Bone Dance

10.0: Dancing for a rainbow, sweating for the sun

I dreamed that night, for what seemed like all night. I wanted several times to wake up, and maybe even tried to; but I could no more wake up out of the world I traveled through that night than I could have woken up out of the real one.

I’m sorry. That was a bad choice of expression. However I say it, I couldn’t wake up.

It began with the pictographs, black on white. I had forgotten them, or forgotten to mention them to anyone. I was on the left end once more, and next to me the woman with the headdress was saying to me, “There’s not time. It’s not your fault, Wind and Rain it’s not, but you’ll suffer for it all the same. You can’t be taught the dance in a fistful of suns, never mind this little slot of darkness.”

The creature with the flute beside her responded, “What’s to teach? Box step, two-step, cha-cha-cha. Every living thing knows it already. Hey,” it hollered at me, “you know those little bugs in your body? The teeny tiny ones that tell everything what to do? Tell ’em I said to lead!”

“You might try being something other than a handicap for once,” she told it. “You old liar.”

“You,” it said with sudden dignity, “are no fun. What business do you have talking about dancing, the mood you’re in? Get thee to an alehouse. Time’s a-wastin’. We’re outta here. Music, music, music!”

Three dimensions. It wasn’t a sudden transition, but until then it had been a paper-flat world. Dream logic. The creature with the flute still was, and wasn’t anymore, and was clutching my wrist and flinging me. Someone else caught me, and flung me again. I could hear the flute, but I couldn’t see it. But even more than the flute, I could hear drums, the crisp rolling voices of the drums from the village circle. I could see the drummers, male and female, gleaming with sweat, bare-shouldered, their lips drawn back in grins of exertion and delight. Someone else caught my arms.

Jammers. I was the balky axle in their wheel. They were stamping and clapping to the drums, their eyes rolled back in their heads. “Step! Step! Step!” they chanted. Their skinny arms and bony elbows were like the bare branches of trees, jerked in the wind of the beat. They held me down. The drums hammered at me, cut openings in my skin, laid their rhythm-eggs in the bloody wounds and sealed them up, to wait for hatching. That was the first time I wanted badly to wake up.

The Jammers capered around me and herded me on, through the illuminated, benighted Deeps. The buildings were lit like the street scenes in movie musicals, with flashing marquees and neon, with electricity pouring unheeded everywhere. It was a movie musical; the cast of thousands leaped and wiggled and stepped, unsynchronized, through a soundstage Nicollet Market. Both Mick Skinners were there, or rather, both bodies. So were Dana and Cassidy. A skeleton went by in a silk top hat and tailcoat, pausing only long enough to thrust its skull through the ring of Jammers and click its teeth at me.

I’d been looking at the Jammers all wrong. I’d been thinking of them as unhealthy, underfed living people. They were beautifully preserved corpses, of course. How silly of me. They danced very well.

Two long-fingered hands, rose-brown next to the Jammers’ graying skin, parted the rim of their wheel and reached in to me. I let my wrists be taken, let myself be pulled out of the ring.

The hands were attached to a woman whose blue-black hair shivered over her shoulders and down her back to her ankles. She was naked. I stared helplessly, because here in the dream-street I couldn’t look away, or go away, as I would have in waking life. It was such a strange-looking body. The soft, substantial fleshiness of the breasts, shifting and trembling like nervous pigeons when she moved; the smooth padding of stomach and thighs and wide-set hips. She wasn’t fat, but looking at her, I thought of butter and cream and molasses, and other rich things: velvet and satin, gold poured out in dim light, the lapping of warm water on the skin. She drew me close and kissed me on the lips.

Then she moved away, and a figure stepped out from behind her. This was a man, dark-skinned, and naked, too. The shoulders were as straight as mine, but broader under the red cloak fastened around his neck; tiles of muscle marked out the chest, and were blurred under the thin pelt of curled black hair. He had no distinct waist; his body narrowed from the chest to the hips, tapering and pared as a knife blade, and the hair grew over it, thinning to a stripe over his belly and widening again at the groin. His penis hung relaxed in the black brush of it, limp and wobbling. His legs were black-haired and bony-kneed. I couldn’t imagine walking in that body. I couldn’t imagine walking in hers.

I had seen them both somewhere before. Where… ah. Stylized, on the walls of China Black’s hounfor.

He also took my hands and drew me close, and kissed me on the lips. Then the picture jumped, as if someone had cut out too many frames in the splice. He closed one large milk-white hand around my neck until I couldn’t swallow, until my breath sounded like a saw going through a board, and slammed me back against the wall. And Beano said, “Nothing’s free… ” And though I didn’t really feel any pain, that was the second time I wanted to wake up, and much more urgently than the first.

Continuity, even by dream-logic, broke, as if the projectionist had started the wrong reel. I was in one of the vegetable gardens, alone, wrapped in a perfect silence that never really happened in the fields. The row at my feet was half-weeded. I knelt and went back to work. Reach, pull, toss. Reach, pull, toss. It had a rhythm. It had a sound, a series of sounds — and I began to hear the drums, somewhere distant, speaking to the motion of my arm.

I stood up (as I did it, I heard that, too, allowed for in the drumbeat) and started walking toward the town circle. It was full dark when I reached it, but the torches, the lanterns, the bonfire, broke the darkness up into pleasing sections. The drummers were in an arc of the circle by themselves, playing fiercely, the big drums between their knees, the smaller ones propped on their thighs. The rest of the circle was clapping and swaying, and singing responses to one strong voice whose owner I couldn’t see. I slid through a gap and stood inside the ring.

The dancers were in the center, stamping, tossing their heads, working their shoulders. The strong voice, I found, was Sherrea’s, singing in a language I didn’t know. And I knew so many. The ring of onlookers had receded behind me; I was surrounded by dancers now. None of them touched me, but none had to. The force of their movements, and the rhythm they moved to, were like an assault.

I felt the rhythm pulling at my muscles. I felt my head yanked back and my spine arched as if someone had hooked my breastbone and was pulling it up on a rope. My legs were weak and weren’t answering my brain. And in all the split places of my skin, in the blood running its closed path beneath, in the straight, hard bones of my arms and legs and in the bone cask of my rib cage, the wasp-eggs of the beat were hatching out.

That was the third time, and the strongest. What I would have run from the third time wasn’t pain. It was the coming of the thing I had waited for all night, the thing Sherrea hadn’t talked about. The number of hoodoo is nine, because it is three times three, and three is at the heart of everything. Something said that, as an aside. I wasn’t listening properly.

The eggs hatched out in a stream of — I don’t know, I don’t know. How does the charge controller feel, when the current comes down the line from wind or water or photovoltaic cell, and it holds it back, feeds it steady to the battery? Is it hot like that, thick and hot and sweet in the mouth and the muscles? Is it clean and brilliant as a breath of ozone after lightning? Silly. It’s hardware. It doesn’t know. I knew.

I lifted my foot, and the power surged in me as if a turbine had spun. Any motion did it. Stepping, leaping, twisting like the upward reach of a lick of flame. Any motion. Would it work in one of those other bodies, the woman or the man? I couldn’t imagine it. Not those borrowed suits of flesh. Just this pure envelope of energy, engulfed and blinded in a rising tide of white light.

Sherrea was in front of me, dressed in white. She sang out a line and voices all around me answered. I laughed and dropped to my knees in front of her. She held out a mirror.

I knew my own face. I had always used mirrors, to make sure I was unobtrusive, to be sure I looked as much like the people around me as I could manage. And so I knew my face, not as mine, but as a mirror and a blurry print of others. Now I knew I had to search this reflection for the real skin and bones, eyes and nose and mouth. Working, Sherrea had said, with the whole mind…

As I found it, I built a replica of it in my memory, so I could find me again without the mirror. A high, smooth forehead fenced with thick, black hair; black eyebrows that arched high and even over large, long-lidded dark eyes; a thin, high-bridged nose and a thin, long mouth; an angular, almost fleshless jaw and chin. Bones and features, bones and features, and not much else. No extras and ornaments. The bones were tired of staying still.

In my right eye, I saw a spark. A reflection in the black pool of the pupil, a light; a little scene. I opened my eye wider and came closer to the mirror.

A riverbank, and a reflection off metal — there was a figure lying spread-eagled on the riverbank. It was transfixed with swords, the white metal bright in the new sun. The feet, the knees, the belly, the breasts, the hands. On the sand, silver-blond hair spread out in starfish arms, wet and clotted with dirt. One long bright sword stood upright in and through the open mouth, below the shocked, wide-open eyes.

It was Dana.

I was sitting up before I was awake, swaying and shaking. If I’d made a noise, it wasn’t enough to bring anyone else.

It was morning, late, and no sounds in the house; Josh, Mags, and Paulo had probably gone off about their respective businesses. It was hot, and the air seemed to weigh me down like rocks where I lay. I stood up and sat back down again. Oh, what a lovely headache. And my whole face ached, skin and bone. It had been a while since I’d been hungover, but it had never given me nightmares before.

I put on some clothes and wandered to the kitchen. Halfway there, I heard someone knock on the screen door, so I continued on a little quicker.

It was Sherrea. “Hi. Are you just up?” she asked through the screen.

“Um. D’you want breakfast,”

“No. Look, could you skip breakfast, for now, and come out here for a minute? I want to tell you something.”

I’d just opened the icebox; I shut it again. “Something’s wrong.”

“Not really. Could you just come?”

I stepped out on the back porch, and her eyes grew wide. “What?” I said.

“You look — I don’t know. You look funny. Not really funny, but… ” Then she shrugged. “Forget it.”

The sky was white-blue, and studded in the southwest with muddled scratches of cloud. It was thick air to breathe, and motionless. Around front, on the steps, I found Theo and Frances. I wondered if I should feel ganged up on, or if they’d missed breakfast, too, at Sher’s insistence. They looked up at me, and Theo’s brows pulled together; Frances stared, her lips open as if she’d forgotten them, and said, “What did—” and stopped.

“Oh, what, already?”

“You look,” Frances said slowly, “most remarkably like you.”

“You look a lot like you, too. Won’t any of you guys make allowances for an ugly hangover?”

“Stop,” Sher said, “or I’ll forget some of this. And I think I’m in deep shit if I do.” She took a huge breath. “Okay. I had a dream last night. And I have to tell it to all of you, and all at once so I don’t leave something important out.”

