“In our presence,” said Petra. “And the fertility specialist who is going to implant the first one.”

  “Of course,” said Volescu with a tight smile. “I will sort them out for you, and discard the—”

  “We will discard and destroy any that have Anton’s Key,” said Bean.

  “That goes without saying,” said Volescu stiffly.

  He hates these rules we’ve sprung on him, thought Petra. She could see it in his eyes, despite the calm demeanor. He’s furious. He’s even…embarrassed, yes. Well, since that’s probably as close as he’s ever come to feeling shame, it’s good for him.

  While Petra was examined by the staff doctor who would do the implantation, Bean saw to hiring a security service. A guard would be on duty at the embryo “nursery,” as the hospital staff charmingly called it, all day, every day. “Since you’re the one who first started being paranoid,” Bean told Petra, “I have no choice but to out-paranoid you.”

  It was a relief, actually. During the days before the embryos were ready for implantation, while Volescu was no doubt trying frantically to devise some nondestructive procedure that he could pretend was a genetic test, Petra was glad not to have to stay in the hospital personally watching over the embryos the whole time.

  It gave her a chance to explore the city of Bean’s childhood. Bean, however, seemed determined to visit only the tourist sites and then get back to his computer. She knew that it made him nervous to stay in one city for so long, especially because for the first time, their whereabouts were known to another person whom they did not trust. It was doubtful Volescu knew any of their enemies. But Bean insisted on changing hotels every day, and walking blocks from their hotel in order to hail a taxi, so that no enemy could set an easy trap for them.

  He was evading more than his enemies, though. He was also evading his past in this city. She scanned a city map and found the area that Bean was clearly avoiding. And the next morning, after Bean had chosen the first cab of the day, she leaned forward and gave the taxi driver directions.

  It took Bean only a few moments to realize where the cab was going. She saw him tense up. But he did not refuse to go or even complain about her having compelled him. How could he? It would be an admission that he was avoiding the places he had known as a child. A confession of pain and fear.

  She was not going to let him pass the day in silence, however. “I remember the stories you’ve told me,” she said to him, gently. “There aren’t many of them, but still I wanted to see for myself. I hope it’s not too painful for you. But even if it is, I hope you’ll bear it. Because someday I’ll want to tell our children about their father. And how can I tell the stories if I don’t know where they took place?”

  After the briefest pause, Bean nodded.

  They left the cab and he took her through the streets of his childhood, which had been old and shabby even then. “It’s changed very little,” said Bean. “Really just the one difference. There aren’t thousands of abandoned children everywhere. Apparently somebody found the budget to deal with the orphans.”

  She kept asking questions, paying close attention to the answers, and finally he understood how serious she was, how much it meant to her. Bean began taking her off the main streets. “I lived in the alleys,” he explained. “In the shadows. Like a vulture, waiting for things to die. I had to watch for scraps that other children didn’t see. Things discarded at night. Spills from garbage bins. Anything that might have a few calories in it.”

  He walked up to one dumpster and laid his hand against it. “This one,” he said. “This one saved my life. There was a restaurant then, where that music shop is. I think the restaurant employee who dumped their garbage knew I was lurking. He always took out most of the cooking garbage in the late afternoon, in daylight. The older kids took everything. And then the scraps from the night’s meals, those got dumped in the morning, in daylight again, and the other kids got that, too. But he usually came outside once in the darkness. To smoke right here by the garbage bin. And after his smoke, in the darkness, there’d be a scrap of something, right here.”

  Bean put his hand on a narrow shelf formed by the frame that allowed the garbage truck to lift the bin.

  “Such a tiny dinner table,” said Petra.

  “I think he must have been a survivor of the street himself,” said Bean, “because it was never something so large as to attract attention. It was always something I could slip into my mouth all at once, so no one ever saw me holding food in my hand. I would have died without him. It was only a couple of months and then he stopped—probably lost his job or moved on to something else—and I have no idea who he was. But it kept me alive.”

  “What a lovely thing, to think such a person could have come out of the streets,” said Petra.

  “Well, yes, now I see that,” said Bean. “But at the time I didn’t think of that sort of thing at all. I was…focused. I knew he was doing it deliberately, but I didn’t bother to imagine why, except to eliminate the possibility that it was a trap, or that he had drugged it or poisoned it somehow.”

  “How did you eliminate that possibility?”

  “I ate the first thing he put there and I didn’t die, and I didn’t keel over and then wake up in a child whorehouse somewhere.”

  “They had such places?”

  “There were rumors that that’s what happened to children who disappeared from the street. Along with the rumors that they were cooked into spicy stews in the immigrants’ section of town. Those I don’t believe.”

  She wrapped her arms around his chest. “Oh, Bean, what a hellish place.”

  “Achilles came from here, too,” he said.

  “He was never as small as you were.”

  “But he was crippled. That bad leg. He had to be smart to stay alive. He had to keep everyone else from crushing him for no better reason than because they could. Maybe his thing about having to eliminate anyone who sees his helplessness—maybe that was a survival mechanism for him, under these circumstances.”

