Breaking out of jail is hard. It's supposed to be. Any jail that would let its population wander willy-nilly out of the gates is a jail that would soon see its gates shut for good. Therefore, jails are rigged up with barbed wire and electric fences and all sorts of neat devices that would make the Marquis de Sade's eyes glaze over with possessive awe.
Things are a little different in the land of the criminally insane. By definition, it's not the inmate's fault that they went on a murderous rampage of chihuahua torture. It's entirely the fault of the bubbling chemical stew that makes up their brains. Logically, then, the purpose of an asylum shouldn't be to merely keep these people penned up, but to fix whatever's wrong with them so that they can be proudly released back into society. It makes sense that there might be a little less barbed wire in such places. After all, surely some of them were getting better...right?
Arkham Asylum did indeed go lightly with their security measures. There were quite a few good reasons, most of which involved their lack of money, time, and resources. (The not-quite-so-good reasons, which no one ever talked about, involved a heavy amount of bribery and a fair bit of threats. The rogues liked being able to stroll back out at any time they pleased.) In fact, if you had to escape from any institution, you'd probably want it to be Arkham.
Getting out of the building, however, was just the beginning. Dodging guards and picking locks were the easy bits. The tricky part of the escape started just as the escapee found himself standing in the fresh air on the fun side of the fence.
In most cities, it might be enough just to make it back to civilization. But Gotham, unlike most cities, was massive. A seventeen-mile by seventeen-mile bit of land housed a population of well over eight million inhabitants, all of whom would be more than eager to call the cops on anyone wearing anything that looked remotely like an Arkham uniform. How was it possible for newly escaped rogues to travel through miles of city, remaining unseen until they could sneakily disappear into a hidden lair?
Simple. Like everyone else in Gotham, they took the subway.
The Gotham City subway had a station located handily on the north tip of the city itself. On the surface, it was an average station, with security cameras, guards, and other well-known security measures stuffed into every available corner. However, there was a secret behind all of this security: none of it worked. The cameras weren't hooked into a security station, the guards were alcoholics thrilled at a chance to drink and sleep and get paid for it, and the iron grate over the turnstile had a loose bar that would permit free entry.
Some people might say that you couldn't plan a station that badly. And yet, some people are quite unaware of the dramatic improvement in customer service when the manager wakes up at four in the morning to find a theme weapon shoved in their face. After a very brief and sycophantic conversation, the bargain was agreed upon: the rogues would have easy access to the subway and the subway manager would be able to keep breathing. It was, one might say, the deal of a lifetime. And, of course, what one rogue knew, the others quickly found out about, thanks to their shared pools of henchmen and the secret-spewing qualities of many psychiatric medications.
A southbound train screeched to a halt in St. Andrew's Station. The doors slid open with a bing-bong, squeaking as they rolled over badly serviced mechanisms in the doorframe. And then, alone on the exhaust-choked platform, Sorrow stepped out of the train.
Jumping through the window head-first hadn't been one of her smarter ideas. She padded, wincing, toward the stairs, head thumping with the dull ache of a body part that's been rammed into something unyielding under severe protest. Little sparkles of broken glass, like snowflakes, were tangled in her hair. Larger chunks of broken glass had slashed into her jumpsuit on their way to the ground, leaving flapping cloth and the occasional deep gash in their wake. And, to top it all off, she was limping from a slightly twisted ankle thanks to the uneven terrain that lay between Arkham and the subway station. On the brighter side, she looked like a person who desperately needed help - and nothing dropped you below the average Gothamite's radar like looking needy. Provided that no one noticed the occasional ARKHAM stenciled onto her clothes, she'd be okay.
She trudged up the stairs. Last time, she'd called her henchmen right away and they'd swung immediately into action, finding her a place to live, clothes to wear, and anything she could ever dream of wanting. This time, though, she had nothing for them to do. There was no goal - no robbery, no heist, no murder - in fact, her only goal was to stay out of Arkham, and she didn't need henchmen for that. Come to think of it, it'd be easier to do that without henchmen.
The stairs led up to the street between two short, graffiti-encrusted walls. Sorrow cautiously peeped over the wall, checking for any signs of life on the grubby, dark street. A lump of rags bulged as its occupant rolled over, looking for a more comfortable position to sleep. Other than that, the street was empty. Sorrow stepped up onto the street and, shivering as the wind wrapped around her shoulders, trotted into the darkness.
