The poultry dealer had a pair of doves in a wicker cage, velvety gray and sullen. Doves in paintings were never sullen. They seemed, in fact, to have managed a permanent state of exaltation, like the mindless fluttering ones around a chalice in… Sherrea’s… cards.

I stood clouted with revelation amid the produce. I wanted knowledge. Sherrea claimed to call it up out of a seventy-eight-card deck. I didn’t believe in the cards, but I might, if pressed, admit to uncertainty about Sher. A little mind reading, with tarot as its rationalization — however she explained it to herself, she might locate my missing memories. If she was a mind reader, if the memories were there, if there was any help in them. But I had to try.

The brown grandmotherly woman who sold the tomatillos was shooting ungrandmotherly narrow-eyed looks at me, so I turned to move on. But I missed my step and stumbled against one of her awning poles, rocking the whole canvas roof, and she shouted something about mi madre. That made me laugh. The sun hit me over the head with its hammer when I came out of the shade, and I stopped laughing.

The Ravine forms the western edge of the Bank, only a few hundred yards from Seven Corners market. It’s full of the cracked pavement of an old interstate highway — still a perfectly good road, in an age that requires less of its road surface and has no use for the concept of “between states.” From the lip of the Ravine I could see the Deeps on the other side, hard gray and brown brick and wood on the nearest structures, shading farther in to rose, bronze, black pearl, and verdigris in spires of stone, metals, and brilliant glass. The empress of it all, rising from its center, was Ego, the tallest building in the City, whose reflective flanks had no color of their own, but wore the sky instead — relentless, cloudless blue today. The towers of the Deeps, rising in angles or curves, were made more poignant by the occasional shattered forms of their ruined kin. If I’d reached them as quickly on foot as I have in the narrative, maybe I’d have no story to tell. Or maybe I would. Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and the pulleys.

The bridge over the Ravine was scattered with vendors who hadn’t found a place in the market. Very few had awnings, or even stalls; they spread blankets on the scorching sidewalks, and kept their hats and shawls and parasols tilted against the sun. The heat rose with the force of an explosion from the road surface below, and the whole scene wiggled in a heat mirage. Near the center of the bridge, I stopped to press my hands over my eyes, trying to squeeze the aching out of my head, to replace it with a firm sense of up and down, forward and back. I shivered. Maybe the sweat was working, after all. Except that I didn’t seem to be sweating anymore.