Bone Dance

7.0: Off to see the wizard

“Well,” said Frances, “have we forgotten anything? Hot dogs, pickles, potato salad, ants — you did bring the ants?”

“Frances,” I said, not for the first time, “that’s enough.”

The trike was parked on the apron of an unused garage door, in a service drive between Loondale and the empty Gilded West tower. That put it near our preferred exit route. We’d circled Ego on foot, and were now on the opposite side, at Ego’s front door, where the guard station was. It was five minutes to midnight.

“I suppose we’ll have to do without the ants.” She tilted her head back and looked at Ego’s top, where the ring of white lights shone smugly, and running clouds edge-lit with moonlight made the view look like the opening shot of a horror movie. “Use it while you’ve got it, Tom. And so will I. May the best fiend win.”

“Is the best one more fiendish, or less?”

“When we finish this, you have my permission to tell me.”

“If I still can.”

She looked at me, and opened up a moonlit death’s-head grin. “If I can hear you.”

“On that jolly note — it’s time.” I headed for the doors as Frances tucked herself in the shadows of the door embrasure. She wore something dull and dark and snug, with a pocketed vest of the same stuff. The fabric didn’t make any sound when rubbed against itself. Motionless, out of direct light, she disappeared.

I pushed through the door and squinted under the bare bulb at the guard station. There were two men there, swapping gossip as their shifts overlapped. One I’d never seen before: an earnest-looking youngish man with short, sun-bleached blond hair. The other, a big man with a heavy red beard and a Santa Claus belly who occupied the desk chair, was a regular on the midnight-to-eight shift. I almost smiled at him. He did lousy work.

“Hey, look who’s here!” he called, leaning back. The desk chair screeched on its base. “It’s the handyman! Albrecht keepin’ up his service contract, huh?”

“You’ll have to ask him,” I said. The blond man curled his lip, whether at me or at his fellow guard I couldn’t tell. Seeing that, I tried a shot at random. “Is that a blackjack in your pocket, or are you just excited about working with this guy?” I said to him.

The curl became a full-fledged sneer. He turned to the red-bearded guard. “I gotta go, Shoe. Got a date out at the pier.”

“Tell him hi for me,” I said to the blond one’s departing back. Shoe thought that was funny.

Good. Down to one; now to move him around. “You want to call up to Mr. A. and let him know I’m here?”

“Let him know who’s here, boy?”

“D. W. Griffith,” which was the name Albrecht knew me by. “Tell him I’ve got the one he wants.” In my hand was an unmarked box, something nobody would identify as a container for a videotape. Just like always. Everything had to be just like always.

“I bet you do,” said Shoe. He went through a door behind the desk. There was a little pane of glass in it to watch me through, but the door kept me from hearing whatever he might choose to say to the person upstairs.

I dropped the videotape. Swearing, I went to my knees in front of the desk and bumped it farther under. Then I reached beneath the desktop and twisted the door camera’s coaxial cable loose from the wall jack, where it connected to the monitor upstairs. I was careful not to break the connection entirely; I wanted streaks and snow, not a blank screen. Frances came through the door like a patch of black fog, under the guard’s window, and around the corner to the elevator. I popped the coax back on. Never use quick-connect jacks on security equipment, I thought as I came up smiling from behind the desk with the unmarked box in my hand. I had time to dust off my knees and straighten my collar before the guard came out.

“So, what’s in the package?” he said, and my bone marrow turned to brine.

“You’ll have to ask Mr. A. about that, too, won’t you?” I hoped my voice was firm and pleasant. Hadn’t I been passed? Did they know somehow that there would be a break-in? If that elevator moved without authorization, hell, in condensed form, would break loose.

“Maybe I will. You’re supposed to get your ass up there. You know the way.”

The release of fear was almost harder to bear than the onset. I couldn’t answer him, snappily or otherwise. I walked at what I hoped was a leisurely pace down the hall and turned the corner.

Frances materialized from whatever surface she’d adhered to. I poked the button, and the scarred bronze doors in front of me opened. There had been lots of elevators there once; the sealed-off openings for their doors were all that were left. Frances stepped in next to me as I pushed the button for the top floor.

I sagged against the wall when the doors closed. I could feel sweat wandering down my spine and chest and rib cage. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t swearing.

Frances had a pistol in her hands; she was mounting a silencer on it with quick motions. “If I were you, I’d save my emotional collapse for later. That was the easy part.”

“For you, maybe.”

“Could they have seen you drop the box?”

“Upstairs, you mean? No. The camera only covers the area right around the front door.”

“Then there isn’t anything to connect with the snow on their monitor. Good.” She seemed to be content with the pistol, but she didn’t put it away in her vest. “How likely is it that we’ll be met at the top by another guard?”

She was right: that had been the easy part. I’d forgotten. “Fifty-fifty. There hasn’t been one the last few times. I’m hoping I’m considered trustworthy.”

“Fine. When the door opens, don’t run out, but don’t dawdle.”

For the first time it occurred to me that if it went to hell, I could say Frances forced me to do this. I wondered if I would. If I asked Sherrea, what would she recommend? Would she say that life was precious, and that I should save mine if I could? Or would she say things about honor, and commitment, and the greater good?

Or would she say, in a voice that wasn’t hers, You gotta learn to serve, and let your own self be fed by the spirits! She’d said I had to do something about my evil ways. Well, Sher, here I am. I wished I could have found something less drastic.

“Get ready,” Frances murmured, and I tried desperately to remember, and re-create, what leaving this elevator had been like when it wasn’t a matter of somebody’s life or death.

The doors opened, and I strode out. No one. No one at all. All this relief would be the ruin of me. Frances moved up and touched me on the shoulder. No talking now; we’d talked the floor plan to pieces back on the island. I nodded. She disappeared down the hall while I knocked on the familiar door, dark wood, heavy and polished. A voice called from beyond it, and I turned the cool chrome knob and stepped through.

The room was the same, dark and close, with its desk and draped window and high-backed chair. The light fell, neat and constrained on the desktop. The white hands in the light were Albrecht’s, and the pale, fleshy face dim above them.

How had I done this before? Had there been a routine, a series of actions that made up the dance of trade? I stood with the box in my hand, my mind blank, my heart slamming in my ribs. The box, the box. I lifted it, set it on the desk, and with my index finger slid it across the wood to Albrecht.

“What is it?” he said.

“What you asked for. Open it.”

I realized belatedly that I hadn’t needed to make the tape look like an original. If I was right, he would have settled for a dub, and it would have been reasonable for me to claim that a dub was all I could find. But he pulled the box (cardboard, this time) open, and I watched his hands, his face, for any sign that I’d failed.

In the mellow light of the desk lamp, I thought it was still convincing: the block lettering for the title, the running time, the distributor’s name; the scuffing and fading of the print where fingers would have worn it. The label glue didn’t even smell. I’d missed my calling; I should have been a forger. When Albrecht played the tape, he’d see a title sequence that gave surprisingly little evidence of its low-tech origins, and five minutes of non-specific establishing scenes assemble-edited from six different B-horror flicks. By minute seven, I calculated, he’d know this wasn’t the movie he’d paid for. But by then, I’d be gone.

