“Mab and sprites and imps of Hell,” the Ticker burst out. “What in all their names did that copper bitch lead you into?” She’d grabbed my shoulders; now she let them go, as if afraid she’d break me.

“It was a mistake.”

“I think that goes without saying.”

I tried running my hands through my hair, but I hit a sore place and stopped. “It’ll probably happen again.”

“Why should it?” she asked ominously.

“Because she’s not done.”

“Might I suggest that you are?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

I thought about it, about the things the Ticker didn’t know. About a car, and an act of violence. “Because it would be a bad idea.”

She looked down the street; not at anything, just not at me. “I tried to follow you from Chrystoble Street,” she said after a moment, with less heat. “I got too late a start. I’m sorry. All I could do was come here and wait.”

I looked up into her moonlit face, at the deep dismay there, and touched her arm. “I’m all right. I just need a shower.”

Her fine-carved mouth worked; then she said, “Do you need to get out of town, too?”

“If I did that, I’d never be able to come back.”

She understood. She knew that, in all the wide world, one could run out of places to run to.

“Go on home,” I told her. “I’ll stop by tomorrow.”

I went straight upstairs, picked up a towel and a bar of soap, and went down again to the backyard. There’s a solar shower there, an old black plastic fifty-gallon drum full of water with a hose and a shower head at the end of it. It loses heat slowly, even well after dark.

I rocked the drum—plenty of water, nearly full, in fact. Maybe my fellow squatters had left town because of the heat. I pulled the shower curtain closed, peeled off my filthy clothes, and flung them out on the grass. Then I opened the spigot. Warm water. I scrubbed down; then I just stood, letting the water pour over me and away, as if rinsing off more than soap. I had an angry-looking gash down one arm, pulled muscles in my neck and shoulder, a darkening bruise on one hip, a painful lump on the back of my head, and another on my shin.

But I was alive. That was nice. I hadn’t realized that before: that events could have turned out such that I wouldn’t be there, and they hadn’t done that. I could almost feel the other path, the one where I’d died. Suddenly, standing naked under running water was the most wonderful experience I’d ever had. So I did it for a long time.