[Editor’s note: Here’s a short tale that shares the setting of Jay Lake’s new novel, Escapement, though enjoyment of the tale doesn’t depend on the novel.]

Zarai examined the bucket-ship Indolent Climax. Her bucket-ship. After fifteen years aboard Captain Quenna’s Blacklegs, scrapping and scheming up and down the Chain, she had finally secured her own command.

The owners were another matter. At least their endless yammering about yields and cargoes and demurrage didn’t follow her out of port.

The bucket-ship was tucked into the second quay at Bluerocks. Not a bad travel distance for the boom that plucked them off the Chain. Unlike the third and fourth quays, there was no swinging out over the long, hard fall to the stones of Atli’s Knee six and half miles below.

The quays were cantilevered out from the face of the Wall atop massive arches of old, old iron which had held their place since long before the current port of Bluerocks had even existed Perhaps they, like the Chain, were old as Creation. She preferred to think of things that way than contemplate who might have raised the arches in the six thousand years since. These days an endless gang of masons and ironsmiths and carpenters kept the quay in condition to receive vessels.

Indolent Climax, like most of her sisters, resembled an almond sliced in half at the waist. The hooking frame circled her there, at her widest point. A long, narrow hull depended from the frame, while her maindeck and poop stood just above. Small watch-decks extended over the side at the three outer points. She also sported a rare glassed-in watch-house on the falls side.

The ship crewed eleven and shipped forty tons of cargo. The log showed that Indolent Climax had been as far down the Wall as Inktown, where the lowest booms stood, though the Chain ran farther. She’d been as high up the Wall as Port Sky, only six miles below the uppermost booms at Heavengate.

Zarai hope to make the entire run some day, from foot to crown. She’d ride the balloon tram from Heavengate to the top of the Wall. From there you could touch the great brass gear that ringed the Earth, and look down upon the queendoms of the flatwater world. She wondered sometimes if anyone had ever tried to set a boom there. An ambitious captain might send a bucket-ship into the aetheric spaces between the stars as the orbital ring passed by at midnight.

Dreams for another time, she reminded herself. For now she paced the quay, following the walkway where the dock ring met the hooking frame to keep Indolent Climax safe as an egg in a cup.

The bucket-ship was magnificent. Anyone would be forced to admit that.

Zarai summoned her courage, then climbed aboard to meet her very first crew.

#

An hour later Zarai was in the master’s cabin with her new first mate and the bucket-ship’s Chain pilot. Beita, the mate, was a stolid woman of a pallid coloring who hailed from somewhere far to the east along the Wall. She had been with Indolent Climax almost a dozen years. Zarai would need to watch for jealousy in that one, passed over for the captaincy to which she had just been appointed.

The Chain pilot was an enkidu–one of the hulking, hairy folk almost as common as humans on the Wall. She called herself Aa. Zarai suspected Aa of being male, but she didn’t know enkidus well enough to be certain. Being flighty and unreliable, not to mention disgusting, men were widely regarded as creatures of ill omen aboard a ship. If Beita and the owners were satisfied with Aa, Zarai knew that she must be too.

There was a fine line between asserting control and pushing the senior crew to the point of resentment. She’d seen that hand overplayed, for fear of the risks of too little discipline.

Indolent Climax shipped with no cargo officer, though there was a tiny cubby if such a woman were ever needed. Beita had played that part this day, due to Zarai being new aboard. The captain knew she’d have to take the responsibility soon enough. Still, she considered this a missed opportunity. An additional officer might have balanced out the crew better.

“Grab underarm is brittle,” Aa complained in a voice that rumbled like distant thunder. Her nose was so big Zarai might have slipped her bunched fingers into each nostril. The captain found that very distracting when trying to interpret the enkidu’s heavy accent. Blacklegs had shipped none of Aa’s kind.

Beita nodded. “Captain Marra was planning to have it repaired when we next called at The Irons.”

That was poorly done, Zarai thought, to leave behind a vessel which could not properly grasp on to the Chain. “Did she have a letter of credit from the owners?”

Beita and Aa exchanged a slow glance that made Zarai wonder for a moment if they were a bonded pair. She’d never had time herself for more than the usual run of dockside girls. A bond had always seemed a pleasant dream. What she’d had with her old captain had been something else. Something less. But… to bond with an enkidu?

