Garrick bent low over Chevie, tracing her eyebrow with the tip of his blade. “Abandon all hope,” he whispered. “For hope has abandoned ye.”

Chevie believed him, and so did the boy.

Garrick was positively ebullient to have Riley back. He had an audience again, swelled to twice its size.

“Numbers in the stalls are up by a hundred percent,” he commented to Riley as they rode in the black cab toward Bedford Square. “It must be a good show.”

Chevie and Riley sat opposite him on the fold-down seats. Chevie was traumatized from stepping over the half dozen federal corpses in the safe suite.

Duff was a jerk, thought Chevie. But he was a human jerk. Chevie had never seen so much death and was more shaken than she had imagined she would be in a combat situation. Her only consolation had been the sight of Waldo Gunn safe inside his panic pod.

At least Waldo knows I am not a murderer.

But this scrap of comfort did little to dispel the shock that crushed her spirit.

Riley, on the other hand, had lived his life in Victorian London, where murder was rare but life was cheap. Many poor children died at birth; if they did survive that first day, the odds were that cholera, smallpox, scarlet fever, or whooping cough would do them in before their fifth birthday. Riley had seen the grim reaper’s handiwork more times than he could count.

Life and death are two ends of the same ride, Garrick had once told him. Nothing to celebrate or mourn.

And so Riley told himself to stay sharp, or he and Miss Savano could be coming to the end of their own rides.

Someday I may mourn all the souls Albert Garrick has done in, he thought. But not this day. This day is for fighting.

It was the early hours of the morning, and the streets were alive with die-hard revelers and city workers, winding along Tottenham Court Road under the eyes of coppers who walked the beat in pairs. Motorized street sweepers scoured the road with their bristled brushes, throwing up wakes of muddied water; and in the shop windows, employees of a dozen electronics stores switched on a thousand television and computer screens.

“Pleasantly warm,” noted Garrick, tapping the knife in his breast pocket, so that Chevie would not forget that it was there or what it could do. “What is the season?”

“Summer,” said Chevie sullenly.

Garrick sighed, and his face seemed to slide like melting butter until the features were his own again.

The face of an accountant, thought Chevie. Or a geography teacher. Not a merciless assassin.

Garrick punched Riley’s shoulder playfully. “Ah... summer in London, without the stench of decay in our nostrils, and the two of us finally brothers in enterprise. Could there be anything finer? Almost a pity we have to go home, eh, boy?”

“Why do you want to go back?” asked Chevie.