“Thanks,” he said. “It was you who almost got me caught in the first place.”

“You would have been caught sooner or later. I saved you.”

“They fired me in the end anyway. Sleeping on the job.” He shrugged. “I thought you were leaving. For good, you said.”

“I have to take care of a few things first.”

“What kind of things?” That question had an intensity she didn’t like.

“The Blue Lady,” she said.

“She’s dead.”

“Maybe.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I need your help. I need you to follow a priest for me.”

“Why?”

“I want to know where she sleeps.” She pressed her hands against the cart, hard, until her arms shook and her fingertips and knuckles turned white. “And what kind of wards she has. What protections.”

“Some favor,” he said. “I didn’t mean why do you want her followed. I meant why should I help.”

She rolled onto her side, and looked at him.

“Because no matter how you try to talk it off, you know I saved your ass back in the Plaza. Because they almost stuck me in a Penitent that night, and now the guy who rescued me is in trouble. Because we’re the Lady’s children, and there’s nobody to help us but us.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

They rolled out from under the wagon and dusted themselves off on the street. Angry drunken shouts from the cafe heralded the groundskeepers’ return, and they fled uphill into the Palm, lost their pursuers in an open-air market mess of food trucks and jewelry stalls.

Together they climbed a shopping center across from the priest’s office. Izza searched the mirror-pool windows opposite for the woman’s face, while Nick stuck his head over the building’s edge and spit down into the clogged river of afternoon traffic. Whenever someone looked up, he ducked back onto the roof, chortling. She thumped him on the skull, and he stopped, for a while.

Izza spotted the priest before Nick grew bored enough to move on to a newer and dumber game. A lucky glimpse: the woman leaning against a windowsill and watching the clouds as if they held a secret. “That’s her.”

“The one with the lips?”

“I guess she has lips. That one there.”

“I see her.”

“I want you to follow her.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t steal her wallet or anything. Don’t get cute, or close enough she’ll see.”

“I’ve done this before.”

“Just follow her home. I’ll meet you in the Grieve at nine.”

“Sometimes these folks don’t go home. They drink, or stay in the office all night.”

“Keep after her, then—if I miss you at nine we’ll meet again at dawn. If that doesn’t work, leave a note in the warehouse.”

“Your friend’ll chase me out.”

“Cat? Tell her you’re looking for me.”

“Why not follow this woman yourself?”