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We did not bid the female messenger good-bye. One second she was there and the next she was gone. And a second after that, we, too, were gone.

There was a brick marker that read Theodore Roosevelt on a limestone banner and beneath it the words High School. I somehow knew we were in Iowa.

The same combination of red brick and limestone comprised the school itself. The central portion was three stories tall, three generous stories, so that the structure was taller and more impressive than the simple number of floors might indicate. The wings extended to left and right and were of just two floors each. There were architectural details rendered in stone—window framing, a stone railing across the roofline—that gave the school a slightly ornate look, an almost Old World look. It very nearly evoked Downton Abbey.

Just before the front door was a tall flagpole. The Stars and Stripes snapped in a breeze stiff enough to ruffle the mature hardwood and fir trees that flanked the entrance and which were dotted haphazardly across the lawn.

It looked like the very model of a high school—what a traditional high school ought to be.

As usual, I had questions. As usual, I didn’t ask. It’s not that Messenger will never answer a question, but he prefers not to, and for whatever reason, I don’t want to nag at him. He’s the master, I’m the apprentice. I’ve accepted that. More or less. And as the teacher he gets to choose how and when to tell me things.

Frustrating? Extremely.

We walked at a normal pace across the lawn. Kids were pouring from buses that had pulled up in the parking lot. At the same time freshmen and sophomores and juniors were piling from their parents’ cars, and the luckier seniors were pulling up in cars of their own.

The familiar morning rush. And we joined it, invisible to the crowd as it filled the main hallway. How did we squeeze through dense-packed bodies without touching anyone around us? I don’t know. It’s something I’ve now seen happen many times, and even when I pay the closest attention it’s hard to explain. It’s as if reality bends to get out of our way. Like we’re a force field that no one feels. Limbs and heads and torsos all seem to warp, like some kind of photo booth effect.

Testing it, I deliberately passed my arm through a girl. Her body appeared to split in two at the waist, upper half and lower half seemingly completely disconnected, yet she chatted glumly to a friend all the while and her legs kept moving her forward.

Messenger noticed my experiment, raised one eyebrow slightly and said nothing.

We walked in this way until we arrived at a narrower hallway leading into one of the wings. There Messenger’s focus seemed to settle on one particular group of three boys walking together in that bouncy, playfully shoving way that boys sometimes have. There was nothing particularly noteworthy, just three boys, probably sophomores or juniors, all three of them white, all three dressed in jeans and T-shirts with logos of bands or defiant slogans.

Here the crowd had thinned a bit and I took notice of a particular girl moving in the opposite direction from the boys. She was wearing an abaya of sky blue over her head and neck. Other than that she was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white blouse. I liked her shoes.

It was the abaya that one of the boys grabbed as she went by. Grabbed it from behind and yanked it back off her head.

“Hey!” the girl yelled, and tried to put the scarf back in place.

“See, she does have hair under there!” This from the smallest of the three boys, a short, cute kid with longish brown hair.

“Drop dead,” the girl snapped.

“Just playin’ with your towel, towel-head.” This was not said in a playful tone, and it came from the boy in the middle. He was tall, powerfully built, with short blond hair. He was wearing sunglasses so I could not see the color of his eyes.

A second girl, just arriving on the scene, saw what was going on and said, “It’s called an abaya, moron. And leave her alone, Trent.”

This second girl was not in Muslim dress. She was in the navy blue and white uniform of a cheerleader.

“Wasn’t me,” Trent said, faux innocent. “It was Pete. Wasn’t it, Pete? See, Pete thought maybe she had horns under there and that’s why she’s always wearing that towel.”

“Idiot,” the cheerleader said, and rolled her eyes.

The bell rang and everyone went hurrying away.

The Muslim girl looked shaken and angry, but she said nothing more and the incident appeared to be over.

Messenger and I now stood in an empty hallway, ringing with the muted sounds of lessons filtering through a long row of closed doors.

“This is connected to the dead boy, Aimal,” I said, careful not to give it a questioning inflection. But Messenger was not enticed into answering my non-question question.

I did not know where we were, exactly, nor where Aimal had been, but I was pretty sure there were thousands of miles separating the two locations. But in Messenger’s world, space and time are a bit . . . different.

