She sat back on her haunches astride him. “You don’t even understand”—that last word even more a growl than usual in Stone—“why I’m angry.”

“Can you get off me?”

She bared teeth.

“It’s hard to talk this way, is all.”

One wingbeat drew her to her feet. He stood more slowly, exaggerating submission. She’d seen him kip up from worse falls. “Your stunt risked the Lady’s life.”

He picked gravel out of his ears and brushed more from the hollow between his neck and collarbone. Across the street, a billboard man with improbably orange skin blew smoke rings into the night. The rings, swelling, faded to air. “Let’s not do this here.”

He flew slowly, painted greens and oranges and browns by billboards and streetlights. She followed. A late-night worker gaped from a high window at them both, and Shale waved. Aev landed after him, on an observation deck beneath a towering nightmare antenna. The city lay below, river flowing down to bay and blackly glittering ocean. Out there, Captain Pelham’s crew guided the captured Dream and its foul cargo to port.

“I’ve seen the view before, Shale.”

“But it’s no less beautiful for your knowing it,” he said. “They pay to come up here these days, the humans I mean. In the forty years since we left the rooftops, they’ve learned to love them.” He patted coin-op binoculars mounted at the observation deck’s edge. “Five-year-olds press their faces to this lens and stare out to the edge of the world.”

“Wearing skin has fogged your mind.”

“The Lady made me to walk among them, with your hands. Will you blame me for that?”

“I blame you for your meathead stunt tonight.”

“I know those girls. Their father’s a broken man—all the anger inside his skull has left a calculus of hate. We want followers for our Lady. Do we serve Her by deserting her people?”

“You did not intervene in the market to serve Her.”

“She asked me to go there.”

“You petitioned Her! You wheedled and convinced because you didn’t want to let that girl down. You had to be the hero. And now we all might die because of your pride.”

“As if I’m the only one.”

“What are you saying?”

“You saved the reporter.”

Aev walked to the high railing, vaulted over, and let herself fall.

She grabbed the roof’s edge and jerked to a halt above the windows; her talons scarred the concrete, leaving grooves that caught moon- and city-light.

“Mother?” Shale asked from behind her.

She said nothing.

He lowered himself over the edge and hung beside her in the calm of the wind.

“I have risked us all,” he said after a while.