I said what I was supposed to: “No, but I’m dressed.”

She stuck her head in as I was limping cautiously toward the door. She didn’t offer to help, because even if I had behaved like an idiot and betrayed every intelligent piece of advice she’d ever given me, she was still my best friend and a damned considerate fey wight.

My nurse waited in the hall. “Need a chair?” he asked us.

Tick-Tick shook her head before I realized that he’d meant the kind with wheels. “We’ll do very well,” said the Queen of the Veldt, and offered me her elbow with a dashing air. I took it as if the gesture were mere gallantry between friends. Besides, she was too tall for me to throw an arm across her shoulders to hold myself up.

The moon had come out of its corner, silver on turquoise, and the sun was expiring under a count of ten. I’d missed the whole boxing match for the sake of Rico’s stupid case. Good riddance to it and her.

I slumped in the sidecar in relative comfort, while Tick-Tick drove with decorum and a sixth sense for avoiding potholes. When we got to her place, she worked the elevator rope. There wasn’t enough light in the atrium to see how far her neighbor had gotten on the tapestry. Besides, it had only been a day—two days—since I’d seen it. In a normal life, that wasn’t long. I wondered if he’d found his skull. Heck, maybe he could get Walt’s.

Tick-Tick had a fainting couch about two levels up from the kitchen platform. I hobbled up the risers and sprawled on it. “Did you tell ‘em, at the clinic, that you lived in a tree house?”

“Ho. Ho. Wait until morning, when you’re stiff as bricks and have to come down for breakfast. Which puts me in mind of dinner. What do you want for it?”

“No vegetables. It’d be cannibalism. Actually, I don’t think I could eat right now. Do you mind?”

“Gracious, no. Waste away to nothing. We’ll hang you on a pole with your mouth open and use you for a wind sock.”

A little later she called softly, “Are you asleep?”

I turned my face away from the window, where the outlines of buildings against the navy blue sky made such pleasant, cool geometry. The Ticker was sitting at her workbench in a spill of light from a kerosene lamp, a book open in front of her. I don’t know what it was; it had tiny, closely-spaced type, thin yellowed pages, and occasional illustrations that looked like Victorian engravings, dense and scratchy.

“No, I’m awake.”

“I shouldn’t bother you.”