Julie made a sharp and very sudden right turn, canting the BSA almost onto its side, like a racer, and gunning it uphill for two blocks as Farrell shut his eyes and clutched her. Handling the great machine as deftly as a feather duster, she whisked it to the curb in front of a fraternity house and cut the engine, pulling off her helmet as she turned toward him. “In Lima,” she said quietly. “In the market.” Farrell dismounted to let her haul the BSA up on its stand, and they stood the bike’s length apart, wary and uncomfortable, staring at each other. He saw that she had let her black hair grow below her shoulders again, the way she wore it in college.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just grateful, you don’t know.” Julie studied him a moment longer; then blinked, shrugged, smiled like water breaking in the moonlight, and lunged silently into his arms. She almost knocked him off his feet—Julie was a strong woman and quite as tall as Farrell—and that was entirely proper, that was the only tradition they had ever had time to establish, unless you counted their habit of meeting one another in strange places, always unprepared. Farrell had thought often in the last ten years—though never when he was with her—that, of all the generous things that had happened to him with women, those first thundering embraces from Julie Tanikawa, after a suitable separation, were about the best. Taking everything into consideration, like the fact that we can’t stand each other longer than three days.

“I was just thinking about you,” she said. She leaned back against his arms, resting her own arms stiffly on his shoulders. Farrell nodded smugly. “Of course you were. That’s because I called you here. You weren’t even in Avicenna until maybe five minutes ago.”