THEY HEADED OUT, losing Anders in the process, who said he’d meet them later on, and made their way down to the plaça. From the square they moved into one of the narrow alleys of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter—the Barri Gòtic—which had sprung up around the fourteenth-century Cathedral, the basilica before it, and the Roman forum before that.

They wound their way through the crooked lanes of the medieval labyrinth, ending up at a bar Vikram haunted, though not this night. It was quiet as a church in there, and they lasted no longer than it took to down one drink before they found themselves dancing in a subterranean discotheque back near the Plaça Reial. Tom managed to wrangle a bottle of absinthe at the bar and proceeded to drink most of it, which would turn out to be the second worst idea he had that night.

In a couple of hours, they were back on the street looking for a place to eat, having failed so far in their quest to find Vikram. They did find Anders, lurking alone down a side alley when they ran into him, and dragged him along to a late supper. At the restaurant, Miles ate and drank and chatted with Tom and Marie, a college student from North Carolina. Across the table Anders sat next to Tawny while Krissy was deep in conversation with a couple of girls from Yugoslavia both named Katya. They were all at least a few years older than Miles, and at one point Anders narrowed his eyes at Miles and asked him, “So, did you get separated from your school field trip or something?”

“Um...,” said Miles, slow to take Anders’s meaning, “I’m between schools at the moment, actually.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” he said.

“That’s young,” said Marie, who was in her early twenties.

“You don’t look nearly that old,” said Anders.

In spite of Anders, Miles felt strangely at home among Vikram’s friends. The feeling extended to the others in the room, including a group of college students at the next table who were seeing off a friend that night and trying, with Tom’s help, to remember the words to a familiar Irish blessing.

“May the road rise up to greet you...” said one, raising his glass.

“Meet ya, not greet ya,” said Tom.

“Ah, right. And may the sun always be—be always—at your back.”

“Sun’s on my face,” said the man whose last night it was. “Wind’s at my back.”

“Wind blows out yer arse,” said another.

“Close enough!” And they drank to his health.

One of the group told Tom about an after-hours get-together at some students’ apartment near the Plaça del Tripi, and that was all the persuasion it took to move them in that direction and prolong the festivities after the check arrived. Maybe they’d run into Vikram there.

The apartment was only a few minutes’ walk away, down a side street that looked narrow enough for you to reach out and touch the buildings on both sides. The flat was on the second floor, and people had spilled out the door onto the landing and down the stairs. Some unholy fusion of jazz and world music wafted around the room, receding into the background and filling the gaps in conversation. The apartment itself was small—a narrow main room with whitewashed walls and a high, wood-beamed ceiling, a kitchen at one end and open french doors leading to a wrought-iron balcony at the other. Guests crowded onto and around the large L-shaped sofa that dominated the living area, and open bottles of wine covered the small kitchen table. Tom grabbed one of the fuller bottles of red by the neck and, not finding any glasses handy, took a swig and offered it to Miles with an apologetic shrug.

“So how d’ya like Barcelona, yer first night heah?” asked Tom, his accent thickening as his blood-alcohol level rose.

“I like it,” said Miles. “Is it always like this?”

“Weell...it is the weekend.”

“Actually, it’s Thursday,” Miles pointed out.

Tom flashed his lupine grin. “Close enough,” he said with a shrug, adding with a nod to the balcony, “I think I’m genna grab some fresh air.”

Krissy and Marie wandered over, and Miles offered them the bottle. Marie took a short swig, then wiped a dribble of red wine off her chin with the back of her hand. She handed the bottle to Krissy, who eyed it suspiciously. “Ah, well, when in Rome,” she said with a chuckle and finished it off. Anders was leaning against the kitchen counter, talking to the two Katyas, while Tawny sat on the arm of the sofa, listening to a good-looking, dark-haired young man make his case.

“Looks like Tawny’s made a new friend,” said Miles.

“Yeah, she has to practically beat them off,” said Krissy, who blushed when Miles laughed at the unintentional innuendo. “You know what I mean.”

When Miles looked up again, Tawny had ditched the guy who’d been chatting her up and was now in the kitchen talking to Anders. Tawny seemed a more obvious match for that overgrown Viking than someone as interesting as Anna. Anders was the only guy in the place taller than she was, for one thing, and her face lit up whenever he looked at her. From time to time, Tawny would wet her lips or tilt her head in rapt fascination while Anders spoke. It was like watching a baboon display its ass. He wondered how immune to temptation Anders really could be.

“I’m gonna see if there’s anything else to drink,” Miles said to Krissy, as he headed over to the collection of bottles on the kitchen counter. He smiled at Katya and Katya and pretended to test bottles for fullness as he tried to listen to Anders’s and Tawny’s conversation. Somehow, they’d found glasses and were drinking some kind of booze. Tawny laughed at something Anders said, and he finished his drink and excused himself to use the facilities.

Miles casually sidled over, a mostly empty bottle of white wine in his hand. “Where’d you find that?” he said, motioning toward her glass.

“Dunno. Anders found it,” she said. “Scotch, he said. Quite nasty, but it does the trick.”

“Anders seems nice,” he said, hoping he sounded like he meant it.

