THE BROWNSTONE BUILDINGS ALONG Gran Vía seemed translucent where the big-bellied clouds hung above them like swathes of soiled velvet. As John backed through the screeching door and the wind-stirred dust and clotted cobwebs of the presbytery hallway, he decided that the Magulf light really had thickened and changed. He climbed the stairs. The presbytery was quiet, and there was no sign of Bella—it was, he remembered, her afternoon off—but his bed was freshly made, the sheets taut. He dropped his bag with a clink of the bottles he’d bought for Felipe and sat down, peeling off and destroying his gloves, kicking off his shoes. The koiyl leaves he’d collected still lay in the corner, in a Quicklunch box he’d found. Part of the welcoming aura of the room, he realized, came from the smoky undertow that emanated from them. He sorted out his bag, then climbed the stairs and found Felipe in the top room overlooking Gran Vía. The old priest sat with his feet up on a stool, the fan circling, whisky and trisoma on the low table.

“There you are,” Felipe said. “A good trip?”

“Good enough.” John handed him the bottles. “I brought you these.”

Felipe studied the labels. “Herefordshire. So you’ve been home?”

“The bishop suggested it. She wanted to give me time to think. To readjust.”

“She would…” Felipe sighed and put the bottles down. “Although I’d have thought that home would be a poor place for contemplation.”

“She gave me an ultimatum,” John said. “About my seeing Laurie Kalmar.”

Felipe nodded.

“But I’ve decided now what I’m going to do.”

“That’s good, my son.” With a wince, Felipe shifted in his chair. “Of course, you’ll still be staying your term here?”

“Yes, I plan to remain a priest until then.”

“And after that?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“Do you have any plans?”

“Not really, Felipe. It’s a big step. I can still hardly see as far as my taking it, let alone beyond.”

“These things are sometimes for the best.”

“That’s pretty much what the bishop said.”

Felipe nodded, and crinkled his eyes. The fan on the roof creaked and circled. “And Laurie?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t want to lose her.” Outside, a truck went by. John looked down at the green spines of his gloves; the tiny Halcycon logo, which he noticed for the first time, was incorporated into the thread of the cuff, with the blur of his flesh beneath.

“Up to the west,” Felipe said, “where the coast of Africa meets the River Ocean, the climate is better. Things grow unaided. Life is said to be easier there. I mean”—Felipe made a face and waved his hand at a fly—“that society between Europeans and Borderers is more relaxed. They work jointly, and there’s no fence around the Zone. The freighters that head from there for Australasia have mixed crews. After all, if people live closely enough together, they forget their prejudices, they develop a physical and a mental tolerance…”

John nodded. He’d heard this before—from Borderers here in the Endless City, from priests at Millbrooke Seminary—but it was always about another place, some part of the Endless City they’d heard about but never actually seen.

“You managed,” John asked, “when I was away?”

“Oh, you know.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve been…a little preoccupied.”

He heard the bang of a door and the tramp of footsteps on the stairs. That would be Bella returning. Although this was her afternoon off, she’d have managed to come back laden with shopping.

“I’ve been thinking about that leaf while you were away,” Felipe said. “The koiyl. Not really the kind of thing that a European priest—even I—would be expected to show any curiosity about. Still, I made my inquiries.” He smiled. “I think we should go out later tonight, my son, after you’ve done Mass. See what we can see…”

Nuru was waiting at the church for him, his hands clamped under his armpits, his dapper black clothes flapping in the wind. They were both early, and the door was unlocked, but Nuru hadn’t bothered to go in: here, unlike at the clinic, he had no plans to take over.

“Fatoo John.” Nuru spread his hands and followed John into the church as a cawing black squall clattered up from the roof. The emphasis was on the John. Who had he expected to see? Some new priest? He knew, after all, that John had been called back unexpectedly by the Fatoo Bishop. He probably knew about Laurie, too.

Dim light and cool air. John went alone into the vestry and dressed for Mass. The damp surplice was torn at the hem and smelled of incense and Felipe; even after Paris and Hemhill, the smell of a European was instantly recognizable to him. He tried to remember who had said to him that he hadn’t really come back at all, and where it had been. He drew a breath and attempted to compose himself as the sound of footsteps and laughter came through the open doorway with the first of the arriving congregation. He changed his gloves and unlocked the sealed box that contained the Sacrament, wishing that Laurie would come at least once to the church during a service.

