Everyone thinks they’re the one: the one that won’t get clipped, the one that will make the jump, the one that will hold on just that little bit longer. The burn won’t burn, the ice won’t sear. The bear will glance aside on a moonless night. There must have been a time when Judith felt that way, but she can’t remember when; just one more indulgence a professional can’t afford. Young whores are brave; old whores cultivate cowardice. Knives cut, fire burns, smoke smothers: don’t wait to find out if you’re special.

She’s been planet-hopping for a while now, unhappy with everything on offer. Stratus is the best of a bad lot, densely settled, heterogeneous, oceans the deep purple of a three day bruise. Sex sells well enough; she’s not starving anyway. She opens a second house, then a third, could see herself settling down long term. It’s all good enough.

But she’s got an ear to the ground and when the first rumbles come—the anti-intellectualism, the fear of difference, the doublespeak—she doesn’t waste time mourning, just ups stakes and departs for sunnier climes. She paid her dues in blood long ago; let others carry the sword now.

The farmboy Justin slips away at night and takes to the roads, heading toward the city, dreaming of skilled work, guild work. He dreams of adventure, of love, of riches untold, but most strongly of being something better and rarer and more interesting than he was before. He longs for tight alleyways, the crush of pubs, the splendors of the public baths: city life!

Life in the city is hard and lonely at first. He gets a job in a factory and it’s grim, repetitive work. The pubs take his money and repay him in headaches and a throat scraped raw. He lives in a room with five other refugees from the farms; they mostly talk about being homesick and how much money they’re sending back to their sainted mothers. He gets fired from his job, and thrown out onto the street. In desperation, he returns to the baths, where hands clever from the bobbins can make money in other ways.

His skills grow legendary; he spends less than a month in the baths before finding a room of his own—all his!—in the factory district; less than a year in the factory district before buying a house of his own in the merchant quarter; less than five before buying a mansion in the hills. Those who know, know, and shower him with wealth, furs, jewelry; the mansion fills with fountains and music and highly polished discretion.

Lions haunt the seven long over the fields of Harbona. It has been a century and more since the last long feline summer closed — not in blood, or in fear, but in a quiet dusty corner deep in some nameless alley on the north end of town. Control came and cleared away the mouldering heap, mane ratted straw, just one more troublesome body to dispose of; it was only in retrospect that let those who cared pin it as the last big cat the city had seen.

Nowadays it’s only blunt-toothed predators that sit yawning on an August stoop. The Parsimonious Kid and his punk lie sun-mazed, twined together, scabby legs and rotten shorts, teeth browned and foul smelling, fingers stained with tobacco and iodine. The punk is playing with a knife, flicking it open and closed, open and closed. His palms are stiff with the egg white of scars.

Pars levers them off the concrete when the sun threatens to disappear behind the buildings. “C’mon,” he growls, and the punk trails viciously in his wake, innocent of nothing except thought.

Later, in the flat, unmoving midnight light, their hands brush together in the steaming viscera of their latest mark. The Kid sneers at his punk, and the punk stares back, ghosts both, desperate for some piece of life, however found, ghosts and lions both.

Judith was running a down-at-the-heels jewelry store-cum-pawnshop in the largest city on Haman, which wasn’t saying much. It wouldn’t have been so much as spit in the ocean back home, but she was doing all right. Mostly she was honest, these days, or at least as honest as Haman demanded, though she had a profitable little sideline in fencing.

She was scrupulously fair, and they knew it, and she let her yes be yes and her no be no, and so she had less trouble than she might have otherwise. She underpaid them — fence’s fee — but didn’t gouge them too much. She kept a pot of beans at the boil throughout the long winter nights ready against any smash thief or boxersman that came in.

The wind brought two rail bums to her on an unsettled autumn night. “Hey, Jude,” said the older one, the Parsimonious Kid.

“Hey, Pars. Help y’self to some beans.” They ate in silence until their faces lost something of that lean, hunted look. “Who’s the suckling?”

“Just some punk I picked up out of Harbona. He’s all right. Say hi, punk.”

“Hi.”

“He got a name?”

“Nah, he ain’t earned one yet. We thought we’d come here, get the lay of the land, see what there was to do.”

The punk had a vicious, dull cast to his face; he was born to go blood simple. She marked him down, and gave Pars no better than even odds to be dragged down with him. Neither need fear drowning.