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pyramid. That’s where he first attacked. Alfred Spady, 1863—”
    “Hayden,” their mother said, sharply. “That’s enough.” She straightened in her chair, lifting her hand slightly as if she’d considered slapping him, the way you might a hysterical person who is raving. “Hayden! Stop it! You’re not making any sense.”
    That wasn’t true, exactly. He
was
making some sense—to Miles at least. Hayden was talking about the Battle of Whitestone Hill, near Kulm, North Dakota, where Colonel Alfred Sully had destroyed a settlement of Yanktonai Indians in 1863. There were no pyramids, obviously, yet what Hayden was describing was fairly clear, and even quite interesting to Miles.
    But their mother was unnerved. The things Hayden’s therapist had been reporting had upset her, and later, after Hayden had gone back upstairs and when she and Miles were washing dishes, she spoke in a low voice. “Miles,” she said, “I need to ask you a favor.”
    She touched him lightly, and a piece of soapsuds transferred to his forearm, the bubbles slowly disintegrating.
    “You need to stop enabling him, Miles,” she said. “I don’t think he would get nearly so stirred up if you didn’t encourage it—”
    “I’m not!” Miles said, but he withdrew from her reproachful look. He wiped his fingers over his arm, the wet spot where she had touched him. Was Hayden sick? he wondered. Was he pretending? Miles thought uncomfortably about some of the things Hayden had been saying recently.
    “I’m thinking that I might have to eventually kill them,” Hayden had said, his voice in the darkness of the bedroom late at night. “Maybe I’ll just destroy their lives, but they actually might have to die.”
    “What are you talking about?” Miles had said—though obviously he knew who Hayden was referring to, and he felt a little frightened; he could feel the pulse of a vein in his wrist and could hear the soft tiptoeing sound of it in his ears. “Man,” he said, “why do you have to say crap like that? You’re making people think you’re crazy. It’s so
extreme!
”
    “Hmmm,” Hayden said. His voice curled sideways through the dark. Floating. Musing. “You know what, Miles?” he said at last. “I know about a lot of stuff that you don’t know about. I have powers. You realize that, don’t you?”
    “Shut up,” Miles said, and Hayden laughed, low, that wistful, teasing chuckle that Miles found both comforting and galling at the same time.
    “You know, Miles,” he said. “I really am a genius. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings before, but let’s face it. I’m a lot smarter than you, so you need to listen to me, okay?”
    Okay
, Miles thought. He believed and he didn’t believe, both at the same time. That was the condition of his life. Hayden was a schizophrenic, and he was faking. He was a genius, and he had delusions of grandeur. He was paranoid, and people were out to get him. All of these things were at least partially true at the same time.
    In the years since Hayden had gone missing—slipping out of the psychiatric hospital where he had been confined—he had become more and more elusive, harder and harder to recognize as the brother that Miles had once loved so dearly. Eventually, perhaps, that old Hayden would disappear entirely.
    If he was, in fact, a schizophrenic, he was one with an unusually practical streak. He covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, changing his name and identity, managing, along the way, to hold down various jobs and appear, to the people he met, convincingly normal. Personable, even.
    Miles, on the other hand, had been the one to live a life of nearvagrancy.He had been the one who must have come across as “feverish” and “disordered” and “obsessive” as he trailed behind Hayden’s various aliases. Too late, he came to Los Angeles, where Hayden had been working as a “residual income stream consultant” named Hayden Nash; too late in