Mr Udnam won’t go back up to Greig’s again tonight. He won’t call the police. She doesn’t want to go back until later, either. Outside she lights up. Goes down past the Tron. People are out, eating and drinking. Across the road and up past Old College. She goes onto Nicolson Street then down around the corner until she can see Arthur’s Seat. It is the best big, dead, old volcano that could ever be right in the middle of a city. Her favourite time to see it is when the sun is going down against the crags. They look like they are on fire. The entire thing turns rose gold. Then it disappears and the clifftops are black and moody again. Lean against a building. Light a smoke. There are advertisements all over the wall opposite. Camp Coffee. HP Sauce. Sunlight Soap. Those crags look like the jagged faces of ancient men glowering across the city. They always have done. They always will. Once this was all water and ice and then plants and animals and eventually people and cars and motion and fashion and food and those that have and those that will never have. Those crags have watched over it all. Up there to the top of the crags: that’s where she is going. Hard rubble underfoot makes her unsteady but she knows this path too well to stop and she knows what she wants.

Flora’s thighs hurt. Her shoes are so wrong for this.

She doesn’t care. Right up to the top of the crags is where she can see again. The sea is a steady dark blue in the distance. It is dark but she knows exactly where the island is. Big ships will be sitting out there on the Firth of Forth. Sailors will be drinking in the Port of Leith. Flora can see all the church spires. One for every pub they say. The outline of Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace down at the bottom. Flora climbs the rocky path of the crags until she can see the whole city skyline sparkle before her. The lights across Edinburgh are tiny dots – like human souls. Like each soul has it in them to ignite another one. As if they really are all linked, even if it rarely feels like it. Like all the freedom they are trying to find in the twenties is just a light that so many other people will snuff out. Greig is in among those lights, in his tenement, dancing. The whole city sparkles best at night. It is when she comes into her own. It is worth the risk. All of it is. The drag balls – they need them. Where else can they be properly free? Greig used to go to drag balls in Harlem when he was working in New York. He told her sodomy stopped being punishable by death there in 1861. After that you got life imprisonment for it.