The Demon and the City

his round face pasty with dust, like a pie, as he gaped up at the wreckage.
    "Well," Zhu Irzh remarked from her other side. "Happy Day of the Dead, eh?"
Interlude
    The Great Meridian had settled uneasily back into its appointed track, but it would be a while before the tremors ceased entirely. Shaopeng Street had been split straight down the center, and the tram rails had been swallowed by the gaping crack. Most of the shops and chophouses were damaged, either reduced to piles of mortar or leaning unsteadily against one another.
    Along Step Street, the shacks had collapsed like a row of dominoes and at least one demon lounge was now buried beneath the mass of buildings that had slid down the hill. The wall of Ghenret harbor had been breached and the water level had risen over the sea sluices and flooded back into the Jhenrai canal and over its banks, placing the go-downs and warehouses in several feet of brackish tide.
    Shai was a true ruin now.
    The outlying suburbs of Orichay and Bharulay had suffered considerably, slipping down the muddy hills on which they had been built. Much of Bharulay—compartment blocks, warehouses and the tram station—had ended up on top of the mining works, sealing the entrance to the hills of Wuan Chih. The rest of the shattered Eregeng Trade House had fallen into the streets beneath, squashing the Second National Bank underneath it.
    The roof of the Pellucid Island Opera House had fallen in, and back in Ghenret the foundations of Paugeng had slipped, causing the tower to list. From a distance, it appeared as if the home of the Tserais had put its ear to the ground to listen. Robin's lab was crushed beneath it.
    A later estimate put the death toll at nine thousand, and the city was generally considered to have got off lightly. Three thousand or more were missing, among them a well-known and reclusive poet, gone without trace.

Sixty
    When they finally reached Paugeng through the wrecked streets, they found that its great plexiglass wall had been shattered by the quake, letting in the night and the dusty wind. The tower was listing even further, and from the looks of things, it would not be long before it followed so many of the city's taller buildings, and collapsed. No one had got around to putting any warning tape on it: there was just too much destruction. Zhu Irzh thought of the boys in the port, with their icon of Jhai. If they could see their goddess now, he thought . . . He hoped they were still alive. Soon, the looting would begin, though from what he'd witnessed along Shaopeng, it already had.
    "Surprised to find yourself back here?" the demon asked.
    "Since you ask, yes." Jhai rose up from where she had been sitting on a block of fallen concrete, trying to reach her mother on the cellphone. She winced. "I feel as though I've run a marathon."
    "You have, more or less. And what now, Jhai?"
    The heiress paused, then said with an effort, "I don't know." Her voice was tart, but she was staring fiercely into the empty air, and then she passed a hand across her watering eyes.
    "Jhai?"
    "It's only the wind." She swallowed. "I'm all right. My mother is all right. She and Ei got to the airport, she told me." Then she said, "I thought I knew what I was doing, Zhu Irzh. I reached too far."
    "Hubris," the demon said cheerfully. "Gets them all in the end. But you're one of the lucky ones. You've got a second chance. A while ago I checked up on extradition treaties between different realms. As a Keralan, you should be exempt from anything the Celestial Realms might level at you. My own Hell is a slightly different matter, and I'm sure the Jade Emperor will try to make sure that you pay some sort of penalty, but these things take a lot of time. For the moment, I think you might even be safe." But will I? he thought. Jhai's virus might still be in his system, judging from the episode in the demon lounge. What if he had another attack? It might be a good idea to start talking about a cure.
    Jhai was looking at him warily. "You're sure of that, are you?"
    "I'm never sure of anything." He reached out and took her hand. "Except one thing. You'll never really belong with humankind. And you'd be a foreigner in Hell. So now you're an exile, like me." His fingers closed around hers.
    Jhai scowled. "Zhu Irzh? Are you proposing?"
    "What, marriage?" the demon said, affronted. "Certainly not. But I think we could get to know one another a bit. Is your bedroom still intact?"
    Jhai looked at him for