Steel under my palm has been instructed to dislike me. I know because I helped arrange the instruction.

The service gate is supposed to reject this credential, which makes the little red refusal on the reader mildly insulting on a professional level. I press the badge to it again and let my fingers rest against the casing while the system considers the version of events it has been given—D’ivoire Nnamani, temporary observer, clearance processed elsewhere, somebody else’s administrative responsibility. The first two facts are almost true. The third is irresistible. Bureaucracies will forgive nearly any trespass if the blame has already been assigned to another office.

The reader blinks green. I accept its apology and step through into the yard, where everything beneath the containment dome seems to be labouring for air. The southern tunnel is breathing too, which is considerably worse. Its walls ease outward by a few centimetres, drawing a shallow draught through torn conduit, powdered concrete, and the cavities left behind by things that used to be whole; then they settle around the emptied space and begin again. Vasche taught thirty metres of ruined infrastructure the manners of lungs while his pulse was beating uselessly inside a wall, and the lesson has somehow remained behind after him.

I do not need to ask where he is.

Kohana stands near the tunnel mouth with one hand closed around a light too small for what it contains. White escapes between her fingers and lays thin marks across her wrist. Doctrine has classifications for Celestial death; Logistics has containment protocols; entire sections of the Academy curriculum are devoted to making the fact survivable. None of them have ever improved the first sight of what remains.

Above us, the dome works Vasche’s last violence through its frame in long metallic complaints. One transparent panel has gone milky beside the western seam; another carries a fracture thin enough to disappear beneath reflected sky.

Load travels from rib to rib, locks taking more than their design promised and passing the excess onward before any single joint can surrender. It is holding. That is the only compliment a structure earns during catastrophe.

At the centre of the yard, Kaede Ohuang-Zhùróng has caught herself against a rail.

Atropa staggered less than a minute ago and has not recovered the ground cleanly. Kaede bends over one human hand locked around the steel while six Shadow arms drag enormous black articulations across the concrete behind her. Winter-white pupils burn inside pink irises. Every instrument aimed at the crown returns uselessness in a different dialect, but the pressure around it leaves receipts everywhere: light curving strangely around her skull, condensation stippling the dome’s inner surface, reflections turning their heads before the bodies responsible for them.

The yard is still evacuating.

Blaire has the northern lane moving in controlled streams, bracelets knocking softly whenever another frightened group discovers that her preferred direction was apparently their idea all along. Tasi is farther east, bells turning curiosity back toward colour and movement before curiosity can harden into testimony. Masae holds Keeper low beside the western support, studying the buckling braces with a look of personal offence, already counting what can be shored, cut free, or forced back into place. Isleen works the service road with one hand on a railway worker’s shoulder while every spare glance cuts back toward Kaede.

Nobody has stopped. Vasche chose the living, and we are still obeying him; grief can submit its invoice later. I put my palm against the platform rail.

The steel is cold despite the heat, and the yard opens beneath my hand in routes rather than distances: track lines, service corridors, cargo lanes, locked gates, the hollow beneath the western warehouse where a Spectrian hull waits folded into dimensions the railway authority has never been paid enough to imagine. Every useful exit arrives wearing an objection. Objections can be negotiated.

I begin with the nearest gate. Its access log acquires an inspection clearance nobody issued and finds the forgery comfortably similar to several legitimate mistakes already made this morning. A maintenance barrier farther north discovers that its records place it open six minutes ago; precedent does the rest. Down the yard, one routing signal becomes less certain that freight access and evacuation access are fundamentally different ideas.

Small lies, shabby enough to resemble clerical residue and useful enough to carry weight for a few minutes. By the time Hiroyuki reaches me, I have bullied three impossible approaches down into shapes that might survive contact with reality.

He stops beside me at the rail. We do not spend Vasche’s name. The tunnel does it for us, drawing another shallow breath while concrete eases outward around the place where he is not. Something in me recoils from how faithfully the ruin has retained the shape of his last command. Neither of us is ready to inventory what else he left behind.

“Twenty-four,” Hiroyuki says.

The yard clocks are still recovering from containment. One display skips a second; another repeats one and seems embarrassed enough to move on.

“What are you purchasing with it?”

“A way to put Kohana inside Kaede.”

I look toward her. “Through an existing route?”

“There isn’t one.”

Existing routes come with owners. Nonexistence, at least, has fewer claimants.

“Tasi can make twenty-four seconds large enough to enter,” he continues. “Blaire can keep the civilians from breaking the shape. Isleen will occupy Atropa’s attention. Masae keeps the yard standing.”

“And where do you spend yourself?”

“On the count. Tasi can stretch the interval; I keep Atropa from taking those seconds back.”

That leaves one cost unitemised.

I look to Kohana. Across the concrete, what remains of Vasche whitens the seams between her closed fingers.

“Kohana goes inside,” Hiroyuki says.

I look past her to Kaede. She bends harder over the rail. One Shadow arm lashes across the ballast, black fingers ploughing long furrows through the stones before recoiling, and the dome answers with a complaint from somewhere near the western seam.

“Atropa will see the opening the moment we make it.”

“She can see it. She cannot be allowed to close it.”

Naturally. Building a strategy around Death failing to notice something would be less a plan than an embarrassing final document.

I turn my thumb slowly against the rail. “Then tell me what I’m actually buying.”

“Twenty-four seconds in which Kohana has somewhere to go that Atropa has not agreed she may reach.”

Now that is language with decent tailoring.

I close my hand around the rail and let the available routes rearrange themselves beneath my skin. Below us, behind concrete, false clearances and several crimes against Earth customs law, the waiting ship sits folded inside its berth. The gate carries one lie in its records. The northern corridor is already acquiring another. Somewhere between them lies a path absent from every map, every clearance, every rule written to refuse it.

Its chief defect is that it does not exist, and I have worked with worse materials.

“Give me the first second,” I say.

Hiroyuki inclines his head.

“I’ll make the other twenty-three expensive to revoke.”

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

I light a cigarette because my mouth wants something to do besides bare its teeth.

The first drag tastes worse than it should. Cheap paper, hot filter, diesel worked deep into the yard, concrete dust rasping along the back of my throat, human fear rising through all of it with that familiar metal edge it gets when too many bodies understand the same danger at once.

Underneath the ordinary smells lies the residue of Vasche’s death, clean and mineral and strange enough that my tongue begins cataloguing it before I can stop myself. 

I watch the cigarette until the need to bite down passes.

Smoke fills my lungs. I hold it until my ribs begin complaining, until the pressure has weight and purpose, then release the breath slowly through my nose and send my magic out with it.

The change begins in the body’s oldest agreement with place, the one frightened people reach for before thought catches up. Concrete acquires the worn familiarity of stone crossed by generations of feet. Freight fencing gathers the suggestion of rails polished smooth beneath anxious palms. The north corridor lengthens into the instinctive invitation of an aisle, and somewhere beneath the sirens three low organ notes drag themselves through the teeth of everyone close enough to breathe me.

