Horn rattled against porcelain, followed by the faint chime of steel. Before his brain caught up with his body he went tense. Aristide waited, not touching him; in the swirl of steam against his skin, Cyril imagined he could feel the currents of Ari’s breath.

“Now?” he asked, and Cyril realized how closely Aristide must be watching him, to have noticed the minuscule slackening of his muscles.

“Go ahead,” he said, curling his fingers beneath the toilet seat. But as soon as the steel edge touched his throat he was standing, one hand over the thin, shallow cut beneath his jaw.

Aristide’s expression gave him nothing, so he gave nothing back. For a moment they stood opposite one another. A drop of blood fell from Cyril’s chin and sprayed across the floor, turning black against the lapis tile.

Then Aristide wiped off the razor, leaving a pink streak on white terry cloth, and set it on the sink with painful precision. “Perhaps you ought to do it yourself after all.”

Left alone with the sound of running water, Cyril felt his failure on so many levels he lost count.

The last airplane they’d put him in had been a military affair: stripped down and freezing cold, dun and green and dirty. The one he boarded as Ambrose van Weill had plush seats and offered cocktails before takeoff.

That didn’t make the flight any warmer, or more pleasant. Neither did his hangover.

The suit fit well enough, for something thrown together in less than three days, no second fitting or fiddly bits. Amazing he could remember what it ought to feel like, enough to notice the difference in the pitch of the sleeves, the gap at the back of the collar.

Aristide had looked at the ensemble and given a small tch of disapproval, but there wasn’t much he could do in an hour. Their farewell on the runway had been awkward, stilted. They had not touched one another. They had not touched one another at all, save the shaving incident.

Cyril found the first knuckle of his forefinger at his chin, where Aristide had tilted his jaw half an inch higher for a better angle with the badger brush. He cleared his throat, and put his hand into his lap.

His neighbor was a white-haired Lisoan woman in half-moon spectacles. She slept through the first half of the first leg, waking when they hit rough weather over the Egyrian Sea.

She took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes, then growled, ≈Demon’s jism.≈

The emphatic profanity startled a snort out of Cyril, which caught his neighbor’s attention. ≈You speak Shedengue?≈