Angel in Ashes

Chapter 1 — The Rooks’ Headquarters

The Rooks’ headquarters was four compartments and a corridor bolted into the lower hull of the Savior airship, and it had been something else first.

You could see where. Brackets on the bulkheads with nothing mounted to them. A hatch stencilled CARGO 3 that opened onto bunks. Cable runs that had been cut and rejoined and cut again, the newer splices wrapped in tape that didn’t match.

The air was oil and hot metal. It sat on the back of the tongue and stayed there.

Heat came up through the deck plates in slow waves. Adeline felt it through her boots at every step, rising and falling with something in the engines she couldn’t see.

JT went ahead of them with his arms out.

Short red hair, cut close. A mask over the lower half of his face — matte black, angular, a thin line of blue etching along the jaw and a visor that held a faint glow even in the dark stretches. Below his left eye, where the mask ended, the edge of a tattoo. She had been trying to work out what it was since the day she came aboard and had got as far as a curve.

“Behold the empire.”

His boots hit the steel plating and the sound came back off both walls at once.

“Kitchen’s a death trap. It’ll poison you three ways before breakfast.” He knocked a hatch as he passed it. “Showers work every other Tuesday, if you pray to the right gods. And if the lights flicker—”

A panel over their heads spat once and settled.

“—that’s not ambience. That’s wiring begging for a mercy it stopped deserving six months ago.”

Adeline said nothing. She was looking at everything.

The corridor ran ahead into rust-orange light. Two of the overheads were out. A third came and went on no schedule she could work out. Where the wiring had been opened up and left that way, bare copper showed through, and every so often it threw a spark that died before it reached the floor.

There was soot on the bulkheads at shoulder height, worn smooth in a continuous band the whole length of the passage. Three people, going back and forth, for years.

Someone had cut a tally into the doorframe of the second compartment and stopped at nine.

Four bunks in a compartment built for six. Two of them stripped. Savior had folded the Rooks into the airship the way you find space for equipment nobody has decided about yet — a hull section that wasn’t being used, three people who weren’t on anyone’s roster, and a girl with wings who had walked out of a mountain and into a war and had not been given a job title since.

This is a home.

She had lived in one place for as long as she could remember. It had been a mountain, and it had been hers because nobody else wanted it, and nothing in it had ever been worn smooth by anybody but her.

Don’t touch anything.

Past the galley the corridor narrowed, and her wings caught.

Not badly. A drag of primaries along the bulkhead, three or four feathers bending back before they sprang straight. The ship was built for people who ended at their shoulders. She had stopped noticing around the third day.

“Conduit.”

Adeline ducked. The pipe went over her head with an inch to spare and she never looked up to check.

Catalina walked half a step behind and to the left. She had been walking there since the elevator. Not following. Not crowding. Off the shoulder, where she could see the whole span of both wings and the deck ahead at the same time.

When the corridor tightened she went first and turned sideways. When it opened she came back. When something hung low she said the word before Adeline reached it.

There was no system to it. Nobody had agreed to anything.

“Hatch.”

Adeline stepped over the coaming without breaking stride.

Her wings stayed open the whole way — half-spread, loose, taking soot off both walls in two pale streaks that would need an hour of work to get out of the down.

It did not occur to her to fold them.

Catalina caught up and bumped JT’s shoulder with her own. The stack of thin bracelets on her wrist knocked together, a small bright sound underneath the engine drone.

“Don’t listen to him. He loves this place more than he’ll admit.”

“Love’s a strong word.” The visor tipped toward her. “I tolerate it. Like bad roommates.”

“You’ve said that one.”

“I’ll keep saying it until it stops being true.” His attention swung sideways. “Still beats whatever cave you crawled out of, right?”

Adeline held his look and didn’t answer. Ten seconds. Eleven.

JT broke first, which he always did, and made it look like he’d meant to.

Catalina laughed. Her hair caught the working overhead as they passed under it — pink through the top, blue underneath, the whole mass of it pushed back off her face and held there by nothing Adeline could identify.

“Face it. You’d miss these walls if someone handed you Phoenix’s suite.”

“Phoenix’s suite.” Actual disgust, this time. “That place reeks of arrogance and body spray. There are mirrors in the hallway. Four of them. Between the door and the couch.”

“And you’d still raid the minibar.”

“Only if it’s stocked better than ours. Which is a low bar. Which is my point.”

JT stopped walking.

The Rooks’ section ended here. There was a pressure door set into the bulkhead ahead of them — oval, heavy, a wheel at the centre and a small port of scratched glass above it. The frame was painted a yellow that had not been touched up in a long time. Through the glass she could see that the deck plating on the other side was a different colour.

“That’s the tour,” he said. “Four rooms and a hallway. You’ve seen the empire.”

“There’s more ship than this.”

“There’s a lot more ship than this.” He put both hands on the wheel. “None of it’s ours.”

He hauled. The door came off its seal with a sound she felt in the back of her teeth, and swung.

The corridor beyond was wider by two feet. Every overhead in it worked. There was a line of grip tape run down the centre of the deck, and it had not been worn through anywhere along its length, and there was no soot on the walls at all.

Adeline stopped in the doorway with her wings still in the Rooks’ side of it.

“Turn,” Catalina said.

She turned, and went through sideways, and the primaries cleared the frame by nothing.

They walked. Same deck, different ship. Nobody had bolted anything to anything here.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“JT.”

“There’s a room down this way.” He didn’t slow down. “I want you to see it before somebody works out I’ve been letting you into it.”

The corridor opened ahead, and the air changed.

Colder. Drier. The engine noise dropped away to a low even hum that came through the floor rather than the walls.

The compartment beyond was nothing like the ones behind it. Brushed steel. Glass. A deck that had been cleaned recently and cleaned properly, with the seams between the plates swept out. No brackets with nothing on them. No tape.

Then the light off the screens found her.

They ran the whole curve of the far wall, floor to ceiling, more than she could count in one pass. A weather system turning slowly over an ocean, white and enormous. A column of numbers scrolling upward faster than reading. A stadium from above, the crowd moving in one direction and then the other. A street in a city at night with the rain coming down through the lights.

Adeline stopped where she was.

Her own face came back at her off a dozen panels at once. Pale skin. White hair gone silver in the glare. Her wings behind her taking the colour off whatever screen they happened to be in front of, so that the left one ran storm-grey and the right one ran the red of the scrolling numbers, and neither of them looked like anything that belonged to her.

Fourteen years on a mountain, and the world had been four things. Snow. Rock. Weather coming in. Her father’s back moving ahead of her through the trees.

She had known there was more. It had been a fact she owned and never used.

Now it was on a wall in front of her, all of it, running whether she watched or not. On one of those panels it was raining on people who had never heard of her and never would.

She put her hand out. Stopped short of the glass.

“Magic,” she breathed.

The word barely made it out. She had not meant to say it in company.

Catalina was watching her.

Not the screens. Not the storm or the stadium or the rain. Her.

Adeline caught it half a second late, and Catalina did not do what people did — did not smirk, did not turn it into a joke about mountain girls and indoor plumbing. She held it a moment past comfortable. Then she looked away first, and the tops of her ears went pink under all that hair, and she found something on the far wall to be interested in.

She’s going to say something.

She didn’t.

Then one panel changed.

The others kept running. This one went to a still frame and a line of red text across the bottom.

IRON CRESCENT POWER — EXECUTIONS IN AL-MIRAJ

Then it moved.

Soldiers in polished armour walking a line of civilians across open ground. Dust coming up around their boots and hanging there in the light. A square packed to the edges with people. A man on his knees on a wooden platform with his hands behind him. A woman somewhere off to the left with her mouth open and no sound reaching the microphone.

The platform had been dressed for it. Banners down both sides in colours that had gone bad under the sun. Flowers along the front edge. A row of children in white robes at the foot of the steps with baskets, throwing petals out across the stone in handfuls, on a signal, in time.

The picture cut to a second angle without a break in the sound. Then a third, higher, looking down the length of the square from a rooftop. Whoever was doing this had put cameras up first and built the rest of it afterward.

Children in the front row. Not one of them crying.

Adeline’s hands closed at her sides.

It was the clapping. She could have held the rest — she had seen what people did to each other, she had a father who had walked her through the arithmetic of it before she was tall enough to see over the counter.

But the hands kept time. Every pair in that square coming down together, and together, and together. Nobody early. Nobody late.

They’re making them do that.

Someone counted out the beat.

“Why isn’t anyone stopping this?”

It came out raw, and it wasn’t aimed at anyone in the room.

The door opened behind them.

Warren came in with two officers a step back on either side, both of them holding datapads that lit their faces from below. He had white-blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail with nothing loose in it. Charcoal suit, collar high on the throat, silver at the seams. The overcoat hung off his shoulders without his arms in the sleeves and did not move much when he did.

Nobody said anything. JT’s hands came out of his pockets.

“Because it isn’t a mission.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t look at the screen.

“Politics. Terrorism. Geopolitical complexity beyond the scope of intervention.” He let that sit for three seconds. “Not our concern.”

Adeline’s wings flexed once, hard enough that the tips rang against the steel behind her.

“We save people. That’s the point.”

Not a question. Not an argument. A statement of what she had believed Savior meant when she fought her way into it.

“She’s right.” Catalina had come up level with her without making anything of it. “People are dying.”

The screens put a cold light across the side of her face. Her eyes did not move. Teal, and level, and fixed on Warren.

“Doesn’t that matter more than politics?”

Warren looked at the two of them for a moment. Whatever he did with that, he did behind his face, and then he turned and spoke to the officer on his left in a register pitched below hearing. A signature went across a datapad. A document closed with a soft chime.

He was gone in under a minute, and neither of them had been answered.

He had a fleet in the air and a war to allocate it to, and he had come down four decks to say three sentences in a compartment he had no other reason to enter. Whatever the decision about Al-Miraj was, it had been made somewhere else, by people who would never see this room. He had only carried it down.

The room stayed cold after him.

He looked right at it.

He looked right at it and filed it.

Behind her the panel kept running. The square. The platform. The hands coming down together.

Adeline’s chest pulled tight and stayed tight.

Say it and you can’t take it back.

She had been inside Savior a matter of weeks. She had a rank she didn’t understand, a locker with her name spelled right, and a commander who had looked at a square full of people and decided the word for them was complexity.

He would have known what to do.

He’d have known before the feed finished loading.

But her father was three thousand miles away in a casino he didn’t need, and the hands on the screen were still keeping time.

Her fists tightened until the knuckles went white.

“Then we’ll do it ourselves.”

JT’s head came round. Whatever was under the mask, the visor stopped glowing steady and started doing something else.

“Wait. Rogue? Against a war machine backed by faith and funding?” His voice went up half an octave. “That’s not brave, kid. That’s suicide with extra steps.”

She met him head-on. “No. It’s what Savior should be. Saving lives. Not waiting for permission slips signed in blood.”

JT dragged a hand back through his hair and left it worse than he found it. He said something under the mask that she didn’t catch. Then he turned a quarter away and stood there looking at the deck.

Eight seconds.

“But if you’re really going in—” It came out rough. “I’m not letting you two idiots die alone.”

Catalina stepped forward. Her eyes went between the pair of them and settled.

“She’s not wrong. And I’m done watching screens decide who we’re allowed to save.” Her voice dropped, and there was nothing soft in it. “If Warren won’t move, we do.”

JT laughed. There was no humour anywhere in it.

“You two are completely insane.”

“Guess that makes us Rooks.”

They went out one at a time. Their boots didn’t match the ship’s rhythm and didn’t match each other’s.

Behind them the panel ran on. The square. The polished armour. The dust hanging in the light.

JT got the pressure door open and held it, and one after another they stepped back over the coaming into their own section — into the narrow part, and the bad overheads, and the smell of oil that got into everything.

He pulled it shut behind them and spun the wheel down.

Catalina fell in half a step behind and to the left, and Adeline let her, and neither of them thought about it.

“Conduit.”

She ducked.

JT was three hatches ahead already, complaining about the airframe to nobody. The engines changed pitch under the deck plates. Somewhere aft, a door cycled twice.

“You know we’re probably going to die,” Catalina said. The way you’d mention rain.

“Probably.”

“Okay.” A beat. “Just checking we were on the same page.”

She was smiling. Adeline could hear it without turning round, and something in her chest did a thing it had never done on any mountain, and she did not have a word for that either.

Her wings stayed open the whole way back. Loose, dragging, taking up more room than she had any right to in a corridor built for people who ended at their shoulders.

Nobody asked her to move them. Nobody looked twice.

Not once since she came aboard had it occurred to her that they were something she might have to put away.

She did not notice that she was happy. There was nothing here to measure it against yet.

And somewhere in Al-Miraj, people who would never know their names went on dying on schedule.

Chapter 2 — The Casino — Lucifer’s Test

She came down on the north side because it was faster, and she was thirty seconds through the doors before she understood she had never used them before.

Six weeks in this building. She had a route through it. Down the boulevard side, in at the west doors, left at the coat check that had never taken a coat, up the back stairs with the third one that gave under her weight and made a sound like a question. She could do it in the dark and had, twice.

The north doors put her somewhere else entirely. Facing the room from the wrong end.

It stopped her.

The chandeliers hung low over the entrance, four of them in a row, crystal on brass chain. She brought her wings in tight and held them there and got under anyway, and the top of the left one moved a string and set it going.

Ten feet further the ceiling went up and away from her.

She let them out without deciding to.

The floor was black marble laid in sheets wide enough that she had never found a seam. Glass walls to the height of three men with onyx panels set between them. Light ran through the joints in slow pulses that matched nothing she could hear, and she had given up looking for the source of it.

Water came down two storeys of shaped stone at the far end. It collected in a pool sunk into the floor and lined with mirror, so that when she looked into it she got the painted ceiling coming back up at her — constellations, none of them real, small lights set into the plaster switching on and off in an order somebody had worked out.

Six weeks ago it had been a shell. Roof open to the sky, birds in the rafters, a foot of standing water in the pit where the pool was now.

It was clean.

There was nobody in it. There had never been anybody in it.

No tables. No machines. No felt, no chips, no wheels — nothing to play and nothing to play it with. The bar ran forty feet down the north wall with the shelves behind it swept and empty and lit from underneath, and that made the emptiness the brightest thing in the room.

She had asked him once when it opened.

He had said it doesn’t, in the tone he used for weather.

The air was ozone off the light strips, and perfume that had no one to belong to, and under both of them the smell she had stopped noticing in the first fortnight, which was cigar smoke soaked into every soft surface in the building since before she was born.

Adeline had come to say one sentence and go. She had worked it out somewhere over Nevada with the cold coming off her primaries, and had been holding it since, the way you hold a coin in a closed hand.

“You’re early.”

He was on the velvet couch, which was where he was. Twenty feet out from the west wall, angled at nothing, because it had been there when he bought the place and he had declined every offer to move it.

Coat over the back of it. Long, red. The black and red underneath unbuttoned at the throat. Six foot three and taking up the couch accordingly. Black hair past his shoulders. He hadn’t shaved, which meant he had not left the building today.

There was a book in his hand with his thumb holding a page.

He was not reading it. From the angle of it he had not been reading it for some time.

“Like what I’ve done with the place?”

“It’s too much.”

“It’s exactly too much. That’s the design.” He turned a page he hadn’t read, which he did when he wanted his hands occupied. “Mortals call it luxury. I call it noise made expensive enough that people mistake it for meaning.”

She went the long way. Along the wall instead of across the floor, which she always did, and had never worked out why.

Past a glass table with gold run through it in veins. With him that could be decoration and could be something else and she had stopped asking about a month ago.

Past forty feet of bar with nothing behind it.

Past the door under the stairs.

She slowed there. She did it every time and every time she found a reason not to notice she was doing it.

It was a plain door. Painted the same as the wall and set flush, no handle on this side, a lock that had been changed since she moved in because the plate around it was brighter than the wood. The only door in the building she had not been through.

Behind her, the sound of a page turning stopped.

She kept walking.

“You hate gambling,” she said.

“I hate people calling chance a plan.” He set the book down. Face up, still open, which meant he intended to come back to it and wanted her to see that he did. “Cards at least admit what they are. Almost nothing else does.”

She put her hand flat on the glass wall. Under it there was a vibration coming up through the whole building, steady, too low to hear. It had been there since the day she arrived. Nobody had ever explained it and she had never asked, and by now the asking would be strange.

“It’s loud.” She meant it as a compliment and it came out as one. “But it’s alive.”

He watched her do that. His head went over a fraction.

“That’s what pulls you. The hum.” His voice came down into something else. “You like anything that reminds you the world goes on without asking first.”

Then he stopped.

He said nothing for four or five seconds. His hand had been moving on the arm of the couch, and it went still.

“Six weeks you’ve been under this roof.” He was looking at her the way he looked at things he was working out. “West doors every time. You came in the north.”

“So?”

“West doors you have to walk to. Up the boulevard, past the lot, in off the street.” He did not blink. “North side is the only roof on this building you can put down on. You didn’t walk here tonight. You’ve got somewhere to be.”

“I’ve got—”

She heard it before she finished it.

“We’re leaving tonight.”

We.

She had not decided to say that. It had come out fully formed and she did not know where she had picked it up.

Lucifer’s expression did not change in any way she could point at. But he sat forward, and his arm came off the back of the couch, and the amusement went out of his face and did not come back.

She waited for him to ask.

He didn’t.

“Al-Miraj,” he said instead.

“You’ve seen it.”

“Everyone has seen it. That is the entire point of it.” He tipped two fingers toward the nearest column without turning his head. “It has been on every screen in this building since four this morning. It will be on every screen in this building tomorrow. They are not hiding it, little flame. They are advertising.”

She made herself look.

The screens ran up the columns, six to a face, and they were the only thing in the room with anything on them. The square. The platform. The polished armour and the dust hanging in the light. The children with the baskets, throwing petals in handfuls, on a signal, in time.

The hands coming down together.

She had seen it once, eleven hours ago, four decks under a Savior airship. She could already tell when the third camera was coming.

That was how many times it had run since.

It’ll run tomorrow too.

Whatever we do or don’t do.

Her hand had closed. She made it open.

“I’m going after them.”

“I know.”

“I’m telling you. I’m not asking.”

“I know that too.”

He stood.

It took him one movement and no visible effort, and then he was between her and the north doors without having hurried, and she had to tilt her head to hold his eyes.

They were red. They had always been red. In this light they took the glow off the water and held it and gave nothing back.

“They have had that land four hundred years,” he said. “To the people who live there they are not soldiers. They are the ones who dug the wells. They fed the district through the bad winter. They buried the dead when there was nobody else to do it.” He let that stand a moment. “Every hand they take, they take under a roof they paid for.”

“I don’t care what they built.”

“You will when it matters.”

No heat in it. He said it the way he said things that were going to be true later.

“They don’t fight dirty, Adeline. They canonise it. That is a harder thing to cut.”

He turned his hand over and looked at the back of it, which he did when he was deciding how much to say.

She could hear herself getting louder and could not get underneath it.

“Then someone tears the halo off.”

“You think I haven’t tried?”

It came out flat. No weight on any word in it, which was how she knew.

Her wings came in. Not all the way — a hand’s width, tight to her back, before she caught it and stopped it.

