Bone Dance

5.0: One hundred stories without a punchline

“Myra?” said Dusty with a quaver.

Myra surveyed us all with the same smile. “God, I love tableaux. Les Enfants du Paradis meet The Untouchables. Peppermint, hold that toy of yours by the barrel and fling it toward the river just as hard as you can. Now.” He did, and after a moment, there was a splash. “There’s a good boy. Lie down.”

“What the hell is going on?” Dusty’s voice was like a skin of ice over deep water.

“Allah has sent the change wind, and the world’s turned arse over ears. Now do what you’re told.”

“I ain’t gonna lie down.”

“Yes, you are. But you have a choice as to whether you do it alive or dead. I have no preference, myself.”

Dusty sank slowly to his knees in the mud, and finally lay on his stomach. Myra reached into the little van and started it, fiddled with some things in the cab, and stepped back. The van lurched forward into the darkness, toward the river. In a few moments, there was a crunch.

“Pity,” said Myra. “I was hoping it would sink. Now, as for you two,” she went on, turning her attention to Theo and Sher.

Theo had come to himself enough to clamp his hand over the wound in his arm, but he looked as if he would like to fall down. Sher was keeping him from doing it, and staring narrowly at Myra.

“Who are you?” Sherrea asked her.

Myra’s eyebrows went up. “Child, you frighten me. Bright young people always do. Take your leaking comrade back through that door, lock it, and don’t come out again. Will you do that for me?”

“What’re you going to do with Sparrow?”

“I am going to take Sparrow home, and you will damn well have to take my word for it. Get inside.”

“What home?”

I was, after all, a confirmed bird of passage, but I hadn’t thought that Sherrea knew that. Myra said, “If I wanted you to know, I’d invite you along.”

Sher was glowering from under her hair, a pixie with a bad attitude. “I’d rather she didn’t shoot you,” I croaked.

“You don’t belong to them,” Sherrea said savagely. “You never did. And you don’t now.” Then she turned and pulled Theo inside.

Myra walked over to me and hauled me up by one arm. “Your standards of personal grooming never cease to impress me,” she said, giving my mud the once-over. “Peppermint, stay there until I come back for you, and if I find you’ve twitched a finger, they’ll mistake your corpse for a screen door.”

He still had the silvertones on; their blankness gave his face extra malevolence. He said, “When I kill you, I’m gonna make you remember tonight.”

She looked down at him, the rifle pointed at his jaw. “Probably,” she said, her words slowed by the weight of some personal meaning. “I have a damnably long memory.” She took my elbow and drew me stumbling toward the parking lot.

The dust was rinsed away, but the thing parked at the pavement’s edge was recognizably the tri-wheeler from two days before. We stopped next to it, and Myra dug in her raincoat and pulled out a little chromed key. She poked it into my jeans pocket. “The cuffs,” she explained. “I’d ditch them now, but you’re so much more manageable this way. Get in.”

She’d popped the weather shell open, and I stood staring, a sickly colored light dawning in my battered head. In the driver’s seat of the tri-wheeler was the black-haired woman who owned it, she of the many names. She sat slumped, her eyes half-closed, her mouth slack, her hands dead on her thighs. Inert. Gone.

“Oh. Oh, hell,” I whispered. I glanced at Myra, back again to the black-haired driver.

Myra sighed. “Never mind; I’ll do it.” Before I could struggle, she grabbed the back of my shirt and the waistband of my jeans and swung me in behind that uninhabited body. Then she turned the driver’s limp hands over. Twined in the fingers of the left one I saw a strip of braided leather thong and black beads: my hair tie. Myra laid the rifle across the black-haired woman’s palms. I must have made a little noise, because Myra turned her flat gray gaze on me. “Sorry,” she said. “When you booked your seat, you should have specified ‘no shooting.’ ”

Myra walked away from the tri-wheeler, about a dozen feet. Then she turned around. Her face was blank.

The hands that had been limp closed around the rifle and raised it, pointing it at Myra. And above the rifle, the black-haired woman’s face was alive with the pleased expression that Myra’s features had worn moments before. Myra looked like someone who had gone to sleep in the basement and woken up on the roof, which I suppose wasn’t far from true.

“Myra Kincaid, you make me wish there were disinfectant for the mind,” said the black-haired woman. “Are you confused? Of course you are. The short version is that I’m not on your side, I’ll shoot you if you take one more of those steps, and I’m stealing your friend here. For the long version, ask your brother. He’s around back.”

I saw Myra take a breath; then, as if that had broken a spell, her face contorted, and she screamed, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the thing you’re a pale shadow of,” said the black-haired woman, and started the tri-wheeler. “Come see me again when your permanent fangs grow in.”

Myra took another step, and I steeled myself against the sound of the rifle. But the weather shell slammed down instead, and I was thrown against its scarred window as the trike launched and U-turned.

The driver said loudly, “If I’m lucky, her brother will kill her first, thinking she’s still me, and ask questions later. But God knows, I haven’t been that lucky yet.”

“I know what you are.” The words popped out of my mouth as soon as I opened it. Maybe they’d been sitting there too long.

“Do you?” she said, all polite inquiry. “How nice. I was afraid, for a moment, that you might disappoint me.”

Once there had been people who stole the prerogatives of the loa, who forced their way into other people’s minds and possessed them. They were a fantasy from silly novels and B-movies come alive. They were harnessed to the military — but who harnesses gods? In the end, they betrayed their side, betrayed everyone: they pushed the Button. Over half a century ago.

“You’re a Horseman,” I said.

The three wheels rattled and slammed over a street of potholes and patches, a typical street in this rough, hollow new world. The one she had made.

She stopped at the bridge to the Deeps and turned, and smiled a smile that made my skin creep. “Aren’t we all supposed to be dead?”

I nodded. Somewhere in the back of my head, where I couldn’t get to them, I felt facts begin to fall into line.

“Good. It would have been so confusing, otherwise. Now, shall I return the favor?”

“I don’t — what?”

“Well, you see, I know what you are.”

We stared at each other for perhaps ten seconds, which is a very long time. For the rest of the trip to the Night Fair, I tried not to move. It hadn’t worked with La Maitresse and Mr. Lyle; but this time I was hoping for better results than simply not being noticed. This time I meant to disappear entirely.

The gates of the Night Fair were open, the lights on, the party rolling forward in its habitual way. She stopped at the first opening in the fence and said, “Give me directions.”

I stared at her, all my possible responses shooting like scan lines across my mind: fill the screen, overwrite, overwrite.

