That phone call with Cee drove me from the Mansion. Stirred up too much shit for me to sit still. It was hard to talk to that girl I loved like a little sister because she always made me think about my big sister, Lottie. I didn't want to call her, especially to talk about that fucker Hampton, but I had to. I knew what he'd done to her, how she would feel. She needed her big brother.

Like I needed my big sister. Gah it fuckin hurt! I'll never get over it. I can sometimes go days without feeling it, but when I do, it's just as bad as the day I found out. I was in Rome and she was in Paris. She lived there, and I was on my way to visit her when the terrorists struck the city. That was the day Hampton announced his candidacy and Cheri called me in hysterics. She didn't know about Lottie. I couldn't bear to tell her. So I ran....

I was in a bar/book store in the Trastevere with a group of Dutch college girls, downing shots in little chocolate cups when Cheri called. The drinks had funny sex names and were dessert-like concoctions of liquors and liqueurs for only three dollars a shot. You dropped the whole thing, cup and all, into your mouth. "Take it from behind!" the young bartendress would yell, and everyone would laugh. I had swallowed about ten of them and didn't want to confess to all the laughing girls around me that I didn't feel a fucking thing.

When the comm unit in my ear buzzed, I had been tempted to ignore it, but Cee's name and avatar popped up in the upper right corner of the HUD, so I had stepped outside to take her call. I stood across the street from the crowded little bar and watched the mindless festivities while we talked. Talking to my little G had felt good, but that was the problem: I didn't want to feel.

It made me agitated. I had to move. I just walked, away from the river and deeper into the neighborhood. The streets were narrow and groups of people flashed out of the darkness at me, usually accompanied by a bubble of laughter and conversation, then vanished into the insignificance behind me. Autos huddled against the wall to my right. I stumbled against the stream, past clumps of people eating meals and drinking wine in pools of light contained by low fences, trying not to imagine sudden balls of flame and smoke and stinging debris hurtling out of the buildings and enveloping them all in clouds of screaming agony and death.

I didn't realize I was running until I broke into a piazza and the walls fell away. A fountain in the middle of the open space was populated by people seated in twos and threes. Some were lovers, some families, some just good friends enjoying a warm, dry night. Men dressed all in black with automatic weapons charged out of all the shadows to open fire and spew death everywhere.

I knew it wasn't real. It wasn't real. Something about the fear nagged at the back of my mind. I slowed to a walk, tried to observe the people relaxing and enjoying a beautiful Roman night. It was why I had come here. I tried to be like them, relaxed and calm in the surroundings. I was successful in slowing my pace to a stroll. My legs carried me on a slight diagonal toward the other side of the piazza while my eyes took it all in.

I looked straight ahead, white arches framed darkness. Marble paved the way to stout wooden doors. Crosses adorned the doors. A church. The Basilica of Santa Teresa Maria. I felt a pull toward the massive wooden doors. Why the hell did I want to go into a church? Would they even let someone like me in? It would have to be closed anyway at this hour of night.

A flash of movement to the left caught my attention: an old woman scuttling along the wall. She shuffled to the door, opened it, and slid inside. On an impulse, I strode across the marble tiles and entered the church. The smell of incense welcomed me. A line of pillars marched down each flank of the open space, rising into the darkness. The only light snuck in through narrow windows evenly spaced high up in the walls, or danced around banks of candles.

My eye implants kicked in, raising the light level and revealing detail. A two-lane road could have been paved in the spaces between pillars and wall. A figure, probably male, was lighting a candle against the wall. In the large central space between the pillars, dark wooden benches stood in ranks. At the front was an altar. The old woman was lying prostrate on the floor in front of the altar. The Enhancement revealed alcoves cut into the wall to my right, each with a small altar and statue. A person could kneel at a marble railing fronting each alcove. The ceiling was patterned and painted in intricate detail. Preferring the comforting cloak of darkness, I dialed back the implants.

Somewhere a man was chanting in a strange language. Probably Latin. The music drew me deeper into the space. It drifted into my brain like smoke, worked like a key in the lock of a chest holding remembered emotions from my childhood. I was a small boy holding a man's hand who led me through a space that looked like this, smelled like this, and with music like this to a bench near the back. I sat and stared through the fog of memories at the large golden cross hovering above the white-clothed altar.

