"Yes."

She stood. "You're a real case, buster. See you around."

He didn't see her the next day. He didn't expect to, and was disappointed anyway. In the chilly, fetid, humid dorm that night he reflected that he always seemed to be attracted to women who didn't see him the next day.

Ha. Attracted to her. There's a thought. For a moment, the voice n his head sounded like the familiar banter of JJ Flash, Esquire. But sharp-edged as he was, Flash was never quite that gratuitously nasty. And Mark's friends had dwindled away to nothingness within weeks after the trial. Actually, they'd drowned in booze for a few weeks, like the rest of his mind, and when he got a grip on himself they were gone. He wondered if he'd ever get them back.

Maybe he didn't deserve to. He had deserted them, after all-flushed them down the john on his lawyer's advice, to avoid a holding rap that would scuttle his chances of hanging onto his daughter. He had kept five vials, one for each persona. Three had been broken, one had sufficed to save the life of a child-at the cost of his secret, his life aboveground, and Sprout. The final one had gotten him out of Family Court just as the DEA was closing in on him. He had abandoned his friends. Maybe he had murdered them. And it hadn't done one damned bit of good. He wouldn't come back if he was one of them.

He went to sleep.

She caught up with him the next day, just after noon. They went for a walk again, and just talked. About books, about the fucked-up world they lived in, about the things Mark had been through, as an ace or beyond. Never about her, though; the times he asked she went quiet and spiky, and he quit after a while. She was a bright, bitter, and all-tooknowing kid, cynical and vulnerable by random turns.

She was also beautiful. He tried not to think about that. He settled into the routine of life on the Rox. Or nonroutine. Aside from the steam tables, which came to life sometime in the morning and sometime toward sunset, the only rhythms the Rox knew were the sun and the tides and what people felt like cranking through their ghetto blasters. Mark was going mad. Somewhere his daughter was trapped in a nightmare she couldn't possibly comprehend. He had to help her. But not even Pretorius-sticking his neck way out-had been able to turn up clue one to her whereabouts.

"I can't tell him."

The night wind unreeled flame and light from the tiki torches like a kid jerking at a roll of toilet paper. Pairs of jumpers sparred with one another on the landfill margin behind the Admin Building in the uncertain light.

Blaise paused in mopping his forehead with a towel. He always insisted on clean fresh towels being brought over from the mainland for his showers and workouts. He got them.

"What do you mean, you can't tell him?" His voice took on a dangerous edge.

"It means so much to him. I feel like I'm… like I'm using him."

Anger hit him. Trembling anger. She saw it in his face and stepped back.

You bitch. You bitch! Are you beginning to feel loyal to him?

"You haven't used people before? You haven't used people up? Think, K. C. Think hard. You're a jumper, remember? Jumpers use people. Especially burned-out old nat pukes."

"He's not a nat, he's an ace"She stiffened as if expecting to receive a blow. "Besides… besides, I'm through with that. You know that. We need to build something out here, something strong that the Combine can't just sweep away like a kid knocking down a bunch of blocks."

"You're starting to sound like Bloat."

"I thought I was sounding like you. You with your talk of a New Order. Is that all that it is, just talk?"

I should kill her now. But the thought fell like a dead leaf through his consciousness, without heat, without weight. He already knew he was through with her. But instead of destroying her here and now, he would use her. Use her up in the destruction of Captain fucking Trips.

I'm learning patience, Grandpere. You'll be so proud of me when I tell you.

"No. And that that's why you're going to tell him. We need his help. We, we need his ace power when the Combine comes to call. Besides, you'll be giving him what he wants most in the world, won't you?"

She looked at him a moment, eyes glinting like coins in the firelight. She stood tiptoe to kiss his cheek. "Yeah," she breathed huskily in his ear, and kissed him on the adolescent down of his cheek. "Sometimes, Blaise, you're almost human." She turned and ran away.

I'll pay you for that one too, he thought.

"She's in the Reeves Diagnostic and Development Institute, in Brooklyn. Borough Park area. It's a Kings County joint; there's some kind of deal down between the city, the state, and the counties to share custody, so they can keep her circulating."

He was sitting with his butt planted in damp frigid sand, squinting at the occasional stab of a patrol-boat spotlight. It was cold as hell tonight, but you had to be flat desperate to retreat into one of the crumbling turn-of-the-century buildings crammed together on Ellis. She hunkered behind him, seemingly inured to cold in her thin jacket and thinner pants. "'Diagnostic and Development'?" he said.

"Yeah. Combine sure talks purty, don't it? Pig Latin for `kid jail,' pal. It's in a pretty decent neighborhood, never run too far down, starting to maybe catch a case of the yuppies. Not too bad. As hellholes go."

He turned and looked at her, disbelief struggling with the will to believe on the battlefield of his face. "How could you find out, when the best lawyer in Jokertown drew a blank?"

"Best lawyer in Jokertown is by definition not a juvenile delinquent, darlin'. Capisc'? `You wanna find a missing kid, ask an outlaw,' or words to that effect."

He jumped up, walked toward the water, walked back, sidestepping a drunk or drugged joker face down in the sand. He began to pace in front of K. C. "I have to make plans. I have to do this right. Think now, Mark. Think." He plumped down in the depression he'd made before, feeling heavy and overwhelmed.

"Maybe you should get some sleep first." She bent over and kissed him lightly on the forehead, then melted into black.

Mark stood on the sidewalk in front of the Blythe van Rensselaer Clinic with tears standing like small hot crowds on his face. Tachyon wasn't in, the surly and unfamiliar face behind the desk of the strangely deserted reception room had told him. And when the doctor was in, he wasn't receiving visitors. Any visitors.

Cody was dead. The news lay in Mark's stomach like a gallon of ice. That lady had meant so much to Tach, had done so much to bring him back from the terrible events of the Atlanta Convention.

Sprout had always loved her. And now she was gone, apparent victim of Tachyon's enemies.

Tach had crawled back into the bottle. As he had when honor had forced him to destroy the mind of Blythe van Rensselaer. It would not be easy for him to escape a second time.

And that was tough.

Mark rubbed spidery hands over his face as if scrubbing his cheeks clean with the tears. As he closed his eyes, he saw his daughter's hand reaching out for him again, while he asCosmic Traveler sank through the floor of the courthouse and the bailiffs closed in.

I'm sorry, Doc. She needs me worse than you do. No matter what's happening to you.

I'm sorry.

He raised his head. A patrol car prowled by. The flat black face of the cop on the passenger side seemed to track him through the chicken-wire mesh that covered the windows of all the cars from the jokertown precinct as it slid sharklike through the sightseers huddled in schools against the strangeness of the scene.

Time for my boot heels to be wandering, his nascent street-sense told him.

He stuck his hands in the pocket of his army jacket and walked away. But not too fast.

The Demon Princes had shot out the streetlights again. The man walking home from swing shift down the Jokertown side street paid no mind. It would take more than cracks in the sidewalk to disrupt the primo ballerino grace with which he walked, as it would take more than the chill of a New York January evening to require him to add the threadbare windbreaker thrown over one shoulder to the black Cinderella T-shirt. Besides, he saw in the dark like a leopard.