The City sat on a network of maintenance tunnels, some of which went back to the beginning of the previous century. A few had been turned into fallout shelters, during the years when those seemed like a good idea. Others were used as passways for steam piping and electrical conduit. Taken together, and allowing for detours around blocked and collapsed portions, they reached from the Night Fair to the river. That was the way the alcohol came in; and that was the way Frances went out, to the river and a boat with a false lower deck. Usually the crew filled the space with merchandise, taxed and otherwise, for the trip back. Frances ate into their profit margin. They were glad of the trike.

Beano told me all this when he came into the back room, a folded and sealed square of paper in one hand. In the transom above the back door, I’d watched the course of the day; the glass had faded to blazing white, and the air in the room had turned hot and motionless. It was still hot, but the light through the transom was the last of it. Beano held out the paper.

The wax held the impression of a thumbprint, and the letters “FR” quickly scratched with a fingernail. I was confused for a moment, until I remembered that Frances’s last name began with an “R.” I broke the seal.

The message was in a small, angular hand, and the ink was very black. It read:

“What hills, what hills are those, my love,

Those hills so fair and high?”

“Those are the hills of heaven, my love,

But not for you and I.”

Nor the other hills, either. At least, not yet.

Frances

It was better identification than the thumbprint and initials. I crumpled it and handed it to Beano. “You’d better burn this. If they knew she’d been here, you wouldn’t live to see the end of it.”

He took me literally; he lit the oil lamp on the table and burnt it over that. Then he came and squatted next to the chair I’d spent most of the day in. His face gleamed evenly all over with sweat, like wet marble. In the skin under his eyes there was a faint flush of pink, like fever. He wore the same clothes he’d opened the door in that morning; the T-shirt was black with sweat down his chest and under his arms.

“You’ve run up a big tab,” he said softly. He touched a long fingernail to the blood on my shirt. I felt the nail go through the cloth and dig slowly into my skin.

Deciding is not the same as being reconciled; and reconciled is nothing like being willing. In self-imposed isolation all day, entertained with the thoughts I couldn’t muffle, I’d had time for reconciliation. But my stomach churned anyway, and my heart pumped at a speed to support any desperate action I wanted to take. I stood up. Beano stood, too, half a head taller, stark with muscle.