—Pathways—

Rafe was leading the new girl down Carotid Alley, holding her hand like they’d been friends for years. “You’ll want to step over those purple things,” he told her, pointing down at the paper cylinders scattered on the broken stones. “Bangums, we call them, and you never know when they might have some bang left. Sometimes they’ll just startle you, but Sixty-Leven blew off a pinky toe last night—and kept right on dancing, the fool! He was high as a knob on a flagpole, but so was everyone else. You really did show up at just the wrong moment,” he said, smiling back at her.

It was the night after the Second Masque, and Rafe could still feel the party in his flesh—a constellation of aches and pains, some sharp, some dull, that aroused sweet memories with every cringe. He was glad when the girl smiled back, though it seemed to take too long for her to hear him, like she had to wait for what he’d said to be translated by some invisible imp flying near her ear. “There’ll be plenty more parties, of course, and I doubt you’ll have to pay for a thing—for a while, anyway. They’ll get used to you around the boarding house eventually, so milk it while you can.”

She was smiling now, all shy and golden, with jet-black hair cut at a steep angle that framed her jaw just so. It was a pity that she kept rubbing at her skin with her fingers—her chin, her upper lip, her forearms, anywhere she’d shaved, he guessed. She was probably worried that her stubble was coming in, but her fingers were so dirty—almost black at the tips.

Then again, Rafe had no room to judge anyone’s bodily anxiety, not when he couldn’t walk down the hall to the bath without being wrapped up tighter than one of Little Gem’s unsmokable spliffs.

“Up ahead is Mr. Rue’s. See, with the golden button on the sign, and the tiny dancing man on the button? Rue’s is where you can get fitted for dresses that actually suit your frame. That’s if you ever have any extra coin, mind, because he marks up the mods for our kind. He’s bent himself, but he taxes us for being crosswise! It’s like that, even here—though Gingerbeard’s always telling me it’s better than it’s been for a generation.”

It looked like the new girl was about to speak, but she just shrugged, almost compulsively, like something was itching under her shirt.

“Now, speaking of coin, don’t bother trying to borrow at the boarding house. Everyone’s always skint, except for Mrs. Dallow, and she’d rather set you afire than spot you a five. Not that she’s unkind, as landladies go—and she’s one of the only owners in Eth who’ll rent to the bent, as Gingerbeard puts it. But safety’s harder to come by than coin—that’s a Gingerbeard phrase, too. I’m full of those,” he said, glancing back to see if his giddiness was getting on her nerves.

Then he stopped, fighting the feeling that they’d gone in a circle.

Hadn’t they just left Carotid? Where was the turn?

With all he’d taken last night, it wouldn’t be surprising if he was still high enough to get turned around. It wasn’t like the two of them to go so far—Gingerbeard preferred a controlled buzz, and kept Rafe steady even when he wanted to get blitzed—but it had been a Masque, and those only came along so often.

Here was the turn, up ahead. Rafe had been on track after all.

“And if you do have any extra coin, be shy about it until it’s spent. It’s not that there’s thieving, much—but if you’re anything like me, you’ll help your friends until you’ve nothing left to eat with. Where did you say you were from, again?”

The new girl, whose name he kept forgetting, opened her mouth to speak—then shut it, ducking into the doorway of Mr. Rue’s.

Rafe was about to scold her when he saw what she’d seen and backed in beside her, just in time.

Six men with scab-brown helmets were hauling a bent boy down the street. His mouth was bloody, his eyes purple and swollen, his breasts yanked out of his top.

Rafe’s stomach churned. He pressed into the shadows, trembling.

When the guards were gone, the new girl clasped him to her chest, her heart thumping in his ear. “It’s all right,” Rafe told her, squeezing her hard before he let her go, as much to comfort himself as her. “It happens, even here. If they come for you, just run, and if they catch you I’m sorry,” he said, but then he stopped talking, because she hadn’t taken her hands away.

She was rubbing his back, her long arms reaching down over his shoulders. There was a strange intensity to the action. It didn’t seem sexual, but nor did she seem to be afraid any longer.

Maybe it was a custom where she was from, some way of showing thanks. Not wishing to be rude, he reached up behind and touched her the same way—then froze when he felt the nubs on her shoulder-blades.

Stubs, really.

He could feel the jagged edges where whatever had stuck out had been cut off.

Or ripped.

She opened her mouth, moving her throat like she was trying to coax her voice along. It never came, but he heard her all the same, in a faraway sing-song.

Those were my wings.

“Oh,” he said, grinning as he backed away. “Well, there’s all kinds at Mrs. Dallow’s! I’m sure no one will look at them funny, if you decide to show your body. And I—I don’t do that, myself. Folk will give you space in the bath, if you ask for it.”

What a long night this had become. He just wanted to put his face in Gingerbeard’s hair and breathe a while.

“Let’s go, yeah? We’ll be safe inside.”

Rafe felt better as soon as the boarding house was in sight. The front door was crooked, its stone doorstep so old that it sagged almost to the street in the middle. There were chipped flower boxes in the windows above, all overflowing with butts and bottles. Someone inside was singing an aria—beautifully, but at a volume so high that it must have annoyed anyone in the rooms adjacent.

“Here we are, then: Mrs. Dallow’s Cut-Rate Boarding House! The finest sanctuary for bent folk in all of Eth, or at least the finest that orphans like us can afford. All right, I’ll tell you the bad news first: it’s noisy, and someone’s always bringing in lice. But it’s warm, always, because it’s built right on a stone-vent from the catacombs. Keeps your toes from getting cold at night, but you will get sticky as summer candy—another of Gingerbeard’s phrases. Sorry, I’m smitten, I guess you can tell! You’ll meet them presently.” Rafe remembered when the pronoun had seemed strange to him, and looked back to see if she was confused. “You met any twains yet? No? Gingerbeard is crosswise, like us, but—different. Different from me, anyhow. They’re neither man nor woman, unless it’s a night when they’re both, and those are my favorite kind. We call Gingerbeard ‘they,’ anyway, and some from abroad aren’t used it, and think we’re speaking of multiple people. But here, let’s go in and find them.”

But the new girl wouldn’t go. She just stood on the corner, staring at the building like it might hurt her to enter.

“Come on! It’s safe inside, and warm.”

She shook her head, and pursed her red lips tight.

“You have to,” he said. “It’s not safe here.”

Maybe he was still high. The word seemed to have lost its meaning.

Safe. Safe. Safe. Safe.

She was moving her throat again.

I’m not like you.

“Of course you are! A girl to my boy, naturally, but I see you. ‘Like knows like, love.’ That’s another—” He stopped, stepping across the alley, squinting at her face, which seemed to be changing, though he couldn’t say how.

