Sara’s co-parents split four against four when she asked for permission to have a rose fitted to her smartsuit. In the past, the chairperson had had the right to settle split decisions, but that had caused everyone to schedule their household motions for the week when the most sympathetic chairperson would be sitting, so they’d done away with it in April, at the same meeting when they’d voted six-to-two to let Sara handle her own credit and take robocabs unescorted. Because they’d omitted to replace the rule with any other deadlock-breaking measure, the issue was left undecided, so Sara decided to take full advantage of her newly permitted independence for the first time. She decided that everything not specifically forbidden to her ought to be allowed, and made an appointment to see the family’s tailor. Then she called a robocab, went into Blackburn, and had the bud fitted.

The fitting cost more than she’d anticipated, but Sara figured that her credit would just about stretch, provided that she put an absolute block on all the shopping channels for the next month. The sacrifice seemed justified.

She hadn’t said anything in the house-meeting about color or perfume, in case some haphazard aesthetic objection proved to be a deadlock-breaker, and no one had brought it up, so she assumed that her own choice would be okay as long as she didn’t pick anything too obviously provocative. In the end she went for purple and a nectar called colibri–which seemed safe enough, because the only people who actually wore hummingbirds displayed them as jewelry rather than attitudinal statements.

"It’ll take three months for the flower to open fully," Ms. Chatrian told her. "By that time there’ll be enough foliage to protect your modesty, if you want to extend it that far–the stem will be long enough to arrange the leaves however you like, but it might be best to keep the shells in place for a while yet."

Sara blushed at that, although there was no need. Ms. Chatrian had been the family tailor ever since Sara was born, so she’d seen a lot more of Sara than any doctor ever had. In any case, Sara had no intention of relying on extensions of the rose to take the place of more functional accoutrements.

"It’s not going to get in the way when I sleep, is it?" she asked.

The tailor shook her head. "Even when it bursts forth in all its glory it’ll fold up flat into the smartsuit if you smooth it down with your hand and hold it in position. You ought to do that when you take a shower as well as when you go to sleep, and you’ll have to do it if you ever need to wear a spacesuit or a deep-diving surskin."

Sara didn’t think there was any possibility of her taking an excursion into space or the hidden depths of the sea in the near future, but she nodded anyway to show that she appreciated the flower’s potential discretion.

"It’s detachable, of course," Ms. Chatrian added, "but you’ll have to follow the instructions very carefully. It can be stored indefinitely, if the right provisions are made for its nutrition. I don’t suppose you’ve had any reason to change your suit, as yet–but it’s only a matter of time."

Sara blushed at that too, although she wasn’t quite sure why. The tailor knew perfectly well that Sara had only ever had one suit, which had been growing along with her since she was a babe in arms, and that she was unlikely to be extending her wardrobe for at least another three years–but it was, indeed, only a matter of time. Sara wasn’t likely to get much taller than she was now–although Mother Quilla, the tallest of her co-parents, was always assuring her that it wasn’t too late for some judicious somatic encouragement–but she knew that she still had a way to go, personal-development-wise. The time would come soon enough when she’d need more than one smartsuit, to reflect the glorious complexity of her post-adolescent character.

The inevitable argument got under way as soon as the robocab that brought her back from Blackburn dropped her at the door, but the dispute as to whether she was entitled to select her own personal embellishments without broader consultation soon devolved into a harmless discussion about the color.

"Purple’s a terrible color for a rose," Mother Maryelle opined. "At a distance, it’ll look as if you’re wearing a geranium."

"It’s a bit dark," Mother Quilla said, although Sara couldn’t see how she could tell from the fringe that was peeping out of the bud. "Imperial’s all very well in broad daylight, but it won’t show up well in less kindly light. You should have gone for a lighter shade. Mauve, perhaps."

"White, perhaps," Father Gustave put in, a trifle mischievously. "All girls your age should wear white."

"Except that she was born on the wrong side of the Pennines," Father Aubrey pointed out, "and she could hardly wear red, considering the kind of signals that would have given out–not to mention the fact that it would look as if she’d been shot in the chest. Or maybe in the back, given that it would look more like an exit-wound. It’s not going to have thorns, is it? You’re spiky enough without."

"Thorns," Sara informed him, with all due dignity, "are optional."

For a while, it almost seemed as if no one was going to ask about the perfume, but Mother Jolene was just waiting her turn. When Sara told her that the nectar was called colibri, Mother Jolene–who knew no foreign languages–looked puzzled, but Father Gustave, always enthusiastic to occupy the intellectual high ground, tipped her off. "French for hummingbird," he said. "Does that mean that the flower will attract hummingbirds, when it’s mature enough to start producing nectar?"

