The table is long, to stretch the unlit length of that long porch, suspended beneath the enormity of the house above, propped out over the steepening slope below. That table’s long, and scrubbed so meticulously clean it might catch even the faintest hint of what light’s available down here and hold it, a reflection, suspended, so it seems, a fraction of an inch or so above that ruthlessly polished surface. A thick orange cord’s been laid along the top of it in a mostly straight and unkinked line until about halfway down, where it ends in a plug, and the line’s taken up by a thin brown cord, continuing on until it in turn ends in a plug joined by a smooth white cord, this one relaxed, looped in a couple-three lazy coils to fetch up at the base of a small white desk lamp, set here at the very head of the table to thinly shine on a lone white saucer laden with three unbitten slices of pressed meat, rectangularly pink. A figure’s sat in a chair, turned away from table, lamp, and plate, a silhouette wrapped in a blanket, arms and legs presumably tucked away, head tipped forward, chin pressed to sunken chest, sharp shoulders rising slowly and settling, slowly, with sleepingly regular breaths, gently stirring a wild crown of loose thin hair.

Agravante’s stood to one side, a hand on the balustrade, a tiny knife in that hand, the wickedly pointed blade maybe half the length of its handle. The collar of his shirt’s undone, the knot of his tie loosened, the both of the same dull color, uncertain in the darkness. He lifts the knife up to balance on its point, held in place by a fingertip, lets it topple to catch it, quick. Lays it gently, clink, on the railing.

“Trumpets,” croaks the other, and Agravante looks to see that head lifted, woozily a-wobble, but those tiny dark eyes are fixed on something far away, over and past the glower of downtown that rusts the bellies of the clouds hung low above, something away out past the unseen horizon. “Blow,” says the other. “Horns. For that is the law, on this day, when the moon has risen,” something of a struggle, then, wriggling weakly in that chair, to free, perhaps, an arm, to point, but those blankets, it seems, are tightly wrapped. “In half an hour, if even that, the sun will also rise, to give chase over the clouds, and down there,” those tiny eyes shift, that attention shifts, to fix on the city below, “they will cast about for me, but they will not find me,” that head turns, then, and those eyes find Agravante, “for you have done me this great wrong, and hidden me from sight.” A sigh, and that head tips precipitously back, the weight too much for such a frail neck. “The new moon has now risen that will swallow them whole.”

Agravante watches, waiting, tiny knife now tightly in his hand.

“The levain,” says the other. The words, no longer clear, struggle through a hoarse and rough-edged whisper. “Must be fed.” That head pulls itself upright, but tips slowly to one side, the weight as yet too much, and those black eyes jerk and dart. “A measure of Camas wheat, and good clean Bull Run water, but, but but, but,” the head struggling upright, and there, a small but definite smile of accomplishment, perhaps, even pride. Agravante steps away from the balustrade, toward the blanket-wrapped other in that chair. “The water must be left out, open to the air, an hour or so, or more,” the words clearing, strengthening, “there are reagents, that must dissipate, I brought it with us, the levain, when first we did come over, a crock tucked in my shirt, against the warmth of my breast, and every loaf that I’ve made since has started with a dollop of that levain, and is this,” that smile, sharpening, Agravante halting, the look on his face slipping, from one valence, to another, “what you want? Is this why you coddle me? Feed me? Keep me,” that tongue licking out, a slickery sheen in the darkness, “warm? Ah ah,” as Agravante steps close, presses close with that knife in his hand, “let’s not be rash, boy, boy, son, grandson, after all,” swallowing thickly, chin drawn back, those black eyes craned down to the wicked point, “there may yet be,” says the other, “a chance,” letting the word linger, stretch into a question, a possibility, those eyes squeezing shut as Agravante lifts the knife, high up above his head, and drives it down to thunk into the table, stuck upright, just out of reach.

“Would’ve been such a waste,” mutters the other, and then, calling after Agravante, who’s making his way back up the length of the porch, “Regret is a luxury! Much too expensive. Best to make peace, with what is, and fire up the grill! I’ll have six lambs, and a ram, without blemish, and a whole young bull, and none of your oxen, and no incense, do you hear me? None! It is a rancid stench, in my nostrils!”

Chuckling, at the creak of stairs behind, shaking that wild-crowned head. Out there the darkness has lightened, the horizon now a reddening jagged line to break apart earth and sky. The other looks down, to the meat on the plate in the puddle of lamplight, and leans toward it, a struggle again within those blankets tightly wrapped, too tight. Slumping in the chair, leaning over, mouth opening, straining, yearning, but still it’s just a bit too low, too far. Straightening, that head tipped back to blow out a defeated sigh.

“Shit,” hisses the other.

First, the underwear, blue jockey shorts he finds among the tangled bedclothes and clumsily works over long and skinny feet, kicking up to yank them along his shanks and teuks, snugly snapping them about his loins, working his fit within. Something clunks free as he unwinds a pants-leg from the blankets, and he bends over the foot of the low bed to fish it up, a pair of goggles, leather straps a-dangle, lenses framed by round brass rings. Frowning through them in the dim light, he huffs over one of the lenses, misting the glass with his breath, and scrubs at it with a pinched-up wrinkle of bedsheet. Peering through them again, turned this way and that, the only light in here diffused through gauzy curtains hung in slender windows there and there. Careful of his slumping pompadour, he works the straps over around the back of his head, fitting the lenses over his eyes, blinking behind the glass, then lifts the lenses up to his forehead, just beneath his pile of matted curls. Then he casts about until he comes up with a grubby white T-shirt.

Clack and creak, the trailer’s flimsy door pops open and below springs groan as the Mason climbs within, Luys in yellow corduroy and rough brown serge, his hair a neat black cap, two white paper cups in the cardboard caddy in his hand. “Hey,” says Sweetloaf, turning the T-shirt around, inside-out and back again, “you have any fucking idea what the fuck time it is? Because I did not mean to sleep this fucking late.”

Luys smiles. It’s a gentle smile, to see Sweetloaf there, knelt on the alcoved bed, jockey shorts and goggles, terribly delicate shoulders, those knees too great for his thighs, the T-shirt slowing, stilling in his hands, “sun’s fucking up,” he’s saying, “we gotta get the fuck on our way, is that chai?”

Luys sets the caddy on the table of the booth there in the nose of the trailer, then steps down the length of it, heavy steps one, two, three, “wait a fucking,” says Sweetloaf, as a big brown hand reaches to cradle the side of his head, thumb of it quite gently stroking his cheek, a bit of leather tied about the wrist. “My lord,” murmurs Sweetloaf, even as he presses a kiss to the rough-edged palm. “We have to go.”

Both those hands now, cupping his shoulders, and Luys stoops as Sweetloaf lifts his mouth for a kiss, a lightly gentle kiss, and brief, but then another too quickly opening to something hungry, forceful, mouth seizing mouth, tongue parting lips, a grunt from Sweetloaf, his own hands pushing against Luys’s shoulders, fingers crumpling yellow corduroy even as he sighs into a third and savoring kiss.

“Her grace,” says Sweetloaf, when Luys lets go his lips, “expects us,” opening his eyes, “expected us, at sunup this very whoop!” as Luys pushes him back on the rumpled umber comforter, serge knees dimpling the bedsheets, pinning Sweetloaf’s hips between them, the one hand still gripping a shoulder, the other wrenching aside the tails of his yellow shirt, slither of belt and jangling clank of buckle undone, “wait,” Sweetloaf’s saying, “sir,” as Luys releases his burgeoning cock from the lopping flap of his fly, “we have to,” as Luys folds over him one hand driven into the sheets a strut the other gripping Sweetloaf’s pompadour, “her grace,” says Sweetloaf, but lever and sway and hips and hand, the glistening mauve that brushes his chin, his cheek, his mouth a grimace turned away, “my lord,” he says, “my fucking lord,” as his head’s turned, tipped, placed, thick fingers crimping his curls, he sputters, “the father, father of our lord, by my good father and by the ghost and the apostles twelve,” Luys has pushed himself up and drooping back, and Sweetloaf beneath him’s braced up on his elbows, “and the seven who stand with me,” he’s saying, he’s chanting, “and listen to the things that drop from his mouth, back the fuck off! Celtatalbabal! Io Sabaoth!” and he spits. Luys has drawn the one leg back and off the bed, and now the other, taking a step uncertain, back. “Rous!” shouts Sweetloaf, sitting up, and Luys takes back another step, “Rous!” and another, “Rous!” until he fetches up against the booth, “Rous!” yelps Sweetloaf once more, tossing blankets and sheets aside, yanking his dungarees into his lap. Luys puts a hand back, trembling, and presses it to the table to still it, then leans a pivot to swing himself into the booth, the clink of his loosened belt against the tabletop.

Sweetloaf’s got his dungarees on, he’s buttoning them up, “the taste,” he’s muttering, and then, “I got no fucking idea,” wrestling into his T-shirt, goggles pompadour and all, “maybe Beaumont’s rubbing off on me,” kicking himself to the end of the bed, “fucking Christy-Ann,” snatching his shoes from the floor. Luys watches, impassive, that hand of his quite still there by the cups still in the caddy.

“Well?” says Sweetloaf, his hand on the handle of the door. “You coming? Cause I’m sure as shit going.”

Luys takes in a deep breath, but then looks away, down the cramped length of the trailer, past the spill of garbage from under the little sideboard sink, to the ruin of the bed tucked at the end.

“Yeah,” says Sweetloaf, opening the flimsy door. “My lord, sir, you want some fucking advice?”

“Not especially,” says the Mason.

“Get yourself the fuck together,” says Sweetloaf, and out he steps.

“My lady Chatelaine!” cries one of them, and five or six steps above she stops with a clang, lowering her head before swinging back to glare down at them both brought up quite short behind, beneath, Trucos and Getulos in worn coveralls streaked and smeared with smatters of differing colors, side by side on those skeletal stairs, each with a paint-speckled boot on the same perforated tread.

“Don’t,” she says, “call me that. And if you are gonna call me that, don’t fucking say my lady. Are we clear?”

“Of course” and “Yes, my – of course.”

“Cause I wanted to think we were clear the last time,” she says, “but here we are again,” and she lifts the steaming paper cup in her hand, an admonition, “so, are we?” Her enormous grey T-shirt says Dirtbag Algorithm. “Absolutely, fucking, clear?”

A look, between the two of them. The one says, “Absolutely, my lady, but,” and the other winces. “What must we do?”

