“They couldn’t tell which was which.”

“And doctors have had their looks,” Tar`ro said. “Believe me, the Archon gets every report plopped down on her desk.”

Prue came to mind, expecting to marry him. And just like that, Diamond felt angry toward the little orphan girl.

Father shook him gently. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” the boy lied.

“Everybody’s waiting for you to get old enough,” Tar`ro said.

“Old enough,” Diamond whispered.

“I know you have inklings of this,” Father said. “But you have to see it plainly now. Everybody—the Archons and the papio too—look at you as a potential father. If you can grow up and have children, and if your family inherits your powers—”

“Which might not happen,” Nissim interrupted. “Hybridization is a complex, knot-rich process.”

Tar`ro laughed again. “But what if he can? A thousand women marry him, and his kids get just a portion of his tricks mixed in with that ordinary blood . . . and the world is remade for all time . . . ”

The other men shifted their rumps, saying nothing.

Tar`ro’s voice brightened, hardened. “What’s the matter, gentlemen? You think I should sit in a classroom or stand on that landing, suffering boredom, suffering rain, and for no good reason but to keep one odd kid out of trouble? No, no. I’ve always seen the big true picture.”

“I don’t like the tone,” Father said.

“And neither of you appreciate the scope of things.”

“Perhaps you should describe what you see,” Nissim said.

Diamond stood, stepping out of his father’s reach. The shop’s floor ended with a raised lip, and reaching the edge, he gazed into blackness spoiled by swirling dots and blobs of busy light.

Scorn in his voice, Tar`ro said, “You dear gentlemen are too smart to see anything clearly. We’re not fighting a war. Wars are a string of battles that end when anybody starts to cry. No, what’s happening now is far worse than anything in history books. This is everybody fighting over one clear, spectacular prize. This is two species ready to risk everything, and this is each District doing battle with every other District, and every person tonight is trying to make sense of his thoughts. Now that the world has been stirred up, everything gets ugly, and there’s not going be any good place to go for a long time to come.

“That’s what I think,” he said.

Every man was suddenly talking at once. Angry, sloppy whispers mixed in the air. Diamond was left free to bend until he felt as if he were floating over the lights of a million insects. Something about this scene was eerily, deliciously familiar, and ready to remember, he felt happy enough to smile.

Then the bickering and the talk of violence became loud, and an ancient memory fled back inside the boy’s tiny, enormous mind.

Sleep had never been her nature. Fatigue had done its damage in the past, nipping at her flesh, playing games with her thoughts, but Quest had endured enough weariness to believe that sleep could never claim her. Except yesterday morning was relentless and sorry and wicked. Exhaustion arrived before she shucked off most of her body, letting the temporary flesh die in plain sight while the rest of her scrambled to a higher position. Abandoning organs and limbs demanded hard concentration. Climbing fast without being seen was always best done when she was rested. She wasn’t rested. The last of her legs were trembling when she found a new perch—a marginal hiding place on the edge of the District—and that was when the papio attacked.

Quest was already taking wild chances. Just lingering near the settled forest was a gnawing risk, and that was before full war broke out. She saw the papio wings flying into the forest’s wound, shooting at shadows, and the tree-walkers flung slugs and darts and swift little bombs, almost every shot missing its mark. Quest should have left immediately. She knew it. Yet there she remained, ignoring every wise impulse, eating more lost birds and using their meat to cook fresh eyes and great funnel-shaped ears, aiming the new organs everywhere but at the ongoing battle.

Was this a symptom of deep fatigue, turning blind to a thousand dangers?

She didn’t know, couldn’t guess. But the boy kept churning her thoughts. Instinct and every drop of new blood accepted his importance, yet she had no idea where he was or how awful his circumstances were. That’s why she shucked off most of those new senses and slipped out of her hiding place, abandoning the wilderness. Exhaustion brought madness. Insanity made her leap and scamper, even as those scrawny high branches shook from cannon fire, and suddenly she discovered herself clinging to a bare trunk still warm from the morning’s fire, gazing down into the raw gouge of open air and late sun and war.

The Ivory Station was on the far side of the gouge.

Her final eyes watched little else.

The battle was at its frenzied worst: rapid and vicious, and clumsy. Presumably both sides had intricate battle plans, but nobody seemed to remember them. Armored airships maneuvered clumsily beside the Ivory Station, and the wings slashed past, sometimes spinning their jets to hover long enough for two targets to fix every weapon on one another. Corona bladders and scales were extremely tough, weathering astonishing rains of gunfire. But even the strongest materials failed eventually. Airships turned to flame. Wings shattered and tumbled toward the demon floor. There was an instant when exhaustion would annihilate both armies, but then the final airships retreated into the forest, and as night rose, a flock of larger, slower wings arrived, delivering hundreds of papio soldiers to the wide landing at the bottom of the Ivory Station.

Night bloomed faster than normal. The papio launched flares as messages, and the tree-walkers launched flares to confuse their enemies. Small guns took over the fight. Eerily beautiful clusters of light were born from explosions. The Station burned in darkness. Hanner’s trunk and battered canopy burned. Spellbound, Quest never noticed the pair of wings coming up her side of the gouge, and then they slashed past, near enough that their jets warmed her flesh.

She dropped that flesh and fled.

An agile little wing pursued her through the forest’s highest reaches. Or it was hunting other quarry, and it just happened to fix its bright spotlights on her body. The glare made her flesh turn real, a small cowardly shadow lurking beneath. Burning precious fuel, the wing hovered. Quest was perched on a dead hard-willow branch. The pilot stared at her with a puzzled, halfway-irritated expression. “You are something and you are important,” the woman probably thought. “But you aren’t what I want tonight.”

Quest let the branch slip away.

The papio fired her guns in response, splintering rotted wood.

Quest made herself narrow, falling as fast as possible. Wilderness was beckoning, familiar and dense, unconquered by either human species. Then she pushed much of what remained into long leatherwings, and she flew, flat at first and then higher, deep into places that nobody but her had ever named, her final eyes drinking the available light.

She had never felt as tired as she did then.

For the first time in her life, closing her eyes and mind seemed possible.

But time moved, and she moved through time, and there always seemed to be another point where she was sicker and weaker than before. No creature could live long in this state, not even her. Each stroke of the wings found misery. Muscles born just that day were spent, poisoned by their exertions, and she had to summon enough will to keep her mouth from hunting. The wilderness was jammed with creatures fleeing lost places, out of their territories and easy to kill. But she wasn’t safe and maybe she never would be safe again. That grim possibility carried her high, up near the ceiling where the only sunlight came after the rain, and that’s where she found a nest of daylight leatherwings—great beasts driven mad by explosions and the stench of burnt life.