Cherry had left them, not happily and not quietly, but without any further parting shots that accused any of their sorry number of being a liar. Temperance’s alien sun was on its way and the room was bathed in underwater blues, the gold of the night time lamps drowned and filtered down to a feeble green.

Even as the cart carrying Marinell rattled out of earshot, nobody moved, nobody spoke. It was Guy who broke the stillness, raking at his blood-caked curls with his fingers and rising from his seat with a scowl. Sao realized he hadn’t seen Guy scowl before. With a tinge of rebellion in him, he looked ever more like a teenager, which of course he was not.

Sao had to wonder how old he really was. An accomplice of Muka’s, and the murder had happened over twenty years ago - he might have nearly a decade over Sao himself.

Of all the stares being passed around the room, Guy snagged on his. “You’re not done here, are you?”

It wasn’t much of a question. Sao didn’t feel much like playing lead interviewer, either. Everyone relieved of the duty was looking at him now and his chin itched.

He was saved, as he had been many times before, by Rai’s fast-waning patience. “While he’s thinking on that, I’ve gotta know - what exactly is on the hard drive?”

Guy ran his hands down his face, pulling the ends of his mouth down into a hideous grimace. “Not this again.”

“Triamond died for it, five years ago. I know that some research was taken from a fae facility back when the murder happened - the one Muka was supposedly involved in. So it’s gotta be something big.” Rai crossed his arms and frowned viciously enough for Guy to pull his face back in order. “But if that was the case, I have to wonder why it wasn’t backed up to some network. The fae ambassadors say the Citadel has digital archives over a hundred years old.”

“And they do.” Guy strode over to Lumi (Sao could not quite parse him as being the mysterious Lamort) and looked down his nose at the grim little face. “Maybe you should field this one.”

“He’ll find out all he needs to, when it’s taken to the Core police,” Lumi said quietly.

“If it doesn’t get snapped up by another Rose, or an actual warden.” Seeing that Lumi’s lips were not about to budge for even that, Guy’s smile turned sour. “I see. You’ll happily give me and Muka up and spill your whole life’s story to the most insidious, disingenuous bitch you can find. But you’re going to make the investigator wait to figure it all out on his own. No self preservation, no consideration, not a speck of foresight. I should have let her take you down.”

“What did you do with her?”

“I handled her, as you asked. And I handled Hode too, this morning. Don’t act like you thought he was a saint. I swear, what you let these people get away with, do you enjoy seeing your daughter be—”

“Stop,” Thomi bleated. “Guy, don’t say it. I was the one who lost my temper at Mother, if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have had to do any of this. Father would have been able to talk her down, or Muka could have, but I went too far.”

“No, any one of us would have done the same. And you only hit her, you didn’t kill her. That wasn’t you.” Lumi clasped her hand in his. “She was the one who went too far.”

“Wait, wait.” Rai took a seat at the bar. “You dodged my question about the hard drive. But alright, I’ll bite - what happened with Britania? She was supposedly Lamort’s wife - what did she do to piss you all off so badly?”

The temperature seemed to rise with his tone. Suddenly wary, Guy touched Thomi’s sleeve. He might have been trying to comfort her, but it was an oddly desperate, childlike gesture. Lumi also gazed up at his daughter, squeezed her hand, but his small fingers seemed to hang off her rather than offer support.

“You don’t need to be here for this,” Lumi said, turning to Sao, to Rai and back to Thomi. “Or we can stop here - Britania was an awful person, that’s really all that needs to be said. Guy, we don’t need to get into the details, do we? Thomi, let’s—”

“No, you should tell them. We should have told sooner. I want them to know.” Thomi silenced Guy’s coming retort with a firm hand on the shoulder. “Please don’t be mad, Guy. We still need your help.”

Guy nudged her hand away, not violently, but in his adolescent fashion, and went to stand against the row of glass doors. A silhouette against the blinding blue coming through the panes, he made Sao think of a diver in an aquarium. Drifting. Weightless. And yet, trapped.

“Britania and I were never really married,” Lumi said. “I want to make that very clear. Thomi and I never met any of her family, there’s no need to involve them in any of this. Brit was disowned when we met. I suppose that should have been an early indicator… ”

His voice cracked. He cleared his throat to little effect. “I was fresh off the Citadel at nineteen. I looked like this - I’ve always looked like this - and she was willing to take someone like me to the bedroom when most would recoil.”

