Before Julia could figure out how she was supposed to get back inside her body, her vision strayed to the moonlight on the surface of the pond. In fact, her vision moved in that direction quite deliberately, in spite of the memory of her mother’s warning---or maybe because of it. She had always been curious as to what she would see in the cool white light.

Now she was trapped.

The trap was similar to when she’d accidentally stumbled upon the execution of the Chinese students. She could probably have broken it with a supreme exercise of will. yet something about the scene held her fascinated, in a sick sort of way. It was not a typical viewing. It was as if the pond had filled with gray smoke, or as if the place she had stumbled onto was cloaked in thick fog. The images were jumbled. There was a liquor store. There was a young man in a jacket. There was a girl. There was another guy. He was holding something black and hard.

It was a gun.