Happy New Year!' Ashley yelled, flourishing a bottle of generic whisky with more enthusiasm than care; she cracked the bottle off the oak-panelled wall of the castle's crowded entrance hall, but without, apparently, causing damage to either. Clad in a sparkly jacket and a long black skirt, wreathed in silly string and clumps and strands of paper streamers from party poppers, her long hair bunned, she enveloped me in a very friendly kiss, breathing whisky and wine fumes. I kissed right back and she pushed away, laughing. 'Wo, Prentice!' she shouted over the noise. The hall was packed with people; music spilled out from the main hall beyond; pipes and fiddles, tabors and accordions, guitars and a piano, several of them playing the same tune.\n\n'I thought you gave up,' I said, pointing at the cigarette she had stuck behind one ear. Josh and Becky were still at the doors, greeting people they knew.\n\n'I did,' she said, taking the fag from behind her ear and putting it in her mouth. She left it there for a few seconds, then restored it to its previous position. 'See? Still given up; no temptation at all.'\n\nAsh and I levered our way through the press of people while I undid my jacket and struggled to extricate my half-bottle of whisky from a side pocket. We made it into the hall, which was actually less crowded, though still full. A huge fire roared in the grate; people balanced on the fire-seat which ran around the hearth, and on every other available perch, including the stairs and the piano. A few enthusiasts within the midst of the crowd were trying to dance the Eightsome Reel, which in the circumstances was a little like trying to stage a boxing match in a telephone box; not totally impossible, just pointless.\n\nAsh and I found a space over near the piano. She reached over the piano to a pile of little plastic cups, grabbed one and shoved it into my hand. 'Here; have a drink.' She sloshed some whisky into the cup. 'How've you been?'\n\n'Fine,' I said. 'Broke, and I can see that 2.1 disappearing over the event horizon, but fuck it; I've still got my integrity and my M\u00f6bius scarf, and a boy can go a long way with those things. You got a job yet?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Let's stand away from this fucking piano.'\n\n'What?'\n\n_'Have you got a job yet?_\n\n'Na. Hey.' She put one hand on my shoulder. 'Heard what David Bowie's latest film's called?'\n\n'This sounds Lewisian,' I shouted.\n\n'No,' she shook her head. ' \"Merry Christmas, Mister Ceausescu\"!' Ashley laughed like a drain; a teetotaller might have said her breath smelled like one.\n\n'Very funny,' I yelled into her ear. 'Haven't laughed so much since General Zia got blown up. Where is Lewis, anyway? We were waiting for them to turn up at Hamish and Tone's but they never showed. He and James here?'\n\nAsh looked concerned for a second, then her smile returned. She put her arm round my shoulders. 'Saw James over by the accordion earlier. Hey; you want to take a stroll round the battlements?' She pulled a spliff half out of her breast pocket, let it fall back. 'Got a number here, but Mrs McSpadden keeps wandering through, and I seem to remember she took inordinate and _extremely_ loud interest in one of these last year when wee Jimmy Calder stoked up. You comin?'\n\n'Not right now,' I said, looking around the crowd, acknowledging a few waves and some distant mouthings that were probably shouts. I stood on tip-toes to look round the hall; a paper-plane battle seemed to be taking place at one end. 'You seen Verity?'\n\n'Not for a bit,' Ash said, pouring herself more whisky. I refused. 'Hey.' Ash nudged me. 'There's dancing upstairs.'\n\n'Verity there?'\n\n'Maybe,' Ash said, raising her eyebrows.\n\n'Let's check it out.'\n\n'Way to go, Prent.'\n\n... No Verity in the Solar, loud with sounds and dark with light, and less crowded still. Ash and I danced, then cousin Josh asked her, and I sat watching the people dance for a while \u2013 the best way to extract any real enjoyment from dancing, I've always thought, but I seem to be unusual in not gaining any real pleasure from performing the movements \u2013 and then saw Helen Urvill, entering the hall holding a lager can. I went over to her, through the dancers.\n\n'Happy New Year!'\n\n'Hey, Prentice. Same to you ...'\n\nI kissed her, then lifted her up and spun her round; she whooped.\n\n'How are _you?'_ I yelled. Helen Urvill, elegantly tall and judiciously lean, straight thick hair obsidian black, dress combat-casual, back on holiday from Switzerland and looking as thoroughly kempt as ever, passed the lager can to me.\n\n'I'm fine,' she said.\n\nI looked at the tin she'd handed me. _'Carling Black Label?'_ I said, incredulous. Somehow this did not quite seem Helen's style.\n\nShe smirked. 'Try some.'\n\nI tried some; the stuff foamed, went up my nose. I spluttered, stepping back, dripping, while Helen took the can back and stood grinning. 'Champagne?' I said wiping my chin.\n\n'Lanson.'\n\n'What else? Oh you're so _stylish,_ Helen,' I said. 'Wanna dance?'\n\nWe danced, and shared the can of champagne. 'How's Diana?' I shouted above the music.\n\n'Couldn't get back,' Helen yelled. 'Still out in Hawaii.'\n\n'Poor thing.'\n\n'Yeah.'\n\nHelen continued to circulate; I decided it was time for a pee and then maybe some food, which took me via the garden (there was a queue for the downstairs loo, and the upper part of the castle was locked) to the kitchen.\n\nMrs McSpadden was in command, over-seeing a production line of sandwiches, sausage rolls, bowls of soup and chilli, slices of black bun and Christmas cake and accompanying slices of cheese.\n\n'Prentice!' Mrs McSpadden said.\n\n'Mthth MnThpndn!' I replied, mouth full of cake.\n\nShe shoved a set of keys into my hand. 'Will ye pop down to the cellar, for us?' Mrs S shouted. 'Get another litre of whisky; it's the second archway on the left. Dinnae let anybody down with you, mind; keep that door locked.' The microwave chimed and she hauled a still half-frozen block of chilli out on a big plate; she started breaking it up with a large wooden spoon.\n\nI swallowed. 'Okay,' I said.\n\nI went through to the utility room, cool and dark after the noise and chaos of the kitchen. I turned the light on, sorted through the keys for one that looked like it might match the door to the cellar. A movement outside caught my eye and I peered through the window; looked like I'd put on an outside light, too.\n\nVerity Walker, clad in a short black dress, was dancing sinuously on the roof of Uncle Fergus's Range Rover. Lewis sat cross-legged on the bonnet of the car, watching her. He glanced over, shading his eyes, and seemed to see me, looking through the window from the utility room. Verity pirouetted. Holding her shoes in one hand, she ran the other down over her body to one thigh, then back to her head and through her cropped blonde hair. The floodlight outside \u2013 harsh and white \u2013 lit her like she was on stage. Her hair glowed like pale flame.\n\nLewis jumped off the Range Rover (Verity wobbled a little as the car bounced on its springs, but recovered); he stood at the side of the car, between me and it, and held one hand up to Verity. She danced on, oblivious, then he must have said something, and she danced seductively, fluidly, to the edge of the roof, hips moving slow, a big smile on her face as she looked down at Lewis, then she threw herself off the roof. Lewis caught her, staggered back a couple of steps, then forward, as Verity wrapped her arms round his neck and her legs round his waist; white glances of thigh against the black. Lewis put his arms round her as he pitched forward.\n\nThey thumped together into the Range Rover. I thought the impact must have hurt her back, but it didn't look like it had. Her arms and legs stayed where they were, and Lewis's head bent down to hers. Her hands started to stroke and caress the nape of his neck and the back and sides of his head.\n\nAfter a while, one of Lewis's arms disengaged, waving behind him. One finger pointed up to the bright flood-light that was showing me all this. His hand made a cutting, chopping motion.\n\nWhen he did it a second time, I put the light out.\n\nI let myself into the cellar, locked the door behind me. The cellar was cold. I found the whisky, let myself out of the cellar and locked it, turned all the lights out, gave Mrs McSpadden the bottle, accepted a belated new-year kiss from her, then made my way out through the kitchen and the corridor and the crowded hall where the music sounded loud and people were laughing, and out through the now almost empty entrance hall and down the steps of the castle and down the driveway and down to Gallanach, where I walked along the esplanade \u2013 occasionally having to wave or say 'Happy New Year' to various people I didn't know \u2013 until I got to the old railway pier and then the harbour, where I sat on the quay-side, legs dangling, drinking my whisky and watching a couple of swans glide on black, still water, to the distant sound of highland jigs coming from the Steam Packet Hotel, and singing and happy-new-year shouts echoing in the streets of the town, and the occasional sniff as my nose watered in sympathy with my eyes.\nCHAPTER 8\n\nRory stood on the dunes, facing the sea. Lewis stomped away along the tide-line, kicking at the odd piece of driftwood and the occasional plastic bottle. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his camouflage jacket; his head \u2013 short-haired, these days \u2013 was down.\n\nSouth Uist. Lewis seemed to be taking it as a personal insult that the family had come to the Hebrides for their summer holiday. People kept asking him what he was doing on Uist; Lewis was further north, ha ha.\n\n'He's awful moody, isn't he, Uncle Rory?'\n\nRory watched Lewis walk away along the beach. 'Yeah.' He shrugged.\n\n'Why do you think he doesn't want to walk with us?' Prentice's thin face looked genuinely puzzled. Rory smiled, looked once more at Lewis's retreating back, then started down the far side of the dune heading for the narrow road. Prentice followed. 'I think,' Rory said, 'it's called being at an awkward age.'\n\nKenneth, Mary and the boys had come holidaying to the Hebrides, as they did most years. Rory had been invited along too, as he usually was, and for a change had accepted. So far, they'd been lucky; the Atlantic weather systems had been kind, the days bright and warm, the nights calm and never completely dark. The big rollers boomed in, the wide beaches lay mostly empty, and the machair \u2013 between dunes and cultivation \u2013 was a waving ocean of bright flowers thrown across the rich green waves of grass. Rory loved it, somewhat to his surprise; a holiday from holidays. A place to stay where he didn't have to take notes about flights and ferries and hotels and restaurants and sights. No travel book to think about, no articles, no pressure. He could laze.\n\nHe volunteered to take the boys on a walk after breakfast that Sunday. James had stayed behind and Lewis had been sullen for the half-hour or so they'd been walking before suddenly announcing he wanted to be alone.\n\nRory and Prentice walked on together, their short shadows preceding them. The road would be turning east soon, and taking them back to the main road so that they could turn south and walk back to the house. Lewis knew his way about the area, so Rory was happy to let him wander off alone.\n\nA car passed them on the single track road, heading north; they stood aside to let it pass, waving at the single occupant when he waved at them. The surf was a distant wash of noise, rolling over the sparkling machair in invisible waves. Larks warbled, points of sound in the sweep of blue sky and small puffy clouds.\n\n'Is it all right to walk on a Sunday, Uncle Rory?'\n\n'All right?' Rory said, glancing at the boy. In shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, he looked almost painfully thin. Rory wore an old cheesecloth shirt and cut-off jeans.\n\n'Aye; dad was saying you're not even allowed to walk in some islands on a Sunday!' Prentice rolled his eyes and puffed his cheeks out.\n\n'Well, yeah,' Rory said. 'I think they're like that in Lewis and Harris. But that's the hard-line prods up there. Down here they're Catholics; bit more relaxed about that sort of thing.'\n\n'But not being able to _walk!'_ Prentice protested, shaking his head at his shadow on the grey-black tarmac.\n\n'I think you're allowed to walk to church and back.'\n\n'Ho! Big deal!' Prentice didn't sound impressed. He was silent for a while. 'Mind you,' he said, sounding sly. 'I suppose you could always take a very long way round.'\n\nRory laughed, just as his attention was caught by a little white blossom lying on the road surface in front of them. Prentice looked up, at first surprised, then smiling, when Rory laughed. Prentice stood on the flower, then jumped, shrieking with pain.\n\n'Ah; my foot! My foot! Oh! Oh!'\n\nRory stood, open mouthed for a second, watching Prentice hop around on the tarmac, clutching at one ankle, his face contorted. Rory thought for a second Prentice was pretending, but the boy's expression convinced him he was in real pain. Prentice hopped onto the grass and fell over, still clutching at his foot; Rory could see something white stuck to the sole of the boy's sandshoe.\n\n'What is it?' he said, crouching down by Prentice's side. The boy was shaking, and when he looked up at Rory there were tears in his eyes.\n\n'I don't know,' he sobbed. 'Stepped on something.'\n\n'Let me see.' Rory sat on the grass in front of Prentice and held his foot. The little white blossom he'd seen on the road's surface was stuck to the boy's sandshoe; it wasn't a flower, it was a little paper charity flag for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the sort you secured to your lapel with a pin. The flag was still attached to its pin, which was buried in the sole of Prentice's shoe. Rory sucked his breath in when he saw it; most of the pin must be inside the boy's foot, near the middle of the broadest part of the sole.\n\nPrentice's foot and leg shuddered as he rolled on the grass. 'It's awful sore, Uncle Rory,' he said, voice trembling.\n\n'It's just a wee pin,' Rory said, trying to sound encouraging. 'I'll have it out in a second.'\n\nHe licked his lips, rubbed his right index finger and thumb together for a couple of seconds and held Prentice's foot steady with his left hand. He used the nails of his finger and thumb to find the head of the pin, itself almost buried in the tan rubber sole of the sandshoe. He grasped it. Prentice whimpered, foot trembling in Rory's grip. Rory gritted his teeth, pulled.\n\nThe pin slid out; an inch of it, shining in the sunlight. Prentice cried out, then relaxed. Rory put the boy's foot down gently.\n\nPrentice sat up, face quivering. 'That's better,' he said. He used one shirt sleeve to wipe at his face. 'What was it?'\n\n'This.' Rory showed him the pin.\n\nPrentice grimaced. 'Ouch.'\n\n'You're probably going to need a tetanus injection,' Rory told him.\n\n'Aw no! More needles!'\n\nThey took his shoe and sock off. Rory sucked at the tiny wound and spat, trying to remove any dirt. Prentice, eyes still watering, laughed nervously. 'Is that not a horrible smell, no, Uncle Rory?'\n\nRory threw the boy's white sock at him, grinning. 'I've been to India, kid; that ain't nuthin.'\n\nPrentice put his shoe and sock back on and got to his feet, obviously in some pain when he stood. 'Here; I'll give you a carry-coal-bag,' Rory said, turning his back to the boy and putting his arms out from his sides as he crouched.\n\n'Really, Uncle Rory? You sure? Will I not be awful heavy?'\n\n'Hop on; you're a bean-pole, laddie. I'll probably go faster with you on my back; you walk too slow. Come on.'\n\nPrentice put his arms round Rory's neck and got up onto his back; Rory set off at a run. Prentice whooped.\n\n'See?' Rory said, slowing to a fast walk.\n\n'I'm not too heavy, honest, Uncle Rory?'\n\n'What? A skelf like you? Never.'\n\n'Do you think this is a punishment from God for talking about walking on a Sunday, Uncle Rory?'\n\nRory laughed. 'Certainly not.'\n\n'Do you not believe in God either, Uncle Rory?'\n\n'No. Well; not in the Christian God. Maybe something else.' He shrugged his shoulders and shifted Prentice into a more comfortable position on his back. 'When I was in India, I thought then I knew what it was I might believe in. But when I came back it all seemed to go away again. I think it was something to do with the place.' He looked to one side, at the dazzling expanse of machair; endless emerald green scattered thick with flowers so bright they seemed lit from inside. 'Places have an effect on people. They alter your thoughts. India does, anyway.'\n\n'What about when you went to America? Did that affect what you thought?'\n\nRory laughed gently. 'Yeah; it did that all right. Kind of in the opposite way, though.'\n\n'Are you going to go away again?'\n\n'I expect so.'\n\nPrentice elapsed his hands in front of Rory's chin. Rory glanced at his wrists; thin and fragile looking. Prentice was still holding the little Lifeboat flag, twirling the pin between his fingers.\n\n'When did you stop believing in God?' Prentice asked.\n\nRory shrugged. 'Hard to say; I think I started to think for myself when I was about your age, maybe a bit younger.'\n\n'Oh.'\n\n'I tried to imagine how the world had been created, and I imagined Sooty \u2013 you know; the glove puppet \u2013'\n\n'I know; they still have him. Sooty and Sweep.' Prentice giggled.\n\n'Well, I imagined him standing on a wee planet about the size of a football \u2013'\n\n'But he hasn't got any legs!'\n\n'Ah, but he did in the annuals I got for Christmas. Anyway, I imagined him waving a wand, and the world came into existence. Like, I'd been to church, been to Sunday School, so I knew all the stuff in the Bible, but I guess I needed to envisage it ... see it, in my own terms.'\n\n'Uh-huh.'\n\n'But then I thought; wait a minute; where does the planet Sooty's standing on come from? I thought Sooty could have waved his wand and made that appear too, but where would he stand while he was doing it? I mean, I didn't think, Well, he could float in space, and it never occurred to me to ask where Sooty himself had come from, or the wand, but I was already heading towards not believing, I suppose. It was like the dragons.'\n\n'Dragons?' Prentice said, sounding excited and wary at once. Rory felt the boy tremble.\n\n'Yeah,' Rory said. 'I used to hide under the covers of my bed at night, imagining there were dragons out there; in the room when the light was out, when there was nobody else there. I'd hunch down under the covers with just an air-hole to breath through, and shelter there. The dragons couldn't get you through the air-hole; they could only get you if you put out a foot or a hand, or worst of all your head; that was when they struck; bit it off, or pulled you right out and ate all of you.'\n\n'Waa! Alien!' Prentice said. His arms squeezed Rory's neck.\n\n'Yeah,' Rory said. 'Well, I guess a lot of horror films come from that sort of background. Anyway; I used to be petrified of these dragons, even though I knew they probably didn't exist; I mean I knew there was no Santa Claus, and no fairies and elves, but still thought ghosts and dragons were a possibility, and it only took one to kill you ... I mean how did I really know I could trust adults? Even mum and dad? There were so many things I didn't really understand about people, about life. Most of the time you could just ignore a lot of the stuff you didn't know; it'd come in time, you'd be told when you needed to know... But how did you know that there wasn't some big secret, some big, evil deal going down that involves you but had been kept secret from you?\n\n'Like, maybe your parents were just fattening you up until you would make a decent meal for these dragons, or it was an intelligence test; the kids smart enough to have sussed out the fact there were dragons around were the ones that would survive, and the ones that just lay there, trusting, each night, deserved to die, and their parents couldn't tell them or the dragons would eat them, and stories about dragons were the only clues you were ever given; that was all the adults could do to warn you ... I was pretty paranoid about it. I used to be frightened to fall asleep at night sometimes, afraid I'd stick my head out from under the clothes while I was asleep and wake up to find my head in a dragon's mouth, before I died.'\n\n'Wow!'\n\nRory grunted, shifting Prentice's weight again. Kid wasn't so feather-light after all. 'But then one night, under the covers \u2013 I was just getting older, I guess, but anyway \u2013 I was sort of reviewing the day, and I was thinking about school, and what we'd learned, and we'd been doing the Second World War, and I hadn't liked the sound of this Hitler guy at all; and I'd asked dad, just to double-check, and \u2013'\n\n'So he was still alive? When you were ten?'\n\n'Oh yeah; didn't die until I was twelve. Anyway; he brought down this book; history of the War in pictures, and it had like all these photos of the death camps, where the Nazis murdered millions of Jews, and communists, and homosexuals, and gypsies and anybody else they didn't like ... but mostly Jews, and there were like just piles of bodies; incredibly thin bodies, like bones; skeletons wrapped with tissue paper, and piled higher than a house ... and pits; long pits full of bodies, and the metal stretchers they were put onto to be shoved into the ovens, and the piles of wedding rings and spectacles; glasses, and even artificial legs and weird stuff like that ...\n\n'Anyway, that night they put a night-light in my room, in case I had nightmares, but the shadows were even worse than the darkness, and so I just lay there, under the covers, quivering with fear thanks to these damn dragons, and I wished Ken was back from University because sometimes I was allowed to sleep in his room, and I wished I was allowed a torch in my room, but I wasn't, and I was wondering about crying really loudly, because that would bring mum and dad in to see me, but then what did I say was wrong? And then I suddenly thought ...\n\n'The dragons might be there; they might be real and they might be every bit as vicious as I'd imagined, but I'm a human being; so was Adolf Hitler and he killed millions of people!\n\n'And I threw back the bedclothes before I had any more time to think about it and burst out of the bed; threw myself into the middle of the bedroom, screaming and roaring and thrashing about.'\n\n'Ha!' Prentice said, squirming.\n\n'That brought mum and dad through; thought I was having a fit or something. But I just looked up from the carpet with this great big reassuring smile and said there was nothing to worry about.' Rory smiled at the memory, bringing his head up to look around. A break in the dunes let the sound of surf grow louder. There was a car in the distance coming towards them.\n\n'Brilliant!' Prentice said.\n\nRory grunted, shifting Prentice's weight once more. 'Never had any trouble with dragons after that.'\n\n'I'll bet you didn't!'\n\nThe car hummed nearer as the view to one side slowly opened up through the dunes to reveal the shining beach and blue-green ocean.\n\n'Let's see if we can get a lift off this car, eh?' Rory said. 'You okay to get down?\n\n'Yeah!' Prentice slid off onto the grass and stood there, favouring his good leg, while Rory stretched and rubbed at his lower back. He stuck one thumb out when the car was still a few hundred yards away. Prentice reached up and put something on the thin collar of Rory's shirt. It was the little paper Lifeboat flag. Rory held his collar out so that he could look at it. He looked down at the boy's grinning face. 'Thanks,' he said.\n\n'That's your medal, Uncle Rory,' Prentice told him. 'For being a brilliant uncle.'\n\nRory ruffled the boy's hair. 'Thanks, Prentice.' He looked back at the car. Was it slowing?\n\n'I used to worry about Darth Vader,' Prentice confessed, putting his arm round Rory's waist and lifting his foot to massage it with one hand. 'I'd lie under the covers and make the noise he makes when he's breathing, and then I'd stop, but sometimes it would go on after I'd stopped!' Prentice shook his head, and slapped one hand off his forehead. 'Crazy, eh?'\n\nRory laughed, as the approaching car started to slow down. 'Yeah, well, that's what stories do to you, sometimes. Your dad's always tried never to tell you lies, or stories that would scare you or make you superstitious, but \u2013'\n\n'Ha!' Prentice said, as the battered Cortina II drew to a stop just past them. 'I remember he tried to tell us clouds came from the Steam Packet Hotel, in the town. That's what they were: packets of steam from the Steam Packet Hotel. Ha!'\n\nRory smiled as they walked towards the car, him supporting the limping boy. Rory looked away for a second, towards the beach, where the long Atlantic rollers crashed against the broad expanse of gold.\n\nHe sniffed the glass; the whisky was amber, and there wasn't much of it. The smell stung. He put it to his lips, hesitated, then knocked it back in one go. The drink made his lips and tongue tingle; his throat felt sore and the fumes went up his nose and down into his lungs. He tried very hard not to cough like he'd seen people cough in westerns when they tried whisky for the first time, and got away with just clearing his throat rather loudly (he looked round at the curtains, afraid somebody might have heard). His eyes and nose were watering, so he pulled his hanky from his trousers, blew his nose.\n\nThe whisky tasted horrible. And people drank this stuff for pleasure? He had hoped that by trying some whisky he'd understand adults a bit better; instead they made even less sense.\n\nHe was standing between the curtains and the windows of the ballroom of the Steam Packet Hotel, on the railway pier at Gallanach. Outside, the afternoon was wet and miserable-looking, and what little light there had been \u2013 watery and grey \u2013 was going now. Sheets of rain hauled in off the bay, blew around the steamers and ferries moored round the windswept quay, then collapsed upon the dark grey buildings of the town. The street lamps were already lit, and a few cars crawled through the rough-mirror streets with their lights on and their wipers flapping to and fro.\n\nMusic played behind Rory. He balanced the empty whisky glass on the window-sill and gave his nose a last wipe, pocketing his hanky. He supposed he'd better go back into the ballroom. Ballroom; he hated the word. He hated the music they were playing \u2013 Highland stuff, mostly \u2013 he hated being here in this dull, wet town, with these dull people listening to their dull music at their dull wedding. They should be playing the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, and they shouldn't be getting married in the first place \u2013 modern people didn't.\n\n_'Heeee-yooch!'_ a voice shouted, startlingly nearby, making Rory jump. The curtains bowed in a few yards away, almost touching the window-sill, the movement like a wave. Rory could hear the stamping, slapping feet move in time to the fiddles and accordions as they played a jig. People were clapping, shouting out. God, it was all so provincial.\n\nRory straightened his tie, and with his whisky still burning in his throat, and now his stomach too, he moved along to the gap in the curtains and slid through, back into the ballroom, where people sat drinking at long wooden tables and groups of dancers went whirling round in complicated, ever-changing patterns, all flowing dresses and clasping hands and big red sweaty faces and white shirts and ties and narrow trousers or \u2013 even worse \u2013 kilts.\n\nRory moved near the stage, behind the tables where Kenneth and Mary sat, talking to mum. Boring Hamish and the horse-resembling Antonia were on the floor, him in a kilt, her still in her white bridal gown, both dancing badly and out of time, but seemingly thoroughly enjoying themselves.\n\n'Well,' he heard his mum saying, 'you two had better get a move on, or Hamish and Antonia will beat you to it.' She laughed and drank from her glass. She wore a hat. Rory hated his mother in a hat. He thought she sounded drunk. Kenneth and Mary smiled uncertainly at each other.\n\n'Well, mum,' Kenneth said, sitting back, filling his pipe. 'We have been practising.'\n\n'Kenneth!' his wife said quietly.\n\nMum shook her head. 'Ah, don't mind me; plenty of time yet, I dare say.' She looked into her empty glass. 'I wouldn't be missing grandchildren so much, but ...' She shrugged. There was an awkward silence between the three people then, while the music played and the dancers whooped and shouted and clapped and stamped. Rory saw his mother's shoulders move once, and she put her head down for a second, sniffed. She reached down for her handbag on the floor. Kenneth handed her his hanky. He put his arm round his mum's shoulders. Mary moved her seat closer, reached out and took one of the older woman's hands in hers.\n\n'God, I miss that old devil,' mum said, and blew her nose. Eyes bright with tears, she looked at Mary, and then saw Rory standing behind and to one side of them. 'Rory,' she said, trying to sound all right. 'We wondered where you were. Are you enjoying yourself, darling?'\n\n'Yes,' he lied. He hated her calling him 'darling'. He stayed where he was because he didn't want to get close enough for them to smell his breath. His mother smiled.\n\n'Good lad. See if you can find your cousin Sheila; you said you'd ask her to dance, remember?'\n\n'Yeah, all right,' he said, turning away.\n\nHe didn't like boring cousin Sheila, either. She was about the only girl here who was his own age. It was horrible being this age when nobody else was; they were all either adults or children. He blamed his parents. Mostly he blamed his dad. If he'd looked after himself, not had a heart attack, he'd still be around. That was how thoughtless he'd been. Rory supposed it was the same thoughtlessness that had made dad and mum have him so much later than the rest of their children. People just didn't think, that was the trouble.\n\nHe didn't go looking for Sheila. He decided to go wandering. He would slip away. He had always liked slipping away from things. At parties he would just quietly leave when nobody was watching him, so that only much later would anybody wonder where he was. When he was out with a group of other kids, playing kick-the-can or soldiers, he would often sneak away, so that they would never find him, or think he had fallen down a hole or into a burn or a loch. It was a wonderful feeling, to disappear like that; it made him feel different and special. He gloried in the cunningness of it, the feeling of having outwitted the others, of knowing what they did not; that he was out and away and they were back there where he'd left them, ignorantly worrying where he was, searching; wondering.\n\nHe slunk out through the doors while they were clapping the band after finishing one of their noisy, interminable Highland dances.\n\nIt was cooler in the lobby. He drew himself upright and walked confidently through the bit of the lobby that gave onto the Cocktail Lounge, where ruddy-faced men stood panting and laughing, sleeves rolled up, ties loose, queuing for drinks or holding trays of them, laughing loudly in deep voices.\n\nHe went through another set of doors, down some steps, round a corner, and found the hotel's single small lift. He pulled both sets of gates open with an effort, entered, then closed them again. The lift was a little bigger than a phone box. He pressed the brass button for the top floor. The lift jerked into motion and set off, humming. The white-washed walls of the lift shaft moved smoothly downwards as the lift ascended. Stencilled letters painted inside the shaft said 1st Floor ... 2nd Floor ... God, he thought, Americans must think they're in the Stone Age when they come to stay in a place like this.\n\nHe felt ashamed.\n\nThe top floor was boring. He went from one end to the other of the U-shaped hotel, up and down steps that marked the boundaries of the three separate buildings that made up the Steam Packet Hotel. There were no windows; only skylights, each spattered with rain drops and lined with little rivulets of running water. He'd been hoping for windows, and a view over the bay or the town.\n\nHe trod the corridors again, looking for an unlocked door. Maybe the maids would have left some of the rooms open, if there was nobody staying in them just now. He tried a few handles. The only open door led to a broom cupboard.\n\nThen at the next door he heard giggling. He looked at the number. It was room 48. 48 was a good number; not as good as 32 or 64, but better than, say, 49, and much better than 47 (though that was interesting too because it was a prime). The very best numbers were numbers like 20, 23, 30, 40, 57, 75, 105 and 155. Calibre numbers; gun numbers. Those were luckiest. But 48 was all right.\n\nMore giggling. He looked back down the corridor, then crouched and looked through the key-hole. It was a bit clich\u00e9d, but what did people expect in a boring hotel like this in a boring town like this in a boring country like this? It was all you could do.\n\nThere was no key in the lock, so he could see in through the big old-fashioned key-hole. He saw a large dressing table sitting in a broad bay window. The dressing-table held a big, tippable mirror, and most of the rest of the room was visible in it. In the mirror Rory saw his sister Fiona, and then Fergus Urvill. They were making the big double bed.\n\nFiona still wore her peach-coloured bridesmaid's dress, very long and smooth-looking. There were flowers in her hair, which made her look quite good. Rory suspected she looked so good because she didn't live here any more; she lived in London, and Aunt Ilsa had got her a job working for a television company. Fiona sold time to people. That was how she put it. She sold advertising space. She sold time. Rory thought that sounded pretty interesting.\n\nFergus Urvill was on the other side of the bed, dressed in a kilt, shirt and waistcoat. Rory knew Fergus was ages with Kenneth, but somehow he always seemed older. Maybe it was because he had gone to a private high school. Rory didn't really know Fergus Urvill very well; although he did sometimes visit Lochgair, he spoke differently \u2013 posher \u2013 and seemed to spend a lot of his time shooting at birds and animals with other rich people.\n\nRory had always found Fergus Urvill to be a little frightening. Kenneth had told him the story, years ago, about when Fergus put Lachy Watt's eye out; he'd stuck a fossil bone in it, or something. Rory thought now that his brother must have exaggerated the story, made it more horrific than it really had been, and he _certainly_ didn't believe that Lachy had run away to sea just so that he could wear an eye-patch and pretend he was a pirate. He had joined the merchant navy \u2013 Rory had asked dad about that \u2013 but he had an artificial eye, not a patch. Rory knew because he'd been with mum once when they'd met Lachy and a woman in the street in Lochgilphead. Rory had looked very hard but hadn't been able to decide which was the false eye.\n\nHis own eye smarted, exposed to the draft coming through the key-hole. He blinked, then used his other eye.\n\nFiona and Fergus were making the bed, but doing it in a funny sort of way; the bottom sheet had been doubled up half-way down the bed. They were both chuckling to themselves, and talking in quiet, urgent whispers. Fiona glanced off to one side a couple of times. Rory worked out she was looking at the door he was crouched behind.\n\nThey made the bed up, so that it looked ordinary. Rory got ready to run away down the corridor. But they didn't leave the room; instead, Fiona and Fergus, still breathless with giggles, still chattering excitedly away, started to turn the furniture in the room upside down. They left the bed, of course, but they turned a table, a chest of drawers, two bedside cabinets, two chairs and an easy chair upside down. They carefully replaced lights and vases and other bits and pieces as they went along. They stood before the dressing table for a while, looking at it and discussing it, apparently, but eventually just turned it round so that it faced the wrong way, rather than turn it upside down.\n\nFiona leant back against the rear of the dressing table, breathing hard, and waved one hand, wafting air over her face. Her cheeks were pink, and a couple of coils of copper hair had fallen from her hairdo, one on each side of her head. She pulled at her bodice, blew down, went 'Whoo!' Rory couldn't see Fergus Urvill. Then he reappeared, stood by Fiona. He was holding a key and a couple of toilet rolls; he said something Rory didn't catch. 'Oh no,' Fiona said, touching Fergus's arm. Her face looked amused but concerned. 'No, that's naughty ...'\n\nFergus stood there for a moment. Rory couldn't see his face, but Fiona's looked glowing and bright. 'I like being naughty,' he heard Fergus say, and then he stepped forward and took Fiona in his arms, still holding the key and the toilet rolls.\n\n_What?_ thought Rory. This really was something. Sister Fiona and big Fergus Urvill? Stupid girl; probably only after her body.\n\n'Ferg!' Fiona said, breaking away. Her face looked surprised, cheeks even redder. She smiled broadly, held Fergus's elbows. 'Well, this is ... unexpected.'\n\n'I've always ...' Fergus lowered his voice as he bent to kiss her again, face in her hair and then his mouth on hers. Rory missed the exact words.\n\nGo on, thought Rory. Go on. Do it. Let me see!\n\nFergus's hands dropped the key and the toilet rolls, grabbed Fiona's bum. She pushed away from him. 'Ferg ...' she said, breathless, lip-stick smeared.\n\n'Fiona,' Fergus moaned, clutching her. 'I want you! I need you!'\n\n'Well,' Fiona said, gulping. 'That's very, ah ... but not here, eh?'\n\nFergus pulled her close again. 'Let me drive you home tonight.'\n\n'Umm, well, I think we were getting a taxi.'\n\n'Please; let me. Please. Fiona. You don't know ...' Fergus stuck his nose into her hair again, made a sort of moaning noise. 'Feel me.' And he guided one of Fiona's hands to the front of his kilt.\n\nGood God, thought Rory. He took another quick glance down the hall, then looked back through the key-hole.\n\nFiona took her hand away. 'Hmm. Yes; actually I already could, Fergus.'\n\n'I need you!' He pulled her close again.\n\n_'Not here,_ Fergus.'\n\n'Fiona; please ...'\n\n'All right; all right, Fergus. I'll try. We'll see, okay?'\n\n'Yes; yes, thank you!' Fergus gathered Fiona's hands in his.\n\n'Right,' she laughed. 'Well, come on; let's get out of here before the happy couple arrive. Put those back in the loo.' She pointed at the toilet rolls. Fergus retrieved them. She busied herself with her hair, restoring it. Fergus turned and disappeared from Rory's view. 'And put some cold water on _that,'_ Fiona said, grinning. 'Looks like your sporran's trying to levitate.'\n\nShe came towards the door. Rory leapt back, staggered on legs that had gone half to sleep, and only just scrambled into the broom cupboard and got the door shut before the bedroom door opened. The broom cupboard key-hole didn't let him see anything. He heard muffled conversation but no footsteps.\n\nHe waited, breathless, heart hammering in the darkness, one hand in his trouser pocket, stroking himself.\n\n_'Do you know where the twins were conceived?'_\n\n_'No idea,' he said, and belched._\n\n_'Fucking McCaig's Folly, that's where.'_\n\n_'What, Oban?'_\n\n_'The very place.'_\n\n_'Good grief.'_\n\n_'You don't mind me saying this, I mean talking about Fiona like this, do you?'_\n\n_'No, no.' He waved one hand. 'Your wife; you talk about her. No, no, that's bad, that sounds bad. I'm all for women's lib.'_\n\n_'Might have bloody known. Might have bloody known you would be. Bloody typical, if you ask me. You're a Bolshie bastard, McHoan.'_\n\n_'And you are the unacceptable face of Capitalism, Ferg.'_\n\n_'Don't quote that fairy at me, you Bolshie bastard. And don't call me Ferg.'_\n\n_'Beg your pardon. Some more whisky?'_\n\n_'Don't mind if I do.'_\n\n_Rory got up out of the creaking wooden seat and walked unsteadily over to where Fergus lay on the bare wooden floorboards, head against the ancient, burst couch. The fire crackled in the grate, its light competing with that of the little gas lamp. Rory unscrewed the top from the bottle of Bells carefully and topped up Fergus's little silver cup. Fergus had brought a leather case with him; it held three of the silver cups and a big hip flask. Rory had brought the bottle in his rucksack._\n\n_'There you go.'_\n\n_'Ta much. You're a decent fellow for a Bolshie bastard.'_\n\n_'One tries, old bean,' Rory said. He walked carefully to his seat,_ _picked his little cup up from the floor and went to the room's single window. It was black outside. There had been a moon when they'd first arrived, but the clouds had come while they were chopping wood, and the rain while they'd cooked dinner on the two little primus stoves._\n\n_He turned from the darkness. Fergus looked like he was almost asleep. He was dressed in plus fours, tweed waistcoat (the jacket, and his waxed Barbour were hanging behind the door of the bothy), thick socks, brogues, and a fawn country shirt with a button-down collar. God, he even had his tie on still. Rory wore cords, mountain-hiking boots and a plain M &S shirt. His nylon waterproofs were draped over a chair._\n\n_What an odd pair we make, he thought._\n\n_He had been back from his travels for a while, staying first in London then at Lochgair, while he tried to work out what to do with his life. He had the impression things were sliding past him somehow. He'd made a good start but now he was faltering, and the focus of attention was drifting slowly away from him._\n\n_He had returned to discover that \u2014 like his brother before him \u2014 Ken had given up being a teacher. Hamish had taken up the managerial place at the factory that everyone had expected would be Kenneth's, when Kenneth had decided to teach. Now Ken too was quitting the profession to try something else: writing children's stories. Rory had always thought of Hamish as a sort of ponderously eccentric fool, and Ken a kind of failure because he had so much wanted to travel, and instead had settled down with Mary, stayed in the same wee corner of the world as he'd been born and raised in, and not only raised his own children, but chosen to teach others', too. Rory had felt slightly sorry for his elder brother, then. Now he felt envious. Ken seemed happy; happy with his wife, with his children, and now with his work; not rich, but doing what he wanted to do._\n\n_And why hadn't Ken told him he was writing too? He might have been able to help him, but even if Ken had wanted to do it all_ _without any assistance from his younger brother, he might at least have told him what he was doing. Instead Rory had found out only when Ken had had his first story published, and now it was as though they were passing each other travelling in opposite directions; Ken slowly but surely building up a reputation as a children's story-teller while his own supposed career as a professional recounter of traveller's tales sank gradually in the west. Books people forgot about and articles in Sunday supplements that were only one notch above the sort of shit tourist boards put out._\n\n_And so he'd left London, to come here, hoping to lick the closing wise wound of whatever talent it was he had._\n\n_He'd spent a lot of time just wandering in the hills. Sometimes Ken came too, or one of the boys if they were in the mood, but mostly he went by himself, trying to sort himself out. What it boiled down to was: there was here, where he had friends and family, or there was London where he had a few friends and a lot of contacts, and it felt like things were happening, and where you could fill time with something no matter how mixed up and fraudulent you felt... or there was abroad, of course; the rest of the world; India (to take the most extreme example he'd found so far), where you felt like an alien, lumbering and self-conscious, materially far more rich and spiritually far more poor than the people who thronged the place, where just by that intensity of touching, that very sweating crowdedness, you felt more apart, more consigned to a different, echoing place inside yourself._\n\n_One day, on a long walk, he'd almost literally bumped into Fergus Urvill, crouching in a hide up amongst the folds in the hills, waiting with telescope and .303 for a wounded Sika deer. Fergus had motioned him to sit down with him behind the hide, and to keep quiet. Rory bad waited with the older man \u2013 silent for quarter of an hour apart from a whispered hello and a quick explanation of what was going on \u2013 until the herd of deer appeared, brown shapes on the brown hill. One animal was holding the rest back; limping heavily. Fergus waited until the herd was as close as it looked like it was_ _going to come, then sighted on the limping beast, still two hundred yards away._\n\n_The sound of the shot left Rory's ears ringing. The Sika's head jerked; it dropped to its knees and keeled over. The rest raced off, bouncing across the heather._\n\n_He helped Fergus drag the small corpse down the slope to the track, where the Land Rover was parked, and accepted a lift back to the road._\n\n_'Hardly recognised you, Roderick,' Fergus said, as he drove. 'Not seen you since Fi and I got shackled. Must be at least that long.'_\n\n_'I've been away.'_\n\n_'Of course; your travels. I've got that India book of yours, you know.'_\n\n_'Ah.' Rory watched the trees slide past the Land Rover's windows._\n\n_'Done any others?'_\n\n_'There was one about the States and Mexico. Last year.'_\n\n_'Really?' Fergus looked over at him briefly. 'I didn't hear about that.'_\n\n_Rory smiled thinly. 'No,'he said._\n\n_Fergus made a grunting noise, changed gear as they bumped down the track towards the main road. 'Ken said something about you living in a squat in London ... or something ridiculous like that. That right?'_\n\n_'Housing cooperative.'_\n\n_'Ah-ha.' Fergus drove on for a while. 'Always wanted to take a look at India myself, you know,'he said suddenly. 'Keep meaning to go; never quite get around to it, know what I mean?'_\n\n_'Well, it isn't the sort of place you can just take a look at.'_\n\n_'No?'_\n\n_'Not really.'_\n\n_The Land Rover came down to the main road between Lochgilphead and Lochgair: 'Look, we've got a do on this evening, in the town \u2013' Fergus glanced at his watch. '\u2013 bit late already, to tell the_ truth. But how about coming round tomorrow _for ... In_ fact, d'you fish?'\n\n_'Fish? Yeah, I used_ to.'\n\n_'Not against your vegetarian principles, is it?'_\n\n_'No. India didn't change me that much.'_\n\n_'Well, then; come fishing with me tomorrow. Pool on the Add with a monster trout in it; been after the swine for months. Plenty of smaller stuff too, though. Fancy it? Course, I'll never talk to you again if you catch the big feller, but might make a fun afternoon. What do you say?'_\n\n_'Okay,' he said._\n\n_So they became friends, after a fashion. Most of Rory's pals in London were in the International Marxist Group, but here he was; wandering the hills with an upper class dingbat who just happened to be married to his sister and who lived for huntin', shootin' and fishin' (and seemed to spend the absolute minimum amount of time in his castle with his wife), and who had just last year rationalised half the work force in the glass factory out of a job. Still, they got on together, somehow, and Fergus was an undemanding companion; company of a sort, but not taxing; none of Ken's garrulousness, Lewis's moodiness or Prentice or James's ceaseless questioning. It was almost like walking the hills on your own._\n\n_And a couple of days ago Fergus had suggested they go for a longer hike, up into the trackless hills where the Landy couldn't reach. They would take collapsible rods, a couple of guns, and have to fish and shoot to eat. They could stay in the old lodge; it would save taking a tent._\n\n_So here they were, on the first floor of the old lodge, which was now used just as a bothy. The room they were in contained a single big dormer window, a fireplace, a couch, a table and two seats, and two bunkbeds. There were other rooms with more beds, but keeping to one room meant only lighting one fire; the autumn weather had turned chilly early._\n\n_'No,'Fergus said, looking up from where he lay, slumped against_ _the couch. 'But you don't mind me talking about Fiona like this, do you? I mean, your sister. My wife. You sure you don't mind, do you?'_\n\n_'Positive.'_\n\n_'Good man.'_\n\n_'McCaig's Folly, eh?'_\n\n_'Hmm? Oh; well yes... at least I think so. Got the idea from Charlotte, actually.'_\n\n_'What, your sister?'_\n\n_'Mmm. The one that married that chap Walker, from Edinburgh.'_\n\n_'Oh yeah; I remember.' Rory went over to the seat that held his jacket._\n\n_'Funny girl, Charlie; had this thing about ... antiquity. Got Walker_ to deflower _her under this ancient fucking_ yew _tree in Perthshire_. So she told _me, anyway.'_\n\n_'Uh-huh.'Rory rummaged in his jacket pockets._\n\n_'Fiona and I thought we'd try something like that, one time we were in Oban, for some do. You know; put a bit of sparkle back in ... You sure you don't mind me talking about your sister like this?'_\n\n_'Yeah.' Rory took his tobacco tin from the jacket. He held the tin up. 'As long as you don't mind me having a little smoke?'_\n\n_'Not at all, not at all. Bloody cold it was, in that damn folly. Had to sit on a \u2013 Oh,' Fergus said, suddenly realising. 'You mean the old wacky baccy.'_\n\n_Rory smiled, sat down. 'That's the stuff.'_\n\n_'Not at all,' Fergus said, waving one hand. 'Go ahead.' He watched carefully as Rory set out the papers. 'Mmm, go ahead.'_\n\n_Rory looked up, saw Fergus's fascinated expression. 'Do you want any of this, Fergus?'_\n\n_'Umm,' Fergus said, sitting back, blinking. 'Could do, I suppose. Never really tried it, to be honest. Couple of chaps at the school got booted out for that stuff and I never did get round to it.'_\n\n_'Well, I'm not forcing you.'_\n\n_'Not at all. Not at all.'_\n\n_They smoked the joint. Fergus, used to the occasional cigar with his brandy now that he'd given up his pipe, pronounced the smoke quite cool, and objected more to the sweet taste of the Old Holborn than to the scent of resin._\n\n_'This any good for hanky-panky?' he said, passing the roach back to Rory, who took a last hot toke then flicked the remains into the heart of the fire._\n\n_'Can be,'he said._\n\n_'Might try it some time. God knows we could do with something to \u2013 Look, you absolutely sure you don't mind me talking about your sister this way?'_\n\n_'Positive.'_\n\n_'Good man \u2013 hey! Did you hear that?'_\n\n_Rory looked up at the ceiling. Fergus was staring at the plasterboard expanse above them. Rory listened. Then, above the crackling of the fire, he did hear something; a quiet, scrabbling noise in the roof-space above them._\n\n_'Rats, I'll bet!' Fergus said, and rolled over to his pack._\n\n_Rory thought about it. They were here in a deserted old house in the middle of nowhere on a black and starless night in one of the more mysterious bits of Scotland, and there was a scrabbling, clawy sort of noise coming from the ceiling above him and this other drunk, stoned man. He shrugged. Yeah; probably rats. Or mice. Or birds._\n\n_Fergus pulled his pack gently to him, scraping over the floorboards. He lifted the rucksack up. The .303 and the shotgun were in a waterproof bag strapped to the side of the pack. Fergus undid the straps. 'Ssh,' he said to Rory. Rory had started building another joint. He waved. He drank some more whisky._\n\n_He was just inserting the roach when Fergus rolled over to him and held the shotgun out to him. 'Here!' he whispered urgently._\n\n_'Hmm,' Rory said, nodding thanks. He heard some clicks._\n\n_Fergus held the ancient Lee Enfield at his side. He knelt close by Rory. 'Think the little bastard's over there.' He pointed. He reached_ _up, touched the gun Rory held. It was hard doing the roach one handed. 'Put that down, man!' Fergus hissed. He took the tin from Rory's lap and put all the makings down on the floor. Rory felt peeved._\n\n_'There,' Fergus said. 'Safety's off. When I fire, aim where I do, all right?'_\n\n_'Yup,' Rory said, forgetting about the J. He took the shotgun. Fergus walked on his heels, still hunkered down, across the room, eyes and gun pointed towards the plasterboard ceiling. He stopped. There was a noise like a spider running across a very sensitive microphone._\n\n_Bang! went the rifle. Rory almost dropped the shotgun. 'There!' yelled Fergus. Plaster was falling from a small hole in the ceiling; there_ was _smoke in the air._ Rory _aimed at the small hole, pulled the trigger. The gun struck back against his shoulder, sending him falling back off his seat. He clattered to the floor._\n\n_'Well, pump it, man, pump it!' he heard Fergus shouting from somewhere._\n\n_Awful lot of smoke around. Ears seemed to be ringing. He pumped the gun. (Funny; he'd have thought Fergus would have been a side-by-side man.) There was another sharp crack of sound from the .303. He saw the hole appear in the plaster almost right above him. Great; he could get the little bastard without having to get up from the floor. The floorboards ought to provide extra firing stability, too. He pulled the trigger again. The gun went Blam! with a little less sonic enthusiasm than before, though it hurt his shoulder a little more._\n\n_A white waterfall of plaster burst down from the ceiling and slapped and pattered all over him. Rory spat bits out of his mouth, blinked the white dust out of his eyes. He heard Fergus colliding with something in the room. He pumped the gun, looked round. Fergus was lying on the couch, aiming at the centre of the ceiling. He fired the Lee Enfield again; Rory was getting the hang of this now, and aimed the shotgun at the same place and fired it, almost before_ _the noise of Fergus's shot had stopped echoing. The room was getting a bit hazy, and there was probably blood coming from his ears, but what the fuck. Rory readied the gun again._\n\n_He tried to follow where Fergus was pointing his rifle. As he did so, still lying there with his legs up on the chair he'd fallen over, he started-to over-balance to one side, towards Fergus._\n\n_'Aah!' Rory said. He tried to put one hand out to stop himself, but the gun was still in his grip. The long, blue-black barrel arced towards Fergus. Fergus looked, as Rory fell helplessly over, the gun barrel falling like some felled tree, wide muzzle pointed straight towards him._\n\n_Rory could tell exactly what was going to happen, and couldn't stop it._\n\n_Fergus's eyes widened. He jumped; fell over the back of the couch._\n\n_Rory fell onto his side; the shotgun roared and the rear of the couch blew open in a dusty horsehair explosion._\n\n_Rory let the gun down to the floor. The noise still rang in his ears. The room stank of smoke and the fire had gone strangely quiet. 'Ferg?' he said, tentatively. Couldn't hear himself speak._ 'Ferg!' _he shouted._\n\n_He sat upright, leaving the gun on the floorboards. Plaster tumbled off his body in clouds of dust._\n\n_'Hello?'Fergus said, appearing over the top of the couch, gunless._\n\n_Rory looked at him. They both blinked, eyes watering. 'Did we get it?' Rory asked._\n\n_'Don't know,' Fergus said. He staggered round the rear of the couch, feet crunching in plaster, and sat down. He looked at the still slightly smoking hole in the couch, just beside where he'd sat, then up at the holes in the ceiling._\n\n_He stayed looking at the holes in the ceiling for a while. Then he started crying._\n\n_Rory watched for a while, befuddled. 'What's the matter, man?' he said._\n\n_Fergus took no notice; he kept on crying, still staring up at the holes in the ceiling. He took big lungfuls of air and then let them out in great racking sobs that shook his whole body. After a while, he put his head in his hands and sat there, rocking back and forward, clutching his hair just above his ears. The tears flowed, trickling off his nose and spotting the white plaster dust on the floorboards at his feet._\n\n_'Ferg,' Rory said, going over to him. He hesitated, then put his arm on the man's shoulders. 'Fergus; for God's sake man, what's wrong?'_\n\n_Fergus looked up and suddenly Rory felt older than him. Fergus's heavy, ruddy face was puffed and bloated, and tears had streaked through the dust on his cheeks, disappearing in the bristles on his jaw-line and chin. When he spoke it was in the voice of a small, hurt boy._\n\n_'Oh God, Rory, I've got to tell somebody, but you must promise; you must give me your word you won't breathe a word to anybody else. On your life.'_\n\n_'Hey, you haven't killed anybody or anything, have you?'_\n\n_'No,' Fergus shook his head, screwed his eyes up. 'No! Nothing like that! It's not something I did.'_\n\n_'Okay; my word. All that stuff. '_\n\n_Fergus looked at him and Rory shivered. 'You swear?' Fergus said, voice hollow._\n\n_Rory nodded. 'I swear.' He felt dizzy. The smoke-filled room seemed to tip and waver. He wondered if they put something trippy in shotgun or rifle cartridges. And why did I mention killing somebody? That wasn't too sensible, way out here on this moonless night, etc., with a couple of lethal fire-arms lying around._\n\n_'All right,' Fergus said, sitting back, breathing deeply. He looked almost soberly at Rory. 'You sure you don't mind me talking about your sister?' he said slowly, with what might have been some sort of smile on his face._\n\n_Oh god, thought Rory, and felt sick._\n\n_But it was too late to go back now._\n\n_The way he told it, it took maybe five minutes. Fergus Urvill was crying like a baby again at the end of it. Rory cuddled him. And after as many tender words as he could think of, to try and lighten the load, to try and make it seem less of a confession, even to try and compensate for the shared and shaming confidence, he told Fergus that he had been responsible for the fire that had burned down the barn near Port Ann, fifteen years earlier._\n\n_They ended up laughing about that, but it was the uneasy laughter of desperation and displacement, and all they could do after that was finish the whisky and have the joint Rory had been working on, and it was almost a relief when Fergus was sick as a dog out of the window, hanging out barfing onto the slates and into the guttering while Rory tried to clean the plaster off the top bunk and stowed the guns out of harm's way._\n\n_They woke with raging hangovers to a wrecked room and the smell of black powder and vomit. There was a dead rat, blown almost in two, resting on the hearth of the fire._\n\n_They left the place as it was, picked up their gear and walked away. Neither of them mentioned anything that had been said during the night; they just agreed to head back to civilisation and not to mix whisky and cannabis like that again._\n\n_There were no more huntin' shootin' and fishin' trips. Rory went back to live in London that winter, and ended up \u2014 funnily enough \u2014 living in a squat._\n\n_He wrote poems._\nCHAPTER 9\n\nThe train sat, wrapped in rain and rocked by gusts, waiting to join the main line. Sidelined again, I watched the cold wind flatten the grubby-looking grass of a weedy field outside Springburn. A man walked across the field, some mongrel dog padding ahead of him. Two paths crossed the rectangular field, forming a neat St Andrew's Cross of down-trodden grass. The dog stopped to sniff at something in the grass, then squatted, urinating. The man following behind was dressed in cheap looking jeans and a donkey jacket, there was a bonnet perched on his head, and his hands were stuffed in his pockets. He walked up behind the dog and kicked its arse. The animal loped away, putting more distance between them, then resumed its casual, padding walk along the path. It was getting dark. Street lights were starting to come on in the distance, crimson slivers slowly brightening to orange.\n\nI looked at my watch. We'd been stuck here, waiting to join the main line into Queen Street, for about ten minutes. You often had to wait here while the Edinburgh trains came and went, but the delay didn't usually last this long. The station was only five minutes away; more importantly, _food_ was only five minutes away. I'd forgone breakfast because I hadn't got to bed till four in the morning, lunch because I had a hangover and anyway I was late for the train, and due to the fact that it was \u2013 according to British Rail at any rate \u2013 still part of the extended Festive Period, there had been no buffet trolley on the train. I was starving. I was so hungry I'd have eaten pork scratchings. Queen Street station, a scant mile and a half away, had burgers, sandwiches, shell pies, french fries and french sticks, bridies and pasties and patties. My God, if all they had were Haggisburgers, I'd eat those.\n\n'Ladies and gentulmun ...' crackled a gruff Glaswegian voice from the carriage loudspeakers. My heart sank. The perfect end to a perfect holiday. 'Due to a signalling failure ...'\n\nI looked out of the wind-shaken carriage, where people were moaning and cursing and making vows to start going by bus, or take the car next time, or buy a car, or learn to drive ... looked out through the rain-spattered sheets of glass, watching the cold January day leach out of the grey skies above the drenched city, and witnessed the rain fall upon the tramped-on, pissed-on, shat-on grass of the narrow path in the scrubby field with a feeling of wry but nevertheless wretched empathy.\n\nGod, what did any of it matter, in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of these blades of grass, and who was to say more important? Growing, surrounded by your kin, you out-living some, some out-living you. You didn't have to adjust the scale much, either, to reduce us to the sort of distant irrelevance of this bedraggled field. The grass was lucky if it grew, was shone upon and rained upon, and was not burned, and was not pulled up by the roots, or poisoned, or buried when the ground was turned over, and some bits just happened to be on a line that humans wanted to walk on, and so got trampled, broken, pressed flat, with no malice; just effect.\n\nAnd intelligence? Control? There were things that we had no more control over yet than the grass did over the developer who chose to plough it all under and build a factory on top. Perhaps some asteroid, nudged out of its place in the great gravitational gavotte, would fall to Earth; a bullet into a face, obliterating. Unwitnessed, for what would be visible, from even a nearby star? A blink of flame, like a match struck beside a search-light ... And then nothing.\n\nBut didn't there have to be something out there, just to witness, just to _know?_ Hell, it didn't even have to do anything; it didn't have to act on prayers or have us singled out as a special species, or play any part in our history and development; it didn't even necessarily have to have created us, or created anything, all it had to do was exist and have existed and go on existing, to record, to _encompass._\n\nI watched as the rain battered the grass and the wind pummelled it, quick gusts flattening patches of the field like sudden bruises beneath the dull sky. I could just imagine my father jumping up and down on this argument, this need for meaning, for faith.\n\nThe train jerked. I started, too, shaken from my reverie. Then the train went into reverse, motors growling, occupants groaning, and trundled slowly back through the squalls of rain, passing Maryhill and looping down through Anniesland and over Great Western Road.\n\nWe paralleled Crow Road for a bit, and stopped, waiting for signals, outside Jordanhill station; I looked up at the rear of the flats which fronted Crow Road, trying to work out which was Janice Rae's.\n\nI thought of Uncle Rory, then remembered that I had some more of his papers with me, and a load of his poems. Mum had found them for me in the house at Lochgair. I got my bag down from the rack. Uncle Rory could not be more depressing than reality was, just now.\n\nAny hope I might have entertained that Lewis and Verity's little Hogmanay hug had been an aberration, something they would fail to follow through, or feel for some reason embarrassed about, was comprehensively quashed the next evening when they turned up together at Uncle Hamish and Aunt Tone's, bearing all the signs of new lovers (literally so in the case of Lewis's neck, which displayed a line of passion purpurae worthy of an industrial vacuum cleaner, and which were ill-concealed by Lewis's longish dark curls and a white shirt fastened with a bootlace tie).\n\nLewis and Verity kept exchanging looks, laughing at anything even remotely amusing each other said, sitting close together, finding a hundred small excuses to touch each other ... I wanted to throw up. We had all gathered for Hamish and Tone's traditional Ne'erday partyette; a necessarily quietish affair during which people exchanged tales of drunkenness, broken resolutions and recipes for hangover cures, as well as taking advantage of the opportunity to compare notes regarding blank spots in the memories of any of the assembled penitents.\n\nI was helping Aunt Tone prepare stuff in the kitchen but had to give up when Lewis and Verity volunteered to assist as well, and then spent most of the time feeding one another little bits of food, goosing each other and going into sardinely-intimate huddles punctuated by low whispers, bursts of baboon-like giggles and convincingly porcine snorts. I went through to the dining-room and helped myself to a pint of the neuron-friendly punch Uncle Hamish always made for the event.\n\nMum and dad turned up later. There were about twenty of us, all told; mostly McHoans but with a smattering of civilians. We sipped \u2013 or in my case gulped \u2013 the weak but tasty punch, nibbled on Aunt Tone's buffet-bits, and played Alternative Charades; an invention of my father's in which one first has to guess the category of the thing one is being asked to decipher. When it was my turn to mime, I tended to concentrate on Popular Communicable Diseases, Well-Known Poisons, Famous Mass Murderers and Great Natural Disasters.\n\nMy last memory is of trying to mime Rare Gynaecological Disorders, preparatory to attempting Toxic Shock Syndrome. But apparently people insisted that one stand up to do one's piece, and I \u2013 successfully acclimatised to the horizontal by this time \u2013 refused to pander to this sort of nit-picking, and so passed my turn on to Cousin Josh with as much good grace as I could muster.\n\n'The congenitally odd-jeaned person to my left will take my place,' I mumbled, waving one hand in his direction before letting my head resume its communion with Hamish and Tone's lounge carpet.\n\nThe bit about odd jeans was totally accurate, by the way; Cousin Josh made his fortune firstly by dealing in cars, then by risking all on a jeans company which at the time was tottering on the very hem of bankruptcy; under Josh's regime, their jeans weren't any better or any cheaper than anybody else's, but he had the garments made in odd sizes; waists of 29, 31, 33 inches, and so on, as opposed to the products from all other companies, domestic and foreign, which tended to favour the even numbers.\n\nIt was one of those brilliantly simple ideas people always wish they had had themselves, and believe that somehow they could have had; no need to incur any extra expense or make any more sizes than anybody else, or necessarily to distinguish one's product in other way, yet just by the idea one has a potential market of half the jeans-buying public, or at least that proportion of it which has always felt that they are somehow perpetually between the usual sizes.\n\nI vaguely remember dreaming about Verity's jeans that night; how graphically, geographically tight they were and how wonderful it must be to take them off her. Then I imagined Lewis, boots tied round his neck, for some reason suddenly resembling Shane MacGowan, skinning her jeans off, not me, and he turned into Rodney Ritchie, at home with his parents, unpicking the individual stitches of her jeans with a tiny knife, and the Ritchies all wore badly-fitting jeans and had denim curtains and denim carpets and denim light shades and denim wallpaper with the little rivets left on like poppers so you could just press paintings and photos onto the wall ... except that Mr Ritchie looked like Claude Levi-Strauss, which is when I think I started to get confused.\n\nEither I had been put to bed, I thought, as I woke up next morning, in the wee cold room at the top of the house, or my standard drunk-person's on-board auto-pilot facility was improving with experience.\n\nI bathed, dressed, and broke my fast with some left-overs from the fridge, a pint of water and a couple of brace of Paracetamol, all without encountering anybody else in the house. It was only eight o'clock; obviously I'd conked out some time before everybody else, and they were still asleep (I had heard appropriate log-sawing-like noises coming from Hamish and Tone's room on my way back from the bathroom). The day looked bright but cold; I laced up the Docs and went for a walk in the hills behind Gallanach.\n\nI felt like shit and I was trying so hard not to think of Lewis and Verity that I couldn't think about anything else, but the day was fabulous; clear and cold, the sky crystal blue and reflecting in the waters of hill-cupped lochans and the glinting length of Loch Add. On such days the hills hold a mixture of azure and gold never seen at any other time of year; the cobalt sky is more intense than it ever is in summer, and the straw-coloured hills shine strong in the light from the low winter sun. Against the shifting mirror that is the surface of a loch, the colours shimmer and dance; they take your breath away, and \u2013 for a brief, relieving while \u2013 they can even take your thoughts away.\n\nUp in the hills, at the place of marching water, I found Ashley Watt and one of her more exotic cousins.\n\nThe concrete spillway below the Loch Add reservoir comes down to a stepped slope above the confluence of several small burns draining nearby slopes. A short bridge carries the track over the spillway, and that was where Ashley and Aline were sitting, legs dangling over the stream in the concrete gully, arms resting on the lower bar of the bridge rails.\n\nThey were sitting side by side, watching the marching water.\n\nWhat happened was that the water first backed up behind the lipped edge of the top step, then over-flowed, and spilled with increasing force, in a sort of hydro-chain-reaction, down each subsequent step to the bottom of the channel. There followed a period of comparative quiet, while the water built up again behind the top step and those beneath. You might guess it was my dad who first pointed out this odd (and classically Chaotic) phenomenon and brought it to the attention of us kids. None of us had ever been able to discover whether it was a deliberate effect, or the result of pure chance. Whatever, it was wonderfully restful, unpredictable and therapeutic.\n\n'Hey, Prentice,' Ash said. She looked a little worn and bleary-eyed, though her long, lion-coloured hair shone like health itself in the brassy sunlight of mid-day.\n\n'Hi.' I nodded to her and to Aline, who was Franco-Vietnamese and engaged to Hugh Watt, one of Ashley's multitudinous cousins from the branch of the family that seemed to favour consorts of an exotic provenance (Hugh's brother Craig was going out with a stunning, lanky Nigerian called Noor). Aline looked even smaller and blacker-haired than usual, beside Ashley. 'Aline; \u00e7a va?'\n\n'Magic, Prentice,' Aline replied in fluent Glaswegian.\n\n'Have some skoosh,' Ash said as I sat down next to her. She reached between her and Aline and handed me a half-finished bottle of Irn-Bru. I had, over the course of the morning, already gulped down about a gallon of teeth-achingly cold stream-water at various points up in the hills, but the traditional Scottish hangover treatment was probably just what I needed. I took a couple of mouthfuls, handed the bottle back, wiping my lips.\n\n'You look terrible,' Ash said.\n\n'Feel worse,' I said glumly, watching the water cascade down the concrete stair-case of the spillway.\n\n'Lost track of you at the Urvills' party, Prentice,' Ashley said. 'You just slope off, or did you get a lumber?'\n\n'Oh God,' I moaned, and lowered my head to the cool steel pipe of the bridge rail.\n\n'Hey ...' Ash said gently, putting her hand on my head and patting me. 'There there, Prentice ma man. What's the matter?'\n\n'Oh, nothing much,' I sighed, slowly raising my head again and gazing at the water. 'I saw the woman I love wrap herself round my older, smarter and wittier brother like clingfilm round a sandwich, and it looks like they're enjoying each other the way ... Oh, God, I'm so pissed off I can't even think of a decent comparison. Or even an indecent one, which would probably \u2013 certainly \u2013 be more to the point.'\n\n'Part from that; everything okay, aye?' Ash said, putting her arm round my shoulders.\n\n'Help me, Ashley,' I said, closing my eyes and putting my head on her shoulder. 'What am I to do?'\n\n'You must think of her on the toilet,' Aline said, and giggled.\n\n'Off-white woman speak truth,' Ash said, lowering her head to rest it on mine. 'The hots rarely survive an intense course of imagining the beloved on the cludgie.'\n\n'No,' I sighed, opening my eyes as a series of splashes announced another chaotic event on the spillway. 'I'd probably only develop a fetish for coprophagy.'\n\n_'Pardon?'_\n\n'That as unpleasant as it sounds?'\n\n'Unpleasanter.'\n\n_'Merde!'_\n\n'Yup.'\n\n'You're a hopeless case, Prentice, so you are. Have you contemplated suicide?'\n\n'Yeah; soon as it's finished, I'm going to throw myself off the Channel Tunnel.'\n\nAshley's shoulders moved once under my head. 'Plenty of time to set your affairs in order, then.'\n\n'It's not my affairs I'm concerned with.'\n\n'Ach, she wasn't your sort, anyway, Prentice.'\n\n'What; you mean not good enough for me?'\n\n'No, Prentice; I mean too much taste. You never stood a chance with a woman that choosy.'\n\nI pulled away and looked dubiously at Ashley, who smiled sweetly. 'What is this?' I said. 'You auditioning for the Exit chapter of the Samaritans, or what?'\n\nAshley took my hands in hers. 'Ah, Prentice. Dinnae worry; maybe it's just an infatuation; hers, or Lewis's ... or yours. Whatever. Maybe she'll come to her senses. Maybe she wants to work her way through all the McHoan brothers in order of age \u2013'\n\n'Or weight.'\n\n' \u2013 or weight. Maybe she'll get married to Lewis but have a lifelong affair with you.'\n\n'Oh, great.'\n\n'See? You don't know what might happen,' Ashley said happily, spreading her hands.\n\n'Anyway, Prentice,' Aline said in her sing-song voice. 'There are plenty more fishes in the sea, yes?'\n\nI looked over at Aline. 'Hey, can I quote you on that?'\n\nAline winked at me, tapped the side of her nose. 'The toilet,' she said conspiratorially.\n\nI started to get up. 'It's no good,' I sighed. 'You two are cheering me up too much and I can't stand the excitement.' I got wearily to my feet, muscles aching from the effects of drink and walk.\n\n'See you down the Jac tonight?' Ash said.\n\n'Maybe,' I said. 'I keep trying to drown my sorrows but they appear to be marginally more buoyant than expanded polystyrene.' The water cascaded down the face of the spillway again, the noise like a million stamping feet heard from a long way off. I shrugged. 'Fuck it, though; worth another try. Gotta start working some time.'\n\n'That's my boy.'\n\n'See you, gals.'\n\n'Bye-bye, Prentice.'\n\n'Try not to fall in love with anybody else before tonight.'\n\n'Yo.'\n\nAn hour or so later I saw my mother's green Metro, just about to turn out of the drive-way of Hamish and Tone's house. She stopped when she saw me, wound the window down. 'Here you are,' she said.\n\n'Here I am,' I agreed.\n\n'I was waiting for ages there.' She glanced at her watch. 'Oh well. Getting in?'\n\nI got into the car; we started to reverse the fifty yards back up the drive. Actually, my legs were so tired I was quite grateful for the lift. 'I brought what I could find of Rory's stuff.' Mum nodded. 'Your dad thinks there's more, but it's buried in the filing.' I looked at the back seat, where a folder lay. 'Not that you deserve it,' she added.\n\n'Oh, thanks,' I said. I picked the folder up; _CRII_ said the lettering on the spine. It looked similar to the folder I already had, but perhaps a little thicker. I vaguely remembered reminding mum last night that I was looking for the rest of Uncle Rory's papers.\n\n'Well?' she said.\n\nI looked over, yawning. 'Well?' I repeated.\n\nWe drew to a stop outside the door of the house. 'You don't remember last night, do you?' mum said, turning the ignition off. She was dressed in angora and chunky cords; new perfume. She looked slightly unamused and not a little worried.\n\n'Not... in its entirety, no,' I confessed.\n\nShe shook her head. 'God, you were drunk, Prentice.'\n\n'Umm,' I said, weighing the folder in my hands. '... Yes.' I smiled my best 'but I'm still your wee laddy' smile.\n\nShe raised those delicate brown brows. 'My God, you don't remember embarrassing Lewis and Verity last night, do you?'\n\nI looked at her.\n\n'I mean, apart from embarrassing your father and me,' she added.\n\nI felt the blood draining from my face like somebody had opened a valve in my ankle. Oh-oh.\n\nI swallowed. 'I wasn't doing my impression of the Bradford City supporter, the King's Cross Disaster victim and the guy from Piper Alpha meeting up in Hell, was I?' (Requires three cigarettes; offends everybody.)\n\n'It's not funny, Prentice; poor Verity was nearly in tears. You're lucky Lewis didn't throttle you.'\n\n'Oh my God,' I said, feeling cold. 'What did I say?'\n\n(Duck, and cover.)\n\n'Told her \u2013 told everybody \u2013 you were madly in love with her!' she said, eyes flashing. 'Then, having declared undying worship of the poor girl, you proceeded to slag her off for taking up with Lewis.' Mum shook her head angrily, tears in her eyes. 'Prentice! What were you _thinking_ of?'\n\n'Oh my God,' I moaned. KYAG. I put the folder down in my lap and put my forehead on the folder.\n\n'Then you followed that up with some fairly off-colour remarks about Lapland, and what you referred to, I believe, as \"the old earth-moving equipment\".'\n\n'Oh my God.'\n\n'And I think we all successfully worked out what \"doing the Delta Foxtrot\" was, as well, before you became totally incoherent.'\n\n'Oh my God!'\n\n'I don't think saying \"Oh my God\" will make it any better, Prentice. I think you should apologise to Verity and Lewis as soon as you can. They're up at the castle.' My mother brought her voice under control with an effort. 'Though you might also think about saying sorry to Hamish and Antonia, too, as you were their guest and it was their party you brought grinding to an embarrassing halt. Just as well you agreed to go quietly when Kenneth suggested it was time you went to bed; though apparently he and Hamish practically had to carry you upstairs, and the whole way up you were muttering something vile about Lewis being thrown naked into a tub of starving Elephant Leeches.'\n\nAnd dad put me to bed! Oh no! Dad and the Tree! The shame of it!\n\n'Mum, I want to die,' I mumbled into the folder.\n\n'Just at the moment, Prentice, I don't think there'd be any shortage of volunteers to help you on your way, if you were serious.'\n\n'I am.'\n\n'Stop being melodramatic, Prentice; it doesn't suit you. Sarcasm's more your forte.'\n\n'Oh my God.'\n\n'Prentice,' mum said, putting her hand on my head and running her fingers through my hair. 'Prentice ...'\n\nI looked up, straightened. Mum's eyes looked red. She shook her head. 'Prentice, why are you so stupid with your cleverness sometimes?'\n\nI took a deep breath. 'Wish I knew, mum,' I said, and sniffed, eyes smarting. Best not to say anything about it running in the family.\n\nShe took me in her arms, hugged me. I was surprised, as I always was at such moments, how slim and small she felt.\n\nAfter a bit we let go of each other. She glanced in the mirror and declared I had wrecked her eyes for the rest of the day. Then we went in to Hamish and Tone's for tea and apologies, and later drove to the castle for what would have been the most excruciating interval of my life if Verity and Lewis had still been there, but they weren't; they had taken off in the car to visit some friends of Verity's who lived in Ardnamurchan, and wouldn't be back until late tomorrow at the earliest.\n\nMum took me back chez Hamish and Tone; she agreed to pass on my expressions of contrition to my father. She'd wanted me to come to Lochgair and say sorry to him there, but I had begged for mercy, and \u2013 rather to my surprise \u2013 been granted it.\n\nI had already decided that tomorrow I would take the train back to what was now your official European City of Culture for the following twelve months. In theory, Verity and Lewis were meant to be giving me a lift in four days time, but that was obviously out, now.\n\nI had to promise mum I'd write to each of them, and apologise in person at the first possible opportunity, and also that I'd stop off at Lochgair before I returned to Glasgow, to see dad.\n\nAshley met me in the Jac that night, listened to my woes, bought me drink when I ran out of money (I'm sure I was short-changed at the bar) even though she probably had less dosh than I did, and listened to my woes all over again when we went back to her mum's and sat up till God knows when, talking low so we wouldn't wake Dean in the next room. She made me coffee, gave me hugs, and at one point I fell asleep, and was at peace for a while, and woke up sprawled on the floor, my head on her lap, one gentle hand stroking my head. 'Ash,' I croaked, 'you're a saint.'\n\nShe just smiled.\n\nA last cup of coffee and I left; back to H and T's in time for a few hours' fitful sleep; then up and away, run to the station by Aunt Antonia. I only just caught the train, and when, a quarter of an hour later, we pulled in to Lochgair, and I should have got my bag and quit the Sprinter and walked to the house and finally have talked \u2013 sober, and not in the context of a game of Alternative Charades \u2013 to my father, and apologised, and spent the three hours until the next Glasgow train with my mother and father in some longed-for spirit of reconciliation, I did nothing of the sort.\n\nInstead I put my head to one side so that it rested against the cold glass of the window, closed my eyes and let my mouth hang open a little. I stayed like that for the minute or so we waited at the Lochgair station platform, and didn't stir again \u2013 yawning convincingly for any other passengers who might be watching \u2013 until we were crossing the viaduct at Succothmore.\n\nStill stuck on the track within sight of Janice Rae's flat, I got up out of my seat, took down my bag and fished out the file mum had brought from the house. I found some much-Tippexed poems typed on foolscap, plus about twenty or so printed A4 pages which looked like they were part of a play or film script. I selected a page at random and started reading.\n\n_Lord:_ ... And I see them as they will be, dead and torn; shocked, mutilated and alone, on battlefields or by long roads, in ditches or against high walls, in echoing white corridors and misty woods, in fields, by rivers; dumped in holes, thrown in piles; neglected and absolved. Or, if living on, filled with petty, bitter memories, and a longing for the war they fought to end. Oh captain, I see in this my ending, what I think you didn't start to glimpse with your most cunning intuition; the soldiers are always the real refugees. Their first victim is themselves, their life taken from them well before \u2014 as though seeking a replacement from another freed \u2014\n\nBut I couldn't take any more. I put the papers in the folder and the folder in my bag, then stuffed that under my seat.\n\nI looked out at the rain instead; it was cheerier.\n\nI'd avoided stopping off to see mum and dad. It made my eyes close, every time I thought about it. What was wrong with me?\n\nWell, I thought; they made me. They produced me; their genes. And they brought me up. School and university still hadn't changed me as much as they had; maybe even the rest of my life could never compensate for their formative effect. If I was too embarrassed, too full of shame to go and see them, it wasn't just my fault; it was theirs too, because of the way they'd brought me up (God, I thought I'd stopped using that excuse when I left Lochgair Primary School). But there _was_ a grain of truth in there.\n\nWasn't there?\n\nAnd hell, I thought; I _had_ been tired; I _was_ tired still, and I would phone that evening \u2013 definitely \u2013 and say I'd fallen asleep, and nobody would be too bothered, and after all a chap could only cope with so much sorrow-saying in one day ... of course I'd phone. A bit of soft soap, a bit of flannel, like dad would say.\n\nNo sweat; I could charm them. I'd make everything all right.\n\nStill, it was the hangover of that piece of moral cowardice at Lochgair station, along with everything else, that led to me feeling so profoundly awful with myself that evening (after the train finally did get into Queen Street and I walked back, soaked and somehow no longer hungry, in the rain to the empty flat in Grant Street), that mum had to call me there, because I hadn't been able to bring myself to phone her and dad ... and I still managed to feign sleep and a little shame and a smattering of sorrow and reassure her as best I could that really I was all right, yes of course, not to worry, I was fine, thanks for calling ... and so of course after that felt even worse.\n\nI made a cup of coffee. I was feeling so bad that I treated it as a kind of moral victory that I was able to empty most of the water out of the obviously Gav-filled kettle and leave the level at the minimum mark. I stood in the kitchen waiting for the water to heat up with a distinct feeling of eco-smugness.\n\nIt was just as I was sitting down in the living room with my cup of coffee that I realised I'd left my bag on the train.\n\nI couldn't believe it. I remembered getting out of my seat, putting on my jacket, wondering about trying to get something to eat, deciding I didn't feel hungry, glancing at the empty luggage rack, and then heading through the station and up the road. With no bag.\n\nHow could I? I put the coffee down, leapt out of my chair and over the couch, ran to the phone, and got through, ten minutes later, to the station. Lost Property was closed; call tomorrow.\n\nI lay in bed that night, trying to remember what had been in the bag. Clothes, toiletries, one or two books, a couple of presents ... and the folder with Uncle Rory's papers in it; both folders, including the one I hadn't read yet.\n\nNo, I told myself, as panic tried to set in. It was inconceivable that I'd lost the bag forever. It would turn up. I had always been lucky that way. People were generally good. Even if somebody had picked it up, maybe they had done so by mistake. But probably a guard had spotted it and it was right now sitting in some staff-room in Queen Street station, or Gallanach. Or maybe \u2013 in a siding only a mile or two from where I lay \u2013 a cleaner's brush was at this moment encountering the bag, wedged back under the seat ... But I'd get it back. It couldn't just disappear; it had to find its way back to me. It had to.\n\nI got to sleep eventually.\n\nI dreamt of Uncle Rory coming home, driving the old Rover Verity had been born in, the window open, his arm sticking out, him smiling and holding the missing folder in his hand; waving it. In the dream, he had a funny looking white towel wrapped round his neck, and that was when I woke up and remembered.\n\nMy white silk scarf; the irreplaceable M\u00f6bius scarf, the gift of Darren Watt, had been in the missing bag as well.\n\n'Noooo!' I wailed into the pillow.\n\nWaking up was a process of gradually remembering all the things I had to feel bad about. I rang Lost Property first thing. No bag. I got them to give me the number for the cleaners' mess-room and asked there. No bag. I tried Gallanach, in case the train had got back there before the bag had been discovered under the seat by some honest person. No bag.\n\nI tried both stations again in the afternoon; guess what?\n\nI did the only thing I could think of, and retired to bed; if I was to be a blade of grass doomed to be trampled flat, then I might as well accept it and lie down. I stayed in bed for the next twenty-four hours, sleeping, drinking a little water, not eating at all, and only rousing myself when Gav arrived back (from his parents', I wrongly assumed), loudly declaring himself to be of unsound liver but totally in love.\n\nOh, lucky ewe, I said, does she come from a respectable flock?\n\nHa ha, it's your au \u2013 fr ... parents' friend, Janice, Gav beamed, radiating unrepentant guilt; came round here the other day looking for you we got talking went for a curry had a few drinks ended up back here one thing led to another know how it is always liked older women they're more experienced know what I mean arf arf anyway spent an extremely enjoyable New Year at her place apart from the usual visit to my folks' of course oh by the way she's coming round here tonight I'm cooking lasagne can you swap rooms seeing Norris won't be back until tomorrow it's just I didn't expect you back until then either, that okay?\n\nI stared at Gav from my bed, blinking and trying to take in this torrent of exponentially catastrophic information. I attempted desperately to convince myself that what I was experiencing was just a particularly cruel and hateful dream concocted by some part of my mind determined to exact due penalty from my conscience for my having behaved with such despicable lack of grace during the holidays ... but failed utterly; my sub-conscious' stock of nightmare-paradigms includes nothing so banally twisted as Gav.\n\nFinally, scraping together the last microscopic filaments of my tattered pride to produce a quorum fit for emergency ego-resuscitation if not actual wit, I managed: 'Gav, I'm shocked.' (Gav looked defensive for all of a micro-second, a concession my lacerated self-respect fell upon with all the pathetic desperation of a humiliatingly defeated politician pointing out that well, things can only get better.) 'You never told me you could cook lasagne.'\nCHAPTER 10\n\nOnce upon a time, long ago, there was a rich merchant who thought that the city where he lived was full of bad people, and especially bad children.'\n\n'Were they Slow Children?'\n\n'Some of them were, as a matter of fact, but at the time they didn't have the signs to tell them so.'\n\n'Are the Slow Children only in Lochgair, dad?'\n\n'No; there are Slow Children in various places; watch out for the road-signs. Now; back to the story. The rich merchant thought the children should always salute him and call him \"sir\" when they passed him in the street. He hated beggars and old people who couldn't work any more. He hated untidiness and waste; he thought that babies who threw things from their cradles should be punished, and children who wouldn't eat their food should be starved until they ate what they had been given in the first place.'\n\n'Dad, what if it had gone rotten?'\n\n'Even if it had gone rotten.'\n\n'Aw, dad! Even if it had maggots and things in it and it was all horrible?'\n\n'Yes; that would teach them, he thought.'\n\n'Awwrr! Yuk!'\n\n'Well, the rich merchant was very powerful, and he came to control things in the city, and he made everybody do as he thought they ought to do; snowball-throwing was made illegal, and children had to eat up all their food. Leaves were forbidden to fall from the trees because they made a mess, and when the trees took no notice of this they had their leaves glued onto their branches ... but that didn't work, so they were fined; every time they dropped leaves, they had twigs and then branches sawn off. And so eventually, of course, they had no twigs left, then no branches left, and in the end the trees were cut right down. The same happened with flowers and bushes too.\n\n'Some people kept little trees in secret courtyards, and flowers in their houses, but they weren't supposed to, and if their neighbours reported them to the police the people would have their trees chopped down and the flowers taken away and they would be fined or put in prison, where they had to work very hard, rubbing out writing on bits of paper so they could be used again.'\n\n'Is this story pretend, dad?'\n\n'Yes. It's not real; I made it up.'\n\n'Who makes up real things, dad?'\n\n'Nobody and everybody; they make themselves up. The thing is that because the real stories just happen, they don't always tell you very much. Sometimes they do, but usually they're too ... messy.'\n\n'So the rich merchant wouldn't like them?'\n\n'That's right. In the city, nobody was allowed to tell stories. Nobody was allowed to hum, or whistle or listen to music, either, because the merchant thought that people should save their breath the way they saved their money.\n\n'But people didn't like living the way the merchant wanted them to; most mums and dads wouldn't serve their children rotten food, and hated having to pretend that they did. People missed the trees and flowers ... and having to walk around with one eye covered by an eye-patch.'\n\n'Why was that, dad? Why did they have \u2013'\n\n'Because the merchant thought it was a waste of light to have both eyes open; why not save the light the way you save money?'\n\n'Were they like Mr Lachy, dad?'\n\n'Well, not exactly, no; Lachlan Watt only has one eye; the other one looks like a real one but it's glass. The people in the city could change from one eye to the other on different days, but Lachlan \u2013'\n\n'Aye, dad, but they're like him sort of, aren't they?'\n\n'Well, sort of.'\n\n'Why has Mr Lachy only got one eye, dad?'\n\n'Uncle Fergus punched him! Eh, dad?'\n\n'No, Prentice. Uncle Fergus didn't punch him. It was an accident. Fergus and Lachy were fighting and Fergus meant to hit Lachy but he didn't mean to put his eye out. Now; do you two want to hear this story or not?'\n\n'Aye, dad.'\n\n'Aye, dad.'\n\n'Right. Well, the city wasn't a nice place to live because of all the silly laws the merchant had passed, and people started to leave it and go to other towns and other countries, and the merchant was spending so much time passing new laws and trying to make people obey the ones he'd already passed that his own business started to fail, and eventually the city was almost deserted, and the merchant found that he owed people much more money than he had in the bank, and even though he sold his house and everything he owned he was still broke; he was thrown out of his house and out of the city too, because he had become a beggar, and beggars weren't allowed in the city.\n\n'So he wandered the countryside for a long time, starving and having to beg for food, and sleeping in barns and under trees, and eventually he found a little town where all the beggars and old people he'd had thrown out of the city had gone; they were very poor, of course, but by all helping each other they had more than the merchant had. He asked if he could stay with them, and eventually they agreed that he could, but only if he worked. So they gave him a special job.'\n\n'What, dad?'\n\n'What was the job, dad?'\n\n'He had to make brooms.'\n\n'Brooms?'\n\n'Old fashioned brushes made from bundles of twigs tied to a wooden handle. You know up in the forest you sometimes see those things for beating out fires?'\n\n'The big flappy things?'\n\n'Yes; they're big bits of rubber \u2013 old tyres \u2013 attached to wooden handles, for beating out fires on the ground. Well, in the old days, those used to be made from twigs, and even longer ago people used to use brooms like that to sweep the streets and even to sweep their houses. Not all that long ago, either; I can remember seeing a man sweeping the paths in the park in Gallanach with a broom like that, when I was older than either of you are now.'\n\n'Ah, but dad, you're ancient!'\n\n'Ha-ha ha ha!'\n\n'That's enough. Now listen; about these brooms, right?'\n\n'What?'\n\nWhat, dad?'\n\n'The man who had been a rich merchant, and who was now a beggar, had to make brooms for the town. He had a little hut with a stone floor, and a supply of handles and twigs. But to teach the man a lesson they had given him a supply of twigs that were old and weak; poor twigs for making brooms with.\n\n'So, by the time he had made one broom the floor of the hut was covered in bits of twigs, and he had to use the broom he'd just made to sweep the floor of his hut clean before he could start making the next broom. But by the time he'd cleaned the floor to his satisfaction, the broom had worn right away, right down to the handle. So he had to start on another one. And the same thing happened with that broom, too. And the next, and the next; the mess made making each broom had to be cleared up with that same broom, and wore it away. So at the end of the day there was a great big pile of twigs outside the hut, but not one broom left.'\n\n'That's silly!'\n\n'That's a waste, sure it is, dad?'\n\n'Both. But the people had done it to teach the man a lesson.'\n\n'What lesson, dad?'\n\n'Ah-hah. You'll have to work that out for yourselves.'\n\n'Aw, dad!'\n\n'Dad, I know!'\n\n'What?' Kenneth asked Prentice.\n\n'Not to be so damn silly!'\n\nKenneth laughed. He reached up and ruffled Prentice's hair in the semi-darkness; the boy's head was hanging out over the top bunk. 'Well, maybe,' he said.\n\n'Dad,' James said from the lower bunk. 'What happened to the merchant?'\n\nKenneth sighed, scratched his bearded chin. 'Well, some people say he died in the town, always trying to make a broom that would last; others say he just gave up and wasted away, others that he got somebody else to make the brooms and found somebody to provide better twigs, and got people to sell the brooms in other towns and cities, and hired more people to make more brooms, and built a broom-making factory, and made lots of money and had a splendid house made ... And other people say he just lived quietly in the town after learning his lesson. That's a thing about stories, sometimes; they have different endings according to who you listen to, and some have sort of open endings, and some don't actually have proper endings yet.'\n\n'Aw, but dad ...'\n\n'But one thing's definite.'\n\n'What, dad?'\n\n'It's light-out time.'\n\n'Aw ...'\n\n'Night-night.'\n\n'Night, dad.'\n\n'Yeah; night.'\n\n'Sleep tight.'\n\n'Don't let the bugs bite.'\n\n'Right. Now lie down properly; noddles on pillows.'\n\nHe made sure they were both tucked in and went to the door. The night-light glowed softly on the top of the chest of drawers.\n\n'Okay ... Dad?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Did the man not have any family, dad?' Prentice asked. 'In the story: the merchant. Did he not have any family?'\n\n'No,' Kenneth said, holding the door open. 'He did, once, but he threw them out of his house; he thought he wasted too much time telling his two youngest sons bed-time stories.'\n\n'Aww ...'\n\n'Aww ...'\n\nHe smiled, padded back into the room, kissed the boys' foreheads. 'But then he was a silly man, wasn't he?'\n\nThey left Margot to look after the children and set off in the car, heading for Gallanach. Kenneth smiled when he saw the hand-painted sign at the outskirts of the village that said, 'Thank You.'\n\n'What are you grinning at?' Mary asked him. She was bending down in her seat, staring into the little mirror that hinged up from the glove-box flap, inspecting her lip-stick.\n\n'Just that sign,' he said. 'The one that goes with the Slow Children sign at the other end of the village.'\n\n'Huh,' Mary said. 'Slow children, indeed. I hope you weren't telling my bairns horrible stories that'll keep them awake all night.'\n\n'Na,' he said. The Volvo estate accelerated down the straight through the forest towards Port Ann. 'Though maggoty meat and people with one eye did come into it at one point.\n\n'Hmm,' Mary said. She snapped the glove-box closed. 'I heard Lachy Watt's back in the town; is that true?'\n\n'Apparently.' Kenneth rotated his shoulders as he drove, trying to ease the nagging pain in them that too much drink the night before always seemed to give him these days.\n\nThey had spent Hogmanay at home, welcoming the groups of people roaming the village as they came round. The last revellers had finally been seen off at nine in the morning; they and Margot had done some cleaning up before going to bed, though Ken had anyway had a couple of hours' sleep between three and five, when he'd fallen into a deep slumber on the wicker couch in the conservatory. The boys had gone out to play on the forestry tracks with their new bikes on what had proved a bright but cold day; Mary had got three hours' sleep before they came back, noisily demanding to be fed.\n\n'Haven't seem him for ... what? Ten years?' Mary said. 'Has he been away at sea all that time?'\n\n'Well, hardly,' Ken said. 'He was in Australia, wasn't he? Settled down there for a while. Had some sort of job in Sydney, I heard.'\n\n'What was he doing?'\n\n'Don't know; you could ask him yourself. Supposed to be coming to Hamish and Tone's shindig tonight.'\n\n'Is he?' Mary said. The Volvo hissed along the dark road; a couple of cars went past, holes of white light in the night, scattering spray which the water jets and wipers of the Volvo swept away again. Mary took a perfume spray from her handbag, applied the scent to wrists and neck. 'Fergus and Fiona are coming tonight, aren't they?'\n\n'Should be,' Ken nodded.\n\n'Do you know if Lachy and Fergus still talk to each other?'\n\n'No idea.' He laughed. 'Don't even know what they'd talk about; a member of the factory-owning Scottish gentry and a second mate \u2013 or whatever Lachy is these days \u2013 who's spent the last few years in Oz. What is there to say; aye-aye, captain of light industry?'\n\n'Fergus isn't gentry, anyway,' Mary said.\n\n'Well, good as. Might not have a title, but he acts like he does sometimes. Got a castle; what more do you want?' Kenneth laughed lightly again. 'Aye-aye. Ha ha.'\n\nThe lights of Lochgilphead swung into view ahead, just as rain started to spot the windscreen. Kenneth put the wipers on. 'Aye-aye!' he sniggered.\n\nMary shook her head.\n\n'Going to the dogs, if you ask me.'\n\n'Fergus, people like you have been saying that since somebody invented the wheel. Things get better. They're always looking up.'\n\n'Yes, Kenneth, but you're basically Bolshie, so you would think so.'\n\nKenneth grinned, took a drink of his whisky and water. 'It's been a good year,' he nodded. Fergus looked suitably disgusted, and threw back the remains of his own whisky and soda in one gulp.\n\nThey stood in the lounge of Hamish and Antonia's house, watching the others help themselves to the buffet Antonia had prepared. Neither of the two men had felt hungry.\n\n'You might not be saying that when the refugees come back from Australia,' Fergus said sourly. Kenneth glanced at him, then looked round for Lachlan Watt; he was sitting on a distant chair, a plate of food balanced on his knees, talking to Shona Watt, his sister-in-law.\n\nKenneth laughed as Fergus refilled his glass from one of the whisky bottles on the drinks trolley behind them. 'Fergus, you're not talking about the Domino Theory by any chance, are you?'\n\n'Don't care what you call it, McHoan; not saying it'll be next, either, but you just watch.'\n\n'Fergus, for God's sake; not even that asshole Kissinger believes in the Domino Theory any more. The Vietnamese have finally got control of their own country after forty years of war; defeated the Japs, the French, us, and the most powerful nation in the history of the planet in succession, with bicycles, guns and guts, been bombed back into the bronze age in the process and all you can do is spout some tired nonsense about little yellow men infiltrating the steaming jungles of the Nullarbor Plain and turning the Aussies into Commies; I think a Highland League side winning the European Cup is marginally more likely.'\n\n'I'm not saying they won't pause to draw breath, Kenneth, but I can't help feeling the future looks black for those of us interested in freedom.'\n\n'Fergus, you're a Tory. When Tories say freedom they mean money; the freedom to send your child to a private school means the money to send your child to a private school. The freedom to invest in South Africa means the money to invest there so you can make even more. And don't tell me you're interested in freedom unless you support the freedom of blacks to come here from abroad, which I know you don't, so there.' Kenneth clinked his glass against Fergus's. 'Cheers. To the future.'\n\n'Huh,' said Fergus. 'The future. You know, I'm not saying your lot won't win, but I hope it doesn't happen in my lifetime. But things really are going to the dogs.' Fergus sounded genuinely morose, Kenneth thought.\n\n'Ah, you're just peeved your lot have elected a woman leader. Even that's good news ... even if she is the milk snatcher.'\n\n'We got rid of an old woman and replaced him with a younger one,' Fergus said, mouth turned down at the corners, staring over his whisky tumbler and across the room to where his wife was talking to Antonia. 'That's not progress.'\n\n'It is, Fergus. Even the Tories are subject to change. You should be proud.'\n\nFergus looked at Kenneth, a wealth of sombre disdain in his slightly watery-eyed look. Kenneth gave him a big smile. Fergus turned away again. Kenneth looked at the other man's heavily jowled, prematurely aged face and shook his head. Chiang-Kai-Shek and Franco dead, Angola independent, Vietnam free at last ... Kenneth thought it had been a great year. The whole tide of history seemed to be quickening as it moved remorselessly leftwards. He felt vaguely sorry for Fergus. His shower had had their reign, he thought, and grinned to himself.\n\nIt had been a good year for Kenneth personally, too. The BBC, bless its cotton socks, had taken some of the stories from his first collection; a whole week of _Jackanory_ to himself, just six weeks before Christmas! At this rate he could start thinking about giving up teaching in a year or two.\n\n'I wish I shared your enthusiasm for change.' Fergus sighed, and drank deeply.\n\n'Change is what it's all about, Ferg. Shuffling the genes; trying new ideas. Jeez, where would your damn factory be if you didn't try new processes?'\n\n'Better off,' Fergus said. He looked sourly at Kenneth. 'We're just about making enough from traditional paperweights to keep the Specialist Division afloat. All this hi-tech stuff just loses us money.'\n\n'Well, it must be making money for somebody; maybe you weren't able to invest enough. Maybe the big boys'll take over. That's the way things go; capitalists all want to have a monopoly. Only natural. Don't get depressed about it.'\n\n'You won't be saying that if we have to close the factory and put everybody out of work.'\n\n'God, Ferg, it isn't that bad, is it?'\n\nFergus shrugged heavily. 'Yes, it is. We've told them it might come to that; the shop-stewards, anyway. Another strike, or too big a pay rise, and we might go under.'\n\n'Hmm,' Kenneth said, sipping at his whisky. He wondered how serious the other man was. Industrialists often made that sort of threat, but they rarely seemed to be carried out. Kenneth was a little surprised that Hamish hadn't said anything about the factory being in such dire straits, but then his brother did seem to put the church and the factory above family and friends.\n\n'I don't know.' Fergus shook his head. 'If we weren't tied to this bit of the country, I'd almost think about chucking it all in and heading off somewhere different \u2013 Canada, or Australia, or South Africa.'\n\nIt was Kenneth's turn to look sour. 'Yes,' he said. 'Well, you'd probably get on fine in the RSA, Ferg. Though that's the one place I _wouldn't_ recommend if you want to keep well away from the red tide.'\n\n'Hmm,' Fergus nodded, still watching his wife, now talking to Shona Watt. 'Yes, you may be right.' He knocked back his drink, turned to the bottle-loaded table behind and poured himself another large whisky.\n\nAntonia clapped her hands, singing out: 'Come on, you boring lot; let's all play charades!'\n\nKenneth drained his glass, murmured. 'God, I hate charades.'\n\n_'Heniiss ... never liked him either; fat lipped beggar ... queer, y'know; thass wha he's singing you know; d'you know that? \"Scuse me while I kiss this guy... disgussin ... absluley disgussin ...'_\n\n_'Fergus, do shut up.'_\n\n_' \"Scuse me, while I kiss this guy\" ... bloody poofter coon.'_\n\n_'I'm sorry about this, Lachy.'_\n\n_'That's okay, Mrs U. You no goin to put your seat belt on, no?'_\n\n_'No; not for short journeys \u2013'_\n\n_'Lachy? Lachy ... Lachy! Lachy; I'm sorry about your eye ... really really sorry; never forgave myself, never... here, shake ...'_\n\n_Fergus tried to lever himself up from the rear bench seat of the old Rover, but failed. He got as far as lifting his head and getting one shoulder off the seat, but then collapsed back onto the leather, and let his eyes close._\n\n_The car rumbled about him ... even more restful than the noise of train wheels in the old days; he tried to remember the old days ..._\n\n_'You sure you don't mind doing this, Lachy?' Fiona said, swinging the car off the'main road and onto the drive that led to the castle. The headlights made a tunnel of the trees and rhododendrons._\n\n_'Na, it's okay.'_\n\n_Lachlan Watt had been about to leave Hamish and Antonia's party when Fergus had fallen over and Fiona had decided it was time to take her husband home; she had offered Lachy a lift back to his brother's house, but when they'd got there Fergus had seemed fast asleep, snoring loudly and taking no apparent notice of Fiona shaking him and shouting at him; Lachy had volunteered to come back to the castle to help get Fergus out of the car and upstairs to bed; Fiona would run Lachy back afterwards._\n\n_'God that man's a nuisance,' Fiona said, as they turned the corner in the drive and the lights of the castle came into view against the coal-dark_ night. _'Like I_ say; _I could have_ got _the baby-sitter to help me with him, but she's just a skelf... not our regular girl. She's built like a rugby player, could probably put Ferg over her shoulder, but not this girl. Leanne's her name ... that's her car there; doesn't look old enough to drive if you ask me ...'_\n\n_Fiona brought the Rover to a halt behind a beaten-up mini, standing on the gravel in front of the castle's main entrance._\n\n_'This really is awful good of you, Lachy._ '\n\n_'Aye, it's no problem, Mrs U.'_\n\n_Fiona turned to him. She smiled. 'Lacby; it's Fiona. You make me feel old when you call me Mrs U.'_\n\n_'Sorry; Fiona.' Lachy grinned._\n\n_He had been a thin, light-framed boy, and he had grown to become a lean, wiry man; the years of life on merchant ships, and then in Australia, had left his skin looking well-used, like soft and fine-grained \u2013 but slightly distressed \u2013 leather. His hair was unfashionably short, and both eyes glittered. It was a spare, uncluttered, characterful face, especially compared to Fergus's._\n\n_'That's better.' Fiona smiled. She turned and looked in disgust at the body in the back seat, just as Fergus started to snore again. 'Well; better get this lump out of the car, I suppose.'_\n\n_Fergus had gone back into a deep sleep. They couldn't wake him. Fiona went in to tell the baby sitter she was free to go, while Lachy tried to rouse Fergus._\n\n_'Hoi you; Fergus. Ferg; wake up, man.'_\n\n_'Aarg ... Henriss, bassard.'_\n\n_'Fergus; wake up, Fergus.' Lachlan tried slapping the man's cheeks; his heavy jowls wobbled like jellies._\n\n_'Hhnn...'_\n\n_'Wake up,' Lachlan said, slapping Fergus's cheeks again, harder. 'Wake up,' he said quietly. 'Ye upper class cunt ye.' He fairly walloped Ferg on one chop._\n\n_Fergus awoke suddenly; arms waving about, eyes wild and bright, making no sound other than a faint gurgling noise. Then he rolled off the seat into the footwell and immediately started snoring again._\n\n_'Any luck with the sleeping beauty?' Fiona said, coming down the steps alongside a slim, blonde-haired girl who was zipping up an anorak._\n\n_Lachlan turned round. 'Na; be's sound.'_\n\n_'That'll be the day,' muttered Fiona. She glanced in at Fergus, then turned to the girl. 'Thanks, Leanne, dear; now drive carefully, won't you?'_\n\n_'Aye, Mrs Urvill,' the girl said, taking out some keys and heading for the mini. 'Night-night.'_\n\n_'Bye now.'_\n\n_Fiona and Lachy took an end of Fergus each; Lachy held him under the shoulders, Fiona by the ankles. They struggled up the steps, through the entrance hall, rested in the main hall, then took him up to the first floor._\n\n_'In here,' Fiona said, nodding._\n\n_Lachy supported Fergus's shoulders with one knee while he twisted the handle of a darkly-stained wooden door. It swung open to darkness._\n\n_'There's a light, aye?'_\n\n_'Just there; down a bit.'_\n\n_The room was small and bright; there was a single bed, a dressing table and chair, and a wardrobe. There was a print of a hunting scene on one wall, opposite a small window._\n\n_'Guest room's good enough for him tonight,' Fiona grunted_ as _they swung him onto the bed and dropped him._\n\n_'Shooch!' Fiona said, collapsing onto the floor. Lachy sat down on the pillow at the head of the bed, breathing hard. Fiona wiped her brow. She got up shakily._\n\n_'That was hard work,' she said. She pulled Fergus's shoes off and nodded to the door. 'Come_ on; _let's break into the old bugger's best malt before we run you back. You deserve it.'_\n\n_'Fair enough,' Lachy said, smiling. 'No takin his clothes off, no?'_\n\n_'Ugh. Certainly not,' Fiona said. She drew back a little against the door to let Lachy go past her into the hallway. 'He's lucky we didn't leave him in the car.' She turned out the light._\n\n_Fergus woke in utter darkness, wondering where he was; he felt as though he was falling backwards forever into darkness. For an instant he thought perhaps he was dead, consigned to perdition and gloom until the end of time, his only sensation that of falling back and back and back, head over heels forever. He heard himself moan, and felt with his hands: bedclothes. He was still wearing his own_ _clothes, too. Here was his shirt on his wrist; there his trousers, sweater... shoes off. He flexed his feet, feeling his toes in his socks. His hands found the sides of the bed; it was a single, then._\n\n_It was still totally dark. He tried to remember where he'd been last._\n\n_The party; Hamish and Antonia McHoan's. Of course. He must still be there, as this wasn't his own bed. Put to bed. Bit bad, that; probably in the dog-house as far as the lady wife was concerned, too, but then what was new?_\n\n_He put one hand out, feeling for a table; he found what felt like one, and then a long cold metal stem. Reaching up, he felt a switch._\n\n_The light clicked on and suddenly everything was white and horribly bright. He shielded his eyes. God, his head felt fuzzy, and sore. He needed a drink very badly; water would do._\n\n_He looked round the white-painted room, thinking that it looked somehow familiar. Perhaps he had slept here before. Or maybe he'd given the McHoans some bits and pieces of furniture._\n\n_He listened but couldn't hear anything. The door of the room looked familiar, too. Odd to find a door so comforting, somehow._\n\n_He got up, wobbled across to the door. He was quite cold. He opened the door; a dark hall. Funny; the place didn't smell like the McHoans' house did. It smelled of wood and a sort of quite pleasant mustiness. This place smelled of stone and polish. Bit like the castle._\n\n_He went out into the hallway, felt along the wall for a light switch; he found one, switched it on. Stairs led up; the wood-panelled hall led to another set of stairs going down. There were old paintings on the walls. He felt very dizzy, and sat down on the bottom step of the stairs. He was home. This was the castle._\n\n_He got up, walked up the stairs. The door to the short flight of stairs that led to the two topmost floors was locked. He didn't understand. He searched his pockets but could find no key._\n\n_He pushed at the door again. He gathered a chestful of air to_ shout at Fiona \u2013 dozy bitch had locked him out of his own fucking castle, his own _bedroom_ \u2013 but then thought of the children. Might _wake the little beggars up. Didn't want that._\n\n_He went down through the lower hall to the kitchen, drank some water. His watch said it was two o'clock; so did the kitchen clock. There ought to have been keys hanging by the door to the utility room, but they weren't there. Bloody fishy. Had Fiona hidden them? Did she think he was dangerous, was that it?_\n\n_Maybe she thought he would get up in some drunken stupor and ravish her. 'Huh, that'll be right,' he said to himself. His voice sounded rough in the quiet kitchen; he cleared his throat, coughed, and felt the dull pounding of his headache suddenly sharpen._\n\n_Damn it all. Perhaps he was being punished. Maybe she was punishing him for getting drunk. Had he done anything disgraceful? He couldn't remember, but he doubted it. He usually held his drink well, and behaved like a gentleman even when he did have one too many._\n\n_He looked at his reflection in the window over the sink. He pulled one splayed hand through his hair. Maybe he ought to have a shower or something. There was always the bathroom on the first floor ..._\n\n_He felt bloody annoyed, Fi locking him out of their apartments like that._\n\n_Then he remembered the observatory._\n\n_You could get up to it by the stairs to the roof. He'd been up there, in the roof_ space _when the men had been installing the dome. For that matter, he'd seen that loft being put together, knew it almost as well as that self-opinionated young architect had. He'd crawled around in there, him and the builder, with a torch, discussing where the observatory could be built; what joists and supports would have to go, what extra bracing would be needed._\n\n_He chuckled to himself, put down the cup he'd been drinking the water from, wiped his lips._\n\n_He padded through the hall, up the four flights of stairs to the little landing where you either went straight ahead and out onto the battlements, or ducked through the wee door into the observatory._\n\n_It was bitterly cold inside the aluminium hemisphere. He wished_ _he'd thought to put shoes on before he'd started on this piece of nonsense; feet felt like blocks of ice. Still._\n\n_He opened the door that gave into the extended cupboard under the roof. Dark. Damn; should have thought to bring a torch, too._\n\n_'Sloppy, Urvill, bloody sloppy,' he breathed to himself._\n\n_He squeezed inside the little cupboard. Really must lose some weight. Well, festive period well and truly over now; time to go on a diet, or do a bit more exercise. He wriggled to the rear of the cupboard; felt for the wooden battens on the panel at the end of the dark space. The panel came away after a little while; he put it on the floor in front of him, and wriggled through on his elbows and knees into the darkness beyond._\n\n_'Getting too old for this sort of thing, 'he told himself. It was very nearly totally dark in the roof space; only a little light came from behind him, through the cupboard from the dome of the observatory. He felt his way across the joists in front of him, got his legs free from the cupboard and was able to get up into a crouch, balancing on a joist, hands just above his head, holding on to rough, undressed wood._\n\n_He swung one foot out, to the next joist, then put out one hand and felt for the next rafter; he transferred his weight carefully. There; did it. He was aware of the lath and plaster clinging to the bottom of the joists; put a foot through that and you'd be right through the ceiling below; chap could fall slap into the bath from here, probably; or into the twins' room, maybe; perish the thought; daddy coming crashing through the ceiling, give the little perishers nightmares for the rest of their lives._\n\n_He swivelled from joist to joist, rafter to rafter, feeling horribly like a monkey and getting very cold feet in the process even though he was breaking out in a sweat at the same time. His knees and his neck were making ghastly creaking noises and protesting like hell._\n\n_He looked back at the light coming from the observatory cupboard, now a good twenty feet away, and thought about going_ _back; this whole prank was becoming a bit much, really. But he'd started, 'so he'd finish._\n\n_He saw the faintest of glows ahead, from between two of the joists. He smiled. 'That's the ticket,' he breathed to himself. With the next joist it came closer; then he could see one edge of the little hatch; then he was over it. A soft light gave away the outline of the door. He heard voices. God, the silly woman had probably left the radio on._\n\n_He got down on his knees again, feet supported on the joist behind; his knees gave sharp twinges of pain, taking almost all his weight._\n\n_He felt for the edges of the square door, found them and lifted it gently. What a locked-room mystery this would present the old girl with, if he could get in without her hearing him, and get undressed and slide in beside her! She'd never be able to work it out. Of course, he thought, as he levered the hatch door open slowly, letting more soft light spill out from underneath, he'd have to cover his tracks in the morning; damn silly to have left the cupboard back there open, and the light on in the dome. But never mind. Fi hardly ever went up there anyway._\n\n_He'd lifted the near edge of the door up about three inches above the top of the joist in front of him. He held it there, lowered his head, peeped into the_ room, _smiling, wondering if he could see Fi from this angle. Voices. Warm air and voices._\n\n_'Oh ... God, God, God, God; yes, yes, yes, yes...'_\n\n_It took him a moment to work out what was going on._\n\n_But then he realised._\n\n_That was Fiona, in the bed, on the bed, covers half off, the only light in the room coming from a little candle by the bedside, her hair spilled on the pillow (the other pillow was on the floor) ... and that was Lachlan Watt, wrapped round her, body bucking like some horse, his hands at her neck, at one breast, in her hair, cupping her neck; the covers sliding off, Fiona putting her arms wide, clutching at the bottom sheet of the bed at one side, clutching the edge of the_ _bedside table with the other. Her head beat from side to side and she said, 'Yes, yes, yes, yes,' again, then Lachlan \u2013 wiry, athletic-looking, skinny shanks ramming back and forth like some skinny bull \u2013 reached under her, pulled her up, his legs spreading, kneeling; she hung onto him, arms round his neck, then after a few vertical stabs he threw her down, back onto the bed; she grunted, arms still tight round his back, then she brought her legs up, right up over his thin, plunging, globe-buttocked behind, until her ankles were in the small of his back, rocking to and fro, feet crossed one over the other, locked there; with one splayed hand she held onto his back, pressing him to her, and with the other hand she felt down the length of his body, over ribs and waist and hips, and with another grunt reached round and under, taking his balls in her hand, pressing them and kneading them and squeezing them._\n\n_'Aw Christ!' he heard Lachlan Watt say, body arching. Fiona shuddered, her voice almost a squeal as she took a series of sudden, deep in-rushing breaths, and buried her head in the hollow between Lachlan Watt's shoulder and neck._\n\n_Fergus let the little door down without making a noise._\n\n_He felt very cold, and he had pissed himself. The urine was warm around his balls and tepid down his leg, but it was cold at his knees. He knelt there in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the subsiding passion in the room below, then swivelled silently and with even greater care than before, and feeling far more sober, moved back towards the thin, escaping light at the far end of the chill, cramped roof space._\nCHAPTER 11\n\nIf the year of our folly 1990 had started inauspiciously for me, then the Fates, Lady Luck, Lord Chance, God, Life, Evolution \u2013 whoever or whatever \u2013 immediately thereafter set about the business of proving that the entangled disasters distinguishing the year's first few days were but a mild and modest prelude to the more thorough-going catastrophes planned for the weeks and months ahead ... and this with a rapidity and even an apparent relish which was impressive \u2013 if also bowel-looseningly terrifying \u2013 to behold.\n\nGav and my Aunt Janice got on like a house on fire, a combined location and fate I occasionally wished on them as I lay awake listening to the sounds of their love-making, a pastime I sometimes suspected I shared with people in a large part of the surrounding community, not to say northern Europe.\n\nI had made the mistake of volunteering to sleep on the couch in the living room on the nights that Janice stayed at our flat; this offer was made with what I thought was obvious sarcasm one evening while Gav and Norris were attempting to develop a technique for cooking poppadoms in the microwave. They were having an intense and appropriately heated discussion on the problems of cold-spots (as evinced by the fact that their first attempts came out looking like braille roundels), and on the unfortunate instability of three poppadoms balanced together \u2013 caused not so much by the jerk they received when the turntable started up as by their movements while they cooked and swelled \u2013 but eventually my flatmates settled on the concept of standing the things up individually on the glass turntable, and so instigated what they termed a 'brain-storming session' in an attempt to find a suitable support mechanism. (I suppressed the urge to point out that the chances of two such patently zephyr-grade minds producing anything remotely resembling a storm was roughly equivalent to the likelihood of somebody called Cohen landing a pork scratching concession in Mecca during Ramadan.)\n\n'An alligator clip with the chrome bits removed.'\n\n'Naw; still metal.'\n\n'Maybe we could shield it.'\n\n'Na; has to be plastic. Yer non thermosetting stuff, for preference.'\n\n'Well, look, Gav,' I said from the kitchen doorway. 'I only overhang the couch by a foot or so at each end; why don't I attempt to curl up there when you and Janice are in residence, if not flagrante, in the bedroom?'\n\n'Eh?' Gav said, swivelling that thick neck of his to look at me, his massive brows furrowing. He scratched at one rugby-shirt shrouded armpit, then nodded. 'Aw; aye.' He looked pleased. 'Thanks very much, Prentice; aye, that'd be grand.' He turned back to the microwave.\n\n'Maybe we could suspend them from this bit in the middle with a length of thread,' Norris grunted, sticking his head almost right inside the appliance. Norris, still clad in his white lab coat, was one of those medical students whom fate has seemingly marked out to spend the bulk of their studies and initial training suffering from quite stupendous hangovers incurred through the intake of near-fatal levels of alcohol the night before, and their subsequent professional careers sternly finger-wagging at any member of the general public who dares to consume over the course of a week what they themselves had been perfectly happy to sink during the average evening.\n\n'I mean, don't let the fact I'm the longest serving flat-dweller put you off; the last thing I want to do is embarrass you, Gav,' I said (just a tad tetchily).\n\n'Na, it's all right, Prentice; ta,' Gav said, then crouched down by Norris and squinted into the lit interior of the microwave. 'Nowhere to attach it,' he told Norris. 'Anyway; wouldnae turn, would it?'\n\nThey both looked thoughtful, heads side by side at the open oven door, while I wondered what the chances were of both heads fitting \u2013 and jamming \u2013 inside and the door safety-catch somehow short-circuiting.\n\n'Na,' Norris said. 'We're looking at some form of support from below, know what ah mean? Come on, Gav, you're the engineer ...'\n\n'I mean, that old duvet's bound to cover most of the important parts of my body, and the chances of the pilot on the fire blowing out again and gassing me in my sleep can't really be _that_ high,' I said.\n\n'Hmm,' Gav said. He straightened, then bent forward and tapped at the white plastic strip on the kitchen window ledge which retained the cheaply horrid secondary double-glazing the flat's owners had fitted.\n\n'Just a block of wood, maybe,' Norris said.\n\n'Get hot,' Gav said, looking more closely at the white plastic strip. 'Depending on how much water there is in the wood; could warp. Still think plastic's your best bet.'\n\n'After all, Gav, I can just stay up till your drinking pals have decided to head home, or Norris's card school chums finally drag themselves away, or crash out and snore on the Richter scale, whatever; the fun rarely extends beyond three or four o'clock in the morning ... why, that would leave me a good four or five hours' sleep before an early lecture.'\n\n'Aye, that's great, Prentice,' Gav said, still closely inspecting the window sill. Then he stood up suddenly and snapped his fingers. 'Got it!' he said.\n\nWhat, I thought? Had my tone of reason in the face of monstrosity finally registered? But no.\n\n'Blu-tack!'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Blu-tack!'\n\n'Blu-tack?'\n\n'Aye; Blu-tack. You know: Blu-tack!'\n\nNorris thought about this. Then said excitedly. 'Aye; Blu-tack!' 'Blu-tack!' Gav said again, looking wide-eyed and pleased with himself.\n\n'The very thing!' Norris nodded vigorously.\n\nI shook my head, quitting the kitchen doorway for the comparative sanity of the dark and empty hallway. 'You crack the Bollinger,' I muttered. 'I'll just phone the Nobel Prize Committee and tell them their search is over for another year.'\n\n'Blu-tack, ya beauty!' I heard from the white-glowing crucible of cutting-edge technological advancement that our humble kitchen had become.\n\n'You mean you haven't read them all?'\n\n'I went off the idea,' I said. I was sitting in what had effectively become my boudoir; our living room. Aunt Janice seemed to prefer staying here with Gavin to travelling out to Crow Road most nights.\n\nGav and Janice sat on the couch, loosely attired in dressing gowns and watching a video.\n\nI had been sitting at the table housed in the living room bay window, trying to write a paper for a tutorial the next day, but Gavin and Janice had chosen to punctuate their highly audible coupling sessions (in what the more tenacious core-areas of my long-term memory still sporadically insisted had once been my bedroom) with an almost equally noisy episode of tortilla chip eating. The corny raucousness which ensued of course meant that the television volume had to be turned up to window-shaking levels so that the happy couple could savour the exquisitely enunciated phrasing of Arnold Schwarzenegger's lines over the noise of their munching.\n\nI had admitted defeat on the subject of the links between agricultural and industrial revolution and British Imperialism, and sat down to watch the video. Perhaps appropriately, given the inflammatory nature of the effect Gav and Janice seemed to have on each other's glands, it was called _Red Heat._\n\n'Oh,' I'd said. 'A Hollywood movie about two cops who don't get along at first but are thrown together on a case involving drugs, foreigners, lots of fights and guns and which ends up with them respecting each other and winning. Sheech.' I shook my head. 'Makes you wonder where these script-writer guys get their weird and zany ideas from, doesn't it?'\n\nGav had nodded in agreement, without taking his eyes off the screen. Janice Rae had smiled over at me, her hair fetchingly disarrayed, her cheeks flushed. 'Oh yes, Prentice,' she'd said. 'What did you think of Rory's work, in that folder?'\n\nHence the exchange above.\n\nJanice looked back at the telly and stretched one leg out over Gavin's lap. I glanced over, thinking that she had much better legs than a woman of her age deserved. Come to that, she had much better legs than a man of Gav's mental age deserved.\n\n'So you haven't found any hints about what it was Rory had hidden in there?' she said.\n\n'I've no idea what he wanted to hide,' I said, wishing that Janice would hide a little more of her legs.\n\nI was uncomfortable talking about the poems and Rory's papers; the bag lost on the train coming back from Lochgair at the start of the year had stayed lost, and \u2013 stuck with just the memory of the half-finished stuff that Janice had given me originally \u2013 I'd given up on any idea I'd ever had of trying to rescue Uncle Rory's name from artistic oblivion, or discovering some great revelation in the texts. Still, it haunted me. Even now, months later, I had dreams about reading a book that ended half-way through, or watching a film which ended abruptly, screen whiting-out ... Usually I woke breathless, imagining there was a scarf \u2013 shining white silk looped in a half-twist \u2013 tightening round my neck.\n\n'It was something he'd seen, I think.' Janice watched the distant screen. 'Something ...' she said slowly, pulling her dressing gown closed. 'Something ... over-seen, if you know what I mean.'\n\n'Vaguely,' I said. I watched Gavin's hand move \u2013 apparently unconsciously, though of course with Gav that could still mean it was fully willed \u2013 to Janice's polyester-and-cotton covered thigh. 'Something,' (I suggested, watching this,) 'seen voyeuristically, perhaps?'\n\n'Mmm,' Janice nodded. Her right hand went up to Gav's short, brownish hair, and started to play with it, twirling it round her fingers. 'He put it in ... whatever he was working on.' She nodded. 'Something he'd seen, or somebody had seen; whatever. Some big secret.'\n\n'Really?' I said. Gavin's hand rubbed up and down on Janice's lap. Gav's face gave no sign he was aware of doing this. I pondered the possibility that the lad possessed some dinosaur-like secondary brain which was controlling the movements of his hand. Palaeobiological precedent dictated such an organ be housed in Gavin's ample rear, and have responsibility for his lower limbs \u2013 not to say urges \u2013 rather than his arms, but then one never knew, and I reckoned Gavin's modest forebrain \u2013 doubtless fully occupied with the post-modernist sub-texts and tertiary structuralist imagery of _Red Heat_ \u2014 could probably do with all the help it could get. 'Really?' I repeated.\n\n'Mmm,' Janice nodded. 'So he said.' She bit her lip.\n\nGavin had a look of concentration on his face now, as though two parts of his brain were attempting the tricky and little-practised operation of communicating with each other.\n\n'Something about \u2013' Janice moved her hips, and seemed to catch her breath. '\u2013 the castle.' She clutched at Gav's hair.\n\nI looked at her. 'The castle?' I said. But too late.\n\nPerhaps lent the final impetus necessary for successful reception by the proximity of the area of stimulus to that of cognition, this hair-pulling signal finally seemed to awaken Gavin to the perception that there might be something else going on in his immediate area other than the video, undeniably captivating though it was. He looked round, first at his hand, then at Janice, who was smiling radiantly at him, and finally at me. He grinned guiltily.\n\nHe yawned, glanced at Janice again. 'Bit tired,' he said to her, yawning unconvincingly once more. 'Fancy goin' to \u2013?'\n\n_'What'_ Janice said brightly, slapping her hand down on Gavin's bulky shoulder, '\u2013 a good idea!'\n\n'Tell us how it ends, eh Prentice?' Gav said, nodding back at the television as he was half hauled out of the room by Aunt Janice, en route to the land of nod after a lengthy detour through the territories of bonk.\n\n'With you going \"Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!\"' I muttered to the closed door. I glared at the screen. '\"How it ends,\"' I muttered to myself. 'It's a video, you cretin!'\n\nI returned to the changes in British society required to bring about the Empire on which the light of reason rarely shone. It was going to be a long night, as I also had to finish an already over-due essay on Swedish expansion in the seventeenth century (it would have to be a goodish one, too; an earlier remark \u2013 made in an unguarded moment during a methodically boring tutorial \u2013 ascribing Swedish territorial gains in the Baltic to the invention of the Smorgasbord with its take-what-you-want ethic, had not endeared me to the professor concerned; nor had my subsequent discourse on the innate frivolity of the Swedes, despite what I thought was the irrefutable argument that no nation capable of giving a Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger could possibly be accused of lacking a sense of humour. Pity it was actually the Norwegians.\n\nI remembered a joke about Kissinger ('no; fucking her.') and found myself listening to Gav and Janice. They were still at that stage of their coital symphony where only the brass section was engaged, as the old metal bed creaked to and fro. The wind section \u2013 essentially vox humana \u2013 would join in later. I shook my head and bent back to my work, but every now and again, as I was writing or just thinking, a niggling little side-track thought would distract me, and I'd find myself remembering Janice's words, and wondering what exactly Uncle Rory might have hidden within his later work (if he really had hidden anything). Not, of course, that there was much point in me wondering about it.\n\nFor about the hundredth time, I cursed whatever kleptomaniac curmudgeon had walked off the train with my bag. May the scarf unravel and do an Isadora Duncan on the wretch.\n\n'Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!' came faintly from what had been my bedroom. I ground my teeth.\n\n'Married?' I gasped, aghast.\n\n'Well, they're talking about it,' my mother said, dipping her head towards the table and holding her Paisley-pattern scarf to her throat as she nibbled tentatively at a large cream cake.\n\nWe were in Mrs Mackintosh's Tea Roomes, just off West Nile Street, surrounded by straightly pendulous light fitments, graph-paper pierced wooden screens, and ladder-back seats which turned my usual procedure of hanging my coat or jacket on the rear of the seat into an operation that resembled hoisting a flag up a tall mast.\n\n'But they can't!' I said. I could feel the blood draining from my face. They couldn't do this to me!\n\nMy mother, neat and slim as ever, ploughed crunchingly into the loaf-sized meringue cream cake like a polar bear breaking into a seal's den. She gave a tiny giggle as a little dollop of cream adhered to the tip of her nose; she removed it with one finger, licked the pinky, then wiped her nose with her napkin, glancing round the restaurant through the confusing topography of slats and uprights of the seats and screens, apparently worried that this minor lapse in hand-mouth coordination was being critically observed by any of the surrounding middle-class matrons, perhaps with a view to passing on the scandalous morsel to their opposite numbers in Gallanach and having mother black-balled from the local bridge club. She needn't have worried; from what I had seen, getting a little bit of cream on your nose was practically compulsory, like getting nicked on the cheek in a ritualised duel before being allowed to enter a Prussian drinking sodality. The atmosphere of middle-aged ladies enjoying something wicked and nostalgic was quite palpable.\n\n'Don't be silly, Prentice; of course they can. They're both adults.' Mother licked cream from the ice-cave interior of the meringue, then broke off part of the superstructure with her fingers and popped it into her mouth.\n\nI shook my head, appalled. Lewis and Verity! Married? No!\n\n'But isn't this ...' My voice had risen a good half-octave and my hands were waggling around on the end of my arms as though I was trying to shake off bits of Sellotape. '... rather soon?' I finished, lamely.\n\n'Well, yes,' mum said, sipping her cappuccino. 'It is.' She smiled brightly. 'I mean, not that she's pregnant or anything, but \u2013'\n\n'Pregnant!' I screeched. The very idea! The thought of the two of them fucking was bad enough; Lewis impregnating that gorgeous creature was infinitely worse.\n\n'Prentice!' Mother whispered urgently, leaning closer and glancing round again. This time we were getting a few funny looks from other customers. My mother smiled insincerely at a couple of Burberried biddies smirking from the table across the aisle; they turned sniffily away.\n\nMy mother giggled again, hand to mouth, then delved into the meringue. She sat back, munching, face red but eyes twinkling, and with those eyes indicated the two women who'd been looking at us; then she raised one finger and pointed first at me, then at her. Her giggle turned into a snort. I rolled my eyes. She dabbed at hers with a clean corner of napkin, laughing.\n\n'Mother, this is not funny.' I drank my tea, and attacked another chocolate eclair. It was my fourth and my belly was still growling. 'Not _at all_ funny.' I knew I was sounding prissy and ridiculous but I couldn't help it. This was a very trying time for me, and the people who ought to be offering support were offering only insults.\n\n'Well,' mother said, sipping at her coffee again. 'Like I say, there's no question of that. I mean, not that it makes much difference these days anyway, but yes, you're right; it is a bit soon. Your father and I have talked to Lewis and he's said they aren't going to actually rush into anything, but they just feel so ... right together that it's ... just come up, you know? Arisen naturally between them.'\n\nI couldn't help it. My obsessed, starveling brain was conjuring up all sorts of ghastly images to accompany this sort of talk; things arising, coming up ... Oh God ...\n\n'They've talked about it,' mother said, in tones of utmost reason, with a small shrug. 'And I just thought you ought to know.'\n\n'Oh, thanks,' I said, sarcastically. I felt like I'd been kicked by a camel but I still needed food, so I polished off the eclair, belched with all the decorum I could, and started eyeing up a Danish pastry.\n\n'They're in the States right now,' mother said, licking her fingers. 'For all we know they might come back married. At least if that happens it won't come as quite such a shock now, will it?'\n\n'No,' I said miserably, and took the pastry. It tasted like sweetened cardboard.\n\nIt was April. I hadn't been back to Gallanach yet this year, hadn't spoken to dad. My studies weren't going so well; a 2.2 was probably the best I could hope for. Money was a problem because I'd spent all the dosh I'd got for the car, and I needed my grant to pay off the overdraft I'd built up. There was about a grand in the old account \u2013 my dad's money came by standing order \u2013 but I wouldn't use it, and what I regarded as my own finances were \u2013 judging from the tone of the bank's increasingly frequent letters \u2013 somewhere in the deep infrared and in serious danger of vanishing from the electromagnetic spectrum altogether.\n\nI had paid my rent early on with the last inelastic cheque I'd written, hadn't paid my Poll Tax, had tried to find bar work but been unsuccessful, and was borrowing off Norris, Gav and a few other pals to buy food, which comprised mostly bread and beans and the odd black pudding supper, plus a cider or two when I could be persuaded to squander my meagre resources on contributing to the funds required for a raid on the local off-licence.\n\nI spent a lot of time lying on the couch in the living room, watching day-time television with a sneer on my face and my books on my lap, making snide remarks at the soaps and quizzes, chat shows and audience participation fora, skimming the scummy surface of our effervescent present in preference to plumbing the adumbrate depths of the underlying past. I had taken to finishing off the flat beer left in cans by the members of Norris's itinerant card school after its frequent visits _chez nous,_ and was seriously considering starting to steal from bookshops in an attempt to raise some cash.\n\nFor a while I had been ringing the Lost Property office at Queen Street station each week, still pathetically hoping that the bag with Uncle Rory's poems and Darren Watt's M\u00f6bius scarf would somehow miraculously turn up again. But even they weren't having anything to do with me any more, after I'd _definitely_ detected an edge of sarcasm in the person's voice and lost my temper and started shouting and swearing.\n\nRejected by Lost Property; it seemed like the ultimate insult.\n\nAnd Aunt Janice never did remember any more about whatever Rory had hidden in his later work.\n\nMum sipped her coffee. I tore the Danish to bits, imagining it was Lewis's flesh. Or Verity's underclothes \u2013 I was a little confused at the time.\n\nWell, let them get married. The earlier the better; it would end in tears. Let them rush into it, let them repent at leisure. They weren't right for each other and maybe a marriage would last a shorter time than a more informal, less intense liaison; brief and bitter, both of them on proximity fuses with things coming rapidly to a crunch, rather than something more drawn out, where they might spend long periods apart and so forget how much they hated being together, and enjoy the fleeting, passionate moments of reunion ...\n\nI fumed and bittered away while my mother finished her coffee and made concerned remarks about how thin and pale I was looking. I ate another Danish; mother told me everybody else was fine, back home.\n\n'Come back, Prentice,' she said, putting one hand out across the table to me. Her brown eyes looked hurt. 'This weekend, come back and stay with us. Your father misses you terribly. He's too proud to \u2013'\n\n'I can't,' I said, pulling my hand away from hers, shaking my head. 'I need to work this weekend. Got a lot to do. Finals coming up.'\n\n'Prentice,' my mother whispered. I was looking down at my plate, licking my finger and picking off the last few crumbs, transferring them to my mouth. I could tell mum was leaning forward, trying to get me to meet her eyes, but I just frowned, and with my moistened finger-tip cleared my plate. 'Prentice; please. For me, if not for your dad.'\n\nI looked up at her for a moment. I blinked quickly. 'Maybe,' I said. 'I don't know. Let me think about it.'\n\n'Prentice,' my mother said quietly, 'say you will.'\n\n'All right,' I said, not looking at her. I knew I was lying but there wasn't anything I could do about it. I couldn't send her away thinking I could be so heartless and horrible, but I also knew that I wasn't going to go home that weekend; I'd find an excuse. It wasn't that this dispute between my dad and me about whether there was a God or not really meant anything any more, but rather the fact of the history of the dispute \u2013 the reality of its course, not the substance of the original disagreement \u2013 was what prevented me from ending it. It was less that I was too proud, more that I was too embarrassed.\n\n'You promise?' mother said, a slight stitching of her brows as she sat back in the ladder-backed seat the only indication that she might not entirely believe me.\n\n'I promise,' I nodded. I felt, wretchedly, that I was such a moral coward, such a sickening liar, that making a promise I knew I had no intention whatever of keeping was hardly any worse than what I had already done. 'I promise,' I repeated, blinking again, and set my mouth in a firm, determined way. Let there be no way out of it; let me really _make_ this promise. I was so disgusted with myself that I wanted to make myself suffer even more when I did \u2013 as I knew I would \u2013 break my word. I nodded fiercely and smiled bravely, utterly insincerely, at my mother. 'I really do promise. Really.'\n\nWe said goodbye outside, in the street. I told her the flat was in too disgusting a state for her to come and visit. She hoisted her umbrella to ward off the light drizzle that had started to fall, gave me a couple of twenty-pound notes, said she'd look forward to seeing me on Friday, kissed my cheek, then went off to do her shopping.\n\nI had dressed as well as I could that morning, in more or less the same stuff I'd worn for Grandma Margot's funeral. Minus the lost M\u00f6bius scarf, of course. I turned up the collar of my fake biker's jacket and walked off.\n\nI gave the money to a thankfully dumb-struck fiddle-player on Sauchiehall Street and walked away feeling like some sort of martyred saint. As I walked, this mood was gradually but smoothly replaced by one of utmost depression, while my body \u2013 as though jealous of all the obsessive regard my emotions were receiving \u2013 came up with its own demands for attention, evidenced by an unsteady, fluid shifting in my guts, and a cold sweat on my brow.\n\nI felt fainter and fainter and worse and worse and more and more nauseous, unsure whether it was the bitterness of sibling-thwarted love, or just too much starch and refined sugar. It felt like my stomach had decided to take a sabbatical; all that food was just sitting there, unprocessed, locked in, slopping around and making me feel horrible.\n\nAfter a while I stopped telling myself I wasn't going to be sick, and \u2013 resigned to the fact that I was going to have to throw up at some point \u2013 kept telling myself instead that I'd manage to hold it in until I was back in the flat, and so do it in private, rather than into the gutter in front of people.\n\nEventually I threw up into a litter bin attached to a crowded bus shelter on St George's Road.\n\nI was still gagging up the last few dregs when somebody punched me on the cheek, sending the other side of my head banging against the metal wall of the shelter. I spun round and sat down on the pavement, a ringing noise in my head.\n\nA tramp dressed in tattered, shiny trousers and a couple of greasy-looking, buttonless coats bent down, looking at me. He smelled of last year's sweat. He gestured angrily up at the litter bin. 'Ye wee basturt; there might a been somethin good in there!' He shook his head in obvious disgust and stalked off, muttering.\n\nI got to my feet, supporting myself on the side of the shelter. A wee grey woman wearing a headscarf peered out at me from the end of the bus queue. 'You all right, sonny?' she said.\n\n'Aye,' I said, grimacing. 'Missus,' I added, because it seemed appropriate. I nodded at the bin. 'Sorry about that; my stomach's on strike and my food's coming out in sympathy.'\n\nShe smiled uncomprehendingly at me, looking round. 'Here's ma bus son; you look after yoursel, okay?'\n\nI felt the side of my head where it had hit the bus shelter; a bruise was forming and my eye felt sore. The wee woman got on her bus and went away.\n\n'Oh, Prentice!' Ash said, more in despair than with disgust. 'You're kidding.' She looked at me in the candle-light. I was past caring about feeling guilt and shame and everything was collapsing anyway, so I just looked straight back at her, resigned, and after a while I shook my head. Then I picked up a bit of naan bread and mopped up my curry sauce.\n\nThe naan bread was big; we'd both stuffed ourselves with it during the meal but it was still big. When it had arrived it had needed a separate table just to accommodate it; luckily the restaurant wasn't busy. 'Not so much a naan bread, more a toasted duvet,' I'd said. Ash had laughed.\n\nDuring the course of the meal we'd reduced the blighter to the proportions of a couple of pillows, not to mention disposing of portions of chicken kalija and fish pakora to start, followed by garlic chilli chicken, lamb pasanda, a single portion of pulao rice, and side dishes of Bombay potato and sag panir to accompany. Two dry sherries and a couple of bottles of Nuit St Georges had washed it all down and now we were onto the coffee and brandy. It was Ashley Watt's treat, of course; I still couldn't afford to eat out unless it was in the street and out of a paper poke. Ash was passing through Glasgow and staying with us on her way to a new job down in London.\n\nIt was mid-summer, and unseasonably warm for Glasgow; Ash wore a long, rough silk shirt, and leggings. A light cotton jacket hung over the back of her chair. I was still wearing out the regulation Docs and the thick black jeans. I had borrowed one of Norris's big paramilitary-style fawn shirts to wear as a jacket over my anti Poll Tax T-shirt. I'd left it to the end of the meal before I said anything about being arrested.\n\n'Aw, man,' Ash said, sitting back slackly in her seat. The candle-light reflected in her glasses. _'Why,_ Prentice?' The Anarkali was dark and quiet and a lot of the light was coming from the candle between us. She looked sad; concerned for me, I thought.