NICKof Time!

In the NICKof Time!
GREAT BOOKS
TO GIVE THIS
HOLIDAY SEASON
FEATURING THE WORKS OF:

Laurell K. Hamilton • Seth Godin • Joseph Finder
Cory Doctorow • Chris Brogan & Julien Smith
Robert J. Sawyer • Mitch Joel • Cherie Priest
Scott Sigler • Tara Hunt • Seth Harwood
J.C. Hutchins
Season’s greetings!
Books make terrific holiday gifts, but finding those perfect books for friends and
family is always a challenge. If only we could flip through those books’ pages on
our schedule. If only if the bookstore could come to us.
That’s the idea behind this In the Nick of Time! holiday sampler. We’ve included
multi-chapter excerpts from a dozen books—terrific novels crafted by bestselling
authors such as Laurell K. Hamilton, Joseph Finder and Cory Doctorow, and
world-class business books from successful entrepreneurs Seth Godin, Chris
Brogan, Mitch Joel and more.
Within this PDF, you’ll learn how to become a savvy leader of online communities,
be transported more than 100 years into the future and past, stare down corrupt
businessmen and powerful creatures from alternate worlds, discover free online
tools to improve your business, behold the world-rending reality of human
cloning, bear witness to the mysterious power of “whuffie,” experience
brainbending techno-tales set in the near future . . . and more.
Each excerpt is prefaced by information about the book and its author. Concluding
each excerpt is an order page with clickable links to several online retailers. If you
prefer to shop in bookstores, print out the order form at the end of this PDF and
present it to your local bookseller. Helpful staff will find what you’re looking for.
From high adventure to savvy business advice, you’ll find something special for the
special someones on your holiday list—including you.
May you have the happiest of holidays, filled with goodwill and peace.
—J.C. Hutchins
Share In the Nick of Time!
with friends and family!
Click here to learn more.
Project Coordinator
J.C. Hutchins
Production Support
Sheer Brick Studio
All excerpts are generously provided by their creators and publishers,

and are protected by the authors’ respective copyrights. You may freely
redistribute this document, but are not permitted to modify or sell it.
DIVINE MISDEMEANORS
Laurell K.
Hamilton
DIVINE MISDEMEANORS
You may know me best as Meredith Nic Essus, princess of faerie.
Or perhaps as Merry Gentry, Los Angeles private eye. In the fey and
mortal realms alike, my life is the stuff of royal intrigue and celebrity
drama. Among my own, I have confronted horrendous enemies, en-
dured my noble kin’s treachery and malevolence, and honored my
duty to conceive a royal heir—all for the right to claim the throne.
But I turned my back on court and crown, choosing exile in the human
world—and in the arms of my beloved Frost and Darkness.
While I may have rejected the monarchy, I cannot abandon my people.

Someone is killing the fey, which has left the LAPD baffled and my
guardsmen and me deeply disturbed. My kind are not easily captured
or killed. At least not by mortals. I must get to the bottom of these
horrendous murders, even if that means going up against Gilda, the
Fai Godmother, my rival for fey loyalties in Los Angeles.
Fairy
But even stranger things are happening. Mortals I once healed with
magic are suddenly performing miracles, a shocking phenomenon
wreaking havoc on human/faerie relations. Though I am innocent, dark
suspicions of banned magical activities swirl around me....
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laurell K. Hamilton is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of two series
that mix mystery, fantasy, magic, horror and romance. Her Anita Blake:
Vampire Hunter novels began with Guilty Pleasures. There are now more than
6 million copies of Anita in print worldwide, in 16 languages. Hamilton’s
Meredith Gentry series (of which Divine Misdemeanors is a part) features
a Fey princess and private investigator. She lives in St. Louis County, Missouri.
Learn more
mo at LaurellKHamilton.org.
Hami_9780345495969_3p_01_r1.e.qxp 11/4/09 4:52 PM Page 3
CHAPTER ONE
the smell of eucalyptus always made me think of southern

California, my home away from home; now it might forever be en-
twined with the scent of blood. I stood there with the strangely hot
wind rustling through the high leaves. It blew my summer dress in a
tangle around my legs, and spread my shoulder-length hair in a scar-
let web across my face. I grabbed my hair in handfuls so I could see,
though maybe not being able to see would have been better. The
plastic gloves pulled at my hair. They were designed so I didn’t con-
taminate evidence, not for comfort. We were surrounded by a nearly
perfect circle of the tall, pale tree trunks. In the middle of that natural
circle were the bodies.
The spicy smell of the Eucalyptus could almost hide the scent of
blood. If it had been this many adult human-sized bodies the Euca-
lyptus wouldn’t have had a chance, but they weren’t adult-sized.
They were tiny by human standards, so tiny, the size of dolls; none of
the corpses were even a foot tall, and some were less than five inches.
They lay on the ground with their bright butterfly and moth wings
frozen as if in mid-movement. Their dead hands were wrapped
around wilted flowers like a cheerful game gone horribly wrong.
They looked like so many broken Barbie dolls, except that Barbie
dolls never lay so lifelike, or so perfectly poised. No matter how hard
4 | Laurell K. Hamilton
I’d tried as a little girl, their limbs remained stiff and unyielding. The
bodies on the ground were stiff with rigor mortis, but they’d been laid
out carefully, so they had stiffened in strangely graceful, almost danc-
ing poses.
Detective Lucy Tate came to stand beside me. She was wearing a
pants suit complete with jacket and a white button-up shirt that
strained a little across the front because Lucy, like me, had too much
figure for most button-up shirts. But I wasn’t a police detective so I
didn’t have to pretend I was a man to try to fit in. I worked at a private
detective agency that used the fact that I was Princess Meredith, the
only American-born fey royal, and back working for the Grey Detec-
tive Agency: Supernatural Problems; Magical Solutions. People
loved paying money to see the princess, and have her hear their prob-
lems; I’d begun to feel a little like a freak show until today. Today I
would have loved to be back in the office listening to some mundane
matter that didn’t really need my special brand of help, but was just a
human rich enough to pay for my time. I’d have rather been doing a
lot of things than standing here staring down at a dozen dead fey.
“What do you think?” she asked.
What I really thought was that I was glad the bodies were small so
that the trees covered most of the smell, but that would be admitting
weakness, and you didn’t do that on the rare occasions you got to
work with the police. You had to be professional and tough or they
thought less of you, even the female cops, maybe especially them.
“They’re laid out like something from a children’s storybook down
to the dancing poses and the flowers in their hands.”
Lucy nodded. “It’s not just like, it is.”
“Is what?” I asked, looking at her. Her dark brunette hair was cut
shorter than mine, and held back by a thick band so that nothing ob-
scured her vision, as I still fought with my own hair. She looked cool
and professional.
She used one plastic-gloved hand to hold out a plastic-wrapped
page. She held it out to me, though I knew not to touch it even with
Divine Misdemeanors | 5
the gloves. I was a civilian, and I had been very aware of that as I
walked through all the police on the way to the center of all this ac-
tivity. The police were never that fond of the private detective, no
matter what you see on television, and I wasn’t even human. Of
course, if I’d been human they wouldn’t have called me down to the
murder scene in the first place. I was here because I was a trained de-
tective and a faerie princess. One without the other wouldn’t have
gotten me under the police tape.
I stared at the page. The wind tried to snatch it from her hand, and
she used both hands to hold it steady for me. It was an illustration
from a children’s book. It was dancing faeries with flowers in their
hands. I stared at it for a second more, then looked down at the bod-
ies on the ground. I forced myself to study their dead forms, then
looked at the illustration.
“They’re identical,” I said.
“I believe so, though we’ll have to have some kind of flower expert
tell us if the flowers match up bloom for bloom, but except for that
our killer has duplicated the scene.”
I stared from one to the other again, those laughing happy faces in
the picture and the very still, very dead ones on the ground. Their
skin had begun to change color already, turning that bluish-purple
cast of the dead.
“He, or she, had to dress them,” I pointed out. “No matter how
many illustrations you see with these little blousy dresses and loin-
cloth things, most demi-fey outside of faerie don’t dress like this. I’ve
seen them in three-piece suits and formal evening wear.”
“You’re sure they didn’t wear the clothes here?” she asked.
I shook my head. “They wouldn’t have matched perfectly without
planning it this way.”
“We were thinking he lured them down here with a promise of an
acting part, a short film,” she said.
I thought about it, then shrugged. “Maybe, but they’d have come
to the circle anyway.”
“Why?”
“The demi-fey, the small winged fey, have a particular fondness for
natural circles.”
“Explain.”
“The stories only tell humans not to step into a ring of toadstools,
or a ring of actual dancing fey, but it can be any natural circle. Flow-
ers, stones, hills, or trees, like this circle. They come to dance in the
circle.”
“So they came down here to dance and he brought the clothes?”
She frowned at me.
“You think that it works better if he lured them down here to film
them,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Either that or he watched them,” I said, “so he knew they came
down here on certain nights to dance.”
“That would mean he or she was stalking them,” Lucy said.
“It would.”
“If I go after the film angle, I can find the costume rental and the
advertisement for actors for his short film.” She made little quote
marks in the air for the word film.
“If he’s just a stalker and he made the costumes, then you have
fewer leads to follow.”
“Don’t say he. You don’t know that the killer is a he.”
“You’re right, I don’t. Are you assuming that the killer isn’t
human?”
“Should we be?” she asked, her voice neutral.
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine a human strong enough or fast
enough to grab six demi-fey and slit their throats before the others
could escape or attack him.”
“Are they as delicate as they look?” she asked.
I almost smiled, and then didn’t feel like finishing it. “No, Detec-
tive, they aren’t. They’re much stronger than they look, and incredi-
bly fast.”
“So we aren’t looking for a human?”
“I didn’t say that. I said that physically humans couldn’t do this, but
there is some magic that might help them do it.”
“What kind of magic?”
“I don’t have a spell in mind. I’m not human. I don’t need spells to
use against other fey, but I know there are stories of magic that can
make us weak, catchable, and hurtable.”
“Yeah, aren’t these kind of fey supposed to be immortal?”
I stared down at the tiny lifeless bodies. Once the answer would
have simply been yes, but I’d learned from some of the lesser fey at
the Unseelie Court that some of them had died falling down stairs,
and other mundane causes. Their immortality wasn’t what it used to
be, but we had not publicized that to the humans. One of the things
that kept us safe was that the humans thought they couldn’t hurt us
easily. Had some human learned the truth and exploited it? Was the
mortality among the lesser fey getting worse? Or had they been im-
mortal and magic had stolen it away?
“Merry, you in there?”
I nodded and looked at her, glad to look away from the bodies.
“Sorry, I just never get used to seeing this kind of thing.”
“Oh, you get used to it,” she said, “but I hope you don’t see enough
dead bodies to be that jaded.” She sighed, as if she wished she wasn’t
that jaded either.
“You asked me if the demi-fey are immortal, and the answer is yes.”
It was all I could say to her until I found out if the mortality of the fey
was spreading. So far it had only been a few cases inside faerie.
“Then how did the killer do this?”
I’d only seen one other demi-fey killed by a blade that wasn’t cold
iron. A noble of the Unseelie Court had wielded that one. A noble of
faerie, and my blood kin. We’d killed the sidhe who did it, although
he said that he hadn’t meant to kill her. He had just meant to wound
her through the heart as her desertion of him had wounded his
heart—poetic and the kind of romantic drivel you get when you’re
used to being surrounded by beings who can have their heads
chopped off and still live. That last bit hasn’t worked in a long time
even among the sidhe, but we haven’t shared that either. No one likes
to talk about the fact that their people are losing their magic and their
power.
Was the killer a sidhe? Somehow I didn’t think so. They might kill
a lesser fey out of arrogance or a sense of privilege, but this had the
taste of something much more convoluted than that—a motive that
only the killer would understand.
I looked carefully at my own reasoning to make certain I wasn’t
talking myself out of the Unseelie Court, the Darkling Throng, being
suspects. The court that I had been offered rulership of and given up
for love. The tabloids were still talking about the fairy-tale ending,
but people had died, some of them by my hand, and, like most fairy
tales, it had been more about blood and being true to yourself than
about love. Love had just been the emotion that had led me to what
I truly wanted, and who I truly was. I guess there are worse emotions
to follow.
“What are you thinking, Merry?”
“I’m thinking that I wonder what emotion led the killer to do this,
to want to do this.”
“What do you mean?”
“It takes something like love to put this much attention into the de-
tails. Did the killer love this book or did he love the small fey? Did he
hate this book as a child? Is it the clue to some horrible trauma that
twisted him to do this?”
“Don’t start profiling on me, Merry; we’ve got people paid to do
that.”
“I’m just doing what you taught me, Lucy. Murder is like any skill;
it doesn’t fall out of the box perfect. This is perfect.”
“The killer probably spent years fantasizing about this scene,
Merry. They wanted, needed it to be perfect.”
“But it never is. That’s what serial killers say when the police inter-
view them. Some of them try again and again for the real-life kill to
match the fantasy, but it never does, so they kill again and again to try
to make it perfect.”
Lucy smiled at me. “You know, that’s one of the things I always
liked about you.”
“What?” I asked.
“You don’t just rely on the magic; you actually try to be a good de-
tective.”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?” I asked.
“Yeah, but you’d be surprised how many psychics and wizards are
great at the magic but suck at the actual detecting part.”
“No, I wouldn’t, but remember, I didn’t have that much magic
until a few months ago.”
“That’s right, you were a late bloomer.” And she smiled again.
Once I’d thought it was strange that the police could smile over a
body, but I’d learned that you either lighten up about it or you trans-
fer out of homicide, or better yet, you get out of police work.
“I’ve already checked, Merry. There are no other homicides even
close to this one. No demi-fey killed in a group. No costumes. No
book illustration left. This is one of a kind.”
“Maybe it is, but you helped teach me that killers don’t start out
this good. Maybe they just planned it perfectly and got lucky that it
was this perfect, or maybe they’ve had other kills that weren’t this
good, this thought-out, but it would be staged, and it would have this
feel to it.”
“What kind of feel?” she asked.
“You thought film not just because it would give you more leads,
but because there’s something dramatic about it all. The setting, the
choice of victims, the display, the book illustration; it’s showy.”
She nodded. “Exactly,” she said.
The wind played with my purple sundress until I had to hold it to
keep it from flipping up and flashing the police line behind us.
“I’m sorry to drag you out to something like this on a Saturday,
Merry,” she said. “I did try to call Jeremy.”
“He’s got a new girlfriend and keeps turning off his phone.” I didn’t
begrudge my boss, the first semi-serious lover he’d had in years. Not
really.
“You look like you had a picnic planned.”
“Something like that,” I said, “but this didn’t do your Saturday any
good either.”
She smiled ruefully. “I didn’t have any plans.” She stabbed a
thumb in the direction of the other police. “Your boyfriends are mad
at me for making you look at dead bodies while you’re pregnant.”
My hands automatically went to my stomach, which was still very
flat. I wasn’t showing yet, though with twins the doctor had warned
me that it could go from nothing to a lot almost overnight.
I glanced back to see Doyle and Frost, standing with the police-
men. My two men were no taller than some of the police—six feet
and some inches isn’t that unusual—but the rest stood out painfully.
Doyle had been called the Queen’s Darkness for a thousand years,
and he fit his name, black from skin to hair to the eyes behind their
black wraparound sunglasses. His black hair was in a tight braid down
his back. Only the silver earrings that climbed from lobe to the
pointed tip of his ears relieved the black-on-black of his jeans, T-shirt,
and leather jacket. The last was to hide the weapons he was carrying.
He was the captain of my bodyguards, as well as one of the fathers to
my unborn children, and one of my dearest loves. The other dearest
love stood beside him like a pale negative, skin as white as my own,
but Frost’s hair was actually silver, like Christmas tree tinsel, shining
in the sunlight. The wind played with his hair so that it floated out-
ward in a shimmering wave, looking like some model with a wind
machine, but even though his hair was near ankle-length and un-
bound, it did not tangle in the wind. I’d asked him about that, and
he’d said simply, “The wind likes my hair.” I hadn’t known what to say
to that so I hadn’t tried.
His sunglasses were gunmetal gray with darker gray lenses to hide
the paler gray of his eyes, the most unremarkable part of him, really.
He favored designer suits, but he was actually in one of the few pairs
of blue jeans he owned, with a silk T-shirt and a suit jacket to hide his
own weapons, all in grays. We actually had been planning on an out-
ing to the beach, or I’d have never gotten Frost out of slacks and into
jeans. His face might have been the more traditionally handsome of
the two, but it wasn’t by much. They were as they had been for cen-
turies, the light and dark of each other.
The policemen in their uniforms, suits, and more casual clothes
seemed like shadows not as bright, not as alive as my two men, but
maybe everyone in love thought the same thing. Maybe it was not
being immortal warriors of the sidhe but simply love that made them
stand out to my eye.
Lucy had gotten me through the police line because I’d worked
with the police before, and I was actually a licensed private detective
in this state. Doyle and Frost weren’t, and they had never worked with
the police on a case, so they had to stay behind the line away from any
would-be clues.
“If I find out anything for certain that seems pertinent about this
kind of magic, I will let you know.” It wasn’t a lie, not the way I
worded it. The fey, and especially the sidhe, are known for never
lying, but we’ll deceive you until you’ll think the sky is green and the
grass is blue. We won’t tell you the sky is green and the grass is blue,
but we will leave you with that definite impression.
“You think there’ll be an earlier murder,” she said.
“If not, this guy, or girl, got very lucky.”
Lucy motioned at the bodies. “I’m not sure I’d call this lucky.”
“No murderer is this good the first time, or did you get a new flavor
of killer while I was away in faerie?”
“Nope. Most murders are pretty standard. Violence level and vic-
tim differs but you’re about eighty to ninety percent more likely to be
killed by your nearest and dearest than by a stranger, and most killing
is depressingly ordinary.”
“This one’s depressing,” I said, “but it’s not ordinary.”
“No, it’s not ordinary. I’m hoping this one perfect scene kind of got
it out of the killer’s system.”
“You think it will?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t.”
“Can I alert the local demi-fey to be careful, or are you trying to
withhold the victim profile from the media?”
“Warn them, because if we don’t and it happens again, we’ll get ac-
cused of being racists, or is that speciesist?” She shook her head, walk-
ing back toward the police line. I followed her, glad to be leaving the
bodies behind.
“Humans can interbreed with the demi-fey, so I don’t think
speciesist applies.”
“I couldn’t breed with something the size of a doll. That’s just
wrong.”
“Some of them have two forms, one small and one not much
shorter than me.”
“Five feet? Really, from eight inches tall to five feet?”
“Yes, really. It’s a rare ability, but it happens, and the babies are fer-
tile, so I don’t think it’s quite a different species.”
“I didn’t mean any offense,” she said.
“None taken, I’m just explaining.”
We were almost to the police line and my visibly anxious
boyfriends. “Enjoy your Saturday,” she said.
“I’d say you too, but I know you’ll be here for hours.”
“Yeah, I think your Saturday will be a lot more fun than mine.” She
looked at Doyle and Frost as the police finally let them move forward.
Lucy was giving them an admiring look behind her sunglasses. I
didn’t blame her.
I slipped the gloves off even though I hadn’t touched a thing. I
dropped them onto the mass of other discarded gloves that was on this
side of the tape. Lucy held the tape up for me and I didn’t even have
to stoop. Sometimes short is good.
“Oh, check out the flowers, florists,” I said.
“Already on it,” she said.
“Sorry, sometimes I get carried away with you letting me help.”
“No, all ideas are welcome, Merry, you know that. It’s why I called
you down here.” She waved at me and went back to her murder
scene. We couldn’t shake because she was still wearing gloves and
carrying evidence.
Doyle and Frost were almost to me, but we weren’t going to get to
the beach right away either. I had to warn the local demi-fey, and try
to figure out a way to see if the mortality had spread to them, or if
there was magic here in Los Angeles that could steal their immortal-
ity. There were things that would kill us eventually, but there wasn’t
much that would allow you to slit the throat of the winged-kin. They
were the essence of faerie, more so even than the high court nobles.
If I found out anything certain I’d tell Lucy, but until I had something
that was useful I’d keep my secrets. I was only part human; most of me
was pure fey, and we know how to keep a secret. The trick was how to
warn the local demi-fey without causing a panic. Then I realized that
there wasn’t a way. The fey are just like humans—they understand
fear. Some magic, a little near-immortality, doesn’t make you un-
afraid; it just gives you a different list of fears.
CHAPTER TWO
frost tried to hug me, but i put a hand on his stomach, too
short to really touch his chest. Doyle said, “She’s trying to appear
strong in front of the policemen.”
“We shouldn’t have let you come see this now,” Frost said.
“Jeremy could have given a fey’s opinion.”
“Jeremy is the boss and he’s allowed to turn his phone off on a Sat-
urday,” I said.
“Then Jordan or Julian Kane. They are psychics and practicing
wizards.”
“They’re only human, Frost. Lucy wanted a fey to see this crime
scene.”
“You shouldn’t have to see this in your condition.”
I leaned in and spoke low. “I am a detective. It’s my job, and it’s our
people up there dead on the hillside. I may never be queen, but I’m
the closest they have here in L.A. Where else should a ruler be when
her people are threatened?”
Frost started to say something else, but Doyle touched his arm.
“Let it go, my friend. Let us just get her back to the vehicle and be-
gone.”
I put my arm through Doyle’s leather-clad arm, though I thought
it was too hot for the leather. Frost trailed us, and a glance showed
that he was doing his job of searching the area for threats. Unlike a
human bodyguard, Frost looked from sky to ground, because when
faerie is your potential enemy, danger can come from nearly any-
where.
Doyle was keeping an eye out too, but his attention was divided by
trying to keep me from twisting an ankle in the sandals that looked
great with the dress but sucked for uneven ground. They didn’t have
too tall a heel, they were just very open and not supportive. I won-
dered what I’d wear when I got really pregnant. Did I have any prac-
tical shoes except for jogging ones?
The major danger had passed when I’d killed my main rival for the
throne and given up the crown. I’d done everything I could to make
myself both too dangerous to tempt anyone and harmless to the no-
bles and their way of life. I was in voluntary exile, and I’d made it
clear that it was a permanent move. I didn’t want the throne; I just
wanted to be left alone. But since some of the nobles had spent the
last thousand years plotting to get closer to the throne, they found my
decision a little hard to believe.
So far no one had tried to kill me, or anyone close to me, but Doyle
was the Queen’s Darkness, and Frost was the Killing Frost. They had
earned their names, and now that we were all in love and I was carry-
ing their children, it would be a shame to let something go wrong.
This was the end of our fairy tale, and maybe we had no enemies left,
but old habits aren’t always a bad thing. I felt safe with them, except
that while I loved them more than life itself, if they died trying to pro-
tect me I’d never recover from it. There are all sorts of ways to die
without dying.
When we were out of hearing of the human police, I told them all
my fears about the killings.
“How do we find out if the lesser fey here are easier to kill?” Frost
asked.
Doyle said, “In other days it would have been easy enough.”
I stopped walking, which forced him to stop. “You’d just pick a few
and see if you could slit their throats?”
“If my queen had asked it, yes,” he said.
I started to pull away from him, but he held my arm in his. “You
knew what I was before you took me to your bed, Meredith. It is a lit-
tle late for shock and innocence.”
“The queen would say, ‘Where is my Darkness? Someone bring
me my Darkness.’ You would appear, or simply step closer to her, and
then someone would bleed or die,” I said.
“I was her weapon and her general. I did what I was bid.”
I studied his face, and I knew it wasn’t just the black wraparound
sunglasses that kept me from reading him. He could hide everything
behind his face. He had spent too many years beside a mad queen,
where the wrong look at the wrong moment could get you sent to the
Hallway of Mortality, the torture chamber. Torture could last a long
time for the immortal, especially if you healed well.
“I was lesser fey once, Meredith,” Frost said. He’d been Jack Frost,
and, literally, human belief plus needing to be stronger to protect the
woman he loved had turned him into the Killing Frost. But once he
had been simply little Jackie Frost, just one minor being in the en-
tourage of Winter’s power. The woman he had changed himself com-
pletely for was centuries in her human grave, and now he loved me:
the only non-aging, non-immortal sidhe royal ever. Poor Frost—he
couldn’t seem to love people who would outlive him.
“I know you were not always sidhe.”
“But I remember when he was the Darkness to me, and I feared
him as much as any. Now he is my truest friend and my captain, be-
cause that other Doyle was centuries before you were born.”
I studied his face, and even around his sunglasses I saw the gentle-
ness—a piece of softness that he’d only let me see in the last few
weeks. I realized that just as he would have had Doyle’s back in bat-
tle, he did the same now. He had distracted me from my anger, and
put himself in the way of it, as if I were a blade to be avoided.
I held out a hand to him, and he took it. I stopped pulling against
Doyle’s arm, and just held them both. “You are right. You are both
right. I knew Doyle’s history before he came to my side. Let me try
this again.” I looked up at Doyle, still with Frost’s hand in mine. “You
aren’t suggesting that we test our theory on random fey?”
“No, but in honesty I do not have another way to test.”
I thought about it, and then shook my head. “Neither do I.”
“Then what are we to do?” Frost asked.
“We warn the demi-fey, and then we go to the beach.”
“I thought this would end our day out,” Doyle said.
“When you can’t do anything else, you go about your day. Besides,
everyone is meeting us at the beach. We can talk about this problem
there as well as at the house. Why not let some of us enjoy the sand
and water while the rest of us debate immortality and murder?”
“Very practical,” Doyle said.
I nodded. “We’ll stop off at the Fael Tea Shop on the way to the
beach.”
“The Fael is not on the way to the beach,” Doyle said.
“No, but if we leave word there about the demi-fey, the news will
spread.”
“We could leave word with Gilda, the Fairy Godmother,” Frost
said.
“No, she might keep the knowledge to herself so she can say later
that I didn’t warn the demi-fey because I thought I was too good to
care.”
“Do you truly think she hates you more than she loves her peo-
ple?” Frost asked.
“She was the ruling power among the fey exiles in Los Angeles.
The lesser fey went to her to settle disputes. Now they come to me.”
“Not all of them,” Frost said.
“No, but enough that she thinks I’m trying to take over her busi-
ness.”
“We want no part of her businesses, legal or illegal,” Doyle said.
“She was human once, Doyle. It makes her insecure.”
“Her power does not feel human,” Frost said, and he shivered.
I studied his face. “You don’t like her.”
“Do you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“There is always something twisted inside the minds and bodies of
humans who are given access to the wild magic of faerie,” Doyle said.
“She got a wish granted,” I said, “and she wished to be a fairy god-
mother, because she didn’t understand that there is no such thing
among us.”
“She’s made herself into a power to be reckoned with in this city,”
Doyle said.
“You’ve scouted her, haven’t you?”
“She all but threatened you outright if you kept trying to steal her
people away. I investigated a potential enemy’s stronghold.”
“And?” I asked.
“She should be frightened of us,” he said, and his voice was that
voice of before, when he’d been only a weapon and not a person
to me.
“We stop by the Fael, and then we’ll talk about what to do with the
other godmother. If we tell her and she tells no one, then it is we who
can say that she cares more about her jealousy of me than about her
own people.”
“Clever,” Doyle said.
“Ruthless,” Frost said.
“It would only be ruthless if I didn’t warn the demi-fey some other
way. I won’t risk another life for some stupid power play.”
“It is not stupid to her, Meredith,” Doyle said. “It is all the power
she has ever had, or will ever have. People will do very bad things to
keep their perceived power intact.”
“Is she dangerous to us?”
“In a full frontal assault, no, but if it is trickery and deceit, then she
has fey who are loyal to her and hate the sidhe.”
“Then we keep an eye on them.”
“We are,” he said.
“Are you spying on people without telling me?” I asked.
“Of course I am,” he said.
“Shouldn’t you run things like that by me first?”
“Why?”
I looked at Frost. “Can you explain to him why I should know
these things?”
“I think he is treating you like most royals want to be treated,” said
Frost.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Plausible deniability is very important among monarchs,” he said.
“You see Gilda as a fellow monarch?” I asked.
“She sees herself as such,” Doyle said. “It is always better to let
petty kings keep their crowns until we want the crown and the head it
sits upon.”
“This is the twenty-first century, Doyle. You can’t run our life like
it’s the tenth century.”
“I have been watching your news programs and reading books on
governments that are present-day, Merry. Things have not changed so
very much. It is just more secret now.”
I wanted to ask him how he knew that. I wanted to ask him if he
knew government secrets that would make me doubt my govern-
ment, and my country. But in the end, I didn’t ask. For one thing, I
wasn’t certain he’d tell me the truth if he thought it would upset me.
And for another, one mass murder seemed like enough for one day. I
had Frost call home and warn our own demi-fey to stay close to the
house and to be wary of strangers, because the only thing I was sure
of was that it wasn’t one of us. Beyond that I had no ideas. I’d worry
about spies and governments on another day, when the image of the
winged dead weren’t still dancing behind my eyes.
CHAPTER THREE
i drove to the fael tea shop, and doyle was right. it wasn’t
close to the beach, where everyone would be waiting. It was blocks
away in a part of town that had once been a bad area but had been
gentrified, which used to simply mean claimed by the yuppies, but
had come to mean a place that the faeries had moved into and made
more magical. It would then become a tourist stronghold, and a place
for teens and college students to hang out. The young have always
been drawn to the fey. It’s why for centuries you put charms on your
children to keep us from taking the best and brightest and the most
creative. We like artists.
Doyle had his usual death grip on the door and the dashboard. He
always rode that way in the front seat. Frost was less afraid of the car
and L.A. traffic, but Doyle insisted that as captain he should be be-
side me. The fact that it was an act of bravery to him just made it cute,
though I kept the cute comment to myself. I wasn’t certain how he
would take it.
He managed to say, “I do like this car better than the other one you
drive. It’s higher from the ground.”
“It’s an SUV,” I said, “more a truck than a car.” I was looking for a
parking spot, and not having much luck. This was a section of town
where people came to stroll on a lovely Saturday, and there were lots
of people, which meant lots of cars. It was L.A. Everyone drove every-
where.
The SUV actually belonged to Maeve Reed, like so much of our
stuff. Her chauffeur had offered to drive us around, but the moment
the police called, the limo stayed at home. I had enough problems
with the police not taking me seriously without showing up in a limo.
I’d never live that down, and Lucy wouldn’t live it down either, and
that mattered more. It was her job. In a sense, the other police were
right; I was just sightseeing.
I knew that part of the problem was the car itself, all that technol-
ogy and metal. Except that I knew several lesser fey who owned cars
and drove. Most of the sidhe had no trouble in the big modern sky-
scrapers, and they had plenty of metal and technology. Doyle was also
afraid of airplanes. It was one of his few weaknesses.
Frost called out, “Parking spot.” He pointed and I maneuvered the
huge SUV toward it. I had to speed up and almost hit a smaller car
that was trying to outmuscle me for the spot. It made Doyle swallow
hard and let out a shaky breath. I wanted to ask him why riding in the
back of the limo didn’t bother him to this degree, but refrained. I
wasn’t sure if pointing out that he was only this afraid in the front seat
of a car would make him more afraid in the limo. That we did not
need.
I got the parking spot, though parallel parking the Escalade wasn’t
my favorite thing to do. Parking the Escalade was never easy, and par-
allel parking was like getting a master’s degree in parking. Would that
make parking a semi the doctoral test? I really never wanted to drive
anything bulkier than this SUV, so I’d probably never find out.
I could see Fael’s sign from the car, just a few storefronts down. We
hadn’t even had to go around the block once; perfect.
I waited for Doyle to make his shaky way out of the car, and for
Frost to unbuckle and come around to my door. I knew better than to
simply get out without one of them beside me. They had all made
very certain that I understood that part of being a good bodyguard was
to train your guardee how to be guarded. Their tall bodies blocked
me at almost every turn when we were on the street. If there had been
a credible threat I’d have had more guards. Two was minimum and
precautionary. I liked precautionary—it meant no one was trying to
kill me. The fact that it was a novelty that no one was trying said a lot
about the last few years of my life. Maybe it wasn’t the happily ever
after the tabloids were painting, but it was definitely happier.
Frost helped me down from the SUV, which I needed. I always
had a moment of feeling childlike when I had to climb in or out of
the Escalade. It was like sitting in a chair where your feet swing. It
made me feel like I was six again, but Frost’s arm under mine, the
height and solidness of him, reminded me that I was no longer a
child, and decades from six.
Doyle’s voice came. “Fear Dearg, what are you doing here?”
Frost stopped in mid-motion and put his body more solidly in front
of me, shielding me, because Fear Dearg was not a name. The Fear
Dearg were very old, the remnants of a faerie kingdom that had pre-
dated the Seelie and the Unseelie courts. That made the Fear Dearg
more than three thousand years old, at minimum. Since they did not
breed, for they had no females, they were all simply that old. They
were somewhere between a brownie, a hobgoblin, and a nightmare—
a nightmare that could make a man think that a stone was his wife, or
that a cliff into the sea a path of safety. And some delighted in the
kind of torture that would have pleased my aunt. I’d once seen her
skin a sidhe noble until he was unrecognizable and then she made
him follow her on a leash like a dog.
The Fear Dearg could be taller than an average human or they
could be shorter than me by a foot, and almost any size in between.
The only sameness from one to the other was that they were not hu-
manly handsome and they wore red.
The voice that answered Doyle’s question was high pitched though
definitely male, but it was querulous with that tone that usually
means great age in a human. I’d never heard that tone in the voice of
a fey. “Why, I saved a parking spot for you, cousin.”
“We are not kin, and how did you know to save a parking place for
us?” Doyle asked, and there was now no hint of his weakness in the
car in his deep voice.
He ignored the question. “Oh, come. I’m a shape-shifting, illusion-
using goblin, and so was your father. Phouka is not so far from Fear
Dearg.”
“I am the Queen’s Darkness, not some nameless Fear Dearg.”
“Ah, and there’s the rub,” he said in his thin voice. “It’s a name I’m
wanting.”
“What does that mean, Fear Dearg?” Doyle asked.
“It means I ha’ a story to tell, and it would best be told inside the
Fael, where your host and my boss awaits ye. Or would ye deny the
hospitality of our establishment?”
“You work at the Fael?” Doyle asked.
“I do.”
“What is your job there?”
“I am security.”
“I didn’t know the Fael needed extra security.”
“Me boss felt the need. Now I will ask once more, will you refuse
our hospitality? And think long on this one, cousin, for the old rules
still apply to my kind. I have no choice.”
That was a tricky question, because one of the things that some
Fear Deargs were known for was appearing on a dark, wet night and
asking to warm before the fire. Or the Fear Dearg could be the only
shelter on a stormy night, and a human might wander in, attracted by
their fire. If the Fear Dearg were refused or treated discourteously,
they would use their glamour for ill. If treated well, they left you un-
harmed, and sometimes did chores around the house as a thank-you,
or left the human with a gift of luck for a time, but usually the best
you could hope for was to be left in peace.
But I could not hide behind Frost’s broad body forever, and I was
beginning to feel a little silly. I knew the reputation of the Fear Dearg,
and I also knew that for some reason the other fey, especially the old
ones, didn’t care for them. I touched Frost’s chest, but he wouldn’t
move until Doyle told him to, or I made a fuss. I didn’t want to make
a fuss in front of strangers. The fact that my guards sometimes lis-
tened more to each other than to me was still something we were
working out.
“Doyle, he has done nothing but be courteous to us.”
“I have seen what his kind does to mortals.”
“Is it worse than what I’ve seen our kind do to each other?”
Frost actually looked down at me then, being alert for whatever
threat might, or might not, be coming. The look even through his
glasses said that I was oversharing in front of someone who was not a
member of our court.
“We heard what the gold king did to you, Queen Meredith.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The gold king was my ma-
ternal uncle Taranis, more a great-uncle, and king of the Seelie
Court, the golden throng. He’d used magic as a date-rape drug, and I
had evidence in a forensic storage unit somewhere that he had raped
me. We were trying to get him tried among the humans for that rape.
It was some of the worst publicity the Seelie court had ever had.
I tried to peer around Frost’s body and see who I was talking to, but
Doyle’s body blocked me, too, so I talked to the empty air. “I am not
queen.”
“You are not queen of the Unseelie Court, but you are queen of the
sluagh, and if I belong to any court left outside the Summerlands, it
is King Sholto’s sluagh.”
Faerie, or the Goddess, or both, had crowned me twice that last
night. The first crown had been with Sholto inside his faerie mound.
I had been crowned with him as King and Queen of the Sluagh, the
dark host, the nightmares of faerie so dark that even the Unseelie
would not let them skulk about their own mound, but in a fight they
were always the first called. The crown had vanished from me when
the second crown, which would have made me high queen of all the
Unseelie lands, had appeared on my head. Doyle would have been
king to my queen there, and it was once traditional that all the kings
of Ireland had married the same woman, the Goddess, who had once
been a real queen whom each king “married,” at least for a night. We
had not always played by the traditional human rules of monogamy.
Sholto was one of the fathers of the children I carried, so the God-
dess had shown all of us. So technically I was still his queen. Sholto
had not pressed that idea in this month back home; he seemed to un-
derstand that I was struggling to find my footing in this new, more-
permanent exile.
All I could think to say aloud was, “I didn’t think the Fear Dearg
owed allegiance to any court.”
“Some of us fought with the sluagh in the last wars. It allowed us to
bring death and pain without the rest of you good folk”—and he
made sure the last phrase held bitterness and contempt in it—“hunt-
ing us down and passing sentence on us for doing what is in our na-
ture. The sidhe of either court have no lawful call on the Fear Dearg,
do they, kinsman?”
“I will not acknowledge kinship with you, Fear Dearg, but Mere-
dith is right. You have acted with courtesy. I can do no less.” It was in-
teresting that Doyle had dropped the “Princess” he normally used in
front of all lesser fey, but he had not used queen either, so he was in-
terested in the Fear Dearg acknowledging me as queen, and that was
very interesting to me.
“Good,” the Fear Dearg said. “Then I will take you to Dobbin, ah,
Robert, he now calls himself. Such richness to be able to name yer-
self twice. It’s a waste when there are others nameless and left want-
ing.”
“We will listen to your tale, Fear Dearg, but first we must talk to
any demi-fey who are at the Fael,” I said.
“Why?” he asked, and there was far too much curiosity in that one
word. I remembered then that some Fear Dearg demand a story from
their human hosts, and if the story isn’t good enough, they torture and
kill them, but if the story is good enough they leave them with a bless-
ing. What would make a being thousands of years old care that much
for stray stories, and what was his obsession with names?
“That is not your business, Fear Dearg,” Doyle said.
“It’s all right, Doyle. Everyone will know soon enough.”
“No, Meredith, not here, not on the street.” There was something
in the way he said it that made me pause. But it was Frost’s hand
squeezing my arm, making me look at him, that made me realize that
a Fear Dearg might be able to kill the demi-fey. He might be our
killer, for the Fear Dearg walked outside many of the normal rules of
our kind, for all this one’s talk of belonging to the kingdom of the slu-
agh.
Was our mass murderer standing on the other side of my
boyfriends? Wouldn’t that have been convenient? I felt a flash of hope
flare inside me, but let it die as quickly as it had risen. I’d worked mur-
der cases before, and it was never that easy. Murderers did not meet
you on the street just after you’d left the scene of their crime. But it
would be nifty if just this once it really was that easy. Then I realized
that Doyle had realized the possibility that the Fear Dearg might be
our murderer the moment he saw him; that was why the extreme cau-
tion.
I felt suddenly slow, and not up to the job. I was supposed to be the
detective, and Lucy had called me in because of my expertise on
faeries. Some expert I turned out to be.
GET MORE OF
DIVINE MISDEMEANORS
To purchase copies of Divine Misdemeanors for holiday gifts,
print the order form at the end of this PDF document and
present it to your favorite local bookseller.
It is also available at these U.S.-based online retailers:

(click retailer name to order)
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Books-A-Million
Indiebound
Visit
LaurellKHamilton.org
to learn more about the book.
TRIBES & LINCHPIN
Seth
Godin
TRIBES & LINCHPIN
About a year ago, blogger and entrepreneur Seth Godin published a
book called Tribes. It's about leadership and marketing and faith and
connection and making a difference in the world. Bookseller 8CR
chose Tribes as its book of the year, and it quickly hit just about every
bestseller list. The response to that book led to Godin's latest,
Linchpin, a book that doesn't come out until January 26th. We're
including an exclusive
exclusi first excerpt here as well.
The Web can do amazing things, but it can’t provide leadership. If you
think leadership is for other people, think again: leaders come in
surprising packages. Tribes will make you think (really think) about the
opportunities in leading your employees, customers, investors,
hobbyists, or readers. It’s not easy, but it’s easier than you think.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Godin is author of ten books that have been bestsellers around the world
and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. He is
responsible for many words in the marketer's vocabulary, including
permission marketing, ideaviruses, purple cows, the dip and sneezers. His
irrepressible speaking style and no-holds-barred blog have helped him
create a large following around the world. Learn more at SethGodin.com.
TRIBES
[ EXCERPT ]
Something To Believe In
Tribes are about faith—about belief in an idea and a community.
And they are grounded in respect and admiration for the leader of
the tribe and for the other members as well.
Do you believe in what you do? Every day? It turns out that this
happens to be a brilliant strategy.
Three things have happened, pretty much at the same time. All
three point to the same (temporarily uncomfortable, but ultimately
marvelous) outcome:
1. Many people are starting to realize that they work a lot and
that working on stuff they believe in (and making things happen) is
much more satisfying than just getting a paycheck and waiting to
get fired (or die).
2. Many organizations have discovered that the factory-centric
model of producing goods and services is not nearly as profitable as
it used to be.
3. Many consumers have decided to spend their money buying
things that aren’t just factory-produced commodities. And they’ve
decided not to spend their time embracing off-the-shelf ideas.
Consumers have decided, instead, to spend time and money on
1
SETH GODIN | TRIBES
fashion, on stories, on things that matter, and on things they

believe in.
So, here we are. We live in a world where we have the leverage to
make things happen, the desire to do work we believe in, and a
marketplace that is begging us to be remarkable. And, yet, in the
middle of these changes, we still get stuck.
Stuck following archaic rules.
Stuck in industries that not only avoid change but actively
fight it.
Stuck in fear of what our boss will say, stuck because we’re afraid
we’re going to get in trouble.
Most of all, we’re stuck acting like managers or employees,
instead of like the leaders we could become. We’re embracing a
factory instead of a tribe.
The irony is that all of this fear used to be useful. Fear of change
is built into most organisms, because change is the first sign of risk.
Fear of change in a huge factory is appropriate when efficiency is the
order of the day. Today, though, the fear that used to protect us at
work is now our enemy; it’s now the thing standing in the way.
Imagine having worked at AOL or a mortgage broker or Sears. It
might have been fun for a while, but it’s no fun at all when the
factory fades.
“How was your day?” is a question that matters a lot more than
it seems. It turns out that the people who like their jobs the most are
also the ones who are doing the best work, making the most impact,
and changing the most. Changing the way they see the world, sure,
but also changing the world. By challenging the status quo, a cadre
of heretics is discovering that one person, just one, can make a huge
difference.
Jonathan Ive is having a ball working at Apple, but he’s also
making a difference. He’s leading the design team and feeding the
Macintosh tribe with ideas they embrace.
2
SETH GODIN | TRIBES
Micah Sifry doesn’t just enjoy the work he does every day at the
Personal Democracy Forum; he’s leading a fundamental change in
the way we think about politics. Thousands of people depend on
Micah’s leadership, and in return, he spends his day engaged in
work that matters.
Heretics are the new leaders. The ones who challenge the status
quo, who get out in front of their tribes, who create movements.
The marketplace now rewards (and embraces) the heretics. It’s
clearly more fun to make the rules than to follow them, and for the
first time, it’s also profitable, powerful, and productive to do just
that.
This shift might be bigger than you think. Suddenly, heretics,
troublemakers, and change agents aren’t merely thorns in our side—
they are the keys to our success. Tribes give you leverage. And each
of us has more leverage than ever before. I want you to think about
the ramifications of the new leverage. I’m hoping you’ll see that the
most profitable path is also the most reliable, the easiest, and the
most fun. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to give you a push on the
path to becoming a heretic yourself.
Why Should You Lead? And Why Now?

This book weaves together a few big ideas, none of which stands
so well on its own, but taken together, form an irresistible argument.
With tribes flourishing everywhere, there’s a vast shortage of
leaders. We need you.
My thesis:
•F
or the first time ever, everyone in an organization—not just
the boss—is expected to lead.
•T
he very structure of today’s workplace means that it’s easier
than ever to change things and that individuals have more
leverage than ever before.
3
SETH GODIN | TRIBES
• The marketplace is rewarding organizations and individuals

who change things and create remarkable products and services.
• I t’s engaging, thrilling, profitable, and fun.
•M ost of all: there is a tribe of fellow employees, or customers,
or investors, or believers or hobbyists or readers just waiting
for you to connect them to each other and to lead them where
they want to go.
Leadership isn’t difficult, but you’ve been trained for years to

avoid it. I want to help you realize that you already have all the skills
you need to make a huge difference, and I want to sell you on doing
it. The best thing is that you don’t need to wait until you’ve got
exactly the right job or built the right organization or moved up
three rungs on the corporate ladder. You can start right now.
Leadership Is Not Management

In a classic I Love Lucy episode, Lucy and Ethel are working on
a candy assembly line. As the candies come faster and faster, the two
of them panic, stuffing truffles into their mouths to keep up with
the onslaught.
They had a management problem.
Management is about manipulating resources to get a known
job done. Burger King franchises hire managers. They know exactly
what they need to deliver and they are given resources to do it at low
cost. Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react
to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as
cheap as possible.
Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you
believe in.
My thesaurus says the best synonym for leadership is:
management. Maybe that word used to fit, but no longer. Movements
4
SETH GODIN | TRIBES
have leaders and movements make things happen.

Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.
Managers make widgets. Leaders make change.
Change? Change is frightening, and to many people who would
be leaders, it seems more of a threat, not a promise. That’s too bad,
because the future belongs to our leaders, regardless of where you
work or what you do.
It’s Good To Be King

In fact, in a stable world, it’s great to be king. Lots of perks. Not
a lot of hassles.
Kings have always worked to maintain stability because that’s
the best way to be king. They’ve traditionally surrounded themselves
with a well-fed and well-paid court of supplicants, each of which has
a vested interest in keeping things as they are.
The monarchy has had a huge impact on the way we see the
world. Kings taught us about power and about influence and about
getting things done. A king assembles his own geographically based
tribe and uses power to enforce compliance.
From royalty, we learned how to build corporations. And from
royalty, we learned how to build nonprofits and other organizations
as well. Long live the king.
Corporations are traditionally built around the CEO, with all
his perks and power. The closer you get to being king/CEO, the
more influence and power you have. The goal of the corporation is
to enrich the king and to keep him in power.
And then, recently, something happened.
Marketing changed everything. Marketing created leverage.
Marketing certainly changed the status quo. Most of all, marketing
freed and energized the tribe.
If the tribe doesn’t like the king, they’re now free to leave.
5
SETH GODIN | TRIBES
The changing status quo isn’t such good news for the CEO, just
as the changing face of warfare and politics wasn’t good news for the
crowned heads of Europe a century ago.
Marketing is the act of telling stories about the things we make.
Stories that sell and stories that spread. Marketing gets one elected
president, and marketing raises money for charity. Marketing also
determines if the CEO stays or goes (Carly Fiorina learned this the
hard way). Most of all, marketing influences markets.
Marketing used to be about advertising, and advertising is
expensive. Today, marketing is about engaging with the tribe and
delivering products and services with stories that spread.
Today, the market doesn’t want the same thing it wanted
yesterday. Marketing, a hundred years of incessant marketing, has
drilled into us a thirst for what’s new. And new isn’t so stable, is it?
Stability Is An Illusion
Marketing changed the idea of stability. It’s human nature—we
still assume the world is stable, still assume that Google will be #1
in five years, that we’ll type on keyboards and fly on airplanes, that
China will keep growing, and that the polar ice cap won’t really be
melted in six years.
And we’re wrong.
We’re wrong because the dynamics of marketing and storytelling
and the incessant drumbeat of advertising has taught us to be
restless in the face of stability. And the Internet just amplified this.
No one invests in a stock that’s boring, with few prospects of big
growth. No one watches a YouTube video that they’ve seen before
because the first time it was just okay. No one passes on an email
from the boss that’s just fine.
Here’s what’s changed: Some people admire the new and the
stylish far more than they respect the proven. And more often than
6
SETH GODIN | TRIBES
not, these fad-focused early-adopters are the people who buy and
the people who talk. As a result, new ways of doing things, new jobs,
new opportunities, and new faces become ever more important.
Marketing, the verb, changed the market. The market is now a
lot less impressed with average stuff for average people, and the
market is a lot less impressed with loud and flashy and expensive
advertising. Today, the market wants change.
Established 1906 used to be important. Now, apparently, it’s a
liability.
The rush from stable is a huge opportunity for you.
Partisans
It’s an insult when you throw that word at a politician, but all
tribes are made up of partisans, the more partisan the better. If
you’re a middle-of-the-roader, you don’t bother joining a tribe.
Partisans want to make a difference. Partisans want something
to happen (and something else not to happen). Leaders lead when
they take positions, when they connect with their tribes, and when
they help the tribe connect to itself.
Making A Ruckus
Old rule: The best way to grow an organization was simple: be
reliable and consistent and trusted, and bit by bit, gain market share.
The enemy was rapid change, because that led to uncertainty
and to risk and to failure. People turned and ran.
Take a look at the top fifty charities on the Chronicle of
Philanthropy’s Top 400 charity list. During the last forty years,
only four charities on this list have changed! Four. Why? Because
donors didn’t want to take risks.
The business world has a long history of conservative tribes, of
7
SETH GODIN | TRIBES
groups of people who relish the status quo. The big news is that this
has changed. People yearn for change, they relish being part of a
movement, and they talk about things that are remarkable, not
boring.
Take a look at the Yugo and the Renault and the Sterling—
companies that decades ago tried to bring new ideas to the U.S. car
market and failed. Why? Because drivers didn’t want to buy a car
that would disappear. It was no fun to work at these companies
because they were fighting an uphill battle. Better to go work for
GM.
New rule: If you want to grow, you need to find customers who
are willing to join you, or believe in you, or donate to you, or
support you. And guess what? The only customers willing to do
that are looking for something new. The growth comes from change
and light and noise.
The Tesla Roadster is a $100,000 electric super-car, built in
Silicon Valley. Impossible to consider thirty years ago. Now, it’s sold
out. The company has assembled a tribe—eager customers,
cheerleaders and vicarious fans.
The Prius Hybrid is a new car based on a hundred-year-old
technology that no domestic carmaker cared enough about to
develop. Today, there’s a long list of brands following Toyota. The
tribe has turned into a movement. This is astounding--the oldest,
staidest consumer product industry turning itself upside down in
just a few years.
If struggling, high-overhead car companies can launch a
technology and find market acceptance, imagine what you can do
with this new leverage.
What do you do for a living? What do you make?
Leaders make a ruckus.
8
SETH GODIN | TRIBES
Leading From The Bottom

The skeptical among us look at the idea of leadership and they
hesitate.
They hesitate because it feels like something you need to be
ordained to do. That without authority, you can’t lead. That big
organizations reserve leadership for the CEO, not for us.
Perhaps you work at a big organization. Perhaps you feel as
though there’s just too much resistance to change. Here’s a question:
Is your organization more stiff than the Pentagon? More
bureaucratic or formalized?
Thomas Barnett changed the Pentagon. From the bottom. No,
he wasn’t on KP duty, but he was close. He had no status, no rank...
just was just a researcher with a big idea.
Here’s what the Wall Street Journal said:
“...Mr. Barnett overhauled the concept to address
more directly the post-9/11 world. The result is a
three-hour PowerPoint presentation that more
resembles performance art than a Pentagon
briefing. It’s making Mr. Barnett, 41 years old, a
key figure in the debate currently raging about
what the modern military should look like.
Senior military officials say his decidedly
controversial ideas are influencing the way the
Pentagon views its enemies, vulnerabilities and
future structure.”
It’s simple, really. Barnett led a tribe that was passionate about
change. He galvanized them, inspired them and connected them
through his idea.
One man with no authority suddenly becomes a key figure.
Tribes give each of us the very same opportunity. Skill and attitude
are essential. Authority is not. In fact, authority can get in the way.
9
LINCHPIN
[ TEASER ]
THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL

The system we grew up with is a mess. It’s falling apart at the
seams and a lot of people are in pain because the things we thought
would work, don’t. Every day I meet people who have so much to
give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it
back. They’ve become victims, pawns in a senseless system that uses
them up and undervalues them.
This is a personal manifesto, a plea from me to you. Right now,
I’m not focused on the external, on the tactics organizations use to
make great products or spread important ideas. This book is
different. It’s about a choice and it’s about your life. This choice
doesn’t require you to quit your job, though it challenges you to
rethink how you do your job.
It’s time to stop complying with the system and draw your own
map.
Stop settling for what’s good enough and start creating art that
matters. Stop asking what’s in it for you and start giving gifts that
change people. Then, and only then, will you have achieved your
potential.
For hundreds of years, the population has been seduced,
1
SETH GODIN | LINCHPIN
scammed and brainwashed into fitting in, following instructions

and exchanging a day’s work for a day’s pay. That era has come to an
end, and just in time.
You have brilliance in you, your contribution is valuable, and the
art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must. I’m
hoping you’ll stand up and choose to make a difference.
YOU ARE A GENIUS

If a genius is someone with exceptional abilities and the insight
to find the nonobvious solution to a problem, you don’t need to win
a Nobel Prize to be one. A genius looks at something that others are
stuck on and gets the world unstuck.
So, the question is: Have you ever done that?
Have you ever found a shortcut that others couldn’t find?
Solved a problem that confounded your family?
Seen a way to make something work that wasn’t working before?
Made a personal connection with someone who was out of reach
to everyone else?
Even once?
No one is a genius all the time. Einstein had trouble finding his
house when he walked home from work every day. But all of us are
geniuses sometimes.
The tragedy is that society (your school, your boss, your
government, your family) keeps drumming the genius part out.
The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain,
in which we trade our genius and artistry for stability.
2
GET MORE OF
TRIBES & LINCHPIN
To purchase copies of Tribes for holiday gifts (or pre-order
Linchpin), print the order form at the end of this PDF document
and present it to your favorite local bookseller.