Sara admitted that it would.

"Well," said Mother Jolene, with a sigh, "I suppose it’s safe enough. It is sterile, I hope–the hummingbirds might be bringing pollen on their beaks."

"Of course it is," Sara assured her.

"As a matter of interest," Father Stephen inquired, "do they make a nectar that attracts suicidal nightingales?"

Father Gustave was the only one who laughed at that. He’d been one of the four who voted against the rose, but he took more interest in it than anyone else over the next few weeks–anyone else, at least, who actually lived in the hometree. Naturally, Sara took great pride in showing it off to all her classmates in webschool, where it harvested a very satisfying crop of envious admiration. One or two of her classmates weren’t sure about the purple, but they were more positive about the scent, even though they couldn’t actually smell it.

Gennifer’s opinion was the one Sara cared about most, because Gennifer was Sara’s best friend, being the nearest neighbor of her own age–her hometree was a mere hundred kilometers away in the Lake District. Teenagers weren’t quite as thin on the Lancastrian ground as that distance implied–there were at least a dozen who lived in between Sara and Gennifer, perhaps as many as fifteen scattered between Blackburn and the Manchester/Liverpool Spine Road, and literally hundreds in the cityplex itself–but all the other "provincials" were slightly older or slightly younger than Sara and Gennifer, in different virtual classes.

Mercifully, Gennifer was entirely supportive, and not in the least envious. "It’s a masterpiece," she said, "and it’ll really suit you. The only thing sexier than wearing the very best living jewelry is wearing flowers that attract the very best living jewelry. Their visits may be brief, but they’ll keep coming back. You are going to have more blooms than one, I suppose?"

"The flower’s sterile," Sara told her. "I’m not quite ready for glad rags yet."

"Of course it is, darling," Gennifer came back, oozing pretended sophistication, "but there’s such a thing as vegetative reproduction. Once the root and stem are fully established they can put forth as many flowers as you can support. You’ll have to mind your diet, though. You’re eating for two now, and one of them is a bush."

Sara realized that she hadn’t thought about the nourishment aspect as deeply as she might. Most smartsuits were parasitic nowadays, because the old-style photosynths hadn’t been able to pick up enough sunlight to power all the kinds of things that modern smartsuits were expected to do. Even Father Gustave, who was further behind the times in most respects than any of her other co-parents, wore an exceedingly smart parasitic business suit that organized his life far better than any personal robot–although the density of data projected on his outer conjunctiva meant that he was walking around half-blind most of the time.

Even though the rose’s foliage would be actively green, Sara knew that she’d have to supply at least half of its energy requirements, and probably more. The larger the implant grew–whether it put out more flowers or not–the more support it would need. Quantity wouldn’t be a problem, but balance might. The kinds of manna with which the pantry was stocked had no special supplements for the manufacture of colibri nectar, or for the purple coloring of the flowers.

On the other hand, Sara thought, any deficit that developed should be easily countered with a couple of pills or a flask of sap.

It would have been nice, in a way, if there had been a single day on which the flower opened–a sort of birthday, which could be celebrated by a suitable invented ritual–but the process was too gradual for any such ready marking. A whole week elapsed between the bud’s first tentative opening and the full display of the flower: a week in which Sara’s impatience to see the process through became almost unbearable, and brought forth a veritable flood of thorn jokes, not just from Father Aubrey but from everyone else–except Father Lemuel, who was nowadays too far adrift in virtual experience to notice anything that happened in mere meatspace unless it were handed to him, literally, on a plate. The only reason Father Lemuel wore smart clothing, so far as Sara could see, was to make sure nothing happened to his body while, as he quaintly insisted on putting it, "his spirit was on the Other Side."

In the end, though, the rose opened all the way–and it was only then that Sara realized that there would be a particular moment to mark after all: the moment when the rose was visited by its first hummingbird.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen right away, even though the perfume became so noticeable about the house that Father Aubrey began to complain.

"Take it outside, why don’t you?" he demanded, when the weekly meeting broke up on the following Tuesday. "It’s a nice evening, and there’s just enough breeze to save you from suffocating."

"I don’t notice it any more," Sara lied, blushing slightly. "If you don’t like it, you’re welcome to pop down to the cellar and retune the air-filters."

