“Jace sent word through the Penitents that they needed someone to escort a priest home. He didn’t say why.” She stood at the edge of one streetlight circle, staring out into shadow; he stood at the circle’s other pole, staring in, at her. His gaze burned her neck. “He didn’t say you.”

“Or you wouldn’t have come.”

“Of course not. You don’t want to see me. It was hard to accept for a while. Still is hard. But this is for the best, for both of us.”

“Then why walk so far back?”

“I like the view.” He heard how that sounded. “No, that’s not. I mean. It’s hard to walk next to you.”

“When have we ever done things the easy way?” She glanced over her shoulder. Streetlight blanched him, and made him seem small. “Come on. Walk with me at least. We don’t need to talk. But you freak me out, trailing back there like a Dhisthran bride.”

“I won’t jump onto your pyre,” he said, approaching slowly, as if she were a scared monkey.

“That’s a weight off my shoulders.” Being with him was easy. They knew each other’s jokes, even the bad ones, and the weak points in their walls. That was why their fights were so harsh.

They walked together, neither looking at the other. “Why did they need someone to come get you?” he asked after a while.

“Off-limits. Sorry.”

“You can tell me.”

“I can’t,” she said, “actually. Rules.”

“Okay.”

They continued down.

“Jace asked if I minded that it was you,” she said. “He offered to send you home.”

“And you said no.”

“We’re adults.”

“We’re sort of adults,” he agreed. “It’s like we’re tied together. I mean.” He fell silent.

“Bound in promissory chains,” she said. The words floated up from the pit of her mind, from Margot swaying on the stage.

“What’s that?”

“A poem.”

“Poetry,” he said, as if that one word encapsulated everything unsatisfactory in the world. Dry fallen fronds scraped together behind them. Pebbles rolled on the road. But there was no wind, and the road was empty. “You ever go back to the Rest?”

“Sometimes.”

“You’re limping.”

“Busy night,” she said.

“Do you want a shoulder?”

“I have two.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. The answer’s no.”

“Okay,” he said. In the silence, she took inventory of her wounds. Bones broken and harshly healed, flesh welded back to flesh, nerves rewired, soul rebuilt. All the physical traces of her fall.