As far back as Evelyn could remember, he'd always liked tall people.

Not exclusively, of course. He had never walked around town with a measuring tape, eliminating potential partners who failed to reach some predetermined mark. Height was not a requirement. More of a pleasant circumstance.

A very pleasant one.

In every other respect, Evelyn had never considered himself particularly selective. Women or men. Humans or monsters. What mattered to him was personality, mutual attraction, and that difficult-to-explain pull that either appeared or didn't. Belonging to one lineage or another ranked somewhere around hair color on the list.

He had been born into a world where humans and monsters had lived side by side for a century and a half.

Every schoolchild in every state knew the official date it had all begun, right alongside the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

November 12, 1876.

The day of the Great Fracture.

That evening, an anomalous meteorite struck Earth. It was later named Blackwell and, without any exaggeration at all, changed the world. Textbooks described a flash visible for hundreds of miles, black rain, dust that refused to settle for days, and the first recorded anomalies. Documentaries aired reconstructed eyewitness accounts every year. Schools held commemorative lessons. And every November twelfth, at exactly 8:17 p.m., outdoor lights across the country went dark for one minute in memory of the first night after the impact.

Evelyn had taken part in the ritual so many times he'd long since stopped counting.

First beside his father, holding his hand and watching the lights disappear from neighboring houses one by one. Then with classmates in the schoolyard. Later in a university dorm, where someone inevitably broke the minute of silence with an inappropriate joke.

One hundred and fifty years ago, Blackwell had split human history in two.

Before the Fracture.

And after.

The first monster lineages appeared in the years following the impact — beings whose bodies, abilities, and biology differed from the human norm. Some were almost indistinguishable at a glance. Others could not have been mistaken for human from half a block away. Over a century and a half the lineages mixed, multiplied, acquired names, legal rights, representatives in Congress, and dedicated clauses in health insurance policies.

The word "monster," according to linguistic historians, had once been considered a slur. Evelyn had always found that difficult to imagine.

Of course, some people still said it as if they were throwing a stone. But in those cases the insult was in the speaker's face, not the word itself. In ordinary speech it had long since shed most of its old meaning. Official terminology changed every few decades, becoming longer, more cautious, and increasingly useless, while monster remained.

Short. Clear. Familiar.

Most monsters seemed perfectly satisfied with it.

Evelyn had studied with them, worked with them, argued with them, gone drinking on Fridays with them, and once nearly got into a fight with a classmate who had four arms and absolutely no sense of when to stop. So another person's nonhuman lineage had never struck him as especially noteworthy.

It had simply happened that all of Evelyn's previous partners were human.

Simply happened.

There had been no principle behind it. They went to the same university, moved through the same social circles, cared about similar things, and liked each other enough to eventually end up in the same bed. If some of them had been monsters instead, Evelyn doubted it would have made any meaningful difference. His preference for height, on the other hand, had followed him with suspicious consistency.

When he was younger, Evelyn liked accompanying his mother to fashion weeks in France. She went for the shows, the contacts, and conversations with people whose names Evelyn forgot almost immediately after being introduced. Evelyn claimed he was interested in art, architecture, and the opportunity to miss several days of classes.

All of that was true.

It just wasn't the whole truth.

The long-legged models gliding down the runway interested him considerably more than France itself. Tall, graceful, impeccably dressed. Women who towered over most of the guests even without heels. Men with narrow hips, long arms, and the walk of people who had never once apologized for taking up too much space.

Evelyn watched them with sincere aesthetic appreciation.

At university, he'd dated a woman who was bright, funny, athletic, and nearly half a head taller than he was. She played on the university volleyball team, wore flats, and liked hugging Evelyn from behind with her chin resting on top of his head.

Their friends found this endlessly entertaining.

"Evelyn, do you even consider partners under six feet?" someone asked after the third drink at a party.

"Of course."

"How often?"

"Under the right circumstances."

"So never?"

Evelyn had waved them off, laughing, while his girlfriend laughed louder than anyone.

Privately, however, he had been forced to admit there was a pattern.

He liked height. Not enough to lose his mind over it. Certainly not enough to forget his own name, freeze in a doorway, or answer yes twice to the same question.

Until last night, it had never caused a problem at all.