S"aven had been Roxy"s. He was born in the blue room of the infamous Lulu"s with a cabaret accompaniment, his birth mother one of the many lost girls who had come to town to seek her fortune and found herself on the game. Lulu"s was his childhood home, and when his birth mother left, the lady of the house—the mistress of S"aven—took him on as her heir. He learned to walk on the sewage-filled streets. Learned to talk with bartering punters. The town had contaminated every part of his life, and he liked to think a piece of himself was firmly engrained in the brickwork of this pretty ugly place.
But in his absence the town had continued to grow and change, and this evolution had occurred without him. There were faces he didn"t recognise, faces that did not recognise him. Places that had been
