"I see difference differently," she said. Then she sighed, a sigh like a yawn, as if she was sleepy. "Sandy suits me."

It seemed a strange, cold thing for a girl to say, and Chorley shivered to hear it.

"I like to be with him," she added. "I'm safe with him."

"Yes, I think you probably are. And he does seem to sincerely care for you. But even if no one is mistaken in their feelings, feelings get hurt. And there are physical dangers of intimacy."

"Uncle Chorley, you're talking to someone who nearly died trying to see what was at the end of a rail line. Intimacy-as you put it-is safer than half of the things I've had to do."

"Did you nearly die?" Chorley knew she'd been sick-"depleted" Tziga had said-but Tziga had understated his own injuries too.

"We'll have some film soon of the Depot," Laura said.

"What?"

"Da and I arranged for someone to go In at The Pinnacles with one of your movie cameras, to film those buildings and people. We need doc.u.mentary evidence."

Chorley supposed he shouldn't be surprised that Laura and Tziga were communicating independently with the Grand Patriarch, and calling on his help. Of course the Grand Patriarch must have had dreamhunters who would act as his agents.

"We'll show the film to the Commission of Inquiry," Laura said. "That's probably the quickest way to get questions asked, and to cut Cas Doran off at the knees."

Chorley reached across the table and waited for her to take his hand. She did-hers dry and callused, a smaller version of his wife's and Tziga's. "Dreamhunter," Chorley said, wonderingly, and squeezed her hand. "You changed the subject," he said. "Don't think I didn't notice."

"Yes, I did. But, back on that subject, Aunt Grace was only Sandy's age when you met her."

"Your Aunt Grace was a powerful woman."

"Uncle Chorley, I'm a powerful woman," Laura said.

"Or girl," Chorley said.

"Don't worry. Sandy is loyal and kind, and I think maybe I do love him."

Chorley sighed; he got up and helped her up too. He opened his wallet and dropped bills onto the table. "All right then, honey." He took her arm. "I'll deliver you to your destiny."

They set off toward the bookshop on the corner. As they went, Laura said quietly and fervently, "Oh-I wish he was."

3.

AURA WAS LATE FOR HER FINAL BALL GOWN FITTING. GRACE AND ROSE HAD BEEN THERE FOR HALF AN HOUR. Rose had her dress on and was standing between two angled mirrors. Sunlight came in the high fitting-room windows, and there were electric lights on the walls, but Rose managed to look like candlelight and moonlight combined, like the central panel of some devotional altarpiece, haloed with radiance.

She had wanted a high-necked dress, and the design she'd chosen had a Chinese-style collar that circled her strong throat. The bodice was fitted, boned and tapered in at the waist, then followed the swelling curves of her hips. The fabric was heavy bone-white silk. The sleeves and bodice were sewn with a filigree of seed pearls. The dress had a train that Rose would have to fasten to one arm in order to dance. She was practicing this when her cousin came in.

"You'll do very nicely," Grace was saying. "And we must put your hair up."

Rose arched her back and neck and threw off light.

Grace grinned at Laura. "I think there will be displays of dumb admiration and the falling over of feet."

"It's not too tight?" Rose said.

"No," said everyone.

The dressmaker nodded to one of the seamstresses. "Please go and get Miss Hame's dress."

Laura had toyed with pale blues and greens, and Rose had nearly persuaded her to wear pink. But her aunt had insisted that, since Laura wasn't a debutante and didn't have to wear white, she should realize, for the purposes of fashion, she wasn't a young girl and could choose a strong color, one that would set off her tan and her dark hair. Laura's dress was also silk, of a vibrant coral red. It was sleeveless, with a low, square neck, fitted at the bust and flaring under it. It was a simple dress of a rich fabric, and Laura was going to wear it with long black gloves and her mother's jet choker.

Laura put her dress on and shared the mirror with Rose while her hem was pinned. They stood looking solemnly at each other.

"Do debutantes wear white so that men can imagine the brides they'll be?" Rose asked her mother.

"I'm not sure," Grace said. "I didn't have a coming out."

"It's for you to imagine the bride you'll be," said the dressmaker.

"I don't look like a dreamhunter," Laura said. She wished that Nown could see her in her ball gown-which was silly, since he couldn't see color anyway.

Her tall cousin walked out of the mirror's frame. "Can I take this off now?"

"Certainly. And we should look at your friend's dress. She's due in for a fitting tomorrow at three. Her mother has already given the dress provisional approval." The dressmaker looked worried.

