“Worecski.” She sighed. “I didn’t, when I thought you were a better prospect. Whole hours ago. Now I’m forced to confront the notion that I backed, as it were, the wrong horse.”

“They were after Mick Skinner.”

“Were they?” she said, startled. “Why? Do you know?”

“No.” I thought about the confrontation behind the Underbridge, before she’d arrived. “But they knew that he’d — that I’d been him part of the time.”

“Now that would suggest a surprising familiarity with the process, wouldn’t it? Hmm. Go change.”

I did. I locked the door of the bedroom, and felt no more comfortable about it than I’d expected to. Another pair of jeans, another shirt, jungle boots; it didn’t take long. I hid folding money in each boot, and coins in a bag around my neck. When I dropped the cord over my head, I realized there was already something there: Sherrea’s pendant, the two overlapping V shapes. If it was protective, it was doing a rotten job. Maybe it only worked for people who believed it would. What did I believe in? The Deal; it wouldn’t make much of an amulet. I threw a few other things in a rucksack and went to submit myself to the will of Frances.

She looked me up and down. “That must have been a tough decision.”

It was my turn to make my eyes wide. “Would you prefer the evening gown, or the tuxedo?”

Frances gathered up her purloined rifle. I locked the archives and doused all the lights. We rode down to the first floor in silence. Frances, it seemed, was thinking. We got all the way to the tri-wheeler before I finally asked, “Where are we going?”

“To the Underbridge,” she said. “I’ve had second thoughts about renewing my acquaintance with everyone involved. Mount up.”

I looked at her sideways. Frances just smiled.

Card 6: Ahead

Seven of Wands

Waite: Discussion, wordy strife, negotiations, war of trade.

Gearhart: The individual against the community; one against many. Unequal odds.

6.0: The house of the spirit

“The nights are getting shorter,” I shouted over Frances’s shoulder as we rode. “Mind the east.” The sky there was a dense and velvet cobalt, over solid rooftops and shattered ones, over the feeble lamps and torches of the Fair.

“Very nice,” said Frances.

“That means the gates close in an hour or so.”

“It does?”

Well, there; that was one thing I knew that she didn’t. “That’s why they call it the Night Fair.”

“What happens after that?”

“Nothing. Lively as a mausoleum. The hours are shorter in the summer, but it beats staying out in the sun.”

We were threading a narrow, noisy, busy strip of pavement bordered with vendors’ stalls. She braked as a huge, hairy gray dog shot out from between two of them and hurtled across the path, its bony joints rolling. A smooth, loam-black face topped with a brilliantly colored cylinder of a hat thrust itself in front of the windshield. “Las bujias, senora,” it said, showing small white teeth and a raised hand full of spark plugs. “Para todas las máquinas, senora, y muy baratas—” Frances growled with the throttle, and the face disappeared as we lunged forward. I peered back through the weather shell, and couldn’t find a sign of the bright hat.