He moved soundlessly toward them across the grass. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt decorated in blobs of green and brown: vintage camouflage. Slung across his chest was a leather bandolier hung with several more homemade shurikens, stumpy blades soldered between the blunted teeth of silver gears. He’d covered his missing hand with a worn brown glove. Flashing Mistletoe a tight smile, he began struggling to pull Hat’s limp body from the sleek black scoot.

“Little help?” he said. Mistletoe sprang forward and pushed from the other side, careful not to trigger her disruptor, which she kept armed, just in case. Together they managed to slide Hat off his seat and into Sliv’s arms. The cop’s crisp tan shirt untucked and ruffled up about his chin, covering the wound in his neck.

“Thanks for not listening to me,” Mistletoe said, once they’d propped Hat against the stone wall.

“How’d I know you’d get into trouble up here?”

Deirdre placed Red’s body alongside his partner’s, efficiently patting down his pockets and transferring his stunner baton to her bag. “Old habit,” she said, straightening up.

Mistletoe wondered if Deirdre was closer to her past than she’d like to think. Deirdre hopped up onto Red’s scoot and shifted her bag into her lap. “If we head north,” she said, “there’s a retreat for tenured professors just outside Montreal.”

“They’ll look for you there,” Mistletoe said.

“I’m not tenured.”

“Forget that,” Sliv said, hoisting himself up onto Hat’s scoot. “I got a safe place back home.” He extended a hand and swung Mistletoe up onto the seat.

Deirdre pointed to the ground. “Back home, meaning subcanopy?”

“Yeah,” Mistletoe said. She squeezed between Sliv and the control panel. “I’m driving.”

*   *   *

The Watchmakers lazed around the emergency room of the abandoned Rio II hospital like dogs in the summertime, watching with half-open eyes and sleepy curiosity as Sliv escorted his two guests through their hideout. They’d taken sea green mattresses from the hospital beds and used them to pad a labyrinthine warren of connected bunks that stretched along the chipped and peeling walls of the ER. Some gang members had hung plaid sheets and colorful tapestries for curtains, while others lounged around in their underwear in full view of everyone else. Even, Mistletoe noticed with surprise, some of the girls. With an indignant flare, she wondered why Sliv had never asked her to join.

A sudden skittering noise beside them made Deirdre freeze. The camera-insect crested a small hill of rusted industrial coffee makers and trained its lens on the visitors. Sliv waved it away, and the insect disappeared beneath the bunk of a snoring boy with shockingly white hair.

“You don’t have to stay out here with us,” Sliv said. “I’ll get a decent place put together for you in one of the surgical wards.”