Which Guy and Thomi did, just then.

“She was not especially beautiful or kind, but she was clever, and she said she could keep a secret, she was very private. I did put some thought into how we might look as a grown human woman and an apparent ten-year-old. I actually looked into the exposure laws regarding fae relationships myself…”

“All optics. Fae adults are human adults. It’s just the distribution of sexual images that’s banned,” Rai muttered. “Some of my family were pretty involved in the inception of that law.”

“In a nutshell. It really sounded perfect to me - I didn’t want photos of myself passed about, explicit or otherwise. What I wanted was to avoid being seen by the Citadel. I told Britania why, and she told me she’d keep me hidden and never tell anyone about us until I was ready. No law on earth or above would move her. I remember her saying exactly that and thinking it sounded grand, a great sacrifice for her. I was so naive. Guy even tried to warn me, he was–”

“Working in the city. Keeping my nose clean, and an eye on you, for what little it meant.”

“- I’m sorry. So Britania became pregnant and Thomi was born. I never went to any of the doctor’s meetings, I was a coward. Luckily fae relations were on the rise and a half fae child was no cause for alarm on the side of doctors. Thomi was just perfect, no deformity, aging stable, clever and charming, she slotted right into school as well. But at home… once a real child was in her hands - not just any child, our child - I began to see why that woman had taken me in. She wasn’t some selfless exception, who saw the grown man in the stunted body. It was the body that she wanted the whole time. I caught her setting up our own daughter, at seven, with some boys just as young, gathered from god knows where. She was preparing a camera.

“I screamed and struck at her, but I may as well have been trying to beat down a wall. She caught my hands, leisurely as anything, and lifted me off the ground and looked at me like she found it all just so flirtatious. It was Thomi that stopped her, asking if she could go do her homework. Math. She was just starting multiplication. Only in second grade.

“We left that night. If my years of blindness earned anything, it was Britania’s complacency. She had gone out to a work function. I told Thomi that Guy wanted us to go to his place and help him move house - we’d visited him before, Thomi liked to call him her uncle - I gave her a sleeping pill and we took the bus.”

“And I did have to end up moving, because of course she’d track you down if we hung around at my old place.” Guy smiled sharply. “A monster with a taste for fae and children. How’s that for a faerietale? Cherry should have stayed to hear this.”

A look from Thomi extinguished his smirk.

“The seventeen year old boyfriend,” Rai said slowly.

Lumi and Guy regarded him with gawking stares.

“The kid she was on a road trip with, who reported her missing. I can’t believe we fucking laughed off that part of the report. It was right there, she was a predator all along.”

Coldly, Sao recalled they’d been fed the impression that Lamort was a much older man, but it was too late and too disgraceful to point out any such lies now.

Rai’s mouth tipped into an ironic slant. “Hold on - the road trip. She took off with their rented ATV. Don’t tell me, those fucking monster truck tyres. You had Hode drive all around the countryside and really couldn’t come up with any spares but hers?”

Guy was mildly offended. “They work, don’t they? They certainly wouldn’t have stopped you from leaving.”

Before discourse became consumed by the matter of Rai’s car, Sao cleared his throat. “In any case, Britania’s record had no reports of domestic or sexual offenses. I take it that you feared being found by the Citadel more than you feared her, at the time.”

“Smart guy,” Guy said. He almost winked - or perhaps it was a spasm. “We just ran. Hopped in and out of hotels before catching up with our old friend Muka, who was living out in Interstate, winding down his tutoring duties. He chose a disused castle by Temperance for his retirement project, and the town made for a perfect hiding spot. Well, I went back to the city for a while, I was trying to finish a culinary course…”

“Muka was the one who made sure I knew everything,” Thomi said. “What he’d done on the Citadel, where my father and Guy had come from, about the fae. A bit about my mother, though I don’t blame him for not exposing it all at the time. He also convinced Father that I should go back to school, a private one in Garland. He paid for everything, never asked anything in return but for me to keep their secrets in confidence. I’m glad he told me about the old crime, that way none of us were going around blind. We could catch each other's mistakes, so on. I owe him so much. I still do.”

