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  After telling Zeb what a model kid Adam was, she would go on to say that Adam's line-toeing was all the more special, all the more praiseworthy, considering ... then she would trail off because Adam's mother, Fenella, was never mentioned at length if Trudy and the Rev could help it. You'd think they'd have used her and her scandalous douchebag behaviour as a stick to beat Adam with - disparage his genetic inheritance - but they never did. He was too good at innocence, or the show of it, with his big blue eyes and his thin, saintly looking face.

  Zeb got hold of some old photos of Fenella - they were on a thumbdrive, at the bottom of a storage box in the closet, the one he was frequently locked into. He'd hidden a mini-light in there so he could see in the dark. He found the drive, then nicked it and plugged it into the Rev's computer to see what would happen. The thing still worked: there were about thirty pics of Fenella, some with tiny Adam, a few with the Rev, none of them smiling much. The thumbdrive must've been an oversight because there were no other pictures of Fenella in the house. She didn't look in any way slutty; she had the same thin, truthful, big-eyed look that Adam had.

  Zeb had quite a crush on her: if only he could talk to her and tell her what was going on she would be on his side, she'd despise the whole setup as much as he did. She must have done, because hadn't she run away? Though she didn't look like the running-away type, she didn't look strong enough.

  Sometimes he felt jealous of Adam, because he'd once had Fenella for his mother, and all Zeb had was Trudy. Then he'd let resentment of Adam's failsafe punishment evasion system get the better of him, and he'd mess with Adam in private: turd in the bed, dead mouse in the sink, switch the hot and cold taps in their shower - he'd figured out plumbing by then - or just apple-pie his sheets. Boy meanies. The Rev had done well out of his oil stocks, in addition to the gushing wells of his parishioners' savings, and they lived in a big house, with Trudy and the Rev at the opposite end to Adam and Zeb. So if Adam yelped they wouldn't hear him. Though he never did yelp; he just beamed out the reproachful I-forgive-you gaze that was ten times more annoying.

  Sometimes Zeb would tease Adam about Fenella. He'd say she must have tattoos all over, tits and all; he'd say she was a cokehead; he'd say she went off with a biker, no, a dozen bikers, did them all, one after the other; he'd say she was peddling it on the street in Vegas to deranged addicts and syphilitic pimps. Why was he saying those gross and repugnant things about the woman he considered his other self, his fairy-dust spirit helper, next door to a marble goddess? Who knows?

  The strange thing was, Adam didn't talk back. He'd just smile in an eerie way, as if he knew something Zeb didn't.

  Adam never ratted about Zeb's juvenile pranks. Even then he was a secretive little bugger. Anyway, the two of them mostly worked as a team. At school - CapRock Prep, a private school funded by one of the OilCorps, boys only - they were known as the Holy PetrOleum Brats because of their dad's position, but nobody picked on them openly, not once Zeb was big enough. Adam alone would have been a sitting duck, he was so stringy and transparent; but if anyone lifted a finger in his direction, Zeb would beat the crap out of them. He only had to do that twice. Word got around.

  Schillizzi's Hands

  In face of the brainwashing team of Trudy and the Rev, Adam and Zeb took joint evasive action. What were they evading, apart from punishment? Anything that might lead in the direction of the path of righteousness, the Holy PetrOleum Path, the path the Rev and Trudy were forever urging them to tread.

  In Adam's case, this action took the form of blue-eyed lying - he could make just about anyone except Zeb think he was innocent as an egg unlaid - whereas Zeb had the instincts of a sneak thief. Time spent in the punishment closet had its upside, hairpins had their uses, and it was not long before he had the secret run of the house, tiptoeing through the bureau drawers and emails of his elders while they believed him securely imprisoned among the winter coats and outdated consumer electronics. Lockpicking became his hobby, and soon enough, with the aid of clandestine sessions on the school's digital facilities and free time at the public library, hacking became his vocation. In his fantasy world no code could keep him out, no door could shut him in, and fantasy merged into reality the older and more practised he became.

  At first he stuck to porno peepsites and pirated acid rock and freakshow music - all forbidden by the Church, needless to say: it went in for buttoned-up collars and public chastity vows, and its music sucked like a thousand Monster Leeches from Outer Space. So Zeb would earphone the Luminescent Corpses or the Pancreatic Cancers or the Bipolar Albino Hookworms while trolling onscreen for ever-new and cunningly deployed girl body parts. No harm in it really: they'd already made the videos, so what he was doing was just a form of time travel. He wasn't causing anything.