No one needs to see a church. Humans have spent too many centuries teaching one another how bodies should move through sacred spaces for the body to require decoration.

A woman clutching her handbag against her chest straightens and starts walking. Two railway workers shouting incompatible instructions lose the argument long enough to hear the same one. At the rear of the evacuation lane, a man turns toward the blocked route he has been feeding people into, tastes the wrongness I have laid across it, and begins sending them north instead.

Fear has already eaten the part of the brain that enjoys choice. The crowd reaches gratefully for ceremony: a line, a procession, a door somebody else has already declared safe.

Ash lengthens at the end of my cigarette. I knock it onto the concrete.

“Return.”

I give the word to the yard.

People will argue with me. Steel usually has better manners.

The command works its way into bolts, hinges, elevator teeth, swollen emergency locks, carrying the low, crawling pressure of an old memory returning through bone. A cargo lift dead for three budget cycles convulses once, complains through every gear it owns, and drags itself awake. A stairwell door spits rust from its latch and opens far enough for the first evacuee to shoulder through. A service barrier grinds against the ground until a buried handle tears free of the grit packed around it.

I make nothing miraculous. I remind each piece of machinery of the last useful thing it knew how to do and leave it to decide whether shame is sufficient motivation.

My second drag puts blood on my tongue. Only a thread. Copper and salt beneath the smoke. 

I swallow it and turn toward Kaede. Death is wearing her badly today.

One human hand grips the rail hard enough to raise every tendon along the wrist. Winter-white pupils burn inside pink irises, and six enormous Shadow arms move behind her with an intimacy that bothers me more than their size. They know where her shoulders end. They anticipate the shift of her weight. They arrange themselves around her with the ease of limbs that believe the body has always belonged to them.

Atropa smells like almost nothing.

Kaede smells terrified.

Predators make mistakes when they think the animal underneath them has stopped fighting.

I draw smoke deep enough to hurt and settle my attention behind Kaede’s eyes. Hiroyuki asked me to occupy Atropa, which is a very polite little phrase for what I intend to do to her.

Death understands bodies once they stop. She understands the cut, the cooling, the final arrangement of flesh around absence.

Grief has worse manners.

It keeps moving after the corpse has finished. It nests in rooms. It sleeps in beds that have become too large. It finds an old shirt months later and puts its face into the cloth before anyone can decide whether that counts as surviving. You can kill a person once. The people who love them will discover fresh ways to lose them for years.

I give Atropa that.

My smoke reaches Kaede in a thin silver thread and slips behind her eyes.

The horizon beyond the dome darkens. Figures begin arriving through it in a procession too long for the yard to hold. Their faces remain indistinct. Faces would make this sentimental, and hands are where mothers keep better records anyway.

The first pair is small, fingers smudged grey with pencil graphite and cheap school ink. The next are older, their knuckles split across fights Kaede has never seen. Knife calluses come after that. Burn scars. Fine lines beginning to gather over veins and joints.

Twenty.

Forty.

Eighty.

Every pair belongs to Kohana. None belongs to the sixteen-year-old standing somewhere behind me with a dead star closed inside her fist.

They carry an empty coffin.

Kaede’s knees loosen; Atropa moves. One Shadow hand lashes through the procession and closes on air. Another tears across the ballast beside the rail, black fingers carving long furrows between the stones. The crown bears down inside Kaede hard enough that I taste its pressure through the smoke, and I keep the procession coming.

Another Kohana. Another, then another. All the impossible ages of a daughter passing before the woman who has spent sixteen years trying to buy her enough ordinary life to reach even one of them.

The coffin stays empty. I make sure of it.

Death gets no body to complete the arrangement. Nothing lies inside for her to claim, cool, name, or finish. I give her only what Kaede knows should have been there: a daughter who might have reached thirty, the woman she could have become at fifty, the old hands Kaede might one day have recognised without looking because they were reaching into the same kitchen drawer they had opened for decades.

Each Kohana carries the same vacancy past her. The hands change. The absence keeps its weight.

Kaede makes a sound through her teeth. Atropa has to feel that from inside her.

I push harder. I bring the procession closer.

A younger hand curled around chopsticks. Fingers stained with ink. A thumb carrying the pale seam of some future knife slipping where it should not. A hand reaching across a street for someone else’s. Another resting over the head of someone asleep. A ring Kaede has never seen and cannot know the meaning of. Veins standing higher beneath thinning skin. Fingers beginning to tremble with age.

None of these lives have happened. A mother can mourn them anyway the instant she understands they may never be allowed to.

The pressure against the dome changes. Only slightly, but the structure notices. Metal gives a long complaint overhead. Condensation shivers across one transparent panel, then black breaks through the centre of one winter-white pupil. It widens. Kaede’s fingers seize around the rail so hard her nails scrape steel. Her shoulders jerk against the arrangement of Shadow limbs behind them, one ugly, human movement forcing its way through something immeasurably larger. Sweat sharpens across her skin, and underneath it comes that tiny animal flare I know too well: the body recognising itself after something else has been using it.

For one breath, Kaede is looking out through her own eye, then white swallows the pupil again. The Shadow arms draw closer.

I let the vision begin to rot before Atropa can make me pay more for it. The oldest Kohana goes first, trembling hands dissolving into smoke at the wrists. The coffin loses one corner, then another. The procession thins until the real yard bleeds through: diesel, wet concrete, bells, buckling steel, a dome carrying more strain than its manufacturers would ever admit in public.

My cigarette has burned close enough to the filter that heat has reached my fingers. I crush it under my heel. The taste of blood has thickened. I can afford it.

Across the yard, everybody else keeps their piece moving: D’ivoire’s next route opens, Blaire feeds civilians north, Tasi climbs toward her count, Masae’s current stays buried in the supports.

They have their routes, crowds, braces and seconds. I keep Kaede.

She raises her head toward me. Atropa’s pupils remain white, but the mouth belongs to the woman trapped underneath them. I know it from the way her jaw sets, from the anger gathering there without anywhere else to go.

Anger still belongs to the living. I show her my teeth.

“That’s all you get.”

The sentence has enough room to mean Kaede, Kohana, or the few stolen seconds Atropa has already taken from everything still breathing beneath this dome. Death can choose whichever insult hurts most.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

I know exactly how far this dome can bend before the evacuation yard becomes several thousand tonnes of very expensive soup.

It would be humiliating not to. I approved half the materials in its ribs from the safety of another planet. Supreme Couture supplied the support casings; Star Shards laced the glass with that ridiculous crystalline shimmer my father’s people insist improves everything it touches; Command paid to drag the entire arrangement Earthside because someone, somewhere, wrote the sentence evacuation infrastructure should showcase Spectra’s aesthetic supremacy and survived the review process.

Spectra. Even our emergency measures have branding.

If I live through this, I am finding the copywriter and making them wear that sentence to their funeral.

Vasche’s supernova never finished. It did not need to.