Theo, Frances, and I exchanged glances, but we knew better than to say anything.

“I was down in the Deeps,” Sher began, “just the way they are now, and it was early in the morning, with all the shadows on the streets. I can see dark clouds between the buildings, and little flickers of lightning between them. I’m just outside of Ego when this woman comes hurrying down Nicollet toward me. She’s almost running. As she comes closer I can see she’s frowning, as if she’s worried. The wind picks up all of a sudden, and paper and leaves are flying around. She comes straight up to me and says, ‘There’s no time. Go straight home and give this to your friend. Hurry.’ And she hands me a postcard.

“It looks like one of the ones we found yesterday, with the buildings lit up, and the Gilded West right out in the middle. But the building that Theo asked about, that you knew the name of, Frances—”

“The Multifoods Building.”

“Right. That one wasn’t there.” She stopped.

We waited.

“Don’t you see!? It’s now, but with the buildings lit up.”

“Okay,” said Theo. I thought so, too.

“Why us?” Frances asked.

“Because,” said Sher, thoroughly exasperated, “she said ‘your friend.’ She didn’t say which friend.”

“And you thought maybe we’d be able to tell, when we heard it?”

“I guess if I did, I was wrong. Blast it root and bough.”

Across town, from the northward road, we heard the sound of a rough-running engine. “Huh,” said Sher. “Company.”

“That’s odd,” I said.

“You just haven’t noticed before. The neighbors stop by to swap favors or pass news along. That sounds like Skip Olsen’s truck.”

“Maybe the wind was up last night,” I said. “It was a great night for dreaming.”

“You had one last night?” Sher asked intently.

“A whole raft of them. Terrible ones. There was a lot of hurrying in mine, too.”

Across the circle, two people were walking toward us. One of them was Josh; the other was a white-haired man ten years older, in a straw cowboy hat. He carried something in one hand. “Sparrow!” Josh called when he was in hollering distance. “Meet Skip Olsen!”

By this time they were at the porch rail. Olsen stuck out a veiny brown hand; I extended mine, took his, and shook it. It still required an effort. Olsen was smiling. “I’d never heard of you,” he said, “but this was sent sort of in care of the town, so I figured if I drove by and asked, they’d all know you. Damnedest bunch for knowing everybody else’s business.” Olsen laughed, and Josh laughed. I reached out and took the package Olsen held out to me.

It was a scuffed white cardboard box, like a gift box, not quite as long as my forearm and a little less than half as thick. It was tied closed with brown twine. Printed on it in ballpoint pen was:

There was, of course, no return address.

Josh took Olsen into the house for tea. I stared at the box. It didn’t weigh much.

“Don’t open it,” Frances said roughly.

“Why not?”

“Sparrow, don’t be an idiot. Don’t open it.”

But I’d already pulled the twine off. I lifted the lid.

Like all gift boxes, it had a piece of tissue paper in it. I folded that back. Inside was a thick tail of hair, silver-blond, tied off with a thin black velvet ribbon. One end of the tail was uneven; the other was straight and freshly cut. That end had been dipped about three inches deep in something that there was no use believing was anything but blood.

I didn’t drop the box, because it weighed hardly anything. I moved very carefully to the top step and sat down, still with the box between my hands, still staring at the contents.

Because neither Theo nor Sher would know, and because Frances might not remember, I said, “Dana’s.” My voice seemed to come from the other side of town.

Frances reached down and almost, but not quite, touched the darkened end of the tail of hair. “And whose is that?”

“I’ll never know, will I?” I said, looking up at her. “Unless I go and see?”

Her hand drew back sharply. “No. He can sit like a spider in the middle of his web and starve, or thrive, or whatever he wants to do. You aren’t going, I’m not going, nobody’s going.”

I picked up the box lid and held it out to her. “Then he’ll come here, won’t he? Would that be better?”

“How did he know?” Theo asked.

“We weren’t a secret,” I said, my voice cracking. “Somebody takes the cucumbers to market, exchanges a little community news, it gets overheard or passed on — he’s probably known for weeks.”

“I’ll go,” said Frances, her mouth tight.

I turned my face up to her again. “But you weren’t invited.”

I watched her eyes change as she realized I was right. The box bearing my name, the threat to my friend. “You can’t,” she said, as she’d said at Del Corazón. “You can’t. She might not even be alive by now, for Christ’s sake.”

“Again, there’s only one way to find out.” I put the lid carefully on the box. I had dreamed of Dana. Of the Ten of Swords, meant for me. Maybe this was the meaning of all that hurrying.

“We need another damned plan,” said Sherrea.

“I wish you wouldn’t say ‘we.’ I don’t need one to get in; this time I know he’s expecting me. He’ll probably leave a light on.”

“Wait, wait.” Frances dropped cross-legged on the floor and jammed her fingers into her hair. “What do you want to accomplish?”

I thought about it, and for a wonder, they kept quiet and let me do it. “I want to get Dana out. If you’re asking what I’d like for my birthday, hell, I’d like to make it possible for Theo to go back. And I’d like to keep Tom Worecski from ever doing this again.”

“Then you’ll have to kill him,” said Frances.

“Will I? You’re the expert.” I felt bad when I saw the color go out of her face. I hadn’t meant it to hurt.

“Sparrow,” Sher said suddenly in a terrible voice. “What did you dream?”

I tried to recite it as fairly, as clearly as she had hers, but she’d had a more coherent original to work from. She closed her eyes partway through, and drew her knees up and rested her forehead on them when I was done. “Oh,” she said, muffled. “Oh, no. I’ve blown it. We’ve run out of time. I’m sorry,” she said, and raised her head. She was red-eyed. “You don’t know anything, because I started too late, and now it has to be done whether you’re ready or not. It’ll kill you. Oh, what’s the fucking date?”

The rest of us sat awed by the whole terrible-sounding, unintelligible speech. But Josh’s voice, from the front door, said, “June twenty-third. Saint John’s Eve.”

“Well, I’ll be plucked and basted,” I said. “It really is my birthday. What a coincidence.”

“Don’t you understand?” Sher cried. “There are no coincidences here. You were made by the loa for this. Everybody else has a soul that’s part of the continuity. Yours is brand-new. You’re a custom-made item for breaking up a jam in the energy flow, and this is the jam, and the time. Tomorrow is Midsummer. The celebration of the sun, the energy source. Of course it’s supposed to be done then. And you’re not ready!” She buried her face in her knees again.

Josh stepped out onto the porch and laid his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t take it all on yourself.”

“Who’m I supposed to share it with?” she groaned, but she raised her head and wiped her eyes. “You’re right. That won’t accomplish shit.”

It had accomplished something, actually. “This is what that reading was about, wasn’t it, Sher?” I said. “The one you did for me back in the City. There’s gonna be blood and fire, and the dead gonna dance in the streets. Right?”

She nodded, slowly, probably because she didn’t like the sound of my voice. I wouldn’t have, either.

“I’m a quick study. Let’s see if I have this right. You’re saying that the loa animated a cheval to use, eventually, to bust up something… ” Even as I said it, the answer occurred to me. “Albrecht’s monopoly, right? And they turned me loose to grow up and get ready for this. Now here they are. And the message is: We made you. You owe us.”

Sher shook her head.

“Sure it is. This may kill me, you said. But they have a right to do that, because I belong to them. I was right, Sher, and you lied. I don’t own anything. And nothing is free.”

Frances and Theo were watching us. I don’t know how much of it made sense to them. But I wasn’t talking to them.

Sher found her voice at last. “We’re reading the same book, but your translation sucks. Okay. If that’s true, you don’t have a choice. But you’re going to find out that nobody is forcing you to do this. I’m trying to make you want to do it, because if you knew as much as you ought to know by now, you would. Santos, the only person who’s leaning on you is Worecski. But your damned stupid life was a gift. And I meant it last night when I said that the only reasons to do a thing were out of love, or because you knew it needed doing.” She stood up, her shoulders very straight. “If you decide to go to Ego, because of Dana or Worecski or whatever, let me know. I’ll help. Out of love, and because it needs doing.”

She was down the steps and six paces away before I could move, or knew I wanted to. I vaulted the railing, landed in the flowerbed, and lunged for her arm.

“I take it back. I can’t replace it with anything yet, but I take it back.”

“Why?” she said, her face pinched.

“Because… because I don’t know anything about your damned loa, and I can’t say whether they would do what I just said they did. But I don’t think that you would.”

She stared at me, her chest rising and falling. “Not bad reasoning,” she said finally, “for a dipshit. That reading I did for you — it had Death in it. D’you remember?”

“Yeah.”

“It doesn’t mean dying, in the tarot. It means change, transformation. I think that’s what it means on the Gilded West, and I think that’s why Theo’s family took it over and closed it up.”

“Symbolic barrier to change.”

“Hell, no — an actual barrier. Hoodoo works on the symbolic level to do something to the actual. I think closing up the Gilded West was a hoodoo work. And I think my dream was a request that we undo it. That we light the building again.”

Theo, behind me, said, “I could do that.”

“What?”

“I could light up the Gilded West. The stuff’s all up there. All I’d need is some initial input of power.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not going back to the City.”

“I’m not going back to Ego. I don’t have to. Except I have to get some charge. I might have to steal juice from next door.”

“Frances,” I said slowly, “how do I stop Tom?”

“You know very well how you stop Tom. You lock him in his head, and you kill the head.”

“What would happen if he were locked out?”

“What?”

“Would he live if he didn’t have a body to ride?”

“Of course not. He’s not a blasted poltergeist. But how do you propose to do it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how to get Theo his first shot of juice, either, without getting it from Ego. But I don’t like that, and I don’t like the thought of killing someone else’s body to get Tom Worecski.”

“He’s probably already killed the host mind,” Frances said, just as Sher said, “Of course not. It screws up the symbolism.”

“It what?” Theo asked.

“If hoodoo works on the symbolic level,” Sher said, impatient, “then what does it mean, symbolically, if you steal power from the thing you want to get rid of to fuel the process that gets rid of it? And you can’t kill the body that Tom’s in because you don’t have any more right to it than he does. You wouldn’t get rid of him, you’d become him.”

“Probably literally,” I said, “based on past experience.”

“Present company is unexcepted, of course,” Frances broke in pleasantly.

