After a while Rafferty looked up, staring through his stringy hair. “You’re still here.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t do this, Corbin.”

“I have to show them.”

“Ellen didn’t sound happy about it. She sounded scared.”

Rafferty’s head jerked around. All weakness left him. He looked like he did before he threw a punch. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing. Come on, Corbin. Let’s get you home.”

He half-carried Rafferty to his street, in spite of the stares of stroller-pushing moms and dads, and jeering kids on stoops who should have been in school. The man insisted on walking the last half block to his building and letting himself inside. Matt watched, then went home himself, found Donna working over a ledger she’d brought from the office. The kids were still at school. He hugged her from behind and thought about Rafferty’s wife and the ruin the man had made of himself in the three years since her loss.

“You smell of beer,” Donna said, but she kissed him back anyway, then shoved him off. “Shower. Sleep.”

He lost the rest of the day to fitful dreams of stone teeth and nails, and the tension in the Rafferty girls, like they were still pools about to freeze. He tried to open his mouth, but he had no mouth. He woke at sunset, scoured sober, with a bad taste on his tongue like a small furry thing had died there.

When he reached the market, he had to push through a crowd—unfamiliar folks for the most part, strangers called by strangers called by friends—to the clearing at the center, a bare twenty-foot circle around a ghostlight lantern that underlit the crowd’s faces green, made them seem ghoulish. The brownstones around the market square stared down on them all, silhouettes in their windows. Uptown nobs watching the little people’s show. The rent here had been too high for normal folks for years. Maybe these posh types had already sent rats to the Blacksuits—pardon me, there’s a disturbance in the market square, perhaps you could come inquire.

Rafferty and his daughters stood in the circle’s center, the girls on the dais where Criers sang their news, Rafferty pacing before them. He wore a red coat and walked with the swagger stick he sometimes carried. Uncombed hair fountained from his scalp.

The others stood around the inner edge of the circle, uncomfortable. “I thought you’d keep him out of trouble,” Sandy said when Matt reached her.

“I did,” he said, knowing he hadn’t.

A Crier stood across the circle from Matt and Sandy—a woman wearing a narrow-brimmed hat and a long coat, watching.