"Cody Havero."

"D'you know what day it is?"

"Wouldn't that depend on how long I've been unconscious? It was Thursday-no." She rubbed an aching forehead. "That's wrong, isn't it? The plane landed after midnight, so I suppose it must be Friday."

"Still is," Finn said cheerfully, making a note on his chart. "No evident impairment of cognitive faculties."

"Why should there be?" she muttered, with an undertone of asperity. "I'm suffering, if anything, from shock, not a concussion."

"Now, miss…" he began. "Doctor," she corrected. "Yes," Finn replied, thinking she'd addressed him. "No," she continued patiently, "I'm a doctor."

"Hiya, Major," the other man said from her blind side, and she rolled her head to get a better view. At first glance the joker looked normal. Most people, surprisingly, never noticed his affliction right off-even though, in a very real sense, it was as plain -as the nose on his face. He had no eyes. Not simply eyeless sockets, but no sockets at all, a smooth curve of solid bone from the crown of his head to the nasal cavity. But there'd been a compensation, a nose that Jimmy Durante would have been proud of, possessing a sensitivity that would put a bloodhound to shame.

"Been an age, Sergeant," Cody acknowledged, levering herself up as he bent over to give her a rough embrace. "Too fuckin' long, an' that's a fact."

"You two know each other, Scent?"

"Goin' on twenty, Doc," the blind joker replied. "Meet the only woman combat cutter in U.S. Army history."

"You were in Vietnam?" Finn asked her. "The Joker Brigade," he added with disgust.

"Gotta understand, Doc," Scent said to the young centaur, "there was a lotta rationalization back then. Nobody gave a rat fuck about us. Attitude was, we get killed, that's one less freak fouling the gene pool. Usual pattern, if a joker got medivac'd to an aid station, he'd hardly be there more'n a day before some REMF in razor-creased tiger stripes'd slick up from Saigon to collect him. Standard excuse was to evac him to a special joker medical facility. Made sense actually-at least, most bought it since our regular quarters were in quarantine zone. Problem was, this `facility' seemed to be located an hour's flight out across the South China Sea. No muss, no fuss, just a thousand-foot-high dive into a telegram home to Momma. 'Cept Cody, she didn't buy it. Man showed up on her doorstep, she told him to fuck off. Man brought some Saigon khakis to back him up…" Finn looked confused.

"Upper-echelon staff officers from MACV headquarters," Cody told him.

"… damn if she didn't have a couple of network camera crews on hand doing interviews. Made sure they got pictures of the Man, made sure they had her records of the casualties. Any funny business, no way could it be kept quiet. Man backed down, did a rabbit. After that, you were a joker and you got hit, you moved heaven and earth to get to Cody's doorstep. It was like she was magic-nobody ever died on her table."

"I'm afraid, Scent, that string's gone down the drain." Along, she thought, with a lot of other things. "I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but why am I here? Maybe I'm confused about my New York geography but from what I remember of the subway map, isn't Blythe klicks from that station I was in? Aren't there closer hospitals?"_

Finn spoke: "All 911 was sure of was some sort of wild-card activity at the Lex-Third Avenue station. And, I'm afraid, your reactions to the medics sort of spooked them. They figured they had a manifestation on their hands. Procedure in those cases is, everything comes to Blythe."

"You were on your way here anyway, right?" Scent chimed in.,

"Lucky me," Cody agreed, but with a bite to her words. Scent chose not to take the hint.

"That's right, Major. If there was ever a right move to make, you made it. That's luck in my book."

"The train, Finn." He looked quizzically at her. "There was a transit officer," she explained, "a woman, who helped me…"

"Haven't heard any reports, but there's no reason why we should. I can run a check, though."

"Please, do. There was a… creature on the train. Looked like a joker, but…" She paused, shuddering at the memory. "I don't know, I keep thinking there was a sense of something…" Her voice trailed off and for a moment she felt lost, trying to sort images and memories that refused to stay still, conscious only of a need to run that bordered on panic.

"Can I get out of here, please?" she asked. "And if possible, is there someplace I can tidy up before I see Dr. Tachyon?"

"Residents have a crash pad, upstairs," Scent said, not giving Finn a chance to answer, "where they grab some stray z's when they're tannin' long shifts-I'll take you."

"There really is trouble, Scent," she told him as they rode the elevator up two flights.

"Ain't that the Lord's gospel-careful," he cautioned suddenly, but Cody was already in the process of a quick and nimble two-step over a body that looked made from limp spaghetti, spilling out of its chair and partially across the hallway. `Nice move.

"That touch, at least, I haven't lost."

"If you'd been a guy, the NFL woulda been your fame an' fortune."

There was no air-conditioning-the system had been overwhelmed by the summer's murderous heat, Scent told her, and there simply wasn't money in the budget for repairs-and the atmosphere was rotten. The sky outside the windows was only beginning to hint at the approaching dawn, heaven help them once the sun actually came up. New York, she knew, didn't suffer summer gladly, and this August appeared worse than most.

"Scent, something is out there."

"A lotta shit's out there, Cody. An' it's all startin' to come down-hard."

"Shiloh."

"That's right, you were there. Yup"-he sighed"Shiloh. Or worse. Here's the hooch. It's a mess, but that's the way you docs seem to like, I guess…"

"When were young and broke and working ninety-six hours at a stretch."

"Break my heart. Anyway, you hungry after, I know a nice diner, coupla blocks' walk, serves finest-kind breakfast."

"I'll let you know"

"Take care, Major."

"Thanks, Sergeant. This is one I owe you."

Tachyon's office, surprisingly, was nothing special, standard bureaucratic box with a view of the river and the Brooklyn waterfront. One wall of bookshelves full of medical texts, a pair of computer terminals on a table underneath littered with disks. Tachyon's desk angled so he could look out the windows without turning his back on any visitor. It was an antique; she didn't know enough to name the period or style, only that it was as magnificent as the small sideboard tucked into the corner behind it. The window was wide open, covered with a screen, with piles of documents stacked haphazardly on the sill. The sky was dark and a whisper of wind stirred the papersstorm signs, a nasty one, and she reacted instinctively, stepping behind the desk to shift the material to the floor below and lever the window partially closed. Made the room that much warmer, by cutting down the admittedly minimal circulation, but at least everything in it wouldn't end up drenched. She hoped the rain would mean the end of the heat wave, but doubted it. Drought had scarred most of the country this summer, days of three-figure temperatures everywhere you went-there was talk up and down the Midwest of a return to the Depression dust bowl-and she knew firsthand what the weather had done to her beloved mountains. There'd been another report on NPR's Morning Edition about the Yellowstone fires, memory filling her nostrils with the acrid tang of pine smoke.

"I hope, Dr. Havero, this interview suits you as much as my office clearly does."

She jumped, taken by surprise, realizing that she'd sunk down into the chair behind the desk-automatically making herself at home-and cursing the fact that the door was to her right, her blind side. Began to stammer an apology, vetoed the thought, tried instead to pass the faux pas off with a shrug and a smile.