“Not true. We never would have made it out of Azar’s if you hadn’t used your”—she wriggles her fingers to indicate the magic of my hypersensory perception—“and you took out the guy with the gun, and took care of Jimmy the Hat....”

“Oh God,” I say. “Don’t remind me.”

“I think we make a pretty good team.”

“Is that what the puppy’s about? You trying to butter me up? By giving me back something that was taken from me?”

Charlie smiles girlishly.

“It was a dirty trick,” I say.

“Is it working?”

Perhaps sensing he is the topic of conversation, the puppy roisters alongside and frolics at my ankles as if he has been waiting his whole life for ankles this tasty.

“You don’t have to decide now,” she says. “We have a lot of time.”

This is a proposition I have never considered. It’s baffling but it is also strangely enticing. I can’t protect anything as a pulse. That’s clear. My pulsing days are over. Could my talent days be starting? Could I do the right thing by doing the wrong thing?

And can I trust Charlie?

“What took you so long to contact me?”

“You were being watched.”

“You weren’t busy getting the sword?”

“I got the sword the same day we got out of Azar’s.”

“You went back in?”

She nods.

“How did you avoid the cops? They tore that place apart.”

“Air shaft.”

“Air shaft?” I exclaim. “Those amateurs!”

“You’re telling me.”

For the first time, we laugh together on this subject. It feels great. It contains a powerful feeling of relief, as if I’ve been underwater for five minutes and finally broke the surface; each laugh feels like a lifesaving gasp of oxygen. When the heady glow of togetherness wears off, however, and we stop laughing, I am confronted with reality.

“I’ll be a fugitive. I’ll never be able to go back home.”

“That’s true,” she says.

“We’ll always be on the run.”

“Also true,” she says. “But not alone.”

She shrugs in a way that affects her whole body. Her hips swivel, as if sending me a message in a pelvic foreign language, and the scar on her shoulder pinches into a barbed hieroglyph of significant meaning. This sparks a flashback of what my life was like before Charlie—the dark rooms, the solitude, the neverness. It also provokes an oracle-flash of what my life could be like if I had her. It seems almost too much to hope for. It seems not like wishfulness but greed.

Still, I think: what do I want?

And, as the Covet girl would say, what will I do to get it?

“You’re wearing the ring,” I note.

“Are you kidding? I’ve only taken it off once,” she says, “to fix it.”