Exhausting. Exciting. Dangerous.

Still missed the normalcy of the one time she’d stayed long enough to make breakfast. A surreal, sublime morning. They’d met at a black market party the night before. Taken off his detective’s badge, gone as a civilian wanting some fun. Bumped into each other on the makeshift dance floor. In someone’s basement. Everyone there expecting the gray caps to blast up through the tiles and send them to the work camps.

“Your day wasn’t as good, I can tell,” she said now. Bringing him back.

“I have a difficult case.”

“How difficult?”

He sat on the chair and talked to me. The cat was as big as a pony and the lizard was as big as a cat. And me, I was as tiny as a reflection in Feral’s eye. A perverse nursery rhyme.

“Difficult enough. A gray cap cut in half. A dead man. In an apartment. But they seem to have fallen from the sky…”

Sintra sat up, looked at him. “Where were they found?”

Finch stared back at her. Surprised by her sudden interest. Sometimes he shared details as an act of faith. But not on something that might pull her down with him.

“Down by the bay,” he said. Waited.

Sintra considered him as he’d considered her. Then changed the subject. “Is that why you were crying? Because of what the memory bulbs showed you?”

“Yes.” Propped himself up on an elbow. Shuddered, winced. An aftershock? Pressure in his head. Like his brain had outgrown his skull.

Sintra hugged him. Kissed him. He laid his head against her chest. She scared him sometimes. Both from her presence and her absence.

“Maybe it was a bad reaction to a drug,” she said. “Maybe you inhaled a bad spore.”

Back before the Rising, Sintra said she had been a doctor’s aide.

“Unlikely.” He and his fellow detectives got fed antidotes every few months. One perk of working for the gray caps. He stole extras for Sintra and Rathven. Sintra always took them with her. Never used them in the apartment.

“But it’s over now.”

“Yes. It’s over.”

He broke off the embrace. Feral was cleaning himself in a shaft of light by the window. Sidle was motionless on the windowsill. Drunk on the new sun.

Sintra wrapped the sheets around her and stood up, walked toward the window. Leaving Finch naked and exposed on the bed. Watching her as he put his underwear back on. Remembering the first time they had made love. How he’d checked the sheets, the pillows after she’d left. Wanting to breathe in more of the smell of her. How there had seemed to be no trace of their sex. Only his memory of the act. As if he had entered a ghost.

She turned to stare at him, framed by the window.

“I’ll come back in a night or two,” Sintra said. “That’s not long.”

“No, it’s not long,” Finch said. Thinking of the station. The other detectives. Work fatigue washed over him.