invisible cords caught his arm. Her Craft lines snapped taut and Mal stopped in midair, rigid as a plank, her left arm extended toward Caleb. Beneath the skin of her arms and fingers, glyphs glowed silver. With a snap of arm and shoulder, she pulled herself back up, and spun toward him once more.
He let momentum carry her past him. His hand moved in a swift half circle, and he grabbed at empty air. He caught her Craft line, solid, invisible, and cold, and Mal stopped.
Pale light streamed from the scars on Caleb’s arms. He pulled her back to him.
Sweat beaded on her forehead and her lip. “I didn’t know you had glyphwork.”
“I don’t.”
She didn’t ask him to explain. They danced, touching and not touching, bound by invisible cord, each in accelerating orbit of the other. Her glyphs left tracks of shadow in the air, and his scars trailed light.
The band played three songs, a small set, before breaking to prepare in earnest for the evening. Neither Caleb nor Mal objected. Leaning against each other, they staggered to the nearest table and called for the bartender. Waiting, Caleb watched Mal. She hugged her shoulders and shivered. The Craft devoured heat, life force, soulstuff. Combining Craftwork and physical exertion—no wonder she was cold.
“You’re a great dancer,” he said.
“You’re not bad yourself.” Her hands traced a cat’s cradle in the air before her. “What are those scars?”
He turned away from her, to the empty dance floor.
“Tell me.”
“It’s personal.”
“Okay,” she said. “Fine.”
Caleb ordered soda water and Mal a mug of hot tea when the waiter drifted past. After she left, Mal said: “It was an excellent dance. I’m sorry if I was too curious. All the Lords and Ladies know there are parts of my life I don’t like to talk about.”
“Okay.” Caleb rolled down his shirt cuffs, and buttoned them. “It’s a sensitive subject. I’m sorry.”
“I can live with that.” Their drinks arrived. Greedily, Mal drank her tea, both the liquid and the heat inside it: she touched the mug, the glyphs on her hands sparked, and frost spread from her touch. By the time the mug reached her lips, dew clung to its sides. Color returned to her cheeks.
She set her empty mug down. Ice crystals encased the tea leaves within. Strange future, for someone. “Where do we go from here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I told your boss we were dating, to keep you from saying something stupid and ruining our careers. I don’t find the idea of dating you repellant, of course.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“My point is, we have a choice. We don’t need to keep up the illusion. I can walk out of here now, never look back. Our paths probably won’t cross again. Your boss never needs to know I spied on him, or that you hid information. Either that, or we could try to make this work.”
“What do you mean?”
She leaned across the table toward him. “Are you … interested in me?”
He remembered her eyes, black and endless, in his living room, in the dark, after the explosion.
He tried to speak, but could not. Across the room, the bass played a slow, deep scale. “Yes,” he said, at last.
“Good. Me too.” She stood and placed a silver coin on the table to cover her drinks.
“You’re leaving?”
She smiled with one side of her mouth, like a crack in a stained-glass window. “Last time we were together, I gave you an invitation, and you declined. I can’t just come to you because you want me now.”
“I’m serious.” He stood, so she could not look down on him.
“So am I. But I don’t want to rush this.” She revolved around the table to him, eclipsing the world as she approached. “Do you trust me?”
“You saved my life.”
“Say it.”
“I trust you.”
“I’ll come for you in my own time. Find someone else, if you’re not comfortable waiting; plenty of girls out there wouldn’t mind you. If you’d rather have someone who wants you, someone you want in turn, then wait, and let me claim you when I claim you.”
“You enjoy this.”
“Making you suffer? Maybe a little.” She held her hand up next to her eye, thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “You can handle it. You’re a strong young man. Loyal. Brave.” She slapped him on the shoulder, hard. “And a good dancer.”
“I’ll wait. Not forever, but I’ll wait.”
“I know.”
She turned from him and left. Doors opened without her touching them, and drifted closed behind. Her afterimage burned in the dark behind his eyes, dimming from gold to red to purple to colors deeper than black, an invisible brand on his brain.
He lifted her coin from the table, felt the piece of her soul worked into it, and walked her down his knuckles and up again.
If he could have seen through the bartender’s eyes when she came to refill his drink, he would have recognized his grin—though he had only seen it on Mal’s face before.
He ordered his dinner and sat alone while lovers, dancers, and gamesmen drifted in to Andrej’s bar. Deep in thought. Laying plans.
20
Two weeks later, the water ran black.
Caleb and Teo were sharing dinner in her apartment over a game of chess. Sam lay supine on the couch. A glass of cold white wine dangled from her fingers.
Every year, when spring evaporated into the punishing heat of desert summer, Teo stole a few bottles of old wine from her family’s cellar and held a private bacchanal. Caleb was a usual guest on these occasions, but this year he had not expected to attend—Sam harbored sharp, serrated feelings toward him after his interruption the night of the Bright Mirror disaster. She caved to Teo’s pressure at the last moment, though, and Caleb received an invitation the day before the event. Sam was friendlier in person than Caleb expected—which was to say, cold and gratingly radical, but she had not yet opened outright hostilities.
Their games proceeded in triangular fashion—Caleb lost to Teo, who loved chess though she did not study it, and Teo lost to Sam, who was too busy railing against the hierarchical relationships encoded in the rules to notice how blatantly Teo let her win. Sam lost to Caleb, and the cycle repeated.
Teo’s bishop scythed across the board to complete Caleb’s most recent humiliation. He stood, swayed, and surrendered his seat to Sam, then excused himself to the kitchen.
High and far back in Teo’s cabinet he found a clean mug, placed it in the sink, and touched a glyph on the dragon-headed faucet. The glyph glowed, ripping away a fragment of soul so small Caleb barely felt it, and the faucet vomited black water over his hand into the mug.
He cursed, dropped the mug, and reached for a towel. The black sludge kept flowing, and a rancid, rotting odor filled the kitchen. When he slapped the faucet glyph, the flow stopped. He touched it again, testing. The dragon disgorged three more drops into Teo’s sink, retched, and died.
“Teo?”
“Did you break something?” Sam called back.
“Teo, does your building have any trouble with RKC? Anything wrong with the water?”
“No. Hells, if there was trouble I’d be the first one with a torch and pitchfork.” Noise from the living room:
