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He was breaking curfew.

When am I not breaking curfew? thought Dylan to himself as he checked his watch, looked over his shoulder and hopped a fence in more or less one motion: and it was true, but even so, he hadn't intended to break curfew this time. He'd meant to be back at Hillworth before the doors closed and the residential advisors (as they called them) determined who was home on time and who got to scrub the latrines the next day. A group whose honored number, Dylan noted with a sigh, now included Dylan Rasmussen.

He was busted. He was busted, and on the day when he'd actually been doing something productive with his time, too.

Well, that was inaccurate. Dylan considered just about everything he did productive -- productive to something, at least. Generally the advancement of his own body of knowledge or entertainment: he made an effort to live a productive life. Reading was productive. Constructing a mental map of Hillworth's exits was productive. Working out the rotations of the Hillworth night watchmen was productive. Even little things -- looking for the pattern in Jesse's irregular breathing when he slept, which kept Dylan up hours with its confounding irregularity. Acid was not productive; neither was Ecstasy; but those, he reasoned, were things he did when he didn't have anything productive to do.

Tonight he was photographing a derelict construction site as part of a project for class. Better said, tonight he was doing something other people would find productive, and he'd meant to get his negatives of the altogether desolate place, get home and get in bed like a good reform school boy. But he got -- absorbed. It was something about the atmosphere of the place; he looked up as a drop of used water plinked onto his head. He was crossing through an old concrete tunnel, quiet but for his footsteps and dark but for the glow of his cell phone, his only flashlight.

It occurred to him distantly that this would be a good place to film a hand-camera horror flick. It occurred to him even more distantly that he was very much alone.

Dylan glanced up, unworried, and walked on, into abandoned scaffolding. The rotting wood was wet under his sneakers; he took note of where the floor seemed shaky, wondered if there was an underground component, wheeled himself with his hands on the iron bars when he was unsure of his footing. No maniacs came up behind him with an axe. Well, if they did he'd hear them, anyway. Maniacs were always disbelief-stretchingly quiet in movies. It was very unscary. He said so to Cora, too, but it didn't seem to put her at better ease with horror movies.

There was a noise. Somewhere to his right, near where a number of huge concrete pipes had broken into pieces. Dylan paused and glanced over in that direction -- what was that noise? He couldn't place it.

There it was again. Ah. Yes, he could. Without a noise, he vaulted this railing too, trailing black petals, and a few steps after he landed he was Alexandros -- it was rather cold weather to dress like Alexandros, he thought vaguely -- and a few steps after that he was running with Kore drawn. He slowed, halted, trained his arrow on the pair of shadowed figures: squinted to make them out. Well, not much to make out. "If you wouldn't mind showing yourself," he said: said, not shouted. They were alone. No need to shout. "Preferably without killing your hostage."

It was very cold out. Alexandros was aware, vaguely, that under his placid breathing his heartrate had accelerated to hammering, but it was contained within his chest; his hands were steady. His voice had been steady, too, when he'd spoken. So he ignored his heart and squinted into the shadows again to see if he could make out anything more distinct -- speaking of distinction, there was the distinct possibility that she'd killed her hostage and was bartering him nothing in exchange for exposing himself to attack. Nothing helpful there to be gained from staring at shadows. It was a dilemma; he checked his grip on Kore and realized this was the first time in -- a long time that he'd drawn it on another person.

His hands were cold. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and listened to the silence of the construction site: particularly, for the creak of movement, and for breathing.

The wind was in the way, but he could hear someone hyperventilating, and thought he could just make out another set of calm breaths -- and that was about as long as he was comfortable keeping his eyes shut for. He opened them again and said, affably, "I'm afraid this is about to get a little cinematic, but how do you feel about a count of five?"

Alexandros blinked at the girl. He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but it hadn't been -- this, anyway. Maybe something a little more armed. In truth they had no idea what they were up against, apart from the two they knew: the woman in black and the man with the crystal ball. No girls with clipboards to be seen. But her calm hand on the man's chest was unmistakeable, and the threat she was making was even more unmistakeable.

He kept his weapon trained where it was trained. "It would," he agreed, "but I'm afraid I can't think of any reason why I'd want to do that. You see, I have this bow -- well, really, I have this arrow, the bow is a corollary -- and that's my bargaining chip. If I didn't do a thing for you would you let your prisoner go?"

Her expression answered him for him.

"See, there you go," he said, smiling at her. "Think of this arrow like my hostage. My unruly, taciturn hostage."

A girl with a clipboard in a lab coat. Wonders upon wonders.

"We're in a bit of a pickle," added Alexandros. And kept his bowstring taut.

The man she was holding looked terrified. Alexandros let his gaze flicker to him only a few times, because every time he met the man's strung-out eyes his heart hammered a little faster. This was the first time anyone's life had depended on him. Well, no. That wasn't true. This was the first time anyone's life depended on him right where he could see.