He closed the box. His hands didn’t have the acquisitive curl I was used to seeing in them. But again, if I was right, it wasn’t simple acquisitiveness that had driven him to seek this out.

Frances, have you found your damned monster yet? I would have to leave her there. If I left without her, before she found Worecski, they’d let me go unhindered, unconnected to the thing about to happen. As it was, the business reputation that was making this possible would evaporate; I’d never sell another tape to Albrecht; I’d have to leave town for a while; but I could survive that. Now Albrecht would open his desk drawer and pull out the leather bag.

He stood up. “Come with me.”

My tongue froze to the roof of my mouth. “Why?” I asked. His expression was neutral, as any good bargainer’s would be. “You don’t think I keep that much in here, do you? Come along.”

So much for maintaining our routine. There was nothing I could do, except follow him and stay alert. He worked a latch on a door set into the paneling behind the desk, and light shot out all around it. I squinted and stepped through.

“Sugar?” said a voice I knew, a woman’s. “You all through — Sparrow!”

She wore a narrow dress of midnight-blue silk that draped like water running over her skin. Her lips were bright coral-red, and her eyelids were smoky. Her shining white-blond hair fell unbound all around her lightly tanned shoulders and decolletage.

“Hello, Dana,” I said, and was surprised that my mouth worked. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Her gaze snapped to Albrecht. “Sugar, what’s — Is this — What’s going on?”

“Just a little business, sweetie,” he said, his attention on the cabinet he was opening. “Don’t you worry.” But she’d used a name for me he’d never heard. Or had he? Myra and Dusty had known it.

It was a large room, exquisitely appointed. Dana was sitting in a pose that suggested she’d been lying down a moment earlier, on a cream-colored couch. It was one of two, set in an L shape. A carved Chinese table stood in front of them, scattered with things: a carafe of dark red wine and two partially filled glasses; the remains of a small meal for two; a little silver-stoppered vial half full of something white; a heavy necklace of silver and turquoise medallions. The lighting came from recesses in the ceiling. The air was cool and dry. There was a sky-blue carpet on the floor three inches deep, and a rack of stereo and video gear topped with a twenty-five-inch monitor.

My eyes kept going, past the rack to another shining wood door and the man standing straight and stiff next to it. I didn’t recognize him at first. He wore a high-collared white jacket and black trousers. His blond hair was scraped back from his face, and he looked even more cadaverous than usual. He was trying desperately to look at nothing, and the effort, I could tell, was almost more than he could bear. Cassidy. Uniformed, clearly in Albrecht’s employ, he was having to witness his boss’s seduction of the woman he was in love with. I turned back to Dana and found her watching me.

“Is this one of life’s little jokes on the two of you?” I asked. My voice was unsteady, but not much. “Or did you use your connections to get him the job?” Connections. I’d realized that Dana had them. I just hadn’t realized they’d been to here.

Dana flushed. “Honey… ” She shook her head.

I looked again at Albrecht, who was pouring himself a drink from a decanter he’d taken from the cabinet, and then back to Cassidy. His deep-set eyes were wide, meeting mine, even wider than the circumstances would warrant. For an instant, I didn’t understand. Then I did what I should have done long before. I turned around.

There was a fifth person in the room. He leaned at ease against the wall, where the opening door from the office had hidden him as I came in. He was tall and lean, with sandy brown hair that fell forward into eyes so light-colored they were nearly colorless. His white shirt was open over his pearl-gray cotton trousers, and his feet were bare. His smile was full of big, even teeth.

“Howdy,” he said. “I do believe you must be Sparrow.”

Frances, I thought in that long moment when I couldn’t so much as swallow, I found the monster.

Mick had said he was strong, fast, and bugfuck crazy. I could see it, feel it, smell it on him, the madness that, when he had to, he could probably disguise as something else. Now he didn’t have to.

He crossed the space between the wall and me in three strides, grabbed up my stiff right hand in both of his, and shook it, hard. “Mighty pleased to meet you, after all this time. I’ve heard an awful lot about you. Heck, for a while I thought I might miss you completely, but here you are at last.” His smile grew, if possible, wider, and he turned it on Dana. “Your friend don’t talk much. You didn’t tell me that.”

“I’m sorry. I just haven’t had anything to say,” I said. I barely recognized my voice. I sounded like someone talking to a growling dog. “I missed your name.”

“Oh, no, you didn’t.” The smile had changed. I was not going to be able to bluff my way through this. “I didn’t tell it to you. But you know what it is, don’t you? These folks have been calling me Fred, but I want you to call me by the name my momma gave me.” He still had hold of my hand. He squeezed it. “Go ahead. You call me by my name.” He squeezed it ’til the bones pinched together.

“I really don’t—” Harder. A little catch of sound came out of my throat. I saw a movement from Dana, that might have been her fingers going to her mouth.

“Say it,” said the monster, his face close to mine.

“Tom Worecski,” I said. He let my hand drop. I was afraid to flex it, for fear that he’d notice he’d left it attached to my wrist.

“Good for you! Now, you go sit on the sofa there. Babe, come over here and give us a kiss.”

As she passed me on the other side of the table, Dana’s eyes cut away from mine. She went to Tom and put her arms around him. He didn’t turn his face to her, but she kissed his jaw and his neck and the hollow of his collarbone while he smiled at me. It wasn’t Albrecht’s seduction. It was Tom’s. I wondered whether anybody would care if I was sick on the rug.

Albrecht set his glass down on the cabinet. “God damn it, Krueger, she’s not—”

“A. A., if you keep your mouth shut, not only will I let you live, I’ll think about not walkin’ you through Nicollet Market buck naked with your dick in your fist. You got that?”

Tom had raised his voice. Albrecht’s face, innocent of sun, flushed to magenta, then went bloodless. “You need me. My staff won’t listen to you.”

“We been through this before. I need you like a goddamn dog needs shoes, A.A. I figured if I let you run all the little shit, it would keep you out of my way. But if that’s not workin’ anymore, I can find some other asshole to run the little shit. So you just sit behind your big desk and buy movies that you think’ll help you get rid of me, and stay the fuck out of my way.”

He was stroking Dana absently, as if she were a cat on his lap. She had her face turned into his shoulder; whatever expression was there, none of us could see it. Albrecht watched Tom and Dana with a look that reminded me a little of Cassidy. I was glad I had my back to Cassidy.

“It’s not Hellriders,” I said to Albrecht.

“Nobody ever thought it was,” said Tom. “But we didn’t want to discourage you right off, if you thought you needed an excuse to come up.” He frowned over Dana’s head, and gazed around the room as if he missed something. “So where’s Her Highness?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t fuck with me. You know what I’m talking about.”

My hands closed in reflex over my knees. The right one hurt.

He saw it; it made him happy again. “Well, shit, Myra and Dusty work for me, you know. When Franny had her little joke on Myra the other night, don’t you think Myra would’ve told me?”

“She told you who it was?”

