Tag had quit wondering about his wedding.

After failing to wed three times, it wasn't even a dream anymore. Twice he had not married the same woman and he wondered that he should be so patient, or so dumb, to have thought the outcome would be different. When he was seventeen and went into the world as a bodyguard he did not know he would come to envy his employer for being married and having a child. The love in the family he saw seemed to give the world purpose. Why, then, should he not also be that person?

In a place like Rhydin, it seemed everyone was getting married and having children but him. He was not like most of them-- immortal, beautiful and outgoing. He could not buy women drinks or loosen their heart with charming wit and fast lips. It had all emphasized how out of place he was, even after so many years, and he had let the dream of married and children die with hardly a whimper. Perhaps it wasn't that he was to be a husband and father, but in this sort of world with stray children... why could he not just be a father? It was certain he wore no wedding band but that faded red ribbon tied around his wrist.

Penny, his little coin, had come into his life then. She was adopted, old enough to know he wasn't her father but he hoped that she might still regard him as such. It was a selfish sentiment he didn't care to talk about.

When she closed the distance with her embrace, it was like picking up a book he enjoyed reading. Like there hadn't been any time that passed at all. Tag would always smell like the sun, like work and the woods. Just like her. It had been worn into their flesh.

"Dead?" He shook his head no. She couldn't see it, but could feel the motion, maybe even the tiny adjustments the face made when it smiled, "No, that's not what the coin said, anyway." He had seen comedy. One of his hands stroked her back as someone does when reassuring a victim, "I still have some time left." The pause that followed was filled with the question, "What do you intend to do with your time?"


Where life's a joy
for girls and boys
And only will get better

Hey ho away we go
We're on the road to never

How could she explain how real it had felt, to think him dead or close to it. Like some witchery had unwound him, and with her own selfish sentiment, she would lose one who understood and by doing so made her real. Less the haunted, the one who felt she had some missing piece. But he still smelled the same, felt the same and sounded the same, and in all the anticipation of horror she finally relaxed and now all that was unwound was that expectance that he was gone.

Like Tag and like actors of that old age where all was chiaroscuro and the souls' windows lit up screens, answers need not live entirely in the safety of words, but the eyes. Hers are contented by relief as she steps back an inch, and actually looks him in the eye. No half-glances. "The coin is always right." Her hands fall to her sides and into the pockets of her jacket where clutches another coin. "Where do you live, now?" He was the same, she knew that much, and that that much had also changed. It was the way he held the night closer than before and she could only hear half the story. The wind stole things, it swallowed the songs.



Along the road to never
Hey ho away we go
We're on the road to never
Hey ho away we go
Along the road to never
Hey ho away we go
We're on the road to never


"I haven't moved yet," He was unafraid to make eye contact with her. His eyes had no remarkable color, they were only so dark that the pupil and iris were indistinguishable unless the sun was in his eyes. Dark pools that moved under his eyelids and were on her face, expressing something that was almost the same sentiment as she. He looked down her once like she was being inspected, but his eyes came back to her's quickly.

"I will stay in the same house for as long as I may." He did not want to promise her he would never leave Rhydin, though he had been living in its whereabouts some ten years. It's vast number of comers and goers, its changing face and harmony was something which had reeled him in. He thought of all the places in the world it was only the rural parts, this changing city, that let him go with little notice.

He didn't seek fame or attention, but the quiet moments like the pauses between them. His eyes shot over his shoulder and he signaled with one had, "Do you remember the way? Should I walk you there?" She was ever-shifting, but he liked to think she would still visit. It had been a long time since her visit. The branches of the trees hung down, some scraping their fingernails on the ground. His gesture with the arm was wide, arching his chest forward unconcerned.


Madi knew the way reliably, and smiled when he asked, because it felt like something gold and won. The smile was easy on her young, plaintive face and did not slide away like it had on the other Madison, the one that shot the trap off of his leg, the same Madison that promised to bury him six feet deep. It did not slide because there are some things the feet did not forget and the way to bring them home was one of them.


The pair walked, unlikely and belonging, towards familiar, mysterious ground and the road rose like trust to greet them and the thieving wind died down. By the time their shadows had been lost completely to the hour, they were at the homestead. She looked on towards the house, the yard, and the so-old sky behind it ? she had stepped off the porch so long ago, a whole life ago, and now here she was, changed and unchanged and facing it again. Faded green cotton rose and fell stiffly with her breath, and Madi turned her head to peer up at his strict profile. She had looked at him that way before, it was how they met and started so simply. Chilled fingers found the side of his arm and tugged with "I remember."