He saw that. He saw everything like that.

“Monsters of that kind feed on righteous blades.” He came a step closer. “Strike them and you crown them. Every one of their dead becomes a story their children learn by heart, and the story is better than the man was. That is the machine. It has been running a great deal longer than you have been alive and it does not care who swings at it.”

He’s not going to stop me.

He hasn’t said no yet.

“They will make you the villain before you get your mouth open. The demon that came for the faithful. The white thing out of the sky that killed men at prayer.” His voice did not rise. “They will have the footage cut before your feet are back on the ground.”

Adeline held where she was.

Her wings had come out again without her deciding it, half open, and the red off the screens was sitting on the feathers and turning them a colour she did not want to look at.

“Then let them.”

He waited.

“I’d rather be hated for saving them than blessed for standing here.”

For a while he said nothing at all.

The lights in the false constellations came on and went off in their order. Water kept coming down the stone. Somewhere above them, on the floor where her room was, the building ticked as it cooled.

Then he let his breath out, slow.

“You’re still a child, Adeline.”

It was not an insult and she did not take it as one.

“But a child built for storms.”

He closed the distance. Near enough that she had to look up, and could see the tattoo work coming out of his collar and up the side of his throat, the lines of it going somewhere under the hair.

“I trained you to stand when the world tries to erase you.” Quiet now. Every word set down on purpose. “If you walk into their fire, walk because you choose it. Not because you think you owe me proof. Not because you want my approval, or my permission, or my blessing.”

Adeline did not blink.

“Then I choose it.”

No hesitation anywhere in it.

She heard it come out and understood, half a beat late, that he had built the sentence for her.

Walk because you choose it. He had put every exit in the room in front of her and named them one at a time — approval, permission, blessing — and shut them all, so that whatever she said next would be hers and could not be handed back to him afterward.

He was not stopping her. He was making certain she could not blame him later.

That was the part she could not put down. Not that he had let her go. That he had gone to the trouble of taking himself out of the decision first, so that if it killed her, it would at least have been her own.

She did not know yet whether that was love or an abdication. She suspected he didn’t either.

Something moved in his face and settled. Not pride. Not approval.

It was the face of a man who had recognised something and had been hoping not to.

He gave a small nod, nearly a bow.

“Then go. Show me you can.”

She went back the way she had come. Along the wall. Past the bar with nothing behind it, past the glass table, past the door under the stairs.

She slowed.

She had lived over that door for six weeks and never once asked. There had always been a better thing to say, and then the moment would be gone, and the door would still be there tomorrow.

She looked at it for perhaps a second and a half.

“Adeline.”

She stopped.

He was standing where she had left him, and the book was still face up on the couch, and he had his hands in his coat pockets.

He did not say the thing.

She could see him not say it. She had watched him do this her whole life — the pause where a question got weighed and put down again — and she had never once got at what was on the other side of it.

“Nothing,” he said. “Go on.”

She went.

The chandeliers took the top of her left wing again on the way under. She did not fold this time. She let them ring.

Outside it was full dark, and Los Angeles was going about its business in every direction at once, and the air off the boulevard was warm and smelled of oil and cut grass. Behind her the doors sealed and cut the quiet off flat.

Inside, Lucifer stood alone in a room built for a thousand people that would never hold one.

The screens on every column played the square, and the platform, and the hands coming down together. He had stopped watching them some time ago.

We, she had said. Without noticing.

He had wanted to ask who.

He put it down where he put the rest of it. Then he crossed the floor and picked up his book and did not read that either, and he sat with his back to the stairs, and to the door under them, for a long time after the last of her wingbeats had gone off the roof.

Chapter 3 — The Jet & The Team

The hangar doors came apart along a seam that had been repainted so many times the paint was thicker than the metal.

They moved four feet and stopped. Then the rest of the way, with a groan that went up through the deck and into her knees.

Cold came in. Ozone and burnt fuel and the flat mineral taste of air that had been outside at altitude ten minutes ago.

The overheads woke in sequence down the length of the bay, one bank at a time, amber before they went white.

And there was the jet.

It was not Phoenix’s. Adeline had seen his through a bulkhead window on her second day — white, unmarked, both wings unbroken lines from root to tip, a machine that had never been asked a difficult question.

This one had been asked all of them.

The hull was patched. Eleven panels she could count from the doorway, none of them quite matching, three of them a different alloy entirely and going a different colour with age. The seams were hand-soldered. They ran unevenly, thick where somebody had needed the join to hold and thin where they had been in a hurry, and every one of them was a night this thing had nearly not survived.

The floor under it was slick with oil in flat rainbow bands.

The smell got to her before she was ten feet in. Steel, combustion, hot lubricant, and something underneath all three that she had no name for, sharp and sweet and sitting at the back of the throat.

Adeline stopped at the threshold and her wings came in without being told.

Not from the size. She had stood under bigger. It was that the thing was running while it sat still — a low steady vibration in the deck plates that came up through her boots and into her chest, and once she noticed it she could not stop noticing it.

Her heart went and found the rhythm of it and matched it, and she did not know that had happened.

She had said the word twice today. Both times about something she was outside of. A wall of screens showing a world that ran without her. A building her father had made out of money and spite and would never open.

This was different, and it took her a moment to work out why.

Nobody had made this by wanting it.

Somebody had made it by staying up. By arguing with an engine at three in the morning and losing, and coming back the next night, and losing again. The mismatched panels were not decoration. They were the record.

She had grown up on a mountain where the only power in the room had always simply been there. Lucifer did not build. Lucifer was, and everything arranged itself around him accordingly, and for fourteen years she had understood strength as a thing you either had or did not have.

Here was a machine that broke gravity, held together by a boy in a mask who had wanted it badly enough for long enough.

Something in her chest went quiet and then went somewhere new.

You can make a thing.

Nobody had ever said it out loud in those words. It had been true the whole time and she had got to seventeen without noticing.

“Magic,” she said.

Not the way she had said it at the screens.

JT turned around before the word had finished, and whatever was under the mask, the visor came up fast.

“Damn right it’s magic.” He crossed to the jet and put his palm flat on the hull hard enough to make it ring. “She’s not a jet. She’s the jet. My jet.”

He looked around the bay, daring it.

“Pretty sure Savior’s lawyers would disagree.” Catalina had come in behind them and put her shoulder against a support beam with her arms crossed. The bay light went across her hair in bands, blue and then rose and then blue.

“Ownership’s about love, not paperwork.” JT ran his hand down the fuselage, slow, the way you go over something you have already gone over a thousand times. “Phoenix doesn’t know his ship’s heartbeat. He’s got people he pays to care.”

His voice dropped out of the performance.

“I’ve got her. She’s got me.”

The voice came from under the starboard wing, and it was not loud, and it stopped him anyway.

“Mostly mine, actually.”

Marlowe came out from under it with a rag in one hand.

Her hair was pinned back off her face and coming loose on one side. Cropped leather jacket, gloves with the fingers cut off, grease to the elbow on her right arm and none at all on her left.

Adeline had met her once, in the Rooks’ nest, and had got exactly one word out of her, which was hi, and had not been sure since whether that had meant anything at all.

She did not look up now either.

She put two fingers on the side panel and struck it once with the heel of her hand, and then stood still and listened to what it did afterward.

“Engines are primed. Thrusters stable. Fuel mixture is where I want it.” She closed the panel. It went in with one clean click. “She’ll fly.”

A beat.

“Probably.”

JT put both hands up.

“She’ll fly because I keep her alive.”

Marlowe looked up for exactly as long as it took.

“You nearly killed her last time.”

“Minor turbulence.”

“Into a mountain.”

She said it the way she had said the fuel mixture. Then the rag went into her belt and that was the end of it.

Adeline found she had been watching Marlowe’s hands and not the machine.

They did not hurry and they did not stop. Every movement went somewhere. When she reached for something it was already where her hand was going.

Adeline stepped forward without deciding to and put her fingertips on the scarred plating.

It was cold, and under the cold it was moving.

“I’ve never felt anything like this.”

Marlowe glanced over. Something happened at the corner of her mouth and did not develop into anything.

“Then you haven’t flown yet.”

The engines came up off idle and the sound arrived in her boots before it arrived in her ears. It went up through the shins and the spine and sat in the back of her skull.

JT was already climbing, one hand on the ladder, talking over his shoulder.

“You ever seen her move? Wait till she cuts atmosphere. She sings.”

“She screams,” Marlowe said. “In tune.”

Catalina pushed off the beam. Her bracelets went as she came off it.

“Fitting.”

Adeline turned toward the three of them. The draft off the intakes came through the bay and moved her feathers and she let it.

Her chest was not calm. But it had somewhere to stand, which it had not had since the screens.

“Then let’s fly.”

Already decided. Quiet.

JT hit the hull once more on his way up.

“That’s my cue. Let’s go show the world what four nobodies and a patched-up miracle can do.”

The lights in the bay went down as the engines took the power. The floor came alive under them, fuel lines shuddering along the deck in their brackets. The noise built and then stopped building and became the only thing there was.

The doors opened the rest of the way onto stars.

Then the jet came up off its cradle, and the sound stopped being machinery, and they went out into the dark.

Los Angeles fell away behind them and went from a city to a smear of light to nothing.

An hour out over the Atlantic, Marlowe put the jet on its own and turned round in the seat.

She slid a tablet across the table without saying anything. The file was already open. She had pulled it before they took off.

Adeline looked at it. Al-Miraj from above. Streets, a grid, one enormous square in the middle of it with a raised platform at the north end.

JT dropped into the seat opposite and put both hands flat on the table. He did that, she had noticed, when he wanted to be still.

“Okay. Before anybody says anything brave. Let me tell you what we are actually walking into.”

Catalina had not sat down. She stayed at the bulkhead with her arms crossed.

“We know what it is.”

“You know what it does. That’s not the same.” He turned the tablet round with two fingers. “I’ve worked that region. I speak the language. I’m telling you now so nobody has to learn it standing in the street.”

Adeline had not known that about him.

He speaks the language.

It occurred to her that she did not know much about him at all. She had been on this aircraft four times and had never once asked him a question about himself.

“Iron Crescent runs Al-Miraj and they’ve run it a long time, and the people who live there are not their prisoners.” JT tapped the square. “That’s the part everybody gets wrong on the way in. Most of that city is people. Working, praying, taking their kids somewhere. They will help you if you’re lost and feed you if you’re hungry, and about ninety per cent of them have never done a thing to anybody.”

Adeline started to say something and got one word out.

“Then—”

“Then Iron Crescent owns the cameras, the courts, the water, and the pulpit.” He did not raise his voice. “They don’t have to make people cruel. They only have to make people afraid, and then point.”

Adeline thought about the square on the wall of screens. The hands coming down together, and nobody early, and nobody late.

Someone counted out the beat.

She had thought that was the cruelty. It was the fear. She had been looking at the wrong thing for eleven hours.

From the front, without turning round:

“Show them.”

JT swiped. The square again, from the ground.

“That crowd claps on a beat because there are men at the back of it watching who doesn’t. That’s all. That’s the whole trick.” He sat back. “Which brings me to us.”

Catalina’s bracelets had stopped.

“To us.”

“Look at us.” He counted them off. “Me, I’m fine. I’ve done this. Marlowe reads a street faster than I do and nobody looks at her twice, which is the whole trick. That leaves the two of you, and I need you both to hear this the way I mean it, not the way it sounds.”

Adeline waited.

“That city has a dress code and it isn’t a joke and it isn’t only about faith. It’s what everybody wears, it’s what everybody expects, and stepping outside it makes you the most interesting thing on the street.” He looked at Catalina. “You cannot walk into Al-Miraj in that.”

It took Adeline a second to understand he was not talking to her.

Catalina had stopped moving against the bulkhead. Not stiffened. Stopped.

Her voice came out even.

“In what.”

“Cat.”

“Say it.”

“In pink,” JT said. “In that collar. With your arms out and your shoulders out and your hair like that. I’m not telling you it’s right. I’m telling you what happens.” He kept his voice level. “You’ll have a crowd inside ninety seconds and Iron Crescent inside three minutes, and it will be on a screen by dinner. And that’s before anybody works out whose face it is.”

She said the next part like a card she had been holding.

“My face.”

“Your face is on album covers in forty countries.” He said it gently and it landed anyway. “You are the single most recognisable person on this aircraft and I include the one with the wings.”

Nobody said anything.

The cabin lights were on the low setting for the crossing. Somewhere behind the bulkhead a pump cycled, ran nine or ten seconds, and shut off.

She’s not going to say yes.

And he’s right.

Both of those were true at once and Adeline could not find the place where they stopped being true, and it was the first time in her life she had been in a room where the correct answer hurt somebody who had not earned it.

Marlowe reached into the locker behind her seat and put two folded bundles of cloth on the table. Dark. Plain. She did not push them across. She put them down where they were and left them there.

Two.

Nobody touched either one.

“That’s not me telling you,” Marlowe said. “That’s me putting them on the table.”

Catalina looked at hers for a long moment.

“You want me to disappear.”

“I want you alive at the end of the week.”

JT did not move his hands.

“That’s not what I asked.”

Her head came up.

She had not moved off the bulkhead. Her arms were still folded and her chin was up, and Adeline had watched her stand exactly like that in front of a stadium with eighty thousand people in it.

She’s doing the stage thing.

That was what it was. She had gone up into the version of herself that could hold a room, because the room had turned, and it was the only armour she had ever been given.

“I have spent my whole life being told what to put on my body.” Her voice did not shake. “Every label. Every manager. Every man with a clipboard who thought he knew what sold. And the one thing — the one thing I got to keep was that I picked it. It’s mine. That’s the deal I made with myself and I have never once broken it.”

“Cat—”

“So no, JT. I don’t want to disappear. I’ve done disappearing. I was extremely good at it.”

The engines filled the space where the rest of it would have gone.

JT’s jaw had gone tight under the edge of the mask. He had not moved his hands since he sat down. He was going to say the thing about the mission, and about how they did not have time, and about how she knew he was right.

Adeline could see all of it lining up.

Don’t.

He drew breath to say it.

Adeline got there first.

“It’s not fair.”

Catalina’s head came round.

“That’s — ” Adeline stopped, started again. “Everybody in this room is about to tell you it’s necessary. Maybe it is. I don’t know enough about that city to argue with him.” She looked at the cloth on the table and back up. “But nobody’s going to say the other part out loud, so I will. There is nothing wrong with you. Not your hair, not your arms, not your face, not one thing about how you walk into a room. The wrong is entirely in the place we’re landing, and it was there before you got on this plane, and it will be there after we leave.”

The pump behind the bulkhead came on and ran its nine seconds and stopped.

“Say that again,” Catalina said.

“What?”

“The last part.”

Adeline did not understand what she had done yet.

“The wrong isn’t in you.”

Catalina came off the bulkhead. She crossed to the table and stood over the cloth without touching it, and then she pushed it back across with two fingers until it was in front of Marlowe again.

She said, “No.”

JT’s head came up. “Cat.”

“You can tell me what it costs. I’ll listen. You don’t get to hand me the thing and call it safety.” Level, and worse for being level. “It isn’t safety. It’s the price of admission to a room somebody built wrong.”

JT said, “That is not—”

“Then what is it?”

He turned to Adeline.

She watched him do it. She watched him look for the sensible one, the one who would take her bundle and put it on and make the argument end, because that was the arithmetic of the whole conversation and both of them knew it.

He thinks I’m going to fix this.

She reached out and pushed her own bundle back across the table beside Catalina’s.

“Adeline.”

“No.”

“You can’t hide anyway.” He said it fast, and not unkindly, and it was the truest thing anybody had said all night. “That’s not the same as—”

“I know I can’t hide.” She left her hand where it was. “So the cloak isn’t for hiding. It’s so that when they look at me they see something apologising for being there. And I’m not going to walk into a city and apologise on the way in.” She met his eyes. “And I’m not going to let her be the only one who didn’t.”

Nobody said anything.

Catalina had gone completely still at the end of the table.

“That’s two,” JT said at last. He sounded tired rather than angry. “You understand that’s two.”

“It’s one,” Adeline said. “It was always going to be one. You just thought it was going to be her on her own.”

JT sat back, and his hands came off the table for the first time since he had sat down.

“Okay.” He said it flatly. “Okay. Then I want everybody clear on what happens next, because in about six hours nobody is going to remember this conversation and everybody is going to remember what comes after it.”

He counted it off on the table with one finger.

“She can’t be missed. You can’t be missed. Together you’re not two people walking down a street, you’re a photograph.” He looked between them. “I’m not telling you that to change your minds. I gave up on that about a minute ago. I’m telling you so that when it happens neither of you is surprised, because surprised is how people get hurt.”

“Understood,” Adeline said.

“No, you don’t, but you will.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “And for what it’s worth — and I want this on the record before we land — you’re both right and I still wish you’d put the damn things on.”

Marlowe reached over without turning round, put both bundles back in the locker, and shut it.

She did not say anything about it either way.

Then JT let his breath out through his teeth.

“Right,” he said. “So that’s settled.”

He turned the tablet face down.

“Now let’s talk about the fact that neither of you is going to make it four blocks.”

The jet went on east, and under them the ocean went on being black, and nobody in the cabin said anything else for a long while.

Chapter 4 — Arrival in Al-Miraj

The horizon went from black to grey to a hard orange line, and then the nose dipped and the desert came up.

“Strap in.” Marlowe did not look up from the console. Her hands moved over it without hurrying. “Thermals out here are bad in the mornings. It’ll be rough for ninety seconds and then it’ll stop.”

The jet hit thicker air and started to shake. Adeline’s wings pressed flat to the seat back and stayed there.

Below, the dunes resolved out of the dark. Long, low, running north to south in ridges. Then a road. Then two roads.

Then the city.

“There she is.” The swagger had gone out of JT’s voice. “Pretty from up here. They always are.”

Marlowe flared the thrusters. The struts came down on scorched tarmac and the jolt went up through Adeline’s spine and into her teeth, and the engines wound down and stopped, and for a second she could still feel them in her bones.

The ramp came down.

The heat did not arrive gradually. It was in the cabin before the ramp had finished lowering, and the first breath of it went down hot and dry and tasted of dust and hot metal, and the second one hurt.

Outside, the light took the colour out of everything.

Adeline came down the ramp with her wings out.

She had thought about it for most of the descent. Not whether — that had been settled over the Atlantic — but how. Whether to hold them in tight and walk small, which she could do for about an hour before the muscles at the root began to shake.

She let them sit where they sat.

Half open, loose, the primaries a foot clear of the tarmac on either side.

Catalina came down behind her. Pink through the top and blue underneath, catching the sun and holding it, the collar at her throat and her arms bare from the shoulder down.

She had her chin up.

They did not look at each other about it. There was nothing left to say that had not been said at thirty thousand feet, and saying it again on a runway would have made it a decision instead of a fact.

JT came last and stood between them and the road for a moment, looking down it.

“Right,” he said. “Walk normally. Don’t slow down for anybody. If somebody speaks to you, you look at me and I’ll handle it.” He adjusted the mask. “And if it goes wrong, it goes wrong fast, so keep your feet.”

They walked in from the airstrip along a service road with a wall on one side, and for four hundred yards there was nobody, and Adeline began to think it might hold.