  Then, once he felt ready, he decided to up the ante and really test his powers.

  The Church of PetrOleum was high-tech enabled, with a dozen sophisticated online social media and donation sites skimming the cash from the faithful 24/7. The security on those sites was supposed to be as foolproof as such things got, with two layers of coding knitware any potential klepto would have to penetrate before making off with the debit accounts. And the system did keep out such kleptos; but it had no defence against an insider job, such as the one Zeb managed to pull off so spectacularly when he was barely sixteen.

  The Rev's weak point was his belief in his own invulnerability, so he was careless; and as he had no head for number-letter combos, he wrote down passwords. Then he hid them in places so obvious even the Easter Bunny would scoff. The cufflink box? The toes of the Sunday shoes? Retro-cretin, sighed Zeb, extracting the wafers of paper, memorizing their cryptic scribblings, then replacing box or shoe in its exact previous location.

  Once possessed of the keys to the kingdom, Zeb diverted the river of donations - not all of it, a mere .09 per cent, margin of error, he wasn't lobotomized - into several accounts of his own devising, making sure that the donors got the standard grovelling thank-you and guilt-inducing pep-talk message from the church, plus a hate slogan or two directed at the Enemies of God's Holy Oil: "Solar Panels Are Satan's Work," "Eco Equals FreakO," "The Devil Wants You to Freeze in the Dark," "Serial Killers Believe in Global Warming."

  For his stash-the-cash hideaways he used an identity pieced together from fragments he'd appropriated by stealth attacks on fuzzily fenced targets, such as 3-D avatar gaming destinations, AdoptAFish and similar bioweepy charities, and Feel-iT-enabled porno installations in suburban malls. ("Haptic feedback gives you true, stimulating flesh-on-flesh sensations! Say goodbye to faked screams and groans, this is the real thing! Warning: Do Not Expose Your Electronic Device to Moisture. Do Not Place Terminals in Your Mouth or Other Mucous Membrane Regions. Severe Burns May Result.")

  No surprise, really, for Zeb to discover during one of his trolling expeditions that the Rev himself was a frequent visitor to the haptic wanksites, though he indulged himself at home - he couldn't afford to be caught in a mall - and hid the feedback terminals in his golf club bag. He favoured those sites involving whips, penetration with bottles, and nipple-burning. He was also a big fan of the historical re-enactment beheading sites, which were relatively expensive, maybe because of the props and costumes - "Mary, Queen of Scots: Feel This Hot Red-Head Spurt," "Anne Boleyn: Royal Slut! Did It with Her Brother, She'll Do It with You, Then You Get to Slice Her Dirty Little Neck," "Katherine Howard: Turn This Stone Cold Fox Stone Cold with One Whack of Your Powerful Blade," "Lady Jane Grey: Make This Elite Virgin Pay the Price of Snootiness, Blindfold Optional." These gave you the sensation, right in your own hands, of what it felt like to decapitate a woman with an axe. ("Fun! Historic! Educational!")

  For extra payment you could decapitate them without their clothes on, which was more exciting. Zeb took a few turns at it himself - courtesy of the Rev's account, which he cooked accordingly - so he had grounds for the clothes versus naked comparison. A naked woman on her knees, about to lose her head - why was this
riveting? Was he callous or a psychopath or something? No, psychopaths had a brain chip missing, according to Adam, who read up on these things. They couldn't feel empathy; screaming and tears were just annoying noises as far as they were concerned. So they couldn't feel shitty and/or pervy about what they were doing, not like Zeb.

  He thought about hacking in and recoding the program so that when the axe came down you got the sensation not in your hands but in your own neck. What would it feel like to have your head chopped off? Would it hurt, or would the shock cancel that out? Or would you get a rush of empathy? But too much empathy could be dangerous. Your heart might stop.

  Were those naked, kneeling, and shortly to be headless women real or not? He guessed not because reality online was different from the everyday kind of reality, where things hurt your body. And they wouldn't be allowed to murder real women right onscreen: surely that was illegal. But the effects were so amazing and 3-D that you ducked the gush of blood.

