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on the table.
    It didn’t require much scrutiny. It read, ONE OF YOU HAS MADE A MISTAKE, and the letterhead said Eidolon Corporation—easy enough to fake, if someone went to the trouble of doing it. No signature. She held it up to the light. No watermark. No secret messages. No hints as to its meaning. “One of you”? Meaning her? Jazz? McCarthy? A member of the Cross Society? Impossible to tell. It was a meaningless taunt, a message designed to unnerve; showy, like the delivery by courier. Designed to prove that they could literally find her anywhere.
    Just like the Cross Society. Presuming that someone in the Cross Society hadn’t sent it in the first place.
    Stewart had been following her. Was it possible he was Eidolon? Eminently, she decided. Cross Society? She hadn’t exactly been provided with a full and forthright disclosure of their membership, but somehow she couldn’t see Ken Stewart believing in the things that the Cross Society took for granted: things like premonitions, and psychics, and the ability to alter the future.
    Then again, maybe that explained the erosion she sensed in him, the jittery nervousness. The world was fraying around him, and he was unraveling with it.
    She could completely sympathize.
    Jazz would probably have ditched the note and pelted down the street, collared Stewart and pummeled him until she got what she wanted to know….
    Jazz.
    Lucia’s smile faded as she flipped open her cell phone and speed-dialed Borden’s number. He picked up on the second ring, sounding lazy and sleep-soaked. He sobered up fast when she identified herself.
    “Hey. Um, good morning. What time—crap. It’s late. I overslept.”
    “Is Jazz with you?” she asked.
    There was a short pause and then the tenor of the callchanged; she heard the rustle of sheets, a sleepy murmur, the quiet closing of a door. He’d stepped into the bathroom, or the hall. “She’s asleep,” he said. “I don’t want to wake her up if I don’t have to. Do I? Have to wake her up?”
    “Soon,” Lucia said. “A courier just delivered a note to me in a red envelope. Did she get one?”
    “No deliveries—shit. Hang on.” The phone rattled, set down on a counter, she guessed. He was back in less than ten seconds. “Yeah. Somebody slid it under the door. Is it a job?”
    “Don’t you usually compose the messages?”
    “Sometimes,” he said cautiously. Borden was Cross Society, in it up to his neck; Lucia liked him a great deal, but at times like these, she was bitterly aware that trust might be a separate issue. “Look, I can’t go into the way it works, not on the phone.”
    “Yes, I get your point. Open it.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Yes.”
    There was a rattle, a pause…. “It says, ‘One of you has made a mistake.’ On Eidolon Corporation letterhead. Holy shit.” She heard his breathing go faster. “They know where we are. I have to get Jazz up, right now.”
    “Wait. Have you ever seen one from Eidolon before?” Lucia realized that she was pacing, a habit when she was nervous. The store clerk was watching her. Not, she was relieved to see, in any way that implied he was a conspirator; no, this was the plain, unvarnished interest she was used to attracting. She gave him a small smile and he found something to be busy with that took him out of her line of sight.
    “Lucia, they know where we are . She’s not safe here. Hell, I’m not safe—”
    “Have they ever sent you a message before?” she asked again, with strained patience.
    His composure broke completely. “Look, I don’t get messages from anybody. I’m not a goddamn Lead!”
    She felt a hot flare of irritation. Leads . According to the Cross Society, she and Jazz were Leads, carrying major roles in the chaotic, enormous play of life and death on Planet Earth. “Actors” influenced certain events at crucial moments, but—again, according to the Cross Society’s rather esoteric theory—Leads operated at a kind of nexus point. Jazz