\n\nI rather liked it. I liked the idea of other people feeling sorry for me, even though I also despised them for it, because I wasn't worth their sympathy and that made them fools.\n\nOf course, I despised myself for despising them for showing such genuine and unselfish emotions, but that's just one of the things you have to get used to when you're in a serious self-destruction spiral. Mine was feeling rather like a power-dive right now. I shrugged. 'Why not? I needed the money.'\n\n'But your family's rich!'\n\n'No, they're ... Well, they might be fairly well ...' I smiled, sat closer, took up my brandy and cradled it in front of the candle flame. 'Actually, there's quite a good exchange on those lines in _Catch-22,_ the movie \u2013 much underrated film \u2013 which isn't in the book, so Buck Henry must have written it, where Nately's been killed and Yossarian's been to Milo's whorehouse to see Nately's whore and Milo's picked him up in the half-track and he's saying Nately died a rich man; he had such-and-such a number of shares in M&M enterprises, and Yossarian says \u2013'\n\nAshley was glaring at me over the candle flame the way a hawk must glare at a field mouse the instant before it parts mouse from field forever. I saw this predatory, outraged expression building on Ash's face like a line of dark clouds on the horizon, and stopped talking, though entirely out of inquisitiveness, not trepidation.\n\n'Shut the fuck up about _Catch-22,_ ya cretin;' Ash said, storming forward and planting both fore-arms on the table cloth. 'What the fucking hell are you doin stealing books for money when you've no need to, eh? Just what sort of dick-head are you, Prentice? I mean, what the fuck are your parents going to think if they hear? How are they goin to feel? Or is that it? Are they supposed to feel bad? Are you tryin to get back at your dad because of this stupit religious thing? Well, come on; are you?'\n\nI sat back, amused.\n\nI played with the dumpy stem of the brandy glass, smirking at Ashley through the candle flame. Ashley's long hair was tied back and she looked rather attractive, now I thought about it. I wondered what the chances were of bedding the girl. A little recreational fornication would go down quite well just now. I wondered if Ash was into rough sex. I had no idea whether I was into it myself, but for some reason just then the idea seemed rather intriguing. I smiled at her, gave a small laugh. 'Really, Ashley, I didn't think you'd take it all so melodramatically. It's only shop-lifting, after all. Just one silly book, too; worse things happen at C & A's.' I sat back, still smiling; legs crossed, arms crossed.\n\nAsh's face was close to the flame, its yellow oval glowing like some magical caste-mark on her forehead. Much closer and she'll melt her glasses, I thought. She appeared to be trying to out-stare me, but actually I'm rather good at that sort of thing when I want to be, and I didn't let my eyes flicker.\n\nA waiter was approaching from behind her, I noticed, without taking my eyes off hers; I felt the grin broaden on my lips. The waiter would distract her, especially as she had ordered the meal and was obviously paying, and anyway she almost certainly hadn't heard the waiter approaching.\n\nAsh reached one hand out across the table and spilled my brandy into my lap.\n\nJust as I was reacting, going 'Wha \u2013!' and jerking forward, Ash turned smoothly to the waiter and with a broad smile said,\n\n'The bill, please.'\n\n'It does look like I've pissed myself!' I protested as we walked back to the flat. 'Those people were definitely laughing at me.'\n\n'Oh, shut up, Prentice.'\n\n'You're telling _me_ to shut up!' I laughed. The July night was warm and muggy and the traffic rumbled like thunder down Great Western Road. 'You throw drink all over me, expect to sleep in my flat tonight and _you_ tell _me_ to shut up!'\n\nAsh paced purposefully on, long flinging strides I was having difficulty in keeping up with. She was still glaring, though straight ahead now. I noticed people coming towards us weren't getting in her way.\n\n'I didn't throw the drink, I tipped it,' she told me. 'And I'm only coming back to the flat to get my bag, if that's the way you feel. I'll sleep in the car. Or find a hotel.'\n\n'I didn't!' I protested, waving my arms and running after her as I saw the possibility of getting into Ashley's increasingly attractive body slipping away from me. 'I didn't say that! I just don't like being told to shut up! I'm sorry! I mean, I'm really sorry I'm annoyed that you spilled \u2013 or tipped \u2013 drink all over me!'\n\nAsh stopped so suddenly I wondered where she'd gone for a moment. I turned, looked, and went back to her, standing looking furious in the light of a Spud-U-Like.\n\n'Prentice,' she said calmly. 'You've practically exiled yourself from your family and your home and your friends, you think you've failed your finals but you say you've no intention of sitting your re-sits even if you have; you've no money and you haven't even been looking for a job; you're getting done for shop-lifting and you're acting like such a fucking dick-head you seem determined to get shot of the last few pals you do have left ... and all you can do is make smart-ass remarks.'\n\nI looked through her bright red glasses into her light grey eyes and said, 'Well, so far so good, certainly, but let's not count our \u2013'\n\nShe stamped on my right big toe, forcing me to produce an involuntary and appallingly undignified yelp. She stormed off; I half limped, half hopped after her.\n\n'Let's not count our vultures before they're hatched, eh?' I laughed. She powered on, ignoring me. I hopped after her. 'Spare a shekel for a healthy beggar?' I cackled. 'Able was I ere I saw Michael; where can you land a Palin? And in what?'\n\nAsh kicked my other shin. Wonderful girl; didn't even seem to break stride.\n\nShe disappeared into an off-licence. I waited outside, rubbing my shin and inspecting the damage to my Docs; luckily the scuff on the right toe didn't show up the way it would have with polished boots.\n\nAsh reappeared with a bag; she swept past me, briefly showing me the bottle of Grouse it contained. I skipped after her down the street. 'After trying the fluid on a small unnoticeable area, you now wish to wash all of my trousers the spirited way, am I right, madam? Now; will you swap these two bottles of warm urine for that one bottle of our product?'\n\nShe shook her head, not looking at me. 'You and I are going to get filthily drunk, Prentice, and if by the time we get to the bottom of this bottle I haven't got some sort of sense out of you I'm going to break it over your thick fucking skull.' She turned, beamed a toothy non-smile at me for about a micro-second, then strode determinedly on.\n\nI tried to keep up. I looked at the bottle in the bag. 'Couldn't you just leave the whisky, I'll drink it all, wake up in the morning \u2013 no, make that the afternoon \u2013 with a head that _feels_ like you hit me over the skull with the bottle, and you sleep in the car ready for that long and demanding journey down the notoriously dangerous A74 tomorrow?'\n\nAsh shook her head.\n\nWe got back to Grant Street. I looked up, saw some lights on in the flat. Maybe, I thought, Ash would be so turned on by the sounds of frantic coupling emanating from Gav and Aunt Janice in the bedroom that she'd tear my clothes off. Or maybe Norris and his pals would distract her from this crazed idea of getting air-locked drunk by suggesting a friendly game of cards.\n\nAsh followed my gaze. She held the bottle up in front of my eyes. 'Ready for this, Prentice?'\n\n'Drink doesn't solve anything, you know,' I told her. 'Just dissolves brain cells.'\n\n'I know,' she said. 'I'm working on the principle that most people are okay unless they get muroculous with drink, when they become arse-holes; you're behaving like an arse-hole now, so maybe drink'll make you okay.'\n\nI tried to look as sceptical as I could. 'I bet you believe in crop circles, too.'\n\n'Prentice, I believe you seem determined to fuck your life up, and I just want to know why.'\n\n'Oh,' I said brightly. 'That's easy; my affections have been rejected by the one I love and her carnality is being most thoroughly investigated by my elder and smarter brother on a more or less hourly basis, so I am spurned and she is spermed; my father believes his children should be free to make up their own minds, but preferably only out of the spare-parts that he provides ... And apart from that ... I mean the exams and getting nicked and stuff ... Well,' I sighed, looking up to the night sky, where the clouds were starting to blot out the few stars that the city lights did not obscure. I spread my arms wide. '... I'm just a waster.'\n\nAsh looked at me. I could see her chest move in and out inside the light cotton jacket. 'Naw, Prentice,' she said quietly, after a while. 'You're just a bairn.'\n\nI shrugged. 'Maybe. Come on.' I indicated the close. 'Let's get as drunk as you think we have to, and you can tell me all the reasons I'm so childish.' I glanced at my watch as we headed for the stairs. 'Better get started, though; we've only got all night.'\n\nWe climbed the stairs, reached the flat.\n\n'You know,' Ash was saying, breathing hard and looking down the stair-well as I opened the door. 'I don't know anybody who lives in a flat who doesn't live on the top floor.'\n\n'Friends in high places,' I said, opening the door to Janice Rae.\n\nAunt Janice was clothed (shirt and jeans), which made rather a refreshing change, and standing in the hallway. She looked distraught. Her eyes were red and her mascara had left what appeared to be a diagram of the Los Angeles freeway system down her cheeks. Beyond her Gav stood looking awkward and sheepish. I glanced from Janice to Gav and back again, while Janice looked at me, lip trembling.\n\nLet me guess, I thought; they've finally done it; they've broken the bed.\n\n'Oh, Prentice!' Janice said suddenly, throwing herself at me and enveloping my upper torso in a hug that would have done credit to a grizzly. I wondered what had brought this on, and how to peel Aunt Janice off. What must Ashley be making of all this? (She'd be getting jealous, with any luck.)\n\nJanice pulled away; I could breathe again, and promptly did so.\n\n'Oh, Prentice,' she said again, holding my head in both hands and shaking her own. Her eyes closed, she turned her face away, released her hold on my cheekbones and let me go on into the hall. Gav stood by the hall table, shifting his weight from side to side and glancing nervously down at the phone now and again.\n\nHe avoided my eyes.\n\nI took a couple of steps forward, then heard something whispered from behind me, and looked back to see Janice hugging Ash, almost violently.\n\nThey'd never met before. How shocking, I thought. Where was that traditional British reserve only abandoned for cloying camaraderie under the influence of injuriously vast quantities of alcohol? I wondered, if nervously.\n\nAsh was looking over Janice Rae's shoulder at me, those grey eyes behind the bright red glasses filling with tears.\n\n'Um; you've to phone home,' Gav mumbled, apparently addressing his trainers.\n\n'ET or BT?' I heard myself say to him, though the different sections of my brain seemed to have slipped out of synch somehow, and I was aware of all sorts of different things at once, and time seemed to have slowed down and at the same time some part of my brain was racing, trying to come up with some logical explanation for what was going on that didn't involve calamity ... and failing.\n\n'It's \u2013' Gav said, this time seemingly directing his remarks to his rugby-shirted chest. 'It's your dad,' he whispered, and suddenly started to cry.\nCHAPTER 12\n\nThis is the Specialist Glass Division,' Hamish said, opening a door. They found themselves in a long corridor with one glass wall that looked out into a bright, modern, open-plan and spacious area. Everything gleamed and the few people visible wore white coats; apart from the exposed brickwork of a couple of rotund furnaces, linked to the ceiling by shining metal ductwork, the place looked more like a laboratory than a factory.\n\nThere was a silence none of the three brothers seemed inclined to fill. Hamish, an immaculate white coat over his three piece suit, gazed with a rapt expression at the almost static panorama on the far side of the glass. Kenneth looked bored. Rory stood at Janice Rae's side, humming something monotonous, one arm round Janice's waist and attempting to tickle her, just above her right hip.\n\n'Very clean,' Janice said eventually.\n\n'Yes,' Hamish said gravely. He nodded slowly, still observing the scene beyond the glass. 'It has to be, of course.' He turned to the tables against the wall behind them, on which lay various glassy-looking objects, some in display cabinets, most loose, all with explanatory notes stuck to the wall above them. From a wooden plinth on one table, Hamish picked up a dull black cone that looked a little like a Viking helmet without the horns.\n\n'This is a missile nose-cone,' he said, turning the cone over in his hands. He held it out to Janice. She took it.\n\n'Hmm. Quite heavy,' she said. Rory tickled her again and she nudged him.\n\n'Yes, heavy,' Hamish said gravely, taking it back and carefully replacing it on its wooden block. 'Strictly speaking, this is a glass ceramic rather than ordinary glass,' he said, adjusting the precise position of the nose cone on the plinth. 'The basis is lithium aluminosilicate, which withstands heat very well. Cooker hobs are made from this sort of thing ... and obviously missiles need to withstand a lot of heat from friction with the air.'\n\n'Obviously,' Kenneth said. He and Rory exchanged looks.\n\nHamish turned to another exhibit; a broad bowl, also dull and dark, and over half a metre across, it was like a gigantic plate with no lip. He lifted an edge so that they could look underneath, where it was criss-crossed with a lattice of deep ribs.\n\n'Satellite aerial?' Kenneth said.\n\n'No,' Hamish said, though a hint of a smile crossed his dour face. 'No, this is a substrate for an astronomical telescope mirror.'\n\n'Like the one Fergus has in the castle?' Rory asked.\n\n'That's right. All the substrates and optics for Mr Urvill's telescope were made here. Though of course they were on a smaller scale than this piece.' Hamish lowered the edge of the bowl and flicked a bit of dust off one edge. 'This is made from the same type of material as the nose cone there. It resists distortion under thermal shock.'\n\n'Hmm,' Janice in a tone that suggested that she was really trying to be interested as well as sound it.\n\n'Over here,' Hamish said, plodding towards another table, 'we have what are called the passivation glasses, related to the Borate glasses but made from zinc-silicoborate ...'\n\n'All I said was I'd like to see the factory,' Janice whispered to Rory as they moved to follow Hamish. 'The outside would have done.'\n\n'Tough shit,' Rory said, and tickled her with both hands this time, producing a yelp.\n\nAnother man in a white coat came up to Hamish from the far end of the corridor. 'Excuse me a moment,' Hamish said to the others, and turned to talk to him.\n\nKenneth turned to Rory and Janice. He tugged on Rory's sleeve and in a low monotone said, 'Dad, I'm bored, dad; dad, are we nearly finished yet, dad? Dad, want to go home, dad.' He leant one hand against the glass wall, glanced back at Hamish \u2013 still deep in conversation, and nodding \u2013 and rolled his eyes. He looked at Janice. 'My elder brother,' he said quietly. 'The man who put the Bore in Boro-silicate.'\n\n'You don't have to stay.' Rory grinned. 'We could get a train home.'\n\nKenneth shook his head. 'No; it's okay.' He glanced at his watch. 'Maybe we can drag the Tree out for lunch soon.'\n\n'Sorry about that,' Hamish said, coming up behind them.\n\nThey all smiled at him. Hamish moved one arm up to indicate they should move down the corridor to where they could see the exciting zinc-silicoborates. He took a pristine white handkerchief out of his pocket and rubbed at the faint hand-print Kenneth had left on the glass partition as he said, 'These passivation glasses are of much use in the semi-conductor industry, and we have high hopes that with the burgeoning of the Scottish computer industry \u2013 Silicon Glen as it is sometimes jocularly called \u2013 we shall shortly be supplying ...'\n\n'And to think, all that could have been mine.' Kenneth sighed with pretended regret, putting his feet up on the low wall of the terrace and rocking his seat back on its rear legs as he shaded his eyes with one hand. He brought his drink up to his lips with the other.\n\nJanice and Rory were tucking into their salads; the terrace of the Achnaba Hotel was crowded with tourists, and on the road in front of the hotel cars, caravans and coaches hummed past, heading for Lochgilphead, Gallanach, or Kintyre. A brisk warm wind blew from the south west, laden with the vanilla smell of gorse blossom, mixed with pine off the forests and a salt hint from the sea.\n\n'Well, that's just the way it goes, Ken,' Rory said. 'Hamish got to be manager of the factory and you didn't. No use crying over spilled boro-silicate ...'\n\nKenneth grinned, staring out over the balustrade of the terrace towards the hills on the far side of Loch Fyne. 'I wonder where that saying comes from. I mean, why milk? If it means something not very valuable, why not water? Or \u2013'\n\n'Maybe crying over milk was unlucky,' Rory suggested.\n\n'It was years before I realised it was even common parlance,' Kenneth said, still staring out to the loch. 'I used to think it was something only mum came out with. Like \"I couldn't draw a herring off a plate.\" I mean, what the hell does that mean? Or, \"Och aye; that's him away the Crow Road.\" Jeez. Opaque or what?'\n\n'But they might all have some ... some basis in reality,' Rory insisted. 'Like crying over milk was bad news; spoiled it.'\n\n'Maybe it spoiled un-spilled milk,' Kenneth nodded. 'Some chemical reaction. Like they say thunder can curdle milk; ions or something.'\n\n'Ah,' Rory said. 'Then maybe you were _supposed_ to cry over milk, because it helped preserve it, or made it easier to turn into cheese. And so it was a waste crying over spilled milk.'\n\n'I think this is where we came in,' Kenneth said. He squinted at a car on the road as it hurried north. 'Isn't that Fergus?' he said, nodding.\n\n'Where?'\n\n'Racing green Jag; heading north.'\n\n'Is that what Ferg's driving these days?' Rory said, rising up in his seat a little to watch the car pass. It swept round the long bend that carried the road towards the forest. He sat back down and took up his fork again. 'Yeah, looked like Ferg.'\n\n'This is Fergus Urvill, who owns the factory?' Janice asked. She sat back in the white plastic chair, fanning herself with her napkin.\n\nKenneth looked at her. 'Yep, that Fergus,' he said. 'Of course, you haven't had the dubious pleasure yet, have you?' He put his glass down on the circular table, and inspected the rolled up sun-shade that protruded from the centre of the table like an unopened flower.\n\n'No,' Janice said. 'What's he like?'\n\nKenneth and Rory exchanged glances. 'Bearing up remarkably well,' Kenneth said.\n\nJanice looked puzzled for a second, then said, 'Oh; yes, of course; Fiona ...' she looked embarrassed. Rory patted her hand on the table.\n\nKenneth looked away for a moment, then cleared his throat. 'Yeah; anyway.' He stretched his shoulders, sat back. 'Fergus ...\n\nUpper-class; huntin'-shootin'-fishin' type ... Could be worse, I suppose.'\n\n'Still,' Rory said. 'Not what you'd call a happy man.'\n\n'Well, of course,' Janice said quietly, and bit her lip.\n\nKenneth frowned. 'His precious factory's making a profit,' he said briskly, draining his glass. 'The Greedy Party's in power. What more does he want?'\n\n'A wife?' Rory suggested, and then sucked on one finger.\n\nKenneth looked down, studying his glass. There was silence.\n\nRory rubbed a mark off the white table's surface. Janice lifted the scooped neck of her bright print dress and blew down.\n\n'Want some shade?' Kenneth asked Janice. She nodded.\n\nKenneth stood, lifted the stalk of the sun-shade and opened the big parasol, casting a shadow over Janice and Rory.\n\n'Did you know,' Janice said to Rory, squeezing his hand. 'In the Dewey Decimal System, glass-making comes under the code six six six?'\n\n'Woo,' Rory whistled. 'Number of the beast! Spooky, eh?'\n\n'Not many people know that,' Janice said. She smiled.\n\nKenneth laughed. He sat back in his chair again, dragging it round so he was under the shade too. 'Shame Ferg isn't superstitious.' He chuckled. 'Mind you, Hamish is. Maybe we should tell him that. The Tree has some pretty weird ideas about religion; he might just swallow the idea he's been working for the devil all this time. Renounce the whole business, start going round smashing windows.'\n\n'Really?' Janice said. 'What is he? I mean what religion?'\n\nKenneth shrugged. 'Oh, just Church of Scotland; but if they had a Provisional Wing, I think he'd be on it.'\n\n'He's always had a soft spot for the royal family \u2013' Rory began.\n\n'Yes; his head,' Kenneth said.\n\n'\u2013 Maybe he could start the Royal Church of Scotland.'\n\n'Maybe he could start thinking like a rational human being instead of a cave-man frightened by lightning,' Kenneth said tartly.\n\n'Oh, you're so cruel,' Rory told him.\n\n'I know,' Kenneth sighed, rolling the base of his glass around on the table top. 'Time for another drink, I think.'\n\n'My round,' Janice said, rising.\n\n'No,' Kenneth said, 'Let \u2013'\n\n'Sit down,' Janice told him, taking his glass from his hand. 'Same again?'\n\nKenneth looked glum. 'No; Virgin Mary this time. Gotta drive.'\n\nThe two men watched Janice head for the bar.\n\n'What _did_ Fergus ever say to you?' Kenneth asked Rory.\n\n'What?' Rory said, blinking. 'What about?'\n\n'God, I hate it when you're mysterious!' Kenneth shook his head. 'You know damn well. Before the crash; way before. What did Fergus ever tell you? Was it after you came back from India that second time; before you went back to London? You two went hill-walking a lot then, didn't you? Old Ferg spill some beans up in them there hills?'\n\n'We talked,' Rory said awkwardly, using his fork to push bits of lettuce around his plate. 'He told me things, but ... I don't want to go into it, Ken, it would only complicate matters. It's nothing that directly touches you.'\n\n'What about Fiona?' Kenneth said, voice low, staring at his brother. 'Did it touch her?'\n\nRory looked away, across the loch. He shrugged. 'Look, Ken, it isn't something you'd benefit by knowing, all right? Just leave it at that.' The fork continued to shift the lettuce leaves around the plate.\n\nKenneth watched his brother for a moment, then sat back. 'Oh well, serves me right for being nosey. Let's change the subject. How's this new project thing coming along?'\n\n'Oh, I'm still working on it.'\n\n'I wish you'd let me look at it.'\n\n'It isn't finished yet.'\n\n'When will it be?'\n\n'When it is,' Rory said, frowning. He put the fork down. 'I don't know. Look; it's sort of a personal story ...\n\n'Ah,' Kenneth said.\n\nRory leaned forward over the table, closer to his brother. 'Look,' he said, glancing round towards the french windows that led to the bar. 'I've had a few more ideas ... well, I've thought about ... areas I didn't think I could use that I now think I can, and I want to develop that stuff, and \u2013'\n\n_'What_ stuff?' Kenneth said, laughing in exasperation and throwing his arms wide. 'Just tell me what _sort_ of stuff!'\n\nRory sat back, shaking his head. 'I can't say. Really.' He glanced up at Kenneth. 'But things ... things might start to happen soon, anyway. I can't say any more for now.'\n\nKenneth shook his head sadly. 'They might have happened by this ... opera, TV series, pop-up-book, whatever the hell it is; _and_ if you'd let me talk to a few people. I mean, if it's just that you're too close to it and you don't want _me_ to look at it, there are people I know who're good at that sort of thing; they can see the wood from the trees; they could \u2013'\n\n'Aw, come on, Ken,' Rory said, a pained expression crossing his face. He ran a hand through his short, straight hair. 'This is my show; this is the way I want to do it. Just let me, all right?'\n\n'I don't know, Rore,' Kenneth said, sitting back. 'Sometimes you play your cards so damn close to your chest I don't think you can see them yourself. You should open up a bit more, share your problems. Share some secrets.'\n\n'I do,' Rory said, biting his lip and looking down at his glass.\n\n'Rory,' Kenneth said, sitting forward and lowering his voice to conspiratorial levels, 'the last secret I remember you telling me was that it was you who set fire to that barn on the Urvill's estate.'\n\nRory grinned, stirring his finger through a little patch of moisture on the side of his glass. 'Hey, I'm still waiting to see if you tell anyone.'\n\nKen laughed. 'Well, I haven't. Have you?'\n\nRory smiled, sucking air through his teeth at the same time, clinked one thumb-nail against his glass. He glanced at his brother. 'Don't worry; my secret is safe with us.' He shook his head, then shrugged. 'Okay,' Rory sighed, trying to suppress a smile, looking away. 'There might be a job with Aunty in the offing, okay?'\n\n'What?' Kenneth laughed. 'The Beeb? You going to be a TV star?'\n\n'It's not definite yet,' Rory shrugged. 'And it's ...' he frowned at his brother. 'Shit, Ken; it's just more hack-work. It's better paid, is all.'\n\n'What is it though?'\n\n'Oh, a fucking travel programme, what else?' Rory rolled his eyes. 'But anyway; we'll see, okay? It's not definite, like I say, and I don't want to get anybody's hopes up, so keep it quiet; but things might start to happen.'\n\n'But that's _great_ news, man,' Kenneth said, sitting back.\n\n'Talking about me, I hope, boys,' Janice said, returning with their drinks on a tray.\n\n'... said, \"My _God,_ Rory, I've never seen one that big!\" and I said \u2013 oh; hello dear,' Rory grinned, pretending only then to notice Janice.\n\nShe sat down, smiling. 'Talking about the size of your overdraft, are we, dear?'\n\n'Gosh-darn,' Rory said, snapping his fingers, looking at Kenneth. 'Caught telling tales again.'\n\n'Runs in the family,' Kenneth said, taking up his glass. 'Cheers, Janice.'\n\n'Your health.'\n\n'Slange.'\n\nThey left after that drink and went back to the house at Lochgair; Rory and Kenneth cleared a tangled choke of bushes and shrubs at the rear of the garden, where Mary wanted the lawn extended. They sweated through the insect-loud afternoon, while the sun shone. Janice sunbathed, and later helped Mary and Margot prepare the evening meal.\n\nJanice had taken that day off from the library. She and Rory left on the last train back to Glasgow that night.\n\nIt was the last time Kenneth ever saw Rory.\n\n_Fiona sat in the passenger seat of the car, watching the red roadside reflectors drift out of the night towards her. She was thrown against one side of the seat as Fergus powered the Aston round the right-hander that took the road out of the forest, down, into and through the little village of Furnace. She was pressed back against the seat as_ _Fergus accelerated again. They swung out and past some small, slower car, over-taking it as though it was stationary; headlights ahead of them glared, the on-coming car flashed its lights and she heard its horn sound as they passed, a few seconds later. The sound was quickly lost in the snarl of the Aston's engine._\n\n_'If you're driving like this to try and prove something, don't bother on my account,' she said._\n\n_Fergus was silent for a while, then, in a very controlled and even voice said, 'Don't worry. Look, I just want to get home as soon as possible. All right?'_\n\n_'Everything'll suddenly get better once we're home, will it?' Fiona said. 'Kiss the kids on the head and get Mrs S to make some tea; stiff whisky for you, G and T for me. Maybe we should call up the McKeans to say we got back safely; you can ask after Julie ...'_\n\n_'For Christ's sake, Fiona \u2013'_\n\n_' \"For Christ's sake, Fiona\",' Fiona sneered, imitating Fergus's voice. 'Is that all you can say? You've had half an hour to think up another excuse, and \u2013'_\n\n_'I don't need,' Fergus sighed, 'any excuses. Look; I thought we had agreed to just leave this \u2014 '_\n\n_'Yes, that would suit you fine, wouldn't it, Ferg? That's your way of dealing with everything, isn't it? Pretend it hasn't happened, maybe it'll go away. If we're all terribly polite and decorous and discreet, maybe the whole horrid thing will just ...' She made a little fluttering motion with her hands, and in a high-pitched, girlish voice, said, 'Disappear!'_\n\n_She looked at him; his broad, soft-jowled face looked hard and set in the dim light shining from the car's instruments. 'Well,' she told him, leaning over as far as she could towards him. 'They won't just go away, Ferg.' She tried to make him look at her. He frowned, put his head slightly to one side and lifted it, trying to look round and over her head. 'Nothing ever goes away, Fergus,' she told him. 'Nothing ever doesn't matter.' She strained over a little more._ 'Fergus _-' she said._\n\n_He pushed her away with his left hand, back into her seat._\n\n_She sat there, mouth open. He seemed to understand the silence and glanced over, a weak smile flickering on his face. 'Sorry,' he said. 'Getting in the way a bit there. Sorry.'_\n\n_'Don't you push me!' she said, slapping his shoulder. She hit him again. 'Don't you ever dare push me again!'_\n\n_'Oh stop it, Fiona,' he said, more exasperated than angry. 'One minute I'm in the dog-house because ... well, because I'm not all over you all the time; next second \u2013'_\n\n_' \"Not all over you all the time\"?' Fiona said. 'You mean not fucking me, Fergus, is that what you mean?'_\n\n_'Fiona, please \u2013'_\n\n_'Oh.' Fiona slapped one palm off her forehead, then crossed her arms, looked away, out of the dark side window. 'Fuck; did I swear? Oh fuck. Oh what a silly fucking cow I must fucking be.'_\n\n_'Fiona \u2013'_\n\n_'I said something straight. I'm so sorry. I actually said what I meant, used the sort of word you'd normally only hear from your golfing chums or your rugby pals. Or does Julie use that sort of language? Does she? Do you like her to talk dirty? Does that get you going, Ferg?'_\n\n_'Fiona, I'm getting rather tired of this,' Fergus said through his teeth, his fingers gripping the wheel harder, rubbing round it. 'I'm sorry you think what you do about Julie. As I have tried to tell you, she was the wife of an old friend and I've kept in touch since she got divorced \u2013'_\n\n_'Still stuck on that, Fergus?' Fiona said, impersonating concern._\n\n_'Oh dear; we had that line back at Arrochar, I seem to recall. And what was the rest of it? Oh yes, one of her sons has leukaemia, poor little kid, hasn't he? And you've helped her and the little darling with BUPA out of the goodness of your heart \u2013'_\n\n_'Yes I have, and I'm sorry you choose to sneer about it, Fiona.'_\n\n_'Sneer!' laughed Fiona. 'It's a joke, Fergus. Jesus, she was practically taking your zip down.'_\n\n_'Oh, don't be ridiculous. It's not my fault Julie got a bit tipsy.'_\n\n_'She was smashed out of her brains, Fergus, and about the only thing she remembered was that she wanted to get your trousers off. God knows why, but she seemed to associate that with pleasure.' Fiona gave a sort of strangled laugh, then put one hand up suddenly to her nose, and looked away, and sobbed once._\n\n_Fergus drove quickly on, trees flicking past like green ghosts to the right, the waters of the loch just a dark absence on the left._\n\n_Fiona sniffed. 'Trying the great silence again, eh, Ferg?' She pulled a handkerchief from her handbag on her lap, dabbed at her nose. 'Still pretending it'll all go away. Still sticking your head in your precious fucking optical-quality sand.'_\n\n_'Look, can't we talk about this in the morning? I mean, when you're ...'_\n\n_'Sober, Fergus?' she said, looking over at him. 'That what you were going to say? Blaming it on drink again? Is that all it was? Of course, silly me. I should have realised. Dear Julie gets drunk and for some bizarre reason suddenly starts feeling you up under the table while we're nibbling our cheese and biscuits, and making pathetic double-entendres, and attacks you outside the bathroom; totally unprovoked, of course, and it's all just the drink talking. And I'm just being hysterical, I suppose, because I've had too many of John's terribly strong G and Ts and it'll all look different in the morning and I'll come to you and say sorry and wasn't I being a silly girl last night, and you can pat me on the head and say yes, wasn't I? And we can still go for cocktails at the Frasers' and bridge at the McAlpines and tee off with the Gordons and cruise with the Hamiltons with a united front, a respectable face, can't we, Fergus?'_\n\n_'Fiona,' Fergus said, face set and teeth clenched. 'I don't know,' he breathed, 'why you're making such a big thing of this. It's just one of those things that happens at parties; people do get drunk and they do do things they wouldn't normally think of. Maybe Julie has ... or has had, in the past, a crush on me or something. I don't know. Maybe \u2013'_\n\n_'A crush on you,' said Fiona. 'Jesus. Well, that's a better try, Ferg. But I don't think you're quite as good a liar as you think you are. And she's not that good an actress.' Fiona looked down, twisting the handkerchief in her fingers. 'Oh God, Ferg, it was so fucking obvious. I mean. I knew there was something going on; all those trips away, and getting drunk and not being able to come home, staying at one of your chums' delightful little pied-\u00e0-terres. Oh, sorry, no, you can't phone back, he's only just got it and it hasn't had a phone put in yet. Or coming back with bruises; how you suddenly became so very clumsy or so easily marked. But at least I could still kid myself, at least I didn't have my nose rubbed in it.'_\n\n_'Fiona!' Fergus shouted, knuckles white on the steering wheel. 'For God's sake, there's nothing to have your nose rubbed in! Julie's just a friend. I haven't touched her!'_\n\n_'You didn't have to, she was touching you,' Fiona said, voice quiet, looking away from Fergus, out to the darkness of the loch. A few weak lights shone on the far side, and headlights on the Otter Ferry road, two miles away across the black expanse of waves, swung out briefly, like a lighthouse beam ... and then dimmed and disappeared. The car roared through another small village before the trees hid the view again._\n\n_Fiona kept her face away from him, looking out into the night, watching the vertical bright line of light the car threw onto the serried mass of dark conifers. Even there she could not escape him; she could see his distorted image in the slanted glass of the car's windows, dim in the background, still lit by his instruments._\n\n_She wondered how she could ever have thought that she loved him, and why she had stayed with him for so long after she'd realised that if she ever had, she did not love him now._\n\n_Of course she could say it was for the children, as people always did ... It was true, up to a point. How terrible it was to have those easy phrases, trotted out so often in the course of gossip, or heart-to-hearts, or in magazine articles, or even court cases, become so real._ _It was never the sort of thing you thought about when you were young, when you were \u2013 or thought you were \u2014 in love, and all the future shone with promise._\n\n_Problems belonged to other people. You might imagine supporting them, talking with them when they needed to talk, trying to help, but you didn't imagine that you would be the one desperate to talk (or the one too embarrassed to talk, too ashamed or too proud to talk); you didn't imagine you would be the one who needed help, not even when you told friends that of course there might be problems, or agreed with your beloved that you would always talk about things ..._\n\n_Staying together for the children._\n\n_And for the adults, she thought. For the sake of appearances. God, she had thought she was above that sort of thing, once. She had been bright and free and determined and she had decided she was going to make her own way in the world, just as well as any of her brothers might. She'd been a sort of feminist before it became fashionable; never had much time for all that sisterly stuff, but she was positive she was as good as any man and she'd prove it ... And marrying Ferg had seemed like an extra boost to her life-plan. London had been exciting, but she had not shone out there, she felt, the way she had here. She had never felt any affection for the place and had made no friends there she would miss; and anyway, she would find fields to conquer up here, coming home triumphant to wed the lord of the manor._\n\n_But it had not been as she had imagined. She had expected to be the centre of things in Gallanach, but the McHoans as a family had so many other things happening to them; she had felt peripheral. The Urvills' own history, too, made her feel like something unimportant on the family tree, for all that Fergus talked of responsibility and duty and one's debt to the next generation._\n\n_She was a leaf, expendable. A twig \u2013 maybe \u2013 at best._\n\n_Somehow all her dreams had disappeared. It seemed to her now that all she had ever had had been the dream of having dreams; the_ _goal of having goals one day, once she had made her mind up what it was she wanted._\n\n_But that had never happened. First Fergus, then the twins, then her own small part in the society of the town and the people there, and in the wider, still circumferential concerns of this wee country's middle-to-ruling classes, and in the more dissipated commonwealth of mildly powerful people who were their peers beyond that \u2013 in England, on the continent, from the States and elsewhere \u2013 took up her time, sapped her will and replaced her own concerns with theirs._\n\n_So now, she thought, I am married to a man whose touch disgusts me, and who anyway does not seem to want to touch me. She looked at Fergus's dim reflection, distorted in the glass, then tried to re-focus on her own image. Can he find me as repellent as I find him? I can't look that bad, can I? A few grey hairs, but you don't notice them; still a size twelve, and I've looked after myself. I look good in this, your standard little black number, and I still get into a tight pair of jeans ... What's wrong with me? What did I do? Why does he have to spend half his time with that drunken, brassy bitch?_\n\n_God, the best time I've had in the past five years was one night with Lachy Watt, angry at Ferg, and more surprised than anything else. They way he just took my hair in one hand, while we were standing looking up at that God-awful window in the great hall, and turned my head to him, and pulled me close; tongue down my throat before I knew what was happening, and there was something adolescent and desperate beneath all that working-class directness, but Jesus, I felt_ wanted ...\n\n_She shook her head. That was best left out of it. Once was once; dismissible. Ever again would set a pattern. Lachy had been back one time afterwards that she knew of, a year later, and he had called, but she'd told him she wouldn't be able to see him, and put the phone down on him. No, that didn't matter._\n\n_She looked at the reflection of Fergus again, as he pulled the wheel; the car tunnelled into the forest, the wall of trees on either_ _side a blur, their greenness more remembered than seen._\n\n_I could leave him, she thought. I could always have left him. But mother's too close for comfort; there'd be too many nearby friends, too many chances of bumping into people I'd rather not bump into; too much mitigating against the clean break; new start. God, I'm pathetic, though, that's so petty. Why haven't I the sheer drive to just get up and go, take the twins and emigrate to Oz or Canada? Or live in wild eccentricity in London or Paris?_\n\n_Or I can stay, as I know I probably will. Muddle through. Look after the twins and try to make sure they negotiate the reefs of puberty and adolescence, set them up to make their way in the world, and do so without becoming just like me ..._\n\n_She looked out, into the grey sweep of road ever rushing towards them. Fergus powered the car down out of the forest, through some more houses and a few lights. The car lurched. Fergus looked over, smiled at her. She didn't know whether to smile back or not, and she wondered what that expression had meant, and what had been going through his head for the last few miles._\n\n_The car jiggled on its springs, lurched again and settled. She clutched at her seat, looking forward. The engine roared._\n\n_She looked back at Ferg, saw tears in his eyes. 'Ferg?' she said._\n\n_The car skidded a little, came straight; she glanced forward at the road, saw the corner and the trees. She clutched at the dashboard with both hands. 'Ferg!' she screamed. 'Look \u2013!'_\nCHAPTER 13\n\nI was eleven when Aunt Fiona died; I remember feeling both peeved and cheated that I was thought too young to go to the funeral. It would have been my chance to show how mature I had become, and anyway from what I'd seen on television and films, funerals looked like rather dramatic and romantic events; people dressed in black and looked sombre. They had thin, tight lips, and they sometimes wept, and there was a lot of grim clutching of other people's shoulders, and low mutterings about how so-and-so had been a good person, and that sort of thing. But under it all was the simple, joyous fact: they were dead and you weren't yet!\n\nI hadn't got to see Aunt Fiona being buried, but I did see Uncle Fergus in hospital. I was in, too, getting my appendix out, and I went along from my ward to his room just to say how sorry I was.\n\nHe had a broken arm, some cracked ribs, and his whole face was bruised; kids with face-paints couldn't have matched all those colours. I'd never seen anything like it.\n\nThere wasn't much to say; I can't remember what I did say. He kept talking about not being able to remember anything after passing Lochgair, no matter how hard he tried. He couldn't understand why she hadn't been wearing her seatbelt. He'd thought she had been, but they said she hadn't. She hadn't. He started to cry.\n\nI sat on the giant, corroded lump of concrete and steel, legs crossed, arms folded, watching the waves break on the sands below and listening to the strange, whooping, hooting sounds and hollow clanging noises produced by the fluted pipes and iron doors embedded in the fractionally tilted concrete mass.\n\nIt was a little after sunset, three days after my father's death. The sun had dipped behind North Jura, and abandoned the sky to a skeined mass of glowing clouds, sinking through the spectrum from gold towards blood-red, all against a wash of deepening blue. The wind was still warm, coming in from the south west, sharp with salt as the remnants of the rolling Atlantic swell hit the rocks nearby and sent up spray, but maybe also \u2013 well, you could imagine it, at least \u2013 containing a hint of grasses, too; something directed over the distant greenery of Ireland, or swept round from the Welsh hills along the circling wind.\n\nThe concrete block was more or less a cube, about four metres to a side, though it looked more squat than that, its lower metre buried in the sand of the small beach a few miles west of Gallanach, about level with the southern tip of Island Macaskin. The concrete and pipe-work block \u2013 four years old now, and streaked with rust and seagull droppings \u2013 was the only full-size work Darren Watt ever completed.\n\nDarren had got his sponsorship from a cement company, which agreed to provide materials and a grant, but finding a place to put the finished piece had been tricky, and it had been Uncle Fergus, no less, who had finally come to the rescue with a site for the work; the town council hadn't liked the idea of a gigantic concrete object the size of four garages being stationed anywhere near the town itself, and for a while it had looked like Darren was going to have real problems finding anywhere to put his concrete edifice (especially after a couple of the more pygmy-brained newspapers had taken up the story and started fuming about a ridiculous waste of public money and the outrageous despoiling of our fragile landscape with queer, arty-farty, loony-left monstrosities).\n\nDarren had thought about playing up to this drivel by giving the thing some wonderfully pretentious title, and I recall him at a party discussing the merits of calling it The Lusitanian Coast Dialectical Kinetic\/Static Object Alpha. In the end, though, he just called it Block One.\n\nIt was a three-kilometre hike from the nearest path, and even the odd yachtsperson, passing close enough to catch sight of the block, would probably have dismissed it as some old war-time ruin. Not exactly as public as Sauchiehall Street, then, but Darren had been happy. It worked; when the tide was at the right level, it produced noises like a ghost trapped in badly tuned organ-pipes, sonorous slammings as waves opened and slammed shut heavy doors like hinged manhole covers within the set tonnes of the block's hollow insides, and \u2013 depending on the waves \u2013 impressive spouts of water, bursting into the air from its rusted throats as though from some stranded cubist whale. He'd learned a lot from it, he'd said; just you wait till the next one, and the ones after that ...\n\nI was thinking about Aunt Fiona because death and dying were on my mind, and I was going back through all the people I'd known who'd had the nerve to pop their clogs before they should have, while I was still around to miss them. Aunt Fiona was a vague memory, even though I'd been eleven when she'd died and I'd known her for so many years. It was as though by her early death the memories had lost the chance of being renewed every now and again, and instead were somehow built over, the spaces that should have been hers recycled and used-up by those of the family who were still alive.\n\nShe'd been okay; I'd liked her, from what I could remember. She'd let us play in the castle and its grounds, and she'd taken us on walks round the coast sometimes. She'd seemed young and old at once to me; of a different generation to Fergus and Lachlan, and even my father. She had seemed younger than them, never mind the real elders, like Grandma Margot; closer to us when we were children. It was a quality she'd shared with Uncle Rory.\n\nThe still absent Uncle Rory. We'd thought that \u2013 as dad's death had gone reported in a few papers, partly because of his modest fame, and partly because of the bizarre nature of his demise \u2013 Rory might hear, and finally get in touch ... but nothing had happened yet, and the funeral was tomorrow. The romantic in me wanted him to reappear at the ceremony, in the grounds of the house at Lochgair, but I doubted that he would. Too pat, too neat, too kind a thing for fate to throw up now.\n\nI looked up at the violet sky, feeling the wind move my hair across my forehead and the nape of my neck. I could see a few stars. I stared at the heavens until my neck got sore, then said, aloud and loud,\n\n'Well?'\n\nNothing.\n\nThe waves shushed across the sands. I lowered my head. Out to sea, a couple of birds flew wing-tip low across the sky-reflecting waters. I shook my head, wondering at it all.\n\nDad died \u2013 my Uncle Hamish seemed to be maintaining \u2013 in suspicious circumstances; God killed him.\n\nUncle Hamish appeared to be almost perversely upset and appalled by the implications of this supposed act; his own part in the bizarre and fatal episode troubled him less, I guessed, than the terrifying idea that there really might be, after all, a God who listens, thinks, decides and acts, just like an ordinary mortal, except more powerful. It rather indicated, I suspected, that all this time my uncle had just been playing a game, and his retributive proto-heresy was exactly as frivolous as my dad had been given to claiming. Whatever, Uncle Hamish was, in short, under sedation.\n\nAnd dad was under the care of the undertaker, and would soon be under the roses at the rear of the garden in Lochgair, un-christened at the start of his life, and joined to unconsecrated ground after its end.\n\nSome generation, I thought. If Uncle Rory was dead (and who was to say he wasn't) then Hamish, my uncle, The Tree, at that moment lying in a darkened room, moaning about a jealous God and being his brother's keeper and the divine and blinding light come from the skies and the smell of the devil and all his works and popping Valium every few hours and muttering about anti-creates and asking his wife to tell my mother that for all his atheism \u2013 so powerfully and dramatically disproved \u2013 he was sure Kenneth had been a mostly good man, and would not suffer unduly in the after-life, even though the gates of heaven were irredeemably closed to him ... This prattling wreck, this bed-bound, hide-bound bag of gibbering nonsense was all that remained of that generation's one-time promise.\n\nRory gone from us for a decade, at least as good as dead; Fiona gone for want of a seat belt; and my father, drunk and angry, furiously determining to prove ... _something_ by a prank barely worthy of some over-privileged Oxbridge undergraduate.\n\nJust Hamish left, and him half-mad with an amalgamated fever of grief, guilt, and re-inoculated faith.\n\nSome result.\n\nI'd surprised myself, when Gav broke down like that, and I knew that dad was dead. I believe I actually came close to fainting. I stood, watching Gav greet, hearing Janice Rae sob into Ashley Watt's shoulder behind me, and gradually I started to feel I was no more attached to or in control of my own body than I was Gavin's. I don't mean that I stood or floated outside myself, just that I was somewhere inside me that wasn't connected with the usual channels of communication, let alone action.\n\nI heard a noise like continual surf, and the view went sort of grey, and tunnel-like for a bit. I was suddenly aware of how delicately balanced we are on our two skinny legs, and my skin seemed to be contracting, pressing in all about me, and going cold, leaving sweat.\n\nI wobbled, apparently; Ash took me by the shoulders and sat me down on the little chair by the table. She got Janice to make some sweet tea. I said thank you, drank the tea, shivered a bit, and then Ash dialled Lochgair for me.\n\nThe phone was engaged, but Ashley kept trying. It was a friend of mum's from the village who answered initially.\n\nI didn't think I was crying, while I was on the phone; I felt calm and in control and I spoke quietly to my mum, who sounded trembly and yet flat-toned, and told me what had happened, but after I'd put the phone down I found that my eyes were full of tears and my cheeks wet with them. They'd dribbled round my chin and onto my chest, inside the open shirt.\n\n'Oh dear,' I said, feeling that I ought to feel embarrassed. Ash handed me a clean tissue, and I dabbed myself dry.\n\n'I'll drive you back,' Ashley said, squatting in front of me in the hall, my hands gathered in hers, her long face serious, eyes shining.\n\n'You've drunk too much. We've both drunk too much,' I said. 'Anyway, you've got to get to London, start your new job.' I took a deep breath. 'Thanks, though.' I bent forward, kissed her nose.\n\nShe put her head down. I sat back in the seat again and gazed over her head at the white-painted wallpaper on the far side of the hallway.\n\nShe looked up into my eyes.\n\n'What happened, Prentice?'\n\nI shrugged. 'Crazy,' I said, my gaze sliding away from those sternly concerned eyes, to look at the worn hall carpet and an old red wine stain from a party two years ago. 'Just crazy.'\n\nAsh patted my hands. 'I'll take you down in the morning, then. I can get them to hold the job. There was no rush. Only if you want.'\n\n'I don't know,' I said, and really didn't. I bent forward, put my head between my knees and stared at the black-taped edge of the carpet under the seat and the rough floorboards beyond. I felt Ash stroke my head, her hands soft and gentle through my hair.\n\nI didn't want to go to bed and anyway could not have slept. She stayed up with me, and we finished the real coffee and then the instant. I talked about the family, about Rory and Fiona and mum and dad. Thunder rolled over the city, just before sunrise, and I found myself laughing, sitting there on the couch, in the living room with Ashley; laughing at the thunder. She held me, shushed me.\n\nThe dawn came up dull at first, then the clouds cleared from the west and a bright blue day was there. Ashley left a note for Gav and Janice, helped me pack a bag \u2013 I couldn't decide on anything \u2013 then we left. The old 2CV, freshly pillar-box red after its latest re-spray, puttered through the near-empty streets of the bright and silent city, and rocked and rolled its way back down towards Gallanach.\n\nThe weather was perfect, the new day glorious. I talked incessantly and Ash listened, sometimes smiled and seemed always to have a kind word.\n\nWe arrived at Lochgair about breakfast-time, with the sun shining through the trees and the birds loud in the garden. Ashley stopped the car at the opened gates at the end of the drive where it entered the courtyard. 'I'll drop you here, okay?' she said.\n\n'Oh, come in,' I told her.\n\nShe shook her head, yawned. Her long fawn hair shone in a beam of sunlight coming through the car's open side window. 'I don't think so, Prentice. I'll get home, get some sleep. Give me a call if there's anything I can do, okay?'\n\nI nodded. 'Okay.'\n\n'Promise?' She smiled.\n\n'Promise,' I said.\n\nShe leaned over, put one hand behind my head and kissed my forehead. I heard her take a breath, like she was about to speak, but then she exhaled, just patted my head. I put one arm round her, held her for a moment, then pulled away, reached into the back and got my bag, opened the door and got out. 'Thanks,' I said.\n\n'It's okay, Prentice,' she said.\n\nI closed the flimsy door. The car revved up and turned round, one skinny front wheel poking out alarmingly from its wheel arch. The little Citro\u00ebn clattered off down the drive. Ashley stuck one hand out of the window and waved; I raised my arm, and held it there as I watched the car head away under the trees through the dappling light. It paused at the main road, then turned away, its noise soon lost in the background of bird-song and wind-ruffled leaves.\n\nThe cool morning air smelled clean and fresh; I took a deep breath and rubbed my smarting eyes, feeling spaced-out from lack of sleep.\n\nThen I picked up my bag and turned to the house.\n\nIt was a well-travelled country, dad told us. Within the oceanic depths of time that lay beneath the surface of the present, there had been an age when, appropriately, an entire ocean had separated the rocks that would one day be called Scotland from the rocks that would one day be called England and Wales. That first union came half a billion years ago. Some of those rocks were ancient even then; two billion years and counting, and shifting and moving across the face of the planet while that primaeval ocean shrank and closed and all that would become the British Isles still lay south of the equator. Compressed and folded, the rocks that would be Scotland \u2013 by then part of the continent of Euramerica \u2013 held within their crumpled, tortuously layered cores the future shape of the land.\n\nBy a third of a billion years ago, that part of Euramerica lay on the equator, covered by great fern forests that would be buried and folded and pressed and heated and so turn to oil and coal, in the future that was yet to come. Meanwhile the mass of rocks, afloat on the molten stone beneath, were heading slowly northwards, and sundering; the climate became hot and the rains sparse; the great dinosaurs, tree-tall and house-heavy, tramped slowly through a semi-desert while a new ocean opened to the west. After the dinosaurs had gone, and while the Atlantic still grew, the volcanoes erupted, smothering the old rock on the surface under their own vast, deep oceans of lava.\n\nThe land then held mountains higher than Everest, but they were worn down eventually by nothing harder than wind and water, until, much later still \u2013 now that Scotland was level with Canada and Siberia and the earth cooler \u2013 the glaciers came, covering the rocks with their own chill, inverted image of the old and weathered lava plains. The sheer mass of that frozen water etched the mountain rock like steel engraving glass, and pressed the roots of those fire-floating hills deeper into the dense sea of magma beneath.\n\nThen the climate changed again; the glaciers retreated and the water they had held filled the oceans, so that the waters rose and cut what would eventually be called the British Isles off from main-land Europe, while the scoured, abraded hills to the north, set free at last from that compressing weight of ice, rose slowly back out of the earth, to be colonised again by plants and animals, and people.\n\nOn walks, on day trips and holidays, he found and pointed out the signs that told of the past, deciphering the symbols written into the fabric of the land. In Gallanach, we saw the bright seam of white cretaceous sandstone that had provided the Gallanach Glass Works with raw material for a century and a half. On Arran, he showed us rocks folded like toffee, ribboned and split; on Staffa, the even, keyboard-regular columns of cooled lava; in Edinburgh, the rubble-tailed stumps of ancient volcanoes; in Glasgow, the black, petrified remains of trees three hundred million years old; in Lochaber, the parallel roads that marked the shores of lochs dammed and un-dammed by glaciers, millennia earlier; throughout Scotland we saw hanging valleys, drumlins and corries; and in the Hebrides we walked the raised beaches where the ocean swells had crashed until the land rose, and touched rocks two and a half billion years old; half as old as Earth itself; a sixth of the age of the entire universe.\n\nHere was magic, I remember thinking, as we drove north towards Benbecula one day, looking out at the machair, gaudy with flowers. I was just old enough to grasp what dad had been telling us, but still young enough to have to think about it in childish terms. Magic. Time was Magic; and geology. Physics, chemistry; all the big, important words dad used. They were all Magic.\n\nI sat listening to the car's engine, as we drove; mum at the wheel, dad in the passenger seat, shirt-sleeved arm out of the Volvo's window, Lewis, James and I in the back.\n\nThe car engine made a steady growling noise, and I remember thinking it was funny that those long-dead plants had been turned into the oil that had been turned into the petrol that made the car growl. I chose to forget the absence of reptiles in those carboniferous forests, and imagined that they had been populated by great dinosaurs, and that they too had fallen into the ooze, and made up part of the oil, and that the noise the car made was like the angry, bellowing growls they would have made while they were alive, as though their last dying breath, their last sound on this planet, had been saved all these millions and millions of years, to be exhaled along a little road on a little island, pushing the McHoan family north, one summer, on our holidays.\n\nI looked out of the open window; the machair lay dazzling under the midsummer sunshine to our left.\n\n'Prentice! Prentice! Oh, Prentice; pray for your father!'\n\n'Hello, Uncle Hamish,' I said, as Aunt Tone ushered mother and me into the bedroom where my uncle lay, propped up, splendid but demented in a pair of blue cotton pyjamas and a red silk dressing-gown decorated with blue dragons. The room was behind dim closed curtains, and smelled of apples.\n\n'Mary! Oh, Mary,' Uncle Hamish said, seeing my mother. He clasped his hands together, holding a black handkerchief. His hair was a bit mussed and he had a stubble shadow; I'd never seen him look so disarrayed. In front of him there was a huge tray with short legs, partly covered by a quarter-completed jigsaw puzzle. I walked up to the bed and put my hand out. I clutched Uncle Hamish's still clasped hands, held them briefly, squeezed and let go.\n\nCloser inspection revealed that Hamish was putting the jigsaw puzzle together upside-down; every cardboard flake was grey, turned the wrong way up.\n\nMum gave Hamish a brief hug and we sat down on a couple of chairs on either side of the bed. 'I'll make some tea,' Aunt Tone said, and quietly closed the door.\n\n'And biscuits!' shouted Uncle Hamish at the closed door, and smiled broadly at first mum and then me. After a moment, though, his face seemed to collapse and he looked like he was about to weep.\n\nThe door opened again. 'What's that, my dear?' Aunt Tone asked.\n\n'Nothing,' Uncle Hamish said, the mouth-only smile suddenly there again, then fading just as quickly. The door closed. Hamish peered down at the jigsaw puzzle, toyed with a couple of the pieces, looking for a place to fit them into what he had already completed. The squint bottom edge of the puzzle, some small spaces between joined pieces, a few tiny flecks of cardboard \u2013 half grey, half coloured \u2013 gathered like dust along the raised edges of the tray, and a small pair of collapsible scissors lying on the bedspread near the pillows, indicated that Uncle Hamish had \u2013 not to put too fine a point on it \u2013 been cheating.\n\n'Thank you, both, for coming,' he said, absently, still fiddling with the grey pieces. He sounded bored, like he was talking to a couple of factory workers summoned to his office for some formality of business. 'I appreciate it.' I exchanged looks with my mother, who appeared close to tears again.\n\nMum had done pretty well till now; we'd both cried a bit when Ashley had deposited me at the gates of the house at Lochgair, but since then she had coped pretty well. We'd visited the good lawyer Blawke that first day, and the next day he'd actually made a house-call, a concession which, extrapolating from the attitude of his secretary when she rang us up to tell us the sacred presence was on his way, we ought to have treated with the sort of awe and respect the average person reserves for royalty and major religious figures. I was a little surprised he didn't kneel and kiss the door-step when he unfolded himself from his Merc.\n\nThe undertaker had been dealt with, a few reporters fended off, Lewis \u2013 in London \u2013 reassured that there was nothing he could do up here for now, and told not to cancel his gig dates, and James, on a school trip in Austria, finally contacted. He would arrive the day of the funeral; one of his teachers would come back with him.\n\nDad's study proved to be a wilderness of papers, disorganised files, chaotic filing cabinets, and an impressive-looking computer that neither mum nor I knew how to operate. The afternoon I got back mum and I had stood looking at the machine, knowing there might be stuff in it we'd need to look at, but unable to work out what to do with the damn thing after switching it on; the relevant manual had disappeared, mum had never touched a keyboard in her life and my computer expertise was confined to having a sound tactical sense of which alien to zap first and a leechlike grip on continuous-fire buttons.\n\n'I know just the person,' I said, and rang the Watts' house.\n\nTwenty-four hours before the funeral, Aunt Tone had rung and said could we possibly come and see Uncle Hamish? He'd asked to see us.\n\nAnd so here we were. Mum sat on the far side of the bed, her eyes bright.\n\nI cleared my throat. 'How are you, Uncle Hamish?' I asked.\n\nHe looked at my mother, as if he thought she'd talked, not me. He shrugged. 'Sorry to drag you out here,' he said. His voice was flat, emotionless. 'I just wanted to say how, how sorry I am, and I want you all to forgive me, even though I didn't ... didn't encourage him. He insisted. I told him not to do it.' He sighed and tried to press one of the cardboard pieces into place on the puzzle without success. 'We were both a little the worse for wear and,' he said. 'I did try. I tried to stop him, tried to talk to him, but ... but ...' He stopped talking, tutted in apparent exasperation and took up the little scissors. He trimmed a couple of finger-nail sized bits of cardboard off the piece and forced it into place. 'Don't make the damn things right any more,' he muttered.\n\nI began to wonder at the wisdom of leaving Uncle H with a pair of scissors, even small ones.\n\nHe looked at me. 'Headstrong,' he said brightly, then looked down at the puzzle. 'Always was. Good; liked him; brother after all, but ... there was no sense of God in him, was there?' Hamish looked at mum, then me. 'No sense of something greater than him, was there, Mary?' he said, turning back to mum. 'Proof all round us; goodness and power, but he wouldn't believe. I tried to tell him; saw the minister yesterday; told him he hadn't tried hard enough. He said he couldn't force people to go to church. I said, why not? Did in the old days. Why not?' Uncle Hamish took up another piece of grey cardboard, turned it this way and that. 'Good enough then, good enough now; that's what I told him. For their own good.' He grunted, looked displeased. 'Idiot told me not to blame myself,' he said, staring grimly at the puzzle-piece, as though trying to pare bits off it with just the sharpness of his stare. 'I said I don't, I blame God. Or Kenneth for ... for goading ... inciting Him.' Uncle Hamish started to cry, his bottom lip quivering like a child's.\n\n'There, Hamish,' mum said, reaching out and stroking one of his hands.\n\n'What exactly happened, Uncle Hamish?' I asked. Sounded to me like the man had cracked completely, but I still wanted to see if he could come up with more details.\n\n'Sorry,' sniffed Hamish, wiping his eyes then blowing his nose into the black hanky. He put the hanky in his breast pocket, clasped his hands on the edge of the tray holding the jigsaw, and lowered his head a little, seeming to address the centre of the puzzle. His thumbs started to circle each other, going round and round.\n\n'We had a few drinks; we'd met in the town. I'd been at the Steam Packet, meeting with some people. Showed them round the factory in the morning. Just paperweights. Man from Harrods. Nice lunch. Thought I'd look for a present for Antonia's birthday, bumped into Kenneth coming out of the stationer's. Went for a pint; bit like the old days, really.'\n\n'Here we are,' Aunt Antonia announced from the door, appearing with a tray full of crockery. There was a pause while tea was poured, biscuits dispensed. 'Shall I stay here, dear?' Aunt Tone asked Hamish.\n\nI thought she looked worse than mum did. Her face was drawn, there were dark shadows under her eyes; even her brown, bunned hair looked greyer than I remembered.\n\nHer husband ignored her, talking on as before, though now having apparently shifted his attention to the cup of tea Aunt Tone had placed in front of him on the puzzle tray. His thumbs were still circling each other.\n\n'Went to the Argyll Lounge; good view of the harbour from there. Drank pints. It was like when we were younger. Had a cigar. Good chat, really. Rang the office, said I was playing truant. He rang Lochgair. We were going to go for a Chinese meal, just for old time's sake, but we never got round to it. Thought it would be fun to go on a bit of a pub-crawl, so we went on to the Gallery bar, in the Steam Packet. That was where we started talking about faith.'\n\nUncle Hamish stopped talking, took up his cup of tea, sipped quickly from it without raising his gaze from the tray, then replaced the cup in the saucer. 'He called me a crack-pot,' Hamish said. His eyebrows rose up his forehead; his voice rose too. Then it fell again as he said, 'I called him a fool.'\n\nHamish looked quickly, furtively, at my mother. 'Sorry,' he mumbled, and looked forward at the tray and the puzzle again. He sighed; his thumbs kept going round. 'I told him Christ loved him and he just laughed,' Hamish complained. 'He refused to see; he refused to understand. I told him he was like a blind man, like somebody who would not open their eyes; all he had to do was accept Christ into his life and suddenly everything would fall into place. The world would look a different place; a whole new plane of existence would open up. I explained that all we did here was merely a preparation for the next life, where we would be judged, punished and rewarded.' Hamish shook his head, face radiating dismay. 'He went all snide, asked me when exactly I'd had the brain by-pass operation.'\n\n(God \u2013 or whatever \u2013 help me; at that point, despite it all, I had to stifle a guffaw. I coughed, and dabbed at my suddenly brimming eyes with a tissue.)\n\nHamish rattled on. 'I told him that only religion gave any meaning to life; only God, as an absolute, gave us a ... peg to hang our philosophies on. What was the meaning of life, otherwise? He said, What meaning? He said, How long is a piece of string? and, What colour is the wind?' Uncle Hamish shook his head again. 'I told him faith was love, the most beautiful thing in the world. He said it was nonsense, surrendering our humanity. Humanity!' Hamish scoffed. 'Religion gives us rules; it can keep people from doing wrong; it helps us be good. But he wasn't having it, would not listen. \"Religion is politics,\" he told me, several times. As though repeating it made it true. \"Religion is politics! Religion is politics!\" Blasphemed. We left the last bar \u2013 can't even remember which one it was, to be honest \u2013 and we were walking back here, for a nightcap, I think, coming along Shore Road \u2013 I left the car in the Steam Packet Hotel car park, of course \u2013 and we had some argument about the Shore Street Church. He said he liked it, liked the architecture, but it was really a testament to the skill of humans, not to the glory of God, and just a symbol. I said it was the house of God, and he'd better not trespass.' Hamish looked up at mum for a moment. 'He was walking along the wall, you see.'\n\nMum nodded. Hamish was already staring at the tray again.\n\n'He said what was any church or temple but a giant, hollow idol? I told him he was sick; he said he was infected with reason. I said Reason was his God, and it was false; it was the true idol.' Hamish sighed. 'The street was wet; there had been rain. I remember noticing that ... Kenneth shouted at me, told me...' Hamish shook his head. '... he said; \"Hamish; all the gods are false. Faith itself is idolatry.\"'\n\nUncle Hamish swivelled his big, grey head and gazed gloomily at me. His eyes looked cold and jelly-like; they reminded me of frog-spawn discovered in some ditch. '\"All the gods are false. Faith itself is idolatry,\"' Uncle Hamish breathed, staring at me. I shivered. 'Can you credit that, Prentice?' He looked down, away from me, shaking his head.\n\nHamish returned his gaze to the puzzle tray. His thumbs kept circling. 'I can't remember exactly what he said,' Hamish whispered, and then sighed. 'But he jumped off the wall and ran over to the church. He started climbing.'\n\nI heard my mother sob once, very quietly.\n\n'I had to climb over the wall,' Hamish breathed, 'Gate was locked. By the time I got there he was out of reach. I thought he was shinning up a drainpipe. Just assumed. Heard rumbles, I think, but ... didn't think anything of it. No flashes, that I can remember. Kenneth was yelling and swearing and shouting imprecations; calling down all sorts of punishment; I was trying to get him to come down; told him he'd fall; told him the police were coming; told him to think of his family. But he kept climbing.'\n\nI studied my hands in the pink-tinged light, turning them over and looking at the lines on my palm, the veins on the back. I tried to imagine dad, climbing up that tower, hauling himself up, hand over hand, sweating and straining in the darkness, trusting to his own strength and the cool metal strip beneath his hands.\n\nThe block beneath me was silent now; the last of the waves had retreated from it and were breaking further down the beach as the tide went out. The sky was still gaudy with crimson clouds, though much of the brightness had gone. I glanced at my watch. I ought to be jumping down off this thing and heading back to the road; it was a rough hike over the headland, and dangerous in the dark. But the red streaks of the clouds were dissolving as the sunset went on, leaving the sky clear above me. This near the centre of the year, on a clear night, it would never get totally dark. I had a while yet, but I wouldn't leave it too late; mum would worry. That would just be the cherry on it, me taking the Crow Road too.\n\nUncle Hamish took another sip of his tea, frowned at the cup and spat the tea back into it. 'Cold,' he said apologetically to his wife. He dabbed at his lips with his handkerchief. I realised only then I hadn't touched the cup that Aunt Tone had poured for me.\n\nHamish went on: 'There was a very strange noise, a sort of humming noise seemed to come from under my feet, from the stones of the church. Couldn't work out what it was, thought it was the drink or just the effect of looking up like that, craning my neck. But it wouldn't go away, and it got louder and I felt my hair stand on end. I shouted up to Kenneth; he was about half-way up, still climbing. Then there was a flash, a blinding flash.\n\n'Saw a glowing red line in front of me, like a vein of burning blood, like lava, in front of me. Noise terrific. Smell of sulphur; something of that nature; smell of the devil, though I think that was just coincidence. Fell down. Half blind, thought a bomb had gone off. Heard ringing, like the church bells all going on at once.' Uncle Hamish went to sip from his tea again, then thought the better of it and put the cup back on the saucer. 'Realised it had been lightning. I still couldn't believe it; found Kenneth behind me, lying on the grass and a sort of slab thing, over a grave. Hands burned. Been climbing the lightning conductor, blew him off. Don't know if that would have killed him, but he'd landed on the stone. Dead. Blood from his head.' Hamish looked slowly over at mum, who was crying silently. 'Sorry,' he told her.\n\nShe didn't say anything.\n\n'Idiot,' I whispered, sitting there on Darren's great grey concrete block. 'Idiot,' I said, and for once I wasn't talking to myself. _'Idiot!'_ I shouted at the sky. 'IDIOT!' I bellowed, hands clawing at the pitted concrete surface beneath me. 'IDIOT!' I screamed, emptying my lungs to the soft sea airs. Coughing and choking, I sat there, tears in my eyes, breathing hard. Eventually I wiped my nose on my shirt sleeve, feeling like a little kid again, and then sniffed, swallowed, and breathed slower, clenching my teeth to stop my jaw trembling.\n\nI sat back, shivering, legs out straight in front, arms behind, hands splayed on the rough concrete. I thought about them all. Dad, falling; Grandma Margot, falling. Darren, broken against the tomb-white concrete of a council litter bin; Aunt Fiona, through the windscreen of the Aston Martin, neck snapped, into the young trees by the roadside ... and who knew what had happened to Rory? Well, in a day or two I was going to start trying to find out. So far mum and I \u2013 with Ashley's help \u2013 had only dealt with the papers and files we had to, to deal with the legal formalities. But there was a lot more stuff to go through, and somewhere in all that bumf there might be something that would tell us about Uncle Rory, and why dad had always been so sure his brother was still alive.\n\nBut for all we knew he'd died a roadside death, too.\n\nUncle Hamish turned to me. 'Swear he was still alive.' He nodded, frowning at me. I raised my eyebrows, feeling very cold inside. Hamish nodded again. 'Still alive; he said something to me. I swear Kenneth said, \"See?\"' Hamish shook his head. 'Said that to me; said, \"See?\" without opening his eyes.' He looked down at his rotating thumbs. His frown seemed to stop them. 'That was what he said; and it was so ... wrong; such a silly, silly thing to say, that I thought I must have only thought I heard it, but I'm sure, that's what he said. \"See?\"' Uncle Hamish shook his head. '\"See?\"' He kept shaking his head. '\"See?\"' He turned to me. 'Can you credit that, Prentice?'\n\nHe looked away again before I could think of what to say. '\"See?\"' he repeated to the tray with the ruined puzzle, and shook his head again. '\"See?\"'\n\n'Excuse me.' Mum got up and left the room, crying.\n\nHamish stared at the cardboard puzzle. Aunt Antonia sat at the end of the bed, staring hollow-eyed at her silent husband. The tray over Uncle Hamish's legs started to vibrate. I could see the duvet over Uncle Hamish's thighs shaking. The bed began to squeak. My uncle stared, appalled, at the tray on his lap, as the little grey pieces of the up-turned puzzle migrated across the vibrating surface of the tray, gradually collecting against one edge.\n\nThe spasms in Uncle Hamish's legs seemed to grow more severe; the cup of tea I'd put on the bedside table near my right elbow showed a concentric pattern of standing ripples. I suddenly thought of the scene in The Unbelievable _Prevalence_ of Bonking, when the tanks enter Prague. Uncle Hamish made a strange keening noise; Aunt Tone patted his feet under the duvet and rose from the end of the bed.\n\n'I'll get your pills, dear.'\n\nShe left the room. Hamish turned to me, his whole body shaking now, the puzzle on the tray starting to break up as the tray bounced up and down beneath it. 'Jealous,' Hamish croaked through clenched teeth. 'Jealous, Prentice; jealous! Jealous! Jealous God! Jealous!'\n\nI got up slowly, patted his trembling hands and smiled.\n\nI've always had this fantasy that, after Uncle Rory borrowed his flat-mate Andy's motorbike and headed off into the sunset, he crashed somewhere, maybe coming down to Gallanach; came off the road and fell down some gully nobody's looked in for the last ten years, or \u2013 rather more likely, I suppose \u2013 crashed into the water, and there's a Suzuki 185 GT lying just under the waves of Loch Lomond, or Loch Long, or Loch Fyne, its rider somehow entangled in it, reduced by now to a skeleton in borrowed leathers, somewhere underwater, perhaps between here and Glasgow; and we all pass it every time we make the journey, maybe only a few tens of metres away from him, and very possibly will never know.\n\nI know that dad \u2013 who had indeed assumed that Rory had been on his way here \u2013 drove the Glasgow road a few times, immediately after Andy and then Janice raised the alarm, looking for some sign of an accident, a skid mark, a damaged fence or wall, always wondering if maybe his brother was lying unconscious or paralysed in a field or a ditch somewhere, invisible from the road ... But all he ever found were road cones, assorted litter and the occasional dead sheep or deer.\n\nWhatever; neither dad nor the police ever found any trace of Rory or the bike. No unidentified bodies turned up that could have been his, and no hospitals received any unknown coma victims fitting his description.\n\nI don't think any of us ever mentioned suicide, but I at least considered the possibility that he had killed himself. Rory had been depressed, after all; his one success had been a travel book written a decade earlier, and everything else he'd tried since had failed to live up to that; he had recently failed to become a TV presenter \u2013 a job he'd thought beneath him but which he needed for the money (and so had been all the more galled when he hadn't been chosen) \u2013 and maybe, too, he'd finally admitted to himself he was never going to write his magnum opus ...\n\nHell, his life just wasn't going anywhere special; people kill themselves for poorer reasons.\n\nI reckoned the chances of him being under the waves somewhere improved significantly if he had committed suicide; he could have picked his spot to drive straight at a wall or a crash barrier, maybe on top of a cliff. Could be anywhere. I could think of a few places, further north in the Highlands, which would be perfect. If he'd tied himself to the bike somehow ...\n\nBut why go to the effort of doing that in the first place? It wasn't as though there was some big insurance sum involved, or any funny business with wills or family money. Rory had inherited some capital when grandad died, held in trust until he was eighteen; he'd used that up travelling round India the first time, then lived off the success of Traps and \u2013 later \u2013 the declining advances and journalistic commissions he'd received after that. When he'd disappeared he'd had a small overdraft.\n\nMaybe he'd been murdered. I'd thought of that years ago, even on the evening we'd heard he was missing. I had been playing down on the shore of Loch Gair with Helen and Diana Urvill, and when we came back for our tea there was a police car in the courtyard of the house.\n\nA police car! I recall thinking, getting all excited.\n\nOf course, in my fantasy I was the one who discovered Rory's evil murderer and brought him to justice, or fought with him and watched him fall off a cliff or into a combine harvester or under a steam-roller or whatever.\n\nOnly I couldn't see that anybody had had much of a motive. It had crossed my mind that it might have something to do with _Crow Road;_ somebody wanted to steal the idea and keep Rory out of the way, but it wasn't even as though there was much to steal. Notes and poems; wow.\n\nI stood up on the silent concrete block and dusted my hands off. The disappearing clouds were the colour of dried blood in a sky gone close to purple. More stars were coming out. A contrail blazed pink overhead, as a plane headed for America. I looked at my watch; I had to go. I'd told mum I'd be back for supper in an hour or so. We were expecting Lewis and Verity that evening; they were flying up from London, where Lewis had been working, and they would hire a car at Glasgow. They might be back when I returned.\n\n'Shouldn't have mentioned you,' Uncle Hamish said, as I walked to the door of the dim bedroom. I turned back. He was still trembling. It hurt me to look at him, the way it hurts to hear nails scraped down a blackboard. 'Shouldn't have said anything about you, Prentice,' he said, the words whistling out between his clenched teeth. I could hear Aunt Tone's footsteps coming up the stairs in the hall outside. 'Shouldn't have said, Prentice; shouldn't have said.'\n\n'Said what, uncle?' I said, hand on the door knob.\n\n'That you were closer to me; that I'd won you, saved you from his heathen faith!' Uncle Hamish's eyes stared at me from a shaking, ash-grey face.\n\nI nodded and smiled at him. 'Oh well,' I said. The door opened and I got out of the way of Aunt Tone, bearing pills and a glass of water. 'See you tomorrow, Prentice,' she whispered to me. She patted my arm. 'Thank you.'\n\n'It's all right. See you tomorrow, Aunt Tone.'\n\nOutside, on the landing, I looked down the stairs to where my mother was standing by the front door, putting on her jacket. I leant back against the closed bedroom door for just a second, and \u2013 looking at nothing in particular \u2013 said very quietly to myself, 'See?'\n\nI went to the land-side edge of the concrete cube, and faced back at the remains of the sunset, trying to work out how I was going to feel seeing Lewis and Verity again, after the way I'd behaved at New Year. But search as I tried, I could find no trace of dread or jealousy; I was even looking forward to seeing them again. Something of the coldness that had settled over me in the last few days seemed to have spread to the way I felt about Verity. It felt like all my jealous passion had dissipated like the clouds overhead.\n\nI thought about jumping down onto the beach, but that might have been asking for another family tragedy, so I climbed down, walked to the end of the shallow scoop of bay and set off through the grass by the side of the burn, heading back to Gallanach through the calm summer gloaming.\n\n... He told us about the plants on the islands, too; how the open, glorious machair, between the dunes and the farmed land, was so dizzily sumptuous with flowers because it was the place where the acidic peat and the alkali sands produced a neutral ground where more plants could flourish in the sunlight. And just the names of those plants were a delight, almost a litany; marsh samphire, procumbent pearlwort, sand-spurrey, autumnal hawkbit, cathartic flax, kidney vetch, germander speedwell, hastate orache, sea spleenwort; eyebright.\n\nWe learned about the people who had made Scotland their home: the hunter-gatherers of eight or nine thousand years ago, nomads wandering the single great wood and stalking deer, or camping by the edge of the sea and leaving only piles of shells for us to find; the first farmers, just beginning to clear the land of the blanket of thick forest a few millennia later; the neolithic people who had built the tomb of Maes Howe before the pyramids were constructed, and the stone circle at Callanish before Stonehenge, in the thousand-year summer of the third millenium; then came the Bronze Age and Iron Age people, the Vikings and Picts, Romans and Celts and Scots and Angles and Saxons who had all found their way to this oceanically marginal little corner of northern Europe, and left on the place their own marks; the treeless slopes themselves, the roads and walls, cairns and forts, tombs, standing stones, souterrains, crannogs and farms and houses and churches; and the oil refineries, nuclear power stations and missile ranges, too.\n\nHe made up stories, about the secret mountain, and the sand-drowned forest, the flood that turned to wood, the zombie peat, and the stone-beings that drilled for air. Sometimes the location for, or the subject of, a story would have some basis in fact; the secret mountain was a real hill on which grew a flower that grew nowhere else in the world. There had indeed been great storms that had moved whole ranges of sand dunes inland, drowning forests, and villages ... And peat _was_ un-dead, the surrounding rocks' acidity, the chill Atlantic airs and ever-likely rain conspiring to prevent the corpses of the dead plants from decomposing.\n\nOther stories were pure fantasy, the result of a kind of child-like quality in him, I think. If you.looked at certain stands of trees from a distance, especially in a glen, and when in full leaf, they did look like great bulging torrents of green water, bursting from the depths of the earth and somehow frozen. There was a sort of visual naivety at work there that verged on the hallucinogenic, but it did, I'd argue, make a warped sort of visual sense. Magmites \u2013 the people who lived in the mantle of the earth, beneath the crust, and who were drilling up for air the way we were drilling down for oil \u2013 must just have appealed to that part of him that loved turning things around. Opposites and images fascinated him, excited him; magicked inspired absurdity from him.\n\nI think Uncle Rory would have given almost anything to have tapped the lush gravidity of that source as well.\n\nTelling us straight or through his stories, my father taught us that there was, generally, a fire at the core of things, and that change was the only constant, and that we \u2013 like everybody else \u2013 were both the most important people in the universe, and utterly without significance, depending, and that individuals mattered before their institutions, and that people were people, much the same everywhere, and when they appeared to do things that were stupid or evil, often you hadn't been told the whole story, but that sometimes people did behave badly, usually because some idea had taken hold of them and given them an excuse to regard other people as expendable (or bad), and that was part of who we were too, as a species, and it wasn't always possible to know that you were right and they were wrong, but the important thing was to keep trying to find out, and always to face the truth. Because truth mattered.\n\nI suppose we all want to pass on our beliefs; they seem even more our own than the genes we transmit ... but maybe they are largely inherited too, even if sometimes what you inherit is the exact opposite \u2013 the reversed image of what was intended.\n\nSometimes I felt he was trying to brain-wash us; that he wanted us to be images of himself, thinking the way he thought, doing what he would have done, as if that would help him cheat death, make him less mortal somehow. Then all his parables and laws seemed like.megalomania, and his reasoned certainties like dogma.\n\nOther times he seemed genuinely altruistic, and on occasion I thought I could sense something like desperation in him, trying so hard to equip us as best he could for the vicissitudes of life, while the world changed all around us so fast that some of his ideas and theories \u2013 which had seemed so important to him in his life, and so crucial for us to know in turn \u2013 became irrelevant; were proved wrong, or just shown to be not so important after all.\n\nMy mother was different, and always had been. I don't think she ever really laid down the law like that, not even once; she just got on with things. We knew we were loved, and we knew when something we'd done was disapproved of, but she trained us by example, and let us make mistakes. The only idea I think she could ever be accused of trying to put into our heads was the welcome realisation that whatever happened to us, she'd be there.\n\nI'm not sure that it wasn't the more effective method in the end, and \u2013 in its own way \u2013 more confident, too.\n\nHalf an hour after I'd left Darren's post-post-modernist concrete block I stood in the dusk light beneath the dun on the hill of Bac Chrom, within sight of the track at last, the lights of Slockavullin village beneath me, the eastern edge of Gallanach a thin grid of orange sparks to my right, the main road to Oban and the north busy with lights of white and orange and red, and the dark landscape below full of soft undulations, littered with chambered cairns, cup and ring marked rocks, standing stones, tumuli and ancient forts.\n\nAll the gods are false, I thought. Faith itself is idolatry.\n\nI looked into that ancient, cluttered darkness, wondering.\nCHAPTER 14\n\nSo anyway, bro, how are things?'\n\nLewis shook his head slowly and deliberately. He held up his whisky glass and studied it from close range, focusing with explicit care, one eye at a time. I formed the impression he was attempting to fix the tumbler's image in his memory so he'd know the identity of the receptacle to blame come the following morning. I was so drunk at the time this actually seemed like quite a smart idea, and I would probably have attempted to do the same thing myself if I'd thought I was remotely capable of coordinating my hand, eyes and brain to that degree. The only reason I could get my drinking hand and my mouth in roughly the same place at approximately the same time at this stage in the evening was because I'd had so much recent practice at it. And even that comparatively simple system wasn't a hundred per cent any more; I'd missed my mouth twice already and spilled small amounts of whisky onto my chin and shirt. I'd carried it off with dignity, though.\n\nLewis looked like he was going to sleep. Either that or the superior intellect of the whisky glass had hypnotised him. I knew the problem.\n\n'Lewis?' I said.\n\n'Wha \u2013 what?' he looked at me, confused.\n\n'I was saying,' I said. 'How are things?'\n\n'Oh,' he said, and sighed. 'I don't know.' He frowned. 'Verity said to me just yesterday ... she said, \"Lewis, I don't think we understand each other any more.\"'\n\n'What did you say?' I sipped my whisky carefully.\n\n'I said, \"Whadaya mean?\",' Lewis snarled.\n\nThen he burst out laughing. It must have been infectious laughter because I started laughing too, and then we were both laughing, but we couldn't have been that drunk because we didn't over-do it. Five minutes later \u2013 well, maybe ten, absolute max \u2013 we' d stopped laughing almost entirely.\n\n'Really?' I said, wiping my eyes.\n\nLewis shook his head. 'Na, course not. Everything's ... was pure dead brilliant, actually.'\n\n'Good,' I said, and drank. I meant it too, but even as I realised that I meant it, I thought: ah, it's just the drink. I'll be worse in the morning. Still, I looked up at Lewis and said, 'I think I'm better.'\n\n'Better ...?' Lewis began, giggling.\n\n'Better than ... yesterday, Mr Creosote?' I started to laugh.\n\n'Better get a bucket \u2013' Lewis howled, but couldn't manage the rest of the line, because by then we were on the floor. I laughed until my ears hurt.\n\nI stood beneath the larches in the rain, holding an umbrella, wearing a kilt and feeling a little self-conscious. The stand of dripping trees had gone yellow and dropped their needles during the last few weeks, turning the ground beneath them a dully shining blond that seemed like a tinted mirror to the ash-bright expanse of overcast sky. I touched the plain black obelisk, slick and cold in the chill October rain. Behind me, the noise from the marquee \u2013 an increasing choir of chattering voices \u2013 was slowly drowning the patter of the drizzle as it fell through the twigs and branches above onto the sodden ground; a busy, buzzy, shared excitement displacing what the solitary soul perceived as a sort of tranquil gloom.\n\nWhat guy? I thought. What is Ash going to show me; who? (And already thought I might have guessed.) Shit, I didn't like the sound of this.\n\nThe rain came on harder and I listened to it drumming on the taut black skin of the umbrella, remembering remembering.\n\n'Remember the River Game?'\n\n'Remember the _Black_ River Game?'\n\n'Ha!'\n\nWe were digging dad's grave, waist deep in the rich black earth of Lochgair, partially shielded from the house by the dense mass of rhodie bushes and tall tangles of wild roses. Jimmy Turrock, the council workman sent from the municipal cemetery to dig the grave officially, and who'd been in the same class as Lewis at school, was sitting against the wheel of his miniature earth-mover, arms folded, head back, mouth open, snoring. That morning over breakfast, Lewis and I had decided we'd dig the hole ourselves. If nothing else, it would take our minds off our hangovers, which were industrial strength.\n\nThe River Game was something dad made up himself. He did it for Lewis and me. The first version was roughed out in a big sketch book, while he tinkered with the rules. When he was happy with it all, he got a big bit of white cardboard from a display company in Glasgow, drew out the playing surface, painted it, sprayed it with lacquer and edged the board with black tape. He'd bought various Lego packs and made the ships and the cargoes out of those. The rules were typed, the cards were printed on labels and they were stuck onto the back of ordinary playing cards. We were presented with the result as a sort of extra present to be shared between Lewis and me for Christmas 1981. James was still a bit young; he'd only have chewed the ships and choked on the cargoes.\n\nLewis \u2013 who had asked for and got a television for his room, and a new Walkman \u2013 had the good grace to express gratitude. I was still celebrating having finally worn down dad's resistance to having a computer in the house, and was therefore far too busy kicking pixel and re-staging the attack of the Imperial AT-ATs on the rebel snow trenches to be bothered sparing more than the most cursory glance at what was, when all was said and done, a lump of amateurishly painted cardboard, a handful of non-motorised and very basic Lego bits, a few adulterated cards and what looked suspiciously like an exam paper. 'Yeah; great, dad. Got any more PP9 batteries for this wee car? The one out your calculator didn't last long,' was about as enthusiastic as I got about the game for most of the festive period.\n\nLater, I deigned to play.\n\nThe River Game was based on trade; dad had wanted something that would distract us from all the war games Lewis and I played: soldiers, with our friends in the woods, battles with our toys, wars on friends' computers. He really wanted something non-capitalistic as well as non-military, but the River Game was going to be just his first effort; he would \u2013 he told us \u2013 be working on something much more right-on, once he had the time to spare. He'd see if we liked the River Game first.\n\nYou had two or three ships; you sailed them from a port on one side of the board to a port on the other side through what was either a big loch or lake choked with islands, or a piece of territory with an awful lot of waterways snaking through it, depending how you chose to look at it. You picked up cargo at the second port and sailed back. The cargo was worth a certain amount when you got back to your home port, and with the money you could buy more ships, configured for speed or capacity. There were at least half a dozen major routes from one port to the other, and basically, the shorter the route you took, the more hazardous it was; there were whirlpools, channels prone to rock falls, stretches of river where the sand-banks changed all the time, and so on. The weather had a chance to change every few moves, and how much the different types of cargo were worth depended on ... Oh, what your opponents had chosen to carry, what the weather was, whether the month had an 'r' in it; I can't remember it all.\n\nIt was quite a fun game, mildly addictive, with a reasonable balance of skill and luck, and Lewis and I eventually got quite a few of our friends playing it, but the truth is it improved dramatically when Lewis \u2013 with my help \u2013 drew up an extra set of rules which let you build _warships!_\n\nWe played that game for weeks before dad caught us at it in the conservatory, one rainy May day, and asked how come there were all these ships with funny-coloured cargoes clustered so close together and surrounded by wrecks where there were no hazards.\n\nOops.\n\nWe called it the Black River Game (Dad even objected to the title). He had been working on a new improved version of the original game that involved using some of the money to build railways across the board; you laid track, you built bridges, dug tunnels, coped with rock falls and marshes and recalcitrant land owners, and the first one to finish his or her railway was, in effect, the winner. But he stopped work on this sophistication when he found us acting out furiously destructive naval engagements on his painstakingly crafted board. He didn't take it away, though. I think for a while he was trying to develop another non-combative game that he'd defy us to turn martial, but it stayed at the development stage and never did see the light of day.\n\nI stopped digging for a moment, wiped some sweat from my brow with the hem of my T-shirt, which was lying on the ground at the head of the grave. I leant on my shovel, looking at Jimmy Turrock's up-ended face while he snored. Lewis stopped digging for a moment too, breathing hard.\n\nI said, 'We disappointed him, though, didn't we?'\n\nLewis shrugged. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face. 'Oh, Prentice, come on; boys will be boys. Dad knew that.'\n\n'Yeah, but he expected better of us.'\n\n'Dads always do, it's traditional. We turned out not too bad.'\n\n'Neither of us did as well as he expected at Uni,' I said. I'd told Lewis \u2013 though not my mother \u2013 that I was fairly certain I'd failed my finals.\n\n'Well, for a start, he didn't know about you,' Lewis said, scraping some earth off the blade of his spade. 'And he was smart enough to know degrees aren't everything. Come on, we're not in prison, we're not junkies and we're not Young Tories.' He waggled his eyebrows. 'It's no small achievement.'\n\n'I suppose,' I said, and started digging again. (Pity he'd mentioned prison; another thing I hadn't told Lewis about was that I'd been nicked for shop-lifting. Not that I'd be going to prison, but it's the thought that counts.)\n\nLewis kept on digging. 'We could have done worse,' he insisted.\n\n'We could have done better,' I said, shovelling another load of earth out of the pit.\n\nLewis was silent for a while, then said, quietly, 'Better than ... yesterday?'\n\nI laughed in spite of myself (and in spite of the grave, and my aching head and still bruised heart). 'Shut up,' I said, 'please.'\n\nLewis shut up. I encountered another rhodie root and attacked it with the hacksaw, then took up the spade again, blinking sweat out of my eyes and waving a couple of flies away.\n\nLewis muttered almost inaudibly as he dug; 'It's only _waffer_ thin ...'\n\nWe snorted and guffawed for a while, then took a break for yet more Irn-Bru, sitting at the edge of the grave, legs dangling into it, with Jimmy Turrock still blissfully \u2013 and vocally \u2013 in the land of nod across the grave in front of us.\n\nI drank deeply from the bottle, passed it to Lewis. He finished it, grimaced, looked at the bottle. 'You know, I've finally realised what this stuff reminds me of,' he said, and belched heavily. I followed suit, trumping his sonorous burp with one that disturbed a few drowsy crows from nearby trees and even had Jimmy Turrock stir in his sleep.\n\n'What?' I said.\n\n'Chewing gum,' Lewis said, screwing the cap back on the bottle and chucking it into the grass near the council earth-digger.\n\nI nodded wisely. 'Yeah, right enough.'\n\nWe sat there, silent for a while. I looked at Jimmy Turrock's spotty, open-mouthed face and his wispy red hair. His snores sounded like somebody forever trying to start a badly-tuned buzz-saw. I listened to it for a while, and watched a couple of flies buzzing around in a tight but complicated holding pattern in front of his mouth, as though daring each other to be the first to investigate inside. After a while they broke off, though, and settled for exploring the rough landscape of Jimmy's checked shirt. My head hurt. Come to that, almost everything hurt. Ah well, self-inflicted wounds.\n\nJimmy Turrock snored on, oblivious.\n\nLewis and Verity had arrived the night before, an hour after I'd got back from my sunset visit to Darren's sea-side sculpture. Their plane had been late and they'd had problems hiring the car, so they arrived nearly two hours later than we'd expected. Rather than phone from the airport, Lewis had hired a mobile along with the car but then when they'd tried to use it, it hadn't worked. The upshot was that mum and I had been getting into a fine panic, and I'd been dreading watching the news: '... and we're just getting reports of an incident at Glasgow airport ... details still coming in ...'\n\nI mean, statistics tell you family tragedies oughtn't to come in quite such close succession, but Jeez; it gets to you, when somebody dies as unexpectedly as dad. Suddenly everybody you know seems vulnerable, and you fear for them all. Every phone-call sends your heart racing, every car journey anyone takes you want to say, Oh God be careful don't go above second gear have you thought of fitting air-bags is your journey really necessary be careful be careful be careful ... So there we were; mum and I sitting watching the television, on the couch together, side by side, holding hands tightly without even realising it and watching the television but not taking in what we were watching, and dreading the sound of the phone and waiting waiting waiting for the sound of a car coming up the drive.\n\nUntil I heard it, and leapt over the couch and hauled open the curtains and the car drew up and Lewis waved at me as he got out and I whooped, 'It's them!' to my mum, who smiled and relaxed and looked suddenly beautiful again.\n\nThere was a big three-cornered hug in the hall; then mum saw Verity standing by the door, taking a very long deliberate time to take her jacket off and hang it up; and so she was brought into the scrum too, and that was the first time, I realised, that I'd ever actually embraced her, even if it was just one arm round her slim shoulders. It was all right.\n\nThen the phone rang. Mum and I jumped.\n\nI got it. Mum took Lewis and Verity into the lounge.\n\n'Hello?'\n\n'Hello!' shouted a voice of immodestly robust proportions. 'To whom am I talking?' the booming voice demanded. It was Aunt Ilsa. We'd left a message at the only contact address we had for her, two days earlier. She was in Ladakh, a place so out of the way it would take several international airports, a major rail terminus and substantial investment in a network of eight-lane highways to promote it to the status of being in the middle of nowhere.\n\n'It's Prentice, Aunt Ilsa.' There was a satellite delay. I was talking to what I suspected was the only satellite ground station between Islamabad and Ulaan Baatar. There was a lot of noise in the background; it sounded like people shouting, and a mule or something.\n\n'Hello there, Prentice,' Aunt Ilsa bellowed. 'How are you? Why did you want me to call?' Perhaps, I thought, she'd been taking steroids and they'd all gone to her vocal chords.\n\n'I'm ... there's \u2013'\n\n'\u2013 ello?'\n\n'\u2013 some bad news, I'm afraid.'\n\n'What? You'll have to speak up, my dear; the hotelier is proving refractory.'\n\n'It's dad,' I said, thinking I might as well get this over with as quickly as possible. 'Kenneth; your brother. I'm afraid he's dead. He died three days ago.'\n\n'Good God! What on earth happened?' Aunt Ilsa rumbled. I could hear shouting. The thing that sounded like a mule went into what appeared to be a fit of coughing. 'Mr Gibbon!' roared Aunt Ilsa. 'Will you control that fellow!'\n\n'He was struck by lightning,' I said.\n\n'Lightning?' Aunt Ilsa thundered.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Good God. Where was he? Was he on a boat? Or \u2013'\n\n'He was \u2013'\n\n' \u2013golf course? Mr ... hello? Mr Gibbon had a friend once who was struck by lightning on a golf course, in Marbella. Right at the top of his back-swing. Bu \u2013'\n\n'No; he was \u2013'\n\n' \u2013course it was an iron.'\n\n' \u2013climbing,' I said.\n\n' \u2013number seven, I think. What?'\n\n'He was climbing,' I shouted. I could hear what sounded like a fight going on at the other end of the phone. 'Climbing a church.'\n\n'A _church?'_ Aunt Ilsa demanded.\n\n'I'm afraid so. Listen, Aunt Ilsa \u2013'\n\n'But he wouldn't be seen dead near a church!'\n\nI bared my teeth at the phone and growled. My aunt, the unconscious humorist.\n\n'I'm afraid that's what happened,' I said as evenly as I could. 'The funeral is tomorrow. I don't suppose you can make it, can you?'\n\nThere was a noise of some Ladakhian confusion for a while, then, fortissimo; 'I'll have to leave you now, Lewis \u2013'\n\n'Prentice,' I breathed through gritted teeth.\n\n' \u2013Our yak has escaped. Tell your mother our thoughts are with her at \u2013'\n\nAnd it was goodbye downlink.\n\nI looked at the phone. 'I'm not sure you have any to spare, aunt,' I said, and put the phone down with a feeling of relief.\n\n'I need a drink,' I said to myself. I strode purposefully towards the lounge.\n\nLewis had been marginally more sensible than me, later on, that night before the funeral; he'd gone to bed one whisky before I had, leaving me in the lounge alone, at about three in the morning.\n\nI should have gone then too, but I didn't, so I was left to get morose and self-pitying, re-living another evening in this room, another whisky-connected two-some over a year earlier.\n\n'But it's not _fair!'_\n\n'Prentice, \u2013'\n\n'And don't tell me life isn't fair!'\n\n'Aw, _think,_ son,' dad said, sitting forward in his seat, clutching his glass with both hands. His eyes fixed on mine; I looked down, glaring at his reflection on the glass-topped coffee table between us. 'Fairness is something we made up,' he said. 'It's an idea. The universe isn't fair or unfair; it works by mathematics, physics, chemistry, biochemistry ... Things happen; it takes a mind to come along and call them fair or not.'\n\n'And that's it, is it?' I said bitterly. 'He just dies and there's nothing else?' I could feel myself quivering with emotion. I was trying hard not to cry.\n\n'There's whatever he left behind; art, in Darren's case. That's more than most get. And there's how people remember him. And there might have been children \u2013'\n\n'Not very likely in Darren's case, was it?' I sneered, grabbing at any opportunity to score even the smallest rhetorical point over my father.\n\nDad shrugged, staring into his whisky. 'Even so.' He drank, looked at me over the top of the tumbler. 'But the rest,' he said, 'is just cells, molecules, atoms. Once the electricity, the chemistry, stops working in your brain, that's it; no more. You're history.'\n\n'That's defeatist! That's small-minded!'\n\nHe shook his head. 'No. What you're proposing is,' he said, slurring his words a little. He pointed one finger at me. 'You're too frightened to admit how big everything else is, what the scales of the universe are, compared to ours; distance and time. You can't accept that individually, we're microscopic; here for an eye-blink. Might be heading for better things, but no guarantees. Trouble is, people can't believe they're not the centre of things, so they come up with all these pathetic stories about God and life after death and life before birth, but that's cowardice. Sheer cowardice. And because it's the product of cowardice, it promotes it; \"The Lord is my shepherd\". Thanks a fucking lot. So we've to live like sheep. Cowardice and cruelty. But everything's okay, because we're doing the Lord's work. Fuck the silicosis, get down that mine and work, nigger; Aw shucks; sure we skinned her alive and threw her in the salt pans, but we were only doing it to save her soul. Lordy lordy, gimme that old time religion and original sin. Another baby for perdition ... Shit; original sin? What sick fuckwit thought that one up?'\n\nDad drained his glass and put it down on the glass-topped table between us. 'Feel sorry for yourself because your friend's dead if you want, Prentice,' he said, suddenly calm and sober. 'But don't try to dignify it with what's supposed to be metaphysical angst; it's also known as superstitious shit, and you weren't brought up to speak that language.'\n\n'Well, thanks for the fucking censorship, dad!' I yelled. I jumped up and slammed my own glass down. The table top cracked; a single big flaw crossed, deep and green and not quite straight, like a dull ribbon of silk somehow suddenly embedded in the thick glass, from one edge of the table to the other, almost underneath our tumblers.\n\nDad stared at it then snorted, chuckling. 'Hey, yeah! A symbol.' He shook his head, glum, muttering as he sat back: 'Hate the fuckers.'\n\nI hesitated, looking at the cracked glass, instinct \u2013 or training \u2013 telling me to apologise, but then did what I'd intended to do, and set about storming out of the room.\n\n'Just fuck off, dad,' I said before I slammed the door.\n\nHe looked up, pursed his lips and nodded, as though I'd asked him to remember and put the lights out before he went to bed. 'Yup; okay.' He waved one hand. 'Night.'\n\nI lay in bed seething, thinking of all the smart things I should have said, until I fell into a troubled sleep. I woke early and left before anybody else was up, driving my hangover back to Glasgow and shouting at caravans that got in my way, and that was the last meaningful, full and frank exchange of views with my dad that I ever had.\n\n'I wish he hadn't died right now,' I said. I didn't look at Lewis. I was still looking at Jimmy Turrock, asleep against the wheel of his council digger. 'I wish I could \u2013 I wish we could have started talking again.' One of the two flies exploring the cotton landscape of Jimmy's shirt suddenly buzzed up to his forehead. His snoring hesitated, then went on. 'It was so stupid.' I shook my head. 'I was so stupid.'\n\n'Yeah,' Lewis said after a bit. 'Well, that's just the way it is, Prentice. You weren't to know.' I heard Lewis sigh. 'There was something I wish I'd told him, too. Could have said, over the phone, end of last week.'\n\nI looked at Lewis. 'Oh yeah?'\n\nLewis looked awkward. He crossed his arms and sucked at his bottom lip. He glanced at me. 'Were you really that ... you know; keen on Verity? I mean; are you?'\n\nI kicked my heels against the sides of the grave, checked out a couple of tree roots we'd have to tackle before we could dig much deeper. I shrugged. 'Ah, it was just infatuation, I suppose. I mean, you know, I'll always like her, but... all that stuff at New Year ... that was ... well, partly the drink, but ... mostly just sibling rivalry; sibling jealousy,' I said. We both grinned. He still looked awkward. This time, instead of sucking his bottom lip, he bit his top one.\n\nI knew, just like that.\n\n'You are getting married,' I said, gulping.\n\nLewis looked at me with wide eyes. \u2013 'She's _pregnant?'_ I spluttered, contralto.\n\nLewis's mouth was hanging open. He shut it quickly. He wiped his face with the hanky; his eyebrows and eyes registered surprise.\n\n'Um, both,' he said. 'Almost certainly.' He wrung the hanky out over the hole, but it didn't drip (still, though, we would leave a fair amount of sweat in our father's grave).\n\nLewis nodded and his smile was flickering, uncertain. I hadn't seen him look so unsure of himself since the time when he was sixteen and I _almost_ had him convinced the Boxer Rebellion had been about underpants.\n\n'Fooof,' I said.\n\nSeemed as appropriate as anything. I stared over at Jimmy Turrock, blinking.\n\nLewis was making a clicking noise with his mouth. He cleared his throat. 'Wasn't exactly planned, to tell the truth, but... well; I mean, we both, you know; want it, so ... And, well, you know how I feel about marriage and all that stuff, but ... Fuck it, it just keeps things simple.'\n\nHe sounded almost apologetic.\n\nI shook my head and, turning to him with a big smile, I said, 'You total bastard.' I put my hands on my hips. He looked concerned, but I guess my grin must have looked sincere. 'You total, complete and utter bastard; I hate you,' I told him. 'But I hope you're disgustingly happy.' I hesitated, just a little, then I hugged him. 'Obscenely happy,' I said. Probably have cried but I was pretty cried out by that stage.\n\n'Man.' He breathed into my shoulder. 'I didn't know how you'd take it.'\n\n'In the neck,' I said, pushing him away. 'Told mum?'\n\n'Wanted to wait till after the funeral. Mind you, I was going to wait till then to tell you, too, so maybe Verity's spilling the beans right now.'\n\n'So when's the big event?'\n\n'Which one?' Lewis smiled; embarrassed, I do believe. He shrugged. 'We thought October, and the sprog thinks March.'\n\nI let out a long, shuddering sigh, head feeling a bit swimmy. 'Marriage, eh?' I said, shaking my head again. I looked him down and up, hoisted one brow. 'Think you'll take to it?'\n\nLewis grinned. 'Like a lemming to water.'\n\nI laughed. Eventually I laughed so loudly I woke Jimmy Turrock, who looked at me \u2013 sitting on the edge of my father's grave on the day of his burial, guffawing away fit to wake the living \u2013 with undisguised horror.\n\nLike a lemming to water. Lewis knew as well as I did the maligned little buggers are perfectly good swimmers.\n\nJames arrived back about mid-day. He was ... well, pretty distressed, and all the fragile defences mum, Lewis and I had been constructing for the past few days \u2013 Lewis and I joking, mum staying quiet and keeping busy \u2013 crumbled. James seemed to blame dad, blame us; blame everybody. He was ugly with anger and he was like a racing outboard in the calm little pond we'd been trying to create; the house felt hellish and we all started snapping at each other. Outside, at the back of the garden, we could hear the council digger, excavating the rest of the hole. The engine revved up and down; it sounded like a machine snoring. James wished us all dead and ran up to his room and slammed the door. It was a relief to get back out to the grave and help Jimmy Turrock apply the finishing touches.\n\nThen it was time to get showered and changed and wait for the hearse and the mourners. The funeral was suitably grim, despite the sunshine and the warm breeze. The words Lewis said over the grave sounded awkward and forced. Mum looked white as paper. James stood, mouth twisted, furious; he stalked off the instant the coffin touched the bottom of the grave. I threw some earth down onto the pale wood of the lid, putting back a little of what I'd helped dig out.\n\nBut it passed, and the people who came \u2013 a good hundred or more \u2013 were kind. We were busy in the house afterwards, feeding and watering them, and then that passed too.\n\nMy big brother and his intended asked me to be their best man the day after dad's funeral. I'd slept, fitfully, on the idea, but finally said yes. It had already been agreed between the two families that the wedding would be held at Lochgair. Lewis and Verity stayed another day after that, then left to go back to London so that Lewis could resume his gigs. He was almost ashamed when I saw him next, when he confessed that nobody thought his delivery had altered a bit; he was just the same on stage after dad's death as he had been before. The only thing he changed was that he stopped telling the joke about the uncle that dies in an avalanche on a dry ski-slope.\n\nI told him not to worry about it; you had to be a different person on stage. The person he was up there would only change if he told a story about dad dying. Maybe a routine based on the idea of an atheist getting struck by lightning while climbing a church tower would be therapeutic for him, one day.\n\nLewis had the decency to be appalled at the idea.\n\nMum and I went through dad's papers, and were able, after Ashley's tuition, to work the computer and access the information it held.\n\nDad's will, which had been written at the time of Grandma Margot's death, had turned up in the strongbox hidden under the study floorboards. The strongbox had been no big secret; we all knew about it. It was just something to make any burglar's job more difficult. Mum had already seen the will when she had opened the strongbox the morning after dad's death, in the company of one of her friends from the village. She had only looked at the first paragraph, which confirmed that dad wanted to be buried in the grounds of the house. She'd been too upset to look at any more of it, and had put the will back under the floor.\n\nSo we opened the strongbox again, divided the papers, took a desk each, and looked at what we had. Mum had given the pile with the will in it to me. I read it first, and my heart sank after I'd scanned quickly through it and got to the end.\n\n'Oh no,' I said.\n\n'What's wrong?' she asked from the main desk in front of the window.\n\n'It's the will,' I said, turning it over, looking at the last part again, looking over the page but still failing to find what I was looking for. 'It hasn't been witnessed or anything.'\n\nMum came over and stood behind me. She took the four hand-written sheets from me, frowning. Her skin was pale and her eyes looked dark. She wore black jeans and a dark blue shirt and her hair was tied back with a piece of blue ribbon. She handed the will back to me. 'I think it's all right,' she said slowly. She nodded. 'I'll call Blawke to make sure. He'll need to look at it anyway.' She nodded again, walked back to sit in her seat and started reading through the papers she had in front of her. Then she looked up at me. 'You phone him, would you?'\n\n'All right,' I said and watched her bend to the papers again. She appeared to read for a few moments; I almost wanted to laugh, she seemed so unconcerned. She looked up again after a few seconds and just sat there, looking out through the open velvet curtains at the back lawn.\n\nShe sat like that for a full two minutes, unmoving, face unreadable. I smiled; I wanted to weep, to laugh. Eventually I said softly, 'Mum?'\n\n'Hmm?' She turned to me, a hesitant smile on her thin face.\n\nI held the will up from where it lay on the desk. 'This is dad's will.' I managed a smile. 'Don't you want to know what it says?'\n\nShe looked confused, then embarrassed, and put her hand to her mouth. 'Oh, of course. Yes. What does it say? Let's see.'\n\nI pulled my seat over alongside hers.\n\nThe good lawyer Blawke opined that the will was perfectly legal; under Scottish law, a hand-written will did not have to be witnessed. He even came out and looked at it personally, which made two visits in one week. Truly our cup of honour ranneth over.\n\n'Yes,' the lawyer Blawke said, reading the will as he sat in the front lounge. 'Well, I can't see anything wrong with it.' He looked unhappy. 'Unarguably his writing ...'\n\nHe studied it again.\n\n'Yes,' he nodded, finally. 'I actually warned him against doing this, some time ago, but he seems to have got away with it.' The heron-like lawyer seemed sad that the will was litigation-proof. He smiled weakly, and mum offered to re-fill his whisky glass.\n\nThe will \u2013 expressed with a brevity and a lack of ambiguity the best lawyers would have been proud of, and the rest alarmed at \u2013 left the house, grounds and so on to mum, along with a two-fifths share in both the residue of dad's savings and any money made after his death. Lewis, James and I had one-fifth shares each. There were specified amounts to an almost archetypal spread of right-on causes: CND, Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Ten grand each. Ten grand! I was initially stunned, fleetingly annoyed, then ashamed, and later vaguely impressed. Mum just sighed, like she'd been expecting something like that.\n\nI confess to having experienced a sensation of relief on discovering I had not been written out of dad's will; I wouldn't have blamed him. I think and hope that that feeling was engendered more by a desire to feel I'd still been loved \u2013 despite everything \u2013 than by avarice. I didn't think there would be all that much to go round after those donations, anyway.\n\nDad's agent, his accountant and the lawyer Blawke worked it out between them (though I checked their figures later). The good lawyer summoned us all to his office a fortnight after dad's death. Only James wouldn't come. Lewis flew up specially.\n\nIt had all, indeed, been just about as simple as it had looked. Blawke told us the sums involved and I was pleasantly surprised. The donations to right-onnery seemed much more in proportion now; I can only claim that I had spent (what at least seemed like) so long living on bread and cottage cheese and fish suppers in Glasgow \u2013 measuring my money in pennies and reluctantly-parted-with pounds \u2013 that I had an excuse for not being able to imagine that the thirty K dad had salved his conscience with when he'd written the will had actually been quite a small part of the modest fortune he'd built up over the years.\n\nDad had left over a quarter of a million pounds, after the government had taken its cut.\n\nMy share came to well over forty thousand smackeroos. The likelihood was that for the next few years at least, I'd bank about fifteen grand per annum, which might or might not tail off, abruptly or gradually, depending on how well dad's stories held up against the tests of time ... not to mention the likes of Thomas the Tank Engine, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and whatever other delights the future of the children's fiction market held.\n\nAnyway, suddenly I was, if not quite within range of the mountains of Rich, certainly well into the foothills of Comfortable. It entirely made up for the discovery, a few days earlier, that the estimate I had made of my chances of passing my final exams had been considerably more accurate than any of the conclusions I had drawn in the course of them. I had distinguished myself by failing, a result the department prided itself on happening only rarely.\n\nMy initial reaction had been to cut my losses on the honours front and see if I could take an MA instead; a re-sit would mean a whole extra year at university. But that sentiment had only lasted for a day. In the turmoil of feelings and fortunes dad's death had produced, the prospect of another year's study, with the framework and time scale that would provide \u2013 especially if I applied myself, as I thought I would now be able to \u2013 seemed suddenly a relief rather than a chore.\n\nAt any rate I still had a little time to decide what to do, and the money would make the choice easier. A return to Glasgow need not now also mean a return to the joys of sharing a flat with Gav, Aunt Janice, and their sonically extrovert passions.\n\nWe stood, the three of us, mum, Lewis and I, on the pavement outside the Main Street offices of the lawyer Blawke, in Gallanach. I was still thinking, Forty grand? and trying not to look too stunned. Mum was slowly putting on her black leather gloves.\n\nLewis and I looked at each other.\n\nLewis wasn't doing too badly himself, down in London, but he too had looked pretty surprised when Blawke told us the sums that were heading our way. Mum hadn't really shown any reaction; she'd just thanked the good lawyer politely and asked after his wife and family.\n\n'Fancy a drink?' Lewis said to me. I nodded. I felt slightly faint. 'Mum?' Lewis said.\n\nShe looked round at him, small and neat in her dark blue coat. It was a bright, warm day and I could see the silver in her dark brown hair. She looked so delicate. I felt like I was in my early teens again, mum seemingly getting shorter and shorter with each season that passed.\n\n'What?' she said. I found myself sniffing the air; I was downwind, but all I could smell was Pear's soap and Lewis's Aramis. Mum seemed to have stopped wearing perfume.\n\n'I think a drink, to steady our nerves,' Lewis said to her.\n\n'Aye,' mum said, looking thoughtful. She gave a thin wee smile and nodded at us. 'Aye, he'd have liked that.'\n\nAnd so we went to the Lounge of the Steam Packet Hotel, looking out over the tourist-crowded pier and the packed car park. The water was bright amongst the hulls of the moored yachts, and the Mull ferry was a black shape in the distance, heading away.\n\nWe drank vintage champagne and fifteen-year-old malt. I suspected dad would have approved.\n\nLewis had to head back to London that night. Mum and I had been busy for a week, tidying up all the loose ends an unexpected death leaves, especially when the deceased is somebody as socially and professionally entangled as dad.\n\nThen mum had gardened while I'd sorted through less urgent papers; printing out everything on the disks, searching out all the rest of the stuff on stories, and sending it \u2013 or copies \u2013 to dad's literary executor, his editor in London. I had become modestly PC-COMPUTERATE (Ashley had given me a grounding in the basics, though PCs were not really her field). I'd even learned how to change the toner cartridge in the photocopier without making a mess.\n\nOn one of the earliest computer disks dad had used, dated shortly after he'd finally joined the computer age and bought the Compaq, in 1986, I found copies of some of Rory's poems; dad must have been putting them onto the system from the drafts Rory had left. I printed those out. It didn't look like dad had been very impressed with the poems, or he'd presumably have transcribed them all onto the computer (they weren't on the hard disk or backed up onto another floppy either \u2013 another indication my father had regarded them as relatively unimportant), but at least I again had something Rory had written. I was still hoping more of Rory's papers would surface somewhere.\n\nDad's old diaries turned up in a cardboard box at the back of a cupboard. Mum glanced at them, handed them to me. They looked pretty boring, frankly: 'M&I to Gal; shops, prom walk, back; did VAT.' and 'me Glasg car 1040 LHR 1315 F'furt; late, missed others. tel. L'gair Din in room, TV' were two of the more exciting and informative entries for last year. Dad's ideas books \u2013 A4 pads, usually \u2013 were where the interesting stuff was. We'd look at the diaries later.\n\nThen, one day, at the back of dad's oldest and most decrepit filing cabinet, I'd discovered treasure. It was in the form of three tatty, falling-apart Woolworth folders stuffed with old exercise books and shorthand-pads, bulging manila envelopes stuffed with old tickets, timetables and assorted scraps of paper, as well as assorted sheets of paper of various sizes, some stapled together, most loose, some typed and some hand-written, and all the work of Uncle Rory. There was one sealed envelope, too.\n\nHere were all the poems I'd seen before and more, typescripts of all the travel pieces, and the progenitor of Traps; Rory's India journal; tattered, battered, stained and torn and littered with doodles and little hand-drawn maps and sketches. A fold-out map of India was stapled to the inside back cover of the first exercise book, and on it Rory's spastically erratic route round the country was picked out in blue Biro. The back cover of the second book was covered with little faded train and bus tickets, attached to the cheap, fibrous blue paper with rusting staples. The last exercise book had only one ticket stapled to the rear cover: Rory's Air India ticket home. Some of the pages were stained with what looked like saffron, and I swear one book still smelled of curry.\n\nI'd sat down there and then and begun to read, flicking through the thin, brittle pages of the journal, smiling at the spelling mistakes and the awkward, amateurish drawings, looking for passages I remembered.\n\nI'd looked at the other stuff too, and found one play \u2013 another martial yarn about death and betrayal, and apparently nameless \u2013 which contained not only the passage about the fate of soldiers which I'd read in the delayed train back in January, in the rain on the line at the back of Crow Road, but which also ended with the lines I'd heard first a few weeks before that, in Janice Rae's flat. In Janice Rae's bed, in fact.\n\n_And all your nonsenses and truths,_ I'd read.\n\n'Your finery and squalid options,' I'd said quietly, to myself.\n\nRory's climax-delaying mantra was all there, right down to the last, three-word line. But, given the situation the narrator was in at that point, the lines took on an extra resonance, and an irony I had not been able to appreciate before. The section was circled with red ink and under that last line was written a note in large letters:\n\n_USE FOR END CR._\n\nGradually though, as I'd looked at it all, my feeling of quiet elation faded as I realised there seemed to be nothing else in any of the folders that seemed to relate to Crow Road. All I found was one cryptic note scribbled in pencil on the inside flap of what looked like the most recent of the three tatty files. It said:\n\n_\"CR: !B killsH!!? (save)_   \n_(jlsy? stil drwnd)\"_\n\nB and H. I vaguely remembered these abbreviations from the notes I'd lost. I shook my head, cursing my own idiot negligence, and Uncle Rory's frustrating delight in abstract abbreviation.\n\n... Jlsy. Well, _that_ was a recurring theme in Rory's work.\n\n... Stil drwnd. But Hell, I thought H got crshd btwen crge & tr!\n\n'Fuck it,' I'd said, and closed the file. I'd turned the bulky, heavy, sealed manila A4 envelope over in my hands for a while, then opened it. Computer disks. (That was a surprise. As far as I knew Uncle Rory had never possessed a computer.) Eight big floppy computer disks each in their own brown paper envelopes. Hewlett-Packard Double-sided Flexible Disks, Recorder # 92195A (Package of 10 disks). Well, yes; of _course_ there would have to be two missing. They were numbered 1 to 8 in black felt-tip, and that was the only indication they weren't brand new and unused. The write-protect holes were still taped over.\n\nI'd looked over at the Compaq, sitting on dad's desk, but the big, somehow already old-fashioned looking disks wouldn't even have fitted into the Compaq's drive if you'd folded them in half.\n\nMaking a mental note to call Ashley in London about the disks some time, I put them back in their manila envelope and the envelope back in its faded folder, and spent a fair while after that just leafing through Uncle Rory's India journal, smiling sadly at it all and becoming almost as willingly lost in it as it seemed Rory had in the pungent, teeming wastes of India itself ... until mum called me from the foot of the stairs, and it was time for tea.\n\nA few days later, I'd travelled back up to Glasgow by train; we'd got all the immediate matters regarding my father's death sorted out. It had been a perfect day; summer-warm and spring-fresh, the air winter-clear, the colours more vivid than in autumn.\n\nI'd felt a sort of shocked calm settle over me as I'd travelled, and been able to forget about death and its consequences for a while.\n\nThe familiar route had looked new and startling that day. The train had travelled from Lochgair north along the lower loch, crossed the narrows at Minard, and stopped at Garbhallt, Strachur, Lochgoilhead and Portincaple Junction, where it joined the West Highland line and took the north shore of the Clyde towards Glasgow. The waters and the skies blazed blue, the fields and forests waved luxuriously in a soft, flower-scented breeze and the high hill summits shimmered purple and brown in the distance.\n\nMy spirits had been raised just watching the summer countryside go past \u2014 even the sight of the burgeoning obscenity of the new Trident submarine base at Faslane hadn't depressed me \u2014 and when the train had approached Queen Street (and I'd been making very sure I had all my luggage with me) I'd seen something sublime, even magical.\n\nIt had been no more than that same scrubby, irregularly rectangular field of coarse grass I'd sat looking at so glumly from the delayed train in the rain that January. Then, the field's sodden, down-trodden paths had provided an image of desolation I had fastened onto, in my self-pity, like a blood-starved leech onto bruised flesh.\n\nAnd now the field had burned. Recently, too, because there was no new growth on the brown-black earth. And yet the field was not fully dark. All the grass had been consumed save for a giant green X that lay printed, vivid and alive, on the black flag of the scorched ground. It was the two criss-crossing paths through the wedged-in scrap of field that still shone emerald in the sunlight. The flames had passed over those foot-flattened blades and consumed their healthier neighbours on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression.\n\nI'd stood there, in the act of taking my bags down from the luggage rack. And smiling to myself, I'd said, 'See?'\n\nDad hadn't specified any memorial; all his will had said was that he wanted to be buried somewhere in the grounds of the house. There was some discussion, and eventually mum decided on a plain black marble obelisk with his name and the relevant dates on it.\n\nI stood there, dressed in my slightly preposterous Highland finery, half-way through this wedding in the rain and remembering the funeral in the sunlight a season earlier, and I thought again how damn ugly that dark monument had turned out, then I shook my head and turned, and walked back to the lawn and the marquee. The ground was squelchy and I had to tread carefully to avoid getting mud on my thick white socks. The kilt swung against my knees.\n\nI wondered if Ash was back yet.\n\n'What what what? Come on, Prentice! My first chance to snog tongues with your brother as a married man and you're dragging me away waving ... ha! ha! Where did you get these?'\n\nThe hall\u2013 of the Lochgair house was swarming with people, crowding in, laughing, brandishing presents, shaking hands, demanding drinks, slapping Lewis on the back, hugging Verity, talking quietly to my mother, wandering through the press of people greeting each other and bumping and smiling and talking away and generally making me feel I might have arranged the reception line a little better; it had been a relief to spot Ashley struggling through the crowd at the front door, remember the computer disks, dash upstairs to get them and then down to intercept her and haul her into the lounge.\n\nFound them in dad's study,' I told Ashley, holding the disks out to her. She put a gaily wrapped package down on a chair, took one of the big disks from me and slid it out of its paper wrapper, grinning.\n\nThen she looked up, frowned and stepped back, arms wide. 'Prentice,' she said, voice deep with censure. 'You haven't said how stunning I look yet. I mean, come now.'\n\nAsh wore loose black pants and a shimmery silver top; hair back-swept and piled up. The glasses had been replaced by contacts. 'You look great,' I told her. I nodded at the disk in her hand. 'Think you can do anything with that?'\n\nAsh sighed and shook her head. 'I don't know. Haven't you got the machine they ran on?'\n\nI shook my head. 'I asked my mum about it; she thinks they might have been Rory's.'\n\n'That long ago, eh?' Ash tapped the disk sleeve dubiously, as though expecting it to crumble to dust at any second.\n\n'I didn't know until today he even had one; I mentioned to mum I'd ask you about these, and she said Rory did have a computer, or a word processor or whatever. Got it out in Hong Kong about a year before he disappeared.'\n\n'Hong Kong?' Ash looked even more dubious.\n\n'Some sort of ... copy; clone? Of an ... well, mum said an Orange, but I guess she means Apple. She remembers him complaining that it \u2013 or the program or whatever \u2013 didn't come with proper instructions, but he got it to work eventually.'\n\n'...Uh-huh.'\n\n'Dad left it in the flat Rory shared in Glasgow when he took Rory's papers away. Wouldn't have a computer in the house, at the time.'\n\n'Wise man.'\n\n'I'm going to try and track down the guy Rory shared the flat with, but I reckon the machine's been chucked out or whatever long ago, and I just thought, could you ... you know ... you might know somebody who perhaps could be able to ... to decode what's on there?' I shrugged, suddenly feeling awkward. Ash was now looking at the disk as though fully anticipating that creepy crawlies were about to start emerging from it. 'I mean,' I said, clearing my throat, suddenly feeling hot and sweaty. 'There might not be anything on them at all, but ... I just thought ...'\n\n'So,' Ash said slowly. 'Let me get this straight: you don't know the machine, but it's probably some ancient nameless Apple clone from the dark grey end of the market, almost certainly using reject chips; it probably had a production run that lasted until the first month's rent fell due on the shed the child-labourers were assembling them in, it used an _eight-inch drive_ and ran. what sounds like dodgy proprietorial software with more bugs than the Natural History Museum?'\n\n'Umm... Yeah. That about sums it up.'\n\nAsh nodded a few times, lips tight, weighing the disk in her hands. 'Right.' She nodded at the ones I still held. 'Okay. Can I take these?'\n\n'Sure.' I handed them to her and she turned for the door.\n\n'See you later,' she said, heading into the crowded hall. I went after her; she was excusing her way to the front door.\n\n'Ash!' I said, squeezing through after her. 'Not now! Come and enjoy the party!'\n\n'Don't worry,' she said, glancing back. 'I shall return. I'll drop these at home so I don't forget to take them back to London; I know people who might be able to help ... but I just remembered I forgot something; something for you. Left it at mum's.' She looked out the door; it was starting to rain. 'Shit.'\n\nThere was an old giant brass cartridge case by the hall hat stand which held our assorted umbrellas and walking sticks; I lifted a brolly from it. Ash turned to me, a worried expression on her face as she said, 'I saw that guy again. I'll show you. Give my present to the happy couple!'\n\n'What guy \u2013?' I said, but she was already sprinting through the still-arriving guests for the little red 2CV, parked a good fifty metres down the car-crowded drive, the disks held tight to her chest. I watched her high-heels flashing over the gravel, and the other guests turning to look at her, then there were more people to greet and hands to shake.\n\nI took the brolly myself eventually and went for a walk up the garden to dad's grave, just to get away from the crowds for a bit.\n\nBack in the house, I dodged one of the waitresses from the Lochgair Hotel, carrying a huge tray with champagne flutes out of the kitchen towards the marquee; I waved at mum, splendid in black with white stripes and standing talking to Helen Urvill, and went through to the hall. I put the umbrella in the old cartridge case. Then I thought maybe I should open it out and dry it, like you're supposed to, so I hauled it out again and left it opened in the hall.\n\n'Prentice,' Verity said, coming down from upstairs.\n\nShe was enfolded in white silk; a creation of some clothes-designer, friend of hers in Edinburgh. Technically it was a blouse, medium-length skirt and jacket, but when she wore it it looked like a single piece, and handsome it was too. She was hardly showing yet, but the outfit would anyway have disguised an almost full-term pregnancy. She wore white leggings, and high-heels that made her taller than me. She also wore the fulgurite necklace; mum had guessed both that Verity would want to wear it, and that she might think it best not to, in case the association hurt, so she'd made a point of telling Lewis she thought Verity ought to wear it, if it suited the outfit she had chosen. Verity's hair was as short-cropped as ever, but she looked none the worse for that, and the little white micro-hat she wore, complete with thrown-back, white fish-net veil, sat well on her too. She came up to me, took me by the shoulders and kissed me on the cheek.\n\n'That was a great speech; thanks,' she said. She was still holding my shoulders, and squeezed them. She looked the way you're supposed to look, both when you're pregnant and on the day of your marriage; glowing, radiant, suffused with joy. Still had perfect skin. She put on a convincingly upper-class English accent as she said, 'You've been en ebserloortly soopah byest men, my deah.'\n\nI put my hands lightly on her still slim waist and made a small bowing motion. 'Any time,' I said, and grinned.\n\nShe laughed, shaking her head. She stepped back, folded her arms, looked me up and down and said, 'And so smart.'\n\nI curtsied, fluttering my eyelashes.\n\nShe laughed again and held out her hand. 'Come on; let's find my husband. He's probably flirting with the bridesmaids by now.'\n\n'I thought that was my job,' I said, taking her arm in mine as we went towards the rear of the hall. I heard the front door open behind us. I turned and looked, stopped, then turned back to Verity. 'I'll take a rain check on that, shweetheart.'\n\nVerity smiled at Ashley Watt, shaking a glistening waterproof she'd just taken off, and nodded. 'Well, there's appropriate, today.' She winked at me and walked off.\n\nAshley met me at the foot of the stairs, brandishing a VHS cassette. 'Got it. Take me to your video.'\n\n'Walk this way,' I told her, heading up the stairs two at a time.\n\n'Do I get to look up your kilt?' she said from behind.\n\n'Not if you're lucky.'\n\nI switched the lights on in the study; we tended to keep the curtains closed. There was a TV and video in the study. I switched it all on and put the cassette in the machine.\n\n'Cool,' Ashley said, standing hands on hips in the middle of the study, heels neatly over the centre of dad's Persian rug, bunned hair directly beneath the big brass and stained-glass light fixture, hanging extravagantly beneath an ornate plaster ceiling rose. She swivelled, surveying the book-case walls, the maps, the prints and paintings and various interesting bits and pieces scattered around shelves, tables, desks and the floor.\n\n'Bit cluttered for my taste,' I said, starting the tape and watching some end-credits. 'Dad found it conducive enough.'\n\n'Fast forward,' Ash said. The screen scrolled quickly, then the BBC Nine O'Clock news started flashing before us. Ash turned away, so I let it roll.\n\nAshley crossed to an over-crowded book case; there was an empty crystal bowl perched on a pile of loose papers on top of the book case, and Ashley tapped the bowl very gently with one finger. She took her hand away, held it in the air near the ice-coloured ornament, and clicked her fingers. She bent her head towards the bowl, seemingly listening for something. I frowned, wondered what she was up to.\n\nShe turned and faced the bowl, went 'Ah,' in a high-pitched voice, then listened again, head tilted, smiling this time.\n\n'Ashley, what exactly are you doing?'\n\nShe nodded at the bowl. 'Crystal; you can make it ring by producing the right noise.' She grinned like a little girl. 'Good, eh?' She looked behind me. 'That's you,' she said, nodding at the screen.\n\nI hit Play. We stood, watched.\n\n'... talked to Rupert Paxton-Marr of the _Inquirer,_ one of the journalists held by the Iraqis, and asked him how he'd felt,' said the BBC man in Amman.\n\nI couldn't resist a thin smile, one journalist asking another how he felt.\n\nRupert Paxton-Marr was a tall, blond, blue-eyed man with exactly the jaw-line I'd have chosen for myself, given the opportunity ; sickeningly handsome, he had an accent to match. 'Well, Michael,' he said. ('Air, hair lair,' I said to myself.) 'I don't think we were really in much danger; clearly international attention has fixed on Iraq, and I think they knew we knew that, and accepted we were ... weren't a threat to them. Umm ... our driver had taken a wrong turning, and that was that. Of course, one does remember what happened to, ah, Farhzad Bazhoft, but I don't think you can let that stop you; in the end one has a job to do.'\n\n'Thank you, Rupert. And now, reporting fr \u2013'\n\nI hit Stop and turned to Ashley, standing beside me. She was still looking at the blank screen where the little green zero symbol sat in one corner, wobbling almost imperceptibly. She had sucked her cheeks in and her lips were pursed. There was a whoop of laughter from somewhere downstairs. Ash nodded slowly, looked at me. 'That's ma boy,' she said.\n\n'You're sure about that?' I said.\n\n'I'm sure.' She looked serious. She looked pretty good, too, now I looked properly; I couldn't remember ever seeing Ashley wearing make-up, and you'd have thought that not having had the practice she'd be crap at it, but she looked great; maybe a little overenthusiastic with the dark stuff round the eyes, but why quibble? She nodded. 'Don't look at me like that; I'm really sure.'\n\n'Sorry. I believe you,' I said. I spun the tape back, to play it again. Ashley put one hand on my arm and rested her chin against the shoulder of my Prince Charlie jacket.\n\n'Turn the sound down,' she said. 'That guy's voice is like chewing on silver paper.'\n\nI turned the sound down. The noise of people laughing and talking in the marquee came through the double glazing and the heavy burgundy of the velvet curtains. I heard an amplified voice outside say, 'Testing.' It was probably Dean Watt; he and his band had been hired by Lewis and Verity to play during the afternoon (for the evening they'd booked a more traditional wheech-your-partner fiddle and accordion band).\n\nI ran the clip again. 'Definitely, officer,' Ashley said, tapping the top corner of the TV. 'Recognise him anywhere, even with his clothes on.'\n\nI switched the TV off and ejected the cassette. I stood for a moment, rubbing my chin.\n\n'Whoops,' Ashley said, and delicately rubbed a little of that transferred make-up from the black shoulder of my jacket.\n\nI waited till she'd finished, then went to dad's desk, unlocked a lower drawer and took out a slide tray; one of those plastic things that holds a few hundred transparencies. 'So, when you saw this guy, Paxton-Marr,' I said, opening the tray and putting the lid on the desk, 'in Berlin, in this hotel, in the jacuzzi ...' I looked up at Ashley, standing sceptically by the TV, one elbow resting on it as she watched me. 'What was the hotel called again?'\n\n'I told you,' she said. 'I can't remember. I called June, and neither could she. It's probably the only place she ever stayed and forgot to nick a towel or yet another emergency sewing kit or whatever.' Ash shrugged. 'Frankly, Prentice, I was stoned out of my brains most of the time I was there. All I can remember is it had a big pool in the basement with a jacuzzi at one end, and they did really good breakfasts.' She sighed. 'Excellent hopple-popple.' Her eyebrows flicked once.\n\n'Hopple-popple?' I grimaced.\n\n'Scrambled eggs,' Ash smiled. 'Take me to Berlin and I'll find it for you. It was somewhere near the zoo.'\n\nI put the tray down on the desk, went over to Ashley, holding out a little piece of cardboard; it was the front cover off a book of matches, torn off the piece that held the matches.\n\n'Wasn't the Schweizerhof, was it?' I asked her.\n\nShe looked steadily into my eyes for a little while, then took the piece of card, looked at it and turned it over.\n\n'Twenty-seven eleven eighty-nine,' she muttered. She nodded and handed me the coyer back. 'Yeah,' she said, frowning. 'Yeah; it was. That was the place.'\n\nI put the little torn bit of cardboard back in the slide tray. It was the second last one, out of about forty of them.\n\n'What's the significance of the date?' Ashley asked, coming over to the desk. Outside, I could hear the sound of an electric guitar chord and a few drum beats.\n\n'I think that was when dad received it.' I picked the latest torn cover out of the tray. 'This one arrived just after he died.' We both sat on the edge of the desk; Ashley looked at the little piece of glossy cardboard.\n\n'Woo,' she whistled. 'Amman Hilton. Spooky, or what?'\n\n'Yeah. Spooky as fuck,' I said, tapping the cover with one finger-nail. 'And I'm sure I recognise that guy Paxton-Marr, too. From Glasgow, or Edinburgh, or here. I've met him. In the flesh, I think.'\n\nAsh put her elbow on my shoulder. 'And damn firm, tanned flesh it was too, let me tell you,' she said.\n\nI looked into those grey eyes, smiling. 'But not as firm and tanned as your programmer from Texas.'\n\nAsh laughed, skipped off the desk. 'Systems Analyst. And you're right; they breed them bigger and better in Texas.'\n\nMusic started up in the marquee. _Kiss The Bride._ Ash stood on the Persian rug again, putting one hand to her ear. 'Hark; it's young brother and his pals.' She frowned. 'Doesn't sound like a Mark E Smith or Morrissey track to me.' She shook her head. 'Tsk. How are the mighty fallen.' She put her head down so that, if she'd been wearing glasses, she'd have been looking over them at me. 'Want my advice?'\n\n'Mm-hmm,' I nodded.\n\n'Come on and dance. We can sort \u2013 or you can sort \u2013 this out later, when you've had time to think.' She struck a dramatic, arguably dance-inspired pose and held out one hand. 'Hey baby, let's boogie!'\n\nI laughed, shut the match-book covers away and locked the desk drawer.\n\n'That's it, laddy,' Ashley said, holding my arm as we went to the door. 'You put that key in yer sporran.'\n\n'At least I know down there it's safe from interference,' I told her. She smiled. I locked the study door too.\n\n'By the way, by the way,' Ash muttered into my ear as we headed along the landing for the stairs, 'got a gramme of the old Bogot\u00e1 talcum powder about my person. Fancy a toot, later?'\n\n'What, the real thing?' I grinned. 'I thought speed was your poison.'\n\n'Normally,' she nodded. 'But this is a special occasion; I splashed out.'\n\n'You wee tyke,' I said. I pulled her closer as we walked, held her tight. 'You just stick with me, kid, all right?'\n\n'Whatever you say, ma man.'\n\nWe did kick-steps down the stairs. Risky, when you're wearing a kilt as it is meant to be worn, but invigorating.\n\nI danced with Ashley, and with Verity, and with Helen Urvill, and with mum, cutting in on Lewis after he'd persuaded her onto the floor. Most of the time though she just sat, surrounded by family and friends, watching us all with an expression that, to me at least, spoke of a kind of stricken joy; a surprise that such pleasure could still exist \u2013 and she feel even remotely a part of it \u2013 when dad was not here to share in it all.\n\nI am not a natural dancer but I made an exception for Verity's wedding. I grooved and sweated and drank and made a point of doing the old red blood cell impression, circulating; bathing in, soaking up and transmitting onwards the oxygen of family news and gossip from cell to cell ...\n\n'Where are you off to next, Aunt Ilsa?' I asked the lady in question, during our waltz. Aunt Ilsa \u2013 even larger than I remembered her, and dressed in something which looked like a cross between a Persian rug and a multi-occupancy poncho \u2013 moved with the determined grace of an elephant, and a curious stiffness that made the experience a little like dancing with a garden shed.\n\n'Canada, I think, Prentice. Churchill, on Hudson's Bay. To observe the arctic bear.'\n\nI confess I had to re-process that sentence a couple of times as we danced, before working out that she did not intend to study the region naked (an image I found rather alarming), but was merely using a more pedantically accurate term for a polar bear.