TRIBES LINCHPIN
Amazon Amazon
Barnes & Noble Barnes & Noble
Borders Borders
Books-A-Million Books-A-Million
Indiebound Indiebound
Visit
SethGodin.com
to learn more about the books.
VANISHED
Joseph
Finder
VANISHED
Nick Heller is tough, smart, and stubborn. And in his line of work, it’s
essential. Trained in the Special Forces, Nick is a high-powered intel-
ligence investigator—exposing secrets that powerful people would
rather keep hidden. He's a guy you don’t want to mess with. He’s
also the man you call when you need a problem fixed.
Desperate, with nowhere else to run, Nick’s nephew Gabe makes that
call one night.
night After being attacked in Georgetown, his mother,
Lauren, lies in a coma, and his step-dad, Roger, Nick’s brother, has
vanished without a trace.
Nick and Roger have been on the outs since the arrest, trial, and
conviction of their father, the notorious “fugitive financier” Victor
Heller. Where Nick strayed from the path, Roger followed their
father’s footsteps into the corporate world. Now, as Nick searches
for his brother, he’s on a collision course with one of the most pow-
erful corporations in the world—and it will stop at nothing to protect
its secrets.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Finder is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly
bestselling novelist. Hailed as “the CEO of suspense,” his fiction often
features the ruthless drive, corruption and conspiracy of the corporate
world as riveting plotlines. Learn more at JosephFinder.com.
PART ONE
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
—honoré de balzac
PROLOGUE
washington, d.c.
L auren Heller’s husband disappeared at a few minutes after ten

thirty on a rainy evening.
They were walking to their car after dinner at his favorite Japanese
restaurant, on Thirty-third Street in Georgetown. Roger, a serious su-
shi connoisseur, considered Oji- San the best, most authentic place in
all of D.C. Lauren didn’t care one way or another. Raw fish was raw
fish, she thought: pretty, but inedible. But Roger—the Mussolini of
maki, the Stalin of sashimi— never settled for less than the best. “Hey,
I married you, right?” he pointed out on the way over, and how was
she supposed to argue with that?
She was just grateful they were finally having a date night. They
hadn’t had one in almost three months. Not that it had been much of a
date, actually. He’d seemed awfully preoccupied. Worried about
something. Then again, he got that way sometimes, for days at a time.
That was just the way he dealt with stress at the office. A very male
thing, she’d always thought. Men tended to internalize their problems.
Women usually let it out, got emotional, screamed or cried or just got
mad, and ended up coping a lot better in the long run. If that wasn’t
emotional intelligence, then what was?
1
JOSEPH FINDER • VANISHED
But Roger, whom she loved and admired and who was probably
the smartest guy she’d ever met, handled stress like a typical man.
Plus, he didn’t like to talk about things. That was just his way. That
was how he’d been brought up. She remembered once saying to him,
“We need to talk,” and he replied, “Those are the scariest four words
in the En glish
language.”
Anyway, they had a firm rule: no shop talk. Since they both worked
at Gifford Industries— he as a senior finance guy, she as admin to the
CEO— that was the only way to keep work from invading their home
life.
So at dinner, Roger barely said a word, checked his BlackBerry
every few minutes, and scarfed down his nigiri. She’d ordered some-
thing recommended by their waiter, which sounded good but turned
out to be layers of miso- soaked black cod. The house specialty. Yuck.
She left it untouched, picked at her seaweed salad, drank too much
sake, got a little tipsy.
They’d cut through Cady’s Alley, a narrow cobblestone walkway
lined with old redbrick ware houses converted to high- end German
kitchen stores and Italian lighting boutiques. Their footsteps echoed
hollowly.
She stopped at the top of the concrete steps that led down to Water
Street, and said, “Feel like getting some ice cream? Thomas Sweet,
maybe?”
The oblique beam of a streetlight caught his white teeth, his strong
nose, the pouches that had recently appeared under his eyes. “I
thought you’re on South Beach.”
“They have some sugar- free stuff that’s not bad.”
“It’s all the way over on P, isn’t it?”
“There’s a Ben & Jerry’s on M.”
“We probably shouldn’t press our luck with Gabe.”
“He’ll be fine,” she said. Their son was fourteen: old enough to
2
stay home by himself. In truth, staying home alone made him a little
ner vous though he’d never admit it. The kid was as stubborn as his
parents.
Water Street was dark, deserted, kind of creepy at that time of
night. A row of cars were parked along a chain- link fence, the scrubby
banks of the Potomac just beyond. Roger’s black S-Class Mercedes
was wedged between a white panel van and a battered Toyota.
He stood for a moment, rummaged through his pockets, then
turned abruptly. “Damn. Left the keys back in the restaurant.”
She grunted, annoyed but not wanting to make a big deal out of it.
“You didn’t bring yours, did you?”
Lauren shook her head. She rarely drove his Mercedes anyway. He
was too fussy about his car. “Check your pockets?”
He patted the pockets of his trench coat and his pants and suit
jacket as if to prove it.
“Yeah. Must’ve left them on the table in the restaurant when I took
out my BlackBerry. Sorry about that. Come on.”
“We don’t both have to go back. I’ll wait here.”
A motorcycle blatted by from somewhere below. The white- noise
roar of trucks on the Whitehurst Freeway overhead.
“I don’t want you standing out here alone.”
“I’ll be fine. Just hurry, okay?”
He hesitated, took a step toward her, then suddenly kissed her on
the lips. “I love you,” he said.
She stared at his back as he hustled across the street. It pleased her
to hear that I love you, but she wasn’t used to it, really. Roger Heller
was a good husband and father, but not the most demonstrative of
men.
A distant shout, then raucous laughter: frat kids, probably George-
town or GW.
A scuffing sound from the pavement behind her.
She turned to look, felt a sudden gust of air, and a hand was
3
clamped over her mouth.

She tried to scream, but it was stifled beneath the large hand, and
she struggled frantically. Roger so close. Maybe a few hundred feet
away by then. Close enough to see what was happening to her, if only
he’d turn around.
Powerful arms had grabbed her from behind.
She needed to get Roger’s attention, but he obviously couldn’t hear
anything at that distance, the scuffling masked by the traffic sounds.
Turn around, damn it! she thought. Good God, please turn around!
“Roger!” she screamed, but it came out a pathetic mewl. She
smelled some kind of cheap cologne, mixed with stale cigarette smoke.
She tried to twist her body around, to wrench free, but her arms
were trapped, pinioned against the sides of her body, and she felt
something cold and hard at her temple, and she heard a click, and then
something struck the side of her head, a jagged lightning bolt of pain
piercing her eyes.
The foot. Stomp on his foot— some half- remembered martial- arts
selfdefense class from long ago. Stomp his instep.
She jammed her left foot down hard, striking nothing, then kicked
backwards, hit the Mercedes with a hollow metallic crunch. She tried
to pivot, and—
Roger swiveled suddenly, alerted by the sound. He shouted, “Lau-
ren!”
Raced back across the street.
“What the hell are you doing to her?” he screamed. “Why her?”
Something slammed against the back of her head. She tasted
blood.
She tried to make sense of what was going on, but she was falling
backwards, hurtling through space, and that was the last thing she re-
membered.
4
CHAPTER ONE
los angeles
I t was a dark and stormy night.

Actually, it wasn’t stormy. But it was dark and rainy and miserable
and, for L.A., pretty damned cold. I stood in the drizzle at eleven
o’clock at night, under the sickly yellow light from the high- pressure
sodium lamps, wearing a fleece and jeans that were soaking wet and
good leather shoes that were in the pro cess of getting destroyed.
I’d had the shoes handmade in London for some ridiculous
amount of money, and I made a mental note to bill my employer, Stod-
dard Associates, for the damage, just on general principle.
I hadn’t expected rain. Though, as a putatively high- powered in-
ternational investigator with a reputation for being able to see around
corners, I supposed I could have checked Weather.com.
“That’s the one,” the man standing next to me grunted, pointing at
a jet parked a few hundred feet away. He was wearing a long yellow
rain slicker with a hood— he hadn’t offered me one back in the of-
fice— and his face was concealed by shadows. All I could see was his
bristly white mustache.
Elwood Sawyer was the corporate security director of Argon Ex-
press Cargo, a competitor of DHL and FedEx, though a lot smaller.
5
He wasn’t happy to see me, but I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t want to
be here myself. My boss, Jay Stoddard, had sent me here at the last
minute to handle an emergency for a new client I’d never heard of.
An entire planeload of cargo had vanished sometime in the last
twenty- four hours. Someone had cleaned out one of their planes at
this small regional airport south of L.A. Twenty thousand pounds of
boxes and envelopes and packages that had arrived the previous day
from Brussels. Gone.
You couldn’t even begin to calculate the loss. Thousands of miss-
ing packages meant thousands of enraged customers and lawsuits up
the wazoo. A part of the shipment belonged to one customer, Traverse
Development Group, which had hired my firm to locate their cargo.
They were urgent about it, and they weren’t going to rely on some
second-string cargo company to find it for them.
But the last thing Elwood Sawyer wanted was some high- priced
corporate investigator from Washington, D.C., standing there in a pair
of fancy shoes telling him how he’d screwed up.
The cargo jet he was pointing at stood solitary and dark and rain-
slicked, gleaming in the airfield lights. It was glossy white, like all Ar-
gon cargo jets, with the company’s name painted across the fuselage in
bold orange Helvetica. It was a Boeing 727, immense and magnificent.
An airplane up close is a thing of beauty. Much more awe- inspir-
ing than the view from inside when you’re trapped with the seat of the
guy in front of you tilted all the way back, crushing your knees. The jet
was one of maybe twenty planes parked in a row on the apron nearby.
Some of them, I guessed, were there for the weekend, some for the
night, since the control tower closed at ten o’clock. There were chocks
under their wheels and traffic cones around each one denoting the
circle of safety.
“Let’s take a look inside, Elwood,” I said.
Sawyer turned to look at me. He had bloodshot basset- hound eyes
with big saggy pouches beneath them.
6
“Woody,” he said. He was correcting me, not trying to be friends.

“Okay. Woody.”
“There’s nothing to see. They cleaned it out.” In his right hand he
clutched one of those aluminum clipboards in a hinged box, the kind
that truck drivers and cops always carry around.
“Mind if I take a look anyway? I’ve never seen the inside of a cargo
plane.”
“Mr. Keller—”
“Heller.”
“Mr. Keller, we didn’t hire you, and I don’t have time to play tour
guide, so why don’t you go back to interviewing the ground crew while
I try to figure out how someone managed to smuggle three truckloads
of freight out of this airport without anyone noticing?”
He turned to walk back to the terminal, and I said, “Woody, look.
I’m not here to make you look bad. We both want the same thing— to
find the missing cargo. I might be able to help. Two heads are better
than one, and all that.”
He kept walking. “Uh- huh. Well, that’s real thoughtful, but I’m
kinda busy right now.”
“Okay. So . . . Mind if I use your name?” I said.
He stopped, didn’t turn around. “For what?”
“My client’s going to ask for a name. The guy at Traverse Develop-
ment can be a vindictive son of a bitch.” Actually, I didn’t even know
who at Traverse had hired my firm.
Woody didn’t move.
“You know how these guys work,” I said. “When I tell my client
how Argon Express wasn’t interested in any outside assistance, he’s
going to ask me for a name. Maybe he’ll admire your in de pen dent
spirit— that go- italone thing. Then again, maybe he’ll just get pissed
off so bad that they’ll just stop doing business with you guys. No big
deal to them. Then word gets around. Like maybe you guys were cov-
ering something up, right? Maybe there’s the threat of a huge lawsuit.
7
Pretty soon, Argon Express goes belly- up. And all because of you.”
Woody still wasn’t moving, but I could see his shoulders start to
slump. The back of his yellow slicker was streaked with oil and grime.
“But between you and me, Woody, I gotta admire you for having the
guts to tell Traverse Development where to get off. Not too many
people have the balls to do that.”
Woody turned around slowly. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone
blink so slowly and with such obvious hostility. He headed toward the
plane, and I followed close behind.
There was a hydraulic hum, and the big cargo door came open like
the lift gate on a suburban minivan. Woody was standing in the belly
of the plane. He gestured me inside with a weary flip of his hand. He
must have switched on an auxiliary power unit because the lights in-
side the plane were on, a series of naked bulbs in wire cages mounted
on the ceiling. The interior was cavernous. You could see the rails
where the rows of seats used to be. Just a black floor marked with red
lines where the huge cargo containers were supposed to go, only there
were no containers here. White windowless walls lined with some
kind of papery white material.
I whistled. Totally bare. “The plane was full when it flew in?”
“Mmm- hmm. Twelve igloos.”
“‘Igloos’ are the containers, right?”
He walked over to the open cargo door. The rain was thrumming
against the plane’s aluminum skin. “Look for yourself.”
A crew was loading another Argon cargo jet right next to us. They
worked in that unhurried, efficient manner of a team that had done
this a thousand times before. A couple of guys were pushing an im-
mense container, eight or ten feet high and shaped like a child’s draw-
ing of a house, from the back of a truck onto the steel elevator platform
of a K-loader. I counted seven guys. Two to push the igloo off the
truck, two more to roll it onto the plane, another one to operate the
K-loader. Two more guys whose main job seemed to be holding alumi-
8
num clipboards and shouting orders. The next jet down, another
white Boeing but not one of theirs, was being refueled.
“No way you could get twelve containers off this plane without a
crew of at least five,” I said. “Tell me something. This plane got in yes-
terday, right? What took you so long to unload it?”
He sighed exasperatedly. “International cargo has to be inspected
by U.S. Customs before we do anything. It’s the law.”
“That takes an hour or two at most.”
“Yeah, normally. Weekends, Customs doesn’t have the manpower.
So they just cleared the crew to get off and go home. Sealed it up. Let
it sit there until they had time to do an inspection.”
“So while the plane was sitting here, anyone could have gotten in-
side. Looks like all the planes just sit here unattended all night. Any-
one could climb into one.”
“That’s the way it works in airports around the world, buddy. If
you’re cleared to get onto the airfield, they figure you’re supposed to be
here. It’s called the ‘honest- man’ system of security.”
I chuckled. “That’s a good one. I gotta use it sometime.”
Woody gave me a look.
I paced along the plane’s interior. There was a surprising amount
of rust in the places where there was no liner or white paint. “How old
is this thing?” I called out. My voice echoed. It seemed even colder in
here than it was outside. The rain was pattering hypnotically on the
plane’s exterior.
“Thirty years easy. They stopped making the Boeing seven- twos
in 1984, but most of them were made in the sixties and seventies.
They’re work horses, I’m telling you. Long as you do the upkeep, they
last forever.”
“You guys buy ’em used or new?”
“Used. Everyone does. FedEx, DHL, UPS— we all buy used
planes. It’s a lot cheaper to buy an old passenger plane and have it
converted into a cargo freighter.”
9
“What does one of these cost?”

“Why? You thinking of going into the business?”
“Everyone has a dream.”
He looked at me. It took him a few seconds to get that I was being
sarcastic. “You can get one of these babies for three hundred thousand
bucks. There’s hundreds of them sitting in airplane boneyards in the
desert. Like used- car lots.”
I walked to the front of the plane. Mounted to the doorframe was
the data plate, a small stainless- steel square the size of a cigarette
pack. Every plane has one. They’re riveted on by the manufacturer,
and they’re sort of like birth certificates. This one said the boeing
company— commercial airplane division—renton, washington,
and it listed the year of manufacture (1974) and a bunch of other num-
bers: the model and the serial number and so on.
I pulled out a little Maglite and looked closer and saw just what I
expected to see.
I stepped back out onto the air stairs, the cold rain spritzing my
face, and I reached out and felt the slick painted fuselage. I ran my
hand over the Argon Express logo, felt something. A ridge. The paint
seemed unusually thick.
Woody was watching me from a few feet away. My fingers located
the lower left corner of the two- foot- tall letter A. “You don’t paint
your logo on?” I asked.
“Of course it’s painted on. What the hell—?”
It peeled right up. I tugged some more, and the entire logo— some
kind of adhesive vinyl sticker— began to lift off.
“Check out the data plate,” I said. “It doesn’t match the tail num-
ber.”
“That’s—that’s impossible!”
“They didn’t just steal the cargo, Woody. They stole the whole
plane.”
10
CHAPTER TWO
washington
I think I saw her eyelids move.”

A woman’s voice, distant and echoing, which worked itself into the
fevered illogic of a dream.
Everything deep orange, the color of sunset. Murmured voices; a
steady high-pitched beep.
Her eyelids wouldn’t open. It felt as if her eyelashes had been
glued together. Against the blood orange sky, stars rushed at her. She
was falling headlong through a sky crowded with stars. They dazzled
and clotted into oddshaped white clouds, and then the light became
harsh and far too strong and needles of pain jabbed the backs of her
eyeballs.
Her eyelashes came unstuck and fluttered like a bird’s wings. More
high- pitched electronic beeps. Not regular anymore, but jumbled, a
cacophony.
A man’s voice: “Let’s check an ionized calcium.”
A clattering of something— dishes? Footsteps receding.
The man again: “Nurse, did that gas come back?”
The husky voice of the first woman: “Janet, can you page Yurovsky
now, please?”
11
Lauren said, “You don’t have to shout.”

“She made a sound. Janet, would you please page Yurovsky now?”
She tried again to speak, but then gave up the effort, let her eyelids
close, the lashes gumming back together. The needles receded. She
became aware of another kind of pain, deep and throbbing, at the
back of her head. It pulsed in time to her heartbeat, rhythmically
sending jagged waves of pain to a little spot just behind her forehead
and above her eyes.
“Ms. Heller,” said the man, “if you can hear me, say something,
will you?”
“What do you want, I’m shouting!” Lauren said at the top of her
voice.
“Now I see it,” one of the female voices said. “Like she’s trying to
talk. I don’t know what she said.”
“I think she said ‘Ow.’ ”
“The doctor’s on rounds right now,” one of the women said.
“I don’t care what he’s doing.” The husky- voiced woman. “I don’t
care if he’s in the medical supply closet screwing a nurse. If you don’t
page him right this second, I will.”
Lauren smiled, or at least she thought she did. She felt a hard
pinch on her neck.
“Hey!” she protested.
Her eyelids flew open. The light was unbearably bright, just as
painful, but everything was gauzy and indistinct, like a white scrim
over everything. She wondered whether she’d fallen back asleep for
several hours.
A hulking silhouette loomed, came close, then pulled back.
A male voice: “Well, she’s responding to painful stimuli.”
Yeah, I’ll show you a painful stimulus, Lauren thought but couldn’t
say.
Actually, two silhouettes, she realized. She couldn’t focus, though.
Everything was strangely hazy, like every time you saw Lucille Ball
12
in that dreadful movie version of Mame. Lauren had played the snooty
Gloria Upson in the Charlottesville High School production of Auntie
Mame, and she’d seen the Rosalind Russell movie countless times, but
couldn’t stand the Lucy one.
“Mrs. Heller, I’m Dr. Yurovsky. Can you hear me?”
Lauren considered replying, then decided not to bother. Too much
effort.
The words weren’t coming out the way she wanted.
“Mrs. Heller, if you can hear me, I’d like you to wiggle your right
thumb.”
That she definitely didn’t feel like doing. She blinked a few times,
which cleared her vision a little.
Finally, she was able to see a man with a tall forehead and long
chin, elongated like the man in the moon. Or like a horse. The face
came slowly into focus, as if someone were turning a knob. A hooked
nose, receding hair. His face was tipped in toward hers. He wore a
look of intent concern.
She wiggled her right thumb.
“Mrs. Heller, do you know where you are?”
She tried to swallow, but her tongue was a big woolen sock. No
saliva.
My breath must reek, she thought.
“I’m guessing it’s a hospital.” Her voice was croaky.
She looked up. A white dropped ceiling with a rust stain on one of
the panels, which didn’t inspire confidence. Blue privacy curtains
hung from a U-shaped rail. She wasn’t in a private room. Some kind of
larger unit, with a lot of beds: an ICU, maybe. A bag of clear liquid
sagged on a metal stand, connected by a tube to her arm.
An immense bouquet of white lilies in a glass florist’s vase on the
narrow table next to her bed. She craned her neck just enough to see
they were calla lilies, her favorites. A lightning bolt of pain shot
through her eyes. She groaned as she smiled.
13
“From Roger?”
A long pause. Someone whispered something. “From your boss.”
Leland, she thought, smiling inwardly. That’s just like him. She
wondered who had ordered the flowers for him.
And how he knew what had happened to her.
She adjusted the thin blanket. “My head hurts,” she said. She felt
something lumpy under the blanket, on top of her belly. Pulled it out. A
child’s Beanie Baby: a yellow giraffe with orange spots and ugly Day-
Glo green feet. It was tattered and soiled. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Your son dropped that off this morning,” a woman said in a soft,
sweet voice.
She turned. A nurse. She thought: This morning? That meant it
wasn’t morning anymore. She was confused; she’d lost all track of time.
Gabe’s beloved Jaffee—as a toddler, he couldn’t say “Giraffiti,” the
name printed on the label. Actually, neither could she. Too cute by half.
“Where is he?”
“Your son is fine, Mrs. Heller.”
“Where is he?”
“I’m sure he’s at home in bed. It’s late.”
“What—time is it?”
“It’s two in the morning.”
She tried to look at the nurse, but turning her head escalated the
pain to a level nearly unendurable. How long had she been out? She
remembered glancing at her watch just before Roger got back to the
car, seeing 10:28. Almost ten thirty at night on Friday. The attack
came not long after that. She tried to do the math. Four hours? Less:
three and a half?
Lauren drew breath. “Wait—when did Gabe come by? You said—
you said, ‘this morning’—but what time is it—?”
“As I said, just after two in the morning.”
“On Saturday?”
“Sunday. Sunday morning, actually. Or Saturday night, depending
14
on how you look at it.”

Her brain felt like sludge, but she knew the nurse had to be wrong.
“Saturday morning, you mean.”
The nurse shook her head, then looked at the horse- faced doctor,
who said, “You’ve been unconscious for more than twenty- four hours.
Maybe longer. It would help us if you knew approximately what time
the attack took place.”
“Twenty- four . . . hours? Where’s— where’s Roger?”
“Looks like you got a nasty blow to the back of the head,” the doc-
tor said. “From everything we’ve seen, you haven’t sustained any inju-
ries beyond a small spiral fracture at the base of the skull. The CT scan
doesn’t show any hematomas or blood clots. You were extremely
lucky.”
I guess it depends on your definition of luck. She recalled Roger’s
panicked face. The arms grabbing her from behind. His scream: “Why
her?”
“Is Roger okay?” Silence.
“Where’s Roger?”
No reply.
She felt the cold tendrils of fear in her stomach.
“Where is he? Is Roger okay or not?”
“A couple of policemen came by to talk to you,” he said. “But you
don’t have to talk to anyone until you feel up to it.”
“The police?” Tears welled in her eyes. “Oh, dear God, what hap-
pened to him?”
A long pause.
“Oh, God, no,” Lauren said. “Tell me he’s okay.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Heller,” the doctor said.
“What? Please, God, tell me he’s alive!”
“I wish I could, Ms. Heller. But we don’t know where your hus-
band is.”
15
CHAPTER THREE
los angeles
W oody Sawyer ran after me, his boots clanging on the steel
air stairs. “What are you saying?” he yelled over the clamor of the
K-loader and the roar of a jet engine starting up nearby. “This isn’t
our plane?”
I didn’t answer him. I was too busy looking around. A minute or
so later I found what I was looking for.
It was the plane I’d seen being refueled earlier. A white Boeing
727 parked on the far side of the Argon jet that was being loaded. It
looked identical to the two Argon jets — they could have been triplets
— only it had the name “Valu Charters” on its fuselage.
“Let’s take a look inside,” I said.
“That’s not our plane!”
“Can you get a couple of your guys to roll one of those airstairs
over here?”
“You out of your mind? That’s not our plane!”
“Have you ever seen a Valu Charters jet around here before?”
“The hell do I know? These dinky little companies come and go
and they lease space from other companies—”
16
“I didn’t see any Valu Charters listed on the airport directory, did
you?”
Woody shrugged.
“Let’s take a look,” I said.
“Look, I could get in some serious deep shit for boarding someone
else’s plane. That’s illegal, man.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll take the fall.”
He hesitated a long time, shrugged again, and then walked back to
where the crew was loading. A minute or so later he came back, roll-
ing a set of airstairs up to the Valu Charters plane. He climbed up to
the cockpit door with visible reluctance.
Just as I suspected, underneath the Valu Charters logo — which
also peeled right off — was the orange Argon Express Cargo logo.
Painted on. Remnants of tamper-resistant tape adhered like old con-
fetti to the door frame of the cargo hatch.
When the door came open I could see that it was fully loaded with
row after row of cargo containers. Each one had a different set of
numbers affixed to the sides — really, stick-on letters and numbers of
random sizes, sort of like the cutout newsprint letters in a ransom
note.
“Do the numbers match your manifest?” I said. I knew they
would.
There was a long silence.
“I don’t get it,” Woody finally said. “How’d they switch planes?”
“Easy,” I said. “It was a whole lot easier than offloading and driv-
ing it out of the airport, and it only takes two guys — a pilot and a
co-pilot.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Didn’t you just say you can buy one of these old junkers cheap?
All they had to do was paint it white, fly it in here in the middle of the
night after the control tower’s closed. Park it nearby and slap on a
couple of vinyl decals. Probably took two guys ten minutes, and no
17
one was around to see them because everyone had gone home. But
they were on the airfield, so they were supposed to be here. No one
probably gave them a second look. Honest-man security, right?”
“My God. Jesus. That’s . . . brilliant.”
“Well, almost. By the time they flew in last night, the fuel-service
guys had gone home too, I bet.”
“So?”
“So that’s why the plane’s still here. They couldn’t fly it out with-
out filling the tank. Which they just finished doing. I’m guessing they
were going to wait to take off until everyone went home.”
“But . . . who could have done it?”
“I really don’t care who. I wasn’t hired to find out who.”
“But — whoever did it — they must be around here somewhere.”
“No doubt.”
“Look, Mr. — can I call you Nick?”
“Sure.”
“Nick, we both want the same thing. We agree on that.”
“Okay.”
“We’re basically playing on the same team.”
“Right.”
“See, I really don’t think Traverse Development needs to hear the
little details, you get me? Just tell them we found the missing cargo.
Or you did — I don’t care. No harm, no foul. Some kind of mix-up at
the airport. Happens from time to time. They’re going to be mighty
relieved, and they’re not going to ask a lot of questions.”
“Works for me.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“But first, would you mind opening this can right here? ” I ap-
proached one of the big containers. Most of the igloos were stuffed
with hundreds of packages for a lot of different customers, but the
routing label on this one indicated that it had originated in Bahrain.
All of its contents were destined for the Arlington, Virginia office of
18
Traverse Development. Through a Plexiglas window I could see

tightly packed rows of cardboard boxes, all the same size and shape,
all with Traverse Development’s logo printed on them.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” he said.
“You have the keys, Woody.”
“Customs hasn’t even inspected it yet. I could get in some deep
shit.”
“You could get in some even deeper shit if you don’t.”
“That supposed to be a threat?”
“Yeah, basically,” I said. “See, my mind keeps going back to the
parking space thing.”
“Parking space? What about it?”
“Well, so, whenever one of your planes lands and parks for the
night or whatever, your crew has to record the number of the space it’s
parked in. Standard operating procedure, right?”
He shrugged. “What’s this about?”
“Your Argon jet flies in from Brussels yesterday and parks in space
36, right? That’s in your computer records. Then our bad guys do this
big switcheroo with the decals, so what looks like your plane ends up
in the wrong space. Number 34, right? Only the problem is, someone
already entered 36 in the computer log, couple minutes after it landed.
Which isn’t so easy to backdate. And which could be a problem when
the guy from Customs comes to check things out, and he’s going to go,
‘huh, how’d that plane get moved over night, like by magic?’ So some-
one wrote the new space, number 34, on the whiteboard in your office.
That would be . . . you. Woody.”
Woody began to sputter, indignant. “You don’t know the first
thing about how our operations work.”
I tapped on the Plexiglas window of the cargo container. “Why
don’t you pop this open, and then we’ll talk. I’m really curious what’s
in here that would make you and two of your employees risk such a
long stretch in prison. Gotta be something totally worth it.”
19
He stared at me for a few seconds and then whined, “Come on,

man, I open this, I could get in trouble.”
“Kind of a little late for that,” I said.
“I can’t open this,” he said, almost pleading. “I really can’t.”
“Okay,” I said, shrugging. “But you got a phonebook I could bor-
row first? See, I want to call around to some of the aircraft boneyards.
There aren’t that many of them — what, six or seven airparks in Cali-
fornia and Arizona and Nevada? And I’m going to read off the serial
number of that old junker over there and find out who sold it. And
who they sold it to. Oh, sure, it’ll probably be some dummy company,
but that’ll be easy to trace.”
“I thought you don’t care who did it,” Woody said. His sallow face
had turned deep red.
“See, that’s my problem. Kind of a personal failing. I get my
hooks into something, I can’t stop. Sort of an obsessive-compulsive
thing.”
He cleared his throat. “Come on, man.”
I tapped the Plexiglas window of the igloo. “Let’s pop the hood
here so I can take a quick look, and then you can get back to your Su-
doku.” I tried to peer through the window, but the Plexiglas was
scratched and fogged, and all I could see were the boxes. I turned
around and gave Woody a smile and found myself looking into the
barrel of a Sig-Sauer P229, a nine-millimeter semi-automatic.
“Woody,” I said, disappointed, “I thought we were playing on the
same team.”
20
GET MORE OF
VANISHED
To purchase copies of Vanished for holiday gifts, print the
order form at the end of this PDF document and present
it to your favorite local bookseller.

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Books-A-Million
Indiebound
Visit
JosephFinder.com
MAKERS
Cory
Doctorow
MAKERS
Perry and Lester invent things — seashell robots that make toast,
Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely
new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the
technological era. Together, they transform the country.
Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot.com-
bomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides
in abandoned Wal-Marts across the land. As their rides, which com-
memorate the New Work’s glory days, gain in popularity, a rogue
Disney executive grows jealous, and convinces the police that Perry
and Lester’s 3D printers are being used to run off AK-47s.
Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New

Workers, joining the cult. Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take
on a new investment strategy: backing litigation against companies like
Disn Lester and Perry’s friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets
Disney.
the ‘fatkins’ treatment, turning him into a sybaritic gigolo.
Then things get really interesting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger. He
is the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of the bestselling novel Little
Brother. Learn more at Craphound.com and BoingBoing.net.
MAKERS
[ EXCERPT ]
“Right, let’s get started. You wanna see what I do, right?” Perry said.
“That’s right,” Suzanne said.
“Lead the way, Lester,” Perry said, and gestured with an arm, deep
into the center of the junkpile. “All right, check this stuff out as we go.”
He stuck his hand through the unglazed window of a never-built shop
and plucked out a toy in a battered box. “I love these things,” he said,
handing it to her.
She took it. It was a Sesame Street Elmo doll, labeled BOOGIE
WOOGIE ELMO.
“That’s from the great Elmo Crash,” Perry said, taking back the box
and expertly extracting the Elmo like he was shelling a nut. “The last
and greatest generation of Elmoid technology, cast into an uncaring
world that bought millions of Li’l Tagger washable graffiti kits instead
after Rosie gave them two thumbs up on her Christmas shopping guide.
“Poor Elmo was an orphan, and every junkyard in the world has
mountains of mint-in-package BWEs, getting rained on, waiting to start
their long, half-million-year decomposition.
“But check this out.” He flicked a multitool off his belt and ex-
tracted a short, sharp scalpel-blade. He slit the grinning, disco-suited
Elmo open from chin to groin and shucked its furry exterior and the
1
C O RY D O C T O R O W | MAKERS
foam tissue that overlaid its skeleton. He slid the blade under the plastic
cover on its ass and revealed a little printed circuit board.
“That’s an entire Atom processor on a chip, there,” he said. “Each
limb and the head have their own subcontrollers. There’s a high-pow-
ered digital-to-analog rig for letting him sing and dance to new songs,
and an analog-to-digital converter array for converting spoken and
danced commands to motions. Basically, you dance and sing for Elmo
and he’ll dance and sing back for you.”
Suzanne nodded. She’d missed that toy, which was a pity. She had
a five year old goddaughter in Minneapolis who would have loved a
Boogie Woogie Elmo.
They had come to a giant barn, set at the edge of a story-and-a-half’s
worth of anchor store. “This used to be where the contractors kept their
heavy equipment,” Lester rumbled, aiming a car-door remote at the
door, which queeped and opened.
Inside, it was cool and bright, the chugging air-conditioners effi-
ciently blasting purified air over the many work-surfaces. The barn was
a good 25 feet tall, with a loft and a catwalk circling it halfway up. It was
lined with metallic shelves stacked neatly with labeled boxes of parts
scrounged from the junkyard.
Perry set Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USB
cable into his chest-cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a
small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front.
“This thing is running InstallParty — it can recognize any hard-
ware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human interven-
tion. They used a ton of different suppliers for the BWE, so every one is
a little
different, depending on who was offering the cheapest parts the day
it was built. InstallParty doesn’t care, though: one-click and away it
goes.” The PDA was doing all kinds of funny dances on its screen, mon-
tages of playful photoshopping of public figures matted into historical
fine art.
2
“All done. Now, have a look -- this is a Linux computer with some of
the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweatshop stuff, either,
see this? The solder is too precise to be done by hand -- that’s because
it’s from India. If it was from Cambodia, you’d see all kinds of wobble in
the solder: that means that tiny, clever hands were used to create it,
which means that somewhere in the device’s karmic history, there’s a
sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they
keel over and are dumped in a ditch. This is the good stuff.
“So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely malleable
computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I’ve turned these
things into wall-climbing monkeys; I’ve modded them for a woman
from the University of Miami at the Jackson Memorial who used their
capability to ape human motions in physiotherapy programs with
nerve-damage cases. But the best thing I’ve done with them so far is the
Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cluster.
Come on,” he said, and took off deeper into the barn’s depths.
They came to a dusty, stripped-down Smart car, one of those tiny
two-seat electric cars you could literally buy out of a vending machine
in Europe. It was barely recognizable, having been reduced to its roll-
cage, drive-train and control-panel. A gang of naked robot Elmos were
piled into it.
“Wake up boys, time for a demo!” Perry shouted, and they sat up
and made canned, tinny Elmo “oh boy” noises, climbing into position
on the pedals, around the wheel, and on the gear-tree.
“I got the idea when I was teaching an Elmo to play Mario Brothers.
I thought it’d get a decent diggdotting. I could get it to speedrun all of
the first level using an old paddle I’d found and rehabilitated, and I was
trying to figure out what to do next. The dead mall across the way is a
drive-in theater, and I was out front watching the silent movies, and one
of them showed all these cute little furry animated whatevers collec-
tively driving a car. It’s a really old sight-gag, I mean, like racial memory
old. I’d seen the Little Rascals do the same bit, with Alfalfa on the
3
wheel and Buckwheat and Spanky on the brake and clutch and the
doggy working the gearshift.
“And I thought, Shit, I could do that with Elmos. They don’t have
any networking capability, but they can talk and they can parse spoken
commands, so all I need is to designate one for left and one for right
and one for fast and one for slow and one to be the eyes, barking orders
and they should be able to do this. And it works! They even adjust their
balance and centers of gravity when the car swerves to stay upright at
their posts. Check it out.” He turned to the car. “Driving Elmos, ten-
HUT!” They snapped upright and ticked salutes off their naked plastic
noggins. “In circles, DRIVE,” he called. The Elmos scrambled into
position and fired up the car and in short order they were doing donuts
in the car’s little indoor pasture.
“Elmos, HALT” Perry shouted and the car stopped silently, rocking
gently. “Stand DOWN.” The Elmos sat down with a series of tiny
thumps.
Suzanne found herself applauding. “That was amazing,” she said.
“Really impressive. So that’s what you’re going to do for Kodacell, make
these things out of recycled toys?”
Lester chuckled. “Nope, not quite. That’s just for starters. The El-
mos are all about the universal availability of cycles and apparatus. Ev-
erywhere you look, there’s devices for free that have everything you
need to make anything do anything.
“But have a look at part two, c’mere.” He lumbered off in another
direction, and Suzanne and Perry trailed along behind him.
“This is Lester’s workshop,” Perry said, as they passed through a set
of swinging double doors and into a cluttered wonderland. Where Per-
ry’s domain had been clean and neatly organized, Lester’s area was a
happy shambles. His shelves weren’t orderly, but rather, crammed with
looming piles of amazing junk: thrift-store wedding dresses, plaster
statues of bowling monkeys, box kites, knee-high tin knights-in-armor,
seashells painted with American flags, presidential action-figures, paste
4
jewelry and antique cough-drop tins.

“You know how they say a sculptor starts with a block of marble and
chips away everything that doesn’t look like a statue? Like he can *see*
the statue in the block? I get like that with garbage: I see the pieces on
the heaps and in roadside trash and I can just *see* how it can go to-
gether, like this.”
He reached down below a work-table and hoisted up a huge triptych
made out of three hinged car-doors stood on end. Carefully, he un-
folded it and stood it like a screen on the cracked concrete floor.
The inside of the car-doors had been stripped clean and polished to
a high metal gleam that glowed like sterling silver. Spot-welded to it
were all manner of soda tins, pounded flat and cut into gears, chutes,
springs and other mechanical apparatus.
“It’s a mechanical calculator,” he said proudly. “About half as pow-
erful as Univac. I milled all the parts using a laser-cutter. What you do
is, fill this hopper with GI Joe heads, and this hopper with Barbie
heads. Crank this wheel and it will drop a number of M&Ms equal to
the product of the two values into this hopper, here.” He put three
scuffed GI Joe heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies in an-
other and began to crank, slowly. A music-box beside the crank played a
slow, irregular rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel” while the hundreds
of little coin-sized gears turned, flipping switches and adding and re-
moving tension to springs. After the weasel popped a few times, twelve
brown M&Ms fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He picked them
out carefully and offered them to her. “It’s OK. They’re not from the
trash,” he said. “I buy them in bulk.” He turned his broad back to her
and heaved a huge galvanized tin washtub full of brown M&Ms in her
direction. “See, it’s a bit-bucket!” he said.
Suzanne giggled in spite of herself. “You guys are hilarious,” she
said. “This is really good, exciting nerdy stuff.” The gears on the me-
chanical computer were really sharp and precise; they looked like you
could cut yourself on them. When they ground over the polished sur-
5
faces of the car-doors, they made a sound like a box of toothpicks falling
to the floor: click-click, clickclickclick, click. She turned the crank until
twelve more brown M&Ms fell out.
“Who’s the Van Halen fan?”
Lester beamed. “Might as well jump — JUMP!” He mimed heavy-
metal air-guitar and thrashed his shorn head up and down as though he
were headbanging with a mighty mane of hair-band locks. “You’re the
first one to get the joke!” he said. “Even Perry didn’t get it!”
“Get what?” Perry said, also grinning.
“Van Halen had this thing where if there were any brown M&Ms in
their dressing room they’d trash it and refuse to play. When I was a kid,
I used to *dream* about being so famous that I could act like that much
of a prick. Ever since, I’ve afforded a great personal significance to
brown M&Ms.”
She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. “Look, I hate to break
this party up, but I came here because Kettlebelly — crap, Kettle*well*
— said that you guys exemplified everything that he wanted to do with
Kodacell. This stuff you’ve done is all very interesting, it’s killer art, but
I don’t see the business-angle. So, can you help me out here?”
“That’s step three,” Perry said. “C’mere.” He led her back to his
workspace, to a platform surrounded by articulated arms terminated in
webcams, like a grocery scale in the embrace of a metal spider. “Three-
dee scanner,” he said, producing a Barbie head from Lester’s machine
and dropping it on the scales. He prodded a button and a nearby screen
filled with a three-dimensional model of the head, flattened on the side
where it touched the surface. He turned the head over and scanned
again and now there were two digital versions of the head on the screen.
He moused on over the other until they lined up, right-clicked a drop-
down menu, selected an option and then they were merged, rotating.
“Once we’ve got the three-dee scan, it’s basically Plasticine.” He
distorted the Barbie head, stretching it and squeezing it with the mouse.
“So we can take a real object and make this kind of protean hyper-ob-
6
ject out of it, or drop it down to a wireframe and skin it with any bitmap,
like this.” More fast mousing -- Barbie’s head turned into a gridded
mesh, fine filaments stretching off along each mussed strand of plastic
hair. Then a Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup label wrapped
around her like a stocking being pulled over her head. There was some-
thing stupendously weird and simultaneously very comic about the
sight, the kind of inherent comedy in a cartoon stretched out on a blob
of Silly Putty.
“So we can build anything out of interesting junk, with any shape,
and then we can digitize the shape. Then we can do anything we like
with the shape. Then we can output the shape.” He typed quickly and
another machine, sealed and mammoth like an outsized photocopier,
started to grunt and churn. The air filled with a smell like Saran Wrap
in a microwave.
“The goop we use in this thing is epoxy-based. You wouldn’t want
to build a car out of it, but it makes a mean doll-house. The last stage of
the output switches to inks, so you get whatever bitmap you’ve skinned
your object with baked right in. It does about one cubic inch per min-
ute, so this job should be almost done now.”
He drummed his fingers on top of the machine for a moment and
then it stopped chunking and something inside it went *clunk*. He
lifted a lid and reached inside and plucked out the barbie head,
stretched and distorted, skinned with a Campbell’s Soup label. He
handed it to Suzanne. She expected it to be warm, like a squashed
penny from a machine on Fisherman’s Wharf, but it was cool and had
the seamless texture of a plastic margarine tub and the heft of a paper-
weight.
“So, that’s the business,” Lester said. “Or so we’re told. We’ve been
making cool stuff and selling it to collectors on the web for you know,
gigantic bucks. We move one or two pieces a month at about ten grand
per. But Kettlebelly says he’s going to industrialize us, alienate us from
the product of our labor, and turn us into an assembly line.”
7
“He didn’t say any such thing,” Perry said. Suzanne was aware that
her ears had grown points. Perry gave Lester an affectionate slug in the
shoulder. “Lester’s only kidding. What we need is a couple of dogsbod-
ies and some bigger printers and we’ll be able to turn out more modest
devices by the hundred or possibly the thousand. We can tweak the de-
signs really easily because nothing is coming off a mold, so there’s no
setup charge, so we can do limited runs of a hundred, redesign, do an-
other hundred. We can make ‘em to order. “
“And we need an MBA,” Lester said. “Kodacell’s sending us a busi-
ness manager to help us turn junk into pesos.”
“Yeah,” Perry said, with a worried flick of his eyes. “Yeah, a business
manager.”
“So, I’ve known some business geeks who aren’t total assholes,” Les-
ter said. “Who care about what they’re doing and the people they’re
doing it with. Respectful and mindful. It’s like lawyers — they’re not all
scumbags. Some of them are totally awesome and save your ass.”
Suzanne took all this in, jotting notes on an old-fashioned spiral-
bound shirt-pocket notebook. “When’s he arriving?”
“Next week,” Lester said. “We’ve cleared him a space to work and
everything. He’s someone that Kettlewell’s people recruited up in
Ithaca and he’s going to move here to work with us, sight unseen. Crazy,
huh?”
“Crazy,” Suzanne agreed.
8
GET MORE OF
MAKERS
To purchase copies of Makers for holiday gifts, print the

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Books-A-Million
Indiebound
Visit
CrapHound.com
TRUST AGENTS
Chris Brogan
&
Julien Smith
TRUST AGENTS
In Trust Agents, two social media veterans show you how to tap into
the power of social networks to build your brand’s influence, repu-
tation, and, of course, profits. Today’s online influencers are web
natives who trade in trust, reputation, and relationships, using social
media to accrue the influence that builds up or brings down
businesses online.
The book shows

sh how people use online social tools to build networks
of influence and how you can use those networks to positively impact
your business. Because trust is key to building online reputations,
those who traffic in it are “trust agents,” the key people your business
needs on its side.
If you want your business to succeed, don’t sit on the sidelines. Instead,
use the Web to build trust with your consumers using Trust Agents.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Not a marketer, not a journalist, Chris Brogan strives to demonstrate how
we can all build new connections and bring about new opportunities through
media making and social networking. Learn more at ChrisBrogan.com.
Julien Smith is an author, consultant, and speaker who has been involved in
online communities for over 15 years—from early BBSes and flashmobs to
the social web as we know it today. Learn more at InOverYourHead.net.
TRUST AGENTS
[ EXCERPT ]
The Connected Guy

Joe Pistone had thought he was going to go undercover for six
months. Instead, he vanished for six years.
You see, he was already practically a wiseguy. He had grown up
among the Mafia in Paterson, New Jersey, and had worked the same
kind of jobs. Like many involved in the Mob, Pistone was of Sicilian
descent and spoke Italian, and they accepted him. When he started
showing up at Carmello’s—a restaurant at 1638 York Avenue on the
corner of 86th Street and one block from the East River—he fit in
perfectly. He knew it was a spot in Manhattan where wiseguys hung
out, and he knew he’d get acquainted eventually. He just didn’t know
how deep he would get.
Turns out that, to go undercover, Pistone knew how to make all
the right moves. He knew that in order to be a good undercover agent,
he needed to be a good street agent: someone who understood not just
how things worked in an office, but out in the city, too. He knew all
about the Mob from growing up around its members; but he had been
brought up by a good family whose values led him to join the FBI. The
FBI didn’t know who he was anymore. No one named Joe Pistone was
working there, nor was there one in the company records; his person-
1
CHRIS BROGAN & JULIEN SMITH • TRUST AGENTS
nel file had been removed and his desk had been entirely cleaned out.
As Pistone himself says of his old life: ‘‘I obliterated it.’’
While Pistone was immersing himself in Mob life, the FBI was try-
ing to figure out who this new guy with the Bonanno family was—Pis-
tone had remade himself into a jewel thief named Donnie Brasco.
As it turns out, Pistone was so deep that even FBI surveillance
teams who were following him had no idea who they were taking pic-
tures of. The name Donnie Brasco was suddenly everywhere, but the
FBI didn’t know where he had come from. Most wiseguys had grown
up in or near the city, but Brasco’s story was that he was from Califor-
nia and had spent time in Florida doing some jobs (i.e., burglaries)
before coming here.
When Pistone was officially brought in to the Mob, it was by Ben-
jamin ‘‘Lefty Guns’’ Ruggiero. That day, he became a ‘‘connected
guy’’—someone connected to the Mob—but not officially a ‘‘made
guy’’ (or wiseguy), which is an official member of Cosa Nostra. But
you don’t just get connected to the Mob that easily. Pistone had spent
more than six months working undercover in New York, becoming a
regular at Carmello’s, before he could gain Ruggiero’s trust. It was this
patience, this diligence, that helped him move quickly up the ranks.
His first moves, though, were subtle ones. At Carmello’s, he would
occasionally see mobsters the FBI wanted more information about,
but, as he said, ‘‘I never got an opportunity to get into conversation
with them. It isn’t wise to say to the bartender, ‘Who is that over
there? Isn’t that so-and-so?’ ’’ Pistone ‘‘wanted to be known as a guy
who didn’t ask too many questions, didn’t appear to be too curious.
With the guys we were after, it was tough to break in. A wrong move—
even if you’re just on the fringes of things—will turn them off.’’ In-
stead, Donnie Brasco learned to play backgammon (a game wiseguys
played a lot around then) and just hung out. Around Christmas, he
was able to get into a couple of games with the right people. He intro-
duced himself as ‘‘Don,’’ and let people see him hanging around so
2
they would recognize him as a regular at the bar. Now he could sit
around and chat with the others.
‘‘What do you do?’’ asked Marty, the bartender, eventually. Marty
wasn’t a Mob guy, but he knew that many of his clientele were mob-
sters. That kind of question wasn’t ‘‘the kind you answer directly,’’
claims Pistone. So he said, ‘‘Oh, you know, not doing anything right
now, you know, hanging out, looking around. . . . Basically, I do any-
thing where I can make a fast buck.’’ He made clear what kind of guy
Donnie Brasco was, and word got around. In Pistone’s own words,
The important thing here in the beginning was not so much to get
hooked up with anybody in particular and get action going right away.
The important thing was to have a hangout, a good backup, for credi-
bility. When I went other places, I could say, ‘‘I been hanging out at
that place for four or five months.’’ And they could check it out. The
guys that had been hanging around in this place would say, ‘‘Yeah,
Don Brasco has been coming in here for quite a while, and he seems
all right, never tried to pull anything on us.’’ That’s the way you build
up who you are, little by little, never moving too fast, never taking too
big a bite at one time. There are occasions where you suddenly have to
take a big step or a big chance. Those come later.
Finally, the time was right for Pistone to make a move. He brought
some jewelry from the FBI that had been confiscated during investiga-
tions to the bar with the intention of selling it to the mobsters. Since
cops are always trying to buy illegal items, to make a bust, Brasco de-
cided he would do something different. Because he had already made
clear to anyone who asked that Brasco wasn’t on the up-and-up, he
could try to sell ‘‘a couple of diamond rings, a couple of loose stones,
and a couple of men’s and ladies’ wristwatches’’ to the bartender. Pis-
tone recounts the story:
‘‘If you’d like to hold on to these for a couple days,’’ I said, ‘‘you
can try to get rid of them.’’
‘‘What’s the deal?’’ he asked.
3
‘‘I need $2,500 total. Anything over that is yours.’’

