“There?” Orfeus said, looking. The building in front of them stretched over most of a block. It was only a conservative three or four storeys high, but the creamy white stone of the structure gave it an older look than anything else here, all elaborate carved buttresses. Plants filled every inch of empty space, bursting and brambling out windows and over ledges.

Rivasoa lifted a hand to point, her sleeve dangling down. The entrance to the building was up a flight of marble stairs, a ramp zigzagging gracefully amongst them. The doors were tall and gilded. From that, from the domed roof and the few remaining gargoyles, this building had been a church or cathedral once.

Orfeus clasped her hands together. “Are you going to save my soul?”

“Your beliefs aren’t the problem.”

So something about her was.

Rivasoa led her up the stairs and through the imposing doors, which swung open at their approach.

Inside, it was one vast and unfurnished room. More stained glass windows took up one wall, and chandeliers hung from the ceiling, the richly green kind that filtered air. All the light in here was green and instead of furniture, there was more green. Plants lined the place in a tidily ordered profusion of growth, ferns and flaxes and small trees, a lot of elderberry. This place felt more forest than temple. After a moment, she could make out a few doors leading out, but from the size of it, this room took up most of the building.

Gathered in waiting was something that put her in mind of a council. Nothing as formal or pretentious as she’d expected, just a loose circle of five people dressed in soft cream-coloured clothes. In full daylight the effect would be dazzling, in this city and only in this city: they would take on the colours of each place they moved through, a shifting prism of light. In the night, it just made them seem pale, curiously washed out.

“Orfeus,” Rivasoa said and clasped her hands together so her sleeves met. She stepped back and away, walking quietly to a corner of the vast room, by a pond overgrown with lilies. Orfeus had half hoped for some sort of quick comment about what protocol to follow, but at least now she didn’t have to go to the trouble of ignoring it.

None of the five said anything. Orfeus stretched her arms out and said, “Me.”

After a fragment of pause, one of them moved forward, a middle-aged white person with a stern face and precise curls of chestnut hair. “Thank you for coming,” they said. Their hoverchair looked almost organic, panels on the side iridescent as beetle wings, and they spoke like someone used to being listened to.