The boy lay flat on the night-cooling roof, face down, only his eyes and the top of his black knit cap overlipping the age-rotten tile edge.

Ten or twelve meters down the airshaft, one window was broken out; a few shards still glimmered, caught in the black iron security cage. A smear of darker soot spread up along the smog-greased wall: a map of flames. And the smell of smoke was strong enough to bury the turds that'd be carpeting the airshaft's floor. Labor blocks in the Mission District are always short of working toilets.

He counted windows for the fourth time: three down. Five in from the southeast corner. One window per. Mid-block sorrows never had more.

Sure enough: it was the burnout.

He frowned a silent shrug to himself. Sokay. Not everything burns.

He crept back from the edge, moving with enforced patience. The tar that blackened his shirt and pants matched the summer-sticky roof well enough that the sid prowlcars couldn't pick him up on visual or IR from their onstation just below the orange-lit cloud deck, but their fucking motion sensors gave him a pain in the crack.

He took the hank of tarred rope out of his business pack, shook it out and looped its middle around the nearest gas vent, then worked his way back to the lip of the airshaft. He slid over the edge like cold oil, walking backward down the wall in slow motion, past caged windows frosted blind white. Airshaft windows in the Labor blocks are all frosted; the boy, if he ever thought about it at all, just figured it was supposed to let people forget a little about everybody else who crowded them on all sides, like if they didn't have to see them all the time they wouldn't mind so much.

His dad'd say that's the kind of thing some Administrator probably came up with a hundred years ago, and nobody ever bothered to actually come around a Labor block and see if it mattered dick to anybody. Just as well; clear windows could put a serious cramp in the boy's business.

His street socks slipped easily between the iron bars of the security cage. He brushed aside the remaining shards of glass, then locked his ankles together and slowly let them take his weight as he lowered himself backward. He kept a light grip on the rope until he was sure the security cage would hold, then let the rope dangle.

Hanging head downward, he teased open the side vent of his business pack and felt for his favorite tool: an antique folding screw-jack. An elastic loop hung from one of its struts; he slipped the loop over one wrist and tightened it before he pulled the jack out. This jack had cost him three grams of one-step coke, and he fucking right wasn't gonna drop it the eighteen stories to the airshaft's floor.

He glanced down, and had to swallow. Sixty-odd meters is a long, long fall.

Sokay: he knew better than to eat right before he went to work.

He sat up and bent his legs until he could grab the security gate's bars next to his ankles, then pulled himself up and slipped an arm through. He set the jack between the two middle bars and twisted the screw with his fingers until the jack tightened into place, then slid the jackhandle out of his business pack, socketed it, and went to work. Slowly, slowly -- only goddamn amateurs make the iron stretch and squeal.

And whatever else he might be at eleven years old, Hari Michaelson was no goddamn amateur.

The window exhaled roast pork and a smother of burnt hair. Somebody'd been home for the fire. Hari grimaced, then shrugged.

Sokay. So the only interruption he had to sweat was maybe a sid arson squad.

He carefully descrewed the jack and stowed it, then slid through the gap feet first, feeling below the windowsill with the toes of his street socks.

He found something there: thick, rounded, spongy, with a crackled surface. He held his breath -- both hands on the bars, ready to shove himself back out the window and be gone -- and explored it with his feet. A picture built in his mind, pixel by pixel. A rug, maybe: rolled up, folded in thirds, nylon scorched to a crust, irregular, with a core of hard structure -- yeah.

This wasn't something. It was somebody.

Some body.

Stretching beyond it, he found open floor. He withdrew his feet, hooked one strap of his business pack around his ankle and lowered it to the floor, and then he cantilevered himself inside, keeping his weight on the window bars until he was sure he'd cleared the body. He shoved off and caught his balance in the darkness, already fishing for his pocket flash.

"Hey, kid . . . ."

Hari jolted sideways, caught his foot on something hard and slammed into the wall. He flattened against it, burrowing into the shadow beside the window, then went still. Panting silently. Listening.

There: breathing. Hoarse. Ragged. Whispery. Like the voice. Should've heard it on the way in. Would've, without that scabass corpse on his mind --

"Kid -- come here, kid . . . ."

Hari took a deep breath to relax his throat so he could pitch his voice low: quiet and solid and a lot older than his shadowed face.

"I have a knife."

Which was true, but in his hand instead was a half-canister of tanglefoot he'd looted off a sid who got deleted in the Phalt Dawg wipe at Geegate Park. He could twitchpile this fucker from twenty feet. If he could see him.

