Ranami shifted beside her. If Ranami always knew when Phalue was brooding, Phalue always knew when something was bothering Ranami. “What is it?” Phalue said as they walked the street that led to the Alanga ruins.

“We should do something about the orphans,” Ranami said. “There are too many of them. They shouldn’t have to beg or to scrape coins off the street.”

“You want to adopt? We can’t take in all of them.”

“That’s a separate issue,” Ranami said. She’d pressed Phalue on the matter before, but they’d only just gotten married. There was too much to do, too much to worry about, without adding a child or two into the mix. Phalue had always thought she’d adopt one day, but now that that day loomed closer, the idea made her sweat. She wasn’t exactly the mothering sort. And what example did she have? Her father had been kind but not overly affectionate, and her mother had been only an intermittent presence in her life.

“They’re especially vulnerable to wayward constructs when they don’t have a place to shelter in at night. We should set up a system for them. We have the money; we just need to redistribute it in the right ways.”

“We can add it to the list,” Phalue said.

Both of them fell silent after that. It wasn’t a short list, and it seemed to grow longer by the day. They could spend several lifetimes trying to fix the damage her father had done. One lifetime would have to be enough, though it felt woefully inadequate each time Phalue looked at the list.

Outside the city, the rain slowed to a drizzle. The forest was alive with the sounds of bird calls, frogs croaking and the steady drip of water filtering down from the treetops. Flowers and plants she hadn’t seen since the dry season were sprouting from the earth, sensing that their thirst would now be quenched. She supposed there was some beauty in a wet season.

She felt less so when she stepped into the Alanga ruins. There was no roof here, only old and broken pillars and walls that held faint memories of paint.

“We’re a little early,” Ranami noted. “We might have to wait.”

In the rain, Phalue added mentally. She actually enjoyed the rain when she could observe it from indoors, a mug of tea in hand, her oilskin cloak shed like a snake’s old skin. She wiped a cold droplet from the end of her nose. Being in it was the problem.

Voices echoed faintly from the walls. It seemed they didn’t have to wait after all. But as they drew closer, Phalue realized they’d stumbled upon an earlier meeting that had perhaps run long. Ranami stopped her before she could walk in on it.

She put a finger to her lips, and then her ear.