OUTSIDE THE PUB it was raining cats and dogs.

Shadow was still not entirely convinced that he was in a pub. True, there was a tiny bar at the back of the room, with bottles behind it and a couple of the huge taps you pulled, and there were several high tables and people were drinking at the tables, but it all felt like a room in somebody’s house. The dogs helped reinforce that impression. It seemed to Shadow that everybody in the pub had a dog except for him.

“What kind of dogs are they?” Shadow asked, curious. The dogs reminded him of greyhounds, but they were smaller and seemed saner, more placid and less high-strung than the greyhounds he had encountered over the years.

“Lurchers,” said the pub’s landlord, coming out from behind the bar. He was carrying a pint of beer that he had poured for himself. “Best dogs. Poacher’s dogs. Fast, smart, lethal.” He bent down, scratched a chestnut-and-white brindled dog behind the ears. The dog stretched and luxuriated in the ear-scratching. It did not look particularly lethal, and Shadow said so.

The landlord, his hair a mop of gray and orange, scratched at his beard reflectively. “That’s where you’d be wrong,” he said. “I walked with his brother last week, down Cumpsy Lane. There’s a fox, a big red reynard, pokes his head out of a hedge, no more than twenty meters down the road, then, plain as day, saunters out onto the track. Well, Needles sees it, and he’s off after it like the clappers. Next thing you know, Needles has his teeth in reynard’s neck, and one bite, one hard shake, and it’s all over.”

Shadow inspected Needles, a gray dog sleeping by the little fireplace. He looked harmless too. “So what sort of a breed is a lurcher? It’s an English breed, yes?”

“It’s not actually a breed,” said a white-haired woman without a dog who had been leaning on a nearby table. “They’re crossbred for speed, stamina. Sighthound, greyhound, collie.”

The man next to her held up a finger. “You must understand,” he said, cheerfully, “that there used to be laws about who could own purebred dogs. The local folk couldn’t, but they could own mongrels. And lurchers are better and faster than pedigree dogs.” He pushed his spectacles up his nose with the tip of his forefinger. He had a mutton-chop beard, brown flecked with white.

“Ask me, all mongrels are better than pedigree anything,” said the woman. “It’s why America is such an interesting country. Filled with mongrels.” Shadow was not certain how old she was. Her hair was white, but she seemed younger than her hair.

“Actually, darling,” said the man with the muttonchops, in his gentle voice, “I think you’ll find that the Americans are keener on pedigree dogs than the British. I met a woman from the American Kennel Club, and honestly, she scared me. I was scared.”

“I wasn’t talking about dogs, Ollie,” said the woman. “I was talking about... Oh, never mind.”

“What are you drinking?” asked the landlord.

There was a handwritten piece of paper taped to the wall by the bar telling customers not to order a lager ‘as a punch in the face often offends.’

“What’s good and local?” asked Shadow, who had learned that this was mostly the wisest thing to say.

The landlord and the woman had various suggestions as to which of the various local beers and ciders were good. The little mutton-chopped man interrupted them to point out that in his opinion good was not the avoidance of evil, but something more positive than that: it was making the world a better place. Then he chuckled, to show that he was only joking and that he knew that the conversation was really only about what to drink.

The beer the landlord poured for Shadow was dark and very bitter. He was not certain that he liked it. “What is it?”

“It’s called Black Dog,” said the woman. “I’ve heard people say it was named after the way you feel after you’ve had one too many.”

“Like Churchill’s moods,” said the little man.

“Actually, the beer is named after a local dog,” said a younger woman. She was wearing an olive-green sweater, and standing against the wall. “But not a real one. Semi-imaginary.”

Shadow looked down at Needles, then hesitated. “Is it safe to scratch his head?” he asked, remembering the fate of the fox.

“Course it is,” said the white-haired woman. “He loves it. Don’t you?”

“Well. He practically had that tosser from Glossop’s finger off,” said the landlord. There was admiration mixed with warning in his voice.

“I think he was something in local government,” said the woman. “And I’ve always thought that there’s nothing wrong with dogs biting them. Or VAT inspectors.”

The woman in the green sweater moved over to Shadow. She was not holding a drink. She had dark, short hair, and a crop of freckles that spattered her nose and cheeks. She looked at Shadow. “You aren’t in local government, are you?”

Shadow shook his head. He said, “I’m kind of a tourist.” It was not actually untrue. He was traveling, anyway.

“You’re Canadian?” said the muttonchop man.

“American,” said Shadow. “But I’ve been on the road for a while now.”

“Then,” said the white-haired woman, “you aren’t actually a tourist. Tourists turn up, see the sights and leave.”

Shadow shrugged, smiled, and leaned down. He scratched the landlord’s lurcher on the back of its head.

“You’re not a dog person, are you?” asked the dark-haired woman.

“I’m not a dog person,” said Shadow.

Had he been someone else, someone who talked about what was happening inside his head, Shadow might have told her that his wife had owned dogs when she was younger, and sometimes called Shadow puppy because she wanted a dog she could not have. But Shadow kept things on the inside. It was one of the things he liked about the British: even when they wanted to know what was happening on the inside, they did not ask. The world on the inside remained the world on the inside. His wife had been dead for three years now.

“If you ask me,” said the man with the muttonchops, “people are either dog people or cat people. So would you then consider yourself a cat person?”

Shadow reflected. “I don’t know. We never had pets when I was a kid, we were always on the move. But –”

“I mention this,” the man continued, “because our host also has a cat, which you might wish to see.”

“Used to be out here, but we moved it to the back room,” said the landlord, from behind the bar.

Shadow wondered how the man could follow the conversation so easily while also taking people’s meal orders and serving their drinks. “Did the cat upset the dogs?” he asked.

Outside, the rain redoubled. The wind moaned, and whistled, and then howled. The log fire burning in the little fireplace coughed and spat.

“Not in the way you’re thinking,” said the landlord. “We found it when we knocked through into the room next door, when we needed to extend the bar.” The man grinned. “Come and look.”

Shadow followed the man into the room next door. The mutton-chop man and the white-haired woman came with them, walking a little behind Shadow.

Shadow glanced back into the bar. The dark-haired woman was watching him, and she smiled warmly when he caught her eye.

The room next door was better lit, larger, and it felt a little less like somebody’s front room. People were sitting at tables, eating. The food looked good and smelled better. The landlord led Shadow to the back of the room, to a dusty glass case.

“There she is,” said the landlord, proudly.

The cat was brown, and it looked, at first glance, as if it had been constructed out of tendons and agony. The holes that were its eyes were filled with anger and with pain; the mouth was wide open, as if the creature had been yowling when she was turned to leather.

“The practice of placing animals in the walls of buildings is similar to the practice of walling up children alive in the foundations of a house you want to stay up,” explained the muttonchop man, from behind him. “Although mummified cats always make me think of the mummified cats they found around the temple of Bast in Bubastis in Egypt. So many tons of mummified cats that they sent them to England to be ground up as cheap fertilizer and dumped on the fields. The Victorians also made paint out of mummies. A sort of brown, I believe.”

“It looks miserable,” said Shadow. “How old is it?”

The landlord scratched his cheek. “We reckon that the wall she was in went up somewhere between 1300 and 1600. That’s from parish records. There’s nothing here in 1300, and there’s a house in 1600. The stuff in the middle was lost.”

The dead cat in the glass case, furless and leathery, seemed to be watching them, from its empty black-hole eyes.

I got eyes wherever my folk walk, breathed a voice in the back of Shadow’s mind. He thought, momentarily, about the fields fertilized with the ground mummies of cats, and what strange crops they must have grown.

“They put him into an old house side,” said the man called Ollie. “And there he lived and there he died. And nobody either laughed or cried. All sorts of things were walled up, to make sure that things were guarded and safe. Children, sometimes. Animals. They did it in churches as a matter of course.”

The rain beat an arrhythmic rattle on the windowpane. Shadow thanked the landlord for showing him the cat. They went back into the taproom. The dark-haired woman had gone, which gave Shadow a moment of regret. She had looked so friendly. Shadow bought a round of drinks for the muttonchop man, the white-haired woman, and one for the landlord.

The landlord ducked behind the bar. “They call me Shadow,” Shadow told them. “Shadow Moon.”

The muttonchop man pressed his hands together in delight. “Oh! How wonderful. I had an Alsatian named Shadow, when I was a boy. Is it your real name?”

“It’s what they call me,” said Shadow.

“I’m Moira Callanish,” said the white-haired woman. “This is my partner, Oliver Bierce. He knows a lot, and he will, during the course of our acquaintance, undoubtedly tell you everything he knows.”

They shook hands. When the landlord returned with their drinks, Shadow asked if the pub had a room to rent. He had intended to walk further that night, but the rain sounded like it had no intention of giving up. He had stout walking shoes, and weather-resistant outer clothes, but he did not want to walk in the rain.

“I used to, but then my son moved back in. I’ll encourage people to sleep it off in the barn, on occasion, but that’s as far as I’ll go these days.”

“Anywhere in the village I could get a room?”

The landlord shook his head. “It’s a foul night. But Porsett is only a few miles down the road, and they’ve got a proper hotel there. I can call Sandra, tell her that you’re coming. What’s your name?”

“Shadow,” said Shadow again. “Shadow Moon.”

Moira looked at Oliver, and said something that sounded like “waifs and strays?” and Oliver chewed his lip for a moment, and then he nodded enthusiastically. “Would you fancy spending the night with us? The spare room’s a bit of a box room, but it does have a bed in it. And it’s warm there. And dry.”

“I’d like that very much,” said Shadow. “I can pay.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Moira. “It will be nice to have a guest.”

OLIVER AND MOIRA both had umbrellas. Oliver insisted that Shadow carry his umbrella, pointing out that Shadow towered over him, and thus was ideally suited to keep the rain off both of them.

The couple also carried little flashlights, which they called torches. The word put Shadow in mind of villagers in a horror movie storming the castle on the hill, and the lightning and thunder added to the vision. Tonight, my creature, he thought, I will give you life! It should have been hokey but instead it was disturbing. The dead cat had put him into a strange set of mind.

The narrow roads between fields were running with rainwater. “On a nice night,” said Moira, raising her voice to be heard over the rain, “we would just walk over the fields. But they’ll be all soggy and boggy, so we’re going down by Shuck’s Lane. Now, that tree was a gibbet tree, once upon a time.” She pointed to a massive-trunked sycamore at the crossroads. It had only a few branches left, sticking up into the night like afterthoughts.

“Moira’s lived here since she was in her twenties,” said Oliver. “I came up from London, about eight years ago. From Turnham Green. I’d come up here on holiday originally when I was fourteen and I never forgot it. You don’t.”

“The land gets into your blood,” said Moira. “Sort of.”

“And the blood gets into the land,” said Oliver. “One way or another. You take that gibbet tree, for example. They would leave people in the gibbet until there was nothing left. Hair gone to make bird’s nests, flesh all eaten by ravens, bones picked clean. Or until they had another corpse to display anyway.”

Shadow was fairly sure he knew what a gibbet was, but he asked anyway. There was never any harm in asking, and Oliver was definitely the kind of person who took pleasure in knowing peculiar things and in passing his knowledge on.

“Like a huge iron birdcage. They used them to display the bodies of executed criminals, after justice had been served. The gibbets were locked, so the family and friends couldn’t steal the body back and give it a good Christian burial. Keeping passersby on the straight and the narrow, although I doubt it actually deterred anyone from anything.”

“Who were they executing?”

“Anyone who got unlucky. Three hundred years ago, there were over two hundred crimes punishable by death. Including traveling with Gypsies for more than a month, stealing sheep – and, for that matter, anything over twelve pence in value – and writing a threatening letter.”

He might have been about to begin a lengthy list, but Moira broke in. “Oliver’s right about the death sentence, but they only gibbeted murderers, up these parts. And they’d leave corpses in the gibbet for twenty years, sometimes. We didn’t get a lot of murders.” And then, as if trying to change the subject to something lighter, she said, “We are now walking down Shuck’s Lane. The locals say that on a clear night, which tonight certainly is not, you can find yourself being followed by Black Shuck. He’s a sort of a fairy dog.”

“We’ve never seen him, not even on clear nights,” said Oliver.

“Which is a very good thing,” said Moira. “Because if you see him – you die.”

“Except Sandra Wilberforce said she saw him, and she’s healthy as a horse.”

Shadow smiled. “What does Black Shuck do?”

“He doesn’t do anything,” said Oliver.

“He does. He follows you home,” corrected Moira. “And then, a bit later, you die.”

“Doesn’t sound very scary,” said Shadow. “Except for the dying bit.”

They reached the bottom of the road. Rainwater was running like a stream over Shadow’s thick hiking boots.

Shadow said, “So how did you two meet?” It was normally a safe question, when you were with couples.

Oliver said, “In the pub. I was up here on holiday, really.”

Moira said, “I was with someone when I met Oliver. We had a very brief, torrid affair, then we ran off together. Most unlike both of us.”

They did not seem like the kind of people who ran off together, thought Shadow. But then, all people were strange. He knew he should say something.

“I was married. My wife was killed in a car crash.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Moira.

“It happened,” said Shadow.

“When we get home,” said Moira, “I’m making us all whisky macs. That’s whisky and ginger wine and hot water. And I’m having a hot bath. Otherwise I’ll catch my death.”

Shadow imagined reaching out his hand and catching death in it, like a baseball, and he shivered.

The rain redoubled, and a sudden flash of lightning burned the world into existence all around them: every gray rock in the drystone wall, every blade of grass, every puddle and every tree was perfectly illuminated, and then swallowed by a deeper darkness, leaving afterimages on Shadow’s nightblinded eyes.

“Did you see that?” asked Oliver. “Damnedest thing.” The thunder rolled and rumbled, and Shadow waited until it was done before he tried to speak.

“I didn’t see anything,” said Shadow. Another flash, less bright, and Shadow thought he saw something moving away from them in a distant field. “That?” he asked.

“It’s a donkey,” said Moira. “Only a donkey.”

Oliver stopped. He said, “This was the wrong way to come home. We should have got a taxi. This was a mistake.”

“Ollie,” said Moira. “It’s not far now. And it’s just a spot of rain. You aren’t made of sugar, darling.”

Another flash of lightning, so bright as to be almost blinding. There was nothing to be seen in the fields.

Darkness. Shadow turned back to Oliver, but the little man was no longer standing beside him. Oliver’s flashlight was on the ground. Shadow blinked his eyes, hoping to force his night vision to return. The man had collapsed, crumpled onto the wet grass on the side of the lane.

“Ollie?” Moira crouched beside him, her umbrella by her side. She shone her flashlight onto his face. Then she looked at Shadow. “He can’t just sit here,” she said, sounding confused and concerned. “It’s pouring.”

Shadow pocketed Oliver’s flashlight, handed his umbrella to Moira, then picked Oliver up. The man did not seem to weigh much, and Shadow was a big man.

“Is it far?”

“Not far,” she said. “Not really. We’re almost home.”

They walked in silence, across a churchyard on the edge of a village green, and into a village. Shadow could see lights on in the gray stone houses that edged the one street. Moira turned off, into a house set back from the road, and Shadow followed her. She held the back door open for him.

The kitchen was large and warm, and there was a sofa, half-covered with magazines, against one wall. There were low beams in the kitchen, and Shadow needed to duck his head. Shadow removed Oliver’s raincoat and dropped it. It puddled on the wooden floor. Then he put the man down on the sofa.

Moira filled the kettle.

“Do we call an ambulance?”

She shook her head.

“This is just something that happens? He falls down and passes out?”

Moira busied herself getting mugs from a shelf. “It’s happened before. Just not for a long time. He’s narcoleptic, and if something surprises or scares him he can just go down like that. He’ll come round soon. He’ll want tea. No whisky mac tonight, not for him. Sometimes he’s a bit dazed and doesn’t know where he is, sometimes he’s been following everything that happened while he was out. And he hates it if you make a fuss. Put your backpack down by the Aga.”

The kettle boiled. Moira poured the steaming water into a teapot. “He’ll have a cup of real tea. I’ll have chamomile, I think, or I won’t sleep tonight. Calm my nerves. You?”

“I’ll drink tea, sure,” said Shadow. He had walked more than twenty miles that day, and sleep would be easy in the finding. He wondered at Moira. She appeared perfectly self-possessed in the face of her partner’s incapacity, and he wondered how much of it was not wanting to show weakness in front of a stranger. He admired her, although he found it peculiar. The English were strange. But he understood hating ‘making a fuss.’ Yes.

Oliver stirred on the couch. Moira was at his side with a cup of tea, helped him into a sitting position. He sipped the tea, in a slightly dazed fashion.

“It followed me home,” he said, conversationally.

“What followed you, Ollie, darling?” Her voice was steady, but there was concern in it.

“The dog,” said the man on the sofa, and he took another sip of his tea. “The black dog.”

THESE WERE THE things Shadow learned that night, sitting around the kitchen table with Moira and Oliver:

He learned that Oliver had not been happy or fulfilled in his London advertising agency job. He had moved up to the village and taken an extremely early medical retirement. Now, initially for recreation and increasingly for money, he repaired and rebuilt drystone walls. There was, he explained, an art and a skill to wall building, it was excellent exercise, and, when done correctly, a meditative practice.

“There used to be hundreds of drystone wall people around here. Now there’s barely a dozen who know what they’re doing. You see walls repaired with concrete, or with breeze blocks. It’s a dying art. I’d love to show you how I do it. Useful skill to have. Picking the rock, sometimes, you have to let the rock tell you where it goes. And then it’s immovable. You couldn’t knock it down with a tank. Remarkable.”

He learned that Oliver had been very depressed several years earlier, shortly after Moira and he got together, but that for the last few years he had been doing very well. Or, he amended, relatively well.

He learned that Moira was independently wealthy, that her family trust fund had meant that she and her sisters had not needed to work, but that, in her late twenties, she had gone for teacher training. That she no longer taught, but that she was extremely active in local affairs, and had campaigned successfully to keep the local bus routes in service.

Shadow learned, from what Oliver didn’t say, that Oliver was scared of something, very scared, and that when Oliver was asked what had frightened him so badly, and what he had meant by saying that the black dog had followed him home, his response was to stammer and to sway. He learned not to ask Oliver any more questions.

This is what Oliver and Moira had learned about Shadow sitting around that kitchen table:

Nothing much.

Shadow liked them. He was not a stupid man; he had trusted people in the past who had betrayed him, but he liked this couple, and he liked the way their home smelled – like bread-making and jam and walnut woodpolish – and he went to sleep that night in his box-room bedroom worrying about the little man with the muttonchop beard. What if the thing Shadow had glimpsed in the field had not been a donkey? What if it had been an enormous dog? What then?

The rain had stopped when Shadow woke. He made himself toast in the empty kitchen. Moira came in from the garden, letting a gust of chilly air in through the kitchen door. “Sleep well?” she asked.

“Yes. Very well.” He had dreamed of being at the zoo. He had been surrounded by animals he could not see, which snuffled and snorted in their pens. He was a child, walking with his mother, and he was safe and he was loved. He had stopped in front of a lion’s cage, but what had been in the cage was a sphinx, half lion and half woman, her tail swishing. She had smiled at him, and her smile had been his mother’s smile. He heard her voice, accented and warm and feline.

It said, Know thyself.

I know who I am, said Shadow in his dream, holding the bars of the cage. Behind the bars was the desert. He could see pyramids. He could see shadows on the sand.

Then who are you, Shadow? What are you running from? Where are you running to?

Who are you?

And he had woken, wondering why he was asking himself that question, and missing his mother, who had died twenty years before, when he was a teenager. He still felt oddly comforted, remembering the feel of his hand in his mother’s hand.

“I’m afraid Ollie’s a bit under the weather this morning.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Yes. Well, can’t be helped.”

“I’m really grateful for the room. I guess I’ll be on my way.”

Moira said, “Will you look at something for me?”

Shadow nodded, then followed her outside, and round the side of the house. She pointed to the rose bed. “What does that look like to you?”

Shadow bent down. “The footprint of an enormous hound,” he said. “To quote Dr. Watson.”

“Yes,” she said. “It really does.”

“If there’s a spectral ghost-hound out there,” said Shadow, “it shouldn’t leave footprints. Should it?”

“I’m not actually an authority on these matters,” said Moira. “I had a friend once who could have told us all about it. But she...” She trailed off. Then, more brightly, “You know, Mrs. Camberley two doors down has a Doberman Pinscher. Ridiculous thing.” Shadow was not certain whether the ridiculous thing was Mrs. Camberley or her dog.

He found the events of the previous night less troubling and odd, more explicable. What did it matter if a strange dog had followed them home? Oliver had been frightened or startled, and had collapsed, from narcolepsy, from shock.

“Well, I’ll pack you some lunch before you go,” said Moira. “Boiled eggs. That sort of thing. You’ll be glad of them on the way.”

They went into the house. Moira went to put something away, and returned looking shaken.

“Oliver’s locked himself in the bathroom,” she said.

Shadow was not certain what to say.

“You know what I wish?” she continued.

“I don’t.”

“I wish you would talk to him. I wish he would open the door. I wish he’d talk to me. I can hear him in there. I can hear him.”

And then, “I hope he isn’t cutting himself again.”

Shadow walked back into the hall, stood by the bathroom door, called Oliver’s name. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

Nothing. No sound from inside.

Shadow looked at the door. It was solid wood. The house was old, and they built them strong and well back then. When Shadow had used the bathroom that morning he’d learned the lock was a hook and eye. He leaned on the handle of the door, pushing it down, then rammed his shoulder against the door. It opened with a noise of splintering wood.

He had watched a man die in prison, stabbed in a pointless argument. He remembered the way that the blood had puddled about the man’s body, lying in the back corner of the exercise yard. The sight had troubled Shadow, but he had forced himself to look, and to keep looking. To look away would somehow have felt disrespectful.

Oliver was naked on the floor of the bathroom. His body was pale, and his chest and groin were covered with thick, dark hair. He held the blade from an ancient safety razor in his hands. He had sliced his arms with it, his chest above the nipples, his inner thighs and his penis. Blood was smeared on his body, on the black and white linoleum floor, on the white enamel of the bathtub. Oliver’s eyes were round and wide, like the eyes of a bird. He was looking directly at Shadow, but Shadow was not certain that he was being seen.

“Ollie?” said Moira’s voice, from the hall. Shadow realized that he was blocking the doorway and he hesitated, unsure whether to let her see what was on the floor or not.

Shadow took a pink towel from the towel rail and wrapped it around Oliver. That got the little man’s attention. He blinked, as if seeing Shadow for the first time, and said, “The dog. It’s for the dog. It must be fed, you see. We’re making friends.”

Moira said, “Oh my dear sweet god.”

“I’ll call the emergency services.”

“Please don’t,” she said. “He’ll be fine at home with me. I don’t know what I’ll... please?”

Shadow picked up Oliver, swaddled in the towel, carried him into the bedroom as if he were a child, and then placed him on the bed. Moira followed. She picked up an iPad by the bed, touched the screen, and music began to play. “Breathe, Ollie,” she said. “Remember. Breathe. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine.”

“I can’t really breathe,” said Oliver, in a small voice. “Not really. I can feel my heart, though. I can feel my heart beating.”

Moira squeezed his hand and sat down on the bed, and Shadow left them alone.

When Moira entered the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up, and her hands smelling of antiseptic cream, Shadow was sitting on the sofa, reading a guide to local walks.

“How’s he doing?”

She shrugged.

“You have to get him help.”

“Yes.” She stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked about her, as if unable to decide which way to turn. “Do you... I mean, do you have to leave today? Are you on a schedule?”

“Nobody’s waiting for me. Anywhere.”

She looked at him with a face that had grown haggard in an hour. “When this happened before, it took a few days, but then he was right as rain. The depression doesn’t stay long. So, just wondering, would you just, well, stick around? I phoned my sister but she’s in the middle of moving. And I can’t cope on my own. I really can’t. Not again. But I can’t ask you to stay, not if anyone is waiting for you.”

“Nobody’s waiting,” repeated Shadow. “And I’ll stick around. But I think Oliver needs specialist help.”

“Yes,” agreed Moira. “He does.”

Dr. Scathelocke came over late that afternoon. He was a friend of Oliver and Moira’s. Shadow was not entirely certain whether rural British doctors still made house calls, or whether this was a socially justified visit. The doctor went into the bedroom, and came out twenty minutes later.

He sat at the kitchen table with Moira, and he said, “It’s all very shallow. Cry-for-help stuff. Honestly, there’s not a lot we can do for him in hospital that you can’t do for him here, what with the cuts. We used to have a dozen nurses in that wing. Now they are trying to close it down completely. Get it all back to the community.”

Dr. Scathelocke had sandy hair, was as tall as Shadow but lankier. He reminded Shadow of the landlord in the pub, and he wondered idly if the two men were related. The doctor scribbled several prescriptions, and Moira handed them to Shadow, along with the keys to an old white Range Rover.

Shadow drove to the next village, found the little chemists’ and waited for the prescriptions to be filled. He stood awkwardly in the overlit aisle, staring at a display of suntan lotions and creams, sadly redundant in this cold wet summer.

“You’re Mr. American,” said a woman’s voice from behind him. He turned. She had short dark hair and was wearing the same olive-green sweater she had been wearing in the pub.

“I guess I am,” he said.

“Local gossip says that you are helping out while Ollie’s under the weather.”

“That was fast.”

“Local gossip travels faster than light. I’m Cassie Burglass.”

“Shadow Moon.”

“Good name,” she said. “Gives me chills.” She smiled. “If you’re still rambling while you’re here, I suggest you check out the hill just past the village. Follow the track up until it forks, and then go left. It takes you up Wod’s Hill. Spectacular views. Public right of way. Just keep going left and up, you can’t miss it.”

She smiled at him. Perhaps she was just being friendly to a stranger.

“I’m not surprised you’re still here though,” Cassie continued. “It’s hard to leave this place once it gets its claws into you.” She smiled again, a warm smile, and she looked directly into his eyes, as if trying to make up her mind. “I think Mrs. Patel has your prescriptions ready. Nice talking to you, Mr. American.”

SHADOW HELPED MOIRA. He walked down to the village shop and bought the items on her shopping list while she stayed in the house, writing at the kitchen table or hovering in the hallway outside the bedroom door. Moira barely talked. He ran errands in the white Range Rover, and saw Oliver mostly in the hall, shuffling to the bathroom and back. The man did not speak to him.

Everything was quiet in the house: Shadow imagined the black dog squatting on the roof, cutting out all sunlight, all emotion, all feeling and truth. Something had turned down the volume in that house, pushed all the colors into black and white. He wished he was somewhere else, but could not run out on them. He sat on his bed, and stared out of the window at the rain puddling its way down the windowpane, and felt the seconds of his life counting off, never to come back.

It had been wet and cold, but on the third day the sun came out. The world did not warm up, but Shadow tried to pull himself out of the gray haze, and decided to see some of the local sights. He walked to the next village, through fields, up paths and along the side of a long drystone wall. There was a bridge over a narrow stream that was little more than a plank, and Shadow jumped the water in one easy bound. Up the hill: there were trees, oak and hawthorn, sycamore and beech at the bottom of the hill, and then the trees became sparser. He followed the winding trail, sometimes obvious, sometimes not, until he reached a natural resting place, like a tiny meadow, high on the hill, and there he turned away from the hill and saw the valleys and the peaks arranged all about him in greens and grays like illustrations from a children’s book.

He was not alone up there. A woman with short dark hair was sitting and sketching on the hill’s side, perched comfortably on a gray boulder. There was a tree behind her, which acted as a windbreak. She wore a green sweater and blue jeans, and he recognized Cassie Burglass before he saw her face.

As he got close, she turned. “What do you think?” she asked, holding her sketchbook up for his inspection. It was an assured pencil drawing of the hillside.

“You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?”

“I dabble,” she said.

Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National Gallery or the Tate Modern.

“You must be cold,” he said. “You’re only wearing a sweater.”

“I’m cold,” she said. “But, up here, I’m used to it. It doesn’t really bother me. How’s Ollie doing?”

“He’s still under the weather,” Shadow told her.

“Poor old sod,” she said, looking from her paper to the hillside and back.

“It’s hard for me to feel properly sorry for him, though.”

“Why’s that? Did he bore you to death with interesting facts?” She laughed, a small huff of air at the back of her throat. “You really ought to listen to more village gossip. When Ollie and Moira met, they were both with other people.”

“I know that. They told me that.” Shadow thought a moment. “So he was with you first?”

“No. She was. We’d been together since college.” There was a pause. She shaded something, her pencil scraping the paper. “Are you going to try and kiss me?” she asked.

“I, uh. I, um,” he said. Then, honestly, “It hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Well,” she said, turning to smile at him, “it bloody well should. I mean, I asked you up here, and you came, up to Wod’s Hill, just to see me.” She went back to the paper and the drawing of the hill. “They say there’s dark doings been done on this hill. Dirty dark doings. And I was thinking of doing something dirty myself. To Moira’s lodger.”

“Is this some kind of revenge plot?”

“It’s not an anything plot. I just like you. And there’s no one around here who wants me any longer. Not as a woman.”

The last woman that Shadow had kissed had been in Scotland. He thought of her, and what she had become, in the end. “You are real, aren’t you?” he asked. “I mean... you’re a real person. I mean...”

She put the pad of paper down on the boulder and she stood up. “Kiss me and find out,” she said.

He hesitated. She sighed, and she kissed him.

It was cold on that hillside, and Cassie’s lips were cold. Her mouth was very soft. As her tongue touched his, Shadow pulled back.

“I don’t actually know you,” Shadow said.

She leaned away from him, looked up into his face. “You know,” she said, “all I dream of these days is somebody who will look my way and see the real me. I had given up until you came along, Mr. American, with your funny name. But you looked at me, and I knew you saw me. And that’s all that matters.”

Shadow’s hands held her, feeling the softness of her sweater.

“How much longer are you going to be here? In the district?” she asked.

“A few more days. Until Oliver’s feeling better.”

“Pity. Can’t you stay forever?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You have nothing to be sorry for, sweet man. You see that opening over there?”

He glanced over to the hillside, but could not see what she was pointing at. The hillside was a tangle of weeds and low trees and half-tumbled drystone walls. She pointed to her drawing, where she had drawn a dark shape, like an archway, in the middle of clump of gorse bushes on the side of the hill. “There. Look.” He stared, and this time he saw it immediately. “What is it?” Shadow asked.

“The Gateway to Hell,” she told him, impressively.

“Uh-huh.”

She grinned. “That’s what they call it round here. It was originally a Roman temple, I think, or something even older. But that’s all that remains. You should check it out, if you like that sort of thing. Although it’s a bit disappointing: just a little passageway going back into the hill. I keep expecting some archaeologists will come out this way, dig it up, catalog what they find, but they never do.”

Shadow examined her drawing. “So what do you know about big black dogs?” he asked.

“The one in Shuck’s Lane?” she said. He nodded. “They say the barghest used to wander all around here. But now it’s just in Shuck’s Lane. Dr. Scathelocke once told me it was folk memory. The Wish Hounds are all that are left of the wild hunt, which was based around the idea of Odin’s hunting wolves, Freki and Geri. I think it’s even older than that. Cave memory. Druids. The thing that prowls in the darkness beyond the fire circle, waiting to tear you apart if you edge too far out alone.”

“Have you ever seen it, then?”

She shook her head. “No. I researched it, but never saw it. My semi-imaginary local beast. Have you?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe.”

“Perhaps you woke it up when you came here. You woke me up, after all.”

She reached up, pulled his head down towards her and kissed him again. She took his left hand, so much bigger than hers, and placed it beneath her sweater.

“Cassie, my hands are cold,” he warned her.

“Well, my everything is cold. There’s nothing but cold up here. Just smile and look like you know what you’re doing,” she told him. She pushed Shadow’s left hand higher, until it was cupping the lace of her bra, and he could feel, beneath the lace, the hardness of her nipple and the soft swell of her breast.

He began to surrender to the moment, his hesitation a mixture of awkwardness and uncertainty. He was not sure how he felt about this woman: she had history with his benefactors, after all. Shadow never liked feeling that he was being used; it had happened too many times before. But his left hand was touching her breast and his right hand was cradling the nape of her neck, and he was leaning down and now her mouth was on his, and she was clinging to him as tightly as if, he thought, she wanted to occupy the very same space that he was in. Her mouth tasted like mint and stone and grass and the chilly afternoon breeze. He closed his eyes, and let himself enjoy the kiss and the way their bodies moved together.

Cassie froze. Somewhere close to them, a cat mewed. Shadow opened his eyes.

“Jesus,” he said.

They were surrounded by cats. White cats and tabbies, brown and ginger and black cats, long-haired and short. Well-fed cats with collars and disreputable ragged-eared cats that looked as if they had been living in barns and on the edges of the wild. They stared at Shadow and Cassie with green eyes and blue eyes and golden eyes, and they did not move. Only the occasional swish of a tail or the blinking of a pair of feline eyes told Shadow that they were alive.

“This is weird,” said Shadow.

Cassie took a step back. He was no longer touching her now. “Are they with you?” she asked.

“I don’t think they’re with anyone. They’re cats.”

“I think they’re jealous,” said Cassie. “Look at them. They don’t like me.”

“That’s...” Shadow was going to say “nonsense,” but no, it was sense, of a kind. There had been a woman who was a goddess, a continent away and years in his past, who had cared about him, in her own way. He remembered the needle-sharpness of her nails and the catlike roughness of her tongue.

Cassie looked at Shadow dispassionately. “I don’t know who you are, Mr. American,” she told him. “Not really. I don’t know why you can look at me and see the real me, or why I can talk to you when I find it so hard to talk to other people. But I can. And you know, you seem all normal and quiet on the surface, but you are so much weirder than I am. And I’m extremely fucking weird.”

Shadow said, “Don’t go.”

“Tell Ollie and Moira you saw me,” she said. “Tell them I’ll be waiting where we last spoke, if they have anything they want to say to me.” She picked up her sketchpad and pencils, and she walked off briskly, stepping carefully through the cats, who did not even glance at her, just kept their gazes fixed on Shadow, as she moved away through the swaying grasses and the blowing twigs.

Shadow wanted to call after her, but instead he crouched down and looked back at the cats. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Bast? Are you doing this? You’re a long way from home. And why would you still care who I kiss?”

The spell was broken when he spoke. The cats began to move, to look away, to stand, to wash themselves intently.

A tortoiseshell cat pushed her head against his hand, insistently, needing attention. Shadow stroked her absently, rubbing his knuckles against her forehead.

She swiped blinding-fast with claws like tiny scimitars, and drew blood from his forearm. Then she purred, and turned, and within moments the whole kit and caboodle of them had vanished into the hillside, slipping behind rocks and into the undergrowth, and were gone.

OLIVER WAS OUT of his room when Shadow got back to the house, sitting in the warm kitchen, a mug of tea by his side, reading a book on Roman architecture. He was dressed, and he had shaved his chin and trimmed his beard. He was wearing pajamas, with a plaid bathrobe over them.

“I’m feeling a bit better,” he said, when he saw Shadow. Then, “Have you ever had this? Been depressed?”

“Looking back on it, I guess I did. When my wife died,” said Shadow. “Everything went flat. Nothing meant anything for a long time.”

Oliver nodded. “It’s hard. Sometimes I think the black dog is a real thing. I lie in bed thinking about the painting of Fuseli’s nightmare on a sleeper’s chest. Like Anubis. Or do I mean Set? Big black thing. What was Set anyway? Some kind of donkey?”

“I never ran into Set,” said Shadow. “He was before my time.”

Oliver laughed. “Very dry. And they say you Americans don’t do irony.” He paused. “Anyway. All done now. Back on my feet. Ready to face the world.” He sipped his tea. “Feeling a bit embarrassed. All that Hound of the Baskervilles nonsense behind me now.”

“You really have nothing to be embarrassed about,” said Shadow, reflecting that the English found embarrassment wherever they looked for it.

“Well. All a bit silly, one way or another. And I really am feeling much perkier.”

Shadow nodded. “If you’re feeling better, I guess I should start heading south.”

“No hurry,” said Oliver. “It’s always nice to have company. Moira and I don’t really get out as much as we’d like. It’s mostly just a walk up to the pub. Not much excitement here, I’m afraid.”

Moira came in from the garden. “Anyone seen the secateurs? I know I had them. Forget my own head next.”

Shadow shook his head, uncertain what secateurs were. He thought of telling the couple about the cats on the hill, and how they had behaved, but could not think of a way to describe it that would explain how odd it was. So, instead, without thinking, he said, “I ran into Cassie Burglass on Wod’s Hill. She pointed out the Gateway to Hell.”

They were staring at him. The kitchen had become awkwardly quiet. He said, “She was drawing it.”

Oliver looked at him and said, “I don’t understand.”

“I’ve run into her a couple of times since I got here,” said Shadow.

“What?” Moira’s face was flushed. “What are you saying?” And then, “Who the, who the fuck are you to come in here and say things like that?”

“I’m, I’m nobody,” said Shadow. “She just started talking to me. She said that you and she used to be together.”

Moira looked as if she were going to hit him. Then she just said, “She moved away after we broke up. It wasn’t a good breakup. She was very hurt. She behaved appallingly. Then she just up and left the village in the night. Never came back.”

“I don’t want to talk about that woman,” said Oliver, quietly. “Not now. Not ever.”

“Look. She was in the pub with us,” pointed out Shadow. “That first night. You guys didn’t seem to have a problem with her then.”

Moira just stared at him and did not respond, as if he had said something in a tongue she did not speak. Oliver rubbed his forehead with his hand. “I didn’t see her,” was all he said.

“Well, she said to say hi when I saw her today,” said Shadow. “She said she’d be waiting, if either of you had anything you wanted to say to her.”

“We have nothing to say to her. Nothing at all.” Moira’s eyes were wet, but she was not crying. “I can’t believe that, that fucking woman has come back into our lives, after all she put us through.” Moira swore like someone who was not very good at it.

Oliver put down his book. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t feel very well.” He walked out, back to the bedroom, and closed the door behind him.

Moira picked up Oliver’s mug, almost automatically, and took it over to the sink, emptied it out and began to wash it.

“I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” she said, rubbing the mug with a white plastic scrubbing brush as if she were trying to scrub the picture of Beatrix Potter’s cottage from the china. “He was coming back to himself again.”

“I didn’t know it would upset him like that,” said Shadow. He felt guilty as he said it. He had known there was history between Cassie and his hosts. He could have said nothing, after all. Silence was always safer.

Moira dried the mug with a green and white tea towel. The white patches of the towel were comical sheep, the green were grass. She bit her lower lip, and the tears that had been brimming in her eyes now ran down her cheeks. Then, “Did she say anything about me?”

“Just that you two used to be an item.”

Moira nodded, and wiped the tears from her young-old face with the comical tea towel. “She couldn’t bear it when Ollie and I got together. After I moved out, she just hung up her paintbrushes and locked the flat and went to London.” She blew her nose vigorously. “Still. Mustn’t grumble. We make our own beds. And Ollie’s a good man. There’s just a black dog in his mind. My mother had depression. It’s hard.”

Shadow said, “I’ve made everything worse. I should go.”

“Don’t leave until tomorrow. I’m not throwing you out, dear. It’s not your fault you ran into that woman, is it?” Her shoulders were slumped. “There they are. On top of the fridge.” She picked up something that looked like a very small pair of garden shears. “Secateurs,” she explained. “For the rosebushes, mostly.”

“Are you going to talk to him?”

“No,” she said. “Conversations with Ollie about Cassie never end well. And in this state, it could plunge him even further back into a bad place. I’ll just let him get over it.”

Shadow ate alone in the pub that night, while the cat in the glass case glowered at him. He saw no one he knew. He had a brief conversation with the landlord about how he was enjoying his time in the village. He walked back to Moira’s house after the pub, past the old sycamore, the gibbet tree, down Shuck’s Lane. He saw nothing moving in the fields in the moonlight: no dog, no donkey.

All the lights in the house were out. He went to his bedroom as quietly as he could, packed the last of his possessions into his backpack before he went to sleep. He would leave early, he knew.

He lay in bed, watching the moonlight in the box room. He remembered standing in the pub and Cassie Burglass standing beside him. He thought about his conversation with the landlord, and the conversation that first night, and the cat in the glass box, and, as he pondered, any desire to sleep evaporated. He was perfectly wide awake in the small bed.

Shadow could move quietly when he needed to. He slipped out of bed, pulled on his clothes and then, carrying his boots, he opened the window, reached over the sill and let himself tumble silently into the soil of the flower bed beneath. He got to his feet and put on the boots, lacing them up in the half dark. The moon was several days from full, bright enough to cast shadows.

Shadow stepped into a patch of darkness beside a wall, and he waited there.

He wondered how sane his actions were. It seemed very probable that he was wrong, that his memory had played tricks on him, or other people’s had. It was all so very unlikely, but then, he had experienced the unlikely before, and if he was wrong he would be out, what? A few hours’ sleep?

He watched a fox hurry across the lawn, watched a proud white cat stalk and kill a small rodent, and saw several other cats pad their way along the top of the garden wall. He watched a weasel slink from shadow to shadow in the flower bed. The constellations moved in slow procession across the sky.

The front door opened, and a figure came out. Shadow had half-expected to see Moira, but it was Oliver, wearing his pajamas and, over them, a thick tartan dressing gown. He had Wellington boots on his feet, and he looked faintly ridiculous, like an invalid from a black and white movie, or someone in a play. There was no color in the moonlit world.

Oliver pulled the front door closed until it clicked, then he walked towards the street, but walking on the grass, instead of crunching down the gravel path. He did not glance back, or even look around. He set off up the lane, and Shadow waited until Oliver was almost out of sight before he began to follow. He knew where Oliver was going, had to be going.

Shadow did not question himself, not any longer. He knew where they were both headed, with the certainty of a person in a dream. He was not even surprised when, halfway up Wod’s Hill, he found Oliver sitting on a tree stump, waiting for him. The sky was lightening, just a little, in the east.

“The Gateway to Hell,” said the little man. “As far as I can tell, they’ve always called it that. Goes back years and years.”

The two men walked up the winding path together. There was something gloriously comical about Oliver in his robe, in his striped pajamas and his oversized black rubber boots. Shadow’s heart pumped in his chest.

“How did you bring her up here?” asked Shadow.

“Cassie? I didn’t. It was her idea to meet up here on the hill. She loved coming up here to paint. You can see so far. And it’s holy, this hill, and she always loved that. Not holy to Christians, of course. Quite the obverse. The old religion.”

“Druids?” asked Shadow. He was uncertain what other old religions there were, in England.

“Could be. Definitely could be. But I think it predates the druids. Doesn’t have much of a name. It’s just what people in these parts practice, beneath whatever else they believe. Druids, Norse, Catholics, Protestants, doesn’t matter. That’s what people pay lip service to. The old religion is what gets the crops up and keeps your cock hard and makes sure that nobody builds a bloody great motorway through an area of outstanding natural beauty. The Gateway stands, and the hill stands, and the place stands. It’s well, well over two thousand years old. You don’t go mucking about with anything that powerful.”

Shadow said, “Moira doesn’t know, does she? She thinks Cassie moved away.” The sky was continuing to lighten in the east, but it was still night, spangled with a glitter of stars, in the purple-black sky to the west.

“That was what she needed to think. I mean, what else was she going to think? It might have been different if the police had been interested... but it wasn’t like... Well. It protects itself. The hill. The gate.”

They were coming up to the little meadow on the side of the hill. They passed the boulder where Shadow had seen Cassie drawing. They walked toward the hill.

“The black dog in Shuck’s Lane,” said Oliver. “I don’t actually think it is a dog. But it’s been there so long.” He pulled out a small LED flashlight from the pocket of his bathrobe. “You really talked to Cassie?”

“We talked, I even kissed her.”

“Strange.”

“I first saw her in the pub, the night I met you and Moira. That was what made me start to figure it out. Earlier tonight, Moira was talking as if she hadn’t seen Cassie in years. She was baffled when I asked. But Cassie was standing just behind me that first night, and she spoke to us. Tonight, I asked at the pub if Cassie had been in, and nobody knew who I was talking about. You people all know each other. It was the only thing that made sense of it all. It made sense of what she said. Everything.”

Oliver was almost at the place Cassie had called the Gateway to Hell. “I thought that it would be so simple. I would give her to the hill, and she would leave us both alone. Leave Moira alone. How could she have kissed you?”

Shadow said nothing.

“This is it,” said Oliver. It was a hollow in the side of the hill, like a short hallway that went back. Perhaps, once, long ago, there had been a structure, but the hill had weathered, and the stones had returned to the hill from which they had been taken.

“There are those who think it’s devil worship,” said Oliver. “And I think they are wrong. But then, one man’s god is another’s devil. Eh?”

He walked into the passageway, and Shadow followed him.

“Such bullshit,” said a woman’s voice. “But you always were a bullshitter, Ollie, you pusillanimous little cock-stain.”

Oliver did not move or react. He said, “She’s here. In the wall. That’s where I left her.” He shone the flashlight at the wall, in the short passageway into the side of the hill. He inspected the drystone wall carefully, as if he were looking for a place he recognized, then he made a little grunting noise of recognition. Oliver took out a compact metal tool from his pocket, reached as high as he could and levered out one little rock with it. Then he began to pull rocks out from the wall, in a set sequence, each rock opening a space to allow another to be removed, alternating large rocks and small.

“Give me a hand. Come on.”

Shadow knew what he was going to see behind the wall, but he pulled out the rocks, placed them down on the ground, one by one.

There was a smell, which intensified as the hole grew bigger, a stink of old rot and mold. It smelled like meat sandwiches gone bad. Shadow saw her face first, and he barely knew it as a face: the cheeks were sunken, the eyes gone, the skin now dark and leathery, and if there were freckles they were impossible to make out; but the hair was Cassie Burglass’s hair, short and black, and in the LED light, he could see that the dead thing wore an olivegreen sweater, and the blue jeans were her blue jeans.

