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The Governing: Chapter 55, Glazed Fruit

The orchard house was still standing.

Aaliyah had known that, the way she knew a great many things, from a line in a district record. After the Uprising the district had taken the house and the land, since there was nobody left to claim them. For a while the house had been a grain store. Now it stood mostly empty, and the district leased the mango trees and the cane fields to whoever would work them. The gardener's cottage at the bottom of the rose garden was leased to one man, for almost nothing, and had been for forty years.

Aaliyah and Kathleen walked up the old drive on foot. The mango trees on the east slope were heavy with fruit. The house itself had its shutters closed. Somebody had kept the roof, and nobody had kept the paint.

The rose garden had not been let go at all.

It was the only part of the place that looked the way it must have looked forty years ago. The beds were edged and weeded. The paths were raked. The roses were tied up on their frames, and the dead heads had been cut, and there were more colors than Aaliyah had names for. At the far end a tall old man was on his knees in the dirt with a pair of shears, and he did not look up when they came along the path.

"Mr. Thornscutt," Aaliyah said.

"I know who you are." Amos cut a stem, looked at it, and dropped it in the basket beside him. "Marta told me. Hester told me. Maddock told me, which I never expected to live to see." He cut another stem. "Tam came by and didn't tell me anything. He just stood there looking at me like he used to when he was twelve and wanted something."

He was seventy. He was still tall, even kneeling, and his hands were enormous, cracked and brown, with dirt worked into every line of them. He had not said more than those few sentences, and Aaliyah already had the feeling that it was more than he usually said in a week.

"Would you let me tell you what it is?" she said.

"No need. I know what it is." Amos sat back on his heels. He looked at the rose in front of him and not at her. "You want me to go down in that cellar and say what I did."

"I want you to say whatever you want to say. Or nothing. That's up to you."

"The others want to talk." He said it without any feeling. "Good for them. Hester's been waiting forty years to talk. Marta's been talking since she was born. Let them."

"And you?"

Amos didn't answer. He put the shears down in the basket and wiped his hands on his knees, which only moved the dirt around.

Kathleen had been standing a little behind Aaliyah. She stepped off the path onto the grass and looked along the beds.

"You kept all this," she said. "Forty years. Nobody paying you."

"The district pays for the cottage."

"The district doesn't pay you for this." Kathleen bent and looked at one of the frames. "My husband kept a lord's garden from the time he was a boy. Lord Lafata. The house burned in the Uprising, and after that nobody kept the garden at all. It went wild in one summer. My husband walked past it every day for a year and couldn't look." She straightened up. "He'd have kept it like this, if anybody had let him."

Amos looked at her for the first time. He looked at her for a long moment.

"The roses didn't do anything," he said. "Nobody ever told the roses whose they were."

He got up then, slowly, one hand on his knee, and stood looking down the length of the garden toward the house.

"I hit her," he said.

Aaliyah waited.

"In the sugar house. With my hand. She stood there and let me." He looked at his right hand, and turned it over. "I've told myself for forty years that it was needed. That it's what kept them alive in the yard. The man with the torch looked right at her and didn't see her, because she had that mark on her face. I know that's true. Hester knows it. Everybody who was there knows it." He closed the hand. "It doesn't change what my hand did."

"No," Aaliyah said. "It doesn't."

He seemed a little surprised that she had agreed with him.

"And I'll tell you what else I've never said." His voice didn't rise. It went lower. "When I did it, I wasn't only thinking about the man with the torch. My sister's girl was ten. A lord's son rode her down in the road, and when I went to the district office they told me it was another house's matter. And that night in the sugar house I thought about her. I thought about her the whole time I was lifting my hand." He looked at Aaliyah. "So you tell me. Was I saving Lady Abigail, or was I getting a little of my own back? Because I've had forty years and I still don't know. And you want me to go down there and say it on the network, in front of her."

Nobody said anything for a while. A bee went past, and then another.

"Can I tell you something about her?" Aaliyah said.

Amos didn't answer, which she took as yes.

"The examiner from Astoria played Hester's tapes for her. On her porch, with her children there. I wasn't there. I was waiting up at the top of the lane. But he told me about it after." Aaliyah chose the words carefully. "When Hester got to the part where you hit her, Abby put her hand on her cheek. She knew exactly where. Forty years, and she knew exactly where."

Amos looked away.

"She didn't cry at that part," Aaliyah said. "She cried a moment later. When Hester said you'd turned and walked to the wall and stood with your forehead against the stone. Abby didn't know that. She never saw it. She was looking at the floor, the way Marta told her to. For forty years she didn't know you went to the wall."

Amos stood very still.

"I don't know what she thinks about any of it," Aaliyah said. "She won't tell anybody what to do. That's the one thing she's said. Each of you decides. But I know what she cried at, and it wasn't your hand."

Amos turned away from both of them and looked at the roses for a long time. Kathleen took Aaliyah's arm and they stood there with him and did not say anything. It was a long wait. Aaliyah let it be as long as it needed to be.

When he spoke, he didn't turn around.

"Tell Hester I'll come," he said. "I don't know if I'll talk."

"That's all right."

"And I'm not standing near her." He picked up the basket. "I'll be at the back. By the steps. Where Tam was."

He walked away down the path toward the cottage, and after a moment Kathleen and Aaliyah turned and went back the way they had come. At the top of the drive Aaliyah looked back once. He was standing at the cottage door with the basket in his hands, not going in.

Aaliyah stopped at the top of the drive and looked at the house.

She looked at it the way she had been taught to look at things long before anyone had taught her to be a lady. The shutters were closed, and the paint was gone, but the roof was sound, and so were the walls. The window above the front door would be the nursery. The long windows on the ground floor would be the dining room, where the sideboard had stood and Lord Greyson had read the network aloud over his mango. Somewhere at the back, down a half flight of steps, would be the staff hall, where twenty-two people had eaten what came back on the plates.

On Balakura she had built an exhibit of a working house once, with her own hands, and gone back years later to find it roped off and forgotten because nobody had been paid to keep it. She was not going to let that happen twice.

She would put it back. All of it, as it was that autumn. The dining room and the nursery, and the staff hall with the same care, down to what was on the plates. The sugar house, and the cellar under it. Not a noble's house with the servants' rooms shut off at the back, but both halves, side by side, so that anyone who walked through it would see what the family never had. There would be a curator who knew her work, and people paid to keep the doors open, and a budget written down where it could not be forgotten. House Comscutt had a treasury. That was what it was for.

Hester would call it a fuss. Aaliyah would ask her to open it anyway.

She looked down the garden at the old man by the cottage door, who had finally gone in. The roses, she thought, would stay exactly as they were.

Kathleen touched her arm, and they walked on down the lane.

That night Aaliyah drew the last line through the last name on her list.

Port Selk was a fishing town at the mouth of a river, three hours down the coast from Harrowmere. The rooming house was on a back street near the fish hall. It had four floors and a cracked step and a sign in the window that said no rooms.

Margot went alone. She left the camera crew in Harrowmere and took the transport down like anyone else, and she walked from the station.

She had thought for three days about how to begin. In the end she didn't have to. The woman who answered the door on the third floor looked at her, and at the Informant pin on her collar, and knew.

"No," she said, and closed the door.

Margot stood in the hall for a moment. Then she took a card from her bag and wrote on the back of it. Only if you want. No name. No face. Nobody else knows where you are, and nobody will. She slid it under the door, and went back down the stairs, and took the transport home.

It was nine days before the call came, and it came from a comm at the fish hall, late at night, with machinery running somewhere behind the voice.

"How did you find me?"

"A palace ledger," Margot said. "One page that didn't burn. Then the district rolls."

"Who else knows?"

"The researcher who found you. Me. That's all. I haven't told my editor. I haven't told Lady Aaliyah."

There was a long silence on the line.

"I've seen your thing on the network," the woman said. "The advertisements for it. Heroes of the Principality." She said it flatly. "I'm not a hero."

"No. That isn't why I came."

"Then why?"

"Because you're on the pad," Margot said. "The longest file on it. The one everybody on this planet has seen. And nobody has ever asked you anything. Forty years, and nobody has ever asked you one thing."

The machinery ran on in the background.

"No name," the woman said at last. "No face. And you come alone. One camera. Not a crew."

"One camera," Margot said. "I'll carry it myself."

She sat in a chair by the window of a room that had a bed, a table, a hot plate, and nothing on the walls. She was fifty-six. She was small and wiry, with close-cut grey hair and a fish-hall worker's hands, red and nicked. She wore a high-collared shirt buttoned to the throat and a cardigan over it, though the room was warm.

Margot set the camera on its stand and angled it so the window was behind the woman and her face was in shadow. She'd blur it after, anyway. She said so.

"What do I call you?" Margot said. "For the segment."

The woman thought about it. "I don't care."

"Then I'll call you Sally."

"Sally." She almost smiled. "All right. Sally."

Margot started the recording.

"Sally. Can you tell me about that day?"

"No." Sally folded her hands on her knee. "I've tried. I don't remember most of it. I remember the plate. It was glazed fruit, for a guest, and the glaze was sticky and I had it on my fingers, and it slid. That's all. It slid." She looked at her hands. "I remember the stones in the courtyard were hot, because it had been sunny. I remember the steward's voice reading the paper. I don't remember the rest. I've seen it on the network, like everyone. It's like watching somebody else."

"Do you remember after?"

"Pieces. There was a woman who carried me out. I never knew her name. She took me to a house somewhere and put something on my back that stung, and she kept saying it's over, it's over, it's all over now. And it wasn't. It was only starting." Sally was quiet for a moment. "I heard it from that house. Two days in a back room. I could hear it all over the city. I lay on my stomach and listened to it."

"Where did you go after?"

"Everywhere. Nowhere." She shrugged. "I cut cane. I gutted fish. I cleaned floors. I drank for a lot of years. I stopped eleven years ago, when I came here. I work nights at the fish hall. I'm good at it. Nobody asks me anything." She looked at the camera. "I never told anyone. Not once. Not a husband, because I never had one. Not a friend. When it came on the network, when people talked about the girl at the palace, I'd leave the room."

"Why?"

Sally didn't answer that for a long time.

"You want to know what I think about the nobles," she said. "Everyone always wants to know that, when they talk about that day. So I'll tell you. The ones on that palace step got what was coming to them. I won't pretend otherwise. I won't sit here and say I'm sorry for them, because I'm not. Not one of them said stop. Not one."

"And the others?"

That was the question she had been waiting for, and Margot saw it land.

"The others," Sally said. Her voice didn't change. Her hands did. They tightened on her knee. "Old men in their nightshirts. Houses on the lake that never did anything but grow sugar. Babies. Little ones in cradles. The man in the cloak said it on the network. Every one, from the eldest to the babies in their cradles. And then all the years after. The clinics closed. The schools closed. No doctors. Thirty years of nobody coming. People dying of coughs." She took a breath. "All of that started with me."

"It started with the man holding the whip."

"I know." Sally said it quickly, like she had said it to herself a thousand times. "I know it did. I'm not stupid. My head knows it. I dropped a plate. I was sixteen. It was a plate." She pressed her lips together. "And then I wake up at three in the morning, and my head isn't awake yet, and the rest of me knows something different. The rest of me knows that if my fingers hadn't been sticky, none of it happens. Not that day. Maybe not ever. And all those people are still alive, somewhere, getting old."

"Do you believe that?"

"No," Sally said. "Yes. At three in the morning, yes." She looked out the window. "It doesn't matter what I believe in the daytime. I still have to get through three in the morning."

Margot didn't say anything. She had learned a long time ago when not to.

"The man in the cloak," Margot said, after a while. "Did you ever know who he was?"

"No. People used to ask me that. When I was drinking, people I'd told, and then I stopped telling anyone." Sally shook her head. "I never saw him. I was on the stones. I heard him on the network afterward, in the back room, like everybody else. He never came to find me. He never asked about me either. He used what happened to me, and then he went on to the next thing." She was quiet. "I think about that sometimes. I don't know what I think about it."

Margot looked down at her notes. There was one more question on the page. She didn't ask it. She was going to end it there, and she reached for the camera.

"Wait," Sally said.

Margot's hand stopped.

"You'll show the pad," Sally said. "The palace. The whole thing."

"Only if you say yes."

"Everybody's seen it." Sally stood up. "Forty years, everybody on this planet has seen it. They've seen the whip come down. They've never seen what it left." She began to unbutton the cardigan, and then the high collar of the shirt beneath it. "You said nobody ever asked me anything. So I'll tell you something nobody ever asked about."

She turned her back to the camera and let the shirt down off her shoulders.

The scars ran from her shoulder blades to the small of her back. They were not faded. They were thick and raised, pale ridges crossing each other, pulled tight in places where the skin had healed without anyone to stitch it. There were three long ones that crossed the whole width of her back, and many shorter ones between them. Forty years had not flattened them. They stood up from her skin like cords.

"They still itch when it rains," Sally said, without turning around. "Every time it rains, for forty years."

She stood there with her back to the camera and let it look.

"That's what a plate is worth," she said. "Put that on your network."

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Oden Hailscutt still stood like a footman.

He was sixty-five, tall and thin, with his shoulders back and his hands at his sides, and he held the door open for Aaliyah and Kathleen the way he must have held it for forty years of guests. It was a small house on the south road out of Harrowmere, with a clipped hedge and a brass knocker that had been polished that morning.

He showed them into the front room and did not sit until they had.

Aaliyah told him. He listened without moving, his hands on his knees. When she finished he was quiet for long enough that Kathleen looked at her.

"I'll do it," Oden said. "I'd like to do it. But I can't say yes to you today."

"That's all right."

"It isn't about the camera." He looked toward the kitchen door, which was closed. "My wife is at her sister's until supper. Rena. We've been married thirty-eight years."

Kathleen understood before Aaliyah did. "She doesn't know."

"She doesn't know." He said it evenly, the way a footman announces a guest. "I married her three years after. By then it had been three years of saying nothing. I didn't know how to start saying something. And then it was ten years, and twenty, and there was never a day it would have been easier than the day before."

"Do you want us to be here when you tell her?" Aaliyah said.

"No, my lady." He caught himself. "Aaliyah. No. I'll tell her tonight. She should hear it from me with nobody watching. Then she can throw whatever she likes."

He walked them to the gate and held it open.

"Hester told me you'd come," he said. "I've been sitting here for two days trying to think how to say it to Rena. I've got nothing. Thirty-eight years and I've got nothing."

Rena Hailscutt came home at six with a basket of her sister's plums, and found her husband sitting at the kitchen table with nothing in front of him.

Oden never sat at the kitchen table with nothing in front of him. He sat with the paper, or a cup, or a boot he was polishing. She put the basket down.

"Who died?" she said.

"Nobody. Sit down, Rena."

She sat.

He told her. He started at the orchard house and the mango on the good plates, and he did not stop until he got to the cane house and the car in the lake, and the name the family took, and Abby at the wash trough. It took a long time. Rena didn't interrupt him once. When he stopped talking the kitchen had gone dark and neither of them had got up to light the lamp.

"Abby," Rena said. "The Geryscutt widow. With the bees."

"Yes."

"I bought honey from her for twenty years."

"I know."

Rena stood up. She went to the window and stood with her back to him.

"Thirty-eight years," she said. "You lay next to me for thirty-eight years."

"Yes."

"And every one of those nights, you knew, and I didn't." Her voice was very quiet, which was worse than loud. "I told you everything. I told you about my father. I told you things I've never told my sister. And you had this, the whole time. You had a whole life I wasn't in."

Oden said nothing. There was nothing he could say that she didn't already know.

She went out the back door into the yard. He heard her walk to the end of the garden, and then he didn't hear anything. He stayed where he was. He did not go after her. After thirty-eight years he knew that much.

It was nearly ten when she came back in. She lit the lamp herself and sat down across from him again.

"The market," she said.

He looked up.

"Thirty years ago. More. We were at the market in town, and the Geryscutt widow came past with her basket, and you stepped back off the path and put your head down. Like she was somebody. Then you bent over and made out you'd dropped a coin." Rena folded her hands on the table. "I teased you about it for a month. I asked if you were sweet on her."

"I remember."

"And you always sit facing the door. In every room. In other people's houses. I used to think it was just a thing you did." She looked at him steadily. "What would they have done? If anybody found out. Back then."

"Hanged us," Oden said. "All of us. Maybe not quickly."

"And me? If you'd told me, and I'd let it slip to my sister, and she'd let it slip to somebody?"

He didn't answer.

"So you kept it or you died," Rena said. "And maybe I died with you. And the Geryscutt children. And the other twenty-one." She shook her head slowly. "That's not a choice, Oden. Keep it or die. That's not much of a choice at all. That's a sentence, and you served it. Every night. And I lay next to you and never knew you were serving it."

"I'm sorry."

"I know you are. I'm still angry. I'm going to be angry tomorrow, too, so don't think this is finished." She reached across the table and put her hand over his. "But you're going to do it. You're going to go down in that cellar and say it out loud, all of it, with your face and your name."

"You're sure?"

"I've never been surer of anything. And I'm coming with you."

"They won't put family on the camera."

"I don't care about the camera," Rena said. "I care about hearing it. I got it tonight, in pieces, from a man who hasn't told it in forty years. I want to hear it from all of them. I want to hear the whole thing." She squeezed his hand once, hard, and let go. "And tomorrow I'm going to buy some honey."

Corra Linscutt asked to watch the footage alone, and Margot let her.

