"No," said Dirk.

"Tell me about-you know, about afterwards. Jaan just sort of sketched it out. I want to know." Her voice was weary and full of pain, but not to be denied.

So Dirk told her.

"He pointed his gun at Garse?" she said at one point. Dirk nodded, and she subsided again.

When he had finished, Gwen was very silent. Her eyes closed briefly, opened again, then closed and did not reopen. She lay quietly on her side, curled up into a sort of fetal ball, her hands clenched into small fists beneath her chin. Watching her, Dirk felt his eyes drawn to her left forearm, to the cold reminder of the jade-and-silver she still wore.

"Gwen," he said, softly. Her eyes opened again– for a very short time-and she shook her head violently, a silent shouted no! "Hey," he said, but by then her lids were shut tight once more, and she was lost within herself, and Dirk was alone with her jewelry and his fears.

The room was soaked in sunlight, or what passed for sunlight here on Worlorn; the sunset tones of high noon were slanting through the window, and dust motes drifted lazily through the broad beam. The light fell so that only one side of the mattress was illuminated; Gwen lay half in and half out of shadow.

Dirk-he did not speak again to Gwen, or look at her-found himself watching the patterns the light made on the floor.

In the center of the chamber everything was warm and red, and it was here the dust danced, drifting in from the darkness and turning briefly crimson, briefly golden, throwing tiny shadows, until it drifted out of the light again and was gone. He raised his hand, held it out for-minutes? hours?-for a time. It grew warm and warmer; dust swirled around it; shadows fell away like water when he twitched and turned his fingers; the sun was friendly and familiar. But suddenly he became aware that the movements of his hand, like the endless whirling of dust, had no purpose, no pattern, and no meaning. It was the music that told him so; the music of Lamiya-Bailis.

He pulled his hand in and frowned.

Around the great center of light and life was a thin twisting border where the sun shone through the window's rim of black and blood stained glass. Or fought through. It was only a small border, but it sealed the land of the stirring dust on every side.

Beyond it were the black corners, the sections of the room that the Hub and the Trojan Suns never reached, where fat demons and the shapes of Dirk's fears hunched obscurely, forever safe from scrutiny.

Smiling and rubbing his chin-stubble covered his cheeks and jaw, and he was starting to itch-Dirk studied those corners and let the Darkdawn music back into his soul. How he had ever tuned it out he was not sure, but now it was back and all around him.

The tower they were in-their home-sounded its long low note. Years away, or centuries, a chorus answered in ringing widows' wails. He heard shuddering throbs, and the screams of abandoned babies, and the slippery sliding sound of knives slicing warm flesh. And the drum. How could the wind beat a drum? he thought. He didn't know. Perhaps it was something else. But it sounded like a drum. So terribly far off, though, and so alone.

So horribly endlessly alone.

The mists and the shadows gathered in the farthest, dimmest corner of their room, and then began to clear. Dirk saw a table and a low chair, growing from the walls and floor like strange plastic vegetables. He wondered briefly what he was seeing them by; the sun had moved a little, and only a thin beam of light was trickling through the window now, and finally that snapped off too, and the world was gray.

When the world was gray, he noted, the dust did not dance. No. Not at all. He felt the air to be sure; there was no dust, no warmth, no sunlight. He nodded sagely. It seemed that he had discovered some great truth.

Dim lights were stirring in the walls, ghosts waking for another night. Phantoms and husks of old dreams. All of them were gray and white; color was only for the living, and had no place here.

The ghosts began to move. They were locked into the walls, each of them; from time to time, Dirk thought he could see one stop its furious dancing and beat helplessly and hopelessly against the glass walls that kept it from the room. Wraith hands pounding, pounding, yet the room shook not at all. Stillness was a part of these things; the phantoms were just that, all insubstantial, and pound though they might, finally they must return to dancing.

The dance-the dance macabre-shapeless shadows– Oh, but it was beautiful! Moving, dipping, writhing. Walls of gray flame. So much better than the dust motes, these dancers; they had a pattern, and their music was the song of the Siren City.

Desolation. Emptiness. Decay. A single drum, beaten slow. Alone. Alone. Alone. Nothing has meaning.

"Dirk!"

It was Gwen's voice. He shook his head, looked away from the walls, down to where she lay in darkness. It was night. Night. Somehow the day had gone.

Gwen-she had not been sleeping-was looking up at him. "I'm sorry," she said. She was telling him something. But he knew it already, knew it from her silence, knew it from– From the drum perhaps. From Kryne Lamiya.

He smiled. "You never forgot, did you? It wasn't a question of forgetting. There was a reason why you never removed the…" He pointed.

"Yes," she said. She sat up in the bed, the coverlet falling down around her waist. Jaan had unsealed the front of her suit, so it hung on her loosely, and the soft curves of her breasts were visible. In the flickering light the flesh was pale and gray. Dirk felt no stirrings. Her hand went to the jade-and-silver. She touched it, stroked it, sighed. "I never thought– I don't know– I said what I had to say, Dirk. Bretan Braith would have killed you."

"Maybe that would have been better," he answered. Not bitterly, but in a bemused, faintly distracted sort of way. "So you never meant to leave him?"

"I don't know. How do I know what I meant? I was going to try, Dirk, really I was. I never really believed, though. I told you that. I was honest. This isn't Avalon, and we've changed. I'm not your Jenny. I never was, and now less than ever."

"Yes," he said, nodding. "I remember you driving. The way you gripped the stick. Your face. Your eyes. You have jade eyes, Gwen. Jade eyes and a silver smile. You frighten me." He glanced away from her, back to the walls. Light-murals moved in chaotic patterns, along with the thin wild music. Somehow the ghosts had gone away. He had only taken his eyes from them for an instant, yet all of them had melted and left. Like his old dreams, he thought.

"Jade eyes?" Gwen was saying.

"Like Garse."

"Garse has blue eyes," she said.

"Still. Like Garse."

She chuckled, and groaned. "It hurts when I laugh," she said. "But it's funny. Me like Garse. No wonder Jaan-"

"You'll go back to him?"

"Maybe. I'm not sure. It would be very hard to leave him now. Do you understand? He's finally chosen. When he pointed his laser at Garse. After that, after he turned against teyn and holdfast and world, I can't just– You know. But I won't go back to being a betheyn to him, not ever. It will have to be more than jade-and-silver."

Dirk felt empty. He shrugged. "And me?"

"You know it wasn't working. Surely. You had to feel it. You never stopped calling me Jenny."

He smiled. "I didn't? Maybe not. Maybe not."

"Never," she said. She rubbed her head. "I'm feeling a little better now," she said. "You still have those protein bars?"

Dirk took one from his pocket and flipped it at her. She snatched it from the air with her left hand, smiled at him, unwrapped it, and began to eat.

He stood up abruptly, jamming his hands deep into his jacket pockets, and walked to the high window. The tops of the bone-white towers still wore a faint, waning reddish tinge-perhaps the Helleye and its attendants were not entirely gone from the western sky. But below, in the streets, the Darkdawn city drank of night. The canals were black ribbons, and the landscape dripped with the dim purple radiance of phosphorescent moss. Through that lambent gloom Dirk glimpsed his solitary bargeman, as he had glimpsed him once before upon those same dark waters. He was leaning on his pole, as ever, letting the current take him, coming on and on, easily, inexorably. Dirk smiled. "Welcome," he muttered, "welcome."