And where did the day go after that?

Sao would never quite figure that out. One minute the sun was rising, then next it was setting, as if the morning’s chaos had convinced it to turn right back around, back to bed behind the mountains. He could sympathize.

When he took his last look out the fields, the countryside was painted the same darkening pink it had been when he and Rai had arrived in Temperance. The towers of Mymilion stood, in all their wisdom and eccentricity, by apperances untouched by the incident.

If only. What really unsettled Sao most about the unseen passage of time was that he had been awake for the whole thing.

—

Only one patrol car had come to check on the situation, though more were soon on their way.

The sirens had actually been from the ambulance, called by the trio who’d driven Thomi back to Temperance from the mall after she threw herself at their feet and begged to go back and save her elderly father.

Out of the ambulance came the same short haired woman who had come to collect Muka, and two unfamiliar uniformed men. She laughed when Rai asked if she ever slept, and confided in Sao that she preferred her nighttime crew. Naturally they wanted to get Marinell to a hospital as soon as they could, but he refused to move from the front step of the hotel. There he hunched with a dripping towel over his stump until Florien arrived, in the back of one of a patrol cars, one of the phalanx that filed in just about half an hour after the first. Cal and Tal came in a separate van; Cal having to coax his larger friend out with whispers and hand-holding. Tal had been in the courtyard with Guy when the latter placed a crater in Hode’s head.

Marinell did not ask for Sao, did not look for him, or even look at him when Sao came around to the front parking lot with Rai, after the crash.

Marinell stood to hold the end of Florien’s handkerchief with his remaining hand, and let the medics lead him to a stretcher and strap him down. Sao glimpsed his face; he was smiling, valiantly. A stranger once again.

There was no hint of fear in neither father nor son when the ambulance doors swung shut.

—

One of the male medics had pried at the wreckage until he found a small arm, spattered with blood. That was all Sao would see of the body. The medic had held the hand and given it comforting words, while an emergency crew had done a little more pushing and prodding with the help of the other medic, but in the end the man holding the hand shook his head no, and let it go. The exposed fingers fell limp over the crumpled hood of the car, propped slightly on its fingertips, a pale and lopsided spider.

Sao couldn’t stop staring. He kept expecting it to move, twitch, jolt. Willing it to. Hoping for a ghost; he wasn’t sure.

When the hydraulic claw and tow hooks were brought in, Rai decided he’d rather see what was happening at the front of the hotel. Sao followed, in silent agreement.

They had removed Cherry from the drivers’ seat before that, of course.

—

Before the second ambulance took her away, Rose made a halfhearted bid for (at least one part of) what she’d originally come to Temperance for.

“You can request a viewing after it’s processed by Central’s archive team,” Rai said. “That’s what you wanted from the start, right?”

She gave him a withering look. “It’s property of the Citadel. It’ll be recalled eventually.”

“Then you’ll have to wait until then.”

“So be it. I’ve done what I can. Now I’m just done.”

Sao remembered her leaning hard on the walking stick, sweating. Her unmade face was shadowed by her long-uncombed hair. So the meeting must have happened at midday. “Haven’t seen the sun in weeks,” she murmured. “Can’t say I missed it much. I can’t be out without suncream.” She touched her face. “And I’ve never gone so long without a shower.”

“You’ll be headed back to the Citadel, then?” Sao asked.

“I have to make my report. And a hospital stay will likely be in order. But after that…” She rested her chin on the top of her stick, dabbing moisture from her forehead. “I’m still an Investigator of Central, and there are still fae expatriates to look into, so you won’t be rid of me so easily.”

Rai sighed and swept off a line of sweat from his own brow. “We’re not likely to have a lot of crossover.”

Sao tried to take refuge in the shadow of the hotel. Their faceoff seemed interminable.

“I was thinking I’d get an assistant too,” Rose said.

“Well, don’t look at him. He was assigned to me by Mainline HQ.”

Her eyes took hold of Sao anyway. “Isn’t that Cherry’s book?”

Sao had the dilapidated Omnibus under his arm. “She left it on the counter in the hotel. I’ll get it back to her.”

“That thing was her security blanket. If she isn’t crowing for it, she probably doesn’t need it anymore. Perhaps she never did.” Rose sighed. “Faerietales. What nonsense. Still, sometimes a little nonsense helps relax the mind. I enjoyed the school library, even if the literature was basic. Citadel curriculum never had much in the way of fiction.”

“Why? Not productive?” Rai asked.

“I never really thought about it. I suppose that’s their usual reasoning. And yet, for all its practical application, they never allowed coffee on the Citadel either. I could really use one now. I don’t know how I went a whole year without.”

Rai, outdone at last, hooked his hands into his pockets and turned away. Sao recalled Thomi saying how Rai would enjoy the Citadel. But here was definitive proof otherwise.

As they parted, Rai threw over his shoulder, “You might be a better Investigator than I am, Rose.”

—

The police found Thomi later that afternoon. She was sitting quite comfortably at the edge of the tallow tree forest that overlooked the Myrmilion’s back courtyard. It was a spot where the whole castle could be seen mirrored in the pond.

The team who had come to dredge the pond spotted her, a glint of silver when the sun fell over the shadowy foliage.

She was alone.

Sao and Rai were already out of Interstate when they got the news. A patrol officer had been assigned to take them back, and Rai’s destroyed car was to be left pending further investigation. The discussion had turned to the price of towing it to Central for him, and Rai said they could keep it. After the crash, he hadn’t gone back for a second look.