The dome caught the first expansion before Kohana crushed the whole stellar catastrophe back down into something small enough to close inside her fist. She stopped the energy from carrying on through Kyoto; she did not travel backwards and persuade several thousand tonnes of glass and steel that they had never been struck by a dying star. The ribs still carry loads they were not designed to remember, half the western locks have taken heat past specification, and every surviving support compensates for something beside it that has become less trustworthy.

The supernova is over. The engineering has not forgiven it.

The western seam gives another ugly metallic complaint overhead. I look up automatically, following the distortion through the glass until it reaches the rib taking too much weight. Still inside tolerance. Barely.

“The supernova is handled,” I tell her. “The architecture is not. If that western rib goes, its load walks into the next one, then the next, and this entire dome comes down into the evacuation yard.” I glance up at the fractured glass. “I refuse to have several thousand tonnes of bespoke Spectrian engineering become a mass grave under my family’s logo.”

Kohana is still holding Vasche.

She has kept that fist closed since the tunnel, knuckles cramped around a white light small enough to disappear inside her hand. Now she looks from the failing seam to what she is carrying and hesitates. Only for a second, but I see it: the ugly little calculation between the dead boy she cannot bear to put down and the living city requiring both of her hands.

Her fingers open slowly. White spills across her palm and climbs the wet lines of her wrist. She looks at the star once before tucking it into the secured pocket against her chest, fastening it with more care than anything in this yard is currently receiving. Her fingertips remain there for an extra beat, then she checks the closure again.

Only then does she raise both hands.

Her palms turn toward the dome. Her shoulders lock beneath the weight almost immediately, every tendon in her forearms drawing hard beneath the skin. Overhead, the western rib’s slow descent stops. The fracture beside it creeps another centimetre through the glass, shivers, and holds.

The bracelets at my wrists answer the strain with a bright little chord. Three Kyoto Rail officials glance over at once. One has planted himself directly in an evacuation lane with a tablet clutched to his chest, waiting for paperwork to develop load-bearing properties.

I flick two fingers toward the retaining wall. He takes the suggestion.

Excellent. I can still work with the species.

Kohana barely notices. Her remaining acid-green eye tracks the western rib while her left arm gives one quick tremor before she drags it steady again. The structure presses down through both raised hands, through locked elbows and shoulders already sitting too high beneath the strain. 

“Blaire,” she says without looking away from the western rib. “Make them want the north corridor.”

I look at her.

“That sounded suspiciously like an instruction.”

“I’m asking.” Her chin moves a fraction toward the evacuation lanes. She cannot spare more without shifting the load. “You know how to make people listen.”

That is vile.

She could have asked for herself. I have whole wardrobes of reasons to refuse Kohana Ohuang-Zhùróng personally. She falls outside my jurisdiction, my clientele, my family, my taste, and the outer border of my patience. Instead, she has looked directly at the one thing I am best at, and handed me several thousand frightened strangers. The civilians are considerably harder to dislike on principle.

A family reaches the northern lane sideways and manages to inconvenience three separate flows of traffic at once. Railway staff try to keep evacuees out of the working lanes, which would be easier if frightened people didn’t treat every uniform as a personal invitation to ask the same six questions. A little boy has lost one shoe. His father has him lifted beneath the arms because the crowd is packed too tightly for either of them to stop and search for it.

One of my bracelets answers with a soft, treacherously tender note before I have asked anything of it.

Traitor.

Kohana keeps her eye on the dome. She does not dress the request up for me or offer some little speech about duty. She has looked at me and decided I am the person in this yard most capable of making safety desirable. The accuracy is offensive.

Hiroyuki is in the shape of that request somewhere. Ask clearly. Do not beg. Leave the other person enough room to choose what they were probably going to do anyway.

I raise my chin and bring my wrists together.

The bracelets meet in a bright, hard chord.

Their harmonics climb at once, brightening through the yard until the nearest station microphones catch them. From there, the sound finds the traffic cameras, temporary relay nodes, emergency speakers, and the Rosaflux support grid threaded through the dome and adjoining rail infrastructure. The operation has treated them as separate systems all day.

They have twenty-four seconds to become more sophisticated.

“Fine,” I tell Kohana. “For the next twenty-four seconds, this hideous yard is Rosaflux by proxy. If anyone embarrasses me in it, I am blaming you.”

I turn my wrist, and Rosaflux travels with me as easily as ever. The cameras find me first—they usually do—red indicators pivoting inside their housings while station microphones wake in little electrical clicks. The temporary grid beneath the platforms answers in rose-coloured telemetry, spreading through Earth wiring that has spent several hours carrying pieces of my district without displaying the appropriate gratitude.

The dome’s glass is the least interesting thing my family brought here. The same contracts that supplied its ribs and transparent panels also laid temporary communications, crowd-routing nodes, and emergency lighting through the surrounding railway. Every component arrived carrying somebody’s judgement about where a sign belongs, which colour catches the eye first, how long an alarm can repeat before people stop hearing it, which corridor appears safer from twenty metres away, where a frightened crowd will hesitate and where it will flow.

Somebody chose the height of every arrow, the spacing between lights, even what leave now should sound like.

People like to call those decisions superfluous, which is one of the reasons people so often require managing.

I gather every choice I can reach.

The nearest crossing light abandons its frantic emergency pulse and settles into a clean directional sequence. Station speakers stop competing over the same patch of air. Three Star Shards interface halos still insisting on displaying strawberry gateau beside evacuation telemetry go dark at once. I make a private note to tell Father that if his branding survives the apocalypse better than his restraint, I am dissolving the campaign myself.

Then I reach for the oldest weapon Rosaflux owns: the terror of being seen behaving badly.

Every gala line. Every receiving hall. Every opening night where three hundred ambitious people somehow pass through two doors without clawing one another apart because somebody important may be watching. The remembered guidance of an usher’s hand. The little correction that runs through a room when everyone else has already understood where to stand. The social horror of discovering that you are the only person moving in the wrong direction.

I lay all of it over the evacuation yard: wait your turn, keep moving, give the person ahead of you room, leave the announcement enough silence to be heard, keep your hands to yourself, and for the love of anything expensive, do not make a scene. 

My bracelets begin to sing.

I designed the pattern years ago for gala reveals, the moment when an entire room needs to understand that whatever comes next deserves its attention. Here, the notes travel through station glass and concrete, threading beneath alarms and vibrating faintly through the dome’s damaged ribs. Rosaflux tells people where to look and lends obedience the flattering sensation of having been their own idea.

The northern lane corrects itself first.

A woman who has been forcing herself sideways through it lifts her head, finally sees the route already opening in front of her and turns with it. Two men start arguing over who moved first, hear themselves doing it in front of several hundred people and abruptly discover manners. A railway worker raises one arm toward the north corridor and finds the crowd responding before he has managed to shout the instruction.

The father with the shoeless boy gets space around his elbows. That one I pretend not to notice.

I take advantage, splitting one evacuation lane neatly into two. The second bends around a damaged barrier instead of jamming against it. Staff at the southern access stop feeding people toward a route that has become dangerous because the lights above it have acquired the visual equivalent of severe disapproval. Farther north, the crowd begins opening a corridor before the station announcement has finished telling them one is required.

