“Ontogeny, oh, let me tell you about Ontogeny,” she says, hair full of bangs and fingers full of calluses. “Let me tell you about the broke and unemployed, the gardeners and the drinkers.”

Picture us, drinking in a piano bar, half drowned out by Gershwin songs having their backs broken by karaoke. Cash only. Me: “Don’t tell me about that. Ontogeny’s old news. I’ve been to Ontogeny, it’s all low roofs and moving vans, all strip clubs and salt mud. Tell me about angrier cities.”

She laughs who hasn’t paid for a beer all night. “Angriest city I’ve ever been in was this place called Rem, way over across the sea. Didn’t speak a lick of the language, no, but who cared? They hated foreigners, sure, but then they all hated each other, too. You could get beat up for smiling too widely, stabbed for laughing. Ugliest damn buildings, all square slabs and narrow windows and all the roads were full of broken glass, I swear they did it on purpose.”

“Why the hell’d anyone live there?”

“Brother, it was pure mean-headedness. They all hated the place with a passion but they hated to let anyone leave more. They’d lie in wait for you on the road outside of town, and if they caught you leaving they’d gut you open like an Argentine fish and dump you in the river full of rocks.”

“How you get out, then?”

She grins all malice, yellow teeth chewing on smoke. “Hitched a ride on a corpse, naturally. Ran a snorkel up through the throat and sucked air through the ruins of his trachea and just floated on down to sea. It was all I could taste for, like, a month.”

I don’t believe a word of it, no way no how, but there’s another round of beers to buy and they’re likely to call us up to the piano any day now. Here at least we understand hospitality.

Only those born here call it Bridge. To everyone else it has a thousand less complimentary names: the Maze, Lose-Your-Way, Alleyway, the Fucking Nightmare. Cut by countless rivers, pierced by canyon upon canyon, tatted thick with bridges delicate and sturdy. Cedar loves it, could live here forever (she thinks), finally, a city as big as the world. Gangs lost in the warrens so long they have built their own language, grown their own culture, faces thick with city-paint; the several markets might as well be embassies, trade as complex and beautiful as treaty-making…

They are all as homeless here as she is, as vagabond: to step outside is to be lost, rooms swallowed by the turning of a corner. They carry their few belongings on their bodies, as does she, and everywhere she turns she meets another short-legged, thick-soled woman with a backpack. If they don’t speak the language, so what? Chinook is universal, if inelegant, and her mercurial tongue finds homecoming in every stranger mouth.

She sleeps in alleyways, in rooms above bars, in sweaty bordellos, in smoke-filled hotels. She trades on her wits, and a million lies. The city is blessed by sun, cauled by water, and Cedar, dust-raddled citizen of the road, finds her home and loses it, every night, truly.

All hands, all elbows, and shifting, endless eyes.

This uneasy protean lump of flesh has thrashed its way beyond the city walls, beyond all human company. It speaks in every human voice, a graceless, thick-tongued burble of words and unfinished thoughts. Matted and patchy with hair, it has rolled between Cedar and the fields. She finds herself reflected in cow’s eyes, dog’s eyes, human eyes warm and brown, ashen beneath her sunbeaten skin.

She hides among the stalks. It passes by, a wash of sewer heat rattling her against the corn, a brace of hounds trailing after with jaws aslobber. The crossroads and the dogs shred it apart, one for every uneasy limb, and disperse severally, hands and arms and weeping eyes clutched triumphantly in yellow teeth.

She issues forth, Cedar of the roads, and stands in an empty silence. In the dust a million palmprints, each smaller, just slightly, than her own.

An endless wood, gouged with trenches, scarred with mortars, choked with gas. Their uniforms and flags have gone grey with mildew, green with mold, and their faces worn away in the endless cycle of front line-relief-support-and-furlough. They are sodden lumps of wool and iron.

Cedar has been hired as a messenger, but in this trackless tangle she has lost her way. The lines shift daily, hourly; now before her, now behind her, somehow never crossing her position.

Her dispatches must be out of date, must come too late, but she can’t find anyone to take them. She asks directions of the faceless men, but is swamped in their reek of foreign beer. Always elsewhere. The guns are always firing over the next hill, behind the next stand of trees, but she is always too late, a forced witness to an apocalypse already achieved.

Leopard head and leopard head; xie sees in all directions at once, and from one end of the spectrum to the other, and all the universe vibrates in every indivisble atom.

Cedar is drunk again and handsy as hell. “Wait, wait, wait,” she says. “Wait. No, listen–” She leans over to puke into what is, momentarily, a jasmine bush. One of hir mouths waters uncontrollably and begins to speak prophecy; something about famines, something about empires. The future is an endless spool of magnetic tape.

She plays with hir wings, spreads the remiges wide and slides her fingers between them, peeps through. Xie shivers, feels it down to hir pelt. They trip on the sudden cobblestones and collapse laughing in a doorway that had been a phone booth.

“I love you,” says Cedar, “I love this place, I love everything! Hey, no, hey, listen…”

They cling to each other and Daniel folds all four of hir wings in tight. The eighteenth century slides past, but Cedar is snoring, passed out, and misses it.