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want me around. Not really. They just wanted me to feel bad for not being like them. I felt the certainty of it like a stone in my boot that I couldn’t shake out, a constant irritant that might one day make me lame.
    No wonder I preferred life up on the chimneys, alone in the sky.
    â€œI have to go back to work,” I said, rising. “Has anyone…?”
    I hesitated, and Rahvey gave me a blank look this time.
    â€œHas anyone been to the cemetery?” I asked, my voice carefully neutral.
    Rahvey turned away. “We’ve been a little busy,” she said, her voice managing to suggest an outrage she didn’t really feel.
    I nodded. “I’ll go,” I said.
    â€œOf course you will,” said Rahvey. And this time the bitterness was real.

 
    CHAPTER
    3
    ON THE EAST SIDE of the Drowning was an ancient, weather-beaten temple teeming with vervet monkeys and fire-eyed grackles. It was as close to leaving the city as I ever got, a kind of halfway house between the urban sprawl of Bar-Selehm and the wilderness beyond. By day, an elderly priest burned incense and chanted among the weed-choked altars for whoever put a copper coin in his bowl, but by night, the little shrines and funerary markers were haunted by baboons and hyenas. For a city girl like me, it was unnerving, but I had no choice. Two years ago, my father’s remains were buried here.
    Papa.
    He was a good Lani, a good father, a kindly, brown-eyed giant of a man, quick to grin, to play, to tease. I had loved him with all my heart, and I missed him every day.
    â€œI’ll always keep you safe, Anglet,” he had said. “I’ll always be there to look after you.”
    The only lie he ever told me.
    I was already grown up when he died, already working, but till then and in spite of everything I went through in the Seventh Street gang, I had never felt truly alone. Papa had always been there, a buffer between me and my sisters, my work, the world in general, ready with a touch, a word, a smile that calmed my raging blood, dried my tears, and told me that all would yet be well. Always. He was my rock, my consolation, and my joy. When Papa looked at me, the universe made sense, and all the words the others hurled at me fell harmless at my feet or blew away like smoke.
    He died in a mining accident with four other Lani men. He was trying to reach two apprentices who had been trapped by a rockfall, but the new passage they opened released a pocket of gas. There was an explosion. It took a week to get to the bodies after the shaft collapsed, and I was not allowed to see him. His remains were burned, as is our custom, and the ash strewn over the river, save for one fragment of bone that was interred in the hard, dusty grounds of the temple.
    Two years to the day.
    I have been alone ever since. I believe the two apprentices were found unharmed.
    Tanish came with me to the grave, eyeing me sidelong and careful not to make noise. Partly he was trying to show respect, but it was also the place that left him subdued. He had seen enough death for one day. I would have told him to leave me to my thoughts, but a family of hippos had taken over the riverbank below the temple, and a Lani woman had been killed by one of them when she went to draw water only a couple of weeks before. I didn’t want him wandering alone, so I let him hover awkwardly at my back as I found the marker and knelt down, sitting on my heels.
    Someone had placed crimson tsuli flowers on the grave, bound with gold cord. They were fresh and lustrous, hothouse grown at this time of year. Expensive.
    Vestris.
    It had to be. I felt a quickening of my pulse as I sensed my sister’s presence, and my eyes flashed hungrily around the graveyard as if she might still be there. But she was gone, and my disappointment felt suddenly shameful. Deflated, I adjusted the flowers and focused on the stone marker, feeling young and alone.
    Family is family.
    Except when