She laughed. “As I’ve said once tonight, I have no preference. But I thought you’d rather I asked, since we’ll get there whether you help or not.”

I wanted to ask which of the major arcana she was. There was a gas lamp on one of the gateposts; it sent light skidding over the side of her face, across her nose, but it missed the eye socket. There was a little scar, barely more than an indentation, near the corner of her mouth. It might have been from a childhood injury, long forgotten. Oh, little laughing gods, of course forgotten — her body couldn’t have been more than thirty. It was an injury from someone else’s childhood.

“Keep going,” I said in an ugly, clogged voice. “There’s a closer gate.”

She took the handcuffs off as soon as we arrived. My wrists hurt, but I didn’t rub them. She kept the automatic rifle with her; I couldn’t imagine what she meant to use it on, since she didn’t need it for me.

There are no similes for the way I felt, leading her into the building, into the elevator, standing across from her in that little box as it lurched quietly toward the top of the building. Maybe it says enough that I didn’t try to hide my wire-crossing from her.

What had it been like for Myra Kincaid? Had she known that her body was being stolen? Had she struggled? Or had she missed it all, and suddenly found herself awake, face-to-face with the comfortless smile of the loa? Make the elevator work, Sparrow; or she’ll mount you, and sink her spurs into you, and have every scrap of knowledge out of you, of that, of anything. Let her fight me for it, I thought. But there were the wires in my hands, and here was the elevator quaking around me. Maybe a reputation for coercion was the best coercive tool of all.

Open the elevator doors, unlock the apartment door — no, it was already unlocked, because I’d bolted out of it with the key in my pocket and a large man close behind me. I didn’t feel anything at the memory. Through the dark front room, then, into the hallway.

I wasn’t numb after all. Because at the end of the hall, the doors to the third room stood a little open, spilling light and music, and I felt a shock of cold on my skin, and a scream blocked up in my throat.

I think I took the black-haired woman by surprise; I was through the hall door and the inside one as well before anyone could have stopped me. A man sat in my comfortable chair, his back to me. The song was Richard Thompson’s “Yankee Go Home.” I had an absurd, precise recollection of it; it was on disk, and the insert was inscribed to someone, in blue ink, in a pointy, idiosyncratic hand. Then the man swung around to face me, and smiled.

“I love this one,” he said. “Brings back a lot of lousy memories.”

I’d never seen him before. Maybe in his mid-twenties, with smooth, glossy brown skin, long hair bleached to chestnut-brown that was braided all over his scalp and twined with bright green thread and tiny copper fish charms. Wide mouth, heavy straight brows over large round black eyes. A compact, slender body in a yellow cotton shirt and loose gray trousers. But he was wearing Mick Skinner’s jacket, and smiling Mick Skinner’s self-mocking smile, and I knew who he was. And what he was. The facts were assembled now, because the driver of the trike was not the only person who ought to be dead and wasn’t, and Myra Kincaid wasn’t the only person with a chunk missing from her memory. Mick Skinner knew what all my missing pieces were.

Of course he did. He’d been me while they’d happened.

Now he was somebody else, but it was still him, using my best-kept secret, my archives, my sanctuary. It was as bad as using my body.

“How the hell many of you are there?” I squeaked in his uncomprehending face.

His eyes went past me then, and narrowed, and his smile faded. The black-haired woman had come in behind me, the damned rifle leveled — Chango, if she pulled the trigger she’d chop the hardware to bits. She didn’t pull the trigger. She just stared with the same narrow-eyed concentration at him.

“Frances?” he said at last, as if he couldn’t breathe.

“Hello, Mick,” she said. The rifle never wavered. “I wondered when it would be you.”

He puffed air out through his nose — a substitute for laughter, maybe, though he wasn’t smiling. “You’re still a woman.”

“’Again,’ actually. Didn’t you go through a few learning experiences getting out of the goddamn stinking jungle? Or have you kept your boyish charm ever since Panama?” She had an edge on her voice and manner now, blackened and smoking and too hot for safety.

He shook his head, as if shaking off insects. “Fran… Jesus, would you put that gun down?”

“No, I don’t think I would. Why aren’t you dead, Mick?”

“Well, why the hell aren’t you?”

“Because I have the morals of a shark. On the basis of personal experience, I’m forced to assume the same of you.”

Mick’s new mouth pressed closed, crookedly. Then he said, “We all did. There wasn’t one of us I’d trust to feed my dog for a weekend. But that was a long time ago.”

“As long as that?” Her smile was really only a baring of her teeth. “Heavens, Mick, did you think we’d evolve!”

It took him a moment to rally. “Learn, maybe? Change? People do.” But his voice was fainter, battered down by her manner.

“And lucky they are, too. But we’re not people. We’re sharks. It’s our nature. We can’t stand to see clear water without a little blood in it.”

“Fran, can’t you—”

“What are you doing here, Mick?”

“Pardon me,” I said, and I was as amazed to hear my voice as they seemed to be. “If neither of you minds, we could have this conversation in the next room just as well. And if you’re going to shoot him,” I added to the woman named Frances, “I wish you wouldn’t do it in here.”

She stared at me, then took in the room with a quick shift of her gaze. I think, until then, she hadn’t really seen it. “Bless my soul,” she said at last. “It’s the lost graveyard of the Sonys.”

“If it was only a graveyard, I wouldn’t care,” I replied, though I hated to do it. “They all work.”

She looked the room over again, this time with more attention. Then she looked at me. I could almost hear her thinking, though not well enough to know in what direction. “Lead the way,” she ordered. So I did. She gestured Mick Skinner out behind me.

I walked into the middle room. The teakettle was lying on the floor in a small puddle; most of the water seemed to have disappeared between the floorboards. That, and a black smudge on the ceiling, were all that were left to remind me of La Maitresse and Mr. Lyle. I took the kettle to the sink and started pumping water into it. There was a calm and reasoned dialogue going on in my head, something like:

This is a ridiculous thing to be doing.

The whole business is ridiculous. What should I be doing that would make more sense?

She might shoot me.

For making tea? I suppose she might. She might shoot me for not making tea.

In other words, I can’t fix things no matter what I do, so I might as well do anything at all.

I think I’m so scared I can’t feel it.

When I turned back to face my houseguests, Mick Skinner was standing by one felt-covered window, watching me, bemused and a little alarmed. And he was Mick Skinner; I was surprised at how easy it was to think of him that way, independent of his looks.

The woman, Frances, was perched lightly on the arm of the leather slingshot chair, the rifle comfortable in the crook of her right arm, its barrel tracking Mick Skinner. A casual sweep of that arm, and both he and I would be perforated at the waist.

