Trash blows along the filthy streets. Music is interrupted by gunfire and police sirens. Children wander out to see; they are thin and dressed in far too little clothing for the cold wind blowing down from the mountains. Their parents mutter in Spanish and English of the things that know no languages, and do not care: hunger, hatred, fear.

This is one of Death's playgrounds.

Denver, some like to say, isn't like the ancient cracked melting pots of the East or the sun-scorched madhouse of Los Angeles. Denver doesn't have ghettoes.

Welcome to the barrio.

In mostly though not entirely black Five Points, there is real neighborhood pride. In Capitol Hill, where the racially and ethnically mixed inhabitants almost all have one thing in common -- poverty -- there is still hope for the future. But this section of the city has no sense of history, no awareness of purpose, and is going nowhere. Bounded roughly by Colfax on the north, Hampden on the south, Broadway on the east and Federal on the west, it is 1,500 square blocks, more or less, of almost entirely Hispanic poverty and despair.

The Vietnamese, the most recent immigrants, have claimed for themselves the southwest corner of this section, and turned south Federal into the thriving "Little Saigon," but this recent prosperity is unnoticed and definitely unshared by most of the residents.

No current solution is going to change things. Government speaks of economic revitalization, of GNP and quarterly growth and capital gains; somehow these words never seem to be heard here. Private charity does the best it can in the face of shrinking donations and massive indifference, which is to say that its best isn't very good. And the old American dream, Yankee ingenuity and pioneer spirit, pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps? The only Horatio Alger self-made types here are the local crack dealers.

Things are better for the people here -- the descendents of the area's oldest and second-oldest inhabitants, the remnants of the despised Indians and Spanish peons -- than they have ever been, but change is relative. The historical record of improvement matters very little to a hungry child, or an addict dying on the sidewalk, or the random victim of a drive-by shooting.

Still, there is incremental progress; given another hundred years and half a chance, the people of the southwest Denver barrio may be able to heal some of their wounds, and pull themselves out of the underclass. They may.

Or perhaps, they will not have to wait that long.

Adversity has always made us what we are. The Romans became an empire because they were a small, weak nation between mighty, warring ones, and grew to survive; the United States and democratic France were born out of response to oppression; out of the flames of the Holocaust came the phoenix that is Israel. If progress is, as Teilhard de Chardin said, essentially a force, then it is still one that acts through individuals: Africanus, Jefferson, Ben-Gurion -- and Euclid, Newton, Curie, Hawking.

Right now, in the midst of this place of despair, there is a young girl whose name will be remembered.

He was very good with that car.

She couldn't see his face, or even a general outline of his body, but she felt certain it was "he." The kind of training and experience required to handle a car that way were rarely provided to women; race car driving and professional murder alike were overwhelmingly male professions.

She wasn't all that worried about it.

She pushed herself hard to the right as the car came around for another pass. She tumbled and rolled, hand pushing down into the snow compacted into ice on the road, cold slick grip and coming up still blinking the glare of the headlights from her eyes. The driver, already aware that he'd missed again, was coming for her once more, wasting no time, handling the big old Chevy like a rally car. It was one of those early-nineties jobs that got about three gallons to the mile, and it would splatter her across the grill and bumper like a bug on the windshield, if she let it. Bits of dirty ice glinted like pure crystal under the streetlight as they spun away from his wheels.

She wondered what the driver thought. Did he wonder why he was trying to run her down, a scared little neopunk who looked about fourteen, with her green-tipped hair and ripped Army surplus clothing? Or did he not think anything at all?

She jumped up.

Well, if he'd thought she was just a fourteen-year-old neo, he wouldn't be thinking that any more. Her combat boots sailed over the roof of the Chevy, and if he looked back he'd see her turning, coming down lightly.

He made a mistake, his first since he'd come barreling down the alley off Seventeenth trying to kill her. He should have done another tight U-turn in the street, kept going, presenting a moving target and maintaining his momentum. Instead he stopped, skidding a full carlength down the street, and started trying to back up. He had just stepped down hard on the accelerator when she cleared the HK submachine gun from her backpack and sent a hail of bullets through the rear window, bullets which punched into his head and back and splattered blood and tissue across the windshield. The car continued to roll slowly backward.

She stepped out of the way and let it roll until the driver's side door was even with her; then she opened the door, reached in, and pulled the keys from the ignition. She did a quick two-way check of the street and, satisfied, leaned into the car.

As she'd thought, it was a man, a big guy who might have been one of the Gold family's or maybe a freelance. Or government, but the problem with the agent type was that they never looked quite as genuinely sleazy. She'd assume freelance, until she found something that indicated otherwise.

She didn't. Her fast search yielded an old but well-maintained .45 -- if he'd just shot her in the back rather than going for the splatter, it might have been him searching her corpse rather than the other way around -- an empty McDonald's burger box, and a wallet. She looked around and sprinted back into the alley, where she could study the wallet without being observed.

It had a driver's license for Joe Broz. She liked that; whoever had made the license was literate and had a sense of humor. Other than that, there was money, lots of it; she counted several hundred, mostly in well-worn tens and twenties. She pocketed it and looked in the other side.

A few scraps of paper, which she took for examination later. And the photograph.

It was a shot from inside Muddy's, she was fairly sure; she could even visualise how it had been done. She was in the booth nearest the bar, facing across the table. Next to her was some death-rocker, generic in pale skin and black leather and long, black hair. She couldn't see who was at the far right edge of the picture; only a gesturing hand, holding a lit cigarette, was showing. But next to that unknown person, and clearly visible in the picture, was Jacki.

A younger Jacki, of course. Hair pulled back tight -- that was still right, she thought -- but much more makeup than she wore these days, and the biker jacket and black, lacy clothing wouldn't be right. Hell, she didn't even call herself Jacki any more. And whether she'd recognize the girl holding the photograph -- a girl whose appearance had not changed significantly in the decade and more since the snapshot was taken, or for quite a while before that -- was open to question.

But the night's events did mean that she and Jacki, or Jaclyn, were linked, at least in the minds of those people who'd had someone try to kill her. That created not only danger, but an obligation.

And Karolyn always took care of her friends.

Jay bit back a sour taste as they pulled up to the drive-by scene.

The cops had done a good job. Most cops were at least Basic EMT's these days; they had to be, or most of their witnesses would wind up dead. The two lesser casualties -- including the young man who was probably the intended victim, a teenager wearing a Rockies cap and new buckle-top GI boots -- had been effectively dealt with. The old man could wait for the next ambulance, and the kid would ride to DGH in the back of a blue-and-white.

The bad one was another matter.

All Jay could see of her was exotic-looking, drapey clothing and long, dark hair spilling across the sidewalk, where she was lying in a darkening red pool. There wasn't a lot of blood coming from her now, which might be a good sign or a very bad one.

"Female Caucasian or Hispanic," the cop was saying as they spilled from the ambulance. "Multiple gunshots. Henderson got her ABC's, but who knows ..." The cop was very young, probably no more than twenty, and looked more than a little green. But he was holding up pretty well, and Jay looked at him with approval.

"Right. Thanks, trooper. Jan!" His fellow backseater -- five-five, bone-thin, and whom Jay had once seen lift a two-hundred-fifty pound man in a fireman's carry -- nodded, without waiting for his next orders. She set the jump kit down and knelt at the injured woman's side, starting the primary assessment and going on to the secondary by the time Jay and the driver, TC, had the litter over. She started talking rapid-fire, her voice tense but controlled.

"Four shots, one in the chest -- I think she has a pneumo -- two abdominal, no rigidity, and one in the hip. No spurting, either. B/P's eighty-six over fifty-four. Like I said, I think the pneumo's the worst. No breath sounds at all on the left side, and the heart sounds're okay, but who knows how long that'll last. What do you want?"

Jay grinned at her. She was only a year in the field, but she probably could have run the scene by herself. "ET tube and bag, then ABL IV's wide open, one each antecubital, fourteen if you can get it, sixteen or eighteen if you can't." He turned to TC. "TC, get me the chest tube kit, would you? And then immobilize her head. Probably doesn't need it, but ..." He shrugged.

"Uh-huh." Jay and Jan were both strong for their builds, but hardly TC's build. He was about Jan's height, but so wide he had trouble fitting in the ambulance seats. Very little of that was fat. Holding a patient immobile for any length of time was harder than it looked, and could set most medics to trembling after not very long. TC would hold her rock-steady for however long they needed.

"All right, let's turn her," Jay said when TC was in position. "TC, yours."

