The elf woman’s jaw clenched. “Whatever I say, they will be nice. My house will see to it, as it will see to breaking you for your presumption.”

“Honey, right now your house couldn’t break eggs in this town, and you know it.”

This was all going over my head. I had dragged myself to my feet with the aid of the edge of the desk, and was standing with both hands braced on the glossy expanse of rosewood, waiting for the bees to get out from behind my eyes. Things swam slowly into focus on the desktop: a silver fountain pen, a black leather blotter holder, a black leather box embossed with silver, open, with sheets of stationery in it. Thick white sheets with hair-thin red and blue fibers in the weave. Paper that remembered its maker.

The woman in the pink silk suit had yanked Hawthorn out of our hands—my hands. Hawthorn had walked through Soho and seen us, the people who lived there, and knew that some of the ones he saw would die because of what he was doing. He had looked us all in the eye and set death loose among us.

This woman might never have seen Soho, but that didn’t make it better. She’d never had to decide to kill; only to do business. Death was an operating expense. Even Hawthorn’s death. His blood was, literally, on her hands, and all that was to her was the cost of solving a problem. The collapse of the passport ring was only an affront to her professional pride. The mutation of the virus was nothing to her at all.

I crossed the room unsteadily to stand in front of the elf woman.

The skin between her nose and her upper lip twitched, as if she had controlled a sneer. “Stand off from me,” she ordered. “I don’t like the way you smell.” But her eyes cut away from me and back, and away, as if trying to run.

“Orient,” Sunny said sharply, “if you do anything I will throw you down the stairs.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s my job.”

“To protect her from me? My God, then who the hell is left to protect me from her?” I swung around to glare at Sunny. She’d never lowered the pistol, and her eyes hadn’t left her prisoner for more than an instant. I said, “If there were any fairness in the world, she’d be dead. Instead everybody else is, the world is unfair, and it’s your job to enforce it?”

If she hadn’t been tanned, Sunny’s face would have been almost as white as the elf woman’s. “Vengeance is not mine, remember? My job isn’t punishment. It’s not even dealing out justice. I don’t get to decide right and wrong. I only get to bring them in.”

My breath rasped over a burning lump in my throat.