In this tableau Messenger never spoke—he just stood there before me, wearing the same expression of compassion he had revealed only moments before. I was the one speaking, though words so distorted by anguish would have been hard for a person unfamiliar with me to make out. But I could hear and understand them clearly. They were words that sealed my fate. Words that trapped me without hope of escape.

“Yes,” I sobbed. “Yes, yes, I will. I will. I will do it. I have to do it. I will atone.”

“If you choose this fate, you must speak these words: You will be my teacher.”

My sobbing self spoke them. “You will be my teacher.”

Messenger said, “I will be your student.”

And my anguished self repeated them and wiped tears away. “I will be your student.”

“And when I am judged ready, I will faithfully execute my office.”

“And . . . and . . .” The me I saw, that living memory, strained to recall the exact words. “I will . . . I mean, when I am judged ready, I will faithfully execute my office.”

“I will be the Messenger of Fear.”

The tableau faded from view. I looked at Messenger and it was as if he looked through me, saw all the way down into my soul and knew things about me that I refused to acknowledge but that he understood.

I looked at his coat with its skull buttons. I looked at the terrible ring, the distorted, screaming face. Most of all, I recalled the moment when I had touched him and had been flooded with images so unsettling, so disturbing, that even the pale memory freezes my blood. I guessed, or perhaps at some point in my forgotten past he had told me, but in any event I understood then, understood that there was no escape, that I had no choice in the matter, not any longer. My fate was settled.

And the words came from my own mouth now, not from the image from memory but still as if spoken in a dream.

“I will be the Messenger of Fear.”

NONE OF THIS LAST HAD BEEN SEEN OR HEARD BY Liam and Emma. No time had elapsed for them since Messenger had said, “My apprentice will understand, and thus, so will I.”

The two frightened kids waited for me as though I was to question them.

“My apprentice will lay her palm against your cheek, and if you do not resist, it will be quick and not unpleasant.”

Would I? I supposed I must. But what I wanted to do was yell at Messenger to give me everything, not to just dole out bits and pieces of myself in whatever amount was necessary to manipulate me. To tell me everything, about himself, about this impossible reality, if reality it was.

I was trapped, yes, but that did not compel me to be docile. Perhaps I was trapped, yes, but . . . but even a very good trap often has an escape route.

I was equivocating, beginning to feel my way toward escape, though a few minutes before I had been ready to accept my fate. There is something rebellious in me, something that does not readily accept limitation.

But then, I pondered the scene that had just been revealed to me by Messenger. I had been sobbing. That was me—me, Mara—and I had been sobbing with terrible remorse. What could possibly have happened to cause me to sob my heart out that way? What had happened?

What had I done?

Messenger, my teacher. Me, his student.

I will be the Messenger of Fear.

What did that mean?

One thing was clear as I drew a mental cloak over my defiant urges: right now it meant obeying him. Until I figured out what was happening.

Somehow, by some means I could not begin to guess at, I was in a very different reality with rules that included being able to move effortlessly from place to place, to freeze time or speed it up. To simply know things that should be unknowable. To intrude on thoughts that were not my own. A place of sentient mists and stunning women and, above all, the boy in black, the Messenger with his mysterious manner and strange dress and too-intimate voice.

I had not forgotten—no, far from it—the visions I had seen on making physical contact with Messenger. I cautioned myself that however calm and controlled he seemed now, he was a creature whose mind was filled with dark scenes of unspeakable wickedness.

He was, in short, dangerous.

Time had passed since Messenger had warned Liam and Emma that I would be touching them, but if the two of them were impatient, they gave no sign. They waited, not frozen, but like a GIF, a loop, eyes blinking, mouths breathing, their fingers intertwined, the ginger boy and the dark girl.

Messenger waited too, and watched, interested by how I was digesting all this new information. It angered me, that calm way of his, that solemn but compassionate watching and waiting. The patience of him.

But what was I to do? This was his world, and I was sworn to be his student. Later I would find the way out, oh yes, as you see, already I was thinking of escape, even while suspecting that my thoughts were as open to him as the page of any book.

Flushing at that unsettling notion, I broke my trance and laid my hand against Liam’s faintly freckled cheek and against Emma’s at the same time, standing between the two of them, an intruder in their relationship. But that rude and too-familiar physical transgression was nothing compared to what I next experienced. For into my reeling mind poured the whole history of Emma and Liam.

I saw Liam’s first memory. He was on his back, looking up, and into his field of vision came a woman. She seemed tired, her eyes dark, hair straggling, but she smiled like a Madonna when she saw him.

His mother. I was seeing Liam as a baby, seeing his mother. I saw images of his father as well, a large man, with big hands and a look of perpetual skepticism. I saw his pets, his friends, his room, the posters on his wall as he grew older.