Rose had finally taken it on herself to design Mamie's gown, after they had held every variation on white-icy, bone, cream, pearly peach, salmon, beige, fawn-up to Mamie's face, and every shade, without fail, had made Mamie's mauve, mottled skin look corpselike. Grace and Rose had found a pattern Mamie liked, a dress that would let her bare shoulders and the tops of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rise out of it. A dress with a belted waist and a skirt that had two generous pleats at the back and two at the front. Rose's innovation was to make the shawl neck and sleeves of black silk-to add a black belt, and to make the recessed pleats black also. The silks were the same weight, the white brocaded, the black with a sheen rather than a gloss. The black made Mamie's skin look better-a lilac-tinted pallor rather than fishy.

When the dress was produced, Rose, Laura, Grace, and all the seamstresses gave it their full attention.

"Mamie's mother can't mind if we come to her next fitting," Rose said.

"I'm sure she won't," said the dressmaker.

"It's a big responsibility-making this ball less of an ordeal for Mamie," Laura said.

"She'll enjoy it," Rose said. "You wait and see. As for me, I'm going to have-a ball!"

4.

ANDY STOPPED IN AT MRS. LILLEY'S ONLY TO SMUGGLE SOME BLANKETS OFF HIS BED AND STUFF THEM INTO HIS pack. He hid the pack outside, then went back into the kitchen to get Laura, whom he'd told to keep Mrs. Lilley and her girls chatting.

The Lilley girls were scarcely responding to Laura's polite patter. They were cool and monosyllabic. The elder shot Sandy a wounded look and spun back to scrubbing the stove top.

"Well, ladies-good day," Sandy said. Then, "Come on, Laura." He put an arm around her shoulders and ushered her out the door. He picked up his pack.

"We're going In only for one night, so what's all that?" Laura said, then, "Do those girls hate me just because they had to keep airing out my room?"

Sandy grunted. He listened to Laura's patient silence. She put her hand in his. He felt that she was waiting for a confession. He said, "I took one of them to a dance held by the Wry Valley Young Farmers. The girls sat on one side of the room and the men on the other, like a school dance. And a good proportion of the men were out among the cars and carriages drinking whiskey."

"Which one did you take?"

"Patricia," he said. "The elder."

"I knew they liked you," Laura said.

On the way back from the dance, Pat had pushed Sandy against a tree trunk and put her hand down his trousers. He'd liked that too, rather helplessly, but the very next day he'd set out walking the border-the walk that finally took him to Debt River and the site of the dream Quake.

"One of them even said to me that you weren't really my type," Laura said.

"I'm not," Sandy replied, sulkily.

"I don't have a type. Do you think you do?" She sounded breezy. "What's she like then, your type of girl?"

Sandy thought it was best to be quiet.

"Taller, I suppose," Laura said, musing.

They walked hand in hand into the rangers' station and headed straight for the line before the big ledger of the intentions book. Several older dreamhunters smiled at them in an indulgent way.

"What are we going to write?" Laura whispered as they shuffled forward.

"That we're walking a short way east along the border."

"Is that what Da said?"

Tziga Hame had given Sandy directions on the day Sandy delivered Laura to Summerfort. He told Sandy that The Gate was just inside the border, about two hours east of Doorhandle. "It's easy to find because it is right on a landmark rangers refer to as Foreigner's West."

"I've been to Foreigner's North," Sandy said. He wanted to impress Laura's father with what he knew, to tell him all about the supposed French explorer and his crazy attempt to map the Place, and his odd compa.s.s bearings, "Nord" and "Ouest"-North and West in French. It was interesting, Sandy thought, the whole question of who the man had been and how the h.e.l.l he'd gotten himself so turned around, since "Nord" may have been in the north but "Ouest" was more south and east-east of Doorhandle anyway. But Sandy hadn't launched into a dissertation on what he knew, because he'd figured out that it wasn't a good idea to interrupt Tziga Hame, whose concentration was ragged and who got upset when he lost the thread of his thoughts.

"The Gate is in plain sight," Laura's father had said to Sandy. "But scarcely anyone would think to bed down there, because the ground is hard and uneven and cut up. The dream is in a tightly confined spot, actually in the circle. You'll find a circle on the ground. I knew the dream was there when I first saw the site. I don't know how I knew, but my need was so great I suppose that some instinct led me to it. The confined site, the bad ground, and the rarity of dream-hunters who can catch master dreams, all have guaranteed that The Gate has sat there untapped since I caught it."

