The wide avenue swallowed them in a single wave of frayed noises.

  Above, the sky had cracked into a slow orpiment, seeping into the corners of the buildings like a printing error no one had ever bothered to correct.

  The market ahead wasn’t closing: it was dismantling itself.

  Tarps yanked down blindly, crates dragged away with irritated jerks, a grainy murmur crawling between the stalls like a wounded animal looking for a place to disappear.

  The smells hit them at once: stale bread, greasy meat, mashed fruit, ancient sweat.

  A sticky film — like breathing through someone else’s skin.

  Ever since they’d turned into that street, Antea had felt an insistent, almost insolent impression settle inside her:

  that chaos wasn’t chaos.

  Not entirely.

  She could tell from the smallest details.

  At almost every stall leaned one, sometimes two armed men: unmoving figures, nailed to a function no one explained yet everyone seemed to recognize.

  Fixed points in an invisible social geometry, solid enough to hold everything together.

  Maybe, in the absence of money, access to goods depended on reputation.

  Or on undeclared ranks.

  Or on some customary proscription list dividing who could touch from who had to watch.

  Or simply fear.

  Fear is always an excellent rule.

  To the left, two brutes were beating a man on the ground.

  On the right, a man tried to grab some food.

  The vendor hooked him by the wrist, a splintered scream tore through him, and the would-be thief’s arm bent until the goods fell.

  He froze, uncertain, then one of those figures who seemed to embody a new kind of enforcer of the sibylline order grabbed him by the shirt and began hitting him with impersonal regularity.

  The movement of the crowd pushed them forward a few meters.

  That was when Antea saw an exceptionally tall, slender man — and could admire, because despite herself the image seized her gaze, the one thing she could see: his back.

  It was truly impossible not to notice him.

  A foreign body in the fragment of social fabric they had let themselves be drawn into.

  In front of him stood a blonde girl.

  She wore a short skirt of fine fabric, sand-colored, leaving her long, slim legs bare.

  Her top was a worked pale band, wrapped cleanly around her torso and exposing the line of her abdomen.

  The sensuality was immediate: in the way the skirt moved with her hips, in her relaxed posture, in the natural confidence with which she occupied the space beside the tall man.

  Every proportion of her body — legs, waist, hips, chest — fell into place with unnerving precision.

  Nearby, two ordinary girls — one slightly plump, both dressed in dull, tired fabrics — stared at her with what Antea instantly read as a quiet resentment mixed with mute desire.

  The impression brushed past Antea and dissolved at once.

  Mark was standing very close to her, as if worried for her.

  He was watchful, ready — or so it seemed to her — for an attack from some ill-intentioned passerby.

  It was hard to imagine there weren’t plenty around.

  And just as hard to imagine she could be of any real help if something did happen.

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  Inside, Antea was uneasy.

  The ethological fresco that this small node of Anarchy had etched into her field of view proved useful: nothing works better than coping-oriented thoughts to sand down apprehension.

  If we’re forced to live in a place like this — even just for a short while — the fear Mark’s strength can instill in this community, or in other communities similar to it, won’t be enough to secure us a proper integration.

  —or maybe yes, maybe it makes sense to think it would go exactly that way; after all, many worlds work more simply than one tends to believe—

  but in any case, the sooner we understand this place’s essential social rules, the sooner we’ll obtain information useful to our purposes.

  Or to what is, right now, our only real purpose: finding someone from our own world. It would be stupid to assume we’re the only ones.

  Much more briefly: Mark had the arms, she had the brain.

  That’s how she saw herself.

  And how she saw him.

  To her eyes, Nahely was more like a cute, gentle mascot — someone who ended up doing certain things simply because she had fewer inhibitions. Things she herself couldn’t do, and that Mark — able, in theory, but always with that lingering semi-hikikomori clumsiness — would have handled poorly anyway.

  Then, on the right edge of her vision, the rhythm changed.

  Not a sound: a subtraction.

  A man walked ahead, distracted by a stall.

  Another slipped behind him with three smooth, natural steps.

  The blade went in between the shoulder blades and came out immediately. One stroke.

  The body collapsed sideways, struck a crate of fruit, and knocked it over with a dry thud.

  Apples rolled into the dust, slow, tracing uneven trails.

  The vendor jerked back, rigid, eyes fixed on the dark stain spreading near his goods — as if the violence had invaded his personal space.

  The assassin ran off in a rush.

  The vendor shouted at one of those protector-of-God-knows-what types to do something. The shout — which was just one among many in that grotesque-horror theatre — drew Antea’s attention.

  Her half-calm as she watched the body bleed out in front of the stall said plenty about how quickly violence settles into the human psyche.

  Into her psyche, at least.

  Though it’s always convenient — that irresponsible move endemic to philosophy — to elevate oneself to some kind of variable standing in for the entire species.

