At first Susannah was all right. She held on despite the fact that she had lost over a foot and a half of herself—the self that had arrived here, anyway—and was now forced into her old familiar (and hatefully subservient) posture, half-kneeling and half-sitting on the filthy sidewalk. Her back was propped against the fence surrounding the vacant lot. A sardonic thought crossed her mind— All I need’s a cardboard sign and a tin cup.

She held on even after seeing the dead woman cross Forty-sixth Street. The singing helped—what she understood to be the voice of the rose. Oy helped, too, crowding his warmth close to her. She stroked his silky fur, using the reality of him as a steadying-point. She told herself again and again that she was not insane. All right, she’d lost seven minutes. Maybe . Or maybe the guts inside that newfangled clock down there had just hic-cupped. All right, she’d seen a dead woman crossing the street. Maybe . Or maybe she’d just seen some strung-out junkie, God knew there was no shortage of them in New York—

A junkie with a little green worm crawling out of her mouth?

“I could have imagined that part,” she said to the bumbler. “Right?”

Oy was dividing his nervous attention between Susannah and the rushing headlights, which might have looked to him like large, predatory animals with shining eyes. He whined nervously.

“Besides, the boys’ll be back soon.”

“Oys,” the bumbler agreed, sounding hopeful.

Why didn’t I just go in with em? Eddie would have carried me on his back, God knows he’s done it before, both with the harness and without it.

“I couldn’t,” she whispered. “I just couldn’t.”

Because some part of her was frightened of the rose. Of getting too close to it. Had that part been in control during the missing seven minutes? Susannah was afraid it had been. If so, it was gone now. Had taken back its legs and just walked off on them into New York, circa 1977. Not good. But it had taken her fear of the rose with it, and that was good. She didn’t want to be afraid of something that felt so strong and so wonderful.

Another personality? Are you thinking the lady who brought the legs was another personality?

Another version of Detta Walker, in other words?

The idea made her feel like screaming. She thought she now understood how a woman would feel if, five years or so after an apparently successful cancer operation, the doctor told her a routine X-ray had picked up a shadow on her lung.

“Not again,” she murmured in a low, frantic voice as a fresh group of pedestrians schooled past. They all moved away from the board fence a little, although it reduced the space between them considerably. “No, not again. It can’t be. I’m whole. I’m…I’m fixed .”