“She didn’t have to. Dusty told me some of the stuff Myra said when she wasn’t Myra, and I knew right off. There ain’t anybody jaws on like that but Franny.”

That didn’t explain how he knew someone had come up with me, or how he knew I wasn’t really there to sell A.A. Albrecht a faked videotape. The only thing that did -

“I expect she’s listening at a keyhole,” Tom said cheerfully. He stared at me as he added, louder, “So, Fran? You come in here, or I’m gonna break this kid’s neck. You know I can.”

Maybe she wouldn’t care. But I thought I ought to tell her, at least, that he hadn’t started yet. “I’d hate that,” I said. “Besides, you haven’t finished my hand.” Stall. You’ve lost the advantage of surprise, Frances. At least pick your moment.

“Thatagirl,” Tom called out, “come on in and have a seat. Hell, we got us enough folks for a party.”

I twisted around on the couch. The door beside Cassidy swung slowly open to admit Frances, alone, with her pistol. Why hadn’t she shot — ah, of course. She wasn’t here to kill Tom’s body. The head fight had begun already; I could see it in Frances’s tight-closed lips, the net of squint lines around Tom’s eyes.

I wanted desperately to know the range of a Horseman’s powers. Because I’d thought of another solution to the problem of isolating Tom Worecski. Frances could eliminate Tom’s options for switching bodies. Bang, bang, bang. Bang. Maybe she’d meant to all along, and it was my bad luck I’d ended up here, as one of Tom’s options.

“Someone gave us away,” I said to Frances.

“I was beginning to think someone must have. Everything was going according to plan.” She kept her eyes, and the pistol, on Tom.

By logic, someone in the room ought to have wrenched it out of her hand by now. No, if anyone approached her, anyone who wasn’t Tom, she could shoot. Tom could order one of them to get the gun. I began to think I ought to be doing something besides sitting and watching, but what could I do? I wasn’t supposed to be there. I wasn’t part of this fight. It had nothing to do with me. I was caught between the two of them.

“Go sit beside your friend, babe,” Tom said, and Dana let go of him. Her face, when she had her back to Tom, was vacant with fear. She sat down close to me and clung to my sleeve, where Tom couldn’t see it.

“Put it down, Franny. It’s not gonna do you any good.”

“Oh, I don’t know. A loud noise, some nasty stains — it would have a certain nostalgia value at the very least.” The room was cool, but there was a light gloss of sweat above Frances’s eyebrows.

“Huh. I thought they were the good old days. But I figured you’d got religion or something. All the fun we used to have, and here you are, with a self-righteous stick up your ass, out to blow my brains out for bein’ just as bad as you.” He took a step forward, grinning, teeth clenched intermittently. “And you know that’s true. I’ve never done anything you didn’t do.”

I’d heard that before, from Mick about Frances. She’d denied it. And I remembered what Tom Worecski’s death sentence was for. I must have moved; Tom’s gaze flicked to me and back to Frances.

“You didn’t tell anybody?” he said. “Oh, my. Let you who are without sin cast the first stone.”

Frances also grinned; like Tom, she seemed to be doing it at least half because of the pressure. “If I’d washed my sins away first, I wouldn’t have been able to minister to the rest of you.”

Tom snorted. “You loved it. You always figured you had a right to run the world. You thought being part of the committee that was gonna blow it to hell was no more than you deserved. You wanted to show those bastards who hadn’t had the sense to get together and elect you Goddess.”

“That’s not true.” Frances spoke without heat, as if he’d misstated the time and she was correcting that. But the heat was there, underneath, unspoken, a slow tide of it. “You had to lie to get me to sign on. You never once planned to hold the country hostage, but I believed it. I thought I was working for peace. I may have been criminally stupid and blind as a cave fish, but I didn’t think we meant to actually drop the Big One.”

“Shit, Franny, then you were the only one.”

“A loner to the very end.” Her right hand was trembling, barely.

“Is it true?” Tom asked the air. “Was she really pure as the driven snow, even though she executed half the damn launch sequence her own self?”

“We were supposed to hold and wait to abort,” Frances snapped, her face white. Some of it was surely whatever Tom was doing to her head. But she looked like a woman watching a rerun of her worst nightmare. She had done it. She had lived with it all these decades. And she’d dedicated herself to seeing that the people who’d shared the blame wouldn’t live with anything anymore. I’d been right all the time, to be afraid of her.

“I’ll bet the jury’s done deliberating,” Tom said. “Awful sorry I couldn’t get twelve of ’em, but one good one oughta be enough for this. Whattaya say, Skin? Innocent or guilty?”

In Albrecht’s darkened office, someone moved hesitantly toward the door. It was Mick Skinner.

Frances took a step forward — no, it was a stagger, a widening of an unstable stance — and flung her left hand up to her face. The pistol wobbled and sank. Cassidy, glancing at Tom, moved toward her. Then the hand over her face dropped, and showed the blackness of her eyes, and her clenched teeth. She brought the end of the silencer to bear on Cassidy. I heard Dana suck her breath in; but Cassidy stepped back.

Tom had used Mick, the shock of him, to break Frances’s concentration. Then he’d struck at her, hard enough to cut her loose, for a moment, from her muscles. But Frances was in fragile command of herself now, and Tom stood relaxed for the first time since Frances had come into the room. He’d struck and let her go. It was a gesture of contempt.

Mick looked like someone enduring the course of a natural disaster. His once-neat braids were coming loose, coils and streaks of hair stuck in the sweat on his forehead and jaw, and his clean-lined features were marked with weariness and emotion. Sweat striped and dotted the chest of the T-shirt he wore. He must have come from the island on foot, and quickly. At Tom’s command. His hands opened and closed at his side. “Guilty,” he said softly, looking at Frances. And, in an echo of himself, “My family was in Galveston.”

“I was going to tell you,” said Frances. Her eyes were on his face; her voice was low and unsteady. “By deed, if not by word. Feel free to reproach me, but you won’t catch up to what I’ve done to myself. I’ve had more time, after all. But what about you? What will you have to reproach yourself for?”

“You ought to die.” Mick sounded half strangled.

“So should your ally, here. Leave us out of it. You didn’t inform Tom of my arrival out of sheer righteous indignation. Christ, I wish you had. Then maybe you’d have kept all these civilians out of range of my comeuppance. Besides, Tom hadn’t told you I was one of the ones responsible for the Bang, had he? He wanted me to convict myself. He knew you’d hurt more that way. So why did you tell him we were coming? What superior philosophy made it necessary to warn the snake about the scorpion?”

Mick was silent.

“Or was it not philosophy at all?” Her voice was softer now. “You can walk away from him, Mick. Now. I can hold him that long. Take Sparrow and get away from here. There’s nothing he can do to you. If he told you otherwise, it was a lie.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Tom broke in, cheerful. “Ol’ Skin, his experience tells him different.”

“I tried,” Mick said. “He sent Myra and Dusty after me. I dumped my body and rode Sparrow, figuring I could hide out that way, just until things cooled down. But they found me. I got away from them, but I think I was supposed to. He can find me anytime he wants, Fran, and now he can find Sparrow, too.”

