"In the hills above the encampment, away from the rutted roads where the catering truck's horn did not reach to waken him, Serafino Morales pushed aside the roof of wood boards and tree branches that covered the hole in the ground where he slept. He closed his eyes tightly to shut out the bright sunlight. His ancestors had ruled the south of Mexico when the Spaniards invaded in the sixteenth century, dismantled its culture, and left it in ruins. What was left of this once golden, once noble heritage lay here, in dispassionate acceptance, on scattered blankets and a dirty mattress pulled from...

"There was suppressed deep inside Niki Crawford the knowledge that all of her compassion and caring, all of her responsibility, had for one moment come up against something else, another part of her she'd only guessed was there, and that other part had prevailed. Without clearly understanding it, she knew she had been all that had stood between order and chaos, sanity and madness. But it had been raining. And now her mind, unable to absorb the magnitude of the consequences of her decision, continued erasing from her memory everything she had seen." Niki Crawford could have saved the life of 8...

"No one could stop him. Or even keep up with him. Not the city maintenance crews. Not the department of transportation, which angrily lamented that a few minutes of tagging could take a whole day and three thousand dollars to remove ... He'd go bombing -- tagging walls -- for two, even three days without really going home except to eat and change clothes. ... He never thought about the damage he caused. It never occurred to him that writing was bad for the neighborhood. After all, he could be getting his thrills doing far worse things. ... Now midway up the footpath he saw his destination --...

"Judith looked out over the four acres of green grass; at the children moving, criss-crossing the soccer fields; at the sudden crash of bodies and the referee in the black knit shirt with the white V-neck collar, standing over the two boys tangled on the ground. He paused, wrote something on a pad of paper, and raised his hand to the sky, a yellow card at his fingertips. She tried to remember. Yellow was a foul. It was red that got you ejected from the game. From the other side of the field several parents let loose a barrage of verbal assaults on the referee; from the home team coach came a...