The day and the time and the place are agreed upon, in a telephone call that takes hours to hash out. I make all the right motions towards Zamir—I concur that we must ensure only people we trust are there, that the rest of the city cannot know what happens then, that keeping Drakon and Jabberwock from having their tendrils in the exchange is paramount. She arranges it, mostly—I know where it can’t be, I know who can’t be present, but Zamir is clever and just corrupt enough to know how far the city’s watch truly stretches.

I wonder what she’s done, in the past, in these places, to know how to hide so well. I wonder why I hadn’t seen, that Zamir eventually learned something from card-counting and slipping aces in the deck. She learned how to hide, and then how to hide that she was hiding. A dagger in her hand, concealed as a pencil.

And yet…she was still my friend. I wasn’t going to betray that. I couldn’t, because then sending Robin away would leave me all alone.

It had once been a marketplace, I thought, for trades to be made in the open air. A few fenceposts still stood like flagpoles, large and wooden on the bottom and tapering to rotten splinters near the top, faded cloth overhangs tumbled to the ground. Faint paths had been trodden into the ground over time, the impressions of hundreds if not thousands of visits, etched a little deeper where stalls must have stood. Around the abandoned lot stood tall, darkened buildings, some of them half-built and scaffolding stretching like arteries across their broken faces. No one had ever finished them, and in the silence of the night it seemed like no one ever would. What kind of a nightmare would ever want to?

I yawned and leaned against one of the benches. I probably should have been getting more sleep, or at least more coffee—but coffee was just the way in which I eked out awareness that belonged to the days and weeks ahead. If my math was right, I was already several years in debt, and digging deeper.

Robin didn’t share that debt. “What are we doing out here now?” she asked. “Why?”

“Why not?” I replied.

“Because you’ve told me repeatedly how much people want to kill me?” she ventured, which was a pretty good answer. “And they always seem to do it at night. But—no, no. There’s just nothing here, Starling. We should go back home.”

“Soon enough,” I promised, and I picked my words carefully. She already didn’t like me, and her complaining now only presaged the angry words I suspected would be unleashed when she learned what my purpose here really was. It would help if I hadn’t actually been lying to her. “Soon enough you’ll be able to go home. But it’s important we’re out here for just a little longer, just until the hour ticks over into the next.” That was the time Zamir had promised that she’d bring another city employee, someone she could vouch for, someone I’d be permitted to question to my own satisfaction. That last assurance was the only reason I’d shown up at all, pushed my doubts far enough down I didn’t have to listen to them.

Stolen story; please report.

But first it was time for my guest to arrive. He was quiet enough, but in the stillness of the park very few could hide. “Hexel,” he called softly. “I was surprised you called me for…” Conjager glanced to Robin. “…this.”

“Who watches the watchmen?” I said. “You and Zamir are the same, or you pretend to be. Beacons of pure intentions in the scummy water that’s the rest of city hall and its outstretched institutions. And you’ve been close enough, so far. You’re here to keep an eye on her, and she’ll keep an eye on you, so that I don’t have to do all of the work around here.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Madeline Zamir?”

“The same. You’ve met?”

“Not face to face, but we talk to the archives on occasion. No one likes her—they say she’s corrupt, easily bought and swayed, that easy store goods can pay her off. But,” he said with a sigh, “I understand that means she is not sold already to Drakon, I understand that we all make strange bedfellows for one another…and even so, I do not know I would have chosen her for such a risky endeavor.”

Robin stomped her foot on the ground. “Hey,” she said. “I can hear you, you know. And the way you’re talking means you both know why we’re in the middle of nowhere and I don’t.”

Conjager clicked his tongue. “You don’t know?”

“No. Starling hasn’t told me anything. I don’t know if she knows how.”

I rubbed my hand against my eyes. Right. Hope and trust and all that nonsense. The problem with inviting Conjager was that, in Robin’s eyes, I didn’t measure up, and I’d get to be reminded of that every time she wanted to make a point. “Look,” I said. She’d know soon enough, wouldn’t she? “The things I do are too dangerous to involve you. Either you or I are gonna get killed for it—and I can’t have that. Zamir’s found someone else. A nurse. Sasha Akhton Amman. She lives near Hyencinth Street, she’ll keep you safe.”

“What?”

“I’m sending you away. To someone else. Someone better.”

“A nightmare?”

“Who else is there in this damn place?”

“I’m not going.”

Now it was my turn to stomp the ground—although when I did it, the motion was effectively punctuating a sentence and not one of childish passion. Naturally. “You are,” I said. “It’s already done. Zamir and Amman will meet us by this streetlamp. We’ll prove, if you need it, that you can trust Amman. Her nightmare’s not bad—something about driving, Zamir said, and hardly no one’s got a car here. You’ll go home, you’ll be safe, you won’t be mixed up in any of this. It’s the best I can get you under the circumstances and I tried to-”

She made a sudden jerky motion, as though trying to run away, and it was only because my nerves jangled with pent tension that I was able to catch her. She squirmed and struggled in my grasp. “This isn’t right.”

“Nothing here is right,” I snapped. “We’re doing the best we can.”

“Starling-” Conjager started.

“No!” she shouted. “You’re not listening to me. Something here isn’t right-”

“Every time,” I said. “Every time, this is the problem, you don’t listen and you don’t know a damn thing about this city-”

I’d been thinking of Robin as scrawny, but she was stronger than she looked. She pulled harder, dragging me out of the circle of light formed by the streetlamp. “You don’t care! You don’t think the city’s different than whatever-”

“Starling!” Conjager shouted. We both froze. “It’s past the hour,” he said. “So where’s Zamir?”

She should have been here by now. And with arrangements like this, you weren’t late. She wouldn’t be late. “I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s not-”

And then, where I’d been standing just a moment before, the first gunshot shattered the streetlamp.