His smile, only a small one but very sweet, faltered a tiny bit. “I know it sounds crazy—”

“I saw a woman appear out of nowhere right here,” Trudy said. “Three and a half hours ago, I saw this. When she showed up, she had no legs from the knees down. Then she grew the rest of em. So who’s crazy, my friend?”

He was looking at her, wide-eyed, just some anonymous time-server in a suit with his tie pulled down at the end of the work-day. And yes, she could see the pits and shadows of old acne on his cheeks and forehead. “This is true?”

She held up her right hand. “If I’m lyin, I’m dyin. Bitch stole my shoes.” She hesitated. “No, she wasn’t a bitch. I don’t believe she was a bitch. She was scared and she was barefooted and she thought she was in labor. I just wish I’d had time to give her my sneakers instead of my good goddam shoes.”

The man was giving her a cautious look, and Trudy Damascus suddenly felt tired. She had an idea this was a look she was going to get used to. The sign said WALK again, and the man who’d spoken to her started across, swinging his briefcase.

“Mister!”

He didn’t stop walking, but did look back over his shoulder.

“What used to be here, back when you used to stop by for acne treatments?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It was just a vacant lot behind a fence. I thought it would stop—that nice sound—when they built on the site, but it never did.”

He gained the far curb. Walked off up Second Avenue. Trudy stood where she was, lost in thought.I thought it would stop, but it never did.

“Now why would that be?” she asked, and turned to look more directly at 2 Hammarskjöld Plaza. The Black Tower. The humming was stronger now that she was concentrating on it. And sweeter. Not just one voice but many of them. Like a choir. Then it was gone. Disappeared as suddenly as the black woman had done the opposite.

No it didn’t,Trudy thought.I just lost the knack of hearing it, that’s all. If I stood here long enough, I bet it would come back. Boy, this is nuts. I’mnuts.

Did she believe that? The truth was that she did not. All at once the world seemed very thin to her, more an idea than an actual thing, and barely there at all. She had never felt less hard-headed in her life. What she felt was weak in her knees and sick to her stomach and on the verge of passing out.

There was a little park on the other side of Second Avenue. In it was a fountain; nearby was a metal sculpture of a turtle, its shell gleaming wetly in the fountain’s spray. She cared nothing for fountains or sculptures, but there was also a bench.

W ALK had come around again. Trudy tottered across Second Avenue, like a woman of eighty-three instead of thirty-eight, and sat down. She began to take long, slow breaths, and after three minutes or so felt a little better.

Beside the bench was a trash receptacle with KEEP LITTER IN ITS PLACE stenciled on the side. Below this, in pink spray-paint, was an odd little graffito:See the TURTLE of enormous girth. Trudy saw the turtle, but didn’t think much of its girth; the sculpture was quite modest. She saw something else, as well: a copy of theNew York Times, rolled up as she always rolled hers, if she wanted to keep it a little longer and happened to have a bag to stow it in. Of course there were probably at least a million copies of that day’sTimes floating around Manhattan, but this one was hers. She knew it even before fishing it out of the litter basket and verifying what she knew by turning to the crossword, which she’d mostly completed over lunch, in her distinctive lilac-colored ink.

She returned it to the litter basket and looked across Second Avenue to the place where her idea of how things worked had changed. Maybe forever.

Took my shoes. Crossed the street and sat here by the turtle and put them on. Kept my bag but dumped theTimes.Why’d she want my bag? She didn’t have any shoes of her own to put in it.

Trudy thought she knew. The woman had put her plates in it. A cop who got a look at those sharp edges might be curious about what you served on dishes that could cut your fingers off if you grabbed them in the wrong place.

Okay, but then where did she go?

There was a hotel down at the corner of First and Forty-sixth. Once it had been the U.N. Plaza. Trudy didn’t know what its name was now, and didn’t care. Nor did she want to go down there and ask if a black woman in jeans and a stained white shirt might have come in a few hours ago. She had a strong intuition that her version of Jacob Marley’s ghost had done just that, but here was an intuition she didn’t want to follow up on. Better to let it go. The city was full of shoes, butsanity, one’ssanity —

Better to head home, take a shower, and just…let it go. Except—

“Something is wrong,” she said, and a man walking past on the sidewalk looked at her. She looked back defiantly. “Somewhere something isvery wrong. It’s—”

Tippingwas the word that came to mind, but she would not say it. As if to say it would cause the tip to become a topple.

It was a summer of bad dreams for Trudy Damascus. Some were about the woman who first appeared and thengrew. These were bad, but not the worst. In the worst ones she was in the dark, and terrible chimes were ringing, and she sensed something tipping further and further toward the point of no return.

Susannah’s memory had become distressingly spotty, unreliable, like the half-stripped transmission of an old car. She remembered the battle with the Wolves, and Mia waiting patiently while it went on…

No, that wasn’t right. Wasn’t fair. Mia had been doing a lot more than waiting patiently. She had been cheering Susannah (and the others) on with her own warrior’s heart. Holding the labor in abeyance while her chap’s surrogate mother dealt death with her plates. Only the Wolves had turned out to be robots, so could you really say…

Yes. Yes, you can. Because they were more than robots, much more, and we killed them. Rose up righteous and killed their asses.

But that was neither here nor there, because it was over. And once it was, she had felt the labor coming back, and strong. She was going to have the kid at the side of the damn road if she didn’t look out; and there it would die, because it was hungry, Mia’s chap washongry, and…

You got to help me!

Mia. And impossible not to respond to that cry. Even while she felt Mia pushing her aside (as Roland had once pushed Detta Walker aside), it was impossible not to respond to that wild mother’s cry. Partly, Susannah supposed, because it washer body they shared, and the body had declared itself on behalf of the baby. Probably could not do otherwise. And so she had helped. She had done what Mia herself no longer could do, had stopped the labor a bit longer. Although that in itself would become dangerous to the chap (funny how that word insinuated itself into her thoughts, became her word as well as Mia’s word) if it was allowed to go on too long. She remembered a story some girl had told during a late-night hen party in the dorm at Columbia, half a dozen of them sitting around in their pj’s, smoking cigarettes and passing a bottle of Wild Irish Rose—absolutelyverboten and therefore twice as sweet. The story had been about a girl their age on a long car-trip, a girl who’d been too embarrassed to tell her friends she needed a pee-stop. According to the story, the girl had suffered a ruptured bladder and died. It was the kind of tale you simultaneously thought was bullshit and believed absolutely. And this thing with the chap…thebaby …