'What the fuck am I doing here?' I asked myself. I didn't believe in religion or God, and hadn't been to a church since I was, what, 10 or 11? If there was a God who sent people to Heaven or Hell, I was going to Hell for the things I had done. But I didn't believe in any of that shit. So what the fuck was I doing here?

I sat on the cold, hard wood and listened to the man's voice bounce off the stone skeleton of the building, the marble floor, the ceiling high above. I breathed in the incense, in and out, and my eyes came to rest on a single candle flame to the left of the old woman. It bounced and danced, shimmied first to the left, then to the right, and it grew stronger and whiter, sending an aura in all directions. It was flame, a flame, fire and the incense was burning, it was smoke, fire and smoke and -

BOOM! A bomb exploded and then the 'pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop' of gunfire. Dust and smoke billowed out followed by panicked people stampeding. Women screaming and men shouting, all was chaos and disorder, and somewhere in there was Lottie, bleeding to death from shrapnel and maybe a bullet. Figures all in white burst out of the smoke behind the fleeing people, spraying bullets everywhere. People fell where they ran, blood slicked the street and the stench of gunpowder stuck in my nostrils.

In my nostrils and on my hands.... The gun bucked and jumped in my hands and I felt nothing as I watched bullets rip into the man in front of me, watched the red flowers bloom on the man's chest, watched the shock and disbelief take over his face, watched him look down at his chest as he fell backwards, and I felt nothing but satisfaction of a job well done. Then I ran off, looking for another target, and there in the front of the church I saw a woman, a strong African American woman with paint on her hands and her cheek, and she looked over her shoulder at me, met my eyes as I raised the gun to my shoulder and caressed the trigger....

That was crazy. The grief was so fresh then, and I had been struggling with the guilt over that little girl's death and Vinnie's father's suicide. The whole time I was Inside, that guilt ate away at me, but in there you just so focused on staying out of trouble that you can evade things like guilt. But back then I had Lottie to motivate me to be better. When she was taken away....

All I had left was Cee, and knowing the pain she in, it drives a spike into my skull.

When did this place become my favorite place in the world? Sitting in this cathedral so much like that old church in Rome, but simpler, more humble, less ornate, with ranks of hard wooden benches - they call them "pews" - marching away from me toward a marble altar under a dome, massive pillars sprouting out of the marble-tiled floor to hold up the vaulted ceiling at least thirty feet above my head, statues of centuries-dead dudes evenly spaced along the walls between stained-glass windows, the faint whiff of spice and burning wax in the air, and the cries of a pipe organ echoing off all the bare stone - ain't no other place in Seattle that fills me with this sense of profound peace. I would almost say I felt the presence of God if I believed in the Big White Man In the Sky.

Not even my digs in the Mansion make me this calm, feel this safe, and that's the best home I ever had. It should be: I designed it and oversaw its construction. Highest point in Seattle.

But this right here used to be the highest point in Seattle, before the downtown skyscrapers went up. You could stand at the front doors and look all the way across Elliott Bay to West Seattle. You could dominate the city from here. "Seize the high ground" the villain in an old superhero tv show said in his penthouse apartment in the biggest building in the city.

That villain was an awful lot like the real life Warren Hampton. "We have to stop him! He's crazy!" Crazy. What's crazy is the thought that we can stop that mutha fucker. We can stop him like we can stop climate change.

"But we have to try, Darnell. Don't you see? It's better to die fighting the dominion of evil than to live passively accepting it." Fucking Vinnie been my conscience since ... since I grew one. I watched Father Vincent Biaggi puttering behind the altar. He was playing with gold cups and white cloths, arranging and rearranging them. He was getting ready for the evening mass he held every weeknight for the same fifteen geezers.

For the life of me I couldn't figure out how that man believed in God, believed all that shit about Jesus Christ being God and dying for our sins and rising to heaven so he could come back down at the head of God's Army and bring the Kingdom of Heaven to this earth. Fuck, I couldn't figure out how he could be my friend. I'd ruined his life, caused his father's death and the death of a little girl, and he forgave me and became my friend - my best friend in the world, if I was honest with myself.

That pressure was building up in my chest again, building up and making it swell, building up to force the scream from my throat and the tears from my eyes. I wanted to be in the middle of a vast expanse of nowhere surrounded by no one where I could let this scream bounce off the canyons and peaks, let the tears flow to the river, let all this pain and guilt billow like smoke into the air. But weeping and screaming in the last pew of a cathedral wasn't me, wasn't ever going to be me, so I bit it down and blew it out.