Guy was eager to shield them from sentimentality. “And little Lamort became a shut-in for almost ten years. Did nothing but peek out of the curtains and fret over his ex-wife, relied on Muka to do everything for him, bring him food, take him anywhere, until I moved back. That was what, five years ago?”

“You know it was,” Lumi shot back with sudden venom.

“The Birdsing Parade. There were only about fifty people still living there, and every time they had their Parade, we thought it would be the last. But five years ago - it really was. Appropriate, no? Their last day was your first day out. The beginning of the end.”

Sao thought of the picture on Guy’s table. An image not frozen in time, but caught in the confluence of two fluid paths. The last parade had been five years ago, yet Lumi and Guy had not looked a day older than they did today. Still, Guy had been happy in the moment, or at least hopeful. The loss of hope could be more crushing than any distance, any amount of passed time.

“Thomi was on break from her college,” Guy went on. “I had just decided to move in. Muka hooked me, he wanted me to look at the hotel, see if I could help the owner out - this was before Marinell bought the place. Marinell is…” Another flicker of the eyes. “He’s alright. Although he never ordered any new drapes, he wasn’t the one who set fire to them. And I haven’t seen a single rat since he moved in. But forget him. Five years ago, he wasn't in the picture. It was the three of us, getting dressed for the parade, most of the effort going into preparing Mr. Lamort for his first day out in years. And the very instant we finished lacing up our shoes, a prospective parent came knocking on the doorstep of Myrmilion…”

Again, he was eyeing Sao, and Sao suspected he was drawing up the same comparisons Hode had done. “Triamond.”

“None other. Muka stayed to show him around. We don’t know when or how he came across the hard drive - it likely dropped as we were leaving, hell, it could have been in Birdsing. Or maybe he was only able to turn it in at Birdsing, seeing as our station’s sole constable was almost always out on patrol - typically up and down the Saturn Hotel bar. In any case we were at the parade, sat down for some ice cream, and Lamort checked his pockets and realized the thing he’d been holding onto for almost twenty years was gone. We searched all over, but it was crowded as hell. We’ll never see Birdsing like that again.

“Naturally, Muka checked the police lost-and-found. But I expect he was too efficient, went too early, and Triamond did not turn it in until later, that or our generous old friend just assumed the constable knew what a fae drive looked like.” Guy went quiet for a moment, rubbing his nose. “I drove back to the school, Lamort’s house, looked everywhere I could think of. On my way back to the Parade, I recognized Triamond on the road coming in the other direction. I cut him off and waved him down. He didn’t like my questioning him, but then, he wasn’t even listening. He immediately took me for a local thug or addict. Threw his wallet at me. When I said I didn’t want money, asked him about the drive, he got pushy...”

“You killed him,” Lumi said, hoarsely. “He didn’t even have the disc.”

“He was breathing when I left him.” Guy looked from Lumi, to Thomi, then at the carpet. “I got upset. I didn’t want to be found by the Citadel, have us all dragged back and chained up in a cell for the rest of our lives. But for some inconceivable reason, you and Muka thought it was all a great big joke. Like the mayor, like the letters, like your playing student. All temporary self indulgence, that somehow more indulgence would let him clear away at will.” 

“He only ever wanted our happiness. To live what we never could have on-”

“Did that itself never sound overly self-congratulatory to you? He so easily overlooked what happened on the citadel. What had to happen for us to escape with that lousy drive. He even said it was liberating to finally be free of the damn thing.” Guy engrossed himself with a hangnail. “He thought we could be free of it all, just like that. Ignorance.”

“Don’t talk about him that way. And if you remember, he was the one to clean up your mistake.”

“And he let you get away with yours. He was always too soft, and you’re even worse. What did I tell you, and what happened, hm? A fae agent did spot the lost drive. Rose came after Muka, and Cherry attached herself to Rose. Cherry, lord, the great rotting fruit of your carelessness. You couldn’t help but tease her, Muka couldn’t help but let her get away with anything. Rose taught her a few tricks and I was left to deal with her excursions to the hotel, where it seems she found relief from by posting photos for all to see, cursing you out to the world. And her curses drew in the worst possible visitor.” Guy clapped his hands together, causing everyone but Thomi to jump. She may have tuned them all out. “By the time that woman drove into town, it was too late to start caring again.”

