But I couldn’t forget it. My mind reeled as we walked. Khalika’s rucksack bulged with what I assumed was overnight gear. She read my thoughts and said she didn’t intend to stay over—she had things that needed doing. She told me she’d seen me once with Mark and asked if anything was heating up.

“Not that I’m following you or anything.”

I told her that, of course, there was nothing, reminded her of my revulsion when it came to sex. She gave me a funny, quizzical look and said that wasn’t what she was picking up.

“Would you just quit? You’re making me nervous. He’s a good guy who’s been through some heavy shit.”

“OK, just watch yourself.”

“He said he was investigating what was going on with Dick’s side business—that the overkill didn’t look like it was done by the loan sharks. He thinks it’s possible it was real monsters of the deep that were responsible.”

I waited for her reaction, which didn’t happen.

“The guy is damaged, by the way. His family is gone—the daughter snatched, followed by the wife taking a header off the terrace. He’s hot to crack this pedo ring, and I gotta admit, I’m really down with that, even if another pops up right in its place.”

“Yeah, we’re all on the same page. A light-hearted threesome, for sure.”

Khalika picked up the pace some more. I almost had to jog to keep up. The wind was whipping, cyclonic on the cross streets. The main avenues were lined with colossal, windowed tombstones. Whatever went on behind the windows, in the streets below them, the keepers of order seemed unable or unwilling to keep up with it, were throwing in the bloody towel. Khalika said that if you believed there was any evil you thought hadn’t been done sometime, by somebody, you would be wrong.

We passed a cardboard box with two ratty sneakered feet sticking out, an empty bottle on the pavement next to it. It looked like the guy inside might be dead, frozen solid on a street in one of the richest cities, in what was, for now, one of the richest decades there’d been. “Fraud is the sister of greed,” somebody said. Even in that cold, the stench was almost overwhelming. The guy was decomposing in his box. Khalika made no comment, forged ahead. The mood seemed to be getting less festive by the minute.

“Dick was a very busy boy,” she finally said. “He didn’t sit around with his thumb up his ass. I suppose that was why they chose a different finger.”

She peeked at me, gave a little snort.

“I really hated that grifting fucker and his whore—maybe more than you did. The threat about your pony sealed it for me, that he would take the one thing that kept you attached to the land they stole, a temporary oasis in the midst of what? How do you even put a name to it?”

Khalika’s pea coat was wide open and flapping, and she didn’t seem to care. I shoved my hands down in my jacket pockets, lowered my head. The March wind howled like a lost banshee down the canyons of some remote planet, kicking up grit and molecules of frozen shit—dog and human. I pulled my hood up. We passed another of the town’s semi-living refuse, this one curled up under some stairs, wrapped in flapping newspapers, a beanie pulled over his eyes.

Maybe freezing to death isn’t the worst way to go—like drowning.

At least past a certain point.

Happy fucking birthday.

Something big is coming, my orphan child…

Stay awake…

Was he going to let me know how far it’s gone, maybe past the point of no return? Are we supposed to join you and Oceane?