I could stop the scream and stifle the tears, but I couldn't close my eyes and blind the visions. The newsreels were inside me and they played when they played whether I wanted to see them or not. They showed me everyone I'd hurt; they showed me the little girl breaking free and running in front of a car, flying up into the air and slamming down on the hood of the car, bouncing off and skidding across the pavement; they showed me the young man in the courtroom gallery watching me; they showed me the explosion sending flames and shock waves and stone shrapnel and fragments of my sister hurtling through the air in every direction.

"FUCK!"

Was it just in my head or did the word escape? I opened my eyes. Nobody was staring at me, no echoes were reverberating. It must have been just in my head. Vinnie wasn't at the altar anymore. The clock in the top right corner of my field of vision said 4:54. He was back in his dressing room putting on his robe and scarf - he called it a "stole." If I were going to get out of here before the ritual started, it was time to jet. Usually I would scoot and sit on the stone steps out front or go get a drink at Vito's down the block or just walk around the neighborhood until Vinnie was done, then I'd meet him in the courtyard between the cathedral's side entrance and his house - he called it "the rectory." These Catholics had weirdass names for everything.

I decided to just wait for him here. The service would be short, maybe thirty minutes, and the organ would play, and nobody would pay any attention to me sitting way back here. Everybody else be sitting up in the first few rows. Every once in a while I would sit and watch Vinnie do his thing. The prayers were all blather but he and his little flock said them with fervent devotion, and the little speech he would give after the bible readings - he called it "my sermon" - always had a little lesson or an observation that was worth listening to, always left me thinking about something. Vinnie's a wise dude, a tribal elder living in the mind of a 28-year-old white boy from Columbia City.

It was the day I met Vinnie. When that feeling of peace in cathedrals happened. Life is weird, man. The two of us winding up in that random church in the Trastevere at the same time. I was lost in that vision, then I heard a voice speak a few feet to my right....

"It will be all right, son. God will forgive you." I glanced over and saw it was a tall white guy dressed like a priest, with the black clothes and the white collar. I was like, "Shit, this cat going to try to convert me or comfort me?" Then I looked at him for real, and I recognized Vinnie from my trial. Not gonna lie, I freaked a little, but you know, I kept my cool. Didn't let it show.

I sat back and shook my head. I think I laughed. "I don't believe in no God," I said. "And if there is some God up there judging us all, he ain't forgiving me for the shit I done" I stared at the gold cross. Crosses, priests, God - it was all bullshit. "I don't even know why I came in here!"

"Don't you?"

The priest's calm challenge infuriated me. "No!" I hissed. I almost yelled it, but at the last moment, respect for the place caused me to choke down on the volume. I remember sitting back, taking a deep breath, and admitting it to myself. "Peace," I whispered, more to myself than the priest. I came in here looking for peace.

"Did you find it?"

I started to answer "no there is no peace", but maybe that wasn't true, because, "Yeah," I actually did feel less fucked up. "As much as I can get." I looked over at him. We met eyes. What was that man was thinking?

"Good." The priest looked up at the ceiling, then back down, still with that enigmatic smile. "I can always feel God's presence in these old churches. God is present everywhere, and I know it should not take ... this ... to make me feel him, but...." He shrugged, as if to acknowledge his own failing. "When I was little and I needed to feel safe, I used to run down to St. Jerome's and sneak in the back. I would sit in a pew and it felt like God was guarding the door. I would tell myself that nobody could get in. Nobody ever did bother me while I was there." He turned back to me with a broad, amused smile. "I guess it worked."

The old woman levered herself to her feet. Her face tilted to the ceiling, she swayed side-to-side. She was reciting something. I could hear the tone and the cadence, but no words.

"She must have lost someone very special to her," the priest remarked. "Or be very afraid. She prays with such fervor."

I watched the old woman. The tears on her cheeks, the way she clutched the beads to her chest and looked up, I knew: "She lost someone, and she can't stand that she'll never see him again."

