He hadn't stopped moving since he'd landed in Capetown seven months ago. All the guidebooks said not to hit South Africa in June -- that the winter months could be gloomy. But he wasn't here for the weather, or for sightseeing, and he was just as glad not to arrive with an influx of tourists. Too many faces, too many people. Hard, with a blind side the size of . . . well, Africa, to be comfortable for the first time without someone he knew on his left.

He'd bought a Jeep from a British man in Capetown whose accent reminded him of Giles. There was a steady traffic in cars sold by homeward-bound expats to new arrivals, and he found his Jeep through a notice on the message board at the American Embassy. The man was headed back to London for the first time in ten years and was eager to hear how things were there. Xander struggled to answer questions -- he'd only been there for a week or two, how the hell would he know how things had changed? -- but he ended up getting a reasonable price on the Jeep, some valuable tips on driving on the left, and a business card with instructions to call if he needed advice, so he couldn't have done that badly. Either that or he just seemed so out of his depth that the man felt sorry for him. He put the card in the glove compartment of the Jeep, but he knew he'd never call. He named the Jeep Toto, though if anyone asked, it was all about loyal comradeship during a strange journey, and not so much about bad '80s pop music.

He had a plan. In the back of the Jeep was camping gear, including a kerosene heater, a supply of food, an extensively stocked toolbox, four extra gas cans, and maps. Road maps, of every region that he could find, topographical maps, and a map of the whole continent that Willow had prepared for him, each country outlined in heavy marker, color-coded and labeled. Blue were the countries he could safely go to by himself, like Benin, Cape Verde, and Gabon. Green meant places like Chad, Ethiopia, Guinea, Nigeria, Rwanda, where he should hook up with the UNDF or the Red Cross or the WFO. She had programmed the State Department's travel advisory line into his satellite phone, and he was supposed to check out the current status of each destination before he even thought about hitting the border. In some places, travelers were advised to move only during daylight, and only in groups. He thought it sounded a lot like Sunnydale, actually.

But then there were other countries, outlined in red. Thirteen of them on the map, including Algeria (No), Burundi (Hell No) and Somalia (No fucking way). When he'd first talked with Giles about coming here, he'd listened noncommittally to the instructions that he wasn't to take unnecessary risks, that no one expected Xander to travel into a war zone to find Slayers.

From South Africa he went to Namibia, where he saw red dunes in the desert and drank walende and mataku -- he bought an extra bottle of the watermelon wine and put it in the back of the Jeep. Next time he was in a city, he'd send it to Giles.

It was in Namibia that he saw his first hyena. It was strangely anticlimactic -- he'd been expecting more, without realizing it. Maybe the hyenas got more out of it than he did, because after that, he heard them at night whenever he was out past the cities, their barking laughs reaching his ears where he lay curled in his sleeping bag in the back of his Jeep. He always slept on his left side, with a cross hung in the back window, and both a stake and a revolver under his pillow.

When he reached the northernmost reaches of Namibia, he sat behind the wheel, eating cold beef stew from a can and contemplating Angola, clearly outlined in red on his map. They'd always been so wrapped up in their own nightly battleground that much of what was going on elsewhere in the country, let alone the world, passed them by, but he vaguely remembered news stories about wars where people had been massacred with machetes -- dismembered, or cut entirely in half. He speared a pasty potato and wondered. How long it would take someone to die like that? Would they be aware of the pain, or would death be immediate? Would they understand what had happened to them? Or would they be stuck for long minutes looking at parts of their body and wondering why they didn't match up before their brain finally gave up trying to make sense of it?

The war in Angola had lasted 25 years. Longer than he'd been alive, but a blink of the eye to someone who'd lived to be over a thousand. The war was over now, but there were millions of homeless people, crime and violence. Leftover fighters, barely old enough to shave and already past their prime. Damaged people, maimed people, hungry and dazed, and Xander thought it sounded like his kind of place.