Then the road met a street, and the street had people in it.

The first one was a boy with a bicycle.

He was riding toward them, and he saw Adeline, and he stopped pedalling. He did not brake. He just stopped pedalling and let the bicycle roll, and he was still looking when it drifted off the road and put him in the gutter.

A woman with two full bags set them both down in the road.

That was the thing. Not the staring — she had expected staring, in the way you expect weather.

It was the way people stopped what they were holding.

A man rolling a cart stopped rolling it. Two women at a doorway stopped talking mid-sentence, one of them with her hand still up. A vendor with a knife in a melon put the knife down flat on the board and did not pick it up again.

Nobody shouted. Nobody pointed.

It was quieter than before they had turned the corner.

They know.

Whatever they think I am, they already know it isn’t a costume.

She did not look down.

That was the part she had decided on the ramp and it turned out to be the hardest thing she had done all week. Every instinct she had said find the ground three feet ahead of your boots and stay there. She kept her chin level instead and let them look, and the sweat ran down her spine, and the wings stayed where they were.

Then somebody looked at Catalina, and something different happened.

There was a sound from a doorway. Not a word. A short sharp intake of breath, the noise you make when somebody drops something.

A man put his hand over his son’s eyes.

He did it without hurrying and without malice, the way you would move a child away from a bad smell, and he kept his hand there until they had gone past, and Adeline watched Catalina see it happen.

Catalina’s chin did not come down.

But her hand came up, and touched her own bare shoulder, and dropped again.

JT was talking. He had started somewhere back on the service road and had not stopped, a low steady stream of Arabic that Adeline could not follow a syllable of. He was smiling under the mask. She could hear it in the sound of it.

Two streets in, the road narrowed and there were men in burnished armour standing across it.

Four of them, and a table, and a cable running from the table to a camera on a pole.

“Keep walking,” JT said in English, out of the side of his mouth, cheerful. “Keep walking, keep walking, do not stop, do not — okay. We’re stopping.”

The tallest one had put his hand up.

What followed took about four minutes and Adeline understood none of it.

JT talked. The guard talked. JT laughed at something and the guard did not. JT gestured back at the two of them without looking at them, an easy flick of the hand, the way you indicate freight.

She stood in the sun with fifteen feet of wing out behind her and did not understand one word being said about her.

He could be selling us.

I wouldn’t know.

That was new. She had spent fourteen years on a mountain where she was the most dangerous thing for forty miles, and six weeks in a building where her father could make a room do whatever he wanted, and it had never once occurred to her that being unable to speak was a way of being small.

The guard walked over.

He came around Adeline first.

He walked the whole way round her, slowly, and he took his time at the back. He did not touch her. He stopped where the left wing met her shoulder and looked at that join for a while, at the place where the feathers stopped and the muscle started, and Adeline stood and let a stranger work out whether she was wearing something.

He said one word over his shoulder.

JT answered fast.

The guard’s mouth moved. He was not surprised, exactly. He had the face of a man who had been told a story he did not believe and had decided it was somebody else’s problem.

Then he went to Catalina.

He did not walk around her. He stood in front of her and looked at her hair and then her collar and then he said one word.

JT said a great many words at speed.

The guard said the same word again.

“He wants to know what you are,” JT said, in English, and his voice had changed. “I told him you’re performers. Contracted for the festival week. Him and me are going to have a conversation about the paperwork in a second and it’s going to be fine.”

“What does he want.”

“Cat—”

“JT. What does he want.”

JT was quiet for half a beat.

“He wants you to sing.”

Nobody moved.

The camera on the pole was pointing at the road. The other three guards had stopped doing anything else.

“Here,” Catalina said.

“Here.”

She looked at the guard. He looked back with no interest in his face at all — not cruelty, nothing that dramatic. He was a man verifying a document.

Adeline understood exactly what was being asked, and understood a half second later that there was no version of this where she could take it instead.

Catalina sang.

Eight bars, maybe. No accompaniment, in a dead street, with her arms at her sides and her chin still up. She did not choose something big. She sang it small and clean and pitched down, the way you would sing to somebody who was falling asleep.

It was the best sound Adeline had heard in her life and it was happening in the worst place she had ever stood.

The guard listened to about six seconds of it.

Then he made a short gesture with two fingers — enough, that’s enough — and turned back to JT and said something bored, and JT laughed, and the barrier went up.

Catalina stopped mid-phrase.

She walked through ahead of all of them and she did not look at anybody.

Two hundred yards on, past a wall of shuttered fronts, JT said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t.”

“Cat, I had four minutes and no—”

“I said don’t.” Her voice was completely level. “You got us through. That’s the job.”

She walked on.

Adeline came up beside her and did not say anything, because everything she could think of was a version of are you all right and she already knew the answer to that.

Eight bars. In a dead street, for a bored man with a clipboard, to prove she was allowed to exist on that road.

On the plane she had said the one thing I got to keep was that I picked it, and Adeline had thought at the time that she understood what that meant. She had not. She had understood it as a preference. Something a person felt strongly about.

It had taken four minutes at a folding table to show her it was the whole thing.

They made her prove it.

Adeline turned that over and could not get it to come out any way but one.

A man with a table and a clipboard had stood in a street and required a girl to perform, on command, to establish that she was permitted to walk down it. That was not a consequence of anything Catalina had chosen. It was a thing done to her by somebody who had the authority to do it and knew he did.

And I stood there.

And I’d have stood there in a cloak too. It wouldn’t have bought her one second.

The street opened.

The square was enormous and it was full.

Adeline had seen it eleven hours ago on a wall of screens four decks under an airship. She knew the shape of it before she knew she knew — the platform at the north end, the banners down both sides in colours gone bad under the sun, the flowers along the front edge.

There were cameras on three rooftops. She found all three without looking for them, because she had watched the cuts.

“They’ve rehearsed it.” Marlowe had come up on her left. She was speaking barely above the crowd, and nobody in twenty feet had looked at her once since they got off the jet. “This isn’t punishment. It’s a broadcast. Three fixed positions, one on a mount. Same coverage every week.”

Children in white robes stood at the foot of the steps with baskets.

Then the applause started.

It came all at once, and it was in time, and it did not build the way applause builds.

Catalina flinched hard.

Her hand came out and closed on Adeline’s bare forearm, fingers going in deep enough to leave marks, and it was not affection and it was not steadying. It was somebody grabbing at a rail.

Then she understood what she had done.

Adeline felt it happen. She felt the grip change from a reflex into a decision — the fingers loosening, the wrist starting to draw back, the whole arm beginning the small polite retreat of somebody who has remembered where she is and what it costs to be seen touching another girl in this square.

Catalina started to take her hand back.

Adeline caught it.

Not gently. She took Catalina’s hand out of the air on its way down and closed her own around it and held on, and she did it in the open, in front of the platform and the banners and the three cameras and eleven thousand people.

Her wings came up a hand’s width when she did it. She had not told them to.

Catalina had gone completely still.

“Ady—”

“No.”

Adeline did not look at her. She was looking at the platform.

“They can watch.”

Say the rest of it.

“You’re not putting your hand down in front of these people. Not for them. Not here.”

Catalina’s fingers tightened around hers, once, hard.

Somewhere off to their right, eight or nine feet away in the press of bodies, a phone came up.

Adeline did not see it. Neither of them did.

It was steady. It was held at chest height by a man who did not appear to be watching them at all, and it stayed up for about forty seconds, and it caught the wings, and it caught the hair, and it caught the two hands.

Then the soldiers brought a man out onto the platform.

He was blindfolded, and his hands were tied behind him, and he stumbled on the second step and one of them held him up by the arm until he had his feet again, and that was the part she could not get past.

The applause got louder. It did not get less exact.

“They shout blessings,” JT said. He had stopped performing entirely. “That’s what that is. In case you were wondering what the words are.”

Adeline’s free hand closed until her nails went through the skin of her palm.

She could be on that platform in four seconds. She had done the arithmetic without meaning to — the crowd depth, the angle, the height of the steps. Four seconds, and the blade would be on the ground, and the man would be alive, and every camera on those roofs would have it.

Marlowe’s hand settled on her shoulder. No weight in it at all.

“Not for one,” she said.

The blade came up.

Catalina turned her face into Adeline’s shoulder and Adeline let her and kept hold of her hand and made herself keep watching, because it seemed to her that somebody who had come all this way to stop it owed the man that much.

The blade came down.

The cheer covered the sound.

It ended too soon. Cut off clean, on a switch. The body was taken off the platform before anything could pool. Two people came out with cloths and went over the stone, quickly and without any particular feeling, the way you wipe a counter.

The children scattered petals again over the wet place.

“Every witness is part of it,” Marlowe said. “That’s the design. Nobody in this square gets to keep clean hands, so nobody in this square can afford to say anything.”

The crowd began to move.

And it moved around them.

Not the way a crowd flows around an obstacle. People were going out of their way. There was a space about four feet wide that stayed four feet wide no matter how tightly the rest of it packed, and it moved when they moved, and it did not close.

Adeline had never been given room like that in her life.

On the mountain there had been nobody to give it. In the Rooks’ corridors people went round her wings without thinking about it, and that was not the same, because that was three people who knew her and one narrow hallway.

This was eleven thousand strangers agreeing about something without discussing it.

They decided what I am.

And nobody had to say it out loud.

She did not let go of Catalina’s hand. Catalina did not ask her to.

They went out of the square east, into a street where the shopfronts were shuttered against the heat, and behind them the platform was already being swept for the next one.

Somewhere in the crowd behind them, a man lowered his phone and began to walk in the other direction.

Chapter 5 — The Safehouse

The safehouse was a workshop that had stopped being one.

Corrugated iron over a steel frame, two rooms and a yard, on a street of the same. The windows had been painted out from the inside, black, in a hurry — the brush marks ran vertical and somebody had gone over the corners twice and left the middle thin, so that at the top of each pane a grey smear of streetlight still came through.

The day’s heat was still coming out of the walls. It would go on coming out of them until about three.

Inside there was one lantern, a workbench with its vice still bolted to it, and a floor with forty years of oil worked into the concrete in overlapping dark rings.

JT went in first and stood still for eight seconds before he let anybody follow.

JT said, “Clear.”

Marlowe came in behind him without disturbing the dust. She put two fingers on the doorframe as she passed and left them there a moment, which she did with every door.

Adeline had to fold to get under the lintel. She got the left wing through and the right one caught on the frame and she had to back out and come again sideways, and when she was inside there were two pale streaks of feather-dust down the black paint at shoulder height, and a third at the top where the primaries had dragged.

She looked at them.

Anybody who walks past that door knows something came through it.

Catalina came in last. She shut the door and stood with her hand flat on it for a while after it was closed.

In the corridor on the ship she had walked half a step behind and to the left without either of them thinking about it. She had not done that once today. Today she had walked where JT put her.

She’s been counting her own steps for eleven hours.

Nobody said anything about the square.

JT rolled a map across the workbench and put a wrench on one corner and a mug on the other. “Right. Ground rules. We’re four foreigners in a city that films everything. We move at night, we move in twos, we don’t buy anything, we don’t ask for anything, and we don’t—”

“JT.”

Marlowe had not looked up from the tablet. She turned it round and set it on the bench facing him.

He went quiet.

Adeline came over. On the screen was a clip, thirty or forty seconds, shot from chest height in a crowd. It was steady. Whoever held the phone had held it well.

It showed a girl with fifteen feet of white wing standing in a crowd of eleven thousand people. Then it panned two degrees left and there was Catalina beside her, pink through the top and blue underneath, chin up, arms bare.

Then it held on their hands.

Forty seconds. The platform going on behind them, out of focus.

Adeline came closer. “Where is that.”

“Everywhere.” Marlowe scrolled. Marlowe scrolled and the same clip came up again under a different heading, then again, then again with a border round it and text underneath. “It went up about two hours ago. It has been reposted by four accounts with real reach and one of them is an Iron Crescent affiliate.”

Adeline looked at her. “How do you know it’s affiliate.”

“Because the other three are arguing and that one isn’t.”

JT had stopped moving over the bench.

Catalina had come to stand at the end of the bench. “What are they saying.”

He didn’t answer.

“JT.”

“It’s in Arabic, Cat.”

“I know it’s in Arabic. That’s why I’m asking you.”

He set both palms on the workbench and looked at the map instead of at either of them.

He had read all of it already. On the walk, probably, scrolling with the mask down while he checked corners. He had known since the third street and had said nothing and had made two jokes on the way in.

That’s what he does with things.

“Some of them think she’s an angel.” He said it to the map. “That’s not a compliment here. Not the way they mean it. Angels in this city are what the Crescent says they are, and the Crescent hasn’t said anything yet, which is the part that worries me.”

Catalina said, “And the rest?”

“The rest are arguing about what she is.” A pause. “And a lot of them aren’t arguing about her at all. They’re arguing about the hands.”

The generator outside changed pitch and settled.

Catalina said, “Say the word they’re using.”

“Cat—”

“I’ve had words used about me since I was fifteen. In four languages. I’d rather know which one.”

JT looked up then, and whatever was under the mask, the visor had gone dim.

“There’s more than one,” he said. “None of them are good, and two of them are the kind that a man says out loud in a square here and nobody stops him.” He straightened. “I’m not going to teach them to you. You’d hear them in the street after and you’d know, and knowing wouldn’t help you.”

Catalina held his look for a second and then nodded once, and let it go, and Adeline watched her decide to let it go and understood what that had cost.

She’s not going to ask again.

She’ll just carry it.

Marlowe took the tablet back and turned it face down.

“So. The plan.”

JT straightened off the bench. “The plan was low profile.”

“The plan was low profile eleven hours ago.”

Marlowe put her hands flat either side of the tablet and looked at the two of them properly, which she had not done since Los Angeles.

“I want to say a thing and I want to say it once, and I’d rather say it now than after.”

Nobody stopped her.

“We are not going to be invisible here. That was never available, and I should have said so on the plane instead of letting JT hand out cloth.” Level. No heat anywhere in it. “So we stop planning for invisible.”

Adeline’s wings had come in against her back. She had not decided that. They had done it somewhere around the word cloth, and she left them where they’d gone rather than haul them out again and make a point of it.

“And before I go on I want to be clear about one thing, because it saves an argument later.” Marlowe’s eyes came up. “Neither of you did this. A city that films a killing every week decided a long time ago what it does to people who look wrong standing in it, and it decided that before either of you were born. That isn’t something you brought with you. It’s something you walked into.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

“What comes next is operational, not moral. There’s a difference and I’d rather you heard it from me now than work it out later from my tone.”

Adeline said, “Say the operational part.”

“Two of us can move unseen in this city and two of us can’t, and from here every plan gets built on that instead of around a pretence.” Marlowe picked the tablet back up. “That’s a constraint. Constraints are fine. I’ve worked with worse ones this year. What I can’t work with is three people telling themselves they’re ghosts.”

JT rubbed the back of his neck. “That is the most frightening pep talk I have ever received.”

“It wasn’t one.”

Adeline sat with that.

She had come into the room braced for the other version — the one where somebody totalled up what she and Catalina cost and set the number on the bench between them. She had been assembling her answer to it since the square, and the answer was I’d do it again, and she had been holding it ready for two hours.

Nobody was going to ask her for it.

She put it on the city.

Not on us.

The heat came out of the walls. Somewhere down the street a metal shutter came down and somebody laughed and it stopped.

Catalina had gone to the workbench. She stood over the map without seeming to read it, one thumb moving in slow circles against the inside of her own wrist.

“They did it on a schedule,” she said.

Marlowe looked up from the bench.

“The broadcast?”

“The clapping.” Her voice was flat and careful. “It came in on the beat and it went out on the beat and nobody was early. That’s rehearsal. Somebody stood in that square and taught them and made them do it again until it was right.”

“Seven-minute cycles,” Marlowe said. “Same sequence, same three angles, same cut. It runs weekly.”

Catalina said, “So they practise.”

“They practise.”

Catalina’s thumb stopped.

“That man on the platform.” She was still looking at the map. “Somebody decided he wasn’t a person. Not a court. Not a crowd. One person with the authority to decide it, and then everybody downstream just — went along, because the alternative was being the next one they decided about.” Her voice had changed. “That’s all it takes. One decision and then paperwork.”

Adeline looked at her.

There was something beneath it.

She could hear the shape of it without being able to name it. Catalina was not talking about the man on the platform, or not only about him, and whatever the rest of it was had been sitting in her a long time before this morning.

Ask her.

Don’t ask her.

Adeline said, “Cat.”

“It’s nothing.” She pushed off the bench. “It’s a long day.”

She went and sat down against the far wall.

That wasn’t nothing.

Adeline let it go. She had been let go of once tonight herself, on the subject of the word, and there was an arithmetic to that she did not have a name for either, but she understood it well enough to know that pushing now would be taking something.

They worked the map for two hours.

Marlowe found the supply line — trucks out of the warehouse district every ninety minutes, the same four streets, the same three vehicles rotating. Not the square, not the platform, not the men with the blades. The freight that made all of it possible.

“They’re staging the stage,” she said. “Props, cable, generators, the camera rig. Fear needs a loading dock like everything else.”

It was the first thing all day that had made JT look like himself.

“Now that I can work with.”

“Disable, don’t detonate,” Marlowe said. “No fire, no noise, nothing that photographs. If we make a scene we stop being the people who came to stop it and start being the next thing on the broadcast.” Her eyes came up. “The one thing we cannot afford is to become the story.”

“Bit late,” JT said.

“Then let’s not become more of it.”

Adeline traced the route with one finger. Warehouse district, east side, four blocks off the water. Shift change before dawn, and two minutes of nobody watching.

“Two minutes.”

“For most people that’s two minutes.” Marlowe’s mouth moved fractionally. “For you it’s a while.”

They ate after that, sitting against the walls, out of packets. JT rigged a line across the door and tested it twice. Marlowe took the generator apart far enough to stop it coughing and put it back together and it ran smooth after that, and nobody thanked her, and she didn’t appear to want them to.

The lantern went down to its last third and nobody got up to do anything about it.

They had been in the country eleven hours. In that time Adeline had been stared at by a boy who rode into a gutter, walked around by a man in armour who wanted to know where the feathers stopped and she started, and given four feet of clear ground by eleven thousand people who had agreed about her without discussing it. She had not spoken to a single person in this city. Not one. JT had done all of it in a language she would never learn, and she had stood beside him being looked at.

Is this what it’s going to be.

She put the thought down where she put the others.

Adeline found the patch of floor under the roof hatch where the tin had been patched badly and a thin bar of streetlight came through. She sat with her back to the wall and let her wings all the way out, and the relief of it went down her spine and into her legs.

Catalina came and sat beside her without asking.

She sat with her knees up and her arms round them, which she had not done once all day, and she was close enough that their shoulders were nearly touching and not touching.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

Adeline said, “You were shaking. In the square.”

“I was.”

“Why?”

The question came out gentler than she’d planned.

Catalina took her time.

“Because performance is consent when it’s mine.” Slow. Choosing them. “When I pick the stage. When I pick the song. When the meaning is the one I put in it.” She turned her head enough that her cheek was nearly on her own knee. “Today wasn’t mine. They made a room where clapping is compulsory and I stood in it.”