"There’s no need," Mother Jolene put in. "The wallskin will adapt–just give it a couple of days. You didn’t complain fifteen years ago when we had the nursery decked out with wallflowers, Aubrey."

"I thought they were gillyflowers," Mother Maryelle put in.

"Technically . . ." Father Stephen began–but no one wanted a pedantic sermon on the precise etymological implications of the words "wallflower" and "gillyflower." Mother Verena was quick to say: "Have you seen any hummingbirds yet, Sara?"–and when Sara admitted, by means of a shrug, that she hadn’t, Mother Verena was quick to advise her to leave her window open so that the scent could drift, because the house would reclaim the organic compounds in preference to venting them.

That seemed like a good idea, so Sara opened her window as soon as she got back to her schoolstation, before she even called Gennifer for a chat.

"Any hummingbirds yet?" were Gennifer’s first words, too, but Sara had her camera set to close-up, so there was no point in shrugging her shoulders again.

"Not yet," she said. "If we lived closer to the cityplex it would be different, but hummingbirds are thin on the ground in these parts."

"They never touch the ground," Gennifer pointed out, a trifle pedantically, "so whatever they’re thin on, it isn’t that."

"I’m going to open my window wide tonight," Sara added, "to give them a chance to pick up the scent–but I suppose it’ll take time to drift as far as Blackburn. Sometimes, I wish my parents hadn’t decided that a rural environment was best for child-rearing."

"If you think you’re out in the wilds, wait till you visit me here in the summer," Gennifer said. "Isn’t it too late? I mean, evening’s when people want their living jewelry about their person. You might do better to open the window tomorrow morning, if it weren’t for school. Maybe you’d better wait for the weekend."

Sara didn’t want to wait for the weekend, but she could see what Gennifer had said about the evening not being the best time to expect other people’s finest feathered frippery to be flying free, so she decided to take the next best option–which was to leave the window open all night. The most likely time of all for costume jewelry to be left to its own devices, she figured, was when its owners had gone to sleep. Unlike roses, hummingbirds couldn’t just flatten themselves out.

The flaw in that plan, she realized soon enough, was that if she were actually going to witness the crucial moment then she would have to stay awake herself–which might not be easy, given the efficiency of her metabolic education. She reminded herself that she didn’t have to stay awake all night, but only long enough for the first questing hummingbird to appear, and convinced herself that she could do it–or, at least, that she would wake up at the first flutter of tiny wings.

It was with that thought uppermost in her mind that she finally laid her head on her pillow, having refrained from dimming the nightlight, on the grounds that it would be no use hearing the flutter of tiny wings if she couldn’t see them beating.

It was the repeated momentary eclipse of the nightlight that eventually brought her out of a light doze with a start. She hadn’t heard wings because the flyers that were zooming around her room were noiseless. They weren’t birds at all, nor even real bats, but mere shadowbats: "astral tattoos," as the 3V ads called them.

There were six, and they were as graceful in flight as only semisubstantial creatures could be. They spiraled and soared, dived and looped–and when they dived, they descended upon Sara’s not-quite-flattened rose like swallows skimming the surface of a calm lake.

For a moment or two she thought that they were only playing, attracted more by the light than the rose, and even when she realized that they really were interested in the flower on her bosom she thought it had to be the color rather than the scent that was attracting them. After all, they had no beaks; unlike hummingbirds, they couldn’t actually drink the nectar, and because they were essentially vaporous themselves, they had no need for vulgar liquid nourishment. It took her several minutes to become convinced that they really were taking the volatilized scent right out of the air, a few molecules at a time. They had neither mouths nor noses, so they were not drinking or breathing it, but they were certainly mopping it up–her own nose told her that much.

It was only a short step from the formulation of that conviction to another, which was that the shadowbats’ aerial frolics were becoming more hectic by the moment. It seemed that they were not only sipping the intangible perfume of her purple rose, but also becoming intoxicated by it.

For a few moments Sara lay quite still, marveling at the unexpectedness of it all–but then a sense of violation began to build. A rose perfumed by colibri nectar should not be attracting shadowbats. None of the flowers offered by the family’s ultra-respectable tailor were scented to attract shadowbats, nor were any she had ever seen advertised in webspace. The shadowbats that had invaded her room might not be guilty of theft, given that she had no enforceable proprietary rights in the scent exuded by her flower, but they were certainly culpable of some strange as yet unnamed perversity.

So far as Sara knew, shadowbats drew their nourishment exclusively from the bodies of their hosts; unlike ornamental birds and bees, they were not designed to seek out "food" elsewhere. Their flight was not supposed to be purposeful. Why, therefore. . . ?