I did not believe we were there because one jerk kid had harassed one girl in one school. The penalties Messenger imposes can be . . . Well, they are the fuel of my nightmares.

“Where should we follow the story next?” Messenger asked.

“What?” The question was so out of the blue I wasn’t sure how to answer. Since when did Messenger consult me? And, anyway, didn’t he already know all the answers? Didn’t he know exactly how this story—whatever it was really about—would end up?

But he was still waiting for an answer, so I had no real choice but to attempt one. “We either follow Trent—he’s the ringleader—or the girl.”

“As you wish.”

“Well . . . which one?”

“Both.”

And then something extraordinary happened. Extraordinary even by the standards of the extraordinary reality into which I have entered. The world around me split in two.

We stood, Messenger and I, in a void, blackness ahead and behind and above, and far more disturbing, black emptiness below as well. I saw no floor or ground beneath my feet, but I was not weightless, either.

But this void was as narrow as a footpath, and to either side of this void was the world. Two worlds. Or two iterations of the same world. The effect was as if we had been standing in a darkened room and two enormous movie screens had been set up, one to our left, the other to our right, each infinitely tall and long and wide.

Two real worlds. I had only to turn my head or even just move my eyes to see one, then the other. Both at once if I stared straight ahead.

But, as hard as it is to imagine, and despite my suggestion, you must not think these were movie screens. They each were real, each happening, each completely three-dimensional. I knew that I could step into either, so that they were less like screens than like living dioramas.

To our left, the girl. To our right, Trent. We could hear both. I could smell the lamb stew the girl was heating in the microwave of her kitchen.

The girl’s phone dinged an incoming text. Without thinking I stepped into her world, hoping to read it over her shoulder. Instantly a wall closed between me and Messenger. I saw neither him, nor Trent.

Frightened, I stepped back into the newly appeared wall, passed through it, and was with Messenger again.

This made me feel foolish. Obviously Messenger understood all this better than I, but that didn’t mean I wanted to seem like some kind of newbie.

That in itself struck me as absurd and I laughed.

Messenger shot me an inquiring look.

“Just . . . takes getting used to,” I explained lamely and stepped back into the girl’s world. Her name was Samira. I saw it on her text. The person she was texting was named Zarqa.

Zarqa: Heard u were hassled. RU OK?

Samira: It was nothing. Just jerks.

Zarqa: What happened?

Samira: They pulled off my abaya. NBD.

Zarqa: It is a big deal. U shd tell sum1. Bullying.

Samira: No.

Zarqa: Grl we have to stand together.

The microwave rang and Samira cut the conversation off with a quick GTG and a heart emoticon.

Samira set her phone aside and removed her meal.

I stepped back to Messenger. “Her name is Samira. I think that was another Muslim girl texting her.”

“All right, I admit it: I’m mystified.”

The words were what I was feeling, but they did not come from me.

Oriax had appeared.

Oriax is a female. She’s a female in much the same way that a billion is a number, or a Porsche is a car, or a twenty megaton nuclear bomb going off is fireworks.

Age? Whatever age she wants you to see. She may be eighteen. She may be older than human civilization.

I knew enough of her to know that she is sadistic, cruel, evil, and not really human, and incredibly beautiful. Dark hair, dark eyes, an outfit of scraps of leather melded seamlessly to form a dominatrix look that fits her like it was painted on—and might well be. Her boots were extreme high heels but minus the heel, a look only possible when you have hooves.

“Well, hello there, mini-Messenger. What was your name again? Pawn? Puppet?”

She had a throaty purr that sounded like an intimate whisper. The illusion is so real that when she punctuates the p sound in puppet I swear I can feel her breath on my ear, and it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Mara,” I said. “My name is Mara.”

She moved like a tiger, sinuous, precise, dangerous. She was beside me and though I’m straight I felt my throat tighten and my breathing become labored, such is her animal appeal.

“You know, Mara, you don’t have to dress like a schoolgirl. I could arrange for something a bit more . . . well, let’s just say something that would make it harder for Messenger.” She laughed wickedly at that, then with a wink, added, “I mean harder for Messenger to ignore you so completely. As a young woman.”

