This is all wrong, he thought. That’s just exactly what she told you not to do. This isn’t about rape, she said…

But it was too hard. Isaac could not do it. If he thought of Yagharek he thought of Kar’uchai, and if he thought of her he thought of Lin.

This is all arse-side up, he thought.

If he took Kar’uchai at her word, he could not judge the punishment. He could not decide whether he respected garuda justice or not: he had no grounds at all, he knew nothing of the circumstances. So it was natural, surely, it was inevitable and healthy, that he should fall back on what he knew: his scepticism; the fact that Yagharek was his friend. Would he leave his friend flightless because he gave alien laws the benefit of the doubt?

He remembered Yagharek scaling the Glasshouse, fighting beside him against the militia.

He remembered Yagharek’s whip savaging the slake-moth, ensnaring it, freeing Lin.

But when he thought of Kar’uchai, and what had been done to her, he could not but think of that as rape. And he thought of Lin, and everything that might have been done to her, until he felt as if he would puke with anger.

He tried to extricate himself.

He tried to think himself away from the whole thing. He told himself desperately that to refuse his services would not imply judgement, that it would not mean he pretended knowledge of the facts, that it would simply be a way of saying, “This is beyond me, this is not my business.” But he could not convince himself.

He slumped and breathed a miserable moan of exhaustion. If he turned from Yagharek, he realized, no matter what he said, Isaac would feel himself to have judged, and to have found Yagharek wanting. And Isaac realized that he could not in conscience imply that, when he did not know the case.

But on the heels of that thought came another; a flipside, a counterpoint.

If withholding help implied negative judgement he could not make, thought Isaac, then helping, bestowing flight, would imply that Yagharek’s actions were acceptable.

And that, thought Isaac in cold distaste and fury, he would not do.

He folded his notes slowly, his half-finished equations, his scribbled formulae, and began to pack them away.

When Derkhan returned, the sun was low and the sky was blemished with blood-coloured clouds. She tapped the door in the quick rhythm they had agreed, bundling past Isaac when he opened it.

“It’s an amazing day,” she said with sadness. “I’ve been sniffing quietly all over the place, getting a few leads, a few ideas…” She turned to face him and was instantly quiet.

His dark, scarred face bore an extraordinary expression. Some complex composite of hope and excitement and terrible misery. He seemed to brim with energy. He shifted as if he crawled with ants. He wore his long beggar’s cloak. A sack sat beside the door, bulging with heavy, bulky contents. The crisis engine was gone, she realized, disassembled and hidden away in the sack.

Without the spread-out mess of metal and wire, the room seemed utterly bare.

With a little gasp, Derkhan saw that Isaac had wrapped up Lin in a foul, tattered blanket. Lin clutched at it fitfully and nervously, signing nonsense up at him. She saw Derkhan and jerked happily.

“Let’s go,” said Isaac in a hollow voice that strained with tension.

“What are you talking about?” said Derkhan angrily. “What are you talking about? Where’s Yagharek? What’s come over you?”

“Dee, please…” whispered Isaac. He took her hands. She reeled at his imploring fervour. “Yag’s still not come back. I’m leaving this for him,” he said, and plucked a letter from his pocket. He tossed it nervously into the centre of the floor. Derkhan began to speak again and Isaac cut her off, shaking his head violently.

“I’m not…I can’t…I don’t work for Yag no more, Dee…I’m terminating our contract…I’ll explain everything, I promise, but let’s go. You’re right, we’ve stayed much too long.” He flicked his hand at the window, where the evening sounded boisterous and easygoing. “The fucking government are after us, and the biggest damn gangster on the continent…And the…the Construct Council…” He shook her gently.

“Let’s go. The…the three of us. Let’s get out and away.”

“What happened, Isaac?” she demanded. She shook him back.

“Tell me now.”

He looked away quickly, and back at her.

“I had a visitor…” She gasped and her eyes widened, but he shook his head slowly. “Dee…a visitor from the fucking Cymek.” He held her eyes and swallowed. “I know what Yagharek did, Dee.” He was quiet as her face rearranged itself into a cold calm. “I know what he got…punished for.

“There’s nothing holding us here, Dee. I’ll tell you everything-everything, I swear-but there’s nothing holding us here. I’ll tell you while we…while we go.”

For days he had been in an awful lassitude, distracted by crisis maths and utterly, exhaustingly despondent about Lin. Quite suddenly, the urgency of their situation had come home to him. He realized their danger. He understood how patient Derkhan had been, and he understood that they must leave.

“Godsdamnit,” she said quietly. “I know it’s only a few months, but he…he’s your friend. Isn’t he? We can’t just…can we just leave him…?” She looked at him and her face creased. “Is it…what is it? Is it so terrible? Is it bad enough that it…that it cancels everything else out? Is it so terrible?” Isaac closed his eyes.

“No…yes. It’s not that simple. I’ll explain when we go.

“I’m not going to help him. That’s the bottom line. I can’t, I fucking can’t, Dee, I fucking can’t. And I can’t see him, I don’t want to see him. So there’s nothing here, so we can go.

“We really must go.”

Derkhan argued, but briefly and without conviction. She was gathering her tiny bag of clothes, her little notebook, even while she said she was not sure. She was caught up in Isaac’s wake.

She scrawled a tiny addendum to the back of Isaac’s note, without opening it. Good luck, she scribbled. We will meet again. Sorry to disappear so suddenly. You know how to get out of the city. You know what to do. She paused for quite a long time, unsure of how to say goodbye, and then wrote Derkhan. She replaced the letter.

She wrapped her scarf about her, let her new black hair slide like oil over her shoulders. It rubbed against the scab left by her ruined ear. She looked out of the window, to where the sky grew thick with evening, then turned and put her arm gently around Lin, helped her walk in her erratic fashion. Slowly, the three of them descended.

“There’s a bunch of guys over in Smog Bend,” Derkhan said. “Bargemen. They can take us south without any questions.”

“Fuck, no!” hissed Isaac. He looked up from below his hood with wide eyes.

They stood at the end of the street, where the cart had acted as goal for the children hours before. The warm evening air was full of smells. There were loud disagreements and hysterical laughter from a parallel avenue. Grocers and housewives and steelwrights and minor criminals chatted on corners. The lights were emerging with the sputter of a hundred different fuels and currents. Flames in various colours sprang up behind frosted glass.