"I use to live in an abandoned bar, you know." He looked at her and then back to the face of his house. It was modest, simple. Small column that suppose the roof over the porch but not railing to keep anyone in. He tilted his head to the side, looking at it as a stranger might, "It was named Ollie's Bar and it was in need of repair but... very spaceous. I liked the space a lot." When he walked, there was a faint limp from where the bear trap had been chewing on his leg. He was lucky, he thought, to still have a leg there at all, nevermind it still working.

He looked at her and his smile appeared slight. His time line was linear, transfixed like a weight upon his feet. He wondered what she would have thought of him fifteen years ago. That time he was less interesting, more conflicted and introverted. But he was also younger, he could have changed. Maybe.

"I will show you her," Her stepped up to the door of the house and opened it. After he went in he took off his shoes. The man decorated simply, that wasn't a surprise. New, chaotic additions were on newsprint paper, hanging on the walls like fine art clearly outlined and colored by Penny. In those images, her dad was always smiling. In one, they were in the garden together, the vegetable patch off the side of the house.

The entry room opened up with Penny's bedroom on the left and his on the right. The entry room melted seamlessly into the living room, where there were the indications of his lineage. He still used short tables that required one to sit on a pillow on the floor. Past the living room was the doorway to the kitchen, which hadn't a door on it at all. He signaled to her that she should pause while he stepped into his bedroom.

What could be seen of his personal quarters were that they were more European. The bed sat high on a wooden frame and there was no comforter, just sheets and a nightstand. By the bed was a book she might recall having given him. He practiced writing in it and his thoughts and penmenship had grown from undetermined letters into statements and curious sentences. That book with the gold lined paged rested above the others in a stack. When he came out of his room his hand caught the doorknob to quietly close it behind him. It was then that the darkness of the home occured to him.

All the shadows were huddled together until he put on a light. It sent their's racing up the wall. He opened the small, leather bound book and leaned in so that she could see it better.

It was him, one of the very few images he had of himself when he was younger. They were given one on the day that they graduated from school, when he was seventeen. His face was more severe then, despite being younger. More blank, less with the character of years but yet... it was still him. Probably, he thought, Madi wouldn't have liked him at all. He turned the page to the next one.

"This, this is her," It was a caucasian woman, sitting in a kimono with a tight but slightly mischevious smile. The image hadn't much color to it, but it was certain her hair was dark and tied up. She looked as though she was happy, one of her hands was paused, holding something in the palm of it that couldn't be made out, "That's my mother." He hadn't shown anyone this picture of her before and why he was showing her now he couldn't have explained. He did not look particularly like her, that happened sometimes when someone was half of one thing and half of another.

Being a father had made him think more about family. Wasn't Madi somehow part of that?


"I will show you her"

Her nods underlined an understanding. It occurred to her as they stepped inside that they were walking backwards into history and the future all at once, but not just any past or any future, but Tag?s.

The house was cosy and the walls hugged them, whereas the warehouse had too many distances between the door and the ladder, the door and the bed, the chair and the window. She hangs back as he walks into his bedroom, sees only the foot of his bed and the glimpse of a bedside table and averts her eyes, she does not know about the woman in her magpie colours and that she and her ribbons have gone. Her eyes take in Penny?s art, a few knuckles following a yellow crayon sunburst. The Dark Man re-appeared and she heard the crinkling yawn of a book opening. Expecting to turn and find the child or the magpie woman, she finds his only company a book.

And for the first time, his waif is introduced to Tag at seventeen. Her brows crease and rise while she looks between the face of the boy and the man he has become, and it jolts something in her, she remembers that he knows both of her dirtroadspecanshellsshotapartsteelburialsablondema nwalkingout ofawhite houseofthatsamemanwalking...away ..again, and some ghost of herself telling Tag ?I have been left again.?

The boy in the picture returns her stare. She smiles at him.

Falling and flying.


A page turns. This time there is no severity, but silk. The woman is mischief and sake-warmth. Madison reaches out to the photo and dips a hand into another year, and takes from the woman's open palm what is resting there, half-seen and shining, Face up.

The woman in silk seems for a moment to wink.


"That's my mother."

Everyone had two sides. Two lives; young, old. Madison looks up at him again, and feels for the first time that she knows him and that he really isn?t dark anymore. That perhaps she had been wrong to distinguish him so all along. He was no shadow. He was only as dark as the hair on his head.

"What is her name?" Glancing from the past; the photo album beauty, and to the future, the artwork on the wall.


"I don't know," he admitted to her with a small shrug. It was as though her real identity didn't matter. Perhaps it was just the name that didn't matter. It was as though it suddenly occurred to him that these images were sad and he shut the small leather cover that held so few images. His eyebrows knit and he followed her gaze to the wall, to Penny's images.