The train of thought suddenly turned back on itself, returning to "the bodies of their hosts"–or, more likely, host in the singular, if she were only concerned with the particular flock of night-visitors turning somersaults around her nightlight. These were not just any shadowbats; they belonged to someone. In fact, they belonged to the kind of person who was likely to wear, at least some of the time, an elaborate network of quasi-Gothic "astral tattoos" . . . which was, as all eight of her parents would readily deduce, not at all the same kind of person whose idea of a fashion statement was a small flock of decorously positioned hummingbirds.

Despite the deep dent in her credit inflicted by the rose, Sara took a robocab into town on Saturday morning in order to visit Ms. Chatrian. After much thought, she had decided against telling any of her co-parents about the shadowbats in case one of the four who had supported her initial request should decide to switch sides and join a campaign to have the rose removed and put in storage until she was older.

Fortunately, Ms. Chatrian wasn’t busy. Sara didn’t have to sit in reception for long–which was good, because Sara always found Ms. Chatrian’s reception area rather uncomfortable. It was so very clean and orderly by comparison with the rooms in the hometree that she was always anxious about leaving accidental stains on the glossy furniture or the polished surfaces of the desk and occasional table.

"It’s coming along nicely," Ms. Chatrian observed, warily, when Sara was admitted to her presence. "Any hummingbirds come fluttering round yet?"

"Two, when I got out of the cab," Sara told her. "I didn’t want to hang about while they took a drink, though. There’s a problem."

The real reason Sara hadn’t lingered on the pavement wasn’t the urgency of the problem, but a curious impression she’d had lately that people were looking at her. She’d told herself sternly that it must be her imagination, caused by the fact that she still wasn’t used to being out and about without several parents forming a protective wall between her and the wider society, but she still hadn’t shaken it off.

"What problem?" Ms. Chatrian asked, through slightly pursed lips.

"I left my window open on Tuesday," Sara explained, "but I didn’t get hummingbirds. I got shadowbats."

"Really?" said Ms. Chatrian. "They’re quite pretty when they’re in flight, aren’t they? I’ve had a few requests for sublimating accessories but they’re not quite my style. Sublimation technology is progressing by leaps and bounds, so I suppose we’ll all get used to it soon enough, but detachable shadows. . . . I was talking about them to your Father Stephen only the other week, and he called them ‘airy-fairies from Cloudcuckooland.’ It’s a joke, you see. . . . "

"I know," Sara said, patiently. "The shadowbats were attracted by the scent of the rose. They were soaking it up from the air–getting drunk on it."

"I’m sure you’re mistaken, Sara," the tailor said, in her most imperious adults-know-best voice.

"I’m sure I’m not," Sara countered.

Ms. Chatrian was too worldly wise to be so easily wrong-footed. "What did your parents say about it?" she asked.

"I haven’t told them," Sara said, flatly. "I thought it was a matter between you and me."

"Me?" the tailor said, disingenuously. "I don’t see that it concerns me. I supplied exactly what you ordered. Colibri is designed to attract hummingbirds, but what smells sweet to hummingbirds is bound to smell sweet to other things as well. Shaped sublimates may be simple entities by comparison with creatures of flesh and blood, but they need some kind of sensory apparatus to guide themselves around, and smell is the obvious one to use. If you have a complaint, you ought to address it to the manufacturers of the shadowbats–I’m sure they’ll be interested to know that their nice new technology has a good old-fashioned glitch."

Sara thought about that for a moment or two, and decided–slightly reluctantly, in view of the fact that Ms. Chatrian was giving her a king-sized brush-off–that the tailor was right. If she had a complaint, she ought to take it up with the people who had made the dodgy shadowbats. If, on the other hand, she were merely curious–she hadn’t quite made up her mind–the supplier would be more likely than Ms. Chatrian to give her further information.

"Which of the astral tattooists hereabouts is most likely to have supplied the shadowbats?" Sara asked the tailor. "I checked the local section of the web-directory, but there are six listed and I don’t know where to start."

"It’s not my field," Ms. Chatrian was quick to say, "but if I were you, I’d start by asking the Dragon Man. He’s next door to the cocoonist’s on the far side of the square, by the fire-fountain. He’s quite cutting-edge, in spite of the fact that his window-display’s all needles and blades, and he attracts clients interested in . . . the macabre."

