“I know that now,” Markus says. “I didn’t know it back then. Back in the real world.”

“Not even an inkling?”

The pombero shrugs. “Always knew I was different, of course. But mostly that’s just taken as madness.”

“Do you feel mad now?”

“Only at her.” He looks off into the distance, even though any distance here is finite.

I have to be careful, Mallian thinks. I have to lure him in, because I’m in no position to grab. His friend Jilaria Bran had sacrificed herself for his cause, but they had been close for many decades. This part-human, part-Kin mongrel creature might be far less likely to accede to his request. The time to ask is not yet, but it will be soon.

First, there are other ways to build Markus’s confidence in him and get him on his side.

“Why are you mad?” Mallian asks. He doesn’t really care, but letting the creature vent will give him more cause to listen to what Mallian has to say next.

“She took me away from everything I love,” Markus says. “The first time lightning struck me my wife was there when I surfaced, nursing me back to health. My daughter, too, back from university to help. Days later, maybe three, maybe four, we were sitting on the deck in our garden. Clear blue sky. No clouds. I was feeling better for the first time, and Sarah was tracing those strange patterns on my calf and foot. The bolt came from nowhere.”

I don’t care, Mallian thinks. “Go on,” he says.

“This time they were close,” Markus says. “When I woke, they were dead, both of them. Burned. Scorched and melted. And a creature, a fleeting thing, took my hand and guided me from that place as if it were saving me.”

“But it wasn’t saving you,” Mallian says. “It was taking you from your dead wife and daughter and bringing you here, to this place.”

“Yes. Bringing me here.”

“Just so that Grace can eat you, watch you heal, eat you again.”

The pombero looks down at his scarred leg. Around the wound radiate the old lightning scars, like fine fronds or a satellite image of a complex river tributary.

“If you wish to hit back, there’s something you can do for me,” Mallian says.

“Does it have to do with Ascent?”

“Quiet, quiet,” he says. “I’m not sure how far her senses reach, and if she hears that word on the breeze she might come back to feed on you sooner than you’d wish.”

A visible shiver passes through the pombero. That’s good. It draws it more onto Mallian’s side.

“But yes,” he says, “it has something to do with that.”

Markus’s eyes light up. He nods.

Mallian tells him what he wants.

“That’s all?”