We got there a few seconds behind her, much too late; Vincent lay motionless on the floor. She jumped off the balcony, absorbed the impact of the twenty-story fall with her staff, and was gone. It didn't occur to me until later, but none of us went after her; we let her go. I think we were all kind of in shock.
    Albert calmed the heavies who were flooding into the room with la pastorale (a vision of a meadow with cows, of all things), and then eased them out of the room entirely. I checked Vincent's pulse, found it weak but present, and called the paramedics. All I could think was that if he died there would be no way to stop what was obviously starting. Vincent's men would try to avenge their don and the city would fall into chaos.
    I asked Albert to find out what he could from the foot soldiers about any plans that Vincent might have going; if we could preempt their attacks, we might mitigate the aftereffects. A medical team arrived and removed the don on a backboard. His neck is broken, and as I write this he's still in critical condition.
    Albert informed me that, under coercion, Vincent's man Tony continued to insist that nothing had been planned, that he had no idea what had just happened, Vincent hadn't tried to kill Aliese, what the hell was going on? Albert and I and INH looked at one another.
    "This is beginning to resemble a, what is the word for it? As if events have been manipulated, somehow?" Albert remarked.
    "Yes," I agreed grimly. And it looked as if Lucky had gotten sucked into it quite neatly.
    Then Reilly called Albert. Lucky had turned herself in; I felt a moment's horrible relief that we would not have to hunt her down. She had been read her rights, made a statement. They hadn't charged her with anything yet. We passed on the fact that Vincent wasn't quite dead, and suggested that they make a noise about the situation being a setup on the police band; Aliese and probably Vincent's men as well would be listening in, and it might make at least one of them pause for thought before they did anything drastic. Albert, INH and I headed out into the city to quiet trouble spots as we found them, until we eventually had to quit in sheer exhaustion. Given the state of emergency, no one quibbled about whether or not the robot should really be out with us, and it behaved itself perfectly the whole time. We came home and I pretty much passed out.
    Given that this is undoubtedly our lowest point to date as a team, it will probably sound perverse to say that I woke up the next morning in a better mood than I recalled being in for weeks, but it's the truth.
    I'm not exactly happy, mind, but things seem different now than they did before. Maybe it took a crisis like the one we've got now to drag me out of myself a little. I've been dwelling pretty steadily for weeks now on my own problems, and it hasn't done any good. In fact, if I was to be totally honest, I'd have to say it's done the opposite. Maybe if I hadn't spent the past month telling her to get lost every time she tried to say as much as "good morning," this wouldn't have happened. Maybe she would trust me a little more than I guess she does.
    Not that I'm by any means inclined to absolve her of responsibility for what she's done, but I am willing to share it. So I managed to more or less keep my mouth shut when Lucky made her entrance later this morning.
    "Coffee?" I inquired.
    "I can leave if you want." Through the raspiness, her voice sounded defensive. Ellis has gotten her released for 72 hours, then she's supposed to report back to the station.
    "You live here." It was all I could think to say.
    That was more or less the end of the conversation for a while, but after a while a discussion got started up as we debated our enemies' identities, motives, and likely next moves. We agreed that TECH had probably instigated the Mafia war, possibly hoping to sell weapons to both sides in the conflict. Lucky was at long last induced to delve into her knowledge of the principals—I guess she's figured out there's no point now in trying to hide her past, at least from us. We might not know the details, but it's pretty obvious that she's got connections.
    She called Aliese and found him uncommunicative. He said that he had not been contacted by any third party, that he had no intention of "continuing" anything, that he only wanted to see that what was his could be protected. He did not intend any preemptive action. Vincent's second-in-command, Giovanni, said much the same thing in even less direct language, or started to, before breaking off into, "What the—who—holy Jesus!"
    We headed out for his command base, taking INH with us, and found the place a smoking wreckage, although it looked as if most of them had gotten out. Someone had escalated; these were by no means the usual street guns but phased plasma weapons. TECH sticking its nose into things, or so we assumed. No, Aliese wasn't going to "continue" anything, but he was going to finish what had been started. With Don Vincent in a coma and his own actions apparently justifiable as defensive, he would take the chance to expand his own sphere of influence. We decided to look for Aliese and see if we could talk some sense into him. All that practicing has begun to pay off; I can lift both my companions with ease by now, and we headed for the nearest of his likely locations through a light spring rain.

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