Distractions killed, and one of the biggest distractions had fallen out of the sky this September. Like a bird with a broken wing found when strolling through a park one morning, its bright little beak flashing yellow in the deep, dewy grass, every chirp a needle in your heart. Then there you were scooping it up with your bare hands because it needed you, and because you knew what kind of man it would make you for walking by.

Not a good man, that much was true. Picking it up didn't make you good, though. You had gone long past that. Maybe you once shot at blue jays with a little air rifle your Pops bought you on account of them being pests; or maybe after your ninth birthday you crushed a nest of tiny blue eggs when you scampered up into a tree after your old man — the same old man who let you take potshots at pests in the victory garden — had given you a bloody lip for looking at him funny; and maybe it wasn't any of those things that made you less than good, but had actually been the way you felt about those things. How it had felt to have that little bit of power, your only bit of power, over lives that weren't yours.

Now you were older and wiser and had real power. You could save something instead of ruin it. Saving felt good, as if by rescuing some little thing you were cupping a sliver of your own soul between your palms.

Destruction was easy. Destruction was simple. Destruction needed growing targets for vanishing returns.

But salvation?

Salvation was hard. Salvation was complicated. Salvation could be found in something as small as a sparrow ... or a girl.

He had picked her up without thinking, that girl. Had helped her many times after, too many times. With birds, you mended their wings and let them go. That was how it went with wild things. They pined forever for the outside world, and then they died for lack of it.

This bird, though, he wanted to keep her. Put her in a golden cage where she could safely, sweetly sing.

So that qualified her as a distraction, and Tarian Marek didn't do distractions. He definitely didn't do them on a Sunday when he had other things on the docket. Yet here he was leaving the Manor half an hour late — later if he missed the eleven o'clock into the Valley.

He jogged down the rise to the University's station, catching his ride just as it started for town. Lunchtime on a Sunday meant a lot of other students packed the streetcar, leaving him to hang half out of the rear doorway. Fine by him. Smart fellas never strayed far from the exits anywhere they went. Know your ins and outs, as Pops had always said, one of the few bits of worthy advice that miserable souse had given in his life.

Marek hung on till the streetcar reached the last quarter of Main Street, the hopped off in front of Paleophone Record Store. He breezed through the door to an expected greeting:

"You're late."

It didn't matter if you were late by a second or a day, Clancy Nakamura would remind you of it like you'd broken one of the Ten Commandments. Aw, no, not a Commandment — he broke plenty of those himself. More like if you'd broken a record, that was it.

"With good reason," Marek said. "I ran into trouble."

Clancy looked up from the jazz records by the far wall. He wasn't the only one to stop working; June had paused between rock and roll records, while Gaius had turned aside from his row of composers and classics. Like a few other businesses in the Valley, it opened after noon on Sundays, and that meant a lot of organizing after the madhouse of Saturday. Clancy's parents left that up to their son since they were the churchgoing types, and Clancy got by with help from pals who also happened to be employees.

"What kind of trouble?" Clancy said, staring hard over the top of his eyeglasses.

Shrugging out of his sport coat, Marek answered. "The kind I could handle."

Gaius and Clancy exchanged uneasy looks at that, but didn't question him. June was another story, as always. She blurred across the room with her empowered speed, and stared him right in the face. "Trouble looks like it fought back," she said, squinting at his cheek and then his mouth.

The injuries from the fight with Romilly had been minimized thanks to Ellsworth's kyurall, but the cuts had turned to scabs, and the bruises under his clothes that Marek could feel but not see had probably faded to an ugly yellow-green. His own fault, really. He shouldn't have been playing around. Building that ice wall had meant leaving himself open to attack. It had worked out in the end, though. Had been fun, too. The look on Romilly's face when he got kicked! That memory would warm Marek's heart for a long, long time. Not as long as the memory of Ellsworth giving over that vial, but —

Shame on him for letting that distraction creep back in. She was a tricky one, that elder Ellsworth girl. It was those wounded eyes, like she had been born knowing what kind of world waited for her.

"Maybe trouble even hit you upside the head boss," June mused, going on tiptoes to examine at him. "You look kinda dizzy."

He stepped back. June was cute if you liked 'em crazy, but he had seen what her brand of puppy love had done to more than one gal. If she ever decided to like fellas, he would start sleeping with a knife in his hand instead of just under his pillow. "I think you're confused, June-bug," he said. "I'm not the boss of this joint."

She got the hint at once, playing Our Lady of Contriteness sinking back onto her heels. "Whoops," she said, "slip of the tongue."

His tone was downright avuncular as he said, "Slip too many times with that thing, and someone might be liable to cut it out of your head."

June stuck said tongue out at him, then streaked like a bullet back to her messy records.