“Was I wrong? Are you not—bent? Like me? Crosswise?”

That word has no place here.

A thought struck him as he noticed how smooth she’d become. No shadow of stubble darkened her lip now. Maybe she’d been taking her Esther, which meant she did have coin. And the poverty put distance between them, because if anyone had ever been dying to take his Tester, it was Rafe.

Esther and Tester, that’s what Gingerbeard called them. One makes you softer and one makes you rougher, and neither can we afford, my love.

However spoiled she might be, though, he couldn’t just leave her here. Not with those helmeted monsters roaming.

Rafe had a wicked idea.

“Look,” he shouted, pointing behind her, “the guards are coming back!”

It was cruel, but effective. She scurried in, and he followed.

She was staring up at the walls in the lobby, and he remembered doing the same, once. Everyone who landed at Mrs. Dallow’s was asked to tell about themselves on a big piece of paper, and the joke was that no one ever told the truth—so there were pictures, stories, and made-up songs about all sorts of faraway lands and lost titles. Some had even made certificates of origin. The entry room was plastered with papers, each one stuck up haphazardly with paste, and Rafe was just about to explain the custom to the new girl when he saw.

She was rubbing her back against the wall, like her stumps were itching, and all the papers were coming down.

It was raining castles and princes in gowns.

He stepped toward her.

“Are you all right?”

I need help.

“How can I help?”

Ask Little Gem.

Rafe felt sick to his stomach. He couldn’t remember telling her about Little Gem.

He must have forgotten. It must have been the drugs. He must have been getting confused, because they were upstairs already, outside of the bathroom, and he couldn’t remember climbing those creaky steps.

Don’t worry.

“Right.”

So they went into the bathroom.

Little Gem was there, in the tub, naked.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he said.

It was even harder for Little Gem to have her clothes off in front of people than it was for Rafe.

Ask her.

The new girl put her hands on his shoulder-blades and gave him a push.

Rafe didn’t want to be rude to either of them.

Ask her how to help me.

His skin felt tight. It felt like he’d forgotten how to say no.

“Gemmie?”

All he could see was her brown back bent over in that deep, deep tub.

Something had been drawn on her skin.

A door.

“Gemmie, love, I need to help—what was your name again?”

“Let her touch your back,” said Little Gem, her voice oddly raspy, like she’d been screaming all night.

It bothered him that he hadn’t seen Little Gem’s face. She was curled around something, or someone.

“Let her touch your bare back,” said Little Gem.

This Rafe truly didn’t want to do.

But he pulled his clothes off, feeling the pit of his stomach burning.

“All right,” he told the new girl, “you go ahead.”

Then he must have gotten confused again, because he was up high, his arms tied to the ceiling. He looked down at his body, feeling that awful rush that always came when he could see his breasts, rising into panic now because there were people around.

“This isn’t right,” he said, hating his high, plaintive whine as it echoed through the room.

“It’s what she needs,” rasped Little Gem, her voice echoing up from all the way down on the floor.

Rafe could see into the tub from where he hung. It was deep, very deep, and it seemed like it was getting wider. There was room for both of them in there, Little Gem and the wiry woman she was cradling in her arms.

She was broad-cheeked, dark-skinned, with a gray mess of hair that was months overdue for a braiding.

His flesh prickled as he realized that he knew her.

He’d killed her.

In the farmhouse.

She was his, he saw. His very own unquiet dead. She’d be with him always, following him from place to place.

That bothered him. Not that she was haunting him—that part he deserved.

It bothered him because that killing had happened in a world apart from this one, a colder, wetter place, full of trees.

Which meant that none of this was real.

The boarding house. Little Gem. Mrs. Dallow. All of it had gone away from him, and he couldn’t remember why.

The new girl, very tall, her limbs and neck spindly and strange, touched his back. Her hand was wet.

She was washing him, with soap. He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t stop it.

He looked down at the floor. The tub was gone, and the ghost from the farmhouse was sitting on a stool. Little Gem sat behind her, both hands on her back, staring up at Rafe.

“She’s better at it than me,” said Little Gem.

She had gold buttons for eyes.

Tiny men were dancing on their faces.

“Better at what?” he called down.

“Lookit.”

Little Gem was pointing.

Rafe looked.

The woman from the farmhouse was pulling paper streamers out of her arm, red and rustling, leftovers from the Second Masque. They were tumbling into a bucket on the floor.

There were so many, and the new girl was kissing his back. It didn’t feel right. Nothing did.

“Gemmie?”

Something had begun to worry him.

“Gemmie, where’s Gingerbeard?”

She gave a rattling sigh, and climbed out of the tub.

“Everywhere,” she said.

There was something wrong with Little Gem’s arms.

“Where’s Gingerbeard?” Rafe said again.

“All around,” said Little Gem, gesturing. Her arms were slashed open from elbow to wrist.

He was starting to remember.

It made him angry. He’d intended not to dwell on such things.

Behind him, the new girl made a sound like ughhhhh. She’d stepped in something, and she took her hands off his back to scrape it off her shoe.

“Stop fucking around, Gemmie,” he shouted.

“Lookit.”

Little Gem pointed down.

Rafe saw what the new girl had stepped in.

It was Gingerbeard.

There were pieces of them everywhere.

The pieces formed a trail, and the trail led out of the room.

Rafe struggled against his ropes. He had to get down and collect them, or he’d never be able to put Gingerbeard back together.

But Rafe couldn’t get free. The new girl had opened her mouth wide and started licking his back, far down on the left side. Her tongue was cool and moved slowly, deliberately, up toward his neck.

The ghost sighed. She’d filled one bucket, then called for another.

But Rafe was looking past her, into the room he shared with Gingerbeard, number 17, where the lights were off.

It wasn’t empty.

“There you are,” he whispered, relieved.

Gingerbeard would get him down from here.

“Hello, lovely,” Rafe called.

Gingerbeard, silhouetted by the light outside, turned their head.

They’d been looking down at the street, and now they were looking up at Rafe.

Their hair was up, all bushy and curly.

It would smell sweet and musky at once, like curried honey, and he couldn’t wait to put his face in it and breathe.

Although they stood in darkness, Rafe could tell from the cut of their dress what they were wearing. It was the one with the purple flowers, the one Mr. Rue made. The two of them had nicked the fabric from the curtains of a house that burned down on Lank Street half a year ago.

My smoky lilac, Rafe had called them the first night they wore it.

But the dress was sagging tonight. Gingerbeard had a substantial body, and it was Rafe’s greatest joy to wrestle it around. Now, though, they barely filled out the purple fabric, because of how much the—

“Fuck,” whispered Rafe.