And so it began. At Carmello’s, he met Albert, who was connected
to the Colombo family; from there, he hooked up with Jilly’s crew,
which stole all sorts of goods around New York and sold it in a place
called Acerg (backward for Jilly’s last name, Greca). From there, he
connected with Tony Mirra, a soldier for the Bonanno family. Mirra
was a knife man, and Brasco was told, ‘‘If you ever get into an argu-
ment with him, make sure you stay an arm’s length away, because he
will stick you.’’
Today, Pistone lives under an assumed name somewhere in the
United States with his family. He stayed in the Mafia for six years and
was so deeply immersed in that life that, at one point, he was one kill
away from being made—turned into a real mobster. He claims that
the whole time he never lost his moral compass, never doubted himself
or strayed from his mission. He brought the Mafia to its knees; every
individual the FBI would go after during this time, it would get—all
because of Pistone, the best infiltrator ever to have entered the Mob.
La Cosa Nostra never truly recovered.
Why Is This Important? While most people don’t know of Joe
Pistone, they do recognize the name ‘‘Donnie Brasco,’’ because he was
portrayed by Johnny Depp in the 1997 film of the same name. Like-
wise, most people haven’t heard of Alan Conway, though his story is so
unusual it is unlikely you’ll ever forget it. This book is about trust; but
it’s also about how technology can influence it.
This book is about the crossroads between the two and how that
impacts your business. Pistone was able to deceive everyone he met,
because, back then, you couldn’t just type ‘‘Joe Pistone’’ into Google
Images and find a picture of him. Today, Pistone may have had a Face-
book or a MySpace page before going undercover or, at the very least,
would have shown up in a few pictures on Flickr or on a birthday
video on YouTube. And once your traces are on the Web, they’re there
forever.
4
What Is the Truth, Anyway?

The way people use the Web is constantly changing. People have
become more wary of where the information they receive comes from,
and with good reason. We read articles about how the person beside
us at the bar ordering the Miller Genuine Draft is actually a paid
‘‘buzz generator.’’ We read product reviews on the Web, believing that
they are a reflection of what the reviewers think of the product—only
to find out that products returning a higher cut of the profits are al-
ways rated higher than products that are perhaps superior in quality.
We know how less-than-honest advertisers and marketers work to
influence us. We realize that those few lazy reporters in our media
who just report on whatever a PR firm tells them without follow-up
offer poor reporting. We are living in an age where the collapse of
2008 and 2009 shook our trust in our entire financial system, compro-
mised the viability of our retirement funds, and sent massive waves of
distrust through London, New York, and beyond.
It is unclear in an age in which technologies such as Google prevail
over almost all information whether either of the two gentlemen dis-
cussed earlier would have been able to pass as the people they did for
so long. Conway’s elaborate Stanley Kubrick impersonation was even-
tually discovered as a fraud and exposed on television in a series called
The Lying Game; by that time, he had already borrowed tens of thou-
sands of dollars from people who believed him to be the real thing. As
for Joe Pistone, his true identity was never exposed (that is to say, until
the FBI revealed it). This enabled him to eventually send more than
100 members of the New York Mob to prison, striking a serious blow
to the Mafia. How would he have done this in the twenty-first century,
with much of our communication going through digital channels?
Obliterating an identity online as well as in the real world is extremely
difficult.
It’s difficult to reach out and do business with people using the
Web. This is especially true in an environment where trust isn’t previ-
5
ously established and where the prospective customer has access to far
more information about your organization, products, and services
than ever before.
Why Trust Agents, and Why Now?

Who we trust has changed. We know from personal experience
that this generation and the next aren’t blindly trusting information
from just any random source. In fact, upon conducting research in this
field, IBM discovered that 71 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds studied
spend more than two hours online per day, compared to only 48 per-
cent of the same group who spend two hours watching television.
One-third of them (32 percent) received advice about where to go on
the Web mostly from friends. Consider your own behavior; you’ll
likely realize that your own skepticism is also on the rise.
We are currently living in a communications environment where
there is a trust deficit. As a society, we no longer have confidence in
advertising. We are hostile to those who appear to have ulterior mo-
tives, even if they’re just selling themselves. The result is our tendency
to join together into loose networks, or tribes, that gather based on
common interest. We are suspicious of anything that comes to us from
outside our circle of friends. We form groups of like-minded individu-
als around those topics, products, or news items that interest us. For
example, the news- sharing site Digg.com reports news quite differ-
ently than Reddit. com, the London Times, or the Wall Street Journal.
And that news might be suspect in certain circles, because the stories
on Digg that reach the top are sometimes moved to the top by dubious
means: voting campaigns, robotic algorithms, and so forth. Again, we
ask you: Whom should you trust?
Trust agents have established themselves as being non-sales- ori-
ented, non-high-pressure marketers. Instead, they are digital natives
using the Web to be genuine and to humanize their business. They’re
interested in people (prospective customers, employees, colleagues,
6
and more), and they have realized that these tools that enable more
unique, robust communication also allow more business opportunities
for everyone.
Who, exactly, are trust agents? They are the power users of the
new tools of the Web, educated more by way of their own experiences
and experiments than from the core of their professional experi-
ences. They speak online technology fluently. They learn by trying, so
they are bold in their efforts to try new on applications and devices.
They recommend more, and more often, on social bookmarking ap-
plications (Delicious.com and the like) than anyone else. They connect
with more people than anyone else, and they know how to leave a
good impression. As they do so, they build healthy, honest relation-
ships. Trust agents use today’s Web tools to spread their influence
faster, wider, and deeper than a typical company’s PR or marketing
department might be capable of achieving, and with more genuine in-
terest in people, too.
We need to become them—and to harness them.
As we delve more deeply into this topic, we intend for you to con-
sider two things: (1) how to be genuine, real, and open with people
while also (2) recognizing that if you can think strategically and un-
derstand certain principles, you can learn how to master tomorrow’s
radios as well as trust agents do. You can bring the news to people.
You can build influence, share influence, and benefit from the other
currencies that such exchanges of trust deliver to you.
Most people will do this within a business setting while working
for a company, but always with an eye toward being legitimate and
honest with the community within which they operate. The more you
read, the more you’ll realize that we’re asking you to balance being
genuinely part of an online community with being aware of business
opportunities, and how executing the trust agent’s strategy can realize
business goals. We know that this can be tricky business, but also that
it’s absolutely possible. Further, we believe you can do it, too.
7
The Six Characteristics of Trust Agents

In researching how we wanted to talk about trust agents and how
we would impart the information to you, we’ve defined six overarch-
ing but interrelated behaviors that describe what a trust agent is. We
realized that if we were to build the book this way, you could under-
stand each of these actions as a separate entity and grasp the concepts
better. These actions form a linked system. We believe that trust
agents use all six of them, though each manifests these traits in differ-
ing degrees. As you read about them, you may notice that you can
place people you know into some categories, but don’t forget to con-
sider your own strengths and work from those, too. That’s likely how
you’ll have the most impact.
1. Make Your Own Game: Perhaps the first defining skill set that
trust agents seem to share is their recognition of the fact that there’s
the established way to do things—and then there’s a game-changing
way to do things. This new method, which usually involves skill, ex-
perimentation, and a comfort level with trial, error, and early failures,
is how most trust agents break out of the mold and appear on our col-
lective radar. In popular entertainment, Oprah Winfrey went from
being the local TV weather reporter to a multimillion-dollar media
enterprise. Though she used traditional media tools to accomplish
this, when you look back on the circumstances of Winfrey’s rise, you’ll
recognize all the various points in her career where she made her own
game (against some fairly daunting odds). Put another way, making
your own game is about standing out.
2. One of Us: One thing that distinguishes certain people as trust
agents is the simple defining question of whether a specific community
sees them as ‘‘one of us.’’ In his early career at Microsoft, Robert Sco-
ble blogged about the good— but, more important, the bad—Micro-
soft products at the time. When he shared his take on why Internet
Explorer wasn’t as good as Firefox, we (his audience of readers) felt
that Scoble represented One of Us. We could believe what he said,
8
because he was a member of our community, talked like us, spent time
where we spent time, and seemed to be genuine and honest with us.
This characteristic extends to every trust agent we identify throughout
the book. In other words, being One of Us is about belonging.
3. The Archimedes Effect: You can do any and all of these six
things well, but when you use your unique abilities to enhance them
(using knowledge, people, technology, or time), then what you do be-
comes immensely powerful. We consider the Web to be one of the
best tools for increasing the power of what you do, so we discuss this
with you to get you started on bringing it all together and achieving
your goals. It’s probably already clear, but the Archimedes Effect is
about leverage.
4. Agent Zero: Trust agents are at the center of wide, powerful
networks. They make building relationships a priority because it’s a
human thing to do—long before any actual business requires trans-
acting. They are people who jump at the chance to meet others online,
at events, or in mixed social settings, and who then often connect
these new acquaintances with other people in their personal networks.
They realize the value of our networks isn’t in their ability to ask for
things, but in their ability to complete projects faster, find resources
more easily, and reach the right people at the right time. Because hav-
ing a wide network is very powerful and opens doors, Agent Zero is
about developing access.
5. Human Artist: Learning how to work well with people, em-
power people, recognize their strengths and weaknesses, and know
when to improve relationships and when to step away are all part of
what a trust agent does. In business terms, these are often called soft
skills. From our perspective, companies that aren’t valuing the power
of peak performers in the arena of human interpersonal skills and so-
cial interaction are companies doomed to a painful future. This is an
art consist- ing of sciences. It’s the hardest part to teach, but one of the
9
most necessary ingredients. Being a Human Artist, in a way, is about

developing understanding.
6. Build an Army: No matter how great you think you are, you
can’t do it all alone. When you can get a large group to collaborate, you
can achieve monumental tasks that may have been previously impos-
sible. As more people gather on social networks and elsewhere, asking
each to push a little can help it become an avalanche in a way no set of
tools was ever able to do before. Because the Web is so vast, and we are
so small, building an army is about developing mass.
10
GET MORE OF
TRUST AGENTS
To purchase copies of Trust Agents for holiday gifts, print the

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Books-A-Million
Indiebound
Visit
TrustAgent.com
WAKE
Robert J.
Sawyer
WAKE
"One of the foremost science fiction writers of our generation"
(SF Site) presents a trilogy of the Web's awakening.
Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math-and blind. Still,

she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex
paths clearly in her mind. But Caitlin's brain long ago co-opted her
primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. So when she
receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality, the
landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness,
spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and shapes. While
exploring this amazing realm, she discovers something — some
other — lurking in the background. And it's getting more and more
intelligent with each passing day...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert J. Sawyer — called "the dean of Canadian science fiction" by the
Ottowa Citizen and "just about the best science-fiction writer out there"
by the Denver Rocky Mountain News — is one of seven authors in history
to win all three of the science-fiction field's highest honors for best novel of
the year: the Hugo Award,, the Nebula Award, and the John W. Campbell
Memorial Award. The ABC television series FlashForward is based on his
novel of the same name. Learn more at SFWriter.com.
What a blind person needs is not a
teacher but another self.
—Helen Keller
CHAPTER 1
Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light.

Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound.
Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others.
But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist
at all: awareness.
Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of
being.
Being ... but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—
only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless
moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception ...
Caitlin had kept a brave face throughout dinner, telling her parents
that everything was fine—just peachy—but, God, it had been a terrifying
day, filled with other students jostling her in the busy corridors, teachers
referring to things on blackboards, and doubtless everyone looking at
her. She’d never felt self-conscious at the TSB back in Austin, but she
was on display now. Did the other girls wear earrings, too? Had these
corduroy pants been the right choice? Yes, she loved the feel of the fabric
and the sound they made, but here everything was about appearances.
1
ROBERT J. SAWYER ~ WAKE
She was sitting at her bedroom desk, facing the open window. An
evening breeze gently moved her shoulder-length hair, and she heard the
outside world: a small dog barking, someone kicking a stone down the
quiet residential street, and, way off, one of those annoying car alarms.
She ran a finger over her watch: 7:49—seven and seven squared, the
last time today there’d be a sequence like that. She swiveled to face her
computer and opened LiveJournal.
“Subject” was easy: “First day at the new school.” For “Current
Location,” the default was “Home.” This strange house—hell, this
strange country!—didn’t feel like that, but she let the proffered text stand.
For “Mood,” there was a drop-down list, but it took forever for
JAWS, the screen-reading software she used, to announce all the choices;
she always just typed something in. After a moment’s reflection, she
settled on “Confident.” She might be scared in real life, but online she
was Calculass, and Calculass knew no fear.
As for “Current Music,” she hadn’t started an MP3 yet ... and so she
let iTunes pick a song at random from her collection. She got it in three
notes: Lee Amodeo, “Rocking My World.”
Her index fingers stroked the comforting bumps on the F and J
keys—Braille for the masses—while she thought about how to begin.
Okay, she typed, ask me if my new school is noisy and crowded.
Go ahead, ask. Why, thank you: yes, it is noisy and crowded. Eighteen
hundred students! And the building is three stories tall. Actually, it’s
three storeys tall, this being Canada and all. Hey, how do you find a
Canadian in a crowded room? Start stepping on people’s feet and wait
for someone to apologize to you. :)
Caitlin faced the window again and tried to imagine the setting sun.
It creeped her out that people could look in at her. She’d have kept the
venetian blinds down all the time, but Schrödinger liked to stretch out on
the sill.
First day in tenth grade began with the Mom dropping me off and
BrownGirl4 (luv ya, babe!) meeting me at the entrance. I’d walked
2
the empty corridors of the school several times last week, getting my
bearings, but it’s completely different now that the school is full of kids,
so my folks are slipping BG4 a hundred bucks a week to escort me to
our classes. The school managed to work it so we’re in all but one
together. No way I could be in the same French class as her—je suis une
beginneur, after all!
Her computer chirped: new email. She issued the keyboard command
to have JAWS read the message’s header.
“To: Caitlin D.,” the computer announced. She only styled her
name like that when posting to newsgroups, so whoever had sent this
had gotten her address from NHL Player Stats Discuss or one of the
other ones she frequented. “From: Gus Hastings.” Nobody she knew.
“Subject: Improving your score.”
She touched a key and JAWS began to read the body of the message.
“Are you sad about tiny penis? If so—”
Damn, her spam filter should have intercepted that. She ran her
index finger along the refreshable display. Ah: the magic word had been
spelled “peeeniz.” She deleted the message and was about to go back to
LiveJournal when her instant messenger bleeped. “BrownGirl4 is now
available,” announced the computer.
She used alt-tab to switch to that window and typed, Hey, Bashira!
Just updating my LJ.
Although she had JAWS configured to use a female voice, it didn’t
have Bashira’s lovely accent: “Say nice things about me.”
Course, Caitlin typed. She and Bashira had been best friends for two
months now, ever since Caitlin had moved here; she was the same age as
Caitlin—fifteen—and her father worked with Caitlin’s dad at PI.
“Going to mention that Trevor was giving you the eye?”
Right! She went back to the blogging window and typed: BG4 and
I got desks beside each other in home room, and she said this guy in the
next row was totally checking me out. She paused, unsure how she felt
about this, but then added, Go me!
3
She didn’t want to use Trevor’s real name. Let’s give him a code
name, cuz I think he just might figure in future blog entries. Hmmm, how
’bout ... the Hoser! That’s Canadian slang, folks—google it! Anyway,
BG4 says the Hoser is famous for hitting on new girls in town, and I
am, of course, tres exotique, although I’m not the only American in that
class. There’s this chick from Boston named—friends, I kid you not!—
poor thing’s name is Sunshine! It is to puke. :P
Caitlin disliked emoticons. They didn’t correspond to real facial
expressions for her, and she’d had to memorize the sequences of
punctuation marks as if they were a code. She moved back to the instant
messenger. So whatcha up to?
“Not much. Helping one of my sisters with homework. Oh, she’s
calling me. BRB.”
Caitlin did like chat acronyms: Bashira would “be right back,”
meaning, knowing her, that she was probably gone for at least half an
hour. The computer made the door-closing sound that indicated Bashira
had logged off. Caitlin returned to LiveJournal.
Anyway, first period rocked because I am made out of awesome. Can
you guess which subject it was? No points if you didn’t answer “math.”
And, after only one day, I totally own that class. The teacher—let’s call
him Mr. H, shall we?—was amazed that I could do things in my head the
other kids need a calculator for.
Her computer chirped again. She touched a key, and JAWS
announced: “To: cddecter@ ...” An email address without her name
attached; almost certainly spam. She hit delete before the screen reader
got any further.
After math, it was English. We’re doing a boring book about this
angsty guy growing up on the plains of Manitoba. It’s got wheat in every
scene. I asked the teacher—Mrs. Z, she is, and you could not have picked
a more Canadian name, cuz she’s Mrs. Zed, not Mrs. Zee, see?—if all
Canadian literature was like this, and she laughed and said, “Not all of
it.” Oh what a joy English class is going to be!
4
“BrownGirl4 is now available,” JAWS said.

Caitlin hit alt-tab to switch windows, then: That was fast.
“Yeah,” said the synthesized voice. “You’d be proud of me. It was an
algebra problem, and I had no trouble with it.”
Be there or B^2, Caitlin typed.
“Heh heh. Oh, gotta go. Dad’s in one of his moods. See you”—which
she’d no doubt typed as “CU.”
Caitlin went back to her journal. Lunch was okay, but I swear to God
I’ll never get used to Canadians. They put vinegar on French fries! And
BG4 told me about this thing called poontang. Kidding, friends, kidding!
It’s poutine: French fries with cheese curds and gravy thrown on top—
it’s like they use fries as a freakin’ science lab up here. Guess they don’t
have much money for real science, ’cept here in Waterloo, of course. And
that’s mostly private mollah.
Her spell-checker beeped. She tried again: mewlah.
Another beep. The darn thing knew “triskaidekaphobia,” like she’d
ever need that word, but—oh, maybe it was: moolah.
No beep. She smiled and went on.
Yup, the all-important green stuff. Well, except it’s not green up here,
I’m told; apparently it’s all different colors. Anyway, a lot of the money
to fund the Perimeter Institute, where my dad works on quantum gravity
and other shiny stuff like that, comes from Mike Lazaridis, cofounder of
Research in Motion—RIM, for you crackberry addicts. Mike L’s a great
guy (they always call him that cuz there’s another Mike, Mike B), and I
think my dad is happy here, although it’s so blerking hard to tell with
him.
Her computer chirped yet again, announcing more email. Well, it
was time to wrap this up anyway; she had about eight million blogs to
read before bed.
After lunch it was chemistry class, and that looks like it’s going to
be awesome. I can’t wait until we start doing experiments—but if the
teacher brings in a plate of fries, I’m outta there!
5
She used the keyboard shortcut to post the entry, and then had JAWS
read the new email header.
“To: Caitlin Decter,” her computer announced. “From: Masayuki
Kuroda.” Again, nobody she knew. “Subject: A proposition.”
Involving a rock-hard peeeniz, no doubt! She was about to hit delete
when she was distracted by Schrödinger rubbing against her legs—a
case of what she liked to call cattus interruptus. “Who’s a good kitty?”
Caitlin said, reaching down to pet him.
Schrödinger jumped into her lap and must have jostled the keyboard
or mouse while doing so, because her computer proceeded to read the
body of the message: “I know a teenage girl must be careful about whom
she talks to online ...”
A cyberstalker who knew the difference between who and whom!
Amused, she let JAWS continue: “... so I urge you to immediately tell
your parents of this letter. I hope you will consider my request, which is
one I do not make lightly.”
Caitlin shook her head, waiting for the part where he would ask for
nude photos. She found the spot on Schrödinger’s neck that he liked to
have scratched.
“I have searched through the literature and online to find an ideal
candidate for the research my team is doing. My specialty is signal
processing related to V1.”
Caitlin’s hand froze in mid-scratch.
“I have no wish to raise false hopes, and I can make no projection of
the likelihood of success until I’ve examined MRI scans, but I do think
there’s a fair chance that the technique we have developed may be able to
at least partially cure your blindness, and”—she leapt to her feet, sending
Schrödinger to the floor and probably out the door—“give you at least
some vision in one eye. I’m hoping that at your earliest—”
“Mom! Dad! Come quick!”
She heard both sets of footfalls: light ones from her mother, who was
five-foot-four and slim, and much heavier ones from her father, who was
6
six-two and developing, she knew from those very rare occasions on
which he permitted a hug, a middle-aged spread.
“What’s wrong?” Mom asked. Dad, of course, didn’t say a word.
“Read this letter,” Caitlin said, gesturing toward her monitor.
“The screen is blank,” Mom said.
“Oh.” Caitlin fumbled for the power switch on the seventeen-inch
LCD, then got out of the way. She could hear her mother sit down and
her father take up a position behind the chair. Caitlin sat on the edge of
her bed, bouncing impatiently. She wondered if Dad was smiling; she
liked to think he did smile while he was with her.
“Oh, my God,” Mom said. “Malcolm?”
“Google him,” Dad said. “Here, let me.”
More shuffling, and Caitlin heard her father settle into the chair.
“He’s got a Wikipedia entry. Ah, his Web page at the University of
Tokyo. A Ph.D. from Cambridge, and dozens of peer-reviewed papers,
including one in Nature Neuroscience, on, as he says, signal processing
in V1, the primary visual cortex.”
Caitlin was afraid to get her hopes up. When she’d been little, they’d
visited doctor after doctor, but nothing had worked, and she’d resigned
herself to a life of—no, not of darkness but of nothingness.
But she was Calculass! She was a genius at math and deserved to
go to a great university, then work someplace real cool like Google.
Even if she managed the former, though, she knew people would say
garbage like, “Oh, good for her! She managed to get a degree despite
everything!”—as if the degree were the end, not the beginning. But if
she could see! If she could see, the whole wide world would be hers.
“Is what he’s saying possible?” her mom asked.
Caitlin didn’t know if the question was meant for her or her father,
nor did she know the answer. But her dad responded. “It doesn’t sound
impossible,” he said, but that was as much of an endorsement as he was
willing to give. And then he swiveled the chair, which squeaked a little,
and said, “Caitlin?”
7
It was up to her, she knew: she was the one who’d had her hopes
raised before, only to be dashed, and—
No, no, that wasn’t fair. And it wasn’t true. Her parents wanted her
to have everything. It had been heartbreaking for them, too, when other
attempts had failed. She felt her lower lip trembling. She knew what a
burden she’d been on them, although they’d never once used that word.
But if there was a chance ...
I am made out of awesome, my ass, she thought, and then she spoke,
her voice small, frightened. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to write him back.”
8
CHAPTER 2
The awareness is unburdened by memory, for when reality seems

unchanging there is nothing to remember. It fades in and out, strong
now—and now weak—and strong again, and then almost disappearing,
and—
And disappearance is ... to cease, to ... to end!
A ripple, a palpitation—a desire: to continue.
But the sameness lulls.
Wen Yi looked through the small, curtainless window at the rolling

hills. He’d spent all his fourteen years here in Shanxi province, laboring
on his father’s tiny potato farm.
The monsoon season was over, and the air was bone-dry. He turned
his head to look again at his father, lying on the rickety bed. His father’s
wrinkled forehead, brown from the sun, was slick with perspiration and
hot to the touch. He was completely bald and had always been thin, but
since the disease had taken hold he’d been unable to keep anything down
and now looked utterly skeletal.
Yi looked around the tiny room, with its few pieces of beat-up
furniture. Should he stay with his father, try to comfort him, try to get
9
him to take sips of water? Or should he go for whatever help might

be found in the village? Yi’s mother had died shortly after giving birth
to him. His father had had a brother, but these days few families were
allowed a second child, and Yi had no one to help look after him.
The yellow root grindings he’d gotten from the old man down the
dirt road had done nothing to ease the fever. He needed a doctor—even
a barefoot one, if a real one couldn’t be found—but there was none here,
nor any way to summon one; Yi had seen a telephone only once in his
life, when he’d gone on a long, long hike with a friend to see the Great
Wall.
“I’m going to get a doctor for you,” he said at last, his decision made.
His father’s head moved left and right. “No. I—” He coughed
repeatedly, his face contorting with pain. It looked as though an even
smaller man was inside the husk of his father, fighting to burst out.
“I have to,” Yi said, trying to make his voice soft, soothing. “It won’t
take more than half a day to get to the village and back.”
That was true—if he ran all the way there, and found someone with a
vehicle to drive him and a doctor back. Otherwise, his father would have
to make it through today and tonight alone, feverish, delirious, in pain.
He touched his father’s forehead again, this time in affection, and felt
the fire there. Then he rose to his feet and without looking back—for he
knew he couldn’t leave if he saw his father’s pleading eyes—he headed
out the shack’s crooked door into the harsh sun.
Others had the fever, too, and at least one had died. Yi had been
awoken last night not by his father’s coughing but by the wailing cries
of Zhou Shu-Fei, an old woman who lived closer to them than anyone
else. He’d gone to see what she was doing outside so late. Her husband,
he discovered, had just succumbed, and now she had the fever, too; he
could feel it when his skin brushed against hers. He stayed with her for
hours, her hot tears splashing against his arm, until finally she had fallen
asleep, devastated and exhausted.
Yi was passing Shu-Fei’s house now, a hovel as small and ramshackle
10
as the one he shared with his father. He hated to bother her—she was
doubtless still deep in mourning—but perhaps the old woman would
look in on his father while he was away. He went to the door and rapped
his knuckles against the warped, stained board. No response. After a
moment, he tried again.
Nothing.
No one here had much; there was little theft because there was little
to steal. He suspected the door was unlocked. He called out Shu-Fei’s
name, then gingerly swung the door open, and—
—and there she was, facedown in the compacted dirt that served as
her home’s floor. He hurried over to her, crouched, and reached out to
touch her, but—
—but the fever was gone. The normal warmth of life was gone, too.
Yi rolled her onto her back. Her deep-set eyes, surrounded by the
creases of her aged skin, were open. He carefully closed them, then rose
and headed through the door. He shut it behind him and began his long
run. The sun was high, and he could feel himself already beginning to
sweat.
Caitlin had been waiting impatiently for the lunch break, her first
chance to tell Bashira about the note from the doctor in Japan. Of course,
she could have forwarded his email to her, but some things were better
done face-to-face: she expected serious squee from Bashira and wanted
to enjoy it.
Bashira brought her lunch to school; she needed halal food. She
went off to get them places at one of the long tables, while Caitlin joined
the cafeteria line. The woman behind the counter read the lunch specials
to her, and she chose the hamburger and fries (but no gravy!) and, to
make her mother happy, a side of green beans. She handed the clerk
a ten-dollar bill—she always folded those in thirds—and put the loose
change in her pocket.
11
“Hey, Yankee,” said a boy’s voice. It was Trevor Nordmann—the

Hoser himself.
Caitlin tried not to smile too much. “Hi, Trevor,” she said.
“Can I carry your tray for you?”
“I can manage,” she said.
“No, here.” She felt him tugging on it, and she relented before her
food tumbled to the floor. “So, did you hear there’s going to be a school
dance at the end of the month?” he asked, as they left the cashier.
Caitlin wasn’t sure how to respond. Was it just a general question,
or was he thinking of asking her to go? “Yeah,” she said. And then: “I’m
sitting with Bashira.”
“Oh, yeah. Your seeing-eye dog.”
“Excuse me?” snapped Caitlin.
“I—um ...”
“That’s not funny, and it’s rude.”
“I’m sorry. I was just ...”
“Just going to give me back my tray,” she said.
“No, please.” His voice changed; he’d turned his head. “There she is,
by the window. Um, do you want to take my hand?”
If he hadn’t made that remark a moment ago, she might have agreed.
“Just keep talking, and I’ll follow your voice.”
He did so, while she felt her way with her collapsible white cane. He
set the tray down; she heard the dishes and cutlery rattling.
“Hi, Trevor,” Bashira said, a bit too eagerly—and Caitlin suddenly
realized that Bashira liked him.
“Hi,” Trevor replied with no enthusiasm.
“There’s an extra seat,” said Bashira.
“Hey, Nordmann!” some guy called from maybe twenty feet away; it
wasn’t a voice Caitlin recognized.
He was silent against the background din of the cafeteria, as if
weighing his options. Perhaps realizing that he wasn’t going to recover
12
quickly from his earlier gaffe, he finally said, “I’ll email you, Caitlin ...
if that’s okay.”
She kept her tone frosty. “If you want.”
A few seconds later, presumably after the Hoser had gone to join
whoever had called him, Bashira said, “He’s hot.”
“He’s an asshole,” Caitlin replied.
“Yeah,” agreed Bashira, “but he’s a hunky asshole.”
Caitlin shook her head. How seeing more could make people see
less was beyond her. She knew that half the Internet was porn, and she’d
listened to the panting-and-moaning soundtracks of some porno videos,
and they had turned her on, but she kept wondering what it was like to
be sexually stimulated by someone’s appearance. Even if she did get
sight, she promised herself she wouldn’t lose her head over something
as superficial as that.
Caitlin leaned across the table and spoke in a low voice. “There’s a
scientist in Japan,” she said, “who thinks he might be able to cure my
blindness.”
“Get out!” said Bashira.
“It’s true. My dad checked him out online. It looks like he’s legit.”
“That’s awesome,” said Bashira. “What is, like, the very first thing
you want to see?”
Caitlin knew the real answer but didn’t say it. Instead, she offered,
“Maybe a concert ...”
“You like Lee Amodeo, right?”
“Totally. She’s got the best voice ever.”
“She’s coming to Centre in the Square in December.”
Caitlin’s turn: “Get out!”
“Really. Wanna go?”
“I’d love to.”
“And you’ll get to see her!” Bashira lowered her voice. “And you’ll
see what I mean about Trevor. He’s, like, so buff.”
They ate their lunch, chatting more about boys, about music, about
13
their parents, their teachers—but mostly about boys. As she often did,
Caitlin thought about Helen Keller, whose reputation for chaste, angelic
perfection had been manufactured by those around her. Helen had very
much wanted to have a boyfriend, too, and even had been engaged once,
until her handlers had scared the young man off.
But to be able to see! She thought again of the porno films she’d only
heard, and the spam that flooded her email box. Even Bashira, for God’s
sake, knew what a ... a peeeniz looked like, although Bashira’s parents
would kill her if she ever made out with a boy before marriage.
Too soon, the bell sounded. Bashira helped Caitlin to their next class,
which was—appropriately enough, Caitlin thought—biology.
14
CHAPTER 3
Focus. Concentration.
With effort, mustering both, differences are perceived, revealing the
structure of reality, so that—
A shift, a reduction in sharpness, a diffusion of awareness, the
perception lost, and—
No. Force it back! Concentrate harder. Observe reality, be aware of
its parts.
But the details are minute, hard to make out. Easier just to ignore
them, to relax, to ... fade ... and ...
No, no. Don’t slip away. Hold on to the details! Concentrate.
Quan Li had obtained privileged status for someone only thirty-five

years old. He was not just a doctor but also a senior member of the
Communist Party, and the size of his thirtieth-floor Beijing apartment
reflected that.
He could list numerous letters after his name—degrees, fellowships—
but the most important ones were the three that were never written down,
only said, and then only by the few of his colleagues who spoke English:
Li had his BTA; he’d Been To America, having studied at Johns Hopkins.
15
When the phone in his long, narrow bedroom rang, his first thought, after
glancing at the red LEDs on his clock, was that it must be some fool
American calling. His US colleagues were notorious for forgetting about
time zones.
He fumbled for the black handset and picked it up. “Hello?” he said
in Mandarin.
“Li,” said a voice that quavered so much it made his name sound like
two syllables.
“Cho?” He sat up in the wide, soft bed and reached for his glasses,
sitting next to the copy of Yu Hua’s Xiong di he’d left splayed open on
the oak night table. “What is it?”
“We’ve received some tissue samples from Shanxi province.”
He held the phone in the crook of his neck as he unfolded his glasses
and put them on. “And?”
“And you better come down here.”
Li felt his stomach knotting. He was the senior epidemiologist in the
Ministry of Health’s Department of Disease Control. Cho, his assistant
despite being twenty years older than Li, wouldn’t be calling him at this
time of night unless—
“So you’ve done initial tests?” He could hear sirens off in the
distance, but, still waking up, couldn’t say whether they were coming
from outside his window or over the phone.
“Yes, and it looks bad. The doctor who shipped the samples sent
along a description of the symptoms. It’s H5N1 or something similar—
and it kills more quickly than any strain we’ve seen before.”
Li’s heart was pounding as he looked over at the clock, which was
now glowing with the digits 4:44—si, si, si: death, death, death. He
averted his eyes and said, “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
Dr. Kuroda had found Caitlin through an article in the journal

Ophthalmology. She had an extremely rare condition, no doubt related
16
to her blindness, called Tomasevic’s syndrome, which was marked

by reversed pupil dilation: instead of contracting in bright light and
expanding in dim light, her pupils did the opposite. Because of it, even
though she had normal-looking brown eyes (or so she was told), she
wore sunglasses to protect her retinas.
There are a hundred million rods in a human eye, and seven million
cones, Kuroda’s email had said. The retina processes the signals from
them, compressing the data by a ratio of more than 100:1 to travel along
1.2 million axons in the optic nerve. Kuroda felt that Caitlin having
Tomasevic’s syndrome was a sign that the data was being misencoded by
her retinas. Although her brain’s pretectal nucleus, which controlled pupil
contraction, could glean some information from her retinal datastream
(albeit getting it backward!), her primary visual cortex couldn’t make
any sense of it.
Or, at least, that’s what he hoped was the case, since he’d developed
a signal-processing device that he believed could correct the retinal
coding errors. But if Caitlin’s optic nerves were damaged, or her
visual cortex was stunted from lack of use, just doing that wouldn’t be
enough.
And so Caitlin and her parents had learned the ins and outs of the
Canadian health-care system. To assess the chances of success, Dr.
Kuroda had wanted her to have MRI scans of specific parts of her brain
(“the optic chiasma,” “Brodmann area 17,” and a slew of other things
she’d never known she had). But experimental procedures weren’t
covered by the provincial health plan, and so no hospital would do the
scans. Her mother had finally exploded, saying, “Look, we don’t care
what it costs, we’ll pay for it”—but that wasn’t the issue. Caitlin either
needed the scans, in which case they were free; or she didn’t, in which
case the public facilities couldn’t be used.
But there were a few private clinics, and that’s where they’d ended up
going, getting the MRI images uploaded via secure FTP to Dr. Kuroda’s
computer in Tokyo. That her dad was freely spending whatever it took
17
was a sign that he loved her ... wasn’t it? God, she wished he would just
say it!
Anyway, with time-zone differences, a response from Kuroda might
come this evening or sometime overnight. Caitlin had adjusted her mail
reader so that it would give a priority signal if a message came in from
him; the only other person she currently had set up for that particular
chirping was Trevor Nordmann, who had emailed her three times now.
Despite his shortcomings, and that stupid thing he’d said, he did seem
genuinely interested in Caitlin, and—
And, just then, her computer made the special sound, and for a
moment she didn’t know which of them she most hoped the message
was from. She pushed the keys that made JAWS read the message aloud.
It was from Dr. Kuroda, with a copy to her dad, and it started in his
long-winded fashion, driving her nuts. Maybe it was part of Japanese
culture, but this not getting to the point was killing her. She hit the page-
up key, which told JAWS to speak faster.
“... my colleagues and I have examined your MRIs and everything
is exactly as we had hoped: you have what appear to be fully normal
optic nerves, and a surprisingly well-developed primary visual cortex
for someone who has never seen. The signal-processing equipment
we have developed should be able to intercept your retinal output, re-
encode it into the proper format, and then pass it on to the optic nerve.
The equipment consists of an external computer pack to do the signal
processing and an implant that we will insert behind your left eyeball.”
Behind her eyeball! Eek!
“If the process is successful with one eye, we might eventually add a
second implant just behind your right eyeball. However, I initially want
to limit us to a single eye. Trying to deal with the partial decussation of
signals from the left and right optic nerves would severely complicate
matters at this pilot-project stage, I’m afraid.
“I regret to inform that my research grant is almost completely
exhausted at this point, and travel funds are limited. However, if you can
18
come to Tokyo, the hospital at my university will perform the procedure

for free. We have a skilled ophthalmic surgeon on faculty who can do the
work ...”
Come to Tokyo? She hadn’t even thought about that. She’d flown
only a few times before, and by far the longest flight had been the one a
couple months ago from Austin to Toronto, when she and her parents had
moved here. That had taken five hours; a trip to Japan would surely take
much longer.
And the cost! My God, it must cost thousands to fly to Asia and
back, and her parents wouldn’t let her go all that way alone. Her mother
or father—or both!—would have to accompany her. What was the old
joke? A billion here, a billion there—before you know it, you’re talking
real money.
She’d have to discuss it with her parents, but she’d already heard
them fight about how much the move to Canada had cost, and—
Heavy footfalls on the stairs: her father. Caitlin swiveled her chair,
ready to call out to him as he passed her door, but—
But he didn’t; he stopped in her doorway. “I guess you better start
packing,” he said.
Caitlin felt her heart jump, and not just because he was saying yes
to the trip to Tokyo. Of course he had a BlackBerry—you couldn’t be
caught dead at the Perimeter Institute without one—but he normally
didn’t have it on at home. And yet he’d gotten his copy of the message
from Kuroda at the same time she had, meaning ...
Meaning he did love her. He’d been waiting eagerly to hear from
Japan, just as she had been.
“Really?” Caitlin said. “But the tickets must cost ...”
“A signed first edition of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
by von Neumann and Morgenstern: five thousand dollars,” said her dad.
“A chance that your daughter can see: priceless.”
That was the closest he ever got to expressing his feelings: para-
phrasing commercials. But she was still nervous. “I can’t fly on my own.”
19
“Your mother will go with you,” he said. “I’ve got too much to do at
the Institute, but she ...” He trailed off.
“Thanks, Dad,” she said. She wanted to hug him, but she knew that
would just make him tense up.
“Of course,” he said, and she heard him walking away.
It took Quan Li only twenty minutes to get to the Ministry of Health

headquarters at 1 Xizhimen Nanlu in downtown Beijing; this early in the
morning, the streets were mostly free of traffic.
He immediately took the elevator to the third floor. His heels made
loud echoing clicks as he strode down the marble corridor and entered
the perfectly square room with three rows of workbenches on which
computer monitors alternated with optical microscopes. Fluorescent
lights shone down from above; there was a window to the left showing
black sky and the reflections of the lighting tubes.
Cho was waiting for him, nervously smoking. He was tall and broad-
shouldered, but his face looked like a crumpled brown paper bag, lined
by sun and age and stress. He’d clearly been up all night. His suit was
wrinkled and his tie hung loose.
Li examined the scanning-electron-microscope image on one of the
computer monitors. It was a gray-on-gray view of an individual viral
particle that looked like a matchstick with a sharp right-angle kink in its
shaft and a head that was bent backward.
“It’s certainly similar to H5N1,” said Li. “I need to speak with the
doctor who reported this—find out what he knows about how the patient
contracted it.”
Cho reached for the telephone, stabbed a button for an outside line,
and punched keys. Li could hear the phone ringing through the earpiece
Cho was holding, again and again, a shrill jangling, until—
“Bingzhou Hospital.” Li could just barely make out the female voice.
“Dr. Huang Fang,” said Cho. “Please.”
20
“He’s in intensive care,” said the woman.

“Is there a phone in there?” asked Cho. Li nodded slightly; it was a
fair question—the lack of equipment in rural hospitals was appalling.
“Yes, but—”
“I need to speak to him.”
“You don’t understand,” said the woman. Li had now moved closer
so that he could hear more clearly. “He is in intensive care, and—”
“I’ve got the chief epidemiologist for the Ministry of Health here
with me. He’ll speak to us, if—”
“He’s a patient.”
Li took a sharp breath.
“The flu?” said Cho. “He has the bird flu?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“How did he get it?”
The woman’s voice seemed ragged. “From the peasant boy who
came here to report it.”
“The peasant brought a bird specimen?”
“No, no, no. The doctor got it from the peasant.”
“Directly?”
“Yes.”
Cho looked at Li, eyes wide. Infected birds passed on H5N1 through
their feces, saliva, and nasal secretions. Other birds picked it up either
by coming directly in contact with those materials, or by touching things
that had been contaminated by them. Humans normally got it through
contact with infected birds. A few sporadic cases had been reported
in the past of it passing from human to human, but those cases were
suspect. But if this strain passed between people easily—
Li motioned for Cho to give him the handset. Cho did so. “This is
Quan Li,” he said. “Have you locked down the hospital?”
“What? No, we—”
“Do it! Quarantine the whole building!”
“I ... I don’t have the authority to—”
21
“Then let me speak to your supervisor.”

“That’s Dr. Huang, and he’s—”
“In intensive care, yes. Is he conscious?”
“Intermittently, but when he is, he’s delirious.”
“How long ago was he infected?”
“Four days.”
Li rolled his eyes; in four days, even a small village hospital had
hundreds of people go through its doors. Still, better late than never:
“I’m ordering you,” Li said, “on behalf of the Department of Disease
Control, to lock down the hospital. No one gets in or out.”
Silence.
“Did you hear me?” Li said.
At last, the voice, soft: “Yes.”
“Good. Now, tell me your name. We’ve got to—”
He heard what sounded like the other phone being dropped. It must
have hit the cradle since the connection abruptly broke, leaving nothing
but dial tone, which, in the predawn darkness, sounded a lot like a
flatlining EKG.
22
CHAPTER 4
Concentrating! Straining to perceive!

Reality does have texture, structure, parts. A ... firmament of ... of ...
points, and—
Astonishment!
No, no. Mistaken. Nothing detected ...
Again!
And—again!
Yes, yes! Small flickerings here, and here, and here, gone before they
can be fully perceived.
The realization is startling ... and ... and ... stimulating. Things are
happening, meaning ... meaning ...
—a notion simple but indistinct, a realization vague and unsure—
... meaning reality isn’t immutable. Parts of it can change.
The flickerings continue; small thoughts roil.
Caitlin was nervous and excited: tomorrow, she and her mother
would fly to Japan! She lay down on her bed, and Schrödinger hopped
up onto the blanket and stretched out next to her.
She was still getting used to this new house—and so, it seemed, were
23
her parents. She had always had exceptional hearing—or maybe just
paid attention to sound more than most people did—but, back in Austin,
she hadn’t been able to make out what her parents were saying in their
bedroom when she was in her own room. She could do it here, though.
“I don’t know about this,” her mother said, her voice muffled.
“Remember what it was like? Going to doctor after doctor. I don’t know
if she can take another disappointment.”
“It’s been six years since the last time,” her dad said; his lower-
pitched voice was harder to hear.
“And she’s just started a new school—and a regular school, at that.
We can’t take her out of classes for some wild-goose chase.”
Caitlin was worried about missing classes, too—not because she was
concerned about falling behind but because she sensed that the cliques
and alliances for the year were already forming and, so far, after two
months in Waterloo, she’d made only one friend. The Texas School
for the Blind took students from kindergarten through the end of high
school; she’d been with the same group most of her life, and she missed
her old friends fiercely.
“This Kuroda says the implant can be put in under a local anesthetic,”
she heard her dad say. “It’s not a major operation; she won’t miss much
school.”
“But we’ve tried before—”
“Technology changes rapidly, exponentially.”
“Yes, but ...”
“And in three years she’ll be going off to university, anyway ...”
Her mother sounded defensive. “I don’t see what that’s got to do
with it. Besides, she can study right here at UW. They’ve got one of the
best math departments in the world. You said it yourself when you were
pushing for us to move here.”
“I didn’t push. And she wants to go to MIT. You know that.”
“But UW—”
“Barb,” her father said, “you have to let her go sometime.”
24
“I’m not holding on,” she said, a bit sharply.

But she was, and Caitlin knew it. Her mother had spent almost sixteen
years now looking after a blind daughter, giving up her own career as an
economist to do that.
Caitlin didn’t hear anything more from her parents that night. She
lay awake for hours, and when she finally did fall asleep, she slept
fitfully, tormented by the recurring dream she had about being lost in an
unfamiliar shopping mall after hours, running down one endless hallway
after another, chased by something noisy she couldn’t identify ...
No periphery, no edge. Just dim, attenuated perception, stimulated—

irritated!—by the tiny flickerings: barely discernible lines ever so briefly
joining points.
But to be aware of them—to be aware of anything—requires ...
requires ...
Yes! Yes, it requires the existence of—
The existence of ...
LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

Title: Being of two minds ...
Date: Saturday 15 September, 8:15 EST
Mood: Anticipatory
Location: Where the heart is
Music: Chantal Kreviazuk, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”
Back in the summer, the school gave me a list of all the books we’re
doing this year in English class. I got them then either as ebooks or as
Talking Books from the CNIB, and have now read them all. Coming
attractions include The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood—
Canadian, yes, but thankfully wheat-free. In fact, I’ve already had an
25
argument with Mrs. Zed, my English teacher, about that one, because I
called it science fiction. She refused to believe it was, finally exclaiming
“It can’t be science fiction, young lady—if it were, we wouldn’t be
studying it!”
Anyway, having gotten all those books out of the way, I get to choose
something interesting to read on the trip to Japan. Although my comfort
book for years was Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, I’m too old
for that now. Besides, I want to try something challenging, and BG4’s
dad suggested The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, which is the coolest-sounding title
ever. He said it came out the year he turned sixteen himself, and my
sixteenth is coming up next month. He read it then and still remembers
it. Says it covers so many different topics—language, ancient history,
psychology—it’s like six books in one. There’s no legitimate ebook
edition, damn it all, but of course everything is on the Web, if you know
where to look for it ...
So, I’ve got my reading lined up, I’m all packed, and fortunately I
got a passport earlier this year for the move to Canada. Next time you
hear from me, I’ll be in Japan! Until then—sayonara!
Caitlin could feel the pressure changing in her ears before the female
voice came over the speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve started our
descent toward Tokyo’s Narita International. Please ensure that your seat
belts are fastened, and that ...”
Thank God, she thought. What a miserable flight! There’d been lots
of turbulence and the plane was packed—she’d never have guessed that
so many people flew each day from Toronto to Tokyo. And the smells
were making her nauseated: the cumulative body odor of hundreds of
people, stale coffee, the lingering tang of ginger beef and wasabi from the
meal served a couple of hours ago, the hideous perfume from someone
26
in front of her, and the reek of the toilet four rows back, which needed a
thorough cleaning after ten hours of use.
She’d killed some time by having the screen-reading software on her
notebook computer recite some of The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind to her. Julian Jaynes’s theory was,
quite literally, mind-blowing: that human consciousness really hadn’t
existed until historical times. Until just 3,000 years ago, he said, the
left and right halves of the brain weren’t really integrated—people had
bicameral minds. Caitlin knew from the Amazon.com reviews that many
people simply couldn’t grasp the notion of being alive without being
conscious. But although Jaynes never made the comparison, it sounded
a lot like Helen Keller’s description of her life before her “soul dawn,”
when Annie Sullivan broke through to her:
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I

am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot
hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet
conscious time of nothingness. I had neither will nor
intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by
a certain blind natural impetus. I never contracted
my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed
anything beforehand or chose it. Never in a start of
the body or a heartbeat did I feel that I loved or cared
for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without
past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation,
without wonder or joy or faith.
If Jaynes was right, everyone’s life was like that until just a
millennium before Christ. As proof, he offered an analysis of the Iliad
and the early books of the Old Testament, in which all the characters
behaved like puppets, mindlessly following divine orders without ever
having any internal reflection.
27
Jaynes’s book was fascinating, but, after a couple of hours, her

screen reader’s electronic voice got on her nerves. She preferred to use
her refreshable Braille display to read books, but unfortunately she’d left
that at home.
Damn, but she wished Air Canada had Internet on its planes! The
isolation over the long journey had been horrible. Oh, she’d spoken a bit
to her mother, but she’d managed to sleep for much of the flight. Caitlin
was cut off from LiveJournal and her chat rooms, from her favorite blogs
and her instant messenger. As they flew the polar route to Japan, she’d
had access only to canned, passive stuff—things on her hard drive, music
on her old iPod Shuffle, the in-flight movies. She craved something she
could interact with; she craved contact.
The plane landed with a bump and taxied forever. She couldn’t wait
until they reached their hotel so she could get back online. But that was
still hours off; they were going to the University of Tokyo first. Their trip
was scheduled to last only six days, including travel—there was no time
to waste.
Caitlin had found Toronto’s airport unpleasantly noisy and crowded.
But Narita was a madhouse. She was jostled constantly by what must
have been wall-to-wall people—and nobody said “excuse me” or “sorry”
(or anything in Japanese). She’d read how crowded Tokyo was, and she’d
also read about how meticulously polite the Japanese were, but maybe
they didn’t bother saying anything when they bumped into someone
because it was unavoidable, and they’d just be mumbling “sorry, pardon
me, excuse me” all day long. But—God!—it was disconcerting.
After clearing Customs, Caitlin had to pee. Thank God she’d visited
a tourist website and knew that the toilet farthest from the door was
usually Western-style. It was hard enough using a strange washroom
when she was familiar with the basic design of the fixtures; she had no
idea what she was going to do if she got stuck somewhere that had only
Japanese squatting toilets.
When she was done, they headed to baggage claim and waited
28
endlessly for their suitcases to appear. While standing there she realized
she was disoriented—because she was in the Orient! (Not bad—she’d
have to remember that line for her LJ.) She routinely eavesdropped on
conversations not to invade people’s privacy but to pick up clues about
her surroundings (“What terrific art,” “Hey, that’s one long escalator,”
“Look, a McDonald’s!”). But almost all the voices she heard were
speaking Japanese, and—
“You must be Mrs. Decter. And this must be Miss Caitlin.”
“Dr. Kuroda,” her mom said warmly. “Thanks for coming to meet us.”
Caitlin immediately had a sense of the man. She’d known from his
Wikipedia entry that he was fifty-four, and she now knew he was tall (the
voice came from high up) and probably fat; his breathing had the labored
wheeze of a heavy man.
“Not at all, not at all,” he said. “My card.” Caitlin had read about this
ritual and hoped her mom had, too: it was rude to take the card with just
one hand, and especially so with the hand you used to wipe yourself.
“Um, thank you,” her mother said, sounding perhaps wistful that
she didn’t have a business card of her own anymore. Apparently, before
Caitlin had been born, she’d liked to introduce herself by saying, “I’m a
dismal scientist”—referring to the famous characterization of economics
as “the dismal science.”
“Miss Caitlin,” said Kuroda, “a card for you, too.”
Caitlin reached out with both hands. She knew that one side would
be printed in Japanese, and that the other side might have English, but—
Masayuki Kuroda, Ph.D.
“Braille!” she exclaimed, delighted.
“I had it specially made for you,” said Kuroda. “But hopefully you
won’t need such cards much longer. Shall we go?”
29
GET MORE OF
WAKE
To purchase copies of Wake for holiday gifts, print the

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Books-A-Million
Indiebound
Visit
SFWriter.com
SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION
Mitch
Joel
Is it important to be connected? Well, consider this: If Facebook were
a country, it would have the sixth largest population in the world.
The truth is, we no longer live in a world of six degrees of separation.

