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.