\n\n'Super.' I smiled.\n\nUncle Hamish sat at the table with the rest of the family and got slowly drunk. I danced with Aunt Tone, and asked after her husband's health.\n\n'Oh, he's getting better all the time,' Aunt Tone said, glancing at him. 'He hasn't had the nightmares for weeks now. I think going back to work helped him. Fergus was very understanding. And he's had a lot of long chats with the minister. People have been very kind, altogether. You haven't talked to him?' Aunt Tone looked at me critically.\n\n'Not for a bit.' I gave her a big smile. 'I will, though.'\n\nUncle Hamish watched the dancing. He lifted his whisky to his lips, sipped at it, then shook his head with such slow deliberation I caught myself listening for the creak. 'No, Prentice. I have been foolish, and even vain. I did not pay sufficient heed to the scriptures. I thought that I knew better.' He sipped his whisky, shook his head. 'It was vanity; my theories, my beliefs about the hereafter; vanity. I have renounced them.'\n\n'Oh,' I said, disappointed. 'No more anti-creates?'\n\nHe shook, as though a chill had passed through him. 'No, that was my mistake.' He looked at me straight for the first time. 'He punished both of us, Prentice.' Uncle Hamish flicked his gaze towards the roof of the marquee. 'Both of us,' he repeated. He looked away again. 'God knows we are all his children, but he is a strict father, sometimes. Terribly, terribly strict.'\n\nI put my head on my hand and looked at my uncle as I considered this idea of God as child-abuser. Hamish started to shake his head again before he'd sipped his whisky, and I experienced a brief feeling of excited horror, waiting for the resulting catastrophe; but he just stopped in mid-shake, sipped, then shook his head slowly again. 'Aye; a strict father.'\n\nI patted his arm. 'Never mind.' I said, helpfully.\n\nI danced with Aunt Charlotte, Verity's still-handsome and determinedly superstitious mother, who told me that the newly-weds would surely be happy, because their stars were well-matched.\n\nExhibiting a generosity of spirit I rather surprised myself with, I agreed that certainly the stars in their eyes seemed to augur well.\n\nI bumped into the smaller than life-size Mr Gibbon near the bar at one point; I was in such a gregarious, clubbable mood I actually enjoyed talking to him. We agreed Aunt Ilsa was a wonderful woman, but that she had itchy feet. Mr Gibbon looked over at Aunt Ilsa, who had \u2013 I could only imagine by force \u2013 got Uncle Hamish up for a dance. Together they were having the same effect on the dance floor as a loose cannon manned by hippos.\n\n'Yes,' Mr Gibbon said, sighing, his eyelids fluttering. 'I am her kentledge.' He smiled at me with a sort of apologetic self-satisfaction, as though he was the luckiest man alive, and tip-toed off through the crowds with his two glasses of sherry.\n\n'Kentledge?' I said to myself. I'd have scratched my head but my hands were full of glasses.\n\n'Prentice. Taking a breather too, eh?'\n\nI had stepped outside the marquee for a breather, late on, after the hoochter-choochter music started and the place got even warmer. I looked round in the shadows and saw Fergus Urvill, Scottishly resplendent in his Urvill dress tartan. Fergus came into the light spilling from the open flap of the marquee. He was smoking a cigar. The rain had ceased at last and the garden smelled of earth and wet leaves.\n\nFergus glittered; crystal buttons sparkled on his jacket; black pearls of obsidian decorated his sporran, and the skean dhu stuck into the top of his right sock \u2013 a rather more impressive and business-like example of the traditional Highland-dress knife than mine, which looked like a glorified letter opener \u2013 was crowned with a large ruby, glinting in the light against the hairs of his leg like some grotesquely faceted bulb of blood.\n\n'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, getting my breath back.'\n\nFergus looked into the marquee. 'They're a handsome couple, eh?'\n\nI glanced in, to see Lewis and Verity, hand in hand, talking to some of Verity's relations. Lewis had changed into a dark suit and a bootlace tie; Verity wore a dark skirt and long, gold-coloured jacket.\n\nI nodded. 'Yes,' I said. I cleared my throat.\n\n'Cigar?' Fergus said, digging an aluminium tube from one pocket of his jacket. I shook my head. 'No,' Fergus said, looking at me tolerantly. 'Of course you don't, do you.'\n\n'No,' I said. I grinned inanely.\n\nI was surprised at just how uncomfortable I felt in his presence, and how hard it was both to work out precisely why I felt that way, and to disguise the fact. We talked for a little while. About my studies; going better now, thank you. And about flying. Fergus was learning to fly; up at Connel, the air field a few miles north of Oban. Oh, really? Yes. Hoped to be going solo by the end of the year, if all went according to plan. He asked me what I thought of the Gulf crisis and I, quailing, said it all kind of depended how you looked at it.\n\nI think I made him feel as awkward eventually as I had from the start of the conversation, and I took the opportunity of a new reel beginning to head back into the marquee, to join in another swirling, riotous dance.\n\nAshley, Dean and I retired to my room in the house during the supper interval, while people got their breath back and the band \u2013 four oldish guys mysteriously called the Dougie McTee Trio \u2013 tried to get drunk.\n\nWe snorted some coke, we had a couple of Js, and in response to a single question from Dean, I told them both all about the River Game; its history, every rule and feature, a thorough description of the board, an analysis of the differing playing styles of myself, Lewis, James, dad, mum and Helen Urvill, some handy tips and useful warnings, and a few interesting excerpts from certain classic games we'd played. It took about ten minutes. I don't think I repeated myself once or left anything out, and I finished by saying that all of that, of course, wasn't to mention the secret, banned version; the Black River Game.\n\nThey both stared at me. Dean looked like he hadn't believed a word I'd said. Ashley just seemed amused.\n\n'Aye. Good coke, isn't it?' she said.\n\n'Yep,' Dean said, busy with mirror and blade again. He glanced at his sister and nodded at me. 'For God's sake, Ash, stick that number in his mouth and shut him up.'\n\nI accepted the J with a smile.\n\nThe three of us kick-stepped down the stairs.\n\n'Hoy, all that stuff about that game,' Dean shouted as we three swung into the marquee, where an Eightsome Reel of extravagant proportions and high decibel-count was in its Dervish phase. 'That gospel, aye?'\n\nI frowned deeply as I looked at him. 'Oh no.' I shook my head earnestly. 'It's _true.'_\n\nLater, I sat alone at a table, quietly drinking whisky, watching them all. I'd lowered my head; one hand lay flat, palm-down, on the table. I felt very calm and deadly and in control; shit, I felt like I was Michael Corleone. The tunes and laughs and shouts washed through me, and the people, for that moment, seemed to be dancing about me, for me. I felt ... pivotal, and drank a silent toast to Grandma Margot. I drank to my late father. I thought of Uncle Rory, wherever he was, and drank to him. I even drank to James, also absent.\n\nJames was coming down only slowly from his peak of anger. Even now, he was still so sullen and difficult to get on with that it had almost been a relief when he'd said he didn't want to be involved in the wedding. He'd gone to stay with some school pals at Kilmartin, a little north of Gallanach, for the weekend. I think mum was unhappy he wasn't here today, but Lewis and I weren't.\n\nI drank some more whisky, thinking.\n\nA marriage.\n\nAnd a little information.\n\nNot to mention more than a little suspicion.\n\nAll it had taken was one blurred face, glimpsed far away by somebody else, seen soundless for a second on a fuzzed TV in a noisy, crowded, smoky pub in Soho, one Friday evening \u2013 just one tiny example of all the inevitable, peripheral results of a confrontation in a distant desert \u2013 and suddenly, despite all our efforts, we were back amongst the bad stuff again; shrapnel from the coming war. Although, of course, I couldn't be sure.\n\nMum went past, dancing with Fergus Urvill, who was sweating. Mum looked small, next to him. Her expression was unreadable. Jlsy, I thought, and drank to Uncle Rory.\n\nLewis and Verity left at midnight in a taxi. None of that let's-make-a-mess-of-the-car nonsense for them. The taxi was supposedly heading for Gallanach; only mum and I knew they were actually booked into the Columba in Oban, and heading for Glasgow and the airport tomorrow.\n\nThe four-man trio played; the dancing continued. Mum left with Hamish and Tone; she was staying with them tonight. I was in charge of the house. I danced until my legs ached. I talked until my throat hurt. The band, and the bagpipe players who'd joined in with them, stopped playing at about two. Dean and I fed some home-made compilation tapes through the PA, and the dancing went on.\n\nLater, after everybody had either left or crashed out in the house, Ash and I walked out along the shore, by the calmly lapping waters of Loch Fyne, in a clear, cool dawn.\n\nI remember babbling, high and spacey and danced-out all at once. We sat and stared out over the satin grey stretch of water, watching low-flying seagulls flapping lazily to and fro. I treated Ash to bits of Uncle Rory's poetry; I knew some of it by heart, now.\n\nAsh suggested heading back and to the house, and either having some coffee or getting some sleep. Her wide eyes looked tired. I agreed coffee might be an idea. The last thing I remember is insisting I had whisky in my coffee, then falling asleep in the kitchen, my head on Ash's shoulder, mumbling about how I'd loved dad, and how I'd loved Verity, too, and I'd never find another one like her, but she was a heartless bitch. No she wasn't, yes she was, no she wasn't, it was just she wasn't for me, and if I had any sense I'd go for somebody who was a kind and gentle friend and who I got on well with; like Ash. I should take up with Ash; I should fall in love with her, that's what I ought to do. Only if I did, I muttered into her shoulder, she'd be sure to fall for somebody else, or die, or get a job in New Zealand, but that's what I ought to do, if only things worked that way ... Why do we always love the wrong people?\n\nAsh, silent beneath me, above me, just patted my shoulder and laid her head on mine.\n\nMum woke me in the late afternoon. I moaned and she put a pint glass of water and two sachets of Resolve down on the table near my head. I tried to focus on the water. Mum sighed, tore the sachets open and tipped the powder fizzing into the glass.\n\nI checked things out with the one eye that would open. I was in my room at Lochgair, on my bed, still mostly clothed in shirt and kilt and socks. My head felt like it had been recently used for a very long and closely contested game of basketball. Somebody had stolen my real body and replaced it with a Prentice-shaped jelly mould packed full of enhanced-capacity pain receptors firing away like they were auditioning for a Duracell commercial. Mum was dressed in faded jeans and an old holed sweater. Her hair was tied back and she wore violently yellow rubber kitchen gloves which were doing horrible things to my visual cortex. A yellow duster dangled from her hip pocket. I couldn't think what else to do, so I moaned again.\n\nMum sat down on the bed, put a hand on my head and ran my curls through her rubber-clad fingers.\n\n'What's that you've got in your hair?' she said.\n\nMy brain cells? I wondered. Certainly it felt like they'd been squeezed out of my ears. Damn rim-shots. Not that I could share this insight with my mother, for the simple reason that I couldn't talk.\n\n'What is it?' mum said. 'This black stuff?' She rubbed her fingers together in my hair, the rubber gloves squeaking horribly. 'Oh, stop moaning, Prentice. Drink your water.' She sniffed at her fingers. 'Hmm,' she said, rising and heading for the door. 'Mascara, eh?'\n\nI looked up, monocular, at the closing door, grimacing.\n\nMassacre?\nCHAPTER 15\n\nI sipped my Bloody Mary, looking down at huge, white, piled-up clouds so bright in the mid-day sunshine they looked yellow. The plane had just levelled out and there was a smell of food; they were serving lunch further forward in the cabin. I watched the clouds for a moment, then looked at my magazine. I was on my way to London, a couple of torn-off match-book covers in my pocket, hoping to confront Mr Rupert Paxton-Marr.\n\n'Thanks mum ... Ash?'\n\n'Yo, Prentice. How's it hanging?'\n\n'Oh, plum.'\n\n'Still wearing the kilt, eh? Look, I've had some word from \u2013'\n\n'How about you?'\n\n'Eh?'\n\n'How are you?'\n\n'Oh, rude health. Verging on the obscene. Listen; my computer wizard's been in touch.'\n\n'What? About the disks?'\n\n'Cor-rect.'\n\n'What's on them? What do they say? Is there anyth \u2013'\n\n'Hey ... hold your horses. Had to get the stuff to him first.'\n\n'Oh. Where is he?'\n\n'Denver.'\n\n_'Denver?'_\n\n'Yup.'\n\n'Denver _Colorado?'_\n\n'... Yes.'\n\n'What, in America?'\n\n'Yeah, Northern Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System ...'\n\n'Okay, okay, so he's ... hey, is this your Texan programmer? Has he moved states?'\n\n'Systems Analyst, for the last fucking time, Prentice, and no, it isn't him; just a guy I exchange E-mail with sometimes.'\n\n'Right. And he's got the disks?'\n\n'No, of course he hasn't got the disks.'\n\n'What? Then \u2013'\n\n'He has the information that was held on them. Well, on the one that held anything. Seven were blank; not even formatted.'\n\n'Ah, right. I see ... so what does it say? What is on it? Was it all Rory's \u2013'\n\n'It's a little more complicated than that, Prentice.'\n\n'Oh.'\n\n'I've got a message on my screen here from him. Thought you might be interested in it.'\n\n'Oh; you're at work. Hey, have you seen the time? You're working late, aren't you?'\n\n'Yes ..., Prentice. Do you want to hear the message?'\n\n'Will I understand it?'\n\n'You'll get the gist of it.'\n\n'Okay.'\n\n'Right. I quote: \"I thought your man up there in the misty glens might like to know \u2013\"'\n\n' \"Misty glens\"? That's sounds a bit patronising.'\n\n'Prentice; shut up.'\n\n'Sorry.'\n\n' \"... might like to know what our game plan is with respect to your word-processed file(s). As we don't yet know what geek program this mutant _No-namo-brand_ clone was running, we have had to resort to extreme measures to access the data. Dr Claire Simmons of London University, who picked up the disks, will use a vintage Hewlett Packard TouchScreen (which has compatible eight-inch drives) in the establishment's Museum of Computing to extract the raw binaries, _sector by sector,_ praying all the while that somebody has posted an ediger to Usenet that she can use to strip off the physical addressing; she will then attack the content one word at a time, swapping bytes as needed and inverting bits if none of it looks like ASCII, stripping the eighth bits if they're in the way or un-encoding the lot if we can't do without them, and unload the result to a Prime mini-computer (another indestructible antique) somewhere on the campus network. She moves all this to her Iris, double-encrypts it and E-mails it via Internet (off JANUS or BITNET to nsfnet-relay.ac.uk, probably) via Cornell to an account I'm not supposed to have on the Minnesota Supercomputer Center's Cray-2 (currently the biggest and quickest compute-server short of a Connection Machine at the high end, so I might as well use it to do the decryptions and perhaps take my own first whack at demangling before moving the data along). From there I download via a dedicated T3 line to an SGI 380SX-VGX at one of AT&T's Bell Labs (the one in Boulder, I think \u2013 another unofficial account) from where I can further download \u2013 and filter out certain offending control characters \u2013 to a Mac II at my office. Then I dump the results onto a floppy and bike them home to tinker with in my basement, which is where the _hard_ work starts.\" ... Get all that, Prentice?'\n\n'Yeah. Basically what he's saying is, it's a piece of piss.'\n\n'Absolutely. A doddle.'\n\n'Great. So when can we expect to see some results?'\n\n'No idea. Don't forget the guy's doing it for fun, and he's a busy man. No promises, but he sounds confident. I'll call him in a week if he doesn't get in touch first.'\n\n'Tell him I'll fax him a crate of champagne or something.'\n\n'Certainly. So, when ...? Ah shit. Fucking decollator's jammed again. Gotta go attend the print, Prent.'\n\n'Okay. Bye. Oh, and thanks.'\n\nI now had a better idea of what Rory had been doing in the days before his disappearance. It looked like he had been working on _Crow Road_ between the time he'd come back from London after seeing his friends and the evening he disappeared, on the motor bike he'd borrowed from his flat-mate. That was what he'd been doing, stuck in his room in the flat in Glasgow; finally actually writing something on his bizarre contraption of a computer.\n\nHe'd done it, he'd stopped writing notes and started on the work itself.\n\nI'd talked to a retired policeman who at the time had looked \u2013 briefly \u2013 into what had happened to Rory. The police hadn't come up with anything; they'd interviewed Janice Rae, and Rory's flat-mate Andy Nichol, and looked at the papers Rory had left with Janice. There was no suicide note, so they'd decided the papers weren't relevant. Apart from checking the hospitals and eventually listing Rory as a Missing Person, that had been that.\n\nThe only useful information I'd got from the police was that Rory's flat-mate had left local government and joined the civil service a few months after Rory had disappeared. I'd tracked Andy Nichol down at a tax office in Plymouth and called him there, but apart from saying he'd heard a lot of keyboard-clattering noises coming from Rory's room during the days before Rory had borrowed his bike and disappeared, he'd only been able to confirm what I already knew. He did say he'd tried working Rory's Neanderthal computer after dad had said he could have it, but he couldn't make the beast work; he'd sold the machine and the two blank disks that had come with it to a friend in Strathclyde University. It had been chucked out years ago.\n\n... Whatever; after those few days work, Rory had suddenly upped and offed, and never came back. Maybe the stuff on the disks would give me a clue why he'd suddenly done that. If there _was_ anything useful there; that clattering noise didn't prove anything ... I'd seen _The Shining._\n\nThe cloud cover started to break up over the midlands; I chomped through my lunch. The starter was smoked salmon. I thought of Verity and Lewis, on honeymoon in the Bahamas, and \u2013 with just a tinge of sadness \u2013 silently wished them well.\n\nI saw Ashley come into the pub. She stood near the door, looking round, that strong-boned head swivelling, those grey eyes scanning. She didn't see me on the first sweep; I was mostly hidden by other people. I watched her take a couple of steps forward, look round again. She was dressed in a dark, skirted suit, under the old but still good-looking jacket I remembered her wearing at Grandma Margot's funeral. Her hair was gathered up and tied; she wasn't wearing her glasses. Her face looked tense and forbidding. She seemed harder, more capable and more self-contained than I recalled her being in Scotland.\n\nIn those few moments, in the noise and smoke of a pub by the river, a quarter mile from the Tower, in the great, cruel, headless monster that was London after a decade of Hyaena rule, I wondered again at my own feelings for Ashley Watt. I knew I didn't love her; she didn't make me feel anything like the way I had about Verity, and yet I'd been \u2013 I realised \u2013 looking forward to seeing her, and now that I had seen her, just felt, well ... happier, I guess. It was all puzzlingly simple. Maybe \u2013 to lapse into the humdrum continuum for a moment \u2013 she was the sister I'd never had. I remembered the mascara mum had discovered in my hair after the wedding, and wondered if the position of honorary sibling was one Ashley would entirely welcome.\n\nI tried to remember Ashley's tone when I'd rung her, a couple of days ago, to say that I was coming down (this about a week after I'd had my own personal info-dump on the workings of the world computer network). I had already called Aunt Ilsa and arranged to stay with her and Kentledge Man, and I'd wondered at the time if I'd detected the merest hint of reproach in Ashley's voice when I'd told her I would be staying in deepest Kensington. At any rate, she'd told me there was a sofa-bed and a spare duvet of indeterminate tog value at the flat she shared in Clapham, in case Aunt Ilsa went on some sudden expedition to Antarctica and forgot to tell her Filipino maid, or whatever. She'd added that the two girls she shared with really wanted to meet me (I felt pretty sure the person they really wanted to meet was Lewis).\n\nI raised my hand as Ashley's gaze passed again over where I stood; she caught the movement, and that city-hard expression changed instantly, relaxing and softening as she smiled broadly and walked over.\n\n'Hiya, babe.' She punched my shoulder, then gave me a big hug. I hugged right back. She smelled of _Poison._\n\n'How are you?' I asked her.\n\nShe put one fist on her hip and held her other hand up in front of my face, fingers spread. 'Drinkless,' she grinned.\n\n'You got _off?'_\n\n'Yeah,' I said, swirling the remains of my pint round in my glass.\n\nAsh shook her head. 'I thought you were going to plead guilty.'\n\n'I was,' I confessed. I shrugged, looked down. 'I got a smart lawyer. She said it was worth fighting. Ended up in a jury trial, eventually.'\n\nAsh laughed. 'Well done,' she said. She lowered her head until she could look into my eyes. 'Hey, what's the matter?'\n\n'Well,' I said, trying not to smile. 'I _did_ do it after all; it seems wrong I got off because I dressed in a suit and I could afford an expensive advocate and people in the jury had heard of dad and felt sorry for me because he'd died. I mean if I'd come from Maryhill and I wasn't reasonably articulate and didn't have any money, even if I _had_ just forgotten I hadn't paid for the book, I bet everybody would have told me to plead guilty. Instead, thanks to the money, I had an advocate who'd probably make God look just a little lacking in gravitas, and discovered a talent for lying through my teeth that promises a glittering career as a _Sun_ journalist.'\n\nAsh leaned conspiratorially forward over the small table we were crouched round, and quietly said, 'Easy, boy, you're on their turf.'\n\n'Yeah,' I sighed. 'And don't drink the tap water.' I looked around the place, all crowds and smoke. The English accents still sounded oddly foreign. 'No sign?' I asked.\n\nAsh looked round too, then shook her head. 'No sign.'\n\n'You sure he drinks here?'\n\n'Positive.'\n\n'Maybe he's been sent away, back to the Gulf.'\n\nAsh shook her head. 'I spoke to his secretary. He's having some root canal work done; he's here till the end of next week.'\n\n'Maybe I should have just arranged to see him.' I sighed. 'My new-found talent as a con-man might have come in useful. I could have said I had pictures of Saddam Hussein torturing a donkey or something.'\n\n'Maybe,' Ash said.\n\nWe had discussed this sort of thing. Ash's first idea was simply that she should ring him up, tell him she'd seen him on television and heard he worked in London; she was here too, now, and did he fancy a drink sometime? But I wasn't sure about this. If he'd been reluctant to give Ash his name in Berlin, and thought even there that he'd already said too much, he might be suspicious when she rang up. So I felt; so my \u2013 by now rather paranoid \u2013 feelings suggested. A chance meeting seemed more plausible, or at least it had when I'd been talking to Ash from dad's study in Lochgair. Now I wasn't so sure.\n\n'How's your wizard?' I asked her.\n\n'Eh?' Ash looked confused for a moment. 'Oh; Doctor Gonzo? Still working on the files. They weren't just weird shit, they were corrupted weird shit; where did your dad keep those things; inside a TV? But anyway; he's still hopeful.'\n\n'Doctor _Gonzo?'_ I said, tartly.\n\n'Don't look like that, Prentice,' Ash chided. 'This guy's knocking his pan in for you for nothing. And he has got a doctorate.'\n\nI smiled. 'Sorry.'\n\n'Oh, and supposing the good Doctor can decipher all that corrupted crap you presented him with, what format do you want these files in eventually anyway, you ungrateful wretch?'\n\n'How d'you mean?'\n\n'I mean what program do you use on the Compaq?'\n\n'Oh, Wordstar,' I nodded knowledgeably.\n\n'Version? Number?'\n\n'Ah ... I'll have to come back to you on that one. Look; just ask him to print it out and send it to me. Would that be okay?'\n\nShe shrugged. 'If you want. Or you could get a modem; E-mail's about a zillion times faster.'\n\n'Look, I'm still not all that comfortable around computers that don't come with a joystick and a \"fire\" button; just ... just ordinary airmail and real paper will be fine.'\n\nAsh grinned, shook her head. 'As you wish.' She stood up. 'Same again?' she asked, clinking my glass.\n\n'No,' I said. 'I'll have a half.'\n\n'Any particular sort?'\n\n'Na, anything.'\n\nI was alternating pints and whiskies on principle; they keep giving you your old glass back down here.\n\nI watched Ash weave her way to the bar.\n\nI still felt nervous about meeting this guy Paxton-Marr, but all-in-all, I told myself, things weren't so bad. Those of us most affected by dad's death were \u2013 with the possible exception of Uncle Hamish \u2014 bearing up pretty well, I might yet find out what Uncle Rory had written, I didn't have to worry about money, I had no criminal record, and I was being a good young(ish) adult again, attending diligently to my studies. Mostly I stayed in Glasgow during the week, and went back to Lochgair at weekends, unless mum \u2013 sometimes accompanied by James \u2013 came to stay with me. I had got filthy drunk just once since dad had died, and then with good reason; it had been the day Thatcher resigned. Bliss was it, etc., even if the Tapeworm Party was still in power.\n\nThe lawyer Blawke had found me a place to rent for the year I needed to be in Glasgow. It was part of the property of a Mrs Ippot, who'd died rich but intestate at a sourly ripe old age, having throughout her life promised part, or all, of her sizeable fortune to various individual relations and combinations of relations within her extensively and antagonistically divided family, in a blizzard of contradictory letters, and with what appeared to be a profound lack of consideration for the litigious chaos that was bound to ensue. Mrs Ippot, in short, had been the sort of client probate lawyers have wet dreams about.\n\nMy own theory was that Mrs I had actually thoroughly detested every single one of her relatives, and had hit on a nicely appropriate way of confounding all of them. By Jarndyce out of Petard, Mrs Ippot's lawyer-infested legacy had ensured that her rebarbatively consistent family would suffer years if not decades of self-inflicted hatred and frustration as the increasing legal fees gradually corroded the monies she had left; a tortuously slow method of telling your relatives from beyond the grave exactly what you thought of them that makes giving all the loot to a cats' home look positively benign in comparison.\n\nAnd so I stayed in the late Mrs Ippot's enormous town house in Park Terrace, overlooking Kelvingrove Park and the River Kelvin running through it. The museum and art gallery sat red, huge and stately to the left, its sandstone bulk crammed with the silt of time and human effort, while on the hill to its right, skirted by the black outlines of trees, the university soared with self-impressed Victorian fussiness into the grey autumnal skies, positively exuding half a millennium's experience in the collation and dissemination of knowledge.\n\nThe high ceilings and vast windows of Mrs Ippot's former home appeared to have been the work of an architect anticipating the design of aircraft hangars; the interior was cluttered with paintings, rugs, chandeliers, life-sized ceramics of the smaller big cats, small statues, large statues and objets d'art of every imaginable description, all interspersed with heavy, dark, intricately gnarled wooden furniture that gave the appearance of being volcanic in origin. The house's inventory \u2013 drawn grimly to my attention by a spotty clerk who obviously resented the fact I was younger than he was \u2013 came in three volumes.\n\nI christened the place Xanadu, but never did find any sleds.\n\nMy friends, of whom I saw less these days, suggested parties when they first heard about the place. On seeing it, they usually agreed with me that to mount a serious whoopee on the premises would be to invite cultural catastrophe on a scale usually only witnessed during major wars and James Last concerts.\n\nOne of my pals \u2013 graduated, employed; moving on to better things \u2013 sold me his old VW Golf, and I drove down to Lochgair most weekends, usually on a Thursday night as I didn't have any classes on a Friday. James and I helped mum, who was redecorating the house. She was talking about knocking down the old conservatory and putting in a new one, perhaps covering a small swimming pool. She had also formed the idea of building a harpsichord, and then learning to play it. We took tea at the Steam Packet Hotel on occasion, and James kept an Ordnance Survey map on which he inked in all the walks we undertook, on the hills and through the forests around Gallanach.\n\nMum and I had started going through dad's diaries. Some were pocket size, some were desk diaries; a couple of early ones were effectively home made. They went back to when he'd been sixteen. I'd suggested Mum read them first in case there was anything embarrassing in them, though I think in the end she just skimmed them. They weren't the stuff of scandal, anyway; the entries we'd sampled when we first discovered them in the box at the back of the cupboard were about as revealing as they ever got; really just appointments, notes on what had happened that day, where dad had been, who he'd met. If there was a single indiscretion recorded there, I never found it. The same went for any but the most basic observation or idea; he'd kept those in the A4 pads.\n\nIt was at the bottom of the box containing dad's diaries, in an old presentation tin which had held a bottle of fifteen-year-old Laphroaig, that I found Rory's diaries; little pocket books, usually a week-per-two-pages. Dad must have filed them separately from the other papers.\n\nI got very excited at first, but then discovered that Rory's diaries were even more sparse \u2013 and considerably more cryptic \u2013 than my father's, with too many initials and acronyms to be easily understood, and too full of week\u2013 and even month-long gaps to form a reliable impression of Rory's life. There was no diary for the year he disappeared. I'd tried to make sense of Rory's diaries, but it was uphill work. The entry for the day of my birth (when Rory had been in London) read:\n\nK r; boy 8\u00a3. _Prentis?!?_ M ok Eve, pub.\n\nThe entry for the next day read: \"vho\" in shaky writing, and that was all. \"ho\" and \"vho\" (or sometimes h.o. and v.h.o.) often followed entries regarding pubs or parties the night before, and I strongly suspected they stood for hungover and very hungover. K meant Kenneth and M Mary, pretty obviously. ok was itself (its opposite was nsg, which stood for Not So Good; he'd spelled it out the first time he'd used it, following a \"48hr h.o.\" after Hogmanay the previous year). A small r meant \"rang\"; a telephone call. And I had indeed weighed in at eight pounds.\n\nI found a few mentions of \"CR\" \u2013 I even recognised some of the notes I'd read the previous year; he must have jotted them down in his diary first before transferring them to his other papers. But there was nothing to provide any new answers.\n\nThe one thing that stayed with me as a result was not a solution to anything, but rather another mystery. It was on a page at the back of the last diary, the diary for 1980; a page headlined by the mysterious message:\n\nJUST USE IT!\n\n... a page covered with notes, some in pencil, some in ball-point, some in very thin felt-tip, but a page which held the only instance anywhere in all the papers I had where Rory had made an effort not just to alter or score out some words or letters, but to obliterate them. It read:\n\nshow Hlvng pty wi C?\" (whoops): 2 close??\n\nThe symbols just before the H and C had been obliterated by a heavy black felt-tip marker, but the original note had been written with a ball-point, and by holding the page up to the light at just the right angle, I could see that the first letter had been an F and the second an L.\n\nF and L. Those abbrevations didn't turn up anywhere else in Rory's notes for either _Crow Road_ or anything else that I knew of. Rory _never_ crossed stuff right out; he only ever put a line through it. Why the big deal with the felt-tip? And who were F and L? And why that \"whoops\"? And what was too close to what?\n\nI found myself cursing Uncle Rory's inconsistency. F in the diaries sometimes meant Fergus (aka Fe), sometimes Fiona (also Fi), and sometimes Felicity, a girl Rory had known in London, also recorded as Fls, Fl or Fy (I guessed). The only L in the diaries seemed to be Lachlan Watt, though he \u2013 mentioned on the rare occasions when he came back to visit from Oz \u2013 was LW, more usually.\n\nSome nights at Lochgair, after long evenings spent poring over those little, thin-paged diaries on the broad desk in dad's study, trying to make sense of it all, and failing, I'd fall asleep in my bed with the symbols and acronyms, the letters and numbers and lines and boxes and doodles and smudges all swirling round in front of me even after I'd put the light out and closed my eyes, as though each scribbled sign had become a mote of dust and \u2013 by my reading \u2013 been disturbed; lifted from the page and blown around me in a vortex of microscopic info-debris, chaotic witnesses of a past that I could not comprehend.\n\nI found one thing which \u2013 after a little puzzled thought \u2014 I could comprehend, but which I hadn't been expecting, in Uncle Rory's 1979 diary. Stuck to the inside back cover with a yellowing stamp hinge was an old, faded, slightly grubby paper Lifeboat flag, without its pin.\n\nThe sentimentalist in me was reduced almost to tears.\n\nIn Glasgow I had taken to sitting in churches. It was mostly just for the atmosphere. Catholic churches were best because they felt more like temples, more involved with the business of religious observance. There was always stuff going on; candles burning, people going to confession, the smell of incense in the air ... I'd just sit there for a while, listening but not listening, seeing but not seeing, there but not there, and finding solace in the hushed commerce of other people's belief, absorbed in the comings and goings of the public and the priests, and their respective professions of faith. A father would approach me, now and again ... but I'd tell him I was just browsing.\n\nI walked a lot, dressed in my Docs and jeans and a long tweed coat that had been my father's. Uncle Hamish sent me thick letters full of original insights into the sacred scriptures, which I dipped into sometimes when I couldn't sleep. I never got further than page two of any of them. I frequented the Glasgow Film Theatre, and installed a video and a TV in the lounge. I bought a ghetto-blaster which usually lived in the flat's kitchen (and so became known as the gateaux-blaster) but which I would take walkabout with me sometimes, at least partly for the weight-training which transporting the brute from room to room provided. I'd stand and look at time-dark paintings, or run a finger over the line of some cold, marble animal, while the tall, glittering rooms resounded to the Pixies, REM, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, The Fall and Faith No More.\n\n'He's here,' Ash said, coming back with the drinks. She sat down.\n\nI looked around. I saw him after a while. A little shorter and a little younger-looking than I'd expected, from the tape I'd seen. He was talking to a couple of other guys; they were all dressed in grey trench coats, and one had put a hat down on the bar that at least looked like it ought to be called a fedora. I wondered if the other two were also journalists.\n\nRupert Paxton-Marr; a foreign correspondent, his meticulously-trained, razor-sharp mind ready in an instant to describe a place as 'war-torn' and bring home to us all events and disasters in far away places, to talk of people tearing at the rubble with their bare hands, to reveal that only with dawn did the full extent of the devastation become apparent, and even \u2013 in the very best traditions of British popular journalism \u2013 to ask people who'd just seen their entire family duly butchered, burned, crushed or drowned, How do you feel?\n\nAsh seemed contemplative, eyeing me with a steady gaze. 'Well ...' I said, feeling my heart beat faster and my palms start to sweat. I took the two torn match-book covers out of my pocket. 'Think I'll go see what he has to say for himself.'\n\n'Want me to come?' Ash started to move in her seat.\n\nI shook my head. Then bit my lip. 'Shit, I don't know. All the way down here, I was just going to go up to him and say, \"You send these to my dad?\", but now I don't know. It feels a bit weird.' I looked over at the three men. 'I mean,' I laughed. 'They're even wearing trench-coats!'\n\nAsh looked briefly over too. 'Hey,' she said, smiling. 'They're on wine; they're not just knocking back whiskies and heading off. They'll be here a while yet. Sit and think for a moment.'\n\nI nodded, took a deep breath and drank some whisky.\n\nI thought about it some more. Then I said, 'Okay. Maybe we should go together. You could sort of introduce ... I could go out and pretend to just come in ... Hell; I could just tell him the truth ... I don't know.' I closed my eyes, appalled at my own lack of gumption.\n\nAsh got up, putting a hand on my shoulder. 'Sit here. I'll tell him I've just recognised him. You come over later; just mention the match-books. Don't show them, not at first. How does that sound?'\n\nI opened my eyes. I shook my head and said, 'Oh, I don't know, good as anything.'\n\n'Right.' Ash went over to the men. She pulled something from the back of her head as she went, and shook her long fawn hair down. It was the length of the jacket. I smiled to myself. That's my girl, I thought.\n\nI saw them look her up and down. Rupert smiled, then looked mystified as she talked, animated, hands waving. Then he laughed, his tanned, handsome face smiled and he looked her up and down again. The expression changed just a little, though, after that, as though something else had occurred to him. He looked a little more wary. So it appeared to me, anyway. He held out one hand, seeming to make introductions. Ash nodded. He pointed to the bar; she shook her head, then nodded back at me.\n\nRupert Paxton-Marr gazed above me, then dropped his gaze. He looked at me then back at Ashley. She was talking to him. His expression went through puzzlement, maybe concern, then went wary again, finally cold, studiously expressionless. He nodded, leaning back against a post supporting the front of the bar. Ash glanced back at me, her eyes opening wide for an instant, then she turned back to the men.\n\nI started to get to my feet.\n\nRupert's expression didn't change as I walked over. Two couples passed in front of me, weaving their way between the tables. When they'd passed, Rupert was already on his way to the door, mouth smiling broadly, one hand alternately waving and pointing at his watch as he backed off. By the time I got to where Ash and the two guys in the trench coats were standing, he'd made it out to the street.\n\nI stood there, frowning at the door Rupert Paxton-Marr had exited through. Something about the way he'd moved as he'd backed off had left me with an uncanny feeling of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu.\n\nAsh looked surprised. So did the two guys. One of them looked me up and down. 'Jesus Christ,' he said. 'How'd you do that? Usually only women with toddlers screaming \"Daddy!\" in tow have that sort of effect on Rupe.'\n\n_Remember, remember,_ I thought to myself, and smiled. I turned to the man and shrugged. 'It's a gift,' I told him.\n\n'He owe you money or somefink?' the second man said. They were both about thirty, lean and clean-cut. Both were smoking.\n\nI shook my head.\n\nAsh laughed loudly. 'No,' she said, holding her hands out to the two men. 'It's just that the last time we all met up, we all got filthy drunk \u2013 didn't we, Presley? \u2013 and Rupert thinks Presley here \u2014 '\n\nPresley? Ash was indicating me when she said the name. _Presley?_ I thought.\n\n'... thinks that Rupert tried to proposition him. Which he didn't, of course, but it was all a little embarrassing, wasn't it, dear?' Her happy, smiling face looked demandingly at me.\n\nI nodded dumbly as the two men looked at me as well.\n\n'Embarrassing,' I confirmed.\n\nAsh was beaming smiles all over the place like a laser gone berserk. 'I mean,' she said, tossing her hair. 'Rupert isn't gay, is he? And Presley ...' She looked suddenly sultry, voice slowing, going a little deeper. 'Here ...' She took an extra breath, her gaze flickering down from my face to my crotch and back, '... _certainly_ isn't.'\n\nThen she seemed to collect herself and directed a broad smile to the two men. They looked suitably confused.\n\n_'Presley?_ PRESLEY?' I yelled as we walked rapidly along Thomas More Street. 'How _could_ you?' I waved my hands about. A light drizzle was falling out of the orange-black sky.\n\nAshley strode on, grinning. She held a small umbrella; her heels clicked. 'Sorry, Prentice; it was just the first thing I thought of.'\n\n'But it isn't even very _different_ from Prentice!' I shouted.\n\nShe shrugged. 'Well then, that's probably why it was the first thing I thought of.' Ash laughed.\n\n'It's not funny,' I told her, sticking my hands into my pockets, stepping over some empty pizza containers.\n\n'It wasn't funny,' Ash agreed, almost prim. 'It's your reaction that is.' She nodded.\n\n'Great,' I said. 'There are two guys going around now who think my name is Presley, but to you it's just a hoot.' I stepped on a wobbly paving stone and jetted dirty water up my chinos. 'Jeez,' I muttered.\n\n'Look,' said Ash, sounding serious at last. 'More to the point, I'm sorry I fucked that up. I don't know _why_ he dashed off like that. All I said was I'd a friend with me. I didn't even say you wanted to meet him or anything. It was weird.' She shook her head. 'Weird.'\n\nWe had escaped from the pub after finishing our drinks and chatting \u2013 awkwardly on my part, easily on Ashley's \u2013 with Rupert's two friends (Howard and Jules); a stilted conversation whose most useful result seemed to have been a general agreement that old Rupe was a lad, eh?\n\n'Doesn't matter,' I told her. I saw a taxi coming with its light on and suddenly remembered I was rich. 'I know where I saw him, now.'\n\nI stepped into the road and waved.\n\n'You do?' Ash said from the kerb.\n\n'Yep.' The cab pulled in. Things were looking up; my usual Klingon Cloaking Device \u2013 which has tended to engage automatically on the rare occasions I have felt rich enough in the past to afford a taxi \u2013 seemed to have been de-activated. I held the door open for Ashley.\n\n'So; you going to tell me, or be all mysterious?' she said as she got in.\n\n'I'll tell you over dinner.' I sat beside her and closed the door. 'Dean Street, Soho, please,' I told the driver. I smiled at Ashley.\n\n'Dean Street?' she said, eyebrow arching.\n\n'Amongst many other things, I owe you a curry.'\n\nWhen I was fifteen I had my first really bad hangover. On Friday nights I and some of my school pals used to meet at the Droid family house in Gallanach; we'd sit in Droid's bedroom, watching TV and playing computer games. And we'd drink cider, which Droid's big brother purchased for us \u2013 for a small commission \u2013 from the local off-licence. And smoke dope, which my cousin Josh McHoan, Uncle Hamish's son, purchased for us \u2013 at an exorbitant commission \u2013 in the Jacobite Bar. And sometimes do speed, which came from the latter source as well. Then one night Dave McGaw turned up with a litre of Bacardi and he and I finished it between the two of us, and the next morning I was woken up by my dad to a strange and horrible new feeling.\n\nvho, as Rory would have written. nsg at all.\n\nThere had been a phone-call for me; Hugh Robb, from the farm near the castle, reminding me I'd agreed to come and help with making the bonfire for Guy Fawkes' night. He was coming out to pick me up.\n\nThis, of course, was not really what I needed (any more than I needed dad lecturing me on how unsound a custom it was to build bonfires on November the fifth and so celebrate religious bigotry; didn't I know it had been an anti-catholic ceremony, and the effigy burned on the fire used to be the Pope?), but I couldn't admit to mum and dad I'd been drinking and had a hangover, so I had to get dressed with my head pounding and my insides feeling distinctly unwell. I waited outside on the porch steps, taking deep breaths in the cool clear air and wishing the hangover would just go away. Then I suddenly thought maybe it wasn't a hangover; maybe this pounding in my head was the first symptom of a brain tumour ... and so I ended up praying that I _did_ have a hangover.\n\nHugh Robb was a big, amiable Scotch Broth of a lad; he was a full year older than I was but we were in the same class at school because he'd been kept back a year. He arrived in a tractor hauling a trailer full of branches and old wood and I rode with him in the cab, wishing that the tractor had better suspension and that Hugh could have thought of something else to talk about other than the prolapsed uterus of one of the farm's cows.\n\nRound the hill from the castle there was a big east-facing field; it was surrounded by trees on all sides but the slope gave it a view towards Bridgend. I still thought of it as the ponies' field because it was where Helen and Diana's ponies had been stabled originally before they'd been moved to a more level paddock west of the castle.\n\nHugh and I unloaded the broken planks and the great bare grey branches from the trailer. We worked together for a bit, then I continued to stack the wood while Hugh went to collect some more. He made a couple of trips, dumping what looked like about a tonne of wood each time before announcing he was off to another farm where they had even more wood.\n\nI let the tractor disappear, bumping along the track towards the castle, then collapsed back in the huge pile of branches awaiting my attention. I lay, spread-eagled and half-submerged on the springy mass of grey, leaf-nude wood and stared up at the wide blue November sky, hoping the bass drum inside my head would hit a few thousand rest-bars reasonably soon.\n\nThe sky seemed to beat in time to the throbbing inside my head, the whole blue vault pulsing like some living membrane. I thought about Uncle Rory and his discovery that it was not possible to influence TV screens from afar by humming. I wondered \u2013 as ever \u2014 where he was; he'd been gone a couple of years by that time.\n\nA bird swung into view over the trees behind my head, and I lay there and I watched it; broad, flat-winged, flight feathers at the square wing-tip ruffling like soft fingers, the small, quick head flicking this way and that, the brown-grey body between the soft density of wings tilting and turning as it glided the cool air, tail feathers like a rich brown fan.\n\n'Beauty,' I whispered to myself, smiling despite the pain in my head.\n\nThen suddenly the buzzard burst and sprayed across the sky; it fell plummeting, limp and trailing feathers, to the ground. A double crack of sound snapped across the field.\n\nThe bird fell out of sight behind me. I blinked, not believing what had happened, then rolled over, looking through the mask of branches at the trees edging the field where the sound of the shots had come from. I saw a man holding a shotgun, just inside the trees, looking to one side then the other, then running out into the field. He wore green strapped wellies, thick brown cords, a waxed jacket with a corduroy collar, and a cloth bunnet. One more prick in a Barbour jacket, but this one had just shot a buzzard.\n\nHe gazed down at something in the grass, then smiled. He was tall and blond and he looked like a male model; enviable jaw line. He stamped down on the thing in the grass, looked around again then backed off, finally turning and walking smartly back into the woods.\n\nI should have shouted, or taken the bird to the police as evidence \u2013 buzzards are a protected species, after all \u2013 but I didn't. I just watched the Barbour disappear into the trees, then rolled over and breathed, 'Fuckwit.'\n\nHe was at the firework party the following night, laughing and talking and sharing a dram from Fergus's hip flask. I watched him, and he saw me, and we looked at each other for a few moments before he looked away, all in the furious, writhing light of the pyre that I had put together, and which contained \u2013 pushed in near its now blazing centre \u2013 the corpse of the bird he had killed.\nCHAPTER 16\n\nWe stood beside the observatory dome, on the battlements of Castle Gaineamh, facing into a cool westerly breeze. Lewis, in cords and a grease-brown stockman's coat, looked through the binoculars, his black hair moving slightly in the wind. Verity stood at his side, face raised shining to the winter blue sky, bulky in her thermal jacket, her ski-gloved hands clasped thickly under the bulge of her belly. The plain beyond the woods below, holding Gallanach and cupping the inner bay, was bathed in the deep-shadowed sunlight of late afternoon. Wisps of cirrus moved high above, tails trailing up, promising clear weather. A two-coach sprinter moved in the distance, on the viaduct at Bridgend, windows glinting in the sunlight. I took a deep breath and could smell the sea.\n\nThe unopened air-mail packet from Colorado, lodged next to my chest between shirt and jacket, make a crinkling, flexing noise, giving me a funny feeling in my belly.\n\n'No sign?' Verity asked.\n\nLewis shook his head. 'Mm-mm.'\n\nVerity shivered. She hunched her shoulders, bringing them up and in towards her neck. 'Brr,' she went. She linked arms with Lewis.\n\n'Ah,' he said, protesting, still looking through the field glasses, though now at a slight angle.\n\nVerity tutted, and with a gorgeously pretended scowl moved away from her husband and stepped over to me. She slid an arm round my waist, snuggling. I put an arm round her shoulders. She rested her head against my arm; I looked down at her. She was growing her hair a little. The sides of her head weren't actually shaved any more. She smelled of baby oil; Lewis had what sounded like the enviable job of smoothing it over The Bulge, in an attempt to fend off stretch marks later. I smiled, unseen, and looked back to the north.\n\n'Is that what-do-you-call-it?' Verity said, nodding.\n\n'No, that's thingy-ma-bob,' Lewis said, just as I said,\n\n'Hey; well remembered.'\n\n'Dunadd,' Verity said patiently, ignoring both of us. She was looking at the small, rocky hill a kilometre to the north. 'Where the footprint is.'\n\n'Correct,' I said.\n\nLewis glanced at us, grinned. He lowered the binoculars a little. 'Can't see it from here, but that's where it is.'\n\nDunadd Rock had been the capital of Dalriada, one of the early and formative kingdoms in Scotland. The footprint \u2013 looks more like a bootprint, actually, just a smooth hollow in the stone \u2013 was where the new king had to place his foot when he made his vows, symbolically \u2014 I suppose \u2014 to join him to the land.\n\n'Can I have a look?' Verity said. Lewis handed her the glasses, and she leant against the stone battlements, supporting her belly. Lewis stood behind her, chin lowered onto her shoulder.\n\n'Right at the summit, isn't it?' Verity asked.\n\n'Yep,' Lewis said.\n\nShe looked at Dunadd for a bit. 'I wonder,' she said, 'if you had one of your feet planted there, when you gave birth ...'\n\nI laughed. Lewis went wide-eyed, drawing up and back from his wife. She turned round, grinning wickedly at Lewis and then me. She patted Lewis's elbow. 'Joke,' she said. 'I want to be in a nice warm birthing pool in a nice big hospital.' She turned back to the view. Lewis looked at me.\n\n'Had me fooled,' I shrugged. 'Runs in the family, after all.'\n\n'Can you see that stone circle, too?' Verity said, lifting the binoculars to gaze further north.\n\nEarlier that day, Helen Urvill, Verity and Lewis and I had been behaving like tourists. The land around Gallanach is thick with ancient monuments; burial sites, standing stones, henges and strangely carved rocks; you can hardly put a foot down without stepping on something that had religious significance to somebody sometime. Verity had heard of all this ancient stoneware but she'd never really seen it properly; her visits to Gallanach in the past had been busy with other things, and about the only place she had been to before was Dunadd, because it was an easy walk from the castle. And of course, because we had lived here most of our lives, none of the rest of us had bothered to visit half the places either.\n\nSo we borrowed Fergus's Range Rover and went site-seeing; tramping through muddy fields to the hummocks that were funeral barrows, looking up at moss-covered standing stones, plodding round stone circles and chambered cairns, and leaning on fences staring at the great flat faces of cup-and-ring marked rocks, their grainy surfaces covered in the concentric circular symbols that looked like ripples from something fallen in a pond, frozen in stone.\n\n'Did I ever tell you about the time I used to be able to make televisions go wonky, from far away?'\n\nIt was a bright and warm day, back in that same summer Rory had come out to the Hebrides with us. Rory and I were walking near Gallanach, going from the marked rocks in one field to the stone circle in another. I remember I had a pain in my side that day and I was worrying that it was appendicitis (one of the boys in my class that year had almost died when his appendix had ruptured). It was just a stitch, though. Uncle Rory was a fast walker and I'd been intent on keeping up with him; my appendix waited another year before it needed taking out.\n\nWe had been visiting some of the ancient monuments in the area, and had started talking about what the people who'd built the cairns and stone circles had believed in, and that had led us on to astrology. Then suddenly he mentioned this thing about televisions.\n\n'Making them go _wonky?'_ I said. 'No.'\n\n'Well,' Rory said, then turned and looked behind us. We stood up on the verge as a couple of cars passed us. It was hot; I took off my jacket. 'Well,' Rory repeated, 'I was ... a few years older than you are now, I guess. I was over at a friend's house, and there was a bunch of us watching _Top of the Pops_ or something, and I was humming along with a record. I hit a certain deep note, and the TV screen went wavy. Nobody else said anything, and I wondered if it was just coincidence, so I tried to do it again, and after a bit of adjusting I hit the right note and sure enough, the screen went wavy again. Still nobody said anything.' Rory laughed at the memory. He was wearing jeans and T-shirt and carried a light jacket over his shoulder.\n\n'Well, I didn't want to make a fool of myself, so I didn't say anything. I thought maybe it just worked on that one particular television set, so I tried it at home; and it still happened. The effect seemed to work from quite a distance, too. When I stood out in the hall and looked into the lounge, it was still there, stronger than ever.\n\n'Then we were going up to Glasgow, mum and I, and we were passing a shop window full of TVs, and so I tried this new gift for messing up TV screens on them, and hummed away to myself, and all the screens went wild! And I was thinking Great, I really can do magic! The effect is getting stronger! I could appear on TV and do this! Maybe it would make everybody's screens go weird!'\n\n'Wow,' I said, wanting to get home and try this myself.\n\n'So,' Rory said. 'I stopped in my tracks and I asked mum. I said, \"Mum; watch this. Watch those screens.\" And I hummed for all I was worth, and the pictures on the screens went wavy. And mum just looked at me and said, \"What?\" And I did it again, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get her to see the effect. Eventually she got fed up with me and told me to stop being silly. I had screens going mental in every TV shop we passed in Glasgow that day, but nobody else seemed to be able to see it.'\n\nRory grimaced, looking across the edge of the plain beyond Gallanach to the little rocky hill that stuck up from the flat fields.\n\n'Now, I wish I could remember just what it was that made the penny drop, but I can't. I mean, usually a beautiful assistant says something stupid and the clever scientist says, \"Say that again!\" and then comes up with the brilliant plan that's going to save the world as we know it ... but as far as I remember it just came to me.'\n\n'What?' I said.\n\nRory grinned down at me. 'Vibrations,' he said.\n\n'Vibrations?'\n\n'Yeah. The vibrations I was setting up in my own skull \u2013 actually in the eyeball, I suppose \u2013 were making my eyes vibrate at about the same frequency as the TV screen flickers. So the screen looked funny, _but only to me,_ that was the point. And it made sense that the further away you were from the screen \u2013 as long as you could still make it out, of course \u2013 the more pronounced the effect would appear.' He looked down at me. 'You see?'\n\n'Yeah,' I said, 'I think so.' I studied the road for a bit, then looked up, disappointed. 'So it doesn't really work after all?'\n\nRory shook his head. 'Not the way I thought it did, no,' he said.\n\nI frowned, trying to remember how we'd got onto this. 'What's that got to do with what we were talking about?' I asked.\n\nRory looked at me. 'Ah-ha,' he said, and winked. He nodded at a gate set in the low wall facing the road; beyond were the standing stones. 'Here we are.'\n\n'Here we are.' The stair-door creaked open; I went to help Helen. She handed me a tray with four pewter mugs. The mulled wine steamed; it smelled wonderful. 'Mmm, great,' I said. Helen took my hand and stepped out through the little half-size door onto the battlements. Her broad face was tanned and her body looked lean and fit after some early-season skiing in Switzerland. She wore Meindl boots, an old pair of leather trousers that had belonged to her mother, a cashmere sweater and a flying jacket that looked distressed enough to have seen action over Korea, if not Greater Germany. Her hair was shining black and shoulder length.\n\nShe took a mug. 'Help yourself,' she said. 'Any sign of him?'\n\n'Nope,' I said. I held the tray out to Lewis and Verity, who made the appropriate noises and took a mug each.\n\nHelen nodded at the corner of the airmail package inside my jacket. 'Still incubating that, Prentice?'\n\nI grinned. 'Yeah.'\n\nWe stood there sipping the hot, spicy wine, looking north.\n\n'Prentice? Ash. He's done it.'\n\n'Who? Doctor Gonzo?'\n\n'Yeah; printing it out now; mail you the hard copy tomorrow morning; he'll E-mail it to me too, I'll download the files and stick them on a disk your Compaq'll accept and bring it with me next week when I come up for Hogmanay ... unless you got a modem yet, did you?'\n\n'No, no I didn't.'\n\n'Okay; that'll be the arrangement, then. Sound all right to you?'\n\n'Yeah; great. I'll write back to say thanks. He, ah ... say what the files actually were in the end?'\n\n'Text.'\n\n'That all he said?'\n\n'Yep. Prentice, he hasn't read whatever he found; well, probably not more than the first few lines to check they were in English, not gibberish. Once he'd cracked it I don't think he was really interested in what was actually written there. But it is text.'\n\n'Right. Text.'\n\n'Should get to you in a few days, airmail.'\n\nThe big envelope from the States had arrived in the mail this morning, five days after Ash had called; the return address was Dr G, Computing Science Faculty, University of Denver, Co. I'd stared at the thing as it lay there on the front door mat, my mouth gone oddly dry. I had a slight hangover, and had decided \u2013 as I gingerly picked the disappointingly slim package up \u2013 that I'd open it after breakfast. Then after breakfast I'd thought maybe I should leave it until later, especially when Verity rang and invited me over to the castle.\n\nIt was the last day of 1990; a full twelve months after that fateful party when Mrs McSpadden had sent me down to the cellar for some more whisky. We were all back here for the usual round of parties and visits and hangovers. I was mostly looking forward to it all, even though I was still trying to find reasons not to ask Fergus the things I knew I ought to ask him about Mr Rupert Paxton-Marr. But then, maybe I oughtn't to ask them at all. Maybe what was in this airmail package would relieve me of the need to ask any questions (I told myself). I kept coming back to the distinct possibility that maybe I was making something out of nothing, treating our recent, local history like some past age, and looking too assiduously, too imaginatively for links and patterns and connections, and so turning myself into some sort of small-scale conspiracy theorist.\n\nI had been immersed in my studies all term, and everything seemed to be going well. My professor, reading my tutorial papers and essays, had gone beyond noises of encouragement and vicarious complacency to a sort of uncomprehending peevishness that I'd contrived to fail so spectacularly the year before.\n\nMeanwhile, in the history that we were currently living through, it looked like a war was going to start in just over two weeks, but \u2013 apart from a kind of low background radiation of species-ashamed despair because of that \u2014 personally I felt not too bad. Mum appeared to be holding out, despite Christmas and New Year traditionally being a bad time for the bereaved. She had actually started building the much talked-about harpsichord, turning a spare bedroom at Lochgair into a workshop which at the moment looked suitably chaotic; James had mostly rejoined humanity, to the extent that several times over the last few weekends before Christmas he'd taken his Walkman phones off long enough to have what could, with only a little generosity, be described as a conversation. Lewis was doing well, Verity was almost disgustingly healthy (apart from the occasional sore back and a bladder that appeared to have become inordinately susceptible to the sound of running water), and I actually looked forward to seeing Lewis and Verity now, much to my own amazement; there was still a distant pang when Verity smiled at me ... but it was more remembered than real.\n\nI looked at my watch. In four hours I'd be setting off for Glasgow Airport, for Ashley. She was booked on a late flight and I'd volunteered to go pick her up. She'd be working until half-five in London this evening, and it would have been pushing the old 2CV a bit to get to Scotland \u2013 let alone here \u2013 in time for the bells.\n\nI scanned the skies to the north, watching for movement. I was looking forward to the drive, even if it was at night and I wouldn't be able to see the scenery.\n\nThe wind gusted a little and I supped my mulled wine. The woods \u2014 evergreen and deciduous-bare \u2013 swept down to the fields and then the town; forests rose on the hills to the east.\n\n'Anybody heard the news today?' Lewis asked.\n\n'Nothing special happening,' Helen said.\n\nI guessed she'd got an up-date from Mrs McSpadden, who tended to keep the TV on in the kitchen these days.\n\n'All quiet on the desert front,' breathed Lewis, taking up the glasses again and looking north towards Kilmartin.\n\n'You sure he'll come that way?' Verity asked.\n\nLewis shrugged. 'Think so.'\n\n'Said he would,' Helen confirmed.\n\nVerity stamped her feet.\n\n'Hey,' Helen said. 'I never asked you, Lewis; you got any Gulf jokes?'\n\nLewis made an exasperated noise, still looking through the binoculars. 'Na. I heard a couple of crap Irish ones, and the usual suspects in different disguises, but there hasn't been anything good. I was trying to work on a routine about if the Stealth bomber worked as well as it did in Panama, the B-52 as it did in Viet Nam and the marines as effectively as they did in Lebanon, then Saddam had nothing too much to worry about, but it wasn't funny enough.' He brought the glasses down from his eyes for a moment. 'In fact, it wasn't funny at all.'\n\n'I know a girl from school who's out there,' Helen said. 'Nurse.'\n\n'Yeah?' Verity said, stamping her feet again.\n\n'Ha!' Lewis said suddenly.\n\n'You seen him?' Verity said, clutching Lewis's arm.\n\nHe laughed, glancing down at her. 'No,' he said, and grinned at me. 'But guess who got called up as a reservist?'\n\nI shrugged. 'I give in.' I didn't think I knew anybody in the forces.\n\nLewis smiled sourly. 'Jimmy Turrock. Used to be a bandsman. They're the stretcher-bearers in war time.'\n\nI frowned, not recognising the name. 'Jimmy \u2013?' I began. Then I remembered.\n\n'The grave-digger!' I laughed.\n\n'Yeah,' Lewis said, turning away again, raising the glasses. 'The grave-digger.'\n\nI felt cold inside and my smile faded. 'Wow,' I said. 'Some sense of humour the army has.'\n\n'Work experience,' Lewis muttered.\n\n'Who's this you're talking about?' Verity asked.\n\n'Guy helped us bury dad,' Lewis said.\n\n'Oh,' she said. She hugged Lewis.\n\n'You going to go if they call you up, Prentice?' Helen Urvill said, not looking at me.\n\n'Hell no,' I said. 'Which way's Canada?'\n\n'Yeah,' muttered Lewis. 'Shame dad's dead; maybe he could have got us into the equivalent of the National Guard, if we have one.'\n\n'Traffic wardens?' I suggested. Lewis's shoulders shook once.\n\n'You really wouldn't go?' Helen said to me, one eyebrow raised.\n\n'I might send them some blood if they ask me nicely,' I told her. 'In an oil can.'\n\n'I suppose we can't use the telescope, can we?' Verity said suddenly, nodding at the white dome to our right. 'As well as the binoculars I mean.' She looked at each of us.\n\n'Nup,' Helen said.\n\n'Too narrow a field of view,' Lewis said.\n\n'And upside down,' I added.\n\nVerity looked over at the dome. There was a smile on her face. 'Do you remember that night we met in the dome?' she said, looking up at Lewis. 'We hadn't seen each other since we were kids ...'\n\nLewis handed the glasses to Helen, who held them one-handed, straps dangling. Lewis hugged his wife. 'Of course I do,' he said, and kissed her nose. She buried her face in his coat. I looked away, thinking about the drive up to the airport this evening.\n\nMaybe I should allow another half-hour or so for the journey, just in case of hold-ups. And of course they were building new bits onto the airport at the moment; could be a problem parking, and tonight was bound to be busy. I'd leave early, no sense in leaving late and having to hurry. I had taken to driving a bit slower and more carefully these days. Mum still worried, but at least I could reassure her with a clear conscience.\n\nI sighed, and the package against my chest flexed again. I looked down at it. Hell, this was silly; I ought to read the stuff. Waiting until I got back to the house and was sitting at the desk in the study was just putting it off.\n\n'How's the wonderful world of Swiss banking these days anyway, Hel?' Lewis asked.\n\n'Oh, wacky and transparent as ever,' Helen said. They started talking about Z\u00fcrich and London, and I sat down on the slope of slated roof, behind them. I pulled the airmail package out and opened it carefully. Verity looked back at me and smiled briefly, before turning back to Helen and Lewis to share some joke about the Hard Rock Caf\u00e9. My hands felt clammy as I slid the sheets of paper out of the thick white envelope. This is daft, I thought. It probably is gibberish, or Rory's job application for that travel programme presenter's job; a CV for the TV. Nothing important, nothing revelatory.\n\nThe first sheet was a letter from the good Doctor, arcane with acronyms and abbreviations, telling me how he'd deciphered the binary mush he'd been sent and turned it into what I held in my hands. He sounded like a likeable guy, but I kind of just glanced at the letter. I went on to the print-out.\n\nThere were about fifty or sixty pages of single-space laser print. The first twenty or so pages were taken up with pieces I recognised: articles and poems and the nameless play Rory had apparently decided to cannibalise for the end of Crow Road. Then came three passages of prose.\n\nI glanced up at the others; Helen and Verity were still talking, Lewis was looking through the binoculars towards Gallanach. I started reading, and my mouth went dry.\n\nI raced through each of the passages, my eyes bulging, hands shaking. The voices of the others, the cool December air and the chill slates under my backside seemed like they were all a million miles away, as I read what Uncle Rory had written.\n\n_'D'you know where the twins were conceived?'_\n\n_'No idea,' he said, and belched._\n\n_'Fucking McCaig's Folly, that's where.'_\n\n_'What, Oban?'_\n\n_'The very place.'_\n\n_'Good grief.'_\n\n_'You don't. mind me saying this, I mean talking about Fiona like this, do you?'_\n\n_'No, no.' He waved one hand. 'Your wife; you talk about her. No, no, that's bad, that sounds bad. I'm all for women's lib.'_\n\n_'Might have bloody known. Might have bloody known you would be. Bloody typical, if you ask me. You're a Bolshie bastard, McHoan.'_\n\n_'And you are the unacceptable face of Capitalism, Ferg.'_\n\n... That was how the first passage began. I finished it and realised my mouth was hanging open. I closed it and started, dazed, the next passage:\n\n_'Henriss ... never liked him either; fat lipped beggar... queer, y'know; thass wha he's singing you know; d'you know that? \"Scuse me while I kiss this guy ...\" disgussin ... absluley disgussin ...'_\n\n_'Fergus, do shut up.'_\n\n_' \"Scuse me, while I kiss this guy\"... bloody poofter coon.'_\n\n_'I'm sorry about this, Lachy.'_\n\n_'That's okay, Mrs U. You no going to put your seat belt on, no?'_\n\n_'No; not for short journeys \u2014 '_\n\n_'Lachy? Lachy ... Lachy! Lachy; I'm sorry about your eye ... really really sorry; never forgave myself, never... here, shake...'_\n\n'Holy fucking shit,' I whispered, when I finished it. Suddenly my hands felt very cold. I looked at the slates I was sitting on, then over at the dome of the observatory, gleaming in the low winter sun.\n\n'You okay, Prentice?' Verity said, frowning at me from the battlements.\n\nI nodded, tried to smile. 'Fine,' I gulped. I turned to the third and last passage.\n\n_Fiona sat in the passenger seat of the car, watching the red roadside reflectors as they drifted out of the night towards her; she was thrown against one side of the seat as Fergus powered the Aston around the right-hander ..._\n\n... And on through to the end:\n\n... _'Look \u2014 !'_\n\nAnd that was all. I looked up, brain reeling.\n\n'Yo,' Helen said, looking through the binoculars. She bent at the knees and put her mug down on the stones under her feet, then rose smoothly again.\n\n'You see him?' Verity said, turning, still hugged within Lewis' arms, to look out over the battlements.\n\n'Could be,' Helen said. She handed the field glasses over to Lewis.\n\n'Yeah, might be,' he said. It was Verity's turn next with the binoculars.\n\nI swallowed a few times, put the sheets of paper back in their envelope. I stood up and walked over to the others, in a kind of trance.\n\nVerity shook her head. 'Na, I can't see the damn thing.' She handed the glasses to me. 'You're looking pale, Prentice. You sure you're okay?'\n\n'Fine,' I croaked, not looking at her. I took the binoculars. 'Thanks.'\n\nI'd seen the speck unaided by that time. Once I'd found it again the binoculars enlarged the dot into the frontal silhouette of a high-winged light aircraft, flying more or less straight towards us, its body pointed a little to the south west to compensate for the wind. It waggled in the air a little as it flew down the glen, encountering a gust high above Kilmartin.\n\n'Christ,' Lewis said. 'It's a Mig on a bombing run; everybody down!'\n\nI handed the glasses back to Helen, who didn't look particularly amused. She frowned at me. 'You okay, Prentice?'\n\n'Fine,' I said.\n\n'You should have loaned your dad your jacket,' Lewis told Helen.\n\n'Doesn't fit him,' Helen said, binoculars at her eyes. I watched the dot of the plane drift closer towards us through the northern sky.\n\n'You were in a sleeping bag,' I heard Lewis say softly to Verity. He was holding her from behind, chin on the crown of her head. I must have missed what they'd said earlier. I felt weird; I was glad the battlements were too high to fall over if I fainted.\n\nVerity smiled. 'I remember. We were all smoking and playing cards and taking turns to look at the stars, and we got the munchies.' She frowned. 'There was Diana and Helen, and ... what was that guy's name?' She glanced round and up at Lewis. 'Wayne somebody?'\n\n'Darren somebody,' Lewis said. He accepted the glasses from Helen, held them with one hand and balanced them on Verity's head. 'Hoy, stand still.'\n\n'Sorry, _sir,'_ she said.\n\n'Darren Watt,' I said. The plane was closer now but harder to see; it had dropped below the level of the hills behind and was no longer silhouetted against the sky. You could still see it with the naked eye, though. It glinted, once.\n\nVerity nodded. Lewis tutted in exasperation. 'He was the gay guy, wasn't he?' Verity said.\n\n'Yup,' Lewis said. 'Sculptor. Good, too; fucking shame, that was.'\n\n'Oh God,' Verity said. 'Of course, he died.'\n\n'Bike crash,' Helen said, scooping up her mug of cooled wine from the flagstones, and draining it.\n\nThe plane was flying over Gallanach now. I thought I could hear its engine. I remembered standing here once with mum, years ago. Fergus and dad were shooting at clay pigeons in a field to our right somewhere, and I remembered hearing the flat Crack ... Crack noise of the guns, and thinking they sounded just like one plank falling on top of another. Blam! indeed. _Remember, remember ..._\n\nVerity laughed, making Lewis tut again. 'You were doing your radio impressions,' she said, 'that night. Remember?'\n\n'Of course,' Lewis said.\n\n'Why was I in a sleeping bag?' Verity said, frowning at the approaching plane.\n\n'You were in the cupboard.' Helen smiled. She waved out across the chill afternoon air above Gallanach. I looked back at the plane, which was switching its lights on and off.\n\n'Oh,' Verity said. 'Yeah; the wee cubby hole.'\n\n'Ah ha,' Helen said, as Lewis waved too, still watching through the binoculars, now elevated above Verity's head. 'But it was really a secret passage.'\n\n'Was it?' Verity asked, glancing at Helen.\n\n'Yeah. Di and I used to take the bit of wood off at the back and get into the attic. Wander all over.'\n\n'Anything interesting in there?' Lewis asked. The plane was in a shallow dive, angling towards us a few hundred metres away.\n\n'Just pipes and tanks,' Helen shrugged. 'There was a loft door into mum and dad's room.' She smiled. 'When we started getting interested in sex, we used to pretend we'd get up there one night and see if we could catch them at it, but we were too frightened.' Helen laughed lightly. 'Had us giggling ourselves to sleep a few nights, though. And anyway, Ferg had put a bolt on it.'\n\nThe little white Cessna roared overhead, waggling its wings. Lewis and Verity and Helen all waved. I stared up, seeing the single tiny figure waving in the cockpit. The plane banked, circled round the hill the castle stood on and came back over, lower, engine loud and echoing in the woods beneath.\n\nI made myself wave.\n\nOh dear fucking holy shit, I thought.\n\nThe plane waggled its wings again, then straightened out over Dunadd as Fergus took the Cessna \u2013 his Christmas present to himself \u2013 back north to its home at Connel.\n\n'That it?' said Verity.\n\n'Yup,' Helen said.\n\n'What did you expect?' Lewis asked. 'A crash?'\n\n'Oh ...' said Verity, heading for the door to the stairs. 'Let's get back in the warm.'\n\nBlam! _Remember, remember._ Amman Hilton. Look \u2013! JUST USE IT Kiss the sky, you idiot ...\n\n'Prentice?' Lewis said, from the little door. I looked over at him. 'Prentice?' he said again. 'Wake up, Prentice.'\n\nI'd been staring after the departing plane.\n\n'Oh,' I said. 'Yeah.' On still shaky legs, I followed the others down from the wind-blown battlements and into the warm bulk of the great stone building.\n\n'So the televisions weren't going wonky at all,' I said, still struggling to understand.\n\n'That's right,' Rory said. 'It just looked like it, to me only.' He plucked a long piece of grass from beside one of the standing stones and sucked on the yellow stalk.\n\nI followed suit. 'So it was in your head; not real?'\n\n'Well ...' Rory frowned, turning away a little and leaning back on the great stone. He folded his arms and looked out towards the steep little hill that was Dunadd. I stood to one side, watching him. His eyes looked old.\n\n'Things in your head can be real,' he said, not looking at me. 'And even when they aren't, sometimes they ...' he looked down at me, and I thought he looked troubled. 'Somebody told me something once,' he said. 'And it sounded like it had really hurt him; he'd seen something that made him feel betrayed and hurt by somebody he was very close to, and I felt really sorry for this person, and I'm sure it's affected them ever since ... but when I thought about it, he'd been asleep before this thing had happened, and asleep again afterwards, and it occurred to me that maybe he'd dreamed it all, and I still wonder.'\n\n'Why don't you tell him that?'\n\nRory looked at me for a while, his eyes searching mine, making me feel awkward. He spat the blade of grass out. 'Maybe I should,' he said. He nodded, looking out across the fields. 'Maybe. I don't know.' He shrugged.\n\nI stood there, back at the same stone my Uncle Rory had rested against, a decade earlier. I'd left the castle and driven here to the stone circle shortly after we'd come down from the battlements. There was still plenty of time to get back to Lochgair for dinner before I had to set off for Glasgow, and Ash.\n\nI leant against the great stone, the way Rory had when he'd talked about the man betrayed, the man who'd seen \u2013 or thought he'd seen \u2013 something that had hurt him. I looked ahead, out over the walls and fields and stands of trees. I shivered, though it wasn't especially cold.\n\n'See?' I said, quietly, to myself.\n\nMaybe Rory had been looking at Dunadd that day, as I'd assumed at the time. But beyond Dunadd, just a little to the right on this line of sight, I could see the hill where Gaineamh castle stood, its walls showing blunt and steel grey through the naked trees.\n\n'Prentice!'\n\n'... Yeah?'\n\n'Food! Come on, it's getting cold!'\n\nMum had been calling from the bottom of the stairs. I was sitting at the desk in the study, curtains open to the darkness, just the little desk light on, its brass stalk gleaming, its green shade glowing. I looked back down from my reflection in the dark computer screen, first to my watch \u2013 still half an hour before I had to leave to pick up Ashley \u2013 and then to the thin, battered-looking pocket diary lying opened on the desk.\n\n_Fri_ F @ Cas, L.Rvr, trak, hills. Bothy;   \nfire, fd, dnk, js. (F stnd) rt in clng!   \nguns. F nsg. trs & scrts. F barfd   \nWELCOME TO ARGYLL!\n\nI saw her hair first, shining tight-tied in a spotlight somewhere down the domestic arrivals concourse. I hadn't seen Ashley Watt for about six weeks, after that night in London when I'd seen but not talked to Rupert Paxton-Marr. Ashley was dressed in the same business-like suit she'd worn that night, and carried a big shoulder bag. Her smile was broad.\n\n'Ash. Great to see you.' I hugged her, lifting her off her feet.\n\n'Woo!' she laughed throatily. 'How ya doin, Presley?'\n\nI winced, dramatically, but still offered to carry her bag.\n\n'Prentice; you read a couple of things your uncle wrote and suddenly you're accusing people of murder? Come on.'\n\n'Haven't you looked at the files Doctor Gonzo sent over?'\n\n'Of course not; not my business, Prentice.' Ashley sounded indignant. 'Oh; before I forget,' she said, reaching for her jacket on the back seat and digging into a pocket. She took out a little three-inch Sony disk and handed it to me. 'Present from Colorado. Yours to tinker with.'\n\n'Thanks,' I said, putting the disk in my shirt pocket. 'I might, too; the spelling mistakes have been annoying me.' I moved my head. 'The stuff's in that envelope on the back seat.'\n\n'You don't want me to read it _now,_ do you?'\n\n'There's a torch.'\n\n'Am I allowed to finish building the spliff first?'\n\n'Okay, but then read.'\n\nI'd waited till we were out of Glasgow before I'd told Ashley about the horrible ideas concerning Fergus that I just couldn't get out of my head.\n\nMost of the journey from Lochgair up to Glasgow I'd spent thinking, trying to work out what might be true and what false in the fragments of writing that Rory had left on disk. The rat in the ceiling and the confession of something over-seen; that was what had taken me back to stand amongst the standing stones that afternoon, after I'd left the castle.\n\nAnd remembering what Rory had said to me there had taken me back to that 1976 diary entry.\n\nrt in clng! F nsg.   \ntrs & scrts\n\nAnd the 1980 diary with the words JUST USE IT!, and the L that had been changed to a C; the L _must_ stand for Lachlan Watt and the F for Fiona. That was the secret Fergus had told Rory, that night in the bothy; the story of Fergus waking up after being brought home from Hamish and Tone's party and crawling through the castle roof-space to see his wife in bed with Lachy Watt. That was the party that Fiona and Lachlan had left together.\n\nOf course, all I had was Rory's fictionalised word for any of it.\n\nSo I'd asked my mum, over dinner.\n\n'Did Fiona ... leave a party with somebody else?' she repeated, looking mystified.\n\n'It's just something in one of Rory's poems,' I said. '... Not earth-shakingly important or anything, but there's an odd sort of note that ... well, I just wondered if you knew, or had heard ...' I shrugged, sipping my glass of water.\n\nMum shook her head, helping herself to some more peas. 'The only time I ever saw Fiona leave a party with somebody else, Fergus was there too. In body, at least.'\n\n'Uh-huh?' I said.\n\n... scrts ...\n\nI owed the last, absurdly simple part of the theory to a stag that had suddenly run onto the road while I was zapping down Glen Croe, between the Rest-and-be-Thankful and Ardgartan. One moment the road ahead was clear in the headlights, next second Wha! Something dark brown looking big as a horse with huge antlers like some twisted aerial array came belting out of the forest across the road and leapt the downhill crash barrier. I slammed the brakes on, nearly locking the wheels. The beast disappeared into the darkness and the car swept through the single cloud of steamy breath it had left behind.\n\nI'd come off the brakes and accelerated again almost immediately, shaking my head and muttering curses at all kamikaze deer, and feeling my heart-beat start to slow again after my fright. I'd adjusted my seat belt and looked over at the passenger's seat. Something had moved there, when I'd braked.\n\nI'd left the airmail envelope holding the print-out of Rory's pieces sitting on the passenger seat, because I wanted Ashley to read them. The envelope had slipped forward under the deer-induced sharp braking, plonking down into the passenger footwell. I'd tutted, waited for the straight along the side of Loch Long, checked for traffic, then reached over, retrieved the package from the footwell and put it back on the seat.\n\nAnd that had set me pondering.\n\nI'd passed through Arrochar in a daze, thinking, of course!\n\nAshley read the relevant passage while we travelled the new, fast stretch of the Loch Lomond road.\n\n'Yeah,' she said slowly. 'Mm-hmm.' She put the sheaf of papers down, switched off the torch, looked at me, then lit the J. 'So this is Rory's idea of what happened just before Fergus and Fiona crashed?'\n\n'Yeah.'\n\n'And is this Rory indicating your Aunt Fiona fucked my Uncle Lachy?' she sounded almost amused.\n\n'Right,' I said. I glanced at her.\n\n'Kind of fanciful, isn't it?' she said. 'Jeez, he was hardly ever here, and they didn't really move in the same social circles.'\n\n'Damn,' I breathed. 'Maybe you should have read the other two bits first.'\n\n'Hmm.' Ashley drew smoke in, handed the J to me.\n\nI took a small toke. 'Yuk; what's this?'\n\n'Herbal mixture,' Ash said. 'No point giving up fags and then smoking tobacco in Js.'\n\n'Hmm,' I said, handing the number back.\n\n'So what are you saying, Prentice? Did I miss something?'\n\n'Maybe.' I shook my head, letting the car slow as we approached Tarbet. 'Or maybe I'm reading too much into it ... want to read the other two bits?\n\nAsh sighed, accepted the J back and switched the torch back on.\n\nWe passed Tarbet, accelerating over the shallow neck of land to Arrochar, pottered through the village at less than forty, then gathered speed again as we curved round the head of Loch Long, passing the place where I'd retrieved the airmail package from the footwell a couple of hours earlier.\n\n'Yeah, but what _did_ Fergus tell Rory?' Ash said, finishing that part.\n\n'Read the next bit,' I said. I waved my hand when Ash offered me the joint.\n\nThe road started to climb along the dark shoulder of the hillside towards the Rest-and-be-Thankful, leaving the old road still down in the floor of the glen. I kept a careful look out for Mad Stags From Hell crashing across the road, but none appeared.\n\n'Woof,' Ash said, closing the last page. 'Horny stuff towards the end there.' She switched the torch off again. 'You think that last bit is what Fergus told Rory in the bothy, if it really happened?'\n\n'Yeah,' I said. 'There's a diary entry to back it up, and there is a way through the castle's attic from the observatory to the master bedroom, and a loft door. Helen mentioned it just today.'\n\n'But Prentice!' Ash laughed, coughing. 'All you've got is Rory's ... written word for it!'\n\n'It's all circumstantial, I know. Although mum does remember the party at Hamish and Tone's, and Lachy did help Fiona take Fergus home.'\n\n'Wow,' Ash said, tartly.\n\n'So anyway, what's happened is: Fergus has spilled these beans to Rory, who's spent years trying to come up with some creative ideas for his big project and failed dismally, then decided Just Use It; use the one spectacular piece of real-life drama only he and Fergus know about; he's written this sort of diary piece about the time they were in the bothy together; another, more fictionalised bit about what Fergus actually saw; and then a third passage that ... well, that's the point.' I glanced over at her. 'I was hoping you might see the same thing I did in that last bit, the bit in the car. I think that was what Rory was writing just before he borrowed the bike and went to see Fergus, because of what he had started to suspect, when he was writing that.'\n\n'Went to see Fergus?'\n\n'Yes.' I looked over at her. 'And Fergus killed him.'\n\n_'What?_ And Fergus _killed_ him?' Ash said, voice high. 'Why, Prentice?' She opened the window a crack and threw the roach out.\n\n'I'll come to that,' I said, holding up one finger. We were passing Loch Restil now; I was still watching out for stags.\n\nAshley shook her head. 'Prentice, have you been reading crime novels instead of your history books?'\n\nI gave a small laugh. 'No. The worst crimes are always in the history books, anyway.'\n\nAsh undid her hair, reached into her bag and started to brush her hair with a long-tooth comb. 'Hmm,' she said. 'Okay. So keep going.'\n\n'Right,' I said. 'That guy Paxton-Marr. He'd been sending dad those match-book covers ... I mean _match-book_ covers, right?'\n\n'Yeah, so?'\n\n'So he knows Fergus; Fergus was getting the guy to send them, making dad think Rory was still alive, farting around all over the world. Why should Fergus want to do that?'\n\n'I don't know, but what's so special about match-book covers?'\n\nI looked over for a moment; her face was pale in the lights of an on-coming car. 'That bit in the bothy,' I told her. 'Rory tells Fergus he accidentally set fire to a barn on the estate when he was a kid. I think the only other person Rory'd ever told about that was dad, who thought that nobody else knew. So when these match-book covers came from all over the world, he thought it was a secret sign from Rory.'\n\nAshley was silent for a while, then sighed. 'What fertile imaginations you have in your family.'\n\n'Yeah,' I said. 'I'm afraid so.'\n\nWe rounded the long left-hander into Glen Kinglas, where Verity had almost lost the back-end of the Beemer a year earlier. The long straight disappeared into the darkness. A few tiny red sparks in the distance were tail lights. I had another shivery feeling of d\u00e9j\u00e0-vu.\n\nAshley tapped her fingers on the dashboard, then ran them through her hair. After a while she said, 'And what did Rory suspect?'\n\n'Murder. His sister's murder.'\n\nAsh took her time before answering. 'You think Fergus killed your Aunt Fiona _as well?\"_\n\nI nodded. 'You guessed it.'\n\n'She was already dead when they had the crash?'\n\n'Hmm, I hadn't thought of that,' I admitted. I came off the power. I checked the mirror; there was nothing following us, and no headlights in front. 'No, I believe Rory got it right in that bit he wrote, and she was alive when they crashed; I was thinking of something else.'\n\n'What?' Ash said.\n\nI braked smoothly as though we were approaching a sharp corner, not on a long straight. From the corner of my eye, I could see Ash looking at me. I changed down to second gear, let the engine brake the car. I reached over and hit the little red release button on Ashley's seat belt, then I slammed the brakes on. The Golf skidded briefly along the road on locked wheels. I heard Ashley shout something. Her hands went out in front of her. She shot forward, harder than I'd intended and went 'Oof!' against the dashboard, blonde hair flying. Her head hit the screen.\n\nThe car juddered to a stop.\n\nI stared in horror.\n\nAsh sat rubbing her forehead. She glared at me. She was holding her chest just underneath her breasts with her other hand. She glared at me. 'What the _fucking_ hell was that for, Prentice?'\n\n'Oh shit,' I said, hand to mouth. 'Oh God, are you all right?' I checked the mirror, put both hands to my mouth. 'I didn't mean to actually hurt you.'\n\n'Well you actually did, you idiot.' She looked down at her seatbelt anchorage, then at the buckle. One side of the belt was still wrapped round her. I sat staring at her, my back against the driver's door, my heart pounding. Ashley patted her forehead, studied her fingers, then scowled at me and sat back in her seat, re-fixing her seatbelt. She waggled her shoulders, sticking her chest out a little and grimacing through the screen at the dark grey length of road exposed to the headlights. 'You complete fool, Prentice; I may never dance the rhumba again.' She looked at me, then pointed forwards. 'Drive.'\n\n'God, I'm sorry,' I said. I got the car moving again.\n\nAsh patted her chest and inspected her forehead in the mirror on the back of the sun-visor, using the torch she'd been reading with. 'No lasting damage done, I think,' she said, snapping the torch off and the visor shut.\n\n'I'm really sorry,' I said. I rubbed my hands on my trousers, one at a time. 'I didn't mean \u2013'\n\n'Enough,' Ash said. 'I promise I won't sue, okay?'\n\n'Yeah,' I said, shaking my head. 'But I'm really \u2013'\n\n'You think,' Ash interrupted, 'that your Uncle Fergus killed his wife by driving off the road and undoing her seat belt just before they hit?'\n\nI took a deep breath. 'Yes.'\n\n'Slow down, will you?' Ash said.\n\n'Eh?' I said, slowing. We hadn't been going particularly fast.\n\nThen I realised. 'Oh. Yeah,' I said, feeling even worse. 'I pick my places, don't I?'\n\nAsh didn't reply; we both watched, silent, as the Golf dawdled past the parking place at the Cowal road junction where Darren Watt had died.\n\n'Shit,' I said. 'Oh God, I'm doing an awful lot of apol \u2013'\n\n'Forget it,' Ash said. 'Let's get home.'\n\nI shook my head. 'Oh shit,' I said miserably.\n\nThe lights of Inveraray were off to our right, steady across the dark waters of Loch Shira as we rounded Strone Point, when Ash spoke again. 'Bit of a risky way to top your wife, isn't it?'\n\n'Convincing, though. And maybe ... Don't laugh,' I said, glancing over at her. 'Maybe the perfect crime.'\n\nAsh looked at me dubiously. 'Oh dear, Prentice. Really.'\n\n'I'm serious,' I said. 'He banged his head; he doesn't remember the last few miles of the drive. He even asked to be hypnotised, though they never did. Short-term memory gone, see? Hell, if he did it just on the spur of the moment, maybe even he isn't sure he meant it. He told me himself that he thought Fiona had been wearing a seat belt. I saw him just after the crash, while I was in hospital too, getting my appendix out. So nobody \u2013 maybe not even him \u2013 will ever know. It's fucking perfect. Risky but perfect, if it does work.'\n\nWe stopped at traffic lights by the ornate, hump-backed bridge that took the road over the Aray. I sat staring at the red light; Inveraray sat ahead, round the side of the little bay, white buildings glowing in the sodium twilight of the street lights.\n\n'But if he doesn't know he did it,' Ash said, putting the sun visor down again and checking her forehead in the mirror in the lights of the on-coming stream of traffic, 'why would he kill Rory anyway?'\n\nI shrugged. 'Maybe he _does_ know he did it; but even if he doesn't, he might guess that he did. Maybe he was afraid Rory would publish something too close to the truth, maybe Rory was threatening to tell people about his theory; the police, for a start. Maybe neither murder was premeditated; maybe Fergus just reacted, both times. I don't know.'\n\n'Hmm,' Ash said. She sat looking baffled for a bit, then shook her head. The lights changed and we crossed the bridge.\n\n'If I'm right,' I said, 'Fergus probably had thought about killing her before he did. Maybe he only actually decided then and there, on the road that night; but he must have thought about it. Like I say; even if he isn't sure he did it himself, he knows he might have. I mean how hard do you have to think about something, how seriously, before it becomes something you could do, in the heat of the moment?'\n\n'I give in,' said Ash. 'You tell me.'\n\n'Jeez,' I said. 'When I was feeling really bad last year I used to lie awake at night thinking that if there was some way of killing Lewis, quickly, painlessly, with no way of being found out, I might just do it, especially if I knew somehow that Verity would turn to me afterwards \u2013'\n\n'Oh for God's sake, Prentice,' Ash said, turning her head to watch downtown Inveraray slide past. A minute later we were out, accelerating down the darkness of the loch side.\n\n'Look,' I said. 'I was pretty fucked-up. I mean, I'm not saying it wasn't my own fault, Ash; I know it was. I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm just trying to explain that some crazy stuff can go through your head sometimes through love, or jealousy, and maybe, if it's triggered by something ... I mean if somebody had actually given me a method of killing Lewis like that I'd probably have been horrified. I hope I couldn't even have thought about doing it any more once I knew it was possible. It was just a fantasy, a kind of warped internal therapy, something I day-dreamed about to make me feel better.' I shrugged. 'Anyway, that's the case for the prosecution.'\n\nAsh sat, mulling, for a while.\n\n'So,' she said. 'Have you checked out whether Fergus was alone the night Rory may or may not have gone to see him? I mean this whole thing falls to pieces if your uncle \u2013'\n\n'He was alone, Ash,' I told her. 'Mrs McSpadden had gone to visit relatives in Fife that weekend. Mum and dad had suggested the twins came and stayed with us. Fergus brought them over about tea time; I remember talking to him. He had a couple of drinks and then he left. So he was alone in the castle.'\n\nAsh looked at me. I just shrugged.\n\n'Okay,' she said eventually. She rested her elbow on the door, and tapped at her teeth with one set of nails. Her skirt had ridden up a little, and I stole the occasional glance at her long, blackly shining legs.\n\n'So,' she said later when we were in the forest, away from the loch side and a few kilometres out of Furnace. 'What is to be done, Prentice?'\n\n'I don't know,' I confessed. 'There's no body ... Well, there is Aunt Fiona's, but that's neither here nor there. But Rory's still missing, in theory. I suppose I could go to the boys in blue with what I've got, but Jeez, can you imagine? Right, sonny, so you think this wee story that ye've read means yer uncle wiz kilt ... Ah see. Would you mind just putting on this nice white jaikit? Aye, the sleeves are a wee bitty on the long side, but you won't be needing yer hands much in this braw wee room we've got for you with the very soft wallpaper.'\n\nWe curved down into Furnace, the road finding the loch shore again. I could sense Ash looking at me, and chose not to look back, concentrating on checking the mirrors and the instruments. Eventually she took a breath. 'Okay. Supposing Fergus did kill Rory, what did he do with the body?'\n\n'Probably hid it,' I said. 'Not too near the castle ... He had plenty of time; all night. He had a Land Rover; he could have got the bike in the back. Bit of a struggle maybe, but Fergus is a biggish lad, and a 185 Suzi isn't that heavy. It did occur to me he could have driven the bike himself with the body lashed to his back looking like a pillion. It's a bit Mezentian, but possible. But then he'd have had to have walked back from wherever he left it ...' I looked over at Ashley, who was staring at me with a worried, even frightened expression. I shrugged. 'But I think he took it up to one of the lochs in the hills, in the Landy; used the forestry tracks and dumped body and bike together into the water. There are plenty of places. The forest to the south of the castle, on the other side of the canal ... It's just full of little lochs up there, and there are tracks to most of them; it's the obvious ... What's the matter?' I asked.\n\n'You're right into all this, aren't you?'\n\n'What do you expect?' I laughed, a strange, tight feeling in my belly. 'What if I'm right? Jeez, this guy might just have killed two of my close relations; wouldn't _you_ be kind of interested?'\n\nAsh breathed out. 'Oh dear, Prentice,' she sighed, shaking her head and staring out of the window at the night as we swept through the forest towards Lochgair. 'Oh dear, oh dear ...'\n\nWe pulled up outside the Watt house in Bruce Street before eleven. Ash looked in the visor mirror again. She frowned and held her hair away from her face, turning her head from side to side. 'Can't see a bruise,' she said.\n\nI looked over. 'No, I think you're all right there.' I spread my hands. 'Look, I'm really sorry \u2013'\n\n'Oh, shush,' Ash said. She nodded at the house. 'Coming in?'\n\n'Just for a minute. I'd like to ask a favour of your mum.'\n\n'Yeah?' Ash said, reaching into the back for her flight bag. 'Let me guess; you want to get in touch with Uncle Lachy.'\n\nI turned the engine off and killed the lights. 'Aye; I wondered if she might let me have his phone number in Australia. I'd like a wee word with him.'\n\n'Yeah, I bet you would.'\n\nWe got out of the car and walked up the path towards the door.\n\nI had a brief chat with Mrs Watt, gracefully refused a dram, and left after five minutes. A shower scattered raindrops in bright cones under the street lights as I drove away. I went up Bruce Street then took a couple of lefts onto the Oban road where it ran along the side of what had been the Slate Mine wharf.\n\nWhen I saw the building site, I pulled in and stopped the car.\n\nThe site was lit with a sort of hollow orange dimness by the nearby sodium lamps. It was here I'd come with Ashley that night after Margot's percussive cremation; we sat here on the Ballast Mound, the World Hill. It was the night she'd told me about Berlin, the Jacuzzi, and the man who'd hinted there was some trick being played on somebody in Gallanach. She'd given me that piece of the Berlin Wall, shortly after we'd sat together here. The developers had been going to level the mound the following day, preparatory to putting up some new houses.\n\nBut it looked like they hadn't got very far.\n\nThe old wharf was derelict again; levelled all right, and with foundation trenches dug, but no more. Little wooden stakes were stuck into the ground near a few of the trenches; loose bits of wet string tied to them lay straggled across the ploughed-up ground. There were no earth movers or dumper trucks on the site any more, just a couple of loose piles of bricks, the bottom few layers already overgrown by weeds. A picket fence round the site had been knocked flat almost all the way round, and the developer's signboard hung flapping in the breeze, secured at only one corner to a rickety, lop-sided framework.\n\nGone bust, I supposed and, with a look at where the Ballast Mound had been, drove away.\nCHAPTER 17\n\nThe line went dead. Twenty thousand kilometres away \u2013 and a lot more than that if you took the satellite route my words had \u2013 a man put the phone down on me. I listened to the electronic buzz for a while, then replaced the onyx handset in its gold cradle.\n\nI put my hands between my knees, looked out through my own reflection in the study windows to the darkness of the park and the string of orange lights along Kelvin Way, and felt a cold, sick feeling coiling in my belly. I was running out of excuses for doing nothing.\n\nIf Lachlan Watt had said _'What?'_ or _'How dare you!'_ or something like that; even if he'd just denied it \u2013 indignant or amused \u2013 and perhaps especially if he'd asked me to repeat what I'd just said, I'd have had some doubt. But to put the phone down ... Did that make sense? I mean, you're living quietly in Australia, the phone goes, and somebody you last remember as a kid in Scotland has the nerve to ask if you ever slept with his aunt in her marital bed. Do you put the phone down without another word if the answer's No?\n\nMaybe you do. Everybody's different. Maybe I still didn't know enough. I lowered my head to the green leather surface of the antique desk and banged my head softly a couple of times, my hands still clasped between my knees.\n\nI'd been putting this off for days. And anyway weeks had passed. First, Ashley's mum hadn't had Lachy's number, then she got it off somebody else in the family, then it turned out it was an old number (I hadn't tried it anyway) and he'd moved, then there was a delay getting the new number, and when Mrs Watt did phone up with it, I'd dithered. What was I supposed to say? How did I broach the subject? Come right out with it? Talk round it? Hint? Accuse? Make up some story about a just-discovered will, with a bequest to the one man she'd been unfaithful with? Or the one she'd most enjoyed being unfaithful with? Should I pretend to be a lawyer? A journalist? Offer money? I fretted for days and could have gone on doing so for months.\n\nI'd stayed in Glasgow that Thursday night, completing a paper on the effect of industrial growth on the drive towards the unification of Germany in the eighteenth century; it wasn't actually due in until the following Friday, but I reckoned that slamming the blighter in a whole seven days early would keep the Prof. happy.\n\nI'd turned one of the late Mrs Ippot's first-floor reception rooms into a study, moving a giant oak and leather desk over to the window with the help of Gav and Norris; I'd bought a PC similar to but faster than the machine at Lochgair and plonked it roughly in the middle of the mega-desk, where it looked a bit lost, but clashed nicely. For the essay on German unity, I'd surrounded the computer with a dozen delicately beautiful pieces of Meissen pottery. Whether they had any positive effect on the worth of the paper I don't know, but they were a lot more soothing to look at while I was searching for inspiration than a blinking cursor.\n\nI'd finished the paper about 2am and printed it out. I thought about getting in the car there and then, dropping the paper through the letter-box of a pal who'd take it in to the department for me tomorrow, and then heading for Lochgair. But I was tired, and I'd already told mum I'd be down in the morning; I didn't want to wake her by arriving in the middle of the night.\n\nSo I'd had a whisky and gone to bed.\n\nThe main bedroom in Mrs Ippot's expansive town house contained a canopied four-poster about the size of a double garage, the sleeping surface of which was about the same height as a mini's roof. The posts were telegraph-pole thick; highly polished mahogany carved into representations of fairies, elves and gnomes, all stacked like little caryatids. I liked to imagine they were the work of an Amerindian totem-pole maker who'd read too much Tolkien.\n\nThe centre-piece of the bedroom was a vast chandelier cut from ruby-coloured Murano glass; it hung like a glistening spray of frozen blood from the centre of a gilt-smothered ceiling whose few flat patches were covered in paintings of cherubs and fawns cavorting in a sylvan landscape that appeared to be equal parts Rubens and Disney.\n\nThe walls of the room, when not hidden from view by the bed's luxurious (but Islamically abstract) brocade side curtains, were covered with huge Rococo canvases of Venus in various guises, settings and ages, though all shared the same state of deshabille and a rotundity of figure that must have required the painterly equivalent of soft-focus to appear so leniently attractive.\n\nWhere the walls did not glow with acres of flesh, they reflected that golden voluptuousness with great gilt-frame mirrors which almost visibly strained the walls they hung on, and which, I couldn't help but notice, also provided rather a good view from and of the silk-sheeted bed. I'd understood Mrs Ippot had been elderly and frail when she died, but I rather hoped she'd had more fun in the bed than just lying there contemplating the condign punishment I'd decided she had devised for her immediate family (certainly _I_ had yet to share the space between those sheets with anybody, though the bedroom's sheer scale and stateliness did lend masturbation an air of solemnity and arguable dignity the apprehension of which had previously quite passed me by). Even the bedside tables were Chippendale; one of them was topped with a large cut-crystal Venetian vase which I kept fruit in, when I remembered. Otherwise it played host to the little lump of concrete that had been part of the Berlin Wall, which Ashley had given to me over a year earlier.\n\nThe bedroom also contained the greater part of Mrs I's collection of camphor-wood chests; a few too many, perhaps. Despite the visual and tactile splendour, olfactorily it was like sleeping in a chemist's.\n\nHowever, the sad truth is that being surrounded by art treasures designed to excite the eye, gladden the gland and animate the avarice does not guarantee a full night's kip. I'd woken at about half-six, lain there restlessly for a bit, then given up trying to get back to sleep and got up to have some toast and a cup of tea.\n\nI'd put the TV on in the kitchen and found we were at war.\n\nI sat and watched it for a while; heard the CNN guys in Baghdad, saw the reporters report from Saudi airfields, listened to the studio pundits gibber about surgical strikes and pinpoint accuracy, and discovered that, these days, war is prosecuted, not waged. Actually, both words struck me as possessing greasily appropriate connotations in the circumstances.\n\n'Fuck it,' I said to myself. What was telephoning somebody you hardly know on the other side of the planet and asking them impertinent questions about their sex life, compared to this gratuitous malfeasance? I strode up the stairs to the reception-room study, determined to make the phone call.\n\nI settled on the direct approach and the truth about myself.\n\nAnd Lachy Watt put the phone down on me.\n\nMaybe he just wanted to get back to the TV and watch our exciting Third World War for a bit.\n\nI'd stayed in the Lochgair house over Hogmanay itself. We had plenty of drink in, and mum and I had prepared loads of food, but not many people actually visited after the bells. Verity went to bed about ten past midnight after struggling to stay awake from about ten o'clock. She had a very small glass of whisky at the bells. Some people from the village came in about one, Aunt Tone and Uncle Hamish arrived about two for half an hour of strained conversation, and some of James's pals called in after four, but mostly it was just mum, Lewis, James and I together. James conked out about six, but Lewis and I were determined to see the dawn come up just on principle.\n\nWe sat in the conservatory, talking and listening to CDs on the gateaux blaster, which I'd brought down with me from Glasgow because it sounded better than the Golfs own sound system (which anyway didn't include a CD player). We were drinking whisky, chasing it with pints of mineral water; pacing ourselves. Lewis felt we were both starting to nod off at one point and so suggested a game of chess. I mooted for the River Game, but we'd have had to have dug the board and everything out and read through all the rules, so we decided chess would be simpler.\n\n'I've been too sensible,' I told him, while pondering a pawn exchange.\n\n'Sensible?' Lewis sounded surprised. _'You?'_\n\nI grinned. 'Well ... Look at me; I'm studying, I'm living quietly, I'm coming home to mother each weekend ... I even bought a sensible, reasonably cheap car. All that money I got...' I shook my head. 'I'm twenty-two; I should have blown it all on floozies or dangerous drugs, or just took off round the world, or bought a Ferrari.'\n\n'You can't buy a Ferrari for forty grand,' Lewis said, chin in hands, studying the board.\n\n'I didn't say it had to be a new one.'\n\nLewis shrugged. 'Well, you've still got most of the dosh. Go ahead; go do some of that stuff.'\n\n'Yeah, but I sort of promised mum I'd get this degree.'\n\n'Okay, so wait till the summer and _then_ do it.'\n\n'But mum'll just worry if I get a fast car.'\n\n'So take off round the world.'\n\n'Yeah. Maybe. I might.'\n\nLewis looked up at me. 'What are you intending to do, anyway, Prentice?' He grimaced, stretched, rubbed his face. 'I mean, are you still just going to wait and see who's recruiting graduates and then take what sounds like the best job, or have you settled on something yet? Something you actually want to do?'\n\nI shook my head. 'Still open, that one,' I said. I took the pawn Lewis had offered. He looked vaguely surprised. 'I still like the idea of just _being_ a historian,' I told him. 'You know, ideally. But that means staying in academia, and I don't know if that's what I want. Somehow I don't think they let you go straight from graduation onto prime-time TV with a twenty-six part dramatised history of the world.'\n\n'Sounds a little unlikely,' Lewis agreed, taking my pawn. 'You given up on the diplomatic service?'\n\nI smiled, thinking back a year to Uncle Hamish's party. 'Well, I'm not sure I'm cut out for that. I've met some of those people, they're bright ... But in the end you have to do as you're damn well told by fuckwit politicians.'\n\n'Ah! Politics, then?' Lewis said.\n\nI bit my lip, looking the length and breadth of the board, trying to work out if the bishop I wanted to move next was going to cause any problems in its new position. 'Na, I should have started by now anyway, but ... shit; you have to make deals. You have to lie, or come so damn close to lying it makes little difference. It's all so fucking expedient, Lewis; they all have this thing about my enemy's enemy is my friend. \"He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch.\" I mean; good grief. What a crock of shit that is. I despair for our species.'\n\n'Not politics, then.'\n\n'I wonder if Noam Chomsky needs an assistant,' I said.\n\n'Probably got one,' Lewis said.\n\n'Yeah,' I sighed. 'Probably.'\n\nLewis looked quizzical. 'Everything else all right?'\n\n'Yeah,' I said, feeling awkward. 'Why?'\n\nHe shrugged, studied the board again. 'I don't know. I just wondered if there was anything ...'\n\n'Hi guys.'\n\nWe both looked over to see Verity, hair in spiky disarray, face soft with sleep, wrapped in a long white towelling dressing gown, padding into the conservatory holding a glass of milk.\n\n'Morning,' I said.\n\n'Hi there, darlin,' Lewis said, swivelling so she could sit on his lap. She put her head on his shoulder and he kissed her forehead. 'You okay?'\n\nShe nodded sleepily. Then she straightened, drank some milk and ruffled Lewis's hair. 'Might get dressed,' she said, yawning. 'Been having nightmares.'\n\n'Aw,' Lewis said tenderly. 'You poor thing. Want me to come to bed?'\n\nVerity sat on Lewis's lap, rocking back and forth a little, her bottom lip pouting. She frowned and said, 'No.' She smoothed Lewis's hair again. 'I'll get up. You finish your game.' She smiled at me, then looked up. 'Nearly dawn.'\n\n'Why, so it is,' I said. Beyond the glass of the conservatory there was just the faintest hint of grey in the sky over the house.\n\nVerity waved bye-bye and went off, head down, rubbing her eyes, back into the house.\n\nI moved the bishop. Lewis sat and thought.\n\nI had won a knight and another pawn for the bishop when Verity came back. She was washed and dressed; she looked fabulous in leggings and a black maternity dress with a black leather jacket over the top. She stood at the doors, clapped her hands together and \u2013 when we appeared quizzical \u2013 waved some keys at us and said, 'Fancy a drive?'\n\nWe looked at each other and both shrugged at the same time.\n\nWe took Lewis and Verity's new soft-top XR3i \u2013 roof down, heater up full \u2013 out into the grey-pink dawn and drove through Lochgilphead and then into Gallanach and just cruised about the town, waving at the people still walking around the place and shouting Happy New Year! at one and all. Lewis and I had brought the whisky, just in case we met anybody we felt we ought to offer a dram. So we started with each other, and all that water during the night must have done us the power of good because the whisky tasted great.\n\n(I'd looked back at the castle, as we'd passed the hill on the outskirts of Gallanach, feeling guilty and ashamed and nervous because I still hadn't done anything about my suspicions, but telling myself that I _still didn't have any real_ evidence, and anyway I was off-duty now; this was the season to have fun, after all. Hogmanay; let's-get-oot-oor-brains time. And, naturally, an end-of-year truce. Hell, it was traditional.)\n\n'Let's go down Shore Road and drop some whisky on that grave dad hit!' Lewis shouted suddenly. 'Mr Andrew McDobbie 1823\u2013 1875 and his wife Moira 1821-1903 deserve to be thought of at this time!'\n\n'Ugh, you ghoul,' said Verity.\n\n'No,' I said. 'It's a great idea. Verity; to the church!'\n\nWhich is how we came to find Helen Urvill and Dean Watt wandering through Gallanach along Shore Road, arm in arm. Dean was playing \u2013 necessarily softly \u2013 on his Stratocaster, while Helen held a bottle of Jack Daniels. They were being followed by a bemused-looking dog.\n\n'Happy New Year!' shouted Dean Watt, and struck a chord. There ensued a great deal of Happy New Years; the mongrel that had been following Helen and Dean joined in by barking.\n\nThere were lots of hugs and handshakes and kisses too, before Helen Urvill yelled, 'Yo Verity!' as she hung on Dean's shoulder and breathed bourbon fumes at us. 'You sober, girl?'\n\n'Yep,' Verity nodded briskly. 'Want a lift anywhere?'\n\nHelen swung woozily round to look at Dean, who was fiddling with a machine-head. 'Well, we were heading back for the castle ...' She frowned deeply, and her eyes flicked around a bit. 'I think ...' She shrugged; her thick black eyebrows waggled. 'But if you're going somewhere ...'\n\n'Let's go somewhere,' Verity said to Lewis, who was in the passenger's seat. 'Somewhere further.' She nudged Lewis.\n\n'Okay,' Lewis said. 'Got a full tank; where we going to go?'\n\n'Oban!'\n\n'Boring!'\n\n'Glasgow!'\n\n'What _for?'_\n\n'How about,' I suggested, over the noise of the barking hound. 'That bit north of Tighnabruaich, where you can look out over the Kyles of Bute? That's a nice bit of scenery.'\n\n'Brilliant!' Lewis said.\n\n'Great idea!'\n\n'Let's go!'\n\n'Get in, then.'\n\n'And let's take the dog.'\n\n'Is it car-trained?'\n\n'Who cares? We can point it over the side if it comes to it.'\n\n'Fuck it, yeah, let's take the mutt.'\n\n'Might not want to come,' Dean said, and handed the Fender to Lewis, who put it at his feet with the neck by the door, while Dean knelt down by the side of the dog, which was sniffing at the rear wheel of the Escort.\n\n'Course it wants to come,' Helen said, with the conviction only the truly drunk can muster. 'Not a dog been born doesn't like sticking its nose out a car window.'\n\n'Here you go,' grunted Dean, lifting a puzzled-looking canine of medium build, indeterminate breed and brownly brindled coat into the car and onto my lap.\n\n'Hey, thanks,' I said, as Helen clambered in beside me and Dean squeezed in on her far side. 'So it's me that gets to find out if this beast's shit-scared of driving.'\n\n'Ah, stop whining,' Helen said, and pulled the fishy-smelling dog away from me to plonk it in Dean's lap.\n\n'All set?' asked Verity.\n\n'I wonder if its wee eyes'll light up when the brakes go on?' Dean said, trying to look into them.\n\n'All set!' Helen yelled, then yodelled lustily as we performed a U-turn and went smoothly back through the town. Helen offered me some Jack Daniels, which I accepted. We still shouted Happy New Year! at people, and the dog barked enthusiastically in accompaniment; it didn't seem in the least discomfited when we left Gallanach and headed through Lochgilphead and away.\n\nWe stopped briefly at Lochgair. I ran into the house. Mum was up, washing dishes. I kissed and hugged her and said we'd be a few hours. Not to worry; Verity was bright as a button and so sober it ought to constitute a crime in Scotland at this time on a Hogmanay morning. She told me to make sure nobody else drove, then, and be careful. She made me take a load of sandwiches, dips and God-knows what, two bottles of mineral water and a flask of coffee she'd just made, and I staggered out the house and had to put most of it in the convertible's rather small boot, but then that was that and off we went through the calm, brightening day, playing lots of very loud music and munching through the various bits and pieces of food I hadn't stashed in the boot. Dog liked the garlic dip best.\n\n'I don't give a fuck what colour he is; a man who can't pronounce his own name shouldn't be in charge of the most destructive military machine the world has ever seen,' I heard Lewis say, while I sat looking at Dean Watt, and thought, Shit, not again.\n\n'She did, did she?' I said, trying to look pleased. 'Well. Good for her. Nice chap, is he?'\n\nDean shrugged. 'Okay, ah suppose.'\n\nWe were sitting on the rocks beyond the car-park crash barrier at the viewpoint above West Glen, overlooking the Kyles of Bute. The island itself stretched away to the south, all pastel and shade in the slightly watery light of this New Year's morning. The waters of the sound looked calmly ruffled, reflecting milky stretches of the lightly clouded sky.\n\nDamn, I thought.\n\nAshley had got off with somebody at Liz and Droid's party. Dancin and winchin, as Dean had put it. Then gone off together. And suddenly I felt like it had happened again. Maybe not quite as stylish as jumping off your uncle's Range Rover into your future husband's arms, but just as effective. My heart didn't exactly go melt-down this time, but it still wasn't too pleasant a feeling.\n\nDean seemed happy to adjust his Strat and pick out the occasional tiny, tinny-sounded phrase; Lewis and Verity and Helen were arguing about the coming war. Or at least Lewis was ranting and they were having to listen.\n\n'Aw, Hell,' Lewis said. 'I'm not arguing he isn't an evil bastard ...'\n\nAshley, I thought, staring out into the view. Ashley, what was I thinking of? Why had I taken it so slow? What had I been frightened of? Why hadn't I said anything?\n\nHadn't I known what it was I wanted to say?\n\n'\u2013 democracy and freedom, what Our Brave Boys are actually going to be fighting for is to restore the nineteenth century to Kuwait and defend the seventeenth century in Saudi Arabia.'\n\nNow I thought I knew what I wanted to say, but it might already be too late. The knowledge and the provenance of its uselessness were the same; a feeling of loss I couldn't deny. Did that mean I was in love with her? If I was, it felt quite different from what I'd felt for Verity. (Verity sat at Lewis's side, huddled in her leggings and leathers and wearing Lewis's startlingly bright skiing jacket, all orange and purple and lime; she looked like a little psychedelic blonde Buddha perched on the tartan car rug.) Something calmer than that, something slower.\n\n'\u2013 ternational law is only so goddman sacrosanct when it isn't something awkward like the World Court telling America to quit mining Nicaraguan harbours.'\n\nBut perhaps I was wrong about Ash being interested in me, anyway. Ashley was the one I remembered talking to in the Jac that evening after Grandma Margot's cremation; she was the one who kept telling me to tell Verity I loved her. If you love her, tell her. Wasn't that what she'd said? So if Ashley felt anything for me beyond friendship, why hadn't she said anything to me? And if she did feel anything, what was she doing going off with this friend of Droid's?\n\n'\u2013 next time the US wants to invade somewhere and see what happens; out'll come that good old veto again. Heck, we got _lots_ of practice using that. _We'll_ do it if the Yanks don't. Panama? This place with the ditch? You don't like the guy in power any more after paying him all that CIA drug money over the years? Ah, why not? On you go. Seven thousand dead? Never mind, we can hush that up.'\n\nCould I finally be right, and a woman was taking up with somebody else to make me feel jealous? I doubted it. Maybe she had been patiently waiting for me to tell her how I felt, or make some sort of move, and now she was fed up waiting, so all bets were off. But why should she have been so passive? Was Ashley that old-fashioned ? Didn't sound like it; from what she'd told me, it was her who went after that Texan systems analyst, not the other way round. If she'd fancied me at all she'd have said or done something about it before now, wouldn't she?\n\n'\u2013 resolutions are fine, unless they're against Israel, of course, in which case, Aw sheeit; you guys just stay in them Golan Heights, and that Gaza Strip. Shoot; them Palestinians probably weren't \u2013 aw, gosh-darn; did I say shoot them Palestinians? Well, hell no, we won't mention that. Twenty-three years the Israelis have been ignoring UN resolutions and occupying foreign territory; south, east and north. Hell's teeth, they'd probably invade the Mediterranean if you told them the fish were Palestinian. But does the US lay siege to them? Impose sanctions? Like fuck, they _bank-roll_ the place!'\n\nMaybe she did think of me as a brother. All those times I'd rambled drunkenly away to her about how much I loved Verity and what a hard time I was getting from everybody, and how wonderful Verity was, and what a poor, hard-done-by kid I was, and how much I loved Verity and how nobody understood me, and how wonderful Verity was ... How could you expect anybody to listen to all that moronic, self-pitying, self-deluding crap for so long and not think. Poor jerk?\n\n'\u2013 we paid him to fight the Iranians for us, but now the scumbag's getting uppity, so we'll pay other scumbags like Assad to help fight _him,_ and it'll all happen \u2013'\n\nUnloading all that stuff on Ash; most people would have told me to fuck off, but she listened, or at least didn't interrupt ... but what must she have been thinking? The response just couldn't be, Oh, he's so sensitive, or Oh, what a deep capacity for lurve this young fellow has ... _Poor jerk._ That about covered it. Or just, _Jerk._\n\n'\u2013 a modern day Hitler it's Pol Pot; even Saddam Hussein hasn't obliterated two million of his own people. But does the West mount a crusade against _that_ genocidal mother-fucker? No! We're _supporting_ the vicious scumbag! The United fucking States of America and the United fucking Kingdom think he's just the bee's knees because he's fighting those pesky Vietnamese who had the _nerve_ to beat Uncle Sam \u2013'\n\nBut maybe she hadn't really got off with this guy. Maybe it was all a mistake, maybe there was still a chance. Oh shit, I thought, and watched a seagull glide smoothly through the air below us, over the tops of the trees and the bundled rocks that led down to the distant shore.\n\n'Oh,' said Verity suddenly, and clutched her belly, and looked wide-eyed at Lewis, who was in full flight over the vexed sands of Kuwait, and apparently quite beyond verbal interception.\n\n'\u2013 Sabra and Chatila; ask the Kurds in Halabja \u2013' He stopped dead, looked at his wife, who was still clutching her belly, looking pleadingly at him.\n\nLewis's jaw dropped and his face went white.\n\nVerity hugged herself, put her head between her knees and started to rock back and forth. 'Oh-oh,' she said.\n\nLewis staggered to his feet, hands flailing, while Verity's shoulders started to quiver. The dog, which had been snoozing at Lewis's feet, jumped up too.\n\n'Verity, what's wrong? Is it \u2013?' began Helen, leaning over and putting an arm on Verity's shoulders.\n\n'Who's the least drunk?' Lewis hollered, gaze oscillating rapidly between the car parked a few metres behind us and his wife, sitting rocking back and forth and shaking. The dog barked, bouncing up on its front feet, then sneezing.\n\n'Oh! Oh! Oh!' said Verity, as Helen hugged her.\n\n'Aw Christ,' said Dean. 'Verity, you're no about to drop, are ye?'\n\nLewis stood with his hands out, fingers splayed, eyes closed, on the rock. 'I don't believe this is happening!' he yelled. The dog barked loudly in what sounded like agreement.\n\nHelen Urvill, her face down at Verity's knees \u2013 where Verity's head was still wedged \u2013 suddenly slapped Verity across the back and rolled away, laughing.\n\nDean looked confused. I felt the same way, then realised.\n\nLewis opened his eyes and stared at Helen lying laughing on the rock.\n\nVerity rose quickly and gracefully, her face pink and smiling. She stepped up to Lewis and hugged him, rocking him, her face tipped up to his as she giggled. 'Joke,' she told him. 'It isn't happening. I keep telling you, this baby's going to be born in a nice warm birthing pool in a nice big hospital. Nowhere else.'\n\nLewis sagged. He might have fallen if Verity hadn't held him. He slapped both hands over his face. 'You unutterable ... minx!' he roared, and put a hand to each side of Verity's grinning face, holding her head and shaking it. She just giggled.\n\nSo we sat and had some coffee and sandwiches.\n\n_'Damn_ fine coffee,' muttered Lewis.\n\nWell, he had a tartan shirt on.\n\nWe drove back later; I watched buzzards and crows and gulls stoop and wheel and glide across the under-surface of thickening grey cloud. We were all very tired save Verity, and I must have fallen asleep because it came as a surprise when we had to stop to put the top up, in Inveraray, when the rain came on. It was a cramped, claustrophobic journey after that, and the dog whined a lot and smelled.\n\nWe got to Lochgair; I staggered into the house, collapsed into my bed and slept for the rest of the day.\n\nI kept missing Ashley after that. Whenever I rang the Watt house she was out, or asleep. She rang me once, but I'd been out walking. Next time I called she had caught the train for Glasgow, en route for the airport and London.\n\nTone and Hamish's usual post-Hogmanay soiree had been even more subdued than usual. Hamish had given up drink, but apparently found his heretical ideas on retribution more difficult to jettison, and so spent most of the evening telling me \u2013 with a kind of baleful enthusiasm \u2013 about a Commentary he was writing on the Bible, which cast new light on punishment and reward in the hereafter, and which had great contemporary relevance.\n\nI drove back to Glasgow on the fifth of January. After New Year's Eve, watching Fergus show off his new plane, I hadn't visited the castle again.\n\nTwo weeks later, after I had had my abbreviated conversation with Lachlan Watt in sunny Sydney, I set off for Lochgair at nine that Friday morning, listening to the war on the radio for as long as I could, until the mountains blocked out the signal.\n\nWar breaks out amongst the oilfields and the price of crude plummets. From being an ally so staunch he can missile American ships and it passes as an understandable mistake, and gas thousands of Kurds with barely a gesture of censure (Thatcher promptly increased his export credits, and within three weeks Britain was talking about all the lovely marketing opportunities Iraq represented; for chemicals, presumably), Saddam Hussein had suddenly become Adolf Hitler, despite more or less being invited to walk into Kuwait.\n\nIt was a war scripted by Heller from a story by Orwell, and somebody would be bombing their own airfield before too long, no doubt.\n\nFrom Glasgow to Lochgair is a hundred and thirty-five kilometres by road; less as the crow flies, or as the missile cruises. The journey took about an hour and a half, which is about normal when the roads aren't packed with tourists and caravans. I spent most of the time shaking my head in disbelief at the news on the radio, and telling myself that I mustn't allow this to distract me from confronting Fergus, or at the very least sharing my suspicions with somebody other than Ash.\n\nBut I think I already knew that was exactly what would happen.\n\nAnd Ash ... God, the damn thing may be just muscle, merely a pump, but my heart really did seem to ache whenever I thought of her.\n\nSo I tried not to think about Ashley Watt at all, utterly unsure whether by doing so I was being very strong, or extremely stupid. I chose not to make an informed guess which; my track record didn't encourage such honesty.\n\nMum dropped her laser-guided bombshell over lunch that day. We were sitting in the kitchen, watching the war on television, dutifully listening to the same reports and watching the same sparse bits of footage time after time. I was already starting to get bored with the twin blue-pink glowing cones of RAF Tornadoes' afterburners as they took off into the night, and even the slo-mo footage of the exciting Brit-made JP-233 runway-cratering package scattering bomblets and mines with the demented glee of some Satanic Santa was already inducing feelings of weary familiarity.\n\nOn the other hand, such repetition left one free to appreciate the subtler points in these reports that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, such as the fact that the English _could_ pronounce the soft _ch_ sound, after all. The little rascals had only been teasing us all these years, saying 'Lock' Lomond and 'Lock' Ness! Why, it must be something genetic, we'd all thought. But no! Places like Bah'rain and Dah'ran were rolled confidently off the tongue by newsreader after newsreader and correspondent after correspondent as though they'd been using the technique for years.\n\nUnfortunately, rather like a super-gun, there appeared to be a problem traversing such a sophisticated phonetic delivery system, and while the Arabian peninsula obviously lay in the favoured direction, nowhere unfortunate enough to be located to the north of London seemed able to benefit from this new-found facility.\n\n'Oh,' mum said, passing the milk across the kitchen table to me, 'assuming we're all still alive next Friday, Fergus has asked me to the opera in Glasgow. Is it all right if we stay with you?'\n\nI watched the lines of tracer climb above Baghdad, impotent spirals of light twisting to and fro. I felt frozen. Had I heard right? I looked at my mother.\n\nShe frowned. 'Prentice, are you okay?'\n\n'Wha-?' I said. I could feel the blood draining from my face. I put the jug down, feeling as white as the low-fat it contained. I tried to swallow. I couldn't talk, so I settled for clearing my throat and looking at mum with a interrogatory expression.\n\n'Fergus,' mum said tolerantly. 'Invited me to the opera in Glasgow, next Friday. May we stay with you? I assume there's room ... I do mean separate rooms, Prentice.' She smiled. 'Are you all right? You're not worried about the war, are you? You look white as a sheet.'\n\n'I'm fine,' I waved one hand weakly. Actually I felt sick.\n\n'You look sick,' mum said.\n\nI tried to swallow again. She shook her head. 'Don't worry, Prentice. They won't conscript you; you're far too Bolshie. I really wouldn't worry.'\n\n'Hg,' I said, almost gagging.\n\n'Is that all right? Are we allowed to stay with you? Does your lease, or whatever, cover that?'\n\n'Ah,' I said at last. 'Yeah.' I nodded, finally swallowing successfully. 'Yeah, I think so. I mean, of course. Yes. Why not? Loads of room. What opera? What are you going to see?'\n\n'Macbeth.'\n\n_Macbeth!_ 'Oh,' I said, trying to smile. 'That's Verdi, isn't it?'\n\n'Yes, I think so,' mum said, still frowning. 'Would you like to come? It's a box, so there should be room.'\n\n'Um, no thanks,' I said. I didn't know what to do with my hands, which seemed to want to shake. Finally I shoved them in the pockets of my jeans.\n\n'You sure you're all right, Prentice?'\n\n'Of course!'\n\nMum tipped her head to one side. 'You're not upset because I'm going out with Fergus, are you?'\n\n'No!' I laughed. 'Why, are you?'\n\n'We've partnered each other at bridge a couple of times. He's a friend, Prentice, that's all.' Mum looked puzzled.\n\n'Right. Well,' I said. 'Yes, of course there's room. I'll ... no problem.'\n\n'Good,' mum said, and clicked a couple of sweeteners into her tea. She was still looking at me strangely. I turned and watched the war for a while. Jumping Jesus, now what?\n\nI sat at dad's desk. It took longer to write down what I suspected than I'd thought it would. I started with pen and paper, but my writing looked funny and I kept having to dry my hand. Finally I used the computer and printed out what I'd typed. I put the sheet of paper in an envelope and left it lying in the top right drawer of the desk. I wished dad had had a gun, but he hadn't. I settled for the old Bowie knife I'd had since my Scouting days, sticking the leather sheath down the back of my jeans. I changed into a T-shirt and a shortish jumper so that I could get at the knife quickly, feeling frightened and embarrassed as I did so.\n\nMum was in what had been a spare bedroom, constructing the harpsichord. When I stuck my head round the door, the room stank of varnish and the sort of old-fashioned glue you'd rather not know the original source of. 'I'm just going up to the castle, to see Uncle Fergus,' I said. 'You reminded me: there are some pieces of Lalique in the house I'm staying in. I thought I'd have a talk to Fergus about them, see if he fancied bidding for them when the contents are eventually auctioned.'\n\nMum was standing at the work-bench, dressed in overalls, her hair tied back. She was polishing a piece of veneer with a cloth. 'Pieces of what?' she said, blowing from the side of her mouth to dislodge a wisp of hair that had escaped the hair clasp.\n\n'Lalique. Ren\u00e9 Lalique. Glass; you know.'\n\n'Oh, yes.' She looked surprised. 'Fergus'll see them on Friday, won't he?'\n\n'Well, they're in storage in the cellar,' I said. 'I haven't actually seen them. They're in the inventory. I took a note of them. But I thought if he did want to look at them, maybe I could look them out in time for Friday.'\n\n'Oh.' Mum shrugged, tipped oil from a bottle onto the brown-stained cloth. 'Okay, then. Say hello from me.'\n\n'Yeah,' I said. I closed the door.\n\nI walked away thinking I should have said more, should have said ... well, the conventional things you tell people when you're going in fear of your life. But I couldn't think of a way to say them that wouldn't sound ridiculous and melodramatic. I'd closed off the letter I'd left in the desk with quite enough of that sort of thing, I thought.\n\nI took the Golf out of Lochgair, along the Gallanach road. The Bowie knife was an uncomfortable lump down and across the small of my back, its wood and brass handle cold on my back at first, then warming.\n\nI stopped and made a phone call in Lochgilphead.\n\n'Mr Blawke, sorry to trouble you at home \u2013'\n\nOstensibly I was just checking out whether it was all right for me to mention the Lalique to Fergus, before the expensive French glass-ware was included in any auction, but really I was making sure the lawyer Blawke knew where I was going.\n\nIt wasn't until I was at the foot of the castle driveway that I realised all this time I'd just been assuming Fergus would be there. As I hesitated, hands shaking on the wheel, it occurred to me there was probably a good chance he wasn't. I hadn't checked, after all, and Fergus frequently went away for the weekend; maybe he wasn't at the castle. Relief coursed through me, along with an annoying current of shame that I felt so relieved.\n\nI took the Golf up the drive.\n\nThe gravel circle in front of the castle held five cars, including Fergus's Range Rover. 'Oh God,' I said to myself.\n\nI parked the Golf behind a Bristol Brigand which sat half on the gravel and half on the grass. I walked up to the doors and rang the bell.\n\n'Prentice!' Mrs McSpadden roared. 'Happy New Year to you.'\n\n'Happy New Year,' I said, realising only then that I hadn't seen Mrs McS since the turn of the year. I was permitted to kiss the formidable ramparts of one of Mrs McS's cheeks. 'Is Uncle Fergus in?' I asked. _Say,_ No, I thought, _Say,_ No!\n\n'Aye, he is that,' she said, letting me into the castle. 'I think they're playing billiards. I'll take you up.' She stood aside to let me into the entrance hall with its glassy-eyed audience of stags' heads.\n\n'Actually, it's sort of personal,' I said, smiling faintly, aware I was blinking a lot.\n\nMrs McS looked at me oddly. 'Is that a fact? Well, then, would you wait in the library?'\n\n'Ah ... all right,' I said.\n\nWe walked through the hall. 'Isn't this Gulf thing terrible?' Mrs McSpadden shouted, as if trying to be heard there. I agreed it was terrible. She showed me into the library, on the other side of the lower hall from the kitchen entrance. I stood in there nervously, trying to breathe normally, letting my gaze flick over the ranked rows of impressive, dark leather spines. I wished my own was half so noble and upright. The room smelled of leather and old, musty paper. I went to look out one of the room's two small windows, at the garden and the wood beyond. I adjusted the knife down the back of my jeans so that I could get at it easily.\n\n'Prentice?' Fergus Urvill said, entering the library. He closed the door behind him. He was dressed in tweed britches and a Pringle jumper over a checked country shirt, with thick socks and brogues. He brushed some grey-black hair away from his face. His jowls flexed as he smiled at me, lifting a little from the collar of his shirt.\n\nI cleared my throat.\n\nFergus stood there, his arms folded. After a moment he said, 'What can I do for you, young man?'\n\nI moved from the window to the large wooden table that filled the centre of the room, and put my hands lightly on its surface to stop them shaking. A seat back pressed into my thighs.\n\n'Fergus ...' I began. 'I wondered ... I wondered if you knew where ... where my Uncle Rory might be.'\n\nFergus frowned, then one eye closed and he sort of cocked his head. Still with his arms folded, he leaned forward a little. 'Sorry? Your uncle \u2013'\n\n'Uncle Rory,' I said. Maybe a little too loudly, but at least my voice didn't sound as shaky as I'd expected. I lowered it a little to say, 'I thought you might have an idea where he is.'\n\nFergus stood straight again. The frown was still there around his eyes, but his lips were smiling. 'You mean Rory, who disappeared ...?'\n\n'Yes,' I nodded. My mouth felt dry and I had to fight to swallow.\n\n'I've no idea, Prentice.' Fergus scratched behind one ear with one hand. He looked mystified. 'Why do you think I might know?'\n\nI felt myself blinking too much again, and tried to stop it. I took a breath.\n\n'Because you got a man called Rupert Paxton-Marr to send match-book covers to my dad.' My hands were shaking even though they were planted on the surface of the table. I pressed down harder.\n\nFergus rocked back a little on his brogues. His frown-smile intensified. 'Rupert? Sending your dad ... what?' He looked a little amused, a little confused, and not nervous in the least. _Oh God, what am I doing?_ I thought.\n\nOf course, I hadn't thought to bring any of the match-book covers with me. 'Match-book covers,' I said, my dry throat rasping. 'From all over the world, so that dad would think Rory was still alive.'\n\nFergus looked to one side and unfolded his arms, sticking his hands in his pockets. He looked up at me. 'Hmm. Would you like a drink?' he said.\n\n'No,' I told him.\n\nHe moved to the other end of the table, where there was a small wooden desk like the top of a lectern. He opened it and took out a squat decanter and a crystal glass. He took the glittering, faceted stopper out of the decanter and poured some of the brown liquid into the glass, frowning all the time. 'Prentice,' he said, shaking his head and mating stopper and decanter again. 'I'm sorry, you've lost me. What are you ... what is ... what do you think is going on? Rupert's sending, or was sending Kenneth ...?'\n\n'Match-book covers, from hotels and restaurants and bars in various parts of the world,' I told him, as he stood, relaxed, one hand in pocket, one hand holding the glass, his face scrunched up in the manner of one trying hard and with some sympathy to understand what another is saying. 'Somehow,' I struggled on, 'they were meant to convince dad that Rory was still alive. But I think he's dead.'\n\n'Dead?' Fergus said, drinking. He nodded at the seat I was standing over. 'Aren't you going to take a seat?'\n\n'No thanks,' I said.\n\nFergus shrugged, sighed. 'Well, I can't imagine ...' The frown came back again. 'Has Rupert told you he was doing this?'\n\n'No,' I said.\n\n'And are you sure it wasn't Rory?' Fergus shrugged. 'I mean, was it his handwriting?'\n\n'There wasn't any handwriting.'\n\n'There wasn't ...' Fergus shook his head. He smiled, an expression that looked to be half sympathy and half incomprehension. 'Prentice, I'm lost. I don't see ...' His voice trailed off. The frown returned. 'Now, wait a moment,' he said. 'You said you thought I might know where Rory is. But if he's dead ...?' He stared, looking shocked, into my eyes. I tried hard not to look away, but in the end I had to. I looked down at the table-top, biting my lip.\n\n'Prentice,' Fergus said softly, putting his glass down on the table. 'I've no idea where your uncle is.' There was silence for a while. 'Rupert is an old school friend of mine. He's a journalist who goes all over the world; he's out in Iraq at this moment, in fact. I haven't seen him for a couple of years, though he used to come and shoot on occasion. He is a bit of a practical joker at times, but ...' Fergus looked thoughtful. He shrugged. 'Rory did tell me something once about setting fire to a barn on the estate once; accidentally, when he was very young. That might tie in with these match boxes ...' He shook his head, inspected the contents of his glass. 'But I don't _think_ I ever mentioned that to Rupert.'\n\nI felt sick. 'Nothing about ... some pieces of writing makes any sense, does it?'\n\n'Writing?' Fergus said, tilting his head, one eye narrowing. He shook his head. 'No. Whose writing?'\n\n'Rory's. Based on something that you saw here; up in the roof-space of the castle, and which you told Rory when you were in that bothy together. The night you shot the rat.'\n\nFergus had leaned forward again. He looked totally bemused. Finally he jerked upright and laughed. He looked at the glass he held. 'Maybe I should lay off this stuff. You're making less and less sense as you go along here, Prentice. Rory and I did spend a night in a bothy once, on the estate. But there wasn't any ... rat.' He smiled and frowned at the same time. 'Or any shooting. I don't think we even had guns with us; we were fishing some of the out-of-the-way lochans and streams.' He sighed, giving the impression of patient weariness. 'Is this something you've read?'\n\n'Yes,' I conceded.\n\n'What, in your father's papers, since his death?' Fergus looked as though he felt pity for me.\n\nI nodded, trying not to look down from his gaze. 'Sort of,' I breathed.\n\n'And who is meant to have seen what?' He raised one finger to his mouth, bit briefly at a nail and examined it.\n\n'None of that makes any sense to you, does it?' I said. 'No ... confession, revelation? Nothing to do with Lachy Watt?'\n\nFergus looked hurt. He swirled the glass, drained it. 'That was a very long time ago, Prentice,' he said quietly.\n\nHe looked at me more sorrowfully than accusatorily. 'We were only children. We don't always appreciate the seriousness of what we do ...' He glanced at his empty glass ... 'when we're younger.'\n\nHe put the glass on the table.\n\nI couldn't match his gaze, and lowered mine again. I felt dizzy.\n\nI heard Fergus take in a breath. 'Prentice,' he said, eventually. 'I was quite close to Kenneth. He was a friend. I don't think we saw eye-to-eye on anything really, but we ... we got on, you know? He was a gifted man, and a good friend, and I know I feel the loss. I can imagine how you feel. I ... I've had my own ... What I mean is, it isn't an easy thing to cope with, when somebody that close dies so suddenly. Everything can look ... Well, everything can look very black, you know? Nothing seems right. You even resent other people their happiness, and, well, it just all seems very unfair. It is a terrible strain to be under; don't think I don't appreciate that. And just now, when the world seems ...' He took another deep breath. 'Look, old son \u2013'\n\n'I'm sorry,' I said, stopping him. I smiled shakily. 'Uncle Fergus; I'm very sorry I came here. I've been silly. I don't know what I was ...' I shook my head, looked briefly down. 'I don't know what I was thinking. I've not been getting much sleep recently.' I smiled bravely. 'Watching too much television, maybe.' I waved one hand round a little, as though flailing out for something just beyond reach, then shrugged. 'I'm sorry,' I concluded.\n\nFergus looked serious for a moment. Then he gave a small smile. He crossed his arms again. 'Oh well. I think everything looks a bit sort of mad, really, at the moment, doesn't it?'\n\n'A bit,' I agreed. I sniffed, wiped my nose with a paper hanky.\n\n'Sure you won't have that drink?' Fergus said.\n\nI nodded, stuffed the hanky back into my jeans. 'No thanks, I have to drive. Better be getting back.'\n\n'Right you are,' Fergus said.\n\nHe saw me to the door. He patted me on the shoulder as I stood in the doorway. 'Don't worry, Prentice, all right?'\n\n'Yeah,' I said.\n\n'Oh, and I don't know if your mother's mentioned it \u2013'\n\n'Opera; Friday.' I smiled.\n\nFergus smiled too, jowls wobbling. 'Ah, she has.'\n\n'Yes. No problem,' I said.\n\n'Jolly good. Well, that's all right then.' He offered me his hand.\n\nWe shook. 'Thanks, uncle,' I said. He nodded, and I walked down the steps and across the gravel to the Golf.\n\nHe waved goodbye from the steps, looking concerned but encouraging.\n\nI let the Golf trundle down to the bottom of the hill, where the drive levelled out and joined the tarmac single-track which swept round the base of the hill towards the main road between Gallanach and Lochgilphead. At the junction I stopped. I just sat there for a while. I raised my right hand and looked at the palm for a while, then spat on it and rubbed it hard on the side of my thigh. I tore the knife and its sheath out from my jeans and threw them down into the passenger footwell. I looked in the rear-view mirror, where I could just see the reflection of the top of the castle \u2013 its battlements and silver observatory dome \u2013 through the limbs of the leafless trees.\n\n'Guilty as charged, you bastard,' I heard myself say. Then with a quick look either way, I revved up, slipped the clutch and sent the VW screaming along the road away from the castle.\n\nThe courtyard was empty and the house storm doors were shut when I got back to Lochgair. I parked the Golf in the yard and got out; my hands were shaking. I felt like getting furiously drunk. I stood there, breathing hard in the calm air, listening to gulls crying above the drive down towards the loch, while crows crackled in the trees around the house like some drunken chorus, scornful. My heart was thudding now and my trembling hands were slick with sweat. I had to rest back against the side of the car. I closed my eyes. The cries of the birds were replaced by a roaring noise in my ears.\n\nJesus, I thought, if this was how I felt, how must Fergus be reacting, if I was right, and he was guilty? Now would be the time to watch him, study him. But I could barely have walked just then, let alone drive back to the castle, even if I had been able to summon up the courage to return.\n\nEventually I felt better again, and instead of going into the house, went for a walk through the woods and the forest and up into the hills, and sat on an old ruined wall on the hill topped by the cairn where dad had told us about the mythosaurs, all those years ago. I looked down to the trees and the loch in the pastel light cast by the bright, gauzy overcast, while the mild wind freshened. I replayed that scene in the castle library time after time after time, imagining that I remembered every word, every movement, every nuance of tone and phrasing, every millimetric increment of body language, trying to work out whether I was being terribly sensitive and acute, or just insanely fanciful and paranoid.\n\nSometimes I thought it was perfectly obvious that Fergus was utterly genuine, and all my ideas, all my suspicions were demonstrably ludicrous. Of course the man was innocent; I was insane. Guilty as charged, indeed; who was I to judge?\n\nOther times it was as though his every inflection and gesture shrieked artifice, lies, deception. Very good deception, cunningly deployed lies and artful artifice, but everything false all the same.\n\nHe had reacted just as you would expect somebody to react. But was that the way somebody actually would react? I didn't know, and could not decide.\n\nI got so angry and confused at it all I threw my head back and screamed at the grey sky, roaring full force, all noise and no meaning till my lungs emptied and my throat ached. I doubled up, coughing and spluttering, eyes watering, feeling marginally better but looking round guiltily, hoping nobody had heard or seen. Only a couple of crows answered, harsh voices calling from the trees beneath.\n\nI'd chosen a vantage point from which I could watch the road and the house, and only went back down there when I saw mum's Metro turn off the loch road from Gallanach and flicker like a green ghost as it moved up the drive, half-obscured by the trunks and branches of the bare, grey oaks.\n\nI suppose I was uncommunicative with James and my mother that evening; I spent most of the time in dad's study, reading and rereading the three pieces Rory had written about himself, Fergus, Aunt Fiona and Lachlan Watt. I looked through some of Rory's diaries, gritting my teeth at the impenetrable paucity of their desiccated information. I turned on the Compaq and looked at the letter I'd written that morning. Damn; found a spelling mistake that had got through the spell-checker; 'saw' where I'd meant to type 'was'.