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Aspect on. I never need to.
    But I didn’t think I was humiliating myself, except in my own eyes. I didn’t think Jacey was hearing me at all. He certainly wasn’t even pretending to listen.
    But there are questions and questions, and they mean nothing in the face of what’s true, even if it’s never an answer.
    How many Corbies make Twa? It didn’t matter, it hasn’t ever mattered. There was only one outside, except that there was a flock swooping and swirling over the water, and neither of us knew whether that counted one or many or at all. Except that then a solitary crow peeled away from the flock and came flapping in to land beside the Corbie on the jib; and now what we didn’t know was whether that was the other Corbie reporting for duty or bringing reinforcements, or just a random bird being territorial – his harem, his perch, his patch, his river – or...
    His day to disappear. We had neither of us been looking for that, whatever else we expected, but – though we had both been looking – there was still only one bird on the jib there. Looking at us.
    “Um...”
    Here came another, banking, rising, stalling in an awkward flurry just above the jib, above the perching one.
    Dropping down to join it.
    One bird.
    “What are they...?”
    Another bird, and another.
    Jacey said, “How many crows make one?”
    Now they came thick and fast, forming a queue in the air, shifting and liquid in the wind but binding together and holding like a rope to its one fixed point, that place outside the window where one by one they came to join the one that held still there. On the jib, looking back at us, absorbing every bird that came.
    “Jacey...”
    It wasn’t getting any bigger, just more solid. More weighty, more powerful – just more . It was the conservation of mass again, only working the other way. I might need a new theory.
    We might not have time to discuss it.
    Ordinarily I don’t like being hustled, grabbed, shoved around.
    Ordinarily, with my Aspect on? You couldn’t do it. I’m unshovable, rooted, balanced precisely on that gravitic line that runs from me to the earth’s core. And you wouldn’t want to grab, you really wouldn’t.
    Jacey? Grabbed my elbow, tugged me away from the window, shoved me towards the door, hustled me right out of there.
    I’ve never been more glad to be moving.
    One glance back, through the doorway; one last glimpse of what was happening out there. One last line of crows, spiralling in – but not a bird now that they fell into like a gravity-well, like a black hole. Big black-clad man, a Corbie in his other guise: standing easily on the eight-inch span of the beam of the jib, where it jutted out above the river. Standing, looking. Watching us go.
    We went.
    Down the stairs, pell-mell. Before we reached the bottom, we heard shatter-sounds above and behind us, as it might be the sounds of a large man stepping through the glass of a picture window.
    Just stepping, through triple-glazed and armoured glass. It was a big window, a little vulnerable; Jacey always did go high-spec, and was happy to deal in redundancy. I want to keep you safe, he’d said to Fay.
    The man who could step through that glass? Was not the kind of man a girl could knock flying, just with a blow. Even with her Aspect on.

 
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    A T THE FOOT of the stairs, Jacey turned automatically to the inner door, through to his garage and his precious motors. My turn to grab, to shove, to hustle.
    “Not that way. There’s two of them, remember?”
    “I know. What makes you think the other one’s not out there?” A nod to the street-door, where I already had my other hand on the latch.
    “Because they know where I am and who I’m with, and everybody knows you.” Poor little rich boy: Jacey had been a petrolhead since he was fourteen, since his parents allowed him his first roadbike. The law didn’t, but the law was not an issue for the Cathars. It was Jacey who taught me to ride, and to