The quickest route from Neil’s apartment to Palmetto State University of the Arts was a ten-minute walk through the snow-muffled streets of Prague. Palmetto State – named not for its location in the Czech Republic but for its sister university in South Carolina – was found in the oldest district of Prague. The walk would take him through the most beautiful and historical parts of the city, where the January snow and the early hour conspired to paint his surroundings in a ghostly silver haze, reminding Neil of tintype photographs.

Neil usually walked in with his flatmates, but Allison had very smugly told him the day before that her first class wasn’t until eleven o’clock, and Renee didn’t have to be in until ten. So that morning Neil had only made enough coffee for himself, drinking it while watching the lamp-lit streets through the kitchen window. It was the dead of winter and the sun didn’t rise until eight, so he’d taken his morning run in the dark and didn’t greet the morning light until his way into campus.

When Neil enrolled at PSUA he only had a vague understanding of what that would entail. He knew that he would be creating art, but he had underestimated how much art he would have to remake. His tutors and peers held expectations that Neil rarely found himself able to keep up with. More often than not, he would come out of a group critique or a one-on-one tutorial and realise that he had severely misjudged what he had made. He would go in with a potential masterpiece, and leave with a disappointment. Having said that, Neil enjoyed what he did. He enjoyed being wrong and his only ‘punishment’ was to try again.

No torture.

No death sentences.

Just ‘try again.’

Neil didn’t expect to survive until graduation, though. It was entirely dependent on whether or not he could last through another life-drawing class with Painting student Jack Kyselý without trying to strangle him and consequently be sentenced to death. At least, that was how he assumed murder would be dealt with; he never had gotten around to researching that. Allison firmly believed in improvisation, and would offer a suggestion like running from the police and fleeing to another country before any charges were made, and Renee would suggest… well, Neil knew how Renee would react to the murder of a so-called innocent.

When Neil walked into Kubišta, PSUA’s life-drawing room, his friend and Graphic Design student Matt had already arrived and staked out easels for them in front of the model’s platform in the centre of the room. Neil shrugged off his heavy woollen coat and unwound his scarf, dropping them onto one of the chairs within reach. He pulled out his drawing materials and latest sketchbook from his bag – a brown leather messenger bag Allison had picked out, and not the plain grey duffle that Neil would have chosen.

Neil took off the rubber bands that held his sketchbook closed, and Matt crowded in to look over his shoulder – an easy feat, considering Matt was six-foot-one and Neil was five-foot-three. The sketchbook sprang open, each page coated in so much gesso and paint that the binding could scarcely contain them. As it fanned open, Neil’s trademark characters wavered on the pages, exquisitely rendered and deeply strange.

There was Allison, human from the waist up with dark brown skin, blonde corkscrew curls, and immaculately applied make-up around sharp fangs and snake eyes. From the waist down she possessed the tail of a Jamaican boa, black and gold scales glinting in the light like gemstones. Neil had rendered her with rows of delicate sequins and several thin snakes crawling up her white leather crutches.

Renee often appeared elbow deep in fire-resistant gloves, welding goggles perched atop her forehead and a silver snake choker clasped around her neck. Her fire-feathered wings were so bright against her dark skin that Neil often used a different paper stock to collage onto his drawings.

And then there was Ztuart. He was deer from the hips down, with a human torso and arms, but he still possessed the head and mighty antlers of a stag. In the drawing, one of Neil’s ‘cats’ perched on a branch of Ztuart’s antlers. Sir Fat Cat McCatterson was mostly cat, that was true, but with the membranous wings of a bat and horns of a Scottish highland cow. Neil’s other ‘cat’, King Fluffkins, possessed taloned feet, slit-pupiled eyes, and her tongue, when it flicked out, was forked.

In the stories Neil told in his sketchbooks, Ztuart dealt in wishes. To the majority of people who knew him, Ztuart was known as the Wishmonger. To Neil, he was just Uncle Ztuart. Neil had been drawing these creatures for nearly three years, and of their world for much longer, and his friends tended to talk about them as if they were real.

“What was Ztuart up to this weekend?” Matt asked.

“He bought some Nile crocodile teeth yesterday from a Somali poacher,” Neil said.

