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Theconflagration spread from other buildings up the road, sprouting from broken gas lamps. The dead and their shattered homes burned while more people screamed and ran and died, until the horror faded into smoke and the loop of disaster began again, spinning forward the history of devastation in minutes before my appalled gaze. I shook myself and kept walking—it wouldn’t do to call attention by gawking at nothing. I hoped we wouldn’t be staying long in Lisbon.
    I turned at the corner and crossed the road to the north arcade, keeping my sight on the shop fronts to my right, away from the continuous loop of phantom disaster. I glanced in the window of a restaurant, which only reminded me how long it had been since I’d eaten. The hunting and fishing store was just past the restaurant and several signs for the Pensão Praça da Figueira — which advertised ROOMS! in English, so I assumed it was some kind of hotel.
    I overshot the door with the green sign hand-painted on the inside of the glass above that read HOSPITAL DE BONECAS 1830 ERVANÁRIA PORTUGUESA . An old woman dressed in black sat in a chair outside, stitching the neck of a cloth doll together where it had torn at the shoulder and was spitting forth buds of wooly stuffing. She was little more than a shadow under the canvas awning, but to me she was as obvious as if she were still alive. “Você certamente levou muito tempo para chegar aqui,” she muttered, her voice coming slow and creaking. In my head I heard the sentiment, roughly translated as “You took your time getting here.”
    I didn’t dare drop toward the Grey to talk to her more easily, but strolled a step backward to look into the window of the jewelry shop next door. “And why do you care?” I muttered in reply. I saw something black and glimmering, far away above the buildings, that soared into the sky and fell back toward earth, leaving trails of Grey like cirrus clouds.
    “Much to mend, much to fix. Little time,” the old ghost replied, still watching the fabric between her fingers as she set tiny stitches into the doll’s neck. “Os Magos do Osso.”
    I turned my head to give her a more-direct stare, letting my curiosity about the black thing in the sky go. Her words had a ring of memory in them that chimed on words Carlos had used, even though the two phrases sounded nothing alike. “Kostní Mágové,” I said. Bone Mages.
    She nodded, not looking up, and faded away.
    I took that as my cue to go inside.
    The space was narrow and made more so by a large floor-to-ceiling glass case filled with old dolls, miniatures, and toys that seemed to watch me as I entered. Not far back from the door lay a staircase. Signs reading MUSEU and OFICINA PARA RESTAUROS pointed up the stairs . There wasn’t enough room on the ground floor to hide a potted plant in, much less Quinton, so I went up the stairs.
    The first room was mostly a shop, with displays of dollhouse miniatures, doll clothes, and a plethora of accessories. It was all high quality—no cheap plastic, mass-produced junk—and a lot of it looked handmade. Layer on layer of ghostly children wandered through the displays. Behind a counter at the back were ceiling-high niches in which sat dozens of dolls and stuffed toys of every description and age, from near-new Barbies to ancient teddy bears and porcelain-headed ladies in fancy dresses. Most of them watched me with phantom eyes.
    I walked up another flight of stairs to the hospital itself, where dolls and toys were taken in with loving care by the white-coated staff, who marked a number on the bottoms of their feet or tied a paper tag to the leg to identify them later and then carried them offto be “operated” on at white tables. Glass-fronted drawers held disembodied doll parts: heads, legs, arms, eyes. . . . It gave me the willies.
    I was unnerved enough by the dismembered dolls that I jumped when Quinton spoke into my ear. “It’s a little disturbing, isn’t it?”
    I