There had been no weight to his words, and she seemed to have picked up on that. Had he really become that easy to read? That wouldn't do, that wouldn't do at all. He would fix up a nice surprise for the gang, one that would be all the more surprising because they hadn't got one in a while. Not today, but soon.

He draped his coat over his arm. "I'm going to the stockroom," he said. "It needs a good going-over by now." Loosening his tie, he added, "Care to help me, Gaius?"

"I don't see why not," Gaius replied. He always used those exact words whenever anyone mentioned going to the stockroom, because he really couldn't see why not. Handling entries and exits from that particular place was part of his job, and he had the same amount of pride in his work as the rest of them did. They all had special tasks for their special qualities.

Marek strolled off first, digging a pack of gum out of his coat. He chewed fast, barely tasting the heat of the clove flavor, and shoved the pack into a pocket of his slacks. Through the back of the store was the office to the right, and the stockroom to the left. It didn't look like much, just a big room full of shelves and boxes, all of them lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Had to use flashlights if you actually wanted to check the inventory.

This stockroom had one thing that most of its kind didn't. Straight to the right at the far corner stood a very important trio of shelves. The vital one was on the bottom, where it covered a lever that led into the wall. Marek leaned down, found that lever, and slammed it so hard against the concrete floor that the metal of it groaned. The wall slid back a couple of feet; he pushed it farther in with only two fingers, then slid it to the right.

The tunnel behind it looked as dank and uninviting as ever. But the mold looked friendlier than the over-sized artist's mannequin did. He would never admit that thing gave him the creeps, but he didn't need to — whenever Marek got near that jumped-up old log, Gaius got a mean glint in his eyes. Someone had the poor idea to set the dummy into an Adirondack chair instead of on the floor where garbage belonged. June would be the winner's bet. Marek tossed his sport coat onto a nearby shelf full of odds and ends. He'd have to take it off anyway once he set to work, and it wasn't like anyone would rifle through his pockets. His people knew better than that.

Gaius strode into the stockroom. When he reached the tunnel, he held out the hand he had covered in a rubber glove somewhere between the front of the store and the stockroom. "Battery."

Marek took the gum out of his mouth, then handed it over like a nurse passing a scalpel to a surgeon. In a way, that was true. Gaius's power worked best under a precise set of circumstances. The "battery," as he called it, needed to be imbued with juice from a subject. Saliva, blood, what have you. He wore gloves to limit contamination of both himself and his work, making sure that the replica resembled the original as closely as possible. The mannequin had articulated limbs held together by metal joints, and it was life-sized. Both those things would let the replica pass for the real deal. Being made of wood, it wasn't fireproof, but neither were most people, so it all evened out.

Opening the drawer that had been built in the mannequin's chest, Gaius spoke. "That trouble you could handle" — he dropped the ball of gum into the drawer — "was it trouble you'd planned for?"

Damn it, Marek really was becoming that easy to read. No, he hadn't planned on needling Romilly into a fight, but he couldn't resist once the opportunity had come strolling along in bad makeup. Romilly had let himself fall into the trap so easily, too. Insulting the women in his life made him drag that tarnished honor of his, the fool. "Plan for the unplanned," Marek said. "Didn't someone famous say that once?"

Gaius slid the drawer shut. "You know what happens when you improvise, Tarian."

Tarian, Christ save him. Marek might as well been back in the West End listening to his parents have a wall-shaker of a donnybrook. With those, it had always been a matter of time before one of them declared him as the root of all their evils — sometimes Ma in that sharp-tongued tone of hers, the Welsh-Irish mutt who had given her cherished boy a name that promised schoolyard beatings; other times Pops called out his son's name like a curse.

"I fully expect the consequences of my delinquency to rain down on me, Mother dear," Marek said, which proved to be the wrong thing to say when Gaius frowned.

"What did you do?"

Might as well admit the truth. You had to be honest when it came to your buddies, at least some of the time. They'd catch on to your lies if every other word was one. "Oh, nothing much." Marek took another piece of gum from his pocket. He snapped it right up between his teeth, relishing the flavor. "Just instigated a war."

And what a glorious war it promised to be. Not only had he insulted Abriana Adesso two days in a week, he had got one over on one of his oldest enemies.

"With?" Gaius shook his head. "No, never mind. I can guess."

"Can you?"

"You're only that elated when you ruin Calix Romilly's day."

Marek shrugged. He couldn't deny it, even if it meant he was still an open book to his friends.

After a very long and very disapproving look, Gaius pressed his bare left hand to the mannequin's forehead. The wooden frame rippled, changing color and texture until it looked like a mass of boiling flesh. Hard contours gained soft edges as the skin solidified. Fine details emerged from the blank face, all the bits and pieces a person could be expected to have. Clothes and hair and eyelashes sprouted from the pale pink flesh. The last touch was the eyeglasses. From top to bottom, the mannequin had become a perfect copy of Marek. And still the thing gave him the creeps.

