But the car was gone, spurting away almost recklessly through the other cars, and turning off two blocks ahead.

Garekyn’s heart sank. He ran his fingers back through his hair, and finding a handkerchief in one of his many pockets, he wiped angrily at his face.

He walked on, trying to think.

Perhaps this had happened for the best. Perhaps this thing, this Benji species of mutant, could have done him harm. If he were to go back now to Trinity Gate, perhaps a collection of these beings, alerted by the redoubtable Benji, could do him harm.

Only slowly did he come to realize this had been a great experience for him, a unique experience, and that he had now much to ponder, whereas he’d had almost nothing tangible at all to think about before.

But he was stung, stung to his soul. He’d encountered somebody, somebody vital in his search for the past, and that someone had fled from him, and so he would have to approach the entire matter in some new and more cautious way.

He found a café where he felt at home.

It was a restaurant actually, not open as yet for “dinner,” as they called it, but it was fine with them if he took one of the smaller tables near the front window and drank a glass of the house wine.

The wine went to his head as it always did from the first mouthful, and he felt the relaxation move through him as if he’d sunk down in a warm bath.

He had never forgotten the warning of the Parents that during his mission on Earth, he must refrain from all spirits or fermented drinks, and all other intoxicants, that he would have little or no defense against them, that indeed human beings had little or no defense against them, but that they might cripple his cerebral circuits even more quickly than they worked on human beings.

But he liked wine. He liked being intoxicated. He liked having the pain and loneliness dulled by intoxication. He loved it, in fact, and he wept as he called for another glass and drank it down as if it were a shot of bourbon. Why not a bottle? The waitress nodded without a word, and filled the glass for him again when she returned, setting the corked bottle beside it.

Silently, Garekyn shed tears. People passed him on the other side of the glass. He wiped at his eyes crossly with his handkerchief, but it didn’t make him feel better. He sat back in the comfortable little chair, and began to take a swift inventory of everything Benjamin Mahmoud had ever said about the “spirit Amel.”

Then something utterly unforeseen happened.

Garekyn’s eyes were closed. He had pressed two fingers of his right hand against the bridge of his nose as a mortal might who was experiencing a headache.