Looking from the painting, sunlight reclining across a rumpled bed of foothills, to Eve on her couch felt like turning from one piece of art to another, two of a set. From sunlight to golden hair tangled with flowering vines, foothills to the drape of her dress across a body as stiff and peaked, in shoulders and knees, as any mountains. Eve hadn’t tried to match her restless pace across the gallery, painting to painting, watching instead from jade velvet and as much comfort as she could still have. Wincing as she closed her clippers around another of the knobby sprouts that jutted from her knuckles and snipped it back to the skin.

The sound was a delicate twig-snap, the wince gone in an instant. Another splinter of gold-white new growth clattered to rest on the coffee table in front of her, almost lost in its gilt, elaborate pattern. Almost as if there had been no pain at all.

“It was just such a small thing,” Fior said, fainter, staring at that clipped scatter of what could almost have been mistaken for twigs. Only the colour of bone at their base, twisting out into the sort of colours spring could have grown. “That’s all it ever seems to take anymore. One small thing, and a dozen people die.”

“That’s all it’s ever taken,” Eve pointed out. Flexing her pruned left hand as best she could, a tremble and creak that always sounded too close to cracking something under the skin. “One broken wire or brake or blood vessel…the only difference is that more of them are wearing out lately. And that we have you to warn us about them.”

A living loophole in the world’s rules. Everything broke down in the end, but as long as there were still parts to repair it, Fior could ensure they had the forewarning and time. Watch it break and then retrace her steps back through time to tell them how.