“No,” Frances said, and in her voice was the deep sadness I’d heard when she’d told Dusty, I have a damnably long memory. “He just has a hold on you. The longer you stay, and the more dirty things you do for him, the better the hold will be.”

But I had looked up, uncontrollably, at Tom.

“That’s right,” said Tom, to me. “Mick got you away from them the first time I sent my kids. No love lost between Mick and Myra and Dusty, I’ll tell you. The second time, Franny got you away. But while that was going on, I’d sent Mick himself.”

Mick, in the archives, saying, I came back for my jacket.

“You bastard, that’s not true,” Mick said. “You didn’t send me.”

“That got a little screwed up,” Tom continued, as if Mick had never spoken. “Worked out all right in the end, though. I’ve never been able to get anybody on that goddamn island before.”

This time there was no protest from Mick.

“My God,” Frances sighed, “can you hear yourself? Playing Ming the Merciless, gloating over your explanations to the captive hero?”

Tom looked surprised. “Who says you’re the hero?”

“I do. How can you be so small, Tom O’ Bedlam? How can you have lived so long, and still be so small?”

“I run a city,” he said, his lip curled. “You’re just a little killer.”

She looked mildly insulted. “I’m seeking vengeance for the whole Western Hemisphere. I think that’s positively grandiose.”

Tom leaned into the cushions of the couch and smiled. “Hell, I missed you, Franny. I’d have elected you Goddess.”

“Don’t start,” Frances said softly.

“It don’t hurt to ask. There’s enough here for two of us.” His voice, too, was soft. Albrecht, in the act of pouring himself another drink, made a little noise and turned. “Fran, I know you. I know you better’n anybody. I know Skin here thinks he’s got your number, but he’s just a goddamn puppydog.” And that made Mick flinch, and look to Frances. “But it could be the good old days all over again. I know what you want, Franny.”

His voice, his face, had turned surprisingly sweet. Frances watched him gravely, the line of her dark brows straight, her lips pressed tightly together. The head fight was over. This was the clean, insidious pressure of words and a shared past.

The rest of us sat or stood quite still, waiting for our futures to be decided. I had seen Albrecht’s face when Tom proposed to turn half his city into a courting gift. I had seen Mick’s face. Mick, who a few hours ago had made love to Frances. Cassidy’s expression was of uncomprehending, enduring despair, the look of a man who didn’t expect things to ever be good again. And Dana, beside me, might have been carved out of ice. She hadn’t raised her eyes from the Chinese table since Frances’s pistol had pointed at Cassidy. There was no blood under her faint tan, and her fingers twisted and ground at the silk over her knees.

Chango, was I going to go quietly to the slaughterhouse? My side had the gun. If my side was still on my side. I wanted out of here. She wanted… something.

“I don’t understand,” I said in as conversational a tone as I was capable of. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for, besides a change of subject. “Why did you decide you had to bring me in?”

Tom paced slowly to the other couch, and sat down. He was at right angles to me now, and his right knee brushed my left one. A smile grew on his face, in increments. “Because Mick said you were a good fit. He and Franny must have told you all the fun we used to have? I wanted a taste.”

“Take a bite of this, then,” said Frances calmly. She raised the pistol in both hands, firing position. The silencer had a perfectly round black eye that looked into mine.

I wanted to scream. I moved instead. Before I knew I meant to, I found myself rolling over the back of the couch and breaking for the door that Cassidy guarded. The gun made an ugly, flat sound. Cassidy reached the door first — and yanked it open. “Go!” he mouthed. His hollowed-out face was twisted with anguish, like a man facing the medusa. I’d have to take him with me. Otherwise Tom Worecski would dissect him alive, and Cassidy knew it. I grabbed his arm as I hit the door.

It turned into a snake, strong and contrary. No, still an arm, but twisting through mine, jerking it up until my shoulder joint blossomed with fire. His other arm closed around my jaw. He giggled next to my ear.

I couldn’t see him, but I could see the part of the room I’d just left. Frances stood with her gun not quite aimed at us, wearing a near cousin to Cassidy’s expression. Dana, half crouched on the sofa, stared wide-eyed at us. Albrecht had pressed back against the wall, his hands over his face. Mick was still in the office door, one arm reaching, as if he could stop whatever was about to happen. And Tom was sitting, empty, on the couch.

Empty.

Cassidy’s voice said, beside my head, “I told you, Franny, I could snap the kid’s neck. Wanna watch?” Then he sucked air in through his teeth, as if something struck him.

I pulled and pulled, and only hurt myself. I didn’t stop trying to pull away. If I could have torn off the arm he was holding, I would have.

“You know what I want, you say,” Frances said in an unattended way, as if she’d sent the words to her lips and tongue with no instructions for tone of voice. “After all these years — all this overly long and self-indulgent life — there’s only one thing I want. And the most unnatural circumstance on the face of God’s creation is that I might be here, with a gun in my hand and you in front of me, and still be denied that one thing.”

Frances’s eyes were round and pitch-dark, as if the pupils had eaten the irises. I didn’t think she was seeing us. I thought she might be walking in some nightmare desert landscape inside her head, where she was converging on Tom Worecski with all her conscious mind, her wit, her honed and focused will. Cassidy’s body was still, and tensed hard. Tom was moving through that landscape, too. The gun muzzle swung and steadied, and I saw again a foreshortened view of the silencer.

I don’t think I heard the gun. It would have been dramatic, but however dramatic the moment may have been, I don’t think that was part of it. No, I didn’t hear anything, or see or feel anything. I stopped -

— and started again on my hands and knees on a field of sky blue, with Tom’s voice ringing out across the room. “What is that? What the fuck is it?”

“Cass?” Dana’s voice came, thinly, from the same quarter. And again, stronger, “Cass?”

My shirt, where it lay over my shoulders and back, felt funny. It stuck to my skin. I turned my head and found the blood shining under my chin. I couldn’t get my breath. I was afraid to look behind me.

“Cassidy!” Dana screamed finally, and crossed the carpet in a headlong stumble, to fall to her knees next to Cassidy. Next to his body, behind me. You had to have known, beforehand, that it was Cassidy. I shivered once, twice, and realized that I wasn’t going to stop. “You bastards,” Dana gasped, “you fucking bastards!”

“Wanna try again, Franny?” Tom’s voice, from the couch, was harsh. “Wanna see how many more civilians you can go through before I get bored and pull your guts out through your face?”

Frances stood in front of me, her feet wide apart, the gun in both hands pointing to the floor. She was staring at Tom as if her eyes would never move again.

“Let her go, Tom,” Mick said, barely loud enough to hear. Perhaps anything louder would have gotten out of his control. “Let ’em both go. You proved you could beat her. She can’t stop you. Let ’em go.”

“What’s the goddamn thing, Mick? You’ve ridden it. You didn’t tell me about it.”

“… it’s a cheval.”

“Bullshit it is! They don’t have any brains.”

I stood slowly up. Dana was curled on her knees beside Cassidy’s body, crying: great, heaving sobs with no self-awareness in them. Her hands were closed over her face. Now, when there was no one there to feel it, she didn’t touch him.