“Save a little tar on that brush for me.” Sherrea, to my amazement, blushed.

“It doesn’t do to forget that I’m one of them, too,” Frances added. She looked, abstracted, at her hands; then she said, “I’ve smothered her. Like smothering an infant with a pillow, though it took longer. I’ve been four years in her body, and she was not, God help her, a strong little soul.”

“You’re right,” Sher said. “I had forgotten. But you can have a great time hitting yourself over the head later. It’s irrelevant to what we’ve got to do.”

Frances slid one daunting eyebrow upward. “Where were we then? Sunk up to the undercarriage in a symbolic pothole. Unless one of you has a metaphysical shovel?”

She hated this, I could tell. She didn’t have even the tolerance for hoodoo that I did. She hadn’t spent her life in the streets surrounded by it, making deals with it, using its forms as polite social fictions, its person-principles as swear words. If Sher’s carryings-on about energy had any truth in them, Frances’s power was from the past that gave birth to her. She wouldn’t think of asking favors from the loa.

“Oh,” I said weakly. “Well, of course.”

“I’m glad you think so,” said Frances. “But you could be a little more help to the rest of us.”

“What’s the use of having a god in the machine if you don’t holler for it to come out now and then? Sher, if the Hoodoo Engineers are more than a communal living experiment — are they?”

“Finish your sentence,” she said harshly.

“Can they mess with the weather?”

“It’s slow.”

“And can you ask the loa for favors, and do they deliver?”

“Santos, Sparrow, what—”

“Will they, for instance, provide a well-timed, incredibly melodramatic wind storm in the right place, if asked nicely?”

Sher was still staring at me, but Theo whistled, and said, “Far out! You could maybe even make it work. Except — how much time do we have?”

“A whole day,” Sher said dryly.

“Bummer. I couldn’t mount a windmill up there that fast without a dozen people. And you’d be able to see it from Ego, anyway.”

“So we need a really small windmill,” I said.

Theo shook his head. “Then you lose vane area. You’d need a tornado—”

“If we’re asking anyway, why not ask big? Let me think.” I rubbed at my forehead with both hands. “If — if we got the wind… we’d want an eggbeater turbine, the kind with the spin around the vertical axis, and we’d have to mount it… Chango, we’d have to build it first, because I don’t know where we’d find one.”

“New Brighton, Hopkins, or Saint Louis Park,” Frances said.

“What?” said Theo and I, more or less in unison.

“Honeywell was building Darrieus turbines for the Army, to power mountain listening posts. The eggbeaters, right? Carbon fiber and plastic, and small, to avoid flyover detection. I can tell you where the plants were. Better yet, I can show you.”

I looked at Theo. “We’ve had an eggbeater turbine in the neighborhood all this time?”

“Somebody might have already hauled ’em away,” Theo said reluctantly.

“If we’d known about ’em, we would have. Can you make it work?”

“If we can find one,” he said. “If I can get it mounted… Sher, does it mess with the symbolism if I borrow some stuff from the Underbridge?”

“Hurrah for Tom Swift and his chums,” said Frances. “Now, what about Worecski?”

“I don’t know. That’s not my specialty.” I turned to Sher. “What do you use to contain a spirit?”

Sher thought about it. “A govi. A soul jar. People who think they’re under hoodoo attack have the houngan bottle their spirit and keep it safe for ’em. I think it’s bullshit.”

“Well, you know my views on the subject.”

She flushed. “Thanks.”

“No, my views are that I haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on, so I’ll try whatever anyone else thinks will work.”

“I don’t know if it’ll work. I don’t know if we have time to make one. Shit—”

I put out my hand and touched hers. “Oh, come on. Maybe I’ll be reincarnated.”

“I hope not,” she snapped, and stalked off across the town circle.

“I’d better get going,” said Theo. “I have to start gathering up gear. Can you spare Frances to help me hunt down the turbine?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, startled. “We haven’t—”

“Yeah, we have. Sher’s gone to do the research for her part. I have to go do mine. I mean, it sounds like we’re short on time.”

“Theo, if… Look, something’s going to go wrong. Maybe everything. You stand to lose a lot if any of the pieces fall on you. I think you should stay out of it.”

“I’ve already lost a lot.” His good-looking face had a set, hard look that I hoped wasn’t permanent. “I want a chance to get it back.”

“This may not be any chance at all.”

“You want to do it instead?”

He had me. And he knew it; I saw it in his eyes. “This is not The Magnificent Seven, Theo. This is real life.”

“Is it? You make it sound like A Fistful of Dollars. Go ahead. Tell me you’re gonna clean up the town single-handed.”

I had to drop my eyes from his. “I can’t. I don’t know how to be in two places at once.”

“So you need me to do the work in the Gilded West. Somebody’s got to, and I know how.”

Of course; it needed doing. Theo, who didn’t seem to have a religion, had always lived by the principles of this one.

“Just… ye gods, Theo, just stay away from Ego.”

“I’ll try,” he said. Then he clasped my hand quickly and headed off in the direction Sher had gone.

Which left Frances. “What shall I do, boss?”

“Help Theo find a turbine, I guess.”

“And then?”

“Come back here.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

I didn’t, either. “Why the hell do people have friends?” I burst out.

She didn’t misunderstand the sentiment. “As I’m sure Theo would say, it’s a bummer, man. But you can’t keep us from our future any more than we can keep you from yours. Place your troops.”

I sighed. “I’d feel better, actually, if you could stick to Theo. He’ll need help with the installation, and if he gets in any trouble—” I shrugged. “He’s not exactly John Wayne.”

“Luckily for you, neither am I; John Wayne was an actor. All right, I’ll be pit bull for Theo. Which means, I think, that this is good — pardon me, au revoir.”

“You won’t be back?”

“We’ll send word if we find the turbine. But if we do, I think we’d best go straight into town with it.”

She stood gravely in front of me for a moment; then, lightly, she put her arms around me and let go again. She looked to the sky and said fiercely, “And how thou pleasest, God, dispose the day.”

Then she left.

It was Saint John’s Eve; it was my birthday; it was, whether I was prepared or not, whether I liked it or not, the day of my introduction to the master of my head, my mait-tete, my patron in the system.

I was lying blindfolded in a room, not my own. I hadn’t had anything to eat all day. I was wearing white. I knew that because I’d put it on myself, on Sherrea’s instructions. I knew about electronics. I knew nothing about the soul. I could only follow instructions.

Outside, the drums were playing, and had been for an hour.

I heard footsteps, several, and felt hands on my shoulders and under my knees. Whose hands? Oh, little gods, big gods, whose hands were they, that I was giving myself into? I could pull away, I could yank off the blindfold, I could say no. Sherrea hadn’t lied to me this morning: I could say no.

I jammed the syllable back down my throat until it was less than a whimper, only a tautness between my lungs and mouth. I was lifted up and carried outdoors, into the hot, windless air and the endless chirring of crickets. The drums wrapped around me like flannel.

My attendants set me on my bare feet suddenly, with a bang, and I staggered. I was on grass. I smelled candle wax and burning wood and people. I was held by my upper arms on both sides and drawn forward, and gripped and drawn forward again. I was being passed, I realized, down a double row of hands.

They weren’t strangers. None of the people who participated, who moved me from this point to the next one, would be strange to me. Josh would be here, whose hands had held my life and not dropped it, and given it back to me for free. Kris might have just passed me on, dirt under her stubby nails, teeth flashing in a firelit grin. LeRoy, who had picked me up broken and delivered me here, and Mags, who had fed and clothed me. These were the people who had lifted and carried me from the old condition of my mind to the current one. I could trust them to move me safely one more time.

Even under the blindfold, the light had grown strong. I heard the shook-canvas sound of the bonfire. A small pressure on my shoulders urged me to my knees, and finally full-length, facedown, on the grass. Above me, but not far, as if she might be kneeling, I heard Sherrea’s voice. It was the voice of a kick-ass bruja. My friend Sherrea looked like a waif, and sounded like a governess turned gun moll. She cried when I hurt. She was gone. This was a bruja.

“Close the circle. Legba Attibon, let it close and sit by the door. As we invite, let you admit. Legba of the stick, you are always welcome.”

On all sides of me, voices answered, in a language I didn’t recognize.

“Who knows this person?” Sher asked.

“I do,” said a strong and ragged chorus of voices. What person? Me?

“Keep what you know in your heads, then, good and bad. Hold it there, fix it in your eye, see it clearly from all sides. Because this person is bound for death, where the self is withered and washed away, where even names are cut like wheat and eaten. This person will cross the river that never runs, and on the other side, if you can’t give back the soul that you remember, this person will be truly dead, and go forever nameless in the dark.”

Hands again, that brought me to my feet. I was pouring sweat in the heat of the fire and the hot night, dazed and weak from hunger and from fear. The hands pushed, and I stepped forward into ice water. I was off balance; the other foot joined the first, and I fell to hands and knees into cold so intense it simply stopped my nerves. If I had known what I ought to do next, I’d forgotten it.

Then warmth on each arm — hands? — pulled me forward. My fingers closed in grass; I dragged myself, my feet useless as unshaped granite, and fell, facedown once more, on the ground.

Sound broke out like full-scale war. Yelling, drums, all the noises that can be made with the fingers and palms. It felt so good to be warm. It felt wonderful to be lying limp as wet newsprint, unable to rise, and to know that the condition was temporary.

In fact, I had to sit up almost at once, my legs under me, my head erect. The hands insisted. The hands cosseted and combed and smoothed, and where they passed, I was dry and free of any lingering chill. My skin seemed to have been remade and reinstalled. My heart gave a single, shattering bang and began to beat strong and evenly, and I wondered if it had been stopped and I hadn’t known. At last, the fingers traveling over my hair and face drew the blindfold away.

My eyes burned and watered with the light. The bonfire was behind me; before me was the great central tree of the town circle, surrounded in ramparts of candles. There were candles, too, in the hands of the people who formed the circle that enclosed me. There were enough people that it might have been everyone in town. No one stood close enough to me to have removed the blindfold that lay abandoned on my knees. Nowhere in the circle was there a body of water large enough that I could have stepped or fallen in it.

“You are born into the light,” said Sherrea, and I saw her at last. White cloth ran unbelted from her shoulders to her ankles and left her arms bare. Her hair was uncovered and massed like a thundercloud around her head, around her stern face. The stern waif’s face, with an indented place at the corner of the mouth as if a smile was stored there, with a lift of the eyebrows that said in her voice, clear as words, “Is this wild, or what? Isn’t this hot?”

