He had before him a man and three women. The man and two of those women had military training. One of those women was fairly obviously pregnant. The third woman was a sometimes friend, possibly an occasional lover. She regarded him with a modicum of trust. And she was only as dangerous as her temperament would let her be. Only as dangerous as a civilian.

Mike, emerging from the kitchen, stepped in beside Beth. He'd opened for himself a bottle of beer. He took a sip and looked at Mace, and as he asked the older man, politely--

-- "What did you want to know about Beth's paper--?" --

-- he rammed into Beth's lower back the blade of the knife he was carrying in his other hand. She arched with a silent gasp-- really, it was almost funny: like those ancient cartoons by Charles Schulz, Peanuts, when Snoopy the beagle went up the sunny beach poking folks in their bare backs with the tip of his cold, cold nose-- and Mike pulled the blade out of her and shoved her into Mace's arms and went out the apartment door. The bottle shattered on the floor of the hall outside.

It took them a second to react. More than a second to realize what had just happened.

"Fuck--" Mace breathed.

Whitby met his eyes. Then she was out the door at a run, after the footsteps pounding off down the hall. She heard him shout--

"Loinnir, no-- Wait--!"

But she was already gone. Mike shouldered through the fire door at the end of the hall and thudded down the steps, thundering bootsteps echoing in countertime to his as Whitby went down the steps, too, and then Mike was out the door at the bottom, and she was after him, maybe forty feet behind. The air hit her face like a cold wet rag. She paused at the door only long enough to be sure he wasn't just to the right or left of the frame, waiting for her with that bloody knife. But, no: there he was, dead ahead, running--

She tapped the phone-circuit at her collar.

"Mace, we're heading north," she said, as she sprinted away from the door.

Copy that, Whitby.

She left the circuit open. She kept her eyes on Mike. She ran after him, and her boots made no sound on the snow.

Cassie helped Mace lower Beth to the rag-strip rug. She was breathing shallowly and rapidly: panic, pain. A bloodstain spreading darkly in the region of her right kidney. Her eyes were glazing with shock--

"I'll call an ambulance," Cassie said. She looked at Mace. "Go."

"Call the cops, too." Mace straightened. He reached down, squeezed her shoulder, met her eyes. Then he turned and went out the door.

She liked to say that she was a diver before she was a pilot or an astronaut, and that the latter two were easier jobs by far than the first, and a situation like this was where the proof lay: it was dark, beyond the lights of the campus, and that's where they were now, she and Mike, heading north by northwest, and the air was swirling with snow as thick as the silt an amateur like Teddy McElhone would stir up on the ocean's bottom, and still she could see Mike, sense him, track him. Kept herself calm, her mind, her eyes, her breathing, too: the ground was uneven and the snow was deep, nothing but treacherous wet slop underfoot, and the going was slow, as heavy as moving under pressure, but she kept moving forward, methodically. They crossed a street, a white tire-tracked river, no cars in sight, and pushed their private ways through bare twig-snaps of bushes into a region of trees. Pine and birch. Mike didn't slow, didn't look behind him. Whitby could see he knew how to move in snow: from the region, no doubt. A local boy. She scowled at his sweatshirted, retreating back--

Now where would you be takin' me on our first date?

Mace was maybe three minutes behind. He had their trail and was moving north, though the wind and snow were already blunting the footprints before him. He looked ahead, focusing hard with his prosthetic eye, and got nothing but a sudden stab of pain in his left temple as the processors, trying to track every damn snowflake, momentarily overloaded his optic nerve with data--

"Shit--!" He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, shook the pain from his head. "Whitby, talk to me."

Mace--

She was panting, but not panicking--

-- we're comin' up on another road. He's twenty, thirty meters ahead, and-- Fuck--!

A grunt, then nothing.

Mace opened his eyes. "Loinnir?"

A two-count while he told himself to stay calm. He was seasoned enough not to have to remind himself that panicking would only rob him of air and concentration. It would render him vulnerable, it wouldn't help Whitby, and it wouldn't stop the little prick they were hunting down. Mace set off again, at a run, in Whitby's eroding bootprints.

Sometimes Cassie hated her soft heart.