“It’s funny. I knew she was still here,” said Oliver. “But I still had to see her. With all your talk. I had to see it. To prove she was still here.”

“Kill him,” said the woman’s voice. “Hit him with a rock, Shadow. He killed me. Now he’s going to kill you.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Shadow asked.

“Well, yes, obviously,” said the little man, in his sensible voice. “I mean, you know about Cassie. And once you’re gone, I can just finally forget about the whole thing, once and for all.”

“Forget?”

“Forgive and forget. But it’s hard. It’s not easy to forgive myself, but I’m sure I can forget. There. I think there’s enough room for you to get in there now, if you squeeze.”

Shadow looked down at the little man. “Out of interest,” he said, curious, “how are you going to make me get in there? You don’t have a gun on you. And, Ollie, I’m twice your size. You know, I could just break your neck.”

“I’m not a stupid man,” said Oliver. “I’m not a bad man, either. I’m not a terribly well man, but that’s neither here nor there, really. I mean, I did what I did because I was jealous, not because I was ill. But I wouldn’t have come up here alone. You see, this is the temple of the Black Dog. These places were the first temples. Before the stonehenges and the standing stones, they were waiting and they were worshipped, and sacrificed to, and feared, and placated. The black shucks and the barghests, the padfoots and the wish hounds. They were here and they remain on guard.”

“Hit him with a rock,” said Cassie’s voice. “Hit him now, Shadow, please.”

The passage they stood in went a little way into the hillside, a man-made cave with drystone walls. It did not look like an ancient temple. It did not look like a gateway to hell. The predawn sky framed Oliver. In his gentle, unfailingly polite voice, he said, “He is in me. And I am in him.”

The black dog filled the doorway, blocking the way to the world outside, and, Shadow knew, whatever it was, it was no true dog. Its eyes actually glowed, with a luminescence that reminded Shadow of rotting sea-creatures. It was to a wolf, in scale and in menace, what a tiger is to a lynx: pure carnivore, a creature made of danger and threat. It stood taller than Oliver and it stared at Shadow, and it growled, a rumbling deep in its chest. Then it sprang.

Shadow raised his arm to protect his throat, and the creature sank its teeth into his flesh, just below the elbow. The pain was excruciating. He knew he should fight back, but he was falling to his knees, and he was screaming, unable to think clearly, unable to focus on anything except his fear that the creature was going to use him for food, fear it was crushing the bone of his forearm.

On some deep level he suspected that the fear was being created by the dog: that he, Shadow, was not cripplingly afraid like that. Not really. But it did not matter. When the creature released Shadow’s arm, he was weeping and his whole body was shaking.

Oliver said, “Get in there, Shadow. Through the gap in the wall. Quickly, now. Or I’ll have him chew off your face.”

Shadow’s arm was bleeding, but he got up and squeezed through the gap into the darkness without arguing. If he stayed out there, with the beast, he would die soon, and die in pain. He knew that with as much certainty as he knew that the sun would rise tomorrow.

“Well, yes,” said Cassie’s voice in his head. “It’s going to rise. But unless you get your shit together you are never going to see it.”

There was barely space for him and Cassie’s body in the cavity behind the wall. He had seen the expression of pain and fury on her face, like the face of the cat in the glass box, and then he knew she, too, had been entombed here while alive.

Oliver picked up a rock from the ground, and placed it onto the wall, in the gap. “My own theory,” he said, hefting a second rock and putting it into position, “is that it is the prehistoric dire wolf. But it is bigger than ever the dire wolf was. Perhaps it is the monster of our dreams, when we huddled in caves. Perhaps it was simply a wolf, but we were smaller, little hominids who could never run fast enough to get away.”

Shadow leaned against the rock face behind him. He squeezed his left arm with his right hand to try to stop the bleeding. “This is Wod’s Hill,” said Shadow. “And that’s Wod’s dog. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“It doesn’t matter.” More stones were placed on stones.

“Ollie,” said Shadow. “The beast is going to kill you. It’s already inside you. It’s not a good thing.”

“Old Shuck’s not going to hurt me. Old Shuck loves me. Cassie’s in the wall,” said Oliver, and he dropped a rock on top of the others with a crash. “Now you are in the wall with her. Nobody’s waiting for you. Nobody’s going to come looking for you. Nobody is going to cry for you. Nobody’s going to miss you.”

There were, Shadow knew, although he could never have told a soul how he knew, three of them, not two, in that tiny space. There was Cassie Burglass, there in body (rotted and dried and still stinking of decay) and there in soul, and there was also something else, something that twined about his legs, and then butted gently at his injured hand. A voice spoke to him, from somewhere close. He knew that voice, although the accent was unfamiliar.

It was the voice that a cat would speak in, if a cat were a woman: expressive, dark, musical. The voice said, You should not be here, Shadow. You have to stop, and you must take action. You are letting the rest of the world make your decisions for you.

Shadow said aloud, “That’s not entirely fair, Bast.”

“You have to be quiet,” said Oliver, gently. “I mean it.” The stones of the wall were being replaced rapidly and efficiently. Already they were up to Shadow’s chest.

Mr. No? Sweet thing, you really have no idea. No idea who you are or what you are or what that means. If he walls you up in here to die in this hill, this temple will stand forever – and whatever hodgepodge of belief these locals have will work for them and will make magic. But the sun will still go down on them, and all the skies will be gray. All things will mourn, and they will not know what they are mourning for. The world will be worse – for people, for cats, for the remembered, for the forgotten. You have died and you have returned. You matter, Shadow, and you must not meet your death here, a sad sacrifice hidden in a hillside.

“So what are you suggesting I do?” he whispered.

Fight. The Beast is a thing of mind. It’s taking its power from you, Shadow. You are near, and so it’s become more real. Real enough to own Oliver. Real enough to hurt you.

“Me?”

“You think ghosts can talk to everyone?” asked Cassie Burglass’s voice in the darkness, urgently. “We are moths. And you are the flame.”

“What should I do?” asked Shadow. “It hurt my arm. It damn near ripped out my throat.”

Oh, sweet man. It’s just a shadow-thing. It’s a night-dog. It’s just an overgrown jackal.

“It’s real,” Shadow said. The last of the stones was being banged into place.

“Are you truly scared of your father’s dog?” said a woman’s voice. Goddess or ghost, Shadow did not know.

But he knew the answer. Yes. Yes, he was scared.

His left arm was only pain, and unusable, and his right hand was slick and sticky with his blood. He was entombed in a cavity between a wall and rock. But he was, for now, alive.

“Get your shit together,” said Cassie. “I’ve done everything I can. Do it.”

He braced himself against the rocks behind the wall, and he raised his feet. Then he kicked both his booted feet out together, as hard as he could. He had walked so many miles in the last few months. He was a big man, and he was stronger than most. He put everything he had behind that kick.

The wall exploded.

The Beast was on him, the black dog of despair, but this time Shadow was prepared for it. This time he was the aggressor. He grabbed at it.

I will not be my father’s dog.

With his right hand he held the beast’s jaw closed. He stared into its green eyes. He did not believe the beast was a dog at all, not really.

It’s daylight, said Shadow to the dog, with his mind, not with his voice. Run away. Whatever you are, run away. Run back to your gibbet, run back to your grave, little wish hound. All you can do is depress us, fill the world with shadows and illusions. The age when you ran with the wild hunt, or hunted terrified humans, it’s over. I don’t know if you’re my father’s dog or not. But you know what? I don’t care.

With that, Shadow took a deep breath and let go of the dog’s muzzle.

It did not attack. It made a noise, a baffled whine deep in its throat that was almost a whimper.

“Go home,” said Shadow, aloud.

The dog hesitated. Shadow thought for a moment then that he had won, that he was safe, that the dog would simply go away. But then the creature lowered its head, raised the ruff around its neck, and bared its teeth. It would not leave, Shadow knew, until he was dead.

The corridor in the hillside was filling with light: the rising sun shone directly into it. Shadow wondered if the people who had built it, so long ago, had aligned their temple to the sunrise. He took a step to the side, stumbled on something, and fell awkwardly to the ground.

Beside Shadow on the grass was Oliver, sprawled and unconscious. Shadow had tripped over his leg. The man’s eyes were closed; he made a growling sound in the back of his throat, and Shadow heard the same sound, magnified and triumphant, from the dark beast that filled the mouth of the temple.

Shadow was down, and hurt, and was, he knew, a dead man.

Something soft touched his face, gently.

Something else brushed his hand. Shadow glanced to his side, and he understood. He understood why Bast had been with him in this place, and he understood who had brought her.

They had been ground up and sprinkled on these fields more than a hundred years before, stolen from the earth around the temple of Bastet and Beni Hasan. Tons upon tons of them, mummified cats in their thousands, each cat a tiny representation of the deity, each cat an act of worship preserved for an eternity.

They were there, in that space, beside him: brown and sand-colored and shadowy gray, cats with leopard spots and cats with tiger stripes, wild, lithe and ancient. These were not the local cats Bast had sent to watch him the previous day. These were the ancestors of those cats, of all our modern cats, from Egypt, from the Nile Delta, from thousands of years ago, brought here to make things grow.

They trilled and chirruped, they did not meow.

The black dog growled louder but now it made no move to attack. Shadow forced himself into a sitting position. “I thought I told you to go home, Shuck,” he said.

The dog did not move. Shadow opened his right hand, and gestured. It was a gesture of dismissal, of impatience. Finish this.

The cats sprang, with ease, as if choreographed. They landed on the beast, each of them a coiled spring of fangs and claws, both as sharp as they had ever been in life. Pin-sharp claws sank into the black flanks of the huge beast, tore at its eyes. It snapped at them, angrily, and pushed itself against the wall, toppling more rocks, in an attempt to shake them off, but without success. Angry teeth sank into its ears, its muzzle, its tail, its paws.

The beast yelped and growled, and then it made a noise which, Shadow thought, would, had it come from any human throat, have been a scream.

Shadow was never certain what happened then. He watched the black dog put its muzzle down to Oliver’s mouth, and push, hard. He could have sworn that the creature stepped into Oliver, like a bear stepping into a river.

Oliver shook, violently, on the sand.

The scream faded, and the beast was gone, and sunlight filled the space on the hill.

Shadow felt himself shivering. He felt like he had just woken up from a waking sleep; emotions flooded through him, like sunlight: fear and revulsion and grief and hurt, deep hurt.

There was anger in there, too. Oliver had tried to kill him, he knew, and he was thinking clearly for the first time in days.

A man’s voice shouted, “Hold up! Everyone all right over there?”

A high bark, and a lurcher ran in, sniffed at Shadow, his back against the wall, sniffed at Oliver Bierce, unconscious on the ground, and at the remains of Cassie Burglass.

A man’s silhouette filled the opening to the outside world, a gray paper cutout against the rising sun.

“Needles! Leave it!” he said. The dog returned to the man’s side. The man said, “I heard someone screaming. Leastways, I wouldn’t swear to it being a someone. But I heard it. Was that you?”

And then he saw the body, and he stopped. “Holy fucking mother of all fucking bastards,” he said.

“Her name was Cassie Burglass,” said Shadow.

“Moira’s old girlfriend?” said the man. Shadow knew him as the landlord of the pub, could not remember whether he had ever known the man’s name. “Bloody Nora. I thought she went to London.”

Shadow felt sick.

The landlord was kneeling beside Oliver. “His heart’s still beating,” he said. “What happened to him?”

“I’m not sure,” said Shadow. “He screamed when he saw the body – you must have heard him. Then he just went down. And your dog came in.”

The man looked at Shadow, worried. “And you? Look at you! What happened to you, man?”

“Oliver asked me to come up here with him. Said he had something awful he had to get off his chest.” Shadow looked at the wall on each side of the corridor. There were other bricked-in nooks there. Shadow had a good idea of what would be found behind them if any of them were opened. “He asked me to help him open the wall. I did. He knocked me over as he went down. Took me by surprise.”

“Did he tell you why he had done it?”

“Jealousy,” said Shadow. “Just jealous of Moira and Cassie, even after Moira had left Cassie for him.”

The man exhaled, shook his head. “Bloody hell,” he said. “Last bugger I’d expect to do anything like this. Needles! Leave it!” He pulled a cell phone from his pocket, and called the police. Then he excused himself. “I’ve got a bag of game to put aside until the police have cleared out,” he explained.

Shadow got to his feet, and inspected his arms. His sweater and coat were both ripped in the left arm, as if by huge teeth, but his skin was unbroken beneath it. There was no blood on his clothes, no blood on his hands.

He wondered what his corpse would have looked like, if the black dog had killed him.

Cassie’s ghost stood beside him, and looked down at her body, half-fallen from the hole in the wall. The corpse’s fingertips and the fingernails were wrecked, Shadow observed, as if she had tried, in the hours or the days before she died, to dislodge the rocks of the wall.

“Look at that,” she said, staring at herself. “Poor thing. Like a cat in a glass box.” Then she turned to Shadow. “I didn’t actually fancy you,” she said. “Not even a little bit. I’m not sorry. I just needed to get your attention.”

“I know,” said Shadow. “I just wish I’d met you when you were alive. We could have been friends.”

“I bet we would have been. It was hard in there. It’s good to be done with all of this. And I’m sorry, Mr. American. Try not to hate me.”

Shadow’s eyes were watering. He wiped his eyes on his shirt. When he looked again, he was alone in the passageway.

“I don’t hate you,” he told her.

He felt a hand squeeze his hand. He walked outside, into the morning sunlight, and he breathed and shivered, and listened to the distant sirens.

Two men arrived and carried Oliver off on a stretcher, down the hill to the road where an ambulance took him away, siren screaming to alert any sheep on the lanes that they should shuffle back to the grass verge.

A female police officer turned up as the ambulance disappeared, accompanied by a younger male officer. They knew the landlord, whom Shadow was not surprised to learn was also a Scathelocke, and were both impressed by Cassie’s remains, to the point that the young male officer left the passageway and vomited into the ferns.

If it occurred to either of them to inspect the other bricked-in cavities in the corridor, for evidence of centuries-old crimes, they managed to suppress the idea, and Shadow was not going to suggest it.

He gave them a brief statement, then rode with them to the local police station, where he gave a fuller statement to a large police officer with a serious beard. The officer appeared mostly concerned that Shadow was provided with a mug of instant coffee, and that Shadow, as an American tourist, would not form a mistaken impression of rural England. “It’s not like this up here normally. It’s really quiet. Lovely place. I wouldn’t want you to think we were all like this.”

Shadow assured him that he didn’t think that at all.

MOIRA WAS WAITING for him when he came out of the police station. She was standing with a woman in her early sixties, who looked comfortable and reassuring, the sort of person you would want at your side in a crisis.

“Shadow, this is Doreen. My sister.”

Doreen shook hands, explaining she was sorry she hadn’t been able to be there during the last week, but she had been moving house.

“Doreen’s a county court judge,” explained Moira.

Shadow could not easily imagine this woman as a judge.

“They are waiting for Ollie to come around,” said Moira. “Then they are going to charge him with murder.” She said it thoughtfully, but in the same way she would have asked Shadow where he thought she ought to plant some snapdragons.

“And what are you going to do?”

She scratched her nose. “I’m in shock. I have no idea what I’m doing anymore. I keep thinking about the last few years. Poor, poor Cassie. She never thought there was any malice in him.”

“I never liked him,” said Doreen, and she sniffed. “Too full of facts for my liking, and he never knew when to stop talking. Just kept wittering on. Like he was trying to cover something up.”

“Your backpack and your laundry are in Doreen’s car,” said Moira. “I thought we could give you a lift somewhere, if you needed one. Or if you want to get back to rambling, you can walk.”

“Thank you,” said Shadow. He knew he would never be welcome in Moira’s little house, not anymore.

Moira said, urgently, angrily, as if it was all she wanted to know, “You said you saw Cassie. You told us, yesterday. That was what sent Ollie off the deep end. It hurt me so much. Why did you say you’d seen her, if she was dead? You couldn’t have seen her.”

Shadow had been wondering about that, while he had been giving his police statement. “Beats me,” he said. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Probably a local, playing some kind of game with the Yankee tourist.”

Moira looked at him with fierce hazel eyes, as if she was trying to believe him but was unable to make the final leap of faith. Her sister reached down and held her hand. “More things in heaven and earth, Horatio. I think we should just leave it at that.”

Moira looked at Shadow, unbelieving, angered, for a long time, before she took a deep breath and said, “Yes. Yes, I suppose we should.”

There was silence in the car. Shadow wanted to apologize to Moira, to say something that would make things better.

They drove past the gibbet tree.

“There were ten tongues within one head,” recited Doreen, in a voice slightly higher and more formal than the one in which she had previously spoken. “And one went out to fetch some bread, to feed the living and the dead. That was a riddle written about this corner, and that tree.”

“What does it mean?”

“A wren made a nest inside the skull of a gibbeted corpse, flying in and out of the jaw to feed its young. In the midst of death, as it were, life just keeps on happening.” Shadow thought about the matter for a little while, and told her that he guessed that it probably did.

MARIA DREAMED OF her father flying and knew things would be alright.

She woke in the morning, and for the first time in more than a year, she felt refreshed. It didn’t matter that she was covered in sweat from sleeping in the hot, close basement of the abandoned house, or that that the ashy scent of wildfire smoke had invaded their makeshift bedroom, or that her cough was back. None of it bothered her the way it had before, because she finally felt hopeful.

She got up, climbed the basement stairs, and stepped out into the oven heat of the Phoenix morning, squinting and wrinkling her nose at the ashy irritants in the air. She stretched, working out the kinks of sleep.

Smoke from the Sierras shrouded everything in an acrid mist, again – California blowing in. Trees and grasses and houses turned to char, billowing hundreds of miles across state lines to settle in Arizona and cut visibility to a gray quarter-mile. Even Arizona’s desert sun couldn’t fight the smoke. It glowed as a jaundiced ball behind the veil but still managed to heat the city just fine.

Maria coughed and blew her nose. More black ash. It got into the basement somehow.

She headed across the lava rock backyard for the outhouse, her flip-flops slapping her heels as she went. Off in the gray distance, the fire-flicker of construction cutters marked where the Taiyang loomed over downtown Phoenix, veiled behind haze.

On a clear day, the Taiyang gleamed. Steel and glass and solar tiles. Solar shades fluttering and tracking the sun, shielding its interconnected towers from the worst of the heat, its gardens gleaming behind glass, moist green terrariums teasing the people who lived outside its climate control and comfort.

But now, with the forest-fire smoke, all that was visible of the Taiyang were the plasma sparks of construction workers as they set and fused the girders for the arcology’s next expansion. It wouldn’t be Papa. Not now. He’d already be down off the high beams and on his way home, with cash in his pocket and full water jugs from the Red Cross pump, but there were hundreds of others up there, working their own twelve-hour shifts. Impressionistic firefly flashes of workers lucky enough to have a job, delineating the arcology’s looming bulk even when you couldn’t see the building itself through all the haze.

Papa said it was almost alive. “Its skin makes electricity, mija, and in its guts, it’s got algea vats and mushrooms and snails to clean the water just like someone’s kidneys. It’s got pumps that pound like a heart and move all the water and waste, and it’s got rivers like veins, and it re-uses everything, again and again. Never lets anything out. Just keeps it in, and keeps finding ways to use it.”

The Taiyang grew vegetables in its vertical hydroponic gardens and fish in its filtering pools, and it had waterfalls, and coffee shop terraces, and clean air. If you were rich enough, you could move right in. You could live up high, safe from dust and gangs and rolling brownouts, and never be touched by the disaster of Phoenix at all.

Amazing, surely. But maybe even more amazing that someone had enough faith and money and energy to build.

Maria couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen someone build anything. Probably the Santoses, back in San Antonio, when they’d put a new addition on their house. They’d saved for three years to make room for their growing family – and then the next year it was gone, flooded off the map.

So it was something to see the Taiyang Arcology rising proudly over Phoenix. When she’d first come to the city, in the refugee convoy, Maria had resented the Taiyang for how well the people lived there. But now, its shadow bulk was comforting, and the glitter and spark of construction work made her think of candles flickering at church, peaceful assurances that everything was going to be alright.

Maria held her breath as she opened the outhouse door. Reek and flies billowed out.

She and her father had dug the latrine in the cool of the night, hammering together a rough shelter with two-by-fours and siding scavenged from the house next door. It worked okay. Not like having a real toilet with flushing water, but who had that anymore?

It’s better than shitting in the open, Maria reminded herself as she crouched over the trench and peed into her Clearsac. She hung the filled bag on a nail and finished her business, then grabbed the full Clearsac and headed back to the basement.

Down in the relative cool of their underground shelter, Maria carefully squeezed her Clearsac into their water jug, watching yellow turn clear as it passed through the filter and drained into the container.

Like a kidney in reverse, Papa had explained.

When they’d first started using the Clearsacs, she’d been disgusted by them. Now she barely thought about it.

But pretty soon... no more Clearsacs.

The thought filled her with relief. The dream of escape... She could still see Papa flying, proud and strong, free of all the tethers that kept them trapped in Phoenix. This broken city wasn’t the last stop as Maria had feared. It wasn’t their dead end. She and her father weren’t going to end up like all the other Texas refugees, smashed up against the border controls of California, which said it already had too many people, and Nevada and Utah, which seemed to hate people on principle – and Texans in particular. They were getting out.

Smiling, she drank from the water jug. She tried to keep a disciplined eye on how much she had, but she was so thirsty, she ended up draining it and feeling ashamed, and yet still drinking, convulsively swallowing water until there was nothing except drops that she lapped at, too, trying to get everything.

Never mind. It’s not like it was before. Papa’s got a job now. It’s okay to drink. He said it was okay to drink.

She remembered how it had been the day after Taiyang International hired him: him coming home with a five-gallon cube of water and two rolls of toilet paper, plus pupusas that he’d bought from a pop-up stand near the construction site – but most of all, him coming home smiling. Not worried about every drop of water. Not worried about... well, everything.

“We’re all good now, mija,” he’d said. “We’re all good. This job, it’s a big one. It’ll last a long time. We’re gonna save up. And we don’t just got to go north now. We can buy our way to China, too. This job, it opens a lot of doors for us. After this, we can go anywhere. Anywhere, mija.”

He kept saying it, over and over again: We can go anywhere.

Papa had a job again. He had a plan again. They had a chance, again. And for the first time in months, he sounded like himself. Not the scared and sorrowful man who kept apologizing that they didn’t have enough food for the night or the medicine that Mom needed, or who kept insisting that it was possible to go north when it clearly wasn’t. Not that man who seemed to crumple in on himself as he realized that the way the world had been was no longer the way the world was.

It had all happened so fast. One minute Maria had been worrying about what her mother would say about her B on a biology test and the dress she’d have for her quinceañera, and the next, America was falling apart all around them, like God had swiped his hand across the map and left a different country in its place.

You weren’t supposed to get turned back by militias at the border of Oklahoma or see people strung in the margins of the interstates. But she’d seen both. Her father kept saying that this was America, and America didn’t do these things, but the America in her father’s mind wasn’t the same as the America that they drove across.

America wasn’t supposed to be a place where you huddled for safety under the shield of an Iowa National Guard convoy and woke up without them – waking with a start to desert silence and the hot flapping of a FEMA tent, realizing that you were all alone, and that somewhere out in the darkness, New Mexicans were planning to make a lesson of you. In Papa’s mind, that shit didn’t happen. On the ground, it did. There was America before Cat 6 hurricanes and megadroughts, and there was after – with everyone on the move.

That was all past now, though. Papa finally had a plan that would work, and a job that paid, and they were getting out.

Maria settled back on her mattress and dug out a language tablet. The Chinese gave them away free to anyone who asked, and people hacked them to get access to the public network. To make up for her greed with the water, she decided to study instead of watching pirated movies.

The screen lit up, and a familiar Chinese lady started the lesson. Maria followed her prompts. The lady moved on from numbers to other words, tricky games that highlighted the tonal differences between “ma” and “ma,” “mai” and “mai.”

Different language. Different rules. Tones. Tiny differences to Maria’s ear that turned out to make all the difference in the world. If you weren’t trained to listen for them, you didn’t know what was going on. You were lost.

The lady in the tablet nodded and smiled as Maria said “buy” and “sell” correctly.

Maria was so engrossed in her study that it took a while to notice that time had passed, and Papa wasn’t home.

She got to her feet and went out into the choking furnace of 120-degree heat. The smoke had thickened. It seemed like all of California was on fire, and all of it was blowing in to Phoenix.

Maria peered toward the Taiyang, but even the construction cutter flickers were invisible now. Papa was never late coming off shift. He always did his shift, got his pay, filled his jugs from the Red Cross pump, and came straight home.

She started walking toward the construction site, making her way down the long dust-rutted boulevards, where Texas bang bang girls stood on the street corners and tried to pick up rich Californians who were over the border to go slumming. Walking past the Red Cross pump, where the lines for water stretched around the block and the price always seemed to go up. Past the shanty towns of suburban refugees that filled Fry’s and Target parking lots, all of them scavenging and building plywood slums around the relief pump, grateful to be close to any place where they could get water. Past the Merry Perry revival tent, where people lashed themselves with thorn bushes and begged God to send them rain.

Maria trudged through the choking smoke and dust, wishing she’d saved some of her water jug for the brutal heat of the walk. The arcology loomed out of the smoke, a jumbled collection of boxy interconnected towers, as isolated from Phoenix as if it were a castle fortress.

On the Taiyang’s construction side, the gate guard wouldn’t let her in. He didn’t seem to understand English, Spanish, or her broken Chinese. But he did make a call, though.

A Chinese man came out to her. A polished man, he wore a hardhat, nice clothes, and filter mask around his neck – a good one from REI that would keep California and Phoenix out of his lungs. Maria eyed it jealously.

“You’re here about the accident?” he asked.

“What accident?”

“There was a fall.”

He spoke with an accent, but his English was clear enough. It had been a long fall, he said. She wouldn’t want to see his body. He was very sorry. Taiyang International had made arrangements for the respectful disposal of his body. She could pick up his remains in the evening. There was some leftover pay, and Taiyang would cover the costs of the cremation.

Maria found herself staring at the man’s fancy dust mask as he droned on. The rubberized seals and replaceable filters...

Her father would be smoke. More smoke, adding to the burn that people tried to keep out of their lungs. Maybe she was breathing him in, right now – him and the Sierras and all of California.

His ash, flying free.

“DAMN AND BLAST it!”

Plaquette let herself in through the showroom door of the watchmaker’s that morning to hear Msieur blistering the air of his shop with his swearing. The hulking clockwork man he’d been working on was high-stepping around the workroom floor in a clumsy lurch. It lifted its knees comically high, its body listing to one side and its feet coming down in the wrong order; toe, then heel. Billy Sumach, who delivered supplies to Msieur, was in the workroom. Through the open doorway he threw her a merry glance with his pretty brown eyes, but he had better sense than to laugh at Msieur’s handiwork with Msieur in the room.

Msieur glared at Plaquette. “You’re late. That’s coming off your pay.” Plaquette winced. Their family needed every cent of her earnings, but she’d had to wait home till Ma got back from the railroad to take over minding Pa.

The mechanical George staggered tap-click, tap-click across the shop. It crashed into a wall and tumbled with a clank to the floor, then lay there whirring. Msieur swore again, words Ma would be mortified to know that Plaquette had heard. He snatched off one of his own shoes and threw it at the George. Billy Sumach gave a little peep of swallowed laughter. Msieur pointed at the George. “Fix it,” he growled at Plaquette. “I have to present it to the governor the day after tomorrow.”

As though Plaquette didn’t know that. “Yes, Msieur,” she said to his back as he stormed through the door to the showroom.

The second the door slammed shut, Billy let out a whoop. Plaquette found herself smiling along with him, glad of a little amusement. It was scarce in her life nowadays. “My land,” Billy said, “’Pears Old George there has got himself the jake leg!”

The fun blew out of the room like a candle flame. “Don’t you joke,” Plaquette told him, through teeth clamped tight together. “You know ’bout my Pa.”

Billy’s face fell. “Oh Lord, Plaquette, I’m sorry.”

“Just help me get this George to its feet. It weighs a ton.” Billy was a fine man, of Plaquette’s color and station. Lately when he came by with deliveries he’d been favoring her with smiles and wistful looks. But she couldn’t study that right now, not with Pa taken so poorly. Together they wrestled the George over to Plaquette’s work table. There it stood. Its painted-on porter’s uniform had chipped at one shoulder when it fell. Its chest door hung open as a coffin lid. Plaquette wanted to weep at the tangle of metal inside it. She’d taken the George’s chest apart and put it back together, felt like a million times now. Msieur couldn’t see what was wrong, and neither could she. Its arms worked just fine; Plaquette had strung the wires inside them herself. But the legs...

“You’ll do it,” Billy said, “Got a good head on your shoulders.”

Feeling woeful, Plaquette nodded.

An uncomfortable silence held between them an instant. If he wanted to come courting, now would be the time to ask. Instead, he held up his clipboard. “Msieur gotta sign for these boxes.”

Plaquette nodded again. She wouldn’t have felt right saying yes to courting, anyway. Not with Pa so sick.

If he’d asked, that is.

“Billy, you ever think of doing something else?” The words were out before she knew she wanted to ask them.

He frowned thoughtfully. “You know, I got cousins own a lavender farm, out Des Allemands way. Sometimes I think I might join them.”

“Not some big city far off?” She wondered how Billy’s calloused hands would feel against her cheek.

“Nah. Too noisy, too dirty. Too much like this place.” Then he saw her face. “Though if a pretty girl like you were there,” he said slowly, as though afraid to speak his mind, “I guess I could come to love it.”

He looked away then. “Think Msieur would mind me popping to the showroom real quick? I could take him his shoe.”

“Just make sure no white folks in there.”

Billy collected Msieur’s shoe then ducked into the showroom. Plaquette hung her hat on the hook near the back and sat down to work. Msieur’s design for the George lay crumpled on her table where he’d left it. She smoothed out the sheets of paper and set to poring over them, as she’d done every day since she started working on the George. This was the most intricate device Msieur had ever attempted. It had to perform flawlessly on the day the governor unveiled it at the railroad. For a couple years now, Msieur had depended on Plaquette’s keen vision and small, deft hands to assemble the components of his more intricate timepieces and his designs. By the point he decided to teach her how to read his notes, she’d already figured out how to decipher most of the symbols and his chicken scratch writing.

There. That contact strip would never sit right, not lying flat like that. Needed a slight bend to it. Plaquette got a pencil out of her table’s drawer and made a correction to Msieur’s notes. Billy came back and started to bring boxes from his cart outside in through the workroom door. While he worked and tried to make small talk with her, Plaquette got herself a tray. From the drawers of the massive oak watchmaker’s cabinet in the middle of the shop, she collected the items she needed and took them to her bench.

“Might rain Saturday, don’t you think?” huffed Billy as he heaved a box to the very top of the pile.

“Might,” Plaquette replied. “Might not.” His new bashfulness with her made her bashful in return. They couldn’t quite seem to be companionable any more. She did a last check of the long row of black velvet cloth on her workbench, hundreds of tiny brass and crystal components gleaming against the black fur of the fabric. She knew down to the last how many cogs, cams, and screws were there. She had to. Msieur counted every penny, fussed over every quarter inch of the fine gauge wire that went into the timekeepers his shop produced. At year’s end he tallied every watch finding, every scrap of leather. If any were missing, the cost was docked from her salary. Kind of the backwards of a Christmas bonus. As if Msieur didn’t each evening collect sufficient profits from his till and lower them into his ‘secret’ safe.

Billy saw Plaquette pick up her tweezers and turn towards the mechanical porter. “Do you want Claude?” he asked her.

He knew her so well. She smiled at him. “Yes, please.” He leapt to go fetch Claude out of the broom closet where they stored him.

Billy really was sweet, and he wasn’t the only one who’d begun looking at her differently as she filled out from girl to woman this past year. Ma said she had two choices: marry Billy and be poor but in love; or angle to become Msieur’s placée and take up life in the Quarter. Msieur would never publicly acknowledge her or any children he had by her, but she would be comfortable, and maybe pass some of her comforts along to Ma and Pa. Not that they would ever ask.

’Sides, she wasn’t even sure she was ready to be thinking about all that bother just yet.

Plaquette yawned. She was bone tired, and no wonder. She’d been spending her nights and Sundays looking after Pa since he had come down with the jake leg.

Claude’s books had excited Plaquette when she first heard them, but in time they’d become overly familiar. She knew every thrilling leap from crumbling clifftops, every graveside confession, every switched and secret identity that formed part of those well-worn tales. They had started to grate on her, those stories of people out in the world, having adventures she never could. Pa got to see foreign places; the likes of New York and Chicago and San Francisco. He only passed through them, of course. He had to remain on the train. But he got to see new passengers at each stop, to smell foreign air, to look up into a different sky. Or he had.

He would again, when he got better. He would. The metal Georges would need minding, wouldn’t they? And who better for that job than Pa, who’d been a dependable George himself these many years?

But for Plaquette, there was only day after day, one marching in sequence behind another, in this workroom. Stringing tiny, shiny pieces of metal together. Making shift nowadays to always be on the other side of the room from Msieur whenever he was present. She was no longer the board-flat young girl she’d been when she first went to work for Msieur. She’d begun to bud, and Msieur seemed inclined to pluck himself a tender placée flower to grace his lapel. A left-handed marriage was one thing; but to a skinflint like Msieur?

Problems crowding up on each other like stormclouds running ahead of the wind. Massing so thick that Plaquette couldn’t presently see her way through them. Ma said when life got dark like that, all’s you could do was keep putting one foot in front the other and hope you walked yourself to somewhere brighter.

But as usual, once Billy set Claude up and the automaton began its recitation, her work was accurate and quick. She loved the challenge and ritual of assemblage: laying exactly the right findings out on the cloth; listening to the clicking sound of Claude’s gears as he recited one of his scrolls; letting the ordered measure take her thoughts away till all that was left was the precise dance of her fingers as they selected the watch parts and clicked, screwed or pinned them into place. Sometimes she only woke from her trance of time, rhythm, and words when Msieur shook her by the shoulder come evening and she looked up to realize the whole day had gone by.

Shadows fell on Plaquette’s hands, obscuring her work. She looked around, blinking. When had it gone dusk? The workroom was empty. Billy had probably gone on about his other business hours ago. Claude’s scroll had run out and he’d long since fallen silent. Why hadn’t Msieur told her it was time to go? She could hear him wandering around his upstairs apartment.

She rubbed her burning eyes. He’d probably hoped she’d keep working until the mechanical George was set to rights.

Had she done it? She slid her hands out of the wire-and-cam guts of the mechanical man. She’d have to test him to be sure. But in the growing dark, she could scarcely make out the contacts in the George’s body that needed to be tripped in order to set it in motion.

Plaquette rose from her bench, stretched her twinging back and frowned – in imitation of Mama – through the doorway at the elaborately decorated Carcel lamp displayed in the shop’s front. Somewhat outmoded though it was, the clockwork regulating the lamp’s fuel supply and draft served Msieur as one of many proofs of his meticulous handiwork – her meticulous handiwork. If she stayed in the workshop any later she’d have to light that lamp. And for all that he wanted her to work late, Msieur would be sure to deduct the cost of the oil used from her wages. He could easily put a vacuum bulb into the Carcel, light it with cheap units of Tesla power instead of oil, but he mistrusted energy he couldn’t see. Said it wasn’t “refined.”

She took a few steps in the direction of the Carcel.

C-RRR-EEEAK!

Plaquette gasped and dashed for the showroom door to the street. She had grabbed the latch rope before her wits returned. She let the rope go and faced back toward the black doorway out of which emerged the automaton, Claude. It rocked forward on its treads, left side, right. Its black velvet jacket swallowed what little light there still was. But the old-fashioned white ruff circling its neck cast up enough brightness to show its immobile features. They had, like hers, much of the African to them. Claude came to a stop in front of her.

CRREAK!

Plaquette giggled. “You giving me a good reminder – I better put that oil on your wheels as well as your insides. You like to scare me half to death rolling round the dark in here.” She pulled the miniature oil tin from her apron pocket and knelt to lubricate the wheels of the rolling treads under Claude’s platform. It had been Plaquette’s idea to install them to replace the big brass wheels he’d had on either side. She’d grown weary of righting Claude every time he rolled over an uneven surface and toppled. It had been good practice, though, for nowadays, when Pa was like to fall with each spastic step he took, and Plaquette so often had to catch him. He hated using the crutches. And all of this because he’d begun taking a few sips of jake to warm his cold bones before his early morning shifts.

Jamaica Ginger was doing her family in, that was sure.

Her jostling of Claude must have released some last dregs of energy left in his winding mechanism, for just then he took it into his mechanical head to drone, “... nooot to escaaape it by exerrrtion...”

Quickly, Plaquette stopped the automaton midsentence. For good measure, she removed the book from its spool inside Claude. She didn’t want Msieur to hear that she was still downstairs, alone in the dark.

As Plaquette straightened again, a new thought struck her.

The shutters folded back easily. White light from the coil-powered street lamp outside flooded the tick-tocking showroom, glittering on glass cases and gold and brass watches, on polished wooden housings and numbered faces like pearly moons. More than enough illumination for Plaquette’s bright eyes. “Come along, Claude,” Plaquette commanded as she headed back towards the work room – somewhat unnecessarily, as she had Claude’s wardenclyffe in the pocket of her leather work apron. Where it went, Claude was bound to follow. Which made it doubly foolish of her to have been startled by him.

She could see the mechanical porter more clearly now; its cold steel body painted deep blue in imitation of a porter’s uniform, down to the gold stripes at the cuffs of the jacket. Its perpetually smiling black face. The Pullman Porter ‘cap’ atop its head screwed on like a bottle top. Inside it was the Tesla receiver the George would use to guide itself around inside the sleeping-car cabins the Pullman company planned to outfit with wireless transmitters. That part had been Plaquette’s idea. Msieur had grumbled, but Plaquette could see him mentally adding up the profits this venture could bring him.

If Msieur’s George was a success, that’d be the end of her father’s job. Human porters had human needs. A mechanical George would rarely be ill, never miss work. Would always smile, would never need a new uniform – just the occasional paint touch-up. Would need to be paid for initially, but never paid thereafter.

With two fingers, Plaquette poked the George’s ungiving chest. The mechanical man didn’t so much as rock on its sturdy legs. Plaquette still thought treads would have been better, like Claude’s. But Msieur wanted the new Georges to be as lifelike as possible, so as not to scare the fine ladies and gentlemen who rode the luxury sleeping-cars. So the Georges must be able to walk. Smoothly, like Pa used to.

The chiming clocks in the showroom began tolling the hour, each in their separate tones. Plaquette gasped. Though surrounded by clocks, she had completely forgotten how late it was. Ma would be waiting for her; it was nearly time for Pa’s shift at the station! She couldn’t stop now to test the George. She slapped Claude’s wardenclyffe into his perpetually outstretched hand, pulled her bonnet onto her head, and hastened outside, stopping only to jiggle the shop’s door by its polished handle to make sure the latch had safely caught.

Only a few blocks to scurry home under the steadily burning lamps, among the sparse clumps of New Orleans’s foreign sightseers and those locals preferring to conduct their business in the cool of night. In her hurry, she bumped into one overdressed gent. He took her by the arms and leered, looking her up and down. She muttered an apology and pulled away before he could do more than that. She was soon home, where Ma was waiting on the landing outside their rooms. The darkness and Pa’s hat and heavy coat disguised Ma well enough to fool the white supervisors for a while, and the other colored were in on the secret. But if Ma came in late –

“Don’t fret, Darling,” Ma said, bending to kiss Plaquette’s cheek. “I can still make it. He ate some soup and I just help him to the necessary, so he probably sleep till morning.”

Plaquette went into the dark apartment. No fancy lights for them. Ma had left the kerosene lamp on the kitchen table, turned down low. Plaquette could see through to Ma and Pa’s bed. Pa was tucked in tight, only his head showing above the covers. He was breathing heavy, not quite a snore. The shape of him underneath the coverlet looked so small. Had he shrunk, or was she growing?

Plaquette hung up her hat. In her hurry to get home, she’d left Msieur’s still wearing her leather apron. As she pulled it off to hang it beside her hat, something inside one of the pockets thumped dully against the wall. One of Claude’s book scrolls; the one she’d taken from him. She returned it to the pocket. Claude could have it back tomorrow. She poured herself some soup from the pot on the stove. Smelled like pea soup and crawfish, with a smoky hint of ham. Ma had been stretching the food with peas, seasoning it with paper-thin shavings from that one ham shank for what seemed like weeks now. Plaquette didn’t think she could stomach the taste of more peas, more stingy wisps of ham. What she wouldn’t give for a good slice of roast beef, hot from the oven, its fat glistening on the plate.

Her stomach growled, not caring. Crawfish soup would suit it just fine. Plaquette sat to table and set about spooning cold soup down her gullet. The low flame inside the kerosene lamp flickered, drawing pictures. Plaquette imagined she saw a tower, angels circling it (or demons), a war raging below. Men skewering other men with blades and spears. Beasts she’d never before heard tell of, lunging –

“Girl, what you seeing in that lamp? Have you so seduced.”

Plaquette started and pulled her mind out of the profane world in the lamp. “Pa!” She jumped up from the table and went to kiss him on the forehead. He hugged her, his hands flopping limply to thump against her back. He smelled of sweat, just a few days too old to be ignored. “You need anything? The necessary?”

“Naw.” He tried to pat the bed beside him, failed. He grimaced. “Just come and sit by me a little while. Tell me the pictures in your mind.”

“If I do, you gotta tell me ’bout San Francisco again.” She sat on the bed facing him, knees drawn up beneath her skirts like a little child.

“Huh. I’m never gonna see that city again.” It tore at Plaquette’s heart to see his eyes fill with tears. “Oh, Plaquette,” he whispered, “What are we gonna to do?”

Not we; her. She would do it. “Hush, Pa.” It wouldn’t be Billy. Ma and Pa were showing her that you couldn’t count on love and hard work alone to pull you through. Not when this life would scarcely pay a colored man a penny to labor all his days and die young. She patted Pa’s arm, took his helpless hand in hers. She closed her eyes to recollect the bright story in the lamp flame. Opened them again. “So. Say there’s a tower, higher than that mountain you told me ’bout that one time. The one with the clouds all round the bottom of it so it look to be floating?”

Pa’s mouth was set in bitterness. He stared off at nothing. For a moment, Plaquette though he wouldn’t answer her. But then, his expression unchanged, he ground out, “Mount Rainier. In Seattle.”

“That’s it. This here tower, it’s taller than that.”

Pa turned his eyes to hers. “What’s it for?”

“How should I know? I’ll tell you that when it comes to me. I know this, though; there’s people flying round that tower, right up there in the air. Like men, and maybe a woman, but with wings. Like angels. No, like bats.”

Pa’s eyes grew round. The lines in his face smoothed out as Plaquette spun her story. A cruel prince. A fearsome army. A lieutenant with a conscience.

It would have to be Msieur.

That ended up being a good night. Pa fell back to sleep, his face more peaceful than she’d seen in days. Plaquette curled up against his side. She was used to his snoring and the heaviness of his drugged breath. She meant to sleep there beside him, but her mind wouldn’t let her rest. It was full of imaginings: dancing with Msieur at the Orleans Ballroom, her wearing a fine gown and a fixed, automaton smile; Billy’s hopeful glances and small kindnesses, his endearingly nervous bad jokes; and Billy’s shoulders, already bowed at seventeen from lifting and hauling too-heavy boxes day in, day out, tick, tock, forever (how long before her eyesight went from squinting at tiny watch parts?); an army of tireless metal Georges, more each day, replacing the fleshly porters, and brought about in part by her cleverness. Whichever path her future took, Plaquette could only see disaster.

Yet in the air above her visions, They flew.

Finally Plaquette eased herself out of bed. The apartment was dark; she’d long since blown out the lamp to save wick and oil. She tiptoed carefully to the kitchen. By feel, she got Claude’s reading scroll out of the pocket of her apron. She crept out onto the landing. By the light of a streetlamp, she unrolled and re-rolled it so that she could see the end of the book. The punched holes stopped a good foot-and-a-half before the end of the roll. There was that much blank space left.

Plaquette knew My Lady Nobody practically word for word. She studied the roll, figuring out the patterns of holes that created the sounds which allowed Claude to speak the syllables of the story. She could do this. She crept back inside and felt her way through the kitchen drawer. She grasped something way at the back. A bottle, closed tight, some liquid still sloshing around inside it. A sniff of the lid told her what it was. She put the bottle aside and kept rummaging through the drawer. Her heart beat triple-time when she found what she was looking for. Pa did indeed have more than one ticket punch.

It was as though there was a fever rising in her; for the next few hours she crouched shivering on the landing and in a frenzy, punched a complicated pattern into the end of the scroll, stopping every so often to roll it back to the beginning for guidance on how to punch a particular syllable. By the time she’d used up the rest of the roll, her fingers were numb with cold, her teeth chattering, the sky was going pink in the east, and the landing was scattered with little circles of white card. But her brain finally felt at peace.

She rose stiffly to her feet. A light breeze began blowing the white circles away. Ma would probably be home in another hour or so. Plaquette replaced the scroll in her apron pocket, changed into her night gown, and lay back down beside her father. In seconds, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

THE ‘HUT’ IS a couple of insulated portable cabins, with a few smaller sheds containing generators, fuel, wind turbine parts and so on. There is a chemical toilet, a wash basin, basic cooking facilities. Two or three of us can share the hut at a time, but there is not normally a need for more than one to keep an eye on the equipment. Resources being tight, lately we tend to come out on our own.

In all honesty, I prefer it this way. Birds draw out the solitude in us. They repay patience and silence – long hours of a kind of alert, anticipatory stillness. The days begin to blur into each other; weekends and weekdays becoming arbitrary distinctions. I find myself easily losing track of the calendar, birds and weather my only temporal markers. I watch the migration patterns, record their altering plumage, study the changeful skies. I could not be happier.