"On three. One, two, three." They rolled her onto the spine board, then rapidly fastened down the c-spine padding. Once upon a time the doctrine had been that spinal immobilization came before any other treatment, but that had been when the bulk of trauma was the result of auto or industrial accidents, not gunshots.

"Jesus, it's Camilla!"

Jay swallowed as she registered on his mind outside the simple category of patient. "Trooper?"

"You know," the cop went on, "Camilla, that singer? I just saw her new video yesterday ... ack." He turned around and vomited on the sidewalk.

"Get him away," Jan snapped at the other cop, who nodded and took the younger one by the arm, pulling him toward their patrol car. Her hands never strayed from their task, putting an endotracheal tube down Camilla's throat and attaching it to a bag-valve oxygen supply.

Live, Camilla, Jay thought. He opened the kit, pulled on his gloves, and took a deep breath. Jan had already opened her shirt to hear breath and heart sounds; the loose material had flopped open easily. Jay felt down the ribs, gave the site a quick iodine wipe, then cut through skin and fascia and eased the tube in, withdrawing the stiffening stylet once he was sure he was between the pleurae. He was peripherally aware that Jan had finished intubating and given the bag to TC, and was now working on getting an IV in.

Ssssh. Camilla took a reflexive breath without the aid of the bag, gave something that would have been a cough if she hadn't had a plastic tube down her throat, and lay still again. "That's something," he muttered, and taped the tube down.

"'Scuse me." Jan was pushing him aside to get to the other arm.

"How's the first one?"

"Got it in, she's got good veins when she hasn't just been shot ... shit! Try again, one up ... she'd almost avenic by now, but ... and in." Camilla now had two bags of bright red artificial blood flowing into her, and it should be enough, combined with the oxygen, to keep her alive.

Should.

"Right. Trooper!"

Something in his voice must have echoed the Army; the young cop came trotting over instantly. He still looked green, but his voice was steady enough as he answered, "Sir?"

"Help us load her?"

The cop swallowed, then visibly steeled himself. Jay could almost read his thoughts: he had a gun and a badge, he was a police officer, and he was supposed to be able to handle anything. You never can, trooper, Jay thought with a bit of sadness, but he refrained from saying it. Some things you have to learn on your own. "TC, yours."

"On three. One, two, three."

They lifted her gently but quickly, and then into the ambulance. "Just a second," he said to Jan and TC, then turned to the cop. "Listen," he said softly, "you did a good job."

The cop leaned against a telephone pole, his eyes closed, his face very pale. "Thanks."

Jay put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed once. "Thank you." Then he jumped into the ambulance.

Live.

"Warp speed, Sulu."

"Aye aye, Captain." The tires were already squealing as TC shifted to a bad imitation of a bad imitation of a Scottish accent. "My puir wee bairns canna take it any more ..."

Jay and Jan were much too busy to laugh.

It was a lie.

Leo fumbled inside his jacket before remembering that he never brought his smokes with him here. There would be a pack out in the limo, waiting; he itched for them with a junkie's need. As soon as he got out there ...

A lie.

"The picture never lies," the old saw went. He'd always wanted people to belive that, at least about him, to believe what they saw in the magazines and on their TV screens: a big, smiling, silver-haired man, incredibly fit at sixty-eight, with the slight Southern accent and little boy's grin bringing a personable touch to the Old Testament patriarch's air of stern authority. His pictures were perfect, almost as good as he was in person.

But not these pictures.

Dr. Faulkner wouldn't meet his eyes. Faulkner was too nice a guy, that was the problem, lots of brains and a sense of medical integrity that Hippocrates would have envied, but he couldn't look a patient in the eyes as he pronounced a death sentence.

"Doc, it hasn't spread all the way through ..."

"Enough, Leo," Faulkner said, still looking at the desk, sometimes back at the CAT. Never at Leo. "Enough. The two lower right lobes and the lower left lobe are gone. Oh, you can still breathe with them, but it's metastasized too much. The upper right lobe will soon be gone, and these," he tapped a spray of dots on the picture, "are tumors starting to form in the upper left. And even if we could save that one lobe, Leo, you couldn't breathe with just that. Also there's your heart; the cancer will reach that too, sooner or later."

