“Maybe I need to walk you home first!” She set the flask down on a table and put her hands on his upper arms. “Can you make it across the lock?”

“I’m fine.”

She guided him down the porch steps and onto the lawn, which was now wet with dew. Walking helped restore his equilibrium, and he was able to follow her across the planks.

“Ready to walk?” he asked.

“It’s almost three miles. I can get to Swains on foot, but if you go with me, you’ll end up face-down in the water before you make it back here!”

“I can handle it. Just the thing to sober me up.” He could tell that his words were still slurred, and the dark surface of the canal tilted away from horizontal for a moment before realigning itself.

“Lee, you don’t look up to it. You should just climb the stairs and go to bed.”

“But it’s too far for you alone,” he said, unable to string the words together the way he wanted, “this late. Too far to walk alone this late.” Now he felt nauseated, so he rested his hands on his knees and took shallow breaths.

“Well then maybe I could ride to Swains. I could borrow your bicycle.”

Lee looked up with his hands still on his knees. “It’s Charlie’s,” he said between half-breaths. “But you could borrow it. I have a lock for it. As long as you lock it.” He straightened and tried to remember where he had left it after their sunset walk. “It’s locked to the tree.” Katie followed him to a tree on the far side of the lockhouse. “Can you ride it? It’s not too big?”

“I grew up riding boys’ bicycles,” she said. “That’s all my family ever had.”

“OK,” he said, still breathing shallowly. He fumbled around in his pocket for the small key, then used it to unlock the leg-irons. “You can put these in here for the ride,” he said, sliding them into the tool compartment. “Leave ‘em open. That way you can lock it to something at Swains.” He started to give her the key, but she deflected his hand.

“Keep the key. I won’t need it. That way you can unlock it yourself.” She smiled and gripped his upper arm again. “After you sleep this off, you can pick it up tomorrow at Swains. I’ll lock it to the canoe rack… on the berm, near the driveway. No one will notice it there.”

“OK,” he said, smiling weakly. He carried the bicycle the few steps to the towpath. Katie gathered the front of her dress with one hand and swung a leg over the top tube and tool compartment. She found her balance and put a foot up on the pedal.

“Gimme a kiss goodnight,” she said. He draped an arm around her shoulders and leaned forward to kiss her with his eyes closed and time unraveling. Katie pulled back from the kiss and studied him long enough to see his eyes reopen. She pushed off and pedaled into the night.

***

Flying down the towpath between the moonlit surfaces of the canal and the river, she lost herself. She was no one, knew no one, was heading nowhere but further into the darkness. Her dress was blown back into her legs by the wind but her coat and the steady pumping of her legs kept her warm. A looming shadow appeared in the canal – Cy’s number 41 boat, tied to the berm and deserted – and its familiar contours pulled her out of her trance. She was pedaling to Swains, where she was staying with Cy and Pete while they waited for the canal to open.

And then the lockhouse appeared as a pale shape hovering in the curving distance. Pete should be inside it, asleep by now, she thought. It must be close to midnight. Cy was probably still out at the Tavern or plodding his way home astride Jewel. She let the bicycle glide as she approached the lock, then carried it across on the planks.

The canoe rack was beyond the driveway to her left, so she wheeled it past the tethered canoe Pete had used to launch his stick armada. On the far side of the rack near the woods, she propped it against a post where it would be inconspicuous. The leg-irons had been rattling around inside the tool compartment throughout her ride, so she knew they were still there. She pulled them out, aligned the open cuffs on her palm, and closed her hand around the two upper C-arms. She walked back to the unlit lockhouse and around to the back, where the mules rested in a small corral abutting the driveway. One, two, three dark beasts – so Cy and Jewel were still out. Still carrying the leg-irons, she circled to the front door and slipped inside.

***

Cy limped and Zimmerman shuffled from the Tavern patio around to the downstream end of the building opposite the entrance. They let their eyes adjust to the reduced light, then navigated to a black shape on the mottled lawn. It was a wooden trapdoor to a cellar beneath the Tavern, and Zimmerman seemed to know it was unlocked. He bent over and pulled the door open for Cy, who felt his way down the stairs into the darkness. The air in the cellar smelled like decaying leather and dust.

Zimmerman followed, then pulled a string hanging from the ceiling at the base of the stairs. A weak electric bulb cast a spectral light over the mid-sized room. Crates and chairs were stacked to varying heights along the concrete walls, with bedframes, tables, and other furniture clumped into piles in the middle. The far wall held a closed door, but Cy didn’t know or care where it led. He limped to a shapeless straw tick along the right-hand wall that was covered with an old blanket. An inverted dresser drawer had been placed on the floor beside it. He groaned as he sat down on one side of the tick and Zimmerman lowered himself onto the other side.

In the feeble light, Cy watched Zimmerman withdraw a small glass vial from his coat pocket and sweep the bottom of the inverted drawer clean with his hand. Without speaking, he opened the vial and tapped a coin-sized circle of white powder out onto the drawer. From his shirt pocket he pulled a curling square of heavy paper. He used an edge to sculpt the powder into two thin lines. When the lines looked symmetrical, he handed the paper to Cy.

Cy rolled it into a tube and placed one end against the nearest line of powder. He lowered a nostril to the other end and inhaled steadily, advancing the tube until the line was gone. He lifted his head, sniffed a few times, rubbed his nose, and handed the paper tube to Zimmerman, who inhaled the other line. Both men leaned back on the tick against the wall.

Cy felt his facial muscles relax. The incessant throbbing in his hip was gone, replaced now by an almost-comical itchiness dancing around his torso and legs. He yawned three times in the span of a minute but didn’t feel tired. Morphine had let him sleep and kept him sane in the months after he got hurt, and losing his prescription had been like losing a brother. But now heroin was a revelation. Much faster and much cheaper. And heroin made him feel that everything that held him back was an illusion. Money, property, women, pain. In reality everything was connected and all the levers were in his hands. No one out there at the Tavern saw it. No one on the canal saw it. But Zimmerman would know. He turned toward his provider for confirmation but Zimmerman was already tapping out another circle of powder on the drawer. He edged the circle into two lines and handed the paper square back to Cy.

After ingesting their second lines, they slouched back against the wall. Cy yawned again as the outline of an invisible network of gears that governed the world revealed itself. Now he felt a little tired. But he also knew that the design of the entire network was coded into an acorn that he held in his fist, and that he could use the acorn to accomplish his plans at any time. He yawned and let the acorn dissolve in a gesture of power and goodwill. He knew that another line from the vial could summon its return.

“Are you feeling better, my friend?” Zimmerman’s voice was raspy but musical.

“Much better. The way I’ve been waiting to feel.” Zimmerman nodded but didn’t reply. “Since I left Philadelphia,” Cy said, “I ain’t found a doctor who will prescribe me morphine. They all tell me I reached a time limit.”