“I’ll be fine.”

* * *

Iona told the rickshaw driver to go slowly because she was feeling unwell. She was afraid she might throw up, and the thought of people seeing the contents of her stomach made her feel even worse. The driver was quite old anyway, and not capable of pulling her very fast even if he wanted to, and they completed the journey without incident.

Iona entered her house and went to bed even though it wasn’t yet late. She lay there and wondered if she really wanted to finish the tutorial tomorrow. Perhaps she’d followed her curiosity about Alyssa too readily. Their first two meetings had made her uneasy but the experience she’d just had at the newspaper office had terrified her. She should have heeded her sense of unease, not rushed toward the source of it.

Before drifting off to sleep Iona resolved that tomorrow morning she would write to the planning department and, with apologies, tell Alyssa she was busy with design projects and would have to discontinue the tutorials.

* * *

The king’s attendants came to wake him in the middle of the night. He didn’t come around right away, so Clarence jumped on his head to speed the process along.

“What is it?” the king asked.

“Open the window and see for yourself,” Clarence replied.

The king got out of bed, taking the blankets with him because it was cold. He pulled open the shutters—

And smoke poured in. Masses of it drifting right toward the tower. The king blinked it away and tried to see where it was coming from.

Through the murk he could see a building below blazing from the inside, the flames licking around the windows and threatening to spread to the exterior at any moment. He was unsure which building it was. The smoke made everything look different.

“Oh my god!” said the king, his pulse rapidly rising. “What are we doing about it?”

“Don’t worry, the firemen are already there.”

“Right. Good.” But the king didn’t feel reassured at all. He squinted to try and see the firemen. It was just as well the city had some firemen, even if he couldn’t remember the last time they’d been needed. “How did it happen?”

“We’ll have to find that out.”

4

THE FIRST IONA KNEW of it was as she crossed the street to go to work. A newspaper distributor was handing out a new edition, which struck Iona as odd because there had been an edition published only yesterday. Sometimes if an issue was in heavy demand it would be reprinted the next day: had the report on Weston prompted this? The urgency of the clamor around the distributor suggested otherwise. This was not a crowd gathered for yesterday’s news.

Iona walked over to the distributor and took a closer look at his wares. Indeed, the newspaper was a new edition. Iona held out her hand, accepted a copy, and read the news.

Her immediate reaction to learning of the fire was sadness and pity.