She'd come here for a reason. Admittedly, it wasn't the best of reasons - she didn't really have a destination in mind, after all - but it was her best option for now. Her one and only lair, the warehouse, was a good mile and a half from here, and it was sure to be watched by either a cop or a cape. Since she couldn't go to the warehouse, she'd come here, to this dilapadated nest of old factories and empty buildings that housed the Iceberg Lounge in their depths like a slightly rotten egg. The cops didn't come to this part of the city - or if they did, they cruised quietly along with their lights off and prayed not to be noticed. The people infesting these buildings were very eager to display just how much they hated anyone in uniform.
She hurried through the abandoned streets, stepping briskly over empty liquor bottles and scraps of old newspapers. Abruptly, with a pair of screams that sounded like infants on a roller coaster, a pair of furry things that might have been cats shot out from the nearest alley, doing their best to swipe each other's heads off as they barreled into the street. Sorrow ducked backward to avoid the spinning ball of yowling fur. One of her cheap shoes, battered from a long night of kicking nearly everything that stood in her way, caught on a jagged edge of broken sidewalk and promptly disintegrated with a loud rrrrip! She stumbled to the left, swearing as the sole of her shoe parted from the scrap of canvas holding it in place.
WhizzzzzzzzzzzTHUNK! Something small, black, and round sailed out of the darkness and pocked hard into the asphalt, bouncing heavily into the midst of the domesticated deathmatch. Gas hissed into the air, and two suddenly exhausted cats fell sound asleep in the middle of the road.
Not that Sorrow had stuck around to see it. Little black things whirring through the air generally meant one thing in this town: someone in a costume was after you. The instant that the little metal ball had whacked into the ground, Sorrow was off and running like a groupie who's just spotten an unguarded stage door.
The wind swirled her long hair into her face, blinding her as she skidded around a corner. She swore and scraped it away, leaving a long black smear across her face, and got her vision back just in time to hopscotch over a series of sleeping bums.
Who was tracking her? Obviously it was a Bat - no cop would chuck custom-made metal things at a criminal when they could just as easily shoot them. But which one? The odds of getting away from any of them were slim, but if it was Batman up there...No, it wasn't Batman. He wouldn't have missed.
An old, tattered garbage bag lay almost invisibly in the road, covered with a layer of rotting leaves and general muck. As Sorrow's bare foot came down on it, it slipped away, landing a few feet away with a sickly squelching noise. Her arms pinwheeled wildly as she fought to stay upright. She ran onward, looking somewhat like a malfunctioning robot as she tried to simultaneously stay upright and scrape goo from the sole of her foot. Where to go?
Ah! A storage yard, with no buildings to grapple from! She dove between the slats of the worn-out fence, wincing as splinters raked down her legs. Then, with wobbly knees, she got to her feet and ducked into the warren of storage containers.
A cape flapped noisily as the vigilante descended to street level. Okay, so...not Nightwing, then. One wide blue eye in a field of filth peeked around the corner of the rusty metal storage container. With a light leap, the vigilante sprang over the fence and instantly lowered himself into a crouching position.
Robin! Well, that was a relief. She ducked deeper into the maze, trotting quietly in a zigzag pattern toward the opposite end of the lot.
A forgotten, rusted door handle topped a pile of general debris. Sorrow picked it up and chucked it into the air, watching it rocket down a passageway until it hit a storage container with a reverberating clangangangangang.
Soft, barely audible footsteps drummed in the air as Robin obediently trotted in the direction of the noise. From all the blustering, bragging stories told by the other rogues, Sorrow was pretty certain that she knew why. The sudden, loud noise in the middle of a hide-and-seek chase generally meant one of two things: either the rogue was luring the vigilante to his elaborate trap, or, more commonly, the loud noise in question was the elaborate trap breaking at the crucial moment. Either way, the vigilante response was straightforward - go to the source of the noise and punch the offender's face in.
And, of course, this would have been the ideal thing for him to do, if only Sorrow had had an elaborate trap. Unfortunately for Robin, Sorrow's only plan involved running away, which she did the very instant that he slipped out of sight in the clustered ranks of storage containers.
There was no time to find a good hiding spot. She needed to go somewhere now! It had to be safe, and easy to get to, and...an idea struck her. She skidded to a halt, spun around, and raced in the opposite direction.