\n\nI started drinking whisky after dinner, sitting at the desk in the study at first, craning over its leather surface, sifting through the various papers and diaries, my eyes getting sore. I nearly spilled my whisky into the Compaq at one point, so I turned off the little green-shaded light on the desk and went over to the couch, taking all the bits and pieces with me. I switched on the standard lamp behind me and lay lengthwise on the couch, surrounded by paper. I had the TV on with the sound turned down most of the time, using the remote to turn it up whenever it looked like there was something interesting coming in from the Gulf. I heard James go to bed about eleven-thirty. Mum looked in to say good-night about twelve. I waved, wished her pleasant dreams and kept on reading.\n\nI woke up just after two with the whisky glass balanced on my chest and my eyes feeling gritty. I finished the whisky even though I didn't really feel like it, then went to bed. I drank some water before I fell asleep.\n\nThe clock said 4:14 when I woke up, my bladder just at that point where it might or might not be possible to fall asleep again without having to go for a pee (it didn't usually wake me with so poor an excuse). I lay there for a bit, listening to soft rain hitting the bedroom window. Maybe that was what had woken me. I turned over to go to sleep again, then suddenly started to wonder if I'd turned the computer off. I had the feeling that I had, but I couldn't actually remember doing so. Fuck it, I thought; it would be safe enough. I rolled over onto my other side.\n\nBut my bladder had woken up properly in the meantime and was demanding attention. I sighed, swung out of bed, not bothering with my dressing gown even though the house had grown a little chilly by now. There was an orange night-light plug in a socket in the corridor; I decided to save my eyes from the shock of putting on any more powerful illumination and navigated the anyway familiar route to the bathroom by the plug's pale orange glow.\n\nI sat in the darkness, peeing. A sort of quarter-erection had made it advisable to sit down. I smiled, remembering Lewis's spiel about trying to pee when you had a full bladder and a full erection at the same time. I flushed the toilet, washed my hands and drank some water from the tap. Mum must have been varnishing some part of the harpsichord earlier, judging by the smell in the corridor. I padded along to the study.\n\nI could just make out the dim shape of the desk and computer on the far side of the room when I opened the study door. I couldn't hear the Compaq's fan running, or see a light on, but I went over to it anyway. I stood with my thighs against the wood and leather back of the desk's chair, and leant forward, pressing the computer's disk eject button in case I had switched it off but had left a disk in it. No disk. I yawned, straightened, and rubbed the inside of my right fore-arm where it had brushed against the glass shade of the little desk light. The shade had been hot.\n\nThere was a little red dot glowing on the dark screen of the computer monitor; must be the reflection of the TV on the other side of the room. Ha; so I had left it \u2014\n\nI froze, suddenly wide awake.\n\nWhy was the light shade hot?\n\nThe little red light reflected on the screen winked out, as though suddenly obscured.\n\nI threw myself back from the desk, just starting to sense movement behind me; I fell backwards as something dark scythed past in front of my face and a noise like the wind terminated in a splintering crash. Somebody \u2013 just a silhouette in the dim vague shadows of the room, lit only by the feeble light spilling from the hall night-light \u2013 stumbled forward, just behind where I had stood, arms reaching in front of them, pulling something long and dark and thin out of the wrecked back of the seat. The figure started to turn as I landed heavily on my back on the rug; I kicked out at their nearest knee, wishing I was wearing my Docs. Or anything, come to that.\n\nI felt my heel hit their leg. 'Huh!'\n\nSounded male; he staggered a little, then came forward at me, one arm raised as I started to roll, suddenly feeling very vulnerable and naked. A smashing noise sounded from overhead; metal and glass. I kept rolling, pushing up with my hands and leaping to my feet. Glass was falling from the ceiling as something thudded into the floor where I'd lain. I was at the man's side as he staggered forward, raising the bar or jemmy or whatever the hell it was from where it had struck the carpet. I kicked him in what I hoped was the kidneys and watched him stumble to one side, then something banged into the top of my head and hit my shoulder, confusing me. My feet crunched over something hard on the rug as I staggered. More light from the hall, as I stood swaying, dazed, and the attacker recovered. I could see him better now; all in black. Gloves, balaclava. His build ...\n\n'Uncle Ferg?' I heard somebody whisper. It sounded like me.\n\n'Prentice?' said a woman's voice, distantly, worriedly, from the corridor.\n\nI watched the man in front of me seem to hesitate, arm raised. I was falling. I staggered backwards, trying not to fall, crashing into a filing cabinet.\n\n'Prentice!' mum screamed, somewhere. Then; 'James! Get back!'\n\nThe dark figure looked towards the hallway, where the light was. I nearly fell round the side of the filing cabinet, then pulled myself up on some shelves, staring back at the black-dressed man in the middle of the room. There was movement at the study door; sparks flashed in the middle of the ceiling. I clutched at something on the bookshelf; graspable, heavy enough; an ashtray or bowl. I threw it, heard it hit his body and clunk to the floor. He still stood there, maybe only for a second or so, but it seemed like an eternal hesitation, while he glanced from me to the hallway again. I thought I heard a door slam. I roared, shouting incoherently the way I had on the hillside that afternoon as I stumbled from the shelves, past the filing cabinet and nearly fell over the desk while he came forward at me, arm raised again; I picked up the computer's keyboard from the desk, hauling it bursting free and swinging it as hard as I could at him as he brought his arm down.\n\nThere was a terrific, bone-ringing crash that seemed to infect the whole world, like an electric shock and a thunder-clap and an earthquake all at once. There was an odd pattering and clinking noise from every part of the room. I stood, holding nothing, blinking in the darkness while somebody moved stumbling away, obscuring light.\n\nI felt weird. My feet and arms and head felt buzzy and sore, but when I felt my head I couldn't feel any blood. Feet felt slippy. I heard the phone on the desk make a noise, and picked it up, still dazed.\n\n'Which service?' said a man's voice.\n\n'Police!' I heard my mother shout.\n\n'Sorry,' I mumbled. I put the phone down, pushing myself away from the desk. I tripped on the pale remains of the keyboard. Its lettered keys lay scattered about the floor like teeth. I stubbed my toe on something, bent down and picked up a long steel bar. I limped to the top of the stairs in time to see the front door slam shut.\n\nMy head felt buzzy again; I went into the kitchen, found the broken door lock and two full red plastic petrol cans sitting on the kitchen table, then got back out into the hall, still holding the steel bar even though it was beginning to feel very heavy, and shouted, 'Mum? Mum; it's all right! I think ...' before I had to sit down at the kitchen table, because my tongue had suddenly become a clapper in the bell of my skull, and my head was ringing. I put my arms on the table and rested my head on them while I waited for the echoes in my head to go away.\n\n'Welcome to Argyll,' I told myself.\n\nThe kitchen light was painfully bright when it went on. Mum brought me my dressing gown and put a blanket over my shoulders and made me drink heavily sugared tea, and I remember thinking, Sugared tea; dad must have died again, and mumbling something about having a flag in my foot when mum washed them and put bandages on them, and wondering why she was looking so upset and James so frightened; then police came. They seemed very large and official and asked me lots of questions. Later, Doctor Fyfe appeared looking slightly dishevelled, and I recall asking him what he was doing up at this time in the morning, and how he was these days. Old ticker holding out all right, was it?\nCHAPTER 18\n\nWe were on the battlements; I faced into the cool north wind. I waited to feel the dizziness of d\u00e9j\u00e0-vu, but didn't. Maybe too much had happened, or not enough time had passed.\n\n'Well, whatever the heathen equivalent is,' Lewis said. 'Will you?'\n\n'Of course,' I said. I looked down into the small pink face bundled inside the old family shawl; Kenneth McHoan had his eyes tightly closed and wore an expression of concentration on his features that implied sleep was a business of some deliberation. One of his hands \u2013 the thumb so small it could have fitted on just the nail of one of my own thumbs \u2013 was held up near his chin; the tiny fingers made a slow waving motion, like a sea anemone in a stray current, and I jiggled up and down a little, cradling the sleeping child and going, 'Shh, shh.'\n\nI glanced at Verity, sitting beside Lewis, her arm round his waist. She looked up from her son's face for a moment.\n\n'Uncle Prentice, the Godfather.' She smiled.\n\n'An offer only a churl could refuse.'\n\n'People have their own absorption spectra, Prentice,' said Diana Urvill, as she took a Corning turn-of-the-century cut glass plate out of the display case in the castle Solar and \u2013 after wiping the plate with a lint-free cloth \u2013 handed it carefully to me. We both wore white gloves. I took the plate \u2013 like an immense ice crystal with too many angles of symmetry \u2013 and placed it on the table, on the topmost sheet of foam. I folded the translucent padding over \u2013 thinking how much it looked like prawn crackers \u2013 secured it with tape, then found a suitably sized box and placed the plate in the centre, on a bed of small white expanded-polystyrene wafers that looked like flattened infinity symbols.\n\nI lifted one of the giant sacks of the wafers and filled the box to the brim with them, covering the wrapped-up plate, then closed the box and took the little card Diana had left on the table and taped it to the side of the box where it could be read. Then I put the box on a five-high pile near the door; the stacking limit was six, so it completed that column.\n\n'Absorption spectra?' I said sceptically, as we started to repeat the whole process with a Fritsche rock crystal ewer.\n\nDiana, dressed in baseball boots, black tracksuit bottoms and a UCLA sweatshirt, her black hair tied in a pony tail, nodded, and breathed on the ewer before polishing it. 'Things they get absorbed in. Interests, that sort of thing. If you could take a sort of life-spectrum for everybody, of all the things they believed in and took an interest in and became involved in \u2013 all that sort of stuff \u2013 then they'd look like stellar spectra; a smooth band of colour from violet to red, with black lines where the things that meant something to those people had been absorbed.'\n\n'What an astronomical imagination you have, Diana,' I said. 'Getting enough oxygen up on Mauna Kea, yeah?' I grinned.\n\n'Just a pet theory, Prentice.' She finished polishing the ewer. 'Better than believing in,' she said, and handed me the elaborately carved jug, 'crystals.'\n\n'Well, that's true, in a very un-Californian way, isn't it?' I filled the inside of the ewer up with little polystyrene beads from another giant sack, a broad smile on my face as I remembered.\n\nShe cried out and the crystal sang in reply.\n\nLater, we exchanged signals.\n\n'Help me fold these sheets, will you?'\n\nThe day after all the excitement at Lochgair, I sat at the dining table with what looked like a turban on my head. It was a towel wrapped round one of those sealed liquid containers you freeze and put in cool boxes.\n\nI signed the statement.\n\n'Thank you, sir.'\n\n'Davey, stop calling me \"sir\", for God's sake,' I breathed. Constable David McChrom had been in my class at school and I couldn't bring myself to call him \"officer\". His nickname had been Plooky, but that might have been carrying informality a little too far.\n\n'Ach, second nature these days, Prent,' he said, folding the papers and standing up. He looked depressingly fresh and well-scrubbed; joining the police force seemed to have done wonders for his skin condition. He lifted his cap from the table top, turning to my mother. 'Right. That's all for now, Mrs McHoan. I'll be getting back, but if you think of anything else, just tell one of the other officers. We'll be in touch if we hear anything. You all right now, Mrs McHoan?'\n\n'Fine, thanks, Davey,' mum smiled. Dressed in jeans and a thick jumper, she looked a little dark around the eyes, but otherwise okay.\n\n'Right you are, then. You look after that heid of yours, okay, Prentice?'\n\n'As though it were my own,' I breathed, adjusting my towel.\n\nMum saw him out.\n\nThe CID were still in the study, looking for fingerprints. They'd be lucky. I looked out of the dining-room window to where a couple of policemen were searching the bushes near the kitchen door.\n\nMy, we were being well looked after. I doubted a roughly equivalent fracas in one of the poorer council estates would have attracted quite such diligent and comprehensive investigation. But maybe that was just me being cynical.\n\nMy head hurt, my feet hurt, my fingers hurt. All the extremities. Well, save one, thankfully. Most of the damage came from the central light fixture in the study ceiling. It was part of that \u2013 a large, heavy, brass part of it \u2013 which had hit me on the head, and it was the shattered glass of its shades which had cut my feet as I'd stumbled around the study. My fingers hurt from the impact of computer keyboard and steel tyre-iron.\n\nThe desk drawers had been levered open. The back of the desk's matching chair had taken the full force of a blow with the tyre-iron, the light fixture had been hit accidentally by the same implement and the ceiling rose damaged, the Compaq's keyboard was wrecked and the kitchen door needed a new lock. I felt I could use a new head.\n\nNothing had been stolen, though I'd noticed that all the papers I'd been looking at earlier that night \u2013 and which I'd left scattered round the couch \u2013 had been neatly gathered together and piled on one end of the desk, under a paperweight. The envelope I'd left in the desk's top right drawer that morning was still here. The police didn't open it. Apart from the damage, and that one contrary act of tidiness, it looked like our attacker had taken nothing, and left behind him only the petrol and the tyre-iron.\n\nI wanted to phone Fergus; ask him how he was. Good night's sleep? Any aches and pains? But mum had been fussing over me after Doctor Fyfe had said I'd need watching for a day or two and I wasn't being allowed to do very much. Somehow I lacked the will, anyway.\n\nThey'd asked me if I had any idea who it might have been, and I'd said No. I didn't say anything to my mother, or anybody else, either.\n\nWhat could I say?\n\nI was certain it had been Fergus \u2013 his build had been right, and even though I'd been dazed, I swear he did hesitate when I spoke his name \u2013 but how was I supposed to convince anybody else? I shook my head, then grimaced, because it hurt. I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid, not even thinking that he might try and steal or destroy whatever evidence he thought I had. 'Is this something you've read?' I whispered to myself, remembering what Fergus had asked me. 'In your father's papers, after his death?'\n\nJeez. I felt myself blush at my na\u00efvety.\n\nMum continued to fuss, but I got better through the day.\n\nAfter the CID boys finished in the study, I photocopied all Rory's papers \u2013 though I had to drag a chair over to the photocopier and sit down to do it \u2013 then, before the police left, and after much pleading, got mum to drive into Gallanach and deposit the parcelled originals in the bank. She came back with a new lock for the kitchen door. I hadn't been able to persuade her that a little holiday \u2013 in Glasgow, maybe \u2013 would be a good idea, so while she was away I rang Dean Watt and asked if he and Tank Thomas fancied coming to stay at Lochgair for a few days. Tank was a quiet and normally docile friend of the Watts', two metres tall and one across; I'd once seen him carry a couple of railway sleepers, one over each shoulder, without even breaking sweat.\n\nJames \u2013 who'd earlier been appalled that he'd only missed the first two periods of school while the police interviewed him \u2013 arrived back at four, glowing with glory. Apparently his part in the night's events \u2013 which I'd thought consisted largely of sticking his head round his bedroom door and being told to get back in again (and doing as he was told, for once) \u2013 had gained something in the translation at school; I suspected the gains involved the single-handed beating-off an attack by an entire gang of ninja assassins while mum and I slept.\n\nI told mum about Dean and Tank, but she wasn't having it, and rang Dean up to cancel the protection I'd arranged. The police had promised to keep an eye on the house over the next few nights, after all; a patrol car would check up the drive. This didn't sound like much good to me, but mum seemed reassured.\n\nOld Mr Docherty, a leathery-faced octogenarian with wispy white hair who was one of our neighbours in the village, arrived at tea-time and offered to come over with his shot-gun and sit up all night. 'Ah've nuthin tae steal maself, Mrs McHoan, and Ah'd rather make sure you and the bairns were all right. Canny have this sort aw thing going on in Lochgair, ye know. Be Glasgow people, Ah tell ye. Be Glasgow boys.'\n\nMum thanked him, but refused. He seemed happy when we asked him to help us fit the new lock on the kitchen door. Lewis was all set to come up from London when we told him what had happened, but mum persuaded him we were fine, really.\n\nFretting for something else to do, I rang up Mrs McSpadden at the castle and related all that had happened, and twice told her how I suspected the raider had been after Rory's papers, which I'd copied and deposited in the bank. 'In the bank, Prentice,' she repeated, and I could hear her voice echoing. 'Good idea.'\n\nI asked after Fergus and Mrs McSpadden said he was fine. He and his friends had been out fishing that day.\n\nTo my own amazement, I slept soundly that night. James said lights came up to the drive twice. I had to go and see Doctor Fyfe that day, and mum insisted on driving me into Gallanach, despite the fact I felt fine. Doctor Fyfe gave me permission to go back to Glasgow that evening, providing I took the train and stayed with friends.\n\nI stayed the extra night instead, and left by car in the early hours, taking Rory's diaries and the copies of his papers with me. I phoned Mrs McSpadden from Glasgow and told her that, too, and discovered that Fergus had gone to Edinburgh for a couple of days. On impulse, I told her I'd remembered something more from the attack, and I'd be going to the police in a day or two, once I'd checked on something.\n\nBack at university, I attended lectures \u2013 hobbling a little on my cut feet \u2013 and I studied, though I had headaches on the Monday and the Tuesday night. I made sure Mrs Ippot's house was securely locked each night, and closed all the shutters. I rang mum three or four times each day. Mum said Fergus had sent a huge bouquet of flowers to the house, when he'd heard what had happened. He'd phoned from Edinburgh and advised getting an alarm system fitted, and knew a firm in Glasgow who'd do it cost price, as a favour to him. Wasn't that sweet of him? Oh, and I hadn't forgotten she and Fergus would be coming to Glasgow for the opera at the end of the week, had I?\n\nI said of course not.\n\nI put the phone down, numb, my thoughts racing in a kind of aimless short-circuit as I wondered what on earth I was going to do.\n\nAnd, naturally, I followed the war like a good little media-consumer.\n\nThe clich\u00e9s were starting to come out. It was hardly possible to open a newspaper, turn on a television or listen to a radio programme without having rammed down the relevant orifice some witless variation on the facile adage concerning truth being the first casualty of war; a truism that is arguably a neat piece of propaganda itself, implying as it does that the majority of the military, politicians and media have any interest in, respect for or experience with disseminating the truth even in times of profoundest peace.\n\nI started inventing reasons for not putting mum and Fergus up on the Friday. I would be ill. I would have a bad cold. I would discover that the tenancy agreement specified I couldn't have anybody else to stay over-night at the Ippot house. The electricity had been cut off due to a computer error. A gas leak. Serious structural deficiencies caused by the weight of mirrors and chandeliers. Anything.\n\nI stopped watching the war at Tuesday lunch-time because if I'd carried on the way I had been, the history we were living through was going to stop me getting my degree for the history that had been and gone.\n\nAsh rang on the Tuesday evening. I told her everything that had happened, at the castle and Lochgair. She didn't seem to know what to make of it all; she said maybe I ought to go to the police. She sounded low, and said things weren't too good at work, though she wouldn't be more specific.\n\nMeanwhile, the sound of her voice was pulling me apart; it filled me with elation at the same time as it plunged me into despair. I wanted to shout Look, woman, I think I'm falling in love with you! I am! I do! I love you! Honest! I'm sure! Well, almost certain! ... but you couldn't; I couldn't. It wasn't the sort of equivocal thing to shout at any time, and even if I had been completely sure how I felt, I probably couldn't have told her, not just then. I got the impression it wasn't the sort of thing she wanted to hear anyway. She sounded like she just wanted to keep her head down for the moment; keep things quiet, uncomplicated; just cool out. Recently banged-on-the-head nutters raving down the phone at her suddenly declaring undying passionate love for no apparent reason was probably the last thing she needed. I was sure about that. Well, fairly certain.\n\nSo it was a desultory kind of phone call. I felt pretty depressed myself at the end of it. I didn't ask her about her love-life.\n\nI put the phone down feeling the same way I had a year earlier, the day I'd been travelling from Gallanach to Glasgow after Hogmanay, and I'd pretended to be asleep when the train stopped at Lochgair. Remembering that cowardice and that shame, I almost picked the phone up again to call Ash back, and my hand reached out a couple of times, and I debated with myself, muttering, my face contorting with silly expressions, and I told myself I was acting like a madman, and I really wanted to make that call and I really ought to, but I was terrified to do it as well, even though I knew that I should ... shouldn't I? Yes; yes I should; yes I definitely ought to, it was obvious, clear definite. I should.\n\nBut in the end I didn't.\n\nAt least there was always work to be done. I'd submerged myself in my studies with a feeling of almost orgasmic relief. The very fact the past can be taken or left made me want to accept it; the sheer demanding immediacy of the present made it repulsive.\n\nAnd so everything returned to a sort of normality, which didn't last, of course.\n\nOn Wednesday, the 23rd of January 1991, shortly after noon, Fergus Walter Cruden Urvill left Gaineamh Castle in his Range Rover and travelled north through the town of Gallanach and the village of Kilmartin, passing Carnasserie Castle and the cairn and standing stone at Kintraw, crossed the thin flood plain of the Barbreck River above Loch Craignish, travelled inland again to rejoin the shore at the cut-off for the Craobh Haven marina development, and then curved past the village of Arduaine, skirting Loch Melfort before passing through Kilmelford and entering the forest that led to Glen Gallain and then down to the shore of Loch Feochan and the twisting road heading for Oban. The Range Rover passed through the town a little before one o'clock and continued north to Connel, waited for the traffic lights to change at the old bridge over the Falls of Lora, then crossed, negotiated some road-works and finally turned left off the road a little further on, entering the thin strip of level coastal ground that was the Connel airstrip.\n\nFergus Urvill parked the Range Rover in the airfield car park. He talked to one Michael Kerr, from the village of Benderloch a couple of kilometres up the road from the field. Kerr was repairing the car-park fence; Mr Urvill said he wanted to use the telephone in the Portakabin that served as the airfield office. Michael Kerr said that Mr Urvill seemed in a good mood, and told him that he would be flying out to one of the Outer Hebrides ('the Utter HeBrides,' were his exact words), where an old school friend lived. He was going to surprise this friend and take him a bottle of whisky for a belated Hogmanay. He showed Michael Kerr the bottle of Bowmore whisky he was taking with him, in a small leather suitcase which also contained some clothes and toiletries. The only thing Kerr noticed that was out of the ordinary was that Mr Urvill grimaced a couple of times, and flexed his shoulders oddly. Kerr asked the older man if he was all right, and Fergus said yes, but it felt like a couple of ribs were acting up a little. An old injury; nothing to worry about.\n\nMrs Eliza McSpadden, the housekeeper at the castle, had confirmed that Mr Urvill had complained of chest pains the night before, and had taken some Paracetamol painkillers. He had taken a box of the tablets with him that morning, when he drove to Connel. He had said he would be away for a couple of days, and \u2013 apparently on impulse as he was about to get into the car \u2013 asked Mrs McSpadden to prepare some of her Cullen Skink soup for his lunch on the Friday. He wouldn't need more as he would be dining with Mrs Mary McHoan in Glasgow that evening, before the opera. The Colonial restaurant in Glasgow later confirmed that they had a booking for two for the Friday evening in Mr Urvill's name.\n\nWhen Mr Urvill came back out of the airfield office, it was about one-thirty. Michael Kerr helped him check the Cessna aircraft. The plane taxied to the end of the runway, faced into a wind and then took off into a five-knot south-westerly breeze, in good visibility under a five-thousand-foot cloud-base of light overcast. The forecast said the breeze would freshen and veer to the south east that evening, and the following few days would be bright and clear with a steady southerly wind of force three or four.\n\nThe Cessna was spotted by the British Army radar base on the island of St Kilda flying into an area that was restricted for missile testing. The light aircraft was flying at an altitude of two thousand feet on a bearing of 320\u00b0, which would take it towards Iceland. There was no radio response from the plane, and an RAF Nimrod, on patrol over the North Atlantic, was diverted to intercept.\n\nThe Nimrod rendezvoused with the light aircraft at 1516 GMT. It decreased speed and flew almost alongside, a little above and ahead of the Cessna for twenty-five minutes, attempting to make radio and visual contact. The Nimrod crew reported that the single occupant of the plane seemed to be unconscious, slumped back in his seat.\n\nAt 1541 GMT the Cessna's engine started to cut out and the plane \u2013 presumably out of fuel \u2013 began to lose altitude. The engine stopped altogether less than a minute later. The plane pitched forward, causing the pilot's body to slump over the controls, whereupon the aircraft went into a steep dive and started to spin. It fell into the sea, impacting at 1543.\n\nThe Nimrod circled, dropping a life raft and reporting the position of the wreck to nearby shipping. The plane sank twenty minutes later, as the sun was setting. There was little visible wreckage. An East German trawler picked up the Nimrod's liferaft during the following morning.\n\nThe crew of the Nimrod reported that at no time had the figure on board the light aircraft shown any sign of consciousness.\n\n'Hello?'\n\n'Prentice?'\n\n'Speaking. Is \u2013?\n\n'It's Ashley. I just heard about Fergus.'\n\n'Ashley! Ah ... Yeah. I heard this afternoon. I was going to call; I don't have your work number.'\n\n'Well?'\n\n'Well, what?'\n\n'Do you know any more than what's been on the news?'\n\n'Well, mum went up to the castle to see if Mrs McSpadden needed a hand, and she said she seemed kind of shell-shocked; kept talking about soup.'\n\n'Soup?'\n\n'Soup. Cullen Skink, specifically.'\n\n'Oh.'\n\n'Yeah, well, apparently Fergus seemed in good spirits, but he'd had some chest pains, the night before. Anyway, he drove up to Connel to fly out to the Hebrides to see some chum of his out there, and next thing we know he's dive-bombing the Atlantic and forgetting to pull up. Unconscious, apparently.'\n\n'Hmm ... so what do you think?'\n\n'Well, I don't know. Mum said she asked Mrs McSpadden who he was going to see, and she said she didn't know who it could have been. The police had already asked her that, apparently; they said they would make enquiries.'\n\n'Right. You think it was a heart attack?'\n\n'I don't know. Umm ...'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Well, apparently Mrs McSpadden said Fergus had a phone call the night before. She took it initially, then handed the phone to him.'\n\n'Yeah? And?'\n\n'Whoever it was, they were Scottish, but it was an international phone call; a satellite call. Mrs McSpadden thought she recognised the voice but she wasn't sure.'\n\n'Hmm. Recognised the voice.'\n\n'Yeah. Did ... I mean, did she know Lachy?'\n\n'Yes. Yes, she did. They both worked behind the bar in the Jac, about ... twenty years ago, maybe.'\n\n'Ah-ha.'\n\n'Ah-ha indeed.'\n\nI took a deep breath. 'Look, Ash, I've been mean \u2013' I heard a noise in the background.\n\n'Shit, that's the door. What?'\n\nThe breath sighed out of me. 'Ah ... nothing. Take care, Ash.'\n\n'Yeah, you too, bye.'\n\nI put the phone down, put my head back, looked up at the plaster stalactites that formed the ceiling frieze in the study of the Ippot house, and howled like a dog.\n\nThe Strathclyde Police received a telephone tip-off at their head-quarters in Glasgow that a drug ring was using Loch Coille Bharr \u2013 just south of the Argyllshire village of Crinan \u2013 as a hiding place for cocaine, at 1325 on January the 23rd. The tip-off was quite specific; talking of weighted, water-tight plastic cylinders towed behind yachts coming from the Continent and transferred to the loch to await pick-up by dealers from Glasgow. The loch was cordoned off that day and police divers started searching the south end of the loch the following morning, while policemen in small boats used grappling hooks to drag the rest.\n\nNo drug-packed cylinders were ever found, but on the second day one of the boats snagged something heavy. A diver went down to free the line from what was expected to be a water-logged tree.\n\nHe surfaced to report that the line had hooked onto the rear wheel of a motor-bike which had, tied to it, the remains of a body.\n\nThe bike and the body were brought to the surface that evening. The corpse had decomposed and been eaten by fish, to the point of being a skeleton held together more by the clothes it still wore than by the few pieces of connective tissue left. The clothes suggested the deceased had been a male, but the police weren't sure of the skeleton's sex until the body was examined in Glasgow the following day.\n\nWhat they did know was that the bike \u2013 a Suzuki 185 GT registered in 1977 \u2013 had been reported stolen by its owner in Glasgow in 1981, after it had been loaned to a friend and never returned. Probably that alone would have led to the police coming to Lochgair to see us, but one of the local policemen with a long memory had already put two and two together when he'd heard the make and model of the bike.\n\nThe corpse carried no identifying papers, but dental records matched. We knew then it was Rory.\n\nThe skeleton had been found wearing a crash-helmet, but it must have been put back on after Rory had been murdered; according to the pathologist's report, he'd been killed by a series of blows to the back of the head with a smooth, hard, spherical or nearly spherical object, approximately nine centimetres in diameter. He was probably unconscious after the first blow.\n\nAnd so, after the coroner had released the remains following the inquest in late February, Uncle Rory's bones came back to Lochgair at last, and were laid to rest at the back of the garden, under the larches, between the rhododendrons and the wild roses, at the side of his brother. The stone-mason added Rory's name and dates to the black marble obelisk, and we held a small ceremony just for the immediate family and Janice Rae. It fell to me to read out the words Rory had, apparently, intended to close Crow Road with, by way of a funeral oration.\n\nThe passage came from Rory's nameless play, and began: 'And all your nonsenses and truths ...'\n\nJanice cried.\n\nI remarked to Lewis that the way things were going in our family it might work out cheaper in the long run if we bought our own hearse.\n\nI do believe he was shocked. Or maybe he just wished he'd said it.\n\nTechnically the case remained open and Rory's murderer was still being sought, but beyond briefly interviewing mum, Janice and Rory's old flat-mate Andy Nichol, the police took no further action. I never did find out just how good at adding-up that policeman was.\n\nThe firm Ashley Watt was working for in London went into receivership in the last week of January. She was made redundant, but remained in the city looking for another job.\n\nThe war ended, in a famous victory. Only their young men died like cattle, and there was even talk of the US making a modest profit on the operation.\n\nVerity's baby was born \u2013 bang on time \u2013 on March the 2nd, in London, in a warm birthing pool in a big hospital. The boy was registered as Kenneth Walker McHoan; he weighed three and a half kilos and looked like his father.\n\nLewis, Verity and young Kenneth travelled up to Lochgair two weeks later.\n\nThe lawyer Blawke read Fergus Urvill's will in Gaineamh Castle on the 8th of March. I had been asked to be present, and travelled down by train \u2013 the Golf was in for a service \u2013 with feelings of bitterness and dread.\n\nHelen and Diana, solemnly beautiful in black, both looking tanned \u2013 Helen from Switzerland, Diana from Hawaii \u2013 sat together in the tall-ceilinged Solar and heard that they were to inherit the estate, with the exception of various pieces of glass held in the castle, which \u2013 as the twins had already known \u2013 were to be donated to the Glass Museum attached to the factory. Mrs McSpadden \u2013 sitting hunched and crying with what was, in retrospect, a quite baffling quietness \u2013 received the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds, and the right either to live on in the castle, or receive a similar amount if the property was sold or if she was asked to vacate her apartments by the twins or their heirs. Fergus had asked to be buried in the old castle garden, but as they never did recover the body a monument was decided on instead. A memorial service would he held in Gallanach at a later date.\n\nThe Range Rover was part of the estate, but the Bentley Eight had been willed to my father. Fergus had changed his will after dad's death \u2013 following promptings by the good lawyer Blawke \u2013 and so the car and its contents passed to me instead, which came as something of a surprise.\n\nThere were various other bits and pieces \u2013 bequests to charities and so on \u2013 but that was the gist of it.\n\nThe lawyer Blawke handed me the keys to the Bentley after the reading, while we were standing around awkwardly drinking small sherries dispensed by a quietly tearful Mrs McSpadden and I was still in a slight daze, thinking, What? Why? Why did he give me the car?\n\nI talked to the twins. Helen just wanted to get away, but Diana had decided to stay on for a while; I agreed to come and help her pack stuff away in a few days time. Fergus's personal effects were going to be stored in the cellar, and of course the glass had to be packed up to be taken to the museum. The twins said they still hadn't decided what to do with the castle long-term, and I got the impression it depended on what Mrs McSpadden chose to do.\n\nI said my good-byes as soon as I decently could. I had intended to take mum's Metro straight back to Lochgair; I'd told Helen and Diana that I'd probably come back that afternoon with mum, to take the Bentley away. But for some reason, when I got out of the castle doors, I didn't go crunching over the gravel to the little hatchback but turned and went back into the Solar and asked if I could take the Bentley to Lochgair instead, and come back for the Metro later.\n\nDiana told me the garage was open, so I walked round to the rear of the castle where the garage and outhouses were. The Bentley sat inside the opened double garage, burgundy bodywork gleaming like frozen wine. I opened the car, wondering why the will had mentioned the contents of the Eight as well as the vehicle itself.\n\nI got in and sat in that high armchair of a driver's seat, smiling at the walnut and the chrome and breathing in the smell of Connelly hide. The car looked showroom-clean; un-lived in. Nothing in the door pockets, on the back seats or the rear shelf; not even maps. I hesitated before opening the glove box. I was just paranoid enough to think maybe there was a bomb wired to that or the ignition, but, well, that didn't seem very Fergus-like, despite it all. So I opened the glove box.\n\nIt contained the car's manual \u2013 I'd never seen one bound in leather before \u2013 the registration documents, and a cardboard presentation box I recognised as coming from the factory gift shop.\n\nI took it out and opened it. There was a paperweight inside, which was what the box was meant to contain, but the big lump of multi-coloured glass was a little too large for the cardboard insert that went with the box. When I looked at the base it was an old limited edition Perthshire weight, not a Gallanach Glass Works product at all.\n\nI left the paperweight lying on the seat and got out, checked the car's boot \u2014 carefully, thinking of the end of _Charley Varrick_ \u2014 but that was in concourse condition too.\n\nI went back to the driver's seat and sat there for a while, holding the paperweight and gazing into its convexly complicated depths, wondering why Fergus had left this lump of glass \u2013 not even from his own factory \u2013 in the car.\n\nThen I weighed the glassy mass in my hand, and clutched it as you might a weapon, and took another, evaluating look at it, and realised. It was spherical, or nearly spherical, and probably pretty well exactly nine centimetres in diameter.\n\nI almost dropped it.\n\nI shivered, and put the paperweight back in the presentation case, put that in the glove-box, and \u2013 after the car did not blow up when I turned the ignition \u2013 drove its quietly ponderous bulk back to Lochgair.\n\nFergus's memorial service was held a week later, at the Church of Scotland, on Shore Street in Gallanach, mid-Argyll. Kind of a traumatic location for the McHoans, and I wouldn't have gone myself \u2013 it would have felt too much like either hypocrisy or gloating \u2013 but mum wanted to attend, and I could hardly not offer to escort her.\n\nWe put some flowers on the McDobbies' grave, where dad had died, then went in to the church, each kissing the sombrely beautiful twins.\n\nI stood listening to the pious words, the ill-sung hymns and the plodding reminiscences of the good lawyer Blawke \u2013 who must be becoming Gallanach's most sought-after after-death speaker \u2013 and felt a furious anger build up in me.\n\nIt was all I could do to stand there, moving my mouth when people sang, and looking down at my feet when they prayed, and not shout out some profanity, some blasphemy, or, even worse, the truth. I actually gathered the breath in my lungs at one point, hardly able to bear the pressure of fury inside me any longer. I tensed my belly for the shout: Killer! Fucking MURDERER!\n\nI felt dizzy. I could almost hear the echoes of my scream reflecting back off the high walls and arched ceiling of the church ... but the singing went on undisturbed. I relaxed after that, and looked around at the trappings of religion and the gathered suits and worthies of Gallanach and beyond, and \u2013 if I felt anything \u2013 felt only sorrow for us all.\n\nI looked up towards the tower. All the gods are false, I thought to myself, and smiled without pleasure.\n\nI talked to a red-eyed Mrs McSpadden after the service, walking down through the gravestones towards the road and sea, under a sky of scudding cloud; the wind tasted of salt. 'Aye,' Mrs McSpadden said, in what was for her almost a whisper. 'You never think it's going to happen, do you? We all have our little aches and pains, but when I think about it, if I'd just said something when he mentioned a sore chest that night to go to the doctor ...'\n\n'Everybody hurts, Mrs McSpadden,' I said. 'And he had broken those ribs, in the crash. Anybody would have assumed it was just those.'\n\n'Aye, maybe.'\n\nI hesitated. 'Mum said he'd had a phone call from abroad, the night before?'\n\n'Hmm? Oh, yes. Yes, he did. I thought I ... Well, yes.'\n\n'You don't know who it was?'\n\n'No,' she said slowly, though I saw her frown.\n\n'It's just that a friend of mine from university who's abroad at the moment had been going to call Fergus, to ask permission to visit the factory \u2013 he's writing a dissertation on the history of glass making \u2013 and I haven't heard from him for a while; I wondered if it might have been him, that's all.' (All lies of course, but I'd tried to ring Lachy Watt in Sydney and found that the phone had been disconnected. Ashley's mum didn't know where he was now, and I did still want to know what had finally driven Fergus to do what he had.)\n\n'Oh, I don't know,' Mrs McSpadden said, shaking her large, florid head. A big black bead of glass glittered at the end of her hatpin; a stray strand of white hair blew in the gusting wind.\n\n'You didn't hear anything that was said,' I prompted.\n\n'Och, just something about putting somebody up. I was on my way out the door.'\n\n'Putting somebody up?'\n\n'Aye. He said he hadn't put anybody up, and that was all I heard. I suppose he must have been talking about people who'd stayed at the castle, or hadn't stayed; whatever.'\n\n'Yes,' I said, nodding thoughtfully. 'I suppose so.' I shrugged. 'Ah well. Perhaps it wasn't who I was thinking of after all.'\n\nOr maybe it was. Maybe if Mrs McS had heard one more word before she'd closed that door, it would have been the word 'to'.\n\n'Come to think of it,' Mrs McSpadden said, 'I'd just been talking about you, Prentice, when the phone went.'\n\n'Had you?'\n\n'Aye; just mentioning to Mr Urvill what you'd said about remembering more details of when your house was burgled.'\n\n'Really?' I nodded, putting my gloved hands behind my back and smiling faintly at the grey and restless sea beyond the low church wall.\n\n_'Canada?'_ I said, aghast.\n\n'I've got an uncle there. He knows somebody working in a firm installing a system I know a bit about; they swung the work permit.'\n\n'My God, when do you go?'\n\n'Next Monday.'\n\n'Next _Monday?'_\n\n'I'll be going up to Gallanach tomorrow, to say goodbye to mum.'\n\n'Flying?'\n\n'Driving. Leaving the car there. Dean can use it.'\n\n'Jesus. How long are you going to Canada for?'\n\n'I don't know. We'll see. Maybe I'll like it.'\n\n'You mean you might stay?'\n\n'I don't know, Prentice. I'm not making any plans beyond getting there and seeing what the job's like and what the people are like.'\n\n'Shee-it. Well, can I see you? I mean; I'd like to say goodbye.'\n\n'Well, you going to Gallanach this weekend?'\n\n'Umm ... Would you believe that this weekend I was intending to drive a Bentley to Ullapool, get a ferry to the island of Lewis, drive to the most north-westerly point on the island I could find and throw a paperweight into the sea? But ...'\n\n'Well, don't let me stop you. I've got plenty of family to see, goodness knows.'\n\n'But-'\n\n'But I'm flying out from Glasgow on the Monday morning. You can put me up in this palace you're living in, if you like.'\n\n'Sunday? Yeah. Let me think; can't get a ferry on a Sunday, but I can get to Ullapool on Friday, travel over; back Saturday. Yeah. Sunday's fine. What time do you think you'll get here?'\n\n'Six all right?'\n\n'Six is perfect. My turn to take you for a curry.'\n\n'No it isn't, but I accept anyway. I promise not to throw brandy all over you.'\n\n'Okay. I promise not to act like an asshole.'\n\n'You have to act?'\n\n'Gosh, you know how to hurt a chap.'\n\n'Years of practice. See you Sunday, Prentice.'\n\n'Yeah. Then. Drive carefully.'\n\n'You too. Bye.'\n\nI put the phone down, looked up at the ceiling, and didn't know whether to whoop with joy because I was going to see her, or scream in despair because she was going to Canada. Caught between these two extremes, I experienced an odd calmness, and settled for a low moan.\n\nI was starting to think that maybe the Bentley wasn't really me. People gave me funny looks when I drove it, and I had already been stopped by some traffic cops on Great Western Road the day I drove the beast back from Lochgair to Glasgow. Is this your car, sir? they'd asked.\n\nWith hindsight, perhaps saying, Gosh, I thought you only did this to black people! wasn't the most politic reply to have made, but they only kept me waiting for an hour while they checked up on me and scrutinised the car. I spent the time sitting in the back of the police car thinking of all the worthy causes I could give the proceeds of the Bentley's sale to (I certainly wasn't going to keep Fergus's blood-money). The African National Congress and the League Against Cruel Sports were two names that suggested themselves as fit to spin Ferg's remains up to near turbo-charger speeds in his watery grave. Thankfully the Bentley's tyres were nearly new and the lights, like everything else, were all in perfect working order, so the boys in blue had to let me go.\n\nAnyway, it felt right that it was the monstrous burgundy-coloured Eight I took to the Hebrides rather than the Golf.\n\nI started out on the Friday morning and took the A82 to Inverness, then crossed to the west coast and Ullapool. The drive confirmed that the Bentley would have to go. It hadn't been as unwieldy as I'd imagined it might be, but I just felt embarrassed in the thing. There hadn't been anything in Fergus's will to say I couldn't do what I wanted with the car, so what the hell, I'd sell it.\n\nI caught the afternoon ferry to Stornoway. I stayed in the Royal Hotel that night, read history books about ancient wars and long-gone empires, and dipped into our currently interesting times via the television. I stationed the paperweight on the bedside table, as though to guard me through the night.\n\nAt ten o'clock the next morning I stood in a strong wind and light drizzle, wrapped in my dad's old coat, near the lighthouse at the Butt of Lewis \u2013 trying to think of a good joke about that to tell my brother \u2013 and wishing I'd brought a brolly. I hadn't been able to decide whether this really was the most north-westerly point of the island \u2013 there was a place with the appropriate name of Gallan Head that might have done as well \u2013 but in the end I thought maybe it didn't really matter that much, and anyway this headland was easier to get to.\n\nThere were some cliffs, not especially high. I had the paperweight in my pocket, and I took it out, feeling suddenly self-conscious and foolish even though there was nobody else around. The wind tugged at the coat and threw light, soaking spray into my eyes. The sea was tarnished rolling silver and seemed to go on forever into the light grey watery expanse of spray and air and cloud.\n\nI hefted the glass ball, then threw it with all my might out to sea. I don't think it would have mattered especially to me if it had hit the rocks and shattered, but it didn't; it just disappeared into the greyness, heading towards the piling, restless waves. I think I saw it splash, but I'm not sure.\n\nI had been thinking about saying something, when I threw the paperweight into the sea; 'You forgot something,' had been the line I'd been toying with on the drive up, through the peat-smoke smell. But it seemed trite; in the end I didn't say anything.\n\nInstead I stood there for a while, getting wet and cold, and looking out at the waves and thinking of that wreckage, lying out there on the floor of the Atlantic, a few hundred kilometres to the northwest, far beneath the surface of that grey receiving sea.\n\nWas Fergus Urvill anywhere, still? Apart from the body \u2013 whatever was left of him physically, down there in that dark, cold pressure \u2013 was there anything else? Was his personality intact somehow, somewhere?\n\nI found that I couldn't believe that it was. Neither was dad's, neither was Rory's, nor Aunt Fiona's, nor Darren Watt's. There was no such continuation; it just didn't work that way, and there should even be a sort of relief in the comprehension that it didn't. We continue in our children, and in our works and in the memories of others; we continue in our dust and ash. To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constipatory, too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.\n\nThe belief that we somehow moved on to something else \u2013 whether still recognisably ourselves, or quite thoroughly changed \u2013 might be a tribute to our evolutionary tenacity and our animal thirst for life, but not to our wisdom. That saw a value beyond itself; in intelligence, knowledge and wit as concepts \u2013 wherever and by whoever expressed \u2013 not just in its own personal manifestation of those qualities, and so could contemplate its own annihilation with equanimity, and suffer it with grace; it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the individual spirit in the vanity and frivolity of a heaven.\n\nThe waves surged against the cliffs, thudding into the rock and being reflected. The shapes of their energy charged back into that wild, disturbed water, obliterated and conserved at once.\n\nIt seemed to me then that it was this simple; individual life has no momentum, and \u2013 just as dad had said \u2013 the world is neither fair nor unfair. Those words are our inventions, and apply only to the results of thought. To die as Darren had, and as my father had, and perhaps as Rory had, with what might have been great things still to do, and much to give and to receive, was to make our human grief the greater, but could not form part of any argument. They were here, and then they weren't, and that was all there was.\n\nMy father had had the right of it, when I'd been so upset at Darren Watt's death; it had been a sort of petulance I had felt towards the world, an anger as well as a sadness that Darren had died so soon (and so uglily, so sordidly; a litter bin, for fuck's sake). How dare the world not behave as I expected it to? How dare it just rub out one of my friends? It wasn't fair! And, of course, indeed it was not fair. But that was beside the point.\n\nWell, the old man had been right and I had been wrong, and I just hoped that he'd known somehow that I would come to my senses eventually.\n\nBut if he had gone to his grave \u2013 via the McDobbies' \u2013 thinking that his middle son was a credulous fool, and likely to stay that way, well, that hurt me; hurt me more than I could say, but there was no fixing that now. It was over.\n\nI turned and left and caught the ferry back to Ullapool from Stornoway that afternoon, drinking cups of styrofoam coffee and eating greasy pies while I stood out on deck watching the beating waves.\n\nWe'd seen dolphins following the ship once, coming back this way past the Summer Isles after a holiday, one day many years ago; mum and dad and Lewis and James and me.\n\nBut that was then.\n\nI was back in Glasgow six hours later. I slept well.\n\nAnd so we went back to the Anarkali restaurant on that Sunday night, Ashley Watt and I, and we had a meal that was almost identical to the one we'd had before, on the summer night when dad had died, except we got along just fine this time, and Ashley didn't throw any brandy over me, and I didn't act like a complete asshole, and as I sat there, talking about all the old times and about the future, again I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, because it was so good to see her, but she was going away tomorrow, flying off across that wide grey ocean I'd stood looking at just the day before, flying away to Canada and maybe going to stay there, and I didn't know whether to ask about any men in her life or not \u2013 even though I knew from Dean that the guy she'd gone off with at Hogmanay had only been a one-night thing \u2013 and I still didn't feel I could tell her how I felt about her because she was going to go away now, and how could I suddenly say I love you when I'd never said it to anybody in my life before? How could I say it now especially, the night before she was due to leave? It would look like I was trying to make her stay, or just get her into bed. It would probably wreck this one precious evening that we did have, and upset her, confuse her, even hurt her, and I didn't want to do any of that. And through it all I knew there must have been a moment when I could have told her, some time in the past, some time over the last few months, when it would have been the right time and the right place, and it would have felt like the most natural thing in the world to say and do, but somehow, in the heat of things, just during the complexity of events \u2013 and thanks to my own stupidity, my hesitation, my indecision; my negligence \u2013 I'd missed it, and that, too, was gone from me; over.\n\nSo I just sat there, across from her, looking into her soft-skinned face all glowing in the candle-light, that long, thin nose rising straight above her small, smiling red mouth as if together they made an exclamation mark, and I felt lost in the grey sparkle of those eyes.\n\nWe walked out into the cool March night. It was fair but it had been wet and the pavements shone. Ashley stood on the steps as I put on the old tweed coat that had been my dad's. She wore a black dress and the old naval jacket with the turned-over cuffs I remembered from Grandma Margot's funeral. She leant against some railings, watching me button my coat up, and with her left foot she clicked her toe and heel as if in accompaniment to some song I couldn't hear.\n\nI looked down at her tapping black shoe as I adjusted my collar. 'Morse code?'\n\nShe shook her head, long fawn hair spilling over her dark shoulders.\n\nWe went arm in arm down the steps. 'What was that film that had a dancer tapping out insults at somebody?' I said.\n\n'Dunno,' Ash said, click-clicking her feet as we walked.\n\n'Was it Dead Men _Don't_ Wear Plaid?' I scratched my head. I wasn't wearing gloves and I could feel Ashley's warmth through her jacket. She smelled of _Samsara,_ which was a departure for her, I thought.\n\n'Maybe,' she said, and then she laughed.\n\n'What?'\n\n'I was just remembering,' she said, squeezing my waist. 'Mrs Phimister's class. Remember? The French teacher? We were in the same class.'\n\n'Oh yeah,' I said. We turned onto Woodlands Road.\n\n'You hated her because she'd confiscated a radio or something, and you used to tap out insults in morse code.' Ash laughed loud.\n\n'God, yeah,' I said. 'That's right.'\n\n' \"Fuck off you old cow\", was the witticism I recall best,\" Ash said, still snorting with laughter.\n\n'Jeez,' I said, pulling away from her a little to look into her eyes. 'You mean you could decipher it?'\n\n'Yeah,' Ash said, with a sort of friendly scorn.\n\n'You rotter!' I laughed. 'You absolute cad-ess. You cad-ette; I thought that was my secret. I only told people later, after I'd left school, and then nobody believed me.'\n\n'Yeah,' Ash said, grinning at me. 'I knew. A couple of times I almost got detention because I was giggling so much. Nearly wet my knickers trying not to laugh. Got some very stern looks from Mrs Phimister.' She laughed again, throwing her head back.\n\n'I didn't even know you knew morse code,' I said. 'I learned it in the scouts. Where did you learn it?'\n\n'My grandad taught me,' Ash said, nodding. 'We used to sit and pass messages at meal times by clinking our cutlery off the plates. Mum and dad and the others always wondered what we found so hilarious about yet another helping of shepherd's pie and chips.'\n\n'And you never said!' I shook my head. 'You rascal!'\n\nShe shrugged, looked down at her black, medium-high heels as she did a little tap-dance. 'You didn't like me; what was the point?'\n\n'I didn't like any girls,' I told her. 'In fact I wasn't that keen on any of the boys either. Come to think of it, I felt mostly contempt even for my friends.'\n\n'Yeah,' Ash said, leaning over towards me so that her grinning face was almost on my chest. 'But you didn't break their noses with a boulder disguised as a snowball, did you?'\n\nI stopped in my tracks.\n\nAsh gave a little squeal as she staggered, suddenly losing support on one side. She steadied and turned. She faced me, looking puzzled, from a metre or so away. I just stood there open-mouthed.\n\n'You knew that was me?'\n\n'Course I did.' She frowned and smiled at the same time.\n\n'Another secret gone!' I exclaimed, waving my arms. 'I've felt guilty about that for years!'\n\nAsh tipped her head to one side.\n\n'Well, not all the time,' I said. 'I mean, on and off.'\n\nShe raised one eyebrow.\n\n'Okay,' I said, slumping a little. 'Mostly off. But I did feel bad about it. I really did. I always felt bad about that.'\n\nAshley shook her head gently and came forward, took my arm and led me along the street. 'Never mind,' she said. 'I never told anybody. And I forgave you.'\n\n'Really?' I said, putting my arm round her again, 'When?'\n\n'At the time. Well, after it stopped hurting, anyway.'\n\nWe turned the corner into Woodlands Gate. I shook my head. 'Why didn't you ever say you knew it had been me?' I asked her.\n\nShe shrugged. 'The subject never really arose before.'\n\nI shook my head again. 'Good grief,' I said. 'All this time. Good grief.'\n\nAshley had been ravenous when she'd arrived at the house in Park Terrace a little after seven that Sunday evening, so she'd just dumped her bags and we'd gone straight out to the restaurant. When we got back after the meal, I showed her round the place. We opened a bottle of Graves I had in the kitchen \u2013 after first agreeing that of course we shouldn't \u2013 and then walked from room to room while I did my guided tour bit and pointed out the more interesting or valuable works of art, while we sipped our wine and the statues gleamed and the chandeliers glittered and the paintings glowed and the carpets spread before us like gigantic blow-ups of oddly symmetrical printed circuits.\n\nAshley shook her head a lot. When she saw the main bedroom she laughed.\n\nWe went back to the kitchen. She demurred when I offered to top her glass up. 'I should go to bed now,' she said, pulling a hand through her hair. She put her glass down on an oak working surface. 'Take some water in a big glass and get to me bed ...' she said. 'Do you mind?' She looked at me.\n\nI shrugged. 'No, of course not. There's glasses in the bathroom, beside your room.' A terrible sadness settled on me then, and I had to swallow hard a couple of times. I drank, to hide it, then said, as matter-of-factly as I could, 'What time do you want up tomorrow?'\n\n'About seven should do.'\n\n'Right,' I said, looking at my glass. 'Right. Seven. I'll bring you tea and toast, all right?'\n\n'Fine.'\n\n'Okay then,' I said.\n\nI looked up and she was smiling. She looked at her watch. 'Well,' she said, and flexed her brows. 'Night-night.'\n\nShe came forward, put one hand on my shoulder, kissed my cheek.\n\nI put my hand on her hip, let my head nuzzle towards hers a little. She put her arm round my waist and I turned to her, hugged her, my lips at her neck, kissing delicately. She pushed her head against mine, and we started to turn to each other at the same moment, as she put her arms round me; the kiss just seemed natural after that.\n\nIt went on for some time. Ashley seemed to loosen and grow more tense at the same time; her mouth appeared to want to swallow mine, her hands grabbed my curls, nails scratching at my scalp. I pulled on her hair, kissed and licked her neck. She dug her nails into the small of my back through my shirt. We kissed again and I kneaded her backside, then pulled the dress up while she wriggled a little to make it easier, and I found skin, stockings, her knickers, and pushed my hands inside, gripping her smooth, warm bum. She pulled herself up against me.\n\n'This,' she said, breaking off, breathing hard, while her hands stroked the nape of my neck and her gaze flicked from my mouth to my eyes and back again, 'this might be better suited to that ridiculous bedroom, what do you think?'\n\nI nodded. 'Good idea.'\n\n'Bring the wine.'\n\n'Better yet.'\n\nIt was something. On that monumentally ostentatious bed of the late Mrs Ippot's, Ashley and I made love like we'd done it for years and then been apart for years and just met up and hadn't forgotten a thing.\n\nA couple of times, lying there panting afterwards while we trickled with sweat and licked at each other, or were stroking and caressing and thinking about starting all over again, she laughed.\n\n'The room?' I said, first time.\n\n'No,' she said, shaking her gorgeous head, all tawny hair and flushed face. 'It's just you and me; I never thought this was going to happen.'\n\nAnd, later, when she cried out, I heard the crystal bowl on the table by the side of the bed ring, pure and faint, as if in reply.\n\nIt was later still, when we'd put the lights out and had agreed just to cuddle, exhausted and drained, but had not been able to merely cuddle, and so had coupled once more, and I still lay on top of her, inside her, while she breathed and I breathed and our hearts gradually slowed down again, that I did what I'd done before in that situation, flexing whatever muscle it is in the male genitals or the associated support systems that briefly fills the slowly detumescing penis with blood again, sending a small pulse of socketed touch into Ashley's body. She gave a little exhalation half-way between a sigh and a laugh, and then squeezed back with her vaginal muscles, like a hand round me.\n\nThere was a pause, and I thought I felt her go very still for a second, and then she squeezed me again; two quick grippings in succession. There was a pause, and I responded, but she dug her fingers into the small of my back as though to stop me, and so I relaxed.\n\nShe squeezed again, four times, the second pulse longer than the other three. Another pause, during which I realised \u2013 it was morse! Then another four pulses, the second one short and the others long.\n\nI. L. Y.\n\nI had raised my head away from her shoulder while I concentrated on what she was doing in there; now I lowered my face to her skin again. I laughed, very lightly, and after a moment so did she, and then I sent the same signal back, with a single long pulse at the end: I.L.Y.T.\n\nAnd I swear the sending made the signal all the truer.\n\nAnd that falling was followed by two more shared fallings, as we fell apart, and then asleep.\n\nI woke and she was dressed, standing by the bed, a beatific smile across her face, which was washed and glowing and framed by neatly combed hair. I struggled to get up on one elbow.\n\n'Ash?'\n\nShe put one hand to the back of my head and kissed my lips. 'I have to go,' she said.\n\n'What? But \u2013 you mean to _Canada?'_\n\n'Prentice, I promised. I have to.'\n\nI felt my jaw drop. I rolled onto my back for a second, then sat bolt upright. 'But last night!' I said, spreading my arms wide.\n\nAshley smiled even more broadly and climbed half onto the bed, one black-stockinged knee on the crumpled sheets. She kissed me. 'Was wonderful,' she said, 'but I have to go.'\n\n'You can't!' I slapped myself on the forehead with one palm. 'This can't be happening! It's a dream! Stay!' I reached out to her, held her face between my hands. 'Ashley! Please! Stay!'\n\n'I can't, Prentice. I said I'd go. I promised.'\n\n'I'm serious!' I said. 'I don't \u2013'\n\nShe put one soft hand gently to my mouth, shushing me, then kissed me long and tenderly. 'I'm going, Prentice,' she said, 'but it doesn't have to be for ever.'\n\n'Well, how long?' I wailed.\n\nShe shrugged, stroked my shoulders with her hands. 'You get this degree, okay? If you still want me then, well ...'\n\n'Promise?' I said, in what was meant to be a terminally sarcastic manner, but came out pathetically.\n\nShe smiled. 'I promise.'\n\n'Oh my God!' I said, looking at the clock by the crystal bowl. 'I don't believe this!' Maybe, if I could just stall her ...\n\n'There's a taxi waiting,' she told me. 'It's all right.' She smoothed some hair away from my eyes, her touch like silk.\n\n'But I was going to drive \u2013'\n\n'You rest,' she said. 'You probably had too much wine last night, anyway. The taxi really is waiting.' She slipped her hand under the covers, held my penis as she kissed me, then slipped away as I fell forward, trying to embrace her, hold her, keep her.\n\n'Ashley!' I said desperately. She was at the door.\n\n'Yes?' she said.\n\n'I didn't dream that... signal last night, did I?'\n\nShe laughed. 'Nope. Meant every letter; every word. With all my heart.' One brow flicked. 'Amongst other organs.' She tipped her head to one side, eyebrows raised. 'And you?'\n\n'The same,' I gulped.\n\nShe looked down at the floor, then back at me, still smiling. 'Good. Well, we can take it from there, okay?'\n\n'I'll write every day!' I told her.\n\n'Don't be ridiculous,' she laughed, with one shake of her head. 'Just pass those exams.'\n\n'They'll be over by mid-June,' I said, more to keep her there in my sight for a few seconds longer that for any other reason.\n\n'Then I'll be back in mid-June,' she said.\n\nShe pulled her black gloves from her jacket pockets and put them on. 'Bye, Prentice.' She blew me a kiss.\n\n'Bye,' I gulped. She closed the door. I flopped back, stunned, staring at the glittering red chandelier.\n\nI jumped out of bed as the front door banged closed; I tore downstairs bollock-naked and waved to her from one of the drawing room windows, which went from about human knee level to giraffe's head level.\n\nShe saw me; I could see her laughing. She pushed the window down and waved, and pointed to my groin and made a shocked expression as the cab started away. The driver saw me too and looked amused and shook his head. The cab drove off around the curbed terrace. I opened the window and leaned out, waving, and Ashley pushed the cab's window right down and stuck her head and arms out and blew me kisses through her wildly waving, slip-streamed hair all the way until the cab rounded the corner and disappeared.\n\nI sat down on the parquet, staring at the white gauziness of the huge net curtains, all my muscles complaining, my head pounding, my penis tingling, my flesh goose-pimpling against the cool wood of the floor. I shook my head. I collapsed back, banging my already internally abused head on a Persian rug. The carpet's pile was luxuriously deep however, so it didn't hurt as much as it might.\n\nI looked up at the ornately carved wooden ceiling, not entirely sure what to think. Then I started to laugh, lying there in the enormous room, naked, tummy wobbling, laughing like an idiot and hoping the resemblance ended there.\n\n'Oh well,' I said, laughing, to the ceiling. 'Here's hoping.'\n\n'Good; you're getting sensible,' mum said. She walked carefully towards me, the big blue sheet folding and drooping between us. She took the sheet's other two corners from me.\n\n_'Getting?'_ I said indignantly.\n\nMum smiled, folded the sheet over twice more and put it on top of the tumble drier. I pulled another sheet down off the old clothes pulley that hung under the ceiling of the utility room. We took an end each, stood apart, pulled the sheet taut.\n\n'Mm-hmm,' she said, tugging at the sheet again. 'I think selling the Bentley is very sensible.' She folded the sheet over, hand to hand; I did the same. We pulled it taut again. Mum looked thoughtful. 'Maybe we should sell that ancient thing sitting in the garage out there, as well.'\n\n'The Lagonda?' I said. We folded the sheet over again.\n\n'Yes,' mum said, walking towards me again. 'It's just a waste of space at the moment.'\n\n'You mean you weren't thinking of going in for classic car restoration after you've finished the harpischord?'\n\nMum smiled as she took the sheet from me. 'Well, actually that had occurred to me, but ...' She wrinkled her nose. 'No; I don't think so.'\n\n'Well, we won't get much for it in the state it's in at the moment.' I pulled another sheet down.\n\n'I'm not bothered about the money,' mum said. She folded the sheet away, shot me a mischievous look. 'And besides, whose fault is it the car's in the state it is, anyway?'\n\n'What?' I said. I stood looking at her.\n\nMum took the sheet from me and put two of its corners in my hands as she backed off, pulling it tight. She smiled. 'It was you who tipped the big dresser down onto it in the garage that time, wasn't it?'\n\nShe pulled the sheet; it flew out of my fingers, billowing over the floor of the room like some slow motion wave. I ran after it, catching it. I retrieved the corners, untwisted the sheet and studied the amused expression on my mother's face. She tugged the sheet again and I held onto it this time.\n\nI'm ashamed to admit that it even occurred to me to deny it, albeit briefly. I grinned sheepishly as we folded the sheet over. 'Yeah, guilty as charged, but it was an accident.' I shook my head. 'How did you work that out?'\n\nShe walked towards me, took the sheet from me. 'Found a bit of broken glass in your underpants when I was washing them,' she said, and gave a tiny laugh as she turned away to place the sheet on the drier.\n\nI looked up at the ceiling. 'Oh dear,' I said.\n\nMum turned round, standing there in her jeans and blouse, glowing with what might well have been self-satisfaction. She reached up and pulled a last sheet down off the pulley, handing one end to me. 'Yes. Well, we'll draw a discreet veil over that little incident, shall we?'\n\nI nodded, pursed my lips. 'Might be best,' I agreed. I coughed, pulled the sheet taut with her, and with a textbook expression of interested interrogation, asked, 'And how is the harpsichord-construction project going, anyway?'\n\n'Well \u2013'\n\nIt didn't end there, either. Nobody had thought to tell me, but obviously it was open season on Prentice's ignorance. If you were female, anyway.\n\n'Well,' I said. 'I think my absorption spectrum must be hazy.'\n\n'No,' Diana said. 'I think it's much like anybody else's.' She took a Waldglas beaker out of the display cabinet and glanced at me. She may have seen a hurt expression because she shrugged and smiled and said, 'Okay, maybe yours has a few more black lines. You were always interested in all sorts of stuff, weren't you?'\n\nI shrugged. 'It runs in the family.'\n\n'Fact is,' Diana said, breathing on the knobby green glass, 'it's probably thanks to you I spend so much of my life fourteen thousand feet above Hawaii looking for I-R stars.'\n\n'It is?' I said. \/\n\n'Yeah,' Diana said, smiling at the glass as she polished it. 'You remember the night there was Helen, me, you, Lewis and Verity and ... Darren? We were up in the observatory?'\n\n'I remember,' I said.\n\n'You got really stoned and started gibbering about how fantastic the universe was?'\n\nI shook my head. 'I don't remember that,' I confessed.\n\n'Well, you were pretty ripped,' Diana said. She handed me the beaker. 'But you were coherent, mostly, and you were really enthusiastic. I mean you even shut Lewis up; you just raved about how amazing astronomy was. You meant cosmology, but what the heck. You were just bubbling with it.' She brought a second Waldglas beaker out of the cabinet.\n\n'Huh.' I filled the beaker with polystyrene beads, found a box big enough to hold the two beakers and put the first one carefully into its bed of little white infinity symbols. 'Well, I'll take your word for it.'\n\n'Oh, you were just so fascinated with it all. Especially with stellar evolution. That had obviously really blown your mind. \"We are made of bits of stars!\" you shouted.' Diana laughed a little. 'You'd been reading about all that stuff and it just tickled you pink. You told us about how the sun and the solar system were made out of the remnants of older stars that had blown up; how the elements that made up the world had been made in those ancient stars, and that meant our bodies, too, every atom. Jeez, I thought you were going to explode.' She handed me the second beaker.\n\n'Hmm,' I said. 'Well, I sort of remember that, I think.'\n\nActually, I wasn't sure I really did at all. My recollection of that evening got very hazy after the bit where Verity had pretended to tell me my fortune.\n\n' \"We are made from bits of stars! We are made from bits of stars!\" you kept yelling, and went through it all: super novae scattering heavy atoms; the debris swirling through space, other novae and supers sending shock-waves through the debris, compressing it; stars forming, planets; geology, chemistry; life.' Diana shook her head. She extracted a thin, delicate, old-looking flute of a wine glass from the display case. 'And Jeez, you made me feel ashamed. I mean, dad had built the observatory for us; it was a present, in a way. And we hardly used it. We went up there to smoke dope. And here you were, knew all about this stuff, and actually made it sound interesting. You were really gone on the idea that we were stuck down here on this one little planet and still just savages really, but we'd glimpsed the workings of the universe, worked out from light and radiation what had happened over the last fifteen billion years and could talk sensibly about the first few seconds after the big bang \u2013 even if the jury has gone back out on that idea nowadays \u2013 and could predict what would happen to the universe over the next few billion, and understand it ...' Diana held the wine glass up to the light, and cleaned it with the cloth. 'You were pretty scathing about religion, too; tawdry and pathetic in comparison, you said.' She shrugged. 'I didn't necessarily buy that, but you made me ashamed not to have used the telescope more. And so I did, and then I got some books on astronomy, and found out a lot of it was about maths, which I was good at anyway, though somehow the fact astronomy was about numbers and equations as well as stars and telescopes hadn't occurred to me. But anyway, that was the start of it, I was hooked. Been a star-junkie ever since, Prent, and it's all your fault.'\n\nShe flashed a shocked expression at me and handed me the glass.\n\nI shook my head. 'You as well, eh?'\n\n'Hmm?' Diana said.\n\n'Nothing,' I breathed, running a hand through my hair. 'Shit, I never knew.' I looked mockly serious. 'This is something of a responsibility, Diana. I trust you haven't had cause to regret your decision.'\n\n'Not at all, Prentice.' She closed the now empty cabinet, and took off her white gloves. 'I mean, maybe I'd have settled on astronomy anyway, without your one-man show. Whatever; it's been fun. Cold at nights and a long way from the beach, and the air's a bit thin ... but it's the skies that really take your breath away.' She nodded. 'You should visit, come see it all some time.'\n\n'I'd like to,' I said. 'People allowed to come and look round?'\n\nDiana folded her arms and rested her back against the display cabinet. 'It can be arranged.'\n\n'There's somebody I'd like to take there.'\n\nDiana smirked. 'Yeah? Somebody special? Who's that?'\n\n'Oh ... friend of mine. In Canada at the moment.'\n\n'Ashley, huh?'\n\nI felt myself blush. 'Well, yeah,' I said, trying not to grin too much.\n\nDiana nodded, still smiling. 'It'd be great to see you both out there. You two sort of an item these days?'\n\nI shrugged, felt myself blush again. 'Sort of. I hope so. I think so.'\n\nDiana laughed, which was good to hear; I didn't think she had laughed since Fergus died. 'Yeah, I think so.'\n\nVerity and Lewis brought young Kenneth to the castle that day, so that Mrs McSpadden could go all gooey over him. She did. Diana seemed equally charmed. Kenneth just slept.\n\nDiana broke open a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Macallen, which was older than any of us (well, except Mrs McS, but she'd gone back to the kitchen by then), and an awful lot older than Kenneth.\n\n'Let's wet his head,' Diana said.\n\n'Can we go up on the roof?' I said. It just seemed like a good idea.\n\nSo we climbed up there, into a bright March afternoon with a keen blue sky and a smell of wood-smoke on the westerly breeze. We sat on the slates and drank our whiskies and took turns holding the baby, who was still fast asleep.\n\n'You having him christened?' Diana asked Verity softly, peering down at the infant's tiny scrunched-up face. She rocked him to and fro.\n\n'Well, I think mum and dad would rather he was, but I'm not bothered one way or the other. Lewis isn't too keen, are you, my love?'\n\nLewis showed his teeth. 'Over my dead body, actually.' he said.\n\n'See?' Verity said to Diana, who was smiling broadly and holding the boy close, sniffing him. She just nodded.\n\nVerity glanced at Lewis, then said, 'Prentice?'\n\n'Yo?'\n\n'We'd like you to be his godfather. Would you be?' She actually looked as though she thought I might refuse. Lewis was grinning at me.\n\nI cleared my throat. 'Well ... in terms of the actual title, I'm sort of taking a long hard look at my previous statements about the existence or non-existence of a supreme being at this moment in time, re-appraisal-wise,' I said, a suitably pained expression on my face as Diana handed the baby to me.\n\nLewis laughed.\n\nAnyway, it was agreed, and then we thought the little blighter ought to have at least a semblance of a christening, so Lewis dabbed his finger in his whisky and reached over and put a tiny drop of the spirit on his son's head, and said, 'There; that's all he's going to get.'\n\n'Kenneth Walker McHoan,' I said, cradling him with one arm and raising my glass in the other hand.\n\nWe drank the lad's health. Then Diana threw her glass away over the battlements towards the woods. Lewis, Verity and I all looked at each other, then followed suit, and heard a couple of the tumblers smash somewhere in the trees beneath. Young Kenneth opened his eyes at that point, looked woozily up at me and let out a small, plaintive cry. I laughed and kissed his tiny nose, then handed him back to his mother so she could feed him.\n\nI stood up then and went to the battlements, and held the ancient rough stones beneath my hands. I looked out over the woods and the plain and the fields; to Gallanach, with its quays and spires and serried streets, and out to the crumpled hills beyond, the brindle of forests to the east and the glitter of waves to the west, where the ocean was. I thought of Ashley, on the other side of that ocean, and wondered what she was doing right now, and hoped that she was well, and happy, and maybe thinking of me, and then I just stood there, grinning like a fool, and took a deep, deep breath of that sharp, smoke-scented air and raised my arms to the open sky, and said, _'Ha!'_\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n##### Copyright\n\nThe 7 Habits of Highly Effective People\n\nCopyright \u00a9 1989, 2004 by Stephen R. Covey\n\nCover art to the electronic edition copyright \u00a9 2012 by RosettaBooks, LLC\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.\n\nElectronic edition published 2012 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.\n\nePub ISBN: 978-0-7953-2342-3\nTo my colleagues,  \nempowered  \nand empowering\n\n### Acknowledgments\n\nInterdependence is a higher value than independence.\n\nThis work is a synergistic product of many minds. It began in the middle seventies as I was reviewing 200 years of success literature as part of a doctoral program. I am grateful for the inspiration and wisdom of many thinkers and for the trans-generational sources and roots of this wisdom.\n\nI am also grateful for many students, friends, and colleagues at Brigham Young University and the Covey Leadership Center and for thousands of adults, parents, youth, executives, teachers, and other clients who have tested this material and have given feedback and encouragement. The material and arrangement has slowly evolved and has imbued those who have been sincerely and deeply immersed in it with the conviction that the Seven Habits represent a holistic, integrated approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness, and that, more than in the individual habits themselves, the real key lies in the relationship among them and in how they are sequenced.\n\nFor the development and production of the book itself I feel a deep sense of gratitude:\n\n\u2014to Sandra and to each of our children and their spouses for living lives of integrity and service and for supporting my many travels and involve\u00adments outside the home. It's easy to teach principles loved ones live.\n\n\u2014to my brother John for his constant love, interest, insights and purity of soul.\n\n\u2014to the happy memory of my father.\n\n\u2014to my mother for her devotion to her more than 87 living descendants and for her constant demonstrations of love.\n\n\u2014to my dear friends and colleagues in the business, especially:\n\n\u2014to Bill Marre, Ron McMillan, and Lex Watterson for feedback, encour\u00adagement, editorial suggestions, and production help.\n\n\u2014to Brad Anderson, who at great personal sacrifice for over a year, developed a Seven Habits video-based development program. Under his leadership this material has been tested and refined and is being implemented by thousands of people across a broad range of organiza\u00adtions. Almost without exception, after initial exposure to this material, our clients desire to make it available to greater numbers of employees, underscoring our confidence that it \"works.\"\n\n\u2014to Bob Thele for helping to create a system for our firm that gave me the peace of mind to enable me to really focus on the book.\n\n\u2014to David Conley for communicating the value and power of the Seven Habits to hundreds of business organizations so that my colleagues, Blaine Lee, Roice Krueger, Roger Merrill and Al Switzler, and I have the constant opportunity to share ideas in a large variety of settings.\n\n\u2014to my proactive literary agent Jan Miller, and my \"can do\" associate Greg Link and his assistant Stephanni Smith and Raleen Beckham Wahlin for their creative and courageous marketing leadership.\n\n\u2014to my Simon and Schuster editor Bob Asahina for his professional competence and project leadership, for his many excellent suggestions and for helping me to better understand the difference between writing and speaking.\n\n\u2014to my earlier devoted assistants Shirley and Heather Smith and to my present assistant Marilyn Andrews for a level of loyalty which is truly uncommon.\n\n\u2014to our Executive Excellence magazine editor Ken Shelton for his editing of the first manuscript years ago, for helping refine and test the material in several contexts, and for his integrity and sense of quality.\n\n\u2014to Rebecca Merrill for her invaluable editing and production assistance, for her inner commitment to the material, and for her skill, sensitivity, and carefulness in fulfilling that commitment, and to her husband, Roger, for his wise, synergistic help.\n\n\u2014and to Kay Swim and her son, Gaylord, for their much appreciated vision which contributed to our organization's rapid growth.\n\n### Contents\n\nFOREWORD\n\n**PART ONE: PARADIGMS AND PRINCIPLES**\n\nInside-Out\n\nThe Seven Habits\u2014An Overview\n\n**PART TWO: PRIVATE VICTORY**\n\nHABIT 1 Be Proactive\n\nPrinciples of Personal Vision\n\nHABIT 2 Begin with the End in Mind\n\nPrinciples of Personal Leadership\n\nHABIT 3 Put First Things First\n\nPrinciples of Personal Management\n\n**PART THREE: PUBLIC VICTORY**\n\nParadigms of Interdependence\n\nHABIT 4 Think Win\/Win\n\nPrinciples of Interpersonal Leadership\n\nHABIT 5 Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood\n\nPrinciples of Empathetic Communication\n\nHABIT 6 Synergize\n\nPrinciples of Creative Cooperation\n\n**PART FOUR: RENEWAL**\n\nHABIT 7 Sharpen the Saw\n\nPrinciples of Balanced Self-Renewal\n\nInside-Out Again\n\nA Personal Note\n\nAFTERWORD: Questions I am Often Asked\n\nAPPENDIX A: Possible Perceptions Flowing out of Various Centers\n\nAPPENDIX B: A Quadrant II Day at the Office\n\nPROBLEM\/OPPORTUNITY INDEX\n\nINDEX\n\n### Foreword\n\nWhen I wrote this book in 1989, I had no idea how the world would change and that people would be able to read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in this amazing way on these amazing devices.\n\nSince then, this book has been called \"the most influential business book of the century\" (by The Wall Street Journal). It stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for five years. A \"must-read\" translated into 38 languages, with 20 million copies in print (and is arguably the most pirated business book in the world). Google 7 Habits and you'll get more than 12 million hits.\n\nI've been humbled and gratified by the worldwide audience this book has reached. Presidents, prime ministers, and kings read the book, but so do college students, construction workers, and kitchen help. I've heard from literally thousands of people who say things like this:\n\n  * \"I learned to focus on truly important things, not just urgent things.\"\n  * I listen\u2014really listen\u2014to other people for the first time.\"\n  * \"Since I started thinking win-win in a job that was killing me, I've found a new mission and purpose in my professional life.\"\n\nHow will The 7 Habits impact you? My hope is that you will find new hope, a greater sense of purpose, more peace of mind, and far more rewarding relationships in both your personal and professional life.\n\nStephen R. Covey\n\nDecember 2009\n\nFranklinCovey Co.\n\n## _PART ONE_\n\n# PARADIGMS  \nand PRINCIPLES\n\n### Inside-Out\n\n_There is no real excellence in all this world  \nwhich can be separated from right living._\n\nDavid Starr Jordan\n\nIN MORE THAN 25 YEARS of working with people in business, university, and marriage and family settings, I have come in contact with many individuals who have achieved an incredible degree of outward success, but have found themselves struggling with an inner hunger, a deep need for personal congruency and effectiveness and for healthy, growing relationships with other people.\n\nI suspect some of the problems they have shared with me may be familiar to you.\n\n_I've set and met my career goals and I'm having tremendous professional success. But it's cost me my personal and family life. I don't know my wife and children any more. I'm not even sure I know myself and what's really important to me. I've had to ask myself\u2014is it worth it?_\n\n_I've started a new diet\u2014for the fifth time this year. I know I'm overweight, and I really want to change. I read all the new information, I set goals, I get myself all psyched up with a positive mental attitude and tell myself I can do it. But I don't. After a few weeks, I fizzle. I just can't seem to keep a promise I make to myself._\n\n_I've taken course after course on effective management training. I expect a lot out of my employees and I work hard to be friendly toward them and to treat them right. But I don't feel any loyalty from them. I think if I were home sick for a day, they'd spend most of their time gabbing at the water fountain. Why can't I train them to be independent and responsible\u2014or find employees who can be?_\n\n_My teenage son is rebellious and on drugs. No matter what I try, he won't listen to me. What can I do?_\n\n_There's so much to do. And there's never enough time. I feel pressured and hassled all day, every day, seven days a week. I've attended time management seminars and I've tried half a dozen different planning systems. They've helped some, but I still don't feel I'm living the happy, productive, peaceful life I want to live._\n\n_I want to teach my children the value of work. But to get them to do anything, I have to supervise every move... and put up with complaining every step of the way. It's so much easier to do it myself. Why can't children do their work cheerfully and without being reminded?_\n\n_I'm busy\u2014really busy. But sometimes I wonder if what I'm doing will make any difference in the long run. I'd really like to think there was meaning in my life, that somehow things were different because I was here._\n\n_I see my friends or relatives achieve some degree of success or receive some recognition, and I smile and congratulate them enthusiastically. But inside, I'm eating my heart out. Why do I feel this way?_\n\n_I have a forceful personality. I know, in almost any interaction, I can control the outcome. Most of the time, I can even do it by influencing others to come up with the solution I want. I think through each situation and I really feel the ideas I come up with are usually the best for everyone. But I feel uneasy. I always wonder what other people really think of me and my ideas._\n\n_My marriage has gone flat. We don't fight or anything; we just don't love each other anymore. We've gone to counseling; we've tried a number of things, but we just can't seem to rekindle the feeling we used to have._\n\nThese are deep problems, painful problems\u2014problems that quick fix approaches can't solve.\n\nA few years ago, my wife Sandra and I were struggling with this kind of concern. One of our sons was having a very difficult time in school. He was doing poorly academically; he didn't even know how to follow the instructions on the tests, let alone do well on them. Socially he was immature, often embarrassing those closest to him. Athletically, he was small, skinny, and uncoordinated\u2014swinging his baseball bat, for example, almost before the ball was even pitched. Others would laugh at him.\n\nSandra and I were consumed with a desire to help him. We felt that if \"success\" were important in any area of life, it was supremely important in our role as parents. So we worked on our attitudes and behavior toward him and we tried to work on his. We attempted to psych him up using positive mental attitude techniques. \"Come on, son! You can do it! We know you can. Put your hands a little higher on the bat and keep your eye on the ball. Don't swing till it gets close to you.\" And if he did a little better, we would go to great lengths to reinforce him. \"That's good, son, keep it up.\"\n\nWhen others laughed, we reprimanded them. \"Leave him alone. Get off his back. He's just learning.\" And our son would cry and insist that he'd never be any good and that he didn't like baseball anyway.\n\nNothing we did seemed to help, and we were really worried. We could see the effect this was having on his self-esteem. We tried to be encouraging and helpful and positive, but after repeated failure, we finally drew back and tried to look at the situation on a different level.\n\nAt this time in my professional role I was involved in leadership development work with various clients throughout the country. In that capacity I was preparing bimonthly programs on the subject of communication and perception for IBM's Executive Development Program participants.\n\nAs I researched and prepared these presentations, I became particularly interested in how perceptions are formed, how they govern the way we see, and how the way we see governs how we behave. This led me to a study of expectancy theory and self-fulfilling prophecies or the \"Pygmalion effect,\" and to a realization of how deeply imbedded our perceptions are. It taught me that we must look at the lens through which we see the world, as well as at the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.\n\nAs Sandra and I talked about the concepts I was teaching at IBM and about our own situation, we began to realize that what we were doing to help our son was not in harmony with the way we really saw him. When we honestly examined our deepest feelings, we realized that our perception was that he was basically inadequate, somehow \"behind.\" No matter how much we worked on our attitude and behavior, our efforts were ineffective because, despite our actions and our words, what we really communicated to him was, \"You aren't capable. You have to be protected.\"\n\nWe began to realize that if we wanted to change the situation, we first had to change ourselves. And to change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.\n\nTHE PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER ETHICS\n\nAt the same time, in addition to my research on perception, I was also deeply immersed in an in-depth study of the success literature published in the United States since 1776. I was reading or scanning literally hundreds of books, articles, and essays in fields such as self-improvement, popular psychology, and self-help. At my fingertips was the sum and substance of what a free and democratic people considered to be the keys to successful living.\n\nAs my study took me back through 200 years of writing about success, I noticed a startling pattern emerging in the content of the literature. Because of our own pain, and because of similar pain I had seen in the lives and relationships of many people I had worked with through the years, I began to feel more and more that much of the success literature of the past 50 years was superficial. It was filled with social image consciousness, techniques and quick fixes\u2014with social band-aids and aspirin that addressed acute problems and sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily, but left the underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again.\n\nIn stark contrast, almost all the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what could be called the Character Ethic as the foundation of success\u2014things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is representative of that literature. It is, basically, the story of one man's effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his nature.\n\nThe Character Ethic taught that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.\n\nBut shortly after World War 1 the basic view of success shifted from the Character Ethic to what we might call the Personality Ethic. Success became more a function of personality, of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, skills and techniques, that lubricate the processes of human interaction. This Personality Ethic essentially took two paths: one was human and public relations techniques, and the other was positive mental attitude (PMA). Some of this philosophy was expressed in inspiring and sometimes valid maxims such as \"Your attitude determines your altitude,\" \"Smiling wins more friends than frowning,\" and \"Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.\"\n\nOther parts of the personality approach were clearly manipulative, even deceptive, encouraging people to use techniques to get other people to like them, or to fake interest in the hobbies of others to get out of them what they wanted, or to use the \"power look,\" or to intimidate their way through life.\n\nSome of this literature acknowledged character as an ingredient of success, but tended to compartmentalize it rather than recognize it as foundational and catalytic. Reference to the Character Ethic became mostly lip service; the basic thrust was quick-fix influence techniques, power strategies, communication skills, and positive attitudes.\n\nThis Personality Ethic, I began to realize, was the subconscious source of the solutions Sandra and I were attempting to use with our son. As I thought more deeply about the difference between the Personality and Character Ethics, I realized that Sandra and I had been getting social mileage out of our children's good behavior, and, in our eyes, this son simply didn't measure up. Our image of ourselves, and our role as good, caring parents was even deeper than our image of our son and perhaps influenced it. There was a lot more wrapped up in the way we were seeing and handling the problem than our concern for our son's welfare.\n\nAs Sandra and I talked, we became painfully aware of the powerful influence of our own character and motives and of our perception of him. We knew that social comparison motives were out of harmony with our deeper values and could lead to conditional love and eventually to our son's lessened sense of self-worth. So we determined to focus our efforts on us\u2014not on our techniques, but on our deepest motives and our perception of him. Instead of trying to change him, we tried to stand apart\u2014to separate us from him\u2014and to sense his identity, individuality, separateness, and worth.\n\nThrough deep thought and the exercise of faith and prayer, we began to see our son in terms of his own uniqueness. We saw within him layers and layers of potential that would be realized at his own pace and speed. We decided to relax and get out of his way and let his own personality emerge. We saw our natural role as being to affirm, enjoy, and value him. We also conscientiously worked on our motives and cultivated internal sources of security so that our own feelings of worth were not dependent on our children's \"acceptable\" behavior.\n\nAs we loosened up our old perception of our son and developed value-based motives, new feelings began to emerge. We found ourselves enjoying him instead of comparing or judging him. We stopped trying to clone him in our own image or measure him against social expectations. We stopped trying to kindly, positively manipulate him into an acceptable social mold. Because we saw him as fundamentally adequate and able to cope with life, we stopped protecting him against the ridicule of others.\n\nHe had been nurtured on this protection, so he went through some withdrawal pains, which he expressed and which we accepted, but did not necessarily respond to. \"We don't need to protect you,\" was the unspoken message. \"You're fundamentally okay.\"\n\nAs the weeks and months passed, he began to feel a quiet confidence and affirmed himself. He began to blossom, at his own pace and speed. He became outstanding as measured by standard social criteria\u2014academically, socially and athletically\u2014at a rapid clip, far beyond the so-called natural developmental process. As the years passed, he was elected to several student body leadership positions, developed into an all-state athlete and started bringing home straight A report cards. He developed an engaging and guileless personality that has enabled him to relate in nonthreatening ways to all kinds of people.\n\nSandra and I believe that our son's \"socially impressive\" accomplishments were more a serendipitous expression of the feelings he had about himself than merely a response to social reward. This was an amazing experience for Sandra and me, and a very instructional one in dealing with our other children and in other roles as well. It brought to our awareness on a very personal level the vital difference between the Personality Ethic and the Character Ethic of success. The Psalmist expressed our conviction well: \"Search your own heart with all diligence for out of it flow the issues of life.\"\n\nPRIMARY AND SECONDARY GREATNESS\n\nMy experience with my son, my study of perception and my reading of the success literature coalesced to create one of those \"Aha!\" experiences in life when suddenly things click into place. I was suddenly able to see the powerful impact of the Personality Ethic and to clearly understand those subtle, often consciously unidentified discrepancies between what I knew to be true\u2014some things I had been taught many years ago as a child and things that were deep in my own inner sense of value\u2014and the quick fix philosophies that surrounded me every day. I understood at a deeper level why, as I had worked through the years with people from all walks of life, I had found that the things I was teaching and knew to be effective were often at variance with these popular voices.\n\nI am not suggesting that elements of the Personality Ethic\u2014personality growth, communication skill training, and education in the field of influence strategies and positive thinking\u2014are not beneficial, in fact sometimes essential for success. I believe they are. But these are secondary, not primary traits. Perhaps, in utilizing our human capacity to build on the foundation of generations before us, we have inadvertently become so focused on our own building that we have forgotten the foundation that holds it up; or in reaping for so long where we have not sown, perhaps we have forgotten the need to sow.\n\nIf I try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other\u2014while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity\u2014then, in the long run, I cannot be successful. My duplicity will breed distrust, and everything I do\u2014even using so-called good human relations techniques\u2014will be perceived as manipulative. It simply makes no difference how good the rhetoric is or even how good the intentions are; if there is little or no trust, there is no foundation for permanent success. Only basic goodness gives life to technique.\n\nTo focus on technique is like cramming your way through school. You sometimes get by, perhaps even get good grades, but if you don't pay the price day in and day out, you never achieve true mastery of the subjects you study or develop an educated mind.\n\nDid you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm\u2014to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut.\n\nThis principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to \"play the game.\" In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people's hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn't deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success.\n\nMany people with secondary greatness\u2014that is, social recognition for their talents\u2014lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you'll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, \"What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.\"\n\nThere are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary.\n\nIn the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they're eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them.\n\nIn the words of William George Jordan, \"Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil\u2014the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.\"\n\nTHE POWER OF A PARADIGM\n\nThe Seven Habits of Highly Effective People embody many of the fundamental principles of human effectiveness. These habits are basic; they are primary. They represent the internalization of correct principles upon which enduring happiness and success are based.\n\nBut before we can really understand these Seven Habits, we need to understand our own \"paradigms\" and how to make a \"paradigm shift.\"\n\nBoth the Character Ethic and the Personality Ethic are examples of social paradigms. The word paradigm comes from the Greek. It was originally a scientific term, and is more commonly used today to mean a model, theory, perception, assumption, or frame of reference. In the more general sense, it's the way we \"see\" the world\u2014not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, interpreting.\n\nFor our purposes, a simple way to understand paradigms is to see them as maps. We all know that \"the map is not the territory.\" A map is simply an explanation of certain aspects of the territory. That's exactly what a paradigm is. It is a theory, an explanation, or model of something else.\n\nSuppose you wanted to arrive at a specific location in central Chicago. A street map of the city would be a great help to you in reaching your destination. But suppose you were given the wrong map. Through a printing error, the map labeled \"Chicago\" was actually a map of Detroit. Can you imagine the frustration, the ineffectiveness of trying to reach your destination?\n\nYou might work on your behavior\u2014you could try harder, be more diligent, double your speed. But your efforts would only succeed in getting you to the wrong place faster.\n\nYou might work on your attitude\u2014you could think more positively. You still wouldn't get to the right place, but perhaps you wouldn't care. Your attitude would be so positive, you'd be happy wherever you were.\n\nThe point is, you'd still be lost. The fundamental problem has nothing to do with your behavior or your attitude. It has everything to do with having a wrong map.\n\nIf you have the right map of Chicago, then diligence becomes important, and when you encounter frustrating obstacles along the way, then attitude can make a real difference. But the first and most important requirement is the accuracy of the map.\n\nEach of us has many, many maps in our head, which can be divided into two main categories: maps of the way things are, or realities, and maps of the way things should be, or values. We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps. We seldom question their accuracy; we're usually even unaware that we have them. We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be.\n\nAnd our attitudes and behaviors grow out of those assumptions. The way we see things is the source of the way we think and the way we act.\n\nBefore going any further, I invite you to have an intellectual and emotional experience. Take a few seconds and just look at the picture Figure 1.\n\nNow look at the picture Figure 2 and carefully describe what you see.\n\nDo you see a woman? How old would you say she is? What does she look like? What is she wearing? In what kind of roles do you see her?\n\nYou probably would describe the woman in the second picture to be about 25 years old\u2014very lovely, rather fashionable with a petite nose and a demure presence. If you were a single man you might like to take her out. If you were in retailing, you might hire her as a fashion model.\n\nBut what if I were to tell you that you're wrong? What if I said this picture is of a woman in her 60's or 70's who looks sad, has a huge nose, and is certainly no model. She's someone you probably would help across the street.\n\nWho's right? Look at the picture again. Can you see the old woman? If you can't, keep trying. Can you see her big hook nose? Her shawl?\n\nIf you and I were talking face to face, we could discuss the picture. You could describe what you see to me, and I could talk to you about what I see. We could continue to communicate until you clearly showed me what you see in the picture and I clearly showed you what I see.\n\nBecause we can't do that, turn to Figure 3 and study the picture there and then look at this picture again. Can you see the old woman now? It's important that you see her before you continue reading.\n\nI first encountered this exercise many years ago at the Harvard Business School. The instructor was using it to demonstrate clearly and eloquently that two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It's not logical; its psychological.\n\nHe brought into the room a stack of large cards, half of which had the image of the young woman you saw in Figure 1, and the other half of which had the image of the old woman in Figure 3.\n\nHe passed them out to the class, the picture of the young woman to one side of the room and the picture of the old woman to the other. He asked us to look at the cards, concentrate on them for about ten seconds and then pass them back in. He then projected upon the screen the picture you saw in Figure 2 combining both images and asked the class to describe what they saw. Almost every person in that class who had first seen the young woman's image on a card saw the young woman in the picture. And almost every person who had first seen the old woman's image on a card saw an old woman in the picture.\n\nThe professor then asked one student to explain what he saw to a student on the opposite side of the room. As they talked back and forth, communication problems flared up.\n\n\"What do you mean, 'old lady'? She couldn't be more than 20 or 22 years old!\"\n\n\"Oh, come on. You have to be joking. She's 70\u2014could be pushing 80!\"\n\n\"What's the matter with you? Are you blind? This lady is young, good looking. I'd like to take her out. She's lovely.\"\n\n\"Lovely? She's an old hag.\"\n\nThe arguments went back and forth, each person sure of, and adamant in, his or her position. All of this occurred in spite of one exceedingly important advantage the students had\u2014most of them knew early in the demonstration that another point of view did, in fact, exist\u2014something many of us would never admit. Nevertheless, at first, only a few students really tried to see this picture from another frame of reference.\n\nAfter a period of futile communication, one student went up to the screen and pointed to a line on the drawing. \"There is the young woman's necklace.\" The other one said, \"No, that is the old woman's mouth.\" Gradually, they began to calmly discuss specific points of difference, and finally one student, and then another, experienced sudden recognition when the images of both came into focus. Through continued calm, respectful, and specific communication, each of us in the room was finally able to see the other point of view. But when we looked away and then back, most of us would immediately see the image we had been conditioned to see in the ten-second period of time.\n\nI frequently use this perception demonstration in working with people and organizations because it yields so many deep insights into both personal and interpersonal effectiveness. It shows, first of all, how powerfully conditioning affects our perceptions, our paradigms. If ten seconds can have that kind of impact on the way we see things, what about the conditioning of a lifetime? The influences in our lives\u2014family, school, church, work environment, friends, associates, and current social paradigms such as the Personality Ethic\u2014all have made their silent unconscious impact on us and help shape our frame of reference, our paradigms, our maps.\n\nIt also shows that these paradigms are the source of our attitudes and behaviors. We cannot act with integrity outside of them. We simply cannot maintain wholeness if we talk and walk differently than we see. If you were among the 90 percent who typically see the young woman in the composite picture when conditioned to do so, you undoubtedly found it difficult to think in terms of having to help her cross the street. Both your attitude about her and your behavior toward her had to be congruent with the way you saw her.\n\nThis brings into focus one of the basic flaws of the Personality Ethic. To try to change outward attitudes and behaviors does very little good in the long run if we fail to examine the basic paradigms from which those attitudes and behaviors flow.\n\nThis perception demonstration also shows how powerfully our paradigms affect the way we interact with other people. As clearly and objectively as we think we see things, we begin to realize that others see them differently from their own apparently equally clear and objective point of view. \"Where we stand depends on where we sit.\"\n\nEach of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are\u2014or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms. When other people disagree with us, we immediately think something is wrong with them. But, as the demonstration shows, sincere, clearheaded people see things differently, each looking through the unique lens of experience.\n\nThis does not mean that there are no facts. In the demonstration, two individuals who initially have been influenced by different conditioning pictures look at the third picture together. They are now both looking at the same identical facts\u2014black lines and white spaces\u2014and they would both acknowledge these as facts. But each person's interpretation of these facts represents prior experiences, and the facts have no meaning whatsoever apart from the interpretation.\n\nThe more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.\n\nTHE POWER OF A PARADIGM SHIFT\n\nPerhaps the most important insight to be gained from the perception demonstration is in the area of paradigm shifting, what we might call the \"Aha!\" experience when someone finally \"sees\" the composite picture in another way. The more bound a person is by the initial perception, the more powerful the \"Aha!\" experience is. It's as though a light were suddenly turned on inside.\n\nThe term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his highly influential landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn shows how almost every significant break\u00adthrough in the field of scientific endeavor is first a break with tradition, with old ways of thinking, with old paradigms.\n\nFor Ptolemy, the great Egyptian astronomer, the earth was the center of the universe. But Copernicus created a paradigm shift, and a great deal of resistance and persecution as well, by placing the sun at the center. Suddenly, everything took on a different interpretation.\n\nThe Newtonian model of physics was a clockwork paradigm and is still the basis of modern engineering. But it was partial, incomplete. The scientific world was revolutionized by the Einsteinian paradigm, the relativity paradigm, which had much higher predictive and explanatory value.\n\nUntil the germ theory was developed, a high percentage of women and children died during childbirth, and no one could understand why. In military skirmishes, more men were dying from small wounds and diseases than from the major traumas on the front lines. But as soon as the germ theory was developed, a whole new paradigm, a better, improved way of understanding what was happening made dramatic, significant medical improvement possible.\n\nThe United States today is the fruit of a paradigm shift. The traditional concept of government for centuries had been a monarchy, the divine right of kings. Then a different paradigm was developed\u2014government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And a constitutional democracy was born, unleashing tremendous human energy and ingenuity, and creating a standard of living, of freedom and liberty, of influence and hope unequaled in the history of the world.\n\nNot all paradigm shifts are in positive directions. As we have observed, the shift from the Character Ethic to the Personality Ethic has drawn us away from the very roots that nourish true success and happiness.\n\nBut whether they shift us in positive or negative directions, whether they are instantaneous or developmental, paradigm shifts move us from one way of seeing the world to another. And those shifts create powerful change. Our paradigms, correct or incorrect, are the sources of our attitudes and behaviors, and ultimately our relationships with others.\n\nI remember a mini-paradigm shift I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly\u2014some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.\n\nThen suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.\n\nThe man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people's papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.\n\nIt was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, \"Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn't control them a little more?\"\n\nThe man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, \"Oh, you're right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don't know what to think, and I guess they don't know how to handle it either.\"\n\nCan you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn't have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man's pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. \"Your wife just died? Oh, I'm so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?\" Everything changed in an instant.\n\nMany people experience a similar fundamental shift in thinking when they face a life-threatening crisis and suddenly see their priorities in a different light, or when they suddenly step into a new role, such as that of husband or wife, parent or grandparent, manager or leader.\n\nWe could spend weeks, months, even years laboring with the Personality Ethic trying to change our attitudes and behaviors and not even begin to approach the phenomenon of change that occurs spontaneously when we see things differently.\n\nIt becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.\n\nIn the words of Thoreau, \"For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.\" We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.\n\nSEEING AND BEING\n\nOf course, not all paradigm shifts are instantaneous. Unlike my instant insight on the subway, the paradigm-shifting experience Sandra and I had with our son was a slow, difficult, and deliberate process. The approach we had first taken with him was the outgrowth of years of conditioning and experience in the Personality Ethic. It was the result of deeper paradigms we held about our own success as parents as well as the measure of success of our children. And it was not until we changed those basic paradigms, until we saw things differently, that we were able to create quantum change in ourselves and in the situation.\n\nIn order to see our son differently, Sandra and I had to be differently. Our new paradigm was created as we invested in the growth and development of our own character.\n\nParadigms are inseparable from character. Being is seeing in the human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what we are. We can't go very far to change our seeing without simultaneously changing our being, and vice versa.\n\nEven in my apparently instantaneous paradigm-shifting experience that morning on the subway, my change of vision was a result of\u2014and limited by\u2014my basic character.\n\nI'm sure there are people who, even suddenly understanding the true situation, would have felt no more than a twinge of regret or vague guilt as they continued to sit in embarrassed silence beside the grieving, confused man. On the other hand, I am equally certain there are people who would have been far more sensitive in the first place, who may have recognized that a deeper problem existed and reached out to understand and help before I did.\n\nParadigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world. The power of a paradigm shift is the essential power of quantum change, whether that shift is an instantaneous or a slow and deliberate process.\n\nTHE PRINCIPLE-CENTERED PARADIGM\n\nThe Character Ethic is based on the fundamental idea that there are principles that govern human effectiveness\u2014natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguably \"there\" as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension.\n\nAn idea of the reality\u2014and the impact\u2014of these principles can be captured in another paradigm-shifting experience as told by Frank Koch in Proceedings, the magazine of the Naval Institute.\n\nTwo battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities.\n\nShortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, \"Light, bearing on the starboard bow.\"\n\n\"Is it steady or moving astern?\" the captain called out.\n\nLookout replied, \"Steady, captain,\" which meant we were on a dangerous collision course with that ship.\n\nThe captain then called to the signalman, \"Signal that ship: We are on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees.\"\n\nBack came a signal, \"Advisable for you to change course 20 degrees.\"\n\nThe captain said, \"Send, I'm a captain, change course 20 degrees.\"\n\n\"I'm a seaman second class,\" came the reply. \"You had better change course 20 degrees.\"\n\nBy that time, the captain was furious. He spat out, \"Send, I'm a battleship. Change course 20 degrees.\"\n\nBack came the flashing light, \"I'm a lighthouse.\"\n\nWe changed course.\n\nThe paradigm shift experienced by the captain\u2014and by us as we read this account\u2014puts the situation in a totally different light. We can see a reality that is superceded by his limited perception\u2014a reality that is as critical for us to understand in our daily lives as it was for the captain in the fog.\n\nPrinciples are like lighthouses. They are natural laws that cannot be broken. As Cecil B. deMille observed of the principles contained in his monumental movie, The Ten Commandments, \"It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.\"\n\nWhile individuals may look at their own lives and interactions in terms of paradigms or maps emerging out of their experience and conditioning, these maps are not the territory. They are a \"subjective reality,\" only an attempt to describe the territory.\n\nThe \"objective reality,\" or the territory itself, is composed of \"lighthouse\" principles that govern human growth and happiness\u2014natural laws that are woven into the fabric of every civilized society throughout history and comprise the roots of every family and institution that has endured and prospered. The degree to which our mental maps accurately describe the territory does not alter its existence.\n\nThe reality of such principles or natural laws becomes obvious to anyone who thinks deeply and examines the cycles of social history. These principles surface time and time again, and the degree to which people in a society recognize and live in harmony with them moves them toward either survival and stability or disintegration and destruction.\n\nThe principles I am referring to are not esoteric, mysterious, or \"religious\" ideas. There is not one principle taught in this book that is unique to any specific faith or religion, including my own. These principles are a part of most every major enduring religion, as well as enduring social philosophies and ethical systems. They are self-evident and can easily be validated by any individual. It's almost as if these principles or natural laws are part of the human condition, part of the human consciousness, part of the human conscience. They seem to exist in all human beings, regardless of social conditioning and loyalty to them, even though they might be submerged or numbed by such conditions or disloyalty.\n\nI am referring, for example, to the principle of fairness, out of which our whole concept of equity and justice is developed. Little children seem to have an innate sense of the idea of fairness even apart from opposite conditioning experiences. There are vast differences in how fairness is defined and achieved, but there is almost universal awareness of the idea.\n\nOther examples would include integrity and honesty. They create the foundation of trust which is essential to cooperation and long-term personal and interpersonal growth.\n\nAnother principle is human dignity. The basic concept in the United States Declaration of Independence bespeaks this value or principle. \"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalien\u00adable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.\"\n\nAnother principle is service, or the idea of making a contribution. Another is quality or excellence.\n\nThere is the principle of potential, the idea that we are embryonic and can grow and develop and release more and more potential, develop more and more talents. Highly related to potential is the principle of growth\u2014the process of releasing potential and developing talents, with the accompanying need for principles such as patience, nurturance, and encouragement.\n\nPrinciples are not practices. A practice is a specific activity or action. A practice that works in one circumstance will not necessarily work in another, as parents who have tried to raise a second child exactly like they did the first can readily attest.\n\nWhile practices are situationally specific, principles are deep, fundamental truths that have universal application. They apply to individuals, to marriages, to families, to private and public organizations of every kind. When these truths are internalized into habits, they empower people to create a wide variety of practices to deal with different situations.\n\nPrinciples are not values. A gang of thieves can share values, but they are in violation of the fundamental principles we're talking about. Principles are the territory. Values are maps. When we value correct principles, we have truth\u2014a knowledge of things as they are.\n\nPrinciples are guidelines for human conduct that are proven to have enduring, permanent value. They're fundamental. They're essentially unarguable because they are self-evident. One way to quickly grasp the self-evident nature of principles is to simply consider the absurdity of attempting to live an effective life based on their opposites. I doubt that anyone would seriously consider unfairness, deceit, baseness, uselessness, mediocrity, or degeneration to be a solid foundation for lasting happiness and success. Although people may argue about how these principles are defined or manifested or achieved, there seems to be an innate consciousness and awareness that they exist.\n\nThe more closely our maps or paradigms are aligned with these principles or natural laws, the more accurate and functional they will be. Correct maps will infinitely impact our personal and interpersonal effectiveness far more than any amount of effort expended on changing our attitudes and behaviors.\n\nPRINCIPLES OF GROWTH AND CHANGE\n\nThe glitter of the Personality Ethic, the massive appeal, is that there is some quick and easy way to achieve quality of life\u2014personal effectiveness and rich, deep relationships with other people\u2014without going through the natural process of work and growth that makes it possible.\n\nIt's symbol without substance. It's the \"get rich quick\" scheme promising \"wealth without work.\" And it might even appear to succeed\u2014but the schemer remains.\n\nThe Personality Ethic is illusory and deceptive. And trying to get high quality results with its techniques and quick fixes is just about as effective as trying to get to some place in Chicago using a map of Detroit.\n\nIn the words of Erich Fromm, an astute observer of the roots and fruits of the Personality Ethic:\n\nToday we come across an individual who behaves like an autom\u00adaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain. Two statements may be said concerning this individual. One is that he suffers from defects of spontaneity and individuality which may seem to be incurable. At the same time it may be said of him he does not differ essentially from the millions of the rest of us who walk upon this earth.\n\nIn all of life, there are sequential stages of growth and development. A child learns to turn over, to sit up, to crawl, and then to walk and run. Each step is important and each one takes time. No step can be skipped.\n\nThis is true in all phases of life, in all areas of development, whether it be learning to play the piano or communicate effectively with a working associate. It is true with individuals, with marriages, with families, and with organizations.\n\nWe know and accept this fact or principle of process in the area of physical things, but to understand it in emotional areas, in human relations, and even in the area of personal character is less common and more difficult. And even if we understand it, to accept it and to live in harmony with it are even less common and more difficult. Consequently, we sometimes look for a shortcut, expecting to be able to skip some of these vital steps in order to save time and effort and still reap the desired result.\n\nBut what happens when we attempt to shortcut a natural process in our growth and development? If you are only an average tennis player but decide to play at a higher level in order to make a better impression, what will result? Would positive thinking alone enable you to compete effectively against a professional?\n\nWhat if you were to lead your friends to believe you could play the piano at concert hall level while your actual present skill was that of a beginner?\n\nThe answers are obvious. It is simply impossible to violate, ignore, or shortcut this development process. It is contrary to nature, and attempting to seek such a shortcut only results in disappointment and frustration.\n\nOn a ten-point scale, if I am at level two in any field, and desire to move to level five, I must first take the step toward level three. \"A thousand-mile journey begins with the first step\" and can only be taken one step at a time.\n\nIf you don't let a teacher know at what level you are\u2014by asking a question, or revealing your ignorance\u2014you will not learn or grow. You cannot pretend for long, for you will eventually be found out. Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education. Thoreau taught, \"How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?\"\n\nI recall one occasion when two young women, daughters of a friend of mine, came to me tearfully, complaining about their father's harshness and lack of understanding. They were afraid to open up with their parents for fear of the consequences. And yet they desperately needed their parents' love, understanding, and guidance.\n\nI talked with the father and found that he was intellectually aware of what was happening. But while he admitted he had a temper problem, he refused to take responsibility for it and to honestly accept the fact that his emotional development level was low. It was more than his pride could swallow to take the first step toward change.\n\nTo relate effectively with a wife, a husband, children, friends, or working associates, we must learn to listen. And this requires emotional strength. Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand\u2014highly developed qualities of character. It's so much easier to operate from a low emotional level and to give high-level advice.\n\nOur level of development is fairly obvious with tennis or piano playing, where it is impossible to pretend. But it is not so obvious in the areas of character and emotional development. We can \"pose\" and \"put on\" for a stranger or an associate. We can pretend. And for a while we can get by with it\u2014at least in public. We might even deceive ourselves. Yet I believe that most of us know the truth of what we really are inside; and I think many of those we live with and work with do as well.\n\nI have seen the consequences of attempting to shortcut this natural process of growth often in the business world, where executives attempt to \"buy\" a new culture of improved productivity, quality, morale, and customer service with strong speeches, smile training, and external interventions, or through mergers, acquisitions, and friendly or unfriendly takeovers. But they ignore the low-trust climate produced by such manipulations. When these methods don't work, they look for other Personality Ethic techniques that will\u2014all the time ignoring and violating the natural principles and processes on which a high-trust culture is based.\n\nI remember violating this principle myself as a father many years ago. One day I returned home to my little girl's third-year birthday party to find her in the corner of the front room, defiantly clutching all of her presents, unwilling to let the other children play with them. The first thing I noticed was several parents in the room witnessing this selfish display. I was embarrassed, and doubly so because at the time I was teaching university classes in human relations. And I knew, or at least felt, the expectation of these parents.\n\nThe atmosphere in the room was really charged\u2014the children were crowding around my little daughter with their hands out, asking to play with the presents they had just given, and my daughter was adamantly refusing. I said to myself, \"Certainly I should teach my daughter to share. The value of sharing is one of the most basic things we believe in.\"\n\nSo I first tried a simple request. \"Honey, would you please share with your friends the toys they've given you?\"\n\n\"No,\" she replied flatly.\n\nMy second method was to use a little reasoning. \"Honey, if you learn to share your toys with them when they are at your home, then when you go to their homes they will share their toys with you.\"\n\nAgain, the immediate reply was \"No!\"\n\nI was becoming a little more embarrassed, for it was evident I was having no influence. The third method was bribery. Very softly I said, \"Honey, if you share, I've got a special surprise for you. I'll give you a piece of gum.\"\n\n\"I don't want gum!\" she exploded.\n\nNow I was becoming exasperated. For my fourth attempt, I resorted to fear and threat. \"Unless you share, you will be in real trouble!\"\n\n\"I don't care!\" she cried. \"These are my things. I don't have to share!\"\n\nFinally, I resorted to force. I merely took some of the toys and gave them to the other kids. \"Here, kids, play with these.\"\n\nPerhaps my daughter needed the experience of possessing the things before she could give them. (In fact, unless I possess something, can I ever really give it?) She needed me as her father to have a higher level of emotional maturity to give her that experience.\n\nBut at that moment, I valued the opinion those parents had of me more than the growth and development of my child and our relationship together. I simply made an initial judgment that I was right; she should share, and she was wrong in not doing so.\n\nPerhaps I superimposed a higher-level expectation on her simply because on my own scale I was at a lower level. I was unable or unwilling to give patience or understanding, so I expected her to give things. In an attempt to compensate for my deficiency, I borrowed strength from my position and authority and forced her to do what I wanted her to do.\n\nBut borrowing strength builds weakness. It builds weakness in the borrower because it reinforces dependence on external factors to get things done. It builds weakness in the person forced to acquiesce, stunting the development of independent reasoning, growth, and internal discipline. And finally, it builds weakness in the relationship. Fear replaces cooperation, and both people involved become more arbitrary and defensive.\n\nAnd what happens when the source of borrowed strength\u2014be it superior size or physical strength, position, authority, credentials, status symbols, appearance, or past achievements\u2014changes or is no longer there?\n\nHad I been more mature, I could have relied on my own intrinsic strength\u2014my understanding of sharing and of growth and my capacity to love and nurture\u2014and allowed my daughter to make a free choice as to whether she wanted to share or not to share. Perhaps after attempting to reason with her, I could have turned the attention of the children to an interesting game, taking all that emotional pressure off my child. I've learned that once children gain a sense of real possession, they share very naturally, freely, and spontaneously.\n\nMy experience has been that there are times to teach and times not to teach. When relationships are strained and the air charged with emotion, an attempt to teach is often perceived as a form of judgment and rejection. But to take the child alone, quietly, when the relationship is good and to discuss the teaching or the value seems to have much greater impact. It may have been that the emotional maturity to do that was beyond my level of patience and internal control at the time.\n\nPerhaps a sense of possessing needs to come before a sense of genuine sharing. Many people who give mechanically or refuse to give and share in their marriages and families may never have experienced what it means to possess themselves, their own sense of identity and self-worth. Really helping our children grow may involve being patient enough to allow them the sense of possession as well as being wise enough to teach them the value of giving and providing the example ourselves.\n\nTHE WAY WE SEE THE PROBLEM IS THE PROBLEM\n\nPeople are intrigued when they see good things happening in the lives of individuals, families, and organizations that are based on solid principles. They admire such personal strength and maturity, such family unity and teamwork, such adaptive synergistic organizational culture.\n\nAnd their immediate request is very revealing of their basic paradigm. \"How do you do it? Teach me the techniques.\" What they're really saying is, \"Give me some quick fix advice or solution that will relieve the pain in my own situation.\"\n\nThey will find people who will meet their wants and teach these things; and for a short time, skills and techniques may appear to work. They may eliminate some of the cosmetic or acute problems through social aspirin and band-aids.\n\nBut the underlying chronic condition remains, and eventually new acute symptoms will appear. The more people are into quick fix and focus on the acute problems and pain, the more that very approach contributes to the underlying chronic condition.\n\nThe way we see the problem is the problem.\n\nLook again at some of the concerns that introduced this chapter, and at the impact of Personality Ethic thinking.\n\n_I've taken course after course on effective management training. I expect a lot out of my employees and I work hard to be friendly toward them and to treat them right. But I don't feel any loyalty from them. I think if I were home sick for a day, they'd spend most of their time gabbing at the water fountain. Why can't I train them to be independent and responsible\u2014or find employees who can be?_\n\nThe Personality Ethic tells me I could take some kind of dramatic action\u2014shake things up, make heads roll\u2014that would make my employees shape up and appreciate what they have. Or that I could find some motivational training program that would get them committed. Or even that I could hire new people that would do a better job.\n\nBut is it possible that under that apparently disloyal behavior, these employees question whether I really act in their best interest? Do they feel like I'm treating them as mechanical objects? Is there some truth to that?\n\nDeep inside, is that really the way I see them? Is there a chance the way I look at the people who work for me is part of the problem?\n\n_There's so much to do. And there's never enough time. I feel pressured and hassled all day, every day, seven days a week. I've attended time management seminars and I've tried half a dozen different planning systems. They've helped some, but I still don't feel I'm living the happy, productive, peaceful life I want to live._\n\nThe Personality Ethic tells me there must be something out there\u2014some new planner or seminar that will help me handle all these pressures in a more efficient way.\n\nBut is there a chance that efficiency is not the answer? Is getting more things done in less time going to make a difference\u2014or will it just increase the pace at which I react to the people and circumstances that seem to control my life?\n\nCould there be something I need to see in a deeper, more fundamental way\u2014some paradigm within myself that affects the way I see my time, my life, and my own nature?\n\n_My marriage has gone flat. We don't fight or anything; we just don't love each other anymore. We've gone to counseling; we've tried a number of things, but we just can't seem to rekindle the feeling we used to have._\n\nThe Personality Ethic tells me there must be some new book or some seminar where people get all their feelings out that would help my wife understand me better. Or maybe that it's useless, and only a new relationship will provide the love I need.\n\nBut is it possible that my spouse isn't the real problem? Could I be empowering my spouse's weaknesses and making my life a function of the way I'm treated?\n\nDo I have some basic paradigm about my spouse, about marriage, about what love really is, that is feeding the problem?\n\nCan you see how fundamentally the paradigms of the Personality Ethic affect the very way we see our problems as well as the way we attempt to solve them?\n\nWhether people see it or not, many are becoming disillusioned with the empty promises of the Personality Ethic. As I travel around the country and work with organizations, I find that long-term thinking executives are simply turned off by psych up psychology and \"motivational\" speakers who have nothing more to share than entertaining stories mingled with platitudes.\n\nThey want substance; they want process. They want more than aspirin and band-aids. They want to solve the chronic underlying problems and focus on the principles that bring long-term results.\n\nA NEW LEVEL OF THINKING\n\nAlbert Einstein observed, \"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.\"\n\nAs we look around us and within us and recognize the problems created as we live and interact within the Personality Ethic, we begin to realize that these are deep, fundamental problems that cannot be solved on the superficial level on which they were created.\n\nWe need a new level, a deeper level of thinking\u2014a paradigm based on the principles that accurately describe the territory of effective human being and interacting\u2014to solve these deep concerns.\n\nThis new level of thinking is what Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is about. It's a principle-centered, character-based, \"inside-out\" approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness.\n\n\"Inside-out\" means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self\u2014with your paradigms, your character, and your motives.\n\nIt says if you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it. If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, a more helpful, a more contributing employee. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character.\n\nThe inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.\n\nInside-out is a process\u2014a continuing process of renewal based on the natural laws that govern human growth and progress. It's an upward spiral of growth that leads to progressively higher forms of responsible independence and effective interdependence.\n\nI have had the opportunity to work with many people\u2014wonderful people, talented people, people who deeply want to achieve happiness and success, people who are searching, people who are hurting. I've worked with business executives, college students, church and civic groups, families and marriage partners. And in all of my experience, I have never seen lasting solutions to problems, lasting happiness and success, that came from the outside in.\n\nWhat I have seen result from the outside-in paradigm is unhappy people who feel victimized and immobilized, who focus on the weaknesses of other people and the circumstances they feel are responsible for their own stagnant situation. I've seen unhappy marriages where each spouse wants the other to change, where each is confessing the other's \"sins,\" where each is trying to shape up the other. I've seen labor management disputes where people spend tremendous amounts of time and energy trying to create legislation that would force people to act as though the foundation of trust were really there.\n\nMembers of our family have lived in three of the \"hottest\" spots on earth\u2014South Africa, Israel, and Ireland\u2014and I believe the source of the continuing problems in each of these places has been the dominant social paradigm of outside-in. Each involved group is convinced the problem is \"out there\" and if \"they\" (meaning others) would \"shape up\" or suddenly \"ship out\" of existence, the problem would be solved.\n\nInside-out is a dramatic paradigm shift for most people, largely because of the powerful impact of conditioning and the current social paradigm of the Personality Ethic.\n\nBut from my own experience\u2014both personal and in working with thousands of other people\u2014and from careful examination of successful individuals and societies throughout history, I am persuaded that many of the principles embodied in the Seven Habits are already deep within us, in our conscience and our common sense. To recognize and develop them and to use them in meeting our deepest concerns, we need to think differently, to shift our paradigms to a new, deeper, \"inside-out\" level.\n\nAs we sincerely seek to understand and integrate these principles into our lives, I am convinced we will discover and rediscover the truth of T. S. Eliot's observation:\n\n_We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time._\n\n### The Seven Habits\u2014An Overview\n\nWe are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.\n\nAristotle\n\nOUR CHARACTER, BASICALLY, is a composite of our habits. \"Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny,\" the maxim goes.\n\nHabits are powerful factors in our lives. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character and produce our effectiveness... or ineffectiveness.\n\nAs Horace Mann, the great educator, once said, \"Habits are like a cable. We weave a strand of it everyday and soon it cannot be broken.\" I personally do not agree with the last part of his expression. I know they can be broken. Habits can be learned and unlearned. But I also know it isn't a quick fix. It involves a process and a tremendous commitment.\n\nThose of us who watched the lunar voyage of Apollo 11 were transfixed as we saw the first men walk on the moon and return to earth. Superlatives such as \"fantastic\" and \"incredible\" were inadequate to describe those eventful days. But to get there, those astronauts literally had to break out of the tremendous gravity pull of the earth. More energy was spent in the first few minutes of lift-off, in the first few miles of travel, than was used over the next several days to travel half a million miles.\n\nHabits, too, have tremendous gravity pull\u2014more than most people realize or would admit. Breaking deeply imbedded habitual tendencies such as procrastination, impatience, criticalness, or selfishness that violate basic principles of human effectiveness involves more than a little willpower and a few minor changes in our lives. \"Lift off\" takes a tremendous effort, but once we break out of the gravity pull, our freedom takes on a whole new dimension.\n\nLike any natural force, gravity pull can work with us or against us. The gravity pull of some of our habits may currently be keeping us from going where we want to go. But it is also gravity pull that keeps our world together, that keeps the planets in their orbits and our universe in order. It is a powerful force, and if we use it effectively, we can use the gravity pull of habit to create the cohesiveness and order necessary to establish effectiveness in our lives.\n\n\"HABITS\" DEFINED\n\nFor our purposes, we will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.\n\nKnowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.\n\nI may be ineffective in my interactions with my work associates, my spouse, or my children because I constantly tell them what I think, but I never really listen to them. Unless I search out correct principles of human interaction, I may not even know I need to listen.\n\nEven if I do know that in order to interact effectively with others I really need to listen to them, I may not have the skill. I may not know how to really listen deeply to another human being.\n\nBut knowing I need to listen and knowing how to listen is not enough. Unless I want to listen, unless I have the desire, it won't be a habit in my life. Creating a habit requires work in all three dimensions.\n\nThe being\/seeing change is an upward process\u2014being changing seeing, which in turn changes being, and so forth, as we move in an upward spiral of growth. By working on knowledge, skill, and desire, we can break through to new levels of personal and interpersonal effectiveness as we break with old paradigms that may have been a source of pseudo-security for years.\n\nIt's sometimes a painful process. It's a change that has to be motivated by a higher purpose, by the willingness to subordinate what you think you want now for what you want later. But this process produces happiness, \"the object and design of our existence.\" Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.\n\nEFFECTIVE HABITS\n\nInternalized principles and patterns of behavior\n\nTHE MATURITY CONTINUUM\n\nThe Seven Habits are not a set of separate or piecemeal psych-up formulas. In harmony with the natural laws of growth, they provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness. They move us progressively on a Maturity Continuum from dependence to independence to interdependence.\n\nWe each begin life as an infant, totally dependent on others. We are directed, nurtured, and sustained by others. Without this nurturing, we would only live for a few hours or a few days at the most.\n\nThen gradually, over the ensuing months and years, we become more and more independent\u2014physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially\u2014until eventually we can essentially take care of ourselves, becoming inner-directed and self-reliant.\n\nAs we continue to grow and mature, we become increasingly aware that all of nature is interdependent, that there is an ecological system that governs nature, including society. We further discover that the higher reaches of our nature have to do with our relationships with others\u2014that human life also is interdependent.\n\nOur growth from infancy to adulthood is in accordance with natural law. And there are many dimensions to growth. Reaching our full physical maturity, for example, does not necessarily assure us of simultaneous emotional or mental maturity. On the other hand, a person's physical dependence does not mean that he or she is mentally or emotionally immature.\n\nOn the maturity continuum, dependence is the paradigm of you\u2014you take care of me; you come through for me; you didn't come through; I blame you for the results.\n\nIndependence is the paradigm of I\u2014I can do it; I am responsible; I am self-reliant; I can choose.\n\nInterdependence is the paradigm of we\u2014we can do it; we can cooperate; we can combine our talents and abilities and create something greater together.\n\nDependent people need others to get what they want. Indepen\u00addent people can get what they want through their own effort. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.\n\nIf I were physically dependent\u2014paralyzed or disabled or limited in some physical way\u2014I would need you to help me. If I were emotionally dependent, my sense of worth and security would come from your opinion of me. If you didn't like me, it could be devastating. If I were intellectually dependent, I would count on you to do my thinking for me, to think through the issues and problems of my life.\n\nIf I were independent, physically, I could pretty well make it on my own. Mentally, I could think my own thoughts, I could move from one level of abstraction to another. I could think creatively and analytically and organize and express my thoughts in under\u00adstandable ways. Emotionally, I would be validated from within. I would be inner directed. My sense of worth would not be a function of being liked or treated well.\n\nIt's easy to see that independence is much more mature than dependence. Independence is a major achievement in and of itself. But independence is not supreme.\n\nNevertheless, the current social paradigm enthrones indepen\u00addence. It is the avowed goal of many individuals and social movements. Most of the self-improvement material puts indepen\u00addence on a pedestal, as though communication, teamwork, and cooperation were lesser values.\n\nBut much of our current emphasis on independence is a reaction to dependence\u2014to having others control us, define us, use us, and manipulate us.\n\nThe little understood concept of interdependence appears to many to smack of dependence, and therefore, we find people, often for selfish reasons, leaving their marriages, abandoning their children, and forsaking all kinds of social responsibility\u2014all in the name of independence.\n\nThe kind of reaction that results in people \"throwing off their shackles,\" becoming \"liberated,\" \"asserting themselves,\" and \"doing their own thing\" often reveals more fundamental depen\u00addencies that cannot be run away from because they are internal rather than external\u2014dependencies such as letting the weaknesses of other people ruin our emotional lives or feeling victimized by people and events out of our control.\n\nOf course, we may need to change our circumstances. But the dependence problem is a personal maturity issue that has little to do with circumstances. Even with better circumstances, immaturity and dependence often persist.