Carefully watching Pepper launch into the west, What-the-Dickens picked up a few more tips about skibbereen aerial maneuvers. Bit by bit, his flying skills were improving. He saw how much energy he’d spent floundering, pumping those fragile wings like a butterfly in a tornado. Now he could harness the wind a little better, coast a little longer, and conserve his energy.

The moon throbbed like candleglow behind very thin clouds — it kept its shape as a heavenly coin, but the light melted out in skirts all around it.

Suddenly the language of the night — the way winds never stop, really, even on the stillest of still evenings — came clear to the orphan skibberee. The world was constantly talking to itself, in remarks and replies, in choruses and antiphons. What was the noise a tree could make but the noise a wind made in it? And with his wings, What-the-Dickens himself shaped a slender hollow in the night. He was a reed whispering its own small testimony to the world, and about it.

He might have talked to Pepper — she was that near — but she seemed disinclined to chatter, and he couldn’t blame her. Even dreading his eventual good-bye to Pepper — maybe because that good-bye hadn’t happened yet — this evening’s flight was the best example of happiness he’d come across yet. The world below was purple and crumpled, broken up into clumps of houses and trees, fields and barns. The air aloft was shot with bevels of warm and cold. It smelled of earth and nothing else. The stars were mostly hidden; the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. It was pretty.

All too soon Pepper flicked one wing tip, signaling her intention to descend into society. What-the-Dickens followed, gracelessly, but not without a certain oomph.

He still couldn’t figure out how Pepper’s wings informed her about her position and destination. Maybe his wings weren’t wired right … or maybe they were wired for a different task entirely.

He thought, I wouldn’t have known to begin to sink right here, over this simple unrenovated farmhouse. Its pleasant boxy shape, its lack of architectural gewgaw, its softly steaming chimney — it says nothing to me that the houses farther down the road don’t also say.

But there Pepper was headed, and so he was headed there, too. Sticking close to her. Until. Until.

Nearer the earth, the winds were stronger — why was that? The skibbereen went back to flying en pointe, as it were, with a certain amount of attitude. The traditional angelic pose: leading with your right shoulder, your nose, and your brow, and letting your legs trail along for the ride rather than pumping them.

The skibbereen whipped once around the house. Pepper, apparently, was looking for a way to enter. She was flummoxed though, and wagged a finger, indicating that they regroup on top of a mailbox by the road. “This stinks,” said Pepper. “I’m supposed to say good-bye to you here, then slip inside and do my work alone. But the place is sealed up tighter than Croesus’s safe-deposit box. What gives? It’s the rare farmhouse that don’t leave a window open a crack, even in the bitterest winter. Farmers like fresh air.”

“Maybe they’re not farmers. Who are we looking for?”

“Who am I looking for,” Pepper corrected him, a bit sternly. “This is our sad farewell, but let’s make it snappy. I got to find a way in.”

“I’ll stay till I can’t any longer,” he said. “If you argue, you’re wasting your own time, and you don’t have that much of it left. We both don’t,” he finished. “I mean, you and me together. Now, tell me the contact information.”

“You don’t have any of this on your roster?” Pepper shook her head sadly. “They posted the details all across the colony network. There’s something radically busted with your reception, buddy.”

“There’s something wrong,” he agreed, “but let’s not obsess about me. Who is our client?”

“It’s a boy kid,” she said, “named Gage. Gage Tavenner. He’s had a pesky little incisor waiting to come out for weeks. Our best information says he fell backward off his chair at breakfast and knocked out the little beauty at last. So my job is to nip in there, nab the goods, pay the tribute, and get out. Once I can find a way in, that is.”

“We’ll manage it,” he said, liking the sound of that hopefulness.

“Now you listen to me, What-the-Dickens,” said Pepper. “Butt out. I can’t afford to be late getting back. My whole license depends on executing this maneuver in a timely fashion, and — wait; what’s that?”

She screwed up her forehead as if listening to a wireless. “Incoming …” she whispered, and made a shhh-ing gesture.

What-the-Dickens saw her wings flick in sequins of slightly different colors — first, silvery beads like rain on a spiderweb; next, silver interspersed with a smoky yellow; and then silver accented with a mouthwash blue. “Oh, great,” she moaned. “I might’ve guessed.”

“What?” he said. “What?”

“They have it in for me,” she said. “Always did, you know! Think I’m too — oh, I don’t know. Opinionated. Loud. Not classy enough. Common. Now getta load of this: they’ve doubled my assignment. They’re claiming a dental emergency. Nearby, a tooth from someone named Lee Gangster. What a name! I gotta wrap this job up fast and get way out to Gangsterland. And what am I supposed to use for tribute? I only brought one coin.”

“Maybe I was supposed to bring one,” said What-the-Dickens.

“Maybe you were,” she snapped. “Maybe they were telling you so on your wing set, and you didn’t read your instructions.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, first things first. Gotta get this one over with. Ought to be a walk in the park once I get in. How to crack the site, though?”

“Look,” said What-the-Dickens. Pepper turned, but she didn’t see what he had seen — the flick of shadowy grey — something — disappearing off the back porch and into — a hatch? A small door? “Follow me,” he said.

He led her around the side of the house, and they examined what they had previously overlooked. “What is it?” asked What-the-Dickens.

“It’s called a cat flap,” said Pepper. “And call me a genius, but where there’s a cat flap there is usually a cat.”

“There was,” he said. “I saw the last bit of one disappear inside. It was indistinct in the shadows. But I know it’s in there.”