“What should we do?”

“We need a decision!”

“He can’t be right!” and a shove, against the railing, “He’s wrong! He’s wrong!” pushed back, into the wall. “Which way,” and “Where,” and “should she look” and “Guys,” says Gloria, but “should she be facing,” they continue, “forwards?” and “guys,” she says, “guys,” but “toward the rear!” and “Leading them on!” and “Drawing them in!” and “Guys!” she shouts, and the ringing clomp of her cork-soled wedge on the stair. “Enough! Geeze. Just, make the call. This is your show, your deal, it’s your call. Okay? I can’t, I can’t make it for you. I’m not gonna do that,” turning away, another step up, but then she looks back, a gesture with her cup, “but make it quick, okay? It’s already Monday. We roll on Saturday,” and up and up she goes, leaving them stood there, turning slowly to face each other’s consternation.

Up on the balcony, Gloria’s stopped before the door, now a pink so glossily soft it almost seems to give under the exploratory pressure of a fingertip, to tack as it’s lifted away, and maybe a ghost of a print left behind. The pink’s been laced with tendrils of feathery barely white, leaf-shapes stenciled in curls and coils that twine together but never repeat. She looks to the two of them clanking back down the staircase, into the hurl and the burl, the palettes of those spattered coveralls predominately pink, overlaid with drips and splotches of ivory and white. She takes hold of the knob of rose-tinted crystal, turns it, and opens the door.

The office within is still too small, too bright, the carpet still grimy, the escritoire remains half-buried under papers. “They painted the door again,” says Gloria.

“Hadn’t noticed,” says Anna, sat before the desk, brief grey shorts and a frilly blouse, sorting the papers, this precarious pile, that teetering stack.

“Why would you,” says Gloria, taking a wincing sip from her cup. “I mean, it’s not like it’s ever off its hinges, or we’re tripping over dropcloths, or hey, are those the rest of them?”

Anna can only watch helplessly as Gloria seizes the papers from her hands, “I told you,” she says, her patience distressed, “it was put through Saturday. To be delivered this morning. Despite the holiday.”

The papers, of a size, are oddly weighted, plastic cards affixed to the bottom thirds, “Yeah, I know,” Gloria’s saying as she rummages ungainly through them, cards click-clacking, “but still,” Trebizond, Trebizond, Trebizond, the letters stamped in flashing golden plastic.

“This brings the total number drawing from your account to thirty-seven,” says Anna.

“Yeah?” says Gloria, tapping the papers against an edge of the desk, neatening up the edges, looking up to see Anna’s sternly frown. “I thought you said this wouldn’t be a problem.”

“I said I could get them. I never said,” a sigh, both sharp and pointed, “no one,” she says, “has ever done anything on this,” a gesture toward the sheaf in Gloria’s hands, “scale,” she says, “before. I couldn’t,” and a slow shake of her head, “possibly, tell you if, or if not, this,” sitting heavily back with a creak, “was or was not to be a problem, which,” taking off her spectacles, “is,” she says, wiping the one lens, and the other, with a tail of her blouse, “a problem,” slipping them back into place, lips pursed in a pinch.

“Well,” says Gloria, “okay then,” dropping the pages indiscriminately atop another pile, “all the more reason.” Zipping pop of unstripping stickum, she rips the card from the topmost page, tossing the paper aside. Another zip, toss, and another, zip, clack of cards together in her fingers, paper fluttering settling onto the carpet.

“Gloria,” says Anna, a monishment.

“What, it’s not like they need to read the letter,” says Gloria, zip, toss. “Study the terms.” Zip, clack. “Weigh pros and cons.” Pop, flap. “Sign anything.” Zip, click. Flutter. “All they have to do,” she says, “all. They have. To do.”

“Is what, Suzette?”

Gloria, holding out the next denuded letter, lets it fall, flop. “I thought you were all in on this,” she says.

“All in,” says Anna, with a questioning lilt.

“Dammit, Anna, this is not something you do just because,” and “I didn’t,” Anna’s saying, but, “because, because this only works,” says Gloria, forcefully, “this only works if we’re all, all of us, all in.”

“All in what?”

“All in!” shouts Gloria. “Agreement! Together! On this!” Knocking the rest of the freighted pages clumsily into the air, toppling the stack they’d been resting on to slither and flittering slide as Anna scrambles to stem the flood, Gloria, opening her mouth, shutting it up again.

“There’s no need for histrionics,” says Anna stiffly, gathering papers up from the floor.

“I’m just,” says Gloria, “I’m trying to help people.”

“I know,” says Anna, sitting back up. “I know.” She’s folding discarded letters together along their creases, setting the tidy bundles aside. “But you get so angry, doing it.”

“Shouldn’t I?” snarls Gloria, shuffling quickly click-clack through the cards in her hands, “Here,” she says, “I’ll go call Thorpe,” holding one of them up between a couple of fingers, “least we could do for her. And here,” winging another, “get that to Addison,” she’s heading for the door as Anna fumble-juggling manages to catch it. “I mean, thank God for what happened to Melissa, right?” says Gloria, scowl souring even as she does, “else we’d be up to thirty-eight.”

The door’s jerked open, slams shut. Anna flinches. Turns back to the stacks of paper, resettling her spectacles, “One might think,” she mutters, tucking the folded letters into a pigeonhole, “the books would be more easily kept, an it all flows just one way.”

Rattle of gunfire, whoop of triumph, but he’s knelt here in the bathroom, unconcerned, shoulders draped in a robe of worn brown terrycloth. Whump of an explosion forced through television speakers, loud enough yet to rattle the bottles and cans that litter the bismuth-pink tub. He nudges one with a fingertip, an empty chime, the clack and hollow rattle of vacated cans against damp fiberglass unevenly stained with something rustily brown, distributed in swipes and smears that rise up the sides to an abruptly level ring a couple inches below the rim, well above the garbage within. The XO, the CO, Chad, sits heavily back on his heels, “Shit,” he grunts. “I just wanted a fucking beer.”

Staccato ostinatos of small-arms fire, hectoring shouts, get him, get him get him, tempo raggedly hastening as the timbre shrills until, shuffling down the hall he grimaces at the volume, waving a hand irritatedly as if to brush away a swarm of percussive pop-pop-pops, he scowls at the howls of disappointment, you utter chud, how did you miss, he was standing right there!

He turns away from that boisterous front room, out onto an awkward landing, a short flight of stairs dropping from it, treads hacked and gouged, into a kitchen, checkerboard floor obscured by smears and streaks of mud and grease and other stuff, the stickily rippled playa orange and brown and dull dark red left by whatever might’ve seeped from the grim black garbage bags and paper sacks piled about the almost unseen can, overburdened themselves with spilling slopping garbage, more empty bottles and cans and also wadded crumpled wrappers and paper towels, tailings of food half-eaten, pizza crusts and burrito rinds, glistening slimy plops of this or crumbling ridges of that, deposits of wetly dark coffee grounds and there what might once have been a handful of jojos. He steps off the stairs, off the track of something dragged at some point through the filth across the kitchen toward the back door, leaving a wake of rusted, ruddied stains through and under, displacing the mud and the grease and whatever else, but he’s headed for the fridge, there by the big sheet of plywood leaned up against the cabinets. Yanks open the door on overstuffed unlit chaos, “shit,” he says, to himself, “right,” expression souring about that stiffly slick white scar, “Jesus, it’s starting to smell.” Gently, gingerly closing the door of it, clink.

“Say the word,” growls the man behind him, and “Jesus!” he yelps, a faltering step to one side, turning, as the growling heedlessly continues. “I’ll have her up to core it out. Somebody’s got to deal with this mess.”

“Don’t,” says Chad, says the CO, “don’t fucking do that,” a freighted breath, “don’t,” he says, again.

“Don’t?” Heavy steps toward him, that broad-brimmed black hat pulled low, that jacket of army-surplus green. “We still gotta get something straight,” a kick at a ringingly empty can, squelch into filth, “you don’t tell me don’t.”

“Don’t you fucking,” says the CO, staggered back, fumble-hand catching the railing behind him, as explosions redouble out front, he’s struggling gulping trying to catch his breath, “Moody, I swear to God – ”

“Swear to me,” snarls Moody, shoving back a ragged cuff, flash of gold, light slung from a crystal dial, and the CO turning his head away opens eyes squeezed shut and stood there before him, breathing like a bellows, the CO, one knobble-knuckled hand clenched in a fist on the linoleum table-top scrubbed clean, the other lifting up a glossy blue brochure rolled in a crumpled tube, shaking it in the CO’s face as he draws back, trembling, “No,” he manages to say.

“Annapolis,” the CO’s sneering, “the Naval fucking Academy, is that what you think you want?”

“They, they,” the CO’s stammering, “they said they, they want me,” and “What?” the CO barks, “What is it they want?” and “they said, because of the,” and “tell me what, what is it,” shaking that crumpled brochure with every imperative, “the test score, the test,” the CO’s saying, “the, the PSAT,” wincing at a slap of laughter from the CO. “The test? They don’t give a good God damn about any damn test or your brains, your moral character, any of that shit. They got your name, boy,” uncrumpling the brochure, stabbing the mailing label with a finger, “because you are my witless, worthless son,” rattle of glossy paper as the brochure’s hurled away, “and I sank a God damned Japanese sub for them, right in the God damn mouth of the Columbia, nineteen and forty three, and look what good it got me!”

But the CO’s looking away, toward that oblong of ocean brightly blue on the spotless checkerboard floor, a slender destroyer, unfussily grey, steaming serenely across it. His T-shirt’s striped with orange and yellow and brown, his jawline smoothly untroubled by stubble, cheek unstiffened by any scar. Flinching at the sudden crack of an explosion, loud, but not so loud enough to be so close, to ring and shake the cans and bottles piled up with the garbage and, pinch of a frown, he looks up from the filth to see sharp-scowling Moody, the hat, that jacket, those eyes, the heavy gold watch about his wrist. “You know what has to be done,” says Moody.

Blinking, mouth twisted about some sour taste, “Fuck you,” spits the CO.

“Jasper’s dead! Bambi shot him! Cops ain’t doing a goddamn thing! It’s a conspiracy, dammit, all the way up to the top of this stinking city! Chad!” but the CO’s lurching away up the steps to the awkward landing, “You know what you have to do, you worthless, useless sack of – ”

“Useful,” says the CO, turning abruptly, one hand on the balustrade. “You want useful?” Gunfire rising once more somewhere behind him. “Go get me a bottle of something. Whiskey. Old Crow, I don’t give a shit. I,” he takes a step, as if to come back down, and Moody, clutching the crown of his hat, takes his foot off the bottom stair, “I am the commanding officer,” says the CO. “You will not speak to me that way again.”