Stay away from the places with minefields, Xander. We don't want you coming home with any parts missing.
You mean, any more parts missing.
Not funny.
Sorry, Wills.
Just promise me you'll be careful.
I promise.

Buffy and Willow had both cried when they'd hugged him at the airport. Dawn had been suspiciously misty as well. Giles hadn't given anything away, stiff upper lip and all that, but he'd smiled with a warmth that Xander wasn't accustomed to seeing, and there had been a rare hug, and a quiet whisper.

Do come back safely, Xander. They've already lost too much.

He sighed, and refolded the map. Botswana was supposed to be nice. Maybe he'd head for Angola later, when he'd found a Slayer or two. There would be time to cover the more dangerous ground once he had a super-powered bodyguard.

There wasn't an easy way to find what he was looking for. The international aid organizations had networks set up to help family members find each other, where refugees from the many war-torn regions left their names, asking for the missing or the dead. But Xander didn't have names, or even numbers. It would be easier to pinpoint specific Slayers, Willow had said, when there were fewer of them to find. "It's like a big tangled ball of bits of string," she'd said. "I can see the ball, but I can't find particular bits until it's less . . . tangled." It all made sense to the thinking members of the gang -- her and Giles and Dawn -- and that was all that really mattered to Xander. Even if this trip was a wild goose chase, it got him away from Cleveland, away from Willow and Buffy and Giles, who all understood, and please, god, Andrew, who thought he did, to somewhere where he'd never seen so much blessed sky in his life.

No easy way, and he couldn't very well just ask outright. So wherever he went, he talked, and listened. He was a cultural researcher, collecting stories, or so his visas claimed, and he traveled through towns and villages and sat around fires that kept away the chill night air, and showed them what he was looking for. Stories, about young girls, powered by the gods, fighting against the darkness.

The reluctance to speak of things that had happened in Sunnydale was almost overwhelming. He felt unsure, guilty, as if he should be asking for permission, almost forgetting that he'd been sent here for just this reason. All the lies to their families, the excuses made to teachers and bosses. Covering for each other when possible, giving each other moral support through the groundings and detention when it wasn't. Even if they tried to do other things, be with other people, their lives were defined by what they knew, what no one else did. Vampires are real. Demons exist. Buffy kills them. Sometimes.

Even here, the boundaries were invisible but impenetrable, as his life unfolded into the pleasant deception of campfire stories. Scary, yes, to give a prickle of gooseflesh along the arms and the back of the neck, but all in fun. The stories happened to someone else, and that someone else? Fictional. The Xander in his stories never had a name. Always "he," always "the boy," never "I." If anyone ever recognized the truth in his tales, matched his truth with one of their own, then he could be real. Only then.

He was good at this, and getting better. Buffy always needed to be prompted to tell her stories and then did so tersely, comically condensed. "I saw, I slayed. Let's eat." Willow would get distracted in midstream, adding insertions from different stories altogether. Andrew was hopeless, forgetting that it was about the story, not about who told it. Of all of them, Giles was the best, and Xander wondered if that was a Watcher thing, to always know that you never would be the point of the story.

So he told them of a girl. He told them of a boy-wolf, and of a vampire with a soul. He told them of witches and ghosts and hyena spirits and invisible girls. And when the nights were very dark, and his face was hidden by shadows, he'd tell of a beautiful demon who had lived for vengeance, but who had been made human and forgotten everything she'd learned, forgotten that men are cruel. But every story always included a girl who was given powers beyond human strength, dreams beyond human knowledge. Sometimes he could feel the stories as if they were happening all over again, and then he'd tell of how the girl gave her life to a hellgod to save the world, because on those nights he knew he could tell the story as it deserved. When he finished, he would always ask if they had ever heard such stories, if they had ever heard of such girls.

