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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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