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crossing, their friendship would expire. Eager to avoid that day and conscious of the sudden change in mood, he made his excuses.
    With his back resolutely turned to the humiliating scene, Pedro continued scanning the northside until he came to a figure standing by the river. The young man was dressed in the black hood and short cloak of an engineer, but Pedro would have known he was foreign anyway—he was standing closer to the water than a Rasenneisi ever would.
    Pedro was delighted when his father instructed him to escort Signore Bombelli to the Midnight Road. “Wear a scarf and wait until you can see he has crossed safely.”
    He leaped down from his perch and flung on a long cassock. Like his father’s, it had a strange array of tools in hidden pockets. Pedro was always glad for an excuse to escape from the stifling smell of wool and caution, but right now all he wanted to know was why this stranger was not afraid of the water.

CHAPTER 6
    The moment the sun appeared, Captain Giovanni threw off his dark hooded cloak, revealing a mane of untidy black hair covering a brow furrowed in thought as he studied the river. His eyes were dark, and his broad leonine face was dominated by a large, honest nose. An emaciated dog had limped after him since he’d arrived, and now it sniffed at the bag cautiously, clearly expecting to be chased away. He let it be.
    It was too early in the year for the northern mountains’ snowmelt, but the current was still powerfully fast and loud. He could see where the landslides had happened, of course, but there’d been little erosion of the banks after the initial Wave, which was typical of a forced river diversion: when they came, they came suddenly. These were the signs trained eyes detected, but it did not take an engineer to see this river was abnormal. Normal rivers do not flow uphill.
    No wonder the Rasenneisi kept their distance. He knew the theory, and he had seen one other like it, but still it made him uneasy, like a thing from a story of omens and prodigies. From what he had heard, Rasenna was a town out of place too, still living in a time when it was somewhere that mattered.
    “Probably don’t get many strangers, eh?”
    The dog turned its head curiously. The flat Concordian accent sounded strange, almost toneless compared with the singing dialect it was used to. The engineer took a biscuit from the bag and threw it, and the dog snatched it out of the air, teeth clamping loudly.
    “I guess they don’t feed strays here either.” A soft smile spread over his face like the sun moving over rocks, softening the deep shadows in between. While the dog barked and wagged its appreciation, Giovanni turned back to the river with the same stern look. He opened the bag fully. Everything inside fit neatly, with no wasted space. The dog studied the young man as he patiently searched; it was accustomed to intemperate passions—a Rasenneisi would either have chased it away or adopted it by now.
    The engineer found the tool he needed and, after adjusting the dials on the small glass rod, sank to the ground and crawled to the side of the bank. He’d dipped the rod into the water and was about to sink his whole hand in when the dog growled. Giovanni watched his flickering reflection carefully, then quickly stood as a shimmering hand gushed from the water and swiped at where his face had been a moment ago. The water lost its shape and dropped back formlessly into the river, and as the dog barked again, Giovanni realized it was barking not at the creature but at him—it had been warning him.
    He frowned. His unkindly brow was at odds with his shepherd’s eyes. Normally pseudonaiades moved sluggishly out of water, as awkward as men were in their world, but he guessed normal did not apply to a river not meant to be: a residue of the charge that had called up the Wave must still be present, though much depleted. As the errant partials tried to get home, so the water tended to stray—that was his