Of course, his mother had never beaten the piss out of anyone in grief. He wondered what Alain would look like in the morning, when the swelling and bruising really set in. It would be stomach turning.
Rabia came slowly back down the steps, hugging her bag in front of her.
“I’ve been locked out,” she said.
“Oh,” Omesh said. She was looking around as if seeing Barnacle Town for the first time. He looked around as well, remembering all his first impressions, the tenuousness of it all. The almost overwhelming sense of the vacuum of space all around them, of the flimsiness of the barrier that separated this from that. Every unartfully welded join became a thing of menace, as did the smell of cook fires and the danger they represented in an enclosed environment like this one. He had learned