She let out a breath.

“And then a man made me sing in the street to prove I was allowed to be on it.”

Adeline had been waiting eleven hours to be able to do something about that and had not been able to do one thing about any of it, and there was still nothing to do about it now, and she understood, sitting on a concrete floor in a workshop that was still giving back the afternoon, that this was going to be most of it. That loving somebody in a place like this meant standing next to what was being done to them with your hands empty most of the time.

But they were not in the street now. There were no cameras in this room. There was nobody left to see.

She moved her wing.

It came forward and over and settled across Catalina’s shoulders, the primaries brushing her cheek on the way down, and it was the first time all day that Adeline had touched her without doing arithmetic first.

Catalina went stiff.

One heartbeat. Two.

Then the breath went out of her in a way that had been waiting a long time to be allowed, and her spine gave, and her shoulders came down, and she leaned in and put her temple against the hollow of Adeline’s shoulder like she’d been holding herself an inch off it for hours.

Under the wing it was warmer and darker and the room went away.

Adeline lifted her hand and let it settle against the back of Catalina’s head, fingers in her hair, and did not think about it before she did it.

She said, “You don’t have to carry this alone.”

Catalina’s eyes were already closed. “Then maybe I can breathe.”

The wing stayed where it was.

Outside, the generator ran even. Down the street somebody’s television came on and somebody turned it down. The walls were still giving up the day. In an hour they would be finished and the cold would come in behind it, and neither of them would be awake for that either.

Across the room JT looked over once and looked away again and did not comment, which for JT was a considerable act of restraint.

Marlowe glanced up from the bench, saw them, and went back to the tablet.

She did not go back to the supply line.

She went back to the clip, and to the account that wasn’t arguing, and to the second-and-a-half of it where the camera drifted right and took in the corner of a street sign behind them, and she sat looking at that street sign for a long time without waking anybody.

Chapter 6 — The Warehouse

They left the safehouse at ten past two with the lantern still burning.

Marlowe’s idea. Leave the light on, leave the tripline set, leave the ration packets out on the bench where anybody coming through the door would read four people who had stepped out and meant to come back.

They took the map, the tablet, and nothing else.

The warehouse was eleven streets east and it was worse. No painted windows because there were no windows. A roof of corrugated sheet on a steel frame with a gap running the whole length of one side where the sheeting had lifted and never been fixed, and through the gap a strip of sky the colour of a bruise going brown.

It had been a fabrication shop. There were still lathes under sheets at the far end, four of them, and a gantry crane on a rail that ran the length of the building and had rusted in place about a third of the way along.

The floor was cold. That was the first thing Adeline noticed and the only good thing about the place — the concrete here had never seen the sun.

Marlowe got a work light running off a battery within ten minutes and set it face down on the bench so it lit the underside of the roof and nothing else.

Then she said, “Twenty-two minutes.”

JT looked up from the map.

“What?”

“Between us leaving and the door going in.” She turned the tablet round. There was a feed on it, low resolution, greyscale, angled down a street. “Municipal camera, two junctions up. It’s not encrypted, which tells you what they think of the people who live there.”

Adeline came and looked.

The picture showed the top of their street. At 02:31 by the timestamp four vehicles came into frame and stopped short of the corner and men got out of them without hurrying.

JT counted them off the screen. “That’s twelve.”

“Fourteen. Two stayed with the vehicles.” Marlowe scrolled forward. “They were inside four minutes. They came out with the lantern.”

Adeline said, “With the—”

“Somebody carried the lantern out and put it on the ground and then went back in.” She put the tablet down. “I don’t know what that means. It might mean nothing.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Twenty-two minutes.

The picture ran on. Nothing came back out of the door for six minutes and then the timestamp jumped and Marlowe stopped it.

They stood in that doorway with a light.

There were two streaks of feather-dust down the black paint at shoulder height and a third one higher up. Somebody had held a lamp to those and worked out roughly how tall the thing was that made them.

“The street sign,” Adeline said.

“The street sign.” Marlowe did not look pleased about being right. “Second nineteen of the clip. The camera drifts and you get the corner of a plate with two-thirds of a road name on it. It took me an hour and it would have taken anyone with local knowledge about six minutes.”

Adeline did the arithmetic and did not like where it came out.

“So they’ve had the address since—”

“Since about the time we sat down to eat.”

JT let out a long breath and pushed his hands back through his hair.

“Right,” he said. “Well. That’s the honeymoon over.”

Catalina had not come over to the bench.

She had gone to the gap in the roof sheeting and was standing under it with her arms folded, looking out at what could be seen of the street.

Adeline went and stood next to her.

A wall. A section of another roof. And one window four floors up in the block across the way with a light on in it at half past two, and a shape that crossed the glass twice and then stopped crossing it.

“They’re not asleep either.”

“No.”

“Half two in the morning, and there’s four lights on that I can see, and they’ll all be up again at five.” She was speaking quietly, not to be overheard. “Do you know what I keep coming back to? Not the platform. The petals.”

Adeline waited. She had learned that much in eleven hours — that Catalina arrived at things sideways and that the arriving could not be hurried.

“They put children at the front with baskets. Somebody’s kids. Somebody dressed them that morning and did their hair and put them in white and sent them out to throw flowers at a killing, and that somebody was probably standing in that crowd clapping on the beat, and if they’d stopped clapping—”

She didn’t finish it.

“They’d be next.”

“They’d be next.” Catalina’s arms came tighter across herself. “That’s what I can’t get out. It isn’t the Crescent. The Crescent is nine hundred men with cameras. It’s that they’ve made everybody else do the work for them. Everybody in that square is guarding everybody else, for free, all day, forever.”

The light in the fourth-floor window went off.

Somebody just decided it was safe to go to bed.

Adeline thought about that for a while. Not the fear — she understood fear, she had grown up on a mountain with a father who had taught her the arithmetic of it. What she could not get hold of was the maintenance. That every person in that square got up in the morning and did the work of it again, and would tomorrow, and had been doing it since before Catalina was born.

“And we’re going to go and cut some cable,” she said.

Adeline didn’t answer that straight away, because the honest answer was yes, and it might be all we can do, and she was not sure yet whether saying it would be true or just tired.

Behind them JT and Marlowe were still on the supply line.

“Convoy’s the cleanest hit.” JT had his knife out, using the point on the map. “Take them mobile. Scatter the freight before the stage can be built. In and gone.”

Marlowe was annotating as he talked. “Cleaner than the square.” “Not clean. Patrol patterns are irregular by design and the uplink might not be in the vehicle we think it’s in.” Her stylus stopped. “But it’s infrastructure, not theatre. We do it in the dark, we leave before anyone has a face, and we do not become the story.”

Catalina turned round.

Then she said, “What if we did?”

Both of them looked up.

The knife stopped moving on the map.

She came back to the bench. She was not doing the stage thing. Adeline could see that immediately, because the chin was down rather than up and the hands had come out of her folded arms and were hanging at her sides.

“Hear me out.”

JT put the knife down flat, which he did not do.

“I’m going to hear you out,” JT said, “and then I’m going to say no. But go on.”

“You want to be invisible because being seen makes us the villain in their broadcast.” She put both hands on the edge of the bench. “But we’re already in it. That clip’s been up nine hours. So the question isn’t whether they get to point a camera at us. It’s what they film when they do.”

“Cat—”

“You said it yourself in the street. They don’t have to make people cruel, they only have to make them afraid and then point.” Her voice had steadied into something Adeline had heard exactly once before, from a stage. “So make them point at me.”

The work light hummed against the bench.

“I can pull a crowd. It’s the one thing I’m actually good at and it’s the only thing I’ve brought that neither of you can do. Put me somewhere loud and public with my face showing and every camera and every patrol in six blocks comes to look, and while they’re looking at me they are not looking at wherever you two are.”

Nobody spoke.

“And the people in that square get to see somebody stand in the open and not be afraid. Once. Just once, where they can see it.” She stopped. Started again, lower. “That’s not nothing. I don’t think that’s nothing.”

It’s not nothing.

It’s also the worst idea anybody’s had today.

Adeline heard both of those arrive at the same time, and understood that the second one didn’t cancel the first, and that this was going to be the shape of a great many things from now on.

The work light hummed. Somewhere out in the dark the gantry crane shifted a fraction on its rail and settled, the way old steel does when the night cools it.

Adeline waited for one of them to say yes.

“No,” Marlowe said.

Flat. Immediate. Not unkind.

“Marlowe—”

“I said no and I’m going to give you the reason, because you’ve earned the reason.” She put the stylus down. “Everything you just said is correct. You would pull them. It would work. And the moment it works you are a girl with no armour standing alone in a street in a city that has already been told what you are by an account with a hundred thousand followers.” Her eyes came up. “There is no extraction from that. None. I’ve looked. I looked while you were talking.”

JT was nodding slowly, and his eyes had stayed on the bench the whole time she was talking.

“She’s right, Cat. And it’s worse than she’s saying.” He turned the knife over. “The crowd’s the danger. Not the Crescent. You get four hundred people round you in a street here and the Crescent doesn’t have to lay a finger on you. They just have to stand back and film what happens.”

Adeline watched her take it.

Catalina didn’t argue.

That was the thing Adeline noticed. She didn’t argue. She looked at each of them, and she took it, and she nodded once, and then she crossed to the cold end of the building and sat down against the wall with her knees up.

She had lost and she hadn’t made anybody pay for it.

Adeline went and sat next to her.

Catalina said it before Adeline could.

“They’re right.”

“I know.”

Catalina turned her head. “I still think I’m right too.”

“I know that as well.”

Catalina was quiet for a while after that.

“In the square,” she said.

Adeline waited.

Whatever the rest of it was, it did not come. There was the start of a breath that would have carried a word and then there wasn’t, and Catalina let it go and did not try again.

She’s going to say it eventually.

Not tonight.

Adeline did not go after it. There would be a night with fewer things in it.

Catalina laughed, once, with no sound in it. Then her head came over and found Adeline’s shoulder, and she stopped talking, and about ninety seconds later her breathing changed.

Adeline shifted her weight to take it and did not move after that.

Across the room JT had gone quiet with the knife.

“I’ve never seen her do that,” he said eventually. “Not once. Not on the ship, not on tour, not in all the time I’ve been working around her.” He nodded at the sleeping shape without lifting the blade. “She goes home alone. Everybody knows it. It’s the only thing about her nobody argues with.”

He looked up.

“That’s you, kid.”

Adeline didn’t have anything to say to that, so she didn’t say anything. She sat a fraction stiller and watched the lit strip of ceiling where the work light was pointing, and something in her chest did the thing it had done in a corridor on an airship, and she still had no word for it.

Marlowe closed the tablet.

“First light is 0547,” she said. “We move at 0530. Seventeen minutes before the shift tightens.” She stood and stretched her back out and it cracked audibly. “Supply line. Dark. No fire, no faces, and we come back here.”

JT jerked his chin at the far wall. “And her?”

Marlowe was already reaching for the work light. “She sleeps.” “She’s the only one of us who’s going to be worth anything at five, and I’d rather have her rested and angry than tired and right.”

She turned the light down to its lowest setting.

The warehouse went to almost dark. Through the gap overhead the strip of sky had gone from brown to something with grey in it, which meant it had started, hours out but started.

Adeline sat against the cold wall with Catalina’s weight against her side and thought about a fourth-floor window with the light going off, and about four hundred people in a street, and about a girl who had offered to stand in front of all of them and had been told no by the two people in the room who loved her enough to say it.

She’s going to do it anyway.

The thought arrived complete and she did not know where it had come from and she did not doubt it for a second.

And I’m going to be standing next to her when she does.

She put her cheek against the top of Catalina’s head for a moment. Dust and warmth and the desert still in her hair.

Then she looked back up at the roof, and waited for five o’clock, and did not sleep at all.

Chapter 7 — The Stage Rescue

They moved at half five.

The city was not asleep. It was between things — the last of the night shift gone home and the first of the bread ovens lit, and a blue coming up over the eastern roofs that was not yet light and was no longer dark.

Marlowe went first with the slate held low against her hip, thumbing the screen every forty feet and killing it between. JT walked her left shoulder. Adeline and Catalina came behind, and Adeline kept her wings in as tight as the muscle would hold, which was not because anyone had asked.

The warehouse district smelled of diesel and cardboard.

The supply line went exactly the way Marlowe had drawn it.

Three vehicles in a yard behind a chain fence. Two men at the gate and neither of them looking at the gate. Marlowe took eleven minutes with a multi-tool inside the third truck and came out and said nothing, and that was the whole of it — no fire, no noise, nothing that photographs.

The camera rig would go up at nine and it would not power on.

“That’s a week,” JT said, and he sounded surprised to be saying it. “That’s a whole week of their broadcast in a scrapyard.”

They went back a different way.

Four blocks.

Then the light.

It came over the top of a wall at the end of the street, white and total, and it was not aimed at them. It was aimed at a stage.

The sound arrived a half second behind it.

Palms. On the beat. Nobody early.

JT stopped walking. “That’s not on the route.”

“Second square.” Marlowe already had the slate up. “There’s a second square. It isn’t in any of the municipal footage because they don’t broadcast this one.”

Adeline had gone to the end of the alley before she decided to.

The square was smaller. Two hundred people, maybe three. No banners, no flowers, no children with baskets — none of the dressing, because there were no cameras here to dress it for.

Just the platform and the lights and the clapping.

A woman came up the steps with her wrists bound.

There was a girl with her. Seven, maybe. Too small for the pace of it, and when the rifle came against her shoulder to move her along her knees went and she sat down on the third step.

Her mother bent toward her as far as the ropes allowed and said something and smiled.

She’s smiling at her.

She knows exactly what this is and she’s smiling at her so the last thing—

Adeline’s wings came out. Not far. Four inches, and she had not told them to, and she felt Marlowe register it beside her.

“We go around,” Marlowe said.

She said it quietly. She said it the way you say a thing you have already lost.

“Adeline. Around.”

Adeline turned her head.

Catalina was looking at her. Her hand had come halfway out — toward the square, toward the steps, toward the girl — and stopped where it was.

Their eyes held for about a second and a half.

Everything in the last eleven hours had been the two of them deciding the same thing at the same time. A bundle pushed back across a table. A hand caught on the way down. Adeline had a whole language for it by now and none of it needed words.

So she did not say anything.

She went.

One beat she was standing in the dark with Catalina’s shoulder against hers. The next she was twenty feet up.

Behind her the alley came apart.

“Don’t—” JT got one word out and then gave up on it, because she was already over the wall, and she heard the word change in his mouth from a plea into an order aimed at somebody else. “Marlowe, west alley, now—”

“I know.”

“Thirty metres, I need—”

“I know.” The slate was already up. Marlowe did not sound rattled. She sounded like somebody rebuilding a thing at speed while it was still moving. “Second square, two hundred plus, four armed on the platform, six in the crowd, no vehicle. West alley is the only out. You have the gap, I have the count, go.”

And underneath both of them, at the mouth of the alley, one voice that did not say anything at all.

Adeline heard that too.

She heard the absence of it, all the way up, in the half second before the lights took her.

The wings came down once.

The banners at the edge of the square went sideways. A lighting rig tipped off its stand.

The swords came into her hands on the way down.

She hit the boards hard enough to split two of them and did not stop moving when she landed. Stopping was the thing that got people killed. Lucifer had spent four years taking it out of her.

The first guard did not raise his rifle.

He was still turning. The left blade went through the receiver and the right one took his hand off the grip before the two halves had finished separating.

He stood there and looked at his own arm.

The clapping stopped.

Not at once. In patches. A section at a time. People stopping at different speeds.

Somebody kept going two beats alone. Then understood. Then stopped.

Then the noise came back, and it was not one noise.

A man at the front went down on both knees.

Four rows back a woman screamed. There was a word in it.

Then the bottle.

And that was the square, for as long as Adeline stood on that platform. Half of it on its knees. Half of it throwing whatever was in reach. Nobody in the middle. She had walked into a city that had spent four hundred years being told what a winged thing meant, and she had not given them one second to agree on an answer.

They don’t know what I am.

Neither do I.

The bottle burst against her left wing.

For a half second nothing happened.

Then the liquid caught.

It went up the feathers in a line, wrist to tip. Her whole left side went orange.

She was not alarmed.

She knew what was burning. The fuel, not her. It sat on the oil in the outer layer. Four seconds and it would run out.

The down underneath had never caught in her life. Her father had proved it to her once, on purpose, in the snow, when she was nine.

She knew all of that in the time it took to happen.

Catalina did not.

The sound that came out of her was not a word.

It went across the square. Over two hundred people, over the loudspeakers, over the fire.

It was the worst thing Adeline had ever heard.

And for a fraction of a second she did not understand what it was for.

Then she did.

She thinks I’m burning.

She opened the wing. All the way, hard, one sweep.

The fire came off the trailing edge in a sheet.

It dropped behind her onto the boards and went out on the wood.

The wing was black along the top edge and white everywhere else and it worked exactly as well as it had four seconds ago.

Two of the guards on the steps stopped where they were.

Adeline turned her head and found her at the bottom of the steps with both hands over her mouth.

She held it for as long as she could afford. Half a second. Less.

Then she nodded. Once, small. And went back to work.

Somewhere in the alley behind her JT started shooting.

“Stage left.” His voice came flat over the noise, not shouted, cutting anyway. “Clear gap. West alley, thirty metres.”

Catalina came onto the platform.

She did not jump. She went up the side steps like a person.

It took longer. It put her in the open for four full seconds.

Adeline saw all of it and could not do one thing about any of it, because there were six men between them.

She got to the woman. She got her hands on the ropes.

“I’m not here to hurt you.”

The woman flinched back from her and Catalina did not let go.

“I’m here to take you home.”

She got the ropes off. She got the girl up under one arm.

Adeline stood over them with both wings out and let the square do what it wanted.

Stones. Bottles. A length of scaffold pipe that came end over end, hit the boards, skidded.

She did not move off that spot until Catalina was off the platform.

Then she came down off it herself.

The next forty seconds did not come apart into pieces. They were one thing.

There were men and then there were not.

She did not hit anybody.

There was no time in it for hitting. There was a shape to this and her hands had known it since she was nine.

Go where they are not. Arrive first. Put the blade where it stops the man, not where it hurts him.

Knee. Weapon hand. The gap under the arm where the plate ends.

Those three, before Lucifer let her hold anything sharp.

You are not strong.

Across a frozen yard, more than once.

You will never be strong. You are fast. Fast is better. Fast goes away with one bad decision, so make none.

A rifle came up on her right.

She was not there.

She was inside it. Past the barrel. The right blade went in under the arm and came out and she was turning away before he folded.

Three on the steps.

The first went down at the knee and stayed down.

The second she took across the back of the thigh on the way past. She left him for JT. JT took him.

The third got inside her guard.

She went left when she should have gone through.

It cost her a quarter second. He was faster than the others.

He put eight inches of blade into her leg.

Four inches of it went in.

She felt the whole length arrive. Then the heat, after.

She did not stop.

She could not afford the beat it would have taken.

She turned into him with the knife still in her. The left sword came up under his jaw.

It went in. He came off it when she pulled.

She drew it out of her own leg with her free hand. She dropped it on the boards.

