How can we? Susannah asked.

We’ll have our palaver in the castle, Mia replied promptly. The Castle on the Abyss. In the banquet room. Do you remember the banquet room?

Susannah nodded, but hesitantly. Her memories of the banquet room were but recently recovered, and consequently vague. She wasn’t sorry, either. Mia’s feeding there had been … well, enthusiastic, to say the very least. She’d eaten from many plates (mostly with her fingers) and drunk from many glasses and spoken to many phantoms in many borrowed voices. Borrowed? Hell, stolen voices. Two of these Susannah had known quite well. One had been Odetta Holmes’s nervous—and rather hoity-toity—“social” voice. Another had been Detta’s raucous who-gives-a-shit bellow. Mia’s thievery had extended to every aspect of Susannah’s personality, it seemed, and if Detta Walker was back, pumped up and ready to cut butt, that was in large part this unwelcome stranger’s doing.

The gunslinger saw me there, Mia said. The boy, too.

There was a pause. Then:

I have met them both before.

Who? Jake and Roland?

Aye, they.

Where? When? How could y—

We can’t speak here. Please. Let us go somewhere more private.

Someplace with a phone, isn’t that what you mean? So your friends can call you.

I only know a little, Susannah of New York, but what little I know, I think you would hear.

Susannah thought so, too. And although she didn’t necessarily want Mia to realize it, she was also anxious to get off Second Avenue. The stuff on her shirt might look like spilled egg-cream or dried coffee to the casual passerby, but Susannah herself was acutely aware of what it was: not just blood, but the blood of a brave woman who had stood true on behalf of her town’s children.

And there were the bags spread around her feet. She’d seen plenty of bag-folken in New York, aye. Now she felt like one herself, and she didn’t like the feeling. She’d been raised to better, as her mother would have said. Each time someone passing on the sidewalk or cutting through the little park gave her a glance, she felt like telling them she wasn’t crazy in spite of how she looked: stained shirt, dirty face, hair too long and in disarray, no purse, only those three bags at her feet. Homeless, aye—had anyone ever been as homeless as she, not just out of house but out of time itself?—but in her right mind. She needed to palaver with Mia and get an understanding of what all this was about, that was true. What she wanted was much simpler: to wash, to put on fresh clothes, and to be out of public view for at least a little while.

Might as well wish for the moon, sugar, she told herself … and Mia, if Mia was listening. Privacy costs money. You’re in a version of New York where a single hamburger might cost as much as a dollar, crazy as that sounds. And you don’t have a sou. Just a dozen or so sharpened plates and some kind of black-magic ball. So what are you gonna do?