  Adam didn't see the attraction of these activities once he found out about them, which he did because Zeb couldn't resist the urge to share his knowledge about the Rev's secret life. Which was now also, to some extent, his own.

  "That is depraved," was Adam's comment.

  "Right! That's the point! What are you, gay?" Zeb said, but Adam only smiled.

  The Rev's frustrated kink urges must have been in need of an outlet: Zeb was now too large and surly to take a chance on as a sado-subject. He might hit back, and the Rev was at heart a coward, so the belting and piss-drinking and imprisonment were now in the past. Nor was Trudy an option for the warped bastard, since - despite her stand-by-your-mealticket subservience - she would never put up with leather halters and nipple piercing and flagellation with a cane, or eating her own excrement. Information is power, so Zeb thanked his lucky stars for the online haptic-feedback sites, and made a record of the number of times the Rev had used them, and took care to store away this Santa's packsack of red velvet information for future use. Though the Rev might manage to electrocute himself via his own dick in the meantime - blow himself up like an overboiled hotdog - and Zeb would sure like to be an eye at the keyhole for that hilarious little fiasco. He briefly considered rewiring the haptic terminals to achieve this very effect, but was unsure of the voltage it would take. A Rev just badly scorched rather than no-refunds dead could mean big trouble: he'd figure out who did it, for sure.

  By this time Zeb had magic fingers: he could play code the way Mozart played the piano, he could warble in cuneiform, he could waltz through firewalls like a tiger of old leaping through a flaming circus hoop without singeing a whisker. He could slip into the PetrOleum Church accounting - both sets of books, the official set and the actual one - in a few swift moves, and he did, on a regular basis. This went on for a couple of years, as the .09 per cents piled up, and Zeb grew taller and sprouted more body hair, and worked out in the gym at CapRock Prep, where he took care to keep in the middle of the bell curve gradeswise, especially in IT, so that his extraterrestrial hacking talents would not be suspected.

  In six months he would graduate, and what then? He had some notions, but so did his parental overseers. The Rev had made it known that through his connections he could get Zeb a coveted job in the northern oil desert, driving one of the humungous machines that wrangled oil-rich bituminous gravel. It would make a man of Zeb, he said, leaving the possible definition of man floating in the air between them. (Child torturer? Religious fraudster? Online girl decapitator?) Also, the money was good. Then, when he'd done that for a while, Zeb could decide on what calling he wished to pursue.

  There were three subtexts to this: 1) The Rev wanted Zeb to go very far away because he was beginning to be afraid of him, and rightly so. 2) With any luck, Zeb would get lung cancer, or a third eye, or scales like an armadillo: the air up there was so toxic you mutated in about a week.

  And 3) Zeb was not brilliant. Not like Adam, who - in the hopes that he would carry on in the old man's fraudchurch biz - had been sent to Spindletop U. and had majored in PetrTheology, Homiletics, and PetrBiology; this last, as far as Zeb could see, required you to learn biology in order to disprove it. That took a certain kind of intellectual adroitness, a kind - it was implied - that Zeb lacked. Galley slave would be more his level.

  "I think that's a wonderful idea," said Trudy. "You should be so grateful to your father for taking all that trouble. Not every boy has a father like yours."

  Smile, Zeb ordered himself. "I know," he said. The word smile meant "carving knife" in Greek. He'd found that on the web, when he wasn't decapitating historical figures.

  Zeb missed Adam when he wasn't there, and he suspected it was mutual. Who else could they talk to about the improbable sublayers of their lives? Who else could do a hilarious word-for-word imitation of the Rev's Prayer to Saint Lucic-Lucas, to whom God had revealed the Holy Oil?

  When they were apart they avoided text messages, phone calls, or anything else with an electronic signal: the internet, as was well known, leaked like a prostate cancer patient, and the Rev was most likely snooping, if not on Adam, at least on Zeb. But when Adam would come back for vacations it was old-home week. Zeb would welcome him with an amphibian in the shoe or an arthropod in the cufflink box or a burr or two artfully stuck onto the inside of his Y-fronts, though they were getting too old for this kind of japery, so it was more of a nostalgia thing.

