Miranda recalled the mania, the cutting, the screaming fights with transient lovers. And that had been just one tenant. The other had been worse—strange noises filtering up through the floor (her alternative music compositions), loud arguments with herself (rehearsing her lyrics), and a nasty, cloying tendency to attach herself to the nearest human ear and pour forth all the details of her angst-filled life without so much as a hello, how are you for a preamble.

Miranda quietly thanked Priya and returned to the front door. “So sorry about the delay. Would you like to come in and sign the contract?”

The young Mr. Mair looked a little anxious at first, but she settled him in a chair, fetched him a cup of tea and a plate of sweetmeats, and smiled innocently over her own cup of tea as he scrawled his signature and added his full name below it in clear, legible block capitals. Priya placed her stamp on the papers, her lips pressed together with a resolute sobriety that was somewhat marred by the occasional twitch.

“Here’s the key for downstairs,” Miranda said, handing it to him. “Welcome to city living.”

Long after, when he had become more of a friend than a tenant, she finally told him about the confusion his name had occasioned.

—

“Names are important,” said Chance.

“What?” Miranda asked, looking wistful and disoriented.

“Names are very important. I used to laugh at how humans use names, but I was very foolish. Humans can make the act of naming powerful, even dangerous.”

He tapped a page from her notes. “This woman—she had no name.”

“We called her the Mermaid. She was so comfortable in the water.”

“It would be a great help if I could find out her name.”

Miranda frowned. “It would help me as well, but she never told us, and we never found out. She was a transient, part of the City’s flourishing underground. No records, no relatives, no trace.”

Chance glanced down for a moment, looking at the end of the red brick path where she stood. Then he looked over his shoulder at the hedges, now closer than ever. Her journey out from the center had brought her to the opposite side of the labyrinth.

She pursed her lips mutinously but soon wilted. “All right,” she said.

No sensation would accompany this maze. It was a purely mental journey, something Chance could observe without moving from his place. Miranda stepped forward. Her next inhalation was shaky and constricted. The hedges were tall and close, tall enough to dim the interior to twilight and close enough to trigger the slightly smothered breathing of imminent claustrophobia.

“All right,” she whispered, and went in.

—