Blue Moon snark

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The body lay in a small clearing. I knew it was human because they told me it was. It wasn't that the body didn't look human, exactly. The shape was there enough that I could tell it was lying on its back. It was more that my mind refused to acknowledge that this could have been a human being. My eyes saw it, but my mind kept refusing to put the pieces together, so it was like looking at one of those pictures where you stare and stare until the hidden shapes spin out in 3-D relief. It looked as if there had been an explosion of blood and flesh, and the body had been at the center of it. Dried blood spread out from the body in every direction, as if when the body were moved there'd be a body-shaped clean spot, like an ink blot.

Soooo something like this?

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I could see all that, but still my eyes couldn't make sense of it. My mind was trying to protect me. It had happened before-once or twice. The smart thing would be to turn and walk away. Let my mind have its confusion because the truth was going to be one of those mind-blasting moments.

This does not sound like a terribly difficult thing to comprehend.

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I forced myself to look at it, forced myself not to look away, but the summer heat wavered around me in a sickening rush.

Welp. We all know where this is going.

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I'd borrowed surgical gloves. Someone had offered me heavier plastic gloves to go over. AIDS, you know. I declined. One, my hands would sweat.

Wanna know how I know you've never worked with gloves, Hamilton?

Despite the "explosion of blood and gore" the body is still intact enough to be examined, it got partially eaten, and... well to be honest, this isn't a terribly gross crime scene by this own series' standards.

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The chest was bare. One breast torn completely off. The other deflated like a balloon as if something had eaten the flesh out of the middle, like a kid sucking the jelly out of a donut.
It was an unfortunate choice of metaphors, even in my own head.

BUT we need some kind of excuse to make Anita stumble over something by accident instead of investigating, so she makes herself need to go puke.

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I grabbed the tree trunk to help me stand, and my arm tingled so hard it almost went numb. I stood, pushing away from the tree, nearly falling, but I kept my feet. I looked up the smooth trunk. About eight feet up was a pentagram carved into the bark of the tree.

Anita just puked out the plot advancement: There's a circle of power made of pentagrams in the trees! But first she has to hack up some pointless speculation:

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Wiccans -witches- can use their power for evil if they're willing to pay the price in karma. Whatever you do, good or ill, comes back to you threefold.

Or so an ever-present handful of girls in high school would want you to believe.

To be fair this chapter is almost back to the "classic" style of Anita Blake getting out there, investigating shit and getting shit done... almost. She has to bring up Richard again.

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For one awful moment, I wondered if Henderson had been trying to trick me and the body was really Lucy. But the height was wrong. The woman had been tall, not my size. Most of the women that Richard dated were short. I guess if you've got a body type you like, you stick to it.

I wonder how many times Richard got dumped for screaming Anita's name during a "lupa audition."

But Anita has great news for the mentally ill after a charming, barely related story about demons!

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"And it worked. If she stays on her medication, the mental illness is under control. The possession didn't cause the schizophrenia."
Henderson nodded. "We all get the lecture in training that mental illness can open a person up to demonic possession, Ms. Blake. It's like PCP but weirder."
"Yeah," I said. "PCP doesn't cause people to levitate."

This, by the way, has no bearing whatsoever on the plot. Just an aside to let you know that if your brain doesn't always fire on all cylinders, you're doubly fucked.

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He frowned at me. "Did you witness the exorcism?"
I shook my head. "I won't talk about it. I especially won't talk about it here and now. Words have power, Captain. Memories have power. I won't play into it."

We'll never know. So the cop asks Anita if she could've done it, she gets evasive, he presses the point...

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"No, I could not do this. Trafficking with the demonic taints the soul. I may not be a perfect Christian, but I am trying."
"Fucking vampires taints the soul, too, Blake."

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Why the sudden antagonism? The identity of the victim.

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I turned back to him and felt the blood drain from my face. "Who is it?"
"Betty Schaffer, the woman who accused your lover boy of rape."

...so why did they let her tromp around the crime scene rather than arrest her on the spot? Anita knows why it was Betty, though:

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Movies try to give us shit about needing virgins and purity for sacrifice, but true evil doesn't want to kill and send purity to heaven. True evil wants to corrupt good, and once the good are dead, they are beyond the devil's reach. But the impure, to sacrifice them, to kill them-well, the devil gets his due.

