Dark Rivers of the Heart

and diagrams played across the screen.
        Focusing on the winterscape once more, Spencer remembered snow forts, castles, tunnels, carefully tamped sled runs. More important: in addition to the physical details of old playgrounds in the snow, he faintly recalled the joy of laboring on those projects and of setting out on those boyhood adventures. Recollections of innocent times.
        Childhood fantasies. Happiness. They were faint memories. Faint but perhaps recoverable with practice. For a long time, he hadn't been able to remember even a single moment of his childhood with fondness.
        The events in that July not only had changed his life forever thereafter but had changed his perception of what his life had been like before the owl, the rats, the scalpel, and the knife.
        Sometimes his mother had helped him build castles of snow. He remembered times when she'd gone sledding with him. They especially enjoyed going out after dusk. The night was so crisp, the world so mysterious in black and white. With billions of stars above, you could pretend that the sled was a rocket and you were off to other worlds.
        He thought of his mother's grave in Denver, and he suddenly wanted to go there for the first time since his grandparents had moved him to San Francisco. He wanted to sit on the ground beside her and reminisce about nights when they had gone sledding under a billion stars, when her laughter had carried like music across the white fields.
        Rocky stood on the floor in back, paws planted on the front seat, and craned his head forward to lick affectionately at the side of Spencer's face.
        He turned and stroked the dog's head and neck. "Mr. Rocky Dog, more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, terror of all cats and Dobermans.
        Where did that come from, hmmm?" He scratched behind the dog's ears.
        Then with his fingertips, he gently explored the crushed cartilage that ensured the left ear would always droop. "Way back in the bad old days, did the person who did this to you look anything like the man back there in the black room? Or did you recognize a scent? Do the evil ones smell alike, pal?" Rocky luxuriated in the attention. "Mr. Rocky Dog, furry hero, ought to have his own comic book. Show us some teeth, give us a thrill." Rocky just panted. "Come on, show us some teeth," Spencer said, growling and skinning his lips back from his own teeth. Rocky liked the game, bared his own teeth, and they went grind at each other, muzzle to muzzle.
        "Ready," Ellie said.
        "Thank God," he said, "I just ran out of things to do to keep from going nuts."
        "You've got to help me spot them," she said. "I'll be looking too, but I might not see one of them."
        Indicating the screen, he said, "That's Godzilla?"
        "No. This is the gameboard that Godzilla and I are both going to play with. It's a grid of the five acres immediately around the house and barn.
        Each of these tiny grid blocks is six meters on a side. I just hope to God my entry data, those property maps and county records, were accurate enough. I know they're not dead-on, not by a long shot, but let's pray they're close. See this green shape? That's the house.
        See this? The barn.
        Here are the stables down toward the end of the driveway. This blinking dot-that's us. See this line-that's the county road, where we want to be."
        "Is this based on one of the video games you invented?"
        "No, this is nasty reality," she said. "And whatever happens, Spencer … I love you. I can't imagine anything better than spending the rest of my life with you. I just hope it's going to be more than five minutes."
        He had started to put the truck in gear. Her frank expression of her feelings made him hesitate, because he wanted to kiss her now, here, for the first time, in case it was the last time too.
        Then he froze and stared at her in amazement as comprehension came.
        "Godzillas looking straight down at us right now, isn't he?"
        "Yeah. 7) "It's a satellite? And you've hijacked it?"
        "Been saving these codes for a day when I was in a really tight corner, no other way out because I'll never get a chance to use them again. When we're out of here, when I let go of Godzilla, they'll shut it down and reprogram."
        "What does it do besides look