The tailor smiled with undeserved self-satisfaction at her weak joke about the cutting edge, just as Father Stephen would have. Sara wondered whether Father Stephen and Ms. Chatrian had ever been more than customer and client, but it wasn’t a thought she wanted to pursue just now.

Sara made the most dignified exit she could contrive, and went up the road to the square, followed by no less than four hummingbirds. This time, she had to stop to let them drink, although she felt very conspicuous doing it in the square, bathed in cool sparks from the over-energetic fire-fountain. She couldn’t tell whether the passers-by who glanced at her were admiring her flower or secretly condemning her as a pathetic show-off who ought to be old enough by now to be less avid for adult attention.

Ten minutes later, she’d plucked up enough courage to go through the Dragon Man’s opaque and highly decorated door. Unlike Ms. Chatrian, the sublimate technologist manned his own reception desk–which was situated in a room as different from Ms. Chatrian’s tastefully sterile, user-friendly, pastel-shaded antechamber as anyone could imagine. The Dragon Man’s shop was dingy and dusty, and the walls were covered in dead pictures rather than window-screens. As far as Sara could tell, the only screen in the room was the one on the desk on which the proprietor was currently resting the absurdly boot-like soles of his smartsuit.

The Dragon Man looked older than anyone else Sara had ever seen in the flesh. This presumably meant that he actually was older than anyone else she had ever seen in the flesh, because if he’d been any younger he’d have had access to far better age-retardant technologies, and probably wouldn’t look a day over thirty even if he were two hundred and thirty.

Sara knew that Ms. Chatrian must have deliberately refrained from mentioning the fact that the Dragon Man was a wrinkly, although she realized when she noticed that there wasn’t anything remotely like the image of a dragon on his delicately patterned smartsuit that his nickname was probably supposed to signify that he didn’t measure up to modern standards of male beauty. There didn’t seem to be as much of him within his extra skin as there was of most people; Sara was slightly embarrassed to be reminded of urban legends about people who wore suits so smart that they kept right on going when their wearers died, until nothing was left of the individual inside but a mere skeleton. She understood immediately why Ms. Chatrian had identified the Dragon Man as the most likely sublimate technologist in town to attract clients with an interest in "the macabre."

"Hi," said the Dragon Man, in an unexpectedly warm voice. "That’s a nice rose–it really suits you. What can I do for you?" He took his feet off the desk but he remained seated. As his face came more clearly into view Sara saw that he wasn’t literally wrinkly at all–his smartsuit had seen to that. Even so, he really did look very old. Sara had the odd impression–which was surely an illusion–that the synthetic flesh of his smartsuit was laid directly upon the bones of his skull. She had seen talking heads on 3V whose appearance was similar, but the artificiality of 3V had lent them a kind of propriety–and a kind of venerable dignity–that actual presence could not duplicate.

"Ms. Chatrian says that you’re the man to talk to about shadowbats," Sara said, mustering all her courage and resolve.

"Very kind of her, I’m sure," the old man said, equably. "Knowing Linda, though, I doubt that she’d be sending you to me if you wanted a few substitute decorations in a different style. So what about shadowbats?"

Sara realized that none of her co-parents had ever used Ms. Chatrian’s first name. She wondered whether that meant that, unlike the Dragon Man, they were all younger than the tailor was–even Father Gustave!

"A flock of them came into my room the other night," she said. "They were attracted by the scent of my rose."

The Dragon Man sniffed audibly. "Colibri," he said, after a slight pause. "You were expecting hummingbirds. Your first hummingbirds, at a guess. I can see how shadowbats might have been a disappointment . . . and a puzzle."

"You don’t seem very surprised," Sara observed. "Unlike Ms. Chatrian."

The Dragon Man lifted his bony shoulders in what might have been a shrug. "New technology always does more than it’s intended to," he said. "Shaped sublimates are designed to soak up everything they need from their hosts, but the absorption process is necessarily crude; it’s not surprising that they sometimes soak up other things as well. Nobody notices, for the most part, but perfume is . . . well, more noticeable. You have to remember that they’re creatures like none that natural selection ever produced, and that they don’t know what they’re not supposed to do. They have built-in inhibitions about settling on anyone else’s surskin, but fluttering around is the name of their game. You weren’t afraid, I hope?"

"Of course not," Sara said. "I knew they couldn’t hurt me, even if I breathed one in. They seemed to be getting drunk, though–I wondered if they might be in danger."

