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to serve his own needs.
    Today he had fired her in the direction of a scientist and college professor who probably thought his life was good, his job satisfying, and his future assured.
    In this he was mistaken because he did not know that he was the target of the bullet fired by Doctor Pharos.
    Boy waited in the dark.
    She liked the dark.
    It was like a glove that fit all of her curves and extrusions. It kept her safe and reminded her of her power.
    She sat cross-legged on the dining room table in a nest of steel. Each of the eight steak knives and eleven assorted cooking kniveshad been driven into the tabletop. She had taken great pains to make sure they stood perfectly straight, a precise half circle. She didn’t use forks. Forks were stupid. Who would use a fork?
    Knives, though.
    She got wet thinking about knives.
    Her flesh trembled as she sat in her nest.
    Waiting.
    Waiting.
    The man was late tonight. That was okay, though. It was a variable in a predictable pattern.He was sometimes late. A drive through for take-out. Dry cleaning. Sometimes a trip to the bookstore for magazines. She thought it strange that he only read magazines. There wasn’t a single book in the house.
    People were strange.
    She waited.
    The music coming through her earbuds was pinpeat . Elegant Cambodian ceremonial music that once played in the courts and temples. Ten instruments collaboratingto form a sensual cloud of beauty that was unlike anything Boy had ever heard except the pihat ensembles of Thailand. So lovely. So serene.
    She liked playing it very loud at times. It was more appealing than the sound of screams.
    Now it played softly. A whisper.
    Her heart fluttered with the tinkling notes of the renard-ek, the high-pitched bamboo xylophone. Her breathed flowed in and out withthe extended notes of the srelai thom, the large quadruple-reed flute.
    So lovely.
    Her eyes wanted to drift shut, but she knew that if that happened she would fall asleep. This music could do that to her too easily.
    Instead, Boy kept her eyes open and slowly, methodically counted the lines of wood grain in the tabletop.
    When the key turned in the lock, she was awake, alert, and calm.
    The tablewas not in line of sight with the front door, else she would not have chosen it as her place to wait. The man entered the house. Boy heard him toss the keys into the ceramic dish he used for that purpose. She heard him turn the lock. The whap of mail landing on the coffee table. One thump, two thumps as he kicked off his loafers. A click, and the TV was on. CNN. Wolf Blitzer was talking aboutsomething nobody cared about. He sounded desperate to be relevant.
    The man—Professor Harry Seymour, chairman of the experimental aeronautics department at Texas A&M, Corpus Christi—came around the corner and into the dining room. Looking over his shoulder at the TV. Looking the wrong way.
    Boy smiled.
    She waited until he turned around. Waited until he saw her.
    Waited until he stiffened withshock and fear and outrage.
    Waited until Professor Seymour began to yell.
    Attempted to yell.
    She did not actually permit him to get a shout as far as his mouth.
    As Seymour opened his mouth, she pivoted sideways, supple as a dancer, and kicked him in the throat.
    The professor crashed sideways into a breakfront, fell heavily and badly, and hit his head on the way down. He slid all the way tothe carpet, choking and gagging, trying to speak, trying to yell, trying to groan, trying to cry out.
    In all of those things he failed.
    Boy slid off the table and landed on cat feet. She bent over him and punched him in the face three times using a single-knuckle punch that was delivered with a whip of the wrist. No thrust. A thrust would injure her hand. A whip injured only him.
    One blow tohis left sinus. One blow to his right sinus. A third to the bridge of his nose. His head snapped back from the foot pounds of force lurking within the speed of her punch. The back of his head hit the breakfront.
    She