Mick’s sigh trembled. “It’s a long story, Tom. Please let ’em go. I’ll tell you all about it. You don’t want them.”

Like Frances, I looked at Worecski. His eyes moved between us.

“Don’t I? How long a story is it, Skin?” Tom jerked his head toward Frances. “Go take the gun away from her.”

Mick came walking slowly, shakily over. I think he expected Frances to shoot him. Instead she stared at him, the gun still in both hands; then she pulled the clip out smoothly and handed the gun to Mick. Tom laughed.

“That’ll do. Now, here’s how we’re gonna play it. Skinner’s gonna tell me his long story. Then I’ll decide what I want to do with the two of you, and I’ll come round you up. Whatcha think, Skin? Fifteen minutes? Is it that long a story?” He threw his head back and laughed. “Jesus, Skin, if Scheherazade had looked like you, her old man would have offed her the first night.”

Then he sat up and turned to Frances and me. He didn’t look like a man who’d just laughed. “Ever seen a rabbit after a dog’s caught it? Run, you little rabbits. I’ll be right behind you.”

7.1: You get what you pay for

Had we known that Tom, in this one thing, was perfectly trustworthy, we’d have taken the elevator.

Instead we ran as we’d been ordered to. We plunged down the fire stairs in the near darkness of the emergency lighting and the sealed-in heat of the past day. At first we tried to pause at landings, watching for an ambush, waiting for the sound of a shot. We gave it up after a dozen floors. After all, what did it get us? A chance to return fire? With what? But the strain on our nerves was as great as the strain on our legs and lungs.

By the time we reached the foot of the stairs we were both wringing wet. Frances had twice come close to falling. She leaned on the door at the bottom of the stairwell, her head flung back, the breath shuddering in and out of her lungs. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I ought to say so, while I had the chance.”

“It doesn’t matter.” And it really didn’t. She’d killed — my friend? I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell, I wasn’t sure what a friend was. I could have asked him whether we were friends, if she hadn’t — But she wasn’t responsible; cats kill birds, and rattlesnakes bite, that’s what they do. She only wanted one thing in the world. I wondered if she wanted anything else now.

“What’s out there?” she asked. “Should I be prepared for the unusual?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s the Hall of Broken Glass.”

A thin burst of a laugh. “Crystal Court. What happened to it?”

“I don’t know,” I said again. “The whole first floor is empty, except for the guard desk. I think the mess has been left as a no-man’s-land. We’ll be exposed, crossing it.”

“Well, that’ll be a change. Let’s do it.”

We came out of the stairwell quickly. I led, because I knew where the door was. Frances knew where the doors used to be. Weak pools of light overlapped across broken tile floor and drifts of glass and plastic shards, and shone through gaping frames that had once been storefronts, rimed with the remains of shattered plate glass. In the center of the room the twisted wreck of an escalator lay, wrenched free of the sagging second-level balcony and heaped on the floor like the spine of a metal dinosaur. I had a badly preserved bit of videotape of an old television show that showed this space full of people, the escalator turning and turning. I’d watched it once, and never again.

The floor crunched and rang under me as I ran, loud as a siren. I could hear Frances behind me; then suddenly I couldn’t. She’d slipped and fallen to her knees. I skidded to a halt, darted back, grabbed her arm, and pulled her up and forward. She got her feet under her in time to keep from being dragged.

Two shots, I thought as the door loomed ahead of me. One for each of us. I should hear them any minute now. He’s had his fun. Then we were through the door, and the air was warm and humid and smelled like food and alcohol fumes and sweat and cooking smoke and not at all like the rooms at the top of Ego. The trike was still there.

“This is crazy,” Frances said, fumbling the latches open. “As soon as we roll away, he’s lost us, he can’t… Oh, God.” She scrubbed fiercely at her face with both hands. It printed her cheeks with little smears of blood. She must have stopped her fall with her palms, back in the Hall of Broken Glass. “Of course — Tom doesn’t give a damn if he loses us. We can’t hurt him; why should he care if we get away? He must be laughing himself into a seizure right now.”

She helped me into the back and scrambled into the driver’s seat. Whatever she thought Tom was doing right now, she hadn’t slowed down. As for me, the mindless strength that had gotten me out of Ego shut off the moment the weather shell closed over my head. Waves of trembling passed over me, and to stop thinking of Cassidy I had to stop thinking at all.

Spirits, he hadn’t even gotten a good exit line. No lines at all; no more trusting, uncomplicated, ill-considered actions; no more startling moments when the fine mind shone through a break in the alcoholic clouds. The fine mind was on a wall in Ego -

Stop thinking.

And Dana, who was still alive, still there, who might come to envy Cassidy because nobody could stay on the good side of a madman forever. And when she found herself deep in the nightmare, who had the means to drag her safe out of it? What friend did she have -

Stop.

The trike was rolling; buildings passed overhead. Frances’s shoulders were raised, as if she were ducking something. We shot through an intersection, and I saw headlights catch fire, swing in behind us.

“Dios te salve, Maria,” Frances spat. “Tell me that’s coincidence.”

She turned, and turned, and did a savage cut-and-cut-again through the remains of a hotel’s covered driveway. We sailed, nearly airborne, into the street and around the corner. A few streets later we had headlights behind us.

By the third time, we’d been forced south all the way to the Exhibition Hall. Frances slipped us out of reach by darting down a highway exit ramp — the toll collector saw us coming and fled the booth — then lurching off it and straight up through the tall grass of the embankment to the street above. I couldn’t hear her words over the engine, but the tone held a rising edge of fury and panic.

Ego’s dark silhouette rose over her sister towers ahead of us, banded near the top with its ring of lights, its two antenna masts rising like horns from the roof…

“Radio!”

“What?” Frances shouted.

“They’ve got radio! Nobody else does because nobody can afford to power a transmitter. But Albrecht runs the commercial stations! A few roof spotters with binoculars, talking to a central point, plus the receivers in the cars—”

“Oh, God,” she groaned. “I’d gotten used to civilization being dead. I suppose you don’t know of anything to foul their signal?”

“Sure. One good electromagnetic pulse — got a nuke?” I said, with unnecessary force.

“Thank you.”

“Transmitting on their frequency would do it, but I’d need the wattage and the antenna height. No go.”

“And I can’t exactly lose them in traffic,” Frances said bitterly, with a gesture that took in the empty streets around us.

“No,” I answered slowly, because I wasn’t sure that what I’d had was a useful idea. “But if you can lose them long enough to get to the Night Fair, I defy ’em to track you through it.”

A moment; then she said, “And from there I can bolt for old I-394 and simply outrun them.”

Thinking about something else was as good as not thinking at all. All I had to do was not run out of something elses. “How are we fixed for pin money?”

She didn’t answer; she was in the midst of a nauseating bit of maneuvering. But from the quality of the non-answer, she thought it was a damn silly question.

So I added, “Running costs. I want to stop at my place and pick up a couple of things.”

“I’ll let you use my toothbrush.”

“Will you let me sell your near-mint CD of Sergeant Pepper?”