Sometimes, you want to go where everybody knows your name. And, most often, people tend to prefer places where everyone that knows their name isn't immediately inclined to bark orders like 'Hands up!' or 'Stop or I'll shoot!' For the rogues, there was only one place that fit that description - and fortunately for Sorrow, it was within easy running distance.
The Iceberg Lounge was the place to be in Gotham. Well, except for weeknights. Holidays, too, found the place pretty deserted, since very few families wanted to spend quality time together at a club patronized by Gotham's most infamous. And then, of course, there were so many other places to go on the weekends, places where you weren't likely to get shot in the head for unwittingly mocking the object of someone's obsessions...In fact, the only ones who considered the Iceberg to be the hot spot were either criminally insane or fantastically stupid.
A velvet rope, looking as if no one had ever touched it in the years it had served as a barrier, hung hopefully next to the entrance of the Iceberg so that the non-existent crowds would have a place to watch the non-existent patrons saunter in for some non-existent fun. Sorrow vaulted the rope with one leap and yanked the glass door open, shoving herself inside and reaching for the next door as -
Wham!
She bounced backward and thumped hard against the entryway wall. "Watch where you're going," a voice growled angrily out of the dimly-lit hall. A bifurcated figure loomed out of the darkness, his half-scarred face scrunched in anger as he took in the wreckage of his suit.
Sorrow winced. She'd run head-first into the white half of his suit - of course, it would be the white half, she couldn't have gotten so lucky to run into the black, mostly-destroyed half of it - and a Rorschach blot of mud, blood, and shattered glass splotched him from chest to wrist. Instinctively, she raised a hand to brush the worst of it off for him.
In all the fun and excitement of the running, jumping, and mind-searing panic, she'd forgotten that she'd left her gloves somewhere on the grounds of Arkham. Two-Face, on the other hand, realized it at just about the time that her bare fingertips came into view. He wrenched himself sideways and whipped out a single, shining gun in a movement so well-rehearsed that one might think he threatened to kill people every few minutes.
"Oh! No, I didn't mean...I wasn't going to..." Sorrow protested, jerking her arms upward into the classic I-swear-I-didn't-mean-it jazz hands pose framing her face. Cold glass pressed against the back of her neck. She couldn't open the door to run away without stepping forward, and she couldn't step forward without getting closer to that gun that was already too close to her, and she really didn't want to die tonight...
He considered her for a moment. Then, with his free hand, he slipped his coin from his pocket. It flew into the air with an almost inaudible ping. He was making a decision! Oh, no, oh, no...
Thwup. Well, bad heads would have meant death, she was pretty certain...what would good heads possibly mean?
He glared at the coin and reluctantly stuffed the gun back into its holster. Then, silently, he looked her over again, noting the shattered glass in her hair, the various scratches and scrapes she'd acquired, and the shredded remains of her Arkham-issued outfit. "How far to your hideout?" he asked wearily.
"Uh...well, the cops are probably watching it..." Sorrow said uneasily.
He shot the coin another dirty look. "Come on, then," he grumbled, slipping the coin back into his pocket.
"Where?"
He rolled his eyes. "Our place. Take it or leave it," he said somewhat hopefully as he noticed her hesitating.
"Oh. Uh...I just wasn't expecting...thanks," she mumbled, falling in beside him. Okay, so it was a place to go, which was good, but...well, death waited on the other side of a coin-flip. Maybe she could find a better place tomorrow..."Wait!" She jabbed a foot into the door, preventing it from swinging open. "Robin's out there!"
Two-Face snorted disdainfully. "The day we run from that brat is the day we turn ourselves in to Arkham."
Well, wasn't that nice. She cautiously followed him into the night, keeping an eye out for approaching yellow capes as she trotted toward his nicely split sedan.
Many people assume that love makes the world go around. This is incorrect. In actuality, it's caffeine that makes the world go around, delivering energy and pep to people who would much rather stay in bed and let the world worry about itself.
Troy Grey stumbled into Arkham, both hands wrapped around a life-saving paper cup full of coffee. Steam wisped into the air, bathing his face in hot vapor as he took sip after grateful sip of the delicious drink.
After his usual zombie walk to the attic, with the usual lack of greetings from any of the staff as he passed, he sat himself down in his dusty chair and took another long swig of his drink. Slowly, blissfully, the caffeine began dancing in his head, propping his eyelids open and motivating him to get to work on another round of things that no one cared about.