—because of how much the guards had left on the ground when they executed them on the corner.

They’d never come to bed last night.

Gingerbeard was walking toward the light.

Could hardly even tell who it was.

Worth risking quakes, to those pig-fuckers.

To make an example.

Of all of us.

Rafe closed his eyes, fixing his mind on the ghost from the farmhouse. If she was here, then none of this was happening.

Which meant that Gingerbeard wasn’t here.

Rafe would not see them.

Rafe would not remember this.

It worked, somehow. When Rafe opened his eyes, room 17 was gone.

Not the new girl, though. She was still behind him, and her tongue had traced an archway up from his left side to a point between his shoulder blades, then down again, all the way down on the right.

A door, like Little Gem’s.

It didn’t tickle any more. It stung.

Then it tugged, like the new girl was sliding her hands into his flesh and pulling the door open.

“She’ll climb inside,” rasped Little Gem. “She’ll be safe there, snuggled up in your chest. That’s how you can help her. She’ll sleep in you, and her wings will grow.”

“Stop,” he said, or tried to say, and something about the sound of his own voice made him frightened.

It wasn’t like the other noises in the dream. This one was real.

He tried it again. “Stop.”

It came out like a wheeze from behind him. It had nothing to do with his mouth or throat.

He struggled to open his eyes.

Light came through, a little.

It was enough to motivate him.

He pushed his tongue between his teeth and bit, hard.

The pain helped. His eyelids wavered up, offering him a blurry slice of the world past his dream.

This wasn’t the boarding house. It was some wide, flickering chamber, full of animals and bric-a-brac.

Little Gem was gone, and the new girl, and Gingerbeard, for which he was grateful. But the ghost of the woman he’d killed in the farmhouse was here, sitting on a stool, bleeding into a bucket.

Her arm was open, not the sort of slice you made to keep your desire to die at bay, but the kind you made when you had finally decided to embrace it—a long, confident cut between the tendons.

The kind that had carried Little Gem away in the boarding house bathtub.

The ghost looked bored. Her blood had slowed to a trickle, which seemed to irk her. “Some more here, Umber.”

A deflated brown bear came shuffling to her side, bringing a tray of tea and cakes. She nodded her thanks, shoving one cake after another into her mouth, swallowing them quickly, not stopping to chew. The sustenance seemed to replenish her arteries, though not her energy. Her blood came gushing back as she kept on chewing, looking like she might take a nap now.

But she was startled by another voice.

It was Jassa’s.

Suddenly Rafe remembered more than he cared to.

“Ah!” Jassa cried, helplessly, like a dog chasing a rabbit in a dream.

With great effort, Rafe shoved his pupils to the corners of his eyes.

Jassa was hanging from the ceiling, too, her bare ass to him. A tall woman stood behind her, painting on her back with a brush.

He could tell the woman was crosswise, just barely—like knows like. She was beautiful, in presentation still more than in form, and he found himself aching at the sight of her.

Not because he wanted her. Because it had been so very long since he’d been among his people.

Yet something gave him pause about associating her with Little Gem, Gingerbeard, and the rest. Maybe it was the clear understanding he suddenly had that she would have had nothing to do with any of them at the boarding house, since they were the grubbiest possible sort of bent orphans and she was some sort of forest queen.

But then, maybe the distance he felt had nothing to do with being bent at all. Maybe it was because of what she was—doing.

She dipped her paintbrush in ink that seemed somehow too black, and started to paint a door on Jassa’s back. It was a trapdoor, and she sang to it, a pretty melody in some dusty-sounding language he’d never heard before. The ink began to hiss, and the door swung slowly down and open, showing him the white tips of Jassa’s severed ribs peeking out amidst her muscle.

The ink that lined the doorway flashed, though it was a flash that took light out of the room, not in. Rafe was blinded, for a moment, by that too-black darkness, and from the ghost’s muttering it sounded like the others were, too.

When Rafe found he could see again, Jassa’s back was cut neatly open, lying flat like one of those beds that swung down from the wall in Mrs. Dallow’s tiniest rooms—pansy-pantries, she’d called them. That’s where Rafe had hidden himself away after Gingerbeard’s murder, at least until the tlak had run out, but he’d found a sort of claustrophobic comfort there that was entirely lacking in the swung-down trapdoor of Jassa’s back.

It was a plank of raw meat, and her organs were lying atop it in a tidy little bundle.

Steam was rising off them.

Like a red loaf of bread.

Rafe couldn’t stop staring.

Because whatever had been done to her had been done to him, too. He could feel it, the weight of his openness pressing down behind him, the lack of breath and pulse in the cavity of his chest, the dizzy wrongness that somehow hadn’t killed him. Wherever his mind might have gone, whenever he might have escaped to, all this was really happening, and the carnage at the boarding house had passed. That one had led to the other was undeniable, but he struggled to keep himself here, in the present—and to survive.

He tried to anchor his thoughts with the details. Wondering why he and Jassa weren’t bleeding out, he saw the ink shimmering around the edges of the doorway cut into her back, a shimmer that coated her workings, too.

They weren’t dying because the tall woman didn’t want them to die, at least not straightaway. It bothered him that he couldn’t imagine her purpose in all of this—it was like no enchantment he’d heard of.

Witchery, that’s what it was.

“Go ahead,” the bent witch said. “Bring it here.”

A tiny man with a face like a dried apple carried over a bucket full of blood, then poured it carefully into Jassa’s innards.

Her guts bubbled happily, like an animal given a treat, and Rafe started laughing, though it wasn’t funny, exactly. It was more like he’d filled to overflowing with all that he’d crammed inside over the past few months, from Gingerbeard’s slaughter to the catastrophe of this moment, and now it all had to come out however it could. But the trouble with laughing, in the state he was in, was that his mouth was trying to make the noises that were actually coming from behind him, his lungs jerking on the trapdoor bed that the bent witch had swung out of his back.

“What is that awful noise?” rasped the tiny man, and then he looked up at Rafe. “Ach—the crosser’s awake!”

“That word has no place here,” the bent witch murmured.

Rafe stopped laughing.

“But calling me a—what was it?—a ‘mobile excrescence’ is fair game?” muttered the tiny man. “I see how it is.”

The bleeding ghost sipped her tea. “Thought you said these two would be unconscious the whole time.”

“I did,” said the witch. “He should be.”

She strolled around to look at Rafe’s eyes, holding an ink-smeared wooden palette, its edges wrapped in tiny, curling vines. “Unless—hm.” Setting it down, she consulted some arcane diagram. “It could be his withdrawal,” she murmured. “Soaking up the effects of Lady Ley’s blood.”

“Hit him again,” said the ghost, and Rafe, fearful that the bear would swing a balled paw down into his guts, began to twist around, trying to get his wrists loose from the rope.

The tiny man trotted over with the bucket and poured more blood into Rafe’s organs.

Rafe calmed, immediately.

How warm it was inside.

Now he was sleepy, and glad for it. He felt like he might wake anywhere, at any time, even back at Mrs. Dallow’s, before the Second Masque, with Gingerbeard’s big, sweet-smelling arms wrapped around him.

He’d tell them to stay in that night, and all would be right.

But he couldn’t allow himself to forget any of this.

What the woman from the farmhouse was doing to him went beyond vengeance. It would have to be answered, even if her gang of freaks killed him.

Maybe he’d come back to haunt her, if a ghost could haunt a ghost.

“And the tall one, in the furs?” said Hollis, his voice like a nail file on a salt lick. “The human, I mean, not the bear. Tell me her name again, first and last. I’m not trying to be hard on you two, I just need to make sure you’ve been paying attention!”

“Tanka,” gasped Rafe. “Tanka Equi—fuck!”

He was doubled over in pain again. Jassa wasn’t even attempting to make words of her moans. Both of them had been writhing on the floor for hours, neither knowing nor caring where this small, dark chamber was, or why these freaks wanted them to know their names.

It meant something that they did, though.

It meant Rafe and Jassa wouldn’t be allowed to die any time soon.

“I guess that’s as close as they’re going to get,” muttered Hollis from atop the bear’s shoulders.

Umber the bear, thought Rafe, because even their dead pets had names to memorize.

Hollis had climbed atop the awful thing after Jassa’s fumbling attempt to crush his head in her hands. Rafe wished she’d managed it, if only to stop that excruciating voice, though it probably would’ve extended their misery once the others found out.

“I know! We’ll put our heads together and come up with a mnemonic device. Something that rhymes; that’s what seemed to help the kiddies at Cru, when all else failed. Which it did, as a rule. Let’s see: Hollis Runt, rhymes with flawless—”

“Equinox,” sputtered Rafe. “Tanka Equinox. Please, just stop talking.—Fuck!”

The cramps about blinded him this time. His body was slick with sweat, all his muscles were spasming at once, and he could feel every red-hot bone in his body. Worst of all, he was famished, and had no hope of keeping down so much as a sip of water until all this had run its course.

It would take several days, if they were lucky. This was tlak withdrawal, and Rafe couldn’t believe how deep they’d gone into it, or how quickly.

But then, he couldn’t say how much time had passed between the killing fields and here. They’d woken on this floor, surrounded by these flickering mountains of bric-a-brac, wearing ill-fitting clothes of soft leather, already tlak-sick.

“I’m trying to keep you focused,” said Hollis in that hideous voice of his, every syllable ripping through Rafe’s head, “and distracted! I’d read you a storybook, if Tanka would lend me one. But we might as well accomplish something while we’re at it. We have work to do as soon as you’re well! You can even help me carve him, if you’re so inclined—though more precision will be required than your last job.”

“Let us be,” said Rafe, as Hollis swam in and out of focus. “Please.”

“They never will,” said Jassa, clutching the blackened remnant of her forearm to her chest. “Can’t you see? They want us—broken.”

“You got to broken all by yourselves,” said Ashlan from the doorway. “You have any idea what shape you were in when we found you?”

Rafe shoved himself away from her.

She wasn’t a ghost, as he’d believed when he’d seen her in the ring of fire. But he still couldn’t reconcile her presence here with her death in the farmhouse.

His body was wracked with chills, only partly because of the sickness.

I killed you, he thought. Why didn’t you die?

“Anyway,” said Ashlan, looking up at Hollis. “It’s time.”

“Ah, lovely! The show begins. Hoist us up again, would you, Umber?”

The bear restored him to his perch as Tanka entered the dim, empty chamber, climbing atop a tall stool and folding her arms over her legs.

Rafe writhed onto his belly, panting. She was staring at him, but her face was impossible to read. He found no hatred in her eyes, but he still hadn’t heard her speak.

Hollis patted the bear’s ragged muzzle. It opened its jaw, and he pulled a pair of metal boxes from between its teeth.

Rafe’s metal boxes.

“Give it,” shouted Jassa, dragging herself toward Umber’s feet as well as her muscles would allow. “You give it here!”

“Nothing in there, Jass,” said Rafe. Nothing but game pieces, and a drash as hungry as they were.

But she kept on crawling, as if she’d gone over the edge.

Maybe she had. On top of everything else, her hand was gone, and half her forearm with it.

Hollis passed the larger box down to Ashlan, who set it on the floor and slid it toward Rafe with her foot.

“You still haven’t worked it out, Rafe Davin?” said Hollis, flipping open the lid of the smaller box and plucking out a die. “Your companion here was holding out on you. She had a stash of her own all this while. Show him, Ashlan Ley.”

She crouched beside him. “This was in her shoe.”

In her hand was a blood-soaked scrap of cloth. Ashlan peeled it open, and a chunk of tlak tumbled out.

He should have stabbed her when he had the chance.

Jassa was coming, writhing along the floor like a snake.

She looked like she might try to gobble it off the floor if she could get there in time.

“That was ours,” Rafe shouted, slapping a palm onto the crumb, rolling over to shield it with his back. “Open the latch,” he said to Ashlan. He didn’t have the coordination to pinch his fingers, but the tlak had stuck to his sweaty skin. “Please.”

She frowned, considering.

His body shook harder. “I can’t do it myself. Open the latch!”

“All right. But you’re feeding that fucking thing yourself.”

The drash let out a frantic clattering as she flipped open the lid, and Ashlan backed away.

The poor beast was starving. Rafe put his hand to the hole in the mesh, and it snatched at the crumb with its mandibles, taking a chunk of his palm along with it.

He was bleeding, but it didn’t matter. He could hear it masticating. Everything was going to be all right.

Jassa had almost shimmied over to him. “My sins have saved us!” she babbled. “Fortune favors the worst. You see that, don’t you? How even now She smiles upon us? My Ace?”

Rafe closed his arms around the blur of the drash beneath its mesh.

Its body was slowing. Its poison was growing sweet. It would be ready soon.

With shaking fingers, he pried up the screen.

Jassa’s heel snapped his jaw shut. A second kick rolled him off the box. By the time he righted himself, she’d already scooped up the drash and pressed it to her neck. As it clamped down, she stroked its carapace with the back of her trembling hand—and bellowed.

There was no pleasure in the sound.

