She points to Cupbearer, his empty, ugly face, his closed, single eye. She does not know what a person’s life expectancy is with three ribs neatly removed, but he is still breathing. “Give everything back to him,” she says. Her voice is clear, authoritative, and someone else’s. Speaking into this hot aorta of the earth, at the end of the things Naomi can know. “Everything he lost. Give it back.”

It’s an entirely uneventful restoration. It feels as if there ought, at least, to be some flash and sparkle, something she could write down. Instead, there is just the fair face, and the pale hair, the gray glass eyes, and the long lashes. There is his open mouth, full of teeth. He stretches and rolls back both shoulders. At least he has the courtesy to tremble, as one before the grace of God. That saved a wretch like me.

“Vincent,” says Ari, in a gasp.

Ah. That was the name. Vincent. Feels anticlimactic. When they go to embrace each other, Naomi turns away. She puts her notebook into her bag. She puts in the vial of blood, the peach with one bite out of it that will leave sticky juice all over the inside fabric. This day was a victory of sorts; it will be a little while before she runs out of things to write about. She cannot remember the foxtrot anymore. She has committed either an unforgivable waste or the first really good deed of her life. She thinks of the perfect machinery of the fay, Menagerie greeting every comer exactly the same, every time. She wonders, if you break a pattern once, and only once, does it change your place in some human taxonomy? Sometimes, Naomi’s journalism teacher told her, you are writing one story and then you realize suddenly that you are writing another. “We should go,” Naomi says.

The fay watch them with the still eyes of wasps. Who can even tell if a wasp is watching them? Magpie and Menagerie are frozen as if forbidden from movement. Behind her, Naomi can hear the grinding of Oracle’s metal knuckles as she packs away her own things. Perhaps it is an exhibition of great emotion.

When they step out of the hill, sunrise has not come yet. It feels as if it ought to have, but they have not, after all, played through the night. The moon is still a lightless hole in the sky.

They are just boys, Naomi reminds herself, without looking over her shoulder. She knows they are following, and she is not so invested as Orpheus anyway. She can hear their ragged breaths as they come out of the hill, their crunching footsteps where the dew has frosted the grass. One of them is crying, and because Naomi does not recognize the voice she thinks it must be Vincent. They earned this all themselves, but they asked for none of it.