into

intent on them, her hair half-concealing her face.
So many times he’d seen her in just that pose. He found that his mouth was dry. It was suddenly impossible to look away from her. Impossible to accept that he couldn’t just walk up to her, take her head in his hands, twining his fingers into the glossy heaviness of her hair, tilting up her chin to kiss him . . .
She brushed her hair back from her face and caught sight of him. She looked up, startled. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I haven’t seen much of you lately. What have you been up to?”
“Actually, I was just obsessing about your hair.”
She winced. “Harris.”
“Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s all right.” He could tell from her expression that it wasn’t. “Jean-Pierre was just looking for you.”
“He found me. He forced a small fortune into my unwilling hands.”
“So you’re all dressed up to go out and spend it?”
He settled into the seat next to her. “Yeah, basically. I’m going to pay off a debt, then find a tailor and commission some blue jeans.”
Her eyes got round. “I never thought of that. What a great idea! If I give you some of my money and my measurements—”
“Sure.”
She tore a page from the back of the notebook she was writing in and began scribbling. Harris saw that she did already know the measurement system the people of Neckerdam used—a standard value called a “pace” broken down into fifty “fingers.”
He glanced over the books she was browsing through. Events of the Reign of Bregon and Gwaeddan in Novimagos, Volume One. The Full History of the World Crisis. “Catching up on history?”
She slid the piece of paper and several of her own coins to him. “Yes, and you should be, too. Noriko told me a little about the recent history of the fair world, and it was too strange—I had to check up on some things.”
“Oh, God, the journalist is running amok again.” He folded the paper and tucked it and the coins away. “Things such as what?”
“Such as . . . about twenty years ago, in the Old World, which is what they usually call Europe, they