There’s gonna be blood, and fire, and the dead gonna dance in the streets. The dead should feel right at home.

I bought a ticket on the GravAttack, hoping that speed and spin, fear and adrenaline, would wash me clean. The closed wheel smelled of rust, sweat, and hot alcohol from the generator; my fellow rubes shrieked; pitch-dark alternated with flashes of light; and centrifugal force mashed my back into the padded bay. I felt as if the wall of my body cavity would give way and let my organs out — but my mind wasn’t so fragile. My mood survived the ride undisturbed.

So I unfolded my last paper portrait of A. A. Albrecht and bought a ride on the Snake’s Tail from a vivacious man dressed in tinsel. The drops fell on my tongue from the little tube in his hand. It tasted like spearmint and red pepper. In five minutes the Night Fair stretched from sea to sea, shining.

I was turning the pages of a rotting paperback at a junkstall (each newsprint page crackled brightly as I turned it, like static electricity in the dark) when a hand closed over my arm. “Hello!” said its owner. “How are you?”

He was tall, with a great, fine white smile that was only a little enhanced by the Snake. He wore a lovely silver-gray suit, like a politician or a talk-show host. His hair, which curled, was a delicate pink, like the inside of a shell. His skin was fine-textured and pale. Over his eyes and ears he wore a pair of silvertones, which would be making his world as bright and beautiful as mine, except that his would be real and mine was a hallucination. My spike of jealousy confused me. So did the feeling that I was supposed to recognize him. “All recovered?” he asked, his fingers tight on my wrist. He was pulling me away from the junkstall.

I didn’t recognize him — but of course, this was the man in gray that Cassidy had mentioned. Still in gray twenty-four hours later. An affectation. I scorned affectation. I tried to scorn him.

“No, no,” he said, laughing. “Myra’ll have my ass if you scoot away now. We’ve got us a conversation to finish.” He pulled me toward the middle of the pavement. Why was he laughing? He was hurting my wrist. At the end of the block where the crowd thinned, I could see a woman standing under a pair of oil lamps. Her hair was the color of dark cherries.

The air went out of my lungs. It had been knocked out, I realized. Riding the Snake’s Tail does that, sometimes, reverses cause and effect. I was sitting in the street, and the man in the silvertones was no longer attached to my wrist. Now he was holding on to someone else, who seemed to be having trouble standing up. He had stopped laughing. The someone else was creasing the lapels of the lovely gray jacket, but other than that, I got no clear impression of him. Next to all that silver and gray and fragile pink, the newcomer seemed like a dim spot on my eye. Down the block, the woman with the cherry-colored hair was coming toward us.