Lyle was a serial killer.  That he preyed on young Chinese women, and not kids was not much comfort, though really, victim preference never changed for killers like Lyle.  Creatures of habit, creatures of routine, all of us.  If he touched a single chestnut hair on Nate’s head, he was a dead man.     But Parker knew, perhaps better than anyone else alive except Jarod, exactly how compelling an actor Lyle was.  Even if all Lyle had managed to do was convince Nate of his benevolence before Parker and Jarod rescued him, he would cause pain.  Wellsprings of pain, wounds that time and experience might scar over, but would never quite heal.  Parker had hoped to protect what little remained of her family from the poison of all the early Centre secrets, the most painful of which had—she had believed—died with her baby brother.    Now, it was all she could do to keep those secrets from killing them all.    It was a terrible burden, a ripping away from her peaceful, previous life.  Now, even if she personally witnessed the body burned and the ashes scattered, she knew she would always look over her shoulder for him.  She would fear Lyle’s return until her own death.  There were many lives she would rather have lived than one so brutally thrust back into her past.    She must have made a small sound, because Jarod took one hand off the stick and rested it on the fingertips of her right hand, on top of the armrest.  For a long moment, she did nothing but stare.  If there was anyone the Centre had hurt more than Jarod, she didn’t know.  She wondered, when she’d thought of him, whether that childhood had brought him any happiness all, if he had ever known real tenderness there.      He must have; he had to learn that gesture from somewhere.    Buried feelings.  Once, when she was a girl younger than Nate was now, that touch would have taken her breath, set an electric shock through her.  She was no longer as capable of calling up passions.  Her emotions were powerful, overwhelming, sometimes, but rarely did one so strong and difficult as passion move her to anything but a defense, if she felt them at all.  Now, she could accept the gesture for what it was, the comfort of a friend.  A man she didn’t understand, a stranger she cared about, but a friend anyway.    Jarod glanced at her, his dark eyes weighted with something that was neither as simple nor as comfortable as compassion.  She wondered what occupied his thoughts when he was still; she wondered more why that look of pain cut her so suddenly.  It was not her fault he had lost the first half of his life.  It was not her guilt to bear, so why did she feel responsible?     Gently, ignoring the hurt in his face, she drew her hand away and set it in her lap.    Who was she kidding?  She had no earthly idea what kind of relationship to expect from Jarod, nor what kind of emotions he was trying to draw from her.  She curled the hand he had just touched into a fist.  She hated confusion.  It was one of her least favorite emotions.    Jarod’s expression had gone controlled and distant again, his eyes fixed on the horizon.  They would be landing soon, she guessed.  And the plane began to glide toward the ground as if she had cued it.    Trust.  Trust would be enough for both of them. ---    Midnight in the garden of evil.    Miss Parker took light, quiet breaths as she crept through the ventilation ducts on her stomach.  It was five hours later here, so she was wide awake, at least, adrenaline keeping the pain of cuts, scrapes, and aches away.  She’d snagged an elbow on a piece of metal coming in, and it was slowly leaking blood, but it wasn’t a terrible pain; nothing band-aids and Benadryl couldn’t cure.    Her arms and legs were already aching, though.  Ventilation-duct surveillance was not in her daily regimen of exercise.    And that’s what this was.  Surveillance and surveillance only.  When they went in for real, they’d have to know their way around.  Broots had managed to hack a diagram of the emergency exits for the Triumvirate facility, and from that, Jarod had managed to create a working map of the children’s camp.  But it wasn’t exactly reliable; there could have been rooms in the design that were never built; there could have been additions or changes from the original design.    And the map of the ducts themselves would be invaluable when they moved in.    So even though Parker was armed—to the teeth—she was not to attempt rescues on her own.  Jarod had phrased the order just like that.  Any other time, she would have challenged him. What gave Jarod the right to command anyone?  If anything, Miss Parker should be in charge of this expedition.  She was the one with the practical skills.  That was the reason Jarod had asked her here in the first place.    Well, the most obvious reason.    However, she didn’t have the will to argue with anyone at the moment.  If she started in on Jarod, on Broots, who joined them by satellite, she wouldn’t stop.  She would yell at them both until she was out of breath and words.  They had delayed the mission a week for planning and all the while she’d grown more frustrated, felt more useless.    Planning time we needed.    She had been able to contribute, a little.  But Jarod and Broots got into a genius vibe.  They were gone, lost in chemical compounds and plastique explosive, in complex equations and hours of computer hacking.  Both of them slept less than she did.    She would not tear into them for doing what they did best.  It wasn’t like they left her behind on purpose.  Smarter to direct her frustration toward this, toward what Miss Parker could do and Jarod couldn’t.  Now her hands were untied.  Besides, Jarod was right.     This was not a job to do blind and alone.    So she’d take his orders, and she’d use the surveillance equipment he’d built, and she’d do what had to be done and get her ass out of there.  Unless somebody brought out a screaming, tortured hostage.  Then all bets were off.    There.  Dim light cast yellowish lines just in front of her.  It was another vent that faced out into a room.  She sidled up to it and pushed the end of one of the devices through the slats.  This was one of Jarod’s special numbers; it estimated the dimensions of a room by bouncing beyond-the-range-of-hearing sounds off the walls.  Echolocation.  Like a bat.    There was no way to know whether or not it worked.   Concentrating on the machine kept her from the full impact of what was in the room.  Low bunk beds, each of them filled with small bodies that made noises, just like any preschool naptime.  There were too many children to count.  And this was the second dormitory.  She closed her eyes and turned away, waiting for the low beep which meant the machine was done.   She had no idea what the children did during the day.  All the rooms she’d seen so far that weren’t dorms were largely empty and painted with bright colors.  One room was a playroom, with toys and electronic equipment that would make any kid jump for joy.  No simlabs.  No experimental laboratories.  No closets filled with—she shuddered at a sudden memory—formaldehyde bottles.