"Kid -- make some light. I'm not gonna hurtcha. Couldn't . . . if I wanted to . . ."

Hari didn't move. "Nobody has to hurt nobody. I'll go right back out that window. Sorry, mister. Dint think nobody lived here."

A rusty chuckle. "Give it . . . twenty minutes."

Hari frowned at the cityglow leaking in through the shattered window: enough to highlight his silhouette. He chewed his lip and looked the other way.

Where the door should be was only empty shadow: hallway fluorescents must be shot. He slid silently along the wall.

Darkness had always been his best friend.

"Kid, c'mon, Jesus Christ. Hang." A gasp, and another: wet and thick. "Can't you see . . . I'm cuffstripped . . . to this goddamn chair . . . ?"

Not without the night goggles he'd dropped during a bad ditch down the fire escape of an Artisan six-flat uphill from the District two weeks ago. For now he was stuck with a pocket mini-flash, and lighting himself up didn't sound like such a good idea.

"Kid, c'mon . . . bone straight, kid: I got something for you."

Hari tightened his grip on the tanglefoot as he crept toward the door, thinking: Likewise, fucker.

"Don't even have to unstrip me . . . ." The ragged half-whisper sank for a moment under the effort of breathing before it could surface again. "I was an Actor, kid."

Hari stopped.

His heart fluttered. Bullshit. Actors don't crib in fucking Labor-block sorrows. Bullshit.

But he couldn't quite make himself move.

"You prob'ly never heard of me. But I was. An Actor. For a while -- people thought I was gonna be big. Some people. The next Mkembe, maybe. Long time ago, now."

Hari gazed into the black emptiness of the doorway. That's where he should be going. Right now. Into the darkness: back to the streets. He knew the streets, every step of them. Temps and Laborers. Drunks, cock whores, ass-bandits and ragfaces. The streets weren't home; they were better than home.

He was safe out there.

Two quick steps, then run like hell. But --

What if this fucker was straight? How many Actors did he figure to ever meet?

And Studio Central was only a couple klicks from here. He could walk there with his eyes closed and never trip. Studio Central -- sore feet and stiff legs and smog-smudges beside his eyes where he squeezes his face against the cold iron bars of the main gate. Any hour. Any weather. Just to see one. An Actor. Any Actor.

To see someone who'd been there. Who'd done that.

Slowly, reluctantly, knowing -- knowing right down to the cold fist of dread that bunched in his stomach -- that this was stupid, that this was goddamn amateur, that he was gonna deserve whatever buttripping this fucker was gonna twist on him, Hari said, "An Actor? Straight?"

"A thaumaturge . . . Know what that is?"

"It's Greek," the boy answered without thinking. "Greek for worker of wonders."

"Hey, that's right . . . ." A whistle of breath from the darkness. "How'd you know that?"

Hari gritted his teeth. Stupid. Stupid goddamn amateur. "Maybe I read your fucking mind."

"Don't . . . come huffy, kid. I just . . . I mean, how many creepers know about Greek?"

"How many Actors live in the sorrows?"

"Huh. Fair enough." A painful wheeze. "Y'know . . . my little SRO wasn't so bad . . . before. Before, y'know. I've lived worse."

"Sure." Single Room Occupancy was for losers. The boy scored enough every month on his Labor-block creeps to keep himself and his psycho can't-hold-a-fucking-job dad in a triple. Only thing worse than the sorrows was a Temp dorm. "So who'd you used to be?"

"You wouldna heard of me."

"Okay."

"Long time. Before you were born."

"If you say so."

"On Overworld . . . ." A drop of melancholy oiled the voice's rust. "On Overworld, I was Iriàl Telukhai. They used to call me --"

"The Lightweaver . . ." Hari breathed. "Holy crap . . ."

"You know me?"

"Holy crap! You're Nathan Mast?"

"Were you . . . 're you a fan? Anybody still play those?"

"Sure. You kidding?" Hari said. Lots of pirate shit was free on the net. Especially the antique stuff. "You old-timers was hard. You can keep your goody-goody fuckwads. Raymond Story, Parrish Tan. All them losers. Jonathan Mkembe, man, he was a killer -- I seen you with him in Westmarch Raiders. And Twilight in Ironhold, and --"

"Listen, kid: you gotta make a light, okay?"

The boy's enthusiasm dropped like a stone into the pit of his stomach; he remembered where he was, and why.