“You who kept the soul and spirit plain, come and set it in its place again,” she said to the circle at large.

There was a big black ceramic pot at her feet. One by one, people came from out of the circle to put things in it. It was a singular, startling procession.

Josh began it. He wore an African shirt so large it might have roofed the sheep pen; he pulled from somewhere in it a paperback book. It was the copy of A Tale of Two Cities that I’d been reading at his kitchen table. He dropped it into the pot with a look at me so full of mingled things that I couldn’t begin to sort them out.

Kris followed him, with — it was. I almost laughed aloud. A leaf of lettuce, and a wink.

Paulo came, with both hands cupped closed around something. He held them over the mouth of the pot and opened them, but the contents went up, not down, and glowed for an instant, gold-green, against the dark sky. A firefly. He looked dismayed for a moment, then caught my eye. For the first time I could remember, he seemed very much the opposite of solemn.

LeRoy dropped in a spare bit of wiring harness I’d made him for the truck. And said, “I have a memory that isn’t mine.”

“Give it,” said Sher.

From a pocket, LeRoy pulled a video-8 format cassette. I couldn’t read the label, but I knew it by the colors and their arrangement. It was achingly familiar. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the best buddy movie ever made. Theo, Theo. Oh, santos, I was going to cry, and in front of everybody.

Then Sherrea leaned forward with something in her hand. A piece of paper… No, a card. The Page of Swords. Joan of Arc, with her boy’s hair and man’s armor, looking down to hell, up to heaven. The card flexed, fluttered, and was gone, into the mouth of the pot.

“You are reborn and remade,” Sherrea said, “and only the strongest and most true went into the making. Now you have to wake. Stand up and receive the spirit of your head.”

I had to do it by myself. I was weak; my legs trembled under me, and my hands shook. But I stood. Sherrea came to me — so small for such a kick-ass bruja — with a glass bowl full of something clear. Water? She dipped her finger in it, and the smell rose: alcohol. With her finger, she drew something on my forehead.

Someone must have fed the fire, because I was blinded with light. Empty whiteness rose around me from my feet to my shoulders to my chin (I saw Sherrea’s face for a last moment, through the thickening haze) and finally closed over my head.

Me, the dog/rabbit, patient and silly in black on white. The dancing flutist with the two feathers, or antennae, or ears. And the woman with the halo of fire. There was no line of other pictographs, and I felt the lack of dimension more strongly than ever.

“If you want anything,” said the flutist, “just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen that one,” I said.

“You ain’t seen nothin’, kid. Just whistle. You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone, but accept no substitutes. Just put your lips together and blow. Don’t let your deal go down.”

“You know, that almost made sense.”

“It will pretty soon. Or you’re dead meat.”

“Where are the others?” I asked it.

“That’s all we have time for! Tune in next week!”

I might be dead next week, I tried to say, but it was too late.

I opened my eyes on the ground, where I’d landed in what I recognized in hindsight as a boneless, uncontested faint. No one in the cluster of people around me seemed to think I ought to be embarrassed. I had a vague impression of some ritual things being done quickly; then Josh and Kris put a shoulder under each of my arms and half carried me back to the farmhouse. Not long after they’d stretched me on my bed, Sher poked her head, then the rest of her, in the door. She was back to the torn leggings. I felt much better.

“I don’t know if that will help,” she said. “But it was a damn good try. You take a mean initiation.”

“Thank you. I think.”

“There’s usually pronouns in it, though.”

It was a moment before I figured out what she meant. Then I laughed.

“We tried to fix your identity to your body, so that you’d be more likely to hold out against Tom. And we made this.” She lifted up an oblong glass bead, the size of the end of my thumb. “It’s not exactly a govi. It’s sort of your doppelganger.”

“Strong family resemblance,” I agreed.

“Your psychic doppelganger, dipshit. The idea is that you buck Tom off, and this doesn’t; you trap him in this and break it. It’s a decoy body.”

“Do you think it’ll work?”

She sat down, hard, on the edge of the bed. “No. But I can’t think of anything else to do. Santos, I wish we had more time.”

“We’re available for a limited time only,” I said, three-fourths asleep.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“They’ve got the turbine; the note came from Theo an hour ago. He says he’ll see you in Oz.”

“Ha ha, Theo. Sher? In the… thing, this evening. There wasn’t anything from Frances.”

“She said, in — I think it was an Irish accent — that there was only one thing you’d ever given her that she could hold in her two hands, that she hadn’t eaten. And that the one thing would be perfect for the pot, but it was also the first thing you’d given her, and she thought the sentiment would be more use to her than the identification would be to you.”

I laughed again. “That’s very Frances-like of her. Sher, why does China Black have silver eyebrows?”

“She got in trouble once, she says, because her eyebrows moved. She was afraid it would happen again.”

“Silly,” I said, and fell asleep.

10.1: Who plans revenge must dig two graves

The wind had come up, and swept a domed lid of overcast across the night as far as I could see. Which, given the towers in the way, wasn’t far; but I’d seen it over the road into the City, too. In the Night Fair, vendors would be keeping an eye on the sky, a hand on their shutters and awning cranks. If the wind didn’t blow the clouds away, there would be rain. Which was no guarantee that there would be a whirlwind.

LeRoy had driven me to the edge of the Deeps. I’d spent the ride looking out the passenger’s side window of the truck, to keep from looking at him. Even so, I could tell that he was glancing over every few minutes, when the crumbling pavement gave him leave. Whatever he wanted — to ask if he could come along, to ask me to give it up, to cuss me out for undoing his work in getting me out of the City in the first place — I wasn’t strong enough to stand against it. So I’d kept my face to the glass and the growing darkness, and hoped that the cloud cover meant that the Engineers, or random luck, were giving us what we needed.

Josh had wanted to come, too. I’d talked him out of that, at least. I didn’t want anyone else there if Tom Worecski managed to backtrack along my trail. LeRoy was risk enough. I wondered if LeRoy realized that I hadn’t made any provisions for getting out of the City. Something could happen that would leave me alive and in danger if I stayed. But how could I say when and where I’d meet him, or what to do if I didn’t? Besides, alive and still in danger was the least likely possibility.

I had a clean shirt, Large Bob’s nice trousers, the glass bead on a chain around my neck, and not much else. Nothing that might serve as a weapon. I had maybe been rash there. But I didn’t know anything about weapons, and I didn’t want to hurt myself. Or have someone take the gun or knife or whatever away and use it to hurt me. That, at the moment, seemed more pressing than symbolism.

It wasn’t deja vu; I had been here before, in the street, looking up at Ego. But the appropriate haunted-house sky was missing this time behind the building’s halo of little lights. And Frances wasn’t with me. She was in the Gilded West, with Theo, waiting for a brisk Jehovan miracle. For Oya Iansa, Lightning Woman, patron of revolution and change, whose dancing brings the wind. I wondered if she was the pictograph who sounded like Frances. I hoped Theo hadn’t taken too much gear from the Underbridge. If an electrical storm came with the tornado, the club would be full of dancers under the long windows. Oh, gods. I wanted to be on the sound balcony. I wanted to see Robby, and hear Spangler say “fuck” one more time. I wanted it so badly I hurt.

Enough. I shook myself and went to Ego’s front door.

I could see the camera, watching from its bracket on the ceiling, and past it, the guard desk. I looked into the camera’s eye and nodded, schooling my face to something like confident blankness.

The guard was one I didn’t know, young, brown-haired, with a sunburnt nose. He looked up when I stopped in front of the desk.

“They know I’m coming,” I said.

“Can I have your name, please, to—”

“They don’t need my name. They just saw my face on the monitor upstairs.” I tilted my head toward the camera.

“I have to call to authorize—”

“Please do.”

He went into the little room with the window in the door, and I followed silently after. When I came in, he was on the intercom saying, ”… didn’t give a name, sir.” I reached gently around his shoulder and took the desk mike away from him.

“Hello, Tom,” I said. It would come through clearly; I knew how to talk into a microphone. “I thought I was invited.”

There was a beat of silence. Then the drawling voice, saying, “Well, God damn if you aren’t. Come on up. You know the way.”

The guard stepped back, watching me. He seemed skittish. I handed him the microphone and headed for the elevator.

I didn’t know what I was going to do. We’d discovered, when we put our heads together, that the only thing we could plan was the lighting of Ego. Helping Dana, thwarting — or even avoiding — Tom, were too full of variables. I could only go, because I had to go, and stay alert, and do the next thing, whatever it was. Everything depended on what happened next, and what happened after that, and after that, and I had no idea what any of those would be. I was waiting, almost literally, for a sign. Improvisation wasn’t what I was good at. What was I good at? What was I made to do?

Theo would light the Gilded West, if he could, at the request of Sherrea’s gods. What was I here for? To bring Dana out. To stop Tom Worecski. I doubted I could manage either one. I was simply moving in the direction that seemed right, and hoping that at the appropriate moment, something would tell me I’d arrived.

“This isn’t just the power monopoly,” Sherrea had said before I climbed into the truck. “That’s just a symptom. D’you understand?” It had meant a lot to her, I could tell: her hands were closed hard on my shoulders, and her face was uncomfortably close to mine. She wouldn’t have forgotten if it wasn’t important. Once, I would have smiled and told her yes, I understood, sure. This afternoon, I’d stood quiet under her hands and finally shook my head. She’d remembered then, let go and stepped back. But I’d seen the fear in her face.

Oh, spirits, if Frances wasn’t John Wayne, I certainly wasn’t. Why hadn’t I just stood at the front door and cut my throat?

The elevator door opened on darkness. The elevator itself was still lit, so the power hadn’t gone off. I stepped out, holding the door open. It pinged furiously; I jumped and lost my grip. The door closed and left me in a perfect absence of light. I wish I’d thought to bring a candle. But how could I have expected that here, where electricity ran like water, there wouldn’t be enough light to see by?

I could find the office by touch; there weren’t that many doors. But I could probably find other things, too, if I was meant to. I took two steps, my fingers trailing along the wall. “Tom,” I said on a whim, “this is stupid. I can turn around and leave.”

In the ceiling, a speaker crackled. I’d been right. He’d seen too many movies. “That elevator ain’t comin’ back.”

