Miss Parker couldn't remember when she'd last been so aware of the passage of time.
She and Sydney had caught up to Jarod's last known location in time to stop for dinner at a rest stop and decide where to go from there. The most likely destination was further south, of course. Jarod had been making a beeline down the coast since the previous evening and had shown no obvious inclination to suddenly veer off east or, more bizarrely, westwards into the sea. The problem was, Jarod was an expert at evading them by now. If he knew that the signal on his tracker would die, he could have counted on them to continue along the most likely route while doubling back northwards. Hell, even now he could be hijacking their jet while it sat idling on a tarmac in Spokane. In the end, they decided to continue at least as far as Salem, it being the next sizeable city south of the last transmitted location.
There, in Salem, the trail went completely cold. They tried all their old tricks; or rather, Broots tried them, keeping an eye out for possible Pretends and mysterious avengers named Jarod in all the local media outlets. Nothing emerged. This was frustrating, but not what one could call surprising. It wasn't uncommon for it to take weeks to pick up Jarod's trail again after missing him at the scene of a Pretend.
On Wednesday, the day after their scheduled flight back to Blue Cove, the calls from the Centre started coming, first every few hours, then every hour. Parker envied Sydney his burgled phone. Unlike him, she had no excuse at hand for not being reachable. When she was next in touch with Broots, he conveyed the hounding he was getting from up top.
"They want to know why you haven't been in touch," he said. "They're starting to make threats. Mostly against me."
"Tell them the phone battery died, and I lost the charger."
"… What should I say when they ask how you told me that?"
"Tell them I used a pay phone," she said, as if it was obvious. As if she hadn't groped for the answer herself.
"Fine, but they're gonna ask why you didn't use the pay phone to call them."
She wasn't even sure if there was a point to the charade. For all she knew, it was obvious to the Centre higher-ups what had happened, as soon as the field team had failed to show up for their flight. Brigitte might be rubber-stamping the decision to withhold counteragent already.
On Thursday, Parker redoubled her attempts to call Jarod on Sydney's phone. All other possibilities had dried up.
"Couldn't you track the phone?" she asked Broots, cursing her negligence for not thinking of it sooner.
"He must have turned it off. That, or whatever is blocking his tracker's signal is blocking the phone, too. Either way, the phone's not any help."
Parker spent the next hour quietly indignant over the fact that apparently, all Jarod had to do to avoid having his phone tracked was turn it off. What use was Broots's fancy GPS technology if it was stymied by a power button?
"But he can't just turn off something implanted in his head," she reasoned. "So why can't we reach the tracker?"
"Maybe he's in a tunnel," said Sydney. His assistance had ground to a halt once they'd worked into the wee hours of Thursday morning. Since breakfast, his attention had turned to the motley collection of books in their bed-and-breakfast's modest library.
"A tunnel?"
"Sure. You've never lost a call when driving through a tunnel? The signal can't reach underground." He licked a finger and turned the page. "Hm. Or maybe he's underground."
He didn't sound all that interested in finding out.
When Friday rolled around, desperation was at an all-time high. Miss Parker's desperation, at least. Sydney was near-somnolent with his apparent lack of concern.
"I would have thought you'd be more worried," said Parker. She wouldn't admit to herself to being worried, per se, but her actions spoke louder than words. She'd snapped the leads on the last four pencils she'd used while poring over newspaper headlines. The morning's copy of The Oregonian was open on the table in front of her, and her fingertips were stained black. "Your boy's about to go on a murderous rampage, and even if we had the means to stop him, we don't have the first clue where he is. And you're reading."
"If Jarod thought there was any chance of that happening, he would have contacted us by now," Sydney replied. He was, indeed, flicking through his nth potboiler. "He's likely eyeing his next Pretend as we speak. You are the only one here who thinks we are running out of time."
"What if you're wrong? What if he's wrong?"
"He isn't."
The fifth pencil lead snapped.
"Fine, I get it, your faith in him is untouchable, but we need a backup plan in case by some fantastic miracle he miscalculated and is less than twenty-four hours from a one-man volcanic eruption."
They did have a backup plan if all else failed, though Parker would exhaust all other options before resorting to it. There was a Centre satellite office not too far away, the Pacific northwest hub for sweepers in the field. She could get a team on site with a few hours' notice. She could also return to Blue Cove, hat in hand and grovelling at Brigitte's feet for an extra vial of counteragent. Though humiliating, it would be the safest option.