She said, “I haven’t forgotten the subject before the committee, even if you have. What brought you here, Mick?”

“I came back for my jacket.”

“No, no, answer the exam questions fully; you’ve no idea what we’re testing for. This city, Skinner, you idiot, just now, for what God-damned purpose.”

He looked steadily at her, his face baffled and hurt, and resigned. “Do you still have purposes?” he asked. “I used mine up. I just move around, Fran.”

“Why move here?”

“I’d never been here, so I came. I had a notion to go on north and try to get into Canada.”

“A pitiful and profoundly moving story,” she said. I hadn’t realized I’d been hoping she’d believe him until I felt my spirits fall. “Let’s explore a promising side passage, shall we? What’s your connection to our chum here?” She tipped her head toward me.

Mick Skinner, inexplicably, was silent. “He rode me,” I told her, and stopped. The bald statement of it, out loud, sickened me; and it didn’t answer her questions, or mine.

“Oh, my downy chick, my sweet hatchling, I know that. I knew there was one of us here by the stink of it. When I laid hands on you, there on the bridge, I got the smell of Horseman in my nose so strong I thought I’d gag with it.

“Did you know that, Mick? That we leave a trail behind us, a spoor of possession? It’s related, I think, to the way we recognize each other in some other poor bastard’s body. And I thought, when I got a whiff of this one, that it was damned familiar.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Mick said. He sounded as if the words were being squeezed out of him. “I had… some bad rides. I didn’t know what happened the first time. I didn’t make the switch, it just—”

“Don’t, please, spare us the gory details,” Frances said pleasantly.

“The body I was on got hit by a car,” he said. I could tell — I thought I could tell — he hated doing it. “And suddenly I was three streets over, on Sparrow, being pushed out a door.” I had been in danger of being thrown through the door; if he had, by skill or fortune, spared me that, I owed him something. “I only stayed long enough to find another ho — another body.”

“What was wrong with that one?” Frances asked, pointing at me.

A muscle worked in Mick’s jaw. “He wasn’t done with it.”

Frances raised her eyebrows.

Mick Skinner’s eyes closed, and his long brown hands clenched. He was… ashamed? Of not taking me over? “I can’t not do it. Every time the choice comes, between dying and taking another horse, I jump for the horse every goddamn time. I can’t let go of living. But I try to find people who have let go. You find somebody who’s about to eat a bullet, you hop on, take the gun out of his mouth — it’s almost with his consent, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel so fucking evil.”

“But it happened more than once,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say it again: You rode me.

“I couldn’t get a solid ride. Sick people are hard. Crazy ones are harder. Jesus, the last one I got on a second too late, and he was dead. I didn’t think that was possible.” He looked up at me, apologetic. “And you were such a good fit. I kept being pulled back. I didn’t mean to be.”

At that, Frances began to laugh. She rose from the arm of the chair and came over to me. She still held the rifle as if she meant to use it. “Heavens, yes. Fits as if it were made for you. And with every convenience built in. Of middling height, to avoid drawing attention. Strong, young, resistant to disease, toxins, and bad food. And eminently biddable.”

“Fran,” said Mick with great care, “you don’t have to mess with Sparrow.”

“No, I don’t. But I want to. Do you know, Mick, that by my reckoning there are only three Horsemen left? I’d thought it was two, until you surfaced, which only shows you that I may be a hair off in my figures.” She was close enough for me to see the gloss of sweat on her skin. “Only the real sharks survived the witch-hunts after the Big Bang. And I found that each passing year pruned them further, leaving only the creme de la creme of sharkdom.

“Now, Mick, my old friend and partner, if there are only three of us left, and my theory of natural selection is correct, mustn’t we be the three meanest sons of bitches in the valley?”

Mick shrugged, not too unconvincingly.

“And yet — I remember you, Mick. You weren’t a nice person—”

“We were all shits,” Mick interrupted.

“ — but you didn’t have the real, cold-hearted taste for blood. Now, how could someone like that have survived for years in a world that will not suffer a Horseman to live? By apprenticing himself to the biggest shark of all, the Daddy Killer of the whole toothy race, that’s how. The slayer of cities, the drowner of worlds, the pusher of Buttons. Let me tell you why I’m in this city. I’ve come to pay a long-delayed call on the Prince of Sharkness.”

The stove burner hissed in the silence while Mick and I worked out what that meant. “Who?” Mick said finally. His voice was a colorless whisper, and all the blood had deserted his face for parts unknown. “Who was it? My family lived in Galveston.”

“Excessive, Mick. Too much pathos. Add the dog that was your boyhood companion, and I’ll throw you off the stage.”

“Who did it, Fran?”

She was grave when she said, “For to see Mad Tom O’Bedlam, ten thousand miles I’ve traveled.”

Mick Skinner stared, his round black eyes open as wounds. His lips formed the first letter twice before any sound came out. “Worecski? Tom Worecski pushed the Button?”

“He was the mastermind. He assembled the clique, and convinced them they would be humanity’s saviors. The clique, hubris-ridden idiots, have made permanent amends. Now there’s only Mad Tom.”

Mick put one unsteady hand behind him, found the wing chair, and sat in it. “It would have been Worecski. My God.”

The teakettle was rumbling, I realized, and I stepped toward the camp stove to turn it off.

“No,” said Frances. She took hold of a lock of my hair and pulled me to a halt. “We just got to the good part.”

I stood very still as she fingered my hair, tugged it lightly, tucked it behind my ear. I would not tremble like a nervous dog.

“As I was saying about our specimen here, all the conveniences. The apparent genetic inheritance, for instance. The ruddy tan, the black hair and dark eyes, the bone structure” — she tapped my cheek under my right eye — “nothing there to raise an eyebrow anywhere from Oklahoma to Tierra del Fuego. Indigenous Western Hemisphere genes. Just what you’d want for sneaking around down below Texas.”

Mick Skinner’s eyes were on us, but I wasn’t sure they were seeing anything. I wondered if his mind was somewhere in drowned Galveston.

“Another handy thing about those genes is that they’re commonly associated with a lack of facial hair in males.”

My resolve was all for nothing; I was shivering in little, uncontrollable bursts. Frances was studying my face as if I were a painting, or something else that couldn’t stare back. She prodded my jaw lightly. I was more aware of her hand than the rifle.

“And there, Mick,” she said, “we come to the real artistry. This face, this pleasing architecture that would be handsome on either sex. The gothic arches of the eyebrows and the nostrils and the lips, echoing each other. That’s a work of art, that is, a work of trompe l’oeil.”

