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

“Radio!”

“What?” Frances shouted.

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

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll let you use my toothbrush.”

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

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

“Underground parking garages,” I replied.

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

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

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

“You didn’t know?”

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

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

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