“Same scene: changes and never changes. You remember Brad?”

“Pale kid with the needle teeth, yeah. In from the boondocks.”

“Let himself go a few months back.”

“No shit.”

“Full out with the claws and everything. Candy took him down, with help. Almost had to call the Suits, but everyone’s okay, except for Brad.” He stabbed his sternum with the tip of his middle finger and made a face. “Shanda moved back down to Alt Selene, her grandkids need some help down there. The Strings broke up, got back together, broke up again. It’s life.”

“Or something like it,” she said, completing their old phrase. “It’s good to see you again, Walsh.”

“Same here, kid. Get out on the floor!”

Raz had taken his whiskey and looked, not tense exactly, but distant.

“I’ll play some pool first,” Cat said.

Walsh kept rein on his surprise. “Get on, then. Take table two.”

They wormed through the crowd to the empty table. “I can’t play with you,” Raz said.

“Don’t be so sure.” She racked the balls, rolled them back and forth on green felt, switched two solids and stripes.

“I’m stronger. My heart doesn’t beat, and I don’t have to breathe. It wouldn’t be fair.”

The cues were still horrible and gnarled. She ground blue chalk against the tip, and inhaled, smelling sweat and blood in a good way. Familiar, long-absent scents of stale beer and cloves tickled up her nose and back down her throat. Her tongue woke wet in her mouth, and she felt an anticipatory thrill, like a man had turned a key in her spine to tighten her nerves like piano wire. Tuning her.

Somewhere in that thrashing crowd was a fang to make her feel the way she used to want.

She leaned her hip into the table, sighted on the cue ball, and sank two solids on the break.

22

22

From the air, Alt Coulumb made no sense. Taking the city part by part, you could mislead yourself into believing it obeyed a higher logic: the Business District to the north had gridded streets and avenues, but fanning around the clockface that order broke to jags, as if the Sacred Precinct was a rock thrown through a window and the rest of the city the window’s shards. “Cow paths,” she said as they flew south toward the university.

“I don’t understand.”

“We didn’t have many trees back home, but I climbed the ones we did have. This looks like cow paths from overhead.”

“You did not grow up in a city?”

Tara caught her breath as Shale’s wings spread to mount an updraft. “No.”

“Where?”

“You wouldn’t know it.”

He said nothing.

“Edgemont,” she relented at last. “Little place at the eastern edge of the Badlands. Farm country. Lots of corn. Very flat.”

“Near Lark’s Ridge?”