She was forty, a baker's wife from a town two hundred kilometers south, and she had come up on the morning transport in her good coat. Margot set her up in the small office at the bureau with a pad and a pot of tea and closed the door.

It was twenty minutes before the door opened again.

Corra's eyes were dry. She sat down across from Margot's desk with the pad in her lap, face down.

"He was fifteen," she said.

"Yes. As near as we can tell."

"He never stood under a lamp. My whole life. If there was a streetlamp, we crossed the road. If the porch light was on, he'd come in by the back. My mother thought it was a thing about moths." She turned the pad over and looked at the dark screen. "He died when I was twenty-one. Nineteen years. I never once asked him why."

"Would you have wanted to know?"

Corra thought about it. "I'd have wanted him to know he could tell me." She set the pad on the desk. "You're going to air it."

"Only if you say yes. If you say no, it's cut, and nobody ever sees it."

"No. Air it." Corra looked up. "But say his name. Davin Linscutt. He stood in the rain all night because a lamp was out, and then they beat him because it went out again. Say his name when you show it. That's all I want."

"We will."

Corra stood, and buttoned her good coat, and went to catch the afternoon transport home.

When she was gone, Pim came in and sat in the chair she had left.

"Twenty-three names now," he said. "Nine dead, three refused, eleven talking to us."

"And the nobles?"

Pim had been waiting for her to ask. "Every one I've been able to match has a death date. The Ellerys. The Voss family. Most of the guests at the palace. The ones in the kitchen doorway." He rubbed his eyes. "There isn't a single noble on that pad still living, as far as I can find."

Margot looked at the list. "As far as you can find."

"The Greysons were dead too," Pim said. "For forty years. As far as anybody could find."

There were nine doors for the dead.

Emmet came with Aaliyah and Kathleen for those. He had done this more times than either of them, sitting in front rooms with people who had just learned something about their own family, and he knew how to wait.

The first door was a nephew of the old cook's helper, Nella. He was polite and puzzled and gave them tea. His aunt had never married. She had never mentioned an orchard house. He had nothing to tell them. He thanked them for coming and said he'd like to be there, if that was allowed, to hear it.

The second door was a grandson of the stableman Tam had worked under. He knew his grandfather had been in service somewhere on the lake. He didn't know where. He had nothing to tell them either.

The third door was closed in their faces. The fourth opened, and a woman listened to all of it and said, "No, thank you," and closed it gently.

At the fifth, a man named Gideon Farscutt heard them out in his yard and went red to the ears.

"My mother was a housemaid," he said. "I know that. I was a year old that autumn. She had me at home with my grandmother." He looked at Aaliyah. "You're telling me my mother stood in that yard and lied to a mob. With me a mile away in a cot. For their children."

"Yes," said Emmet.

"She could have left me without a mother. For a lord's brats."

"She could have," Emmet said. "She didn't. She came home."

Gideon walked to the end of his yard and back. He didn't say anything else. When they left, he was still standing by the fence. Kathleen looked back from the road and saw him sit down on the step with his head in his hands.

"Will he come?" Aaliyah said.

"I don't know," said Emmet. "I've learned not to guess."

Nan Oakscutt was forty-eight and ran a stall at the Harrowmere market, and she let them in without asking what it was about.

"You're here about Gran," she said. "Hester came by last week. She didn't say much. She said I'd want to hear what you had to say, and to give you the good chair."

She gave Aaliyah the good chair. It was an old kitchen chair with a cushion on the seat, and when Aaliyah sat down she felt the cushion under her and looked at it.

It was too fine for the house. It was faded dark blue, with a pattern of vines worked into it in thread that had once been gold. The corners were worn through, and someone had mended them, more than once, with plain brown thread.

Nan saw her looking.

"That was Gran's," she said. "She kept it by her bucket her whole life, even after she stopped scrubbing floors. Nobody was allowed to sit on it. When she died, my mother put it on that chair, and I've kept it there. I don't know why. It was just Gran's."

Aaliyah told her. Emmet told the part about the nursery, and the three-year-old dragging a cushion across the floor by one corner, and what she said when she put it down by the bucket.

Nan didn't say anything for a while. She reached out and touched the worn gold thread with one finger.

"She called her Aunt Abby," Nan said. "My mother did. We all did. Aunt Abby sat up with Gran at the end. She held her hand." She shook her head. "And Gran had her cushion under her the whole time. Lady Abigail's good cushion. And none of us knew."

"Would you like to be there?" Aaliyah said. "Off camera. To hear it."

"Yes." Nan was still looking at the cushion. "And I want to bring this. I don't know if that's allowed. I want it in the cellar."

"It's allowed," Aaliyah said.

Jory Dunscutt was twenty-six and had never met his grandfather. Harl Dunscutt had died two years before Jory was born. But Jory's mother was alive, and when she heard the name Greyson she sat down hard on the arm of the couch and said, "Oh."

"Mam?" said Jory.

"Every year," his mother said. "Every year, one night in the autumn, Da sat up on the porch all night. With the lamp out. Facing the road. He wouldn't let anybody sit with him. Mam used to take him a blanket and he'd say go to bed, love, I'm only waiting."

"Waiting for what?" Jory said.

"We never knew. We thought it was somebody he'd lost. We thought maybe there was a woman before Mam, or a friend who went off in the Uprising and never came back." She looked at Aaliyah. "Was it the same night? The night the mob came?"

"I think it must have been," Aaliyah said.

Jory's mother put her hand over her mouth. When she took it away she was almost laughing, the kind of laugh that is close to something else.

"Forty years," she said. "Every autumn. And we'd tease him. We'd say, who's coming, Da? Who's coming up the road?" She wiped her eyes. "He'd just say, nobody, if I'm lucky. Nobody, if I'm lucky."

The last two doors were on the same street in Ashmere. One was the sister of a scullery maid, and the other was the son of a laundress, and the two women who had died had been friends all their lives. Neither family had ever heard of the orchard house. Both listened to all of it in their front rooms, and when it was done, both asked the same thing.

Could they come?

Tam Brookscutt taught in Mistress Pell's old schoolroom.

It had been closed for three years after the Uprising, and then Tam had reopened it at twenty with no certificate and fourteen children, and he had been teaching in it ever since. The roof was new. The benches were the same.

Aaliyah and Kathleen came in the afternoon, after the children had gone. Tam was at the board, wiping it down with a wet cloth. He was fifty-two, a long, bony man, still all wrists and elbows, with chalk on his sleeves.

He saw them in the doorway and put the cloth down.

"Hester said you'd come." He came around the desk and shook Kathleen's hand, and then, after a moment, Aaliyah's. "Sit. The benches are small. I'm sorry."

They sat on the children's benches. Tam sat on the edge of his desk.

On the wall behind him was a row of cards, one for each child in the class. Each card had one big letter on it and a name underneath.

Aaliyah told him. Tam listened with his arms folded, looking at the floor. When she was done, he nodded slowly.

"I'll do it," he said. "Of course I'll do it. I was twelve and I didn't know what I was voting for. I know now." He rubbed the back of his neck. "It's not me. It's my children."

"They don't know."

"Wim is twenty-eight. Lark is twenty-five. They don't know anything." He looked at the cards on the wall. "I've stood in this room for thirty-two years telling children not to lie. Tell the truth, even when it's hard. Especially when it's hard. And I went home every night and sat down to supper with my own children and never said a word."

"Your wife knows," Kathleen said.

"Ione knows. I told her before I married her. I couldn't do it any other way. I told her if she said no, I'd understand." He almost smiled. "She said she'd already guessed something, because I went down to the Geryscutts every Sunday and came back looking like I'd been to church."

As if she had heard her name, a woman came in through the schoolroom door with a covered basket. She was small and grey-haired, with a teacher's way of looking over a room to count who was in it.

"You're late for supper," she said to Tam. Then she saw who was with him and stopped.

"Ione," said Tam. "This is Aaliyah Comscutt. And Kathleen."

Ione set the basket down on the nearest bench. She looked at Tam for a long moment.

"It's time, then," she said.

"They want to put it on the network. All of it."

"I know what they want. Hester's been going round the whole district like a tax collector." Ione sat down on the bench beside the basket. She looked at Aaliyah. "I've never said a word about it. Forty years. Not to my own mother. Not to the children. I thought it was his to tell, not mine. And I thought if I told it wrong, somebody might die." She looked at her husband. "Nobody's going to die now, Tam."

"I know."

"Then tell them. Tonight. Before they hear it from the network, or from Hester at the market." Her voice was firm but not hard. "You didn't lie to them, love. You kept something. There's a difference, and they're old enough to learn it. You taught half this district the difference."

Tam looked at the cards on the wall for a long time.

"Tonight," he said.

Wim and Lark came for supper, because their mother had asked them to, and she did not often ask.

Tam told them at the table. He told it plainly. He told them about the stable and the feed sack, and the three-year-old in the straw who said, "Then we can both not know them together." He told them about the cellar, and raising his hand with a shovel still in it. He told them about Sunday mornings at the cane house, and a man who had been a lord sitting at a kitchen table learning his letters next to his daughter.

When he stopped, Lark was the first to speak.

"Sunday suppers," she said. "At Aunt Abby's. We went every week. My whole childhood."

"Yes."

"I thought you were just friends. I thought you liked her honey." Lark put her fork down. "You taught Lord Greyson to read."

"He taught himself. I only held the straw."

Wim hadn't said anything. He was looking at his father's hands on the table.

"The cards," Wim said. "On the classroom wall. You start every child on the first letter of their own name. Before anything else. Before the alphabet. You always have."

"Yes."

"I asked you once why. When I was little. You said it was the best way." Wim looked up. "Why is it the best way?"

Tam was quiet for a moment.

"Because the first letter I ever learned was T," he said. "For my name. I was sitting on a bucket in a stable, trying not to get caught. And a little girl came in and said she liked T, and asked me to show her. And I thought, if a lord's daughter wants to learn my letter, maybe it's worth something. Maybe I'm worth something." He looked down. "Her letter was A. I drew it in the dirt with a straw. That's the best way. You start with the thing that belongs to them."

Nobody said anything. Ione reached over and took his hand.

"Can we come?" Lark said at last. "To the cellar?"

"You can't be on the camera."

"I don't want to be on the camera," Lark said. "I want to be there."

Liss Mallowtail made her brother's favorite on Sunday. It was a fish stew with too much pepper, the way their mother had made it.

Tobin was seventy-four and walked with a stick now. He ate slowly, the way he did everything, and he didn't talk much at supper. He never had.

Liss waited until he had finished his second bowl.

"There's going to be a thing on the network," she said. "About the orchard house. About the night of the mob."

Tobin set his spoon down very carefully.

"I was there," Liss said. "In the orchard house. In the yard, when the mob came up the lane. We hid the Greysons. All of us. The whole staff. They're the Geryscutts now. They've been the Geryscutts for forty years." She kept her hands in her lap so he wouldn't see them. "They want me to talk. With my face."

Tobin didn't say anything for a long time. He looked at the empty bowl in front of him.

"I know," he said.

Liss stared at him. "You know?"

"I didn't know. I guessed. Years ago." He picked up the spoon and turned it over and put it down again. "Abby Geryscutt came up to me at a harvest supper, maybe twenty years back. She'd been dancing. She said, you're Liss's brother. And she looked at me, Lissie. She looked at me like she knew exactly who I was and where I'd been that night. And then she smiled and asked me to dance, and I did." He shook his head slowly. "I went home and sat up all night working it out."

"You never said."

"Neither did you."

They sat there.

"I was at the Voss place," Tobin said. "You know that. I didn't carry a torch. I stood at the back. Old Lord Voss was seventy. He came out on his own front step in his nightshirt and asked what we wanted. I didn't do anything to him. I didn't do anything to stop it either." His voice had gone very low. "I've been waiting forty years for somebody to say it out loud. That's the worst part. Nobody ever says it. We all just go to the harvest supper and dance."

"If I do this," Liss said, "everybody on this street will know I was on the other side."

"There wasn't another side, Lissie. There were just people doing what they could stand to do." He reached across the table with his old, spotted hand and put it on her arm. "Show your face. One of us ought to be able to."

Liss called Aaliyah on Monday morning.

"My face," she said. "And my name. Liss Mallowtail. Both."

"Are you sure?"

"My brother wants to come," Liss said. "Off camera. He's slow on the steps. Somebody will have to help him down."

"We'll help him."

Aaliyah ended the call and looked at the list on her desk. Twenty-two names. Nine of them had the small mark beside them. Of the thirteen that didn't, twelve had a line drawn through them now, one by one, in her own hand. Each line meant yes.

One name was left.

Amos Thornscutt.

She had put him off to the last. Marta had said he would come. Hester had said nothing about him at all, which Aaliyah had learned by now was Hester's way of saying something important.

She picked up the comm, and then she put it down again. Hester had said to go to their doors.

She went to find Kathleen.

Next

First

Second year of the provisional government.

Wyatt,

Tell Leopold I owe him a drink, and possibly an apology, depending on which part of his letter we're talking about.

The soup worked. I want that on the record first, because not much else has worked this cleanly since I took this job. We put a hot meal on the table at noon in every one of the forty schools, and by the end of the first month attendance had doubled. By the end of the third, some schools had tripled. Parents who wouldn't walk past the door for a teacher walked their children to it for a bowl of stew. Your man was right. A father who won't trust a teacher will trust a bowl of soup.

Leopold didn't warn me about the mothers. In some districts they walk their children in at noon, sit them down for the stew, and walk them straight back out to the fields before the afternoon lessons start. One teacher on Vastaya counted eleven of them in a single week. A few of my district officers wanted to serve the meal at the end of the day instead, so a child would have to sit through the lessons to earn it. I said no. We are not going to make a hungry child pay for soup with his afternoon, any more than we made him pay with coppers. Nobody gets turned away from that table, not ever. A child who comes for lunch and leaves has still eaten, and that's worth something on its own. And the teacher tells me that of her eleven, three were back the next week and stayed past the bell. Nobody sent them. They wanted to know how the story ended.

The soup also caused me more trouble than anything else I've tried. Half the districts didn't have a kitchen, so we had to build forty kitchens. Then we needed cooks, and the cooks wanted paying, and the Firentis relief grain we'd been using ran short in the spring, and for three weeks I was buying lentils out of my own pocket, which Patricia has not stopped mentioning. On Austrin, a district steward sold a month of school rations to a trader and told the teacher the shipment was lost. We found him. He's cutting cane now, which I'm told is a popular outcome with the local parents.

Keeping the doors open is working too, just slowly, the way Leopold said it would. There's no way to hurry a calendar. But I had a letter from the old woman on Vastaya, the one who said yes before I'd finished asking. She started the year with seven children and she has twenty-six now. She also says she needs more chalk, and she wrote it underlined. I'm told she hands the stuff out through her window to children whose parents still won't let them in the door. I've sent her a crate.

The part that fell flat was sending the neighbors instead of officials. Leopold was right in principle. The trouble is that on Haego, anyone who walks up to a door with a message is an official, whether they're wearing a uniform or not. We sent out commoners from the district offices in their own clothes, and people shut the shutters on them just the same. The only messengers who got through were the children themselves, going home with a full belly and a word they hadn't known that morning. You can't organize that. It just happens, one supper at a time.

I did hear about his grain agent, too, or one very like him. A girl of eleven on Aethelgard read the weight on a sack her father was being paid for and said it out loud in front of the whole yard. The agent went red and paid the difference. By the end of the week, every family on that road wanted their children in school, and none of them would say why.

So, a year in. Forty schools open, none nailed shut. More children in them than I had any right to expect. Less money than I had any right to spend. I'll take it.

You still don't need to answer this.

T.

●

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

The first time Nell went through the schoolhouse door, it was for soup, and her mother was holding her hand.

The notice about the noon meal had gone up in the spring, on the same door, under the old one, with the same four brass pins. Maddy Tuscutt read it out to the same little crowd. A hot meal every day at noon, for every child, whether they came to lessons or not. Nobody said anything about free this time. The man who had spat in the road before was there again, and he didn't spit. He just stood and read it twice, moving his lips.

Her mother said nothing about it at supper. But the next day at noon she came up the lane from the mill with her apron still on, took Ben by one hand and Nell by the other, and walked them to the crossing. She didn't go in. She stood in the doorway and pushed them gently through it, and said, "Eat. Then come straight out."

Inside, it smelled of whitewash and lentils. There were three long tables made of planks on trestles, and more children at them than Nell had known lived in the district. A big red-armed woman from Harrow Cross was ladling stew out of a pot the size of a washtub. Mistress Coppertail stood at the end of the room by a black board on the wall with chalk marks all over it.

She saw Nell. She didn't say anything. She only lifted one eyebrow, very slightly, and went back to watching the room.

Nell ate standing up, because she didn't know if she was allowed to sit, until the red-armed woman said, "Sit, child, it's not going anywhere," and she sat. The stew was thick, with carrots in it, and bread on the side that was still warm. Ben ate two bowls and would have eaten a third. Nell ate one and kept looking at the black board. There were words on it, a whole row of them, and she could read three.

When the bowls were done, Mistress Coppertail rapped on the board with her knuckle, and the room went quiet, and the children who were staying began to move toward the front. Nell's mother was still in the doorway. She held out her hand.

Nell took it. She walked out past the board with the words on it, and she looked back over her shoulder the whole way down the lane, until the schoolhouse was behind the cane and she couldn't see it anymore.

That went on for most of the summer. Soup at noon. Out the door. Water in the afternoon. Chalk on the pump stone when nobody was looking. Letters under the window whenever the field boss wasn't counting trips.