“He hates to be touched, Fran,” said Mick.

“A nice balance of bone to flesh, too. Seems a bit sturdy one minute, a bit frail the next. The Adam’s apple, that was tricky. See?” She pushed lightly with her thumb to raise my chin. “There isn’t one, but there’s sort of a suggestion in the angle of the neck. Marvelous. There’s a lot here that’s done with suggestion, in fact.”

Mick said, “Stop it.”

“The silhouette of the torso, for instance.” She drew a line with her index finger, slowly, from my collarbone to my stomach. I closed my eyes. “Tapered, but not excessively; narrow at the waist, but not too much. The tits weren’t a problem; within tolerance for a flat-chested woman, as long as the shirt never comes off.”

“Frances,” Mick said in a voice that would have stopped a train. It stopped her hand on the first button of my shirt. “Yes?”

“I got real tired of watching people be tortured. Give me another thirty years to work up a taste for it. He hasn’t done anything to you.”

She was suddenly full of focused intensity, like a magnifying glass held up to the sun. “His mind?” she asked Mick gently. “Or the body? You and I, we’ve learned to consider them separately.”

“Do you think he’s Tom? God damn it, Fran, I’ve been in there. I would have known—”

“Two things: I have only your word for that; and if it’s not Tom,” she said in a voice like a breeze off an icefield, “why do you call it ‘he’?”

Mick opened his mouth, and closed it.

“Because if you’ve ridden this body,” said Fran, with horrible satisfaction, “you must know it’s not male.”

“Or female,” Mick said faintly. “It’s — oh. Oh, my God.”

“Christ, Mick, if you really were surprised, I’d think you were a drooling idiot. Non-sex-specific bodies aren’t exactly thick on the ground.”

“It’s a cheval,” said Mick, huge-eyed.

“Very good, class.” She brushed loose hair back from my forehead and studied my face. “A mindless, soulless, sexless shell, genderless as a baby doll,” she said to me — at me — whoever she was talking to, it wasn’t me. She didn’t believe I existed. Oh, tricky Legba, she was going to kill me, and she didn’t even know I was there. I stepped back, and she matched me as if she’d read my mind. She probably had. “A crisp new brain without a tenant. A bottle made to be filled by one of us, empty brass waiting to be turned into a bullet. A shiny new horse to be offered to the desperate Horseman, in the vain hope that he or she will prefer it over the nearest infantry grunt. A domestic animal bred and broken for one of us to ride. And that means one of us is riding it. If his intentions were good, why the charming masquerade?” Her eyes were strange and wild, and I couldn’t look away from them.

“What if he — she — doesn’t know?” Mick said desperately. “What if it’s one of us, but messed up, so he doesn’t remember?” Her fingers twisted in my shirtfront, and she thumped me back against the kitchen wall.

“Run for it, Tom,” she said softly. “Or plead a bit, or try to kill me. Do anything you like, except move to skip off this body. That, I won’t allow.”

My vision wavered with tears, and my knees were buckling. I wanted to reach out and grab her shoulders, to hold myself up, to beg, but I was afraid to raise my hands for fear she’d pull the trigger. She was going to pull it anyway. My knees hit the floor, and the tears spilled over. What a horrible, shameful, pointless way to die. “Please,” I babbled wetly, “I’m not who you think I am. I’m not anybody.”

Mick Skinner said fiercely, “Fran, if you don’t stop, I’m gonna hit you. And you’re gonna have to weigh whatever’s kept you from shooting me against that.”

“Maybe I just wanted an audience,” she replied. There was a distance in her voice at odds with the violence in her eyes. “Shall I tell you how many people’s bodies I’ve ridden and lost, or used up? I can’t remember. But I took them all to get Mad Tom Worecski. I’ll kill that many again before I let him get away from me.”

“It’s not Worecski,” Skinner shouted. “You want to know for sure? Ride him — it — oh, God damn! Ride it and see!”

She stood over me, her face wild. The muzzle of the rifle was almost against my lips. Then hot white pain blossomed in my chest, my head, pierced my eyes and ears and made me deaf and blind. Consciousness didn’t slide away; it just stopped.

And was back. I had barely enough warning to turn my head before I threw up. My head was too heavy for my neck, and both of them were too much for my shoulders. I slumped against the wall. That hadn’t been anything like before, when I’d been… when Mick… I couldn’t think it, I’d be sick again.

Frances was still in front of me, her feet planted wide, the rifle in her hands. She was the color of raw bread dough, and her face and arms shone with sweat. She shook her head and turned away, walked across the room to the desk, and laid the rifle on it. Then she braced both hands on the desktop.

“He’s not there,” she said, her voice muffled. I wondered if it was her voice or my ears. Mick stood watching her, and I thought he might be preparing to do something, though I didn’t know what. “But one of us has to be riding. The chevaux were empty, no personality, no mind. Just a carcass. It’s a cheval, but there’s a mind on it, so it must be one of us. But it’s not Tom Worecski. And if it’s not… ” She straightened up, and her right hand reached, shaking, for empty air. ”… then I don’t know where he is.”

Slowly, tidily, she folded up; Mick caught her before her head hit the floor.

“Oh, Frances, you never did know much about people. Including you.” Mick turned to me, and there was nothing on his face to say that he didn’t spend every day in scenes like the one we’d just played. “It’s only exhaustion,” he added.

It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the woman in his arms. I wanted to say something rude, but couldn’t mobilize more than a stare.

“She was always like this. Like a damn guided missile — once she launched herself at something, she couldn’t stop or slow down or change direction. We used to call her Redline. I’ll bet she hasn’t let this body sleep for a couple-three days.”

He got her over his shoulder and stood up with a grunt. “I’ll put her on the bed.”

“No.”

He stopped and blinked at me.

“She was about to shoot me in the face. Leave her where she fell. If she gets a crick in her neck, I’ll cry buckets.” Then I remembered that the crick would be in someone else’s neck. But Frances would feel it… Papa Legba, no wonder they’d gone nuts.

Mick frowned, but lowered Frances gently back to the floor. Her black hair had swung forward when he’d picked her up; strands were caught in her eyelashes and over her lips. Mick smoothed them back, his long brown hands light and careful, as if he were afraid of marking her skin. “She’s not… It sounds stupid, but she’s not so bad. For one of us. She was crazy, but she wasn’t vicious.”

The taste of bile was still in my mouth, and I was shivering steadily. “Which were you?” I asked. “Crazy, or vicious?”