False accusations of rape are pretty evil I suppose, but at this point I really don't believe she was lying.

You'd think this might get the real mystery to kick in and Anita's going to have to get serious go to work, buuuut we're 4/5s of the way through the goddamn book and ain't nobody got time for that. So... this happens:

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He pulled a cell phone from his pocket. He punched up a number. "She's right here."
He handed the phone to me.
Henderson was watching us like we were entertaining. I took the phone. The voice on the other end was a man, and I didn't know him.
"I am Franklin Niley, Ms. Blake. I think it is time we meet face-to-face."
"I don't think so," I said.
"Wilkes told me that you have spoiled our little plan about blaming those pesky trolls for the death. But it is not too late to blame your lover. How many people will believe his
innocence once they find out he is a werewolf?"

The bad guy just straight-up calls Anita on the phone, identifies himself, and takes credit for all the bad things.

That just happened. That just fucking happened.

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"Come to me, Ms. Blake. Let us talk. After I have answered your questions, then you can decide whether to leave or stay. Now, would you be so kind as to put the sheriff back on the phone?"

On the next episode of Anitaball Z, another display of posturing and dick-waving.

Yay for more snark! I have nothing more to add.

The next chapter starts off talking about Richard. He's nervous. He's angry. He's wearing shades for the first time in case his eyes change. He's...

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The waitresses wore pink uniforms and small, useless aprons. A blond waitress came up to us, smiling. "Richard, Shang-Da, haven't seen you in here all week. Knew you couldn't stay away from Albert's hash browns."
Richard flashed her that smile of his that has been known to melt women into little quivering puddles.  The fact that he's unaware of the effect makes it all the more devastating.

...still Anita's perfect high school crush. Who spots the bad guys in the diner and... walks too fast, or something, so Anita grabs his arm.

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Richard stared down at me from behind black lenses, his eyes lost. I'd never realized how much of his expression was in his eyes. I couldn't read what he was thinking. With some effort, I might have found out, but the last thing I wanted to do was activate the marks in front of Niley's people.

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, crime scene investigator/private eye-thing, just realized that eyes are important to expression. Bullshit, why else does she keep going on about "cop eyes" in every fucking book?

Anyway, she starts describing the bad guys, and gets to Niley.

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His eyes were pleasant and empty like an amused snake.

Sir Hiss?
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Niley's eyes moved from me to Richard. "Well, Mr. Zeeman, we meet at last."

Does anyone even say that ironically anymore? So, having confessed to his crimes over the telephone to a SUSPECT, Niley's suddenly worried about one of them wearing a wire and has them searched before they talk anymore.

It really wouldn't have been that hard to secure a warrant to monitor Anita and Richard's phones, but since when has law enforcement ever been competent in these books?

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Niley took Richard's other arm, slipping it through his like you'd walk arm and arm with your lover. He patted Richard's arm. "My, aren't you a handsome fellow."
Richard gave me a look as Niley led him away. I'd have given a great deal to see his eyes at that moment. Usually the bad guys make moves on me.

NOBODY SAID ANYTHING ABOUT GAYS!
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ABORT ABORT ABORT

Anita makes small talk with one of the henchmen, and then a 500-pound, bald, eunuch sorcerer who sounds an awful lot like BabyCakes shows up to frisk her.

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I turned to see what had captured his attention so thoroughly. The man was close to seven feet tall and had to weigh over five hundred pounds. His face was totally hairless, not just clean shaven. He had no eyelashes, nothing; smooth and unreal. His eyes were a nearly colorless grey too small for his large face. He wore a black shirt untucked over black slacks, black shoes. The skin of his arms and face were unbelievably white as if the sun never touched him.

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But first, more psychological bullshit.

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"What flavor are you, sociopath, psychopath, or schizophrenic?"
He blinked small eyes, the smile fading. "Misguided people have told me I was crazy, Anita. But I did hear voices, my master's voice."
"Yeah, but were the first voices your master or just bad brain chemistry?"
His frown deepened. "I don't know what you mean."
I sighed. He probably didn't. Sorcerers were people who got their magic through demonic-or worse-power. They bargained for what they got and bartered their souls for money, comfort, lust, power. But some were a version of possession. People weakened by some flaw: mental illness or even a flaw of character. The right kind of flaws can attract evil.

