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deflected another two dozen of the slender spines. The Hound ceased shooting and bobbled gently from side to side, regarding him with its measuring devices. A moment later, it dispatched two servos for his neck…
    Reacting quickly, he called his own servos to him. Four feet from his face, the enemy's hands and his own met and locked, metal fingers laced through metal fingers. He set full power into his hands and tried to snap the other set of prosthos.
    His hopes for a swift triumph were destroyed when he saw the Hound had similar ideas. Its own servos wrenched at his, the four members swaying back and forth in the air, gaining and losing the same space in a rhythmic duel. Finally, when both sets reached full power and stress, they did not move at all, but merely strained in frozen tableau against each other. The grav-plates on all four hands erupted almost simultaneously in smoke and sparks. The metal hands dropped to the floor as if they were a single creature, a metal bird with shot pellets in its wings.
    Now both hunter and hunted were handless. Hunter and hunted…
    Timothy realized the nomenclature was no longer adequate. With both of them handless, and with Ti able to neutralize the pin weapon, the balance of power had been equalized. As he moved past the Hound, he was aware that another facet of his power had made itself known tonight. Under moments of stress and anxiety, he seemed to acquire new abilities. The hate had been valuable, and he would still need it And with his power to influence small objects in transit as well as when they were still, he might be able to give vent to the hatred when he encountered Klaus Margle.
    The Hound stopped following him when he moved into shooting range again. It bumped purposelessly against the beams, as if its mind had been in its hands and, losing them, it had lost all cleverness. Ti floated upstairs and stopped in the hallway
to
listen. He could hear footsteps in the kitchen…
    He was prepared for them. Confidence surged through him, augmenting his hate. He drifted into the living-room just as the gunmen walked in with their weapons drawn. "Your Hound is finished," he said, drawing their attention from the areas of deeper shadow which they were cautiously exploring.
    The man on Margle's left swung and fired. Timothy deflected all but one pin, lifted that and turned it back on the gunman. The dart sank into the Brother's chest, its poison exploding into his bloodstream. He gagged, doubled over, and dropped.
    "I won't kill you if you surrender," Timothy said wearily. The hate was still there, but a deep welling sadness had joined it.
    Margle and the remaining man were crouched behind a sofa, unwilling to surrender merely because of a lucky shot.
In
the dark, they could not have seen that his hands were gone. "You're crazy," Margle said, his voice high and sharp, grating on the nerves. He was quiet, waiting for Timothy to speak and reveal his position.
    "Why did you kill Taguster?" Ti asked, remaining at the same place.
    "Why tell you?" Margle asked. There was a giggle in his voice, an edgy little laugh that sounded almost sadistic. Apparently, they could not see him yet.
    "You're going to kill me. Or I'll kill you. Whichever way, telling me why you murdered Taguster won't make much difference, will it?"
    "He was on PBT," Margle said.
    "What excuse does that
give
you for killing him?" To discover that their reason was so thin made the death seem all the more meaningless to Ti and resurrected the hatred which had begun to die in him.
    Margle chuckled, as if lax and unwatchful—although he was not. His kind of man never was. "It was getting too expensive for him. He decided to gather information on us. The Narcotics Bureau has never been able to synthesize the stuff, even with samples they obtained. Taguster was trying to get enough to give them some sort of clue so that, in return, they would make him a legal addict. Then he could get PBT free from supplies the UN has