“I don’t know,” Lee insisted. Mal smelled of curdled sweat and woodsmoke and a spice she knew with absolute certainty she’d never scented before. “Are you…living on the streets? Do you need somewhere to go?” Abruptly that was her lodestone, the only possible port out of this storm. Mal’d had a breakdown, years before. She’d lost her memory. She’d been living rough. She’d only now remembered Lee and managed to get in touch. “Come back with me. I can put you up, I can…Anything, Mal. Anything you need. Let’s get something to eat. You need medicine?”

Mal put her at arm’s length, but only to look at her. “You haven’t changed,” she said, and Lee didn’t know if she meant physically or this helpless outpouring of babble. She opened her mouth to say something, to restate all the offers she’d just made, but a tall, skinny youth lurched into the pair of them, reeking of beer. He slurred a lewd proposition to one or both of them. Without hesitation Mal straight-armed him in the chest, sending him skidding six feet on his back.

Lee stared at her, owl-eyed.

“I don’t need help, Lee. And I am on a mission. The world is going to end.” She said it with that mocking quirk to her mouth, like she always did when she was taking the piss out of herself for being too serious. “I have to go. I’ve stayed too long already, and I—Yes, yes, I’m coming.”

This last was cast over Lee’s shoulder. She twisted around and let out a shocked cry because there was a man there and he was terrifying.

He was broad as a weightlifter at the shoulder and waist, shrouded in a long leather coat. A baseball cap did its best to shadow a face simultaneously brutal and compelling: heavy-browed, broad-nosed, weak-chinned. His skin looked bronze in the streetlight, darker than Mal’s, lighter than Lee’s own. His eyes were very deep-set, glittering like beetles. There was a smile on his wide mouth and it didn’t help.

“Uk,” Lee got out. There was a spatter of something across his cheek and up into his hairline, like a birthmark. Like blood. And blood was on the air, that metal smell of it. She had never before had such a sense of another human being’s dangerous physicality. He looked like he could crush bricks in his bare hands.

She belatedly recalled what Mal had said. Things we had to take care of.

“Mal…?”

“He’s with me. He’s a friend.” And Mal let her go, leaving Lee feeling as though she was falling even as she stood there. “We need to go. We have to catch the last train out of here. Lee, I’ll…There’ll be another time, I promise. There will.”