“I know where the fire stairs are.”

“Sure, you do. But I’m awful sorry about the lights on those stairs. Seem to be on the blink. You sure you want to go down ’em in the dark, nice and slow?”

That might mean that he had put something in the stairwell. Or it might only mean that, once I headed for it, he would.

“And speakin’ of fire, what did you think of the one I lit for you last time? Huh?” He laughed, a high, scratching giggle overhead. How about a little fire, Scarecrow, I thought, but didn’t say. The horse you rode in on, and your little dog, too, Worecski.

I found a light switch under my fingers and flipped it, but nothing happened. Shut off at the breaker box, probably located in Ego’s heels; and I was in her hair. Either he’d just ordered it done, or the paging system was on a separate circuit.

I reached the door that opened on Albrecht’s office. Would Tom be in it? Or Albrecht, or both? If the lamp was on, I’d be blind. I opened the door a finger width at a time.

The office was dark. And unnaturally silent — of course. With the power off, any fans or air-conditioning exclusive to this floor would go off, too. From the perfect lack of noise, I figured Albrecht’s floor must have had its own independent everything. If Tom was in the room, I ought to be able to hear his breathing, if I could only keep my own quiet.

I bumped lightly into the desk, and let my hands drift in the area where the lamp ought to be. It was there. I tried the switch because it had to be tried, but nothing happened. I worked my way around the desk, stopping to listen every two or three steps, holding my breath until the pulse in my head deafened me. In time, I made it to the door in the paneling that led to the big, bright room that had been the stage for Tom’s last drama.

It was as dark as the office. And the cool, dry air had been replaced with suffocating heat and damp. No venting, no air-conditioning. I could feel sweat springing to my skin already, like condensation on a glass. I took a step into the void, another -

And couldn’t quite stifle the sound I made when something brushed against my face. I staggered backward. Nothing happened. I reached out and found something between my fingers: plastic — long ribbons of it — hanging from the ceiling like loose-curled vines.

What I had to stifle then was a stream of epithets. It was videotape. Half-inch videotape pulled off its reels and draped like party streamers as far as I could reach.

Light fluttered through the room, and I thought at first it was a reflection from somewhere. But in the afterimage I realized what I’d seen. The blinds had been drawn back from the wall of window glass, and the first pale flickering of lightning had passed through. Lightning. What about wind? That wasn’t my part of the show. I couldn’t spare either hope or fear for the weather now.

But it had given me that moment’s illumination. In it, I’d seen thickets of tape, veiling the room from one side to the other. Albrecht’s collection, it must be, everything I’d found for him, everything he’d commissioned from anywhere else, all originals, because he’d insisted on that. I closed both fists on handfuls of tape and began, methodically, to pull it down.

The furniture was gone. When I reached the place where the two couches had been, I found only empty floor. A stab of lightning showed me the marks in the deep carpet left by the couches’ feet, and by the Chinese table. He might not be here at all, I thought suddenly, alarmed. A cluster of tape slipped through my fingers to the floor. He might have left this here for me, and be sitting somewhere below, imagining the scene, laughing. If so, he could have left something else as well, something lethal.

No, it felt wrong. Tom Worecski had a wonderful imagination; I had the proof of it right here. But I didn’t think he’d want to miss the effect he’d caused, even if he had to limit himself to judging by the noises I made. I gathered up an armful of tape and yanked.

Bleaching white light shot into the room from the window and was gone, with the crash of mangled air on its heels. I staggered and fell, and jammed my knuckles into my teeth to stop sound and air.

Dana was hanging from the ceiling. The afterimage was printed on my vision wherever I turned: head down, naked, her bare arms dangling among the twists of videotape, the ragged remains of her blond hair sticking out around her face, her mouth dark with dried blood, her eyes wide and empty. Her throat had been cut.

There was another flash, and I didn’t have warning enough to look away, so I saw her again. I would have to see her to get past her. I ought to get her down from there; but oh, gods, gods, I couldn’t do it. What did you burn candles to Erzulie for, Dana? To save you from someone like Tom Worecski? Had she been alive yesterday, when I held her hair in a box? I couldn’t tell, not from one lightning flash to the next. A broken mannequin, a ruined fashion doll — but all the while she’d been alive, she had been real, and I hadn’t noticed. Now it was too late.

The need for stealth, it seemed to me, was gone. “Where are you, Tom?” I said aloud.

“This way,” he answered from behind a screen of tape, in the same tone I used: flat, stripped of frivolity or even character. It was his live voice, not another ceiling speaker. I moved cautiously forward through the plastic. It stuck to my skin where it brushed, to the glaze of sweat there. I could feel my shirt clinging wet to my back, the trousers catching damply at my thighs and calves. “Why did you send for me, Tom?”

“Mick told me your little story. He said you couldn’t remember being a Horseman, but I figured you for a liar.” He was moving; his arc was taking him toward the right, away from the windows, putting me between him and them. Did he think I had a gun?

“It’s true. I don’t. I never was a Horseman.”

“Oh, bullshit. The fuckin’ chevaux were just meatbags. Somebody’d have to operate ’em. So, are you Mitchell, that little ass wipe? He thought he was Mister C. I. fuckin’ A. He’d love to try to take me out.”

“I told you what I am.” There was no reason not to talk; the rustling of the videotape would have told him where I was. He’d invited me up. He thought I was a Horseman. He wanted another head fight, wanted to prove to another of his kind that he was the master.

“Or Scoville, maybe? Christ, what a pussy. And Chichenas hated my guts — are you Chichenas?”

On the other hand, if I’d run out of things to say, there was no reason to go on talking. When he was done playing with me, he’d strike. And then I’d see if my doppelganger worked.

Theo was in the Gilded West, right outside that window. If he got lucky and a toy cyclone danced on the vanes of his turbine, if it didn’t tear off the top of the building and crush him in the rubble, he would light up the night. It seemed terribly silly and distant. Why had we wanted to do it? What good was it going to be to anyone? I just hoped he could get away safe. Frances would help. I skirted another clump of tape.

“Sparrow, look out,” someone said, low and quick. In front of me I saw a movement, a lighter spot in the dark like a face. I ducked right. There was a spit of flame and a dry, deafening crack, and I felt something tear a hole through the flesh of my left shoulder. My scream and the gunshot reverberated together in the room and were gone.

I’d fallen to one knee; I stayed there, bent over and gasping. I clutched at my shoulder, but my hand wasn’t big enough to close over both the entrance and the exit wounds. Blood ran down my right wrist into my sleeve. So much for the clean shirt. Apologies to its owner when — no, it didn’t look as if I’d have the chance to make those. It had never occurred to me that he would have a gun, that he would choose to fight with something other than his head. I was an idiot. I was not good at this.

Lightning came and went in a quick, rhythmless dance. The room was pockmarked, in the flashes, with the image of the rain that patted against the window glass. The couches had been moved to this end of the room, and Mick Skinner occupied one of them. His had been the warning voice. He sat very straight, his hands pressed together between his tight-closed knees, his hair tangled and filthy, his pretty stolen face hollowed out and blank. Tom stood in front of him, a pistol in his hands aimed professionally at me. Behind him was the other door into the room, where Cassidy had died.

“Surprise,” Tom said. Then he moved closer, and I heard the frown in his voice. “God damn — you’re not Frances. Shit, I didn’t figure she’d miss a chance like this.”

I sucked air in, quivering, uneven. It hurt, it hurt, and my stomach cramped with fear. I pressed my lips against my upraised knee to hold back whimpering and bile. Then I turned my head just enough to say, “No… I’m me. You didn’t… you didn’t send for her.”

“Hell, no. I thought this way I’d get Frances’s head and the cheval body. I always did like one-of-a-kind shit. But Franny was supposed to try to sneak in on you. That’d make you a Trojan horse, huh? That’s just the kind of joke she always liked. She turn yellow, maybe?”

“Lost her… sense of humor.”

He was too dangerous not to watch. My breath stumbling loudly through my open mouth, I lifted my head from my knee and my gaze from the floor. Tom’s face was bright with sweat in the lightning flicker. “Well, one out of two ain’t bad.”

I tried to send a look of appeal to Mick, but he couldn’t see it for the backlighting, or he didn’t care. It was time to say something brave and witty, and do something creative. Nothing occurred to me. It seemed I hadn’t seen enough movies after all. But Frances had. The door banged open under her kick, showering splinters from the frame. She’d gotten a handgun from somewhere, and was taking aim while the door was still swinging. Tom dropped to the floor like a felled tree and fired three shots, all of which hit Frances somewhere between the shoulders and the knees. She sagged back and slid down the door frame. I could hear the drag of air into her lungs.

“Stupid bitch,” Tom muttered. He scrabbled across the floor and kicked her pistol out of her reach, farther into the room. “Did you think I’d believe this shit? I knew you had to show up.”

It was more than I had known. I wanted to say so, but my tongue was frozen.

“So go for it, Franny,” Tom went on. He got to his feet, grinning. “That horse is gonna die. Make the jump, girl, just like you wanted me to. Only this time I’ve got the gun. Ain’t nobody to ride but your pals, and if you ride ’em, I’ll kill ’em. Unless you want to try to take me again.”

“You said you’d let her go,” Mick spoke from the couch. He sounded as if he’d been shot, too, as if he had only one lung working. “You said you’d showed her, and now you wouldn’t have to kill her.”

“And I wouldn’t have had to, you little prick, except here she is. She needed showing again. What was I supposed to do? Let her kill me instead?”

“You promised me — if she got away from you, you’d let her go. You promised.” Mick rose, shakily. What had happened to him in the last weeks? What had Tom done to him? Whatever it was, why hadn’t it given him a sensible distrust of promises from Tom Worecski?

Frances hadn’t moved, but I saw her eyes open and squint in the blaze of lightning. Rain was projected on her face, the image of it running down the glass. I wondered if I could get to her discarded pistol unnoticed.

Tom faced Mick, his whole face alive with anger. Then it fell. “You’re right. I broke my promise.” Tom dropped to his knees on the carpet and held the pistol out to Mick. “Kill me. Kill me, goddammit. If you can bring yourself to do it, then I must deserve to die.”

Mick took the pistol. The big window rattled with the thunder. “Oh, I can do it,” Mick said in a trembling voice.

I thought, No.

