He crouched in the street, wreathed in demonsmoke. Horses reared. Carriage wheels clattered on cobblestones. Human shapes approached from the sidewalk. A girl held out her arm. She recoiled when he turned to her. Out here, in the light, he felt exposed.

He flew.

When he crested the skyscrapers, two more demons hit him at once.

*   *   *

Abelard felt glass knives carve his city’s sky. He saw them through the eyes of a frightened boy on a fire escape, of an old man watching the few visible stars through a telescope, of a girl singing on a rooftop in the Paupers’ Quarter.

God’s knowledge washed against his own like waves at an island’s shore, leaving traces of itself. Demons in the city but not of it—demons marked as Seril’s people.

They flew toward the gargoyles’ tower. Through an accountant working late Abelard saw two catch Shale in midair, whiplike limbs seizing his arms, proboscises jabbing. They drank from him.

On the northeastern tower, the moon began to set.

Then, a silver streak—

*   *   *

Cat saw Shale tumbling, held aloft by two sets of demon wings. She heard his cry through the Suit; without the Suit she would have only felt it in her bones. We need to help him, she said.

“You can’t fight them and carry me,” Raz said.

I’ll set you down—

“Throw me.”

Are you crazy?

Shale’s roar weakened as they drained him.

“Do it.”

She gathered him in her arms, let the Suit judge trajectory, and threw. He was a missile of cloth and muscle and teeth.

He landed on a demon’s back, and as she closed the gap she saw him wrap his legs around its abdomen, grab its bulbous head and pull, back and up. A proboscis sprang free of Shale’s back, spun around, split into snapping jaws, but too late. Raz snapped the head free of the body.

And fell, as the demon disintegrated beneath him.

Godsdammit she didn’t have time—the fall, the Suit offered, would take thirty seconds—she tore two legs off Shale’s remaining demon. Claws caught at her but Shale’d regained enough strength to help. She speared the demon through the heart with its own leg. Its carapace cracked, and twenty seconds, she planted her legs on Shale’s body and dove down from him, fifteen, ten, flare—

She caught Raz thirty feet from the pavement, turned his plummet to a sideways swoop, then soared.

He was, she noticed, still grinning.

They met Shale in the air. Silver light leaked from cracks in his skin. He pressed one hand to his side, and more light trickled through his fingers.

Can you fly?

“I must.”

He pointed to the tower in the Ash atop which Cat had seen the second moon.

It was setting now, and glass bugs buzzed around it.

*   *   *

Panic of order time breaks the.

Tara, in some sequence: