She said, “I haven’t forgotten the subject before the committee, even if you have. What brought you here, Mick?”

“I came back for my jacket.”

“No, no, answer the exam questions fully; you’ve no idea what we’re testing for. This city, Skinner, you idiot, just now, for what God-damned purpose.”

He looked steadily at her, his face baffled and hurt, and resigned. “Do you still have purposes?” he asked. “I used mine up. I just move around, Fran.”

“Why move here?”

“I’d never been here, so I came. I had a notion to go on north and try to get into Canada.”

“A pitiful and profoundly moving story,” she said. I hadn’t realized I’d been hoping she’d believe him until I felt my spirits fall. “Let’s explore a promising side passage, shall we? What’s your connection to our chum here?” She tipped her head toward me.

Mick Skinner, inexplicably, was silent. “He rode me,” I told her, and stopped. The bald statement of it, out loud, sickened me; and it didn’t answer her questions, or mine.

“Oh, my downy chick, my sweet hatchling, I know that. I knew there was one of us here by the stink of it. When I laid hands on you, there on the bridge, I got the smell of Horseman in my nose so strong I thought I’d gag with it.

“Did you know that, Mick? That we leave a trail behind us, a spoor of possession? It’s related, I think, to the way we recognize each other in some other poor bastard’s body. And I thought, when I got a whiff of this one, that it was damned familiar.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Mick said. He sounded as if the words were being squeezed out of him. “I had… some bad rides. I didn’t know what happened the first time. I didn’t make the switch, it just—”

“Don’t, please, spare us the gory details,” Frances said pleasantly.

“The body I was on got hit by a car,” he said. I could tell — I thought I could tell — he hated doing it. “And suddenly I was three streets over, on Sparrow, being pushed out a door.” I had been in danger of being thrown through the door; if he had, by skill or fortune, spared me that, I owed him something. “I only stayed long enough to find another ho — another body.”

“What was wrong with that one?” Frances asked, pointing at me.

A muscle worked in Mick’s jaw. “He wasn’t done with it.”

Frances raised her eyebrows.

Mick Skinner’s eyes closed, and his long brown hands clenched. He was… ashamed? Of not taking me over? “I can’t not do it. Every time the choice comes, between dying and taking another horse, I jump for the horse every goddamn time. I can’t let go of living. But I try to find people who have let go. You find somebody who’s about to eat a bullet, you hop on, take the gun out of his mouth — it’s almost with his consent, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel so fucking evil.”