Like Lottie. Her face as the social worker walked her to his car by the hand floated into my mind, and my chest hurt, literally as if a hole had opened in the center of it. My heart felt crushed as it was sucked into the void. First my father had disappeared, then my mother taken away and it was just the two of us. Then the social worker who had taken my mother away came back and took Lottie. She had promised to find me, whispered it in my ear when the man told her she could hug me good bye. A few years later, she had found me, and when I turned 18, we took up a regular communication. She was the one who told me our father had died before we went into foster care. Then right after I "graduated college", our mother died. Lottie had asked me to go to the funeral with her. Even though I didn't give a shit that the woman had been my mother, I went.

"I'm sorry for your loss," the priest said. I had almost forgotten he was there. I wondered what told him that I'd lost someone special. It reminded me of the first thing he'd said to me.

"Why did you say that?" I asked.

He looked surprised. "I just guessed from the way you looked at the woman while you answered my conundrum. You recognized in yourself her loss."

I waved that off. "No, the first thing you said to me. That God would forgive me."

The priest nodded. "Ah yes, that. I don't know. I just looked at you and your evident distress, and that is what came into my head." He tilted his head to the right. "I thought it might be what you needed to hear at that moment, so I said it."

I shook my head. "I don't want forgiveness." Which was good, because "God wouldn't forgive someone like me anyway."

"There is no one who God would not forgive."

"Brother, you don't know what kind of man I am," I retorted.

"I know exactly who you are, and I already forgave you," the priest replied with a muted chuckle. "You're one of the biggest reasons I became a priest."

When he said that, I flipped my shit. Wtf? Then I took a close look at him for the first time, and I realized that I did recognize him. He had attended every day of my trial. I didn't recognize him at first because in that courtroom his eyes had blazed with hatred out of a frozen mask of anger and pain, so very different from the serenity, empathy and humor in his face on this day....

I was glad that I had taken him up on the offer he expressed as he was leaving: to visit him after getting back to Seattle from Italy. I didn't know why I was doing it, but I couldn't get that scene out of my head and I was curious. He was so happy to see me. He invited me into the rectory for a drink and we sat and talked for a couple hours. From there we became friends.

He ended the mass and left the altar for the side foyer where he would shake hands and share words with people as they left. It almost took longer than the mass, because old people moved slow and Vinnie refused to rush anyone. Everybody got the same attention, the same affection. It was one of the biggest things I loved about him: every life had the same value to him.

When the last person left and Vinnie came back to the altar to straighten up and take the gold back to the safe, I joined him. "Nice speech, Padre," I said, and he shook his head with a chuckle.

"Nice to see you, Darnell. What brings you by tonight?"

"It's been a while, my man." It had, too. The Mansion was hopping, the entertainment group was putting on a record number of major performances, and Gangsta Software was preparing the beta launch of a revolutionary new app. All this while Seattle was blowing up with a new crisis every day, it seemed, and the country was going nuts over the presidential election. To be honest, it was all feeling like too much, and that was why I was here. "I have a proposal for you."

His eyebrows jumped. "Really. Sounds fascinating." He was walking away and he waved for me to follow. "Come to the rectory and I'll make us a couple drinks." Vinnie was one of the best amateur bartenders I knew. It still made me laugh that the Catholic Church has no beef with its priests drinking liquor. "Are you hungry?" he asked. I shrugged, and he responded, "Great, I'll make us some pasta."

The rectory was like a little house on the cathedral grounds. It had two bedrooms and was maybe 1300 square feet. It would fit in my living room. But it was comfortable and I liked hanging out here with him. We caught up while he mixed up something with whiskey that made me wonder why I was paying my head bartender so much money, then whipped up a simple pasta meal that made me wonder if my celebrity chef really was worth the salary I was giving him. "Shit, Vinnie, I think your meals are blessed by God," I said around a forkful of the best damn spaghetti this side of Rome.

After dinner we sank into a couple of plush chairs that must have been a hundred years old and he asked me what was up. Now that the time was here, it was hard for me to say what I had to say, because I couldn't tell him what I really wanted to tell him. I don't usually have a hard time telling people what's on my mind, but this was different. Because it was impossible. But I started.

"Lately I've been wanting to restart my music career. Thugz Mansion was a dream and I love the place, love making it thrive, but I want to express myself. I always loved music. I want to be an artist, not a businessman."

Vinnie jumped into the pause. "That's great, Darnell. You were a talented artist."

I thought I was. Before I got deep into the gang, I was making a name for myself in hiphop. "D Cole" meant something. "I've been writing some songs and practicing some of my old stuff." I looked up from my hands and met his eyes. "I think I'm ready to perform."