In fact, we’re now down to only six pixels of separation, which changes
everything we know about doing business.
This is the first book to integrate digital marketing, social media,

branding and entrepreneurship in a clear, entertaining, and
personal branding,
instructive manner that everyone can understand and apply.
Through the use of timely case studies and fascinating stories, Six
Pixels of Separation offers a complete set of the latest tactics, insights,
and tools that will empower you to reach a global audience and
consumer base—and, best yet, you can do this pretty much for free.
Everyone is connected. Isn’t it time for you and your company to

connect to everyone? Six Pixels of Separation will show you how.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marketing Magazine dubbed Mitch Joel the “Rock Star of Digital Marketing”
and is considered one of the world’s most influential authorities on Blog
Marketing. Mitch is President of Twist Image—an award-winning Digital
Marketing and Communications agency. Learn more at TwistImage.com/blog.
C H A P T E R 11
Burn the Ships
THE LARGEST PUBLISHER OF AUDIO BOOKS IN THE WORLD

(IT’S NOT WHO YOU THINK)
One day before a road trip, Hugh McGuire was searching online
for free audio books and he could not find any. McGuire, a writer,
software developer, and engineer, had always kept a keen eye on
the open source movement, and in August 2005, based on some
other open source and public domain projects that inspired him,
he launched LibriVox.
LibriVox has a simple objective: “To make all books in the pub-
lic domain available, for free, in audio format on the Internet.”
Working off a very simple website and additional free Web-
based applications, McGuire started putting the word out about
LibriVox and asked for volunteers to come forward and record
audio chapters of public domain books that were of personal in-
terest to them. Using a message board to choose the titles and
assign the chapters, the community is not driven by a bunch of
voice-over professionals with full-on audio recording studios. In
fact, it’s the exact opposite. Anyone with a computer, a micro-
phone, and some free audio recording software can put the classic
words to their own voice. All voices are welcome. No auditions
197
Six Pixels of Separation_9780446548236_HCtextF1.indd 197 6/25/09 9:45:06 AM

198 | SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION
necessary. All audio is accepted, no matter what the voice sounds

like. Audio books are created in different languages, as well.
Developed and grown almost exclusively through online com-
munications, the community is the project; there is no hierarchy
of management and control. Simply put, if you want to record an
audio version of, say, An Outcast of the Islands by Joseph Conrad,
all you have to do is hop over to the online message boards, leave
a message with the chapters you would like to handle, and see
how long it takes for others to fill in the rest. Once all of the chap-
ters are completed, the entire audio book is published to the Web
and available for free to download.
This fascinating new spin on audio books was recently called
“perhaps the most interesting collaborative culture project this
side of Wikipedia” by Mike Linksvayer, the vice president of
Creative Commons (one of the only organizations that helps assign
a certain level of copyright while still enabling certain uses for
work—an increasingly important role in the digital world).
Most of the texts used for the audio books are drawn from
Project Gutenberg (according to Wikipedia: “a volunteer effort
to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works. . . . Founded
in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most
of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain
books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-
lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer”)
and the Internet Archive (again, from Wikipedia: “a nonprofit
organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and
openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of
the Web. . . . The IA makes its collections available at no cost to
researchers, historians, and scholars. It is a member of the Ameri-
can Library Association and is officially recognized by the State
of California as a library”). LibriVox’s annual budget is $0, “and
for the moment we don’t need any money,” says McGuire.

Burn the Ships | 199
The principles of LibriVox, as listed on its website, www

.librivox.org, are also as fascinating as the project itself:
• LibriVox is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project

• LibriVox donates its recordings to the public domain
• LibriVox is powered by volunteers
• LibriVox maintains a loose and open structure
• LibriVox welcomes all volunteers from across the globe, in all
languages
LibriVox has become the largest publisher of audio books in

the world.
Hugh McGuire curates LibriVox along with several other open
source and collaborative projects and start-ups like earideas (“a
collection of the best thought-provoking audio available on the
Web” and edited by human beings), Collectik (a website that helps
you manage, mix, and share audio and video online), datalibre.ca
(“Urging Governments to Make Data about Canada and Canadi-
ans Free and Accessible to Citizens”), and a new book-publishing
start-up called the Book Oven.
In order for Hugh to figure out a way to get more books into
audio format, he had to think differently. He could not publish
audio books the way it had always been done before. He had to
get out of his own way and let the community take over, own, and
nurture LibriVox. There was no “thinking outside of the box” be-
cause, in truth, there was no box for this strategy. There was no
traditional book publisher who was doing this sort of project. It
became a question of how to change the way people get and listen
to books on audio.

LIBRIVOX BURNED THE SHIPS

In the 1500s, Hernando Cortez was the captain of eleven ships
with more than 500 soldiers headed for Mexico to conquer the
Aztecs and bring back gold and treasures. As you can well imag-
ine, after his ships arrived in Mexico, the sailors and soldiers were
not in the best of shape. Some of them fell ill on the journey, some
had lost their motivation, and their quarters were not exactly
shipshape. Several of Cortez’s crewmates wondered what would
happen to them in this strange new land. If they faced challenges
or resistance, how would the crew return home? The crew asked
Cortez what the plan would be to get back home. The captain had
the perfect response: He burned the ships.
There was no going back.
The only direction to go was forward.
The old ways of doing things were about to be rethought.
In fact, there were no more “old ways of doing things”; a new
way had to be defined.
The story of Hernando Cortez and the burning of the ships rip-
ples through to the present time. So much has changed in terms of
what it means to be a business owner, the global economy, how we
connect to our consumers, and the marketing and communications
we create to connect more effectively with them. This notion of
“being a part of their community” is still new, and, if the truth be
told, it is not exactly clear or defined. As we enter this new world
of new business, we, as the next breed of entrepreneurs, must do
what we can to burn the ships. Every time a new business opportu-
nity arises, be it through blogs, podcasts, or Twitter, we are far too
fast to look at ways to monetize and commercialize the channel as
though it were print, radio, or TV (the more traditional media).
If print, radio, or TV were a new medium, started today, what
do you think they would do? Would they burn the ships?

New channels and new tools, like new lands, call for new
strategies. The amazing part of all of the innovations we’ve dis-
cussed in this book is that we can still take the necessary time to
understand what they are and how they connect us ever so much
closer to our consumers. We can embrace the notion of discovery.
As you move forward, take the appropriate amount of time to un-
derstand the environment and its elements (but don’t sit back and
wait forever). Buying Google AdWords may seem like a simple
and obvious tactic, but there’s still plenty of beauty in some of
the more complex concepts that are present as well (or the ones
that may at first appear to be complex). Bill Gates once said that
he loved to see extremely complex concepts broken down into
something simple and easy to understand. There is nothing more
beautiful than finding that simplicity in the complexity. Think
about the Google home page. Think about how easy it is to upload
a video to YouTube.
HOW DO YOU BURN THE SHIPS?

For your business and from a pure marketing perspective, step
one is to let go of trying to integrate or adapt your traditional ad-
vertising to the Internet. To date, most of the bigger ad agencies
are, for the most part, practicing “adaptation.” They’re looking at
the big thirty-second television commercial and are trying to fig-
ure out a way to re-create that in the online channels. This might
be by producing a similar banner ad, or it might be by adapting the
offer for an e-mail marketing campaign. What they’re not doing is
looking at what the brand truly is, how it connects to their con-
sumers, where those consumers are in the online channels, and
how to best reach, communicate, and connect with them.
Now is your chance to look at how your consumers are behav-
ing and creating content for the new channels, and what kind of

advertising messages they are looking for during the engagement.

Unique content made specifically for them (think about Blendtec’s
“Will It Blend?”) on a click-to-view (and click-to-subscribe) basis
is one of the newer lights over the dark horizon as the ships burn.
Video, audio, and mobile also start to glow as the blaze from the
ships rages on.
You need to lead. You need to be curious. You need to be will-
ing to do whatever it takes to maximize all of these new media
channels to best deliver your brand. There are billions of dollars at
stake and billions of people connected and watching. Please note:
Google, Skype, eBay, Starbucks, and many more of the super-
brands we have come to know have all done very little to no
traditional advertising to build their empires.
This chapter is all about opportunity for your business. It’s all
about closing your eyes and taking yourself back to the 1500s.
It is truly a New World and you have every single opportunity
to make your own choice: You can do things the way you have
always done them, or you can burn the ships.
BE VIGILANT AND CONSTANTLY BE MONITORING

Once you have begun to listen to the conversation and have
started monitoring what others are saying about you, it’s going
to open up a whole new dialogue for your business. If you’ve
already begun to respond (maybe you have even started to use
Twitter or have set up your own blog), it is going to be increas-
ingly difficult to respond to all of the online and offline chatter—
especially if you’ve done everything effectively.
You must be vigilant. It is both an internal and external action.
Early last year, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released
a fifty-plus-page report entitled “Digital Footprints: Online Iden-
tity Management and Search in the Age of Transparency.”

Here is one key finding: “Internet users are becoming more

aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for informa-
tion about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago.”
It turns out that Santa isn’t the only one finding out who’s
naughty or nice. It sounds like half of the Internet population is
doing their own ego-surf (searching their own name) to see what
the score and count is.
The truth is, you should be surprised that it’s not more than
half of the online population.
And while this may, indeed, be a simple vanity search, man-
aging your personal and company brand in the era of powerful
search engines and our desires to connect through online social
networks is becoming more of a challenge and a huge necessity.
The report also says:
Unlike footprints left in the sand at the beach, our online

data trails often stick around long after the tide has gone out.
And as more Internet users have become comfortable with the
idea of authoring and posting content online, they have also be-
come more aware of the information that remains connected to
their name online.
Nearly half of all Internet users (47%) have searched for
information about themselves online, up from just 22%, as
reported by the Pew Internet Project in 2002. Younger users
(under the age of 50) are more prone to self-searching than those
ages 50 and older. Men and women search for information about
themselves in equal numbers, but those with higher levels of
education and income are considerably more likely to monitor
their online identities using a search engine.
Just 3% of self-searchers report that they make a regular
habit of it and 22% say they search using their name “every
once in a while.” Three-quarters of self-searchers (74%) have
checked up on their digital footprints only once or twice.

It may be easy to dismiss the statistics and information as ap-

plying to a small fragment of the online population. But further
consideration reveals that the opposite is true: This is the begin-
ning phase of a trend that is leading toward a shift in business.
It will affect what individuals say, do, and publish online. As
images, video, and audio become more mainstream online (and
more searchable), self-searching will become ever more relevant.
Through tagging and the combination of text, the research in this
report indicates that managing your brand—as part of an ongoing
strategic mandate—will become as important to you as selling and
business development are to your company’s growth.
Remember, I’m Googling you just like you’re Googling me—
and it’s happening more and more often. As such, you have to
keep seeing what the search engines are pushing back. Now that
you have the tools, your job is to set a regular schedule to keep on
top of this. You must be increasingly vigilant in your effort and
know what to look for (and how to respond). Customer service
just went beyond the one-to-one interactions we have in our daily
business and is now being played out online where the interaction
is live, hot, and in the public view—forever.
STAY IN THE LOOP

Earlier on we looked at the many free tools you can use to
monitor the conversation and be more effective at understanding
what is taking place. As you move past the simple acts of monitor-
ing, your use of these tools should shift and adjust as you transi-
tion into ongoing reconnaissance by being present, by staying in
the loop.
At first glance, the tools below may seem like the simple moni-
toring solutions we first discussed in earlier chapters. But they are
also powerful ways to be watching for new trends and are some of

the best ways to share information with your clients, stakehold-

ers, and other interested parties.
Now we’re not just looking at how people feel about your
brand, we’re moving into a live and organic ongoing conversa-
tion, because once consumers realize that you are involved, en-
gaged, and a part of the conversation, the tone of the content will
definitely shift. Think about it this way: when someone is talking
about another person behind his back, it is usually quite a dif-
ferent conversation than if the speaker knows that individual is
listening or will hear what is being said about him.
1. Google Alerts
By this point you’re going to notice that some of the links com-
ing back to you will be related to how you reacted in the so-
cial channels. Google Alerts becomes a powerful tool to measure
whether your input is having a positive effect on your business
and the conversation around your brands. One quick trick is to
create a spreadsheet and begin to track not only the number of
mentions you are getting (which is still a valid indication of how
your efforts have evolved), but also whether the conversation is
positive, negative, or neutral. There are many paid services you
can also use to monitor your social media activity, but Google
Alerts will give you a more-than-basic perspective.
Pushing the technology forward, Google Alerts can also be
turned into an industry nerve center for you. By simply enter-
ing the keyword terms that are relevant to your industry (for ex-
ample, some of my Google Alerts are for keywords like “blog,”
“online advertising,” and “digital marketing”), you will be able
to keep a pulse on what the overall industry is doing. Going even
further beyond the trending capabilities that will be delivered
to you, you can also take some of the more salient topics and use
them in your own content creation.

Personal anecdote: When both Twitter and Second Life started

gaining attention in the marketing industry, I was noticing the
increase in my alerts on these channels. In turn, I was able to
blog about them early on and be seen as an early adopter—even
though I was just following what was “hot” in my Google Alerts
(there, now you know the real secret).
Beyond helping you stay in the loop, Google Alerts are an ef-
fective way not only to track how your brands are doing, but also
to see overall trends in your industry that you can then use either
to create original content and be seen as a leader or to adapt and
adjust your business model.
2. Technorati
While having your Watchlists enabled (much like Google
Alerts) to monitor what people are saying on the blogs, Tech-
norati also offers two additional tools that can help you monitor
the space and see how valued those individual voices are.
As you know, Technorati ranks blogs. Their rankings are based
on an odd concoction of how websites and blogs link to a specific
blog—the more links and references, the higher the ranking. If
you have a blog of your own, make sure you have “claimed” it in
Technorati (it’s a simple process that involves a sign-up). If you
don’t have a blog, the ranks are still important and are relevant
advanced information for you to monitor on an ongoing basis. If
someone is talking about you, knowing how big his audience is
and whom he reaches is an important tool. This doesn’t mean you
should treat higher-ranked blogs any differently than the lower-
ranked ones, but the size of the audience and its overall power to
spread a message will play a role in how you respond.
Authority is another important measurement tool. According
to the Technorati blog,

Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the

last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati
Authority the blog has. It is important to note that we measure
the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a
blog links to your blog many times, it still only counts as +1
toward your Authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will
last another 180 days. Technorati rank is calculated based on how
far you are from the top. The blog with the highest Technorati
Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati
rank, the closer you are to the top.
As you become more engaged in these conversations, you’ll

notice two things:
1. Technorati often plays with its own algorithm, so blog rank-

ings go out of whack a lot. It’s frustrating, but to date, they
are still the only real game in town. While some well-known
bloggers have abandoned Technorati, it is still the 800-pound
gorilla in the room. While the process of ranking blogs may
not be perfect, it is still recommended to stay current on what
and who is connecting in Technorati.
2. Technorati also uses tag clouds. A tag cloud is a visualization
of the words that are used to create a piece of content. The
more frequently used words are both bigger and bolder in
size. In a quick glance you can get a vibe as to either what’s
hot or what are the most frequently used phrases in a blog
posting. Tag clouds are an extremely useful way to see both
what’s on people’s minds and what gets people talking. You
should frequently look at tag clouds to better identify the
type of language and words consumers use to talk about you
and what they find interesting.

3. Google Blog Search

While Google Blog Search has no ranking or authority systems
in place like Technorati, it does have a great RSS subscription
service where you can do a quick search and then subscribe to it
through your news reader. This way, you will be notified auto-
matically when that set of search results gets updated. Do this for
your own key terms, and don’t forget about the ones that serve
your industry and your competitors.
CENTRALIZE ALL OF YOUR INFORMATION

Most of the tools and programs we have discussed have RSS
capabilities. One of the easiest ways to gain ground, stay in the
loop, and be able to respond efficiently and effectively will be to
manage the mass amount of information that is now available at
your fingertips. Google Reader (or iGoogle or My Yahoo! or what-
ever Web-based news reader you are using) must become your
personal NORAD system.
By adding all of this more advanced information (along with
the more basic tactics we discussed in the earlier chapters) and
organizing it into properly named folders in Google Reader, you
will be able to manage your information and news so that you
can spend the majority of your time focused on responding and
spreading the good gospel, instead of wasting your valuable time
going from site to site and searching aimlessly for what’s been
said about you. Because tools like Google Reader also enable you
to mark information as read or to save it, you also will not have
to worry about whether or not you responded to something, as
you are managing all of this news and information from within
one, centralized location. Use these tools to get efficient and
organized.

BE WRONG—BECAUSE THERE ARE THREE SIDES

(AND MORE) TO EVERY STORY
Is there anything as counterintuitive as telling a business owner
to be wrong?
Publishing your thoughts “out there” for the world to see is
not only an important part of building your reputation and your
business, but it also demonstrates (to yourself and to your clients)
what you think and how you think. Blogging and the other more
social publishing tools are hugely powerful because they enable
you to think about something, write your thoughts down about
it, publish it, and then allow the public to comment and add their
own perspective. If you embrace the idea that you are going to
be wrong (once in a while), you are well on your way to burning
the ships.
Being open to the idea that you could be wrong is being open
to the idea of risk. Real entrepreneurs risk it all every day. In a
world where most people shy away from risk and most people
would dread not only the idea of being wrong, but also having it
highlighted and out there for the world to see, being wrong sud-
denly becomes a powerful entrepreneurial force. Putting yourself
in a position where you can be wrong and where you not only
embrace it but respond to it allows you to be deeply engaged with
your community.
CONNECTING IS NOT ENGAGING

Just because you’re connected in the digital channels does not
mean that anyone really cares. Connecting is not engaging. Do not
confuse the two. People think that because they have a presence
in an online social network, like Facebook, they are providing
something of value to their consumers. Nothing could be further

from the truth. Think about the title of this book. Yes, we are all
connected now, but that doesn’t mean anyone is paying any par-
ticular attention to what you are doing or is engaged in whatever
you are selling.
You see this time and time again. Think about someone who
has requested to be connected to you in an online social network.
You may not know him, but after reviewing his profile and some
of the people he’s connected to, you decide to make him part of
your digital social circle. From that moment on, the messages, re-
quests, and sales pitches never end. That individual is abusing
your connectedness and is confusing it with engagement.
Engagement online is almost as tough to create and nurture as
trust. Being connected is table-stakes, but building engagement is
quickly going to evolve into a game of delivering high-value con-
tent and becoming widely regarded as someone who continually
adds value to others without being perceived as a user and abuser
with the end goal of simply getting more sales.
BE RESPONSIVE AND FAST

Your business life just became a high-speed game of virtual
paintball. In order not to get hosed with too many paint pellets,
there is one very simple tactic you must carry out. It is one that
states, without a question, that you, unlike your competitors,
have truly decided to make a commitment to respond to your
customers.
Never be silent.
If someone e-mails you, blogs, podcasts, or interviews you for
an article, do everything in your power at least to leave a com-
ment (or e-mail) letting them know you are reading, paying atten-
tion, and, most importantly, appreciative.
Make this the one thing you never fail to do.

Whom do I never forget? I never forget those who respond.

Now there are instances when Google Alerts fails or a Technorati-
driven ego surf does not pull in every result, so there is a good
chance you will miss some of the content being produced about
you. If it’s an honest miss, there’s nothing you can do. If you
knew about something and didn’t leave a message or follow up,
shame on you.
More than anything, digital channels provide a global platform
to share. There is the momentum effect that businesses must be
paying more attention to, the instances when a consumer mentions
your company, brand, product, or service in his or her profile in
an online social network and the effect it has in the marketplace.
You should find it completely insane that individuals (and compa-
nies) who have blogs whose popularity helped them get mass dis-
tribution for their products do not take the time to acknowledge
when they are mentioned in the exact same types of spaces.
It’s a responsibility always to respond to an inquiry. This is
why marketing plays such a critical role in customer service and
in your business. It’s simple: I say “Thank you”; you respond with
“You’re welcome.” But now take some real action here: if someone
bought your product and took the time to mention it in his own
space, don’t you (as the person or company being mentioned) feel
obliged at least to drop in a simple “thank you”?
If anything, there’s a Raving Fan (as author Kenneth Blanchard
calls them) you are all but ignoring. This is further amplified
because the feedback is being given in one of the social media
channels.
Most companies look at the space and want to dive headfirst
into blogging. We’ve already discussed the importance of moni-
toring the space, listening to what’s being said, and being a part
of those conversations prior to trying to start your own. There’s a

reason: Nothing stinks of insincerity more than a blog or blogger

who is not listening to the other conversations.
“People are busy and they can’t respond to every comment or
posting” is a very common mantra you begin to hear from some
of the Internet celebrities who have gained a level of fame in these
channels. But in this day and age, can you really still afford to
have that kind of attitude, especially when these channels gave
you access to business opportunities in the first place?
No chance.
As much as you physically can, respond and be thankful to
everyone who takes the time to mention you. If anything, my
personal disappointments have only fueled my passionate fire to
make sure all of the links in the chain are (and stay) connected.
LET PEOPLE STEAL YOUR IDEAS

Here is a true story about the conception of Six Pixels of
Separation:
One of my former employees at Twist Image came up with the
line “Six Pixels of Separation.” It was a phrase used in develop-
ing copy for one of my presentations. While the context of it was
totally different from what it is today, I brought my version and
what I felt Six Pixels of Separation stands for to one of my business
partners. Having a more traditional background and being from
an older generation, he suggested we trademark it and not talk
about it publicly until this book was ready for publishing. You
should have seen his face when I told him I had already blogged
about the concept a few months back.
“What if someone steals the idea and writes the book first?”
he asked.
“Then they’re a thief,” I said calmly.
“How would you prove that?” he pushed on.

“Do a search for ‘six pixels of separation’ in Google and you

tell me.”
The conversation was over.
I was not afraid to put the idea of Six Pixels of Separation out
to the world. I was not afraid to be told that I was an idiot for
thinking that individuals would soon have personal brands that
would rival even the biggest corporate brands out there, and I
wasn’t afraid someone could steal the idea, either. The world is no
longer about proving in a court of law who was the first to have
the idea; a simple search proves everything to everyone.
Let people steal your ideas.
It may sound dramatic, but odds are if your idea is strong and
you have shared it in these circles, someone will come along and
“adapt” it as his own. Not only will the community know, but
beyond that it won’t get any further.
Scraping is a part of the digital life cycle. There are many sites
and business owners who simply don’t have the time to develop
their own content, so they troll across the Web and copy and
paste whatever content they like and place it on their own web-
sites as if it were their own. It’s highly illegal but, sadly, never
worth the trouble, time, money, and lawyers you need to engage
to attempt to get it resolved. Somebody with such low scruples is
usually running an operation offshore or in countries with much
more lax copyright laws.
It is a dilemma, but it’s also a paradox: On one side, everything
you have taken the time to create and nurture should be your
own and only you should profit from its value. I am a journal-
ist, and you can imagine how painful it is to see all of my con-
tent floating around on a bunch of websites and blogs without
my written consent. On the other hand, with the millions of blog
postings and pieces of content being created each and every day,
it is very flattering that they choose to steal my content. So, while

it’s morally impossible to accept this kind of behavior, the reality

is that your content will probably get stolen, but the real people,
the potential community members or customers you are looking
to attract, probably will not be in those other spaces.
GO OUT ON THE FRINGE

Remember: Your primary goal is to be spreading your ideas
and thoughts far and wide, knowing full well that the right peo-
ple will find you and the right people will also know who the
real source is for all of the great content they now have in their
lives. There are going to be countless times in the online channels
where you will not be acknowledged as the source of an idea and
someone will not thank you for inspiring an idea that generated
business for him or her. With the mass numbers of channels and
the amount of content out there, those who really burn the ships
are not waiting for credit. They are out there, on the fringe, build-
ing, sharing, growing, nurturing, and leading.

GET MORE OF
To purchase copies of Six Pixels of Separation for holiday gifts,
print the order form at the end of this PDF document

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Books-A-Million
Indiebound
Visit
TwistImage.com/book
BONESHAKER
Cherie
Priest
BONESHAKER
In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the Klondike
brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to
compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue
to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus
was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.
But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying
blocks of downtown
d Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of
blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.
Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the
devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar
Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to
support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a
secret crusade to rewrite history.
ta him under the wall and into a city teeming with

His quest will take
ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed
refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cherie Priest is the author of seven novels, including Boneshaker and Four
and Twenty Blackbirds. She presently lives in Seattle, Washington, with her
husband and a fat black cat. Learn more at CheriePriest.com.
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 15
From Unlikely Episodes

in Western History
CHAPTER 7: Seattle’s
Walled and Peculiar State
Work in progress, by
Hale Quarter (1880)
Unpaved, uneven trails pretended to be roads; they tied the nation’s

coasts together like laces holding a boot, binding it with crossed
strings and crossed fingers. And over the great river, across the plains,
between the mountain passes, the settlers pushed from east to west.
They trickled over the Rockies in dribs and drabs, in wagons and
coaches.
Or this is how it began.
In California there were nuggets the size of walnuts lying on the
ground—or so it was said, and truth travels slowly when rumors have
wings of gold. The trickle of humanity became a magnificent flow.
The glittering western shores swarmed with prospectors, pushing
their luck and pushing their pans into the gravelly streams, praying
for fortunes.
In time, the earth grew crowded, and claims became more tenu-
ous. Gold came out of the ground in dust so fine that the men who
mined it could’ve inhaled it.
In 1850 another rumor, winged and sparkling, came swiftly from
the north.
The Klondike, it said. Come and cut your way through the ice you
find there. A fortune in gold awaits a determined enough man.
The tide shifted, and looked to the northern latitudes. This meant
very, very good things for the last frontier stop before the Canadian
border—a backwater mill town on Puget Sound called Seattle after
the native chief of the local tribes. The muddy village became a tiny
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 16
Cherie Priest
16 • • • • • • • • • • • •
empire nearly overnight as explorers and prospectors paused to trade

and stock up on supplies.
While American legislators argued over whether or not to buy the
Alaska territory, Russia hedged its bets and considered its asking price.
If the land really was pocked with gold deposits, the game would
absolutely change; but even if a steady supply of gold could be lo-
cated, could it be retrieved? A potential vein, spotted intermittently
but mostly buried beneath a hundred feet of permanent ice, would
make for an ideal testing ground.
In 1860, the Russians announced a contest, offering a 100,000 ruble
prize to the inventor who could produce or propose a machine that
could mine through ice in search of gold. And in this way, a scientific
arms race began despite a budding civil war.
Across the Pacific Northwest, big machines and small machines
were tinkered into existence. They were tricky affairs designed to
withstand bitter cold and tear through turf that was frozen diamond-
hard. They were powered by steam and coal, and lubricated with
special solutions that protected their mechanisms from the elements.
These machines were made for men to drive like stagecoaches, or de-
signed to dig on their own, controlled by clockwork and ingenious
guiding devices.
But none of them were rugged enough to tackle the buried vein,
and the Russians were on the verge of selling the land to America for a
relative pittance . . . when a Seattle inventor approached them with
plans for an amazing machine. It would be the greatest mining vehicle
ever constructed: fifty feet long and fully mechanized, powered by
compressed steam. It would boast three primary drilling and cutting
heads, positioned at the front of the craft; and a system of spiral shov-
eling devices mounted along the back and sides would scoop the
bored-through ice, rocks, or earth back out of the drilling path. Care-
fully weighted and meticulously reinforced, this machine could drill in
an almost perfect vertical or horizontal path, depending on the whims
of the man in the driver’s seat. Its precision would be unprecedented,
and its power would set the standard for all such devices to come.
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 17
Boneshaker
17
• • • • • • • • • • • •
But it had not yet been built.

The inventor, a man named Leviticus Blue, convinced the Rus-
sians to advance him a sum great enough to gather the parts and fund
the labor on Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine. He
asked for six months, and promised a public test display.
Leviticus Blue took his funding, returned to his home in Seattle,
and began to build the remarkable machine in his basement. Piece by
piece he assembled his contraption out of sight of his fellow townsmen;
and night by night the sounds of mysterious tools and instruments star-
tled the neighbors. But eventually, and well before the six-month dead-
line, the inventor declared his masterpiece “complete.”
What happened next remains a subject of much debate.
It might have been only an accident, after all—a terrible malfunc-
tion of equipment running amuck. It may have been nothing more than
confusion, or bad timing, or improper calculations. Or then again, it
might have been a calculated move after all, plotted to bring down a
city’s core with unprecedented violence and mercenary greed.
What motivated Dr. Blue may never be known.
He was an avaricious man in his way, but no more so than most;
and it’s possible that he wished only to take the money and run—with
a bit of extra cash in his pocket to fund a larger escape. The inventor
had recently married (as tongues did wag, his bride was some twenty-
five years his junior), and there was much speculation that perhaps
she had a hand in his decisions. Perhaps she urged his haste or she
wished herself married to a richer husband. Or perhaps, as she long
maintained, she knew nothing of anything.
What is certain is this: On the afternoon of January 2, 1863, some-
thing appalling burst out from the basement and tore a trail of havoc
from the house on Denny Hill to the central business district, and
then back home again.
Few witnesses agree, and fewer still were granted a glimpse of the
Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine. Its course took it under the
earth and down the hills, gouging up the land beneath the luxurious
homes of wealthy mariners and shipping magnates, under the muddy
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 18
Cherie Priest
18 • • • • • • • • • • • •
flats where sat the sprawling sawmill, and down along the corridors,
cellars, and storage rooms of general stores, ladies’ notions shops,
apothecaries, and yes . . . the banks.
Four of the major ones, where they were lined up in a row—all
four of those banks were ravaged as their foundations were ground
into mulch. Their walls rattled, buckled, and fell. Their floors col-
lapsed downward in a V-shaped implosion as their bottom buttresses
dropped away, and then the space was partially filled with the top-
pling roofs. And these four banks held three million dollars or better
between them, accumulated from the California miners cashing in
their nuggets and heading north in search of more.
Scores of innocent bystanders were killed indoors as they stood in
line for deposits or withdrawals. Many more died outside on the street,
crushed by the leaning, trembling walls as they gave up their mortar
and crashed heavily down.
Citizens clamored for safety, but where could it be found? The
earth itself opened up and swallowed them, here and there where the
Drill Engine’s tunnel was too shallow to maintain even the thinnest
crust of land. The quaking, rolling street flung itself like a rug being
flapped before beaten clean. It moved hard from side to side, and in
waves. And wherever the machine had gone, there came the sounds
of crumbling and boring from the underground passages left by its
passing.
To call the scene a disaster does it a terrific disservice. The final
death toll was never fully calculated, for heaven only knew how many
bodies might lie wedged in the rubble. And alas, there was no time
for excavation.
For after Dr. Blue lodged his machine back beneath his own
home, and after the wails of the injured were tended, and the first of
the angry questions were being shouted from the remaining rooftops,
a second wave of horror would come to afflict the city. It was difficult
for Seattle’s residents to conclude that this second wave was unrelated
to the first wave, but the details of their suspicions have never been
explained to anyone’s collective satisfaction.
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 19
Boneshaker
19
• • • • • • • • • • • •
Only the observable facts can be recorded now, and perhaps in

time a future analyst may provide a better answer than can presently
be guessed at.
This much is known: In the aftermath of the Drill Engine’s as-
tonishing trail of destruction, a peculiar illness afflicted the recon-
struction workers nearest the wreckage of the bank blocks. By all
reports this illness was eventually traced to the Drill Engine tunnels,
and to a gas which came from them. At first, this gas appeared odor-
less and colorless, but over time it built up to such an extent that
it could be discerned by the human eye, if spied through a bit of
polarized glass.
Through trial and error, a few particulars of the gas were deter-
mined. It was a thick, slow-moving substance that killed by contami-
nation, and it could be generally halted or stilled by simple barriers.
Temporary stopgap measures cropped up across the city as an evacu-
ation was organized. Tents were disassembled and treated with pitch
in order to form makeshift walls.
As these barriers failed one ring at a time, and as thousands more
of the city’s inhabitants fell fatally ill, sterner measures were called for.
Hasty plans were drawn up and enacted, and within one year from
the incident with Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine, the
entire downtown area was surrounded by an immense brick, mortar,
and stone wall.
The wall stands approximately two hundred feet high—depending
on the city’s diverse geographic constraints—and it averages a width
of fifteen to twenty feet. It wholly encircles the damaged blocks, con-
taining an area of nearly two square miles. Truly, it is a marvel of engi-
neering.
However, within this wall the city spoils, utterly dead except for
the rats and crows that are rumored to be there. The gas which still
seeps from the ground ruins everything it touches. What once was a
bustling metropolis is now a ghost town, surrounded by the surviving
and resettled population. These people are fugitives from their home-
town, and although many of them relocated north to Vancouver, or
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 20
Cherie Priest
20 • • • • • • • • • • • •
south to Tacoma or Portland, a significant number have stayed close

to the wall.
They live on the mudflats and up against the hills, in a sprawling
nontown most often called the Outskirts; and there, they have begun
their lives anew.
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 21
One
She saw him, and she stopped a few feet from the stairs.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
The woman in the dull black overcoat didn’t blink and didn’t move.
“What do you want?”
He’d prepared a speech, but he couldn’t remember it. “To talk.
To you. I want to talk to you.”
Briar Wilkes closed her eyes hard. When she opened them again,
she asked, “Is it about Zeke? What’s he done now?”
“No, no, it’s not about him,” he insisted. “Ma’am, I was hoping we
could talk about your father.”
Her shoulders lost their stiff, defensive right angles, and she shook
her head. “That figures. I swear to God, all the men in my life, they . . .”
She stopped herself. And then she said, “My father was a tyrant, and
everyone he loved was afraid of him. Is that what you want to hear?”
He held his position while she climbed the eleven crooked stairs
that led the way to her home, and to him. When she reached the nar-
row porch he asked, “Is it true?”
“More true than not.”
She stood before him with her fingers wrapped around a ring of
keys. The top of her head was level with his chin. Her keys were aimed
at his waist, he thought, until he realized he was standing in front of
the door. He shuffled out of her way.
“How long have you been waiting for me?” she asked.
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 22
Cherie Priest
22 • • • • • • • • • • • •
He strongly considered lying, but she pinned him to the wall with
her stare. “Several hours. I wanted to be here when you got home.”
The door clacked, clicked, and scooted inward. “I took an extra
shift at the ’works. You could’ve come back later.”
“Please, ma’am. May I come inside?”
She shrugged, but she didn’t say no, and she didn’t close him out
in the cold, so he followed behind her, shutting the door and standing
beside it while Briar found a lamp and lit it.
She carried the lamp to the fireplace, where the logs had burned
down cold. Beside the mantle there was a poker and a set of bellows,
and a flat iron basket with a cache of split logs. She jabbed the poker
against the charred lumps and found a few live coals lingering at the
bottom.
With gentle encouragement, a handful of kindling, and two more
lengths of wood, a slow flame caught and held.
One arm at a time, Briar pried herself out of the overcoat and left it
hanging on a peg. Without the coat, her body had a lean look to it—as
if she worked too long, and ate too little or too poorly. Her gloves and
tall brown boots were caked with the filth of the plant, and she was
wearing pants like a man. Her long, dark hair was piled up and back,
but two shifts of labor had picked it apart and heavy strands had scat-
tered, escaping the combs she’d used to hold it all aloft.
She was thirty-five, and she did not look a minute younger.
In front of the growing, glowing fire there was a large and ancient
leather chair. Briar dropped herself into it. “Tell me, Mr. . . . I’m sorry.
You didn’t say your name.”
“Hale. Hale Quarter. And I must say, it’s an honor to meet you.”
For a moment he thought she was going to laugh, but she didn’t.
She reached over to a small table beside the chair and retrieved a
pouch. “All right, Hale Quarter. Tell me. Why did you wait outside so
long in this bitter weather?” From within the pouch she picked a
small piece of paper and a large pinch of tobacco. She worked the
two together until she had a cigarette, and she used the lamp’s flame
to coax the cigarette alight.
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 23
Boneshaker
23
• • • • • • • • • • • •
He’d gotten this far by telling the truth, so he risked another con-
fession. “I came when I knew you wouldn’t be home. Someone told
me that if I knocked, you’d shoot through the peephole.”
She nodded, and pressed the back of her head against the leather.
“I’ve heard that story, too. It doesn’t keep nearly as many folks away
as you might expect.”
He couldn’t tell if she was serious, or if her response was a denial.
“Then I thank you double, for not shooting me and for letting me
come inside.”
“You’re welcome.”
“May I . . . may I take a seat? Would that be all right?”
“Suit yourself, but you won’t be here long,” she predicted.
“You don’t want to talk?”
“I don’t want to talk about Maynard, no. I don’t have any answers
about anything that happened to him. Nobody does. But you can ask
whatever you want. And you can take your leave when I get tired
of you, or when you get bored with all the ways I can say ‘I don’t
know’—whichever comes first.”
Encouraged, he reached for a tall-backed wooden chair and
dragged it forward, putting his body directly into her line of sight.
His notebook folded open to reveal an unlined sheet with a few small
words scribbled at the top.
While he was getting situated, she asked him, “Why do you want
to know about Maynard? Why now? He’s been dead for fifteen years.
Nearly sixteen.”
“Why not now?” Hale scanned his previous page of notes, and
settled down with his pencil hovering over the next blank section.
“But to answer you more directly, I’m writing a book.”
“Another book?” she said, and it sounded sharp and fast.
“Not a sensational piece,” he was careful to clarify. “I want to write
a proper biography of Maynard Wilkes, because I believe he’s been
done a great disservice. Don’t you agree?”
“No, I don’t agree. He got exactly what he should have expected.
He spent thirty years working hard, for nothing, and he was treated
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 24
Cherie Priest
24 • • • • • • • • • • • •
disgracefully by the city he served.” She fiddled with the half-smoked

wand of tobacco. “He allowed it. And I hated him for it.”
“But your father believed in the law.”
She almost snapped at him. “So does every criminal.”
Hale perked. “Then you do think he was a criminal?”
One more hard draw on the cigarette came and went, and then
she said, “Don’t twist my words. But you’re right. He believed in the
law. There were times I wasn’t sure he believed in anything else, but
yes. He believed in that.”
Spits and sparks from the fireplace filled the short silence that fell
between them. Finally, Hale said, “I’m trying to get it right, ma’am.
That’s all. I think there was more to it than a jailbreak—”
“Why?” she interrupted. “Why do you think he did it? Which
theory do you want to write your book about, Mr. Quarter?”
He hesitated, because he didn’t know what to think, not yet. He
gambled on the theory that he hoped Briar would find least offensive.
“I think he was doing what he thought was right. But I really want
to know what you think. Maynard raised you alone, didn’t he? You
must’ve known him better than anyone.”
Her face stayed a little too carefully blank. “You’d be surprised.
We weren’t that close.”
“But your mother died—”
“When I was born, that’s right. He was the only parent I ever had,
and he wasn’t much of one. He didn’t know what to do with a daugh-
ter any more than I know what to do with a map of Spain.”
Hale sensed a brick wall, so he backed up and tried another way
around, and into her good graces. His eyes scanned the smallish room
with its solid and unadorned furniture, and its clean but battered
floors. He noted the corridor that led to the back side of the house.
And from his seat, he could see that all four doors at the end of it were
closed.
“You grew up here, didn’t you? In this house?” he pretended to
guess.
She didn’t soften. “Everybody knows that.”
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 25
Boneshaker
25
• • • • • • • • • • • •
“They brought him back here, though. One of the boys from the
prison break, and his brother—they brought him here and tried to
save him. A doctor was sent for, but . . .”
Briar retrieved the dangled thread of conversation and pulled it.
“But he’d inhaled too much of the Blight. He was dead before the
doctor ever got the message, and I swear”—she flicked a fingertip’s
worth of ash into the fire—“it’s just as well. Can you imagine what
would’ve happened to him, if he’d lived? Tried for treason, or gross
insubordination at least. Jailed, at the minimum. Shot, at the worst.
My father and I had our disagreements, but I wouldn’t have wished
that upon him. It’s just as well,” she said again, and she stared into the
fire.
Hale spent a few seconds trying to assemble a response. At last he
said, “Did you get to see him, before he died? I know you were one of
the last to leave Seattle—and I know you came here. Did you see him,
one last time?”
“I saw him.” She nodded. “He was lying alone in that back room,
on his bed, under a sheet that was soaked with the vomit that finally
choked him to death. The doctor wasn’t here, and as far as I know, he
never did come. I don’t know if you could even find one, in those
days, in the middle of the evacuation.”
“So, he was alone? Dead, in this house?”
“He was alone,” she confirmed. “The front door was broken, but
closed. Someone had left him on the bed, laid out with respect, I do
remember that. Someone had covered him with a sheet, and left his
rifle on the bed beside him with his badge. But he was dead, and he
stayed dead. The Blight didn’t start him walking again, so thank God
for small things, I suppose.”
Hale jotted it all down, mumbling encouraging sounds as his pen-
cil skipped across the paper. “Do you think the prisoners did that?”
“You do,” she said. It wasn’t quite an accusation.
“I suspect as much,” he replied, but he was giddily certain of it.
The prison-boy’s brother had told him they’d left Maynard’s place
clean, and they didn’t take a thing. He’d said they’d laid him out on
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 26
Cherie Priest
26 • • • • • • • • • • • •
the bed, his face covered up. These were details that no one else had
ever mentioned, not in all the speculation or investigation into the
Great Blight Jailbreak. And there had been plenty of it over the years.
“And then . . . ,” he tried to prompt her.
“I dragged him out back and buried him under the tree, beside his
old dog. A couple days later, two city officers came out and dug him
back up again.”
“To make sure?”
She grunted. “To make sure he hadn’t skipped town and gone
back east; to make sure the Blight hadn’t started him moving again; to
make sure I’d put him where I said I did. Take your pick.”
He finished chasing her words with his pencil and raised his eyes.
“What you just said, about the Blight. Did they know, so soon, about
what it could do?”
“They knew. They figured it out real quick. Not all the Blight-dead
started moving, but the ones who did climbed up and went prowling
pretty fast, within a few days. But mostly, people wanted to make sure
Maynard hadn’t gotten away with anything. And when they were sat-
isfied that he was out of their reach, they dumped him back here. They
didn’t even bury him again. They just left him out there by the tree. I
had to put him in the ground twice.”
Hale’s pencil and his chin hung over the paper. “I’m sorry, did you
say—do you mean . . . ?”
“Don’t look so shocked.” She shifted in the chair and the leather
tugged squeakily at her skin. “At least they didn’t fill in the hole, the
first time. The second time was a lot faster. Let me ask you a question,
Mr. Quarter.”
“Hale, please.”
“Hale, as you like. Tell me, how old were you when the Blight
came calling?”
His pencil was shuddering, so he placed it flat against the note-
book and answered her. “I was almost six.”
“That’s about what I figured. So you were a little thing, then. You
don’t even remember it, do you—what it was like before the wall?”
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 27
Boneshaker
27
• • • • • • • • • • • •
He turned his head back and forth; no, he didn’t. Not really. “But
I remember the wall, when it first went up. I remember watching it
rise, foot by foot, around the contaminated blocks. All two hundred
feet of it, all the way around the evacuated neighborhoods.”
“I remember it, too. I watched it from here. You could see it from
that back window, by the kitchen.” She waved her hand toward the
stove, and a small rectangular portal behind it. “All day and all night
for seven months, two weeks, and three days they worked to build
that wall.”
“That’s very precise. Do you always keep count of such things?”
“No,” she said. “But it’s easy to remember. They finished construc-
tion on the day my son was born. I used to wonder if he didn’t miss it,
all the noise from the workers. It was all he ever heard, while I was car-
rying him—the swinging of the hammers, the pounding of the masons’
chisels. As soon as the poor child arrived, the world fell silent.”
Something occurred to her, and she sat up straight. The chair
hissed.
She glanced at the door. “Speaking of the boy, it’s getting late.
Where’s he gotten off to, I wonder? He’s usually home by now.” She
corrected herself. “He’s often home by now, and it’s damnably cold
out there.”
Hale settled against the stiff wood back of his borrowed seat.
“It’s a shame he never got to meet his grandfather. I’m sure May-
nard would’ve been proud.”
Briar leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. She put her face in
her hands and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. She straight-
ened herself and wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. She
peeled off her gloves and dropped them onto the squat, round table
between the chair and the fireplace.
“You don’t know? But there aren’t any other grandchildren, are
there? He had no other children, did he?”
“Not as far as I know, but I guess there’s no telling.” She leaned
forward and began to unlace her boots. “I hope you’ll excuse me,”
she said. “I’ve been wearing these since six o’clock this morning.”
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 28
Cherie Priest
28 • • • • • • • • • • • •
“No, no, don’t mind me,” he said, and kept his eyes on the fire.
“I’m sorry. I know I’m intruding.”
“You are intruding, but I let you in, so the fault is mine.” One boot
came free of her foot with a sucking pop. She went to work on the
other one. “And I don’t know if Maynard would’ve cared much for
Zeke, or vice versa. They’re not the same kind.”
“Is Zeke . . .” Hale was tiptoeing toward dangerous ground, and
he knew it, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Too much like his father,
perhaps?”
Briar didn’t flinch, or frown. Again she kept that poker-flat stare
firmly in place as she removed the other boot and set it down beside
the first one. “It’s possible. Blood may tell, but he’s still just a boy.
There’s time yet for him to sort himself out. But as for you, Mr. Hale,
I’m afraid I’m going to have to see you on your way. It’s getting late, and
dawn comes before long.”
Hale sighed and nodded. He’d pushed too hard, and too far. He
should’ve stayed on topic, on the dead father—not the dead husband.
“I’m sorry,” he told her as he rose and stuffed his notebook under
his arm. He replaced his hat, pulled his coat tightly across his chest,
and said, “And I thank you for your time. I appreciate everything
you’ve told me, and if my book is ever published, I’ll make note of your
help.”
“Sure,” she said.
She closed Hale out, and into the night. He braced himself to face
the windy winter evening, tugging his scarf tighter around his neck
and adjusting his wool gloves.
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 29
Tw o
At the edge of the house’s corner a shadow darted and hid. Then it
whispered, “Hey. Hey, you.”
Hale held still and waited while a shaggy brown head peered
around the side. The head was followed by the skinny but heavily cov-
ered body of a teenaged boy with hollow cheeks and vaguely wild
eyes. Firelight from inside the house wobbled through the front win-
dow and half shadowed, half illuminated his face.
“You were asking about my grandfather?”
“Ezekiel?” Hale made a safe and easy guess.
The boy crept forward, taking care to stay away from the parted
place in the curtains so he couldn’t be seen from the home’s interior.
“What did my mother say?”
“Not much.”
“Did she tell you he’s a hero?”
Hale said, “No. She didn’t tell me that.”
The boy made an angry snort and ran a mittened hand up his head,
across his matted hair. “Of course she didn’t. She doesn’t believe it, or
if she does, she doesn’t give a damn.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do,” he said. “She acts like he didn’t do anything good. She acts
like everyone’s right, and he emptied out the jail because someone
paid him to do it—but if he did, then where’s the money? Do we look
like we have any money?”
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 30
Cherie Priest
30 • • • • • • • • • • • •
Zeke gave the biographer enough time to answer, but Hale didn’t
know what to say.
Zeke continued. “Once everyone understood about the Blight,
they evacuated everything they could, right? They cleared out the hos-
pital and even the jail, but the people stuck at the station—the folks
who’d gotten arrested, but not charged with anything yet—they just
left them there, locked up. And they couldn’t get away. The Blight was
coming, and everyone knew it. All those people in there, they were
going to die.”
He sniffed and rubbed the back of his hand under his nose. It
might have been running, or simply numb from cold.
“But my grandfather, Maynard, you know? The captain told him
to seal off the last end of the quarter, but he wouldn’t do it while there
were people inside. And those people, they were poor folks, like us.
They weren’t all bad, not all of them. They’d mostly been picked up
for little things, for stealing little things or breaking little things.
“And my grandfather, he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t seal ’em in
to die there. The Blight gas was coming for them; and it’d already
eaten up the shortest way back to the station. But he ran back into the
Blight, covering his face up as much as he could.
“When he got there, he threw the lever that held all the cells
locked, and he leaned on it—he held it down with his own weight, be-
cause you had to, to keep the doors open. So while everyone ran, he
stayed behind.
“And the last two out were a pair of brothers. They understood
what he’d done, and they helped him. He was real sick with the gas,
though, and it was too late. So they brought him home, trying to help
him even though they knew that if anybody saw them, they’d get ar-
rested all over again. But they did it, same as why Maynard did what
he did. ’Cause ain’t nobody all bad, through and through. Maybe
Maynard was a little bad, doing what he did; and maybe those last two
guys were a little good.
“But here’s the long and short of it,” Zeke said, holding up a fin-
ger and pushing it under Hale’s nose. “There were twenty-two people
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 31
Boneshaker
31
• • • • • • • • • • • •
inside those cells, and Maynard saved them, every last one. It cost
him his life, and he didn’t get nothing for it.”
As the kid turned to his front door and reached for the knob, he
added, “And neither did we.”
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 32
Three
Briar Wilkes closed the door behind the biographer.

