Were they discussing me? As if I was some object to be bartered or sold? Hadn’t she just mentioned a choice? Did I have a choice? What was the nature of that choice?

“I think you’re wrong, Messenger,” Oriax said, and there was an edge to her voice now. “I think she’s demonstrated that she could be very useful to us. Very happy with us. You forget: I know all that she does not.”

I don’t know why I reacted so strongly to that. Maybe it was just the idea that Oriax knew me, that she knew who I was, all of what I was, or at least more than I knew. I reached out instinctively and touched her arm.

When I had touched Messenger, I had been deluged by terrifying images of pain, fear, loathing, and despair. In touching Oriax, I unleashed a similarly intense flood of imagery, but . . . oh, the intensity and the suddenness was all the two experiences had in common. For these were not images of pain but of pleasure.

What a pale word. Pleasure. What a vanilla word, for the overpowering flood of sweating, grunting, delirious physical sensuality. My mouth hung open in shock. I did not like to think that I was naive, but whatever I had guessed or intuited of the body’s capacity for raw experience, it was nothing that began to approximate what Oriax’s touch had revealed.

I was embarrassed and overwhelmed. I was repelled and yet . . . not just repelled. My mouth was dry, my eyes wide, my heart pounding, and other sensations, sensations that I had never before felt but which nevertheless touched some chord in me.

“Oh!” I said.

“Do you see, Messenger? She said, ‘Oh!’ Don’t you want to savor the sweet innocence in that single syllable? ‘Oh!’” Oriax laughed. It was not a good laugh. Yes, it was musical, yes, it was delightfully rich and deep, but it struck some discordant note, too.

I drew back a step, and I could see that this unconscious reaction irritated Oriax. Her eyes snapped to Messenger, an oddly reptilian movement, too quick to be human. A predator’s eyes.

Messenger said, “You have the right to make your offer, Oriax.”

“Oh, not just yet, I think,” Oriax said, no longer in such a playful mood. “We will talk again, when she comes to see the whole truth and faces what her fate must be with you, Messenger. Then.” She raised one exquisitely manicured finger, extended it slowly, and let it merely brush my cheek.

I shuddered as the images washed through me again, washed through me but did not leave me feeling clean. But I closed my eyes, and I . . . savored them . . . just for a moment before they faded away. I knew before I opened my eyes that she would be gone, and she was.

Messenger watched me with the detachment of a scientist watching a specimen in a petri dish.

“What choice?” I asked him.

He looked at me, looked directly into my eyes, and I felt powerless to do anything but return his gaze. His detachment grew strained and I felt that in some way still too inchoate to explain, he was giving me something, some curse or blessing, or maybe it was all my imagination, so recently rocked by Oriax.

But for just a moment I saw things in his blue eyes. There was power there, and loss. There was knowledge but also vulnerability. He was, for all his strangeness, a boy. Maybe he was a thousand years old. But maybe he was barely older than me. Beneath that long black coat with its dreadful skull buttons, and beneath that severe, steel-gray shirt, there was maybe something real, something physical.

He was not a spirit, I felt, but a real being, a person, a mind but also a body.

But no, all of this was just a sort of hangover of the wild fantasies Oriax’s touch had revealed. No, I told myself harshly, you must not forget, Mara, that this boy is in league with the Master of the Game and that his touch was the very soul of darkest terror.

Samantha Early had fetched her backpack. She was going to school. Only after she had climbed into the car with her harried father did I recognize that she was wearing the exact outfit in which she killed herself.

“Oh, God. It’s today,” I said.

“Yes,” Messenger said.

“We have to . . . to stop it.”

I expected a non-answer or at best a cryptic comment that would do nothing to reassure or enlighten me. But, to my surprise, Messenger came closer and waited until the gravity he exerted had brought me to face him, to look at his face, into his eyes.

“You must understand. We do not have the duty of changing the world, of substituting our own wills for those of the people involved. A human deprived of freedom becomes something less than human. There must be free will. Even when . . .” Some dark memory clouded his eyes and caused him to glance away as if to hide a pain he was unwilling to reveal. He took a steadying breath and in a monotone went on. “People are free to make choices, even terrible ones. But when they make bad choices, when they do evil, then it may be that justice, fairly and ruthlessly applied, can show a person a new path. Justice is our cause, not human happiness.”

I was torn as to what to say in response. This was the most Messenger had ever shared with me. I didn’t want to discourage future explanations with too many questions, let alone arguments.

But just as curiosity drives me, so a lesser attribute, argumentativeness, sometimes rears its head. So I said, “If the point is justice, why the game? Why not just decide a sentence and carry it out?”

I blushed to see what next animated his face, for I was certain that for just the briefest moment, a flash that escaped before he could conceal it, he had looked at me with affection. Once he had recomposed his features into their usual emotionless character, he said, “Here is what I have been taught, and a small part of what I must teach you.”