“Aha. I am enlightened. But how do we keep them from finding us between here and the Night Fair, O Solomon my partner?”

“Underground parking garages,” I replied.

She ripped out a U-turn past the fender of our current pursuer, and spared a second to glance over her shoulder at me. “You terrify me. But we have to amputate first. Pray that my memory is good.”

I didn’t understand what she meant until she did it. She turned suddenly, at speed, into a driveway between two apartment buildings — but it wasn’t a driveway. It was wide enough for two people walking abreast, for bicycles, for the trike. But not for the car on our tailpipe, whose driver must have seen the sculptured break in the concrete curbing and trusted it to be what it looked like. The noise behind us was horrible.

Frances killed her headlights and wove through two blocks’ worth of alleys. “Good,” she said. “It was still there.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I wasn’t sure. Which of the ramps can we still get into?”

I banished from my mind the death we hadn’t died, and set to navigating.

We twined through the Deeps from the roots of one tower to the next. Between them, when we had to cross streets, we coasted, the engine idle to keep sound to a minimum. Once, under the Dayton family’s building, we drove into a pit party, mingled nightbabies and street-meat dancing, drinking, and cockfighting under strings of lights and the low concrete ceiling. They scattered, and we wove through like a needle in burlap. The band didn’t even stop playing.

We surfaced at last across from one of the Night Fair’s gates, the one she’d brought me to that first day. She stopped the bike in the shadow of the overhang and studied the street. It wasn’t empty; there was too much spillover from the Fair for that. “Careful,” she said — to herself, I thought. “They must be frantic by now. They’ll have told him that they’ve mislaid us, and he’ll… ”

“What?” I asked.

“We really have to get out of here,” she said lightly. “Because if we’re still here to fish for, he’ll poke a hook in the best bait he can find and dangle it. The friends we left behind, say.”

I opened my mouth to tell her that I wouldn’t be tempted to trade my life for Dana’s, and closed it again. I suppose I would have said it if I had been sure either that it was true, or that it wasn’t. Instead I said, “Mick sold us out.”

“Think of my ongoing concern, then, as my way of rubbing his nose in it. Now, soldiers, march away; and how thou pleasest—” She put the trike in gear and crossed the street as quietly as the engine would run.

The Fair was full of commotion and whatever level of frenzy could be sustained over the course of a night. I’d never wondered why I could be comfortable here and twitchy in a group of four people. The answer, now that I thought about it, was easy. The streets and stalls of the Night Fair were the opposite of intimacy. To be one of four was to be a focal point; to be one of hundreds was to be anonymous as sand on the shore.

“Is it always like this?” Frances asked, barely avoiding an oncoming water truck.

“Oh, yeah—” But it wasn’t. Not the density of people, but the galvanic current that ran through them, the sound of the voices, the intensity of motion: these were different. These said, Warning, alert, something needs attention, system failure.

Both Mick and Dana knew where my apartment was. Mick knew what was in it. “Hurry,” I said.

Frances looked back at me. Whatever she saw made her turn the trike into an instrument of chaos.

We couldn’t get closer than half a block from my building. We didn’t need to. The top floor was a torch that could probably be seen on the island.

I kicked the weather shell open and was past Frances and into the crowded street before she could stop me. She caught up with me. I fought her, and screamed at her, until with force and practiced economy, she hit me in the stomach. I folded up on the pavement in the little clearing we’d made in the disaster-watchers. My very own disaster. Had the ones who started it even thought of the tenants? The old man who sang so badly, the people who’d had cabbage for dinner. Was anyone dead? But it had to be fire. Because nothing could harm the archives except fire.

I gasped for air, and took it in mixed with smoke and sparks and floating black ash. The fire was loud, louder than the noise of the crowd. There was an explosive cracking, and someone above me said, “There goes a beam!” and the rising voices and comments that burst out told me that the top floor had fallen in. I lifted my head — and saw, half obscured by the people around me, a head of curly hair, rose-pink in the firelight. The crowd shifted; I saw him full-length for a moment, in gray suit and silvertones, smiling like a blindfolded angel at the blaze. His companion smiled, too, trailing her fingers absently through the hair at the nape of his neck. Dusty and Myra Kincaid. Sated, for the moment, with cruelty.

Frances took my elbow, pulled me to my feet, and took me, bent over and staggering, back to the trike. I clung to it when I found it under my hands. There were two pumper trucks in the street, their crews heaving like galley slaves, but the water from the hoses only reached to the fourth floor. If the fire followed its present course, soon that would be the top of the building. Frances’s arm closed around my shoulders. I ducked away.

“All right,” she said. “I forgot. I thought this time… Can you get in by yourself?”

I could. Her voice had been level; so I was surprised when I looked up and saw her beside the trike, a thin track of tears marking the dirt and soot on each cheek. I lifted my fingers to my face, to see if it was wet, to see if this was something catching and not crying at all, because why would Frances cry over this? But my face was dry. Well, of course. Water vaporized in fire. The whole inside of my head was dry, and quiet.

She said things to me as she roused the trike: They would be watching for us here, and we had to run now if we were ever going to get away. It sounded sensible. I don’t know if she expected an answer.

The next thing she said was scatological. “Roadblock,” she added. Through the windshield I saw that we were quite far from the Night Fair, and that she was right. And it wasn’t the last one.

Sometime later we were parked in a dark place, with Frances sitting hunched in the driver’s spot as if she’d been gut-shot, her arms folded tight around her. “While he ran us through downtown like icons in a video game, he sealed up the City,” she said. Her voice was the ruin of the one I was used to. “Maybe we could get out on foot. Maybe, but we couldn’t get far. Dear God, dear God, why didn’t you let me kill him?” Then she shook herself, and sat upright. “Stop that. Well, Horatio, I need another idea.” She looked over her shoulder.

She wanted me to think. I shook my head, to tell her I couldn’t do that, that cause and effect and the manipulating of them were beyond me because they were part of the stream of time, and I didn’t want to go there. Maybe she thought I just didn’t have any ideas. It came to the same thing.

She sat very still for a long while; then she put the trike in gear. “Back to the island, if we can. Maybe China Black will bury us in the basement for a year and a day, or however long it is before Tom finds some pleasing distraction that isn’t us.”

I don’t know why Worecski hadn’t ordered the bridge stopped up. Maybe some property of the island prevented it. Or maybe his roadblock was on the span connecting the island to the opposite bank, where there would be no place to turn off, no escape. But on the near end, the suspension bridge was unoccupied. Frances drove slowly, her head working from side to side, until finally she said, “There,” and turned off. Either we were expected, or Frances had found the street by sheer force of will.

China Black’s gate looked different in the dark, its weathered wooden slats higher, closer set, forbidding; Frances drove fifty feet past it, cursed, and backed up. It didn’t open when we turned in. Frances left the trike to idle as she went up to try it, and finally to pound on it. There was no response.

She stepped back a pace from the gate and addressed it in a clear, carrying voice, bright as buffed chrome. “I understand the reluctance — the wasps’ nest having been knocked down, I don’t suppose I’d want to be standing next to the fool with the stick, either. But at least have the decency to minister to one of the victims.”

