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shift after saving the life of a hemorrhaging woman.
    Hard to believe it was the same one when everything else was so different.
    A different sound caught his ear and he stilled, listening. He didn’t turn because . . . well, because he knew it was coming from the corner where Jade was sleeping.
    Or, rather, pretending to sleep.
    Always keen, his ears seemed even sharper now, and he could tell she’d risen from her place on the floor. If she was in pain or needed him, she would have called out. Or said something.
    But . . . then he heard the soft metal clunk. She’d found her pack and picked it up. Preparing to leave? Or simply needing something from the bag?
    He waited until she was well away from her pallet before he turned his head. “Jade? Is everything all right?”
    “Oh,” she said, her voice still low and husky. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I was just . . . I needed to. . . .” Her voice trailed off in embarrassment.
    “I wasn’t sleeping.” Elliott pulled to his feet. “Sorry we don’t offer indoor plumbing here,” he said, moving toward her, willing to pretend he didn’t know what she was up to. And, good God, the white T-shirt she wore was like a magnet for the moonlight, showing off the curves of her torso. As if he needed a reminder.
    Her face remained shadowy and she seemed to be moving smoothly, without pain. Had he really healed her completely, then?
    “I’m afraid you’ll have to go down and outside. I’ll come with you,” he said.
    Holding the pack she’d slung over her shoulder, she shifted on her feet and looked up at him. “Well, isn’t that awkward. You don’t need to come—I’ll be fine. There aren’t any
gangas
around—we’d hear them if there were.”
    “Or smell them.”
    She gave a soft laugh and nodded. Elliott gestured toward the opening in the floor where the rope ladder hung. “Awkward or not, I’m going with you.”
    “If you want,” she said as if it was her idea, when she clearly preferred to be left alone. Then she turned and started down the ladder.
    Elliott followed and remained a prudent distance away, standing in what had been a street a half-century ago, as she disappeared into the shadows. Scanning the area for the orange eyes of
gangas
or the yellow ones of wolves, he waited, resisting the urge to follow her.
    As nearly everywhere he’d been, decrepit, overgrown buildings loomed over and around him, barely recognizable as the establishments they’d once been. A diner, with its sign peeling away. A gift shop. A pharmacy. In the morning, he’d check to see if there was anything salvageable for his bag of medical supplies.
    Far as he could tell, this had been the downtown of a quaint little Main Street USA town. Probably one that had already been on the verge of extinction fifty years ago, with its Mom-and-Pop shops threatened by big box stores and lifestyle malls on the outskirts of town. But big box or little, all of them had been reduced to jungles of bush and vine. Not for the first time, Elliott wondered what town this had been, once upon a time. And who had died here, and who had lived, when It all happened.
    Then he realized that Jade had been gone for quite a while, and he sharpened his attention, turning toward the shadows.
    A few steps toward the darkness, listening carefully, he wondered if she had indeed melted into the darkness, never to return.
    Just like the mysterious Robin Hood Quent had told him about.
    Would it matter if she had? Other than the fact that she was a woman alone in the night, with
gangas
and wolves and other dangers, would he care?
    Obviously, she had already been alone earlier, when she blazed in Annie Oakley-style . . . hadn’t she? Or was Jade secretly returning to her own band of companions, now that she was healed?
    “Jade,” he called, stepping closer to a shadowy alley, now overgrown with bushes and trees. “Are you all right?”
    His heart was suddenly pounding. He was worried about her being alone in the