“Ugh, the web novel site.” Rai gripped the countertop. “Britania was a judge for a story contest. She must have come across Cherry’s posts, or maybe Cherry submitted something in her usual style, with her usual ‘illustration’. It would have been easy for Britania to squeeze info out of her...”

“Muka laughed when I told him about the photos,” Guy said. “He didn’t take her phone, didn’t cut off her escapes or even confront her. He thought Cherry was some harmless, downtrodden little angel. That nothing would happen because it was Cherry doing it. She's not fae. But like it or not, Muka was, so matter what he told himself, he'd never be able to percieve her as more than a lesser human child, and not even a particularly special one. He'd never see her the right way. And that's why she became dangerous - was allowed to become so. She pushed and pushed and nobody seemed to take notice, so she pushed harder... You saw, perhaps, Investigator. And…”

He had leveled a sneer at Rai, but was reluctant to point it at Thomi.

“Don't go there. Posing danger doesn’t make a person evil,” Thomi said. “Especially if they had reason. Or if they make a mistake. You of all people should know, Guy.”

“She must have had an amazing reason for killing Muka with you so willing to take the blame in her place.”

The air was so still Sao heard the untouched glasses behind the bar shivering.

Thomi's foot pressed to the carpet and she stood, eyes enormous and vacant. “You. I didn’t want to lie to you, so I told you I’d confess. You didn’t respect my choice. You were at the dinner after all, weren’t you? You tampered with the food to stop me - to stop the detectives once they heard my confession. And for what? Muka is dead - the police if not the citadel were going to come calling unless we provided some explanation. I was handling it. I know it’s not honor or truth that drove you to stop me. You didn’t think I could - you’d rather Cherry be blamed - why do you hold such a grudge against a little girl?” Her hair had hardened into a plank with blood and grit heavy on her shoulder. When she turned it nearly clubbed Lumi’s face. She did not even have to begin her approach; Guy had already scuttled away and wound up pinned against a table, his knees almost giving way when it hit his tailbone.

Sao’s head felt like it was in a steel compress. “I’m not quite up to speed. Cherry killed Muka?”

Rai stayed on his stool, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Cherry’s book looked like it had been through a couple of additional fights when I saw her last night. I didn’t ask. Everything surrounding Cherry was a mistake or an accident, anyway. I’m more interested in your kid-eating monster.”

Lumi shook his head and went to resume his place by Thomi’s side, securing her by the arm.

“Britania,” Rai said. “Where is she?”

Guy had recovered and was sitting by the table where he’d almost fallen. “In the lake with Hode. He’ll be the one who's missing half his head.” He picked at a napkin. “He wasn't supposed to be around at all. Rose had Muka’s sympathy. As his student and a faerie. He hated the Citadel but not its people. And she was small, so easy for me and Marinell to move around, so she got to live, stupid as the choice may have been. But Britania? Even Muka didn’t object to me finishing her off. Toward Hode he would have been the same.”

Thomi and Lumi were maintaining an unhappy silence.

“Perhaps Rose filled you in.” Guy tilted his head toward Sao. “Britania came to the school looking for Lamort. At some point she began talking with Rose, and must have let slip that ‘Lumi’ was not a real student, and Rose realized he was an accomplice of Muka’s. Whether Rose told Britania that she was also fae or not, two came to some hurried agreement, that Britania would force Lamort to reveal his involvement, and the location of his missing drive, at a certain spot.”

“The tower at sunset.” Thomi had also taken a seat, at a different table from Guy, and only when she’d set an arm on the pristine white tablecloth did Sao notice her fingers were broken, bent and brittle like tree branches, caked in dirt. “I was too proud. I hadn’t seen her for over ten years, and I didn’t know exactly what she’d done to drive Father away - that was the one thing Muka kept from me - and there was a touch of morbid curiosity. I was bigger than Muka, Guy or my father, too, so I thought maybe I’d be able to take control, force everyone to reconcile, and if push came to shove I could be the one to send her off.”

A long-suffering sigh from Guy. “Thomi, you don’t have to take all this on…”

“It was only me, my father and mother at the tower. The sun was just starting to set, it was almost romantic. The meeting started civilly enough. Sweet talk, and I almost fell for it. Father became suspicious when she turned to the missing drive, and when he tried to end the meeting, she became furious. She grabbed him, said some… disgusting things. And then she had the pictures. Pictures of me, from when I would have been too young to remember. With…”

“All burned,” Guy said. “Nobody saw them.”

