Mica followed me through the night market. Through my augmented eyes, a blue nose kept close to my cuff and a brush of pink light followed every movement of my arm. Without the augments, I would have seen an empty space beside me. Mica would still have been there. Above the market roof, lift cars climbed the faces of the neon towers. Augmented menus floated beside the cooking pans; the older stalls still chalked their prices for people who took their lenses off.
My mother had first seen the fox on the day I was born. Some children came with brilliant horses or birds that filled the birthing room. Mica had been small enough to curl in my mother's palm, and had stayed that size for twenty-seven years. In the crowded lane, a luminous stag put its antlers through a noodle stall without disturbing a bowl. A girl's moth beat its wings around her head like a second halo. When the crowd thickened, I held out my cuff. Mica climbed in. We had done it so often I no longer watched to see if they would.
I liked knowing where to find them. In the years when everything else had changed address, Mica had kept that place.
We were passing the last row of food stalls when the paw tapped twice. Mica did that before trouble. As a child I had followed their stare to a bicycle cutting across the pavement; last winter, to the loose heel of a stair. Often the trouble was nothing worse than a dropped cup. I stopped anyway.
Above the lane, a broad illuminated sign hung from two arms of the market roof. Its letters rolled through advertisements, painting the steam from the stalls blue, then red. At the right arm, a fastening rocked loose. Metal made a thin, high sound.
"Move back," I called.
The cook beside the sign's left support looked up. A little boy in a yellow coat did not. He was turning a sugar-glass bird in his hands to catch the sign's changing colors, and the crowd had folded around him. I caught his coat and pulled him toward the cook. The fastening gave way with a crack that swallowed my shout.
The boy slid from my hand into the cook's arms. I stepped after him, but someone's packing crate had rolled against my ankle. I fell in the middle of the lane. The sign came down from the right, turning on its remaining arm. Its edge filled my sight. All its beautiful colors went white.
Mica sprang from my sleeve.
For an instant, Mica was still small, a blue fleck between me and several hundred kilos of metal. Then their outline opened. They stood upright, taller than the stalls, with long legs and narrow shoulders beneath their vast ears. Light streamed from them in long tails, blue at their roots and rose at their ends. Hair like neon smoke swept across a face so dark it held the points of two star-bright eyes. Hands appeared where paws had been, five fingers spread toward the falling sign.
The sign stopped a hand's breadth above my head.
Loose bulbs hung in the air around it. A fork, knocked from the cook's counter, floated beside my cheek. Behind the giant fox, the whole lane had gone quiet in the strange way a crowd does before it remembers how to scream.
Mica looked down at those new hands. Surprise crossed that familiar face before pain did. The fingers shook. One bulb fell and burst on the pavement. The sign dropped the width of that bulb.
"Get out!" the cook shouted. He had the boy behind him now.
I dragged my ankle free of the crate and crawled left, away from the sign's lowered edge. Once clear, I stood and looked for Mica. People with augmented eyes stared at the huge figure under the roof. Others stared at the sign held up by nothing they could see. Mica's tails had spread across the lane like a piece of the night sky, but their light frayed at the tips. My cuff hung empty, and for the first time I could imagine it staying that way.
"You can let it down over there," I told Mica. The row of packing stalls on the right looked empty. Their owners had run at the first crack. "I'm out. Put it there."
Mica did not move the sign. Their head turned toward me, ears low. I pointed again, impatient with my own fear. A line of silver cracks went through the sign's face.
"Mica, please."
A blue hand reached down. Two fingers touched the inside of my wrist, without weight. The old warning. Then Mica pointed past the sign to a striped packing awning.
I ducked to see beneath it. A woman's shoe stuck out from under a collapsed folding table. One of its braces had locked across her boot, and the far corner of her stall was under the sign's waiting edge. The place I had told Mica to drop it was not empty.
"There's someone here," I called to the cook. He started toward us with the boy still holding his apron. "Take him away from the lane."
The woman beneath the table turned her face toward my voice. "I can't get my leg out."
I looked at Mica. Their hands were still raised, but their elbows had begun to bend. The sign sank another inch. They had seen the woman before I had, and chosen to hold it there.
"I'm coming," I said to her.
Mica's eyes flashed to mine. The blue hand came between me and the awning, palm outward. I knew that gesture too: stay. I shook my head. Mica's mouth opened a little, though no sound came. Their hand returned to the sign.
I went back beneath the sign.
The awning smelled of hot sugar and singed cloth. A crate of glass jars had fallen across the table, weighing the brace down. I pushed the crate over. Jars rolled against my knees. I pressed the release with my thumb and lifted the brace off her boot. She pulled her leg free.
Above us, the sign lurched. Mica made a sound like a breath forced through clenched teeth. Forks and wrappers that had been hanging in the air scattered across the lane.
"Can you stand?" I asked.
"If you help."
We got up together. She leaned hard on my shoulder, and for three steps I could see nothing but the paving directly ahead. I wanted to look at Mica. I could not afford to lose my footing. The woman and I reached the cook's counter just as the boy's sugar-glass bird, abandoned on the ground, lifted briefly and rang against the steel leg of a stool.
"Clear!" I shouted.
Mica looked at the woman, then at the empty packing stalls. Their hands closed. The sign's free right edge swung down on the remaining arm, its light sliding backward across the roof. Mica checked its fall until it reached the stalls. The stall frames broke under the weight, and the sign went dark.
The loose bulbs came down at once. The air smelled of broken glass and cooking oil. Mica stood in the emptied lane, staring at the long blue fingers of their hands. Their tails thinned to ribbons. The light folded inward, and the figure was a small fox again.
I hurried over. Mica sat beneath the empty roof arm, breathing fast, their fur faint around the edges. I sat on the paving beside them while the market found its voices: the cook calling for someone to bring a chair, the boy asking his mother if she had seen the fox too, the woman from the stall assuring three different people that her leg was all right.
The woman limped over, her augmented eyes following Mica. She crouched carefully. "Thank you," she said to Mica, and held out her hand.
I had already raised my arm for Mica to climb aboard. I lowered it. Mica crossed to the woman and set one small paw against her palm. She held still until Mica stepped back.
Then Mica came back to me. They climbed the familiar seam but stayed outside my cuff, facing the lane. Their paw came to rest over my pulse.