\n\nTrue independence of character empowers us to act rather than be acted upon. It frees us from our dependence on circumstances and other people and is a worthy, liberating goal. But it is not the ultimate goal in effective living.\n\nIndependent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players. They're not coming from the paradigm of interdependence necessary to succeed in marriage, family, or organizational reality.\n\nLife is, by nature, highly interdependent. To try to achieve maximum effectiveness through independence is like trying to play tennis with a golf club\u2014the tool is not suited to the reality.\n\nInterdependence is a far more mature, more advanced concept. If I am physically interdependent, I am self-reliant and capable, but I also realize that you and I working together can accomplish far more than, even at my best, I could accomplish alone. If I am emotionally interdependent, I derive a great sense of worth within myself, but I also recognize the need for love, for giving, and for receiving love from others. If I am intellectually interdependent, I realize that I need the best thinking of other people to join with my own.\n\nAs an interdependent person, I have the opportunity to share myself deeply, meaningfully, with others, and I have access to the vast resources and potential of other human beings.\n\nInterdependence is a choice only independent people can make. Dependent people cannot choose to become interdependent. They don't have the character to do it; they don't own enough of themselves.\n\nThat's why Habits 1, 2, and 3 in the following chapters deal with self-mastery. They move a person from dependence to indepen\u00addence. They are the \"Private Victories,\" the essence of character growth. Private victories precede public victories. You can't invert that process anymore than you can harvest a crop before you plant it. It's inside-out.\n\nAs you become truly independent, you have the foundation for effective interdependence. You have the character base from which you can effectively work on the more personality-oriented \"Public Victories\" of teamwork, cooperation, and communication in Habits 4, 5, and 6.\n\nThat does not mean you have to be perfect in Habits 1, 2, and 3 before working on Habits 4, 5, and 6. Understanding the sequence will help you manage your growth more effectively, but I'm not suggesting that you put yourself in isolation for several years until you fully develop Habits 1, 2, and 3.\n\nAs part of an interdependent world, you have to relate to that world every day. But the acute problems of that world can easily obscure the chronic character causes. Understanding how what you are impacts every interdependent interaction will help you to focus your efforts sequentially, in harmony with the natural laws of growth.\n\nHabit 7 is the habit of renewal\u2014a regular, balanced renewal of the four basic dimensions of life. It circles and embodies all the other habits. It is the habit of continuous improvement that creates the upward spiral of growth that lifts you to new levels of understanding and living each of the habits as you come around to them on a progressively higher plane.*\n\nThe diagram in the image below is a visual representation of the sequence and the interdependence of the Seven Habits, and will be used throughout this book as we explore both the sequential relationship between the habits and also their synergy\u2014how, in relating to each other, they create bold new forms of each other that add even more to their value. Each concept or habit will be highlighted as it is introduced.\n\nTHE SEVEN HABITS PARADIGM\n\nEFFECTIVENESS DEFINED\n\nThe Seven Habits are habits of effectiveness. Because they are based on principles, they bring the maximum long-term beneficial results possible. They become the basis of a person's character, creating an empowering center of correct maps from which an individual can effectively solve problems, maximize opportunities, and continually learn and integrate other principles in an upward spiral of growth.\n\nThey are also habits of effectiveness because they are based on a paradigm of effectiveness that is in harmony with a natural law, a principle I call the \"P\/PC Balance,\" which many people break themselves against. This principle can be easily understood by remembering Aesop's fable of the goose and the golden egg.\n\nThis fable is the story of a poor farmer who one day discovers in the nest of his pet goose a glittering golden egg. At first, he thinks it must be some kind of trick. But as he starts to throw the egg aside, he has second thoughts and takes it in to be appraised instead.\n\nThe egg is pure gold! The farmer can't believe his good fortune. He becomes even more incredulous the following day when the experience is repeated. Day after day, he awakens to rush to the nest and find another golden egg. He becomes fabulously wealthy; it all seems too good to be true.\n\nBut with his increasing wealth comes greed and impatience. Unable to wait day after day for the golden eggs, the farmer decides he will kill the goose and get them all at once. But when he opens the goose, he finds it empty. There are no golden eggs\u2014and now there is no way to get any more. The farmer has destroyed the goose that produced them.\n\nI suggest that within this fable is a natural law, a principle\u2014the basic definition of effectiveness. Most people see effectiveness from the golden egg paradigm: the more you produce, the more you do, the more effective you are.\n\nBut as the story shows, true effectiveness is a function of two things: what is produced (the golden eggs) and the producing asset or capacity to produce (the goose).\n\nIf you adopt a pattern of life that focuses on golden eggs and neglects the goose, you will soon be without the asset that produces golden eggs. On the other hand, if you only take care of the goose with no aim toward the golden eggs, you soon won't have the wherewithal to feed yourself or the goose.\n\nEffectiveness lies in the balance\u2014what I call the P\/PC Balance. P stands for production of desired results, the golden eggs. PC stands for production capability, the ability or asset that produces the golden eggs.\n\nTHREE KINDS OF ASSETS\n\nBasically, there are three kinds of assets: physical, financial, and human. Let's look at each one in turn.\n\nA few years ago, I purchased a physical asset\u2014a power lawnmower. I used it over and over again without doing anything to maintain it. The mower worked well for two seasons, but then it began to break down. When I tried to revive it with service and sharpening, I discovered the engine had lost over half its original power capacity. It was essentially worthless.\n\nHad I invested in PC\u2014in preserving and maintaining the asset\u2014I would still be enjoying its P\u2014the mowed lawn. As it was, I had to spend far more time and money replacing the mower than I ever would have spent, had I maintained it. It simply wasn't effective.\n\nIn our quest for short-term returns, or results, we often ruin a prized physical asset\u2014a car, a computer, a washer or dryer, even our body or our environment. Keeping P and PC in balance makes a tremendous difference in the effective use of physical assets.\n\nIt also powerfully impacts the effective use of financial assets. How often do people confuse principal with interest? Have you ever invaded principal to increase your standard of living, to get more golden eggs? The decreasing principal has decreasing power to produce interest or income. And the dwindling capital becomes smaller and smaller until it no longer supplies even basic needs.\n\nOur most important financial asset is our own capacity to earn. If we don't continually invest in improving our own PC, we severely limit our options. We're locked into our present situation, running scared of our corporation or our boss's opinion of us, economically dependent and defensive. Again, it simply isn't effective.\n\nIn the human area, the P\/PC Balance is equally fundamental, but even more important, because people control physical and financial assets.\n\nWhen two people in a marriage are more concerned about getting the golden eggs, the benefits, than they are in preserving the relationship that makes them possible, they often become insensitive and inconsiderate, neglecting the little kindnesses and courtesies so important to a deep relationship. They begin to use control levers to manipulate each other, to focus on their own needs, to justify their own position and look for evidence to show the wrongness of the other person. The love, the richness, the softness and spontaneity begin to deteriorate. The goose gets sicker day by day.\n\nAnd what about a parent's relationship with a child? When children are little, they are very dependent, very vulnerable. It becomes so easy to neglect the PC work\u2014the training, the communicating, the relating, the listening. It's easy to take advantage, to manipulate, to get what you want the way you want it\u2014right now! You're bigger, you're smarter, and you're right! So why not just tell them what to do? If necessary, yell at them, intimidate them, insist on your way.\n\nOr you can indulge them. You can go for the golden egg of popularity, of pleasing them, giving them their way all the time. Then they grow up without any internal sense of standards or expectations, without a personal commitment to being disciplined or responsible.\n\nEither way\u2014authoritarian or permissive\u2014you have the golden egg mentality. You want to have your way or you want to be liked. But what happens, meantime, to the goose? What sense of responsibility, of self-discipline, of confidence in the ability to make good choices or achieve important goals is a child going to have a few years down the road? And what about your relationship? When he reaches those critical teenage years, the identity crises, will he know from his experience with you that you will listen without judging, that you really, deeply care about him as a person, that you can be trusted, no matter what? Will the relation\u00adship be strong enough for you to reach him, to communicate with him, to influence him?\n\nSuppose you want your daughter to have a clean room\u2014that's P, production, the golden egg. And suppose you want her to clean it\u2014that's PC, production capability. Your daughter is the goose, the asset, that produces the golden egg.\n\nIf you have P and PC in balance, she cleans the room cheerfully, without being reminded, because she is committed and has the discipline to stay with the commitment. She is a valuable asset, a goose that can produce golden eggs.\n\nBut if your paradigm is focused on production, on getting the room clean, you might find yourself nagging her to do it. You might even escalate your efforts to threatening or yelling, and in your desire to get the golden egg, you undermine the health and welfare of the goose.\n\nLet me share with you an interesting PC experience I had with one of my daughters. We were planning a private date, which is something I enjoy regularly with each of my children. We find that the anticipation of the date is as satisfying as the realization.\n\nSo I approached my daughter and said, \"Honey, tonight's your night. What do you want to do?\"\n\n\"Oh, Dad, that's okay,\" she replied.\n\n\"No, really,\" I said. \"What would you like to do?\"\n\n\"Well,\" she finally said, \"what I want to do, you don't really want to do.\"\n\n\"Really, honey,\" I said earnestly, \"I want to do it. No matter what, it's your choice.\"\n\n\"I want to go see Star Wars,\" she replied. \"But I know you don't like Star Wars. You slept through it before. You don't like these fantasy movies. That's okay, Dad.\"\n\n\"No, honey, if that's what you'd like to do, I'd like to do it.\"\n\n\"Dad, don't worry about it. We don't always have to have this date.\" She paused and then added, \"But you know why you don't like Star Wars? It's because you don't understand the philosophy and training of a Jedi Knight.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You know the things you teach, Dad? Those are the same things that go into the training of a Jedi Knight.\"\n\n\"Really? Let's go to Star Wars!\"\n\nAnd we did. She sat next to me and gave me the paradigm. I became her student, her learner. It was totally fascinating. I could begin to see out of a new paradigm the whole way a Jedi Knight's basic philosophy in training is manifested in different circum\u00adstances.\n\nThat experience was not a planned P experience; it was the serendipitous fruit of a PC investment. It was bonding and very satisfying. But we enjoyed golden eggs, too, as the goose\u2014the quality of the relationship\u2014was significantly fed.\n\nORGANIZATIONAL PC\n\nOne of the immensely valuable aspects of any correct principle is that it is valid and applicable in a wide variety of circumstances. Throughout this book, I would like to share with you some of the ways in which these principles apply to organizations, including families, as well as to individuals.\n\nWhen people fail to respect the P\/PC Balance in their use of physical assets in organizations, they decrease organizational effectiveness and often leave others with dying geese.\n\nFor example, a person in charge of a physical asset, such as a machine, may be eager to make a good impression on his superiors. Perhaps the company is in a rapid growth stage and promotions are coming fast. So he produces at optimum levels\u2014no downtime, no maintenance. He runs the machine day and night. The production is phenomenal, costs are down, and profits skyrocket. Within a short time, he's promoted. Golden eggs!\n\nBut suppose you are his successor on the job. You inherit a very sick goose, a machine that, by this time, is rusted and starts to break down. You have to invest heavily in downtime and maintenance. Costs skyrocket; profits nose-dive. And who gets blamed for the loss of golden eggs? You do. Your predecessor liquidated the asset, but the accounting system only reported unit production, costs, and profit.\n\nThe P\/PC Balance is particularly important as it applies to the human assets of an organization\u2014the customers and the employees.\n\nI know of a restaurant that served a fantastic clam chowder and was packed with customers every day at lunchtime. Then the business was sold, and the new owner focused on golden eggs\u2014he decided to water down the chowder. For about a month, with costs down and revenues constant, profits zoomed. But little by little, the customers began to disappear. Trust was gone, and business dwindled to almost nothing. The new owner tried desperately to reclaim it, but he had neglected the customers, violated their trust, and lost the asset of customer loyalty. There was no more goose to produce the golden egg.\n\nThere are organizations that talk a lot about the customer and then completely neglect the people that deal with the customer\u2014the employees. The PC principle is to always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.\n\nYou can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.\n\nPC work is treating employees as volunteers just as you treat customers as volunteers, because that's what they are. They volunteer the best part\u2014their hearts and minds.\n\nI was in a group once where someone asked, \"How do you shape up lazy and incompetent employees?\" One man responded, \"Drop hand grenades!\" Several others cheered that kind of macho management talk, that \"shape up or ship out\" supervision approach.\n\nBut another person in the group asked, \"Who picks up the pieces?\"\n\n\"No pieces.\"\n\n\"Well, why don't you do that to your customers?\" the other man replied. \"Just say, 'Listen, if you're not interested in buying, you can just ship out of this place.'\"\n\nHe said, \"You can't do that to customers.\"\n\n\"Well, how come you can do it to employees?\"\n\n\"Because they're in your employ.\"\n\n\"I see. Are your employees devoted to you? Do they work hard? How's the turnover?\"\n\n\"Are you kidding? You can't find good people these days. There's too much turnover, absenteeism, moonlighting. People just don't care anymore.\"\n\nThat focus on golden eggs\u2014that attitude, that paradigm\u2014is totally inadequate to tap into the powerful energies of the mind and heart of another person. A short-term bottom line is important, but it isn't all-important.\n\nEffectiveness lies in the balance. Excessive focus on P results in ruined health, worn-out machines, depleted bank accounts, and broken relationships. Too much focus on PC is like a person who runs three or four hours a day, bragging about the extra ten years of life it creates, unaware he's spending them running. Or a person endlessly going to school, never producing, living on other peo\u00adple's golden eggs\u2014the eternal student syndrome.\n\nTo maintain the P\/PC Balance, the balance between the golden egg (production) and the health and welfare of the goose (production capability) is often a difficult judgment call. But I suggest it is the very essence of effectiveness. It balances short term with long term. It balances going for the grade and paying the price to get an education. It balances the desire to have a room clean and the building of a relationship in which the child is internally committed to do it\u2014cheerfully, willingly, without external supervision.\n\nIt's a principle you can see validated in your own life when you burn the candle at both ends to get more golden eggs and wind up sick or exhausted, unable to produce any at all; or when you get a good night's sleep and wake up ready to produce throughout the day.\n\nYou can see it when you press to get your own way with someone and somehow feel an emptiness in the relationship; or when you really take time to invest in a relationship and you find the desire and ability to work together, to communicate, takes a quantum leap.\n\nThe P\/PC Balance is the very essence of effectiveness. It's validated in every arena of life. We can work with it or against it, but it's there. It's a lighthouse. It's the definition and paradigm of effectiveness upon which the Seven Habits in this book are based.\n\nHOW TO USE THIS BOOK\n\nBefore we begin work on the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I would like to suggest two paradigm shifts that will greatly increase the value you will receive from this material.\n\nFirst, I would recommend that you not \"see\" this material as a book, in the sense that it is something to read once and put on a shelf.\n\nYou may choose to read it completely through once for a sense of the whole. But the material is designed to be a companion in the continual process of change and growth. It is organized incrementally and with suggestions for application at the end of each habit so that you can study and focus on any particular habit as you are ready.\n\nAs you progress to deeper levels of understanding and implementation, you can go back time and again to the principles contained in each habit and work to expand your knowledge, skill, and desire.\n\nSecond, I would suggest that you shift your paradigm of your own involvement in this material from the role of learner to that of teacher. Take an inside-out approach, and read with the purpose in mind of sharing or discussing what you learn with someone else within 48 hours after you learn it.\n\nIf you had known, for example, that you would be teaching the material on the P\/PC Balance principle to someone else within 48 hours, would it have made a difference in your reading experience? Try it now as you read the final section in this chapter. Read as though you are going to teach it to your spouse, your child, a business associate, or a friend today or tomorrow, while it is still fresh, and notice the difference in your mental and emotional process.\n\nI guarantee that if you approach the material in each of the following chapters in this way, you will not only better remember what you read, but your perspective will be expanded, your understanding deepened, and your motivation to apply the mate\u00adrial increased.\n\nIn addition, as you openly, honestly share what you're learning with others, you may be surprised to find that negative labels or perceptions others may have of you tend to disappear. Those you teach will see you as a changing, growing person, and will be more inclined to be helpful and supportive as you work, perhaps together, to integrate the Seven Habits into your lives.\n\nWHAT YOU CAN EXPECT\n\nIn the last analysis, as Marilyn Ferguson observed, \"No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.\"\n\nIf you decide to open your \"gate of change\" to really understand and live the principles embodied in the Seven Habits, I feel comfortable in assuring you several positive things will happen.\n\nFirst, your growth will be evolutionary, but the net effect will be revolutionary. Would you not agree that the P\/PC Balance principle alone, if fully lived, would transform most individuals and organizations?\n\nThe net effect of opening the \"gate of change\" to the first three habits\u2014the habits of Private Victory\u2014will be significantly increased self-confidence. You will come to know yourself in a deeper, more meaningful way\u2014your nature, your deepest values and your unique contribution capacity. As you live your values, your sense of identity, integrity, control, and inner-directedness will infuse you with both exhilaration and peace. You will define yourself from within, rather than by people's opinions or by comparisons to others. \"Wrong\" and \"right\" will have little to do with being found out.\n\nIronically, you'll find that as you care less about what others think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves and their worlds, including their relationship with you. You'll no longer build your emotional life on other people's weaknesses. In addition, you'll find it easier and more desirable to change because there is something\u2014some core deep within\u2014that is essentially changeless.\n\nAs you open yourself to the next three habits\u2014the habits of Public Victory\u2014you will discover and unleash both the desire and the resources to heal and rebuild important relationships that have deteriorated, or even broken. Good relationships will improve\u2014become deeper, more solid, more creative, and more adventuresome.\n\nThe seventh habit, if deeply internalized, will renew the first six and will make you truly independent and capable of effective interdependence. Through it, you can charge your own batteries.\n\nWhatever your present situation, I assure you that you are not your habits. You can replace old patterns of self-defeating behavior with new patterns, new habits of effectiveness, happiness, and trust-based relationships.\n\nWith genuine caring, I encourage you to open the gate of change and growth as you study these habits. Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it's holy ground. There's no greater investment.\n\nIt's obviously not a quick fix. But I assure you, you will feel benefits and see immediate payoffs that will be encouraging. In the words of Thomas Paine, \"That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods.\"\n\n## _PART TWO_\n\n# PRIVATE VICTORY\n\n### HABIT 1  \nBE PROACTIVE\n\n### PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL VISION\n\nI know of no more encouraging fact  \nthan the unquestionable ability of man  \nto elevate his life by conscious endeavor.\n\nHenry David Thoreau\n\nAs YOU READ THIS BOOK, try to stand apart from yourself. Try to project your consciousness upward into a corner of the room and see yourself, in your mind's eye, reading. Can you look at yourself almost as though you were someone else?\n\nNow try something else. Think about the mood you are now in. Can you identify it? What are you feeling? How would you describe your present mental state?\n\nNow think for a minute about how your mind is working. Is it quick and alert? Do you sense that you are torn between doing this mental exercise and evaluating the point to be made out of it?\n\nYour ability to do what you just did is uniquely human. Animals do not possess this ability. We call it \"self-awareness\" or the ability to think about your very thought process. This is the reason why man has dominion over all things in the world and why he can make significant advances from generation to generation.\n\nThis is why we can evaluate and learn from others' experiences as well as our own. This is also why we can make and break our habits.\n\nWe are not our feelings. We are not our moods. We are not even our thoughts. The very fact that we can think about these things separates us from them and from the animal world. Self-awareness enables us to stand apart and examine even the way we \"see\" ourselves\u2014our self-paradigm, the most fundamental paradigm of effectiveness. It affects not only our attitudes and behaviors, but also how we see other people. It becomes our map of the basic nature of mankind.\n\nIn fact, until we take how we see ourselves (and how we see others) into account, we will be unable to understand how others see and feel about themselves and their world. Unaware, we will project our intentions on their behavior and call ourselves objective.\n\nThis significantly limits our personal potential and our ability to relate to others as well. But because of the unique human capacity of self-awareness, we can examine our paradigms to determine whether they are reality- or principle-based or if they are a function of conditioning and conditions.\n\nTHE SOCIAL MIRROR\n\nIf the only vision we have of ourselves comes from the social mirror\u2014from the current social paradigm and from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around us\u2014our view of ourselves is like the reflection in the crazy mirror room at the carnival.\n\n\"You're never on time.\"\n\n\"Why can't you ever keep things in order?\"\n\n\"You must be an artist!\"\n\n\"You eat like a horse!\"\n\n\"I can't believe you won!\"\n\n\"This is so simple. Why can't you understand?\"\n\nThese visions are disjointed and out of proportion. They are often more projections than reflections, projecting the concerns and character weaknesses of people giving the input rather than accurately reflecting what we are.\n\nThe reflection of the current social paradigm tells us we are largely determined by conditioning and conditions. While we have acknowledged the tremendous power of conditioning in our lives, to say that we are determined by it, that we have no control over that influence, creates quite a different map.\n\nThere are actually three social maps\u2014three theories of determinism widely accepted, independently or in combination, to explain the nature of man. Genetic determinism basically says your grandparents did it to you. That's why you have such a temper. Your grandparents had short tempers and it's in your DNA. It just goes through the generations and you inherited it. In addition, you're Irish, and that's the nature of Irish people.\n\nPsychic determinism basically says your parents did it to you. Your upbringing, your childhood experience essentially laid out your personal tendencies and your character structure. That's why you're afraid to be in front of a group. It's the way your parents brought you up. You feel terribly guilty if you make a mistake because you \"remember\" deep inside the emotional scripting when you were very vulnerable and tender and dependent. You \"remember\" the emotional punishment, the rejection, the comparison with somebody else when you didn't perform as well as expected.\n\nEnvironmental determinism basically says your boss is doing it to you\u2014or your spouse, or that bratty teenager, or your economic situation, or national policies. Someone or something in your environment is responsible for your situation.\n\nEach of these maps is based on the stimulus\/response theory we most often think of in connection with Pavlov's experiments with dogs. The basic idea is that we are conditioned to respond in a particular way to a particular stimulus.\n\nHow accurately and functionally do these deterministic maps describe the territory? How clearly do these mirrors reflect the true nature of man? Do they become self-fulfilling prophecies? Are they based on principles we can validate within ourselves?\n\nBETWEEN STIMULUS AND RESPONSE\n\nIn answer to those questions, let me share with you the catalytic story of Viktor Frankl.\n\nFrankl was a determinist raised in the tradition of Freudian psychology, which postulates that whatever happens to you as a child shapes your character and personality and basically governs your whole life. The limits and parameters of your life are set, and, basically, you can't do much about it.\n\nFrankl was also a psychiatrist and a Jew. He was imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany, where he experienced things that were so repugnant to our sense of decency that we shudder to even repeat them.\n\nHis parents, his brother, and his wife died in the camps or were sent to the gas ovens. Except for his sister, his entire family perished. Frankl himself suffered torture and innumerable indignities, never knowing from one moment to the next if his path would lead to the ovens or if he would be among the \"saved\" who would remove the bodies or shovel out the ashes of those so fated.\n\nOne day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called \"the last of the human freedoms\"\u2014the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Viktor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.\n\nIn the midst of his experiences, Frankl would project himself into different circumstances, such as lecturing to his students after his release from the death camps. He would describe himself in the classroom, in his mind's eye, and give his students the lessons he was learning during his very torture.\n\nThrough a series of such disciplines\u2014mental, emotional, and moral, principally using memory and imagination\u2014he exercised his small, embryonic freedom until it grew larger and larger, until he had more freedom than his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. He became an inspiration to those around him, even to some of the guards. He helped others find meaning in their suffering and dignity in their prison existence.\n\nIn the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.\n\nWithin the freedom to choose are those endowments that make us uniquely human. In addition to self-awareness, we have imagination\u2014the ability to create in our minds beyond our present reality. We have conscience\u2014a deep inner awareness of right and wrong, of the principles that govern our behavior, and a sense of the degree to which our thoughts and actions are in harmony with them. And we have independent will\u2014the ability to act based on our self-awareness, free of all other influences.\n\nEven the most intelligent animals have none of these endowments. To use a computer metaphor, they are programmed by instinct and\/or training. They can be trained to be responsible, but they can't take responsibility for that training; in other words, they can't direct it. They can't change the programming. They're not even aware of it.\n\nBut because of our unique human endowments, we can write new programs for ourselves totally apart from our instincts and training. This is why an animal's capacity is relatively limited and man's is unlimited. But if we live like animals, out of our own instincts and conditioning and conditions, out of our collective memory, we too will be limited.\n\nThe deterministic paradigm comes primarily from the study of animals\u2014rats, monkeys, pigeons, dogs\u2014and neurotic and psychotic people. While this may meet certain criteria of some researchers because it seems measurable and predictable, the history of mankind and our own self-awareness tell us that this map doesn't describe the territory at all!\n\nOur unique human endowments lift us above the animal world. The extent to which we exercise and develop these endowments empowers us to fulfill our uniquely human potential. Between stimulus and response is our greatest power\u2014the freedom to choose.\n\n\"PROACTIVITY\" DEFINED\n\nIn discovering the basic principle of the nature of man, Frankl described an accurate self-map from which he began to develop the first and most basic habit of a highly effective person in any environment, the habit of proactivity.\n\nWhile the word proactivity is now fairly common in management literature, it is a word you won't find in most dictionaries. It means more than merely taking initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.\n\nPROACTIVE MODEL\n\nLook at the word responsibility\u2014\"response-ability\"\u2014the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.\n\nBecause we are, by nature, proactive, if our lives are a function of conditioning and conditions, it is because we have, by conscious decision or by default, chosen to empower those things to control us.\n\nIn making such a choice, we become reactive. Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn't, it affects their attitude and their performance. Proactive people can carry their own weather with them. Whether it rains or shines makes no difference to them. They are value driven; and if their value is to produce good quality work, it isn't a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not.\n\nReactive people are also affected by their social environment, by the \"social weather.\" When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don't, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.\n\nThe ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values\u2014carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.\n\nProactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their response to the stimuli, conscious or unconscious, is a value-based choice or response.\n\nAs Eleanor Roosevelt observed, \"No one can hurt you without your consent.\" In the words of Gandhi, \"They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.\" It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens to us in the first place.\n\nI admit this is very hard to accept emotionally, especially if we have had years and years of explaining our misery in the name of circumstance or someone else's behavior. But until a person can say deeply and honestly, \"I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,\" that person cannot say, \"I choose otherwise.\"\n\nOnce in Sacramento when I was speaking on the subject of proactivity, a woman in the audience stood up in the middle of my presentation and started talking excitedly. It was a large audience, and as a number of people turned to look at her, she suddenly became aware of what she was doing, grew embarrassed and sat back down. But she seemed to find it difficult to restrain herself and started talking to the people around her. She seemed so happy.\n\nI could hardly wait for a break to find out what had happened. When it finally came, I immediately went to her and asked if she would be willing to share her experience.\n\n\"You just can't imagine what's happened to me!\" she exclaimed. \"I'm a full-time nurse to the most miserable, ungrateful man you can possibly imagine. Nothing I do is good enough for him. He never expresses appreciation; he hardly even acknowledges me. He constantly harps at me and finds fault with everything I do. This man has made my life miserable and I often take my frustration out on my family. The other nurses feel the same way. We almost pray for his demise.\n\n\"And for you to have the gall to stand up there and suggest that nothing can hurt me, that no one can hurt me without my consent, and that I have chosen my own emotional life of being miserable\u2014well, there was just no way I could buy into that.\n\n\"But I kept thinking about it. I really went inside myself and began to ask, 'Do I have the power to choose my response?'\n\n\"When I finally realized that I do have that power, when I swallowed that bitter pill and realized that I had chosen to be miserable, I also realized that I could choose not to be miserable.\n\n\"At that moment I stood up. I felt as though I was being let out of San Quentin. I wanted to yell to the whole world, 'I am free! I am let out of prison! No longer am I going to be controlled by the treatment of some person.'\"\n\nIt's not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us. Of course, things can hurt us physically or economically and can cause sorrow. But our character, our basic identity, does not have to be hurt at all. In fact, our most difficult experiences become the crucibles that forge our character and develop the internal powers, the freedom to handle difficult circumstances in the future and to inspire others to do so as well.\n\nFrankl is one of many who have been able to develop the personal freedom in difficult circumstances to lift and inspire others. The autobiographical accounts of Vietnam prisoners of war provide additional persuasive testimony of the transforming power of such personal freedom and the effect of the responsible use of that freedom on the prison culture and on the prisoners, both then and now.\n\nWe have all known individuals in very difficult circumstances, perhaps with a terminal illness or a severe physical handicap, who maintain magnificent emotional strength. How inspired we are by their integrity! Nothing has a greater, longer lasting impression upon another person than the awareness that someone has transcended suffering, has transcended circumstance, and is embodying and expressing a value that inspires and ennobles and lifts life.\n\nOne of the most inspiring times Sandra and I have ever had took place over a four-year period with a dear friend of ours named Carol, who had a wasting cancer disease. She had been one of Sandra's bridesmaids, and they had been best friends for over 25 years.\n\nWhen Carol was in the very last stages of the disease, Sandra spent time at her bedside helping her write her personal history. She returned from those protracted and difficult sessions almost transfixed by admiration for her friend's courage and her desire to write special messages to be given to her children at different stages in their lives.\n\nCarol would take as little pain-killing medication as possible, so that she had full access to her mental and emotional faculties. Then she would whisper into a tape recorder or to Sandra directly as she took notes. Carol was so proactive, so brave, and so concerned about others that she became an enormous source of inspiration to many people around her.\n\nI'll never forget the experience of looking deeply into Carol's eyes the day before she passed away and sensing out of that deep hollowed agony a person of tremendous intrinsic worth. I could see in her eyes a life of character, contribution, and service as well as love and concern and appreciation.\n\nMany times over the years, I have asked groups of people how many have ever experienced being in the presence of a dying individual who had a magnificent attitude and communicated love and compassion and served in unmatchable ways to the very end. Usually, about one-fourth of the audience respond in the affirmative. I then ask how many of them will never forget these individuals\u2014how many were transformed, at least temporarily, by the inspiration of such courage, and were deeply moved and motivated to more noble acts of service and compassion. The same people respond again, almost inevitably.\n\nViktor Frankl suggests that there are three central values in life\u2014the experiential, or that which happens to us; the creative, or that which we bring into existence; and the attitudinal, or our response in difficult circumstances such as terminal illness.\n\nMy own experience with people confirms the point Frankl makes\u2014that the highest of the three values is attitudinal, in the paradigm or reframing sense. In other words, what matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life.\n\nDifficult circumstances often create paradigm shifts, whole new frames of reference by which people see the world and themselves and others in it, and what life is asking of them. Their larger perspective reflects the attitudinal values that lift and inspire us all.\n\nTAKING THE INITIATIVE\n\nOur basic nature is to act, and not be acted upon. As well as enabling us to choose our response to particular circumstances, this empowers us to create circumstances.\n\nTaking initiative does not mean being pushy, obnoxious, or aggressive. It does mean recognizing our responsibility to make things happen.\n\nOver the years, I have frequently counseled people who wanted better jobs to show more initiative\u2014to take interest and aptitude tests, to study the industry, even the specific problems the organizations they are interested in are facing, and then to develop an effective presentation showing how their abilities can help solve the organization's problem. It's called \"solution selling,\" and is a key paradigm in business success.\n\nThe response is usually agreement\u2014most people can see how powerfully such an approach would affect their opportunities for employment or advancement. But many of them fail to take the necessary steps, the initiative, to make it happen.\n\n\"I don't know where to go to take the interest and aptitude tests.\"\n\n\"How do I study industry and organizational problems? No one wants to help me.\"\n\n\"I don't have any idea how to make an effective presentation.\"\n\nMany people wait for something to happen or someone to take care of them. But people who end up with the good jobs are the proactive ones who are solutions to problems, not problems themselves, who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary, consistent with correct principles, to get the job done.\n\nWhenever someone in our family, even one of the younger children, takes an irresponsible position and waits for someone else to make things happen or provide a solution, we tell them, \"Use your R and I!\" (resourcefulness and initiative). In fact, often before we can say it, they answer their own complaints, \"I know\u2014use my R and I!\"\n\nHolding people to the responsible course is not demeaning; it is affirming. Proactivity is part of human nature, and, although the proactive muscles may be dormant, they are there. By respecting the proactive nature of other people, we provide them with at least one clear, undistorted reflection from the social mirror.\n\nOf course, the maturity level of the individual has to be taken into account. We can't expect high creative cooperation from those who are deep into emotional dependence. But we can, at least, affirm their basic nature and create an atmosphere where people can seize opportunities and solve problems in an increasingly self-reliant way.\n\nACT OR BE ACTED UPON\n\nThe difference between people who exercise initiative and those who don't is literally the difference between night and day. I'm not talking about a 25 to 50 percent difference in effectiveness; I'm talking about a 5000-plus percent difference, particularly if they are smart, aware, and sensitive to others.\n\nIt takes initiative to create the P\/PC Balance of effectiveness in your life. It takes initiative to develop the Seven Habits. As you study the other six habits, you will see that each depends on the development of your proactive muscles. Each puts the responsibility on you to act. If you wait to be acted upon, you will be acted upon. And growth and opportunity consequences attend either road.\n\nAt one time I worked with a group of people in the home improvement industry, representatives from twenty different organizations who met quarterly to share their numbers and problems in an uninhibited way.\n\nThis was during a time of heavy recession, and the negative impact on this particular industry was even heavier than on the economy in general. These people were fairly discouraged as we began.\n\nThe first day, our discussion question was \"What's happening to us? What's the stimulus?\" Many things were happening. The environmental pressures were powerful. There was widespread unemployment, and many of these people were laying off friends just to maintain the viability of their enterprises. By the end of the day, everyone was even more discouraged.\n\nThe second day, we addressed the question, \"What's going to happen in the future?\" We studied environmental trends with the underlying reactive assumption that those things would create their future. By the end of the second day, we were even more depressed. Things were going to get worse before they got better, and everyone knew it.\n\nSo on the third day, we decided to focus on the proactive question, \"What is our response? What are we going to do? How can we exercise initiative in this situation?\" In the morning we talked about managing and reducing costs. In the afternoon we discussed increasing market share. We brainstormed both areas, then concentrated on several very practical, very doable things. A new spirit of excitement, hope, and proactive awareness concluded the meetings.\n\nAt the very end of the third day, we summarized the results of the conference in a three-part answer to the question, \"How's business?\"\n\nPart one: What's happening to us is not good, and the trends suggest that it will get worse before it gets better.\n\nPart two: But what we are causing to happen is very good, for we are better managing and reducing our costs and increasing our market share.\n\nPart three: Therefore, business is better than ever.\n\nNow what would a reactive mind say to that? \"Oh, come on. Face facts. You can only carry this positive thinking and self-psych approach so far. Sooner or later you have to face reality.\"\n\nBut that's the difference between positive thinking and proactivity. We did face reality. We faced the reality of the current circumstance and of future projections. But we also faced the reality that we had the power to choose a positive response to those circumstances and projections. Not facing reality would have been to accept the idea that what's happening in our environment had to determine us.\n\nBusinesses, community groups, organizations of every kind\u2014including families\u2014can be proactive. They can combine the cre\u00adativity and resourcefulness of proactive individuals to create a proactive culture within the organization. The organization does not have to be at the mercy of the environment; it can take the initiative to accomplish the shared values and purposes of the individuals involved.\n\nLISTENING TO OUR LANGUAGE\n\nBecause our attitudes and behaviors flow out of our paradigms, if we use our self-awareness to examine them, we can often see in them the nature of our underlying maps. Our language, for example, is a very real indicator of the degree to which we see ourselves as proactive people.\n\nThe language of reactive people absolves them of responsibility.\n\n\"That's me. That's just the way I am.\" I am determined. There's nothing I can do about it.\n\n\"He makes me so mad!\" I'm not responsible. My emotional life is governed by something outside my control.\n\n\"I can't do that. I just don't have the time.\" Something outside me\u2014limited time\u2014is controlling me.\n\n\"If only my wife were more patient.\" Someone else's behavior is limiting my effectiveness.\n\n\"I have to do it.\" Circumstances or other people are forcing me to do what I do. I'm not free to choose my own actions.\n\n**Reactive Language**\n\nThere's nothing I can do.\n\nThat's just the way I am.\n\nHe makes me so mad.\n\nThey won't allow that.\n\nI have to do that.\n\nI can't.\n\nI must.\n\nIf only.\n\n**Proactive Language**\n\nLet's look at our alternatives.\n\nI can choose a different approach.\n\nI control my own feelings.\n\nI can create an effective presentation.\n\nI will choose an appropriate response.\n\nI choose.\n\nI prefer.\n\nI will.\n\nThat language comes from a basic paradigm of determinism. And the whole spirit of it is the transfer of responsibility. I am not responsible, not able to choose my response.\n\nOne time a student asked me, \"Will you excuse me from class? I have to go on a tennis trip.\"\n\n\"You have to go, or you choose to go?\" I asked.\n\n\"I really have to,\" he exclaimed.\n\n\"What will happen if you don't?\"\n\n\"Why, they'll kick me off the team.\"\n\n\"How would you like that consequence?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't.\"\n\n\"In other words, you choose to go because you want the conse\u00adquence of staying on the team. What will happen if you miss my class?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Think hard. What do you think would be the natural conse\u00adquence of not coming to class?\"\n\n\"You wouldn't kick me out, would you?\"\n\n\"That would be a social consequence. That would be artificial. If you don't participate on the tennis team, you don't play. That's natural. But if you don't come to class, what would be the natural consequence?\"\n\n\"I guess I'll miss the learning.\"\n\n\"That's right. So you have to weigh that consequence against the other consequence and make a choice. I know if it were me, I'd choose to go on the tennis trip. But never say you have to do anything.\"\n\n\"I choose to go on the tennis trip,\" he meekly replied.\n\n\"And miss my class?\" I replied in mock disbelief.\n\nA serious problem with reactive language is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People become reinforced in the paradigm that they are determined, and they produce evidence to support the belief. They feel increasingly victimized and out of control, not in charge of their life or their destiny. They blame outside forces\u2014other people, circumstances, even the stars\u2014for their own situation.\n\nAt one seminar where I was speaking on the concept of proactivity, a man came up and said, \"Stephen, I like what you're saying. But every situation is so different. Look at my marriage. I'm really worried. My wife and I just don't have the same feelings for each other we used to have. I guess I just don't love her anymore and she doesn't love me. What can I do?\"\n\n\"The feeling isn't there anymore?\" I asked.\n\n\"That's right,\" he reaffirmed. \"And we have three children we're really concerned about. What do you suggest?\"\n\n\"Love her,\" I replied.\n\n\"I told you, the feeling just isn't there anymore.\"\n\n\"Love her.\"\n\n\"You don't understand. The feeling of love just isn't there.\"\n\n\"Then love her. If the feeling isn't there, that's a good reason to love her.\"\n\n\"But how do you love when you don't love?\"\n\n\"My friend, love is a verb. Love\u2014the feeling\u2014is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?\"\n\nIn the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb. Reactive people make it a feeling. They're driven by feelings. Hollywood has generally scripted us to believe that we are not responsible, that we are a product of our feelings. But the Hollywood script does not describe the reality. If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.\n\nProactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend or do not love in return. If you are a parent, look at the love you have for the children you sacrificed for. Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured.\n\nCIRCLE OF CONCERN\/CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE\n\nAnother excellent way to become more self-aware regarding our own degree of proactivity is to look at where we focus our time and energy. We each have a wide range of concerns\u2014our health, our children, problems at work, the national debt, nuclear war. We could separate those from things in which we have no particular mental or emotional involvement by creating a \"Circle of Con\u00adcern.\"\n\nAs we look at those things within our Circle of Concern, it becomes apparent that there are some things over which we have no real control and others that we can do something about. We could identify those concerns in the latter group by circumscribing them within a smaller Circle of Influence.\n\nBy determining which of these two circles is the focus of most of our time and energy, we can discover much about the degree of our proactivity.\n\nPROACTIVE FOCUS\n\n(Positive energy enlarges the Circle of Influence)\n\nProactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They work on the things they can do something about. The nature of their energy is positive, enlarging and magnifying, causing their Circle of Influence to increase.\n\nReactive people, on the other hand, focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern. They focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control. Their focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language, and increased feelings of victimiza\u00adtion. The negative energy generated by that focus, combined with neglect in areas they could do something about, causes their Circle of Influence to shrink.\n\nREACTIVE FOCUS\n\n(Negative energy reduces the Circle of Influence)\n\nAs long as we are working in our Circle of Concern, we empower the things within it to control us. We aren't taking the proactive initiative necessary to effect positive change.\n\nEarlier, I shared with you the story of my son who was having serious problems in school. Sandra and I were deeply concerned about his apparent weaknesses and about the way other people were treating him.\n\nBut those things were in our Circle of Concern. As long as we focused our efforts on those things, we accomplished nothing, except to increase our own feelings of inadequacy and helplessness and to reinforce our son's dependence.\n\nIt was only when we went to work in our Circle of Influence, when we focused on our own paradigms, that we began to create a positive energy that changed ourselves and eventually influenced our son as well. By working on ourselves instead of worrying about conditions, we were able to influence the conditions.\n\nBecause of position, wealth, role, or relationships, there are some circumstances in which a person's Circle of Influence is larger than his or her Circle of Concern.\n\nThis situation reflects a self-inflicted emotional myopia\u2014another reactive selfish life-style focused in the Circle of Concern.\n\nThough they may have to prioritize the use of their influence, proactive people have a Circle of Concern that is at least as big as their Circle of Influence, accepting the responsibility to use their influence effectively.\n\nDIRECT, INDIRECT, AND NO CONTROL\n\nThe problems we face fall in one of three areas: direct control (problems involving our own behavior); indirect control (problems involving other people's behavior); or no control (problems we can do nothing about, such as our past or situational realities). The proactive approach puts the first step in the solution of all three kinds of problems within our present Circle of Influence.\n\nDirect control problems are solved by working on our habits. They are obviously within our Circle of Influence. These are the \"Private Victories\" of Habits 1, 2, and 3.\n\nIndirect control problems are solved by changing our methods of influence. These are the \"Public Victories\" of Habits 4, 5, and 6. I have personally identified over 30 separate methods of human influence\u2014as separate as empathy is from confrontation, as sepa\u00adrate as example is from persuasion. Most people have only three or four of these methods in their repertoire, starting usually with reasoning, and, if that doesn't work, moving to flight or fight. How liberating it is to accept the idea that I can learn new methods of human influence instead of constantly trying to use old ineffective methods to \"shape up\" someone else!\n\nNo control problems involve taking the responsibility to change the line on the bottom on our face\u2014to smile, to genuinely and peacefully accept these problems and learn to live with them, even though we don't like them. In this way, we do not empower these problems to control us. We share in the spirit embodied in the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer, \"Lord, give me the courage to change the things which can and ought to be changed, the serenity to accept the things which cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.\"\n\nWhether a problem is direct, indirect, or no control, we have in our hands the first step to the solution. Changing our habits, changing our methods of influence and changing the way we see our no control problems are all within our Circle of Influence.\n\nEXPANDING THE CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE\n\nIt is inspiring to realize that in choosing our response to circumstance, we powerfully affect our circumstance. When we change one part of the chemical formula, we change the nature of the results.\n\nI worked with one organization for several years that was headed by a very dynamic person. He could read trends. He was creative, talented, capable, and brilliant\u2014and everyone knew it. But he had a very dictatorial style of management. He tended to treat people like \"gofers,\" as if they didn't have any judgment. His manner of speaking to those who worked in the organization was, \"Go for this... go for that... now do this... now do that\u2014I'll make the decisions.\"\n\nThe net effect was that he alienated almost the entire executive team surrounding him. They would gather in the corridors and complain to each other about him. Their discussion was all very sophisticated, very articulate, as if they were trying to help the situation. But they did it endlessly, absolving themselves of responsibility in the name of the president's weaknesses.\n\n\"You can't imagine what's happened this time,\" someone would say. \"The other day he went into my department. I had everything all laid out. But he came in and gave totally different signals. Everything I'd done for months was shot, just like that. I don't know how I'm supposed to keep working for him. How long will it be until he retires?\"\n\n\"He's only fifty-nine,\" someone else would respond. \"Do you think you can survive for six more years?\"\n\n\"I don't know. He's the kind of person they probably won't retire anyway.\"\n\nBut one of the executives was proactive. He was driven by values, not feelings. He took the initiative\u2014he anticipated, he empathized, he read the situation. He was not blind to the president's weaknesses; but instead of criticizing them, he would compensate for them. Where the president was weak in his style, he'd try to buffer his own people and make such weaknesses irrelevant. And he'd work with the president's strengths\u2014his vision, talent, creativity.\n\nThis man focused on his Circle of Influence. He was treated like a gofer, also. But he would do more than what was expected. He anticipated the president's need. He read with empathy the president's underlying concern, so when he presented informa\u00adtion, he also gave his analysis and his recommendations based on that analysis.\n\nAs I sat one day with the president in an advisory capacity, he said, \"Stephen, I just can't believe what this man has done. He's not only given me the information I requested, but he's provided additional information that's exactly what we needed. He even gave me his analysis of it in terms of my deepest concerns, and a list of his recommendations.\n\n\"The recommendations are consistent with the analysis, and the analysis is consistent with the data. He's remarkable! What a relief not to have to worry about this part of the business.\"\n\nAt the next meeting, it was \"go for this\" and \"go for that\" to all the executives... but one. To this man, it was \"What's your opinion?\" His Circle of Influence had grown.\n\nThis caused quite a stir in the organization. The reactive minds in the executive corridors began shooting their vindictive ammunition at this proactive man.\n\nIt's the nature of reactive people to absolve themselves of responsibility. It's so much safer to say, \"I am not responsible.\" If I say \"I am responsible,\" I might have to say, \"I am irresponsible.\" It would be very hard for me to say that I have the power to choose my response and that the response I have chosen has resulted in my involvement in a negative, collusive environment, especially if for years I have absolved myself of responsibility for results in the name of someone else's weaknesses.\n\nSo these executives focused on finding more information, more ammunition, more evidence as to why they weren't responsible.\n\nBut this man was proactive toward them, too. Little by little, his Circle of Influence toward them grew also. It continued to expand to the extent that eventually no one made any significant moves in the organization without that man's involvement and approval, including the president. But the president did not feel threatened because this man's strength complemented his strength and com\u00adpensated for his weaknesses. So he had the strength of two people, a complementary team.\n\nThis man's success was not dependent on his circumstances. Many others were in the same situation. It was his chosen response to those circumstances, his focus on his Circle of Influence, that made the difference.\n\nThere are some people who interpret \"proactive\" to mean pushy, aggressive, or insensitive; but that isn't the case at all. Proactive people aren't pushy. They're smart, they're value driven, they read reality, and they know what's needed.\n\nLook at Gandhi. While his accusers were in the legislative chambers criticizing him because he wouldn't join in their Circle of Concern Rhetoric condemning the British Empire for their subju\u00adgation of the Indian people, Gandhi was out in the rice paddies, quietly, slowly, imperceptibly expanding his Circle of Influence with the field laborers. A ground swell of support, of trust, of confidence followed him through the countryside. Though he held no office or political position, through compassion, courage, fast\u00ading, and moral persuasion he eventually brought England to its knees, breaking political domination of three hundred million people with the power of his greatly expanded Circle of Influence.\n\nTHE \"HAVE'S\" AND THE \"BE'S\"\n\nOne way to determine which circle our concern is in is to distinguish between the have's and the be's. The Circle of Concern is filled with the have's:\n\n\"I'll be happy when I have my house paid off.\"\n\n\"If only I had a boss who wasn't such a dictator....\"\n\n\"If only I had a more patient husband....\"\n\n\"If I had more obedient kids....\"\n\n\"If I had my degree....\"\n\n\"If I could just have more time to myself....\"\n\nThe Circle of Influence is filled with the be's\u2014I can be more patient, be wise, be loving. It's the character focus.\n\nAnytime we think the problem is \"out there,\" that thought is the problem. We empower what's out there to control us. The change paradigm is \"outside-in\"\u2014what's out there has to change before we can change.\n\nThe proactive approach is to change from the inside-out: to be different, and by being different, to effect positive change in what's out there\u2014I can be more resourceful, I can be more diligent, I can be more creative, I can be more cooperative.\n\nOne of my favorite stories is one in the Old Testament, part of the fundamental fabric of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's the story of Joseph, who was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers at the age of seventeen. Can you imagine how easy it would have been for him to languish in self-pity as a servant of Potiphar, to focus on the weaknesses of his brothers and his captors and on all he didn't have? But Joseph was proactive. He worked on be. And within a short period of time, he was running Potiphar's household. He was in charge of all that Potiphar had because the trust was so high.\n\nThen the day came when Joseph was caught in a difficult situation and refused to compromise his integrity. As a result, he was unjustly imprisoned for thirteen years. But again he was proactive. He worked on the inner circle, on being instead of having, and soon he was running the prison and eventually the entire nation of Egypt, second only to the Pharaoh.\n\nI know this idea is a dramatic paradigm shift for many people. It is so much easier to blame other people, conditioning, or conditions for our own stagnant situation. But we are responsible\u2014\"response-able\"\u2014to control our lives and to powerfully influence our circum\u00adstances by working on be, on what we are.\n\nIf I have a problem in my marriage, what do I really gain by continually confessing my wife's sins? By saying I'm not responsible, I make myself a powerless victim; I immobilize myself in a negative situation. I also diminish my ability to influence her\u2014my nagging, accusing, critical attitude only makes her feel validated in her own weakness. My criticism is worse than the conduct I want to correct. My ability to positively impact the situation withers and dies.\n\nIf I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control\u2014myself. I can stop trying to shape up my wife and work on my own weaknesses. I can focus on being a great marriage partner, a source of unconditional love and support. Hopefully, my wife will feel the power of proactive example and respond in kind. But whether she does or doesn't, the most positive way I can influence my situation is to work on myself, on my being.\n\nThere are so many ways to work in the Circle of Influence\u2014to be a better listener, to be a more loving marriage partner, to be a better student, to be a more cooperative and dedicated employee. Some\u00adtimes the most proactive thing we can do is to be happy, just to genuinely smile. Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice. There are things, like the weather, that our Circle of Influence will never include. But as proactive people, we can carry our own physical or social weather with us. We can be happy and accept those things that at present we can't control, while we focus our efforts on the things that we can.\n\nTHE OTHER END OF THE STICK\n\nBefore we totally shift our life focus to our Circle of Influence, we need to consider two things in our Circle of Concern that merit deeper thought\u2014consequences and mistakes.\n\nWhile we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law. They are out in the Circle of Concern. We can decide to step in front of a fast-moving train, but we cannot decide what will happen when the train hits us.\n\nWe can decide to be dishonest in our business dealings. While the social consequences of that decision may vary depending on whether or not we are found out, the natural consequences to our basic character are a fixed result.\n\nOur behavior is governed by principles. Living in harmony with them brings positive consequences; violating them brings negative consequences. We are free to choose our response in any situation, but in doing so, we choose the attendant consequence. \"When we pick up one end of the stick, we pick up the other.\"\n\nUndoubtedly, there have been times in each of our lives when we have picked up what we later felt was the wrong stick. Our choices have brought consequences we would rather have lived without. If we had the choice to make over again, we would make it differently. We call these choices mistakes, and they are the second thing that merits our deeper thought.\n\nFor those filled with regret, perhaps the most needful exercise of proactivity is to realize that past mistakes are also out there in the Circle of Concern. We can't recall them, we can't undo them, we can't control the consequences that came as a result.\n\nAs a college quarterback, one of my sons learned to snap his wristband between plays as a kind of mental checkoff whenever he or anyone made a \"setting back\" mistake, so the last mistake wouldn't affect the resolve and execution of the next play.\n\nThe proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it. This literally turns a failure into a success. \"Success,\" said IBM founder T. J. Watson, \"is on the far side of failure.\"\n\nBut not to acknowledge a mistake, not to correct it and learn from it, is a mistake of a different order. It usually puts a person on a self-deceiving, self-justifying path, often involving rationalization (rational lies) to self and to others. This second mistake, this cover-up, empowers the first, giving it disproportionate impor\u00adtance, and causes far deeper injury to self.\n\nIt is not what others do or even our own mistakes that hurt us the most; it is our response to those things. Chasing after the poisonous snake that bites us will only drive the poison through our entire system. It is far better to take measures immediately to get the poison out.\n\nOur response to any mistake affects the quality of the next moment. It is important to immediately admit and correct our mistakes so that they have no power over that next moment and we are empowered again.\n\nMAKING AND KEEPING COMMITMENTS\n\nAt the very heart of our Circle of Influence is our ability to make and keep commitments and promises. The commitments we make to ourselves and to others, and our integrity to those commitments, is the essence and clearest manifestation of our proactivity.\n\nIt is also the essence of our growth. Through our human endowments of self-awareness and conscience, we become conscious of areas of weakness, areas for improvement, areas of talent that could be developed, areas that need to be changed or eliminated from our lives. Then, as we recognize and use our imagination and independent will to act on that awareness\u2014making promises, setting goals, and being true to them\u2014we build the strength of character, the being, that makes possible every other positive thing in our lives.\n\nIt is here that we find two ways to put ourselves in control of our lives immediately. We can make a promise\u2014and keep it. Or we can set a goal\u2014and work to achieve it. As we make and keep commit\u00adments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honor becomes greater than our moods.\n\nThe power to make and keep commitments to ourselves is the essence of developing the basic habits of effectiveness. Knowledge, skill, and desire are all within our control. We can work on any one to improve the balance of the three. As the area of intersection becomes larger, we more deeply internalize the principles upon which the habits are based and create the strength of character to move us in a balanced way toward increasing effectiveness in our lives.\n\nPROACTIVITY: THE THIRTY-DAY TEST\n\nWe don't have to go through the death camp experience of Frankl to recognize and develop our own proactivity. It is in the ordinary events of every day that we develop the proactive capacity to handle the extraordinary pressures of life. It's how we make and keep commitments, how we handle a traffic jam, how we respond to an irate customer or a disobedient child. It's how we view our problems and where we focus our energies. It's the language we use.\n\nI would challenge you to test the principle of proactivity for thirty days. Simply try it and see what happens. For thirty days work only in your Circle of Influence. Make small commitments and keep them. Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.\n\nTry it in your marriage, in your family, in your job. Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it\u2014immediately. Don't get into a blaming, accusing mode. Work on things you have control over. Work on you. On be.\n\nLook at the weaknesses of others with compassion, not accusation. It's not what they're not doing or should be doing that's the issue. The issue is your own chosen response to the situation and what you should be doing. If you start to think the problem is \"out there,\" stop yourself. That thought is the problem.\n\nPeople who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day will, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally \"being lived.\" They are acting out the scripts written by parents, associates, and society.\n\nWe are responsible for our own effectiveness, for our own happiness, and ultimately, I would say, for most of our circumstances.\n\nSamuel Johnson observed: \"The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.\"\n\nKnowing that we are responsible\u2014\"response-able\"\u2014is fundamental to effectiveness and to every other habit of effectiveness we will discuss.\n\nAPPLICATION SUGGESTIONS\n\n  1. For a full day, listen to your language and to the language of the people around you. How often do you use and hear reactive phrases such as \"If only,\" \"I can't,\" or \"I have to\"?\n  2. Identify an experience you might encounter in the near future where, based on past experience, you would probably behave reactively. Review the situation in the context of your Circle of Influence. How could you respond proactively? Take several moments and create the experience vividly in your mind, picturing yourself responding in a proactive manner. Remind yourself of the gap between stimulus and response. Make a commitment to yourself to exercise your freedom to choose.\n  3. Select a problem from your work or personal life that is frustrating to you. Determine whether it is a direct, indirect, or no control problem. Identify the first step you can take in your Circle of Influence to solve it and then take that step.\n  4. Try the thirty-day test of proactivity. Be aware of the change in your Circle of Influence.\n\n### HABIT 2  \nBEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND\n\n### PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL LEADERSHIP\n\nWhat lies behind us and what lies before us  \nare tiny matters compared to what lies within us.\n\nOliver Wendell Holmes\n\nPLEASE FIND A PLACE TO READ THESE NEXT FEW PAGES where you can be alone and uninterrupted. Clear your mind of everything except what you will read and what I will invite you to do. Don't worry about your schedule, your business, your family, or your friends. Just focus with me and really open your mind.\n\nIn your mind's eye, see yourself going to the funeral of a loved one. Picture yourself driving to the funeral parlor or chapel, parking the car, and getting out. As you walk inside the building, you notice the flowers, the soft organ music. You see the faces of friends and family you pass along the way. You feel the shared sorrow of losing, the joy of having known, that radiates from the hearts of the people there.\n\nAs you walk down to the front of the room and look inside the casket, you suddenly come face to face with yourself. This is your funeral, three years from today. All these people have come to honor you, to express feelings of love and appreciation for your life.\n\nAs you take a seat and wait for the services to begin, you look at the program in your hand. There are to be four speakers. The first is from your family, immediate and also extended\u2014children, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents who have come from all over the country to attend. The second speaker is one of your friends, someone who can give a sense of what you were as a person. The third speaker is from your work or profession. And the fourth is from your church or some community organization where you've been involved in service.\n\nNow think deeply. What would you like each of these speakers to say about you and your life? What kind of husband, wife, father, or mother would you like their words to reflect? What kind of son or daughter or cousin? What kind of friend? What kind of working associate?\n\nWhat character would you like them to have seen in you? What contributions, what achievements would you want them to remem\u00adber? Look carefully at the people around you. What difference would you like to have made in their lives?\n\nBefore you read further, take a few minutes to jot down your impressions. It will greatly increase your personal understanding of Habit 2.\n\nWHAT IT MEANS TO \"BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND\"\n\nIf you participated seriously in this visualization experience, you touched for a moment some of your deep, fundamental values. You established brief contact with that inner guidance system at the heart of your Circle of Influence.\n\nConsider the words of Joseph Addison:\n\nWhen I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow: when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great Day when we shall all of us be Contemporaries, and make our appearance together.\n\nAlthough Habit 2 applies to many different circumstances and levels of life, the most fundamental application of \"begin with the end in mind\" is to begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined. Each part of your life\u2014today's behavior, tomorrow's behavior, next week's behavior, next month's behavior\u2014can be examined in the context of the whole, of what really matters most to you. By keeping that end clearly in mind, you can make certain that whatever you do on any particular day does not violate the criteria you have defined as supremely important, and that each day of your life contributes in a meaningful way to the vision you have of your life as a whole.\n\nTo begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you're going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.\n\nIt's incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it's leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy\u2014very busy\u2014without being very effective.\n\nPeople often find themselves achieving victories that are empty, successes that have come at the expense of things they suddenly realize were far more valuable to them. People from every walk of life\u2014doctors, academicians, actors, politicians, business professionals, athletes, and plumbers\u2014often struggle to achieve a higher income, more recognition or a certain degree of professional competence, only to find that their drive to achieve their goal blinded them to the things that really mattered most and now are gone.\n\nHow different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and, keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most. If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster. We may be very busy, we may be very efficient, but we will also be truly effective only when we begin with the end in mind.\n\nIf you carefully consider what you wanted to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success. It may be very different from the definition you thought you had in mind. Perhaps fame, achievement, money, or some of the other things we strive for are not even part of the right wall.\n\nWhen you begin with the end in mind, you gain a different perspective. One man asked another on the death of a mutual friend, \"How much did he leave?\" His friend responded, \"He left it all.\"\n\nALL THINGS ARE CREATED TWICE\n\n\"Begin with the end in mind\" is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.\n\nTake the construction of a home, for example. You create it in every detail before you ever hammer the first nail into place. You try to get a very clear sense of what kind of house you want. If you want a family-centered home, you plan to put a family room where it would be a natural gathering place. You plan sliding doors and a patio for children to play outside. You work with ideas. You work with your mind until you get a clear image of what you want to build.\n\nThen you reduce it to blueprint and develop construction plans. All of this is done before the earth is touched. If not, then in the second creation, the physical creation, you will have to make expensive changes that may double the cost of your home.\n\nThe carpenter's rule is \"measure twice, cut once.\" You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You begin with the end in mind.\n\nFor another example, look at a business. If you want to have a successful enterprise, you clearly define what you're trying to accomplish. You carefully think through the product or service you want to provide in terms of your market target, then you organize all the elements\u2014financial, research and development, operations, marketing, personnel, physical facilities, and so on\u2014to meet that objective. The extent to which you begin with the end in mind often determines whether or not you are able to create a successful enterprise. Most business failures begin in the first creation, with problems such as undercapitalization, misunderstanding of the market, or lack of a business plan.\n\nThe same is true with parenting. If you want to raise responsible, self-disciplined children, you have to keep that end clearly in mind as you interact with your children on a daily basis. You can't behave toward them in ways that undermine their self-discipline or self-esteem.\n\nTo varying degrees, people use this principle in many different areas of life. Before you go on a trip, you determine your destination and plan out the best route. Before you plant a garden, you plan it out in your mind, possibly on paper. You create speeches on paper before you give them, you envision the landscaping in your yard before you landscape it, you design the clothes you make before you thread the needle.\n\nTo the extent to which we understand the principle of two creations and accept the responsibility for both, we act within and enlarge the borders of our Circle of Influence. To the extent to which we do not operate in harmony with this principle and take charge of the first creation, we diminish it.\n\nBY DESIGN OR DEFAULT\n\nIt's a principle that all things are created twice, but not all first creations are by conscious design. In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances outside our Circle of Influence to shape much of our lives by default. We reactively live the scripts handed to us by family, associates, other people's agendas, the pressures of circum\u00adstance\u2014scripts from our earlier years, from our training, our conditioning.\n\nThese scripts come from people, not principles. And they rise out of our deep vulnerabilities, our deep dependency on others and our needs for acceptance and love, for belonging, for a sense of importance and worth, for a feeling that we matter.\n\nWhether we are aware of it or not, whether we are in control of it or not, there is a first creation to every part of our lives. We are either the second creation of our own proactive design, or we are the second creation of other people's agendas, of circumstances, or of past habits.\n\nThe unique human capacities of self-awareness, imagination, and conscience enable us to examine first creations and make it possible for us to take charge of our own first creation, to write our own script. Put another way, Habit 1 says, \"You are the creator.\" Habit 2 is the first creation.\n\nLEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT\u2014THE TWO CREATIONS\n\nHabit 2 is based on principles of personal leadership, which means that leadership is the first creation. Leadership is not management. Management is the second creation, which we'll discuss in the chapter on Habit 3. But leadership has to come first.\n\nManagement is a bottom line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish? In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, \"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.\" Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.\n\nYou can quickly grasp the important difference between the two if you envision a group of producers cutting their way through the jungle with machetes. They're the producers, the problem solvers. They're cutting through the undergrowth, clearing it out.\n\nThe managers are behind them, sharpening their machetes, writing policy and procedure manuals, holding muscle development programs, bringing in improved technologies and setting up working schedules and compensation programs for machete wielders.\n\nThe leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, \"Wrong jungle!\"\n\nBut how do the busy, efficient producers and managers often respond? \"Shut up! We're making progress.\"\n\nAs individuals, groups, and businesses, we're often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don't even realize we're in the wrong jungle. And the rapidly changing environment in which we live makes effective leadership more critical than it has ever been\u2014in every aspect of independent and interdependent life.\n\nWe are more in need of a vision or destination and a compass (a set of principles or directions) and less in need of a road map. We often don't know what the terrain ahead will be like or what we will need to go through it; much will depend on our judgment at the time. But an inner compass will always give us direction.\n\nEffectiveness\u2014often even survival\u2014does not depend solely on how much effort we expend, but on whether or not the effort we expend is in the right jungle. And the metamorphosis taking place in most every industry and profession demands leadership first and management second.\n\nIn business, the market is changing so rapidly that many products and services that successfully met consumer tastes and needs a few years ago are obsolete today. Proactive powerful leadership must constantly monitor environmental change, particularly customer buying habits and motives, and provide the force necessary to organize resources in the right direction.\n\nSuch changes as deregulation of the airline industry, skyrocket\u00ading costs of health care, and the greater quality and quantity of imported cars impact the environment in significant ways. If industries do not monitor the environment, including their own work teams, and exercise the creative leadership to keep headed in the right direction, no amount of management expertise can keep them from failing.\n\nEfficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual has phrased it, \"like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.\" No management success can compensate for failure in leadership. But leadership is hard because we're often caught in a management paradigm.\n\nAt the final session of a year-long executive development program in Seattle, the president of an oil company came up to me and said, \"Stephen, when you pointed out the difference between leadership and management in the second month, I looked at my role as the president of this company and realized that I had never been into leadership. I was deep into management, buried by pressing challenges and the details of day-to-day logistics. So I decided to withdraw from management. I could get other people to do that. I wanted to really lead my organization.\n\n\"It was hard. I went through withdrawal pains because I stopped dealing with a lot of the pressing, urgent matters that were right in front of me and which gave me a sense of immediate accomplishment. I didn't receive much satisfaction as I started wrestling with the direction issues, the culture building issues, the deep analysis of problems, the seizing of new opportunities. Others also went through withdrawal pains from their working style comfort zones. They missed the easy accessibility I had given them before. They still wanted me to be available to them, to respond, to help solve their problems on a day-to-day basis.\n\n\"But I persisted. I was absolutely convinced that I needed to provide leadership. And I did. Today our whole business is different. We're more in line with our environment. We have doubled our revenues and quadrupled our profits. I'm into leadership.\"\n\nI'm convinced that too often parents are also trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling.\n\nAnd leadership is even more lacking in our personal lives. We're into managing with efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.\n\nRESCRIPTING: BECOMING YOUR OWN FIRST CREATOR\n\nAs we previously observed, proactivity is based on the unique human endowment of self-awareness. The two additional unique human endowments that enable us to expand our proactivity and to exercise personal leadership in our lives are imagination and conscience.\n\nThrough imagination, we can visualize the uncreated worlds of potential that lie within us. Through conscience, we can come in contact with universal laws or principles with our own singular talents and avenues of contribution, and with the personal guidelines within which we can most effectively develop them. Combined with self-awareness, these two endowments empower us to write our own script.\n\nBecause we already live with many scripts that have been handed to us, the process of writing our own script is actually more a process of \"rescripting,\" or paradigm shifting\u2014of changing some of the basic paradigms that we already have. As we recognize the ineffective scripts, the incorrect or incomplete paradigms within us, we can proactively begin to rescript ourselves.\n\nI think one of the most inspiring accounts of the rescripting process comes from the autobiography of Anwar Sadat, past president of Egypt. Sadat had been reared, nurtured, and deeply scripted in a hatred for Israel. He would make the statement on national television, \"I will never shake the hand of an Israeli as long as they occupy one inch of Arab soil. Never, never, never!\" And huge crowds all around the country would chant, \"Never, never, never!\" He marshalled the energy and unified the will of the whole country in that script.\n\nThe script was very independent and nationalistic, and it aroused deep emotions in the people. But it was also very foolish, and Sadat knew it. It ignored the perilous, highly interdependent reality of the situation.\n\nSo he rescripted himself. It was a process he had learned when he was a young man imprisoned in Cell 54, a solitary cell in Cairo Central Prison, as a result of his involvement in a conspiracy plot against King Farouk. He learned to withdraw from his own mind and look at it to see if the scripts were appropriate and wise. He learned how to vacate his own mind and, through a deep personal process of meditation, to work with his own scriptures, his own form of prayer, and rescript himself.\n\nHe records that he was almost loathe to leave his prison cell because it was there that he realized that real success is success with self. It's not in having things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.\n\nFor a period of time during Nasser's administration Sadat was relegated to a position of relative insignificance. Everyone felt that his spirit was broken, but it wasn't. They were projecting their own home movies onto him. They didn't understand him. He was biding his time.\n\nAnd when that time came, when he became president of Egypt and confronted the political realities, he rescripted himself toward Israel. He visited the Knesset in Jerusalem and opened up one of the most precedent-breaking peace movements in the history of the world, a bold initiative that eventually brought about the Camp David Accord.\n\nSadat was able to use his self-awareness, his imagination and his conscience to exercise personal leadership, to change an essential paradigm, to change the way he saw the situation. He worked in the center of his Circle of Influence. And from that rescripting, that change in paradigm, flowed changes in behavior and attitude that affected millions of lives in the wider Circle of Concern.\n\nIn developing our own self-awareness many of us discover ineffective scripts, deeply embedded habits that are totally unworthy of us, totally incongruent with the things we really value in life. Habit 2 says we don't have to live with those scripts. We are response-able to use our imagination and creativity to write new ones that are more effective, more congruent with our deepest values and with the correct principles that give our values meaning.\n\nSuppose, for example, that I am highly overreactive to my children. Suppose that whenever they begin to do something I feel is inappropriate, I sense an immediate tensing in the pit of my stomach. I feel defensive walls go up; I prepare for battle. My focus is not on the long-term growth and understanding but on the short-term behavior. I'm trying to win the battle, not the war.\n\nI pull out my ammunition\u2014my superior size, my position of authority\u2014and I yell or intimidate or I threaten or punish. And I win. I stand there, victorious, in the middle of the debris of a shattered relationship while my children are outwardly submissive and inwardly rebellious, suppressing feelings that will come out later in uglier ways.\n\nNow if I were sitting at that funeral we visualized earlier, and one of my children was about to speak, I would want his life to represent the victory of teaching, training, and disciplining with love over a period of years rather than the battle scars of quick fix skirmishes. I would want his heart and mind to be filled with the pleasant memories of deep, meaningful times together. I would want him to remember me as a loving father who shared the fun and the pain of growing up. I would want him to remember the times he came to me with his problems and concerns. I would want to have listened and loved and helped. I would want him to know I wasn't perfect, but that I had tried with everything I had. And that, perhaps more than anybody in the world, I loved him.\n\nThe reason I would want those things is because, deep down, I value my children. I love them, I want to help them. I value my role as their father.\n\nBut I don't always see those values. I get caught up in the \"thick of thin things.\" What matters most gets buried under layers of pressing problems, immediate concerns, and outward behaviors. I become reactive. And the way I interact with my children every day often bears little resemblance to the way I deeply feel about them.\n\nBecause I am self-aware, because I have imagination and conscience, I can examine my deepest values. I can realize that the script I'm living is not in harmony with those values, that my life is not the product of my own proactive design, but the result of the first creation I have deferred to circumstances and other people. And I can change. I can live out of my imagination instead of my memory. I can tie myself to my limitless potential instead of my limiting past. I can become my own first creator.\n\nTo begin with the end in mind means to approach my role as a parent, as well as my other roles in life, with my values and directions clear. It means to be responsible for my own first creation, to rescript myself so that the paradigms from which my behavior and attitude flow are congruent with my deepest values and in harmony with correct principles.\n\nIt also means to begin each day with those values firmly in mind. Then as the vicissitudes, as the challenges come, I can make my decisions based on those values. I can act with integrity. I don't have to react to the emotion, the circumstance. I can be truly proactive, value driven, because my values are clear.\n\nA PERSONAL MISSION STATEMENT\n\nThe most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focuses on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.\n\nBecause each individual is unique, a personal mission statement will reflect that uniqueness, both in content and form. My friend, Rolfe Kerr, has expressed his personal creed in this way:\n\n  * Succeed at home first.\n  * Seek and merit divine help.\n  * Never compromise with honesty.\n  * Remember the people involved.\n  * Hear both sides before judging.\n  * Obtain counsel of others.\n  * Defend those who are absent.\n  * Be sincere yet decisive.\n  * Develop one new proficiency a year.\n  * Plan tomorrow's work today.\n  * Hustle while you wait.\n  * Maintain a positive attitude.\n  * Keep a sense of humor.\n  * Be orderly in person and in work.\n  * Do not fear mistakes\u2014fear only the absence of creative, constructive, and corrective responses to those mistakes.\n  * Facilitate the success of subordinates.\n  * Listen twice as much as you speak.\n  * Concentrate all abilities and efforts on the task at hand, not worrying about the next job or promotion.\n\nA woman seeking to balance family and work values has expressed her sense of personal mission differently:\n\nI will seek to balance career and family as best I can since both are important to me.\n\nMy home will be a place where I and my family, friends, and guests find joy, comfort, peace, and happiness. Still I will seek to create a clean and orderly environment, yet livable and comfortable. I will exercise wisdom in what we choose to eat, read, see, and do at home. I especially want to teach my children to love, to learn, and to laugh\u2014and to work and develop their unique talents.\n\nI value the rights, freedoms, and responsibilities of our democratic society. I will be a concerned and informed citizen, involved in the political process to ensure my voice is heard and my vote is counted.\n\nI will be a self-starting individual who exercises initiative in accomplishing my life's goals. I will act on situations and opportunities, rather than to be acted upon.\n\nI will always try to keep myself free from addictive and destructive habits. I will develop habits that free me from old labels and limits and expand my capabilities and choices.\n\nMy money will be my servant, not my master. I will seek financial independence over time. My wants will be subject to my needs and my means. Except for long-term home and car loans, I will seek to keep myself free from consumer debt. I will spend less than I earn and regularly save or invest part of my income.\n\nMoreover, I will use what money and talents I have to make life more enjoyable for others through service and charitable giving.\n\nYou could call a personal mission statement a personal constitution. Like the United States Constitution, it's fundamentally changeless. In over two hundred years, there have been only twenty-six amendments, ten of which were in the original Bill of Rights.\n\nThe United States Constitution is the standard by which every law in the country is evaluated. It is the document the president agrees to defend and support when he takes the Oath of Alle\u00adgiance. It is the criterion by which people are admitted into citizenship. It is the foundation and the center that enables people to ride through such major traumas as the Civil War, Vietnam, or Watergate. It is the written standard, the key criterion by which everything else is evaluated and directed.\n\nThe Constitution has endured and serves its vital function today because it is based on correct principles, on the self-evident truths contained in the Declaration of Independence. These principles empower the Constitution with a timeless strength, even in the midst of social ambiguity and change. \"Our peculiar security,\" said Thomas Jefferson, \"is in the possession of a written Constitution.\"\n\nA personal mission statement based on correct principles becomes the same kind of standard for an individual. It becomes a personal constitution, the basis for making major, life-directing decisions, the basis for making daily decisions in the midst of the circumstances and emotions that affect our lives. It empowers individuals with the same timeless strength in the midst of change.\n\nPeople can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.\n\nWith a mission statement, we can flow with changes. We don't need prejudgments or prejudices. We don't need to figure out everything else in life, to stereotype and categorize everything and everybody in order to accommodate reality.\n\nOur personal environment is also changing at an ever-increasing pace. Such rapid change burns out a large number of people who feel they can hardly handle it, can hardly cope with life. They become reactive and essentially give up, hoping that the things that happen to them will be good.\n\nBut it doesn't have to be that way. In the Nazi death camps where Viktor Frankl learned the principle of proactivity, he also learned the importance of purpose, of meaning in life. The essence of \"logotherapy,\" the philosophy he later developed and taught, is that many so-called mental and emotional illnesses are really symptoms of an underlying sense of meaninglessness or emptiness. Logotherapy eliminates that emptiness by helping the individual to detect his unique meaning, his mission in life.\n\nOnce you have that sense of mission, you have the essence of your own proactivity. You have the vision and the values which direct your life. You have the basic direction from which you set your long- and short-term goals. You have the power of a written constitution based on correct principles, against which every decision concerning the most effective use of your time, your talents, and your energies can be effectively measured.\n\nAT THE CENTER\n\nIn order to write a personal mission statement, we must begin at the very center of our Circle of Influence, that center comprised of our most basic paradigms, the lens through which we see the world.\n\nIt is here that we deal with our vision and our values. It is here that we use our endowment of self-awareness to examine our maps and, if we value correct principles, to make certain that our maps accurately describe the territory, that our paradigms are based on principles and reality. It is here that we use our endowment of conscience as a compass to help us detect our own unique talents and areas of contribution. It is here that we use our endowment of imagination to mentally create the end we desire, giving direction and purpose to our beginnings and providing the substance of a written personal constitution.\n\nIt is also here that our focused efforts achieve the greatest results. As we work within the very center of our Circle of Influence, we expand it. This is highest leverage PC work, significantly impacting the effectiveness of every aspect of our lives.\n\nWhatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.\n\nSecurity represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it.\n\nGuidance means your source of direction in life. Encompassed by your map, your internal frame of reference that interprets for you what is happening out there, are standards or principles or implicit criteria that govern moment by moment decision-making and doing.\n\nWisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, an integrated wholeness.\n\nPower is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.\n\nThese four factors\u2014security, guidance, wisdom, and power\u2014are interdependent. Security and clear guidance bring true wisdom, and wisdom becomes the spark or catalyst to release and direct power. When these four factors are present together, harmonized and enlivened by each other, they create the great force of a noble personality, a balanced character, a beautifully integrated individual.\n\nThese life-support factors also undergird every other dimension of life. And none of them is an all-or-nothing matter. The degree to which you have developed each one could be charted somewhere on a continuum, much like the maturity continuum described earlier. At the bottom end, the four factors are weak. You are basically dependent on circumstances or other people, things over which you have no direct control. At the top end you are in control. You have independent strength and the foundation for rich, interdependent relationships.\n\nYour security lies somewhere on the continuum between extreme insecurity on one end, wherein your life is buffeted by all the fickle forces that play upon it, and a deep sense of high intrinsic worth and personal security on the other end. Your guidance ranges on the continuum from dependence on the social mirror or other unstable, fluctuating sources to strong inner direction. Your wisdom falls somewhere between a totally inaccurate map where everything is distorted and nothing seems to fit, and a complete and accurate map of life wherein all the parts and principles are properly related to each other. Your power lies somewhere between immobilization or being a puppet pulled by someone else's strings to high proactivity, the power to act according to your own values instead of being acted upon by other people and circumstances.\n\nThe location of these factors on the continuum, the resulting degree of their integration, harmony, and balance, and their positive impact on every aspect of your life is a function of your center, the basic paradigms at your very core.\n\nALTERNATIVE CENTERS\n\nEach of us has a center, though we usually don't recognize it as such. Neither do we recognize the all-encompassing effects of that center on every aspect of our lives.\n\nLet's briefly examine several centers or core paradigms people typically have for a better understanding of how they affect these four fundamental dimensions and, ultimately, the sum of life that flows from them.\n\nSPOUSE CENTEREDNESS. Marriage can be the most intimate, the most satisfying, the most enduring, growth-producing of human relationships. It might seem natural and proper to be centered on one's husband or wife.\n\nBut experience and observation tell a different story. Over the years, I have been involved in working with many troubled marriages, and I have observed a certain thread weaving itself through almost every spouse-centered relationship I have encountered. That thread is strong emotional dependence.\n\nIf our sense of emotional worth comes primarily from our marriage, then we become highly dependent upon that relationship. We become vulnerable to the moods and feelings, the behavior and treatment of our spouse, or to any external event that may impinge on the relationship\u2014a new child, in-laws, economic setbacks, social successes, and so forth.\n\nWhen responsibilities increase and stresses come in the marriage, we tend to revert to the scripts we were given as we were growing up. But so does our spouse. And those scripts are usually different. Different ways of handling financial, child discipline, or in-law issues come to the surface. When these deep-seated tendencies combine with the emotional dependency in the marriage, the spouse-centered relationship reveals all its vulnerability.\n\nWhen we are dependent on the person with whom we are in conflict, both need and conflict are compounded. Love-hate over-reactions, fight-or-flight tendencies, withdrawal, aggressiveness, bitterness, resentment, and cold competition are some of the usual results. When these occur, we tend to fall even further back on background tendencies and habits in an effort to justify and defend our own behavior and we attack our spouse's.\n\nInevitably, anytime we are too vulnerable we feel the need to protect ourselves from further wounds. So we resort to sarcasm, cutting humor, criticism\u2014anything that will keep from exposing the tenderness within. Each partner tends to wait on the initiative of the other for love, only to be disappointed but also confirmed as to the rightness of the accusations made.\n\nThere is only phantom security in such a relationship when all appears to be going well. Guidance is based on the emotion of the moment. Wisdom and power are lost in the counterdependent negative interactions.\n\nFAMILY CENTEREDNESS. Another common center is the family. This, too, may seem to be natural and proper. As an area of focus and deep investment, it provides great opportunities for deep relationships, for loving, for sharing, for much that makes life worthwhile. But as a center, it ironically destroys the very elements necessary to family success.\n\nPeople who are family-centered get their sense of security or personal worth from the family tradition and culture or the family reputation. Thus, they become vulnerable to any changes in that tradition or culture and to any influences that would affect that reputation.\n\nFamily-centered parents do not have the emotional freedom, the power, to raise their children with their ultimate welfare truly in mind. If they derive their own security from the family, their need to be popular with their children may override the importance of a long-term investment in their children's growth and development. Or they may be focused on the proper and correct behavior of the moment. Any behavior that they consider improper threatens their security. They become upset, guided by the emotions of the moment, spontaneously reacting to the immediate concern rather than the long-term growth and development of the child. They may yell or scream. They may overreact and punish out of bad temper. They tend to love their children conditionally, making them emotionally dependent or counterdependent and rebellious.\n\nMONEY CENTEREDNESS. Another logical and extremely common center to people's lives is making money. Economic security is basic to one's opportunity to do much in any other dimension. In a hierarchy or continuum of needs, physical survival and financial security comes first. Other needs are not even activated until that basic need is satisfied, at least minimally.\n\nMost of us face economic worries. Many forces in the wider culture can and do act upon our economic situation, causing or threatening such disruption that we often experience concern and worry that may not always rise to the conscious surface.\n\nSometimes there are apparently noble reasons given for making money, such as the desire to take care of one's family. And these things are important. But to focus on money-making as a center will bring about its own undoing.\n\nConsider again the four life-support factors\u2014security, guidance, wisdom, and power. Suppose I derive much of my security from my employment or from my income or net worth. Since many factors affect these economic foundations, I become anxious and uneasy, protective and defensive, about anything that may affect them. When my sense of personal worth comes from my net worth, I am vulnerable to anything that will affect that net worth. But work and money, per se, provide no wisdom, no guidance, and only a limited degree of power and security. All it takes to show the limitations of a money center is a crisis in my life or in the life of a loved one.\n\nMoney-centered people often put aside family or other priorities, assuming everyone will understand that economic demands come first. I know one father who was leaving with his children for a promised trip to the circus when a phone call came for him to come to work instead. He declined. When his wife suggested that perhaps he should have gone to work, he responded, \"The work will come again, but childhood won't.\" For the rest of their lives his children remembered this little act of priority setting, not only as an object lesson in their minds but as an expression of love in their hearts.\n\nWORK CENTEREDNESS. Work-centered people may become \"workaholics,\" driving themselves to produce at the sacrifice of health, relationships, and other important areas of their lives. Their fundamental identity comes from their work\u2014\"I'm a doctor,\" \"I'm a writer,\" \"I'm an actor.\"\n\nBecause their identity and sense of self-worth are wrapped up in their work, their security is vulnerable to anything that happens to prevent them from continuing in it. Their guidance is a function of the demands of the work. Their wisdom and power come in the limited areas of their work, rendering them ineffective in other areas of life.\n\nPOSSESSION CENTEREDNESS. A driving force of many people is possessions\u2014not only tangible, material possessions such as fashionable clothes, homes, cars, boats, and jewelry, but also the intangible possessions of fame, glory, or social prominence. Most of us are aware, through our own experience, how singularly flawed such a center is, simply because it can vanish rapidly and it is influenced by so many forces.\n\nIf my sense of security lies in my reputation or in the things I have, my life will be in a constant state of threat and jeopardy that these possessions may be lost or stolen or devalued. If I'm in the presence of someone of greater net worth or fame or status, I feel inferior. If I'm in the presence of someone of lesser net worth or fame or status, I feel superior. My sense of self-worth constantly fluctuates. I don't have any sense of constancy or anchorage or persistent selfhood. I am constantly trying to protect and insure my assets, properties, securities, position, or reputation. We have all heard stories of people committing suicide after losing their fortunes in a significant stock decline or their fame in a political reversal.\n\nPLEASURE CENTEREDNESS. Another common center, closely allied with possessions, is that of fun and pleasure. We live in a world where instant gratification is available and encouraged. Television and movies are major influences in increasing people's expectations. They graphically portray what other people have and can do in living the life of ease and \"fun.\"\n\nBut while the glitter of pleasure-centered life-styles is graphically portrayed, the natural result of such life-styles\u2014the impact on the inner person, on productivity, on relationships\u2014is seldom accurately seen.\n\nInnocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment. The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of \"fun,\" constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger \"high.\" A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now.\n\nToo many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TV, too much video game playing\u2014too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person's capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart is unfulfilled. Where is the security, the guidance, the wisdom, and the power? At the low end of the continuum, in the pleasure of a fleeting moment.\n\nMalcolm Muggeridge writes \"A Twentieth-Century Testimony\":\n\nWhen I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer.\n\nIn retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, \"licking the earth.\"\n\nFRIEND\/ENEMY CENTEREDNESS. Young people are particularly, though certainly not exclusively, susceptible to becoming friend-centered. Acceptance and belonging to a peer group can become almost supremely important. The distorted and ever-changing social mirror becomes the source for the four life-support factors, creating a high degree of dependence on the fluctuating moods, feelings, attitudes, and behavior of others.\n\nFriend centeredness can also focus exclusively on one person, taking on some of the dimensions of marriage. The emotional dependence on one individual, the escalating need\/conflict spiral, and the resulting negative interactions can grow out of friend centeredness.\n\nAnd what about putting an enemy at the center of one's life? Most people would never think of it, and probably no one would ever do it consciously. Nevertheless, enemy centering is very common, particularly when there is frequent interaction between people who are in real conflict. When someone feels he has been unjustly dealt with by an emotionally or socially significant person, it is very easy for him to become preoccupied with the injustice and make the other person the center of his life. Rather than proactively leading his own life, the enemy-centered person is counterdependently reacting to the behavior and attitudes of a perceived enemy.\n\nOne friend of mine who taught at a university became very distraught because of the weaknesses of a particular administrator with whom he had a negative relationship. He allowed himself to think about the man constantly until eventually it became an obsession. It so preoccupied him that it affected the quality of his relationships with his family, his church, and his working associates. He finally came to the conclusion that he had to leave the university and accept a teaching appointment somewhere else.\n\n\"Wouldn't you really prefer to teach at this university, if the man were not here?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Yes, I would,\" he responded. \"But as long as he is here, then my staying is too disruptive to everything in life. I have to go.\"\n\n\"Why have you made this administrator the center of your life?\" I asked him.\n\nHe was shocked by the question. He denied it. But I pointed out to him that he was allowing one individual and his weaknesses to distort his entire map of life, to undermine his faith and the quality of his relationships with his loved ones.\n\nHe finally admitted that this individual had had such an impact on him, but he denied that he himself had made all these choices. He attributed the responsibility for the unhappy situation to the administrator. He, himself, he declared, was not responsible.\n\nAs we talked, little by little, he came to realize that he was indeed responsible, but that because he did not handle this responsibility well, he was being irresponsible.\n\nMany divorced people fall into a similar pattern. They are still consumed with anger and bitterness and self-justification regarding an ex-spouse. In a negative sense, psychologically they are still married\u2014they each need the weaknesses of the former partner to justify their accusations.\n\nMany \"older\" children go through life either secretly or openly hating their parents. They blame them for past abuses, neglect, or favoritism and they center their adult life on that hatred, living out the reactive, justifying script that accompanies it.\n\nThe individual who is friend- or enemy-centered has no intrinsic security. Feelings of self-worth are volatile, a function of the emotional state or behavior of other people. Guidance comes from the person's perception of how others will respond, and wisdom is limited by the social lens or by an enemy-centered paranoia. The individual has no power. Other people are pulling the strings.\n\nCHURCH CENTEREDNESS. I believe that almost anyone who is seriously involved in any church will recognize that churchgoing is not synonymous with personal spirituality. There are some people who get so busy in church worship and projects that they become insensitive to the pressing human needs that surround them, contradicting the very precepts they profess to believe deeply. There are others who attend church less frequently or not at all but whose attitudes and behavior reflect a more genuine centering in the principles of the basic Judeo-Christian ethic.\n\nHaving participated throughout my life in organized church and community service groups, I have found that attending church does not necessarily mean living the principles taught in those meetings. You can be active in a church but inactive in its gospel.\n\nIn the church-centered life, image or appearance can become a person's dominant consideration, leading to hypocrisy that undermines personal security and intrinsic worth. Guidance comes from a social conscience, and the church-centered person tends to label others artificially in terms of \"active,\" \"inactive,\" \"liberal,\" \"orthodox,\" or \"conservative.\"\n\nBecause the church is a formal organization made up of policies, programs, practices, and people, it cannot by itself give a person any deep, permanent security or sense of intrinsic worth. Living the principles taught by the church can do this, but the organization alone cannot.\n\nNor can the church give a person a constant sense of guidance. Church-centered people often tend to live in compartments, acting and thinking and feeling in certain ways on the Sabbath and in totally different ways on weekdays. Such a lack of wholeness or unity or integrity is a further threat to security, creating the need for increased labeling and self-justifying.\n\nSeeing the church as an end rather than as a means to an end undermines a person's wisdom and sense of balance. Although the church claims to teach people about the source of power, it does not claim to be that power itself. It claims to be one vehicle through which divine power can be channeled into man's nature.\n\nSELF-CENTEREDNESS. Perhaps the most common center today is the self. The most obvious form is selfishness, which violates the values of most people. But if we look closely at many of the popular approaches to growth and self-fulfillment, we often find self-centering at their core.\n\nThere is little security, guidance, wisdom, or power in the limited center of self. Like the Dead Sea in Israel, it accepts but never gives. It becomes stagnant.\n\nOn the other hand, paying attention to the development of self in the greater perspective of improving one's ability to serve, to produce, to contribute in meaningful ways, gives context for dramatic increase in the four life-support factors.\n\nThese are some of the more common centers from which people approach life. It is often much easier to recognize the center in someone else's life than to see it in your own. You probably know someone who puts making money ahead of everything else. You probably know someone whose energy is devoted to justifying his or her position in an ongoing negative relationship. If you look, you can sometimes see beyond behavior into the center that creates it.\n\nIDENTIFYING YOUR CENTER\n\nBut where do you stand? What is at the center of your own life? Sometimes that isn't easy to see.\n\nPerhaps the best way to identify your own center is to look closely at your life-support factors. If you can identify with one or more of the descriptions below, you can trace it back to the center from which it flows, a center which may be limiting your personal effectiveness.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Spouse Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * Your feelings of security are based on the way your spouse treats you.\n  * You are highly vulnerable to the moods and feelings of your spouse.\n  * There is deep disappointment resulting in withdrawal or conflict when your spouse disagrees with you or does not meet your expectations.\n  * Anything that may impinge on the relationship is perceived as a threat.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * Your direction comes from your own needs and wants and from those of your spouse.\n  * Your decision-making criterion is limited to what you think is best for your marriage or your mate, or to the preferences and opinions of your spouse.\n\nWisdom\n\n  * Your life perspective surrounds things which may positively or negatively influence your spouse or your relationship.\n\nPower\n\n  * Your power to act is limited by weaknesses in your spouse and in yourself.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Family Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * Your security is founded on family acceptance and fulfilling family expectations.\n  * Your sense of personal security is as volatile as the family.\n  * Your feelings of self-worth are based on the family reputation.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * Family scripting is your source of correct attitudes and behaviors.\n  * Your decision-making criterion is what is good for the family, or what family members want.\n\nWisdom\n\n  * You interpret all of life in terms of your family, creating a partial understanding and family narcissism.\n\nPower\n\n  * Your actions are limited by family models and traditions.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Money Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * Your personal worth is determined by your net worth.\n  * You are vulnerable to anything that threatens your economic security.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * Profit is your decision-\u00admaking criterion.\n\nWisdom\n\n  * Money-making is the lens through which life is seen and understood, creating imbalanced judgment.\n\nPower\n\n  * You are restricted to what you can accomplish with your money and your limited vision.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Work Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * You tend to define yourself by your occupational role.\n  * You are only comfortable when you are working.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * You make your decisions based on the needs and expectations of your work.\n\nWisdom\n\n  * You tend to be limited to your work role.\n  * You see your work as your life.\n\nPower\n\n  * Your actions are limited by work role models, occupational opportunities, organizational constraints, your boss's perceptions, and your possible inability at some point in your life to do that particular work.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Possession Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * Your security is based on your reputation, your social status, or the tangible things you possess.\n  * You tend to compare what you have to what others have.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * You make your decisions based on what will protect, increase, or better display your possessions.\n\nWisdom\n\n  * You see the world in terms of comparative economic and social relationships.\n\nPower\n\n  * You function within the limits of what you can buy or the social prominence you can achieve.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Pleasure Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * You feel secure only when you're on a pleasure \"high.\"\n  * Your security is short-lived, anesthetizing, and dependent on your environment.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * You make your decisions based on what will give you the most pleasure.\n\nWisdom\n\n  * You see the world in based on what what's in it for you.\n\nPower\n\n  * Your power is almost negligible.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Friend Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * Your security is a function of the social mirror.\n  * You are highly dependent on the opinions of others.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * Your decision-making criterion is \"What will they think?\"\n  * You are easily embarrassed.\n\nWisdom\n\n  * You see the world through a social lens.\n\nPower\n\n  * You are limited by your social comfort zone.\n  * Your actions are as fickle as opinion.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Enemy Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * Your security is volatile, based on the movements of your enemy.\n  * You are always wondering what he is up to.\n  * You seek self-justification and validation from the like-minded.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * You are counter-dependently guided by your enemy's actions.\n  * You make your decisions based on what will thwart your enemy.\n\nWisdom\n\n  * Your judgment is narrow and distorted.\n  * You are defensive, overreactive, and often paranoid.\n\nPower\n\n  * The little power you do have comes from anger, envy, resentment and vengeance\u2014negative energy that shrivels and destroys, leaving energy for little else.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Church Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * Your security is based on church activity and on the esteem in which you are held by those in authority or influence in the church.\n  * You find identity and security in religious labels and comparisons.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * You are guided by how others will evaluate your actions in the context of church teachings and expectations.\n\nWisdom\n\n  * You see the world in terms of \"believers\" and \"nonbelievers,\" \"belongers\" and \"non-belongers.\"\n\nPower\n\n  * Perceived power comes from your church position or role.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Self-Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * Your security is constantly changing and shifting.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * Your judgment criteria are: \"If it feels good... \"What I want.\" \"What I need.\" \"What's in it for me?\"\n\nWisdom\n\n  * You view the world by how decisions, events, or circumstances will af\u00adfect you.\n\nPower\n\n  * Your ability to act is lim\u00adited to your own resources, without the benefits of interdependency.\n\n* * *\n\nMore often than not, a person's center is some combination of these and\/or other centers. Most people are very much a function of a variety of influences that play upon their lives. Depending on external or internal conditions, one particular center may be activated until the underlying needs are satisfied. Then another center becomes the compelling force.\n\nAs a person fluctuates from one center to another, the resulting relativism is like roller coasting through life. One moment you're high, the next moment you're low, making efforts to compensate for one weakness by borrowing strength from another weakness. There is no consistent sense of direction, no persistent wisdom, no steady power supply or sense of personal, intrinsic worth and identity.\n\nThe ideal, of course, is to create one clear center from which you consistently derive a high degree of security, guidance, wisdom, and power, empowering your proactivity and giving congruency and harmony to every part of your life.\n\nA PRINCIPLE CENTER\n\nBy centering our lives on correct principles, we create a solid foundation for development of the four life-support factors.\n\nOur security comes from knowing that, unlike other centers based on people or things which are subject to frequent and immediate change, correct principles do not change. We can depend on them.\n\nPrinciples don't react to anything. They don't get mad and treat us differently. They won't divorce us or run away with our best friend. They aren't out to get us. They can't pave our way with shortcuts and quick fixes. They don't depend on the behavior of others, the environment, or the current fad for their validity. Principles don't die. They aren't here one day and gone the next. They can't be destroyed by fire, earthquake or theft.\n\nPrinciples are deep, fundamental truths, classic truths, generic common denominators. They are tightly interwoven threads running with exactness, consistency, beauty, and strength through the fabric of life.\n\nEven in the midst of people or circumstances that seem to ignore the principles, we can be secure in the knowledge that principles are bigger than people or circumstances, and that thousands of years of history have seen them triumph, time and time again. Even more important, we can be secure in the knowledge that we can validate them in our own lives, by our own experience.\n\nAdmittedly, we're not omniscient. Our knowledge and understanding of correct principles is limited by our own lack of awareness of our true nature and the world around us and by the flood of trendy philosophies and theories that are not in harmony with correct principles. These ideas will have their season of acceptance, but, like many before them, they won't endure because they're built on false foundations.\n\nWe are limited, but we can push back the borders of our limitations. An understanding of the principle of our own growth enables us to search out correct principles with the confidence that the more we learn, the more clearly we can focus the lens through which we see the world. The principles don't change; our understanding of them does.\n\nThe wisdom and guidance that accompany principle-centered living come from correct maps, from the way things really are, have been, and will be. Correct maps enable us to clearly see where we want to go and how to get there. We can make our decisions using the correct data that will make their implementation possible and meaningful.\n\nThe personal power that comes from principle-centered living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, and actions of others or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit other people.\n\nThe only real limitation of power is the natural consequences of the principles themselves. We are free to choose our actions, based on our knowledge of correct principles, but we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Remember, \"If you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.\"\n\nPrinciples always have natural consequences attached to them. There are positive consequences when we live in harmony with the principles. There are negative consequences when we ignore them. But because these principles apply to everyone, whether or not they are aware, this limitation is universal. And the more we know of correct principles, the greater is our personal freedom to act wisely.\n\nBy centering our lives on timeless, unchanging principles, we create a fundamental paradigm of effective living. It is the center that puts all other centers in perspective.\n\n* * *\n\nIf you are... Principle Centered\n\nSecurity\n\n  * Your security is based on correct principles that do not change, regardless of external conditions or circumstances.\n  * You know that true principles can repeatedly be validated in your own life, through your own experiences.\n  * As a measurement of self-improvement, correct principles function with exactness, consistency, beauty, and strength.\n  * Correct principles help you understand your own development, endowing you with the confidence to learn more, thereby increasing your knowledge and understanding.\n  * Your source of security provides you with an immovable, unchanging, unfailing core enabling you to see change as an exciting adventure and opportunity to make significant contributions.\n\nGuidance\n\n  * You are guided by a compass which enables you to see where you want to go and how you will get there.\n  * You use accurate data which makes your decisions both implementable and meaningful.\n  * You stand apart from life's situations, emotions, and circumstances, and look at the balanced whole. Your decisions and actions reflect both short- and long-term considerations and implications.\n  * In every situation, you consciously, proactively determine the best alternative, basing decisions on conscience educated by principles.\n\nWisdom\n\n  * Your judgment encompasses a broad spectrum of long-term consequences and reflects a wise balance and quiet assurance.\n  * You see things differently and thus you think and act differently from the largely reactive world.\n  * You view the world through a fundamental paradigm for effective, provident living.\n  * You see the world in terms of what you can do for the world and its people.\n  * You adopt a proactive lifestyle, seeking to serve and build others.\n  * You interpret all of life's experiences in terms of opportunities for learning and contribution.\n\nPower\n\n  * Your power is limited only by your understanding and observance of natural law and correct principles and by the natural consequences of the principles themselves.\n  * You become a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, largely unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, or actions of others.\n  * Your ability to act reaches far beyond your own resources and encourages highly developed levels of interdependency.\n  * Your decisions and actions are not driven by your current financial or circumstantial limitations. You experience an interdependent freedom.\n\n* * *\n\nRemember that your paradigm is the source from which your attitudes and behaviors flow. A paradigm is like a pair of glasses; it affects the way you see everything in your life. If you look at things through the paradigm of correct principles, what you see in life is dramatically different from what you see through any other centered paradigm.\n\nI have included in the Appendix section of this book a detailed chart which shows how each center we've discussed might possibly affect the way you see everything else*. But for a quick understanding of the difference your center makes, let's look at just one example of a specific problem as seen through the different paradigms. As you read, try to put on each pair of glasses. Try to feel the response that flows from the different centers.\n\nSuppose tonight you have invited your wife to go to a concert. You have the tickets; she's excited about going. It's four o'clock in the afternoon.\n\nAll of a sudden, your boss calls you into his office and says he needs your help through the evening to get ready for an important meeting at 9 A.M. tomorrow.\n\nIf you're looking through spouse-centered or family-centered glasses, your main concern will be your wife. You may tell the boss you can't stay and you take her to the concert in an effort to please her. You may feel you have to stay to protect your job, but you'll do so grudgingly, anxious about her response, trying to justify your decision and protect yourself from her disappointment or anger.\n\nIf you're looking through a money-centered lens, your main thought will be of the overtime you'll get or the influence working late will have on a potential raise. You may call your wife and simply tell her you have to stay, assuming she'll understand that economic demands come first.\n\nIf you're work-centered, you may be thinking of the opportunity. You can learn more about the job. You can make some points with the boss and further your career. You may give yourself a pat on the back for putting in hours well beyond what is required, evidence of what a hard worker you are. Your wife should be proud of you!\n\nIf you're possession-centered, you might be thinking of the things the overtime income could buy. Or you might consider what an asset to your reputation at the office it would be if you stayed. Everyone would hear tomorrow how noble, how sacrificing and dedicated you are.\n\nIf you're pleasured-centered, you'll probably can the work and go to the concert, even if your wife would be happy for you to work late. You deserve a night out!\n\nIf you're friend-centered, your decision would be influenced by whether or not you had invited friends to attend the concert with you. Or whether your friends at work were going to stay late, too.\n\nIf you're enemy-centered, you may stay late because you know it will give you a big edge over that person in the office who thinks he's the company's greatest asset. While he's off having fun, you'll be working and slaving, doing his work and yours, sacrificing your personal pleasure for the good of the company he can so blithely ignore.\n\nIf you're church-centered, you might be influenced by plans other church members have to attend the concert, by whether or not any church members work at your office, or by the nature of the concert\u2014Handel's Messiah might rate higher priority than a rock concert. Your decision might also be affected by what you think a \"good church member\" would do and by whether you view the extra work as \"service\" or \"seeking after material wealth.\"\n\nIf you're self-centered, you'll be focused on what will do you the most good. Would it be better for you to go out for the evening? Or would it be better for you to make a few points with the boss? How the different options affect you will be your main concern.\n\nAs we consider various ways of looking at a single event, is it any wonder that we have \"young lady\/old lady\" perception problems in our interactions with each other? Can you see how fundamentally our centers affect us? Right down to our motivations, our daily decisions, our actions (or, in too many cases, our reactions), our interpretations of events? That's why understanding your own center is so important. And if that center does not empower you as a proactive person, it becomes fundamental to your effectiveness to make the necessary paradigm shifts to create a center that will.\n\nAs a principle-centered person, you try to stand apart from the emotion of the situation and from other factors that would act on you, and evaluate the options. Looking at the balanced whole\u2014the work needs, the family needs, other needs that may be involved and the possible implications of the various alternative decisions\u2014you'll try to come up with the best solution, taking all factors into consideration.\n\nWhether you go to the concert or stay and work is really a small part of an effective decision. You might make the same choice with a number of other centers. But there are several important differences when you are coming from a principle-centered paradigm.\n\nFirst, you are not being acted upon by other people or circumstances. You are proactively choosing what you determine to be the best alternative. You make your decision consciously and knowledgeably.\n\nSecond, you know your decision is most effective because it is based on principles with predictable long-term results.\n\nThird, what you choose to do contributes to your ultimate values in life. Staying at work to get the edge on someone at the office is an entirely different evening in your life from staying because you value your boss's effectiveness and you genuinely want to contribute to the company's welfare. The experiences you have as you carry out your decisions take on quality and meaning in the context of your life as a whole.\n\nFourth, you can communicate to your wife and your boss within the strong networks you've created in your interdependent relationships. Because you are independent, you can be effectively interdependent. You might decide to delegate what is delegable and come in early the next morning to do the rest.\n\nAnd finally, you'll feel comfortable about your decision. Whatever you choose to do, you can focus on it and enjoy it.\n\nAs a principle-centered person, you see things differently. And because you see things differently, you think differently, you act differently. Because you have a high degree of security, guidance, wisdom, and power that flows from a solid, unchanging core, you have the foundation of a highly proactive and highly effective life.\n\nWRITING AND USING A PERSONAL MISSION STATEMENT\n\nAs we go deeply within ourselves, as we understand and realign our basic paradigms to bring them in harmony with correct principles, we create both an effective, empowering center and a clear lens through which we can see the world. We can then focus that lens on how we, as unique individuals, relate to that world.\n\nFrankl says we detect rather than invent our missions in life. I like that choice of words. I think each of us has an internal monitor or sense, a conscience, that gives us an awareness of our own uniqueness and the singular contributions that we can make. In Frankl's words, \"Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life... . Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.\"\n\nIn seeking to give verbal expression to that uniqueness, we are again reminded of the fundamental importance of proactivity and of working within our Circle of Influence. To seek some abstract meaning to our lives out in our Circle of Concern is to abdicate our proactive responsibility, to place our own first creation in the hands of circumstance and other people.\n\nOur meaning comes from within. Again, in the words of Frankl, \"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.\"\n\nPersonal responsibility, or proactivity, is fundamental to the first creation. Returning to the computer metaphor, Habit 1 says \"You are the programmer.\" Habit 2, then, says, \"Write the program.\" Until you accept the idea that you are responsible, that you are the programmer, you won't really invest in writing the program.\n\nAs proactive people, we can begin to give expression to what we want to be and to do in our lives. We can write a personal mission statement, a personal constitution.\n\nA mission statement is not something you write overnight. It takes deep introspection, careful analysis, thoughtful expression, and often many rewrites to produce it in final form. It may take you several weeks or even months before you feel really comfortable with it, before you feel it is a complete and concise expression of your innermost values and directions. Even then, you will want to review it regularly and make minor changes as the years bring additional insights or changing circumstances.\n\nBut fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.\n\nI recently finished reviewing my own mission statement, which I do fairly regularly. Sitting on the edge of a beach, alone, at the end of a bicycle ride, I took out my organizer and hammered it out. It took several hours, but I felt a sense of clarity, a sense of organization and commitment, a sense of exhilaration and freedom.\n\nI find the process is as important as the product. Writing or reviewing a mission statement changes you because it forces you to think through your priorities deeply, carefully, and to align your behavior with your beliefs. As you do, other people begin to sense that you're not being driven by everything that happens to you. You have a sense of mission about what you're trying to do and you are excited about it.\n\nUSING YOUR WHOLE BRAIN\n\nOur self-awareness empowers us to examine our own thoughts. This is particularly helpful in creating a personal mission statement because the two unique human endowments that enable us to practice Habit 2\u2014imagination and conscience\u2014are primarily functions of the right side of the brain. Understanding how to tap into that right brain capacity greatly increases our first creation ability.\n\nA great deal of research has been conducted for decades on what has come to be called brain dominance theory. The findings basically indicate that each hemisphere of the brain\u2014left and right\u2014tends to specialize in and preside over different functions, process different kinds of information, and deal with different kinds of problems.\n\nEssentially, the left hemisphere is the more logical\/verbal one and the right hemisphere the more intuitive, creative one. The left deals with words, the right with pictures; the left with parts and specifics, the right with wholes and the relationship between the parts. The left deals with analysis, which means to break apart; the right with synthesis, which means to put together. The left deals with sequential thinking; the right with simultaneous and holistic thinking. The left is time bound; the right is time free.\n\nAlthough people use both sides of the brain, one side or the other generally tends to be dominant in each individual. Of course, the ideal would be to cultivate and develop the ability to have good crossover between both sides of the brain so that a person could first sense what the situation called for and then use the appropriate tool to deal with it. But people tend to stay in the \"comfort zone\" of their dominant hemisphere and process every situation according to either a right or left brain preference.\n\nIn the words of Abraham Maslow, \"He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.\" This is another factor that affects the \"young lady\/old lady\" perception difference. Right brain and left brain people tend to look at things in different ways.\n\nWe live in a primarily left brain-dominant world, where words and measurement and logic are enthroned, and the more creative, intuitive, sensing, artistic aspect of our nature is often subordinated. Many of us find it more difficult to tap into our right brain capacity.\n\nAdmittedly this description is oversimplified and new studies will undoubtedly throw more light on brain functioning. But the point here is that we are capable of performing many different kinds of thought processes and we barely tap our potential. As we become aware of its different capacities, we can consciously use our minds to meet specific needs in more effective ways.\n\nTWO WAYS TO TAP THE RIGHT BRAIN\n\nIf we use the brain dominance theory as a model, it becomes evident that the quality of our first creation is significantly impacted by our ability to use our creative right brain. The more we are able to draw upon our right brain capacity, the more fully we will be able to visualize, to synthesize, to transcend time and present circumstances, to project a holistic picture of what we want to do and to be in life.\n\nExpand Perspective\n\nSometimes we are knocked out of our left brain environment and thought patterns and into the right brain by an unplanned experience. The death of a loved one, a severe illness, a financial setback, or extreme adversity can cause us to stand back, look at our lives, and ask ourselves some hard questions: \"What's really important? Why am I doing what I'm doing?\"\n\nBut if you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.\n\nThere are a number of ways to do this. Through the powers of your imagination, you can visualize your own funeral, as we did at the beginning of this chapter. Write your own eulogy. Actually write it out. Be specific.\n\nYou can visualize your twenty-fifth and then your fiftieth wedding anniversary. Have your spouse visualize this with you. Try to capture the essence of the family relationship you want to have created through your day-by-day investment over a period of that many years.\n\nYou can visualize your retirement from your present occupation. What contributions, what achievements will you want to have made in your field? What plans will you have after retirement? Will you enter a second career?\n\nExpand your mind. Visualize in rich detail. Involve as many emotions and feelings as possible. Involve as many of the senses as you can.\n\nI have done similar visualization exercises with some of my university classes. \"Assume you only have this one semester to live,\" I tell my students, \"and that during this semester you are to stay in school as a good student. Visualize how you would spend your semester.\"\n\nThings are suddenly placed in a different perspective. Values quickly surface that before weren't even recognized.\n\nI have also asked students to live with that expanded perspective for a week and keep a diary of their experiences.\n\nThe results are very revealing. They start writing to parents to tell them how much they love and appreciate them. They reconcile with a brother, a sister, a friend where the relationship has deteriorated.\n\nThe dominant, central theme of their activities, the underlying principle, is love. The futility of bad-mouthing, bad thinking, put-downs, and accusation becomes very evident when they think in terms of having only a short time to live. Principles and values become more evident to everybody.\n\nThere are a number of techniques using your imagination that can put you in touch with your values. But the net effect of every one I have ever used is the same. When people seriously undertake to identify what really matters most to them in their lives, what they really want to be and to do, they become very reverent. They start to think in larger terms than today and tomorrow.\n\nVisualization and Affirmation\n\nPersonal leadership is not a singular experience. It doesn't begin and end with the writing of a personal mission statement. It is, rather, the ongoing process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with those most important things. And in that effort, your powerful right brain capacity can be a great help to you on a daily basis as you work to integrate your personal mission statement into your life. It's another application of \"begin with the end in mind.\"\n\nLet's go back to an example we mentioned before. Suppose I am a parent who really deeply loves my children. Suppose I identify that as one of my fundamental values in my personal mission statement. But suppose, on a daily basis, I have trouble overreact\u00ading.\n\nI can use my right brain power of visualization to write an \"affirmation\" that will help me become more congruent with my deeper values in my daily life.\n\nA good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it's personal, it's positive, it's present tense, it's visual, and it's emotional. So I might write something like this: \"It is deeply satisfying (emotional) that I (personal) respond (present tense) with wisdom, love, firmness, and self-control (positive) when my children misbehave.\"\n\nThen I can visualize it. I can spend a few minutes each day and totally relax my mind and body. I can think about situations in which my children might misbehave. I can visualize them in rich detail. I can feel the texture of the chair I might be sitting on, the floor under my feet, the sweater I'm wearing. I can see the dress my daughter has on, the expression on her face. The more clearly and vividly I can imagine the detail, the more deeply I will experience it, the less I will see it as a spectator.\n\nThen I can see her do something very specific which normally makes my heart pound and my temper start to flare. But instead of seeing my normal response, I can see myself handle the situation with all the love, the power, the self-control I have captured in my affirmation. I can write the program, write the script, in harmony with my values, with my personal mission statement.\n\nAnd if I do this, day after day my behavior will change. Instead of living out of the scripts given to me by my own parents or by society or by genetics or my environment, I will be living out of the script I have written from my own self-selected value system.\n\nI have helped and encouraged my son, Sean, to use this affirmation process extensively throughout his football career. We started when he played quarterback in high school, and eventually, I taught him how to do it on his own.\n\nWe would try to get him in a very relaxed state of mind through deep breathing and a progressive muscle relaxation technique so that he became very quiet inside. Then I would help him visualize himself right in the heat of the toughest situations imaginable.\n\nHe would imagine a big blitz coming at him fast. He had to read the blitz and respond. He would imagine giving audibles at the line after reading defenses. He would imagine quick reads with his first receiver, his second receiver, his third receiver. He would imagine options that he normally wouldn't do.