Aversion to humiliation won out.
Sydney continued to be of no help whatsoever. Parker only succeeded in getting him to raise his head when her brainstorming veered into his field of expertise.
"You won't talk him down." He sniffed in disapproval. "Hypothetically, I mean. I've read into the mechanisms behind quicksilver madness, what little I'm allowed to know. He has to be able to make rational or compassionate decisions to respond to an argument of logic or emotion. QSM takes those out of the equation. He would be neurologically incapable of considering your argument."
Parker glared across the table at him.
"Are you just gonna shoot down ideas, or do you actually have any ideas of your own?"
Sydney retreated. "I already told you, there's no point to this."
"Hypothetically, then."
"Hypothetically?" He squinted at Parker like she was a crossword clue. "If I didn't have counteragent on hand, I'd use a sedative. A tranquillizer. But I'm telling you, you won't need it."
"Where would I get that?"
He shrugged. "Not the first clue."
The west coast has a reputation for its proliferation of unauthorized pharmacy, and Oregon is no exception to the rule. An hour past dusk, Parker returned to the B&B with a vial of clear liquid, a set of syringes, and a nosebleed. Sydney arched a curious eyebrow.
"Were you mugged?" he asked.
"They thought I was a cop. Said I 'walk like a cop', what the hell does that mean?" She dabbed at her streaming nose. "Ta very much for the help, Syd."
The sarcasm bounced right off him.
"Of course," he said.
"This will work, though? If Jarod goes red-eyed, this will keep him down?"
Sydney finally put down his book. "It might."
"Might?" She boggled at him. "Might?"
"I'm not a biochemist, Miss Parker," he said patiently. "I've seen aggressive patients sedated before, and it's worked well. What I don't know is how the sedative will interact with the quicksilver in his system, or with the gland itself. I would suggest wearing him out first, if you can."
"Wear him out?" Like you'd tire out a toddler for an early bedtime. "Great. I'll take him to the playground, shall I?"
"What?"
"Never mind." She sighed. "Wear him out, got it."
This was all hypothetical at the end of the day. Parker had picked up a police scanner on her whirlwind tour of Salem's underbelly, knowing full well that if the police heard about Jarod wigging out before she did, it would already be too late. In her mind's eye, a SWAT team closed in on a rage-addled Jarod down some dark alley and, with terrifying efficiency, gave him a neat little hole in the middle of his forehead, letting that sought-after brain of his dribble out onto the pavement.
She'd been awake too long. One way or the other, tomorrow would be a long day. She fell asleep to the buzz, chirp and rumble of the police scanner with its volume turned down low, and dreamed of red.
"It's transmitting again."
Broots had called at the tail end of breakfast with the first real news in days, breaking up the tense monotony of the morning. Parker froze with a chunk of banana half-chewed in her mouth.
"What is?" she asked, but she knew the answer.
"The tracker. It doesn't say why, it's just… it's back."
The timing was either very fortuitous or very frustrating. Worst-case scenario, Jarod had less than a day's worth of sanity left and had run too far to be reached in time. Best-case scenario… best-case scenario depended on one's definition of "best".
Without knowing precisely why, Parker dropped her voice to a whisper.
"Where is he?"
"Don't quote me on it, but the system says he's in Salem."
"What? Salem, Oregon?" She wasn't sure what to do with that information. They — she and Sydney — had paused their hunt in Salem. Had Jarod finagled things such that, somehow, the tracker was pointing to their position instead of his? "Let me guess, he's in a bed-and-breakfast near the airport?"
"No-o," said Broots slowly. "I dunno about the bed-and-breakfast part, but it looks like he's on the outskirts of town, to the west." Not Parker's and Sydney's position, then. Tentatively, she began to hope. Broots continued. "There's not a lot out there, at least according to the map I'm looking at. A roofing shop, a glass manufacturer, a motel, a car dealership, a storage unit yard, a landscaping firm… not a lot."
"The outskirts, you said. Is the tracker moving?"
"Doesn't look like it. If it's on him, he's not in a vehicle. Could be on foot, though, this thing's not that sensitive."
