Some of it doesn’t belong to me, some of it does. I’ll bet you can tell the difference.

Thanks to Croik for beta and encouragement. I might have done it without her, but I wouldn’t have wanted to.

* * *

Cold night. Strange how everything cools so fast when the sun goes down, and the evening sweeps across the desert like another ice age. In the hollow between the shadows, as the red tint on the horizon fades and a certain blue descends, I want to imagine… glaciers groaning across a sea of dunes. Packing the sand to rock beneath their bulk, driving splinters of stone into the earth. I want visions of a westward migration, of the scattered corpses of men and dogs. I want the sensation of my lungs contracting from the cold, my hair freezing to my cheeks, my breath billowing in clouds before me…

It’s not that I don’t like the desert. You can get away with murder here – and I often have. I take one of Victor’s cigarettes from the pack on the table, and light it against the chill.

Victor won’t care. He’s been dead for hours.

His corpse is stiffening in the corner, and the gun that painted the wall with half his face is tucked under my coat. I didn’t want him watching me scrub the blood from my hands, but I still don’t remember how long ago I bent over him and closed his one remaining eye.

I must be going mad. True, I haven’t exactly been what you could call sane these past few years, but this… this is a special breed of madness. I’ve never liked killing assassins. It gets all the wrong people talking. But Victor had this coming… in his own sort of way. The questions he was asking me – about a stranger in a white coat – and the way he was asking them implied soon enough he would be taking them to the men he believed to be our mutual superiors.

And I just couldn’t have that.

With my back pressed against the window like this, I can feel the cold like the point of a knife poised between my shoulder blades. It must be slowing me down. My blood is thick in my veins.

You have to tighten up, Dominique; you can’t keep dropping off like this… I’ll blame the cold. Blame the gun holstered against my ribs, Victor’s questions, the fiberglass lumps of brain and bone splattered across the wallpaper.

I’ll blame anything but what it really is.

Feels sometimes like I’m standing beneath a bleach-white sky, staring up into brilliant double suns and praying for rain. But God doesn’t answer prayers like that, does he? And so it’s no use praying for something I’ll never see outside my dreams.

Nothing had changed… but everything can. I only need to wake up, stop sleepwalking. I’ve been half-dead these past months, it seems. So maybe this was just what I needed, something to snap me out of this damn trance.

Then again… maybe I need something else entirely.

I take out my watch and glance at it and it’s been three weeks, two days, nine hours, forty-seven minutes, and twelve – make that thirteen – seconds since I last saw Legato Bluesummers. And the way things are going, I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever see him again. When I close my eye, I catch a rush of pale fabric out of the corner of my vision, and when I breathe in, it drowns out everything but the cold laughter just beyond the fringe of my perception.

And I think… this is it. This is really it. I’ve finally gone completely and totally mad. Is this supposed to come as a surprise?

But there’s something incontestably freeing, too. As though, with madness, there descends also a certain degree of clarity. I’m a woman possessed, no longer to be held accountable for my actions. And that is why I step away from the window, fluidly. I don’t feel any hesitation; in fact, I don’t feel much of anything at all when I tip the lamp on the table so oil spills in a murky pool on the floor, the same swirling translucence as a sheet of ice.

I tap the ash from my cigarette, and it shakes me awake somehow - the way the smoke curls and bows to the ceiling… I drop the butt to the ground, and the oil catches, so fast I have to step back and it can only lick at my boots like a wounded animal.

I slip into the hall and shut the door behind me against a wall of black smoke. Paces ahead of me, a pair of yellowy eyes glare at me from the shadows. A little black cat, startled by the tread of my boots on hardwood. It bristles, hisses and spits at me, and then it catches the scent of smoke creeping now under Victor’s door and with an irritated yowl disappears out the window at the end of the hall.

It’s good. The little things like that, they’re what find new ways to make me feel guilty. The innocent things’ll get you every time.

Outside, I turn back. Just for a moment, long enough to see flames creeping over Victor’s windowsill before I take off running down the street. I feel strangely content, satisfied, as though the hard part is over at last. But maybe it’s just that I feel more awake than I have in weeks, that I’m on my way back to Dimitri, to…

To hell with that. I’ll never get anywhere thinking that way. I catch the red-eye sand steamer and try to remind myself that I’m not rational anymore, that I’m crazed and wild and liable to do anything.

I sleep for an hour, but I keep my eye open the whole time.

Outside Rushmore Town, I almost miss it but I think I’m being tailed. The man in the dark duster, and the blue-eyed girl with him… I duck into an antique shop and browse a row of cheap china until I’m certain I’ve shaken them.

Maybe I should take Legato a little teapot in the shape of a duck.

But I steal a car instead, a fast one that looks like it can get me across the desert. I’m in the warm throes of obsession now; I’ll be in Dimitri before nightfall. Breathing his air again, listening to his voice… I wonder, is this what it feels like to be him? To be so driven, single-minded, determined? Perhaps I’m not as hopeless as he thinks I am.

Just before town, I ditch the car on the side of a dune, and I have a picture in my mind of sand - just sand - driven by the wind, corroding the paint striping the leather. Covering it. Until there’s nothing left that says I once passed this way. It’ll happen faster than you would think out here. If I died in the desert, it would take two days for sandstorms to peel the flesh from my bones.

I enter Dimitri close to sunset, just when the desert is starting to cool off. I hardly feel it this time, though. Something fanatical and feverish is driving me into a town already barred against the night. It’s disappointing, somehow, that no one can be here, that there isn’t anyone to bear witness to my sweeping madness, to what must be a feral gleam in my eye, a smug curl to my lips.

And then I catch it, footsteps at my back. Silent and clever, just behind me and on my blindside. Nice. My hand goes to the pistol beneath my coat, but something keeps me from drawing. I think I give off an aura of lunacy - Danger! Rabid animal! Exercise extreme caution! Proceed at your own risk! – and I like that, even though by now, I know, I should have turned and by now I should have my gun pressed to the stranger’s temple and by now he should be looking puzzled and by now he should be bleeding into the dirt… You get the picture.

"Dominique."

Something curls inside me, and I turn, and what must be a rather foolish, reckless grin is tugging at the corners of my mouth. I face him across a wheel-rut in the street, and it might as well be the Red Sea.

"Legato." I nod. "I’m back."