He remembered the corpse by the window.

The canister of tanglefoot had grown warm in his hand. "What d'you need a light for?"

"To show you . . . . To show you the treasure, kid."

"Oh, like I ain't heard that before."

"Don't play me, boy." Mast's voice gathered strength. "You know there's a treasure. 'S why you're here."

"If you say so."

"'S why they were here, too."

"They?"

"Met one on your way in, kid." A bitter grunted laugh. "Just couldn't keep my goddamn yap shut. Knew it was a mistake. Knew it. Sometimes you know you're being shit-stupid, but you just can't help it. Wasn't even on the sniff. Stone sober. Well, mostly. I just hadda tell somebody. After all these years. Didn't want to. Had to. You wouldn't understand."

No? Still here, wasn't he? "If you say so."

"Thirty years, kid. I been hunting it up. My only treasure. Only thing I kept from Overworld. Only thing nobody could take from me."

Hari's breath went short. From Overworld . . . .

Was he dreaming?

"Thirty years. You got no idea how long that is."

Sure he did: three times forever. Fuck the money. He'd find another score. What this Overworld thing might be, he didn't give a shit. Once he got it, he was bone straight gonna keep it.

"Okay," Hari said. "Okay, I'm making the light. Don't do nothing, okay? Don't -- just don't do nothing."

"Couldn't . . . if I wanted to."

He shifted the tanglefoot to his left hand, and tried to keep breathing. He pointed the canister at the whisper from the darkness and dug in his pocket for his mini-flash. It slipped in his sweat-slick fingers; he couldn't twist it alight, not with one hand. He held its check-scored steel barrel between his teeth while he scrubbed his sweaty hand across his pants.

He bit down on the barrel while he twisted the mini-flash's head; it finally gave with a tight scritch that buzzed in his teeth, and flared, and --

In the cone of searing white, one slitted eye glittered back at him from a pile of charred meat.

"You . . . get it?" the meatpile gasped. "You get it, now?"

White bands of stripcuffs bound wrists to the metal arms of a scorched chair; another stripcuff locked ankles around the chair's column. Hari took the mini-flash out of his mouth. He let the tanglefoot canister fall to his side.

"Tolja . . . I can't hurtcha, kid."

Blackened crusts of skin had cracked, leaking fluids that gleamed darkly in the flash's glow. Most of his polyon Laboralls had survived; where they hadn't, the synthetic had melted and charred. Hari couldn't tell where cloth ended and flesh began.

When he could breathe again, the boy's first words were "Holy crap . . . ."

"Pretty . . . ugly, huh?"

"Jesus, mister . . . I mean, Jesus Christ --" The boy shook his head blankly. "Don't you hurt?"

"Sorta . . . keep it outside. Mindview. Hurts . . . but doesn't touch me . . . long as I hold mindview."

Mindview. The boy's last hope dissolved into a bitter wash in the back of his throat. The guy was a crackjob.

Mindview was for thaumaturges. Actors on Overworld. Meditation, like. Altered consciousness. How they touched the Flow that powered magick. On Earth, it was just a word.

Crackjob.

Hari sighed and swung the mini-flash's beam around the sorrow. Probably wasn't any treasure. Just a brokedown crackjob dying in a chair.

The beam picked up the corpse by the window. And another one, half in the hall, where Hari woulda tripped over it on his way out the door. Burnt up, both of them. Like the meatpile.

And there were little cans scattered around on the floor -- the little round fuel-tins that nobody actually burns anymore. Only people who use them are ragfaces; you squeeze the goo into a piece of cloth and hold it over your mouth and nose, and you can get pretty fucking twisted. Hari had done it a couple times; fun for a little, but then you get sick, and you're so fucked up you're easy prey on the street.

You never see a young ragface. They don't last. The only way to last as a ragface is to be so fucking old and ugly and full of sick that nobody wants your ass or your mouth or anything else on you, even for free.

Hari shook his head. Made him want to puke. "Man. And you used to be hard."

"What . . . ?"

"The fucking Lightweaver." Hari couldn't get his mind around it. "What happened to you? How's Nathan Mast come so brokedown you get punked by ragfaces?"

"You don't . . . understand --"

"Sure I do. Look at this shit on the floor --"

"No -- listen to me." The meatpile's voice gathered desperate strength. "I'm the ragface, kid. Those were cops."

Hari stared.