Rose had, through her binoculars, Sao thought. No wonder she hadn’t had the wherewithal to talk to Cherry at the time.

“I couldn’t breathe, I wasn’t speaking any sense, and she tried to grab at me. Father stopped her by grasping her legs and she kicked him aside. I picked one of the big flat flagstones off the path and hit her.”

“Cherry-like.” This from Guy, who sounded, Sao thought, proud. Lumi tightened his hold on Thomi’s arm.

“She collapsed. I tried to shake her, and she was breathing but she wasn’t waking up. I never knew her - never even had reason to love her - but I was terrified, I wanted more than anything to hear her speak again.”

Lumi took over. “It was getting dark. We went into the tower, up the steps to the third floor to find Muka. Had no idea Cherry was at the top the whole time. Rose must have fallen in the minutes we were walking - you can’t hear much from inside the tower. Muka called on Guy, and he and Thomi took care of things. I…” He hung his head. “I went back to the dormitories.”

“So Rose saw it all.” Sao watched their faces carefully as he continued. “She knew that you, Lumi - er, Lamort - were a fae. And when Guy arrived she must have known too.”

Guy smiled as Sao’s scrutiny passed over him. “I put a hole through Britania and sank the body in the pond in front of her, so yes, she knew.”

“Meaning Cherry reported Rose’s fall long after you’d all cleaned up and taken her to the hotel basement. And Lumi, you orchestrated the supposed sighting of an ambulance. There never was one. Cherry’s moral conscience failed, but her intuition was correct.”

“I’d say the opposite,” Rai growled. “It was all guilt that made her chase Rose’s ghost. You heard her - Rose was her only friend. She had nobody else worth fixating on. Swiping Rose without a good explanation was only going to put her obsession in overdrive.”

“You did get more time to bond with her than I did.” Sao smiled, and Rai looked away. “But there’s something odd about the sequence of events. Or perhaps it’s what Rose told me that was odd. Guy - Lumi - you say she must have known you two were fae by the time she was taken to the hotel. But to me, she was reluctant to name either one of you as Muka’s accomplices, or as people involved her in capture.”

“Patriotism?” Rai asked, picking at the wood grain of the bar. “Patriotic shame?”

“I made it quite clear I knew about the murder on the Citadel.”

“The Investigator’s closer than he suspects,” Guy said. “For the Citadel, the murder of the guard was probably the crime of least concern. Take it from me - Rose cares less about collaring a murderer and more about sneaking back what was stolen. The Citadel lost something far more valuable and volatile. The disc, and its owner.”

“Guy…” Lumi began, but Guy held up a hand, and curled it into a pointer. He pointed at Lumi and Sao prepared to leap behind the bar - but the air in the room stayed still. Stiflingly.

“Do you not notice something odd about Lamort here? Even as a fae? Keep in mind, he and I are the same age, and Muka was a decade older. Ah - let me throw Rose into the pot - I estimate she’s, hm, twenty? Two decades younger than him.” Guy gave Sao a playful look. Sao felt like he was in a classroom, and he’d incited some sort of grudge in the teacher. Picked on again. “You, Mr. Assistant, I think this is a question you’re best equipped to answer.”

“It’s about age…?” Sao scratched at the stubble around the scar on his chin. “Lamort is definitely the youngest looking.”

“Exactly so. No defects - none of those horns or tumors, bone degradation or extra eyes and backward toes and back-flaps. His aging, or lack of it, is perfectly balanced. Who knows how long he might live? He’s forty two and looks ten at best. This–” Guy parted his hands in Lumi’s direction, like a stage magician revealing the untouched body in the box. “-is the core of what fae research has been chasing for over a century.”

Straining to unstick himself from the bar, Rai slowly turned on his stool. “All that youth experimentation was supposed to be over. A hundred years ago. It was an agreement with Central.”