It worked like an incantation. After a moment the left half of the gate swung inward a little. It was China Black herself who’d opened it; the eyebrows caught the light as she looked past the panel at Frances. Then she slipped through and pulled the gate to behind her. The black, high-collared thing she wore, I decided, was a robe.

She reached the trike in two long strides and peered in at me. “You’re hurt?” She stretched out a hand for my shoulder.

Of course. The blood. I’d forgotten I was wearing Cassidy’s colors on my shirt.

The passionless, ironical observer that was master of my head wasn’t mastering my body. I was as surprised as anyone when I jerked away and folded forward in the passenger’s seat, clutching my hands to my face as if to close off all the senses that worked there.

“No,” Frances said, and I felt China Black’s hand snatched away. “It’s not h — the blood isn’t Sparrow’s. But yes, that’s the victim. All I want is a way out of town, or shelter until the mess I’ve made settles.”

The foolish physical reaction was gone already. “You wouldn’t have so much trouble,” I muttered, straightening up carefully, “if you didn’t talk about me in the third person.”

But China Black was already shaking her head. “I can’t. The island was safe only as long as he wanted nothing on it. We have no defense against the kind of force he will bring; we are too few, and those are not our skills. We cannot protect you here. We can only die with you. And forgive me, but this is not our fight.”

Frances lifted her chin. “News, it seems, travels fast. I thought the car phones were all gone.”

“Rumors travel fast. That you are here, and desperate, confirms them, no?”

“Can you at least help us leave?”

Another head shake. “I don’t know enough. I’m sorry. Beware of the river; you can be caught at the old dams and locks, and they may be watching at the bridges, too. But if you escape, there is a place you can go.” China Black recited the directions: south, farther south than I’d been since I’d first entered the City.

“You didn’t warn us about Mick,” I said.

“I wasn’t sure until tonight, when I found him gone. Forgive me.”

“Is Sherrea here? Or Theo? I’d like to say goodbye.”

It seemed like a stupid thing to want, but neither of them looked at me oddly. “They’ve both gone,” said China Black. “They, too, are at risk, because they were seen with you. They left not long after you did.”

“Of course.” I had nothing more to say.

Frances stood very straight, with one hand on the trike. “I’m sorry to have turned surly,” she said to China Black, “when I ought to have been thanking you for sheltering me. Someday someone will put Tom out of his and the rest of the world’s misery. He might even manage to do it himself. But I won’t get another chance.”

“Life is full of second chances,” China Black said sternly.

“I don’t deny it. But thank you, anyway.” Frances swung herself back on the trike and closed the shell around us. China Black stepped backward when the engine started. Frances saluted her with a raised hand and pulled out of the drive.

The east was turning milky; it was there to see as we recrossed the bridge, heading for whatever haven we might happen on. Another dawn in Frances’s company. I’d spent more time with Frances than I’d ever spent with Sherrea at a stretch. I didn’t think that, by itself, constituted friendship.

I hoped Sherrea was safe. She’d tried, after all. She’d told me to change my wicked ways long ago — days ago. Forever. To forget myself, and serve whatever came my way, needing it. There was very little now to forget. And something, I supposed, to serve. How many days ago? Five? Six? I’d called her from Del Corazón, and I’d threatened Beano with — that’s right, it had been…

“What day is it?” I asked Frances.

A pause. “Thursday, I think. No, it’s tomorrow now — Friday.”

“Turn right at the next street.”

She glanced back at me. “Is this a decision-making device?”

“I’ve had an idea. No, that way. Now, go straight.”

A short cautious time later, we had stopped in the shadows behind Del Corazón. We might be too late. We couldn’t be — that would be closing the last gate, the ultimate injustice in an unjust world. Fifteen years of life used up, wiped away; if I found out I was fifteen minutes late for the only unselfish thing I’d ever thought of doing, it would be more than even I deserved. I yanked on the cord that rang the back bell, and waited, and yanked again.

The door flew open, and the door frame protested, metal on metal. Beano stood inside, white as diluted milk, in tight, torn jeans and a T-shirt that seemed likely to die of exhaustion crossing his pectorals. He frowned when he saw me. He began to swing the door shut.

“No,” I said, my voice breaking. “Listen to the deal first. Then make decisions.”

“A deal?” Beano asked. “Or a screw job?”

“A deal. Can we come in?”

I don’t think he’d seen Frances until then. “Who’s she?”

“A package I want to deliver.”

“Fastened with tape,” Frances said blandly, “and not with string. Don’t look at me; I have no idea what’s going on.”

“Can we come in?” I repeated.

After a moment Beano said, “I’m busy.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here.” And I met and sustained his rose-colored glare.

“It is a screw job.”

I shook my head.

I think he let us in out of unadulterated curiosity. He hurried us through the back rooms to the shop, where the air was thick with old and new incense. Frances sat, one ankle across the other knee, on the corner of a little table stacked with denim and leather pants. It would have been a convincingly casual pose, if she hadn’t spoiled it by watching me. Behind her, hanging from a nail, was something made of knotted silk cord, like the web of a wealthy spider. Beano went behind the counter and leaned on it. That told me my place. I was the supplicant; I was to have judgment passed on me and my offer.

“So?” he said.

Out of habit, and a desire to make everything normal again, I began to think of how to ask for what I wanted without revealing how much I wanted it, or how much it was worth. I stopped myself and swallowed all the words I’d formed. This was not the time.

“We’ve crossed the City bossman,” I said to Beano’s unreceptive face, because I didn’t think I could explain about Tom Worecski. “And he wants us so badly he’d drink the river if he thought we were at the bottom of it. I want to buy passage for her” — and I nodded at Frances — “past the roadblocks and safely out of the City.”

“What about you?” Frances asked, her voice sharp.

“How’m I supposed to do that?” Beano asked me. We both ignored Frances. She wouldn’t like it, but I hoped she’d put up with it.

I took a deep breath. I might be too late… “Right now, someplace around here, people are unloading barrels of methanol that were never within shotgun range of a tax stamp. Like they do every Friday. She can go out by the same method the barrels came in.”

Beano had been relaxed when I began. He wasn’t relaxed anymore. “Or City finds out about the ’nol? That’s not how it works. City’s out there. You’re still in here.” He straightened up, and his shoulders and chest seemed suddenly to occupy the whole side wall.

“I told you it wasn’t a screw job,” I said. “If she gets out safely, I’ll pay for it.”

He stopped glaring. His head pushed forward, tilted, like a bird watching for insects in the grass. “Will you,” he said. His eyes were red and heavy-lidded, like a vampire’s after a good meal.

I nodded, but I did it meeting his gaze, and it was enough.

“I have a question in the queue,” said Frances.

“Just you,” I told her. I supposed I would have to look her in the eye as well.

She answered, gently, “The hell you say.”

I could lie; I could tell her we’d have a better chance if we split up, that I could find my way out by myself, or had a place to hole up. Like any good lie, it had a little truth in it. Smuggling one person would be easier to accomplish than smuggling two. It took less room, and it took less convincing of the people doing the smuggling. So I could say it. She might buy it, and go quietly.