Aa snuffled. Beita picked at the pockets of her leather vest a moment before looking up. “No ma’am. Captain Marra paid for most of our repairs out of her own funds.”

“I see.” Zarai felt a lurch in her gut. She was well enough provided for, thanks be to her old mistress. Beyond that, she was always frugal with her darics. She kept deposits in the strong-banks of five different ports along the Chain. But that wasn’t ship money. If she had ship money, she’d be the owner. “How brittle? Do we lose grip?”

“Have not yet dropped off link,” rumbled Aa. “Have been one or two slips.”

“One or two?”

Beita nodded, supporting Aa. “A few. It’s all logged, ma’am.”

Still, they were shipping out again. It couldn’t be that bad. “What else?”

A litany of rusted bolts, loosening springs and rotting wood followed. Zarai had sailed aboard Blacklegs from her first descent until this day. Captain Quenna was a cautious woman who almost always kept mid-Chain and feared men with a passion that Zarai had come to share without ever quite understanding. Beyond the obvious, of course. But Blacklegs had been very well kept indeed. They’d never been taken for a seedpod–what sailors called those bucket-ships everyone thought would soon drop away.

Indolent Climax was another matter entirely, much to Zarai’s shame.

She resolved to write a long letter to the owners that very night, documenting the scandalous condition of the ship and suggesting the need for a prompt refit. But not too soon. If Indolent Climax went into the yards at The Irons or High Thefariae for a month, Zarai would be out of work again. With only one ship and a single captain signed off in her ticket boot, she needed time at her own helm before that happened.

Otherwise she might not find another berth.

#

The boom came for them just after four bells of the afternoon watch. Zarai stood proudly on the maindeck. The crimson cloak of her command billowed in the wind of the Wall. At any rate, she thought it billowed, until she realized she’d caught a corner in her leather trousers when adjusting her clothing a few minutes earlier. That was set right with a moment’s embarrassed tugging.

Zarai watched the three heavily-tattooed dwarfs who worked the boomhead lower their pinch into position. They were a hereditary class, with a guild language all their own, teeth filed to points, and a high fatality rate. Aa directed from the poop, booming terse orders to the four crew womanning Indolent Climax’s grab.

The pinch had to settle properly around the outside of the grab. It then needed to be secured into place well enough to support the weight of the bucket-ship. Secondary cables stretched from the boom head to the watch-decks on the vessel’s outer points, secured there to the ribs of the hull. Those lines kept Indolent Climax from tipping as the boom swung her out away from the quay and toward the Chain.

Aa pumped a fist three times, the lock-down signal.

“Boom away!” shouted Zarai.

One of the dwarfs grinned sharply as the hawsers from the boom took up the slack. Indolent Climax creaked, then shifted in her berth.

The first opportunity for danger was that the boom might have been poorly set, or that a hawser would break. A moment later they were swinging free without mishap. Zarai recovered her breath. “Chain pilot, the ship is yours!”

“Aye,” rumbled Aa.

The boom swung them out toward the rushing waters of the River Vertus.

#

The Vertus rises just above Heavengate, issuing in a mighty torrent from a giant crack six or seven miles below the top of the Wall. It tumbles through a series of cataracts and channels and watercourses, descending almost ninety miles before it pours over the Lip of Ashtaroth below Inktown and out into the empty air above the Atlantic Ocean.

On its own account, the River Vertus is said to be a wonder of the Wall. What sets the it apart from a hundred other magnificent waterfalls and vertical rivers at the waist of the world is the Chain.

Certain mystes aver that the Chain is a remnant of God’s Creation, a tool with which He crafted the world. Others point out that since God is by definition incapable of imperfection, the Chain must be part of the natural order. Most people take the view that the Chain exists, and therefore the thing simply is, much like the Wall itself.

The Chain loops emerge from a cavern half a mile below the outlet of the River Vertus. It follows the channel of the Vertus all the way downward, re-entering the Wall at the Lip of Ashtaroth. Each link is said to be forged of the same brass forming the ring gear at the top of the Wall, as well as the great whorl of clockwork which lies at the heart of the Earth. These links extend one hundred eighty three feet from bow to base. They alternate between rightwise links and crosswise links. The Chain descends at a steady half a mile per hour, making the entire trip down the Wall from Heavengate to Inktown a matter of some four days’ work.

Taking a bucket-ship back up was another matter entirely.

