In the “sidled” state, though, you were already well into the realm of strings and other nonconcrete structures, and so your view was littered with them too. The world became a confusing tableau of glaringly bright ehhif and buildings, all tangled about with the more subdued light-strings of matter substrates, weft lines, and the other indicators of forces and structures that held the normally unseen world together. It was not a condition that one stayed in for long if one could help it—certainly not in bright daylight. At night it was easier, but then so was everything else: that was when the People had been made, after all.

Rhiow and Saash trotted hurriedly down Lexington, being narrowly missed by ehhif pedestrians, other ehhif making early deliveries from trucks and vans, houiff out being walked, and (when crossing streets) by cabs and cars driving at idiotic speed even at this time of morning. There was simply no hour, even on a Sunday, when these streets were completely empty; solitude was something for which you had to go elsewhere. One had to weave and dodge, or hug the walls, trying not to fall through gratings or be walked into by ehhif coming unexpectedly around corners.

They made fairly good time, only once having to pause when an under-sidewalk freight elevator started clanging away while Saash was walking directly over its metal doors. She jumped nearly out of her skin at the sudden sound and the lurch of the opening doors, and skittered curbward— straight into a houff on the leash. There was no danger: the houff was one of those tiny ones, a bundle of silky golden fur and yap and not much else. Saash, however, still panicked by the dreadful clanging of the elevator alarm and the racket of the rising machinery, hauled off and smacked the houff hard in the face, as much from embarrassment as from fright at jostling into it, and galloped off down the street, bristling all over. The houff, having been hit claws-out and hard by something invisible, plunged off down the sidewalk in a panic, half-choking on its collar and shrieking about murder and ghosts, while its bewildered ehhif was towed along behind.