The magpie had left, the gypsy that had been at his side on and off and now finally, off. It disappointed him that sort of ending. He had been the one to leave her, surprisingly enough. He found that forgiveness was not infinite and that his heart bore so many scars toward her that there was no sensitivity, no great feeling but the badge of hurt layered up like scar tissue numbing any intensity there had been. Women were not evil, were not to blame. He was just, perhaps, difficult to live with.

"She was beheaded when I was an infant," Fingertips along the edge of the leather that held her image, "I've not a memory of her, just this picture." Really, the picture could have had any name to him, it would have been the same face. His eyes followed her's to the images Penny has on the wall.

His eyebrows knit. Like a severe problem, "She keeps drawing on the walls..."

There was a man that sprawled the image of a tree upon a warehouse door.

Someone had told her once that a room was a place to hide from the wolves that that was all any room was and Madison had never forgotten it. But walls were not arms, and eventually you got cold behind them. Sometimes you had to face the wolves.

She did not think the pictures sad, but she could see the way he had begun to channel the words in his mouth to his hands, and the night was pulled closer still, inward, and the house adjusted.

His hands spoke his discomfort, so Madi took her eyes off the album, off the walls, off of him, and landed on her shoes, a good a place as any, scuffed and dry with field dirt. They used to be bright aqua, but were now a faded nothing color, as were her laces, once pristine, once white.


She walks towards the lounge, where the low tables and cushions sat, and took off her jacket. It was something to do with a moment that brought out the awkwardness in the girl, a moment to wring via the sleeves of her coat, to wrap it around her middle. She doesn?t see ribbons of blacks and whites, any of the vestiges of a female presence other than herself, or any further sign of the child. Ringlets hide her face, a face that looks back at him, the corner of her mouth lifted in a weary smile. ?Crayon is easy to remove." But she wasn?t really sure of that and her posture agreed.

From where she stood, between rooms, between lives, the man with the black glass hair seemed awfully far away.


"Wanna eat?"

It was the earliest memory he had. He dreamt about it, sometimes.

"Mamoru," his father called the little five year old Tag to him. He went to his father with quiet hesitance. He had known as a child, dependent on body language, that his father was more distant with him than his younger brother. Today though, he took the boy up in his arms, held him close and examined him with his eyes.

"He looks like you," said his uncle, taking a bite of food off the dinner table. They were all sitting there, the adults of the family having dinner. His father cut his uncle a glance which the uncle ignored.

"You were a mistake, Mamoru." But the arms his father held him in were comforting, "You will have to be twice what any other bodyguard is to have the same respect. Always remember that. Try harder, do more and perhaps you will be a mark of honor on this family, for this country."

His uncle stopped eating to look at his father. As a child, he did not understand their interactions. It was later on that Tag understood that his uncle had an affection for him. It might have been because he had lost a foot in battle so his mentality, his role in life, was not so rigidly guided by the emperor's needs like his father's.

"Here, eat this," said his uncle, shoving a rice ball to his mouth with his pair of chopsticks, "It's sweet."

Inside a house over two decades later, he paused and nodded to Madi's request, "I will get us something to eat. Please sit."

There was some awkwardness there that he wasn't speaking of. That is, some were not familiar with the style and seating arrangement of his culture. Sometimes it was embraced immediately and other times, he could tell, it was more than just literally looked down upon. It was with such a superfical concern that he paused before stepping into the kitchen, looked worried, made a smile and then stepped into the kitchen anyway.

One fantastic thing about travel was the cuisine. There were so many more foods to eat and try, to enjoy. It was something that made him quite happy and he hadn't hesitated much to try a new food, even if he did get sick from it. Growing up, his food had been rather bland, sometimes the fish was salted but it was definitely not as spicy as curry or sweet as flan. He couldn't always remember the names of everything, but he liked to try it all. Penny was a little more picky, but that was usually how children were about foods.

He was good with a knife. He had always been good with a knife. He had never eaten with her before, not formally, not like this. It was a mixture of some leftovers he had with Penny, and then something else that he enjoyed himself out of habit. He stepped out of the kitchen he carried a tray with multiple plates on it and set the plates on top of the table. More lights were lit and he indicated towards a place he had set for her.

Fork and chopsticks. White rice, some salted fish but also chicken tenders and apple slices. There was also some scrambled eggs and a small side salad. Food assortments became weird like that when travel and children were involved. It seemed to occur to him that the dishes were somewhat mismatched and odd. He hadn't stuttered in years.