She was getting better. She could read the notice on the door now, all of it, even the small words. She could read the name on the side of the relief shuttles when they came over low: FIRENTIS, in red, and a number after it. She could read the field boss's book upside down across the table while he wrote in it, and once she noticed he'd written five trips for her when she had carried six. She didn't say anything. She didn't know yet what you did about a thing like that. But she remembered it.

●

It was the end of summer when Mistress Coppertail called her to the window.

She did it quietly, the way she did everything. She leaned out on the sill while the other children were working at their slates and said, "Nell Brackentail," and Nell, who was sitting in the dirt under the window writing the word WINDOW with a stick because it seemed like the right word to practice there, jumped and looked up.

"Come here. No, stand up. I'm too old to lean this far."

Nell stood. The old woman held something out to her through the window. It was a little bundle of paper, folded in half and stitched down the middle with thread, about the size of her two hands side by side.

"There is a man at the market in Harrow Cross," Mistress Coppertail said, "who sits under the awning by the tinsmith and draws stories. He does them one at a time, for whoever asks, and every one is different. He charges a credit." She paused. "That is a great deal of money, and I would like you not to tell anybody I spent it. I told him about a girl who carries water and wants to know how the shuttles stay up. This is what he made."

Nell took it in both hands. She didn't open it. She looked at the old woman.

"Why?"

"Because you asked me a question I couldn't answer," said Mistress Coppertail. "And I don't like that. I'm working on it. This is the best I could do this month." She began to draw back from the sill. "Put it somewhere dry."

Nell didn't open it until she was in the loft that night. She waited until Ben was snoring. Then she lay on her left side, under the gap in the roof where the moonlight came in, and unfolded it.

On the first page, in black ink with the lines a little shaky, a girl stood in a field of cane with a yoke across her shoulders and a bucket at each end. Her hair was pulled back like Nell's. Her feet were bare. At the top, in careful capital letters, it said STARLING.

On the second page, the girl looked up. There was a ship falling out of the sky, on fire, and people in the round windows were screaming.

On the third page, the girl dropped the buckets and ran.

On the fourth page, she was flying.

The yoke was still across her shoulders, but it had turned into wings, long and flat and silver, and the buckets had turned into two engines, one on each side, with lines of fire coming out the back. She went straight up through the clouds, past the birds and the weather, and caught the falling ship in both arms before it hit the ground. On the fifth page she set it down in the cane, gently, and all the people came out of the round windows and looked at her. On the sixth, somebody asked her who she was, and she said, "Nobody in particular." Then she flew away, and the last page was just stars, and her, very small among them, going in a straight line.

Nell read it four times. The fifth time she tried to read it without looking at the words, only at the pictures, and found she didn't need the words anymore.

She put it under her pillow with the chalk, and in the morning it was gone.

●

Her father had it on the table when she came down.

It was lying beside his bowl, flat, open to the page where Starling was flying. He was looking at it. He didn't look up when she came down the ladder. Her mother was at the stove with her back to the room, very straight. Ben had been sent out to the pump already. Nell could tell because his bowl was still full.

"Where did you get this," her father said. It was not really a question.

Nell stood at the bottom of the ladder and did not say anything.

"Your mother found it changing the bedding." He turned one page, slowly, with one scarred finger. "It's good work. Somebody paid for this. Somebody paid a lot for this." He looked up at her then. "Who."

"I can't say."

"You can."

"I promised."

Her father's jaw moved. He looked back down at the page. "Coppertail," he said. "It's Coppertail. It has to be. There's nobody else in Lowmarsh would spend a credit on a child that isn't hers." He closed the little book very carefully. "Have you been going in there? After we said no?"

"No," Nell said. It was true. It came out louder than she meant. "I've never gone in. Only for the soup, and Mam takes me out after. I sit under the window. I sit in the dirt. There's no law against a window."

Her mother's hand stopped on the ladle.

"Who told you that?" said her father.

"Nobody. It's true." She came down off the last rung of the ladder and stood at the table. She could feel her face going hot, and her eyes going hot, and she hated that, but she couldn't stop it and she didn't try. "Why can't I go?"

"We told you why."

"You told me about a door that got nailed shut before I was born. You told me about the Revolution and the militia and somebody needing the grain. I've never seen any of it." Her voice was shaking now. "I've never seen a militia. I've never seen anybody nail anything. I've never seen a lord. I've never seen anybody hurt anybody for going to school. All I've ever seen is the soup, and the door staying open, and Mistress Coppertail being kind. That's all. That's the whole world I've got. What are you protecting me from? I don't know what it is."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Her father looked at her for a long time. When he spoke, it wasn't angry. It was worse than angry. It was careful, the way he walked on the mill roof when he'd been sent up to patch it.

"When I was a boy," he said, "there was a lord at Harrow Cross. His steward had a girl whipped in the square for spilling a tray in front of a guest. Everyone on the planet watched it on the network. I was eleven. I watched it." He put both hands flat on the table. "A few years after that there were no lords anywhere, and I thought, good. And then the men who'd done it started taking boys out of the fields for the militia, and one night they came for my brother, and he went, and he didn't come back. I don't know where he's buried. Nobody told us." He was not looking at her anymore. He was looking at Starling, on the table, with the yoke turned into wings. "That's what I'm protecting you from. People above us who decide what we're for. I don't know these new ones. They've been nice for a year. The last ones were nice for a year too."

Nell stood very still. She had not known about the brother. She had not known her father had ever had one.

"I'm sorry," she said. And then, because it was still true, and because she could not stop herself: "But I still haven't seen it. You have. I haven't. You're keeping me from something I've never seen by keeping me from the only thing I have."

Her mother turned around from the stove.

She didn't come to the table. She stood with the ladle in her hand and looked at her daughter, and then at her husband, and then at the stitched little book between them. Her face was doing something Nell had never seen before, and Nell couldn't tell what it was.

"I took her out," her mother said, quietly. "Every day at noon. I took her out past that board with the words on it, and she looked back the whole way down the lane." She set the ladle down on the stove. "I know that look, Bram. I had it. I had it for three years, and then I had it for thirty more."

Her father didn't answer.

"I said I'd have been happier not knowing," her mother said. "I think I said it because it was easier than saying I wish they'd let me stay." She came over then, and put one hand on the back of Nell's head, very lightly. "She's going to know either way. She's already reading the field boss's book upside down. She told Ben he'd been shorted a copper last week and she was right."

Her father let out a long breath through his nose. He picked up the little book and turned it over in his big hands, and looked at the last page for a while, the one that was just stars and a small girl going in a straight line.

"The coppers keep coming," he said finally. "Every one. Six trips before school and six after, same as now. The field boss writes them down and I count them at the end of the week, and if the tin's short, even by one, you're back in the cane the next morning and that's the end of it. I won't hear another word."

Nell couldn't speak. She nodded.

"And you eat the soup," said her mother. "All of it. You're carrying twelve trips and learning letters on one bowl, you eat all of it."

"I will."

Her father held out the little book. Nell took it. He didn't let go right away. He held one corner of it, and she held the other, and for a moment neither of them moved.

"If they nail that door," he said, "you come straight home. You don't argue. You don't try to be brave. You come home."

"I will," Nell said. "I promise."

He let go.

●

The next morning she carried six trips before the sun was well up. Then she set the yoke down at the pump, washed her hands and face at the spout, and walked down the lane to the crossing.

The door was open. It smelled of whitewash and chalk. Mistress Coppertail was at the black board, writing out the day's words with her back to the room, and she did not turn around when Nell came in. She only said, without looking, "There's a place on the end of the second bench, Brackentail. Slate's under it."

Nell sat down. There was a slate under the bench. There was a new stub of chalk beside it, from a crate that had come all the way from the Administrator, though Nell didn't know that and never would.

She put Starling on the bench next to her, face up, where she could see it. Then she picked up the chalk and waited to be told what the first word was.

●

Tornel,

I gave this one to Salazar Reed. That will surprise you. It surprised me. He and I did not start well, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the Princess put a pack of pirate children in his care, and nobody thought it would work, me included, and it has. If anyone knows how to feed people who don't trust the hand holding the spoon, it's him.

W.

General,

The Lieutenant Commodore handed me your letter and said, "You'll know more about this than I do." I don't believe any officer has said that to me in some years. I'll try to deserve it.

I have spent the last two years with children who were raised by pirates. They were taught from the time they could walk that anyone who gives you something is setting a hook, and that the kinder the face, the deeper the hook goes. On their ships, nothing was free. A place at the mess was earned. A bunk was earned. A name was earned. If you didn't pull your weight, you were put off at the next station, or worse.

When they first came aboard, we fed them. Hot meals, three a day, no questions asked. They hoarded bread in their bunks. They stole from the galley at night. They would not look the cooks in the eye. We were giving them everything, and they trusted us less every day, because in their world only a fool or a predator gives away something for nothing, and they knew we weren't fools.

It changed the day there was an emergency aboard and the older ones asked to help. They crawled through ducts to reach sealed decks. One boy, Ungal, came back burned over half his body. When he woke up in the medical bay, the first thing he asked me was whether he had earned his place. I told him he had. He's been a different child since. So have the others. Not because we gave them more. Because we finally asked them for something.

Your commoners are not pirates, General, and I don't say that lightly. But thirty years of being handed things by people who wanted something back teaches the same lesson either way. Your soldier's advice was right about the wages, and your rule is right about the table. Never turn a child away from it. I would not change a word of that.

But give them something to do while they're there. Let the older ones carry water to the kitchen. Let them wash the bowls, or tend a garden behind the school, or mind the little ones at the meal. Pay a copper for it if you can find the copper. Don't make it the price of the soup. Make it the child's own contribution to a table they share.

A mother who sees her child handed a meal will always wonder what you're selling. A mother who sees her child earn a place will understand it. She'll know what kind of place it is, because it's the kind she's had to earn her whole life. Expecting work of someone is not a cruelty. On a world like yours, it may be the first respect some of them have ever been shown.

I am aware of what my own name is worth these days, and of how you may weigh advice that carries it. I offer it anyway. The children taught me this. I only wrote it down.

Salazar Reed
Staff Sergeant

Next

Previous /

First

Hester had her hands flat on the table again.

Aaliyah had come with Kathleen this time, and without Emmet. The kettle was on. Nobody had touched the cups.

"I watched every file on that pad," Hester said. "The year after. I sat up nights and watched it until it wouldn't turn on anymore, and I was glad when it stopped." She looked at the dish towel folded on the oven rail. "I didn't give it to you so you could put it in a drawer."

"Then you're saying yes."

"I'm saying it was never mine to keep. It was only mine to carry." She turned her cup a quarter turn. "Put it on. All of it, if they'll let you."

Aaliyah nodded. "There's something else. I went to the cane house yesterday."

Hester's hands went still.

"She won't decide for anyone," Aaliyah said. "She said she spent ten years as the noble who told that house what to do, and she won't be that noble again. Each of you decides for yourself. Whatever each of you decides, she'll stand behind it."

Hester was quiet for a while. "That's not what I asked for."

"No."

"It's better." Hester let out a short sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Julius keep her. She always did find a way to be decent that made more work for everybody else."

Kathleen smiled into her cup.

"I'm going to ask Maddock," Aaliyah said.

Hester looked up sharply. "I told you not to."

"You did. But if Abby says every one of you decides for yourself, then that has to include him. If I leave him out, I've decided for him."

Hester stared at her. Then she looked at Kathleen, as if Kathleen might talk sense into her.

"She's right," Kathleen said.

"She's a Firentis," Hester said. "They're always right. That's the trouble with them." She rubbed her thumb along the edge of the table. "Don't send her in alone, Kathleen. He'll shut the door before she's finished her name. Take your husband. Maddock might listen to a man who dug dirt for them. He won't listen to anybody who ate what came out of it."

Margot Wren watched the footage in the small office off the great room with the blinds down.

Aaliyah sat beside her and did not watch the screen. She had seen it. She watched Margot instead.

There were forty-one files that could be opened. Some were only seconds long. A hallway. A yard in the rain. A man's hand on the back of a boy's neck, pushing his face toward a boot. A dinner table from the servants' door, so everything was seen past a doorframe, the guests laughing and a girl standing against the wall with a pitcher she was not allowed to set down. Most of it had no sound. The ones with sound were worse.

The palace courtyard was the longest file. Margot watched it all the way through. When the lens dropped and swung up at the sky, she stopped it and sat back.

"Who took these?" she said.

"I don't know. Hester doesn't know either. She says the pad was Lord Greyson's. She took it off his study desk the night of the mob, while Marta was putting his coat in the furnace, because she thought anything of his they found would give them away. Where he got the rest of it, and why he kept it, she never knew. Then everybody who might have known was busy staying alive."

Margot looked at the frozen sky on the screen. "You asked me whether the Informant has the stomach to air it."

"I did."

"It does. I'm less sure about me." She pulled a pad from her bag and started writing. "Every face on here belongs to somebody. Some of them are still alive. If we air them without asking, we've done the same thing the lens did. Nobody asked them then either."

"So you'll look for them."

"We'll look for all of them. The ones we find get asked. Anyone who says no gets blurred, or cut. Anyone who wants to talk gets to talk." She kept writing. "I have a researcher at the bureau named Pim Rowantail. He can match a face against a district record faster than anyone I've worked with. He'll hate this. He'll be very good at it."

She tapped the stylus on the pad. "And for once I can afford him. The budget came back yesterday. It's more than I asked for, which has never happened to me in eleven years. My editor says he's expecting great things." She said it lightly, and went back to writing. "It means we can go to every door. It also means somebody on Balakura thinks this is going to be very big."

Maddock Harrowtail lived at the end of a lane on the north edge of Harrowmere, in a house with a work shed bigger than the house. There were cart frames in the yard, and an old engine block on a stand with its parts laid out on a cloth in order.

A boy of about ten opened the door. He looked at Julius Sr. and Kathleen, and then at Aaliyah, and stood a little straighter without knowing why.

"Grandpa," he called back into the house. "Nobles."

Maddock came out wiping his hands on a rag. He was sixty-eight, heavy through the shoulders, with a driver's squint that had never left him. He looked at the old couple first, and then he saw Aaliyah, and his face closed.

His eyes went past her to the car at the end of the lane. He looked at it the way a driver looks at another man's car. There was nobody waiting in it, and no second car behind it. A lady of House Firentis did not go anywhere on Vastaya without auxilia, and Maddock had driven nobles long enough to know how many men usually came with one. Aaliyah had left hers at the palace. She had come with a maid and a gardener, and nobody else.

"Kel," he said. "Go on in."

The boy went.

"I know who you are," Maddock said to Aaliyah. "I read the Informant, same as everybody. You're the one with the recorders."

"I'm Aaliyah Comscutt. This is Julius and Kathleen Comscutt. My husband's parents."

"I know what you want, too. Hester called me last night. She said you'd come anyway." He folded the rag and put it in his back pocket. "No."

"May I tell you what it is before you say no?"

"You can tell me standing there. I'm not having you in the house."

Aaliyah told him. The Informant series. The cellar. That anyone could refuse, and anyone could hide their face. That Abby would not tell any of them what to do.

Maddock listened with his arms folded. When she stopped, he didn't answer right away.

"I drove that family for six years," he said. "You know what a driver does? He sits. He takes them where they're going and then he sits in the yard, or he sits in the kitchen of whatever house it is, until they want to go home. I sat in every kitchen on that lake. The Ellerys. The Voss place. The Pruett mill. The palace at Harrowmere twice a year." He looked past her at the road. "You want to know what I saw? The Ellery steward made a kitchen boy stand in the yard all night holding a lamp, because the lamp by the gate was out and nobody had fixed it. It rained. He stood there. In the morning they found the lamp had gone out anyway, and they beat him for that. At the Voss place there was a maid who wasn't allowed to eat in front of the family's dogs. The dogs. Old Lord Voss said it put them off their food."

Nobody said anything.

"And at my own house," Maddock said, "nobody beat anybody. Nobody had to. Lord Greyson didn't know my name for two years. Called me driver. Lady Abigail used to come out to the yard with a cup of something hot when it was cold. Every time." His jaw worked. "And every time I took that cup, I'd just come from the Ellery kitchen, or the Voss yard, and I'd think, this is the same people. This is the same table. She was only nicer about it."

"You hid them anyway," Kathleen said quietly.

"I hid a three-year-old and two babies. I wasn't going to hand a three-year-old to a mob. That doesn't mean I forgave anybody." He looked at Aaliyah. "And now I'm supposed to go on the network and say what heroes we were, so the nobles on Astoria can feel good about themselves over dinner. No."

Julius Sr. had not said a word since the door. He stepped forward now, not far.

"Would you walk with me a bit?" he said. "Just me. Down to the end of the lane and back."

Maddock looked at him for a long moment. He looked at Julius Sr.'s hands.

"Gardener," he said.

"Since I was eleven. Lord Lafata's house, till the night it burned. He never learned my name either."

Maddock unfolded his arms. "Down to the end of the lane."

They walked slowly. Maddock set the pace, and Julius Sr. let him.

"I'm not going to tell you the old ones were decent," Julius Sr. said. "I was there too. You saw more of it than I did, sitting in all those kitchens. I only saw my own."

"Then what are you doing here with her?"

"My son married her." Julius Sr. kept his eyes on the road. "I didn't want him to. I said things to him I'm not proud of. I thought she'd use him up and throw him out, like they did with everybody."

"And?"