  “You’re such a Christian,” said Petra. “So full of charity.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Bean. “I assume you’re going to raise our child Armenian Catholic, right?”

  “It would make Sister Carlotta happy, don’t you think?”

  “She was happy no matter what I did,” said Bean. “God made her happy. She’s happy now, if she’s anything at all. She was a happy person.”

  “You make her sound—what?—mentally deficient?”

  “Yes. She was incapable of holding on to malice. A serious defect.”

  “I wonder if there’s a genetic test for it,” said Petra. Then she regretted it immediately. The last thing she wanted was for Bean to think too much about genetic tests, and realize what seemed so obvious to her, that Volescu had no test.

  They visited many other places, and more and more of them made him tell her little stories. Here’s where Poke used to hide a stash of food to reward kids who did well. Here’s where Sister Carlotta first sat down with us to teach us to read. This was our best sleeping place during the winter, until some bigger kids found us and drove us out.

  “Here’s where Poke stood over Achilles with a cinderblock in her hands,” said Bean, “ready to dash his brains out.”

  “If only she had,” said Petra.

  “She was too good a person,” said Bean. “She couldn’t imagine the evil that might be in him. I didn’t, either, until I saw him lying there, what was in his eyes when he looked up at that cinderblock. I’ve never seen so much hate. That was all—no fear. I saw her death in his eyes right then. I told her she had to do it. Had to kill him. She couldn’t. But it happened just the way I warned her. If you let him live, he’ll kill you, I said, and he did.”

  “Where was it?” asked Petra. “The place where Achilles killed her? Can you take me there?”

  He thought about it for a few moments, then walked her to the waterfront among the docks. They found a clear place where they could see between the boats and ships and barges out to where the great Rhine swept past on its way to the North Sea.

  “What a powerful place,” said Petra.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It just—the river, so strong. And yet human beings were able to build this along its banks. This harbor. Nature is strong but the human mind is stronger.”

  “Except when it isn’t,” said Bean.

  “He gave her body to the river, didn’t he?”

  “He dumped her into the water, yes.”

  “But the way Achilles saw what he did. Giving her to the water. Maybe he romanticized it.”

  “He strangled her,” said Bean. “I don’t care what he thought while he did it, or afterward. He kissed her and then he strangled her.”

  “You didn’t see the murder, I hope!” said Petra. It would be too terrible if Bean had been carrying such an image in his mind all these years.

  “I saw the kiss,” said Bean. “I was too selfish and stupid to see what it meant.”

  Petra remembered her own kiss from Achilles, and shuddered. “You thought what anyone would have thought,” said Petra. “You thought his kiss meant what mine does.”

  And she kissed him.

  He kissed her back. Hungrily.

  But when the kiss ended, his face grew wistful again. “I would undo everything, all that I’ve done with my life since then,” said Bean, “if I could only go back and undo that one moment.”

  “What, you think you could have fought him? Have you forgotten how small you were then?”

  “If I’d been there, if he’d known I was watching, he wouldn’t have done it. Achilles never risks discovery if he can help it.”

  “Or he might have killed you, too.”

  “He couldn’t kill us both at once. Not with that gimp leg. Whichever one he went for, the other would scream bloody murder and go for help.”

  “Or hit him over the head with a cinderblock.”

  “Yes, well, Poke could have done that, but I couldn’t have lifted it higher than his head. And I don’t think dropping a stone on his toe would have done the job.”

  They stayed by the dock for a little longer, and then made the walk back to the hospital.

  The security guard was on duty. All was right with the world.

  All. Bean had gone back to his childhood range and he hadn’t cried much, hadn’t turned away, hadn’t fled back to some safe place.

  Or so she thought, until they left the hospital, returned to their hotel, and he lay in the bed, gasping for breath until she realized that he was sobbing. Great dry wracking sobs that shook his whole body.

  She lay beside him and held him until he slept.

  Volescu’s fakery was so good that for a few moments Petra wondered if he might really have the ability to test the embryos. But no, it was flimflam—he was simply smart enough, scientist enough, to find convincing flimflam that was realistic enough to fool extremely intelligent laypeople like them, and even the fertility doctor they brought with them. He must have made it look like the tests these doctors performed to test for a child’s sex or for major genetic defects.

  Or else the doctor knew perfectly well it was a scam, but said nothing because all the baby-fixers played the same game, pretending to check for defects that couldn’t actually be checked for, knowing that by the time the fakery was discovered, the parents would already have bonded with the child—and even if they hadn’t, how could they sue for failing to perform an illegal procedure like sorting for athletic prowess or intellect? Maybe all these baby boutiques were fakers.

  The only reason Petra wasn’t fooled is that she didn’t watch the procedure, she watched Volescu, and by the end of the procedure she knew that he was way too relaxed. He knew that nothing he was doing would make the slightest difference. There was nothing at stake. The test meant nothing.

  There were nine embryos. He pretended to identify three of them as having Anton’s Key. He tried to hand the containers to one of his assistants to dispose of, but Bean insisted that he give them to their doctor for disposal.

