Robin was the first to stir. She hadn’t heard everything I had—but she knew enough that something was wrong. She’d never met Zamir, I realized, and now she wouldn’t ever have that chance. The fact that Zamir just a few dozen minutes ago had tried to have her killed might have placed a damper upon that. “What’s wrong?” she said. “What happened?”

“They’re gone,” I said. “Both of them.”

“How?”

“In all the ways that matter.” I inched the door open, peering out into the hallway for any sign of Arcadia. Who knew what faction Arcadia represented, whose hand was pulling their puppet strings—but one of those strings was connected to a heavy machine gun, and I didn’t want to tangle with it. Nothing. I stepped quietly into the office where they’d been conducting their business. A wedge of light illuminated the corner of a desk, and in a chair behind it was a stiff-limbed, almost hunched figure. I quickly looked away.

My fingers fumbled along the wall and found the light switch, and yellow light flowed into a trio of dusty cracked bulbs in the ceiling. A reddish-brown half pint of whiskey was tipped over on the table, dripping down onto the carpet. A glass was toppled against one of the desk’s feet, and there was no second glass. The air felt thick with a strange, unidentifiable smell, acrid and plasticine. I placed my hand over my house and mouth and breathed shallowly.

Zamir stared back at me across the desk. Her eyes were wide open, and a thin trickle of blood had welled up beneath them and run down her cheeks. Her teeth were clenched in a frozen rictus grin, and her head was tilted to one side. She was slumped upright in her chair. Almost all of her muscles seemed to have spasmed and tensed as she was dying, but I didn’t know which poison would do that. “Curare?” I said aloud. My voice felt off-color and distorted. “Otravan powder? Hell, it hardly matters—why do it? Why die like a poisoned rat?”

Sometimes there are no cards left to play, nothing except the wrong ones. Sometimes the bluff runs out and all you choose is how to fold, and to whom.

“Damn it all, Zamir! You’re smarter than that! You learned to be smarter than that! Keep your cards close to your chest no matter who you’re dealing to, never give more than you need to and rarely even then. Drakon couldn’t bend you to his will—why break now? Why hand over everything I’ve trusted you with, why throw it all away for an end like this?”

Wide dead eyes met mine. I hope she might understand.

“You sold me out. You set me up. You couldn’t have said anything to me that’d change that. It doesn’t matter whether you didn’t want to! You lie. You weasel. You know how to do that, Zamir, I know you damn well do—so why didn’t you? Why’d you sell out now, why-”

“She was scared,” Robin said.

I whirled around. She was standing in the doorway. She moved past me to stand just next to Zamir’s body, and I couldn’t caution her away. She placed one hand on Zamir’s sleek silver coat, seemingly the same one she’d been wearing all those years ago, playing cards, a jacket that marked her as a city official, a jacket that marked her as a target. “Why—how would you know?”

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“Everybody is. They think we’re scared, you and me, because we’re not nightmares. But I don’t—they all are, and it makes them do things just like it does us.” I didn’t need to ask what Zamir could have been scared of. The same things I was: Drakon, Jabberwock, the feeling that the wildfires were starting to close in and seeing the smoke meant we were too late, the feeling of facing down creatures toothier and more vicious than ourselves. Robin placed a hand on Zamir’s shoulder—and then, beneath her fingers, there was a crinkling sound, like paper folded too many times. She stopped and jerked away in surprise.

I threw open Zamir’s jacket. Tucked not into the inside pockets, but pinned, seemingly at random, to the lining, were two envelopes. The first I recognized—the pages of Drakon’s transaction journal, the pages that Arcadia had left to find. That Arcadia wouldn’t find, now.

She’d still been bluffing. All the way to the end. I sighed and looked down at her. “God damn it,” I said, but there was no more anger in it. “You lied and you drank your poison and you hoped to hell I could hear you.”

“What’s that?” Robin asked.

“Reprieve. At least for a time.”

The second envelope was thicker. It had a thin signature on it that was recognizably Zamir’s. I slit it open with my fingernails and pulled out a thin sheet of paper. The handwriting was messy, as though she’d been writing furtively, in the dark—maybe in the moments when Arcadia’s gaze had been elsewhere, the few moments she could grasp for between treason and death. It was addressed to me.

Starling, it began. I wish you luck.

There is more. We are more than that. I should thank you, curse you—but the luck of the draw is what rests beneath us both.

We’ve been lucky since the day we met, lucky to avoid this rising tide, lucky like two birds who do not know the plague that stalks the earth beneath. But even birds must land sometime. I know as I set this down that my luck has run dry. Maybe I will die today, maybe tomorrow, but I will not see a new week. I knew that as soon as Arcadia came calling, toting her monstrosity of a weapon—Dawn, she calls herself, Dawn Arcadia, because it is the sunrise that ends nightmares. The contradiction, that she is a nightmare itself…I did not tell her.

I am sorry. Since the day we met you have known I am a coward, reckless and fearful at the same time. I could have refused Arcadia everything but I couldn’t face the pain of that gun against my neck. If I am…clever… There was another word there, scribbled out. …I will not have to.

I would not have chosen this ending either. I hope I will have done right. Arcadia, like the rest of Jabberwock, knows your trail, but they cannot yet move in all the circles you do. Take this as a warning and do not venture too far afield. She will know soon enough all the ways I’ve lied to her—I’ve learned better to do so, than the day we met. But I have been practicing on you, Starling, so maybe you will not be so grateful.

Nothing of that will last forever. And you must move faster. At least I know what I have to hide from Arcadia—you do not know what your Robin is hiding, you do not know what Jabberwock and Drakon seek of her. You will be wrong-footed until you know that, you have nothing to bargain with, and so you run around this city headless, guileless…but still lucky. For now.

Why couldn’t it continue? Why must my luck run out? I liked what we’d built within the Outscape—I will miss it.

Goodbye.

I closed my eyes. “Bye, Maddy,” I whispered. “I hope it’s better where you are.”

Robin came over to me. She didn’t say anything for a moment, just leaned against me. “She was your friend,” she said softly. No indication whether that’d stopped because Zamir had betrayed me, or because she’d had the fool sense to die.

“She was,” I agreed. “And so we’re going to do what she asked me to do. What I should have been doing already. I’m not going to send you away, Robin—that was always a stupid plan and I’m sorry I came up with it.”

“Good-”

“So if we manage not to get ourselves killed first,” I said, “we’re going to find out what you remember.”