Time to wake up, Highness, said a cynical voice curled up in one corner of his head, and he narrowed his eyes at Uranophane. "Let's dispense with questions neither of us are going to answer, why don't we," he was surprised to find his voice as calm and amiable as ever, "and move on to some more productive uses of our time, shall we? I have a question for you. Do you think you'd be able to take his starseed in the time it took me to loose this arrow?"

The bowstring was digging into his finger. "I can provide some of the calculations on that, but I'm afraid you might not trust my mathematics. I did get an A in Trig. Well, no, I got an F. But it was almost an A."

In truth he did do the math, and the math turned out conclusively: there was no point in standing here talking. He narrowed his eyes on the point of his arrow before he let fly -- and that must have been his undoing, because the arrow clanged against the metal barrier behind her, or behind where she'd been. The mottled shadows were moving. She was gone.

s**t.

"If you kill him I'll catch you before you run off," he called out, backing against the fallen concrete pipe immediately and edging quickly to one side -- he saw movement, notched and shot another arrow, it found nothing. "Not too many places to hide. Come out, come out," he notched again, squinted, "wherever you are?"

Silence. Somewhere, though, he could hear the captive's ragged breathing.

"Would an apology help things any?"

"The very same," said Alexandros, though the truth was he was about as much of a magician as he was a fedora made out of black velvet with a red bow on it. "Sometimes I call up my buddies Siegfried and Roy and we chat," he was edging around with his back to a pipe, "mostly about spinal injuries and that, uh, that douchebag, David Copperfield -- and Penn Jillette --"

Was she fishing for information? He didn't put it past the dark princess's wizard to send out a minion with a sense of humor like his own: cruel and cocky, to hear Helen tell of it. Perhaps the clipboard girl didn't know who he was. Perhaps she was fishing to see if he was who she was looking for. Perhaps she didn't know anything at all, and he was paranoid: that being, perhaps, the grimmest option, as it implied there was more than one predator in town who saw fit to gather starseeds. Well, barring the options that involved his Great Crystal being stolen. Those were pretty grim.

Alexandros stepped into a patch of darkness shed by the overhang of the construction site. Inside was much darker, full of shadows and cover.

As it turned out, he did have an idea.

"Hey," he called out from his cover. "If I threw my bow down where you could see it, would you come out with your prisoner and talk to me?"

"Come closer," said Alexandros, and he beckoned with his left hand. (Left-handed is right-brained, said his mom once. Left-handed means that in the right day and age, you would've been left out on a crag, enjoined his dad cheerfully. For the crows.) He didn't expect her to follow his direction, but now his intention was out there in the open. Then he swept his cloak over one shoulder to indicate that he wasn't concealing anything, then slowly, without taking his eyes off her, got down on one knee.

"I feel the need to reiterate that if you slaughter that man despite all my best, gentlemanly efforts," he smiled at her, "as God is my witness I will hunt you down as fast and far as my non-teleport-enabled feet can take me. You're pretty level-headed though, right," he laid Kore down with his right hand, "and even if I am bluffing, which I might well be, is it really worth it?"

Alexandros took his hand off Kore, slowly. When it was clear she wasn't going to make any sudden motions he took it off entirely and raised both hands in the air in the universal gesture for surrendering one's weapon. "After all," he went on, "you can always get another, if I'm not mistaken?"

He stood just as slowly, in a manner that he hoped indicated that he was in no way intending to spring at her with his nonexistent judo skills. Then he kicked Kore skittering across the concrete away from them both and backed up with his hands in the air into the darkened structure.

"You're going to follow me," he called. "You want to talk to me."

Even if he thought they deserved it, deific witness or otherwise. Someone had gone to school, had she? And paid attention, no less.

He did want to say, You mistake me for a sailor soldier. He did want to say, You mistake me for Prince Endymion. He did, most of all, want to laugh like he thought it was funny (he didn't), say something flippant like, Perhaps not, and go on with the conversation -- that, he was pretty certain, was the movie-debonair way to do it.

"I don't know," he said, still and drawn-back against the wall in his patch of shadow. Motion, he knew, highlit every shadowy feature on a person's face, every glint of light on everything metal they carried. He was covered in trinkets: indicative of his station in more favorable circumstance, downright damnably useless at the moment. He favored watching her instead at the moment -- she was quite unlike anything he'd faced, whether it be monsters on the street or opponents in the tourneys in the Golden Kingdom. She dressed like a scientist or a doctor, though not like any scientist or doctor he'd seen. She acted more like she had the training of a Cavalier -- though a less armed Cavalier, he'd never seen. He really hadn't the slightest idea.

His voice wasn't a sonorous one. Never had been. Naturally hoarse and scratchy, the least regal thing about him (against some strong competition, too) -- it carried just fine here, though. "Oh, I don't know," he said again. "We've hardly met. What don't we have to talk about?"