He settled back on his heels and shook his head. “We were all crazy. God, how long d’you think you could stay well adjusted after you found out you could possess people?”

“I’m the possessee. You tell me.” I got up slowly — I felt as if I’d lost blood, I was so weak — and turned off the fire under the kettle. It hadn’t boiled dry, which was my only proof that it had not been hours since I filled it. I rummaged for tea on the shelves and found chamomile in a jam jar. Fine with me; my nerves could use soothing. I caught myself reaching for the teapot, and took down a mug instead. While the flowers steeped, I cleaned up after myself.

“If I leave for half an hour, will you be here when I get back?” Mick Skinner asked, which forced me to admit to myself that he was still in the room.

“Where are you going?”

“Thought I ought to fetch some food, before things shut down at dawn.”

He was relatively new to the City, but he knew the Night Fair’s schedule. “Did you steal that out of my head?”

“What — oh. Yeah. I needed it this morning, when I… ” When he’d ridden me last. “Do you have all my memories now?”

“No. Don’t get so damned excited. I get at a hor — a person’s memories just like they do. I have to fish for ’em. Sometimes what I’m concerned with brings one up, but it’s usually not that easy.”

I settled carefully into the wing chair, cradling my mug in both hands. I felt as brittle as one of my fragile old tapes, yanked into motion between pinch rollers, around capstans. If one reel balked: snap. I angled my head at Frances, limp on the floor. “Is that why it felt like she was killing me, when she made her little trip in?”

He rubbed his forehead and finished the gesture by smoothing his hair. The copper fish chimed lightly. “She was in a state. Instead of opening a window, she broke the glass with a hammer, I guess.”

“In other words, she didn’t have to do that. Heck, I feel lots better.”

Mick’s front teeth met, sharply. “Look. There’s a limit to how much apologizing I’m going to do for Frances, but I’m not going to trash her for you, either. We went through hell together — and if that sounds like a cliche, it’s not. We were friends. If she’s nuts, I know why. And there’s nothing she’s done that I haven’t done, too.” He stood up, a series of precise movements. “I’m going for food. If you’re not here when I get back, I promise not to give a goddamn.” And he left.

The tea had cleared the foul taste out of my mouth, and had stopped my shaking. I could probably make my way out of the building now, and lose myself in the Night Fair. I remembered, suddenly, the thong from my hair that Frances had held outside the Underbridge. She’d found me then. But maybe she was done with me now that she’d gouged out knowledge and found I wasn’t what she wanted.

Oh, snakes and scorpions. Of course I couldn’t go. The archives were all the hostage anyone needed to hold me. Without them, what did I have to Deal, except fast talk and falsehood?

“Excuse me,” the pale thread of a voice came from the figure on the floor. “Can I borrow two pennies? The man with the ferryboat won’t take my I.O.U.”

She hadn’t moved, except to open her eyes. Those were fixed on me, large and black and smudged underneath with the driven weariness that, I now realized, had been there all night.

“You’re not going to die,” I said. It would be harder than that to squeeze sympathy out of me.

“Ah. That explains it. Though I can’t imagine why I’m not.”

“Because there’s a cure for overwork. More’s the pity.”

She closed her eyes at that. “Do you know, I think I agree?”

I stood up with a lurch and went to pour more water into my mug.

“For what it’s worth — which I suspect is not a lot — I’m sorry,” she added. “When I have a little more energy, I’ll endeavor to grovel, if you want.”

“Don’t put yourself out on my account.” I thought about going into another room. But it would have looked, and felt, like retreat. And there was the possibility, small but non-zero, that if I stayed I might be able to make her uncomfortable. I sat down again. “So, did you have a nice time? Did you get everything you wanted?”

“Out of you? No, since what I wanted was to find out you were Tom Worecski. Does it make you feel better, or worse, to know that you went through that for nothing?”

“Only from your point of view. It makes me feel better that I’m still alive.”

“Ah, yes. Everyone’s first desire. To stay alive.”

I suppose what happened was that we were both made uncomfortable. At any rate, the conversation faltered there.

It was she who broke the silence. “You were in Louisiana?”

At the word, I remembered: waking disoriented and empty of thought, chilly and stiff-limbed, to a steady sound I didn’t recognize. I’d struggled up on one elbow, discomfort in my eyes until I’d realized I could rub them with my fingers and the feeling would go away. Running water, that’s what the sound had been. I flinched and splashed my tea.

“I am sorry,” Frances said. “Whatever that was, it was probably my fault. Memory is like silt, sometimes. It may be a while before it settles.”

“No. I just — I didn’t know I remembered it.”

“What was it?”

“The first thing I ever… Coming up, the first time.”

She looked amused. “The first time for what?”

“No, the first time for anything. When I woke up.”

“It can’t have been the first time, you know,” she said. “You must be one of us, riding a cheval. You’ve mislaid your identity, but it may turn up.”

“You’re the one who went through my head with a crowbar. Didn’t you find it?”

She frowned. “No. Nothing older than a bunker down south.”

“How much of that did you sample?”

She winced; at my tone, I suppose; so I added in the same one, bright and pointy, “Not that I object. I just don’t want to bore you with things you already know.”

I must have reached the limits of her apologetic mood, because she said, “If you bore me, you’ll know. I’m going to get off the floor and sit in this chair. Unless you plan to shoot me if I do.”

And that, I swear, was the first time I remembered the rifle abandoned on the desk. In her hands it had been a malevolent, ticking presence. Out of them, it was a paperweight. Something had happened in the room, something I couldn’t fathom, that had made it unlikely that any of the three of us would shoot the others.

She settled into the slingshot chair like an old woman, and the leather creaked. “What happened to Mick, by the way?”

Had that last been too casual? Was she worried? If so, what about? “He’s gone to get supplies to restore your depleted self.”

Frances looked up at that. “Has he?” she said mildly. “If he has a yen to play Saint Theresa, he can lavish his talents on a more appreciative audience.”

“Since you’ve proven you can take care of yourself.”

“Given the state you were in when I made your acquaintance,” Frances said, “you should talk.”

I shrugged. “I couldn’t help it. Your pal Mick left me lying in the sun.”

“And you warped. I understand. Tell me about Louisiana.”

“It’s very wet.”

“No, I mean waking up in Louisiana.” I stood up again. I was beginning to feel spring-loaded. I stalked to the sink, put my mug in it, and turned around. “Why in hell do you want to know?”

“Maybe I’ll be able to figure out who you are.”

“I know who I am.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Really.”

“All right. I don’t, particularly. But are you surprised that I’d rather be the palace eunuch than one of the great boogeymen of our age?”