"I-If you want something else, I can get you something else." A sentence curling in on itself, biting its own tail. Two cups of water on the table for them. He took a seat so that the table would rest between them.

Water gurgled down the drain as she released the plug, it seemed to punctuate anything she had been about to say, given time for the words to slip away. She wiped the last traces of moisture from the dishes and her hands and walked up to Tag, her eyes down as fingers dug down into khaki pockets. "I lost someone, too."

Around them, the sage-green walls did not hug but leaned away, and the girl shrugged, like the burden of uneven history did not have reasoning she could possess for him to understand her own loss; gold hair, gold brows, gold whiskers, sun-lit drawl. "Sometimes I see him. Not just when I sleep, but in daydreams, and he's right... there...", she arches her brows, helplessly, and lifts her shoulders towards the dark man, to explain that the man stood sometimes so close, too-close. A staggered little breath works past her lips, and she shakes her head, and the ringlets that persist in hiding her features do just that.

"I remember the one you showed me to, at the Inn." Sable, like Tag, sable in features and hair and manner, "she is not here..." Madi chews on the edge of her lip, throwing her gaze over him to the window, towards the door, knowing no one can explain those things, when someone leaves, and what is left behind. Unsayable.

So incongruous, how does she tell Tag about her phantom, the man with golden hair that speaks to her, so real she can smell the wood on his hands, the steel in his breaths, the malt of his sweat. So familiar and yet she was certain she had not met him, not in this town and not in one before. De ja vu. But stronger, more potent, more confusing for her.


Cornflower eyes track back to the fathoms of the eyes of the man that is in front of her, the one there was no denying the reality of, and a lopsided smile rights itself on her face. Something she ought to wear more often. "G'night."

"Her..." the word uttered and given a long pause, as if to compare his feelings with her own. Absently one hand was rubbing the other wrist, only it wasn't his wrist but the ribbon he was rubbing.

"Rona?" He looked up from his desk. He was at the orphanage. His orphanage, the one he ran years ago in an old, Victorian style mansion that had been renovated with multiple bedrooms and a bathroom for every four kids. There were six living there at the time, the youngest was five. His office was practically the entry way of the building. After someone entered, the entry way melted into a wide hallway with an open staircase leading upstairs on the left at the start. At the end of the hall was a heavy wooden desk.Multicolored ribbons ran along the floor when she walked. It was like a dream when she appeared, the sun behind her in the doorway. His eyebrows arched up and he stood up and walked to her.

"Kusinage, this place is beautiful."

"Th... Thank you." At this time, he was still struggling sometimes with his stutter. It wasn't always, not like before. He looked toward the desk and then to her, "It is nice you came. I wanted your help. It is the paperwork..." his hand drifted to the desk and his eyes went back to her. Lilli hadn't taught him to read yet.

He smiled for her, remembering that she was like the wind and flowers. Gypsies. Tag could not even delude himself that they attracted him unlike any other. Was it because of Rona, that there would always be the association of first passion away from home? No, it was more fundamental than that. The gypsy drifted but was never removed from home and it was as though a loose network of family was always woven around them. Why was it he could not be born that way?

Years later.

"Rona." He was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking over his shoulder at her in the morning. Eyebrows arched up and he wanted to open up his mouth and tell her everything, everything on his mind. That he wished Sunday had been that Autumn day eight years ago, when fear and anxiety hadn't ruled his heart. When their relationship seemed so much simpler than what it was now. His exhale when he spoke.

"I think I should go."


Now he was in the kitchen, looking at Madi as she told him goodnight. His smile appeared slight, an indication she?d be seen again sometime. He stepped out of the kitchen, through the living room that joined all others and opened the door for her. He would sit on the edge of the porch, the toes of his feet touching the ground and he?d wait. Penny hadn?t been returned home yet by the sitter, but it wasn?t unusual for her to be kept late on the special weekly visits.

From where he sat on the porch he stared ahead on the path he thought she would take. Looked up at her as if he had something he wanted to tell her but couldn?t remember it. Wordless goodnight, his eyes averted. He did not watch her depart.

Early in the morning he woke Penny and took her to the sitter's house before he left for work. It was early, dawn has hardly broke when he turned her over to the woman's care. That's how it was though, with tending horses. The hours were always quite early. It was for the better to avoid the daytime's hot breath. It was on his passing of his home toward work that he noticed the candle, dry and odd on the ground.

He picked it up by the handle. By now the glamour of its light was gone, it had become a frozen artifact lukewarm in his hand. He pulled a piece of grass that had attached itself to the brush and tested the end of it to see if it was still wet. Dried now, hard but still bending with touch. His eyes went through the grass, trying to pick out any spilt yellow droplets that would lead the way from the fallen house to Oz.

