Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets by Guy Adams, Kasey Lansdale, Glen Mehn Page A

player of the game.”
    “Or the player of the game. She’s the most resentful pawn ever committed to the game, and that makes her dangerous. She’s a puzzle, isn’t she? Where’s that manifesto of hers? I’m of a mind to read it. Ms. Solanas, you are a bit of a puzzle, aren’t you?”
    He padded back from the window, casting a long, lean shadow across the floor, rifling through the pockets of my pants looking for those ragged sheets with purple writing on them.
    O VER THE NEXT two days, I’d packed my few belongings for my new home at Avenue B, and Sherlock had turned up the next night with an array of tough youths carrying boxes and crates of notebooks and chemical apparatus, a coffee table made from a cable spool, and a few chairs that looked like they’d spent some time on the street.
    It was starting to look more like a home than anywhere I’d been since before the War.
    Sherlock was still talking about Valerie. We’d run into her once more on the street, and talked to her about her Manifesto . Sherlock wanted to know more.
    “Go on, John. Find out what you can about Valerie from your contacts at the Factory. Keep an eye out for her, and talk to her if you have to, but if you can follow her without her noticing, that would be helpful.”
    I didn’t know why we were so interested—why he was so interested, that is. I would have been happy to have whiled the weekend away with day-old cakes and bread. I had some deliveries that could be made to the Factory, though, so I went ahead, not knowing what to expect. Everyone had the same reaction. Nothing outstanding, for the Factory. Billy and Paul were there, ready to get their prescriptions, only too happy to share catty gossip.
    “Valerie? Who?”
    “You know. The street dyke. Twitchy.”
    “Oh, yeah. Creepy. Did you see her screen test?”
    “Eyes like dark holes, staring into your soul.”
    “Not attractive, really. Could be, if she put on makeup or something. Could be better, anyway. Better than street chic. Eau de Hudson, like she usually wears.”
    “There was something about her, though. Something interesting. She was clever, when she wasn’t too twitchy. Maybe if she’d been fed.”
    “Some days she’d be so angry, railing about men and scum. Other days, she’d be real personalable. Friendly. She used to come in with Irene, sometimes, but we haven’t seen them together in months. She just keeps coming in shouting at Andy about her script. He gets so many scripts from people. What’s he supposed to do?”
    “And money. She’s always asking everyone for money.”
    “Speaking of, Doc. What have you got for us? We loved those black beauties last time. Got us right through the flow in summertime, here and on the fourth floor. I’ve done enough stairs, though, so you can go up to the fourth yourself.”
    “There’s another floor?” My entire room in the Chelsea wasn’t a tenth of this space. Fourteen-, maybe sixteen-foot-high ceilings of bare wood. You could dance in here. There was nothing but a couple of hard chairs and a simple table.
    “Yep. There’s an old bed up there, too. Just the one. My husband and I lived up here while we were fighting with Stuy Town, before that Mr. Lorch let us move in to his place.”
    I remembered them. The Post had written a scathing editori

Parallels
Jenni Hill
    A friend and fellow editor, Jenni’s a new talent in the short fiction world, with a number of anthology credits to her name. I was hugely pleased to be able to get her on board. ‘Parallels’ takes the anthology’s concept to its bleeding limit, not only wholly reinventing Holmes and Watson—as teenaged girls, no less—but giving us an alternate Holmes story itself full of alternate Holmes stories. It’s almost frighteningly meta, and is a perfect finish to the anthology. Enjoy.
    S UDDENLY , IT ALL made sense to John Watson. Sherlock’s true nature: the clues had all been there.
    His pale skin, his piercing grey eyes, the way he mesmerised