\n\nAt one point in his football career, he told me he was constantly getting uptight. As we talked, I realized that he was visualizing uptightness. So we worked on visualizing relaxation in the middle of the big pressure circumstance. We discovered that the nature of the visualization is very important. If you visualize the wrong thing, you'll produce the wrong thing.\n\nDr. Charles Garfield has done extensive research on peak performers, both in athletics and in business. He became fascinated with peak performance in his work with the NASA program, watching the astronauts rehearse everything on earth, again and again in a simulated environment before they went to space. Although he had a doctorate in mathematics, he decided to go back and get another Ph.D. in the field of psychology and study the characteristics of peak performers.\n\nOne of the main things his research showed was that almost all of the world-class athletes and other peak performers are visualizers. They see it; they feel it; they experience it before they actually do it. They begin with the end in mind.\n\nYou can do it in every area of your life. Before a performance, a sales presentation, a difficult confrontation, or the daily challenge of meeting a goal, see it clearly, vividly, relentlessly, over and over again. Create an internal \"comfort zone.\" Then, when you get into the situation, it isn't foreign. It doesn't scare you.\n\nYour creative, visual right brain is one of your most important assets, both in creating your personal mission statement and in integrating it into your life.\n\nThere is an entire body of literature and audio and video tapes that deals with this process of visualization and affirmation. Some of the more recent developments in this field include such things as subliminal programming, neurolinguistic programming, and new forms of relaxation and self-talk processes. These all involve explanation, elaboration and different packaging of the fundamen\u00adtal principles of the first creation.\n\nMy review of the success literature brought me in contact with hundreds of books on this subject. Although some made extravagant claims and relied on anecdotal rather than scientific evidence, I think that most of the material is fundamentally sound. The majority of it appears to have originally come out of the study of the Bible by many individuals.\n\nIn effective personal leadership, visualization and affirmation techniques emerge naturally out of a foundation of well thought through purposes and principles that become the center of a person's life. They are extremely powerful in rescripting and reprogramming, into writing deeply committed-to purposes and principles into one's heart and mind. I believe that central to all enduring religions in society are the same principles and practices clothed in different language\u2014meditation, prayer, covenants, or\u00addinances, scripture study, empathy, compassion, and many different forms of the use of both conscience and imagination.\n\nBut if these techniques become part of the Personality Ethic and are severed from a base of character and principles, they can be misused and abused in serving other centers, primarily the center of self.\n\nAffirmation and visualization are forms of programming, and we must be certain that we do not submit ourselves to any program\u00adming that is not in harmony with our basic center or that comes from sources centered on money-making, self interest, or anything other than correct principles.\n\nThe imagination can be used to achieve the fleeting success that comes when a person is focused on material gain or on \"what's in it for me.\" But I believe the higher use of imagination is in harmony with the use of conscience to transcend self and create a life of contribution based on unique purpose and on the principles that govern interdependent reality.\n\nIDENTIFYING ROLES AND GOALS\n\nOf course, the logical\/verbal left brain becomes important also as you attempt to capture your right brain images, feelings, and pictures in the words of a written mission statement. Just as breathing exercises help integrate body and mind, writing is a kind of psycho-neural muscular activity which helps bridge and inte\u00adgrate the conscious and subconscious minds. Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought and helps break the whole into parts.\n\nWe each have a number of different roles in our lives\u2014different areas or capacities in which we have responsibility. I may, for example, have a role as an individual, a husband, a father, a teacher, a church member, and a businessman. And each of these roles is important.\n\nOne of the major problems that arises when people work to become more effective in life is that they don't think broadly enough. They lose the sense of proportion, the balance, the natural ecology necessary to effective living. They may get consumed by work and neglect personal health. In the name of professional success, they may neglect the most precious relationships in their lives.\n\nYou may find that your mission statement will be much more balanced, much easier to work with, if you break it down into the specific role areas of your life and the goals you want to accomplish in each area. Look at your professional role. You might be a salesperson, or a manager, or a product developer. What are you about in that area? What are the values that should guide you? Think of your personal roles\u2014husband, wife, father, mother, neighbor, friend. What are you about in those roles? What's important to you? Think of community roles\u2014the political area, public service, volunteer organizations.\n\nOne executive has used the idea of roles and goals to create the following mission statement:\n\nMy mission is to live with integrity and to make a difference in the lives of others.\n\nTo fulfill this mission:\n\nI have charity: I seek out and love the one\u2014each one\u2014regardless of his situation.\n\nI sacrifice: I devote my time, talents, and resources to my mission.\n\nI inspire: I teach by example that we are all children of a loving Heavenly Father and that every Goliath can be overcome.\n\nI am impactful: What I do makes a difference in the lives of others.\n\nThese roles take priority in achieving my mission:\n\nHusband\u2014My partner is the most important person in my life. Together we contribute the fruits of harmony, industry, charity, and thrift.\n\nFather\u2014I help my children experience progressively greater joy in their lives.\n\nSon\/Brother\u2014I am frequently \"there\" for support and love.\n\nChristian\u2014God can count on me to keep my covenants and to serve his other children.\n\nNeighbor\u2014The love of Christ is visible through my actions toward others.\n\nChange Agent\u2014I am a catalyst for developing high performance in large organizations.\n\nScholar\u2014I learn important new things every day.\n\nWriting your mission in terms of the important roles in your life gives you balance and harmony. It keeps each role clearly before you. You can review your roles frequently to make sure that you don't get totally absorbed by one role to the exclusion of others that are equally or even more important in your life.\n\nAfter you identify your various roles, then you can think about the long-term goals you want to accomplish in each of those roles. We're into the right brain again, using imagination, creativity, conscience, and inspiration. If these goals are the extension of a mission statement based on correct principles, they will be vitally different from the goals people normally set. They will be in harmony with correct principles, with natural laws, which gives you greater power to achieve them. They are not someone else's goals you have absorbed. They are your goals. They reflect your deepest values, your unique talent, your sense of mission. And they grow out of your chosen roles in life.\n\nAn effective goal focuses primarily on results rather than activity. It identifies where you want to be, and, in the process, helps you determine where you are. It gives you important information on how to get there, and it tells you when you have arrived. It unifies your efforts and energy. It gives meaning and purpose to all you do. And it can finally translate itself into daily activities so that you are proactive, you are in charge of your life, you are making happen each day the things that will enable you to fulfill your personal mission statement.\n\nRoles and goals give structure and organized direction to your personal mission. If you don't yet have a personal mission state\u00adment, it's a good place to begin. Just identifying the various areas of your life and the two or three important results you feel you should accomplish in each area to move ahead gives you an overall perspective of your life and a sense of direction.\n\nAs we move into Habit 3, we'll go into greater depth in the area of short-term goals. The important application at this point is to identify roles and long-term goals as they relate to your personal mission statement. These roles and goals will provide the founda\u00adtion for effective goal setting and achieving when we get to the Habit 3 day-to-day management of life and time.\n\nFAMILY MISSION STATEMENTS\n\nBecause Habit 2 is based on principle, it has broad application. In addition to individuals, families, service groups, and organizations of all kinds become significantly more effective as they begin with the end in mind.\n\nMany families are managed on the basis of crises, moods, quick fixes, and instant gratification\u2014not on sound principles. Symp\u00adtoms surface whenever stress and pressure mount: people become cynical, critical, or silent or they start yelling and overreacting. Children who observe these kinds of behavior grow up thinking the only way to solve problems is flight or fight.\n\nThe core of any family is what is changeless, what is always going to be there\u2014shared vision and values. By writing a family mission statement, you give expression to its true foundation.\n\nThis mission statement becomes its constitution, the standard, the criterion for evaluation and decision making. It gives continuity and unity to the family as well as direction. When individual values are harmonized with those of the family, members work together for common purposes that are deeply felt.\n\nAgain, the process is as important as the product. The very process of writing and refining a mission statement becomes a key way to improve the family. Working together to create a mission statement builds the PC capacity to live it.\n\nBy getting input from every family member, drafting a state\u00adment, getting feedback, revising it, and using wording from different family members, you get the family talking, communicat\u00ading, on things that really matter deeply. The best mission state\u00adments are the result of family members coming together in a spirit of mutual respect, expressing their different views, and working together to create something greater than any one individual could do alone. Periodic review to expand perspective, shift emphasis or direction, amend or give new meaning to time-worn phrases can keep the family united in common values and purposes.\n\nThe mission statement becomes the framework for thinking, for governing the family. When the problems and crises come, the constitution is there to remind family members of the things that matter most and to provide direction for problem solving and decision making based on correct principles.\n\nIn our home, we put our mission statement up on a wall in the family room so that we can look at it and monitor ourselves daily.\n\nWhen we read the phrases about the sounds of love in our home, order, responsible independence, cooperation, helpfulness, meeting needs, developing talents, showing interest in each other's talents, and giving service to others it gives us some criteria to know how we're doing in the things that matter most to us as a family.\n\nWhen we plan our family goals and activities, we say, \"In light of these principles, what are the goals we're going to work on? What are our action plans to accomplish our goals and actualize these values?\"\n\nWe review the statement frequently and rework goals and jobs twice a year, in September and June\u2014the beginning of school and the end of school\u2014to reflect the situation as it is, to improve it, to strengthen it. It renews us, it recommits us to what we believe in, what we stand for.\n\nORGANIZATIONAL MISSION STATEMENTS\n\nMission statements are also vital to successful organizations. One of the most important thrusts of my work with organizations is to assist them in developing effective mission statements. And to be effective, that statement has to come from within the bowels of the organization. Everyone should participate in a meaningful way\u2014not just the top strategy planners, but everyone. Once again, the involvement process is as important as the written product and is the key to its use.\n\nI am always intrigued whenever I go to IBM and watch the training process there. Time and time again, I see the leadership of the organization come into a group and say that IBM stands for three things: the dignity of the individual, excellence, and service.\n\nThese things represent the belief system of IBM. Everything else will change, but these three things will not change. Almost like osmosis, this belief system has spread throughout the entire organization, providing a tremendous base of shared values and personal security for everyone who works there.\n\nOnce I was training a group of people for IBM in New York. It was a small group, about twenty people, and one of them became ill. He called his wife in California, who expressed concern because his illness required special treatment. The IBM people responsible for the training session arranged to have him taken to an excellent hospital with medical specialists in the disease. But they could sense that his wife was uncertain and really wanted him home where their personal physician could handle the problem.\n\nSo they decided to get him home. Concerned about the time involved in driving him to the airport and waiting for a commercial plane, they brought in a helicopter, flew him to the airport, and hired a special plane just to take this man to California.\n\nI don't know what costs that involved; my guess would be many thousands of dollars. But IBM believes in the dignity of the individual. That's what the company stands for. To those present, that experience represented its belief system and was no surprise. I was impressed.\n\nAt another time, I was scheduled to train 175 shopping center managers at a particular hotel. I was amazed at the level of service there. It wasn't a cosmetic thing. It was evident at all levels, spontaneously, without supervision.\n\nI arrived quite late, checked in, and asked if room service were available. The man at the desk said, \"No, Mr. Covey, but if you're interested, I could go back and get a sandwich or a salad or whatever you'd like that we have in the kitchen.\" His attitude was one of total concern about my comfort and welfare. \"Would you like to see your convention room?\" he continued. \"Do you have everything you need? What can I do for you? I'm here to serve you.\"\n\nThere was no supervisor there checking up. This man was sincere.\n\nThe next day I was in the middle of a presentation when I discovered that I didn't have all the colored markers I needed. So I went out into the hall during the brief break and found a bellboy running to another convention. \"I've got a problem,\" I said. \"I'm here training a group of managers and I only have a short break. I need some more colored pens.\"\n\nHe whipped around and almost came to attention. He glanced at my name tag and said, \"Mr. Covey, I will solve your problem.\"\n\nHe didn't say, \"I don't know where to go\" or \"Well, go and check at the front desk.\" He just took care of it. And he made me feel like it was his privilege to do so.\n\nLater, I was in the side lobby, looking at some of the art objects. Someone from the hotel came up to me and said, \"Mr. Covey, would you like to see a book that describes the art objects in this hotel?\" How anticipatory! How service-oriented!\n\nI next observed one of the employees high up on a ladder cleaning windows in the lobby. From his vantage point he saw a woman having a little difficulty in the garden with a walker. She hadn't really fallen, and she was with other people. But he climbed down that ladder, went outside, helped the woman into the lobby and saw that she was properly taken care of. Then he went back and finished cleaning the windows.\n\nI wanted to find out how this organization had created a culture where people bought so deeply into the value of customer service. I interviewed housekeepers, waitresses, bellboys in that hotel and found that this attitude had impregnated the minds, hearts, and attitudes of every employee there.\n\nI went through the back door into the kitchen, where I saw the central value: \"Uncompromising personalized service.\" I finally went to the manager and said, \"My business is helping organiza\u00adtions develop a powerful team character, a team culture. I am amazed at what you have here.\"\n\n\"Do you want to know the real key?\" he inquired. He pulled out the mission statement for the hotel chain.\n\nAfter reading it, I acknowledged, \"That's an impressive state\u00adment. But I know many companies that have impressive mission statements.\"\n\n\"Do you want to see the one for this hotel?\" he asked.\n\n\"Do you mean you developed one just for this hotel?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Different from the one for the hotel chain?\"\n\n\"Yes. It's in harmony with that statement, but this one pertains to our situation, our environment, our time.\" He handed me another paper.\n\n\"Who developed this mission statement?\" I asked.\n\n\"Everybody,\" he replied.\n\n\"Everybody? Really, everybody?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Housekeepers?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Waitresses?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Desk clerks?\"\n\n\"Yes. Do you want to see the mission statement written by the people who greeted you last night?\" He pulled out a mission statement that they, themselves, had written that was interwoven with all the other mission statements. Everyone, at every level, was involved.\n\nThe mission statement for that hotel was the hub of a great wheel. It spawned the thoughtful, more specialized mission state\u00adments of particular groups of employees. It was used as the criterion for every decision that was made. It clarified what those people stood for\u2014how they related to the customer, how they related to each other. It affected the style of the managers and the leaders. It affected the compensation system. It affected the kind of people they recruited and how they trained and developed them. Every aspect of that organization, essentially, was a function of that hub, that mission statement.\n\nI later visited another hotel in the same chain, and the first thing I did when I checked in was to ask to see their mission statement, which they promptly gave me. At this hotel, I came to understand the motto \"Uncompromising personalized service\" a little more.\n\nFor a three-day period, I watched every conceivable situation where service was called for. I always found that service was delivered in a very impressive, excellent way. But it was always also very personalized. For instance, in the swimming area I asked the attendant where the drinking fountain was. He walked me to it.\n\nBut the thing that impressed me the very most was to see an employee, on his own, admit a mistake to his boss. We ordered room service, and were told when it would be delivered to the room. On the way to our room, the room service person spilled the hot chocolate, and it took a few extra minutes to go back and change the linen on the tray and replace the drink. So the room service was about fifteen minutes late, which was really not that important to us.\n\nNevertheless, the next morning the room service manager phoned us to apologize and invited us to have either the buffet breakfast or a room service breakfast, compliments of the hotel, to in some way compensate for the inconvenience.\n\nWhat does it say about the culture of an organization when an employee admits his own mistake, unknown to anyone else, to the manager so that customer or guest is better taken care of!\n\nAs I told the manager of the first hotel I visited, I know a lot of companies with impressive mission statements. But there is a real difference, all the difference in the world, in the effectiveness of a mission statement created by everyone involved in the organiza\u00adtion and one written by a few top executives behind a mahogany wall.\n\nOne of the fundamental problems in organizations, including families, is that people are not committed to the determinations of other people for their lives. They simply don't buy into them.\n\nMany times as I work with organizations, I find people whose goals are totally different from the goals of the enterprise. I commonly find reward systems completely out of alignment with stated value systems.\n\nWhen I begin work with companies that have already developed some kind of mission statement, I ask them, \"How many of the people here know that you have a mission statement? How many of you know what it contains? How many were involved in creating it? How many really buy into it and use it as your frame of reference in making decisions?\"\n\nWithout involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment.\n\nNow, in the early stages\u2014when a person is new to an organi\u00adzation or when a child in the family is young\u2014you can pretty well give them a goal and they'll buy it, particularly if the relationship, orientation, and training are good.\n\nBut when people become more mature and their own lives take on a separate meaning, they want involvement, significant involve\u00adment. And if they don't have that involvement, they don't buy it. Then you have a significant motivational problem which cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created it.\n\nThat's why creating an organizational mission statement takes time, patience, involvement, skill, and empathy. Again, it's not a quick fix. It takes time and sincerity, correct principles, and the courage and integrity to align systems, structure, and management style to the shared vision and values. But it's based on correct principles and it works.\n\nAn organizational mission statement\u2014one that truly reflects the deep shared vision and values of everyone within that organization\u2014creates a great unity and tremendous commitment. It creates in people's hearts and minds a frame of reference, a set of criteria or guidelines, by which they will govern themselves. They don't need someone else directing, controlling, criticizing, or taking cheap shots. They have bought into the changeless core of what the organization is about.\n\nAPPLICATION SUGGESTIONS\n\n  1. Take the time to record the impressions you had in the funeral visualization at the beginning of this chapter. You may want to use the chart below to organize your thoughts.\n  2. Take a few moments and write down your roles as you now see them. Are you satisfied with that mirror image of your life?\n  3. Set up time to completely separate yourself from daily activities and to begin work on your personal mission statement.\n  4. Go through the chart in Appendix A showing different centers and circle all those you can identify with. Do they form a pattern for the behavior in your life? Are you comfortable with the implications of your analysis?\n  5. Start a collection of notes, quotes, and ideas you may want to use as resource material in writing your personal mission statement.\n  6. Identify a project you will be facing in the near future and apply the principle of mental creation. Write down the results you desire and what steps will lead to those results.\n  7. Share the principles of Habit 2 with your family or work group and suggest that together you begin the process of developing a family or group mission statement.\n\n* * *\n\n##### Footnote\n\n*Please refer to Appendix A.\n\n### HABIT 3  \nPUT FIRST THINGS FIRST\n\n### PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL MANAGEMENT\n\nThings which matter most must never be  \nat the mercy of things which matter least.\n\nGoethe\n\nWILL YOU TAKE JUST A MOMENT and write down a short answer to the following two questions? Your answers will be important to you as you begin work on Habit 3.\n\nQuestion 1: What one thing could you do (you aren't doing now) that if you did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your personal life?\n\nQuestion 2: What one thing in your business or professional life would bring similar results?\n\nWe'll come back to these answers later. But first, let's put Habit 3 in perspective.\n\nHabit 3 is the personal fruit, the practical fulfillment of Habits 1 and 2.\n\nHabit 1 says, \"You're the creator. You are in charge.\" It's based on the four unique human endowments of imagination, conscience, independent will, and, particularly, self-awareness. It empowers you to say, \"That's an unhealthy program I've been given from my childhood, from my social mirror. I don't like that ineffective script. I can change.\"\n\nHabit 2 is the first or mental creation. It's based on imagination\u2014the ability to envision, to see the potential, to create with our minds what we cannot at present see with our eyes; and conscience\u2014the ability to detect our own uniqueness and the personal, moral, and ethical guidelines within which we can most happily fulfill it. It's the deep contact with our basic paradigms and values and the vision of what we can become.\n\nHabit 3, then, is the second creation, the physical creation. It's the fulfillment, the actualization, the natural emergence of Habits 1 and 2. It's the exercise of independent will toward becoming principle-centered. It's the day-in, day-out, moment-by-moment doing it.\n\nHabits 1 and 2 are absolutely essential and prerequisite to Habit 3. You can't become principle-centered without first being aware of and developing your own proactive nature. You can't become principle-centered without first being aware of your paradigms and understanding how to shift them and align them with princi\u00adples. You can't become principle-centered without a vision of and a focus on the unique contribution that is yours to make.\n\nBut with that foundation, you can become principle-centered, day-in and day-out, moment-by-moment, by living Habit 3\u2014by practicing effective self-management.\n\nManagement, remember, is clearly different from leadership. Leadership is primarily a high-powered, right brain activity. It's more of an art; it's based on a philosophy. You have to ask the ultimate questions of life when you're dealing with personal leadership issues.\n\nBut once you have dealt with those issues, once you have resolved them, you then have to manage yourself effectively to create a life congruent with your answers. The ability to manage well doesn't make much difference if you're not even in the \"right jungle.\" But if you are in the right jungle, it makes all the difference. In fact, the ability to manage well determines the quality and even the existence of the second creation. Management is the breaking down, the analysis, the sequencing, the specific application, the time-bound left-brain aspect of effective self-government. My own maxim of personal effectiveness is this: Manage from the left; lead from the right.\n\nTHE POWER OF INDEPENDENT WILL\n\nIn addition to self-awareness, imagination, and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment\u2014independent will\u2014that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make deci\u00adsions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endow\u00adments.\n\nThe human will is an amazing thing. Time after time, it has triumphed against unbelievable odds. The Helen Kellers of this world give dramatic evidence to the value, the power of the independent will.\n\nBut as we examine this endowment in the context of effective self-management, we realize it's usually not the dramatic, the visible, the once-in-a-lifetime, up-by-the-bootstraps effort that brings enduring success. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.\n\nThe degree to which we have developed our independent will in our everyday lives is measured by our personal integrity. Integrity is, fundamentally, the value we place on ourselves. It's our ability to make and keep commitments to ourselves, to \"walk our talk.\" It's honor with self, a fundamental part of the Character Ethic, the essence of proactive growth.\n\nEffective management is putting first things first. While leadership decides what \"first things\" are, it is management that puts them first, day-by-day, moment-by-moment. Management is discipline, carrying it out.\n\nDiscipline derives from disciple\u2014disciple to a philosophy, disci\u00adple to a set of principles, disciple to a set of values, disciple to an overriding purpose, to a superordinate goal or a person who represents that goal.\n\nIn other words, if you are an effective manager of your self, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will. You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source. And you have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, your moods to those values.\n\nOne of my favorite essays is \"The Common Denominator of Success,\" written by E. M. Gray. He spent his life searching for the one denominator that all successful people share. He found it wasn't hard work, good luck, or astute human relations, though those were all important. The one factor that seemed to transcend all the rest embodies the essence of Habit 3\u2014putting first things first.\n\n\"The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don't like to do,\" he observed. \"They don't like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.\"\n\nThat subordination requires a purpose, a mission, a Habit 2 clear sense of direction and value, a burning \"yes!\" inside that makes it possible to say \"no\" to other things. It also requires independent will, the power to do something when you don't want to do it, to be a function of your values rather than a function of the impulse or desire of any given moment. It's the power to act with integrity to your proactive first creation.\n\nFOUR GENERATIONS OF TIME MANAGEMENT\n\nIn Habit 3 we are dealing with many of the questions addressed in the field of life and time management. As a longtime student of this fascinating field, I am personally persuaded that the essence of the best thinking in the area of time management can be captured in a single phrase: Organize and execute around priorities. That phrase represents the evolution of three generations of time management theory, and how to best do it is the focus of a wide variety of approaches and materials.\n\nPersonal management has evolved in a pattern similar to many other areas of human endeavor. Major developmental thrusts, or \"waves\" as Alvin Toffler calls them, follow each other in succes\u00adsion, each adding a vital new dimension. For example, in social development, the agricultural revolution was followed by the industrial revolution, which was followed by the informational revolution. Each succeeding wave created a surge of social and personal progress.\n\nLikewise, in the area of time management, each generation builds on the one before it\u2014each one moves us toward greater control of our lives. The first wave or generation could be charac\u00adterized by notes and checklists, an effort to give some semblance of recognition and inclusiveness to the many demands placed on our time and energy.\n\nThe second generation could be characterized by calendars and appointment books. This wave reflects an attempt to look ahead, to schedule events and activities in the future.\n\nThe third generation reflects the current time management field. It adds to those preceding generations the important idea of prioritization, of clarifying values, and of comparing the relative worth of activities based on their relationship to those values. In addition, it focuses on setting goals\u2014specific long-, intermediate-, and short-term targets toward which time and energy would be directed in harmony with values. It also includes the concept of daily planning, of making a specific plan to accomplish those goals and activities determined to be of greatest worth.\n\nWhile the third generation has made a significant contribution, people have begun to realize that \"efficient\" scheduling and control of time are often counterproductive. The efficiency focus creates expectations that clash with the opportunities to develop rich relationships, to meet human needs, and to enjoy spontaneous moments on a daily basis.\n\nAs a result, many people have become turned off by time management programs and planners that make them feel too scheduled, too restricted, and they \"throw the baby out with the bath \"water,\" reverting to first or second generation techniques to preserve relationships, spontaneity, and quality of life.\n\nBut there is an emerging fourth generation that is different in kind. It recognizes that \"time management\" is really a misnomer\u2014the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves. Satisfaction is a function of expectation as well as realization. And expectation (and satisfaction) lie in our Circle of Influence.\n\nRather than focusing on things and time, fourth generation expectations focus on preserving and enhancing relationships and on accomplishing results\u2014in short, on maintaining the P\/PC Bal\u00adance.\n\nQUADRANT II\n\nThe essential focus of the fourth generation of management can be captured in the time management matrix diagrammed on the next page. Basically, we spend time in one of four ways.\n\nAs you can see, the two factors that define an activity are urgent and important. Urgent means it requires immediate attention. It's \"Now!\" Urgent things act on us. A ringing phone is urgent. Most people can't stand the thought of just allowing the phone to ring.\n\nYou could spend hours preparing materials, you could get all dressed up and travel to a person's office to discuss a particular issue, but if the phone were to ring while you were there, it would generally take precedence over your personal visit.\n\nIf you were to phone someone, there aren't many people who would say, \"I'll get to you in 15 minutes; just hold.\" But those same people would probably let you wait in an office for at least that long while they completed a telephone conversation with someone else.\n\nTHE TIME MANAGEMENT MATRIX\n\nUrgent matters are usually visible. They press on us; they insist on action. They're often popular with others. They're usually right in front of us. And often they are pleasant, easy, fun to do. But so often they are unimportant!\n\nImportance, on the other hand, has to do with results. If some\u00adthing is important, it contributes to your mission, your values, your high priority goals.\n\nWe react to urgent matters. Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative, more proactivity. We must act to seize opportunity, to make things happen. If we don't practice Habit 2, if we don't have a clear idea of what is important, of the results we desire in our lives, we are easily diverted into responding to the urgent.\n\nLook for a moment at the four quadrants in the time management matrix. Quadrant I is both urgent and important. It deals with significant results that require immediate attention. We usually call the activities in Quadrant I \"crises\" or \"problems.\" We all have some Quadrant I activities in our lives. But Quadrant I consumes many people. They are crisis managers, problem-minded people, deadline-driven producers.\n\nAs long as you focus on Quadrant I, it keeps getting bigger and bigger until it dominates you. It's like the pounding surf. A huge problem comes and knocks you down and you're wiped out. You struggle back up only to face another one that knocks you down and slams you to the ground.\n\nSome people are literally beaten up by problems all day every day. The only relief they have is in escaping to the not important, not urgent activities of Quadrant IV. So when you look at their total matrix, 90 percent of their time is in Quadrant I and most of the remaining 10 percent is in Quadrant IV, with only negligible attention paid to Quadrants II and III. That's how people who manage their lives by crisis live.\n\nThere are other people who spend a great deal of time in \"urgent, but not important\" Quadrant III, thinking they're in Quadrant I. They spend most of their time reacting to things that are urgent, assuming they are also important. But the reality is that the urgency of these matters is often based on the priorities and expectations of others.\n\nPeople who spend time almost exclusively in Quadrants III and IV basically lead irresponsible lives.\n\nEffective people stay out of Quadrants III and IV because, urgent or not, they aren't important. They also shrink Quadrant I down to size by spending more time in Quadrant II.\n\nQuadrant II is the heart of effective personal management. It deals with things that are not urgent, but are important. It deals with things like building relationships, writing a personal mission statement, long-range planning, exercising, preventive mainte\u00adnance, preparation\u2014all those things we know we need to do, but somehow seldom get around to doing, because they aren't urgent.\n\nTo paraphrase Peter Drucker, effective people are not problem-minded; they're opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively. They have genuine Quadrant I crises and emergencies that require their immediate attention, but the number is comparatively small. They keep P and PC in balance by focusing on the important, but not urgent, high leverage capacity-building activities of Quadrant II.\n\nWith the time management matrix in mind, take a moment now and consider how you answered the questions at the beginning of this chapter. What quadrant do they fit in? Are they important? Are they urgent?\n\nMy guess is that they probably fit into Quadrant II. They are obviously important, deeply important, but not urgent. And because they aren't urgent, you don't do them.\n\nNow look again at the nature of those questions: What one thing could you do in your personal and professional life that, if you did on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in your life? Quadrant II activities have that kind of impact. Our effective\u00adness takes quantum leaps when we do them.\n\nI asked a similar question to a group of shopping center mana\u00adgers. \"If you were to do one thing in your professional work that you know would have enormously positive effects on the results, what would it be?\" Their unanimous response was to build helpful personal relationships with the tenants, the owners of the stores inside the shopping center, which is a Quadrant II activity.\n\nWe did an analysis of the time they were spending on that activity. It was less than 5 percent. They had good reasons\u2014problems, one right after another. They had reports to make out, meetings to go to, correspondence to answer, phone calls to make, constant interruptions. Quadrant I had consumed them.\n\nThey were spending very little time with the store managers, and the time they did spend was filled with negative energy. The only reason they visited the store managers at all was to enforce the contract\u2014to collect the money or discuss advertising or other practices that were out of harmony with center guidelines, or some similar thing.\n\nThe store owners were struggling for survival, let alone prosper\u00adity. They had employment problems, cost problems, inventory problems, and a host of other problems. Most of them had no training in management at all. Some were fairly good merchandis\u00aders, but they needed help. The tenants didn't even want to see the shopping center owners; they were just one more problem to contend with.\n\nSo the owners decided to be proactive. They determined their purpose, their values, their priorities. In harmony with those priorities, they decided to spend about one-third of their time in helping relationships with the tenants.\n\nIn working with that organization for about a year and a half, I saw them climb to around 20 percent, which represented more than a fourfold increase. In addition, they changed their role. They became listeners, trainers, consultants to the tenants. Their inter\u00adchanges were filled with positive energy.\n\nThe effect was dramatic, profound. By focusing on relationships and results rather than time and methods, the numbers went up, the tenants were thrilled with the results created by new ideas and skills, and the shopping center managers were more effective and satisfied and increased their list of potential tenants and lease revenue based on increased sales by the tenant stores. They were no longer policemen or hovering supervisors. They were problem solvers, helpers.\n\nWhether you are a student at the university, a worker in an assembly line, a homemaker, fashion designer, or president of a company, I believe that if you were to ask what lies in Quadrant II and cultivate the proactivity to go after it, you would find the same results. Your effectiveness would increase dramatically. Your crises and problems would shrink to manageable proportions because you would be thinking ahead, working on the roots, doing the preventive things that keep situations from developing into crises in the first place. In time management jargon, this is called the Pareto Principle\u201480 percent of the results flow out of 20 percent of the activities.\n\nWHAT IT TAKES TO SAY \"NO\"\n\nThe only place to get time for Quadrant II in the beginning is from Quadrants III and IV. You can't ignore the urgent and important activities of Quadrant I, although it will shrink in size as you spend more time with prevention and preparation in Quadrant II. But the initial time for Quadrant II has to come out of III and IV.\n\nYou have to be proactive to work on Quadrant II because Quadrants I and III work on you. To say \"yes\" to important Quadrant II priorities, you have to learn to say \"no\" to other activities, sometimes apparently urgent things.\n\nSome time ago, my wife was invited to serve as chairman of a committee in a community endeavor. She had a number of truly important things she was trying to work on, and she really didn't want to do it. But she felt pressured into it and finally agreed.\n\nThen she called one of her dear friends to ask if she would serve on her committee. Her friend listened for a long time and then said, \"Sandra, that sounds like a wonderful project, a really worthy undertaking. I appreciate so much your inviting me to be a part of it. I feel honored by it. For a number of reasons, I won't be participating myself, but I want you to know how much I appre\u00adciate your invitation.\"\n\nSandra was ready for anything but a pleasant \"no.\" She turned to me and sighed, \"I wish I'd said that.\"\n\nI don't mean to imply that you shouldn't be involved in significant service projects. Those things are important. But you have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage\u2014pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically\u2014to say \"no\" to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger \"yes\" burning inside. The enemy of the \"best\" is often the \"good.\"\n\nKeep in mind that you are always saying \"no\" to something. If it isn't to the apparent, urgent things in your life, it is probably to the more fundamental, highly important things. Even when the urgent is good, the good can keep you from your best, keep you from your unique contribution, if you let it.\n\nWhen I was Director of University Relations at a large university, I hired a very talented, proactive, creative writer. One day, after he had been on the job for a few months, I went into his office and asked him to work on some urgent matters that were pressing on me.\n\nHe said, \"Stephen, I'll do whatever you want me to do. Just let me share with you my situation.\"\n\nThen he took me over to his wallboard, where he had listed over two dozen projects he was working on, together with performance criteria and deadline dates that had been clearly negotiated before. He was highly disciplined, which is why I went to see him in the first place. \"If you want to get something done, give it to a busy man.\"\n\nThen he said, \"Stephen, to do the jobs that you want done right would take several days. Which of these projects would you like me to delay or cancel to satisfy your request?\"\n\nWell, I didn't want to take the responsibility for that. I didn't want to put a cog in the wheel of one of the most productive people on the staff just because I happened to be managing by crisis at the time. The jobs I wanted done were urgent, but not important. So I went and found another crisis manager and gave the job to him.\n\nWe say \"yes\" or \"no\" to things daily, usually many times a day. A center of correct principles and a focus on our personal mission empowers us with wisdom to make those judgments effectively.\n\nAs I work with different groups, I tell them that the essence of effective time and life management is to organize and execute around balanced priorities. Then I ask this question: if you were to fault yourself in one of three areas, which would it be: (1) the inability to prioritize; (2) the inability or desire to organize around those priorities; or (3) the lack of discipline to execute around them, to stay with your priorities and organization?\n\nMost people say their main fault is a lack of discipline. On deeper thought, I believe that is not the case. The basic problem is that their priorities have not become deeply planted in their hearts and minds. They haven't really internalized Habit 2.\n\nThere are many people who recognize the value of Quadrant II activities in their lives, whether they identify them as such or not. And they attempt to give priority to those activities and integrate them into their lives through self-discipline alone. But without a principle center and a personal mission statement, they don't have the necessary foundation to sustain their efforts. They're working on the leaves, on the attitudes and the behaviors of discipline, without even thinking to examine the roots, the basic paradigms from which their natural attitudes and behaviors flow.\n\nA Quadrant II focus is a paradigm that grows out of a principle center. If you are centered on your spouse, your money, your friends, your pleasure, or any extrinsic factor, you will keep getting thrown back into Quadrants I and III, reacting to the outside forces your life is centered on. Even if you're centered on yourself, you'll end up in I and III reacting to the impulse of the moment. Your independent will alone cannot effectively discipline you against your center.\n\nIn the words of the architectural maxim, form follows function. Likewise, management follows leadership. The way you spend your time is a result of the way you see your time and the way you really see your priorities. If your priorities grow out of a principle center and a personal mission, if they are deeply planted in your heart and in your mind, you will see Quadrant II as a natural, exciting place to invest your time.\n\nIt's almost impossible to say \"no\" to the popularity of Quadrant III or to the pleasure of escape to Quadrant IV if you don't have a bigger \"yes\" burning inside. Only when you have the self-awareness to examine your program\u2014and the imagination and conscience to create a new, unique, principle-centered program to which you can say \"yes\"\u2014only then will you have sufficient independent will power to say \"no,\" with a genuine smile, to the unimportant.\n\nMOVING INTO QUADRANT II\n\nIf Quadrant II activities are clearly the heart of effective personal management\u2014the \"first things\" we need to put first\u2014then how do we organize and execute around those things?\n\nThe first generation of time management does not even recog\u00adnize the concept of priority. It gives us notes and \"to do\" lists that we can cross off, and we feel a temporary sense of accomplishment every time we check something off, but no priority is attached to items on the list. In addition, there is no correlation between what's on the list and our ultimate values and purposes in life. We simply respond to whatever penetrates our awareness and appar\u00adently needs to be done.\n\nMany people manage from this first-generation paradigm. It's the course of least resistance. There's no pain or strain; it's fun to \"go with the flow.\" Externally imposed disciplines and schedules give people the feeling that they aren't responsible for results.\n\nBut first-generation managers, by definition, are not effective people. They produce very little, and their life-style does nothing to build their production capability. Buffeted by outside forces, they are often seen as undependable and irresponsible, and they have very little sense of control and self-esteem.\n\nSecond-generation managers assume a little more control. They plan and schedule in advance and generally are seen as more responsible because they \"show up\" when they're supposed to.\n\nBut again, the activities they schedule have no priority or recognized correlation to deeper values and goals. They have few significant achievements and tend to be schedule oriented.\n\nThird-generation managers take a significant step forward. They clarify their values and set goals. They plan each day and prioritize their activities.\n\nAs I have said, this is where most of the time management field is today. But this third generation has some critical limitations. First, it limits vision\u2014daily planning often misses important things that can only be seen from a larger perspective. The very language \"daily planning\" focuses on the urgent\u2014the \"now.\" While third generation prioritization provides order to activity, it doesn't question the essential importance of the activity in the first place\u2014it doesn't place the activity in the context of principles, personal mission, roles, and goals. The third-generation value-driven daily planning approach basically prioritizes the Quadrant I and III problems and crises of the day.\n\nIn addition, the third generation makes no provision for man\u00adaging roles in a balanced way. It lacks realism, creating the tendency to over-schedule the day, resulting in frustration and the desire to occasionally throw away the plan and escape to Quadrant IV. And its efficiency, time management focus tends to strain relationships rather than build them.\n\nWhile each of the three generations has recognized the value of some kind of management tool, none has produced a tool that empowers a person to live a principle-centered, Quadrant II life-style. The first-generation notepads and \"to do\" lists give us no more than a place to capture those things that penetrate our awareness so we won't forget them. The second-generation ap\u00adpointment books and calendars merely provide a place to record our future commitments so that we can be where we have agreed to be at the appropriate time.\n\nEven the third generation, with its vast array of planners and materials, focuses primarily on helping people prioritize and plan their Quadrants I and III activities. Though many trainers and consultants recognize the value of Quadrant II activities, the actual planning tools of the third generation do not facilitate organizing and executing around them.\n\nAs each generation builds on those that have preceded it, the strengths and some of the tools of each of the first three generations provide elemental material for the fourth. But there is an added need for a new dimension, for the paradigm and the implementa\u00adtion that will empower us to move into Quadrant II, to become principle-centered and to manage ourselves to do what is truly most important.\n\nTHE QUADRANT II TOOL\n\nThe objective of Quadrant II management is to manage our lives effectively\u2014from a center of sound principles, from a knowledge of our personal mission, with a focus on the important as well as the urgent, and within the framework of maintaining a balance between increasing our production and increasing our production capability.\n\nThis is, admittedly, an ambitious objective for people caught in the thick of thin things in Quadrants III and IV. But striving to achieve it will have a phenomenal impact on personal effectiveness.\n\nA Quadrant II organizer will need to meet six important criteria.\n\nCOHERENCE. Coherence suggests that there is harmony, unity, and integrity between your vision and mission, your roles and goals, your priorities and plans, and your desires and discipline. In your planner, there should be a place for your personal mission statement so that you can constantly refer to it. There also needs to be a place for your roles and for both short- and long-term goals.\n\nBALANCE. Your tool should help you to keep balance in your life, to identify your various roles and keep them right in front of you, so that you don't neglect important areas such as your health, your family, professional preparation, or personal development.\n\nMany people seem to think that success in one area can compensate for failure in other areas of life. But can it really? Perhaps it can for a limited time in some areas. But can success in your profession compensate for a broken marriage, ruined health, or weakness in personal character? True effectiveness requires balance, and your tool needs to help you create and maintain it.\n\nQUADRANT II FOCUS. You need a tool that encourages you, motivates you, actually helps you spend the time you need in Quadrant II, so that you're dealing with prevention rather than prioritizing crises. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to organize your life on a weekly basis. You can still adapt and prioritize on a daily basis, but the fundamental thrust is organizing the week.\n\nOrganizing on a weekly basis provides much greater balance and context than daily planning. There seems to be implicit cultural recognition of the week as a single, complete unit of time. Business, education, and many other facets of society operate within the framework of the week, designating certain days for focused investment and others for relaxation or inspiration. The basic Judeo-Christian ethic honors the Sabbath, the one day out of every seven set aside for uplifting purposes.\n\nMost people think in terms of weeks. But most third-generation planning tools focus on daily planning. While they may help you prioritize your activities, they basically only help you organize crises and busywork. The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. And this can best be done in the context of the week.\n\nA \"PEOPLE\" DIMENSION. You also need a tool that deals with people, not just schedules. While you can think in terms of efficiency in dealing with time, a principle-centered person thinks in terms of effectiveness in dealing with people. There are times when principle-centered Quadrant II living requires the subordination of schedules to people. Your tool needs to reflect that value, to facilitate implementation rather than create guilt when a schedule is not followed.\n\nFLEXIBILITY. Your planning tool should be your servant, never your master. Since it has to work for you, it should be tailored to your style, your needs, your particular ways.\n\nPORTABILITY. Your tool should also be portable, so that you can carry it with you most of the time. You may want to review your personal mission statement while riding the bus. You may want to measure the value of a new opportunity against something you already have planned. If your organizer is portable, you will keep it with you so that important data is always within reach.\n\nSince Quadrant II is the heart of effective self-management, you need a tool that moves you into Quadrant II. My work with the fourth-generation concept has led to the creation of a tool specifi\u00adcally designed according to the criteria listed above. But many good third-generation tools can easily be adapted. Because the principles are sound, the practices or specific applications can vary from one individual to the next.\n\nBECOMING A QUADRANT II SELF-MANAGER\n\nAlthough my effort here is to teach principles, not practices, of effectiveness, I believe you can better understand the principles and the empowering nature of the fourth generation if you actually experience organizing a week from a principle-centered, Quadrant II base.\n\nQuadrant II organizing involves four key activities.\n\nIDENTIFYING ROLES. The first task is to write down your key roles. If you haven't really given serious thought to the roles in your life, you can write down what immediately comes to mind. You have a role as an individual. You may want to list one or more roles as a family member\u2014a husband or wife, mother or father, son or daughter, a member of the extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. You may want to list a few roles in your work, indicating different areas in which you wish to invest time and energy on a regular basis. You may have roles in church or community affairs.\n\nYou don't need to worry about defining the roles in a way that you will live with for the rest of your life\u2014just consider the week and write down the areas you see yourself spending time in during the next seven days.\n\nHere are two examples of the way people might see their various roles.\n\n  1. Individual\n  2. Spouse\/Parent\n  3. Manager New Products\n  4. Manager Research\n  5. Manager Staff Dev.\n  6. Manager Administration\n  7. Chairman United Way |   1. Personal Development\n  2. Spouse\n  3. Parent\n  4. Real Estate Salesperson\n  5. Community Service\n  6. Symphony Board Member\n\n---|---\n\nSELECTING GOALS. The next step is to think of one or two important results you feel you should accomplish in each role during the next seven days. These would be recorded as goals. (See next page.)\n\nAt least some of these goals should reflect Quadrant II activities. Ideally, these weekly goals would be tied to the longer-term goals you have identified in conjunction with your personal mission statement. But even if you haven't written your mission statement, you can get a feeling, a sense, of what is important as you consider each of your roles and one or two goals for each role.\n\nSCHEDULING. Now you can look at the week ahead with your goals in mind and schedule time to achieve them. For example, if your goal is to produce the first draft of your personal mission statement, you may want to set aside a two-hour block of time on Sunday to work on it. Sunday (or some other day of the week that is special to you, your faith, or your circumstances) is often the ideal time to plan your more personally uplifting activities, including weekly organizing. It's a good time to draw back, to seek inspiration, to look at your life in the context of principles and values.\n\nIf you set a goal to become physically fit through exercise, you may want to set aside an hour three or four days during the week, or possibly every day during the week, to accomplish that goal. There are some goals that you may only be able to accomplish during business hours, or some that you can only do on Saturday when your children are home. Can you begin to see some of the advantages of organizing the week instead of the day?\n\nHaving identified roles and set goals, you can translate each goal to a specific day of the week, either as a priority item or, even better, as a specific appointment. You can also check your annual or monthly calendar for any appointments you may have previ\u00adously made and evaluate their importance in the context of your goals, transferring those you decide to keep to your schedule and making plans to reschedule or cancel others.\n\nAs you study the following weekly schedule, observe how each of the nineteen most important, often Quadrant II, goals has been scheduled or translated into a specific action plan. In addition, notice the box labeled \"Sharpen the Saw\" that provides a place to plan vital renewing Quadrant II activities in each of the four human dimensions that will be explained in Habit 7.\n\nEven with time set aside to accomplish 19 important goals during the week, look at the amount of remaining unscheduled space on the schedule! As well as empowering you to put first things first, Quadrant II weekly organizing gives you the freedom and the flexibility to handle unanticipated events, to shift appointments if you need to, to savor relationships and interactions with others, to deeply enjoy spontaneous experiences, knowing that you have proactively organized your week to accomplish key goals in every area of your life.\n\nDAILY ADAPTING. With Quadrant II weekly organizing, daily plan\u00adning becomes more a function of daily adapting, of prioritizing activities and responding to unanticipated events, relationships, and experiences in a meaningful way.\n\nTaking a few minutes each morning to review your schedule can put you in touch with the value-based decisions you made as you organized the week as well as unanticipated factors that may have come up. As you overview the day, you can see that your roles and goals provide a natural prioritization that grows out of your innate sense of balance. It is a softer, more right-brain prioritization that ultimately comes out of your sense of personal mission.\n\nYou may still find that the third-generation A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 prioritization gives needed order to daily activities. It would be a false dichotomy to say that activities are either important or they aren't. They are obviously on a continuum, and some important activities are more important than others. In the context of weekly organizing, third-generation prioritization gives order to daily focus.\n\nBut trying to prioritize activities before you even know how they relate to your sense of personal mission and how they fit into the balance of your life is not effective. You may be prioritizing and accomplishing things you don't want or need to be doing at all.\n\nCan you begin to see the difference between organizing your week as a principle-centered, Quadrant II manager and planning your days as an individual centered on something else? Can you begin to sense the tremendous difference the Quadrant II focus would make in your current level of effectiveness?\n\nHaving experienced the power of principle-centered Quadrant II organizing in my own life and having seen it transform the lives of hundreds of other people, I am persuaded it makes a difference\u2014a quantum positive difference. And the more completely weekly goals are tied into a wider framework of correct principles and into a personal mission statement, the greater the increase in effective\u00adness will be.\n\nLIVING IT\n\nReturning once more to the computer metaphor, if Habit 1 says \"You're the programmer\" and Habit 2 says \"Write the program,\" then Habit 3 says \"Run the program,\" \"Live the program.\" And living it is primarily a function of our independent will, our self-discipline, our integrity, and commitment\u2014not to short-term goals and schedules or to the impulse of the moment, but to the correct principles and our own deepest values, which give meaning and context to our goals, our schedules, and our lives.\n\nAs you go through your week, there will undoubtedly be times when your integrity will be placed on the line. The popularity of reacting to the urgent but unimportant priorities of other people in Quadrant III or the pleasure of escaping to Quadrant IV will threaten to overpower the important Quadrant II activities you have planned. Your principle center, your self-awareness, and your conscience can provide a high degree of intrinsic security, guidance, and wisdom to empower you to use your independent will and maintain integrity to the truly important.\n\nBut because you aren't omniscient, you can't always know in advance what is truly important. As carefully as you organize the week, there will be times when, as a principle-centered person, you will need to subordinate your schedule to a higher value. Because you are principle-centered, you can do that with an inner sense of peace.\n\nAt one point, one of my sons was deeply into scheduling and efficiency. One day he had a very tight schedule, which included down-to-the-minute time allocations for every activity, including picking up some books, washing his car, and \"dropping\" Carol, his girlfriend, among other things.\n\nEverything went according to schedule until it came to Carol. They had been dating for a long period of time, and he had finally come to the conclusion that a continued relationship would not work out. So, congruent with his efficiency model, he had sched\u00aduled a ten- to fifteen-minute telephone call to tell her.\n\nBut the news was very traumatic to her. One-and-a-half hours later, he was still deeply involved in a very intense conversation with her. Even then, the one visit was not enough. The situation was a very frustrating experience for them both.\n\nAgain, you simply can't think efficiency with people. You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things. I've tried to be \"efficient\" with a disagreeing or disagreeable person and it simply doesn't work. I've tried to give ten minutes of \"quality time\" to a child or an employee to solve a problem, only to discover such \"efficiency\" creates new problems and seldom resolves the deepest concern.\n\nI see many parents, particularly mothers with small children, often frustrated in their desire to accomplish a lot because all they seem to do is meet the needs of little children all day. Remember, frustration is a function of our expectations, and our expectations are often a reflection of the social mirror rather than our own values and priorities.\n\nBut if you have Habit 2 deep inside your heart and mind, you have those higher values driving you. You can subordinate your schedule to those values with integrity. You can adapt; you can be flexible. You don't feel guilty when you don't meet your schedule or when you have to change it.\n\nADVANCES OF THE FOURTH GENERATION\n\nOne of the reasons why people resist using third-generation time management tools is because they lose spontaneity; they become rigid and inflexible. They subordinate people to schedules because the efficiency paradigm of the third generation of manage\u00adment is out of harmony with the principle that people are more important than things.\n\nThe fourth-generation tool recognizes that principle. It also recognizes that the first person you need to consider in terms of effectiveness rather than efficiency is yourself. It encourages you to spend time in Quadrant II, to understand and center your life on principles, to give clear expression to the purposes and values you want to direct your daily decisions. It helps you to create balance in your life. It helps you rise above the limitations of daily planning and organize and schedule in the context of the week. And when a higher value conflicts with what you have planned, it empowers you to use your self-awareness and your conscience to maintain integrity to the principles and purposes you have determined are most important. Instead of using a road map, you're using a compass.\n\nThe fourth generation of self-management is more advanced than the third in five important ways.\n\nFirst, it's principle-centered. More than giving lip service to Quad\u00adrant II, it creates the central paradigm that empowers you to see your time in the context of what is really important and effective.\n\nSecond, it's conscience-directed. It gives you the opportunity to organize your life to the best of your ability in harmony with your deepest values. But it also gives you the freedom to peacefully subordinate your schedule to higher values.\n\nThird, it defines your unique mission, including values and long-term goals. This gives direction and purpose to the way you spend each day.\n\nFourth, it helps you balance your life by identifying roles, and by setting goals and scheduling activities in each key role every week.\n\nAnd fifth, it gives greater context through weekly organizing (with daily adaptation as needed), rising above the limiting perspective of a single day and putting you in touch with your deepest values through review of your key roles.\n\nThe practical thread running through all five of these advances is a primary focus on relationships and results and a secondary focus on time.\n\nDELEGATION: INCREASING P AND PC\n\nWe accomplish all that we do through delegation\u2014either to time or to other people. If we delegate to time, we think efficiency. If we delegate to other people, we think effectiveness.\n\nMany people refuse to delegate to other people because they feel it takes too much time and effort and they could do the job better themselves. But effectively delegating to others is perhaps the single most powerful high-leverage activity there is.\n\nTransferring responsibility to other skilled and trained people enables you to give your energies to other high-leverage activities. Delegation means growth, both for individuals and for organiza\u00adtions. The late J. C. Penney was quoted as saying that the wisest decision he ever made was to \"let go\" after realizing that he couldn't do it all by himself any longer. That decision, made long ago, enabled the development and growth of hundreds of stores and thousands of people.\n\nBecause delegation involves other people, it is a Public Victory and could well be included in Habit 4. But because we are focusing here on principles of personal management, and the ability to delegate to others is the main difference between the role of manager and independent producer, I am approaching delegation from the standpoint of your personal managerial skills.\n\nA producer does whatever is necessary to accomplish desired results, to get the golden eggs. A parent who washes the dishes, an architect who draws up blueprints, or a secretary who types correspondence is a producer.\n\nBut when a person sets up and works with and through people and systems to produce golden eggs, that person becomes a manager in the interdependent sense. A parent who delegates washing the dishes to a child is a manager. An architect who heads a team of other architects is a manager. A secretary who supervises other secretaries and office personnel is an office manager.\n\nA producer can invest one hour of effort and produce one unit of results, assuming no loss of efficiency.\n\nA manager, on the other hand, can invest one hour of effort and produce ten or fifty or a hundred units through effective delegation.\n\nManagement is essentially moving the fulcrum over, and the key to effective management is delegation.\n\nGOFER DELEGATION\n\nThere are basically two kinds of delegation: \"gofer delegation\" and \"stewardship delegation.\" Gofer delegation means \"Go for this, go for that, do this, do that, and tell me when it's done.\" Most people who are producers have a gofer delegation paradigm. Remember the machete wielders in the jungle? They are the producers. They roll up their sleeves and get the job done. If they are given a position of supervision or management, they still think like producers. They don't know how to set up a full delegation so that another person is committed to achieve results. Because they are focused on methods, they become responsible for the results.\n\nI was involved in a gofer delegation once when our family went water skiing. My son, who is an excellent skier, was in the water being pulled and I was driving the boat. I handed the camera to Sandra and asked her to take some pictures.\n\nAt first, I told her to be selective in her picture taking because we didn't have much film left. Then I realized she was unfamiliar with the camera, so I became a little more specific. I told her to be sure to wait until the sun was ahead of the boat and until our son was jumping the wake or making a turn and touching his elbow.\n\nBut the more I thought about our limited footage and her inexperience with the camera, the more concerned I became. I finally said, \"Look, Sandra, just push the button when I tell you. Okay?\" And I spent the next few minutes yelling, \"Take it!\u2014Take it!\u2014Don't take it!\u2014Don't take it!\" I was afraid that if I didn't direct her every move every second, it wouldn't be done right.\n\nThat was true gofer delegation, one-on-one supervision of methods. Many people consistently delegate that way. But how much does it really accomplish? And how many people is it possible to supervise or manage when you have to be involved in every move they make?\n\nThere's a much better way, a more effective way to delegate to other people. And it's based on a paradigm of appreciation of the self-awareness, the imagination, the conscience, and the free will of other people.\n\nSTEWARDSHIP DELEGATION\n\nStewardship delegation is focused on results instead of methods. It gives people a choice of method and makes them responsible for results. It takes more time in the beginning, but it's time well invested. You can move the fulcrum over, you can increase your leverage, through stewardship delegation.\n\nStewardship delegation involves clear, up-front mutual under\u00adstanding and commitment regarding expectations in five areas.\n\nDESIRED RESULTS. Create a clear, mutual understanding of what needs to be accomplished, focusing on what, not how; results, not methods. Spend time. Be patient. Visualize the desired result. Have the person see it, describe it, make out a quality statement of what the results will look like, and by when they will be accomplished.\n\nGUIDELINES. Identify the parameters within which the individual should operate. These should be as few as possible to avoid methods delegation, but should include any formidable restric\u00adtions. You wouldn't want a person to think he had considerable latitude as long as he accomplished the objectives, only to violate some long-standing traditional practice or value. That kills initiative and sends people back to the gofer's creed: \"Just tell me what you want me to do, and I'll do it.\"\n\nIf you know the failure paths of the job, identify them. Be honest and open\u2014tell a person where the quicksand is and where the wild animals are. You don't want to have to reinvent the wheel every day. Let people learn from your mistakes or the mistakes of others. Point out the potential failure paths, what not to do, but don't tell them what to do. Keep the responsibility for results with them\u2014to do whatever is necessary within the guidelines.\n\nRESOURCES. Identify the human, financial, technical, or organiza\u00adtional resources the person can draw on to accomplish the desired results.\n\nACCOUNTABILITY. Set up the standards of performance that will be used in evaluating the results and the specific times when reporting and evaluation will take place.\n\nCONSEQUENCES. Specify what will happen, both good and bad, as a result of the evaluation. This could include such things as financial rewards, psychic rewards, different job assignments, and natural consequences tied into the overall mission of an organization.\n\nSome years ago, I had an interesting experience in delegation with one of my sons. We were having a family meeting, and we had our mission statement up on the wall to make sure our plans were in harmony with our values. Everybody was there.\n\nI set up a big blackboard and we wrote down our goals\u2014the key things we wanted to do\u2014and the jobs that flowed out of those goals. Then I asked for volunteers to do the job.\n\n\"Who wants to pay the mortgage?\" I asked. I noticed I was the only one with my hand up.\n\n\"Who wants to pay for the insurance? The food? The cars?\" I seemed to have a real monopoly on the opportunities.\n\n\"Who wants to feed the new baby?\" There was more interest here, but my wife was the only one with the right qualifications for the job.\n\nAs we went down the list, job by job, it was soon evident that Mom and Dad had more than sixty-hour work weeks. With that paradigm in mind, some of the other jobs took on a more proper perspective.\n\nMy seven-year-old son, Stephen, volunteered to take care of the yard. Before I actually gave him the job, I began a thorough training process. I wanted him to have a clear picture in his mind of what a well cared for yard was like, so I took him next door to our neighbor's.\n\n\"Look, son,\" I said. \"See how our neighbor's yard is green and clean? That's what we're after: green and clean. Now come look at our yard. See the mixed colors? That's not it; that's not green. Green and clean is what we want. Now how you get it green is up to you. You're free to do it any way you want, except paint it. But I'll tell you how I'd do it if it were up to me.\"\n\n\"How would you do it, Dad?\"\n\n\"I'd turn on the sprinklers. But you may want to use buckets or a hose. It makes no difference to me. All we care about is that the color is green. Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n\"Now let's talk about 'clean,' Son. Clean means no messes around\u2014no paper, strings, bones, sticks, or anything that messes up the place. I'll tell you what let's do. Let's just clean up half the yard right now and look at the difference.\"\n\nSo we got out two paper sacks and picked up one side of the yard. \"Now look at this side. Look at the other side. See the difference? That's called clean.\"\n\n\"Wait!\" he called. \"I see some paper behind that bush!\"\n\n\"Oh, good! I didn't notice that newspaper back there. You have good eyes, Son.\n\n\"Now before you decide whether or not you're going to take the job, let me tell you a few more things. Because when you take the job, I don't do it anymore. It's your job. It's called a stewardship. Stewardship means 'a job with a trust.' I trust you to do the job, to get it done. Now who's going to be your boss?\"\n\n\"You, Dad?\"\n\n\"No, not me. You're the boss. You boss yourself. How do you like Mom and Dad nagging you all the time?\"\n\n\"I don't.\"\n\n\"We don't like doing it either. It sometimes causes a bad feeling, doesn't it? So you boss yourself. Now, guess who your helper is.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"I am,\" I said. \"You boss me.\"\n\n\"I do?\"\n\n\"That's right. But my time to help is limited. Sometimes I'm away. But when I'm here, you tell me how I can help. I'll do anything you want me to do.\"\n\n\"Okay!\"\n\n\"Now guess who judges you.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"You judge yourself.\"\n\n\"I do?\"\n\n\"That's right. Twice a week the two of us will walk around the yard, and you can show me how it's coming. How are you going to judge?\"\n\n\"Green and clean.\"\n\n\"Right!\"\n\nI trained him with those two words for two weeks before I felt he was ready to take the job. Finally, the big day came.\n\n\"Is it a deal, Son?\"\n\n\"It's a deal.\"\n\n\"What's the job?\"\n\n\"Green and clean.\"\n\n\"What's green?\"\n\nHe looked at our yard, which was beginning to look better. Then he pointed next door. \"That's the color of his yard.\"\n\n\"What's clean?\"\n\n\"No messes.\"\n\n\"Who's the boss?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"Who's your helper?\"\n\n\"You are, when you have time.\"\n\n\"Who's the judge?\"\n\n\"I am. We'll walk around two times a week and I can show you how it's coming.\"\n\n\"And what will we look for?\"\n\n\"Green and clean.\"\n\nAt that time I didn't mention an allowance. But I wouldn't hesitate to attach an allowance to such a stewardship.\n\nTwo weeks and two words. I thought he was ready.\n\nIt was Saturday. And he did nothing. Sunday... nothing. Monday... nothing. As I pulled out of the driveway on my way to work on Tuesday, I looked at the yellow, cluttered yard and the hot July sun on its way up. \"Surely he'll do it today,\" I thought. I could rationalize Saturday because that was the day we made the agreement. I could rationalize Sunday; Sunday was for other things. But I couldn't rationalize Monday. And now it was Tues\u00adday. Certainly he'd do it today. It was summertime. What else did he have to do?\n\nAll day I could hardly wait to return home to see what happened. As I rounded the corner, I was met with the same picture I left that morning. And there was my son at the park across the street playing.\n\nThis was not acceptable. I was upset and disillusioned by his performance after two weeks of training and all those commit\u00adments. We had a lot of effort, pride, and money invested in the yard and I could see it going down the drain. Besides, my neighbor's yard was manicured and beautiful, and the situation was beginning to get embarrassing.\n\nI was ready to go back to gofer delegation. Son, you get over here and pick up this garbage right now or else! I knew I could get the golden egg that way. But what about the goose? What would happen to his internal commitment?\n\nSo I faked a smile and yelled across the street, \"Hi, Son. How's it going?\"\n\n\"Fine!\" he returned.\n\n\"How's the yard coming?\" I knew the minute I said it I had broken our agreement. That's not the way we had set up an accounting. That's not what we had agreed.\n\nSo he felt justified in breaking it, too. \"Fine, Dad.\"\n\nI bit my tongue and waited until after dinner. Then I said, \"Son, let's do as we agreed. Let's walk around the yard together and you can show me how it's going in your stewardship.\"\n\nAs we started out the door, his chin began to quiver. Tears welled up in his eyes and, by the time we got out to the middle of the yard, he was whimpering.\n\n\"It's so hard, Dad!\"\n\nWhat's so hard? I thought to myself. You haven't done a single thing! But I knew what was hard\u2014self-management, self-supervision. So I said, \"Is there anything I can do to help?\"\n\n\"Would you, Dad?\" he sniffed.\n\n\"What was our agreement?\"\n\n\"You said you'd help me if you had time.\"\n\n\"I have time.\"\n\nSo he ran into the house and came back with two sacks. He handed me one. \"Will you pick that stuff up?\" He pointed to the garbage from Saturday night's barbecue. \"It makes me sick!\"\n\nSo I did. I did exactly what he asked me to do. And that was when he signed the agreement in his heart. It became his yard, his stewardship.\n\nHe only asked for help two or three more times that entire summer. He took care of that yard. He kept it greener and cleaner than it had ever been under my stewardship. He even reprimanded his brothers and sisters if they left so much as a gum wrapper on the lawn.\n\nTrust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people. But it takes time and patience, and it doesn't preclude the necessity to train and develop people so that their competency can rise to the level of that trust.\n\nI am convinced that if stewardship delegation is done correctly, both parties will benefit and ultimately much more work will get done in much less time. I believe that a family that is well organized, whose time has been spent effectively delegating on a one-on-one basis, can organize the work so that everyone can do everything in about an hour a day. But that takes the internal capacity to want to manage, not just to produce. The focus is on effectiveness, not efficiency.\n\nCertainly you can pick up that room better than a child, but the key is that you want to empower the child to do it. It takes time. You have to get involved in the training and development. It takes time, but how valuable that time is downstream! It saves you so much in the long run.\n\nThis approach involves an entirely new paradigm of delegation. In effect, it changes the nature of the relationship: The steward becomes his own boss, governed by a conscience that contains the commitment to agreed upon desired results. But it also releases his creative energies toward doing whatever is necessary in harmony with correct principles to achieve those desired results.\n\nThe principles involved in stewardship delegation are correct and applicable to any kind of person or situation. With immature people, you specify fewer desired results and more guidelines, identify more resources, conduct more frequent accountability interviews, and apply more immediate consequences. With more mature people, you have more challenging desired results, fewer guidelines, less frequent accountability, and less measurable but more discernable criteria.\n\nEffective delegation is perhaps the best indicator of effective management simply because it is so basic to both personal and organizational growth.\n\nTHE QUADRANT II PARADIGM\n\nThe key to effective management of self, or of others through delegation, is not in any technique or tool or extrinsic factor. It is intrinsic\u2014in the Quadrant II paradigm that empowers you to see through the lens of importance rather than urgency.\n\nI have included in the Appendix an exercise called \"A Quadrant II Day at the Office\" which will enable you to see in a busi\u00adness setting how powerfully this paradigm can impact your effectiveness.*\n\nAs you work to develop a Quadrant II paradigm, you will increase your ability to organize and execute every week of your life around your deepest priorities, to walk your talk. You will not be dependent on any other person or thing for the effective management of your life.\n\nInterestingly, every one of the Seven Habits is in Quadrant II. Every one deals with fundamentally important things that, if done on a regular basis, would make a tremendous positive difference in our lives.\n\nAPPLICATION SUGGESTIONS:\n\n  1. Identify a Quadrant II activity you know has been neglected in your life\u2014one that, if done well, would have a significant impact in your life, either personally or professionally. Write it down and commit to implement it.\n  2. Draw a time management matrix and try to estimate what percentage of your time you spend in each quadrant. Then log your time for three days in fifteen-minute intervals. How accurate was your estimate? Are you satisfied with the way you spend your time? What do you need to change?\n  3. Make a list of responsibilities you could delegate and the people you could delegate to or train to be responsible in these areas. Determine what is needed to start the process of delegation or training.\n  4. Organize your next week.* Start by writing down your roles and goals for the week, then transfer the goals to a specific action plan. At the end of the week, evaluate how well your plan translated your deep values and purposes into your daily life and the degree of integrity you were able to maintain to those values and purposes.\n  5. Commit yourself to start organizing on a weekly basis and set up a regular time to do it.\n  6. Either convert your current planning tool into a fourth generation tool or secure such a tool.\n  7. Go through \"A Quadrant II Day at the Office\" (Appendix B) for a more in-depth understanding of the impact of a Quadrant II paradigm.\n\n* * *\n\n##### Footnote\n\n*Please refer to Appendix B.\n\n*On the previous pages is a sample weekly schedule from the Seven Habits Organizer. If you would like samples of these schedules (which you can adapt to your current system), please call 1-800-255-0777 or visit our Internet home page at http:\/\/www.franklincovey.com. These schedules are also a feature of Microsoft Schedule + with Seven Habits.\n\n## _PART THREE_\n\n# PUBLIC VICTORY\n\n### Paradigms of Interdependence\n\nThere can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.\n\nSamuel Johnson\n\nBEFORE MOVING INTO THE AREA OF PUBLIC VICTORY, we should remember that effective interdependence can only be built on a founda\u00adtion of true independence. Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Algebra comes before calculus.\n\nAs we look back and survey the terrain to determine where we've been and where we are in relationship to where we're going, we clearly see that we could not have gotten where we are without coming the way we came. There aren't any other roads; there aren't any shortcuts. There's no way to parachute into this terrain. The landscape ahead is covered with the fragments of broken relationships of people who have tried. They've tried to jump into effective relationships without the maturity, the strength of char\u00adacter, to maintain them.\n\nBut you just can't do it; you simply have to travel the road. You can't be successful with other people if you haven't paid the price of success with yourself.\n\nA few years ago when I was giving a seminar on the Oregon coast, a man came up to me and said, \"You know, Stephen, I really don't enjoy coming to these seminars.\" He had my attention.\n\n\"Look at everyone else here,\" he continued. \"Look at this beautiful coastline and the sea out there and all that's happening. And all I can do is sit and worry about the grilling I'm going to get from my wife tonight on the phone.\n\n\"She gives me the third degree every time I'm away. Where did I eat breakfast? Who else was there? Was I in meetings all morning? When did we stop for lunch? What did I do during lunch? How did I spend the afternoon? What did I do for entertainment in the evening? Who was with me? What did we talk about?\n\n\"And what she really wants to know, but never quite asks, is who she can call to verify everything I tell her. She just nags me and questions everything I do whenever I'm away. It's taken the bloom out of this whole experience. I really don't enjoy it at all.\"\n\nHe did look pretty miserable. We talked for a while, and then he made a very interesting comment. \"I guess she knows all the questions to ask,\" he said a little sheepishly. \"It was at a semi\u00adnar like this that I met her... when I was married to someone else!\"\n\nI considered the implications of his comment and then said, \"You're kind of into 'quick fix,' aren't you?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" he replied.\n\n\"Well, you'd like to take a screwdriver and just open up your wife's head and rewire that attitude of hers really fast, wouldn't you?\"\n\n\"Sure, I'd like her to change,\" he exclaimed. \"I don't think it's right for her to constantly grill me like she does.\"\n\n\"My friend,\" I said, \"you can't talk your way out of problems you behave yourself into.\"\n\nWe're dealing with a very dramatic and very fundamental paradigm shift here. You may try to lubricate your social interac\u00adtions with personality techniques and skills, but in the process, you may truncate the vital character base. You can't have the fruits without the roots. It's the principle of sequencing: Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.\n\nSome people say that you have to like yourself before you can like others. I think that idea has merit, but if you don't know yourself, if you don't control yourself, if you don't have mastery over yourself, it's very hard to like yourself, except in some short-term, psych-up, superficial way.\n\nReal self-respect comes from dominion over self, from true independence. And that's the focus of Habits 1, 2, and 3. Inde\u00adpendence is an achievement. Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make. Unless we are willing to achieve real independence, it's foolish to try to develop human relations skills. We might try. We might even have some degree of success when the sun is shining. But when the difficult times come\u2014and they will\u2014we won't have the foundation to keep things together.\n\nThe most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won't be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.\n\nThe techniques and skills that really make a difference in human interaction are the ones that almost naturally flow from a truly independent character. So the place to begin building any relation\u00adship is inside ourselves, inside our Circle of Influence, our own character. As we become independent\u2014proactive, centered in correct principles, value driven and able to organize and execute around the priorities in our life with integrity\u2014we then can choose to become interdependent\u2014capable of building rich, enduring, highly productive relationships with other people.\n\nAs we look at the terrain ahead, we see that we're entering a whole new dimension. Interdependence opens up worlds of possibilities for deep, rich, meaningful associations, for geometri\u00adcally increased productivity, for serving, for contributing, for learning, for growing. But it is also where we feel the greatest pain, the greatest frustration, the greatest roadblocks to happiness and success. And we're very aware of that pain because it is acute.\n\nWe can often live for years with the chronic pain of our lack of vision, leadership or management in our personal lives. We feel vaguely uneasy and uncomfortable and occasionally take steps to ease the pain, at least for a time. Because the pain is chronic, we get used to it, we learn to live with it.\n\nBut when we have problems in our interactions with other people, we're very aware of acute pain\u2014it's often intense, and we want it to go away.\n\nThat's when we try to treat the symptoms with quick fixes and techniques\u2014the band-aids of the Personality Ethic. We don't understand that the acute pain is an outgrowth of the deeper, chronic problem. And until we stop treating the symptoms and start treating the problem, our efforts will only bring counterpro\u00adductive results. We will only be successful at obscuring the chronic pain even more.\n\nNow, as we think of effective interaction with others, let's go back to our earlier definition of effectiveness. We've said it's the P\/PC balance, the fundamental concept in the story of the goose and the golden egg.\n\nIn an interdependent situation, the golden eggs are the effec\u00adtiveness, the wonderful synergy, the results created by open communication and positive interaction with others. And to get those eggs on a regular basis, we need to take care of the goose. We need to create and care for the relationships that make those results realities.\n\nSo before we descend from our point of reconnaissance and get into Habits 4, 5, and 6, I would like to introduce what I believe to be a very powerful metaphor in describing relationships and in defining the P\/PC balance in an interdependent reality.\n\nTHE EMOTIONAL BANK ACCOUNT\n\nWe all know what a financial bank account is. We make deposits into it and build up a reserve from which we can make withdrawals when we need to. An Emotional Bank Account is a metaphor that describes the amount of trust that's been built up in a relationship. It's the feeling of safeness you have with another human being.\n\nIf I make deposits into an Emotional Bank Account with you through courtesy, kindness, honesty, and keeping my commit\u00adments to you, I build up a reserve. Your trust toward me becomes higher, and I can call upon that trust many times if I need to. I can even make mistakes and that trust level, that emotional reserve, will compensate for it. My communication may not be clear, but you'll get my meaning anyway. You won't make me \"an offender for a word.\" When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.\n\nBut if I have a habit of showing discourtesy, disrespect, cutting you off, overreacting, ignoring you, becoming arbitrary, betraying your trust, threatening you, or playing little tin god in your life, eventually my Emotional Bank Account is overdrawn. The trust level gets very low. Then what flexibility do I have?\n\nNone. I'm walking on mine fields. I have to be very careful of everything I say. I measure every word. It's tension city, memo haven. It's protecting my backside, politicking. And many organi\u00adzations are filled with it. Many families are filled with it. Many marriages are filled with it.\n\nIf a large reserve of trust is not sustained by continuing deposits, a marriage will deteriorate. Instead of rich, spontaneous understanding and communication, the situation becomes one of accom\u00admodation, where two people simply attempt to live independent life-styles in a fairly respectful and tolerant way. The relationship may further deteriorate to one of hostility and defensiveness. The \"fight or flight\" response creates verbal battles, slammed doors, refusal to talk, emotional withdrawal and self-pity. It may end up in a cold war at home, sustained only by children, sex, social pressure, or image protection. Or it may end up in open warfare in the courts, where bitter ego decimating legal battles can be carried on for years as people endlessly confess the sins of a former spouse.\n\nAnd this is in the most intimate, the most potentially rich, joyful, satisfying and productive relationship possible between two peo\u00adple on this earth. The P\/PC lighthouse is there; we can either break ourselves against it or we can use it as a guiding light.\n\nOur most constant relationships, like marriage, require our most constant deposits. With continuing expectations, old deposits evaporate. If you suddenly run into an old high school friend you haven't seen for years, you can pick up right where you left off because the earlier deposits are still there. But your accounts with the people you interact with on a regular basis require more constant investment. There are sometimes automatic withdrawals in your daily interactions or in their perception of you that you don't even know about. This is especially true with teenagers in the home.\n\nSuppose you have a teenage son and your normal conversation is something like, \"Clean your room. Button your shirt. Turn down the radio. Go get a haircut. And don't forget to take out the garbage!\" Over a period of time, the withdrawals far exceed the deposits.\n\nNow, suppose this son is in the process of making some important decisions that will affect the rest of his life. But the trust level is so low and the communication process so closed, mechan\u00adical, and unsatisfying that he simply will not be open to your counsel. You may have the wisdom and the knowledge to help him, but because your account is so overdrawn, he will end up making his decisions from a short-range emotional perspective, which may well result in many negative long-range consequences.\n\nYou need a positive balance to communicate on these tender issues. What do you do?\n\nWhat would happen if you started making deposits into the relationship? Maybe the opportunity comes up to do him a little kindness\u2014to bring home a magazine on skateboarding, if that's his interest, or just to walk up to him when he's working on a project and offer to help. Perhaps you could invite him to go to a movie with you or take him out for some ice cream. Probably the most important deposit you could make would be just to listen, without judging or preaching or reading your own autobiography into what he says. Just listen and seek to understand. Let him feel your concern for him, your acceptance of him as a person.\n\nHe may not respond at first. He may even be suspicious. \"What's Dad up to now? What technique is Mom trying on me this time?\" But as those genuine deposits keep coming, they begin to add up. That overdrawn balance is shrinking.\n\nRemember that quick fix is a mirage. Building and repairing relationships takes time. If you become impatient with his apparent lack of response or his seeming ingratitude, you may make huge withdrawals and undo all the good you've done. \"After all we've done for you, the sacrifices we've made, how can you be so ungrateful? We try to be nice and you act like this. I can't believe it!\"\n\nIt's hard not to get impatient. It takes character to be proactive, to focus on your Circle of Influence, to nurture growing things, and not to \"pull up the flowers to see how the roots are coming.\"\n\nBut there really is no quick fix. Building and repairing relation\u00adships are long-term investments.\n\nSIX MAJOR DEPOSITS\n\nLet me suggest six major deposits that build the Emotional Bank Account.\n\nUnderstanding the Individual\n\nReally seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit. You simply don't know what constitutes a deposit to another person until you understand that individual. What might be a deposit for you\u2014going for a walk to talk things over, going out for ice cream together, working on a common project\u2014might not be perceived by someone else as a deposit at all. It might even be perceived as a withdrawal, if it doesn't touch the person's deep interests or needs.\n\nOne person's mission is another person's minutia. To make a deposit, what is important to another person must be as important to you as the other person is to you. You may be working on a high priority project when your six-year-old child interrupts with some\u00adthing that seems trivial to you, but it may be very important from his point of view. It takes Habit 2 to recognize and recommit yourself to the value of that person and Habit 3 to subordinate your schedule to that human priority. By accepting the value he places on what he has to say, you show an understanding of him that makes a great deposit.\n\nI have a friend whose son developed an avid interest in baseball. My friend wasn't interested in baseball at all. But one summer, he took his son to see every major league team play one game. The trip took over six weeks and cost a great deal of money, but it became a powerful bonding experience in their relationship.\n\nMy friend was asked on his return, \"Do you like baseball that much?\"\n\n\"No,\" he replied, \"but I like my son that much.\"\n\nI have another friend, a college professor, who had a terrible relationship with his teenage son. This man's entire life was essentially academic, and he felt his son was totally wasting his life by working with his hands instead of working to develop his mind. As a result, he was almost constantly on the boy's back, and, in moments of regret, he would try to make deposits that just didn't work. The boy perceived the gestures as new forms of rejection, comparison, and judgment, and they precipitated huge withdraw\u00adals. The relationship was turning sour, and it was breaking the father's heart.\n\nOne day I shared with him this principle of making what is important to the other person as important to you as the other person is to you. He took it deeply to heart. He engaged his son in a project to build a miniature Wall of China around their home. It was a consuming project, and they worked side by side on it for over a year and a half.\n\nThrough that bonding experience, the son moved through that phase in his life and into an increased desire to develop his mind. But the real benefit was what happened to the relationship. Instead of a sore spot, it became a source of joy and strength to both father and son.\n\nOur tendency is to project out of our own autobiographies what we think other people want or need. We project our intentions on the behavior of others. We interpret what constitutes a deposit based on our own needs and desires, either now or when we were at a similar age or stage in life. If they don't interpret our effort as a deposit, our tendency is to take it as a rejection of our well intentioned effort and to give up.\n\nThe Golden Rule says to \"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.\" While on the surface that could mean to do for them what you would like to have done for you, I think the more essential meaning is to understand them deeply as individ\u00aduals, the way you would want to be understood, and then to treat them in terms of that understanding. As one successful parent said about raising children, \"Treat them all the same by treating them differently.\"\n\nAttending to the Little Things\n\nThe little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. Small discourtesies, little unkindnesses, little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals. In relationships, the little things are the big things.\n\nI remember an evening I spent with two of my sons some years ago. It was an organized father and son outing, complete with gymnastics, wrestling matches, hotdogs, orangeade, and a movie\u2014the works.\n\nIn the middle of the movie, Sean, who was then four years old, fell asleep in his seat. His older brother, Stephen, who was six, stayed awake, and we watched the rest of the movie together. When it was over, I picked Sean up in my arms, carried him out to the car and laid him in the back seat. It was very cold that night, so I took off my coat and gently arranged it over and around him.\n\nWhen we arrived home, I quickly carried Sean in and tucked him into bed. After Stephen put on his \"jammies\" and brushed his teeth, I lay down next to him to talk about the night out together.\n\n\"How'd you like it, Stephen?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" he answered.\n\n\"Did you have fun?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What did you like most?\"\n\n\"I don't know. The trampoline, I guess.\"\n\n\"That was quite a thing, wasn't it\u2014doing those somersaults and tricks in the air like that?\"\n\nThere wasn't much response on his part. I found myself making conversation. I wondered why Stephen wouldn't open up more. He usually did when exciting things happened. I was a little disappointed. I sensed something was wrong; he had been so quiet on the way home and getting ready for bed.\n\nSuddenly Stephen turned over on his side, facing the wall. I wondered why and lifted myself up just enough to see his eyes welling up with tears.\n\n\"What's wrong, honey? What is it?\"\n\nHe turned back, and I could sense he was feeling some embar\u00adrassment for the tears and his quivering lips and chin.\n\n\"Daddy, if I were cold, would you put your coat around me, too?\"\n\nOf all the events of that special night out together, the most important was a little act of kindness\u2014a momentary, unconscious showing of love to his little brother.\n\nWhat a powerful, personal lesson that experience was to me then and is even now. People are very tender, very sensitive inside. I don't believe age or experience makes much difference. Inside, even within the most toughened and calloused exteriors, are the tender feelings and emotions of the heart.\n\nKeeping Commitments\n\nKeeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal. In fact, there's probably not a more massive withdrawal than to make a promise that's important to someone and then not to come through. The next time a promise is made, they won't believe it. People tend to build their hopes around promises, particularly promises about their basic liveli\u00adhood.\n\nI've tried to adopt a philosophy as a parent never to make a promise I don't keep. I therefore try to make them very carefully, very sparingly, and to be aware of as many variables and contin\u00adgencies as possible so that something doesn't suddenly come up to keep me from fulfilling it.\n\nOccasionally, despite all my effort, the unexpected does come up, creating a situation where it would be unwise or impossible to keep a promise I've made. But I value that promise. I either keep it anyway, or explain the situation thoroughly to the person involved and ask to be released from the promise.\n\nI believe that if you cultivate the habit of always keeping the promises you make, you build bridges of trust that span the gaps of understanding between you and your child. Then, when your child wants to do something you don't want him to do, and out of your maturity you can see consequences that the child cannot see, you can say, \"Son, if you do this, I promise you that this will be the result.\" If that child has cultivated trust in your word, in your promises, he will act on your counsel.\n\nClarifying Expectations\n\nImagine the difficulty you might encounter if you and your boss had different assumptions regarding whose role it was to create your job description.\n\n\"When am I going to get my job description?\" you might ask.\n\n\"I've been waiting for you to bring one to me so that we could discuss it,\" your boss might reply.\n\n\"I thought defining my job was your role.\"\n\n\"That's not my role at all. Don't you remember? Right from the first, I said that how you do in the job largely depends on you.\"\n\n\"I thought you meant that the quality of my job depended on me. But I don't even know what my job really is.\"\n\nUnclear expectations in the area of goals also undermine com\u00admunication and trust.\n\n\"I did exactly what you asked me to do and here is the report.\"\n\n\"I don't want a report. The goal was to solve the problem\u2014not to analyze it and report on it.\"\n\n\"I thought the goal was to get a handle on the problem so we could delegate it to someone else.\"\n\nHow many times have we had these kinds of conversations?\n\n\"You said....\"\n\n\"No, you're wrong! I said....\"\n\n\"You did not! You never said I was supposed to....\"\n\n\"Oh, yes I did! I clearly said....\"\n\n\"You never even mentioned....\"\n\n\"But that was our agreement....\"\n\nThe cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals. Whether we are dealing with the question of who does what at work, how you communicate with your daughter when you tell her to clean her room, or who feeds the fish and takes out the garbage, we can be certain that unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding, disappointment, and withdrawals of trust.\n\nMany expectations are implicit. They haven't been explicitly stated or announced, but people nevertheless bring them to a particular situation. In marriage, for example, a man and a woman have implicit expectations of each other in their marriage roles. Although these expectations have not been discussed, or some\u00adtimes even recognized by the person who has them, fulfilling them makes great deposits in the relationship and violating them makes withdrawals.\n\nThat's why it's so important whenever you come into a new situation to get all the expectations out on the table. People will begin to judge each other through those expectations. And if they feel like their basic expectations have been violated, the reserve of trust is diminished. We create many negative situations by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly understood and shared by other people.\n\nThe deposit is to make the expectations clear and explicit in the beginning. This takes a real investment of time and effort up front, but it saves great amounts of time and effort down the road. When expectations are not clear and shared, people begin to become emotionally involved and simple misunderstandings become compounded, turning into personality clashes and communication breakdowns.\n\nClarifying expectations sometimes takes a great deal of courage. It seems easier to act as though differences don't exist and to hope things will work out than it is to face the differences and work together to arrive at a mutually agreeable set of expectations.\n\nShowing Personal Integrity\n\nPersonal Integrity generates trust and is the basis of many different kinds of deposits.\n\nLack of integrity can undermine almost any other effort to create high trust accounts. People can seek to understand, remember the little things, keep their promises, clarify and fulfill expectations, and still fail to build reserves of trust if they are inwardly duplicitous.\n\nIntegrity includes but goes beyond honesty. Honesty is telling the truth\u2014in other words, conforming our words to reality. Integrity is conforming reality to our words\u2014in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. This requires an integrated character, a oneness, primarily with self but also with life.\n\nOne of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present. When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present.\n\nSuppose you and I were talking alone, and we were criticizing our supervisor in a way that we would not dare to do if he were present. Now what will happen when you and I have a falling out? You know I'm going to be discussing your weaknesses with someone else. That's what you and I did behind our supervisor's back. You know my nature. I'll sweet-talk you to your face and bad-mouth you behind your back. You've seen me do it.\n\nThat's the essence of duplicity. Does that build a reserve of trust in my account with you?\n\nOn the other hand, suppose you were to start criticizing our supervisor and I basically told you I agree with the content of some of the criticism and suggest that the two of us go directly to him and make an effective presentation on how things might be improved. Then what would you know I would do if someone were to criticize you to me behind your back?\n\nFor another example, suppose in my effort to build a relationship with you, I told you something someone else had shared with me in confidence. \"I really shouldn't tell you this,\" I might say, \"but since you're my friend....\" Would my betraying another person build my trust account with you? Or would you wonder if the things you had told me in confidence were being shared with others?\n\nSuch duplicity might appear to be making a deposit with the person you're with, but it is actually a withdrawal because you communicate your own lack of integrity. You may get the golden egg of temporary pleasure from putting someone down or sharing privileged information, but you're strangling the goose, weakening the relationship that provides enduring pleasure in association.\n\nIntegrity in an interdependent reality is simply this: you treat everyone by the same set of principles. As you do, people will come to trust you. They may not at first appreciate the honest confrontational experiences such integrity might generate. Con\u00adfrontation takes considerable courage, and many people would prefer to take the course of least resistance, belittling and criticiz\u00ading, betraying confidences, or participating in gossip about others behind their backs. But in the long run, people will trust and respect you if you are honest and open and kind with them. You care enough to confront. And to be trusted, it is said, is greater than to be loved. In the long run, I am convinced, to be trusted will be also to be loved.\n\nWhen my son Joshua was quite young, he would frequently ask me a soul-searching question. Whenever I overreacted to someone else or was the least bit impatient or unkind, he was so vulnerable and so honest and our relationship was so good that he would simply look me in the eye and say, \"Dad, do you love me?\" If he thought I was breaking a basic principle of life toward someone else, he wondered if I wouldn't break it with him.\n\nAs a teacher, as well as a parent, I have found that the key to the ninety-nine is the one\u2014particularly the one that is testing the patience and the good humor of the many. It is the love and the discipline of the one student, the one child, that communicates love for the others. It's how you treat the one that reveals how you regard the ninety-nine, because everyone is ultimately a one.\n\nIntegrity also means avoiding any communication that is decep\u00adtive, full of guile, or beneath the dignity of people. \"A lie is any communication with intent to deceive,\" according to one definition of the word. Whether we communicate with words or behavior, if we have integrity, our intent cannot be to deceive.\n\nApologizing Sincerely When You Make a Withdrawal\n\nWhen we make withdrawals from the Emotional Bank Account, we need to apologize and we need to do it sincerely. Great deposits come in the sincere words:\n\n\"I was wrong.\"\n\n\"That was unkind of me.\"\n\n\"I showed you no respect.\"\n\n\"I gave you no dignity, and I'm deeply sorry.\"\n\n\"I embarrassed you in front of your friends and I had no call to do that. Even though I wanted to make a point, I never should have done it. I apologize.\"\n\nIt takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one's heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.\n\nPeople with little internal security can't do it. It makes them too vulnerable. They feel it makes them appear soft and weak, and they fear that others will take advantage of their weakness. Their security is based on the opinions of other people, and they worry about what others might think. In addition, they usually feel justified in what they did. They rationalize their own wrong in the name of the other person's wrong, and if they apologize at all, it's superficial.\n\n\"If you're going to bow, bow low,\" says Eastern wisdom. \"Pay the uttermost farthing,\" says the Christian ethic. To be a deposit, an apology must be sincere. And it must be perceived as sincere.\n\nLeo Roskin taught, \"It is the weak who are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.\"\n\nI was in my office at home one afternoon writing, of all things, on the subject of patience. I could hear the boys running up and down the hall making loud banging noises, and I could feel my own patience beginning to wane.\n\nSuddenly, my son David started pounding on the bathroom door, yelling at the top of his lungs, \"Let me in! Let me in!\"\n\nI rushed out of the office and spoke to him with great intensity. \"David, do you have any idea how disturbing that is to me? Do you know how hard it is to try to concentrate and write creatively? Now, you go into your room and stay in there until you can behave yourself.\" So in he went, dejected, and shut the door.\n\nAs I turned around, I became aware of another problem. The boys had been playing tackle football in the four-foot-wide hallway, and one of them had been elbowed in the mouth. He was lying there in the hall, bleeding from the mouth. David, I discovered, had gone to the bathroom to get a wet towel for him. But his sister, Maria, who was taking a shower, wouldn't open the door.\n\nWhen I realized that I had completely misinterpreted the situa\u00adtion and had overreacted, I immediately went in to apologize to David.\n\nAs I opened the door, the first thing he said to me was, \"I won't forgive you.\"\n\n\"Well, why not, honey?\" I replied. \"Honestly, I didn't realize you were trying to help your brother. Why won't you forgive me?\"\n\n\"Because you did the same thing last week,\" he replied. In other words, he was saying, \"Dad, you're overdrawn, and you're not going to talk your way out of a problem you behaved yourself into.\"\n\nSincere apologies make deposits; repeated apologies interpreted as insincere make withdrawals. And the quality of the relationship reflects it.\n\nIt is one thing to make a mistake, and quite another thing not to admit it. People will forgive mistakes, because mistakes are usually of the mind, mistakes of judgment. But people will not easily forgive the mistakes of the heart, the ill intention, the bad motives, the prideful justifying cover-up of the first mistake.\n\nThe Laws of Love and the Laws of Life\n\nWhen we make deposits of unconditional love, when we live the primary laws of love, we encourage others to live the primary laws of life. In other words, when we truly love others without condition, without strings, we help them feel secure and safe and validated and affirmed in their essential worth, identity, and integrity. Their natural growth process is encouraged. We make it easier for them to live the laws of life\u2014cooperation, contribution, self-discipline, integrity\u2014and to discover and live true to the highest and best within them. We give them the freedom to act on their own inner imperatives rather than react to our conditions and limitations. This does not mean we become permissive or soft. That itself is a massive withdrawal. We counsel, we plead, we set limits and consequences. But we love, regardless.\n\nWhen we violate the primary laws of love\u2014when we attach strings and conditions to that gift\u2014we actually encourage others to violate the primary laws of life. We put them in a reactive, defensive position where they feel they have to prove \"I matter as a person, independent of you.\"\n\nIn reality, they aren't independent. They are counter-dependent, which is another form of dependency and is at the lowest end of the Maturity Continuum. They become reactive, almost enemy-centered, more concerned about defending their \"rights\" and producing evidence of their individuality than they are about proactively listening to and honoring their own inner imperatives.\n\nRebellion is a knot of the heart, not of the mind. The key is to make deposits\u2014constant deposits of unconditional love.\n\nI once had a friend who was dean of a very prestigious school.* He planned and saved for years to provide his son the opportunity to attend that institution, but when the time came, the boy refused to go.\n\nThis deeply concerned his father. Graduating from that particu\u00adlar school would have been a great asset to the boy. Besides, it was a family tradition. Three generations of attendance preceded the boy. The father pleaded and urged and talked. He also tried to listen to the boy to understand him, all the while hoping that the son would change his mind.\n\nThe subtle message being communicated was one of conditional love. The son felt that in a sense the father's desire for him to attend the school outweighed the value he placed on him as a person and as a son, which was terribly threatening. Conse\u00adquently, he fought for and with his own identity and integrity, and he increased in his resolve and his efforts to rationalize his decision not to go.\n\nAfter some intense soul-searching, the father decided to make a sacrifice\u2014to renounce conditional love. He knew that his son might choose differently than he had wished; nevertheless, he and his wife resolved to love their son unconditionally, regardless of his choice. It was an extremely difficult thing to do because the value of his educational experience was so close to their hearts and because it was something they had planned and worked for since his birth.\n\nThe father and mother went through a very difficult rescripting process, struggling to really understand the nature of uncondi\u00adtional love. They communicated to the boy what they were doing and why, and told him that they had come to the point at which they could say in all honesty that his decision would not affect their complete feeling of unconditional love toward him. They didn't do this to manipulate him, to try to get him to \"shape up.\" They did it as the logical extension of their growth and character.\n\nThe boy didn't give much of a response at the time, but his parents had such a paradigm of unconditional love at that point that it would have made no difference in their feelings for him. About a week later, he told his parents that he had decided not to go. They were perfectly prepared for this response and continued to show unconditional love for him. Everything was settled and life went along normally.\n\nA short time later, an interesting thing happened. Now that the boy no longer felt he had to defend his position, he searched within himself more deeply and found that he really did want to have this educational experience. He applied for admission, and then he told his father, who again showed unconditional love by fully accepting his son's decision. My friend was happy, but not excessively so, because he had truly learned to love without condition.\n\nDag Hammarskjold, past Secretary-General of the United Na\u00adtions, once made a profound, far-reaching statement: \"It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.\"\n\nI take that to mean that I could devote eight, ten, or twelve hours a day, five, six, or seven days a week to the thousands of people and projects \"out there\" and still not have a deep, meaningful relationship with my own spouse, with my own teenage son, with my closest working associate. And it would take more nobility of character\u2014more humility, courage, and strength\u2014to rebuild that one relationship than it would to continue putting in all those hours for all those people and causes.\n\nIn twenty-five years of consulting with organizations, I have been impressed over and over again by the power of that state\u00adment. Many of the problems in organizations stem from relation\u00adship difficulties at the very top\u2014between two partners in a professional firm, between the owner and the president of a company, between the president and an executive vice-president. It truly takes more nobility of character to confront and resolve those issues than it does to continue to diligently work for the many projects and people \"out there.\"\n\nWhen I first came across Hammarskjold's statement, I was working in an organization where there were unclear expectations between the individual who was my right-hand man and myself. I simply did not have the courage to confront our differences regarding role and goal expectations and values, particularly in our methods of administration. So I worked for a number of months in a compromise mode to avoid what might turn out to be an ugly confrontation. All the while, bad feelings were developing inside both of us.\n\nAfter reading that it is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses, I was deeply affected by the idea of rebuilding that relationship.\n\nI had to steel myself for what lay ahead, because I knew it would be hard to really get the issues out and to achieve a deep, common understanding and commitment. I remember actually shaking in anticipation of the visit. He seemed like such a hard man, so set in his own ways and so right in his own eyes; yet I needed his strengths and abilities. I was afraid a confrontation might jeopar\u00addize the relationship and result in my losing those strengths.\n\nI went through a mental dress rehearsal of the anticipated visit, and I finally became settled within myself around the principles rather than the practices of what I was going to do and say. At last I felt peace of mind and the courage to have the communication.\n\nWhen we met together, to my total surprise, I discovered that this man had been going through the very same process and had been longing for such a conversation. He was anything but hard and defensive.\n\nNevertheless, our administrative styles were considerably different, and the entire organization was responding to these differ\u00adences. We both acknowledged the problems that our disunity had created. Over several visits, we were able to confront the deeper issues, to get them all out on the table, and to resolve them, one by one, with a spirit of high mutual respect. We were able to develop a powerful complementary team and a deep personal affection which added tremendously to our ability to work effectively together.\n\nCreating the unity necessary to run an effective business or a family or a marriage requires great personal strength and courage. No amount of technical administrative skill in laboring for the masses can make up for lack of nobility of personal character in developing relationships. It is at a very essential, one-on-one level, that we live the primary laws of love and life.\n\nP PROBLEMS ARE PC OPPORTUNITIES\n\nThis experience also taught me another powerful paradigm of interdependence. It deals with the way in which we see problems. I had lived for months trying to avoid the problem, seeing it as a source of irritation, a stumbling block, and wishing it would somehow go away. But, as it turned out, the very problem created the opportunity to build a deep relationship that empowered us to work together as a strong complementary team.\n\nI suggest that in an interdependent situation, every P problem is a PC opportunity\u2014a chance to build the Emotional Bank Accounts that significantly affect interdependent production.\n\nWhen parents see their children's problems as opportunities to build the relationship instead of as negative, burdensome irrita\u00adtions, it totally changes the nature of parent-child interaction. Parents become more willing, even excited, about deeply under\u00adstanding and helping their children. When a child comes to them with a problem, instead of thinking, \"Oh, no! Not another prob\u00adlem!\" their paradigm is, \"Here is a great opportunity for me to really help my child and to invest in our relationship.\" Many interactions change from transactional to transformational, and strong bonds of love and trust are created as children sense the value parents give to their problems and to them as individuals.\n\nThis paradigm is powerful in business as well. One department store chain that operates from this paradigm has created a great loyalty among its customers. Any time a customer comes into the store with a problem, no matter how small, the clerks immediately see it as an opportunity to build the relationship with the customer. They respond with a cheerful, positive desire to solve the problem in a way that will make the customer happy. They treat the customer with such grace and respect, giving such second-mile service, that many of the customers don't even think of going anywhere else.\n\nBy recognizing that the P\/PC balance is necessary to effectiveness in an interdependent reality, we can value our problems as opportunities to increase PC.\n\nTHE HABITS OF INTERDEPENDENCE\n\nWith the paradigm of the Emotional Bank Account in mind, we're ready to move into the habits of Public Victory, of success in working with other people. As we do, we can see how these habits work together to create effective interdependence. We can also see how powerfully scripted we are in other patterns of thought and behavior.\n\nIn addition, we can see on an even deeper level that effective interdependence can only be achieved by truly independent people. It is impossible to achieve Public Victory with popular \"Win\/Win negotiation\" techniques or \"reflective listening\" techniques or \"creative problem-solving\" techniques that focus on personality and truncate the vital character base.\n\nLet's now focus on each of the Public Victory habits in depth.\n\n* * *\n\n##### Foot Note\n\n* Some of the details of this story have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.\n\n### HABIT 4  \nTHINK WIN\/WIN\n\n### PRINCIPLES OF INTERPERSONAL LEADERSHIP\n\nWe have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.\n\nEdwin Markham\n\nONE TIME I WAS ASKED TO WORK WITH A COMPANY whose president was very concerned about the lack of cooperation among his people.\n\n\"Our basic problem, Stephen, is that they're selfish,\" he said. \"They just won't cooperate. I know if they would cooperate, we could produce so much more. Can you help us develop a human relations program that will solve the problem?\"\n\n\"Is your problem the people or the paradigm?\" I asked.\n\n\"Look for yourself,\" he replied.\n\nSo I did. And I found that there was a real selfishness, an unwillingness to cooperate, a resistance to authority, defensive communication. I could see that overdrawn Emotional Bank Ac\u00adcounts had created a culture of low trust. But I pressed the question.\n\n\"Let's look at it deeper,\" I suggested. \"Why don't your people cooperate? What is the reward for not cooperating?\"\n\n\"There's no reward for not cooperating,\" he assured me. \"The rewards are much greater if they do cooperate.\"\n\n\"Are they?\" I asked. Behind a curtain on one wall of this man's office was a chart. On the chart were a number of racehorses all lined up on a track. Superimposed on the face of each horse was the face of one of his managers. At the end of the track was a beautiful travel poster of Bermuda, an idyllic picture of blue skies and fleecy clouds and a romantic couple walking hand in hand down a white sandy beach.\n\nOnce a week, this man would bring all his people into this office and talk cooperation. \"Let's all work together. We'll all make more money if we do.\" Then he would pull the curtain and show them the chart. \"Now which of you is going to win the trip to Bermuda?\"\n\nIt was like telling one flower to grow and watering another, like saying \"firings will continue until morale improves.\" He wanted cooperation. He wanted his people to work together, to share ideas, to all benefit from the effort. But he was setting them up in competition with each other. One manager's success meant failure for the other managers.\n\nAs with many, many problems between people in business, family, and other relationships, the problem in this company was the result of a flawed paradigm. The president was trying to get the fruits of cooperation from a paradigm of competition. And when it didn't work, he wanted a technique, a program, a quick fix antidote to make his people cooperate.\n\nBut you can't change the fruit without changing the root. Working on the attitudes and behaviors would have been hacking at the leaves. So we focused instead on producing personal and organizational excellence in an entirely different way by developing information and reward systems which reinforced the value of cooperation.\n\nWhether you are the president of a company or the janitor, the moment you step from independence into interdependence in any capacity, you step into a leadership role. You are in a position of influencing other people. And the habit of effective interpersonal leadership is Think Win\/Win.\n\nSIX PARADIGMS OF HUMAN INTERACTION\n\nWin\/Win is not a technique; it's a total philosophy of human interaction. In fact, it is one of six paradigms of interaction. The alternative paradigms are Win\/Lose, Lose\/Win, Lose\/Lose, Win, and Win\/Win or No Deal.\n\n  * Win\/Win\n  * Win\/Lose\n  * Lose\/Win |   * Lose\/Lose\n  * Win\n  * Win\/Win or No Deal\n\n---|---\n\nWin\/Win\n\nWin\/Win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win\/Win means that agreements or solutions are mutually beneficial, mutually satisfy\u00ading. With a Win\/Win solution, all parties feel good about the decision and feel committed to the action plan. Win\/Win sees life as a cooperative, not a competitive arena. Most people tend to think in terms of dichotomies: strong or weak, hardball or softball, win or lose. But that kind of thinking is fundamentally flawed. It's based on power and position rather than on principle. Win\/Win is based on the paradigm that there is plenty for everybody, that one person's success is not achieved at the expense or exclusion of the success of others.\n\nWin\/Win is a belief in the Third Alternative. It's not your way or my way; it's a better way, a higher way.\n\nWin\/Lose\n\nOne alternative to Win\/Win is Win\/Lose, the paradigm of the race to Bermuda. It says \"If I win, you lose.\"\n\nIn leadership style, Win\/Lose is the authoritarian approach: \"I get my way; you don't get yours.\" Win\/Lose people are prone to use position, power, credentials, possessions, or personality to get their way.\n\nMost people have been deeply scripted in the Win\/Lose mental\u00adity since birth. First and most important of the powerful forces at work is the family. When one child is compared with another\u2014when patience, understanding or love is given or withdrawn on the basis of such comparisons\u2014people are into Win\/Lose thinking. Whenever love is given on a conditional basis, when someone has to earn love, what's being communicated to them is that they are not intrinsically valuable or lovable. Value does not lie inside them, it lies outside. It's in comparison with somebody else or against some expectation.\n\nAnd what happens to a young mind and heart, highly vulnera\u00adble, highly dependent upon the support and emotional affirmation of the parents, in the face of conditional love? The child is molded, shaped, and programmed in the Win\/Lose mentality.\n\n\"If I'm better than my brother, my parents will love me more.\"\n\n\"My parents don't love me as much as they love my sister. I must not be as valuable.\"\n\nAnother powerful scripting agency is the peer group. A child first wants acceptance from his parents and then from his peers, whether they be siblings or friends. And we all know how cruel peers sometimes can be. They often accept or reject totally on the basis of conformity to their expectations and norms, providing additional scripting toward Win\/Lose.\n\nThe academic world reinforces Win\/Lose scripting. The \"normal distribution curve\" basically says that you got an \"A\" because someone else got a \"C.\" It interprets an individual's value by comparing him or her to everyone else. No recognition is given to intrinsic value; everyone is extrinsically defined.\n\n\"Oh, how nice to see you here at our PTA meeting. You ought to be really proud of your daughter, Caroline. She's in the upper 10 percent.\"\n\n\"That makes me feel good.\"\n\n\"But your son, Johnny, is in trouble. He's in the lower quartile.\"\n\n\"Really? Oh, that's terrible! What can we do about it?\"\n\nWhat this kind of comparative information doesn't tell you is that perhaps Johnny is going on all eight cylinders while Caroline is coasting on four of her eight. But people are not graded against their potential or against the full use of their present capacity. They are graded in relation to other people. And grades are carriers of social value; they open doors of opportunity or they close them. Competition, not cooperation, lies at the core of the educational process. Cooperation, in fact, is usually associated with cheating.\n\nAnother powerful programming agent is athletics, particularly for young men in their high school or college years. Often they develop the basic paradigm that life is a big game, a zero sum game where some win and some lose. \"Winning\" is \"beating\" in the athletic arena.\n\nAnother agent is law. We live in a litigious society. The first thing many people think about when they get into trouble is suing someone, taking them to court, \"winning\" at someone else's expense. But defensive minds are neither creative nor cooperative.\n\nCertainly we need law or else society will deteriorate. It provides survival, but it doesn't create synergy. At best it results in compromise. Law is based on an adversarial concept. The recent trend of encouraging lawyers and law schools to focus on peaceable negotiation, the techniques of Win\/Win, and the use of private courts, may not provide the ultimate solution, but it does reflect a growing awareness of the problem.\n\nCertainly there is a place for Win\/Lose thinking in truly compet\u00aditive and low-trust situations. But most of life is not a competition. We don't have to live each day competing with our spouse, our children, our coworkers, our neighbors, and our friends. \"Who's winning in your marriage?\" is a ridiculous question. If both people aren't winning, both are losing.\n\nMost of life is an interdependent, not an independent, reality. Most results you want depend on cooperation between you and others. And the Win\/Lose mentality is dysfunctional to that cooperation.\n\nLose\/Win\n\nSome people are programmed the other way\u2014Lose\/Win.\n\n\"I lose, you win.\"\n\n\"Go ahead. Have your way with me.\"\n\n\"Step on me again. Everyone does.\"\n\n\"I'm a loser. I've always been a loser.\"\n\n\"I'm a peacemaker. I'll do anything to keep peace.\"\n\nLose\/Win is worse than Win\/Lose because it has no standards\u2014no demands, no expectations, no vision. People who think Lose\/Win are usually quick to please or appease. They seek strength from popularity or acceptance. They have little courage to express their own feelings and convictions and are easily intimidated by the ego strength of others.\n\nIn negotiation, Lose\/Win is seen as capitulation\u2014giving in or giving up. In leadership style, it's permissiveness or indulgence. Lose\/Win means being a nice guy, even if \"nice guys finish last.\"\n\nWin\/Lose people love Lose\/Win people because they can feed on them. They love their weaknesses\u2014they take advantage of them. Such weaknesses complement their strengths.\n\nBut the problem is that Lose\/Win people bury a lot of feelings. And unexpressed feelings never die: they're buried alive and come forth later in uglier ways. Psychosomatic illnesses, particularly of the respiratory, nervous, and circulatory systems often are the reincarnation of cumulative resentment, deep disappointment and disillusionment repressed by the Lose\/Win mentality. Dispropor\u00adtionate rage or anger, overreaction to minor provocation, and cynicism are other embodiments of suppressed emotion.\n\nPeople who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings towards a higher meaning find that it affects the quality of their self-esteem and eventually the quality of their relationships with others.\n\nBoth Win\/Lose and Lose\/Win are weak positions, based in personal insecurities. In the short run, Win\/Lose will produce more results because it draws on the often considerable strengths and talents of the people at the top. Lose\/Win is weak and chaotic from the outset.\n\nMany executives, managers, and parents swing back and forth, as if on a pendulum, from Win\/Lose inconsideration to Lose\/Win indulgence. When they can't stand confusion and lack of structure, direction, expectation, and discipline any longer, they swing back to Win\/Lose\u2014until guilt undermines their resolve and drives them back to Lose\/Win\u2014until anger and frustration drive them back to Win\/Lose again.\n\nLose\/Lose\n\nWhen two Win\/Lose people get together\u2014that is, when two determined, stubborn, ego-invested individuals interact\u2014the re\u00adsult will be Lose\/Lose. Both will lose. Both will become vindictive and want to \"get back\" or \"get even,\" blind to the fact that murder is suicide, that revenge is a two-edged sword.\n\nI know of a divorce in which the husband was directed by the judge to sell the assets and turn over half the proceeds to his ex-wife. In compliance, he sold a car worth over $10,000 for $50 and gave $25 to the wife. When the wife protested, the court clerk checked on the situation and discovered that the husband was proceeding in the same manner systematically through all of the assets.\n\nSome people become so centered on an enemy, so totally obsessed with the behavior of another person that they become blind to everything except their desire for that person to lose, even if it means losing themselves. Lose\/Lose is the philosophy of adversarial conflict, the philosophy of war.\n\nLose\/Lose is also the philosophy of the highly dependent person without inner direction who is miserable and thinks everyone else should be, too. \"If nobody ever wins, perhaps being a loser isn't so bad.\"\n\nWin\n\nAnother common alternative is simply to think Win. People with the Win mentality don't necessarily want someone else to lose. That's irrelevant. What matters is that they get what they want.\n\nWhen there is no sense of contest or competition, Win is probably the most common approach in everyday negotiation. A person with the Win mentality thinks in terms of securing his own ends\u2014and leaving it to others to secure theirs.\n\nWhich Option Is Best?\n\nOf these five philosophies discussed so far\u2014Win\/Win, Win\/Lose, Lose\/Win, Lose\/Lose, and Win\u2014which is the most effective? The answer is, \"It depends.\" If you win a football game, that means the other team loses. If you work in a regional office that is miles away from another regional office, and you don't have any functional relationship between the offices, you may want to compete in a Win\/Lose situation to stimulate business. However, you would not want to set up a Win\/Lose situation like the \"Race to Bermuda\" contest within a company or in a situation where you need cooperation among people or groups of people to achieve maximum success.\n\nIf you value a relationship and the issue isn't really that important, you may want to go for Lose\/Win in some circumstances to genuinely affirm the other person. \"What I want isn't as important to me as my relationship with you. Let's do it your way this time.\" You might also go for Lose\/Win if you feel the expense of time and effort to achieve a win of any kind would violate other higher values. Maybe it just isn't worth it.\n\nThere are circumstances in which you would want to Win, and you wouldn't be highly concerned with the relationship of that win to others. If your child's life were in danger, for example, you might be peripherally concerned about other people and circum\u00adstances. But saving that life would be supremely important.\n\nThe best choice, then, depends on reality. The challenge is to read that reality accurately and not to translate Win\/Lose or other scripting into every situation.\n\nMost situations, in fact, are part of an interdependent reality, and then Win\/Win is really the only viable alternative of the five.\n\nWin\/Lose is not viable because, although I appear to win in a confrontation with you, your feelings, your attitudes toward me and our relationship have been affected. If I am a supplier to your company, for example, and I win on my terms in a particular negotiation, I may get what I want now. But will you come to me again? My short-term Win will really be a long-term Lose if I don't get your repeat business. So an interdependent Win\/Lose is really Lose\/Lose in the long run.\n\nIf we come up with a Lose\/Win, you may appear to get what you want for the moment. But how will that affect my attitude about working with you, about fulfilling the contract? I may not feel as anxious to please you. I may carry battle scars with me into any future negotiations. My attitude about you and your company may be spread as I associate with others in the industry. So we're into Lose\/Lose again. Lose\/Lose obviously isn't viable in any context.\n\nAnd if I focus on my own Win and don't even consider your point of view, there's no basis for any kind of productive relation\u00adship.\n\nIn the long run, if it isn't a win for both of us, we both lose. That's why Win\/Win is the only real alternative in interdependent realities.\n\nI worked with a client once, the president of a large chain of retail stores, who said, \"Stephen, this Win\/Win idea sounds good, but it is so idealistic. The tough, realistic business world isn't like that. There's Win\/Lose everywhere, and if you're not out there playing the game, you just can't make it.\"\n\n\"All right,\" I said, \"try going for Win\/Lose with your customers. Is that realistic?\"\n\n\"Well, no,\" he replied.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"I'd lose my customers.\"\n\n\"Then, go for Lose\/Win\u2014give the store away. Is that realistic?\"\n\n\"No. No margin, no mission.\"\n\nAs we considered the various alternatives, Win\/Win appeared to be the only truly realistic approach.\n\n\"I guess that's true with customers,\" he admitted, \"but not with suppliers.\"\n\n\"You are the customer of the supplier,\" I said. \"Why doesn't the same principle apply?\"\n\n\"Well, we recently renegotiated our lease agreements with the mall operators and owners,\" he said. \"We went in with a Win\/Win attitude. We were open, reasonable, conciliatory. But they saw that position as being soft and weak, and they took us to the cleaners.\"\n\n\"Well, why did you go for Lose\/Win?\" I asked.\n\n\"We didn't. We went for Win\/Win.\"\n\n\"I thought you said they took you to the cleaners.\"\n\n\"They did.\"\n\n\"In other words, you lost.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"And they won.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"So what's that called?\"\n\nWhen he realized that what he had called Win\/Win was really Lose\/Win, he was shocked. And as we examined the long-term impact of that Lose\/Win, the suppressed feelings, the trampled values, the resentment that seethed under the surface of the relationship, we agreed that it was really a loss for both parties in the end.\n\nIf this man had had a real Win\/Win attitude, he would have stayed longer in the communication process, listened to the mall owner more, then expressed his point of view with more courage. He would have continued in the Win\/Win spirit until a solution was reached they both felt good about. And that solution, that Third Alternative, would have been synergistic\u2014probably some\u00adthing neither of them had thought of on his own.\n\nWin\/Win or No Deal\n\nIf these individuals had not come up with a synergistic solution\u2014one that was agreeable to both\u2014they could have gone for an even higher expression of Win\/Win\u2014Win\/Win or No Deal.\n\nNo Deal basically means that if we can't find a solution that would benefit us both, we agree to disagree agreeably\u2014No Deal. No expectations have been created, no performance contracts established. I don't hire you or we don't take on a particular assignment together because it's obvious that our values or our goals are going in opposite directions. It is so much better to realize this up front instead of downstream when expectations have been created and both parties have been disillusioned.\n\nWhen you have No Deal as an option in your mind, you feel liberated because you have no need to manipulate people, to push your own agenda, to drive for what you want. You can be open. You can really try to understand the deeper issues underlying the positions.\n\nWith No Deal as an option, you can honestly say, \"I only want to go for Win\/Win. I want to win, and I want you to win. I wouldn't want to get my way and have you not feel good about it, because downstream it would eventually surface and create a withdrawal. On the other hand, I don't think you would feel good if you got your way and I gave in. So let's work for a Win\/Win. Let's really hammer it out. And if we can't find it, then let's agree that we won't make a deal at all. It would be better not to deal than to live with a decision that wasn't right for us both. Then maybe another time we might be able to get together.\"\n\nSome time after learning the concept of Win\/Win or No Deal, the president of a small computer software company shared with me the following experience.\n\n\"We had developed new software which we sold on a five-year contract to a particular bank. The bank president was excited about it, but his people weren't really behind the decision.\n\n\"About a month later, that bank changed presidents. The new president came to me and said, 'I am uncomfortable with these software conversions. I have a mess on my hands. My people are all saying that they can't go through this and I really feel I just can't push it at this point in time.'\n\n\"My own company was in deep financial trouble. I knew I had every legal right to enforce the contract. But I had become convinced of the value of the principle of Win\/Win.\n\n\"So I told him 'We have a contract. Your bank has secured our products and our services to convert you to this program. But we understand that you're not happy about it. So what we'd like to do is give you back the contract, give you back your deposit, and if you are ever looking for a software solution in the future, come back and see us.'\n\n\"I literally walked away from an $84,000 contract. It was close to financial suicide. But I felt that, in the long run, if the principle were true, it would come back and pay dividends.\n\n\"Three months later, the new president called me. 'I'm now going to make changes in my data processing,' he said, 'and I want to do business with you.' He signed a contract for $240,000.\"\n\nAnything less than Win\/Win in an interdependent reality is a poor second best that will have impact in the long-term relation\u00adship. The cost of that impact needs to be carefully considered. If you can't reach a true Win\/Win, you're very often better off to go for No Deal.\n\nWin\/Win or No Deal provides tremendous emotional freedom in the family relationship. If family members can't agree on a video that everyone will enjoy, they can simply decide to do something else\u2014No Deal\u2014rather than having some enjoy the evening at the expense of others.\n\nI have a friend whose family has been involved in singing together for several years. When they were young, she arranged the music, made the costumes, accompanied them on the piano and directed the performances.\n\nAs the children grew older, their taste in music began to change and they wanted to have more say in what they performed and what they wore. They became less responsive to direction.\n\nBecause she had years of experience in performing herself and felt closer to the needs of the older people at the rest homes where they planned to perform, she didn't feel that many of the ideas they were suggesting would be appropriate. At the same time, however, she recognized their need to express themselves and to be part of the decision-making process.\n\nSo she set up a Win\/Win or No Deal. She told them she wanted to arrive at an agreement that everyone felt good about\u2014or they would simply find other ways to enjoy their talents. As a result, everyone felt free to express his or her feelings and ideas as they worked to set up a Win\/Win agreement, knowing that whether or not they could agree, there would be no emotional strings.\n\nThe Win\/Win or No Deal approach is most realistic at the beginning of a business relationship or enterprise. In a continuing business relationship, No Deal may not be a viable option, which can create serious problems, especially for family businesses or businesses that are begun initially on the basis of friendship.