“No. But you’re asking me to take a few steps back toward it. Talk to those people. And a lot’s changed in Tatié since we were yoked together. It’s even odds or worse I could get ahold of someone who could help.”

“But would you try?”

“Why should I? ’Cause I ain’t got anything to lose? Stroll off. There’s plenty past the Cliff House they can still take away from me. This could see me thrown in prison. It could get spun up as sedition, treason, espionage. The folk you want me to talk to, they’re traitors to the nation of Gedda. I could be prosecuted.”

“Then you’d better be very careful.”

She put her cup down hard, so coffee sloshed across the scrubbed-raw surface of the table. “You got a lotta nerve. I ain’t even looked sideways at saying yes.”

“Not even for Cordelia’s sake?”

“Don’t bring her into this.”

“She was brought into this eight years ago. She chose it. The person I need to get across the border was … was her friend. Like we were. And he didn’t have a choice.”

She shook her head, not looking at him. “People always have a choice. And if you’re talking about who I think, he made the wrong one. She didn’t.”

In the pause that followed, Aristide took a steadying breath. “Ms. Saeger—”

“Queen’s sake, just call me Opal.”

“Opal. We’re both from the same world, or close to. And so I hope you’ll know it isn’t vanity when I say you must know who I was. Or you must at least have heard of me.”

She sipped her coffee, making him wait for her answer. Then, swallowing, she nodded and said, “Yeah. I knew your name. And enough about you to steer well clear.”

“Probably wise.” He removed his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I only bring it up to make a point.”

“Which is?”

“I was proud. Still am, with less reason. And I have rarely been a man to beg. But if you ask me to, I will prostrate myself. I will lie flat on the floor at your feet, and plead for your help like a Hearther penitent before an icon of my saint.”

She considered him across the gray wood of the table, staring over the linen runner and the saltcellar, an ashtray full of butts. “Poetic. But then, you were in front of the curtain, not behind. Or up above. You know how to play to the punters.”

“Almost my entire life has been an act of one sort or another,” he told her. “But not this.”

She leaned back in her chair. Sunrise struggled through the overcast outside, limning the fine hairs that outlined the contours of her face. He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. Only stared as steam rose from her cup.