Panic remains. I have never believed in miracles that tacky. Rosaflux gives it etiquette. For twenty-four seconds, etiquette will keep people from crushing one another beneath a failing dome. That is enough.

The western rib groans, and every sensor threaded through Rosaflux answers at once. The fracture overhead lengthens another hair’s breadth, pauses beneath the force Kohana feeds back into the structure, and remains where it is.

I turn my attention very firmly toward the north lane before Kohana can catch me noticing.

“Twenty-four seconds,” I say, tightening the grid until every camera, speaker, bracelet, crossing light, and directional display agrees on the same version of the yard. “That is all you’re getting. Ruin the presentation, and I will deny involvement.”

Kohana has no breath to waste answering me. Her teeth are set, violet curls stuck damply against her temple, both hands occupied with keeping several thousand tonnes of compromised Spectrian engineering where architecture belongs.

She can argue with the dome.

I have the audience.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The truck is too tall, which is why I climb it.

Somebody shouts before I get one boot onto the rear coupling. Somebody else joins in when I use the side mirror as a handhold, and by the time I haul myself onto the roof, three separate Kyoto Rail employees have informed me that I am not authorised to be there. Their concern follows me upward in increasingly creative Japanese.

Huzzah! I have a stage.

Kyoto Freight 7B was clearly designed by someone with no interest in making me look good on top of it. Square cab, rain-streaked metal, hazard stripes scratched nearly white at the edges, somebody’s work gloves abandoned beneath one windscreen wiper. The roof dips under my weight with a soft complaint when I straighten, then settles. Good enough. From here I can see almost the whole eastern yard: the wounded dome, the evacuation lanes. Hiroyuki stands far enough away to see all of us.

I know what he wants: twenty-four seconds, and ordinary ones will never do.

Fortunately, nobody has ever hired me for ordinary. I shake out my bare wrist, and the bells wake around me—small ones clustered there for the quick work, two hanging from the long points of my hat, and another pair, much larger, dragging their weight from the ends of my coattails. Each is tuned badly enough against the others to offend anyone with respectable musical training. That part is intentional. Harmony is lovely when you want a song; I need disagreement.

I turn my bare wrist beside my ear. The first bell gives me the thin bright note of a station clock changing minute; another answers half a beat too late, while somewhere behind me one of the larger coattail bells swings through the space they leave and answers with a low silver note of its own. Time hates syncopation. People do too, generally, but time has considerably less humour about being contradicted.

Below me, the east side of the yard still has too many wandering eyes. A cluster of railway workers has stopped moving because Kaede has become the most interesting thing any of them will ever see, which is understandable and deeply inconvenient. Near the freight fence, two teenagers have found a gap in the cordon and are discussing whether a better view is worth the possibility of becoming part of the emergency.

I give the bells at my wrist a quick shake before they can finish making up their minds. The sound slips sideways through the yard, no louder than before, only suddenly much harder to ignore. Three heads turn toward me, then seven; one of the teenagers points, and I reward him with a deep bow that sends the hat bells swinging past my shoulders and the heavy pair at my coattails following a moment later. By the time I straighten, he has forgotten all about the fence.

Much better.

Blaire can have their behaviour. I only need their attention pointed somewhere harmless, so I throw both arms wide and let the small bells chatter while the larger ones roll in behind them.

“Ladies, gentlemen, railway employees who have already told me to get down from here—”

A furious voice rises from beside the truck.

I point down toward it. “See? Audience participation.”

A few people laugh, thin and nervous and nowhere near enough to qualify as joy. That is fine. I am not asking for joy. I am listening for timing.

I start the pattern with the smallest bells. One strikes, another answers a fraction late, and I step along the painted centre seam of the truck roof while the bells at my hat swing into the next count. My right leg rises behind me and stays there. The long coattails follow the turn of my hips more slowly, their heavy bells describing broad arcs behind me before arriving with two low notes that make the whole sequence feel larger than the movements that produced it. Anyone who knows me well enough would recognise that the joke has ended by now. Fortunately, most of the yard still thinks I am dancing.

I run the pattern once, then again with one interval displaced and another opened wider. My weight rolls from heel to toe while my shoulders turn through the rhythm, the quick, silver chatter at my wrist pulling ahead and the heavier bells trailing after me in slower pendulum arcs. From below, I probably look like something between a performer and a public nuisance balanced illegally on railway property. Both descriptions are fair.

The clocks answer on the third pass. The large analogue face over Track 3 loses half a second; its minute hand twitches forward, falters, then slips back to where it began. Farther down the platform, a digital board flashes 13:03, blanks, and proudly presents 13:03 again. A staff clock near the entrance advances by one second, holds it too long, then scrambles after the rest. None of them agree with my bells.

I grin. “Terrible ensemble.”

I send the next sequence deeper, carrying the sound through the truck beneath my boots and outward into steel, poured concrete, signal wire, display boards, switching systems, cheap plastic clocks, expensive clocks, and all those little quartz hearts that have spent their manufactured lives trusting one second to behave like every other. Into that machinery I place twenty-four notes, one after another, each landing hard enough that I feel the answering vibration climb through my soles and settle into my bones.

When the last note fades, every clock I can reach changes at once.

00:24.

The number spreads across the yard in green digits, red digits, cheap liquid crystal, and one deeply confused analogue face attempting to communicate a value it was never built to display. Somewhere above me, Hiroyuki shifts on the walkway. I keep my eyes firmly elsewhere. Looking at Hiroyuki in the middle of something difficult is an excellent way to discover that he would like the difficult thing done more, and I am already badly over budget on activities likely to earn me a lecture later.

My left calf has begun trembling under the strain, but I keep my right leg raised while I start the count again. This time the twenty-four seconds open beneath the rhythm.

A second ordinarily passes too quickly for anyone to notice that it has shape. You enter it and leave before there is time to understand there was somewhere inside it to stand. I catch the first and give it depth, then do the same to the second, the third, and every one that follows, until twenty-four small chambers fit edge to edge inside the same interval the clocks insist they are measuring.

Technically, each one is still a second.

I would love to watch somebody prove otherwise.

Nothing in the yard stops. Alarms keep sounding, rain reaches the concrete exactly when gravity expects it to, and every ordinary motion continues around me. I have not slowed anything; there is only more room inside the count now, more distance between an action and its consequence, more space for a hand to move or a gate to open before now becomes too late.

As the sixth count approaches, my jaw begins to ache. I had not noticed how hard I was biting my teeth together until I loosen them and taste blood where the inside of my cheek has caught against a molar. The bells clustered around my bare wrist feel heavier too, every note sending a little more heat through the bones of my hand.

Still cheaper than losing the count.

“Six,” I say, and let the bells answer.

By twelve, the analogue clock over Track 3 has developed a visible tremor. At fifteen, the digital boards begin losing pieces of their numerals around the edges, strokes vanishing and returning while the system struggles to decide what time is supposed to look like. At eighteen, something deep beneath the freight yard tries to pull the whole arrangement back into the ordinary sequence of things.

