Colleen is waiting for a bus, sleek and smiling and satisfied, enjoying the weather. She knows without thinking too much several things: the temperature, the barometric pressure, the predicted weather. She counts the wind as it pushes against her and numbers the leaves as they blow past. The seconds tock against her skin. She draws the traffic against her palm with the nail of her middle finger.

On the bus she sits next to a tall, hunched figure. She counts the seats and the people on the bus and the number of windows before she sits down. When the person next to her reaches forward to pull the cord she grabs hir wrist where it’s exposed between glove and sleeve. It’s covered with scales, and even as she marvels she knows how many there are.

“Hello,” says the person. Hir voice is low and pleasant. When she looks into hir face xie smiles, too wide, sharp yellow lion’s teeth dangerous in the sun.

“Sit down,” said the woman, in a voice that could be either a low alto or a high tenor. There was only one chair in the room, exactly under the sharp glare of the single light. Colleen hesitated, vaguely troubled by the etiquette of the situation.

“Are you sure you don’t want to–” she started.

“No. Sit down.” Colleen sat. She could just make out the men in the echoing emptiness of the warehouse, so many TRUTHs catching the light.

“Why’ve they got TRUTH tattooed on them like that?” There was always time for questions, always time for answers. She was learning, and her blood rattled the bars of her veins.

“I don’t know,” said the woman. “Is that what it says? I wondered.” The lie was tidy and polite; there was no curiosity in her voice, in her face.

Colleen tried to keep the new fear hidden, didn’t quite succeed. “Who are you?”

“Now that’s a story worth hearing.” The woman circled Colleen, her steps long and feline. “But there’s questions in that question, and questions in those questions, all the way down to the atomies; do you want my name, do you want my business? Do you want my history?” As she talked her voice quavered, now low, now high. Colleen started to stand up and there was a hand on her shoulder pushing her back into the chair. “I was born on the slopes of a mountain in Asia Minor…” Off in the distance a flute started playing, and a drum, and cymbals; the hand on her shoulder tightened and promised everything but the truth.

Colleen’s apartment didn’t have a fireplace, let alone a chimney, so the horse had to go around to the front door and knock. “I’m sorry,” she told it. “I know it’s not what you’re used to.”

“Doesn’t bother me none, ma’am,” it said, head twisted all the way around to talk to her. It was a bony thing, just a skeleton of a horse, really, except for the wings, which were huge and solid and gorgeous in their featheriness. “Nobody’s got fireplaces anymore, seems like. It’s all central heatin’.” The city was spread out below them; they were high enough up that the sun was still shining, the last golden wink of the day, but the city was in the mountain’s broad shadow and the streetlights were on. “Everything’s electrical now.”

“Do you miss the old way?” She closed her eyes as the horse spiraled south toward the ocean. “Fires and villages and pioneers, I mean. You know, pre-industrial stuff.”

“No’m,” said the horse. “I like things like this. Science stuff. Fireplaces are okay, I reckon, but nuclear reactors are better.” It turned its head away from her so she had to strain to make out what it said. “Someday maybe I’ll get up in one of the ships. Always did want to get into outer space.”

Getting out of the house was the hard part. Everything after that took care of itself. She got a lift almost as soon as she got to the freeway, from a hard-eyed man in a business suit who took her two hundred miles to the south and kept talking the entire time, funny stories about the weirdoes he’d seen while selling vacuum cleaners all mixed up with warnings about the dangers to a young girl out hitchhiking alone. She laughed at his jokes and nodded at his lectures and when she got out of the car he pressed a twenty dollar bill into her hand and roared off into the distance.

Colleen kept moving for three days, heading south toward where it was warmer and sometimes looking back over her shoulder. She never had any problems from any of the people who picked her up, though they all warned her that she was tempting fate thumbing rides, all of them, except for one large woman in a tatty sweatshirt with Tweety Bird on it who was driving a beat-up minivan.

“Good for you,” said the woman, who’d told Colleen she was a Christian before she’d even got into the car. “Everyone’s so scared these days. There’s no faith in the world. I used to hitch all over the place when I was your age and I never had any problems I couldn’t handle. Most people are safe as houses.” When she dropped Colleen off, the woman leaned over and handed her a knife through the window. “Have faith,” said the woman, “and take care of yourself.” There was a cross etched into the blade, wrapped around with thorns. In her hand it was hot, heavy, and dangerous, like a storm just coming over the horizon.

“Seven seconds,” said the sphinx.

Colleen was shivering on the corner and couldn’t place the voice for a second. It was cold and she was hungry – or she wasn’t hungry, but she knew she ought to be. She was empty with the memory of hunger. “What?” she said.

“Between lights,” repeated the sphinx. “Seven seconds. Except during rush hour, when it’s longer – thirty seconds even – and after ten, when it depends on where the traffic’s coming from. Average time between changes in absence of traffic is twelve seconds and a half.”

Colleen filed this information away. It didn’t seem to mean anything, but she was learning that everything meant something. There were connections even in the empty places.

The sphinx was tiger-striped and brunette and stuck up on the front of the metal switching box next to the crosswalk sign. Its eyes were wide and blank. Oriental. Its voice was full of corner noises, cars gearing up, men whistling, women humming, heels tapping against the concrete, water gurgling down the storm drain. Metal rattle of the switching box. “The light’s changed,” it told her. “Aren’t you going to go?”

“Hold on,” she said. “I’m counting.”