Sometimes he wished that he could tell his own stories, and neatly cut those powerful girls out and instead tell a sweet story with a happy ending, but he never did, because that wasn't what he was here for, and because that was simply too much fiction for him to carry with him.

He was building the framework for a reservoir in Swaziland when Giles called him, worried. It had been over a month since the satellite phone had rung, and for a long, heart-stopping moment, he couldn't identify the sound. When he realized, he had to scramble for it, buried under his camping gear in the back of his Jeep, next to the still-blank journals that they'd sent with him. Giles had set up an account that they could all draw on while they traveled, and was concerned that Xander wasn't taking much. Long stretches between withdrawals, and then never much.

"Honestly, Xander, you're spending about a quarter of what Willow and Kennedy are spending together, and you don't want to know how much Buffy and Dawn are going through."

"Yeah, well, Italy's more expensive than Africa."

"And also it would seem that Africa doesn't have as many places to buy shoes."

"They're looking for Slayers in shoe stores?" He smiled to think of Dawn and Buffy, shopping in Italy. "Well, I guess it makes sense. Remember how many pairs Buffy went through."

"Yes, well--"

"I'm doing fine, Giles," he said. "Really. I'm not hurting for money."

"There's plenty there, Xander. If you were, uh, feeling uncomfortable about it--"

"I'm not. Don't worry." He was telling the truth. There was little he needed. It was possible for a frugal traveler to spend single digits a day in some parts of Africa, and he was more frugal than most.

Giles ended the conversation quickly, and Xander was left standing in the African plain, staring at the dead phone in his hand. He understood, of course. Giles was overworked, had been even before Xander left. This phone call had probably been on a list of a hundred things Giles had to do today, and Xander was grateful that he'd found the time at all. But it had been good to hear his voice, and he wouldn't have minded hearing it a little longer.

He had arrived in Swaziland -- again at the wrong time of year -- the first month of summer, when winter was when the temperatures were bearable. But September meant that he could be in Lobamba for the Umhlanga, when young Swazi women arrived in droves for the festival. It made sense to let them come to him. But no Slayers came, so he moved on.

Despite its name, which meant "the marrying place," he went to Siteki, where the government funded a school to train healers and diviners. He talked to an old woman with fierce eyes and a gentle voice who gave him a mug of beer made from sorghum and listened to his stories and told him about muti, which meant both magic and medicine. In return, he told the woman about Tara -- no story this time, just simple words about her grace, her gentleness. The woman gave him some herbs, which he carefully wrapped up in a bright swatch of cloth to send to Willow, and an amulet that she said would bring his spirit healing, which he dutifully hung around his neck when she gestured imperiously at his hesitation. When she gripped his hand to say goodbye, his knees nearly buckled. He saw the mischief in her smile and laughed, and left her there.

He reached Zimbabwe in mid-October, before the end of the dry season, before everything turned green. He traveled between the villages and the aid stations -- two-thirds of the population here depended on food distributions -- offering his help with building projects. He didn't like the ones that were run by the various church groups -- the so-called "Faith-based Initiatives." On top of the whole men of the cloth thing, Faith always made his mind go somewhere that had nothing to do with God, and Initiatives made his skin crawl. At least the well-meaning Christians never thought to object to his building a cross into the hatching above the doors of his shelters. But he never stayed.

A sweet-natured old priest named Father Tony invited him to stay in his house for the night. The old man's hands were strong, calloused, with long, flexible fingers that moved restlessly, hypnotically. Xander refused the invitation, and his own hands shook on the wheel as he drove away. He headed straight to Harare, where he splurged by staying in the most expensive hotel he could find, buying imported beer to stop the shaking, and taking an obscenely long shower. He used the credit card, hoping that Buffy and Dawn hadn't maxed it out, and was relieved when it went through without a murmur. Giles would be pleased when he saw the bill.

