“Who?” says Nightjar, feeling stupid. “What?”

“That you’d gone missing,” she says. “I would have confessed earlier, but I was waiting for Gnomon to leave.”

“So you’re a tattletale,” spits Nightjar.

“I saved you, sister. They wouldn’t have noticed you were gone.”

Nightjar slams the door. Confusion, anger, grief, chagrin: when she lets herself speak it’s a crack of thunder, and a crack in the dam.

POE, she whispers in her terrible new voice, and the ghost is there.

Her mother wakes her in the morning and her father tucks her in at night, warm and solicitous. They don’t blame her. She’s a child! She had an ordeal, and what matters now is her safety.

But Nightjar remembers the terrible freedom of the balloon, vulgar conversations, the danger of his hand on her arm. Remembers being an uneasy peer. Remembers Killington’s hat falling, in the spray of black.

She fumbles in a bag and finds the striker he used to light the balloon. “Nightmare?” Killington mumbles, stirring. “Wait–don’t–”

She’s clicking it, and the flare of sparks traces them both in shadow. Gnomon is there, then, behind her. His cane is a sword.

“Mmm,” says Killington.

“That doesn’t bode terribly well,” she says.

“You don’t need to be afraid, little girl,” he says, grinning a knockaround grin. “Think of it this way: you’d be in more danger if I were my parents.”

“Oh?”

“They named me that.”

“Oh.”

Killington plays with cranks and sprockets, and the fire below the balloon turns from blue to white. They rise slowly to pass between two loops of road.

“My parents,” says Nightjar, stumbling a little, “named me Nightmare.”

“I know they did,” says Killington, and his smile disappears.

Nightjar’s seven. Her hair is finally long and glossy, as black as eyes. She has the run of the manor house and its grounds; sometimes, if she takes Gnomon, she’s allowed to walk the road of an afternoon. Not that she has a choice, about Gnomon. Her father spun him out of her shadow.

Gnomon is tall and thin, booted, cloaked and cravatted. He wears small, square pince-nez glasses. He has no mouth or eyes. Nightjar hates him and admires him: she begins wearing a cloak of her own.