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Kit was starting to feel that he was on a tour of Train Stations of Europe. In Keleti station, the vaulted ceiling and the vast glass windows felt charmingly old-fashioned, while the various offices, their signs painted a dull beige with words in peeling, bold black lettering—Luggage Storage, Lost Items, Inspector—looked left over from the Soviet occupation.

People swarmed around them as they made their way toward the exit, voices rising in a mix of languages: Hungarian, English, German, French. Kit glanced over at Ty to see how he was doing; he looked overwhelmed. Kit quickened his pace; soon they were standing outside the station, its elegant facade rising above them. Good. Outside, there were fewer people and there was much less noise.

Kit saw Ty’s shoulders relax. There were so many questions he wanted to ask Ty: Since he’d learned more about autism, he’d wondered how it fit with being a Shadowhunter. Or being on a quest like this. Battles were noisy, chaotic, bloody things, and the life they were currently living was devoid of any kind of routine.

But he’d never seen Ty even hesitate in battle, and he remembered what Ty had said in Amsterdam: that everything fell away during battle except the fighting. And he probably had coping strategies Kit hadn’t even noticed.

“So,” Kit said, adjusting the straps on his backpack. “How do we find the Shadow Market?”

Ty was already on his phone, scrolling through what looked like articles about Budapest. “Livvy—” he began.

“I can find it,” she interrupted. She was drifting lightly, her bare feet about an inch above the stained pavement. “I can flit around, find Downworlders, eavesdrop on them. It’ll give you a chance to drop your stuff at the hotel. The Market won’t open until nightfall, anyway.”

“We should pick up more weapons,” Ty said. “Especially now that we know what’s following us. I’d say we’re a little underpowered.”

“Agreed,” said Kit. “Do we know where there’s a cache?” The Clave had agreements with most of the major religions dating back centuries. Shadowhunters took care of demons, and in return, there would always be weapons available for their use, hidden in churches, mosques, and the like.

“There’s a famous synagogue here,” said Ty, still looking at his phone. “I’d be surprised if they didn’t have something. Let’s drop our stuff at the hotel and check it out. Livvy—”

Ty turned, clearly intending to ask his sister a question. But she had already vanished.

—

The hotel in Budapest was located on a quiet side street near the old Jewish Quarter. Kit had expected something small and dingy, since Ty had only chosen it because it was close to the synagogue where they planned to pick up weapons.

To his surprise, it was quite pretty. There was a small lobby painted green and silver where a mundane girl with green hair and a name tag that said Emerald sat behind a small desk. She smiled and gave them a key card for their room, which was at the top of a flight of curving stairs.

The walls of the room were painted dark blue, stamped with metallic stars, and the furniture had the flaking gold finish of old mirrors. There were, as requested, two beds. Ty chose the one farther from the window, as he always did, and shrugged off his light jacket. Kit watched him for a moment before following suit, then opened his bag and hunted through it to find his gear, folded compactly at the bottom. He tried to remember if he and Ty had verbally agreed that gear was necessary tonight, but he supposed it didn’t matter—when he glanced over at Ty, he saw that he’d also unpacked his gear and laid it on his bed. His dinged, now-very-old MP3 player was out too, and Ty had begun fiddling with it, his expression absorbed.

Kit took the opportunity to head into the bathroom—tiny and cheerfully yellow—to wash up. Once he’d showered, he stood in front of the mirror, running wet hands through his hair and wondering exactly how he’d gotten here. Not to Budapest, but to a place where he weirdly felt more comfortable with Ty than he did with anyone else besides his family.

Leaving his clothes in a pile on a chair, Kit left the bathroom wearing just a towel around his waist. No point putting on his travel clothes when he planned to change into gear anyway.

“Can I—” Ty looked up, and dropped his music player. “Crap,” he muttered, bending down to pick it up. As he turned it over in his hands, Kit put a T-shirt on over the towel; when Ty stood back up, he announced that he was going to take a shower and disappeared into the bathroom, carrying his gear.

Kit grabbed his own gear and tried to remember the last time he’d worn the stuff. It felt familiar in his hands—the tough, leatherlike fabric; the color, almost darker than black. The weight of it when it was on, that moment you thought, I can’t move around in this, and then when you realized you could, more easily than you’d ever moved before.

Once they were both clean and dressed, they headed out into the winding streets of Budapest. They weren’t without weapons—Kit had daggers up his sleeves, and Ty had sheath knives in his boots—but Kit felt the prickling desire for more of them, the need to get to the synagogue and load himself down with seraph blades and throwing stars. He’d managed to escape the Riders of Mannan a few times before, but he wasn’t remotely confident he could do it again.

The evening light filtered through the narrow streets, making their shadows stretch out comically long on the sidewalk. They passed a cat mewing in an alley, and Ty bent down to pet it gently, stroking his long fingers over its soft ears as the cat purred and butted its head against his hand.

It was stupid to be jealous of a cat.

They reached a street lined with oddly lighted buildings. “They’re ruin bars,” Ty explained as they passed groups of young people in bright clubbing gear, smoking thin cigarettes and speaking rapidly to each other in Hungarian. “After a big mundane war, a bunch of these old buildings were kind of left to fall apart. Then the locals decided to repurpose them as social spaces, where they could come to drink and listen to music. I like the idea,” he added, as they passed a bar whose interior was strung with brightly colored Christmas lights, the kind they called “fairy lights” in England. “I like taking something broken and not fixing it exactly, but making it into something different.”

“Something better?” Kit said.

“Just something different.” Ty sounded a little dreamy. Kit wondered if the big mundane war was World War II. Probably. Tessa had been a hospital nurse in London during the Blitz, but she was unusual. Shadowhunters didn’t generally involve themselves in mundane wars; it was against the Law to fight in them.

“Let’s try this one,” said Kit, pointing to the fairy-light bar. “We can grab something to eat—we should fuel up, and anyway, the synagogue doesn’t close for another half hour. We need it to be empty, don’t we?”

“Well, yes. Technically I suppose we could go in at any time, but someone would probably complain about us prying up the floor.” Ty smiled a little. “All right, let’s go in.”

When they crossed the threshold of the ruin bar, Kit looked around, trying to see the place through Ty’s eyes. Not better, just different. There was no roof, only the fairy lights strung overhead in overlapping lines. The walls, holding up nothing, were covered in mismatched tiles, chipped plaster, and exposed brick, with layers of old advertisements stuck on here and there like punctuation marks. Someone had put a big gold frame around some faded graffiti, as if it were art. Kit suspected this was the kind of place that wanted you to reconsider what art might be.

What stood out most was the furniture. Almost nothing was being used for its intended purpose: An old bathtub had been turned into a plush, low-sitting sofa, the inside lined with mismatched velvet cushions. A heavy wooden door had been reimagined as a long table, surrounded by chairs made of old pieces of metal pipe welded together. What couldn’t be transformed had been decorated: doors covered in mosaics of broken glass, mismatched chairs painted with animal faces.

Kit and Ty found a table that had once been an ironing board and sat down on two upended wine barrels. Ty was looking around, smiling, his gray eyes full of the reflections of multicolored fairy lights.