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been running in the spring. According to the street guide of Kehoe Glenn, she was close now to the address she’d seen on the man’s driver’s licence. She rode along the edge of the gully.
    When she got to what she thought was the house, she crept silently around the front and confirmed it was number 72. Then she returned to the ravine. She wanted darkness to fall before she tried to go in; she wanted the house empty. It wasn’t empty now. There was a face in the back window, looking down, doing something. She presumed it was the lady of the house. She was talking to someone else in the room, a person Larysa couldn’t see.
    She waited until nightfall, but the lights in the house stayed on until the very early hours of the morning, and when Larysa next saw the woman, there was no doubt she was alone, and that she had not slept. Perhaps she would never sleep again. Dawn gave way to daytime, and Larysa finished the stolen cookies by midday. Her water was almost gone. She tried not to fall asleep – the woman would
have
to leave at some point – but she dozed anyway. When she woke, the woman was still in the house.
    By the time the sun had vanished for a fourth time in the west – Wednesday night – the emptiness of her stomach and the awareness that staying in one place was dangerous convinced her she had to act. She left the bike in the trees and crept up the edge of the lawn and along the red-bricked side of the house around to the corner. From here, she could see the road. She sidled along the front of the house to the door and knocked lightly. She’d carefully kept the two parts of her weapon in different pockets in the front of her pants, but now she snapped the cartridge onto the muzzle and held the device against her leg. She’d picked up a rock the size of her fist in the ravine as back-up. It was in her left hand.
    Someone was approaching the door and when it opened, Larysa was looking at an exhausted, sallow face. There was confusion in the woman’s eyes. “Can I help you?” she asked.
    “I am lost,” said Larysa.
    The woman opened the door more fully and Larysa brought the weapon up and fired it. Two long, thin darts flew out of its mouth on the ends of two wires and penetrated the woman’s blouse. She threw her head back and stiffened. A sound as long and thin as the wires rose from the woman’s lips. Then, just as suddenly, the power left her, and she crashed in a heap in the front hallway. Larysa pushed the woman’s insensate body backwards into the house and closed the door. It had been open for all of ten seconds.

] 7 [
Wednesday, August 10, evening
    The Queesik Bay Police Service (QBPS) served the Queesik reserve as well as six communities between Mayfair and Fort Leonard. The band force was actually larger than Port Dundas’s, despite having a smaller catchment. They were well funded and their jurisdiction was absolute: anybody who committed a crime within band territory would be arrested and charged according to the QBPS’s own statutes. It was mind-boggling to Hazel how much independence band police had. But one thing was incontrovertible: petty crime was as rampant on the reserves as it was anywhere, but major crimes were much lower, and reoffending was rare. Sometimes when the subject of band police came up at the detachment, she couldn’t tell if the resentment she heard was because Indian policewere better funded and had better resources or because they closed more cases.
    “Will you look at this?” she muttered to herself. She was sitting in the public area in front of the intake desk at the Queesik Bay Police Service in a comfortable plastic chair with excellent back support. It was an open-concept headquarters: intake was a curving desk with two elevated chairs behind it, each one containing a uniformed officer either taking calls or dealing with the public. Both officers were young men in crisp light-blue uniforms.
    The station house stood on its own beside the concentration