As I recall, Mary and I looked magnificent in our sequined dresses, perfumed and powdered. I had taken from a safe place the finest of my outfits from the height of the New Art’s popularity. A curving neckline. An audacious black hat. Shoes made from lizard and mole skin. A handbag of a texture and design rare in any but the most southern of the Southern Isles. My hair was still a bit of a mess—that could not be helped; scarcely a mirror survived in the city, most fragmented by bombardment or wrinkled by filaments of fungi. For me, wearing such clothes reminded me of what had been, which made me sad—but also made me stand taller, for back in my glory days I had practically owned the opera house. I cannot remember what Mary wore, but whatever she wore, it could only presage future glory.

Mary and Sybel and I had one thing in common: none of us had succumbed to any of the fungal diseases that had so ravaged the general population as a side effect of the ceaseless bombardments. The same could not be said for many of those who surrounded us as we jostled our way through the door.

Toad-like James Lacond, ever-present cigar between his lips—his usual Nicean Reserve—had a patch of tendrils, a brilliant green, growing off the left side of his balding head. Nothing in his sour demeanor, however, revealed even the slightest discomfort. (As always, for a fat man he moved with surprising grace.) “Lie down with the gray caps,” he was fond of saying, “and you make your peace with them, in one way or another.”

My brother, however, tight-lipped and nervous (because I expected, with no truce yet spoken or implied, that you and Mary would fight the entire evening; why, the war was at times the least of my worries, even though I could sense the gray caps in the floorboards, their symbols and signs everywhere), showed more of the strain. A silvery-purple “birthmark” writhed upon his forearm like a living tattoo. Who knew if his clothes hid some greater embarrassment? (They didn’t. I could now maintain control, at least for a while. Had I manifested in my full fungal state, it would have cleared out the opera house.)