“I need a drink,” Cat said once Raz’s sailors moored Dream and Bounty both and reefed the sails and jagged the mainmast and scuppered the jibjaw or whatever it was they’d been up to while she packed Dream’s crew into Blacksuit wagons. “And before you get clever, I don’t mean the kind where I’m the beverage. Care to chaperone?”

Raz signed a few forms and handed them to his ship’s clerk. “You want me to come along and make sure you have no fun? Happy to oblige.”

“More like play designated hitter.”

“Is that a sports thing?”

“It’s like a designated driver, only if I’m too drunk to hit someone, you do it.”

“Sounds fun,” he said. “My Alt Coulumb nightlife’s a half century out of date, and the last time I chose a bar in this city I ended up brainwashed. You know a place?”

She bared her teeth at him, though hers were somewhat less pointy. “I can think of a few.”

*   *   *

Tara stood beside Shale on the skyscraper’s roof. Aev had left them—flitted off to brood on the abyss. They watched the horizon and the water, neither wanting to speak first.

Shale gave up the contest. “You can’t fly.”

“I can,” she said. “Just not in Alt Coulumb, thanks to your ever-so-progressive local interdict.”

“The skies belong to the Lady,” Shale said. “It would be a perversion for you to fly through them.”

“That’s what counts as perversion for a gargoyle? You must have a boring sex life.”

“Reproduction works differently for us.”

“I bet.”

Shale shifted uncomfortably. “Our poetry can only be read from the air. How will you read it if you cannot fly?”

“I was hoping you’d carry me.”

“You trust me to do that?”

“No,” she said, with more nonchalance than she felt. “But I figure dropping me would cause more trouble than it’s worth. And after all you’ve done tonight, you owe me.”

A calculating silence ensued.

“I have apologized for the face thing,” she said. “Every time I’ve seen you. Except for this afternoon, when you were on too high a dudgeon for me to get a word in edgewise.”

“You’ve seen me maybe three times in the last year.”

“I thought you needed space to heal.”

“After you cut off my face.”

She rolled her eyes. “There’s not even a scar.”

“Where should I hold you?”

Tara had not given much thought to that question. “Around the waist, probably.”

“Very well.” He grabbed her about the waist and jumped off the building.