Etria was best after dark, Robin mused, leaning against the back of the stone bench and extending her legs to cross them at the ankles. With nothing else to do while she waited for Fliss, she drew a yellow rubber ball out of the dark brown bag at her side and made it dance across her fingers and the backs of her hands as though it had no weight. More practice was always a good thing. Her long wing-like sleeves fell back, baring the blue tattoos that spiralled around both arms, from the backs of her hands outwards and snaking upwards out of sight—past her elbows, in fact.

Benches were nearly always positioned where they’d be shaded at least part of the day. Failure to respect the sun at midday, especially on days when cloud cover was sparse, could have consequences ranging from inconveniently-visible tan lines for lighter-skinned entertainers, to painful sunburns, to all-out collapses. Her own bronze skin was some protection, but she’d still chosen to keep most of it covered to go out hours ago.

The sun was down, but she could still enjoy the scent of the flowers above her even if she didn’t need the shade. There really was no time in Etria that you wouldn’t see greenery and not much of it devoid of flowers or fruit; the rainy season made everything wet and grey, the occasional hurricane made it wetter and darker and windy as well, but she hadn’t seen stark ice-frosted rock and wind-driven waves of snow under a flat white sky since... well, she’d been maybe twice Olwen’s age, really.

She didn’t miss it.

She ignored the people walking by, and they ignored her. This block had a number of businesses that were doing good trade even at, or maybe especially at, this hour: specialized pastry shops, a chocolate shop, an exotic tea shop, one with several mixtures of cut fruits and fruit salad, one selling incense and perfumed oils, a flower shop, a shop selling bottled drinks including those odd fizzy things she couldn’t quite get used to. And, of course, the gelato shop that Fliss was currently visiting to pick up their usual treat. Crowded as it was tonight, she’d conceded that it might be simpler for only one to brave the masses, and Fliss had natural advantages.

A decision to introduce her new coworker to gelato had become a ritual every time they were both working and then the best friendship Robin had ever experienced.

The Vixen stayed closed on Firstday, which allowed the maintenance crew to do their weekly in-depth cleaning and any repairs that needed to be attended to, and the resident entertainers could make use of the stage for a collective rehearsal of any material that involved collaboration. Gabriel typically used the time to get caught up on the books; she knew he enjoyed the option of doing that in the dining room during rehearsals instead of in his quiet office alone.

Rehearsal had gone well today: in particular, she and Nikki had reworked a routine they’d previously done together involving Robin’s hoops and Nikki’s dancing, and it looked better now than it had originally. Lane needed someone small and stealthy to ‘magically’ swap places with Nikki in a reasonably simple trick that, for a change, didn’t need extensive practice to get right, and while Corvan could possibly pull it off, Robin was a better choice. A somewhat silly routine in which she juggled balls and occasionally dropped one and had to chase Astra around to retrieve it should get laughs; Corvan had suggested a variant that would mean Riddle claiming one as an egg and sitting on it protectively, and possibly Astra caching the balls around the stage behind Robin’s back, but those would take more rehearsal and training time and could be explored in the future.

Technically, she was no longer one of the resident entertainers. Technically, she was Gabriel’s assistant manager, responsible for the show and the dining room although not for the kitchen and its complexities.

In practice, they were short one person since their comedian Zahra had left. That meant not only more time to fill on stage, which could be done by adding openings for casual performers, but also one vacant shift a week waiting tables in the dining room. So Robin was doing most of her previous job along with at least part of her current one, since despite all efforts to temporarily redistribute the load, Gabriel couldn’t actually be in two places at once.

The remaining residents had limited time around their own lives and independent preparation time to help out; Nikki and Fliss had each done one extra shift to take some of the pressure off her, but Insomnia had other gigs including a regular one and Corvan had animals and her League talks and all. Lane had offered to, and could use the extra day’s pay, but that could become complicated if they did it regularly.

So, she was currently busy. Two nights a week, on Gabriel’s theoretical days off, she managed the dining room and cash from opening to closing; two nights a week she was there to make sure the chaos of resident and casual entertainers added up to a smooth show; one day a week she was at the rehearsal sessions; administrative tasks like scheduling she could usually do by starting early, but like Gabriel, she came in when necessary. This situation meant that she also had one night a week waiting tables, except when one of the residents could arrange the time to cover, and she needed to devote more of her week to working on stage material around all that, but she’d manage.

