Graham wanted to go for a walk. It was a quarter to four in the morning, in a foreign city, and Graham had a penchant for pissing people off for fun, usually by being distressingly English at them. Terry went with him.

The roads of Biarritz, a very small city as these things went, were paved, but farther out, around the areas where people actually lived, they were laid with salmon-colored bricks that matched the shade of paint that everyone seemed to want to splash their houses with. The color wasn't clear at this hour, but the moonlight was sufficient to show the dark lines in the patternwork.

Discrete signs popped out of the landscaped terraces, each describing the police patrols that would immediately stop any malcontents from loitering in the area. Naturally, Graham sat down in the three-inch shrubbery and knocked the ash out of his pipe against one of the signs.

The police never came. Eventually they wandered back toward the hotel, and then past it, to the beach. To the north lay the lights of the casino, still bright. They hadn't bothered going; gambling was neither of their vices. Somewhere around there was the palace, too, but the hotel, with its room service and ocean view and notebook with half a sketch forming from the Stygian depths -- the hotel room seemed so much more real than the rest of the town.

"There," Graham said, breathing in the air that swept toward them, salt and cold together. "That's better."

"Better than?" Terry asked.

"Something," Graham said. "Whatever was happening back in the room. Didn't you notice? Like the world was falling into itself."

"That might have been the gin," Terry said mildly. "Or the sleep deprivation. Or the gin."

Graham pulled out his pipe and began to refill it. "Perhaps," he said.

The waves shushed over the rocky sand, and Terry wondered if he'd ever know what day it was again.

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