He gave her the closest street address to the tracker's position and signed off. Parker sat at the table, staring at the phone, her unfinished banana abandoned on a plate before her. He'd been here the whole time. That, or he'd gone away and come back, and she couldn't fathom a reason he would do that. Did he know they were here, too? Same old Jarod, thumbing his nose at them in broad daylight?
A sleep-rumpled Sydney paused on his way from his bedroom to the bathroom and frowned over at Miss Parker.
"Who was that on the phone?" he asked.
Parker hesitated. If she told him, he'd want to come with her. At that moment, she didn't want any company. More and more, Sydney was a weight clamped around her ankle.
"I'm calling gas stations around Salem to see if they spotted Jarod leaving town."
It wasn't an awful idea, now that she spoke it aloud. If this lead from Broots didn't pan out… well, by then, it would likely be too late.
Sydney nodded, following along with her invented logic. "That could give us a direction, if they caught where he was heading. It would be a start. Any luck?"
"Maybe. The description matched someone this guy saw, but he'd have to identify a photo of Jarod before I'd consider it a lead. I'm going to go have a word with him."
"I can be ready in ten minutes if you want to wait—"
"No time. I'll be back soon." As far as she knew, she was telling the truth on that count, at least. Then, as an afterthought: "While I'm gone, pack up and stay by the phone. I want to be out of here as soon as possible if we get a good lead."
She left, laden down with the sedative, her phone, a photo of Jarod, and the tiniest twinge of guilt at lying to Sydney. The lie might end up being fruitless in the end. Sydney was stuck on the idea that Jarod had escaped his new leash, and if he was right, she was walking into another trap or some Jarod-style taunt: neener, neener, you thought you'd catch me that easily?
But it was looking more and more like Sydney was wrong.
City outskirts are designed around a rejection of glamour and customer appeal. Sure, the glass manufacturing shop off the highway out of town boasted a 10% off sale and advertised its hours (open Tuesday to Thursday, 9 am to 2 pm!), but that was the limit. The motel didn't even advertise whether it had any vacancies.
Nobody at the roofing shop or glass manufacturer had seen Jarod, assuming the employees Parker spoke to were telling the truth. She got the same story at the car dealership, though she took it with a grain of salt. Jarod could easily hide in any one of the stickered cars, whether hunching his shoulders in the back seat or curled in the fetal position in the trunk. If it came to it, she could search the cars… but she hoped it wouldn't come to that.
Next, Parker pulled the rental car into the motel parking lot. It wasn't the last option in the area — along with the field of used cars, Jarod could also conceivably hide in a storage unit, or might even squat in one of the vacant warehouses she'd passed on the way here. It was, however, relatively easier to search.
The motel was one storey of salmon pink. The owner seemed to have a passion for wind chimes, and Parker didn't envy the guest who tried to catch forty winks there on a windy night. Inside the main office out front, the receptionist was sitting in front of a desk fan with his eyes closed, despite the autumnal nip in the air. He didn't look up as she came in.
"Morning," she said. She slapped a photo of Jarod on the desk, acting out the old routine as she had so many times before. "Have you seen this man?"
"Warrant?" grunted the receptionist. He still hadn't opened his eyes.
"I'm not a cop." She sighed. If this guy really dug his heels in, she could be at this for a while. She glanced around, taking in her surroundings. Next to the computer monitor was a framed photo of the receptionist and a pair of young boys. Both boys had the same shade of sandy blond hair as the receptionist, and there were no other adults in the picture. She clenched her throat so her next words came out a little croaky. "The man in this picture took my little boy from me. I just." She sniffed theatrically. "I just want to talk to him. I need to make him see reason."
That got the receptionist's attention, and at long last, he opened his eyes and peered at the photo.
"Oh, yeah. Him," he said. "Thought he had a weird energy, yeah. He reserved room eight, a four-night stay. I'm not gonna give you the key or anything, but you can try to raise him. Don't create a scene, though—" He gave Parker a warning look. "—I don't wanna call the cops, but I will. I don't need fights breaking out at my place."
"Wait, you're saying — he's here?" Something warm and shaky surged in her chest.
"Sure, yeah." He cast a sideways look at her, suspicion overcoming his features. "What, you weren't expecting — are you recording this? Are you wired? 'Cause that's—"
"No, it's fine," she said. She made a token effort to return to the throat-toad of motherly heartache. "I had almost given up hope."
