She was still leaning against the kitchen counter. In the huge shirt and a pair of skinny jeans with the knees worn through, and her brown hair rumpled, she looked younger than I’d ever seen her. Until I looked at her face. There were lines at the corners of her eyes, but her age lay in something other than wrinkles, in the sternness that set her features even now, when she was smiling a little.

“Twenty-five? Twenty-six?” I asked.

“Stubborn bastard.” The smile widened. “It’s something like that.”

“Don’t you know?”

She tilted her head a little to one side, not in the coy, fey gesture I’d seen other people use, but as if she wanted to see me with the light a little different. Very serious person, Sunny Rico. Her age was in that, too; even when she smiled, even when she was witty, she was very serious. “Have you ever been back to the World since you first came to B-town?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“I have, a couple of times. Never for very long, or very far in. Every time, the calendar surprised me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know that time in the Elflands runs differently—lots differently, sometimes—from the way it does here?”

I nodded again. My friend Strider had told me once of slipping back across the Border after he’d been in town for six months (I didn’t ask him why he’d done it, because I think he was taking a risk by telling me as much as he had; Strider’s exile, enforced or self-imposed, had a whiff of politics about it). In the Elflands, only two months had passed. Another friend said she’d run away to Bordertown for two weeks, when she was very young, and come dragging home to the Elflands to find it was a little over a year later and her parents had staged her funeral in absentia the week before.

“It’s also true of the Borderlands and the World. The discrepancy isn’t as big, but the longer you’re here, the further off you’ll find you’ve gotten from World Standard Time. I’m probably anything from twenty-three to twenty-eight at the moment, depending on when I leave the Borderlands, and you don’t know how old you are, either.”

“That’s silly. You know how long it’s been for you, so that’s how old you are.”

“Maybe. You can count years. You can count days. You can even count hours. But how do you know those hours are as long as the ones where you used to live?”

“They feel like it.”

“They would, wouldn’t they? This is the Borderlands. If everything wasn’t different when you got here, why would anyone bother to run away to it?”

“I’ve forgotten what we were talking about,” I said irritably.