What else was she going to do, let Gabriel down? After he’d offered her the promotion, and she’d told him everything from her past that could be relevant or come back to bite, and he hadn’t withdrawn it? He trusted her. That mattered more than a temporary lack of leisure, and possibly being a little short on sleep.

But she could still make time for the gelato ritual with Fliss.

“Hey! Hey, you!” Someone laid a hand on her shoulder from behind.

“I’m not interested.” She didn’t even bother to turn around. Whatever the owner of that rough masculine voice and that hand wanted, he wasn’t getting it from her. Just in case, she let one hand drop to her bag, though she kept the ball in the other. In the outer pocket, easy to grab in a hurry, was a butterfly knife barely short enough to be legal; it was pretty enough for a prop in dexterity demonstrations, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t use it in other ways. She could have it out, open, and ready with one hand much faster than people tended to believe.

It was, in fact, an older skill than her juggling or hoops, and admiration of it had in a way led to learning the others and choosing a different path than the one she’d been on.

She left it in her bag, but her hand still on it, when the large calloused hand dragged her to her feet by force and spun her to face the man speaking to her. The ball nearly fell; she reversed her hand and seized it.

“Ow! Get your hands off me! One more touch and I start screaming. There’s always at least one peacekeeper around here. I don’t know what you consider acceptable wherever you’re from, but you don’t get to manhandle people here!” She planted her feet, in dark brown boots with thick high heels that loaned her nearly an extra hand of height that she often wished she had, shoulder width apart and glared at him. She didn’t cross her arms, though; she needed one free to throw the ball, the other to seize her knife if necessary.

She saw him do a double-take, his gaze raking along her from her head—her dark hair covered by a bright spangled triangular scarf tied across her forehead with the tails confining the rest of the mane at the back of her neck—down over her slender body. To move freely at rehearsal, she was wearing a sleeveless short dress that fit closely but had elastic laces across a sheer panel on each side, the skirt stopping above her knees and loose; to go out in the warm of the day, she’d added a common sort of long coat of lightweight cotton over it, one with long wing-like sleeves and a long full skirt but it fastened at the front only with a single ornate clasp at waist-level that drew it close around her body. The yellowish streetlights made the pleasant plum of her dress just look dark, the white flowers too harsh against it, and her coat was simply pale, not pale purplish-blue, but it shouldn’t really matter.

Large braided hoops, tin-plated to look shiny silver, swung from both ears; just below the hollow of her throat, a genuinely silver chain held an oval disc of turquoise with a symbol engraved into it. As usual, she had her eyes lined dark and dusted bright, and her lips were gently reddened.

She was definitely not what he’d expected to see.

She was much less surprised that he was less than a head taller than her, with some muscle but it wasn’t dramatic, bearded and bronze-skinned with long dark hair falling over his forehead past his eyebrows. Coarse dark hair peeked out of the neck of his brightly-striped tunic, gaudy even in this light.

He ignored her words and seized her wrist, pushing the sleeve up so he could look at the tattoos.

“How did you get these?”

The same tattoos circled his arms, although his had been elaborated with further symbols and a second, narrower spiral in black, and his were softened by dark hair.

“What difference does it make to you?”

“Father’s youngest brother has been lost many years. It shames our family.”

“Do I look like anyone’s brother to you?” She layered as much disdain into it as she could, while she gestured with her free hand, still holding the ball, down her body, the slim curves, the entirely-real if modest cleavage visible at the the neck of her dress with a little support from a halter under it.

She’d started taking Etria’s feminization formula while still in her undernourished teens. It had been, to say the least, a successful second step in many senses, right after permanently getting rid of as much hair as she could.

“I... no,” he admitted, releasing her wrist. “You do not. And no woman... woman should not have those tattoos.” That accent was strong.

Robin saw Fliss coming, from behind the stranger and to one side; the stranger did not. This was about to end.

“Are you making my friend uncomfortable?” Fliss asked, her tone mild and not particularly aggressive. She had a waxed-paper cup of gelato in each hand, but both could have fit in one.

The stranger spun to the side to look, and found himself barely at eye level with Fliss’ pink halter—which she’d been in the mood today to add proportionately-but-not-really small breasts under. He looked up, and then further up.

Height varied wildly in Etria. Robin had yet to see anyone who matched Fliss, lean-bodied and long-limbed and always taking for granted that every doorway meant ducking. She was farther above the range of average height than Robin was below it.

