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the cot in the office was hardly private, hardly appropriate.
    Besides, he wasn’t sure he could keep his balance around this woman who, when not mired in quicksilver moments of confusion, struck him as one of the sanest people he’d ever met. He’d learned his lessons young—to love, but not to lose yourself. To help, but to know you could never help enough. He’d built those walls with care.
    Mickey didn’t so much blast through his walls as she simply appeared on the other side.
    That’s just what she did now, looking him in the eye. None of the evasiveness of so many off their meds, and none of the glittery intensity. Just pure, straight and honest connection. “Please,” she said. “I just need to stay off the streets a few days.”
    When he opened his mouth, it was to offer a gentle refusal—for all the reasons that made so much sense. He simply couldn’t give this woman the kind of help she truly needed. Cruel, to pretend that he could.
    Except she wasn’t asking him to pretend anything. And when he sighed, when he looked away to grab some room to find his badly astray equilibrium, his gaze skipping over old floor mats and ragged wall posters to the big glass storefront windows covered with bars …
    His gaze caught on a dark green sedan cruising down the street. Too slow to be going somewhere in particular; too fast to be preparing for the turn at the corner. Looking for someone, just as the kids had said. And here he was, with someone who wanted to stay off the streets. Curiosity and coincidence.
    He’d already checked in with the clinics; they hadn’t known her. At this, he ought call the cops. But the cops seldom paid much attention to the street community and its denizens, other than to pump them for information. One way or another, Mickey was probably on her own—and seemed to want to stay that way. Maybe for once he could actually help . Truly make a difference.
    There was time enough to change his mind if he’d made a mistake. He turned back to the hope on Mickey’s face and said, “Yes.”

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Chapter 4

    Naia’s classes were heavy with the literary and the arts; she was to emerge from Stanford as a cultured, intelligent young woman with no aspirations for career, and no particular foundation for one.
    She really wished she could slip in a computer science class or two. Or better yet, resource management, with which she could do something to improve the way her country burned through its natural gifts. What good was it that the upper class had all the oil money they could imagine, when none of the outlying villages even had electricity?
    So it was not with any particular enthusiasm that she gathered her notebooks for Great Archeological Sites in Europe , stuffing them into her briefcase as she reached for the bright scarf that would cover her hair in public.
    It was with considerably less enthusiasm that, once she opened the door to her upscale apartment, she unexpectedly confronted her advisor, Badra.
    Advisor. The woman was a chaperone, meant to keep her in line—meant to report back to her father. During her first days here, Naia had engaged in a fierce battle of wills with Badra. In the end—against threat of being recalled home—Naia agreed to maintain certain customs of her country’s conservative social requirements, and to post her daily schedule. When she went to public events, Badra came with her.
    But Badra didn’t come to her apartment in the middle of the day.
    And Badra never came with one of the San Francisco embassy’s burly security men at her heels.
    Naia tried to cover her instant plunge into fear and guilt—as though she’d never even met a woman named Anna who taught her about dead drops and casual lying and compartmentalizing her feelings. “ As-sallamu aleykum ,” she said, automatically greeting Badra with appropriate words. And then she dredged up resentment. “Whatever are you doing here? I’ve got class in half an hour, and barely enough