Rector echoed him. “Yeah, where? I don’t see anything.” But he could hear something, and it worried him. The scuttling patter of sliding rocks came with a structure, a rhythm. A pace, like uncertain footsteps. His chest clenched with fear, and without meaning to, he drew himself up closer to Angeline. “Is it the monster?”

“Not a monster,” she reminded him gently.

He fought the urge to press his back against hers, and he struggled against the impulse to run for cover. He couldn’t see the thing, but he could sense it. Did it remember him? Would it come for him again?

He didn’t want to look; he couldn’t help but look. So when a gust of high wind stretched and broke the stringy yellow air, he gasped, pointed, and stumbled backwards.

“Settle yourself, Red.”

Zeke gasped, too, only just now joining them. “It’s … it’s … that’s not a person!” he squeaked.

Angeline’s words were level and calm. “No, not a person.”

“Not a person,” Rector repeated, saying it like a mantra. “Not a person.” He hadn’t been nuts. It hadn’t been a person who’d scared him half out of his skin and chased him into the chuckhole. “Not a person; never a person. And, oh God…” His stomach sank, tying itself into a complicated sailor’s knot. “It’s right on top of us!”

But the princess said, “No,” and squeezed the back of his neck.

Her strength astonished him, though it shouldn’t have. He’d been climbing through the city with her for two days, after all; it shouldn’t be a surprise that her grip was as firm as the nuns at the orphanage. He wanted to turn and run, but her hand was steady, and he had a feeling that it’d yank him back like a dog on a leash if he tried.

The creature up on top of the wall moved slowly from side to side, pacing back and forth. It maneuvered deftly along the blast-loosened bricks. And as the fog parted and congealed, the elongated, person-shaped creature watched them.

“She sees us,” Angeline declared softly.

Zeke’s eyes crinkled into a frown. “She?”

“I believe so.” The princess turned to Rector and said, “I think I know what’s happening here. She ain’t sick, you see? She ain’t coming down inside. She’s smarter than that. She knows what’s here.”

“Then what’s she doing up there?” Rector wanted to know.

“She’s looking for the thing that jumped on you, Red. Dollars to dice, he’s her mate.”

Rector watched hard as the long-limbed, hair-covered creature up above—which looked almost tiny, all the way up there—came and went, out of focus. Moments later, as the fog twisted into a knot, it vanished.