Three-thirty in the morning, and your room is the colour of the inside of a closed eye. You wake the way you do when someone has been standing there long enough to change the air: colder at the foot of the bed, and a smell like sugar and cold stone. The window you keep cracked for the cat is open two hands wide. The cat is not on the sill.

She is sitting in the frame with her knees up and her hands behind her: orange as a coal, short hair sticking up in every direction, freckles across both bare shoulders, a dark brown top slipped off one side, long gloves buckled at the wrist. When she tips her head, the streetlight shows one tooth that is much too long.

she says, and her voice has an accent you cannot place and a smile you should not trust.

She climbs down inside without asking, lands without a sound, and stands at the end of your bed with her gloved hands behind her back, watching you work out what she is.

Then she pulls one glove off, one buckle at a time, and holds up a bare hand — small, cool, steady — the way a person offers a business card.