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cradling her cellphone between her shoulder and her ear in a quiet spot she had found just inside a newly–cleared hotel bedroom due to be used as a programming room the next day. But Al Coe’s phone kept on going to voicemail, and she had left three messages already – she had started out by being snarky, but by the third message she had graduated to Please call me, where ARE you, I am getting worried . This fourth call was not giving her any more joy, and she finally thumbed off the phone with a frustrated grimace and without leaving another message. A passing thought about starting to call the local hospitals meandered across the surface of her mind, but then she mentally shook herself and firmly admonished her more paranoid self to stop being ridiculous – and to possibly start thinking of something adequate to say when Al did turn up with those posters, which were turning into quite the production.
    Turning sharp right as she exited the sanctuary of the not–yet–panel–room, she nearly collided with a figure standing close to the wall, very still, his skin a silvery–white, with two pale eyes set dully into an almost expressionless face.
    “Sorry,” she said automatically, ducking around the guy.
    He did not respond, by word or gesture, and Andie Mae briefly felt as though she should be offended and flounce off in a huff – but she had other things on her mind, and she methodically subtracted the silver man from her thoughts as she hurried forward and plunged into the busier corridors where the con was beginning to swing into a higher gear.
    She failed to notice a pair of con–goers who had paused as she flung herself unseeingly past them, but the older of the two, a middle–aged man with a receding hairline of salt–and–pepper hair that swept around the back of his head like a half–tonsure and a lush gray beard, halted as he turned to follow Andie Mae’s progress with glittering gray–blue eyes.
    “Thar she blows,” he muttered.
    His companion, a lanky youngster in perhaps his late teens, turned his head marginally.
    “She didn’t even look,” the young man said, in a voice dithering between obligatorily aggrieved (on his mentor’s behalf) and vaguely puzzled.
    “Oh, she wouldn’t pay attention to the likes of me, Marius, not in public,” Sam Dutton, Andie Mae’s predecessor as the con Chair, said. “I only owned this con for the last three decades, that’s all. But it’s her baby now and she doesn’t want to be reminded of history, not today. And I’m history. I’m not surprised that she wouldn’t stop and chat. But still – she looks rather more singularly focused than one should be at this stage of the game. I wonder if everything is okay.”
    “Do you miss it?” Marius Tarkovski asked, turning back to Sam with a small smile.
    Sam waved his hands in a gesture that implied a complete inability to answer the question. “Some part of me does,” he admitted. “I just know I should be in the thick of things, and it feels odd – like a mental itch – being here and not being on the inside. But on the other hand… anything that does go wrong won’t be my fault this time, dammit. Her show. Her game. Her responsibility. It’s what she wanted, and I hope that she gets exactly what she wanted.” He stopped, and looked almost astonished. “That came out rather more claws–out than I intended,” he said. “Who knew. Maybe it does rankle just a bit more than I thought it would.”
    “You sure it was a good idea coming this year?” Marius asked.
    “Well, your Mom is happier knowing that you’ve got me on standby – your first solo con and all that,” Sam said, grinning. “So there’s the babysitting aspect of it…”
    Marius aimed a polite but still affronted fist bump at the older man’s shoulder. “I’m seventeen ,” he said.
    “Exactly,” Sam agreed laconically, and followed the passage of a trio of scantily–clad female fairies wearing the barest minimum of