“How can my story be sadder than that?” Shameless girl, she isn’t humoring him, she’s actually flirting with him now, any technique her crepe-paper and spider-italics young ladyhood ever taught her, to keep from having to move into his blackness. Understand it isn’t his blackness, but her own—an inadmissible darkness she is making believe for the moment is Enzian’s, something beyond even the center of Pan’s grove, something not pastoral at all, but of the city, a set of ways in which the natural forces are turned aside, stepped down, rectified or bled to ground and come out very like the malignant dead: the Qlippoth that Weissmann has “transcended,” souls whose journey across was so bad that they lost all their kindness back in the blue lightning (the long sea-furrows of it rippling), and turned to imbecile killers and jokers, making unintelligible honks in the emptiness, sinewed and stripped thin as rats—a city-darkness that is her own, a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends. But as time passes things get louder there. It is shaking itself into her consciousness.

“Flirt if you want,” Enzian now just as smooth as that Cary Grant, “but expect to be taken seriously.” Oh, ho. Here’s whatcha came for, folks.

Not necessarily. His bitterness (all properly receipted in German archives which may, however, be destroyed now) runs too deep for her, really. He must have learned a thousand masks (as the City will continue to mask itself against invasions we often do not see, whose outcomes we never learn, silent and unnoticed revolutions in the warehouse districts where the walls are blank, in the lots where the weeds grow thick), and this, no doubt, this Suave Older Exotic, is one of them.

“I don’t know what to do.” She gets up in a long, long shrug and begins to stalk gracefully in the room. Her old style: a girl about 16 who thinks everyone is staring at her. Her hair falls like a hood. Her arms often touch.

“You don’t have to come into this any further than locating Slothrop,” he finally gets around to telling her. “All you have to do is tag along with us, and wait till he shows up again. Why bother yourself with the rest?”

“Because I feel,” her voice, perhaps by design, very small, “that ‘the rest’ is exactly what I ought to be doing. I don’t want to get away with some shallow win. I don’t just want to—I don’t know, pay him back for the octopus, or something. Don’t I have to know why he’s out here, what I did to him, for Them? How can They be stopped? How long can I get away with easy work, cheap exits? Shouldn’t I be going all the way in?”