He said, “All I want is for you to cut me a little slack.”

He never even knew what I was saying.

Angela the dancer said she never heard the shot.

Maybe she was lying, and maybe she was not.

She keeps ’em coming in, and that keeps the party hot,

And she says there isn’t any point in praying.

Hunched in my chair, I almost laughed. So much for the sweet illogic of a sunshine past. This could have come from Here and Now, from the clean irreducibility of the Deal, from the hard surfaces of the Deeps. Two skips — I’d try another cleaning.

Then the second song began. None of the reckless flourish of the first one; this opened with a plaintive swell and ripple of guitar notes and a shivering fall of chimes. Fingers long since dust slid evocatively on strings corroded, snapped, discarded, on a guitar broken or burned or somehow lost long, long ago, and a voice slid like the fingers, hypnotic with its power of life-after-death. I’d been disarmed by that first song, cynical and safe.

Out in the light of the dark city scene

Pushin’ and shovin’ and blowing their horns

Only the pigeons are enjoying the view

The concrete is cold and the street is alive

But the only thing you hear is that voice inside

So you step off the curb…

A dead woman sang about isolation, and faced me down with mine.

We were all of us alone in our heads, Cassidy said. Living and dying alone in our unbreachable heads, our indefensible bodies.

The Jammers were mad. The Horsemen before them had breached the unbreachable, gone mad, and pressed the red button on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

But the tarot flickered garish on Sherrea’s coffee table, thick with the major arcana, saying, The issue you have raised is largely controlled by others.

There’s something in the air tonight,

I can see it, but it’s just out of sight…

And Mick Skinner knew about the blackouts.

The disk played on in my headphones, unattended. Eventually I noticed the silence and the smell of warm circuitry. I was curled up tight in the chair; Sher’s pendant was poking me in the chest. I unfolded, painfully, and turned things off. Then I sat in the dark, thinking hard about nothing. Eventually I fell asleep in the chair.

The sun couldn’t wake me in the archives, and the chair was made to be comfortable. But it was a chair, not a bed. My knees got stiff at last from being bent, my neck got sore from being turned, the circulation slowed in my right arm, and I woke up.

I peeled a corner of the felt back from the living-room windows, squinted out, and found it midmorning. The Night Fair would be sealed, stagnant around the base of the building. I’d go back to sleep until sunset. The Night Fair in sunlight loomed as an unknown, unnatural land, and I wasn’t going to brave it today. But before I slept, I’d look in on Mick Skinner. If I was lucky, he’d have slipped away.