#

Indolent Climax dangled from the boom, being soaked by spray from the roaring rush of the River Vertus. Aa and her four crewwomen locked the grab as one of the rightwise links slid slowly by. That was a quick operation, as a link of the Chain took four minutes and ten seconds from base to bow to pass a fixed point. The chain pilot and her crew had two and half minutes to secure the grab and release the boom’s pinch so that the bucket-ship would be safely away on the Chain. Otherwise they would need to declare a missed grab while the boom still had time to clear them, before the next crosswise link came down.

At one minute and fifty-five seconds by the grab timer, Aa bellowed the all clear. The tattooed dwarfs on the boom waved as they swung away. Indolent Climax had begun her journey down.

Aa’s voice echoed across the deck. “Captain, ship is yours!”

Zarai was in complete command of her destiny for the first time in her life.

#

It would be fourteen hours down-Chain to their first port of call at Catha. Given the afternoon departure, that meant a night run through the Angel Narrows. That was one of the most difficult parts of the River Vertus. It was also one of the few passages which the bucket-ship crews preferred to transit upward rather than down.

Down was always the sailor’s friend, provided the deck was clear and the grip was good.

Zarai tucked herself into the glass watch-house and stared along the Chain. Nineteen times out of twenty, the passage through the Angel Narrows was peaceful. But when the Chain pirates attacked, a ship and crew were at peril.

Speed was never an option on a downward course. Bucket-ships moved at the Chain’s pace, no more, no less. Some captains preferred to batten tight and take refuge below. Such a strategy required trust that nothing came on the deck which was strong enough to breach the hatches. Others hired toughs; lop-eared women with scars for breasts who could line the rail and pepper any threat with weapons fire, and if needed, contest possession of the deck at swords-point.

She’d ridden Angel Narrows both ways time and again in her trips under Quenna–first as deck hand, then as supercargo, and finally as first mate. Hiding below listening to the groaning thump of the bucket-ship always made her half-crazed. Zarai now found that standing on the deck as they descended between glistening rock walls lined with shadowed ledges frightened her.

She was the captain. She would face this.

At dusk Zarai rang all hands. They assembled just below the small platform of the poop. Aa waited by her four, who served as deck hands and general labor during a descent. They worked much harder on the way up. Beita was ranked with her three watch-standers, one of whom doubled as ship’s carpenter. Finally there was the cook, an old woman named Megg who came with the ship’s equipage and so in theory answered to the owners. Like most cooks she answered only to herself.

“We will pass the Angel Narrows during the mid-bells of the first night watch,” Zarai called out.

Aa and Beita exchanged another of those glances. They must be a pair, she thought, but how can Beita couple with such an… animal? She tried to excuse them both as foreign and therefore ignorant.

“Though I am confident that we will sail without incident, the crew will be on deck with hooks and pistoles in the unlikely event of trouble.”

That brought a small laugh.

“We will be safe.”

They just stared at her. Some of the older crewwomen shook their heads.

Zarai felt as if she’d just missed the point of a joke. There always seemed to be sailors who treated pirate attacks as somehow humorous. She’d even heard that the sort of perverted women who favored sexual relations with men claimed to look forward to the clandestine visits.

Sometimes she wondered if she’d missed more than one point.

#

Zarai was on the poop just after three bells of the first watch. She was studying the grab and thinking about putting mirrors on the rail to keep a descent watch when the first of the Chain pirates hit the deck. She spun on her heel and snap-drew her pistole. A quick pull of the trigger set the spring within the butt to buzzing as the twinned darts launched from the barrel-rails.

One dart missed the pirate. The other lodged in the pangolin-leather across his midriff.

His, she thought. There’s a man on my ship now. Bad luck for certain.

The invader was definitely male. Short, broad-shouldered, with a swelling gut wrapped in that distinctive diamond-scaled armor. A huge, dark cape whipped behind him in the wind that boomed along the Angel Narrows. He wore high boots rolled down around his knee, canvas trousers, and a tricorn hat sporting a long, pale feather.

His face, so handsome and strange… men were supposed to be beneath a woman’s notice, but somehow this one was not.

Zarai tore herself away from the Chain pirate’s visible amusement and leapt for the ship’s bell. “Repel boarders!”

She heard Beita cry, “No, no, it’s a mistake,” but already there were more hitting the deck with the distinctive buzz of rope-sliders.