“Quite nice,” she said, “but spoken for.” Miles knitted his brow as if he didn’t know that. “With Anna, the barmaid.”

“Oh,” said Miles, “I thought they were broken up.”

“Who told you that?”

“I’m pretty sure Vikram had said that,” he lied.

“How does he know?” she asked, skeptically.

“Well, he’s her roommate, isn’t he,” he said.

Tawny turned her head in the direction Anders had gone. She turned back to Miles and raised her eyebrows. “Hmm...food for thought, that.”

“Mmm...” Miles said and nonchalantly swallowed the remains of the bottle, which included a cigarette butt, causing him to double over in an unproductive hacking fit, his eyes watering as Tawny looked on in bored distaste.

“Well...” he managed finally to gasp, “nature calls.”

With that, he headed out of the kitchen, passing Anders on the way with a queasy smirk, and found the bathroom, a small closet under some stairs where a commode and sink were crammed. In the mirror above the sink, his reflection caught him in its glassy stare. If someone had asked him why he’d told that pathetic lie, he couldn’t have told them. So he wondered why he did it. And he wondered why it was that drunken encounters with bathroom mirrors always forced him to question his life choices.

When Miles emerged from the loo, there was an excited commotion coming from the other end of the flat. Tom had climbed atop the balcony’s iron railing, one hand holding onto the ledge of the balcony above, the other pointing across the street. I know ’at balkenny, Miles heard Tom say, I was in ’at flat lest week. Miles could hear other voices alternately pleading with him not to or egging him on to go ahead and do it. Iss only sex feet away, Tom was reasoning as only a drunk can, Iss lower down, see...theeah’s plenty of room to land...I’m not genna break the gless.

Miles struggled his way through the crowd now gathered around the open french doors to the balcony. He called out, “Tom! What the hell are you doing?”

“Whozat?” Tom called back, scanning the expectant faces below.

“Me. Miles.” He raised a hand and caught Tom’s eye.

“Ahh, cheers, Miles.”

“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” said Miles.

“You don’t think I ken jump that?”

A few people parted to let Miles through. He looked across the street to the other balcony. It really wasn’t that far—about seven or eight feet away straight across and a couple feet down. “You could probably make it three out of four times,” said Miles.

“Right on, mate!” said Tom.

“It’s that fourth time that worries me.”

“I’m only genna do it the once.”

Miles wasn’t doing a very good job of discouraging him, he realized. He could hear Krissy from back in the apartment call, “Oy, is that you, Tom? Get down off theah, ya Kiwi bastard.”

Miles tried a different tack. “How will you get back? You gonna break into their apartment after you make it over?”

Tom scoffed, then hesitated, considered. “Ehh...I ken see yer point.”

While it was certainly doable in theory, whether it would have been after the amount of beer, wine, and absinthe Tom had consumed that night—not factoring in the force of his weight landing on the other balcony, nor the question of whether he’d go crashing through the french doors or bounce off them, or what he would do once he got there—would forever remain moot because, as Tom was weighing his options, one of the students who lived in the flat came out of the stairwell through the front door, saw where he was, and screamed, causing Tom to jerk his head around, lose his grip on the upper ledge, and fall over the railing straight down to the pavement below. Miles rushed toward Tom and the iron railing too late. He looked over the side. Sure enough, gravity worked the same here as it did everywhere else. Tom’s form was inelegantly sprawled on the stones below, where the road had risen up to meet him.

3.

VIKRAM LIKED HIS cigarettes unfiltered, allowing all of the smoke’s spicy notes to warm his mouth and lungs while the nicotine entered his bloodstream to do its thing. He was alone in flavor country, enjoying this intoxicating mix of poisons, when he saw Tom drop over the railing of the balcony and onto the paving stones in front of him. He’d been hoping to run into Tom and the others here but hadn’t expected to be met so dramatically.

Vikram rushed over to find Tom flat on his back, his eyes closed, his body slack. He knelt down next to him and glanced up to see the people on the balcony starting to scatter. Vikram didn’t have much time, and it didn’t appear Tom did either. With a quick check in either direction, Vikram tapped the thumb and middle finger of his right hand above his left, and the palm of his left hand suddenly glowed with a cold artificial light. He proceeded to scan Tom’s supine form, his hand inches from his face. A clean fracture of the spinal cord was all it found. Child’s play—fixed in a few moments by Vikram as he waved his hand over Tom’s neck, illuminating his features with the bluish light.

Tom opened his eyes, shook his head, and Vikram helped him to his feet. He stood next to Tom, a hand under his elbow in case he needed it, and looked up again to see Miles alone on the balcony staring down at him as though he’d just caught him in flagrante delicto.

The sight of Tom lying broken on the ground had left Miles light-headed and a little nauseous. He licked his lips, his mouth dry, feeling the gooseflesh on his arms despite the sultry temperature. The sight of Tom now standing and apparently unhurt would have been a relief if it weren’t for the spooky way it seemed to have been accomplished.

Vikram, momentarily frozen in Miles’s bewildered stare, the cigarette still dangling from his lower lip, smiled uncertainly and waved hello. “You made it,” he called up.