Skin colour varied wildly in Etria, any street scene a study in the countless shades and tints of human diversity. Despite that, Fliss was as extraordinarily dark as she was tall, and all the more so with the yellowish gas streetlights washing out highlights.

Her current wig was her simplest one of many black braids with metallic beads; she’d chosen a long loose skirt brightly-patterned with yellows and pinks and blues, a rainbow of beaded jewellery, and her usual strongly-coloured sparkly makeup. The white-and-gold-striped bag that held her money and identification and so on looked small, though it was comparable in size to Robin’s.

Someone who had never seen her before and had no idea what she might do could quite reasonably be taken aback.

“I copied the tattoos,” Robin said flatly, drawing the stranger’s attention back to her. Her accent, she knew, could pass for native Etrian to anyone except a native Etrian, and should only be more convincing. “I was going to marry someone with them. He wouldn’t tell me whether they meant anything. I was looking forward to marrying him anyway but, well, he died. By his own hand, and no one had any warning or any explanation. The tattoos are my way of remembering him.”

She’d told the story often enough that it rather felt like literal and unadulterated truth.

“I... his name?” the stranger asked.

“Wouldn’t help you. He told me he’d changed it when he came to Etria.”

“He is for sure dead?”

“I’m absolutely sure. He’s gone. The pauper’s graveyard doesn’t do marker stones, but I could tell you where. I’m sorry, I’m sure it will be a shock to your family. But there is literally nothing else I can do.”

When he didn’t leave immediately, Fliss said gently, “I am sure you have things to do that are far from my friend, yeah?”

He nodded, backing up a step. “I must tell my family.”

“A good idea.”

Robin reclaimed her seat on the bench. Fliss sat down beside her and handed her one of the cups.

“He did not hurt you?”

Robin shook her head. “Nice timing. The peacekeepers might have been cranky with me if I’d stuck a hole in him. Even a non-lethal one, just to make my point.” She took a deep slow breath. The only harm he could inflict was to leave her angry and unsettled, and she had better things to do. She, in fact, had far more of a future than he did. Another deep breath. It wasn’t worth going back down that path. Just let it go.

“You would, I think, have plenty of witnesses. I do not think you were the one who approached him.” Fliss shrugged. “The past should stay buried. Let us hope it now does so. They did not have the strawberry. I got you the orange with bits of chocolate in it.”

“Oh no,” Robin said. “How ever will I live with that? I guess I’ll just have to bear it somehow.” She scooped up a bit with the extremely simplistic spoon, just a small mass-produced paddle-shaped thin bit of wood, and let the cold sweet treat melt in her mouth.

There was no chance Fliss had failed to notice the tattoos or the physical similarities.

There was also no chance Fliss would ever pursue it or bring it up again.

“You hoped to visit the orphans’ home before rehearsal today,” Fliss said. “Were you able to?”

“I didn’t make it. One of the other tenants had the bathroom tied up forever, and the service was late dropping off the laundry and my landlady was in the middle of cooking so that didn’t get sorted out, and it was just a messy kind of morning. I’ll try tomorrow. I did warn them last time that I might not be able to come very often for a while because I’d be busy with work, but some of them have heard that kind of thing from adults too often. It’s not like I need to be there for hours. Stopping by to say hi and do a few tricks for them is enough to make them happy.”

Two dozen children lived around the corner from her boarding house and a few blocks down. One of the other tenants worked there and had asked her one day whether she’d be willing to volunteer a little time. Some were genuinely orphaned by tragic events and had no family to take them; some had been abandoned by parents who simply could not care for them; a few had been rescued from situations that no one should ever have to live in. Now and then family turned up; now and then someone adopted one of them, usually the younger ones. Most of them left only when they were old enough to be self-sufficient.

They weren’t necessarily the unlucky ones. They got an education, the city and the League monitored the orphan houses closely and independently, every effort was made to keep siblings together, and there were enough adults around that a bad apple would be unlikely to get away with it for long.

If Viv had made one decision differently, Olwen would be growing up in a house like it.

For that matter, from some of Nikki’s offhand comments, he probably should by rights have ended up in one, at least for a couple of years or so.

“We will, I hope, have a new resident soon,” Fliss said. “So that you can stop doing two jobs at once.”

“I’m not, really. Which is good, because I doubt we’ll find anyone quickly.”

“There are many people in Etria.”

“Someone epicene. Which can be hard to define, but not in a mocking or fetishized sexual way or anything insulting like that.”

“That reduces it greatly, but still many.”

