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Patrick watched the ale disappear with suspicion. His eyes stuck to Theo’s retreating back. I wiped my chin furtively and tried to plaster on a smile.

“Are you all right?” he asked without looking my way.

“Fine,” I said. “Theo was just apologizing. He becomes ill-tempered when he’s tired.”

“Does he?” Patrick said, looking down at me. “In two years, he’s not so much as raised his voice.”

I gave a little shrug. “Using your medium is exhausting. I suppose it got the better of him today.”

But Patrick’s attention was on the swinging door Theo had disappeared behind. His head tilted to the side. “When we caught up to him in Dunnitch, he told us he was searchin’ for a girl,” he said. “He meantyou.” It brooked no argument, no room for denial.

I shifted uncomfortably. “Perhaps.”

“He’s still in love with you,” Patrick continued, sounding oddly contemplative. “I’ve gathered that much, but I’m having trouble with the probability of it.” And this time there was black suspicion.

My stomach roiled. “The probability?”

“Of the two of you ending up here, of all places,” he said. “In a town the rest of the country has forgotten about. How unlikely it is, that he found you after all?”

The tray in my hands slipped an inch, and his eyes tracked the movement. I tried to look indignant. “Youbrought me here,” I reminded him.

He nodded, taking the tray from my hands and placing it back on the bar. “Like I said, it’s the probability of it. Perhaps you were destined to find each other.”

I laughed, the first swells of giddiness bubbling up my throat. “God, I hope destiny has something more in store for me than the boy I loved when I was eighteen.”

Patrick simply watched me, eyes on my lips, following the next drink I tipped into my mouth. I was sweating. The room seemed hot as a furnace. Noise clambered the walls in my ear, and the fabric of my blouse suddenly itched unbearably. Patrick would see my flushed skin and think me drunk. He didn’t suspect, didn’t know, would never hold a gun to my temple with his finger on the trigger.Bang.

I took another drink.

“Go easy,” Patrick warned, brows pinching. “You’ll drown yourself.”

And indeed, I had begun to feel as though I was underwater, where all sound was transmuted and dull. It was very inviting.

“Ifheis who you want,” Patrick said next, nothing but blue eyes expanding and retracting in my vision. “I’ll step out of your way. But you’d better tell me now, Nina.”

I shook my head. “No” I might have said. It was difficult to tell. I took his hand without making the conscious decision to do so, and perhaps I overbalanced, because his other came to my shoulder, and he said, “Whoa, there.”

In my periphery I saw Polly and Otto dancing again, and her arms were wrapped around his neck. The pianist made room on his bench for Scottie, who thrashed on the keys. I found a half-glass of abandoned whiskey on the table. Patrick said, “You’ll regret that,” and made to take it away, but I held on. I found his face in the soup of faces and drank the lot while he watched warily. “You’re very handsome,” I told him. “Even when you scowl.”

Perhaps I told him again about those drawings of him in the rubble of the Artisan school. Perhaps I told him other things, too, like how scaredI had always been in those halls, how scared I was still. Utterly terrified every second of the day. I had no idea if any sensible thought colluded with speech. It was so difficult to tell while underwater.

At some point in the night, however long it lasted, his arms came around me—were we dancing again? Faces spun on a carousel. The ground had fallen away. I shut my eyes and leaned my head against his chest and was struck by the steadiness of his heartbeat.

How did we get here?I thought.

“God knows, Scurry girl, but here we are,” he said. And I wondered if he’d somehow found the lock to my chest and was bleeding it of every good and terrible thing I’d ever done.

CHAPTER 41NINA

I had strange dreams.

Gun barrels coughing smoke in the air, shaped into portraits by Theo and his precise hands—a rendition of my own face with two different sides to it. There were trolleys and tunnels and Isaiah, who brushed against my legs and frolicked away. Patrick and Polly and Theo and me, all seated on a train tumbling onward, onward, beyond our control. One by one they jumped from the moving carriage at uncertain intervals, beckoning for me to follow, while I plucked the spokes of a dandelion clock and hoped it would tell me when to go.

I awoke to lurid light filtering through the curtains, cutting my face in two. Dust motes squalled in the beam, the air felt heavy, the bedding too oppressive, and I shucked it off with sudden, violent desperation.

I groaned quietly and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes. Slowly, my mind churned, presenting me with snatches of the evening prior in frightening distortion. It had been a long time since liquor had gotten the better of me.

My leaden arms fell to my sides and my hand met with coarse, stringy fur. It moved up and down beneath my touch.