“I’m not . . .” I began, and then realized there was no safe way for me to conclude that sentence. Instead I blushed and fell silent.

“I don’t think he’s even really noticed the way you look at him sometimes, or the way your heart speeds up when he comes close or—”

“What is it you want, Oriax?” Messenger asked wearily.

“Oh, you, Messenger. Always. You’re just so very delicious. I could eat you up.” She licked her lips, which today were glowing mauve, and leered, but for a chilling moment it occurred to me to wonder if she might not mean that literally.

I had stood by helplessly while she had tricked a boy into accepting a punishment that left him shattered as a human being. She had laughed and sung a grim little song as he was made to experience being burned alive. Was there anything too foul for her? Was there any sort of limit? I doubted it.

“I’m fine,” I said, responding way too late to her offer to improve my appearance.

“Why this girl?” Oriax gestured at Samira, who had gone on eating, disregarding the three of us. “Because someone pulled her silly scarf?”

“Don’t pretend to be blind to the connection, Oriax,” Messenger said. “Hatred grows like a cancer, spreading ever outward from its source. It’s a poison in the human bloodstream that spreads far beyond its origin. ‘If you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn say not that you are innocent when the heart dies.’ Isthil teaches that no one who does evil can ever be blameless for the consequences.”

“Oh, well then,” Oriax said, dripping sarcasm, “if Isthil said it—”

And just like that, without a word from Messenger, without any sort of warning, we were back in that void between two realities.

On our left, still within Samira’s reality, an irritated Oriax realized we’d given her the slip. She seemed not quite able to find us, though we could still see her.

On the other side of the void, Trent was with Pete. The third boy was no longer with them and in fact I never saw him again. I hoped he’d seen the malice in his friends and chosen a better path for himself.

Trent and Pete were sitting on swings at a park playground. Trent glared and frightened off the younger children who approached.

“Have you heard from your dad?” Pete asked.

Trent shook his head angrily. “He’s gone. Up in North Dakota, looking for work.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Hey. Douche nozzle. You think I want to talk about my dad? He’s gone. Maybe he’ll come back, maybe not. Okay? We done?”

Pete swung a little, a short arc, with his feet dragging the ground. “Okay, man.”

“Probably just drinking,” Trent muttered. “Up there drinking and not giving a damn about anything.”

“He used to be kind of cool before he lost his job,” Pete observed.

“Yeah, well, he did lose it. So that’s that, right? They gave it to some Mexican.” At that point his talk turned scatological and racist and I won’t attempt to repeat it.

There was a depth of barely contained anger in Trent. His friend, Pete, seemed like a more balanced person, but one who was under the sway of his larger companion. “My dad’s okay,” Pete said. “He still—”

“Do I give a damn?” Trent asked with weary mockery.

Pete was taken aback but forced a sickly smile and said, “No, man, even I’m not really interested in my dad.”

“He’s got a job anyway.”

“Yeah, but he kind of hates it because—”

“But he’s got a job. Right? So he’s not off somewhere all messed up from being out of work. Right? So shut up.”

Pete shut up.

I’ve often wondered about people like Pete. I have never understood why angry thugs like Trent seem able to attract more normal followers.

But then I winced, remembering. I had been a bad person. I had done a terrible thing. And yes, I’d had friends and acolytes the whole time.

Self-righteousness rises in me sometimes, and then I remind myself that I do not have the right to look down my nose at others. I am the apprentice to the Messenger of Fear, and as such I deliver a measure of justice. But it had begun when I accepted the truth of my own weakness. My position as apprentice was not an entitlement, it was a punishment.

“Oriax can’t see us?” I asked, mostly just to distract myself from painful memories.

“Eventually, but not immediately. Her powers are different. Very great, but different. But she will find us in time.”

“Then let’s use the time to figure this out,” I said.

“The time?” He cocked his head, waiting.

It took me a few seconds to grasp the hint. “Yes, the time. But I don’t think I want to see more of Trent. I want to understand the connections. I want to see what led to the death of that poor boy with his face blown away.”

Just like that, one-half of this split-screen reality replaced Trent and Pete with the solemn scene of the far-distant funeral.