\n\nIn an effort to preserve the relationship, people sometimes go on for years making one compromise after another, thinking Win\/Lose or Lose\/Win even while talking Win\/Win. This creates serious problems for the people and for the business, particularly if the competition operates on Win\/Win and synergy.\n\nWithout No Deal, many such businesses simply deteriorate and either fail or have to be turned over to professional managers. Experience shows that it is often better in setting up a family business or a business between friends to acknowledge the possi\u00adbility of No Deal downstream and to establish some kind of buy\/sell agreement so that the business can prosper without permanently damaging the relationship.\n\nOf course there are some relationships where No Deal is not viable. I wouldn't abandon my child or my spouse and go for No Deal (it would be better, if necessary, to go for compromise\u2014a low form of Win\/Win). But in many cases, it is possible to go into negotiation with a full Win\/Win or No Deal attitude. And the freedom in that attitude is incredible.\n\nFIVE DIMENSIONS OF WIN\/WIN\n\nThink Win\/Win is the habit of interpersonal leadership. It involves the exercise of each of the unique human endowments\u2014self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and independent will\u2014in our relationships with others. It involves mutual learning, mutual influence, mutual benefits.\n\nIt takes great courage as well as consideration to create these mutual benefits, particularly if we're interacting with others who are deeply scripted in Win\/Lose.\n\nThat is why this habit involves principles of interpersonal leadership. Effective interpersonal leadership requires the vision, the proactive initiative and the security, guidance, wisdom, and power that come from principle-centered personal leadership.\n\nThe principle of Win\/Win is fundamental to success in all our interactions, and it embraces five interdependent dimensions of life. It begins with character and moves toward relationships, out of which flow agreements. It is nurtured in an environment where structure and systems are based on Win\/Win. And it involves process; we cannot achieve Win\/Win ends with Win\/Lose or Lose\/Win means.\n\nThe following diagram shows how these five dimensions relate to each other.\n\nNow let's consider each of the five dimensions in turn.\n\nCharacter\n\nCharacter is the foundation of Win\/Win, and everything else builds on that foundation. There are three character traits essential to the Win\/Win paradigm.\n\nINTEGRITY. We've already defined integrity as the value we place on ourselves. Habits 1, 2, and 3 help us develop and maintain integrity. As we clearly identify our values and proactively orga\u00adnize and execute around those values on a daily basis, we develop self-awareness and independent will by making and keeping meaningful promises and commitments.\n\nThere's no way to go for a Win in our own lives if we don't even know, in a deep sense, what constitutes a Win\u2014what is, in fact, harmonious with our innermost values. And if we can't make and keep commitments to ourselves as well as to others, our commit\u00adments become meaningless. We know it; others know it. They sense duplicity and become guarded. There's no foundation of trust and Win\/Win becomes an ineffective superficial technique. Integrity is the cornerstone in the foundation.\n\nMATURITY. Maturity is the balance between courage and consideration. I first learned this definition of maturity in the fall of 1955 from a marvelous professor, Hrand Saxenian, who instructed my Control class at the Harvard Business School. He taught the finest, simplest, most practical, yet profound, definition of emotional maturity I've ever come across\u2014\"the ability to express one's own feelings and convictions balanced with consideration for the thoughts and feel\u00adings of others.\" As a part of his doctoral research, Hrand Saxenian had developed this criterion over years of historical and direct field research. He later wrote up his original research format in its com\u00adpleteness with supportive reasoning and application suggestions in a Harvard Business Review article (January-February 1958). Even though it is complementary and also developmental, Hrand's use of the word \"maturity\" is different from its use in the 7 Habits \"Ma\u00adturity Continuum,\" which focuses on a growth and development process from dependency through independency to interdependency.\n\nIf you examine many of the psychological tests used for hiring, promoting, and training purposes, you will find that they are designed to evaluate this kind of maturity. Whether it's called the ego strength\/empathy balance, the self confidence\/respect for others balance, the concern for people\/concern for tasks balance, \"I'm okay, you're okay\" in transactional analysis language, or 9.1, 1.9, 5.5, 9.9, in management grid language\u2014the quality sought for is the balance of what I call courage and consideration.\n\nRespect for this quality is deeply ingrained in the theory of human interaction, management, and leadership. It is a deep embodiment of the P\/PC balance. While courage may focus on getting the golden egg, consideration deals with the long-term welfare of the other stakeholders. The basic task of leadership is to increase the standard of living and the quality of life for all stakeholders.\n\nMany people think in dichotomies, in either\/or terms. They think if you're nice, you're not tough. But Win\/Win is nice... and tough. It's twice as tough as Win\/Lose. To go for Win\/Win, you not only have to be nice, you have to be courageous. You not only have to be empathic, you have to be confident. You not only have to be considerate and sensitive, you have to be brave. To do that, to achieve that balance between courage and consideration, is the essence of real maturity and is fundamental to Win\/Win.\n\nIf I'm high on courage and low on consideration, how will I think? Win\/Lose. I'll be strong and ego bound. I'll have the courage of my convictions, but I won't be very considerate of yours.\n\nTo compensate for my lack of internal maturity and emotional strength, I might borrow strength from my position and power, or from my credentials, my seniority, my affiliations.\n\nIf I'm high on consideration and low on courage, I'll think Lose\/Win. I'll be so considerate of your convictions and desires that I won't have the courage to express and actualize my own.\n\nHigh courage and consideration are both essential to Win\/Win. It is the balance that is the mark of real maturity. If I have it, I can listen, I can empathically understand, but I can also courageously confront.\n\nABUNDANCE MENTALITY. The third character trait essential to Win\/Win is the Abundance Mentality, the paradigm that there is plenty out there for everybody.\n\nMost people are deeply scripted in what I call the Scarcity Mentality. They see life as having only so much, as though there were only one pie out there. And if someone were to get a big piece of the pie, it would mean less for everybody else. The Scarcity Mentality is the zero-sum paradigm of life.\n\nPeople with a Scarcity Mentality have a very difficult time sharing recognition and credit, power or profit\u2014even with those who help in the production. They also have a very hard time being genuinely happy for the successes of other people\u2014even, and sometimes especially, members of their own family or close friends and associates. It's almost as if something is being taken from them when someone else receives special recognition or windfall gain or has remarkable success or achievement.\n\nAlthough they might verbally express happiness for others' success, inwardly they are eating their hearts out. Their sense of worth comes from being compared, and someone else's success, to some degree, means their failure. Only so many people can be \"A\" students; only one person can be \"number one.\" To \"win\" simply means to \"beat.\"\n\nOften, people with a Scarcity Mentality harbor secret hopes that others might suffer misfortune\u2014not terrible misfortune, but ac\u00adceptable misfortune that would keep them \"in their place.\" They're always comparing, always competing. They give their energies to possessing things or other people in order to increase their sense of worth.\n\nThey want other people to be the way they want them to be. They often want to clone them, and they surround themselves with \"yes\" people\u2014people who won't challenge them, people who are weaker than they.\n\nIt's difficult for people with a Scarcity Mentality to be members of a complementary team. They look on differences as signs of insubordination and disloyalty.\n\nThe Abundance Mentality, on the other hand, flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth and security. It is the paradigm that there is plenty out there and enough to spare for everybody. It results in sharing of prestige, of recognition, of profits, of decision making. It opens possibilities, options, alternatives, and creativity.\n\nThe Abundance Mentality takes the personal joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment of Habits 1, 2, and 3 and turns it outward, appreciating the uniqueness, the inner direction, the proactive nature of others. It recognizes the unlimited possibilities for positive interactive growth and development, creating new Third Alternatives.\n\nPublic Victory does not mean victory over other people. It means success in effective interaction that brings mutually beneficial results to everyone involved. Public Victory means working to\u00adgether, communicating together, making things happen together that even the same people couldn't make happen by working independently. And Public Victory is an outgrowth of the Abun\u00addance Mentality paradigm.\n\nA character rich in integrity, maturity, and the Abundance Mentality has a genuineness that goes far beyond technique, or lack of it, in human interaction.\n\nOne thing I have found particularly helpful to Win\/Lose people in developing a Win\/Win character is to associate with some model or mentor who really thinks Win\/Win. When people are deeply scripted in Win\/Lose or other philosophies and regularly associate with others who are likewise scripted, they don't have much opportunity to see and experience the Win\/Win philosophy in action. So I recommend reading literature, such as the inspiring biography of Anwar Sadat, In Search of Identity, and seeing movies like Chariots of Fire or plays like Les Miserables that expose you to models of Win\/Win.\n\nBut remember: If we search deeply enough within ourselves\u2014beyond the scripting, beyond the learned attitudes and behaviors\u2014the real validation of Win\/Win, as well as every other correct principle, is in our own lives.\n\nRelationships\n\nFrom the foundation of character, we build and maintain Win\/Win relationships. The trust, the Emotional Bank Account, is the essence of Win\/Win. Without trust, the best we can do is compro\u00admise; without trust, we lack the credibility for open, mutual learning and communication and real creativity.\n\nBut if our Emotional Bank Account is high, credibility is no longer an issue. Enough deposits have been made so that you know and I know that we deeply respect each other. We're focused on the issues, not on personalities or positions.\n\nBecause we trust each other, we're open. We put our cards on the table. Even though we see things differently, I know that you're willing to listen with respect while I describe the young woman to you, and you know that I'll treat your description of the old woman with the same respect. We're both committed to try to understand each other's point of view deeply and to work together for the Third Alternative, the synergistic solution, that will be a better answer for both of us.\n\nA relationship where bank accounts are high and both parties are deeply committed to Win\/Win is the ideal springboard for tremendous synergy (Habit 6). That relationship neither makes the issues any less real or important, nor eliminates the differences in perspective. But it does eliminate the negative energy normally focused on differences in personality and position and creates a positive, cooperative energy focused on thoroughly understanding the issues and resolving them in a mutually beneficial way.\n\nBut what if that kind of relationship isn't there? What if you have to work out an agreement with someone who hasn't even heard of Win\/Win and is deeply scripted in Win\/Lose or some other philosophy?\n\nDealing with Win\/Lose is the real test of Win\/Win. Rarely is Win\/Win easily achieved in any circumstance. Deep issues and fundamental differences have to be dealt with. But it is much easier when both parties are aware of and committed to it and where there is a high Emotional Bank Account in the relationship.\n\nWhen you're dealing with a person who is coming from a paradigm of Win\/Lose, the relationship is still the key. The place to focus is on your Circle of Influence. You make deposits into the Emotional Bank Account through genuine courtesy, respect, and appreciation for that person and for the other point of view. You stay longer in the communication process. You listen more, you listen in greater depth. You express yourself with greater courage. You aren't reactive. You go deeper inside yourself for strength of character to be proactive. You keep hammering it out until the other person begins to realize that you genuinely want the reso\u00adlution to be a real win for both of you. That very process is a tremendous deposit in the Emotional Bank Account.\n\nAnd the stronger you are\u2014the more genuine your character, the higher your level of proactivity, the more committed you really are to Win\/Win\u2014the more powerful your influence will be with that other person. This is the real test of interpersonal leadership. It goes beyond transactional leadership into transformational leader\u00adship, transforming the individuals involved as well as the relation\u00adship.\n\nBecause Win\/Win is a principle people can validate in their own lives, you will be able to bring most people to a realization that they will win more of what they want by going for what you both want. But there will be a few who are so deeply embedded in the Win\/Lose mentality that they just won't think Win\/Win. So remem\u00adber that No Deal is always an option. Or you may occasionally choose to go for the low form of Win\/Win\u2014compromise.\n\nIt's important to realize that not all decisions need to be Win\/Win, even when the Emotional Bank Account is high. Again, the key is the relationship. If you and I worked together, for example, and you were to come to me and say, \"Stephen, I know you won't like this decision. I don't have time to explain it to you, let alone get you involved. There's a good possibility you'll think it's wrong. But will you support it?\"\n\nIf you had a positive Emotional Bank Account with me, of course I'd support it. I'd hope you were right and I was wrong. I'd work to make your decision work.\n\nBut if the Emotional Bank Account weren't there, and if I were reactive, I wouldn't really support it. I might say I would to your face, but behind your back I wouldn't be very enthusiastic. I wouldn't make the investment necessary to make it succeed. \"It didn't work,\" I'd say. \"So what do you want me to do now?\"\n\nIf I were overreactive, I might even torpedo your decision and do what I could to make sure others did too. Or I might become \"maliciously obedient\" and do exactly and only what you tell me to do, accepting no responsibility for results.\n\nDuring the five years I lived in Great Britain, I saw that country brought twice to its knees because the train conductors were maliciously obedient in following all the rules and procedures written on paper.\n\nAn agreement means very little in letter without the character and relationship base to sustain it in spirit. So we need to approach Win\/Win from a genuine desire to invest in the relationships that make it possible.\n\nAgreements\n\nFrom relationships flow the agreements that give definition and direction to Win\/Win. They are sometimes called performance agreements or partnership agreements, shifting the paradigm of pro\u00adductive interaction from vertical to horizontal, from hovering supervision to self-supervision, from positioning to being partners in success.\n\nWin\/Win agreements cover a wide scope of interdependent interaction. We discussed one important application when we talked about delegation in the \"Green and Clean\" story in Habit 3. The same five elements we listed there provide the structure for Win\/Win agreements between employers and employees, between independent people working together on projects, between groups of people cooperatively focused on a common objective, between companies and suppliers\u2014between any people who need to interact to accomplish. They create an effective way to clarify and manage expectations between people involved in any interdepen\u00addent endeavor.\n\nIn the Win\/Win agreement, the following five elements are made very explicit:\n\nDesired results (not methods) identify what is to be done and when.\n\nGuidelines specify the parameters (principles, policies, etc.) within which results are to be accomplished.\n\nResources identify the human, financial, technical, or organizational support available to help accomplish the results.\n\nAccountability sets up the standards of performance and the time of evaluation.\n\nConsequences specify\u2014good and bad, natural and logical\u2014what does and will happen as a result of the evaluation.\n\nThese five elements give Win\/Win agreements a life of their own. A clear mutual understanding and agreement up front in these areas creates a standard against which people can measure their own success.\n\nTraditional authoritarian supervision is a Win\/Lose paradigm. It's also the result of an overdrawn Emotional Bank Account. If you don't have trust or a common vision of desired results, you tend to hover over, check up on, and direct. Trust isn't there, so you feel as though you have to control people.\n\nBut if the trust account is high, what is your method? Get out of their way. As long as you have an up-front Win\/Win agreement and they know exactly what is expected, your role is to be a source of help and to receive their accountability reports.\n\nIt is much more ennobling to the human spirit to let people judge themselves than to judge them. And in a high trust culture, it's much more accurate. In many cases people know in their hearts how things are going much better than the records show. Discern\u00adment is often far more accurate than either observation or mea\u00adsurement.\n\nWin\/Win Management Training\n\nSeveral years ago, I was indirectly involved in a consulting project with a very large banking institution that had scores of branches. They wanted us to evaluate and improve their manage\u00adment training program, which was supported by an annual budget of $750,000. The program involved selecting college graduates and putting them through twelve two-week assignments in various departments over a six-month period of time so that they could get a general sense of the industry. They spent two weeks in commer\u00adcial loans, two weeks in industrial loans, two weeks in marketing, two weeks in operations, and so forth. At the end of the six-month period, they were assigned as assistant managers in the various branch banks.\n\nOur assignment was to evaluate the six-month formal training period. As we began, we discovered that the most difficult part of the assignment was to get a clear picture of the desired results. We asked the top executives the key hard question: \"What should these people be able to do when they finish the program?\" And the answers we got were vague and often contradictory.\n\nThe training program dealt with methods, not results; so we suggested that they set up a pilot training program based on a different paradigm called \"learner-controlled instruction.\" This was a Win\/Win agreement that involved identifying specific objec\u00adtives and criteria that would demonstrate their accomplishment and identifying the guidelines, resources, accountability, and consequences that would result when the objectives were met. The consequences in this case were promotion to assistant manager, where they would receive the on-the-job part of their training, and a significant increase in salary.\n\nWe had to really press to get the objectives hammered out. \"What is it you want them to understand about accounting? What about marketing? What about real estate loans?\" And we went down the list. They finally came up with over one hundred objectives, which we simplified, reduced, and consolidated until we came down to 39 specific behavioral objectives with criteria attached to them.\n\nThe trainees were highly motivated by both the opportunity and the increased salary to meet the criteria as soon as possible. There was a big win in it for them, and there was also a big win for the company because they would have assistant branch managers who met results-oriented criteria instead of just showing up for twelve different activity traps.\n\nSo we explained the difference between learner-controlled in\u00adstruction and system-controlled instruction to the trainees. We basically said, \"Here are the objectives and the criteria. Here are the resources, including learning from each other. So go to it. As soon as you meet the criteria, you will be promoted to assistant managers.\"\n\nThey were finished in three-and-a-half weeks. Shifting the training paradigm had released unbelievable motivation and cre\u00adativity.\n\nAs with many paradigm shifts, there was resistance. Almost all of the top executives simply wouldn't believe it. When they were shown the evidence that the criteria had been met, they basically said, \"These trainees don't have the experience. They lack the seasoning necessary to give them the kind of judgment we want them to have as assistant branch managers.\"\n\nIn talking with them later, we found that what many of them were really saying was, \"We went through goat week; how come these guys don't have to?\" But of course they couldn't put it that way. \"They lack seasoning\" was a much more acceptable expres\u00adsion.\n\nIn addition, for obvious reasons (including the $750,000 budget for a six-month program), the personnel department was upset.\n\nSo we responded, \"Fair enough. Let's develop some more objectives and attach criteria to them. But let's stay with the paradigm of learner-controlled instruction.\" We hammered out eight more objectives with very tough criteria in order to give the executives the assurance that the people were adequately prepared to be assistant branch managers and continue the on-the-job part of the training program. After participating in some of the sessions where these criteria were developed, several of the executives remarked that if the trainees could meet these tough criteria, they would be better prepared than almost any who had gone through the six-month program.\n\nWe had prepared the trainees to expect resistance. We took the additional objectives and criteria back to them and said, \"Just as we expected, management wants you to accomplish some additional objectives with even tougher criteria than before. They have assured us this time that if you meet these criteria, they will make you assistant managers.\"\n\nThey went to work in unbelievable ways. They went to the executives in departments such as accounting and basically said, \"Sir, I am a member of this new pilot program called learner-controlled instruction, and it is my understanding that you partic\u00adipated in developing the objectives and the criteria.\n\n\"I have six criteria to meet in this particular department. I was able to pass three of them off with skills I gained in college; I was able to get another one out of a book; I learned the fifth one from Tom, the fellow you trained last week. I only have one criterion left to meet, and I wonder if you or someone else in the department might be able to spend a few hours with me to show me how.\" So they spent half a day in a department instead of two weeks.\n\nThese trainees cooperated with each other, brainstormed with each other, and they accomplished the additional objectives in a week and a half. The six-month program was reduced to five weeks, and the results were significantly increased.\n\nThis kind of thinking can similarly affect every area of organiza\u00adtional life if people have the courage to explore their paradigms and to concentrate on Win\/Win. I am always amazed at the results that happen, both to individuals and to organizations, when responsible, proactive, self-directing individuals are turned loose on a task.\n\nWin\/Win Performance Agreements\n\nCreating Win\/Win performance agreements requires vital para\u00addigm shifts. The focus is on results; not methods. Most of us tend to supervise methods. We use the gofer delegation discussed in Habit 3, the methods management I used with Sandra when I asked her to take pictures of our son as he was waterskiing. But Win\/Win agreements focus on results, releasing tremendous indi\u00advidual human potential and creating greater synergy, building PC in the process instead of focusing exclusively on P.\n\nWith Win\/Win accountability, people evaluate themselves. The traditional evaluation games people play are awkward and emo\u00adtionally exhausting. In Win\/Win, people evaluate themselves, using the criteria that they themselves helped to create up front. And if you set it up correctly, people can do that. With a Win\/Win delegation agreement, even a seven-year-old boy can tell for himself how well he's keeping the yard \"green and clean.\"\n\nMy best experiences in teaching university classes have come when I have created a Win\/Win shared understanding of the goal up front. \"This is what we're trying to accomplish. Here are the basic requirements for an A, B, or C grade. My goal is to help every one of you get an A. Now you take what we've talked about and analyze it and come up with your own understanding of what you want to accomplish that is unique to you. Then let's get together and agree on the grade you want and what you plan to do to get it.\"\n\nManagement philosopher and consultant Peter Drucker recom\u00admends the use of a \"manager's letter\" to capture the essence of performance agreements between managers and their employees. Following a deep and thorough discussion of expectations, guide\u00adlines and resources to make sure they are in harmony with organizational goals, the employee writes a letter to the manager that summarizes the discussion and indicates when the next performance plan or review discussion will take place.\n\nDeveloping such a Win\/Win performance agreement is the central activity of management. With an agreement in place, employees can manage themselves within the framework of that agreement. The manager then can serve like a pace car in a race. He can get things going and then get out of the way. His job from then on is to remove the oil spills.\n\nWhen a boss becomes the first assistant to each of his subordi\u00adnates, he can greatly increase his span of control. Entire levels of administration and overhead can be eliminated. Instead of super\u00advising six or eight, such a manager can supervise twenty, thirty, fifty, or more.\n\nIn Win\/Win performance agreements, consequences become the natural or logical result of performance rather than a reward or punishment arbitrarily handed out by the person in charge.\n\nThere are basically four kinds of consequences (rewards and penalties) that management or parents can control\u2014financial, psychic, opportunity, and responsibility. Financial consequences include such things as income, stock options, allowances, or penalties. Psychic or psychological consequences include recogni\u00adtion, approval, respect, credibility, or the loss of them. Unless people are in a survival mode, psychic compensation is often more motivating than financial compensation. Opportunity includes training, development, perks, and other benefits. Responsibility has to do with scope and authority, either of which can be enlarged or diminished. Win\/Win agreements specify consequences in one or more of those areas and the people involved know it up front. So you don't play games. Everything is clear from the beginning.\n\nIn addition to these logical, personal consequences, it is also important to clearly identify what the natural organizational con\u00adsequences are. For example, what will happen if I'm late to work, if I refuse to cooperate with others, if I don't develop good Win\/Win performance agreements with my subordinates, if I don't hold them accountable for desired results, or if I don't promote their professional growth and career development?\n\nWhen my daughter turned 16, we set up a Win\/Win agreement regarding use of the family car. We agreed that she would obey the laws of the land and that she would keep the car clean and properly maintained. We agreed that she would use the car only for responsible purposes and would serve as a cab driver for her mother and me within reason. And we also agreed that she would do all her other jobs cheerfully without being reminded. These were our wins.\n\nWe also agreed that I would provide some resources\u2014the car, gas, and insurance. And we agreed that she would meet weekly with me, usually on Sunday afternoon, to evaluate how she was doing based on our agreement. The consequences were clear. As long as she kept her part of the agreement, she could use the car. If she didn't keep it, she would lose the privilege until she decided to.\n\nThis Win\/Win agreement set up clear expectations from the beginning on both our parts. It was a win for her\u2014she got to use the car\u2014and it was certainly a win for Sandra and me. Now she could handle her own transportation needs and even some of ours. We didn't have to worry about maintaining the car or keeping it clean. And we had a built-in accountability, which meant I didn't have to hover over her or manage her methods. Her integrity, her conscience, her power of discernment and our high Emotional Bank Account managed her infinitely better. We didn't have to get emotionally strung out, trying to supervise her every move and coming up with punishments or rewards on the spot if she didn't do things the way we thought she should. We had a Win\/Win agreement, and it liberated us all.\n\nWin\/Win agreements are tremendously liberating. But as the product of isolated techniques, they won't hold up. Even if you set them up in the beginning, there is no way to maintain them without personal integrity and a relationship of trust.\n\nA true Win\/Win agreement is the product of the paradigm, the character, and the relationships out of which it grows. In that context, it defines and directs the interdependent interaction for which it was created.\n\nSystems\n\nWin\/Win can only survive in an organization when the systems support it. If you talk Win\/Win but reward Win\/Lose, you've got a losing program on your hands.\n\nYou basically get what you reward. If you want to achieve the goals and reflect the values in your mission statement, then you need to align the reward system with these goals and values. If it isn't aligned systemically, you won't be walking your talk. You'll be in the situation of the manager I mentioned earlier who talked cooperation but practiced competition by creating a \"Race to Bermuda\" contest.\n\nI worked for several years with a very large real estate organization in the Middle West. My first experience with this organiza\u00adtion was at a large sales rally where over 800 sales associates gathered for the annual reward program. It was a psych-up cheerleading session, complete with high school bands and a great deal of frenzied screaming.\n\nOut of the 800 people there, around forty received awards for top performance, such as \"Most Sales,\" \"Greatest Volume,\" \"Highest Earned Commissions,\" and \"Most Listings.\" There was a lot of hoopla\u2014excitement, cheering, applause\u2014around the pre\u00adsentation of these awards. There was no doubt that those forty people had won; but there was also the underlying awareness that 760 people had lost.\n\nWe immediately began educational and organizational develop\u00adment work to align the systems and structures of the organization toward the Win\/Win paradigm. We involved people at a grass roots level to develop the kinds of systems that would motivate them. We also encouraged them to cooperate and synergize with each other so that as many as possible could achieve the desired results of their individually tailored performance agreements.\n\nAt the next rally one year later, there were over 1,000 sales associates present, and about 800 of them received awards. There were a few individual winners based on comparisons, but the program primarily focused on people achieving self-selected performance objectives and on groups achieving team objectives. There was no need to bring in the high school bands to artificially contrive the fanfare, the cheerleading, and the psych up. There was tremendous natural interest and excitement because people could share in each other's happiness, and teams of sales associates could experience rewards together, including a vacation trip for the entire office.\n\nThe remarkable thing was that almost all of the 800 who received the awards that year had produced as much per person in terms of volume and profit as the previous year's forty. The spirit of Win\/Win had significantly increased the number of golden eggs and had fed the goose as well, releasing enormous human energy and talent. The resulting synergy was astounding to almost everyone involved.\n\nCompetition has its place in the marketplace or against last year's performance\u2014perhaps even against another office or indi\u00advidual where there is no particular interdependence, no need to cooperate. But cooperation in the workplace is as important to free enterprise as competition in the marketplace. The spirit of Win\/Win cannot survive in an environment of competition and contests.\n\nFor Win\/Win to work, the systems have to support it. The training system, the planning system, the communication system, the budgeting system, the information system, the compensation system\u2014all have to be based on the principle of Win\/Win.\n\nI did some consulting for another company that wanted training for their people in human relations. The underlying assumption was that the problem was the people.\n\nThe president said, \"Go into any store you want and see how they treat you. They're just order takers. They don't understand how to get close to the customers. They don't know the product, and they don't have the knowledge and the skill in the sales process necessary to create a marriage between the product and the need.\"\n\nSo I went to the various stores. And he was right. But that still didn't answer the question in my mind: What caused the attitude?\n\n\"Look, we're on top of the problem,\" the president said. \"We have department heads out there setting a great example. We've told them their job is two-thirds selling and one-third management, and they're outselling everybody. We just want you to provide some training for the salespeople.\"\n\nThose words raised a red flag. \"Let's get some more data,\" I said.\n\nHe didn't like that. He \"knew\" what the problem was, and he wanted to get on with training. But I persisted, and within two days we uncovered the real problem. Because of the job definition and the compensation system, the managers were \"creaming.\" They'd stand behind the cash register and cream all the business during the slow times. Half the time in retail is slow and the other half is frantic. So the managers would give all the dirty jobs\u2014inventory control, stock work, and cleaning\u2014to the salespeople. And they would stand behind the registers and cream. That's why the department heads were tops in sales.\n\nSo we changed one system\u2014the compensation system\u2014and the problem was corrected overnight. We set up a system whereby the managers only made money when their salespeople made money. We overlapped the needs and goals of the managers with the needs and goals of the salespeople. And the need for human relations training suddenly disappeared. The key was developing a true Win\/Win reward system.\n\nIn another instance, I worked with a manager in a company that required formal performance evaluations. He was frustrated over the evaluation rating he had given a particular manager. \"He deserved a three,\" he said, \"but I had to give him a one\" (which meant superior, promotable).\n\n\"What did you give him a one for?\" I asked.\n\n\"He gets the numbers,\" was his reply.\n\n\"So why do you think he deserves a three?\"\n\n\"It's the way he gets them. He neglects people; he runs over them. He's a troublemaker.\"\n\n\"It sounds like he's totally focused on P\u2014on production. And that's what he's being rewarded for. But what would happen if you talked with him about the problem, if you helped him understand the importance of PC?\"\n\nHe said he had done so, with no effect.\n\n\"Then what if you set up a Win\/Win contract with him where you both agreed that two-thirds of his compensation would come from P\u2014from the numbers\u2014and the other one-third would come from PC\u2014how other people perceive him, what kind of leader, people builder, team builder he is?\"\n\n\"Now that would get his attention,\" he replied.\n\nSo often the problem is in the system, not in the people. If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results. You have to water the flowers you want to grow.\n\nAs people really learn to think Win\/Win, they can set up the systems to create and reinforce it. They can transform unnecessar\u00adily competitive situations to cooperative ones and can powerfully impact their effectiveness by building both P and PC.\n\nIn business, executives can align their systems to create teams of highly productive people working together to compete against external standards of performance. In education, teachers can set up grading systems based on an individual's performance in the context of agreed upon criteria and can encourage students to cooperate in productive ways to help each other learn and achieve. In families, parents can shift the focus from competition with each other to cooperation. In activities such as bowling, for example, they can keep a family score and try to beat a previous one. They can set up home responsibilities with Win\/Win agreements that eliminate constant nagging and enable parents to do the things only they can do.\n\nA friend once shared with me a cartoon he'd seen of two children talking to each other. \"If mommy doesn't get us up soon,\" one was saying, \"we're going to be late for school.\" These words brought forcibly to his attention the nature of the problems created when families are not organized on a responsible Win\/Win basis.\n\nWin\/Win puts the responsibility on the individual for accom\u00adplishing specified results within clear guidelines and available resources. It makes a person accountable to perform and evaluate the results and provides consequences as a natural result of performance. And Win\/Win systems create the environment which supports and reinforces the Win\/Win performance agreements.\n\nProcesses\n\nThere's no way to achieve Win\/Win ends with Win\/Lose or Lose\/Win means. You can't say, \"You're going to think Win\/Win, whether you like it or not.\" So the question becomes how to arrive at a Win\/Win solution.\n\nRoger Fisher and William Ury, two Harvard law professors, have done some outstanding work in what they call the \"principled\" approach versus the \"positional\" approach to bargaining in their tremendously useful and insightful book, Getting to Yes. Although the words Win\/Win are not used, the spirit and underlying philosophy of the book are in harmony with the Win\/Win ap\u00adproach.\n\nThey suggest that the essence of principled negotiation is to separate the person from the problem, to focus on interests and not on positions, to invent options for mutual gain, and to insist on objective criteria\u2014some external standard or principle that both parties can buy into.\n\nIn my own work with various people and organizations seeking Win\/Win solutions, I suggest that they become involved in the following four-step process:\n\nFirst, see the problem from the other point of view. Really seek to understand and to give expression to the needs and concerns of the other party as well as or better than they can themselves.\n\nSecond, identify the key issues and concerns (not positions) involved.\n\nThird, determine what results would constitute a fully acceptable solution.\n\nAnd fourth, identify possible new options to achieve those results.\n\nHabits 5 and 6 deal directly with two of the elements of this process, and we will go into those in depth in the next two chapters.\n\nBut at this juncture, let me point out the highly interrelated nature of the process of Win\/Win with the essence of Win\/Win itself. You can only achieve Win\/Win solutions with Win\/Win processes\u2014the end and the means are the same.\n\nWin\/Win is not a personality technique. It's a total paradigm of human interaction. It comes from a character of integrity, maturity, and the Abundance Mentality. It grows out of high-trust relation\u00adships. It is embodied in agreements that effectively clarify and manage expectations as well as accomplishment. It thrives in supportive systems. And it is achieved through the process we are now prepared to more fully examine in Habits 5 and 6.\n\nAPPLICATION SUGGESTIONS:\n\n  1. Think about an upcoming interaction wherein you will be at\u00adtempting to reach an agreement or negotiate a solution. Commit to maintain a balance between courage and consideration.\n  2. Make a list of obstacles that keep you from applying the Win\/Win paradigm more frequently. Determine what could be done within your Circle of Influence to eliminate some of those obstacles.\n  3. Select a specific relationship where you would like to develop a Win\/Win agreement. Try to put yourself in the other person's place, and write down explicitly how you think that person sees the solution. Then list, from your own perspective, what results would constitute a Win for you. Approach the other person and ask if he or she would be willing to communicate until you reach a point of agreement and mutually beneficial solution.\n  4. Identify three key relationships in your life. Give some indication of what you feel the balance is in each of the Emotional Bank Accounts. Write down some specific ways you could make deposits in each account.\n  5. Deeply consider your own scripting. Is it Win\/Lose? How does that scripting affect your interactions with other people? Can you identify the main source of that script? Determine whether or not those scripts serve well in your current reality.\n  6. Try to identify a model of Win\/Win thinking who, even in hard situations, really seeks mutual benefit. Determine now to more closely watch and learn from this person's example.\n\n### HABIT 5  \nSEEK FIRST TO UNDERSTAND,  \nTHEN TO BE UNDERSTOOD\n\n### PRINCIPLES OF EMPATHIC  \nCOMMUNICATION\n\nThe heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.\n\nPascal\n\nSUPPOSE YOU'VE BEEN HAVING TROUBLE WITH YOUR EYES and you decide to go to an optometrist for help. After briefly listening to your complaint, he takes off his glasses and hands them to you.\n\n\"Put these on,\" he says. \"I've worn this pair of glasses for ten years now and they've really helped me. I have an extra pair at home; you can wear these.\"\n\nSo you put them on, but it only makes the problem worse.\n\n\"This is terrible!\" you exclaim. \"I can't see a thing!\"\n\n\"Well, what's wrong?\" he asks. \"They work great for me. Try harder.\"\n\n\"I am trying,\" you insist. \"Everything is a blur.\"\n\n\"Well, what's the matter with you? Think positively.\"\n\n\"Okay. I positively can't see a thing.\"\n\n\"Boy, are you ungrateful!\" he chides. \"And after all I've done to help you!\"\n\nWhat are the chances you'd go back to that optometrist the next time you needed help? Not very good, I would imagine. You don't have much confidence in someone who doesn't diagnose before he or she prescribes.\n\nBut how often do we diagnose before we prescribe in commu\u00adnication?\n\n\"Come on, honey, tell me how you feel. I know it's hard, but I'll try to understand.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know, Mom. You'd think it was stupid.\"\n\n\"Of course I wouldn't! You can tell me. Honey, no one cares for you as much as I do. I'm only interested in your welfare. What's making you so unhappy?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know.\"\n\n\"Come on, honey. What is it?\"\n\n\"Well, to tell you the truth, I just don't like school anymore.\"\n\n\"What?\" you respond incredulously. \"What do you mean you don't like school? And after all the sacrifices we've made for your education! Education is the foundation of your future. If you'd apply yourself like your older sister does, you'd do better and then you'd like school. Time and time again, we've told you to settle down. You've got the ability, but you just don't apply yourself. Try harder. Get a positive attitude about it.\"\n\nPause.\n\n\"Now go ahead. Tell me how you feel.\"\n\nWe have such a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice. But we often fail to take the time to diagnose, to really, deeply understand the problem first.\n\nIf I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication.\n\nCHARACTER AND COMMUNICATION\n\nRight now, you're reading a book I've written. Reading and writing are both forms of communication. So are speaking and listening. In fact, those are the four basic types of communication. And think of all the hours you spend doing at least one of those four things. The ability to do them well is absolutely critical to your effectiveness.\n\nCommunication is the most important skill in life. We spend most of our waking hours communicating. But consider this: You've spent years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak. But what about listening? What training or education have you had that enables you to listen so that you really, deeply understand another human being from that individual's own frame of reference?\n\nComparatively few people have had any training in listening at all. And, for the most part, their training has been in the Person\u00adality Ethic of technique, truncated from the character base and the relationship base absolutely vital to authentic understanding of another person.\n\nIf you want to interact effectively with me, to influence me\u2014your spouse, your child, your neighbor, your boss, your coworker, your friend\u2014you first need to understand me. And you can't do that with technique alone. If I sense you're using some technique, I sense duplicity, manipulation. I wonder why you're doing it, what your motives are. And I don't feel safe enough to open myself up to you.\n\nThe real key to your influence with me is your example, your actual conduct. Your example flows naturally out of your character, or the kind of person you truly are\u2014not what others say you are or what you may want me to think you are. It is evident in how I actually experience you.\n\nYour character is constantly radiating, communicating. From it, in the long run, I come to instinctively trust or distrust you and your efforts with me.\n\nIf your life runs hot and cold, if you're both caustic and kind, and, above all, if your private performance doesn't square with your public performance, it's very hard for me to open up with you. Then, as much as I may want and even need to receive your love and influence, I don't feel safe enough to expose my opinions and experiences and my tender feelings. Who knows what will happen?\n\nBut unless I open up with you, unless you understand me and my unique situation and feelings, you won't know how to advise or counsel me. What you say is good and fine, but it doesn't quite pertain to me.\n\nYou may say you care about and appreciate me. I desperately want to believe that. But how can you appreciate me when you don't even understand me? All I have are your words, and I can't trust words.\n\nI'm too angry and defensive\u2014perhaps too guilty and afraid\u2014to be influenced, even though inside I know I need what you could tell me.\n\nUnless you're influenced by my uniqueness, I'm not going to be influenced by your advice. So if you want to be really effective in the habit of interpersonal communication, you cannot do it with technique alone. You have to build the skills of empathic listening on a base of character that inspires openness and trust. And you have to build the Emotional Bank Accounts that create a commerce between hearts.\n\nEMPATHIC LISTENING\n\n\"Seek first to understand\" involves a very deep shift in para\u00addigm. We typically seek first to be understood. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They're either speaking or preparing to speak. They're filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people's lives.\n\n\"Oh, I know exactly how you feel!\"\n\n\"I went through the very same thing. Let me tell you about my experience.\"\n\nThey're constantly projecting their own home movies onto other people's behavior. They prescribe their own glasses for everyone with whom they interact.\n\nIf they have a problem with someone\u2014a son, a daughter, a spouse, an employee\u2014their attitude is, \"That person just doesn't understand.\"\n\nA father once told me, \"I can't understand my kid. He just won't listen to me at all.\"\n\n\"Let me restate what you just said,\" I replied. \"You don't understand your son because he won't listen to you?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" he replied.\n\n\"Let me try again,\" I said. \"You don't understand your son because he won't listen to you?\"\n\n\"That's what I said,\" he impatiently replied.\n\n\"I thought that to understand another person, you needed to listen to him,\" I suggested.\n\n\"Oh!\" he said. There was a long pause. \"Oh!\" he said again, as the light began to dawn. \"Oh, yeah! But I do understand him. I know what he's going through. I went through the same thing myself. I guess what I don't understand is why he won't listen to me.\"\n\nThis man didn't have the vaguest idea of what was really going on inside his boy's head. He looked into his own head and thought he saw the world, including his boy.\n\nThat's the case with so many of us. We're filled with our own rightness, our own autobiography. We want to be understood. Our conversations become collective monologues, and we never really understand what's going on inside another human being.\n\nWhen another person speaks, we're usually \"listening\" at one of four levels. We may be ignoring another person, not really listening at all. We may practice pretending. \"Yeah. Uh-huh. Right.\" We may practice selective listening, hearing only certain parts of the con\u00adversation. We often do this when we're listening to the constant chatter of a preschool child. Or we may even practice attentive listening, paying attention and focusing energy on the words that are being said. But very few of us ever practice the fifth level, the highest form of listening, empathic listening.\n\nWhen I say empathic listening, I am not referring to the techniques of \"active\" listening or \"reflective\" listening, which basically involve mimicking what another person says. That kind of listening is skill-based, truncated from character and relation\u00adships, and often insults those \"listened\" to in such a way. It is also essentially autobiographical. If you practice those techniques, you may not project your autobiography in the actual interaction, but your motive in listening is autobiographical. You listen with reflective skills, but you listen with intent to reply, to control, to manipulate.\n\nWhen I say empathic listening, I mean listening with intent to understand. I mean seeking first to understand, to really understand. It's an entirely different paradigm.\n\nEmpathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person's frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel.\n\nEmpathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement, a form of judgment. And it is sometimes the more appropriate emotion and response. But people often feed on sympathy. It makes them dependent. The essence of empathic listening is not that you agree with someone; it's that you fully, deeply, under\u00adstand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.\n\nEmpathic listening involves much more than registering, reflect\u00ading, or even understanding the words that are said. Communica\u00adtions experts estimate, in fact, that only 10 percent of our communication is represented by the words we say. Another 30 percent is represented by our sounds, and 60 percent by our body language. In empathic listening, you listen with your ears, but you also, and more importantly, listen with your eyes and with your heart. You listen for feeling, for meaning. You listen for behavior. You use your right brain as well as your left. You sense, you intuit, you feel.\n\nEmpathic listening is so powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with. Instead of projecting your own autobiography and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives and interpretation, you're dealing with the reality inside another person's head and heart. You're listening to understand. You're focused on receiving the deep communication of another human soul.\n\nIn addition, empathic listening is the key to making deposits in Emotional Bank Accounts, because nothing you do is a deposit unless the other person perceives it as such. You can work your fingers to the bone to make a deposit, only to have it turn into a withdrawal when a person regards your efforts as manipulative, self-serving, intimidating, or condescending because you don't understand what really matters to him.\n\nEmpathic listening is, in and of itself, a tremendous deposit in the Emotional Bank Account. It's deeply therapeutic and healing because it gives a person \"psychological air.\"\n\nIf all the air were suddenly sucked out of the room you're in right now, what would happen to your interest in this book? You wouldn't care about the book; you wouldn't care about anything except getting air. Survival would be your only motivation.\n\nBut now that you have air, it doesn't motivate you. This is one of the greatest insights in the field of human motivation: Satisfied needs do not motivate. It's only the unsatisfied need that motivates. Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival\u2014to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.\n\nWhen you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing or problem solving.\n\nThis need for psychological air impacts communication in every area of life.\n\nI taught this concept at a seminar in Chicago one time, and I instructed the participants to practice empathic listening during the evening. The next morning, a man came up to me almost bursting with news.\n\n\"Let me tell you what happened last night,\" he said. \"I was trying to close a big commercial real estate deal while I was here in Chicago. I met with the principals, their attorneys, and another real estate agent who had just been brought in with an alternative proposal.\n\n\"It looked as if I were going to lose the deal. I had been working on this deal for over six months and, in a very real sense, all my eggs were in this one basket. All of them. I panicked. I did everything I could\u2014I pulled out all the stops\u2014I used every sales technique I could. The final stop was to say, 'Could we delay this decision just a little longer?' But the momentum was so strong and they were so disgusted by having this thing go on so long, it was obvious they were going to close.\n\n\"So I said to myself, 'Well, why not try it? Why not practice what I learned today and seek first to understand, then to be under\u00adstood? I've got nothing to lose.'\n\n\"I just said to the man, 'Let me see if I really understand what your position is and what your concerns about my recommenda\u00adtions really are. When you feel I understand them, then we'll see whether my proposal has any relevance or not.'\n\n\"I really tried to put myself in his shoes. I tried to verbalize his needs and concerns, and he began to open up.\n\n\"The more I sensed and expressed the things he was worried about, the results he anticipated, the more he opened up.\n\n\"Finally, in the middle of our conversation, he stood up, walked over to the phone, and dialed his wife. Putting his hand over the mouthpiece, he said, 'You've got the deal.'\n\n\"I was totally dumbfounded,\" he told me. \"I still am this morning.\"\n\nHe had made a huge deposit in the Emotional Bank Account by giving the man psychological air. When it comes right down to it, other things being relatively equal, the human dynamic is more important than the technical dimensions of the deal.\n\nSeeking first to understand, diagnosing before you prescribe, is hard. It's so much easier in the short run to hand someone a pair of glasses that have fit you so well these many years.\n\nBut in the long run, it severely depletes both P and PC. You can't achieve maximum interdependent production from an inaccurate understanding of where other people are coming from. And you can't have interpersonal PC\u2014high Emotional Bank Accounts\u2014if the people you relate with don't really feel understood.\n\nEmpathic listening is also risky. It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening experience because you open yourself up to be influenced. You become vulnerable. It's a paradox, in a sense, because in order to have influence, you have to be influenced. That means you have to really understand.\n\nThat's why Habits 1, 2, and 3 are so foundational. They give you the changeless inner core, the principle center, from which you can handle the more outward vulnerability with peace and strength.\n\nDIAGNOSE BEFORE YOU PRESCRIBE\n\nAlthough it's risky and hard, seek first to understand, or diagnose before you prescribe, is a correct principle manifest in many areas of life. It's the mark of all true professionals. It's critical for the optometrist, it's critical for the physician. You wouldn't have any confidence in a doctor's prescription unless you had confidence in the diagnosis.\n\nWhen our daughter Jenny was only two months old, she was sick one Saturday, the day of a football game in our community that dominated the consciousness of almost everyone. It was an important game\u2014some 60,000 people were there. Sandra and I would like to have gone, but we didn't want to leave little Jenny. Her vomiting and diarrhea had us concerned.\n\nThe doctor was at that game. He wasn't our personal physician, but he was the one on call. When Jenny's situation got worse, we decided we needed some medical advice.\n\nSandra dialed the stadium and had him paged. It was right at a critical time in the game, and she could sense an officious tone in his voice. \"Yes?\" he said briskly. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"This is Mrs. Covey, Doctor, and we're concerned about our daughter, Jenny.\"\n\n\"What's the situation?\" he asked.\n\nSandra described the symptoms, and he said, \"Okay. I'll call in a prescription. Which is your pharmacy?\"\n\nWhen she hung up, Sandra felt that in her rush she hadn't really given him full data, but that what she had told him was adequate.\n\n\"Do you think he realizes that Jenny is just a newborn?\" I asked her.\n\n\"I'm sure he does,\" Sandra replied.\n\n\"But he's not our doctor. He's never even treated her.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm pretty sure he knows.\"\n\n\"Are you willing to give her the medicine unless you're abso\u00adlutely sure he knows?\"\n\nSandra was silent. \"What are we going to do?\" she finally said.\n\n\"Call him back,\" I said.\n\n\"You call him back,\" Sandra replied.\n\nSo I did. He was paged out of the game once again. \"Doctor,\" I said, \"when you called in that prescription, did you realize that Jenny is just two months old?\"\n\n\"No!\" he exclaimed. \"I didn't realize that. It's good you called me back. I'll change the prescription immediately.\"\n\nIf you don't have confidence in the diagnosis, you won't have confidence in the prescription.\n\nThis principle is also true in sales. An effective sales person first seeks to understand the needs, the concerns, the situation of the customer. The amateur salesman sells products; the professional sells solutions to needs and problems. It's a totally different approach. The professional learns how to diagnose, how to under\u00adstand. He also learns how to relate people's needs to his products and services. And, he has to have the integrity to say, \"My product or service will not meet that need\" if it will not.\n\nDiagnosing before you prescribe is also fundamental to law. The professional lawyer first gathers the facts to understand the situation, to understand the laws and precedents, before preparing a case. A good lawyer almost writes the opposing attorney's case before he writes his own.\n\nIt's also true in product design. Can you imagine someone in a company saying, \"This consumer research stuff is for the birds. Let's design products.\" In other words, forget understanding the consumer's buying habits and motives\u2014just design products. It would never work.\n\nA good engineer will understand the forces, the stresses at work, before designing the bridge. A good teacher will assess the class before teaching. A good student will understand before he applies. A good parent will understand before evaluating or judging. The key to good judgment is understanding. By judging first, a person will never fully understand.\n\nSeek first to understand is a correct principle evident in all areas of life. It's a generic, common denominator principle, but it has its greatest power in the area of interpersonal relations.\n\nFOUR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL RESPONSES\n\nBecause we listen autobiographically, we tend to respond in one of four ways. We evaluate\u2014we either agree or disagree; we probe\u2014we ask questions from our own frame of reference; we advise\u2014we give counsel based on our own experience; or we interpret\u2014we try to figure people out, to explain their motives, their behavior, based on our own motives and behavior.\n\nThese responses come naturally to us. We are deeply scripted in them; we live around models of them all the time. But how do they affect our ability to really understand?\n\nIf I'm trying to communicate with my son, can he feel free to open himself up to me when I evaluate everything he says before he really explains it? Am I giving him psychological air?\n\nAnd how does he feel when I probe? Probing is playing twenty questions. It's autobiographical, it controls, and it invades. It's also logical, and the language of logic is different from the language of sentiment and emotion. You can play twenty questions all day and not find out what's important to someone. Constant probing is one of the main reasons parents do not get close to their children.\n\n\"How's it going, son?\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\n\"Well, what's been happening lately?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\n\"So what's exciting in school?\"\n\n\"Not much.\"\n\n\"And what are your plans for the weekend?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\nYou can't get him off the phone talking with his friends, but all he gives you is one- and two-word answers. Your house is a motel where he eats and sleeps, but he never shares, never opens up.\n\nAnd when you think about it, honestly, why should he, if every time he does open up his soft underbelly, you elephant stomp it with autobiographical advice and \"I told you so's.\"\n\nWe are so deeply scripted in these responses that we don't even realize when we use them. I have taught this concept to thousands of people in seminars across the country, and it never fails to shock them deeply as we role-play empathic listening situations and they finally begin to listen to their own typical responses. But as they begin to see how they normally respond and learn how to listen with empathy, they can see the dramatic results in communication. To many, seek first to understand becomes the most exciting, the most immediately applicable, of all the Seven Habits.\n\nLet's take a look at what well might be a typical communication between a father and his teenage son. Look at the father's words in terms of the four different responses we have just described.\n\n\"Boy, Dad, I've had it! School is for the birds!\"\n\n\"What's the matter, Son?\" (probing).\n\n\"It's totally impractical. I don't get a thing out of it.\"\n\n\"Well, you just can't see the benefits yet, Son. I felt the same way when I was your age. I remember thinking what a waste some of the classes were. But those classes turned out to be the most helpful to me later on. Just hang in there. Give it some time\" (advising).\n\n\"I've given it ten years of my life! Can you tell me what good 'x plus y' is going to be to me as an auto mechanic?\"\n\n\"An auto mechanic? You've got to be kidding\" (evaluating).\n\n\"No, I'm not. Look at Joe. He's quit school. He's working on cars. And he's making lots of money. Now that's practical.\"\n\n\"It may look that way now. But several years down the road, Joe's going to wish he'd stayed in school. You don't want to be an auto mechanic. You need an education to prepare you for some\u00adthing better than that\" (advising).\n\n\"I don't know. Joe's got a pretty good set up.\"\n\n\"Look, Son, have you really tried?\" (probing, evaluating).\n\n\"I've been in high school two years now. Sure I've tried. It's just a waste.\"\n\n\"That's a highly respected school, Son. Give them a little credit\" (advising, evaluating).\n\n\"Well, the other guys feel the same way I do.\"\n\n\"Do you realize how many sacrifices your mother and I have made to get you where you are? You can't quit when you've come this far\" (evaluating).\n\n\"I know you've sacrificed, Dad. But it's just not worth it.\"\n\n\"Look, maybe if you spent more time doing your homework and less time in front of TV....\" (advising, evaluating).\n\n\"Look, Dad. It's just no good. Oh... never mind! I don't want to talk about this anyway.\"\n\nObviously, his father was well intended. Obviously, he wanted to help. But did he even begin to really understand?\n\nLet's look more carefully at the son\u2014not just his words, but his thoughts and feelings (expressed parenthetically below) and the possible effect of some of his dad's autobiographical responses.\n\n\"Boy, Dad, I've had it! School is for the birds!\" (I want to talk with you, to get your attention.)\n\n\"What's the matter, Son?\" (You're interested! Good!)\n\n\"It's totally impractical. I don't get a thing out of it.\" (I've got a problem with school, and I feel just terrible.)\n\n\"Well, you just can't see the benefits yet, Son. I felt the same way when I was your age.\" (Oh, no! Here comes Chapter three of Dad's autobiography. This isn't what I want to talk about. I don't really care how many miles he had to trudge through the snow to school without any boots. I want to get to the problem.) \"I remember thinking what a waste some of the classes were. But those classes turned out to be the most helpful to me later on. Just hang in there. Give it some time.\" (Time won't solve my problem. I wish I could tell you. I wish I could just spit it out.)\n\n\"I've given it ten years of my life! Can you tell me what good 'x plus y' is going to do me as an auto mechanic?\"\n\n\"An auto mechanic? You've got to be kidding.\" (He wouldn't like me if I were an auto mechanic. He wouldn't like me if I didn't finish school. I have to justify what I said.)\n\n\"No, I'm not. Look at Joe. He's quit school. He's working on cars. And he's making lots of money. Now that's practical.\"\n\n\"It may look that way now. But several years down the road, Joe's going to wish he'd stayed in school.\" (Oh, boy! Here comes lecture number sixteen on the value of an education.) \"You don't want to be an auto mechanic.\" (How do you know that, Dad? Do you really have any idea what I want?) \"You need an education to prepare you for something better than that.\"\n\n\"I don't know. Joe's got a pretty good set up.\" (He's not a failure. He didn't finish school and he's not a failure.)\n\n\"Look, Son, have you really tried?\" (We're beating around the bush, Dad. If you'd just listen, I really need to talk to you about something important.)\n\n\"I've been in high school two years now. Sure I've tried. It's just a waste.\"\n\n\"That's a highly respected school, Son. Give them a little credit.\" (Oh, great. Now we're talking credibility. I wish I could talk about what I want to talk about.)\n\n\"Well, the other guys feel the same way I do.\" (I have some credibility, too. I'm not a moron.)\n\n\"Do you realize how many sacrifices your mother and I have made to get you where you are?\" (Uh-oh, here comes the guilt trip. Maybe I am a moron. The school's great, Mom and Dad are great, and I'm a moron.) \"You can't quit when you've come this far.\"\n\n\"I know you've sacrificed, Dad. But it's just not worth it.\" (You just don't understand.)\n\n\"Look, maybe if you spent more time doing your homework and less time in front of TV... .\" (That's not the problem, Dad! That's not it at all! I'll never be able to tell you. I was dumb to try.)\n\n\"Look, Dad. It's just no good. Oh... never mind! I don't want to talk about this anyway.\"\n\nCan you see how limited we are when we try to understand another person on the basis of words alone, especially when we're looking at that person through our own glasses? Can you see how limiting our autobiographical responses are to a person who is genuinely trying to get us to understand his auto\u00adbiography?\n\nYou will never be able to truly step inside another person, to see the world as he sees it, until you develop the pure desire, the strength of personal character, and the positive Emotional Bank Account, as well as the empathic listening skills to do it.\n\nThe skills, the tip of the iceberg of empathic listening, involve four developmental stages.\n\nThe first and least effective is to mimic content. This is the skill taught in \"active\" or \"reflective\" listening. Without the character and relationship base, it is often insulting to people and causes them to close up. It is, however, a first stage skill because it at least causes you to listen to what's being said.\n\nMimicking content is easy. You just listen to the words that come out of someone's mouth and you repeat them. You're hardly even using your brain at all.\n\n\"Boy, Dad, I've had it! School is for the birds!\"\n\n\"You've had it. You think school is for the birds.\"\n\nYou have essentially repeated back the content of what was being said. You haven't evaluated or probed or advised or inter\u00adpreted. You've at least showed you're paying attention to his words. But to understand, you want to do more.\n\nThe second stage of empathic listening is to rephrase the content. It's a little more effective, but it's still limited to the verbal communication.\n\n\"Boy, Dad, I've had it! School is for the birds!\"\n\n\"You don't want to go to school anymore.\"\n\nThis time, you've put his meaning into your own words. Now you're thinking about what he said, mostly with the left side, the reasoning, logical side of the brain.\n\nThe third stage brings your right brain into operation. You reflect feeling.\n\n\"Boy, Dad, I've had it! School is for the birds!\"\n\n\"You're feeling really frustrated.\"\n\nNow you're not paying as much attention to what he's saying as you are to the way he feels about what he's saying. The fourth stage includes both the second and the third. You rephrase the content and reflect the feeling.\n\n\"Boy, Dad, I've had it! School is for the birds!\"\n\n\"You're really frustrated about school.\"\n\nFrustration is the feeling; school is the content. You're using both sides of your brain to understand both sides of his commu\u00adnication.\n\nNow, what happens when you use fourth stage empathic listening skills is really incredible. As you authentically seek to understand, as you rephrase content and reflect feeling, you give him psychological air. You also help him work through his own thoughts and feelings. As he grows in his confidence of your sincere desire to really listen and understand, the barrier between what's going on inside him and what's actually being communi\u00adcated to you disappears. It opens a soul to soul flow. He's not thinking and feeling one thing and communicating another. He begins to trust you with his innermost tender feelings and thoughts.\n\n\"Boy, Dad, I've had it! School is for the birds!\" (I want to talk with you, to get your attention.)\n\n\"You're really frustrated about school.\" (That's right! That's how I feel.)\n\n\"I sure am. It's totally impractical. I'm not getting a thing out of it.\"\n\n\"You feel like school's not doing you any good.\" (Let me think\u2014is that what I mean?)\n\n\"Well, yeah. I'm just not learning anything that's going to help me. I mean, look at Joe. He's dropped out of school and he's working on cars. He's making money. Now that's practical.\"\n\n\"You feel that Joe really has the right idea.\" (Well....)\n\n\"Well, I guess he does in a way. He's really making money now. But in a few years, I bet he'll probably be ticked off at him\u00adself.\"\n\n\"You think Joe's going to feel he made the wrong decision.\"\n\n\"He's got to. Just look at what he's giving up. I mean, if you don't have an education, you just can't make it in this world.\"\n\n\"Education is really important.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah! I mean, if you don't have a diploma, if you can't get jobs or go to college, what are you going to do? You've just got to get an education.\"\n\n\"It's important to your future.\"\n\n\"It is. And... you know what? I'm really worried. Listen, you won't tell Mom, will you?\"\n\n\"You don't want your mother to find out.\"\n\n\"Well, not really. Oh, I guess you can tell her. She'll probably find out anyway. Look, I took this test today, this reading test. And, Dad, they said I'm reading on a fourth-grade level. Fourth grade! And I'm a junior in high school!\"\n\nWhat a difference real understanding can make! All the well-meaning advice in the world won't amount to a hill of beans if we're not even addressing the real problem. And we'll never get to the problem if we're so caught up in our own autobiography, our own paradigms, that we don't take off our glasses long enough to see the world from another point of view.\n\n\"I'm going to flunk, Dad. I guess I figure if I'm going to flunk, I might as well quit. But I don't want to quit.\"\n\n\"You feel torn. You're in the middle of a dilemma.\"\n\n\"What do you think I should do, Dad?\"\n\nBy seeking first to understand, this father has just turned a transactional opportunity into a transformational opportunity. Instead of interacting on a surface, get-the-job-done level of communication, he has created a situation in which he can now have transforming impact, not only on his son but also on the relationship. By setting aside his own autobiography and really seeking to understand, he has made a tremendous deposit in the Emotional Bank Account and has empowered his son to open, layer upon layer, and to get to the real issue.\n\nNow father and son are on the same side of the table looking at the problem, instead of on opposite sides looking across at each other. The son is opening his father's autobiography and asking for advice.\n\nEven as the father begins to counsel, however, he needs to be sensitive to his son's communication. As long as the response is logical, the father can effectively ask questions and give counsel. But the moment the response becomes emotional, he needs to go back to empathic listening.\n\n\"Well, I can see some things you might want to consider.\"\n\n\"Like what, Dad?\"\n\n\"Like getting some special help with your reading. Maybe they have some kind of tutoring program over at the tech school.\"\n\n\"I've already checked into that. It takes two nights and all day Saturday. That would take so much time!\"\n\nSensing emotion in that reply, the father moves back to empathy.\n\n\"That's too much of a price to pay.\"\n\n\"Besides, Dad, I told the sixth graders I'd be their coach.\"\n\n\"You don't want to let them down.\"\n\n\"But I'll tell you this, Dad. If I really thought that tutoring course would help, I'd be down there every night. I'd get someone else to coach those kids.\"\n\n\"You really want the help, but you doubt if the course will make a difference.\"\n\n\"Do you think it would, Dad?\"\n\nThe son is once more open and logical. He's opening his father's autobiography again. Now the father has another opportunity to influence and transform.\n\nThere are times when transformation requires no outside coun\u00adsel. Often when people are really given the chance to open up, they unravel their own problems and the solutions become clear to them in the process.\n\nAt other times, they really need additional perspective and help. The key is to genuinely seek the welfare of the individual, to listen with empathy, to let the person get to the problem and the solution at his own pace and time. Layer upon layer\u2014it's like peeling an onion until you get to the soft inner core.\n\nWhen people are really hurting and you really listen with a pure desire to understand, you'll be amazed how fast they will open up. They want to open up. Children desperately want to open up, even more to their parents than to their peers. And they will, if they feel their parents will love them unconditionally and will be faithful to them afterwards and not judge or ridicule them.\n\nIf you really seek to understand, without hypocrisy and without guile, there will be times when you will be literally stunned with the pure knowledge and understanding that will flow to you from another human being. It isn't even always necessary to talk in order to empathize. In fact, sometimes words may just get in your way. That's one very important reason why technique alone will not work. That kind of understanding transcends technique. Isolated technique only gets in the way.\n\nI have gone through the skills of empathic listening because skill is an important part of any habit. We need to have the skills. But let me reiterate that the skills will not be effective unless they come from a sincere desire to understand. People resent any attempt to manipulate them. In fact, if you're dealing with people you're close to, it's helpful to tell them what you're doing.\n\n\"I read this book about listening and empathy and I thought about my relationship with you. I realized I haven't listened to you like I should. But I want to. It's hard for me. I may blow it at times, but I'm going to work at it. I really care about you and I want to understand. I hope you'll help me.\" Affirming your motive is a huge deposit.\n\nBut if you're not sincere, I wouldn't even try it. It may create an openness and a vulnerability that will later turn to your harm when a person discovers that you really didn't care, you really didn't want to listen, and he's left open, exposed, and hurt. The tech\u00adnique, the tip of the iceberg, has to come out of the massive base of character underneath.\n\nNow there are people who protest that empathic listening takes too much time. It may take a little more time initially but it saves so much time downstream. The most efficient thing you can do if you're a doctor and want to prescribe a wise treatment is to make an accurate diagnosis. You can't say, \"I'm in too much of a hurry. I don't have time to make a diagnosis. Just take this treatment.\"\n\nI remember writing one time in a room on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii. There was a soft breeze blowing, and so I had opened two windows\u2014one at the front and one at the side\u2014to keep the room cool. I had a number of papers laid out, chapter by chapter, on a large table.\n\nSuddenly, the breeze started picking up and blowing my papers about. I remember the frantic sense of loss I felt because things were no longer in order, including unnumbered pages, and I began rushing around the room trying desperately to put them back. Finally, I realized it would be better to take ten seconds and close one of the windows.\n\nEmpathic listening takes time, but it doesn't take anywhere near as much time as it takes to back up and correct misunderstandings when you're already miles down the road, to redo, to live with unexpressed and unsolved problems, to deal with the results of not giving people psychological air.\n\nA discerning empathic listener can read what's happening down deep fast, and can show such acceptance, such understanding, that other people feel safe to open up layer after layer until they get to that soft inner core where the problem really lies.\n\nPeople want to be understood. And whatever investment of time it takes to do that will bring much greater returns of time as you work from an accurate understanding of the problems and issues and from the high Emotional Bank Account that results when a person feels deeply understood.\n\nUNDERSTANDING AND PERCEPTION\n\nAs you learn to listen deeply to other people, you will discover tremendous differences in perception. You will also begin to appreciate the impact that these differences can have as people try to work together in interdependent situations.\n\nYou see the young woman; I see the old lady. And both of us can be right.\n\nYou may look at the world through spouse-centered glasses; I see it through the money-centered lens of economic concern.\n\nYou may be scripted in the abundance mentality; I may be scripted in the scarcity mentality.\n\nYou may approach problems from a highly visual, intuitive, holistic right brain paradigm; I may be very left brain, very sequential, analytical, and verbal in my approach.\n\nOur perceptions can be vastly different. And yet we both have lived with our paradigms for years, thinking they are \"facts,\" and questioning the character or the mental competence of anyone who can't \"see the facts.\"\n\nNow, with all our differences, we're trying to work together\u2014in a marriage, in a job, in a community service project\u2014to manage resources and accomplish results. So how do we do it? How do we transcend the limits of our individual perceptions so that we can deeply communicate, so that we can cooperatively deal with the issues and come up with Win\/Win solutions?\n\nThe answer is Habit 5. It's the first step in the process of Win\/Win. Even if (and especially when) the other person is not coming from that paradigm, seek first to understand.\n\nThis principle worked powerfully for one executive who shared with me the following experience:\n\n\"I was working with a small company that was in the process of negotiating a contract with a large national banking institution. This institution flew in their lawyers from San Francisco, their negotiator from Ohio, and presidents of two of their large banks to create an eight-person negotiating team. The company I worked with had decided to go for Win\/Win or No Deal. They wanted to significantly increase the level of service and the cost, but they had been almost overwhelmed with the demands of this large financial institution.\n\n\"The president of our company sat across the negotiating table and told them, 'We would like for you to write the contract the way you want it so that we can make sure we understand your needs and your concerns. We will respond to those needs and concerns. Then we can talk about pricing.'\n\n\"The members of the negotiating team were overwhelmed. They were astounded that they were going to have the opportunity to write the contract. They took three days to come up with the deal.\n\n\"When they presented it, the president said, 'Now let's make sure we understand what you want.' And he went down the contract, rephrasing the content, reflecting the feeling, until he was sure and they were sure he understood what was important to them. 'Yes. That's right. No, that's not exactly what we meant here... yes, you've got it now.'\n\n\"When he thoroughly understood their perspective, he proceeded to explain some concerns from his perspective... and they listened. They were ready to listen. They weren't fighting for air. What had started out as a very formal, low-trust, almost hostile atmosphere had turned into a fertile environment for synergy.\n\n\"At the conclusion of the discussions, the members of the negotiating team basically said, 'We want to work with you. We want to do this deal. Just let us know what the price is and we'll sign.'\"\n\nTHEN SEEK TO BE UNDERSTOOD\n\nSeek first to understand... then to be understood. Knowing how to be understood is the other half of Habit 5, and is equally critical in reaching Win\/Win solutions.\n\nEarlier we defined maturity as the balance between courage and consideration. Seeking to understand requires consideration; seeking to be understood takes courage. Win\/Win requires a high degree of both. So it becomes important in interdependent situations for us to be understood.\n\nThe early Greeks had a magnificent philosophy which is embodied in three sequentially arranged words: ethos, pathos, and logos. I suggest these three words contain the essence of seeking first to understand and making effective presentations.\n\nEthos is your personal credibility, the faith people have in your integrity and competency. It's the trust that you inspire, your Emotional Bank Account. Pathos is the empathic side\u2014it's the feeling. It means that you are in alignment with the emotional thrust of another person's communication. Logos is the logic, the reasoning part of the presentation.\n\nNotice the sequence: ethos, pathos, logos\u2014your character, and your relationships, and then the logic of your presentation. This represents another major paradigm shift. Most people, in making presentations, go straight to the logos, the left brain logic, of their ideas. They try to convince other people of the validity of that logic without first taking ethos and pathos into consideration.\n\nI had an acquaintance who was very frustrated because his boss was locked into what he felt was an unproductive leadership style.\n\n\"Why doesn't he do anything?\" he asked me. \"I've talked to him about it, he's aware of it, but he does nothing.\"\n\n\"Well, why don't you make an effective presentation?\" I asked.\n\n\"I did,\" was the reply.\n\n\"How do you define 'effective'? Who do they send back to school when the salesman doesn't sell\u2014the buyer? Effective means it works; it means P\/PC. Did you create the change you wanted? Did you build the relationship in the process? What were the results of your presentation?\"\n\n\"I told you, he didn't do anything. He wouldn't listen.\"\n\n\"Then make an effective presentation. You've got to empathize with his head. You've got to get into his frame of mind. You've got to make your point simply and visually and describe the alternative he is in favor of better than he can himself. That will take some homework. Are you willing to do that?\"\n\n\"Why do I have to go through all that?\" he asked.\n\n\"In other words, you want him to change his whole leadership style and you're not willing to change your method of presenta\u00adtion?\"\n\n\"I guess so,\" he replied.\n\n\"Well, then,\" I said, \"just smile about it and learn to live with it.\"\n\n\"I can't live with it,\" he said. \"It compromises my integrity.\"\n\n\"Okay, then get to work on an effective presentation. That's in your Circle of Influence.\"\n\nIn the end, he wouldn't do it. The investment seemed too great.\n\nAnother acquaintance, a university professor, was willing to pay the price. He approached me one day and said, \"Stephen, I can't get to first base in getting the funding I need for my research because my research is really not in the mainstream of this department's interests.\"\n\nAfter discussing his situation at some length, I suggested that he develop an effective presentation using ethos, pathos, and logos. \"I know you're sincere and the research you want to do would bring great benefits. Describe the alternative they are in favor of better than they can themselves. Show that you understand them in depth. Then carefully explain the logic behind your request.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll try,\" he said.\n\n\"Do you want to practice with me?\" I asked. He was willing, and so we dress rehearsed his approach.\n\nWhen he went in to make his presentation, he started by saying, \"Now let me see if I first understand what your objectives are, and what your concerns are about this presentation and my rec\u00adommendation.\"\n\nHe took the time to do it slowly, gradually. In the middle of his presentation, demonstrating his depth of understanding and re\u00adspect for their point of view, a senior professor turned to another professor, nodded, turned back to him, and said, \"You've got your money.\"\n\nWhen you can present your own ideas clearly, specifically, visually, and most important, contextually\u2014in the context of a deep understanding of their paradigms and concerns\u2014you signif\u00adicantly increase the credibility of your ideas.\n\nYou're not wrapped up in your \"own thing,\" delivering gran\u00addiose rhetoric from a soapbox. You really understand. What you're presenting may even be different from what you had originally thought because in your effort to understand, you learned.\n\nHabit 5 lifts you to greater accuracy, greater integrity, in your presentations. And people know that. They know you're present\u00ading the ideas which you genuinely believe, taking all known facts and perceptions into consideration, that will benefit everyone.\n\nONE ON ONE\n\nHabit 5 is powerful because it is right in the middle of your Circle of Influence. Many factors in interdependent situations are in your Circle of Concern\u2014problems, disagreements, circumstances, other people's behavior. And if you focus your energies out there, you deplete them with little positive results.\n\nBut you can always seek first to understand. That's something that's within your control. And as you do that, as you focus on your Circle of Influence, you really, deeply understand other people. You have accurate information to work with, you get to the heart of matters quickly, you build Emotional Bank Accounts, and you give people the psychological air they need so you can work together effectively.\n\nIt's the inside-out approach. And as you do it, watch what happens to your Circle of Influence. Because you really listen, you become influenceable. And being influenceable is the key to influencing others. Your circle begins to expand. You increase your ability to influence many of the things in your Circle of Concern.\n\nAnd watch what happens to you. The more deeply you under\u00adstand other people, the more you will appreciate them, the more reverent you will feel about them. To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.\n\nHabit 5 is something you can practice right now. The next time you communicate with anyone, you can put aside your own autobiography and genuinely seek to understand. Even when people don't want to open up about their problems, you can be empathic. You can sense their hearts, you can sense the hurt, and you can respond, \"You seem down today.\" They may say nothing. That's all right. You've shown understanding and respect.\n\nDon't push; be patient; be respectful. People don't have to open up verbally before you can empathize. You can empathize all the time with their behavior. You can be discerning, sensitive, and aware and you can live outside your autobiography when that is needed.\n\nAnd if you're highly proactive, you can create opportunities to do preventive work. You don't have to wait until your son or daughter has a problem with school or you have your next business negotiation to seek first to understand.\n\nSpend time with your children now, one on one. Listen to them; understand them. Look at your home, at school life, at the challenges and the problems they're facing, through their eyes. Build the Emotional Bank Account. Give them air.\n\nGo out with your spouse on a regular basis. Have dinner or do something together you both enjoy. Listen to each other; seek to understand. See life through each other's eyes.\n\nMy daily time with Sandra is something I wouldn't trade for anything. As well as seeking to understand each other, we often take time to actually practice empathic listening skills to help us in communicating with our children.\n\nWe often share our different perceptions of the situation, and we role-play more effective approaches to difficult interpersonal family problems.\n\nI may act as if I am a son or daughter requesting a special privilege even though I haven't fulfilled a basic family responsibil\u00adity, and Sandra plays herself.\n\nWe interact back and forth and try to visualize the situation in a very real way so that we can train ourselves to be consistent in modeling and teaching correct principles to our children. Some of our most helpful role-plays come from redoing a past difficult or stressful scene in which one of us \"blew it.\"\n\nThe time you invest to deeply understand the people you love brings tremendous dividends in open communication. Many of the problems that plague families and marriages simply don't have time to fester and develop. The communication becomes so open that potential problems can be nipped in the bud. And there are great reserves of trust in the Emotional Bank Account to handle the problems that do arise.\n\nIn business, you can set up one-on-one time with your employ\u00adees. Listen to them, understand them. Set up human resource accounting or stakeholder information systems in your business to get honest, accurate feedback at every level: from customers, suppliers, and employees. Make the human element as important as the financial or the technical element. You save tremendous amounts of time, energy, and money when you tap into the human resources of a business at every level. When you listen, you learn. And you also give the people who work for you and with you psychological air. You inspire loyalty that goes well beyond the eight-to-five physical demands of the job.\n\nSeek first to understand. Before the problems come up, before you try to evaluate and prescribe, before you try to present your own ideas\u2014seek to understand. It's a powerful habit of effective interdependence.\n\nWhen we really, deeply understand each other, we open the door to creative solutions and third alternatives. Our differences are no longer stumbling blocks to communication and progress. Instead, they become the stepping stones to synergy.\n\nAPPLICATION SUGGESTIONS:\n\n  1. Select a relationship in which you sense the Emotional Bank Account is in the red. Try to understand and write down the situation from the other person's point of view. In your next interaction, listen for understanding, comparing what you are hearing with what you wrote down. How valid were your assumptions? Did you really understand that individual's per\u00adspective?\n  2. Share the concept of empathy with someone close to you. Tell him or her you want to work on really listening to others and ask for feedback in a week. How did you do? How did it make that person feel?\n  3. The next time you have an opportunity to watch people commu\u00adnicate, cover your ears for a few minutes and just watch. What emotions are being communicated that may not come across in words alone?\n  4. Next time you catch yourself inappropriately using one of the autobiographical responses\u2014probing, evaluating, advising, or interpreting\u2014try to turn the situation into a deposit by acknowl\u00adedgment and apology. (\"I'm sorry, I just realized I'm not really trying to understand. Could we start again?\")\n  5. Base your next presentation on empathy. Describe the other point of view as well as or better than its proponents; then seek to have your point understood from their frame of reference.\n\n### HABIT 6  \nSYNERGIZE\n\n### PRINCIPLES OF CREATIVE COOPERATION\n\nI take as my guide the hope of a saint:  \nin crucial things, unity\u2014  \nin important things, diversity\u2014  \nin all things, generosity.\n\nInaugural address of President George Bush\n\nW HEN SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS CALLED to head up the war effort for Great Britain, he remarked that all his life had prepared him for this hour. In a similar sense, the exercise of all of the other habits prepares us for the habit of synergy.\n\nWhen properly understood, synergy is the highest activity in all life\u2014the true test and manifestation of all of the other habits put together.\n\nThe highest forms of synergy focus the four unique human endowments, the motive of Win\/Win, and the skills of empathic communication on the toughest challenges we face in life. What results is almost miraculous. We create new alternatives\u2014something that wasn't there before.\n\nSynergy is the essence of principle-centered leadership. It is the essence of principle-centered parenting. It catalyzes, unifies, and unleashes the greatest powers within people. All the habits we have covered prepare us to create the miracle of synergy.\n\nWhat is synergy? Simply defined, it means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself. It is not only a part, but the most catalytic, the most empowering, the most unifying, and the most exciting part.\n\nThe creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don't know exactly what's going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don't know what new dangers and challenges you'll find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness. You become a trailblazer, a pathfinder. You open new possibilities, new territories, new continents, so that others can follow.\n\nSynergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots comingle and improve the quality of the soil so that both plants will grow better than if they were separated. If you put two pieces of wood together, they will hold much more than the total of the weight held by each separately. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three or more.\n\nThe challenge is to apply the principles of creative cooperation, which we learn from nature, in our social interactions. Family life provides many opportunities to observe synergy and to practice it.\n\nThe very way that a man and a woman bring a child into the world is synergistic. The essence of synergy is to value differences\u2014to respect them, to build on strengths, to compensate for weaknesses.\n\nWe obviously value the physical differences between men and women, husbands and wives. But what about the social, mental, and emotional differences? Could these differences not also be sources of creating new, exciting forms of life\u2014creating an environment that is truly fulfilling for each person, that nurtures the self-esteem and self-worth of each, that creates opportunities for each to mature into independence and then gradually into inter\u00addependence? Could synergy not create a new script for the next generation\u2014one that is more geared to service and contribution, and is less protective, less adversarial, less selfish; one that is more open, more trusting, more giving, and is less defensive, protective, and political; one that is more loving, more caring, and is less possessive and judgmental?\n\nSYNERGISTIC COMMUNICATION\n\nWhen you communicate synergistically, you are simply opening your mind and heart and expressions to new possibilities, new alternatives, new options. It may seem as if you are casting aside Habit 2 (to begin with the end in mind); but, in fact, you're doing the opposite\u2014you're fulfilling it. You're not sure when you engage in synergistic communication how things will work out or what the end will look like, but you do have an inward sense of excitement and security and adventure, believing that it will be significantly better than it was before. And that is the end that you have in mind.\n\nYou begin with the belief that parties involved will gain more insight, and that the excitement of that mutual learning and insight will create a momentum toward more and more insights, learnings, and growth.\n\nMany people have not really experienced even a moderate degree of synergy in their family life or in other interactions. They've been trained and scripted into defensive and protective communications or into believing that life or other people can't be trusted. As a result, they are never really open to Habit 6 and to these principles.\n\nThis represents one of the great tragedies and wastes in life, because so much potential remains untapped\u2014completely undeveloped and unused. Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential. They experience synergy only in small, peripheral ways in their lives.\n\nThey may have memories of some unusual creative experiences, perhaps in athletics, where they were involved in a real team spirit for a period of time. Or perhaps they were in an emergency situation where people cooperated to an unusually high degree and submerged ego and pride in an effort to save someone's life or to produce a solution to a crisis.\n\nTo many, such events may seem unusual, almost out of character with life, even miraculous. But this is not so. These things can be produced regularly, consistently, almost daily in people's lives. But it requires enormous personal security and openness and a spirit of adventure.\n\nMost all creative endeavors are somewhat unpredictable. They often seem ambiguous, hit-or-miss, trial and error. And unless people have a high tolerance for ambiguity and get their security from integrity to principles and inner values they find it unnerving and unpleasant to be involved in highly creative enterprises. Their need for structure, certainty, and predictability is too high.\n\nSYNERGY IN THE CLASSROOM\n\nAs a teacher, I have come to believe that many truly great classes teeter on the very edge of chaos. Synergy tests whether teachers and students are really open to the principle of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.\n\nThere are times when neither the teacher nor the student knows for sure what's going to happen. In the beginning, there's a safe environment that enables people to be really open and to learn and to listen to each other's ideas. Then comes brainstorming, where the spirit of evaluation is subordinated to the spirit of creativity, imagining, and intellectual networking. Then an absolutely unusual phenomenon begins to take place. The entire class is transformed with the excitement of a new thrust, a new idea, a new direction that's hard to define, yet it's almost palpable to the people involved.\n\nSynergy is almost as if a group collectively agrees to subordinate old scripts and to write a new one.\n\nI'll never forget a university class I taught in leadership philosophy and style. We were about three weeks into a semester when, in the middle of a presentation, one person started to relate some very powerful personal experiences which were both emotional and insightful. A spirit of humility and reverence fell upon the class\u2014reverence toward this individual and appreciation for his courage.\n\nThis spirit became fertile soil for a synergistic and creative endeavor. Others began to pick up on it, sharing some of their experiences and insights and even some of their self-doubts. The spirit of trust and safety prompted many to become extremely open. Rather than present what they prepared, they fed on each other's insights and ideas and started to create a whole new scenario as to what that class could mean.\n\nI was deeply involved in the process. In fact, I was almost mesmerized by it because it seemed so magical and creative. And I found myself gradually loosening up my commitment to the structure of the class and sensing entirely new possibilities. It wasn't just a flight of fancy; there was a sense of maturity and stability and substance which transcended by far the old structure and plan.\n\nWe abandoned the old syllabus, the purchased textbooks and all the presentation plans, and we set up new purposes and projects and assignments. We became so excited about what was happening that in about three more weeks, we all sensed an overwhelming desire to share what was happening with others.\n\nWe decided to write a book containing our learnings and insights on the subject of our study\u2014principles of leadership. Assignments were changed, new projects undertaken, new teams formed. People worked much harder than they ever would have in the original class structure, and for an entirely different set of reasons.\n\nOut of this experience emerged an extremely unique, cohesive, and synergistic culture that did not end with the semester. For years, alumni meetings were held among members of that class. Even today, many years later, when we see each other, we talk about it and often attempt to describe what happened and why.\n\nOne of the interesting things to me was how little time had transpired before there was sufficient trust to create such synergy. I think it was largely because the people were relatively mature. They were in the final semester of their senior year, and I think they wanted more than just another good classroom experience. They were hungry for something new and exciting, something that they could create that was truly meaningful. It was \"an idea whose time had come\" for them.\n\nIn addition, the chemistry was right. I felt that experiencing synergy was more powerful than talking about it, that producing something new was more meaningful than simply reading something old.\n\nI've also experienced, as I believe most people have, times that were almost synergistic, times that hung on the edge of chaos and for some reason descended into it. Sadly, people who are burned by such experiences often begin their next new experience with that failure in mind. They defend themselves against it and cut themselves off from synergy.\n\nIt's like administrators who set up new rules and regulations based on the abuses of a few people inside an organization, thus limiting the freedom and creative possibilities for many\u2014or business partners who imagine the worst scenarios possible and write them up in legal language, killing the whole spirit of creativity, enterprise, and synergistic possibility.\n\nAs I think back on many consulting and executive education experiences, I can say that the highlights were almost always synergistic. There was usually an early moment that required considerable courage, perhaps in becoming extremely authentic, in confronting some inside truth about the individual or the organization or the family which really needed to be said, but took a combination of considerable courage and genuine love to say it. Then others became more authentic, open, and honest, and the synergistic communication process began. It usually became more and more creative, and ended up in insights and plans that no one had anticipated initially.\n\nAs Carl Rogers taught, \"That which is most personal is most general.\" The more authentic you become, the more genuine in your expression, particularly regarding personal experiences and even self-doubts, the more people can relate to your expression and the safer it makes them feel to express themselves. That expression in turn feeds back on the other person's spirit, and genuine creative empathy takes place, producing new insights and learnings and a sense of excitement and adventure that keeps the process going.\n\nPeople then begin to interact with each other almost in half sentences, sometimes incoherent, but they get each other's mean\u00adings very rapidly. Then whole new worlds of insights, new perspectives, new paradigms that insure options, new alternatives are opened up and thought about. Though occasionally these new ideas are left up in the air, they usually come to some kind of closure that is practical and useful.\n\nSYNERGY IN BUSINESS\n\nI enjoyed one particularly meaningful synergistic experience as I worked with my associates to create the corporate mission state\u00adment for our business. Almost all members of the company went high up into the mountains where, surrounded by the magnifi\u00adcence of nature, we began with a first draft of what some of us considered to be an excellent mission statement.\n\nAt first the communication was respectful, careful and predict\u00adable. But as we began to talk about the various alternatives, possibilities and opportunities ahead, people became very open and authentic and simply started to think out loud. The mission statement agenda gave way to a collective free association, a spontaneous piggybacking of ideas. People were genuinely em\u00adpathic as well as courageous, and we moved from mutual respect and understanding to creative synergistic communication.\n\nEveryone could sense it. It was exciting. As it matured, we returned to the task of putting the evolved collective vision into words, each of which contains specific and committed-to meaning for each participant.\n\nThe resulting corporate mission statement reads:\n\nOur mission is to empower people and organizations to signifi\u00adcantly increase their performance capability in order to achieve worthwhile purposes through understanding and living principle-centered leadership.\n\nThe synergistic process that led to the creation of our mission statement engraved it in the hearts and minds of everyone there, and it has served us well as a frame of reference of what we are about, as well as what we are not about.\n\nAnother high level synergy experience took place when I ac\u00adcepted an invitation to serve as the resource and discussion catalyst at the annual planning meeting of a large insurance company. Several months ahead, I met with the committee responsible to prepare for and stage the two-day meeting which was to involve all the top executives. They informed me that the traditional pattern was to identify four or five major issues through questionnaires and interviews, and to have alternative proposals presented by the executives. Past meetings had been generally respectful exchanges, occasionally deteriorating into defensive Win\/Lose ego battles. They were usually predictable, uncreative, and boring.\n\nAs I talked with the committee members about the power of synergy, they could sense its potential. With considerable trepida\u00adtion, they agreed to change the pattern. They requested various executives to prepare anonymous \"white papers\" on each of the high priority issues, and then asked all the executives to immerse themselves in these papers ahead of time in order to understand the issues and the differing points of view. They were to come to the meeting prepared to listen rather than to present, prepared to create and synergize rather than to defend and protect.\n\nWe spent the first half-day in the meeting teaching the principles and practicing the skills of Habits 4, 5, and 6. The rest of the time was spent in creative synergy.\n\nThe release of creative energy was incredible. Excitement re\u00adplaced boredom. People became very open to each other's influ\u00adence and generated new insights and options. By the end of the meeting an entirely new understanding of the nature of the central company challenge evolved. The white paper proposals became obsolete. Differences were valued and transcended. A new com\u00admon vision began to form.\n\nOnce people have experienced real synergy, they are never quite the same again. They know the possibility of having other such mind-expanding adventures in the future.\n\nOften attempts are made to recreate a particular synergistic experience, but this seldom can be done. However, the essential purpose behind creative work can be recaptured. Like the Far Eastern philosophy, \"We seek not to imitate the masters, rather we seek what they sought,\" we seek not to imitate past creative synergistic experiences, rather we seek new ones around new and different and sometimes higher purposes.\n\nSYNERGY AND COMMUNICATION\n\nSynergy is exciting. Creativity is exciting. It's phenomenal what openness and communication can produce. The possibilities of truly significant gain, of significant improvement are so real that it's worth the risk such openness entails.\n\nAfter World War II, the United States commissioned David Lilienthal to head the new Atomic Energy Commission. Lilienthal brought together a group of people who were highly influential\u2014celebrities in their own right\u2014disciples, as it were, of their own frames of reference.\n\nThis very diverse group of individuals had an extremely heavy agenda, and they were impatient to get at it. In addition, the press was pushing them.\n\nBut Lilienthal took several weeks to create a high Emotional Bank Account. He had these people get to know each other\u2014their interests, their hopes, their goals, their concerns, their backgrounds, their frames of reference, their paradigms. He facilitated the kind of human interaction that creates a great bonding between people, and he was heavily criticized for taking the time to do it because it wasn't \"efficient.\"\n\nBut the net result was that this group became closely knit together, very open with each other, very creative, and synergistic. The respect among the members of the commission was so high that if there was disagreement, instead of opposition and defense, there was a genuine effort to understand. The attitude was \"If a person of your intelligence and competence and commitment disagrees with me, then there must be something to your disagreement that I don't understand, and I need to understand it. You have a perspective, a frame of reference I need to look at.\" Nonprotective interaction developed, and an unusual culture was born.\n\nThe following diagram illustrates how closely trust is related to different levels of communication.\n\nThe lowest level of communication coming out of low-trust situations would be characterized by defensiveness, protectiveness, and often legalistic language, which covers all the bases and spells out qualifiers and the escape clauses in the event things go sour. Such communication produces only Win\/Lose or Lose\/Lose. It isn't effective\u2014there's no P\/PC balance\u2014and it creates further reasons to defend and protect.\n\nThe middle position is respectful communication. This is the level where fairly mature people interact. They have respect for each other, but they want to avoid the possibility of ugly confrontations, so they communicate politely but not empathically. They might understand each other intellectually, but they really don't deeply look at the paradigms and assumptions underlying their own positions and become open to new possibilities.\n\nRespectful communication works in independent situations and even in interdependent situations, but the creative possibilities are not opened up. In interdependent situations compromise is the position usually taken. Compromise means that 1 + 1 = 1\u00bd. Both give and take. The communication isn't defensive or protective or angry or manipulative; it is honest and genuine and respectful. But it isn't creative or synergistic. It produces a low form of Win\/Win.\n\nSynergy means that 1 + 1 may equal 8, 16, or even 1,600. The synergistic position of high trust produces solutions better than any originally proposed, and all parties know it. Furthermore, they genuinely enjoy the creative enterprise. A miniculture is formed to satisfy in and of itself. Even if it is short lived, the P\/PC balance is there.\n\nThere are some circumstances in which synergy may not be achievable and No Deal isn't viable. But even in these circumstances, the spirit of sincere trying will usually result in a more effective compromise.\n\nFISHING FOR THE THIRD ALTERNATIVE\n\nTo get a better idea of how our level of communication affects our interdependent effectiveness, envision the following scenario:\n\nIt's vacation time, and a husband wants to take his family out to the lake country to enjoy camping and fishing. This is important to him; he's been planning it all year. He's made reservations at a cottage on the lake and arranged to rent a boat, and his sons are really excited about going.\n\nHis wife, however, wants to use the vacation time to visit her ailing mother some 250 miles away. She doesn't have the oppor\u00adtunity to see her very often, and this is important to her.\n\nTheir differences could be the cause of a major negative experience.\n\n\"The plans are set. The boys are excited. We should go on the fishing trip,\" he says.\n\n\"But we don't know how much longer my mother will be around, and I want to be by her,\" she replies. \"This is our only opportunity to have enough time to do that.\"\n\n\"All year long we've looked forward to this one-week vacation. The boys would be miserable sitting around grandmother's house for a week. They'd drive everybody crazy. Besides, your mother's not that sick. And she has your sister less than a mile away to take care of her.\"\n\n\"She's my mother, too. I want to be with her.\"\n\n\"You could phone her every night. And we're planning to spend time with her at the Christmas family reunion. Remember?\"\n\n\"That's not for five more months. We don't even know if she'll still be here by then. Besides, she needs me, and she wants me.\"\n\n\"She's being well taken care of. Besides, the boys and I need you, too.\"\n\n\"My mother is more important than fishing.\"\n\n\"Your husband and sons are more important than your mother.\"\n\nAs they disagree, back and forth, they finally may come up with some kind of compromise. They may decide to split up\u2014he takes the boys fishing at the lake while she visits her mother. And they both feel guilty and unhappy. The boys sense it, and it affects their enjoyment of the vacation.\n\nThe husband may give in to his wife, but he does it grudgingly. And consciously or unconsciously, he produces evidence to fulfill his prophecy of how miserable the week will be for everyone.\n\nThe wife may give in to her husband, but she's withdrawn and overreactive to any new developments in her mother's health situation. If her mother were to become seriously ill and die, the husband could never forgive himself, and she couldn't forgive him either.\n\nWhatever compromise they finally agree on, it could be re\u00adhearsed over the years as evidence of insensitivity, neglect, or a bad priority decision on either part. It could be a source of contention for years and could even polarize the family. Many marriages that once were beautiful and soft and spontaneous and loving have deteriorated to the level of a hostility through a series of incidents just like this.\n\nThe husband and wife see the situation differently. And that difference can polarize them, separate them, create wedges in the relationship. Or it can bring them closer together on a higher level. If they have cultivated the habits of effective interdependence, they approach their differences from an entirely different paradigm. Their communication is on a higher level.\n\nBecause they have a high Emotional Bank Account, they have trust and open communication in their marriage. Because they think Win\/Win, they believe in a third alternative, a solution that is mutually beneficial and is better than what either of them originally proposed. Because they listen empathically and seek first to understand, they create within themselves and between them a comprehensive picture of the values and the concerns that need to be taken into account in making a decision.\n\nAnd the combination of those ingredients\u2014the high Emotional Bank Account, thinking Win\/Win, and seeking first to understand\u2014creates the ideal environment for synergy.\n\nBuddhism calls this \"the middle way.\" Middle in this sense does not mean compromise; it means higher, like the apex of the triangle.\n\nIn searching for the \"middle\" or higher way, this husband and wife realize that their love, their relationship, is part of their synergy.\n\nAs they communicate, the husband really, deeply feels his wife's desire, her need to be with her mother. He understands how she wants to relieve her sister, who has had the primary responsibility for their mother's care. He understands that they really don't know how long she will be with them, and that she certainly is more important than fishing.\n\nAnd the wife deeply understands her husband's desire to have the family together and to provide a great experience for the boys. She realizes the investment that has been made in lessons and equipment to prepare for this fishing vacation, and she feels the importance of creating good memories with them.\n\nSo they pool those desires. And they're not on opposite sides of the problem. They're together on one side, looking at the problem, understanding the needs, and working to create a third alternative that will meet them.\n\n\"Maybe we could arrange another time within the month for you to visit with your mother,\" he suggests. \"I could take over the home responsibilities for the weekend and arrange for some help at the first of the week so that you could go. I know it's important to you to have that time.\n\n\"Or maybe we could locate a place to camp and fish that would be close to your mother. The area wouldn't be as nice, but we could still be outdoors and meet other needs as well. And the boys wouldn't be climbing the walls. We could even plan some recre\u00adational activities with the cousins, aunts, and uncles, which would be an added benefit.\"\n\nThey synergize. They communicate back and forth until they come up with a solution they both feel good about. It's better than the solutions either of them originally proposed. It's better than compromise. It's a synergistic solution that builds P and PC.\n\nInstead of a transaction, it's a transformation. They get what they both really want and build their relationship in the process.\n\nNEGATIVE SYNERGY\n\nSeeking the third alternative is a major paradigm shift from the dichotomous, either\/or mentality. But look at the difference in results!\n\nHow much negative energy is typically expended when people try to solve problems or make decisions in an interdependent reality? How much time is spent in confessing other people's sins, politicking, rivalry, interpersonal conflict, protecting one's back\u00adside, masterminding, and second guessing? It's like trying to drive down the road with one foot on the gas and the other foot on the brake!\n\nAnd instead of getting a foot off the brake, most people give it more gas. They try to apply more pressure, more eloquence, more logical information to strengthen their position.\n\nThe problem is that highly dependent people are trying to succeed in an interdependent reality. They're either dependent on borrowing strength from position power and they go for Win\/Lose, or they're dependent on being popular with others and they go for Lose\/Win. They may talk Win\/Win technique, but they don't really want to listen; they want to manipulate. And synergy can't thrive in that environment.\n\nInsecure people think that all reality should be amenable to their paradigms. They have a high need to clone others, to mold them over into their own thinking. They don't realize that the very strength of the relationship is in having another point of view. Sameness is not oneness; uniformity is not unity. Unity, or oneness, is complementariness, not sameness. Sameness is uncreative... and boring. The essence of synergy is to value the differences.\n\nI've come to believe that the key to interpersonal synergy is intrapersonal synergy, that is synergy within ourselves. The heart of intrapersonal synergy is embodied in the principles in the first three habits, which give the internal security sufficient to handle the risks of being open and vulnerable. By internalizing those principles, we develop the abundance mentality of Win\/Win and the authenticity of Habit 5.\n\nOne of the very practical results of being principle-centered is that it makes us whole\u2014truly integrated. People who are scripted deeply in logical, verbal, left-brain thinking will discover how totally inadequate that thinking is in solving problems which require a great deal of creativity. They become aware and begin to open up a new script inside their right brain. It's not that the right brain wasn't there; it just lay dormant. The muscles had not been developed, or perhaps they had atrophied after early childhood because of the heavy left-brain emphasis of formal education or social scripting.\n\nWhen a person has access to both the intuitive, creative, and visual right brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain, then the whole brain is working. In other words, there is psychic synergy taking place in our own head. And this tool is best suited to the real\u00adity of what life is, because life is not just logical\u2014it is also emotional.\n\nOne day I was presenting a seminar which I titled, \"Manage from the Left, Lead from the Right\" to a company in Orlando, Florida. During the break, the president of the company came up to me and said, \"Stephen, this is intriguing. But I have been thinking about this material more in terms of its application to my marriage than to my business. My wife and I have a real communication problem. I wonder if you would have lunch with the two of us and just kind of watch how we talk to each other?\"\n\n\"Let's do it,\" I replied.\n\nAs we sat down together, we exchanged a few pleasantries. Then this man turned to his wife and said, \"Now, honey, I've invited Stephen to have lunch with us to see if he could help us in our communication with each other. I know you feel I should be a more sensitive, considerate husband. Could you give me something specific you think I ought to do?\" His dominant left brain wanted facts, figures, specifics, parts.\n\n\"Well, as I've told you before, it's nothing specific. It's more of a general sense I have about priorities.\" Her dominant right brain was dealing with sensing and with the gestalt, the whole, the relationship between the parts.\n\n\"What do you mean, 'a general feeling about priorities'? What is it you want me to do? Give me something specific I can get a handle on.\"\n\n\"Well, it's just a feeling.\" Her right brain was dealing in images, intuitive feelings. \"I just don't think our marriage is as important to you as you tell me it is.\"\n\n\"Well, what can I do to make it more important? Give me something concrete and specific to go on.\"\n\n\"It's hard to put into words.\"\n\nAt that point, he just rolled his eyes and looked at me as if to say, \"Stephen, could you endure this kind of dumbness in your marriage?\"\n\n\"It's just a feeling,\" she said, \"a very strong feeling.\"\n\n\"Honey,\" he said to her, \"that's your problem. And that's the problem with your mother. In fact, it's the problem with every woman I know.\"\n\nThen he began to interrogate her as though it were some kind of legal deposition.\n\n\"Do you live where you want to live?\"\n\n\"That's not it,\" she sighed. \"That's not it at all.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he replied with a forced patience. \"But since you won't tell me exactly what it is, I figure the best way to find out what it is is to find out what it is not. Do you live where you want to live?\"\n\n\"I guess.\"\n\n\"Honey, Stephen's here for just a few minutes to try to help us. Just give a quick 'yes' or 'no' answer. Do you live where you want to live?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Okay. That's settled. Do you have the things you want to have?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"All right. Do you do the things you want to do?\"\n\nThis went on for a little while, and I could see I wasn't helping at all. So I intervened and said, \"Is this kind of how it goes in your relationship?\"\n\n\"Every day, Stephen,\" he replied.\n\n\"It's the story of our marriage,\" she sighed.\n\nI looked at the two of them and the thought crossed my mind that they were two half-brained people living together. \"Do you have any children?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yes, two.\"\n\n\"Really?\" I asked incredulously. \"How did you do it?\"\n\n\"What do you mean how did we do it?\"\n\n\"You were synergistic!\" I said. \"One plus one usually equals two. But you made one plus one equal four. Now that's synergy. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So how did you do it?\"\n\n\"You know how we did it,\" he replied.\n\n\"You must have valued the differences!\" I exclaimed.\n\nVALUING THE DIFFERENCES\n\nValuing the differences is the essence of synergy\u2014the mental, the emotional, the psychological differences between people. And the key to valuing those differences is to realize that all people see the world, not as it is, but as they are.\n\nIf I think I see the world as it is, why would I want to value the differences? Why would I even want to bother with someone who's \"off track\"? My paradigm is that I am objective; I see the world as it is. Everyone else is buried by the minutia, but I see the larger picture. That's why they call me a supervisor\u2014I have super vision.\n\nIf that's my paradigm, then I will never be effectively interde\u00adpendent, or even effectively independent, for that matter. I will be limited by the paradigms of my own conditioning.\n\nThe person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings. That person values the differences because those differences add to his knowledge, to his understanding of reality. When we're left to our own experiences, we constantly suffer from a shortage of data.\n\nIs it logical that two people can disagree and that both can be right? It's not logical: it's psychological. And it's very real. You see the young lady; I see the old woman. We're both looking at the same picture, and both of us are right. We see the same black lines, the same white spaces. But we interpret them differently because we've been conditioned to interpret them differently.\n\nAnd unless we value the differences in our perceptions, unless we value each other and give credence to the possibility that we're both right, that life is not always a dichotomous either\/or, that there are almost always third alternatives, we will never be able to transcend the limits of that conditioning.\n\nAll I may see is the old woman. But I realize that you see something else. And I value you. I value your perception. I want to understand.\n\nSo when I become aware of the difference in our perceptions, I say, \"Good! You see it differently! Help me see what you see.\"\n\nIf two people have the same opinion, one is unnecessary. It's not going to do me any good at all to communicate with someone else who sees only the old woman also. I don't want to talk, to communicate, with someone who agrees with me; I want to communicate with you because you see it differently. I value that difference.\n\nBy doing that, I not only increase my own awareness; I also affirm you. I give you psychological air. I take my foot off the brake and release the negative energy you may have invested in defend\u00ading a particular position. I create an environment for synergy.\n\nThe importance of valuing the difference is captured in an often quoted fable called \"The Animal School,\" written by educator Dr. R. H. Reeves:\n\nOnce upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a \"New World,\" so they organized a school. They adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer, all animals took all the subjects.\n\nThe duck was excellent in swimming, better in fact than his instructor, and made excellent grades in flying, but he was very poor in running. Since he was low in running he had to stay after school and also drop swimming to practice running. This was kept up until his web feet were badly worn and he was only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in school, so nobody worried about that except the duck.\n\nThe rabbit started at the top of the class in running, but had a nervous breakdown because of so much makeup in swimming.\n\nThe squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustrations in the flying class where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the tree-top down. He also developed charley horses from over-exertion and he got a C in climbing and a D in running.\n\nThe eagle was a problem child and had to be disciplined severely. In climbing class he beat all the others to the top of the tree, but insisted on using his own way of getting there.\n\nAt the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well and also could run, climb and fly a little had the highest average and was valedictorian.\n\nThe prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school.\n\nFORCE FIELD ANALYSIS\n\nIn an interdependent situation, synergy is particularly powerful in dealing with negative forces that work against growth and change.\n\nSociologist Kurt Lewin developed a \"Force Field Analysis\" model in which he described any current level of performance or being as a state of equilibrium between the driving forces that encourage upward movement and the restraining forces that discourage it.\n\nDriving forces generally are positive, reasonable, logical, con\u00adscious, and economic. In juxtaposition, restraining forces are often negative, emotional, illogical, unconscious, and social\/psychological. Both sets of forces are very real and must be taken into account in dealing with change.\n\nIn a family, for example, you have a certain \"climate\" in the home\u2014a certain level of positive or negative interaction, of feeling safe or unsafe in expressing feelings or talking about concerns, of respect or disrespect in communication among family members.\n\nYou may really want to change that level. You may want to create a climate that is more positive, more respectful, more open and trusting. Your logical reasons for doing that are the driving forces that act to raise the level.\n\nBut increasing those driving forces is not enough. Your efforts are opposed by restraining forces\u2014by the competitive spirit be\u00adtween children in the family, by the different scripting of home life you and your spouse have brought to the relationship, by habits that have developed in the family, by work or other demands on your time and energies.\n\nIncreasing the driving forces may bring results\u2014for a while. But as long as the restraining forces are there, it becomes increasingly harder. It's like pushing against a spring: the harder you push, the harder it is to push until the force of the spring suddenly thrusts the level back down.\n\nThe resulting up and down, yo-yo effect causes you to feel, after several attempts, that people are \"just the way they are\" and that \"it's too difficult to change.\"\n\nBut when you introduce synergy, you use the motive of Habit 4, the skill of Habit 5, and the interaction of Habit 6 to work directly on the restraining forces. You create an atmosphere in which it is safe to talk about these forces. You unfreeze them, loosen them up, and create new insights that actually transform those restraining forces into driving ones. You involve people in the problem, immerse them in it, so that they soak it in and feel it is their problem and they tend to become an important part of the solution.\n\nAs a result, new goals, shared goals, are created, and the whole enterprise moves upward, often in ways that no one could have anticipated. And the excitement contained within that movement creates a new culture. The people involved in it are enmeshed in each other's humanity and empowered by new, fresh thinking, by new creative alternatives and opportunities.\n\nI've been involved several times in negotiations between people who were angry at each other and hired lawyers to defend their positions. And all that did was to exacerbate the problem because the interpersonal communication deteriorated as it went through the legal process. But the trust level was so low that the parties felt they had no other alternative than to take the issues to court.\n\n\"Would you be interested in going for a Win\/Win solution that both parties feel really good about?\" I would ask.\n\nThe response was usually affirmative, but most people didn't really think it was possible.\n\n\"If I can get the other party to agree, would you be willing to start the process of really communicating with each other?\"\n\nAgain, the answer was usually \"yes.\"\n\nThe results in almost every case have been astounding. Problems that had been legally and psychologically wrangled about for months have been settled in a matter of a few hours or days. Most of the solutions weren't the courthouse compromise solutions, either; they were synergistic, better than the solutions proposed independently by either party. And, in most cases, the relation\u00adships continued even though it had appeared in the beginning that the trust level was so low and the rupture in the relationship so large as to be almost irreparable.\n\nAt one of our development programs, an executive reported a situation where a manufacturer was being sued by a longtime industrial customer for lack of performance. Both parties felt totally justified in the rightness of their position and perceived each other as unethical and completely untrustworthy.\n\nAs they began to practice Habit 5, two things became clear. First, early communication problems resulted in a misunderstanding which was later exacerbated by accusations and counteraccusations. Second, both were initially acting in good faith and didn't like the cost and hassle of a legal fight, but saw no other way out.\n\nOnce these two things became clear, the spirit of Habits 4, 5, and 6 took over, the problem was rapidly resolved, and the relationship continues to prosper.\n\nIn another circumstance, I received an early morning phone call from a land developer desperately searching for help. The bank wanted to foreclose because he was not complying with the principal and interest payment schedule, and he was suing the bank to avoid the foreclosure. He needed additional funding to finish and market the land so that he could repay the bank, but the bank refused to provide additional funds until scheduled payments were met. It was a chicken and egg problem with undercapitaliza\u00adtion.\n\nIn the meantime, the project was languishing. The streets were beginning to look like weed fields, and the owners of the few homes that had been built were up in arms as they saw their property values drop. The city was also upset over the \"prime land\" project falling behind schedule and becoming an eyesore. Tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs had already been spent by the bank and the developer and the case wasn't scheduled to come to court for several months.\n\nIn desperation, this developer reluctantly agreed to try the principles of Habits 4, 5, and 6. He arranged a meeting with even more reluctant bank officials.\n\nThe meeting started at 8 A.M. in one of the bank conference rooms. The tension and mistrust were palpable. The attorney for the bank had committed the bank officials to say nothing. They were only to listen and he alone would speak. He wanted nothing to happen that would compromise the bank's position in court.\n\nFor the first hour and a half, I taught Habits 4, 5, and 6. At 9:30 I went to the blackboard and wrote down the bank's concerns based on our prior understanding. Initially the bank officials said nothing, but the more we communicated Win\/Win intentions and sought first to understand, the more they opened up to explain and clarify.\n\nAs they began to feel understood, the whole atmosphere changed and a sense of momentum, of excitement over the prospect of peacefully settling the problem was clearly evident. Over the attorney's objections the bank officials opened up even more, even about personal concerns. \"When we walk out of here the first thing the bank president will say is, 'Did we get our money?' What are we going to say?\"\n\nBy 11:00, the bank officers were still convinced of their rightness, but they felt understood and were no longer defensive and officious. At that point, they were sufficiently open to listen to the developer's concerns, which we wrote down on the other side of the blackboard. This resulted in deeper mutual understanding and a collective awareness of how poor early communication had resulted in misunderstanding and unrealistic expectations, and how continuous communication in a Win\/Win spirit could have prevented the subsequent major problems from developing.\n\nThe shared sense of both chronic and acute pain combined with a sense of genuine progress kept everyone communicating. By noon, when the meeting was scheduled to end, the people were positive, creative, and synergistic and wanted to keep talking.\n\nThe very first recommendation made by the developer was seen as a beginning Win\/Win approach by all. It was synergized on and improved, and at 12:45 P.M. the developer and the two bank officers left with a plan to present together to the Home Owners Associa\u00adtion and the city. Despite subsequent complicating developments, the legal fight was aborted and the building project continued to a successful conclusion.\n\nI am not suggesting that people should not use legal processes. Some situations absolutely require it. But I see it as a court of last, not first, resort. If it is used too early, even in a preventive sense, sometimes fear and the legal paradigm create subsequent thought and action processes that are not synergistic.\n\nALL NATURE IS SYNERGISTIC\n\nEcology is a word which basically describes the synergism in nature\u2014everything is related to everything else. It's in the rela\u00adtionship that creative powers are maximized, just as the real power in these Seven Habits is in their relationship to each other, not just in the individual habits themselves.\n\nThe relationship of the parts is also the power in creating a synergistic culture inside a family or an organization. The more genuine the involvement, the more sincere and sustained the participation in analyzing and solving problems, the greater the release of everyone's creativity, and of their commitment to what they create. This, I'm convinced, is the essence of the power in the Japanese approach to business, which has changed the world marketplace.\n\nSynergy works; it's a correct principle. It is the crowning achievement of all the previous habits. It is effectiveness in an interdependent reality\u2014it is teamwork, team building, the devel\u00adopment of unity and creativity with other human beings.\n\nAlthough you cannot control the paradigms of others in an interdependent interaction or the synergistic process itself, a great deal of synergy is within your Circle of Influence.\n\nYour own internal synergy is completely within the circle. You can respect both sides of your own nature\u2014the analytical side and the creative side. You can value the difference between them and use that difference to catalyze creativity.\n\nYou can be synergistic within yourself even in the midst of a very adversarial environment. You don't have to take insults personally. You can sidestep negative energy; you can look for the good in others and utilize that good, as different as it may be, to improve your point of view and to enlarge your perspective.\n\nYou can exercise the courage in interdependent situations to be open, to express your ideas, your feelings, and your experiences in a way that will encourage other people to be open also.\n\nYou can value the difference in other people. When someone disagrees with you, you can say, \"Good! You see it differently.\" You don't have to agree with them; you can simply affirm them. And you can seek to understand.\n\nWhen you see only two alternatives\u2014yours and the \"wrong\" one\u2014you can look for a synergistic third alternative. There's almost always a third alternative, and if you work with a Win\/Win philosophy and really seek to understand, you usually can find a solution that will be better for everyone concerned.\n\nAPPLICATION SUGGESTIONS:\n\n  1. Think about a person who typically sees things differently than you do. Consider ways in which those differences might be used as stepping-stones to third alternative solutions. Perhaps you could seek out his or her views on a current project or problem, valuing the different views you are likely to hear.\n  2. Make a list of people who irritate you. Do they represent different views that could lead to 'synergy if you had greater intrinsic security and valued the difference?\n  3. Identify a situation in which you desire greater teamwork and synergy. What conditions would need to exist to support syn\u00adergy? What can you do to create those conditions?\n  4. The next time you have a disagreement or confrontation with someone, attempt to understand the concerns underlying that person's position. Address those concerns in a creative and mutually beneficial way.\n\n## _PART FOUR_\n\n# RENEWAL\n\n### HABIT 7  \nSHARPEN THE SAW\n\n### PRINCIPLES OF BALANCED SELF-RENEWAL\n\nSometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things... I am tempted to think... there are no little things.\n\nBruce Barton\n\nSUPPOSE YOU WERE TO COME UPON SOMEONE in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" you ask.\n\n\"Can't you see?\" comes the impatient reply. \"I'm sawing down this tree.\"\n\n\"You look exhausted!\" you exclaim. \"How long have you been at it?\"\n\n\"Over five hours,\" he returns, \"and I'm beat! This is hard work.\"\n\n\"Well, why don't you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?\" you inquire. \"I'm sure it would go a lot faster.\"\n\n\"I don't have time to sharpen the saw,\" the man says emphat\u00adically. \"I'm too busy sawing!\"\n\nHabit 7 is taking time to sharpen the saw. It surrounds the other habits on the Seven Habits paradigm because it is the habit that makes all the others possible.\n\nFOUR DIMENSIONS OF RENEWAL\n\nHabit 7 is personal PC. It's preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have\u2014you. It's renewing the four dimensions of your nature\u2014physical, spiritual, mental, and social\/emotional.\n\nAlthough different words are used, most philosophies of life deal either explicitly or implicitly with these four dimensions. Philosopher Herb Shepherd describes the healthy balanced life around four values: perspective (spiritual), autonomy (mental), connectedness (social), and tone (physical). George Sheehan, the running guru, describes four roles: being a good animal (physical), a good craftsman (mental), a good friend (social), and a saint (spiritual). Sound motivation and organization theory embrace these four dimensions or motivations\u2014the economic (physical); how people are treated (social); how people are developed and used (mental); and the service, the job, the contribution the organization gives (spiritual).\n\n\"Sharpen the saw\" basically means expressing all four motiva\u00adtions. It means exercising all four dimensions of our nature, regularly and consistently in wise and balanced ways.\n\nTo do this, we must be proactive. Taking time to sharpen the saw is a definite Quadrant II activity, and Quadrant II must be acted on. Quadrant I, because of its urgency, acts on us; it presses upon us constantly. Personal P\/C must be pressed upon until it becomes second nature, until it becomes a kind of healthy addic\u00adtion. Because it's at the center of our Circle of Influence, no one else can do it for us. We must do it for ourselves.\n\nThis is the single most powerful investment we can ever make in life\u2014investment in ourselves, in the only instrument we have with which to deal with life and to contribute. We are the instruments of our own performance, and to be effective, we need to recognize the importance of taking time regularly to sharpen the saw in all four ways.\n\nThe Physical Dimension\n\nThe physical dimension involves caring effectively for our phys\u00adical body\u2014eating the right kinds of foods, getting sufficient rest and relaxation, and exercising on a regular basis.\n\nExercise is one of those Quadrant II, high-leverage activities that most of us don't do consistently because it isn't urgent. And because we don't do it, sooner or later we find ourselves in Quadrant I, dealing with the health problems and crises that come as a natural result of our neglect.\n\nMost of us think we don't have enough time to exercise. What a distorted paradigm! We don't have time not to. We're talking about three to six hours a week\u2014or a minimum of thirty minutes a day, every other day. That hardly seems an inordinate amount of time considering the tremendous benefits in terms of the impact on the other 162-165 hours of the week.\n\nAnd you don't need any special equipment to do it. If you want to go to a gym or a spa to use the equipment or enjoy some skill sports such as tennis or racquetball, that's an added opportunity. But it isn't necessary to sharpen the saw.\n\nA good exercise program is one that you can do in your own home and one that will build your body in three areas: endurance, flexibility, and strength.\n\nEndurance comes from aerobic exercise, from cardiovascular efficiency\u2014the ability of your heart to pump blood through your body.\n\nAlthough the heart is a muscle, it cannot be exercised directly. It can only be exercised through the large muscle groups, particularly the leg muscles. That's why exercises like rapid walking, running, biking, swimming, cross-country skiing, and jogging are so bene\u00adficial.\n\nYou are considered minimally fit if you can increase your heart rate to at least one hundred beats per minute and keep it at that level for thirty minutes.\n\nIdeally you should try to raise your heart rate to at least sixty percent of your maximum pulse rate, the top speed your heart can beat and still pump blood through your body. Your maximum heart rate is generally accepted to be 220 less your age. So, if you are 40, you should aim for an exercise heart rate of 108 (220 \u2013 40 = 180 x .6 = 108). The \"training effect\" is generally considered to be between 72 and 87 percent of your personal maximum rate.\n\nFlexibility comes through stretching. Most experts recommend warming up before and cooling down\/stretching after aerobic exercise. Before, it helps loosen and warm the muscles to prepare for more vigorous exercise. After, it helps to dissipate the lactic acid so that you don't feel sore and stiff.\n\nStrength comes from muscle resistance exercises\u2014like simple cal\u00adisthenics, push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups, and from working with weights. How much emphasis you put on developing strength depends on your situation. If you're involved in physical labor or athletic activities, increased strength will improve your skill. If you have a basically sedentary job and success in your life-style does not require a lot of strength, a little toning through calisthenics in addition to your aerobic and stretching exercises might be suffi\u00adcient.\n\nI was in a gym one time with a friend of mine who has a Ph.D. in exercise physiology. He was focusing on building strength. He asked me to \"spot\" him while he did some bench presses and told me at a certain point he'd ask me to take the weight. \"But don't take it until I tell you,\" he said firmly.\n\nSo I watched and waited and prepared to take the weight. The weight went up and down, up and down. And I could see it begin to get harder. But he kept going. He would start to push it up and I'd think, \"There's no way he's going to make it.\" But he'd make it. Then he'd slowly bring it back down and start back up again. Up and down, up and down.\n\nFinally, as I looked at his face, straining with the effort, his blood vessels practically jumping out of his skin, I thought, \"This is going to fall and collapse his chest. Maybe I should take the weight. Maybe he's lost control and he doesn't even know what he's doing.\" But he'd get it safely down. Then he'd start back up again. I couldn't believe it.\n\nWhen he finally told me to take the weight, I said, \"Why did you wait so long?\"\n\n\"Almost all the benefit of the exercise comes at the very end, Stephen,\" he replied. \"I'm trying to build strength. And that doesn't happen until the muscle fiber ruptures and the nerve fiber registers the pain. Then nature overcompensates and within 48 hours, the fiber is made stronger.\"\n\nI could see his point. It's the same principle that works with emotional muscles as well, such as patience. When you exercise your patience beyond your past limits, the emotional fiber is bro\u00adken, nature overcompensates, and next time the fiber is stronger.\n\nNow my friend wanted to build muscular strength. And he knew how to do it. But not all of us need to develop that kind of strength to be effective. \"No pain, no gain\" has validity in some circumstances, but it is not the essence of an effective exercise program.\n\nThe essence of renewing the physical dimension is to sharpen the saw, to exercise our bodies on a regular basis in a way that will preserve and enhance our capacity to work and adapt and enjoy.