Kill the mentally ill, it's safer that way.

So the others return while Richard smolders with generic rage.

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Niley looked happy, pleased with himself. He clapped Linus Beck on the back, and the eunuch raised the other man's hand to his mouth and kissed it.
Maybe I didn't know as much about eunuchs as I thought I did. I thought it meant sexless. Maybe I was wrong.

What that gesture has to do with sex, even in context, is beyond me. Anyway, more dick-waving, then:

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Everyone ordered, finally even Richard. When the waitress walked away, Linus, Richard, and I headed for the rest room so he could search me for listening devices and magical booby traps.
I only had one question. "Which bathroom are we going to use?"

On that high-larry-us note, Chapter 24 ends.

Because a large, evil albino eunuch has never been done before in the history of ever.
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She worries about the goddamned bathroom while being searched and possibly attacked by the so called bad guys? And this chick is a cop/supernatural 'expert'? :facepalm

I thought sociopath and psychopath were the same thing?

Reepicheep-chan wrote:

I thought sociopath and psychopath were the same thing?

They do. I'll give this one to the author because I've heard enough people use these terms like this that it makes sense for Blake to use them this way. Like, to the point that I never noticed her doing that because it seemed like common speech? I wonder if it's a regional thing? Because around here, when the average person says sociopath, they mean Antisocial Personality Disorder, but psychopath involves psychosis. And then even in the field of psychology itself, there's actually some parsing of the terms, depending on one's focus. Frex, historical psychologists will not necessarily use them interchangeably, depending on which time period & region they are discussing; historical and sometimes contemporary psychologists will use one or the other because they believe the origin is completely different, either as an organic disease or a product of socialization.

The creeper professionally frisks Anita and they get down to business. The bad guys want Anita to GTFO.

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"Wilkes and his men already covered that. We told them we were leaving by sundown," I said.
"I know what you told the good sheriff," Niley said. He wasn't smiling now. His eyes were cool, the humor dying from his face like the sun sinking away, leaving the world to darkness.

In case you forgot he's a satanic bad guy, the overwrought descriptions are there to remind you.

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"I don't think he believes we're leaving, Richard," I said.
"I don't care what he believes," Richard said.
I glanced at Richard. He was sitting with his arms crossed, staring at Niley. It would have been more unnerving without the manatee T-shirt, but he got the point across.

...seriously? The goddamn manatees? He wore THAT to confront the bad guys? Unironically?

Richard the Perfect, ladies and gents. Perfectly removing what little tension there was in this scene.

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"Why is it so important that we get out of town, Niley?"
"I told you. The spirits say to come against you is death."

Well, don't give away the ending or anything.

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He smiled and cut a piece of his country omelet. "Anita, do not be coy. I think we both know that Wilkes does not have the stomach for this work. He may work himself up to shooting you, but he is not up to truly scaring you away. His threat, shall we say, lacks a certain fright factor." He took his bite of omelet and chewed.
"Is the threat next?" I said, pouring syrup on my pancakes.
He smiled, dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, and shook his head. "Let us save that for last. Now, ask your questions."

Trivia time: In Anita Blake's version of the USA, witchcraft and sorcery used to hurt people carries an automatic death penalty. Anita is not a law enforcement officer, but she is a state- or federally-licensed vampire executioner. It should carry enough weight to call up the FBI and pique their interest in the numerous and blatant examples of police corruption and state-line crossing felonies, and Niley behaving like a supervillain and revealing all his glorious plans to her is especially stupid because of that.

Spoiler alert, she never does that, and even though the FBI is already actively investigating and should have more than enough evidence to act, they're sitting on their hands in the name of a dramatic climax.

Anyway, Niley wants to get the land the trolls are on to rip it up and find the Lance of Longinus. It's stupid.

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"Why Betty?"
Linus answered in his high, musical voice. "She was a liar, a traitoress, and a wanton thing. She opened herself to evil."

I love it when villains are so boring, they know they're evil. Saves time.

So anyway, Niley makes his threats.

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"I think a tranquillizer dart from a distance for Richard. When he wakes, he will be bound by silver chains and on his stomach, naked. I will rape him, and I will enjoy it. Then I will let Linus slit his throat, and Linus will enjoy that." He turned cold eyes to me.
"You, Anita, I will give to Linus for his master."