When he returned to the presbytery, he went into the backroom and called her on the airwave. All he got was her answerer. He stared at the answerer’s face and said, “You’ve changed the color of your eyes.”

“We thought it was time.”

“We?”

“It was causing confusion. I always told Laurie that it would.”

“Blue eyes make you look very different.”

“I know.”

“Almost the same as Laurie.”

The answerer smiled.

“I’d like to meet her tomorrow,” he said.

“I’m sure she’ll be free. Would it be lunchtime, as usual?”

“I was thinking of that bar just outside the Zone.”

“Which one? Is it one that you’ve been to before?”

“It has stars on the roof. A big place—”

“It’s called Red Heat.”

“Red Heat? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Back in his room, waiting for whatever it was that Felipe had arranged to happen that night, John settled on the bed with the Quicklunch box of koiyl leaves beside him. The window was open. Across the street, the lights of most of the tenements were on and people were moving. Bella had certainly got their generator started by now, but he decided to work in darkness. The black shapes of the leaves in the box reminded him of figs at Christmas. Even the smell. And of old-fashioned Christmas soap, the kind shaped to look like something else. Touching one of the cards he’d attached to the leaves, he heard the sound of his own voice and the rumble of the taxi’s engine in the background. A street name, and a description—deeply unflattering—of the vendor.

As he worked through the box, he found that the leaves were surprisingly varied. Of course, Laurie had pointed that out long ago. There were other high valleys that grew a product that was harmless and pure. This fat leaf, for example, was almost wider than his palm. And the stem was cut farther down—another local variation. He licked the rough and slightly oily skin. Sweet and tarry. He took a bite, and his mouth flooded with juice—or was it his own saliva? He pulled the wastebin over to the bed and spat out the reddish lump.

The next leaf was thinner, cut higher up the stem. Less sweet, more astringent. He spat that out too, aiming and hitting the bin from a slight distance, beginning to see that this would be part of the pleasure of the chewing: expectorating as a sport. His mouth, initially numb, seemed to swell and regain sensation.

It was fully dark now. Little stars rose and expired inside his eyes. Another leaf. Another. He heard his voice from the cards describing the taste and sensation, heard the wet smacking of his lips. Here, now, was a leaf from Lall. Not a particularly good specimen. Smaller than the rest. Almost shriveled. His voice on the card told him that he’d even managed to buy it at a slightly lower price. It was nothing like the fat green specimen that he’d been offered in the village, and after the others it seemed to have little effect on him. Perhaps he’d reached the maximum active dose, or was developing a tolerance. He got up and went to the window.

The lights were off in many of the tenements across the street, and the sky was a deep impenetrable crimson. He looked at his watch. Time was barely moving, and even the tiny flickering quaternary lines seemed half frozen, but it was too late now to try Laurie again—the real Laurie—without waking her. Off to the east, towards the coast, his eyes caught a flicker of blue-white. Probably lightning, but no rumble came on the wind, and it seemed too low even for these skies. His fingers picked at the paint of the windowledge as he tried to remember something that someone had once said…

A low rumble, long delayed, broke over the rooftops. It came, with typical Borderer lack of logic, from the direction opposite to the lightning flicker. The sound continued, then grew and resolved, sending the cats and rats and the few people who were still out scurrying to the edges of Gran Vía. He watched as a big forty-wheeler came churning between the houses, spewing a fog of dust and exhaust. The baroque cabin and the rusty fuselage slid by, then stopped, still thrumming, beneath his window, blocking the frontage of the presbytery and its neighbors.

In the corridor, John could hear Felipe shouting. He pulled on fresh gloves, grabbed his translat, and ran to help the old priest down the stairs and outside into the street, where the local children had reawakened and were already climbing over the truck as yawning adults looked on. A forty-wheeler had no place here on Gran Vía, especially this late, but it was hard for the people not to smile, especially as Felipe was winched, waving and turning, to the cabin. John clambered up the ladder alongside him, almost losing his footing as he helped lift Felipe in.

The horn moaned, the door swung shut. The engine roared, and the truck began to roll forward, tumbling John across a screeslope of cushions and rags at the back of the cabin. He climbed over the long front seat at the far end while the driver sat at some distance from him in the middle, with Felipe on the other side. The driver was a small man, grinning and elfin, with sharp bones and pointed ears. John vaguely recognized him as one of Felipe’s drinking cronies, but the man wasn’t a churchgoer. They rarely were.