She did not look at what came with it.

That’s going to matter later.

Not now.

A fourth came at her low and she went over him.

One beat of the wings. A foot of air, no more.

She came down behind him and put both blades through the strut that held the lighting rig.

The whole thing came down across the rear of the platform.

The lights went out on that side.

It got darker and it got worse.

She did not count them.

She did not look at what she had done to any of them. That was a decision and she made it there, on the boards, with her hands full, and it went into the same place everything else went.

JT’s fire came in three-round bursts from the alley and took two off her blind side.

Marlowe’s voice was in her ear with distances in it.

Then the gap was open.

She went through it last, with the heat still on her feathers.

They came out into the alley and kept going.

Behind them the square did not chant.

It roared, and there were no words in it, and underneath the roar somebody was still kneeling.

They ran the back streets for nine minutes.

JT led. Marlowe called the turns off the slate. Catalina had the girl against her chest and the mother by the wrist and she did not once look back to check that Adeline was there.

Adeline caught that, running, and did not know what to do with it, and kept running.

The market was empty at that hour. Stalls with their frames up and nothing on them, tarps loose overhead, a generator somewhere running for nobody. They went to ground behind an overturned cart and the two of them — the woman and the girl — went down onto the ground and stayed there, silent, because people who live in a city like that learn young what noise costs.

Marlowe read the slate. “Patrols are rerouting. We’re inside their net and their thermal is blind because half the square is on fire.”

“That’s not us,” JT said. “We didn’t do that.”

“It doesn’t matter whether we did it. It’s on fire and we were on the stage.”

They went over the east wall twenty minutes later. JT first, then Marlowe, then Catalina with the girl, then the mother. Adeline last, three running steps and a single downstroke and JT’s hand at the top.

They dropped down the far side into a street with nobody in it and the sound cut off flat.

Nobody spoke for a while after that.

The mother sat against the wall with her daughter in her lap and looked at Adeline the way you look at weather coming. Not gratitude. Not fear either. Something that had not decided.

Adeline stood apart from all of them with her back to the wall and her wings held in.

Her left one had a burn along the trailing edge, six or seven primaries gone black at the tips and curled in on themselves, and the smell of it was still coming off her in the cold — feathers and whatever had been in the bottle, sweet and chemical and wrong. It did not hurt yet. The burn was under the black and had not woken up.

Half of them knelt.

Half of them wanted me dead on those boards.

And I did that in about nine seconds.

Catalina came and stood in front of her.

She had somebody’s blood on her sleeve and her hair had come down out of the tie and there was a scrape along her jaw from the steps.

She looked at the burn for a long moment.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay.”

Then she looked down.

Adeline followed the look, and found a great deal of blood on her own left leg, from about mid-thigh to the top of the boot, and that some of it had gone into the boot and was making a sound in there when she shifted her weight.

She had forgotten about it.

Not overlooked. Forgotten — entirely, the way you forget a thing that was never filed. It had happened. It had mattered briefly. Then it had stopped mattering and she had walked off without it.

“Oh,” she said.

Catalina made a small noise.

Then she was on her knees in the street with both hands on Adeline’s leg.

She said, “Sit down.”

“I’m fine—”

“Adeline. Sit down.”

She sat down.

Catalina got the field kit off JT without looking at him. He handed it over without being asked and went and stood somewhere else with his back to them. Marlowe took the mother and the girl twenty feet up the street and started telling them about the extraction in a low voice that did not need to be that long.

Nobody said anything about any of that either.

Then there were hands on her leg.

Above the knee, where the armour ended and there was nothing but her. Turning it toward what light there was. Thumbs pushing the torn fabric back off the edges of the cut, careful, and then not careful, because it had to be done.

Adeline had been hit by a car once.

She had been thrown through a ceiling. She had had a rib set on a kitchen table by a man who did not believe in anaesthetic, and she had spent fourteen years learning to file every kind of pain there was into the drawer where it belonged and shut the drawer.

She had no drawer for this.

It was not that it felt good. It hurt considerably. It was that somebody’s hands were on her, deliberately, for a reason that was about her, with no lesson at the end of it.

Sit still.

Sit still. Sit still. You are sitting in a street.

Her left wing came up.

Eight inches, from the shoulder, in a slow arc that had nothing to do with her, and she felt it go and could not think of one thing to do about it.

They did that. They had always done that. When she was seven and Lucifer came home they went up before she heard the car.

They were reporting now.

Catalina’s hands went still on her leg.

She did not look up. Adeline watched the top of her head and watched her not look up, and then Catalina went back to work as though nothing had happened at all.

Her ears had gone pink under all that hair.

Oh.

On a mountain there was a wall with this girl on it. Posters in layers, three deep in places — a dozen poses, a dozen stages, photographed by people who had been allowed in the room. She had never said it out loud. Not to Lucifer. Not to anybody.

And now there were two hands on her leg in a burning street, and the person they belonged to had gone pink because a wing moved.

Oh.

Catalina worked. She was not gentle, because it could not be done gently, but every time Adeline’s leg moved she said sorry under her breath, and she said it eleven or twelve times, and Adeline stopped counting.

“You’re shaking,” Adeline said.

“I know.”

“Is it the—”

“It’s not the blood.” Her thumb smoothed the gauze down flat. “I’ve seen blood. I did two years of stadium shows, you would not believe what happens in a pit.”

“Then what.”

Catalina did not answer that.

She wrapped the bandage twice more than she needed to and tied it off, and her hand stayed where it was on Adeline’s shin a second longer than the knot required, and then she took it back.

“You pulled it out yourself,” she said.

“It was in the way.”

Her head came up. “It was in your leg.”

“Yes.”

Catalina stopped with the gauze in her hand and looked up.

And it was not anger. Adeline had braced for anger, because anger was a thing she understood and had a shape for and could stand in front of. This was not that. Catalina’s eyes were wet and her jaw was doing something and what was on her face was closer to grief, which made no sense at all, because nothing had been lost.

She said, “When you caught fire.”

“It was the fuel. It sits on the oil, it never reaches the—”

“I know. You told me.”

Her voice did something on the second word and she took it back.

“You said it goes out. Like the time.”

She went back to the leg.

“You were burning and you explained it to me,” she said, to the bandage.

Adeline did not have anything.

“Then you walked four miles on this.” A nod at the leg. “Didn’t mention it. You’d have got on the plane.”

I would have got on the plane.

She looked for the place in that where she was supposed to have done something else. It wasn’t there.

“It wasn’t the worst one,” she said.

Catalina’s hands stopped again.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t do the comparing thing. I’m not asking where it ranks.”

Adeline said, “Then what are you asking.”

It came out more honestly than Adeline meant it to. She had not intended it as a real question. It arrived as one anyway, and she heard herself wanting the answer, and that was its own new information.

Catalina tied the bandage off. She sat back on her heels and looked at her own hands, which had blood on them to the wrist.

“It’ll be closed by morning,” Adeline said. “It always is.”

“I know it will.”

“Then—”

“Snowbird.” Catalina looked up. There was nothing sharp in it anywhere. “Look at me.”

Adeline looked at her.

“That’s not the part.”

She went back to the bandage.

“Somebody should be counting,” she said. “That’s all.”

Adeline blinked.

Her hand came up and settled on Adeline’s shin, warm through the fabric.

“You don’t keep track of yourself. You’re not going to start.” A small shrug. “So let me do it. I’m good at it. I’ve had a body to manage since I was fifteen.”

Adeline looked at her.

Nobody had ever been frightened for her.

Lucifer had once put a lit brand to a wing of hers and stood back with his arms folded to see what she did about it. That had been care. She had known that for years.

It had come with something expected at the end of it.

This did not.

She said, “Okay.”

Catalina’s eyebrows went up. “Okay?”

“Okay.” Adeline cleared her throat. “You can — hold the file.”

“You’re saying yes.”

“I’m saying yes. Why are you making it a thing.”

“Because I had about nine more arguments.” Catalina sat down properly in the street beside her, hip against hip, and let out a breath that had been in her for an hour. “I built them on the way over. Two of them were extremely good.”

“You can still do them.”

“No. You’ve ruined it.” She was laughing. It was wet and it was undignified and it was the best sound in the whole city. “You’re supposed to be difficult about this. Everyone said you’d be difficult about this.”

Adeline said, “Who’s everyone.”

“JT. Mostly JT.”

Down the street JT said, without turning round, “I can hear you.”

“I know.”

They sat there.

Adeline’s leg had started to hurt properly now, which meant the adrenaline was going, and her wing had started with it — the burn coming up under the black in a long slow line from the wrist to the tip. It was a bad hour arriving.

Catalina leaned over sideways and put her head on Adeline’s shoulder, carefully, on the side that wasn’t burnt.

Adeline did not move at all under it.

She was aware of a great many things at once and could not have ranked any of them. The leg. The burn waking along the wing. The weight of somebody’s head where her shoulder met her neck, which was a small thing and had no right to take up as much room in her as it was.

She went pink.

She put it down somewhere and did not go back to it, the way you leave a door you have not decided about.

Her right wing came in and round, without asking her, and settled against Catalina’s back.

She let it stay.

She said, “Tell me the next one.” “Before it happens. Even if it’s one word. Even if there’s no time.”

“Tell you the next what?”

“The next time you decide something like that.”

Adeline thought about it.

“Okay.”

“Good.”

They watched the sky over the rooftops go from blue to grey to the first real colour of the day. The smoke went up through it in a column that leaned east. Somewhere across the city a loudspeaker came on and began explaining what had happened.

Neither of them moved for a while.

Chapter 8 — The Aftermath

The warehouse took them back without comment.

JT did the door — bolt, brace, line across at shin height — and his hands did all of it while the rest of him was somewhere else. The mother sat down against the wall about four feet inside and did not go any further in. The girl went down with her and stayed under her arm.

Marlowe put the slate on the bench and did not turn it on.

“Right,” JT said.

He straightened up from the door.

“So we’re going to talk about it.”

Adeline had got about six feet into the building. She stopped where she was.

Adeline said, “JT.”

“No, I’d like to, actually. I’ve had four miles to think about how to say it politely and I’ve come up with nothing, so I’m going to say it the other way.” He pulled the mask off and put it on the crate and his face under it was not doing anything at all. “You went in on your own.”

“I know.”

He was not finished. “You didn’t call it. You didn’t look at me. You didn’t give me a count, a direction, a number, or a second.” He held up a hand before she could answer. “And I want to be clear that I’m not angry you went. I’d have gone. Marlowe was working out how to go before you cleared the wall.”

She said, “Then—”

“I’m angry that I found out you’d gone by watching you go.”

The generator ran outside.

“There were two hundred people in that square and four rifles on that platform and I had a firing position that took me eleven seconds to build, and for eleven seconds you were on your own in there because I was still finding out what the job was.” His voice had not risen. That was the worst of it. “That’s not a discipline problem. That’s me not being able to do the one thing I’m here for.”

Adeline made herself stand in it.

He’s right.

Say that. Don’t explain first.

“You’re right,” she said.

JT blinked.

“I’m not finished being annoyed.”

She said, “That’s fine.”

“I had a whole — ” He stopped. Started again. “You’re supposed to argue.”

“I’m not going to.” She came further in. “There wasn’t a decision. That’s the thing I keep getting to and it isn’t an excuse, it’s just what happened. I was at the end of the alley and then I was in the air, and there was nothing in the middle where a word could have gone.” She let that sit. “So I can’t promise you I’ll decide differently. I can promise you’ll hear my voice before you see my feet leave the ground. Even if it’s one word. Even if it’s late.”

JT looked at her for a while.

He turned the mask over once. “One word.”

“One word.”

“Say it now so I know what it sounds like.”

“Going.”

“That’ll do.” He picked the mask back up and turned it over in his hands and did not put it on. “Right. That’s the argument. I’d like it noted that I was very restrained.”

“Noted,” Marlowe said, without looking up.

---

The slate came on after that, and the plan came out of it.

The square was finished as a target — they’d triple it by tonight and it did not matter anyway, because the square was the output. Marlowe put the input on the screen instead. Warehouse east, their staging racks, local storage they thought was safe because it was not networked. Four years of everything recorded in this city sitting on one floor.

“The gate’s watched from four positions,” she said. “Which is why nobody’s going through the gate. JT goes under it. Service tunnels, east run — they don’t watch those because they watch the sky.”

“How long do I need,” JT said.

“Two minutes of nobody looking at the east approach.”

She put the stylus down.

“Which means somebody has to be at the front gate being more interesting than an archive.”

Nobody said anything.

Adeline watched Marlowe not look at Catalina, which was its own kind of looking, and felt the whole of last night arrive in the room and sit down.

Catalina said, “You said no.”

“I did. And I was right, and I’d refuse you again on the same information.” Marlowe turned round. “The information changed at four this morning. I’ve spent forty minutes trying to build a version of this that doesn’t need you at that gate and there isn’t one. That’s not an apology. I’d rather you had it straight.”

She said, “Okay.”

“That’s it?”

“What do you want, a speech?” Something came back into Catalina’s face for the first time since the square. “I’ve been ready since last night. I packed for it.”

“Two minutes is what JT needs. You’ll be there considerably longer than two minutes, and I want that said out loud in this room before anybody agrees to anything.”

Catalina said, “It’s said.”

Adeline had not spoken.

“I’m at the gate with her,” she said.

Marlowe said, “Obviously.”

---

Night came into the building through the gap in the roof sheeting and took the last of the day’s heat with it.

The concrete had never seen the sun and it turned out that mattered. By eleven the floor was pulling warmth out of anything that touched it and by one it had got into the air as well, and the building that had been an oven twenty hours ago had become the other thing entirely.

Everybody went to their own corner of it.

JT stripped the rifle on a crate by the door and put it back together and stripped it again, which was not maintenance by the second pass. Marlowe sat cross-legged with the slate on her knees running the tunnel schematics for the eleventh time. The mother and the girl were asleep under both of the blankets, which nobody had discussed.

Adeline had the far end to herself. She sat with her wings loose and worked at the burnt edge with her fingers, pulling the ruined tips off one at a time and dropping them.

Catalina was eight feet away with her back to a crate.

She had her knees up and her arms wrapped round them and her hands were pushed into her own sleeves, and every so often her shoulders went in a short hard shiver that she stopped as soon as she noticed it.

She had bare arms.

She had had bare arms since Los Angeles, because she had chosen to, and Adeline had thought about that choice roughly forty times in the last day and had not once thought about the fact that it would be cold at night.

Go over.

She did not go over.

It’s eight feet.

She looked at the burnt feather in her hand and put it down with the others.

There was a whole architecture to not going over and she could see all of it. Catalina had not asked. Catalina had been asked for things all day by everyone in this country and had given every single one of them, and the last thing she needed was one more person arriving with a requirement. And there was JT by the door, and Marlowe with the slate, and neither of them would say anything, and both of them would know.

And underneath all of that, sitting quietly at the bottom, the actual reason.

If I go over and she doesn’t want me to, I have to know that.

Catalina’s shoulders went again.

Adeline got up.

It took her four steps and she was aware of every one of them. She sat down on the concrete at Catalina’s left, close but not touching, and did not look at her, and said nothing at all, because she had not worked out a sentence and arriving without one seemed better than arriving with the wrong one.

Catalina did not say anything either. She did not move over and she did not move away, and after a moment her knees came down a fraction out of the tight arrangement they had been in, which Adeline chose not to read anything into and read something into anyway.

For about ten seconds they sat there like two people at a bus stop.

Then Adeline’s right wing came round.

She did not do it. That needed saying, afterward, to herself, several times. It came off her back and round in front of her and over, and it settled across Catalina’s shoulders and down her far side, and it tucked in at the bottom the way it did when she slept, and by the time Adeline registered any of it as happening it had already finished happening.

Catalina made a sound.

It was not a word. It was the noise a person makes when they get into a hot bath.

“Oh.”

Adeline started, “I’m sorry—”

“Don’t you dare.”

Catalina turned into it. All at once, no hesitation anywhere in it — she came round and got both arms under the wing and pressed her face into the down at the shoulder and stayed there.

Her voice came up muffled out of the down. “That is the warmest thing I have ever touched in my life.”

Adeline could not speak.

There was a whole functioning person somewhere inside her and it had gone off like a light. Everything she knew how to do required a plan and there had never been a plan for this, and the part of her that had been managing the entire day — the counting, the angles, the arithmetic of who was where — had simply put its pen down and left the building. Catalina was against her side with her cheek in the feathers and her hands somewhere around her ribs and she was still shivering, but it was going out of her in waves now, each one smaller, the way water goes still.

“Is this okay?” Catalina’s voice came up muffled through the wing. “Say if it’s not okay.”

Adeline said, “It’s okay.”

“Because I will move.”

“Don’t move.”

It came out faster than she meant and considerably more definite, and Adeline heard it, and felt the heat go up the back of her neck and across both ears, and was extremely grateful that it was dark and that Catalina’s face was in her wing.

Catalina laughed.

Adeline felt it more than heard it — a small shake against her ribs, and the down moved with it.

Adeline said, “What.”

“Nothing.”

“You laughed.”

“I’m cold and I’m exhausted and there’s a wing round me.” A pause, and the down moved again. “I’m allowed to be pleased about something.”

The other wing came round.

Adeline did not do that one either. It arrived from the left and closed the gap in front and the two of them were inside it, and the temperature under there went up about ten degrees in under a minute, and the noise of the building went distant and muffled and far away.

Stop doing that.

The wings ignored her. The wings had been ignoring her since she was four.

“They just do that?” Catalina said, from somewhere in the dark under the left one.

Adeline said, “…Yes. On their own. Mostly.”

“Huh.” A considering silence, from somewhere under the left one. “That’s very informative, actually.”

“It isn’t informative about anything.”

“Okay.”

“It isn’t.”

“I said okay.”

She was smiling. Adeline could not see her face and knew it anyway.

Across the building JT put the rifle back together for the third time and did not look over, and Marlowe turned the slate face down on her knee and did not look over either, and the two of them not looking over was the loudest thing in the warehouse.

Catalina’s breathing changed by degrees.

She got heavier against Adeline’s side, and the shivering stopped altogether, and somewhere in there her hand found a fold of Adeline’s sleeve and closed on it and did not let go.

Catalina said, “Adeline.”

“Mm.”

“Let me stay.”

It came out half asleep and it did not have a single thing built onto it — no reason, no argument, no case made. Three words into feathers.

Adeline sat there with both wings round a sleeping pop star in a freezing warehouse in Al-Miraj and discovered that she had absolutely no idea what her face was doing.

“Okay,” she said.

---

The screens came on by themselves at ten past two.

All six columns at once. The work light dimmed as they took the power and the mother by the wall came awake and got her daughter’s head against her shoulder before her eyes had properly opened.

Catalina was up before Adeline had moved. The wings came off her and the cold came straight back in underneath and Adeline felt the loss of it as a physical event.

There was a man on the screens.

Pale, neat, fortyish, in a shirt with no tie. Sitting down. A glass of water beside him that he did not touch at any point.

“You broke my programme,” he said.

He said it the way you would mention a delivery arriving late.

“You went into a square and took two people out of it. On camera. I have no objection to that at all.” He folded his hands. “You’ve been useful. You’ve given the week a shape it didn’t have on Monday.”

