So it’s one of them crystal mornings of early summer, and the sunlight coming in through the clerestory like it was poured from a pitcher. And I’m sort of thinking what to do about that one drainpipe on the eastern students’ dormitory that keeps coming loose at the same damn spot, but mostly I’m thinking that Frael is a beautiful country but you’d be hard-pressed the long and the wide of it to find someone don’t make a cup of tea tastes like they waved the leaves over the pot and put them away again for later.

I miss the commotion of him running in, but then there’s Master Caerel breathless at my elbow, saying, Goodman Stone, I don’t mean to interrupt your breakfast, but there is a situation in the entry hall in which we could use the assistance of someone like yourself.

Lewis picked Cam up in the Personal Services annex of The Mercantile.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m Lewis.”

The young man stood and smiled. “Cam.” Their screens, Lewis knew, were running an interchange right now. He was about to thumb his on to check, but Cam put out his hand as though this were a social meeting, and Lewis shook it out of uncomfortable reflex.

He’d had some difficulty with the specs. The number and exoticism of the choices had been discomfiting, and so he’d settled on the comfortable middle range for most of them. Medium tan skin, dark hair, brown eyes; jaw and cheekbones moulded to give a plausible hint of all kinds of mixed ancestry. Reasonably good-looking, but not stunning. Haircut fashionable but not outre, a soft angle falling to a point over one eye. Clothing mutedly stylish. Smile welcoming but not forceful. A name that could have been short for something in a dozen languages. Confident, but non-intimidating.

“So,” Lewis said, “I thought we could pick up some dinner.” It wasn’t as if he didn’t know these things.

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

Lewis took him to a ramen place he enjoyed but didn’t go to often because they didn’t deliver and he hated going into restaurants to pick up. As they ate, Cam talked to him as though they were old friends reuniting, asking questions about Lewis’s job and his experiences in the city, salting in references to serial releases and odd events in the news. Lewis had been wondering if conversation with a hybrid might be a little uncanny, the illusion of an independent personality wavering under too close an observation. But the only strange thing he noticed was that Cam quoted two paragraphs more or less verbatim from a Glass Shelf review of the most recent Long Galaxy’s Journey (season sixteen, episode eight, and in Lewis’s opinion, that had been ridiculously out of character for Shoshanna, and the serial had been showing its age since Temperance Jasmine had been brought on as showrunner). That wasn’t really that weird. Lewis had probably done something similar himself.

Out on the sidewalk, with the crisp breeze smacking the backs of their necks and neon sputtering above their heads, Lewis said, “So, do you want to see my place?”

Cam smiled. “Yes, I would very much like to see your place.”

It was a long, twitchy walk back to Napanee Depot. Satchel’s blade had been strapped to the fork of his bike, and though no one had seen a walker in these parts for three or four years and he’d practically stopped thinking about them at all, now that he was defenseless, every rustle in the brush and moan of the wind through the leafing-out trees sent adrenaline sparking along his nerves. He kept to the cracked yellow lines in the centre of the road. By the time he limped through the depot’s plywood-reinforced glass doors, the sun was a suggestion of orange on the underside of the clouds, blisters had formed and burst on the balls of both feet, and the thinning sock on his right foot had turned the back of his heel to fucking hamburger.

“Satch, honey!” Sharon said as he staggered into the lobby. “What are you doing back?”

“Sinkhole up on forty-one,” Satchel said, scrupulously editing the adjectives out of the diatribe he had been building in his head for twenty-three kilometres. “Just past the bend. Skidded right into it.”

“Are you hurt?” She got out of her chair and came around her desk to him.

“Nothing serious. I managed to climb out.” It hadn’t been quick or easy, and he’d felt gravel skidding away under his soles for a long way back down the road. “Lost my bike, though.”

The last thing Cai felt like doing after a six-day work week was going to a party, but he’d told Marc he would, and with everything that was going on with him he was trying hard to keep his promises. The bells hanging from the red velvet bow on the door chimed and rattled against the glass as he stepped into a seasonal sub-climate comprised of equal parts pine, beeswax candles, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and wet winter coats. Heads in the living room turned; Maryanne, perched on the arm of a couch, waved a half-eaten gingerbread cookie at him. He waved back and toed off his boots, and carried them down the hall into the spacious back kitchen. It was the size of the living room, and twice as crowded.

“Cai!” Syl’s embrace wrapped him in white lace and satin and fringe. “How have you been? How’s Marc?”

“Good, he’s good, we’re good.”

“Did he bring those coconut cherry things he made last year? Because people have been asking.”

“I don’t know. I came straight from work.” Cai inclined his chin at the diadem of white Christmas tree lights–lit and blinking–that crowned her salt-and-pepper curls. “White Witch?”

Allan was a few minutes early, no thanks to public transit, but he was used to its vagaries and had tricked fate by scheduling the appointment for after rush hour. He double-checked the address in his notebook, then snapped the elastic around the book and slid it into the back pocket of his black jeans. He made a quick all-points review of his appearance: fly fastened, tie and shirtfront free of any evidence of the blueberry muffin he’d had for breakfast, no visible cat hair on what he could see of his jacket–work drag all in place. The wind brushed a lock of hair against his temple, and he tucked it behind his left ear.

The house was a typical red brick bay-and-gable semi, shrubs and perennials taking low-maintenance place of a lawn, nothing blooming now but a pot of sunset-and-flame chrysanthemums drawing the eye up the flagstone walk to the small porch. Allan crunched through fallen leaves and up the porch steps. The door had a bronze knocker in the shape of a sleeping cat.

Response to his knock didn’t take long. He could hear someone coming at a quick walk down uncarpeted stairs, and then the door swung open.

Allan offered his professional smile and his business card. “Russell Evers?”

“Allan del Mar? Please, come in.”

Robin heard the cart as it rattled down the lane, horses’ hooves striking hollowly against the hard-baked August ground. From his sideline gaze out the window, he recognized the cart, and the horses, and the broad man holding the reins. He didn’t stir from his place until Negi dismounted, stepped in front of the horses, and gave the signal to what, for all he must have known, might have been an empty house.

Negi didn’t move until Robin unbolted the door, stepped clear of the threshold, and gave the return signal.