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little mind?” Slam, went the drawer, slam again, his stretched-out arm shoving and banging it shut. Again. Again. “Aren’t you glad you’ve got me?” Again. “How d’you like me?” Again. “D’you like your blue-eyed boy?”
    That slamming drawer vibrated all through me like a blow, a hard bruising fist, but I couldn’t let go of the desk. No matter where I turned my head, we were face to face and his light clear eyes, stolen human-mask eyes, they tugged at something in me like I really was rotten inside, rotten as the dead things that survived the autumn sickness, and that was the part of me that yearned to have him back. “I think you have to go away now,” I said, and something dragged the words out of me, in a whisper, like they were all flattened and scraped against a cold concrete floor. “This isn’t your house anymore. We dug up your secret. We know how to make dead people live again—not as zombies. As people . You can’t stop it. And you have to leave.”
    He tilted his head, his eyes soft with amusement. “Go away now,” he repeated. Slam. “Is that begging, perhaps? Is that how you tell me you’re scared, under all that idiot talk about my secrets ?” Slam. Slam. “Don’t just spit out nonsense you’ve heard the grownups say. You’re far too old for that.” Slam. “Old enough to talk.” Slam. “Reason.” Slam. “Argue. Old enough to die. But then, nothing on earth’s ever too young to die.”
    Slam, thud, slam, reverberating through my arms and shoulders and back and jaw, wrenching me between his hands like I was a dry half-broken branch. The drawer banged home and pulled back faster and faster and then it was a volley, a frenzy of clanging steel and jolting blows shredding me into splinters and I screamed, my fingers flying away from the desktop frantic to save me. I stumbled backwards, didn’t fall, wrapped my arms around myself but they couldn’t keep me still; I shook and trembled with the rattling echoes inside me, the screech of tortured metal ringing in my ears.
    He reached an arm toward me, to jolt and break me just like he had that desk, and I cringed and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, he was holding something out—my papers, the whole lot of them from all over the floor, gathered up tight and crumpling in his fist. He couldn’t have picked them all up so fast. Bits of them fell to the floor again, like torn-off corners, and then, there in his hand, they all crumbled so softly into pulp, into dust.
    “You won’t need these anymore,” he told me, watching them disintegrate. “Amy won’t need them either. Not where she’s going. There’s nothing your researchers”—that word, in his quiet mouth, was a snake poised to strike—”can tell anyone anymore, to do them any good.”
    My desk was ruined now, the frame buckled and bent and the lock-up drawer twisted nearly in half, hanging forlorn from the edge of its runners like it’d melted. The vibrations of it were still banging all through me, my whole skin prickling and painful as the warmth, spring warmth, slowly flowed back. I wasn’t going to let him think he’d really scared me.
    “We can do lots of things now,” I said. “We can bring dead people back. I can. Us lab rats, we’re new, a new kind of human. When we die, we can bring each other back. This isn’t your house anymore. We’ve kicked Death out.”
    “You think you have me figured out,” he said, and he was cheerful again, quietly genial, his face thoughtful as he surveyed the tiny anthills of dust littering my floor. “Because you know. You’re in possession of all the facts.”
    He smiled, a real smile, open and sweet like the old days. “You know all the facts. Well, know this, when the time comes: you had a chance to stop me. All you had to do was leave this place—let it sit, find another roof, tell each other all sorts of ghost stories about the God-knows-what-went-on-here as it rots in the sand. You did, for a