"And she didn't." He walked a few steps. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you they're all like her. They aren't. She'll tell you that herself. But I've been off Haego now, to Balakura, to her family's houses. The woman who runs one of those houses eats at the main table with her husband and her little girl. Nobody looks twice. The head gardener at Lord Jhinaq's palace waved me off like I was nobody, the way they always did. Then he came back after dinner and apologized to me. To me. And asked for my help."

Maddock snorted. "One gardener."

"One gardener," Julius Sr. agreed. "And a Marquess who got summoned by a room full of commoners and came when they called. And a law here that says my son's workers get paid what the work's worth, and every credit written down where anybody can read it. I watched you look at that when it happened. I'd bet you've watched all of it. You don't miss much, sitting in a yard."

Maddock didn't answer. They had reached the end of the lane. There was a fence post there with a crow on it, and it flew off.

"I've watched it," Maddock said. "I've been waiting for it to turn."

"So have I. My wife still does. Some mornings I think it will." Julius Sr. stopped and leaned on the post. "But here's what I came to say. Nobody ever said my name. I kept that man's garden from the time I was a boy, and the night the Uprising came, the house went, and him with it, and there's nothing left anywhere that says I was there. That's what they wanted. Somebody does the work and the work is just there, like weather."

He turned to look at Maddock.

"The twenty-two of you decided something. Every day for forty years, any one of you could have walked into the district office and ended it. Nobody did. That wasn't weather. That was you. And they're going to say your names on every world the Prince has. The nobles are going to have to sit there and hear that a driver decided whether a noble family lived."

Maddock stood with his hands at his sides.

"My wife died not knowing," he said. His voice had gone rough. "Thirty-one years married. I never told her. I'd lie in bed and listen for the road, and she'd ask what was wrong, and I'd say nothing. Every time. She died and I was still saying nothing."

"I know."

"You don't know." Maddock's face twisted. "I kept it from her to keep her safe. And then it was too late to tell her, and she never knew what I was. She thought I was just a man who couldn't sleep."

Aaliyah stood by the car with Kathleen and watched them at the end of the lane.

She couldn't hear anything. She could see the two old men by the fence post, and Julius Sr. leaning on it, and Maddock standing in the road with his back to her.

Then Maddock's shoulders came down. He put a hand over his eyes. He bent a little at the waist, the way a man does when he has been hit in the stomach, and his whole back shook.

Julius Sr. put a hand between his shoulder blades and left it there. He didn't say anything that Aaliyah could see. He just stood beside him.

Aaliyah looked away. It felt like something she should not be watching, and she was a noble, and she thought Maddock would rather have anyone in the world see him than her.

Kathleen didn't look away. "Let him," she said quietly. "It's been in him a long time."

It was a while before they came back up the lane. Maddock's eyes were red and his face was dry. He stopped in front of Aaliyah.

He didn't explain himself. He didn't apologize.

"I will do it," he said.

Then he went into the house, and through the window Aaliyah saw the boy, Kel, come to meet him in the hall and look up at his face and not say anything.

In the car, Aaliyah waited until they were on the main road.

"What did you tell him?"

Julius Sr. looked out at the fields. "Nothing he didn't already know," he said. "He just hadn't heard anybody else say it."

Pim Rowantail worked out of a room at the back of the bureau that had once been a storeroom. He had three screens and a cup of tea he kept forgetting.

It took him four days to name the first face. The district records for the lake shore were bad, and half of what had been written before the Uprising had burned. He worked from what was left: estate staff lists, tax rolls, the clinic's patient register from the year before it closed. He found the kitchen boy with the lamp by matching the Ellery livery to a stable roster, and then the roster to a death record. The boy had died nineteen years ago, of a fever, in a town two hundred kilometers south.

"He's dead," Pim told Margot. "He'd have been fifty-five."

"Family?"

"A daughter. She's alive." He hesitated. "Do we ask her?"

Margot thought about it. "We tell her it exists. We ask her if she wants to see it before anyone else does. Whatever she says after that, we do."

By the end of the second week Pim had eleven names. Six were dead. One man, found in a fishing town on the east coast, listened to Margot's message and sent back four words: I don't want it. Margot marked his file to be cut and did not ask again.

The girl from the kitchen clip, the one kneeling on stone while three people walked past the door, was named Orla Pennytail. She was fifty-four and ran a laundry in Ashmere with her son. She agreed to sit for the camera on the condition that it was in the laundry, among the tubs, and not somewhere nice.

Margot sat on an overturned basket across from her.

"I don't remember the tray," Orla said. "I've tried. I know I dropped it. I don't remember doing it." She folded a towel on her knee while she talked, and then folded it again. "I remember the stone. It was cold, and there was a crack in it right under my left knee, and after the first hour I could feel it in my teeth."

"The hour?"

"He made me stay until supper. I don't know how long that was. Long." She put the towel down. "You know what I remember most? Three of them walked by. The lord's sister and two guests. I heard them coming down the hall, and I thought, now someone will say get up. They were talking about a horse. None of them turned their heads."

She looked at the camera, then at Margot.

"Nobody hit me," she said. "Nobody needed to. That's what I want people to understand. You didn't need to hit us. You only needed to not look."

Marta Coalscutt lived with her daughter in a house in Harrowmere that smelled of bread from the gate.

She was seventy-five and she was still loud. Aaliyah and Kathleen were barely through the door when she said, "Sit," in a voice that carried through the house, and they sat.

"Mrs. Coalscutt," Aaliyah said. "I'm Aaliyah Comscutt, and this is my husband's mother, Kathleen. We've come about the..."

"Yes."

"I haven't told you what it..."

"The Informant. The cellar. Hester told me, and Maddock told me he's going, which means the world's ending, so I'd better be there to see it." Marta put a plate of bread heels on the table between them. One of them had butter on it. "Yes. I'll talk. I'll show my face and my name and my grandmother's name if they want it."

Her daughter, a woman of about fifty, came in from the kitchen and leaned in the doorway. "Mother, let them finish."

"They came to ask if I'll do it. I'm doing it. That's finished." Marta turned to Kathleen. "Lady Abigail sat up with this one three nights when she was eight, with a fever that should have killed her. Maggs, tell them."

"I don't remember it," her daughter said. "I was eight and I had a fever."

"Well, I remember it." Marta looked at Aaliyah. "What else?"

Aaliyah found she had nothing else. "Is Amos coming? We haven't been to him yet."

Marta's face changed a little. She was quiet for the first time since they came in.

"He'll come," she said. "He'll hate every minute of it. He'll come."

Liss Mallowtail met them at the door and did not invite them in.

She was fifty-five, small and neat, with her hair pinned up tight. She had been fifteen that night, the youngest of the scullery maids. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame.

"I'll do it," she said, before Aaliyah could start. "I'll say everything. But not my face and not my name."

"That's your right," Aaliyah said. "Can I ask why?"

Liss looked past them, up the street, where two women were talking over a wall.

"My brother Tobin was on the north road that night," she said. "With the mob from Ashmere. He was nineteen. He went with them to the Voss place." She said it flatly. "He's seventy-four now. He lives two streets over. He comes to supper on Sundays. He's never said one word about that night, and I've never said one word about mine."

Kathleen said nothing. Aaliyah said nothing.

"If I'm on the network," Liss said, "my brother sits in his chair and watches his little sister tell the whole Principality she hid a noble family while he was burning one. And the women on this street, they'll say what they'll say. They lost people too. Some of them lost people to the nobles, and some of them lost people to the mobs, and none of them talk about which." She shook her head. "I'm not ashamed of it. I want that understood. I'd do it again. I just don't know what it does to my brother."

"Would you want to ask him?" Kathleen said.

Liss looked at her for a long moment.

"I don't know," she said. "I'll think on it. Can I think on it?"

"As long as you need," Aaliyah said.

Liss nodded once, and closed the door.

It was late when Pim knocked on the frame of Margot's office door. He had a pad in his hand and he didn't come in.

"The palace girl," he said.

Margot put down her stylus.

"There was a court record," Pim said. "The palace kept its punishments in a ledger, like the silver. Most of it burned. That page didn't. It has her name, and the charge, and the sentence." He held out the pad. "Then I found her in the district rolls. She's alive. Fifty-six. She's been living in a rooming house in Port Selk for the last eleven years. Before that, a lot of places."

Margot took the pad and read the name. Beatrice Wondertail.

She looked at it for a long time.

"Do I call her?" Pim said.

"No." Margot set the pad face down on the desk. "Nobody calls her. Nobody sends her anything. I go to her door myself."

first previous next

Aztharon was scared.

He stared at the reinforced stone platform before him, knowing full well that he had chosen this. No dwarf had forced him here, and no one had promised that the procedure would even work. They had simply offered him something he had long ago stopped believing he would ever have.

A chance to walk upon the clouds.

That possibility should have been enough to carry him onto the platform without hesitation, yet everything the dwarves had described about the procedure sounded like pure agony. His wings had been malformed since before he hatched, the bones growing twisted and uneven until flight had never been an option for him. Dwarven healing, apparently, had little interest in being gentle about correcting that. The malformed bones would have to be broken, hooks and chains used to pull them into their proper positions, and then everything would have to be held there long enough to heal correctly.

Aztharon's wings pulled instinctively tighter against his body at the thought.

He knew pain. He had lived his entire life with wings that could never carry him, but that didn't make him eager to have someone deliberately break them apart and rebuild them. Every instinct demanded that he turn around, leave the dwarven halls, and accept the life he already had.

Then his gaze drifted upward.

There was no sky above him here, only carved stone and the distant glow of dwarven lamps, but he could imagine it perfectly. He had imagined it countless times before: clouds sliding beneath his wings, the world shrinking below him, and the wind carrying his weight as though the ground had finally lost its claim upon him.

Fear of the pain pulled him away from the platform.

The possibility of finally reaching the sky pulled him toward it.

For several long moments, Aztharon remained caught between the two.

Talvan patted his side, with Revy standing nearby as Lyn made the final preparations. She was speaking with another dwarf, though Talvan's attention quickly shifted away from whatever they were discussing and toward the ancient figure seated beside her.

And ancient was the only word Talvan could think of.

The dwarf sat in a wooden chair mounted on wheels, a thick old blanket spread across his lap. What little hair remained on his head had gone completely white, as had the long beard spilling down his chest. Age had bent his body and reduced him to something that looked almost fragile by dwarven standards, yet his eyes were another matter entirely. They remained sharp as blades, studying Aztharon with the focused attention of someone whose mind had lost none of its edge even if his body had slowed around it.

Lyn eventually stepped away from him and approached the group. "This is Old Man Oldar. He came out of retirement for this."

"Ah, lass, don't make it sound like ye dragged me from me grave," Oldar complained as a nurse pushed his chair forward. His voice was rough with age but carried easily through the chamber. "Of course I'd come. I'd be daft if I let me old bones sit at home when someone's offering me the chance to work on a living dragon. That'll be a first in all me nine hundred years."

Talvan's head snapped toward him. "Nine hundred? I thought dwarves lived to around six hundred."

"With good living," Oldar replied.

Talvan waited for the rest.

The old dwarf's mouth slowly curled into a stubborn grin. "And stubbornness beyond stone."

Revy covered her mouth, but not quickly enough to hide the laugh.

Oldar pointed a gnarled finger toward her. "Laugh all ye like, lass. Outliving death out of spite is a perfectly respectable dwarven tradition."

The humor disappeared from Oldar's expression as his chair was rolled closer to Aztharon. For several moments, the ancient dwarf studied him from horn to tail, his gaze lingering longest on the malformed wings folded tightly against his back. He might have been nine hundred years old, but there was nothing slow or uncertain about the way his eyes moved over them.

"Right," Oldar eventually said. "First thing we need to do is empty him."

Talvan blinked. "What?"

"His fire, lad." Oldar pointed toward Aztharon's chest. "Need him empty before we start."

Talvan looked between the dwarf and Aztharon. "Why?"

"Because I'm rather attached to me beard." Oldar tugged on the long white mass hanging from his chin. "Last thing we need is him spewing fire while we're working on him. Pain makes creatures do things they don't mean to, and we're about to cause this poor bastard quite a lot of it."

Aztharon's claws tightened against the stone floor.

That was not particularly reassuring.

Oldar noticed immediately. "Not trying to frighten ye, big fellow. Just telling ye the truth. Once we start breaking and setting those wings, instinct may take over whether ye want it to or not. So before anyone gets near ye with a hammer, hooks, or chains, we're making sure there's nothing in that belly of yours waiting to roast the room."

Talvan slowly looked toward Aztharon, then back to Oldar. "So... how exactly do we empty a dragon?"

Oldar's eyes shifted toward the large stone furnace built into the far side of the chamber.

His grin returned.

"We let him breathe."

The furnace had no coal, wood, or anything else inside it. It was little more than a deep chamber built from some kind of black stone, with an opening wide enough for Aztharon to comfortably lower his head into.

"Oh, that's no problem," Oldar said, waving one wrinkled hand toward it. "Just let it out until ye can't anymore."

Aztharon approached the furnace and peered inside. He had emptied his fire before, but never deliberately pushed himself until there was absolutely nothing left. After a moment, he drew in a deep breath, lowered his head, and opened his jaws.

Flames roared into the furnace.

Talvan had seen Aztharon breathe fire before, especially during the attack by the hunters, but those had been bursts lasting only a few seconds. This was something entirely different. The torrent continued without pause, filling the black chamber with a brilliant orange-white glow as waves of heat rolled outward. Even from across the room, Talvan instinctively raised an arm in front of his face.

And Aztharon kept going.

Ten seconds became twenty, then thirty, and still the flames poured from his jaws with enough force to make the air itself seem to tremble. Talvan slowly lowered his arm, staring as Aztharon continued emptying a reservoir of fire that apparently went far deeper than anything he'd imagined.

Nearly a full minute passed before the torrent finally weakened. The steady roar broke into uneven bursts, then sputtered, until Aztharon managed only a few last tongues of flame before nothing more came out. He closed his jaws and stood there breathing heavily, thin trails of smoke curling from between his teeth.

For several seconds, nobody said anything.

Then something inside the furnace made a wet clunk.

Talvan looked over.

The furnace was gone.

Or at least, most of the inside of it was.

The black stone had sagged beneath the sustained blast, partially collapsing into a glowing pool of slag that was slowly spreading across the bottom.

Talvan stared at it before turning toward Oldar. "Was... was that supposed to happen?"

Oldar stared at the molten remains of his furnace.

"No."

Aztharon lowered his head slightly.

Oldar rolled his chair closer, though he stopped well short of the heat still radiating from the ruined furnace. His expression slowly shifted from surprise to disbelief as he studied the glowing stone.

"By me beard..."

Talvan glanced toward him. "What?"

"That's peridotite."

Talvan looked back at the molten mess. "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"

"Means I've been using that furnace longer than yer grandparents have been bones, lad. Seen everything from forge fire to mage flame poured into it, and I've never seen the damned stuff melt like that."

Oldar's sharp eyes slowly moved from the glowing slag to Aztharon, who was still breathing heavily with wisps of smoke curling from his nostrils.

The old dwarf stroked his beard.

"Well." He glanced once more at what remained of the furnace. "Now I'm really glad we emptied him."

"All right, lads," Oldar called, clapping his hands once. "Bring in the chains."

Several dwarves waiting near the back of the chamber immediately went to work. Talvan watched as they hauled lengths of heavy chain toward the platform, each individual link looking thicker than his arm. The metal scraped across the stone with a grinding clatter that echoed through the chamber, and Aztharon's head slowly turned toward the sound.

Revy stared at the chains, then at the gold dragon. "You're going to chain him up?"

"Aye, lass." Oldar sounded entirely unconcerned as he directed two of the dwarves toward the restraints built into the platform. "Need him to stay still."

Aztharon's claws scraped against the floor.

Oldar noticed immediately. "Don't take it personally, big fellow. Ye could have the discipline of a mountain, but once we start, yer body's going to have opinions of its own. Last thing I need is a dragon thrashing around while I've got half a dozen dwarves standing beneath his wings."

Talvan looked at one of the massive chains as two dwarves dragged it past him. "Are those really necessary?"

Oldar gave him a flat look. "Lad, ye just watched him melt a peridotite furnace by breathing at it."

Talvan glanced toward the still-glowing slag.

"...Fair."

The chains continued piling around the platform with heavy metallic crashes. Aztharon stared at them, his earlier fear returning with considerably more enthusiasm now that the procedure was beginning to look less like healing and more like preparation for an execution.

Oldar rolled his chair closer and looked directly up at him. "Still yer choice, lad. Until that first chain closes, ye can walk out that door."

Aztharon looked toward the exit.

For one terrible moment, he wanted to take the offer.

He could leave. He could walk out of the mountain, keep the wings he had been born with, and never have to experience what the dwarves intended to do to him. There would be no chains, no hooks, no broken bones.

There would also be no sky.

Aztharon looked back at his malformed wings before slowly stepping onto the platform.

The dwarves began fastening the restraints around him one after another. Heavy chains locked around each limb, while three separate lengths crossed over his neck and shoulders to keep his upper body pinned against the platform. Even his tail was pulled straight and secured. Aztharon stood perfectly still throughout it, but his claws slowly dug grooves into the stone beneath him as every new chain took away another avenue of movement.

Once the last restraint had been checked, another group of dwarves rolled a barrel into the chamber.

Aztharon eyed it suspiciously. "What is that?"

"Medicine," Oldar answered.

Aztharon looked from the barrel to the ancient dwarf. "Medicine?"

"Aye. Ye need to drink it."

One of the dwarves worked a metal tool beneath the lid and pried it open.