For months, he'd only seen fragments of himself, bits of face in his shaving mirror. He was fascinated by the strange man who resolved himself from all those pieces and stared back from the wall-length mirror in the tiled bathroom. His hair had grown long and shaggy, and his collarbones stood out clearly under the braided leather cord of the old woman's amulet. He hadn't eaten meat in weeks, had lived on fish and fruit and vegetables and sometimes the thick porridge of maize or sorghum that had different names wherever he went but tasted pretty much the same. Once he'd even eaten fried grubs, and if his stomach churned at the prospect, it was outvoted by the prospect of the girls' reactions when he told them that he'd done it. He couldn't see anything of youth in this hard, scoured man -- whatever of it that hadn't been buried in California had been burned away under the African sun. He flipped up the eyepatch, to see the world's weirdest tan line, then aped a grin at himself to see the bright flash of white teeth against darkened skin.

His newly acquired brown-ness made him wince to think of Willow, with her redhead's skin, in Brazil. When he went out the next day, he bought Sausage-tree cream and packed it up with the herbs the old Slayer had given him. He bought a basket for Dawn in one of the markets in Harare, and a carved whistle for Buffy, and then lingered for a while, running his fingers over the wood. Nice wood they had in Africa. Ebony, rosewood, mahogany, bubinga, teak . . .

Carving after carving depicted man and beast, caught in mid-transformation, the human and the inhuman merging. He picked out one, with man and hyena, then went back the next day and bought two more. Silly, since a cheetah wasn't a wolf, and he didn't know if he'd ever see Oz again. And the man-lion . . . the carvings were supposed to depict punishment, the carver explained, the transformation a curse for having eaten a sacred animal. He didn't know how Oz felt about his wolf these days, and he didn't really want to pick a fight with Angel, but they just seemed right. He got a wicked laugh, though, imagining Angel's bewilderment when he received a gift from Xander.

The carver, pleased at both the sales and at meeting a fellow woodworker, took him to one of the local beer halls, where they drank chibuku, which the man said was beer. It looked like hot chocolate and tasted like nothing Xander had ever drunk -- or ever wanted to drink again -- but it was worth it for the stories.

November found him in Mozambique, outlined in green on his map. He traveled for a while with a group of aid workers he'd met in Maputo. He cleared out a space for two nurses in his Jeep, an exuberant Portuguese woman who handled the translations where necessary, and a young Irishman who smiled easily but spoke very little, even in the spaces that Vidonia left in the air. Once he'd told his stories, Xander didn't feel inclined to speak much either. They stuck to the main roads because of unexploded mines, and traveled to some of the camps of refugees from the floods. Xander wished that he'd been able to find at least one Slayer -- he would have felt much better with real muscle to back him up -- and his fingers often strayed to touch the amulet around his neck. While Vidonia and Rory tended to the people suffering from cholera and malaria and any other number of illnesses, Xander pulled out his toolbox and worked on reinforcing the shelters.

After the third day in the camp, Vidonia approached him with a forthrightness that made him ache. "You are a good man, Xander. But too serious. There is much you do not say. I would like to know you better." He told her there was nothing to know, and left them behind the next morning.

After hurrying through Mozambique, he took a deep breath when he reached Malawi. Maybe it was a sign that they'd rescinded the long-standing law that forced all men cut their hair to above their shoulders, as if they were saying that it was okay for his mess of a shaggy-haired self to be here. Strategically placed signs advertised this place as "The Warm Heart of Africa" -- typical tourism department bullshit. Sunnydale, after all, was "A Good Place to Be!" They'd always added "Buried!" or "Beheaded!" or "Immolated!" whenever they passed the signs. It was the very beginning of the rainy season; the ground was hot and parched, but the skies were lowering, and in another few weeks they'd open.

He liked Lilongwe. The city was split down the middle, split personalities, the newer section full of modern buildings and offices and the older section a blaze of colorful markets and people selling pots and pans and car parts and baskets and live chickens. The river flowed between the two, and visitors were warned about crocodiles, and told to keep to the paths, because big mammals had taken up residence in the woodland that stretched out along the river. Walking along the designated path, he heard a familiar cackling bark somewhere to his left, and just kept walking.