“Jass?” he called. “What’s happening? Jass?”

She sat up, face white, raising her fingers to her neck, where the drash still clung.

It was over too soon.

The freaks were all talking at once, but Rafe wasn’t listening. All he could see was Jassa, her hands steady now, tugging out the drash while its stinger retracted, still dribbling.

She hadn’t even finished the kiss.

“It’s all wrong,” she was whispering. “Is it this?” She pointed at Rafe with her missing hand. “The dark flame? Is it in my body, still? Devouring the sweetness?” She held the drash out to him. “Take it, boy,” she pleaded, sounding dazed, but not drugged. “Show me. Is it me, or is it us?”

It didn’t matter what had passed between them, not now. Rafe, barely breathing, turned his head. As Jassa set the drash on his neck, he looked up at Tanka Equinox, still sitting on her stool, hands in front of her knees.

Her fingers were lacing and unlacing, again and again.

Their tips were stained with black ink.

He shivered, remembering something.

Too black.

It hadn’t been a dream.

She’d opened him up.

She’d remade him.

He clenched his teeth as the stinger plunged, but no rush came. His tongue probed the edges of his teeth, but there was nothing to chew. Just boiling poison in the muscle of his neck, and the deep, sick-making pain of the stinger near his spine.

The nausea, the fever, all the signs of withdrawal were gone—but there was no sweetness, no pleasure, no high.

“It’s us,” he murmured. He clawed the drash from his skin, shuddering.

Its legs waved in ecstasy. At least it could still enjoy itself.

He dropped it in its box and closed the lid.

He and Jassa sat in numb silence as the freaks congratulated themselves.

The sickness was gone, but that only made it worse. It meant there was no end to this. They’d need to shoot again, within a day or two, and for nothing. And then again, and again, with no joy and no release.

He stared up at the freaks. They’d written the rules of this game.

It was time to find out how it worked.

Before he’d thought better of it, Rafe stood. The bear took a step toward him, holding out a paw.

Rafe wiped the sweat from his face, but didn’t back down. They hadn’t gone to all this trouble just to kill him now.

He pointed at Tanka. “You did this. You took us apart and you put us back together wrong.”

“Not wrong. Different.” She slid to her feet, looming over him.

How he wished he was taller.

“All of us, Mister Davin, are made of pathways,” she said. “Some carry us to pleasure, others to pain. I changed a few of yours, as I’ve changed so many of my own.”

“Fuck your pathways. You hacked us open,” said Rafe, “and you played in our fucking guts.”

“Hah!” cried Hollis, clapping his hands. “And are you playing the pot today, Rafe Davin, or the kettle?”

Rafe looked at Ashlan, his face burning.

She stared back at him, rubbing her belly slowly.

Jassa hadn’t moved since he’d taken his kiss. If he’d ever needed one of her craven excuses, it was now—and she wouldn’t so much as look up.

“Speechless, are you?” said Hollis, climbing down the front of the bear, using its ribs like a ladder. “And what could you say, really? Other than, ‘Thank you, Sir Runt, for saving our highly devalued lives.’ If you hadn’t been necessary to us, you’d be halfway to some Devourer’s colon by now. Or had you forgotten all that?”

He had. He’d forgotten most everything, and longed to forget more. “So we owe you,” he said. “Is that it? You’ve experimented on us, and we should be thankful for it?”

“That depends.” Tanka stepped forward, holding out her hands like a pair of scales. “Before we found you, did you want to live? Or die? If you wanted to die, then no, you should not be thankful. We brought you back, and to a version of your life that may well be worse than it was before. But if you wanted to live, Mister Davin, then things are more complicated. You were dying, and we stopped it from happening.” She smiled, and Rafe stared, having no idea what lay behind it. Was she toying with him? “We gave you life, and then we changed your design, which is a kind of taking. So as it stands, we are even—a generous assessment, considering your prior involvement with Lady Ley—and for that, yes, you might well be thankful. It means you are free to go.”

“Hold on a minute,” said Hollis from the floor.

“No.” She held up a finger, and the tiny man shut his mouth. “They are free to go, and live as they are. They may break their addiction, or embrace it as it stands.”

Rafe kept expecting Jassa to interject.

But she wasn’t even listening. She was cradling her blackened arm to her chest, rocking it like a colicky infant.

“If, however, you decide to help us,” said Tanka, “I will restore you. When the job is done, you will be as you were, Mister Davin. Free to indulge, and enjoy your indulgence, without further interference.”

“Those are just words,” said Rafe.

She bowed her head. “As all promises are.”

Rafe stewed a moment, trying to pretend, even to himself, even for a moment, that he might walk away.

Ashlan scratched her chin. “We’re going to eat soon, right?”

Hollis threw his hands up. “Do you ever think of anything but your stomach, Ashlan Ley?”

Rafe remembered the tea and cakes. More than anything, he was hungry. Tlak’s sweetness staved off hunger, for a day at a time—but when it went, it left the body ravaged.

He couldn’t imagine himself hunting in the wood, especially with sickness looming.

He’d never get a mile from here, knowing that Tanka might give him the sweetness back.

And she knew it.

“So this is the game?” said Rafe. “Pretending I have any choice in all this gets you off. You’re gods, is that it?”

That got a reaction from Jassa, though whether it was a laugh or a sob, Rafe couldn’t say.

“I,” said Tanka, “am no such thing.”

“Nor I, sadly,” said Hollis, “but I’ll play the part if you insist on prostrating yourself.”

“Look, this is business,” said Ashlan. “And considering how we met, it seemed like it might be more effective than asking nicely.”

“Then I hope you have a solid supply of tlak,” said Rafe, hating how petulant he sounded, “or we’ll only get sick again.”

“Isn’t that how the Assemblage pays you?” said Hollis.

Rafe looked down at him, startled. How much did they know? “Pays us?”

“For the harvest you collected. For Ashlan’s guts.”

“You kept the satchel?” It could hardly be fresh, but it would be better than returning empty-handed.

“Well, no.” Hollis patted Ashlan on the leg. “But she’ll make all you need.”

She glared. “Runt.”

“Oh, come, don’t get shy about it now. She’s invulnerable. A regeneratrix! But it makes her very cranky.”

Rafe’s mind was reeling. “And what’s your plan, exactly? You want—to take down the Assemblage?”

He looked back, worried, but Jassa still had no reaction. The Widow of Lank Street was gone.

He was shocked at the change, but only for a moment.

Rafe himself felt like seven kinds of hell, but he was standing. Advocating for the both of them. Fighting for their restoration, with whatever he had left.

Because, for all her bluster, she didn’t have half his strength.