Matt found the story illustrated on one of the last pages of the sketchbook: the Somali man with a canvas bag of teeth in hand, a whip-thin snake coiled around his neck. Humans, Neil had explained before in a group tutorial, had to submit to wearing one of Allison’s serpents around their necks before they could enter Ztuart’s shop. That way, if they tried anything suspicious, they were easy to subdue.

“How do you make this stuff up?” Matt asked, his tone a mixture of awe and envy.

Neil shrugged. “Who says I do?”

Matt smiled as if he were in on the joke. “Uh-huh. And Allison’s actually part snake, too.”

Neil pulled his lips up into a small smile and turned back to his sketchbook. It was a truth that they told with certain wry smiles, as if they were being absurd. Besides, Allison’s inhuman appearance was covered by a very strong glamour – anyone who looked at her (and many, she would point out, did) would see long legs, straight teeth, and dark eyes with round, human, pupils.

Over the years Neil had found that that was all it took. Flash a lazy smile, and he could tell the truth without risk of ever being believed. It was easier for Allison, too, who could never keep track of Neil’s web of lies, so it became part of who he was: Neil with his wry smile and wild imagination.

In fact, it was not Neil’s imagination that was unbelievable. It was his life: strange cats for pets, a half-snake best friend and her fire-winged girlfriend, and a wish-dealing uncle. He oftentimes forgot what most people would see if they could truly see his sketchbook’s muses. If they ever revealed their true selves they would be called demons or monsters.

They called themselves chimaera.

“I wonder who’s posing today,” Matt mused, flipping to a blank page in his drawing pad.

“Probably Viktor,” Neil said. “We haven’t had him in a while.”

Someone groaned from behind Neil. Neil turned around to see a headache personified: Jack Kyselý. Neil debated how fast he could kill him and hide the body before someone caught him. His odds didn’t look too good; the room was crowded and he’d have to drag the body past even more students until he found a storage cupboard to hide it in until nightfall.

Jack pulled a face when he saw Neil. “He’s eight million years old. We might as well draw the anatomical skeleton as that fucking bonesack. He looks like an unwrapped mummy. I don’t want to be staring at a naked old man all morning.”

There were some dozen models, of all shapes and ages, who rotated through the class. They ranged from Madame Svobodnik, who somehow managed to ignore all of Profesorka Fiala’s pose instructions and do whatever she pleased yet was still given a new contract every semester, to the objectively pretty Eliška, who followed basic instruction but nothing more, yet was still favoured by Jack and most of the other heterosexual men in the class.

Neil didn’t mind drawing Viktor. For one thing, he was so nearsighted he never made eye contact with any of the students, which was definitely a bonus in Neil’s opinion. No matter that he had been drawing nudes since his first year at PSUA, he still found the experience uncomfortable. Especially when he looked up from a study of their crotch – he couldn’t exactly leave the area blank, and he had already tried that twice during the first few months of his course, with the excuse of “I just ran out of time!”. To look up and find the model staring at him made his stomach roll.

Still, he continued to sign up for the class every semester. Allison, who had dropped the class after a month, found the human form – plain as it was, and not spliced together with other species – a missed opportunity. She was always scrutinising Neil and, when no one could overhear, making pronouncements such as, “I think Lynx ears would suit you,” or “you’d make a good serpent,” in the same way a human might suggest a new hairstyle or shade of lipstick.

“What time is your tutorial later?” Matt asked.

“Straight after this,” Neil said. “I still need to set up my desk for it. Profesorka Myška wanted to see more applied techniques from the gallery visits last semester.”

“Maybe you should try drawing some real-life stuff and leave your cartoons to preschoolers,” Jack hissed, as the model – it was Eliška in the end, much to Jack’s loud approval – walked in and proceeded to the model’s platform. “Maybe you should pay attention to the real world. You’re lucky you just do Illustration; you’d never survive as an actual artist if you kept that shit up.”

Ignoring the ‘just Illustration’ comment and looking determinedly away from Eliška disrobing, Neil imagined how Allison and Renee would react to being called cartoons.

The class’s tutor, Profesorka Fiala, called for silence, clapping her hands together briskly until the students stopped their conversations mid-sentence. “One-minute poses, please, Eliška,” she said.

Eliška stepped into her first pose. It was dynamic, as the one minute poses were meant to be – twisted torso and limbs stretched in simulation of action. These warm-up sketches were all about movement and loose lines.