No use worrying after Mace and Whitby, off like wolves after Mike; God or-- more fittingly-- the devil help the boy when they caught him, whether he had a boning knife in his hand or not. When she went for the phone, Cassie saw by its absence the blade, slender and savage, that was missing from the knife-block. Mike hadn't rummaged his weapon from the cutlery drawer at all. He'd uncapped his beer with the bottle opener, drawn the knife, and stabbed Beth. Who, now, bleeding forth from her right kidney onto the common-room rug, was the focal point of the compassion Cassie wanted not to feel.

"The ambulance is coming," she told Beth as she came back to the common room and knelt beside her. Cassie had the girl on her side on the floor. She found in the linen closet a blanket and a short stack of hand towels, one of which she pressed, folded, to the seeping hole in Beth's back. Beth arched in pain. Her right hand clawed birdlike and blindly at the air, and when her fingers caught Cassie's free hand and clung to it, Cassie couldn't bring herself to pull away.

To the air before her pale face, Beth whispered: "Am I going to die?"

"I don't know, Beth," Cassie replied, honestly.

"It was Mike who stabbed Rob-- your husband. Paul was with me."

Cassie's jaw tightened. She'd called Detective Wilhelm after she called for the medics, and he'd not only expressed his surprise at where she was-- Detective Mann had finished the department's preliminary questioning of Mike less than an hour before, in an apartment one floor above Beth's-- but he'd told her, too: he'd been trying to reach her. Someone had turned in her phone. Water had seeped into it from lying in the snow, but the department's tech team had salvaged and dried out the memory card. They had no visuals of Capa's attacker, but they had a voice print.

Half an hour ago, Detective Wilhelm had discovered that that voice didn't match Paul's.

Dr. Capa, I presume--?

Now he didn't have to wait until the morning, when Mike would have been brought to the station for more thorough questioning, to know that Paul's roommate, not Paul, had attacked Robert Capa. If Mike had been available, that is. In her search for the blanket and towels, Cassie had opened the door to Beth's bedroom. She'd seen the carryon, the suitcase on the bed half-packed. She thought of Mike coming into Beth's apartment, the casual relief in his voice-- the voice Wilhelm's people had conjured from her phone's memory chip, the voice of the man who'd viciously attacked her husband-- and she shuddered with anger and revulsion. He would have been gone by morning, and this stupid, cold girl who was drifting into shock on the floor before her would have gone with him.

And still Cassie felt pity. Empathy for Beth's fear. She glanced at the clock reading on the room's three-dee. "It won't be long now, Beth. The medics will be here any second."

Beth nodded. She shivered under the blanket.

"They were just words," she stammered. "The paper. No one was supposed to-- They were just words." She turned her head, looked up at Cassie. "I'm so sorry."

Cassie looked back at the girl and felt her pity transform itself into something harder, more distant.

"Save it, Beth," she said. "Apologize to my husband when you mean it. Not when you're doing it out of fear."

The cliche would have been for Whitby to look the wrong way as she tried to cross the highway. A glance to the right, not the left, and then a heartstop moment frozen in a maelstrom of snowflakes before the glare of headlights became a bumper, a bonnet, and a windscreen. A bone-cracking thump, a tossing, a tumbling, and crippling or death for a Scotswoman wayward on a road in North America.

But that wasn't what happened.

As she spoke to Mace, Whitby was making her way into a ditch on the south side of Lake Shore Boulevard. She'd lost sight of Mike, but she had his trail, or what had to be his trail. He must already have reached the road. She was wading in snow nearly to her hips as she descended the ditch's near side, brown tall grass feather-slapping her hands and the outer shell of her jacket. "-- Twenty, thirty meters ahead," she was saying to Mace--

-- when the ground dropped out from under her.

At first she thought she'd fallen through ice. That there was water here, not earth. Her breath went out in a cry of "Fuck--!"

-- and then she found herself on her rump on a tufted crush of grass. She caught her breath. She was buried, but she wasn't suffocating. She cautiously stood.

It was that bloody deep. The ditch, the snow. She snorted at herself. She ought to have remembered: American highway features-- signs, lanes, off-ramps, culverts-- were a dozen times bigger than they appeared from the road. Land of the bloody giants. Up to her chest she was.

Loinnir--?

She brushed snow from her collar, tipped her head toward her phone clip. "I'm okay, Stephen. I fell, that's all. Mind the snow in the ditches."

Got it.

Two words, and she could hear the relief in his voice. She waded the ditch, more like swam it, really, twisting her hips and torso in long, rolling strides. Snow sifted in under her jacket collar, melted in wet shudders down her back. When she made her way up onto the shoulder of the lake highway, Mike was out of sight.