Marlowe was already recording. Her hand was flat on the bench beside the slate and she had stopped moving entirely, on purpose, the way you go still when something is looking in your direction.

“I want to speak to the one with the wings.”

Nobody in the warehouse moved.

“There’s been a great deal of argument about you in the last six hours. Roughly a third of the city has settled on demon, which is the boring answer, and I’ve been quietly discouraging it.” Lear’s mouth did something that was almost warm. “Demons are a solved problem here. People know what to do with a demon.”

He leaned forward slightly.

“So I’ve gone the other way. As of the morning bulletin, you’re an angel.”

The word came out of him clean and undamaged.

“Sent. Specifically. To Al-Miraj, at this hour, to that square, for these people.” He let it sit. “Two clerics on air since six. A third is being persuaded. It’s a much better story. It is also the only one that makes everything that happens next your fault.”

Adeline’s hands had gone closed.

He’s giving me the word.

He’s giving me the word so he can hang things on it.

“Because an angel doesn’t arrive without a reason,” Lear said. “So when the water goes off in the eastern districts tomorrow — and it will — that’s the reason. When the bread ration halves, that’s the reason. When a man’s brother is taken and the officer says it was the winged one, he believes it. I’ve spent six hours building a frame that makes it true.”

A small movement of the shoulders.

“Someone has to be the villain. I’m very good at casting. But you’ll notice I’ve cast you as something holy, and that’s genuinely a compliment, and it will do considerably more damage.”

The feed cut.

A courtyard. Whitewash, a drain in the middle of the floor, the flat grey light of an hour before dawn. A man on his knees with a cloth over his eyes.

There were no cameras visible in the frame. There did not need to be.

“Every interference has a price,” Lear said, over the picture. “We film it, we publish it, and we let people draw their own conclusions. I don’t tell anyone what to think. I only make sure they’re looking.”

The shot held past the point of necessity, which was the point.

The rifle was not loud on the feed.

Adeline did not look away. She had decided that in the first square and she held to it, and she watched a man she would never know go down onto a whitewashed floor, and she counted the seconds until two people came out with cloths.

The screens went black.

The work light came back up.

---

Nobody moved for a while.

Then JT picked his mask up off the crate and put it on, and the visor came up, and he said, “Right.”

That was all of it. One word, and it was not the sarcastic one, and Adeline understood that the argument by the door had finished somewhere she had not noticed.

Marlowe saved the recording and did not say anything about having it.

Catalina had gone to the wall. She crouched in front of the mother and said something Adeline did not catch, and then she stayed there with her hand on the girl’s back until the girl’s breathing came down.

When she came back she was not shivering.

She said to JT, “Two minutes.”

“Two minutes.”

“Then I’ll give you ten.”

Adeline stood.

The burnt wing came up and out with her, black edge and grey tips, and the work light caught the damage and made rather more of it than was there.

“He’s wrong about one thing.”

Her voice was low and it did not shake.

“He thinks the story’s the weapon and the archive is just where he keeps it.” She looked at the dead screens. “It’s the other way round. Tomorrow we take the archive. Then there’s nothing underneath the story at all.”

Nobody argued.

Outside, the city was waking, and somewhere in it a bulletin was going out with her in it, and a word attached to her name that had been clean six hours ago.

Chapter 9 — Gatefall

The gate was lit like a stage.

Four floodlights on gantries, two spotlights on the wall, and a rig over the arch that had been put there to make the approach look impressive on camera. Somebody had built it for the footage. Nobody had built it for a fight.

Razor wire along the top of the wall. Banners down both towers that had been white once. A vehicle ramp on the east side with three trucks nose-out and nobody in them.

Marlowe was on the roof of a laundry two streets back with the slate on her knees.

“Front-gate eyes are hot,” she said. “Sixty seconds and they’re blind. Ninety and the loop’s running and their command room thinks it’s Tuesday.”

“Copy,” JT said, from somewhere under the street.

Adeline crouched at the corner of the last building with Catalina beside her.

Her ribs were fine. Her leg had closed overnight the way it always did, a pink seam and nothing else. The burnt wing had scabbed along the top edge and would not fully open and she had not mentioned that to anybody.

Catalina said, “Wing.”

“It’s fine.”

“Open it.”

Adeline opened it. It went three-quarters and stopped.

There was a line of scab along the top edge from the wrist out where the skin had gone with the feathers, and it had tightened overnight the way burns did, and the wing would open exactly that far and then it would not open any further no matter what she asked of it. She had found that out at four in the morning, quietly, at the far end of the building, and had said nothing to anybody about it.

“Right.” Catalina did not make anything of it. She just filed it, the way she had said she would. “So you’re not going up more than once. Tell me before you do, not after.”

Adeline said, “Okay.”

“Say it properly.”

“I’ll tell you before I go up.”

“Thank you.”

Marlowe, in their ears: “Thirty.”

Catalina stood.

She did it in the open, in the floodlight wash at the corner, where anybody on that wall with a scope could see her from the waist up.

Adeline said, “Cat—”

“They have to see me first.” She was not looking at the wall. She was looking at Adeline. “That’s the whole job. If they see you first they shoot, and if they see me first they come out to look, and coming out to look is the entire plan.”

Adeline said, “I know.”

“Good.” A short breath. “Ten minutes. You said I’d get longer than two and I’m telling you it’s ten, and when JT calls clear you go and you don’t wait for me, because I can get out of a place faster than you can.”

She started, “That’s not—”

“Ten,” Catalina said.

Marlowe, flatly, from two streets back: “Fifteen.”

Adeline said, “Going.”

She went.

---

She came out of the alley at a walk.

No cover. No angle. Straight up the middle of the approach road with both blades out, into the floodlights, where every gun on that wall could find her.

That was the point.

The first burst came at nine seconds.

She brought the right wing across.

It came over and down in front of her. Fifteen feet of it, angled to the fire.

The rounds went into the outer layer and stopped.

She felt each one arrive as a push against the wrist joint. Hail through a coat.

Three more guns opened up.

She kept walking.

That was the thing nobody on that wall could process.

Lucifer had spent a winter on it. A thing that does not hurry is worse than a thing that charges.

Men fire faster at something running. Something walking makes them think.

Be a target.

Be a target for as long as you can stand it.

She was fifty feet out when the left side opened up.

She brought the left wing round on instinct.

It stopped where it always stopped now.

Eighteen inches of her, hip to shoulder, that it did not cover.

A round went through her side.

She kept walking. She turned her body instead, put the good wing wide and her burnt shoulder behind it, and crossed the last of the beams at an angle with both blades down.

Behind her, at the corner, Catalina came up off the ground.

The light came with her.

It was not a glow.

It came off her hard, violet-blue, and it hit the wall and the trucks and the underside of the smoke and turned all of it a colour nothing in that city had ever been.

Every face on that parapet went up.

She did not raise her hands.

She sang.

Four notes, no words, pitched low and pushed out of her at a volume that had been built in stadiums — and the sound went across two hundred feet of open ground and hit the wall, and the wall answered it.

Every loose thing on that parapet came off it at once.

Shell casings. A helmet. A length of chain. A man’s rifle out of his hands.

They did not fall. They went up, and hung.

Then they came down into the courtyard behind at the speed of something dropped from four times that height.

She closed her fist.

The top four feet of the parapet folded inward and went with them.

Somebody on the wall started shouting a word over and over.

“Feeds are spoofed.” Marlowe, level. “Loops running. JT, go.”

“In.” A grunt, and metal giving. “Their east tunnel security is a joke somebody wrote in a hurry. I’m at the spine. Starting the pull.”

“How long.”

JT said, “Six minutes if nobody breathes on me.”

Catalina swept one arm across.

The three trucks on the ramp went with it.

All of them. Sideways, on locked wheels, ten feet across the stone and into the barricades at the foot of the wall.

The barricades went. The men behind them ran.

Adeline went in through the gap they left.

---

She did not go through the gate. She went along the inside of the wall where the light did not reach.

Knee. Weapon hand. The gap under the arm.

Three men at the base of the east tower.

The first had his back to her and a radio up and she took him at the knee from behind, which put him on the ground and took the radio out of the air, and he was still reaching for it when she went past.

The second turned.

He was fast.

Rifle round, up, finger inside the guard. She was not going to reach him in time.

So she did not try.

She put the right wing between them and walked into the muzzle.

He fired at three feet.

The wing took it. Every round.

She felt them go in along the leading edge in a line.

Then she came out from behind it with the blade already moving and put it through the strap of his vest and into the shoulder underneath.

He let go of the rifle. His hand had stopped being connected to the decision.

The third ran.

Not at her. At the tower door.

Which meant a stairwell. Which meant height.

Which meant nine seconds from now there was somebody above her with a clear line on the whole yard.

She let him get four steps.

Then she was there.

She had not moved fast in front of anybody all night. She had been walking, deliberately, because walking was the job.

The man at the door made a sound when she stopped being in one place and started being in another.

It was not a word.

She put him against the frame.

He did not get up.

Don’t go up.

She looked at the stairwell.

Two seconds to that roof. She would own the whole yard from it.

Every instinct she had went that way. The wings came half out on their own.

She took them back in.

She did not go up.

It would have been faster. It was always faster.

She went the long way. Round the ramp, on the ground, with the whole east side open above her.

It cost seconds. She could feel every one of them going.

She paid them.

“Four minutes,” JT said.

---

The yard was two hundred feet of nothing.

She crossed it behind the trucks — the ones Catalina had put there, which had not been cover when they were on the ramp and were cover now — and a spotter on the west tower found her at the halfway point and started calling her position.

A heavy gun opened up from the gate house.

It was not a rifle. She knew that from the sound before she knew it from anything else, and she got the right wing up and angled and the first burst hit it like somebody swinging a table.

It moved her. Four feet, sideways, boots skidding.

The second burst put her on one knee.

She stayed behind the wing and the rounds kept coming and the feathers kept taking them, and she felt the third burst arrive in the muscle at the wing root as a deep hot pull, which was new, and which meant that there was a number of these she could do and she had started spending it.

It doesn’t go through.

It still costs.

“Gate house, west corner,” she said.

“Seen.” Catalina, forty feet up and a hundred yards back. “Look away.”

Adeline put her head down behind the wing.

The note came in over the top of her — one long low tone that she felt in the bones of her face — and the gate house window came out of its frame along with about four feet of the wall around it, and the heavy gun stopped.

She got up.

“Thank you.”

“Three minutes,” said Marlowe. “Somebody in that building has a landline. They’re going to have people here from the eastern barracks in eleven.”

A door opened ahead of her and a man came out of it and she put him back through it.

The courtyard came alive.

They came out of the barracks block in a line.

Twenty, more. Shields up and overlapping. Moving in step, which meant somebody inside was still commanding, and that somebody had decided to stop shooting at the thing that could not be shot.

She went at them. The alternative was letting them reach the ramp.

The first shield she went under.

It was the obvious thing and it worked once. She came in low and took the knee behind it and the man went down inside his own formation and made a hole, and she was through the hole before it closed.

They closed it behind her.

That was the moment she understood she was fighting somebody with training and not a crowd with rifles.

Inside the line it was close.

Too close for the wings. Too close for full extension on the blades.

She worked with the points and the pommels and her elbows.

It was ugly. It was slow. She took four of them apart in about eleven seconds and got hit six times doing it.

The sixth was a bayonet in her forearm.

She took his whole arm off the rifle for it.

Then somebody with a shield hit her square and she went back three steps and they came round the outside of her while she was still finding her feet, and four rifles emptied into the right wing at eleven feet.

The feathers took all of it.

She felt every round land. Not one came through.

She stood behind fifteen feet of her own wing in the middle of a courtyard while men emptied magazines into it from three sides and could not reach her, and for about four seconds she was the safest person in Al-Miraj.

Then the shooting stopped.

Not because they had run out. Because somebody had called it.

Oh.

They came round the edge.

They closed the way a hand closes — not fast, properly, a man at every angle and the ring coming in a foot at a time. And every one of them came up her left.

They’ve worked it out.

They had. It had taken them under two minutes. The wing that covered her went right, so they went left, into the eighteen inches the burnt one could not reach, and there was nothing clever she could do about it because the answer was to open the wing and the wing did not open.

She turned into it.

She got the first one at the wrist and the second across the thigh and put the third into the man behind him, and the ring gave a foot and came back, and gave a foot and came back.

The good wing was getting heavy.

That was the thing she noticed and had no time for.

Fifteen feet of loaded feather, held at shield angle, four minutes. It had started to be work.

The muscle at the root was shaking. Every time she brought it across it came slower than the time before.

They were waiting for it to stop coming across.

She cut two more and the space kept shrinking and there was nowhere to put her feet that was not somebody, and the left side of her stayed open the whole time.

“Ninety seconds,” JT said, in her ear, from somewhere under the floor. “Nearly there. Hold on.”

I can’t.

She did not say it.

She had never said it in her life and she did not have the sentence, and so she did the other thing, which was to stop retreating and put her back against a truck so that at least the ring could only be a half-circle.

That bought her nine seconds.

A stock came across her jaw.

The floodlights went sideways. She got a blade up and something hit it hard enough to ring up her arm and into her teeth.

Go up.

You said you’d tell her.

She got half a breath to do it in and did not get the word out.

A knife went in under her ribs.

On the left, through the eighteen inches, exactly where it had been going to go since she came off the airstrip with a burnt wing and told nobody.

---

“ADELINE—”

The scream that came after it was not the word.

It was not anything. It arrived as pressure, as a white wall of nothing coming across the courtyard at the speed of sound, and the ring of men around her stopped being a ring.

They went off their feet. All of them, outward, in every direction at once, like water off a struck surface. Rifles came apart in the air. A shield folded in half and kept going. The man with the knife was gone before she understood he had let go of it.

Glass went out of every window on three sides.

The gantry that held the north floodlights bent at the middle and came down across the trucks, and the trucks moved, and the turret on the east tower twisted round on its mounting until the metal gave and it hung there facing the sky.

Then nothing.

A silence so total that Adeline could hear the knife hit the stone eleven feet away.

She was on her knees. She did not remember arriving there.

Above her, forty feet up, Catalina hung in the air with both hands still out in front of her and the light going out of her from the fingers inward.

She was shaking.

“I didn’t—”

Her voice came down thin across the empty courtyard.

“I didn’t know I could do that.”

Adeline got a hand under herself. The knife had gone in and come out and the hole was doing what holes did, which was fill up and then stop, and she pushed up onto one knee and then the other one and then she was standing.

She said, “You saved me.”

“I couldn’t lose you.”

Catalina came down. Not gracefully — the light was nearly gone and she landed hard and had to put a hand out.

“So I didn’t,” she said.

She looked at her own palms for a second and then she looked at Adeline’s side, and she crossed the ten feet between them and got her hand flat over the wound without asking, and pressed.

“You didn’t tell me before you went up,” she said.

“I didn’t go up.”

Catalina stopped.

She looked at the whole courtyard — the ring of men laid out from where Adeline had been standing, the ramp Adeline had run round instead of over, the three-quarter wing that had never opened.

She said, “You went round.”

“You asked me to.”

Catalina did not say anything to that at all. Her hand stayed where it was on Adeline’s ribs and her jaw did something and she looked at the ground for about two seconds.

“Okay,” she said.

“Two minutes,” JT said, in both their ears. “Whatever that was, it took the lights out down here too. I’m working on a torch and bad language.”

---

They finished it together.

There was still a gate house and there were still men in it, and the two of them went through them without discussing anything at all.

It worked like this.

Catalina hummed — one note, held — and everything loose in the room came up off the floor and hung there, dust and casings and a chair, and the men in it put their arms over their heads because that is what a person does. Adeline went through the middle of it on the ground while they were looking up.

When they brought guns down on her, the right wing came across and the rounds stopped in it, and Catalina dropped the note half an octave and the guns came out of their hands and went to the ceiling.

Twice Adeline moved into a gap before it existed.

Both times it was there.

The second time she looked up, and Catalina was already looking at the place she had been about to be.

From the alleys across the road, people had come out to watch. Not many — eight, ten, in doorways, at the corner. Somebody said a word Adeline did not know and somebody else said it back. A man made a sign over his chest with two fingers and did not take his eyes off her.

She heard all of it and understood none of it and kept working.

“Upload complete.” Marlowe. “Every file. It’s in Savior’s vault behind something that will take them a decade. JT, get out and leave them the receipt.”

“Leaving. Three. Two.”

The stronghold blinked.

Every light in it went at once, and the hum that had been under everything since they arrived stopped, and the courtyard dropped into a darkness that was almost total and then into the red of whatever ran on batteries.

A server rack somewhere inside sighed and quit.

Adeline stood in the middle of it with blood down her left side and a wing that would not open and found that she was breathing hard and could not entirely feel her hands.

“That’s the show,” she said.

---

The engines came out of the south four minutes later.

She heard them before she saw them and she knew the sound, and the knowing arrived with a coldness she did not immediately understand.

A Savior dropship came through the smoke with its lights on full.

It did not circle. It came straight in over the wall they had just taken and put down in the courtyard on the stone they had just cleared, and the wash off it moved the bodies.

Phoenix came out of the hatch before it finished opening.

He landed in a scatter of sparks with the fire-wings out and the smirk already on, and he looked round the courtyard once — the folded parapet, the hanging turret, the glass, the twenty men laid out in a circle with a clear space in the middle of them.

The smirk went off his face.

He did not put it back on.

Warren came down after him.

He did not jump. He came down the ramp at a walk, in the coat, with two officers behind him and a datapad in front of him, and he did not look at the parapet or the turret or the circle of men.

He was reading.

Adeline watched him come the whole way and understood, some distance before he reached her, that he had read the report before the ship landed.

He did not look up from it.

“Morningstar.”

“Sir.”

“Is the archive secure.”

Adeline said, “It’s in the vault.”

“And the building?”

“Dark.” Her voice came out flatter than she meant it to. “Their whole nervous system. They won’t broadcast anything out of here again.”

Warren looked at the datapad.

He looked at the datapad.

“Good.”

He turned to the officer on his left and started talking about perimeter.

Adeline stood there.

Behind him two officers had already started walking the courtyard with lights, stepping over the men Catalina had put down, calling distances to each other in the flat unhurried voices of people arriving after. One of them photographed the folded parapet. Another took the turret. Neither of them looked at the circle in the middle of the stone where the ring had been standing when it stopped being a ring.

That’s it.

That’s the whole of it.

She had expected — she did not actually know what she had expected, and standing in a dark courtyard at five in the morning with somebody else’s blood on her hands she discovered she had been carrying something the whole way in and had not once looked at what it was.

Catalina came up on her left.

She did not say anything. She just put her shoulder against Adeline’s arm and left it there, and Adeline stood inside that and did not move.

---

The monitors came back on.

Not the building’s. Two of them, high on the gate house, on a circuit somebody had run separately for exactly this.

Lear did not repeat himself.

“You blacked my house,” he said. “That was elegant. I’ve watched it twice.”

The screens split.

Four feeds. Then six. Rooftops, a junction, and a wide grey building with a fenced yard and four tanks standing on a gantry above it.

“Do you know what that is?”

Nobody answered. He had not expected anybody to.

