She knocked back her own, and tasted fire and smoke. Then she bent to the table and lined up angles in her head. “We’re paying for the table. And you’re in demand here. Plenty of people would be happy to give you a drink. Not on the dance floor—that’s the only rule. Don’t want the place to get slippery.”

“That’s how you think I work? Canvassing a room of people I don’t know for a taste—”

“I don’t judge. You do what you need to live.”

“I don’t need that.”

“You have to drink sometime.”

“It’s personal.”

“You can tell me.”

“I don’t like to talk about it.”

The angles settled in the green felt’s reflection behind her eyes. Her heart did beat, so she slowed it, and she did breathe, so she waited for the pause after exhalation. The crack of the balls reminded her pleasantly of breaking someone else’s bone.

They finished the game in silence, relating through force and spheres that disappeared into velvet pockets. The band rocked. Four of the booth curtains had been drawn when she came in, and seven were now. She’d seen the seventh curtain close as Raz lined up a shot on the eight ball: two women, one older than Cat, the other younger and rounder, both hungry, and she couldn’t tell which had the teeth. She hadn’t expected to be so aware of the curtains. She liked this place. She liked Walsh. She liked the music. She liked the damn booths and the damn red leather upholstery in them and the stupid paintings of naked women who didn’t look how naked women looked and were all twined round with rose vines and thorns. He missed the eight. She didn’t.

“We saved lives tonight,” she said. “We fought and won. Dance with me.”

“Fine,” he said, though it hadn’t been a question.

He offered her his whiskey, and she took it, swallowed it, set down the glass. Grabbed his hand, smoother than any sailors’ she’d felt. No hemp rope could burn his skin. He followed her with a look on his face like she was a chess problem or a tricky knot he wanted to untie. The whiskey felt good. Girls to the left of them, boys to the right of them, and she pulled him into the valley of the dance.

Music was a way to lose yourself, music good and loud with a pulse you could follow, a double beat that vined through your ears and mouth into veins and spread shoots, leaves, flowers. Drink-sweat and too much perfume and leather and slick vinyl and hair pressed close to her. She smoothed her skirt against her hips and danced. Somewhere a singer sang. There were flowers in her arms and her stomach and deeper. She raised her arms like wings.