“I’d be happy to,” Michelle said as she let a tiny bubble appear in her hand, then let it float up to the ceiling. She pulled off her baseball cap and her long, platinum hair cascaded over her shoulders. Then she shoved the cap into the outside pocket of her bag. “I guess I can say hello, but I’m supposed to see Babel and Lohengrin now. I’ll do that first, then meet him afterward, if that works for you.”

Ana nodded. “Sure. They’re not going anywhere just yet. Barbara and Klaus are in the main conference room. We’re going to need more space soon—they turned the small conference room into overflow for tactical support.”

“You know,” Michelle said with no small amount of resentment in her voice, “this place is getting too big.”

Marcus thought, Man, it feels good to have a ball in my hands!

He wove through the kids, all coils and motion. He dribbled around them, sometimes over their heads, bouncing the ball with satisfying force on the packed dirt of the village court. He twisted a three-sixty to avoid a tall youth with unnaturally long arms. He faked another boy so decisively that he tripped and went down, laughing. He rose up into a two-handed monster dunk, powered by the long muscles of his tail. At the last minute he remembered not to hang on the rim, frail and rickety as it was. Still, the kids playing and the others watching loved it. So did he.

Spinning the worn ball on his upraised finger amid the kids’ rapid Kazakh banter and high fives, Marcus couldn’t believe how good he felt. What a difference a day makes! Bullet-riddled and desperate one day. Fit as a fiddle and surrounded by new friends the next. The Handsmith must’ve known what he was doing. He’d fished out all the bullets in Marcus’s tail. He’d dropped the deformed chunks of metal into a tin bowl with wet, audible thwacks. Each of those sounds pulled him a little ways back toward the living. But even that couldn’t explain how he felt. Only Nurassyl did.