Dusty sank slowly to his knees in the mud, and finally lay on his stomach. Myra reached into the little van and started it, fiddled with some things in the cab, and stepped back. The van lurched forward into the darkness, toward the river. In a few moments, there was a crunch.

“Pity,” said Myra. “I was hoping it would sink. Now, as for you two,” she went on, turning her attention to Theo and Sher.

Theo had come to himself enough to clamp his hand over the wound in his arm, but he looked as if he would like to fall down. Sher was keeping him from doing it, and staring narrowly at Myra.

“Who are you?” Sherrea asked her.

Myra’s eyebrows went up. “Child, you frighten me. Bright young people always do. Take your leaking comrade back through that door, lock it, and don’t come out again. Will you do that for me?”

“What’re you going to do with Sparrow?”

“I am going to take Sparrow home, and you will damn well have to take my word for it. Get inside.”

“What home?”

I was, after all, a confirmed bird of passage, but I hadn’t thought that Sherrea knew that. Myra said, “If I wanted you to know, I’d invite you along.”

Sher was glowering from under her hair, a pixie with a bad attitude. “I’d rather she didn’t shoot you,” I croaked.

“You don’t belong to them,” Sherrea said savagely. “You never did. And you don’t now.” Then she turned and pulled Theo inside.

Myra walked over to me and hauled me up by one arm. “Your standards of personal grooming never cease to impress me,” she said, giving my mud the once-over. “Peppermint, stay there until I come back for you, and if I find you’ve twitched a finger, they’ll mistake your corpse for a screen door.”

He still had the silvertones on; their blankness gave his face extra malevolence. He said, “When I kill you, I’m gonna make you remember tonight.”

She looked down at him, the rifle pointed at his jaw. “Probably,” she said, her words slowed by the weight of some personal meaning. “I have a damnably long memory.” She took my elbow and drew me stumbling toward the parking lot.

The dust was rinsed away, but the thing parked at the pavement’s edge was recognizably the tri-wheeler from two days before. We stopped next to it, and Myra dug in her raincoat and pulled out a little chromed key. She poked it into my jeans pocket. “The cuffs,” she explained. “I’d ditch them now, but you’re so much more manageable this way. Get in.”

She’d popped the weather shell open, and I stood staring, a sickly colored light dawning in my battered head. In the driver’s seat of the tri-wheeler was the black-haired woman who owned it, she of the many names. She sat slumped, her eyes half-closed, her mouth slack, her hands dead on her thighs. Inert. Gone.

“Oh. Oh, hell,” I whispered. I glanced at Myra, back again to the black-haired driver.