“Very true. Legally, they signed a pact. But the Central Army doesn’t exactly make rounds through the fae facilities. It’s impractical for even a small group of normal-sized humans to visit, and the fae council intends it to be that way. You asked why the contents of the drive wouldn’t be on a shared network. Well…” Guy presented Lumi to them again. Lumi slipped fully behind Thomi’s chair. “Lamort here never knew his true value. He had some idea - it was endless experiments in a windowless building, taken apart layer by layer, cell by cell, farmed for material to make even newer and better versions of him. His magic expression was hamstrung, manually, so he wouldn’t be able to fight back when they tied him to a table and stuck him full of needles and pipes.”

Rai swiveled on the squeaking hinge to face Guy. “And you…?”

“A lesser effort. My proportions weren’t right, for starters, the legs too long, the hands too big. Although, once I was off the Citadel, shed off the magic residue, got some meat and drink and city smoke in me, my face started to look more my age. It evened out. I gotta be careful from now on, though. Things could get out of proportion.” Guy became thoughtful. “Aging is a terrible business.”

“I guess I’ll ask one last time,” Rai sighed. “What’s on the disc?”

“My full sequence.” Lumi came out from behind Thomi, peeling her clinging silver strands off his shoulders. “What they’d use to make more of me, as Guy so kindly put it. It’s as much an essence trace as well as a genetic sample. The genetics are one thing, but the magic saturation of the Citadel creates such distortion that samples are only good as soon as they leave the body. There was a machine, not a person that did it…” He shuddered. “And every session took hours. The day we got out, it was to be my last. I stalled, and when I finally worked up the courage, I told myself it would be the perfect revenge - ruin the sampling right as it was about to finish. A guard and Guy - he’d been made a guard too - took me to the room. And that’s when Guy got me out.”

Guy corrected him promptly. “I got us both out.”

“You did. I was never properly grateful. I gave you hell that night when we hid in the shanty under the airport. All I knew was the bland diet from the facility, the empty rooms and white sheets. I almost fainted when I first saw a patterned bedspread. And the meals having flavor scared me.”

“Ah, well, I was a fairly shit cook back then too.”

“So Muka had nothing to do with the murders at all,” Rai said.

“None. He took an interest in helping members of the shanty leave the Citadel - through means of mixed legality, but permanent emigration was a new concept back then, and the system had holes.” Lumi’s face broke into a smile. “I trusted him immediately. Stupidly told him we’d escaped the research facility. But I got lucky. That he was the way he was.”

“Eccentric,” Guy said.

“He had great sympathy for children even then.” Lumi’s voice began to break again. “And perspective - we were children to him.”

Thomi looked from one small face to another, but did not say anything.

“We can’t go back,” Guy said.

“We might have to,” Lumi’s voice shrank with each syllable. “There’s a policy to help all fae nationals. The Citadel doesn’t execute offenders.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind.” Decorum gone, Guy strode up to him, Thomi flying out of her chair to move out of his path. “It’s fifty-fifty on whether they honor you as a success story now that they can’t cover you up, or lobotomize you so you can’t even think of running off again. But even if they take you back, they definitely won’t want me, definitely not anywhere near you. I’ll rot in a cell. And what about Thomi?”

“I’ll take her, of course,” Lumi said in little more than a squeak.

“You can try, but they won’t let her in. She’s not their perfect specimen. Even if she was able to visit you, you know what the purists are like.”

Was that sirens they were hearing, cutting through the stifling air? And when had the sun risen so high? The blue dawn had inverted into a misty tangerine morning. Sao was suddenly very tired.

“What do we do then?” Lumi sobbed.

He fell into a chair, but Guy wrenched him back on his feet, took his arm, and Thomi’s hand. “We go. We start up again somewhere else. We won’t have Muka, but we won’t have Britania’s shadow over us either.” His cat’s eyes ran over his guests at the bar. “The world isn’t small like the Citadel. There’s always someplace new. It may not be the easiest trip, but…”

Sao was exhausted. Hearing Guy’s plans exhausted him. In his life Sao had undertaken his own desperate escapes and new beginnings, and knew they could work. It wasn’t about being deserving. What drained him was the prospect of taking someone - two someones - along. The weight of them on your back as you ran, the reminders they carried, would mean a clean reset was virtually impossible.

He was not ordinarily given to such cynicism. Maybe this wasn’t about cleanliness. It was wiser not to speak.

