He grated a handful of sharp cheese, heated oil, cracked the eggs into a bowl, did his best to ignore Claire moving through the kitchen. Her footsteps weren’t Donna’s, and he hadn’t realized how unused he was to anyone else’s presence here. “Coffee’s in the cabinet upper left of the sink.” Outside the sky was still black, and streetlights burned. Scramble, scramble.

“You buy it ground?” As if he’d confessed to killing children.

“The store grinds it for the percolator.”

She kept quiet, leaving him space to ponder the wrongness of his opinion. She dumped grounds into the sink, which made him wince—they didn’t have a disposal. He remembered yesterday’s sharp-edged conversation and compared it to whatever was happening this morning, so early that Donna still called it night. There was dew on the window. The eggs set; he tossed in cheese, and didn’t correct her about the grounds in the sink.

She watched the coffee as if it were the spring’s first flower opening from a bud. Snapped off the burner, poured fast. When he drank, the flavor opened and kept opening into the back of his throat.

“Good eggs,” she said around a mouthful.

“What did you do to the coffee?”

“If you overboil it, there’s too much acid,” she said. “The taste’s weaker than it should be but that’s what you get using ground beans. I added cinnamon, but it’s not the same.” She shoveled the remaining eggs into her mouth, swallowed hard, then added coffee. “Good, though.”

“You’ll have to show me.”

“It’s easy.”

Dishes in the sink. He grabbed his jacket. By the time he returned, he found she’d washed the dishes, racked them to dry, and scooped the grounds out of the sink.

He stabled the wagon in a garage three blocks over. The morning’s chill fingers ignored his jacket, shirt, and skin, shoved right into him to grab handfuls of viscera. Claire kept her chin down. Theirs was the first cart to leave the garage; the golem plodded forward on four legs. They descended the garage ramp to the street and picked up speed as they drove west through drifting mist beneath a sky still hung with stars.

“I’ll take the leads,” Claire said when they cleared the quarter’s edge. “You can sleep.”

The offer confused Matt. He had not considered letting someone else drive his cart, because he never had someone else to do so. Navigating the morning with this girl beside him made his whole routine, the road and the cart and the mist, seem strange. “I can’t sleep once I’m awake,” he said. That sounded like a riddle told by those head-shaved kids who studied with the Shining Empire sages down on Bleeker, so he tried again. “I mean, I don’t nap.”