There is just one thing to spoil my contentment, but even that, I am confident, will soon be behind me.

I will finish the paper.

IT SOUND EASY, put like that. A vow. A recommitment, a redoubling of my own efforts. One last push.

But I have been here before.

It started easily enough – the usual set of objections, no real hint of the trouble to come. Very few papers ever go through without some amendments, so none of us were bothered that there were a few issues that needed addressing.

But when we had fixed those, the anonymous referee came back with requests for more changes.

We took care of those. Hoped that the paper would now be judged fit for publication. But still the referee wanted more of us. This kept going on. Just when we think we have addressed all possible doubts, the referee somehow manages to find something new to quibble with. I do my best to be stoic, reminding myself that the anonymous referee is just another scientist doing their job, that they too are under similar pressures, and that I should not feel under any personal attack.

But I only have to glance at their comments.

My blood boils. I entertain a momentary fantasy of meeting the referee out here, on some lonely strip of marshland, of swerving violently and running them into a ditch.

Asking, as I watch them gag on muddy water: “Rigorous enough for you now?”

IT HADN’T COME down since great-grandparent days, but as its last descent had left no stone on stone – nor man, woman, child alive – anywhere people had once dwelled aboveground on the continent, the hero would go up before it came down again, and kill the kaiju maximus. They would go too: the hero’s weakness, and her strength.

For long cool days, she led them up the old byways toward the spectre of the mountains. Finally they reached the foothills. Here and there leaves of the deep green forest had just begun turning red or gold in the last days of summer. He and the children were all fit, all well, and so most days the hero could get about twenty kiloms out of them. She carried the food, that pack twice the weight of his, which was plenty heavy enough. She brought down game for them if he asked, a turkey, or ducks. They did just as that old sciencer in the last cavestead had counseled: every morning a drop of her blood under the children’s tongues and his, and indeed the heroic factor served to ward them all from sickness. No more fevers, not a cough. The scaled dry patches on the boy’s neck and hands cleared up, and he suffered no more frightening episodes of breathlessness. In little more than a month the baby, looking all the time more and more like poor Sofiya, shot up several centimets, five or six, and put on as many kilos. And him? That ankle he’d twisted back in the spring stopped aching during the first and last hours of a long day’s hike, stopped aching at all. You don’t really know, until it’s gone, how much the pain was wearing on you all along.

Come downhill one bright chill afternoon, he and the baby and boy were resting in the swale, eating apples, when the hero came down from the sky. She gave him the choice of the last hill they’d climb that day. “Which one?” she said. Just north of them two hills overlapped in east-west adjacency. “Where’s the good water?”

He thought about it and said, “That one,” holding out his apple toward where, unseen and unheard, a freshwater spring bubbled up from cloven rock, and ran down down the chosen hill’s farside. Though much higher, the other hill looked easy-hiking. The hill awaiting them was squat, not half so high: but they’d end up climbing its height four or five times, after all the switchbacks, its sides being steep and densely forested, interrupted by brief sheer bluffs. There never really was a chance, was there, the easy hill might have had the water?

“Saw some ducks while I was up flying,” the hero said. (They only ever argued over the children – food for them, water for them, rest.) “But just those spoonies with orange fat.”

“That’s okay.”

“Kids won’t eat that kind, you said.” The hero’s latest eyes caught the light funny, as if prismatic oil were wetting them, not saltwater tears. “They taste too nasty.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Really.”

“You gotta speak up if you want me to hunt.”

It was nice, he told himself, that she thought to offer. “Tonight I meant to finish up what we brung fresh from the last cavestead. So please don’t worry yourself.” He didn’t need some special solicitude that came out of the blue every once in a while. What he needed was not to be argued against, and never, ever overruled, when the hero wanted to wring a few more kiloms from the day – and so skip some meal, rest stop, or water break – and he said to her, “They can’t; the kids are tired. We need rest.”

I don’t think Sofiya should do that. I don’t think she’s ready.

“You hurting for water? I can take the canteens and fill ’em.”

“We’re okay. Early tomorrow morning we should hit the trickle, otherside of that west hill there. We got plenty till then.” He smiled up at her (irises glinting jewel-like in the oblique fall of light). “And you know I know my water.”

“Yeah.” She touched his head and ran fingers through his hair which, not easily, he kept washed and combed for her. “You do, don’t you?”

Now, his father: there had been a dowser, the old man not just able to find the water but call it from the ground, however dry. He himself could feel the water pumping or at rest in the earth well enough to say where the nearest creek or pond lay, and to judge at a glance whether this standing pool or that mineral-stained leak was poisonous or potable. And the boy could as well: grandson’s talent biding fair to rival his grandfather’s, for already son could often pinpoint what father could only be vague about.

The hero looked at her weary children half-eating, half-sleeping on their weary father’s lap. “We’ll rest here a bit longer, then head up when the sun touches the top of those trees there.”

Mouth full of apple, he nodded. On rare occasions the hero drank thirstily from a spring, or returned to camp with the haunch of some deer she’d devoured out of his and the children’s sight; and he’d roast it up for their supper and next-day’s eating. But she took neither food nor water more than once a month. All the good that a daily two leets of water, full night’s sleep, and three squares did for you, the hero got from a quiet half hour’s sit-down in the sun. She found a bright spot now and partook.

He unraveled a cocklebur from the boy’s head propped on his thigh. “What say you, buddy? How was your papa’s waterwitching that time?”

Eyes closed, the boy held an apple to his mouth, nibbling at it; he spoke with quiet dreaminess. “We’re gonna get to that water today, Papa – right as the sun’s going down. And the spring’s a good gushy one, not no little trickle like you said.”

Still with a couple nice bites on it, the baby chucked her apple-core to the mangy pup that had crept after them since midmorning. “I wanna ’nother one, Papa,” she said. “I’m still hungry.”

“We ain’t got apples to waste, pumpkin.” He handed her the half left of his. “Now, just you get to eat this, okay? It’s yours, all by yourself.”

SYLVAIN HAD JUST pulled up Annette’s skirts when the drips started. The first one landed on her wig, displacing a puff of rose-pink powder. Sylvain ignored it and leaned Annette back on the sofa. Her breath sharpened to gasps that blew more powder from her wig. Her thighs were cool and slightly damp – perhaps her arousal wasn’t feigned after all, Sylvain thought, and reapplied himself to nuzzling her throat.

After two winters at Versailles, Sylvain was well acquainted with the general passion for powder. Every courtier had bowls and bins of the stuff in every color and scent. In addition to the pink hair powder, Annette had golden powder on her face and lavender at her throat and cleavage. There would be more varieties lower down. He would investigate that in time.

The second drip landed on the tip of her nose. Sylvain flicked it away with his tongue.

Annette giggled. “Your pipes are weeping, monsieur.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, nipping at her throat. The drips were just condensation. An annoyance, but unavoidable when cold pipes hung above overheated rooms.

The sofa squeaked as he leaned in with his full weight. It was a delicate fantasy of gilt and satin, hardly large enough for the two of them, and he was prepared to give it a beating.

Annette moaned as he bore down on her. She was far more entertaining than he had expected, supple and slick. Her gasps were genuine now, there was no doubt, and she yanked at his shirt with surprising strength.

A drip splashed on the back of his neck, and another a few moments later. He had Annette abandoned now, making little animal noises in the back of her throat as he drove into her. Another drip rolled off his wig, down his cheek, over his nose. He glanced overhead and a battery of drips hit his cheek, each bigger than the last.

This was a problem. The pipes above were part of the new run supporting connections to the suites of two influential men and at least a dozen rich ones. His workmen had installed the pipes just after Christmas. Even if they had done a poor job, leaks weren’t possible. He had made sure of it.

He gathered Annette in his arms and shoved her farther down the sofa, leaving the drips to land on the upholstery instead of his head. He craned his neck, trying to get a view of the ceiling. Annette groaned in protest and clutched his hips.

The drips fell from a join, quick as tears. Something was wrong in the cisterns. He would have to speak with Leblanc immediately.

“Sylvain?” Annette’s voice was strained.

It could wait. He had a reputation to maintain, and performing well here was as critical to his fortunes as all the water flowing through Versailles.

He dove back into her, moving up to a galloping pace as drips pattered on his neck. He had been waiting months for this. He ought to have been losing himself in Annette’s flounced and beribboned flesh, the rouged nipples peeking from her bodice, her flushed pout and helplessly bucking hips, but instead his mind wandered the palace. Were there floods under every join?

Instead of dampening his performance, the growing distraction lengthened it. When he was finally done with her, Annette was completely disheveled, powder blotched, rouge smeared, wig askew, face flushed as a dairy maid’s.

Annette squeezed a lock of his wig and caressed his cheek with a waterslick palm.

“You are undone, I think, monsieur.”

He stood and quickly ordered his clothes. The wig was wet, yes, even soaked. So was his collar and back of his coat. A quick glance in a gilded mirror confirmed he looked greasy as a peasant, as if he’d been toiling at harvest instead of concluding a long-planned and skillful seduction – a seduction that required a graceful exit, not a mad dash out the door to search the palace for floods.

Annette was pleased – more than pleased despite the mess he’d made of her. She looked like a cat cleaning cream off its whiskers as she dabbed her neck with a powder puff, ignoring the drips pattering beside her. The soaked sofa leached dye onto the cream carpet. Annette dragged the toe of her silk slipper through the stained puddle.

“If this is not the only drip, monsieur, you may have a problem or two.”

“It is possible,” Sylvain agreed, dredging up a smile. He leaned in and kissed the tips of her fingers one at a time until she waved him away.

He would have to clean up before searching for Leblanc, and he would look like a fool all the way up to his apartment.

At least the gossips listening at the door would have an enduring tale to tell.

Sylvain ducked out of the marble halls into the maze of service corridors and stairs. Pipes branched overhead like a leaden forest. Drips targeted him as he passed but there were no standing puddles – not yet.

The little fish could turn the palace into a fishbowl if she wanted, Sylvain thought, and a shudder ran through his gut. The rooftop reservoirs held thousands of gallons, and Bull and Bear added new reservoirs just as fast as the village blacksmiths could make them. All through the royal wing, anyone with a drop of blood in common with the king was claiming priority over his neighbor, and the hundred or so courtiers in the north wing – less noble, but no less rich and proud – were grinding their teeth with jealousy.

Sylvain whipped off his soaked wig and let the drips rain down on his head one by one, steady as a ticking clock as he strode down the narrow corridor. He ducked into a stairwell – no pipes above there – and scrubbed his fingers through his wet hair as he peeked around the corner. The drips had stopped. Only a few spatters marked the walls and floorboards.

The little fish was playing with him. It must be her idea of a joke. Well, Leblanc could take care of it. The old soldier loved playing nursemaid to the creature. Age and wine had leached all the man out of him and left a sad husk of a wet nurse, good for nothing but nursery games.

A maid squeezed past him on the stairs and squealed as her apron came away wet. She was closely followed by a tall valet. Sylvain moved aside for him.

“You’re delivering water personally now, Monsieur de Guilherand?”

Sylvain gave the valet a black glare and ran up the stairs two at a time.

The servants of Versailles were used to seeing him lurking in the service corridors, making chalk marks on walls and ceilings. He was usually too engrossed in his plans to notice their comments but now he’d have to put an end to it. Annette d’Arlain was in the entourage of Comtesse de Mailly, King Louis’s maîtresse en titre, and Madame had more than a fair share of the king’s time and attention – far more than his poor ignored Polish queen.

The next servant to take liberty with him would get a stiff rebuke and remember he was an officer and a soldier who spent half the year prosecuting the king’s claims on the battlefield.

By the time Sylvain had swabbed himself dry and changed clothes, Bull and Bear were waiting for him. Their huge bulks strained his tiny parlor at the seams.

“What is the little creature playing at?” Sylvain demanded.

Bull twisted his cap in his huge hands, confused. Bear raised his finger to his nose and reached in with an exploratory wiggle.

“Down in the cisterns,” Sylvain spoke precisely. “The creature. The little fish. What is she doing?”

“We was on the roof when you called, monsieur,” said Bull, murdering the French with his raspy country vowels.

“We been bending lead all day,” said Bear. “Long lead.”

“The little fish was singing at dawn. I heard her through the pipes,” Bull added, eager to please.

It was no use demanding analysis from two men who were barely more human than the animals they were named for. Bull and Bear were good soldiers, steady, strong, and vicious, but cannonfire had blasted their wits out.

“Where is Leblanc?”

Bull shrugged his massive shoulders. “We don’t see him, monsieur. Not for days.”

“Go down to the cellars. Find Leblanc and bring him to me.”

The old soldier was probably curled around a cask in a carelessly unlocked cellar, celebrating his good luck by drinking himself into dust. But even dead drunk, Leblanc knew how to talk to the creature. Whatever the problem was, Leblanc would jolly the silly fish out of her mood.

“OUR WELL-BELOVED KING is an extraordinary man,” said Sylvain. “But even a man of his parts can only use one throne at a time.”

The Grand Chamberlain fluffed his stole like a bantam cock and lowered his hairy eyebrows. “The issue is not how the second throne will be used but how quickly you will comply with the request. We require it today. Disappoint us at your peril.”

Sylvain suppressed a smile. If royalty could be measured by number of thrones, he was king of Europe. He had at least two dozen in a village warehouse, their finely painted porcelain and precious mahogany fittings wrapped in batting and hidden in unmarked crates. Their existence was a secret even Bull and Bear kept close. To everyone else, they were precious, rare treasures that just might be found for the right person at the right price.

The Grand Chamberlain paced the silk carpet. He was young, and though highborn, titled, and raised to the highest office, responsibility didn’t sit well with him. He’d seen a battlefield or two at a distance but had never known real danger. Those hairy brows were actually trembling. Sylvain could easily draw this out just for the pleasure of making a duke sweat, but the memory of Annette’s soft flesh made him generous.

“My warehouse agent just reported receiving a new throne. It is extremely fine. Berlin has been waiting months for it.” Sylvain examined his fingernails. “Perhaps it can be diverted. I will write a note to my agent.”

The Grand Chamberlain folded his hands and nodded, an officious gesture better suited to a grey-haired oldster. “Such a throne might be acceptable.”

“You will recall that installing plumbing is a lengthy and troublesome process. Even with the pipes now in place servicing the original throne, his majesty will find the work disruptive.”

Installing the first throne had been a mess. Bear and Bull had ripped into walls and ceilings, filling the royal dressing room with the barnyard stench of their sweat. But King Louis had exercised his royal prerogative from the first moment the throne was unpacked, even before it was connected to the pipes. So, it was an even trade – the king had to breathe workmen’s stench, and Bull and Bear had been regularly treated to the sight and scent of healthy royal bowel movements.

The Grand Chamberlain steepled his fingers. “Plumbing is not required. Just the throne.”

“I cannot imagine the royal household wants a second throne just for show.”

The Grand Chamberlain sighed. “See for yourself.”

He led Sylvain into the cedar-scented garderobe. A rainbow of velvet and satin cushions covered the floor. The toilet gleamed in a place of honor, bracketed by marble columns. Something was growing in the toilet bowl. It looked like peach moss.

The moss turned its head. Two emerald eyes glared up at him.

“Minou has been offered a number of other seats, but she prefers the throne.” The Grand Chamberlain looked embarrassed. “Our well-beloved king will not allow her to be disturbed. In fact, he banished the courtier who first attempted to move her.”

The cat hissed, its tiny ivory fangs yellow against the glistening white porcelain. Sylvain stepped back. The cat’s eyes narrowed with lazy menace.

A wide water drop formed in the bend of the golden pipes above the toilet. The drop slid across the painted porcelain reservoir and dangled for a few heartbeats. Then it plopped onto the cat’s head. Minou’s eyes popped wide as saucers.

Sylvain spun and fled the room, heart hammering.

The Grand Chamberlain followed. “Send the second throne immediately. This afternoon at the latest.” The request was punctuated by the weight of gold as he discreetly passed Sylvain a pouch of coins.

“Certainly,” Sylvain said, trying to keep his voice steady. “The cat may prefer the original throne, however.”

“That will have to do.”

When he was out of the Grand Chamberlain’s sight, Sylvain rushed through the royal apartments and into the crowded Grand Gallery. There, in Versailles’ crowded social fishbowl, he had no choice but to slow to a dignified saunter. He kept his gaze level and remote, hoping to make it through the long gallery uninterrupted.

“Sylvain, my dear brother, why rush away?” Gérard clamped his upper arm and muscled him to the side of the hall. “Stay and take a turn with me.”

“Damn you,” Sylvain hissed. “You know I haven’t time for idling. Let me go.”

Gérard snickered. “Don’t deprive me of your company so soon.”

Sylvain had seen his friend the Marquis de la Châsse in every imaginable situation – beardless and scared white by battle-scarred commanders, on drunken furlough in peat-stinking country taverns, wounded bloody and clawing battlefield turf. They had pulled each other out of danger a hundred times – nearly as often as they’d goaded each other into it.

Gérard’s black wig was covered in coal-dark powder that broadcast a subtle musky scent. The deep plum of his coat accentuated the dark circles under his eyes and the haze of stubble on his jaw.

Sylvain pried his arm from Gérard’s fist and fell into step beside him. At least there were no pipes overhead, no chance of a splattering. The gallery was probably one of the safest places in the palace. He steered his friend toward the doors and prepared to make his escape.

Gérard leaned close. “Tell me good news. Can it be done?”

“My answer hasn’t changed.”

Gérard growled, a menacing rumble deep in his broad chest.

“I’ve heard that noise on the battlefield, Gérard,” Sylvain said. “It won’t do you any good here.”

“On a battlefield, you and I are on the same side. But here you insist on opposing me.”

Sylvain nodded at the Comte de Tessé. The old man was promenading with his mistress, a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, and the two of them were wearing so much powder that an aura of tiny particles surrounded them with a faint pink glow. The comte raised his glove.

“I wonder,” said the comte loudly, as if he were addressing the entire hall, “can Sylvain de Guilherand only make plain water dance, or does he also have power over the finest substances? Champagne, perhaps.”

“Ingenuity has its limits, but I haven’t found them yet.” Sylvain let a faint smile play at the corners of his mouth.

“Surely our beloved king’s birthday would be an appropriate day to test those limits. Right here, in fact, in the center of the Grand Gallery. What could be more exalted?”

Sylvain had no time for this. He nodded assent and the comte strolled on with an extra bounce in his step, dragging his mistress along by the elbow.

The doors of the Grand Gallery were barricaded by a gang of nuns who gaped up at the gilded and frescoed ceiling like baby sparrows in a nest. Sylvain and Gérard paced past.

“You don’t seem to understand,” Gérard said. “Pauline is desperate. It’s vulgar to talk about money, but you know I’ll make it worth your effort. Ready cash must be a problem. Courtiers rarely discharge their obligations.”

“It’s not a question of money or friendship. The north wing roof won’t hold a reservoir. If the king himself wanted water in the north wing, I would have to refuse him.”

“Then you must reinforce the roof.”

Sylvain sighed. Gérard had never met a problem that couldn’t be solved by gold or force. He couldn’t appreciate the layers of influence and responsibility that would have to be peeled back to accomplish a major construction project like putting reservoirs on the north wing.

“Pauline complains every time she pisses,” said Gérard. “Do you know how often a pregnant woman sits on her pot? And how often she gets up in the night? The smell bothers her, no matter how much perfume and rose water she applies, no matter how quickly her maid whisks away the filth. Pauline won’t stop asking. I will have no peace until she gets one of your toilets.”

“Sleep in a different room.”

“Cold, lonely beds are for summer. In winter, you want a warm woman beside you.”

“Isn’t your wife intimate with the Marquise de Coupigny? I hear she keeps a rose bower around her toilet. Go stay with her.”

“The marquise told my wife that she does not cater to the general relief of the public, and their intimacy has now ended in mutual loathing. This is what happens when friends refuse each other the essential comforts of life.”

“I’ll provide all the relief you need if you move to an apartment the pipes can reach.”

“Your ingenuity has found its limits, then, despite your boasts. But your pipes reached a good long way yesterday. I hear it was a long siege. How high were the d’Arlain battlements?”

“You heard wrong. Annette d’Arlain is a virtuous woman.”

“Did she tell you the king’s mistress named her toilet after the queen? Madame pisses on Polish Mary. Pauline is disgusted. She asked me to find out what Annette d’Arlain says.”

Two splashes pocked Sylvain’s cheek. He looked around wildly for the source.

“Tears, my friend?” Gérard dangled his handkerchief in front of Sylvain’s nose. “Annette is pretty enough but her cunt must be gorgeous.”

Sylvain ignored his friend and scanned the ornate ceiling. The gilding and paint disguised stains and discolorations, but the flaws overhead came to light if you knew where to look.

There. A fresh water stain spread on the ceiling above the statue of Hermes. A huge drop formed in its gleaming centre. It grew, dangled like a jewel, and broke free with a snap. It bounced off the edge of a mirror, shot past him, then ricocheted off a window and smacked him on the side of his neck, soaking his collar.

Sylvain fled the Grand Gallery like a rabbit panicking for its burrow. He ran with no attention to dignity, stepping on the lace train of one woman, raking through the headdress feathers of another, shoving past a priest, setting a china vase rocking on its pedestal. The drone of empty conversation gave way to shocked exclamations as he dodged out of the room into one of the old wing’s service corridors.

He skidded around a banister into a stairwell. Water rained down, slickening the stairs as he leapt two and three steps at a time. It spurted from joins, gushed from welded seams, and sprayed from faucets as he passed.

The narrow corridors leading to Sylvain’s apartment were clogged with every species of servant native to the palace. The ceiling above held a battery of pipes – the main limb of the system Bull and Bear had installed two years before. Every joint and weld targeted Sylvain as he ran. Everyone was caught in the crossfire – servants, porters, tradesmen. Sylvain fled a chorus of curses and howls. It couldn’t be helped.

Sylvain crashed through the door of his apartment. His breath rasped as he leaned on the door with all his weight, as if he could hold the line against disaster.

Bull and Bear knelt over a pile of dirty rags on the bare plank floor. Sylvain’s servant stood over them, red-eyed and sniffling.

“What is this mess?” Sylvain demanded.

His servant slowly pulled aside one of the rags to reveal Leblanc’s staring face, mottled green and white like an old cheese. Sylvain dropped to his knees and fished for the dead man’s hand.

It was cold and slack. Death had come and gone, leaving only raw meat. All life had drained away from that familiar face, memories locked forever behind dead eyes, tongue choked down in a throat that would never speak again.

The first time they met, Sylvain had been startled speechless. The old soldier had talked familiarly to him in the clipped rough patois of home and expected him to understand. They were on the banks of the Moselle, just about as far from the southern Alps as a man could be and still find himself in France.

Sylvain should have cuffed the old man for being familiar with an officer, but he had been young and homesick, and words from home rang sweet. He kept Leblanc in his service just for the pleasure of hearing him talk. He made a poor figure of a servant but he could keep a tent dry in a swamp and make a pot of hot curds over two sticks and a wafer of peat. He’d kept the old man close all through the Polish wars, through two winters in Quebec, and then took him home on a long furlough. Sylvain hadn’t been home for five years, and Leblanc hadn’t seen the Alps in more than thirty, but he remembered every track of home, knew the name of every cliff, pond, and rill. Leblanc had even remembered Château de Guilherand, its high stone walls and vast glacier-fed waterworks.

Close as they’d been, Sylvain had never told the old man he was planning to catch a nixie and bring her to Versailles. Under the Sun King, the palace’s fountains had been a wonder of the world. Their state of disrepair under Louis XV was a scandal bandied about and snickered over in parlors from Berlin to Naples. Sylvain knew he could bring honor back to the palace and enrich himself in the bargain. The fountains were just the beginning of his plan. There was no end to the conveniences and luxuries he could bring to the royal blood and courtiers of Versailles with a reliable, steady flow of clean, pure water.

She’d been just a tadpole. Sylvain had lured her into a leather canteen and kept her under his shirt, close to his heart, during the two weeks of steady hard travel it took to get from home to Versailles. The canteen had thrummed against his chest, drumming in time with hooves or footsteps or even the beating of his heart – turning any steady noise into a skeleton of a song. It echoed the old rhythms, the tunes he heard shepherds sing beside the high mountain rills as he passed by, rifle on his shoulder, tracking wild goats and breathing the sweet, cold, pure alpine air.

Sylvain had kept her a secret, or so he’d thought. The day after they arrived at Versailles, he’d snuck down to the cisterns, canteen still tucked under his shirt. A few hours later, Leblanc had found him down there, frustrated and sweating, shouting commands at the canteen, trying to get her to come out and swim in the cisterns.

“What you got there ain’t animal nor people,” Leblanc had told him. “Kick a dog and he’ll crawl back to you and do better next time. A soldier obeys to avoid the whip and the noose. But that little fish has her own kind of mind.”

Sylvain had thrown the canteen to the old man and stepped back. Leblanc cradled it in his arms like a baby.

“She don’t owe you obedience like a good child knows it might. She’s a wild creature. If you don’t know that you know nothing.”

Leblanc crooned a lullaby to the canteen, tender as a new mother. The little fish had popped out into the cistern pool before he started the second verse, and he had her doing tricks within a day. Over the past two years, they’d been nearly inseparable.

“Ah, old Leblanc. What a shame.” Gérard stood in the doorway, blocking the view of the gawkers in the corridor behind him. “A good soldier. He will be much missed.”

Sylvain carefully folded Leblanc’s hands over his bony cold breast. Bull and Bear crossed themselves as Sylvain drew his thumb and finger over the corpse’s papery eyelids.

Gérard shut the door, closing out the gathered crowd. Sylvain tried to ignore the prickling ache between his eyes, the hollow thud of his gut.

“Sylvain, my dear friend. Do you know you’re sitting in a puddle?”

Sylvain looked down. The floor under him was soaked. Bull dabbled at the edge of the puddle with the toe of his boot, sloshing a thin stream through the floorboards while Bear added to the puddle with a steady rain of tears off the tip of his ratted beard.

“I don’t pretend to understand your business,” said Gérard, “But I think there might be a problem with your water pipes.”

Sylvain barked a laugh. He couldn’t help himself. A problem with the pipes. Yes, and it would only get worse.

SYLVAIN HAD RARELY visited the cisterns over the past two winters. There had been no need. The little fish was Leblanc’s creature. The two of them had been alone for months while Sylvain fought the summer campaigns, and through the winter, Sylvain had more than enough responsibilities above ground – renovating and repairing the palace’s fountains, planning and executing the water systems, and most importantly, doing it all while maintaining the illusion of a courtly gentleman of leisure, attending levées and soirées, dinners and operas.

Versailles was the wonder of the world. The richest palace filled with the most cultivated courtiers, each room containing a ransom of art and statuary, the gardens rivaling heaven with endless fountains and statuary. The reputation it had gained at the height of the Sun King’s reign persisted, but close examination showed a palace falling apart at the seams.

Sylvain had swept into Versailles and taken the waterworks for his own. He had brought the fountains back to their glory, making them play all day and all night for the pleasure of Louis the Well-Beloved – something even the Sun King couldn’t have claimed.

The tunnel to the cisterns branched off the cellars of the palace’s old wing, part of the original foundations. It had been unbearably dank when Sylvain had first seen it years before. Now it was fresh and floral. A wet breeze blew in his face, as though he were standing by a waterfall, the air pushed into motion by the sheer unyielding weight of falling water.

The nixie’s mossy nest crouched in the centre of a wide stone pool. The rusted old pumps sprayed a fine mist overhead. The water in the pool pulsed, rising and falling with the cadence of breath.

She was draped over the edge of her nest, thin legs half submerged in the pool, long webbed feet gently stirring the water. The little fool didn’t even know enough to keep still when pretending to sleep.

He skirted the edge of the pool, climbing to the highest and driest of the granite blocks. Dripping moss and ferns crusted the grotto’s ceiling and walls. A million water droplets reflected the greenish glow of her skin.

“You there,” he shouted, loud enough to carry over the symphony of gushes and drips. “What are you playing at?”

The nixie writhed in the moss. The wet glow of her skin grew stronger and the mist around her nest thickened until she seemed surrounded by tiny lights. She propped herself on one scrawny elbow and dangled a hand in the pool.

With her glistening skin and sleek form, she seemed as much salamander as child, but she didn’t have a talent for stillness. Like a pool of water, she vibrated with every impulse.

A sigh rose over the noise. It was more a burbling gush than language. The sound repeated – it was no French word but something like the mountain patois of home. He caught the meaning after a few more repetitions.

“Bored,” she said. Her lips trembled. Drips rained from the ferns. “So bored!”

“You are a spoiled child,” he said in court French.

She broke into a grin and her big milky eyes glowed at him from across the pool. He shivered. They were human eyes, almost, and in that smooth amphibian face, they seemed uncanny. Dark salamander orbs would have been less disturbing.

“Sing,” she said. “Sing a song?”

“I will not.”

She draped herself backward over a pump, webbed hand to her forehead with all the panache of an opera singer. “So bored.”

As least she wasn’t asking for Leblanc. “Good girls who work hard are never bored.”

A slim jet of water shot from the pump. It hit him square in the chest.

She laughed, a giddy burble. “I got you!”

Don’t react, Sylvain thought as the water dripped down his legs.

“Yes, you got me. But what will that get you in the end? Some good girls get presents, if they try hard enough. Would you like a present?” Her brow creased as she thought it over. “Maybe,” she said. Hardly the reaction he was hoping for, but good enough.

“Behave yourself. No water outside of the pipes and reservoirs. Keep it flowing and I’ll bring you a present just like a good girl.”

“Good girl,” she said in French. “But what will that get you in the end?”

She was a decent mimic – her accent was good. But she was like a parrot, repeating everything she heard.

“A nice present. Be a good girl.”

“Good girl,” she repeated in French. Then she reverted back to mountain tongue. “Sing a song?”

“No. I’ll see you in a few days.” Sylvain turned away, relief blossoming in his breast.

“Leblanc sing a song?” she called after him.

There it was. Stay calm, he thought. Animals can sense distress. Keep walking.

“Leblanc is busy,” he said over his shoulder. “He wants you to be a good girl.”

“Behave yourself,” she called as he disappeared around the corner.

SYLVAIN PACED THE Grand Gallery, eyeing the cracked ceiling above the statue of Hermes. There had been no further accidents with the pipes. He had spent the entire night checking every joint and join accompanied by a yawning Bull. At dawn, he’d taken Bear up to the rooftops to check the reservoirs.

Checking the Grand Gallery was his last task. He was shaved and primped, even though at this early hour, it would be abandoned by anyone who mattered, just a few rustics and gawkers.

He didn’t expect to see Annette d’Arlain walking among them. Annette was dressed in a confection of gold and scarlet chiffon. Golden powder accentuated the pale shadows of her collarbones and defined the delicate ivory curls of her wig. A troop of admiring rustics trailed behind her as she paced the gallery. She ignored them.

“The Comte de Tessé says you promised him a champagne fountain,” she said, drawing the feathers of her fan between her fingers.

Sylvain bent deeply, pausing at the bottom of the bow to gather his wits. He barely recalled the exchange with the comte. What had he agreed to?

“I promised nothing,” he said as he straightened. Annette hadn’t offered her hand. She was cool and remote as any of the marble statues lining the gallery.

“The idea reached Madame’s ear. She sent me to drop you a hint for the King’s birthday. But –” She dropped her voice and paused with dramatic effect, snapping her fan.

Sylvain expected her to share a quiet confidence but she continued in the same impersonal tone. “But I must warn you. Everyone finds a champagne fountain disappointing. Flat champagne is a chore to drink. Like so many pleasures, anticipation cannot be matched by pallid reality.”

Was Annette truly offended or did she want to bring him to heel? Whatever the case, he owed her attention. He had seduced her, left her gasping on her sofa, and ignored her for two days. No gifts, no notes, no acknowledgement. This was no way to keep a woman’s favor.

Annette snapped her fan again as she waited for his reply.

It was time to play the courtier. He stepped closely so she would have to look up to meet his eyes. It would provide a nice tableau for the watching rustics. He dropped his voice low, pitching it for her ears alone.

“I would hate to disappoint you, madame.”

“A lover is always a disappointment. The frisson of expectation is the best part of any affair.”

“I disagree. I have never known disappointment in your company, only the fulfillment of my sweet and honeyed dreams.”

She was not impressed. “You saw heaven in my arms, I suppose.”

“I hope we both did.”

A hint of a dimple appeared on her cheek. “Man is mortal.”

“Alas,” he agreed.

She offered him her hand but withdrew it after a bare moment, just long enough for the lightest brush of his lips. She glided over to the statue of Hermes and drew her finger up the curve of the statue’s leg.

“You are lucky I don’t care for gifts and fripperies, monsieur. I detest cut flowers and I haven’t seen a jewel I care for in months.”

Sylvain glanced at the ceiling. A network of cracks formed around a disk of damp plaster. Annette was directly beneath it.

He grabbed her around the waist and yanked her aside. She squealed and rammed her fists against his chest. Passion was the only excuse for his behavior, so he grabbed at it like a drowning man and kissed her, crushing her against his chest. She struggled for a moment and finally yielded, lips parting for him reluctantly.

No use in putting in a pallid performance, he thought, and bent her backward in his arms to drive the kiss to a forceful conclusion. The rustics gasped in appreciation. He released her, just cupping the small of her back.

He tried for a seductive growl. “How can a man retain a lady’s favor if gifts are forbidden?”

“Not by acting like a beast!” she cried, and smacked her fan across his cheek.

Annette ran for the nearest door, draperies trailing behind her. The ceiling peeled away with a ripping crack. A huge chunk of plaster crashed over the statue’s head, throwing hunks of wet plaster across the room. The rustics scattered, shocked and thrilled.

He crushed a piece of wet plaster under his heel, grinding it into mush with a vicious twist, and stalked out of the gallery.

The main corridor was crowded. Servants rushed with buckets of coals, trays of pastries, baskets of fruit – all the comforts required by late sleeping and lazy courtiers. He pushed through them and climbed to a vestibule on the third floor where five water pipes met overhead.

“What have you got for me, you little demon?” he seethed under his breath.

A maid clattered down the stairs, her arms stacked with clean laundry. One look at Sylvain and she retreated back upstairs.

Sylvain had spent nights on bare high rock trapped by spring snowstorms. He had tracked wild goats up the massif cliff to line up careful rifle shots balanced between a boulder and a thousand-foot drop. He had once snatched a bleating lamb from the jaws of the valley’s most notorious wolf. He had met the king’s enemies on the battlefield and led men to their deaths. He could master a simple creature, however powerful she was.

“Go ahead, drip on me. If you are going to keep playing your games, show me now.”

He waited. The pipes looked dry as bone. The seal welds were dull and gray and the tops of the pipes were furred with a fine layer of dust.

He gave the pipes one last searing glare. “All right. We have an understanding.”

LEBLANC’S COFFIN GLOWED in the cold winter sun. Bull and Bear watched the gravediggers and snuffled loudly.

Gérard had taken all the arrangements in hand. Before Sylvain had a moment to think about dealing with the old soldier’s corpse, it had been washed, dressed, and laid out in a village chapel. Gérard had even arranged for a nun to sit beside the coffin, clacking her rosary and gumming toothless prayers.

The nun was scandalized when Bull and Bear hauled the coffin out from under her nose, but Sylvain wanted Leblanc’s body away from the palace, hidden away in deep, dry dirt where the little fish could never find it. Gérard and Sylvain led the way on horseback, setting a fast pace as Bull and Bear followed with the casket jouncing in the bed of their cart. They trotted toward the city until they found a likely boneyard, high on dry ground, far from any streams or canals.

“This is probably the finest bed your man Leblanc ever slept in.” Gérard nudged the coffin with the toe of his boot.

“Very generous of you, Gérard. Thank you.”

Gérard shrugged. “What price eternal comfort? And he was dear to you, I know.”

Sylvain scanned the sky as the priest muttered over the grave. A battery of rainclouds was gathering on the horizon, bearing down on Versailles. It was a coincidence. The little fish couldn’t control the weather. It wasn’t possible.

The gravediggers began slowly filling in the grave. Gérard walked off to speak with a tradesman in a dusty leather apron. Sylvain watched the distant clouds darken and turn the horizon silver with rain.

Gérard returned. “Here is the stonemason. What will you have on your man’s gravestone?”

“Nothing,” said Sylvain, and then wondered. Was he being ridiculous, rushing the corpse out of the palace and hauling it miles away? She couldn’t understand. She was an animal. Any understanding of death was just simple instinct – the hand of fate to be avoided in the moment of crisis. She couldn’t read. The stone could say anything. She would never know.

Without Leblanc’s help, Sylvain’s funds wouldn’t have lasted a month at Versailles. He would have wrung out his purse and slunk home a failure. But with Leblanc down in the cisterns coddling the little fish, the whole palace waited eagerly in bed for him. And what had he done for the old soldier in return? Leblanc deserved a memorial.

The stone mason flapped his cap against his leg. The priest clacked his tongue in disapproval.

“He must have a stone, Sylvain,” said Gérard. “He was a soldier his whole life. He deserves no less.”

There was no point in being careless. “You can list the year of his death, nothing more. No name, no regiment.”

Sylvain gave the priest and the stonemason each a coin, stifling any further objections.

The gravediggers were so slow, they might as well have been filling in the grave with spoons instead of spades. Sylvain ordered Bull and Bear to take over. The gravediggers stood openmouthed, fascinated by the sight of someone else digging while they rested. One of them yawned.

“Idle hands are the Devil’s tools,” the priest snapped, and sent both men back to their work in the adjoining farmyard.

An idea bloomed in Sylvain’s mind. The little fish claimed she was bored. Perhaps he had made her work too easy. The lead pipes and huge reservoirs were doing half the job. He could change that. He would keep her busy – too busy for boredom and certainly far too busy for games and tricks.

“Tell your wife she won’t wait much longer for a toilet of her own,” said Sylvain as they mounted their horses. “In a few days she can have the pleasure of granting or denying her friends its use as she pleases.”

Gérard grinned. “Wonderful news! But just a few days? How long will it take to reinforce the roof?”

“I believe I have discovered a quick solution.”

THE NEW WATER conduits were far too flimsy to be called pipes. They were sleeves, really, which was how had he explained them to the village seamstresses.

“Sing a song?” The little fish dangled one long toe in the water. Her smooth skin bubbled with wide water droplets that glistened and gleamed like jewels.

“Not today. It’s time for you to work,” Sylvain said as he unrolled the cotton sleeve. He dropped one end in the pool, looped a short piece of rope around it, and weighted the ends with a rock.

“Be a good girl and show me what you can do with this.”

She blinked at him, water dripping from her hair. No shade of comprehension marred the perfect ignorance of those uncanny eyes. She slid into the water and disappeared.

He waited. She surfaced in the middle of the pool, lips spouting a stream of water high into the air.

“Very good, but look over here now,” he said, admiring his own restraint. “Do you see this length of cotton? It’s hollow like a pipe. Show me how well you can push water through it.”

She rolled and dove. The water shimmered, then turned still. He searched the glassy surface, looking for her sleek form. She leapt, shattering the water under his nose, throwing a great wave that splashed him from head to toe.

How had Leblanc put up with this? Sylvain turned away, hiding his frustration.

As he pried himself out of his soaked velvet jacket, Sylvain realized he was speaking to her in court French. A nixie couldn’t be expected to understand.

The next time she surfaced he said, “I bet you can’t force water through this tube.” The rough patois of home felt strange after years wrapping his tongue around court French.

That got her attention. “Bet you!” She leapt out of the water. “Bet you what?”

“Well, I don’t know. Let’s see what I have.” He made a show of reluctantly reaching into his breast pocket and withdrawing a coin. It was small change – no palace servant would stoop to pick it up – but it had been polished to gleaming.

He rolled the coin between his thumb and forefinger, letting it wink and sparkle in the glow of her skin. The drops raining from her hair quickened, spattering the toes of his boots.

“Pretty,” she said, and brushed the tip of one long finger along the cotton tube.

The pool shimmered. The tube swelled and kicked. It writhed like a snake, spraying water high into the ferns, but the other end remained anchored in the water. The tube leaked, not just from the seams but along its whole length.

“Good work,” he said, and tossed her the coin. She let it sail over her head and splash into the pool. She laughed, a bubbling giggle, flexed her sleek legs, and flipped backward, following the coin’s trajectory under the surface.

He repeated the experiment with all of the different cloth pipes – linen, silk, satin – every material available. The first cotton tube kept much of its rigidity though it remained terribly leaky, as did the wide brown tube of rough holland. The linen tube lay flat as a dead snake, and across the pond, a battery of satin and silk tubes warred, clashing like swords as they flipped and danced.

The velvet pipes worked best. The thick nap held a layer of water within its fibers, and after a few tries, the little fish learned to manipulate the wet surface, strengthening the tube and keeping it watertight.

By evening, her lair was festooned with a parti-colored bouquet of leaping, spouting tubes. The little fish laughed like a mad child, clapping her hands and jumping through the spray. But he didn’t have to remind her to keep the spray away from him – not once.

When he was down to his last shiny coin, her skin was glowing so brightly, it illuminated the far corners of the grotto. He placed the last coin squarely in her slender palm, as if paying a tradesman. The webs between her fingers were as translucent as soap bubbles.

“You won a lot of bets today,” he said.

“Good girls win.” She dropped the coin into the pond and peered up at him, eyes wide and imploring.

He cut her off before she could speak. “No singing, only work.”

“You sang once.”

He had, that was true. How could she remember? He’d nearly forgotten himself. He had crouched at the edge of a high mountain cataract with icy mist spraying his face and beading on his hair, singing a shepherd’s tune to lure her into his canteen. She’d been no bigger than a tadpole, but she could flip and jump through the massive rapids as if it took no effort at all.

She had grown so much in the past two years. From smaller than his thumb to the size of a half-grown child. Full growth from egg in just two years.

But two years was a lifetime ago, and those mountains now seemed unreachable and remote. He wouldn’t think about it. He had an evening of entertainments to attend, and after that, much work to do.

SYLVAIN HAD ALMOST drifted off when Annette dug her toes into the muscle of his calf. He rolled over and pretended to sleep.

He had given her an afternoon of ardent attention and finished up splayed across her bed, fully naked, spent, and sweating. Though he was bone tired from long nights planning the palace’s new array of velvet tubes, he had given Annette a very good facsimile of devotion and several hours of his time. Surely she couldn’t want more from him.

She raked her toenails down his calf again. Sylvain cracked an eyelid, trying for the lazy gaze of the Versailles sybarite. Annette reclined in the middle of the bed draped in a scrap of pink chiffon. The short locks of her own dark hair curled over her ears like a boy’s. She had ripped the wig from his head earlier, and he had responded by pulling hers off as well, more gently but with equal enthusiasm.

“No sleeping, Sylvain. Not here. You must be prepared to leap from the window if my husband arrives.”

“You want me to dash naked through the gardens in full view of half the court? My dear woman, it would mean my death and your disappointment.” He couldn’t suppress a yawn. “The ladies would hound after me day and night.”

“I forgot that about you,” she said under her breath.

Sylvain rolled to his feet and lifted a silken shawl off the floor. He wrapped it around his hips like a savage and returned to bed. He lifted an eyebrow, inviting her to continue, but she had begun playing with a pot of cosmetic.

“What did you forget about me?” If she meant to insult him, he intended to know.

She put her foot in his lap. “I forgot that you are a singular man.”

That didn’t sound like an insult. Sylvain let a smile touch his lips. “Is that your own assessment, or do others speak of me as a singular man?”

“My judgment alone. How many people in the palace ever take a moment to think of anyone other than themselves? Even I, as extraordinary as I am, rarely find a moment to notice the existence of others. Life is so full.” She nudged him with her toe.

“In this moment, then, before it passes, tell me what you mean by singular.” To encourage her, he took her foot in both hands and squeezed.

A dimple appeared on her cheek. “It is a contradiction and a conundrum. By singular, I mean the exact opposite. You are at least three or four men where many others have trouble achieving more than a half manhood.”

“Flattery. Isn’t that my role?”

“I mean no flattery. Quite the opposite, in fact.” She dipped her finger into the cosmetic pot and daubed her pout with glossy pigment. Then she stretched herself back on the velvet pillows, arching as he kneaded her toes.

“Sylvain the wit may be a good guest to have at a dinner party but no better than any other man with some quickness about him. Sylvain the courtier contributes to the might of the crown and the luxury of the palace as he ought. Sylvain the lover conducts himself well in bed as he must or sleep alone. I can’t speak to Sylvain the soldier or hunter but will grant the appropriate virtues on faith.”

“I thank you,” he said, kneading her heel.

She fanned her fingers in a dismissive gesture. “All these are expected and nothing spectacular to comment upon. But the true Sylvain is the singular one – the only one – and yet he’s the man few others notice.”

“And that man is?”

“I don’t know if I should tell you. You might stop massaging my foot.”

“You enjoy being mysterious.”

“The only mystery is how you’ve gotten away with it for so long. If anyone else knew, you’d be run out of the palace.”

“I will stop if you don’t tell me.”

“Very well. Sylvain, you are a striver.”

A lead weight dropped into his stomach. “Ridiculous. I thought you were going to say something interesting, but it is all blather.”

She nudged his crotch with her foot. “Don’t be insulted. Striving must be in your nature. Or perhaps you were taught it as a child and took it into the blood with your host and catechism. But it will all end in disaster. Striving always does.”

He kept his expression remote and resumed stroking her foot.

“You seek to raise yourself above your station,” she continued. “Those who do have no true home. They leave behind their rightful and God-given place and yet never reach their goal. It is a kind of Limbo, a choice to begin eternity in purgatory even before death.”

“And you have chosen to become a lay preacher. Do you have a wooden crate to stand on? Shall I carry it to a crossroads for you?”

“Oh, very well, we can change the topic to Annette d’Arlain if you are uncomfortable. I find myself a most engaging subject.”

“Yes, keep to your area of expertise because you know little of me. I don’t seek to raise myself. I am where I belong. The palace would be poorer without me.”

