Memories rose unbidden of the last time he had watched someone sleep. Then, there had been no glass between them frosted by his breath; he hadn’t been on the outside looking in, but warm beside Madrigal, propped up on one elbow and testing himself to see how many minutes he could go without reaching for her.

Not even a whole minute. There had been an ache in his fingertips that could be assuaged only by touching her.

He had borne far fewer marks on his hands then, though he hadn’t been free of his death ink. He was already a killer, but Madrigal had kissed his marked hands, knuckle by knuckle, and absolved him. “War is all we’ve been taught,” she whispered, “but there are other ways to live. We can find them, Akiva. We can invent them. This is the beginning, here.” She laid her palm against his bare chest—his heart jumped at her touch—and she brought his hand against her own heart, pressing it to the satin of her skin. “We are the beginning.”

It had felt like a beginning, from that first stolen night with her—like the invention of a new way of living.

Akiva had never used his hands so softly as when he traced Madrigal’s sleeping eyelids with his fingertip, imagining what dreams chased behind them and made them flutter.

She had trusted him enough to let him touch her while she slept. Even in recollection, it amazed him—that from the start she had trusted him to lie beside her and trace the lines of her sleeping face, her graceful neck, her lean, strong arms and the joints of her powerful wings. Sometimes he’d felt her pulse spike with jagged dreams; other times she’d murmured and reached for him, waking as she drew him against her and then, silkily, into her.

Akiva turned away from the window. What was it that made these memories of Madrigal rise so thick and fast?

The tendrils of an idea were unfurling in the deep reaches of his mind, beginning to probe for connections—a way to make the impossible possible—but he didn’t admit it to himself. He wouldn’t even have believed that somewhere in him lurked the capacity for hope.

What, he asked himself, had made him leave his regiment in the night, not even telling Hazael and Liraz, to come back into this world?

It would be nothing to break the window glass, or melt it. In seconds he could be beside Karou, waking her with a hand clamped over her mouth. He could demand to know… what, exactly? Did he think she would be able to tell him why he’d come? Besides, the idea of scaring her made him ill. Turning his back, he stalked to the balustrade and looked out over the city.

Hazael and Liraz would have realized by now that he was gone. “Again,” they would be muttering to each other in low voices, even as they covered his absence with some quick story.

Hazael was his half brother, Liraz their half sister. They were children of the harem, offspring of the seraph emperor, whose hobby was breeding bastards to fight the war. Their “father”—and they spoke the word through clenched teeth—visited a different concubine each night, women given as tribute or handpicked as they caught his eye. His secretaries kept a list of his progeny in two columns, girls and boys. Babies were always being added, and as they grew up and died on the battlefield, they were stricken unceremoniously off.

Akiva, Hazael, and Liraz had been added to the list in the same month. They had grown up together, babies in that place of women, and been given over at five to training. They’d managed to stay together since, always fighting in the same regiments, volunteering for the same missions, including the last: marking Brimstone’s doorways with the incendiary handprints that had ignited all in an instant to destroy the sorcerer’s portal.

This was the second time Akiva had vanished without explanation. The first time was years ago, and he’d been gone so long that time that his brother and sister thought he’d died.

A part of him had.

He had never told them or anyone where he’d been for those missing months, or what had happened to make him into who he was now.

Izîl had called him a monster, and wasn’t he? He imagined what Madrigal would think if she could see him today, and see what he had made of the “new way of living” they had whispered about, long ago, in the quiet world of their own cupped wings.

For the first time since he’d lost her, his memory failed to conjure Madrigal’s face. Another face intruded: Karou’s. Her eyes were black and terrified, reflecting the blaze of his wings as he loomed above her.

He was a monster. The things he’d done, nothing could shrive.

He shook open his wings and lifted himself into the night. It was wrong, his being there at the window, a lurking threat while Karou slept so peacefully. He retreated again across the street to let himself sleep, too, and when he did at last, he dreamed he was on the other side of the glass. Karou—not Madrigal but Karou—smiled at him and pressed her lips against his knuckles one by one, each kiss erasing black lines until his hands were clean.

Innocent.

“There are other ways to live,” she whispered, and he woke with bile in his throat, because he knew it wasn’t true. There was no hope, only the executioner’s ax, and vengeance. And there was no peace. Never peace. He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes as frustration built in him like a scream.

Why had he come here? And why couldn’t he make himself leave?

A S OFT W RONGNESS

Saturday morning, Karou woke up in her own bed for the first time in weeks. She showered, brewed coffee, scavenged in the pantry for something edible, came up empty, and left her apartment with Zuzana’s presents in a shopping bag. She texted her friend en route—Peekaboo! Big day. I’m bringing breakfast—and bought some croissants at her corner bakery.

A text came back—If it’s not chocolate, it’s not breakfast—and she smiled and doubled back to the bakery for some chocolate kolaches.

It was then, turning around in the street, that she began to feel that something was off. It was a soft sensation of wrongness, but it was enough that her steps stammered to a halt and she looked around. She remembered what Bain had said about living like prey, always wondering who was tracking her, and it raised her hackles. Her knife was in her boot, hard against the knob of her ankle, the discomfort giving her comfort.

She got Zuzana’s kolaches and continued on, wary. She held her shoulders stiff and several times looked back, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Soon enough she came to the Charles Bridge.

Icon of Prague, the medieval bridge crossed the Vltava between Old Town and the Little Quarter. Gothic bridge towers rose on both sides, and the whole span—pedestrian-only—was lined by monumental statues of saints. This early it was almost deserted, and by the slant of the young sun, the statues flung their shadows long and lean. Vendors and performers were arriving with handcarts to stake out the most coveted real estate in the city, and in the very middle, before the photo-perfect backdrop of Prague Castle on the hill, was the giant puppeteer.

“Oh my god, it’s amazing,” said Karou to no one, because the puppeteer sat alone, ten feet tall and sinister, with its cruel carved face and wooden hands the size of snow shovels. Karou peered behind it—it was clad in an immense trench coat—and no one was there, either. “Hello?” she called, surprised that Zuzana would have left her creation unattended.