“Number six,” Sunny said when I came back to the car. She could have sounded accusing, or bitter, or even mocking, maybe. What she did sound like was the way I felt—a little numb, a little spacey, a lot tired. We’d been chasing after my sunburst of Thataways. It wasn’t a speedy process, no matter how careful we were about the geography. Each location had to be triangulated; each had to be carefully surveyed to see if it was full of dangerous wicked people and their hirelings trying to subvert the human youth of Bordertown (this part was exclusively Sunny’s—I was ordered to stay with the car). And since none of the six locations we’d checked so far had been the hoped-for issuing office of the passport, the next part was mine, as a relatively well-known and trusted face around town. I got to play public health officer, going into each place and finding out which resident or residents had gotten their passports, explaining to them about the virus, and making them swear to report to the closest of the free clinics for monitoring. As some of the residents were inclined to be resentful and belligerent, this wasn’t much like selling candy bars door to door. It was sunset. I wanted some dinner, and I wanted to go visit Tick-Tick at the care hostel. I told Sunny so.

“Which first, dinner or Tick-Tick?”

“Tick-Tick,” I said, realizing that it ought to be dinner. The last thing an invalid needs is a visit from her partner when he’s low on calories and running on half a brain. She’d be patient, but I ought not to make her work so hard. And it wasn’t as if she were alone, since Wolfboy had volunteered to sit with her. Nobody knew if Wolfboy, himself something of an avatar of Borderland transformation, could get the bug. But when asked, he’d raised one jutting hairy eyebrow, considered it, and given a bark (literally) of laughter that I thought was meant to be ironic. He’d written on his notepad, Doesn’t jive with my secret origin. Only vulnerable to silver bullets and the color yellow.

“Yellow?” I’d said.

He’d written, Clashes with my eyes.

Sunny drove with her usual terrifying panache, which didn’t have any apparent effect on her conversation. “How was that last one?”

“Not so bad. Except—” I sighed, which she wouldn’t hear anyway, in the open car at this speed. “I don’t know. I just get around to deciding that I won’t mind anything as long as somebody doesn’t threaten me with a baseball bat again, when I walk into a little bare squat with cardboard over the windows and find nobody there except one undernourished thirteen-year-old girl with a pain in her chest and half her fingers longer than the other half, who only wants everything to be beautiful.”