"That's exciting. Do you have any performances planned? Are you going to do shows at Thugz Mansion?"

"Nah," I replied. "I thought about it, but I want to start away from the Mansion. Establish myself on the road." Here it was. "I want to travel the world, Vinnie. I want to go around the world performing wherever I can get a gig." And now the ask. "And I want you to go with me."

That took him by surprise. His eyebrows went up, then furrowed as he analyzed the request. He started shaking his head slowly in the initial refusal I knew would come. "I have a parish to run, Darnell. And what about Thugz Mansion and the whole Gangsta Enterprises?"

I smiled. So predictable. "I have a great management team for the Mansion, and Gangsta is a conglomerate of many different companies, each with a highly competent executive team. I spend maybe an hour a day on Gangsta. I have total faith in my people.

"But Vinnie, when's the last time you took a vacation? You haven't taken a week since you got out of college and you know it." His look told me I was right. "I thought even God took a break." He laughed. "You always telling me how important global issues are and how we have to think globally, but you barely been out of this country.” That night we met in Rome was his only time abroad and he was only there for two days for a conference. That don’t count. “You want to understand the world, you need to see it. Man, I learned so much from even just going to Europe. There's so much more to learn.

"And don't you want to go back to Rome - the Vatican? You always talking about it, wanting to see the Pope's church and take your ideas to the church because it can be such a force for good in the world. How the fuck you ever gonna do that if you won't leave your parish to someone else for a while? I know you ain't the only priest here." I gave him my dominating glare that broke people down when they knew deep inside that I was right.

Vinnie's brows were drawn so tightly together that it almost looked like a unibrow. "How long are you thinking about being gone?" he asked.

This was going to be a tough jump. "Six months." I saw from the way his eyebrows jumped to opposite corners that I was right. He started shaking his head.

"That's too long for me to be away, Darnell. I -"

"You can't see the world in two weeks, Vinnie. You got to give it some time. Take this like a mission, man. It ain't a vacation. It's a mission." I was getting frustrated. I bounced out of my chair. Had to move around. I knew that "you ain't made to be just a parish priest, Vinnie. Come on, man, you got all these big ideas, and the biggest damn soul I ever been around. And man you got skills - mad skills. You need to share all this shit. The world needs your ideas, and it needs to see a Good man. You can't be hidin here in your little church saying mass for fifteen fucking old people every night.

"Look, man, the way the world is going, and with this new President, I don't know how long it's going to be possible to travel internationally. I just feel like we running out of time, man. You need to do this, and you need to do it now. I know it in my bones.

"And I need to do this. I need it in my soul. And, Vinnie, man," I stopped pacing in front of the window that could see across the street and turned to face him. This was my last appeal. "I need you with me, bro." I shrugged. "I feel like I can't do this without you." I struggled for a way to explain it that would make sense. Without, of course, telling him the truth. "You know the temptations that come at a brother on tour." I mean, everybody knew, but Vinnie was acutely aware of which direction my life had gone when I was trying to get in the business the first time. "You're my conscience," I said softly, then realized it was more than that. "But also, I want to learn, not just be a rapper on tour, you know? I want to learn about the world, people, their history and culture, and there ain't nobody better at that shit than you, man. Well, maybe Dash, but you know...."

I could see from his posture and the grimace on his face that he was wavering. I pushed on. "With our apps you can keep an eye on your parish, man - even say mass like you here. Rayray can install a holojector under the altar, and won't nobody know the difference."

He was staring off into the distance, thinking hard. "Look, Vinnie," I started, and he turned his attention back to me. "I'm talking about a world tour! China, Asia, India. And maybe fucking Jerusalem and Istanbul, and the Pyramids! The Pyramids! C'mon, how can you pass on maybe your last chance to see the Pyramids - and your Holy Land!" Now I was getting really excited to see all these places I never been. "And Africa, got to see the place it all began, right? And we hit Europe - get you back to Rome and in front of the motherfucking Pope himself with your ideas." We both laughed at that. "We can tour the cathedrals of Europe!"

I was dreaming it - we were both dreaming it. Then I thought of the environment and world events and got real sober, real real, real fast. "I don't wanna miss seeing it all, Vinnie," I said softly as I plopped back in my chair.

"All right, Darnell. I'm in."

Never in my life have I been more thankful than I was to hear him say that. This was going to be epic.