Damon hesitated, but he stood up without taking the helping hand that the mirror man had extended toward him.

“This is just a VE,” he said. “No matter how clever it is, it’s just a VE. I can step over that ledge, if I want to. No harm can come to me, if I do none to myself.”

“That’s right,” the mirror man told him. “In this world, all your dreams can come true. In this world, you can do anythingyou have a mind to do.” His hand was still extended, but Damon still refused to take it. Had he done so, it would have been a gesture of forgiveness, and he wasn’t the forgiving type.

Damon remembered the sermon he’d preached to Lenny Garon, about the danger of believing that all injuries could be mended, and the wisdom of not taking too many risks in life lest one miss the escalator to emortality. He didn’t think of himself as a hypocrite, but he knew full well that he hadn’t ever practiced what he’d preached—and he hoped that his long practice would come to his rescue now. He wasn’t about to let the mirror man’s challenge pass unmet, and he wasn’t about to accept the mockpaternal helping hand. If he were to fly, he would fly alone.

He stepped to the very edge of the abyss, spread his arms wide as if they were wings, and jumped.

Perhaps he could have flown, if he’d only known how, or even if he’d only had enough faith in himself—but he didn’t.

Damon fell into the awful abyss, and terror swallowed him up.

He lost consciousness long before he reached the bottom, and was glad to be received by the merciful darkness.

Nineteen

W

hen Damon awoke he was not in pain, but his mind seemed clouded, as if his brain were afflicted by a warm and clammy mist. He had endured such sensations before, when his internal technology had been required to deal with the aftermath of drink or drugs. In such circumstances, even the most vivid dream should easily have drifted into oblivion, but the unnaturally lucid dream of the mirror man clung tight to memory, and the legacy of that final fall was with him still.

When he finally forced his eyes open he found that he was, as the mirror man had insisted, lying on a bed, wearing neither a hood nor a bodysuit. He looked down at himself to find that he was dressed in the same suitskin he had been wearing when he stepped into the elevator with Rajuder Singh. It was not noticeably dirtier than it had been then, but there was a ragged tear in the middle of his chest that hadn’t had time to heal.

He sat up. The bed on which he was lying had a heavy iron frame that gave it the appearance of a genuine antique, although it was presumably there for utility’s rather than art’s sake. His right wrist was handcuffed to one of the uprights.

It took him a few seconds to realize that his was not the only bed in the room, and that he was not the only prisoner it held. He blinked away the mucus that was still obscuring his vision slightly and met the inquisitive gaze of his companion. She was not as tall as recent fashion prescribed, but he judged that she was nevertheless authentically young. Her blond hair was in some disarray, and she was handcuffed just as he was, but she didn’t seem to be in dire distress.

“Who are you?” he asked dully.

“Catherine Praill,” she told him. “Who are you?”

“Damon Hart,” he replied reflexively—a second or two before the significance of what she had said sunk in. He reached up with his free hand to rub the sleep from his eyes. His hand was trembling slightly.

“Are you all right?” the girl asked. She seemed a little tremulous herself—understandably, if she too had been kidnapped by the man of mercury and his associates.

“Just confused,” he assured her. “Do you know where we are?”

“No,” she answered. Then, as if fearing that her bluntness might seem impolite, she added: “I’ve heard of you. Silas mentioned your name.”

Damon inferred that she hadn’t been in a position to keep tabs on the Eliminator boards, or she’d surely have mentioned Operator 101’s last message before recalling that Silas Arnett had “mentioned his name.”

“I’ve heard of you too,” he said. “Lenny Garon told me you’d disappeared.”

“Lenny?” She was genuinely astonished by the introduction of thatname. “How did he know? I hardly know him. Didn’t he leave home or something?”

“He asked after you when your name came up in connection with Silas Arnett’s kidnapping. How long have you been here? Who brought you?”

She recoiled slightly under the pressure of the doubled-up questions. “I don’t know anything,” she protested defensively. “I was in a car—the police were taking me home after questioning me. I must have dozed off. I’ve been awake for about an hour but I haven’t seen anyone except you. I don’t feel hungry or thirsty, so I can’t have been asleep very long—but if you think you’reconfused. . . .” She left it at that.

“So you’ve no idea what day it is, I suppose, or where we might be?” Damon looked around the room for clues, but there were no obvious ones to be seen. There was nothing visible through the room’s only window but a patch of blue sky. The patterned carpet that covered the floor looked as old as the bedstead, but it was probably modern. It was faded but quite free of dust and crumbs—which suggested that it had a suitskin capacity to digest waste. A closet door that stood ajar showed nothing but bare boards and empty hangers. There was a small table beside Damon’s bed on which his beltpack and sidepouch had been placed, and the only item there which had not been on his person when he succumbed to the gas was a glass of clear liquid. It was easy enough to reach, and he picked it up in both hands so that he could take a sip. It was water.

“I don’t know anything at all,” Catherine Praill repeated, her voice increasing its note of alarm. “I don’t understand why they brought me here. Are they holding us to ransom?”

She pronounced the word as if the possibility were almost unthinkable—a revenant crime from a more primitive world. Was it unthinkable, though? Was anythingunthinkable now? In a world where every child had eight or ten parents, might not the potential rewards of kidnapping-for-cash come to outweigh the risks, especially given the awesome powers which these kidnappers seemed to possess?

“I don’t think so,” Damon told her. “It wouldn’t make much sense. But then—I don’t know anything either. It’s not for lack of information—I simply can’t separate the truth from the lies. I don’t know what to believe.”

“My foster parents will be worried. I didn’t have anything to do with Silas being kidnapped. The men from Interpol seemed to think that I did, but I didn’t. I would have helped them if I could.”

“It’s okay,” Damon told her. “Whoever brought us here, I don’t think they mean to do us any harm.”

“How do you know?” she demanded. “You said you didn’t know anything.”

“I don’t—but I thinkthey took Silas because they were trying to force two of my other foster parents to abandon some plan they’ve cooked up, or at least to let them in on it. They thought that if they could attract enough public attention my foster parents would be intimidated—but my foster parents aren’t the kind to bend with the wind. I can’t figure out who did what, or why, and I can’t trust anything that anyone says to me, but . . . well, it wouldn’t make sense for them to harm us. I think they want me to do something for them, and I suspect that they only took you to add to the confusion.”

“I don’t understand,” said the blond girl, growing more distraught in spite of Damon’s attempt to soothe her fears. “Silas doesn’t have anything to do with his old friends—and I certainly don’t.”