Neil dipped his head, took up his sharp pencil – thinking of other uses he would happily put it to – and started to sketch. Quick, fluid lines, and all the sketches on one page; he overlapped them so they looked like an imitation of a dance.

As Jack grinned and dared to wink at Eliška, an idea popped into Neil’s head. He reached up and touched the necklace he was wearing: charcoal and terracotta beads in a dual-stranded loop to his solar plexus. At least they looked like beads. They were much more than that – not much more, but enough for what Neil had planned.

He started sketching, and watched Jack out of the corner of his eye. When Jack paused in his drawing, Neil noted, he was more often than not trying to catch Eliška’s attention. He’d make ridiculously extravagant movements as he drew, as if the swish and flick of his wrist would make his linework more fluid. Neil took one of the beads of his necklace between his thumb and forefinger of his left hand, still drawing Eliška with his right, and made a wish.

It was a very small wish. This bead was just a scuppy, after all. Like money, wishes came in denominations and scuppies were mere pennies. Weaker than pennies, because unlike coins, wishes couldn’t be compounded. Pennies you could add up to make dollars, pounds, rupees, or ringgits, but scuppies were only ever just scuppies. Whole strands of them would never add up to a more potent wish, just plenty of small, nearly useless wishes.

Wishes, for example, for things like broken charcoal.

Neil wished Jack a broken charcoal, and the bead vanished between his fingers. Spent and gone. Sure enough, when Jack put his charcoal to his paper, trying for an easy smirk at Eliška, his charcoal snapped in two and barely made a smudge on his paper. A few seconds later, once Jack had recovered and readjusted his grip on the broken charcoal still clasped between his fingers, Neil took another bead between his fingers and wished again. The halved charcoal splintered in two, leaving a tiny scattering of marks on what had been an accurate rendering of Eliška’s form.

Neil felt a smile tugging at his lips, but stifled it down before it turned into an accurate rendering of his father’s.

Jack’s jaw clenched slightly, and he dropped the charcoal pieces to the floor before picking up his second – and only spare – charcoal stick. Neil gave him a short respite to work on his own drawing, but as soon as Jack started to relax, Neil struck again. Another two beads vanished and the charcoal halves split into two, and then four. Neil had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep a neutral expression while Jack scrambled on the floor for the slightly larger pieces, his face and neck flushed pink and swearing under his breath. Eliška was watching him now, clearly trying to stifle a smile.

Fiala walked over from the outside ring of easels and stopped in front of Jack.

“What appears to be the problem?” she asked quietly, her glare as sharp as her voice. She flipped the page of Jack’s drawing pad, clearly noting that very little drawing had taken place in the class.

Jack flushed a deeper shade of red and stood up straight. “My charcoals broke, Profesorka.”

“I suggest that next time you come with a better attitude and better materials, Mr. Kyselý,” she said sternly. One of her painted eyebrows rose, and Neil imagined it leaving a smudge of paint in its wake.

Jack nodded quickly and dodged between the other students’ easels, tripping up over someone’s bag and crashing into the spare easels before darting out of the door to attend to his humiliation and misery.

The door swung shut and the class resumed after a few moments’ pause. Neil released his necklace when Matt turned to him. “What was that about?”

Neil shrugged. “If he’d asked, I’d have let him borrow my Illustration materials.”

Neil’s remaining classes of the day were comparatively uneventful. His tutorial had been followed by a critical theory lecture on character design. After that, he headed back to the Illustration department to spend a few hours working on his coursework until he headed back into the same full winter darkness by which he’d arrived that morning. It wasn’t even five o’clock yet.

“Court?” Allison asked as he walked up to their usual meet up spot at the railing overlooking the campus pond. Allison was waiting for him, somehow still looking immaculate despite the weather.

Neil simply nodded, and they bent their heads into the icy wind and headed further into the city. The path was made of stone slabs worn from use, but once they reached Kaprova, the smooth stone switched into rounded cobbles that weren’t particularly accessible. They didn’t pause though, as Allison had once used a wish much more potent than a scuppy, and her wheelchair rolled over the cobbles with ease.

Old Town was a labyrinth of streets scarcely touched by the twenty-first century. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale the sky. At least, this was how Neil had come to describe it, taking notes from city guides so he could pretend he had any clue of how Rococo compared to Baroque and Gothic architecture. They hadn’t covered it in class at PSUA, and he certainly hadn’t been taught it before.

