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M arla and Rondeau wound up strolling in Yerba Buena Gardens. They were in the
middle of a city, but all she smelled was grass and cool air. Marla had to admit—to
herself, if not to Rondeau—that she liked the gardens, and suspected that if they visited
Golden Gate Park, she’d like that, too. In the heart of her own city, where she lived and
worked, most of the parks were magnets for drug dealers and users, perpetually trashstrewn,
thoroughly unpleasant. The parks on the outskirts and in the suburbs were nicer,
of course, but when her city had first begun growing, little thought was given to creating
public green spaces. She’d been told the parks at home were nicer in the daytime, less
dangerous, but Marla was usually sleeping during the brightest part of the day. Her
work was more closely aligned with the night. But here, in this park at least, the night
held no particular terrors, and a crowd of people milled around the modern building that
Rondeau called the Metreon. Sounded like the name of a minor angel to Marla, but
whatever.
There were whimsical statues in Yerba Buena Gardens, including a giant-sized metal
chair high enough to walk beneath, and while Marla generally had a low tolerance for
whimsy, she found the sculpture almost charming in its straightforward silliness. San
Francisco probably had other charms, but there was much about it that unsettled her,
including her mental geological map of the place, which included the fault lines that
streaked all around the city. There were magics that benefited from living in a place that
always teetered on the edge of natural disaster, but Marla didn’t think the benefits were
worth the possibility of sliding into the sea. Her own city seldom faced anything worse
than ice storms in the winter and summertime heat waves. She didn’t think she could
handle the local politics here, either—passing the power from sorcerer to sorcerer made
sense as a way of keeping everyone happy, but she wasn’t so sure it worked well when
it came to getting things accomplished and keeping the city safe. Sorcerers were
backstabbing, vicious beasts at worst, cautious allies at best; how many of these pro-tem
chief sorcerers were giving full disclosure to the people who came to replace them,
letting them know about all the current problems and opportunities? Probably none of
them. Marla preferred her own form of mostly benign dictatorship.
It occurred to her that someone would probably try to kill her at Finch’s party. She’d
pissed off the biggest sorcerer in Chinatown (maybe—it was always possible that was
self-aggrandizement), who now knew where Marla was going tonight. That gave the
night a little extra sparkle, at least. At home, people were always trying to kill her. It
helped her keep her edge.
Something fluttered in her peripheral vision. “What’s that?” she said, and Rondeau said,
“Hmm?”
Marla stepped closer to the giant metal chair, eyes scanning the dark. Something swift,
flying, darting randomly up, down, and sideways in the air.
“Hummingbird,” Rondeau said.
Marla nodded. The bird was ruby-throated, wings an invisible blur. Marla frowned.
Hummingbirds in January? They never appeared until spring back home, but there was
snow there—maybe the appearance of a hummingbird in January at night was perfectly
seasonable here, in this strange land where the trees had green leaves in winter. Marla
flapped her hand toward the bird, and it zoomed straight backwards, then zoomed