  “I don’t want any of these embryos to accidentally become a baby,” said Bean with a smile.

  But to Petra, they already were babies, and it hurt her to watch as Bean supervised the pouring out of the three embryos into a sink, the scouring of the containers to make sure an embryo hadn’t managed to thrive in some remaining droplet.

  I’m imagining this, thought Petra. For all she knew, the containers he flushed had never contained embryos at all. Why would Volescu sacrifice any of them, when all he had to do was lie and merely say that these three had contained embryos with Anton’s Key?

  So, self-persuaded that no actual harm to a child of hers was being done, she thanked Volescu for his help and they waited for him to leave before anything else was done. Volescu carried nothing from the room that he hadn’t come in with.

  Then Bean and Petra both watched as the six remaining embryos were frozen, their containers tagged, and all of them secured against tampering.

  The morning of the implantation, they both awoke almost at first light, too excited, too nervous to sleep. She lay in bed reading, trying to calm herself; he sat at the table in the hotel room, working on email, scanning the nets.

  But his mind was obviously on the morning’s procedure. “It’s going to be expensive,” he said. “Keeping guard over the ones we don’t implant.”

  She knew what he was driving at. “You know we’ve got to keep them frozen until we know if the first implant works. They don’t always take.”

  Bean nodded. “But I’m not an idiot, you know. I’m perfectly aware that you intend to keep all the embryos and implant them one by one until you have as many of my children as possible.”

  “Well of course,” said Petra. “What if our firstborn is as nasty as Peter Wiggin?”

  “Impossible,” said Bean. “How could a child of mine have any but the sweetest disposition?”

  “Unthinkable, I know,” said Petra. “And yet somehow I thought of it.”

  “So this security, it has to continue for years.”

  “Why?” said Petra. “No one wants the babies that are left. We destroyed the ones with Anton’s Key.”

  “We know that,” said Bean. “But they’re still the children of two members of Ender’s jeesh. Even without my particular curse, they’ll still be worth stealing.”

  “But they won’t be old enough to be of any value for years and years,” said Petra.

  “Not all that many years,” said Bean. “How old were we? How old are we even now? There are plenty of people willing to take the children and invest not that many years of training and then put them to work. Playing games and winning wars.”

  “I’ll never let any of them anywhere near military training,” said Petra.

  “You won’t be able to stop them,” said Bean.

  “We have plenty of money, thanks to the pensions Graff got for us,” said Petra. “I’ll make sure the security is intense.”

  “No, I mean you’ll never be able to stop the children. From seeking out military service.”

  He was right, of course. The testing for Battle School included a child’s predilection for military command, for the contest of battle. For war. Bean and Petra had proven how strong that passion was in them. It would be unlikely that any child of theirs would be happy without ever having a taste of the military life.

  “At least,” said Petra, “they won’t have to destroy an alien invader before they turn fifteen.”

  But Bean wasn’t listening. His body had suddenly grown alert as he scanned a message on his desk.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I think it’s from Hot Soup,” said Bean.

  She got up and came over to look.

  It was an email through one of the anonymous services, this one an Asian-based company called Mysterious East. The subject line was “definitely not vichyssoise.” Not cold soup, then. Hot Soup. The Battle School nickname of Han Tzu, who had been in Ender’s jeesh and was now assumed to be deeply involved in the highest levels of strategy in China.

  A message from him to Bean, until recently the military commander of the Hegemon’s forces, would be high treason. This message had been handed to a stranger on a street in China. Probably a European- or African-looking tourist. And the message wasn’t hard to understand:

  He thinks I told him where Caligula would be but I did not.

  “Caligula” could only refer to Achilles. “He” had to refer to Peter.

  Han Tzu was saying that Peter thought he was the source of the information about where the prison convoy would be on the day Suriyawong liberated Achilles.

  No wonder Peter was sure his source was reliable—Han Tzu himself! Since Han Tzu had been one of the group Achilles kidnapped, he would have plenty of reason to hate him. Motive enough for Peter to believe that Han Tzu would tell him where Achilles would be.

  But it wasn’t Han Tzu.

  And if it wasn’t Han Tzu, then who else would send such a message, pretending that it came from him? A message that turned out to be correct?

  “We should have known it wasn’t from Han Tzu all along,” said Bean.

  “We didn’t know Han Tzu was supposed to be the source,” said Petra reasonably.

  “Han Tzu would never give information that would lead to innocent Chinese soldiers getting killed. Peter should have known that.”

  “We would have known it,” said Petra, “but Peter doesn’t know Hot Soup. And he didn’t tell us Hot Soup was his source.”

  “So of course we know who the source was,” said Bean.

  “We’ve got to get word to him at once,” said Petra.

  Bean was already typing.

  “Only this has to mean that Achilles went in there completely prepared,” said Petra. “I’d be surprised if he hasn’t found a way to read Peter’s mail.”

  “I’m not writing to Peter,” said Bean.

  “Who, then?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Wiggin,” said Bean. “Two separate messages. Pieces of a puzzle. Chances are that Achilles won’t be watching their mail, or at least not closely enough to realize he should put these together.”