Messenger seemed accepting of my initiative, even approving. “Proceed.”

“What?”

“Don’t be timid, Mara,” he chided. “You’ve seen that we can travel through time. So do it.”

I glanced back along the void. Would going backward take us backward in time? This was not how we’d previously done it. Messenger had always just made it happen.

But of course this was the simple version. This was Time Travel 101, an introduction before greater secrets and techniques could be learned.

I turned and walked with far more confidence than I felt, back along the narrow black bridge between facing realities. And yes, to my satisfaction, time went into reverse.

On her side Samira spit her food into her bowl, placed the stew in the microwave, took it out and put it in the freezer, walked backward from the kitchen.

Far more disturbing, the shrouded body of Aimal once again leaped from its grave and landed on the stretcher, which was then borne away.

I walked faster, faster, and time reeled backward at a geometrically quicker rate. Now Samira was back at school being harassed, and Aimal’s body was being ritually washed by his male relatives, and Samira was in class, and Aimal was quite suddenly alive. I noticed that the time lines were not synchronized, not matched up. I sensed that Aimal’s was the more recent event.

Distracted by that realization, I saw that I had moved too quickly. I reversed my direction and slowed my pace.

Aimal now was in the dirt yard of a bare, one-room cinderblock schoolhouse. There was a single tree providing scant shade from a blistering sun. There were other kids, younger, older, many kicking a soccer ball. Others read. Others just sat in small groups, chatting.

If you ignored the opium poppy fields and the distant but intimidatingly sharp-edged mountains, and the poverty of the school, it could be any school.

A pickup truck came barreling down the semi-paved road, kicking up a plume of dust. There was one man in the cabin, two more in the back.

The kids in the yard didn’t notice. But Aimal did. He rose slowly to his feet, the biggest of the boys. He shaded his eyes and watched the truck and peered closely at something particular.

Without even realizing what I was doing I stepped into his frame and peered as though through his eyes. I saw the thing he focused on.

It was the upraised barrel of an assault rifle.

3

Aimal began yelling. It was not English, of course, but I understood it nevertheless.

“Hide! Hide!” he yelled. “All the girls must hide!”

But by the time his shouts were noticed and conversation had fallen silent and all heads had turned toward the truck, the two men were already leaping from the back and both were armed with assault rifles.

“Run! Run!” Aimal shouted.

Some of the girls responded now. There were only six of them, ranging in age from ten to perhaps fifteen. But now they saw what Aimal saw and understood what Aimal understood, so they ran.

POP! POP POP POP!

That’s what it sounded like, the gunfire.

One of the girls fell facedown in the dirt. A cloud of dust rose from the impact.

A second girl ran to the fallen one and a piece of her shoulder blew away, a twirling chunk of bone and meat, trailing blood.

Now everyone, boy and girl, was screaming, screaming, but only Aimal was running the wrong way. Not away from the guns. Toward them.

He waved his arms and shouted no, stop, stop, this is against Islam, this is against God, you must stop.

He ran until he was between the gunmen and the girls, some of whom kept running. But two of them seemed to have collapsed in sheer terror.

“Get out of the way!” a gunman yelled, and waved his rifle at Aimal. “It’s not you we want.”

Aimal shook his head, almost a spasm it was so quick and violent, like he could not control his bodily movement. He was terrified. He was terrified and barely able to keep his knees from buckling.

He saw what would happen.

He saw and knew and understood what would happen and still he did not back away.

“Go away! Leave us be!” he shouted at the gunmen.

“We are only here for the girls, get out of the way!”

He shook his head again, slower this time, slower, knowing . . . knowing that—

POP! POP POP! POP POP POP POP!

The two men standing, and one still in the truck, opened fire.

The high-powered rounds did not simply strike Aimal’s body, they dismantled it. Before he could fall his right arm was hanging by a spurting artery and his spine had exploded through his back like a bony red alien, and the side of his face was obliterated, turned to red mist and flying chunks of meat and bone.

He fell and now the two girls who had been unable to move cowered and screamed and died, their bodies jerking and jerking and jerking as the gunmen emptied their magazines into them.

