“I apologized.”

I felt like slime—not all at once, but with a steadily growing conviction as I thought back over the last few minutes. “That’s a fact,” I said at last. “I’m sorry. Try turning right at the next street.”

Right was good; in fact, all of my directions were good, which was the only good thing in the car for about a quarter of an hour. In that time, we drove out the side of the city proper, into a formerly residential tangle of streets that were too close to the Border to survive untouched when Faerie came back. Most of the neatly gridded lots had gone back to wilderness. A few still held the ruins of ramblers and two-story Colonials, the kind of houses I could tell you the floor plans of without ever going inside. And there were, occasionally, structures that had been changed by whatever non-human agency turned off the lights periodically even now in Bordertown. I saw a tower, bent over like an old woman, wrapped in mauled vinyl siding and topped with the remains of asphalt shingles. One house seemed to be in perfect condition, if you can say that about a house that appeared to have been turned inside out like a T-shirt in the laundry. Its exterior materials were compacted in a tidy cube from which all its rooms radiated. The chenille bedspread in the master bedroom was white, unmarked, and smooth.

“I hate neighborhoods like this,” Rico said suddenly, breaking our long silence. I jumped because of that, and because I’d been thinking the same thing.

“Too weird?” I tried to keep my voice perfectly neutral.

“Not weird enough. Is it much further?”

Did that mean that she hated them as I did, for the memories they evoked? I’d never lived here; but I’d lived in that place just like it that existed in every North American town, all those places named for trees that had never grown there, for features the terrain had never had. Maybe Rico had lived there, too. That would mean we had a lot to say to each other, or nothing at all. “I can never really tell how far. Just direction. Make this left.”

She did. It was a dead end, but that was all right; I knew we were there. Something had been grandfathered into the zoning here, to allow for the neat little farm that had once occupied the end of the street. Now all that stood was the barn, set far back from the road, its white paint nearly gone, and a scramble of weathered board fence. The “KEEP OUT!” painted on the barrier across the overgrown drive was more recent.

“Ping,” I said. “You Are Here.”