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sighed, thinking of the hectic outside world, which somehow felt more sedate than the new and unexpected chaos of Candida. There was a little breakfast left, scraps of vegetable and at least one mouthful of cooling salmon. ‘So your point is …?’
    ‘My point is, dreams are true. Your dream is true. It will happen.’
    ‘It already did,’ Kay told her, and forked the last of the salmon into her mouth; but her head was full of the dream, and she tasted nothing but hot smoke and the sweet, poisonous oil burning in the body of the dragon.
    Chapter Two: In the House of Traps
    Don’t let it touch you.
    Kay inspected herself in the anteroom mirror. She wanted to appear dignified. There was little she could do about the clothes, but she had washed as best she could in Azure’s tiny bathroom. It would be polite and politic to meet the chatelaine. Besides, she owed Azure.
    Don’t let the city touch you. Don’t let its stink get into your pores. Be clean-skinned.
    She looked rough, her eyes and her skin purpled by tiredness. There were more lines than she cared to remember, the slow erosion of time. She wondered how she had come to look so old when she hadn’t really lived. Her unpinned hair had gone jitterbug overnight, sprouting random strands and knots and tangles. She reached for her brush … damn, it was in her bag back in Azure’s room at the other end of the labyrinth. She tried to flatten it out with her fingers, and it barely noticed. She twirled the raggedy strands into the semblance of pigtails.
    Don’t let the city taste you. Don’t flirt with it. Don’t flash thigh or tit. Don’t copulate.
    ‘Don’t suck your hair like that. The strands fill your stomach to bursting. Then you die.’
    They were simply and unexpectedly there at her side, smiles like duelling scars. Kay tried not to look startled, even when the shorter of the two, the silent one, reached out to stroke her hair. In the mirror, her face formed a stoic grimace, faintly distressed by physical contact. Both her assailants burst into fits of schoolgirl giggles.
    The speaker – top-hatted and taller, with a grease-paint Groucho moustache – made a sweet clucking noise with her tongue. ‘I was like you. When I first arrived here, when I first Appeared, I was a fish without a bicycle. All those years I’d spent planning for the revolution, and here it was spread out before me like Lenin’s succulent, hairy vagina, and I panicked. Why didn’t I choose the blue pill? What I’m saying is that you grow into it. What’s Appeared can’t be Disappeared. It violates the laws of conservation.’ She was breathless. She sounded French. ‘I’m Luna and this is Quint. We represent the Lollipop Guild.’ More giggles.
    They flanked her, both lean and unthreatening, but still she felt trapped between them. She didn’t look at them directly but drew in their reflections. They were grinning like morons. Both were Victoria’s Secret connoisseurs (or victims), ridiculously overdressed in their elaborate costumes of basques, laces, suspenders, rings and belts strung with dangling windchime chains. It was difficult to tell how old they were beyond younger – clearly much younger than Kay. They might be tall children or freaks escaped from some locked attic. Their skins were pale, as if never exposed to the daylight.
    ‘You’re a real Celt, aren’t you?’ Quiet Quint spoke at last, shy, squeaky. She had a jester’s triceratops cap, with little bells that tinkled in time with her breath.
    Determined to remain dignified, even polite, Kay asked: ‘Do you live here?’
    Luna doffed her hat. ‘We are Flower-of-the-Lady’s Gestapo, her paladins, her sex-warriors. Show her, Quint.’
    Quint reached behind Kay’s ear and pulled out a small, patched kitten, which mewled on her palm then scampered down her side to the floor and was gone. ‘It’s a trick,’ she confessed, and looked away.
    ‘We’re bruja and sister. We’re daughters of dragons. Welcome