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after you moved out—it wasn’t quite as noisy as this at first. I guess it’s time for dinner.”
    â€œOh!” Scott made himself relax. “Okay. So let’s—forget about all this morbid old stuff, and don’t look in your envelope, right?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œWe should get into dry clothes. Drier, anyway. I should have brought a tie—Claimayne won’t say anything, but he’ll be disappointed.”
    Madeline nodded and stood away from the door frame. “He’s not much of a Martian.”
    Scott blinked at her, wondering if he’d missed a sentence. “I, uh, suppose not.”
    â€œI mean, Mars is the ruler of Scorpio, and he’s a Scorpio. But Mars must not have been in Scorpio when he was born, or he’d be more assertive.” She turned to her own room and took hold of the doorknob, but paused. “Why did we call it Usabo? I forget.”
    Scott laughed shortly, still very shaky and wishing she would let the subject go. “Right afterward, we saw a storage yard, and the letters on the sign had been messed up by the wind. It was supposed to say, SEE US ABOUT OUR SPECIAL , but—”
    â€œI remember now. It said SEE USABO U TOUR SPECIAL . And we pretended it was talking about what we saw. What we thought wesaw.” She gripped the doorknob tightly. “I don’t ever want to see him and tour special again.”
    Scott looked down at the shreds of the paper on the mattress, and he wiped his hand on his damp jeans. “I don’t either,” he said. But he remembered that initial moment of being outside of time and his own identity, and he had to repeat, more to himself this time, “I don’t either.”
    Madeline was peering at him and opened her mouth to say something, but he waved at her and said, “I’ll see if I can fetch that heater up here without falling down the stairs.”

CHAPTER 3
    THE DINING ROOM TOOK up most of the southern side of the ground floor, with a narrow kitchen tucked up against the west chimney behind a pair of swinging doors. Lights in frosted-glass wall sconces cast a lemony glow over the long room and threw shadows against the plaster ceiling from the open-work beams high overhead, and two of the French windows were opened now onto a view of the rainy night and the freeway lights in the distance. The air in the dining room shifted with the smells of wet vegetation and hot enchilada sauce.
    The walls were cluttered with framed pictures and mirrors and shelves crowded with tiny figurines, and a pair of glass-fronted bookcases flanked the door to the entry hall. Four places had been set at the long table, two on each side, and two bottles of wine stood in the center; the place at the head of the table, where their aunt Amity had always sat, was bare.
    Claimayne, wearing an embroidered dressing gown and a blue silk scarf, had already maneuvered his wheelchair to the place that would have been on his mother’s right, with his back to the windows, and Ariel was just sitting down beside him when Scott and Madeline stepped in from the hall.
    â€œAh,” called Claimayne, “our future landlords!” Ariel scowled fiercely at him.
    Scott pulled out a chair on the other side of the table for Madeline. “We’ll let you both stay on rent free,” he said lightly as she sat down.
    â€œ We might let you stay,” said Ariel, “as the handyman. Isn’t that what you do these days, now that you’re always too drunk to be an artist anymore?”
    Scott had begun to pull out a chair for himself, and after a momentary pause, he continued the motion and then sat down carefully.
    Madeline shifted beside him. “Scott’s an apartment manager,” she said, “at a complex off Sunset. Not a handyman.”
    â€œWe all have a whole week together,” said Claimayne to Ariel, carefully pushing one of the bottles of wine toward her. “Would