“I have to go soon. When I’m better. Then I can go across? Can’t I?”

“Yes,” said Rico. I could barely hear her. “Very soon.” Three people in hospital uniform burst through the door, armed with apparatus that wasn’t going to be of any use.

I bolted from the room, followed by the frail bubbling sound of the girl’s breath.

I fetched up hard against the opposite wall of the hallway and slid down it, and sat on the floor with my face on my drawn-up knees. Almost immediately a man in white was crouched next to me, saying, “Do you feel faint?”

I shook my head without raising it.

“Stay here.” I heard his footsteps move away, blend with others, come back. “Drink some,” he said, by my ear.

It was a paper cup of water. I felt desperately guilty for attracting attention, for seeming to need care in a place where other people really did, where in a room across the hall a girl was hemorrhaging—I knocked back the water and croaked, “Thank you.”

“It’s what I do.”

“I’m fine. I’m not really—”

“She’s the third one we’ve had,” he said, as if he thought I needed to know why he could still stand up, and talk, and think.

“They can’t know,” I muttered.

“They do, though. They don’t care. They take it anyway, because they think maybe this time, for them, it’ll work.”

For one bleak, cyclonic moment, I hated elves. I hated Tick-Tick, and Linn, and every elf I knew and didn’t know, for existing, for being there to envy and long for so fiercely that someone could think a lingering, ugly death was not too great a risk.

It was only a moment; I knew too much for it to last longer. Tick-Tick, if I told her about the dying girl, would find something rare and precious, take it to her second-floor window, and let it drop. Then she’d stand and stare at the wreckage. I’d seen her do it; it was what she did with a grief too big for crying. No elves I’d ever met, no matter how haughty, would believe they were due such unspeakable homage.

But someone else, who didn’t know any elves, might hold that hatred for a long time, let it grow strong, and pass it on. For the first time, I began to understand the size and shape of the thing that Sunny Rico was trying to head off, in Bordertown.

“I’ll be all right now,” I told the nurse, and my voice was steady. “If I’m not in the way, I’d like to stay here, though.”

“Were you a friend of hers?”

I shook my head. He stood up, said, “If you need anything, flag somebody down,” and disappeared down the hall.