He shook his head, backing through a random shaft of light. I got the message, had heard it often enough: Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Save it for the shrink. “Jes’ keep doin’ whatcher doin’.”

And he was gone.

A deep breath, no, several, did little to steady my nerves. Weird about Spunk lately. Every encounter left me shaken and wary. Just my guilty conscience, or some new level of testing? Had he been checking up on me the night of the ninja girl? If so, part of my secret was in his hands. Was he waiting to see what came of it?

Amazing it was only yesterday. I replayed leaving the den . . . could Spunk have followed? Was he really gone now? I squinted down the night-black hallway. I hoped this was just his way of proving that easing up on the streets could be fatal.

And now, less stealthy noises approached along the uptown corridor. I slipped behind a broad pillar. Four Asian men in silk suits the colors of the dawn, laughing, talking, confident that they belonged wherever they happened to be. Like the girls on the Causeway. Likely headed there. How could I not feel a touch of envy?

Once they’d passed by, I moved up to 52nd and put in a dull hour prospecting sad, littered rooms already way picked over before me. In case Spunk was still on my tail, meanwhile doing everything possible to lose him if he was. And thinking.

Finally, I neatened up best I could: doffed my headlamp and street cap, finger-combed up my hat hair. At least my clothes had dried. I stowed the bracelet in my gut wallet, folded cap and grab bag into a back pocket, then took the next set of stairs down to street level to nose on west toward the Souk.

TEN

Here’s what I knew about the Souk, all secondhand from Jake’s running tales in the Mess, or Rubio’s history lessons.

It was a no-man’s-land between Uptown and Down, perched on the rocky outcroppings along the western edge of Central Park, between 59th and 79th Streets, below the first checkpoints in the 86th Street Divide, open to all comers with something to barter or sell, or credit enough to buy. It ran 24/7.

The old park was a series of shallow lakes surrounded by farm plots and muddy pasture for sheep, cows, and goats. North of the wall, a heliport and a police station to patrol the uptown sectors and man the checkpoints.

The wall? Supposedly a flood barrier, but even the strongest surges never reached that high. In reality, a border control. You needed proper ID to travel uptown of the Divide. I’d never been this close to it before.