When he left work he stopped out by the town and stared at the colors that had swept through part of it. His smile deepened, it was true and expressive, even his eyes engaged. The bandit that brightened the town had done its magic on him. He had never seen such beautiful vandalism. Stopping at a store he picked up paints and fresh brushes and, after collecting Penny from the babysitter, returned home to decorate the side of his house with her.

There were two sets of handprints in blue against the soft green paint color of the house. His hand prints, larger and dwarfing Penny's who were blurred with the excessive, enthusiastic paint. There was a tree made of fingerprints in blues and greens, but no browns. Its limbs stretched out impossibly far. Penny used her fingers to make spades of grass and then, under the three were two lumps, one taller than the other but both sitting under the tree with crooked smiles and eyes shut. Exhausted, Penny was washed up, fed and put to bed and he was left, cleaning up the colorful carnage and debris inspired by a candle. Paint smeared down his forearms and wiped on the leg of his pants.


Praline stuck to her fingertips, the sides of her mouth, had even managed to paint the side of one cheek. The sun blazed seven tones of heat and it showed in the whistling dry fields, in the languor of horses treading along the enclosure. The warmth drove things out; anxieties, reverie, bugs, problems, white elephants in any room. Orlan twitched ears at flies and the problems they stood no threat to the world as it melted around them. This reinvented Dorothy, no blue pinafore and no ruby slippers, ate the last of her treat, packed her lunch sack together and hid it in the shade of the groom shack, glad she got to her chocolate before it was a puddle. Her own problems steamed and sweated away. The horses did not ask, the sun did not question. Then it was back to the grind.


Mounting the giant beast, Madi manoeuvred the horse out into a crescent and then out towards where the fields depressed into meadow. There, the odd wildflower sprung up, similarly to the bursts of color blooming throughout Low Estate, and the side of a certain pale green house.

Each horse was walked a few times a week, the job rotated between Ian, Tag and herself. Sometimes she only led the horse, and sometimes she rode, and sometimes she rode her own sorrel, Yeine, along with them. It depended on the day and how much time she had.

The meadow quickly gave way into dirt road, gravel tossed and potholed. Her body swayed with every dip the horse did, her frame wearing what the horse did not. The line of the trees thickened and with it the heat grew. The flowers were long gone. Here all was brown and rust-red, fox-red, and the light that fell through the trees was scattered, dappling her face like phantom moths, flickering over the paleness of her features. The sun moved away, or seemed to, taunting its hide and seek through spindle branches. The horse wanted to stop, shook its mane, began to pound a hoof at the uncertain ground. Madi looked around her. The color drained from her face, and perhaps even from a bud or two poking its acrylic head out of a West End concrete corner.

Andy Jacob was there, as tall, limber and rough hewn as the twin trees surrounding him. A .45 shared the stare he gave the girl. Orlan whinnied and the sound shook birds into flight. A latent fear sprang to life in Madi but it was too late.



Orlan and Madi never made it to back to the corral.

Andy Jacob was effective, however only so much. He had pulled and pushed his way into territories not his own and something had to be said about a rat who ended up in the throne. He had plummeted and then rebuilt his lunatic kingdom all over again and had only Madison and her wild company to blame. He did not understand the woman, mostly because so often when they had met she was too direct, too self-assured, too canny, not like the women he knew. There was something about her propensity for violence that bothered him, because he knew he ought to be worried and it sickened him. Brentan, bless him, had always said that what we most abhorred in another was in essence the part of ourselves we were at odds with. Andy didn't believe it, but even Andy could admit that Madison and he were too alike in one regard to ever get along. Both were stubborn in their convictions, and both were deadly convinced the other was wrong.



So to have this piece of a infuriating puzzle in his arms, draped over the torn velvet seat like a ragdoll was immense and exhilarating though he had no logic to apply to it. Was she some far-flung younger sister who bore the eerie resemblance or was this indeed the Rye he had locked heads with. Did he have the end of that war in his grasp?



The coach tumbled on through the declining neighbourhood to the North East of West End, where the factories, abandoned tenements and underground scene thrived, where the misfits, hip and curious partied in warehouses and unused sewer channels. This Orpheum was resurrected in the very same precinct as the last but as less exclusive. The damage on the first had been so extensive that Andy felt it had even burned out his memory. So they had constructed their horror show in a less isolated spot, closer to where the rest of their scene crowded on the usual evenings. To blend in. Amorphous. Nothing To See Here but Music.


