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them, this sends awe tingling through him like the Holy Sacraments never have. A small gong is struck. Candlelight, flickering on the wall behind the small table, illuminates a portrait of the martyred Dr. Rizal. Was he a secret member as well, as the tsismis has it, or have they only borrowed his image to add weight to the ceremony?
    “The sound of the bell is the sound of you leaving your former life and entering the Society, where you will see the True Light. Your body must be given a visible sign that you are a Brother in the Society—can you endure the hot iron?”
    “I can.”
    The sword and pistol are withdrawn and his shirt pulled open, and the tip of an iron crucifix, searing hot, is pressed to a point on his right breast and held there a moment. He smells burned flesh.
    “Reflect that you are no longer Master of your body. It belongs now to the Society.”
    Educated young men have been leaving the university and taking to the hinterlands. Nothing as important as this will happen again in his lifetime. To not be part of it, to sit idly to one side, uncommitted, is unthinkable.
    “This I accept,” says Diosdado.
    “Then welcome, Brother!” The inductor and others pull down their hoods and step forward to embrace him. Diosdado recognizes the inductor as a young man who was only a year ahead of him at the Ateneo, a young man already a capitán in the rebellion, with famous battles to his name.
    “Thank you, Brothers. I will try to be worthy.”
    “There is only the signing left,” says one of the others, in Spanish now. “Your arm, please?”
    He holds out his arm and the man cuts a slit in the crook of his elbow, then hands him a quill pen as the other, who Diosdado has seen reporting at charity events for the Correo de Ultramar , lays the articles out on the table.
    He dips the point of the quill in the pooling blood and writes his name. It takes quite a while, Diosdado Concepción . They must not keep these, he thinks—what a bounty for the guardia if their agents discovered a pile of initiation documents. He finishes his signature and looks up. He is a member of a secret society, an imposter still, but an imposter for Liberty.
    “Have you chosen your code name, Brother?”
    Padre Peregrino’s lesson that day was the Arcadian story of beautiful Io, so lusted after by Zeus that he transformed her into a cow, hoping to hide her from the jealous wrath of his wife Hera. Hera discovered the ruse and set the hero Argus Panoptes, who possessed at least an extra set of eyes on the back of his head, if not a hundred of them spread over his body, to watch over the herd and warn her if Zeus approached. The Padre is a great lover of mythology, drawing, with his Jesuit wit, moral lessons from the pagan stories.
    “Your name, Brother?” asks the tallest of the hooded men, the hero of Paombong. They are all watching Diosdado now, who stands with a thread of blood dripping off his fingertips to the polished floor.
    “I am Argus,” he tells them. “He who sees all.”

SKAGUAY
    Hod is working on the wagon road three miles out of Skaguay, felling trees and dragging logs through the mud with a chain rig, when a dude strolls up with the road boss.
    “That’s the one,” says the road boss.
    The dude, checked sack suit, street shoes and the only straw boater Hod has seen since coming north, cocks his head and speaks loud enough for Hod to hear over the chopping and whipsawing and cursing of laborers.
    “I expected a larger man.”
    But he continues to watch Hod work, a little dude smile on his face, smoking three cigarettes and dancing out of the way as trees are felled, as logs are dragged and dropped on the corduroy road, and is waiting when the shift ends.
    “Niles Manigault,” he says, offering a soft hand and smiling. “And you are?”
    “Brackenridge.”
    “Splendid. May I ask, Mr. Brackenridge, if you are a practitioner of the fistic arts?”
    The words make no sense at first. Hod rolls his shoulders,