“I leave at half past three.”
“If there’s room in your cart, we can take deliveries together.” He did not answer at first. “Please,” she said. “I don’t know how long they’ll hold Corbin. We have stock to sell. I can pay for cart space if it’s at a premium.”
“I don’t—we have plenty,” he said. “You should rest a day or two.”
“Ellen sings. Hannah runs. I work.”
“I’ll wake you,” he said, “at quarter ’til.”
“You won’t have to.”
He washed the glass and left it on the drying rack and walked back across the carpet to his room. “Good night, Claire.”
“Good night, Mr. Adorne.”
Donna wrapped herself around him when he lay beside her. The room was hot and so was her skin, but he needed her heat, and let her hold him when most nights he would have nudged her off. He stared up into the darkness, thinking about his boys and listening to the soft wordless song through his open window.
*
Cat hit the rooftops running. There was a black hot pit of rage inside her, and if she ran fast enough she could leave it behind. In the Pleasure Quarter you could run for blocks from roof to roof before you hit a street broad enough to make you jump. She wasn’t alone up here. On nights like this, roofs were balconies for drinkers and dreamdust drifters. She ran past cots where hungry dreamers twitched and rolled, adjusting phototropically to her desire.
Oh there was a litany of curses inside her skull.
Oh she’d needed him.
Oh she was coursing on the cold fluid pleasant numbness that fang sent through her and oh she was hungry for more—
But that wasn’t the source of her anger, or her loss, and he both was and wasn’t the one she hated.
She grabbed the badge at her neck and let the Suit pour silver over and through her. But though it made her strong, though it made her fast, it didn’t feel the way it had back when Justice was a cold clear mind without an I inside, the working out of brutal math. Now the ice joined her to something else. She felt the others in the back of her mind, but she was still herself, still Cat.
Faster, though, and stronger. She leapt from roof to roof, and the drunks and dreamdust trippers, the tripmasters and cots and clouds of smoke, the railings and roads all blurred. She leapt over alley after alley, ignoring the bloodrush.
Fine, she thought up to the immense cold silver web. Fine, she screamed at the moon. You want me to let you in. Take me, then. I’ve worked and worked, and here I am back where I started. My room’s a cot and a dresser and a mess. You want worship? Take it all. Take everything I have. Drag me back to where I was before: at least in you I had a space where I was gone. Peel me out of me.
She reached the broad ring road at the Quarter’s edge. She couldn’t jump that distance. She gathered herself and spread wings from her back and flew.
At the apex of her arc she realized she was falling.
Her wings slipped on the wind. She tumbled, mouth open beneath the silver mask, screaming through the sky to land and skid on a roof. The force of her fall blinked off the world. When she came back to herself, she hurt. She lay, human again, in torn clothes at the end of a furrow her fall had plowed through gravel. Gasping. Salt tears wet her face. She hadn’t cried in a while.
She became aware, later, of a shape crouching over her, massive and stone. Aev settled beside her.
Cat lay still, not knowing whether she was dreaming.
“I’m here,” Aev said, soft as an avalanche.
“I fell.”
Her touch on Cat’s arm was firm and light. She used the pads of her fingers, not her talons. “It’s hard to fly,” she said. “But you can learn.”
*
On the Alt Coulumb docks, in the hold of a ship, a hundred bodies waited, and other minds waited within.
24
No pig wants to start the morning trussed.
This one woke on its back in a forest clearing. Nearby, past screening shrubs and evergreens, large wagons rolled down a highway. The pig did not know highway or wagons, but it knew the sound. Rough, heavy cord bound its trotters. It squirmed and surged and wriggled. The coils on its left foreleg began to slip.
A knife flashed in the cold, too bright for pain. The pain came later. Then—nothing.
Two women stood in the clearing. The pig bled on bare earth. The blood from its opened throat traced drunken spider trails along the soil toward a circle of burned pine needles around the corpse. When the blood reached the circle’s edge, it pooled as if it had run against glass.
The younger woman sheathed her work knife. Her hands were clean. She pondered the blood patterns within the circle.