Nocturnalia. Out upon the darkling plain, the tired dance of the broken wing. Brought to a halt by the thought of fire. The thought of what lay behind and what lay ahead being so the same. Passenger only. Passenger enslaved to fury. Some of it her own fury at being so encaptured and enraptured. Her own true nature. Inescapable, but one day perhaps would escape it.

Out there, one night, between being called forth. Between being the dark bird and just a duck with a mind of its own. Before the next possession. Came the vast slather of night wings above and the aerobatic capture of insects and, sometimes, like a lacy overlay on the dark bird’s mind, the invisible sonar of bats, inquiring and then rebuffed. For the dark bird was a dead space, but one that colonized if they lingered too long.

Came, too, in the absolute dead of one night, with no moon and the stars reduced to smudges, a shape-shifter exiled to that place. Exiled like something made and not now used. Manifest as several creatures at once, anchored to a writhing flat black pedestal. Registering as too many coordinates, a creature that had become a map.

“I’ll kill you,” the duck told the shape-shifter. “I’ll kill you and feast on your entrails.”

“You are not a duck.”

“You are not a whatever you are.”

“I’m out of place. I’m not meant to be here. Soon, I won’t be.”

Surprise at approximation of speech, which the shape-shifter, as a shape-shifter will, supplied … and all the rage snuffed out and no directive from the Company. The shape-shifter interfered with the signal. The burst was there, the burst-burst-burst, but sputtering, sputtered.

“Are you something that rhymes with duck?” the shapeshifter asked. “The ghost with the face of a bat used to mutter all the words that rhyme with duck.”

“I know nothing of that.”

The duck could not tell if the shape-shifter spoke for her, because the words didn’t sound like her words. But, then, she didn’t know what her words might sound like in this language.

“There are versions that are not versions at all but only Source. Yet the old man only keeps moving through versions. He’s fractured.”

“I’m not supposed to see him, but I do. I just pretend not to.”

“Bad luck. Bad duck. Sad, sad pluck.”

“Why are you out here?” A shape-shifter could be anything in the City, did not need to live as outcast.

“Because so few want me in there. Because it’s safer here. Besides, I’ve learned to like it here. It’s quiet. I can be alone.”

“I like it, too. I like the quiet. I like the stars.”

They looked up at the stars for a time.

“You cannot kill me,” the duck said, finally, after what analysis was left to it. “Or absorb me.”