One of the gunmen ran into the tiny schoolhouse and came out with a man so undone by fear that he had stained his clothing. The teacher was forced to his knees.

“School is not for girls,” a gunman said, and fired two rounds into the teacher’s groin. The teacher howled in pain and writhed on the ground.

“And since you are a girl now, it is no place for you, either.”

They executed the teacher with bullets in his head and neck.

Someone, Messenger or maybe even me, froze the scene then.

Shocked boys stood staring. One surviving girl lay slumped over her dead classmate. In the distance another girl was frozen in midstep, running. Aimal lay in dirt turned to mud by his blood.

I felt as frozen as the scene around me. I knew I was panting and yet did not feel I was getting air. The very skin on my body seemed to reverberate with the concussion of those gunshots.

We’ve all seen movies and games with shooting. Sometimes it’s in slow motion, sometimes it’s played for laughs, sometimes it’s shown as tragic and awful, but nothing in media prepared me for the real thing. For murder.

It’s always been an ugly word, murder, but still we manage to sanitize it. We jokingly say we’ll murder someone. I’ve said it. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to speak that word lightly again. When you see it, in reality, right there in front of you, actual murder, you want to cry and tear your hair and claw at your own face and fall down on the ground and demand to know why such a filthy thing could happen.

Why would you shoot a fleeing child in the back?

What could possibly justify that?

What kind of god could ever sanction such a thing?

The murderers were two older men and one younger, so young he might be no older than me. What poison had been poured into that young man’s soul that he could do such a thing?

“Are we here for him?” I asked.

“No,” Messenger said. “A different justice awaits them. No, we have business elsewhere.”

He was looking at me with something very like concern.

“If you’re going to tell me it gets easier, please don’t,” I said.

“I don’t know if it gets easier over time,” he said. “But whatever time has passed for me, it has not been enough to make it less terrible.”

He let time flow again, and now I watched as the killers drove away. And I watched as the stunned and shattered survivors lifted themselves up off the ground and rushed to the dead. They cried. They wailed. They sobbed that God is great, and maybe he is, but he wasn’t there on that day.

Something happened to me then, a spinning feeling, a feeling of being sucked down into the earth. But I suppose it was nothing that supernatural. In fact, I just fainted.

I woke with a start.

My first feeling was confusion. Just where was I?

I was no longer at the blood-soaked school yard.

I was lying on cold stone. Beside me on my left was a large rectangular pool with greenish water. On my right was an outdoor café with umbrellas shielding round wooden tables and canvas directors’ chairs. Many of those chairs were occupied by people dressed for tropical weather drinking cups of espresso or mineral water or tiny bottles of unfamiliar sodas.

I sat up, self-conscious at being passed out in a strange place with people chatting not five feet away. The language being spoken was not one I recognized. The people were a mix of white and black and a few who were Asian, like me.

Of course they could not see me. At least I hoped they couldn’t as I wiped away a trickle of sleep drool. Then I raised my eyes above the tables that had preoccupied me and was stunned to find myself in the courtyard of what looked like a white limestone palace. There were pillars and arches all around me. And at one end of the courtyard a sort of open tower rose. Beyond that moldering tower, great trees pressed close all around, almost menacing in their insistence. And farther still, above the immediate foliage, rose vivid green mountains that soared up into mist.

Not the sinister yellow mist that so often appeared in the demimonde I now occupied, but a genuine mist, the steam of low-flying clouds.

“I’ve been here before,” I said, searching for Messenger. But no, that wasn’t quite true, was it? There was familiarity to the location, but it was not a memory of my own experience, rather it was a memory of . . . of a video.

It took me a few minutes to clear my confused thoughts and put my finger on it. A music video. An old one. Something I’d come across on YouTube. Snoop! That was it, Snoop and Pharrell.

And the song was . . . “Beautiful.”

I was probably more proud of myself than I should have been for a simple feat of memory, but this world I now inhabited is strange at the best of times, and it is very easy to lose your way when not only space but time can be rearranged according to Messenger’s whim.

I did not know what the place was called. But I knew it was in Brazil.