“Drive them off!” Zarai screamed.

Crewwomen shouted as the clash of arms erupted across the bucket-ship’s deck. Someone shrieked, “By shit, not this way.”

Zarai hefted the long-poled boarding hook which had been clipped beneath the rail. She braced it before her and advanced on the Chain pirate. Men were like dogs or children–if you showed the hard side of a firm hand, they remembered their place.

Except this one hadn’t read that broadsheet. His laughter shivered the black curls of hair cascading down his shoulders. Distracted once more, she was just as glad she couldn’t make out the color of his eyes.

His laughter choked off swiftly enough when her hook caught him in the thigh. Showing speed she didn’t expect from a mere man, the pirate grabbed her weapon on and yanked.

Zarai was wise to that trick. She stepped into the pull, giving the Chain pirate slack where he’d expected resistance. It was the almost opposite of dancing, but still strangely intimate–her thighs shivered. He stumbled as she recovered her weapon. Angry at her continued distraction, she kicked the dart still stuck in his belly armor. The point pointed through the leather and into his gut.

The Chain pirate hissed and slid back against the deck rail.

Someone screamed on the maindeck below. The boarding rope slapped into Zarai as she tried to identify the voice. The attacker rushed her again as she looked away.

Damn his eyes, she thought, his brute persistence is a credit to his gender.

She swung for his ankles this time. He leapt over the shaft of the hook and came at her with a short, broad gutting knife. Zarai stepped into the blade, letting it catch in the doubled muslin of her shirt so she could whack the Chain pirate on the back of the head with her boarding hook.

His extravagant hat blew off over the rail as he dropped to his knees. With a surprised expression, the man fell face first onto the deck. A crunch suggested his nose was broken.

Zarai gave him an extra kick in the arse for good measure. Who could have thought she’d be so distracted by a man? She looked over her deck. A knot of six or seven of her crewwomen were being forced back by men.

Strange. With Aa’s mighty strength in their midst, they should have struggled more fiercely. Had they all gone weak? Was it some subtle poison in the sweat of men?

Zarai rewound her pistole and loaded another pair of darts into the barrel-rails. That took almost half a minute–a very long time in a fight–but she wanted the full advantage of surprise. She took a deep breath, jumped down to the maindeck, and shot two men in the back of the head. In the surge of confusion which followed, someone fell over the rail with a terrified scream.

That was enough for the Chain pirates.

The survivors ran for their ropes and leapt buzzing upward into the darkness, power springs in their sliders unwinding to carry them away. They were no doubt skimming toward by their upskiff moored a link or two above Indolent Climax. If Zarai had possessed a fire-thrower she would have hosed the night air in hopes of alighting their ropes, their trousers, or ideally their boat.

Pistole still in her hand, she looked at her crew. “What damage?”

“Beita is lost over side,” said Aa. Even in the darkness, the tears glittered in the enkidu’s eyes.

Damn.

“And Liian is gone,” added another woman.

A deckhand? No, Aa would have spoken. One of Beita’s watch-standers. Two short there. Zarai cursed herself for not knowing her crew list by name already. “Are the rest of you in health?”

Aa’s arms twitched, startling Zarai. She realized that the big enkidu woman was ready to strike her down with those ham fists. “Aa, go below with Megg and take some valerian tea. The rest of you rid my deck of these miserable creatures. We’ll stand watch as a crew until we clear the last of the narrows.”

“And you?” asked Megg as she took Aa by the forearm.

Zarai felt a hard, dark flame in the core of her heart. Her ship. Her officers. Her crew. That a simple, foolish man could violate them so badly… that he could distract her so badly…

“I have captured their leader. I shall take Beita’s worth from him.”

“Careful,” the old woman said. “Don’t climb further up a rope you already can’t get down from.”

“I’m the captain here.” Zarai’s voice was colder than she’d intended, but she would be damned if she would unsay the words.

Megg nodded, then tugged Aa toward the anti-Chainward hatch. The other crewwomen spread out across the deck, grumbling as they tossed broken weapons and shreds of cloth into a trough. Two bent over each of the bodies with sidelong looks at Zarai.

You never jettisoned anything over the rail, save in direst emergency, for there were always bucket-ships below you. Zarai reckoned that her captured Chain pirate’s severed hands and feet could be considered a dire emergency.

She went to start in on her first man.