  Then they'd go out onto the tennis court and pretend to play a game, and murmur together in brief snatches across the net, comparing notes. Zeb would want to know if Adam had got laid yet, a question that was skilfully evaded. Adam would want to know how much money Zeb had skimmed off from the Church and sequestered in his secret stowaway accounts, since it was their firm plan to disappear from the Rev's charmed circle once they had sufficient funds.

  It was Adam's last vacation before graduating. Zeb was sitting at the Rev's home office desk monitor with a pair of medical latex gloves on, humming under his breath, while Adam stood watch at the window in case the Rev's gas-guzzling tycoon car or Trudy's Hummerette drove up.

  "You've got Schillizzi's hands," Adam said to him in that neutral way he had. Was it admiration or merely observation?

  "Schillizzi?" said Zeb. "Hot crap, the botulistic old bugger's embezzling again, only this is a lot more! Look at this!"

  "I wish you wouldn't swear," said Adam in his mildest voice.

  "Stuff yourself," said Zeb cheerfully. "And he's stashing it in a bank account in Grand Cayman!"

  "Schillizzi was a well-known white-hat twentieth-century safecracker," said Adam, who was interested in history, unlike Zeb. "He never used explosives, only his hands. He was legendary."

  "I bet the old fart's planning a jump," said Zeb. "Here today, then zap, and the next morning he's sucking up martinis on a tropical beach and renting lick-your-cleft bimbettes, leaving the fuckin' faithful out in the cold with their pants down."

  "Not in Grand Cayman, he won't," said Adam. "They're mostly underwater. But those banks have relocated to the Canaries; there are more mountains there. Only they've kept the Grand Cayman corporate names. Preserving a tradition, I suppose."

  "Wonder if he'll take Trusty Fusty Trudy with him?" said Zeb. Adam's knowledge of banking surprised him, but then Adam's knowledge of a lot of things surprised him. It was hard to know what Adam knew.

  "He won't take Trudy," said Adam. "She's becoming too financially demanding. She suspects what he's up to."

  "You know this how?"

  "An educated guess," said Adam. "The body language. She's giving him the narrow eyes at breakfast, when he's not looking. She's nagging him about vacations, and when are they going to take one. Also she's feeling held back in her interior decoration ambitions: note her on-show collection of wallpaper samples and paint chips. She's tired of playing the angel wife for the benefit of the congregation. She feels she's helped to create the domestic surplus, and she wants more scope."

  "Like Fenella," said Zeb. "She wanted more scope t
oo. At least she got out early."

  "Fenella didn't get out," said Adam in his neutral voice. "She's under the rock garden."

  Zeb turned in the Rev's ergonomic swivel chair. "She's what?"

  "Here they come," said Adam. "Both at once, it's a convoy. Power down."

  Mute and Theft

  "Say that again," said Zeb once they were on the tennis court and safely out of hearing. Neither of them was much good at tennis, but they pretended to practise. They stood side by side, serving balls over the net or, more often, into it. Their rooms were bugged - Zeb had discovered that years ago, and enjoyed feeding misinformation into his desk lamp and then looping it back to himself via the Rev's computer - but it was best to play dumb by leaving the bugs where they were.

  "Under the rock garden," said Adam. "That's where Fenella is."

  "You're sure?"

  "I watched them burying her," said Adam. "From the window. They didn't see me."

  "This wasn't a ... you didn't dream it?" said Zeb. "You must've been fucking fetal!" Adam gave him the fisheye: not only did he not approve of obscenity, he never seemed to get used to it. "I mean, really young," Zeb amended. "Kids make stuff up." For once he was shaken: he could barely think straight.

  If Adam's story was true - and why would he invent this? - it changed Zeb's whole view of himself. Fenella had shaped his story about his past, and also the one about his future, but suddenly Fenella was a skeleton: she'd been dead all along. So, no secret helper waiting out there: he'd never had one. There was no understanding family member he would someday locate, once he'd found the Exit sign and unlocked the invisible locks and cut his way out of the Rev's chicken-hawk-wired coop. He was flying a wing-damaged solo, all alone except for his joined-at-the-head-wound brother, who could well turn pious on him for real, he had the talent. Then Zeb himself would be drifting in Voidsville, out in the cold and dark, like a torn-loose astronaut in one of those old five-tomato space flics. He slammed a ball into the net.