Muscles knit back together and skin began to reform. Orfeus stretched out her fingers to halt her Blood. She felt at the skin of her temple, which had been sped to maybe a week’s worth of healing: the first, papery layer of healed skin brushed off at her touch, and the skin underneath was new and soft but not painful. She stretched, angling her back. The cuts tugged, restricting her movement, but they didn’t bleed. She had the beginnings of scars. Perhaps she could manage to make scars glamorous.

Breathing still hurt. It at least hurt less. She wasn’t going to risk using her Blood to magically fix whatever was damaged, not when a broken rib would then be stuck forever broken, bone fragments woven into new muscle. Blood on its own wasn’t intelligent, and Orfeus was not a doctor.

“May I play?” she inquired, to be annoying. Her guitar was safest in the hatch up above, not here where any sudden lurch might jar it from her hands.

Rivasoa folded her hands in her lap. “In the grove, we find much benefit from quiet contemplation.”

Orfeus grinned. “I’d rather contemplate noise.”

Rivasoa pointedly flipped a page of her smooth, small book. Her hands were large and capable, but she held the stylus careful and dextrous as a surgeon held a knife.

The world whirled past their windows. Green and black, and then, abruptly, more colour. Orfeus shifted to the window, loosening her belt as she craned forward to stare. The train slowed as it passed through the city, if it was a city.

Tall buildings bustled with greenery, trees climbing up the sides and spreading out from square gardens on tower-tops. Broad-topped trees lined the centre of the thin, narrow roads, and everywhere there was colour. The effect would be more startling in full daylight, but it was eminently striking even in nighttime, as the train passed below great spreading skylights in blue and yellow and red and green, violet and gold, ornate as stained glass. The soft gold lights of the city shone through them and cast dappled shadows over the buildings and streets and the green growth below.

It was a shockingly gorgeous city, where every building was a work of art. Orfeus settled back in her seat and looked across to see Rivasoa looking smug. Well, good to know the Blooded didn’t deny themselves human feelings like smugness.

“Our technology is among the best in the world,” Rivasoa said. “We use solar panelling of course, the same as any civilised person, for we honour the Earth. But things being of use does not mean they cannot, too, be of beauty. Many of our solar panels are as you have seen, mosaics of colour. The whole city is a work of art, and one that changes with every shifting angle of the Sun, as all art is changed by its viewer.”