What we suffer takes half of what we are, Gingerbeard once said, but it makes us twice as strong in exchange.

“No, we have no beef with your cult,” said Hollis. “It’s simple, really. You want to get high, and we want the Puppeteer. Have you ever asked yourself what he does with the organs he collects?”

“I thought—” Rafe looked uncertainly at Jassa. “I thought for some reason he was making us better tlak.” But it sounded like a lie, something she might have told him to keep him from poking into deeper truths.

“Ha! Sweeter candy from the store, is that it? No, Rafe Davin, the Puppeteer wants to send a million of me out into the world, to fill up all its dark closets with leaping, rasping puppets of death. Imagine the courts overrun with mannikins—the streets awash with the slushy runoff of our mayhem! Imagine every city in the world dancing at the end of his strings. Or—or you can help me imagine a better future. One in which he’s tied down and dissected before his nefarious plan begins. One in which he’s rebuilt in ways that will make your change seem like a kiss from an angel.”

“If you want him,” said Rafe, “then he’s yours.”

The Puppeteer was a criminal Eth’s guards couldn’t find, much less prosecute.

Rafe didn’t know him by name or by face, and he’d never expected to.

But he’d have promised them anything at all.

Dawn was deafening, both the birdsong and the light itself. The very air he breathed felt thin, intoxicatingly so, and sobriety only fed the feeling. It was as if he’d woken in the mountains, or like a quake had subtly tilted the ground below and no one else had noticed. His muscles were tight, his heart hammered, and yet something thicker and richer than blood seemed to flow through his veins. He could feel everything—every nerve, every twitch, every thought—and the glory was excruciating.

The freaks had given him his own chamber, with windows carved into the wooden walls and more hand-carved furniture than the space warranted. The bear had brought him a tray of food, though there was no meat, and he’d eaten, with a gratitude that ashamed him, before lying down on the bed.

What he’d done there couldn’t be called sleeping. It was more like a ceaseless line of thought that dipped a little from time to time, any rest it might contain constantly threatened by the sheer drop of panic.

The sources were many. He counted them on his fingers. Withdrawal, the loss of sweetness, the memories his dream had stirred. Jassa’s betrayal, the sight of his clan, the slaughter of his clan. Ashlan Ley, Hollis Runt, Tanka Equinox.

And then, older and more insistent than the rest, there was his unbound body.

The slightest change in his physical position could tip his heart over the edge. Another wave hit whenever motion caused his breasts to shift. Looking down at their curves, even clothed and buried under sheets, was intolerable. He wished the freaks hadn’t taken his bandages, filthy though they’d been. He thought of ripping up the witch’s sheets and winding them around his chest, tying them tight enough to break his ribs if he sat down too quickly—just like the first time he’d bound himself, hiding in his uncle’s empty tent.

Cringing, he reached beneath the soft leather shirt he’d woken in and felt his skin. There was no sign of the doorway on his back, nor the sores and scabs the bandages had left. They’d healed him—at least they’d call it that, though it felt to Rafe like another violation.

Fighting against the tightness of his muscles, he drew in a great breath and pushed it out.

Not a twinge of pain remained in his lungs.

He pressed a hand against his chest, feeling the gallop of his heart. The only thing that kept him from seeking out death as quickly as he could was the promise Tanka had made.

If he helped her, there would be sweetness.

The thought plunged him into desperate excitement. How malleable he felt, how raw. The last time he’d felt this way, watching the blue light stream through the windows for minutes that felt like hours, knowing that nothing would ever be the same, it had been the morning after the Second Masque. Someone had come before sunrise to tell him they’d found Gingerbeard. Rafe, high and numb, had nodded as if it was expected news, then lain back down and tried to sleep, as if that might let him forget. But sleep never came, and by noon his shock had hardened into sweaty decision: he would lock himself up in one of Mrs. Dallow’s windowless pansy-pantries until the fist-sized brick of tlak was gone.

They hadn’t even bought the stuff. They’d tried it only once before. It had been a party favor, given to Gingerbeard when they won some ludicrous game of chance at a party on Lank Street. Already drunk, the two of them had taken too much, then lost hold of each other in the crowd.

Lying on that tiny, plank-like bed, he bit into it.

The darkness filled with its slight, nutty sweetness, and everything became irrelevant.

He needed nothing, neither food nor light. He drank nothing, and scurried to the bathroom only twice, when everything was quiet. He ignored every knock, every voice at the door. He’d paid through the end of the week, though he had nothing left over—Gingerbeard had kept their collective wealth in a leather purse strapped to one thigh, since Rafe was always losing things. And the job Mrs. Dallow had found him, working as a courier to the maintenance crews in the upper levels of the catacombs, would be long gone by now.

He heard a great commotion once, when they found Little Gem’s body in the bathtub—shaken loose, Rafe imagined, by the sudden loss of Gingerbeard, her closest confidante. Rafe heard the sounds of grief, and understood that they pertained to someone else he should have mourned, but he still had enough of the brick left to make that irrelevant, too.

It wasn’t quite forgetting, but he felt sure it would lead there, in time.

But the tlak ran out before he could manage it. He stayed in the dark long after it was gone, centering on the sickness, feeling it grow until it pushed him out the door, so late at night that no good-byes were necessary.

He hurried back to the bar on Lank Street, where they needed no Masque to continue the party. Sliding through the crowded room, he found them in the corner, the ones who’d given Gingerbeard the brick, still throwing dice as if the fate of the world depended on it. Their teeth were ruined and their necks were marked, and the one they called Jassa Lowroller, that night’s champion, took stock of Rafe and saw nothing but need.

Like knows like.

Going with her hadn’t felt like a decision, and neither did what followed.

Neither did this—this sudden arrangement with the bent witch, to assassinate the city’s sole supplier of tlak. From what Rafe knew, the man was hidden deep in the catacombs, and was connected enough to avoid the guards, or wealthy enough to own them.

Now that his body had recovered, Rafe wondered what he’d been thinking. When he’d left the Assemblage, he’d been an initiate, as ignorant about the structure of his church as the rules of the games they played. It wasn’t as if he could stroll back into their next gathering and be welcomed as a leader without explanation—it would require a careful, informed performance, one he felt ill-equipped to script, and wasn’t sure he could pull off. So far, the freaks had been content with his vague assurances, but sooner or later they’d want a plan.

Jassa knew enough to get them in, he was sure of it. But her mind was gone.

With or without her help, it would fall to him to concoct a plan and smuggle them in.

He heard footsteps coming down the hall. Rafe struggled up, his panic doubling, his arms squeezed tight around his chest.

It was Tanka, wearing a leather skirt and corset, with tall boots. Without a word, she shoved a bundle at him.