He'd clipped and pasted two entire articles before he realized that something was wrong. Well, maybe not wrong, but...different. Things weren't as he had left them. Well, okay, the papers and his tools were all in their normal piles, but...something was new.
Blink. Blink. His phone was blinking at him. He blinked back. Why would a little red light be flashing on his phone...he'd gotten a message! He fumbled the handset into his hands, almost dropping it in shock. Someone wanted to talk to him? Maybe this was a good thing. Maybe he was finally going to be assigned to some more real work -
The handset hissed into life. "Grey. It's Carlson. Get down here now." In the background, a panicky voice whined something urgent. "Yes, I know she escaped," Carlson snapped at the unknown interrupter. His voice got louder as he finished the message. "You've got some questions to answer. Bring your files." Click.
Files? He had two whole cabinets full of files. No, he surely didn't mean to bring all of those down. Did he mean his personal files? Well, that was silly, because the only inmate he had personal files about was -
Oh.
Oh.
Oh hell!
He abandoned his coffee - who needed caffeine when you had a full dose of adrenaline slamming through your system? - and snatched up his files on Sorrow, bounding down the stairs and through the halls like a man being chased by a rabid baboon. He skidded, panting, to a halt at Carlson's open door.
Dr. Carlson waved him in with a short gesture as he snapped irritably into the phone. "No. I don't know where she is. I don't know where she'd be. I'm about to ask. Yes. I will call you back. I will…I will call you back, Dr. Lily. Yes. Good-bye." He slammed the phone down into the holder with an annoyed grunt and focused on Troy. "Well?" he asked angrily.
"Well...what?" Troy said, baffled.
"Do you have anything to say about this?" Carlson asked pointedly.
"Oh. Uh...she was unhappy." Carlson's face twitched, just for a moment, into the expression of someone who desperately needed a holiday. Troy shifted his grip on the files, almost dropping them. "I mean, um, she said the basement was...bad, but I've never actually seen it, so I don't know how bad it really was..."
Carlson pinned him with a Look. "Now, Grey. Where is she now," he said slowly and patiently.
"Oh. I, uh...her house? Wherever it is? Probably?" he guessed.
Carlson sighed. "Go downstairs," he ordered. "Take pictures of the damage, write up a report, and bring it to the staff meeting. It's at ten," he added when Troy stared blankly at him.
"Sure. Right. Um...sure," Troy agreed, backing out of the office.
Troy fidgeted nervously as he waited outside of the massive steel door that led to the high-security wing. An electrician, armed with giant leather gloves, was wrist-deep in the shattered control panel that operated the door. He grunted in triumph as something clicked into place, and the door reluctantly swung open.
Troy obediently snapped shots of the damage: the keycard reader, now in multiple pieces on the floor, the sobbing orderly being tended by a hard-faced Arkham nurse, the wild variety of biohazard signs taped hurriedly to the walls around one certain door...
He stepped inside. The place was a mess - blanket and pillow tossed aside, mattress laying askew on the bed frame - but that didn't catch his eye. What he did see was a little tiny room with a little tiny camera that reminded him all too vividly of what a little tiny bastard had done to Sorrow.
He didn't know much - after all, he hadn't been working as anything but an archivist while the whole mess had been happening - but he had picked up enough from police reports, overheard conversations, and even from Teng himself to fill in the more disturbing gaps. In a room in a basement very much like this, he had tied her down and done...horrible things.
The camera clattered, unnoticed, to the ground as he stared at the appalling surroundings. Not only had they put her in this awful, all-too-familiar place, but they hadn't even bothered to try to make it livable. There was no window, no social contact, no hope for a better tomorrow...how the hell was this legal? It was like Hannibal Lecter's cell without the charm and whimsy. Why did they even have this basement, where people were obviously just thrown away like so much human garbage?
Sorrow didn't deserve to be thrown away. He scooped up the remains of his camera from the floor and stalked upstairs, fury setting off firestorms behind his eyes.
Anger is a powerful emotion. In its time, it has leveled cities, destroyed lives, and ruined perfectly good birthday parties. Righteous anger, however, is even more dangerous, since the white-hot fire of anger is being fueled by the blowtorch of Being Right. There is no arguing with righteous fury.
