“Damn right you won’t come back,” said one of the ones behind me, and I had maybe part of a second to realize that one of them didn’t want to be talked out of it, and that it only took one, before someone grabbed the back of my shirt. The Ticker’s fist whistled past my ear and my shirt was free again, and I was sliding past her to deliver a stomping kick at the kneecap of the girl who’d come up behind her. I knew when I landed it that it wasn’t in the right spot, but it stopped her anyway.

I left Tick-Tick to pay attention to things behind me. The guy in the coat was hanging back a little, but the other one, a boy with a long blond braid and a big purple bruise on the side of his jaw, waded right in. I made a feint at the bruise, which ought to have worked, so I didn’t pay as much attention to defense as I should have and got a stiff one in the ribs. The girl whose knee I’d kicked lashed out at my ankle with the heel of her work boot and had her calf stomped on instead. But that put me off balance, and I couldn’t do anything about it when her partner punched me somewhere in the vicinity of the kidneys.

One thing led to another, as things do if you let them. We ended up with me on my feet but pretty thoroughly immobilized by two people who, if they hadn’t had a grudge against me when they came down the street, certainly did now, and Tick-Tick pinned down to the hood of a long-abandoned Buick Special by three people, one of them the guy in the coat, who was holding a pistol with the barrel end in the hair over her ear. Him and his damned pockets. We were all breathing hard.

I knew next to nothing about guns—it wasn’t my job. Tick-Tick knew about them, though. The guy in the coat pulled the hammer back with his thumb. The Ticker’s face looked as if it had never worn an expression in its life.

Guns are pretty rare in Bordertown. Ammunition is even more so. I kept my voice low and even, so it wouldn’t startle anyone, and said, “Tick-Tick? Is it loaded?”

Tick-Tick, who knew about guns and what they did and how they did it, who had the acute hearing of her species, would have listened when the hammer went back; she would know, from the sound of metal on metal, if there was a round in the chamber. If there wasn’t, I hadn’t figured out what we would do, since there were still five of them and two of us. But we would probably think of something.

In a voice as blank as her face, the Ticker said, “Yes.”