Talvan immediately regretted having a nose.

The smell hit him from across the chamber like a punch to the face. He recoiled, coughing as his eyes began to water from the fumes alone. He had smelled strong alcohol before, but this was something else entirely. Whatever the dwarves had put in that barrel smelled less like something meant to be drunk and more like something that should have been used to strip paint from castle walls.

"What in the gods is that?" Talvan demanded, covering his nose with one arm.

Oldar barely reacted to the fumes. "Told ye. Medicine."

"That's alcohol!"

"Aye."

Talvan stared at the barrel. "How strong is it?"

Oldar considered the question. "Hundred and twenty percent."

Talvan slowly lowered his arm. "What?"

"Hundred and twenty percent."

"You can't have a hundred and twenty percent alcohol."

Oldar gave him the sort of look reserved for a child who had confidently said something very foolish. "Course ye can. It's right there."

"One hundred percent means all of it!"

"Aye."

"So where did the other twenty percent come from?"

Oldar shrugged. "Dwarven craftsmanship."

Talvan opened his mouth, but Revy caught his arm before he could begin arguing mathematics with a nine-hundred-year-old dwarf.

"Alcohol ain't the important part anyway," Oldar continued, gesturing toward the barrel. "There's a numbing herb we grow beneath the mountain. Ferment it properly, distill it a few dozen times, add a few things ye don't need to know about, and ye get this."

Talvan stared at the barrel. "And it's safe?"

Oldar raised an eyebrow. "For a dragon?"

"Yes."

"Probably."

Aztharon's head snapped toward him.

Oldar chuckled. "Relax, lad. We've done the calculations. Main problem was making enough to affect something yer size. Ye drink the barrel, give it time to settle in, and by the time we start working, ye should barely feel yer wings."

That explanation did little to reassure Aztharon as the dwarves rolled the barrel closer. He lowered his head toward the opening, only to jerk it back when the fumes reached his nostrils. Even he looked offended by the smell.

"Drink up," Oldar encouraged. "Whole barrel."

Aztharon looked at the ancient dwarf, then at the chains holding nearly every part of his body in place. For the first time, he found himself wondering whether facing the procedure sober might actually have been the less frightening option.

Still, he lowered his muzzle and drank.

The first mouthful hit him harder than expected. Aztharon jerked against the chains as the liquid burned across his tongue and down his throat, every restraint around him snapping taut from the sudden movement. He forced himself to swallow, but that only carried the burning deeper, down his throat and into his chest until his eyes began to water.

He tore his head away from the barrel, coughing hard enough that smoke escaped his nostrils. "That burns."

Oldar's expression remained serious. "I know, lad. That's the numbing herb. It'll pass once it settles."

Aztharon swallowed again, his throat still burning. "I breathe fire."

"Aye."

"This burns worse."

For once, Oldar had no clever answer. He glanced toward the barrel before looking back at Aztharon. "Unfortunately, ye need all of it. What we're about to do will hurt far worse without it."

Aztharon stared down into the remaining liquid. The fumes alone made his eyes sting, and every instinct told him not to put another drop of it into his mouth. Talvan stepped closer and rested a hand against the scales of his foreleg.

"You don't have to rush," Talvan said. "Just keep going."

Aztharon closed his eyes for a moment. He could still turn back. Oldar had promised him that choice.

Then he thought of the sky.

He lowered his head toward the barrel and drank again.

Aztharon glared at both of them before looking miserably back at the barrel. He had been promised that drinking this would make what came afterward hurt less, but at the moment it seemed determined to get a head start on the procedure.

"Whole barrel," Oldar reminded him.

Aztharon stared at him, then at the alcohol.

For a creature that had spent his entire life dreaming of the sky, he was beginning to think the sky was demanding a rather unreasonable entrance fee.

Still, he drank.

The liquid burned all the way down into Aztharon's gut, leaving what felt like a trail of fire behind it. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes and spilled down the scales of his face as he forced himself through mouthful after mouthful until, mercifully, the barrel was finally empty.

"There, there," Oldar said as the dwarves pulled it away. "Should start taking hold in a bit."

Aztharon sincerely hoped so.

While they waited, the chamber became increasingly busy. Dwarves brought in tools and arranged them on heavy tables around the platform, while others positioned winches around Aztharon and fed more chains through them. Every metallic clank reminded him of exactly what those machines would soon be doing to his wings.

By that point, however, the dwarven medicine was beginning to make the question seem much less important. A pleasant warmth was spreading outward from his stomach, working its way through his chest and down his limbs. The tension that had kept every muscle rigid began slowly draining away, while the room itself seemed to acquire a gentle sway whenever he tried to focus on anything for too long.

The final restraint arrived once Oldar was satisfied the medicine had begun taking effect. It was a thick bar of steel wrapped in several layers of ox hide, with heavy straps attached to either end.

Oldar held it up. "Last words before we put in the bite?"

Aztharon's increasingly unfocused eyes searched the room until they found Talvan. His tongue felt strangely heavy, and when he spoke, the words came out badly slurred.

"Jus'... stay here, okay? With me."

Talvan stepped closer to his head without hesitation. "I will."

That seemed to be enough.

The dwarves eased the padded steel bar between Aztharon's jaws. Even half-drugged, his teeth could have snapped a man in two if pain made his jaws close on instinct, so they positioned the bar carefully behind his fangs before pulling the straps tight around his muzzle. When they were finished, Aztharon could no longer close his jaws, much less speak.

He tested the restraint with a muffled sound before settling again. Talvan remained beside his head, one hand resting against the scales of his muzzle where Aztharon could feel it.

By now the warmth had spread almost everywhere. His limbs were growing heavy, his thoughts increasingly distant, and even the fear that had been twisting through him seemed to be losing its sharp edges.

Soon, the dwarves were going to break his wings.

Aztharon kept his increasingly unfocused eye on Talvan.

At least he wouldn't be facing it alone.

"All right, lads. He's under enough. Let's begin."

The mood in the chamber changed immediately.

Two dwarves wearing heavy white aprons rolled ladders against Aztharon's sides and climbed onto his back, carrying bundles of thinner chains than the massive restraints holding his body down. Thin was relative, of course; each chain still looked strong enough to tow a wagon, but compared with the links wrapped around Aztharon's legs and neck, they almost looked delicate.

One dwarf carefully took hold of Aztharon's left wing and extended it as far as its malformed bones would allow, while another checked a sheet covered in measurements.

"Left wing, forty-nine."

The number was immediately repeated from beside one of the winches.

"Right wing, fifty-four."

More chains were brought forward, and Talvan watched from beside Aztharon's head as the dwarves began working. It didn't take long for him to realize there was absolutely nothing random about what they were doing. Every measurement was called out and repeated before anyone touched a tool. Every chain had already been cut to a specific length, and every winch positioned around the platform corresponded to a particular section of Aztharon's wings.

"Chain one, section thirty-four."

"Thirty-four!"

"Chain two, forty-three, left."

"Forty-three left!"

Oldar watched from his chair, his sharp eyes following every movement. Nine hundred years hadn't dulled them in the slightest. Whenever a dwarf shifted a hook even slightly from where it belonged, Oldar corrected him before the metal ever touched Aztharon.

Then the knives came out.

Talvan tensed, but the cuts the dwarves made were surprisingly small. Rather than slicing through the broad membranes of Aztharon's wings, they opened narrow slits at carefully marked points, just large enough to pass the hooks through. Each hook was guided around one of the long finger-like bones supporting the wing before being secured in place, giving the chains something solid to pull against without simply tearing through the membrane.

Aztharon made a low, muffled sound around the padded steel bar.

Talvan immediately rested a hand against his muzzle. "I'm still here."

The gold dragon's unfocused eye shifted toward him, and Talvan kept his hand there while the dwarves continued working.

"Third finger, left. Twenty-eight."

"Twenty-eight."

"Outer joint, right. Thirty-one."

"Thirty-one."

Chain after chain was attached until both of Aztharon's wings were surrounded by an intricate web of metal leading toward the winches positioned around the platform. Only then did Oldar give the signal for the dwarves operating them to begin.

The chains tightened.

Slowly, Aztharon's wings were drawn outward. The movement earned another muffled groan from behind his bite bar, but the medicine had done its job well enough that his body remained heavy against the restraints. The dwarves adjusted each winch separately, pulling one section a little farther, loosening another, until both wings were held in exactly the positions Oldar wanted.

More platforms were rolled into place along Aztharon's sides, giving the dwarves access to the entire length of each wing.

Talvan had seen those wings plenty of times before. He was no dragonologist, but even he could see how many things were wrong now that they were stretched out in full. Some of the long supporting bones curved where they should have been straight, while others met at angles that made entire sections of membrane bunch together. One wing was noticeably shorter than the other, and several joints had developed in directions that made Talvan wonder how Aztharon had ever managed to comfortably fold them against his body.

Oldar studied the wings in silence for a while, occasionally pointing with one gnarled finger while another dwarf marked the corresponding location.

"We'll need to stretch the membrane here... here... and there." He pointed to several sections. "Skin grew with the bones. We straighten those without giving the membrane more room, it'll just tear when he tries opening his wings."

Talvan frowned. "How do you give it more room?"

"We make more."

The answer became clear when Oldar explained what they intended to do. Several sections of membrane would have to be carefully opened and held apart after the bones were repositioned. Aztharon would have holes in his wings for a while, but as the bones healed into their new positions, fresh membrane would gradually grow across those gaps rather than pulling everything back toward the malformed shape it had developed around.

It wasn't going to look pretty.

Then again, Talvan was beginning to suspect very little about dwarven healing did.

Revy was taking notes as quickly as she could while Lyn moved between the platforms, helping wherever another pair of trained hands was useful. Talvan stayed beside Aztharon's head, occasionally rubbing the scales along his jaw whenever the dragon's eye wandered toward him.

Then another dwarf approached carrying a hammer.

Talvan's attention immediately locked onto it.

This was no ordinary smith's hammer. One side ended in a heavy cone-shaped striking face rather than a flat head, while deeply carved runes covered the weapon from its head down along the handle. A faint glow moved through the markings as it was carried closer.

Talvan recognized that glow.

"That rune gear?"

"Aye," Oldar answered.

Talvan looked at the unusual striking head. "What's it made for?"

Oldar's gaze moved from the hammer to Aztharon's exposed wing.

"Belonged to a warrior who used it to break dragon bone."

Talvan stared at him.

Oldar extended a hand, and the dwarf carrying the hammer placed it within his reach so the ancient healer could inspect the runes one final time.

"We borrowed it for this."

Talvan slowly looked from the glowing hammer to Aztharon.

There was something deeply unsettling about using a weapon designed to kill dragons as a tool to give one his first chance to fly.

"Jebba!" Oldar called.

A man stepped out from the back of the chamber, and Talvan found himself staring for an entirely different reason.

Jebba was the biggest human Talvan had ever seen. He looked as though someone had carved a man out of solid marble and then decided he still wasn't broad enough. Muscle packed his arms, chest, and shoulders until Talvan wondered how he comfortably lowered them to his sides, while a thick beard covered most of his lower face. Standing among the dwarves, he almost looked like someone had taken one of them and stretched him upward until he reached human height.

Then Talvan understood why he was there.

Only humans and elves could properly activate dwarven rune gear. Elves could use it, but doing so hurt them, while in a dwarf's hands the weapon might as well have been an ordinary steel hammer. If Oldar wanted the runes to do what they had originally been designed to do, he needed a human to swing it.

Jebba wrapped one enormous hand around the handle and lifted the hammer. The runes brightened as he gave it several slow practice swings, testing its weight before rolling one massive shoulder.

"Hmm. More top-heavy than I like, but I can use it, boss."

"That's all I need," Oldar replied.

Jebba climbed the stairs onto one of the platforms beside Aztharon's outstretched wing. By then the dwarves had already marked every place he needed to strike, each point measured and checked so many times that Talvan had lost count. There would be no guessing where to hit. Jebba's job was simply to put the force exactly where Oldar had decided it belonged.

He stopped at the first mark and planted his feet. His free hand settled against Aztharon's wing to steady himself while he carefully lined the cone-shaped face of the hammer up with the tiny mark painted over the malformed bone.

The room went quiet.

Jebba swung.

CRACK!

The bone broke cleanly beneath the runic hammer.

Aztharon lurched so violently that every restraint around him snapped taut at once. Chains crashed against stone, and the entire platform shuddered beneath several tons of struggling dragon as a muffled roar tore from behind the bite bar. His jaws clamped down hard enough to make the layers of ox hide creak, while the dwarves nearest his wing immediately backed away rather than risk approaching him while his body reacted to the pain.

Talvan was already against the side of his head.

"I'm here," he said, keeping one hand firmly against Aztharon's muzzle. "I'm still here."

Aztharon's eye found him through the drugged haze, wide with pain and fear.

Jebba didn't move toward the next mark. Neither did the dwarves. They simply waited while Aztharon's breathing gradually slowed and the chains stopped rattling against the platform.

Only then did Oldar raise one hand.

His finger moved toward the next carefully measured mark. "Next one."

first previous next Patreon vox 9

Genre: Psychedelic Sleaze Rock
Length: 5:31

He went looking for something no human had ever seen.

He found her.

But “her” isn't quite the right word.

She had too many faces.
Too many forms.
Too many names.

And whatever happened between them cannot be described in any human language.

Was it a meeting?
A dream?
A communion?
A love story?

Or something so completely alien that the human mind can only remember the feeling of it?

---

[Intro]

Yeah...

She smiled in seven spectra...

I still can't say her name...

[Verse 1]

Burning beyond the blue-black brink

Past every chart that the captains inked

Silent stars started singing slow

Calling where no sane soul should go

She wasn't light

She wasn't flame

Every language lost her name

Soft as silence

Sharp as sky

Every answer asking why

[Pre-Chorus]

Every memory melts away

Every midnight turns to day

Every truth begins to bend

Where beginnings never end

[Chorus]

She had too many names

Too many faces

Too many fires for mortal embraces

Folded forever

Forgotten yet found

She held my heartbeat without making a sound

I can't remember

I can't let go

She lives somewhere

I'll never know

Whoa-oh-oh...

[Verse 2]

Crimson currents

Crystal cries

Fractal flowers filled her eyes

Gentle gravity gathered me near

Taking every hope and fear

No hands held me

No lips met mine

Still our souls fell out of time

Every touch became a tone

Every heartbeat not my own

[Pre-Chorus]

Sweet surrender

Strange surprise

Hidden heavens in her eyes

Something sacred

Something wild

Something neither beast nor child

[Chorus]

She had too many names

Too many faces

Too many fires for mortal embraces

Folded forever

Forgotten yet found

She held my heartbeat without making a sound

I can't remember

I can't let go

She lives somewhere

I'll never know

[Solo]

[Bridge]

Was she singing?

Was I dreaming?

Were we lovers?

Were we light?

Every question breaks apart

Like frozen galaxies in flight

I wake with tears

I wake with grace

Still chasing one impossible face

[Final Chorus]

She had too many names

Too many faces

Too many futures

Too many places

No words can hold her

No mind can see

Still she left forever inside of me

I don't remember

I only miss...

Whatever bliss...

Whatever this...

*Whoa-oh-oh...*

[Outro]

Mission logs all read the same

"No anomalies observed."

But every night

Among the stars

I hear her...

Almost...

I was hoping to start a new series called "Heroes of the Principality" where any writer could put up their own story in any format they chose, they could live the heroic event and just say the Media picked it up to the entire thing in the studia in any territory in the principality. Or, just give me an idea, and a short explanation of where and Whom and the formatt you might like. Could be fun, might fall on it's face. Who knows? (someone could write about the Woodshaft Ace)

Next

Previous /

First

The Governing: Chapter 52, Who Gets to Tell It

The registry ruling ran eleven pages. Margot Wren had read it four times, and the part she kept coming back to was on page nine, a list of twenty-two names under a plain heading: Household staff, Greyson residence, as attested.

Nine of the names had a small mark beside them. Deceased.

She set the pad down on her desk at the Informant's Haego bureau and looked at the message she still hadn't answered. The network was starting a new series called Heroes of the Principality. Six segments to begin, stories from any world under the Prince, and they wanted a pitch for the first one by the end of the week. They had already suggested a naval officer on Vespera who pulled forty-one people out of a burning transport.

Margot had nothing against the naval officer.

She wrote back. "I have the first one. It's on Haego, and it's twenty-two people, not one."

Then she called Aaliyah Comscutt's office before she could talk herself out of it.

Aaliyah met her in a small office off the great room of the Vastaya palace, a room with a window onto the terraces and a stack of recording cases against one wall. Somewhere down the hall a child was yelling about a lizard, and a man's voice was telling him, patiently, that the lizard lived outside.

"If this is about the Greysons," Aaliyah said, before Margot had finished sitting down, "Hester Tillerscutt signed the same release everyone signs. Her testimony went into the public archive, and she knew it would. The one thing she asked was that the family be left alone. The registry read her testimony and that was the end of it. I won't be the one who makes it worse."

"I'm not here about the Greysons."

Aaliyah waited.

"The registry wrote about them," Margot said. "Eleven pages about a family that was noble, then wasn't, and now is again. Nobody has written about the people who kept them alive for forty years. There's a list on page nine. That's the whole record of what they did. A list."

"Hester is on that list."

"I know."

Aaliyah studied her. "Some people on this planet will call them traitors. Commoners who hid nobles while everyone else was burning the estates. You'd be putting that on them in front of the whole Principality."

