“And Tom would want a city. He’d want plenty to work with, to run roughshod over. He wouldn’t be out in the bush, or settled in some farm village.”

“What if you’re wrong, and he’s changed?”

“Then I won’t be able to find him, will I? He’ll be safe. But I don’t think he’s changed.”

China Black set her cup in front of the samovar and turned the spigot. A fresh wave of mint smell curled around the room. “And why do you trust me with all this?”

“Because I suspect it doesn’t matter. I think he knows I’m coming, and if he does, none of this is news. If he doesn’t, it still won’t matter. He won’t run; Tom always loved a fight.”

“You know him very well, then?”

Frances’s face was still. “We went to Killing People School together. It produces a wonderful camaraderie.”

“Why were you after me?” Mick asked suddenly of the opposite couch. “You followed me around that night, didn’t you?”

“Maybe we didn’t know we were following you,” China Black replied with a large and uncharacteristic grin. “Maybe we thought we were following your body.”

Mick opened his mouth; then the expression seemed to fall off his face. “Oh,” he said.

He settled back into the cushions again, as if he were satisfied. But I’d seen the line that had appeared between his brows for a moment, and the unhappy little twist of his lip. I wondered if anyone else had.

“You said we might be able to help each other,” Frances said. “Now you know what I want. What about you?”

China Black’s attention moved slowly from Mick to Frances. “I am not so sure, now. What do you know about the spirits, the loa?”

Frances visibly squashed her frustration. “I’ve heard of them.”

“They are not gods, though they’re like them; and they are not ghosts, though they’re like that, too. The European churches prayed to gods that rarely spoke, and then only to a few. The spirits speak all the time, and we don’t pray to them any more than you would pray to your grandmother. We live with them. They are part of our family.”

“’Our’?” Frances said.

“If you asked, you would find most people of the City — of the streets — know them. The loa, the saints, the spirits, the ancestors. There are many names, but you would find the principles similar, and the way they shape the world. The people in the towers don’t think about the spirits. They don’t know how the world is shaped. And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it. They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two. Ah!” China Black snorted and shook her head. “I have been a teacher so long that I fall into it, so!”

She drained her teacup and stood, and began to walk slowly up and down the room. “You don’t believe. You are like the people in the towers; it is your past they live in, not seeing that it hurts us all. But these things don’t wait for you to believe in them. Chango, the young warrior with the sword, came among us while we danced. He said that from his quarter, the south, one of his own would come, limping. Oya Iansa, Lightning Woman, came and said that change would arrive from the west, but would not know its own nature. And Eshu drank white rum and smoked a black cigar, and laughed until the tears poured down, as he told us to duck when the marassa met, and joined the dossou-dossa, and the three of them, like a three-pointed throwing star, broke all the windows in the tall buildings in town. Tell me,” China Black said, turning back to the couches, “do you see anything of yourselves in that?”