We surfaced at last across from one of the Night Fair’s gates, the one she’d brought me to that first day. She stopped the bike in the shadow of the overhang and studied the street. It wasn’t empty; there was too much spillover from the Fair for that. “Careful,” she said — to herself, I thought. “They must be frantic by now. They’ll have told him that they’ve mislaid us, and he’ll… ”

“What?” I asked.

“We really have to get out of here,” she said lightly. “Because if we’re still here to fish for, he’ll poke a hook in the best bait he can find and dangle it. The friends we left behind, say.”

I opened my mouth to tell her that I wouldn’t be tempted to trade my life for Dana’s, and closed it again. I suppose I would have said it if I had been sure either that it was true, or that it wasn’t. Instead I said, “Mick sold us out.”

“Think of my ongoing concern, then, as my way of rubbing his nose in it. Now, soldiers, march away; and how thou pleasest—” She put the trike in gear and crossed the street as quietly as the engine would run.

The Fair was full of commotion and whatever level of frenzy could be sustained over the course of a night. I’d never wondered why I could be comfortable here and twitchy in a group of four people. The answer, now that I thought about it, was easy. The streets and stalls of the Night Fair were the opposite of intimacy. To be one of four was to be a focal point; to be one of hundreds was to be anonymous as sand on the shore.

“Is it always like this?” Frances asked, barely avoiding an oncoming water truck.

“Oh, yeah—” But it wasn’t. Not the density of people, but the galvanic current that ran through them, the sound of the voices, the intensity of motion: these were different. These said, Warning, alert, something needs attention, system failure.

Both Mick and Dana knew where my apartment was. Mick knew what was in it. “Hurry,” I said.

Frances looked back at me. Whatever she saw made her turn the trike into an instrument of chaos.

We couldn’t get closer than half a block from my building. We didn’t need to. The top floor was a torch that could probably be seen on the island.

I kicked the weather shell open and was past Frances and into the crowded street before she could stop me. She caught up with me. I fought her, and screamed at her, until with force and practiced economy, she hit me in the stomach. I folded up on the pavement in the little clearing we’d made in the disaster-watchers. My very own disaster. Had the ones who started it even thought of the tenants? The old man who sang so badly, the people who’d had cabbage for dinner. Was anyone dead? But it had to be fire. Because nothing could harm the archives except fire.