Moody lowers his hand, “Oh yeah?” he says. “Or what? Or what?” But the CO’s gone, through the doorway, past the hall, into the clamorous front room.

“That is exactly, what I said,” she mutters to herself, unknotting the soft bow from about her throat. “Six, it was six of them.” Lets it drop to join the jacket already crumpled on the tightly woven carpet. “But that’s okay with me.” Kicking off her kitten heels, shaking back her corkscrew curls, she sets to unbuttoning her blouse.

Naked but for sturdy briefs, she steps to the heavy curtains, checking the drape of them, smoothing their opaquely heavy fall with a sweep of her hand. “Tuesday,” she says, turning back to the bed, draped with blankets a touch more brown than the carpet. “Time to pay for the hamburgers.” She pushes the underpants over her hips and down.

There on the bed by a shut-up laptop a parcel, wrapped in burlap, and a small tin box. She takes up the parcel, unfolding the wrapping until what’s left in her hand is the stub of a candle the width, perhaps, of a finger, but not even so long anymore as a knuckled joint. She sets it with exaggerated care on the carpet. “King and Queen of Caledon,” she says, taking up the tin, “how many miles to Babylon?” Sliding back the lid of it. “Eight, and eight, and eight again,” she says, pinching out a match, bulbously white-tipped. “Shall I get there by candlelight?” Striking the match on the bottom of the tin, the sudden rushing flare of light in her hands, she squats as it settles into itself, a steady, silent flame above the candle, its ragged tallow collar, the sooty crumble of wick. “Aye,” she says, “and back again,” but there’s only a candle, burning on the carpet at the foot of the bed, the discarded suit, the closed-up laptop, and otherwise that dimly generic room is empty.

The carpet under her hands, her knees, a loose grey shag, and it’s been some time since it was last vacuumed. She pushes herself to her feet, glossy corkscrew ringlets dulled, her back, her arms gone ashen in the green-white light of fluorescent tubes caged in lines above, the meticulous definition of her painted lips and eyelids washed away. She coughs, once. The man at the head of the table does not look up from the cards he’s adeptly sorting despite the cigarette that smolders between two fingers, reaching to snap down card after index card, there, and there, pastel blue, pink, yellow, each with a word or phrase or passage handwritten in thin blue ink. His shirt is white, his jacket a rope-stripe of indigo and ivory, his round glasses rimmed with clear plastic, black hair oiled and combed in a severe part. “Jasmine,” he says, “then absence, then jasmine.”

“I only have a couple minutes,” she says. “Four at most.”

He looks up, light flaring from his glasses. “Jasmine. Absence. Jasmine. Countersign.”

Her lips pinch. “Carnation,” she says. “Offal. Jasmine. And it’s cold.”

“Dr. Uniform,” he says, and returns to his cards.

“Mother,” she says.

Snap. Snap. He lifts the cigarette to his lips for a ruminative drag, picks up a card to sweep it across to the other side of the array, where he taps it once, twice, then takes up another and pushes back from the table, getting to his feet. The wall behind him’s panes of frosted glass, more greenly light behind, covered over with index cards fixed in neatly ordered ranks and files. “You lost another operator Thursday night,” he says, sticking one of the cards to the bottom of one of those lines.

“I wasn’t informed there’d be one to lose,” she says, arms folded, pebbled with gooseflesh.

He sticks the second card to the glass by itself, alone. “As you have made abundantly clear, you are Station Rose.” Lifting the cigarette to his lips. “A good head of station is always already aware of whatever might happen within her purview.” A sip of smoke. He turns to look to her again.

“It helps, if we get read in, whenever Ops decides to go walkabout within our, as you put it, purview.”

A dismissive wave, as he sits back down, “A simple errand to fetch an item, one of many, that ought to have taken an hour or more at most. There was no need to distract you.”

Shivering, “You,” she snaps, and then, collecting herself, “had one of your contractors, try a smash and grab for a by-blow right in the middle of surveillance critical to our end of Agile Saffron. And you didn’t think I needed to be distracted.”

He shifts the position of another card, snap. “So you were aware of the details.”

“After the fact.”

“Tell me, Dr. Uniform: why is surveillance by the airport critical to Agile Saffron?”

He doesn’t look up to see the twist of her lips as she considers how to say what she says next. “The night I invoked Setebos protocols. The night Saffron Rose was reactivated. Something, else, came back, with it.” A deep, shuddering breath. “Color Glass,” she says.

At that he looks up, glasses blanked over with light. “There’s been nothing in your reports.”

“I had to be certain,” she says. “The situation’s, delicate, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”

Snap, he sets down a card, sherbet green. Moves another, cornflower blue. “You ascertained this on Friday, then, when you, Frances, put yourself in the same room as a queen, and a dormant scale of qlippoth?”

She looks down at that, away.

“You will document this thoroughly in a report that should have been on my desk that afternoon.” Snap a pale pink card. “You will keep the two of them otherwise apart until an action’s been approved,” shuff, goldenrod slid from here to there, “for the permanent sequestration of Color Glass. Said action to be conducted under the auspices of this Directorate, and not Station Rose.” Looking up. “Is that,” he says, but she’s not there anymore.

“Ah,” he says. “Of course. Nevertheless.” Snap, another card.

The candle’s just a rim of wax on the beige carpet, a smoking nubbin of char where once had been a wick. She unfolds an arm to seize the blanket from the bed, tumbling the laptop to the floor as she wraps it draggled about herself, lowering her shoulders as her shivering, slowly, subsides. “Should’ve been a goddamn phone call,” she mutters, stooping to snatch up her underpants.

Hands by a bare hip, sun-browned, water-beaded, undo the knot of a bikini string, A hint of things to come, the caption, 2,421 likes. Don’t tease us, Sooeurs! says the first comment, followed by a string of emojis, hearts red and purple, a peach, a spurt of pale blue droplets. “What’s wrong?” says Ysabel, leaning close.

Chrissie swipes the photo away, shuts off the phone, “Ettie,” she says. “Posted that, to our feed. Without telling me.”

“From, ah, Los Angeles?” Ysabel presses a kiss to her shoulder. “Do you regret not going with her?”

Chrissie curls her fingers in artful tangles, inky black in the shadows, “No,” she says, quite firmly, and it’s her mouth that’s kissed next. “Though,” she murmurs, when it’s over, “it has only been sixty-seven hours and forty-five minutes. Or so. But she shouldn’t’ve done that.” Her hair’s been shorn to a fuzz of candlelit gold that clings to the curve of her skull.

“Very rude,” says the Starling, sat up on the other side, her yellow bob mussed to disarray, collarbone ruddied by a smudge of lipstick.

“Then you must post something of your own.” Ysabel sits up. “We should stage a tableau! Have Petra photograph it, I’m certain she’d be superior to,” a dismissive fillip of her fingers toward the phone, “whoever did that,” but Chrissie’s shaking her head, “I don’t want to bug her,” she says, nestled among the pillows. “And anyway, there’s the show, tomorrow.” Rugs and wraps now lopped up to her chin. “That’s enough.”

“Your television début!” Ysabel claps once, delighted, looking from one to the other, “as sexy devil-spirits, how could I forget.”

“As tulpas, my lady,” says the Starling.

“I’ll be the tulpa,” says Chrissie. “Both, I guess.”

“What will you look like? What will you wear?”

The Starling shrugs. “We’ll find out tomorrow.”

“Fitting’s at six,” says Chrissie.

“But you must have some ideas – go on,” nudging the Starling, nudging Chrissie, “whip something up. Dress in character. Your Queen commands!”

Leaning over Ysabel, the Starling offers a hand to Chrissie, who takes it with a sigh to pull herself up and, hand in hand, shedding silk and satin and brocade, bolsters and cushions bumped and slippingly tumbled, they step through the ring of candles flickering in their wake, padding toward the dressing screen set up there, between two of the blocky columns, and the frame of it is whitewashed wood, and the panels of pale linen. Ysabel smiling tugs cushions and pillows to arrange a comfortably makeshift throne against the side of the widely empty bed, and drapes her lap with a diaphanous scarf of purple roses and blue, edged with orange tassels. Laid out on the far side of that bed atop the blankets smoothly spread and tucked a black T-shirt, a kilt tartaned with black and red and white, an assortment of tights in blacks and greys, neatly rolled, a pair of fingerless cycling gloves.

“Majesty,” says someone in the shadows off that way.

“Not now,” says Ysabel. “Set the scene: music, something good for a dramatic entrance, at a nightclub. And a glass of the vodka, the vanilla vodka.”

A clack, and the space is filled with a humming chord of voices stretched, a simple echoing phrase plucked from a guitar, breathy vocals, I’m in bed, texting girls, but I’m thinkin bout you baby, and Ysabel takes a colorless sip from the slender fluted glass in her hand.

Buckled platform pumps step from behind the screen, the one, the other, hand still in hand, yellow hair in ringlets tumbled to their shoulders, bodices of ivory folds plunging from their necks in scoops that shift and sway and somehow gather in tightly brief hip-hugging skirts, and clattering bracelets about their wrists, and filigreed armbands of gold, as the chorus swells to a thumping crescendo, you might be someone I could love, or you’re just somebody I fucked once. “Oh, that’s a start,” says Ysabel, but the Starling straightens, hips unslung, arm lowering, as Chrissie steps close, behind, “We have an audience,” she says.

Ysabel’s wryly merry leer melts as the music abruptly ceases with a clack. Next to a column there a figure fitfully limned by candlelight, the crease and placket of a fine white shirt, the knot and drape of a tie, the curls of his long hair. “I created you my Axe,” she says, quite cold and steely sharp. “Shall I have you uncreated? Transformed to a stag, and set upon by hounds?”

“Majesty, I’ve news – ”

“Not! Now!” The candles flare, a slop of light past the columns round about to show the gold of his tie, the gleaming grey of his trousers, the ashen surplus of those curls. “You should be out, with her grace, in the field,” says the Queen, her green eyes fiercely stern.