Rai swiveled idly on his stool. “As I keep saying, I can’t make arrests. My only concrete plan at the moment is to turn in the drive and the rest of the Birdsing crap like I promised to HQ. The cops coming up outside, though, are gonna be looking for Hode. You mind if I let them dredge up the body?”

Guy scoffed, and it turned into a snicker. “Well, then. Let’s hurry.”

“No.” Thomi shook herself free and sat again. “I can’t. There are the children at the school and –” She took a damp breath. “The Citadel isn’t looking for me. Neither is my mother anymore. I have you to thank for that - and I mean that sincerely.”

Lumi pulled back - it was a bit more of a struggle. “Then I’ll be staying too, Guy.”

“Did you not just hear what I said? Have I not done enough?” His voice was a wail, one that drowned even the sirens. Sao’s chest ached.

“More than you should ever have needed to.” Lumi beamed, and Guy flinched like he’d been slapped. “You’ll have time to do things for yourself now. And I’ll finally have to learn to be a parent on my own.”

Guy opened and closed his mouth like a carp.

“It’s not the end, Guy.” Thomi moved forward and put her arm around him. “We’ll be able to meet again. Once Father’s got things sorted out. You and Muka taught me so much - about keeping him in line, that is.”

A wet snuffle, and Guy pushed her back. She kept a hold on him until he pushed again, and finally released him. He made for the patio door unsteadily, as if the floor might give out from under him. Each time he looked back, he took in a different person. Thomi, Lumi. Then Rai, who held him in his dark, hard gaze for a good few seconds.

The last person Guy looked to in the room was, for some reason, Sao. Perhaps he should have expected that. And perhaps he should have said something.

The sirens came up to the front of the building while Guy slipped out the back. He hopped across the short length of wooden boards and stepped off into the grass.

He’d been out of sight for about thirty seconds when they all heard a horrible roar and the screech of rubber.

And a long high scream, the air shivering with reverberations. A girl’s voice. Then came the roar again, a creature tearing through the grass.

Rai launched off his chair, the rotating cushion still rattling when his boots hit the wood of the patio. Thomi was just behind him, pulling Lumi by the hand. Sao was still having trouble seeing them as parent in child, in their real configuration. He followed them out. His lungs burned with the first breath of fresh, bloodless air.

Guy, looking very small, was running in zigzags across the grass and behind him, gaining fast, was Rai’s car. The hood was smoking and the shrieks coming from the car were Rose’s.

Stumbling across the overgrown grass, Guy finally reached the wall of the Saturn Hotel. He extended a bloodied hand to the whitewashed bricks, like a relay runner, as if the building itself were extending a hand of its own. Victory or salvation. His fingers met the wall. He didn’t turn around.

For all its screeching and twisting during the chase, the car hit him with a simple, almost elegant, crunch. The compression was light and sudden, the frame of the car crumpling on impact, like paper suddenly grabbed by some enormous divine hand. Scrunched up and thrown. He saw Guy consumed by brick and metal and rubber, and the moment Cherry, in the driver's seat, was flattened back by an airbag.

The steaming amalgam groaned to a halt like some awful creature taking its last wheeze. The smoke, however, refused to settle. Cursing, Rai ran to inspect what damage was inflicted this time. Sao attempted to follow, waving at the smoke ineffectually, eyes watering. Where the wreckage met the wall, he could make out a crimson handprint. Sao’s foot met something soft, and he looked down to see a spotted cow plush staring up at him through its clear plastic bag, the embroidered mantra Friends Forever on its side. Seized by some nonsensical mania of care, Sao wondered where the friend, the stuffed bear, had flown off to.

The trunk had been popped, and was now hanging by a single hinge. The Birdsing box, bounced out by the crash, had scattered its contents across the grass, into the wreckage, and some of it had even gotten into the car through the broken back window (all the windows were now broken). Rose crawled from the passenger seat picking the pieces of a metal puzzle, which appeared to have spontaneously solved itself on impact, out of her hair.

Rai wrenched open the driver’s door. Sao thought to look for Thomi and Lumi, but he was the only one left on the patio. The two weren’t in the dining room. The fluttering sea-green field of frosted grass offered no clues. They had vanished.

A small van in the green and beige checkered pattern of Interstate police was coming around around the corner of the west wing. And Rai’s car, what was left of it, chose that moment to finally sound its alarm.