#

Zarai waited until the prisoner regained consciousness. His rope continued to drag on her deck, but she pushed it aside and left it alone. That meant the pirate’s fellows were still up there somewhere, staring down at the woman who had bested them and taken their leader.

The clattering of the earth’s orbital gearing echoed down the Angel Narrows, marking the moment of sidereal midnight. As the noise died away, the Chain pirate groaned and opened his eyes.

His face was a mess, nose crushed in the fall. She’d let him keep bleeding. No point in stanching that. He wouldn’t need the blood much longer anyway.

“Hello,” Zarai said. She sat on her haunches, the man’s wide boning knife gripped so tight in her hand that the blade shook.

“Deah la’y,” he began, then stopped. That smile of his had tried to come back, but she guessed he’d broken some teeth.

Even damaged, he had an eerie charm.

“Guess what I lost tonight?” She hated the brittle edge in her voice.

“Ahh…” He nearly went cross-eyed with the effort of getting the failed word out.

Fine, she thought. I’ll have this conversation by myself. “I seem to have misplaced my first mate, as well as one of my deckhands. Beita and… “ Zarai paused, embarrassed that she could not bring the name to mind. She continued in a rush. “Do you recall how those fine women came to tumble over my rail?”

“No’ wha’ ‘ou…” The Chain pirate gave up again. Even through the pain, he still smiled with his eyes.

That glint! It made her furious, and at the same time sparked wonderment. “How do you do that?”

“Wha’?”

Zarai had known a girl once, in High Thefariae, who could smile across a smoky barroom and set her groin to flowing. Marlis, of the short cropped hair and breasts so small and flat she might have been a girl. They’d only ever made love once, but the bruises had stayed on Zarai’s heart for months. She’d hidden much from Quenna for a while after that.

Something about this man reminded her of Marlis. There was no physical resemblance, but the effect he had on her was similar. She felt shamed, as if she were lusting after a dog.

The smile finally reached his broken mouth.

Zarai leaned close. Oh God, the smell of him. “You’re not afraid of anything, are you?”

“’ou.”

It was his absolute confidence which galled her. Lying broken on her deck, cut off from his crew, this mere man already knew he was going to win.

She’d show him better. She would be a captain to be feared up and down the Chain.

Megg squatted next to her and laid one wrinkled hand across Zarai’s knife hand.

She looked sidelong at the cook. “What do you want?”

“Don’t go up that rope, Captain.”

“His men killed two of ours.”

Megg sighed. The old cook cocked her head to give the wounded prisoner a crooked smile. “You always was a beautiful man, Janton,” she told the Chain pirate. “Shame you didn’t get the news.”

“What news?” A cold horror stained Zarai’s heart.

The cook looked her in the eye. “Who’d you ship under, ‘fore?”

Zarai answered slowly: “Quenna. Aboard Blacklegs.”

“Ah.” Megg stroked Janton’s hand. “Only ever served on Blacklegs, girl and woman?”

“Yes. Until now.”

Megg closed her fist around the wounded man’s fingers, then began cleaning the blood off his face with her free hand. “I hear tell that old Quenna never had a man. Not as bond-mate nor toy nor slave.”

Zarai blushed, glad it was dark. “No. Of course not.” Quenna had kept her for a long while, promoting Zarai over time until finally kicking her overboard with a master’s certificate to bring on a tall, much younger woman greatly resembling the naive girl who’d boarded Blacklegs years earlier.

“Some ships do it different.” Rocking on her heels, Megg traced the line of Janton’s jaw. “Most, even. Captain Marra, she and Janton here, they kept an understanding. Drop in, do a little knife dance with no cuts nor bruises, then go below for an hour or two of the old snake-and-pig. Call it an attack, write off a bit of cargo, split the take.” She spat on the poop, a sailor’s insult surely as any vile words. “Poor bastard didn’t know Marra had gone to rock.” She leaned close to Janton. “This will hurt like blazes, dearie.”

Megg pushed the man’s nose back into place. His heels drummed the deck and his breath hissed like water on coals, but he didn’t call out.

“His crew and mine weren’t fighting,” Zarai whispered, staring at her hands. “They were stalling for time.”