“Eastern pumping station. It’s the only one on that side of the river. Everything east of the Qasr road drinks through those four tanks. About two hundred and ten thousand people, most of whom have never heard of you, and all of whom are going to.”

Adeline’s stomach went.

“It has a standing guard of sixty,” Lear said. “It had a standing guard of sixty until two hours ago, when every armed man in this district was pulled west because something with wings was walking up a road at them.”

No.

“I want to be exact, because exactness is the whole of my job.” He folded his hands. “I did not order anything tonight. I did not move one man toward that station, and I have the dispatch logs, and I’ll be publishing them in the morning. I moved them to you.”

He let that stand on its own.

“You are the reason that yard was empty.”

The feed changed.

The same building, closer, from a camera on the fence line. The gate standing open. The guard post dark.

Then the tanks went.

The picture whited out and came back, and there was a column going up out of the top of the frame, and the gantry was not there any more.

Four seconds later the air arrived across the courtyard and moved the dust at her feet.

The sound came after that.

“That’s your water,” Lear said.

Nobody in the courtyard spoke.

“Not tonight’s water. All of it. That station took nine years to build and it will take eleven to replace, and until it does, every household east of the river queues at a truck.” He let it sit exactly as long as it needed. “They’ll queue tomorrow. They’ll queue in August. Children who haven’t been born yet will queue.”

The feed cut again.

A bulletin desk. A man reading. Behind him, blown up and held, a still frame pulled off the square.

White wings. Both of them out.

“And the six o’clock is already running,” Lear said. “It doesn’t mention me. It doesn’t mention the Crescent. It says an angel came to Al-Miraj on Tuesday and the water was gone by Friday, and then it stops talking and lets the audience do the rest.”

He told me.

He told me last night and I heard a threat.

It wasn’t a threat. It was a schedule.

“I said the price gets paid by the people you came for,” Lear said. “You didn’t believe me. Nobody does the first time.”

Something moved off-frame.

“Enjoy the victory. I’ll enjoy the sequel.”

The screens went black.

Nobody said anything at all.

Phoenix was looking north at the glow coming up over the roofline with an expression Adeline had never seen on him and did not like at all.

Warren put the datapad down against his leg.

“Frost. Eastern quarter.” About a second. “Water first. Take everything that carries.”

Somebody aboard the ship said something back. He did not answer it.

Then he looked at Adeline for the first time since he had landed.

He looked at her for three seconds, and there was no accusation anywhere in it, which was considerably worse than if there had been.

Then he turned and walked back toward the ship.

Catalina’s shoulder was still against her arm.

Out past the wall the city was going up in a place they had never been, for a reason that had their names on it, and the first light was coming, and it was going to be a clear day.

Chapter 10 — Savior’s Hammer

They put the Rooks on a rooftop and told them to wait.

It was a municipal building four blocks from the gate with a water tank on it and a stairwell that smelled of pigeons, and a Savior corporal walked them up it at ten past six and said a staging area was being established and somebody would come for them.

Nobody came for them.

From up there you could see most of the western districts and a good deal of the sky, and by half six the sky was full.

Adeline sat on the parapet with her legs over the drop and watched Savior take Al-Miraj.

It did not look like a battle. That was the thing she could not get past. A battle was what had happened in the courtyard at five — four minutes of not being able to breathe and a ring closing on her left side and a knife going in where the wing did not reach.

This was a schedule.

Carriers came over in formation at two thousand feet and did not deviate. Mechs came down on their pillars in a line along the Qasr road, one every ninety seconds, each one landing in a marked square that somebody had chosen off a map before the ships left the coast. Armour came up out of the south in columns and turned at junctions without slowing, because the junctions had been surveyed.

Iron Crescent had held this city for four hundred years.

It took Savior an hour and ten minutes.

“They’ve had the plan the whole time,” Marlowe said.

She was sitting against the water tank with the slate on her knees and she had been quiet for about forty minutes before she said it.

“What?”

“The deployment’s too clean.” She turned the screen round. “That’s a rolling occupation with pre-assigned grid squares and a supply chain behind it. You don’t build that this morning. That took six weeks.”

JT did not look up from his hands. “So they were coming anyway.”

“They were always coming.”

Nobody said anything for a while after that.

Adeline looked out at the mechs coming down one every ninety seconds into squares that had been chosen weeks ago and did the arithmetic she did not want to do.

So what were we.

She could feel Catalina next to her not asking it out loud.

The gunfire stopped in the west first and then in the north, and by half seven there was nothing coming out of the city except the sound of engines idling and somebody’s loudhailer running a message on a loop.

They took the Iron Crescent command post at twenty to eight.

The Rooks watched it on Marlowe’s slate off a Savior feed nobody had bothered to secure — a courtyard, a doorway, men coming out with their hands open.

Then Warren walked into the frame.

He did not hurry. He crossed the courtyard at the pace of a man who had read the outcome in a document, and the fire from both sides of him opened a path and closed behind him, and he stopped in front of a man in a burnished breastplate who had been shouting at his own people ten seconds earlier and had stopped.

They spoke.

The feed had no audio. It lasted about nine seconds and the man in the breastplate did most of it, and at the end of it he put his chin up.

Warren shot him.

One round, at four feet, without raising his voice or his shoulders or doing anything at all with his face.

Marlowe turned the slate off.

“He’d surrendered,” Catalina said.

“He’d stopped shooting,” Marlowe said. “That’s a different thing, and Warren will have the difference written down somewhere.”

Adeline did not say anything.

She had watched a man die on a platform on Tuesday and she had watched a man die on a whitewashed floor on a screen last night, and she had made herself watch both, because somebody who had come all this way to stop it owed them that.

She had watched this one too.

That one’s ours.

That one happened because we opened the door.

They came for the Rooks at ten to nine.

Not a corporal this time. Two officers and a tech with a case, and the tech went straight to Marlowe and put out his hand.

“Slate.”

Marlowe looked at him.

“Archive’s been transferred to central. I need the acquisition device for the chain of custody.”

“It’s Rooks property.”

“It’s evidence.”

Marlowe held on to it for about three seconds longer than was comfortable for anybody on the roof, and then she handed it over.

The tech ran something, unplugged something, and gave it back with the storage stripped.

“What happens to it,” Adeline said.

He was already walking away and he answered without turning round, because it was a reasonable question and he had a reasonable answer.

“Above my grade.”

Warren came up the stairwell at nine.

He did not look like a man who had been awake for thirty hours, because he had not been; he had slept on the ship coming out. The coat was clean. The datapad was in his left hand and he was reading it as he came through the door onto the roof.

The five of them stood up.

Adeline did not decide to do it. She was on her feet before she registered standing, and so was JT, and that was the worst part of the entire morning and she would think about it later.

“Morningstar.” He did not look up. “Report’s filed. Your team is stood down effective now.”

“Sir.”

“Transport at eleven. You’ll be back on the airship by nineteen hundred.”

“Sir.”

He turned a page on the datapad.

“The archive,” Adeline said.

Warren looked up.

“What about it.”

“Four years of everything they did in this city. Every execution they filmed and every one they didn’t broadcast. Names. Orders. Who signed what.” Her voice was steadier than she had any right to expect. “It’s the only thing that proves any of it. If it goes out—”

“It isn’t going out.”

The roof went quiet.

“It’s an intelligence asset with an active regional application and it is now classified at a level I am not going to discuss on a roof.” He said it without any edge at all, which made it worse. “The people who did those things are in custody or they’re dead. That’s the outcome. What you’re describing is a different objective and it wasn’t the one you were given.”

“They deserve to know what happened to them.”

“They know what happened to them. They were there.”

He turned back to the datapad.

“The world deserves—”

“The world,” Warren said, “has an attention span of about nine days, and I have a region to hold for the next four years, and if I publish that archive I lose every asset inside Iron Crescent that is currently deciding whether to talk to me.”

He let that land and did not soften it.

“You did good work. The building’s dark, the archive’s secure, and there are two people alive in a stairwell in the eastern quarter because you went into a square on Tuesday when you had no authorisation to be in this country at all.” A pause. “That’s on the record. I put it there myself an hour ago.”

Adeline found she had nothing to say to that either.

“Anything else?”

“The water.”

Something moved across Warren’s face and was gone.

“Frost has eleven tankers on the east side and four more coming out of Kuwait tonight. That covers drinking. It does not cover a city.” He closed the datapad. “The station’s gone. There is no version of the next decade where that station is not gone.”

“Because of us.”

“Because of a man with a television station who has been planning that for longer than you’ve been in this country.” He looked at her directly for the first time. “You want me to tell you it wasn’t your fault. I’m not going to do that, because I don’t know, and neither do you, and the ones who tell you they know are selling something.”

He went to the stairwell door and stopped with his hand on it.

“You’ve done enough,” he said.

Then he went down the stairs.

Adeline stood where she was for a while.

She was aware of the roof and the parapet and the water tank and the sound of the engines out over the city, and of the four people behind her not saying anything, and of the fact that she could not work out what her face was supposed to be doing.

You’ve done enough.

She turned it over and could not get it to come out one way.

It had not been said cruelly. That was the trouble. If it had been said cruelly she would have known what it was. He had not been dismissing her; he had gone out of his way to put something on a record for her, and he had refused to lie to her about the water when lying would have cost him nothing.

And then he had said enough, and meant stop, and meant it kindly.

Enough is a word you use about a quantity.

Her wings came in.

Not the way they came in when she was cold or when somebody startled her. They came in and kept coming — folding down and in until they were tight against her back and the burnt one pulled where the scab had set, and she let it pull, and it did not occur to her to stop them.

JT said her name.

She did not answer him.

Marlowe sat back down against the water tank and turned the empty slate over in her hands and did not turn it on, because there was nothing on it.

Catalina came and stood beside her.

She did not speak for a long moment. Then she put her hand out.

Not a grab. Not a rescue. She put it out palm-up, at the height where Adeline’s hand was hanging, and waited.

It was the hand from the square.

It was the exact offer, made the exact way, on a roof this time instead of in front of eleven thousand people, and there was nothing in the world stopping Adeline from taking it.

She looked at it.

She looked at the open palm and the scraped knuckles and the blood that had dried in the crease of the thumb, which was hers, from the street, from the leg.

Take it.

Her arm did not move.

There was no decision anywhere in it. She stood on a rooftop in Al-Miraj with her wings folded flat and her hand eight inches from somebody else’s and she could not close the distance, and she did not understand why, and she could feel every second of it going past.

Catalina did not take her hand back.

She held it there.

Ten seconds. Fifteen. Her arm must have started to ache and she did not move it, and she did not say it’s okay, and she did not say anything at all, because she had worked out somewhere in the last four days that Adeline could not be talked across a gap and would sometimes walk it on her own if you left the bridge where she could see it.

Adeline’s hand stayed at her side.

“Okay,” Catalina said, eventually.

She let her arm down slowly, the way you put something breakable on a shelf.

Then she sat on the parapet, close enough that their shoulders were almost touching and not touching, and looked out at the city with her, and stayed there.

Below them, Al-Miraj went on being taken.

The loudhailer ran its message on a loop. The mechs came down along the Qasr road, one every ninety seconds, into squares that had been chosen six weeks ago by people who had never been here.

And out past the river, two hundred thousand people were waking up to no water and a bulletin with her face in it.

Chapter 11 — The Angel’s Proof

They were back in the warehouse by four because there was nowhere else to be.

Transport at eleven had become transport at nineteen hundred and then transport when the corridor clears, and a corporal had told them to hold at their last position, which meant the building with the gap in the roof sheeting and the lathes under sheets and the cold that came up out of the floor.

Marlowe sat against a crate with the empty slate on her knees.

She had not put it down and she had not turned it on. She had been holding it for about two hours the way you hold a thing that used to have a use.

JT was in the dark by the door with his arms folded, watching a street that had Savior armour on it and did not need watching. He had not taken the mask off since the roof.

Adeline sat at the cold end with her back to the wall and her wings folded flat and did not do anything at all.

You’ve done enough.

It had been going round since nine. Not as a wound — she had those and knew the shape of them. This was quieter and it went further in. It had got underneath the part of her that decided what she was for.

Because the trouble was that he had been fair.

He had put her on the record. He had refused to lie about the water. He had told her the truth about what he could not do with the archive and he had not once raised his voice, and at the end of all of that he had looked at her and used a word you use about a quantity.

Enough of what.

She could not finish the sentence, and had been trying since the roof, and every route through it ended in the same place.

A child with wings, pretending.

Catalina was six feet away, sitting where she had sat down after the hand.

She had not tried again. She had not said anything about it and she had not gone anywhere either, and every so often she shifted and the gap stayed six feet, which was as close as Adeline had let anything get since nine in the morning.

The door went at ten past four.

JT had a hand on his weapon before the hinge had finished, and then he stopped, and his shoulders came down about an inch.

“No threat.”

The woman came in first.

It took Adeline a second to place her, because she had last seen her on a platform with her wrists bound and a rifle at her shoulder. She had a different dress on. Somebody had given her a different dress, and the giving of it was its own small fact about the eastern quarter that Adeline did not have room to think about.

The girl came in behind her with a fist in the fabric at her mother’s hip.

Seven, maybe.

JT crouched down about eight feet from them and did not go closer, and started talking.

It was the slow version again. Low, unhurried, gaps left in it. The mother answered in pieces. The girl watched his mask the entire time and did not blink much.

Then the mother said something short, and JT went quiet, and turned round.

“She wanted to see you.”

Adeline stood up.

She was aware of doing it badly — of being covered in four days of a city, of a burnt wing that would not fold properly, of blood on her sleeve that was mostly not hers. She had not washed. She had a hole in her side that had closed and a bruise across her jaw coming up green.

The girl let go of her mother’s dress.

She came across the concrete on her own. It took her some time. Her mother let her do it and did not put a hand out, and Adeline understood, watching her not do it, that they had discussed this before they arrived.

The girl stopped about three feet away and held out both hands.

There was a folded square of paper in them.

She held it flat on both palms, the way you carry something to somebody, rather than out at the fingers the way you hand a thing over. Somebody had shown her how to do that. Adeline could see the whole of it — the deciding, the practising, the walking here across a city with armour on the streets to do a thing she had made up her mind about.

The corners were dirty where small fingers had held them too hard. It had been folded and unfolded a number of times — the creases had gone soft and one of them had started to split.

Adeline crouched down.

It put them at the same height. It pulled the leg where the seam had closed, and she did it anyway, and took the paper with hands she was abruptly aware were not clean.

She unfolded it.

Two figures in crayon.

The one on the left had wings, and the wings were much too big for it — they went off the edge of the paper on one side and the artist had kept drawing them anyway, in the margin, sideways, rather than make them smaller.

Feathers going in every direction. Some of them done carefully, one at a time. Some just scribble, where the hand had got tired or the wanting had got faster than the hand.

There was a halo over its head. Crooked. Yellow. Pressed hard enough into the paper to have gone waxy.

The other figure was smaller.

It was standing next to the winged one with its arm up. Right up, above its own head, because of the difference in height.

It was holding the angel’s hand.

Adeline looked at that for a long time.

At the bottom, in English letters that had been practised somewhere else before they were committed to this page — the down-strokes gone over twice, the k attempted and abandoned and attempted again:

Thank you.

Somewhere a long way off Adeline was aware of her own breathing doing something it had not been asked to do.

He took that word this morning.

At six o’clock a man in a chair with a glass of water he never touched had said angel and made it mean water gone from the east side and a bulletin with her face on it and two hundred thousand people learning her by the wrong name.

He had chosen the kind word because the kind word did more damage.

And a child who had been on a platform four days ago, in a city that had spent four hundred years being told what wings meant, had gone somewhere with a crayon and drawn a halo anyway.

Liar, said the thing in her that always said it. Pretender. You didn’t stop it. The water’s gone and the archive’s classified and Warren sent you home.

She let it talk.

It was not wrong about any of the facts.

But the girl was standing three feet away with her hands empty now and her eyes steady, waiting — not for thanks, Adeline understood that, she was not waiting to be thanked.

She was waiting to see whether it would be taken.

She’s seven.

And she’s braver about this than I am.

Adeline’s throat closed entirely.

She wanted to say all of it. That she was not an angel and had never been one and had been called several other things in that square. That she had put a knife in a man three streets from here nine hours ago. That her wings did not work properly and that she had spent the whole of that fight on the ground because of it.

None of it came out, and while it was not coming out she understood that saying any of it would have been a thing done to a child for her own comfort.

So she did not say it.

She held the paper in both hands where the girl could see her holding it, and she said, “Thank you.”

JT said something quiet behind her.

The girl’s face did the thing children’s faces do — all of it at once, no part of it held back — and then she stepped forward and put her hand flat on the burnt wing.

Right on the black.

Adeline did not move.

The wing did, a little, and the girl did not take her hand away, and behind her the mother said something in a voice that had gone thick.

“She says she’s sorry about your feathers,” JT said.

Don’t.

Adeline’s eyes went, without asking her.

She had not cried in front of anybody since she was eleven years old and she did not do it now either, not properly — it was two, and they went down the side of her face and stopped, and the girl reached up and wiped one of them off with her thumb the way you would for anybody.

Then she turned and went back across the concrete to her mother.

The mother inclined her head once, to Adeline, and said something that JT did not translate.

They left.

The door shut and the warehouse was exactly as it had been, and nothing about the city outside had changed in the slightest.

The water was still gone. The archive was still classified. The transport was still coming and the bulletin was still running and the man who had built the frame had not been inconvenienced by any part of the last four days.

None of that had moved.

Adeline sat back down on the concrete with the drawing in her hands.

She looked at it for a while.

Then she folded it — carefully, along the creases that were already there, so as not to start a new one — and did not put it in a pocket, because a pocket had a war in it, and instead she held it in her closed hand against her sternum.

The wings came round.

Both of them, in front, the way they had in the cold two nights ago, and the paper was inside that and so was she.

She drew us holding hands.

The thought arrived out of nowhere and would not leave.

A child had watched her for ten seconds in the worst minute of that child’s life, and had gone away and drawn an angel, and had put a hand in the angel’s hand — and that had not been a thing she saw, because Adeline had been holding two swords the entire time.

It was a thing she had decided about her.

And this morning somebody held one out and I couldn’t.

Across the warehouse Marlowe turned the empty slate over and put it down on the crate beside her, face down, and left it there.

JT came away from the door.

He did not say anything about the drawing and he did not look at it. He just came over and sat down against the wall on Adeline’s right, six feet away, which was where he sat.

And after a while Catalina moved.

Not all the way. She shifted along the wall until the six feet was four, and stopped there, and looked out at the gap in the roof where the sky was going the colour it went.

She did not put her hand out.

She had done that once today and Adeline had not been able to take it, and she was not going to make her fail at it twice in one day.

I know what you’re doing.

Adeline did not say that either.

But she sat inside her own wings with a piece of paper in her fist and a girl’s handprint still on the burnt one, and she was aware that the distance was four feet instead of six, and that it had been moved from the other end.

Outside, a transport spun up.

The Rooks stood and gathered what they had, which did not take long, and went out to it through a city that did not know any of their names and had decided about one of them anyway.

Chapter 12 — The Flight Back

The transport went up out of Al-Miraj at half past seven and turned west, and after about four minutes there was nothing in the windows but dark.

