I let Poppy spin out the tale of her trip upriver until Daniel came to get me.

“He’ll sleep for a while now. Walk with me. Let’s see this new home of ours.” He headed away from the crowd, walking too brusquely and too fast, away from Julian’s grim news, into the wind-swept, unlit depths of the stadium.

There was no quiet place, no corner where the storm yowl, the boom-boom of the waves, the bone-jarring shudder of the floor didn’t penetrate and overwhelm thought and conversation. In the open concourses, the cold was shivering. I was glad to still have my foul-weather gear.

“How are you?” I asked. I almost had to yell.

“Ask me later.”

We slowed to thread a path through a scrum of kitchen staff clearing debris from the husk of a restaurant, one of many we’d passed but with its glass front still intact. Battered crates and boxes were piled up outside, dripping seawater on the concrete. Inside, old beer signs and a vast and faded mural of a baseball game in progress. Vinyl-covered booths stacked in the corners. Through double doors in the back, a scatter of kitchen equipment shrouded in darkness—sinks and shelving and metal prep stations. Amazing to see so much useful stuff left lying about. If the solars had made it upriver in one piece, there wasn’t going to be any problem with food service in this new den.

The food itself . . . well, not so easy.

Daniel pressed on, like someone was chasing him. Climbing, turning corners, trying doors, we discovered a curving row of shallow rooms, each with a long, rain-spattered window wall overlooking the enclosed lake that had once been the playing field. A few café tables and some broken chairs lay about on their sides. I pressed a palm to the glass, felt it bow and contract with the gale. But it muffled the wind roar. After the din of the concourse, this narrow space felt hushed and private.

“Skybox,” Daniel said. “With luck, Max hasn’t claimed this one yet.”

He righted a chair to face the window and dropped into it. Nothing to see out there but storm-shredded mist and the rain sheeting against the pane. The gray daylight was gathering gloom. The lake surface was invisible. He spent a long time staring at it anyway.

Finally, the silence got to me. “You knew, didn’t you. Before he told us.”

“I knew my sister.”

“When did you know?”

Daniel traced sleety raindrops down the glass with a finger. “When the guy said the papers weren’t real. No way H would accept she’d been scammed. She’d push it to the limit. And she did.”

Not much I could say to that. “He’ll never forgive himself.”

“He will. Unlike H, he’s flexible. He’ll find a way.”

But will you? I knew better than to ask out loud.