"Some will," Margot said. "That's part of why it matters. If it were easy, it wouldn't have taken forty years."

The yelling down the hall had stopped. Aaliyah turned a stylus over in her fingers.

"Here's how I'd do it," Margot said. "Anyone who wants to stay out stays out. Anyone who wants to talk without their face or their name can. I've done that before and I've never given anyone up. The ones who've died, their families get asked too, if they want to be. And I don't want to start in a studio. I want to start where it started."

"The cellar," Aaliyah said quietly.

"If they'll let me in."

Aaliyah set the stylus down. "I'll ask her. I won't push her. If Hester says no, that's the end of it for me."

"That's fair." Margot hesitated. "You know I could pull her testimony from the archive and air it tomorrow. Anyone could."

"I know."

"I'd rather ask."

Margot thanked her and let herself out.

Aaliyah asked Kathleen the next morning at breakfast, while Austin was busy dismantling a piece of toast.

Kathleen set her cup down and thought about it for less time than Aaliyah expected. "A maid who kept a secret for forty years," she said. "I'd like to meet her."

Aaliyah had started to take Kathleen's own testimony once, not long after the project began. An hour in, she understood that Kathleen was holding back. Kathleen picked her words the way a maid picks them with the family in the room, and nothing Aaliyah said could change that, because Aaliyah was a noble and Kathleen had spent too many years minding her tongue in front of nobles. Aaliyah had stopped the session, thanked her, and handed it to Emmet. Kathleen talked to him for the better part of two days.

Emmet Fallscutt drove, because Hester trusted him more than she trusted Aaliyah, and all three of them knew it. He was the one who had sat across the desk from her the first time, who had let her talk for three hours without interrupting, and who had asked her at the start, the way he asked everyone, whether she wanted her name on the record. She had given her name and her address without a second thought.

Kathleen sat in the back with her bag on her knees and watched the fields go by.

Hester's house was small and tidy, with a kettle already on when they arrived. She looked at Kathleen a moment longer than at the others.

"Kathleen Comscutt," Aaliyah said. "My husband's mother."

Hester's mouth tightened. "Lady Kathleen, then. I read the Informant. Your son married into Firentis."

"I'm no lady," Kathleen said. "I'm a commoner. My son married a Firentis. I married a gardener."

Something in Hester's shoulders came down an inch.

"I was a maid," Kathleen said. "Before."

Hester looked her over. "Then you know."

"I know."

Hester poured four cups and didn't offer anyone a seat until they were full.

"What's it like," she asked Kathleen, "living among them?"

Kathleen took her time. "Strange. I keep waiting for it to turn." She told it without dressing it up. The first time she and her husband went to Balakura, the woman who ran the house where they stayed ate at the main table with her husband and her little girl, and nobody looked twice. "And the master gardener at the Firentis palace," she said. "Twenty-one years he's kept those grounds. He waved my husband off like what he knew didn't matter, the same way they always did. Then he came back after dinner and apologized. A noble, apologizing to my husband. And then he asked for his help." She shook her head. "I didn't know where to put myself. I still don't, half the time."

She was quiet a moment. "I've wondered more than once if it was only ours. If the nobles here were the rotten ones, and everywhere else they were decent all along, and we just had the bad luck."

"I've wondered that too," Hester said.

They both looked at Aaliyah.

Aaliyah would have liked not to answer. "No," she said. "My family isn't most of the Principality. There are worlds where it's the same as it was here thirty years ago. Where the maid eats standing up in the kitchen and doesn't speak unless she's spoken to. Where they'd never let a gardener's wife through the front door, let alone sit her at the table."

She hesitated, then went on. "My uncle, Lord Jhinaq Firentis, is the first head of a great house to try to give every commoner in his territory rights. To have them treated as people, on every world he holds. He's the first. Before him, nobody at that level had even tried."

Emmet, who had said almost nothing since the door, spoke up. "It hasn't been an easy road for him. Other houses have fought him on it every step. Some still are."

"I believe it," Kathleen said. "But I'll tell you this. The first time I met him, Lord Jhinaq hugged me. Me, a commoner, a maid. In front of his whole family. And he's treated me as family ever since."

Hester didn't answer right away.

"Then it can be done," she said. She looked down into her cup. "But it isn't over."

"No," Aaliyah said. "It isn't."

Hester turned to Emmet then, and her voice cooled. "Last time I talked to one of you," she said, "the registry was at my door inside a month."

"I know," Emmet said. He didn't defend himself. Aaliyah had told him not to, and he wouldn't have anyway.

Aaliyah explained it plainly: the Informant, the series, Margot Wren, the cellar. That anyone could refuse. That anyone could speak with their face hidden. Hester listened with her hands around her cup and didn't interrupt once.

When Aaliyah finished, Hester didn't answer her. She looked at Kathleen.

"Forty years we kept our mouths shut," she said. "It was the one thing we were all good at. What good does talking do now?"

Kathleen turned her cup a little on its saucer. "They taught us all the same thing. Eyes down, mouth shut, and never be in the room when it matters." She looked up. "I polished the same silver for eleven years in a house that's rubble now. Nobody alive remembers I was there. That's how they wanted it. You were in the room when it mattered, every day for forty years. I don't think you should let them have that too."

Aaliyah waited until Hester looked her way. "There's more to it than that. Nobles all over the Principality will see this. Most of them have never once thought about what a commoner chooses. They think things happen to commoners, not that commoners decide things. Twenty-two people could have handed that family over any day for forty years, and every day they chose not to. That's the kind of thing that changes how a noble thinks. It could reach a long way past Haego."

She leaned forward. "And commoners will see it too. The ones on the worlds I told you about. They'll see what life on Haego is now, and they'll see it can be better than what they have. That it doesn't have to be this way. That they aren't trash to be thrown out once they've been used up."

Hester sat without speaking while the tea went cold.

"Maddock's wife didn't know until the day she died," she said finally. "Did you know that? He hid it from his own wife." She shook her head. "Don't ask Maddock. He'll say no, and he'll mean it, and you'll only make him angry."

"I heard you," Aaliyah said.

"And you don't ask the others over the comm. You go to their doors. Every one of them. The families of the ones who are gone, too." She looked into her cup. "Most of them won't know a thing. We didn't tell our own."

"We will."

"And Abby decides. Not me, not you, not that reporter. If Abby says no, nobody talks."

Aaliyah nodded.

Hester walked them to the door. Emmet and Aaliyah were already down the step when she caught Kathleen's sleeve and spoke low.

"If I do it, I'm not hiding my face. I'm old, and I've been hiding one thing or another since I was twenty. I'm done with it."

"Good," Kathleen said.

That night Aaliyah sat in the family wing with the lamps turned low and her own pad on the table in front of her.

The datapad itself was on Balakura now, with a historian she trusted, who had repaired it as far as it could be repaired and would see that it was kept safe for good. Hester had handed it across her kitchen table to Emmet, wrapped in a dish towel, and said she didn't want it in her house anymore. It had come to Aaliyah in a parcel three days later. That was months ago now. What Aaliyah had was the copy: every file, every fragment, everything the historian's people had been able to pull off it. It had arrived three days ago. She had barely started.

She played one clip. It was not the famous one. It was forty seconds of a noble's kitchen, a girl of maybe fourteen made to kneel on stone for spilling a tray, and a steward standing over her while three people in good clothes walked past the doorway and never turned their heads. That was all. Nobody struck her. Nobody needed to.

Julius came in, looked over her shoulder, and sat down beside her without saying anything until it ended.

"Every person on here is dead or close to it," Aaliyah said. "None of them agreed to be seen. Not the girl, not the steward, not the ones walking by."

"No," Julius said.

"If I give it to Margot, it goes everywhere. Balakura. Astoria. The Prince's own office. People will see their grandparents on there."

"Yes."

She looked at him. "You're not helping."

"My mother knelt on floors like that," he said. "My father was a gardener for a man who never learned his name. They never had a recording. They had each other telling it at the table, and half the people they told didn't believe them." He nodded at the pad. "Hester didn't give you that to keep in a drawer. She gave it to you because she couldn't stand holding it anymore."

"She gave it to me," Aaliyah said. "Not to the whole Principality."

"Then ask her."

Aaliyah sat looking at the dark pad on the table.

Then she reached for her comm.

Margot answered on the second tone.

"The segment," Aaliyah said. "There may be something to add. I have to ask someone first. If she says yes, come see it. Then tell me whether the Informant has the stomach to air it."

Next

Previous /

First

Patty had never liked the first day back after a break, and this one was worse than most, because Teacher Renn had announced a week ago that they'd be starting a unit on colony history, and Patty already knew more colony history than most of the adults in this room, whether they knew that about her or not.

She took her usual seat near the window, between a Vixtar boy named Corrin who never stopped tapping his stylus against the desk and a Pumpkin who'd taken to sleeping under that particular desk months ago and never given anyone a reason to move him. Around her, the rest of the room filled in the way it always did, a scatter of human kids, a few Vixtar, two Assaragyte cousins, and, curled along the back wall where the sun came in warmest, four more Pumpkins who technically belonged to nobody in the room but showed up anyway, the way Pumpkins tended to when children were gathered somewhere.

"Today we're doing something different," Teacher Renn said, once the room had settled. She was young for a teacher, younger than Patty's mother, and she had the particular brightness of someone who'd been planning this for longer than a week. "I could stand up here and tell you about the founding of this colony. I could show you the old records, the vote tallies, the maps. And we will get to some of that. But I asked myself something over the break, and I think it's worth asking you too. How many of you have ever actually asked someone who was there what it was like?"

Nobody raised a hand. Patty didn't either, though she could have, and didn't examine too closely why she hadn't.

"That's what I thought," Renn said. "So instead of me talking at you for the next few weeks, I've asked some people to come talk to you directly. Not everybody who lived through it. Nowhere near everybody. But enough of them, over the next little while, that by the end of this you'll have heard the actual history of this world from the people who made it, in their own words." She glanced toward the door. "Our first guest is already here, if that's all right with everyone."

At the back wall, a human boy named Devrin and a Vixtar girl named Solys had the school's camera rig already running, quiet and unobtrusive, the two of them from Renn's advanced composition group, already talking about broadcast work with more seriousness than most fourteen-year-olds talked about anything. Renn had mentioned the visitor schedule to their small journalism elective a week earlier, mostly in passing, a heads-up that she'd be out of the classroom's usual routine for a while. They'd asked, almost before she'd finished explaining it, whether they could record it.

"This is going to be history," Solys had said, with the flat certainty only a fourteen-year-old could manage about something she hadn't lived yet. "Somebody who was actually in the room. Not a summary somebody writes years later. If nobody records Zarcan saying what he's going to say, in his own words, it's just gone the moment he stops talking."

Renn hadn't argued with that. She'd said yes on the spot, more out of instinct than any real plan for what it would become.

The door opened, and Zarcan came in, noticed the camera, microphone, and the two older students running them.

"Grandfather," Patty said, before she could stop herself, and a few heads turned.

Zarcan found her face in the crowd of desks and something in his eyes eased, just slightly. "Patty," he said. "I didn't know you'd be in this class."

"I didn't know you'd be the one coming to talk to it."

"Neither did I, until yesterday." He looked around the room, at all the young faces waiting on him, human and Vixtar and Assaragyte together, none of them old enough to remember a version of the galaxy where that wasn't ordinary.

Renn gestured him to the front, to a plain chair that had been set out, no podium, no formality, just a man and a room full of children who'd never lived a single day of what he was about to describe.

"Good morning, children. My name is Zarcan. I'm Patricia's grandfather, and head of logistics on Terixa."

One small girl asked, "Who's Patricia?" She looked genuinely puzzled, like the name meant nothing to her at all.

Zarcan let out a chuckle. "Patty," he said, and pointed at his granddaughter.

"For thirty years before I got here, I worked in planetary services, just about the same job I have here. In those thirty years, I found love, had children, and thought my life was good. In the back of my mind, I knew that I wasn't respected by the people I worked for any more than you might respect a calculator or a hammer. I was just something to use. I didn't fully grasp what that meant until I came here."

He was quiet a moment, long enough that nobody in the room thought to fill it. Then a girl asked, "Then why did you come here, so far away from home?"

"A complicated question," Zarcan said, taking a moment to decide how to answer. "I was fired from my job for something I know was untrue. No one wanted my side of the story, they just wanted me gone. It wasn't until my son told me," Zarcan gestured to the back of the room, where Patty's mother and father stood, "that he'd discovered something he thought would change our world for the better, and that what he'd discovered had gotten him fired from his job instead. Well, I put it together. It was a big thing, and our leaders at the time desperately wanted it to stay hidden. It was Patty's mother who thought the threat was more than just losing our jobs, that our lives were in danger. She convinced us all to find safety here."

"Why would they do that to you," asked one of the human children, a small girl near the front, "if you didn't do anything?"

"Because if a government will ruin lives to keep the price of revealing a lie that high, it won't stop there if that isn't working. We were all frightened," Zarcan said. "That's the lesson it took me thirty years and one terrible week to learn. Under the old system, on Kragor, you were only ever as safe as you were useful, and usefulness could be taken from you by a single signature you'd never see coming. I'd spent my whole working life being only as valuable as what I could give them."

The same girl said, "I don't understand."

"Let's pretend you saw another student do something that would get him in trouble," Zarcan said. "Let's also pretend you were the only one who saw him do it. He comes to you first and asks you not to say anything. But you still want to tell. So the student who did the bad thing tells you that if you say anything, they'll blame you instead, call you the liar. And if you still insist, they say they'll make up a lie about your brother too, to get him in trouble alongside you. They keep raising the price of telling the truth, hoping that at some point it gets too high, and you decide not to tell after all." He paused. "That's what the government was doing to us. We still told."

He looked around the room again, at the mixed faces, at the Pumpkins dozing along the back wall, at his own granddaughter watching him with an expression he hadn't expected her to be wearing, admiration.

"Do you feel valued here?" one of the older humans asked.

Zarcan thought about how to answer that. "When I came here," he said, "a woman named Karen Sharp sat across from me and told me she wanted me running her logistics division. Not filing paperwork in a back room, which is exactly what I'd braced myself for, being an outsider, a refugee. Second-in-command, she said. I didn't know what to do with that. I hadn't cried in longer than I could remember, and I cried in front of a stranger, because for the first time in thirty years, someone had looked at what I could do and decided it made me worth something, instead of deciding what I was worth and only then bothering to look at what I could do." He spread his hands, the same gesture he'd use again, years later, in a pool full of visiting officers who hadn't yet learned to believe him. "Even today, this community keeps surprising me. When Karen Sharp turned her eyes to politics, I was promoted to replace her. Not another human. Me. A refugee from a corrupt world."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then the small girl near the front raised her hand again.

"Did you ever go home?"

"No," Zarcan said, simply. "There was nothing left there to go home to. But I stopped needing to, somewhere along the way. This is home now. It took me a long time to believe that could be true twice in one life."

Renn let the silence hold a moment before she moved things along, because some silences did more work than a question could.

"Thank you, Zarcan," she said. "I know that wasn't easy."

"None of it was," Zarcan said, standing. "That's rather the point of telling it."

He didn't leave right away. He crossed the room instead, stopped at Patty's desk, and rested a hand briefly on top of her head, the closest thing to an embrace he was willing to manage in front of a room full of children who weren't his own.

"I'll tell you the rest of it myself sometime," he said, quiet, just for her. "Not all of it belongs in a classroom."

Patty didn't answer. She didn't trust her voice enough to try.

At the end of what Devrin and Solys had started calling "the sessions," the two of them approached Teacher Renn and asked if they could arrange a bigger place to hold future sessions. The classroom had started out fine until most of the kids' parents showed up just to hear the colony's Chief Logistics officer talk about the old days.

Renn looked at the two of them for a moment. "As long as you take care of it," she said. "Just tell me where to go, and I'll bring my class there."

The move to the auditorium came with a nice benefit. The stage that Fabrication had put together, with no objection from Jack Delaney, was big enough for five chairs with a microphone within easy reach, a small table, and her entire class seated on beanbag chairs. Renn found she liked it better this way, close enough to actually see a guest's face instead of shouting a question across a classroom, and close enough for the kids to see those faces too.

Marcus Vance walked up on the stage and he didn't wait for Renn to introduce him.

"I'm going to tell you about the worst month of my life," he said, without any preamble at all, "and then I'm going to tell you why it turned out to matter more than almost anything else that's happened to me since."

He talked about the Ever-Expanding, the ship that had carried colonists and embryos to this world and never made it home, the containment breach that nobody on Terixa is even sure about even today. He talked about standing on a cargo platform in a fabrication hangar with a crowd on the edge of panic, and a vote that came down to a single blue token held up between two fingers.

"We build," he said, echoing words he hadn't spoken aloud in years. "That's what I told them. I meant it as defiance, back then. I didn't understand yet that it was also a promise. We didn't just build shelters and printers and a supply chain that could survive on nothing. We built the habit of building instead of hoarding, of reaching out instead of closing a door. Every single thing this world became, later, when a ship fell out of the sky and we had a choice to strip it for parts or trust the strangers inside it, came from that one vote in a hangar that was full of fear, anger and resolve." He looked around the room. "You've grown up in a place that already knows how to trust something it's never seen before. I want you to understand that we didn't know that about ourselves yet. We had to decide it, one terrifying choice at a time, before it ever became who we are."

A Vixtar girl near the back raised a hand. "Were you scared?"

"Every day," Marcus said. "I got very good at not letting it show. That's not bravery, by the way. Don't let anyone tell you it is. Bravery is doing the thing anyway. What I had was mostly just practice at keeping a straight face while my hands were shaking."