“With genuine performance skills of some kind, enough to not get boring in a month doing the same trick over and over.”

“Stage ambitions are not uncommon. I have heard it said that to be man or woman is itself a performance, so perhaps a higher proportion among the epicene would be plausible.”

“Which do not directly overlap with any of the current residents.”

“I do not think it would be easy to find someone who duplicated any of us.” Fliss sounded amused by that thought. “Not even if you made a deliberate attempt, much less by chance.”

“Who is going to be there reliably, is willing and able to learn how to wait tables as well, sociable enough to make customers happy, understands the value of teamwork and collaboration rather than expecting to be a solo headliner, and who wants the job.”

“That is true,” Fliss conceded. “All combined, it is quite specific. Many want a steady job, but perhaps not that one. But I do think someone will come along. The rest of us all did, yeah?”

“All current residents were casuals when an opening came up. None of the current casuals are right. They don’t collaborate, they’ve had multiple warnings that they’ve gone over a month without being in a show, they haven’t added anything genuinely new in a long time and they’re fine with stagnating, or they just aren’t interested in anything more than they have.” Robin shrugged. “I’m not actually complaining. I just know what we need and I’m realistic about how difficult it’s going to be to find that. I can keep up.”

“We can,” Fliss corrected. “You have pointed out several times that working together is essential, yeah? Gabriel has taken care, and more recently so have you, to choose residents who prefer cooperation to competition. You cannot do that and then expect that no one will care. Idonae has her other commitments but has promised that she will continue to be at the Vixen for at least one show a week and as often as she can she will join us for both, for as long as it takes.”

“And we need her. She’s adding most of the humour right now.”

“She has been happily performing at the Vixen a long time around the rest of her life, I do not think it will stop. Corvan cannot add more hours to the day, but Nikki and I have no responsibilities other than to the Vixen. Lane could use the extra pay and Viv will help arrange time one way or another. I know Keri told you that all three would prefer to support you and delay writing their next song. We can, at least, make certain you do not need to do a turn waiting tables more than occasionally, even if there is little else we can do. But you will tell us if there is, yeah?”

“I will,” Robin conceded. “I still work fewer hours than some people do, at a job I like more and for much better pay, so I think you’re worrying too much, but thank you.”

Fliss simply nodded. “Perhaps we should find a way to arrange for gelato for Olwen’s birthday,” she mused, licking her own coconut-lime concoction off the little spoon. “It would be a small and not expensive treat. Do you think Anissa would allow us to keep some in the kitchen freezer until the first intermission after Olwen helps our high priestess with a trick?”

“I can ask her. We’d need three, for Olwen and Lane and Viv, but that’s not a problem. It’s a good idea, I’ll look into it.” For the most part, they weren’t a very family-oriented group of individuals, but somehow, they were generally fond of Lane’s niece. It might be some sort of displacement there for the families they didn’t have. Or was it because she was bright and precocious and at the same time vulnerable and dependent? Olwen’s birthday might be recognized only by the residents and a very few others, not by the Vixen in general, but surprisingly small things could still make it memorable for her behind the scenes.

“That, I think, is all we can do. Olwen will have a happy birthday, which will make Lane happy, and that is all to the good for the mood backstage and the quality of the show, yeah? So it is all in the name of the Vixen’s excellent reputation.”

Robin chuckled. “I suppose when you put it that way...”

Fliss didn’t normally walk with Robin to her streetcar stop; her own was across the street. Maybe it was because they were still talking, or maybe it had more to do with the way Fliss was subtly keeping watch on anyone who came within a generous radius around the two of them.

“Thanks,” Robin told her, as the streetcar came to a stop, a long covered carriage drawn by a pair of great dark horses that at the shoulders were above the height of her head.

Fliss just smiled and laid a hand on her shoulder, then stepped back so Robin could climb onto the streetcar, drop a penny in the till, and sit down.

Which brother had fathered him? she wondered, as the streetcar began to move. Was that father still alive? Still capable of walking and talking, of feeding himself, of impulse control?

She didn’t have answers, and didn’t really want them.

Trade journeys were rare, and the sins of Etria were legendary and tempting. It was a shame there was no way to get rid of tattoos, since this one was unlikely to be the last. At least it would probably take months or years before the next.

Fliss was right. The dead past should just rest quietly in its grave and leave the living alone.

She couldn’t play with her knife on a streetcar without alarming someone. She fished out her yellow rubber ball and concentrated on that instead, letting the motions and control wash everything else away into calm.