It was social. When it was born for the second time it was with a hunger for company. Its tongue unrolled and it tasted the gritty air for anything that was like itself.

The thing shuddered.

Faintly, so faintly, it could sense something in the east. It could taste frustration. Its wings trembled in empathy.

It arced around and beat its way back in the direction from which it had come. It bore a little north this time, passing over the parks and elegant old buildings of Gidd and Ludmead. The splintering enormities of the Ribs splayed extraordinarily to the south, and the flying thing felt a queasiness, an anxiety, at the awareness of those looming bones. The power that drooled upward from them was not at all to its liking. But its unease battled with its deeply encoded sympathy for its own kind, whose taste grew stronger, much stronger, in the shadow of the great skeleton.

The thing descended tentatively. It approached circuitously, from the north and the east. It flew low and tight, below the skyrail that extended northwards from the militia tower of Mog Hill to that in Chnum. It shadowed an eastbound train on the Dexter Line, gliding in its filthy thermals. Then it swung in a long arc around the Mog Hill tower and over the northern fringe of Echomire’s industrial zone. The thing swept in towards Bonetown’s raised railway, cringing at the influence of the Ribs, but dragged on towards the taste of its fellows.

It flitted from roof to roof, its tongue dangling obscenely as it traced them. Sometimes the downdraft from its wings would make a passer-by look up, as hats and paper bowled down the deserted streets. If they saw the dark shape that loomed momentarily over them and then was gone, they shivered and hurried on, or furrowed their brows and denied what they had seen.

The winged thing let its tongue dangle as it slowly beat the air. It used it as a bloodhound would its nose. It passed over the undulating roofscape that seemed buckled by the Ribs. It licked its way along a faint trail.

Then it crossed the aura of a large, bituminous building in a deserted street, and its long tongue spasmed like a whip. It sped up, arced up and back down in an elegant loop towards the tarred roof. There at the far corner, below that ceiling through which the sensations of its kind leaked like brine through a sponge . . .

It scrambled over the slates flexing its peculiar limbs. Solicitous feelings were oozing from it, and there was a befuddled moment of confusion as its captive kin reacted to its presence. Then their nebulous misery became impassioned: pleas and joy and demands for freedom, and among that, cold and exact instructions on what to do.