“Yes. If we’re lucky. You surprised me. I didn’t have time to be … specific.”

Impossible. Like a story told about the gray caps to frighten children. Fought the urge to bring the gun smashing down on Bliss’s face again.

Focus on what makes sense. Ignore the rest.

He was in a courtyard, the tiles warm and rough beneath the shitty shoes Wyte had lent him. There was a breeze. The sun was out. These things were real.

“What were you doing in my apartment?”

Bliss put more energy behind his words suddenly. “Finch, listen to me: you don’t want to know. It isn’t what you find out that’s going to keep you alive. It’s where you’re standing. You’re in the middle of things you can’t control. It’s too big for you. You shouldn’t be worried about me, or what I was doing. You should be worried about yourself.”

“Answer the question.”

Bliss must have caught the returning menace in Finch’s voice. He tried to smile sheepishly, as if embarrassed. Said in his polished but shopworn voice, “I was looking for information on you.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing. I didn’t have time to find anything.”

“Who do you work for?”

“I work for Morrow,” Bliss said.

“I don’t believe you.” He didn’t. Not really.

“My answer won’t change no matter how you rough me up.”

Finch doubted that. Bliss’s face was covered in blood. But more damage could be done.

“Let’s go back to what I asked you after we took you down off that wall. Why were you in the dead man’s memories?” Bliss looked genuinely surprised. By the question? Or being asked it? “I ate the dead man’s memory bulb. I saw you. I saw you near a desert fortress.”

A kind of mirror. An eye. Pulling back to see a figure that seemed oddly familiar, and then a name: Ethan Bliss. Then a circle of stone, a door, covered with gray cap symbols. And, finally, jumping out into the desert air, toward a door hovering in the middle of the sky, pursued by the gray cap, before the world went dark.

“Memory bulbs are unreliable. You know that. You can see almost anything in them.”

Finch would never be able to tell when Bliss was lying.

“What do the two towers have to do with all of this?”

“Who says they do?”

“Stark.”

Bliss made a dismissive spitting sound. “Stark’s a thug. He’s nothing. Knows nothing.”

“Yet he killed all of your men and nailed you to a wall.”

Bliss grimaced, like he’d swallowed a mouthful of dirt. “That was beginner’s luck. His days are numbered. In this city you adapt or you die.”

Finch still didn’t believe him.