Which, all things considered, was not the best course of action. The gentleman on the left now reached for her as well, and she drew back, and tightened her fingers around her walking stick. Drink and anger pounded a rapid tattoo on the drum of her heart.

“Boys. Kai.” Mako’s voice, behind her. Beneath the noise of crowd and argument she’d missed the tap of his approaching footsteps, and his stick. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“No trouble,” said the gentleman—or boy—on the left. Both straightened slightly.

“No trouble,” Kai said. “I was just making my way back to our table.” And she winked at the bouncers, turned her back on them, and led Mako through the crowd.

“What was that?” the old man said when they were seated again.

“Didn’t want to talk to me,” she said. “Is he always an asshole?”

“He’s been blocked for a while now. Lot of stress. Doesn’t excuse the assholery, but then he’s Iskari. Their assholes get graded on a curve.”

She felt the sinking tension in her gut unwind a little. “I missed you, Mako.”

“You don’t miss shit. Months we haven’t seen a hair of you. And you’re getting dead drunk as soon as you’re back, not because you’re happy. What happened?”

“Who said anything happened?” She raised her hand and searched the crowd for a waiter.

“Your cane, and the fact that you almost started a fight with two bouncers three times your size.”

“Hospital. Basically. And I was moved to a new job. And I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’ve known too many men who didn’t want to talk, and women, too. Not talking doesn’t end any way but bad.”

She shifted in the chair, and her back sang its protest. She’d felt lithe and smooth walking down to the coast from the cable car, cane tucked under her arm like a swagger stick, hands in suit pant pockets, reveling in freedom, in the round sweet scent of barbecue fires, of flowers and incense and skin. She’d knotted around herself in the intervening hours’ sit. And around Mako, who she hadn’t seen since Claude. “Claude and I broke up. Did I tell you?”

“Good riddance.” More whiskey drained, to her and then to the Gleb poet, who delivered the final verse of a tight acrostic to the vigorous applause of a table in the third row back, either friends or structuralists. “Guy’s collar’s too white for you anyway.”

“Hells does that mean? He’s city watch. I wear ties for a living.”

“Once a shipbuilder’s daughter, always a shipbuilder’s daughter. Those calluses don’t rub off easy.”

“They rub off easy enough. And his dad was a fisherman.”

“Time in a Penitent breaks that out of you.”

“If you say so.”