Jack stands at the top of the narrow series of switchbacks that lead up from Cliff City. Well, he’s not so much standing as he is leaning against the cliff wall in an attempt to catch his breath.

“Much as I go down there, you’d think I wouldn’t still get winded from the climb up.” He looks over to Zeke, perched on his shoulder, oblivious—or indifferent—to Jack’s insufficient lung capacity. “You ain’t helping, either. Maybe I need to cut back on the free rides.”

That gets Zeke’s attention. He squints at Jack and blows a curt razz. Reaching into Jack’s shirt pocket, the monkey pulls out the only remaining cigarette from the set Jack rolled before they descended to Cliff City last night. He shakes the cigarette in Jack’s face with a full-bodied rebuke that says, No, no, this is your problem!

Jack shifts his view from the cigarette to Zeke and back to the cigarette. “How thoughtful. Thanks.”

He snatches the cigarette from Zeke and pops the end into his mouth. Zeke reaches to grab it away, but Jack already has his lighter brandished and flipped open. A quick thumb-flick from Jack and a low, wide flame erupts right in the path of Zeke’s outstretched hand.

Zeke retracts. Victorious, Jack smirks and brings the lighter’s flame to the tip of his hand-rolled tobacco envelope. He closes his eyes and takes a long, slow drag from the cigarette. Exhaling, he looks back at Zeke. “See? I’m already taking deeper breaths.”

Zeke buries his face in his hands, but Jack interrupts this display of frustration.

“Still, we made pretty good time. Got plenty to make it across town before it’s time to open the bar. Actually—” Jack glances up to the sky and cracks out a sheepish smirk. “We’ve got enough to make a little detour.”

Hearing this, Zeke looks up at Jack’s stupid smile and rolls his eyes. He knows exactly what Jack’s planning. Jack is going to see her; Lyia. Perhaps “see” is too strong of a word. He’s really just going to watch her from a distance while trying to avoid being seen himself. With good reason, though. The last time he got caught snooping around Maddy Shard’s, he almost left without a pulse.

Jack’s known Lyia his whole life, and he’s worshiped her for nearly as long. The only surviving members of the Fold. No one except the old man and Maddy Shard knows that, though. As far as anyone else knows, they’re actually survivors of the string of massacres that the Shadowfold used to inflict. Mercies. That’s what the people in the Fold used to call it when they organized an attack on a town. Jack was too young to be involved with any mercies, but he had started his training. Had the Fold not fallen, he would eventually have been expected to participate. To use the Touch on whole townships. Towns like Fareburne.

Fareburne. Corva is from there. And she survived. Jack hasn’t heard of anyone ever surviving a mercy. An extermination. If the Shadowfold was anything, it was thorough. Granted, from what he can remember, Fareburne was the largest mercy that had ever been attempted. It makes sense that someone would fall through the cracks. That doesn’t make Jack feel any better though. The term “mercy” never made sense to Jack. Lyia had tried to explain it once, but it never took. Never sat right with him. How could killing off a whole town of people be considered a mercy? It’s a mass murder. It wasn’t a “mercy” when everyone else in the Fold was killed. When Death made his mark on them. How was what they did to others any different?

It’s no wonder the Fold got attacked from all sides. Survivor? Jack doesn’t feel like a survivor. He didn’t survive anything. Lyia saved him. Kept him from dying.

Old Man V told Jack to think of the fall of the Fold as his birthday. He was already five years old at the time, but that was the event that marked the start of his current life.

All told, it hasn’t been a horrible life. Jack served his time as the old man’s barhand, cleaning and maintaining the bar. Tough work, sure, but it beat working at the Red Light. Lyia hadn’t been as lucky. When Maddy Shard figured out that Lyia was the one that saved him from being marked, there was no way the old bat was going to let Lyia go. Healers are too rare, too useful, and too valuable to trade away.

Jack’s contract expired within a few years. Lyia took quite a bit longer to pay off her bond. Jack never could quite figure out the math behind that one. The old man said it had something to do with the costs involved in training a healer. Whatever. Probably Maddy is just better at haggling. In any case, even though both of them were in the clear, they stuck around in their respective roles. Lyia originally wanted to skip town, but Jack had convinced her to stay. It’s not like they had anywhere better to go.

With Zeke still on his shoulder, Jack navigates his way along the long cascade of steps that connect Lower Bule to Upper Bule. He stops part of the way up, ducking behind the short stone wall along the stairs. Zeke lets out an exasperated snort and hops off the wall to sit next to Jack on the steps.

Maddy Shard’s Red Light is on the lower side of town. From this spot, Jack can safely peek over the wall at the whole of Lower Bule unobstructed. The area is a whole mess of stonework buildings so tightly packed that a person could almost get from one end to the other just by leaping rooftops. Granted, a lot of them are only stonework on the outside, a façade for blending in with the cliff. Materials inside each building, like Maddy’s Red Light, tend to be higher-grade stuff. Of course, he can’t see inside any of the buildings. Maddy and most of the folks in Lower Bule are adamant about ensuring their businesses’ privacy. Only eyes backed by a sufficiently high number of nits get the privilege of pulling back the curtain.

Jack isn’t interested in what’s going on inside, though—not this time. Instead, he fixes his stare on the roof. Waiting. Almost ten. Should just be startin’ her day.

As if on cue, the roof access on the Red Light swings open and Lyia steps through. Her attire is markedly without glamour—cotton sweats and a white t-shirt—but Jack’s pupils dilate all the same. He mentally traces the silhouette of the body that gives form to those clothes and follows it as she moves out to the roof. He lets the image sear into his mind before moving up to her face and the kindest eyes to ever paint their amber warmth upon him.

He knows that she’s not overwhelmingly attractive. Not by conventional standards. Certainly not by Red Light standards. None of that matters to him, though. She’s the girl of his dreams. Of his memories. Of his future. It seems like everyone these days has survived some kind of massive attack. But the fall of the Shadowfold belongs to Jack and Lyia. It’s theirs. And they made it through that together.

Her eyes are closed now, wrapped by the warmth of her dark, almost reddish skin. From his roost on the stair, Jack watches as she turns her head toward the canyon wind, allowing it to sweep the strands of straight onyx locks from her face and snap in the air behind her. The distinctive blue streak that starts at her forehead flaps and flows along with the rest of her hair. Jack knows that under the blue dye, that streak of hair is just as white as the one that starts in the same place on his own head. A mark of their shared history.

Jack has every step in Lyia’s morning rooftop ritual memorized. At the start of each day, she steps out on the roof and stands for a minute. She allows the sun and wind to wash off sleep and short-term memory. In her right hand, she carries her morning meditation: one cigarette, one match.

She steps behind the door to the roof, treating it as a makeshift wind shield while she lights her cigarette. Cigarette glowing, she steps out from the door’s protection and closes it behind her. This is her moment alone. In the exposed, open air of the world, she has her personal bubble of solitude.

As Lyia slumps against the door, enjoying the first luxurious pulls from her morning smoke, Jack coordinates the last remaining puffs from his. Quenched by their surreptitiously shared moment, he spins around and sits on the stairway, leaning against the stumpy stone wall. A contented grin stretches across the full width of his face, if only for a few seconds.

A voice penetrates his calm. “You’ve got good taste, kid, I’ll give you that. But she is waaaaaay out of your price range.”

“Fuck you, Corva.”