I sliced strawberries with all my attention. They were particularly fine ones, large and white clear through without a hint of pink. (Wild Borderland strawberries are one of the Border’s little jokes. They form bright red, and fade as they ripen. No strawberry has ever been so sweet.)

“So, can you tell me about last night’s adventures?” Tick-Tick said.

“She didn’t say not to.” I told her about Charlie in the morgue, and how the keys worked, and how the ceiling fell on us at the derelict apartment building. As I’d expected, she made me go back over that part.

“Rico thinks it was the light?” she asked, intent. “Then why assume the trigger was magical, and not photoelectric?”

“The thing in the corner was. Magical, I mean.” I drizzled liqueur on the strawberries—sparingly, however glad the Ticker might have been to squander the stuff on mortals. The smell made me want to lie down in the bowl. “Oh, and so was the other thing, that scared Charlie off the roof.”

She stopped in the middle of plucking a waffle off the griddle and raised her eyebrows at me.

“Oh, sorry. That was the rest of the night, after you went home.” I described the dream, and, sourly, Rico reappearing in my apartment.

“That was well done of her,” said the Ticker.

“It was? It didn’t feel like it at the time.”

“Hah. You’re only ashamed to have been caught in a moment of weakness.”

She was probably at least partly right. I decided that trying to think of the other parts would make my head ache.

Tick-Tick handed me a bowl and a whisk, and pointed at the milk bottle. “Pour the cream off the top of that and whip it, would you?”

“Wait a minute. That’s work.”

“It’s exercise. Do you good before breakfast. Linn is right, you know. These dreams can harm the dreamer; I’ve heard of it happening even over the Border, where one might expect people to know how to prevent such things. If Rico knew the signs, then she would be able to wake you if she saw them.”

I remembered the end of the dream, suddenly and for the first time. It had been as if something had reached past Charlie’s memories and tapped mine on the shoulder. It could have been my own ego, denying death for all it was worth. Or it could have been someone in the room, doing or saying the right things, whatever they were. Nothing that happened after I woke up told me which it was. If Rico had saved me from unspecified damage, she’d been self-effacing enough not to tell me so. I wondered, while I whipped the cream, if that made me feel less nervous, or more.