They didn't send much out of Malawi. Mostly it sucked up money in foreign aid and added it to the tally of debt that it would never be able to crawl out from underneath. Other than tobacco, there wasn't much here to interest the outside world. He spent a day at the big auction house to meet up with one of Giles' contacts; the man wasn't able to give him any solid leads, but the sign on the wall, "Thank You For Smoking," made him think of Spike with an actual smile rather than grinding his teeth, so in a way the day wasn't wasted. Malawi wasn't a powerhouse, like South Africa, or heading upscale, like Botswana. It wasn't a troublemaker, like Rwanda or Somalia, and it didn't have the fame of Egypt, or the mystery of the Congos, or the romance of Morocco. But you can't market what you don't have, and all bullshit aside, it did have a warm heart. Xander liked it.

He struck out again for the villages, the straight rows of huts with their grass roofs, some made of wood, some of mud. He could help with the wooden ones, and learned how to patch the mud ones, and continued to tell his stories.

People died young here. Not that there weren't wrinkles -- the African sun practically guaranteed them -- but truly old people were in the minority. It shocked him when he realized that by Malawi statistics, he was closer to death than to birth by about five years. Strange, after clawing his way so desperately to adulthood, to find himself one of the grown-ups.

He thought about the adults he had known, tried to imagine them here, their reaction to what was now his world. He'd always thought of rooms when he thought of Giles, usually in half-light, the glow of a desk lamp, none of those harsh ultraviolet overheads. Bookshelves, coffee tables, teacups. But he could see Giles here, carving out an oasis of comforts. He'd have a precious few books, only the most important, and despite the roughness of things he'd always manage, as the British aid workers and ex-pats did, to produce a cup of tea on demand, even on the hottest days. Xander could see him, one hand raised to shield against the glare, the creases around his eyes catching and holding the sun, making those fan-shaped tan lines that all the white people here had.

Cordy's parents would be the type who came here for safari, who flew in by chartered plane to Liwonde or one of the other resorts on the Big Lake, stayed for a week, then flew back out. More likely they'd stick to Botswana, where careful management by the tourism board saw to it that backpackers and hikers who didn't have money to spend found it worth their while to head elsewhere, the kind of quiet, deliberate snobbery that adults had always used to show Xander that he didn't belong, and thought he didn't notice. Cordy's parents would never see the projects he worked on, that much he was sure of, but they'd tell their friends at cocktail parties about how they'd "seen" Africa. The Rosenbergs . . . maybe they'd come, in their Eddie Bauer khakis and their sensible shoes. Their eyes would be full of sympathy, and they'd make noises about the legacy of imperialism, then go home and show slides to their neighbors and tell them how they'd seen the "real" Africa, write periodic checks, and never come again.

He thought that Joyce would stay. He could see her among the aid workers in one of the camps that housed the ever-increasing numbers of refugees from Zimbabwe, her hair hidden under a scarf, smiling and touching as she handed out rations of thick white porridge and purified water. He wondered if he was guilty of idealizing the dead. It wouldn't be the first time. But he took a deep breath and tried to picture Anya here, and could only see her frank disapproval of the conditions, and hear her voice. "Why do people live like this, Xander? Why don't they just move?" The clear picture of the confused condemnation in her eyes and the wrinkle of her nose which, of course, would freckle in the sun, made something inside him feel watery and weak. So . . . Joyce. Yes.

He couldn't see his own parents here at all.

This particular village was small, nondescript, no different than any of the hundreds of others he'd stopped in. He was helping to make repairs to an empty hut -- the last man who had lived there had died a few weeks earlier of what was being called tuberculosis, and no one had claimed it. Bad luck, the other villagers said -- everyone who had lived in the house had died. The children watched him with fascination. Kids . . . kids were the same everywhere, he guessed, no matter how uncertain their lives, and it was amazing to see them smile and laugh and jostle each other.