Troy slouched in his chair at the table, glaring at the messy scribble of his report while the other doctors casually discussed their various worries over steamy mugs of coffee. Of course, as always, their worries focused more on themselves than their patients, and for the first time he wondered how a group of people that professed to care so much for other people could be so alarmingly self-centered. Who cared about the price of gas or the rude clerk at the grocery store? Didn't they realize there were more important things to talk about?
Carlson, with a distracted look on his face, waved everyone to their seats. "Good morning. As you all know, Sorrow escaped from the high-security wing last night."
A loud snap echoed through the room as Dr. Lily's nervous fingers squeezed her pencil at just the wrong angle. "Where is she now? Where was she going?"
"We don't know," Carlson said, with a little spin on the word we that meant not me, but him.
Lily dropped her broken pencil. "Great! Just great. Well, I hope you've got enough in the budget for a bodyguard, because now she's loose and I'm next."
"What?" Troy said, baffled. "What do you mean, you're next?"
"Don't be stupid," she snapped. "She kills her doctors. I was her doctor -"
"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard," he snapped, fury pulsing in his head. "She's not out to kill you!"
"Why else would she escape?" Lily demanded.
Troy bit back a snort of disbelief. Yes, why would anyone want to escape from a little, damp, cold, windowless room, where they maybe got to have a partial conversation once a week if they were lucky? Who wouldn't want to live in luxurious surroundings like those? (Besides the occasional hermit, that is.) "She didn't like it down there," he said coldly.
"Obviously," Dr. Lucas snorted. "Look, we're all aware of what she's going to do. One of us is going to wake up and find her standing there - "
"That's totally ridiculous!" Troy blurted, dropping his pen on the table. "She only killed Teng because he hurt her. You can't seriously believe that she'd care for one minute about any of you!" He darted a pleading glance around the table. No one said a word. "She didn't kill the orderly," he pointed out desperately.
"Yes...and we need to know why she didn't."
"BECAUSE SHE'S NOT TRYING TO KILL US!" The entire table jerked backward like a set of puppets on sharply tugged strings. Troy, infuriated, didn't notice. "I told you to let her out of the basement," he snarled. "I told you that if you would just let her back upstairs, she'd be okay. She just needs some therapy, and -"
"And someone to turn the key for her?" someone muttered nastily, just loud enough to be audible.
"What?" Troy blinked. "What do you mean?"
Carlson looked levelly at him. "The orderly in charge of fetching Sorrow told us about your...hmm...conversation." Troy stared blankly back at him. "You told her to escape," Carlson explained.
"I did not!" Troy yelped. The circle of faces around him mirrored their own mixes of disapproval and...and empathy? No. No, he had to be imagining that. No one would be looking like that...as if he was the unlucky one who'd been caught out of the entire group of them. That was ridiculous! Doctors didn't let their patients out! Doctors cared for their patients, and did their best to help them...
...or did they? Sorrow had told him that they took bribes - and come to think of it, there had been a lot of meaningful glances in these post-escape meetings before. Maybe they did take bribes. Yes, that would explain quite a bit, wouldn't it - the Riddler being allowed crosswords, the Scarecrow being allowed his horror movies, why the Joker and Harley Quinn ended up in the same rec room on times too numerous to count...
They weren't trying to help the rogues! They were only trying to help their bank accounts. Well, he wasn't going to take any flak from anyone who would take a bribe to make the Joker's life easier!
"I didn't tell her to escape," he said firmly, ignoring the others as they muttered their disbelief.
Carlson glanced at his papers for a moment. "Hmm," he said quietly. "So tell me...what do you think we should do with her when she comes back?"
Somehow, this didn't seem like the right time to mention that she'd probably cheerfully burn Gotham to the ground if it meant never coming back here. "I'd bring her back upstairs, with the others," he said promptly. "And I'd reinstate daily therapy, for a start."
Carlson nodded. "I see." He set his pencil down. "In fact, I see too well. You've gotten too attached to her, Grey."
"I have not!" Troy protested, horrified.
Carlson rolled his eyes. "Look at yourself. You're sweating. You're angry. Your eye keeps twitching." He sighed as Troy pressed his rebellious eyelid down with an aggravatingly damp hand. "You're just not ready for this kind of a responsibility. Maybe in a few more months, you can try again with someone else...but for now, you can go back to the archives."