Then Tom sagged to the floor and Mick smiled. “Jesus, what a sucker,” he drawled, and put the barrel in his mouth.

“No!” Frances screamed, but it was drowned by the double crack of thunder, inside and out.

Tom stood up and shook himself. “Shit,” he said. “Shouldn’t’ve done that. There was still plenty of fun in him.”

He’d been weak, that was all. Mick had cared for Frances; he’d even cared, I realized, for me. But he’d been too weak to stand against a thing like Worecski. And I’d been too weak to save him.

Frances’s head dropped back against the door frame, and I heard a little despairing noise from her. Her eyes were tight shut. Mick had slid in a heap to the carpet, smearing the white couch on the way. The pistol lay on the floor between his body and his arm.

“One down,” said Tom. “Come on, girl. Jump for it.”

Slowly, Frances shook her head.

The bead of glass at my throat was cool and hard. My head was swimming with heat and loss of blood, and my legs were shaking under me. But neither gun was in Tom’s reach. So I took a last shuddering breath and flung myself untidily at him.

His arm came up across the side of my face like a log. There was no reason why someone who could do what he did should be so strong. He hoisted me up in two handfuls of shirtfront and shook me. I hit him as hard as I could in the stomach with my right fist, but the angle was bad, I was weak, and it wasn’t hard enough. He grunted and bared his clenched teeth, and pushed me backward into the wall. I sobbed when my left shoulder hit.

He wasn’t going to fight with his head. If he didn’t, I hadn’t a chance against him. But the alternative to this pointless battering was to sit quietly and wait for him to kill me. That seemed wasteful.

I staggered upright and went for his throat with both hands. Tom grabbed my wrists and forced me back to the wall again, pinned me there. His eyes, so close to mine, suddenly widened and cut sideways, toward the door.

“Jesus Christ, Frances, what’s holding you back? I thought for sure — But if you were ridin’ this, it would fight better. What does it take, Franny?”

I wondered if she’d heard that. If he was right, she and I would both be better off if she’d ditch her principles and ride.

I could see the pores in his face in the lightning flashes; I could smell the sharp reek of his sweat and feel the moist heat of him. I twisted, felt torn things in my shoulder pull farther apart, and bit off a cry.

“Now I remember,” he said, his voice mild and cheerful. “You don’t like to be touched.” And he leaned forward and forced his mouth down hard on mine.

My teeth were already clenched; it was too late to clamp my lips between them. The hierarchy, from weakest muscles to strongest, is: lips, tongue, jaws. At least he couldn’t get past my teeth. He pulled his head back and laughed softly; his breath fanned my cheek, as warm and damp as the air. “Your head is sayin’ no, but — hell, your body’s sayin’ no, too. Guess I’ll have to change your mind.”

Somewhere in my brain, I probably had the equivalent of jaw muscles, that I could have closed and kept closed. I didn’t know where they were. Tom Worecski had ridden me once before; but the circumstances had been such that I didn’t remember what it had been like. I expected something like the blinding shock of Frances’s assault, a forced mental entry like a mortar shell. I didn’t expect Mick’s easy falling in and out, like blinking, like a switch toggled. All my expectations were worthless.

Tom was a gelid, poisonous presence inserting itself through the soft places in my personality, trickling in like dirty water through a crack. He was a flavor of decay in the back of my throat, a rotting-vegetable slickness under my fingers, the rustling sound of beetles scurrying. And it was all done slowly, slowly, so that I had time to understand what was happening to me. So I knew exactly what sort of tenant would occupy the rooms of my body once I was forced out.

I struggled. I did it physically, flat against the wall, unable to so much as get a knee up between us; and mentally with even less effect.

Suddenly I was alone again. Tom still pinned me in place, but he’d jerked back a little. He was glaring. “What the fuck you got on you?” he said. “What is it?”

He let go of my left wrist. I went for his face with my freed hand, but before I reached him he slammed his right shoulder into my damaged one. The sensation was, for several seconds, literally blinding. My knees buckled, but Tom’s grip kept me from falling.

The chain must have showed a little inside my shirt collar. He hooked a finger in it and flipped it to the outside. The glass bead glittered between us in the crazy light, and he caught it. As soon as he did he knew it was important, by the way I behaved.

It was like Beano all over again: slapping me against the wall, twining fingers through the cord — no, chain — around my neck. But this couldn’t be Beano’s. No miasma of incense. Gunpowder stink, and the smell of blood, which at Beano’s had come later. Oh, santos, Sparrow, keep your mind on it, don’t pass out now. I blinked, trying to clear the smudginess from everything.

“Voodoo shit,” Tom spat out. He fingered the glass bead. “Was this supposed to fool me? Figured you were gonna stick a few pins in me? Shit.” He yanked, and the chain cut into the back of my neck and broke. The bead slid off and dropped to the floor. He moved his foot, moved it back, and I saw the scattering of bright dust in the mottled light through the windows. Something ran from the corner of my eye to my jaw. It might have been sweat.

“All right, now,” he breathed. “Let’s party.” And he began again.

Water action. Filthy liquid filling me up slowly, dissolving me, toxins rushing into my mouth, my nostrils, my ears, filming my eyes, devouring the connections between me and my senses. He’d taken control of my gag reflex already, or I would have obeyed it.

Only twenty-four hours before, my friends had acted out the gathering-together of a tangle of energy, the naming of it: Sparrow. Now Tom O’Bedlam consumed it, strained its juices between his teeth, picked the meat out of it with delicate, epicurean delight. Mick and Frances had told me that the host personality could be starved or smothered gradually, or killed outright. They didn’t tell me it could be eaten.

I couldn’t feel anything. I could still hear: thunder, rain driving against the window, the two of us panting in unison. I could see; he hadn’t taken the optic nerves yet, or the muscles that moved my eyes. Over Tom’s shoulder I had a view of Frances, her head turned against the door frame, her face drawn in loosely with pain. But only loosely, as if it was a leftover expression, as if what had caused it was gone or nearly so.

Maybe she would find that white, flat place. Once Tom was done with my battered body, maybe I would, too.

There was a roaring in my ears, growing steadily. It was in the room, too; the window glass was rattling.

Then the building cracked in half. I heard it.

There was light like white air burning, like a welder’s arc against the eye, like the light in the old military films of nuclear tests. Tom/I screamed; and did it again when the light didn’t wink out. It was his scream in my throat, but I felt it. Somewhere along the tunnel I was disappearing down, there was a remote control for that much of me, if I could just find a button and push… No, it was lips. Just put your lips together…

Silly. Say goodbye. The sound was one I’d heard in movies, when a train thundered down upon the camera like doom.

“Pw? your lips… Nothing to lose.

… and blow.

I had lost sight and hearing. But white fire filled the bottom of my blindness, lapped around my ankles, surged up to my knees, my hips, my rib cage, sliced between Tom’s fingers and my neck, and closed over my head. I thought I heard a shriek, but sound wouldn’t have carried in that medium.

I didn’t know if it was a flat world; there was nothing in it. It was white. It wasn’t warm or cold, welcoming or repellent, sweet or cruel. It was not the place I had come to before. There was nothing in it. No helpful pictographs, no street signs. The natives knew their way around.

Bait, I thought furiously, in a state of nonawareness. You wanted me for bait.

It worked. There were no words formed. The answer was just a part of the void that meant something.

Your timing sucked!

My timing was perfect. The lightning froze him in the midst of possessing you, my whirlwind lit the building and destroyed the barriers that kept me out of Ego, my possession of you consumed him. There was no other possible order.

What did you do to Worecski?

Nothing. I rode you. He was no business of mine, except that you were concerned with him. It was his bad luck that I arrived when I did, and that it’s true what they say, that “Great gods cannot ride little horses.”

Tom… wasn’t your business?

You know my business. If you don’t remember, ask my little sister. Your friend the witch.

You never said you couldn’t get into Ego.

There is no technical manual for the spirit world. You will never know everything.

Why me? Why was it ever me?

Your left foot is in the past. Your right foot is in the present. You hold steel in your left hand, and flint in your right. You are the dancer between the old world and the new, because I made you to be so.

Fuck you! I deny you!

Do you deny your hands and feet?

Silence, in that volumeless space that had never admitted sound.

Let me go back, I said. Frances is dying.

I’m not keeping you here. Go.

I opened my eyes on a room bathed in watery golden light. The Gilded West was still gilded. The wind still roared outside. I was lying on my back. Tom lay three feet away in a half curl, one hand flung out loosely on the carpet, his eyes open and motionless.

“Anybody home?” I croaked. “Are you dead?” There was no response from whatever was left of Tom Worecski.

I crawled to the door, and Frances. Her breath still fluttered in and out of her parted lips, quick and shallow. Her eyes opened.

“Oh, why did I do that?” she whispered.

“Shut up, Frances.”

“Don’t be silly; you wouldn’t be able to tell who I was. He didn’t used to be a very good shot, you see. The nerve of the bastard, practicing up. It’s not fair.”

“Frances, please—”

There was a sound, from on the floor — from the inert body of Tom Worecski. I should have known; it was in all the horror movies. One last resuscitation. But in this movie, the heroes weren’t going to be able to kill the monster one more time.

The sandy head lifted from the floor and turned its frantic ice-pale eyes on me, and its mouth said, “Who are you? What’s… where am I?”

“Good grief,” Frances sighed. She sounded weakly amused. “He didn’t kill the host.”

“Are you sure? I mean, that he’s not—”

“We can… could always spot each other. He’s not there.”

I looked back into those nearly colorless eyes and tried to see them as the eyes of a stranger. For a moment I couldn’t think what to say to him. Then I called on my memories of the same experience. “You’re safe. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I’ll help you in a minute, but please — just wait, okay?”

I knew it wasn’t going to work. He stared at me, and at Frances who had most of her blood, it seemed, on the outside of her.

“Don’t—” I began, but of course he turned his head and saw Mick, too. He would now have hysterics, and there wasn’t time for them.

Perhaps Tom had let him surface to scenes like this before. He didn’t have hysterics. He folded back up on the carpet with his hands over his face, in a pitiful attitude of submission and hopelessness. Eventually, I think, he passed out; I didn’t see him stir.

I turned back to Frances. “Now, shut up and mount up.”

“What?”

“Ride, damn you. I’m not half as near to dying as you are. Mount up and we’ll both get out.”

