By the time Cat pulled herself back onto the dinghy and let the Suit slip away, the sky was purple with the threat of dawn. Open air felt weak, easy. The sunrise seemed obscene. Raz flopped to the deck.

They lay alone on the water.

When she could bear to move again, she reached for him. Her hand fell heavy on his leg, and squeezed. His did the same a second later, on hers.

“That,” he said when he found words to speak, “was a brave dumb thing you did.”

“At least we were dumb together. And brave.”

He laughed, then coughed—and coughed and laughed harder, until he had to bend over the boat’s edge and hack water out of his lungs.

She slapped him on the back. “Let’s get to shore before you burn.”

53

53

“It’s dangerous for you and your sister to be out alone,” Matt told Claire as they opened the stands. He’d chosen his words in the silence of their morning rounds, which had not been silent at all but full of rocking wagon wheels, plodding golem feet, the leafy shiver of lettuce loose in crates. For the second day in a row, they had not talked on the road. Dark circles undermined Claire’s eyes, and she stared over the golem’s surging shoulders. She napped when he drove, which she had never done before.

While he waited for her answer he unlocked his stand’s cupboard, removed the carved wood signs and stepladder, and climbed the one to hang the others from brass hooks. The paint caught dawn’s blush. He hung EGGS, and ADORNE, and FRESH between them. “I was worried for you.”

“Worried” was too neat a word. He’d stayed up an hour past bedtime at the kitchen table with Donna, drinking mint tea brewed with leaves from their window garden. Hannah and Jake had abandoned their game of checkers and thunder lizards long before that; Hannah was sweet with the kid. Then again, neither Donna nor Matt was so free as Hannah to pin Jake down until he said sorry.

Waiting, Matt and Donna counted sirens through the open window, and fistfights, and curses, and mating cats’ cries. Matt wanted to go look for them, but Donna counseled him to stay. After an hour they switched roles, and after that again.

He slept, expecting to wake and find them still gone. But when he emerged robed after his morning shower, Claire was back, with a pot of coffee strong enough to double as industrial solvent.

He’d asked her a wordless question, which she hadn’t answered and still wasn’t answering.