...except his "spirits" have been proven right and if he tries that he's certain to die, but expecting consistency at this point is a lost cause. At least it's Richard being threatened with rape instead of Anita, for once. Linus lets his Evil Powers flare and it freaks Anita out. So Richard gets Biblical on their asses. The boring kind of Biblical.

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Richard turned and looked at Linus. The hair on his arms was standing at attention, too. He spoke, looking directly at the sorcerer. "How you are fallen from Heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn!"
At the first line, that awful power receded, the skin creeping a little less. Linus's face was no longer pleasant.
Richard said, "How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, 'I will ascend to Heaven; Above the stars of God I will set my throne on high.' Isaiah." With the last line, the scent of evil retreated. It lingered like perfume in an empty room, but it was closed down for now.
"Impressive, Richard," Niley said. "So you are a true believer."

A true hypocrite, but... inconsistency. Besides, it's Richard the Perfect, so it has to work.

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Richard rose slowly from his chair. He put a hand flat on the table and leaned across it. I felt the prickling rush of energy like a hot thread pulled across my skin. He lowered his sunglasses just enough for Niley to see his eyes, and I knew what he was doing. I knew that Niley was watching those brown eyes change to wolf amber.
Richard spoke low and carefully. " 'And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.' " He slid his glasses back over his eyes, stood, and stepped away from the table.

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I risked a glance back. I didn't turn to a pillar of salt, but I saw Niley's face. And I knew, knew without doubt, that he would see us dead.

Except it's been well-established that he can't, and we know full well that he won't. Zero. Tension.

The next chapter is just as boring, because nothing happens in it. Anita and company load up some trucks to get out of town and head out to Marianne's house.

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It took about three hours for us to pack and pretend to leave town.

...ready for trouble at a moment's notice, this lot.

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Zane was in the corner opposite me, shoved against Asher's coffin. His black T-shirt had molded to him like a sweaty second skin. Cherry had chosen a white T-shirt today. The reddish dust of the road clung to the white material and mingled with the sweat until it was like dried blood.

Why. Why would you tell me this? I mean, okay, Cherry's shirt helps describe how uncomfortable the ride in back of a truck is, but Zane's t-shirt adds nothing to the story. Anita goes on to complain about what the ride is doing to her hair, in case the discomfort point wasn't being hit hard enough.

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Marianne yelled back to us, "Car coming, hide."
We all wiggled under the top layer of the tarp covering the coffins. There was a second tarp and ropes underneath me. The tarp smelled musty and dry. It was a toss-up whether it was cooler because of the shade or hotter because of the lack of air. I thought I heard a car go by in a spill of gravel, but Marianne didn't tell us to get up, so I didn't. I could see Zane through the hot dimness. We looked at each other with dull eyes; then I smiled. He smiled. It all started to be funny. You just reach a level of discomfort where you either scream or laugh.
The truck lurched to a rattling stop. In the sudden silence I could hear Zane laughing. Cherry's voice came clearly, "What in hell is so funny?"

This would be cute if I didn't despise everyone in this scene.

Everything gets unloaded, Zane and Cherry go to platonically share a bath, and Marianne offers Anita lessons in controlling the munin so she doesn't get hijacked again. That's it. That's all that was in this chapter.

What the hell is hot dimness?

grmblfjx wrote:

What the hell is hot dimness?

A sexy moron? 

Marianne's lesson? Provide a measure of comfort for Nathaniel who is still wounded and naked by brushing his hair.

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I kept staring at her. "Come again?"
She walked towards me, offering me the brush, that too-cheery smile on her face.
"Part of what makes you vulnerable to Raina is your own squeamishness."

Yeah, look. I'm not buying this. We just got done talking to the bad guys about how being "wanton" opened Betty up for evil. Marianne's telling Anita to lighten up about nakedness or else the munin will take control of her again.

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I shook my head. "I think you've exceeded the lesson for the day, Marianne."
She smiled. "Perhaps. But take the brush, do this one small thing. Not for me. Not for Nathaniel, but for yourself. Take back that piece of you that looks away from his body. Give Raina less ground in your heart."

Raina was, in Anita's own words, a "a sociopathic nymphomaniac sadomasochist." Yet Anita sticking to her guns on morals and personal boundaries gives Raina's ghost "ground in her heart"? This is bullshit. Betty going along with the bad guys/spirits meant she "opened herself to evil." Anita going along with them is the only way to control them? The fuck?