  The quality of the fleeting impressions we have about ourselves is filtered through the tendency to overestimate or underestimate our own importance.

  In one direction or the other.

  The assassin was about to pass very close to the three of them; Mark moved toward her, nudging her a little to the left.

  His left arm brushed against her right breast.

  There was no domino effect because Nahely had already stopped a few steps ahead.

  The time it took the burly guy — the one the vendor had just defused — to ready himself to throw his dart at the fleeing assassin lasted about as long as Antea’s reflection on how quickly her relationship with feral human violence had shifted.

  She would have kept watching the scene like an insect that had sublet its own consciousness, if the burly guy hadn’t missed his target. The dart was now coming toward them — though Antea hadn’t realized it yet — and she only felt Mark grab her left side, pushing her sharply toward him.

  At that same instant, a light breeze brushed past them.

  And then Antea — now caught in Mark’s arms, his lips and eyes three or four centimeters above hers, uncomfortably close — was overtaken by a shadow.

  A tall figure loomed over her.

  At least one human head-lengths taller than she was.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she snapped at Mark, shoving him aside.

  But Mark’s eyes weren’t on her — they were fixed on the lanky guy who had appeared in front of them in the blink of an eye.

  Antea’s gaze dropped to the dart the guy was casually playing with in his left hand, cheerful as someone who’d just scored a win.

  And her eyes widened.

  No way.

  That MAN had stopped the dart mid-air?

  How the fuck was that even possible?

  The guy said something.

  He looked hyped out of his mind — celebrating in a loud, theatrical, borderline ridiculous way.

  She saw Mark glaring at him.

  Honestly, the guy was strange: tall like Peter Crouch, moving with Michael Jordan’s fluidity and the bohemian elegance of some artsy pretty-boy.

  It was the same man she had seen from behind earlier.

  You could tell from the shirt: white fabric, clearly higher quality than anything around here, with a thin, abstract pattern that didn’t match anything she’d seen in this place.

  Black pants, fairly fitted, matched with black boots.

  When his noisy, self-celebrating pantomime finally ended — long enough to pull everyone’s attention — he planted himself in front of them again.

  Antea’s eyes slid to his half-open shirt, to the glimpse of a lean, toned chest beneath it.

  She bit her lip.

  And then her eyes dropped automatically to the one area she absolutely did not want to look at.

  She tore her gaze away quickly.

  He said something else, still radiating that overcharged energy, then tapped her in the stomach with the dull end of the dart.

  It didn’t hurt, but she jolted.

  Mark didn’t react.

  Was he intimidated?

  Antea looked at him and got the impression his brain had gone into buffering.

  She still hadn’t gotten a good look at his face.

  His cheekbones were high and sharp.

  His jawline, angular and clean, drew a blade-like profile.

  Overall, his face was handsome and razor-edged — but with the wrong kind of beauty.

  A sexy face, yes, but in a way that felt more like a threat than an invitation.

  His hair, slightly curly and a bit tousled, fell over his forehead, framing him as if trying to tame him — without quite succeeding.

  On his left ear he wore a large earring; on his hand, a thin ring made of a material that looked like fire opal.

  I wonder how much this guy fucks, Antea thought, swallowing.

  But set into the pale, grayish skin of his face were those unsettling yellow eyes.

  The feral clarity around those strange, almost hypnotic — hybrid — irises, which framed two pitch-black pupils dilated far beyond human norms, caught her instantly.

  They were beautiful, yes, but that wasn’t the only reason she couldn’t look away.

  There was another reason — a different one from what anyone might imagine, judging by that playful, self-satisfied grin of his.

  Her heart started pounding.

  Too hard.

  A flash: the constellation of eyes, at one point yellow like the lanky guy’s.

  A fragment of the face of the mutant grizzly-man who had tried to rape her on their first day.

  A sudden fracture in the onion of rationalizations she had painstakingly fabricated after that episode triggered the eruption of a pure existential terror: the kind of fear you feel when it seems that the entire world — including your own body — is repudiating you in a draconian way.

  She relived it all in a second — maybe less.

  The sensation of that heat-drunk, slobbering beast’s drool sliding down her chest.

  The helplessness.

  Every certainty collapsing while inhabiting a body that wasn’t the one she’d grown up in.

  Vertigo.

  Her knees gave out and she dropped.

  The swirl of voices — among which Mark’s “Breathe slow! Breathe slow!” kept breaking through — merged with the tidal sway of her vision.

  She was choking.

  The terror of having lost control over every single part of herself clamped down on her amygdala.

  Was she about to faint?

  Her chest hurt.

  Nothing made sense anymore.

  Strong arms lifted her off the ground.

  Even through the diplopia she could recognize Mark from an angle that should have told her she’d been picked up — if her brain were still the receptacle of intuition it normally was, among other things.