Parker cast the man a watery smile and hurried out to the parking lot. If Jarod had seen the rental pull in, he might already be booking it out the back. Room eight, she could see now, had an advantageous view of both the parking lot and the highway leading into and away from Salem proper. In every other aspect, it looked identical to the rooms on either side of it. A pigeon-themed wind chime jutted out from the soil of the window box outside.
She'd need to kick down the door, at which point the receptionist would make good on his threat and call the cops, so she would have to be fast. Ducking out of sight of number eight's front window, she hastened to fill a syringe with tranquillizer. Jarod shouldn't have reached his saturation threshold yet, but she didn't want to be caught unprepared. Armed with this flimsy weapon, she neared the door, ready to heave the heel of her shoe into the weak area right below the lock — and stopped. It was open. The door wasn't quite flush with the frame.
It wasn't necessarily a good sign. She'd never known Jarod to make things easy on her.
The doorknob turned under her hand and the door swung open. She blinked, adjusting to the dim lighting within.
Her breath caught in her throat.
"Oh, God."
Parker's first thought, bizarre and out of place, was that the motel room's interior looked like a crime scene. This, at least, would explain the blood. Red was smeared thoughtlessly on every horizontal surface in view, as if an artist had foregone washing out their tools after fingerpainting the finishing touches on a bloody battle in tableau. The furniture provided by the motel had been pushed to the edges of the room and draped with translucent white tarps, leaving a clear space in the centre. Two pieces of furniture remained in this clearing: one solitary chair and a high, spindly table made of stainless steel, the latter incongruous with the rest of the decor. And there, sitting in the chair in the middle of the room, was—
"Jarod. No, no, no," she whispered. Jarod was slumped forward in the chair, eerily still, not the slightest twitch in answer to her words. She rushed forward and fell to her knees at his side. His hair was limp and dishevelled and dark with — she pushed the strands off his forehead and came away with red fingers — yes, dark with blood, sticky and matted with it.
"Jarod," she said again, taking his face in her hands, and never mind the blood. "Jarod, please don't — what the hell did you, did you — wake up, wake up, please wake up — Jarod!"
Then, a wonderful, miraculous sound: Jarod gasped, the rattle of air from his lungs wet and thick and heavy. His cradled face stirred in her hands and his eyes blinked open, eyelids heavy and thick, wet lashes clumped together. The whites of his eyes had a horribly familiar cast of pink, which had spread to the skin under his eyes, heavy pouches of skin thick with frayed, spilling capillaries. He glanced around at his surroundings with an expression of profound disappointment, looking everywhere but at her.
"Christ, Jesus Christ," Parker gasped. Her hands slid from his face and she braced them momentarily against his chest, steadying herself. She heaved a bone-deep breath. To her horror, there was something tight and insistent pushing its way up her windpipe — a sob. She fought it back down again and sagged sideways, winded from the effort of it. "I thought you had — what the hell, Jarod?"
He spoke, dehydrated lips pulling reluctantly apart.
"Miss Parker," he said. "You found the tracker signal. That's good." A little cheerful, a little tired, a little approving. Mostly, though, he sounded terribly sad. He looked down at himself. "I must have fallen asleep. It was a long night. And day, before that."
Parker got to her feet. Close to, the strange shapes she'd half-parsed from the doorway came into focus. Strangest of all was the mess on the steel table beside Jarod, featuring a tangle of wires converging on a tiny black box the size of Parker's thumbnail. The device and its peripheral wiring sat on a wad of paper towels, the white double-ply soaked through with red. Two of the wire ends were stripped, a pair of pliers twisting them together.
"Is that—?"
Jarod followed her gaze.
"The tracker," he said. His words were low and resentful. "I turned it back on this morning. You arrived quickly — you stayed nearby?"
"We were across town, near the airport. Sydney's still there. Jarod, what did you do? That's the tracker? But it was—" The scene solidified itself in her eyes. The tracker had been in his head. "You pulled it out."
Jarod nodded, then flinched as a headache rolled through his skull.
"Yeah. I blocked the signal for a while, then turned it off completely once I got my hands on it."
"… By doing brain surgery on yourself," Parker finished. She shook her head. "Congratulations, Jarod. You've reached a whole new level of crazy." She looked around. "So, where's the gland? Did you chuck it in the trash? Cox is going to riot."
