---
Fizz exhaled a breath he did not need and managed to sound smug and deeply relieved at once. "Ah," he said to the night. "Don't worry. He does this."
John did not posture. He did not shout. He set the black hole sphere on the road between them and let it chew a small, careful hole in the dust that said: there is a new gravity in this field, and you do not own it.
The nothing man had the kind of brain that understood arithmetic. He looked at the hole, then at his two friends, and decided to recruit another poor fool somewhere else. He touched two fingers to his brow as if tipping a hat he spared no respect for and backed away, never turning. The laugh returned to the laugher as relief. The spitter re-invented swallowing.
When they were pale shadows among paler thorn, John let the sphere thin until it was a memory and then a story and then not even that.