Windows and walls slid by close enough to touch. Watching Felipe through the swaying forest of cables and screens that filled the cabin, John saw him gulp from his flask, swallow one tablet, and start sucking at the next. As he did so, his eyelids quivered, his hands trembled. He was also humming snatches of a psalm, and belching between verses. John had noticed before that the haze of alcohol and trisoma was always stronger on the occasions that Felipe went out, and he wondered why it had never occurred to him before that the old priest was probably agoraphobic.

Up onto the main highway, where the vehicles were larger although still mostly dwarfed by this one. The little driver was talking now—saying something about fatoo muu; John’s mouth. Then cackling again. John wiped his lips on the back of his hand and saw the wet red stain from the koiyl.

They trundled on. Over, he guessed by the sag in his stomach and the splintering creaks, the loose bridge that he and Laurie had crossed on their way to Chott. The tiny driver leaped up in his seat to peer over the rusty plain of the truck’s hood, pulling down screens on knotted ribbons. He hardly seemed in control. John could see where an access panel had flipped open on the seat between them, and could smell the semeny smell of hot nerve tissue.

The long fuselage creaked and snapped as they veered west, where mudflats and the Breathless Ocean shone, mirroring the clouds, and they headed downhill, picking up speed. The tiny man stroked the nerve tissue, grinning at John, and gave it a sexual squeeze. The sound of the engines, John was almost sure, grew more agonized, louder. Glittering ribbons and screens scythed pendulum arcs, and on the far side of the cab Felipe began to recede like a tunnel in a dream. The whole long body of the truck seemed to rise and buck as the little man’s thin hands dug deeper and harder into a nerve’s mucus-thick sheaf…

Finally they slowed and stopped in a wide parking area by the shore. John climbed shakily down the ladder and walked around the truck’s long hot maw to help Felipe out of his cradle, slotting his right arm under his back and easing him to the ground. By now it was past midnight, and the parking area gleamed with flanks of cooling metal. The tiny driver watched from a few paces off, twitching his head and shoulders.

“You should have put on your leghelpers,” John said.

“Why, my son? I’ve got you.” But already Felipe was panting, and the breath in John’s face consisted more of whisky than air. “But don’t worry. It’s not far. Not unless…”

They were at Seagates, which lay east of Mokifa and Kushiel. Ahead were the great cranes and gantries John had seen in the distance when he sat by the kelpbeds at Chott and Laurie told him about her father and mother. Close up, rearing towards the clouds, the cranes were truly impressive, far bigger than anything that served the automated warehouses in the Zone. Felipe leaned against a brick wall, gasping. He mopped his face with his red-tinged gloves, then began to fumble in his pockets. John found the flask for him within the folds. He looked around for the driver, but the driver was gone.

He linked an arm once more under Felipe’s shoulder, and they started to walk. They passed through iron gates where water glinted up ahead and an engine chattered into life as a boat’s white beam nodded across rotted moorings and breakwaters. Looking down while he hauled Felipe’s weight, he saw a tangle of keels bobbing in the water. A questioning lantern was held up towards them. There was a hiss of surprise as it caught the gleam of John’s eyes. Then things took a predictable path: confusion at the presence of Outers was followed by a shrug, and glee at the thought of cassan—their money.

Felipe pulled himself away from John and stood swaying at the edge of the dock, waving his arms, barking at the boat holders in his own version of their dialect. Somehow, an agreement was reached without the help of a translat, and a small boat was hauled close to the steps.

“How much did you pay to use it tonight?” John asked.

“I bought it, my son. But perhaps we should also try to hire a guide.”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Roughly, but—”

“Then come on.”

The steps were slippery, and the boat rocked wildly, but somehow John managed to get Felipe down and seated at the prow. Scrambling to the stern, he sparked up the lantern and traced the outboard’s flywheel, smoothing out the kinks in the rope and looping the end twice around his palm, pulling it out and through. A puff of exhaust stung his eyes once, twice, and the motor started. He turned the throttle and threw off the mooring rope.

“Where did you learn to do that?” asked Felipe.

John simply shrugged.

Many other craft were emerging from the wharves. Some with lights strung along their spars like Christmas trees, others frothing by on skirts or bobbing with only the creak of an oar. Rounding the last thrust of the pier, John saw the lights of the Seagates market stretching far along the coast.

He shouted to Felipe, “Which way do we go?”

The old priest waved his hands in a vague sweep. Farther east, John saw the funnels of the bulk carriers that plied the shores of the Breathless Ocean, but the smaller craft seemed to be heading straight inshore towards lights and rooftops. He tillered the boat that way, twisting up the throttle. The boat creaked and bucked on the soupy water where irregular lines of wharves, warehouses, and narrowing channels loomed. The gathering flotilla bobbed closer. Faces and prow lights flickered their way. Sitting on the loose plank that served as a seat, John steered under a low footbridge into a canal.

Afloat on either side were platforms seething with lobsters. He watched as one big creature flopped into the canal, its pincers flailed, drowning in water after a lifetime of wading in nutrient sludge. Some of the boats were already pulling in at the low piers. Deals were being haggled. The clamor grew louder. Lights dangled from a long, beamed roof. On other wharves there were heaps of brightly colored bowls, boxes of tubes, the inevitable tins of Quicklunch. Garish and incredible clothes hung on pulleys over the water, and cooking boats nudged around with their stoves blazing, streaming the smell of caramelized kelp and onion. The priests were passing now through stripes of lavender light that caught in the steam billowing from the water. Brass pots swayed and clanged. Here, every new turn and angle was a surprise. John slowed the engines, looking around him.

He smiled and watched as a child swung rope to chain from one section of roof to another, taking long, elaborate detours, whooping, agile as a monkey. They passed, it seemed, the same stall selling miniglaciers of pink-tainted sugar crystals that they’d seen earlier. There was no sign of the koiyl, but this whole night seemed to have developed an arcane logic of its own. He could see it as a kind of board game played through the long afternoons of a European winter. The latest craze—find the secret of the leaf. He could even see the screen, swirling and gilded as you entered it. The outboard stalled, and the boat touched a low bank of sand. He wound the motor, started it up again, and pushed off, steering towards the mouth of another tunnel.

“John!” Felipe pointed. “Over there…”

A soft scent broke over the water. There, piled on matting, heaped in baskets and buckets, lined out on patterned silks, were the koiyl leaves. Extracts and pickles too, and dried bunches of the flowers.

About a dozen merchants. John caught the flatter accents of the mountains in their voices. The leaves, he saw, were fresh, as yet undried: this season’s crop. He nudged the boat closer in. The market was open to the sky here but darker than many of the various lit tunnels, and it was some time before the few bobbing lanterns caught the glow of their gloves and watches, the silver of their eyes. The disturbance then was predictable, but the merchants did their best to answer the questions that John shouted across to them. Yes, they knew Lall. Good leaves. Bona. Leaves were tentatively held across the water, more for him to see than to touch and thus cheapen. But this year, not many. Not this year, and not last year either, although they knew of no problem with the crop. Maybe someone else…But with each merchant it was the same, and John realized then just how good he’d become at identifying the Lall leaves. He didn’t even need to ask. There were far fewer than he’d expected, and they were all of poor quality. The ratio he’d found recently on the streets was something like one in ten, but here the leaf from Lall seemed to be even scarcer. Which was odd, considering that Lall was on the main route through the mountains to this part of the Magulf. Perhaps, he asked, there was some other market that sold leaves, or some other section of this one? No; not within fifty kilometers, anyway. And up at Al-Fhican, they slept with beasts and had tails like animals—those people wouldn’t deal with Lall. Or another day? But no, also. No. And so it went.

John eventually poled the boat back from the crowd towards a small and empty island, and sat watching as the koiyl merchants got on with the business of the night. An absurd thought, but it almost seemed as if, now that he knew they were dangerous, the Lall leaves were disappearing of their own accord.

At the prow, Felipe popped out more tablets from his blisterpack. They were the last, and he seemed drowsy. For some time now he’d given up trying to keep his split shoes and bandaged feet out of the bilgewater.

“Can you think,” John asked, “of anywhere else?”

“For what?” Felipe folded his arms over his chest. His eyelids trembled.

“Other than here, for the leaf.”

“Ah…” Felipe chuckled. “You were hoping for a single dealer, weren’t you? Someone who could have simply waved his hands and…What you’re trying to do here is very difficult.”

“I understand, Felipe.”

“I know what you think of me, my son, and of the little gifts that arrive at the presbytery. Old Felipe with a finger in every imaginable pie…” He paused a moment, his fingers tracing the empty depressions of his blisterpack. “You think I have—all these deals and arrangements. It’s not like that. The reason people bring me things, the reason I’m tolerated and possibly occasionally even liked and respected here, is that I keep my distance. I leave the Borderers to live their own lives. I leave them. As they wish. You see…And because I don’t…” The old priest’s eyes were closed now. After this brief animation, his voice had become a mumble. “Because I don’t…”

He grunted, nodded, was asleep. John restarted the outboard and steered the boat back past the koiyl vendors into the first of the chambered tunnels. The night had gone quickly, and the crowds and the boats around the stalls were already thinning. Scaffolding was being dismantled, barges were being towed away. The piles of unsold wares had a disappointed look.

In the open air again, where the sky was lightening, John shifted and looked around. His bladder was starting to ache, and pissing was always a tricky operation in the Endless City; because of the viruses, you needed somewhere away from habitation. The boat puttered on. Rusting iron bars blocked the wide mouth of a tunnel, so he reversed the throttle and turned back. Felipe began to snore. John took a side canal, which threatened a dead end but then opened to a long, newish concrete wharf. There was no one about as he leaned over to grab a mooring post, threw the rope over, and killed the engine. Keeping his balance, remastering an old trick, he stood urinating into the water. Sparks erupted before his eyes. The air was clear and almost cold here. There was little wind. They were surrounded by the silence of large, dark buildings. He closed himself up and looked around again.

“Felipe?”

The old priest remained slumped in the prow. Now that John had stood up, his back ached terribly. It was probably just from sitting half the night with his hand on the tiller of the boat, but he couldn’t ever remember a pain quite like this one, and he wondered briefly if the crystal rigidity of his recombinant wasn’t starting, even this early in his life, to damage his spine. He clambered onto the wharf and secured the rope. He stretched and rubbed himself, thinking of the faces at Southlands and the metal jutting from flesh in those Yorkshire backrooms. But already the ache was starting to ease…

He walked beside the wall away from the water’s edge. Beyond were the empty frames of stalls, a few caroni birds, a great deal of litter. He glanced back at the boat, then wandered on up through the empty shore market, where his feet slipped and skidded on a mush of discarded food, loose wet packaging, the perennial soggy balls of chewed koiyl. A green light twinkling in the mud caught his eye, and he bent cautiously—waiting for the pain to come back into his spine, using his knees to stoop as he’d seen his mother do on that misty Hemhill morning in her garden not long ago—and peeled the flattened carton from the stones. The emerald pinprick was one of the signal shades Halcycon used to indicate when medicines had passed their use-by date. In another place he saw a misty starfield glinting in the mud. Not just reinventory greens, but potency retarded blues, immediate discard reds. In fact, more than he’d ever seen, even on the shelves at the clinic. Some, now that the moisture had corrupted their circuitry, were giving out muffled versions of the final beep-barp danger signal that he’d often had to ignore. The safety parameters were excessive anyway, and there was the trick Tim Purdoe had shown him—how to bring the lights on or shut them off with the simple passing of a magnet.

He looked again at the sodden carton in his hand—it had contained a mild immune-suppressant, something he’d asked for many times at the clinic—then, hearing voices approaching, he threw it back into the mud. A small cluster of Borderers came into view. The one with the most audible voice was much taller than the rest. As John stood and waited, he caught the flash of metallic hands. When the tall man saw him, he dismissed the others and walked up to him alone.

“Father John.” Ryat smiled. “You should have told me that you were coming here.”

John pointed back at the wharf. “I arrived in a boat with my partner-priest, Felipe.”

Ryat waved an arm. John felt the breeze from his fingers. “Most everything comes through here…But you already know that? From what you have seen?”

“Actually, I was looking for something specific.”

“And could not find it?”

John opened his mouth.

“Come.” Ryat was turning, walking away. “My office is near. We can talk there.”

As the sky brightened and the wind picked up, they left the empty aisles and crossed the iron ridge of an old railtrack towards an ancient building that stood alone. It had tall windows and a portico, and beneath the crusted dirt seemed to have been made from blocks of real stone. John gazed up at the entrance. The inspiring scenes and scrolled cod-Latin inscriptions had weathered away, but a tarnished plate riveted to a pillar still read CONTROLE DE PASSPORTS. A beggar sat in a hollow of the worn steps, her face a black mass of flies. Ryat paused to give her some money, and John noticed the little ritual they went through with their hands to avoid the touch of flesh to metal.

