The London Den plays a game called Midsummer Switch. It’s played with a sixty-three-card deck in three suits: White, Black, and Blood. The cards assemble into hands first by familiar poker rules, pairs and triplicates, and then symbolically, according to their nature. There’s a thrill, tingling sweetly at the back of Naomi’s tongue, in gathering these archetypes into the loose shapes of stories—Treason, a lower-ranking hand, consists of a Duke, Knight, Horseman, and Cupbearer, but the hand is invalidated by the presence of a Queen. The best possible hand is the Full Court, a Queen High, Consort, Prince, and four of the seven remaining court cards, one of which is the Fiddler, who cradles a bone instrument tenderly against his cheek, like he’s listening for the music inside. The stakes are too high to enjoy this game, but Naomi can’t always help it. She likes to imagine that she is the first person ever to write down the rules.

The third party in the room is, ostensibly, human, perhaps in her early fifties. Her gray hair is cropped close to her skull and she wears a sharp black pantsuit. Naomi has seen her here before, and every time the woman looks like she has just come from a board meeting. Her hands, resting on the table, are a creation of delicate metal, silver jointed fingers and gears whirring gently in her knuckles. In her notes, Naomi calls this woman Oracle, after yet another of the cards.

Menagerie shuffles the deck with a snap loud enough to turn Naomi’s head and then greets her impassively, “Fiddler.”

“Sir.”

His eyes flicker and slit. Naomi may have been incorrect about the manner of address. She may have made a mistake. Her pulse jumps and she presses her tongue to the dry roof of her mouth.

It’s impossible not to make mistakes beneath the hill, where there are laws for everything; esoteric, unspoken, and compulsory. What was Naomi wrong about—gender, her relative station, should she have bowed, curtsied, remained silent? If mistakes can’t be avoided, what matters is tracking them precisely, not making the big mistakes or the wrong ones. It would be easier if Naomi could write things down while she was here. There are silver trays by the table filled with candied violets and rose cakes, pheasant on a bed of curling fern, a bowl of softly luminescent fruit. Naomi thinks of Christina Rossetti. Who knows upon what soil they’ve fed their hungry thirsty roots? The wrong mistake would be to eat these.

“With what have you come to play?” There’s something dead in the motion of Menagerie’s pale lips, almost like Claymation.