There isn't any deep meaning or anything here. It's just a flimsy excuse to scrub Anita of the frankly grating trait of going OH NOES IT'S THE PEEN I'M BACK IN HIGH SCHOOL AND AN AWKWARD VIRGIN at all times.

And even then, it's soooo boooring.

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I glanced back at Nathaniel. He was watching me out of those eyes of his.

As opposed to someone else's?

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"You like Marianne, but you resent her," he said.
That made me blink a couple of times and stare at him. He was right, and it was more perceptive than I'd ever expected from Nathaniel. Hearing him say something that smart made me feel better. If there was a brain in that body, then he wasn't just a submissive mess. And maybe, just maybe, he was salvageable, saveable. It was the most positive thought I'd had all day.

Kink-shaming from the lady who takes it up the ass from a corpse? Ooookay then.

Seriously though, Nathaniel is supposed to be this terribly damaged individual -and he is- but here the author confuses Nathaniel's kinks with symptoms of his trauma. In other words, BDSM is wrong, a behavior only sick people engage in. Sound like anyone we know?

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I stroked the hairbrush through his hair, and the stroke ended long before I got to the end of the hair. I'd had hair down to my butt once upon a time when I was about fourteen. But Nathaniel's hair was knee length. If he'd been a woman, I'd have said his hair fell like a dress around him.

He's 19. I'm fairly certain to have hair like that, he'd have to have it cut oh, about never ago.

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"Don't talk about pornographic movies, sadomasochism, sex in general." I thought about it for a second or two. "That hits the usual things you say to piss me off."
He laughed. "I don't know what else to talk about."

That's pretty much the entirety of the character, really. He exists to be completely useless except to be tragic and make Anita uncomfortable.

Anita gets a call from Dolph, her cop friend back in St. Louis. Dolph basically tells her that Niley and his people are Very Evil. In fact, basically the entire collective law enforcement of the US wants to fry his ass.

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"I talked to a cop in Miami. He said that Niley admitted two murders to him, told him details, but not under Miranda and not useable in court. He likes to taunt."

Looks like the cops in Miami are as incompetent as the cops in the rest of the book.

Anyway, they finish the conversation and Anita is scared.

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Nathaniel laid his head on my thigh. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
I stared down at the naked man with his head in my lap. No, if I ran up against a demon now, my house was made of glass, and nothing throws stones like the demonic. They know just where to hit so that the whole damn thing comes crashing down around your ears. I was really not in the mood to find out how far from grace I'd actually fallen.

...he's doing that because he's half-cat. She knows this. OH NOES A NAKED MAN SURELY I AM GOING TO HELL

Then more useless wereleopards show up for the next chapter. Yaaaaaaaay.

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Cherry came into the room. She'd slipped into a pair of jean shorts, and a white midriff tank top. Her small breasts were pressed against the thin material. I was a little too well-endowed to ever dream of going without a bra, but small or not, in that top she needed a bra. I was a prude.

I actually kinda liked this. Yeah, it's more "let me tell you about costumes" and getting all judgy, but she also has a brief moment of self-awareness about it.

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Her short yellow hair was still damp. She stalked into the room on those long legs, managing to look both slutty casual and unnaturally graceful.

I did say it was brief.

Anyway, she works a bit more on getting over her squeamishness, and then sees some more of how fucked-up they are.

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"I don't understand how you can be my Nimir-ra and not be my top, but I know now that you see it as two separate things. Gabriel didn't."
"What is a top?" I asked.
Zane answered for him again. "A dominant to Nathaniel's submissive. A submissive is called a bottom."

(snip)

"Nathaniel is the most . . ." Cherry hesitated, "the most broken of us. Gabriel and Raina made sure we were all bottoms; it was all we were trained for. They were the tops, always, but . . . but Nathaniel . . ." She finally shrugged.
I knew what she meant. Nathaniel was the weakest of them. The one who needed the most care.

Raina and Gabriel weren't tops; they were rapists, and Nate here is the most fucked-up from it. If LKH hadn't decided to make Anita clueless about BDSM, I'm actually fairly confident she would've done enough research to be able to have Anita point out the difference here. But in keeping her as the "good little Christian girl who falls from grace," she can't, and the narrative perpetuates the notion that to be dominant is to rape, and to be submissive is to be basically a Stockholmed rape victim.

