They would claim an empty apartment near the southern edge of the Balcony Cliffs, with an ease of exit toward the ravine that served as preamble to the Company lands. They would be silent and incognito and try to blend in with the others who lived in that space.

“I lived here in mine.”

“In mine, I never knew about this place. I lived in the ruined observatory. In the basement. Before I met Moss.”

“I visited a friend here, once.”

“You had a friend? Doubtful.”

A sculpture of a giant bird. The corpse of a dog. A ruined dollhouse.

By these signs they knew they were home.

Their tenth City.

After the Balcony Cliffs’ attack beetles had been repulsed, after the scavengers received the message, the three regrouped behind a door blocking off a corridor near the southern entrance. Easily defendable. The door’s graffiti featured laughing foxes playing in the desert, each with but a single eye. Chen drew in the second eye on each to balance the equation. Moss reinforced the microbial sensors. There should be no tickle, no trace so light that Moss should not know it in time.

Grayson distrusted the lack of resistance; they had repulsed multitudes in past versions. But though she trained her eye across beams, blueprints and ghost layers bursting across her line of sight … she could parse no threat beyond the usual.

Still …

“We should move up our timeline,” Grayson said.

“But not blind. Not from panic.”

“It’s not panic. It’s common sense.”

“What if the fish is stubborn? What if the fish resists?”

“I’ll go,” Chen said. “I will convince the fish.”

“No,” Moss said. “It must be me or some part of me.”

“Then I will stand watch.”

“We must just go in and do what we came here to do.”

“I’ll go,” Chen repeated, with the force of a slammed door.

But the door had already been shut. Grayson and Moss ignored him.

Soon they would need the blue fox to say yes to them. They would need to be sure the duck with the broken wing didn’t interfere.

Soon, too, their faery mode might not be enough. Sometimes they had to wear their contamination suits. Depending on Moss’s senses, Grayson’s eye, Chen’s prophecies. What did contamination mean in this City, and which way did it flow?

Each Company building was different. But recon had diminishing returns and too many risks. So they rehearsed their plan, with the aid of the old dollhouse found by Grayson (once again). The Company had seven floors, but it was still easier to visualize using dolls and furniture and rooms than diagrams scratched in the dirt. Some things never changed.

They must get some version of Moss inside the Company building, to compromise the portal wall, to infiltrate the wall of globes.

But they’d been wrong about one thing.