She smiled, almost. “And then what? Shall I steal another body once we’re out? Or just stay in yours forever?”

“What’s wrong with Mick’s solution: taking someone who’s getting out of the living racket anyway?”

“Why should it be better to steal people’s deaths than their lives? It’s a rite of passage. How do you know that Mick’s suicides weren’t harmed by what he did?” She winced, and shifted slightly against the molding.

I wanted to fetch a couch cushion to prop her up, but I was afraid she’d die while I was away doing it. I looked around for anything else I could use, and saw her near hand, palm down, on the carpet. Showing between her fingers was a bit of black leather thong strung with a black onyx bead.

“Not strictly sentimental, after all,” she said. “I had to be able to find you. You can have it back now, if you want. Oh, Christ, don’t cry.”

I swallowed, with difficulty, and it didn’t help. “Frances, please. Ride me out of here. If you don’t… ”

“You’ll kill me?” she whispered, grinning.

“Probably,” said a harsh voice above me, “by talking you to death. Get out of the light, you idiot.”

I ducked and rolled sideways, expecting a blow that never came. Then I recognized the broad shape leaning over me, and the voice. It was Josh. His face was set like concrete. LeRoy was right behind him, hauling gear, his eyes huge.

“It’s too late, Josh,” Frances said.

“I love a challenge.” He stuck a needle in her arm.

“Oh, no fair, no fair,” she whispered, shaking her head. Her eyes closed.

I knelt frozen on the carpet and stared. “Is she… ”

“She’s passed out. Now shut up.”

“Josh — what are you doing in here? It’s not safe—”

He jerked his head toward the window. “The building’s lit up.”

“Are you crazy? The place is full of—”

“LeRoy, plug up the hole in this and give it a sedative.”

I would have felt it less if he’d slapped me. He knew it suddenly; he was very still. “I’m sorry. I—” He shook his head and turned back to Frances.

“Not a sedative,” I said. “LeRoy, get that guy out of here.” I nodded at the sandy-haired stranger who’d been Tom Worecski. “He’s alive. Give him the sedative. He’ll go nuts if he wakes up. Tom was riding him.”

“My,” said Josh, his back to me, his gloved hands full of tools, “there’s one alive. Was that an oversight?”

“I didn’t—” Then I realized that Josh hadn’t suggested it was my oversight. I wondered who he blamed.

During the exchange, LeRoy had torn the sleeve off my shirt and examined my bullet hole. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to take the shirt off.”

It was good of him to remember. “Go ahead.”

He did it with a minimum of fuss or contact, and dressed the wound the same way. His hands were shaking, and cold, but deft nonetheless. He produced a hypodermic from apparently thin air — I wondered if I’d blacked out for a few seconds — and I shook my head.

“No, LeRoy, I’m serious.” I hadn’t finished something… ”

“I know,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear. “It’s not a sedative.” He wielded the needle like an expert, which I suppose he was. “It’ll take a minute. But don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

I didn’t think I could. Whatever message the needle delivered, my body was saying, Let go.

For a few minutes, I might have. Then I was standing, supporting myself against the window frame. At last, I saw the Gilded West. It was the skull side, a little irregular where a few of the floods had failed to light. It was gilded, the fantasy palace of the postcards, the monument of Frances’s childhood and the hoodoo work of Sherrea’s gods all at once. A bridge between the old world and the new.

A bridge between the earth and sky. Hanging twisting and quivering from the clouds above, its pointed foot dancing delicately just out of sight on the other side of the building, was a howling cone of wind. Oya danced before my eyes, and I understood, looking at her, why change, in the cards, was called Death.

Josh and LeRoy were at work, supplementing the light with a pair of battery lamps. I couldn’t see Frances. I moved, slowly, toward the office door, the one I’d come in through.

Wet hands closed around my face and lifted it, and Theo said, “Where is he?”

It was Theo. That was why I’d needed to keep going: to find Theo. His thick brown hair was streaked with rain and curling on his face and neck, his glasses were spattered with droplets, and he smelled strongly of burning cable insulation. I sighed and shut my eyes.

Theo shook me, very hard, and said, “Sparrow, where is he?”

His voice was raw.

I opened my eyes again. Theo’s face was laced through with horror, an expression so different from any I’d seen him wear that it almost made a stranger of him. I turned to find the cause of it, back the way I had come.

It was there. It must have been the same thing that had hardened Josh’s features and words, and made LeRoy’s hands shake. I had known it was there, and with unnatural camera angles and restricted depth of field kept myself from having to see it all.

The room was washed in the pale golden light that Theo had turned on, cast by the Gilded West: Death, the patron of change, the destroyer of the established order, looked in the window. What had been terrible in the dark was unbearable now. There had been change enough in that room to wake me up screaming for the rest of my life.

Theo shook me again, and I dragged my eyes away from Dana, from Mick, from the huddle of people who were trying to keep Frances from following the same route. “Sparrow!” Theo said. “Where’s my dad?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t here when… ”

LeRoy’s booster shot kicked in at last, and I could think again. It was a bad time for it. You know my business, she had said. I did. The Hoodoo Engineers had called her, Mr. Lyle and China Black and all the people who knew it was time and past time for change had called her, to break the stagnant hold of Ego on the City. The hold of A. A. Albrecht. She, in turn, had called me.

Not Legba the gatekeeper, male and female, to whom I was supposed to belong; it was Oya Iansa who’d come in with the light from the Gilded West, the goddess who brought revolution and the falling of towers. Oh, of course I was hers, not Legba’s. Out of all the things in that bunker, she’d preserved and awakened the one with the technical knowledge she wanted. I wasn’t a practical joke; I was the whirlwind.

And my friend’s father had been standing in the path of it.

10.2: Mister Death and the redheaded woman

“I have to find him.” Theo turned back to the office door.

“You said once… that you didn’t like him.”

Theo looked over his shoulder at me. The answer was in his face: that if I had been born instead of grown, I wouldn’t have said that.

I followed him out into the dark hallway. I couldn’t do anything about Frances. But I would not lose Theo.

“Where are we going?” I whispered.

“He has a bedroom one floor down.”

If this had been a movie, he would have said, “We’re not going anywhere.” I was glad it wasn’t. “Did — do you live here?”

“Not for years. I moved out a little after my mom died.” Tom had been honest about the illumination in the stairwell. Theo pulled a candle out of a jacket pocket and lit it, and we started down in that narrow field of jittery light. “I visited, though. Mostly to fight with him. And I always thought I hated that, but I kept coming back. I guess it was better than not seeing him.”

The candlelight offered emotional armor that even darkness couldn’t have provided. “Do you… do you love him?” I said.

“He’s my father.”

“Does that mean you love him?”

“It means I can’t tell,” said Theo.

The power was working on the floor below, and the stairwell door was unlocked. Theo opened it a crack and light blasted out, followed by a rush of slightly cooler air. He blew out the candle. When our eyes had adjusted, we stepped into the hall.

“Theo!” I whispered suddenly. It sounded like escaping steam in the silence. “Was there a guard on the front door?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you wonder why not?”

“I still wonder why not, man. Maybe he went to check out the tornado. You want to stand here ’til he shows up?”

“I should have brought a gun from upstairs,” I muttered. “There’s got to be a guard someplace.”

Theo shrugged. “Neither of us knows from guns.”

“You can’t tell that from looking at us.”

He gave me an encompassing stare. “Right now you wouldn’t scare me if you had a cannon.”

He was right, of course. I was suddenly aware of myself in every undignified detail: smeared with blood, soaked with sweat, blinkered with tangles of hair. And half-dressed besides. LeRoy had used a lot more bandage than he’d had to, but I felt the skin on my shoulders, arms, and stomach cooling as the sweat dried, and shivered more than was called for. I found I couldn’t meet Theo’s eyes.

But Theo’s mind was elsewhere. “We gotta do this on attitude,” he continued. “Think Mel Gibson in Monte Cristo.”

“Sure. Could we also do it on paranoid willingness to hit anything that moves with the nearest heavy object?”

“I’ve got no problem with that.”

Theo, my patron saint may have killed your father. If so, I made it possible. I didn’t say it. It wouldn’t have helped.

Theo stopped halfway down the hall and set his hand on a doorknob. He glanced up at me; for a moment I thought he’d speak. Then the moment was gone, and he opened the door.

There was a lamp lit on the nightstand, and a bulky figure on the bed; there was the sound of harsh, irregular breathing. It was Albrecht, gray-skinned, slack-mouthed, aged by ten years, sick. But alive. Theo hunched over the bed as if looking for some microscopic, encouraging signal.

I couldn’t find any resemblance between Theo and his father. Maybe he looked like his mother. That would be interesting, to be able to see your nose on someone else’s face, and know it was only the outward sign of an interior connection, a similarity in the blood. And the emotional connection: Was it different from friendship? What did Theo feel now? Would I feel the same, if it were Theo lying stricken on the bedspread?

I heard something click to my right and looked up. Dusty, my nemesis from the Night Fair and the Underbridge, stood in the connecting door to the next room. He wore a knee-length black robe that was too big around for him, and his shell-pink hair was in disarray. I’d never seen him without the silvertones; his eyes were narrow and deep-set and very dark. He held a long-barreled pistol in both hands. “Hey,” he said, “it’s Sonnyboy and the Whatchacallit.”

I stood very still at the foot of the bed. LeRoy’s injection and a bolt of fear combined to make a buzzing noise in my head. I waited for a sign from heaven.

Theo hadn’t moved, either. His back was to the connecting door. Did he recognize — yes, he’d known Dusty as one of Tom Worecski’s henchmen. Theo’s eyes widened, and closed; his lips pressed tight, and his shoulders rose as he filled his lungs in a rush.

“God damn it,” Theo said, heated and drawling, still facing the bed, “I thought I told you to watch him!”

My teeth snapped closed, an involuntary motion. I knew that voice.

Dusty’s head turned, just a little, and he frowned. “Boss?”

Theo scowled over his shoulder. “What the fuck were you doin’? How long has he been like this?”

There was a little of the bad truck driver from Rainbow Express in it, and some of Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. But it was mostly the voice of Tom Worecski. Monte Cristo, indeed, Theo. But it would only buy a few minutes, nothing else.

“Like what?” said Dusty. He took a step closer, and the gun barrel wavered.