Troy stared open-mouthed at him. "You don't understand!" he wailed, scrabbling for his notes. "If you just listen to what I have to say - "
"I have," Carlson said flatly. "This is what's best for both of you. Now, sit down before you do something that you'll regret." Troy gaped at him like a newly caught fish. "Sit down," Carlson repeated, gesturing to his vacated chair.
Troy felt his legs fold obediently beneath him. Dammit, he thought miserably. How could this have happened?
"Are there any other suggestions for when she returns?" Carlson asked, pointedly excluding him from the rest of the conversation.
"Keep her in the basement, first of all," Dr. Lucas sniffed. "And put some better men down there to watch her! If she got out once, she's clearly not to be trusted."
"And taking her to therapy seems too dangerous," Dr. Torres chimed in. "Perhaps her...new therapist, whoever it is, should go down there and speak to her through the door?" Humiliated rage burned through Troy like a wildfire ripping through a field of magnesium.
"Or not at all," Dr. Palmer corrected. "After all, she's obviously not interested in getting better."
"And perhaps we could remake those gloves?" Dr. Lucas suggested. "You know, the ones that locked onto her hands?"
Troy's fury burned cold as a shot of fear skated up his spine. If they were willing to use Teng's methods...if they were willing to break her just to keep themselves safe...these weren't doctors. These men and women didn't deserve to wear those white coats that told the world that they were healers of the mind. They weren't healers. They were monsters.
"I hope she does come after you," he growled, raising his eyes to see the entire room full of medical professionals turn questioningly to him. "I hope she hunts you all down and...and..." He couldn't think of a proper threat, mostly because he knew in his soul that she would never track them down like that to hurt them. "Have you listened to yourselves? What is wrong with you?" he burst out, slapping an open hand down onto the table. "You can't treat people this way!"
"Careful, lad," Dr. Baldwin warned softly.
Troy ignored him. What was there to be careful about? He could never see Sorrow again! He couldn't even try to help anyone for months yet, maybe not ever, and all he had to look forward to was a lifetime of cutting out articles and pasting them in files that would never get read. "You're just as bad as they are," he accused. "The criminals, the...rogues...you use people and you hurt people and you don't care, you don't care one bit about helping anyone, you just care about your stupid paychecks and your bribes and your...you disgust me!"
"You're not seriously going to let him talk to us this way, are you?" Dr. Lucas asked Carlson, incredulous.
"Troy, go to my office," Carlson instructed wearily. "We need to have a long talk about your future here."
"Oh yeah?" Troy snarled, shooting to his feet. "I'll summarize it for you." He snatched up his notes, tore them in half, and threw them across the table. Scribbly golden paper showered down like oversized confetti. "I quit."
And with that, ex-Dr. Grey slammed out of a staff meeting for the last time.
Quitting his job in a blaze of fury had felt magnificent. Stomping upstairs and throwing his few belongings into a box had felt slightly less magnificent, though, and as that righteous anger drained out of him and reality kicked in he felt just about as magnificent as a pile of squashed jelly beans.
Troy threw the small box of his belongings into the passenger side of his car and took off down the long road away from Arkham Asylum. A little teddy bear fell out of the box and hit the floor as he sped around one of the winding curves in the road.
What had he done?
Oh, he knew perfectly well what he had done. He'd thrown away his job, his career, and his reputation all for the sake of a woman who might not care if he was hit by a truck tomorrow. Brilliant. Great. Maybe he could find something else intelligent to do with the rest of his day, like shooting cop cars with paintballs or hand-feeding sharks.
What the hell was he supposed to do now? He had no job, no money, and no idea where Sorrow was. He pulled over to the roadside and buried his face in his hands, taking a deep breath to try and calm himself. He had to find her. If she went back to Arkham without knowing what they were going to do...he couldn't let that happen to her. No, there had to be some way to keep her safe. First, though, he'd have to find her.
How the hell was he going to do that? Deep breaths. Okay. Okay. She was on foot, so she must be in the city. There was nowhere else to go for at least a twenty-mile radius. She'd have reached a hideout by now, but where? She was friendly with Nygma, Quinn and Isley - maybe she was staying with one of them? But how could he find them...and more to the point, did he really want to track down a rogue when he wasn't absolutely certain that she'd be there too?
Suddenly, he realized where she almost certainly had gone.
There was only one way to find her. He rolled back onto the road and made his way to the nearest theatrical shop.
(to be continued)