Apart from the checkered tiles, the stumps of gaslights, and the broken mosaic of a frieze, most of the interior had given way to scaffolding and rubble. Bats clattered high in the roof, and the few unbroken panes of the domed skylight filtered the already reddish light of the sky with the green of their scum, turning everything gray. Yet, perched at the top of a new set of stairs, Ryat’s office was as rich as the whole building must once have been when harbormasters and customs officers sweated in their uniforms in this colonial rim of Empire.

John sat down. Everything in the office seemed to be made of brass, leather, or wood, and the air smelled of old varnish. There were sash-framed windows looking out on three sides, although the room lay in the middle of the building. John traced the stitching on the arm of his high-backed chair. The spines of his gloves were two-thirds red now.

“From here,” Ryat said, stretching out his booted legs on the desk. “I can watch things.” Outside, it was mostly quiet on the canals and walkways, although a dredger was working offshore and a large tanker was nosing in to port. The scene switched to a view from a high crane, and the tanker became a toy, spreading a white V across the water.

“The reason I came here,” John said, “was to find out about the distribution of the koiyl leaf. Felipe suggested to me that it might come here first from the mountains.”

“Of course. The koiyl comes here. East dock, sector three.”

John nodded—although he didn’t think that east dock, sector three, would be what the Borderers called it. The leather chair squealed as he shifted position. Should he simply say that the koiyl from Lall was contaminated? The silence began to weigh, yet there was no real sense of tension: Ryat was a Borderer, used to not filling in every pause with empty babbling. John asked, “Have you heard of Lall?”

“Lall?” Ryat thought, nodded. “A place in the mountains where the leaf is grown. Yes?”

“I’ve been trying to trace the crop from there. This year’s should be in the Endless City by now if it’s going to be cured and marketed.”

“I presume it is.”

“There seems to be surprisingly little.”

“Perhaps you came here on the wrong night?”

“Is there a way you could find out?”

“Ah…” Ryat kicked back his chair and walked over to the neat rows of tiny brass-plated drawers that reached floor to ceiling on the unwindowed wall to his right. His fingers clicked down the wood and brass. One and then another drawer slid open. The cards buzzed, and the scenes of the empty market in the windows flickered and changed. Once, John thought he glimpsed Felipe lying in the boat, then a flock of caroni birds. Another drawer flew open. Ryat’s hands were quick and graceful here—working in a way that no human hands could—but something was wrong. Why hadn’t he asked John what he was after?

“Yes…” A drawer flashed. “I think we have something. But I see what you mean. There was much leaf from Lall five years ago…” Another drawer. “But now, each year, less.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

Ryat turned to him. “I provide only facilities here.” He still had one card in his hand. The tip of a finger traced the magnetic strip along the back. He seemed to be reading it. “And, of course, Seagates is just a staging post, a channel. The main sales are always at Tiir.”

“I’ve been to Tiir.”

“You did not get an answer?”

“I wasn’t there long. And perhaps I didn’t ask the right questions.”

“These things are difficult, Father John. You ask a simple question in the Endless City and get no answer—or get many. Too many. But never just the one.”

Ryat returned the final card to its drawer. Linking his metal hands behind his back, he crossed to the far window and stood looking out. Despite its depth and clarity, the view through the glass was pixel-based. From the distance he was standing, it had to have been little more than a blur.

“But I will ask for you,” he said. “Of course, I will make inquiries.”

Folding his own hands, John felt the adhesion of his gloves. “Do you know,” he asked, “why I’m doing this? Why I’m asking?”

Ryat raised his shoulders. His fingers slid. “The curiosity of a European fatoo is explanation enough.”

John told him about Ifri Gotal, the strontium 90, the tests, and the cases of bludrut at the clinic. Ryat nodded and listened, but he didn’t seem surprised.

When John finished, Ryat spread his hands. “There have been rumors,” he said. “Even allowing for the poor standard of the leaf from Lall that is available, I understand that the price is down.”

“But you didn’t know?”