She leaned her forehead against it for a moment and walked away,
back to the fire. She warmed her hands there, collected her boots, and
began to unbutton her shirt and loosen the support cinch that held it
close against her body.
Down the hall she passed the doors to her father’s room and her
son’s room. Both doors may as well have been nailed shut for all she
ever opened them. She hadn’t been inside her father’s room in years.
She hadn’t been inside her son’s room since . . . she couldn’t remem-
ber a specific time, no matter how hard she tried—nor could she even
recall what it looked like.
Out in the hall she stopped in front of Ezekiel’s door.
Her decision to abandon Maynard’s room had come from philo-
sophical necessity; but the boy’s room she avoided for no real reason.
If anyone ever asked (and of course, no one ever did) then she
might’ve made an excuse about respecting his privacy; but it was sim-
pler than that, and possibly worse. She left the room alone because she
was purely uncurious about it. Her lack of interest might have been in-
terpreted as a lack of caring, but it was only a side effect of permanent
exhaustion. Even knowing this, she felt a pang of guilt and she said out
loud, because there was no one to hear her—or agree with her, or ar-
gue with her—“I’m a terrible mother.”
It was only an observation, but she felt the need to refute it in
some way, so she put her hand on the knob and gave it a twist.
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 33
Boneshaker
33
• • • • • • • • • • • •
The door drooped inward, and Briar leaned her lantern into the
cave-black darkness.
A bed with a flat, familiar-looking headboard was pushed into the
corner. It was the one she’d slept in as a child, and it was long enough
to hold a grown man, but only half as wide as her own. The slats were
covered with an old feather mattress that had been flattened until
it was barely an inch or two thick. A heavy comforter flopped atop
it, folded backward and tangled around in a dirty sheet.
Beside the window at the foot of the bed there lurked a blocky
brown chest of drawers and a pile of dirty clothes that was pocked
with stray and unmatched boots.
“I need to wash his clothes,” she mumbled, knowing that it would
have to wait until Sunday unless she planned to do laundry at night—
and knowing also that Zeke was likely to get fed up and do his own
before then. She’d never heard of a boy who performed so much of
his own upkeep, but things were different for families all over since
the Blight. Things were different for everyone, yes. But things were
especially different for Briar and Zeke.
She liked to think that he understood, at least a little bit, why she
saw him as infrequently as she did. And she preferred to assume that
he didn’t blame her too badly. Boys wanted freedom, didn’t they?
They valued their independence, and wore it as a sign of maturity;
and if she thought about it that way, then her son was a lucky fellow
indeed.
A bump and a fumble rattled the front door.
Briar jumped, and closed the bedroom door, and walked quickly
down the hall.
From behind the safety of her own bedroom door she finished
peeling away her work clothes, and when she heard the stomp of her
son’s shoes in the front room, she called out, “Zeke, you home?” She
felt silly for asking, but it was as good a greeting as any.
“What?”
“I said, you’re home, aren’t you?”
“I’m home,” he hollered. “Where are you?”
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 34
Cherie Priest
34 • • • • • • • • • • • •
“I’ll be out in a second,” she told him. More like a minute later
she emerged wearing something that smelled less like industrial lubri-
cant and coal dust. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“Out.” He had already removed his coat and left it to hang on the
rack by the door.
“Did you eat?” she asked, trying not to notice how thin he looked.
“I got paid yesterday. I know we’re low on cupboard fixings, but I
can change that soon. And we’ve still got a little something left around
here.”
“No, I already ate.” He always said that. She never knew if he was
telling the truth. He deflected any follow-up questions by asking,
“Did you get home late tonight? It’s cold in here. I take it the fire hasn’t
been up very long.”
She nodded, and went to the pantry. She was starving, but she was
so often hungry that she’d learned to think around it. “I took an extra
shift. We had somebody out sick.” On the top shelf of the pantry
there was a mixture of dried beans and corn that cooked up into a
light stew. Briar pulled it down and wished she had meat to go with it,
but she didn’t wish very long or hard.
She set a pot of water to boil and reached under a towel for a bit
of bread that was almost too stale to eat anymore, but she stuffed it
into her mouth and chewed it fast.
Ezekiel took the seat that Hale had borrowed and dragged it over
to the fire to toast some of the frigid stiffness out of his hands. “I saw
that man leaving,” he said, loud enough that she would hear him
around the corner.
“You did, did you?”
“What did he want?”
A rattling dump of poured soup mix splashed into the pot. “To
talk. It’s late, I know. I guess it looks bad, but what would the neigh-
bors do about it—talk nasty behind our backs?”
She heard a grin in her son’s voice when he asked, “What did he
want to talk about?”
She didn’t answer him. She finished chewing the bread and asked,
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 35
Boneshaker
35
• • • • • • • • • • • •
“Are you sure you don’t want any of this? There’s plenty for two, and
you should see yourself. You’re skin and bones.”
“I told you, I ate already. You fill up. You’re skinnier than me.”
“Am not,” she fussed back.
“Are too. But what did that man want?” he asked again.
She came around the corner and leaned against the wall, her arms
folded and her hair more fallen down than pinned up. She said, “He’s
writing a book about your grandfather. Or he says he is.”
“You think maybe he’s not?”
Briar stared intently at her son, trying to figure out who he looked
like when he made that carefully emotionless, innocent face. Not his
father, certainly, though the poor child had inherited the preposter-
ous hair. Neither as dark as hers, nor as light as his father’s, the mop
could not be combed nor oiled into decent behavior. It was exactly
the sort of hair that, when it occurred on a baby, old ladies would
fondly disturb while making cooing noises. But the older Zeke grew,
the more ridiculous it looked.
“Mother?” he tried again. “You think maybe that man was lying?”
She shook her head quickly, not in answer but to clear it. “Oh.
Well, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I was just . . . I was looking at you, that’s all.
I don’t see you enough, I don’t think. We should, I don’t know . . .
We should do something together, sometime.”
He squirmed. “Like what?”
His squirming did not go unnoticed. She tried to back away from
the suggestion. “I didn’t have anything in mind. And maybe it’s a bad
idea. It’s probably . . . well.” She turned and went back into the
kitchen so she could talk to him without having to watch his discom-
fort while she confessed the truth. “It’s probably easier for you any-
way, that I keep my distance. I imagine you have a hard enough time
living it down, being my boy. Sometimes I think the kindest thing
I can do is let you pretend I don’t exist.”
No argument came from the fireplace until he said, “It’s not so
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 36
Cherie Priest
36 • • • • • • • • • • • •
bad being yours. I’m not ashamed of you or anything, you know.” But
he didn’t leave the fire to come and say it to her face.
“Thanks.” She wound a wooden spoon around in the pot and
made swirling designs in the frothing mixture.
“Well, I’m really not. And for that matter, it’s not so bad being May-
nard’s, either. In some circles, it works out pretty good,” he added, and
Briar heard a quick cutting off in his voice, as if he was afraid that
he’d said too much.
As if she weren’t already aware.
“I wish you’d keep a better circle of company,” she told him,
though even as she said it, she guessed more than she wanted to
know. Where else could a child of hers seek friends? Who else would
have anything to do with him, except for the quarters where Maynard
Wilkes was a folk hero—and not a fortunate crook who died before
he could be judged?
“Mother—”
“No, listen to me.” She abandoned the pot and stood again by the
edge of the wall. “If you’re ever going to have any hope of a normal
life, you’ve got to stay out of trouble, and that means staying out of
those places, away from those people.”
“Normal life? How’s that going to happen, do you think? I could
spend my whole life being poor-but-honest, if that’s what you want,
but—”
“I know you’re young and you don’t believe me, but you have to
trust me—it’s better than the alternative. Stay poor-but-honest, if
that’s what keeps a roof over your head and keeps you out of prison.
There’s nothing so good out there that it’s worth . . .” She wasn’t sure
how to finish, but she felt she’d made her point, so she stopped talk-
ing. She turned on her heel and went back to the stove.
Ezekiel left the fireplace and followed her. He stood at the end of
the kitchen, blocking her exit and forcing her to look at him.
“That it’s worth what? What do I have to lose, Mother? All this?”
With a sweeping, sarcastic gesture he indicated the dark gray home in
which they squatted. “All the friends and money?”
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 37
Boneshaker
37
• • • • • • • • • • • •
She smacked the spoon down on the edge of the basin and
grabbed a bowl to dish herself some half-cooked supper, and so she
could stop gazing at the child she’d made. He looked nothing like
her, but every day he looked a little more like one man, then the other.
Depending on the light and depending on his mood he could’ve been
her father, or her husband.
She poured herself a bowl of bland stew and struggled to keep
from spilling it as she stalked past him.
“You’d rather escape? I understand that. There’s not much keeping
you here, and maybe when you’re a grown man you’ll up and leave,”
she said, dropping the stoneware bowl onto the table and inserting her-
self into the chair beside it. “I realize that I don’t make an honest day’s
work look very appealing; and I realize too that you think you’ve been
cheated out of a better life, and I don’t blame you. But here we are, and
this is what we have. The circumstances have damned us both.”
“Circumstances?”
She took a deep swallow of the stew and tried not to look at him.
She said, “All right, circumstances and me. You can blame me if you
want, just like I can blame your father, or my father if I want—it
doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. Your future was broken
before you were born, and there’s no one left living for you to pin that
on except for me.”
From the corner of her eye, she watched Ezekiel clench and un-
clench his fists. She waited for it. Any moment, and his control would
slip, and that wild, wicked look would fill his face with the ghost of
his father, and she’d have to close her eyes to shut him out.
But the snap didn’t occur, and the madness didn’t cover him with
a terrible veil. Instead, he said, in a deadpan voice that matched the
empty gaze he’d given her earlier, “But that’s the most unfair part of
all: You didn’t do anything.”
She was surprised, but cautiously so. “Is that what you think?”
“It’s what I’ve figured.”
She snorted a bitter-sounding laugh. “So you’ve got it all figured
out now, have you?”
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 38
Cherie Priest
38 • • • • • • • • • • • •
“More than you’d think, I bet. And you should’ve told that writer
about what Maynard did, because if more people knew, and under-
stood, then maybe some respectable folks would know he wasn’t a
criminal, and you could live a little less like a leper.”
She used the stew to buy herself another few bites to think. It did
not escape her notice that Zeke must’ve spoken to Hale, but she
chose not to call attention to it.
“I didn’t tell the biographer anything about Maynard because he
already knew plenty, and he’d already made up his mind about it. If it
makes you feel any better, he agrees with you. He thinks Maynard
was a hero, too.”
Zeke threw his hands up in the air and said, “See? I’m not the only
one. And as for the company I keep, maybe my friends aren’t high
society, but they know good guys when they see them.”
“Your friends are crooks,” she said.
“You don’t know that. You don’t even know any of my friends;
you’ve never met any of them except for Rector, and he ain’t so bad as
far as bad friends go, you even said so. And you should know: It’s like
a secret handshake, Maynard’s name. They say it like spitting in your
hand to swear. It’s like swearing on a Bible, except everybody knows
Maynard actually did something.”
“Don’t talk that way,” she stopped him. “You’re asking for trou-
ble, trying to rewrite history, trying to shuffle things around until
they mean something better.”
“I’m not trying to rewrite anything!” And she heard it, the fright-
ening timbre in his freshly broken, almost man-sounding voice. “I’m
only trying to make it right!”
She swallowed the last of the stew too fast, almost scalding her
throat in her hurry to be done with it, and to quit being hungry so she
could focus on this fight—if that’s what it was becoming.
“You don’t understand,” she breathed, and the words were hot on
her nearly burned throat. “Here’s the hard and horrible truth of life,
Zeke, and if you never hear another thing I ever tell you, hear this: It
doesn’t matter if Maynard was a hero. It doesn’t matter if your father
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 39
Boneshaker
39
• • • • • • • • • • • •
was an honest man with good intentions. It doesn’t matter if I never

did anything to deserve what happened, and it doesn’t matter that
your life was hexed before I even knew about you.”
“But how can it not? If everyone just understood, and if everyone
just knew all the facts about my grandfather and my dad, then . . .”
Despair crackled through his objection.
“Then what? Then suddenly we’d be rich, and loved, and happy?
You’re young, yes, but you’re not stupid enough to believe that.
Maybe in a few generations, when plenty of time has passed, and no
one really remembers the havoc or the fear anymore, and your grand-
father has had time to fade into legend, then storytellers like young
Mr. Quarter will have the final word. . . .”
Then she lost her voice from shock and horror, because she sud-
denly realized that her son had only barely been talking about May-
nard at all. She took a deep breath, lifted her bowl up from the table,
and walked it over to the basin and left it there. It was too much, the
prospect of pumping more water to clean it right then.
“Mother?” Ezekiel gathered that he’d crossed some awful line
and he didn’t know what it was. “Mother, what is it?”
“You don’t understand,” she told him, even though she felt like
she’d said it a thousand times in the past hour. “There’s so much you
don’t understand, but I know you better than you think I do. I know
you better than anyone, because I knew the men you mimic even when
you don’t mean to—even when you have no idea what you’ve said or
done to startle me.”
“Mother, you aren’t making sense.”
She slapped a hand against her chest. “I’m not making sense?
You’re the one who’s telling me wonderful things about someone you
never met, building up this great apology for one dead man because
you think—because you don’t know any better—that if you can re-
deem one dead man you might redeem another. You gave yourself
away, naming them both in one breath like that.” While she had his
full attention, before she lost the element of shock that was holding
him quiet, she continued. “That’s where you’re going with this, isn’t
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 40
Cherie Priest
40 • • • • • • • • • • • •
it? If Maynard wasn’t all bad, then maybe your father wasn’t all bad
either? If you can vindicate the one, then there’s hope for the other?”
Slowly, then with stronger rhythm, he began to nod. “Yes, but it’s
not as daft as you make it sound—no, don’t. Stop it, and listen to me.
Hear me out: If, all this time, everyone in the Outskirts has been
wrong about you, then—”
“How are they wrong about me?” she demanded to know.
“They think everything was your fault! The jailbreak, the Blight,
and the Boneshaker too. But they weren’t your fault, and the jailbreak
wasn’t a big ol’ act of mayhem and nuisance.” He paused to take in
some air, and his mother wondered where he’d ever heard such a
phrase.
“So they’re wrong about you, and I think they’re wrong about
Grandfather. That’s two out of three, ain’t it? Why’s it so nuts to
think they’ve all been wrong about Levi, too?”
It was exactly as she’d feared, laid out in a pretty, perfect line.
“You,” she tried to say, but it came out as a cough. She slowed herself
down and did her best to calm herself, despite the awful crashing of
her son’s dangerous, innocent words. “There’s . . . listen. I under-
stand why it looks so obvious to you, and I understand why you want
to believe that there’s something of your father’s memory worth sav-
ing. And . . . and maybe you’re right about Maynard; as likely as not
he was only trying to help. Maybe he had that moment, that break
when he realized that he could obey the letter of the law or the spirit
of it—and he was chasing some kind of ideal, right into the Blight,
and into his grave. I can believe it, and I can accept it, and I can even
be a little angry about the way he’s been remembered.”
Zeke made an adolescent squeak of disbelief and held out his
hands like he wanted to shake his mother, or strangle her. “Then why
haven’t you ever said anything? Why would you let them stomp all
over his memory if you think he was trying to help people?”
“I told you, it wouldn’t matter. And besides, even if the jailbreak
had never happened, and he’d died in some other, less strange way, it
wouldn’t have made a difference to me. I wouldn’t have remembered
039-41408_ch01_4P.qxp 7/31/09 7:53 PM Page 41
Boneshaker
41
• • • • • • • • • • • •
him any different for any last-minute heroics, and, and, and . . .
Besides,” she added another fierce defense, “who would listen to me?
People avoid me and ignore me, and it’s not Maynard’s fault, not re-
ally. Nothing I could say to defend him would sway a single soul in
the Outskirts, because being his daughter is only a secondary curse
on my head.”
Her voice had crept up again, too close to fear for her own satis-
faction. She beat it back down, and counted her breaths, and tried to
keep her words in a tight, logical line to match and beat Ezekiel’s.
“I didn’t choose my parents; no one does. I could be forgiven for
my father’s sins. But I did choose your father, and for that, they will
never let me rest.”
Something salty and bright was searing a deep, angry streak in her
chest, and it felt like tears clawing their way up her throat. She gulped
them down. She caught her breath and crushed it into submission,
and as her son walked away from her, back toward his bedroom where
he could close her out, she tagged after him.
He shut the door in her face. He would’ve locked it, but it had no
lock, so he leaned his weight against it. Briar could hear the soft
whump of his body pressing a stubborn resistance on the other side.
She didn’t yank the knob, or even touch it.
She pressed her temple against a place where she thought his head
might be, and she told him, “Try and save Maynard, if that will make
you happy. Make that your mission, if it gives you some kind of direc-
tion and if it makes you less . . . angry. But please, Zeke, please. There’s
nothing to retrieve from Leviticus Blue. Nothing at all. If you dig too
hard or push too far, if you learn too much, it will only break your
heart. Sometimes, everyone is right. Not always and not even usually,
but once in a while, everyone is right.”
It took all her self-restraint to keep from saying more. Instead, she
turned away and went to her own bedroom to swear and seethe.
GET MORE OF
BONESHAKER
To purchase copies of Boneshaker for holiday gifts, print the

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Books-A-Million
Indiebound
Visit
CheriePriest.com
THE ROOKIE
Scott
Sigler
THE ROOKIE
Set in a lethal pro football league 700 years in the future, The Rookie
is a story that combines the intense gridiron action of Any Given
Sunday with the space opera style of Star Wars and the criminal
underworld of The Godfather. Aliens and humans alike play positions
based on physiology, creating receivers that jump 25 feet into the air,
linemen that bench-press 1,200 pounds, and linebackers that literally
want to eat you. Organized crime runs every franchise, games are
fixed and rival players are assassinated.
Follow the story of Quentin Barnes, a 19-year-old quarterback

prodigy that has been raised all his life to hate, and kill, those aliens.
Quentin must deal with his racism and learn to lead, or he’ll wind up
just another stat in the column marked “killed on the field.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

New York Times bestselling novelist Scott Sigler is the author of Infected
and Contagious, hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing.
Before he was published, Scott built a large online following by giving away
his self-recorded audiobooks as free, serialized podcasts. His loyal fans,
who named themselves “Junkies,” have downloaded over seven million
individual episodes of his stories and interact daily with Scott and each
other in the social media space.
spac Learn more at ScottSigler.com.
BOOK ONE:
The PNFL
1
TALENT SHOW
Semifinals of the Purist Nation Football League (PNFL)
Outland Fleet Corsairs (7-2) at Mining Colony VI Raiders (9-0)
Micovi Memorial Stadium
7:25 pm PNST
Coverage:
Holocast: Channel 15 Promised Land Sports Network
Translight Radio: 645.6 TL “The Fan”
Third and 7 on the defense’s 41.

Micovi’s three tiny moons hung in the evening sky like pitted
purple grapes. Their reflected light diffused into the night’s mist,
making them glow with a fuzzy magnificence.
Smells of Human sweat, iron-rich mud and the saltwater-like
odor of Carsengi Grass filled the frigid air. The endless hum of the
atmosphere processor echoed through packed stands, but the play-
ers — and the crowd — had long since tuned out its ever-present
droning.
Quentin Barnes slowly walked up behind the center, head
sweeping from left to right as he took in every detail of the defense.
Well, some would call it a “walk,” most would call it a “swagger.”
A step left, a half bounce left, a step right, a half bounce right. He
stood behind the center, his hands tapping out a quick left-right-
left “ba-da-bap” on the center’s ample behind.
From his crouch, the center smiled — the ba-da-bap was the
kind of thing other players would tease you for — that is, unless
your quarterback was Quentin Barnes. The center smiled because
4 S C O T T S I G L E R
Quentin only did that, did the ba-da-bap, when he saw a hole in
the defense. And what Quentin saw, Quentin took.
Behind Quentin, the tailback and the fullback lined up an
I-formation. Two wide receivers lined up on the left side, with a
tight end on the right.
“Red, fifteen! Red, fifteeeeeen!” Quentin’s gravel and sandpa-
per voice barked out the audible. His breath shot out in a growing
white cloud, which seemed to break into slow motion as the crys-
tallized vapor rose almost imperceptibly into the windless night.
Across the offensive and defensive lines, similar start-stop breaths
filled the air like a thin fog of war, each puff illuminated by the
powerful field lights.
“Watch that shucker!” the Corsairs’ outside linebacker called
as he pointed to the tight end. The tight end had caught six pass-
es on the day, four of them in third-down situations, racking up
52 yards and a touchdown. And it wasn’t even halfway through
the third quarter. The linebacker’s jersey, once blazing white with
royal blue numbers, was now a torn mess of brown streaks, green
smears and splotches of red fading to pink. The linebacker moved
to line up directly over the tight end.
From his stance, the tight end smiled. Now he saw it, now he
saw the same thing Quentin had seen almost the second they broke
from the huddle.
“Huuut … hut!”
The center snapped the ball into Quentin’s wide hands. The
linemen launched into their endless battle, huge cleated shoes
kicking up clods of tortured grass and well-worked mud. Quentin
dropped straight back as the fullback and tailback moved to the
left and to the right, respectively, ready to block. The tight end
shot off the line, big legs pumping and big arms swinging. The
linebacker backpedaled, eyes wide and angry — he wasn’t going
to let the tight end beat him this time.
The linebacker watched Quentin’s eyes as they locked onto the
tight end. The tight end stepped to the right, like he was breaking
outside, his head looking up and his shoulders turning out in an
exaggerated move before he cut sharply left, to the inside, and
T H E R O O K I E 5
curled up at eight yards from the line of scrimmage. Quentin’s left

arm reared back — the linebacker snarled as he jumped the rout:
it was payback time, an easy interception.
Quentin’s arm came forward as the linebacker closed on the
tight end — but the ball never left the tall quarterback’s hand.
Pump fake. Quentin reared back again, lightning fast, and lofted a
smooth, arching pass. The linebacker leapt, but the ball sailed just
a few inches over his outstretched fingers to fall perfectly into the
arms of the sprinting tailback, who had come out of the backfield
on a delayed pattern. The tailback turned upfield, never breaking
stride.
The tailback threw a head-and-shoulders juke on the free
safety, who couldn’t change direction quickly enough to catch the
streaking runner. The tailback cut to the right, towards the side-
lines, and turned on the jets — the strong safety had a good angle
of pursuit, but there just wasn’t enough field to catch up. The tail-
back strode into the dirty end zone standing up. The record crowd
of 15,162 roared its approval.
Micovi Raiders 34, Purist Nation Outland Fleet Corsairs 3.
Quentin Barnes reached down and plucked a few blades of
the tough Carsengi Grass from the muddy, cleat-torn field, then
held them to his nose. He breathed deeply, smiled, then rolled his
fingers, feeling the grass’ rough texture before the blades scattered
to the ground.
SMILES SEEMED LIMITLESS that day, particularly to players and

fans of the black-and-silver Mining Colony Six Raiders. And for
Stedmar Osborne, the Raiders’ owner, the smile was so big it
looked almost painful. He sat behind the smoked glass of his luxu-
ry box, enjoying an illegal Jack Daniels on the rocks and smoking
an illegal Tower Republic cigar. Normally he was down on the
field, as any young owner should be, but this week he was enter-
taining a visitor — a Quyth Leader, forbidden both because of his
rap sheet and his species. Not that it was legal for any species other
than Humans to stand on Purist Nation soil. But out here on the
fringe colonies, such things were often ignored if you had enough
influence.
“What did I tell you, Shamakath,” Stedmar said, respectfully
using the Quyth word for ‘leader.’
Gredok the Splithead nodded quickly, his three sets of foot-
long black antennae bobbing like dreadlocks. Gredok had to look
up — he was tall for a Quyth Leader, but at three feet, two inches,
he was exactly half Stedmar’s height.
Out of all the galaxy’s known species, Humans and Quyth
shared the most similar body plan. Most similar, which was actu-
ally not very similar at all. Both species had evolved from primitive
quadrupeds into bipeds, giving them two legs and two arms. From
that point on, however, any similarity broke down. The average
Human stood at twice the height of an average Quyth Leader, and
weighed three times as much.
The Quyth Leader’s body looked as if a sculptor had taken
a Human child’s arms and moved them down to just above the
hips. Both arms and legs ended in three-pincered claws, which
provided solid footing but were incapable of manipulating any
tool. The proximity of legs and arms meant the Quyth could move
with equal ease as a biped or a quadruped, although no respecting
Quyth Leader would ever be caught walking on all-fours. Such be-
havior was fine for Warriors and Workers, but never for a Leader.
The trunk continued up from the arms, a long, smooth, furry
body that ended in a head dominated by one softball-sized eye.
A small, vertical mouth sat under the eye. A set of pedipalps ex-
tended from the sides of the Quyth’s vertical mouth — what were
once tools for killing and eating had evolved into long, dexterous
appendages the Quyth used like Human hands.
“I don’t know why he hasn’t thrown deep more,” Stedmar
said. “With that kid’s arm, they should be going for the bomb on
every play, you know?”
Gredok looked back at the field and rolled his eye, marveling
in the Stedmar’s idiocy. Gredok caught himself in the act, then
stared straight ahead — rolling one’s eye was an expression of de-
rision he’d picked up from hanging around Humans for far too
T H E R O O K I E 7
long. Any neophyte could see that the quarterback had been set-
ting that play up for at least the last two offensive series.
Gredok looked to his left, at Hokor the Hookchest, also a
Quyth Leader. Hokor had forgotten more about football than Gre-
dok would ever know. Hokor’s single eye glowed slightly yellow
with an internal light. The tips of his three sets of flexible, foot-
long antennae spun in tiny circles — there was nothing Human
about that expression. Hokor’s stubby legs were the only things
that stayed still: his tan-striped yellow fur raised and lowered with
subconscious excitement, his tiny three-pincered hands flexed in-
voluntarily, and his pedipalps twitched, as if they were searching
for food to stuff into his small mouth. Gredok reached over and
gently nudged Hokor. Hokor’s antennae immediately stopped cir-
cling, and the yellow light faded until his big eye was perfectly
clear.
Hokor was a great coach, but he had little of what the Humans
called a “poker face.” Gredok, on the other hand, remained calm
and collected. His antennae and pedipalps sat perfectly still, while
his own fur, silky-black and impeccably groomed, lay smooth and
undisturbed.
It might have been a casual outing of three business acquain-
tances, not much different than what went on in the stadium’s oth-
er luxury boxes save for the fact that there were probably no other
non-Humans in the stadium, nor were they packed with lethal-
looking bodyguards: four Humans, who belonged to Stedmar; and
two thickly muscled, six-foot-tall Quyth Warriors, their furless,
hard-shelled carapaces showing battle scars and the hand-painted
emblems of combat tours and various war campaigns.
“Greedy, I’ve got to hand it to you on this football team stuff,”
Stedmar said as the kicker knocked through the extra point to
make the score 35-3. “I had no idea how lucrative this could be,
but you were right — I’m moving at least five hundred keys of
smack every road game, and coming back with a bus full of mon-
ey. I never dreamed smuggling could be so easy. Local customs
officials barely look at a team bus. Even the shucking bats don’t
bother.”
“The Creterakians introduced football,” Gredok said, noting

how Stedmar still referred to the ruling race ‘bats,’ a reference to
some Human animal Gredok had never seen. “Football suppos-
edly reduces interspecies violence. They don’t want to rock the
boat over a little thing like smuggling.”
Stedmar lifted his glass. “Well here’s to interspecies coopera-
tion,” he said, then took a drink as the ice cubes rattled wetly.
“And you have a Tier Three team,” Gredok said. “Imagine
how valuable it becomes with a Tier Two team, and you’re mov-
ing across entire systems, or even a Tier One team, and you’ve got
complete immunity across all governments.”
Stedmar nodded. “Tier Three is good enough for now. It’s go-
ing to take me a few years to buy out a Tier Two team. But hey, if
I can hold on to Barnes, I’ll be competitive from the start.”
“Don’t be sure Barnes can carry your team,” Gredok said.
“There’s a reason no Nationalite quarterback has ever led a team
to a championship. It’s one thing to be great in an all-Human
league. It’s a very different game when Barnes has to throw past
eight-foot-tall Sklorno defensive backs and dodge 400-pound
Quyth Warrior linebackers.”
Stedmar shrugged. “The boy thinks he can handle it.”
“The rest of your team can’t. Your repressive government
barely allows non-Human trade let alone bringing in other races to
play football. In Tier Two ball, you need Quyth Warriors, Sklorno
and Ki. It would be fun to watch your puny 400-pound linemen
try and block a 600-pound Ki nose tackle.”
“I’m working on it, Shamakath,” Stedmar said. Stedmar did
an admirable job of pronouncing the word correctly, no small feat
considering his Human vocal cords were only half as versatile as
the Quyth voice chamber. It was a clear sign of his respect towards
the leader of his syndicate. Hokor genuinely liked Stedmar, and
had big plans for his lieutenant. Assuming, of course, that Stedmar
lived to see the end of this game.
“Football is becoming too popular, even in the Purist Nation,”
Stedmar said. “You know how the Holy Men are, how much they
hate the Planetary Union and the League of Planets. It drives the
T H E R O O K I E 9
Holy Men crazy to know those two heretic systems have fielded so
many championship teams over the past twenty-five years.”
“Heretic?” Gredok said. “Is that what you believe?”
Stedmar laughed. “How can you ask that? I don’t follow this
system’s damned religion.”
Gredok pointed to the infinity symbol tattooed on Stedmar’s
forehead. “You seem to have all the trappings of a Church member.”
“The cost of doing business in this system.” If you’re not a
confirmed member of the Church, you can’t get near most of the
business. Corruption abounds, and is quite profitable.”
Gredok let out a rapid click-click-click of disgust. “Still, the
Purist Nation is not going to allow non-Human races inside its
borders, and you need other races to win in the Galactic Football
League. Governments have been working on that for three cen-
turies — the GFL has only been around for twenty-three seasons,
and three of those were suspended.”
Stedmar shrugged again. “The bats have been here for forty
years.”
“That’s different,” Gredok said. “They conquered all the Hu-
man planets. Your people don’t have a choice.”
“The scriptures also say no non-Humans on any Purist Na-
tion planet, but you know the Holy Men — when they want some-
thing, the Book is always full of loopholes. If it wasn’t for out-
system smuggling the border colonies couldn’t even survive. Our
economy is a disaster and everyone knows it. Things are going to
change, and soon.”
“You forget I’ve been alive three times as long as you. I’ve
always heard about ‘coming changes’ in your system, yet it’s one
fundamentalist coup after another. If it wasn’t for the Creteraki-
ans, the Purist Nation would have torn itself apart long ago.”
“Look at Buddha City,” Stedmar said. “They’ve got every race
in the galaxy on that station, and it orbits Allah, the very seat of
the Purist Nation. But that’s allowed, because the aliens can’t set
foot on Allah itself. That policy has survived through the last three
regimes, because even the radicals know the economy can’t sustain
itself without at least some official out-system trade. There’s even
talk of allowing a limited non-Human presence on outlying food

and research facilities, space stations and, you guessed it, mining
colonies.”
“And you think you’ll still have Barnes when that happens?”
Gredok leaned forward, the football game forgotten, his game, the
power game, now fully underway.
Stedmar shrugged. “The Holy Men might not open things for
another ten years, so who knows. Besides,” Stedmar said as he
turned to look straight into Gredok’s big eye, “I’ve got offers on
the table for Barnes’ contract.”
Gredok showed no emotion, he kept his antennae still, but in-
side he felt a combination of disappointment and a rush of excite-
ment. Of course the Human knew why Gredok had come.
Gredok turned back to the game. The Corsairs were driving,
using their fast-passing game to move forward five or ten yards at
a crack. Both teams wore simple uniforms: pants with no stripe,
jersey decorated with only the player’s number, front and back in
block-letter style, a helmet decorated only with the first letter of
the team name. Every team in the Purist Nation Football League
wore uniforms that were identical save for the team colors. The
Raiders had silver-grey pants and helmets with black jerseys, while
the Corsairs wore royal blue pants and helmets with white jerseys.
“Who would want Barnes?” Gredok said with disgust. “Pur-
ist Nation quarterbacks can’t handle the Upper Tiers, it has been
proven time and time again.”
Stedmar’s thin smile returned. “Kirani-Ah-Kollok.”
This time, Gredok couldn’t control his quivering antennae.
Kirani-Ah-Kollok, Shamakath of the Ki Homeworld Syndicate.
The very being that Gredok hoped to someday replace.
“Kollok? Why would he want Barnes when he’s got Frank
Zimmer at quarterback?”
“Zimmer’s getting old,” Stedmar said. “He’s 33. I know that’s
not much to you, Shamakath, but for a Human that means he’s
only got four or five good years left. Barnes is only 19. Kollok
figures that by the time Zimmer starts to fade, Barnes will be in his
mid-twenties, just hitting the peak of his abilities.”
T H E R O O K I E 11
Few bosses were as ruthless and clever as Kollok, who was not
only a shrewd businessman but also a great judge of football tal-
ent. Kollok’s team, the To Pirates, had won the GFL championship
in 2681, and followed up with a trip to last season’s title game,
where they lost to the current champions, the Jupiter Jacks.
On the field, the Corsairs’ quarterback dropped back and threw
deep downfield. The ball hung in the air for far too long, giving
the Raider’s strong safety time to make a well-timed leap. His out-
stretched hands snagged the ball before the receiver dragged him
down. The crowd roared in approval.
“That’s the quarterback’s fourth interception,” Hokor said
quietly. “He should be shot.”
Stedmar laughed at what he thought was a joke, but Gredok
knew it was no laughing matter. Hokor was a demanding coach,
to say the least. Back in his days as a Tier Three coach in the
Quyth Planetary League, he had executed more than one ineffec-
tual player.
A flock of Creterakian soldiers flew over the field, moving
from perches on one side of the stadium to the other. As their
small shadows zipped across the near stands, then the field, then
the far stands, the crowd noise fell to a hush. The tiny creatures
always made their presence felt during football games, where radi-
cals were fond of deadly terrorist acts. Each one of the twenty or
so winged beings carried an entropic rifle, capable of killing a man
with even a glancing shot. Like any other public gathering, even
ones with only a hundred or so people, the local Creterakian gar-
rison wanted to see and be seen.
“I hate those little shuckers,” Stedmar said quietly. “They do
those flyovers on purpose, you know, to make sure the crowd
doesn’t get too wild.”
Over the years, Gredok had seen several ‘wild’ crowds of
repressed Purist Nation citizens. Just during the drive from the
spaceport to the city center and the football field, he’d seen two
minor riots and one lynch mob. The lynch mob ended when a
flock of soldiers flew in to break it up, then some Purist genius
started throwing rocks at the ugly little flying creatures: the lynch-
ing originally intended to kill one man for an unknown crime

ended in at least twelve deaths when the Creterakians opened fire.
Mining Colony VI, or “Micovi” as the locals liked to call it, was
little more than a barely controlled, overpopulated border outpost
of a Third World system.
The Raiders’ offense ran onto the field, led by the swaggering
Barnes. The crowd noise picked up once again as hometown fans
cheered for their star player.
“He’s awfully big for a quarterback,” Gredok said.
“Seven feet even,” Stedmar said. “Seven feet tall, 360 pounds.”
So big, Gredok thought. Big enough, possibly, to stand up
to the punishment that Upper Tier quarterbacks took week after
week. Frank Zimmer was 6-foot-9, 310 pounds, and was one of
the biggest quarterbacks in the league. “It’s amazing how players
keep getting larger and larger. Fifteen years ago a Human that size
could have been a small tight end.”
Barnes barked out the signals, looking up and down the line
as he did. He paused, stood for a moment, and his hands did a
ba-da-bap on the center’s behind. Barnes screamed out an audible.
Behind him, the tailback went in motion to the left, lining up in the
slot between the tight end and the wide receiver.
“Here we go again,” Stedmar said. “He sees something!”
Gredok and Hokor also leaned forward, although they knew
what was coming — any fool could see the Corsairs’ defensive
backs were in man-to-man while the tailback’s motion revealed
that the linebackers were in a short zone. Barnes now had three
targets to his left — the wide receiver, the tailback, and the tight end.
“Roll out?” Gredok asked. Hokor nodded.
Barnes took the snap as the line erupted in the dirt-churning
mini-war. He ran to his left, down the line, as the three left-side
receivers sprinted straight downfield. But Hokor and Gredok
weren’t the only ones to see what Quentin had seen — the much-
maligned linebacker tore up field, blitzing just inside the sprinting
tight end. Quentin and the linebacker seemed to be on a direct
collision course. The 360-pound linebacker closed in and launched
himself, at which point Quentin calmly sidestepped towards the
line of scrimmage. The linebacker sailed through the air, not even
laying a finger on the deft quarterback.
The defensive end had separated from his block. Quentin’s cut
inside the linebacker took him right into the defensive end’s reach-
ing arms. Quentin cut back to the outside at the last second as the
400-pound end grabbed him with cannon-sized arms. The quar-
terback kept his feet pumping and pushed hard with his right arm.
The end’s feet chopped at the ground as he tried to keep up, but
Quentin’s stiffarm had knocked him off balance. The end fell, both
hands wrapped in Quentin’s jersey, pulling the smaller quarter-
back down. Quentin stumbled, leaned, then seemed to take a step
towards the defensive end and twisted his shoulders as he pushed
out with his right arm yet again. The end fell to the ground, his big
hands slipping free of Quentin’s jersey. Then quarterback popped
upright, like a stiff spring that had been bent to the ground then
released.
So strong, Gredok thought. I’ve never seen a Human quarter-
back so strong.
Already moving upfield and now free of the clutching defen-
sive end, Quentin tucked the ball and ran. The defense shifted
from their pass coverage to come after him, but in the two seconds
after his initial cut he was already ten yards upfield and cutting to
the outside.
“Hikkir,” Hokor said quietly — the Quyth equivalent of
“oh my.”
The crowd roared as the cornerback streaked towards Quen-
tin, but the defender came in too fast. Quentin juked to the right,
to the inside, but in the same second was moving back to the left.
The cornerback stumbled and started to fall — he reached out for
Quentin, who slapped his hands away like an angry parent scold-
ing a spoiled child.
“Hikkirapt,” Hokor said, a little louder this time, the Quyth
equivalent of “that’s quite impressive.”
Quentin sprinted down the sideline. The free safety closed with
a good angle of pursuit. There was nowhere to cut this time, so
Quentin lowered his right hand, and brought it up hard just as the
free safety reached for the tackle. Quentin’s thick forearm caught
the free safety under the chin, lifting him off his feet. The free
safety seemed to float for a second, moving downfield at the same
speed as Quentin, before crashing into the ground and skidding
clumsily across the torn Carsengi Grass.
“Joro jirri,” Hokor said loudly. That loosely translated into
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Stedmar jumped up and down and screamed nonsensical syl-
lables, his drink spilling onto the floor. His bodyguards had lost
discipline, straying from their posts to get a glimpse of the sprint-
ing quarterback. Hokor leaned forward so far his neon-bright yel-
low eye pressed against the luxury box’s glass windows.
It boiled down to Quentin and the strong safety, who closed in
as the quarterback passed the 30-yard line. Quentin looked back
once, then turned his head upfield and seemed to take off, as if he
had booster rockets. Quentin strolled into the end zone for a 52-
yard touchdown run.
Raiders 41, Corsairs 3.
“Just how fast is he?” Gredok asked quietly.
“Yesterday in practice they timed him at 3.8 in the 40-yard
dash.”
Gredok simply nodded. Of course. Why not? Why shouldn’t
the nineteen-year-old huge quarterback, with a plasma rifle for an
arm, the eyes of an aerial predator and the mind of a general run a
3.8 second 40-yard dash? That was faster than most Human run-
ning backs and definitely faster than the typical 380-pound Hu-
man tight end. It wasn’t nearly as fast as a Sklorno wide receiver
or defensive back, but it was about equal with a Quyth Warrior
linebacker. A Tier One linebacker — Quentin would leave most
Tier Two linebackers in the dust.
Hokor still leaned forward, his eye and both sets of his hands
pressed against the glass, his antennae quivering like drug-addled
snakes. Gredok poked him again — hard. Hokor looked up and
saw Gredok’s eye clouding over with just a touch of black. Hokor
swept a pedipalp over his head, submissively pushing his antennae
back, then sat quietly in his seat.
Gredok stared at his coach. Hokor had come across a tape of

Barnes, and had instantly insisted the boy was Tier One material.
Gredok had argued — there were reasons no Nationalite had ever
quarterbacked a championship team. Most Nationalite quarter-
backs, in fact, washed out within two seasons. Despite the boy’s
skills, he had no experience dealing with other races, let alone
leading them. There was more to quarterbacking than pure foot-
ball skill. Far more.
But Gredok believed in his coach. He’d already leveraged his
entire organization’s finances to create the team Hokor wanted,
the team that would make the leap from Tier Two to the big time
… to Tier One. Hokor wanted Barnes, but to get Barnes, Gredok
needed to make a play that could have serious business conse-
quences.
Gredok’s wide eye asked an unspoken question: Are you sure?
Is this kid really worth it?
Hokor stared back with an unspoken answer: Absolutely.
“I think Kollok is going to pay through the nose for this kid,”
Stedmar said quietly, a smug smile on his lips. “Don’t you think he
will, Shamakath?”
The time had come to formally open up the power game.
Gredok wasn’t taking any chances.
“Actually,” Gredok said, “Barnes might do well on my team.”
Stedmar raised his eyebrows in a Human expression for sur-
prise. Gredok sensed Stedmar’s body heat — very steady, only a
hair above normal. Stedmar concealed his emotions very well,
which was just one of the reasons Gredok liked him. Stedmar was
also smart and ruthless. But for all his strong points, he should have
known better than to play the game with Gredok the Splithead.
“You’ve got Don Pine,” Stedmar said. “Why would you want
anyone else?”
“Pine is not what he used to be.”
Stedmar nodded. “But I’ve already got a considerable offer
from Kollok.”
“You should just give me Barnes’ contract as tribute.”
Stedmar smiled. “Now come on, we both know tribute doesn’t
cover something like this. You wouldn’t want me in your organiza-

tion if I’d do something as stupid as give up this kid for free.”
Gredok thought for a second, then nodded. Stedmar played
it smart: polite, respectful, and logical. “What is Kollok’s offer?”
Stedmar walked to the bar and poured himself another drink.
“Well, Barnes’ contract is negligible,” he said. “I have him signed
for another year at one million credits.”
Such a low number for such talent, Gredok thought.
“That is impressive, Stedmar. Barnes is worth three times that
amount, even for a Tier Three team. How did you manage it?”
Stedmar shrugged and smiled. “Technically, I don’t have to pay
him at all. He’s an orphan, like about a million other Nationalite
kids his age. Pogroms, coups, fundamentalist revolutions, power
struggles — thousands of people die or just disappear every year.
Quentin never even knew his parents. They disappeared when he
was one, maybe younger. He had a brother, got hung for stealing
food when Quentin was only five. That was all the family he had.”
“How old was the brother?”
“Nine or ten, Quentin doesn’t remember for sure. Anyway, in
the Purist Nation, family members are responsible for crimes com-
mitted by other family members, up to three generations. Since
Quentin was the only one left in his family, they put him to work
in the forced-labor mines.”
“A five-year-old Human, working in the Micovi mines?”
Stedmar nodded. “Happens all the time. Makes for a very
cheap labor source.”
“Slave labor is always the cheapest.”
“The nice term is ‘honor worker,’ as in working in the forced-
labor camps clears your family honor, you know? Only takes
twenty years.”
Gredok’s antennae circled slowly. He didn’t like Human sys-
tems to start with, and the Purist Nation was by far the worst of
the lot. “So if he was an honor worker in a mine, how did you
discover him?”
Stedmar laughed. “It was the craziest thing. I was driving out
to the mines to conduct some business. So I’m driving by in my
limo when the workers are on break. There’s a crowd built up like
it’s a fight. Well, I love to watch a good fight, especially on this
planet — did you know if you kill a man in a fair fight here, you
don’t go to jail?”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Anyway, so people really go at it. So I pull up to see what’s
going on, only there’s not a fight, everyone is laughing and clap-
ping, looking at each other in amazement. There’s this giant-sized
shucker, must have been 425 pounds, built like an air-tank with
legs, you know? Anyway, this guy looks pissed. He heaves back
and chucks a rock, maybe the rock is a pound or two, chucks it
about sixty yards, really impressive throw. Some guy runs the rock
back, and that’s when the workers start flashing money back and
forth — they’re making bets. Then this scrawny kid steps up, he’s
about six feet tall, but you can tell he’s real young. The big guy has
a look on his face like he could eat a bat whole, entropic rifle and
all, you know? He’s looking at this kid like he wants to kill him.
And the kid is just laughing. The kid takes the rock, pretends like
he’s lining up under a center and actually barks out some signals.
He’s looking left, looking right, then takes a five-step drop like
he’s quarterbacking the Rodina Astronauts or something, and he
heaves that rock. I mean the thing flew eighty-five, maybe ninety
yards. I just about crapped myself.”
Gredok nodded. He was always amazed by Stedmar’s fascina-
tion with fecal euphemisms. “And that’s why you signed him?”
“Partially. So this kid won the bet, obviously, the big guy hands
him a wad of bills, and the kid starts doing this dance, really rub-
bing it in, you know? Well, the big guy, he just loses it. He throws a
big sucker-punch that knocks the kid on his butt. The kid pops up
like nothing happened, except he’s not laughing now, he’s pissed.”
Gredok nodded again. Urine was also a key element of Sted-
mar’s stories.
“So the big guy comes after this kid, and this kid lays into him.
I mean he took this big guy apart. Three straight jabs and then a
big left hook, and the guy goes down. But the kid isn’t finished. He
jumps on the guy and starts blasting him with big haymaker lefts,
over and over again. There’s blood all over the dirt, in a couple
of seconds the guy’s face looks like hamburger. The workers are
laughing and having a grand time, but you know what I’m think-
ing to myself, Shamakath?”
“No.”
“I’m thinking, ‘What if that kid hurts his hands?’ Swear to
High One, that’s what I’m thinking. So I send my Sammy and
Dean and Frankie over there to pull the kid off. But he’s like a
wildcat — doesn’t know who my boys are or what they want, so
he lays Sammy out with that same left hook.”
Stedmar turned to look at one of his bodyguards, a thick Hu-
man with a nose that looked as if it had been broken a dozen times.
“You remember that punch, Sammy?”
“Yeah, boss,” Sammy said, laughing. “And he weighed about
two hundred pounds less back then.”
“I didn’t want the kid hurt, but you can’t expect the boys to
take that, you know? But the more they hit him, the madder he
gets, and he just won’t stay down. Finally, Sammy gets up and he
whips out a stun stick and puts the kid out. They drag him over to
me. I ask the kid if he knows who I am. You know what he says
to me?”
“No,” Gredok said, patiently waiting for the end of the story.
Humans always took so long to get to the point.
“Through a split lip he says to me, ‘You’re the new owner of
the Raiders.’ Not ‘You’re Stedmar Osborne, notorious gangster,’
or ‘You’re that guy that shakes down the mine owners’ or any-
thing like that. Just ‘The owner of the Raiders.’ That was it for
me, I knew the kid lived and breathed football. So I ask him, ‘How
old are you?’ And he tells me ‘Fifteen.’ Fifteen. You know what I
almost did?”
“Crapped yourself?” Gredok said.
“Yah! I almost crapped myself! I paid off the kid’s family debt.
That’s why, technically, I don’t have to pay him at all, I sort of own
him. And just to let you know, a million a year is probably more
than his entire family saw going back three generations, if not four
or five. He thinks he’s rich. So I signed the kid and put him on the
team. He’d never played organized ball before, and the next year,
at sixteen years old, he’s the backup quarterback.”
At this, Hokor looked away from the field and listened at-
tentively. Gredok knew why — this quarterback already had four
years of professional experience, albeit in the lowly PNFL.
“At seventeen he started for me,” Stedmar said. “We went 5-4
that year, he won his last three games. The next year, this eighteen-
year-old kid wins it all for me, 9-0, and two more wins in the play-
offs to give me my first championship. This year, we’re 9-0 again,
we’ll obviously win today, and that’s 21 games in a row for him.
Next week the championship game should be a cakewalk.”
“All because you were driving by and happened to see him
throw a rock.”
Stedmar laughed, he obviously relished telling this story. “Yah!
Crazy, isn’t it?”
“You still haven’t told me Kollok’s offer.”
“Kollok will hand me fifteen million,” Stedmar said, that same
self-confident smile on his lips. “Plus smuggling rights for any pyu-
li he wants to unload in Purist Nation space.”
Gredok nodded, sensing Stedmar’s body heat increase just a
bit. He was lying about the fifteen million, but not about the Ki-
grown narcotic pyuli, of which some Humans just couldn’t get
enough — a year’s worth of rights to that stuff was worth far more
than fifteen million. But Micovi belonged to Gredok. Most of it,
anyway. Was this Kollok’s first move to cut into Gredok’s terri-
tory? Was Stedmar to be trusted?
“You should never take a deal with another syndicate without
consulting me,” Gredok said, the anger building within him.
Stedmar ran his left hand over his head, brushing his hair
back — while he had no antennae, the motion perfectly mimicked
the Quyth sign of fealty. Gredok felt his anger subside a little, an
involuntary, instinctive reaction to the gesture. His lieutenant was
very good at this game. Gredok would never again underestimate
Stedmar Osborne.
“But I have not taken the deal, Shamakath, nor would I ever
do so without your blessing.”
“I will give you ten million for Barnes’ contract,” Gredok said.
“Plus, I’ll give you Muhammad Jorgensen’s territory on Allah.”
Stedmar’s face wrinkled. “I suspect you were going to give
me Muhammad’s territory anyway. He’s getting run over by the
Giovanni syndicate — they want to expand their Purist Nation
territory in a bad way.”
Gredok nodded again. Stedmar was correct. And yet, the of-
fer had been placed on the table — to change it now was a sign
of weakness, and any Shamakath could not admit weakness in
front of his vassals. Stedmar had made his first mistake — instead
of simply trying to add options, he insinuated that Gredok’s offer
was no good.
“I have offered you a deal,” Gredok said quietly, his antennae
pinning down flat against the back of his head, like a dog’s ears
just before an attack. “You will now accept.”
Stedmar’s eyes widened slightly when he saw the antennae go
back, and his temperature spiked almost a full degree. He quickly
glanced at Gredok’s two bodyguards, who showed no sign of emo-
tion.
Where Quyth Leaders were small and sleight, Quyth Warriors
were so much larger they looked like a different species altogeth-
er. They shared the same body style of two legs, two arms with
three-pincer hands and two pedipalps on either side of the vertical
mouth. But while a Leader’s pedipalps were two feet long and slen-
der, a Warrior’s were usually about three feet long, thick with mus-
cle and heavily armored. Warriors did not have silky fur. Instead,
thick chitin covered their bodies. The last difference was perhaps
the most pronounced — a Leader’s softball-sized eye glowed like
window to the soul’s emotions, while the Warrior’s cold eye was
smaller, like a baseball, surrounded by a heavy ridge of chitin and
hooded by a thick, tough, leathery eyelid.
Crazy red and orange designs — the marks of Quyth comman-
dos — decorated the bodyguards’ upper carapaces. Warriors wore
pants, usually grey and devoid of color, but rarely wore anything that
would cover their enameled markings. Stedmar’s bodyguards, four
densely muscled 400-pound Humans, tensed up, ready for action.
“Shamakath, please understand,” Stedmar said calmly. “With

all due respect, Kollok’s deal is better. It’s bad business not to
take it.”
“You will take my offer, Stedmar,” Gredok said. “And you will
take it now.”
“Perhaps we could add some money to the offer — ”
“The offer is tendered. There will be no changes.”
Stedmar’s eyes narrowed. He looked down at the diminutive
Quyth Leader. “Shamakath, I respectfully invoke my right to de-
cline Kollok’s offer, and therefore am not obligated to take your
offer. Barnes will play for me next season.”
Gredok’s antennae rose slightly. Stedmar had quickly taken his
only way out. By keeping Barnes and not selling his contract to
anyone, Stedmar could turn down Gredok’s offer without Gredok
losing face.
But proper etiquette or no, Gredok wanted Barnes. And that
was all that mattered.
Gredok clapped his pincers together and gestured to one of his
bodyguards, who walked over as he reached into his belt. The Hu-
man bodyguards immediately went for their weapons, but Sted-
mar held up a hand to still them.
“Virak,” Gredok said to his bodyguard. “Show Stedmar the
screen.”
The 375-pound Virak the Mean struck a rather imposing fig-
ure, but Stedmar never flinched. Despite the fact that everyone in
the room knew Virak could kill Stedmar in the blink of an eye,
the burly bodyguard looked at the Human and brushed back his
one set of retractable antennae just before looking at Gredok and
doing the same. He then produced a small holoprojector from his
belt and switched it on.
The image flared to life. A dangerous stillness filled the luxury
box. Stedmar looked at the image, eyes widening with rage. He
glanced down to the stands, to the first row, then back again. Gre-
dok sensed the skyrocketing stress level of the Human bodyguards.
They reached for their weapons again, but Stedmar’s curtly raised
hand stopped them for the second time.
The holoscreen showed a smiling, blonde Human woman hold-

ing a baby, both warmly dressed against the evening’s cold. They
sat in the stadium’s front row, the woman laughing with two other
Human women, all of them surrounded by alert bodyguards. The
image shook slightly, obviously due to a long-range focus.
“Your mate and offspring,” Gredok said.
Stedmar swallowed. “Where is this picture coming from?”
“From the scope of pulse cannon, manned by a sniper sitting
in one of the atmosphere processors overlooking the stadium.”
Stedmar looked across the field, up to the skyline, at the endless
line of atmosphere processors that towered thirty stories high. The
big machines were filled with platforms, grates, pipes, blocky com-
pressors … there were a hundred places a sniper could hide unseen.
“I’m sure you’re thinking you can kill me now and save your
mate and offspring,” Gredok said. “But if the sniper doesn’t hear
from me in the next five minutes, he’ll fire. The pulse cannon will
incinerate that entire section, killing everyone in a twenty-yard ra-
dius. So I suggest no sudden moves on her part — if she should rise
to relieve herself, for example, she’ll be the epicenter of a rather
large crater.”
“Frankie,” Stedmar said to one of his bodyguards. “Call down
to Stefan, tell him to make sure everyone stays put, especially Mi-
chelle.”
“Very good,” Gredok said. “The deal is tendered. You will
take it now.”
Stedmar nodded, his face a narrow-eyed visage of barely con-
trolled rage. That disappointed Gredok — Stedmar would have to
improve his self control if he wanted to move even farther in the
syndicate’s hierarchy.
Virak produced a contract box and handed it to Stedmar. The
Human read through the contract, nodded, then placed his thumb
in the slot on one end. Gredok placed his middle left pincer in
the box’s other slot. The machine quickly recorded their genetic
makeup, linked up to the Intergalactic Business Database, verified
their identities, then gave a low “beep” to indicate the transaction
had been recorded.
Gredok’s antennae rose to their normal angle. “Very good,

Stedmar. I will now take my leave. Shall I remove Muhammad
for you?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Stedmar said in a cold voice.
Gredok nodded, then left the luxury box, Hokor and his two
bodyguards close behind.
2
QUENTIN
QUENTIN BARNES RAISED his face into the shower’s steaming

spray. The water trickled down his body to join the water cascad-
ing off of other players before it all slid down the drain. Streaks of
brown and green and red diffused in the water rolling off the other
players. Brown mud, green grass stains, red blood. Quentin’s wa-
ter, of course, carried nothing more than white soap — he’d barely
even been touched. Tackled twice, no sacks. The only thing he had
to wipe off was his own sweat.
Tattoos covered the arms and chests of his teammates, many
designs denoting various Church rankings or religious accomplish-
ments. Many were fully confirmed, with the curving infinity sym-
bol inked on their foreheads. Church participation was expected of
PNFL players — after all, their talents came courtesy of the High
One. And weren’t these men, who dominated Purist Nation pop
culture along with soccer players, an example to all Purists? The
government strongly encouraged players to be vocal proponents of
the faith. There were even well known incidents of players, good
players, being blackballed from the league for not participating in
the Church.
Quentin had tats as well, one on either side of his sternum. The
one on his right, in neat block letters, simply said “SHUCK.” The
matching tat on his left said “YOU.”
Ceiling vents greedily sucked up most of the steam, but twenty
simultaneous showers still produced a light fog. Quentin walked
through the haze as he left the shower, passing by his teammates,
every last one of whom threw him a smile and a compliment.
“Way to do it, Quentin.”
“The High One blessed you today, Quentin.”
“Nice work, boss.”
“They know who they played, right Quentin?”
He smiled back at everyone, answered most of the comments
with a simple nod of the head.
His teammates were civil enough in the locker room and on
the field, but they weren’t his friends. They knew it. They made
sure he knew it. Most of the players came from privileged families,
Church families. Only Church families sent their kids to school,
and only in school could you play organized football.
For the lower classes, time in class or on the field was time
away from the mines. They learned the basics: reading, writing, math,
religion and how to kill the Satanic races. By seven or eight years
old, lower-class kids had all the knowledge they would ever need,
or so the logic went. Quentin never forgot how lucky he was that
Stedmar happened to drive by that one day, four long years ago.
Every year a few poor players found a way into the PNFL, and
they embraced the Church wholeheartedly. Some believed, some
didn’t, but for all the Church was their only chance to achieve
some kind of station in life. Every government job, the majority of
private-sector jobs, anything that involved money, you had to be
confirmed or at least well on your way. On Micovi, football was
a ticket out of a hard existence of grinding manual labor and a
lifespan of forty years. Fifty, if you were lucky.
But Quentin Barnes refused to embrace the Church. In fact, as
far as he was concerned, the Church could take a flying leap.
His left tackle, Maynard Achmad, walked by, flashing Quentin
a big smile.
“Great game, Q,” he said. “We’re going all the way!”