Nearly two hours after they went In, Sandy and Laura ran into a ranger with paintbrushes in his pockets and carrying a can of paint. He had been refreshing signs, he said.

"Are we anywhere near Foreigner's West?" Sandy asked.

The ranger laughed. "You young dreamhunters are so funny, with your little alliances and your sightseeing." He raised one brawny arm to point with the hand holding the paint can.

"Is there a latrine near here?" Laura said. She didn't like to squat behind bushes when she was with Sandy-and she knew that dreamhunters and rangers disapproved of such behavior in the Place's more populated areas. She asked her question peering out at the ranger from behind the shelter of Sandy's shoulder. The Body employed at least a thousand rangers, so she knew she shouldn't expect that every one she met would know about the Depot, or that she'd escaped from it.

"The trail branches by those trees up there. The Inward branch leads to a latrine, then back to Foreigner's West. I've painted the latrine too, so be careful, it might still be wet."

"Thank you," Laura said.

"What are you planning to catch?"

"We're not dreamhunting. We're just sightseeing, as you divined," Sandy said.

"And spending time together." The ranger winked at them, and went on his way.

They walked on till they reached the branch in the trail. Sandy let go of Laura. "I've been watering the bushes along the way," he said.

"Yes, you have." Laura laughed. "You're nearly as bad as a dog."

"It's because we spend all our time in cafes drinking tea," Sandy said, resentfully. Then, apparently without any thought of the connection in ideas, he said, "I'll make a bed for us with these blankets. Your father warned me that the ground was bad."

Laura went on peering up into his face, waiting for some sign of self-consciousness, for him to relent and acknowledge what everyone else could see and was teasing them about. They had been spending all their time in cafes when they weren't shut up in separate rooms in hospitals. She never went home. He never used his key to his uncle's flat. They sat in cafes-together.

Sandy looked down at her. Laura noticed that his jaw was hastily shaven and scratchy in patches. She looked into his eyes, saw resentment and, behind that, baffled, patient misery. She put a hand on his arm and felt a sharp shiver pa.s.s over him.

And then he bent his head and kissed her.

They were kissing, wrapped together, upright, his hands on her face, her hands covering his. His lips were full and firm, his chin rasping and rough.

Laura's bladder gave her a stab.

She broke away from him. "I have to go," she said, waved her hand in the direction of the latrines, and sprinted off.

Her bladder was full but shy. She spent a long time in the fresh-paint-smelling box before anything came. She kept giggling and shivering. The little byway was quiet-as deadly silent as anywhere else in the Place, but Laura had the impression the shelter she was standing in was in the middle of a stampede.

When she'd finished, she uncapped her water bottle and spilled water over her hands, patted her cheeks with her wet palms, then ran back along the path to find Sandy.

He'd made a bed of his purloined blankets and emptied his pack of all the cans and hard-edged packages to make one pillow. He was sitting down, setting out a picnic, but he jumped up when she appeared. He grabbed her-or she collided with him-and they continued kissing, more involved with each pa.s.sing second.

Laura thought, "Do people do this?" She'd never seen anyone kissing like this. Books said things like "He rained kisses on her face." But suddenly they seemed tied together, mouth to mouth. She felt his skin, the wiry hair on his chest. Her hands had gotten into his shirt. They seemed to have a mind of their own. No-she agreed with her hands. Sandy's skin was smooth, his muscles springy and supple. He was lovely to touch, warm and dewy.

He was saying her name, into her mouth.

"What should I do with your clothes?" Laura said. Her throat was so tight she wanted to cough.

Sandy caught her hands and held them away from him. "Laura. We shouldn't. We have to be careful."

"I don't care!" she said fiercely. "I love you." She began struggling with the b.u.t.tons of her own shirt. She pulled its halves apart-sending one b.u.t.ton spinning.

Sandy caught her hands again, then pulled her against him. Their bare skin came together, and Laura sighed. Sandy was saying yes, all right. "But go slower, Laura." He began to help her with her clothes. She attacked his belt buckle, then responded to his "slower" and let go, leaned into him, kissed his shoulders, as high as she could reach when his head was raised.

He took her face between his hands again. "I love you, Laura. I mean it. I don't want to be without you, ever. Can you-would you-do you think we might get married? Please say you will."

"Please, Sandy, let's lie down together."

"I don't really know what I'm doing," he said. "Neither do you. That's why we have to go slow. And I wish you'd promise." He sounded as though he might cry.