All in a rush, “Majesty your humble servant has,” he says, “been,” a breath, “tasked, with remaining here, to coordinate her grace’s efforts. But it’s from this vantage that I might report Luys, the Mason, is not either in the field, nor here, nor seen today by any of the court. Her grace is wrothly vexed by this development.”

The Queen’s head droops, with a sigh, black tresses slipping to curtain her breast. “This news,” she says, her words pitched low, “might’ve waited, till we had finished our ablutions.” Chrissie takes a step away from the Starling, but doesn’t lift her hand from the Starling’s arm. Ysabel’s looking back up, her smile considering a return. “But you’re here now,” she says. “You might as well favor us with an opinion: are they not lovely?”

“Majesty?” says Jeffeory, the Axe. Chrissie’s hand slips away as the Starling looks to her with eyes that are green, not blue.

“Play on!” cries Ysabel then, getting abruptly to her feet. “Vodka for all!” Arms out for balance as she negotiates the slippery tumble of pillows and rugs. “I’ll outfit myself as well,” she says, skipping past the candles as the music resumes mid-beat, you this but fuck it, here’s my confession, as Ysabel catches Chrissie’s hand, lifts it for a kiss, “We’ll have dancing!” Leaning in to quickly kiss the Starling’s lips even as she’s letting go, twisting away, “Vodka!” she calls. “Shots for all!”

“My lady,” says the Starling, “it’s only just past ten.”

“Not in the Dvůr Sto Věží!” says Ysabel, her smile now wickedly bright, and she ducks behind the screen.

“I couldn’t possibly.”

“No,” says Gloria, “seriously, it’s not,” a hand up as if to push it away, but the gold card doesn’t waver in Anne Thorpe’s hand. She’s sat at one end of the nubbled green couch, black trousers crossed at the knee, mustard-yellow sweater vest, her snap-brim at a jaunty angle on her head. “It’s not anything you’d ever have to worry about,” says Gloria. “That’s the beauty of it.”

“It’s precisely why I would have to worry about it,” says Thorpe, but Gloria’s resolutely folding her arms, stood at the edge of the unlit stage, the cavernously busy warehouse opening out behind and below. Thorpe lowers the card, setting it precisely on the arm of the couch. “It’s been a couple-three weeks. Why call me today?”

“You’re still,” says Gloria, “working on the story.”

“I’m always working on a story.”

“Well, this,” a gesture toward the card, “is part of that. I mean, you don’t think it all,” a gesture tossed over her shoulder, at all the daily bustle, “came from my father’s estate, did you? That’s still tied up in, who knows what. Legal shit.”

Drawing back her hand, Thorpe peers down her nose at the shining card, “Bank of,” she says, “Trebizond? Okay, it’s definitely not just the ethics I’m worried about.”

“It’s totally legit.”

“Sure.”

“Anything you need. Within reason.”

“This,” says Thorpe, looking pointedly past Gloria toward the activity below, the overflowing stalls to either side, the yammer and chatter, jangle and strum, the rattle-thump and clang and chime and the clack-lack blunder surrounding that great wooden tub in the middle of it all, the scaffolding at the other end framing a half-painted mural, great sharp fang of a mountain lit up in orange and magenta, unearthly pinks and greens and an appalling blue that looms over what might soon become a tree-stuffed town, “all this?” says Thorpe. “Is within reason?”

Gloria shrugs winsomely. “Reason is,” she says, “as reason does. Don’t you need something like this?”

“Christ,” says Thorpe, studiously refusing to look at the card, “of course I do. That’s the whole fucking point. Why. Did you. Call me. Today.” And then, as Gloria looks toward the half-opened overhead door, “Are you really going to make me ask? About the truck, out there? The trailer? What you’re going to do with it?”

“You saw that?” says Gloria, and she snorts at the stone-faced look of patience depleted that Thorpe offers in response. “It’s, another part of the story. Might make a good ending. We’re building a float. We’re gonna crash the Starlight Parade.”

The stone holds a moment before it cracks in an exasperated, a perplexed, an admiring chortle of a sigh. “Good lord, girl,” says Thorpe. “You are bound and determined to get yourself noticed.”

“It’s a celebration!” cries Gloria, throwing up her hands, turning about, “all of this, of everything we’ve been able to do,” looking about, turning back, “we deserve to get noticed. It’s gonna be epic. It has to be.”

“And the very next day, you’re shut the fuck down.”

“You forget a step or two?” Gloria throws wide her arms, taking all of it in, “This whole place is mine! Free and clear!”

Another complex guffaw. “You mean that circus, a couple-three weeks ago? Sweetie, absolutely nothing about any of that was a legally binding document.”

“They can,” says Gloria, but she’s looking down, turning away, a change in the tenor of the bustle below, a sharpness, a stentoriousness, a shift in focus surging about that tub. “I mean,” Thorpe’s saying, “did you think you saved the Lovejoy Ramp, too? Gloria?” But Gloria’s stooping, a hand on the edge there, stepping off from the stage to drop to the floor below, “Hey!” making her way toward the knot of hobs and cods coalesced to one side of the wooden tub, faces concerned about something in the middle of them all, arms outstretched, helping hands, all suddenly undone, shoved back, flung up, away, some stumbled to the concrete floor, some against the staves of that tub, a haze of golden dust a-shimmer in the air with a yelping coughing whoop, and hands on the lucent Himmelbarb’s shoulders Gloria steps between Cherrycoke and Dewslip, past Loati and Angavelle, to come to the hunch of a girl on the floor, blowsy madras shorts, black hair in curls, shaking with sobs, “Olivia?” says Gloria, small, appalled.

The girl looks up, eyes far too wide, gold smeared about her lips, her cheeks, sheen of it split by the blackening tracks of welling rolling tears, “Gloria,” she says, “oh my God, Gloria,” lunging for her, grasping with hands that drip gold, “She’s had,” says someone, but “Only what you need!” pipes someone else, “Only what you need!” a refrain taken up by others, “Only, only what you need! What you need!”

Gloria kneels to catch her by the elbow, “Olivia,” she’s saying, the waist, “what are you,” but “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Olivia’s saying, “I never, I didn’t know, I had to know, Chloe, Chloe said it was just, but it’s, it’s so much,” those eyes, and nothing but darkness between and beneath the lids of them, filling up so wide, “I can see,” she’s saying, “it’s all so,” twisting in Gloria’s grip, “wait,” says Gloria, “Olivia, wait,” but those eyes look past her, up to all the rest of them pressed close about, “the hands,” says Olivia, “the noses, the cheeks! I see it now! The clothes! It’s, it’s like,” and Gloria flinches as that wondrous mask of cracked and grimy gold, as those eyes turn back to her, “Muppets!” cries Olivia, “Brian Froud! Brian Froud Muppets!” Brows flaking brilliance as they lift in amused bemusement over those depthless eyes, “You’re wearing a wimple!”

On the other side of the tub Ellen Oh lurches with a shove against her tattooed shoulder, and turns to catch the end of a baseball bat before it can poke her again, sweat gleaming her cloak of sharp-drawn ink, blinked from frowning eyes. Marfisa draws back the bat to an angle en garde, “They have it well enough in hand,” she says. “Let’s resume.” White-gold hair in a ruthlessly braided queue, grey shorts and T-shirt, sleekly seamless running shoes, both hands on the black-taped handle of the bat she twirls once, slowly, swings a slow deliberate blow that Ellen parries with a quick shift of the staff in her hands, clack, stepping to one side bare feet deftly crossing one before another beneath the belling cuffs of yoga pants. Another deliberate blow, caught by another jerk of that staff, slender and long, lemony palely troubled by a hint of grain, held warily, hands wide apart. Marfisa sets to with one-handed alacrity, slinging blows that Ellen grimly blocks, down from above, up from below, roundabout into a jab of a thrust clack-lack, whack, whack, pressing forth, falling back, leaning in, to and fro this emptied stretch of aisle between the stalls. “Hit me,” says Marfisa. “Hit me. You’re not trying to hit me.”

“I don’t,” says Ellen, clack, “see the point,” lack-crack, as Marfisa tosses the bat from hand to hand, turns a chop to an uppercut that Ellen whacks aside, “none of this,” stepping back, swing ducked, “will do, any good,” whick, “against that monster,” clack-crack, but back she steps again, and back.

“Exercise!” cries Marfisa, whirling the bat above her head. “Is it not the case,” a chop, and Ellen blocks, “every day you cannot manage to race your heart,” chop, and block, “a measurable stretch, why, then,” crack, “a day is stricken from the brief allotment given you to live!” another chop, but Ellen ducking skips back from it, “Make room! Make room!” someone’s bellowing.

Marfisa lets the unchecked force of that last blow swing her bat down around and up, readily cocked in both hands above her shoulder. “Make room!” It’s Templemass, waving his red-draped arms as he backs his way down the aisle ahead of Gloria and Big Jim Turk and, cradled in Jim’s arms, Olivia. His shirtfront smeared with gold where she’s clutched it groaning, sniveling, gleaming cheeks beneath those black and empty eyes, and the mass of others pressing after, far more than Templemass might hope to clear with his exhortations. Ellen steps back into a stall lined with racks of shawls and bandanas and cravats, as Marfisa, bat still at the ready, steps into a stall across the aisle, hung about with garishly dour portraits on fields of velvety black. “Make room!” cries Templemass once more.

As they’re passing Olivia cranes up in Big Jim’s arms to look to the one side, the other, that cracking golden mask hollowing about an opening mouth, those empty eyes, and she points a golden hand at Marfisa, “Horse!” she cries, she screams, pointing at Ellen, “Horse!” struggling against Jim’s unyielding arms, throwing off Gloria’s comforting hand, and with another “Make room!” they’re off, away down the aisle, headed for the arch at the far end, followed by the tremulously murmurous crowd of those about, the rest stood watching, looking away, resuming what they’d been doing before, and but none of them left there by the wooden tub.

Marisa her bat yet cocked steps back into the clearing aisle with an expectant look for Ellen, leaned there on her staff in the stall opposite, but Ellen’s looking up past the tub, not to the unlit stage, not to the woman watching there in black and ugly yellow, but to the man headed toward them both, quite short, rough moleskin over discreetly checkered shirtsleeves, trousers of rumpled corduroy, “You,” he says, to Marfisa, “you should not be here.”

“This hall’s as open to me,” she says, “as to anyone, whose jacket isn’t blue,” tock, the tip of her bat on concrete.

“You should not be here,” he says, again. “The news has spread, of what your brother’s said you’ve gone and done.”

