"Sorry for not warning you. Could you stand still for a minute?"
    Puzzled, I stood there while she stared at me with a peculiar expression; I decided not to ask.
    "Thanks," she said eventually, with a little smile.
    "OK. See you later." I headed back to base, still confused. As usual. Scott and his dad were doing more work on the computers. I went up to my room, fully intending to take a nap before we rendezvoused with Winters for the evening's entertainment. A pile of papers had been stacked neatly on the pillow. I picked up the top sheet and saw the SysGen logo.
    No nap.
    The company formed in CA in 1981, doing work in research psychology and biology with a bent toward the entertainment industry, and employed a high number of actors for a project of unspecified nature. They ran out of money after a few years, and then a mid-level scandal erupted around one of the directors and the whole thing collapsed in '85. Scott had printed out the personnel lists and neatly highlighted Felix Javelin and Travis Leone.
    All those names, many of them ones I remembered. This is your life. Not quite a cast of thousands, but good enough; I paged through them with a sense of distant curiosity. Between new information and sheer exhaustion, my head was starting to spin. I went back downstairs to find out what Scott and the doctor were up to.
    "Installing a sensor grid upgrade," he answered cheerily.
    "Oh. For what?"
    "We're hoping to be able to pick up the energy pattern when Silverblood goes through a phase change."
    They continued their work, exchanging terse fragments of technobabble. I followed most of it. Eventually my body tugged at my attention again. Sleep? it queried, with a hint of a threat. I caught about an hour's nap to placate it, and then it was five o'clock.
    Hans met with Lucky at the youth center while Scott and I headed for the police station. The SWAT team didn't act thrilled to see us there, seemed to think we were horning in on their action to some degree. Scott and I stayed back and put on our diplomatic faces, tried to make it clear that we were just there to help if necessary and that we'd follow orders, which seemed to reassure them to some extent. I excused myself for a moment, called Lucky and let her know where the bust was going to be. And then it was time.
    It went down textbook-perfect. Nothing unexpected, no traps sprung, no weird new variants cropped up. A couple of the SWAT members were wounded in the exchange of gunfire, but no one was killed, and all the tong members present were captured. We weren't necessary after all, but Winters thanked us for our willingness to be there just in case.
    "Did you get anywhere on that theory you said you were pursuing, on the killing spree?" she asked.
    "Still working on it," I told her. "Mr. Berault is under guard?"
    "We have three men watching him."
    "I think were going to go talk to Mr. Javelin next."
    "You want backup?"
    "He's in a psychiatric ward," I pointed out.
    "Well, yeah, what could he do. The problem is trying to convince a judge about this. You think that he's responsible, that he's talked to someone, made arrangements?"
    "That's the part I'm still not sure on. I'm eliminating possibilities right now."
    "Well, thanks again."
    We gave Lucky and Hans a call, pleased by the lack of surprises, although Lucky remained unsettled about just how easy it had been, wondered if we hadn't been decoyed. She suggested we stick around in the area, maybe finally have dinner and pay off that bet, invited the others along as well. Hans declined and headed off to patrol solo.
    "Sure, why not," I agreed. "Interesting things always happen when we try to do that. You got a place in mind? We'll meet you there."
    "Hm. Lansdowne Street?"
    College hangouts. I rolled my eyes.
    "I have a suggestion," Scott spoke up, much to my surprise. "Have you ever been to The Secret Hideout?"
    "Depends on which one we're talking about," Lucky replied.
    "It's the name of the place."
    "Is it a bar?"
    "Kind of."
    "Never been there."
    "Let me show you this place."
    It was a decent-looking little bar, quaint and underpopulated on a weeknight. The bartender recognized Scott (admittedly, not a difficult task) and greeted the rest of us with a nonchalant nod. Scott headed for the back room.
    "There's a poker game," he mentioned, and then one of the men in the room stood up with an expansive smile and said, "Ah! My mechanical friend, how are you?"
    As the conclusion to a somewhat peculiar day, then, I spent the evening playing seven card stud for dollar stakes with the Muse, the Sphinx, Margaret O'Malley Wilson Guggenheim East (also known as Molly Irish), and Shovels Stevie (former kid sidekick, current machine shop employee). All former criminals, except for Stevie, villains whose glory days had been the thirties and forties—a more innocent time, we were told, with many a nostalgic glance—friends and associates of Toy Man and the Lepidopterist. We politely kept the conversation away from where those missing friends might be, and Lucky and I assured them that we weren't planning on holding any grudges for our defeat, which earned us Molly's radiant smile and an assurance that we would get along famously. I'd love to know where Scott met these people; it gave me a bit of a shock to realize just how much he's developed since his "birth."
    It was all very cordial, and I found myself wishing things were still the way they described them, that our work could still be called the Game. Everything nowadays is so... serious. People die. No one goes into crime for the excitement, the challenge, and most of the people on our side work on a professional level, rather than acting as far outside the law as their opponents. For myself, I am forced to admit that my sense of humor was probably the first casualty of everything that's happened since Reilly placed that call in February.
    I drank iced tea with lots of sugar to keep my eyes from closing and listened more than I contributed to the conversation. Lost a few dollars. My memory holds a hundred bored games in a hundred airport bars, but "I" never cared enough about it to be good at it—unlike Lucky, apparently, who more than held her own. The Muse won the games she didn't and flirted with all the women (including Lucky and especially Maggie; the energy between the two of them was practically visible). I flirted back, somewhat to my own surprise.
    All in all, I felt more relaxed than I have since the day before Chandler's ritual attempt. We made it home around eleven. Hans had mentioned earlier this afternoon that Trent had called again and said, Tag, you're it, so I decided to give him a try before I finally collapsed. It was a couple hours earlier there, why not.
    "Yeah, Trent Aster's office."
    "Hi, Trent."
    "Oh, hi!" He sounded pleased. "Boy, Hans is stiff, isn't he?"
    I couldn't quite suppress a chuckle, glanced around to see if the man was in the area, but he'd gone to bed. "So, what's up?"
    "I'm just wondering—I wasn't the only one to see some kind of visual connection between Emily and Dawn, right?"
    "Well, they look a lot alike." They shared a certain unearthly beauty. And there had been that curious, not-quite-recognition when they were introduced, I recalled.

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