He forced himself to take it. “What’s this?”

“Equipment,” she said, turning her back. “Put it on.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it, his hands shaking.

He’d expect this callousness from the rest of them, but not from her. She ought to know what it meant to be naked in front of a stranger.

He’d had enough trouble taking his clothes of in front of—

Enough. Tanka wasn’t offering him a choice, and he wouldn’t show weakness by begging.

He stood, feeling light-headed, and gripped the bottom of his shirt.

Tanka strode out into the hall, slamming the door behind her.

Alone, confused, Rafe unfolded the bundle.

It was a sturdy, sleeveless garment of black leather. The front was flat and stiff, the inside lined with soft cotton. At the back, two slim runners of hard, black wood fit together with a sturdy series of hooks and eyes, to be cinched tighter by the laces that zig-zagged up the sides.

A binder.

Rafe stared at it for a long time, then pulled off his shirt and slipped into it. It took work to snap the back together alone, and more to cinch the sides tight enough, but he was far too stubborn to ask for assistance. He worked it out eventually, though he’d broken a sweat. There was a glass in the corner, and with the binder on—fitting snugly, pressing hard, but a damn sight more comfortable than the bandages he’d been a fool to wear so long—he stared at himself a long while, then slipped the shirt on over it.

Flat-chested, he looked like himself again. His heartbeat gradually steadied.

It was better-built than any he’d seen. This pressure was different than what he’d grown accustomed to—a comforting tightness, so evenly distributed that he knew there would be no chafing, no cutting into his flesh.

He pulled the door open. Tanka stood in the hall, arms crossed, back turned.

“Why did you do this?” he said.

She pushed past him, shutting the door behind her, and stood for a long while, composing herself before she glanced at him.

“That’ll do.”

“Why,” he said slowly, “did you do this? It’s not like you just had this lying around.”

She did a funny thing with her lips, as if it cost her great effort to speak to him. “We need you to be as—inconspicuous as you were.”

“Inconspicuous?” A bitter laugh came unbidden from his throat. “Is that what you call it? The rest of us call it passing, you see, and it’s a matter of life and death—for us, at least, who have to scrabble just to survive. That’s what most of us are doing, you know? Stuck in Eth, with no way to escape the trap we’re in. While you’re safe out here, aren’t you? With your dead pets and your buried stashes of coin. And now you’ve outed me to a bunch of strangers, and you’ll march me right back into the city with nothing but a scrap of leather to protect me. And why not? This is what you need. For me to put my faith in people who know nothing of our ways, and hope that they don’t let the wrong word slip and get me hacked open on the street. Let me get on with your errands, then, so you can get back to finding yourself—while they’re killing the rest of us just for walking free.”

When the words had stopped, he turned and started making the bed, just to give his hands something to do.

No response came. He wondered what he’d expected. Some chip in her mask, he supposed. Some sign that she felt as awful as he did.

Instead she drew breath, and sighed.

“When I—stepped out, in public, for the first time, as I am—”

You’re bent, he wanted to scream as he tugged the blankets into place, you’re crosswise, just call it what it is!

“—I lived in Tunica with my family, all sixteen of them.”

Tunica Media. That was Northmost Eth. Not the best neighborhood, but far from the worst.

“Back then,” she said, “a woman called Jaena was in power. Jaena the Joiner, they called her. She hailed from the High Andrils, where every child, when they come of age, is asked if they are a boy or a girl. For a brief time, it was—fashionable to do the same in Eth.”

Rafe stopped fussing with the sheets.

No wonder she didn’t call herself bent, or crosswise, or anything at all. According to Gingerbeard, these words had been slurs in the old days.

Poisoned blades, before we hammered them into armor.

“Have you heard of Jaena?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And what came after?”

Rafe nodded, feeling sick.

His grasp on Ethian history was shaky, but everyone at Mrs. Dallow’s knew of Jaena the Joiner. Gingerbeard had spoken of her reign as a golden age. She’d chosen a cabinet of advisors and functionaries who were native-born, and a crosswise woman had served on her High Council.

We breathed easy, then. For a few years, anyhow.

Then Radmun came, with his army of addicts—paid in lassia, to ensure their loyalty.

And Radmun had slaughtered so many citizens on his way in that the catacombs boiled over. The calcified organs of the Gone-Away gods, dormant for decades, were awakened by blood, reordering the streets in a seizure of dark enchantment.

After, Radmun had ruled in peace—or so he’d called it. He’d punished urban murderers with enchantments considerably worse than death.

But there had been a notable exception. He blamed the catastrophe on Jaena’s excess—on the sins of the bent. It became legal to remove them, and their kin, from the streets of Eth.

Tanka’s family, Rafe guessed, had been cleansed.

How she’d escaped was a question he had no intention of asking.

They stewed in silence for a long while.

He sat heavily on the bed, sliding a finger into his collar now and then to touch the top of the binder, just to make sure it was still there. Tanka stared through the slatted window, her face blank for a very long while.

Finally, he tried to guess how much his binder would have cost at Mr. Rue’s. “You made this in one night?” he said, a hand on his chest.

“Umber did,” she said, looking down at him. “It’s still not meant to be worn while sleeping.”

“I know that,” he said. “I know what’s right. Not that I do it, much.” His face was burning. “But you—you ought to know better than to let others know what I am.”

She jerked her head. “I will not justify my decision, Mister Davin. But nor am I ignorant of its impact. We must be as safe as we can, both of us. As safe as anything can be, there.”

“You’ll be safe enough. Unless your powers only work in the wood.”

“No, I’ll be just as strong in Eth. Lady Ley and her doll, as you know, have business with the Puppeteer. I’ll do what I can to aid them, but I’d make a poor spy—and I have matters of my own to attend to. So I will promise to aid you, if things go poorly. Up until you’ve settled into your plan, at least. But keeping your secret safe from the Assemblage, as you’ve done well enough so far, will be up to you. Construct your plan carefully, Mister Davin, and everyone will profit.”

Rafe bit his lip. The careful construction of plans was a talent that had so far eluded him.

He’d better pick it up quickly.

“I have faith in you—or, rather, in the depth of your desire.” She walked to the door, and Rafe stood, wondering if he ought to follow.

“But understand this, Mister Davin.” She stopped, one hand on the doorway. “If, whether by accident or by design, you render it impossible for Lady Ley to achieve her goal, there will be no restoration of your altered pathways. I will keep you alive if I can, but unless the doll has its satisfaction from the Puppeteer, you will live, and die, as you are.”

“Understood,” he muttered.

“You’ll find your things in the common room,” said Tanka, taking her leave. “Meet me down below.”