“If you remained satisfied with being a lover, a courtier, and a good dinner guest, I might agree with you. Your uncle is a minor noble but I suppose his lineage is solid, should anyone care to trace it, and you’re not the first heir to a barren wilderness to manage a creditable reputation at court. But you want to be the first man of Versailles, even at the destruction of your own self and soul. You are striving to be better than every other man.”

“That is the first thing you’ve said that makes any sense.”

Sylvain eased her into his lap. He slid his fingers under the chiffon wrap and began teasing her into an eagerly agreeable frame of mind. She would declare him the best man in France before he was done with her, even if it took all evening.

THE MONKEY CLUNG to Sylvain’s neck and hid its face under his coat collar. Sylvain hummed under his breath, a low cooing sound shepherds used to calm lambs.

The dealer had doused the monkey in cheap cologne to mask its animal scent. The stink must be a constant irritation to the creature’s acute sense of smell. But it would wear off soon enough in the mist of the cisterns.

Sylvain rounded the corner into the little fish’s cavern and tripped. He slammed to his knees and twisted to take the weight of the fall on his shoulder. The monkey squealed with fright. He hushed it gently.

“Work carefully, be a good girl!” The little fish’s voice echoed off the grotto walls.

He had tripped over the painted wooden cradle. The little fish had stuffed it with all of the dolls Sylvain had given her over the past week. The family of straw-and-cloth dolls were soaked and squashed down to form a nest for the large porcelain doll Sylvain had brought her the day before. It had arrived as a gift from the porcelain manufacturer, along with the toilets Bull and Bear were installing in the north wing.

The doll’s platinum curls had been partly ripped away. Its painted eyes stared up at him as he struggled to his feet.

The little fish perched on the roof of her dollhouse, which floated half submerged in the pool. The toy furniture bobbed and drifted in the current.

“Come here, little miss,” he said. She slipped off the roof and glided across to him. She showed no interest in the monkey, but she probably hadn’t realized it was anything other than just another doll.

“Do you remember what we are going to do today?” he asked. “I told you yesterday; think back and remember.” She blinked up at him in ignorance. “What do you do every day?”

“Work hard.”

“Very good. Work hard at what?”

“Good girls work hard and keep the water flowing.” She yawned, treating him to a full view of her tongue and tiny teeth as she stretched.

The monkey yawned in sympathy. Her gaze snapped to the creature with sudden interest.

“Sharp teeth!” She jumped out of the pool and thrust one long finger in the monkey’s face. It recoiled, clinging to Sylvain with all four limbs.

“Hush,” he said, stroking the monkey’s back. “You frightened her. Good girls don’t frighten their friends, do they?”

“Do they?” she repeated automatically. She was fascinated by the monkey, which was certainly a more engaged reaction than she had given any of the toys Sylvain had brought her.

He fished in his pocket for the leash and clipped it to the monkey’s collar.

“Today, we are adding the new cloth pipes to the system, and you will keep the water flowing like you always do, smooth and orderly. If you do your work properly, you can play with your new friend.”

He handed her the leash and gently extracted himself from the monkey’s grip. He placed the creature on the ground and stroked its head with exaggerated kindness. If she could copy his words, she could copy his actions.

She touched the monkey’s furry flank, eyes wide with delight. Then she brought her hand to her face and whiffed it.

“Stinky,” she said.

She dove backward off the rock, yanking the monkey behind her by its neck.

Sylvain dove to grab it but just missed his grip. The monkey’s sharp squeal cut short as it was dragged under water.

Sylvain ran along the edge of the pool, trying to follow the glow of her form as she circled and dove. When she broke surface he called to her, but she ignored him and climbed to the roof of her dollhouse. She hauled the monkey up by its collar and laid its limp, sodden form on the spine of the roof.

Dead, Sylvain thought. She had drowned it.

It stirred. She scooped the monkey under its arms and dandled it on her lap like a doll. It coughed and squirmed.

“Sing a song,” she demanded. She shoved her face nose to nose with the monkey’s and yelled, “Sing a song!”

The monkey twisted and strained, desperate to claw away. She released her grip and the monkey splashed into the water. She yanked the leash and hauled it up. It dangled like a fish. She let her hand drop and the monkey sank again, thrashing.

“Sing a song!” she screamed. “Sing!”

Sylvain pried off his boots and dove into the pool. He struggled to the surface and kicked off a rock, propelling himself though the water.

“Stop it,” he blurted as he struggled toward her. “Stop it this instant!”

She crouched on the edge of the dollhouse roof, dangling the monkey over the water by its collar. It raked at her with all four feet, but the animal dealer had blunted its claws, leaving the poor creature with no way to defend itself. She dunked it again. Its paws pinwheeled, slapping the surface.

Sylvain ripped his watch from his pocket and lobbed it at her. It smacked her square in the temple. She dropped the monkey and turned on him, enormous eyes veined with red, lids swollen.

He hooked his arm over the peak of the dollhouse roof and hoisted himself halfway out of the water. He fished the monkey out and gathered the quivering creature to his chest.

“Bad girl,” he sputtered, so angry he could barely find breath. “Very bad girl!”

She retreated to the edge of the roof and curled her thin arms around her knees. Her nose was puffy and red just like a human’s.

“Leblanc,” she sobbed. “Leblanc gone.”

She hadn’t mentioned Leblanc in days. Sylvain had assumed she’d forgotten the old man, but some hounds missed their masters for years. Why had he assumed the little fish would have coarser feelings than an animal?

She was an animal, though. She would have drowned the monkey and toyed with its corpse. There was no point in coddling her – he would be stern and unyielding.

“Yes, Leblanc has gone away.” He gave her his chilliest stare.

Her chin quivered. She whispered, “Because I am a bad girl.”

Had she been blaming herself all this time? Beneath the mindless laughter and games she had been missing Leblanc – lonely, regretful, brokenhearted. Wondering if she’d done wrong, if she’d driven him away. Waiting to see him again, expecting him every moment.

Sylvain clambered onto the dollhouse roof and perched between the two chimneys. The monkey climbed onto his shoulder and snaked its fingers into his hair.

“No, little one. Leblanc didn’t want to go but he had to.”

“Leblanc come back?”

She looked so trusting. He could lie to her, tell her Leblanc would come back if she was a good girl, worked hard, and never caused any problems. She would believe him. He could make her do anything he wanted.

“No, little one. Leblanc is gone and he can never come back.”

She folded in on herself, hiding her face in her hands.

“He would have said goodbye to you if he could. I’m sorry he didn’t.”

Sylvain pulled her close, squeezing her bony, quaking shoulders, tucking her wet head under his chin.

There was an old song he had often heard in the mountains. On one of his very first hunting trips as a boy, he’d heard an ancient shepherd sing it while climbing up a long scree slope searching for a lost lamb. He had heard a crying girl sing it as she flayed the pelt from the half-eaten, wolf-ravaged corpse of an ewe. He’d heard a boy sing it to his flock during a sudden spring snowstorm, heard a mother sing it to her children on a freezing winter night as he passed by her hut on horseback. The words were rustic, the melody simple.

Sylvain sang the song now to the little fish, gently at first, just breathing the tune, and then stronger, letting the sound swell between them. He sang of care, and comfort, and loss, and a longing to make everything better. And if tears seemed to rain down his cheeks as he sang, it was nothing but an illusion – just water dribbling from his hair.

SYLVAIN STOOD ON the roof of the north wing, the gardens spread out before him. The fountains jetted high and strong, fifteen hundred nozzles ticking over reliably as clockwork, the water spouts throwing flickering shadows in the low evening light.

The gardens were deserted as any wilderness. Inside, everyone was preparing for the evening’s long menu of events. Outside, the statues posed and the fountains played for the moon and stars alone.

Sylvain was taking advantage of this quiet and solitary hour to do one final check of the velvet pipes. He had already felt every inch of the new connection, examined the seams all the way to the point where the fabric sleeve dove off the roof to disappear through a gap above a garret window.

Bull and Bear waited by the main reservoir, watching for his signal. There was no point in delaying any further. He waved his hat in the air. The sleeve at his feet jumped and swelled.

Sylvain ran from the north wing attics down several flights of stairs to Gérard’s apartments. Pauline greeted him at the door herself. She was hugely pregnant and cradled her belly in both hands to support its weight. Breathless, he swept off his hat and bowed.

“Go ahead, monsieur,” Pauline said as she herded him toward her dressing room. “Please don’t pause to be polite. I’ve waited as long as I can.”

Not only were the velvet pipes lighter and easier to install, but they could be pinched off at any point simply by drawing a cord around the sleeve. Sylvain waited for Pauline to follow him, then pulled the red ribbon’s tail and let it drift to the floor. Water gushed into the toilet, gurgling and tinkling against the porcelain.

Pauline seized him by the ears, kissed him hard on both cheeks, and shooed him away. She hiked her skirts up to her hips even before her servant shut the door behind him.

Sylvain arrived fashionably late at the suite of the Mahmud emissary, a Frenchman turned Turk after years at the Sultan’s court. Sylvain saluted le Turque, lifted a glass of wine, and assumed an air of languid nonchalance. Madame and her ladies swept in. Their jewels and silks glowed in the candlelight.

Annette carried Madame’s train – a sure sign she was in favor at that moment. Sylvain saluted her with a respectful nod. She dimpled at him and made her way over as soon as the host claimed Madame’s attention.

“Is that for me, monsieur?” she asked.

Sylvain glanced at the monkey on his shoulder. “Perhaps, if there is a woman in the room who isn’t tired of gifts.”

“Jewels and flowers are all the same. This is something different.” She caressed the monkey under her chin. It reached for Annette like a child for its mother. “What is her name?”

“Whatever you want, of course.”

“I will ask Madame to choose her name. She will love that.” Annette cradled the monkey against her breast and nuzzled its neck. “Oh, she smells lovely – vanilla and cinnamon oil.”

It was the only combination of scents Sylvain had found to kill the stench of cheap cologne. He allowed himself a satisfied smirk.

Across the room a subtle commotion was building. Le Turque had lifted a curtain to reveal a pair of acrobats, but Madame was watching Annette and Sylvain. The acrobats were frozen in a high lift, waiting for permission to begin their performance as the musicians repeated the same few bars of music.

“You had better go back. Madame has noticed the monkey and is jealous for your return.”

Annette awarded him a melting smile and drifted back to Madame’s circle. The ladies greeted the monkey as if it were a firstborn son. Madame let the effusions continue for a few moments and then took sole possession of the creature, holding it close as she turned her attention to the performance.

Sylvain struggled to stay alert, despite the near-naked spectacle on stage. He had barely seen his bed since Leblanc’s death, and the warm wine and rich food were turning his courtier’s air of languid boredom into the prelude to a toddler’s nap. The spinning and leaping acrobats were mesmerizing – especially when viewed in candlelight through a screen of nodding wigs and feathers. The bright silk-and satin-clad backs in front of him dipped as they lifted their glasses to their lips, swayed from side to side as they leaned over to gossip with the friend on the left about the friend on the right, then turned the other way to repeat the performance in reverse. Men and women they might be, but tonight they seemed more like the flamingoes that flocked on the Camargue, all alike in their brainless and feathered idiocy.

At least a flamingo made a good roast.

Sylvain spotted Gérard sneaking into the room, stealthy as a scout. He took his place by Sylvain’s side as if he’d been there all evening.

“Thank God, Gérard,” Sylvain whispered. “Stick your sword into my foot if you see me nodding off.”

Gérard grinned. “It’s the least I could do for the man who has brought such happiness to my wife.”

The acrobats were succeeded by a troupe of burly Turkish dancers bearing magnums of champagne entombed in blocks of ice. Children dressed as cherubs passed crystal saucers to the guests.

“This will keep you awake, my friend. Champagne cold as a cuckold’s bed.”

“I’ve been in such a bed recently. It was quite warm.”

Le Turque himself filled Sylvain and Gérard’s saucers. “Tonight, you are in favor with the ladies, monsieur.”

“Am I?” Sylvain sipped his champagne. The cold, sweet fizz drilled into his sinuses. His eyes watered as he forced back the urge to sneeze.

“So true!” said Gérard. “My own wife is ready to call Sylvain a saint. She has set up an altar to him in her dressing room.”

“But I refused the honor,” said Sylvain. “I would prefer not to have those offerings dedicated to me.”

They laughed. Le Turque gave them a chill grimace.

“My apologies, monsieur,” said Gérard. “It is not a private joke, just too coarse for general consumption. We are soldiers, you know, and are welcomed into civilized homes on charity.”

Le Turque demonstrated his kind forbearance by topping up both their saucers before moving on to the other guests.

Sylvain studied the champagne and their enclosing blocks of ice as the Turkish dancers circled the room, trailing meltwater on the carpet. The bottles couldn’t have been frozen into the ice or the wine would be frozen through. They must be made from dual pieces carved to enclose a bottle like a book. He stopped a dancer and examined the ice. Yes, the two pieces were joined by a seam.

A simple solution, too practical to be called ingenious, but effective. The guests were impressed, even though many of them were fingering their jaws and wincing from cold-induced toothache. Not one guest refused a second glass, or a third, or a fourth. Bottles were being drained at impressive rate.

Annette drew her fan up to her ear and flicked Sylvain a telling glance from across the room. He took Gérard’s arm. “Come along; we are being summoned to an audience with Madame.”

The royal mistress was dressed in white and silver. Her snowy wig was fine as lamb’s wool, her skin frosted with platinum powder. A bouquet of brightly clad ladies surrounded her like flowers around a statue. The monkey slept in her lap. She had tied a silver ribbon around its neck.

The standard palace practice was to praise Madame’s face and figure in public and criticize it in private. Sylvain had seen her often, but always at a distance. Now after months of maneuvering, he was finally close enough to judge for himself.

“A triumph worthy of our Turkish friends, is it not?” Madame offered Sylvain her hand. “I shall never be able to enjoy champagne at cellar temperature again. It is so refreshing. One feels renewed.”

“Our host has distinguished himself,” said Sylvain, brushing her knuckles with his lips. Madame let her fingers linger in his palm for a moment before presenting her hand to Gérard.

“Le Turque is an old man and has resources appropriate to his age and rank,” said Madame. “I wonder how young men can become distinguished in the king’s gaze.”

“Perhaps by murdering the king’s enemies on the battlefield every summer?” said Gérard.

The ladies tittered. Madame slowly drew back her hand and blinked. Pretty, thought Sylvain, at least when surprised.

“Excuse my friend, Madame. Cold champagne has frozen his brain.”

Madame eyed Gérard up and down. “Everyone respects our valiant soldiers, and your devotion to manly duty is admirable.” She turned back to Sylvain. “If your brawny friend the Marquis de la Châsse is content with his achievements, who are we to criticize? But you, monsieur, I know you care about the honor of France both on and off the field of war.”

“Every Frenchman does, madame, but especially when he has been drinking champagne,” said Sylvain. Gérard lifted his glass in salute.

Madame flicked her fan at Annette. “You may have heard an idea of mine. At first, it was just an idle thought, but now le Turque has thrown down the gauntlet. Is there a man who will accept the challenge?”

“No man could refuse you anything, madame. The rulers of the world fall at your feet.”

“I would rush to serve you,” said Gérard, “if I had any idea what you meant. Madame is so mysterious.”

Madame dismissed Gérard with a flick of her fan. “Be so good as to fetch me one of those dancers, monsieur.”

“A Turk with a full magnum, Madame?” Gérard saluted her and set off with a jaunty military stride.

Madame shifted on the sofa. She seemed to be considering whether or not to invite Sylvain to sit. Then she lifted the monkey from her lap and set it beside her.

Not nearly so lovely as Annette, Sylvain decided.

“You may not know, monsieur, how highly you are praised. I am told that even when the Bassin d’Apollon was new, fountain-play was a parsimonious affair, the water doled out like pennies from a Polish matron’s purse.”

She paused to collect dutiful titters from her ladies for this jab at the queen. Perhaps not pretty at all, thought Sylvain. Hardly passable.

“You have found a way to keep all of the fountains constantly alive without pause. Some members of the royal household call you a magician, but the word from the highest level is less fanciful and more valuable. There, you are simply called inspiring.”

Sylvain puffed up at the praise. Gérard returned with a beefy Turk. The dancer’s fingers were blue from the cold, and he struggled to fill Madame’s saucer without dribbling.

“Just like a commander on the battlefield, a woman judges a man by his actions.” She lifted the monkey and planted a kiss between its ears. “Any other man would have collared this monkey’s neck with a diamond bracelet before presenting it to a lady of the court. We would call that vulgar.”

Her ladies nodded.

“You have taste and discernment. So give me champagne, free-flowing and cold. That is a triumph worthy of Versailles.” She presented her hand to Sylvain again, then waved him away. The ladies closed around her like a curtain.

“Vulgar, indeed,” said Gérard as they retreated. “I’ve never seen a woman greet a diamond with anything other than screeches of delight. Have you?”

“My experience with diamonds is limited.”

“Madame knows it. She was spreading you with icing.”

“She wants to secure a valuable ally. Compliments are the currency of court.”

Gérard drained his champagne and rubbed his knuckles over his jaw as if it ached. “She just wants to drink champagne at another man’s expense. As with most pleasures, it comes with a little pain. She wants the pain to be yours, not hers.”

“The champagne fountain is a whim. She will ask me for something else next time.”

“Very well. Madame will ask you to do something expensive and original with only a few pretty words as payment. Will you do it?”

Two full glasses of red wine had been abandoned at the foot of a statue. Sylvain fetched them and passed one to his friend. After the sweet champagne, the warm wine tasted flat and murky as swamp water.

“Only a fool would pass up the opportunity.”

“PAPA, COME PLAY!”

The nixie swam backward against a vortex of current, dodging spinning hunks of ice that floated like miniature icebergs, splintering and splitting as they smashed together. Overhead, the red-and-blue parrot climbed among the fern fronds, screeching and flapping its wings.

As he had suspected, the little fish loved ice. He had once seen a nixie swimming at the foot of a glacier, playing with ice boulders as they calved from the ice field’s flank. The nixie had pushed them around like kindling, building a dam that spread a wide lake of turquoise meltwater over the moraine.

“Papa, come play!”

“Papa!” The parrot screeched its name.

Sylvain had purchased the bird from an elderly lady who was moldering in a north-wing garret, wearing threadbare finery from the Sun King’s reign and living off charity and crumbs of her neighbors’ leftover meals. The parrot was a good companion for the little fish. It was old and wily, and with its sharp beak and talons, it was well equipped to protect itself if she got too rough. It could fly out of reach and was fast enough to dodge sprays and splashes.

“Papa?” The nixie levered herself up the lip of her nest and stared at Sylvain expectantly. “Papa come play?”

Sylvain felt in his pockets for the last of the walnuts. “Here, little one. See if you can lure Papa down with this.”

“Bird! Food!” she yelled, waving the walnut aloft. The parrot kited down to the nest and plucked the nut from her fist.

“Come play, Papa?” she asked. She wasn’t looking at the bird. Her uncanny gaze was for him alone.

“That’s quite enough of that,” he said. “The bird’s name is Papa, and you’ll do well to remember it, young lady.”

She leaned close and spoke slowly, explaining. “Bird is Bird, Papa is Papa.”

“Papa,” agreed the parrot, its beady gaze fixed on Sylvain.

“You are impossible.” Sylvain waved at the surface of the pond, which was now carpeted with icy slurry circulating in the slowing current. “Clear away your toys or I’ll freeze swimming across.”

“Papa go away?”

“The bird is staying here with you. I am going to see about my important business. When I come back, I’ll bring more walnuts for Papa and nothing for you. Now clean up the ice.”

She laughed and dove. The water bubbled like a soup pot, forcing the slush to congeal into wads the size of lily pads. As the turbulence increased the leaves tilted and stacked, climbing into columns of gleaming ice that stretched and branched overhead.

The parrot flew to the top of a column and nibbled at the ice. It was solid and hard as rock.

“Very impressive,” breathed Sylvain.

He had spent the past few days running up debts with the village icemongers and pushing cartloads of straw-wrapped ice blocks down the tunnels. Though she had never seen ice, she had taken to it instinctively, tossing it around the grotto, building walls and dams, smashing and splitting the blocks into shard and slag, and playing in the slush like a pig in mud. But now she was creating ice. This was extraordinary.

“Come here, little one,” he said.

Obedient for the moment, she slipped over the surface to tread water at the edge of the nest. Above the water, her pale green skin was furred with frost. Steam snaked from her nostrils and gill slits.

“Show me how you did that,” he said.

She blinked. “Show me how, Papa?”

He spoke slowly. “The ice was melted into slush, but you froze it again, building this.” He pointed to an ice branch. The parrot sidestepped along the branch, bobbing its head and gobbling to itself. “Can you do it again?”

She shrugged. “You are impossible.”

He scooped up a fistful of water and held it out in his cupped hand. “Give it a try. Can you freeze this?”

The little fish peered up at him with that familiar imploring, pleading expression. He could hear her request even before she opened her mouth.

“Sing a song?”

Gifts were one thing but blatant bribery was another. If he began exchanging favor for favor, it would be a constant battle. But he had no time for arguments. He could risk a small bribe.

“I will sing you one song – a very short song – and only because you have been such a good girl today. But first freeze this water.”

“One song,” she agreed.

Heat radiated up his arm. The water in his fist crackled and jumped, forming quills of ice that spread from his palm like a chestnut conker. He was so astonished that he forgot to breathe for a few moments. Then he drew in a great breath and let himself sing.

The foresters of home played great lilting reels on pipes and fiddles. Their lives were as poor and starved as the shepherds in the meadows above or the farmers in the valley below, but they were proud and honed the sense of their own superiority as sharp as the edges on their axes. Their songs bragged of prowess at dancing, singing, making love, and of course at the daredevil feats required by their trade. The song that came to his lips told of a young man proving his worth by riding a raft of logs down a grassy mountainside in full view of the lowly villagers in the valley below.

He only meant to give her the first verse, but the little fish danced and leaped with such joy that he simply gave himself over to the song – abandoned himself so completely that halfway through the second verse, he found himself punctuating the rhythm with sharp staccato hand claps just as proudly as any forester. He sang all six verses, and when he was done, she leapt into his arms and hugged her thin arms around his neck.

“Papa sing good,” she whispered, her breath chill in his ear.

He patted her between the shoulder blades. Her skin was cold and clammy under a skiff of frost. Sylvain leaned back and loosened her arms a bit so he could examine her closely. Her eyes were keen, her skin bright. She was strong and healthy, and if she was a bit troublesome and a little demanding, it was no more than any child.

“ANNETTE TELLS ME you had your men run water to the north wing.”

Madame reclined on a golden sofa, encased and seemingly immobilized by the jagged folds of her silver robe. Her cleavage, shoulders, and neck protruded – a stem to support her rosebud-pale face. Her ladies gathered around her, gaudy in their bright, billowing silks.

Annette avoided his eye. Sylvain brushed imaginary lint from his sleeve, feigning unconcern. “I believe my foreman mentioned that they had finally gotten so far. I gave the orders months ago.”

“Everyone has a throne now. Madame de Beauvilliers claims to possess one exactly like mine. She shows it to her neighbors and even lets her maid sit on it.”

“Your throne was one of the first in the palace, Madame, and remains the finest.”

“Being first is no distinction when a crowd of nobodies have the newest. No doubt our village merchants will be bragging about their own thrones in a day or two.”

Sylvain twitched. He had just been considering running pipes through the village and renting toilets there. Merchants had the cash flow to sustain monthly payments, and unlike courtiers, they were used to paying their debts promptly.

“No indeed, Madame. I assure you I am extremely careful to preserve the privileges of rank. I am no populist.”

“And how will you preserve my distinction? Will you give me a second throne to sit in my dressing room? A pedestal for a pampered pet? If a cat has a throne, surely you can give me one for each of my ladies. We shall put them in a circle here in my salon and sit clucking at each other like laying hens.”

Her ladies giggled obediently. Annette stared at the floor and wrung the feathers of her fan like the neck of a Christmas goose. Just a few more twists and she would break the quills.

Madame glared at him. Angry color stained her cheeks, visible even through her heavy powder. “If every north-wing matron can brag about her throne, you may remove mine. I am bored of it. Take the vulgar thing away and throw it in the rubbish.”

If Sylvain took just two steps closer, he could loom over her and glare down from his superior height. But intimidation wasn’t possible. She held the whip and knew her power. If she abandoned her toilet, the whole palace would follow fashion. He would be ruined.

He strolled to the window and examined a vase of forced flowers, careful to keep his shoulders loose, his step light. “My dear madame, the thrones don’t matter. You might as well keep yours.”

Madame’s eyebrows climbed to the edge of her wig. Annette dropped her fan. The ivory handle clattered on the marble with a skeletal rattle. Sylvain sniffed one of the blossoms, a monstrous pale thing with pistils like spikes.

“Is that so,” said Madame, iron in her voice. “Enlighten me.”

“We need not speak of them further. If possessing a throne conveyed distinction, it was accidental. They are a convenience for bodily necessity, nothing more. Having a throne was once a privilege, but it has been superseded.”

“By what?” Madame twisted on her divan to watch him, unsettling her artfully composed tableau. He had her now.

“By the thing your heart most desires, flowing freely like a tap from a spring. So cold it chills the tongue. So fresh, the bubbles spark on the palate. Sweet as the rain in heaven and pure as a virgin’s child. I believe you hold a day in February close to your heart? A particularly auspicious day?”

“I do, and it is coming soon.”

“You will find your wishes fulfilled. Count on my support.”

A slow grin crept over Madame’s face. “It’s possible you are a man of worth after all, Sylvain de Guilherand, and I need not counsel my ladies against you.”

She dismissed him. Sylvain was careful not to betray the tremor in his limbs as he strolled through her apartment. The rooms were lined with mirrors, each one throwing his groomed and powdered satin-clad reflection back at him. He could put his fist through any one of those mirrors. It would feel good for a moment – the glass would shatter around his glove and splinter this overheated, foul, wasteful place into a thousand shards.

But if he showed his anger, he would betray himself. Any outburst would reveal a childish lack of self-control and provide gossip that would be told and retold long after he had been forgotten.

Sylvain found the nearest service corridor and descended to the cellars. He got a bottle of champagne from one of the king’s stewards – a man who knew him well enough to extend the mercy of credit. He bought a bag of walnuts and half a cheese from a provisioner’s boy who was wise enough to demand coin. The Duc d’Orléans’ baker gave him a loaf of dark bread and made a favor of it. Then he slipped out of the palace and made his way to the cisterns.

The little fish dozed on a branch of her ice tree, thin limbs dangling. The bird was rearranging the nest, plucking at fern fronds and clucking to itself.

“You’re fancy,” the little fish said, her voice sleepy.

Sylvain looked down. He was in full court garb, a manikin in satin, wrapped in polished leather and studded with silver buttons.

He pulled off his wig and settled himself on a boulder. “Do I look like a man of worth to you, little one?”

“Worth what, Papa?”

He grimaced. “My dear, that is exactly the question.”

He spread a handkerchief at his feet and made a feast for himself. Good cheese and fresh bread made a better meal than many he’d choked back on campaign, better even than most palace feasts with dishes hauled in from the village or up from the cellar kitchens, cold, salty, and studded with congealed fat. A man could live on bread and cheese. Many did worse. And many went gouty and festered on meat drowning in sauce.

The parrot winged over to investigate. Sylvain offered it a piece of cheese. It nuzzled the bread and plucked at the bag of walnuts. Sylvain untied the knot and the bird flapped away with a nut clenched in each taloned foot.

The little fish stretched and yawned. She slipped from the branch, surfaced at the edge of the pool, and padded over to him.

“Stinky,” she said, nose wrinkling.

“The cheese? You’re no French girl.” He pared a sliver for her. She refused it. “Some bread?”

She shook her head.

“What do you eat, my little fish?” She had teeth, human teeth. Had he been starving her?

“Mud,” she said, patting her belly.

There was certainly enough mud to choose from. “Would you eat a fish?” She stuck out her tongue in disgust. “The parrot eats nuts. Have you tried one?”

“Yucky. What’s this, Papa?” She lifted the champagne bottle.

“Don’t shake it. Here, I’ll show you.”

He scraped off the wax seal and unshipped the plug. He held it out. She sniffed at the neck of the bottle and shrugged, then took the bottle and dribbled a little on the floor. It foamed over her bare toes.

“Ooh, funny!” she said, delighted.

“It’s like water, but a bit different.”

She raised the bottle overhead and giggled as the champagne foamed over her ears. It dribbled down her cheeks and dripped from her chin. She licked her lips and grinned.

“Don’t drink it. It might make you sick.”

She rolled her eyes. “Just water, Papa. Fuzzy water.”

“All right, give it a try.”

She took a gulp and then offered the bottle to him, companionable as a sentry sharing a canteen with a friend.

He shook his head. “No, thank you, I don’t prefer it.”

He watched attentively as she played. She drank half the bottle but it had no apparent effect. She remained nimble and precise, and if her laughter was raucous and uncontrolled, it was no more than normal. The rest of the bottle she poured on or around herself, reveling in the bubbles and foam. Sylvain wondered if the ladies of the palace had tried bathing in champagne. If they hadn’t, he wasn’t going to suggest the fashion. The foamy sweet stuff was already a waste of good grapes.

When she lost interest, she dropped the bottle and arced back into the pool, diving clean and surfacing with a playful spout and splash. A finger or two was left, and when he poured it out, it foamed on the rocks fresh as if the bottle had just been cracked.

He nodded to himself. If the little fish could force water through pipes and sleeves, could make ice and keep it from melting, could chase him around the palace and make him look a fool while never leaving the cisterns, what were a few bubbles?

Sylvain knelt and pushed the empty bottle under the surface of the pool. He had done this a thousand times – filled his canteen at village wells, at farmyard troughs, at battlefield sloughs tinged pink with men’s blood – and each time, his lungs ached as he watched the bubbles rise. He ached for one sip of mountain air, a lick of snowmelt, just a snatch of a shepherd’s song heard across the valley, or a fading echo of a wolf’s cry under a blanket of moonlight. Ached to crouch by a rushing rocky stream and sip water pristine and pure.

“Thirsty, Papa?”

The little fish stood at his side. In her hand was a cup made of ice, its walls porcelain-thin and sharp as crystal. He raised it to his lips. The cold water sparkled with fine bubbles that burst on his tongue like a thousand tiny pinpricks and foamed at the back of his throat. He drank it down and smiled.

THE GRAND GALLERY streamed with all the nobles and luminaries of Europe, men Sylvain had glimpsed across the battlefield and longed to cross swords with, highborn women whose worth was more passionately negotiated than frontier borders, famous courtesans whose talents were broadcast in military camps and gilded parlors from Moscow to Dublin, princes of the church whose thirst for bloody punishment was unquenched and universal. This pure stream was clotted with a vast number of rich and titled bores with little to do and nothing to say. The whole world was in attendance for the king’s birthday, but Sylvain had only glimpsed it. He hadn’t left the champagne fountain all evening.

“If you don’t come, I’ll brain you with my sword hilt. Mademoiselle de Nesle is Madame’s sister. If you snub one, you insult both,” Gérard said, then added in an undertone, “Plus, she has the finest tits in the room and is barely clothed.”

“In a moment.”

The fountain branched overhead. Crystal limbs reached for the gilded ceiling and dropped like a weeping willow. Each limb was capped with ice blossoms, and each blossom streamed with champagne.

Madame had offered the first taste to the king, plucking a delicate cup of ice that sprouted from the green ice basin like a mushroom from the forest floor and filling it from a gushing spout. The king had toasted Sylvain and led the gallery in a round of applause. Then the guests flocked eagerly for their turn. They drank gallons of champagne, complained about toothache, and then drank more.

Sylvain had planned for this. He knew the noble appetite, knew the number of expected guests and how much they could be expected to drink. The fountain’s basin was tall and wide, and the reservoir beneath held the contents of a thousand magnums. The reservoir was tinted dark green with baker’s dye. It was too dark to see through but Sylvain calculated it to be about half full. More than enough champagne was left to keep the fountain flowing until the last courtier had been dragged to bed.

But the guests were now more interested in the king’s other gifts – an African cat panting in a jeweled harness, a Greek statue newly cleaned of its dirt and ancient paint, a tapestry stitched by a hundred nuns over ten years, a seven foot-tall solar clock. The guests were still drinking champagne at an admirable rate but sent attendants to fill their cups. The novelty had worn off.

Sylvain slipped off his glove and laid his hand on the edge of the basin, letting the cold leach into his bare palm. The little fish had been eager to play in the fountain’s reservoir, but she’d been inside for hours now and must be getting bored. Still, she had played no tricks. She kept the champagne flowing fresh, kept the ice from melting just as she had agreed. All because he had promised her a song.

“The fountain is fine,” Gérard insisted. “We’ve all admired it. Now come see Madame and her sister.”

Sylvain replaced his glove and followed Gérard. Guests toasted him as he passed.

“I need a fountain in my hat,” said Mademoiselle de Nesle.

The two sisters were holding court outside the Salon of War, presenting a portrait of tender affection and well-powdered beauty. But their twin stars did not orbit peacefully. Madame held the obvious advantage – official status, a liberal allowance from the royal purse, a large entourage, and innumerable privileges and rights along with her jewels and silks – but her sister had novelty on her side and emphasized her ingénue status with a simple gauze robe. Goodwill bloomed between them, or a decent counterfeit of it, but their attending ladies stood like two armies across an invisible border.

Annette stood apart from the scene, dimples worn shallow. A line of worry wrinkled her brow. Her fan drooped from her elbow. No coy signals tonight, just a bare nod and a slight tilt of her eyebrows. Sylvain followed her gaze to the ermine-draped figure of the King of France.

The two sisters had captured the king’s attention. He was ignoring Cardinal de Fleury and two Marshals of the Empire, gazing down from the royal dais to watch his mistress and her sister with obvious interest, plumed hat in his hand, gloved fist on his hip, alert as a stallion scenting a pair of mares.

Sylvain moved out of the king’s view. The ladies were on display for one audience member alone, and Sylvain was not about to get between them.

“A fountain in my hat,” Mademoiselle de Nesle repeated. “My dear sister says you are a magician.”

Sylvain bowed deeply, hiding his expression for a few moments. A ridiculous request. The woman must be simple. Did she think he could pull such a frippery out of his boot?

“The fountain will have its naissance at the peak of my chapeau, providing a misty veil before my eyes.”

“But mademoiselle would get wet,” Sylvain ventured finally.

“Yes! You have grasped my point. My dress is gauze, as you can see. It’s very thin and becomes transparent when wet.” She smoothed her hands over her breasts and leaned toward her sister. “Do you not think it will prove alluring, Louise?”

Madame caressed her sister’s hands. “No man would be able to resist you, my dear sister.”

Mademoiselle laughed. Her voice was loud enough for the opera house. “I care for no man. Only a god can have me.”

The king took a few steps closer to the edge of the dais, the very plumes on his hat magnetized by the scene.

Across the room, the Comte de Tessé approached the fountain with the careful, considered step of a man trying to hide his advanced state of drunkenness. The comte waved his crystal cup under the blossom spouts, letting the champagne overflow the glass and foam over his hand. The cup slipped from his hand and shattered on the fountain’s base. The comte sputtered with laughter.

“Do you not think it would be the finest of chapeaux, monsieur? A feat worthy of a magician, would it not be?”

The comte was joined at the fountain by a pair of young officers, polished, pressed, and gleaming in their uniforms, and just as drunk as the comte but far less willing to hide it. One leaned over the fountain and tried to sip directly from a blossom spout.

“I think it would be a very worthy feat,” Madame said. “Monsieur, my sister posed you a question.”

The officers were now trying to clamber onto the fountain’s slippery base. The comte laughed helplessly.

“No,” said Sylvain.

Madame blinked. Her ladies gasped.

The officer grasped a blossom spout. It snapped off in his hand. His friend slipped on the fountain’s edge and fell into the basin. His gold scabbard clanged on the ice. Two women – their wives, perhaps – joined the comte to laugh at the young heroes.

“Excuse me, mesdames.”

Sylvain rushed back to the fountain. One snarl brought the two young officers to attention. They scrambled off the fountain, claimed their wives from the comte, and disappeared into the crowd.

The comte’s gaze was bleary. “Well done indeed, Monsieur de Guilherand. The palace is ablaze with compliments. But remember it is I who gave you this kingly idea in the first place. As a gentleman, you will ensure I receive due credit.”

“You can take half the credit when you bear half the expense,” Sylvain hissed. “I’ll send you the vintner’s bill. You’ll find the total appropriately kingly.”

The comte turned back to the fountain and refilled his cup, pretending to not hear. Sylvain plucked the cup from the comte’s hand and poured the contents into the basin.

“You’ve embarrassed yourself. Go and sober up.”

The comte pretended to spot a friend across the room and tottered away.

Sylvain examined the broken blossom. Its finely carved petals dripped in the overheated air. The broken branch gushed champagne like a wound. Had the little fish felt the assault on the fountain? Had it frightened her? He tried to see through the dark green ice, watching for movement within the reservoir.

“Perhaps we ask too much,” said Annette, “expecting soldiers to transform themselves into gentlemen and courtiers for the winter. Many men seem to manage it for more than a few hours at a time. One wonders why you can’t, Sylvain de Guilherand.”

She posed at the edge of the fountain, fan fluttering in annoyance.

“Perhaps because I am a beast?”

The reservoir ice was thick and dark. In bright sunlight, he might be able to see through it, but even with thousands of candles overhead and the hundreds of mirrors lining the gallery, the light was too dim. He should have left a peephole at the back of the fountain.

“I speak as a friend,” said Annette. “Madame is insulted. You have taken a serious misstep.”

“Madame has made her own misstep this evening and will forget about mine before morning.”

Annette’s fan drooped. “True. She has made a play to keep the king’s interest, but I fear she’ll lose his favor. Maîtresse en titre is an empty honor if your lover prefers another woman’s bed.”

“She’ll be naming something vile after her sister next,” said Sylvain.

Annette coughed. “You heard about Polish Mary, then?” Sylvain nodded. “It’s her way of insulting those she despises. It makes the king laugh.”

A shadow moved in the fountain’s base, a flicker of a limb against the green ice just for a moment. He should have given the little fish a way to signal him if she was in distress.

“I begin to perceive that my conversation is not engaging enough for you, monsieur.”

“I beg your pardon, madame.” Sylvain turned his back on the fountain. The little fish was fine. Nixies spent entire seasons under the ice of glacier lakes. It was her element. The fact that the champagne continued to flow was perfect evidence that she was not in distress. He was worrying for nothing. Offending Annette further would be a mistake.

He swept a deep bow. “More than your pardon, my dear madame. I beg your indulgence.”

“Indulgence, yes.” She looked over her shoulder at Madame and her sister. “We have all indulged ourselves too much this evening and will pay for it.”

He forced a knowing smile. “Perhaps the best practice is to let others indulge us. Although a wise and lovely woman once mentioned that most ladies prefer a long period of suspense first. It whets the appetite.”

The empty banter seemed to cheer her. Her dimples surfaced and she snapped her fan with renewed purpose.

“Would you join me in taking a survey of the room?” He offered his arm. “I don’t beg your company for myself alone but in a spirit of general charity. If all this indulgence will lead to a morning filled with regrets, at least we can offer the king’s guests a memory of true beauty. With you on the arm of a beast such as myself, the contrast will be striking.”

She glanced at Madame. “I was sent to scold you, not favor you with my company.”

“You can always say I forced you.”

She laughed and took his arm. He led her through a clot of courtiers toward the royal dais. The king had returned his attention to his most favored guests but displayed a shapely length of royal leg for the two sisters to admire.

“Much better, my dear Sylvain,” said Gérard as they approached. “I hate to see you brooding over that fountain. My wife strokes her great belly with the same anxious anticipation. You looked like a hen on an egg.”

Sylvain dropped his hand onto the pommel of his sword and glared. Gérard barked with laughter.

“Your friend the Marquis de la Châsse can’t manage civil conversation, either,” said Annette as they moved on.

“Gérard doesn’t need to make the effort. He was born into enough distinction that every trespass is forgiven.”

“You sound jealous, but it’s not quite accurate. His wealth and title do help, but he is accepted because everyone can see he is true to his nature.”

“And I am not?”

“A bald question. I will answer it two ways. First, observe that at this moment, you and I are walking arm in arm among every person in the world who matters. If that is not acceptance, I wonder how you define the word.”

“I am honored, madame.”

“Yes, you most certainly are, monsieur.”

“And your second answer?”

“You are not true to your nature, and it makes people uncomfortable. Everyone knows what to expect from a man like the Marquis de la Châsse, but one suspects that Sylvain de Guilherand would rather be somewhere else, doing something else. Heaven knows what.”

Sylvain closed his glove over hers. “Not at all. I am exactly where I want to be.”

“So you say, but I do not believe it. Our well-beloved king toasted you this evening. Many men would consider that enough achievement for a lifetime, but still you are dissatisfied.”

“We discussed my character before. Remember how that ended?”

A delicate blush flushed through her powder. “I am answering your question as honestly as I can.”

“Honesty is not a vice much indulged at Versailles.”

She laughed. “I know the next line. Let me supply it: ‘It’s the only vice that isn’t.’ Oh, Sylvain. I can have that kind of conversation with any man. I’d rather go home to my husband and talk about hot gruel and poultices. Don’t make me desperate.”

Sylvain stroked her hand. “Very well. You enjoy my company despite my faults?”

She nibbled her bottom lip as she considered the question. “Because of your faults, I think,” she said. “The fountain is successful, the king is impressed with you, and you have my favor. Take my advice and be satisfied.”

Sylvain raised her palm to his lips. “I will.”

They walked on, silent but in perfect concord. As they circled the gallery, the atmosphere seemed less stifling, the crowd less insipid, the king’s air of rut less ridiculous. Even Madame’s poses seemed less futile and her sister’s pouts less desperate. Sylvain was in charity with the world, willing to forgive its many flaws.

The guests parted, opening a view of the fountain. A girl in petal-yellow silk reached her cup to one of the blossoms. The curve of her bare arm echoed the graceful arc of the fountain’s limbs. She raised the cup to her lips and the crowd closed off his view of the scene just as she took her first sip.

“Nature perfected, monsieur,” said a portly Prussian. “You must be congratulated.”

Sylvain bowed and drew Annette away just as the Prussian’s gaze settled on her cleavage. The king rose to dismount the dais and the whole crowd watched. Sylvain took advantage of the distraction to claim a kiss from Annette, just a brief caress of her ripe lower lip before they joined the guests in a ripple of deep curtseys and bows. The king progressed down the gallery toward Madame and her sister, his pace forceful and intent as a stalking hunter.

Annette slid her hand up Sylvain’s arm and rested her palm on his shoulder. A pulse fluttered on her throat. He resisted the urge to explore it with his lips.

“I suppose it is too early to leave,” he whispered, drinking in the honeyed scent of her powder.

“Your departure would be noticed,” she breathed. “It is the price of fame, monsieur.”

“Another turn of the room, then?”

She nodded. They moved down the gallery in the king’s wake. The African cat gnawed on its harness, blunted ivory fangs rasping over the jewels. Its attendant yanked ineffectually on the leash.

“Poor thing,” said Annette. “They should take it outside. This is no place for a wild animal.”

Sylvain nodded. “I have not thought to ask before now, but how is the monkey? Happier, I hope, than that cat?”

“Very well and happy indeed. My maid Marie coddles her like a new mother. They are madonna and child, the two of them a world unto themselves.” She glanced up at him, a wicked slant to her gaze, daring him to laugh. He grinned.

“And what name did Madame give the creature?”

The color drained from her cheeks. “Is that the viceroy of Parma? I would not have thought to see him here.”

“I couldn’t say. He looks like every other man in a wig and silk. Are you avoiding my question?”

“Show me your fountain. I haven’t had the chance to admire it up close.”

The crowd parted to reveal three young men in peacock silks filling their cups at the fountain. One still kept his long baby curls, probably in deference to a sentimental mother.

“There!” Annette said. “Not quite as delicate a tableau as the girl in yellow, but I think I like it better. You must make allowances for differences in taste, and I have always preferred male beauty.”

“I am sure you do. What did Madame name the monkey, Annette?”

“She is called Jesusa. It is a terrible sacrilege and my accent makes it bad Spanish too, but what can I do when I am presented with madonna and child morning, noon, and night? God will forgive me.”

“Madame didn’t name the monkey Jesusa.”

“Don’t be so sure. Madame is even worse a Christian than I am.”

“Very well. I’ll ask her myself.”

Sylvain strode toward the Salon of War. The crowd was thick. The king was with Madame now. The tall feathers of the royal hat bobbed over the heads of the guests.

Annette pulled his arm. “Stop. Not in front of the king. Don’t be stubborn.”

He turned on her. “Answer my question.”

The jostling crowd pressed them together. She gripped his arms, breath shallow.

“Promise you won’t take offence.”

“Just answer the question, Annette.”

She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. “She named the monkey Sylvain.”

He wrenched himself out of her grip and lurched back, nearly bowling over an elderly guest.

“It is a joke,” said Annette, pursuing him.

“Does it seem funny to you?”

“Take it in the spirit it was intended, just a silly attempt at fun. It isn’t meant as an attack on your pride.”

“Madame thinks I am a prize target. Did you laugh, Annette?” His voice rose. Heads turned. Guests jostled their neighbors, alerting them to the scene. “Who else would like to take a shot at me?”

“Sylvain, no, please.” Annette spoke softly and reached out to him. He stepped aside.

Sylvain paced in a circle, glaring at the guests, daring each one of them to make a remark.

“I have done more than any other man to make a place for myself at court. I’ve attended levees, and flattered, and fucked. But worse – I’ve worked hard. As hard as I can. You find that disgusting, don’t you?”

“No. I don’t.” She watched him pace.

“I’ve worked miracles. Everyone says so. The magician of the fountains, the man who puts thrones throughout the palace. Everyone wants one. Or so it seems, until everyone has one. Then it’s nothing special. Not good enough anymore. Take it away. Come up with something else while we insult you behind your back.”