“If we were only boogeymen,” she said, echoing my earlier words, “no one would care.” In the way she spoke, I heard again what she’d said to Dusty: Probably. I have a damnably long memory. Indeed. Nobody should have one that long.

“Have you ever done anything that Mick hasn’t?” I asked.

“Did he say that?”

“More or less.”

She laughed a little. Then she said, “He was mistaken.” She raised her eyes to mine. “But don’t tell him. He’ll find out eventually.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“The future is a land unmapped, from which no expedition has returned. I don’t think so. He had nothing to do with the Bang. Strange as it seems, he is, as these things go, a passable human being.”

“Are you going to kill me?” In spite of my conviction, it seemed reasonable to ask.

“I told you I was sorry. No. I’m not.”

“But you’re still going to get this Whatsisname.”

“Yes,” she said, “I am. In the best tradition of vigilantism, I’ve filled all the appointive offices myself: judge, jury, prosecutor, and she-who-pulls-the-trigger.”

“It’s a long time since the Big Bang,” I said uncertainly. I’d been almost at ease with her for a few minutes — or pleasurably uneasy, caught up in the heightened reality of verbal sparring. But her last declaration reminded me of the woman she’d been before she fell down.

“Sparrow, Tom Worecski is responsible for more deaths than Hitler. Does time wipe that clean? How much time? Does remorse? I don’t know if he’s sorry for murdering millions of people and making large areas of the Western Hemisphere uninhabitable, but tell me, how sorry ought he to be before I say, ‘Oh, never mind, I guess that makes it all right’?”

I stared at her, and she stared back. “Is that what I’m supposed to say when you apologize?” I asked.

She pressed her lips together. “Point to your side. But believe me, Tom has to die. And I have to do it. There’s no one else.”

“Chango, you could assemble a posse in five minutes if you told ’em what you wanted them for.”

“And shall I tell them how I come by my information? That I know Tom from way back, that we worked together, et cetera? No. There really is no one else.”

This time she didn’t sound as if she took pride in the fact. Or maybe the phrase meant something else, now. She sat staring at her strong hands crossed in her lap, as if images of the long, terrible, unchangeable past were shining up between her fingers.

I pumped the teakettle full of water and put it on the flame. Then I dumped the rest of the chamomile in my chipped enamel teapot and went back to the wing chair.

“Louisiana was wet,” I said. “And getting wetter.” I told the whole story without looking up. I had never told it to anyone. I’d been so careful never to even want to tell it that I’d mostly forgotten it myself. After all, no one else I knew remembered being born.

I’d heard the sound, rubbed my eyes, and recognized the hiss and bubble as running water before I’d seen anything. My vision had been slow to clear; the room revealed itself with each blink, each scrubbing pass with my fingers. The lighting was bluish and uneven. I was surrounded by metal boxes, large ones, with tops that caught the light: glass. I squinted past the reflections into the nearest one.

A dead, sunken face, a shaved head, a mummified naked body. There was a corpse in the box. There were eight boxes in the room, all alike. When, frightened, I turned my eyes away, I saw my own legs and feet, attached to the rest of me, bordered by a box with an open glass lid. I began to scream. I don’t know why; it was an instinct toward terror, a dread of being just like the eight dead things in the room. And of course I was, but for one small detail.

I scrabbled out of the box and fell, and learned that I couldn’t breathe in water. There was almost three feet of it on the floor. I dragged myself up the side of my resting place. On the walls above some of the coffin-boxes, red lights flashed. Warning, alert, something needs attention, system failure. It babbled through my head. Later I knew I’d understood the purpose of the lights, but not then.

I had a sudden clear knowledge, like another instinct, of electrocution and the conductivity of water. I staggered clumsily through the flood (the strangeness of that came to me later: I was born knowing how to walk) to a door (sight of it, and the word springing into my head, door, and the understanding of what it did), which I pounded and pushed on. Finally I found a lever in the wall next to it, which turned.

The door crashed inward on its hinges. It and the water that had leaned on it for — years? — threw me back into the room. One of the mummies floated past me, upward; another followed it. The water had broken the boxes open.

And then, when I had to know it, I knew how to swim. I lurched toward the ceiling of that underwater enamel house, sucked air out of the rapidly diminishing space there, and kicked out against the pressure, toward the door.

I learned eventually that it was the water of Lake Pontchartrain I was struggling against. The place where I came up, under a full moon with mist rising white from the surface into the cooler air of a midsummer night, was Bayou St. John. Three weeks later a hurricane added it all to the New Orleans basin.

“How long ago was that?” Frances asked after a little space of quiet had settled between us.

“Fifteen — almost sixteen years, now.”

She leaned her head back and smiled. “Mmm. If I’m right, you’re eighty or more. If you’re right, you’ve barely reached the Golden Age of Skepticism. Either way, you hardly look it.”

I don’t know what I’d expected from the first person to hear that story, but I found Frances’s response oddly comforting. Just another bizarre, life-threatening adventure. How many of them had she had? I went to pour hot water into the teapot.

There were a few cookies, bought maybe a week ago in the mall market, in a tin on the shelf. They weren’t fresh, but they had refused to go stale, either. I carried the tin, along with the teapot and my other mug, over to the desk and set them on the corner nearest her. She looked at the two mugs and said, “Entertain often?”

“I only have an extra for when I’m too lazy to wash the first one. If you were me, would you have a lot of close friends?”

“In my own fashion, I’m under the same constraints. And you’re right, I don’t. It’s a furtive little life, but it’s all mine.” She chewed carefully. “Better already. Butter and sugar, in sufficient quantity, will cure anything.” She ate and worked on her tea as if that were all she could concentrate on, and maybe it was. I’d done my talking; I was prepared to sit, and watch, and see what happened.

At last she set the cup down and slid her hands over her face. “Thank you. God, I’m tired.” She closed her eyes, and I wondered if she meant to fall asleep there. Then she said, “If we’d been left to our own devices, I think none of the Horsemen would have willingly been within a hundred miles of each other. As predators go, we were more like tigers than wolves. Forcing us together like that just made us worse.”

“That gave you a taste for the furtive life?” I asked.

I expected her to ignore me, or, more likely, to turn one of her phrases that sounded impressive and gave away nothing. Instead, she said, “Christ, no. If it gave me a taste for anything… no, only a distaste. For myself, among other things.” She sighed and tipped her head back against the chair. It was harder to see her expression now. “What a damned waste of human potential it all was.”

“Turning Central America into an archipelago wasn’t enough of an accomplishment for you?”

