I blinked at her. “What do you mean?” I said carefully, even though my heart rate had kicked up into my chest. “What do we have to be?”

Philippa scoffed. She leaned far out over the railing, letting her hair catch the sunlight and dance in scarlet rays. She seemed to study the sidewalks and alleys of the Outscape below as she spoke, not looking at me. “Now is not the time to play stupid,” she said, “to feign obliviousness. You are a detective and I an informant—we are both smart enough to see what’s before us, I hope.” Her grip tightened. “And I fear it is a route for which there are no railings, placed precariously above a fall. What do you think I mean, Starling?”

There was the answer I felt—and I caught it before it could slip out into the air. I took a handful of change from my pocket, half-talents and quarter-talents, silver and copper, glittering in the light. I tossed one out into the air, where it hung for a second, spinning end over end, before dropping away into the distance. She and I both watched it fall. “How old are you?” I asked.

“What kind of a question is that?”

“I want to know,” I said. “You’re a nightmare, Philippa. I don’t know how long you’ve been around this city, and I deserve to know that much. How much you’ve seen, how much you’ve done, whether...this has all happened before.”

Another coin dropped into the empty air. I didn’t know where they’d end up, whether they would be caught and left forever abandoned one of the crenelated outcroppings of the skyscraper; whether they’d drop into the detritus of the street and gutter to be washed away, all the way to the bottom of the Outscape and the sea; or if their flash of metallic light would attract a bystander, to pick them up and rejoice at their luck. “What if it had? Your time is fleeting, Starling. What does the past matter to you? And you have so many enemies you may not have much future, anyway.” She laughed. “I can’t fix that for you. No one can, and yet you are determined to charge ever more headfirst into it.”

I inched closer to her along the railing. “I want to know,” I said, quieter know, “because I’d want to know how it ended.”

“Badly. That cannot surprise you.”

“I might be stupid, Philippa,” I said. “I might tick off the powers that be in the city and bring it crashing down on my head regularly. But it seems like I’m walking into a minefield here and you won’t even tell me where the mines are. You think I don’t know about these dangers already? You think I don’t stay far away because I don’t want to get dragged down into this mire?”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Starling…”

I hurled the coin this time. It sailed off into the distance. “You’re a nightmare that makes people want to fall in love with you—headfirst, destructively, tearing them down from the inside. How can I trust anything I feel around you, Philippa? Just because I walk near a nightmare doesn’t mean the ground is sloping out from underneath me, doesn’t mean I’m falling—how should I gauge what’s real and what’s fake, then, between us?”

“How do you think I feel?”

“What?”

“You are uncertain about me—that’s fine,” she said, although there was a bitter edge to her voice that suggested it wasn’t. She still wouldn’t look at me, keeping her gaze firmly fixed on the ground below…and she wasn’t any less beautiful for it. “But you know where you stand with your Robin, with Usher, with Conjager. They may lie to you, they may have their agendas, but they are decipherable with enough time. What is it that I shall do? How can I trust anyone, at any time, that they mean what they say and they are not merely swayed by the nightmare beneath my words? I would swap places with you in a heartbeat, Starling—but I cannot. That is the minefield we’ll have to walk.”

There was Conjager, his strange obsession with trying to feel pain when he inflicted it on others. There was the way so many nightmares scrambled and scrabbled and fought for power, for the drugs in the dregs of the city. And now Philippa, constantly undermined by her own. “It shouldn’t surprise me either, I said slowly, “that it’s so hard to be happy in this city. But it damn well is.”

“Even those on top can’t obtain it.” She scoffed. “What a mess.”

“Robin keeps telling me she wants out. She wants to get back to her life outside.” I rolled my last coin along the railing. It teetered, edge-on, for a moment seeming like it would fall inwards, to safety. Then a gust of wind caught it and flung it out over the abyss. “She can’t. I know she can’t, and neither can I. But I want to, Philippa. I’ve never wanted it more.”

“Some say the cities outside are not much better. It’s humans which fuel nightmares, after all.”

“But they’re not driven by them in the same way. Bad dreams can be left behind in the night.”

Philippa frowned. “There are old stories of nightmares leaving,” she said. “Legends and myths, really—because they’re conquering stories. Nightmares walking among humans wreak a havoc that would shake such towns to their cores. The escape is not aspirational except for the rush of power that accompanies it.” She sighed. “They are unconfirmed superstition, stories drawn from thin air because they sate some primal desire.”

“So you’re saying I shouldn’t tell Robin that.”

“Not unless you want to give her hope before ripping it away.”

“Only when she really annoys me, then.”

“Starling.”

I held up my hands defensively. “I’m not that mean. But, Philippa, speaking of hope…” She finally turned to look at me. I could see my own silhouetted reflection in those dark purple eyes, and my voice faltered. “I want it,” I managed. “I want us to be…something. Anything, even. But I don’t know if we can. I don’t know when we can.” I took her hand. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want it.”

A flat look. Barely sad, barely disappointed. “Is that it? Deferred?”

“In another time, in another place.” I couldn’t force myself to let go of her hand—so I made a promise then, too: “And we’ll make that place. We’ll turn this damned city into what it has to be.”