I wasn’t numb after all. Because at the end of the hall, the doors to the third room stood a little open, spilling light and music, and I felt a shock of cold on my skin, and a scream blocked up in my throat.

I think I took the black-haired woman by surprise; I was through the hall door and the inside one as well before anyone could have stopped me. A man sat in my comfortable chair, his back to me. The song was Richard Thompson’s “Yankee Go Home.” I had an absurd, precise recollection of it; it was on disk, and the insert was inscribed to someone, in blue ink, in a pointy, idiosyncratic hand. Then the man swung around to face me, and smiled.

“I love this one,” he said. “Brings back a lot of lousy memories.”

I’d never seen him before. Maybe in his mid-twenties, with smooth, glossy brown skin, long hair bleached to chestnut-brown that was braided all over his scalp and twined with bright green thread and tiny copper fish charms. Wide mouth, heavy straight brows over large round black eyes. A compact, slender body in a yellow cotton shirt and loose gray trousers. But he was wearing Mick Skinner’s jacket, and smiling Mick Skinner’s self-mocking smile, and I knew who he was. And what he was. The facts were assembled now, because the driver of the trike was not the only person who ought to be dead and wasn’t, and Myra Kincaid wasn’t the only person with a chunk missing from her memory. Mick Skinner knew what all my missing pieces were.

Of course he did. He’d been me while they’d happened.

Now he was somebody else, but it was still him, using my best-kept secret, my archives, my sanctuary. It was as bad as using my body.

“How the hell many of you are there?” I squeaked in his uncomprehending face.

His eyes went past me then, and narrowed, and his smile faded. The black-haired woman had come in behind me, the damned rifle leveled — Chango, if she pulled the trigger she’d chop the hardware to bits. She didn’t pull the trigger. She just stared with the same narrow-eyed concentration at him.

“Frances?” he said at last, as if he couldn’t breathe.

“Hello, Mick,” she said. The rifle never wavered. “I wondered when it would be you.”

He puffed air out through his nose — a substitute for laughter, maybe, though he wasn’t smiling. “You’re still a woman.”

“’Again,’ actually. Didn’t you go through a few learning experiences getting out of the goddamn stinking jungle? Or have you kept your boyish charm ever since Panama?” She had an edge on her voice and manner now, blackened and smoking and too hot for safety.

He shook his head, as if shaking off insects. “Fran… Jesus, would you put that gun down?”

“No, I don’t think I would. Why aren’t you dead, Mick?”

“Well, why the hell aren’t you?”

“Because I have the morals of a shark. On the basis of personal experience, I’m forced to assume the same of you.”