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a couple of eggs inside the circle, where they would be cooked by the hot geothermal spring. Eating eggs cooked like this was considered extra healthy. I stayed there two months, enjoying the lush beauty of Taiwan and breathing in sulfurous air. My TB was cured.
    Now I breathed in unsulfurous steam, more than a hundred years later. I was jolted back to the present. Was it just two days ago that I’d been in London? Yesterday? Unexpectedly, tears stung my eyes beneath my closed lids as, once again, the cabdriver’s face loomed before me. Was he still alive? What was his family thinking, feeling, doing?
    I sat up, guilt sticking to me like soapy film, and grabbed the shampoo. I hadn’t done it—it had been Incy. All I’d done was… walk away.
    I washed my hair and dunked underwater to rinse it. The water was starting to cool a bit, and I took a sea sponge off a hook, soaped it up, and scrubbed all over my body, feeling as if I were taking off the top layer of skin. Everywhere I scrubbed turned pink and tingly, and I felt weirdly clearheaded, breathing clearly, seeing the water start to swirl down the drain. I felt clean and smooth-skinned and alive.
    Stupid, huh?
    Luckily, I got back to my room without seeing anyone else. I found my bed turned down and a cup of hot tea on the small table beside it.
    â€œNo chocolate?â€

 
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    CHAPTER 7
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    A t breakfast several people smiled or said hello, and the ones who didn’t just seemed like they weren’t morning people, not like they totally hated my guts already. I didn’t eat much, felt uncomfortably full really fast, but the toasted bread with butter was surprisingly satisfying, and the bacon had much more flavor than bacon usually did—salty and chewy and crisp with fried fat.
    After I’d dutifully carried my empty plate into the kitchen, River said, “Come with me.â€

 
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    CHAPTER 8
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    C ould not find the effing map. Could not remember how the hell to get back to the highway to Boston. My breakfast now sat like acid-laced lead in my stomach as I pulled too fast into the parking lot in front of MacIntyre’s Drugs on the main street of this town. Literally, on Main Street. There was one main street, and this was it. God, get me out of here.
    To add to my jangled nerves, my feeling of unease, almost panic, for lack of a better word, was seeming to increase the farther I got from River’s Edge. What was going on? What was hanging over me? For the past twenty-four hours, mynervous breakdown had seemed to tamp down a little. It was back in full force now—a howling in my brain that told me to hide. My fingers brushed the back of my neck, made sure my scarf was there.
    A couple of local kids, dressed in goth black and smoking cigarettes, sat with their backs against the building in a wide alley between the drugstore and the next store over, Early’s Feed and Farmware. One of the kids, a girl with green-streaked hair and a silver hoop in her nose, decided to mess with an outsider. She called, “You can’t park there. Handicapped spot.â€

 
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    CHAPTER 9
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    T hat night the dreams came again.
    I left Clancy’s right after Kim’s spell. I was the only one who’d minded it, the only one whose drinks curdled in her stomach at the thought of the tarred roof upstairs littered with bright bits of dead fluff. Plus, what with the shocking headache and the usual nausea, I’d begged off, leaving Beatrice, Kim, and the others looking at me with bemused expressions. It had been about midnight, and I’d gone back to my hotel, feeling unclean.
    I’d worried about not being able to sleep, but exhaustion and worry hammered me into a deep unconsciousness thatsucked me down, down into the black horror of my childhood, back to the night my life first changed.
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    A big shaking feeling woke me, and I glanced across at my