“Madame is difficult to please.” Annette’s voice was soft and sad.

“Nothing I do will ever be good enough, will it? Even for you, Annette. You tell me I try too hard, I’m a striver, and I’m not true to my nature.” He spread his arms wide. “Well, this is my nature. How do you like me now?”

She opened her mouth and then closed it without speaking. He stepped close and spoke in her ear.

“Not well, I think,” he said, and walked away.

The crowd parted to let him pass, opening a view to the fountain. Two of the young men were leaning over the basin. The boy with the curls crouched at the side of the reservoir. Sylvain broke into a run.

The boy was banging on the ice with his diamond ring. The reservoir rang like a drum with each impact.

Sylvain grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck.

“There’s something in there, monsieur,” he squealed. “A creature, a monster. I saw it.”

Sylvain threw the boy to the floor and drew his sword. The boy scrabbled backward, sliding across the marble. The two friends rushed to the boy’s side and yanked him to his feet. They backed away, all three clinging to each other. Behind them a crowd gathered – some shocked, some confused, most highly entertained. They pointed at him as if he were a beast in a menagerie.

Several men made a show of dropping their hands to the hilts of their dress swords, but not one of them drew.

The fountain sputtered. A blossom crashed into the basin, splashing gouts of champagne.

Gérard shoved through the crowd, wig askew, slipping on the wet floor. He skidded into place at Sylvain’s side.

The fountain sprayed champagne across their backs and high to the ceiling, snuffing out a hundred candles overhead.

“Go to your wife. Get her out of the palace,” said Sylvain.

Gérard ran full-speed for the door.

Sylvain raised his sword and brought it crashing down on the fountain. Ice limbs shattered. Champagne and ice vaulted overhead and fell, spraying debris across the marble floor. He shifted his grip and smashed the pommel of his sword on the side of the reservoir. It cracked and split. He hit it again and again until the floor flooded with golden liquid. Sylvain threw down his sword and shouldered the ice aside.

“Papa?”

The little fish was curled into a quivering ball. Sylvain slipped and fell to his hands and knees. He crawled toward her, reached out.

“It’s all right, my little one. Come here, my darling.”

She lifted her arms. He gathered her to his chest. She burrowed her face into his neck, quaking.

“Noisy,” she sobbed. “Too loud. Hurts. Papa.”

Sylvain held her on his lap, champagne seeping through his clothes. He cupped his palms over her ears and squeezed her to his heart, rocking back and forth until her shivering began to subside. Then he pulled himself to his feet, awkward and unbalanced with the child in his arms.

He stepped out of the shattered ice into a line of drawn swords. Polished steel glinted, throwing points of light across the faces of the household guard. Sylvain shielded the child with his body as he scanned the crowd.

The jostling guests were forced against the walls by the line of guards. The plumes of the king’s hat disappeared into the Salon of Peace, followed by the broad backs of his bodyguards. Madame, her sister, and their ladies clustered on the royal dais, guarded by the Marshal de Noailles.

De Noailles had personally executed turncoat soldiers with the very same sword that now shone in his hand.

“Let the water go, my little one,” Sylvain whispered.

She blinked up at him. “Be a bad girl, Papa?” Her brow furrowed in confusion.

“The water pipes, the reservoirs. Let it all go.”

“Papa?”

“Go ahead, little fish.”

She relaxed in his arms, as if she had been holding her breath a long time and could finally breathe.

A faint rumble sounded overhead, distant. It grew louder. The walls trembled. Sylvain spread his palm over the nixie’s wet scalp as if he could armor her fragile skull. A mirror slipped to the floor and shattered. The guards looked around, trying to pinpoint the threat. Their swords wavered and dipped.

The ceiling over the statue of Hermes bowed and cracked. Plaster rained down on the guests. The statue teetered and toppled. The guests pushed through the guards, scattering their line.

The ceiling sprang a thousand leaks. The huge chandeliers swung back and forth. Water streamed down the garden windows, turning the glass silver and gold, and then dark as the candles sputtered and smoked.

The guests broke through the wide garden doors and stormed through the water streaming off the roof and out onto the wide terraces. Sylvain retrieved his sword and followed, ducking low and holding the little fish tight as he fled into the fresh February night.

He ran across the gardens, past the pools and reservoirs, through the orangery and yew grove. He climbed the Bois des Gonards and turned back to the palace, breathless, scanning the paths for pursuing guards.

Aside from the crowd milling on the terraces, there was no movement in the gardens. The fountains jetted high, fifteen hundred spouts across the vast expanse of lawns and paths, flower beds and hedges, each spout playing, every jet dancing for its own amusement.

“You can turn the fountains off now, little one.”

“Papa?” The little fish was growing heavy. He shifted her weight onto his hip, well balanced for a long walk.

“Don’t worry, my little girl. No more fountains. We’re going home.”

One by one the fountains flailed and drooped. The little fish leaned her head on his shoulder and yawned.

The palace was dark except for an array of glowing windows in the north wing and along the row of attic garrets. At this distance, it looked dry and calm.

And indeed, he thought, nothing was damaged that couldn’t be repaired. The servants would spend a few busy weeks mopping, the carpenters and plasterers, gilders and painters would have a few seasons of work. Eventually, someone would find a way to repair a fountain or two. The toilets and pipes would stand dry, but the nobles and courtiers would notice little difference. What was broken there could never be fixed.

Dawn found them on a canal. Sylvain sat on the prow of a narrow boat, eating bread and cheese and watching his little fish jump and splash in the gentle bow wave as they drifted upstream on the long journey home.

MEU IRMÃ. Can you read? Without help? I don’t even know if you can! I’m asking you to turn off all your connections now. That’s right, to everything. Not even the cutest little app flittering around your head. JUST TURN OFF.

It will be like dying. Parts of your memory close down. It’s horrible, like watching lights go out all over a city, only it’s YOU. Or what you thought was you.

But please, Graça, just do it once. I know you love the AI and all zir little angels. But. Turn off?

Otherwise go ahead, let your AI read this for you. Zey will either screen out stuff or report it back or both. And what I’m going to tell you will join the system.

So:

Zey dream for us don’t zey? I think zey edit our dreams so we won’t get scared. Or maybe so that our brains don’t well up from underneath to warn us about getting old or poor or sick... or about zem.

The first day, zey jerked us awake from deep inside our heads. GET UP GET UP GET UP! There’s a message. VERY IMPORTANT WAKE UP WAKE UP.

From sleep to bolt upright and gasping for breath. I looked across at you still wrapped in your bed, but we’re always latched together so I could feel your heart pounding.

It wasn’t just a message; it was a whole ball of wax; and the wax was a solid state of being: panic. Followed by an avalanche of ship-sailing times, credit records, what to pack. And a sizzling, hot-foot sense that we had to get going right now. Zey shot us full of adrenaline: RUN! ESCAPE!

You said, “It’s happening. We better get going. We’ve got just enough time to sail to Africa.” You giggled and flung open your bed. “Come on Cristina, it will be fun!”

Outside in the dark from down below, the mobile chargers were calling Oyez-treeee-cee-dah-djee! I wanted to nestle down into my cocoon and imagine as I had done every morning since I was six that instead of selling power, the chargers were muezzin calling us to prayer and that I lived in a city with mosques. I heard the rumble of carts being pulled by their owners like horses.

Then kapow: another latch. Ship sailing at 8.30 today due Lagos five days. You arrive day of launch. Seven hours to get Lagos to Tivland. We’ll book trains for you. Your contact in Lagos is Emilda Diaw, (photograph, a hello from her with the sound of her voice, a little bubble of how she feels to herself. Nice, like a bowl of soup. Bubble muddled with dental cavities for some reason). She’ll meet you at the docks here (flash image of Lagos docks, plus GPS, train times; impressions of train how cool and comfortable... and a lovely little timekeeper counting down to 8.30 departure of our boat. Right in our eyes).

And oh! On top of that another latch. This time an A-copy of our tickets burned into Security.

Security, which is supposed to mean something we can’t lie about. Or change or control. We can’t buy or sell anything without it. A part of our heads that will never be us, that officialdom can trust. It’s there to help us, right?

Remember when Papa wanted to defraud someone? He’d never let them be. He’d latch hold of them with one message, then another at five-minute intervals. He’d latch them the bank reference. He’d latch them the name of the attorney, or the security conundrums. He never gave them time to think.

Graça. We were being railroaded.

You made packing into a game. Like everything else. “We are leaving behind the world!” you said. “Let’s take nothing. Just our shorts. We can holo all the lovely dresses we like. What do we need, ah? We have each other.”

I kept picking up and putting down my ballet pumps – oh that the new Earth should be deprived of ballet!

I made a jewel of all of Brasil’s music, and a jewel of all Brasil’s books and history. I need to see my info in something physical. I blame those bloody nuns keeping us off AIr. I sat watching the little clock on the printer going round and round, hopping up and down. Then I couldn’t find my jewel piece to read them. You said, “Silly. The AI will have all of that.” I wanted to take a little Brazilian flag and you chuckled at me. “Dunderhead, why do you want that?”

And I realized. You didn’t just want to get out from under the Chinese. You wanted to escape Brasil.

I FACED THE doctor across her desk. The room was quiet, the walls were pale or white, but somehow I couldn’t see details. There was a blank in my mind, no past to this moment; everything blurred by the adrenalin in my blood.

“You have three choices,” she said gently. “You can upload; you can download. Or you must return.”

My reaction to those terms, upload, download, was embarrassing. I tried to hide it and knew I’d failed.

“Go back?” I said bitterly, and in defiance. “To the city of broken dreams? Why would I ever want to do that?”

“Don’t be afraid, Romy. The city of broken dreams may have become the city of boundless opportunity.”

Then I woke up: Simon’s breathing body warm against my side, Arc’s unsleeping presence calm in my cloud. A shimmering, starry night above us and the horror of that doctor’s tender smile already fading.

It was a dream, just a dream.

With a sigh of profound relief I reached up to pull my stars closer, and fell asleep again floating among them; thinking about Lei.

I was born in the year 1998, CE. My parents named me Romanz Jolie Davison; I have lived a long, long time. I’ve been upgrading since ‘uppers’ were called experimental longevity treatments. I was a serial-clinical-trialer, when genuine extended lifespan was brand new. Lei was someone I met through this shared interest; this extreme sport. We were friends, then lovers; and then ex-lovers who didn’t meet for many years, until one day we found each other again: on the first big Habitat Station, in the future we’d been so determined to see (talk about ‘meeting cute’!). But Lei had always been the risk taker, the hold-your-nose-and-jump kid. I was the cautious one. I’d never taken an unsafe treatment, and I’d been careful with my money too (you need money to do super-extended lifespan well). We had our reunion and drifted apart, two lives that didn’t mesh. One day, when I hadn’t seen her for a while, I found out she’d gone back to Earth on medical advice.

Had we kept in touch at all? I had to check my cache, which saddened me, although it’s only a mental eye-blink. Apparently not. She’d left without a goodbye, and I’d let her go. I wondered if I should try to reach her. But what would I say? I had a bad dream, I think it was about you, are you okay? I needed a better reason to pick up the traces, so I did nothing.

Then I had the same dream again; exactly the same. I woke up terrified, and possessed by an absurd puzzle: had I really just been sitting in that fuzzy doctor’s office again? Or had I only dreamed I was having the same dream? A big Space Station is a haunted place, saturated with information that swims into your head and you have no idea how. Sometimes a premonition really is a premonition: so I asked Station to trace her. The result was that time-honoured brush-off: it has not been possible to connect this call.

Relieved, I left it at that.

I was, I am, one of four Senior Magistrates on the Outer Reaches circuit. In Jupiter Moons, my hometown, and Outer Reaches’ major population centre, I often deal with Emergents. They account for practically all our petty offences, sad to say. Full sentients around here are too law-abiding, too crafty to get caught, or too seriously criminal for my jurisdiction.

Soon after my dreams about Lei a young SE called Beowulf was up before me, on a charge of Criminal Damage and Hooliganism. The incident was undisputed. A colleague, another Software Entity, had failed to respond “you too” to the customary and friendly sign-off “have a nice day”. In retaliation Beowulf had shredded a stack of files in CPI (Corporate and Political Interests, our Finance Sector); where they both worked.

The offence was pitiful, but the kid had a record. He’d run out of chances; his background was against him, and CPI had decided to make a meal of it. Poor Beowulf, a thing of rational light, wearing an ill-fitting suit of virtual flesh for probably the first time in his life, stood penned in his archaic, data-simulacrum of wood and glass, for two mortal subjective hours; while the CPI advocate and Beowulf’s public defender scrapped over the price of a cup of coffee.

Was Beowulf’s response proportionate? Was there an intention of offence? Was it possible to establish, by precedent, that “you too” had the same or commensurate ‘customary and friendly’ standing, in law, as “have a nice day”?

Poor kid, it was a real pity he’d tried to conceal the evidence.

I had to find him guilty, no way around it.

I returned to macro-time convinced I could at least transmute his sentence, but my request ran into a Partnership Director I’d crossed swords with before: she was adamant and we fell out. We couldn’t help sharing our quarrel. No privacy for anyone in public office: it’s the law out here and I think a good one. But we could have kept it down. The images we flung to and fro were lurid. I recall eyeballs dipped in acid, a sleep-pod lined with bloody knives... and then we got nasty. The net result (aside from childish entertainment for idle citizens) was that I was barred from the case. Eventually I found out, by reading the court announcements, that Beowulf’s sentence had been confirmed in the harshest terms. Corrective custody until a validated improvement shown, but not less than one week.

In Outer Reaches we use expressions like “night, and day”, “week, and hour”, without meaning much at all. Not so the Courts. A week in jail meant the full Earth Standard version, served in macro-time.

I’d been finding the Court Sessions tiring that rotation, but I walked home anyway; to get over my chagrin, and unkink my brain after a day spent switching in and out of virtual time. I stopped at every Ob Bay, making out I was hoping to spot the first flashes of the spectacular Centaur Storm we’d been promised. But even the celestial weather was out to spoil my day: updates kept telling me about a growing chance that show had been cancelled.

My apartment was in the Rim, Premium Level; it still is. (Why not? I can afford it.) Simon and Arc welcomed me home with bright, ancient music for a firework display. They’d cleared the outward wall of our living space to create our own private Ob Bay, and were refusing to believe reports that it was all in vain. I cooked a meal, with Simon flying around me to help out, deft and agile in the rituals of a human kitchen. Arc, as a slender woman, bare-headed, dressed in silver-grey coveralls, watched us from her favourite couch.

Simon and Arc... They sounded like a firm of architects, as I often told them (I repeat myself, it’s a privilege of age). They were probably, secretly responsible for the rash of fantasy spires and bubbles currently annoying me, all over Station’s majestic open spaces –

“Why is Emergent Individual law still set in human terms?” I demanded. “Why does a Software Entity get punished for ‘criminal damage’ when nothing was damaged; not for more than a fraction of a millisecond –?”

My housemates rolled their eyes. “It’ll do him good,” said Arc. “Only a human-terms thinker would think otherwise.”

I was in for some tough love.

“What kind of a dreadful name is Beowulf, anyway?” inquired Simon.

“Ancient Northern European. Beowulf was a monster –” I caught myself, recalling I had no privacy. “No! Correction. The monster was Grendel. Beowulf was the hero, a protector of his people. It’s aspirational.”

“He is a worm though, isn’t he?”

I sighed, and took up my delicious bowl of Tom Yum; swimming with chilli pepper glaze. “Yes,” I said glumly. “He’s ethnically worm, poor kid.”

“Descended from a vicious little virus strain,” Arc pointed out. “He has tendencies. He can’t help it, but we have to be sure they’re purged.”

“I don’t know how you can be so prejudiced.”

“Humans are so squeamish,” teased Simon.

“Humans are human,” said Arc. “That’s the fun of them.”

They were always our children, begotten not created, as the old saying goes. There’s no such thing as a sentient AI not born of human mind. But never purely human: Simon, my embodied housemate, had magpie neurons in his background. Arc took human form for pleasure, but her being was pure information, the elemental stuff of the universe. They had gone beyond us, as children do. We had become just one strand in their past –

The entry lock chimed. It was Anton, my clerk, a slope-shouldered, barrelchested bod with a habitually doleful expression. He looked distraught.

“Apologies for disturbing you at home Rom. May I come in?”

He sat on Arc’s couch, silent and grim. Two of my little dream-tigers, no bigger than geckos, emerged from the miniature jungle of our bamboo and teak room divider and sat gazing at him, tails around their paws.

“Those are pretty...” said Anton at last. “New. Where’d you get them?”

“I made them myself, I’ll share you the code. What’s up, Anton?”

“We’ve got trouble. Beowulf didn’t take the confirmation well.”

I noticed that my ban had been lifted: a bad sign. “What’s the damage?”

“Oh, nothing much. It’s in your updates, of which you’ll find a ton. He’s only removed himself from custody –”

“Oh, God. He’s back in CPI?”

“No. Our hero had a better idea.”

Having feared revenge instantly, I felt faint with relief.

“But he’s been traced?”

“You bet. He’s taken a hostage, and a non-sentient Lander. He’s heading for the surface, right now.”

The little tigers laid back their ears and sneaked out of sight. Arc’s human form drew a long, respectful breath. “What are you guys going to do?”

“Go after him. What else?” I was at the lockers, dragging out my gear.

IN THE TIME of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie’s Dream Car. Aunt Mar had bought it for a quarter and crammed funsized Snickers bars in the trunk. Frankly, I was touched she’d remembered.

That was the summer Jamison Pond became wreathed in caution tape. Deep-sea hagfish were washing ashore. Home with Mar, the pond was my haunt; it was a nice place to read. This habit was banned when the sagging antlers of anglerfish illicia joined the hagfish. The Department of Fisheries blamed global warming.

Come the weekend, gulpers and vampire squid putrefied with the rest, and the Department was nonplussed. Global warming did not a vampire squid produce. I could have told them what it all meant, but then, I was a Blake.

“There’s an omen at Jamison Pond,” I told Mar.

My aunt was chain-smoking over the stovetop when I got home. “Eggs for dinner,” she said, then, reflectively, “What kind of omen, kid?”

“Amassed dead. Salt into fresh water. The eldritch presence of the Department of Fisheries –”

Mar hastily stubbed out her cigarette on the toaster. “Christ! Stop yapping and go get the heatherback candles.”

We ate scrambled eggs in the dim light of heatherback candles, which smelled strongly of salt. I spread out our journals while we ate, and for once Mar didn’t complain; Blakes went by instinct and collective memory to augur, but the records were a familial chef d’oeuvre. They helped where instinct failed, usually.

We’d left tribute on the porch. Pebbles arranged in an Unforgivable Shape around a can of tuna. My aunt had argued against the can of tuna, but I’d felt a sign of mummification and preserved death would be auspicious. I was right.

“Presence of fish en masse indicates the deepest of our quintuple Great Lords,” I said, squinting over notes hundreds of Blakes past had scrawled. “Continuous appearance over days... plague? Presence? What is that word? I hope it’s both. We ought to be the generation who digitizes – I can reference better on my Kindle.”

“A deep omen isn’t fun, Hester,” said Mar, violently rearranging her eggs. “A deep omen seven hundred feet above sea level is some horseshit. What have I always said?”

“Not to say anything to Child Protective Services,” I said, “and that they faked the Moon landing.”

“Hester, you –”

We recited her shibboleth in tandem: “You don’t outrun fate,” and she looked settled, if dissatisfied.

The eggs weren’t great. My aunt was a competent cook, if skewed for nicotine-blasted taste buds, but tonight everything was rubbery and overdone. I’d never known her so rattled, nor to cook eggs so terrible.

I said, “‘Fun’ was an unfair word.”

“Don’t get complacent, then,” she said, “when you’re a teenage seer who thinks she’s slightly hotter shit than she is.” I wasn’t offended. It was just incorrect. “Sea-spawn’s no joke. If we’re getting deep omens here – well, that’s specific, kid! Reappearance of the underdeep at noon, continuously, that’s a herald. I wish you weren’t here.”

My stomach clenched, but I raised one eyebrow like I’d taught myself in the mirror. “Surely you don’t think I should go home.”

“It wouldn’t be unwise” – Mar held up a finger to halt my protest – “but what’s done is done is done. Something’s coming. You won’t escape it by taking a bus to your mom’s.”

“I would rather face inescapable lappets and watery torment than Mom’s.”

“Your mom didn’t run off and become a dental hygienist to spite you.”

I avoided this line of conversation, because seriously. “What about the omen?”

Mar pushed her plate away and kicked back, precariously balanced on two chair legs. “You saw it, you document it, that’s the Blake way. Just... a deep omen at sixteen! Ah, well, what the Hell. See anything in your eggs?”

I re-peppered them and we peered at the rubbery curds. Mine clumped together in a brackish pool of hot sauce.

“Rain on Thursday,” I said. “You?”

“Yankees lose the Series,” said Aunt Mar, and went to tip her plate in the trash. “What a god-awful meal.”

I found her that evening on the peeling balcony, smoking. A caul of cloud obscured the moon. The treetops were black and spiny. Our house was a fine, hideous artifact of the 1980s, decaying high on the side of the valley. Mar saw no point in fixing it up. She had been – her words – lucky enough to get her death foretokened when she was young, and lived life courting lung cancer like a boyfriend who’d never commit.

A heatherback candle spewed wax on the railing. “Mar,” I said, “why are you so scared of our leviathan dreadlords, who lie lurking in the abyssal deeps? I mean, personally.”

“Because seahorrors will go berserk getting what they want and they don’t quit the field,” she said. “Because I’m not seeing fifty, but your overwrought ass is making it to homecoming. Now get inside before you find another frigging omen in my smoke.”

DANCY FLAMMARION SITS out the storm in the ruins of a Western Railway of Alabama boxcar, hauled years and years ago off rusting steel rails and summarily left for dead. Left for kudzu vines and possums, copperheads and wandering albino girls looking for shelter against sudden summer rains, shelter from thunder and lightning and wind. It’s sweltering inside the boxcar, despite the downpour, and, indeed, she imagines it might be hotter now than before the rain began. That happens sometimes, in the long Dog Day South Alabama broil. The floor of the boxcar is covered in dead kudzu leaves and rotting plywood, except a few places where she can see the metal floor rusted straight through. The rain against the roof sizzles loudly, singing like frying meat; she sits with her back to one wall, gazing out the open sliding doors at the sheeting rain.

Dancy fishes a can of Libby’s Vienna sausages from her duffel bag, a few mouthfuls of protein shoplifted from a Piggly Wiggly on the outskirts of Enterprise, three days back the way she’s come. She pops the lid and drinks the salty, oily juice before digging the pasty little sausages out with her fingers. Dancy hates Vienna sausages, but beggars can’t be choosers, that’s what her grandmother always said. Neither can thieves, she thinks. Thieves can’t be choosers, either.

When she’s done, she uses a few paper napkins – also lifted from the Piggly Wiggly – to wipe her fingers as clean as she can get them. She catches a little rainwater in the empty can. It’s warm and tastes like grease, but it helps her thirst a little. Starving has never scared her as much as the possibility of dying of thirst, and she’s drunk from worse than an empty Vienna sausage can.

She closes her eyes and manages half an hour’s sleep, a half hour at most. But she dreams of another life she might have lived. She dreams of a talking blackbird – a red-winged blackbird – and the ghost of a girl who was a werewolf before she died. Before Dancy had to kill her. It isn’t a good dream. When she wakes up, the rain has stopped, the clouds have gone, and the world outside the boxcar is wet and steaming in the brilliant August sun. It can’t be very long past noon. She pisses through one of the holes in the floor of the boxcar, already thirsty and wishing she had a few more cans full of the oily sausage-flavored rainwater. She gathers up her green Army surplus duffel bag, worn and patched, patches sewn over patches, and she finds her sunglasses. She stole those, too, from a convenience store somewhere down in Florida. The seraph has never said anything about her thefts. Necessary evils and all, tiny transgressions in the service of the greater good. And she’s made it a rule never to take anything worth more than ten dollars. She keeps a tally, written in pencil on the back of a tourism pamphlet advertising Tarpon Springs. As of today, she owes seventy-three dollars and fifteen cents. She knows she’ll never pay any of it back, but she keeps the tally, anyway.

Dancy climbs down out of the boxcar and opens the black umbrella, almost as patched as the duffel bag; two of the spokes poke out through the nylon fabric.

“Where am I going this time?” she asks, but no one and nothing answers. It’s been days now since the angel appeared, all wrath and fire and terrible swift swords. She’s on her own, until it shows up and shoves her this way or that way. So, she wandered north to Enterprise, then east to this abandoned and left for dead boxcar not far from the banks of the muddy Choctawhatchee River. She makes her way back to the road, rural route something or something else, another anonymous county highway. She parts waist high goldenrod and stinging nettles like Moses dividing the Red Sea. Her T-shirt, jeans, and boots are close to soaked through by the time she reaches the road, which makes her wonder why she bothered taking shelter in the boxcar.

The road is wet and dark and shiny as cottonmouth scales.

Without direction, without instruction, left to her own devices, there’s nothing to do but walk, and so she resumes the march eastward, towards Georgia, still a good thirty or forty miles away. But that’s just as a crow flies, not as she has to walk down this road. And there’s no particular reason to aim for Georgia, except she has no idea where else she’d go.

Dancy walks and sings to herself to take her mind off the heat.

She’s walked no more than half a mile when she sees the dragon.

At first, she thinks she’s seeing nothing but a very large turkey vulture, soaring on the thermals rising up off the blacktop. But then it wheels nearer, far up and silhouetted black against the blue, blue sky, and she can see that whatever it is, it isn’t a turkey vulture. She doesn’t think it’s even a bird, because, for one thing, it doesn’t seem to have feathers. For another, it’s huge. She’s seen big pelicans, but they were, at most, only half as big as the thing in the sky, wing tip to wing tip. She’s seen egrets and herons and eagles, but nothing like this. She stands in the middle of the road and watches, transfixed, not thinking, yet, that maybe this is something to be afraid of, something that could do her harm.

It’s a dragon, she thinks. I’m seeing a dragon, and the angel didn’t warn me. I didn’t even know dragons were real.

The thing in the sky screams. Or it sounds like a scream to Dancy, and the cry sends chill bumps up and down her arms, makes the hairs at the base of her neck stand on end. It’s almost directly overhead now, the creature. She shields her eyes, trying to shut out the glare of the sun, hoping for a better view. It’s sort of like a giant bat, the dragon, because its wings look leathery, taut membranes stretched between bony struts, and the creature might be covered with short, velvety hair like a bat’s. But it’s hard to be sure about these details, it’s so far overhead. The strangest part of all is the dragon’s head. There’s a bony crest on the back of its narrow skull, a crest almost as long as its beak, and the crest makes it’s head look sort of like a boomerang.

The dragon flaps its enormous wings, seven yards across if they’re an inch, and screams again. And that’s when Dancy hears a voice somewhere to her left, calling out from the thicket of beech and pine and creeper vines at the edge of the road. For just a second, she thinks maybe it’s her angel, come, belatedly, to warn her about the dragon and to tell her what she’s supposed to do. Come to reveal this wrinkle in its grand skein – its holy plan for her, whatever comes next. But this isn’t the angel at all. It’s only the voice of a girl who sounds impatient and, maybe, a little frightened.

“Get outta the road,” the girl tells her, somehow managing to whisper and raise her voice at the same time, cautiously raising her voice only as much as she dares. “It’s gonna see you if you don’t get outta the middle of the damn road.”

“But maybe it’s supposed to see me,” Dancy says aloud, though she’d only meant to think that to herself. Already she’s reaching for the Bowie knife tucked into the waistband of her jeans.

“Get outta the road,” the girl shouts, actually shouting this time, no longer trying not to be heard by the hairy black thing in the sky.

Dancy draws her knife, and the sun flashes off the stainless steel blade. Her hand is sweaty around the handle, that stout hilt carved from the antler of a white-tailed buck.

The dragon soars and banks, and then it dives for her.

Why wasn’t I warned? Why didn’t you tell me there are dragons?

But then she’s being pulled, hauled along with enough force and urgency that she almost loses her balance to tumble head over heels off the asphalt and into a tangle of blackberry briars.

“Jesus,” the girl says, “are you simple? Are you crazy?”

Dancy looks back over her shoulder just in time to see the dragon swoop low above the road; there can be no doubt that it was coming for her.

“You saw that?” she asks, and the girl tugging her deeper into the woods replies, “Yeah, I saw it. Of course I saw it. What were you doing back there? What did you think you were doing?”

And it’s not that Dancy doesn’t have an answer for her, it’s just that there’s something in the scolding, exasperated tone of the girl’s voice that makes her feel foolish, so she doesn’t reply.

“What the sam hill were you doing out there anyway, strolling down the road with a knapsack and a knife? You a hitchhiker or some sort of hobo?”

I’m going home to see my mother.

I’m going home no more to roam.

I’m just a-going over Jordan,

I’m just a-going over home.

The girl has stopped dragging Dancy, but she hasn’t released the death grip on her wrist and is still leading her through the woods. The girl’s short hair is braided close to her scalp in neat cornrows, and her skin, thinks Dancy, is almost the same deep brown as a Hershey bar. Beads of sweat stand out on the girl’s forehead and upper lip; a bead of sweat hangs from the tip of her nose.

“I’m not a hobo,” Dancy says. “I don’t hitchhike, either. And it’s not a knapsack, it’s a duffel bag. It was my great grandfather’s duffel bag, when he fought in World War II. He fought the Germans in the Argonne Forest in 1918, and this was his duffle bag.”

They’ve come to a small clearing near a stream, a place where the trees and vines have left enough room for the sun to reach the ground. Dancy asks the girl to please let go of her, and the girl does. Once again, Dancy looks back towards the road and the dragon. There’s a mounting sense that all of this is wrong, that she hasn’t done what she was meant to do back there. She doesn’t run from the monsters; she doesn’t ever run.

The air here is hot and still. It smells like pine sap and cicadas. The air here smells hot, and Dancy imagines that, rain or no rain, one careless match would be enough to set the world on fire. She drops her heavy duffel bag onto the ground, slips the knife back into her waistband, and looks about her. “Who are you, anyway?” she asks the girl.

“Who are you?”

“I asked first,” Dancy replies.

The girl who dragged her into the forest, away from the boomerangheaded dragon, shrugs, and alright, she says, whatever. “My name’s Jezzie, Jezzie Lilligraven.”

“Jessie?”

“No, Jezzie,” says the girl. “With z’s. It’s short for Jezebel.”

Dancy turns her attention back to the clearing. There’s a big wooden packing crate near the center, and a door and window has been cut into the side facing her. The wood is emblazoned with MAYTAG, and THIS END UP, and a red arrow pointing heavenward. There’s a piece of pale blue calico cloth tacked over the window and there’s a door made from corrugated tin. There aren’t any hinges; it’s just propped in place.

“That’s sort of an odd name,” Dancy says, glancing up at the sky, because the dragon might have followed them. “Who’d name their daughter after Jezebel? She was an evil woman who worshipped Baal and persecuted the prophets of God and his people. She was thrown from a window and fed to wild dogs by Jehu for her sins. Who would name their daughter after someone like that?”

The girl stares at Dancy a moment, rolls her eyes, then heads for the wooden packing crate.

“Yeah, so what’s your name, Little Miss Sunshine, and, by the way, you’re very welcome.”

“Dancy. My name is Dancy Flammarion. And very welcome for what?”

The girl lifts the corrugated tin and sets it aside, leaning it against the outer wall of the crate. Dancy thinks it looks cool in there, within the arms of those shadows.

“Dancy Flammarion? That’s your name?”

“Yeah. So?”

The girl shakes her head and steps into the packing crate, vanishing from view. Dancy can still hear her, though.

“Just, with a name like that, I wouldn’t be ragging on anyone else’s. Ever heard of throwing rocks in glass houses?”

“It’s a town up in Greene County,” Dancy says. “My grandmother was born in Dancy, so my mother named me Dancy.”

“You gonna stand out there or what?” the girl says from inside the packing crate.

“Well, you haven’t invited me in.”

There’s a pause, and then, with an exaggerated politeness, the girl says “Dancy Flammarion, would you like to come inside?”

“Yeah,” Dancy says, checking the sky one last time.

It isn’t as cool inside the crate as she’d hoped, but it’s cooler than it had been inside the abandoned Western Railway of Alabama boxcar. There’s a threadbare rug covering the floor, a rug the color of green apples; there’s a cot set up at one end of the crate and a folding aluminum card table at the other. There’s a blue blanket at the foot bed, neatly folded, and a pillow. Books are stacked under the cot and along the walls. On the table, there’s a box of graham crackers and another box of chocolate moon pies. There are also two cans of pork and beans. Beneath the table is a styrofoam cooler and a plastic jug of water.

“You live here?” Dancy asks, eyeing the water jug, aware now just how parched her mouth and throat is.

“No,” the girl replies. “I’m not a hobo. I live down on Parish Road, close to Fort Rucker. That’s an Army base.”

“I’m not a hobo. I done told you that already.”

“Says you. You’re the one out hitchhiking with a knapsack.”

Dancy frowns and looks around the crate again.

“All these books yours?”

“Yeah,” the girl says. “They were my granddad’s, and now they’re mine. My daddy was gonna throw ’em all out, but I saved them. You can have a seat on the cot there, if your britches ain’t too wet and if they ain’t muddy.”

Dancy pats the butt of her jeans, decides they probably are too damp to be sitting on anyone’s bed, and so she settles for a place on the rug, instead.

“It’s nice in here,” Dancy says.

“Thank you,” says Jezzie Lilligraven. “This is where I come to be alone and think, to get away from my brothers and just be by myself.”

“Well, it’s nice,” Dancy says again. Then she notices something else on the floor, something else spaced out here and there along the walls of the packing crate, between the stacks of books – there are pint Mason jars and big two and three big quart jars that might once have held dill pickles or pickled eggs or pickled pig’s feet, but now they’re filled with clear liquid and dead things. Dancy looks at Jezzie and then back at the jars. The one nearest Dancy has a big king snake, black coils and links of cream-colored scales, and the one next to it holds a baby alligator.

“That’s my herpetology collection,” Jezzie says, before Dancy has a chance to ask, and then the girl picks up a yellow and pink waffle-weave dishrag and wipes the sweat off her face.

Dancy looks up at her. “Your what?” she asks.

“It’s the study of reptiles and amphibians. Herpetology.”

“You keep dead things in jars?”

“So I can study them. I caught them myself, and I used rubbing alcohol to preserve them. It ain’t so good as formalin, but where am I gonna get that?”

Dancy rubs at her eyes, which feel at least as dry as her throat.

“You want something to drink?” Jezzie asks, like maybe the girl can read her mind. “I got water, and I got water. But it’s good sweet water, right from our well.”

“Yes, please,” Dancy replies, and Jezzie opens the plastic jug and fills a jelly glass halfway full.

“Now, don’t drink it too fast,” she says. “You’ll get cramps. You might throw up, if you drink it too fast.”

You think I don’t know not to gulp water when I’m this hot and thirsty? she wants to say. You think I don’t know no better? But she keeps the thoughts to herself and sips the water in the jelly glass.

“I like to think one day I’m gonna go away to college,” Jezzie tells her. “I won’t, cause we don’t have the money, and my grades ain’t good enough for no scholarship. But I like to think it, anyway. I have my granddad’s books – like you’ve got your great granddad’s knapsack – and I teach myself everything I can. I don’t have to be ignorant, just cause my family can’t afford college. I might just wind up working at the Wal-Mart or my auntie’s BBQ place, but I don’t have to be ignorant.”

“Keeping snakes in jars, you think that makes you smart?” Dancy asks, and she leans a little nearer the jar with the king snake. Its dead eyes are a milky white. She sets her glass down, picks up one of the books, and she reads the cover aloud – Prehistoric Life by Percy E. Raymond, Third Printing, Harvard University Press.

See? Dancy thinks. I ain’t ignorant, neither. I can read.

“That’s one of my favorites, that one is,” Jezzie tells her. “It’s kinda outta date, cause it was published in 1950, and we know lots more now. I mean, scientists know lots more. But it’s still one of my favorites. It taught me about evolution and geologic time. My teacher wouldn’t teach that, skipped over that part of the textbook so parents wouldn’t complain about –”

“Evolution?” Dancy asks, flipping through the yellowing pages. There are photographs of fossils and dinosaurs and skeletons. “You believe in that, in evolution?”

Jezzie is silent a moment. She sits down on the floor by the table.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I do. It’s science. It’s how everything alive –”

“It’s against the Bible,” Dancy interrupts, setting the book back down. “The Book of Genesis tells how the world was made.”

“In six days,” Jezzie says.

“Yes, in six days. And if that book says any different it’s against God and Jesus, and it’s blasphemous.”

Jezzie is frowning and looking at her hands. “You sound like my Daddy and Mama and the parson down at First Testament Baptist. You ever read a book like that? You ever read about Charles Darwin and natural selection? You know about Mendel and genetics?”

Dancy puts the book down and picks up her glass again. She takes another swallow, wishing the water were at least a little bit cooler.

“No. I don’t read books that go against God.”

“What you’ve got is a closed mind, Dancy Flammarion. You think you know what’s what, and so you won’t let nothin’ else in.”

“I know I didn’t come from no dirty ol’ monkey,” Dancy mutters.

“Oh, but it don’t bother you to think you came from a fistful of mud?”

Outside, the cicadas have begun singing, and it sounds to Dancy like the trees are in pain, the bugs giving voice to the aching of bark and loblolly pine needles.

Jezzie says, “And you probably think the whole wide world is only ten thousand years old. I bet that’s what you think.”

“No, I don’t know how old the world is, Jezebel” – and Dancy says her name like it’s an accusation – “but I know how long it took to make it.”

Jezzie sighs and shakes her head. “That’s just a sad thing, someone with a mind that ain’t got no room for anythin’ but what some preacher says.”

“This water ain’t sweet,” Dancy says, after she’s emptied the glass. “It’s warm, and it tastes like that plastic jug.”

Jezzie reaches over and takes the glass from Dancy. “Closed minded and ungrateful,” she sighs. “You don’t look like someone in a position to be picky about the water she’s drinking.”

“I ain’t ungrateful. But you said –”

“You want more, or is my water not good enough for a close-mind, Biblethumpin’, holy-roller hobo?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Dancy says, though she isn’t. She could easily drink another half glass of the water. But the girl’s right. It was ungrateful, saying what she did, and she’s too ashamed to ask for more.

I shouldn’t even be here. I should be out there on the road. I don’t run. I don’t get to run.

“That thing in the sky, you seen that before?” Dancy asks.

Jezzie nods and pours more water into the glass, even though Dancy hasn’t asked for it. She sets the glass down on the rug, take it or leave it, and then she looks up at the ceiling of the packing crate.

“Yeah,” Jezzie answers, “I’ve seen it lots. People around here been seein’ it on and off since I was little. They call it a thunderbird, and a demon, but that ain’t what it is.”

“It’s a dragon,” Dancy says.

Jezzie laughs and shakes her head again. “It ain’t no damn dragon, girl. There’s no such thing as dragons.”

Dancy feels her face flush, and she wants to get up and walk out, leave this heathen girl alone with her dead snakes and Godless books. Instead, she picks up the glass and takes another sip. Instead, she asks, “Then what is it, if it ain’t no dragon? You’re so smart, Jezebel, you tell me what I saw out there.”

“Long time ago,” Jezzie says, finally taking her eyes off the ceiling of the crate. “Back about seventy million years ago –”

“The world ain’t nearly that old,” Dancy says.

“– all these parts round here were covered over by a shallow tropical ocean, like the sea down around the Florida Keys. And there were strange animals in the ocean back then, animals that went extinct, and if we were to see them today, we’d call them sea monsters – the mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, giant turtles. And in the sky –”

“But,” Dancy interrupts, “when the Flood came, Noah’s Flood, everything was under water, the whole world, for forty days and forty nights.”

“Dancy, you want to hear my answer, or you want to talk?” Jezzie asks and crosses her arms. “You asked me a question, and now I’m tryin’ to answer it.”

Dancy just shrugs and takes another sip of water. After a moment or two, Jezzie continues.

“That was during what’s called the Cretaceous Period,” she says, “because of how these shallow seas laid down layers of chalk. In Latin, chalk is creta.”

Sweat rolls down Dancy’s forehead and into the corner of her left eye. It stings.

“I asked you about the dragon,” she says, squinting, “not for a Latin lesson. And chalk doesn’t come from the sea.”

“Have you ever even seen the inside of schoolhouse?”

Dancy rubs her eye, then stops and stares at Jezzie. The girl’s glaring back at her. She has the look of someone whose accustomed to being patient, the look of someone who frequently suffers fools, even though she isn’t very good at it. It’s a very adult look, and it makes Dancy wish she’d never stepped inside the packing crate.

“In the sky,” Jezzie says again, “there were animals called pterosaurs, huge flying reptiles, and if you were to run into one today – which you did – yeah, you’d likely call it a dragon.” Then she takes the copy of Prehistoric Life, opens it, and thumbs through the pages. She quickly finds what she’s looking for, then turns the book around so Dancy cans see, too. On Page 169, there’s a drawing of a skeleton, the skeleton of a boomerang-headed monster. The skeleton of Dancy’s dragon.

“I’m not in any sorta mood to sit here and argue about scripture and science with you, Dancy Flammarion. But you asked a question, and I answered it as best I can.”

Dancy takes the book from her and sits studying the drawing.

“‘Skeleton of Puhteranodon,’” she reads.

“No. You don’t say the ‘P,’” Jezzie tells her. “The ‘P’ is silent.”

Sweat drips from Dancy’s bangs and spatters the page. “How?” she asks.

“How what?”

“How if these things were around so long ago, and they ain’t around anymore, did one try to eat me not even half an hour ago? You know all this stuff, then you explain, Jezebel, how is it that happened?”

“I don’t know,” Jezzie admits. She leans back against the cot and wipes her face with the dishrag again. “I heard some people say it’s the Devil, and that he’s haunting us cause of wicked things people do. Others say it’s some kind of Indian god the Muskogee Creek used to pray to and make human sacrifices to. The guy runs the Winn-Dixie, he says it came outta a UFO from outer space.”

“But you don’t think any of that’s true.”

Jezzie frowns. She shrugs and takes the book back from Dancy. “No, I don’t suppose I do. It’s all just superstition and tall tales, that’s all it is.”

“So...?”

“You askin’ me what I believe instead? I thought the stuff I believe is against God, and you don’t want to hear my blasphemin’ nonsense.”

“It’s really hot in here,” Dancy says, changing the subject. “I sat out the thunderstorm this morning in an old railroad car, and this place might even be as hot as that.”

“You get used to it. Where you from, anyway?”

Dancy glances out the bright rectangular space leading back to the August day.

“Down near Milligan, Florida,” she says, “Place called Shrove Wood. It’s in Okaloosa County. You won’t have heard of it. No one’s heard of Shrove Wood. But that’s where I grew up, near Wampee Creek.”

“You get homesick?”

Now it’s Dancy’s turn to shrug. The cicadas are so loud she imagines that sound shattering the sky, and she imagines, too, the chunks of sky falling down and bleeding blue all over the earth. She thinks about the cabin off Elenore Road that she shared with her grandmother and mother, until the fire. The house where she was born and raised.

“Sometimes I do,” she says.

“What you doin’ out here on the road, then? Why ain’t you back home with your people? You a runway?”

And Dancy almost tells her about the seraph, almost says, My angel, that’s why. She almost tells the girl about the monsters, all the monsters before the dragon and all the monsters still to come, if the seraph is to be believed, and who in their right mind’s gonna say an angel’s a liar? She’s pretty sure even Jezebel wouldn’t say that. She might be a heathen who’s been led astray from the Word of God by evil books, but Dancy doesn’t think she’s crazy.

“I ain’t no runaway. I didn’t have nothin’ to run away from.”

Which, she knows, isn’t exactly true.

“So, where you headed?”

Dancy doesn’t answer that. Instead, she asks, “If you don’t think all those other people are right about what the dragon is, and you think it’s one of them pterosaurs, then you must have an opinion about how it’s here.”

Jezzie fidgets with the laces of her sneakers.

“I got this notion,” she says, “but it doesn’t make much sense. I mean, I don’t think it’s very scientific. I try to be scientific, when I believe something.”

The cicadas are so loud, Dancy wants to cover her ears.

“Okay, so,” Jezzie says, the book in her lap, the waffle-weave dishrag on the rug next to her, “I’ll tell you what I think. But we ain’t gonna argue about it. I ain’t asking you to believe any of it. I know you won’t, but if I tell you, you don’t get to tell me I’m goin’ to Hell just for thinking it.”

“You don’t even believe in Hell.”

“You don’t know that, Dancy Flammarion. You don’t know me.”

“Fine,” Dancy mutters and takes her eyes off the open door. Orange-white after images dance like ghosts about the inside of the packing crate.

“At the end of the Cretaceous Period, something really bad happened. An asteroid – which is like a meteorite, only a lot bigger – it smashed into the Earth, came down right in the Gulf of Mexico, not even so far from here. And it was a gigantic asteroid, maybe big as New York City –”

“You ever been to New York City?”

“No, but that ain’t the point. This asteroid was enormous, and when it hit, the energy released by the explosion was something like two million times more than the largest atomic bomb ever built. You just think of that much energy. You can’t even, not really. But it almost wiped out everything alive, killed off all those sea monsters and the dinosaurs – and the pterosaurs. And maybe it did something else.”

“Did something else like what?”

“Maybe it was so big an explosion, down there in Yucatan –”

“Where?”

“Yucatan, Mexico.”

“But you just said this happened in the Gulf of Mexico.”

“You know why it’s called the Gulf of Mexico?” Jezzie asks, and Dancy doesn’t know, so she shuts up. “But here’s what I think,” Jezzie goes on. “Maybe that explosion was so big it ripped a hole in time. A wormhole or tesseract. And that’s how the pterosaur gets through. It’s interdimensional or something. It ain’t supposed to be here, and it’s probably confused as all get out, but here it is anyway, because it flew right through that rip in time, maybe at the very instant of the impact, before the blast wave and firestorms and tsunamis got it.