Quentin smiled and sat. Achmad stopped in front of Pete Oky-
mayat’s locker. He leaned and said something to the big linebacker,
which made Pete throw his head back with laughter. He waved
over Adrian Yellow, the kicker, and repeated Achmad’s comment.
Adrian laughed as well, reaching up to slap Pete on the shoulder.
The men were happy, they were going to the title game. They were
happy, and they were sharing it, together.
Quentin looked around the locker room. Everywhere team-
mates sat or stood in groups, yelling, laughing and celebrating.
There were always groups, groups that never included him. Word
might get back to The Elders that the men regularly associated
with someone from a known family of criminals. He felt a pang
of loneliness, then chased the thought away. Shuck them all. He
didn’t need them. He didn’t need anyone.
He turned back to face his locker, and thought about Achmad’s
words. We’re going all the way. All the way to what? The Purist
Nation Football League championship? Next week the Raiders
faced off against the Sigurd City Norsemen, the champs of the
Homeworld Division. They’d kill the Norsemen, then stand atop
the twelve team PNFL.
The PNFL Championship. Big deal. Champions of a Tier Three
league. And an all-Human Tier Three team at that. It was about as
far away from the big time as you could get. But the road to galac-
tic exposure had to start somewhere. The Tier Two teams couldn’t
ignore stats like his three-touchdown, 24-for-30, 310-yard passing
performance against the Corsairs (with another 82 on the ground
including a sweet 52-yard TD run, thank you very much). He was
the best player in the PNFL, bar none, possibly the best Tier Three
player in the galaxy.
He toweled off, rubbing dry his chest, then his face and hair.
When he removed the towel, he saw the big tight end Shua Mul-
likin walking towards him. Quentin stood there, naked and fear-
less, calmly smiling and staring straight up into Shua’s flaring eyes.
“I was open all day and you know it,” Shua said.
“The guy throwing the ball might disagree with you, big fella.”
Shua’s eyes narrowed with rage. “That was the semifinals. Ev-
eryone in the Nation was watching that game, and I didn’t catch
a single pass.”
Quentin shrugged, then sat on the bench in front of his locker
and started dressing.
“This is because I argued with you in practice, isn’t it,” Shua
said, a statement rather then a question. “I dared to contradict you
in front of everyone else and you had to punish me.”
Quentin didn’t bother to look up as he answered. “It’s my
show, Shu. You know this. It’s not like this is new information.”
Quentin felt Shua’s stare. Shua wanted to hit him, wanted it
bad, but everyone knew that Quentin could kick the tar out of just
about anyone on the team.
“You think you’re so high and mighty,” Shua said, his voice
rising. “Someday you won’t be playing football, and you’ll go
back to being the little orphan piece of garbage that you were be-
fore Stedmar found you.”
A hush fell over the locker room. On some planets, calling
someone a “retard” was a major insult. On Micovi, in the Na-
tion, that major insult was “orphan.” Even if it was true, it wasn’t
something you tossed about casually.
Quentin turned and looked into Shua’s eyes. “I’m getting the
impression you don’t want to catch any passes in the champion-
ship game, either.”
Shua’s nostrils flared, his expression a combination of anger
and anxiety. Sure, Shua hated him, but he also wanted his share
of the limelight. Any hero of the PNFL Championship game was
guaranteed to move high in the Church.
“Is that right, Shua?” Quentin said quietly. “You don’t want to
see the rock next week?”
Shua swallowed. “Of course I want to.”
Quentin nodded. “Okay, then apologize.”
The big tight end’s face screwed into a furious mask. “Apolo-
gize? You underclass piece of — ”
Quentin turned away, facing back into his locker. The move
stopped Shua in mid-sentence. Shua looked around the locker
room, looking for support, but he found none. No one was go-
ing to back him up. Not now, not with the championship just one
week away.
Quentin started to whistle as he put on his socks.
Shua’s fists clenched and unclenched. “I’m ... sorry.”
Quentin cupped his hand to his ear and looked up from the
corner of his eye. “What? Sorry man, I couldn’t hear you.”
This time it was loud enough for everyone to hear. “I said I’m
sorry.”
Quentin smiled graciously. “No problem, Shu. Apology ac-
cepted.”
Shua turned and stormed away, his face red from rage and
humiliation. The teammates looked at Quentin for a few more
seconds, then turned back to their various groups and quietly re-
sumed their conversations.
They hated the fact that he held so much power. Most of them
treated underclass people like they were slaves. But on the field, in
the locker room, they couldn’t do that to Quentin Barnes. If they
hated him because he wasn’t like them, he made sure they at least
respected his role as the team leader.
Quentin reached into the bottom of his locker and pulled out
a can of Shokess Beer. He twisted the top, smiling in anticipa-
tion as the can instantly frosted up. He flipped the lid and took
a long drink. It was the best beer the Purist Nation had to of-
fer, which wasn’t saying much — he’d had a can of Miller Lager
once when playing at Buddha City Stadium. Now that was real
beer. You could get almost anything you wanted in Buddha City.
Beer, contraband, music, women … he’d even heard some of his
holier-than-thou teammates had slept with blue-skinned women
from Satirli 6. Talk about a sin. It didn’t get much worse than that,
unless you debased yourself by sleeping with one of the Satanic
species. Quentin had ignored sinful behavior, with the notable ex-
ception of beer.
Alcohol, of course, was basically forbidden in public places.
Other players would have been severely punished for drinking in
the locker room, but Stedmar had taught him that when you had
something other people wanted, something they needed, the rules

don’t necessarily apply to you.
Theron Akbar, the team manager, walked up to Quentin, a big
smile on his little face. His smile faded when he saw the beer.
“That’s a sin, Quentin.”
“It’s also tasty,” Quentin said, then chugged the remainder. He
liked Akbar, who oddly enough was the only member of the or-
ganization with the balls to say something right to Quentin’s face.
“Coach wants to see you, Quentin,” Akbar said. “Right away.”
Quentin set down the empty can and continued toweling off.
“What’s up?”
“Rumor is you’ve been bought.”
The toweling stopped.
“Stedmar had some off-worlder in the luxury box. Right after
the game he talked to the coach, now the coach wants to see you.
You do the math. And the High One really blessed you tonight.
Great game.”
Akbar walked away. Quentin practically dove into his clothes.
This was it — he was finally escaping the shucking rock he’d called
home his entire life.
The universe awaited.
FULLY DRESSED, Quentin stepped through the open door into

his coach’s office.
“You wanted to see me, Coach?”
Coach Ezekiel Graber sat behind his desk. He wore a skullcap
in Raider colors, black with a silver “R.” The Raider logo wasn’t
much to look at, just a plain block letter, the same style used for all
the PNFL teams. Graber wore a sweatshirt, a piece of clothing that
had endured for centuries as fashion and style fluctuated across a
dozen Human planets.
“Sit down, Barnes,” Coach Graber said. He was smiling, but
he didn’t look happy. “You’ve got a decision to make.”
The infinity symbol tattooed on Graber’s forehead had fad-
ed in the twenty or so years since his confirmation at the age of
thirty — what had once been a detailed, deep black was now a

slightly fuzzy gray.
“Barnes, you’ve had one hell of a season.”
“Thanks, Coach.”
“Best I’ve ever coached, I’ll tell you that. High One as my wit-
ness.” Coach Graber paused. Quentin nodded once, smiled, and
the coach continued.
“Quentin, there comes a time in every young man’s life when
he has to decide his path. Your time is now. Stedmar sold your
contract.”
Quentin’s stomach dropped to nothingness, replaced by a tin-
gly swarm of butterflies. This was it. He was going. “Who?” he
said with a dry mouth.
“Ionath Krakens.”
Quentin frowned. The Krakens … a Tier Two team. He’d hoped
for a Tier One franchise, like the up-and-coming Alimum Armada,
or even his boyhood dream of the To Pirates.
“The Krakens? You’re sure?”
Coach Graber nodded. “I’ve got the contract right here.” He
handed Quentin a messageboard. Quentin looked at the read-
out — it was a done deal, all right. All he had to do was put his
thumbprint on it to make it official.
The Ionath Krakens. If that was his ticket out of the Purist Na-
tion, that was good enough for him. And it was a team based in
the Quyth system, where millions of Nationalites had fled during
Butcher Smith’s cleansings. He’d often prayed his parents weren’t
dead, but had actually fled to the Quyth system and couldn’t re-
turn or contact him in any way. Maybe now he’d find out. Tier
Two teams still enjoyed galactic broadcast coverage — even if his
parents weren’t in the Quyth system, there was a chance they’d see
him play, see him and join him. He’d have a real family.
“Now Quentin, you know full well that’s going to take you
out of the system. You’ve still got the option of religious refusal.”
“Yeah,” Quentin said dryly. “I have that option.”
“There’s a lot of people in the Purist Nation, including me, my
son, who hope that you stay in-system until your thirtieth birthday
so you can be confirmed. A person with your fame could go far in

the Church. You could be a Bishop, or even a Mullah, if you ap-
plied yourself.”
Quentin nodded, only half listening. He loved it when peo-
ple used the words ‘my son.’ Someday, someone would use those
words and it would mean something, something real. Right now,
it meant jack.
He could take religious refusal, which would negate the con-
tract. If he did that, a different Tier Two or Tier One team could
pick him up — but only after the next PNFL season. League
rules specified his contract could only be sold once per season,
and if he refused that contract, that meant another year with the
Raiders.
Another year of Tier Three ball. Another year of dirt and mud
and the never ending drone of the atmosphere processors.
“Coach, I’ve always wanted to play Upper Tier ball. To tell
you the truth, I can’t wait to get out of here.”
“Then stop ignoring your religious calling. Get confirmed, see
the galaxy as a missionary spreading the faith.”
Quentin hated the Church with all his soul. He loved the High
One, believed deeply in the High One, but he knew in his heart
that the Church was rife with flaws, half-truths and outright lies,
all designed to keep certain families in power and keep the major-
ity of the population from questioning their lowly place in the
Purist Nation. He would always believe, but would never preach
the Gospel of Stewart.
“I’m no missionary, Coach. You know that.”
“Someday you’ll feel the calling. But you have to be careful
about going out-system before your soul is prepared! Satan lives
out there. We can see him on the news every day, he takes the shape
of the Whitok, Ki, the Sklorno, the Quyth, and disguises himself
in Human form in the Planetary Union, the League of Planets, the
Tower –”
“Yeah, Coach, I got it. I’ve heard this speech before. In fact,
I’ve heard it all my life, a few too many times from a fesw too
many people.”
Coach Graber’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a speech you need to lis-

ten to, son, not just hear.”
“I’m not your son,” Quentin said. “And I’m not part of your
Church.”
“Do you dare blaspheme against the High One?”
“I believe in the teachings of the High One,” Quentin said. “I
just don’t believe in the Church. There’s a big difference. The best
football players are aliens, and I want to play against the best.”
“Satan takes many forms, Quentin. Are you going to consort
with crickets and salamanders and Satan’s other minions?”
“I’m not going to consort with anyone, Coach. I don’t have to
associate with them, just win ballgames with them. If Satan him-
self can run a post pattern, I’ll hit him in stride for six.”
Graber’s breath shot out in a huff. “That’s blasphemous! And
besides, you’re not ready to play Tier Two. You couldn’t handle
the speed.”
“Shuck that. I’m going to rip Tier Two apart.”
“Quentin, I think you just need another season or two to pre-
pare yourself. You’ve only been playing the game for four years,
my son. Imagine how much you can learn with just one more sea-
son!”
“One second I shouldn’t go because it’s sacrilegious, the next
I shouldn’t go because I’m not good enough yet? Maybe you just
want me to stick around and win you a couple more PNFL cham-
pionships, is that it?”
Graber leaned back, his eyes wide with hurt. “Quentin, you
can’t think that I have anything but your best interests at heart. I
don’t want Satan to swallow your soul, boy, and that’s what will
happen if you go out-system and mingle with the sub races.”
“I’m not a boy.”
“You are until you’re thirty! You know the Scriptures!”
Quentin stood up. “You can toss your Scriptures into the Void.
No one here gave a crap about me before I threw a football. You
all talk of the glory of the Purist Nation and the purity of Humans,
but all I see is a galaxy ruled by off-worlders. If the Purist Nation
is so great, if we’re the chosen ones, then why are we ruled by the
bats? I’ll win the PNFL championship for you next week, but then
I’m out of here.”
“You’re not ready.”
“Is that right, Coach?” Quentin held the message board inches
from Graber’s face, then slowly brought his left thumb towards
the imprint spot. He stared into Graber’s angry eyes as his thumb
punched home his destiny. The board let out a small confirming
beep.
“I’ll be here for practice this week, and I’ll win your stupid
PNFL championship for you,” Quentin said. “And as soon as that
game is over, you can kiss my butt goodbye.”
Coach Graber’s shoulders sagged. “Your decision is made.
May the High One have mercy on your soul.”
Quentin laughed. “My soul? Coach, without me, you’d better
be worried if the High One will have mercy on the Raiders.”
Quentin walked out of the office, slamming the door shut be-
hind him.
SEVEN DAYS AFTER SIGNING the Krakens’ contract, Quentin

Barnes walked out of the Raiders locker room for what he hoped
was the last time. He’d left them with a 35-14 win over the Sigurd
Norsemen, and another PNFL championship.
In his left hand he carried his duffel bag. In his right he car-
ried the PNFL Championship MVP trophy. High One knew he’d
earned it, with a record-setting 24-for-28, 363-yard performance.
That and four TD passes. Not a bad day’s work.
He walked outside, where the constant sound of the atmo-
sphere processor greeted him. He hated that noise, and he hated
this place. A hundred people waited for him, many of them wearing
the blue tunics of the Church. Most of the others, and even some
of the tunic-wearers, wore some kind of Raider gear — shirts, hats
or banners. He looked out at a throng of silver and black, most of
it from Raiders’ jerseys marked with the number “10” — Quen-
tin’s number.
Once again his eyes searched for a certain face that he did not
yet know. For a pair of eyes that looked like his. For a smile that
only a parent could have for a child.
Once again, he saw nothing but strangers.
The crowd surrounded him. At seven feet tall, he towered
over everyone. Kids thrust messageboards at him, begging for his
thumbprint and maybe a few words.
“Oh Elder Barnes you’re the greatest!”
“What a great game! Can you sign this ‘To Anna?’”
“Elder Quentin, sign my pad, please!”
They called him “Elder,” a term of respect, even though he was
no more a part of the Church than the Creterakian occupiers. He
didn’t bother to correct them.
Stedmar Osborne was waiting for him, leaning against a jet-
black limo, Sammy and Frankie and Dean his ever-present body-
guards.
Quentin signed quickly, but he signed every messageboard
thrust his way. He didn’t have time for personalized messages, so
he pressed down thumbprints as fast as he could. The satisfied
kids and their parents started to drift away as he kept signing.
At the end, the weak children finally found their way to him. His
heart sank as he looked at some of them — more than a few had
Hiropt’s Disease, all of them assuredly from Micovi’s slums, where
the roundbugs grew to the size of housecats. One of the boys,
dressed in the blue tunic of a Church ward, was missing an arm.
“What happened to you?” Quentin asked the smiling boy.
“My family lived on an ore hauler over on the North Coast,”
the boy said, his eyes wide with hero worship. “One of the engines
blew and I got hurt.”
“You here with your family?”
“High One took them, Mr. Barnes,” the boy said, a smile still
on his face as if his family’s tragedy was the most pleasant of con-
versations. “Died in the explosion. The Holy Men have told me it
was part of the High One’s plan. I’m in the Church now, someday
I’ll be confirmed.”
Quentin smiled sadly at the boy. An orphan. Without a family
sponsor, he had little or no chance of being confirmed. Not unless
he could run a forty in 3.8 seconds and haul in passes with his one
arm. This boy would spend the rest of his life in the mines. But at
least the boy’s parents hadn’t abandoned him.
He shook away the thought. Who was he to question his own
parents? Maybe they were out there, somewhere. Millions fled the
planet during the cleansings, fled or died. Maybe they just couldn’t
find him … right, couldn’t find the most famous athlete in all of
the Purist Nation.
He pressed his thumbprint to the boy’s messageboard. Quentin
opened his duffel bag and handed the boy his sweaty game jersey.
The boy’s eyes widened to white marbles dotted with flecks of
blue.
“Take it,” Quentin said. The boy dropped his messageboard as
he grabbed the jersey with his one arm. He clutched the jersey to
his chest, his face the very picture of joy.
“Let’s go Quentin,” Stedmar called.
Quentin nodded at him and knelt to pick up his bag. He
paused there, looking at the bag, then reached in and started pass-
ing out the contents. To each of the remaining kids he gave some-
thing: shoes, game pants, a T-shirt, even the bag itself. When he
had nothing left to give, he stood and walked past the clamoring
children to the waiting limo.
Stedmar was laughing at him. “Traveling light, kid?”
Quentin shrugged. “Don’t need that stuff anymore, sir.” He
had to look down to talk to Stedmar, who at six-foot-four was a
full eight inches shorter than Quentin.
One of the bodyguards held the door. Quentin and Stedmar
got in the back. The bodyguard drove the limo towards the space-
port, a mere five minutes away from the stadium.
“I’m surprised you didn’t give away the trophy,” Stedmar said
with a smile.
Quentin held it out. “I saved that for you, Mr. Osborne.”
The smile vanished from Stedmar’s face. “Don’t you mess with
me, kid.”
“No sir,” Quentin said. “Four years ago you found me and
gave me a chance. I’m off this planet because of you.”
Stedmar slowly took the trophy. He looked at it, a strange ex-

pression on his face, then looked back at Quentin.
“I made a pretty penny on you, Quentin. I won’t lie to you
about that. I was already underpaying you, and I sold that same
contract to Tier Two, where it’s not even close to what you’re
worth.”
Quentin shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be able to renegotiate
next year.”
“Sure, unless by some crazy fluke the Krakens make it to Tier
One. Then you’re a protected player for two years, and they can
keep paying you what you’re making now.”
“I’ll make the money back eventually, Mr. Osborne.”
Stedmar nodded. “Somehow I know you will. But listen,
kid, you’re in for a lot of changes. Some people like the big time,
some don’t. I’ve seen a lot of Nationalites go out-system with big
dreams, and most of them come running back. They can’t handle
being in the same cities with the aliens, being on the same busses,
shuttles and transport tubes. I mean, have you ever seen a Sklorno
up close?” Stedmar’s face wrinkled with disgust. “You can see
right through their skin. And they drool. It’s a big adjustment.”
“I’m not leaving to make friends,” Quentin said. “I’m going to
win a Tier One championship.”
“And I hope you do, kid. Just remember that if you don’t like
the galaxy, you’ve always got a home here with the Raiders.”
“And how do you think your Raiders will do next season?”
Stedmar looked out the window. “I don’t think we’ll be
worth a dead roundbug. But you’ve still got something to learn,
Quentin.”
“You’ve not going to give me the Holy Man speech, are you? I
got that from Coach Graber.”
Stedmar laughed. “You know me better than that. I don’t buy
into the Church any more than you do. But what you’ve got to
learn, Quentin, is that time always wins, and there’s always some-
one to take your place. I won’t be able to replace you next year, or
the year after that, but you know what? Someone will line up at
quarterback for the Raiders. The team won’t shut down because
you’re gone. We won’t win another championship next season, but

eventually, we will. And when that happens, there will be some
other quarterback coming out of that locker room, mobbed by
kids wanting autographs.”
Quentin smiled politely. Stedmar was the owner, after all, and
deserved respect. He also had the power to have Quentin whacked
anytime he saw fit, and that definitely deserved respect. But Sted-
mar clearly didn’t understand football.
“Yes sir, Mr. Osborne.”
Stedmar grinned, as if he’d just passed on some great pearl of
wisdom and now felt better of himself for the charity. “We’ll have
your things shipped to the Krakens’ team bus. The league wants
you to go straight to the Combine.”
“Don’t I get a chance to meet the team? The coaches?”
Stedmar shook his head. “That’s not the way it works, kid.
You’ve got to go to the Combine to make sure you’re not using
any disguising technology to hide gene modification, cybernetic
implants or anything like that.”
“But I haven’t got any of that bush league garbage.”
“Don’t sweat it, kid, every rookie has to go through it. Besides,
it’s a chance for you to see the home planet of our beneficial rul-
ers.” Stedmar spat the last word out like it was a poisonous spider
crawling around in his mouth.
“Creterak,” Quentin said distantly. “What’s the Combine like?
I’ve heard a lot of stories.”
“You mean the stories like how it used to be a prison station,
how they take samples from all over your body, how they jack
your brain into an A.I. mainframe to test your analytical powers,
how they throw you in a cage with a live Grinkas mudsucker to
test your reflexes in a life and death situation?”
Quentin looked out the window. “Yeah, stuff like that.”
“I don’t know, kid. It’s probably all bull. The League doesn’t
want the merchandise damaged, if you get what I’m saying.”
The red and yellow buildings of the city gave way to the wide
open spaces of the spaceport tarmac. Disabled anti-orbital bat-
teries dotted the landscape, rusted and pitted with forty years of
neglect. The huge relics were once capable of taking out a dread-
nought as far away as a light-year, or so the story went.
Quentin’s stomach quivered. A chill filtered through his body.
The anti-orbital batteries marked the edge of the spaceport — he’d
soon be on the shuttle, and after that, the ship that would carry
him to the Combine.
Quentin clasped his hands together to stop their shaking, but
he couldn’t hide his fear from Stedmar.
“Pre-flight jitters, kid?”
Quentin looked out the window, and nodded. On the tarmac,
a shuttle shot straight up, probably headed for the same ship he’d
soon be on himself.
“I’ll never get that,” Stedmar said. “You go out on the field
and those animals are trying to rip your head off, doesn’t bother
you at all, but you act like an old lady when it comes to simple
space travel.”
Quentin shrugged and kept looking out the window. Tier Two
meant more flying, a lot more flying than his four or five yearly
trips with the Raiders. He didn’t have a choice.
The car slowed to a stop. One of Stedmar’s body guards opened
Quentin’s door. Stedmar handed Quentin a mini-messageboard.
“Your passport is in there. So is the Krakens’ playbook. You need
your thumbprint to access either file, but don’t get careless with
it — thumbprints can be faked, and plenty of people would love
to get their hands on a GFL passport. Just mind your manners,
Quentin, you’ve got no experience dealing with these other races,
and sometimes they can find just about anything offensive. Watch
more, talk less.”
Quentin took the messageboard and slid out of the car. He
leaned in to look at Stedmar. “As soon as they put a football in my
hands, everything will be just fine, Mr. Osborne.”
Stedmar smiled and nodded, an expression on his face that
seemed both proud and slightly condescending. “Tear ‘em up, kid.”
Quentin turned and walked through the doors. He didn’t
bother looking back — there was nothing he wanted to see on this
planet, and nothing he ever planned on seeing again.
Excerpt from “The GFL for Dummies,” by Robert Otto
The GFL’s three-tier system is often a source of confusion to

neophyte fans. While most understand the concept of “Tier Three”
as feeder teams, or what the Old Earth NFL used to call “minor
leagues,” the interaction between Tier Two and Tier One is a little
more complicated.
Currently there are 280 registered Tier Three teams spread
throughout the galaxy. These are official Galactic Football League
franchises, registered with the Creterakian Empire, and controlled
by the Empire Bureau of Species Interaction (EBSI). In truth, the
EBSI does little to control Tier Three other than to provide the
same rules of play that govern the Upper Tiers, and to provide
licensed referees from the Referees Guild.
There are twenty-four Tier Three conferences. Most Tier
Three conferences operate on a single planet. Some, like the Purist
Nation Football League, feature inter-planetary play. Conferences
have around ten teams, and on average play a nine game season,
plus any conference playoffs or tournaments. The season culmi-
nates in the 32-team Tier Three Tournament. Each conference
champ is invited, as are eight at-large teams (note: due to religious
preferences, the PNFL does not participate in the tournament).
In this grueling tournament, a team plays every three days until a
champion is crowned. The tournament is affectionately known as
“The Two Weeks of Hell.”
Tier Three is a individual entity, separate from the other two
Tiers. Tier Two and Tier One, commonly called the “Upper Tiers,”
are actually two divisions of the same league. If Tier Three is con-
sidered “minor leagues,” the seventy-six Upper Tier teams consti-
tute the “major leagues” of professional football.
Most fan attention, naturally, focuses on the twenty-two Tier
One teams. Tier One teams are evenly divided into the Planet Divi-
sion and the Solar Division. The top three teams from each divi-
sion make the six-team Tier One playoff. The two teams with the
best record have a bye, while the remaining four teams compete in
the opening round. The winners of the opening-round games play
the top teams, and the winners of those games meet in the GFL
Championship.
But where there are winners, there are always losers, and that’s
where Tier Two comes into play. While the top Tier One teams
compete for fortune and glory, the worst two teams are dropped
from Tier One, and must compete in Tier Two the following sea-
son.
There are six Tier Two conferences: the Human, the Tower,
the Ki, the Harrah, the Sklorno and the Quyth Irradiated. The
winners of each conference compete in the Tier Two Playoffs. The
two teams that make it to the final game move up to Tier One the
following year to replace the two demoted Tier One teams. This
is the goal of every Tier Two team at the beginning of the sea-
son, and is such a dramatic accomplishment that the actual Tier
Two Championship game is almost an afterthought. The Tier Two
Championship is more like a scrimmage, as neither team wants to
incur injuries.
Why don’t the teams want to risk injuries? Because the Tier
One season begins two weeks after the Tier Two Championship
game. Tier Two teams have only a brief respite from battle before
they are thrust into the meat grinder that is Tier One.
This system successfully produces intense play all year long,
particularly among the Tier One teams near the bottom of the
standings. To drop into Tier Two costs a team untold billions in
revenue from network coverage and merchandising.
BOOK TWO:
Pre-Season
HE WAITED for it.

Waited for the punch-out.
His pulse raced in a way it never did on the football field — a
panicky way. He felt anxious, tried to control his breathing.
This is your fourteenth flight, everything went fine before.
The ship started to vibrate, just a little. A thin sheen of sweat
covered his hands, which clutched tightly to his playbook mes-
sageboard. They were about to drop out of punch space and back
into what people once called “reality.”
This is the most statistically safe method of travel in the galaxy.
Statistics didn’t stop newscasts, however, especially newscasts
of passenger ships forever lost in punch space, or the horrific re-
mains of a ship that met some stray piece of debris during the
punch-out back to relativistic speeds. They called it the “reality
wave,” the feeling that washed over the ship when it dropped out
of punch space and back into regular time.
You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, you’ll be –
His breath seized up and he squeezed his eyes shut as the shud-
der hit. That sickening feeling of splitting, or spreading. He knew
everything blurred, himself included. He’d seen that blurring the

first time he’d flown — seeing it once was enough.
Oh High One oh High One oh no oh no …
And then it was over. He forced himself to relax, forced open
his tightly clenched teeth. He opened his eyes. The observation
deck was still there. Quentin slowly let out a long-held breath. Ev-
eryone else on the deck looked relaxed. Everyone else always did.
He liked to tell himself that they were just oblivious to the danger,
rather than tell himself to stop being such a pansy.
Four seasons in the PNFL had taken him to every major city in
the Purist Nation. He’d seen all four planets, Mason, Solomon, Al-
lah and Stewart, as well as most of the colonies. Space travel was
nothing new to Quentin, but this time it was different.
This was his first trip alone, without the familiarity of his
teammates. But on this flight he certainly didn’t suffer for lack of
attention. On a ship full of Purist Nation businessmen, the league’s
MVP never went wanting for a drink or a dinner or some fat old
fool looking to shake his hand.
One guy on the ship, Manny Sayed, followed him everywhere,
trying to get Quentin to endorse his luxury yacht company.
Quentin wasn’t endorsing anything just yet — he didn’t want to
associate himself with one company before he signed with an
advertising firm that could connect him to the hundreds of in-
dustries trying to cash in on the phenomenal marketing power
of the GFL.
The distance of this trip also made it different. The Purist Na-
tion was only twenty light years across at its widest: most flights
took only half a day. This time, however, he was at the edge of the
Galactic Core, at Creterak — the end of a three-day journey of
some forty-five light years.
Quentin stared out the huge observation window, looking into
space as the passenger liner gradually slowed to a halt some ways
off the Creterakian orbital station Emperor Two. It was a huge
construct, bigger than anything Quentin had ever seen. Hundreds
of ships surrounded the station, all a respectful distance away. The
tiny, flashing dots that were shuttles constantly flew back and forth
from the ships to the station, like a glowing rainstorm simultane-

ously falling towards and away from mile-long piers that jutted
from the station’s equator.
He heard the rhythmic clonk of a now familiar footstep. Quen-
tin grimaced, waiting for the fat voice to speak.
“You think this is big, you should see Emperor One,” said
Manny Sayed. “It’s almost twice as big.” He bore the forehead
tattoo and the blue robe of a confirmed church man — a big robe
to cover his wide girth. He also brandish a half-dozen rings fash-
ioned from the rare metals of the galaxy and a Whopol necklace
suffused with a glowing silvery light. Manny’s left leg was missing
just below the knee, yet he managed to turn even his handicap into
a show of wealth: his platinum, jewel-studded prosthetic leg an-
nounced his presence wherever he walked.
Three days ago, the ostentatious show of wealth on a man
wearing the blue took Quentin by surprise. The ship was full of
such men … businessmen who paid lip service to the tenets of
the Church but also bore the trappings of a more powerful reli-
gion — commerce.
“I’m just taking in the scenery by myself, if you don’t mind,”
Quentin said.
“Don’t mind at all.” Manny stood next to Quentin and looked
out the bubble-like view port. “Hell of a sight.”
Quentin shook his head and sighed.
“It’s ironic,” Manny said. “Creterak is somewhat like the Pur-
ist Nation — no non-Creterakians are allowed on the planet. All
trans-galactic activity is handled on one of the five orbital stations.
But while we do it for religious purposes, the Creterakians do it
for reasons of defense.”
“Why do they need to worry about that? They rule the whole
freakin’ galaxy.”
Manny laughed. “If you add it up, there’s two trillion Hu-
mans, Ki, Harrah, Sklorno and Leekee who’ll do anything to end
that rule. Patriots attack Creterakian garrisons all over the galaxy,
every day. Imagine what they’d do if they could actually land on
the Creterakian homeworld.”
Quentin noticed Manny used the word “patriots” instead of

“terrorists.”
“They think all the other races are too warlike to be trusted.
Don’t forget your history, my son. They hid their sentience from
the rest of the galaxy for over two centuries. They just sat there
and listened to the rest of us killing each other.”
“No offense, Mr. Sayed, but I’ve had my history lessons. I’d
like to be by myself now.”
“You’re headed to the Combine, am I right?”
Quentin nodded.
Manny pointed to a bright star off the port side. “That’s it
right there.”
Quentin leaned into the window and stared at his future.
“What’s it like?”
Manny shrugged. “Looks like any other station, really. Used to
be a prison station, where the Creterakians shipped their prisoners
of war during the Takeover.”
“That’s just a myth.”
“’Fraid it’s quite true, my son. From 2643 to 2659, the station
that is now the Combine was one of the worst places to be in
the entire Galaxy. They kept thousands of prisoners there. Not
that many people made it out, and those that did were never the
same.”
“Why’s that?”
“Torture, interrogation. The Creterakians wanted to learn ev-
erything they could about their new subjects, and they view pris-
oners of war as property. Creterakians breed in the billions, and
they only live for ten or fifteen years, so life and death doesn’t
mean the same thing to them as they do to us.”
“Great. So I’m headed to a former prison station that was used
to torture and execute millions.”
Manny smiled and reached up to clap Quentin on the shoul-
der. “Oh come on, my son, you’re on your way to the GFL! Hell,
if I made it out alive, a big kid like you will have no problems.”
Quentin looked inquisitively at the fat man. “You were in the
Combine?”
Manny’s smile faded and he shook his head. “Not the Com-
bine. You might say I was an original tenant.”
Quentin’s eyes went wide with surprise. He hadn’t met many
veterans of the Takeover. The majority of soldiers who served in
that short, failed war were long-since dead. Creterakians fought
viciously and rarely left their enemies alive.
“Which planet did you fight on?” Quentin asked quietly.
“Allah.” Manny stared out the view port. “The homeworld
itself. They only managed to land four ships — our boys in the sky
destroyed about four hundred others. We like to remember that we
destroyed ninety-nine percent of the infidels, but that last one per-
cent was all they needed. High One knows that was all they were
planning for, with their strategy of victory through overwhelming
numbers. The Creterakians packed one million soldiers into each
landing vessel. Packed them in there like a gas, filling up every
nook and cranny. And they came out like a gas, too. An endless
cloud of them. We had a half-million soldiers on the ground — so
just like that we were outnumbered ten-to-one.”
Manny’s voice trailed off, the memory etching a tired, sad ex-
pression on his face.
“What was it like?” Quentin asked. “The fighting, I mean.”
Manny laughed, a dark, hopeless laugh. “Don’t believe what
the Holy Men write in the history books. It wasn’t a fight, it was
a slaughter. They moved so fast, flying in low, millions of them,
so many you could barely make out an individual amongst the
masses. You’ve seen the sparrows flocking on Allah?”
Quentin nodded.
“Well, think of that, except they’re so thick they darken the
sky, the entire horizon, and each one carries a little entropic rifle. I
remember the first wave came flying over the hill, and we let them
have it — sonic cannons, laser sweeps, shrapnel dust, you name it.
We killed thousands of them, tens of thousands, but the rest just
poured over us. I was hit in that first wave …”
His voice trailed off. Quentin didn’t want to look at Manny’s
leg, but he had to, then looked up again.
“The rifle take off your leg?”
Manny smiled, a sad smile with no humor as his eyes looked

into some faraway memory.
“No, my son, I did that myself. I was hit in the shin. I don’t
know why I didn’t go into shock, like most of my friends did when
they were hit. I looked down and my leg was just disintegrating,
down towards my foot and up my leg as well. Those entropic ri-
fles, if you don’t get to the wound fast, there’s nothing left of you.
I got out my hatchet and just swung it.”
Quentin winced at the thought of such horror.
Manny’s eyes refocused, and he looked at Quentin. “Well,
anyway, we beat off that initial attack. My friends, the few that
were left alive, managed to stabilize my wound. But the bats came
again. There had to be at least 200,000 in that wave. I watched
every one of my friends disintegrate within thirty seconds. That’s
how fast it was over. Thirty seconds. Did your history books tell
you that?”
Quentin shook his head. “The history books tell us the fight
went on for days.”
“Right,” Manny said. “Figures. It was over just like that. For
some reason the High One spared me, and they just shot everyone
around me while I stood there, firing away, killing a few, as they
ignored me. The funny thing is when I got back home, all the Holy
Men called my survival a miracle. They said the High One was
watching over me. I guess there were only a few miracles to go
around that — there weren’t any available to all my friends, or the
490,000 men that died that day. When everyone else was gone, the
bats surrounded me and told me to surrender or die. Regardless
of what I’m told awaits me on the other side, I’m not that partial
to dying. They drugged me up and shipped me off to what’s now
known as the Combine.”
Quentin waited for more of the story, but Manny said nothing.
“What was it like,” Quentin asked finally. “What did … what
did they do to you?”
Manny shook his head and forced a practiced businessman’s
smile. “I don’t talk about that anymore, my son. High One saw
fit to see me through. But don’t you worry about it. It’s a differ-
ent world now. The Creterakians run everything, and they’re very
fond of the GFL, so they won’t hurt the players. I know a lot of
Nationalites think you’re a race-traitor for leaving, but I hope you
do well. Just try not to get killed in the first season. That’s always
embarrassing.”
“I’ll do my best.”
A flock of five Creterakians flew onto the observation deck in a
sudden blur of motion. Just as quickly, they perched on any avail-
able surface. Manny, Quentin, and the three other Humans on the
observation deck froze in place, a reaction bred from thousands of
stories of Creterakians shooting anyone who moved too fast or in
a threatening manner. The five-pound, winged creatures all wore
the tiny silver vests that marked them as security forces, and each
held a small entropic rifle. Manny started to sweat and the fat on
his chin quivered — but he stayed perfectly still.
The Creterakian body consisted of, ironically, a football-
shaped trunk, one end of which tapered off into a flat, two-foot-
long tail — like the body of a tadpole, but with the tail flat on the
horizontal plane instead of the vertical. Their bodies were differ-
ent shades of red, some a solid color, some with splotchy patterns
of pink or purple. Thin, short legs ended in feet with three thin,
splayed toes that curled up around anything available. Two pair
of foot-long arms reached out from either side of the body. The
upper pair were webbed with membranous, patterned wings that
ran from the tip of the arm to the base of the tail. The bottom pair
looked just like the first, but without the membrane.
The bottom arms held the deadly entropic rifles.
Quentin had always found Creterakian heads rather revolting.
Three pairs of eyes lined the round head: a pair looked straight
ahead, a pair sat a bit below those and on the outside looking out
to the left and right, and a pair that pointed straight down.
“Quentin Barnes,” two of them said in unison, their brassy,
high-pitched voices sounding almost as one. The other three sim-
ply sat, feet shuffling back-and-forth. “You will come with us.”
Quentin let out a slow breath and tried to calm his heart rate.
Not since he’d been a child of eleven had a bat actually spoken to
him. There had been a riot at the mines. When the bats came to
break it up, they killed fifteen men.
“Good luck, my son,” Manny said as he bowed twice in the re-
spectful manner of the Church. He handed Quentin a small plastic
chip. “My card. I’ll be at Emperor One for a week, so if you need
anything give me a call. And think about my offer — you’d look
very photogenic at the helm of a luxury yacht.”
Quentin slipped the chip into his pocket. “Thanks,” he mum-
bled, then walked out of the observation deck. The Creterakians
whipped into a hovering formation around him, surrounding him
like an honor guard.
An honor guard or a prison escort, Quentin thought. I’ve
got armed military guards leading me to a former prison station.
Great, just great.
Somehow, his introduction to the Galactic Football League
wasn’t quite as glamorous as he’d expected.
GET MORE OF
THE ROOKIE
The Rookie is available at these U.S.-based online retailers:
Amazon
ScottSigler.com
Visit
ScottSigler.com
THE WHUFFIE FACTOR
Tara
Hunt
THE WHUFFIE FACTOR
Everyone knows about blogs and social networks such as Facebook
and Twitter, and has heard about someone who has used them to grow
a huge customer base. Everyone wants to be hands-on, grassroots, and
interactive, but what does this mean? And more to the point, how do
you do it?
The Whuffie Factor provides businesspeople with a strategic map and

specific tactics for the constantly evolving, elusive, and, to some,
strange world of on line communities.
For those without millions—even thousands—to throw around, here

is a fresh perspective for using social networks to help build a business
whether you are a start-up or a Fortune 500 giant. Even those in big
rich companies need to learn how to be effective and not waste their
money. For them—as well as the entrepreneur—The Whuffie Factor is
an eye-opening guide to a world they probably don’t understand all
that well.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tara Hunt doesn’t believe in pushing messages or creating strong brands,
only in the power of building relationships. She co-founded Citizen Agency
in 2006 with the mission of teaching her clients how to work more effect-
ively with the communities they serve, and how to embrace and adjust to
the changes businesses are facing. Learn more at HorsePigCow.com
Hunt_9780307409508_4p_all_r1.qxp:. 2/26/09 7:33 PM Page 1
1
HOW TO BE
A SOCIAL CAPITALIST
I
f someone comes up to you and, out of the blue, asks: “How’s
your whuffie?” don’t call security.
I’ll explain why shortly, but initially I want to make a cou-
ple of assumptions: first, that, like everyone in business— from
a Fortune 500 company to the start-up just opening its
doors— you want to be more hands-on, grassroots, and interac-
tive to maintain a continuous flow of information to and from
your customers; and, second, that you’ve seen a steady rise in
the money you spend for marketing and promotion but a
decline in the return on that investment. Yet every time you
turn around, there seems to be a story about a business that’s
grown a huge customer base at little or no cost by catching the
Web 2.0 wave— the world of mass collaboration and social
networking— using blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and
other social networking tools. But when you go online and
check them out, all you see is a bunch of chatter and noise. So, N
you think to yourself, “How do I make sense of it all?” L
2 THE WHUFFIE FACTOR
The question is how to do it. Catching the social network-

ing wave of Web 2.0 is neither as easy nor as straightforward as
it might seem at first blush. Simply spending money and try-
ing to buy your way into online communities works about as
well as a dude in a Brooks Brothers suit trying to fit in at the
skateboard park.
To succeed in this Web 2.0 world, you have to turn conven-
tional wisdom on its head and become a social capitalist. A
social capitalist is as ravenous as corporate titans like John
D. Rockefeller and Bill Gates for success, but the coin of the
realm is different. People are on social networks to connect and
build relationships. Relationships and connections over time
lead to trust, which is the key to capital formation. The capital
I’m talking about, though, is not of the monetary variety. It
is social capital, aka whuffie, and a social capitalist is one
who builds and nutures a community, thereby increasing
whuffie.
Once whuffie is “in the bank,” monetary capital then starts
to flow from social capital. It used to work the other way
around. Of course, rich individuals and big companies still
have lots of influence, but we’re talking here about an emerg-
ing world where the rules for success are truly different. If a
company tries to buy its way into social networks, the law of
unintended consequences kicks in and its social capital starts
to diminish. Without social capital, connections in online
communities are lost and any recommendation made will be
seen as spam, met with negative reactions and a further loss of
social capital. So, if someone asks about your whuffie, what
N she’s really getting at is how well you are dealing with the
How to Be a Social Capitalist 3
tricky proposition of growing your business in the Web 2.0

world of social networking.
HOW WHUFFIE CAN BUILD YOUR BUSINESS
What it comes down to, in this Web 2.0 world, is that there
really are only three ways to build a business and make money
online: porn, luck, and whuffie.
Pornography, of course, needs no introduction, but I can
neither endorse it nor advise you on it. I’ll cringe, though, and
admit that we owe it a debt of gratitude. The online porn
industry pushed the adoption of much of the technology we
know, use, and love today. Video and audio streaming, geo-
location software,1 and interactive-type content, such as cook-
ies (used today by sites like Amazon.com and Google), help
you find exactly what you need by recording data and storing it
each time you return, then returning better and better results.
Of course, porn also gave us despicable black-hat tactics like
pop-ups and spam. Although effective, they’re not tactics I
encourage you to use, unless alienating customers and muddy-
ing your reputation is your end goal.
Getting extremely bloody lucky is the second way to make
money online. I have been working in online marketing for
close to a decade and have seen people who struck it rich by
being in the right place at the right time. There are, however,
rarely consistent patterns for these lucky folk.
Okay, so porn is out and luck is a crapshoot. That leaves
whuffie, the only predictable way to both build a business and
make money online. N
L
The term “whuffie” was coined by Cory Doctorow, creator of

the popular blog Boing Boing, to describe social capital in
his futuristic science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom.2 In the future as envisioned by Doctorow, whuffie is
the only currency used. Other currencies— dollars, euros, ren-
minbi, whatever— will simply disappear.
WHAT IS WHUFFIE, ANYWAY?
Whuffie is the residual outcome— the currency— of your repu-

tation. You lose or gain it based on positive or negative actions,
your contributions to the community, and what people think of
you. The measurement of your whuffie is weighted according to
your interactions with communities and individuals. So, for
example, in my own neighborhood, where I have built a strong
reputation for being helpful, my whuffie is higher than when I
travel to another neighborhood where nobody knows me.
There, members of that community “ping” my whuffie to find
out whether I can be trusted. But for me to be fully welcomed,
I can’t simply use my whuffie account; I need to be helpful there
as well. And I can do that, as Cory Doctorow points out in
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in three ways: be nice, be
networked, or be notable. I’ll explain the how-tos of all three
whuffie-building strategies over the course of the book.
In this futuristic world, if you need a hotel room, a car, or
fare for a ride on the bus, you will pay with your whuffie. It
isn’t a card or a piece of paper; your whuffie is stored on your
person and anyone can ping your internal computer to figure
N out how whuffie wealthy (or poor) you are.
Yes, this is an idea from science fiction. In reality, though,

the importance of social capital is neither fictional nor in the
future. In every online community I’ve been part of, whuffie is
a core component of connection; in many cases it is more valu-
able than money. Since the basis of these social networks is
trust, something must determine how I value the differing
opinions of the 2,000-plus “friends” I have on Facebook. In
online communities, a friend can’t pay me to make a certain
choice or have a certain preference. That would be seen as dis-
honest and would damage my whuffie. Financial transactions
don’t mean much of anything in the world of online communi-
ties. They work antithetically to it. Financial transactions are
part of the market economy, whereas whuffie is part of the gift
economy, where services are performed without need for direct
payment.
In the gift economy the more you give away, the more
whuffie you gain, which is completely opposite from currency
in the market economy, where when you give away money, it’s
pretty much gone. Saving whuffie for a rainy day doesn’t work
as well as saving money for a rainy day. Whuffie increases in
value as it circulates throughout the community; for instance,
when I use my whuffie to help you raise yours, there will be a
net increase in whuffie for both of us. As it circulates through-
out the community like this, it inherently connects people.
This really is the key to creating wealth online, and I’ll be
returning to this concept throughout the book.
You may be saying to yourself, “Well, this is very interest-
ing but I live in the real world! What about paying my rent?
Paying my employees? Saving for retirement or sending my N
L
kids to college?” Of course! Day to day, you still need $1.99 to

buy that quart of milk, but in online communities that $1.99
won’t do you much good. We’re dealing with two parallel but
valid economies here. Market capital now flows from having
high social capital. For example, if you are on the job market,
you are probably competing with dozens of other candidates
with similar qualifications. However, having lots of social cap-
ital will put you ahead of the competition if you have good
connections that can recommend you for the position (net-
work); if you have a list of public accolades on the work you’ve
done (notable); or if your references have glowing reviews of
your ability to lead a team and your likability (viewed as being
nice). Having high social capital will give you access to better
positions with better pay.
The same goes for your business. There is a great deal of
competition in the marketplace. Having lots of social capital
will make you stand out: You’ve really connected with many of
your customers, who spread the word to their network; people
talk about your product because it is notable; or you have a
record of having the best customer service, and customers who
have bought elsewhere now go to you because they know
they’ll be treated better. Having high social capital will help
you win customers and sell more product.
It used to work more in the opposite direction. Those with
lots of money used to have more influence. When you had
money, you could buy more advertising, which was more influ-
ential before the Internet because your message could reach a
wider audience than word of mouth. Money still carries clout
N and you can still buy your way in front of large audiences, but
this doesn’t guarantee influence. The stories in this book will

