When Maeve had passed on, C-plus had already been an old man by some standards. He could tell as much by the way strangers treated him. Young women, no longer seeing him as a threat, were open and friendly. Other old men felt free to address him on the street as if he were a member of the same secret club.

So when he had inherited Maeve’s flying apparatus and the somewhat disturbing stockpile of neuroactive pharmaceuticals that went with it, he might have been forgiven for junking it with the explanation that he was too old for this.

But then he had remembered his childhood dream of flying, and resolved that this was not to be one of those abandoned dreams. Private eye and ninja might never come to pass. But no matter how difficult, even disappointing, the reality of flying might be compared to his childhood conception of it, in overcoming all of that he would show what he was made of.

And that was just in this life. In the next one, perhaps it would enable him to achieve other goals. To right old wrongs and discharge old obligations.

So he had fixed up Maeve’s rig. He had loved Maeve in spite of, and even because of, certain aspects of her personality—her basic approach to life—that were manifested in every detail of the flying system she had caused to be built at the circus school. It was whimsical, ad hoc, patched together, willfully perverse, down to the level of the choice of fasteners used to hold it together and the stitching on the harness. This was a sacred artifact, not something he could simply hand off to a minion, and so C-plus had spent a year taking it apart himself, the ostrich plumes and the beadwork, the macramé, the Zuni textiles and jury-rigged intravenous plumbing, and he had put all of that stuff behind glass in a kind of museum or shrine in the corner of the new space—an old hangar at Boeing Field, formerly used for maintenance of private jets, now empty most of the time since most of that work was being performed al fresco, or even while in flight, by purpose-built robots.

All of the mechanical stuff he redid from scratch. The new harness was made just for him, with smart pads that would prevent him from getting bedsores even if he lived in it for weeks. The servos that made it zoom and veer about were beefier and yet more responsive. He added big fans that would blow wind over him when he dreamed of going into a steep power dive or soaring on a thermal.