Basically, nothing really happens here, so Anita fucks off to take a bath in the next chapter. As has been established, no good can come of a naked Anita:

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I was completely underwater, rinsing off my hair, when I heard the door crash open. I surfaced, sputtering, groping for the Firestar. I had the gun pointed before I even saw what was coming through the door. Even when I could see, it didn't make any sense.

Don't get excited. We're only going to have another pissing contest.

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There was a woman in the doorway. Physically, she was small, about my size, but she seemed to fill the room as if she took up more space than the eye could see. Her hair was long and brown. The bangs had been allowed to grow and were thinned until the hair covered her face past her nose like a veil. The hair was tinted ever so slightly blue. She wore a jean jacket with no sleeves. One bare, muscular, tatooed arm was holding the door so that the force of its being kicked in didn't send it flying back in her face. Under other circumstances, I'd have been sort of disdainful, except for the roil of power pouring from her. She looked like she'd gotten lost on her way to a punk biker bar. Psychically, she felt like a wind from the mouth of hell, hot and unfriendly.

Well, she already sounds a lot more interesting than Anita. You're gonna hafta step up your game, Blake.

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Water dripped down my face from my hair, tangling in my eyelashes. I blinked, resisting the urge to wipe the water away with my hands. "One step, just one, and I will pull this trigger," I said.

That might sound tough in any other context, but this is pretty much Anita's standard greeting when she meets other women at this point.

The biker chick is accompanied by two male werewolves who are trying to hold her back, and from them we learn her name is Roxanne.

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Roxanne shook off Roland's hands and started to walk farther into the room.
I fired the gun inches from her head. The sound was thunderous. The bullet took a bite out of the door and buried into the wall behind. It was a Glazer Safety Round, so the wall stopped it. I wasn't afraid of it going through the wall.

Anita Blake: Terrible house guest.

Warning shots are a terrible idea in general. Legally, it can land you in jail for all kinds of things like reckless endangerment, and if you wind up actually shooting the person you're trying to scare off, a prosecutor can build a case that you weren't really in fear for your life on it. More practical drawbacks are that any bullet, even a Glaser Safety Slug, WILL go through walls. A 9mm Glaser will penetrate 6-7 sheets of drywall. She could easily have hit anyone else behind Roxanne, like Roland and the yet-unnamed Native American werewolf right there.

Glaser Safety Slugs were designed for Air Marshals because they won't over-penetrate the target, not to prevent penetrating the air frame. They were designed so that when the Air Marshal shoots a terrorist, the bullet doesn't go through the terrorist and hit a passenger, a very serious concern.

Lastly, intentionally missing your target might embolden them. But it's Anita so that never happens.

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"You would really kill me," she said.
"In a heartbeat," I said. I was getting tired of crouching in the water.

And I'm getting tired of this exchange happening, now not just in EVERY book, but MULTIPLE TIMES. Anita's Executioner cred must be in the toilet.

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"Why didn't you kill me just now?"
"You're the lupa for Verne's pack. Killing you would rain all sorts of crap down. But I will do it, Roxanne. Now, back out of the room, close the door, and let me get dressed. If you still want to talk, fine, but don't ever, ever pull shit like this again."
"Without that little gun you wouldn't be so confident."

The house is flooded in a deluge of piss. Anyway, Roxanne's butthurt because Anita gnawed on Verne's throat.

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Roxanne let Roland and Marianne drag her back through the door. Roxanne pointed a
finger at me. "You insulted my Ulfric, and you will pay for that, with or without the gun."
"Fine," I said.

This takes place in America. In the fucking South. Why is everyone so FUCKING hoplophobic? EVERY CHARACTER she encounters in this book seems to be offended by the existence of modern guns. Because having a virus that makes you a stupid touchy-feely furry with superstrength is so much better, right?

Well. Time for Chapter 40.

Well, now that I have replaced my stolen computer and can find a copy of Blue Moon AGAIN, I need to get back to it.

But anyway, remember how I was ranting about how Anita cannot possibly go all Rambo with a mini-Uzi like she does earlier in the book? Here's FPSRussia to show you why:



His description of the Uzi is 100% accurate.