The interior resembled the former; dank, sprawling, too many exits. Andy had taken up his residence as sound tech and hired a few more hands to fill the gaps when he was fulfilling his other role, the real job, the one that brought the money and the life he aspired to. Parked off to the side, with the assistance of Reno, the driver, Madi was hauled inside and thrown into what had once upon a time been a lunch room. There was a grate-locked window where grey-white-grey seeped in. Dragging her in they hadn't anticipated her quick little fingers. A coin thrown, it landed face down on the concrete, followed by a lighter and a folded white paper crane. Emptied her pockets for a breadcrumb trail. It was nothing and it was something. Andy didn't recognise her flailing arm as anything more as Reno and he lumbered through with her.


Reno hit a switch that dazzled all corners of the Theatre space with neon green lights. Murky, claustrophobic. Andy tied his prize to a chair and whispered his return, sauntering back out into the pit, where the fans would later writhe and mosh while a local punk act played. He set up the cords. Checked the speakers. Tied up, she wouldn't be going anywhere. He would set up for the evening and return to her, let her get so impatient, so scared, she'd have to tell him everything. She was a kid and she wasn't running away from him again.


Madi turned her head nary an inch in a peek at the grated window with its stark light. Her gaze shimmered wetly.

The coin gleamed lunar on the pavement. The crane skittered off on the tail of a breeze.


Andy Jacob was effective, however only so much.

--------------------


"When you guard someone, you are a wind," his teacher said, bowing the sword through the air and taking a few steps, "You are not the creature that they notice, you are part of the wall, the floor they walk on. Their life isn't about you." The sword's tip jumped up and dove down, sliding into its sheath, "Your life is them, they should notice you no more than a child does a bird resting on the top of his tree house as he plays. You are not there to interfere with his play or to be part of his play."

Mamoru must have been looking away, his teacher touched him on the shoulder and he blinked and looked at him then bowed his head and dropped his eyes to the ground respectfully.

"Kusinage, it is important to remember you are nothing. Do not allow yourself to be arrogant or self involved, it is not the life we are living. We live for the whole, we live for the heartbeat of our country. Do not get distracted with the self."

Then his teacher moved onto his best friend, whose posture stiffened when the man came near. Likewise, he placed his hand on his best friend's shoulder.

"Keichi, you are expected to be more than the selfish little pig a civilian is. Remember that it takes a greater man to sacrifice for another than to save for himself." His hand squeezed his shoulder and he walked on.

In the woods, miles and years later, was the wind of a man's words following the trail. He felt his hands, his mind, slip into the body of training, recalling quietly what should and shouldn't be done.

When he reached the city his horse walked with a tired blame and he did not let his head swivel or eyes wander as someone does when new to town. Orlan kept going as if bluffing that he would know the way. In town sometimes other carriage tracks, or the tracks of other various vehicles, started to cloud the way. He would not be lost, though. The ride and heat made his sweat plaster his shirt to his back, the vision of a dark grey bird with wings outstretched who hadn't interfered with the play yet. The remains of a burned building still hit the nose with this sort of weather stirring up smells. He wondered if a town could smell like this for years and not know it. Maybe they just adjusted.

It was with pavement that he could go no further with his guess work. He kept a casual air, did not excite when he heard the noise of someone moving. He dismounted from the horse who was worn, his hooves lifted up and he shook his mane as if to warn Tag about the length of his ride. While moving to tie the horse off he noticed something on the ground. He crouched, fingertips digging at the cement to draw up to him the coin with a scrape.

People dropped coins all the time. The problem with this one was that there weren't very many with only one face and the other, dissolved in an uncertain outcome. His eyes, dark, shot up to the building in front of him. There was an advertisement, skirting on the ground about a show tonight on a cheap flyer.

When he stepped up to the building, a crane tapped him on the shoe and told him he didn't have much time. His head tilted, eyed the flyer pressed on the ground. A band was playing tonight.

"Hey, who are you?"A man spit at him, wondering who was creeping around the grounds before a show. They had enough trouble like that.

"I answered an ad." He cleared his throat and nodded to the inside of the building, "I'm a bouncer, these shows can get rough and as I understood it, last time the boss was upset about damages."

It was a stretch so long bones would crack.

With a painful tear, the taught rope gave way and tore leaving white indentations upon her wrists. Madi struggled out from under the chair that hugged her legs and lower back and kicked free, hauling herself via the elbows into a crawl across the uneven floor. Loose concrete grains covered her chest and stomach in a fine patina, her hair, one cheek. She looked as some survivor, some war-torn child. Fists raised and pulling at the door, locked. It was a frantic melody of clicks as the waif tore at all that kept her from some freedom. It was with a quick look over her shoulder that she saw what had secured her would hopefully become her redeemer.