He was abnormally calm. But that only made him brittle, the air around him more incendiary, one crack and things might explode. Sao would typically try to defuse that heat, find something inane to talk about, but with a third person in the car it seemed inappropriate.

When they heard the crackly voice in the radio say Thomi had been found, Rai nearly tackled their driver, told him to get back on the line and have all available personnel search the school.

He almost startled the driver into the divider a second time when he remembered Muka had a car, a convertible that he’d seen at the hotel when he and Cherry arrived. With Muka dead, and Guy and Thomi in rides accounted for, the only possible driver was—

They soon got news the school was empty, and Muka’s car was nowhere to be found. Thomi was uninterested in answering anyone’s questions. She only cared about getting an answer to the one question of her own: where was Cherry? Rai was eventually put on the phone to tell her. Cherry already had been taken away.

Sao recalled watching the sunset as Rai talked. They had long passed the carousel mall and were almost back in Core. The sky, knifed by skinny raised highways and lampposts, was orange and blue. Cloudy. A flock of birds in chevron formation was crawling along in the distance, headed for warmer parts.

When Rai clarified it had been a patrol car that took Cherry for questioning, Thomi reportedly fainted with relief.

—

“They have to take me away now, right?”

This came after Rai had pulled Cherry away from the car, which started to emit an ominous burning odor after the crash. (Thankfully, by the end of the day, it subsided without incident.) The light of his hands strobed, flickered like a malfunctioning lamp, as he pulled her into the building, down the hall, into the lobby.

“Keys,” he said.

She threw them at his chest and asked again, with a feverish smile. “They’ll take me away, right?”

Rai shot Sao a look of pure desolation. Sao tried to muster some kindness to his voice; softness he knew Cherry wouldn’t take. Why try?

“Well, yes. Somebody will. You can’t stay here,” Sao said.

“You got your answers, Cherry. I need you to give a few of your own. Why did you kill Muka?”

She took a seat on the carpeted staircase, looked down. “Rose was in the basement the whole time. I was just too much of a wimp to go look.”

Rai turned away, arms folded like a straitjacket over his chest. He pressed his head to the opposite wall for a few moments, then turned back and sat beside her. “Rose was never really your friend. She was lying the whole time. To everyone.”

“And she got away with it for so long.” Cherry spoke like as if lost in a dream. Meanwhile, Rai seemed about to throw himself down the stairs.

Her gaze was meandering, her hands twitching. She was swaying slightly. They’d lose her soon, if they weren’t careful. “You almost got away with something too. Muka was involved in her kidnapping. Is that why you smashed his head in?”

And she was back, blinking with astonishment, like she’d crash landed. “You’re probably right. He caught me sneaking out that day, when it was raining. I came out of the tunnel on the hill and forgot he was on his walk. I mean, I had gone out when he was on his walks before, but he never noticed me.”

“He may have been pretending not to notice you.”

“Well, he pulled me back into the school, up the tower to his office. We didn’t make it there. I didn’t want to go in. He started… saying stuff. That Rose was gone, but I didn’t really care about that because I kind of expected that, at the time.”

She scratched at her nails. There was some black residue under them, from digging into the crumbling rubber grip of the steering wheel.

“He started saying he could send me away if I kept bothering people about her. And I just got mad. I mean… he thought he could tell me what to do.” She slapped her knees and gave another wild smile. “Of course I didn’t wanna kill him. But he was so… light.”

“You hit him some more after he landed,” Rai muttered.

“You’re a detective. You wouldn’t have believed he fell down all those stairs with just one crack in his head.”

Rai quickly moved off the step he was sitting on and went to stand by Sao. A good distance from the staircase, and from Cherry. “Smart thinking. Alright, then. Why did you stand up to Guy?”

“Duh, because of what he did to Rose. He was going to kill her, you saw. I didn’t mean to kill…” She stopped. “I did, though. I did mean to kill Muka. But imagine - I know, you’re going to say it would never happen, but how do you know the future?” Her teeth were bared, not at Rai, but at Sao. “Imagine someone tried to kill him. Took him away from you and just when you got him back, said they’d just kill him in front of you. You’d do the same as me.”

“No, I really wouldn’t,” Rai said.

“Then you’re a bad friend.”

“If that’s all it takes, I guess I am.” Rai slid down the wall, squatted with his back against it, watching her. Searching for something that he wasn’t getting. “Cherry. You killed two people. One of them really cared about you. And you totaled my car.”

“I’m sorry.”

Real tears were streaming down her cheeks now. Rai seemed relieved. “But we did find Rose. And she’s alive. I know she’s grateful for that. She’s going to have to go to the hospital soon - come on, let’s say goodbye.”

Could he have put it any clumsier than that, any sadder? And there was his expression, the outstretched hand. In that moment Rai was subdued, even charming. Strangely chaotic, strangely vulnerable, he had never been so inviting - and at the moment Sao realized it was all a ruse. Rai was hoping Cherry would shout and jeer and point out his gaffe. He wanted more than a thoughtless young killer. Even if her kills were thoughtless, they had seemed to come from passion for another, somewhere that wasn’t all ice and impulse.

But Cherry was more interested in gnawing at her blackened nail. He was too late. The bitter tears, the dearth of words; she’d already said goodbye, and had needed nobody’s help to do it.

With remarkable dignity, she replied, “No, I don’t really want to talk to her anymore. She’s a liar too.”