I smiled; if he couldn’t see it, he would still hear it in my voice. “Oh,” I said, “I thought I’d treat myself to breakfast.”

And that should have been the end of it; but it may be that I don’t think clearly with a fortune in my inside pocket. “Have you seen it?” I asked him.

He was startled enough to get in the way of the light. It made him squint, his eyes lost in pasty white flesh. “Pardon?”

“Singin’ in the Rain. Have you seen it?” Dancing over sofas, hanging from lampposts, piling furniture on the speech tutor. Did he have a secret passion for foolery?

“No.”

“Then how do you know you want it?”

His answer was all in his face, scornful and baffled at once. Money makes me ask stupid questions. He wanted it, of course, because someone else didn’t have it.

“Debbie Reynolds dies in the end,” I told him.

Five minutes later I was in an elevator rumbling down from the top of the tallest building in the City, with more money than I’d ever carried in my life, literally surrounded by wealth and power. And I was mostly sick and frightened with it. When I got outside, onto the street, to anyplace that had ever been touched by sunlight, I would be all right.

I went past the guard desk, nodded at the man who sat behind it, and tried, as I went out the door, not to look as if I was rushing. I turned right, into the cheerful morning pandemonium of the mall market, and the tight prickling between my shoulders went away.

I’d done a good job, I decided on reflection. That building, that office, that customer, always made me feel claustrophobic and small, but I’d kept my mind on the Deal, and it had gone as I’d meant it to. I might have sounded a little like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, but there were worse roles.

I bought eggs and peppers and a few ounces of crumbly cheese at three different stalls, and took them all to a grill cart and had the proprietor turn them into an omelette.

After breakfast I would hail a bicycle cab and pay for the long, long ride to the western outskirts of the City, where a culture-vulture knew of a sealed-up basement holding the remains of a video production business. It would be, by my standards, a perfect day.

But it had chaos hidden in it. Cancers start that way: a cell or two, mutated, dividing, a secret for weeks, or months, though I knew nothing about it for weeks.

Card 1: Covering

Death, Reversed

Waite: Inertia, sleep, lethargy, petrifaction, somnambulism, hope destroyed.

Gray: Stagnation. Failure of revolution or other forms of violent change.

Crowley: Transformation and the logical development of existing conditions thwarted. His magical weapon is the pain of the obligation. His magical power is necromancy.

1.0: Gonna go downtown

I came up on my back in the dirt. The sun was hot on the front of me, but the ground under my body was cool. I’d been there a while, then. A white-blue glaring summer sky made my eyes water. My mouth felt like a tomb from some culture where they bury your servants with you.