Heading back to the chair, she righted it and dragged it back to the door, and with a push and a lean and a little luck, began sweeping it into a crash against the handle. The chair was a solid, thick timber with steel across the arms and sides, and it being all she had, she gave it her all.


The lock split, jarred, the door shuddered, and with wide eyes Madi stepped back and pat the steel surface with a nudge. The door squeaked and opened a crack. There was no one in the hall, no more wicked laughter, and the music had lessened in volume, though was still there, it was a sinking sound at a distance, like something being played underwater. She delayed a moment, eyes adjusting to the darkness of the halls, and turned to the left and ran. If someone was going to come at her, her arms were out and ready to shove...


------

On security camera, a dark haired girl broke free from a room and ran down a corridor. On security camera, a dark bird swooped like the wind towards her as she made a turn. The camera panned to another room. A spark and a sudden ghastly plume of smoke, and the first flickers of a deadly fire. The next frame was an image of Andy Jacob, kneeling on stage in a snake-nest of cables and amps, ugly terror ripping apart his expression in the red-green-red neons.

The screen went dementia white, and when it panned again, the last frame beheld Andrei at his side door post, commanding strife into the radio at his chest and spinning around, entering the smoke wreathed shadows behind him.

A level down, Heil was confusion wearing a green jacket. Too much had taken place too soon, though what had he expected, for the fire to wait for him? What he had not expected was the advent of numerous guards, which to his sheer trickery, had led them on a wild goose chase - he had worked backwards through the building, starting at its centre and heading for the roof before heading down again, then there had been the crying children he could only watch run, the dark featured man and the girl down the hall who seemed as unlikely in this building as he. But now, what he had done did not matter so much as the consequence. What he had seen, what he hadn't been able to fix... the flames were stealthy, they came on red feet and he couldn't stand there and try and fathom these things. So Heil ran, too.


The next floor up, Andy fought with the waif, forcing her against the sunset colored glass. That single moment of comprehension shared had only angered him more. "You are coming, get out that window."


The roof had begun to cave in, the blown window resembling torture, all shark-toothed and raw. Madison's palms bled as she was pressed against the ledge but she no longer struggled, her voice distant, softest, it fell like rain. "Save yourself, this is meant for you", and something in that stopped him. Maybe it was the faint echo of her clear-water drawl, the summer and cotton that was the girl he had caught.... he let her turn around for a moment, dumbstruck, and realised all so much far too late. "Madison."

The girl used his moment of weakness to weave around, shove him towards the mouth of glass, and dived away. It was a propelling explosion, black on black, it blanched the blue out of the sky and sizzled it charcoal and ash.


Heil in his dash heard that name, the one that conjured things, it was too profound to be something to ignore that name, her name .. Madison - the detective stopped just as the floor above gave way. The walls around him trembling. He didn't have time to fathom these things. Others were in the building and they would die while he ran out. He knew the exits. He had paved the consequence and now walked it. Through low clouds of destruction out he ran.


Andy Jacob swung against the hollers and screams of the crowd that had gathered below, his grizzled face taut as he struggled against his makeshift trapeze, an arm wrapped around piping, the rest of him scrambling in a naked grip against the brickface. The Watch were providing a net should he fall, he was three stories up now and the floor above was tumbling. He clambered down on threads of anxiety. Officials and nurse staff moved straight for him. There was nothing left of the fourth floor. Not anymore.


------------


The gunslinger gasped awake in her hotel room. Dirt beneath her nails. Under her tongue. A corrupt woman in clean sheets and torn clothes. She breathed smoke, exhaled cinders.


The gravedigger gasped awake in the cemetery. Before her sat Charlie Renauldt, chewing on a strip of grass and wheezing away in laughter. "Hey Kit. Whatcha gon' do now?" He grazed a liver-spotted knuckle against her brow, as he had once so long ago. "Lune Bleu. Not everyone gets a second time to give it a shot. You gon' be happy, you got no choice. No more blood, Kit." She passed out. Charlie stood and lifted her into his arms and walked her down the street, walked with her laying across his arms like a ragdoll, like a woman torched free of all the bad she'd done. He walked her and walked her and stopped at the door of the Penny Moon.

---------


Hoses blasted away the last of the fumes, fried wires, smoke and back fires that threatened around the demolished stage. All was now rubble and decay. Heil had informed one of the fire attendants that he thought there had been people in there at the time of the last explosion. "Not anymore", the attendant replied, leaving Heil drunk with grief, like the rest of the crowd. He ran a hand down his face, put his head in his hands. Then he heard what he didn't believe.