"Drunk?" echoed the Dragon Man, manifesting none of the skepticism that Ms. Chatrian had displayed. "Now that would be interesting, biochemically speaking. Colibri is a moderately complex cocktail, and the metabolic systems of sublimated quasi-life are straight off the drawing-board, so I doubt if they were ever formally introduced in the lab. It must be idiosyncratic to the flock, though–there are plenty of interaction opportunities in Man/Liv, let alone London. Linda doesn’t meddle much, so the scent must be standard, unless there’s some weird interaction with your own metabolism–but the shadowbats would be the prime suspects anyhow, given that they’re in the earliest stages of their evolution."

"Do you meddle much, Mr. . . ?" Sara had to leave the sentence hanging; she couldn’t bring herself to say "Mr. Dragon Man."

"Warburton," he finished for her. "Yes, Miss Lindley, I meddle quite a bit. Old habits die hard, even when you’re in unfamiliar territory. I used to do beautiful work, you know, when I was young. Birds, roses, hearts, mottoes . . . even dragons with gold and silver scales, with wings like angels’ wings and breath like holy fire–but never Washington crossing the Delaware. I must be one of the last men alive who worked with needles, on bare skin. That’s why I keep them in the window. I’ve always kept pace, with the organics and the smartsuits, all the way from . . . well, not quite the beginning, but at least a time when a few of us were still willing and able to stand naked when we weren’t wearing dead clothes. I’ve always meddled. I carried the habit over when I qualified as a sublimate engineer, just as I’d carried it over into all the other retraining programs I had to go through in order to maintain the outer semblance of my career. I’m older than I look, you know."

Sara felt perversely annoyed with herself when the only thing that she could find to say in response to all this was: "How do you know my name?"

"Children are a rare and precious commodity nowadays," the astral tattooist said. "Not just to their elective parents. It used to be said that it took a village to raise a child; nowadays, I guess, it could easily take a whole city. I think you’ll find that everybody in town knows your name–even people you’ve never spoken to, and wouldn’t recognize if you bumped into them on the street. It’s a quiet sort of celebrity, but it’s more substantial in its way than anything brokered by 3V. You were the only one in your year, you see, this side of Kendal or Man/Liv. Think of that! No . . . don’t. It seems quite normal to you, of course–but even people of your parents’ ages, let alone mine . . ." He paused momentarily before going on. "We don’t remember the Crash, but we remember the Aftermath. Everybody takes an interest in children, Miss Lindley. More than you’ll understand, until you’re much older."

There was a peculiar wistfulness in the old man’s tone that made Sara feel uncomfortable. She wondered now whether it had been accurate observation rather than mistaken imagination that had convinced her that people were looking at her in the street. "Shadowbats," she said, reminding herself as well as the shopkeeper what had brought her across his threshold. "Do you know whose they are?"

"I can find out," he said, not bothering to ask whether she meant the person who had designed them or the person who had commissioned them. "What do you want me to do about it if I do?"

Sara hesitated. She wasn’t sure. "Can you fix them?" she asked, faintly.

"Are you sure they’re broken?" he countered.

"They’re not hummingbirds," she said. "I chose colibri because . . ." She trailed off, not knowing whether the obvious continuation of the sentence was an adequate answer to the question he had asked.

Sara became aware that Mr. Warburton was looking at her with the strangest expression on his face. Smartsuits were supposed to be emotionally intelligent: to signal and signify, even better than unmasked faces, all the things that people needed to communicate face-to-face but couldn’t put into words. Their role was, however, essentially supportive. If the human being within was enigmatic, the extra layers of synthetic skin wouldn’t decipher the mystery.

"It’s Saturday morning," the Dragon Man observed, "and you’re the first customer I’ve had. I have four appointments on the machine, but they’re all for this evening, after sunset. Why is that, do you think? Is it going to be bats all the way, now? Am I becoming a creature of the dusk? Sublimate entities don’t have to be shadows, you know. They can be bright, like creatures of pure radiance, or even invisible. We can make fairies and ghosts. Imagine that! We could fill the world with quasi-life that we can’t even see. For now, we have shadows, which only fade away at twilight, but in time, there’ll be hosts of angels dancing around us in the broadest daylight, unsuspected. Or maybe we’ll want to reserve the word angel for the ones that glow like haloes. I’ll find out about the shadowbats, Miss Lindley. I have to respect client confidentiality, you understand, but I’ll find out. If you want hummingbirds, hummingbirds you shall have. We won’t let anything untoward get in their way. Trust me."

"Thanks," Sara said, lamely. She turned to go, wondering why she felt as if she were fleeing in disarray from some non-existent danger.…