Cigars. Whiskey. Both working as a kind of peculiar clock or timer. When they ran out, would his life as Finch run out, too?

Heretic’s touch like wet, dead leaves sewn together and stuffed with meat.

Dinnertime, but he wasn’t hungry.

A long, shuddering sigh as he sat in the old leather chair next to the couch in the living room. Under the light of an old glass lamp shaped like an umbrella that he’d taken from the lobby. Watched the dusk dissolve into night.

On the far wall hung three of the hotel’s original tourist scenes of Albumuth Boulevard. A far better view than the one from the small balcony abutting the kitchen. All the balcony could show him was more of the night sky, a sliver of the two towers, and the alley below. A view saved for emergencies. A second view could be had from the bathroom by opening the small latched window and standing on the toilet. Finch could look down into the courtyard whenever he wanted. Between the two sight lines, he had as much forewarning as he could expect. If what came after him was human.

Not a bad place. At least he had a separate office next to the kitchen and extra bookcases, overflowing, on the wall closest to the door. He’d made them from planks torn up from the rotting eleventh floor.

Even before the Rising, Finch had enjoyed reading. So many nights at the old house in the valley he and his father had sat reading in silence, separate yet together. To block out the night. The wars. Now the gray caps’ camps lay so close that a crushed foundation under a heap of garbage was all that remained of the house. Nothing left but the books and other things he’d rescued.

Some books had been bought during cease-fires. Before the Rising destroyed the idea of bookstores. A few had come from his grandparents, who had returned to the Southern Isles when he was ten. Memories of them were like spent matches dull against a sudden darkness. He leafed through the books for signs of them sometimes. A folded letter. A note that never dropped to the floor.

But most of the books had been his father’s, rescued from the old home. About a dozen Finch knew from long repetition, part of his father’s home-schooling when it was too dangerous to go to class.

His father had started out as a brilliant engineer. In his youth, he had served in the Ambergris military in that brief, bright window when they’d taken on the Kalif’s empire. He was with the troops as they advanced into a desert strewn with oases and hunched trees with gnarled black branches. As they took the Kalif’s lands, and contemplated their own vision of conquest. As they were pushed back.