It’s no simple process to get from my office to the Babel neighborhood. I left my office with my hat down to shade my eyes, Bella in one pocket and my black notepad in the other, pencil tucked into its spine. I made a right on Thessal Street, then three more rights to reach the monorail station. Geometry in the Outscape is more of a suggestion than a rule. Even here, even where nightmares look and breathe and die human, they have a touch of dream logic within them, and as such so too does their city.

But only a touch. No dream would pile a train car full of dripping wet bodies, each one of us standing in our own little puddle. I did my best not to look too closely at any of them, not to get drawn into whatever warped part of the psyche they embodied, tried not to be sick as the Loop trundled alongside grey glass buildings like a snake in the underbrush.

I shoved my way out the sliding doors two stops before mine, taking the steps three at a time. Signs and papers decorated one wall and the floor, flipped from the vertical by a quirk of Escherian architecture. The railings were ornate inscribed brass, the tiles I passed by were free of graffiti and grime, and the buzzing electric lights above them had all their glass intact. Not that they needed them, not today, the neighborhood of Babel elevated high enough that weak sunlight fell to the ground here instead of raindrops. Imagine that. Nightmares which lived so high that the clouds couldn’t touch them.

Lot number 447 was built of solid grey rock, with spiked towers around it like a castle, purple velvet curtains two-thirds lowered and filled with the smooth ripples that meant they’d been recently cleaned. Lot 448 was a tall Gothic mansion, bronze trim running all around the porch, spikes on the fence to warn away birds and hangers-on alike.

Whatever lot 449 had been, it wasn’t anymore. Streaks of ash were coated across the ground ten feet out, myriad footprints tracked through them. Some enterprising soul had attempted to cordon it off, but the rope had been cut in two and lay limp across the ground. I picked it up and spun it between my fingers, wondering if it’d been the police who put it up, or one of Drakon’s boys prowling around. Most likely the latter. The nightmares up here were rich and powerful enough that they knew how to buy and sell souls like pennies, and I hardly knew an officer who could say for sure that they hadn’t joined that trade. They wouldn’t have been invited through the gate unless they would find something useful.

It didn’t sound like this notebook was the right kind of useful. It sounded like a magnet for the kind of trouble I didn’t get want to get mixed up in. But it was trouble which had gone and sought me out anyway.

Certainly someone had already picked out anything valuable. I dug my fingers under a few of the charred beams and levered them from the ground, but there was nothing left of the floor beneath. No ornately patterned rugs, no scrapes and dings of furniture, no scattered pieces of brass and steel which wouldn’t have burned. I did find a blue-and-yellow ribbon tied around the end of a watch band, its end half fused with a lamp cover. Probably left sitting on a table when the lamp fell on it, a notch for the theory that Nicholson hadn’t gotten out.

If I wanted, I could call up Usher at the morgue and get confirmation. He’d have picked through the dental records anyway, matched them up against his extensive files with a strange sort of joy.

I needed to have a look around first, gauge what others had seen. Chesnes had been right. On the streets of the lower Outscape, shady deals, robberies, and even the odd murder happened without a single gaze managing to catch it; but up here in Babel, three neighbors kept running totals of every flower petal a gardener clipped in case they didn’t like the change.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

You could know a lot of the Outscape without ever guessing that Lot 450 belonged there, with a thatched roof and burnished wooden walls. The windows were shut and dark, except for the flickering light of a candle which told me someone was home. No one surrounded by a) so much wood and b) a nearby house which had days ago been a blazing inferno would dare leave an open flame unattended. I rang the bell. It clanged out its message somewhere around my ears, but nothing happened. Then I kicked it and a small pale face stuck its way out the window. “That’s real pine, that is,” it drawled. “Whaddaya want?”

“Insurance. Can’t get ahold of the owner.”

“Dead. You’re wasting your time.”

“Did you see what happened?”

“No. Scram.”

“This is important,” I said. “I need to know what you can tell me.”

“Yeah?” He spat on my shoe, neatly avoiding his valuable pine flooring. “Then I tell you to screw off.” The window slammed shut and he went back to doing whatever it was he’d been doing.

I backed off the porch in a hurry and a huff. I didn’t have the clout here to force the point, and I was so busy wondering if he was representative of all Babel or not that I ran into her. She was taller than me by a full head, with curly red hair framing her head like an angel’s halo and a neat black three-piece suit which put my rumpled button-down to shame. She had deep dark triangular sunglasses, which she pulled down to reveal glittering purple eyes that transfixed me in place, that no one, human or nightmare both, could hope to escape.

A homewrecker. If I got close to her, I wouldn’t see the end of it—no, wait. The end of what? I hadn’t had a partner for eleven years, and all I ever shared my bed with was the stacks of files which wouldn’t fit on my desk. I sidestepped her arm and looked her up and down, saw how every cut in her suit was designed to make people fear for their safety. Especially when they ran across her enclosed in a dream, not fully lucid themselves.

She beat me to the first word. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You must not have seen me.”

“I suppose I didn’t. Though I gotta say, glad I didn’t miss it altogether.”

“Apology by way of flattery. How I adore that.” Her fingers found her shirt’s collar and began to toy with it, a lilting twisting motion that dragged her tie with it. Half a smile played across her face like a shortout neon-tube advertisement before it vanished. “Even if it is entirely dishonest. I should hope your work here is not the same—insurance, hmm? What a strange offering in the Outscape.”

“This world is full of strange things.”

“It takes a human to tell that. What are you doing here, Starling Hexel?”

I tore my eyes away. “How do you know my name?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Well, I don’t put my picture next to my listing. Might deter some clients.”

“Oh, girl, perhaps then they don’t deserve you. Besides, I see you’re on a job now.”

“That’s private information.”

She began to pace a circle around me, a red-haired tiger looking for its opportunity. “Don’t be so coy. It’s my business to know things—just as it is yours to find them out.”

Then I supposed I’d better start finding out. “What’s your name?”

“You can call me Philippa.” Her fingertips brushed the back of my shoulder. “That’s an easy question. Most of the people who employ me want much more. They want me to tell them, oh, that Mr. Anjular there-” She jerked her head towards the recalcitrant house I’d just come from- “is a regular Dragon user, and of the pains he goes through to hide that fact. They say the mornings are hardest for him. Can you imagine why anyone would want to know that?”

An upright man had the law to fall back on. A slanted one might not. “You know a lot of people’s secrets, Philippa?”

“I know that few deserve their moniker. You should, too. See how quickly Anjular gives way.” Her hand on my shoulder spun me around to face the door again, then pulled away. I opened my mouth to reply, but another half-turn revealed that there was no one to say it to. Philippa had vanished—not the first nightmare I’d known with that habit, but the first one in a while to take a chunk of my heart with her.