It was a Savior hull, not theirs. Rows of jump seats down both sides, amber strips along the ceiling on the low night setting, forty people in it and almost all of them asleep inside ten minutes the way soldiers do.

The Rooks had the back.

JT was out before they cleared the coast, head back against the frame with his arms folded, mask still on. Marlowe had the empty slate on her knees and was doing nothing with it.

Adeline sat by the window with her wings clamped down and her hand inside her jacket, closed around a folded piece of paper.

She had been holding it for two hours.

Her reflection came back off the reinforced glass in three or four overlapping copies, and she looked at those instead of out, because out there was nothing and in here there was a version of her face she did not particularly recognise.

You’ve done enough.

She drew us holding hands.

The two of them had been going round each other since the warehouse and had not resolved into anything. She did not think they were going to. There was a way of holding both that she did not have yet and was going to have to learn, and it was not going to be tonight.

The seat beside her gave.

Catalina sat down the way you sit down next to something you do not want to startle — slowly, and further away than she needed to, leaving a hand’s width of grey webbing between them.

She did not speak for a while.

Then: “We haven’t had a minute since the gate.”

“No.”

“Not one. I counted.” She let her head go back against the bulkhead. “There was the roof, and there was the warehouse, and then there was a corporal.”

Adeline almost laughed.

Catalina said, “Your side.”

“It’s closed.”

“I know it’s closed. I want to see where it was.”

She did not wait for permission, which Adeline noticed, and did not mind, which she noticed second.

Catalina leaned over and took the hem of the jacket and turned it back, and looked at the place under the ribs where the knife had gone in and where there was now a line of new skin about four inches long and the wrong colour.

She looked at it for longer than looking at it required.

“Okay.”

Then she took Adeline’s right arm at the wrist and turned it over and found the bayonet cut on the forearm, which had also closed, and did the same thing.

“And the wing.”

Adeline said, “Cat—”

“I’m doing the file.” She said it without any edge at all. “It takes a minute. You can sit there.”

Adeline sat there.

It occurred to her, sitting there, that nobody had ever done an inventory of her before. Lucifer had patched her up a hundred times and had never once gone looking — he had waited for her to bring him a thing and then he had dealt with the thing and then it was finished. This was the other way round. Somebody was going through her looking for what she had not mentioned, on the reasonable assumption that there would be something, and there was.

Catalina got up onto one knee on the seat and got a look at the top edge of the left wing in the amber light, at the black going to grey, at the place where the scab had set into the skin at the wrist joint and pulled every time it moved.

She sat back on her heels. “That one’s not healing like the rest.”

“Burns don’t.”

“Right.” She sat back down. “Then it goes in front of a medic on the ship and not in a week, tonight, and I’m coming with you so that you actually do it.”

Adeline said, “Okay.”

“You said okay fast.”

“I know.”

Catalina looked at her sideways for a second and let it go.

The engines went on doing what engines do.

“Back at the gate house,” Adeline said, after a while. “When we were in there.”

“Mm.”

“I went into a gap before it was there. Twice.”

“Three times,” Catalina said. “You missed one.”

“How did you know where I was going to be?”

Catalina thought about that.

“I didn’t,” she said. “That’s the honest answer. I wasn’t working anything out, I was just — looking at where I wanted you to be, and then you were in it.” A pause. “It scared me a bit, after.”

“Me too.”

“Good. I’d have felt stupid on my own.”

That did get a laugh out of Adeline. Small and mostly breath, but it happened, and Catalina heard it and did not make anything of it, which was the only reason it was allowed to happen at all.

Then the quiet came back and sat between them and got heavier, because there was a thing in it that neither of them had said yet and both of them had been carrying since five in the morning.

Catalina said it.

“I couldn’t let you go.”

Adeline did not move.

“That’s all it was. There wasn’t a decision, I want to be clear about that, I didn’t work anything out. They had you on the ground and I just — ” She stopped. Started again, lower. “I couldn’t let you go, Adeline. So I didn’t.”

Adeline said, “You were scared.”

“Terrified.”

“Of me dying.”

“Yes.” No hedge anywhere in it. “Specifically that. Not the mission. Not the team.”

Adeline turned her face to the window.

Nobody had ever put it in those words in front of her. Lucifer had come for her, more than once, out of places she should not have come out of — and he had never once told her what it had cost him, and she had understood that not telling her was the shape his love came in, and she had made her peace with it a long time ago.

This was a different shape.

It was one she had no practice with at all, and her eyes had gone hot, and she stayed facing the glass until that stopped being true.

Catalina’s hand was on the armrest between them.

It had been there the whole time. Palm down, fingers loose, not reaching for anything and not put anywhere on purpose.

Adeline looked at it.

Eight inches.

Her heart went. Not a flutter, nothing poetic — it slammed, twice, hard enough that she put her free hand flat on her own thigh to stop it showing, and she sat there in a Savior transport with forty people asleep around her and her pulse going like she was about to come off a roof.

This is ridiculous.

You went through a line of twenty men eight hours ago.

Eight inches of grey webbing.

She had been in front of a god’s son. She had walked up a lit road into four guns. She had put a blade through a man’s jaw while his knife was still in her leg, and none of it — not one second of any of it — had ever felt like this did, sitting still, doing nothing, looking at somebody’s hand.

Do it.

Do it now before you work out how to talk yourself out of it.

She reached over and put her hand on top of it and closed her fingers round the side of it and held on.

Catalina went absolutely still.

Everything in Adeline went with her. The whole world contracted to about four square inches of skin and the fact that she had put her hand there on purpose, on purpose, nobody had asked her, nobody had made it easy, she had simply decided and then done it and it was done and it could not be undone now —

Then Catalina turned her hand over underneath.

And laced their fingers through.

And held on back.

Oh.

It went up Adeline’s arm and into her chest and kept going. She had been cold since the roof and she was not cold any more. Something behind her sternum that had been clenched since about nine that morning — since before that, since the airstrip, since the mountain — opened its hand.

Neither of them looked at the other.

They faced forward at a bulkhead like two people at a bus stop, and Adeline’s ears were roaring, and she was grinning at absolutely nothing and could not have stopped that either.

Her wings came out about an inch on both sides.

Then a bit more.

Behave.

They did not behave. They had never once behaved. They had reported her to every room she had ever been in and they were reporting her now, to a bulkhead, at nine thousand feet, and for the first time in her entire life she did not want them to stop.

“Okay,” Catalina said, to the bulkhead.

Her voice had gone slightly up at the end.

“Okay,” Adeline said.

Neither of them said anything else about it, then or later, and both of them were still holding on twenty minutes afterward.

Some time after that Catalina’s head came over onto her shoulder.

She did it slowly and she gave Adeline every opportunity to move.

Adeline did not move.

Then there was a weight against the side of her neck and hair against her jaw and the entire right side of her body sent up a flare.

“See,” Catalina said. “You can lean too. It goes both ways.”

Adeline said, “I don’t know how.”

“I’m aware. You’re doing fine.” A pause. “Don’t move.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

It came out too fast and about an octave off, and she heard all of it happen and could do nothing about any of it, and Catalina made a small pleased noise into her shoulder and shifted a half inch closer, which was unsurvivable.

Adeline sat absolutely still and thought, with total clarity:

I would do that whole city again.

It arrived fully formed. It frightened her slightly. She turned it over anyway.

Four days. A square, a checkpoint, a burning wing, a knife, a man in a chair explaining what her name was going to mean on the far side of a river. She had lost every argument she had had with an adult since Tuesday.

And she would go back and do all of it again for this. Right here. It was not even close.

That was new information about herself and she filed it carefully, because she suspected it was going to matter.

Her whole life had been arranged around not needing this. She had been good at it — on a mountain, with a father who could give her anything except a sentence about what she cost him, and in a building full of people who called her provisional. She had thought that was strength.

It had been an arrangement.

She let her own head come over until her cheek was against Catalina’s hair. It smelled of smoke and desert and, underneath that, something that had survived four days of a war zone and was presumably shampoo, and Adeline registered that she would be thinking about that particular fact later, at length, in private.

Catalina’s hand tightened once around hers.

Forty minutes went by like that, and Adeline did not sleep for one second of it, because she had no intention whatsoever of missing any of it.

At some point Adeline’s eyes went and she did not stop them this time.

Not many, and not from any of the things that would have made sense. Not Warren. Not the water. Not a man on a platform or a courtyard full of people she had put on the ground.

From this.

She was crying because somebody was holding her hand, and some distant administrative part of her found that ridiculous and was overruled by every other part at once.

Catalina must have felt it, because her thumb started moving slowly across the back of Adeline’s hand and did not stop for a long while.

She did not say it’s okay.

She did not say anything at all, which Adeline understood by now to be the most deliberate thing she did.

Los Angeles came up under them a little after midnight.

The city went out in every direction to the edge of the window, orange and white and moving, fifteen million people who had never heard of Al-Miraj and would see forty seconds of it on a feed sometime next week and scroll past.

The transport dropped toward the pad and the engines changed and the cabin began to wake up around them.

They did not move for the whole of the descent.

It was only when the struts hit and the hull settled that Adeline sat up, too fast, wings going out and in with a sound like pages, and her face went red in a way that the amber lighting entirely failed to hide.

Catalina sat up considerably more slowly and did not laugh at her.

Catalina pulled her hair back off her face with both hands and did not look rested by it. “Medic. Tonight. You agreed.”

“I agreed.”

“I’m coming.”

“I know.”

Around them people were standing and pulling kit down and being soldiers again, and the noise came back, and there were about ninety seconds left before the two of them stopped being two people on a seat and started being personnel disembarking.

Adeline had her hand on the harness release and did not press it.

“Cat.”

“Mm.”

She did not have the sentence.

She had never had the sentence. She was not going to find it in ninety seconds on a transport with forty people standing up around her, and she suspected it would not turn up this year either, and that when it did she would make an absolute disaster of saying it.

That was fine. That was a problem for a different night.

So she used the word she had.

“Stay.”

Catalina’s face did something.

It happened fast and she put it away fast and it did not go all the way away, and what was left was not careful at all.

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

She stood and pulled her kit down off the rack, and on the way past she let the backs of her fingers go across Adeline’s for about half a second, which was a length of time that could have been an accident and was not.

Adeline sat in the seat for two seconds longer than she needed to.

She said okay.

Then she got up.

The ramp came down onto a hangar at midnight and the noise came up to meet it — forty people disembarking, loaders, somebody shouting a bay number, the whole ordinary machinery of having come back from somewhere.

Adeline went down it into all of that.

She had a folded piece of paper inside her jacket. She had a burnt wing she was going to have looked at tonight because she had said she would. She had lost the archive and the water and the argument, and there was a city eight hours behind her that was going to be saying her name wrong for a long time, and none of that had stopped being true in the last four hours.

And somebody was walking three feet to her left who had not gone anywhere.

Nobody had named anything.

She found, going down the ramp, that she did not need it named tonight — and more than that, underneath it, running quietly and entirely without permission:

There’s going to be a next one.

Not a mission. A next one of this. A next transport, a next cold building, a next four feet that somebody moved without being asked.

She had spent seventeen years not letting herself want things that were not already hers, on the entirely reasonable grounds that wanting was how you got taken apart.

She wanted this one.

She wanted it so much that it made her hands shake on the rail going down, and she let them shake, and she did not tell herself off about it even once.

Behind her, Catalina said something to JT and JT laughed — actually laughed, the first one since the square — and the sound of it came down the ramp after her into the light.

Chapter 13 — Not Bad

She came down on the north side, because it was faster, and this time she knew she was doing it.

Los Angeles went on underneath her in every direction at two in the morning, warm and orange and entirely unbothered. Somebody was having an argument in a car park off the boulevard. A truck was making a delivery to a place that did not open for six hours.

Four days and eleven hours ago she had stood in a room upstairs and worked out one sentence to say to her father.

She let herself down onto the roof and stood there for a moment before she went in.

The casino was exactly as she had left it.

Clean. Empty.

Forty feet of bar with nothing behind it, shelves lit from underneath.

The false constellations going on and off in the order somebody had worked out. For nobody. At this hour.

The water was still coming down the stone at the far end.

She took the stairs slowly because of the leg.

Past the third one that gave under her weight and made a sound like a question.

She left the lights off.

Her room was the same.

Bed. Window. A chair with clothes on it.

Six weeks in it and it still looked like somewhere she was staying.

She got the jacket off and the boots off and did not manage the rest.

There was blood on the jacket that was not hers, and blood on it that was, and she put it on the chair rather than the floor because there was a version of herself who would deal with that tomorrow and she did not want to make things harder for her.

The drawing came out of the inside pocket.

She sat on the edge of the bed and unfolded it. Checked the split crease. It had not gone any further.

She folded it back the same way.

Then she lay down on top of the covers with it in her hand and her wings spread off both sides of the mattress, and she did not sleep.

You’ve done enough.

It had made the whole flight with her.

Off the transport. Into a taxi. Up onto the roof.

It was in this room now and it had not lost a gram.

She lay in the dark and let it say itself.

She was aware, distantly, that she was in the safest room she had ever slept in and that nothing here was going to hurt her, and that she was not going to be able to breathe properly for a while anyway.

The doorway changed.

She did not hear him arrive. She never did.

Lucifer was leaning on the frame with one shoulder against it and a newspaper folded in one hand, which was a prop, because he had not read a newspaper in forty years and both of them knew it.

“It’s all over the news,” he said.

He shook the paper once.

“Everyone has an opinion. There’s a man on a panel at this moment explaining what you should have done instead. He’s a consultant. He’s never been.”

Adeline did not turn over.

“I tried my best,” she said, into the pillow.

It came out small and it came out flat and there was nothing under it — no case, no argument, no defence. She put it down between them to be looked at and found insufficient, which was what she expected, because it was what she thought.

Lucifer came into the room.

He let the newspaper drop on the way and it landed somewhere near the chair, and he did not look at where it landed.

“Yes,” he said. “And it showed me exactly what you are.”

She did not say anything.

“You went into a country you had no authorisation to be in, because a feed showed you a square.” He was somewhere near the foot of the bed. “You went at a stage in front of two hundred people because a child sat down on a step. You took a building apart because there was a room in it full of what they’d done to people.” A pause. “At no point in any of that did you wait for anybody to tell you it was allowed.”

It didn’t work.

She said it out loud because it had been going round for nineteen hours and saying it was the only thing she had not tried.

“It didn’t work.”

“It worked for eleven people who are alive. It did not work for a city.” His voice did not change. “Those are both true and you’re going to have to carry both, and the fact that you already know that at seventeen is the part I would draw your attention to, if you were listening, which you aren’t.”

Adeline turned over.

Her face was wet and she did not do anything about it and he did not look at it, which was a mercy she recognised as deliberate.

“Warren said I’d done enough.”

“Warren,” said Lucifer, “commands eleven thousand people and has to decide every morning which of them to spend. He said the kindest true thing available to him in the time he had.” He put his hands in his coat pockets. “That doesn’t make it a good sentence. It means he’s better than most of them and still not good enough for you, which is an unusual position for me to be defending and I’d like it noted.”

Something went through Adeline’s chest that was almost a laugh.

The constellations went on and off downstairs.

She lay with the folded drawing in her fist against her sternum and the thing she had been carrying since a transport at nine thousand feet came up the back of her throat and she could not get it to stay down.

It came out before she had decided anything about it.

“I met someone.”

Her whole face went hot the instant it was out.

Lucifer did not move.

He did not tease her. He did not say anything clever, and he had a great deal of clever available at all times, and he chose not to use any of it — and Adeline lay in the dark and watched her father decline to make a joke and understood that she was being handled with great care by somebody who had been waiting four days to be told.

Because he had known.

He had known in a room downstairs before she left, when she had said we to him and heard it come out of her own mouth fully formed, and had waited for him to ask who.

He had not asked.

He had stood in a casino that would never open with his book face up on the couch and a question he decided not to put, and then he had let her walk out of the north doors into it.

“Someone who makes you feel seen,” he said.

It was not a question.

“Yeah.” Her voice came out in pieces. “She — ”

She stopped, because the rest of it was not going to fit in a sentence, and because she had spent the whole flight failing to find the sentence and was not going to find it now either.

So she gave him the only part she had.

“She saved me.”

She heard how it sounded. She let it sound like that.

“Not — she pulled me out. Actually. There was a ring of them and I was on the ground and she took the whole yard apart.” A breath. “But that’s not the — ”

“I know which part it isn’t,” Lucifer said.

Adeline’s wings, which had been flat against the bed, came up an inch off the covers on both sides without being consulted about it.

Her father saw that.

She watched him see it, and she watched him decide not to comment on it, and something moved across his face that she would not be able to describe for years afterward.

“Then it matters, little flame.”

That was all he gave her.

He did not name it. He did not tell her what it was, or how long it would last, or what it would cost, and she understood — lying in the dark with a drawing in her fist — that this was the same thing he had done with the permission on the way out.

He was not going to hand her a word for it.

She was going to have to walk over and get it herself, and when she did it would be hers, and nobody would be able to take it off her by pointing out who had given it.

“Thank you,” she said.

Lucifer looked at the ceiling.

“Don’t.”

He went to the door.

He stopped in it, with his back half to her, in the way he did when the thing he was about to say was the reason he had come up the stairs.

“Ada.”

“Mm.”

“Not a bad first mission for the Dark Horse.”

Then he was gone, and the door was open, and the light from the landing lay across the floor in a long strip.

Adeline lay absolutely still.

Dark Horse.

Not pigeon. Not the provisional one, not Lucifer’s project, not the girl on the roster nobody had decided about yet.

He had said it the way you say a name that already exists.

She turned it over in the dark and did not get it to sit comfortably.

It did not fit. Not tonight. Not with a place on the far side of the world that had learned her as something else entirely and would go on calling her that long after anybody remembered why.

It was a size too big.

So grow.

That was not a thing she had ever said to herself before. It had arrived from somewhere and she did not examine where, because examining it seemed like the fastest available way to lose it.

She was still awake when the sky started.

The room went from black to grey and the window began to have a shape, and the false constellations downstairs kept on going off and on for nobody, and somewhere out on the boulevard the first of the trucks were running.

She had four things.

She counted them, because counting was a thing she could still do.

A folded piece of paper in her fist with a halo on it and two figures holding hands, one of which had been drawn by a seven-year-old who had decided something about her without being asked.

A word from her father that was too big and that she had a great deal of work to do to earn.

A wing that was going to be the wrong colour along the top edge for a long time, which she had been told to have looked at, and would.

And a hand she had reached for on a transport, first, on purpose, while nobody was asking her to.

She put the drawing on the nightstand and turned it so the angel faced the bed.

Then she pulled one wing over herself, which was a thing she had done since she was four and had never once thought about, and she went to sleep in a building her father had built and would never open, in a city where nobody had ever heard of Al-Miraj.

The sun came up.

Somewhere on the other side of the world it was already the middle of the afternoon, and the queue at the water truck went back four streets, and a seven-year-old girl was somewhere in it holding her mother’s hand.

And in Los Angeles a girl with a burnt wing slept holding a piece of paper, and did not dream about any of it, and woke at eleven with her hand still closed.