The Foxhole Court was a place rarely stumbled upon by chance; you had to know it was there, and duck under an archway into a tiny alleyway leading to a small courtyard. The unlikeliness of finding the café was almost ironic with how glaringly bright it was painted; you couldn’t miss it with it’s conspicuous colour-scheme of blinding white and obnoxiously bright orange. Fox paw motifs plastered on surfaces like a child given free reign of a sticker collection. It was a three-storey monstrocity and Neil loved every inch of it. The ground floor held for the café and its kitchen; the first floor contained the staff lounge and their own private kitchen (which didn’t boast much more than a mini fridge and microwave), and the top floor was the private residence of one of the owners of the café, David Wymack.

Unfortunately for Neil – who much preferred the quietness of an absence of customers – or fortunately for Wymack – who had the rent to pay – tourists no longer had to rely on chance to discover the place, as Lonely Planet had outed it to the world.

Hidden around the back of The Church of Saint Giles, the Foxhole Court is one of Prague’s best kept secrets. The decor is bold and modern, with quirky glassware and a striking colour scheme. This place is at the forefront of Prague’s rush to embrace the foodie philosophy of high-quality and locally sourced. And it’s not just the food philosophy that sets this café as one of Prague’s hidden gems: each month 30% of their profits are donated to a chosen local charity or project. All the waiting staff are underprivileged young adults studying at the local Palmetto State University of the Arts. You can fill your days with delicious food and drink while ensuring that your tourism dollars are going towards sustainable community development and ethical projects!

The review made it sound like a publicity stunt, but in reality Wymack simply tried to do right by the people who’d be dealt a bad hand in the game of life. Regardless, it brought in more customers. For the past six months backpackers had been poking their heads through the arch, looking for something to add to their Instagram feeds and travel blogs. This afternoon though, the Foxes, as the staff working at the café were known, found it quiet. A small group of students that Neil didn’t recognise were being served by Seth, but most of the tables were unoccupied since the café would close within the hour.

The Christmas decorations were still up, but the plastic poinsettia and holly and pine garlands would soon be taken down, along with the massive tree that stood in the corner. Two weeks ago it had sheltered the Foxes’ presents to each other, but now the space underneath the tree’s canopy lay empty.

“Oh, good, the Den’s free,” Allison said, pushing herself towards their usual table where Dan and Matt were already sitting. The Den, a table with the benefit of both privacy from the other tables and proximity to the bar, was the favourite of most of the staff members. The exception was Nicky, who preferred the opportunity to look at and speak to strangers to a degree Neil could never relate to. Seth had once carved ‘Foxes only’ into the table with a sharp kitchen knife, but the inscription had often been ignored by both customers and owners alike.

Neil had been working at the Foxhole Court for just over a year, since he had started his first year at PSUA. He had been new to Prague, and his Czech was freshly acquired (by wish, not study) and it had still tasted strange on his tongue, like a new spice. According to his friends and classmates, Neil had been homeschooled by his mother before starting at PSUA, as they were always travelling and never settled for long enough to go to a public school.

In truth, he – nor Allison or Renee, for that matter – couldn’t claim any nationality. Their papers were all forgeries, and their accents were fakes. It was only their first languages that bore any authenticity, but those were not of human origin so Neil didn’t think they counted.

They dropped off their bags and portfolios with the others’ and draped their coats, scarves, and Allison’s handmade leg cosy over the back of one of the leather sofas. Wymack raised his hand in greeting from where he was standing behind the bar, attempting to cover a two person job. Nicky, who was supposed to be helping, was instead leaning over the bar to complain to Matt about being late to his first class of the week.

“It’s not my fault I swear,” Nicky whined as Neil sat down opposite Dan. “If Aaron can wake up for his nine o’clock class he can wake me up for mine. I didn’t even have time for coffee this morning.”

“Didn’t your first class start at two?” asked Matt.

“Well, yeah, but that’s beside the point: I had to have an hour long class, watching other people’s shitty group-work, without coffee. And I just had to drop Erik off at the airport last night. You should be sympathising with me more. I deserve a week off.”

“You’d still come here twice a week just to get away from the twins,” Dan said. She lent on Matt for balance as she twisted herself around to look at Seth. “Seth, you took a class with Andrew last year, right?”

