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organized crime. The kid was a freelance amateur, and God knows what the sugarcane was cut with.
    Noah bought it anyway. In the nearest Greek place he bought a gyro as the price of the key to the bathroom and locked himself in. The room was windowless but surprisingly clean. The testing set that Noah carried everywhere showed him the unexpected: the sugarcane was cut only with actual sugar, and only by about fifty percent.
    “Thank you, Lord,” he said to the toilet, snorted twice his usual dose, and went back to his table to eat the cooling gyro and wait.
    The drug took him quickly, as it always did. First came a smooth feeling, as if the synapses of his brain were filling with rich, thick cream. Then: One moment he was Noah Jenner, misfit, and the next he wasn’t. He felt like a prosperous small businessman of some type, a shop-owner maybe, financially secure and blissfully uncomplicated. A contented, centered person who never questioned who he was or where he was going, who fit in wherever he happened to be. The sort of man who could eat his gyro and gaze out the window without a confusing thought in his head.
    Which he did, munching away, the juicy meat and mild spices satisfying in his mouth, for a quiet half-hour.
    Except—something was happening on the street.
    A group of people streamed down Broadway. A parade. No, a mob. They carried torches, of all things, and something larger on fire, carried high. . . . Now Noah could hear shouting. The thing carried high was an effigy made of straw and rags, looking like the alien in a hundred bad movies: big blank head, huge eyes, spindly body of pale green. It stood in a small metal tub atop a board. Someone touched a torch to the straw and set the effigy on fire.
    Why? As far as Noah could see, the aliens weren’t bothering anybody. They were even good for business. It was just an excuse for people floundering in a bad economy to vent their anger—
    Were these his thoughts? Noah’s? Who was he now?
    Police sirens screamed farther down the street. Cops appeared on foot, in riot gear. A public-address system blared, its words audible even through the shop window: “Disperse now! Open flame is not allowed on the streets! You do not have a parade permit! Disperse now!”
    Someone threw something heavy, and the other window of the gyro place shattered.
    Glass rained down on the empty tables in that corner. Noah jerked upright and raced to the back of the tiny restaurant, away from the windows. The cook was shouting in Greek. People left the parade, or joined it from side streets, and began to hurl rocks and bottles at the police. The cops retreated to the walls and doorways across Broadway and took out grenades of tear gas.
    On the sidewalk outside, a small child stumbled by, crying and bleeding and terrified.
    The person who Noah was now didn’t think, didn’t hesitate. He ran out into the street, grabbed the child, and ran back into the restaurant. He wasn’t quite fast enough to escape the spreading gas. His nose and eyes shrieked in agony, even as he held his breath and thrust the child’s head under his jacket.
    Into the tiny kitchen, following the fleeing cook and waiter, and out the back door to an alley of overflowing garbage cans. Noah kept running, even though his agonized vision was blurring. Store owners had all locked their doors. But he had outrun the tear gas, and now a woman was leaning out of the window of her second-floor apartment, craning her neck to see through brick walls to the action two streets away. Gunfire sounded. Over its echo off the steel and stone canyons, Noah shouted up, “A child got gassed! Please—throw down a bottle of water!”
    She nodded and disappeared. To his surprise, she actually appeared on the street to help a stranger, carrying a water bottle and towel. “I’m a nurse, let me have him . . . aahh.” Expertly she bathed the child’s eyes, and then Noah’s, just as if a battle wasn’t going on within hearing if not