“If he dies, I’m gonna have your ass for breakfast. Go call downstairs for a doctor.” Theo made a little business out of checking his father’s pulse. Careful, careful — the body language would be harder than doing the voice. But of course, that was why Theo hadn’t moved from the bedside.

Dusty was still frowning. “What happened upstairs? And who’s that with you?”

A muscle stood out in Theo’s jaw. “You gonna do what I tell you, or you gonna stay and chat?”

It wasn’t quite right, and I thought Theo knew it. Did Dusty?

He lowered the gun. “Sure thing, boss,” he said, and went out into the hall. Theo let his breath out.

From the hallway door, I heard Dusty say softly, “Hey, Sonnyboy!” and I turned and saw him framed in the doorposts, sighting down the gun at Theo. I had just enough time to take the step that put me in the line of fire.

I heard three shots as Theo knocked me down from behind. Dusty wavered in the doorway and dropped the gun. I saw his face, an interesting mix of bafflement and annoyance, before he fell into the hall and was still.

Myra Kincaid now stood at the door to the next room. She wore a raincoat loosely belted over, I suspected, nothing, and her dark cherry hair fell untidily in her eyes. She looked relaxed, half awake, and held a pistol in a negligent grip, settling as I watched to point at the floor. Santos, I thought, with an upwelling of hysteria, where were they finding all these damned handguns?

“My brother was a mad dog,” she said. “But I expect I’ll miss him, anyway.” She sounded appallingly like Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind. “Tom’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said before Theo could perjure himself. I slid out from under him, and he sat up with a lurch. I got to my feet and managed not to sway too much. The pain in my shoulder was like a blunt-ended hammer that shook my whole body, and it felt as if adrenaline had raised blisters on my nerve endings. But all the while, my eyes never left Myra. The gun made her master of the room; she didn’t behave as if she knew it. “I hope you don’t feel you have to avenge him.”

“If Tom couldn’t kill you, I surely couldn’t. Dusty, not being very bright, hadn’t figured that out.”

Innocuous voice, but something out of alignment in it, in the very air. I looked into her eyes and knew she was a good deal more than half awake. Why had she just killed her brother? What was I supposed to say? Here was a cobra, out of her basket. What could I possibly play to make her dance?

“Worecski’s gone,” I said at last, “and Albrecht’s finished. The market for bravos and assassins just dried up. Where will you go now?”

Her eyelids lifted a fraction. “You’ll let me go?”

Attitude, I thought, gathered mine around me, and replied, “I think you’d better.”

“I want safe conduct.”

Good grief, who did she think I was? What did she think was happening here? “Going fast will be just as effective. Never coming back will be even more so.”

Myra shook her head and smiled. “I’ll do that. Honey, you haven’t got a clue, have you?”

“I beg your pardon?” I asked with an effort.

“That’s all right — it works anyway. But if I’d known you were one of hers, I wouldn’t have had shit to do with this. That was another thing Dusty wasn’t too bright about. ’Course, neither was Tom. I wonder what would have happened if I’d let Dusty pull that trigger.”

I understood, at last. I was alive, and Tom was dead; so I must have killed him. If I could do that, I was too dangerous to challenge. Myra had given me her brother in exchange for her life, and was impressed by my mercy. I had a strong desire to go away and be sick. “You’d better leave now,” I said.

She nodded and dropped the gun in a pocket of the raincoat. For a moment she froze, her hand in the pocket. Then she lifted her head. Her face seemed harder and older, and her lips were twisted and pouting, even as they smiled. Her eyes were rolled back and showed nothing but white.

“Tell my fierce and virtuous sister,” said a dense, caressing contralto through Myra’s mouth, “that Pombagira sends her congratulations. And reminds her that she could not have done it without me.”

Myra Kincaid and the spirit that rode her walked to the door, stepped over her dead brother’s legs, and was gone.

“Sparrow?” said Theo shakily from his place on the floor. “If anything like this comes up again, let’s split town, okay?”

“That’s a great idea. I wish you’d had it sooner.”

“It wouldn’t have worked this time.”

“You’re right.” I stumbled back against the bed and slid to the floor beside Theo. “Go tell Josh that as soon as he can spare the time from Frances, your father needs him. Hurry.”

My eyes were closed, but I could feel him crouched beside me, looking into my face. “What about you?”

“And when he’s done with everybody else, I could probably use a little help, too.”

I heard him run down the hall. Good. The rush was for Albrecht, though; I could have told Theo that I was in no danger. The fierce and virtuous sister still had a use for me.

Tom Worecski has his revenge, and a kind of temporary immortality. It might have been different if there had been a body to stand over, dispose of, remember. And it might have been different if I hadn’t seen the endings of too many horror movies.

But in my sleep I wait for the sequel. In my dreams my loved ones come close and I touch them, and his smile stretches their mouths, his voice comes out. Over and over. And when, awake, I see my loved ones, try as I will, I can’t seem to separate love from terror. It’s the perfect revenge. He would have been delighted.

I don’t dream about flat white spaces and pictographic dancers. I don’t hear the voices of spirits. I don’t miss them. And I don’t fool myself into thinking they’re gone. I just haven’t fouled anything up badly enough to require their intervention, that’s all.

I’ve written this at Sherrea’s request. Or is it a request when someone drops twenty-five pounds of manual typewriter and a monstrous pile of paper beside your plate at dinner, then asks if you’d rather do it in longhand?

“Do what?” I said.

“Your version of what happened to the power monopoly,” she told me, as if I ought to have known.

It was, and is, a very large typewriter. Finally I asked, “Does it have to rhyme?”

She said she wants a record of it for the Engineers, but I think she also means it to be therapy for me. Or maybe she doesn’t. But I’ve treated it as if it was; I’ve tried to faithfully reproduce the person who woke up on the river flats, and understand, and forgive. I’ve made progress on the first two.

Even so, I think this must be three-quarters lying. I can’t have remembered everything; and the process of trying is like reconstructing a dream. You put the connective tissue in where it never existed, because without it, you’ve got, not a narrative, but a string of senseless images.

I don’t trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff left on the sand when the tide of experience recedes. As long as they’re part of that process, there’s something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.

But what if something exists only as a remembrance, that was never an experience? What if it even leaves artifacts in the mind: English, Spanish, French, and a thorough knowledge of semiconductor electronics? These, in me, began as pure memory, untroubled by life or the sensible continuity of time. The experience came later.

What if Sleeping Beauty woke behind the briers alone, in the dark, to the knowledge that the curse was not sleep but waking, and that family, childhood, fairy godmothers and all were dreams spun to amuse a virgin mind in mothballs?

She/he/it would have no choice but to make something of the awakening. I do, as best I can.

Theo and I, in a rash moment over a flask of cherry brandy, resolved to restore the old municipal telephone system to replace Albrecht’s graft- and bribery-powered party lines. After three months of learning experiences, we have half an exchange up; but it’s interesting work.

I found that Loretta, the old woman at China Black’s house, was right: communal hydro generators, regularly spaced along the riverbank, are a reasonably cheap and reliable method for getting power to most of the City. We have four running so far.

Now that the power monopoly is broken, a surprising amount of photovoltaic technology is turning up. Surprising to me, anyway. Last week a storm took the roofing off a house on the south end of town and revealed three solar panels hidden in the rafters. I went down to direct the salvaging of them, and felt like an archaeologist who’d found the library at Alexandria intact.

People come to me for things like that, and for information, and training. I’m learning to talk to them. I’m learning to live with being recognized on the street. A frightening number of people know who I am, and even what I am, and I have to get on with life as if that didn’t matter. Someday maybe it won’t.

I said this was therapy. I think Sher wanted me to see that my life is not a finished story. I already know that, but maybe she doesn’t realize I do. Such a surprising number of people left alive at the end, our narrator included. Do they just stop then, suspended with one foot hanging in midair, one breath half drawn?

“You may tell them,” Frances said, “that Little Nell lived.” She was lying on her back under the Hoodoo Engineers’ big tree, eyes closed, hands limp on the grass. I’d told her about writing this.

“Oh, a tragedy,” I said.

“And that as soon as Little Nell recovers from having her intestines shortened by an inch, she will be a much more interesting person, and it won’t be safe to say things like that.”

“Or necessary, I suppose.”

She raised her eyebrows and her eyelids at the same time.

“I’d thought that you’d want to leave.”

Frances looked up into the boughs and smiled. “Maybe. Eventually. But not until I run out of amusements. It should be damned amusing to be underfoot and in the way while you build the New Jerusalem. I want to write my name in the wet cement.”

I look forward to that.

I liked the idea of a Dickensian ending. But I don’t know yet who marries, who dies, who has offspring and how many. Theo’s father survived the stroke, but his health is uncertain; he’s as fragile as Frances and, unlike her, will remain so the rest of his life. I think he and Theo have said things to each other they weren’t used to saying, and that it did them both good; but I wasn’t there.

I couldn’t say why Sherrea believes the story isn’t done. I know why I do. It’s because Myra Kincaid was right: I haven’t a clue. There is a whole class of answers to life’s big questions that, when examined closely, proves to be nothing but another set of questions. I now know my origins, body and soul. That’s like knowing that magnetic tape is iron oxide particles bonded to plastic film. Wonderful — now, what’s it/or? What does it do!

It does, I suppose, what it has to. It does what it loves to do, or what needs doing. It helps others do the same. So I do that. And sometimes, lying on my back in an inch of cold water with a socket wrench in my hand, or teaching someone how to use a soldering iron, or constructing witty segues between songs on the balcony at the Underbridge, I can feel it, very close: the power and clarity and brilliance, the strength and lightness, that I had once in a dream, a dream of dancing, a hoodoo dream. Maybe in time — nine months? nine years? — I’ll finally have a clue.

I’ve found a videotape, a home dub that someone kept, of several weeks’ worth of a TV comedy show. I like it. It’s funny. But my favorite part, the part I play at the Underbridge when the windows are colorless with dawn, when Theo has fallen asleep with his head on the mixing board, when Robby is marching up and down the dance floor with a broom on his shoulder, is the end of each one. Then the woman whose show it is walks out to her audience and the cameras in a ratty pink chenille bathrobe, grinning, and says, “Go home! Go home!”

She’s made as much sense of the world as she can for one week. She hands it off to the audience. I love her then.

Go home! Go home!

And the house lights go up.