“I am Aev,” she said, “and because I am, I was offered a choice. I thought to let you pay for your presumption. But that is not why we were made.”

“I know.” The pain in her chest had nothing to do with the broken rib. She turned away from the mass of Aev. “You want my loyalty, I guess. A promise I won’t report this. That I’ll protect and serve you, like a serial hero’s sidekick.”

Aev did not answer.

“Say something, dammit.” Gabby’s hands shook. She drew a pack of cigarettes from her inside pocket, lit one. Her fingers slipped on the lighter’s cheap toothed wheel. She breathed tar into the pain in her side.

When she’d drawn a quarter of the cigarette to ash, she turned back to find the alley empty. The poems afterglowed down to darkness, like tired fireflies. A shadow crossed the moon. She did not look up.

The light died and the words once more seemed damaged.

She limped from the alley to the street. A wiry-haired man fanned a tin box of coals topped by a grill on which lay skewers of seasoned lamb.

Gabby paid him a few thaums of her soul for a fistful of skewers she ate one at a time as she walked down the well-lit street past porn shop windows and never-shut convenience stores. The air smelled sweeter here, enriched by cigarette smoke and the sharp, broad spices of the lamb. After she ate, even she could barely notice the tremor in her hands. The drumbeat of blood through her body faded.

She tossed the skewers in a trash can and lit a second cigarette, number two of the five she’d allow herself today. Words danced inside her skull. She had promised nothing.

She realized she was humming, a slow, sad melody she’d never heard before that meandered through the C-minor pentatonic scale, some god’s or muse’s gift. She followed it.

Her watch chimed one. Still time to file for matins, if she kept the patter simple.

3

3

Tara was buying eggs in the Paupers’ Quarter market when she heard the dreaded song.

She lived three blocks over and one north, in a walk-up apartment recommended by the cheap rent as well as by its proximity to the Court of Craft and the market itself, Alt Coulumb’s best source of fresh produce. Now, just past dawn, the market boiled with porters and delivery trucks and human beings. Shoppers milled under awnings of heavy patterned cloth down mazed alleys between lettuce walls and melon pyramids.