All this magic, pulled up by the comet. It’s too much for one person. Spread it around, she thinks. Bless the land and the people on it.
The minutes tick by. The wind picks up. The stars keep their rigid courses in the dark sky. She crouches down and hangs on to her knees with her jacketed arms.
“Come,” she calls, and the dogs and the butterfly come. The dogs take posts on either side of her, while the butterfly alights on her back.
The boy comes too, carrying food in a satchel. He has been well brought up. His parents have taught him to plan for the future, to provide for himself and others. They have raised him to be a good person—and he is. The Sparrow stands. The dogs growl. The boy hands her a bit of homemade bread and honey. She eats it gratefully.
“Where are we going?” he asks. And she knows he will follow her anywhere.
“We are going to meet the Minister,” she says with her mouth full. “But we don’t have to go far. He will be coming to us.”
24. Then.
The day after Marla told him about the baby—not a baby anymore, obviously. She’d been a girl for a while—the Constable put a sign on the door of his office. The Constable Is Ill Today. Please Refrain from Committing Crimes Until Tomorrow.
It was not the first time he used that sign—indeed it was heavily wrinkled and ragged around the edges. Rain-blotched. And oddly effective. Every time he had actually been out ill, the town residents who might normally bend toward rule breaking followed the sign to the letter. Bar fights ceased, petty thievery vanished, employee insubordination all but evaporated, and domestic disturbances were blissfully unavailable.
There were times when the Constable put the sign up just to give everyone a break from themselves.
On this day, though, he locked himself in the back room of the Constable’s office—the room with no windows and one door and one lock to which he had the only key—and did not come out no matter how hard the egg woman knocked.
He had a jug of Special Occasion Whiskey, one that he received as a gift from his mother the day he was appointed to his position (a bald-faced attempt at brownnosing, the Constable knew, but he appreciated it all the same). He’d never touched it in all those years, but he would do so now.
That baby!
He took out his notes and files—illegal, probably—on the birth of the stillborn magic child, of its mother’s eventual unraveling, of its days in the box on his desk, of the sounds (oh, god, that laughing) that came from . . . somewhere. He couldn’t say where. Indeed he did not want to.
Whiskey, in the end, tastes no better in the dark than in the light, and it certainly is not improved with lack of sleep, or a hot morning mouth, or a belly raging for some kind of food.
He threw that child on the rubbish heap. A baby, for god’s sake. And by some miracle . . . He shook his head. He couldn’t even think it.
The cardboard box haunted his dreams.
The sound of a laughing baby, from that day to this, any baby, made him shiver and quake.
And he hated the Minister. Hated him.
The egg woman gave him three days to think—or in this case, drink—on it before she came in with her tools and her grim silence.
Working quickly, she removed the door from the wall, hoisted up the mostly unconscious Constable onto her shoulders, and heaved him into the back alley where she could wet him efficiently with the cistern hose. He stood there under the back awning, dripping and cold, his nose and eyes running with old rainwater and old regrets and new sorrow. He let out one long, lonely wail, and let it die in his throat. He closed his mouth and shivered in silence.
Marla let the hose fall to the ground. “Are you quite through?” she said.
The Constable nodded.
She offered a curt, grim nod in return. “Very good. Now, if you wouldn’t mind putting on dry clothes and following me, there are things that I would like to discuss. And it wouldn’t do to have such conversations on government property.”
The Constable did as he was told. He made a stop at the shower, cleaned the stink of the last few days off his skin, and slid into clean clothes. He slumped his shoulders and bowed his head and went outside next to the egg woman, and allowed her to lead him.
The junk man and the girl were camped on a small hillock just outside of town. It was one of their favorite spots. Three of the Midges had escaped the coop, opting to follow both junk man and girl for the last several days, and were having the time of their lives hunting for bugs in the grass. The girl sat in the branches of one of the trees, encouraging a nest full of baby birds to crawl onto her dress, as the mama bird looked on indulgently.
The junk man squatted by the fire, roasting fat, greasy sausages on sticks.
“I hope you’re hungry, my bird,” he called up to the girl in the tree.
“Simon,” Marla said sharply. The junk man looked up and nearly fell onto the ground. He pointed an accusatory finger at the egg woman.
“TRAITOR!” he shouted.
“I am no such thing. I have brought us an ally. Sit.”
And the girl listened as the three adults discussed her future. They said things like escape plans and protective custody and worst-case scenario. She could hear their worry and their fear. She could hear