Not seeing him, Whitby looked first for signs of stopping. He might have tried, right off, to catch a ride. But there were no brakelights to the right or left, no dark low bulk of a car idling on the shoulder. Headlights approached from the left: a truck flashed by in a rush of air, whipping up snow in its wake. Whitby crossed the crown of the highway's westbound lanes, waded the center ditch. She paused at the inner shoulder of the eastbound lanes as two cars whisked by, fifty meters between them, snowflakes spinning in their headlights. She looked: no sign of Mike ahead of her, no sign of Mace behind.

She crossed the highway and found Mike's trail. The footprints slurred their snowy way down a drop far shallower than the ditch on the road's south side; they led, through scrubby tall grass and rocks, to a piling of boulders maybe six meters high. No way around. Whitby started to make her way up and over.

She was maybe two meters from the top when she realized that what she was climbing wasn't stone.

It was snow-covered ice. What Superior, shrugging free of winter, had tossed up on her own rocky shore.

Whitby's boots had good, soft soles suited to traction on surfaces wet or slick, but here she found herself among sharp ridges ready to tear flesh, to snag and snap bones. For the first time since she and Mike had started their chase, she felt anger. He'd led her up into a trap; she'd followed him. No comfort in the fact that he was risking his life along with hers: she hadn't heard him shout in pain, and she certainly couldn't see him, lying with his neck broken or his leg twisted wrong in a crevice.

You bony fucker.

Her anger took her to the top of the ice-mound and over it. The focus of pursuit kept her moving, then, when she saw his footprints leading off ahead of her on the ground beyond. She assumed she was crossing a stretch of beach. The wind was blowing from the north; the surface ahead was flat, the air above grayish-black and swirling with snow.

She was maybe twenty meters away from the piled ice when she realized two things: She wasn't on a beach. She was on the lake.

And for once she didn't need Richie to tell her: she was being stupid.

She went still. She stood for a long moment looking at the footprints leading off into the distance. The snow was stopping but not settling, still caught in the skirling north wind. A half moon was beginning to cut its pale way through the clouds, and she could see the lights of Marquette, distantly, a crescent galaxy of stars, along the shore to her right.

Whitby breathed the snowy air, calmed herself, reasoned. She knew sea ice, not lake ice. Not freshwater ice. Mike was nowhere to be seen.

And she was thinking for two now.

Her free hand went gently, protectively, to her abdomen as she spoke to her phone clip. "Mace," she said, "I've lost him. He's on the lake. We're maybe three kilometers west of Marquette. I'm coming back in."

Copy that, Loinnir. I'm at the highway. I'll wait for you.

Whitby took a last look at the invisible horizon. Mike was well and truly gone. Let Wilhelm and his boys hunt him down. Let him fall through the ice and drown himself in this rocky inland sea. She turned for the ice-piled shore. She moved more cautiously, now that sense had displaced her anger. She kept to the tracks she'd already made.

She stepped maybe four inches outside her fifth bootprint, and her right foot went through the ice.

Her left knee twisted painfully beneath her when she fell; she compounded said pain when, instinctively, she threw her torso to the left, away from the iciness swallowing her right leg. She landed on her back. A moment of helpless, primal terror as she waited for the ice beneath her to give way--

But it didn't. It held. She reached cautiously to her right, down through the snow. Her hand met icy slush. She eased her weight to the left, and it was as though she could feel the ice sink beneath her, the whole shelf, from where she lay all the way to the shore. Water slurped up through the hole around her right leg. She was soaked to the hip, and as she moved she could feel the ice tip slightly beneath her, sliding her to the right--

She lay back. Breathed. Tried not to think about the cold wetness drawing her down. Tried not to imagine the depth of the dark water beneath the ice.

"Mace," she said to her phone clip, quietly-- as if the lake could hear-- "I've stepped through the ice."

Christ-- Loinnir, did you fall in?

"About a third of me did." She nearly smiled. The grimness, the wet and cold of it. Above her, beyond the whirling snow, stars were prickling the blue-black sky. "I'm not sure if I can pull myself free."

I'll be right there--

"Call for help, darling. Can't have both of us out here like--"

Movement. Behind her head, to her left. She twisted her neck to see--

Mike.

He'd followed his tracks back, and now he was standing about five meters away, watching her. He held the knife in his right hand. He'd cleaned Beth's blood from the blade, and the metal was a flat dull gray in the snowy darkness.

He came a meter closer. Paused.

"Mace, he's here," Whitby said. She didn't keep her voice down this time. Mike started at the sound, slightly. For a moment, she thought he might turn and go.

But he didn't. He stood there, studying the ice around them--

I'll be right there, Loinnir.

Nothing useless passed between them. She didn't say "Hurry--!"; he didn't say "Hold on." She kept the circuit open. If she was to be murdered here, there'd be a record of it.

Really, though, the situation was almost ludicrous: she was afraid to get up; Mike was afraid to come close enough to stab her. And he did want to stab her; of that she was certain. She saw killing in the ease of his posture, heard it in his silence. Obviously, he knew more about the winter lake and the bay than she did. He had only to pick his path to her.

He moved. He broke from stillness into a light, quick, silent stride. He angled to the left of his path outbound and crossed the distance between himself and Whitby. He stepped into her blind spot as he approached, an area just beyond the crown of her head: she had a choice of seeing or defending, and in the split second before the blade came at her face, she threw up her right arm. The blade slit the forearm of her jacket, sliced through her sweater and the skin beneath. She hissed with pain; she grabbed for his wrist with her left hand--

Mike stepped away. He had to know she had little chance of pulling her leg free, let alone of pulling it free while defending herself. She was like a bloody tortoise belly-up on the ice.

Still, she said, while he picked his next angle of attack: "Walk away, lad. All you have t'do is walk the fuck away."

His lips pulled back in the slightest of smirks. His eyes stayed thoughtful and still. He stepped in and cut her again, this time across the back of her left wrist. Then, when she moved to block with her right arm, he slashed her forearm again, more deeply than before. The blade glanced off the bone, and Whitby shrieked with pain--

Mike stabbed her in the chest. Only, just before he brought the blade down, he paused for a second-- just a second, mind-- to tighten his smirk into something more ghoulish. And, as he did, Whitby from behind a red scrim of pain launched her left fist at his jaw. It was an awkward angle, a rotten punch. But it connected. Mike's lower teeth clacked sharply into his uppers. He took a surprised, stumbling step backward, the stab aborted--

"Walk. The fuck. Away," Whitby panted at him.

He dropped back onto his haunches, out of her arm's reach. He crab-walked two steps away and stopped. She waited for him to straighten; she thought he might have listened to her.

But he stayed where he was. He was watching her again, but he wasn't looking at her face. He was studying her torso. Her legs. The one, anyway, the left one, twisted under her on the snow.

A clear shot at the inner thigh.

Where he'd stabbed Capa. Old tricks being the best tricks. The quickest tricks. Like now, when the blade shot forward, and she'd been lying too long on the ice, her other leg too long submerged in water razor-cut cold, and she was in pain and bleeding, and she wasn't fast enough to--

Mace tackled him. A full-body hit, heavy and fast and murderous. Together they flew a full three meters through the air. They landed in paired grunts and an uprush of snow on the ice; miraculously, they didn't fall through. Mike didn't drop the knife. He slashed at Mace as he rolled to his feet; he cut Mace across the chest, right through his jacket--

Which, of course, only made Mace madder. He was fast for his size anyway; he was even faster now. Before Mike could cut him again, Mace stepped in and punched him. His fist hit Mike's jaw hard enough to send the boy reeling backward, northward. Farther out onto the lake.

Onto thinner ice.

In the moment when Mace moved to follow Mike, Whitby came as close as she'd ever come to screaming. "Stephen, no--!"

Five meters away from her, hesitating in mid-stride, Mace broke through the ice.

Then Mike broke through, too.

A ripple effect. Or a crackling one. Whatever faults there'd been in the ice around them began to awaken en masse. A chorus of gurglings and pops, deep cold gratings. Suddenly the ice around Mike was a field of slabs, chunks two meters across or less, and Mace was in a hole at the very edge of that field, where the ice was still a white sheet. Both he and Mike had gone under when they'd fallen in, and they were soaked to the tops of their heads; they were pawing in shock at the ice around them. Whitby could see both of them trying to remain calm, Mace as a professional soldier, Mike as a lifelong denizen of this icy hell, who'd no doubt had his share of drills in the ways of cold-water survival. But he couldn't get a grip on the chunks of ice around him: Whitby saw him pull at one, saw it turn turtle before him and present its clear green belly to the cold night sky. Mace's efforts were equally futile. The ice was breaking away as he tried to drag himself free. He would have three, maybe four, useful minutes. Then the cold would have sapped too much of his body heat, and he would be too weak to pull himself clear.

Time to move.

Whitby lay back, breathed out. Dropped into a dark place deep inside herself, a calm not of space or of vacuum but of black cold silt-free water. She drew a breath as she would from her main tank on a dive, slowly and deeply, and tightened the muscles all along her body's left side. She rolled her weight slowly, then, onto her left arm and the protesting ligaments of her left quadriceps and knee and drew her right leg free of Superior's slushy grip.

She lay on her belly. The ice below her held. She eased up onto her knees and unzipped her jacket and took it off. She laid herself flat again. And she inched her way toward Mace, taking her jacket with her.

He saw her coming; he warned her back with his eyes. Neither of them bothered to speak. A waste of air, of effort. Whitby held tight to the cuff of one sleeve of her jacket and tossed the other cuff toward Mace. A rope of sorts. He grabbed, caught, held on. Silence, still, and gasping, then, too, as they both started to pull. His shoulders cleared the water, his sternum crested the hole's brittle edge--

And the sleeve in Whitby's hand-- the right sleeve of her jacket-- began to rip where Mike had slashed it.

All she could hear was the tearing. That, and the ragged pounding of her heart in her ears. She saw the jacket's fiberfill blossom forth as the gash in the cloth widened. She saw Mace looking at her from six hopeless feet away--

She pulled with everything she had, with every bit of strength in her cold torso, her slashed arms. Mace pulled too, snarling with effort. He heaved his belly onto the ice as the sleeve tore through; Whitby launched herself forward and caught the jacket by the shoulder and pulled again, blindly, desperately--

And she and Mace dragged Mace clear. He was out of the water. He lay panting on the ice, his breath shuddering from his throat, steaming in the cold air. Then he hauled himself onto his elbows and inched his way back toward Whitby. She caught him when he neared, by the soaked shoulders of his jacket, his upper arms, and they pulled themselves up, sitting, near the path Mace had made on his way onto the lake. He said nothing; neither did she. He kept his eyes on her, though, as she unzipped and drew off his jacket. He was dripping wet. Her jacket, damaged though it was, was dry. She wrapped it around Mace's shaking shoulders and hugged him close.

Mike was pawing, still, at the ice surrounding him. His movements, though, had in the last three minutes become less conscious, more automatic. Weaker. Whitby held Mace, and they both sat looking at him. He looked back. And she thought he must know: even if she and Mace cared enough to try to help him, they hadn't the strength.

"You brought it on yourself, lad," she said.

Mike got his arms one final time around a chunk of ice. It upended in the water and pushed him under.

He never came up.

At least not in the thirty seconds they sat and watched. Or in the two extra minutes it took for them to get underway. And that should have been enough time for the greatest of lakes to swallow the bastard whole, him and his black soul, too. Whitby staggered to her feet. Her right leg was stiff with cold; the trouser leg itself was icing up. Her left knee felt like the landing point of a caber toss. Mace stumbled to his feet beside her. Before they started their trek to shore, she got him zipped properly into her jacket. She wore it a size or so too large; it fit him well enough.

"Let's get somewhere warm," she said.

She put her hand to his cheek; Mace turned his head, pressed his cold lips to her palm.

"B--best suggestion I've huh-heard all day," he stuttered. He smiled for her, shivering, and Whitby smiled back. "C'mon, Pilot."

"Right beside you, tool."

He put his arm around her shoulders, Whitby held him around the waist, and, together, they staggered toward solid ground.

Beth didn't die. She lost a kidney. She lost her scholarships and any chance she might have had for a degree. And she lost Paul.

Who didn't kill himself in his cell. He was released. He left Northern Michigan U and returned to Milwaukee.

Capa would decline to press charges.

"That's stupid, man," Mace said.

"He was protecting his friends," Capa countered.

"He's an asshole."

"He wasn't the one who stabbed me, Mace." He looked at Mace with patient weariness in his unearthly eyes, and Mace knew: he wanted it to be over. Cassie wanted it, too.

So Mace let it drop.

What he found harder to drop, oddly enough, was Mike. Superior never gave him up. Mace thought of what John had said about not even having his son's body to bury when he believed Capa lost; he thought of Mike's parents, whoever they might be, grieving however much people who could produce a kid like that could grieve. Then he let that drop as well.

"You brought it on yourself, kid," he murmured. Loinnir's belief. His, too.

They'd stepped off Superior into a chorus of lights. Red, blue, and yellow flashing from police cars and emergency vehicles. Spotlights spiking across the lake's icy surface. Wilhelm was there, looking relieved and just a bit angry, too-- at himself, Mace guessed, and not just at him and Whitby, for whatever skullduggery they'd been pulling out on the ice. The EMT who helped Whitby and Mace get themselves aboard an ambulance was a big, sandy-haired guy named Jerry.

"They say you got the kid who stabbed Marge's boy," he said, quietly, as he sat in the back with them on the way to Marquette General. "That true?"

"Y'ask her," Whitby said, nodding her shaking head toward the dark lake to her left, beyond the bulkhead of the SuperTrac in which she and Mace and Jerry rode. "She has him now."

They sewed up her arms, treated her strained knee, gave her a half-dozen pain meds for later. Mace they kept overnight for observation. A potential for what they called "aftershock": super-chilled blood could cause strokes or respiratory failure when it began to re-circulate in a warming body. When Whitby handed back the meds, saying she was pregnant, the emergency staff at Marquette General suggested that she, too, spend the night. She didn't argue it.

They were home-- to the big cabin south of Carver Lake-- a day later. Capa came home two days after that. Mace and John hoisted him out of the Behemoth and walked him between them up the wide wooden steps. He was no weight at all, the little guy who'd saved the world. He had one arm over Mace's shoulder and his other arm over his father's, and between the two of them they could lift his booted feet clear of the snow with no effort whatsoever.

Cassie got him settled in a spare room on the cabin's first floor. Good for Capa: he didn't have to navigate the stairs to the second floor, and there was a bathroom right next door. Good for Cassie, too: John's library was right across the hall. Capa was a decent patient. He wasn't demanding; he was quiet and polite. Mace knew that from living with him aboard the 'pod. The little guy adored Cassie, and she adored him. That much was plain, too. He heard them talking together, laughing softly together, murmuring. He heard long silent spaces, when he could tell, glancing at the half-closed door to that spare room, that Cassie was sitting beside Capa, and she was reading or watching him sleep, or she was holding his hand while they did nothing but look at each other. And that, Mace thought, was just as things should be.

He and Whitby were doing their own fair share of sitting and looking. The house had that sort of effect. He'd had a major shock to his system, and she was hurt, too, on top of being pregnant. It felt good to rest. They hadn't stopped moving, it seemed, since they'd come back from the sun. Press conferences, debriefings, new commissions, travel. Adjustments to becoming something more than human, almost. Heroes, gods among men.

Or the angels who had served the scrawny, scruffy sun-god now unfussily occupying a spare room in a snow-covered cabin in Michigan. In those first days back from the hospital, Whitby and Capa started up chess games that concluded hours later. And not because of the intensity of the thought involved, the passion in the play. Mace saw Cassie at the door of the spare room; her shoulders were shaking.

He came closer, put his hand on her arm; he thought she was crying. "Cass--?"

"Look," she whispered-- just as Mace realized she wasn't crying. She was trying not to laugh.

Whitby, sitting in a stuffed chair beside Capa's bed, was sound asleep. Across the chessboard from her, Capa was asleep, too-- with his hand poised over the board, the tips of his long, heavy-knuckled fingers frozen on a rook.

"And they're both cheating," Cassie whispered. "I think Loinnir's lost the same bishop three times now."

"Care to do an old woman one last favor, Stephen?"

Mace was helping Marjory carry firewood into the cabin's concrete-floored lower level. They bumped and shouldered their way in through the windowed wooden door, into the area of the house where Mace found himself feeling most at home. Tools clipped neatly to pegboard on the walls, an old red-and-white low-horse outboard and a trolling motor hanging from heavy clamps, the mild asphalt tang of oil and grease. He stacked his pieces of wood in a tidy pile to the right of the door and swatted bark chips from his hands.

"Haven't seen any old women around here, Marge. Beautiful ones, maybe." He smiled at her sincerely. "Anything. Name it."

Marjory smiled back at him, through a most atypical blush. "You and Loinnir can talk your way onto pretty much any flight you want, am I right?"

"Yep."

"Robert and Cassie are too shy to ask--" She looked at him evenly, a little wryly. "Care to take a trip to California?"

And so Charlie saw the snow.

It would be gone in a week or so, but it was waiting for him when Marge and Mace brought him back-- with Elaine Cassidy's blessing-- from San Diego. The sun was testing the air above the pines and the bare white birch trees when he stormed in and caught Cassie, surprised and delighted, in a four-year-old's stampede of affection.

"Momma--!" His eyes were the color of the sky through the spindly snow-stacked branches. Cassie knelt to meet him in the coming hug, held him close. "I flew in the plane!"

She smiled and teared up-- she smiled even more at that, the odd, sweet irony of happiness. "Really, Charlie--? Did Mace and Grandma--" -- with a gently accusing look at the two who were too nonchalantly getting the rest of the way out of their coats and boots just inside the front door, and smiling to themselves, secretively, as they did-- "-- did they let you look out the window--?"

"Uh huh." As Cassie unfastened his jacket, Charlie looked at her with his father's awe in his wide eyes. No need to get alarmed over what he'd tracked in on his boots: the snow was clean. At any rate, any damage to the carpet, she thought, wryly, would be Marge's own darn fault. "There were clouds, Momma. They were big. We flew over mountains--!"

She told him he had to be quiet around Daddy, who was sleeping, and gentle, too, and Charlie with a child's unquestioning ease switched from "dynamo" to "little gentleman." He held his momma's hand as Cassie led him to the spare room, where Capa was napping. He climbed up on the chair beside the bed, carefully hugged his father around the neck, and rested his cheek against Capa's.

"Hi, Daddy," he whispered.

He showed more decorum than Trey and Elena, who blew in like their own Air-Cav division later that afternoon bearing bags of vegetables and meat and flour and other fine comestibles and who announced to the lady of the house that they were there to assist in the making of dinner, which was to feature Upper Michigan's most noted delicacy.

"You're telling me," said Marge unto Trey, with droll skepticism, "that a Chinese astronaut is gonna show a Yooper how to make pasties...?"

"Marjory, I resent that deeply," replied Trey, as he and she and Elena unpacked the grocery bags, mustered utensils. "Chinese hacker, if you please."

From the bay window at the back of the cabin's first floor, Cassie stood and watched her son romp with Mace in the snow. He swept Charlie clear off the ground, an airplane swing, Charlie laughing and absolutely safe in Mace's strong hands; Cassie smiled as Mace grinned and she saw as much as heard him say--

"Gee, kid, you weigh as much as your old man--!"

Whitby and John emerged, booted and jacketed, from the snowy woods, back from a walk, Whitby wanting to stretch her knee, and at the edge of the back yard they parted company. She waved John off with a gloved hand and a smile, and, as Capa senior came back toward the house, she made her way toward the snowy fray. Mace, seeing her approach, bent and rolled himself a snowball.

"Charlie! Get her!"

As Whitby roughly-- but affectionately-- got got, and did her own snowy share of getting, too, Capa came up quietly behind Cassie and joined her at the window.

"I dreamed he was here," he said, wonder soft in his voice as he looked out. "Charlie."

Cassie didn't tell him that he shouldn't be up, walking on his own. She reached back, caught his hands, drew his arms around her waist. Capa held her; she thus supported him.

"They'll need the practice," she said, smiling, watching Mace and Whitby play with Charlie. She added, as Capa rested his chin on her shoulder: "He was moving, too. Earlier. While you were sleeping."

"Hm--?"

She took his hand, slipped his fingers under her sweater to the spot on the right side of her abdomen where she'd felt it, a fluttering as of mothwings. Capa went still, his breathing soft and steady next to her ear, concentrating--

"Oh--"

-- at a sparrow-beat beneath Cassie's skin, beneath his fingertips. Capa squeezed her, and Cassie wrapped her arms around his and relaxed, and together they watched the sweet destruction outside, listened to the battle between the Chinese delegation and the Yoopers-- two Yoopers, now, John having joined the chaos-- in the kitchen.

"She, you mean," Capa countered, gently rubbing Cassie's belly.

"Okay." She could sense him, every bit of him. She could sense his muscles, his bones, his blood, the shift and motion in his joints. She could feel his warmth through the jersey shorts and the old t-shirt and the baggy worn robe he wore. She felt the returning strength in the wiry arms with which he held her. She pressed her fingers over Capa's, there in the vicinity of the feather-light fluttering in her belly, and said, with love: "We'll certainly see, won't we--?"

THE END