She was nervous and unsteady as she stepped from the car and hurried up the stone steps to the Complex. She went through the high-ceilinged corridors, up the creaking elevator to the fifth floor, and showed her identification card to the guard outside the door. She was a Candachi, her grandmother would say; every man, woman, and child in the city should recognize her face, there should be no need for picture I.D.s. But Ariana Bayless had done away with that special privilege for the Higher Hundred ten years ago, and it was one of the few things the mayor had done that Kit actually approved of. Make them all equal in the eyes of the law, blueskin, guldman, and albino. The first step to true parity.

“Kitrini Candachi,” she said to the guard, reinforcing her name, trying not to sound breathless. He was a blueskin, as all the Complex security forces were, and he looked disgusted at her request for admittance to Jex Zanlan’s cell. But she was authorized, and he let her in.

“Cell” was the wrong word, of course; it was a plush apartment, two rooms as well as a bathing chamber, and it offered a wide variety of comforts. There were chairs, sofas, mirrors, books, and news screens, as well as a small kitchen area holding a selection of food. Kit had even been here when Jex served her liquor left over from a dinner meeting he’d had the day before with some of the city officials. There were no windows, of course, and a guard outside, and to someone with Jex’s expansive, impatient temperament, lack of freedom was almost equivalent to death; but Kit had been to real prisons, and she could not help thinking he was being very well-treated.

He had been reading when she stepped through the door, but he flung himself to his feet at her entrance. “Kit,” he said and crossed the room in a few strides. The kiss was comprehensive and bruising. She felt her body break against his, her flesh tear across his, and yet it was not enough. She wanted to be closer, inside him, curled around his beating heart, protected by the canopy of his ribs.

When he broke apart from her as violently as he had embraced her, she felt a deep and wrenching sense of loss. It was always this way on their short visits. She would have been happy merely to sit beside him, pressed against his body while his arm crushed her against him, saying nothing for the full duration of her stay. But Jex was too restless. He was not a man to snuggle and coo for love.

“Have you seen my father?” he demanded, pacing the room. She took a few steps forward, for she had only advanced a couple of feet into the room. “He was here yesterday, lecturing me.”