“And, shit, maybe it ain’t nothin’ more than an echo, a ghost.”

For an almost a full minute, neither of them says anything. Finally, Dancy breaks the awkward silence hanging between them.

“You’re really just making all this up,” she says.

Jezzie frowns again. “I warned you it wasn’t very scientific.”

And then the throbbing cicada shriek is pierced by the scream Dancy heard back on the road, the cry of the dragon that Jezzie insists isn’t a dragon at all. Instinctively, Dancy ducks her head and reaches for her knife; she notices that Jezzie ducks, as well. They both sit staring at the ceiling of the packing crate, tense as barbed wire.

“That was right overhead,” Dancy whispers. “Does it do that? Does it follow you back here?”

Jezzie slowly shakes her head. “Never has before.”

It didn’t follow her, Dancy thinks. It followed me.

And then she sees what’s in Jezzie’s right hand, an old Colt revolver like the one her grandmother kept around to shoot rattlesnakes.

“You know how to use that?” Dancy asks her, as Jezzie thumbs back the hammer. And the sound of the hammer locking into place is so loud that Dancy realizes the bugs in the trees have gone quiet.

“Wouldn’t be holding it like this if I didn’t.”

“Well, how about put it away,” Dancy tells her. “I don’t like guns.”

Again, Jezzie shakes her head, and she keeps her finger on the trigger of the cocked revolver.

“You never did answer my question,” she says. “What you doin’ out here, if you ain’t a runaway and you ain’t a hobo?”

The day has grown so still and silent that Dancy thinks she can almost hear the blood flowing through her veins, can almost hear the grubs and earthworms plowing through the soil beneath the crate. She hasn’t yet drawn her knife, but her hand’s still on the handle, the carved antler cool and smooth against her perspiring palm. She’s been meaning to find some leather to wrap around the handle, because sweat and blood make it slippery, but she hasn’t gotten around to it.

“I’m goin’ someplace,” she tells the girl.

“Yeah, and just where might that be, Dancy Flammarion?”

“I don’t know yet,” Dancy replies. She didn’t even have to think about the answer. Unlike most things, it’s simple and true.

“I sorta had a feeling you were gonna say something like that.”

“I guess I’ll know when I get there,” Dancy says. “You reckon that thing’s still out there? You reckon it’s flying around right over our heads?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Jezzie asks and frowns.

“Well, you say you know it ain’t no dragon, so I thought maybe –”

“Then you thought wrong.”

The silence is broken then by the sound of enormous wings, slowly rising and falling, beating at the sky, and both girls hold their breath as the flapping grows farther and farther away, finally fading into the distance.

Softened almost into melody, Dancy thinks, remembering a line from a book her mother once read her about monsters from Mars trying to take over the world. But God sent germs to stop them.

... slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

And what’s the pterosaur, if she’s right, but another sort of invader, maybe not from another planet, but from another time, and what’s the difference? Something evil that should have died in the Flood, when God – in his wisdom – wiped so much evil off the face of Creation.

“Thanks for the water,” Dancy says, and she gets to her feet, finally releasing her hold on the handle of the big Bowie knife.

“You ain’t goin’ back out there,” Jezzie says, still whispering. It’s not a question.

“You said it ain’t never come out here before. That’s cause it’s here for me, Jezebel, not for you. It’s my dragon to fight, not yours.”

“You’re really crazy as a damn betsy bug, you know that?”

All men are mad in some way or the other, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God’s madmen...

... so deal with God’s madmen...

Dancy’s mother read her so many books, before the demons finally came for Julia Flammarion, and so many of the books had monsters in them. She sometimes imagines that her mother knew the seraph was coming, so she was preparing her daughter.

“I ain’t lettin’ you go out there,” Jezzie says again, a little louder than before.

“This is what I do, Jezebel,” Dancy replies. “I fight dragons.”

Jezebel very slowly eases her thumb off the hammer, decocking the gun.

“It ain’t a dragon. It’s just an animal.”

“Thank you for the water,” Dancys says again, shouldering her duffel bag.

“If you’ll just wait a few hours, it goes away at night. You could wait here with me, and I could read to you, or I could tell you about the big ol’ alligator snapper I found last summer down at Chatham Bend. Or I could tell you more about the chalk seas. I’ve hardly told you anything about the animals. Did you know, they found a dinosaur up at Selma, back in the 1940s? An actual dinosaur. It was a new kind of duck bill. Then they found another one, related to Tyrannosaurus, at –”

“I’ve already stayed too long,” Dancy says, interrupting her. “You never should have brought me here. All that’s done is put you in danger.”

“Jesus,” Jezzie whispers, staring at the gun in her hands. “You really goin’ out there, ain’t you?”

“Don’t you blaspheme,” Dancy says. “Bad enough you believe all this evolution claptrap, without you gotta also take the Lord’s name in vain.

But, truth be told, all Dancy wants to do is sit in the packing crate with this strange, Godless girl, sipping warm water that tastes like a plastic jug and maybe eating some of those graham crackers and pork and beans. She can’t even remember the last time she had a graham cracker. She remembers how they taste smeared with muscadine and blackberry preserves, and her mouth fills with saliva.

“Then here,” says Jezzie, “you take this,” and she offers Dancy the water jug. Dancy doesn’t turn it down. She almost asks for some of the crackers, too, but that would be rude, asking more when you’ve just been given such a gift. “You won’t need it?” she asks.

“Nah, it ain’t that far back home. And here,” says Jezzie, “you take this, too. You need it more’n me.” And she holds the revolver out to Dancy. The barrel and the cylinder glint faintly in the dim light inside the packing crate.

“How old is that thing anyway?” Dancy asks. “Looks like it could’a been used in the Civil War, it looks so old. Gun that old, it’s liable to blow up in your hands.”

Jezzie shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “It was my uncle’s. But I don’t know how old it is. But here, you take it. It’s loaded. Six shots, but I ain’t got no extra bullets.”

“I don’t like guns,” Dancy says again. “You keep it. I got my knife.”

And ain’t that how you slay dragons, with sharp blades? Ain’t my knife as good as any sword ever was?

“Dancy, if you’ll just wait until nightfall –”

“Thank you for the water,” Dancy says for the third time. “That’s what I most need, it’s so hot today.”

“What you most need is some goddamn common sense.”

Dancy almost tells her, again, not to take the Lord’s name in vain, but what’s the point. Ain’t no saving this girl, seduced as she is by atheists and evolutionists.

Just be wasting my breath, that’s all.

“It was nice meeting you, Jezebel Lilligraven,” Dancy says, even if she’s not quite sure that’s true.

“Just be careful,” Jezzie says.

And then Dancy steps out into the sunlight, hardly any less bright or scorching than when she stepped inside the crate, at least an hour before. She looks up at the indifferent sky above the clearing, half expecting to see the dragon, but there’s only the white eye of Heaven gazing back down at her. It can’t be later than three o’clock, she thinks. Still hours and hours left until dusk.

The cicadas are singing again.

When she reaches the edge of the clearing, she looks back just once, and there’s the girl’s face peering out through a part in the calico curtain. She looks frightened; she waves at Dancy, and Dancy waves back.

I’m never gonna see you again, and I kinda wish that wasn’t true.

She walks back into the short stretch of forest dividing the clearing from the road. The going seems a little more difficult than when Jezzie was dragging her along, pell-mell, and once she gets turned around in a kudzu patch, has to retrace her steps, and find a clearer path. She’s drenched in sweat by the time she reaches the gravel shoulder of the highway, and she opens the jug and takes a long swallow. Then she looks again at the blue, blue sky, all the morning’s thunderheads come and gone. There’s no sign of the dragon, so maybe the girl in the crate was right, and maybe it’s flown away back through a hole in time to a world of serpent haunted seas, before Adam and Eve were driven out and cherubim with flaming swords were placed at the gates of Eden that no man or woman would ever again get in. Maybe that’s how it is.

And maybe that girl named after a whore and an idolater is right about all of it, and maybe you don’t know nothin’ about how things really are.

Dancy pushes the thought away, because self doubt’s as dangerous as books that say people evolved from monkeys and slime. Self doubt’s a distraction that can get her killed. She spares one more glance at the summer sky, and then she starts walking again, following the white center line, which will just have to do as a road map until the angel decides to speak to her again.

MY SON’S EYES were broken. Emptied out. Frozen over. None of the joy or gladness were there. None of the tears. Normally I’d return from a job and his face would split down the middle with happiness, seeing me for the first time in three months. Now it stayed flat as ice. His eyes leapt away the instant they met mine. His shoulders were broader and his arms more sturdy, and lone hairs now stood on his upper lip, but his eyes were all I saw.

“Thede,” I said, grabbing him.

He let himself be hugged. His arms hung limply at his sides. My lungs could not fill. My chest tightened from the force of all the never-let-me-go bear hugs he had given me over the course of the past fifteen years, and would never give again.

“You know how he gets when you’re away,” his mother had said, on the phone, the night before, preparing me. “He’s a teenager now. Hating your parents is a normal part of it.”

I hadn’t listened, then. My hands and thighs still ached from months of straddling an ice saw; my hearing was worse with every trip; a slip had cost me five days work and five days pay and five days’ worth of infirmary bills; I had returned to a sweat-smelling bunk in an illegal room I shared with seven other iceboat workers – and none of it mattered because in the morning I would see my son.

“Hey,” he murmured emotionlessly. “Dad.”

I stepped back, turned away until the red ebbed out of my face. Spring had come and the city had lowered its photoshade. It felt good, even in the cold wind.

“You guys have fun,” Lajla said, pressing money discretely into my palm. I watched her go with a rising sense of panic. Bring back my son, I wanted to shout, the one who loves me. Where is he. What have you done with him. Who is this surly creature. Below us, through the ubiquitous steel grid that held up Qaanaaq’s two million lives, black Greenland water sloshed against the locks of our floating city.

Breathe, Dom, I told myself, and eventually I could. You knew this was coming. You knew one day he would cease to be a kid.

“How’s school?” I asked.

Thede shrugged. “Fine.”

“Math still your favorite subject?”

“Math was never my favorite subject.”

I was pretty sure that it had been, but I didn’t want to argue.

“What’s your favorite subject?”

Another shrug. We had met at the sea lion rookery, but I could see at once that Thede no longer cared about sea lions. He stalked through the crowd with me, his face a frozen mask of anger.

I couldn’t blame him for how easy he had it. So what if he didn’t live in the Brooklyn foster-care barracks, or work all day at the solar-cell plant school? He still had to live in a city that hated him for his dark skin and ice-grunt father.

“Your mom says you got into the Institute,” I said, unsure even of what that was. A management school, I imagined. A big deal for Thede. But he only nodded.

At the fry stand, Thede grimaced at my clunky Swedish. The counter girl shifted to a flawless English, but I would not be cheated of the little bit of the language that I knew. “French fries and coffee for me and my son,” I said, or thought I did, because she looked confused and then Thede muttered something and she nodded and went away.

And then I knew why it hurt so much, the look on his face. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a kid anymore. I could handle him growing up. What hurt was how he looked at me: like the rest of them look at me, these Swedes and grid city natives for whom I would forever be a stupid New York refugee, even if I did get out five years before the Fall.

Gulls fought over food thrown to the lions. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s good. Full manager now. We’re moving to Arm Three, next year.”

His mother and I hadn’t been meant to be. She was born here, her parents Black Canadians employed by one of the big Swedish construction firms that built Qaanaaq back when the Greenland Melt began to open up the interior for resource extraction and grid cities starting sprouting all along the coast. They’d kept her in public school, saying it would be good for a future manager to be able to relate to the immigrants and workers she’d one day command, and they were right. She even fell for one of them, a fresh-off-the-boat North American taking tech classes, but wised up pretty soon after she saw how hard it was to raise a kid on an ice worker’s pay. I had never been mad at her. Lajla was right to leave me, right to focus on her job. Right to build the life for Thede I couldn’t.

“Why don’t you learn Swedish?” he asked a French fry, unable to look at me.

“I’m trying,” I said. “I need to take a class. But they cost money, and anyway I don’t have –”

“Don’t have time. I know. Han’s father says people make time for the things that are important for them.” Here his eyes did meet mine, and held, sparkling with anger and abandonment.

“Han one of your friends?”

Thede nodded, eyes escaping.

Han’s father would be Chinese, and not one of the laborers who helped build this city – all of them went home to hardship-job rewards. He’d be an engineer or manager for one of the extraction firms. He would live in a nice house and work in an office. He would be able to make choices about how he spent his time.

“I have something for you,” I said, in desperation.

I hadn’t brought it for him. I carried it around with me, always. Because it was comforting to have it with me, and because I couldn’t trust that the men I bunked with wouldn’t steal it.

Heart slipping, I handed over the NEW YORK F CKING CITY T-shirt that was my most – my only – prized possession. Thin as paper, soft as baby bunnies. My mom had made me scratch the letter U off it before I could wear the thing to school. And Little Thede had loved it. We made a big ceremony of putting it on only once a year, on his birthday, and noting how much he had grown by how much it had shrunk on him. Sometimes if I stuck my nose in it and breathed deeply enough, I could still find a trace of the laundromat in the basement of my mother’s building. Or the brake-screech stink of the subway. What little was left of New York City was inside that shirt. Parting with it meant something, something huge and irrevocable.

But my son was slipping through my fingers. And he mattered more than the lost city where whatever else I was – starving, broke, an urchin, a criminal – I belonged.

“Dad,” Thede whispered, taking it. And here, at last, his eyes came back. The eyes of a boy who loved his father. Who didn’t care that his father was a thick-skulled obstinate immigrant grunt. Who believed his father could do anything. “Dad. You love this shirt.”

But I love you more, I did not say. Than anything. Instead, “It’ll fit you just fine now.” And then: “Enough sea lions. Beam fights?”

Thede shrugged. I wondered if they had fallen out of fashion while I was away. So much did, every time I left. The ice ships were the only work I could get, capturing calved glacier chunks and breaking them down into drinking water to be sold to the wide new swaths of desert that ringed the globe, and the work was hard and dangerous and kept me forever in limbo.

Only two fighters in the first fight, both lithe and swift and thin, their styles an amalgam of Chinese martial arts. Not like the big bruising New York boxers who had been the rage when I arrived, illegally, at fifteen years old, having paid two drunks to vouch for my age. Back before the Fail-Proof Trillion Dollar NYC Flood-Surge Locks had failed, and 80% of the city sunk, and the grid cities banned all new East Coast arrivals. Now the North Americans in Arm Eight were just one of many overcrowded, underskilled labor forces for the city’s corporations to exploit.

They leapt from beam to beam, fighting mostly in kicks, grappling briefly when both met on the same beam. I watched Thede. Thin, fragile Thede, with the wide eyes and nostrils that seemed to take in all the world’s ugliness, all its stink. He wasn’t having a good time. When he was twelve he had begged me to bring him. I had pretended to like it, back then for his sake. Now he pretended for mine. We were both acting out what we thought the other wanted, and that thought should have troubled me. But that’s how it had been with my dad. That’s what I thought being a man meant. I put my hand on his shoulder and he did not shake it off. We watched men harm each other high above us.

THE SUN BURNED through the clouds around noon on the long Cytherean day, and Dharthi happened to be awake and in a position to see it. She was alone in the highlands of Ishtar Terra on a research trip, five sleeps out from Butler base camp, and – despite the nagging desire to keep traveling – had decided to take a rest break for an hour or two. Noon at this latitude was close enough to the one hundredth solar dieiversary of her birth that she’d broken out her little hoard of shelf-stable cake to celebrate. The prehensile fingers and leaping legs of her bioreactor-printed, skin-bonded adaptshell made it simple enough to swarm up one of the tall, gracile pseudo-figs and creep along its gray smooth branches until the ceaseless Venusian rain dripped directly on her adaptshell’s slick-furred head.

It was safer in the treetops, if you were sitting still. Nothing big enough to want to eat her was likely to climb up this far. The grues didn’t come out until nightfall, but there were swamp-tigers, damnthings, and velociraptors to worry about. The forest was too thick for predators any bigger than that, but a swarm of scorpion-rats was no joke. And Venus had only been settled for three hundred days, and most of that devoted to Aphrodite Terra; there was still plenty of undiscovered monsters out here in the wilderness.

The water did not bother Dharthi, nor did the dip and sway of the branch in the wind. Her adaptshell was beautifully tailored to this terrain, and that fur shed water like the hydrophobic miracle of engineering that it was. The fur was a glossy, iridescent purple that qualified as black in most lights, to match the foliage that dripped rain like strings of glass beads from the multiple points of palmate leaves. Red-black, to make the most of the rainy grey light. They’d fold their leaves up tight and go dormant when night came.

Dharthi had been born with a chromosomal abnormality that produced red-green colorblindness. She’d been about ten solar days old when they’d done the gene therapy to fix it, and she just about remembered her first glimpses of the true, saturated colors of Venus. She’d seen it first as if it were Earth: washed out and faded.

For now, however, they were alive with the scurryings and chitterings of a few hundred different species of Cytherean canopy-dwellers. And the quiet, nearly-contented sound of Dharthi munching on cake. She would not dwell; she would not stew. She would look at all this natural majesty, and try to spot the places where an unnaturally geometric line or angle showed in the topography of the canopy.

From here, she could stare up the enormous sweep of Maxwell Montes to the north, its heights forested to the top in Venus’ deep, rich atmosphere – but the sight of them lost for most of its reach in clouds. Dharthi could only glimpse the escarpment at all because she was on the ‘dry’ side. Maxwell Montes scraped the heavens, kicking the cloud layer up as if it had struck an aileron, so the ‘wet’ side got the balance of the rain. Balance in this case meaning that the mountains on the windward side were scoured down to granite, and a nonadapted terrestrial organism had better bring breathing gear.

But here in the lee, the forest flourished, and on a clear hour from a height, visibility might reach a couple of klicks or more.

Dharthi took another bite of cake – it might have been ‘chocolate’; it was definitely caffeinated, because she was picking up the hit on her blood monitors already – and turned herself around on her branch to face downslope. The sky was definitely brighter, the rain falling back to a drizzle and then a mist, and the clouds were peeling back along an arrowhead trail that led directly back to the peak above her. A watery golden smudge brightened one patch of clouds. They tore and she glimpsed the full unguarded brilliance of the daystar, just hanging there in a chip of glossy cerulean sky, the clouds all around it smeared with thick unbelievable rainbows. Waves of mist rolled and slid among the leaves of the canopy, made golden by the shimmering unreal light.

Dharthi was glad she was wearing the shell. It played the sun’s warmth through to her skin without also relaying the risks of ultraviolet exposure. She ought to be careful of her eyes, however: a crystalline shield protected them, but its filters weren’t designed for naked light.

The forest noises rose to a cacophony. It was the third time in Dharthi’s one hundred solar days of life that she had glimpsed the sun. Even here, she imagined that some of these animals would never have seen it before.

She decided to accept it as a good omen for her journey. Sadly, there was no way to spin the next thing that happened that way.

“Hey,” said a voice in her head. “Good cake.”

“That proves your pan is malfunctioning, if anything does,” Dharthi replied sourly. Never accept a remote synaptic link with a romantic and professional partner. No matter how convenient it seems at the time, and in the field. Because someday they might be a romantic and professional partner you really would rather not talk to right now.

“I heard that.”

“What do you want, Kraken?”

Dharthi imagined Kraken smiling, and wished she hadn’t. She could hear it in her partner’s ‘voice’ when she spoke again, anyway. “Just to wish you a happy dieiversary.”

“Aw,” Dharthi said. “Aren’t you sweet. Noblesse oblige?”

“Maybe,” Kraken said tiredly, “I actually care?”

“Mmm,” Dharthi said. “What’s the ulterior motive this time?”

Kraken sighed. It was more a neural flutter than a heave of breath, but Dharthi got the point all right. “Maybe I actually care.”

“Sure,” Dharthi said. “Every so often you have to glance down from Mount Olympus and check up on the lesser beings.”

“Olympus is on Mars,” Kraken said.

It didn’t make Dharthi laugh, because she clenched her right fist hard enough that, even though the cushioning adaptshell squished against her palm, she still squeezed the blood out of her fingers. You and all your charm. You don’t get to charm me any more.

“Look,” Kraken said. “You have something to prove. I understand that.”

“How can you possibly understand that? When was the last time you were turned down for a resource allocation? Doctor youngest-ever recipient of the Cytherean Award for Excellence in Xenoarcheology? Doctor Founding Field-Martius Chair of Archaeology at the University on Aphrodite?”

“The University on Aphrodite,” Kraken said, “is five Quonset huts and a repurposed colonial landing module.”

“It’s what we’ve got.”

“I peaked early,” Kraken said, after a pause. “I was never your rival, Dharthi. We were colleagues.” Too late, in Dharthi’s silence, she realized her mistake. “Are colleagues.”

“You look up from your work often enough to notice I’m missing?”

There was a pause. “That may be fair,” Kraken said at last. “But if being professionally focused –”

“Obsessed.”

“– is a failing, it was hardly a failing limited to me. Come back. Come back to me. We’ll talk about it. I’ll help you try for a resource voucher again tomorrow.”

“I don’t want your damned help, Kraken!”

The forest around Dharthi fell silent. Shocked, she realized she’d shouted out loud.

“Haring off across Ishtar alone, with no support – you’re not going to prove your theory about aboriginal Cytherean settlement patterns, Dhar. You’re going to get eaten by a grue.”

“I’ll be home by dark,” Dharthi said. “Anyway, if I’m not – all the better for the grue.”

“You know who else was always on about being laughed out of the Academy?” Kraken said. Her voice had that teasing tone that could break Dharthi’s worst, most self-loathing, prickliest mood – if she let it. “Moriarty.”

I will not laugh. Fuck you.

Dharthi couldn’t tell if Kraken had picked it up or not. There was a silence, as if she were controlling her temper or waiting for Dharthi to speak.

“If you get killed,” Kraken said, “make a note in your file that I can use your DNA. You’re not getting out of giving me children that easily.”

Ha ha, Dharthi thought. Only serious. She couldn’t think of what to say, and so she said nothing. The idea of a little Kraken filled her up with mushy softness inside. But somebody’s career would go on hold for the first fifty solar days of that kid’s life, and Dharthi was pretty sure it wouldn’t be Kraken.

She couldn’t think of what to say in response, and the silence got heavy until Kraken said, “Dammit. I’m worried about you.”

“Worry about yourself.” Dharthi couldn’t break the connection, but she could bloody well shut down her end of the dialogue. And she could refuse to hear.

She pitched the remains of the cake as far across the canopy as she could, then regretted it. Hopefully nothing Cytherean would try to eat it; it might give the local biology a belly ache.

THOUGH I AM otherwise relentlessly normal, I have one peculiarity: I get along well only with people who are smarter than me. My wife, for example, is smarter than me. I am happy in my marriage.

In my present employment I should be very happy, because everyone around me is smarter and often at pains to prove that fact. It is my duty to reinforce their positive opinions, but at the same time to exert, now and then, small course corrections. Nothing shores up a fine self-opinion better than success.

So far, five years into our project, we had known nothing but failure.

The first thing you saw as you approached the perimeter site was the warehouse, large, square, and painted a brilliant titanium white. Surrounded by two high hurricane fences topped with glittering rolls of razor wire, it looked like the kind of place where you might store an A-bomb. Access to the site was on a strictly controlled, need-to-go basis. Parking was several hundred yards away, on a small lot covered with pulverized rubber. You were told not to drive a loud car, not to cut out your exhaust or rev your engine, not to sing or even shout, upon penalty of being fired.

On the morning of the test, I drove into the lot and parked my white VW, old and shabby. I had owned it since college. My colleagues favored Teslas or Mercedes-Benzes. I liked my Rabbit.

In the lane between the fences, small robots rolled night and day – nonlethal, but capable of shooting barb-tipped wires that carried a discouraging shock. The robots inspected me with their tiny black eyes and, bored by my familiarity, rolled away.

The warehouse was made entirely of wood, no nails or brackets. It covered half an acre and sat on a thick pad of cement reinforced with plastic rebar and mesh. Beneath the pad lay a series of empty vaults that discouraged ground water, rodents, or anything else that might disturb the peace. No pipes or wires were allowed, except for those that fed directly into the warehouse.

After I passed through the fences, a single thick oak door gave access to the warehouse interior. I was scheduled to meet Hugh Tiflin, project manager and chief researcher. He was always prompt, but I was deliberately early. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the architecture, the atmosphere, the implications – to feel the place again.

I summoned up my image of Alan Turing. It is my habit to sometimes talk to the founder of modern computing, hoping for a reflection of his peculiar, sharp wisdom. What we were in the final stages of creating (we all hoped they were the final stages!) could transform the human race. A machine that would end all our secrets. What would Mr. Turing think of such a New Machine?

He never answered, of course. But then, so far, neither did our machine. I entered the security cage and listened to questions spoken by a soft, automated voice – personal questions that were sometimes embarrassing, sometimes sad, sometimes funny. I answered each of them truthfully enough and the cage opened.

Next to the cage, a small illuminated counter revealed the number of my recent visits: 4. In the last month, I had only been here twice. The counter reset every day. I take it as a personal affront when automated systems make mistakes.

A soft rain began to fall on the high, hollow roof, adding to my damp mood and the penetrating chill in the building. The warehouse was dark, except for a light in the far corner that glowed like a pale sun. I approached a low wood rail and stood in the long, curved shadow of a big black sphere, bloated and shiny, rising on tiny fins almost to the ceiling, silent but for the low hum of the power that kept it alive. A bank of heavily insulated pipes passed under the rails and through the wooden wall to dedicated generators and a refrigeration complex outside.

Early in its development, Tiflin had named the sphere Magic 8 Ball, soon shortened to 8 Ball because, as Tiflin insisted, there was nothing magical about our machine – just good solid physics. It retained a window on one side, however, like the old toy. Tiflin had asked it to be painted on after we finished the first phase.

The window’s message: Try Again Later.

Reading that again, I experienced an odd sort of dizzy spell, as if there were too many of me in one place – a symptom of stress and hard work, I presumed.

8 Ball was our third major attempt at a fully operational and manageable quantum computer. No doubt you’ve heard something about quantum computing. The underlying ideas are spooky and new, so a lot of what you’ve heard is bound to be wrong. A quantum computer works not with bits but with qubits, or quantum bits. A classic bit, like a light switch, is either on or off, one or zero. A quantum bit can be kept in superposition, neither on nor off, nor both, nor neither – like Schrödinger’s cat until you open its very special box.

Off in far corners, two other big spheres peered from the shadows: 8 Ball’s defunct siblings, Mega and Mini. Mini was ten meters across and had once contained 128 qubits. In its scavenged condition – white insulation peeling, surrounded by a tangle of pipes and wires leading nowhere – it resembled a giant golf ball. We had turned it off – killed it – three years ago. Standing in the opposite corner, Mega was eleven meters wide and resembled a moldy Florida orange. It had contained 256 qubits, all niobium or aluminum circuits bathed in liquid helium. It had sort of worked, for a time – and then it didn’t. Thumbs-down on Mega.

Filling the expanded north end of the building, 8 Ball was twelve meters in diameter and contained 1024 qubits, each a two-dimensional electron cloud clamped between plates of gallium arsenide and cooled to just a femto-fraction of a degree above absolute zero. The qubits lined the sphere’s penultimate outer layer, and each one communicated, if that’s the right word, through braided world lines across a central vacuum to an entangled twin on the other side of the sphere. Entanglement meant the paired qubits duplicated each other’s quantum state. If one was changed or measured, the other would reflect that interference, no matter how far apart they were. They would be superposed.

Each electron cloud became a new variety of matter, known as an anyon, confirmation of the existence of which we were particularly proud. The qubits’ spooky vacuum jive would, we hoped, help make 8 Ball the most stable quantum computer yet.

But despite a promising beginning, 8 Ball refused to work as designed. Sampling its output caused a catastrophic early collapse of the program strings, which themselves seemed to have been turned into useless nonsense. That had forced us to take a radically new approach. It seemed very possible that if this effort failed, 8 Ball would soon join Mega and Mini as little more than another archaeological curiosity.

Tiflin had asked me to meet him at the warehouse to help check out the newest part of our installation. I was about to stoop to look underneath the black sphere when I noticed a small yellow piece of paper stuck to the rail -- a Post-it Note. Other than me, nobody in the lab used Post-its, and I only used them in my office. I pulled up the note. Written on one side in my squared-off printing was, Don’t try to find me. I did not remember either writing this message or sticking it on the rail. Maybe I had simply forgotten. Maybe someone was messing with me and had put it there to screw with my day. There were plenty of smart-asses in our division capable of playing mind games. Work had been painfully difficult the last few weeks. Pressure on our entire team was intense.

I tried to think back and retrace my steps. Parking, walking, answering the absurdly personal questions, my little talk with Mr. Turing –

Plus the dizzy spell.

I had never written a note.

Outside the warehouse, I heard the slam of a car door, followed by feet on gravel. A key clicked in the outer lock. Tiflin entered the security cage and muttered his own answers to the cage’s questions. The inner gate opened. He seemed even more distracted than I was. As he approached 8 Ball, he patted all of his pockets – shirt, pants, leather jacket – as if he’d forgotten something.

I crumpled the Post-it into a ball and hid it in my pants pocket.

When Tiflin came within a few steps, he glanced up at me, startled, and stopped patting, head cocked like a cat considering where to lick next. He broke that off with a long wink, meant to reassure me that Dr. Hugh Tiflin was indeed still in the building, then smoothed his hands down his coat.

At forty-two, Tiflin was a slender man whose upper torso was taller than average and whose legs were shorter. His neck was pale and swanlike, with distinct cords and veins that revealed frequent changes of emotion. His head was large and well-formed, with a chiseled chin and handsome eagle nose, topped by ebullient wavy brown hair. He wore a signature quilted black leather jacket over a cotton shirt, usually green or pink – green today – tucked into cotton-duck hiking pants. His running shoes were cheap and gray. He replaced them every two or three weeks, but somehow they always looked dirty. He was eldest in our team – older than me by a year. He was a genius, of course, or I’d never have worked with him.

“Good morning, Bose. How’s the scint?” he asked.

Four weeks ago, he had decided to eavesdrop on the qubits’ secret communications using a scintillation detector scavenged from a defense division CubeSat. The detector had originally been designed to monitor radiation from orbit over Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan. Tiflin had personally tuned the device to detect disturbances in 8 Ball’s vacuum – bursts of virtual radiation provoked by the passage of our qubits’ entangled photons. New stuff, amazing stuff. Who knew that a vacuum could act like a cloud chamber in a science museum? Tiflin knew – or knew people who knew. That’s why he was Tiflin.

I stooped again to peer at 8 Ball’s lower belly. A wide concrete platform between the main supports – the fins – steadied a stainless steel tube that poked up through 8 Ball’s shell and deep into its central vacuum. “Rudely intrusive,” I said.

Tiflin chuckled. “Right up the ass. We need to wake up this beast.” He looked for himself. “Seems good,” he said, sucking on his cheeks. “Should help us track our progress.” He rose, gripped the rail with both hands, and looked on 8 Ball with pique mixed with adoration. I understood completely. I, too, regarded the black sphere with both love and dread. 8 Ball was beyond doubt the strangest human construct on Earth, and if Tiflin’s plans were all that he hinted, it was about to go through a sea change of procedure and programming.

“We’re due to meet with Cate in thirty minutes,” he said, again patting his pockets. Was he looking for his phone? A pen? A lighter? “Dieter’s got the strings ready to load. Need a ride?”

I didn’t, but the VW could wait. Tiflin and I needed time to reintegrate our states, to normalize. He sounded reasonably cheerful, but I knew the stress he was under. For a year, tough minds whose job it was to decide which funds should go where had been circling our project like sharks. They were far from convinced 8 Ball was in the division’s best interests. Other groups, however, were still making plans that assumed our success. Both were pressing hard on Tiflin.

The absurd level of continuing, tooth-grinding investment showed how sexy the whole idea of quantum computing was, and how much everyone wanted to completely overturn the world’s security, expose all its secrets, and find deep answers to life’s simple questions before our enemies did – or at least before our competitors in Mumbai or Beijing.

But we had yet to run a long-term, successful session. We seemed to be always smoothing the course, pulling out obstacles – preparing over and over for the first big test. We both knew that could not continue.

Tiflin drove his Tesla back toward our offices with a look of fascinated fury, like a child behind the wheel of a bumper car. I clung to the armrests as we squealed into the concrete garage beside Building 10.

“Today will change everything,” he said, climbing out of the bucket seat. “Today will be 8 Ball’s first birthday.” He smiled his feral smile, upper lip rising over prominent canines. He was looking to see if I shared his conviction, if I would offer my full support.

That’s why I was here.

“We should bring a cake!” I said.

1943

AS MY DATE – Harvey? Harvard? – brags about his alma mater and Manhattan penthouse, I take a bite of overpriced kale and watch his ugly thoughts swirl overhead. It’s hard to pay attention to him with my stomach growling and my body ajitter, for all he’s easy on the eyes. Harvey doesn’t look much older than I am, but his thoughts, covered in spines and centipede feet, glisten with ancient grudges and carry an entitled, Ivy League stink.

“My apartment has the most amazing view of the city,” he’s saying, his thoughts sliding long over each other like dark, bristling snakes. Each one is as thick around as his Rolex-draped wrist. “I just installed a Jacuzzi along the west wall so that I can watch the sun set while I relax after getting back from the gym.”

I nod, half-listening to the words coming out of his mouth. I’m much more interested in the ones hissing through the teeth of the thoughts above him.

She’s got perfect tits, lil’ handfuls just waiting to be squeezed. I love me some perky tits.

I’m gonna fuck this bitch so hard she’ll never walk straight again.

Gross. “That sounds wonderful,” I say as I sip champagne and gaze at him through my false eyelashes, hoping the dimmed screen of my iPhone isn’t visible through the tablecloth below. This dude is boring as hell, and I’m already back on Tinder, thumbing through next week’s prospective dinner dates.

She’s so into me, she’ll be begging for it by the end of the night. I can’t wait to cut her up.

My eyes flick up sharply. “I’m sorry?” I say.

Harvey blinks. “I said, Argentina is a beautiful country.”

Pretty little thing. She’ll look so good spread out all over the floor.

“Right,” I say. “Of course.” Blood’s pulsing through my head so hard it probably looks like I’ve got a wicked blush.

I’m so excited, I’m half hard already.

You and me both, I think, turning my iPhone off and smiling my prettiest smile.

The waiter swings by with another bottle of champagne and a dessert menu burned into a wooden card, but I wave him off. “Dinner’s been lovely,” I whisper to Harvey, leaning in and kissing his cheek, “but I’ve got a different kind of dessert in mind.”

Ahhh, go the ugly thoughts, settling into a gentle, rippling wave across his shoulders. I’m going to take her home and split her all the way from top to bottom. Like a fucking fruit tart.

That is not the way I normally eat fruit tarts, but who am I to judge? I passed on dessert, after all.

When he pays the bill, he can’t stop grinning at me. Neither can the ugly thoughts hissing and cackling behind his ear.

“What’s got you so happy?” I ask coyly.

“I’m just excited to spend the rest of the evening with you,” he replies.

WAR IS A dinner party.

My ladies and I have spent the dregs of summer making ready. We have hung garlands of pennyroyal and snowberries in the snug, familiar halls of Laburnum Castle, strained cheese as pure as ice for weeks in the caves and the kitchens, covered any gloomy stone with tapestries or stags’ heads with mistletoe braided through their antlers. We sent away south to the great markets of Mother-of-Millions for new silks and velvets and furs. We have brewed beer as red as October and as black as December, boiled every growing thing down to jams and pickles and jellies, and set aside the best of the young wines and the old brandies. Nor are we proud: I myself scoured the stables and the troughs for all the strange horses to come. When no one could see me, I buried my face in fresh straw just for the heavy gold scent of it. I’ve fought for my husband many times, but each time it is new all over again. The smell of the hay like candied earth, with its bitter ribbons of ergot laced through – that is the smell of my youth, almost gone now, but still knotted to the ends of my hair, the line of my shoulders. When I polish the silver candelabras, I still feel half a child, sitting splay-legged on the floor, playing with my mother’s scorpions, until the happy evening drew down.

I am the picture of honor. I am the Lily of my House. When last the king came to Laburnum, he told his surly queen: You see, my plum? That is a woman. Lady Cassava looks as though she has grown out of the very stones of this hall. She looked at me with interested eyes, and we had much to discuss later when quieter hours came. This is how I serve my husband’s ambitions and mine: with the points of my vermilion sleeves, stitched with thread of white and violet and tiny milkstones with hearts of green ice. With the net of gold and chalcathinite crystals catching up my hair, jewels from our own stingy mountains, so blue they seem to burn. With the great black pots of the kitchens below my feet, sizzling and hissing like a heart about to burst.

It took nine great, burly men to roll the ancient feasting table out of the cellars, its legs as thick as wine barrels and carved with the symbols of their house: the unicorn passant and the wild poppy. They were kings once, Lord Calabar’s people. Kings long ago when the world was full of swords, kings in castles of bone, with wives of gold – so they all say. When he sent his man to the Floregilium to ask for me, the Abbess told me to be grateful – not for his fortune (of which there is a castle, half a river, a village and farms, and several chests of pearls fished out of an ocean I shall never see) but for his blood. My children stand near enough from the throne to see its gleam, but they will never have to polish it.

My children. I was never a prodigy in the marriage bed, but what a workhorse my belly turned out to be! Nine souls I gave to the coffers of House Calabar. Five sons and four daughters, and not a one of them dull or stupid. But the dark is a hungry thing. I lost two boys to plague and a girl to the scrape of a rusted hinge. Six left. My lucky sixpence. While I press lemon oil into the wood of the great table with rags that once were gowns, four of my sweethearts giggle and dart through the forest of legs – men, tables, chairs. The youngest of my black-eyed darlings, Mayapple, hurls herself across the silver-and-beryl checked floor and into my arms, saying:

“Mummy, Mummy, what shall I wear to the war tonight?”

She has been at my garden, though she knows better than to explore alone. I brush wisteria pollen from my daughter’s dark hair while she tells me all her troubles. “I want to wear my blue silk frock with the emeralds round the collar, but Dittany says it’s too plain for battle and I shall look like a frog and shame us.”

“You will wear vermillion and white, just as we all will, my little lionfish, for when the king comes we must all wear the colors of our houses so he can remember all our names. But lucky for you, your white will be ermine and your vermillion will be rubies and you will look nothing at all like a frog.”

Passiflora, almost a woman herself, as righteous and hard as an antler, straightens her skirts as though she has not been playing at tumble and chase all morning. She looks nothing like me – her hair as red as venom, her eyes the pale blue of moonlit mushrooms. But she will be our fortune, for I have seen no better student of the wifely arts in all my hours. “We oughtn’t to wear ermine,” she sniffs. “Only the king and the queen can, and the deans of the Floregilium, but only at midwinter. Though why a weasel’s skin should signify a king is beyond my mind.”

My oldest boy, Narcissus, nobly touches his breast with one hand while he pinches his sister savagely with the other and quotes from the articles of peerage. “‘The House of Calabar may wear a collar of ermine not wider than one and one half inches, in acknowledgement of their honorable descent from Muscanine, the Gardener Queen, who set the world to growing.’”

But Passiflora knows this. This is how she tests her siblings and teaches them, by putting herself in the wrong over and over. No child can help correcting his sister. They fall over themselves to tell her how stupid she is, and she smiles to herself because they do not think there’s a lesson in it.

Dittany, my sullen, sour beauty, frowns, which means she wants something. She was born frowning and will die frowning and through all the years between (may they be long) she will scowl at every person until they bend to her will. A girl who never smiles has such power – what men will do to turn up but one corner of her mouth! She already wears her red war-gown and her circlet of cinnabar poppies. They brings out the color in her grimace.

“Mother,” she glowers, “may I milk the unicorns for the feast?”

My daughter and I fetch knives and buckets and descend the stairs into the underworld beneath our home. Laburnum Castle is a mushroom lying only half above ground. Her lacy, lovely parts reach up toward the sun, but the better part of her dark body stretches out through the seastone caverns below, vast rooms and chambers and vaults with ceilings more lovely than any painted chapel in Mother-of-Millions, shot through with frescoes and motifs of copper and quartz and sapphire and opal. Down here, the real work of war clangs and thuds and corkscrews toward tonight. Smells as rich as brocade hang in the kitchens like banners, knives flash out of the mist and the shadows.

I have chosen the menu of our war as carefully as the stones in my hair. All my art has bent upon it. I chose the wines for their color – nearly black, thick and bitter and sharp. I baked the bread to be as sweet as the pudding. The vital thing, as any wife can tell you, is spice. Each dish must taste vibrant, strong, vicious with flavor. Under my eaves they will dine on curried doves, black pepper and peacock marrow soup, blancmange drunk with clove and fiery sumac, sealmeat and fennel pies swimming in garlic and apricots, roast suckling lion in a sauce of brandy, ginger, and pink chilis, and pomegranate cakes soaked in claret.

I am the perfect hostess. I have poisoned it all.

This is how I serve my husband, my children, my king, my house: with soup and wine and doves drowned in orange spices. With wine so dark and strong any breath of oleander would vanish in it. With the quills of sunless fish and liqueurs of wasps and serpents hung up from my rafters like bunches of lavender in the fall.

It’s many years now since a man of position would consider taking a wife who was not a skilled poisoner. They come to the Floregilium as to an orphanage and ask not after the most beautiful, nor the sweetest voice, nor the most virtuous, nor the mildest, but the most deadly. All promising young ladies journey to Brugmansia, where the sea is warm, to receive their education. I remember it more clearly than words spoken but an hour ago – the hundred towers and hundred bridges and hundred gates of the Floregilium, a school and a city and a test, mother to all maidens.

I passed beneath the Lily Gate when I was but seven – an archway so twisted with flowers no stone peeked through. Daffodils and hyacinths and columbines, foxglove and moonflower, poppy and peony, each one gorgeous and full, each one brilliant and graceful, each one capable of killing a man with root or bulb of leaf or petal. Another child ran on ahead of me. Her hair was longer than mine, and a better shade of black. Hers had blue inside it, flashing like crystals dissolving in a glass of wine. Her laugh was merrier than mine, her eyes a prettier space apart, her height far more promising. Between the two of us, the only advantage I ever had was a richer father. She had a nice enough name, nice enough to hide a pit of debt.

Once my mother left me to explore her own girlish memories, I followed that other child for an hour, guiltily, longingly, sometimes angrily. Finally, I resolved to give it up, to let her be better than I was if she insisted on it. I raised my arm to lean against a brilliant blue wall and rest – and she appeared as though she had been following me, seizing my hand with the strength of my own father, her grey eyes forbidding.

“Don’t,” she said.

Don’t rest? Don’t stop?

“It’s chalcanthite. Rub up against it long enough and it will stop your blood.”

Her name was Yew. She would be the Horn of her House, as I am the Lily of mine. The Floregilium separates girls into Lilies – those who will boil up death in a sealmeat pie, and Horns – those who will send it fleeing with an emerald knife. The Lily can kill in a hundred thousand fascinating ways, root, leaf, flower, pollen, seed. I can brew a tea of lily that will leave a man breathing and laughing, not knowing in the least that he is poisoned, until he dies choking on disappointment at sixty-seven. The Horn of a unicorn can turn a cup of wine so corrupted it boils and slithers into honey. We spend our childhoods in a dance of sourness and sweetness.

Everything in Floregilium is a beautiful murder waiting to unfold. The towers and bridges sparkle ultramarine, fuchsia, silvery, seething green, and should a careless girl trail her fingers along the stones, her skin will blister black. The river teems with venomous, striped fish that take two hours to prepare so that they taste of salt and fresh butter and do not burn out the throat, and three hours to prepare so that they will not strangle the eater until she has gone merrily back to her room and put out her candles. Every meal is an examination, every country walk a trial. No more joyful place exists in all the world. I can still feel the summer rain falling through the hot green flowers of the manchineel tree in the north orchard, that twisted, gnomish thing, soaking up the drops, corrupting the water of heaven, and flinging it onto my arms, hissing, hopping, blistering like love.

It was there, under the sun and moon of the Floregilium, that I read tales of knights and archers, of the days when we fought with swords, with axes and shields, with armor beaten out of steel and grief. Poison was thought cowardice, a woman’s weapon, without honor. I wept. I was seven. It seemed absurd to me, absurd and wasteful and unhappy, for all those thousands to die so that two men could sort out who had the right to shit on what scrap of grass. I shook in the moonlight. I looked out into the Agarica where girls with silvery hair tended fields of mushrooms that wanted harvesting by the half-moon for greatest potency. I imagined peasant boys dying in the frost with nothing in their bellies and no embrace from the lord who sent them to hit some other boy on the head until the lord turned into a king. I felt such loneliness – and such relief, that I lived in a more sensible time, when blood on the frost had been seen for the obscenity it was.

I said a prayer every night, as every girl in the Floregilium did, to Muscanine, the Gardener Queen, who took her throne on the back of a larkspur blossom and never looked back. Muscanine had no royal blood at all. She was an apothecary’s daughter. After the Whistling Plague, such things mattered less. Half of every house, stone or mud or marble, died gasping, their throats closing up so only whines and whistles escaped, and when those awful pipes finally ceased, the low and the middling felt no inclination to start dying all over again so that the lordly could put their names on the ruins of the world. Muscanine could read and write. She drew up new articles of war and when the great and the high would not sign it, they began to choke at their suppers, wheeze at their breakfasts, fall like sudden sighs halfway to their beds. The mind sharpens wonderfully when you cannot trust your tea. And after all, why not? What did arms and strength and the best of all blades matter when the wretched maid could clean a house of heirs in a fortnight?