The old cook grunted as something cracked in Janton’s nose. “You didn’t know, and they didn’t know you didn’t know.” She sighed. “We’ll have to put him ashore at Catha port and hope someone can fix his mouth. As for crew, we figured you was just rough trade at first. Then it all tumbled down at once. Liian was already gone up the rope with one of her regular men. Beita fell on account of your attack at the end.”

Zarai put her face in her hands. “Quenna never told me any of this.”

“Where did you think the little babbies come from?” Megg’s words were an angry rush. “Have you ever seen a woman fill another woman’s belly? ‘Tis the men who help a woman make more of herself. Their kind cannot marry nor hold property. Some won’t live like cats shut in a playroom. Many bucket-ships have their reg’lar pirates. ‘Tis the way of things, except for prudes like Quenna who hide the truth and call their lie righteous.”

“And now I’ve killed three of them.”

“Did you never drink with other crews, listen to them wink and laugh?”

“No… I…” She’d always stayed close to her captain-lover. Quenna had ignored the occasional jokes from other captains, other crews, so of course Zarai had as well. No wonder their deckhands had turned over so much faster than most ships.

She’d always told herself it was because Quenna’s standards were so high. How could she have been so naïve?

Because you never wanted to believe it, she thought. It never made sense that women would soil themselves so.

Somehow that idea seemed less outrageous now.

“I hear tell they do things different in other lands,” muttered Megg. She scooted around to gather Janton’s head into her lap. He moaned with pain, but settled in. “The enkidus got five husbands each, for the light and dark of the moon, and they share ‘em around like good rat terriers. Out on the flatwater queendoms, they’s one to another like geese do. But up here on the Chain, it’s two countries and two queendoms. One for us, and one for the men.”

Years of snickers and behind-the-hand looks came home in a guilt rush. “I’ve ruined the arrangement for Indolent Climax.”

“Captain, you’ve ruined more than the arrangement.” Megg rocked Janton, soothing his forehead. He’d passed out again.

Zarai walked to the rail. She stared up the Chain, thinking on what Quenna would have said. He’s just a man. They don’t even feel pain, really. Like animals.

That couldn’t be true. Not the way he smiled. Even through the veil of his pain, there was a genuine warmth to Janton. Like Marlis, whom she had to admit, had been mannish.

Her face burned in the darkness with embarrassed anguish. How had she never seen the truth? She could blame Quenna, but Zarai’s thoughts had always been her own. Her heart was her own.

Most importantly, her deeds were her own. Especially the ruining of this man. Being in command wasn’t supposed to be like this. No wonder Quenna had turned inward, seeing only below Blacklegs’ decks.

The water’s rush altered around her. The creaking echo of the Chain abated as Indolent Climax passed out of the bottom of Angel Narrows. Zarai could see across the flatwater world miles below her. A terrible storm raged, lightning flickering through the top of a vast sea of turbulent clouds. Cold stars above glimmered on both sides of the Earth’s track. The moon’s lesser track gleamed brass-bright.

Night covered Northern Earth, but her heart was darker yet.

Janton’s rope banged into Zarai once more. The pirate’s drop line twisted vigorously now that they’d descended into open air.

That meant the up-skiff was still moored above them. The Chain pirates were close overhead, waiting for their leader. Or his body.

“I am better than Quenna,” Zarai told no one in particular.

Janton moaned as Megg looked up again. “Ma’am?”

“I will not be her.” Zarai grabbed the rope-slider, where it was lodged at the bottom of the Chain pirate’s line. “I will not pretend.” She slipped her hand into the grip, fastened the loop around her wrist and elbow.

“You certain you want to go up that rope?” Megg asked.

“No,” Zarai replied. She nodded at Janton. “But this happened because I was certain of something I didn’t understand at all. It’s not that I want to lie with a man.”

Liar, said a little voice within.

She ignored that, ignored the memories of Marlis which were already mingling with vague fantasies of a healthy, smiling Janton. Zarai continued, “I can’t say if I ever will take a man to my breast. But I’ve never looked any of them in the eye as if he were a person. I owe his crew the life of their captain. I go to explain, and apologize.”

Megg snorted, but there was a look in her eyes which might have been respect. “If you leave this ship, you won’t come back the same woman.”

“Does anyone who leaves ever come back the same?” Zaria bent close to Janton. “I’m sorry,” she said, and kissed his sweaty forehead. The smell of him made her thighs shiver all over again.

She stood, released the stop-catch and shot upward through the wet night toward the world of men.