"Surely you have a home to go to. Surely you do not wish to stay here," Amitav prodded.

"No," she said to both questions.

He waited. She waited with him.

Finally, he stood and glanced down at the dead botfly. "I do not know what made this one crash. Usually they work quite well. I believe you've already seen one or two pass by, yes? Your eyes may be empty, but they are not blind."

Clarke held his gaze and said nothing.

He nudged the little wreck with his toe. "These are not blind either," he said, and walked away.

*

It was a hole in darkness: a window to another world. It was set at the height of a child's eyes, and it looked into a kitchen she'd not seen in twenty years.

Onto a person she hadn't seen in almost that long.

Her father knelt in front of her, folded down from adult height to regard her eye-to-eye. He had a serious look on his face. He grasped her wrist with one hand; something dangled in the other.

She waited for the familiar sickness to rise in her throat, but it didn't come. The vision was a child's; the viewer was an adult, hardened, adapted, accustomed by now to trials that reduced child-abuse from nightmare down to trite cliché.

She tried to look around; her field of view refused to change. She could not see her mother.

Par for the course.

Her father's mouth moved; no words came out. The image was utterly silent, a plague of light with no soundtrack.

This is a dream. A boring dream. Time to wake up.

She opened her eyes. The dream didn't stop.

There was a different world behind it, though, a high-contrast jigsaw of photoamplified light and shadow. Someone stood before her on the sand, but the face was eclipsed by this vision from her childhood. It floated in front of her, an impossible picture-inpicture. The present glimmered faintly through from behind.

She closed her eyes. The present vanished. The past didn't.

Go away. I'm done with you. Go away.

Her father still held her wrist—at least, he held the wrist of the fragile creature whose eyes she was using—but she felt nothing. And now those eyes focused autonomously on the dangling thing in her father's other hand. Suddenly frightened, she snapped her own eyes back open before she could see what it was; but once again the image followed her into the real world.

Here, before the destitute numberless hordes of the Strip, her father was holding out a gift for Lenie Clarke. Her first wristwatch.

Please go away…

"No," said a voice, very close by. "I am not."

Amitav's voice. Lenie Clarke, transfixed, made a small animal noise.

Her father was explaining the functions of her new toy. She couldn't hear what he was saying, but it didn't matter; she could see him voiceact'ing the little gadget, stepping through its Net Access functions (they'd called it the Net back then, she remembered), pointing out the tiny antennae that linked to the eyephones...