“Not strictly sentimental, after all,” she said. “I had to be able to find you. You can have it back now, if you want. Oh, Christ, don’t cry.”

I swallowed, with difficulty, and it didn’t help. “Frances, please. Ride me out of here. If you don’t… ”

“You’ll kill me?” she whispered, grinning.

“Probably,” said a harsh voice above me, “by talking you to death. Get out of the light, you idiot.”

I ducked and rolled sideways, expecting a blow that never came. Then I recognized the broad shape leaning over me, and the voice. It was Josh. His face was set like concrete. LeRoy was right behind him, hauling gear, his eyes huge.

“It’s too late, Josh,” Frances said.

“I love a challenge.” He stuck a needle in her arm.

“Oh, no fair, no fair,” she whispered, shaking her head. Her eyes closed.

I knelt frozen on the carpet and stared. “Is she… ”

“She’s passed out. Now shut up.”

“Josh — what are you doing in here? It’s not safe—”

He jerked his head toward the window. “The building’s lit up.”

“Are you crazy? The place is full of—”

“LeRoy, plug up the hole in this and give it a sedative.”

I would have felt it less if he’d slapped me. He knew it suddenly; he was very still. “I’m sorry. I—” He shook his head and turned back to Frances.

“Not a sedative,” I said. “LeRoy, get that guy out of here.” I nodded at the sandy-haired stranger who’d been Tom Worecski. “He’s alive. Give him the sedative. He’ll go nuts if he wakes up. Tom was riding him.”

“My,” said Josh, his back to me, his gloved hands full of tools, “there’s one alive. Was that an oversight?”

“I didn’t—” Then I realized that Josh hadn’t suggested it was my oversight. I wondered who he blamed.

During the exchange, LeRoy had torn the sleeve off my shirt and examined my bullet hole. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to take the shirt off.”

It was good of him to remember. “Go ahead.”

He did it with a minimum of fuss or contact, and dressed the wound the same way. His hands were shaking, and cold, but deft nonetheless. He produced a hypodermic from apparently thin air — I wondered if I’d blacked out for a few seconds — and I shook my head.

“No, LeRoy, I’m serious.” I hadn’t finished something… ”

“I know,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear. “It’s not a sedative.” He wielded the needle like an expert, which I suppose he was. “It’ll take a minute. But don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

I didn’t think I could. Whatever message the needle delivered, my body was saying, Let go.

For a few minutes, I might have. Then I was standing, supporting myself against the window frame. At last, I saw the Gilded West. It was the skull side, a little irregular where a few of the floods had failed to light. It was gilded, the fantasy palace of the postcards, the monument of Frances’s childhood and the hoodoo work of Sherrea’s gods all at once. A bridge between the old world and the new.