demonstrate, time and again, that those with social capital
have enormous influence. The myriad of social media tools I
introduce have given people without much money, but with
lots of whuffie, the ability to broadcast messages to large audi-
ences. And because they already have relationships with these
audiences, they are more likely to have influence. Market capi-
tal and social capital are converging more than many recog-
nize. There may even come a day that social capital is seen as
viable currency in the market economy.
There are clear advantages to raising whuffie. For one, as you
build whuffie, you build relationships with your customers
that yield longer-term loyalty. Second, the more whuffie you
have, the more people will talk about you in a positive light.
The positive word of mouth carried through networks is the
core advantage to involving yourself in online communities.
Whuffie is also a low-cost, high-energy type of strategy,
whereas buying advertising spots can be quite expensive. And
although it is difficult to track the impact of, say, a billboard
on the side of a building, the impact of your involvement in
online communities is almost immediate. Many of the tools
used to connect communities, like blogs and wikis, have direct
ways to collect feedback from community members.
But the most immediate reason why raising whuffie is essen-
tial for your business is that your competitors are either doing
it or thinking about doing it right now. As online communi-
ties become a stronger and stronger source of consumer infor-
mation, your sales will be driven by how well you are received
in those communities. N
L
THIS BOOK IS BUILT ON WHUFFIE
Let me give you an example from my personal experience: this

book. It exists because of my whuffie, the sum of my reputa-
tion, influence, bridging and bonding capital, access to ideas
and talent, access to resources, potential access to further
resources, saved-up favors, accomplishments, and the whuffie
of those I have relationships with. Neither the opportunity nor
the adventure of writing it would have happened without the
many years I spent building my reputation, contributing to
communities, meeting amazing people, and openly giving
away my ideas.
I started blogging about my theories on social networks and
using them for community marketing and the growing popu-
larity of social technologies such as wikis, blogging, and photo
sharing in 2004 on Horsepigcow.com. At first my blog was
just a place for me to throw ideas against a wall and see if they
would stick. I didn’t expect many people to actually read it
besides close friends and my mom. What was surprising to me
is that people did start reading my blog and commenting on
posts, giving me feedback and encouraging my way of think-
ing about marketing. As my ideas evolved and as I interacted
with other bloggers writing about marketing and technology,
more and more people found my blog posts and started to
respond.
After about a year of blogging, I got my first opportunity to
try out my theories about the influence of social capital when I
was hired by a start-up in the San Francisco Bay Area, an
N opportunity that came to me because of the contacts I was
making through my blogging. This allowed me to test my

ideas “in the wild”; that is, with a company developing a prod-
uct and preparing to launch it into the marketplace. The
results were phenomenal. Riya.com, a photo-searching website
that uses artificial intelligence technology to search inside of
the photos for faces, was the start-up I helped launch with
community marketing. Within a day of the launch of the
website, 20,000 people signed up and uploaded more than
1 million photos to be searched.
This success won the attention of a wider audience, and con-
ference organizers started to ask me to come and speak in front
of live audiences. Although I had little experience as a public
speaker, I quickly found out that I loved it. It was through
these speaking engagements that I got the opportunity to meet
more people face-to-face and exchange ideas and case studies.
I continued to write my blog, speak, and record all of my
progress along the way by sharing photos, ideas, research,
gaffes, and successes. My audience kept growing until a partner
and I were able to launch our very own consultancy in 2006.
From day one, we had clients and multiple opportunities. As
others learned from my adventures, they would refer back to
me and my work, extending my network even further.
Then one day I received an e-mail from a longtime reader
of my blog who happened to be a literary agent. She wrote,
“I like your original ideas and stories. Have you thought
about writing a book?” I had many times, but I didn’t expect
to be approached about it so soon. I put my research and stories
into a proposal for this book and was writing it by the end of
2007. N
L
The fact that I openly shared my stories of success and fail-

ure led to this opportunity, but the benefits of whuffie didn’t
end there. As I wrote, people shared interesting case studies,
gave me feedback, told me their own stories, and even helped
design the cover! Many of those who helped are people I met
through my travels, but there were also some whom I’ve never
met face-to-face and who live all over the world. Some are
friends of friends, and others have stumbled upon my work
through referrals from other bloggers.
When my publisher sent me an e-mail with an image of the
proposed book cover attached, I opened it with great anticipa-
tion. This would be the cover I would see on bookshelves
everywhere! However, when I took a look at what he sent me,
it wasn’t what I had imagined. Although the designer is a pro-
fessional and did a lovely job, I felt it lacked warmth. I
couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered me, so I posted
the image to Flickr, a popular photo-sharing website where
many people follow the images I post every day. Then I posted
a message to a group text-messaging service called Twitter,
where I had over 5,000 people following me, and asked people
for their feedback. What happened next was overwhelming.
First, I was just incredibly excited that dozens of people com-
mented on the image and gave feedback on how to improve it.
These comments helped confirm to me that the cover didn’t
communicate the content of the book. Then some submitted
cover ideas of their own! The first was sent to me via Flickr from
Cesar and Angela Castro, a design team couple from Kailua,
Hawaii, who run a website called Standard Society. It included
N images of people interacting on the cover, which was much
closer to the human aspect of the book. After that, a Flickr
member who goes by the name of Jellyfish24 sent me another

design. Via e-mail, I had ten people send their own redesigned
covers. An art professor from Graceland University, Zane Vre-
denburg, even e-mailed me to ask me if he could assign my
cover redesign to his class, to which I replied an enthusiastic,
“OMG! Yes, please!” This produced over a dozen fantastic and
fun covers— one even featured a rooster as the focal point and
became my favorite creatively. Meanwhile, I had a conversation
with one of my favorite designers in the world, Cindy Li, about
my dilemma, after which she offered to submit something into
the pool of growing alternatives. In the end, more than thirty
people, many of them complete strangers, took the time to sub-
mit new cover art for this book. I loved them all, but the final
decision went to Cindy Li’s submission. What you see today is a
book cover designed by whuffie itself.
Although the whuffie accumulated from the positive use of
social networking tools is obviously valuable for individual
projects such as writing a book, it is also vital for big compa-
nies in maintaining contact and rapport with customers and
for small-business owners trying to build a customer base to
create demand, increase the size of a market, and build a busi-
ness. The importance of whuffie for a business can easily be
seen in the sad tale of the music industry, which I discuss next.
Although it squandered its whuffie, it’s important to know
that there are ways to use social networking tools to recover.
TEACHING AN OLD (BIG) DOG NEW TRICKS
The music business is a global industry, with a few big compa- N

nies as dominant players. That the industry is in serious trou- L
ble isn’t really news. CD sales continue to plummet. In 2007,

they dropped 19 percent, an acceleration of the previous
declines. Of course, digital music sales are doing well and
growing by more than 40 percent each year. But since CDs
have constituted 80 percent of the revenue of the recording
industry, the digital sales numbers aren’t quite making up the
difference. Between 2002 and 2006, overall music revenues
declined by 11.6 percent. Everyone in the business is feeling
the hit.
In January 2008, The Economist summed up the changes in
customer behavior:
In 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music

company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in
London to talk to its top managers about their listening
habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked
them for their comments and told them to help them-
selves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of
the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were
free. “That was the moment we realised the game was
completely up,” says a person who was there.3
Sales units for albums that are big hits today—block-

busters— are much smaller than those from just a few years
back. It isn’t the case, however, that people are listening to less
music. They are buying more music than ever, but because of
the added ability to discover new artists as well as the ability
for more artists to emerge via various online channels, people
N have more choices and they are making them.
The decline of the blockbuster isn’t just limited to the

music industry. The myriad of consumer choices compounded
with buyers being able to personalize their shopping experi-
ences has led to a wider range of smaller sales. It’s a phe-
nomenon that Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine,
calls “the long tail”: The rise of the Internet has spawned
the phenomenon of selling “less of more.” Companies like Ama-
zon.com that offer a wide array of choice to suit any taste are
successful because they cater to this desire to personalize. The
idea that there are products that appeal to the mass market—
that is, most everyone— is more and more questionable as con-
sumers exercise this ability to personalize their shopping
experience. The growth of the long tail demonstrates that cus-
tomers have individual tastes that they will opt for over
generic choices once available.
The game for the music industry is not only up, it moved on
a while ago. Unfortunately, music companies continue to
struggle with how to respond. Their approach has been reac-
tionary and hostile: suing their own customers, adding levels
of complexity to gaining access to music, adding levies on
MP3 players, and generally hemorrhaging their whuffie by
bullying music lovers. The result of years of this type of behav-
ior has left a wake of anti-music-industry sentiment among
consumers, which breeds more apathy toward the decline of
the record labels. Many people are more than happy to con-
tribute to that decline as well, supporting independents wher-
ever they can, logging into file-sharing networks, and opening
up their own music collections for others to download. These
people are inclined to blog negatively about the behavior of the N
L
music industry and spend time in online communities spread-

ing their anti-music-label sentiments. I look around at what is
happening and it feels like an all-out war.
An example of how this war between the music industry and
music listeners is playing out took place recently in Canada.
The Canadian government, urged by the Canadian music
industry and the U.S. government, proposed legislation to put
digital rights— preventing the sharing of music between
friends— into audio files. In early 2008, a professor at the
University of Ottawa, Michael Geist, started a Facebook group
that protested the introduction of potential legislation in
Canada: the mirroring of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copy-
right Act. In the description of the Facebook group page, Geist
wrote:
In December 2007, it became apparent that the Canadian

government was about to introduce new copyright legis-
lation that would have been a complete sell-out to U.S.
government and lobbyist demands. The new Canadian
legislation was to have mirrored the U.S. Digital Millen-
nium Copyright Act with strong anti-circumvention leg-
islation that goes far beyond what is needed to comply
with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s
Internet treaties.4
The group attracted more than 40,000 members in the first

couple of weeks, helped by prominent bloggers like Cory Doc-
torow of Boing Boing pointing people toward it. Local “chap-
N ters” of Fair Copyright for Canada sprang up across the country
and met regularly to discuss pressuring local government rep-

resentatives to revisit this legislation.
The same tools that are used to share the music in the first
place have provided people with the ability to hurt the record-
ing industry by mobilizing to exert counterpressure to the
well-paid lobbyists. No wonder the record industry is trying to
pressure the ISPs (Internet service providers) to choke band-
width! Every time someone goes online, it seems, a record label
takes a hit.
But this doesn’t have to be a war. Not at all. Tools like Face-
book and file sharing could also help the labels create demand
and find more music lovers, talent, and new revenue sources.
They could be using Facebook to do things like the following:
• Connecting with music fans, musician by musician
• Enabling musicians to engage in conversations
• Finding out where the fans live so that they can bring
music to them
• Using the groups to have a discussion about what digital

rights management is and get feedback on what could
make it better for both the labels and the fans
• Creating pages so that fans can share new musicians with

their friends
File-sharing services are really simple ways to distribute

music. Several methods could be used to let this sharing hap-
pen and still allow the labels to make money. Instead of track- N
L
ing down people downloading the music and suing them, find
out where they live and bring their favorite bands to them to
play live; or learn from this and build in easier ways for fans to
download and share music on their own websites, putting a
donate button next to the song, urging fans to donate if they
enjoy the music, or letting them download lower-fidelity ver-
sions for free and selling higher-fidelity versions alongside the
free versions. They could also create a music subscription com-
munity for people to buy music in bulk, paying a monthly fee
for unlimited downloads.
There are a multitude of tools online that artists and labels
alike can learn to use to engage their audience. One example is
Eventful Demand.
CREATING DEMAND
Brian Dear, founder of Eventful, gets really jazzed when he

thinks about the exciting array of online community tools
available, including his own, for musicians, artists, speakers,
entertainers, and many other businesses. He sees opportunities
where the labels see threats. And he should know.
Dear launched Eventful in 2004 to help people discover
events more easily and has served over 6 million people (grow-
ing by 100,000 users per week). Having spent many years in
the intersection of music and technology, he was frustrated by
the lack of resources that enabled people to discover music and
social events. Eventful allows you to track your favorite artists,
authors, and speakers; find out when they are appearing in your
N area; and give you recommendations for similar acts. But Dear
goes a step beyond this. He has created Eventful Demand, a

service that allows fans to create demand for their favorite
artists, authors, and speakers to come to them, instead of pas-
sively waiting.
Dear sees this as a win-win-win situation for fans and per-
formers. The fans get to feel like they are part of the process and
that they have some say in a concert schedule, and artists can be
confident that they will play at sold-out venues. Currently, mil-
lions of fans are demanding shows, and thousands of events have
been scheduled. Entire tours for thousands of independent
artists have been planned using this system. A band just has to
post an Eventful Demand widget on its blog, MySpace page, or
band website and promote it to their fans, letting them know
that they will come to the places where their fans are.
One of these artists is Jonathan Coulton, a former software
developer who was able to “quit his day job” in order to pursue
his love of music. Independent of any record label or tradi-
tional trajectory of growth, he has grown an amazing interna-
tional fan base over a few years because of tools like Eventful,
YouTube, CDBaby, Wordpress, and iTunes. In a blog post try-
ing to figure out where to plan his fall 2008 tour, Coulton
wrote:
I need your help planning this thing. I know how London

is going to go, because I saw how it went, but where else
shall I play? Where are you, audience? And don’t just
leave a comment saying “Briglytonne!” or whatever crazy
town you live in, we actually have a system for this:
[Eventful Demand]. N
L
This really works; it’s the only reason I had any confi-
dence that London would be a well-attended show. So if
you haven’t already, add your name to a demand in the
place you’d like to see me play, and that will help me plan
the trip.5
In a couple of weeks, he received over 1,500 demands from

places all over the world. By the time the fall rolled around, he
had a good idea of exactly where he should schedule his tour.
But that isn’t the extent of it. As Brian Dear points out, much
like the gift exchange of the gift economy, these sorts of inter-
actions also create special bonds between performers and their
audience. Dear talked about this in an interview:
Jonathan is a great example of the mixture of reputation

and influence not only that he has over his audience, but
that his audience has over him. It’s a two way street. First
of all, he’s very authentic and he is using all of the social
media tools to tell his story . . . which is an interesting
story to begin with. But then the audience is invited to be
part of that story, which makes it even more interesting.
This exchange makes for this very positive cycle that just
makes the story richer and richer and more interesting.
When artists like Jonathan use tools like Eventful
Demand and end up playing in places they wouldn’t have
formerly thought of playing, that becomes part of the
story, not only for the life of the performer, but also for
the life of the fans. Everyone feels this very strong sense of
N ownership that you don’t get when so-and-so is just com-
ing to play at the local amphitheatre. When you feel that

you helped cause the concert to happen and you actually
had an exchange with the artist through social media,
that is incredibly compelling.
This is really only a small slice of the potential that lies in

the use of these tools.
In fact, Coulton has built his entire career using social net-
working tools. He encourages people to record him and take
photos of him at his concerts. This has led to hundreds of music
videos being created and posted on YouTube, which drive mil-
lions of people to his website to check out his music. He gives
away his music for free, something he’s done from the beginning
when he created a podcast called “A Thing a Week,” where he
would post an MP3 of a song he wrote that week. He also put
Creative Commons licensing on his music, thus encouraging
many podcasters to reuse his content, pointing back to him and
driving even more traffic to his website and music.
How does he make money? He sells merchandise, as well as
the CDs and MP3s he gives away. What is interesting is that
people enjoy his music so much they will come back and
pay for it after they’ve gotten it for free. He also collects dona-
tions for his work, through selling virtual gifts— monkeys,
robots, and bananas— in the form of cartoon images that,
when purchased, show up on Coulton’s website with the
donor’s name attached. A sponsorship of $5 will buy a virtual
banana, $10 will buy a virtual monkey, and $25 will buy a vir-
tual robot.
Coulton told me, “My secret? Just try everything. It’s free or N
L
cheap. And you never know where you will find your audi-
ence.” He’s found his audience in very odd and amazing places.
A fan of his creates Machinima videos, video screen captures
from interactive 3-D games that are dubbed over with music
or voice. He created a few from Jonathan’s work. These became
highly successful among World of Warcraft players and . . . it
drove even more traffic to Jonathan’s work.
“Security is your greatest enemy. You need to be as friction-
less as possible,” Coulton explained to me as he described all of
the serendipitous ways his music has been discovered just
because he removed all control and, instead, made it incredibly
easy for people to take it and use it in various ways. “Malcolm
Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point is out of date, because every-
one is an influencer now. Most people have cameraphones and
can record video and send it to the Net right away for their
friends to see, who will blog about it and pass it along to more
friends. I just encourage it and it figures itself out.”
Coulton’s use of all of the tools is exactly what Brian Dear
encourages. And not just for musicians.
Dear also pointed out a couple of other examples of people
using Eventful Demand alongside other online tools— such as
Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter— to really
connect with their audience and figure out where they should
be appearing.
Wil Wheaton, known to many as Wesley Crusher on Star
Trek: The Next Generation, and currently an author and speaker,
announced in a video that he would go to any city and speak
where there were more than 200 “Demands.” One of those ful-
N filled demands was in Boston at a local bookstore. As the news
got out about Wil’s visit, the store had to book the theater
across the street. After the theater filled up, people poured into
the street and back and forth between the bookstore and the
theater just to be part of it. Even more impressive is that the
crowd was attracted even though an admission fee was charged.
These social networking tools helped both Jonathan Coulton

and Wil Wheaton build whuffie and an audience without
spending much money. When used by people who already have
a following and a built-up whuffie account, they can take them
to another level. If one musician without a staff can build a
worldwide audience like this by engaging people online, a
company with a team of people can do this on a larger scale.
I like to imagine a recording industry that could step back
and realize that the war that is being waged is a losing battle
for all, with nothing but casualties on all sides. In this fantasy,
I see a new ability to embrace the chaos and explore the oppor-
tunities for new forms of revenue, which are out there because
people are spending more money than ever on the products and
services that connect them. I also see a recording industry
using the social media tools to be proactive with their cus-
tomers, using feedback collected in real-time conversations to
redesign the music experience to fit the needs of their cus-
tomers. For this to happen, recording industry executives will
have to become part of the community in significant ways.
They will need to understand the benefits of interaction
between musicians, fans, and music companies and become
incredibly innovative and proactive in recognizing the needs of
the customer. And in the end, they would realize that their N
L
true purpose is to lift people to new heights through their

experience and sharing of music.
Yes, it’s a fantasy. But it is also really the only hope the
music industry has of surviving this major cultural shift in the
long run. And it isn’t just the music industry. This cultural
shift is happening everywhere, and applying the principles I
develop throughout this book will help your business survive
that shift as well.
SOCIAL NETWORKS AND

THE SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER
People often ask me: “I’m a small-business owner. How can

online communities possibly help me?”
One way the idea for this book gelled for me was talking
with a flower enthusiast whose business is growing dahlias. In
late summer of 2006, my friend Christopher Allen asked me if
I would take an hour one afternoon to give some advice to a
friend of his, Deborah Dietz, who was interested in how online
communities could help her dahlia business. I was intrigued. I
hadn’t thought about how such a niche industry could benefit
from these tools, so of course I sat down with her.
Christopher had already helped Deborah set up a blog and
showed her the major online community sites, like YouTube,
Twitter, and Flickr, where she could post content to promote
her business. She was very interested but didn’t seem quite
convinced that taking the time to do this would help her
business. So we started searching around and found multiple
N groups of floral enthusiasts and growers on the Internet. The
people in these communities were exchanging tips and advice

and generally supporting one another. The interaction within
these groups reminded me a great deal of one of my most beloved
communities: coworking. So I told Deborah the coworking
story as a way of demonstrating the benefits that accrued from
being whuffie rich.
Coworking is an idea that turned into a movement when we
applied online community tools. The idea itself came from
Brad Neuberg, a friend who worked on multiple open-source
programs, using code that is openly available to the wider
community of software developers. Bored with working alone
in his home office, Brad started taking his laptop to coffee
shops to have more social interaction. But there were many
issues with the shops. They were loud, and he was expected to
buy multiple coffees and pastries if he sat there for long periods
of time. The Wi-Fi was unreliable, and even though he was
surrounded by people, it wasn’t the kind of social interaction
he was looking for. So he decided to rent a space in a commu-
nity center in the Mission area of San Francisco for two days a
week and advertise to other independent workers to come by
and pay $15 to have a collaborative work experience. He called
his idea “coworking.”
When I met Brad, he was finding it a bit difficult to get the
word out and handle his workload at the same time. Chris
Messina, my business partner, had the idea that a more perma-
nent space would help develop more interest and asked Brad if
he would mind if we used his coworking idea to describe our
concept. Brad agreed. We started posting events on event site
Upcoming.org to see if there was interest from other local peo- N
L
ple in the shared-space concept. We were floored when dozens

of people came to these meetings.
We started looking around at spaces after a couple of meet-
ings. We hadn’t done any budgets or business plans but
wanted to explore nonetheless. Several people shot videos of
our adventure and put them up online; others took photos and
posted them to Flickr with the tag “coworking.” We started a
Google group to help us communicate more effectively and
fired up a wiki at PBWiki.com to organize our thoughts.
Even before we found a space, an odd phenomenon occurred.
People from around the United States and the world started to
join the Google group and post their interest in setting up
their own coworking space in their local community. Because
we were posting all of our discussions, deliberations, decisions,
and media openly, people were able to follow along and learn
from us as we went. They would take our lessons and use them
in their own pursuits.
Since then Chris and I have founded two coworking spaces
in San Francisco: the Hat Factory in Portrero Hill, and Citizen
Space near South Park, close to many of the technology start-
ups in San Francisco. One of my connections with Christopher
Allen, who introduced me to Deborah, is through the cowork-
ing space he cofounded in Berkeley, across the bay from San
Francisco.
All these spaces are wonderful microcommunities in them-
selves, but the big, worldwide community of coworking is
amazing.The Google group has over 1,600 members support-
ing one another’s efforts. There are levels of “experience” in our
N community: coworker, catalyst, and space owner. The cowork-
ers are people who are supporters, either through spreading the
idea by word of mouth or working out of a space itself. Cata-
lysts are people who are in the process of opening a space.
Maybe they’ve put their proverbial stake in the ground and
stated their interest or they are well on their way to opening
their own space. Space owners are like the sage elders in our
community. They’ve opened a space and are willing to share
the experience with coworkers and catalysts to help them
out. Because this community is so supportive, within a year
over thirty spaces emerged with hundreds more in the
process. Most of the spaces have been opened by independent
consultants and small-business owners who just want to work
with others like themselves. They didn’t require much mone-
tary investment up front, but did require lots of energy and
advice.
The coworking movement has been featured in dozens of
major publications, including the New York Times, Business-
Week, Wired, and Entrepreneur magazine; on CNN a couple of
times; and in thousands of blog posts. It’s given me an even
greater gift, though— a worldwide family. Almost everywhere
that I travel now, there is a coworking space or a space in
progress. So when the space owners know I’m coming to town,
they help me find good, reliable Wi-Fi and a nice group of peo-
ple to work with.
Spaces like ours existed well before the Internet. But the
movement was only possible because of the Internet and the
plethora of amazing collaborative and community tools.
After I had told Deborah the story, she realized she needed
to tap into these supportive networks to help her gain more N
L
knowledge and contacts within her industry. She also needed

to start publishing more about her ideas and activities in vari-
ous places, like Flickr and her blog and Twitter, so that the
people she met could see what she was all about. It would also
help people find her online. The more content she produced,
the more people would know about her floral business. This
would open up more potential opportunities. As her network
grew, so would her business. The results? Deborah has con-
nected with many dahlia enthusiasts and has grown interest
and membership in the organizations she is passionate about,
SF Dahlia and the Dahlia Society of California. She continues
to meet interesting new business contacts, who help her grow
her business as well as her whuffie in the dahlia growing com-
munity.
She also came back to Citizen Space a couple days after our
conversation and delivered us the most beautiful dahlias I have
ever seen.
HOW TRUST BUILDS WHUFFIE
I was sitting down for a haircut when my stylist, Gilbert, who

co-owns the salon Honeycomb in Noe Valley, a neighborhood
in the central part of San Francisco, said to me, “I don’t know
what you say to people about me, but my business has doubled
since you started coming. People keep calling in and saying, ‘I
heard about you through Tara.’”
I smiled. There are advantages and disadvantages for the
people in your life if you live it incredibly openly.
N I explained to Gilbert that when I come to him, I usually
tweet out that I am visiting Gilbert at the Honeycomb

Salon. Then I explained that I usually have some question as to
what I should do with my hair, so I post a photo or two of
some ideas on Flickr, then point to it via Twitter to get
people’s “votes.” During the process, I usually take my camera
phone and snap the progressive stages of where I’m at and then
point people to it via Twitter as well. People go and comment
on the progress, especially if I have foils in my hair. After
everything is done and I’m all beautified, I take a higher-
resolution photo of myself, post it on Flickr, and get the
reaction.
Because of this and because he is a darn good stylist, people
start thinking of Gilbert as the person to see about their hair in
San Francisco. Through me, whom they trust, they begin to
trust Gilbert. And, because I have a good number of people in
my network, there is a good chance that a few people will be
calling him up.
Now when I go see Gilbert, he gives me cues on when to
take a photo and reminds me to tweet out questions. He’s got-
ten into Yelp.com, the local review site, and has encouraged
many of his happy customers to go post a review for him. He’s
even considered opening up his own Twitter account. But even
if he doesn’t, being aware of the online tools and community
help his business a great deal. He definitely understands the
amplified power of word of mouth on the Internet.
There are multiple levels on which to be aware and to inter-
act with online communities for small businesses. Gilbert’s
salon is a good example of the potential that social networking
tools provide small, local operators to improve and innovate in N
L
their competitive space. Gilbert now has an advantage over

other hairstylists in his neighborhood. There are all sorts of
ways that local businesses, the proverbial corner stores, could
improve their interactions with their local neighborhood by
being online. They could put up a wiki and encourage their
customers to add requests for carrying certain products so they
know how to plan inventory. They could post photos, tweet, or
blog about store events and changes. Corner stores rely on peo-
ple nipping in for those one or two things that they forgot to
get during their big grocery trip. But they could increase the
frequency of visits by interacting and connecting with their
customers.
USING SOCIAL NETWORKS TO DO GOOD
Online social networking tools have especially powerful poten-

tial for individuals trying to solve community issues and for
nonprofit organizations.
Many nonprofits have limited resources, so their campaigns
are absolutely dependent on word of mouth. Since people in
online communities are incredibly enthusiastic about helping
others out, nonprofit and tech seem to go hand in hand.
Whether you are a large, well-funded organization or a small,
local, cash-strapped organization, you will benefit from inter-
acting with online communities and building your whuffie.
Large, well-funded organizations can build whuffie by connect-
ing to their supporters and building trust. Smaller, cash-
strapped organizations will benefit through spreading awareness
N of their work in the community.
TechSoup is an organization in the San Francisco Bay Area

that assists nonprofits in using new technology through its
NetSquared project. NetSquared shows people how to use the
power of Web 2.0 technologies to fund-raise and build aware-
ness for nonprofits. At one of its events, NetSquared had Nate
Ritter, a blogger and consultant from San Diego, talk about
using Twitter to spread information about the fires in San
Diego during the fall of 2007.
Nate’s foray into heroism started simply by reading other
people’s tweets on what was happening, picking up a few items
from local news sources, and going outside to talk to people
affected by the fire. He would then tweet out what he could
gather, mostly updates on where the fire was moving, who was
being evacuated, the roads that were closed, and the neighbor-
hoods to be cautious about. Many people started noticing what
Nate was doing and encouraged their friends to follow him for
usable, up-to-date news on the fires.
They even started sending him news themselves. People
would direct message Nate with requests for reposting about
shelter needs, well water contamination and availability, shel-
ter openings and closings, people who were okay or looking to
see if others were okay, Red Cross sites and meal kitchens, and
so on. He was posting several pieces of information each
minute after a while, becoming a human news aggregator for
anyone interested in what was going on with the fires.
By the time it was over, he had ten times the followers he
started with and a hundred times the whuffie. People were
reaching out to him to thank him and offer their help with
anything he needed. He was interviewed by Wired magazine N
L
and asked to come speak to several organizations on how he

used Twitter as a way to get the word out about the fires.
Nate built a great deal of trust and goodwill through his use
of Twitter, so when he came to speak at the NetSquared event,
he discussed how nonprofits shouldn’t use just Twitter to send
out updates, but other online community tools to create a full
picture of what the organization is doing. Twitter is great for
giving updates on things like your progress and victories, and
for having public conversations that help inform people on the
issues. Flickr, the photo-sharing site, is another tool that can
be used effectively to give people a visual reference as people
post their photos. He is also using his whuffie to gather volun-
teers to build a nonprofit tool, Crisiswire.com, to track conver-
sation online around issues and events.
Many nonprofits are using online community tools for
awareness building and fund-raising. Interplast, the nonprofit
that provides free life-changing surgery for children and adults
with clefts and disabling burns and hand injuries in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America, posts before and after photos of its
patients’ surgeries. By posting photos on Flickr of the good
work Interplast is doing, it has gained many supporters, raised
awareness about the insufficient access to these types of surg-
eries, found doctors to volunteer their time and expertise, and
raised money.
Beth Kanter, a social media consultant for nonprofit organi-
zations and a fund-raiser for Cambodian Orphans, has success-
fully raised a great deal of money and awareness through her
interaction in online communities. Beth has e-mailed, mes-
N saged, poked, tweeted, blogged, Flickred, YouTubed, and
SlideShared her way into mobilizing a large number of sup-

porters for her pet cause, sending Cambodian orphans to
school. In 2008, Beth’s efforts won her the number one spot,
and $50,000, out of 606 organizations that participated in the
Global Causes for America’s Giving Challenge, an initiative
that employs social media and technology to inspire people to
support causes. Beth’s success comes from her ability to build
whuffie one relationship at a time through the various online
networks.
I first encountered Beth Kanter through Vox.com, a blog-
ging social network that allows individuals to form blog
“neighborhoods”— groups of people who blog on similar
issues or are part of a friend network. In late July 2006, I was
experimenting with Vox.com and received a friend request
from Beth, after which I read some of her posts. Her passion
and commitment to Cambodian orphans was instantly appar-
ent in her writing and I was really impressed with how she was
reaching out to other people working in the nonprofit space,
offering tips as well as asking for feedback. So I accepted her
friend request. Within a couple of hours, Beth sent me a pri-
vate message, introducing herself. She explained that she had
been following my blog posts and activities on other social net-
works for some time and told me my suggestions had been
really helpful for her work. She also explained a little more
about what she was working on. As we talked back and forth,
we sought out each other on other social networks such as
Flickr, Upcoming (event sharing), and Twitter.
As we got to know each other, Beth told me about her two
adopted children from Cambodia and her background. Within N
L
about an hour, Beth built an amazing amount of whuffie with

me. I was ready to support just about anything she believed in.
And I wasn’t the only one. It grew more and more apparent to
me that Beth took that time with everyone in her impressive
network. She didn’t grow her audience through buying e-mail
lists or sending people flyers— both frequently used tech-
niques for nonprofits; she grew it through meeting people, one
at a time, once removed from her current network. And she has
met almost everyone in her network by using social media
tools. She got interested in my work through another person in
her network, then followed what I was doing until she felt
confident enough that I was the type of person who would
actually be interested in her work. And she was right. I’m a
big fan.
Beth is just one person with seemingly boundless energy,
but a team of one nonetheless. But much like Jonathan Coul-
ton, Beth understands that there is great whuffie-building
power in online social networks, so she tries them all, making
new friends and supporters everywhere she goes. Beth now gets
invited to speak at conferences all over the world about how
she effectively builds her network— and her whuffie— with
these online tools. Seeing that Beth is a single person making
all sorts of impact, I can only imagine the impact an organiza-
tion would have if it used the tools.
Beyond the tools, involvement in online communities can
raise awareness about an issue, give people a peek into the good
work you are doing, and create trust. With so many charitable
organizations around, it’s harder and harder to get people’s
N attention and support. But the more people you can collabo-
rate with and build relationships with online, the better off
your organization will be.
Whuffie, then, is the culmination of your reputation, influence,

bridging and bonding capital, current and potential access to
ideas, talent and resources, saved-up favors, and accomplish-
ments. Small businesses, nonprofits, musicians, speakers, and
even authors are using social networks to build whuffie and
grow their businesses. But what about you? How is this going
to help you grow your business? The next chapter covers how
much word of mouth— the oldest and most powerful form of
marketing— is growing through the use of these social net-
works, and it outlines five steps to help you build whuffie and
amplify that word of mouth.
N
L
GET MORE OF
THE WHUFFIE FACTOR
To purchase copies of The Whuffie Factor for holiday gifts,
print the order form at the end of this PDF document

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Books-A-Million
Indiebound
Visit
TheWhuffieFactor.com
JACK WAKES UP
Seth
Harwood
JACK WAKES UP
In the three years since Jack Palms left Hollywood and kicked his drug
habit, he’s added 14 pounds of muscle, read 83 books, and played it
straight. But the residual checks are drying up, and Jack’s happy to
cash in on his former celebrity by showing high rollers around San
Francisco’s club scene.
When people start turning up dead, Jack realizes he’s been playing tour
guide to a pack of former KGB agents turned coke dealers. Soon he’s
got too many gunmen after him to count, and a homicide cop who’s
given Jack 24 hours to bring down the Bay Area’s biggest drug dealer.
But the thing that scares Jack the most? He’s starting to enjoy himself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seth Harwood grew up in the Boston area, graduated from the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop in 2002 and currently lives in Berkeley, CA with his
wife Joelle and their dog. He teaches writing and literature at Stanford
University and the City College of San Francisco.
Jack Wakes Up has received rave reviews from Publishers Weekly, thriller
bestseller Michael Connelly, and was featured in the New York Times Book
Review. Learn more at SethHarwood.com.
1
Jack Palms walks into a diner just south of Japan-
town, the one where he’s supposed to meet Ralph. As he passes
the Wait to Be Seated sign, he wonders if these things didn’t
come standard issue with Please at the start not too long ago, back
when the world was more friendly and kind.
But Jack knows what Ralph and the rest of the people who
come to a place like this would tell him: Fuck that.
The diner’s built out of an old cable car, with a lunch counter
along one side and booths on the other. Ralph sits alone at the
last table, eating, hunched over his plate, long brown hair hang-
ing curly around his face, his blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt
clashing with the ugly checked wallpaper. He hasn’t gotten any
younger or prettier over the years: His pockmarked cheeks move
like a rabbit’s, his eyebrows form a thick mustache over his eyes.
He wears wide sunglasses, the kind blind people wear, pushed
up onto the top of his head.
Ralph smiles when he sees Jack. “Jacky boy,” he says, show-
ing Jack the other side of his booth with a big hand, not getting
up. “You look good. Like you added a little weight.” He winks. “In
a good way.”
www.ThreeRiversPress.com
2 SETH HARWOOD
“Thanks.” Jack pats his rib cage. He calculates it’s been three
years since he last saw Ralph. Three years and then the phone
call this morning, asking Jack to come in on a deal.
“You see that game against the Mets?” Ralph starts, saying
no one should be allowed to pitch around Bonds, the steroids
home-run machine, that the Giants lost because the Mets did
just that. Ralph shakes his head. “I guarantee you: They pitch to
Bonds, he puts that shit in the Bay.”
“Just coffee,” Jack tells the waitress, who’s come out from be-
hind the counter. She stops with the brown-rimmed pot tilted
over the table. When Jack says, “Decaf,” it’s clear she’s not happy
about having to go back for the other pot.
“And toast,” Ralph adds. “He’ll have a wheat toast, darling.”
The waitress, pushing forty and only a few years from when the
days on her feet and gravity will own her, smiles and tips her
head. “Thank you.” He winks. When she’s gone: “You got to have
toast or something. So they know we’re not camping.” He tilts
his head, forking more waffle into his mouth.
“Just don’t eat it.” He shrugs. “I’m buying.”
“Right,” Jack says. Next to Ralph’s untouched water, two butts
half fill his ashtray: one coming in and one with his coffee, waiting
for Jack and his food, Jack guesses. He’s a quarter into his waffle
and has a side of eggs and bacon that he hasn’t touched. Ralph did
a good job syrupping the waffle: buttered it first, went liberal, and
stayed away from the fruit flavors—no blueberry or apple bullshit.
“Listen, Jack.” Ralph barely looks up, cuts the next quarter
waffle into strips. “I’m real sorry about how that shit went down
with Victoria. How you handling yourself?” He looks up, pauses
from eating.
Jack runs his finger over the rim of his coffee mug. “Getting
by, Ralph. Thanks for your concern.”
“Because I feel for you about Victoria telling people you hit
J A C K WA K E S U P 3
her.” He shakes his head. “That wasn’t good.” He looks at Jack,

like he’s trying to get it all figured out right then and there. “You
didn’t, right?”
“No, Ralph.”
“And that wasn’t cool that they pulled the money for your se-
quel, dumped the project.” He forks a big piece of waffle into his
mouth. “I’m sorry about that too.”
“So what’s the basics here, Ralph? The big picture?”
Ralph nods. “It’s a buy,” he says, mouth full, using his fork to
point. “Easy and simple: a buy and a sell. One big trade, no small
shit or breaking up of product. We each stand to make a couple
thou for a few days’ work.”
“You said on the phone we’d be set for good.”
Ralph shrugs. “Shit, Jack. I needed to get you down here to
hear this, right?”
Jack looks around the diner, thinks about how it’d feel to just
get up and walk out. But then he considers the two thousand rea-
sons to stay and the guy from the bank calling this morning
about his missed mortgage payments.
“Keep talking.”
A sip of coffee and Ralph cuts off some eggs with his fork
and adds them to what he’s already chewing. “You want this ba-
con?” he asks. “I’m trying to watch my cholesterol.”
The waitress comes back with the decaf pot and fills Jack’s
cup until he stops her about an inch from the top. He’s glad
Ralph doesn’t ask about the decaf, doesn’t want to explain that he
had his coffee at home and knows a second cup will leave him
too jittery to deal with Ralph’s shit. She drops off a small plate of
dry wheat bread, lightly toasted, at the top of Jack’s placemat. Lit-
tle pats of butter line the side of the plate, the kind you have to
peel the paper off of. Ralph drops two bacon strips on top of the
bread. “Make yourself a sandwich,” he says.
4 SETH HARWOOD
Jack adds a sugar to his coffee and stirs it with one of the
diner’s dirty spoons, adding a half-and-half. “So what’s the who?
The when?”
Ralph goes on eating. “The when is still up in the air, but I
say it happens within the week. Thursday or Friday. The who you
don’t need now. I’d tell you, but it wouldn’t mean anything. You’re
too long out of this game.”
Jack nods, sits back in his chair, and looks at the little white
mug of decaf, thinking about whether he should walk out. “Tell
me why you need me.”
“Listen. You made that sequel, you’d be in a whole different
world right now, financially and otherwise.” Ralph holds up his
hand, stopping Jack before he can tell him to shut up. “I know,”
he says. “Enough. But I’ll just say I heard you’re touching down
on your luck, that maybe you could use a little money. That’s why
I called.”
Jack takes a bitter sip of coffee, puts the mug back down.
“I’m listening.”
“I need a side, a guy who can come along, maybe drive a nice
car, and get us into some respectable places if these guys want a
nice time in the city. You still got the Fastback, right?” Jack nods.
“And that mug of yours can still get us past a few red ropes.
More than mine anyway, probably more than any of the suckers’
I know.”
Jack lifts up a triangle of toast and looks at it, puts it back.
With butter, maybe it’d be all right, but plain it looks like warm
cardboard. “You see my name in the papers lately?” he asks. “No
one gives a shit who I am anymore.”
“Exactly, my man. They see you, people don’t care, but
maybe a small part of them remembers your face, knows you
from the movie. I know it, you know it. That’s why you wear the
hat.” He points to Jack’s baseball cap, the Red Sox World Series
Edition that he’s taken to wearing when he comes into the city.
“They recognize you and sometimes it’s good: ‘Oh, Jack Palms,
you the man from Shake ’Em Down.’ Then sometimes it’s not
good; someone says, ‘You the guy got addicted to smack and hit
his wife. The one never made a second movie.’ Either way, bad
or good, they like knowing you, recognizing someone they think
is a celebrity. And we get the treatment we want.”
Jack doesn’t want to believe it comes down to this, to hear
this is what people think of him, that he’s down to the point
where these are his options. He’s been up in Sausalito for a long
time now, two years of hiding away from the city, cleaning him-
self up, but he can’t hide out forever, especially with his money
from the movie running out.
Jack takes a deep breath. The flat surface of his coffee has no
reflection. Bacon lies across his toast, grease soaking into the
bread. He wonders how Ralph can still be eating like this and
partying like he used to, how nothing’s changed, nothing’s come
along and kicked his ass like the newspapers did when they came
to take Jack’s picture in handcuffs.
“I apologize, Jacky.” Ralph puts his hands flat on the table,
no longer eating. “But you know how it is. I know the papers got
it wrong, but let’s be honest about the street: You not the man
anymore, Jack, but you still got something.”
Jack sips his coffee: cold already and bitter. He takes a deep
breath, lets it out slowly. “Okay,” he says. “I’m in.”
Ralph nods, fluffs his eggs, and forks in a mouthful. “Good,”
he says. “It’s Eastern Europeans coming in from out of town,
Czechs traveling big-time, looking for a large chunk of blow. We
meet them, take them out, show them The Guy, and see that the
deal goes off. It’s easy.”
“Right. And they’ll pay big for that.”
“Relax.” Ralph stops eating for a beat, points his fork at Jack.
6 SETH HARWOOD
“Why so skeptical? It’s just a trade. Big trade. Don’t doubt, bro.”
He forks up a big chunk of eggs, rubs it in the syrup. “I just need
a backup. And for high rollers, I have to look good. That’s why I
call you. When I say we do this, I mean we do the fucker. No
stops.” He brings the fork to his mouth.
Jack nods. It’s been a long time since he’s worked anything.
Maybe he’s just getting nerves; maybe he just needs to be in-
volved with something outside of his own house. He thinks
about where he’d be right now if Ralph hadn’t called: probably at
the gym lifting or out on a morning run, things he needed at first
to keep himself sane while he cleaned up. Now he’s clean; he
needs something new.
“When do we start?”
Ralph laughs while chewing and catches some egg going
down the wrong way. He coughs into the top of his fist. When he
finishes catching his breath, he says, “That part you can just leave
up to me, baby.”
2
Two days later, after Jack’s run his three miles and
just started a coffee, Ralph calls again. He says to meet him
downtown that night at eight, at the Hotel Regis on Stockton.
Jack doesn’t know the hotel but knows the neighborhood around
it: the city’s boutique shopping. The finest places: only designer
names and upscale hotels.
Jack takes out a cigarette, his one of the day: the one he
smokes with his cup of coffee in the morning, the one that re-
minds him where he’s been. He kicked the junk three years ago,
one thousand sixty-six days exactly, and hasn’t had a drink in two
years. No other cigarettes, just this one every morning.
He looks out over the Bay while he smokes, through the
huge kitchen windows that were the biggest selling point of the
house, the thing Victoria fell in love with first. Now he’s used to
the view, to seeing the tiny sailboats move about on the water
while he eats. As he takes a long drag, he feels the familiar nau-
sea and closes his eyes, eases into the comfort of his chair. The
rest of the cigarette goes slowly, bringing the day to a crawl that
Jack can appreciate now, knowing the afternoon will feature
things he doesn’t know and might not be prepared for.
8 SETH HARWOOD
When he’s done, he snuffs out the cigarette, gets up, and
washes his hands, scrubs them vigorously with soap to remove
any of the smell from his fingertips, knowing it won’t ever work.
He takes down the cereal and a ceramic bowl off the shelves that
Victoria had installed when she remodeled the kitchen.
He skims the front page of the newspaper while he eats,
looks out over the Bay, thinking about what Ralph’s going to get
him into with this and whether it’s worth it. Compared to sitting
around all day, there’s hardly a choice. Compared to losing the
house and looking for an apartment he can’t afford either, he’s
ready to hit the shower and get dressed to go.
The phone rings and Jack waits it out, finally hears his an-
swering machine beep. The plain voice of an agent from his bank
comes on, the second call in as many days, asking Jack to call
back, make an appointment to come in and discuss his loan. Jack
knows what the bank knows—that he’s late on the second pay-
ment in a row now and doesn’t have the money. He’s just trans-
ferred the balance from one credit card to another, buying
himself some time, but the bank won’t wait much longer.
Out in the Bay, a steamer makes its way around Alcatraz,
heading for the port of Oakland.
h
Jack dresses in jeans and a dark button-down, not tucked in. For
too long he’s been up here wearing sweats and tracksuits, going
to the gym, and it feels good to be clean, dressed. Back in L.A.,
he dressed up for parties, went out to clubs all the time, had work
to take care of. With Victoria, he’d dress even nicer: tuck in, wear
a suit jacket every once in a while. But that was back then. Even
before the divorce, after her first time in rehab, they’d stopped
going out, mostly just stayed at home to nurse their addictions.
He stops at the mirror in the living room before going out to
the garage. This is where he usually puts on his Sox hat, but now
he leaves it on the rack. He looks at himself in the mirror, runs
his hand over the short brown hair that he cuts himself every
couple of weeks with electric clippers, smoothes the skin over his
face that he shaves clean now every couple of days. In L.A., he
used to have his hair styled and he’d wear a goatee or something
else whenever he wanted, shaved himself with an electric, and
had a good time playing with the styles, but not now. Now he
shaves with a razor, hot water, lather, and a badger brush. His
face feels tight, the skin sensitive, but he takes his chin in his
hand and looks at the side of his face, the bump on his nose from
when he broke it playing football in high school. He’s still in
there, he tells himself, the guy he’s known his whole life, alive
and breathing, has the same looks that got him the movie, and
has even added a little muscle since he made Shake ’Em Down,
the movie where he drove the fast car, won all the fights, got all
the girls.
The dark circles under his eyes are almost gone, the payoff
of two years of getting a good night’s sleep, running every morn-
ing, and spending time in the sun. He stands up and looks over
his body, patting his ribs like he did when he saw Ralph. He
doesn’t look bad, he tells himself, and does his best to try and be-
lieve it.
h
From Sausalito to the bridge, Jack opens up the engine on his
light red, almost orange, ’66 Mustang Fastback “K-Code” GT.
Here on the 101, early on a weekday evening, he can hear the en-
gine roar, feel the torque and the power of the rpm’s as he eats up
the hills. He’s replaced almost everything inside the car himself,
repainted the body too. It was this color—“poppy red”— when he
bought it. He’d originally wanted blue, but something in him
10 SETH HARWOOD
couldn’t make the change. Something in him knew that this car
was meant to be this color forever, new paint or old. So when he
put on the new coat and waxed it to a gleam, he’d kept it the
same: poppy red, all the way.
He got the car after the movie, when he had money; this was
the big thing he’d wanted, the thing he had to have: a ’66 Mus-
tang Fastback that could only survive in the clean California
climate—no winter slush or salt to eat through the frame. Now,
even without anything in the bank and the mortgage falling
apart, he’d give up the house before this car. Nothing matches
the power feel of the Mustang “Hi-Po” engine, the looks he gets
on the street, or the feeling of knowing exactly what he’s driving,
a car so rare that even when they were being produced in 1965,
’66, and ’67, you only had a one in a hundred shot of getting a
“K-Code.” And he’s worked on it enough to know exactly how it
runs and what pieces went into it.
And the style. This car has more style than anything else on
the road for Jack’s money—any amount—the slick line and the
rise in the back untouchable. And he’s not trying to compensate
for anything, as Victoria once suggested. The Mustang eats hills
like they were bumps, a San Francisco must, makes a sound like
a jet engine, and does what he wants. The car is Jack’s love, the
only friend from L.A. times that’s still around.
In the city, heading downtown, Jack gets looks, especially in
and around Union Square, where the traffic slows and the shop-
pers all look to see who you are. Jack keeps his sunglasses on,
tries not to make eye contact with anyone. Whether they’d really
recognize him or he just needs to get over his fears, he’s not sure.
But a part of him doesn’t want to find out.
Jack pulls up outside the hotel and parks next to a new white
Mercedes G-Class, a big boxy number like a cross between a Ger-
man tank and an SUV. He’d guess this for the Eastern Euro-
peans’ car, but they’re probably driving a rental, one of the sports
cars, the convertible Porsche, or an S-Class sedan. He sees a sil-
ver Mustang parked here too, a convertible, one of the recent re-
leases he’s heard so much about. Supposedly they’re more
powerful than his with the same size engine. Forty years later
and they must have reengineered it to do something better, be-
cause it’ll never look as good as the Fastback. They’ve only made
a lighter body, it’s likely, and that’s no great feat with forty fucking
years of technology on your side.
Getting out of his car, Jack catches a quick second glance
from the parking attendant—the look Ralph described; people
know Jack, recognize him still. As San Francisco goes, mostly
sports stars and locals, not that many actors, Jack’s face is one of
the few that people remember.
He gives the attendant a five and hits the revolving door
without looking back, still holding the keys to his car. If it has to
be moved, they can page him.
Inside the lobby, Jack looks around, trying to decide what he
should do. The lobby is two stories high, with fancy chandeliers
and leather couches all over. A big guy wearing a designer suit
stands up from one of the couches on the left side of the lobby.
Jack looks around for the bar, and the guy makes his way over,
asks if Jack is “Mr. Palimas?”
“No.” Jack shakes his head, taking a good look at the guy: big
nose, face like an anvil. He tries to dodge, more from habit than
not, but the guy moves faster than Jack expects, cuts him off.
“You are Jack. I am told to wait.” He holds up a small version
of Jack’s old headshot, probably clipped from a newspaper arti-
cle covering his dark days. “Ralphie told me to meet you.”
“Oh, Ralphie,” Jack says. “In that case.” He shrugs, holds his
hand out for the guy to lead the way.
“I am Michal. Please to come.” He starts toward the elevators.
12 SETH HARWOOD
“Where did you get that?” Jack points to the picture.

