On Avalon, the night had been dark.

That was the thing Angela kept coming back to, on her ninth night on the parapet of the clock tower, with the wind off the river pulling at her hair. On Avalon the dark had been a soft, deep thing that you could lie down in. There had been stars, more stars than there was sky, and the one lamp the Magus kept burning late over his books, and on cold evenings the fire where Princess Katharine read aloud and the hatchlings fought over who got to sit closest. Those were all the lights there were. You could count them on one hand. You could find your way home by them.

Manhattan had no dark at all. The sky over it was a dull orange, as if something were always burning just out of sight. Every building had a hundred windows and every window was lit, and the streets between them were rivers of moving light, white coming and red going, all night long. She had tried to count the lights on one building her first night. She had stopped at four hundred and sat down with her head in her hands.

"It gets easier," said a voice behind her, and she turned to find Brooklyn, trying very hard to look as if he'd just happened to come out onto the parapet. "Want to see the bridge? I could show you the bridge. It's the best one. I'm named after it. Well. Sort of after it."

"Thank you," Angela said. "Perhaps tomorrow."

Brooklyn said tomorrow would be great, and went back inside, and three minutes later Lexington came out and offered to show her how the computer worked, or the subway, or both, because there was a stretch out in Queens where the train ran up above the street and you could ride on top of it if you held on. Angela thanked him too. Then Broadway came out with something long and wrapped in paper, which turned out to be a hot dog with everything on it, and she thanked him and ate it, because Katharine had raised her to be polite and because it smelled wonderful. Broadway looked so pleased that she felt guilty she still didn't want to go anywhere.

Inside, in front of the television, Hudson had been watching all three of them come and go. After Broadway, he reached over and turned the set off.

Goliath looked up from his book at that. Even Bronx lifted his head.

Hudson took his sword from where it leaned against the chair and went out onto the parapet.

For a while the old one said nothing at all. He just stood beside her, wings folded, looking out over the city with his good eye half shut against the glare. She had learned already that this was something he did, and that it was not unfriendly.

"It is too much," she said finally. "I'm sorry. I know this is the clan's home and I want it to be mine. But I can't see it. There's too much of it to see."

"Aye," Hudson said. "It took me a while too. I spent most of my first month here in front of the television, and that wasn't all because of the television."

She laughed in spite of herself.

"Did they ever tell you, on that island," he said, "about the village below Castle Wyvern?"

"Katharine did. A little. She said it was very poor and very cold."

"It was both of those." He leaned on the parapet with both hands. "But from the castle wall, on a winter night, you could see the cook fires down there. Fourteen or fifteen of them. Twenty when the herders came down off the hills for the cold months. And at dusk, when we woke, before we did anything else, we counted them. All of us, standing along the wall in a row, counting. If there were fifteen fires the night before and only fourteen that night, someone went down to see why."

Angela looked out at the city. "Who went?"

"Whoever was youngest and fastest, mostly. When I was young, it was me." He smiled a little. "Usually it was nothing. A family gone to sit with a sick neighbor. Wet wood. But now and then it was something, and we'd have been too late if we hadn't counted."

"Clan lights," Angela said slowly.

"That's what the old one who taught me called them. Not in those words. We didn't have so many words then. But that was what he meant. Those fires were ours to keep."

She looked at the ocean of light below them, the windows on windows, the moving rivers. "But there must be a million here."

"More, I'd say. Too many for any clan to count." Hudson shrugged. "So you don't try to count them all, lass. You pick a few."

She was quiet. Far down below, a siren went by and faded.

"I remember the rookery, you know," Hudson said, and his voice had changed, gone rougher. "At Wyvern. On my rounds I would walk through it every night, just to look at the eggs. I'd been leader of the clan before Goliath, and the habit stayed with me after I gave it up. I liked to know how many there were." He cleared his throat. "After the castle was sacked, I thought they'd all been lost. Every one. I carried that around for a thousand years, near enough, even asleep."

Angela put her hand over his on the parapet. His claws were rough and cold.

"And here you are," the old one said. "One of the ones I counted. Standing on my wall."

Neither of them said anything for a while after that.

"Come," Hudson said at last. "I'll show you a place."

They glided out over the city together, Hudson slow and steady on the warm air rising off the streets, Angela at his wing. She flew better than she let anyone in the clock tower see. On Avalon there had been cliffs and sea winds and Gabriel always daring her to dive lower. Here the air was strange, full of heat and fumes and sudden cold gusts between the buildings, but she found the shape of it soon enough.

He brought her down on top of a six-story building with a water tower on its roof, on a plain street running toward the river. There was a laundromat with its gate pulled down, a corner deli, a brownstone with a green door. The bakery on the corner was dark.

"Brooklyn and I sat a whole night here once," Hudson said, settling onto the edge of the roof. "He hated it till about two in the morning."

"And then?"

"And then he didn't." He nodded at the building across the street. "Pick one."

Angela looked at the windows across the way. Most were dark at this hour. A few flickered blue with televisions. One on the fourth floor, near the end, was lit warm and yellow, and through it she could see a kitchen: a table, a woman sitting at it bent over a sewing machine, a pile of cloth on a chair. Behind her, through a doorway, a smaller room with a cot in it, and a small shape on the cot under a blanket.

"That one," she said.

"Why that one?"

She thought about it. "Because she's awake and the little one isn't. Because she's working so the little one doesn't have to see her worry." She hadn't known she thought that until she said it. "Katharine used to sit up like that. When we were small and one of us was sick."

Hudson nodded as if that were the right answer. Maybe it was. "Then that's your fire," he said. "Watch it."

So she watched. She watched the woman stop to rub her eyes and start again. She watched her get up and stand in the doorway of the little room for a long moment, just looking, and come back. Angela found that she was leaning forward, that she knew without counting how many times the woman had threaded the needle, that the four hundred lights on the building behind her had somehow gone quiet in her head, and there was only this one.

At two o'clock the lights came on in the bakery. A big man in a white apron moved around behind the glass. Hudson made a small pleased sound.

That was when Angela saw the shadow on the fire escape.

It was below the fourth floor, climbing, slowly and carefully, the way someone climbs who doesn't want to be heard. A man, she thought, in a dark jacket with the collar up. He reached the landing outside the little room, the one with the cot, and crouched there by the window, and she saw his hands go to the bottom of the sash.

The woman at the sewing machine didn't look up. The child on the cot didn't move.

Angela was on her feet before she knew it.

"Wait," Hudson said. "Lass. Wait and see what—"

But nobody on Avalon had ever taught Angela how to wait, and she was already gone, off the edge of the roof and down into the light.

To be continued in Part 2

Author's note: I've wanted to write Hudson and Angela together since the first time I saw her, because he's the only one of them who was old enough to remember the eggs. I know the trio are a little silly in this part. They were a little silly about her on the show too, so I'm counting it as accurate. Part 2 is half written. If you want me to hurry, e-mail me at [email protected] and guilt me. It works.

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