“It's a good thing they put these barracks on Victory Boulevard,” Dan said.

“Yeah, that's heavy, all right,” Chuck agreed. “Talk about your good omens.”

“Can't hardly get a better one,” Dan said. Some Old Time books seemed to laugh at the idea that anyone could foretell the future. But the Bible didn't. Whether you were Christian or Jewish, you had to believe in prophets. And plenty of decks of tarot cards floated around, some printed before the Fire came down and others, cruder, afterwards. Dan snapped his fingers. “Talking about omens-can I ask you one more thing?”

“Go ahead.” Sergeant Chuck was in a good mood-maybe he looked forward to a war with the Westside.

“Does King Zev really have a Magic Eight Ball to help tell him what to do?”

“He doesn't have just one-he's got two,” Chuck declared. “My cousin's a preacher's assistant, and he knows stuff like that.”

“Two? Wow! Oh, wow!” Dan hadn't dreamt the Valley was so rich.

“You better believe it,” Chuck said. “And what he does is, he asks both of them the same question and then he sees how each one answers. If that's not scientific, I don't know what is.”

“Scientific.” Dan 's voice went all dreamy-there was a word to conjure with. And plenty of wizards and fortune-tellers did just that. “Well, if we don't have the vitamins to beat the Westside with two Magic Eight Balls, I don't know what else we'd need.”

“Soldiers,” Sergeant Chuck told him. “Whatever else you've got, you always need soldiers.”

Walking up Hilgard to the UCLA campus made Liz want to cry. It was like walking past the skeleton of a good friend. You knew who it was. If you tried, you could picture what the person-or the place-had looked like alive. But all you saw was death.