Jarod didn't reply. He stared at some undefined point to the left of the front door. Parker waved a hand in front of his face.
"I said—"
"I heard you," he snapped. Ah. There he is. Jarod reached up behind his ear, to where Parker had first identified a second, hidden incision scar. Latex-clad fingers ran over the fresh sutures there. "It won't come out. I can't remove it."
Parker blinked in surprise. She wasn't sure she had ever heard Jarod admit he couldn't do something. On the basis of morality, perhaps. Never on the basis of skill.
It would explain the tracker signal, though. If he'd decided he couldn't get the thing out in time to avoid losing his sanity, he'd want someone around to stop him. Turning the tracker back on worked pretty well as short-hand for "I'm over here, come get me".
"You didn't have enough time," she guessed. She tried to summon her usual brusque attitude; it responded like an oar tangled in seaweed. "Well, better luck next time."
"I had plenty of time." Anger crept into his voice. Parker's fingers felt around in her jacket pocket for the syringe. She hoped she wouldn't need it. Meeting a rampaging Jarod with the tiniest sword imaginable looked a lot like a losing hand from her point of view. But Jarod wasn't finished. "I had plenty of time. It won't come out, I won't—" He let out a harsh breath. "I've looked at it from every angle. The graft is clever… I wish it wasn't, but it is. Clever and simple. Every permutation, every technique, every scenario I could think of, I ran through it. But."
The sentence was abandoned there, as Jarod pushed himself to his feet and grabbed a towel from where it hung across a couch arm. While he was running the towel under water in the bathroom, Parker took her eyes off him for long enough to spot a sheaf of papers lying on top of the provided desk, the contents obscured by yet another white tarp. She snaked her hand under the tarp and grabbed them, giving herself just enough time to read the name at the top — ANGUS, NIKKI — before she folded them in quarters and stuffed them in her jacket pocket with the unused syringe.
Jarod returned with the dampened towel and used it to attack the stains on his skin with fervour. Parker eyed him warily, watching him for further signs of aggression. If the gland was really still in there, she still had to treat him like a powder keg.
"But?" she prompted.
"As I said, I ran through all the possible results of removing the gland. Whether it's me doing it, or another surgeon." He rubbed at a caked-on stain on his neck. "In nineteen attempts out of every twenty, I die on the table."
Parker forgot the syringe in her pocket. What?
"And the twentieth?"
"Dumb luck. There's no perfect technique for removing it, not as far as I can tell. If I get very lucky, the gland might not hemorrhage, or the bleed might be minor enough that it only causes temporary oxygen starvation. It's a lot of ifs and mights. In practice: if the gland is removed, I'm dead."
Miss Parker had no words for that. They stood opposite each other, stunned and silent, like the only two skyscrapers left standing after an earthquake. Jarod looked like a man who'd been handed down a life sentence, and in a sense, she supposed he had. Sydney had been so sure that Jarod could wriggle his way out of this mousetrap, but here was the ostensible genius, tripping over the first obstacle thrown in his path, right out of the gate. Words like can't and won't and dead created a picture of permanence that was difficult to apply to him.
It was difficult to apply to herself, as well. If Jarod couldn't free himself from the gland, how could she ever free herself from her role as his handler? She saw years stretching ahead of her, years piling job upon soul-flaying job on her back until she was crushed under the weight of them. They'd make quite a pair: her, driven mad by the work, him, driven mad by the hitchhiker in his skull. Said hitchhiker would make itself heard soon, by the looks of it — new threads of red had reached his irises since the last time she looked him in the eye.
Jarod's laugh was all breath, no voice.
"I doubt I look half as disappointed as you do," he said. "Doesn't this make your job easier?"
"Of course I'm disappointed," she began, a blind swing of anger, then came up short as her gaze landed on that incision above his ear. Somehow, she doubted Jarod would sympathize with the hardships of keeping his shackles well-oiled. An inmate doesn't care that his jailer gets shit benefits and no stock options. She flipped her disappointment over to look at its underside, to turn competing agonies into commonality. "I don't want this either, you know. This whole mess. It's foul, I don't want it. For you, or… anyone."
