"Do you suggest I might be swayed by evidence not germane to this case?" Conower asked silkily.

"I suggest that Mr. Latham is attempting to try his case in the press. This is rank sensationalism."

Conower frowned. "Mr. Latham?"

Latham spread his hands as if surprised. "What am I to do, your honor? My opponent avers that ace powers are harmless. I demonstrate the contrary."

"I aver no such damn fool thing."

"Perhaps he would put it, Ace powers don't kill people-people kill people. I intend to demonstrate that the destructive potential of these powers is too enormous to be dismissed with a flip syllogism."

Pretorius grinned. "I have to hand it to you, St. John. You are stone death walking to straw men."

He shifted weight to the cane from his bad leg and turned to the judge. "Mr. Latham is trying to drag in atrocities with no connection to JJ Flash other than that they were committed by an ace with fire-related powers. And even if Flash were involved, to indict Dr. Meadows on that account smacks of guilt by association."

"If Dr. Meadows commonly associated with known members of the Medellin Cartel," Latham said ingenuously, "would your honor say that fact lacked relevance to his suitability as a parent?"

Conower squeezed her mouth till her lips disappeared. "Very well, Mr. Latham. You may present your case. And may I remind you, Dr. Pretorius, that I'm the one charged with evaluating the evidence?"

Mark felt more exposed and humiliated than he ever had in his life. This was worse than one of those balls-outon-Broadway dreams. All his life he'd shunned attention, in his own persona at least. Now all these strangers were looking at him and Sprout and thinking about those awful pictures.

Pretorius turned away from the bench. His eyebrows bristled over blue-hot eyes. Latham approached the witness stand with a look like an Inquisitor with a fresh-lit torch.

Kimberly was studying her fingernails. Mark looked at Sprout. Seeming to sense his attention, she looked up into his eyes and smiled.

He wanted to die.

"We need to do more, Mrs. Gooding," St. John Latham said.

"Such as what? You seem to be doing a marvelous job of emasculating my ex-husband as it is."

Latham stood. She sat on the couch, to the extent sitting was possible on a chrome-framed Scandinavian slab. It was more a matter of trying not to slide off onto the black marble floor. If the lawyer noticed the bitter sarcasm in her voice-as if she and Mark were on one side and he on the other-he didn't acknowledge it.

"Dr. Pretorius is a chronic romantic, and his notions of human nature and interactions downright quaint. Nonetheless, he is not a total fool. He is cunning, and he knows the law. And you are not without your vulnerable points." She threw her cigarette half-smoked into her drink and set the tumbler down on the irregular glass coffee table with a clink. "Such as?"

"Such as your breakdown in court during the first custody hearing. It lost the case for you then. It cannot help you now"

The two exterior walls that met at one corner of the Goodings' living room were glass. Kimberly gazed out over Manhattan and thought about how much the view reminded her of a black velvet painting. Apartments with panoramic views like this one always came off better in the movies, somehow.

" I was under a lot of stress."

"As are you now. It is not inconceivable that Pretorius might try to reduce you to another such breakdown on the stand."

She looked at him. "Is that what you'd do in his place?"

He said nothing.

She lit another cigarette and blew smoke toward him. "Okay. What did you have in mind?"

"A concrete demonstration of your husband's ace powers. Or solid evidence of the actual nature of the connection between him and Flash and Moonchild and the rest, if he is no more than a Jimmy Olsen figure."

Her eyes narrowed. "What are you saying."

"If your former husband loves your daughter as much as he claims, a perceived threat to her would certainly lead him to employ any powers he might have."

She went white, tensed as if she were about to leap up and attack him. Then she settled back and elaborately studied her manicure.

" I shouldn't be surprised that you're a bastard, Mr. Latham," she said. "After all, that's why I hired you. But it occurs to me-"

She lowered her hand and gave him a smile, poisonous and V -shaped. "It occurs to me that you're insane. You want me to use my daughter for bait?"

He didn't flinch. Didn't even flicker.

"I said perceived threat, Mrs. Gooding. I am talking about a set-piece-a stratagem. There would be no real risk."

Showing as little emotion as he, she picked up her glass and threw it hard at his head. He shifted his weight. The glass sailed past to shatter against the window. In New York, people who live in glass houses have to have stoneproof walls; it's in the building code.

"I'm paying you to win this in court, you son of a bitch. Not to play games with my daughter's life."

He showed her the ghost of a smile. "What do you think the law is but playing games with people's lives?"

"Get out," she said. "Get out of my house."

"Certainly." Calm. Always calm. Infuriating, impermeable, irresistible. "Anything the client desires. But reflect on this: Not even I can get your daughter for you if you don't want her badly enough to sacrifice."

Sprout clung tightly to her parents' hands. "Mommy and Daddy, be nice to each other," she said solemnly. "In that court place, everybody always sounds mad all the time. It makes me afraid."

She clouded up and started to sniffle. "I'm afraid they'll take me away from you."

Her mother hugged her, hard. "Honey, we'll always be with you." A hooded look to Mark. "One of us will. Always."

Sprout let Kimberly lower her onto the mattress among the stuffed toys and gazed up with wide eyes. "Promise?"

"Promise," her mother said.

"Yeah," Mark said around an obstruction in his throat. "One of us will always be around. We can promise you that much."

Kimberly sipped Chianti from her jelly jar. "Your room looks so naked without all the psychedelia." Candlelight struck half-moon amethyst highlights off her eyes. "I mean, who'd -imagine you without that huge poster of Tom Marion over your bed?"

He smiled ruefully. "The worst part is this futon I got in place of my old mattress. It's like nothing at all sometimes. I wake up with sore patches on my knees and elbows from the floor."

Kimberly drank wine and sighed. Mark tried hard not to think about the way her breasts rode up inside the thin cotton blouse. He'd been alone too long.

"Oh, Mark, what happened to us?"

He shook his head. His eyes grew misty. Way back and down, he felt derisive sounds coming out of Flash and Cosmic Traveler, sitting like hecklers in the cheap seats of his mind. It was rare enough they agreed on anything. He felt wordless care and concern from Moonchild, nothing at all from Aquarius. Starshine was vaguely disapproving. He was probably afraid Mark was going to have fun. It wasn't socially conscious.

She moistened her lips. "I know St. John is being awfully hard on you. I wish it didn't have to be this way." He looked at her with eyes that felt as if they had no moisture in them, parched by each random breath of air. It was strange, considering how close he was to tears. Would it do me any good to beg? he wondered. Oh, please, the Traveler said.

She settled back on his pillow. Even in the eighties a man got to have a pillow. For a moment she half lay that way, one leg cocked, her hair hanging in her eyes and around her shoulders with just a little bit of perm kink still in it. He thought she'd never looked so beautiful. Not even when she was carrying Sprout and they were both breaking their necks to make believe that everything was going to work out.