I closed my eyes and saw the school yard. I saw, as if it was on a loop, the bullets tear into helpless children. I wanted to be sick but fought the urge. My feelings were unimportant, my emotions secondary: I had witnessed terrible evil. It had made me sick. But how small were my emotions when weighed against what I had seen?

I stood up and had the passing thought that I was a very long way from home with no airline ticket, no passport . . . It takes a while to adjust to this new reality—I’d lived sixteen years in a world where airplanes carried you across vast distances and time could not be traversed except in one direction and at one speed.

At least I was not there in that school yard. I was in a green, humid place where people sat at ease drinking soda and laughing. Of course no scene is so innocent that it reassures me entirely. The world I now occupied seemed to demand a permanent state of readiness, a constant flinch.

I walked to the nearest table and waved my hand in front of a woman’s face. No reaction. I was still invisible to her. I breathed a sigh of relief at that. If I were visible I’d be questioned, and all my answers would be likely to suggest that I was insane.

Messenger had to be nearby, so I went in search of him, passing through an arched passage and out onto stone steps. From that elevation I looked out over what must be a park. There was a lawn and beyond it tall trees.

I closed my eyes, swallowed hard, pushed my hands down to press the palms against my thighs, holding myself there, feeling my own physical reality.

It is a cliché—one I’ve seen in many books—to say that you feel the earth spinning beneath you. But that is how I felt, as if the planet had wobbled a bit on its axis and its spin through space could be felt.

The world I had known was fraying, coming apart. My world now encompassed ancient gods, messengers who could move through time as easily as flip through a calendar app. My world now contained Oriax, Daniel, and the Master of the Game, and far more evil than I wanted to acknowledge.

What else existed unseen? What other disruptions and horrors would Messenger show me? What would be left of what I used to know?

I caught a glimpse of a dark figure moving through the trees and ran down the steps and across the lawn and paused, realizing that I did not need to run. I could simply decide to be there, beside that dark figure. I could do what Messenger could do, couldn’t I? At least I could when he told me to. Did I need his proximity to use my new powers?

The idea made me queasy. What if I did it wrong? What if I ended up in some entirely different place?

So I ran across a lawn so lush it was like running on a mattress. I found a wide and leafy trail through the trees and followed it, slowing my pace a little so as not to look like an anxious puppy in search of its master, or like a lost child looking for a parent.

Coming around a bend I spotted an old stone tower, something that might have been lifted from a medieval castle. And there below it stood Messenger.

He was not alone. He was in heated conversation with Daniel.

I don’t know what Daniel is. To all appearances he’s a casually dressed youngish man, not imposing in the least. But from Messenger’s hints, and more from Messenger’s obvious deference, I judged Daniel to be a powerful being, someone with a sort of supervisory role over Messenger and, by extension, me.

I stopped, stepped off the path into deeper shadow to be less visible, and shamelessly eavesdropped.

“I was not aware that I was never to stray, even for a few minutes, from the path of duty.” This was Messenger, and he did not sound deferential, he sounded defiant.

“It is not a rule,” Daniel said calmly. “You perform your duties well, Messenger, I have no complaints.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I am concerned for you,” Daniel said. Where Messenger was defiant, Daniel was understanding.

“I would have thought I’d earned some trust,” Messenger said, still huffy in a low-key sort of way.

Daniel put his hand on Messenger’s shoulder. “You have. And beyond that, you have earned some affection.”

Messenger slumped and the defiance was gone from his body language and his tone. “I know you think I’m obsessed.”

“Yes,” Daniel said, and smiled sadly. “I wish I could help you.”

“I know that you may not,” Messenger admitted. “And I know that my searches are in vain. I know, Daniel. I know the chances of seeing her, it’s just that . . .”

“The search has become an expression of faith,” Daniel said.

“My only faith is in Isthil. And, of course, in her servants.”

“Yes, Messenger, I know the correct answer. But the truth is otherwise. Isthil is only your second love. Ariadne is your first. You search for a glimpse of her, knowing how improbable it is, but the act of searching is, for you, an expression of love.”

Messenger had nothing to say to that. He hung his head and the two of them stood in silence until Messenger said, “She once told me there were a dozen places she wanted to see before she died. She loved old places, places that were unique, places that seemed to hold a mystique.”