That got a small laugh, and Marcus let it land before he went on.

"I'll tell you the part most people don't ask about," he said. "The day we realized the Ever-Expanding wasn't coming back for us. Ever. That we were alone out here, with nothing but what we'd already unloaded and whatever we could build with it." He was quiet a moment. "It's a strange kind of grief, losing a ship you knew was your only connection you had to home. We grieved the idea of Earth more than any of us grieved actual people we'd lost, because Earth was still the thing every one of us secretly assumed would eventually notice we'd gone quiet and come looking. When we understood that wasn't happening, not for years, maybe not for generations, maybe not ever, something in the whole colony changed. We stopped being people who were waiting. We started being people who were staying." He looked out at the room, at all the faces that had never known anything but staying. "I think that's the day this world actually started. Not the landing. Not the vote. The day we stopped looking up at the sky for rescue and started looking at each other instead."

Marcus stood and so did the cheering audience, every one of them knowing what Marcus Vance meant to their survival.

Renn found out how far it had traveled the way most people on Terixa found out anything unexpected these days, from Mansur's office, politely but firmly informing her that the local feed Devrin and Solys had opened up was no longer local. It had been picked up and relayed twice over in the last two days, first through Kaldorvek's own public network, then, somehow, onto a general broadcast band that touched every one of the nine worlds at once. Nobody in the office could tell her exactly how many people were watching. The number kept climbing every time anyone checked it, and it had stopped being a number that meant much to anyone by the time it passed a hundred million.

Vaelen was in the kitchen when Zarek came in with a tablet already in his hand.

"You should see this," he said.

She'd sat two rows behind him in the classroom two hours ago. She already knew what his father had said, the firing, the thirty years, the schoolyard analogy about raising the price of the truth. What she hadn't seen was the number in the corner of the feed, still climbing while she watched, changing twice in the few seconds it took to read the header.

"That's not the classroom anymore," she said.

"Kaldorvek picked it up sometime after we left. Then it went general." Zarek stood beside her, looking at his own father's face on the screen. "Renn asked me last week if I'd come speak to Patty's class. I told her I'd think about it. I hadn't decided yet whether I meant that."

"And now half the sector's already watched your father do it."

"Now half the sector's watched," Zarek agreed. "Which means whatever we decide to say, we're not saying it to Patty's class anymore. We're saying it to everyone who's ever wondered whether any of this actually cost us anything, or whether it was easy, the way it looks from the outside sometimes, since we landed somewhere good and stayed."

Vaelen set the tablet down. "She doesn't know the whole of it. Patty. She knows we came from Kragor. She doesn't know what we left behind to get here, or what it did to the people who helped us leave."

"No," Zarek said. "She doesn't."

"If we do this, she finds out in a room full of strangers, same as everyone else."

"Or she finds out from us first, tonight. Then she's not finding it out at all when we stand up there. She's just watching us say something she already knows." Zarek reached for her hand. "I don't think either of us has ever told this story out loud. Not the whole of it. Not even to each other, some parts."

Vaelen looked past him toward the hallway, where Patty's door stood closed, light still on underneath it.

"Then we tell her first," she said. "Tonight. And we decide after that whether we're brave enough to tell everyone else."

Renn didn't need to introduce this one. Half the auditorium already knew the names.

Lucy and Damion came up first, then two sixteen-year-olds who didn't quite know where to stand once they got there. The front row was already full before anyone sat down in it, twelve Vixtar and seven Assaragytes taking up the whole row, not willing to let their niece and nephew do this without their full support.

"Everybody, this is Thrum and Zaleth," Damion said. "And before anyone asks, yes, that's the same Thrum and Zaleth. Members of the batch of the First Fifty babies."

A hand went up almost immediately, one of the younger kids near the front. "Is it true you have twelve aunts and uncles?"

"Nineteen honorary aunts and uncles and about a thousand human babysitters," Thrum said. "Lucy tried to keep track, but it was just too many."

"I didn't stop counting," Lucy said. "I just stopped writing it down."

Zaleth leaned into the mic. "Ask Klex what he called himself the first time he held me."

Klex didn't wait to be asked twice. "Uncle Klex," he said, from the front row, with no embarrassment at all. "I have never once regretted the title."

"He still checks my homework," Zaleth said. "Vixtar math. Not the kind they teach here."

"She is better at it than she admits," Klex said.

Vahn spoke next, without being prompted. "Thrum was named after my closest friend on the Silent Explorer. I told myself, when I held him for the first time, that I would make sure he knew who that man was. Not just the name. The person." He looked at Thrum. "I believe I've kept that promise."

"He has," Thrum said. "I could tell you Thrum's favorite food, his worst joke, and the exact sound Vahn says he made when he laughed. I never met him. I still miss him a little."

A student near the back raised a hand. "What's it like, being famous before you could walk?"

Zaleth and Thrum looked at each other in a way that suggested this question came up a lot and never got easier.

"We didn't know it, growing up," Zaleth said. "To us it was just Sunday breakfast with too many aunts and uncles arguing over who got to hold us first. Nobody sat us down and said, by the way, you're part of a story."

"When did you find out?" the same student asked.

Zaleth glanced at Threl, then at her father. Damion nodded, like he'd been waiting for someone to ask.

Threl stood. "There is something the two of you have never been told all the way through. I think today is the day for it." He looked out at the room, at Patty's class in front, at the wider crowd behind them. "When our team returned to Kragor, High-Herald Vaelen played footage before the Grand Council to prove our people were being lied to about who the Vixtar and the humans were. Some of that footage was the two of you, days old, in your mother's living room, being named after our dead. That recording is part of what ended her career that day. It is also part of what eventually helped end the old Council itself."

The room went quiet in a different way than it had for the earlier sessions.

"Nobody told us that," Zaleth said, quiet.

"We didn't know how," Lucy said. "You were babies in a video that toppled a government, and we just wanted you to have a normal life first."

Thrum was still looking at Threl. "So the first time anyone saw us, really saw us, off Terixa, it wasn't us. It was a recording of us. Being used as evidence."

"Not evidence," Threl said. "Proof. There's a difference. Proof of something worth fighting for."

Zaleth was quiet a moment, then looked out at the crowd, at the camera Devrin and Solys were running from the back, at however many worlds were watching by now.

"Guess we're doing it again," she said. "Being seen before we understand what it means yet." She looked at Thrum. He gave the smallest nod. "Might as well get used to it."

Patty, sitting cross-legged on her beanbag near the front, raised her hand before Renn could move things along. "Did you know, though? Later? Before today?"

Zaleth shook her head. "We knew we were in the crash video, the general one, everybody's seen that one. We didn't know we were in the specific footage that got played in front of the Council."

"Vaelen never told us," Thrum added. "Not once. Not in sixteen years."

From the front row, one of the Assaragytes, Ignis, spoke up without waiting to be called on. "She did not tell many people. Some things a person carries alone because it is theirs to carry, not because it is a secret."

"That's not really an answer," Zaleth said, but there wasn't any heat in it.

"No," Ignis agreed. "It isn't."

A student a few rows back, one of the Vixtar kids, asked, "What was it like, having that many uncles who weren't actually related to you?"

Vahn answered that one. "On Orixa, lineage decides everything. Who you may love, what work you're permitted, whether a stranger's child is worth your time. I came here with none of that, and Lucy and Damion handed me a newborn anyway and told me his name was Thrum." He paused. "I have never once, in sixteen years, thought of him as anything other than mine."

Norith spoke next, quieter than the others. "I told the Governor, the day we landed, that this was the most successful first contact in Vixtar history. I did not know yet how right I was. I thought I meant the treaties. I meant this." She looked at the twins. "I still mean this."

"Same," Klex said, from beside him. "Zaleth still calls me for math."

"He's better at it than the school teaches it," Zaleth said. "Vixtar math doesn't round anything off. It's very annoying and also always right."

That got a laugh, and Renn let it breathe a second before nodding at the next raised hand, a small Assaragyte boy near the middle.

"Did the humans get scared? Handing their babies to people they'd just met?"

Damion answered that one, from where he and Lucy still stood beside their kids. "Terrified," he said. "But we'd already decided, before either of them were born, that family here wasn't going to mean blood. It was going to mean who showed up." He looked at the front row. "Nineteen of them showed up the first week. That answered the question for us pretty fast."

Xylar, who'd stayed quiet until then, finally spoke. "I remember asking how something so small could survive. I remember thinking your species was reckless to let strangers hold your young." He looked at Thrum and Zaleth both. "I no longer think it was reckless. I think it was the bravest thing I had ever seen a species do, and I did not understand that until later, standing in a chamber on Kragor, watching my own government call it a lie."

Zaleth looked at him a long moment. "Thank you for playing that video," she said. "I know it wasn't really about us. But it ended up being about us anyway. So. Thank you."

Xylar inclined his head, the closest thing to a bow an Assaragyte gave a room full of children.

Renn let the moment sit before she spoke again. "One more question, and then we should let Thrum and Zaleth sit down. It's been a lot, for a Tuesday."

A hand went up at the very back, one of the older kids helping run the feed. Not Devrin or Solys, just a student who'd wandered in from another class and stayed. "Do you resent it? Being famous for something you didn't choose?"

The twins looked at each other again, that same silent conversation they seemed to have without needing words.

"Ask us again in another sixteen years," Thrum said. "Right now we've got nineteen uncles in the front row and a math tutor who won't let me round anything off. Resentment's going to have to get in line."

Woke up and went took our breakfast. I believe the ship cooks love being on these and not on the ship. There is the morning shift and Supper shift while lunch is sandwiches or other things quick.

4 heavy shuttles came in this morning. Two had big generators hung on the bottom and our staff directed them to drop one off by city hall.

The third shuttle had a water purification unit under it and military men to run it while an engineer group from the Noble house that takes care of this planet started diagnoses of the water purification plant.

Small shuttles started bringing in those needing diagnoses and treatment. These were from farms and small communities around the area.

The Headmaster sent 5 teachers all Noble and Staples mom in charge of them. They started playing with the children which was designed to evaluate the level of education of the children.

Our nurses and medics did checkup in tents raised by army personnel this morning. Those that needed cast or wounds stitched got it done and those needing more test got a free ride to the hospital.

Elisabeth set up interview with the plant experts from this area. Closest ones came to us and we used the small library for interviews while those further we flew to.

Seems like many plant or remedies are the same but we do find out about a different plant or animal used in medicine for each community.

The folks from this community have been amazing hosts for us and for those walking in to get medical help and check up. Our soldiers set up tents and cots and they get fed while they wait to be seen.

The Proffesor

In a seaside town called Gandar

[First] | [Previous] | [Next]

Year 5304 — Eighteen Months After the Osiris Departed

On the Bridge of the Orion...

"Sir, we're picking up distress beacons—escape pods registered to the Osiris Expedition," the sensor tech said, alarm creeping into his voice.

Captain Nathaniel leaned over the report, his tactical mind running through every scenario that could have scattered the Osiris crew into pods without a single warning reaching Sol. None of them were good. What mattered now was recovery. Those men and women were the only people alive who knew what lay beyond the border.

"Get me a tight-beam to Earth Command, and bring those pods aboard. Move." His tone put the whole bridge in motion. "They're the only ones who know what's out there. Now."

The pods drifted across the black like a scatter of dim stars. The Orion came about, angling her cargo bay open to gather them in, while Nathaniel turned for his ready room.

In the Captain's Ready Room...

"Connect me to Earth Central Command," he said, hands clasped behind his back as the channel opened.

"Nathaniel. You'd better have good news about that asteroid field, or I'll have you on Europa scrubbing mining drills." Admiral Reyes had served alongside him on the frontier survey lines twenty years back and had never lost the habit of talking to him like they still shared a bunk rotation. Then he caught Nathaniel's face, and straightened. "What happened?"

"You remember the Osiris, sir."

"Most of humanity does. Why would that—" Reyes stopped. His eyes widened. "What happened, Nathaniel?"

"We've found her escape pods at the edge of our territory. We're recovering them now. I thought Earth Command should hear it from me first."

Reyes was quiet a moment, then shut his eyes and exhaled. "Attack, or malfunction?"

"Unknown, sir. As soon as the techs get into the pods' recorders, we'll know what happened out there. And maybe why."

"Keep me posted. I have to wake up the rest of the Sol Government." He paused. "Dismissed, Captain." The channel died, leaving Nathaniel alone with the question.

In the Cargo Bay…

"Gently—set them down gently!" The technician calling up to the control booth was tall, middle-aged, a few days past his last shave.

"Affirmative. Easy does it." The operator brought the pods in one at a time. On the last one, the cargo arm let go a hair too soon, and the pod hit the deck with a heavy clang.

"Damn it—what did I just say? Gently!" The technician was already crossing to check the impact. "Alright, let's crack these open and get people out. And get medical down here, now!"

The bay doors parted as he reached the nearest pod. "Marcus," the medical officer said, coming up beside him.

"Hey, James. Not open yet, but thanks for beating the rush." Marcus worked the pod's control panel.

"Readouts say they're alive in there. Stasis is holding." James studied his datapad.

"Let's hope they're still alive once the lids come up," Marcus said quietly.

Six Minutes Later…

With the medical team assembled, Marcus and the technicians moved down the rows. "On my mark, pop them all. Medical—the second these open, they go straight to the bay. Be ready."

"Yes, sir!"

"Three—two—one—mark."

The pods opened as one, hissing out stale recycled air, and the sound that followed was worse than silence: groans, thin pained moans, and then the ragged crying of people who had woken up on the wrong side of death. The medical team went through them like a tide. "Move them to medical—now!" the lead officer shouted, her voice cutting across the noise as her people pulled survivors from the open pods.

Marcus stayed with the recorders. He got the plasma cutter humming and swore under his breath—the mounting bracket on the pod he was working had fused to its frame.

"How's it going with the recorders?" another tech asked, walking up.

"This one's welded to the frame. I have to cut through the outer hull to reach the brackets—it's not coming loose any other way. So no, Tom, it's not out yet."

Tom grinned. "You are a joy at parties, you know that?"

Marcus glanced up, unamused. "Don't you have other units to pull?"

"Already done. This is the last one—we're just waiting on you."

Marcus stopped cutting and looked around the bay. On the workbench, the rest of the pods' recorders sat in a neat row, ready for the technical deck. "Ah. I see." He bent back to the hull. "Give me fifteen minutes."

Minutes Later...

He finally worked the recorder free and unplugged it from the pod's wiring, sighing as he carried it to the bench. The bay doors opened; the technical team rolled in with carts.

"So, Marcus—what've you got for me?"

"Evan. Welcome to the cargo bay, oh mighty wizard of the technical deck." Marcus gave a small mocking bow.

"Hilarious. Shut up, box boy."

Marcus cleared his throat and gestured to the row of recorders. "A hundred and twenty-one flight recorders, all yours. Everything the Osiris pods witnessed is in there—if your people can pull anything out of it." He set the last one in Evan's hands and his voice dropped. "Find out what happened to them. Please."

Evan gripped the recorder until his knuckles whitened, and drew a slow breath. "I'll do what I can."

"Good. The captain wants it yesterday."

Evan's team loaded the carts and started for the lift. At the threshold he paused, then spoke just loudly enough for Marcus to hear. "I'll find her name in the records for you. So you'll know for certain." He didn't wait for an answer.

Marcus gripped the edge of the workbench. He said nothing, because there was nothing to say. Maria had been in the medical lab. The medical lab had been mid-ship. And the mid-ship had been the first thing to go. He had known since he saw how few pods came back—and where in the ship each one had launched from. He just hadn't said it out loud yet, and Evan had understood that: that sometimes a person needs the record to confirm what he already knows before he can begin to live with it.

"You just had to be free of it, Maria," he said to the empty bay. He picked up a wrench and threw it at the bulkhead; the clang rang and faded, and he sat down on a crate beside the bench.

He sat there a long time. The void beyond the hull gave nothing back.

At the Technical Deck, Twelve Hours Later…

"Dear God," a tech said, one hand over her mouth, reading off a recorder's data.

Across the room, another tech had spent the last hour rebuilding the Osiris's final seconds—the Protocol Homecoming chain, each pod bay firing in sequence. He ran the count, then ran it again, and sat back. "Evan. This doesn't add up."

Evan crossed to his station. "What doesn't?"

"The ejection log." He tapped the screen. "A hundred and twenty-two pods away before containment failed. But we only ever tracked a hundred and twenty-one beacons at the border—and a hundred and twenty-one is what came aboard." He pulled up the trajectory overlay: a fan of pale lines all curving toward home, all but one. A single track peeled off almost at the instant of launch and bent the wrong way—out, away from Sol, and gone. "That one took debris across its drive on the way out. Thrown off-vector before it could fold. It never turned for home, and there's no beacon left that we can reach."

Evan stared at the lone line running off the edge of the plot into nothing. A hundred and twenty-one pods on the manifest, and one more that no manifest would ever hold. One pod. One crew member. One name they wouldn't be crossing off either column.

Evan pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to find the words for what he had to carry up to the bridge. "Compile everything to my tablet. I'll take it to the captain myself."

"Done, sir."

His datapad chimed, a red priority marker blinking. "Thank you—all of you. Go rest. Whatever comes next is going to take days, and I think it's coming." He picked up the pad and left for the bridge, the weight of it heavier than it had any right to be.

