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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“… it’s a cheval.”

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

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

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

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

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

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