She turned at last onto the street where we’d parked the night before, across from the apartment building. Former apartment building. In the brassy light of midday, I couldn’t imagine anyone having left the top floor under his own power. Certainly not me. Then I remembered last night’s storm, and realized that things like the spill of bricks into the street, casual as a drift of sand, might be new since I’d been here last.

Rico said something fierce and explosive that I didn’t catch; then she seconded my thoughts. “Linn must have been biting the heads off nails. No telling how much the rain washed away last night.”

“Then why wasn’t he out here last night?”

Rico gave me a look. “Unless you want the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, don’t say that to him.”

She slung herself over the top of the door and strode across the street, and I followed her.

Linn met us on the sidewalk with no sign of rust stains on his teeth; if he was angry, it was some kind of incalculable emotion that I didn’t know how to read. He wore a faded red sweatshirt with the bottom half and the sleeves lopped off, mud-stained jeans, and, twisted up and knotted around his waist but still recognizable, the official silver jacket.

“Such things as might have been here, the sky only knows,” he said, making all the syllables crisp. His partner knew him pretty well, after all. “Sweet Nature herself wipes away this devil’s tracks.” There was a chalk line on the pavement in front of the ex-building; Linn stepped over it absently, like a kid who’d trained himself not to walk on sidewalk cracks. Rico did, too, just as I walked into the thing it delineated.

The sensation faded fast, but I said “Ow,” anyway, and felt like a dog whose master has forgotten to hold the door for it.

“Your pardon,” Linn said, on a note of genuine apology. He held both hands over the chalk line about a door’s width apart, and spoke a sweet, ringing sentence. “You shall have passage now, anywhere along the line.”

He led the way into the still-soggy front hall. All the doors to the apartment units stood open now, and several people in various quantities of silver were moving chunks of brick and second-storey floor joists and scraps of faded wallpaper and frowning over them. One woman with crisp black hair and long almond eyes looked up at us and shouted, “Dammit, Linn, put hats on ‘em!”

“They’re ours,” he told her.

“Never mind, then,” she growled. “Nobody cares if the public servants get brained with a brick.”

“Mind your footing on the stairs,” Linn warned us. “We’ve bound what we can, but the Border is an unchancy place for knots.”