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.”

From the broad back of the lamassu Colleen could look down and see the surface of the ocean so far below, looking like a piece of wrapping paper accidentally thrown away. “God,” she said, and buried her face in its hair.

It flicked its skin irritably. “There is no God but the God,” it reproached her. “The Lord of Air and Darkness and under Him twenty thousand spirits of the air, and under them all the ranks of angels and djinn, Thrones and Dominions. And under them the various elementals and sprites. And then the birds of the air and the beasts of the field and the fishes of the –”

“Shut up,” she said. “Shut up shut up shut up!” She whimpered and dug her knees into its sides.

“It is a known design flaw,” it said. “Sorry. A weakness for triva and pedantry. We all suffer it. It is known, for example, that a witch may be delayed by a handful of sand scattered across his path, and that a demon may be trapped by a jarful of salt set against a door frame. The numbers slip away, you see, and the names; if you look up there are no stars here, nor planets: too much complexity swamps us, sets us running to drain the lake with a soup strainer. Such are our weaknesses.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Its smell was soothing, grassy and comfortingly bestial. When she was a very young girl, her uncle had kept horses and she had gone to see them once or twice. It was that same smell, barnsmell, haysmell; high spaces and a box of cats and animal obsolescence.

“Fair play,” it said. “You’re one of us, now. Gooble, gobble, gooble, gobble.”

She laughed in spite of herself, and felt it going out of her, with seconds between breaths: one, two, three. There were one hundred and six thousand, four hundred, and twenty-three hairs on her head, and she knew them all.

She was fatter now, almost a healthy weight, her hair dark at the roots like a fading dye job, but really thicker and healthier with the better diet. She hacked it all off and marched around the city like a punk rock black Maria, eyes still scooped out and hollow in their sockets. There was a street in the arts district that she kept going back to, where the buildings had turned away from the road and murals covered their broad concrete backs. In the middle of the block a fifteen foot tall Nebuchanezzar stared down at her, its eyes heavy-lidded and strange.

“Worship me,” it said. “Have I not been fair?” Two lamassi stood at his shoulders, their wings spread.

“What do I do, Lord?” said Colleen. “Do I pray?”

“Come with me, and I will show you my rites.” A lamassu stepped out of the mural and knelt before her. It had a back like a baby grand piano. Colleen perched between its double shoulders and wove her fingers into its hair. The Nebuchanezzar opened its mouth until she could see the furnace burning behind it, and the lamassu sprang forward.

The wall passed over her like a shadow.