Ellen’s laid down her staff, she’s taken up a roughly simple jacket, shrugging it over her tattoos. “I have no brother, Shrieve,” Marfisa’s saying.

“Let’s not mince words, my lady Outlaw. The Viscount has told of a figure with the head of a horse, that broached the house at King’s Heights, and did there murther the Glaive Rhythidd, and cut him to the bone.”

“His excellency’s mistaken,” says Marfisa, flatly quiet.

“Of this, I have no doubt,” says Bruno. “Nonetheless. The Glaive is gone, and her Majesty’s Huntsman is gone. It were best if the Outlaw were not to be seen so openly at court, for the next few days.”

“Few,” says Marfisa, looking past him, over his shoulder, to Ellen, the staff once more in her hands. “I wonder if the Shrieve’s not optimistic.”

Bruno claps a hand to Marfisa’s shoulder. “I’ve no doubt the perpetrator will be soon found,” he says, smile faltering as she blinks, once, and he lifts his hand away. “A violation, of this magnitude.” He steps back, starting at how close Ellen has come. “I trust you’ll – both, agree.”

“Well,” says Ellen, when Bruno’s out of earshot, “it’s not as if we’ll find the monster here.”

“Nor my brother, neither,” says Marfisa.

It’s early, of a dim and sodden morning. Thin light seeps through enormous flower-shapes painted across the window-glass to settle on the high thick mattress laid upon the floor, gently picking rumples and folds from among the tangled sheets, the pillows piled, lightening them, but not enough to draw out any differences between the pastels lurked within, only just enough to define the heights, the crumpled peaks and ridgelines, the window-facing slopes. He shifts, the shape of him turning from side to back, a massif obliterating, remaking the bedscape, crumpling ranges, raising up plains, geologic time made legible for one brief turbulent moment before all is settled in a new configuration. His face now visible, the summit of his nose, that light too weak to find many at all of the white hairs hatching the lush black copse of his mustache. A snort, air roaring through the caverns of his nostrils, and he blinking opens the lightless tarns of his eyes, “Gloria?” he says, when he can.

She’s sat at the foot of the mattress, jet-black hair a finely threaded shawl to drape the bulk of her shoulders, spill down her pale bare back.

“Sweetling,” he says. “Your friend will be fine. All is well.”

That hair unsettles as her shoulders lift, a sigh, a slump to still again. “You don’t know Olivia.”

He sits up, sheets slipping, “It happens,” he says, “the first time one,” a breath, “overindulges,” he reaches for her, but falters, falls short, his hand settling instead on his sheeted knee. “An embarrassment, yes, but hardly more than a wince and a blush, and it’s not as if she’s part and parcel of what goes on hereabouts, your friend from school. And when her father came to fetch her, he was none the wiser,” but he surges up sheets falling away to take hold of those heaving shoulders as she chokes out a sob, “oh,” he says, roughly gentle, “my deckled dove, my darling dear, what is it, what,” his arms about her now, rough cheek against hers shining wetly, holding her until she catches hold of herself, her sobs resolving in a deeply determined breath. “Melissa,” she says. “Not Olivia. Melissa. She didn’t, didn’t have to,” as she curls herself against him, “you told me to, play the game, change it, stay at the table and change the game. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t, if I had, if I did,” and he says, “Sweetling, don’t,” but she’s saying “she wouldn’t have, she wouldn’t be, dead.”

A kiss for the top of her head, grizzled mustache pressed to sleek black hair. “That’s not on you. None of that could be on you.”

“Isn’t it?” Pulling away, looking up. “This is my place, Jim. It’s supposed to be my place. I mean, fuck, you wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t have, if I wasn’t, calling the shots around here? Admit it. You wouldn’t look twice at me. If I wasn’t.”

His broad brow ripples with concern. “Well,” he says, agreeably enough, “and it may well be you have the right of it, my deftly diddle. Iffen you weren’t the ball-busting bitch of the walk who every living day is the one to whip this hall into whatever shape it can manage, well,” a smile tenderly hints the corners of his mouth, “it’s true enough, you’d not be resting sweetly in Jim Turk’s arms of a night. You’d not be yourself, but someone else,” and he soothes her scowl with a fleeting brush of his fingertips, “and it’s not anyone else I’d want to be holding,” words worn down to a softly burr, “not anyone, but the entirety, that’s you.”

“Oh, and you think you’re sweet.”

“Ah, no,” he says, “that, for certain, I do not. Sweet ain’t for the likes of you, no. Sweet is what your friend’d want.” She snorts at that, a smile forming in spite of itself. “I declare,” he says, “you spoil me, my morning glory, with your grit, your gumption, your, don’t,” as she pushes away, as laughter threatens her smile, “your accomplishments. Don’t shy away from this. Your friend, what was her name?”

“Olivia.”

“Olivia,” he says, savoring the syllables. “When Olivia’s father came, yesterday, to fetch her from this place, your place, the place that you have built, and did you see, the look, on his face, in his eyes, as he did so?” His guilelessly open smile, his gentling joy. “I never had a daughter, that I know, but rest assured, you, as you are, here and now, what you’ve done: there’s never a cause in this world that would have a father look as peevishly on you,” but at that she shudders, yanks away, scowly souring, “My father?” she spits. “How would he, look at me? At what I did, with his, bullshit dream?” Ostentatiously looking about, the walls of plaster crumbling, the layer of paint drooped away from the ceiling there, the elaborate bloom of a water stain, details coming into focus as morning stretches to fill the room. “He was gonna have all this torn down, because he couldn’t be fucking bothered. You think,” and the look turned to him then, and he blinks, “you think I give a good God damn how he’d look at me, or even if? You know, you have any idea, what I’d say to him? If he was here, right now? I’d say, go fuck yourself, is what.”

“Sweetling,” he says, hushed, “I never meant,” but she holds up a forestalling hand, “Did you hear something?” she says, looking to the brightening windows. “Like a crack?”

Yearning rings in the piano notes, as a bitterly chipper voice sings for you, cause blondes here don’t jump out of cakes. Two women crowded close on stools before a mirror far too bright, both with the same blue eyes, that same nose, the same yellow hair blown out and rounded in enameled bobs. The one to the left shapes her eyes with charcoal daubed about the lids, above, beneath, as the one to the right limns her lips, leaning toward herself in the mirror as rich thick red’s stroked along, around, and the piano changes gears, chin up, put on a pair of these roseys.

“How’s this,” says Chrissie, to her left.

“Let me,” says the Starling, taking Chrissie’s chin in one hand, delicately, lipstick in the other, peering a moment before touching it to those painted lips. “There,” she says, letting go. “Wait.” Neatening a line with a fingertip, lifting away a crumb of color.

“Spoiled, I guess,” says Chrissie, taking up a mascara brush. “You’d think it’d be like riding a bicycle.” The Starling, moueing herself in the mirror, sets to with the lipstick.

“Y’all should already be dressed,” says the harried man in the doorway, an aloha shirt predominately blue over an ivory Henley, “y’all needed on set, like, now.”

“Having to do our own makeup,” says Chrissie, blinking, “takes time.”

“And we’re supposed to,” says the Starling, checking her lips, “whatshername,” says Chrissie, “the intimacy, uh,” a quick stroke, “Terry,” says the Starling.

“I don’t,” says the man in the doorway, scrolling through his phone, “have anything, I just, they’re rigging lights and need you there to check, like, now, so, please, just, get dressed, and, like, go?”

“Dressed?” says the Starling, looking up to him. “In what?”

He looks about the cramped room, the littered counter, the mirror, the two of them perched there, “Shit,” he says. “Costumes. Shit. Let me, just, let me go,” pointing away, ducking out.

“You do that,” says Chrissie, with a sigh.

Closing the door on the din, the ringing chains, the swaying paper-laden baskets, the shun and ponk of pneumatic tubes, all subsumed by the howling whine of that brutishly enormous shredder grinding away beneath the balcony. The latch clicks, and a silence falls to strenuously complement the coziness of the decor stuffed within.

He jerkily undoes the buttons of his linen jacket, shrugs it free of one shoulder, the other, folds it to drape it over the back of a floral armchair stood before that polished desk. His sun-browned head quite bald, slack cheeks grizzled with a dusting of white stubble, eyes bereft of any appreciable emotion, or intent. Turning toward the brick fireplace set in the opposite wall, mantel crowded with a gaggle of matryoshka dolls, a white porcelain vase top-heavy with roses so deeply red they’re black, a throng of sepia-tinted photos in elaborate frames that his emptied eyes seem to fix on, even as his fingers undo the white cuffs of his smoothly cerulean shirt.

He lifts a photo from among the rest, a pudgy woman in a stodgy dress, a pillbox hat swallowing her sculpted curls, a smidge shorter than the men to either side of her, the one in rumpled linen and a wide knit tie, the other in three sharp pieces and hand-painted silk, both quite bald, though their cheeks are each neatly grizzled. He strokes the frame of it once, elegant curlicues of brass suggesting tendrils, or vines, then lets it fall, crack, to the coldly empty grate. Another, the short and pudgy woman in a differently stodgy pantsuit, stood at the very desk behind him, proudly displaying the squat black box of a machine, a lever upright to one side of it. The frame’s an asymmetric thing of slender, overlapping arches that falls from his fingers to the grate with a broken chime of glass. Another, he doesn’t even bother to look at it, and another, this one thrown, smash, and again. Somewhere outside a dim alarm’s begun to sound, just loud enough to trouble the silence here.

The clamor redoubles as the doors swing open, a harshly monotonous blare so loud the shattering of another photograph is lost. The man in the doorway, ink-dappled apron and a blue-backed sheet of paper in his hand, tosses a brusquely dismissive wave at someone, and the klaxon abruptly cuts off. “My lord,” he says. “My lord Welund.”

The last photograph, lifted from the mantel. “It’s been three weeks or more,” says Welund, and drops it to the grate with the clattering others. “Why was none of this cleared away.”

“My lord the Glaive never asked that her, my lord!” as Welund turns away from the hearth. “Your, your brother’s, tie!”

Welund’s hand to the lopsided knot of it, silk striped rigorously blue and rosy pink. “Do you see my brother here?” he says.

“My lord?”

