I woke up paralyzed in a chair, facing the mirror wall. Doyle’s body was at my feet, and my NC gun was on a table to my right, within easy reach, if only I could reach. The bad Jane was behind me, standing on the floor now like a normal person, only not normal: as I watched her in the mirror, she kept shimmering, disappearing, and reappearing, just as she had in the diner parking lot.

“How’s the neck?” she said, solidifying long enough to lay a cool hand against my jugular. “I hope I didn’t overdo it. Phil would be pissed if I did any permanent damage.”

I couldn’t reach, but I could talk: “What the fuck are you?”

“What, you don’t recognize your evil twin? Or do you mean this?” She winked, and winked out. Her voice came from thin air: “It’s the drugs, Jane.”

“You drugged me?”

“Not you, genius. Me.” She was back, crouched behind me with her chin propped on my shoulder. “Altered-state theory, Jane. Remember?”

I remembered.

Altered-state theory, that was a Berkeley thing. She must have gone there too. Small world.

What is altered-state theory?

This stupid acidhead idea about the relationship between consciousness and reality. There was this crazy guy, right, leftover flower child, who used to hang out on campus. He had great dope, and he was willing to share, but it was like the Salvation Army, where before you get the free soup you have to listen to a sermon. So this guy would go on about this theory he had, that any time you altered your perception of reality, there was a corresponding alteration in the way reality perceived you, or something like that…

Getting stoned changes the laws of physics?

In a nutshell. Which, you don’t have to tell me, is the kind of insane logic that makes people jump off of buildings thinking they can fly. But this guy, he’d spent a lot of time refining his hypotheses, and if you pointed out that gravity doesn’t seem to care how you look at it, he’d say that it wasn’t a one-to-one correspondence, consciousness was obviously more flexible than truth, and so you’d need a big change in perception to produce even a small change in reality. In other words, ordinary drugs weren’t strong enough, usually, to let you do magic. But he claimed to have heard rumors about this other, much more potent class of drugs, called X-drugs. With X-drugs, he said, you really could fly, bend time and space, or even go back and undo history.

So the bad Jane—

— was telling me the Troop had access to X-drugs. Which I would have laughed off, if she hadn’t been so busy demonstrating her powers.

Did it occur to you that it really was you who’d been drugged, and that this “demonstration of powers” was simply a trick?

Of course it occurred to me, but the thing is, I didn’t feel drugged, I felt sober. Trust me, I know the difference.

I’m sure you do. But by your own account, at this point you were recovering from an overdose.

A simulated overdose. I wasn’t—

Simulated, but still…And you’d just been knocked unconscious a second time.

I know all that, but it doesn’t change the fact that I wasn’t the one who was tripping, she was.

Of course, I still tried to deny it: “You’re full of shit! X-drugs don’t exist!”

She laughed, faded out, and phased back in again. “Do you really want to waste time pretending you don’t believe me?” she said. “Or can we get down to business before J.D. here starts to stink?”

“What business? What does Phil want from me?”

“We’ll come to that. But first, check out the painting.”

A portrait of a Renaissance nobleman hung on the wall behind me. The bad Jane angled my head like a camera, aiming it at the portrait’s reflection in the mirror, and zoomed in my perspective until I could make out individual brush strokes. Closer still and I began to see, very faint around the portrait’s eyes, the outline of a pair of lenses.

“Panopticon.”

“Yes,” the bad Jane whispered. “They’re watching. They think they’re seeing. They know we can jam their signal, but what they don’t know—Shh! Don’t tell! — is that we can also substitute a false signal. Would you like to know what we’re feeding them now?”

My point of view zoomed out again, until I could see the whole mirror wall. It flickered, and suddenly in the reflection John Doyle was alive again, down on his knees in front of me. I had my NC gun leveled at his chest and was forcing him to keep still as I took swipes at him with a knife.

“Ouch!” the bad Jane said, as my reflection made a particularly nasty cut across Doyle’s scalp. “You know, I don’t know what Love’s orders to you were, Jane, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t tell you to do this…”

Unable to take the pain anymore, Doyle tried to pull away. Instead of shooting him, my reflection bent forward and slashed his throat. As blood geysered from the wound, I felt real wetness splash me in the chair.

“Oops!” said the bad Jane. “You really want to stand behind the person when you do that…” She clucked her tongue as the vision in the mirror faded. “So what do you suppose Dixon is thinking right now?” As if in answer, the elevator dinged off in the distance. “Uh-oh. This can’t be good…” I heard the suite’s outer door burst open. Footsteps echoed in the hall of mirrors. “All right, Jane, you’re on. Think fast.”

She slapped the back of my neck, and I could feel my arms and legs again. I dove for my gun, but by the time I got turned around in the chair she’d disappeared, and I found myself drawing down on a pair of harlequins. They were armed with horns: rifle-length, brass-belled instruments with rubber squeeze-bulbs.

“Put down the weapon, Jane,” the lead harlequin said. Then he clapped a hand to his head and dropped dead of an aneurysm.

“I didn’t do that!” I shouted at the remaining harlequin. Weirdly enough, he believed me. Instead of blasting me with his horn, he pivoted towards the mirror wall.

Then he was dead, too.

The bad Jane’s gun hand extended from a ring of ripples in the mirror glass. “There are more of them on the way,” I heard her say, as the hand withdrew. “You’d better get out of here.”

I tried to find my comm unit, but she’d taken it. “If you can hear me,” I told the nobleman’s portrait, “I didn’t do this!” The nobleman stared back skeptically.

I left the suite and ran to the elevator. When the doors opened on the lobby a minute later, the corpse of Bozo the bellhop fell into the car. I stepped over the body and saw two more harlequins coming for me. I ran the other way.

A flight of stairs brought me up beside the Grand Canal. A gondola floated by, the tourists inside it all staring. Although I’d tucked my NC gun back in my jacket, my hands and face were still covered with John Doyle’s blood spatter. “It’s just ketchup!” I called to them. Hurrying along, I rounded a bend in the canal and came face-to-face with a mime, who immediately drew a hatchet from his belt.

“Wait!” I said. “I surrender!”

The hatchet clipped a lock of my hair as it flew past my head.

“I surrender, God damn it!”

The air behind the mime shimmered. The bad Jane reached around with her knife, and the front of the mime’s white blouse turned red.

“You see?” the bad Jane said, as the mime crumpled. “Not a drop on me!”

Wink. Gone again.

And I ran on, past more staring tourists, through a door marked NO ADMITTANCE, down another hall and some more stairs, coming out finally on an underground loading dock.

A sports car idled at the dock’s edge. “Get in,” the bad Jane said.

I felt the weight of my NC gun pressing against my ribs. My hand twitched.

“Try it and I’ll leave you here,” she said. “You don’t want that.”

Behind me, a door banged open.

“Last chance…”

I got in the car. An ax blade kissed the back bumper as we pulled away.

“Better buckle up,” the bad Jane advised, steering us up a ramp and out onto the Strip. As I clicked my safety belt into place, I heard a squeal of tires and looked back; a subcompact stuffed with Scary Clowns was coming up fast behind us.