"I don’t know," I say, pressing water into her hand and trying to get her to sit down again. "It could have been some other dancer, but I know she was in the back when we came to get you. If you went to the police..."

She moans, trembling and shaking her head. "The police?! I can’t go to the police! Oh god... Nia... I told you, I told you..." Her head drops into her hands and she begins to sob. Damien and I look on, looking like monkeys confronted with a nuclear reactor. I think hard about putting a hand on her shoulder, or patting her back, but don’t. I feel like a heel for sitting on a stack of teetering magazines instead, and wanting a smoke.

Damien doesn’t attempt to one-up my heelmanship, taking the seat next to her, but not touching her. Instead, he cements his own legs together and places his hands on his knees. "Amy..." he says softly, "Nia... Nia may not have been the only one, you know... There were others from last night. No one’s well enough to ID them... but us, that is..."

"I can’t!" she gasps, her already smeared make-up trailing down her cheeks. "I can’t see her that way... Oh god, this is all my fault... Nia, and Bull, and... and..."

I sigh, rising up. "Why don’t you stay here with her? I’ll see what else I can dig up. Maybe Charlie found his legs again, and we have a few more names." Damien nods, not looking grateful at all for getting the opportunity to comfort poor, bereaved, frantic Amy. I can’t blame him. I hate blood, but I hate crying more.

"You!" screams Amy. "How can you be so damn calm?! I thought artists were supposed to be emotional! You guys are as emotional as a pair of corpses!"

I step back, inching my way to the door, now feeling ten times worse for leaving, and a hundred more times desperate to do so. "Well, it’s not like I knew Nia, Amy. And like you said, she got what was coming to her--"

"She was a person!!!" Amy flies off the bed, lunging for me, and I see her hands, red tipped, flashing in the florescent light of her overhead bulb. Her face is wet, black and white, with a rude streak of red painted across her cheeks. "They were all people!" She nearly rakes me as Damien leaps forward and snatches her, pulling her back into his suddenly steel-like arms.

"Just go!" he half-growls, half yells, and I comply, turning and bolting out the door.

The bar is still covered in tape. I study it from up the walk, lit cigarette in hand. The smoke... It doesn’t feel like it did before. There’s no heady rush, or whistful relaxation. My body isn’t reacting like I want it to, and it’s pissing me off. Now, the smoke just tastes bad, and my body seems almost miffed that I would reintroduce the two of them.

I stub it out on a support pillar. Two credits wasted, and not a mote closer to how the hell I’m going to get into the bar.

For all the police tape, there isn’t a whole lot of police... Only one of two drift in or out. A random ex-customer wanders by now and then, making a disappointed snort, then trudging off to the lower levels in search of another flesh fix.

I wish I had brought Amy with me... or at least not pissed her off so bad that she couldn’t talk rationally. I need a way in. The front is hopelessly locked, a padlock and doorknob cover barring the way. There’s no guard there, so that’s something, at least... I don’t think we got out the front way, not clean as a whistle like we are. I can see Charlie having a back way out, especially if he’d taken up with creeps like that. I could have asked him about it at the hospital, but he wasn’t especially keen on me either. I sigh. After the backouts, we’re definately working on my PR.

I duck into an ally, one next to Charlie’s bar, and try to visualize the inside... There’s a reason I do grand, sweeping landscapes. My spatial relations suck. No one remembers what the trees and shrubs and flowers looked like, so I can do what I want. Try an indoor scene, though, and my people end up four feet high while my tables end up six. Disaster.

I imagine standing at the front door, walking in, going towards the back... My eyes fly open when I realize the back room would be exactly where a small dumpster is, and the in route for a few pipes. I stand there for a few moments, doubting my moment of clarity... How could I be so sure? Was I so despertate that I would fake genius to myself? Or had something been knocked right in my brain, and a part that had been unaligned that it finally worked?

I hear another cop shuffle out, and mention something about lunch... I swallow hard. Why am I doing this? I’ve gone insane... If they find me on the scene, I’ll be hung up by my toenails. Hell, they won’t even bother with the string; just toss me over the side of the walk and listen for the splat when I hit twenty or so levels down.

I try to push it out of my head. I need to get in. I’ve even forgotten the real reasons why I there now... Something about the blackouts... Something about Charlie’s office... Maybe getting a better idea of what happened will clear some of the fog out of my brain. But none of that is important now. There’s a thrill building in my stomach at the prospect of just getting in, of overcoming the challenge of it. It doesn’t make sense. Right now, I don’t want it to make sense. Nothing else does.

