“I stowed away,” said Cyril. It wasn’t the whole truth. He’d hauled himself onto the first boat with a ladder in the bay and let the world go black around him. He’d woken hours later in the grip of a thug, to the sound of a motor and water breaking on the hull. But he was allowed small lies. “She was turning tail. Got out of the city with the skin on her bones and not a lot besides. Had some bruiser named Marto with her. After the swelling went down, she clocked me. Said I was a roto print of some actor named Solomon Flyte, if he’d taken a few good slugs to the face.”

Ari looked like he was trying not to be sick, but Cyril pressed on. “We were halfway to Agrakoti by then. And I was in no shape to hunt after you. By the time we made landfall and I caught up on the news, I … I didn’t really want to.”

“I wish you had.”

“No you don’t. I was a midden heap walking.”

“You still are.”

“Stroll off.”

When Aristide’s arms tightened around him his first instinct was panic—he was trapped and strangling, snared—but then Aristide spoke into his ear.

“Never again.”

The sound of that familiar purr, crackling now with smoke and age, told him he was safe, and brought him home.

Aristide woke up in the early morning to the grumble of thunder. It was not the first time he had woken—Cyril had never been an easy bedfellow, and was less so now. Still, every time a cry or jerk tore Aristide from sleep, he remembered where he was and with whom and felt amazed all over again. And so he didn’t mind.

This time, it was not one of Cyril’s nightmares that woke him. Dawn had crept, indistinct, into the sky. An early spring storm battered the window with sheets of rain. Cyril was gone from beside him and sitting half naked on the foot of the bed, twisting the tuning dial on the radio.

Quietly, without moving, Aristide watched his reflection in the sideboard mirror: his concentration and economy of movement. The shift of small muscles beneath scarred skin. He did not fidget, didn’t pause when he came across a station playing an old song by Marcel Langhorn. He looked grave and focused, brows drawn down over his newly crooked nose. Everything about him had changed, it seemed, except that livid scar across his stomach.

Then a piece of shaggy hair fell across his forehead and he jerked his chin, tossing it out of his eyes.

No knife had ever plunged so deep.

“What are you looking for?” asked Aristide, and saw him jump but clamp down on the reflex. A shudder of skin like a horse scaring flies.