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the music came to an abrupt halt.
    The reeking alley wind caught the echo of the shouting in the meeting hall. Something about work and clean living; about enemies and spies; about the Mountain.
    A muffled voice from behind the door shouted
go away, leave
—a woman’s voice?—
leave us alone.
He kept hammering.
    When the door suddenly opened Arjun nearly fell forward into the muzzle of the shotgun the woman inside was holding. He sort of slumped sideways in the doorway.
    She had very green and troubled eyes.
    T ucking the shotgun under her other arm, she helped Arjun stand, and led him through the door and into the room beyond. Arjun hit his head on a low shelf and she murmured an automatic apology; he stumbled over a pile of leather-bound books on the floor and she did it again. She directed him with some firmness to a musty armchair in the corner. She sat across from him with the shotgun ready to hand.
    The room was half lit with candles and hazy with dust. Every inch of space was lined with books and scrolls. His first thought was that it was a scholar’s library; his second—having taken account of the little signs and tags on every shelf, and the big brass cash register on the table beside him—was that it was a bookshop.
    A pair of yellow feline eyes regarded him distrustfully from under a low shelf.
    The woman was quite young, and quite small, which made Arjun realize that he himself was quite small, and slight.
    The gun in her lap was absurdly too large for her. She balanced it on her knees. Her dark hair was in ringlets that struck Arjun—he had no idea why—as old-fashioned.
    She asked him what he wanted, and he laughed, because theanswer was so obvious, or so impossible, depending on how one approached the question. He held up his gory hand to show her his most immediate and practical concern.
    She leaned a little closer to see. She gasped
oh dear.
Her hand rose to her mouth—she wore a number of plain silver rings—and the gun slipped off her lap and hit the floor with a significant thud. It did not go off. The woman scrabbled on the floor for it, and hefted it again into her lap. Arjun had not moved; could not have moved had he wanted to. She flushed a little and put the gun aside.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you might be … Never mind. You know. What machine, then?”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “What machine was it? I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
    “Please,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “I mean your accident. Where did you work?”
    “Oh. I don’t know. No machine. It was a bite.”
    “A
bitei”
    “Yes,” he said. “An animal. Please, do you have bandages or ointments? Its bite may be venomous. Or infected. I will try to pay you for them.”
    “An animal? A dog?”
    “No. I don’t know.” Arjun held his bad hand stiff and throbbing against his chest, and rummaged in his pockets with his good hand. He removed a fold of green and blue notes, clipped together with a gold pin, and some coins of various sizes and shapes with a mess of heads and weapons and birds and animals and flags and numbers stamped on them. He held them out to her. Her green eyes flicked to them for only a second, and she shrugged.
    “I don’t know what all that is. Is it money? It’s not money from around here. It’ll only get you into trouble. The pin’s nice. If you have a pin like that you don’t work in the factories. Unless you stole it, I suppose.”
    “I do not think I am a thief. Please. My name is Arjun. I do not know where I am. If I have no money that’s good here I can work.”
    “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know what you are. I know where you came from. This close to the Mountain? You’re not the first ghost to come wandering.” She came over and held his wrist. He closed his eyes in agony as she pulled at his makeshift bandages. “Poor thing,” she said. “Poor lonely thing.” It felt as though she was crushing hishand in a vise; he assumed she was only