She recalled Hawk and Emry towering over her as they looked up past the truck bed, at the thin shapes of crows wheeling about overhead. The bleached blue of the sky and the deep, shaded, rusted orange of the truck stood out in her mind very clearly, as Hawk took her hand.

"I don't like this," Emry was saying. She couldn't quite remember his face. "You two go straight home an' lock th' doors. I'll catch up when I can move the truck. Both a' you, look after each other. Keep each other safe."

The ping of the elevator reaching its floor roused Liya for a moment. Silently she went from it out into the main hall of the palace, across the deeply shaded, cold blue floors with its gold inlays. The hall was unlit but for the wintry sunlight pouring in through the huge windows and the open door.

She and Hawk had crossed a dry, treeless pasture under a lurid yellow sun, and had just reached the edge of the scrub on the other side when they heard dogs barking. Hawk had stopped them, and they both listened, trying to pinpoint where it was coming from.

She couldn't remember Hawk's face, either, just him cursing softly.

The palace grounds were cast in an odd green pall. She descended the countless steps from the top of the hill on which the Palace sat, towards the floor of the plains, and the stables that sat at on the dirt path that wound around a small pasture.

She remembered Hawk running and her with her arms wrapped around his neck, and the barking just behind them. She remembered looking down--Hawk was sprinting across gravel, and then grass, and then nothing at all as the ground under them vanished, and she could see their shadow like a dark bruise on the water below--