"We got someone!"



Fifteen minutes later, soot-smeared, all the hardness singed from her face, ragged and wrapped in a blanket was Madison Rye, flanked by clinic staff, two officials and the Detective no where in sight. She did not know what it was that she now had, it did not taste good, but she knew it was all hers. A cinder-laden smile, small but effulgent upon her dirtied face, smouldered as she was escorted away from the building. "Anybody know her?"


The woman had been found staring out at the grey-coated sky, hugging her knees, covered in soot, ashes, but unscathed in a burnt-out room. There was a faint white scar down one temple, but it was not fresh.


The woman had been found unharmed. They didn't yet know her name. But someone in the crowd would, the only word she'd said was his name.



"They call it a somersault, Kit, when you make it back from the dead. When you get a second chance. When you make another life. Whatcha gon' do now with that change in yer pocket?"



There was passion around the fire that raged into the night. It was so bright it was easy to forget that the sun had gone and they were all the light there was. Even his eyes, dark mirrors colored by its ribbons, were in an undisturbed solid stare. Orlan was like a blockade between him and the fire. His chin rested above the saddle, one hand on its horn as he watched a man tumble from the window. People with sheets were catching him, bodies were rushing around with great hurry and importance.

The lithe female figure folded as the floor gave way and the building emitted a sound not unlike metal avalanche. He could not shout or run into the flames, he was frozen in observation, his lips pressing into a line and his eyebrows lowered.

"Mamoru," His friend was speaking to him through the night air, just above a whisper. Everyone slept on these floors, they were neighbors in the large room. He did not roll over to face him, there wasn't much point since it would have been difficult to make out his face at night. Instead, he gave a controlled exhale that let his friend know he was awake. It produced the desired effect, his friend contrinued, "You know it doesn't have to be like this."

"What do you mean?"

"This style, this life. There are options you know."

"What are you talking about?"

"I met someone today." A long pause as if the confession carried great sin, "A man from far away. His eyes are large and they shine like green gems. So white. Do you know what?"

"What?"

"He was a merchant and do you know why he was a merchant?"

"Because his father was a merchant."

"No!" He realized he spoke up too loud, someone else in the room shifted and when he continued it was with a more hushed sound, "Because he wanted to. His father was a fisherman but when he grew up he decided he wanted to be merchant and he just... he just was. Our life can be like that, you know? Where we get to make decisions, have wives, do whatever we want."

"Do you believe that sort of freedom really exists?"

"It's gotta." He could hear his friend roll over to his other side, "It's what the man told me. Mamoru, I think this is something I'm willing to die for."

The crickets sang between them. Keichi thought he had fallen asleep until he spoke up again,"What will you do with your freedom?"

"Anything I want." Simply. Then, "I think a business would be good. What about you?"

What was worth dying for, if it was something he could choose? The silence was between them again as he thought about it. He hadn't ever imagined. He already knew what he wanted, he was just hesitant to say it. "I want to interfere."

The fires of the building were starting to get subdued by the will of the people. Madi was somewhere in that wet, smoky ash. Was his experience here not an echo of his teacher's truth? It is death that rises from the bird that interferes. He had stepped in and still and yet and anyway... Madi was gone. She had not met him by Orlan, she had suffered greatly and she had died alone, perhaps even around people who despised her the most.

A cool wind staggered among the people. A voice picked through the air and offered something dear. Someone was alive. He left Orlan to go by the outside of the group to see who it was, to hope and visit the ghost of the building that had been salvaged. It was Madison.

He could not have explained why it was his heart quickened more at the sight of her than the thought of her loss. With the delays and loops in their visits, he expected spans of time. Also, she had been the one to promise to bury him. Having seen her he turned and went to Orlan and stroked the side of his neck. The horse had finally started to adjust to the chaos, though remaining wary of it still. He did not want to fight the crowd to get to her, the event had happened and he had played his part for her. She should know, though, that he was all right.

Upon approaching Orlan there was a tree drawn in black ash on the saddle. It had been a bird, he just hadn't seen the pheonix.



By the time he had gotten home, the sun was threatening to rise. His bones had been pulled out through his feet. He did not smell like a clean shirt, like the woods. He smelled like the end of a book, like a bonfire of storytelling and the sweat of worry. It was all of those things on him. He did not stop by the house, he went directly to the neighbors where Penny would be. His expectation was her just anger, too great for such a small body.

At the bottom of the neighbor's staircase he stopped to take in a breath. Comedy or Tragedy?

"Heads up!" Penny in her nightgown sprinted from the top stair of the house and landed in his arms.