Myra sighed. “Never mind; I’ll do it.” Before I could struggle, she grabbed the back of my shirt and the waistband of my jeans and swung me in behind that uninhabited body. Then she turned the driver’s limp hands over. Twined in the fingers of the left one I saw a strip of braided leather thong and black beads: my hair tie. Myra laid the rifle across the black-haired woman’s palms. I must have made a little noise, because Myra turned her flat gray gaze on me. “Sorry,” she said. “When you booked your seat, you should have specified ‘no shooting.’ ”

Myra walked away from the tri-wheeler, about a dozen feet. Then she turned around. Her face was blank.

The hands that had been limp closed around the rifle and raised it, pointing it at Myra. And above the rifle, the black-haired woman’s face was alive with the pleased expression that Myra’s features had worn moments before. Myra looked like someone who had gone to sleep in the basement and woken up on the roof, which I suppose wasn’t far from true.

“Myra Kincaid, you make me wish there were disinfectant for the mind,” said the black-haired woman. “Are you confused? Of course you are. The short version is that I’m not on your side, I’ll shoot you if you take one more of those steps, and I’m stealing your friend here. For the long version, ask your brother. He’s around back.”

I saw Myra take a breath; then, as if that had broken a spell, her face contorted, and she screamed, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the thing you’re a pale shadow of,” said the black-haired woman, and started the tri-wheeler. “Come see me again when your permanent fangs grow in.”

Myra took another step, and I steeled myself against the sound of the rifle. But the weather shell slammed down instead, and I was thrown against its scarred window as the trike launched and U-turned.

The driver said loudly, “If I’m lucky, her brother will kill her first, thinking she’s still me, and ask questions later. But God knows, I haven’t been that lucky yet.”

“I know what you are.” The words popped out of my mouth as soon as I opened it. Maybe they’d been sitting there too long.

“Do you?” she said, all polite inquiry. “How nice. I was afraid, for a moment, that you might disappoint me.”

Once there had been people who stole the prerogatives of the loa, who forced their way into other people’s minds and possessed them. They were a fantasy from silly novels and B-movies come alive. They were harnessed to the military — but who harnesses gods? In the end, they betrayed their side, betrayed everyone: they pushed the Button. Over half a century ago.

“You’re a Horseman,” I said.

The three wheels rattled and slammed over a street of potholes and patches, a typical street in this rough, hollow new world. The one she had made.

She stopped at the bridge to the Deeps and turned, and smiled a smile that made my skin creep. “Aren’t we all supposed to be dead?”