I climb on top of the dumpster, the smell of rotting cigarette butts soaked with the sick smell of vodka and burbon. I balance, cat-like, on the lip, muscles tugging and pulling to keep me in place. The back wall is nearly featureless, if you discount the graffitti and occassional urine stain... nearly featureless, because about seven feet above me, tiny and unlit, is a window, barred. I study it, struggle to remember it. Yes, there was a little window in the bathroom, back when Capers was Roddy’s... You used to see splashes of neon floating in through it. Inspectors called in a venter’s window, a cheap way of keeping machine cleaned air coming in, when you were too cheap to get it piped in. Right above the little window is a general vent, one of the humongous iron monstrosities that keeps the good oxygen two flowing through the city, and keeps all of us from asphixiating. The window isn’t very big, but a skinny dancer, a skinnier artist, and a threadbare writer should have been fine... All we would have had to do is jump into the dumpster...

But how did we get to it?

And on that note, how the hell am I going to get to it now?

I hop off the dumpster, poking around the discarded cans for something sturdy enough to stack... I find a plastic crate... Good... Set that aside... A box of expired tins of meat product... Gross, but it would do... A handful of boxes too flimsy to do their previous owner much good, much less me... At the end of my scavenget hunt, I’m only three feet closer to my goal.

I pace up and down the ally, looking back and forth from my feet to my meager stack on top of the dumpster. A thought occurs to me... Well, not a thought... More like an errant spirit, peering over my shoulder, whispering into my ear. ‘Jump it!’

I stop. Jump it? For a gymnast, it might be possible... with a springboard... but me? I picture myself jumping, arms outstreched for th bars, then falling, smashing into the wall, tumbling into the pile of trash next to the closed dumpster... I even begin the pained, embarrassing walk home in my mind, but the spirit breaks in again, with a thought that isn’t mine in a mind that I hope still is.

‘Jump it!’

I feel myself grin. Aw, hell. Why not?

I sprint, digging my feet into the ground, muscles grinding and tensing in perfect unison. The dumpster approaches much faster than I thought it would, and I push myself up, springing off a trashcan onto the lip, then tense, and push off before the momentem and irrationality leave me. I reach out...

And grab the bars.

A moment of strong elation is followed hard by an even stronger moment of panic. I hang. What the hell do I do now? My sneakered feet claw at the brickwork, and I manage to sit myself on the meager sill, half my body still caught midair.

Long way down, I think, swallowing hard. Last time I listen to that outer-inner voice. I twist my head carefully, ducking down while still trying to keep the balancing act going while I study the bars. Cheap. Charlie never had much worth stealing inside, especially not in the ladies room. It’s not like the old days, where he would have had a a safe tucked away under his desk, loaded with unmarked twenties and fifties. Even the alcohol wasn’t worth the effort of taking them home. I squint, studying the open latch and grating so old it’s spiked with rust. From inside, one of us pushed it out...

And then someone took the time to push it back in? My mind jars as logic stops being my friend again. This can’t be it, then... But it has to be! We sure as hell didn’t go out the front, unless I suddenly took up dodging as my second talent... Hell, to get away from a melee that took out fifteen other people, I’d have to be better at running around than I am matching my blues... And colors are my forte.

I chance a little tug at the window. Nothing. I tug harder. A little give, but I know I’ll need to put my muscle into it to get it... and at this angle, my muscle has other things to worry about. No way in... Long way down... I sigh. Might as well get the damn grating off... I grab it with both hands, bracing my feet against the wall and sucking in a breath. If I can just get it to swing out... then I can drop down.... Exhaling an explosion of air, I yank. I get a brief glimpse of the inside wall as the grating comes completely out of the window, and gravity takes over, pulling me back and down. My back lands on the lip of the dumpster, biting into it painfully, and I bite back a curse as I tumble, falling to the ground in a heap, right onto of the grating.

Ow... I stand. Ow, again... Though not too bad. I fell a good fifteen feet, but for all the protest from my body, I could have just tripped while walking to the store. I stretch the way I’ve seen some of the Vidscreen professionals do, testing myself for anything seriously out of whack. Nothing major pops or groans, and in under a minute, I’ve shaken off the fall. I could get used to this new body...

Once again, I dig in, sprint, leap, push, jump... and my hands catch the sill. I scuttle through, not even breaking a sweat. I may just have a second career, if things don’t pan out in the landscape industry.