He did as she said, though he was uneasy in the hollowed-out body of the treehouse. Even in daylight, it was hard to say what was shadow and what was a doorway, and that bear of hers might be lurking anywhere. Rafe packed his things, as anxious about the fact that someone had tossed them all over the floor as any of the rest of it.

The sound of the drash scuttling in its box hardly soothed him. “But there’s sweetness at the end of this road,” he whispered to himself, though it was only true if he could manage to get them all to the end of this winding, uncertain path.

Sliding on his pack, then wrapping his filthy old cloak around his shoulders, he saw the blur of a body pacing on the porch, through a doorway with white curtains tied off to the sides. It was Jassa, he realized as she returned to lean over the railing. The sight of her was startling, not least because she’d pinned one overlong sleeve over the ruin of her right arm.

Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to him that it was the right hand she’d lost. No wonder she was so out of sorts, he thought, walking slowly toward her. After a lifetime of rolling dice and stabbing folks in the back with it, she was bound to miss it more than she would’ve the left.

Then, too, she looked strangely pious, staring silently into the sunshine like some leather-clad nun. Leaning on the porch’s railing—built, like the rest of it, out of living wood the witch must have coaxed into shape—Jassa was scribbling in her notebook, even more furiously, even less legibly than usual.

She’d rifled through his pack to get it. He suppressed the urge to shove her over.

Instead he joined her at the railing. He’d expected her to look haggard, but she looked a good deal more rested than he did, and as calm as he was nervous.

You’re the Ace here, he thought.

“Deuce.”

“My Ace,” she cooed, without looking up from her sprawl of incomprehensible symbols.

“What nonsense are you scribbling now?”

“Plans.” She bobbed her head, finishing a long line and tucking the pencil between the pages. “Oh, new plans, my Ace. Full of Fortune’s blessings! Things are looking up—sky-high!”

He stared at her.

She was waving her book above her head.

Overjoyed.

“Focus, Jassa. Jassa. Look at me.”

She seemed to notice him for the first time. “My Ace!”

“That’s right.” Bend her to your will, he thought, or it’s over before it begins. Use her faith. “Your Ace. And I’m telling you—Fortune is telling you, through me—”

“You’re Fortune’s favorite,” she said, beaming.

“Of course I am,” he said. “And Fortune says only one plan matters, Deuce.”

“To win all the games,” she said, suddenly serious, turning to open her book again.

He slapped it from her hand, gripping her by the shoulders. “No.”

Her face went white. “No? No! No, my Ace.”

“All that matters,” he hissed, “is that we get the sweetness back. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” she breathed, eyes wide. “Yes, my Ace.”

He let her go before he lost control.

He wanted so badly to push her over that he could almost feel the thud.

It took him a moment to master his breath.

“You need it,” she said, bathed by understanding. “You need the sweetness, don’t you?”

He sighed, grateful that she’d gotten that much. “Yes, Deuce. We both do.”

“Because—they’re gone. All of them.”

He turned, frowning. “Because who are—”

“Your family,” she said sadly. “Gobbled right up. Yum!”

He was on her in a moment.

The air whooshed out of her as she struck the floor of the porch. She held her arms before her face, and he grasped them, one in each hand, wrestling them away so he could beat her face into pulp—with his forehead, if he had to.

But he’d no sooner gripped the folded leather of her right sleeve than she gave a gulping scream, her eyes swimming in and out of consciousness.

The flesh of her truncated forearm crackled beneath his fingers.

It was still cold. He could feel the jutting bone.

“Hurts, does it?”

He stood up, still holding her right arm.

“Yes,” she moaned.

“Then hold your fucking tongue,” he snarled, shoving her away.

He stood at the railing, struggling to collect himself, feeling sick to his stomach.

It didn’t matter that he hated this, hated himself. All of it was temporary. “We’ll get the sweetness back,” he said again. “We’ll bring them to the Puppeteer. We’ll win this game. But speak out of turn, Deuce, and you’ll feel that pain again in an instant.”

She staggered up, stowing her notebook in her bag, then lifting a dark blue sack from the floor and slinging it over her left shoulder.

He’d been so distracted by her demeanor that he hadn’t even noticed it. It swung slightly, though she stood quite still.

“What is that?”

“It’s her.”

Rafe remembered what Hollis had said about Ashlan.

“You mean—”

Regeneratrix, he’d called her.

“Fresh-baked numbles!” cried a voice from behind him.

Rafe spun on a heel. Hollis was tucked away in Ashlan’s handbag, jabbing a cloth finger at her stomach. “That’s right, Rafe Davin, your supply’s replenished. Piping hot guts, and enough of them to buy you a hearty helping of your favorite street drug, I have no doubt.”

Ashlan was cramming a loaf of bread into her mouth, swatting Hollis’ hand away from her belly. “You enjoyed that too much.”

“What, splitting you open? I’ve been patiently waiting my turn ever since the man-boy showed me the way.”

Rafe looked down at the lawn, his face burning. He didn’t care for the way Hollis had spoken, or his horrid little leer, but he knew that the doll would never own up to it. And a drop of his rage would kill the thing in an instant.

At least he knew who to be wary of.

Down below, Tanka was striding across the grass. “Shall we, then?” she called.

As Ashlan started down the spiraling ramp, Hollis poked his head out of her bag. “Saddle up, boys and girls, and you’ll be back in the comfortable arms of a debilitating addiction in no time!”

“Knock it off, Runt, or someone’s going to toss you in a river along the way.”

Rafe walked down before Jassa, who seemed perfectly placid again. She even smiled at him as he passed, showing no sign that she remembered what he’d done to her moments ago. He wondered if she’d ever be what she was. Maybe his own sanity was just a veneer of shock that would crumble, in its own way, before long.

So long as Tanka put him back together first, he couldn’t see that it mattered. It had been a long time coming—if he could even call himself sane, as he was.

They made their way around the tree’s enormous trunk, until Ashlan stopped abruptly ten feet from the ground. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.

Rafe, stopping himself before he stumbled into her, followed her gaze. Lumbering up behind Tanka was Umber the bear, dressed in a greatcoat, dragging a massive, silver-buckled, two-wheeled trunk with one paw.

Hollis pulled himself halfway out of the handbag. “Surely you don’t mean to bring him with us to Eth?” He craned his neck up at Ashlan. “Surely she doesn’t?”

“Umber will be just fine,” Tanka sang. “And I don’t go anywhere without him. Unless one of you wants to carry my trunk in his place?”

“Inconspicuous,” muttered Rafe.

Maybe sobriety wouldn’t be such a problem.

Not if they all died before they passed through the shining wall of Eth.