"You put the dark edge down first," Jimmy said. Sky nodded without lifting her eyes. "Luther said the light won't look honest unless it has something to push against." Jimmy stared at her, because those were nearly the words Luther had spoken to him after an argument over a ruined blue tank. They were not famous words or the kind of thing anyone had recorded. They belonged to the shared vocabulary of two painters who had once worked side by side until dawn.
An hour later Sky set the brush down. The mountains were still rough in places, and the sunrise needed a second session before any finish could be applied. But the composition had balance, the lines held together, and the road seemed to disappear into distance rather than stop at the curve of the tank. It was not Luther's work, Jimmy realized with some surprise. It was influenced by him, certainly, but where Luther had used angry color and sharp changes, Sky had left space for quiet.
"You know what you're doing," he said. She did not smile immediately, as though compliments had to pass through several layers of suspicion before she could believe them. "It's not finished," she answered. Jimmy looked at the tank and then at Gregory.
"Good. Neither are most things worth keeping." Behind him, Terry cleared his throat and asked the practical question that had been waiting since the girl walked through the door. "Sky, where are your people?"
Her hand closed around the strap of the backpack. "I came on a bus." Terry waited, and when she offered nothing else, he tried again. "Who knows you're here?
A parent? A guardian? Somebody who can come get you after we're done?" Sky's eyes flickered toward the highway.
"If I tell you, you'll make me go back," she said. It was not an accusation. It was a simple description of how the world usually worked.
Gregory could have demanded the answer. Once, years earlier, he probably would have. Instead he reached for his coat from the hook beside the office and gave the others a look that meant the joking was over. "You look hungry," he said to Sky.
"We've got sandwiches and there's a place to sit where nobody has to shout over an engine. You can tell us enough to keep you safe." She studied him with the concentration of somebody deciding whether a door would close behind her. Then she nodded once.
As she followed him toward the office, the backpack struck the workbench, and a slim notebook slipped partway out through a broken zipper. Jimmy caught it before it fell. A page had opened beneath his thumb: the same serpent emblem, copied again and again, sometimes carefully,