I drive my left heel into the truck roof. “No.”

The metal dents beneath my heel with a sharp, unhappy pop. I glance down, pat the roof once, and mutter, “Sorry,” without interrupting the rhythm.

Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.

By twenty-three, my raised leg is shaking hard enough to disturb the long coattails behind me. Their heavy bells swing out of the pattern and return with two notes I never asked for.

I take them.

Improvisation is just failure arriving in costume.

Twenty-four.

The count locks.

For one impossible interval, twenty-four seconds remain exactly twenty-four seconds while containing far more life than arithmetic has any right to permit. I feel Hiroyuki catch the far edge through the count itself: the twenty-four seconds try to fold shut, meet resistance somewhere beyond me, and stay open.

Below, D’ivoire’s route begins taking shape where the yard has no room for one, possibility threading itself through regulations, infrastructure, and whatever technical offence he has committed to make the space admit him. I leave it to him. Blaire’s northern lanes keep swallowing civilians with enough grace that half of them probably believe choosing them was their own idea, which is very much hers.

Mine is the interval they are spending.

The space between ticks, the breath held before a joke lands, the suspended fraction before my raised foot returns to the stage: twenty-four seconds filled with everybody else’s work until the measurement remains technically correct and practically useless.

I keep ringing.

The small bells at my wrist burn against my skin now. Every movement of my head pulls another thin note from the ends of my hat, while the heavier bells on my coattails follow my balance with a slower, punishing swing. Sweat crawls down my spine beneath the costume, my calf is threatening open rebellion, and every clock in Kyoto Freight 7B is going to require emotional support when this is over.

Then the interval begins to contract.

I feel it first at the edges, the twenty-four seconds pressing inward as ordinary time tries to remember how little room it is supposed to occupy. I tighten the pattern before it can succeed, wrist bells racing ahead while the hat and coattail bells drag the rhythm wide again.

“Stay open.”

The answer comes back bright, discordant and exactly where I need it. Around me, those twenty-four impossible chambers strain beneath everything packed inside them: people moving, routes lengthening, steel holding, grief biting deeper into Death. At the far end, Hiroyuki keeps his grip on my count.

My jaw aches when I smile. I smile wider anyway and ring the pattern again.

“Twenty-four is plenty,” I tell the seconds. “Don’t get greedy.”

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

This is exactly the sort of scene where I am supposed to shine: the wounded dome overhead, Death wearing Kaede’s body, Kohana at the centre of everything with both hands raised toward several thousand tonnes of glass and steel, twenty-four impossible seconds waiting to be filled. In Starlight Melody Pika Pika Pitch!, the music would already be climbing. 

Instead I have Hiroyuki’s rule card in my pocket, the folded corner pressing against my hip.

Veil first. Lanes exact. No spectacle.

He underlined the last two words twice.

I look up. The dome flexes over the yard, its fractures bright in the noon. Everybody else is already buried in some impossible little assignment, which leaves me the ground beneath them.

“Fine,” I tell Keeper. “We’ll be indispensable in an extremely unphotogenic way.”

Keeper warms in my hand.

“You would enjoy this.”

Another pulse of heat answers me.

“Of course you would. You have terrible taste.”

I settle the barrel against the western support and let Aurora enter the steel without fanfare. That is the difficult part. 

Every cable under the yard arrives in my awareness at once: signal current running beneath the tracks, emergency lighting, switching systems, camera feeds, station speakers, relays, backup circuits, all the exhausted little electrical organs of a place being asked to remain functional during the end of several different worlds at once. Above them, the catenary lines hum hard enough that I can taste metal behind my teeth. There is enough electricity here to make something gorgeous.

Hiroyuki’s handwriting seems to burn straight through my pocket.

“I read it, you tyrant.”

I close my eyes and listen harder until the rail yard stops presenting itself as a scene and becomes a circuit instead. That helps. The western support is carrying too much. Two locks above it have overheated. A switching cabinet near Track 3 keeps trying to restart a damaged relay, and the emergency grid has lost one southern branch and is feeding the north corridor through a backup line never designed for this many frightened people at once.

Problems, real ones, with wires and loads and failure points I can actually put my hands around.

I push Aurora through Keeper and feel the musket answer all the way into my wrist. Blue-white light travels beneath the skin of the support, finding bolts, joints, brackets, every place where metal has started wondering whether remaining connected is still worth the trouble.

“Stay married,” I tell the nearest joint.

The steel gives a low complaint through Keeper.

“Nobody said marriage was glamorous.”

It holds, so I move the current outward.

The north corridor needs light before it needs anything beautiful. I steal power from a dead advertisement board, an unused bank of vending machines, and three platform displays whose only remaining contribution to public safety is announcing trains nobody is getting on. The emergency fixtures brighten by degrees along Blaire’s route. No auroral curtain unfurls over the concrete, no radiant path announces itself beneath anyone’s feet. There are lights where people need lights.

Halfway north, a station gate shudders when its motor catches against damaged gearing. I send a narrow current through the housing, take the load off the bad coil, and let the mechanism finish opening under its own power. Nobody looks at me.

The cameras are next, and half of them are still pointed toward Kohana. My first impulse is wonderfully simple: kill every lens in the yard.

Then I feel Blaire moving through the same network.

I leave the cameras alive and kill their way out instead. The local feeds remain open to Blaire’s network while every path leading beyond the yard begins encountering a series of deeply unfortunate technical difficulties. Press relays lose their handshakes. Remote storage stops accepting packets. Three outbound feeds begin writing corrupted timestamps over otherwise perfectly usable footage. Anyone inside the yard who needs those cameras can keep them; anyone hoping to turn Kohana into tonight’s headline gets static.

Keeper pulses against my palm just before the western rib shifts, and every thought in my head turns toward Kohana at once. The white glow from the pocket against her chest jumps with the impact.

My feet move. I make it one step before stopping myself.

She already has the dome. Everybody else has their piece. I have the yard. That should make me feel better.

Everything in me wants to cross the yard.

I could pretend it is because she needs me. That would be easier. I want to be beside her. I want her to look over and see me there, and my face goes hot at how badly I need her to.

Keeper warms in my hand.

I squeeze the grip. “You are not invited into this conversation.”

Keeper stays warm, shameless thing. I refuse to dignify that with an answer and shove the whole mortifying feeling down through the musket and into the yard.

Aurora drives farther through the western support, spreading through the steel in a branching net that carries weight away from the overstressed joint and into three others that can still take it. I borrow the rail itself for grounding. Emergency power reroutes around the damaged southern branch. A signal cabinet stops trying to resurrect itself long enough to quit threatening the rest of the circuit.

Nothing explodes or transforms. Nobody cheers. The yard remains standing. I understand, suddenly, why Hiroyuki underlined the rule twice.

Above me, Tasi’s bells find their count, and every clock I can see settles on 00:24.

The change reaches my field before I understand what she has done. Current still travels, relays still switch, electricity still obeys every law it knew a moment ago, but the distance inside each second has gone strange.

I could do something enormous with that.

The thought opens inside me like stage lights. Bolts From the Blue could be in my hands before the first expanded second finishes. Oath is warm against my shoulder and Keeper would follow eagerly. I can already imagine the arcs between them, blue-white and cathedral-bright, every weak point in the dome pinned at once beneath enough Power to make the whole yard look up.

It would be beautiful. It would also be exactly what Hiroyuki told me not to do.

I close my eyes. The picture stays with me anyway, brilliant and perfect behind my eyelids, and I let it. Wanting the spectacle does not mean I have to make one.

“Not now,” I tell Oath, feeling Keeper answer in my hand. “Both of you. Behave.”

I spend Tasi’s twenty-four seconds on smaller things. A failing relay gets enough current to finish one last useful cycle. The north gate stays powered. Three overheated locks bleed charge into the rail instead of cooking themselves shut. The western support keeps its load. Blaire keeps her cameras. D’ivoire gets every electrically controlled gate between here and whatever impossible route he is making.

Piece by piece, the yard survives.

It feels offensively uncinematic.

Then a fracture races a few more centimetres across the dome. Kohana catches the movement, and the support beneath my hand takes the answering load. Keeper flares so brightly that blue-white light climbs my wrist, and the old thrill catches inside me before I can help it—that sweet rising certainty that something extraordinary is happening and everyone could turn and see.

I press the light back down into the steel.

“Not mine,” I whisper.

The bracket holds. Three people pass beneath it without ever knowing it almost failed.

Maybe this is what being useful feels like when nobody is watching. I am still deciding whether I like it.

Keeper settles warmer into my palm.

“All right,” I whisper to it, and probably to myself. “We can be the part that holds.”

The western rib groans overhead and stays where it is.

For now, I think that has to count as shining.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

I take the platform edge at an easy pace, one hand resting against the rail while catastrophe arranges itself beneath the glass.

From here the yard becomes legible.

D’ivoire has taken the shadow of a support column near the ramp, naturally. The angle gives him the northern lane, the concealed berth beneath the yard, and the route he is presently coaxing through space that has offered him no permission whatsoever. It is only predictable because I have known him long enough to recognise the difference between improvisation and the sort of audacity performed by somebody who planned three exits before entering the room. 

Infuriating man. I would be considerably less useful without him.

The clocks are having a poorer time of it. Across the yard, damaged displays skip numbers, repeat them, lose whole pieces of themselves, and finally surrender to 00:24.

My attention finds Kohana before I decide to give it to her.

That habit is older than I care to examine today.

Violet curls cling damply to her temples. Whenever the structure shifts, the lattice above her answers in little visible distortions, and the white glow from Vasche’s pocket rises along her collar with each breath. Around her, people who have survived enough violence to consider themselves difficult to frighten discover urgent reasons to look elsewhere whenever the light around her sharpens.

She is sixteen.

Titles make that fact inconvenient, but not less true. Summoner. General. Prodigy. Red-level Phenomenon when somebody wishes to convert terror into classification. None of them add a year to her life.

There are days when remembering her age makes me gentler. Today it makes gentleness dangerous.

Kohana feels me looking and turns her remaining eye toward the walkway. I lift one hand, palm lightly toward my chest. The gesture belongs to neither Doctrine nor any field manual worth admitting to print. She knows it anyway.

“Stay inside the count.”

I send the words beneath Tasi’s bells and the alarms until they reach her without requiring the rest of the yard to hear them.

Her eye narrows.

“Fourteen open. Twenty-eight shut. Do not spend what has not been given to you.”

I leave the rest unnamed. Minutes, memory, blood—Kohana has always been distressingly creative about finding currencies when somebody else needs paying for.

She gives me a small nod. It would convince almost anyone. I have known her too long. She has heard me, understood me perfectly, and reserved the right to disobey if circumstances become sufficiently cruel. She will spend beyond the count if somebody waits on the other side of it. Blood is easy; it replenishes. Memory can be bargained with, or Kohana can at least persuade herself it can. The part I fear is what happens when every lesser currency runs out, because some piece of her still regards her own continued existence as the cheapest thing left to spend.

Once, I would have called preventing that love. I know better now.

Fear has worn guardianship’s clothes on me before, and I have already seen what happens when concern decides another person’s choices are an inconvenience to be managed. The scale of the danger does not grant me permission to repeat the offence. So I hold Kohana’s gaze long enough for her to understand that I know she is lying, and then I let her keep the lie.

The choice remains hers. I dislike that more than I have language for. I turn away before concern becomes another hand around her wrist.

“Twenty-four,” I say.

Tasi’s count answers through the rail beneath my palm. The interval is open, and I feel the first pressure against its far edge almost immediately.

Atropa has noticed. I settle my hand more firmly against the steel.

“You have your window.”

Across the yard, everyone spends it at once.

Then Death reaches for the seconds. There is no grand rupture, no sudden stopping of clocks; Atropa begins insisting that the twenty-four seconds have already given everything they are entitled to give. The edges of Tasi’s count start drawing inward beneath that claim, and I close my hand around the rail and refuse to let them.

The contest passes through me without spectacle: pressure building behind my eyes, a cold line travelling the length of my spine, the peculiar nausea of consequence trying to arrive before cause has finished earning it. Tasi’s widened interval strains against my grip while Atropa tries to collect its ending early.

Across the yard, Tasi’s hands tremble once, but the bells continue. D’ivoire forces the route farther while Kohana remains beneath the dome, and the twenty-four seconds stay open around all of them.

Then the pressure changes.

I feel it first where consequence ought to be: aftermath before arrival, the result of something that has already happened somewhere D’ivoire’s route has not yet reached. It is moving backwards toward us.

At the centre of that pressure, black gathers, its edges burning with that impossible pink, until a thin ribbon of consequence begins slipping toward Kohana through a path D’ivoire did not make. My hand tightens on the rail while Tasi keeps the count stretched around us and I hold its far edge against Atropa’s pull. Across the yard, 00:24 remains bright.

Whatever belongs after those twenty-four seconds has decided to come looking for her early.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The first thing you must understand about coming after Death is that Death never cleans up.

Death leaves black water in the washbasin. She leaves a widow fastening her good dress crooked because nobody has remembered to tell her where her fingers are. Fire blackens the walls. Floodwater hangs its dead in trees. Even the tidy deaths—the white-sheet deaths, the signed-paper deaths, the deaths with relatives summoned and tea already boiling—leave somebody standing in a kitchen three mornings later with two cups cooling on the table.

There is always a second cup. Remember that. She has never once washed it.

Death is easy to follow for precisely this reason. She sheds evidence everywhere she goes. Today the first piece to reach me is her Shadow, before Kyoto has acquired a smell or a skyline.

Black is not one colour, no matter what frightened little painters tell you. There is earth-black beneath the fingernails after a grave has been closed. There is stove-black, chimney-black, the oily black at the bottom of a pan. There is the black behind your eyelids when you press them too hard and the black beneath winter ice where the river has forgotten the sun.

