“What then?” Iris asks, not sure why she’s indulging her pint-size extortionist.

“Have you ever seen a sunset before? A real one?”

“No. I’ve never been above the clouds before.”

“Good. You aren’t going to see this one either. You have to miss it. That’s the deal. Liars don’t get to have all the goodies. If you want a free ride in a Drop Bubble, you have to close your eyes until I say. You have to miss the last of the sunset.”

Cake sits in Iris’s stomach like a lump of wet concrete. She opens her mouth to tell the little blackmailer to take a long walk out an open window.

Chip speaks first. “I have an alternative suggestion. I have recorded this conversation. How about we play it for Mr. Danforth? I wonder how he’ll feel about you tossing around threats and trying to cheat him out of his refund.”

Tell-Me-Anything totters back a step, blinking rapidly. “No,” she says. “You wouldn’t. I’m only twelve. You wouldn’t do that to a twelve-year-old. I’d cry.”

Iris turns and for the first time looks Tell-Me-Anything right in her false new face, lets herself be swept up by the full psychotropic force of her mask.

“If there’s one thing prettier than a sunset,” Iris says, “it’s seeing little shits cry.”

9.

The clouds shimmer, piles of golden silk. Chip registers 1,032 variations in the light, ranging from canary to a hue the color of blood stirred into cream. There are shades here he’s never witnessed, lighting up optic sensors that have not been tested since he was assembled in Taiwan. They watch until the sun drops into the slot of the horizon and is gone.

“I’m glad I got to see this. I’ll never forget it,” he tells Iris.

“Do you ever forget anything?”

“No.”

“You saved my ass from a twelve-year-old supervillain. I owe you.”

“No,” he says. “I owe you. Twenty more minutes, to be exact.”

A scattering of ancient stars fleck the gathering darkness. Chip knows all their names, although he has never directly seen any of them before.

The Clockwork waiter comes clitter-clattering from behind the bar on his cricket legs. A brass hatch opens in the floor, panels sliding away in a manner that suggests an iris widening in the dark. A quivering membrane fills the opening, an oily rainbow slick of light flashing across its surface.

“Who’s ready to step into a dream and float back to earth?” cries the Clockwork waiter, gesturing with spindly arms. “Who’s big enough and thirteen years old enough to go first?”

Girls scream me me me me me me! Chip observes Iris wrinkling her nose in disgust.

“How about the birthday girl? Abigail Danforth, step on up!”