The corners of Ryat’s mouth twitched. In profile against the changing window, his face flickered slightly. “These things always do come out, Father John. Why do you think I go to the Zone? I do not expect I will ever get very far with the tennis…” He grinned. “And these ancient weapons are terrible, yes? To be feared even now. The laws of nature have not changed. Why, think what would happen if the weapons were to be developed again—here, for example, in the Endless City. Of course, it would require a different culture, the kind of organization and government that I sometimes suspect that your people in the Zone are here to discourage. To keep us dependent, moderately happy, but not too wise…”

“But at least there are no wars.”

“No,” Ryat said. “There are no wars.”

“And now that you know there is a poison in the Lall leaves, will you help?”

Ryat pointed to the racks of drawers. “As you see, I cannot stop something that is already—”

“The leaves will still eventually come through Seagates—at least some of them.”

“What do you expect me to do? Destroy them? Or should I speak out, intentionally devalue them, as you or someone else seems to have done already? You tell me that a few people die here in the Endless City, but how many people live in Lall? And do you imagine you can warn about the leaf from one area and not harm the trade as a whole? And the traders, what will you do for them?”

“It isn’t—”

“Father John, let me tell you I once spoke with another European. Someone who came from the Zone here to this room and explained that we Borderers must not sell Quicklunch, that it causes the stomachs of our children to ulcer. Do you not see that too, at your clinic?”

John nodded, but the symmetry of someone else sitting here and arguing about food contamination was too neat. It was true that Quicklunch had been dumped on the Magulf after a scare in Europe, but that had been a recombinant-precipitated reaction, and the figures at the clinic for stomach problems had never stood out.

“I am sorry.” Ryat sighed. “I only wish to tell you that the answer is not easy.”

“I understand there are problems. I agree with at least some of what you say about the hypocrisy of the Zone. But you haven’t seen these people dying. They’re young people, Ryat—children, sometimes—and many haven’t even chewed the leaf themselves. I know there are other injustices, but will you at least help me to do something about this one? Will you look out for the Lall leaf in Seagates, and keep me informed?”

Ryat pursed his lips. “Yes,” he said. “If I can.”

“I’m grateful.” John stood up from his chair. The ache in his back had returned. He felt weary, dazed. The light at the end of the tunnel, he remembered Hal once saying, can be an oncoming train.

“Come on, Father John.” Ryat strode around the table and placed a hand on his shoulder. The metal clenched, and John forced himself not to pull back. “This crop from Lall will turn up. And from here…There will be ways to change things. Have you thought perhaps that you are trying too hard? A material thing can sometimes be as elusive as a feeling. If you seek too strongly, it may disappear…”

John looked at Ryat as the hand released and withdrew. He felt a sudden twist of anger. At close quarters, as with everyone else here in the Endless City, Ryat’s breath reeked of kelp.

Finding his own way out from Ryat’s office, John wiped a Magulf dollar and tossed it at the beggar on the steps. Now that there was no point in keeping it secret, he had half a mind to ask her too what she knew about the leaf, but she shrank from the coin as it spun on the eroded marble between them. He walked back to the boat through the market where the glowing cartons flapped and soggy balls of litter scuttled towards him. The world was dimmer than ever this morning. Even the wind and heat seemed frail.

He turned the corner. A thick scum of lobster husks, sodden kelp, koiyl leaves, and the twisting body of an animated doll broke and slapped at the concrete wharf. Beyond the wharf, a path of flames trailed across the water. He stared at it for a moment, rubbing his back, his feet slowing. Then he broke into a run. Farther up, past where the boat should have been, gray figures clustered at the water’s edge. Filaments of their clothing unfurled, and he could hear them shouting and whooping. Chicahta…Scuro…Rojo…

Tumbling, nearly falling, he yelled Felipe’s name.

He found Felipe propped against the boat’s mooring post. His shoes were off, and his sodden bandages had been unraveled. Oily bolts and screws had been removed from the boat’s torn-off outboard and pushed between his toes. John shook Felipe’s shoulders, but the old priest only muttered and smacked his lips, still deep in trisoma dreams. John slumped down beside him. Smoke was rising across the water, stinging his eyes as the wind drew at the flames. For a while, the boat shone as brightly as the sun that was so rare in these Magulf skies. Then the blaze died, as the boat, raising its blackened prow like a drowning hand, slid beneath the water.

Down the wharf, the witchwoman cackled and waved.