She’d tried last night, three times, and three times fallen, plummeting ten stories until Aev swept down to catch her. No room for failure now. Wings wide.

Two beats buffeted the deck. The Suit did what she asked, when she asked, but she felt like a climber with a finger grip on a narrow ledge: the wind was there, but she could not pull herself atop it.

The demons reached the port-facing rooftops, gaining altitude.

You can’t muscle yourself up from this position. Change the angle. Use your body, not your arms. Swing.

She bent her legs, gathered Raz to her, and leapt.

He squawked, undignified. The deck receded below, the ship rocking from the force of her departure.

She began to fall.

Come on, wind, she thought. I need you.

Her wings filled. She saw deep currents rising from the city, colored red below red: heat, a path she could use. Beneath her—beneath her!—lay Alt Coulumb, port streets she’d patrolled, the warehouse where she cornered the gargoyles the year before, Pleasure Quarter alleys down which the younger woman she had been staggered sickly and strung out hunting for an easy fix, and there, ahead, the tower of Kos Everburning. A moon shone on her spread wings, and another on the skyline, atop a tower in the Ash, where Seril held court.

Raz laughed, his arms around her, his grip tight with monkeyfear of falling.

She laughed, too, fiercely. To fly was glorious.

The demons sped north and east. Cat hunted them.

*   *   *

Thus Jones, in the light of an unfamiliar goddess:

“Would you consider yourself a refugee?”

“A survivor. It took me forty years to reach home, and then only in a reduced condition.”

Jones stood in silver light. The world shifted as she shifted angles, like a hologram postcard. One blink, one turn of the head, and she stood before a woman whose face she almost recognized, not quite Mother, not quite her, not quite Grandma. Another blink, another turn, and the roof was gone and the sky too and the woman, replaced by a frothing silver sea.

But Jones still held her notebook.

“Your gargoyles attacked Alt Coulumb after you died.”

“I was not dead. I was dismembered. Parts of me were stolen. But I lived, reduced, with and through my children. Fallen, I went mad. So did they. It took us a long time to learn to think again.”

“Why did you come back?”

“I belong here,” she said. “My love is here, as are my people. Justice fails many. She follows rules without question. The night must have a compassionate face.”

The crucial question: “How do you operate with Justice, then?”

“She was built from stolen pieces of my corpse. Now that I have returned, we are one and two. Her children are freer than they were, thanks to me. The system is more flexible. In her old, rigid form, Justice was vulnerable. We are better now.”