Atropa’s black has no honest dirt in it. Nothing has burned there. Nothing has grown there. It is what remains when you take the seed, the worm, and the grave out of the earth.

Along one edge, pink burns through the black in a narrow seam. I slip two fingers inside before it can draw shut. The Shadow closes hard around my knuckles. Better manners than most doors; anything worth entering ought to object first.

Never trust a door that wants you inside. A house should make you knock, a dog should bark once, and any doorway worth crossing ought to resent you a little. This is elementary wisdom. Your babushka should have taught you. If she did not, borrow mine; she has been dead long enough that she will not mind.

I pull. The Shadow gives with the soft reluctance of rotten fruit beneath a thumb, and Kyoto spills through.

Hot steel first. Then concrete dust, diesel, scorched wiring, frightened sweat soaked into uniforms. Somebody has abandoned an orange drink beneath a bench, where it is fermenting with admirable commitment despite the apocalypse. Above it all hangs the dry mineral stink of hot glass, stressed metal, and concrete ground fine enough to coat the tongue.

The containment dome crouches over the yard like a glass pot left too long on the boil. Beneath it, Death leans against a rail with all the dignity of a witch caught drunk behind the bathhouse.

“Ai, golubushka. Six extra arms and still you cannot hold yourself upright. What do they make gods from these days?”

She cannot hear me yet.

You can. That will do.

Kaede Ohuang-Zhùróng has one human hand locked around the steel, knuckles whitening while Death makes a poor job of pretending the body belongs to her. Pink burns around winter-white pupils, and the crown inside her skull shines hard enough to trouble the air around it. Kaede’s teeth are clenched tight enough to make tomorrow hurt, provided tomorrow is allowed through the door.

Atropa breathes, and the dome clouds from within. Mist whitens the glass and blooms across safety goggles; reflections disappear from polished freight panels, while ash creeps along the guttering overhead without so much as a breeze to carry it. I wait and watch to see how much of the world she means to put in her mouth.

You learn patience around gods. Snatch the bowl away too early and they will swear they only wanted a sip, even while their teeth are still marks around the rim. Better to let the appetite show itself first.

The sky stays above us. Buildings keep their corners. Steel remains bolted to steel, and whatever Epitaphion is whispering through Kaede’s bones has not yet persuaded the rail yard to become anything worse than a rail yard.

The cigarette smoke tells me why before it reaches me.

Volchitsa. Who else would put her teeth in Death and call it a lesson?

Isleen has grief hooked beneath Atropa’s ribs and is worrying it deeper, patient as a wolf with a bone too large to swallow whole. That bite is unmistakable. She has always preferred the lesson that leaves teeth marks, and Death, poor thing, has finally found herself enrolled.

Smoke clings to the working, blood underneath it, and somewhere inside all that sorrow is the same ugly little satisfaction Isleen has carried for ages whenever pain manages to teach what words could not.

My volchitsa. Still chewing on gods. I ought to be proud.

I am, which is much worse.

Farther north, Blaire has panic walking in straight lines. Hundreds of frightened people are going where she wants them to go because she has discovered, correctly, that terror will endure almost anything before it willingly embarrasses itself in public. Tasi has twenty-four seconds pulled wide enough to stuff a small lifetime between the ticks. Masae is feeding all that magnificent Power of hers into cables, bolts, and railway steel instead of the sky; somewhere inside her, I am certain, a twelve-year-old heroine is dying of neglect. D’ivoire is tucked beside the ramp with one hand on the rail, coaxing another impossible metre out of a place that does not have one to spare. He wears the same face men wear when they are about to insist the damage was already there.

Beauty is for weddings and corpses. This has better bones. Everybody has found the ugly little task only they can do, and for once nobody is reaching for somebody else’s.

Atropa pushes deeper into Kaede.

Watch the hand on the rail, koshka. Gods are very distracting; this is how they get away with things.

Kaede’s grip changes by almost nothing. Her thumb draws inward first, then the smallest finger curls hard against the steel. Such a miserable scrap of movement, hardly worth a god’s attention—which is precisely why gods are forever choking on things like it. A fishbone under the tongue, a seed wedged between the teeth, a splinter buried too deep for clumsy fingers. The great beast swallows the whole woman and discovers one tiny piece has declined to go down.

Kaede lifts her face. In the fogged glass beside her, pink burns around winter-white pupils, but her mouth belongs to her long enough to speak.

“Not this second.”

I smile. Stubborn devochka. Death dislikes queues, and Tasi has managed the rare pleasure of making her wait in one.

My attention moves to the other reason I came.

Kohana. My koshka.

You were expecting someone else? Then you have not been paying attention.

She stands beneath the western rib with both hands raised, the dome forcing its weight down through her shoulders while Vasche’s little star rests secured against her chest. White light leaks around the edges of the pocket and brushes the underside of her jaw whenever she shifts beneath the strain. A whole man reduced to something small enough for a girl to carry close to her heart.

Death has a cruel sense of proportion.

Behind her, the tunnel where Vasche died continues breathing.

Concrete eases outward, takes its shallow mouthful of air, and passes the motion deeper into the tunnel before settling back into place. A moment later it begins again. Vasche is gone, yet the habit he taught the stone has outlived him.

Keep that one, koshka. I will not even charge you.

People are very fond of imagining an ending as a knife: one clean stroke, living on this side, dead on the other, and afterwards everybody may clear the table and put the extra cup back in the cupboard. Such optimism. A death is rarely considerate enough to stay where it happened.

A woman keeps the posture of someone who used to reach for her in sleep. A war sits down to supper with children born years after the treaty was signed. A mother dies and leaves her cruelty behind in a daughter who still apologises when no one is listening. Kindness is worse; kindness can survive for decades in hands that have forgotten who first showed them how to be gentle.

Turn the page if you like. The dead know how to follow.

Vasche is dead, and the tunnel takes another breath.

If that troubles your arithmetic, blame arithmetic.

Kohana shifts beneath the dome, and Vasche’s star throws a wash of white along her throat. Sixteen years old, with enough exhaustion on her face to borrow decades she has not lived yet. Some children grow ancient because time has treated them badly; some old women grow young again because time has finally learned to be afraid. My koshka has somehow managed both at once.

Hiroyuki watches her from the platform. Poor zolotoy. Once I considered eating him. In my defence, he was very pretty and standing too close to dinner. Now he has become useful enough that I would almost feel bad about it. He has learned one of love’s nastier lessons: you may adore a person, guard her, teach her, lose sleep over every stupid thing she does, and still none of that makes her yours to steer by the shoulders. He would have preferred this wisdom delivered over tea, I think, instead of beneath a collapsing dome with Death in attendance. Life has never been known for choosing a convenient classroom.

D’ivoire, meanwhile, has nearly finished his route. Its unfinished edge shows near the ramp, held together with regulation, technicality, absence, and lies neat enough to survive inspection. Clever malchik. Give him a locked door, and he will discover the hinge was filed under the wrong department; give him empty space, and he will find some forgotten clause proving a road ought to have been there all along. He has carried his road almost to the far side of Tasi’s twenty-four seconds.

