CROSSING THE RIVER, THE FOG lessened. Lights hung in the night water like reflections in a mirror that had been breathed on.

For a moment it might have been anywhere. Torch poles above the Tiber. Brands on the living bank of Thebes. Or some stretch of medieval water lit for an occasion.

But past the river, the fog closed in again.

Rachaela remembered the days of the fog, years ago, when the Scarabae first reached out for her.

"Of course," said Althene, "this is nothing. Hardly a London Particular."

She sat away along the seat of the taxi, the traveling lights catching her colors. She wore a blue velvet coat, and under that a tunic suit of ash-blue silk. Around her neck was a spray of green cut-glass vivid as crystallized angelica, and on the middle finger of her left hand a large polished emerald.

Rachaela had put on the olive-green dress Althene had bought her. It was her concession to the evening. She felt vaguely angry, uncomfortable. Why had she come? Perhaps to see the film, or merely to escape the house.

But there was never any escape now, and she had accepted that, surely.

Areas of her emotions had opened out. She seemed to have another sense. This constant awareness of other places, times, feelings… different lives, previous centuries. It was insidious, and pleasing in a bittersweet way. Perhaps it had even been there from the beginning, and her mother had successfully driven it under. When she listened to music, maybe it had come then, in another form.

Althene did not say very much.

She too seemed to be deriving some sensation or thought from the foggy city. Once, she sighed. Her perfume was light yet brunette, cinnamon with something darker.

Her perfection was slightly, as always, intimidating.

/ don't really like her, Rachaela thought. She only fascinates me.

No, she makes me angry.

Althene had said that Rachaela should come with her to see the film. An old film, made in 1916, Griffith's Intolerance.

The restaurant was in a tiny side street with old-fashioned lamps that gave a greenish cat's-eye glow through the fog.

Rachaela noticed that Althene did not pay the driver.

The room was small with high wooden screens. There were only seven tables.

An impeccable, short, swarthy man stepped out and led them to the seventh, behind the highest screen of all.

On the cream tablecloth a single thick white candle burned.

"For you, madame, madame," he said, holding their chairs.

Then he went and a young girl, plump and rosy in a black dress, came and brought them each a glass of palest red wine in long goblets without stems.

Rachaela made no comment. They drank the wine. It was slaty and very soft.

The meal had been ordered, apparently, already. Rachaela was not offered a choice, but she could hardly object, for everything was—naturally—perfection again.