“From bad to worse,” she groaned. “This is a trap. They’ve set me an im possible task. They don’t want me to come back alive.”

“Pepper,” he said, and tugged at her wing so hard that she yelped. “I’ll come in with you. If the cat sniffs you out, I’ll distract it. I know cats. Firsthand, and from the beginning. Use the help you have on hand. Me. Come on, let’s go.”

He pushed ahead of her, breathing hard — surprised at himself — and leaned on the small door. “Are you coming?” he said over his shoulder, and Pepper followed without speaking.

The house was orderly to a fault. The rooms were strict in their arrangements: chairs lined up along the wall of the dining room like soldiers, spaced evenly apart. In the moonlight the table surfaces gleamed like lakes of mahogany. No books anywhere; books were such dreadful dust collectors. On the wallpapered walls a few browned photographs of pinched-looking relatives hung in oval frames. They looked like portals from beyond the grave. It seemed even dead folk could still manage to disapprove.

Sane. Antiseptic. The wrong type of peculiar.

“Does your radar tell you exactly where the tooth is?” asked What-the-Dickens in a hush. “I’m not picking up a thing.”

“No. You got to apply a certain amount of common sense, which in your case, I’m realizing, ain’t all that common. A human don’t usually sleep in a dining room — let’s check out the kitchen. Farmhouses of a certain age often got a spare bedroom off the kitchen, for a farm maid to use, or a granny who needs to sleep nearer the stove for warmth. Or an extra kid. Stick close, you hear me?”

He nodded. They achieved the kitchen, an homage to sterility and order, from its squares of red-and-white linoleum to its Agway farm calendar, a blue ink slash striking out those days of the month already lived into submission and buried in memory: even yesterday.

“There’s no bedroom off here,” said What-the-Dickens.

“No cat, either,” said Pepper. “Cats often hug the stove light, too. Are you sure you saw something entering?”

“I think I did. It’s why my eye veered to the back porch.”

“We’ll have to go even more slowly. All right, let’s move out.”

They circled through the formal parlor, where on a side table a hand-carved chess set was displayed. It was so neatly set that it looked as if no one was allowed to play with it. What-the-Dickens wanted to pet the mane of the knight’s piece, which was carved like a horse’s head, but he could see by the look in Pepper’s eye that he had better just shadow her.

They caught a slight draft of heated air eddying up the stairwell to the second floor. Several doors gave out onto a landing. One was a bathroom with a night-light, and that door was slightly open. Other doors were open, too, a few inches each. Pepper’s intincts said the door on the left, and her instincts were wrong — there was a smell of sour adult breath — so then they tried the door on the right.

Gage was sleeping in his bed. He was an only kid — only and lonely, both, because his parents had other obligations besides child rearing, and reminded him about this on a daily basis. He couldn’t have brothers or sisters, they told him: life was tough and he should just get on with it.

His room was spare, like the downstairs rooms — not so much as a comic book collection, or baseball cards, or drawings taped up on the walls — the tape would leave marks, he was told — or books. Only a desk with his homework ready for the morning. Stacked on the paper blotter.

“He’s a solid sleeper — I can tell by the way his adenoids are whistling,” whispered Pepper. “Let’s hope he’s not a deadweight on the pillow. Those are the worst. You got to tickle them exactly right, enough to make them stir but not enough to awaken them. It’s a dicey business and the first place that things can go very, very wrong.”

“Why can’t you just wake him up and do this transaction in public?” asked What-the-Dickens.

She shot him a look. “And be seen? And be caught? And be caged? And be sold? And maybe be tortured? And betray our colony? And our mission? And deprive the world of the possibility of wishes that really might come true? What kind of world do you want to live in, anyway? That’s the big question, ain’t it?”

“I thought you said to shhh,” he answered, cowed by her intensity and ashamed of his own ignorance.

She led him to the mattress. They landed gently on the edge of the sheet. Gage’s head was turned toward the wall, so at least they weren’t in danger of his suddenly opening his eyes and seeing them.

Pepper tugged at the pillow, looking for the tooth. It was a heavily compacted pillow made out of duck feathers. That sort doesn’t have the airy bounce of its foam rubber cousin, but tends to flop at rest as if exhausted by its own muscular weight.

The skibbereen both began to burrow, but they had to beware of suffocation. Then, too, there was the slim chance that, while they were halfway under the pillow, the sleeper would roll over and crush them.

After a while, having no luck, What-the-Dickens turned and stood with his spine against the pillow and tried to walk backward, inching the pillow up along his wings to widen the space between pillow and sheet. It was hard work, and dangerous, but he managed well enough for Pepper to dive face-first into the linens.

She scissored her arms back and forth in the dark seam. By the digging in of her knees, What-the-Dickens could tell that Pepper had found something. She was reaching for a fingerhold of the buried treasure when the bedroom door cracked open an extra inch.

The strip of light from the upstairs hall widened.

What-the-Dickens was facing the door. He couldn’t move, or he’d risk killing Pepper by the collapse of the heavy pillow. But he could see what was approaching.

Who was approaching.

“Look!” he shouted — he couldn’t help himself. His heart fizzed and sputtered and his eyes watered. He felt less like the mistake that Pepper had called him and more like a miracle.

Gage stirred at the noise; Pepper panicked and came up at a clip, hugging the tooth. “Look,” said What-the-Dickens again. “It’s im possible. It’s McCavity.”