I want you to go with so-and-so, D—— would tell a girl sometimes. Go with Bobby Bo, or Go with Long-John Larry. (There were girls who liked to go with Long-John Larry, who didn’t have that nickname for no reason.) Go with meant to let the guy have you for … as long as he wanted, in any and every way he wanted.

There were a couple of half-derelict motels up on the highway that the guys could use for this purpose—and D—— often preferred they leave the ranch, if hard drugs were going to be involved. Eerie was found dead in one of those. And Ned had furnished a cave up on the dry ridge—a laborious walk, and well out of earshot of the buildings, though just a short hop in one of the dune buggies, supposing any of them were running. He might let the other guys use it, depending. Most girls didn’t like to go with Ned.

One went, however, if One was asked to go.

Ned liked to watch things suffer. He liked to pull the legs off bugs. He could spend a whole afternoon shooting horned toads in their loose bellies with a pellet pistol, watching their fluids leak out on the sand, perusing them for symptoms of sensation. In his flat green eyes the same neutral curiosity as when he’d wire up a new room or tinker with a motor.

Ned was a mortal, a bondsman of death, and even his cruelty was shallow, like his eyes.

D—— wanted me to go with Ned one time … the time that Laurel was away with O——, I think. I know. I didn’t refuse, exactly, but somehow it didn’t happen.

D——, Ned, and I were standing in … some space somewhere. On three vertices of a triangle with the dry air crackling between us. Trust me, I thought, you wouldn’t enjoy it. I didn’t have the bayonet, but I ran my thumb along the air where the edge of it would have been.

It wasn’t that I had no taste for pain. I just didn’t have any taste for Ned. If you needed something fixed he was fine, but after that forget it.

Ned went slack and dropped the subject. Wandered off. Then again, taking Laurel to the cave was probably an even better way of hurting me.

D——’s reasons were—D—— didn’t need reasons. Of course he didn’t do it merely out of spite. It was all about breaking down the ego, doubtless, and to ensure the People would be One. Then too, when D—— forced upon you something lesser, it increased the value of his own satiric love.

In Laurel’s case, One wouldn’t have called it punishment. D—— wasn’t jealous of O——, not in that way. He was jealous of the piece of O—— he wanted for himself. D—— wouldn’t have liked it if he’d known that either Laurel or I had deflected O—— from the ranch … and probably he did have his ways of knowing that.

So. Laurel had been back from Malibu for only a few hours when D—— looked at her piercingly: I want you to go with Ned. My blood jumped in me, but I didn’t move. Laurel lowered her head and obeyed.