Seth scoffed as he swept past them with a tray of glasses cleared from a recently vacated table. After a moment of hesitation, he passed the tray to Wymack, who gave a pointed look at Nicky and the growing pile of plates, bowls, and glasses he had yet to start washing. Nicky didn’t notice, so Wymack sighed and took them to the kitchen, loading them into the dishwasher.

Seth looked back at the rest of the Foxes. “If by ‘taking a class’ you mean ‘heard his name being called on the register and having to put up with Profesorka Řeha asking everyone where he was that morning, every single week,’ then yeah.”

“At least you didn’t have to actually talk to him,” Allison said as she pulled up next to Neil’s end of the couch. “There’s this girl in my class who is constantly undermining my work and asking me ‘yeah, but where are you really from?’.”

“Why don’t you just tell her the truth?” Neil asked under his breath.

It had been too quiet for the others to hear, but Allison caught his eye. She arched a dark eyebrow that said, ‘oh, and I wonder how that conversation might go down’.

Neil brought the conversation back to Nicky’s cousins to avoid a too-long pause that would only draw attention to his and Allison’s ever-silent, ever-secret conversations.

“I’ve never met the twins,” he said.

“Be grateful,” Dan said darkly. “Besides, I doubt you’d see them by chance. Aaron never leaves the Architecture studios and Andrew just never comes in.”

Nicky waved that off dismissively. “Andrew’s never at home when I forget something and have to run home. I think he’s just holed up in Sculpture annoying people.” He paused. “Or killing them.”

Neil had heard enough from Nicky and a little from Renee to know he wasn’t in any rush to meet either of the twins. Renee had a strange friendship with Andrew; he knew that they had met before PSUA, but Renee had never admitted to the details and Neil hadn’t cared enough to push for them. Nicky, on the other hand, rarely let Neil go ignorant about his life. He stood by his family when it came down to it, but it was clear they weren’t particularly close. The twins were antisocial and barely hung out with each other, let alone anyone else, but Nicky was a social butterfly. Neil was used to Nicky’s complaints about the twins’ isolationist stance, effectively making Nicky choose between his family and his social life, but apparently neither of the twins were swayed by Nicky’s unhappiness. It was only at the Foxhole Court where Nicky was free to do as he liked.

Neil couldn’t empathise; he met the Foxes through Allison and Renee, and they were all he needed. It had taken him almost a year to acclimatise to them, though, and Allison and Renee even longer. New people meant new threats. He’d been on the run from his father since he was ten years old, and despite being safe for three years now, being distrustful of strangers was a hard habit to break. It was something his mother had drilled into him. Even after her death, he couldn’t shake the echo of her suspicion.

It was the reason he was dreading the upcoming Cross-School Course: a semester-long project that paired up students from different disciplines to collaborate. Neil had his fingers crossed (because his string of scuppies wasn’t powerful enough, and Matt swore by the practice of crossing fingers, touching wood, and the power of jinxes) that he would be paired up with another Fox. It wasn’t impossible; they were all on different courses at PSUA, but it was statistically very unlikely.

“What did you order?” Allison asked Dan. “I’m starving.”

“Apple strudel and goulash,” Dan said. “We got veggie, but I’m not sure if there’ll be enough strudel to go around. It was pretty popular this morning.”

“You could go make more,” Seth said as he passed.

Dan waved him off. “Not my shift, remember? I distinctly remember trading it over whether or not Wymack and Abby spent Christmas together.”

Where most people bet in money, the Foxes traded and wagered in shifts. I’ll trade your six a.m. start for my seven p.m. close. My weekend shifts this month if Matt prefers briefs to boxers. The only thing the Foxes had in common besides Art and hardship was their strange obsession with betting on the stupidest things; they would bet on anything from highest grades to who’d take the first swing in an argument. The oldest bet the Foxes had was whether or not Wymack and Abby, the Foxhole Court’s other owner, were already together, or how soon they would start hooking up.

Abby called out from the kitchen window to say that their order was ready, and Matt got up to grab the tray. When he came back with steaming food and hot tea, Neil caught sight of an odd-looking creature in the window, lit by the lamplight outside. An odd-looking creature with the flattened face of a cat, bat wings, and long horns that curved skyward at the tips. Neil thought he had done a good job of getting the most normal looking lesser-chimaera to befriend him. At least, King looked like a normal cat if you didn’t pay attention to her feet. Sir, on the other hand… well, they were a matched set. Neil knew that their non-cat ‘extras’ were glamoured to the human eye, but it was still jarring to see either of them outside of his apartment or Ztuart’s shop.