"Tolja -- you ain't the first . . . to try a score tonight. Local CID gets word a sorrows Temp's got something valuable? Sids want a piece. The piece. Wanted my treasure." A wet cough. Half a shrug that split charred skin against the white bands of the stripcuffs. "Didn't ask nicely."

"What . . ." Hari could barely make himself whisper. "What'd you do?"

"Goddamn gave it to them. What d'you think?" A hoarse laugh, creaky as the Geegate in a high wind. "They didn't want it as much as they thought they did."

"Maybe I don't want it either."

"Case of sniff . . . stashed under my cot. Found it when they tossed the place. Didn't believe me, you get it? I told 'em. But, y'know, what I am -- so they tried to burn it out of me. Was gonna burn me with my own sniff. So I gave 'em my treasure. Gave it all."

"What treasure? I don't get it --"

"Fire, kid . . . fire's easy. I was always good with fire. You said you saw Westmarch Raiders. You know what I could do . . . with fire . . . ."

"Uh, yeah. Sure." On Overworld. Forever ago.

Fucking crackjob.

"Just . . . got away from me. A little. Got 'em both, but . . . eh. Ain't gonna make it. Lungs. A little cooked. Fill up . . . with fluids, y'know? Pus and shit. Drowning . . . ."

"Jesus."

"Ugly, huh?"

"I guess."

"It's all . . . ugly. Everything. Ugly damn world, kid."

Hari shrugged. "Compared to what?"

The meatpile's only answer was a slow wheeze.

The boy beckoned impatiently. "Let's have this treasure, old man. Those sids'll have sid friends. I gotta be gone when they come looking. I'll call EMS on my way out, okay?"

"Look, I gotta . . . 'S not something I can give you . . . I gotta show you --"

"Like you showed them? Fuck that. And fuck you, old man. I'm outta here."

"Kid -- kid, you can't just go -- not now, not when I -- I mean . . . kid, please . . ."

Time to be gone. Hari shook his head. "Hey, I'm sorry you burnt up. Sorry your life came out a shitty waste. But I'm leaving."

"Shitty waste . . ." The meatpile croaked at his departing back. "It's all on you, kid."

Hari stopped in the doorway. "Bullshit."

"All on you. All of it. Walk out that door, my life was a shitty waste . . . because of you . . . ."

"You can't put that on me --"

"Put it on yourself . . . when you came in my window . . . ."

Hari lowered his head. Stupid. He clenched his teeth until his ears rang. Stupid goddamn amateur. He should've been running a long time ago. Should've been on the street and gone.

Instead he was standing in a busted sorrow doorway over a dead cop, head down and chest squeezing choke-tight and no way to make his stupid goddamn amateur ass walk the fuck out of here.

Just because this burnt-up crackjob used to be an Actor. Said he used to.

Probably wasn't even Nathan Mast. Probably just another jellybrain ragface with a line of shit.

And who cares, anyway? Who cares who this crackjob used to be?

The boy said softly, "What do I got to do?"

"Just . . . turn around, kid . . . ." The voice was fading again to rust and wet rags. "Swing that light over here . . . ."

Hari didn't even know why he was doing it.

The glitter in the one uncooked eye at the top of the meatpile dimmed, glazing, rolling away from the boy and the mini-flash, fixing on something that wasn't there: staring into the empty space between the palms of charred hands cuffstripped to the scorched steel arms of the chair --

Wait: it wasn't the eye that was dimming.

Hari frowned down at his mini-flash. Its light was going yellow, fading toward orange, even though the charge bar on its side still read full, even though the bulb still shone white when he looked straight into it, and even though it was impossible the shadows in the little room deepened, solidified, drawing themselves in around him like the arms of night, and when he looked up, he saw where the light had gone.

It was between Nathan Mast's hands.

"Holy crap . . . ." A reverent whisper: almost a prayer. "Are you doing that? How are you doing that?"

A foggy, rainbow-edged glow pulsed between burnt palms. Hari took an awe-stricken step forward, and another. The glow gathered itself from a shaft into an elongated ovoid, its curves detaching, leaving shadows behind on the charred skin from which it had sprung.

"You can't do that. It doesn't work. Not on Earth. You can't --"

"Shh . . ." Mast murmured. "Shhh . . . here it comes . . . ."

The glow twisted itself into a translucent ball: a shimmering sphere of light hanging in the sorrow's dusk.

