His sister did not tell him she was coming to see him. We found her asleep on his doorstep. His apartment then was a bachelor’s apartment: he had no family to insulate from the Qin, so he lived in a set of three rooms carved out of the attic of a building which housed a smuggler fronted by an ink-and-stationery shop on the first floor, the smuggler herself on the second, and Dirva on the third. The building sat on the outer edge of the district where the Semadran shopkeepers congregated. It was not an obvious place or one that was particularly easy to find, and in fact it did not even have his address listed outside. The only sign that the third floor had an apartment was a set of narrow, iron stairs discreetly bolted to the back of the building, which led to a small landing at Dirva’s door. He had his mail addressed to the ink shop. His sister must have known where he lived. She must have had more than an address, because it would have taken a measure of familiarity with the district in Rabatha to know where to look. More likely, she had to have been there before to have found it.

We didn’t see her until we came around the back of the building. It was deep winter the day she arrived and getting on towards dusk. The days in Rabatha never get properly cold, but at night the temperature drops like a stone. “We have a vagrant,” I said.

Dirva looked up. She was wrapped in a patched coat up to her ears. Her white hair was the only thing visible. I could tell by the way her clothes hung on her that she was not a large person. The white hair and her size made me think she was a half-grown runaway seeking shelter in the district. Possibly a nahsiyya. Possibly an escaped slave from the Qin parts of town. In any case, I had assumed she was at least mostly Semadran. Dirva knew better. He cursed, which was exceedingly rare for him. “It’s not a vagrant,” he said. “It’s my sister.”