\n\nAnd we need to be wise in developing an exercise program. There's a tendency, especially if you haven't been exercising at all, to overdo. And that can create unnecessary pain, injury, and even permanent damage. It's best to start slowly. Any exercise program should be in harmony with the latest research findings, with your doctor's recommendations and with your own self-awareness.\n\nIf you haven't been exercising, your body will undoubtedly protest this change in its comfortable downhill direction. You won't like it at first. You may even hate it. But be proactive. Do it anyway. Even if it's raining on the morning you've scheduled to jog, do it anyway. \"Oh good! It's raining! I get to develop my willpower as well as my body!\"\n\nYou're not dealing with quick fix; you're dealing with a Quadrant II activity that will bring phenomenal long-term results. Ask anyone who has done it consistently. Little by little, your resting pulse rate will go down as your heart and oxygen processing system becomes more efficient. As you increase your body's ability to do more demanding things, you'll find your normal activities much more comfortable and pleasant. You'll have more afternoon energy, and the fatigue you've felt that's made you \"too tired\" to exercise in the past will be replaced by an energy that will invigorate everything you do.\n\nProbably the greatest benefit you will experience from exercising will be the development of your Habit 1 muscles of proactivity. As you act based on the value of physical well-being instead of reacting to all the forces that keep you from exercising, your paradigm of yourself, your self-esteem, your self-confidence, and your integrity will be profoundly affected.\n\nThe Spiritual Dimension\n\nRenewing the spiritual dimension provides leadership to your life. It's highly related to Habit 2.\n\nThe spiritual dimension is your core, your center, your commit\u00adment to your value system. It's a very private area of life and a supremely important one. It draws upon the sources that inspire and uplift you and tie you to the timeless truths of all humanity. And people do it very, very differently.\n\nI find renewal in daily prayerful meditation on the scriptures because they represent my value system. As I read and meditate, I feel renewed, strengthened, centered and recommitted to serve.\n\nImmersion in great literature or great music can provide a similar renewal of the spirit for some. There are others who find it in the way they communicate with nature. Nature bequeaths its own blessing on those who immerse themselves in it. When you're able to leave the noise and the discord of the city and give yourself up to the harmony and rhythm of nature, you come back renewed. For a time, you're undisturbable, almost unflappable, until grad\u00adually the noise and the discord from outside start to invade that sense of inner peace.\n\nArthur Gordon shares a wonderful, intimate story of his own spiritual renewal in a little story called \"The Turn of the Tide.\" It tells of a time in his life when he began to feel that everything was stale and flat. His enthusiasm waned; his writing efforts were fruitless. And the situation was growing worse day by day.\n\nFinally, he determined to get help from a medical doctor. Observing nothing physically wrong, the doctor asked him if he would be able to follow his instructions for one day.\n\nWhen Gordon replied that he could, the doctor told him to spend the following day in the place where he was happiest as a child. He could take food, but he was not to talk to anyone or to read or write or listen to the radio. He then wrote out four prescriptions and told him to open one at nine, twelve, three, and six o'clock.\n\n\"Are you serious?\" Gordon asked him.\n\n\"You won't think I'm joking when you get my bill!\" was the reply.\n\nSo the next morning, Gordon went to the beach. As he opened the first prescription, he read \"Listen carefully.\" He thought the doctor was insane. How could he listen for three hours? But he had agreed to follow the doctor's orders, so he listened. He heard the usual sounds of the sea and the birds. After a while, he could hear the other sounds that weren't so apparent at first. As he listened, he began to think of lessons the sea had taught him as a child\u2014patience, respect, an awareness of the interdependence of things. He began to listen to the sounds\u2014and the silence\u2014and to feel a growing peace.\n\nAt noon, he opened the second slip of paper and read \"Try reaching back.\" \"Reaching back to what?\" he wondered. Perhaps to childhood, perhaps to memories of happy times. He thought about his past, about the many little moments of joy. He tried to remember them with exactness. And in remembering, he found a growing warmth inside.\n\nAt three o'clock, he opened the third piece of paper. Until now, the prescriptions had been easy to take. But this one was different; it said \"Examine your motives.\" At first he was defensive. He thought about what he wanted\u2014success, recognition, security\u2014and he justified them all. But then the thought occurred to him that those motives weren't good enough, and that perhaps therein was the answer to his stagnant situation.\n\nHe considered his motives deeply. He thought about past happiness. And at last, the answer came to him.\n\n\"In a flash of certainty,\" he wrote, \"I saw that if one's motives are wrong, nothing can be right. It makes no difference whether you are a mailman, a hairdresser, an insurance salesman, a housewife\u2014whatever. As long as you feel you are serving others, you do the job well. When you are concerned only with helping yourself, you do it less well\u2014a law as inexorable as gravity.\"\n\nWhen six o'clock came, the final prescription didn't take long to fill. \"Write your worries on the sand,\" it said. He knelt and wrote several words with a piece of broken shell; then he turned and walked away. He didn't look back; he knew the tide would come in.\n\nSpiritual renewal takes an investment of time. But it's a Quadrant II activity we don't really have time to neglect.\n\nThe great reformer Martin Luther is quoted as saying, \"I have so much to do today, I'll need to spend another hour on my knees.\" To him, prayer was not a mechanical duty but rather a source of power in releasing and multiplying his energies.\n\nSomeone once inquired of a Far Eastern Zen master, who had a great serenity and peace about him no matter what pressures he faced, \"How do you maintain that serenity and peace?\" He replied, \"I never leave my place of meditation.\" He meditated early in the morning and for the rest of the day, he carried the peace of those moments with him in his mind and heart.\n\nThe idea is that when we take time to draw on the leadership center of our lives, what life is ultimately all about, it spreads like an umbrella over everything else. It renews us, it refreshes us, particularly if we recommit to it.\n\nThis is why I believe a personal mission statement is so impor\u00adtant. If we have a deep understanding of our center and our purpose, we can review and recommit to it frequently. In our daily spiritual renewal, we can visualize and \"live out\" the events of the day in harmony with those values.\n\nReligious leader David O. McKay taught, \"The greatest battles of life are fought out daily in the silent chambers of the soul.\" If you win the battles there, if you settle the issues that inwardly conflict, you feel a sense of peace, a sense of knowing what you're about. And you'll find that the public victories\u2014where you tend to think cooperatively, to promote the welfare and good of other people, and to be genuinely happy for other people's successes\u2014will follow naturally.\n\nThe Mental Dimension\n\nMost of our mental development and study discipline comes through formal education. But as soon as we leave the external discipline of school, many of us let our minds atrophy. We don't do any more serious reading, we don't explore new subjects in any real depth outside our action fields, we don't think analytically, we don't write\u2014at least not critically or in a way that tests our ability to express ourselves in distilled, clear, and concise language. Instead, we spend our time watching TV.\n\nContinuing surveys indicate that television is on in most homes some thirty-five to forty-five hours a week. That's as much time as many people put into their jobs, more than most put into school. It's the most powerful socializing influence there is. And when we watch, we're subject to all the values that are being taught through it. That can powerfully influence us in very subtle and impercep\u00adtible ways.\n\nWisdom in watching television requires the effective self-management of Habit 3, which enables you to discriminate and to select the informing, inspiring, and entertaining programs which best serve and express your purpose and values.\n\nIn our family, we limit television watching to around seven hours a week, an average of about an hour a day. We had a family council at which we talked about it and looked at some of the data regarding what's happening in homes because of television. We found that by discussing it as a family when no one was defensive or argumentative, people started to realize the dependent sickness of becoming addicted to soap operas or to a steady diet of a particular program.\n\nI'm grateful for television and for the many high quality educa\u00adtional and entertainment programs. They can enrich our lives and contribute meaningfully to our purposes and goals. But there are many programs that simply waste our time and minds and many that influence us in negative ways if we let them. Like the body, television is a good servant but a poor master. We need to practice Habit 3 and manage ourselves effectively to maximize the use of any resource in accomplishing our missions.\n\nEducation\u2014continuing education, continually honing and ex\u00adpanding the mind\u2014is vital mental renewal. Sometimes that in\u00advolves the external discipline of the classroom or systematized study programs; more often it does not. Proactive people can figure out many, many ways to educate themselves.\n\nIt is extremely valuable to train the mind to stand apart and examine its own program. That, to me, is the definition of a liberal education\u2014the ability to examine the programs of life against larger questions and purposes and other paradigms. Training, without such education, narrows and closes the mind so that the assump\u00adtions underlying the training are never examined. That's why it is so valuable to read broadly and to expose yourself to great minds.\n\nThere's no better way to inform and expand your mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature. That's another high leverage Quadrant II activity. You can get into the best minds that are now or that have ever been in the world. I highly recommend starting with a goal of a book a month, then a book every two weeks, then a book a week. \"The person who doesn't read is no better off than the person who can't read.\"\n\nQuality literature, such as the Great Books, the Harvard Classics, autobiographies, National Geographic and other publications that expand our cultural awareness, and current literature in various fields can expand our paradigms and sharpen our mental saw, particularly if we practice Habit 5 as we read and seek first to understand. If we use our own autobiography to make early judgments before we really understand what an author has to say, we limit the benefits of the reading experience.\n\nWriting is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context. Writing good letters\u2014communicating on the deeper level of thoughts, feelings, and ideas rather than on the shallow, superficial level of events\u2014also affects our ability to think clearly, to reason accu\u00adrately, and to be understood effectively.\n\nOrganizing and planning represent other forms of mental re\u00adnewal associated with Habits 2 and 3. It's beginning with the end in mind and being able mentally to organize to accomplish that end. It's exercising the visualizing, imagining power of your mind to see the end from the beginning and to see the entire journey, at least in principles, if not in steps.\n\nIt is said that wars are won in the general's tent. Sharpening the saw in the first three dimensions\u2014the physical, the spiritual, and the mental\u2014is a practice I call the \"Daily Private Victory.\" And I commend to you the simple practice of spending one hour a day every day doing it\u2014one hour a day for the rest of your life.\n\nThere's no other way you could spend an hour that would begin to compare with the Daily Private Victory in terms of value and results. It will affect every decision, every relationship. It will greatly improve the quality, the effectiveness, of every other hour of the day, including the depth and restfulness of your sleep. It will build the long-term physical, spiritual, and mental strength to enable you to handle difficult challenges in life.\n\nIn the words of Phillips Brooks:\n\nSome day, in the years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now... Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process.\n\nThe Social\/Emotional Dimension\n\nWhile the physical, spiritual, and mental dimensions are closely related to Habits 1, 2, and 3\u2014centered on the principles of personal vision, leadership, and management\u2014the social\/emotional dimen\u00adsion focuses on Habits 4, 5, and 6\u2014centered on the principles of interpersonal leadership, empathic communication, and creative cooperation.\n\nThe social and the emotional dimensions of our lives are tied to\u00adgether because our emotional life is primarily, but not exclusively, developed out of and manifested in our relationships with others.\n\nRenewing our social\/emotional dimension does not take time in the same sense that renewing the other dimensions does. We can do it in our normal everyday interactions with other people. But it definitely requires exercise. We may have to push ourselves because many of us have not achieved the level of Private Victory and the skills of Public Victory necessary for Habits 4, 5, and 6 to come naturally to us in all our interactions.\n\nSuppose that you are a key person in my life. You might be my boss, my subordinate, my coworker, my friend, my neighbor, my spouse, my child, a member of my extended family\u2014anyone with whom I want or need to interact. Suppose we need to communicate together, to work together, to discuss a jugular issue, to accomplish a purpose or solve a problem. But we see things differently; we're looking through different glasses. You see the young lady, and I see the old woman.\n\nSo I practice Habit 4. I come to you and I say, \"I can see that we're approaching this situation differently. Why don't we agree to communicate until we can find a solution we both feel good about. Would you be willing to do that?\" Most people would be willing to say \"yes\" to that.\n\nThen I move to Habit 5. \"Let me listen to you first.\" Instead of listening with intent to reply, I listen empathically in order to deeply, thoroughly understand your paradigm. When I can explain your point of view as well as you can, then I focus on communicating my point of view to you so that you can understand it as well.\n\nBased on the commitment to search for a solution that we both feel good about and a deep understanding of each other's points of view, we move to Habit 6. We work together to produce third alternative solutions to our differences that we both recognize are better than the ones either you or I proposed initially.\n\nSuccess in Habits 4, 5, and 6 is not primarily a matter of intellect\u2014it's primarily a matter of emotion. It's highly related to our sense of personal security.\n\nIf our personal security comes from sources within ourselves, then we have the strength to practice the habits of Public Victory. If we are emotionally insecure, even though we may be intellectu\u00adally very advanced, practicing Habits 4, 5, and 6 with people who think differently on jugular issues of life can be terribly threatening.\n\nWhere does intrinsic security come from? It doesn't come from what other people think of us or how they treat us. It doesn't come from the scripts they've handed us. It doesn't come from our circumstances or our position.\n\nIt comes from within. It comes from accurate paradigms and correct principles deep in our own mind and heart. It comes from inside-out congruence, from living a life of integrity in which our daily habits reflect our deepest values.\n\nI believe that a life of integrity is the most fundamental source of personal worth. I do not agree with the popular success literature that says that self-esteem is primarily a matter of mind set, of attitude\u2014that you can psych yourself into peace of mind.\n\nPeace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.\n\nThere is also the intrinsic security that comes as a result of effective interdependent living. There is security in knowing that Win\/Win solutions do exist, that life is not always \"either\/or,\" that there are almost always mutually beneficial Third Alternatives. There is security in knowing that you can step out of your own frame of reference without giving it up, that you can really, deeply understand another human being. There is security that comes when you authentically, creatively and cooperatively interact with other people and really experience these interdependent habits.\n\nThere is intrinsic security that comes from service, from helping other people in a meaningful way. One important source is your work, when you see yourself in a contributive and creative mode, really making a difference. Another source is anonymous service\u2014no one knows it and no one necessarily ever will. And that's not the concern; the concern is blessing the lives of other people. Influence, not recognition, becomes the motive.\n\nViktor Frankl focused on the need for meaning and purpose in our lives, something that transcends our own lives and taps the best energies within us. The late Dr. Hans Selye, in his monumental research on stress, basically says that a long, healthy, and happy life is the result of making contributions, of having meaningful projects that are personally exciting and contribute to and bless the lives of others. His ethic was \"earn thy neighbor's love.\"\n\nIn the words of George Bernard Shaw,\n\nThis is the true joy in life\u2014that being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. That being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It's a sort of splendid torch which I've got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.\n\nN. Eldon Tanner has said, \"Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.\" And there are so many ways to serve. Whether or not we belong to a church or service organization or have a job that provides meaningful service opportunities, not a day goes by that we can't at least serve one other human being by making deposits of unconditional love.\n\nSCRIPTING OTHERS\n\nMost people are a function of the social mirror, scripted by the opinions, the perceptions, the paradigms of the people around them. As interdependent people, you and I come from a paradigm which includes the realization that we are a part of that social mirror.\n\nWe can choose to reflect back to others a clear, undistorted vision of themselves. We can affirm their proactive nature and treat them as responsible people. We can help script them as principle-centered, value-based, independent, worthwhile individuals. And, with the Abundance Mentality, we realize that giving a positive reflection to others in no way diminishes us. It increases us because it increases the opportunities for effective interaction with other proactive people.\n\nAt some time in your life, you probably had someone believe in you when you didn't believe in yourself. They scripted you. Did that make a difference in your life?\n\nWhat if you were a positive scripter, an affirmer, of other people? When they're being directed by the social mirror to take the lower path, you inspire them toward a higher path because you believe in them. You listen to them and empathize with them. You don't absolve them of responsibility; you encourage them to be proac\u00adtive.\n\nPerhaps you are familiar with the musical, Man of La Mancha. It's a beautiful story about a medieval knight who meets a woman of the street, a prostitute. She's being validated in her life-style by all of the people in her life.\n\nBut this poet knight sees something else in her, something beautiful and lovely. He also sees her virtue, and he affirms it, over and over again. He gives her a new name\u2014Dulcinea\u2014a new name associated with a new paradigm.\n\nAt first, she utterly denies it; her old scripts are overpowering. She writes him off as a wild-eyed fantasizer. But he is persistent. He makes continual deposits of unconditional love and gradually it penetrates her scripting. It goes down into her true nature, her potential, and she starts to respond. Little by little, she begins to change her life-style. She believes it and she acts from her new paradigm, to the initial dismay of everyone else in her life.\n\nLater, when she begins to revert to her old paradigm, he calls her to his deathbed and sings that beautiful song, \"The Impossible Dream,\" looks her in the eyes, and whispers, \"Never forget, you're Dulcinea.\"\n\nOne of the classic stories in the field of self-fulfilling prophecies is of a computer in England that was accidently programmed incorrectly. In academic terms, it labeled a class of \"bright\" kids \"dumb\" kids and a class of supposedly \"dumb\" kids \"bright.\" And that computer report was the primary criterion that created the teachers' paradigms about their students at the beginning of the year.\n\nWhen the administration finally discovered the mistake five and a half months later, they decided to test the kids again without telling anyone what had happened. And the results were amazing. The \"bright\" kids had gone down significantly in IQ test points. They had been seen and treated as mentally limited, uncoopera\u00adtive, and difficult to teach. The teachers' paradigms had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.\n\nBut scores in the supposedly \"dumb\" group had gone up. The teachers had treated them as though they were bright, and their energy, their hope, their optimism, their excitement had reflected high individual expectations and worth for those kids.\n\nThese teachers were asked what it was like during the first few weeks of the term. \"For some reason, our methods weren't working,\" they replied. \"So we had to change our methods.\" The information showed that the kids were bright. If things weren't working well, they figured it had to be the teaching methods. So they worked on methods. They were proactive; they worked in their Circle of Influence. Apparent learner disability was nothing more or less than teacher inflexibility.\n\nWhat do we reflect to others about themselves? And how much does that reflection influence their lives? We have so much we can invest in the Emotional Bank Accounts of other people. The more we can see people in terms of their unseen potential, the more we can use our imagination rather than our memory, with our spouse, our children, our coworkers or employees. We can refuse to label them\u2014we can \"see\" them in new fresh ways each time we're with them. We can help them become independent, fulfilled people capable of deeply satisfying, enriching, and productive relation\u00adships with others.\n\nGoethe taught, \"Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be.\"\n\nBALANCE IN RENEWAL\n\nThe self-renewal process must include balanced renewal in all four dimensions of our nature: the physical, the spiritual, the mental, and the social\/emotional.\n\nAlthough renewal in each dimension is important, it only becomes optimally effective as we deal with all four dimensions in a wise and balanced way. To neglect any one area negatively impacts the rest.\n\nI have found this to be true in organizations as well as in individual lives. In an organization, the physical dimension is expressed in economic terms. The mental or psychological dimen\u00adsion deals with the recognition, development, and use of talent. The social\/emotional dimension has to do with human relations, with how people are treated. And the spiritual dimension deals with finding meaning through purpose or contribution and through organizational integrity.\n\nWhen an organization neglects any one or more of these areas, it negatively impacts the entire organization. The creative energies that could result in tremendous, positive synergy are instead used to fight against the organization and become restraining forces to growth and productivity.\n\nI have found organizations whose only thrust is economic\u2014to make money. They usually don't publicize that purpose. They sometimes even publicize something else. But in their hearts, their only desire is to make money.\n\nWhenever I find this, I also find a great deal of negative synergy in the culture, generating such things as interdepartmental rival\u00adries, defensive and protective communication, politicking, and masterminding. We can't effectively thrive without making money, but that's not sufficient reason for organizational existence. We can't live without eating, but we don't live to eat.\n\nAt the other end of the spectrum, I've seen organizations that focused almost exclusively on the social\/emotional dimension. They are, in a sense, some kind of social experiment and they have no economic criteria to their value system. They have no measure or gauge of their effectiveness, and as a result, they lose all kinds of efficiencies and eventually their viability in the marketplace.\n\nI have found many organizations that develop as many as three of the dimensions\u2014they may have good service criteria, good economic criteria, and good human relations criteria, but they are not really committed to identifying, developing, utilizing, and recognizing the talent of people. And if these psychological forces are missing, the style will be a benevolent autocracy and the resulting culture will reflect different forms of collective resistance, adversarialism, excessive turnover, and other deep, chronic, cul\u00adtural problems.\n\nOrganizational as well as individual effectiveness requires devel\u00adopment and renewal of all four dimensions in a wise and balanced way. Any dimension that is neglected will create negative force field resistance that pushes against effectiveness and growth. Organizations and individuals that give recognition to each of these four dimensions in their mission statement provide a pow\u00aderful framework for balanced renewal.\n\nThis process of continuous improvement is the hallmark of the Total Quality Movement and a key to Japan's economic ascen\u00addency.\n\nSYNERGY IN RENEWAL\n\nBalanced renewal is optimally synergetic. The things you do to sharpen the saw in any one dimension have positive impact in other dimensions because they are so highly interrelated. Your physical health affects your mental health; your spiritual strength affects your social\/emotional strength. As you improve in one dimension, you increase your ability in other dimensions as well.\n\nThe Seven Habits of Highly Effective People create optimum synergy among these dimensions. Renewal in any dimension increases your ability to live at least one of the Seven Habits. And although the habits are sequential, improvement in one habit synergetically increases your ability to live the rest.\n\nThe more proactive you are (Habit 1), the more effectively you can exercise personal leadership (Habit 2) and management (Habit 3) in your life. The more effectively you manage your life (Habit 3), the more Quadrant II renewing activities you can do (Habit 7). The more you seek first to understand (Habit 5), the more effectively you can go for synergetic Win\/Win solutions (Habits 4 and 6). The more you improve in any of the habits that lead to independence (Habits 1, 2, and 3), the more effective you will be in interdepen\u00addent situations (Habits 4, 5, and 6). And renewal (Habit 7) is the process of renewing all the habits.\n\nAs you renew your physical dimension, you reinforce your personal vision (Habit 1), the paradigm of your own self-awareness and free will, of proactivity, of knowing that you are free to act instead of being acted upon, to choose your own response to any stimulus. This is probably the greatest benefit of physical exercise. Each Daily Private Victory makes a deposit in your personal intrinsic security account.\n\nAs you renew your spiritual dimension, you reinforce your personal leadership (Habit 2). You increase your ability to live out of your imagination and conscience instead of only your memory, to deeply understand your innermost paradigms and values, to create within yourself a center of correct principles, to define your own unique mission in life, to rescript yourself to live your life in harmony with correct principles and to draw upon your personal sources of strength. The rich private life you create in spiritual renewal makes tremendous deposits in your personal security account.\n\nAs you renew your mental dimension, you reinforce your personal management (Habit 3). As you plan, you force your mind to recognize high leverage Quadrant II activities, priority goals, and activities to maximize the use of your time and energy, and you organize and execute your activities around your priorities. As you become involved in continuing education, you increase your knowledge base and you increase your options. Your economic security does not lie in your job; it lies in your own power to produce\u2014to think, to learn, to create, to adapt. That's true financial independence. It's not having wealth; it's having the power to produce wealth. It's intrinsic.\n\nThe Daily Private Victory\u2014a minimum of one hour a day in renewal of the physical, spiritual, and mental dimensions\u2014is the key to the development of the Seven Habits and it's completely within your Circle of Influence. It is the Quadrant II focus time necessary to integrate these habits into your life, to become principle-centered.\n\nIt's also the foundation for the Daily Public Victory. It's the source of intrinsic security you need to sharpen the saw in the social\/emotional dimension. It gives you the personal strength to focus on your Circle of Influence in interdependent situations\u2014to look at others through the Abundance Mentality paradigm, to genuinely value their differences and to be happy for their success. It gives you the foundation to work for genuine understanding and for synergetic Win\/Win solutions, to practice Habits 4, 5, and 6 in an interdependent reality.\n\nTHE UPWARD SPIRAL\n\nRenewal is the principle\u2014and the process\u2014that empowers us to move on an upward spiral of growth and change, of continuous improvement.\n\nTo make meaningful and consistent progress along that spiral, we need to consider one other aspect of renewal as it applies to the unique human endowment that directs this upward movement\u2014our conscience. In the words of Madame de Sta\u00ebl, \"The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it: but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.\"\n\nConscience is the endowment that senses our congruence or disparity with correct principles and lifts us toward them\u2014when it's in shape.\n\nJust as the education of nerve and sinew is vital to the excellent athlete and education of the mind is vital to the scholar, education of the conscience is vital to the truly proactive, highly effective person. Training and educating the conscience, however, requires even greater concentration, more balanced discipline, more con\u00adsistently honest living. It requires regular feasting on inspiring literature, thinking noble thoughts and, above all, living in har\u00admony with its still small voice.\n\nJust as junk food and lack of exercise can ruin an athlete's condition, those things that are obscene, crude, or pornographic can breed an inner darkness that numbs our higher sensibilities and substitutes the social conscience of \"Will I be found out?\" for the natural or divine conscience of \"What is right and wrong?\"\n\nIn the words of Dag Hammarskjold,\n\nYou cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds.\n\nOnce we are self-aware, we must choose purposes and principles to live by; otherwise the vacuum will be filled, and we will lose our self-awareness and become like groveling animals who live prima\u00adrily for survival and propagation. People who exist on that level aren't living; they are \"being lived.\" They are reacting, unaware of the unique endowments that lie dormant and undeveloped within.\n\nAnd there is no shortcut in developing them. The law of the harvest governs; we will always reap what we sow\u2014no more, no less. The law of justice is immutable, and the closer we align ourselves with correct principles, the better our judgment will be about how the world operates and the more accurate our paradigms\u2014our maps of the territory\u2014will be.\n\nI believe that as we grow and develop on this upward spiral, we must show diligence in the process of renewal by educating and obeying our conscience. An increasingly educated conscience will propel us along the path of personal freedom, security, wisdom, and power.\n\nMoving along the upward spiral requires us to learn, commit, and do on increasingly higher planes. We deceive ourselves if we think that any one of these is sufficient. To keep progressing, we must learn, commit, and do\u2014learn, commit, and do\u2014and learn, commit, and do again.\n\nTHE UPWARD SPIRAL\n\nAPPLICATION SUGGESTIONS:\n\n  1. Make a list of activities that would help you keep in good physical shape, that would fit your life-style and that you could enjoy over time.\n  2. Select one of the activities and list it as a goal in your personal role area for the coming week. At the end of the week evaluate your performance. If you didn't make your goal, was it because you subordinated it to a genuinely higher value? Or did you fail to act with integrity to your values?\n  3. Make a similar list of renewing activities in your spiritual and mental dimensions. In your social-emotional area, list relationships you would like to improve or specific circumstances in which Public Victory would bring greater effectiveness. Select one item in each area to list as a goal for the week. Implement and evaluate.\n  4. Commit to write down specific \"sharpen the saw\" activities in all four dimensions every week, to do them, and to evaluate your performance and results.\n\n### Inside-Out Again\n\nThe Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.\n\nEzra Taft Benson\n\nI WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH YOU a personal story which I feel contains the essence of this book. In doing so, it is my hope that you will relate to the underlying principles it contains.\n\nSome years ago, our family took a sabbatical leave from the university where I taught so that I could write. We lived for a full year in Laie on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii.\n\nShortly after getting settled, we developed a living and working routine which was not only very productive but extremely pleas\u00adant.\n\nAfter an early morning run on the beach, we would send two of our children, barefoot and in shorts, to school. I went to an isolated building next to the canefields where I had an office to do my writing. It was very quiet, very beautiful, very serene\u2014no phone, no meetings, no pressing engagements.\n\nMy office was on the outside edge of a college, and one day as I was wandering between stacks of books in the back of the college library, I came across a book that drew my interest. As I opened it, my eyes fell upon a single paragraph that powerfully influenced the rest of my life.\n\nI read the paragraph over and over again. It basically contained the simple idea that there is a gap or a space between stimulus and response, and that the key to both our growth and happiness is how we use that space.\n\nI can hardly describe the effect that idea had on my mind. Though I had been nurtured in the philosophy of self-determinism, the way the idea was phrased\u2014\"a gap between stimulus and response\"\u2014hit me with fresh, almost unbelievable force. It was almost like \"knowing it for the first time,\" like an inward revolu\u00adtion, \"an idea whose time had come.\"\n\nI reflected on it again and again, and it began to have a powerful effect on my paradigm of life. It was as if I had become an observer of my own participation. I began to stand in that gap and to look outside at the stimuli. I reveled in the inward sense of freedom to choose my response\u2014even to become the stimulus, or at least to influence it\u2014even to reverse it.\n\nShortly thereafter, and partly as a result of this \"revolutionary\" idea, Sandra and I began a practice of deep communication. I would pick her up a little before noon on an old red Honda 90 trail cycle, and we would take our two preschool children with us\u2014one between us and the other on my left knee\u2014as we rode out in the canefields by my office. We rode slowly along for about an hour, just talking.\n\nThe children looked forward to the ride and hardly ever made any noise. We seldom saw another vehicle, and the cycle was so quiet we could easily hear each other. We usually ended up on an isolated beach where we parked the Honda and walked about 200 yards to a secluded spot where we ate a picnic lunch.\n\nThe sandy beach and a freshwater river coming off the island totally absorbed the interest of the children, so Sandra and I were able to continue our talks uninterrupted. Perhaps it doesn't take too much imagination to envision the level of understanding and trust we were able to reach by spending at least two hours a day, every day, for a full year in deep communication.\n\nAt the very first of the year, we talked about all kinds of interesting topics\u2014people, ideas, events, the children, my writing, our family at home, future plans, and so forth. But little by little, our communication deepened and we began to talk more and more about our internal worlds\u2014about our upbringing, our scripting, our feelings and self-doubts. As we were deeply immersed in these communications, we also observed them and observed ourselves in them. We began to use that space between stimulus and response in some new and interesting ways which caused us to think about how we were programmed and how those programs shaped how we saw the world.\n\nWe began an exciting adventure into our interior worlds and found it to be more exciting, more fascinating, more absorbing, more compelling, more filled with discovery and insight than anything we'd ever known in the outside world.\n\nIt wasn't all \"sweetness and light.\" We occasionally hit some raw nerves and had some painful experiences, embarrassing experiences, self-revealing experiences\u2014experiences that made us extremely open and vulnerable to each other. And yet we found we had been wanting to go into those things for years. When we did go into the deeper, more tender issues and then came out of them, we felt in some way healed.\n\nWe were so initially supportive and helpful, so encouraging and empathic to each other, that we nurtured and facilitated these internal discoveries in each other.\n\nWe gradually evolved two unspoken ground rules. The first was \"no probing.\" As soon as we unfolded the inner layers of vulner\u00adability, we were not to question each other, only to empathize. Probing was simply too invasive. It was also too controlling and too logical. We were covering new, difficult terrain that was scary and uncertain, and it stirred up fears and doubts. We wanted to cover more and more of it, but we grew to respect the need to let each other open up in our own time.\n\nThe second ground rule was that when it hurt too much, when it was painful, we would simply quit for the day. Then we would either begin the next day where we left off or wait until the person who was sharing felt ready to continue. We carried around the loose ends, knowing that we wanted to deal with them. But because we had the time and the environment conducive to it, and because we were so excited to observe our own involvement and to grow within our marriage, we simply knew that sooner or later we would deal with all those loose ends and bring them to some kind of closure.\n\nThe most difficult, and eventually the most fruitful part of this kind of communication came when my vulnerability and Sandra's vulnerability touched. Then, because of our subjective involve\u00adment, we found that the space between stimulus and response was no longer there. A few bad feelings surfaced. But our deep desire and our implicit agreement was to prepare ourselves to start where we left off and deal with those feelings until we resolved them.\n\nOne of those difficult times had to do with a basic tendency in my personality. My father was a very private individual\u2014very controlled and very careful. My mother was and is very public, very open, very spontaneous. I find both sets of tendencies in me, and when I feel insecure, I tend to become private, like my father. I live inside myself and safely observe.\n\nSandra is more like my mother\u2014social, authentic, and sponta\u00adneous. We had gone through many experiences over the years in which I felt her openness was inappropriate, and she felt my constraint was dysfunctional, both socially and to me as an individual because I would become insensitive to the feelings of others. All of this and much more came out during those deep visits. I came to value Sandra's insight and wisdom and the way she helped me to be a more open, giving, sensitive, social person.\n\nAnother of those difficult times had to do with what I perceived to be a \"hang up\" Sandra had which had bothered me for years. She seemed to have an obsession about Frigidaire appliances which I was at an absolute loss to understand. She would not even consider buying another brand of appliance. Even when we were just starting out and on a very tight budget, she insisted that we drive the fifty miles to the \"big city\" where Frigidaire appliances were sold, simply because no dealer in our small university town carried them at that time.\n\nThis was a matter of considerable agitation to me. Fortunately, the situation came up only when we purchased an appliance. But when it did come up, it was like a stimulus that triggered off a hot button response. This single issue seemed to be symbolic of all irrational thinking, and it generated a whole range of negative feelings within me.\n\nI usually resorted to my dysfunctional private behavior. I sup\u00adpose I figured that the only way I could deal with it was not to deal with it; otherwise, I felt I would lose control and say things I shouldn't say. There were times when I did slip and say something negative, and I had to go back and apologize.\n\nWhat bothered me the most was not that she liked Frigidaire, but that she persisted in making what I considered utterly illogical and indefensible statements to defend Frigidaire which had no basis in fact whatsoever. If she had only agreed that her response was irrational and purely emotional, I think I could have handled it. But her justification was upsetting.\n\nIt was sometime in early spring when the Frigidaire issue came up. All our prior communication had prepared us. The ground rules had been deeply established\u2014not to probe and to leave it alone if it got to be too painful for either or both.\n\nI will never forget the day we talked it through. We didn't end up on the beach that day; we just continued to ride through the canefields, perhaps because we didn't want to look each other in the eye. There had been so much psychic history and so many bad feelings associated with the issue, and it had been submerged for so long. It had never been so critical as to rupture the relationship, but when you're trying to cultivate a beautiful unified relationship, any divisive issue is important.\n\nSandra and I were amazed at what we learned through the interaction. It was truly synergistic. It was as if Sandra were learning, almost for the first time herself, the reason for her so-called hang-up. She started to talk about her father, about how he had worked as a high school history teacher and coach for years, and how, to help make ends meet, he had gone into the appliance business. During an economic downturn, he had experienced serious financial difficulties, and the only thing that enabled him to stay in business during that time was the fact that Frigidaire would finance his inventory.\n\nSandra had an unusually deep and sweet relationship with her father. When he returned home at the end of a very tiring day, he would lie on the couch, and Sandra would rub his feet and sing to him. It was a beautiful time they enjoyed together almost daily for years. He would also open up and talk through his worries and concerns about the business, and he shared with Sandra his deep appreciation for Frigidaire financing his inventory so that he could make it through the difficult times.\n\nThis communication between father and daughter had taken place in a spontaneous way during very natural times, when the most powerful kind of scripting takes place. During those relaxed times guards are down and all kinds of images and thoughts are planted deep in the subconscious mind. Perhaps Sandra had forgotten about all of this until the safety of that year of commu\u00adnication when it could come out also in very natural and sponta\u00adneous ways.\n\nSandra gained tremendous insight into herself and into the emotional root of her feelings about Frigidaire. I also gained insight and a whole new level of respect. I came to realize that Sandra wasn't talking about appliances; she was talking about her father, and about loyalty\u2014about loyalty to his needs.\n\nI remember both of us becoming tearful on that day, not so much because of the insights, but because of the increased sense of reverence we had for each other. We discovered that even seem\u00adingly trivial things often have roots in deep emotional experiences. To deal only with the superficial trivia without seeing the deeper, more tender issues is to trample on the sacred ground of another's heart.\n\nThere were many rich fruits of those months. Our communica\u00adtion became so powerful that we could almost instantly connect with each other's thoughts. When we left Hawaii, we resolved to continue the practice. During the many years since, we have continued to go regularly on our Honda trail cycle, or in the car if the weather's bad, just to talk. We feel the key to staying in love is to talk, particularly about feelings. We try to communicate with each other several times every day, even when I'm travelling. It's like touching in to home base, which accesses all the happiness, security, and values it represents.\n\nThomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again\u2014if your home is a treasured relationship, a precious companionship.\n\nINTERGENERATIONAL LIVING\n\nAs Sandra and I discovered that wonderful year, the ability to use wisely the gap between stimulus and response, to exercise the four unique endowments of our human nature, empowered us from the inside out.\n\nWe had tried the outside-in approach. We loved each other, and we had attempted to work through our differences by controlling our attitudes and our behaviors, by practicing useful techniques of human interaction. But our band-aids and aspirin only lasted so long. Until we worked and communicated on the level of our essential paradigms, the chronic underlying problems were still there.\n\nWhen we began to work from the inside out, we were able to build a relationship of trust and openness and to resolve dysfunc\u00adtional differences in a deep and lasting way that never could have come by working from the outside in. The delicious fruits\u2014a rich Win\/Win relationship, a deep understanding of each other, and a marvelous synergy\u2014grew out of the roots we nurtured as we examined our programs, rescripted ourselves, and managed our lives so that we could create time for the important Quadrant II activity of communicating deeply with each other.\n\nAnd there were other fruits. We were able to see on a much deeper level that, just as powerfully as our own lives had been affected by our parents, the lives of our children were being influenced and shaped by us, often in ways we didn't even begin to realize. Understanding the power of scripting in our own lives, we felt a renewed desire to do everything we could to make certain that what we passed on to future generations, by both precept and example, was based on correct principles.\n\nI have drawn particular attention in this book to those scripts we have been given which we proactively want to change. But as we examine our scripting carefully, many of us will also begin to see beautiful scripts, positive scripts that have been passed down to us which we have blindly taken for granted. Real self-awareness helps us to appreciate those scripts and to appreciate those who have gone before us and nurtured us in principle-based living, mirroring back to us not only what we are, but what we can become.\n\nThere is transcendent power in a strong intergenerational family. An effectively interdependent family of children, parents, grand\u00adparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins can be a powerful force in helping people have a sense of who they are and where they came from and what they stand for.\n\nIt's great for children to be able to identify themselves with the \"tribe,\" to feel that many people know them and care about them, even though they're spread all over the country. And that can be a tremendous benefit as you nurture your family. If one of your children is having difficulty and doesn't really relate with you at a particular time in his life, maybe he can relate to your brother or sister who can become a surrogate father or mother, a mentor or a hero for a period of time.\n\nGrandparents who show a great interest in their grandchildren are among the most precious people on this earth. What a marvelous positive social mirror they can be! My mother is like that. Even now, in her late 80's, she takes a deep personal interest in every one of her descendants. She writes us love letters. I was reading one the other day on a plane with tears streaming down my cheeks. I could call her up tonight and I know she'd say, \"Stephen, I want you to know how much I love you and how wonderful I think you are.\" She's constantly reaffirming.\n\nA strong intergenerational family is potentially one of the most fruitful, rewarding, and satisfying interdependent relationships. And many people feel the importance of that relationship. Look at the fascination we all had with Roots some years ago. Each of us has roots and the ability to trace those roots, to identify our ancestors.\n\nThe highest and most powerful motivation in doing that is not for ourselves only, but for our posterity, for the posterity of all mankind. As someone once observed, \"There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children\u2014one is roots, the other wings.\"\n\nBECOMING A TRANSITION PERSON\n\nAmong other things, I believe that giving \"wings\" to our children and to others means empowering them with the freedom to rise above negative scripting that had been passed down to us. I believe it means becoming what my friend and associate, Dr. Terry Warner, calls a \"transition\" person. Instead of transferring those scripts to the next generation, we can change them. And we can do it in a way that will build relationships in the process.\n\nIf your parents abused you as a child, that does not mean that you have to abuse your own children. Yet there's plenty of evidence to indicate that you will tend to live out that script. But because you're proactive, you can rewrite the script. You can choose not only not to abuse your children, but to affirm them, to script them in positive ways.\n\nYou can write it in your personal mission statement and into your mind and heart. You can visualize yourself living in harmony with that mission statement in your Daily Private Victory. You can take steps to love and forgive your own parents, and if they are still living, to build a positive relationship with them by seeking to understand.\n\nA tendency that's run through your family for generations can stop with you. You're a transition person\u2014a link between the past and the future. And your own change can affect many, many lives downstream.\n\nOne powerful transition person of the twentieth century, Anwar Sadat, left us as part of his legacy a profound understanding of the nature of change. Sadat stood between a past that had created a \"huge wall of suspicion, fear, hate and misunderstanding\" between Arabs and Israelis, and a future in which increased conflict and isolation seemed inevitable. Efforts at negotiation had been met with objections on every scale\u2014even to formalities and procedural points, to an insignificant comma or period in the text of proposed agreements.\n\nWhile others attempted to resolve the tense situation by hacking at the leaves, Sadat drew upon his earlier centering experience in a lonely prison cell and went to work on the root. And in doing so, he changed the course of history for millions of people.\n\nHe records in his autobiography:\n\nIt was then that I drew, almost unconsciously, on the inner strength I had developed in Cell 54 of Cairo Central Prison\u2014a strength, call it a talent or capacity, for change. I found that I faced a highly complex situation, and that I couldn't hope to change it until I had armed myself with the necessary psychological and intellectual capacity. My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place had taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress.\n\nChange\u2014real change\u2014comes from the inside out. It doesn't come from hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior with quick fix personality ethic techniques. It comes from striking at the root\u2014the fabric of our thought, the fundamental, essential para\u00addigms, which give definition to our character and create the lens through which we see the world. In the words of Amiel,\n\nMoral truth can be conceived in thought. One can have feelings about it. One can will to live it. But moral truth may have been penetrated and possessed in all these ways, and escape us still. Deeper even than consciousness there is our being itself\u2014our very substance, our nature. Only those truths which have entered into this last region, which have become ourselves, become spontaneous and involuntary as well as voluntary, unconscious as well as conscious, are really our life\u2014that is to say, something more than property. So long as we are able to distinguish any space whatever between Truth and us we remain outside it. The thought, the feeling, the desire or the consciousness of life may not be quite life. To become divine is then the aim of life. Then only can truth be said to be ours beyond the possibility of loss. It is no longer outside us, nor in a sense even in us, but we are it, and it is we.\n\nAchieving unity\u2014oneness\u2014with ourselves, with our loved ones, with our friends and working associates, is the highest and best and most delicious fruit of the Seven Habits. Most of us have tasted this fruit of true unity from time to time in the past, as we have also tasted the bitter, lonely fruit of disunity\u2014and we know how precious and fragile unity is.\n\nObviously building a character of total integrity and living the life of love and service that creates such unity isn't easy. It isn't quick fix.\n\nBut it's possible. It begins with the desire to center our lives on correct principles, to break out of the paradigms created by other centers and the comfort zones of unworthy habits.\n\nSometimes we make mistakes, we feel awkward. But if we start with the Daily Private Victory and work from the inside out, the results will surely come. As we plant the seed and patiently weed and nourish it, we begin to feel the excitement of real growth and eventually taste the incomparably delicious fruits of a congruent, effective life.\n\nAgain, I quote Emerson: \"That which we persist in doing becomes easier\u2014not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased.\"\n\nBy centering our lives on correct principles and creating a balanced focus between doing and increasing our ability to do, we become empowered in the task of creating effective, useful, and peaceful lives... for ourselves, and for our posterity.\n\n### A Personal Note\n\nAs I conclude this book, I would like to share my own personal conviction concerning what I believe to be the source of correct principles. I believe that correct principles are natural laws, and that God, the Creator and Father of us all, is the source of them, and also the source of our conscience. I believe that to the degree people live by this inspired conscience, they will grow to fulfill their natures; to the degree that they do not, they will not rise above the animal plane.\n\nI believe that there are parts to human nature that cannot be reached by either legislation or education, but require the power of God to deal with. I believe that as human beings, we cannot perfect ourselves. To the degree to which we align ourselves with correct principles, divine endowments will be released within our nature in enabling us to fulfill the measure of our creation. In the words of Teilhard de Chardin, \"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.\"\n\nI personally struggle with much of what I have shared in this book. But the struggle is worthwhile and fulfilling. It gives meaning to my life and enables me to love, to serve, and to try again.\n\nAgain, T. S. Eliot expresses so beautifully my own personal discovery and conviction: \"We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.\"\n\n### Afterword:  \nQuestions I am Often Asked\n\nFrankly, I've always been embarrassed by personal questions like some in this afterword. But I am asked them so often and with such interest that I've gone ahead and included them here. Many of these questions and answers were also included in Living the 7 Habits.\n\nThe 7 Habits was published in 1989. Given your experiences in the many years that have followed, what would you change, add, or subtract?\n\nI'm not responding lightly, but frankly I wouldn't change any\u00adthing. I might go deeper and apply wider but I have had the opportunity to do that in some of the books released since then.\n\nFor example, over 250,000 individuals were profiled showing Habit 3, Put First Things First, as the habit most neglected. So, the First Things First book (published 1996) went deeper into Habits 2 and 3 but also added more substance and illustrations for all the other habits.\n\nThe 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families applied the 7 Habits framework of thinking into building strong, happy, highly effec\u00adtive families.\n\nAlso, my son, Sean, applied the framework to the unique needs, interests and challenges of teens in a very visually attractive, entertaining, and edifying way in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.\n\nWe have also had tens of thousands of people tell us of the significant impact of becoming the creative force of their own lives through internalizing the 7 Habits. Seventy six of them shared the details of their fascinating stories of courage and inspiration in Living the 7 Habits\u2014showing the transforming power of the principles in all kinds of personal, family, and organizational settings regardless of their circumstances, organizational position, or prior life experiences.\n\nWhat have you learned about the 7 Habits since the book's release?\n\nI have learned or had reinforced many things. I'll briefly mention ten learnings.\n\n1. The importance of understanding the difference between principles and values. Principles are natural laws that are external to us and that ultimately control the consequences of our actions. Values are internal and subjective and represent that which we feel strongest about in guiding our behavior. Hopefully we will come to value principles, so that we get the results we want now in a way that enables us to get even greater results in the future, which is how I define effectiveness. Everyone has values; even criminal gangs have values. Values govern people's behavior but principles govern the consequences of those behaviors. Principles are independent of us. They operate regardless of our awareness of them, acceptance of them, liking of them, belief in them, or obeying of them. I have come to believe that humility is the mother of all virtues. Humility says we are not in control, principles are in control, therefore we submit ourselves to principles. Pride says that we are in control, and since our values govern our behavior, we can simply do life our way. We may do so but the consequences of our behavior flow from principles not our values. Therefore we should value principles.\n\n2. From experiences all over the world with this material I have come to see the universal nature of the principles undergirding this material. Illustrations and practices may vary and are cultur\u00adally specific, but the principles are the same. I have found the principles contained in the 7 Habits in all six major world reli\u00adgions and have actually drawn upon quotations from sacred writings of those religions when teaching in those cultures. I have done this in the Middle East, India, Asia, Australia and the South Pacific, South America, Europe, North America, Africa, and among Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. All of us, men and women alike, face similar problems, have similar needs, and internally resonate with the underlying principles. There is an internal sense of the principle of justice or win\/win. There is an internal moral sense of the principle of responsibility, of the principle of purpose, of integrity, of respect, of cooperation, of communication, of renewal. These are universal. But practices are not. They are situationally specific. Every culture interprets universal principles in unique ways.\n\n3. I have come to see the organizational implications of the 7 Habits, although, in the strict technical sense, an organization does not have habits. Its culture has norms or mores or social codes, which repre\u00adsent habits. An organization also has established systems, processes, and procedures. These represent habits. In fact, in the last analysis, all behavior is personal. It is individual even though it often is part of collective behavior in the form of decisions made by management regarding structure and systems, processes and practices. We have worked with thousands of organizations in most every industry and profession and have found that the same basic principles contained in the 7 Habits apply and define effectiveness.\n\n4. You can teach all 7 Habits by starting with any one habit. And you can also teach one habit in a way that leads to the teaching of the other six. It's like a hologram where the whole is contained in the part and the part is contained in the whole.\n\n5. Even though the 7 Habits represents an inside-out approach, it works most successfully when you start with the outside challenge and then take the inside-out approach. In other words, if you are having a relationship challenge, say a breakdown of communication and trust, this will define the nature of the needed inside-out ap\u00adproach in winning the kind of private victory that enables the pub\u00adlic victory meeting that challenge. This is the reason I often teach Habits 4, 5, and 6 before I teach Habits 1, 2, and 3.\n\n6. Interdependence is ten times more difficult than independence. It demands so much more mental and emotional independence to think win\/win when another person is into win\/lose, to seek to understand first when everything inside you cries out for under\u00adstanding, and to search for a better third alternative when compromise is so much easier. In other words, to work successfully with others in creative cooperative ways requires an enormous amount of independence, internal security, and self-mastery. Oth\u00aderwise, what we call interdependency is really counter-dependency where people do the opposite to assert their independence, or codependency where they literally need the other person's weakness to fulfill their need and to justify their own weakness.\n\n7. You can pretty well summarize the first three habits with the expression \"make and keep a promise.\" And you can pretty well summarize the next three habits with the expression \"involve oth\u00aders in the problem and work out the solution together.\"\n\n8. The 7 Habits represents a new language even though there are fewer than a dozen unique words or phrases. This new language be\u00adcomes a code, a shorthand way of saying a great deal. When you say to another \"was that a deposit or a withdrawal?\" \"Is that reactive or proactive?\" \"Is that synergistic or a compromise?\" \"Is that win\/win or win\/lose or lose\/win?\" \"Is that putting first things first or second things first?\" \"Is that beginning with the means in mind or the end in mind?\" I've seen entire cultures transformed by a wide under\u00adstanding of and commitment to the principles and concepts sym\u00adbolized by these very special code words.\n\n9. Integrity is a higher value than loyalty. Or better put, integrity is the highest form of loyalty. Integrity means being integrated or centered on principles not on people, organizations, or even fam\u00adily. You will find that the root of most issues that people are deal\u00ading with is \"is it popular (acceptable, political), or is it right?\" When we prioritize being loyal to a person or group over doing what we feel to be right, we lose integrity. We may temporarily gain popularity or build loyalty, but, downstream, this loss of integrity will undermine even those relationships. It's like badmouthing someone behind their back. The person you are temporarily united with through badmouthing someone else knows you would bad mouth them under different pressures and cir\u00adcumstances. In a sense, the first three habits represent integrity and the next three loyalty; but they are totally interwoven. Over time, integrity produces loyalty. If you attempt to reverse them and go for loyalty first, you will find yourself temporizing and compromising integrity. It's better to be trusted than to be liked. Ultimately, trust and respect will generally produce love.\n\n10. Living the 7 Habits is a constant struggle for everyone. Every\u00adone falters from time to time on each of the seven and sometimes all seven simultaneously. They really are simple to understand but difficult to consistently practice. They are common sense but what is common sense is not always common practice.\n\nWhich habit do you personally have the greatest difficulty with?\n\nHabit 5. When I am really tired and already convinced I'm right, I really don't want to listen. I may even pretend to listen. Basically I am guilty of the same thing I talk about, listening with the intent to reply, not to understand. In fact, in some sense, I strug\u00adgle almost daily with all 7 Habits. I have conquered none of them. I see them more as life principles that we never really mas\u00adter and that the closer we come to their mastery, the more aware we become of how far we really have yet to go. It's like the more you know the more you know you don't know.\n\nThis is why I often gave my university students 50 percent of the grade for the quality of their questions and the other 50 per\u00adcent for the quality of their answer to their questions. Their true level of knowledge is better revealed that way.\n\nSimilarly, the 7 Habits represents an upward cycle.\n\nHabit 1 at a high level is vastly different from Habit 1 at a lower level. To be proactive at the beginning level may only be awareness of the space between stimulus and response. At the next level it may involve a choice such as, not to get back at or to get even. At the next level, to give feedback. At the next level, to ask forgiveness. At the next level, to forgive. At the next, to for\u00adgive parents. At the next level, to forgive dead parents. And the next level, to simply not take offense.\n\nYou're the vice-chairman of FranklinCovey Company. Does FranklinCovey live the 7 Habits?\n\nWe try to. Continually trying to live what we teach is one of our most fundamental values. But we don't do it perfectly. Like any other business, we're challenged by changing market realities and by integrating the two cultures of the former Covey Leader\u00adship Center and Franklin Quest. The merger took place in the summer of 1997. It takes time, patience, and persistence in apply\u00ading the principles and the true test of our success will be in the long run. No snapshot will give an accurate picture.\n\nAny airplane is off track much of the time but just keeps com\u00ading back to the flight plan. Eventually, it arrives at its destination. This is true with all of us as individuals, families, or organiza\u00adtions. The key is to have an \"End in Mind\" and a shared commit\u00adment to constant feedback and constant course correction.\n\nWhy seven? Why not six or eight or ten or fifteen? What is so sacred about seven?\n\nNothing is sacred about seven, it just so happens that the three private victory habits (freedom to choose, choice, action) precede the three public victory habits (respect, understanding, creation) and then there is one to renew the rest and that equals seven.\n\nWhen asked this question, I've always said if there were some other desirable characteristic you would like make into a habit, you would simply put that under Habit 2 as one of the values you are trying to live by. In other words, if punctuality is a desir\u00adable trait you want to make a habit, that would be one of the val\u00adues of Habit 2. So no matter what else you came up with you would put it under Habit 2, your value system. Habit one is the idea that you can have a value system, that you can choose your own value system. Habit 2 is what those choices or values are and Habit 3 is to live by them. So they are very basic, generic, and interconnected.\n\nIt so happens that at the writing of this afterword for this new edition of the Seven Habits, I have just completed a new book entitled The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness. To some, calling it the 8th Habit may appear to be a departure from my standard answer. But you see, as I say in the opening chapter of this new book, the world has profoundly changed since The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was published in 1989. The chal\u00adlenges and complexity we face in our personal lives and relation\u00adships, in our families, in our professional lives, and in our organizations are of a different order of magnitude. In fact, many mark 1989\u2014the year we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall\u2014as the beginning of the Information Age, the birth of a new reality, a sea change of incredible significance... truly a new era.\n\nBeing highly effective as individuals and organizations is no longer optional in today's world\u2014it's the price of entry to the playing field. But surviving, thriving, innovating, excelling and leading in this new reality will require us to build on and reach beyond effectiveness. The call and need of a new era is for fulfillment. It's for passionate optimization, for significant contribution and greatness. These are on a different plane or dimension. They are different in kind\u2014just as significance is different in kind, not in degree, from success. Tapping into the higher reaches of human genius and motivation\u2014what we could call voice\u2014requires a new mindset, a new skill-set, a new tool-set... a new habit.\n\nThe 8th Habit, then, is not about adding one more habit to the 7th\u2014one that somehow got forgotten. It's about seeing and har\u00adnessing the power of a third dimension to the 7 Habits that meets the central challenge of the new Knowledge Worker Age.\n\nHow does notoriety affect you?\n\nIt affects me in different ways. From an ego standpoint, it's flat\u00adtering. From a teaching standpoint it is humbling, but I must strongly acknowledge that I am not the author of any of these principles and deserve absolutely no recognition. I am not saying this because of a desire to be modest and humble. I am saying this because I believe it\u2014that I, myself, believe it. I see myself like most of you\u2014as a seeker of truth, of understanding. I am not a guru; I disdain being called a guru. I want no disciples. I am only trying to promote a discipleship toward principles that are already in people's hearts, that people will live true to their con\u00adscience.\n\nIf you had it to do over again, what is the one thing you would do differently as a businessperson?\n\nI would do more strategic, proactive recruiting and selecting. When you are buried by the urgent and have a thousand balls in the air, it is so easy to put people that appear to have solutions into key positions. The tendency is to not look deeply into their backgrounds and patterns, to do \"due diligence,\" nor is it to carefully develop the criteria that needs to be met in the particular roles or assignments. I am convinced that when recruiting and selecting is done strategically, that is, thinking long-term and proactively, not based upon the pressures of the moment, it pays enormous long-term dividends. Someone once said, \"That which we desire most earnestly we believe most easily.\" You really have to look deeply into both character and competence because even\u00adtually, downstream, flaws in either area will manifest themselves in both areas. I am convinced that although training and devel\u00adopment is important, recruiting and selection are much more important.\n\nIf you had it to do over again, what is the one thing you would do differently as a parent?\n\nAs a parent, I wish I had spent more time in carefully developing soft, informal win\/win agreements with each of my children in the different phases of their lives. Because of business and travels I often indulged my children and went for lose\/win too much instead of paying the price in relationship building sufficient to really develop thorough, sound win\/win agreements more con\u00adsistently.\n\nHow is technology going to change business in the future?\n\nI believe in Stan Davis's statement that \"When the infrastructure changes, everything rumbles,\" and I think the technical infrastruc\u00adture is central to everything. It will accelerate all good and bad trends. I'm also convinced that it is for these very reasons that the human element becomes even more important. High tech without high touch does not work, and, the more influential technology be\u00adcomes, the more important is the human factor which controls that technology becomes, particularly in developing a cultural commit\u00adment to the criteria in the use of that technology.\n\nAre you surprised or astounded at the universal popularity of the 7 Habits (with other countries\/cultures\/ages\/gender)?\n\nYes and no. Yes, in that I had no idea it would become a world\u00adwide phenomenon and that a few of the words would become part of Americana. No, in the sense that the material had been tested for over twenty five years and I knew that it would work primarily because it is based upon principles I did not invent and therefore take no credit for.\n\nHow would you begin to teach the 7 Habits to very young children?\n\nI think I would live by Albert Schweitzer's three basic rules for raising children: First, example; second, example; third, example. But I wouldn't go quite that far. I would say, first, example; sec\u00adond, build a caring and affirming relationship; and third, teach some of the simple ideas underlying the habits in the language of children\u2014help them gain a basic understanding and vocabulary of the 7 Habits and show them how to process their own experi\u00adences through the principles; let them identify what particular principles and habits are being illustrated in their lives.\n\nMy boss (spouse, child, friend, etc.) really needs the 7 Habits. How would you recommend I get them to read it?\n\nPeople don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Build a relationship of trust and openness based upon a character example of trustworthiness and then share how the 7 Habits have helped you. Simply let them see the 7 Habits in action through your life. Then, at the appropriate time, you might invite them to participate in a training program or share your book as a gift or teach some of the basic ideas when the occasion calls for it.\n\nWhat is your background and how did you come to write the 7 Habits?\n\nIt was implicitly understood that I would follow in my father's footsteps and go into the family business. However, I found that I enjoyed teaching and training leaders even more than business. I became deeply interested and involved in the human side of organizations when I was at Harvard Business School. Later I taught business subjects at Brigham Young University and did consulting, advising, and training on the side for several years. During that time, I became interested in creating integrated lead\u00adership and management development programs around a sequential and balanced set of principles. These eventually evolved into the 7 Habits and then while applying it to organiza\u00adtions it evolved into the concept of principle-centered leadership. I decided to leave the university and go full-time into training executives from all different kinds of organizations. After a year of following a very carefully developed curriculum came the development of a business that has enabled us to take the mate\u00adrial to people throughout the world.\n\nWhat is your response to the people who claim to have the true formula for success?\n\nI would say two things. First, if what they are saying is based on principles or natural laws, I want to learn from them and I com\u00admend them. Second, I would say we are probably using different words to describe the same basic principles or natural laws.\n\nAre you really bald or do you shave your head for efficiency's sake?\n\nHey, listen, while you're busy blow-drying your hair, I'm out serving the customers. In fact, the first time I heard the expression, \"Bald is beautiful,\" I kicked the slats out of my crib!\n\n### APPENDIX A\n\n### POSSIBLE PERCEPTIONS FLOWING  \nout of VARIOUS CENTERS\n\n**  \n**\n\nIf your center is: Spouse\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * The main source of need satisfaction\n\nFamily\n\n  * Good in its place\n  * Less important\n  * A common project\n\nMoney\n\n  * Necessary to properly take care of spouse\n\nWork\n\n  * Necessary to earn money to care for spouse\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Means to bless, impress, or manipulate\n\nPleasure\n\n  * Mutual, unifying activity or unimportant\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Spouse is best or only friend\n  * Only friends are \"our\" friends\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * Spouse is my defender, or common enemy provides source of marriage definition\n\nChurch\n\n  * Activity to enjoy together\n  * Subordinate to relationship\n\nSelf\n\n  * Self-worth is spouse based\n  * Highly vulnerable to spouse attitudes and behaviors\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Ideas which create and maintain relationship with spouse\n\n* * *\n\nIf your center is: Family\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * Part of the family\n\nFamily\n\n  * The highest priority\n\nMoney\n\n  * Family economic support\n\nWork\n\n  * A means to an end\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Family comfort and opportunities\n\nPleasure\n\n  * Family activities or relatively unimportant\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Friends of the family, or competition\n  * Threat to strong family life\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * Defined by family\n  * Source of family strength and unity\n  * Possible threat to family strength\n\nChurch\n\n  * Source of help\n\nSelf\n\n  * Vital part of but subordinate to family\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Rules which keep family unified and strong\n  * Subordinate to family\n\n* * *\n\nIf your center is: Money\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * Asset or liability in acquiring money\n\nFamily\n\n  * Economic drain\n\nMoney\n\n  * Source of security and fulfillment\n\nWork\n\n  * Necessary to the acquisition of money\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Evidence of economic success\n\nPleasure\n\n  * Economic drain or evidence of economic stress\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Chosen because of economic status or influence\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * Economic competitors\n  * Threat to economic security\n\nChurch\n\n  * Tax write-off\n  * Hand in your pocket\n\nSelf\n\n  * Self-worth is determined by net worth\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Ways that work in making and managing money\n\n* * *\n\nIf your center is: Work\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * Help or hindrance in work\n\nFamily\n\n  * Help or interruption to work\n  * People to instruct in work ethic\n\nMoney\n\n  * Of secondary importance\n  * Evidence of hard work\n\nWork\n\n  * Main source of fulfillment and satisfaction\n  * Highest ethic\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Tools to increase work effectiveness\n  * Fruits, badge of work\n\nPleasure\n\n  * Waste of time\n  * Interferes with work\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Developed from work setting or shared interest\n  * Basically unnecessary\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * Obstacles to work productivity\n\nChurch\n\n  * Important to corporate image\n  * Imposition on your time\n  * Opportunity to network\n\nSelf\n\n  * Defined by job role\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Ideas that make you successful in your work\n  * Need to adapt to work conditions\n\n* * *\n\nIf your center is: Possessions\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * Main possession\n  * Assistant in acquiring possessions\n\nFamily\n\n  * Possession to use, exploit, dominate, smother, control\n  * Showcase\n\nMoney\n\n  * Key to increasing possessions\n  * Another possession to control\n\nWork\n\n  * Opportunity to possess status, authority, recognition\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Status symbols\n\nPleasure\n\n  * Buying, shopping, joining clubs\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Personal objects\n  * Usable\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * Takers, thieves\n  * Others with more possessions or recognition\n\nChurch\n\n  * \"My\" church, a status symbol\n  * Source of unfair criticism or good things in life\n\nSelf\n\n  * Defined by the things I own\n  * Defined by social status, recognition\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Concepts which enable you to acquire and enhance possessions\n\n* * *\n\nIf your center is: Pleasure\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * Companion in fun and pleasure or obstacle to it\n\nFamily\n\n  * Vehicle or interference\n\nMoney\n\n  * Means to increase opportunities for pleasure\n\nWork\n\n  * Means to an end\n  * \"Fun\" work OK\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Objects of fun\n  * Means to more fun\n\nPleasure\n\n  * Supreme end in life\n  * Main source of satisfaction\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Companions in fun\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * Take life too seriously\n  * Guilt trippers, destroyers\n\nChurch\n\n  * Inconvenient, obstacle to recreation\n  * Guilt trip\n\nSelf\n\n  * Instrument for pleasure\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Natural drives and instincts which need to be satisfied\n\n* * *\n\nIf your center is: A Friend or Friends\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * Possible friend or possible competitor\n  * Social status symbol\n\nFamily\n\n  * Friends or obstacle to developing friendships\n  * Social status symbol\n\nMoney\n\n  * Source of economic and social good\n\nWork\n\n  * Social opportunity\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Means of buying friendship\n  * Means of entertaining or providing social pleasure\n\nPleasure\n\n  * Enjoyed always with friends\n  * Primarily social events\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Critical to personal happiness\n  * Belonging, acceptance, popularity is crucial\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * Outside the social circle\n  * Common enemies provide unity or definition for friendship\n\nChurch\n\n  * Place for social gathering\n\nSelf\n\n  * Socially defined\n  * Afraid of embarrassment or rejection\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Basic laws which enable you to get along with others\n\n* * *\n\nIf your center is: An Enemy or Enemies\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * Sympathizer or scapegoat\n\nFamily\n\n  * Refuge (emotional support) or scapegoat\n\nMoney\n\n  * Means to fight with or prove superiority\n\nWork\n\n  * Escape or opportunity to vent feelings\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Fighting tools\n  * Means to secure allies\n  * Escape, refuge\n\nPleasure\n\n  * Rest and relaxation time before the next battle\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Emotional supporters and sympathizers\n  * Possibly defined by common enemy\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * Objects of hate\n  * Source of personal problems\n  * Stimuli to self-protection and self-justification\n\nChurch\n\n  * Source of self-justification\n\nSelf\n\n  * Victimized\n  * Immobilized by enemy\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Justification for labeling enemies\n  * Source of your enemy's wrongness\n\n* * *\n\nIf your center is: Church\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * A companion in or facilitator for church service, or a trial of faith\n\nFamily\n\n  * Models to exemplify adherence to church teachings, or trials of faith\n\nMoney\n\n  * Means to support church and family\n  * Evil, if greater in priority than church service or teachings\n\nWork\n\n  * Necessary for temporal support\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Temporal possessions of minimal importance\n  * Reputation and image of great worth\n\nPleasure\n\n  * \"Innocent\" pleasures as an opportunity to gather with other church members\n  * Others as sinful or time wasters, to be self-righteously denied\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Other members of the church\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * Nonbelievers; those who disagree with church teachings or whose lives are in blatant opposition to them\n\nChurch\n\n  * Highest priority source of guidance\n\nSelf\n\n  * Self-worth is determined by activity in the church, contributions to the church, or performance of deeds that reflect the church ethic\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Doctrines taught by the church\n  * Subordinate to the church\n\n* * *\n\nIf your center is: Self\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * Satisfier and pleaser\n\nFamily\n\n  * Possession\n  * Need satisfier\n\nMoney\n\n  * Source of needs satisfaction\n\nWork\n\n  * Opportunity to \"do my own thing\"\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Source of self-definition, protection, enhancement\n\nPleasure\n\n  * Deserved sensate satisfactions\n  * \"My rights\"\n  * \"My needs\"\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Supporter, provider for \"me\"\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * Source of self-definition, self-justification\n\nChurch\n\n  * Vehicle to serve self-interests\n\nSelf\n\n  * Better, smarter, more right\n  * Justified in focusing all resources on personal gratification\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Source of justification\n  * Those ideas that serve my best interests; can be adapted to need\n\n* * *\n\nIf your center is: Principles\n\nThese are alternative ways you may tend to perceive other areas of your life:\n\nSpouse\n\n  * Equal partner in a mutually beneficial interdependent relationship\n\nFamily\n\n  * Friends\n  * Opportunity for service, contribution, and fulfillment\n  * Opportunity for intergenerational rescripting and change\n\nMoney\n\n  * Enabling resource in the accomplishment of important priorities and goals\n\nWork\n\n  * Opportunity to use talents and abilities in a meaningful way\n  * Means to provide economic resource\n  * Time investment to be kept in balance with other time investments and in harmony with priorities and values in life\n\nPossessions\n\n  * Enabling resources\n  * Responsibilities to be properly cared for\n  * Secondary to people in importance\n\nPleasure\n\n  * Joy that comes from almost any activity in a focused life\n  * True re-creation as an important part of a balanced, integrated life-style\n\nA Friend or Friends\n\n  * Companions in interdependent livings\n  * Confidants\u2014those to share with, serve, and support\n\nEnemy or Enemies\n\n  * No real perceived \"enemies\"; just people with different paradigms and agendas to be understood and cared about\n\nChurch\n\n  * Vehicle for true principles\n  * Opportunity for service and contribution\n\nSelf\n\n  * One unique, talented, creative individual in the midst of many unique, talented, creative individuals who, working independently and interdependently, can accomplish great things\n\nPrinciples\n\n  * Immutable natural laws which cannot be violated with impunity\n  * When honored, preserve integrity and thus lead to true growth and happiness\n\n* * *\n\n### APPENDIX B\n\n### A QUADRANT II DAY  \nat the OFFICE\n\nTHE FOLLOWING EXERCISE AND ANALYSIS is designed to help you see the impact of a Quadrant II paradigm in a business setting on a very practical level.\n\nSuppose that you are the director of marketing for a major pharmaceutical firm. You are about to begin an average day at the office, and as you look over the items to attend to that day, you estimate the amount of time each one will take.\n\nYour unprioritized list includes the following:\n\n  1. You'd like to have lunch with the general manager (1-\u00bd hours).\n  2. You were instructed the day before to prepare your media budget for the following year (2 or 3 days).\n  3. Your \"IN\" basket is overflowing into your \"OUT\" basket (1-1\u00bd hours).\n  4. You need to talk to the sales manager about last month's sales; his office is down the hall (4 hours).\n  5. You have several items of correspondence that your secretary says are urgent (1 hour).\n  6. You'd like to catch up on the medical journals piled upon your desk (\u00bd hour).\n  7. You need to prepare a presentation for a sales meeting slated for next month (2 hours).\n  8. There's a rumor that the last batch of product X didn't pass quality control.\n  9. Someone from the FDA wants you to return his call about product \"X\" (\u00bd hour).\n  10. There is a meeting at two P.M. for the executive board, but you don't know what it is about (1 hour).\n\nTake a few minutes now and use what you have learned from Habits 1, 2, and 3 that might help you to effectively schedule your day.\n\n8-to-5 Schedule\n\n8 |\n\n* * *\n\n---|---  \n9 |\n\n* * *\n\n10 |\n\n* * *\n\n11 |\n\n* * *\n\n12 |\n\n* * *\n\n1 |\n\n* * *\n\n2 |\n\n* * *\n\n3 |\n\n* * *\n\n4 |\n\n* * *\n\n5 |\n\n* * *\n\nBy asking you to plan only one day, I have automatically eliminated the wider context of the week so fundamental to fourth generation time management. But you will be able to see the power of a Quadrant II, principle-centered paradigm even in the context of one nine-hour period of time.\n\nIt is fairly obvious that most of the items on the list are Quadrant I activities. With the exception of item number six\u2014catching up on medical journals\u2014everything else is seemingly both important and urgent.\n\nIf you were a third generation time manager, using prioritized values and goals, you would have a framework for making such scheduling decisions and would perhaps assign a letter such as A, B, or C next to each item and then number 1, 2, 3 under each A, B, and C. You would also consider the circumstances, such as the availability of other people involved, and the logical amount of time required to eat lunch. Finally, based on all of these factors, you would schedule the day.\n\nMany third generation time managers who have done this exercise do exactly what I have described. They schedule when they will do what, and based on various assumptions which are made and explicitly identified, they would accomplish or at least begin most of the items in that day and push the remainder onto the next day or to some other time.\n\nFor instance, most people indicate that they would use the time between eight and nine A.M. to find out exactly what was on the agenda for the executive board meeting so that they could prepare for it, to set up lunch with the general manager around noon, and to return the call from the FDA. They usually plan to spend the next hour or two talking to the sales manager, handling those correspondence items which are most important and urgent, and checking out the rumor regarding the last batch of product \"X\" which apparently didn't pass quality control. The rest of that morning is spent in preparing for the luncheon visit with the general manager and\/or for the two P.M. executive board meeting, or dealing with whatever problems were uncovered regarding product \"X\" and last month's sales.\n\nAfter lunch, the afternoon is usually spent attending to the unfinished matters just mentioned and\/or attempting to finish the other most important and urgent correspondence, making some headway into the overflowing \"IN\" basket, and handling other important and urgent items that may have come up during the course of the day.\n\nMost people feel the media budget preparations for the following year and the preparation for the next month's sales meeting could probably be put off until another day, which may not have as many Quadrant I items in it. Both of those are obviously more Quadrant II activities, having to do with long-term thinking and planning. The medical journals continue to be set aside because they are clearly Quadrant II and are probably less important than the other two Quadrant II matters just mentioned.\n\nThis is the kind of thinking which third generation time managers generally go through, even though they may vary as to when they will do what.\n\nWhat approach did you take as you scheduled those items? Was it similar to the third generation approach? Or did you take a Quadrant II, fourth generation approach? (Refer to the Time Management Matrix in Habit 3 - Put first things first.)\n\nThe Quadrant II Approach\n\nLet's go through the items on the list using a Quadrant II approach. This is only one possible scenario; others could be created, which may also be consistent with the Quadrant II paradigm, but this is illustrative of the kind of thinking it embodies.\n\nAs a Quadrant II manager, you would recognize that most P activities are in Quadrant I and most PC activities are in Quadrant II. You would know that the only way to make Quadrant I manageable is to give considerable attention to Quadrant II, primarily by working on prevention and opportunity and by having the courage to say \"no\" to Quadrants III and IV.\n\nTHE TWO P.M. BOARD MEETING. We will assume the two P.M. executive board meeting did not have an agenda for the attending executives, or perhaps you would not see the agenda until you arrived at the meeting. This is not uncommon. As a result, people tend to come unprepared and to \"shoot from the hip.\" Such meetings are usually disorganized and focus primarily on Quadrant I issues, which are both important and urgent, and around which there is often a great deal of sharing of ignorance. These meetings generally result in wasted time and inferior results and are often little more than an ego trip for the executive in charge.\n\nIn most meetings, Quadrant II items are usually categorized as \"other business.\" Because \"work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion\" in accordance with Parkinson's Law, there usually isn't time to discuss them. If there is, people have been so beaten and smashed by Quadrant I, they have little or no energy left to address them.\n\nSo you might move into Quadrant II by first attempting to get yourself on the agenda so that you can make a presentation regarding how to optimize the value of executive board meetings. You might also spend an hour or two in the morning preparing for that presentation, even if you are only allowed a few minutes to stimulate everyone's interest in hearing a more extended prepara\u00adtion at the next board meeting. This presentation would focus on the importance of always having a clearly specified purpose for each meeting and a well thought out agenda to which each person at the meeting has had the opportunity to contribute. The final agenda would be developed by the chairman of the executive board and would focus first on Quadrant II issues that usually require more creative thinking rather than Quadrant I issues that generally involve more mechanical thinking.\n\nThe presentation would also stress the importance of having minutes sent out immediately following the meeting, specifying assignments given and dates of accountability. These items would then be placed on appropriate future agendas which would be sent out in plenty of time for others to prepare to discuss them.\n\nNow this is what might be done by looking at one item on the schedule\u2014the two P.M. executive board meeting\u2014through a Quad\u00adrant II frame of reference. This requires a high level of proactivity, including the courage to challenge the assumption that you even need to schedule the items in the first place. It also requires consideration in order to avoid the kind of crisis atmosphere that often surrounds a board meeting.\n\nAlmost every other item on the list can be approached with the same Quadrant II thinking, with perhaps the exception of the FDA call.\n\nRETURNING THE FDA CALL. Based on the background of the quality of the relationship with the FDA, you make that call in the morning so that whatever it reveals can be dealt with appropriately. This might be difficult to delegate, since another organization is in\u00advolved that may have a Quadrant I culture and an individual who wants you, and not some delegate, to respond.\n\nWhile you may attempt to directly influence the culture of your own organization as a member of the executive board, your Circle of Influence is probably not large enough to really influence the culture of the FDA, so you simply comply with the request. If you find the nature of the problem uncovered in the phone call is persistent or chronic, then you may approach it from a Quadrant II mentality in an effort to prevent such problems in the future. This again would require considerable proactivity to seize the opportu\u00adnity to transform the quality of the relationship with the FDA or to work on the problems in a preventive way.\n\nLUNCH WITH THE GENERAL MANAGER. You might see having lunch with the general manager as a rare opportunity to discuss some longer-range, Quadrant II matters in a fairly informal atmosphere. This may also take thirty to sixty minutes in the morning to adequately prepare for, or you may simply decide to have a good social interaction and listen carefully, perhaps without any plan at all. Either possibility may present a good opportunity to build your relationship with the general manager.\n\nPREPARING THE MEDIA BUDGET. Regarding item number two, you might call in two or three of your associates most directly connected to media budget preparation and ask them to bring their recommen\u00addations in the form of \"completed staff work\" (which may only require your initials to finally approve) or perhaps to outline two or three well-thought-out options you can choose from and identify the consequences of each option. This may take a full hour sometime during the day\u2014to go over desired results, guidelines, resources, accountability, and consequences. But by investing this one hour, you tap the best thinking of concerned people who may have different points of view. If you haven't taken this approach before, you may need to spend more time to train them in what this approach involves, what \"completed staff work\" means, how to synergize around differences and what identifying alternative options and consequences involves.\n\nTHE \"IN\" BASKET AND CORRESPONDENCE. Instead of diving into the \"IN\" basket, you would spend some time, perhaps thirty to sixty minutes, beginning a training process with your secretary so that he or she could gradually become empowered to handle the \"IN\" basket as well as the correspondence under item number five. This training program might go on for several weeks, even months, until your secretary or assistant is really capable of being results-minded rather than methods-minded.\n\nYour secretary could be trained to go through all correspondence items and all \"IN\" basket items, to analyze them and to handle as many as possible. Items that could not be handled with confidence could be carefully organized, prioritized, and brought to you with a recommendation or a note for your own action. In this way, within a few months your secretary or executive assistant could handle 80 to 90 percent of all of the \"IN\" basket items and correspondence, often much better than you could handle them yourself, simply because your mind is so focused on Quadrant II opportunities instead of buried in Quadrant I problems.\n\nTHE SALES MANAGER AND LAST MONTH'S SALES. A possible Quadrant II approach to item number four would be to think through the entire relationship and performance agreement with that sales manager to see if the Quadrant II approach is being used. The exercise doesn't indicate what you need to talk to the sales manager about, but assuming it's a Quadrant I item, you could take the Quadrant II approach and work on the chronic nature of the problem as well as the Quadrant I approach to solve the immediate need.\n\nPossibly you could train your secretary to handle the matter without your involvement and bring to your attention only that which you need to be aware of. This may involve some Quadrant II activity with your sales manager and others reporting to you so they understand that your primary function is leadership rather than management. They can begin to understand that they can actually solve the problem better with your secretary than with you, and free you for Quadrant II leadership activity.\n\nIf you feel that the sales manager might be offended by having your secretary make the contact, then you could begin the process of building that relationship so that you can eventually win the confidence of the sales manager toward your both taking a more beneficial Quadrant II approach.\n\nCATCHING UP ON MEDICAL JOURNALS. Reading medical journals is a Quadrant II item you may want to procrastinate. But your own long-term professional competence and confidence may largely be a function of staying abreast of this literature. So, you may decide to put the subject on the agenda for your own staff meeting, where you could suggest that a systematic approach to reading the medical journals be set up among your staff. Members of the staff could study different journals and teach the rest the essence of what they learn at future staff meetings. In addition, they could supply others with key articles or excerpts which everyone really needs to read and understand.\n\nPREPARING FOR NEXT MONTH'S SALES MEETING. Regarding item number seven, a possible Quadrant II approach might be to call together a small group of the people who report to you and charge them to make a thorough analysis of the needs of the salespeople. You could assign them to bring a completed staff work recommendation to you by a specified date within a week or ten days, giving you enough time to adapt it and have it implemented. This may involve their interviewing each of the salespeople to discover their real concerns and needs, or it might involve sampling the sales group so that the sales meeting agenda is relevant and is sent out in plenty of time so that the salespeople can prepare and get involved in it in appropriate ways.\n\nRather than prepare the sales meeting yourself, you could delegate that task to a small group of people who represent different points of view and different kinds of sales problems. Let them interact constructively and creatively and bring to you a finished recommendation. If they are not used to this kind of assignment, you may spend some of that meeting challenging and training them, teaching them why you are using this approach and how it will benefit them as well. In doing so, you are beginning to train your people to think long-term, to be responsible for completing staff work or other desired results, to creatively interact with each other in interdependent ways, and to do a quality job within specified deadlines.\n\nPRODUCT \"X\" AND QUALITY CONTROL. Now let's look at item number eight regarding product \"X,\" which didn't pass quality control. The Quadrant II approach would be to study that problem to see if it has a chronic or persistent dimension to it. If so, you could delegate to others the careful analysis of that chronic problem with instructions to bring to you a recommendation, or perhaps simply to implement what they come up with and inform you of the results.\n\nThe net effect of this Quadrant II day at the office is that you are spending most of your time delegating, training, preparing a board presentation, making one phone call, and having a productive lunch. By taking a long-term PC approach, hopefully in a matter of a few weeks, perhaps months, you won't face such a Quadrant I scheduling problem again.\n\nAs you go through this analysis, you may be thinking this approach seems idealistic. You may be wondering if Quadrant II managers ever work in Quadrant I.\n\nI admit it is idealistic. This book is not about the habits of highly ineffective people; it's about habits of highly effective people. And to be highly effective is an ideal to work toward.\n\nOf course you'll need to spend time in Quadrant I. Even the best laid plans in Quadrant II sometimes aren't realized. But Quadrant I can be significantly reduced into more manageable proportions so that you're not always into the stressful crisis atmosphere that negatively affects your judgment as well as your health.\n\nUndoubtedly it will take considerable patience and persistence, and you may not be able to take a Quadrant II approach to all or even most of these items at this time. But if you can begin to make some headway on a few of them and help create more of a Quadrant II mind-set in other people as well as yourself, then downstream there will be quantum improvements in performance.\n\nAgain, I acknowledge that in a family setting or a small business setting, such delegation may not be possible. But this does not preclude a Quadrant II mind-set which would produce interesting and creative ways within your Circle of Influence to reduce the size of Quadrant I crises through the exercise of Quadrant II initiative.\n\n### Problem\/Opportunity Index\n\nThis index should not be interpreted as an attempt to provide \"quick fix\" solutions to deep concerns. It is, rather, a reference to material in this book that specifically deals with these concerns and, hopefully, will provide insight and help in working on them. These references reflect parts of the holistic, integrated approach of the Seven Habits and are most effective when understood and used in context.\n\nPERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS\n\nGrowth and Change\n\nCan you really create change in your life?\n\nIf you can change seeing, you can change being, 15-45\n\nGravity to pull to you, 46-48\n\nFrom \"you\" to \"I\" to \"we,\" 48-52\n\nYour companion in change, 59-60\n\nOpening your \"gate of change,\" 60-62\n\nBeing in charge of change, 65-94\n\nBecoming your own first creator, 103-106\n\nUsing your head, 132-135\n\nOnward and upward, 304-306\n\nWhen change is unsettling\n\nCreating a changeless core,\n\nWhen you've been handed a bad script\n\nChanging it, 103-106, 132-145\n\nPassing a new script on to others, 316-318\n\n\"But it's too hard to change!\"\n\nThe power of independent will, 147-149\n\nWhen to say \"yes!\" and what it takes to say \"no!,\" 150-158\n\nTrying to be something you're not\n\nYou can't get the fruits without the roots, 21-23,\n\nSymbol without substance, 35-38\n\nWhen you're burned-out on setting goals\n\nPutting yourself in control immediately, 91-92\n\nGoals that grow out of mission and roles, 135-137\n\nMaking it happen each week,\n\nPersonal Leadership\n\nWhen you don't know if you're being effective or not\n\nWhat is \"effectiveness\" anyway?, 52-59\n\nYou're \"really busy\"\u2014so what?, 98-99\n\nIf you're \"successful\"\u2014and miserable\n\nPrimary and secondary greatness, 21-23\n\nSymbol without substance, 35-36\n\nOutside-in, 43-44\n\nWhen your \"ladder of success\" is leaning against the wrong wall, 98-99\n\nWhen what you're doing doesn't work\n\nInside-Out, 15-45\n\nLiving a facade\n\nYou can only pretend for so long, 36-38\n\nWhen you don't have a solid core\n\nYou can't make a lighthouse move, 32-35\n\nCreating a \"principle center,\" 122-128\n\nWhen you can't find purpose or meaning in your life\n\nTranscending adversity, 74-75\n\nHabit 2: Begin With the End in Mind, 95-144\n\nMoving beyond self,\n\nRoots and wings, 314-318\n\nWhen you feel controlled by circumstances or other people\n\nYour companion in change,\n\nHabit 1: Be Proactive, 65-94\n\nHabit 2: Begin with the End in Mind, 95-144\n\nHabit 3: Put First Things First, 142-82\n\nUnderstanding your scripting\n\nThe power of a ten-second experience, 24-29\n\nHabit 1: Be Proactive, 65-94\n\nHabit 2: Begin with the End in Mind, 95-144\n\nInside-Out Again, 314-318\n\nAppendix A - Possible Perceptions Rowing out of Various Centers\n\nPersonal Management\n\nPlanning systems that don't work\n\n\"Efficiency\" may not be the answer,\n\nFour generations of time management, 149-150\n\nQuadrant II\u2014the new generation, 158-171\n\nLosing sight of what really matters\n\nHabit 2: Begin with the End in\n\nMind, 95-144\n\nHabit 3: Put First Things First, 145-182\n\nWhen you can't say \"no!\"\n\nWhat it takes to say \"no!,\" 156-158\n\nWhen you want to run away\n\nThe pleasure-centered life, 114-115\n\nEscape from the pounding surf, 152-153\n\nMaintaining Balance and Peace\n\nBeing great at something\u2014at the sacrifice of everything else\n\nHaving a solid center for balanced success, 109-128\n\nIdentifying roles and goals, 135-137\n\nThe fourth generation makes it possible, , 170-171\n\nWhen family and work demands conflict\n\nCreating a personal constitution, 106-109\n\nKeeping priorities straight, 113-114\n\nIdentifying roles and goals, 135-137\n\nIf you suffer from feelings of insecurity\n\nWhere do you get your security?, 109-128\n\nLike yourself before you can like others, 186-187\n\nSources of intrinsic security, 298-299\n\nHandling moods\n\nYou are greater than your moods, 66-67\n\nWhen your honor becomes greater than your moods,\n\nHandling tough problems\n\nTurning adversity into opportunity, 74-75\n\nActing instead of being acted upon, 76-77\n\nDefining your problem: direct, indirect or no control, 85-86\n\nMaking decisions\n\nThe value of a Personal Mission Statement, 108-109\n\nWhen \"PMA\" doesn't work\n\nFacing reality,\n\nAchieving success... and killing yourself in the process\n\nEffectiveness lies in the balance, 52-59\n\nHabit 7: Sharpen the Saw, 287-307\n\nWhen you're unhappy\n\nWhat is happiness, 47-48\n\nThe have's and the be's, 89-90\n\nBeing responsible for your own happiness,\n\nWhen you make a mistake\n\nThe other end of the stick, 90-91\n\nAsking forgiveness when you \"blow it,\" 197-199\n\nINTERPERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS\n\nFamily\n\nCreating strong families\n\nParents caught in management paradigm,\n\nCreating a family mission statement, 137-139\n\nUsing a force field analysis, 279-280\n\nRoots and wings, 314-318\n\n\"But I never have time for my family!\"\n\nHabit 2: Begin with the End in\n\nMind, 95-144\n\nHabit 3: Put First Things First, 145-182\n\nWho's more important\u2014the individual or the masses?,\n\nMaking one-on-one time, 258-259\n\nTaking time\u2014together, 309-314\n\nWhen the family climate is wrong\n\nParents caught in management paradigm,\n\nChanging the climate, 279-281\n\nBecoming a transition person, 316-318\n\nWhen your happiness is based on your family\n\nBeing family-centered, 112-113\n\nMarriage\n\nFalling out of love\n\nAre you empowering your spouse's weaknesses?, 41-42\n\nIf you want to have... be!,\n\nLove her!, 79-80\n\nWhen your spouse is the problem\n\nIf you want to have... be!,\n\nStay in your Circle of Influence, 81-90\n\nInfluencing your spouse\n\nWorking on the \"be's,\"\n\nThe thirty-day test, 92-93\n\nBuilding an Emotional Bank Account, 185-203\n\nThe key to your influence, 238-239\n\nWalking out on a marriage\n\nForsaking responsibility in the name of independence,\n\nDeteriorating or broken relationships\n\nWhen the greed for golden eggs kills the goose,\n\nBuilding the Emotional Bank Account, 188-203\n\nWhen your happiness is based on your spouse's\n\nBeing spouse-centered, 111-112\n\nDealing with differences\n\nWhen you're spouse-centered, \u2014112\n\nHabit 5: Seek First to Understand, 235-260\n\nHabit 6: Synergize, 261-284\n\nThe Frigidaire hang-up, 309-314\n\nWhen there's no trust in the relationship\n\nBuilding an Emotional Bank Account, 185-203\n\n\"But we never have time for each other!\"\n\nSpending one-on-one time, 257-259\n\nTaking time\u2014together, 309-314\n\nWhen there's no communication\n\nCommunication, cooperation and synergy, 270-274\n\nTaking time to talk things out, 309-314\n\nConfessing each other's \"sins\"\n\nBeing enemy-centered,\n\nNegative synergy, 274-277\n\nParenting\n\nOverreacting to a child's negative behavior\n\nWriting a new script, 104-106\n\nBeing family-centered, 112-113\n\nSeeing and being differently, 132-133\n\nWhen you \"blow it,\" 198-199\n\nWhen you don't like the kind of parent you are\n\nRewriting your script, 104-106\n\nSeeing and being differently, 132-133\n\nRole-playing your concerns, 258-259\n\nIf you or your spouse is emotionally immature\n\nBeing unwilling to change,\n\nParental \"image\" can overpower parental integrity, 38-40\n\nIf you have a need to be popular with your child\n\nBeing family-centered, 112-113\n\nGoing for the golden eggs, 55-56\n\nInfluencing a child\n\nFrom \"please\" to power, 38-40\n\nOverpowering children when they're young, 55-56\n\nBuilding an Emotional Bank Account, 185-203\n\nHabit 5: Seek First to Understand, 235-260\n\nGetting children to handle their jobs\n\ncheerfully and well\n\nGetting the golden eggs\u2014and preserving the goose,\n\n\"Green and clean,\" 174-179\n\nCreating a Win\/Win with a child\n\n\"No Deal\"\u2014a liberating option,\n\nLicensed to drive\u2014a Win\/Win opportunity,\n\nRaising a responsible child\n\nGetting golden eggs and preserving the goose,\n\n\"Green and clean,\" 174-179\n\nCreating a Win\/Win,\n\n\"If Mommy doesn't get us up in time...,\"\n\nEncouraging a child: \"Use your R&I!,\"\n\nBuilding a relationship with a child\n\nStar Wars, 56-57\n\nProactivity: the thirty-day test, 92-93\n\nBuilding an Emotional Bank Account, 185-203\n\nHabit 5: Seek First to Understand, 235-260\n\nWhen getting your own way weakens the relationship\n\nParental \"image\" can overpower parental integrity, 38-40\n\nOverpowering children when they're young, 55-56\n\nGetting the golden eggs\u2014and preserving the goose,\n\nRescripting over-reactive behavior, 104-106\n\nWhen one wins and one loses, both lose, 209-213\n\nWhen your child sees things differently\n\n\"I don't want to share!,\" 38-40\n\nStar Wars, 56-57\n\nHandling a \"rebellious\" son, 199-201\n\nHabit 5: Seek First to Understand, 235-260\n\nWhen a child has difficulty in school\n\nLooking at your lens as well as through it, 16-21\n\n\"Look at my child\u2014I'm a failure!\"\n\nGetting social mileage out of your child's behavior, 16-21\n\nParental \"image\" can overpower parental integrity, 38-40\n\nBeing family-centered, 112-113\n\nWhen your child's self-esteem is low\n\nChanging the way you see your child, 16-21\n\nPossessing self precedes sharing with others,\n\nReflections from the social mirror, 67-68\n\nHabit 5: Seek First to Understand, 235-260\n\nThe image you reflect back to others, 299-301\n\nWhen you can't understand your child\n\nHabit 5: Seek First to Understand, 235-260\n\nMotivating children\n\n\"Green and clean,\" 173-179\n\nWhen your child won't communicate\n\nLearning how to listen, 245-253\n\nRelationships with Others\n\nIf it's difficult to build good relationships\n\nYou can't get the fruits without the roots, 21-23\n\nFrom \"you\" to \"I\" to \"we,\" 48-52\n\nBuilding Emotional Bank Accounts, 185-203\n\nWhen you don't understand others\n\nHabit 5: Seek First to Understand, 235-260\n\nWhen others don't understand you\n\nThen seek to be understood, 255-257\n\nHandling blaming, accusing, or ugly feelings towards others\n\nA dependent response,\n\nListening to your language, 78-80\n\nUgly feelings are buried alive,\n\nCreating an abundance mentality, 219-220\n\nIf you don't have a Win\/Win character\n\nFinding a mentor or model,\n\nWhen you need to give feedback\u2014but it's going to hurt\n\nCourage and consideration: creating the balance, 218-219\n\nDealing with differences\n\nTwo people see differently; both can be right, 24-29\n\nStar Wars, 56-57\n\nThe glasses you wear make a difference, 126-128\n\nThe difference is all in your head, 130-131\n\nUnderstanding: one person's mission is another's minutia, 190-191\n\nHabit 5: Seek First to Understand, 235-260\n\n\"But you said...,\" 194-195\n\nThe laws of love and the laws of life, 199-201\n\nHabit 6: Synergize, 261-284\n\nWhen there's no communication\n\nTrying to see the \"old lady,\" 24-29\n\nBuilding bank accounts of trust, 185-203\n\nHabit 5: Seek First to Understand, 235-260\n\nSynergy and communication, 269-271\n\nWhen there's no cooperation\n\nCooperation, communication and trust,\n\nInfluencing others\n\n\"Search your own heart...,\" 16-21\n\nIf you want to have, be...,\n\nP\/PC in the human dimension, 55-56\n\nWorking in your Circle of Influence, 81-90\n\nBuilding Emotional Bank Accounts, 185-203\n\nOpen communication in Win\/Win, 220-222\n\nThe key to influence, 238-239\n\nTo influence, you have to be influenced,\n\nIf you can't reach a Win\/Win\n\n\"No deal\"\u2014a liberating option, 213-216\n\nNot all decisions need to be Win\/Win,\n\nCompetition has its place,\n\n\"Irreconcilable\" differences\n\nYou don't have to take them to court, 280-283\n\nWhen there's no trust\n\nBuilding Emotional Bank Accounts, 185-203\n\nBuilding strong relationships\n\nIf you want to have, be...,\n\nCreating a changeless core,\n\nA tool that makes it possible, 161-162\n\nBuilding Emotional Bank Accounts, 185-203\n\nRelationships\u2014a key to Win\/Win, 220-222\n\nBonding in the AEC, 269-270\n\nSocial\/emotional renewal, 297-299\n\nRebuilding broken relationships\n\nBuilding Emotional Bank Accounts, 185-203\n\nThinking Win\/Win when you're dealing with a Win\/Lose person\n\nDealing with Win\/Lose\u2014the real test of Win\/Win,\n\nScripting others\n\nThe power of perception, 16-21\n\nReflections from the social mirror, 67-68\n\nThe image you reflect back to others, 299-301\n\nLoving\u2014with no strings attached\n\nThe laws of love and the laws of life, 199-201\n\n\"But I know how to listen!\"\n\nAre you really listening?, 245-253\n\nWhen communication becomes emotional\n\nDon't unload\u2014listen!,\n\nRelationships on the Job\n\nWorking for a dictator\n\nIf you want to have, be...,\n\nBeing a proactive gopher, 86-88\n\nHandling peer resentment\n\nProactivity\u2014the key, 86-88\n\nWhen the job isn't clear\n\n\"But you said...,\" 194-195\n\nWhen you're not getting through to your boss\n\nMaking effective presentations, 255-257\n\nDealing with difficult relationships on the job\n\nGiving yourself to the one, 201-202\n\nWhen management resists change\n\nBeing a proactive gopher, 86-88\n\nFocusing on results, 224-226\n\nRunning scared of your boss\n\nThe capacity to earn\u2014your most important financial asset,\n\nGetting a job\n\nUsing your \"R&I,\"\n\nORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS\n\nCreating top quality organizations\n\nOrganizational PC, 57-59\n\nMeasure once, cut twice,\n\nCreating organizational mission\n\nstatements, 139-143\n\nCreating synergy in business, 267-269\n\nStewardship delegation\u2014a focus\n\non results, 173-174\n\nRelationships at the top\u2014the key, 201-202\n\nHabit 4: Think Win\/Win, 204-234\n\nHabit 5: Seek First to Understand, 235-260\n\nHabit 6: Synergize, 261-284\n\nBalanced renewal in business, 302-303\n\nLack of teamwork in the organization\n\nIndependence precedes effective interdependence, 48-52, 185-188\n\nCreating organizational mission\n\nstatements, 139-143\n\nHabit 4: Think Win\/Win, 204-234\n\nHabit 6: Synergize, 261-284\n\nRivalry, politicking, conflict in the organization\n\nNegative synergy, 274-275\n\nWhen the environment is Win\/Lose\n\nYou get what you reward, 229-232\n\nPoor customer service\n\nWatering down the chowder,\n\n\"P\" problems are \"PC\" opportunities,\n\n\"My salespeople are just order takers!,\" 230-231\n\nGetting crunched by the changing economy\n\nAct or be acted upon,\n\nWrong jungle!, 101-103\n\n\"Creaming\"\n\n\"My salespeople are just order takers!,\" 230-231\n\nHigh producers who are interpersonal disasters\n\nWatering what you want to grow, 231-232\n\nMANAGERIAL EFFECTIVENESS\n\nWhen you're managing instead of leading\n\nWrong jungle!, 101-103\n\nWhen you have too much to do\n\n\"Efficiency\" may not be the answer,\n\nHabit 3: Put First Things First, 145-182\n\nA Quadrant II Day at the Office, 345-352\n\nIneffective meetings\n\nThe two P.M. board meeting, 336-337\n\nPreparing for next month's sales meeting, 351-352\n\nHandling correspondence\n\nThe \"in\" basket and correspondence,\n\nKeeping up on trade publications\n\nCatching up on medical journals,\n\nBudgets\n\nPreparing the media budget, 349-350\n\nIrresponsible employees\n\nIs it \"them\" or \"me?,\"\n\nTreating employees like your best customers, 58-59\n\n\"But you said...,\" 194-195\n\nNegative feelings in business relationships\n\nMoving from 5 to 20 percent Quadrant II time, 155-156\n\nNegative feelings are buried alive, 209-213\n\nLack of creativity, innovation\n\nStewardship delegation\u2014bringing out the best, 171-179\n\nHabit 4: Think Win\/Win, 204-234\n\nHabit 6: Synergize, 261-284\n\nDealing with a low trust culture\n\nThe price of a high-trust culture,\n\nTrying to legislate trust,\n\nBuilding Emotional Bank Accounts, 185-203\n\nHabit 4: Think Win\/Win, 204-234\n\nIf you can't reach a Win\/Win\n\n\"No deal\"\u2014a liberating option, 213-216\n\nNot all decisions need to be Win\/Win,\n\nCompetition has its place,\n\nExpensive, time-consuming training programs\n\nLearner-control and results focus, 224-226\n\nUnmotivated employees\n\n\"Green and clean,\" 174-179\n\nWin\/Win management training, 224-226\n\nWin\/Win performance agreements, 226-229\n\nToo many people to supervise\n\nIncreasing the span of control with Win\/Win, 226-229\n\nThe sales manager\u2014it can be delegated, 350-351\n\nIn difficult negotiations\n\nThe most viable alternative\u2014Win\/Win, 212-213\n\n\"No deal\"\u2014a viable option, 213-216\n\n\"We'd like you to write the contract...,\" 254-255\n\nYou don't have to take it to court, 280-283\n\nPerformance evaluation problems\n\nHelping people evaluate themselves, 226-229\n\nWatering what you want to grow, 231-232\n\n### INDEX\n\nAbundance Mentality, 219-21, ,\n\naccountability, , ,\n\nAddison, Joseph,\n\nadvisement response,\n\naffirmation, 132-35\n\n\"Aha!\" experience,\n\nAlcoholics Anonymous prayer,\n\nAmiel, 317-18\n\n\"Animal School, The\" (Reeves), 278-279\n\napologizing sincerely, 197-99\n\napplication suggestions:\n\nfor begin with end in mind,\n\nfor first thing first, 179-82\n\nfor proactivity, 93-94\n\nfor renewal, 306-7\n\nfor synergy,\n\nfor understanding, 259-60\n\nfor Win\/Win,\n\nAristotle,\n\nattitudes, 23-24\n\ndefinition of,\n\nsources of, , , , , ,\n\nattitudinal values, 74-75\n\nautobiographical responses, four, 245-53\n\nbalance, , 301-3\n\nbalanced self-renewal, principles of, 287-307\n\nBarton, Bruce,\n\nbegin with end in mind, 95-144\n\nall things are created twice, 99-100\n\nalternative centers, 111-18\n\napplication of, 146-47, , , , ,\n\napplication suggestions for,\n\nfamily mission statements, 137-39\n\nidentifying center, 118-22\n\nidentifying roles and goals, 135-37\n\nleadership and management in, 101-3\n\norganizational mission statements, 139-43\n\npersonal mission statement, 106-9, 128-29\n\nprinciple center, 122-28\n\nrescripting (becoming your own first creator), 103-6\n\nbehaviors, 23-24,\n\npatterns of,\n\nreactive vs. proactive, 71-72, , 78-80, , , 87-88\n\nsources of, , , , , ,\n\nthree areas of problems in, 85-86\n\nbeing, 31-32,\n\nBennis, Warren,\n\nBenson, Ezra Taft,\n\nbe's, 89-90\n\nbrain, left, functions of, , , , ,\n\nbrain, right, 130-35,\n\nexpanding perspective of, 131-32\n\nfunctions of, , ,\n\ntwo ways to tap into, 131-35\n\nvisualization by, 132-35\n\nbrain dominance theory, ,\n\nBrooks, Phillips, 296-97\n\nBush, George,\n\nbusiness, synergy in, 267-69\n\nCamp David Accord,\n\ncenter(s), 109-28,\n\nalternative, 111-18\n\nidentifying of, 118-22\n\nlife-support factors for, 109-11\n\npossible perceptions flowing out of,\n\nprinciples as, 32-35, 122-128, , ,\n\nchange:\n\nability to,\n\nForce Field Analysis in, 279-83\n\nfrom inside out, 35-40, 316-18\n\nprinciples of, 35-40, 47-48\n\nfrom renewal, 279-83, 304-6\n\nsee also inside-out process\n\ncharacter:\n\nand communication, 237-39\n\nthree traits of, 217-21\n\nWin\/Win, , 217-21\n\nCharacter Ethic, 18-23,\n\nvs. Personality Ethic, 18-21, , , , 238-39\n\nprimary greatness trait in, 21-23\n\nprinciples and values of, ,\n\n_Chariots of Fire_ ,\n\nchurch centeredness, 117-18, ,\n\nChurchill, Winston,\n\nCircle of Concern, 81-85, 90-91, ,\n\nCircle of Influence, 81-91\n\ncommitments and promises in,\n\nexpanding of, 86-88, 89-90\n\nnegative energy and, ,\n\none on one in, 257-59\n\npositive energy and,\n\nin relationships,\n\nrenewal in, ,\n\nclassroom, synergy in, 265-67\n\ncoherence, 160-61\n\ncommitment(s):\n\ninvolvement and,\n\nmaking and keeping, 91-92, , 193-94,\n\nin upward spiral,\n\n\"Common Denominator of Success,\" The (Gray), 148-49\n\ncommunication, ,\n\ncharacter and, 237-39\n\nand Emotional Bank Account, 188-190\n\nempathic, principles of, 235-60\n\nfour basic types of,\n\nfrom inside-out, 310-14\n\nintegrity and,\n\nlevels of,\n\nin relationships, 220-23\n\nsynergy and, 264-65, 269-71\n\nthird alternative in, 271-74\n\nsee also listening; understanding\n\ncompensation system, 231-32\n\ncompetition, , 208-9, , , ,\n\ncompromise, , , 270-73,\n\ncomputer metaphor, , , ,\n\nconditioning, 67-68, , ,\n\nconfrontation, 196-97\n\nconscience, , , ,\n\neducation and development of, 305-6\n\nas human endowment, , , , , 103-6, , , ,\n\nin proactive model,\n\nin time management,\n\nconsequences:\n\nof actions, ,\n\nas expectation, , , ,\n\nfour kinds of, 227-28\n\nconsideration, , 218-19,\n\nConstitution, U.S., 107-8\n\ncontribution, as law of life,\n\ncooperation:\n\nvs. competition, 205-6, , , ,\n\ncreative, principles of, 261-84\n\nas law of life,\n\nand levels of communication,\n\nCopernicus,\n\ncourage, 201-2, , 217-19, ,\n\ncreation:\n\nby design or default,\n\nfirst, 99-106, 129-31, , 146-47\n\nleadership and management, 101-3\n\nmental and physical, 99-100, 146-147\n\nrescripting as, 103-6\n\nsecond, 99-103,\n\ncreative process, see synergy\n\ncreative values,\n\ncredibility, 221-22,\n\ncrises, , , , , ,\n\nDaily Private Victory, , , , ,\n\ndaily vs. weekly scheduling, , 165-68,\n\nDeclaration of Independence, U.S., ,\n\ndefensive communication,\n\ndelegation:\n\nagreements, 223-24,\n\nfive elements in, , 223-24\n\n\"gofer,\" 173,\n\nincreasing P and PC by, 171-72\n\nstewardship, 173-79, 223-24,\n\nin weekly organizing,\n\ndeMille, Cecil B.,\n\ndependence, 49-51, ,\n\ndesire, , ,\n\ndeterminism:\n\nparadigm of, , ,\n\nthree theories of, 67-68\n\ndevelopment, see growth\n\ndiagnosis before prescription, 243-45\n\ndifferences, valuing, , , 277-79,\n\ndignity,\n\ndirect control, 85-86\n\ndiscipline, ,\n\nas law of life,\n\nin time management, 157-58\n\ndoing, in upward spiral,\n\ndriving forces, 279-83\n\nDrucker, Peter, , ,\n\nduplicity, , ,\n\necology,\n\neducation, 265-67, 294-97\n\neffectiveness, 52-4, , ,\n\nefficiency vs., , , 161-62, 169-170,\n\nhabits and paradigm of, , , 52-54, , , ,\n\nby organizational PC, 57-59\n\npersonal, ,\n\nEinstein, Albert,\n\nEinsteinian relativity paradigm,\n\nEliot, T. S, ,\n\nEmerson, Ralph Waldo, ,\n\nEmotional Bank Account, 188-90\n\nrelationships and, 221-22\n\nsix major deposits in, 190-202\n\nunderstanding and, , 241-43, , 251-59\n\nemotional deposits, 190-202\n\napologizing sincerely, 197-99\n\nattending to little things, 192-93\n\nclarifying expectations, 194-95\n\nkeeping commitments, 193-94\n\nlaws of love and laws of life in, 199-202\n\nshowing personal integrity, 195-97\n\nunderstanding individual, 190-92\n\nemotional dimension, in renewal, , 297-99, ,\n\nemotional responses,\n\nempathic communication, principles of, 235-60\n\nempathic listening, 239-43\n\nsee also listening\n\nendurance, 289-90\n\nenemy centeredness, 115-17, ,\n\nenergy, positive and negative, ,\n\nenvironmental determinism,\n\nethos,\n\nevaluation response,\n\nexcellence,\n\nexercise, 289-92\n\nexpectations:\n\nclarifying, 194-95\n\nin five areas, , ,\n\nand time management, , , ,\n\nexperiential values,\n\nfairness,\n\nfamily centeredness, 122-23, ,\n\nfamily mission statements, 137-39\n\nFarouk I, King of Egypt,\n\nFerguson, Marilyn, 60-61\n\nfinancial assets, ,\n\nfirst (mental) creation, 99-106, 129-131, , 146-47\n\nfirst things first, 145-82,\n\napplication suggestions for, 179-82\n\nbecoming Quadrant II self-manager, 162-68\n\ndelegation, 171-79\n\nand four generations of time man\u00adagement, 149-50, 159-60, 170-71\n\nliving it, 169-70\n\nmoving into Quadrant II, 158-60\n\nQuadrant II, 150-56,\n\nQuadrant II tool, 160-62\n\nwhat it takes to say \"no,\" 156-58\n\nFisher, Roger,\n\nflexibility:\n\nphysical,\n\nin planning,\n\nfocus:\n\nproactive, ,\n\nQuadrant II, ,\n\nreactive, ,\n\nForce Field Analysis, 279-83\n\nFrankl, Viktor, 68-70, , , , , 128-29,\n\nFranklin, Benjamin,\n\nfreedom to choose, 68-71,\n\nFreudian psychology,\n\nfriend centeredness, 115-17, ,\n\nFromm, Erich,\n\nGandhi, Mohandas K., ,\n\nGarfield, Charles,\n\ngenerations, in time management, 149-50, 159-60, 170-71\n\ngenetic determinism, 67-68\n\nGetting to Yes (Fisher and Ury),\n\ngoals:\n\nand expectations, 194-95\n\nlong-term, , 135-37\n\nselecting of,\n\nin weekly organizing, ,\n\nGod,\n\nGoethe, Johann Wolfgang von, ,\n\nGolden Rule,\n\ngoodness, ,\n\ngoose and golden egg fable,\n\nGordon, Arthur, 292-93\n\nGray, E. M. 148-49\n\ngreatness, primary and secondary, 21-23\n\ngrowth,\n\nForce Field Analysis in, 279-83\n\nmaturity continuum as, 48-52, 110-11,\n\nprinciples of, , , 35-40, 47-48\n\nfrom renewal, 279-83, 304-6\n\nguidance, 109-28,\n\nguidelines, as expectation, , , ,\n\nhabits, 47-48\n\none, 65-94\n\ntwo, 95-144\n\nthree, 145-82\n\nfour, 204-34\n\nfive, 235-60\n\nsix, 261-84\n\nseven, 287-307\n\nbreaking of, 46-47\n\nof effectiveness, , , 52-54,\n\nof interdependence,\n\nmaturity continuum and, 48-52\n\norganizational PC as, 57-59\n\nreaders' application of, 59-60\n\nand synergy,\n\nworking on,\n\nHammarskjold, Dag, ,\n\nHandel, George Frederick,\n\nhappiness, , , ,\n\nHarvard Business School,\n\nhave's, 89-90\n\nheart, exercising of, , 291-92\n\nHolmes, Oliver Wendell,\n\nhonesty, , 195-97\n\nhuman assets, , 55-56,\n\nhuman endowments, , , , , 103-6, , , 147-48, , ,\n\nhuman interaction:\n\nsix paradigms of, 206-16,\n\nwhich option is best in, 211-13\n\nsee also interdependence\n\nhuman nature,\n\nbalance in renewal of, 301-3\n\nfour dimensions of, 288-301\n\nhuman relations, see Personality Ethic\n\nhumility,\n\nIBM, , , 139-40\n\nignoring vs. listening,\n\nimage, , ,\n\nimagination, , 146-17\n\nas human endowment, , , , , 103-6, , ,\n\nin proactive model,\n\nvisualization and, 131-35,\n\nimportance, in time management, 150-54, , , ,\n\nindependence:\n\nand interdependence, 186-87, , ,\n\nparadigm of, 49-51\n\nindependent will,\n\nas human endowment, , , ,\n\npower of, 147-49\n\nin proactive model,\n\nindirect control, 85-86\n\nindividual, understanding of, 190-92\n\ninfluence, human:\n\nby listening, 238-43\n\nthirty separate methods of,\n\nsee also Circle of Influence\n\ninitiative, , 75-76,\n\nIn Search of Identity (Sadat), 103-4, ,\n\ninside-out process, 15-44, 309-18\n\nnew level of thinking in, 42-44\n\nPersonality and Character Ethics in, 18-21\n\npower of paradigm in, 23-31\n\nprimary and secondary greatness in, 21-23\n\nprinciple-centered paradigm in, 31-35\n\nprinciples of growth and change in, 35-40\n\nway we see problem is problem in, 40-42,\n\nintegrity, , , , , 195-97, ,\n\nas character trait,\n\nas law of life,\n\ninteraction, see human interaction\n\ninterdependence, 185-203\n\nEmotional Bank Account and, 188-190\n\nhabits of,\n\nand independence, 186-87, , ,\n\nparadigm of, 49-51, 185-203\n\nP problems as PC opportunities in, 202-3\n\nintergenerational living, 314-16\n\ninterpersonal communication, key to, ,\n\ninterpersonal effectiveness,\n\ninterpersonal leadership, 204-34\n\ninterpretation response,\n\ninvolvement, commitment and,\n\nJapan, economic success of, ,\n\nJefferson, Thomas,\n\nJohnson, Samuel, ,\n\nJordon, David Starr,\n\nJordan, William George, 22-23\n\nJoseph, story of,\n\nKerr, Rolfe, 106-7\n\nkindnesses, 192-93\n\nknowledge, , ,\n\nKoch, Frank,\n\nKuhn, Thomas,\n\nlanguage, listening to, 78-80\n\nlaws:\n\nof love and life, 199-202\n\nnatural, see principle(s)\n\nleadership:\n\nbasic task of,\n\ninterpersonal, principles of, 204-34\n\nvs. management, 101-3, , ,\n\npersonal, 95-144\n\ntransactional vs. transformational,\n\nlearning:\n\nmutual, ,\n\nin upward spiral,\n\nLewin, Kurt,\n\nliberty vs. freedom,\n\nlife, laws of, 199-202\n\nlife-support factors, 109-28\n\ncenters' affect on, 111-18\n\ndevelopment of, 122-28\n\nidentifying center by, 118-22\n\nmaturity of, 110-11\n\nLilienthal, David, 269-70\n\nlistening:\n\nempathic, , , 221-22, 239-43\n\nfour levels of,\n\nlogical or emotional responses in,\n\nskills for, 248-49,\n\ntime investment in, 252-53\n\ntraining in,\n\nsee also understanding\n\nliterature, ,\n\nlittle things, attending to, 192-93\n\nlogic, , , ,\n\nlogical responses,\n\nlogos,\n\nlogotherapy,\n\nlong-term organizing,\n\nLose\/Lose,\n\nLose\/Win, 209-10,\n\nlove, , 199-202\n\nloyalty, ,\n\nLuther, Martin,\n\nMcKay, David O.,\n\nmanagement:\n\nvs. leadership, 101-3, , ,\n\npersonal, 145-82\n\ntime, 149-50, , 159-60, 170-71\n\nmanagement training, Win\/Win, 224-227\n\nmanager, and input\/output,\n\nmanager's letter,\n\nMann, Horace,\n\nMan of La Mancha,\n\nMarkham, Edwin,\n\nMaslow, Abraham,\n\nmaturity, 217-19,\n\nmaturity continuum, 48-52, ,\n\nlife-support factors on, 110-11\n\nmeditation, ,\n\nmental (first) creation, 99-100, 129-131, , 146-47\n\nmental dimension, in renewal, , 294-95, ,\n\nMessiah (Handel),\n\nmethods vs. results, 173-74,\n\nmiddle way,\n\nmimic content, in listening, , 248-249\n\nmirror, social, 67-68\n\nMiserables, Les (Hugo),\n\nmission statements:\n\nfamily, 137-39\n\norganizational, 139-43\n\npersonal, 106-9, 128-29,\n\nin time management, ,\n\nmistakes, 90-91,\n\nmodels:\n\nproactive,\n\nreactive,\n\nmoney centeredness, 113-14, ,\n\nmotivation:\n\nsatisfied needs and,\n\nsee also desire\n\nmotives, , , ,\n\nMuggeridge, Malcolm,\n\nNasser, Gamal,\n\nnature, as synergistic, , 283-84\n\nneeds, satisfied,\n\nnegative energy, ,\n\nnegative synergy, 274-77,\n\nnegotiation, 206-16, ,\n\nsee also Win\/Win\n\nNewtonian model of physics,\n\n\"no,\" saying, 156-58\n\nNo Deal, Win\/Win or, 213-16\n\nobjective reality,\n\nobjectivity,\n\none on one, 257-59\n\nopportunities, , , 202-3, ,\n\nopportunity consequences, ,\n\norganizational mission statements, 139-43\n\norganizational PC, 57-59\n\n\"Organize and execute around priori\u00adties,\" ,\n\norganizing,\n\nlong-term and weekly, ,\n\nsee also first things first; Quadrant II\n\noutside-in paradigm, 43-14, ,\n\nPaine, Thomas,\n\nparadigms, 23-35\n\nattitudes and behaviors from, , , , , ,\n\nbasic, and paradigm shifts, 29-31,\n\ncore, 111-18\n\ndifferences and, 277-79\n\nnew level of thinking and, 43-44\n\npower of, 23-29,\n\nprinciple-centered, 32-35, 123-28, ,\n\nproactivity and, , ,\n\nrenewal and,\n\nof self,\n\nof seven habits,\n\nsix, of human interaction, 206-216\n\nparadigm shifts, ,\n\nnegative vs. positive,\n\npower of, 29-31,\n\nprocess of, 31-32\n\nby readers, 59-60\n\nas rescripting self, 103-6\n\nPareto Principle,\n\npartnership agreements, 223-24\n\nPascal, Blaise,\n\npathos,\n\npatience, ,\n\nPavlov, Ivan Petrovich,\n\npeace of mind,\n\npenalties, see consequences\n\nPenney, J. C.,\n\npeople, effectiveness vs. efficiency and, 161-62, 169-70,\n\nperception demonstration, 23-29, ,\n\nperceptions:\n\nchanging of, 17-18, 29-31\n\ndifferences in, 277-79\n\npossible, flowing out of various centers, 321-29\n\nunderstanding and, 253-55\n\nsee also paradigms\n\nperformance agreements, 223-24, 227-29\n\nPersonality Ethic, 18-44\n\nbasic flaws of, , , , 35-36\n\nvs. Character Ethic, 18-21, , , , 238-39\n\nimpact of, 40-42,\n\ntechniques in, , 21-22, ,\n\npersonal leadership, 95-144\n\npersonal management, 145-82\n\npersonal mission statement, 106-9,\n\nwriting and using, 128-29\n\npersonal vision, 65-94,\n\nperspective, expanding of, 131-32\n\nphysical assets, 54-55,\n\nphysical (second) creation, 99-100,\n\nphysical dimension, in renewal, , 289-92, ,\n\nplanning, in time management, , , , 160-62, ,\n\npleasure centeredness, 114-15, ,\n\npositive energy,\n\npositive mental attitude (PMA),\n\npositive thinking vs. proactivity,\n\npossession centeredness, , ,\n\nposterity,\n\npotential,\n\nPotiphar,\n\npower, 109-28,\n\nof independent will, 147-49\n\nof paradigm, 23-31\n\nP\/PC Balance:\n\nassets and, 54-57\n\ncourage and consideration as, 218-219\n\nin interdependence, ,\n\nin levels of communication, 270-71\n\nopportunities and, 202-3\n\nin organizational effectiveness, 57-59\n\nprinciple of, 52-54, ,\n\nin time management, ,\n\npractices vs. principles, 34-35\n\nprescription, diagnosis before, 243-45\n\npresentation process, 255-57\n\nprevention of crises, , , , ,\n\nprimary greatness, 21-23\n\nprinciple(s), 32-44, , ,\n\nof balance self-renewal, 287-307\n\ncentered paradigm, 32-35, 122-28, , ,\n\nas center of life, 122-28\n\nof creative cooperation, 261-84\n\nof empathic communication, 235-260\n\nexamples of,\n\nof growth and change, 35-40\n\nof interpersonal leadership, 204-34\n\nnew level of thinking and, 42-44\n\nof personal leadership, 95-144\n\nof personal management, 145-82\n\nof personal vision, 65-94\n\nof P\/PC Balance, 52-54, ,\n\nvs. practices, 34-35\n\nproblems and, 40-42\n\nvs. values,\n\nprincipled negotiation,\n\npriorities:\n\norganizing and executing around, 149-50,\n\nsee also first things first; Quadrant II\n\nPrivate Victory, 63-182, ,\n\nDaily, , , , ,\n\nproactivity, 65-94,\n\nact or be acted upon, 76-78\n\napplication of, , , , ,\n\napplication suggestions for, 93-94\n\nCircle of Concern\/Circle of Influ\u00adence in, 81-85\n\nconsequences and mistakes in, 90-91,\n\ndirect, indirect, and no control in, 85-86\n\nexpanding Circle of Influence in, 86-88\n\nfreedom of choice in, 68-70, ,\n\nhave's and be's in, 89-90\n\nlistening to language in, 78-80\n\nmaking and keeping commitments in, 91-92\n\nmodel,\n\nvs. reactivity, 71-72, , 78-80, , , 87-88, 104-6\n\nsocial mirror in, 67-68\n\ntaking initiative in, 75-76\n\nthirty-day test in, 92-93\n\nvalue-based, , , ,\n\nwriting personal mission statement by, 128-29\n\nprobe response,\n\nproblems:\n\nnew level of thinking for, 42-44\n\nP, as PC opportunities, 202-3\n\nthree areas of, 85-86\n\nin time management, 151-56,\n\nway we see problem as, 40-42\n\nand Win\/Win solutions,\n\nprocess(es), , 233-34\n\nhabits and, 46-48\n\nprinciple of, 36-38\n\nproducers:\n\nand input\/output, ,\n\nin time management, 150-56\n\nproduction (P), ,\n\nassets and, 54-57\n\nincreasing, , 171-72, ,\n\nproblems, as PC opportunities, 202-3\n\nproduction capability (PC), , , ,\n\nassets and, 54-57\n\nincreasing, , 171-72, ,\n\nopportunities in, P problems as, 202-3\n\norganizational, 57-59\n\npersonal, renewal as, 288-289\n\npromises, 91-92\n\nsee also commitments\n\npsychic determinism,\n\npsychological consequences,\n\npsychological dimension, in renewal, , 294-95, ,\n\npsychology, ,\n\nPtolemy,\n\nPublic Victory, 183-284, ,\n\nPygmalion effect,\n\nQuadrant I, 151-55, , , ,\n\nQuadrant II:\n\nadvances of fourth generation and, 170-71\n\nday at office in, ,\n\ndelegation in, 171-79\n\nexplanation of, 150-56\n\nfocus, ,\n\nliving, 169-70\n\nmoving into, 158-60\n\nparadigm,\n\nrenewal in, , , , , ,\n\nsaying \"no\" for, 156-58\n\nself-manager, 162-68\n\nsix important criteria in, 160-62\n\ntool, 160-62\n\nQuadrant III, 151-53, , , ,\n\nQuadrant IV, 151-53, , , 159-160,\n\nquality,\n\nreactive focus, ,\n\nreactive language,\n\nreactive model,\n\nreactive vs. proactive, 71-72, , 78-80, , , 87-88, 104-6\n\nreaders:\n\napplication by,\n\nexpectations from, 60-62\n\nsummary for, 51-52,\n\ntwo paradigm shifts by, 59-60\n\nreading,\n\nreality,\n\ninterdependent, , , ,\n\nreactive vs. proactive, , ,\n\nsubjective vs. objective,\n\nReeves, R. H., 278-79\n\nreflecting feeling, in listening,\n\nreflective listening, ,\n\nrelationships, , 221-23\n\nin organizations, 201-2; see also Public Victory\n\nin time management, , , , , , 169-70,\n\nsee also interdependence; Win\/Win\n\nrenewal, 285-318\n\napplication suggestions for, 306-7\n\nbalance in, 301-3\n\nfour dimensions of, 288-303\n\ngrowth and change process from, 279-83, 304-6\n\nmental dimension in, , 294-97\n\nphysical dimension in, , 289-92, ,\n\nscripting others in, 299-301\n\nsocial\/emotional dimension in, , 297-99, ,\n\nspiritual dimension in, , 292-94, , 303-4\n\nsynergy in, 303-4\n\nupward spiral in, 304-6\n\nrephrasing content, in listening,\n\nrescripting self, 103-6, ,\n\nresources, , , ,\n\nrespectful communication, ,\n\nresponse(s), 68-70,\n\nto consequences and mistakes, 90-91\n\nfour autobiographical, 245-53\n\ngap between stimulus and, 69-70, , , ,\n\nlogical or emotional,\n\nin proactive model,\n\nin reactive model,\n\nresponsibility, , ,\n\ndelegating of,\n\nproactive people and, , , , 89-90, , ,\n\nreactive people and, , , ,\n\nin Win\/Win,\n\nsee also proactivity\n\nresponsibility consequences,\n\nrestraining forces, 279-83\n\nresults:\n\ndesired, 173-74, , ,\n\nvs. methods, 173-74,\n\nin time management, 151-56,\n\nin Win\/Win, solutions,\n\nrewards, see consequences\n\nRogers, Carl,\n\nroles:\n\nand expectations, 194-95\n\nidentifying of, 135-37, 162-63,\n\nin long-term and weekly organiz\u00ading, ,\n\nRoosevelt, Eleanor,\n\nRoots,\n\nRoskin, Leo,\n\nSadat, Anwar, 103-4, , 316-17\n\nsameness, unity vs.,\n\nsatisfaction,\n\nof needs,\n\nsaw, sharpening of, , , , 287-307\n\nsee also renewal\n\nSaxenian, Hrand,\n\nsaying \"no,\" 156-58\n\nScarcity Mentality,\n\nscheduling, , 161-68\n\nscripting others, 299-301\n\nscripting self, 103-6, ,\n\nsecondary greatness, 21-23\n\nsecond (physical) creation, 99-103,\n\nsecurity, 109-28, , 298-99, ,\n\nseeing, 31-32,\n\nseek first to understand, then to be understood, 235-60\n\nselective listening,\n\nself-awareness, 66-67\n\nand freedom to choose, 69-70\n\nas human endowment, , , , , 103-6, , ,\n\nand language, 78-80\n\nin proactive model,\n\nsee also proactivity\n\nself-centeredness, , ,\n\nself-fulfilling prophecies,\n\nself-manager, Quadrant II, 162-68\n\nself-mastery, see Private Victory\n\nSelye, Hans,\n\nsequencing,\n\nservice, , 298-99\n\nSeven Habits, overview of, 46-62\n\nShaw, George Bernard,\n\nSheehan, George,\n\nShepherd, Herb,\n\nsincerity, 197-99\n\nskills,\n\nas effective habit, , ,\n\nlistening, 248-49,\n\nsocial dimension, in renewal, , 297-99, ,\n\nsocial mirror, 67-68\n\nsolutions, , ,\n\nsolution selling,\n\nspiral, upward, in renewal, 304-6\n\nspiritual dimension, in renewal, , 292-94, , 303-4\n\nspouse centeredness, 111-12, ,\n\nStael, Madame de,\n\nStar Wars, 56-57\n\nstewardship delegation, 173-79, 223-224,\n\nstimulus:\n\ngap between response and, 69-70, , , ,\n\nin proactive model,\n\nin reactive model,\n\nand response, 68-70\n\nstrength:\n\npersonal, , 201-2, 221-22,\n\nphysical, 290-91\n\nstructure, , 229-32\n\nStructure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn),\n\nstudents, 265-67, 300-301\n\nsubjective reality, , ,\n\nPersonality vs. Character Ethic of, 18-21, ,\n\nprimary and secondary traits of, 21-23\n\nprinciples and foundation of,\n\nWin\/Win in,\n\nsuccess literature, 18-19, , ,\n\nsupportive systems, , 229-32\n\nsympathy vs. empathy,\n\nsynergy, , , , , , 261-284\n\nall nature as, , 283-84\n\napplication suggestions for,\n\nin business, 267-69\n\nin classroom, 265-67\n\ncommunication and, 264-65, 269-71\n\nfishing for third alternative in, 271-274,\n\nForce Field Analysis in, 279-83\n\nintrapersonal, 274-75\n\nnegative, 274-77\n\nin renewal, 303-4\n\nvaluing differences in, , , 277-79,\n\nsystems, supportive, , 229-32\n\nTanner, N. Eldon,\n\nteachers, 265-67, 300-301\n\nteamwork, see interdependence, para\u00addigm of\n\nTeilhard de Chardin, Pierre,\n\nTen Commandments, The,\n\nthinking, new level of, 42-44\n\nthirty-day test, 92-93\n\nThoreau, Henry David, , ,\n\ntime management:\n\nfour generations of, 149-50, 159-60\n\nfourth-generation, five advance\u00adments in, 170-71\n\nmatrix,\n\nthird-generation limitations of, , ,\n\nsee also first things first; Quadrant II\n\nToffler, Alvin,\n\nTotal Quality Movement,\n\ntransaction vs. transformation, , 251-52,\n\ntransition person, 316-18\n\ntrust:\n\nas highest form of human motiva\u00adtion,\n\nand levels of communication, , ,\n\nin relationships, , 188-190, , 196-97, , 220-22, ,\n\ntruth, definition of,\n\ntruths, see principle(s),\n\n\"Turn of the Tide, The\" (Gordon), 292-93\n\n\"Twentieth-Century Testimony, A,\"\n\nunconditional love, 199-202\n\nunderstanding,\n\napplication suggestions for, 259-60\n\ncharacter and communication in, 237-39\n\ndiagnosis before prescription in, 243-45\n\nempathic listening in, 239-43\n\nfour autobiographical responses in, 245-53\n\nof individual, 190-92\n\none on one in, 257-59\n\nperception and, 253-55\n\nas primary function, 235-60\n\nseek to be understood after, 255-57\n\nUnited States, as paradigm shift,\n\nunity, , ,\n\nupward spiral, in renewal, 304-6\n\nurgency, in time management, 150-154, , , ,\n\nUry, William,\n\nvalues,\n\nvs. principles,\n\nproactivity based on, , , ,\n\nthree central, 74-75\n\nin time management,\n\nVietnam prisoners of war,\n\nvision, personal, 65-94,\n\nvisualization, 96-97, 131-35\n\nWarner, Terry,\n\nWatson, T. J.,\n\nweekly vs. daily scheduling, , 165-68,\n\nweekly worksheet, , 166-67, 181-182\n\nwill, see independent will\n\nWin, 210-11\n\nWin\/Lose, 207-9,\n\nWin\/Win, 204-34\n\nagreements, 223-24, 227-29\n\napplication suggestions for,\n\ncharacter, 217-21\n\ncooperation vs. competition in, 205-6, 208-9, , , ,\n\nfour-step process in, 233-34\n\nfive dimensions of, 216-34\n\nmanagement training, 224-27\n\nor No Deal, 213-16\n\nas paradigm,\n\nperformance agreements, 227-29\n\nprocesses, , 233-34\n\nrelationships, , 221-23\n\nsix paradigms of human interaction in, 206-16\n\nsolutions, , ,\n\nsupportive systems, 229-32\n\nsynergy and, ,\n\nthree character traits in, 217-21\n\nwisdom, 109-28,\n\nWolfe, Thomas,\n\nwork centeredness, , ,\n\nworksheet, weekly, , 166-67, 181-182\n\nWorld War I, success after,\n\nwriting, \n\n### About FranklinCovey\n\nMISSION STATEMENT\n\nWe enable greatness in people and organizations everywhere.\n\n### FOUNDATIONAL BELIEFS\n\nWe believe:\n\n  1. People are inherently capable, aspire to greatness and have the power to choose.\n  2. Principles are timeless and universal, and are the foundation for lasting effectiveness.\n  3. Leadership is a choice, built inside out on a foundation of char\u00adacter. Great leaders unleash the collective talent and passion of people toward the right goal.\n  4. Habits of effectiveness come only from the committed use of integrated processes and tools.\n  5. Sustained superior performance requires P\/PC Balance\u00ae\u2014a focus on achieving results and on building capability.\n\nVALUES\n\n  1. Commitment to Principles. We are passionate about our con\u00adtent, and strive to be models of the principles and practices we teach.\n  2. Lasting Customer Impact. We are relentless about delivering on our promises to our customers. Our success comes only with their success.\n  3. Respect for the Whole Person. We value each other and treat each person with whom we work as true partners.\n  4. Profitable Growth. We embrace profitability and growth as the lifeblood of our organization; they give us the freedom to fulfill our mission and vision.\n\nFranklinCovey (NYSE:FC) is the global leader in effectiveness train\u00ading, productivity tools and assessment services for organizations, teams and individuals. Clients include 90 percent of the Fortune 100, more than 75 percent of the Fortune 500, thousands of small and midsized busi\u00adnesses, as well as numerous government entities and educational institu\u00adtions. Organizations and individuals access FranklinCovey products and services through corporate training, licensed client facilitators, one-on-one coaching, public workshops, catalogs, more than 140 retail stores and www.franklincovey.com.\n\nFranklinCovey has 2,000 associates providing professional services, products and materials in twenty-eight languages, in thirty-nine offices and in ninety-five countries worldwide.\n\nPrograms and Services\n\n  * xQ Survey and Debrief (to help leaders assess their organization's \"Ex\u00adecution Quotient\")\n  * The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People workshop\n  * The 4 Disciplines of Execution worksession\n  * FOCUS: Achieving Your Highest Priorities workshop\n  * The 4 Roles of Leadership workshop\n  * The FranklinCovey Planning System\n\nTo learn more about FranklinCovey products and services,  \nplease call 1-888-868-1776 or 1-801-817-1776, or go to  \nwww.franklincovey.com.\n\n### About the Author\n\nStephen R. Covey is an internationally respected leadership authority, family expert, teacher, organizational consultant and author who has dedicated his life to teaching principle-centered living and leadership to build both families and organizations. He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard University and a doctorate from Brigham Young University, where he was a professor of organizational behavior and business management and also served as director of university relations and assistant to the president.\n\nDr. Covey is the author of several acclaimed books, including the in\u00adternational bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which was named the #1 Most Influential Business Book of the Twentieth Century and one of the top-ten most influential management books ever. It has sold more than 15 million copies in thirty-eight languages throughout the world. Other bestsellers include First Things First, Principle-Centered Leadership and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, bringing the com\u00adbined total to more than 20 million books sold.\n\nAs a father of nine and grandfather of forty-three, he received the 2003 Fatherhood Award from the National Fatherhood Initiative, which he says is the most meaningful award he has ever received. Other awards given to Dr. Covey include the Thomas More College Medallion for con\u00adtinuing service to humanity, Speaker of the Year in 1999, the Sikh's 1998 International Man of Peace Award, the 1994 International Entrepreneur of the Year Award and the National Entrepreneur of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Dr. Covey has also been recognized as one of Time magazine's 25 Most Influential Ameri\u00adcans and has received seven honorary doctorate degrees.\n\nDr. Covey is the cofounder and vice chairman of FranklinCovey Com\u00adpany, the leading global professional services firm with offices in 123 countries. They share Dr. Covey's vision, discipline and passion to in\u00adspire, lift and provide tools for change and growth of individuals and organizations throughout the world.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}