“Do you see my brother in this room?” suddenly sharp, and loud. “Then do not speak of him. Why has the work stopped?” Looking past him, out to the chains hung still, freighted baskets restlessly a-sway with the momentum of their halting, tubes and valves all holding their great breaths, even the monstrous shredder’s stopped, teeth of it quivering visible, and all the clerks in their striped shirts and aprons stood by their roll-top desks. “My lord,” says the clerk beside him, handing over the blue-backed sheet of paper. Welund takes it, then looks down at it, then frowns. “I don’t know this account,” he says.

“It is quite large, my lord.”

“I see that. It mentions subordinancies?”

“Thirty-seven, sir.”

“So many!” Blinking, peering more closely at the fine print. “How is it I’m not familiar with this account?”

“We’ll pull the file, milord. But note,” the clerk leans over the paper, seeking a clause, pointing it out, “one is held by the Queen’s Outlaw.”

Expressions did animate Welund’s face, of concern, annoyance, puzzlement, but all of them now fall away to leave a slackly chill. “I see,” he says, looking up, from the document, to the clerk. “The closure’s noted as of shortly before six,” he turns his wrist to check the watch about it, a silver nest of gears and dials, numbers and hashes picked out in something that gleams like mother-of-pearl. “Three hours lost, already. This account,” handing back the document, “is now a top priority. Any and all collections, repossessions, foreclosures, are to be taken immediately, and thoroughly.” The clerk nods, crisply. “What are you called?”

“Illicuddy, milord.”

Welund collects his jacket from the back of the armchair. “Empty this office. Arrange it as might best suit you. It’s been long enough without a director here on the floor. I trust,” looking the clerk up and down, the white gloves, the gartered sleeves, the ink-splotched apron, gabardine trousers with the cuffs rolled, “you’ll dress accordingly.”

“My lord,” says Illicuddy.

“Get back to work!” bellows Welund, shoving his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, rattling down the stairs even as switches are thrown, pumps chug to life, tubes trembling hum and ring, chains set to back and forth motion and their baskets swinging with them, and with one final decisive flick, the great churning shredder is set in tumultuous motion.

“I’m sorry – wait – ”

“It’s all right – ”

“No, but – ”

“Cut,” the patiently exasperated annoyance, “cut.” Crisply, from over in the corner, “Reset?”

“No,” that patient weariness. Someone else says, “Position two?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“No,” that patience, nearly exhausted, audibly reins in its edge. “No, let’s just, break a moment, in the moment, and then we’ll pick it, we’ll pick it right back up, we’ve got, we’ve still got – ”

“Really. Sorry.”

“Don’t,” that sharpness, loosed, the reins sawn, hauled back, “we’ve got, just a few more moments, to capture, from this vantage, let’s use this, as an opportunity, play it out, play with it, let’s let it take a shape we can, we can use, in the master, these are, these would be, intercuts, I mean, easy money at the brick factory, right? Still rolling?”

“Hadn’t stopped,” crisp as ever, from the corner.

“We got bytes,” slowly lugubrious, “what we don’t got, is time.”

“Okay. Ladies. Gus. You’re looking, fantastic. The, ah, tableau, it’s, it’s working. Now. Assuming we’re, we’re all ready to, get back to it, let’s roll with it again, let it play out, don’t worry so much about – ”

“He can’t touch her,” says the Starling, brightly lit there, on her knees at the foot of the shining white expanse of bed, smokey stockings and a wisp of underwear about her hips and her yellow hair blown out in a rounded bob. “It’s all right,” says Chrissie, sitting up beside her, stockings of smoke, underwear a wisp, “it’s all right,” yellow hair a-bob, “I can,” taking the Starling’s hand, “he can,” her other hand, her arm held awkwardly over her breasts.

“We, ah, talked about that, restriction, when there were, there were three of you.”

“Triplettes,” two syllables ludicrously mournful.

“We talked about it,” says the Starling. “We agreed. Where’s Terry Prudhomme?”

“It’s okay, Star,” says Chrissie, but the Starling’s shaking her head, “No, it’s not.”

“Actually?” says the tanly smoothly man, supinated between them under all that bright bright light, naked the stretch of him from close-cropped hair and clean-shaven cheeks past the broadly sculpted utterly hairless planes and angles of his pecs, the shining tight-packed ridges of his abdomen, the sleekly length of his thighs, his calves to his gleamingly pedicured toes, “this merkin-thingie’s pinching something fierce, the glue or something, I don’t know,” an oddly delicate gesture with one wide hand coming not at all close to the stark green bit of cloth that cups his genitals. “I could use a minute to adjust, if that would help y’all get more, ah, comfortable? Too?”

“I’m sorry,” says Chrissie, and both arms wrapped about herself now, “it was, it won’t, it won’t happen again.”

“Doing fine, darlin,” says the naked man, sitting up to swing his big feet over away off one side of the bed.

“Where,” says the Starling, peering into the darkness beyond all that bright light, “is Terry Prudhomme?”

“It was, her flight got, screwed, the holiday, logistics, are, she’ll be here, when she gets here, but we’ve got this room, this room we’ve got today, we need this, today, it’s all we’ve got, but we’re all professionals, this is good, this is fine, it’s a break, mandated break, definitely a cut now, let’s, let Gus get himself settled, we’ll reconvene in fifteen and pick up right back here, and can somebody get Gus a robe?”

“I’m sorry,” Chrissie’s saying, as the Starling yanks loose a sheet, “I’m sorry, it was just a, like a, flinch. It won’t happen again.”

“This is not,” mutters the Starling, draping that sheet about Chrissie’s shoulders, “what we agreed.”

The first card turned over a single, unmarked color, a brightly yellow laid on the blue-painted floorboards, fnap. The next a metalled bronze, sheenly glimmering in the floating daylight, set down off to the right of the first. The third a glimmering russet placed, after a moment’s hesitation, between and above, and the fourth, turned quickly over, placed below, a dull nut brown, quartering the circle.

She contemplates them a moment, sat on the smooth blue floor at the foot of the mattress on the pallet in the middle of the room, the floor, the sloping ceiling, the attenuated walls all the same flawless eggshell blue, clear and plain and cloudless, her white briefs, her cloak of tattooed ink.

The fifth card is much smaller, eggshell white, cut not from glossy stock but something more like linen. She sets it in the center of that square, taps the back of it, once, then quickly turns it over, snap. Frances Upchurch, say slender, sans-serif letters, and beneath them, in the same font, a simple, ten-digit number. “Two,” she reads, “two, zero. One. One. Sev – ”

“Must you?” says the woman now in the room with her, not too tall, hair bound tightly in a sheaf of tiny corkscrew curls, broad shoulders bared by a sturdy grey tanktop, Miner Normal, it says on the front of it, over a stylized Corinthian capital.

“You’re driving,” says Ellen Oh, setting the rest of the cards to one side. To the other, laid on the smooth blue floor, the flop-empty goggle-eyed head of a horse. Mrs. Upchurch purses her lips. “That so.”

“Why were you in the house, that night.”

“I should’ve thought that was obvious,” but then, with a sigh, Mrs. Upchurch plucks at the knees of her baggy blue sweatpants and, wincing, sits herself across the spread from Ellen. “Forgive my tone, and appearance. Yesterday was an utter bear. Today was to have been a me day.”

“You, ah,” Ellen frowns, “took my call.”

“You summoned me, Ellen Oh.”

“But,” Ellen looks down, at that card, “you gave me your number.”

“I wasn’t expecting you’d,” says Mrs. Upchurch, as Ellen says, “I never thought you’d,” and they both bite off frustrated stops.

“I forget,” says Mrs. Upchurch. “Who you’ve known. What you might’ve picked up, along the way.”

“I wasn’t thinking you’d actually, appear,” says Ellen. “Physically. I’d, uh, would’ve had something, to drink. Snacks.”

A snort too brief to be considered a laugh. “All right,” says Mrs. Upchurch, “so. Tell me why I’m here.”

“The monster,” says Ellen. “How do I kill it.”

Mrs. Upchurch shrugs. “How should I know.”

“You,” Ellen frowns. “That’s what you do. You know things.”

A hand to her breast, “You flatter me, truly,” and the performance of a smile, an eloquently simple mask of those naked eyes, unpainted lips, “but I do have my limits.”

Looking down, at the cards between them. “But you want it dead.”

That smile folds into something at once admonishing and disappointed. “You’re the one who wants to kill, Ellen. Do try to keep up.” And then, head tipping judiciously to one side, “Awfully first-person singular, this morning. Where’s your partner in vengeance?” Ellen, still looking down, her hands on her knees. “Too distracted? Her celebrity crush, perhaps?” Mrs. Upchurch looks up, away, around, the bed, the blue, the gently sifting daylight. The cards. “Her troublesome brother?” The only other anything besides themselves a photograph, hung out in the air of the room, invisible threads secured to unseen anchors set in plaster, between the floorboards, a hand, the back of it roped with veins in rich greys, crisp blacks, reaching for something, or warding it off.

“The monster,” says Mrs. Upchurch. “Let’s call him, Charley, for the sake of convenience. Charley was, once, something of a colleague.”

“Not,” says Ellen, “their grandfather.”

“What? No. No, the Pinabel is, gone. Destroyed. Overwritten. Charley has, gone through some changes.”

“You,” says Ellen, “you were there to see what would happen. When it was threatened. What it could do.”

“You took your shot. You failed – but you did make it out alive, which is no small accomplishment.”

“And,” says Ellen, looking up, small smile slipping into place, “now I know how to hit it.”

“What you hit,” says Mrs. Upchurch, “was only there to hold the teeth he was using to rip you open. That gonna be your strategy for round two?”

Ellen lifts a hand to the crook of her neck, where leaves and vines have been tangled by a jagged discontinuity, a frozen slash of lightning violent through them.

“The meatmongers,” says Mrs. Upchurch. “Renny, and Brankowicz, his daughter, Jill. Have you told them you’ve quit? Or were you just going to leave them to figure it out, eventually?”

Ellen, both hands back on her knees.

“Your housemates, Daniel, Montaigne. You’re just going to leave them in the lurch, with the rent?”

The corners of Ellen’s lips, pinched.

“You must know,” says Mrs. Upchurch. “This is the last time you will ever get to leave a place. It would be well to do so properly.”

“I was, already,” says Ellen, tipping back her head, looking up, and up, into all that seamless smoothly blue. “This room,” she says. “I’d finally made it what I’d seen it could be, would be, when Monty and me first found this place. I walked in here, and I saw it, and I made it, and I was done. I was thinking, maybe Accra. There’s a guy there, usually sets up by the Makola, he does, just, amazing shit, with goat. So I was already thinking, maybe, Accra. When Phil climbed into my car.”