Here is the trouble, reader. Roads are very good at taking you somewhere. They may take you to the wedding, the battlefield, the grave; a sufficiently wicked road may even carry you through the moment everything changes. But when the blood has fallen and the vows have been spoken and the grave has been filled, you cannot ask the road to take you to what those things leave behind.

Consequence has no address.

You do not walk to After. After comes knocking when it is ready, usually while the kettle is boiling and you have forgotten to put on your shoes.

D’ivoire can bring Kohana to the threshold. What waits beyond it is mine.

I crouch beside Atropa’s Shadow and lay my palm against it.

Cold climbs through the skin of my hand and settles beneath the elbow. Under it waits everything already gathering on the far side of this moment: grief searching for the body that will have to carry it, blood that has not chosen where to fall, apologies ripening in mouths that do not yet know what they owe, names that will become curses three dinners from now. Consequences crowd behind the second like children outside a sweetshop before opening, little fists against the glass, mouths already tasting sugar. I know them better than I know roads.

There is an old saying that hope dies last. Nonsense. Hope is a theatrical creature; it likes an audience and good lighting. After has no such vanity. After washes the dishes when everybody else has gone home. After folds the dead man’s shirt because his wife cannot bear to touch it. After remembers where he kept the spare key six months after nobody needs it anymore. After stays.

That is why I am still here.

The pink seam widens beneath my palm, and at last Atropa notices me. All six Shadow arms stiffen together. Her head turns with such slow ceremony that another woman might mistake it for dignity, while Kaede’s mouth opens around a breath neither of them owns completely.

I show her my teeth. “Nu, nu. Do not pout at me, golubushka. It makes you look young.”

The Shadow cinches around my wrist. Kaede’s jaw jerks, and Atropa’s white pupils contract until I know the insult has finally arrived where I sent it. Much better.

I press my fingers deeper. Black separates around luminous pink, resisting until it gives with the wet heaviness of earth under a shovel. D’ivoire’s impossible route reaches toward the opening and stops at the exact place his authority runs out.

Something shifts in the darkness behind me.

I have neglected to mention my company. Forgive me. A guest should be allowed an entrance.

Everyone has come bearing something, after all. This is proper. A Russian does not arrive at another person’s house empty-handed.

I have brought After.

My masterpiece comes through hand first.

Or what has agreed, for the moment, to be a hand. Black birds pour through the seam in a crush of wings and knit themselves together around claws, beaks, and Shadow until five enormous fingers find purchase beside my wrist. More follow. A forearm gathers itself out of the flock, then a shoulder, then enough of a woman’s shape for the provincial eye to become optimistic. It never lasts. Birds are forever peeling away from her edges and returning somewhere else, so that Ananke seems to possess a body only by continually voting one into existence.

Pink light shows wherever the agreement fails. It burns through the joins between birds in thin noon-bright seams, opening and closing beneath feathers too black to have any honest colour in them. Her head forms above me for half a second—smooth brow, the suggestion of a cheek, one hollow place where an eye ought to settle—and comes apart in a rush of wings before the face can finish becoming hers.

Ananke has never understood the virtue of entering a room at a reasonable size.

She moves again, though I do not see the movement itself. One moment most of her remains behind the opening; the next, a great black shoulder crowds mine and several birds are already circling the rail above us. Somewhere between those two facts, time has misplaced the necessary steps.

Kohana sees her.

Ah. That expression.

Seventeen chapters since Ananke came through your eye, koshka, and apparently time has done nothing for the relationship. I had hoped you might both have matured.

Her shoulders go rigid beneath the dome. Her remaining green eye fixes past me onto Ananke, and the empty place beside it seems to recognise her first. Every bud, every stolen hour, every Noon Seam and miserable little offspring of that first catastrophe passes across Kohana’s face without needing to be named.

“Do not count old debts at the threshold, koshka,” I tell her. “It is bad luck.”

Ananke’s face briefly attempts a grin. Three beaks make the teeth.

Kohana looks at me with enough feeling to season soup.

Yes, yes. The eye. We will discuss it after Death.

I do not command Ananke. One does not command necessity and expect to keep all one’s fingers. I open my hand against the seam and let her see what I have found.

She chooses, laying one vast hand into the opening, and the yard misses a stair beneath her weight. A fraction of time drops out from under my feet and returns slightly misplaced; Tasi’s bells stumble across the absence, recover, and pull the count wide again. Somewhere behind the glass, a digital clock loses track of which number belongs between two others. Ananke curls her fingers deeper into the twenty-four seconds, taking hold of whatever she finds there, and the passage stops sliding away from me.

Her buds have spent half this story feeding on lost minutes. Their mother requires no lesson in what to do with stolen ones.

Hiroyuki keeps the count from closing while Ananke gives the opening something to catch against; what lies beyond it belongs to me.

See? Cooperation. Civilisation may yet survive us.

The Shadow opens around my wrist like cold earth.

Beyond it waits something that resembles a corridor only because your mind is provincial and insists on giving such things walls. No one has entered it yet. Strictly speaking, no one can enter until they have already emerged, but do not trouble yourself over the grammar, koshka. Grammar has survived worse women than us.

Behind me, Atropa makes a low sound in Kaede’s throat. Her six Shadow arms have turned toward Ananke now, and Ananke has noticed. I feel the pleasure of it travel through the hand braced beside mine.

“Mind the seam,” I tell her. “You may quarrel with your auntie later.”

Whether Atropa qualifies as an aunt is irrelevant. All sufficiently old women become relatives when they are angry in the same kitchen.

Ahead, Kohana lifts her head. She cannot see me clearly through the opening yet, but she feels it; that girl has spent too much of her life finding doors where sensible people insisted there were walls. The black-and-pink seam threads itself toward her while Ananke holds fast inside the stolen seconds.

“Koshka.”

Her remaining green eye catches on the wrongness in the air, then flicks once toward Ananke.

Yes, koshka, you. And yes, she is helping. Make peace with one disaster at a time.

Tasi’s twenty-four seconds remain stretched around the yard, swollen with everybody else’s impossible labour, and the consequence Hiroyuki felt crawling backwards through the count has finally reached the person appointed to receive it. After comes to everyone eventually; I merely have the bad manners to meet it at the door.

I curl my fingers deeper into Death’s Shadow and pull the unwritten passage wide enough for Kohana. Beside me, Ananke digs in, necessity fastening itself to stolen time beside the girl whose eye socket once spilt her into the world as a storm of black wings.

Some stories are vulgar enough to rhyme.

“Come, koshka. Do not keep the next page waiting. It has already set the table.”

The seam opens beneath Ananke’s hand, black and pink drawn wide around the road D’ivoire could not finish. Everything they have carried here—the route, the crowd, the steel, the grief, the seconds stolen from Death—finally fits through one impossible door.

Twenty-four seconds.

See, koshka? Plenty.