They laughed at the strange white man with one eye . . . giggled and stared with an unconcealed fascination that was a relief after the guarded, considerate glances of adult curiosity. Some wanted to learn, and he happily demonstrated what he was doing. The carpentry he was doing wasn't fancy. Simple, fundamental techniques. The first house he'd finished wasn't very pretty or sophisticated, but it was solid, and clean, and there was a threshold that a vampire couldn't walk through, and he was prouder of that house than he'd ever been of anything. He thought sometimes that if he'd been a strange white man with two eyes, he would have found a job on a construction site in Cleveland and hunkered down on the local hellmouth and whittled stakes, and never come here.

Most of the kids in the rural areas spoke some sort of English, more spoke Chichewa, but their regional languages confounded his Western ear, too many vowels that somehow went together to make up words that he'd never understand. But they managed to get by, between the words that he knew of Chichewa, the words they knew of English, and lots of gestures and facial expressions and practical demonstrations. He'd improvise and act things out, and they'd laugh at him, but they communicated. He'd done it for months, when he was confronted with Setswana in Botswana, Swati in Swaziland, Shona and Sindebele in Zimbabwe, and the multitude of languages he couldn't even remember the names of in Mozambique.

Dawn would have loved this, and would probably have picked up seven new languages by now. Buffy would have charmed them much as he suspected she was charming the Italians, her disastrous attempts to communicate defused by that bright smile and a helpless wave of her hands. Giles would probably have made flashcards. Willow would have hated it. He imagined her as she was back in high school, studying French and German and testing off the scale, but never feeling comfortable speaking the languages because her conjugations had to be perfect, and she didn't want to get it wrong. It hurt to imagine Willow here, silenced, retreating back into her shyness. It made him uneasy to think that he might be better at a thing than Willow, and he found himself waiting for the inevitable karmic smackdown.

There was one girl who watched him with a strange, unsettling intensity. He invited her to learn with the others, but she shied away, ducking her head and retreating, but never going far. She had a brilliant smile -- he saw it when the children were together -- but she'd never given it to him. He guessed her age at about 10, although given the ebbs and flows of nutrition here, alternating between floods and droughts, she could be older than that. She seemed . . . careful, in a way that the other children weren't, who threw themselves around with reckless abandon.

The explanation for that kind of care was all too common here. Too many were sick, and many more weren't sick yet but carried the infection in their blood. Education had started to take hold, but there wasn't much hope. The box of condoms that Dawn had oh-so-helpfully hidden in his luggage -- still unopened after seven months -- would cost someone here a month's pay. Those who were diagnosed positive were told repeatedly to be careful about their blood -- not to bleed, and if they did, not to let others touch their blood.

He discovered his mistake when he stumbled, lost control of a beam he was lifting. Braced himself for the impact, waiting for the pain, only to find that he was untouched, undamaged. The girl had darted forward and was holding the beam aloft by one end, no strain on her face, scarecrow arms stretched straight above her head, and he had a sudden image of Buffy carrying 190-pound I-bars on the construction site back in Sunnydale.

Impatience flashed across her face as he lay there, gawking at her, and he hurriedly scrambled out from underneath the beam. When he was clear, she let it fall. It made a sharp, heavy thunk as it hit, sending up puffs of dust from the bone-dry ground. She ducked her head again, and he reached out, unthinking, to reassure her. She backed away, looked around quickly, and was gone. Fast. Faster than his all-too-human legs could follow.

He sat down in the dust, knees shaking. The kid was freaked. Of course the kid was freaked. He wondered what had happened, to make her so careful, whether she had unknowingly hurt someone before she figured out how very much she'd changed.

