—but this was right up there with the worst things she could remember doing deliberately and in cold blood. The feeling that they were completely dependent on someone else for a chance at escape wasn’t very pleasant either.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Work the muscles, don’t get stiff, keep centered. Just do your best and let other people do theirs and afterwards you can tell stories about it.

And Martin Thurston had threatened, sincerely, to cut out his wife’s tongue. Even though she detested the woman, that . . .

Was exactly what you expect from Cutters. I don’t know what it is, Rudi tried to explain but I got the feeling he really didn’t understand it himself after we came out of . . . wherever we were on Nantucket. But whatever is doing things to the Cutters’ spirits, that whatever-it-is hates us for existing. We really, really need to do this.

Noise built; they were into the populated part of the city, and she could see narrow glimpses of horses and bicycles and pedestrians and pedicabs and wagons and a handcart full of very fresh green onions that made her eyes water for an instant until she had to bite her lip to smother a sneeze. The steel wheels of the wagons grated and rattled and banged on the pavement, and the bed of the vehicle punched at her side as it hit little ridges and dips; nobody wasted leaf springs on a mass-produced freight carrier like this. Then the traffic thinned.

“Roit,” a deep bass voice said, cheerfully. John Hordle was a bit scary too. “’ang ’ard, all. Time for the kiddies to play the fall down and bleed you evil buggers game.”

Let your mind flow. Don’t think, just be, just do.

A stretch of pavement, the gravel-and-concrete patches light even against sun-faded asphalt a generation old. A stretch of roadway, with a sheet-metal watering trough and an automatic nose-operated dispenser. Another one of those a little farther down, and an extremely fancy black carriage, with the Presidential seal on its doors, and a driver and groom watering an equally fancy set of matched black horses; she hoped with some distant corner of her mind they wouldn’t get hurt in the contentions of men. And a line of soldiers standing in a double file at parade rest against the plate-glass windows of the jewelry store.

At least I’ll have these sacks of chaff off me in a second. It’s filtering down through the burlap and it itches. And I’ll be smelling something bedsides scared excited soldier.

It would probably, almost certainly, be blood instead, and the smells you got when bodies were cut open. Until then she had more light and air than the rest of the dense-packed crowd in the wagon.

No thought. Be. Do.