Hari found himself on his knees without knowing how he got there, afraid to breathe, afraid to look away, afraid to blink, afraid that he was dreaming and that anything he did might wake him up and this had never happened, would never happen, that he'd been on his cot all along and oh god, he could give anything, god he would give anything, if only this were real, if only this could be really happening to him, if he could be really here right now, watching the light squirm and pulse and coil itself into a shape, not just a glow but something was there -- something was really there: a tiny figure shining between blossoming wings of light --

"Do you see it?" Mast's hands shivered, and the wings began to curl and flex, and color cascaded along them, dripping from their edges in a dewfall of rainbow. "You see it, don't you? Tell me you see it --"

"What is it . . . ?" Hari whispered. "What's it s'posed to be?"

"What's it look like? Tell me . . . you have to tell me . . . ."

"I don't know . . . I never . . . ." Hari struggled breathlessly to find words for what he saw. "It's got wings, and colors, and I don't know, I can't see if it's got a face, or what . . . Is it s'posed to be an angel or something?"

"A butterfly . . . ."

"Yeah? A butterfly? Never seen one. A butterfly. Huh." Hari looked up into the charred ruin of Nathan Mast's face. The one good eye had brimmed, and now it spilled a trickle along the blackened cracks of his cheek. "What's it do?"

"What --? Do?" The wet eye blinked. "I don't --"

"Your butterfly," Hari said. "What's it do, old man? Does it, like, blow up or something?"

"I -- I don't . . ."

"Is it poisonous? Can you, like, sic it on people and it bites them and they swell up 'n' die and shit?"

"No -- no, of course not --"

"Or scout for you, maybe; wings, sure, it can fly in through people's windows and tell you where they keep their good shit, right?"

"No -- no, it doesn't do anything . . . It just is . . . it's beautiful . . . isn't it?"

"Yeah, pretty. Sure. But --"

The butterfly of light began to fade, shredding like smoke in the wind.

"Beautiful . . . . In the ugly . . . ugly damn world . . . no matter how . . . I had . . . I found . . . it was mine."

The image blurred to a featureless globe.

"My beautiful butterfly . . . ."

It dissolved back into the blue-white wash from the mini-flash.

Mast's eye drifted shut.

Hari lowered his head. His face stung. His palm ached where the check-scored barrel of the mini-flash was digging into his skin. He took a deep breath. And another. His jaw gritted so hard it made his eyeballs hurt.

For a while the only sound was the wet wheezing gurgle of Mast's struggle to breathe.

Slowly, softly, unable to look at the dying man, the boy said, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

He stood up, shaking. "This is it? This is your fucking treasure?" His voice rose to a shout. "This is what you spent your thirty fucking years hunting up? Some fucking treasure. You sick piece of shit -- I almost believed you!"

He lifted the mini-flash, trembling, starting to cry with the blood-simple need to bury it in Mast's burnt-up skull. "You sick scabass ragface motherfucker -- good thing you're dying, you hear me? Good thing or I'd smoke your scabby old ass myself, you -- you -- God damn it! God damn fuck!"

Words failed him. He slapped tears off his face and snarled and jumped forward to boot that fucking meatpile right where it'd do him the most good --

And stopped.

And stood there.

In the sorrow's silence.

Real silence: nothing but half a breeze whispering at the broken window, faint grumbles of car turbos and a distant prowlcar siren.

That wet-rag gurgle --

Gone.

Now Nathan Mast really was just a meatpile.

Hari almost kicked him anyway.

But what'd be the point? "Fuck him. Fuck him anyway," the boy muttered, and looked around to see if there might be something here worth stealing after all.

He'd had enough of being given shit.

*

A day later, he got a solid price for the guns he took off the dead sids; two days after that he got a better one for their ID. Almost enough for rent. So everything else that month was gravy: he and his psycho dad ate pretty good for a week or two.

Another solid score bought him some new night goggles. He trashed the mini-flash. He couldn't stand to look at the fucking thing.

He stayed away from Studio Central. For a while. He knew he couldn't stay away forever.

He creeped thousands of flops. Sometimes he got caught. Sometimes he got stomped. Sometimes he did the stomping. After a while he found other ways to make a living for himself and his psycho dad. Ways more dangerous. More painful.

More ugly.

But sometimes in a starless midnight or a sun-scorched noon, sometimes when he was too drunk or too beaten and bloody or too crushed by grief to grit his teeth and fight it -- sometimes in the bleakest sorrows of his dangerous, painful, ugly life -- he would find one tiny corner of his dark heart still lit by a dewfall of rainbow, dripping from shining wings . . . .