The second it started moving, he beat feet into the tunnel. He paused, though, without looking back. If he had, he would have probably seen that mannequin stagger to its feet. "Anything you need from the other side?" Marek said.

Gaius didn't hesitate. "No."

"Succinct as ever, my friend." Marek gave him a wave, then pressed farther into the darkness.

The tunnel quickly swallowed up the light of the stockroom. He didn't need to see the way. The smooth downward slope of the floor offered no obstacle. He could trail his fingers along one of the rough walls to keep track of where he was until the lights came on. They soon at his presence in clusters along the ceiling. He had snapped a few off once, trying to figure out what they were. After a few nights of research in the University's Reading Room, he learned that they were a hybrid of mushrooms and stone. Old Lord Rambling had made them — the books didn't say how, of course — but once ground up, they made the fuel that lit the fireflies and the gaslights.

The rum-runners who had dug out this tunnel had been smart enough to use those petraphos to light their way. Not a pain in the neck like electricity. Running wires in would have invited too many questions back when Prohibition was in full swing.

After several hundred feet, the tunnel ended in a stony wall. That was all anyone would see without the right key, and he had that around his neck. Getting it had been a job and a half, but worth every bead of blood and sweat spent. Some of it had even been his. He took a chain from beneath the collar of his shirt, a length of gold with a sliver of stone hanging from the very end. He took this sliver and pressed it to a divot in the wall. A door formed out of the stone. At the top was a Judas window behind a grille. He twisted the handle, pushing his way inside.

It would have been impressive for a speakeasy back in the day. When Valens Valley had been a mining boom town, a local hotel owner had done well enough to build another such establishment. This one had been made out of brick. A flood in the last century had made things go from boom to bust, but the guy still had this palace made. The idiot called it quits after a second flood; other townsfolk hadn't. They rebuilt a few years later smack on top of the ruins thanks to Lord Rambling. The guys who tunneled their way into the lobby had burnished it into a glory it probably never had in the last century. The wallpaper was peeling off the bricks now and the wood at the bottom half of the walls had lost some of its shine, but it still worked as a club house when Marek and the rest of the gang needed it to. There was even booze at the bar. These days it played double duty as a storage room for the kind of stuff that outsiders couldn't see.

He had taken enough chances in his fight with Romilly and the ensuing conversation with Ellsworth, so he took none now. Once he closed the door, he stuck the sliver of stone into another divot on the inside. Although nothing changed where he was standing, anyone who came down the tunnel would see a stone wall there again.

On the far end of the lobby, crowded against the boarded-up stairwell and safely stowed behind a metal fence that he and the rest of the gang had installed, were the many things they had hidden here. He opened the combination lock, then swung the gate so he could step inside. Metal shelves had been lugged here, too, so everything could be placed into neat rows. He cut through them without thinking of which way to turn, because the path was imprinted on his soul. He came to a shelf, her shelf, in the far corner, filled with all the things a girl could need when crafting kyurall. Bone meal, dried blood, and tears of laughter were the least disgusting ones, but any of them would bring in a small fortune — except for one thing. That had value only to him.

It sat on the very top shelf by itself, in a locked box. He pulled it down, not even blinking when the lock bit into his forefinger. It clicked open once it examined his blood. Inside the plain, old box was a plain, old vial exactly like the one that Ellsworth had been carrying around in her necklace. Exactly, because she had given him this one, too. She'd forgotten that, just like she had forgotten other things.

He brushed a finger against the glass, as he had done so many years ago during lunch break at school. Someone had put something in his book bag. When he had gone to the nurse's office, maybe. Slipped it in while he was being treated for his beating. He opened the bag a little wider, then stared. Silver liquid. That looked like kyurall. But who would give him that? He took it out and the thing beneath it, which proved to be a note, one that only said, "Please use this — it will help."

The kyurall had helped him better than she could have guessed. Helped him so much that he had decided to help her when he heard her old man telling her off for losing another precious vial. Hadn't even waited till they were home. No, he harangued her about it on the grounds of the high school right in front of God and everybody and Marek. Marek, who'd been watching from one of the classrooms directly behind them, shielded by Venetian blinds.

What had that bastard said to her?

"Keeping you under my roof is charity itself, and yet you still ruin the other gifts you're given."

Yeah, that'd been it. Said those words to her as if he'd said them a million times before — and who knows, maybe he had. Then Daddy dearest had stalked off, muttering about limiting her supply of tive components. She had bowed her head at those words, but she hadn't cried. It was clear then what kind of house she lived it. Marek had lived in one not much different before he had come to the Valley.

For that girl, robbing a measly supply depot had been no problem. He would do whatever he could for her, including kill her enemies. Kill whole countries, if he had to. The rest of the gang would do the same if they knew what he knew about her. Being a Moriarty meant loyalty above all, and Elise Ellsworth was an honorary member of the gang he ran.