We’ve acquired a minor court of our own: namely, a girl named Ana—the Mad Hatter of the first night—and her sibling, Nino, who is half as vocal as Piotrek and twice as crazy. The only two to ever share their faces let alone their names with us. They’ve crashed here with us the last two mornings, collapsing on the living room sofa, only to disappear sometime around noon.

I’ve come, by now, to recognize each of their trademark persuasions: Claudia, with her haughty demands, casting the desire to please her like a spell. Piotrek and his unspoken ability to make anyone feel beautiful. Ana, with a fragility that would make the most feeble old lady leap in front of a truck to save her; and Nino, with his danger. By now I’ve seen more than one policeman hightail it away from him with a glance, including last night after he rode a stolen skateboard down the funicular to the lower city.

“He’s going to die,” Piotrek said, blinking into the darkness—before he shrugged and followed suit.

But it’s Ana who finds the gentle place in my heart. For every way that Claudia is sharp, Ana is soft. For every word Claudia says, there is a mere cant of Ana’s eyes. Polish, like Piotrek, she is a waif of a girl, a sparrow in Cosplay boots with precariously high heels, tremoring like a leaf on a stem.

“Nino’s going to marry me at Christmas,” she says, touching a thin silver ring on her finger. She can’t be more than sixteen. But for all his lunatic ways, Nino is a different man around her. Gentle, near-reverent, as though she were not a kooky girl in striped leggings but a pale Madonna with anime eyes, always yelling for one of us to “look after Ana,” before embarking on his next crazy stunt.

“Are any siblings actual siblings?” I say to Claudia one night.

“A few,” she says. “But blood relations are rare in Utod circles. Most of us are orphans, after all.”

In all this time, Tibor has yet to make himself known. I don’t care. For the first time since I woke up in the Center, I feel that I am home.

*  *  *

“You know, there are bigger courts,” Claudia says one morning as we eat cold pizza after Luka, more haggard by the night, has already collapsed in bed. She has reclaimed the sofa in the absence of Ana and Nino, and stretches like a cat.

“Bigger than Zagreb?” I say around a mouthful of food.

“Budapest is bigger. So is Moscow. We should go. Court’s moving in a few days, anyway.”

“Moving where?” I say, slightly panicked.

She shrugs. “It changes. There’s a communiqué that goes out every month in the homeless magazine.”

“A print magazine?” I say. She nods. “Isn’t that risky?”