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the winter. There were no ticks, no deer or snakes, nothing but the dead world glossed over with the cleanness of ice and snow. Most importantly, everything sounded different in the winter: music, like her own voice, tinkled like a shattering icicle.
    The last time she prowled the winter woods in Cloud County, she’d been nineteen. And he had been twenty. They walked hand in gloved hand, harmonizing from the ridges that looked down over the valley, fully aware that they could be heard by anyone with true Tufa blood, no matter how far away. They didn’t care. At least, she didn’t. She still didn’t know for sure about him.
    She was so wrapped up in her happiness, in her ability to sing after all those years of enforced quiet, that she didn’t notice the man hiding behind the trunk of a maple tree. She passed within ten feet of him, and although the tree was too narrow to fully block him, he was dressed in winter browns that didn’t draw her eye. He held perfectly still until she passed out of sight.
    When she was gone, Junior Damo stepped out and gazed down the trail after her. He recognized her, all right: there was hardly a Tufa who wouldn’t have. Bo-Kate Wisby was one of only two Tufa who had been totally, irrevocably cast out of their society, banished from Needsville, Cloud County, and the night wind. Which made her presence here, now, that much more perplexing.
    Not that Junior had any doubt where she’d just been. There was only one destination for a Tufa on this mountain, and it was his as well. He resumed climbing.
    Junior was thirty, with the standard black hair and perfect teeth of the Tufa, but he had a slightly dazed look most of the time, as if day-to-day events confused him. Along with the forelock that fell across his eyes no matter how much he combed it back, he sported an eternally boyish appearance that helped immensely with the ladies.
    As a long-haul trucker for Diversified Transport, he had been out of town in Iowa when Rockhouse was mauled at the Pair-A-Dice, but he knew the story. It would make a great song someday: the daughter-molesting old man hated by everyone, who finally got his comeuppance at the hands of the very child he’d both raped and tried to destroy. The fact that Curnen Overbay had torn his throat out with her very teeth would be tricky to couch in lyrical poetry, but someone would manage it. And the story’s end, with Curnen leaving Cloud County along with her non-Tufa lover, would be perfect.
    He knew the injury had destroyed the old man’s voice, although his musical talent with the banjo would be undimmed. No one, in fact, played anything like old Rockhouse, with his six working fingers on each hand. No one else could.
    He reached Rockhouse’s dwelling and knocked on the door. “Rockhouse? It’s Junior Damo. I need to talk to you, sir.” There was no reply.
    He glanced up at the chimney, where a solid column of smoke emerged into the cold air. He put his ear to the door, and heard something move inside. He knocked again. “Rockhouse? My feets are getting cold out here.” He pushed on the door, and it opened inward.
    A bright shaft of clean winter sun cut across the dim interior and fell onto the old man seated at the table. It took a long moment for Junior to understand what he was seeing: the tears, the blood, the mutilated hands. “Great googa-mooga,” he said, and made a protective hand gesture.
    Rockhouse, whose glare could once reduce even the biggest, bravest man to quivering jelly, waved at the floor with his left hand. Junior saw the cylindrical device and for an instant wondered why the old man had a light saber. Then he realized what it was, picked it up, and put it on the table. The door closed behind him.
    Rockhouse put the electrolarynx to his throat. “Bo-Kate Wisby did this,” he said, the flat tones a contrast with his distorted expression. “She cut off my fingers.”
    â€œI