After a beat, he believed her. She saw the moment it happened, when skepticism turned speculative. They might be remembering the same thing: Miss Parker jumping to her feet and storming out of conference room C, refusing point blank the appointment to asset handler. She'd told the entire room she didn't want this for herself. Now she'd added a new, unspoken angle: she didn't want it for him, either. It was news to her, too.
"No," said Jarod slowly. "I know you don't." It was the closest either of them would get to an apology for the past week. He frowned. "I thought you'd be angry. I thought, if you showed up at all, you'd be armed when you did."
Parker made a noise like an irritated cat. "Oh, I'm angry. I've got a pot full of wrath on the back burner, just for you. It can wait, though." She was abruptly, fiercely glad to be talking to a surly, walking-around Jarod, instead of a version of Jarod who'd bled out in a chair in the middle of his motel room. She pulled herself out of that morbid image and rallied. The hue of Jarod's eyes was deepening with each passing second. "We need to get you back before you start trying to strangle me again, everything else can wait. You should have a few more hours' buffer time, but I'm not trusting my neck to Cox's estimations."
Jarod nodded reluctantly. A thorny reminder passed across his brow, and he made for the desk, where he'd left the records of Angus's abortion procedure. He frowned at the bare spot there.
"Where—?"
Parker reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the purloined papers.
"I grabbed them when you weren't looking. Thought you might 'conveniently forget' on the way out if I didn't."
Jarod's shoulders tensed, then relaxed.
"If Lyle weren't in the picture, I might have." Discomfort flickered across his features. "If there had been time…"
He was ashamed, she realized. He'd chosen to save himself over Nikki Angus, and in the end, he'd managed neither. Perhaps he could have pulled one last Pretend on behalf of Angus if he'd foregone motel brain surgery altogether. They'd never know, now.
If Sydney had been assigned as Jarod's handler, this would be the point where he'd say something reassuring and philosophical. He'd try to make Jarod see that he was making the best choice from a selection of terrible choices, in choosing to comply. That Angus would, gun to her head, choose her life over her career aspirations. That he was saving the would-be governor, the only way he could.
But Parker was Jarod's handler, not Sydney, so she stowed the records back in her pocket and mutely jerked her head toward the door.
They headed out to the car together. Both were as unsteady as the other, Parker with her bum leg, Jarod swaying on his feet from a long night of surgery. As they passed the motel's front office, the receptionist's eyes and the tip of his nose were visible through the window blinds, watching their progress. Parker caught the man's eye. He waved sheepishly.
She was about to pull the car out of the parking lot when Jarod, who had taken the back seat in the name of precaution, stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
"You said on the phone that you don't have extra counteragent," he said. "Has that changed?"
"No."
Jarod's brow crinkled in worry. "Then how—"
Parker drew the syringe from her pocket. Would it work? Sydney had said that she'd have a better shot if she tired him out first. The answer was in Jarod's face, hang-dog and sagging from sheer exhaustion. If he wasn't "tired out", no one was.
"I have this. A sedative."
Jarod eyed it speculatively. "Surgical-grade?"
"Surgical — does it matter? I don't know, it's supposed to knock you out. Would you rather go into QSM?"
He opened his mouth as if to debate the issue, then closed it and draped his arm over the back of the front passenger seat. She could still see the pair of pin-prick marks from the first two counteragent injections. Months from now, his arm would be riddled with purpled track marks. She'd seen abused arms much like his last night, when she went downtown for the sedative kit.
Seconds after the needle slid in, Jarod's eyelids sagged dangerously and he lowered himself into a supine position across the back seat, lethargic and careful and slow.
"Sweet dreams, Jarod," she muttered, watching him sink into a troubled sleep. At the last moment before he lost consciousness, the corner of his mouth twitched in a smile.
As soon as she was sure he was out, Parker leaned her forehead against the steering wheel, hands gripping at ten and two like it was all that tethered her to Earth. Deep, strident inhale, wobbling exhale. What was she doing? Where was the wisdom in hanging on to a tiger by its tail like this?
Sydney was so sure Jarod would find a way out of this, all on his own. Well, here was one door closed in his face — Jarod couldn't simply tear the wretched thing out and run. The Centre would have to use pliers to rip the traitorous thought out of her, but in the privacy of Parker's mind, she wished it could have been that easy.
A/N: It occurred to me this week that y'all over on FFN don't know how long this fic is gonna be because, as far as I know, this site doesn't have that function. This is chapter 8 of 34.
