“I fucked them, and if they couldn’t break free I fucked them to death.” Matter-of-fact. After the Grand Coulee, we went to Yosemite. Would you tell your dinh something for me, Susannah? If you see him again?”

“Aye, if you like.”

“Once he knew a man—a bad man—named Amos Depape, brother of the Roy Depape who ran with Eldred Jonas in Mejis. Your dinh believes Amos Depape was stung to death by a snake, and in a way he was … but the snake was me.”

Susannah said nothing.

“I didn’t fuck them for sex, I didn’t fuck them to kill them, although I didn’t care when they died and their pricks finally wilted out of me like melting icicles. In truth I didn’t know why I was fucking them, until I came here, to Fedic. In those early days there were still men and women here; the Red Death hadn’t come, do ye ken. The crack in the earth beyond town was there, but the bridge over it still stood strong and true. Those folk were stubborn, trying not to let go, even when the rumors that Castle Discordia was haunted began. The trains still came, although on no regular schedule—”

“The children?” Susannah asked. “The twins?” She paused. “The Wolves?”

“Nay, all of that was two dozen centuries later. Or more. But hear me now: there was one couple in Fedic who had a baby. You’ve no idea, Susannah of New York, how rare and wonderful that was in those days when most folk were as sterile as the elementals themselves, and those who weren’t more often than not produced either slow mutants or monsters so terrible they were killed by their parents if they took more than a single breath. Most of them didn’t. But this baby!”

She clasped her hands. Her eyes shone.

“It was round and pink and unblemished by so much as a portwine stain—perfect—and I knew after a single look what I’d been made for. I wasn’t fucking for the sex of it, or because in coitus I was almost mortal, or because it brought death to most of my partners, but to have a baby like theirs. Like their Michael.”

She lowered her head slightly and said, “I would have taken him, you know. Would have gone to the man, fucked him until he was crazy, then whispered in his ear that he should kill his molly. And when she’d gone to the clearing at the end of the path, I would have fucked him dead and the baby—that beautiful little pink baby—would have been mine. D’you see?”

“Yes,” Susannah said. She felt faintly sick. In front of them, in the middle of the street, the ghostly woman made yet another turn and started back again. Farther down, the huckster-robot honked out his seemingly eternal spiel: Girls, girls, girls! Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can’t tell the difference!

“I discovered I couldn’t go near them,” Mia said. “It was as though a magic circle had been drawn around them. It was the baby, I suppose.