that Elevated. Drums! Perhaps the echo clung because she had been
interested beyond measure in his tale of those two emeralds, the
drums of jeopardy. Mobs sacking palaces and museums and banks and
homes; all the scum of the world boiling to the top; the Red Night
that wasn't over.

She uttered a shaky little laugh. She would tell Cutty. The real
drums of jeopardy weren't emeralds but the roll of warning that
prescience taps upon the spine, the occult sense of impending danger.
That was why the Elevated went tumpitum-tump! tumpitum-tump! She
would tell Cutty. The drums of fear.

He over there and she here, in darkness; both of them waiting for
something to happen; and the invisible drumsticks beating the tattoo
of fear. If he were in her thoughts might not she be a little in
his? She stood up. She would do it. Convention in a moment like
this was nonsense. Hadn't he kept his side of the line scrupulously?

Nonchalance. It occurred to her for the first time that there must
be good material in a man who could come through in a contest with
death, nonchalant. She would fetch him and have him here to meet
Cutty, this rather forlorn Johnny Two-Hawks, with his unshaven face,
his black eye, and his nonchalance. She would fetch him at once.
It would save a good deal of time.

There were but ten apartments in the building, two on a floor. The
living room formed an L. Kitty's buttressed Gregor's. The elevator
shaft was inside, facing the court; and the stair head was on the
Gregor side of the elevator. The two entrances faced each other
across the landing.