“This is how it’s got to be,” I told her.

“Why?”

Curse the woman. She could put more irony, more force of will, more threats and promises and personal anguish, into that one word than anyone I’d ever heard of.

“One of us has to stay. I don’t have anything to lose. Everything I had to offer anyone, everything I’ve spent my life and feelings on, is gone. I’m over, I’m done with. I shouldn’t have been started in the first place, you know that.”

“That’s terribly affecting, but you left a part out. Why does one of us have to stay?”

I took another breath. “Because somebody’s got to pay for it.”

Frances frowned. Then something changed in her face, and she slid off the table and addressed Beano. “The tri-wheeler in back is mine. I built a lot of it myself. Everything works. It’s full of pre-Bang toys you won’t find anywhere else, and I had every intention of staking my life on its reliability. It’s worth passage out of town for two, and a great deal more. Will you take it in trade?”

Beano smiled at her. “Good thing you offered. The boys with the barrels are gonna want something. They can have the trike.”

“If you hadn’t mentioned it,” I said, exasperated, to Frances, “he might not have thought of the trike.”

Frances rounded on me. Her face was bloodless. “You can’t do this. You can’t.”

“Of course I can. It’s none of your business.” I said to Beano, “Safe passage for her out of the City. Deal, or no?”

“I’ll check.” He stopped in the doorway to the back rooms, and said, “Don’t go away.” Then he closed the door.

“You made it my business,” Frances said immediately.

My gaze went where I’d been keeping it from going, while Beano was in the room: the shelves of the display case. The set of bone needles was there. “No, I didn’t. I wish I’d just lied about it.”

“I’d have figured it out. I will not do this.”

“Look, it’s not as if I’m going to die.”

“Aren’t you?” she said, and there was such a look in her eyes that I stepped back a pace. I realized suddenly that she didn’t have to change my mind. She could replace it. She could walk out of here in my body, with hers under my/her arm. If I’d realized it, surely she had, too.

She had. I saw it in her face. Then her eyes closed tight; she steepled her fingers over her nose and mouth, turned, and walked into the shadows near the front of the store.

“That would be a Tom sort of trick, wouldn’t it?” she said pleasantly. “I could just bludgeon you into doing what I want.”

“Neither of us would get out of town.”

“That’s probably true. I suppose this way or the other yields up the same thing. Including the bludgeon. But do you know,” she said, and she dropped her hands and looked at me, her self-possession in tatters, “I’d forgotten exactly what Tom was like? That sucking evil that pulls you into it, that bends light, that declares itself the center of the universe and you an impurity, there on sufferance — no, that’s not right. That makes it sound exclusive to Tom. I didn’t know I’d changed, Sparrow, because I didn’t have my own kind to measure myself against.” She stopped. I couldn’t tell if she’d forced herself to, or if she couldn’t force herself to go on.

I had to make three tries at saying anything before I succeeded. “Then maybe you won’t throw it away after all.”

The silence was four heartbeats long. I counted.

“Ah. I didn’t think you’d figure it out.”

“Anybody who was paying attention would have noticed that you were snuffing every Horseman who helped push the Button. You’ve been dropping artistic hints all night.”

She sighed unevenly, which might have been laughter. “And you were there when I told China Black I’d have to leave one alive, after all.”

“Yeah. But I think you picked the wrong one.”

She walked back into the light, and stopped within arm’s reach of me. I stayed where I was. “Is this,” she said, “your way of making me reconsider my choice?”

The conversation was too intense to bear, had been for a long time; and I was tired. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

Beano opened the door at the back of the shop. “They like it,” he said. “It’s a deal.”

I’d known they were going to like it. I’d known Beano would talk them into it. “Fine,” I told him. “As soon as I know she’s clear, you get paid.”

Beano frowned at that, but I glared back, and he finally shrugged. It was only time.

Frances’s hand lifted, then dropped. “This is a hard thing you want me to live with,” she said, doubt in her voice again.

“You’ve had a lot of practice,” I reminded her. “You’ll manage.” And I walked away, to the farthest back room, to wait.

The City sat on a network of maintenance tunnels, some of which went back to the beginning of the previous century. A few had been turned into fallout shelters, during the years when those seemed like a good idea. Others were used as passways for steam piping and electrical conduit. Taken together, and allowing for detours around blocked and collapsed portions, they reached from the Night Fair to the river. That was the way the alcohol came in; and that was the way Frances went out, to the river and a boat with a false lower deck. Usually the crew filled the space with merchandise, taxed and otherwise, for the trip back. Frances ate into their profit margin. They were glad of the trike.

Beano told me all this when he came into the back room, a folded and sealed square of paper in one hand. In the transom above the back door, I’d watched the course of the day; the glass had faded to blazing white, and the air in the room had turned hot and motionless. It was still hot, but the light through the transom was the last of it. Beano held out the paper.

The wax held the impression of a thumbprint, and the letters “FR” quickly scratched with a fingernail. I was confused for a moment, until I remembered that Frances’s last name began with an “R.” I broke the seal.

The message was in a small, angular hand, and the ink was very black. It read:

It was better identification than the thumbprint and initials. I crumpled it and handed it to Beano. “You’d better burn this. If they knew she’d been here, you wouldn’t live to see the end of it.”

He took me literally; he lit the oil lamp on the table and burnt it over that. Then he came and squatted next to the chair I’d spent most of the day in. His face gleamed evenly all over with sweat, like wet marble. In the skin under his eyes there was a faint flush of pink, like fever. He wore the same clothes he’d opened the door in that morning; the T-shirt was black with sweat down his chest and under his arms.

“You’ve run up a big tab,” he said softly. He touched a long fingernail to the blood on my shirt. I felt the nail go through the cloth and dig slowly into my skin.

Deciding is not the same as being reconciled; and reconciled is nothing like being willing. In self-imposed isolation all day, entertained with the thoughts I couldn’t muffle, I’d had time for reconciliation. But my stomach churned anyway, and my heart pumped at a speed to support any desperate action I wanted to take. I stood up. Beano stood, too, half a head taller, stark with muscle.

“That’s the Deal,” I said.

He licked his lips — unconsciously, I thought. “Nothing’s free,” he agreed.

I closed my eyes, waiting for whatever it was going to be. When nothing happened, I opened them again.

Beano was smiling. “Whattaya say you make a dash for the door?”

“Why?” I whispered.

“It’s more fun that way.” He turned and walked purposefully toward the back.

I meant to pay my debts, honorably, without protest. But I couldn’t stand against that last flicker of hope. I bolted for the shop and the front door.

He caught me there, slapped me up against the wall, pinned me to it with a hand around my neck. The fingers of his other hand trailed down the side of my face, traced my jaw, and caressed their way down my throat. “What’s this?” he asked. He lifted Sherrea’s pendant into my field of vision. “Present from your mom?”

I couldn’t breathe past his grip. I couldn’t answer. He twisted the cord around his fist and yanked, and the cord broke. I heard the pendant hit the floor.

He found out, eventually, that I was not like other people. It didn’t seem to trouble him much.