“I’m just gonna go for a smoke,” Neil said to the others. He got up, grabbed his coat and pulled it on as he walked around the building to the windowsill Sir was perched on.

Between her teeth, Sir had a folded piece of parchment. He fished it out of her mouth, trading it for a cat treat from one of his many coat pockets, and read the message. It took all of two seconds.

“He never says please,” Neil told Sir, who meowed back at him in agreement.

Neil fished out a cigarette from another pocket, lighting it and letting the smoke waft around him for a few seconds before he stubbed it out on the underside of his shoe. Neil didn’t smoke, but it was an effective excuse for him having to run outside without notice when Sir or King came with a message.

He opened the door to the café, waited for the overhead bell to finish its chime, and called out to Allison. “We have to go.”

Matt looked up from his laptop where he was showing Dan something. “What? But—” He gestured to the array of food on the table.

Neil shrugged. He didn’t particularly care for sweet pastries. “I can’t. I have an errand.”

“You and your errands!” Dan sighed, rolling her eyes in exasperation or frustration or both.

“It’s for Uncle Stuart,” Neil said, using Ztuart’s human moniker, and Dan let it drop, knowing from experience that she wouldn’t get any specifics no matter how hard she pushed.

Neil’s errands were a regular occurance. Sometimes he was only gone for a few hours; other times, for days. He would come back disheveled, or sunburned, or with a limp, or possibly a bite mark, and once with an unshakable fever that had turned out to be malaria no matter how many times he insisted he was fine.

“Just where did you happen to pick up a tropical disease?” Nicky had demanded, to which Neil had replied, “I don’t know. On the tram, maybe? This old woman sneezed right in my face the other day.”

“That is not how you get malaria,” Matt had pointed out.

“I’m fine,” Neil had insisted, as he usually did. “Really.”

And that was the end of that discussion. Part of being friends with Neil was resignation to never really knowing him. Neil rarely talked about himself, and he was an expert at evading questions – for all that his friends knew of his background, he might have sprung whole from the head of Zeus. Once, Nicky had picked up one of Neil’s boots when it was left on the couch, and a knife had slid out of a sheath in the ankle. There was the matter of him being jumpy and twitchy at mundane moments of the day, but impossible to shock at the more unusual happenings of the Foxes’ lives. And, of course, there were the scars: faded knicks and cuts criss-crossed here and there, either from stupid accidents or desperate escapes. That was the extent of the scarring the Foxes had caught sight of, and they had never asked Neil about it. Neil knew they were curious, but they also knew that he wouldn’t have wanted to talk about it. The Foxes all had their own scarred backgrounds, so Neil trusted that they wouldn’t ask – though it was clear that they still worried – but the same could not be said for his classmates who came to PSUA from sheltered childhoods. Neil had to be more careful in covering his arms with long sleeves to avoid questioning stares and pity. The problem was that those scars on his hands and wrists and arms were the most minor of his scarring. His entire torso was a canvas of previous injuries: a pucker with jagged edges courtesy of a bullet to his shoulder; deeper knife wounds from confrontations with fellow knife-wielders; cicatrices from rushed surgeries; a shapeless patch of pale skin from his left shoulder to his navel marked where he’d jumped out of a moving car and torn himself raw on the asphalt.

Neil wished he had something to give the Foxes in return for their easy friendship and trust, but nothing about him was safe enough to share. They never pried, but it took him weeks to realise they didn’t have to. They didn’t ask for secrets; they settled for breadcrumb truths of day to day life. They knew he hated sweets but loved fruit, that his favourite colour was grey, and that he didn’t like movies or loud music. Neil didn’t understand why, but his friends hoarded these insights like gold. They had pieced him together and built a real person around all of his lies. They found the parts of him no disguise could change. Nothing they learned would tell them who he really was, but it had been frightening nonetheless.

Matt shrugged, and said, “Fine. Two bowls of goulash for me.”

Neil wound his scarf around his neck as Allison zipped up her leg cosy, and grabbed both his and Allison’s portfolios when she asked him to. They waited for the door to open, and he followed Allison out of the café.