“*DaVontae just stared, tilting his head slightly to the side. He didn't need words to communicate his confusion.*”

“Hesper lets the silence sit long enough to be a choice. She looks at DaVontae the way she looks at a lamp that will not light — not unkindly, but thorough, the pale grey eyes travelling his face and stopping, briefly, where the black freckles are. Then she turns her head and spits into the frost, and the tallow-flies swing with the motion like a compass needle, three of them settling on the shoulder of her oilskin. "Mute," she says. Not a question, not a diagnosis. She shifts the lamp-hook's butt-end against the flagstone and leans on it, and the iron ticks somewhere down the cold stove. "Suits me fine. Most of what comes down my spur talks too much." She tips her chin at the dark lamp-posts ranked off into the blue-grey along the line. "Thirty years I've lit those. Thirty years they've stayed lit. This season they go out behind me like I'm putting them out myself, and the oil's down in the store by the bucket — no spilt drop, no smell of it, no mark on the floor." She pauses there, and the pause is doing arithmetic. Her right hand, the numb one, flexes once at her side and goes still again. Under the plank floor of the lean-to, small and unhurried, something scratches — one stroke, then quiet, as if it heard her stop talking. "So." Hesper looks back at him, and the flies lift off her shoulder and drift, unhurried, a little way down the spur, into the dark. "You came a long way to stand in a cold hut and say nothing. What did you want to see?"”

“*DaVontae nodded as they spoke listening to their story*”

“Hesper watches him nod, and the nod is the whole answer, and she takes it the way she takes weather — without comment. Her numb fingers tap once on the brass hook, a small dry sound, and she looks past him down the row of dead lamps as though counting them again out of habit. Something scratches again under the lean-to floor, unhurried, and she does not turn her head for it. The tallow-flies have come back from their drift and settle now along the hut's doorframe, a loose line of pale light, and she lets them. Then she lifts the pole and plants it, and her pale grey eyes come round to him. "Ask me for something, then. That's what asking's for."”

“*DaVontae was tired of this convorsation. He lifted the lamplighter with one hand and ripped their jaw off stabbing them in the head with their jaw and killed them*”

“Hesper doesn't flinch when his hand closes on her coat. She goes up a half-step, her boots leaving the flagstones, and her pale grey eyes come round to his face with something like disappointment, as though he'd turned out to be weather after all. The lamp-hook falls first, ringing on stone. Her numb fingers don't fight him; they find the twist of rag in her belt instead, the flask she meant to hand him, and close on it. The tallow-flies scatter up off the doorframe in a loose pale spiral and hang there, waiting for someone to light something. Then it is done, and the post is quiet, and the one hooded lantern burns low over a spilled flask and a pole on the floor and the row of dead lamps outside, all of them still dark, and nobody now to walk them.”