“Why should we?” Hazel said. “They don’t like us.”

“They just looked like fairies to me.”

“Well, they’re not. They didn’t have to come across the water to get here. They were already here when we arrived.”

“So they’re native fairies.”

“They’re not fairies. We’re fairies. They’re just pluikers.”

“And what does that mean?”

Hazel grinned at me. “That they’re great big fat pimples on the arse of the world.”

“You’re beginning to sound like a racist.”

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t like them. They keep us in the cities—right from the start they have, back when the cities were no more than a few shacks at the edge of the water. We rode those high seas for long, long weeks and looked to replenish ourselves from the green and the wild, but they kept it all for themselves and they still do.”

“Well, it was their land.”

Hazel sniffed. “There’s so much. Did they need it all?”

“How would you feel if someone took something that was yours, and you didn’t want to give it up?”

“I suppose. Except on the one hand they say that the wild and the green belongs to no one, it just is. Then on the other, they keep us out of what they claim are their territories. So what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe they don’t want what you call the wild and the green to be spoiled the way the cities already are.”

Hazel shot me a frown.

“This is a boring conversation,” she told me.

She reached over and turned on the radio, stopping at a station that was playing a 50 Cent song. We listened to rap and hip-hop for the rest of the drive in, all the way to where she had me let her off downtown.

Our conversation was still bothering me after I’d dropped the car off at the garage Christy rented for it and got back to Jilly’s loft. I don’t know why I still called it that. After her accident, Jilly moved into the Professor’s house and I took over her loft, but it’s been a couple of years now. And it wasn’t just me—everybody still referred to it as Jilly’s place. I guess it was because we didn’t want to give up the hope that one day she’d be able to manage the steep stairs of the building and move back in.

When I got upstairs, I laid my fiddlecase on the kitchen table, shed my clothes, and got into the Murphy bed that I almost never bothered to fold back into the wall. It wasn’t like I ever had anybody over.