Night had dropped against sky once again, a kidnapping that held the dark bird close, and sometimes the bird sagged inside that darkness as if trapped in some rough black cloth that stank of surgery. It worried at the dark bird, worried at her like the stars were the tips of thorns and it had become stuck in a thicket of them.

Out in the City, members of some cult, going door to door in a broken shantytown neighborhood, hadn’t noticed the duck in the shadow out of the sun. Some broken cult that couldn’t contain itself, must be known by all, all must be in it, even though there were so few. The dark bird had slaughtered them when it meant to ignore, something in their demeanor bringing out the rage. Murder control bereft, the monster still in its home in her skull. So she had killed them all on her own. A seepage that startled. Nothing beatific in the remains, fly-studded but quiet.

There came again light under the blackened sky, there on the lonely hill where she had a nest—become starful against recollection, and grand and rich and also drenched in gray or light purple or even the moon. Soaked by the moon, the blackness, so it felt like cold river water, a comfort upon the dark bird’s face and beak.

There came no call from a Company outpost. No admonition to attack, to defend. No alert. Just the night, and some sense of the foxes out on the desert floor, the ones she despised, feared, envied. No one bound them. No voice owned them out of blue sky or velvet night.

But she waited in that place. For the tiny creatures to come out, the ones that could not know her type or her purpose or her past. If the dark bird remained still and silent, she could live in that moment, watching. Unspoiled by any impulse to snatch them up in her beak, to crunch, gnaw, or devour.

The nighttime blossoms registered black to human sight, but to her a glittering field of yellow and blue and saffron—pinprick flowers in multitudes—arose on slender stalks, and with them the smell of lavender and rosemary and mint. Smells, almost, from another world, deployed by the flowers as a kind of trap, a memory of things that no longer existed. For they were clever flowers, almost worthy of the magical garden.