My feet took me back to the morgue on autopilot. I don’t know why. Going to my office would have been an admission of defeat after what I’d told Philippa; going back would mean I was nothing more than everything she’d told me I was. And for all that, I couldn’t help but notice that I was still walking alone.

Pain makes the world smaller, pulls it tight around you. Questions rattled around in my head like a badly-tuned music box all that long walk back, halfway round the circumference of the Outscape, but I couldn’t focus on a single one. Each step sent a jolt of pain through my right leg, and the choice of how much weight I dared put on it, how much of that ache I could bear if I wanted to keep walking, filled my head. I might have walked past Drakon on the street without ever seeing him, so wrapped up I was in myself.

Usher greeted me at the door. I watched his eyes, dark circles around them, rake me up and down. His apron was stained with crusted blood, a little darker than that across my coat, and he clutched a pair of tweezers in his hand. “I have said you make too many enemies, hmm? Which one of them caught up with you now? And have you brought it with you, hmm?”

“Well, I’m here and I’m not dead,” I told him. “Have any bodies come in?”

“Just one. Identified,” he added, to forestall me. “Silas Silken. A doctor of…some disrepute, hmm?”

“Oh.” I frowned. “I went to him once, that little clinic halfway up Relieur. Second floor, circular windows. I haven’t dared try the medicine he gave me because I think it’ll knock me flat and burn out my throat. What happened?”

He shrugged. “Went to sleep and never woke up. Not an uncommon occurrence here, hmm.” He stuck his tongue out as though he were thinking, motioning that I should follow him indoors. “Certainly a less painful way to go than our mutual friend Chesnes—and certainly less painful than whatever you get yourself into. Those are not risks to take, hmm? I must maintain my delicate handiwork, hmm?”

“You don’t have that,” I said. “You think you have it because none of your customers can complain.”

“On that note, hmm? I have not been idle while you are running around.”

“Does that mean you found something?”

He held up the tweezers, then seemed to realize there was nothing clutched between its pincers. “Ah—hmm. Never mind, there is little to show. Numbers on a graph and water in a beaker, nothing that you will understand.” Before I could recognize the insult in that, he went on. “I examined Chesnes’ wounds anew, to see what insights they yielded, hmm? Such a vicious attack often leaves residue behind, bits and pieces that are scraped off or barbed. I didn’t find any of that.”

“But you had a point.”

“Indeed. Traces of seawater, the arkanine salt that you will find coating the docks near the southeastern shore. Not something to find in the Delta.”

Guileless Usher, who would tell me things. Guileless Usher, who didn’t know how much he’d just given me. And who could hide it? Not the song and dance of Vallas and Koshmar, for half the story was written in the long gashes across Chesnes’ body. “Where exactly can you pinpoint it?” I said, stepping close to him. “The neighborhood? The street?”

“You do know how you appear, hmm?” he said. “The less I tell you the greater chance you stand of staying intact.”

“Do I look goddamn intact to you, Usher?” I snapped. I found what I was looking for on his desk—a pack of cigarettes. Mine had disappeared from my pockets and I was pretty sure that rat Koshmar had taken them. They weren’t even the good kind. Some of the worst twinges of pain dropped away from my limbs as I lit one and took a long drag “Don’t answer that. But I’m not walking away now, and the less you tell me, the more walking I’ll have to do. So let me ask again, Usher, and let’s get a straight answer. How close can you get me?”

***

He got me to the sandbar, stretching the length of several streets, gravel and rocks strewn across it. One of the rare places where the Outscape sloped down far enough to meet the sea, rather than being suspended by a maze of ladders and poles. Fragments of wood and metal were scattered about, remnants of docking stands and boats that had drifted too far afield—but when I arrived, it was empty of anyone and anything. Water licked at the shore like the sound of a hundred hands tapping out a lonesome rhythm, a sound that burrowed its way into the back of my mind.

I don’t know what I was looking for. I don’t know what I expected to find—Chesnes had been dragged away days ago. Any brush of sand would be long gone, any flecks of blood washed away in the faintly corrosive waves. Call it a feeling, if you will, an intuition beat bloody into my brain. The killer wouldn’t leave this place unguarded, even if nobody should have known its significance. A killer trying to avoid Drakon would have eyes everywhere to confirm whether he’d found them out or not and to be ready to run like hell if they had. Even Bianca had tried it, had caught me out when I was running around using her name, but she turned out to be too soft to kill me or run like she should have.

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I paced the length of the sandbar, peering into the alleys and low brick streets which bordered them. Barrels and rotted crates were stacked along the walls, mold and time destroying whatever value they might once have contained. But one was intact enough to sit upon, and so I did, flicking a match along the wall to light my cigarette.

Stakeouts are the easiest thing in the world: it’s your target who does all the moving. But a trap laid for bears will catch smaller beasts just as effectively, if you wait long enough. The first person I saw walking down those dreary streets was none other than Madeline Zamir, a clipboard pressed tight to her side. She’d picked up new glasses since I’d seen her last, thick lenses that made her pupils big as marbles. She walked with the same little nervous gait as always, and she didn’t see me.