“It is a lovely room,” says Mrs. Upchurch.

Ellen looks down, takes up the horse’s head, there by her knee. “I used to live in a world,” she says, “wherever I was, whatever I was doing, I’d know, any minute, he could just, be there. Both of us in the popcorn line at the Qaraghandy Zoo, or, or he’d be sitting at the only other table in a gasthaus, in Bissen, or just, I can’t even remember where, Antananarivo, not looking where I was going, and boom, and just, knowing that? It was, like, an echo, that never stopped ringing.”

Both her hands on that mask now in her lap.

“I don’t live there anymore,” she says. “I’ve already left. Just one last thing to tidy up.”

Mrs. Upchurch leans forward, looking over the cards spread between them. “Purpose,” she says, musing, “through a sense of propriety, and – oh, but I’m reading it upside down. The body,” she says, with a gesture to her right, “through grounding, and firm boundaries, achieves a purity of purpose.” Looking up. “What else could we require.”

Ellen picks up the fifth card, small and pale. “Do I need to,” she says, but “No, no,” says Mrs. Upchurch, getting to her feet. “I’ll show myself out. I know the way.”

Disappearing into a sweatshirt, wrestling her way up and through, glossy bob now mussed, a suggestion of yellow curls unsprung, as sharp notes toggle a simple phrase over an airy space of strings, can’t plan for anything, except the rain. “I guess we won’t be getting a check today, either.” She bends to scoop up a squiggle of tie-dye.

Wiping the last of the cold cream from her face in the far too brightly mirror, the flags will all fly green at the embassies, you’re here next to me, except you’re not. She frowns. Turns away from herself in the too brightly mirror to look to her there, pulling up swirling tights, “Hey,” she says, “you’re,” a gesture, up by her face, her hair.

“What?” Leaning close, there beside her in the mirror, their hair of a length, thereabouts, but hers undoing itself in artfully definite curls, and noticeably darker, and her blinking eyes bright green. “Oh,” she says.

“You should probably,” says Chrissie.

“Why bother,” says the Starling.

Chrissie smiles. “Would’ve been funny, if it happened out there.”

“Funny,” says the Starling, skeptically. “Go on, get dressed. I want ever so much to be gone from here.”

“I miss Cos, and Aya,” says Chrissie, dabbing the corner of her jaw with the greasy cloth. “Why don’t they ever come out to play anymore?”

“Should’ve just brought the blasted screen with us,” mutters the Starling, plucking up jars and vials and tubes from before the mirror, dropping them clink and clatter in the bag at her feet.

Hung on the wall the letters, deep and wide, precisely serifed forms cut from some dully leaden metal dark against the pale wood paneling, and the man in the brown coveralls up on the stepladder grunts as he lifts the capital R from its hooks, grimaces as he twists to lower it, carefully, to the floor. “Welund Barlowe and Lackland,” murmurs the receptionist, beard meticulously trimmed, a small but ornate brass telephone headset clipped to one ear. “How might I direct your call.”

Out in that lobby all chrome and cream and beige she’s vivid, her pink track suit, bright blue piping down the sleeves, her hair, close-cropped, a virulent chartreuse. Behind her a confusion of reflections and refractions interleaved, glass walls lightstruck by lamps discreetly tucked away delineating this hall, that conference room, until at last the high grey gloomy clouds without.

Reflections shift and swing, a suggestion of movement, and she stands herself alacritously up. He’s coming out alone, his navy suit, his shirt and tie of the same chalky blue, his white white hair in dreaded locks gathered loosely together, expression grimly set. She hastens to the elevator bank, pressing the button to summon one, checking within as the doors open, allowing him brusquely to step in first, taking up a position beside him as the doors slide shut.

“Send word,” he murmurs. “The Barons, the Soames, the Mason, all to the house in King’s Heights this very afternoon, ready to move in strength. And our knights to assemble, and Joaquin as well, under the Anvil’s hand.”

“My lord,” she says, outwardly unperturbed.

“And I need a meeting with Reginald Davies, as soon as it might be arranged. You can reach him through his firm, Maieutics, or possibly his development concern, Anaphenics.”

“Is this to be a drink, my lord? Dinner? A phone call?”

“Whatever it might take,” he says, “logistically, to get us speaking, together, as soon as possible,” and a sigh, “so be it.”

Elevator doors slide open on a dim garage filled with ranks of close-packed automobiles. Iona in pink leads the way toward a black SUV, looming there on a rumple of concrete hard by a thickset pillar. Agravante, white head lowered in thought, crisply following after. She stops, abruptly, there by the tail of it, lifting a hand, fob in her fingers, thumb poised, “My lord,” she says, but then the fob drops with a clank as light blooms about her hand to banish shadows lighting up the figure leaping spring-squonk and panel-crump from the trunk of a sedan to swinging bring a long staff down from overhead a savage whipping chop that’s caught, just, by Iona’s shivering blade.

Press, a twirl, whack, click-clack, the staff spinning, swinging, jabbing to test Iona’s parries and ripostes, black tights and a baggy black jacket, flop-muzzled goggle-eyed horse’s head, the mane of it stiffly upright. Agravante shakes out his white-locked head, stretches out his navy arms, a long-bladed dagger in either hand, hilts of them wrapped in blued wire, “Stop,” he says, politely enough. “Outlaw,” he says, “you should not have,” but then revelation dawns, as his shoulder’s shoved from behind, by the tip of a bat, “come,” he says, “alone,” lowering his daggers, annoyed.

“Never alone, in a herd,” says the figure stepping out from behind him, white T-shirt and grey running tights, baseball bat delivering another insouciant push, and rising wobbly from the shoulders a limp-snouted bristle-maned horse head, glaring at him somehow through pop eyes skewed in different directions.

“Put up, Chariot,” says Agravante, stepping with the push of the bat, “stand down,” his arms still open wide, but now his hands are empty. “This is bark, not bite.”

“Bite enough, for a lie direct,” says the horse with the bat.

“A lie?” says Agravante, suddenly concerned. “How so?”

“You,” a poke of the bat, “have a day, and a night, to put it about that you misspoke. To say, where any and all might hear, that the Queen’s Outlaw,” a shove, rocking his shoulder back, “has been most grievous wronged by your own words. A day, and a night, and if you do not? It will then be proved upon your body,” and another thrust, but this one he catches, one hand whipped in to grip the end of the bat, hold it firm against a briefly push-pull struggle.

“I spoke nothing but the truth,” says Agravante. “Someone wearing a horse mask broke into the house at King’s Heights. The Glaive was murthered, then and there. Cut down to bone, as if struck, perhaps, by a gallowglas,” looking from the horse with the bat, to the horse with the staff. “There is no lie in that.”

“A day, and a night,” says the horse with the bat, backing away. “Make it right, or it will be made right.”

“And then we come for your monster,” says the horse with the staff, lifting it up, away. Those floppy snouts turn then, toward each other, a look shared between them. Then they’re off, into the shadows among the cars.

“Well,” says Agravante. Iona stoops to find the fob.

Six tables of a length, pushed together in two close lines of three tables each, the tops of them differing colors, dully scrubbed white and sunny yellow, pale green and sinister gleaming red, stolid brown and lavender, but she’s not sat at any of them, she’s standing there, at the one end of the mullioned windows darkening in the wall above, pale feet bare, laddered tights printed with clockwork gears, vast blue T-shirt, her long black hair undone, and one hand balled in a fist.

“Chatelaine?” says the Queen.

She’s stepped through the open double doors, black curls artfully tangled, loosely belted robe of lace. “What,” says Gloria, turning away from the windows, “you don’t even bother to dress, now?”

“I was told it was urgent.”

“Close the,” Gloria’s free hand gestures, “doors. Come here.”

The double doors swing shut together as the Queen, golden slippers on her feet, lace frothing about her knees, her shins, steps to the end of the table, “Well?” she says.

“Just,” says Gloria, still stood there by the windows, “first, actually, first. Ask me your question.”

The Queen looks down to her hand, fingers spread on the brown tabletop. “What?” she says, looking back up to Gloria.

“Ask your question. Whenever you want, something, a cup of coffee, a ride to the store, to feel, better, about, your fucking self, you ask it, so go on, ask. Ask the goddamn question.”

The Queen lifts her hand from the table, folds up her arms.

“I was dead,” says Gloria, and the ragged edge of that word. “I said yes, I told you yes, I would’ve done anything for you, I did all of those horrible things to you, and he, he killed me, I was dead, and you, you,” blinking rapidly, “your brought me back,” says Gloria, simply, quietly. “Why did you bring me back.”

“Gloria,” says the Queen, gently, even tenderly. “What is this about.”

Gloria lurches toward the table, “I haven’t,” she says, unclenching her fist, “painted a goddamn thing in weeks.” She lays out what she’s been holding in it all this time, click, click, click.

A moment’s hesitation, and then, with uncertain steps, the Queen makes her way up the line of tables, past lavender spun with threads of violet, past deeply banked red a-glitter with silver and black, there to look down on sunny yellow formica and set atop it three black jagged shards of plastic, embossed with a broken string of numerals. Printed there, at what had been a corner, interlocking circles of red and orange. Bank of Trebi, on another, continuing across the third, zond. Gloria Monday. Good perhaps, 8 maybe, or 7, the date’s been sundered by a crack.

“It’s the end,” says Gloria. “Is what it’s about. Happened this morning. I’m pretty sure. But the Safeway delivery just got canceled, so there’s, we’re out the, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, and Doe refused our order, so that’s, ah, no donuts, or coffee, in the morning, we were gonna, we have to put in the Rubinette’s order, next day or two, I’m not sure how we’re gonna, Anna, Anna has some, she’s gonna make some calls, about, ah, about my father’s, uh, but,” shaking her head, pink bangs a-swish.

“Who did you tell,” says the Queen.

“Christ,” Gloria’s saying, “the internet, the phones, wait – what?”

“These,” says the Queen, pressing one daintily manicured fingertip there by the broken card, “are always secured by an awful secret. If that secret is shared, with anyone, that security is,” lifting her hand away, “broken. The value,” to her breast, clutching closed the lace. “I hope,” she says, so very tenderly, “it was worth it.”

Turning away, walking away, back down the length of the tables. “Ysabel?” calls Gloria, after her. “Ysabel!”