War must civilize itself, wrote Muscanine long ago. So say all sensible souls. There can be no end to conflict between earthly powers, but the use of humble arms to settle disputes of rich men makes rich men frivolous in their exercise of war. Without danger to their own persons, no Lord fears to declare battle over the least slight – and why should he? He risks only a little coin and face while we risk all but benefit nothing in victory. There exists in this sphere no single person who does not admit to this injustice. Therefore, we, the humble arms, will no longer consent to a world built upon, around, and out of an immoral seed.

The rules of war are simple: should Lord Ambition and the Earl of Avarice find themselves in dispute, they shall agree upon a castle or stronghold belonging to neither of them and present themselves there on a mutually agreeable date. They shall break bread together and whoever lives longest wins. The host bends all their wisdom upon vast and varied poisons while the households of Lord Ambition and the Earl bend all their intellect upon healing and the purifying of any wicked substance. And because poisons were once a woman’s work – in the early days no knight could tell a nightshade from a dandelion – it became quickly necessary to wed a murderess of high skill.

Of course, Muscanine’s civilized rules have bent and rusted with age. No Lord of any means would sit at the martial table himself nowadays – he hires a proxy to choke or swallow in his stead. But there is still some justice in the arrangement – no one sells themselves to battle cheaply. A family may lift itself up considerably on such a fortune as Lord Ambition will pay. No longer do two or three men sit down simply to their meal of honor. Many come to watch the feast of war, whole households, the king himself. There is much sport in it. Great numbers of noblemen seat their proxies in order to declare loyalties and tilt the odds in favor of victory, for surely someone, of all those brawny men, can stomach a silly flower or two.

“But think how marvelous it must have looked,” Yew said to me once, lying on my bed surrounded by books like a ribbonmark. “All the banners flying, and the sun on their swords, and the horses with armor so fine even a beast would be proud. Think of the drums and the trumpets and the cries in the dawn.”

“I do think of all that, and it sounds ghastly. At least now, everyone gets a good meal out of the business. It’s no braver or wiser or stranger to gather a thousand friends and meet another thousand in a field and whack on each other with knives all day. And there are still banners. My father’s banners are beautiful. They have a manticore on them, in a ring of oleander. I’ll show you someday.”

But Yew already knew what my father’s banners looked like. She stamped our manticore onto a bezoar for me the day we parted. The clay of the Floregilium mixed with a hundred spices and passed through the gullet of a lion. At least, she said it was a lion.

Soon it will be time to send Dittany and Mayapple. Passiflora will return there when the war is done – she would not miss a chance for practical experience.

Lord Calabar came to the Floregilium when I was a maid of seventeen. Yew’s husband came not long after, from far-off Mithridatium, so that the world could be certain we would never see each other again. They came through the Horn Gate, a passage of unicorn horns braided as elegantly as if they were the strands of a girl’s hair. He was entitled by his blood to any wife he could convince – lesser nobles may only meet the diffident students, the competent but uninspired, the gentle and the kind who might have enough knowledge to fight, but a weak stomach. They always look so startled when they come a-briding. They come from their castles and holdfasts imagining fierce-jawed maidens with eyes that flash like mercury and hair like rivers of blood, girls like the flowers they boiled into noble deaths, tall and bright and fatal. And they find us wearing leather gloves with stiff cuffs at the elbows, boots to the thigh, and masks of hide and copper and glass that turn our faces into those of wyrms and deepwater fish. But how else to survive in a place where the walls are built of venom, the river longs to kill, and any idle perfume might end a schoolgirl’s joke before the punchline? To me those masks are still more lovely than anything a queen might make of rouge and charcoal. I will admit that when I feel afraid, I take mine from beneath my bed and wear it until my heart is whole.

I suppose I always knew someone would come into the vicious garden of my happiness and drag me away from it. What did I learn the uses of mandrake for if not to marry, to fight, to win? I did not want him. He was handsome enough, I suppose. His waist tapered nicely; his shoulders did not slump. His grandfathers had never lost their hair even on their deathbeds. But I was sufficient. I and Floregilium and the manchineel tree and my Yew swimming in the river as though nothing could hurt her, because nothing could. He said I could call him Henry. I showed him my face.

“Mummy, the unicorns are miserable today,” Dittany frowns, and my memory bursts into a rain of green flowers.

I have never liked unicorns. I have met wolves with better dispositions. I have seen paintings of them from nations where they do not thrive – tall, pale, sorrowfully noble creatures holding the wisdom of eternity as a bit in their muzzles. I understand the desire to make them so. I, too, like things to match. If something is useful, it ought to be beautiful. And yet, the world persists.

Unicorns mill around my daughter’s legs, snorting and snuffling at her hands, certain she has brought them the half-rotted meat and flat beer they love best. Unicorns are the size of boars, round of belly and stubby of leg, covered in long, curly grey fur that matts viciously in the damp and smells of wet books. Their long, canny faces are something like horses, yes, but also something like dogs, and their teeth have something of the shark about them. And in the center, that short, gnarled nub of bone, as pure and white as the soul of a saint. Dittany opens her sack and tosses out greying lamb rinds, half-hardened cow’s ears. She pours out leftover porter into their trough. The beasts gurgle and trill with delight, gobbling their treasure, snapping at each other to establish and reinforce their shaggy social order, the unicorn king and his several queens and their kingdom of offal.

“Why do they do it?” Dittany frowns. “Why do they shovel in all that food when they know they could die?”

A unicorn looks up at me with red, rheumy eyes and wheezes. “Why did men go running into battle once upon a time, when they knew they might die? They believe their shield is stronger than the other fellow’s sword. They believe their Horn is stronger than the other fellow’s Lily. They believe that when they put their charmed knives into the pies, they will shiver and turn red and take all the poison into the blade. They believe their toadstones have the might of gods.”

“But nobody is stronger than you, are they, Mum?”

“Nobody, my darling.”

He said I could call him Henry. He courted me with a shaker of powdered sapphires from a city where elephants are as common as cats. A dash of blue like so much salt would make any seething feast wholesome again. Well, unless some clever Lily has used moonseeds, or orellanine, or unicorn milk, or the venom of a certain frog who lives in the library and is called Phillip. Besides, emerald is better than sapphire. But I let him think his jewels could buy life from death’s hand. It is a nice thing to think. Like those beautiful unicorns glowing softly in silver thread.

I watch my daughter pull at the udders of our unicorns, squeezing their sweaty milk into a steel pail, for it would sizzle through wood or even bronze as easily as rain through leaves. She is deft and clever with her hands, my frowning girl, the mares barely complain. When I milk them, they bite and howl. The dun sky opens up into bands like pale ribs, showing a golden heart beating away at dusk. Henry Calabar kisses me when I am seventeen and swears my lips are poison from which he will never recover, and his daughter feeds a unicorn a marrow bone, and his son calls down from the ramparts that the king is coming, he is coming, hurry, hurry, and under all this I see only Yew, stealing into my room on that last night in the country of being young, drawing me a bath in the great copper tub, a bath swirling with emerald dust, with green and shimmer. We climbed in, dunking our heads, covering each other with the strangely milky smell of emeralds, clotting our black hair with glittering sand. Yew took my hand and we ran out together into the night, through the quiet streets of the Floregilium, under the bridges and over the water until we came to the manchineel tree in the north orchards, and she held me tight to her beneath its vicious flowers until the storm came, and when the storm came we kissed for the last time as the rain fell through those green flowers and hissed on our skin, vanishing into emerald steam, we kissed and did not burn.

FRUITS RIPEN AND worlds ripen.

If not taken at the right moment, any ripe prize falls from its tree and rots away, and nothing is gained.

That was how They looked at the situation.

Call them ‘alien’. The word isn’t ridiculous, yet by the same token, no label does justice to their origins or far-reaching powers. And after four and a half billion years of slow, often irregular growth, the Earth was deemed ripe. In the parlance of universal laws, that little orb had grown just soft enough and sweet enough. That’s why They came. That’s why an ordinary day in late June came and left again, and in those hours, by invasive and ephemeral means, every aspect of human existence was conquered.

The new rulers were few, less than a hundred, but they were an experienced, well-practiced partnership. Avoiding sloppiness and haste, they followed their occupation with months of careful study. This was a new colony, one realm among ten thousand thousand scattered about the galaxy, and their first job was to understand the world’s nature. Out of that collection of meat and history, failure and divine promise, they had to select one good leader – a human face and mind to be entrusted with the administration of what was theirs.

HENRY SENSED RESIGNATION in the posture of the Christmas tree. It slouched toward the living room window as if peering out. There was no way he could plug it in, cheer it up. The thing was dryer than the Sandman’s mustache, its spine a stick of kindling. The least vibration brought a shower of needles. Ornaments fell of their own accord. Some broke, which he had to sweep and vacuum, initiating the descent of more needles, more ornaments. The cat took some as toys and batted them around the kitchen floor. Glittering evidence in the field indicated Bothwell, the dog, had acquired a taste for tinsel.

Mero had told him not to take it down. She had a special way she wrapped the ornaments when boxing them. He wasn’t about to argue for doing it by himself. At the end of that first week she was away in China, though, the presence of the tree became an imposition. He described it in his Friday journal as, ‘A distant cousin, once accused of pyromania, arriving for an indefinite visit.’

In the middle of his work, in the middle of the grocery store, when walking with the dog around the lake, the spirit of that sagging pine was always waiting by the front window in the living room of his thoughts. Then Mero finally called on FaceTime from Shanghai. Her image was distorted as if he was seeing her through rippling water. In a heartbeat, the picture froze, but she kept talking. He told her he missed her and she said the same. She said Shanghai was amazing, enormous, and that she liked the young woman who was her translator and guide. She asked about Bothwell. Henry spoke about the freezing wind, the snow. She told him to be careful driving, and then he told her about the tree. “It’s shot,” he said. “I gotta take it down.”

Suddenly the call cut out, and he couldn’t get her back. He wanted to tell her he loved her and hear her voice some more, but in a way he understood. It was like dialing another world. The distance between Ohio and Shanghai made him shiver. He called Bothwell and the Border Collie appeared. “Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked. The dog’s green eyes were intense and it cocked its head to the side as if to say, “What do you think?” So Henry put his coat and hat and mittens on, and they went out, over the snow, across the yard, through the orchard, past the garden, into the farmer’s winter fields that surrounded the property. Corn stubble and snow stretched out to the horizon in three directions. It was sundown, orange and pink in the west, a deep royal blue to the east where he spotted the moon.

They headed toward the wind break of white oak about a quarter mile into the field. The frozen gusts that blew across the open land sliced right through him, and he struggled to hold closed his jacket with the broken zipper. They entered the thicket of giant old trees. Under the clacking, empty branches last light turned to mist and shadow. He sat down on a fallen log and looked to the west. Bothwell sniffed around and then sat behind him to escape the gusts that eddied in among the trees. Henry had a hell of a time lighting a cigarette. Once he got it going, though, he made an executive decision. The first part was to open a bottle of wine when he got back to the house. The second was to dismantle the tree and get rid of it by the following afternoon.

He saw how he would do it. Put the ornaments in a pile on the dining room table. Cover them with a table cloth to hide them from the cat, and leave them there till Mero got back. Pull the lights. Grab the cursed tinsel off in handfuls. Kick the tree in the spleen and wrestle it to the floor. Remove the base. Drag the corpse through the dining room, the kitchen, to the sliding door. Deposit the remains out back in the snow. Burn incense to mask the odor of rotted Christmas. Sweep and vacuum. Two hours for the whole ordeal, he figured and spoke into the wind, “Adios, mother fucker.” Then Bothwell made a strange noise.

Henry felt something behind him. He stood up quickly and turned, glimpsing what looked in the dimmest of light like a wolf. Gray and tan, bushy coat. It skulked around a tree and disappeared. He knew there were no wolves in Ohio, but the creature was too big for a coyote. The idea of it sneaking around in the dark sent a shot of adrenalin through him. His heart pounded. He called the dog to him and they left the trees in a rush. Somewhere between the smoke and the wolf, night had dropped. Unable to see where he was stepping, he twisted his leg on corn stubble and his knee began to ache. He hobbled toward the light of the house, peering over his shoulder every few yards. By the time he reached the kitchen, he could hardly walk. He pulled the cork on a bottle of Malbec, standing on one leg.

Grabbing the glass and bottle, he hopped into the living room. The tree was waiting for him. As he sat on the couch, a shower of needles fell and then an ornament. It hit a branch on the way down and broke, shattering into three jagged scoops and a handful of glitter. He watched it happen, knew it was the ornament Mero had bought for their first Christmas together. He decided in an instant, he’d wait till spring to tell her. Bothwell came in and curled up by his feet. He drank wine and turned on the TV.

He woke suddenly hours later to the dark, in bed. His mouth was dry. He had no recollection of having gotten off the couch and come upstairs. Looking at the clock, he saw it was only 3:13. He laid his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes. That’s when he realized there was a quiet but distinct rhythmic noise coming up from downstairs. He could barely hear it, like a voice whispering too loud. The first thing he did was call to Bothwell for courage. The dog was already at his side of the bed. Henry sat up, put his feet on the floor, and listened. The voice continued, mumbling on, and then broke out into a cry for help. One long extended scream, diminishing into silence, followed by a loud thud.

Henry jumped up, his heart racing, his hair, what there was of it, tingling. He reached for the wooden baton he kept behind the night table next to the bed. At the top of the stairs, he let the dog go first. He stepped slowly, protecting his bad knee and not in any hurry to see what was going on. Before he reached the bottom step, it struck him that the noise must have been coming from the TV he’d never turned off. This made him braver and, holding his weapon in front of him, he limped boldly into the living room.

The light was still on. “Great,” he said, gazing down upon the fallen Christmas tree. Although it had slouched so long toward the window, when it fell, it went over backwards, across the middle of the living room floor. Ornaments everywhere. The useless water in the metal base drained onto the carpet. The dry needle fallout was epic. He looked at the dog. The dog looked at him. Henry stepped forward and kicked the tree. It shuddered, dropping more of itself. He shook his head and looked across the room. The TV was off.

He and Bothwell searched each of the downstairs rooms, to be on the safe side. Then he made a pot of coffee. He decided not to wait for morning but to dive in, dismantle the thing, and get it out of the house. While the coffee brewed, he cleared the dining room table and took another look at the remains. Leaning against the archway that led to the living room, he told himself he’d just have to get his head around it. He went and poured a cup and came back and sat on the couch. The cat, Turtle, was at the other end. It struck Henry that she’d probably sat through the entire misadventure – the tree weaving, gasping, calling out for help, and then crashing to the floor. He remembered she was sitting there in the same position when he’d lumbered down the stairs. “Please, don’t get too worked up over anything,” he said to the cat. Turtle looked at him and then stood. At that moment, the TV came on. Henry lurched and grunted in surprise. The cat jumped down from the couch, and as soon as it left, he saw that it had been laying on the remote.

His hands found the needles sharper than when the tree was alive. He got the rubber gloves from beneath the kitchen sink and put them on. The work proved exhausting, all that bending and the often tedious exercise of untwining an ornament hanger from a branch. At times he had to wrestle the dead weight of the thing, rolling it to get to ornaments crushed beneath it, lifting it to open the sharp branches so he could reach in and rescue the angel from where she’d fallen into the belly of the beast. “Don’t forget the icicles,” he heard Mero say in his mind. Plastic icicles, thin as pipe cleaners, perfectly transparent. There were 6. After locating 4, he said, “Fuck it,” and gave up.

At sunrise of a bitter, overcast day, Henry dragged the tree through the dining room and kitchen, out the sliding door. The wind was howling fiercely, but he left his jacket inside and was dressed only in a T-shirt. He slid the corpse over the already fallen snow. It left a wake of brown needles. Depositing it next to the garden shed, he took a few steps back. He’d made sure earlier to slip on his boots. He charged forward and kicked the tree. His boot got under the trunk and lifted it into the air. His next move was a crushing stomp to the mid-section, but when he brought his foot down, the bad knee of his other leg went out. He slipped on the snow and fell.

After sweeping and vacuuming and moving the coffee table and chairs back in front of the window, he lay down on the couch and grabbed the remote. Not even ten AM and he found Jack Palance in black and white, The House of Numbers. He maneuvered the couch pillow under his head, and then closed his eyes and let the sound of the twins and prison plot lead him to sleep. He woke at 4:15 pm and looked to the window. The sky was dark gray. He heard the wind. Before he got up and looked, he knew it was snowing, big flakes angling down from the west.

He went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. Still dazed from sleep, he leaned against the kitchen sink, staring out the window. He watched the empty branches bend, and watched in the distance across the field as the world filled up with snow. “The new ice age,” he said to his reflection. His gaze shifted to the garden shed and looked and blinked and looked again. He leaned over the kitchen sink to get his glasses closer to the glass. For a moment, he went numb, even his knee stopped aching.

This time he put on his jacket and hat and mittens. He called for Bothwell and they went out the sliding door. The snow was on its way to becoming ice, and the wind was fierce. Covering his face with his arm, he made his way toward the garden shed. He believed the tree was there but covered by a small drift. When he reached the spot where he’d dumped it, he turned his back to the wind and looked down. There was a rise in the snow. He toed the white mound but felt nothing beneath it. A minute later, he’d cleared the spot, pushing the snow aside with his boots, and was staring at frozen ground.

“Where?” he said to Bothwell and although he laughed, a current of fear cut through the confusion. He looked up quickly and scanned the darkening yard to see if the thing had been blown away. The wind on the plains was strong enough. Over the summer it had lifted a glass topped table on the patio and flipped it, turning its top to jagged chips of ice. He didn’t see any sign of the corpse in the distance, so he started back into the orchard to check the shadows beneath the trees. He and the dog walked all around the property but found nothing, save that he’d at some point left the garage light on.

Entering the garage through the side door, he found instant relief from the snow. Bothwell followed him in. He looked out over the stacks of unopened boxes he’d never unpacked after moving two years earlier. It was all books, thousands of them. He smelled their damp molder, and had a memory flash of the warehouse scene at the end of Citizen Kane. A scrabbling sound followed fast by a desperate squeal came from far back in the hangar-sized structure. The dog barked. Henry flipped the light off and they headed back to the house.

Later, in his office, sipping coffee, sitting in front of his computer, he leaned back and took a break from the irritation of his writing. His thoughts wandered and then he pictured the Christmas tree miles away in the dark, slouching through drifts to the edge of route 70 and sticking out a branch. “Cali or the North Pole?” Henry considered the desiccated pine’s journey west – the truckers, the rest stops, the mountain vistas until that reverie was interrupted by a horrendous clank that shuddered through the house from somewhere below. Bothwell leaped up from where he lay near the door, his ears at attention.

Henry wished he’d brought the baton upstairs. Still, the noise didn’t sound like someone forcing a door or window. It had that unmistakable sense of finality to it, like the God of trouble had smote some major appliance once and for all. “Burst pipe? Water heater? Something electric?” He went through a list as he limped down stairs, the dog leading the way. The lights in the hallway, the living room, dining room, kitchen all came on when he flipped their switches, and he was grateful for that. He looked around to see if Turtle had knocked over a vase or picture frame, slid a glass off the counter in the bathroom, but for once the cat was innocent. The porch door and sliding door in the back were both locked. He ran the water to check for a lack of pressure, but the flow was steady and strong.

The dog followed him around the kitchen as he searched for the flashlight. “This is unparalleled bullshit,” he said to Bothwell, who seemed sympathetic yet could barely hide his excitement over the promise of action at such a late hour. It took Henry twenty minutes, going through the various kitchen junk drawers, checking each at least twice, before finding the flashlight. It took him another ten minutes to find batteries. The beam it emitted when finally operational was a vague pretense of light. He found the baton where he’d left it in the living room and then went into the hallway, to the basement door. He opened it. “Forsake all hope,” he said to the dog.

Standing at the top of those worn steps leading into darkness an image of the tree returned to him, and this time it wasn’t headed west. This time, it had never left. A reek of dampness and subtle mildew rolled up and engulfed him. He thought of the basement cliché of horror movies as he flipped on the light switch and took his first step. Turtle appeared out of nowhere and brushed past him, a black blur diving down the stairs. “No,” he yelled after the cat, but that was pointless.

The house was over a hundred years old, and he’d never heard of a ‘wet basement’ before they’d bought it. Back in Jersey, where they’d come from, the words – wet basement – were a deal breaker. Old farmhouses weren’t built with rec rooms or indoor ping pong tables in mind, though. The basement was basically a foundational necessity, a place to store things raised up on pallets. Water was expected at certain times of the year. Henry had to duck as he stepped beneath the lintel. There was one dim lightbulb hanging from a chain in the middle of the main part of a concrete chamber.

He used the baton to rip down a prodigious cobweb, and made his way from one appliance to the next, laying his hand lightly on it to see if it trembled with life. The water heater was fine, the dehumidifier showed signs of life, and then he touched the furnace. It was silent, no vibration and stone cold. “That ain’t good,” he said. The dog sat on the bottom step, as if reluctant to put a paw down and commit to the underground. Henry flipped on the flashlight and moved to the dark back of the cellar and the adjoining concrete closet without a door, a narrow space where the fuse box hung.

Often, during spring, the water rose in that niche as high as 4 or 5 inches, and he’d once seen a toad hop out of it into the greater basement. Luckily the ground outside was frozen and the floor dry. He ran the beam of the flashlight over the different fuses to see if one had popped, but they were all unmarked and he really had no idea what he was looking for. Mero was the one who always dealt with the fuses.

“We’re gonna freeze our asses off tonight,” he said. When he stepped back into the basement, he noticed Bothwell retreating up the stairs. “Traitor,” he shouted, and meant to follow as quickly as possible. As he made his way for the steps, though, he realized he had no idea where Turtle had gotten to. He aimed the tepid beam into dark corners and made the psss psss psss noise Mero always used to summon the cat. After two dozen psss’s, he called out, “You can stay down here all winter.” As he made for the steps, he heard a meow. He turned and aimed the beam at a spot on the wall next to the water heater.

He’d forgotten it was there, a roughly foot and a half by one foot hole in the concrete of the wall that led into the foundation. Why it was there, he had no idea. He wondered if perhaps a pipe had been shoved through there from outside at some point. Maybe a poorly covered over coal chute? He stepped up to it and shone the light inside. Turtle’s green eyes caught the weak glow and made the most of it. She was about 4 feet into the tunnel. He gave it a Psss, psss, psss. A meow answered. “Come on, Turtle,” he said. “Come on.” Every time he made the psss noise the cat meowed but stayed where it was. “I hate you,” he said to it. The bright green eyes blinked.

When the cat moved, she moved slowly. She appeared at the opening and leaped down onto the floor. That’s when he distinctly heard the porch door open with a bang, heard the whoosh of the storm enter the kitchen above. He was sure of it. He could feel the burst of adrenalin shoot through him, yet he was stiff with fear. There was no spit to swallow. The harder he gripped the baton, the less he believed he would be able to wield it if he had to. Bothwell backed down the stairs into view. His hackles were up and he was growling. Henry heard footsteps and dropped the flashlight. He managed to creep to the bottom of the steps. “If you leave now, I won’t shoot you,” he shouted. “The police are on the way.”

There was more movement above, but he couldn’t track it. Just one slow clomping footstep after another. Out of some perverted impulse, he made his move. Gripping the baton, he reared it over his head and lurched up the stairs on his bad knee in a woefully executed surprise attack. Using his elbows on the door jambs, he propelled himself in a stumble down the hall and into the kitchen, Bothwell barking at his side. “Swing for the fence,” Henry whispered.

The door was wide open and the cold air swept in around him. He went to it immediately and shut it. Only one step ahead of paralyzing fear, he knew he couldn’t rest, but plunged into room after room, expecting the intruder in every one. In the downstairs bedroom, he instructed Bothwell to look under the bed. They checked all the closets. When Turtle jumped out from behind the shower curtain, Henry flailed with the baton and destroyed a towel rack.

Upstairs, out of breath, his knee screaming, he made the rounds of all the rooms but found no one. Half relieved, he said, “What a night,” to the dog as they made their way down from the second floor. Back in the kitchen, he looked for his phone and found it on the counter. Without putting the baton down, he dialed the police. There was a long span of silence and then the line sparked with static. He tried to get through twice more and gave up. “Here’s another forklift full of shit,” he told Bothwell, tossing the phone on the counter. The dog’s expression as much as said, “You’re getting a little dramatic now.” Henry nodded in agreement and paused to think it through. That’s when he noticed something he’d missed earlier. The kitchen floor was littered with brown needles. He’d been so intent on attack, he’d trod right through them, never looking down.

He gripped the baton and Bothwell tensed. The trail of brown needles led off into the dining room. Man and dog moved slowly, quietly toward the darkened entrance. He could have sworn he’d left all the lights on downstairs. He stopped and listened. Just the wind. Lifting the baton, he flipped on the switch. Instinctively crouching, he tensed against an assault if only from the sudden light. When Bothwell didn’t bark, Henry knew there was no one there. The house was perfectly still.

“Nothing,” he said to the dog, and decided to make a pot of coffee. Before he could move, though, some speck of brightness caught his eye, and he looked down at the dining room table. The dark green cloth appeared a miniature landscape what with the ornaments trapped beneath it. He stepped closer. There were brown needles scattered amid the rolling hills, and in one of the more prominent valleys lay, side by side, the two missing icicles he’d abandoned on the tree. He reached out but didn’t touch them.

“Come on, now,” he said to the ceiling.

He muttered through two glasses of wine; his breath, vapor. The kitchen was especially freezing, and the cold finally drove him to forsake the bottle. He wrapped up in three blankets and propped himself in a corner of the couch with the lights out. The baton lay only inches away on the coffee table. Bothwell was next to him curled in a ball, and Turtle stretched out along the rim of the pillow he rested his head on. After quite a while, his eyes adjusted and he could see past the window, the snow coming down. At some point he heard the heater kick back on and the dog gave a whimper of appreciation. When he shut his eyes to better hear the voices in the wind, sleep took him like an avalanche, and he wound up in the back seat of a cab, streaking along the main street of Shanghai, going to meet Mero for lunch.

MY MOTHER HAD firm instructions that, in case of a house-fire, two things required saving: the family photograph album, and the Granville-Hydes. I grew up beneath five original floral papercuts, utterly heedless of their history or their value. It was only in maturity that I came to appreciate, like so many on this and other worlds, my Great-Aunt’s unique art.

Collectors avidly seek original Granville-Hydes on those rare occasions when they turn up at auction. Originals sell for tens of thousands of pounds (this would have amused Ida); two years ago an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum was sold out months in advance. Dozens of anthologies of prints are still in print: the Botanica Veneris, in particular, is in 15 editions in twenty-three languages, some of them non-Terrene.

The last thing the world needs, it would seem, is another Botanica Veneris. Yet the mystery of her final (and only) visit to Venus still intrigues half a century since her disappearance. When the collected diaries, sketch books and field notes came to me after fifty years in the possession of the Dukes of Yoo I realised I had a precious opportunity to tell the true story of my GreatAunt’s expedition – and of a forgotten chapter in my family’s history. The books were in very poor condition, mildewed and blighted in Venus’s humid, hot climate. Large parts were illegible or simply missing. The narrative was frustratingly incomplete. I have resisted the urge to fill in those blank spaces. It would have been easy to dramatise, fictionalise, even sensationalise. Instead I have let Ida Granville-Hyde speak. Hers is a strong, characterful, attractive voice, of a different class, age and sensibility from ours, but it is authentic, and it is a true voice.

The papercuts, of course, speak for themselves.

SUCH A SHOW!

At lunch Het Oi-Kranh mentioned that a space-crosser – the Quest for the Harvest of the Stars, a Marsman – was due splash down in the lagoon. I said I should like to see that – apparently I slept through it when I arrived on this world. It meant forgoing the sorbet course, but one does not come to the Inner Worlds for sorbet! Het Oi-Kranh put his spider-car at our disposal. Within moments the Princess Latufui and I were swaying in the richly upholstered bubble beneath the six strong mechanical legs. Upwards it carried us, up the vertiginous lanes and winding staircases, over the walls and balcony gardens, along the buttresses and roof-walks and up the ancient iron ladder-ways of Ledekh-Olkoi. The islands of the archipelago are small, their populations vast and the only way for them to build is upwards. Ledekh-Olkoi resembles Mont St Michel vastly enlarged and coarsened. Streets have been bridged and built over into a web of tunnels quite impenetrable to non Ledekhers. The Hets simply clamber over the homes and lives of the inferior classes in their nimble spider-cars.

We came to the belvedere atop the Starostry, the ancient pharos of Ledekh-Olkoi that once guided mariners past the reefs and atolls of the Tol Archipelago. There we clung – my companion the Princess Latufui was queasy – vertigo, she claimed, though it may have been the proximity of lunch – the whole of Ledekh-Olkoi beneath us in myriad levels and layers, like the folded petals of a rose.

“Should we need glasses?” my companion asked.

No need! For at that instant the perpetual layer of grey cloud parted and a bolt of light, like a glowing lance, stabbed down from the sky. I glimpsed a dark object fall though the air, then a titanic gout of water go up like a dozen Niagaras. The sky danced with brief rainbows, my companion wrung her hands in delight – she misses the sun terribly – then the clouds closed again. Rings of waves rippled away from the hull of the space-crosser, which floated like a great whale low in the water, though this world boasts marine fauna even more prodigious than Terrene whales.

My companion clapped her hands and cried aloud in wonder. Indeed, a very fine sight!

Already the tugs were heading out from the protecting arms of Ocean Dock to bring the ship in to berth.

But this was not the finest Ledekh-Olkoi had to offer. The custom in the archipelago is to sleep on divan-balconies, for respite from the foul exudations from the inner layers of the city. I had retired for my afternoon reviver – by my watch, though by Venusian Great Day it was still midmorning and would continue to be so for another two weeks. A movement by the leg of my divan. What’s this? My heart surged. V strutio ambulans: the Ambulatory Wort, blindly, blithely climbing my divan.

Through my glass I observed its motion. The fat succulent leaves hold reserves of water, which fuel the coiling and uncoiling of the three ambulae – surely modified roots – by hydraulic pressure. A simple mechanism, yet human minds see movement and attribute personality and motive. This was not pure hydraulics attracted to light and liquid, this was a plucky little wort on an epic journey of peril and adventure. Over two hours I sketched the plant as it climbed my divan, crossed to the balustrade and continued its journey up the side of Ledekh-Olkoi. I suppose at any time millions such flowers are in constant migration across the archipelago, yet a single Ambulatory Wort was miracle enough for me.

Reviver be damned! I went to my space-trunk and unrolled my scissors from their soft chamois wallet. Snip snap! When a cut demands to be made, my fingers literally itch for the blades!

DAMAGED NEARLY TO extinction by a war it had won, Qad’s Piercing Glory tumbled through deep space, its engines dead, deceleration impossible. Glory’s Mayday shrieked, insistent, while Qad, beset by nightmares, slept in his transit pod. Glory focused its failing resources on keeping Qad alive.

Decades later, in the nearest shipyard, Executives registered the cry for help. They created an account for this new consumer and dispatched space boats with gravity tractors.

A millennium later, the space boats returned. The ship floated obediently in their tractor nets, its tumbling damped, its momentum slowly, inexpensively reduced from interstellar speeds. The boats minimized energy expenditure and Executive attention, guided by Artificial Normals. The rescue required little intelligence, and had not been marked as emergency or priority. The estimated account expenditure reached neither level. The boats put the disabled ship into a repair bay and signaled for awakening.

Qad woke in the cold and dark, surprised to wake at all. He had expected to freeze in the wilderness of deep space, or burn in the brilliance of starbirth. He pulled out the transit pod catheters and intravenous supply lines, indifferent to leaks or smells. Cleaning was the job of Artificial Stupids. He ignored their jobs; he barely noticed their existence.

He felt his way to the darkened bridge. Glory’s viewscreen displayed the unlit interior of the repair bay in real time, showed him the rescue and approach in past time, and offered him the repair agreement. He accepted it. What choice did he have? Light flooded the bay and the bridge.

The Artificial Normal shaved him clean, gave him a fashionably architectural haircut, and painted the faces of the little sisters. It offered him a display of fashionable clothing and guided him to a selection that flattered him and the new haircut. He paid, on credit, the licensing fee for the patterns and waited while Glory created them.

He preferred to dress himself, but he had to let the Normal fasten the hundred buttons down the back of the open-fronted coat, and tie the bow of his modesty apron. It laid out his sword belt, scabbard, and blade. He checked the edge and strapped on the weapon. Finally, the Artificial opened his drawer of medals and pinned them on in their proper order. The two he had recently designed remained in their presentation boxes. He hoped and expected the Executives to accept them, to award them, to reward him.

At the access tube, a leader light waited to guide him into the shipyard. He followed it. His boots rang on metal grating. Gravity increased, making the horizontal walkway feel like a steep climb. Qad wondered if standards had changed, or if the Glory had miscalculated his sleep therapy. He could hardly meet the Executives with sweat dripping down his face. He paused for a moment to slow his heavy breathing. The leader light stopped with him, then oscillated before him, urging him to continue.

The eldest little sister squeaked with hunger, and the others joined the cry, a demanding quartet. They expected to be fed when he woke, but the invitation of the Executives took precedence. He opened himself to the sisters so they could take sustenance from him. No matter his exhaustion, he must withstand the drain on his resources in order to distract and quiet the little sisters during his meeting.

The leader light lost patience and skittered down the grating. Qad followed, ignoring the pain and fatigue in his thigh muscles.

He reached the executive chamber not a moment too soon. The double doors opened.

Three Executives sat on a dais at the far end of the chamber. Qad strode toward them, stopped a proper five paces before them, and bowed.

“It’s time,” said the central Executive.

“My report: I took my Piercing Glory on a mission to explore and claim new worlds. I found two systems with suitable planets. I cleared them.” Qad held out his two medal boxes.

The Chief Executive beckoned him forward. Qad approached and placed the medals on the table. The Executive leaned over his huge belly, concealed by an embroidered lace modesty apron, and reached with spidery, sinewy arms to open the boxes.

Qad was proud of his designs. They displayed the position of the conquered worlds, the level to which he had cleared them, the potential of their remains. The medals would hang prominent on his chest. Impressive, but not too overwhelming.

The Executive inspected each one, reading them easily.

“Adequate,” he said. On either side of him, the other Execs murmured agreement.

Qad suppressed a frown. He had expected compliments, not an edge of criticism.

“And the damage to your ship?”

“Piercing Glory behaved with great courage in clearing the second planet. It was nearly destroyed. The inhabitants had nearly reached the danger zone, with powerful weapons. They would have achieved interstellar flight soon, and threatened our civilization. My ship has sent the proof to you.”

“You cleared the worlds to the third level of evolution.”

“We did.”

“While the directives limit clearing to second level.”

“Those directives are new,” Qad said. “Many years behind my expedition.”

“Did you consider waiting to receive recent directives?”

“Of course,” Qad said. “But the danger was rising. I offered mercy if they destroyed their weapons and submitted to me. They refused. They attacked. Glory and I responded.”

“We understand your destroying the weapons. We understand your destroying the intelligences. We question destroying the second level of evolution.”

“The danger was rising,” Qad said again. “Several species stood in the second rank to take over from the intelligences, though they had nearly been exterminated. In thousand time, in million time...” He paused, expecting the Executives to understand and accept.

“In million time,” said the Chief Executive, “they might have become fit to succumb to our will, as subordinate populations.”

“Or to become enemies,” Qad said, forcing himself to keep his tone mild.

“We will confer,” the Chief Executive said.

Leaving Qad to stand silent and obedient, his hand clenched around the grip of his sword, the Executives sat still while a privacy shield formed around them. Qad wondered what they would decide, who might speak for him, who might decline his argument.

By the time they reappeared, his feet hurt and his legs trembled with fatigue. He would have to recalibrate Glory’s sleep therapy, and perhaps even punish his ship’s intelligence for causing him discomfort bordering on embarrassment.

The Chief Executive rose. His legs were as thin and insectoid as his arms. His belly sagged beneath his modesty apron.

“Here is the decision.”

One of the other Executives looked pleased, the other annoyed. Qad had hoped for a unanimous decision in his favor. Whatever the decision, unanimous was beyond his reach.

“You are awarded the discovery medal.”

An Artificial Normal moved forward and attached the medal in first place above the row of previous medals. The pin scratched Qad’s chest. This error could only be deliberate. He slowed his anxious, angry heartbeat, hoping to prevent blood from showing behind the medal’s gleam. He kept himself from glaring at the Normal, for the Executive would take it, properly, as a sign of discontent toward authority. A glare at a Normal meant nothing, left the Artificial unaffected, and opened Qad to criticism.

Qad waited for his reward, which was standard for discovering a world suitable for unopposed colonization. They should give him at the very least license for another little sister.

But the Chief Executive continued.

“The second claim is declined.”

Qad paled. He locked his knees to keep from falling.

I’ll appeal, he thought. Appeal was allowed if the decision failed to be unanimous. Expensive, but allowed.

“Had you eliminated the first level of evolution,” the Chief Executive said, “your claim would have been approved. Had you waited for most recent instructions, your claim will have been approved.”

In a millennium, or many, Qad thought resentfully. He had made the decision to act rather than wait, and he still believed his decision correct. The intelligence he had destroyed was dangerous – at least the Executives agreed – and the upcoming intelligence held the potential to be even more of a threat, refined and honed by the enmity of its predecessors. He thought them well gone. He also thought the Executives desperately short-sighted, but they would deny any such accusation.

“You are fined the reward of your first discovery,” the Chief said.

The Artificial Normal pulled the medal from Qad’s shirt, ripping the shipsilk. The blotch of blood spread.

“You are dismissed,” said the Chief.

Qad stared at him, amazed, appalled. The leader light appeared at his feet, oscillating from before him to behind him, sensing the tension, anxious for him to follow.

He tried to turn on his heel, as insulted characters did in novels. The unnatural action nearly pitched him to the floor. He caught himself and departed without another word.

As he passed through the doorway, another Artificial Normal hurried after him and handed over an official paper. Supposing it was a report of the meeting, he stuffed it into his pocket.

In the comforting center of Glory, Qad dropped his sword belt with a clatter, then pulled off his new coat, popping most of the buttons, and threw it to the floor. He let the Artificial Stupids serve him porridge and wine, usually a comforting combination, though this time rather tasteless. The wine took the edge off the pain in his legs. He ripped the stained shipsilk shirt from beneath his apron. Ignoring the hungry complaints of the little sisters, he flung the shirt to the floor, then flung himself with equal ferocity into his transit pod. He slept.

He awoke baffled and sluggish, expecting the glow of stars beyond the sweeping port, but seeing only darkness. Silence surrounded him.

Was it all a dream? he asked himself. A nightmare? One nightmare to another? Is Glory drifting, wounded, in space?

“Glory?”

For the first time in his life, Glory remained silent in response to his question. Artificials failed to respond to his voice.

A thunderous pounding brought him to his feet in a rush of fear and pain. His legs nearly went out from under him. Space was vast and empty, with only a few tales of ships hit by drifting matter in all the millennia of civilization.

“Qad! Open!”

Having someone demand entry into his ship was even more startling. It was unique to his experience.

He left Glory’s center, feeling his way in the darkness. Desperate, he scratched Glory’s bulkheads, releasing lines of luminescent ship’s fluid on the walls. In the faint light he found his way to the access tube. He slid his hands across the slick bulkhead until he found the entrance. Leaving a scrabble of shining fingerprints, he pulled the sphincter open.

Light poured in from the shipyard.

“About time,” said the Chief Executive, pushing his way into Glory. Qad backed up, manners taught but seldom used drawing him away from touching the Executive’s protruding stomach. Without meaning to, Qad gazed at the moving bulges beneath the Executive’s modesty apron, imagining he could see the made-up eyes and orifices of the little sisters beneath it. No – not his imagination. Fashions had changed, and not, in Qad’s opinion, for the better. The apron’s elaborate embroidery cunningly concealed small holes through which the little sisters could stare, or blink, or offer a kiss.

He lost count at a dozen. There were more.

“I am here,” the Executive said.

Qad thought he meant he had come into Glory, then realized the Executive meant he had noticed that Qad’s gaze focused on the partly-concealed little sisters.

Qad raised his head to make eye contact with the Executive. His face blazed with embarrassment.

“Have you made a decision?” The Chief Executive’s gaze raked Qad. “Given your improper dress, perhaps not.”

Stupefied by lack of sleep, hangover, and pain, set off-balance by being half-clothed and unarmed, Qad blinked. “About an appeal? Not yet.”

“Fool. Did you receive my proposal?” He snatched at Qad’s trousers. Qad jumped, startled, offended, but the Executive had grabbed the crumpled report rather than Qad’s person.

The paper rattled as the Executive shook it in Qad’s face. He broke the seal – Is it a rudeness, Qad wondered, to break the seal of another man’s letter, if the seal is one’s own? I should have looked at it.

Qad took back the paper and read it, lips moving, sounding out the words that in an ordinary communication Glory’s voice would have spoken to him.

Before he reached the proposal, the bill from the shipyard astonished him.

“You agreed to it,” the Executive said.

“Did I have a choice?” Qad said. “I expected...” He stopped, aghast at what he had nearly said to the Chief Executive.

“To be treated more generously by the council?” The Chief Executive laughed. “Things have changed, young adventurer, since the last time you came proffering a handful of amateur medals.”

Qad flushed with anger. “Medals honored. Conquests approved. Rewards conveyed.”

“Your lack of judgment wiped out your resources. How do you intend to pay the shipyard bill? It increases every day. With interest.”

Glory had been cut off from power, for non-payment, and lay within a berth that kept the ship from drawing on starlight. Lacking power, wounded nearly to death, Glory would deteriorate, physically and intellectually, depleting its own resources to maintain Qad and the little sisters. If it survived, the ship would return to its childhood, begging information from other ships, who complied in response to offerings that Qad never questioned or understood. That was ship’s business.

Qad might return to his own childhood, absorbing the little sisters that he no longer could maintain.

He glanced again at the paper, forcing his attention past the bill, which he could never pay. Shaky with hunger and exhaustion and disbelief, he reached the end.

“But I planned to create my own lineage,” Qad said.

“Who’s stopping you? You have three little sisters –”

“Four!” Qad glanced down. Indeed the youngest had already begun to withdraw into his body, stunted by his lack of attention. If he had been alone, he would have slipped his hand beneath the apron to stroke her brow, perhaps even to touch her orifice with his finger to let her suck his blood for sustenance. But with the Chief Executive in his presence, that was impossible. Unthinkable.

At least it was the youngest, not the oldest, his favorite.

“– And you are young. You have plenty of time.”

“And you have plenty of little sisters,” Qad said. “For your own lineage.”

The Chief Executive glowered at him, but stroked his hand across his modesty apron, proudly. “Do you understand the advantages – the honors! – I’m offering you? Your shipyard bill paid, your ship restored, my support if you appeal the council’s decision –”

“You –”

Qad stopped. Do I expect him to support me if I refuse his proposal? he thought. Why am I arguing with him? Is he correct, and I’m a fool? His hand mimicked the Chief Executive’s, passing over the four bulges, one increasingly faint, beneath his own modesty apron.

“Why?”

“Your audacity appeals to me.”

“For an interbreed?”

“Of course! What do you imagine I’m talking about? Writing about?”

Qad had met a few interbreeds. He had to admit they had a certain... audacity.

He had dreamed of his own lineage, created by him and his little sisters, spreading out amongst the stars, conquering worlds. And yet everything the Chief Executive had said was true. This was an honor, a compliment.

“Audacity must be tamed, of course,” Qad’s suitor said. His heavy lids lowered over his pale eyes. “I am up to the challenge.”

Qad froze his expression. Is that what the council did to me, with its decision? he wondered. Tamed my audacity? It’s true I won’t soon again eliminate a second order of evolution, no matter what the danger.

“Your ship has a few more hours of its own resources to draw on,” the Executive said. “After that...” A warning, not quite a threat. “I’ll come back in time for you to make your decision without too much risk to your... lineage.”

He turned. Qad had to scuttle past him to open the sphincter. It clenched behind the Executive, leaving the unreadable scrabbles of Qad’s fingers shining on Glory’s inner wall.

Following the fast-fading glow of his rush to the access tube, Qad returned to Glory’s center and crawled into his pod. Ordinarily the bedding would have been resorbed and remade, but now it smelled of his sleep. He stretched out his hand to where he had thrown his shipsilk shirt, and found an amorphous, dissolving mass littered with his medals, and his sword and scabbard. He pulled away.

Qad reviewed the proposal in his mind’s eye, wishing for light so he might read the paper a second time. He wished for the Executive to put a deposit on his shipyard bill and allow Glory a few minutes’ power for light and maintenance, but of course the Executive’s interests were better served by leaving him in darkness and silence, his ship dying around him.

Qad would be relieved of debt, Piercing Glory repaired and upgraded to current standards. Glory would like that, Qad thought. They might even win an appeal, gaining two worlds’ worth of acclaim instead of a zero balance.

He would sleep, and then make a decision, but his choice was unavoidable. He could only make it irrevocable.

The little sisters woke him again and again, begging for food. By the time he gave up and rose, he was ravenously hungry. His fingertips were pierced and sore from the little sisters’ sucking. The youngest had revived and rebounded. The oldest purred with satisfaction, eyelids heavy.

As desperate as the little sisters, Qad begged Glory for food, a bath, a new shirt. The call went unanswered.

Hoping the Artificials had some residual power, he called for one to bring cosmetics. Again, he received no reply. He searched the chambers and corridors until he found an Artificial Stupid with a store of face paint. Scratching Glory’s wall desperately to obtain a glimmer of light, he did his best to make up the little sisters. When he painted their orifices, they snapped at him with hungry little teeth. When the youngest bit him a third time, he snapped his fingernail against her face. She screeched and withdrew as far as she could. He snarled at her, not bothering to calm her.

He worked particularly diligently on the eldest, then thought again and smeared away the paint on her eyes. He gripped the youngest’s face in one hand and decorated her as formally and elaborately as he could.