“Is that the proper ambition of humankind? We had — we were like gods.” She gave a gasp of uncomfortable-sounding laughter. “We were like gods. Think of Zeus: He could turn himself into a shower of gold, and all he wanted to do was to cheat on his wife. We played savage practical jokes, ruined lives, and wreaked vengeance. That was our contribution to society.”

“Why did they keep you?”

“Who?”

“The army. Or whoever.”

“Why did they keep the stealth bomber? I’m sorry,” she said when I shook my head. “You don’t know what the stealth bomber was. Or you don’t remember. I suppose they’d spent too much money on us. Though, to be fair, we did exactly what we were meant to do, as long as we felt like it.”

“Which was?” I knew, in a vague way; but something told me that Frances discussing the past was a rare commodity. It seemed a shame to let her stop now, when, if she kept on, she might get to… something I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hear.

She drew her feet up in the chair, folded her arms over her knees, and propped her chin on her crossed wrists. “Objective,” she said crisply. My experience of lecturing professors was all from actors on video, but she reminded me of those. “To provide lousy intelligence and advice to El Presidente de la Republica Banana. Old-fashioned method: feed fake dispatches and phony coded orders to his intelligence staff, and hope they don’t realize it was too easy to get. Newfangled method: mount a Horseman on his Jefe de Seguridad, maybe another on his Secretary of State. Not only do you get hand delivery of your bogus information; you also get a highly placed double agent with an impenetrable cover. Que bueno, si? And that, of course, was only one of our many uses.”

“Did it work?”

Her grin was feral. “Sometimes. And before you ask, we’ll leave the exceptions decently buried, thank you. Since they ranged from the deeply shameful to the utterly horrific.”

“Why didn’t you just take the presidentes over and declare peace?”

“It may be,” she said, looking insufferably patient, “that you are fifteen, after all. Because the cabinet, the generals, and the God-damned janitorial staff would have blown El Presidente’s brains out and declared a change of government. Do you think a nation wages war because of one person in a big leather chair in a nice office?”

“Having never lived in a nation,” I said, “I wouldn’t know.”

Frances turned her face away, as if I’d slapped her. “Don’t worry, you’re not missing much. A wretched anthill of peaceful, productive, useful life with hardly any invigorating biting and scratching. Where people flossed once a day and mowed the lawn on Sundays.”

I watched her, and said, “It wasn’t your fault.”

One emphatic black eyebrow went up, and her straight mouth crimped with irony at the corners. “Thank you, I feel ever so much better. I suppose my sense of social responsibility makes up in vigor what it lacked in timeliness.”

“Could you have stopped them then?”

She paused to think about it. “Yes. Which is why I’m so assiduously stopping them now. Have been stopping them. It’s my penance. Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord Is With Thee would be easier, but it seems a shame to waste all that good marksmanship.”

My hands closed over the arms of the wing chair. “You mean, it’s not just this Tom Whatsisname. You’re hunting them all down.”

“Have hunted. Past tense. I’m nearly done.”

“All the Horsemen?”

“God, no. Besides, the populace at large has mostly taken care of that. I only wanted the refined gathering that thought, for their various reasons, that lobbing one in would be a good idea. The populace did take care of one of them, as it turned out. I dispatched four more.” She spread her hard, browned fingers in the air between us. “And all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten this little hand. Well, not specifically this hand.” Then, suddenly: “That bothers you, doesn’t it?”

I swallowed, with an effort, and said, “That I’m sharing a room with someone whose life’s work has been to find people and murder them? Why would you think that?”

“Whatever you’re good at, it’s not sarcasm. They were four people who had never done a decent thing in the world and never would. They were the highest accomplishment of a subset of humanity who gloried in degradation and cruelty, who saw everyone — even each other — as lab rats and Judas goats.”

She was so calm. Maybe she’d lived long enough with righteous anger that it had smoothed into something else. But it drove me to say, “What’s the matter? Were you jealous?”

She leaned forward, and there was something in her face that made me shiver. “I had nothing to be jealous of. Listen and be made wise. Once upon a time in New Mexico, there was an MP named Stedmon. One dark night he annoyed me. I don’t remember the offense. The next evening he walked in on an edifying scene involving his fiancée and four men from his unit. Four being the most I could collect, from my vantage point on his fiancée, on short notice.

“Then there was the Great Parachuting Lesson, considered by my fellows to be one of our best gags. I mounted my victim in a bar off base and dismounted in midair, just when he ought to have opened his chute. He was a little disoriented at first, I’m afraid, and as a result broke his legs.

“The four people I killed could have matched both of those for cruelty. In fact, any Horseman could have. Every sane community kills vermin and rabid animals.”

She jerked to her feet and strode to the other side of the room. I hadn’t noticed until then how small an area the lamp illuminated; she was an arrangement of light and dark near the door. Then the arrangement moved, and I knew her hands had gone up to her face.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. Her words were blurred, as if by her fingers. “I told you I’d developed a distaste, which was understating it a bit. I’m not proud of those incidents, and I apologize for telling them as if I am. Or for telling them at all. They’re over half a century old.”

She was not going to get to it, the thing I was afraid of. I didn’t have to worry about it. So I was alarmed when I found myself saying, “And what was I supposed to be for?”

I heard her take a steadying breath, and saw her hands come down. “Did you know you had something to do with us?”

“Not at first. Never mind.”

She stood very still; then she came back into the light in a few strides and squatted beside me, looking into my face. “You didn’t know, did you? Until tonight, when I said so?”

“Everything in the damned bunker said ‘Property of U.S. Government’ on it,” I said bitterly. “I figured they just hadn’t gotten around to stenciling me. And I didn’t think anything hidden that well had been meant to do anybody any good.”

“You were meant to do us some.”

“That’s not much consolation for having been hatched full-grown out of a box.”

Her black eyes widened, and she said, “Would you rather not have been hatched at all?” I stared down at her, silenced.

She rose again and began to pace the room, in and out of the darkness. “I think the most elementary purpose of the chevaux was to reassure everyone else. Regular forces pointed out — and rightly, too — that if any of us were wounded or threatened with death, we were likely just to steal the nearest available body. Those of our friends and allies, for instance. The solution was to have untenanted and highly desirable bodies available as a bribe to keep us from devouring our own side. So they grew the chevaux.”

I repeated, a little numb, “Grew them.”

“Well, of course. Did you think you were made of bicycle parts? The chevaux were organic; hence, grown. Brought to maturity and then held until needed, probably in those boxes.”