One of the two double doors bursts open, well before the Queen has reached them, forcefully enough to bounce off the stuttering twang of a doorstop. He’s standing there, wide-eyed with chagrin as that door swings slowly back. “Lady,” he calls, catching the handle, pushing within, “my lady,” but he’s looking to Gloria, not the Queen. “There’s trouble, with the truck. You must come.”

“The truck,” says Gloria, coming down by the Queen.

“Rabbits have come, lady,” he says, “on behalf, they say, of the Guisarme,” his neatly knotted tie of gold, his ashen curls, brushing his shoulders, “they mean to take the truck, but Jim Turk refuses – lady!” pressing back against the door as she bulls past him, out of the room, into the hall, away. “Majesty?” he says, turning to the Queen, stood there, stricken.

Bare feet slapping, down the stairs, around and past the scaffolding skewed through the gloomy foyer, under a wide low arch, bulbs strung along the ceiling of it dark, out into the cavernous warehouse, echoing with the commotion of the crowd about the open overhead door at the other end, there before the empty unlit stage. She breaks from her hasty harried trot into a plunging arm-pumping run past stalls filled with garbage and equipment and art, up to and around the lustrous wooden tub as shouts break over the clamor, “Hey!” and “Whoa!” and “Stop!” and “Gallowglas, gallowglas approaching! Gallowglas to the field!” Hands grab, torsos interpose, she’s stumbled, buffeted, shoves in turn, “Dammit,” she snaps, and yelps “Out of my way!” shouldering on, but “Lady!” cries someone, and someone else, “Chatelaine!” There, suddenly, before her, wee Goggie, eyes wide, cheeks flushed, hands up, halt, stop, “you mustn’t, you can’t,” she’s saying, “he’s horribly wounded, if you set foot out there, he’ll be done to dust, and for sure!”

A latter, shots from without, they’re all surging forward, jamming the doorway to see, “Why,” growls Gloria, “why aren’t,” struggling, yanking, wrenching against the hands that grasp that clench that hold, that bar, “help him!” she roars.

A mighty crash out there, the splash of glass, a howl of rage, hoots and taunts, Gloria hurls herself about, against those implacable hands, but someone out there, someone, a high clear voice is singing, “Was on a jolly summer’s morn,” and another voice leaps to join, “the twenty-ninth of May!” as a wornly ragged chorus assembles itself, “that we took up, our turmut hoes, and here, we means, to stay!” and oh, the cheers at that. One last shrug of a yank from Gloria against slackening grips, hands falling away, bodies that step back, as out there a single voice, deep, but threadily hesitant, “For some delights, in hay-makin,” and a heavy, hacking cough, Gloria shoving abruptly forward and again the grabbing clutching gripping, “and some they fancies mowin!” strengthening with every word, “but of all the jobs, what we like best, give us, the turmut-hoein!”

The light, changing, changes.

Gloria turns away, from the door, the song, the crowd, to see her majesty then, approaching, up the aisle between the stalls, and that cavernous late afternoon swells with the daylight that shines from her face, her hands, and they all, all of them, falling silent, fall away, press close to either side an aisle of their own past the outshone tub, toward the open overhead door.

The Queen in sunlight and in lace steps out onto the loading dock, illuminating the scene below, the battleship of a pickup truck, intimidating grille dented to one side, fender crumpled, headlight shattered, and Big Jim Turk stood up on the hood of it, hunched over clutching himself, wobble of a hilt there winking in her daylight, a rapier shoved through his shoulder, tip of it a-gleam above his back, and a smile grimly twists beneath his mustache. On the pavement before and about there’s bald Otto Dogstongue, and Mulciber behind him, doubled over a wound of his own, and Trucos and Getulos, side-by-side, paint-spattered fists up and ready, and Lustucru in his apron and looming, limber Fell Swinton. Arrayed against them a tidy knot of rabbits, the empty-handed Stevedore and the Gaffer, the Kamali with his jeweled gloves, lowering a scimitar, the Luthier with his chain, and there among them the Guerdon, glowering in pinstripes. Off around that way, by the side of the flatbed trailer, there’s the snarling Buggane squared off against Swift and the Jackstaff, spinning away his stick, deferentially alarmed to see her, shining, there.

“What is the meaning of this,” says the Queen.

Crumple-pop of the hood as Big Jim with a grunt sits himself, “They would,” he says, taking hold of that workmanlike hilt, “repossess our truck,” and, grimacing, prepares to pull.

“Majesty,” says the Guerdon, smoothing away his glower, “if we might repair in camera?”

“You might address us here, before the court.”

The Guerdon’s expression, smoothed, betrays a squint of disdain. “It should be a matter simple enough, majesty. Funds for its purchase were drawn from an account found to be in arrears. Until we’ve ironed out the irregularities, which I’m sure we will, the truck must be,” wincing, he pauses, as Big Jim Turk with a guttural groan hauls the rapier free from his body. “Must needs be secured,” he says, then.

“The truck’s secure with us,” says the Queen. “There’s no need to remove it, if all’s so simple, and so certain, as you say.”

“But, majesty, there are bonds beyond those of the court,” again, he pauses, as Jim Turk tosses the freed blade to the Stevedore’s feet, clang. “The damage, of course,” a gesture, toward the dented grille, “must be seen to.”

“That,” grits Mulciber, the word scraped thin by pain, “is on you.”

“You will leave the truck,” says the Queen.

“What, then, majesty, are we to tell the Glaive?”

“That you failed,” she says, and at that, he looks down, to his polished bluchers on the tarmacadam. He nods, once. “It shall be even as your majesty has said.”

“It is always to be as we say.”

The evening above, deepening to an eerily sullen blue, still held at bay, for the moment, by her warming golden light. The Guerdon lifts a hand, beckoning, and the Jackstaff heads back around the truck, followed by cautious Swift, and the Stevedore collects his sword. Big Jim scoots himself to the front of the hood, a hand clapped to his leaking shoulder, and there he plants a boot on the bumper to glare as the rabbits and the Guerdon retreat, up toward the two SUVs angled at the top of the darkening street, and then, as cheers break out, as applause smatters up from the crowd in the doorway, on the dock, as Otto offers an arm to Mulciber, and the Fell Swinton throws up her great big hands, and Trucos, shaking his head, looks over the broken headlight. Jim Turk steps off the bumper and hauls himself onto the dock with the help of many hands, hands that return to and redouble the applause, as he bows before the Queen. She waves a benison over them all, but turns away to step back into the warehouse without a word.

The applause patters to silence as evening falls all about. The Buggane hops onto the flatbed and from there to the dock as Getulos, pointing, insists something to Trucos. Big Jim, hand once more clutched to his shoulder, nods absently to Iemanya and to John Wharfinger, to beaming Charlichhold, as he joins with most of the rest of the crowd to filter back in under the overhead door, into that cavernous room as racks of fluorescents above flickering buzz to actinic life, dispelling shadows, and with them the warming ambience of the tub. And there’s Gloria Monday stood before it, her T-shirt rumpled, askew, expressionlessly watching his approach.

“Sweetling,” he says, lifting his hand from the hole torn through his shoulder, holding it wetly shining between them as she steps close, “but a moment with the owr, and I’ll be right as rain.”

She slaps him.

P. interrogationis, she writes in blue-black ink, hesitating only the briefest moment between that first r, and the second. Closing her little black notebook, capping the pen, she leaves her hands to these tasks as she leans forward, intent on the glass tank before her, the two white plastic pots within packed full of rich wet dirt and barky mulch upholding small copses of slender green stalks, topped by feathery fronds eaten away in countless brown-edged holes like lace, or ash. A dozen or so cocoons depend from this branch, that groin, rippled packets blackly umber but for that one, there, it’s burst, shell of it no longer tight-packed darkness but whitely translucent and delicately struggling free of the last clinging shreds, wobbling its way atop the frond, ungainly with the brand-new bulk of furled and sodden wings, a butterfly.

“You’re early,” she murmurs.

Hesitantly precise, the butterfly picks its way to the very end of a frond that doesn’t seem at all to notice the negligible weight, and there, achingly slowly, it unfurls its great frail span, russet-spotted ruby sheets filigreed and edged with ghostly white, shivering as they dry in the light of the lamp close-set above.

“New addition to the harem?”

She closes her eyes, dips her head. Takes up unseen from the foot of the bed beside her a round of fabric beigely grey, lifts it up over her head to tug it down, a stretchy yoke about her neck. Gathering the softly mass of her long black hair into a practiced bun she holds with one hand as the other pulls that yoke back, a clinging scarf to hold back her hair, to smoothly, closely, frame her face. Only then does she turn on her stool, the flutter of a couple-few other butterflies about the room at her sudden movement, and she looks up to the blurry silhouette there, a mass of white locks draped about dark shoulders on the other side of the cloudy gauze, there in the open doorway of the room. “You are always to knock, first,” she says. “You did agree to that.”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear,” says Agravante.

“I hear a great many voices below,” she says. “Comings, and goings. Am I to be paraded at another gathering?”

“Circumstances,” he says, the form of him shifting as he steps closer to the gauze, coming into focus, concern and resolve squaring off in his expression, “have forced our hand. We’ve made the first move.”

She leans forward, hands on her knees somewhere beneath her long empurpled skirts. “You’ve made a move,” she says. “I wonder: have you made a decision?”

“Action demands decision,” he says.

“But not, so much, reaction,” she says. “You’ve a certain renown for keeping options open, Viscount, but there’s a fine line between such admirable reserve, and dithering till the iron’s cold, and circumstances force.” She takes, then, a deep and fortifying breath. “Which, then, is it to be? Am I to rule a city? Or a suburb?”

“A city,” he says, after only a moment. “By this time tomorrow, I should imagine.”

“So very sudden,” she says. And then, “Are you, here, to quicken me? Is that the plan?”

“I will not be King. I’ve made that clear,” a step back, his features blurring with the distance, and the gauze. “I’ve another in mind, for that.”

“And will I get to meet Señor Another, before the event? Have a word or two, perhaps, with my Bridegroom, before he has my husbanding?”

“You will, you should,” says Agravante, “stay here, and safe; the next two dozen hours or so will prove fraught. Knights will be posted, at your door. And food – are you, hungry? We have,” he says, stepping back, into the hall, “pizza.”

“I’m not,” she says, a shake of her scarf-wrapped head, “hungry. Some tea, perhaps.”

The door swings shut, more firmly, perhaps, than necessary. She sits, without moving, until she hears the scrape of the hasp, and the clack of the lock, snapping home.