She tried to bite him again.

When he had finished, he pulled on his rumpled, stained apron and swordbelt, and went to the access hatch to wait, unshirted and grubby. Even the sword-belt carried stains, none, he regretted, from duels, and the sword’s edge remained dull.

Hardly a scene from a romance, he thought. But it was the best he could do with his – and Glory’s – resources fast declining.

A scratch at the access hatch. Qad pulled open the sphincter and followed the energetic leader light into the shipyard.

The Executive’s quarters surrounded Qad with opulence, everything clean and new, sharp-edged and glittering. The lights blazed. Artificial Stupids surrounded him, herded him to a bathing room, and scrubbed him and the little sisters clean. He cupped his hand over the eldest little sister, to shield her. The Artificial Stupids did not notice.

They shaved him, pomaded his hair, dressed him in silk trousers and open-fronted shirt, and made up three of the little sisters’ faces. The eldest remained concealed and unnoticed beneath his hand.

One of the Artificial Stupids handed him an elaborate modesty apron. The Artificials departed so he could arrange it himself, which puzzled him since they had already seen him, and the little sisters, naked.

He was surprised that the apron followed his own, old-fashioned customs, concealing the eyes and orifices of the little sisters.

The Artificials returned and herded him again, to an even more elaborate receiving room. The Chief Executive, dressed in vivid white with silver apron embroidery, sprawled on a black couch, his great stomach bulging into his lap. A bottle of wine stood near, with a single glass half full.

He gestured to Qad, then held up his hand to stop him at the formal five paces distant.

“I want to see what I’m getting for my patronage. I might decline, if I’m displeased.”

If that stipulation was in the proposal, Qad had forgotten it. But he could hardly object; it would do him no good.

“Show me,” the Executive said.

“May I know your name, first?”

“No. Don’t be too audacious in my presence, young adventurer.”

He knew Qad’s name, from the council meeting, but had never used it. This interbreeding would belong to the Executive’s lineage alone.

“Show me,” he said again.

Reluctantly, Qad loosed the bow of his modesty apron. He had never revealed himself to another person. He had expected – intended – for the little sisters to reproduce their lineage with him alone, to keep him pure.

Face and neck flushing hot, he pulled the apron aside, leaving its edge to conceal his eldest. Agitated by Qad’s reaction, the little sisters writhed and stretched, showing their teeth.

The Executive grabbed the apron and yanked it from Qad’s body. The frill of its neckpiece parted with a sharp rip, and the apron fluttered to the floor. Qad’s eldest little sister craned outward, fluttering smudged eyelids, snapping sharp teeth.

The Executive looked from one little sister to the next, beginning with the youngest, passing uninterested over the middle two, and fastening on the eldest.

“Names?”

Qad had never named the little sisters. It never occurred to him to do so. They were part of him; why would he name his own parts? This must be another fashion, like the modesty apron eye-slits, that he had never heard of. He turned the situation to his own advantage.

“No,” he said. “As you decreed, we aren’t exchanging names.”

The Executive laughed. “Well played, young adventurer. So. You neglect this one, which I will take and you will not miss.”

He nodded at the eldest little sister, whose teeth – smeared with misplaced red paint – snapped in a vertical line, who was most robust, most fit for the taking.

“This one –” Qad did his best to keep his expression neutral, failed, and gestured to the youngest. “This one is younger. Fresher.”

The Executive smiled. “One I will leave for you to raise.” He looked closer, inspecting the bruise Qad had left when he corrected his youngest. “And train to your will. The eldest has a longer benefit of absorbing your audacity, and perhaps your discipline in curbing it.”

Another new-fangled idea, that a little sister would learn from example, would learn from anything. Qad knew better than to argue, for the Executive had made his decision.

He had come close enough to rip off Qad’s modesty apron. Now he was even closer, pressing his belly against Qad’s stomach. He reached behind himself and loosened his trousers, allowing them to fall away from his skinny thighs, his boots, his skinny ankles and delicate feet. He kicked the silken clothing away, leaving only boots and sword-belt.

Possessed by terror, Qad reached for his own sword. The Executive snarled, grabbed his wrists, and powered him to the floor. The fur of the rug turned steely and wrapped itself around his arms and legs, pinioning him spreadeagled. On his knees, the Executive straddled him, straightened, and wrapped his arms around his own belly to pull it out of the way. His prehensile ovipositor writhed from his body, extending from his crotch.

All four of Qad’s little sisters snapped their teeth and craned toward it, but its attention focused on the eldest. It brought its tip to the little sister’s orifice and plunged inside.

Qad cried out in apprehension. The force opened him – his little sister – and extended along their tangled nerves. The ovipositor flexed and bulged, propelling the ovum along its length. The bulge reached the little sister’s orifice, pushed, failed to press past the teeth.

The little sister bit, severing the tip of the ovipositor. Lubricated by blood, the ovum squirted into the orifice. The Executive screamed and shuddered in agony and triumph.

The ovipositor dragged itself slowly back into the Executive’s body to regenerate.

Horrified, Qad felt his own ovipositor clench and writhe below his belly, aching to push out of his body. Groaning, holding himself, he managed to repress it.

The Executive rose. He gazed at Qad.

“You may leave,” he said, as if they were back in the council meeting. His docked ovipositor vanished into his body, leaving blood spatter on the Executive’s legs, on the rug, on Qad.

The rug’s restraints retracted, returning to fur, releasing him. Qad staggered to his feet, clutching his torn and stained modesty apron. Holding it against him, covering himself, he stumbled after the leader light, back to Glory, as his little sister moaned and keened and finally fell silent.

He slept.

He had no idea how long he remained insensible in his pod. When he awoke, a faint light permeated Glory’s center. His body ached.

“Glory?”

“Sleep.”

Desperately grateful for the sounds of his ship’s voice, he obeyed.

He could barely move. He hurt all over. Glory’s bulkheads glowed, more brightly than the last time he came out of his fugue. He pushed aside the material of his pod – clean now but much rougher than normal.

The eldest little sister protruded from his belly, a curve of taut skin, with a faint silver scar where the orifice had been. The other little sisters had retreated into him, leaving their sharp teeth snapping in defense and disappointment. He was ravenous. His arms and legs had shriveled to bone-thin appendages, fat and muscle absorbed to nourish the Executive’s growing interbreed. He tried to call for food, for wine. An Artificial Normal approached him – an unfamiliar one, not belonging to Glory.

It must be the Executive’s, Qad thought, here to watch and keep me.

He asked it for wine.

It extended an appendage and snapped him hard against the forehead. He fainted. After that, he no longer begged for wine. He submitted to the discomfort, even to the pain.

When the Executive pounded on the access hatch, Qad wept with relief. He struggled out of his pod, clasping his hands beneath the enormous bulge of the little sister – no longer a little sister, but the Executive’s interbreed. If he let go, it bounced uncomfortably and kicked from inside.

He found the foreign Artificial Normal scratching and probing at the clenched sphincter, insensible to the damage it inflicted. He pushed the Artificial aside and opened Glory by hand, as gently as he could. He imagined that his ship whispered appreciation.

The Executive entered, striding on stick-thin legs, cupping his belly in his long arms. Qad imagined that he carried even more little sisters than before. Their eyes sparkled and blinked at him from beneath the modesty apron. The Executive smiled, baring long teeth beneath cadaverous gums. “It is time?” Qad asked.

“You have plenty of time.”

The Executive guided him back to his pod, waited while he settled in, and sat on a chair produced – how? Qad wondered, and realized that the Executive’s patronage gave the Executive authority over Glory’s resources.

He slept and woke again and again. He lost track of time. A nutrition tube crawled down his throat, assuaging his hunger but leaving the aches untouched, the discomfort of the interbreed increasing. Always when he woke he found the Executive watching him. He tried to speak but the tube gagged him and kept him silent.

Pain roused him.

The bulge of the interbreed clenched, released, clenched again. Its nerves, tangled with his own, fired agony into his belly, his ovipositor, his spine. He screamed against the nutrition tube. It scrambled out of his way, falling from his lips. The Executive stood over him, silently watching.

The scar of the little sister’s orifice split open, searing him with a pain more intense than any he had ever experienced. The head of the interbreed protruded through the toothless opening, followed by shoulders, then skinny, spidery arms. As the Executive reached down, the interbreed’s sharp teeth snapped. The Executive flicked his fingernail against the interbreed’s cheek, bringing a long, wailing cry, which the Executive ignored. He picked up the new being, whose long thin legs and delicate feet slid from the pouch created by the little sister’s presence. The neck of the pouch closed and cut it off, spilling fluids into Qad’s nest. The pouch shriveled and fell away.

“Let me hold –” Qad cut himself off when he heard his own voice, dry and raspy, begging. The Executive gazed down at him, impassive, one arm cradling the interbreed, the other his belly.

If he lets me hold the interbreed, Qad thought, I’ll never let go. I’ll have to duel him.

And he will win.

Glory groaned as the Executive’s Artificial wrenched open the access sphincter, but a moment later the lights and power returned, along with the soft sounds of Glory’s life.

“Sleep,” whispered the ship.

Qad obeyed.

In a millennium of time, he woke. Glory pulsed around him, full of life and starlight, sensing nearby untouched worlds.

Qad’s belly ached where the little sister had lived, where the interbreed had grown. He throbbed with longing for the interbreed, but Glory was so far from the ship dock that the Executive must have solidified his new lineage. The interbreed would be entirely his creature. The Executive would give the interbreed a modern ship and send him out to conquer, to colonize, to perform evolutionary eliminations with the audacity the Executive so valued. Qad would never see either of them again.

A spiral of arousal moved beneath the scar of the interbreed’s birth. A new little sister, descended from the one he had lost, struggled to grow from its leftover ganglion. The other little sisters craned to see it. Qad snatched up the modesty apron that Glory had created anew for him, and flung it over them. Following his custom, it was solid and opaque. The little sisters squeaked and snapped, competing for his attention beneath the heavy shipsilk.

Three only, Qad thought. They are pure. The fourth is... gone, used up, contaminated. I want never to think of the eldest little sister again.

He reached toward it through his nerves, to its leftover ganglion, and extinguished it with a rush of anger. It burned out, leaving him bereft.

Ignoring the other little sisters, for now, he turned his attention to Glory, and singled out a new world.

THE BANK DIDN’T pay for the oranges. They should have – offerings were clearly listed as a reimbursable expense – but the turnaround time and degree of nudging needed when Agnes submitted receipts made the whole process prohibitive. If she bugged Trask too much around the wrong things she might lose the job, and with it the gas card, which was worth a lot more money than the oranges. Sucking up the expense was an investment in staving off unemployment.

Plus, she liked the feeling that since they came out of her pocket, it was she that was stockpiling favor with the spirits, instead of the bank. What did JPMorgan Chase need with the gratitude of a piddling household spirit in one of the hundreds of thousands of falling-down buildings that dotted its asset spreadsheets? All her boss cared about was keeping the spirits happy enough that roofs would not collapse or bloodstains spread on whitewashed walls when it came time to show the place – or a hearth god or brownie cause a slip or tumble that would lead to a lawsuit. The offerings came from her, and with each gift she could feel their gratitude. Interaction with household spirits was strictly forbidden, but she enjoyed knowing they were grateful. As now, entering the tiny red house at 5775 Route 9, just past the Tomahawk Diner. She breathed deep the dry wood-and-mothballs smell. She struck a match, lit the incense stick, made a small slit in the orange peel with her fingernail. Spirits were easy to please. What they wanted was simple. Not like people.

Wind shifted in the attic above her, and she caught the scent of potpourri. A sachet left in a closet upstairs, perhaps, or the scented breath of the spirit of the place. Agnes knew nothing about this one, or any of the foreclosed houses on her route. Who had lived there. Where they went. All she knew was the bank evicted them. A month ago or back in 2008 when the bubble first began to burst. Six months on the job and she still loved to investigate, but her roster of properties was too long to let her spend much time in each. And the longer she stayed, the harder it was to avoid interacting.

When she turned to go, he was standing by the door.

“Hello,” he said, a young man, bearded and stocky and bespectacled, his voice disarmingly cheerful. She thought he was a squatter. That’s the only reason she spoke back.

“Hi,” she said, carefully. Squatters weren’t her job. Trask had someone else to handle unlawful inhabitants. Most of the ones she’d met on her rounds were harmless, down on their luck and hiding from the rain. But anybody could get ugly, when they thought their home was threatened. Agnes held up an orange. “I’m just here for the offerings,” she said. “I won’t report that you’re sleeping here. But they do checks, so you should be prepared to move on.”

He tilted his head, regarded her like a dog might. “Move... on?”

“Yeah,” she said, and bit her tongue to keep from warning him. The guy Trask uses, he’s a lunatic. He’ll burn the place down just to punish you. She knew she should have been sympathetic to all the people overcrowded or underhoused because the banks would rather keep buildings empty than lower the prices. But nobody knew better than Agnes that when you broke the law, you had to be ready for the consequences.

“Oh!” he said, at last. “Oh, you think I’m a human!”

She stared. “You’re... not?”

“No, no,” he said, and laughed. A resounding, human, manly laugh. It reverberated in her belly. “No... let’s just say I can’t move on. This is my house.”

“I’m so sorry.” Agnes bowed her head, panic swelling in her stomach at her accidental disobedience. If Trask knew they spoke, she could get fired. “I meant no disrespect.”

“I know,” he said. Spirits could see that much, or so the stories went. Beyond that it was tough to tell. Some were all-knowing and some were dumb as boxes of rocks. What else did this one know about her?

Agnes had given up long ago trying to figure out why household spirits manifested differently. Sometimes it made sense, like the Shinto-tinged ancestor embodiment in the house where a Japanese family had lived, or the feisty boar-faced domovoi in a rooming house they had seized from a Russian lady. Others resisted explanation – who knew why an ekwu common to the Igbo people kept a vigil in a McMansion six thousand miles from Nigeria that had never been occupied by anyone, of African descent or otherwise... or why a supposedly timeless spirit would manifest as a scruffy hot man with a sleeve of tattoos like a current-day skateboarder? Weird, but no weirder than the average manifestation.

“Thank you for the orange,” he said, and crossed the room to take it out of her hand. She could smell him: He smelled like any other man. She could feel his heat. His hair was brown red. His glasses magnified his eyes slightly, making him look a little like a cartoon character.

“You like oranges? It’s usually a safe bet. Some houses like some pretty wacky shit, though. I don’t kill cats for anybody.” She realized she was doing that thing. The thing where she talked too much. Because she wanted somebody – a man – to like her. For an instant she did that other thing, where she immediately hated herself for this, and then realized none of it mattered. This wasn’t a man. It could never leave. It knew nothing of the world but what it found between these walls. And she had to go. Now.

He peeled the orange. She half-expected his hand to pass right through it, but that was silly. She knew spirits could affect the physical world in ways far more varied and impressive than any human. Once she watched a building burst into sudden, all-encompassing flames, reducing itself to ash and windblown smoke in four minutes.

“I like oranges,” he said. “Also whiskey. Could you bring me some of that, next time?”

“Bourbon, rye, scotch – single-malt, blended...” She recited the names like a list of lovers, men who had done her wrong, men who she still loved and would take back in an instant. She had no intention of bringing him booze. But saying the names made her blood thicken and her mouth dry.

“Bring me your favorite,” he said.

“That’s maybe not such a good idea,” she semi-whispered.

He shrugged. “Whatever you like.”

She wondered if she could trust the sadness in his voice. If spirits really were all that different from men. If, at bottom, they wanted something, and once they had it they were through with you.

“Why don’t you stay?” he said, his eyes wide and throbbing with loneliness.

“I’ve got two dozen houses left to visit today,” she said. “And then I’ve got to turn the keys in. Otherwise, the other maintenance workers won’t be able to get in.”

“After, then. Come back here. You’re nice. I can see it.”

“I wish I could,” she said. “But there’s people expecting me.”

He nodded, and handed her half the orange.

A door slammed, upstairs, in the long seconds that came next. The spirit’s head whipped to the side, his lips curling into a snarl, and for an instant Agnes saw the face of something savage and canine.

“The wind,” she said.

“Sorry,” he whispered, human again, pale and embarrassed. “I’ve been very on edge lately. I don’t know why.”

“I’m Agnes,” she said, telling herself she had imagined the momentary monster-face. The next house was 12 Burnt Hills Road, and she hated that one. The spirit manifested as the house itself, floorboards opening like mouths and bricks shifting as she walked through.

“Call me Micah.”

He wiped one juice-wet hand on the hem of his flannel shirt, then extended it. They shook. She bowed her head again, and he laughed protestingly. Then she left.

It was a lie, of course. No one was expecting her. No one cared where she was.

TEN YEARS AGO, Clara had attended a creative writing workshop run by Karen Joy Fowler, and what Karen Joy told her was: We are living in a science fictional world. During the workshop, Karen Joy also kept saying, I am going to talk about endings, but not yet. But Karen Joy never did get around to talking about endings, and Clara left the workshop still feeling as if she was suspended within it, waiting for the second shoe to drop.

Eventually, Clara attempted a cold equations story, and though Karen Joy never read it, Clara thought she might have liked it if she’d had the chance. In Clara’s story, “False Equations”, the Emergency Dispatch Ship (EDS) was packed full of animals, rather than people, and the stowaway was the child of a white-backed vulture pair. An egg when she was smuggled aboard, the stowaway hatched during the journey to Walden (rather than Woden).

Clara had made several copies of the story and sent them out to the other members of her book club. Fern wrote back to say that the story was too complex and far-fetched. Bea wrote that she hadn’t time to read anything just then except the book that they were supposed to be reading for their next meeting. And Belle said simply that there were far too many “Cold Equations” reworkings and inter-textual responses out there, and she didn’t see why Clara had bothered attempting another if she had so little to say about the matter.

Clara, like Fern and all of the other members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club, had never managed to finish reading the set book before their scheduled get-together. But then, none of their planned book discussions had yet taken place. There was always some complication, some hindrance that they were incapable of overcoming.

The workshop had not been a total loss, however, since Clara had met Belle there, and they had ended up good friends. They lived near each other – their farms were only a short walk apart – and a few years ago they had opened up a café in town where they served good, simple food and provided their customers with a shaded garden in which to sit and chat.

These days, when Clara can, she takes time off from the café to go and visit her daughter. Alice lives near the great lakes. She has a large house; tall, and stone-walled, with large windows to catch the afternoon breezes. As Clara comes down the shared driveway to Alice’s house, she always experiences a moment of something like regret, or fear. What if, once she enters her daughter’s house, she isn’t able to leave again? What if, once she sees all the children her daughter cares for, she can’t stop herself from saying something cruel? Telling her daughter what she believes: that Alice’s house full of other people’s children is just a way for her daughter to endlessly delay her own grieving, her own letting go of things. Or what if the opposite occurs: what if she enters that house full of children, sees all the work that needs to be done caring for them, and is caught up in her daughter’s Sisyphean task of feeding, bathing, and holding other creatures’ young. Like Sisyphus forever pushing his stone up the same mountain, only to watch it roll down again.

Clara isn’t sure she is a welcome visitor any more, or whether she wants to go there. She doesn’t think about these things directly, but as she comes up the walk she tries to imagine herself greeting and being greeted by her daughter and struggles to construct an image that contains ease or warmth.

As it happens, she finds Alice in the garden with her new lover. They are walking from tree to tree, looking up into the canopy of each one and then moving on.

This is not Alice’s first lover, Jeff, who is dead now, and Clara has difficulty remembering this one’s name. Blue? Balloon?

They go to wallow in the mudhole that spreads out from beneath the African tulip tree. The one Jeff had liked to wallow in with guests. They had been cooling off there together – Alice and Jeff – when they had told Clara there would be no grandchildren. “It’s my fault, I’m afraid,” he’d said, as if he’d forgotten to pick up ice on the way home, but blushingly. “They’re no good, my swimmers. My –”

“She knows what you mean,” Alice had said. “There’s no need to go on and on.”

Clara had remembered, then, the termination Alice had when she was in high school. The waiting room full of pictures of empty landscapes at sunset, the interview with the cheerful nurse, the other young females in the waiting room – all of them avoiding each other’s eyes. And afterwards, her daughter wanting ice cream and to sit by the river and watch the waterbirds dancing in the shallow water. Alice had rested her head on Clara’s shoulder, curled her feet up under her bottom like a child. Her breath had smelled of milk and sweet biscuits, and her hair of antiseptic. It was the last time Clara can remember her daughter wanting to be held.

The garden has changed more than Clara’s daughter has, since Jeff’s passing. The paths that were once just worn earth have been widened and cleared of weeds. The beds of unnamed flowers that Alice and her husband used to grow have been replaced with vegetable patches and rows of imported exotics. Mulched and weeded and trimmed and fertilised to within an inch of their lives.

“You should keep going,” Alice says to her lover.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh yes, of course! Women’s talk.” He winks at Clara as he moves away. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

When he has gone, Alice sighs and settles into a more comfortable position. “The sad thing is, he means it,” she says. “He won’t tolerate me doing anything without consulting him. He calls it communication, when what he really means is him telling me what to do.” She flicks her ears a little to clear away the flies. “It almost makes me glad we’re too different to breed. Imagine us: the parents of the last generation!”

Clara squints into the sun and watches her daughter’s lover still moving from tree to tree, looking up, thinking, then moving on. She is tired of being a visitor already, but Alice asks her all the questions a daughter asks anyway. No, Clara hasn’t heard from her husband of late. Yes, the café is going well. They’ve started a new tradition of monthly dinners. Seasonal dishes, all made with local produce. No, nobody special.

Alice looks across the mudhole to the forest. “I’ve lost track of Dad,” she says. “Wasn’t he out west somewhere, living on a wildlife refuge of some kind?”

“I’d heard that,” Clara said. “Him and that female were working the summers and mostly left alone in the winters. Wandering the hills.”

“Janet,” says her daughter.

“What?”

“Dad’s new partner, her name is Janet.”

She ought not to have come, Clara thinks. Everything her daughter says or asks of her feels like a reproach. Even the gardens are reproachful, the liquidambars arching over the green lawn. The perfect garden beds, the even paths, the vistas like postcards. It was just what she’d dreaded, coming down the driveway, just what she’d been preparing herself for.

Alice wants to show her around the bottom end of the garden, which she says is where Jeff spent most of his time during the last few months of his life. Sometimes, he would fall asleep on the lawn, stretched out like a child and snoring so loudly that the small birds – the fairywrens and tits – would scatter with fear.

“When I woke him up he would always say he hadn’t been sleeping at all,” Alice says. “He’d say he’d been writing. He’d tell me all about whatever it was he had been working on. By the end, the things he told me were just a jumble. A nonsense. But at first I believed him. Or... or I wanted to. He was working on a Cold Equations story, he said. But it was set here on earth, and instead of people, the two characters were rhinos, like us. The two last rhinos on earth. And as soon as one died, the other would become functionally extinct.”

Alice was smiling, as though even now she could hear Jeff working out the shape of his story in her head. “That must be how he thought of us,” she said. “After all those years of being together, of sharing our lives and building this house and this garden. That there was no point to us being together, or having children. That we were just the leftover scraps of something that had once been whole.”

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE, and may it please the court:

Thank you, it’s good to be here. A special hearing convened by you is very special. I’m happy to answer your questions.

Well, yes, the subpoena. But I’m happy too.

No, I did not represent them in those years. And now I’m only serving as their spokesperson while their legal standing is being clarified.

No, I don’t know where they are. But if I did, that would be a matter of attorney-client privilege.

Spokesperson confidentiality, yes. Like protecting my sources. That’s what I meant to say.

I do know what contempt of court means, yes. I brought my toothbrush.

No, I’m happy to answer any questions you have. Really.

Okay, sure. I met them when they were finishing their postdocs at MIT. I should clarify that they had no affiliation with MIT at the time they did the work in question, as MIT has proved.

Their project involved identifying and removing problem parts in the biobricks catalog. After MIT shifted the catalog to the iGEM website –

No, I don’t think repudiated is the right word for that. MIT might have been worried about legal repercussions, but I don’t know. I came in later.

Anyway, after that change of host, the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts grew much larger, and the parties for whom I am speaking found that there were questionable parts in the catalog, for instance a luminous bacteria that emitted lased light which unfortunately burned retinas, or –

Sorry. I’ll try to be brief. While going through the biobricks catalog, my former clients found a seldom-used plasmid backbone called DragonSpineXXL, much longer than typical plasmid backbones. The DragonSpine’s designers apparently had hoped to enable bigger assemblages, but they encountered in vitro problems, including one that they called spina bifida –

It’s a metaphor. I’m not a biochemist, I’m doing the best I can here. But to get to the point at your level of patience and understanding, as you so aptly put it, our bodies obtain their energy when the food we eat gets oxidized, producing ATP inside our mitochondria. ATP is the energy source used by all our cells. In plants, on the other hand, light striking the chloroplasts in leaves powers the production of ATP. Despite the different processes, the ATP is the same – Yes, I too was surprised. But all life forms on Earth share 938 base pairs of DNA, so it makes sense that there are some family resemblances. So, it occurred to my almost clients that –

They consisted of a microbiologist, a systems biologist, a synthetic biologist, and an MD specializing in biochemistry and nutritional disorders –

Yes, no doubt a good joke about the four of them walking into a bar could be concocted. But instead of that they found biobricks in the catalog that could be combined to make a synthetic chloroplast. They felt it would be possible to attach this synthetic chloroplast to a DragonSpine, and still have room to attach another assemblage they concocted, one where fascia cells formed hollow fibroblasts –

Sorry. Fascia are bands of connective tissue. The bands are stretchy, and they’re all over inside us. They kind of hold our bodies together. Like your feet, have you ever had plantar fasciitis? No? You’re lucky. I guess you sit down on the job more than I do. Anyway, fascia consist of wavy bands of collagen blobs called fibroblasts. So, my acquaintances loaded DragonSpines with fibroblasts containing chloroplasts –

Yes, I know it’s confusing. You are not biologists, I know. It’s easy to remember that. What it comes down to is that my sometime clients, using nothing but synthetic parts found in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, created photosynthesizing human cells.

Wait, excuse me, what you say is not correct. They didn’t want to patent it. They knew that the registry was an open source collection.

I don’t think they suspected that the idea itself would be patentable. The law there is ambiguous, I think that can be said. You might have judged their idea a business method only, you’ve done that before. An idea for a dating service, a new way to teach a class, a new way to replenish your energy – they’re the same, right? They’re ideas, and you can’t patent an idea, as you ruled in Bilski and elsewhere.

Yes, there were some physical parts in this case, but the parts in question were all open source. If you type out your idea on a computer, that doesn’t make it patentable just because a computer was involved, isn’t that how you put it in Bilski?

Quoting precedent is not usually characterized as sarcasm, Your Honor. The patent law is broadly written, and your decisions concerning it haven’t helped to narrow or clarify it. Some people call that body of precedent kind of ad hoc-ish and confusing, not to say small-minded. Whatever keeps business going best seems to be the main principle, but the situation is tricky. It’s like you’ve been playing Twister and by now you’ve tied yourselves into all kinds of contortions. Cirque du Soleil may come knocking any day now –

Sorry. Anyway the patent situation wasn’t a problem for my erstwhile clients, because they didn’t want a patent. At that point they were focused on the problem so many new biotechnologies encounter, which is how to get the new product safely into human bodies. It couldn’t be ingested or injected into the bloodstream, because it had to end up near the skin to do its work. And it couldn’t trigger the immune system –

Yes, in retrospect the solution looks perfectly obvious, even to you, as you put it so aptly. The people I am speaking for contacted a leading firm in the dermapigmentation industry. Yes, tattooing. That methodology introduces liquids to precisely the layer of dermis best suited for the optimal functioning of the new product. And once introduced, the stuff stays there, as is well known. But my putative clients found that the modern tattoo needle systems adequate to their requirements were all patent protected. So they entered negotiations with the company that owned the patent entitled ‘Tattoo Needle Tip Equipped with Capillary Ink Reservoir, Tattoo Tube Having Handle and Said Tattoo Needle Tip, and Assembly of Said Tattoo Needle Tip and Tattoo Needle.’

This device was modified by the parties involved to inject my future clients’ chloroplast-fibroblasts into human skin, in the manner of an ordinary tattoo. When experiments showed the product worked in vivo, the two groups formed an LLC called SunSkin, and applied for a new patent for the modified needle and ink. This patent was granted.

I don’t know if the patent office consulted the FDA.

No, it’s not right to say the nature of the tattoo ink was obscured in the application. Every biobrick was identified by its label, as the records show.

Yes, most of the tattoos are green. Although chlorophyll is not always green. It can be red, or even black. But usually it’s green, as you have observed.

No wait, excuse me for interrupting, there were no deaths. That was the hair follicle group. Thermoencephalitis, yes. It was a bad idea.

No, I’m not saying that no one with SunSkin tattoos ever died. I’m saying that no deaths suffered by those customers was proved to be caused by the tattoos. I refer you to that entire body of criminal and civil law.

Of course some of them did in fact die. No one ever claimed photosynthesis would make you immortal.

I do not speak for SunSkin, which in any case went bankrupt in the first year of the crash. My association is with my potential clients only.

After the crash, my ostensible clients formed a 501(c)(3) called End Hunger. They renounced the patent on their product, and indeed sued to have the patent revoked as improperly granted, the product being made entirely of open source biobricks.

No, the patent was not their idea in the first place. It was the idea of the lawyers hired by SunSkin. Amazing as it may seem.

Yes, the assemblage itself was my quasi-clients’ idea. Yes, the idea was new, and not obvious, which is how the patent law as written describes eligibility. But the parts were open source, and photosynthesis is a natural process. And my associates wanted their assemblage to remain open source. Actually all that quickly became a moot point. Once they published the recipe, and the knowledge spread that human photosynthesis worked, the injection method as such became what you might call generic. It turned out the cells were very robust. You could stick them in with a bone needle and they would do fine.

I don’t know how much money my semi-clients made.

Estimate? Say somewhere between nothing and a hundred million dollars.

I brought my toothbrush, as I said. Obviously my once and future clients made a living. I don’t think you can object to that. As you pointed out in Molecular versus Myriad, no one does anything except for money. Indeed you thought it was a great joke to imagine that people might work just for curiosity or recognition or the good of humanity. Curiosity, you said. That’s lovely, you said. Don’t you remember? You got a good laugh from the gallery, because you have no idea how scientists think or what motivates them. You actually seem to think it’s all about money.

Not since the crash it isn’t.

Yes, it does appear that large quantities of ATP entering the body by way of capillaries in the dermis causes some people to experience side effects. Hot flashes, hypersatiety, vitamin deficiencies, irritable bowel syndrome, some others. But you’ve made it clear in many cases that side effects cannot be allowed to stop the making of money. Your priorities there are very clear.

Well, I’m surprised to hear you describe the worst depression since the Black Death as a side effect. Especially the side effect of a new kind of tattoo.

Agreed, when you photosynthesize sunlight you will be less hungry. You might also spend more of your day outdoors in the sun, that’s right, and subsequently decide that you didn’t need quite as much food or heating as before. Or clothing. Or housing, that’s right. I don’t see all these green naked people wandering around sleeping under tarps in the park like you seem to, but granted, there have been some changes in consumption. Did changes in consumption cause the Great Crash? No one can say –

That means nothing. Your feeling is not an explanation. Historical causation is complex. Technology is just one strand in a braid. What you call the Great Crash others call the Jubilee. It’s been widely celebrated as such.

Yes, but those were odious debts, so people defaulted. Granted, maybe it was easier to do that because they weren’t in danger of starving. Maybe the rentier class had lost its stranglehold –

Not true. Most people think the crash resulted not from photosynthetic tattoos or the Big No but rather from another liquidity crisis and credit freeze, as in 2008. Possibly you’ve even heard people saying that the failure to regulate finance after 2008 was what led to the crash, and that the failure to regulate finance was a result of your decision in Citizens United and elsewhere. Possibly you’ve heard yourselves described as the cause of the crash, or even as the worst court in the history of the United States.

Sorry. This is what one hears when one is outside this room.

May I point out that I am not the one straying from the point. In the matter of this current hearing, which strikes me as a bit of a witch hunt to find culpability for the crash anywhere but at your own doorstep, I repeat that my clients never wanted the patent and renounce all claims to it. The patent was awarded to an LLC called SunSkin, which went bankrupt in the first year of the crash when its principal lender broke contract by refusing to pay a scheduled payment. Possibly the lawsuit against the lender will eventually be won, but as SunSkin no longer exists, it will be a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for them.

Well, as the lender was nationalized along with all the rest of the banks in the third year of the crash, if SunSkin’s lawsuit ever comes to you, you may have to recuse yourselves as being a party to the defendants. Not that that kind of conflict ever stopped you before.

I don’t know, can there be contempt of court if the court is beneath contempt?

I don’t care, I brought my toothbrush. I’ll be appealing this peremptory judgment at the next level.

Not true. There is most definitely a next level.

THERE’S A RAIL link, obviously, connecting this liminal place to the coast at Whitstable, but the mayor and his entourage will arrive by boat. It’s more dramatic that way.

Representatives of the airfield construction crews are lined up to greet him. Engineers in hard hats and dayglo orange overalls. Local politicians too, of course. Even those who bitterly opposed this thing’s construction are here for its dedication. The place is a fact now, so they may as well bless it, and in their turn, be blessed.

It’s early morning, and bitterly cold. Still, the spring light, glinting off glossy black tarmac and the glass curtain walls of the terminal buildings, is magnificent.

I’m muscling some room for my nephews at the rail of the observation deck, and even up here it’s hard to see the sea. A critical press has made much of the defences required to protect this project from the Channel’s ever more frequent swells. But the engineering is not as chromed as special as it’s been made out to be: this business of reclaiming land from the sea and, where necessary, giving it back again (‘managed retreat’, they call it), is an old one. It’s practically a folk art round here, setting aside this project’s industrial scale.

The mayor’s barge is in view. It docks in seconds. None of that aching, foot-tap delay. This ship’s got jets in place of propellers and it slides into its decorated niche (Scots blue and English red and white) as neatly as if it were steered there by the hand of a giant child.

My nephews tug at my hands, one on each, as if they’d propel me down to deck level: a tempted Jesus toppling off the cliff, his landing softened by attendant angels. It is a strange moment. For a second I picture myself elderly, the boys grown men, propping me up. Sentiment’s ambushed me a lot this year. I was engaged to be married once. But the wedding fell through. The girl went to be a trophy for some party bigwig I hardly know. Like most men, then, I’ll not marry now. I’ll have no kids. Past thirty now, I’m on the shelf. And while it is an ordinary thing, and no great shame, it hurts, more than I thought it would. When I was young and leant my shoulder for the first time to the civic wheel, I’d entertained no thought of children.

The mayor’s abroad among the builders now. They cheer and wheel around him as he waves. His hair is wild, a human dandelion clock, his heavy frame’s a vessel, wallowing. He smiles. He waves.

A man in whites approaches, a pint of beer – of London Pride, of course – on a silver tray. The crowd is cheering. I am cheering, and the boys. Why would we not? Politics aside, it is a splendid thing. This place. This moment. Our mayor fills his mouth with beer and wheels around – belly big, and such small feet – spraying the crowd. The anointed hop around, their dignity quite gone, ecstatic. Around me, there’s a groan of pop-idol yearning, showing me I’m not alone in wishing that the mayor had spat at me.

FOR FIFTEEN YEARS my grandfather lived next door to the Mughal princess Zeenat Begum. The princess ran a tea stall outside the walled city of Old Lahore in the shade of an ancient eucalyptus. Dozens of children from Bhati Model School rushed screaming down muddy lanes to gather at her shop, which was really just a roadside counter with a tin roof and a smattering of chairs and a table. On winter afternoons it was her steaming cardamomand-honey tea the kids wanted; in summer it was the chilled Rooh Afza.

As Gramps talked, he smacked his lips and licked his fingers, remembering the sweet rosewater sharbat. He told me that the princess was so poor she had to recycle tea leaves and sharbat residue. Not from customers, of course, but from her own boiling pans – although who really knew, he said, and winked.

I didn’t believe a word of it.

“Where was her kingdom?” I said.

“Gone. Lost. Fallen to the British a hundred years ago,” Gramps said.

“She never begged, though. Never asked anyone’s help, see?”

I was ten. We were sitting on the steps of our mobile home in Florida. It was a wet summer afternoon and rain hissed like diamondbacks in the grass and crackled in the gutters of the trailer park.

“And her family?”

“Dead. Her great-great-great grandfather, the exiled King Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in Rangoon and is buried there. Burmese Muslims make pilgrimages to his shrine and honor him as a saint.”

“Why was he buried there? Why couldn’t he go home?”

“He had no home anymore.”

For a while I stared, then surprised both him and myself by bursting into tears. Bewildered, Gramps took me in his arms and whispered comforting things, and gradually I quieted, letting his voice and the rain sounds lull me to sleep, the loamy smell of him and grass and damp earth becoming one in my sniffling nostrils.

I remember the night Gramps told me the rest of the story. I was twelve or thirteen. We were at this desi party in Windermere thrown by Baba’s friend Hanif Uncle, a posh affair with Italian leather sofas, crystal cutlery, and marbletopped tables. Someone broached a discussion about the pauper princess. Another person guffawed. The Mughal princess was an urban legend, this aunty said. Yes, yes, she too had heard stories about this so-called princess, but they were a hoax. The descendants of the Mughals left India and Pakistan decades ago. They are settled in London and Paris and Manhattan now, living postcolonial, extravagant lives after selling their estates in their native land.

Gramps disagreed vehemently. Not only was the princess real, she had given him free tea. She had told him stories of her forebears.

The desi aunty laughed. “Senility is known to create stories,” she said, tapping her manicured fingers on her wineglass.

Gramps bristled. A long heated argument followed and we ended up leaving the party early.

“Rafiq, tell your father to calm down,” Hanif Uncle said to my Baba at the door. “He takes things too seriously.”

“He might be old and set in his ways, Doctor sahib,” Baba said, “but he’s sharp as a tack. Pardon my boldness but some of your friends in there...” Without looking at Hanif Uncle, Baba waved a palm at the open door from which blue light and Bollywood music spilled onto the driveway.

Hanif Uncle smiled. He was a gentle and quiet man who sometimes invited us over to his fancy parties where rich expatriates from the Indian subcontinent opined about politics, stocks, cricket, religious fundamentalism, and their successful Ivy League-attending progeny. The shyer the man the louder his feasts, Gramps was fond of saying.

“They’re a piece of work all right,” Hanif Uncle said. “Listen, bring your family over some weekend. I’d love to listen to that Mughal girl’s story.”

“Sure, Doctor sahib. Thank you.”

The three of us squatted into our listing truck and Baba yanked the gearshift forward, beginning the drive home.

“Abba-ji,” he said to Gramps. “You need to rein in your temper. You can’t pick a fight with these people. The doctor’s been very kind to me, but word of mouth’s how I get work and it’s exactly how I can lose it.”

“But that woman is wrong, Rafiq,” Gramps protested. “What she’s heard are rumors. I told them the truth. I lived in the time of the pauper princess. I lived through the horrors of the eucalyptus jinn.”

“Abba-ji, listen to what you’re saying! Please, I beg you, keep these stories to yourself. Last thing I want is people whispering the handyman has a crazy, quarrelsome father.” Baba wiped his forehead and rubbed his perpetually blistered thumb and index finger together.

Gramps stared at him, then whipped his face to the window and began to chew a candy wrapper (he was diabetic and wasn’t allowed sweets). We sat in hot, thorny silence the rest of the ride and when we got home Gramps marched straight to his room like a prisoner returning to his cell.

I followed him and plopped on his bed.

“Tell me about the princess and the jinn,” I said in Urdu.

Gramps grunted out of his compression stockings and kneaded his legs. They occasionally swelled with fluid. He needed water pills but they made him incontinent and smell like piss and he hated them. “The last time I told you her story you started crying. I don’t want your parents yelling at me. Especially tonight.”

“Oh, come on, they don’t yell at you. Plus I won’t tell them. Look, Gramps, think about it this way: I could write a story in my school paper about the princess. This could be my junior project.” I snuggled into his bedsheets. They smelled of sweat and medicine, but I didn’t mind.

“All right, but if your mother comes in here, complaining –”

“She won’t.”

He arched his back and shuffled to the armchair by the window. It was ten at night. Cicadas chirped their intermittent static outside, but I doubt Gramps heard them. He wore hearing aids and the ones we could afford crackled in his ears, so he refused to wear them at home.

Gramps opened his mouth, pinched the lower denture, and rocked it. Back and forth, back and forth. Loosening it from the socket. Pop! He removed the upper one similarly and dropped both in a bowl of warm water on the table by the armchair.

I slid off the bed. I went to him and sat on the floor by his spidery, whitehaired feet. “Can you tell me the story, Gramps?”

Night stole in through the window blinds and settled around us, soft and warm. Gramps curled his toes and pressed them against the wooden leg of his armchair. His eyes drifted to the painting hanging above the door, a picture of a young woman turned ageless by the artist’s hand. Soft muddy eyes, a knowing smile, an orange dopatta framing her black hair. She sat on a brilliantly colored rug and held a silver goblet in an outstretched hand, as if offering it to the viewer.

The painting had hung in Gramps’s room for so long I’d stopped seeing it. When I was younger I’d once asked him if the woman was Grandma, and he’d looked at me. Grandma died when Baba was young, he said.

The cicadas burst into an electric row and I rapped the floorboards with my knuckles, fascinated by how I could keep time with their piping.

“I bet the pauper princess,” said Gramps quietly, “would be happy to have her story told.”

“Yes.”

“She would’ve wanted everyone to know how the greatest dynasty in history came to a ruinous end.”

“Yes.”

Gramps scooped up a two-sided brush and a bottle of cleaning solution from the table. Carefully, he began to brush his dentures. As he scrubbed, he talked, his deep-set watery eyes slowly brightening until it seemed he glowed with memory. I listened, and at one point Mama came to the door, peered in, and whispered something we both ignored. It was Saturday night so she left us alone, and Gramps and I sat there for the longest time I would ever spend with him.

This is how, that night, my gramps ended up telling me the story of the Pauper Princess and the Eucalyptus Jinn.

IF THERE’S ONE thing Anat knows, it’s this. She loves Oscar her brother, and her brother Oscar loves her. Hasn’t Oscar raised Anat, practically from childhood? Picked Anat up when she’s fallen? Prepared her meals and lovingly tended to her scrapes and taught her how to navigate their little world? Given her skimmer ships, each faster and more responsive than the one before; the most lovely incendiary devices; a refurbished mob of Handmaids, with their sharp fingers, probing snouts, their furred bellies, their sleek and whiplike limbs?

ASHIBAN XIDYLA HAD a headache. A particularly vicious one, centered somewhere on the top of her head. She sat curled over her lap, in her seat on the flier, eyes closed. Oddly, she had no memory of leaning forward, and – now she thought of it – no idea when the headache had begun.

The Gidanta had been very respectful so far, very solicitous of Ashiban’s age, but that was, she was sure, little more than the entirely natural respect for one’s elders. This was not a time when she could afford any kind of weakness. Ashiban was here to prevent a war that would quite possibly end with the Gidanta slaughtering every one of Ashiban’s fellow Raksamat on the planet. The Sovereign of Iss, hereditary high priestess of the Gidanta, sat across the aisle, silent and veiled, her interpreter beside her. What must they be thinking?

Ashiban took three careful breaths. Straightened cautiously, wary of the pain flaring. Opened her eyes.

Ought to have seen blue sky through the flier’s front window past the pilot’s seat, ought to have heard the buzz of the engine. Instead she saw shards of brown and green and blue. Heard nothing. She closed her eyes, opened them again. Tried to make some sense of things. They weren’t falling, she was sure. Had the flier landed, and she hadn’t noticed?

A high, quavering voice said something, syllables that made no sense to Ashiban. “We have to get out of here,” said a calm, muffled voice somewhere at Ashiban’s feet. “Speaker is in some distress.” Damn. She’d forgotten to turn off the translating function on her handheld. Maybe the Sovereign’s interpreter hadn’t heard it. She turned her head to look across the flier’s narrow aisle, wincing at the headache.

The Sovereign’s interpreter lay in the aisle, his head jammed up against the back of the pilot’s seat at an odd, awkward angle. The high voice spoke again, and in the small bag at Ashiban’s feet her handheld said, “Disregard the dead. We have to get out of here or we will also die. The speaker is in some distress.”

In her own seat, the pink- and orange- and blue-veiled Sovereign fumbled at the safety restraints. The straps parted with a click, and the Sovereign stood. Stepped into the aisle, hiking her long blue skirt. Spoke – it must have been the Sovereign speaking all along. “Stupid cow,” said Ashiban’s handheld, in her bag. “Speaker’s distress has increased.”

The flier lurched. The Sovereign cried out. “No translation available,” remarked Ashiban’s handheld, as the Sovereign reached forward to tug at Ashiban’s own safety restraints and, once those had come undone, grab Ashiban’s arm and pull.

The flier had crashed. The flier had crashed, and the Sovereign’s interpreter must have gotten out of his seat for some reason, at just the wrong time. Ashiban herself must have hit her head. That would explain the memory gap, and the headache. She blinked again, and the colored shards where the window should have been resolved into cracked glass, and behind it sky, and flat ground covered in brown and green plants, here and there some white or pink. “We should stay here and wait for help,” Ashiban said. In her bag, her handheld said something incomprehensible.

The Sovereign pulled harder on Ashiban’s arm. “You stupid expletive cow,” said the handheld, as the Sovereign picked Ashiban’s bag up from her feet. “Someone shot us down, and we crashed in the expletive High Mires. The expletive expletive is expletive sinking into the expletive bog. If we stay here we’ll drown. The speaker is highly agitated.” The flier lurched again.

It all seemed so unreal. Concussion, Ashiban thought. I have a concussion, and I’m not thinking straight. She took her bag from the Sovereign, rose, and followed the Sovereign of Iss to the emergency exit.