The boxes in which, abandoned, support systems failing slowly, eight costly, empty shells had been left to decay. Nine. But one of them had risen like a horror-movie menace to walk a changed earth, where even the living tried to avoid the sunlight. “They customized them, too,” Frances continued. “After all, a brain is a terrible thing to waste, when you can store useful skills and information in it. Languages, codes, computer programming, volleyball rules, flirting with a fan — whatever the brass considered useful. Who knows. God and you, I suppose.”

“Electronics,” I said thickly. “Why am I neuter?”

“I’m not sure. I think the chevaux could be modified by the rider.”

“They could what?”

“I told you, I’m not sure. I never met one before you. Christ, I don’t think any of them were ever deployed.”

“Deployed. Amazing. Feels just like being alive.”

“Life can be defined as that which admits of no comfortable acquaintance with the cemetery. By that definition, you’re more alive than I am.” The resonant voice was smooth and bitter as unsweetened chocolate.

“I don’t know,” I said, examining my filthy shirt. “I look as if I might have just dug myself out with my fingernails.”

That seemed to amuse her. “You could go change, you know.”

“I would have. But… ” My voice slipped away from me.

“But it would have meant leaving Mick and me alone in here. And,” she said slowly, “it would have meant undressing with strangers in the place. In the whole secretive fabric of your life, your body is the most private thread. Because it’s the outward sign of all your secrets.”

I wondered if I was pale. “Gee. Do you read minds?”

Frances snorted. “No, I attack them, stun them, and bolt them whole, like a constrictor. And I’m sluggish while digesting.”

“I think you need sleep,” I told her, shaking my head. “And food.”

“I always talk like this. Almost always. It whiles away the tedium of the decades. But speaking of food, where the hell is Mick?”

A good question. He wasn’t as familiar with the Night Fair as I was, but the place was full of things to eat. If he wasn’t picky, he could have been back in twenty minutes. Unless — well, why not? Why shouldn’t he have taken the opportunity to bolt before Frances came to and started waving her rifle around again? Even in the vulnerable and addled state I’d been in when he left, why should I have expected him to do anything else? The way he’d caught Frances as she fell, brushed the hair back from her face, was no evidence to the contrary.

I looked up to find Frances’s eyes on me, her hands curled tight on themselves. “Pack if you’re going to,” she said softly. “We’re on the street in ten minutes.”

“What?”

“Mick is the only person besides you and me who knows where I am. And who I am.”

I gaped. “He wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t he? Maybe not. But even so, could he keep it to himself if someone asked him strenuously enough? Or, perhaps, didn’t bother to ask?”

I swallowed, to no effect, and said, “You’ve been looking for this guy for years. You think he’ll find Mick Skinner in an hour?”

“I can’t afford to believe he hasn’t.”

“I’m staying here.” I managed not to drop my eyes from hers.

“No, you’re not,” she said agreeably.

“They don’t want me. None of them want me. They want you.”

“What I did to you tonight,” she replied, each word evenly spaced and without emphasis, “was nothing. Tom O’Bedlam or anyone who serves him will separate you from your desire to live and any last complacent conviction you may have about the privacy of your own mind as easily as tearing rotted cloth. Knowledge of me will gush out of your brain and your mouth and a hundred other openings that he’ll make just for that purpose. I suggest you come with me.”

“What can I tell him? ‘Well, yeah, there’s this woman, right now she looks like this, but that might have changed; and she wants to bump you off, but you knew that already.’ ”

“Sparrow,” she said, and stopped, and began again. “It didn’t occur to you that I might have your welfare in mind and not mine?”

I frowned at her, and she returned my gaze, her eyebrows raised. “Why would you?”

“Thank you, I have retained a few dried-out shreds of human decency, I think.”

“That’s not how things work around here.”

It was her turn to frown. “Pretend you’re someplace else, then. Go change, and gather up anything you need, within limits.”

“Where are y — we — going?”

She leaned on the corner of the desk. “Away.”

Do you still have purposes? Mick had asked. I used mine up. I just move around. I couldn’t go to Dana, obviously; and I couldn’t go to Cassidy, because I didn’t know where that was. If I went to Sherrea, I might involve her -

Oh, no. Think. I already had. Sherrea and Theo, Theo with a hole in him, and at the bottom of the stairs the woman Frances had ridden, Myra, and Dusty, whose craziness had come off him like heat off a griddle. Who’d pointed out, smiling, that now he knew where to find Theo and Sher if he needed them.

“When you… when you rode that red-haired woman out back of the Underbridge. How much of her brain did you pick?”

“Not much. I was busy, you’ll recall. Why?”

I didn’t ask them to get involved. I didn’t ask Theo to follow me out of the building with a gun. He knew better; he’d told me so. “The two people I was with. They were still there… ”

Some buttress of self-containment slipped loose, for an instant, behind her face, and was restored just as quickly. “If you’re going to suggest we go back,” she said, “I’ll save you the trouble. No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because if it’s not the first place they’ll look, it’s the second.”

“You think Myra and Dusty work for Tom Whatsisname.”

“Worecski.” She sighed. “I didn’t, when I thought you were a better prospect. Whole hours ago. Now I’m forced to confront the notion that I backed, as it were, the wrong horse.”

“They were after Mick Skinner.”

“Were they?” she said, startled. “Why? Do you know?”

“No.” I thought about the confrontation behind the Underbridge, before she’d arrived. “But they knew that he’d — that I’d been him part of the time.”

“Now that would suggest a surprising familiarity with the process, wouldn’t it? Hmm. Go change.”

I did. I locked the door of the bedroom, and felt no more comfortable about it than I’d expected to. Another pair of jeans, another shirt, jungle boots; it didn’t take long. I hid folding money in each boot, and coins in a bag around my neck. When I dropped the cord over my head, I realized there was already something there: Sherrea’s pendant, the two overlapping V shapes. If it was protective, it was doing a rotten job. Maybe it only worked for people who believed it would. What did I believe in? The Deal; it wouldn’t make much of an amulet. I threw a few other things in a rucksack and went to submit myself to the will of Frances.

She looked me up and down. “That must have been a tough decision.”

It was my turn to make my eyes wide. “Would you prefer the evening gown, or the tuxedo?”

Frances gathered up her purloined rifle. I locked the archives and doused all the lights. We rode down to the first floor in silence. Frances, it seemed, was thinking. We got all the way to the tri-wheeler before I finally asked, “Where are we going?”

“To the Underbridge,” she said. “I’ve had second thoughts about renewing my acquaintance with everyone involved. Mount up.”

I looked at her sideways. Frances just smiled.