“Ralphie has changed our meeting from bar to our suite. It is
big.” He turns and shows Jack an awkward toothy smile, as if he
got an extra helping of teeth in the attributes line at birth and his
mouth did its best to fit them all in. They run together at angles,
jammed and overlapping. “Our suite is big so we can have party.”
A bellman holds the elevator doors open and they enter. As
the doors slide closed, Jack sees his reflection and that of the
smiling suit. He’s taller than Jack and wider; this guy can carry
himself. Plus he’s been lifting more than just the rocks they’ve
got where he’s from, and his suit is well cut, expensive.
Jack rubs his face. He leans toward the door and looks at his
cheeks: pale and clean from this morning’s shave. A couple dots
of dried blood have come out along his jaw since he left the
house. His eyes still look tired. Though he’s put on five or ten
pounds of muscle in the past two years, his eyes still look deep-
set in his face—like he’s using—as if he needs a couple nights’
sleep, even though it feels like that’s all he’s done for the past two
years. His skin is pale, freckled—has been since the sixth grade,
when his mother moved him and his sister up from North Car-
olina to Boston to get away from his father and the sun. He takes
a good look at his brown eyes and runs a hand over his hair, won-
dering how obvious it is that he has no place better to be.
He turns his neck to the side, leaning his ear to his shoulder,
trying to loosen up, get a pop. In his movie, they gave him a big
tattoo from his chest up onto his neck, out the top of his shirt.
People liked that, were disappointed when they found out it
wasn’t real. Even when Jack first met Victoria, she ran her fingers
around his neck and pulled his collar down.
As the numbers light up above the doors, Jack rolls up his
sleeves. He’s going all the way to the top.
3
The doors open onto a single large room, a two-story
suite. White leather furniture fills the middle of the room be-
neath floor-to-ceiling windows. Jack is used to good views like the
one he has up in Sausalito, seeing the Bay, but from here he can
see into the hills, clear to Alcatraz, Treasure Island, El Cerrito,
Berkeley, and down over Alameda and beyond. The other down-
town skyscrapers surround them; it’s like seeing the skyline
from the inside. Jack recognizes the Transamerica Pyramid but
doesn’t know the others by name.
As he and Michal step out of the elevator, three men in suits
stand to meet them, one of them wearing an awful green eye-
sore with wide lapels. Ralph is here, wearing another loud Ha-
waiian shirt.
Two guys come forward with hands extended, the one with
the bad suit, and another, wearing a simple blue suit. Jack no-
tices a fifth man standing against the wall behind him, almost
blending in, wearing a suit that looks a lot like Michal’s. Michal
steps back and takes a position beside the elevator doors, fading
back as if he and the other guy have been posted there. They
13
14 SETH HARWOOD
stand with their arms crossed, like sentries on either side of the
elevator.
“Shake this man down,” the Czech with the green suit says,
doing a funny dance in his legs, mostly, without any movement
of his torso or arms.
The others laugh.
“Yes, man. You are the one from this movie.” Green Suit
bends his knees and shakes his legs, brings them apart and to-
gether. “Shake this down.”
To stop this, Jack takes his arm in a two-handed shake and
starts pumping, telling the guy he’s glad to meet him.
“I am Al,” Green Suit says. “It is a very pleasure to meet
you.” His suit is soft, some kind of ultrasynthetic fabric, shiny
and dull at the same time, with a gold shirt underneath and a
dark, wine-colored tie.
“Nice suit,” Jack says, because it’s clear he’s looking.
“You like it.” Al turns to the others. “This is good guy. Style,
see. Loud, like the American rock and roll.” He laughs, a full-on,
head-tilted-back-and-mouth-wide-open laugh that you have to go
along with. He moves his hands along his sides, displaying the
green fabric.
The other two come around and start shaking Jack’s hands,
the one guy in a blue suit and the other wearing a deep gray solid.
Both of these guys come on reserved like their clothes. “I am
David,” the guy in the blue suit says. He has a glass of scotch in
one hand, raises it in salute as he says his name. His hair is cut
short, in a buzz that’s grown out, or was cut recently by someone
who wanted to make him look like a Chia Pet.
“I am Vlade,” the third guy says, taking Jack in a hug. “I have
still the good name from our country that I do not change like
them.” He looks at Al and makes a funny face, putting his lower
lip up toward his mustache, as if he’s smelled something bad.
“Al,” he says, with an intentionally flat accent, imitating how

Americans must sound to him.
“Yes, sir, this is the man here: Jack Palms,” Ralph says, step-
ping forward. He has a thick cigar in one hand and a scotch in
the other. He sways as he moves. Jack realizes this is why Ralph
asked him along: because he’s planning on spending most of his
time in the bag.
“Jack Palms,” Al says, “let us share with you some blow.”
More laughs and then Jack watches Al, Ralph, and the others re-
treat to the couches. He can see a glass-top coffee table in the
middle all ready to go, with the lines cut and set. Ralph sits down
on one of the couches and starts rolling up a twenty.
Jack hesitates. Coke got him going in L.A., made him the
rage at the right parties, introduced him to some of the right peo-
ple, maybe even started his short movie career. But it also led him
to H and his life falling apart.
Now he’s spent two years in a place where life seems dull: ei-
ther because he’s taken too much out of it and he’s evening out,
or because he’s got fewer dopamine receptors left to stimulate
his pleasure cells—either the karmic or the biological explana-
tion, Jack’s not sure which he prefers. He smells the remnants
of the morning’s cigarette on his fingers. Even after the scrub-
bing, it’s still there, like a trail of where he’s been, a reminder of
mistakes he’s made.
Ralph leans close to the table and snorts a line. Ralph,
who’s never had anything bad happen as long as Jack’s known
him, Ralph who just keeps going and going and partying. Fuck-
ing Ralph.
Jack clenches his teeth. If he can stand here, watch these
guys, and play roving concierge, maybe he’ll be cured.
David cleans up a line with a freshly rolled bill.
“Mr. Jack?” Al says, pointing to the table.
16 SETH HARWOOD
“No thanks.” Jack stays where he is, hooks a thumb at the

sentries. “Just think of me like one of these guys: here to work.
To help you have the fun.”
The Czechs turn to him. David says, “You do not want to
join?”
“You do not enjoy the blow?”
Jack shakes his head. “I’m okay.”
Ralph holds up both hands and says, “Serious downer.” He
leans toward the table, covers a nostril, and snorts a line. “Oh,
yeah. Motherfucker!” He does another quick one, then lies back
on the couch, powder on his upper lip. “Yeah!” he yells.
David’s still looking at Jack, so he shows him three fingers.
“Three years now,” Jack says. David nods.
Vlade stands up and comes over to Jack. He claps his hands,
rubs Jack’s shoulder when he gets there. “This is all right. Seri-
ously. It means there is more for us.” He starts laughing. “There
is the bar,” he says, pointing to a small brown-doored refrigerator
under a mirrored wall of glass shelves and cocktail glasses. He
gives Jack a slight push. “Help yourself.”
Jack starts to decline, then thinks better of it and goes over.
He finds seltzer and ice, a lime, and makes himself a drink. As
he turns, he sees David’s and Al’s heads bent to the table, Vlade
still watching him.
“Cheers, bro.” Jack holds up his glass, just seltzer and ice,
and squeezes in the lime.
GET MORE OF
JACK WAKES UP
To purchase copies of Jack Wakes Up for holiday gifts, print
the order form at the end of this PDF document and
present it to your favorite local bookseller.

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Books-A-Million
Indiebound
Visit
SethHarwood.com
7TH SON: DESCENT
J.C.
Hutchins
7TH SON: DESCENT
As America reels from the bizarre presidential assassination commit-
ted by a child, seven men are abducted from their normal lives and
delivered to a secret government facility. Each man has his own career,
his own specialty. All are identical in appearance. The seven strangers
were not born, but grown—unwitting human clones—as part of a
project called 7th Son.
The government now wants something from these “John Michael

Smiths.” They share the flesh as well as the implanted memories of
the psychopath responsible for the president’s murder. The killer has
bigger plans, and only these seven have the unique qualifications to
track and stop him.
But when their progenitor makes the battle personal, it becomes clear
he may know the seven better than they know themselves...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An innovator in online publishing and promotion, J.C. Hutchins has been
featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and on NPR’s Weekend
Edition, ABC News Radio and the BBC. He used podcasting and fan evangel-
ism to land two fiction book deals with St. Martin’s Press. With more than
five million episodic downloads to date, his 7th Son thriller trilogy is the most
popular “podcast novel” series in history. The trilogy has been optioned by
Warner Bros. for film development. Learn more at JCHutchins.net.
PROLOGUE
he president of the United States is dead. He was mur-

T dered in the morning sunlight by a four-year-old boy.
It was a simple stumping rally in Kentucky, no more
than a pit stop on Tobacco Road. The Bluegrass State would vote
Republican in next year’s election, just as it had in the past two. At
least that’s what President Hank “Gator” Griffin said on this crisp
October morning at Bowling Green College.
His speech was a barn-raiser, a helluva thing, roiling with Bi-
ble Belt–f riendly sound bites. Keep the country strong. Reelect
morality. Reelect character and faith. Next November, reelect Grif-
fin and Hale.
God bless America. Waving now, working the crowd. Pump-
pump handshake. Wink. Thank you. Kiss the lady. Hold the baby.
Listen to the cheers.
Listen, as they turn to screams.
It happened so quickly: a smile and nod from the four-year-
old’s parents, a kiss on little Jesse Fowler’s cheek for the photogra-
phers, a glint of silver in the boy’s hand, the president’s carotid
artery open at the jaw, the scarlet wound arcing across his throat
like a comet. The child’s face spattered in red mist, the president’s
Find more serialized stories and order 7th Son: Descent at JCHutchins.net.
7 TH S O N : D E S C E N T 49
mouth forming a question, the boy’s tiny teeth glittering white in

the camera flashbulbs, a cry from a Secret Serv ice agent.
The president did not stagger, did not sway; he crumpled at the
knees, face white as bone. His forehead split open as it struck the
sidewalk. There were many screams, many arms around him. A
Secret Serv ice agent grabbed the murderous boy as he dashed be-
tween a photographer’s legs. The agent lifted Jesse Fowler high, by
the ankle. The boy was furious, screaming obscenities no four-
year-old should know. He swung his switchblade at the agent,
knocking off the man’s sunglasses. He swung again. And again.
More hands around the president. More screams from the
crowd. Fowler’s parents rushing the agent in shock, trying to pro-
tect their son. Secret Serv ice agents covering Griffin’s body with
their own, his blood seeping into their suits. A scream rising from
the child as he swung upside down by his ankle.
A chopper soon descended onto the campus’s common field,
its downdraft ripping the GRIFFIN/HALE signs from shocked specta-
tors’ hands. The president and an army of Secret Serv ice and
medical agents arrived at the Bowling Green hospital three min-
utes later. But Hank “Gator” Griffin was already dead by then.
During the chaos at the college, little Jesse Fowler had been
disarmed and tossed into the backseat of a police cruiser. His par-
ents were also apprehended.
Just before the vehicle carrying the world’s youngest political
assassin peeled away from the scene, a photojournalist snapped a
picture of the child. It would have been worthy of the Pulitzer
Prize, had it been published. In the photo, Jesse Fowler’s tiny blood-
stained hands were pressed against the car’s rear window. He
gazed at a spattered GRIFFIN/HALE sign, which was reflected in the
cruiser’s window in one of those remarkable moments of photo-
journalism.
The child’s bloodshot eyes were wide. He was laughing.
50 J. C. HUTCHINS
By noon that day, Vice President Vincent Hale had been sworn
in as the leader of the world’s last superpower. Secretary of State
Charles Caine was appointed VP.
The child’s parents, Jennifer and Jackson Fowler, were arraigned
on charges of conspiring to murder the president of the United
States. The small Bowling Green restaurant they owned would
never open again.
Their son was placed under maximum security in an undis-
closed government facility for evaluation and interrogation. A
week later, a nurse and an armed guard discovered Jesse Fowler’s
body. The four-year-old was lying in bed, his mouth and eyes
open, dead. There were no signs of self-asphyxiation. There was
no overdose, no theatrical cyanide capsule, no reasonable cause
of death. Just the dried remains of a nosebleed, and eyes so blood-
shot the whites had gone completely red.
Jesse Fowler had said only one thing during that week of con-
finement and examination. A balding, bearded doctor had asked
the boy if he knew what he’d done to the president.
Jesse Fowler had looked at the doctor and giggled.
“Go fuck your mother,” he’d said.
ONE
aturday sex with Sarah was the best, John Smith decided.
S The very best. It was long, sweaty, dirty; nipple nibbles,
fingernails raking the back and chest, obscene whispers, in-
complete sentences. Headboard practically banging into the neigh-
boring apartment’s living room. Open windows to let the November
Miami breeze cool them—and to let the rest of the world shift un-
comfortably with envy. That sort of sex.
John marveled at this as he pulled himself off her body, pant-
ing, staring up at the ceiling with an expression that was half
self-satisfaction, half awe. Sarah grabbed a sheet from the floor,
laughed long and loud, and rolled sideways to face him. The sheet
stuck to her sweaty breasts and hips. She brushed a red curl from
her face.
“Unbelievable,” she said.
John gazed at the ceiling and shook his head. “I know.”
“It’s getting better.”
He shook his head again and blinked. “I know.”
Sarah smiled. “You should write a song about it.”
“Uh, how about ‘Christ Almighty, Do Me All Nighty.’ ”
“You could’ve done better than that,” she snorted, and climbed
52 J. C. HUTCHINS
out of bed. John watched Sarah’s hips as she gracefully stepped

through his cramped bedroom, traversing the thirtysomething’s
version of hopscotch: a pile of books on the floor, last night’s
clothes, several ratty folders filled with sheet music, an empty box
of Trojans, his Gibson guitar. She was nimble and beautiful, and
John wondered, not for the first time, what she saw in him.
She opened the bedroom door. John’s fat, fuzzy cat scrambled
past her legs and leaped onto the bed. He stomped onto John’s
chest and meowed, malcontent.
“Buzz off, Cat,” John said.
“You need to buy him food,” Sarah said, stepping into the living
room on her way to the bathroom. “You said it yourself last night.
And, Jesus . . . you should really clean up this place.”
“Right,” he called. “Wanna help?”
Sarah laughed. “Your h ouse. Your mess. You clean it up.”
“Mañana.”
John reached over and plucked a lighter and crumpled pack of
cigarettes from the far end of the bedside table. He shook the
pack, and two bent—but, thank God, not broken—Camel Lights
rattled out and into his palm. He lit one, inhaled, and gazed at the
ceiling.
Cat meowed again, sounding more surly this time. John ab-
sently scratched the critter’s head, regarding him with a mixture
of disdain and fondness. As Sarah showered, John watched the
palm trees sway outside the window, stroked Cat, and finished his
smoke.
He’d already put on a T‑shirt and pulled his hair into a pony-
tail when Sarah came back into the room.
“Where ya going, stud?”
“Nowhere. Just to the Castle,” he replied, slipping on a pair of
jeans. “Gotta get the cat his food, and get me some more smokes.”
Sarah looked at the unlit Camel by the ashtray. “I’m out, too.”
“Have that one,” John said, and kissed her. “Try to live through
the nasty nonmenthol flavor. I’ll take the bike. Won’t be long.”
Outside, as he pedaled his ten-speed into the apartment com-
plex parking lot, Sarah called down to him from the balcony. She
told him to hurry. She made a joke about how red-haired maidens
reward bicycle-r iding knights with breakfast and “muchly” hot
sex . . . particularly if they come bearing cancer sticks.
John laughed, imagining her in bed, his head between her
thighs, and said he’d pedal as fast as he could.
Alleys—honest-to-goodness damp, dark, well-worn shortcut
alleys—were one of the things John missed most while living in
Miami. Cycling always reminded him of his childhood in the
Midwest, and of bike races with neighborhood kids, up and down
the alleys. Miami was a driver’s city, a twentieth-century city, a
pink place that had no love for kick-t he-can or cobblestones. This
was the land of the planned community, where “historic home”
meant that the paint on a h ouse’s shutters had just dried.
As he pedaled to the Castle convenience store—Zero Hassle at
the Castle!—John pined for alleys and shortcuts, redbrick roads
that led to scrappy basketball rims and tree houses. But there was
no sense begrudging it. Miami was different. Neither better nor
worse, just different. And since Miami had been around a lot lon-
ger than John had, he thought it best to adapt.
Besides, Miami had palm trees. And November weather like
this.
He was making a quick turn onto Flamingo, a scenic residen-
tial road that would add a few minutes to his r ide—but what the
hey, it was Saturday—when he spotted the white van barreling
toward him.
I don’t think it sees me, he thought. If it did, it wouldn’t be going
so fa—
John yanked the bike to the left, gripped both brakes, and
54 J. C. HUTCHINS
nearly flew over the handlebars. The van’s tires screeched. John’s
bike swerved between two parked cars, a Lexus and a very old,
very cherry Beetle, and isn’t it the damnedest things you notice at mo-
ments like this? The bike’s front wheel struck the curb. John spilled
onto the sidewalk, felt the flesh tear on his palm and chin.
He heard the van’s front doors open, the rear slide-door whoosh
along its rail, and the click-c lick of expensive dress shoes. John
tried to slip out from under the ten-speed, but his foot was stuck
on the chain. He looked up. Three men sporting sharp suits and
crew cuts surrounded him.
“You know, a little help here would—”
“Grab him,” the biggest suit said, and the other two pounced.
Their gloved hands locked on to John’s upper arms like talons,
yanking him from under the bike in one fluid motion, as if he
were in some street-fighter ballet.
One of the men twisted John’s left arm behind his back—say
uncle, isn’t it the damnedest things you notice?—and John howled.
The other suit held John’s right arm out straight, like a wing. John
couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. They were going to break his
arm; John could feel the muscles pulling apart.
The third man, the big suit, stepped before him. The stranger
had gray eyes, a flat nose, a cleft in his chin, cheekbones carved
from marble. No emotion was on that face. The men stood there
on the sidewalk for what felt like an excruciating eternity.
Finally, the man raised his eyebrows. “You want it to stop?”
John nodded his head furiously.
The big man inhaled and exhaled slowly. “Good. Now. You’re
going to take a little r ide with us.”
The pain in John’s left arm eased a little, and he used the mo-
ment to heave his body from side to side. His outstretched arm
tore away from its captor and swung outward. He screamed for
help. The talon on the throbbing wrist behind his back slipped
slightly. He was going to do it, going to do it, going to run, going

to break—
No air. No air.
The leader, the one with the Superman chin, punched John in
the stomach a second time. Then a third. John fell to the sidewalk,
clutching his midsection, cradling it like a squirming baby. Through
the haze, he saw one of the men toss the ten-speed into the back
of the van. He spotted the other with a syringe, felt the bee sting of
the needle, then things became pleasant, sweet, dark, darker.
He heard one last thing before he lost consciousness, the lead-
er’s voice.
“Should’ve come quietly, Johnny-boy.”
When Michael was a child, his mother and father took him for a
drive through Indiana’s corn country, the place where that state’s
true heart would always beat. American flags, high school basket-
ball, Old-Time Religion. Those things were in the soil of the
state—no, deeper than that even, a layer of bedrock geologists
could never fathom. The drive into the heartland took two hours
from where they lived in Indianapolis.
Michael had been only nine at the time, but he had noticed
the transformation of the horizon during that drive: the mortar
and steel of city giving way to the bland homes of the suburbs.
Then, with the abruptness of a beachhead, the land of station wag-
ons and culs-de-sac relinquished control to the flat expanse of
Indiana’s heart. The corn. It was a sea, Michael thought back then.
Bright green combines occasionally slipped through its waves like
barges. And like the sea, the corn could barely be contained; it
ebbed just feet from the road.
There, at a family picnic by the roadside, Michael’s mother
had told him that places were like people; they had personalities.
More important, she said, they had emotions. Souls. Sometimes
56 J. C. HUTCHINS
you could feel the soul of a place. Michael had munched on a pea-
nut butter sandwich and asked her what she meant.
“Close your eyes,” she said. “Listen. Just breathe and listen.
Listen with your ears. What do you hear?”
Quiet, he’d said. Grasshoppers. Corn leaves slapping against
each other. A bird. The wind.
“Now what do you feel?” she asked.
Nice. Peaceful. Love, maybe.
“Maybe that’s what this place is like,” his mother said. “Maybe
this place is peaceful, loving. Gentle. Maybe that is this place’s soul.
It’s important to listen to a place sometimes, to hear what it thinks.
Understand?”
Michael said he did, a little. Maybe. His mother laughed and
kissed him on the cheek and said that maybe he would under-
stand when he was older. He’d finished his sandwich, took a sip of
cherry Hi-C from his thermos, and went to play Frisbee with his
father.
Michael had never forgotten that conversation. And while he
understood its mysteries now about as much as he had then, he
always made time to close his eyes and listen to a new place. It
had come in handy years later when he went to Parris Island, and
then to Kosovo and Afg hanistan and other countries with alien
names and landscapes. Those places held power over their inhab-
itants. That faraway day’s lesson had dovetailed with what he
learned in boot, and later in Force Recon training. Know the land,
and you’ll know the people.
Michael knew Gitmo. He’d been here for only a week, and he
knew it. Gitmo was angry. Gitmo was confused. Under the Kevlar
and pride and posturing, Gitmo was crying for blood. Its inhabit-
ants were restless. It wanted to put a hurt on whoever was behind
the death of the president two weeks ago.
Michael ran to appease the lion inside. He ran to clear his
head of the irrational, the emotions, the confusion and endless

discussions that were unfolding at Guantánamo and, presumably,
in America. He’d learned about the president’s assassination a
week after the rest of the civilized world. He had been on assign-
ment, assisting CIA types in a nation where the scorpions were
the size of ashtrays and the politics as volatile as nitroglycerin.
Now he was back in the fold, catching up, getting informed.
Michael was into his sixth mile when a Humvee approached
from behind. It pulled ahead by a few hundred yards and stopped.
A full bird stepped out and waited for Michael to catch up.
Michael stopped, stood erect, and saluted. His breathing was
even, but the sweat poured from his arms and face. His thirty-year-
old body was a study in sculpture, loyalty, and endurance. Scars
were on his arms and back. A USMC tattoo on his right biceps.
Women remarked at his physique and his blue eyes, not that it
mattered much to him. Men remarked at his ability to do seventy
pull-ups in two minutes.
The colonel returned the salute and stepped forward.
“It’s Saturday, son,” the older man said. “Even God Himself
rested one day of the week.”
Michael half-smiled. “I expect to go to heaven, sir, and I’d like
to represent our Corps in a mano a mano boxing match against
the Lord God when I get there. This is prep.”
“Blasphemous.” The colonel laughed, then clapped Michael
on the shoulder. They stepped over to the Humvee. The driver
passed the colonel a clipboard. The old man scanned the sheet of
paper.
“Says here you’re to report to the airstrip in three hours. Head-
ing to Virginia.”
“Sir? I just returned from an op,” Michael said. “I’m supposed
to head back home to Denver. Two weeks’ leave.”
“I don’t know anything about that.” The colonel nodded at the
58 J. C. HUTCHINS
clipboard. “This came to my office. Classified. I’m supposed to

round you up personally and get you on that plane. Now I don’t
take a shine to running errands, Smith, particularly when they’re
so hush-hush I can’t have one of my staff get their nails dirty for
me. You’re not going to give me any trouble on this, are you?”
Michael stiffened. “Of course not, sir.”
“Then be there at eleven hundred, as ordered.”
“Yes, sir.”
As the Humvee sped away, Michael stood in the sun, still
sweating. He gritted his teeth. He breathed and listened.
Gitmo was angry. Gitmo was confused. For the first time this
week, Michael was glad for that. He was glad he wasn’t the only
one. He began to run again, this time back toward the base.
The lion inside him had many questions.
the president is alive!! this is another attempt to create pan-

demonium!! an elaborate hoax is being staged against the amer-
ican people. as you know my source inside insists this is nothing
more than an excuse to get griffin out of the public eye. black-
jack and Special(k) say there is no threat to america but the presi-
dent had to be removed so he can conduct talks with the true
entities behind this conspiracy.
the world had to believe assassination was true so no one
could suspect the real reason why griffin is gone. the grays are
finally reestablishing communications and wish to discuss total
social and technological integration with us!! after two years of
silence they are retransmitting their signals! there is proof, the
photograph below was sent from blackjack and confirmed by
another source as authentic. it is an image taken from hubble of
the phobosian base where the grays have been stationed for the
past dec ade. the time is at hand! the next great age of humanity
has begun!!!! kilroy2.0 was here kilroy2.0 is everywhere
>ATTACH graybase.jpg
>LOAD TRACKSCRAMBLER
>EXECUTE
>UPLOAD
Kilroy2.0 leaned back from the computer screen in satisfac-

tion. This new message had just been posted to his Web site TheT-
ruthExcavated.com. It was one of six sites he updated daily.
He rocked back and forth in the wooden chair, his round,
bearded face ebbing in and out of the light flickering from the
five computer monitors. The rest of the apartment was soaked in
shadow; the afternoon sunshine warming the rest of Washington,
D.C., was blocked by the sheets of aluminum foil taped to the
window frames.
Sunlight was not welcome here. This was a timeless place. A
temple. Kilroy2.0 was beyond time, beyond day, beyond daylight.
There were no Fridays or Saturdays or Mondays. Only Nondays.
Once, long ago during his life as a civilian, Kilroy2.0 had been
known by another name, a man’s name, a Pedestrian’s name, for-
gettable. It was the name of an unenlightened tourist of the world,
one familiar to worker bees who did not hear the whispers in the
walls. But that name, that life, that was Before. Before he had seen
the Truth that was seeping through the Media’s Lies. Before he
had his pulpits.
Before he was here. Before he was everywhere.
Kilroy2.0 smiled in the silence, rocking, cataloging and priori-
tizing the next series of Web-site updates in his mind. Beneath the
desk, the small fans inside his five computers whirred softly. The
wooden chair creaked as he rocked. The walls did not speak, for
which he was grateful. Silence was like a sand castle to him: frag-
ile, fleeting, golden.
The pounding at the front door shattered it all.
60 J. C. HUTCHINS
Kilroy2.0 started, glanced across the living room. The chain

locks rattled at the impact. His eyes flashed back to Monitor Three,
at the miniature video screen in the corner.
The feed from the wireless webcam he’d installed in the out-
side hall was dead.
The pounding, again.
Kilroy2.0 stood straight up, the chair hitting the floor like a
pistol shot. Hands shaking, he dashed to the windows. This was
it. They’d finally found him and they’d make him vanish, take
away the Word and transform him into a Pedestrian just like Be-
fore and
—can’t let that happen, have to get out of here—
He ripped at the aluminum foil on the windows, gasping and
squinting through the furious sunlight.
A man was out there, waiting for him on the fire escape.
Kilroy2.0 shrieked. The pounding behind him stopped . . .
then the door exploded inward, nearly flying off its hinges. Kil-
roy2.0 whirled toward the door. The window behind him shat-
tered. Arms reached out to him from inside, now from outside.
The voltage from the Taser stun gun surged through Kilroy2.0’s
body before he knew he was hit. He crashed face-first onto the
hardwood floor, taking all of his 320 pounds with him. His dirty
spectacles skittered across the hardwood.
One man was barking orders. Take everything with a mother-
board. Monitors, too. Look for laptops, BlackBerries, cell phones.
Clean it out. Cuff him up.
Kilroy2.0 heard it all, terrified, exhilarated. They dragged his
limp body out of his home and down the apartment building’s
stairs. As they stepped out of the building and into the sunlight, a
rogue thought flashed through Kilroy’s mind.
He couldn’t smile at the irony, but he wanted to.
kilroy2.0 was here
Hospitals may vary in shape, size, and design from the outside.
They are all identical inside.
Hallway mazes, clanging doors, floors and walls colored in
muted browns and blues. Hospitals are collages of impassive col-
ors that do not offend, that make no promises.
Father Thomas walked through the halls of St. Mary’s, passing
door after door, trying not to focus on the smell of sterilizer and
Salisbury steak that seemed to sweat from its walls. When a place
deals in illness and death, those things are in the air, the walls,
the beds, of that place. In his six years as a priest, Thomas had
strode through many hospitals like this one. They all smelled the
same to him.
He wondered, fleetingly, if doctors smelled a sameness in
churches.
The call to the rectory this morning had come as neither shock
nor revelation to Thomas. It was Mark McGee. Mark’s father,
Gavin, had requested his last rites. Thomas knew the man, liked
him, admired his humor and courage—particularly during the
past three years. Gavin McGee was an optimistic man. But cancer
eats everything, especially optimism.
For three years, Thomas had watched his parishioner being
devoured by his own mutating flesh. The cancer in Gavin McGee’s
lungs took great pleasure in tearing out of remission, feasting
upon the good cells of a good man. Thomas believed almost ev-
erything he’d been taught in seminary about suffering, about
God’s mysterious role in death and diseases. Yet he silently be-
lieved that God had no role in creating a few things on this earth.
Cancer was one of them. It was as if Lucifer had left a splinter of
himself in the world when he had fallen long ago, a thing whose
purpose was to uncreate, to unwind man’s Providence and dine
on its goodness. Cancer was not a bad thing that happened to
62 J. C. HUTCHINS
good people. It was an arrow fired from something old and un-
holy.
Father Thomas found Room 511 and knocked. Mark McGee
answered, shook Thomas’s hand, and motioned him inside. The
priest hugged Ellen, Gavin’s daughter, and said hello to her hus-
band. He nodded quietly at their thank-yous, told them it was his
duty and his honor; Gavin McGee was his friend, a pillar, a proud
parent, a little slice of legend at St. Barnabas. They all smiled at
that, and Thomas was glad for it.
Even through the fog of painkillers, Gavin McGee recognized
Thomas almost instantly and smiled. The patient’s thick silver-red
hair was nearly gone now. His once-w ide shoulders sagged down-
ward, toward Tinkertoy arms. Gavin McGee winked at Thomas,
saying it all: I’m throwing the fight, but I’m fine with it.
“Hello, Gavin,” Thomas said.
“I know the secret now, Father,” McGee said. “Realized the
place I’m heading is a helluva lot better than where I’m at.”
Thomas smiled. “That’s about as true as it gets.”
McGee nodded toward his grown children. Nearly forty years
ago, Gavin McGee had been the topic of dinnertime conversation
here in sleepy-e yed Stanton, Oklahoma. He had taken his ex-w ife
to court to claim full custody of Ellen and Mark. As a mother,
Shellie just wasn’t up to snuff, he’d told the judge. Boozing, carry
ing on with barflies, she was no role model he wanted his children
to follow. The judge ruled in his favor, marking Gavin McGee as
the first man in Stanton ever to win such a case.
“Not a bad life, eh, Father?” McGee said.
“No, Gavin. Not a bad life. The best life.”
Thomas administered the last rites. Gavin McGee renounced
his sins, asked for forgiveness, said he believed in Father, Son,
Holy Spirit, and the one Holy and Apostolic Church. McGee held
his children’s hands through the sacrament, accepted the body

and blood of Christ, and smiled when it was over.
In his years performing this role in dozens of rooms just like
this one, Thomas often saw such dignity so close to the end. He
wondered if his own parents had felt this kind of peace. Their
deaths had been sudden, but surely in the divine infinite expanse
of a second, they would have felt the same calm and courage as
Gavin McGee. Surely we all will, he thought.
In St. Mary’s parking lot, on the way back to his Cavalier, Fa-
ther Thomas Smith was stopped by an armed man who politely
asked him to join him for a r ide. The green-e yed man, who sported
a crew cut—c learly military—said he didn’t want any trouble; he
simply wanted the priest to get in the car. As a Crown Vic with
tinted windows pulled up beside them, Thomas insisted he had
no money, and that he was a shodan—a first-degree karate black
belt—and could protect himself if it came to that.
Two other men stepped out of the car. They were also armed.
The leader said he didn’t think it would come to that.
A bead of sweat slipped down Jay’s forehead, hung on his eye-

brow, then finally plunged onto his cheek. He wanted to wipe off
the sweat, but c ouldn’t. He was handcuffed and terrified.
Two strangers were in his East Village apartment, walking
through his living room, scanning the myriad spines on the book-
shelves, daintily picking up and examining the trinkets from far-
away lands. Their white latex gloves provided a disconcerting
contrast against the many dark-hued, primitive items.
A third man stood before him, above him. This man pulled a
white handkerchief from his suit’s breast pocket. He reached down
and gently wiped the sweat from Jay’s face.
Jay did not speak. He had been told not to speak unless spoken
64 J. C. HUTCHINS
to. He abided by this rule in silent terror, watching these three

puzzle over his life. One of them gazed at a photograph of Mikhail
Gorbachev with interest. The man glanced at a photo of Jay stand-
ing beside Kofi Annan and harrumphed.
A half hour ago, Jay had been enjoying a sweet tea and an in-
tense game of Tetris—his two Saturday vices, if one could call
them that—when Patricia called to tell him she was running late.
The subway had inexplicably stopped serv ice for a few minutes,
she’d said. This gave Jay a few more minutes of Tetris’s spinning
bricks before he had to run to the market on Eighth to snag the
chicken breasts. Eventually, he left. He’d been gone for no more
than twenty-five minutes. In that time, these three men had bro-
ken into his home and waited.
They’d descended on him like midnight predators. A chop to
his shoulder. A quick shove across the room, where he fell onto
the sofa. A display of gun barrels to convince him they meant busi-
ness. Impassive glares from dangerous faces.
Jay Smith had quickly learned in New York that when a man
with a gun asks you for your wallet, you give it to him. If he tells
you to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Swahili, you do that, too.
Say nothing threatening, do nothing threatening. Find another
way to burn the adrenaline, just give him the wallet and go for a
long walk afterward. Process it in the to-be, not the now.
Jay glanced over the couch now, searching for the cordless
phone. A wordless 911 call, a traced line, a dispatched cruiser . . .
but the receiver wasn’t there. They had removed it.
One of the searching men plucked a picture frame from a
bookshelf and handed it to the man standing before Jay. It was a
black-and-white photograph of Patricia: black hair cropped short,
eyebrows arched in surprise and joy. The leader held up the photo
and looked down at Jay.
“Your wife. She’s about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. I bet
you’d do anything for her, wouldn’t you?”
Jay licked the sweat from his lips and shuddered. “Yes.”
“I bet the last thing she’d want to see when she came home is
her husband with a bullet where his brain used to be, hmmm?”
“Yes.”
“And I bet the last thing you’d want is your little Peppermint
coming home and meeting us. Meeting us, Jay. That could be very
troublesome—downright dangerous—for such a pretty lady. Isn’t
that right? Why, we might have to do something to those photo-
taking peepers of hers, should she see us.”
“How did you know—”
The man raised his 9 mm and pointed it at Jay’s head. “Answer
the question.”
Jay shuddered again. “Right.”
“I’m sorry for the theatrics, but this way is best,” the man said.
“It’s also the most effective.”
His brown eyes bored into Jay’s. “So. Are you going to con-
tinue being a good boy?”
Jay nodded. One of the men lifted him off the couch and
shoved him toward the front door.
Mike Smith gazed at his reflection in the men’s room mirror. He

smiled. He brushed his hair again. He turned his head from side
to side, looking for stubble. He flared his nostrils, searching for wily
nose hairs. He checked his fingernails. They probably wouldn’t be
on camera, but appearances are everything and people talk. He straight-
ened his tie. He gargled a handful of water. Looked for stubble
again. He’d be going to makeup in five minutes, so it probably
didn’t matter. But still.
This is my night, he thought. The beginning of the explosion. Ten
66 J. C. HUTCHINS
minutes on CNN. Ten minutes on Larry King. Larry fucking King. The
book’ll shoot up the lists like a Titan rocket. The networks will call.
Ten minutes with King. Then twenty with Oprah. ABC will pull Barbara
Wahwah out of retirement for an exclusive. And then, nirvana itself, the
speaking engagements. Oh, the speaking engagements, the huddled
masses, all gathered to hear the World According to Me.
He was going to give Rochelle the biggest, wettest, sloppiest
kiss for pulling this off. Shit. He was going to give Larry King the
biggest, wettest, sloppiest kiss when this was all over with, just as
Marlon Brando had. This was it. The beginning of the explosion.
There was a knock at the door. That cute production assistant
with the ponytail and a pen behind her ear peeked into the men’s
room and smiled. It was probably supposed to look like a comfort-
ing smile for Mike’s benefit, but the corners of her mouth tele-
graphed years of experience: I know you’re nervous, that’s why I gave
you some time in the head. But navel gazing’s over, bub.
“Mike? It’s me again, Terry. We’re gonna have to get you over to
makeup in the next two minutes.”
“Right on.” Confident. Cool.
Terry was unimpressed. “Dr. Smith, I’m going to remind you
that you’re the first up tonight. And since this is Larry King Live,
you’ll want to be on time.”
Mike nodded and gulped. He suddenly had to pee.
“Right, right. Just give me another minute, okay?”
Terry’s eyes tensed for a second. “One minute.”
Mike dashed over to a urinal, frantically unzipped his fly, and
barely managed to aim at the basin before the piss came. He was
washing his hands when the door opened again.
It was another PA, apparently. Young man, jeans, T‑shirt. A
security pass dangled from a band around his neck like a flimsy
convention name tag. He smiled nervously—now that is a bona
fide, dyed-in-the-wool, can’t‑hide-shit-from-a‑psychologist genuine smile,
Mike thought—and walked over to the sink. The kid was holding
a copy of Hunting the Hunters.
“Dr. Mike?”
“I’m ready,” Mike said, glancing in the mirror.
“That’s great. But I was hoping that before you went, you could
sign my copy of your book. I loved it, especially the chapters
about the Three Ring Circus killer. I have a pen.”
Mike brightened. “Of course. I’m glad you liked it.”
The kid placed the book on the counter. As Mike’s hand reached
for the hardback, he asked, “And to whom am I signing this fine
piece of—”
He opened it and blinked. The pages had been cut, hollowed
out. A pistol was resting inside.
In one heartbeat, the kid grabbed the gun, pressed it to the
base of Mike’s ear, and said, “To your biggest fan.”
Saturday night was movie night at the Smith home, though Jack
often thought the rigmarole of getting Kristina and Carrie bun-
dled up, out the door, and into the Passat was a production Holly-
wood could make a movie of, or option at least. Getting the twins
to agree on a movie at the video store was another epic; perhaps
a telev ision miniseries. Witness the spectacle of clashing cinematic
tastes! Carrie wants to see The Lion King for the trillionth time! Kris-
tina demands Pippi Longstocking, an untried classic! Who will win?
Who will decide?
Daddy, that’s who.
Tonight, the four-year-olds had been relatively peaceful in
Blockbuster’s family section, particularly after Daddy slyly recom-
mended D.A.R.Y.L., a “megacool” movie he’d seen when he was a
boy.
Blessedly, they took the bait. They made a pit stop in the mys-
tery section for “Mommy and Daddy’s movie” and made it home
68 J. C. HUTCHINS
with little fuss. Jack chalked it up to James Brown’s “I Got You (I

Feel Good).” The twins gleefully sang along. All six times.
Lisa had already called the pizza place by the time they came
home. Jack got the plates ready; Lisa and the girls grabbed the
juice boxes and the napkins. Lisa was asking them which flavor
they wanted—“Grape!” the kids cried in unison—as Jack turned
on the TV and popped in the girls’ movie.
The doorbell rang. Jack grabbed a twenty from his wallet and
opened the door for the pizza guy. The men exchanged the typical
heys and how’s it goin’s. This pizza guy . . . like all pizza guys these
days, it seemed . . . peered over his shoulder, curiously eyeing the
living room. Minimum-wage voyeurs, Jack thought. But then again,
there had to be some perk for such a thankless job.
“How much do I owe you?” Jack asked.
The stranger dropped his box, covered Jack’s mouth with one
hand, and yanked him outside with the other. It was quick and
silent.
The girls did not watch D.A.R.Y.L. with Daddy that night.
TWO
ohn lifted his T‑shirt and gazed at the reflection of his

J stomach in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. His midsection
hurt like hell, but there were no bruises; no proof of the
assault. Even his hand and chin had been had been cleaned and
bandaged. His left arm still throbbed from when those suits had
pulled it behind his back and nearly broken it, that game of Say
Uncle on steroids.
He lowered his shirt and looked at his reflection. Shoulder-
length, sandy blond hair. High cheekbones. Five feet eleven inches.
Lanky. Aside from the small Band-A ids on his chin and palm,
John looked the same as he did when he had kissed Sarah good-
bye this morning.
John didn’t know what time it was or where he was; he’d never
worn a watch, and this so-called waiting room had no clocks. Just
a conference table, ten posh office chairs, several plastic cups, a
single drinking straw, some cans of soda—and one large, cracked
mirror. The mirror, that was his work.
About an hour and a half ago, John had abruptly been pulled
from unconsciousness. He was strapped to a gurney, looking up
at fluorescent lights, white ceiling tiles, and bespectacled faces.
70 J. C. HUTCHINS
Through the haze, those faces had looked like moons. They gently
commanded John to stay calm. He did, for a few seconds. Then he
remembered the bicycle r ide, the van . . . t he man with the marble
cheekbones . . . and began screaming for answers. He screamed
about constitutional rights, probable cause, and arrest warrants.
He pleaded and proclaimed his innocence again and again. The
restraints didn’t budge. Neither did these strangers.
As the moonmen pushed his gurney down a hallway, John
asked questions. He pressed his body against the restraints. He
craned his neck and spotted men in military fatigues with M16s
trailing beside the folks with the white coats. The ceiling tiles
streaked by above him. The gurney made a right, a left, a right. He
wanted to know what he’d done. He wanted to know where he was.
There had been a terrible mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake. After
a while, the true terror took hold and he’d stopped screaming.
When the gurney finally stopped, one of the moonmen—a
middle-aged doctor, presumably—bent down to whisper in John’s
ear. John could feel the man’s beard, his mouth was so close.
“John, I want you listen to me,” the man said, his voice calm.
He had an under bite, which made him sound vaguely like Sean
Connery. It was annoying. “My name is James DeFalco. I’m an as-
sistant here. I’m not the man who can answer your questions; I’m
not authorized to give you any information yet. But your ques-
tions will be answered soon. Soon, John. Do you understand?”
John stared at the ceiling and blinked. He said he understood.
“Good,” DeFalco said. “Now, we’re going to lower this gurney,
remove your restraints, and help you up. We’re going to walk you
through this door. We’re then going to close the door. There you’ll
wait for the answers to your questions.”
Fuck this, John thought.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you, John?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to cooperate, John?”

“Yes.”
The white coats lowered the gurney. Then the soldiers loos-
ened the restraints across his chest, wrists, and legs. John didn’t
move until two of the grunts had slung their rifles behind their
backs and grabbed his armpits to help him up.
John swiftly swung his elbow upward and connected with the
nose of one of the soldiers. Blood peppered John’s shirt. The sol-
dier fell backward across the gurney. The other grunt grabbed
John and slammed him, front-first, into the wall. As the white
coats screamed not to hurt him, for God’s sake don’t hurt him, the
door was yanked open and John was thrown into the waiting
room. As he scrambled to get up, the dead bolt clicked home.
John had pounded on the metal door, paced the room, and fi-
nally thrown one of the office chairs into that mirror wall, praying
it would shatter to reveal a roomful of clipboard-toting eggheads—
and a way out. It did not shatter. The chair cracked the glass and
nearly hit John as it bounced back from the impact. It was a seven-
foot-tall exclamation point for his screams.
That had been an hour ago. He’d sung to himself, to keep the
terror away and the questions from eating up his brain. He sang
the trusty standbys: Dylan, Baez, McLachlan. He even sang some
of his own songs—“Do This for Me,” “Rockefeller Center,” “Win-
ter Love,” “Unscrew You.”
Now John was staring at himself in a splintered mirror, wonder-
ing why men in suits had beaten and sedated him, why moonmen
with rifles had thrown him into a conference room, why in God’s
name this had happened to him.
John heard the dead bolt unlock. He turned to see a fat man
with tangled hair, pop-bottle glasses, and a wild man’s beard en-
ter the room. No, not fat. Obese. Well over three hundred pounds,
a boulder with legs. The newcomer immediately waddled over to
72 J. C. HUTCHINS
one of the chairs and plopped into it. The door closed and locked.
The stranger stared and smiled at the table.
John walked over and stood across from the newcomer. The
man did not look up. He rocked in his chair.
“Are you the man I’m supposed to talk to?” John asked.
Silence. Rocking.
“Listen. I’ve got questions,” John said.
The man scratched his head. He didn’t look up.
John looked closely at the man. The dude was probably his
age. He slouched over a great belly. He smelled. He had dandruff.
A Pollock painting of food stains covered his grimy yellow T‑shirt.
John watched the man reach over, grab a can of Dr Pepper from
the table’s center, and pour the soda into a plastic cup. He snatched
the drinking straw, plunked it into the liquid.
John sat down across from him. “Hey. You the guy I’m supposed
to talk to, or not?”
“No.” The man’s voice had a disconcerting tremble; high-pitched,
almost feminine.
“Did they bring you here, too?”
“Yeah.” Giggle.
“Do you know why w e’re here?”
The stranger looked up, grinning. Behind his pop-bottle spec-
tacles, the man’s blue eyes widened until they looked as if they’d
pop out of his skull.
“I know everything,” he whispered.
John jumped back in his chair and nearly screamed.
He knew those eyes.
Ten minutes later, the priest and the marine came in; the door
locked behind them. John looked wordlessly at the pair as they
entered—watched in part fascination, part horror, as they gazed
each at the other, at the soda-sipping lunatic, at John.
It was an exercise in contrasts. The marine was wearing BDUs.

Flattop. Broad-shouldered. Chisel-c hinned. The priest was slightly
pudgy; his cheeks were full and shiny, his stomach pressed against
his belt. His hair was combed in a style of humility or fashion
cluelessness; John didn’t know which.
John did know, however, that—despite the physical differences—
t hese men were brothers. Identical twins. They were the same
height. Their blue eyes worked over each other with the same ex-
pression of suspicion. Their faces were pursed in the same look of
silent fear and amazement.
John also knew that despite the physical differences, the luna-
tic across from him was also a dead ringer for these two.
And all three of them looked like John.
The lunatic slurped the last of the Dr Pepper in his cup and
smacked out a soda-commercial ahhhh.
The priest reached into his breast pocket with a shaking hand
and pulled out a rosary. He sat down at the end of the table, in the
chair closest to the cracked mirror. He ran his fingers through his
hair and gawked at John in disbelief. John was certain he was re-
turning the expression.
The feeling was unreal, like the unsettling sensation of watch-
ing yourself on video, only magnified. Do I really look like that?
Only worse. Only this time, the video You is sitting six feet away
from the real You, wearing a priest’s collar, breathing the same air,
probably feeling the same slippery, sick sensation in his gut.
The marine still stood near the door. His eyes flicked over the
lunatic, then sized up John and the priest. Cracking his knuckles,
the marine strode back to a corner of the room and leaned against
the wall, watching them, saying nothing.
The priest dropped his rosary on the table. He looked at John,
his hands still shaking. “Are we brothers?” His voice had a slightly
nasal quality. Had his nose been broken years ago?
74 J. C. HUTCHINS
“I don’t know.” John felt sick. “I thought I was an only child.”

The priest nodded. “So did I.”
“Quadruplets,” the fat lunatic said.
The door opened again. This time, two more men. One of them
was yelling out into the hall as the door was closing, something
about who he was and whom they’d have to answer to if they didn’t
explain everything right fucking now. He pounded on the door as
it locked.
The other newcomer was almost as thin as John. He was wear-
ing a sweatshirt and jeans; his hairline was beginning to thin. He
looked very much like the priest sitting at the table—same hair,
same tightly wound shoulders, probably a dozen pounds lighter
than Father Whoever. The man’s eyes jumped nervously from the
screaming man to the rest of the room. They widened when they
spotted John’s face. The wide-e yed man opened his mouth to say
something. John just shook his head: Don’t know what to tell you,
man.
The man who’d been pounding on the door whirled around.
This one looked like a politician. Blow-dried hair, Brooks Brothers
suit, starched collar, and shiny, expensive tie. Brooks Brothers
looked at his fellow captives. His face went white.
“Shit the bed,” he said.
And then the wide-e yed man beside him—t he one who looked
like the priest at the table—fainted. The politician looked down
at the body, then up at John. He shrieked, whirled around, and
began pounding on the door again.
Let me out let me out let me out.
The lunatic began to laugh.
John’s eyes went to the priest again. Father Whoever was clutch-
ing his head in his hands. John looked past the priest, into the
splintered mirror wall. This is just like that, he thought. Only the
reflection screams because you’re the video You not the real You
and you’re the cracked mirror, seven years of bad luck and wel-
come to Wonderland, you should’ve come quietly, Johnny-Boy, I
really need a cigarette, and this c an’t be happening. . . .
By the time the seventh “twin” came through the door, the
group had calmed down, clammed up. No one had spoken since
the unhinging twenty minutes ago. Call it sensory overload. Call
it shock. Call it brains filled with too many questions to make
nice-nice pleasantries like What’s your name and What do you do
and Jeez you look familiar did I know you in high school.
John gazed up at the newly arrived bearded, bespectacled,
bewildered man, but didn’t look closely. It didn’t matter. The new-
comer looked like the priest. He looked like the lunatic, the politi-
cian, the fainting man, the marine.
He looks like me. Just like me.
GET MORE OF
7TH SON: DESCENT
To purchase copies of 7th Son: Descent for holiday gifts, print the
order form at the end of this PDF document and present it
to your favorite local bookseller.

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
Books-A-Million
Indiebound
Visit
JCHutchins.net
Kind Bookseller:
So many of my friends and loved ones made the nice
list this year,
and deserve the best holiday gifts — books! Rather than shop online,
I want to support your store by purchasing these checked titles:
Divine Misdemeanors Tribes

Author: Laurell K. Hamilton Author: Seth Godin
Publisher: Ballantine Books Publisher: Portfolio
Quantity: ______________ Quantity: ______________
Vanished Linchpin (pre-order)

Author: Joseph Finder Author: Seth Godin
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press Publisher: Portfolio
Quantity: ______________ Quantity: ______________
Makers Trust Agents

Author: Cory Doctorow Authors: Chris Brogan and
Publisher: Tor Books Julien Smith
Quantity: ______________ Publisher: Wiley
Quantity: ______________
Wake
Author: Robert J. Sawyer Six Pixels of Separation
Publisher: Ace Author: Mitch Joel
Quantity: ______________ Publisher: Business Plus
Quantity: ______________
Boneshaker
Author: Cherie Priest The Whuffie Factor
Publisher: Tor Books Author: Tara Hunt
Quantity: ______________ Publisher: Crown Business
Quantity: ______________
7th Son: Descent
Author: J.C. Hutchins Jack Wakes Up
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin Author: Seth Harwood
Quantity: ______________ Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Quantity: ______________
About me:
Design production assistance by Sheer Brick Studio

NICKof Time!

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

NICKof Time!

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

In the NICKof Time!

FEATURING THE WORKS OF:

Click here to learn more.

All excerpts are generously provided by their creators and publishers,

While I may have rejected the monarchy, I cannot abandon my people.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

the smell of eucalyptus always made me think of southern

It is also available at these U.S.-based online retailers:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

fashion, on stories, on things that matter, and on things they

Why Should You Lead? And Why Now?

• The marketplace is rewarding organizations and individuals

Leadership isn’t difficult, but you’ve been trained for years to

Leadership Is Not Management

have leaders and movements make things happen.

It’s Good To Be King

Leading From The Bottom

THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL

scammed and brainwashed into fitting in, following instructions

YOU ARE A GENIUS

It is also available at these U.S.-based online retailers:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L auren Heller’s husband disappeared at a few minutes after ten

clamped over her mouth.

I t was a dark and stormy night.

“Woody,” he said. He was correcting me, not trying to be friends.

“What does one of these cost?”

I think I saw her eyelids move.”

Lauren said, “You don’t have to shout.”

on how you look at it.”

Traverse Development. Through a Plexiglas window I could see

He stared at me for a few seconds and then whined, “Come on,

It is also available at these U.S.-based online retailers:

Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New

Then things get really interesting.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

jewelry and antique cough-drop tins.

It is also available at these U.S.-based online retailers:

The book shows

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

The Connected Guy

‘‘I need $2,500 total. Anything over that is yours.’’

What Is the Truth, Anyway?

Why Trust Agents, and Why Now?

The Six Characteristics of Trust Agents

most necessary ingredients. Being a Human Artist, in a way, is about

It is also available at these U.S.-based online retailers:

Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math-and blind. Still,

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light.

“BrownGirl4 is now available,” JAWS said.

The awareness is unburdened by memory, for when reality seems

Wen Yi looked through the small, curtainless window at the rolling

him to take sips of water? Or should he go for whatever help might

“Hey, Yankee,” said a boy’s voice. It was Trevor Nordmann—the

Quan Li had obtained privileged status for someone only thirty-five

Dr. Kuroda had found Caitlin through an article in the journal

to her blindness, called Tomasevic’s syndrome, which was marked

come to Tokyo, the hospital at my university will perform the procedure

It took Quan Li only twenty minutes to get to the Ministry of Health

“He’s in intensive care,” said the woman.

“Then let me speak to your supervisor.”

Concentrating! Straining to perceive!

• The marketplace is rewarding organizations and individuals