They'd known, of course, that there would be girls like her out there, girls who had no idea what had suddenly happened to them. It was why he was here, after all. They'd taken bets about it, who would be the first to find a Slayer, and made jokes about the Great Scooby Slayer Race of 2004. Buffy had said it was a gift, but it didn't seem so much like one now, not when he could still see the fear on her face. Buffy had spoken in ringing tones about getting strong, and Willow had spoken so seriously about finding all the girls, finding them and teaching them, and he'd nodded his head with grave self-importance and agreed. But this was . . . this was different. She was so small.

He drove back to Lilongwe the next day. The capital city was more advanced, but there were still more bicycles here than cars, and the combination of Dollars, Pounds, and Rand in his pocket meant that he was an embarrassingly wealthy man. He touched base with the Red Cross and UNDF headquarters, then checked in with the American embassy to see if there was any mail waiting for him and visit the clinic. Dawn had reeled off a truly scary-making list ("Hepatitis, typhoid, cholera, meningitis, malaria, diptheria, tetanus, rabies -- are you listening to me, Xander?" "I'm not gonna get rabies, Dawn." "Yeah, it's one of those diseases no one ever gets. Sorta like syphilis.") and made him promise to keep on top of things, health-wise.

He checked into a hotel, not wanting to drive back in the dark. Potholes on the back roads that could swallow a medium-sized mammal and drivers who seemed to think that headlights were an unnecessary drain on their batteries had long since convinced him of the wisdom of pulling off the road and camping once night fell. He found himself hesitating outside the hotel's Internet station, brightly lit, modern.

It wouldn't take much -- an e-mail to Giles. I found one. Send instructions. Send a Watcher. She'd be collected in a week or so, and Xander could be back out on the road again, where he really wanted to be. Head north, cross the border into Tanzania, maybe. Or maybe go east into Zambia. All he had to do was send an e-mail to Giles. Andrew would probably answer it. Giles was so very busy, and Andrew had managed to seep in around the edges. Since he'd been one of the happy few on the bus -- Andrew had unthinkingly gotten T-Shirts made for everyone that proudly proclaimed "I survived the Sunnydale Crater!" and Jesus Christ, Andrew -- they couldn't ever be rid of him, and he'd started doing tasks that Giles simply didn't have time for. Made himself indispensable to Giles, in a way that Xander had never managed. Xander mentally put Tunisia on his list of "must go" places, just so he could send Andrew a jealousy-inducing postcard from Matmata that said "Greetings from Tattooine." It felt petty, but Xander didn't really care.

The neatly turned out, perfectly manicured woman at the reception desk eyed him as he loitered, so he kept his attention on the aquarium in the window, watching the fish swim. Brightly colored mbuna fish, freshwater, plucked out of Lake Malawi to be transplanted to fish tanks all over the Western world. There was a long list of advice that came with mbuna fish . . . they were bright, and colorful, and aggressive. A single mbuna was fine on its own, but if you had two or three, they'd always fight. The best advice was to have lots of them -- 25 or more, and they'd reach some sort of weird fish accord and settle down. Any less, and they'd act out, fighting each other and killing more run-of-the-mill fish in the process. More than one goldfish had given its life because mbunas couldn't sort their shit out.

Xander stared at the fish in the tank, thinking about numbers and balance, about Buffy and Faith and Kendra, who he hadn't thought about in years, and tangled balls of string. He thought about the girl with the scared eyes and the brilliant smile that she only gave to her friends, and imagined shipping her off to Cleveland, or wherever the hell they decided she was needed, handing her a stake, or a sword, and telling her to fight demons. He could do that, send her away, and maybe it would be better for her. He wondered if Andrew was calling himself a Watcher yet. Andrew would be thrilled if Xander sent him a Slayer.

He thought of the bad luck house back in the girl's village. It wouldn't be so bad. He'd had his shots. He could unpack the back of his jeep for the first time in seven months. There were things that needed building.

Maybe he'd send Andrew a fish instead.