In the middle of the night an egg.

It was Gay’s cafe originally, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, forty eight weeks a year—she took two weeks off, spring and fall, for her vacations—rain, snow, drought, fire, it made no difference. She had a generator out back and the freezer was a dirt cellar before it was a walk-in; the only time she closed it was when St. Helens burst and the whole town was evacuated. Even then she was the last out and the first back.

But then Oran kept through, and he was a talker. Charming, clever in small doses, affable as long as things were going his way; you know the type. Smoked too much weed and made a few too many bold claims: he used to work for Boeing (he said) but he left (he said) because he didn’t want the company claiming the patent (he said) for the motorless freight carrier he’d invented (he said). Gonna revolutionize hauling, just as soon as he got it working at full scale.

He spun her round his finger, and after a while they were living together, and a while after that he started helping out around the diner, and then it wasn’t too long before he was doing more and more, and then Gay left for her spring vacation and just didn’t come back. Staying with her sister down at Rockaway, he said. He was just keeping the lights on, he said.

Lies, of course; he’d locked her in the basement and kept her down there for years while we figured she’d merely got wise and cut her losses. We didn’t get the straight of it until the son he’d kept locked down with her broke the lock and hacked his nuts off with a kitchen knife. Served him right. He was at Coyote Ridge for a while before they shipped him out of state; up to Montana somewhere, maybe.

Anyway, Gay doesn’t work the grill much these days, but the son still does. Corran’s his name; he’s not much of a talker.

“Shoot,” he says, the lazy son, the clever one. “I’ll wrassle ya, if you’re so het up about it.”

The stranger grins in that inhumanly beautiful way they had, and they drop into a wrassler’s crouch, hands held out like there was an invisible beer bottle in ‘em, as if to say, watch out for broken glass. Heelgripper, he pops a similar squat and they circle each other in the fading firelight, serious enough but also friendly. Nobody’s after grievous bodily harm, but it wouldn’t be the first time a body left a friendly wrassle permanently the worse for wear, nor the last; he might be a jackass with more lip than sense, but he’s not a fool. His time in exile has beaten some of his early bad habits out of him; his life in the hills has left him rich, strong, and be-sonned.

He gives as good as he gets, least for the first few hours, but the stranger keeps grinning that immobile, inhuman grin, eyes warm and friendly and fixed, even as they take turns flopping each other into the dust, and it ain’t long before he realizes the fix is in and he is a damfool, but by that point the fire’s long burned to ashes and the sun’s peaking over the hills.

Prometheus regretted it the instant the chains slipped away and he tumbled forward off the crag. Swallowed, into a mouth of blue.

He fell for days, night passing into day into night, until his devoured liver regenerated and his torn flesh reknit itself, an unpain grown long familiar during his eternal confinement. The wind of his passage tore the moisture from his throat and eyes.

He has fallen before, many times, from earth to earth, from Ossa to Pelion, from sky to grave; this has happened before, will happen again. He could resist everything except a revolution — or, rather, revolution was worth failure; the fall was worth the climb.

Still: he had grown into the rock, and the rock into him, skin as hard as petrified oak; the generations of eagles that had grown fat and powerful on his recurring liver now old friends, loved the way a stone loves the root that shatters it. Breaking free was not without cost.