“Zamir,” I called. My voice was hoarse and almost didn’t sound like me. “Zamir.”

She jumped. “Starling! Why-”

“What are you doing here?” I asked. She wasn’t who I was trying to catch—she didn’t have the viciousness to kill Chesnes like that, she didn’t have the nightmare that would have burned such fear into his eyes. And even then, I wouldn’t believe it of Zamir. We were friends, of a sort—I knew she wouldn’t do it. But maybe it was still a good thing I’d caught her out. “You haven’t been answering my calls, Zamir. Maybe I was starting to worry.”

“You were starting to worry-?” She glanced from side to side. “You know what you gave me.”

“I know you were the only person I could have given them to.”

She grimaced. “I am here on city business. Check-ups, record-keeping. And the city belongs to only one man.” She said it almost plaintively. “You have given me a sleeping tiger—but Starling, I do not know how long it will sleep for, and I do not want to be holding it when it wakes.”

Her paranoia was infective. I gripped her shoulders and pulled her deeper into the alley. “Listen. I’ve no idea whether I made the right decision. I don’t know whether I should have given you those pages or kept them or thrown them into the sea. But it’s done, now, and the more we pass them about the more I’m worried we’ll get shot down doing it.”

“Starling…”

“Can I trust you?”

A muscle twitched at the edge of her jaw. “I suppose you have no choice.”

“If you give it up we will both burn together.”

“What is it we keep getting ourselves into? And how?” She sighed, and backed away from me again into the main street. “I—have to run. And with what I have I should not be seen talking to you for too long. But—I will do what I can, where I can. They are good information, in the right hands, but it will take work to discover whose hands those are.”

And she scampered away before I could say more, or even say goodbye. Zamir was always worried about her hide. Maybe I should have been too, I reflected, gingerly pressing a finger against the bruises lining my cheek. I’d thrown her into the deep end with me—no, I’d thrown her deeper, for she moved in circles with Drakon’s plants in City Hall that I wouldn’t dare touch. “Just be smarter than Bianca was,” I muttered under my breath, watching her receding form. “Hold your cards close and don’t play them until you’re sure what everyone else has.”

I kept waiting. Zamir was the first to fall into this crude trap. I hoped she wouldn’t be the last nor the only.

Evening came upon these narrow alleys, then night. As the light faded from the clouds above, a few nightmares stumbled drunk past my hiding spot. I gave them the luxury of a once-over, but none of them had the composure I was looking for. A calculated killing meant a calculating killer, I hoped, one who’d return to the scene of their crime to ensure it remained unknown. Perhaps they could have been faking, but I’d seen enough intoxicated, incapacitated nightmares to know the difference.

I didn’t want to spend another night without a bed. I tossed the last of my cigarettes into the gutter and stood up. The clatter of my shoes on pavement echoed strangely, and it took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t an echo at all. Footsteps, on the street outside bordering the sandbar. I ground the embers into the pavement to quash the glow and pressed myself flat against the wall, listening for the faintest of indications that they might similarly have heard me. Silence, for a moment, the only sound my breath in my ears—then the footsteps resumed.

I chanced a look. It was a woman with ratty brown hair and a tattered jacket with a red patch on its sleeve. She walked so nonchalantly that she was instantly suspicious, her hands clasped behind her with no visible weapon there. I recognized the reason for that after only a second: the very street she walked on blurred at her steps, turning a pale white streaked with blood. The acrid smell of chloroform and antiseptic was so potent around her that it started to give me a headache even twenty feet away from her. Any weapon she carried would be secondary to that nightmarish power.

Even Bella might not overcome it. I pulled her from my pocket, the rattle of her cylinder terribly loud in the silence. The woman stopped. She cocked her head to the side with an audible crack. “Who’s there?” she called. “Come out, come out…”

I pulled my head back and flattened myself further against the wall. I was no nightmare—there was no vision, no aura she could find me by. If she came to investigate, I could hope to get the drop on her with Bella, so long as I kept my wits about me. And that was no guarantee.

Instead I heard her footsteps getting quieter—moving away from me and towards the sandbar. “Come now,” she said again, voice singsong. “No sense hiding from Fletcher, no sense trying to run.” She stepped down onto the shore with a crunch of sand, snapping a plank beneath her heel. “It’s only the rats and birds and monsters out at this hour. Which one are you?”

Whoever she pursued didn’t answer. The woman gave a low unnerving laugh. There was the splash of shallow water, and her laugh turned into a cry of triumph. “A fledging bird, then! The ocean is no place for you.”

It was lucky her back was turned to me, for I had to stifle a gasp when I saw what she’d found. Hauled dripping from the water, one arm caught in Fletcher’s viselike fingers, was a kid—a girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve years old.