Leo caught his hand back with a conscious effort as it tried to reach into his pocket for a lighter. Nicotine, NOW! cried the weak part of his brain, the junkie's mind. Shut up, shithead, he told it. You got us into this. He monitored this conversation with yet another part of his brain, and wondered if maybe after this appointment he ought to ask Faulkner if he could recommend a good psychiatrist. "How long?" he whispered, realizing for the first time that cliches become cliches because they're true; every patient with every terminal disease must ask that question, in every language, in that same broken tone.

Faulkner spread his hands, finally looking up now that the conversation had shifted onto technical grounds. "Uncertain, to say the least. If we start therapy now, maybe as much as four years, though that's an outside possibility." He laughed a bit. "You haven't had a chest film in six years, so we don't know how fast it's spreading. Otherwise, you're damned healthy, and if it hadn't been for that cold that I thought might turn into pneumonia ... thanks to your two packs a day, mostly. My fault too; when you started coming to me I should have ... oh, well.

"Two to three years, probably. A year if you're unlucky. If you're very unlucky, hmmm, six months." He looked at the desk again.

"Right," Leo heard himself say from a distance. "When do I start therapy?"

"I'll give you a consult for Swedish, they have the best in the region. I'll make some phone calls, get back to you. They should be able to start by Friday."

"Thanks, Doc." Leo lifted his two hundred and twenty pounds easily from the chair. Funny. I still feel healthy. That thought was deadened and distant right now, like everything else.

"Leo?" Faulkner's voice stopped him on his way out the door.

"Yeah, doc." When he turned, he was surprised; Faulkner was looking straight at him, his usually mild eyes hard.

"Stop smoking. Now. It could give you as much as a year more."

"Right," Leo said, and walked mechanically out to the car. The door opened as he approached, and he fell inside.

"Take me home now," he told the chauffeur softly, and then grabbed a cigarette, lighting it and taking long, deep drags as though his life depended on it.

"Mike in one, Ms. Doyle."

"Alicia," she corrected the tech, then smoothed her hair absently and took a deep breath as the red light came on. What she wanted was a backrub and a hot cup of coffee, to smooth the knots in her shoulders and stomach as easily. Stop it, she told herself angrily. This was the best audience she could hope for, about half of them students from CU -- the green-conscious "granolas," mostly, not the business-school sharks -- and the rest of them older versions of the same. Boulder had been the regional center of both the organized Green party and its unofficial associates for a long time. So I'm really just preaching to the choir; at least they wouldn't try to eat her alive, like those rednecks in Colorado Springs the week before.

"My friends, I'm very glad to be with you today. As I'm sure you know, the Senate today passed the Bailey-Pirroni bill, companion to my own initiative in the House, what is often known as the 'Doyle frozen veggie pack.'" She gave them a timed self-deprecating grin, letting the ripple of laughter swell and then fade. "Don't let the name fool you. First, I can hardly claim all the credit: without the support of certain Representatives from outside my party, especially Christen Erwin-MacDonald of Minneapolis and of course Durango's own David Josselyn, the Northern Plant Life and Wildlife Habitat Act would never have been passed."

Cheers erupted around her, with some group of people well back in the audience chanting her name: A-lic-ia! A-lic-ia! That was what she was to them, then, not the faceless politico encsconced in Washington eleven months of the year, but their friend whom they could call by her first name, their trusted emissary. A-lic-ia! A-lic-ia! It was spreading through the crowd. She let it wash over her, the crowd's figurative bearing of her on their shoulders, their trust, their love.

She bit down on the inside of her lip, hard.

This is how the Caesars went mad.

She held up her hands. "Please. Please!"

Slowly, finally, it died away.

"Second, the Act, although it focuses primarily on plant life in a relatively small section of Alaskan wilderness ..." She grinned again. "Relatively small. The area in question is actually somewhat larger than, for example, the state of Colorado ..." More laughter. "In any case, the Act has implications for every American. The Alaskan tundra is an ecosystem so complex that biologists can spend their lives trying to understand it. I've been there, so I also know that it is, in its way, extremely beautiful. And, my friends, it is a true virgin wilderness, a symbol of what we must reclaim for ourselves and our children, the future we must remake and preserve!"

Ah, this was the moment, to use her remarkable voice to full effect, to show them her personal power.

"This is the heritage of every American from Anchorage to Miami! This we must defend, for our children, for our own lives, for our very world!"

This time she gave in, throwing her head back and spreading her arms wide to them, basking in the roar of the crowd.