Out of Gedda OSP rat, it said. Stephen flipped it over with blackened fingers. Parallel lines on the other side, hashed regularly along their length. Train tracks. Crude but recognizable. The Catwalk, or what Saeger’s supporters had made of it. That was who had bombed her home.

A memory surfaced: Cordelia Lehane lingering in the gallery of the entrance hall at Hadhariti, her face gone pale with shock as the gruesome puzzle of Cyril’s past came together. Then, Lillian had compared her to a ghost, a haunting. She had been a piece of a lost world, and half lost herself: grieving, defeated, confused. For her—for all of them—the boundaries between friend and enemy, right and wrong, had been blurred by necessity.

Alive, would she have thrown a bomb through the front windows of Coral Street? Lillian didn’t think so. It was death and narrative that had warped her memory into an avenging revenant. A poltergeist.

Would Saeger herself have thrown this incendiary? Lillian thought back to their few interactions. The candidate stiff and formal in her gala dress, then burning with frustration in a basement pub, afraid that all her hopes for her country might be thwarted if she lost this election. She might not be a canny politician, but she knew firebombing people’s houses wouldn’t win her votes.

Nobody Lillian knew had thrown this through her window. And no one who knew her. Someone had seen her as a symbol, too. To them this was just like defacing a monument, or tearing down a flag.

In bed, in the small hours, Lillian tucked her cold feet beneath Jinadh’s thigh and felt him flinch awake.

“Sorry,” she said, and made to pull away.

He laid his hand on her ankle underneath the covers and held her where she was. «They’ll warm up.»

She chewed at her lip and felt dry skin split. After too many years in the tropics, she had forgotten how the cold could turn skin into paper, tearing where it creased. «Jinadh.»

He made a sleepy sound.

«Should we stay?»

Silence.

«In Gedda,» she said, in case he hadn’t clocked her.

A pause, before he rolled over. In the dark, she could only make out the curve of his cheek against the lighter black, the reflection of faint moonlight in his eyes.

«Do you want to leave?» he asked.

She hesitated, though she had asked the question. «It does make sense. If Stephen doesn’t get back into Cantrell, nothing keeps us here except your job.»

«I can’t ask to be transferred again so soon. Especially not right now, with … these complications. I can’t expect special treatment; the opposite, perhaps.»

«Could you not just speak to them? Explain this is a matter of—» She let it hang, implying rocks through the window, firecrackers smoking on the rug. All the things that might come afterward, much worse.