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Together the girls flew into the dusk, something Maeve had gotten a lot better at since leaving the caves two months ago.

In the caves, everything was routine, she thought. Here, in a way nothing is, but also sometimes some things happen repeatedly.

“Hotel rooms” are small temporary homes you can borrow when you travel. They cost money so we don’t do it a lot, but they’re always the same, everywhere we are. We can take showers and watch TV and charge the phone and order food and hear little bits of the lives of the people around us through the walls.

I kind of love them. When we’re in a hotel room, I can start to understand why Veronica loves everything in the whole world.

Hotels do not smell like trains.

The girls descended to a rooftop a short alleyway from the hotel. “Okay, you know the drill,” Veronica said happily, setting down her plastic grocery bags.

I do know “the drill,” Maeve thought, which means the hotel room routine. Veronica goes to “check in” and I wait on the roof until an hour goes by on the clock on Veronica’s phone, and then I fly down to the balcony. Then showers and real beds!

“Yup!” Maeve agreed. “Tonight I think I’m going to browse Pintagram some more.”

Veronica crouched on the edge of the roof, spreading her wings from around her cloak. “I dunno if you’re ready for an hour of Pintagram,” she said, making a looney face over her shoulder. “You’re gonna see some serious shit, sunshine! Hour from now, I’ll come back and you’ll be all glassy-eyed and hyperventilating!”

“Ha ha,” Maeve said, long since used to Veronica’s patter, opening the photo app on her phone.

“See you in a jiff!” the older gargoyle grinned, and took to the air.

In a beige room across the alleyway, a nondescript mustached man in a blue polo shirt and beige khakis sat on the hotel bed, browsing an app on his phone. Two champagne flutes—no bottle—were achieving room temperature on a small table. Veronica alit on the night-shrouded hotel balcony and, carefully cloaked, moved to the sliding glass door. She tapped on it lightly with one foreclaw, smiling into the lit room.

This was always the tricky bit.