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are gone. The lobby is silent, bare, the marble columns dull and crumbling. Just the light from the front door. Just the floating dust motes. Just the dull cry of the hologram outside, muffled, barely audible. And suddenly you know where you must go, whom you must see.
    The wind is blowing harder when you leave the Tolstoi District, and the animals stare at you with wide, mournful eyes from their sanctuaries.

CHAPTER 4
    What does the statue say to him who made her? Thank you? Thank you for making me in one image, in one position. Never having to move. Never having to be other than what you see reflected in his eyes. To lose a certain essential fluidity.
    And yet you know that only the man you first saw emerging from the darkness of Veniss Underground ten years ago can help you. He was hesitant. He squinted fiercely, his hand held across his face as though to ward off a blow, and the light streaming through his fingers nonetheless, like a live thing, and his joy in it, in this simple thing, this redemption.
The light streaming through his fingers.
    You remember the way his eyes widened when he saw you, the way his mouth, unaccustomed to laughter, had formed a lopsided grin; the way he held himself—shoulders stooped, head tilted upward in rapture. (Flash forward to the firmly aristocratic Shadrach: stance upright, bold, quick to laugh politely, a decent conversationalist at parties. And yet, at first, this rough man emerging from darkness.) He smelled of earth and minerals. His touch on your wrist was gentle, respectful.
    He was no different than any of the others who, by chance or connections, had been allowed to come out of the tunnel into the light, except that somehow he made you smile. His eyes held you, and you found yourself thinking how odd it was that to find the light you must descend into darkness. He eclipsed your senses, and you still do not know whether you fell in love with him in that instant, at first sight, or whether it was his love for you, as radiant as the sun, that you came to love so fiercely.
    He kissed you first on the rose birthmark on your left hand, then the neck, then the mouth, all in plain view, moments after you spoke to him. Later that day, after he had gone through the last checkpoints, you attacked each other in a rented room with the rumble of the cool-down jets of out-system shuttles making the room vibrate with sound and motion, and the two of you oblivious to anything but the sweet tactile mystery of each other's bodies, neither as yet knowing anything else about the other except the flesh, and not caring (not thinking, but just
being
for hours). In the dark. In the light. A confluence of arms and legs, a symphony of sex broken by laughter and wordplay.
    It was never the same as that night, when your passion fogged the windows and your mouths could not get enough of the other, twins separated for too long. It was never quite like that again—the rough beauty of him in the dim light; the tousle of black hair; the scent of him, rich and indescribable; the long, delicious scar on the inside of his right thigh; the mysterious softness of his worker's hands, the palms of which were so pale they seemed to shine even with the curtains drawn; the way, afterward, he held you so delicately to him, engulfed you in him, as if he were a comfortable blanket and you a sun-sleepy girl again.
    In the beginning you loved him unconditionally, madly, unreasonably—and he loved you back as if you were not just the only woman in the world, but the only
person
in the world. At the beginning, you were equals. You knew the city and he did not; he came from an underground land darkly exotic. Your knowledge and sophistication. His strangeness, his stories about a place that seemed fantastical, impossible, unreal. All through the dark months when the central government imploded and chaos sought to break through, you guided him through the warrens of rival parties, kept both of you alive and