Sunny and I went upstairs, past a brown-skinned woman in jeans and a gray cotton sweater who balanced a tray of bottles and jars against one shoulder. She didn’t seem to hurry, but she got down the stairs pretty quickly for all that, and without so much as the clink of glass on glass from the tray. Not much like what I thought of as a hospital, anyway. There were more members of the staff working upstairs, in their assorted clothes and their quiet, competent style.

“I’ll wait for you,” Sunny said outside the door of 24.

“You can come in if you want.”

“I know. I’ll wait.”

Wolfboy must have overheard us. He came out of the Ticker’s room and showed a few of his teeth in a smile, then gave a casual index-finger-to-the-eyebrow salute to Sunny.

“How is she?” I asked him.

He made a gesture with his hands and shoulders that was expressive of not much of anything. Since it obviously didn’t satisfy me, he sighed and took out the notebook. Not any better, he wrote.

“Are they treating her okay?”

Like a goddess. He paused, then wrote, I have to go back to the store tonight. Think that’ll be okay?

I knew what he meant. There was nothing either of us could do, by being there, to make her well, but if we went away, it felt as if we weren’t trying. Still, Wolfboy had a business to run and a relationship to keep up. “Go ahead. I’ll tell her you’ll be back in the morning.”

As soon as I saw her, I knew Tick-Tick was worse. I’d been warned that she would get worse before she got better, but that didn’t really make it easier to look at and smile. Her face seemed sunken and worn away, her eyes and hair dull. She wasn’t coughing, but I knew she was being medicated for that, and that it was only a symptom.

“Am I interrupting anything?” I asked from the doorway.

She scrunched the corners of her mouth, and beckoned me in. When I got within whispering distance, she said, “Are you having fun questing?”

I thought about lying, and rejected it. “No. It’s godawful. Are you getting well?”

“I believe I am, my dear. I know I look devilish, but it’s always worst in the evening. And if I don’t recover, I’ll will you the bike, and we’ll both feel like characters out of a Richard Thompson song.”

“That’s not funny,” I told her, a little more sharply than I’d meant to.

“It will be, eventually.”

There wasn’t anything much to say, but I didn’t want to go yet, and I thought she didn’t want me to leave. Finally she said, “Is Rico bullying you cruelly?”

“No. She’s out in the hall, by the way.”