Who was she? Would she approve of this vendetta she was being ridden on? I’d awakened, over and over, in strange places with bits of my past gone, and it had nearly driven me crazy. How long had Frances ridden this woman? Would she wake up in a new city, maybe years since her last memory, and do any better than I had? Would she get the chance to wake up at all?

The exhaustion belonged to the stranger’s body. The driving passion, the mind under the lash, belonged to Frances. Both needed to eat and rest. Both would suffer if they didn’t. Whoever was entitled to judge between them, it wasn’t me.

I said, a little loudly, “Well, if you didn’t like spicy chicken, you should have said so.”

“I love spicy chicken,” she said, and sat up. Her face was composed, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to notice, or at least to comment on, the weariness in it.

So I said, “At the Underbridge, there’s a place where you can catch a few hours’ sleep.”

“I’ll be fine once I eat. Now, can we eat?”

“You’re welcome,” I replied, and began to set bundles on all the flat surfaces. There weren’t a lot of these, on or in the trike, but I ate leaning against the outside, which left her the passenger’s seat as a table. “Eat the okra first,” I warned. “It’s terrible cold.”

And that was the last conversation for a few minutes. Except for the rattle of the paper, we were a speck of silence in the Night Fair’s tapestry of noise. I stopped chewing to listen to it. I felt like an alien object in the world-body, something it had encysted because it couldn’t cast it out. Or was it Frances who had been isolated, and I was simply standing within the radius of the effect?

“Wish I had some coffee,” Frances said at last, around a bite of biscuit.

I stared at her. “Nothing easier. Give me ten bucks, and I’ll be back sometime tomorrow with about twelve green coffee beans. If someone, somewhere in town, has managed to lay hands on a sackful.”

She smiled, wry and surprisingly genuine. “I know. I think that’s the rest of my penance. To get to where coffee grows, it’s a thousand miles over bad roads full of unpleasant people. I hear there’s a slope near Taos where they’ve discovered it does pretty well, but strangers within half a mile can expect to be shot at.”

“Is coffee worth shooting people for?” I asked.

“Or getting shot at for? Have you never had it?”

“No.”

An indecipherable expression crossed her face at high speed. “In that case, I suppose not. But I wish I had some, all the same.”

Headlights appeared and bobbed in front of us, blinding, as a car turned into the other end of the alley. “Bother,” Frances said, and began to clear wrapping paper away from the ignition.

“Stay where you are, please,” said an air-filled whistling ruin of a voice behind me.