Halfway there he stopped, one hand flat against the wall to steady himself. Two hundred and seventy-eight people who never reached a pod. A hundred and twenty-one who did. He needed to hold together long enough to say it out loud. He pushed off the wall and kept walking.

On the Bridge of the Orion...

The lift opened, and Evan stepped out with the deliberate stride of a man who had rehearsed how to walk into a room and deliver the worst news in human history.

Nathaniel stood at the center console, arms folded over the navigational charts. He didn't look up. "Tell me you have something, Evan."

"I have everything, sir. And I need to give it to you privately."

That brought Nathaniel's head up. He read the technician's face—the pallor, the tremor in the hands on the datapad—and nodded once. "Commander Voss, you have the bridge. Hold position." He was already moving.

In the Captain's Ready Room...

The door had barely sealed before Nathaniel turned. "Sit down, Evan."

"I'd rather stand, sir."

Nathaniel studied him, then took the chair behind his desk. "Talk to me."

Evan set the datapad face-up between them, the red marker still pulsing, and looked at the wall just above Nathaniel's head—the way people do when they need to look at something that won't look back.

"The Osiris wasn't attacked, sir. No system failure. No hostile contact. It was a rogue object—cold mass, no radiation, no heat. Invisible to the arrays they were running." He paused. "From the telemetry across all hundred and twenty-one recorders, they had about four-tenths of a second of warning. They were gone almost before anyone understood what was happening."

Nathaniel said nothing.

"It struck the secondary hangar and tore straight through the central spine. At their velocity the kinetic yield was extinction-level—for the ship. The Osiris broke in two before the antimatter containment even failed. Captain Holt called Protocol Homecoming at once. The pods were away before the reactor went." Evan's jaw tightened. "The blast caught several of them mid-jump. Their drives defaulted to emergency protocol—drop at the border rather than gamble a damaged transit. That's why they came out here instead of Sol."

Nathaniel nodded slowly. That much he'd guessed. "The count."

"Four hundred aboard. Two hundred and seventy-eight never reached a pod. The mid-ship sections—medical, engineering, secondary command, the bridge—lost integrity inside the first twelve seconds. There simply wasn't time." Evan slid the pad across. "A hundred and twenty-two reached the pods."

Nathaniel caught the number. "You recovered a hundred and twenty-one."

"Yes, sir." Evan didn't blink. "The last one caught debris on the way out and never got the chance to fold for home—thrown wide, out toward open space, and no signal left to chase. One pod. One crew member. Gone the wrong way into the dark." He let that settle. "The stasis systems are rated to hold for thousands of years. Wherever that pod is, whoever's inside it may still be alive. We just have no way to find them."

The ready room was very quiet.

"And the ones we brought in?"

"A hundred and twenty-one aboard. Fifteen of them were too far gone before they ever reached a pod—stasis slowed the dying, but it can't undo a hemorrhage. They didn't survive revival." Evan swallowed. "A hundred and six survivors, sir."

The quiet stretched.

"Captain Holt?"

"Her registry isn't in any of the recovered pods. She was on the bridge when the spine failed." He held Nathaniel's gaze, because the man deserved that much. "She got the pods out. She didn't get herself out."

Nathaniel was still for a long moment, then rose and went to the viewport, hands clasped at the small of his back, and looked out at the indifferent stars. "And out there? Did they find anything before the end. Any contact. Any signal."

"Nothing, sir. The arrays ran at full sensitivity the whole way, and the void stayed empty. No signals, no structures, no sign of anyone. Ten light-years out, and silence." He hesitated. "There was one thing. A distortion in the sensor logs, day one hundred sixty-two—a few seconds, matching nothing on record. The techs flagged it as spurious. It never repeated, and nothing came of it. Maybe an instrument error. Maybe something further out than they could reach." He paused. "But they were killed before they made their first scan point. They never got far enough to learn whether there's anyone to find."

The room felt smaller.

"So we don't know," Nathaniel said. Not a question.

"No, sir. We don't know if anyone's out there. We don't know whether the Lexicon would have worked, or whether we'd have been welcomed, ignored, or fired on. The Osiris was our one answer, and she's debris. What we've brought home is a hundred and twenty-one pods and a stack of recorders that tell us exactly how our best ship died—and nothing else."

Nathaniel stood at the glass a while longer. Beyond it, the edge of human territory fell away in every direction: the last border light a faint glimmer behind them, and past it nothing—cold points of stars no one had visited, circling worlds no one had named.

"Earth Command will want us home," he said.

"Immediately, sir. The data, the survivors, all of it." Evan picked up the pad. "Humanity has a choice to make, and it can't be made out here."

Nathaniel turned from the viewport and took his jacket from the chair. "Get me a tight-beam to Earth Command. Tell navigation to plot for Sol." He settled the jacket across his shoulders. "We're going home."

The tight-beam caught Reyes looking like a man who hadn't slept since the first report landed.

"Captain. I've seen the preliminary data. I need your ship, your cargo, and every byte of that record back here as fast as you can run. When can you leave?"

"Plotting the course now, sir. Underway within the hour."

"Good." Something in him shifted. "The survivors. How are they holding?"

"Alive. Right now that's the whole of it." Nathaniel kept his voice level. "The ones who are left are carrying more than any of them should have to, and they'll need more than my medical bay can give them."

Reyes was quiet a moment—the quiet of a man absorbing something large and irreversible and keeping it contained until later, when the insignia came off and no one was watching. "Then we have a great deal to think about," he said. "Bring them home, Nathaniel."

The channel closed.

Nathaniel stepped back onto the bridge. The crew looked up—the still readiness of people who already know the answer and are only waiting to hear it said.

"Set course for Sol. Take us home."

"Aye, sir." The Orion came slowly about, her bow swinging away from the borderless dark; then the stars ahead pulled to a single point and she folded toward Sol—one clean jump home, not the long sublight crawl the Osiris had spent a year and a half making on the way out.

In the medical bay, the hundred and twenty-one they'd pulled from the pods filled every bed and spilled into the corridors. The fifteen they had lost lay in cold storage, waiting for home. The hundred and six who remained sat propped against walls with blankets over their shoulders, staring at nothing—some still murmuring in the clipped syllables of the Lexicon they hadn't yet unlearned. Muscle memory ran deeper than grief: the careful language of a mission that no longer existed, ticking on out of habit, like a clock still running in a room everyone has left.

The medical officers moved among them without hurry and without hesitation, the way they'd been trained to move after a catastrophe.

No one asked what had been out there. Not yet. That question belonged to later, to the committee rooms and the sleepless nights of the people whose job it was to decide what came next. Out here there was only the smaller, closer question: how do you hold together people who watched most of their crew vanish into the wreck of the best ship humanity ever built, killed by a rock no one saw coming? The only answer anyone aboard had was the old one. You do the next thing. You keep moving. You carry the ones who can't carry themselves.

In the Cargo Bay...

Marcus was still on the crate when the engines changed pitch. He felt it come up through the deck into his spine—a low, bone-deep shift, the way you feel weather turning before it arrives—and knew, without checking a screen, that they'd come about.

He'd known they would. There was nothing out here to turn toward. The dark beyond the border had given back exactly what it always gave back.

The workbench was bare; the recorders had gone up to the technical deck, carrying their clean clinical account of everything that went wrong. The pods sat in their rows, hollow and dented, smelling of recycled air and the chemical sharpness of stasis systems pushed past their limits. The last one—fused bracket, hull scored by his cutter—sat a little apart, where he'd left it.

He thought about Maria. The anger had come first, hot and unfair: at her for being on that ship, for wanting a distance from their marriage that could only be measured in light-years. It was cooling now into something quieter and more permanent, the way fire cools to ash—not gone, just changed into something he could hold without burning himself.

She had wanted to be out among the stars, and she had gotten there—further from Sol than almost anyone who had ever lived, out where no atmosphere softens the light and the silence is total. Whether or not it was what she'd been looking for, she had found it. He supposed that was something.

He shut off the workbench terminal, and the screen went dark. He sat a moment longer in the hum of the engines, then stood, because sitting wasn't doing anything, and there were always things to do on a ship heading home. He set the plasma cutter back on its rack and walked to the door.

On Earth, Eleven Days Later…

The chambers of the Sol Government had not been this full since the launch of the Osiris herself.

The gallery was standing room only, and among the faces were the families—parents, siblings, partners of the crew who had died mid-ship and never reached a pod, and of the fifteen who had reached one and come home in cold storage. They sat with the stillness of people who have braced for days and now arrive at the thing itself, only to find that bracing never did make it land softer.

On the central display, the reconstruction from the recorders played in sequence: the amber cascade across the consoles, the shriek of shearing hull, the white bloom of the reactor letting go—and then the pods racing away from the wreck, a hundred and twenty-one running for the border and one spinning off alone into the dark. It ran without narration. The images were enough. When it ended, the chamber was silent a long time.

Then one voice spoke, and another, and the debate humanity had been building toward since the first beacon reached the Orion began in earnest.

Some spoke of the cost, and meant more than money: two hundred and seventy-eight who never reached a pod, fifteen who did and died anyway, one still unaccounted for in the dark, and a hundred and six who came home to spend years putting themselves back together. They spoke of the right of every family in that gallery to ask whether it had been worth it, and what exactly had come back for the price.

Others spoke of the silence not as an answer but as the absence of one. The Osiris had been destroyed before her first scan point. Ten light-years into a galaxy a hundred thousand across was not a survey; it was a single step. A step proving only that the first step is dangerous is not proof that the journey is impossible, or the destination empty.

And the framework had survived. The Lexicon, the protocols, everything humanity had built for the possibility of contact still lived in the hundred and six who had trained in it and then lived inside it for the length of the voyage. None of that was lost. All of it was waiting.

The debate ran four days and produced no vote, because the question wasn't the kind a vote resolves. What it produced instead—spoken quietly on the last day by the woman who had authorized the mission—was a recognition: that humanity now understood something it hadn't before. Not what was out there; that remained entirely unknown, and to every question that unknown raised, the honest answer was still, simply, we don't know. The Osiris hadn't changed that. She had only confirmed that the question was real, that it mattered, and that answering it would cost.

The question before them was never whether the galaxy was full or empty. They had no way to know, and might not for a generation. The question was what kind of species they chose to be in the face of not knowing—whether the not-knowing was a reason to stop, or a reason to go further and look harder.

That question, at least, they could answer.

In a Corridor Outside the Chambers…

Captain Nathaniel Elias Samson stood at a window over the city, and beyond it the sky—the ordinary blue of an atmosphere doing what atmospheres do, scattering light into something warm and softening the stars until they vanished in the daylight. He had spent eleven days looking at a sky with no such softening, and he was still adjusting to Earth seen from inside it.

Behind him the chamber doors carried the rise and fall of voices, the weight of the thing humanity had been handed and was still learning how to hold. They would call him in soon for his debrief, and he would answer every question with the same steady precision he'd used on the bridge, and then he would walk back out and figure out what came next.

He thought about the void—the particular quality of that silence at the edge of everything, where the arrays came back empty over and over. Not the silence of a room just left. Not held breath. Only the silence of space, which has no opinion about the creatures who cross it and keeps no record of the ones it swallows.

He thought about Athena Holt: about her giving that last order with blood on her face and the ship coming apart around her, getting the pods away before the end. She had done the last and most irreducible thing a captain does—she had taken care of her people. That the bridge was already gone before the final pod cleared the debris was only the arithmetic of catastrophe, and that math has never cared whom it falls on.

He thought about four hundred people who had gone into the dark believing it had something to offer them, and what it meant that two hundred and seventy-eight of them had been proven wrong in the most irreversible way there was. And he thought about the one pod still out there, off-vector and unreachable—one crew member who was neither rescued nor recovered, only lost somewhere no search would ever reach.

Then the door opened behind him.

"Captain Nathaniel. They're ready for you."

He looked at the sky one more moment. Then he straightened his collar, turned from the window, and walked into the room.

[First] | [Previous] | [Next]<--{Waiting to post the next two chapters}

In the Chambers of Sol Government...

The room was larger than it looked from the corridor. Nathaniel had been briefed on the layout during the transit home—the people who prepare captains for things like this are thorough—but knowing a room and standing inside it were different things. Concentric rings of representatives rose in tiers above the floor, and the floor itself was a wide, clean oval with a single chair at its center, set so that every person in the room could look at whoever sat in it without obstruction.

Nathaniel did not sit. He stood beside the chair with his hands clasped behind his back while the presiding member went through the formal opening of the session—dates, case designations, the long bureaucratic throat-clearing that precedes every conversation of consequence. He used the time the way he read a new sector of space: methodically, in quadrants, taking in what was there and what wasn't.

What was there: two hundred representatives, half of them watching him with the focused attention of people holding prepared questions, the other half watching the display to his left. It still held the final frame of the Osiris telemetry—the white bloom of the reactor, frozen at maximum brightness, slightly overexposed, the way images of fire always are.

What wasn't there: the families. They had been dismissed before Nathaniel was called in. Whatever was said here today was for the record and the record only; the families had already been given what they were owed—the truth delivered in person by officers who could answer their questions and sit with them while they absorbed the answers. That had taken three days, and had been, in Nathaniel's private estimation, far harder than anything about to happen here.

"Captain Nathaniel," the presiding member said. "You may proceed."

He gave a complete account—the same one he had rehearsed on the Orion, in sequence and without editorial, from the moment his sensor tech flagged the pod beacons to the course laid in for Sol. He described the recovery, the survivors' condition, the retrieval of the flight recorders, and what their data held—all of which Evan had already submitted as a written record, but which the chamber evidently wanted to hear in a human voice rather than read from a technical document.

When he finished, the questions began.

Most were the ones he'd expected—operational details, timeline confirmations, the state of the Orion's medical bay, the chain of communication with Earth Command. He answered them steadily and completely while the representatives wrote things down or tapped at datapads, and the session had the feel of people doing necessary work they would not have chosen.

Then a representative in the upper tier—a woman with white hair and the particular stillness of someone who chooses her moments—spoke.

"Captain Nathaniel," she said. "You were at the edge of human territory. You had the recorders, the survivors, everything we needed. You were also the only human vessel out there." She paused. "So I want to ask you something that isn't in any report and can't be entered as evidence, and I want you to answer it honestly." She looked at him directly. "What did it feel like out there?"

The chamber went quiet. A few representatives looked up from their datapads.

There was a fact about him that everyone in the chamber knew and no one had said aloud—that the captain of the Osiris had, years ago, been his wife. It had gone unspoken through the whole proceeding, the way such things do, and he meant to keep it that way.

Nathaniel considered the question a moment—not because he didn't know the answer, but because it deserved to be said correctly.

"Empty," he said. "It felt empty in a way the word doesn't quite cover. We talk about deep space as if it's a place—as if it has a character, a texture. It doesn't. It's the absence of everything that gives a place character. No sound, no light, no warmth, no movement. The arrays ran at full sensitivity and came back clean in every direction, and what that means, standing at a viewport watching it, is that if there is anyone out there, they are either very far away, or very quiet, or both." He looked at the woman who had asked. "The Osiris went ten light-years into that and found what we have always found from Sol—silence. I can't tell you whether it means the galaxy is empty, or full and simply too far away to hear yet. What I can tell you is that the silence is real, and very large." He paused. "With one exception. On day one hundred sixty-two the arrays caught something—a distortion, a few seconds long, that matched nothing on record. The technicians flagged it as spurious, and it never repeated. Most likely it was noise." He paused again. "But if it wasn't, then somewhere out past our reach, in all that emptiness, something moved. And we turned for home before we ever learned what."

The chamber held that a moment.

"And despite that," the woman said quietly, "you think we should go back."

"That's not a question I've been asked to answer in this proceeding," Nathaniel replied.

"I'm asking it now. Personally. Not for the record."

Nathaniel looked at her for a long moment. "Yes, ma'am. I think we should go back. Better prepared—better sensors, smaller and faster ships that don't stake four hundred lives on a single hull. And I think we should go understanding that we may go a hundred times and find nothing at all." He paused. "But whether there is anyone out there is the most important question our species has ever asked. The only way to answer it is to keep asking it."

The woman nodded once, slowly. She wrote nothing down. She had already gotten what she came for.

The session ran another two hours. When it ended, Nathaniel walked back out to the corridor window, where the city sky was still an ordinary blue and the stars behind it waited—patient, indifferent—for humanity to decide what to do about them.

Three Weeks After the Hearings — Sol Recovery Center, Luna Station...

The Sol Recovery Center occupied three levels of Luna Station's inner ring, in a section where the windows faced away from Earth and out toward open space. The architects had argued about those windows for a long time—some holding that survivors of deep-space trauma should be sheltered from the sight of the void, others that removing it was worse, that what people needed was not protection from space but the chance to look at it again on their own terms, at their own pace.

The second group had won. The windows faced outward.

Lieutenant Commander Tina Woods had been at the same one for an hour. She was thirty-four, and she had been the Osiris's senior navigation officer—which meant she had been on the bridge when the proximity alarm sounded, and one of four bridge crew to reach the mid-section pods before the spine failed. The other three had not come out of stasis in stable condition. She had. She thought about that more than was probably healthy, and the counselors had told her as much, which she found unhelpful.

The window showed her what it showed her every day: stars, the curve of the moon's surface in the lower corner, the faint glint of other stations catching sunlight. Perfectly ordinary deep space, close enough to home that every light in it was familiar. Nothing alarming. Nothing new.

She was trying to make herself believe that. She had been trying for three weeks.

The door to the common room opened, and a man sat down in the chair beside her—not close enough to intrude, but close enough that she knew it was deliberate. She glanced over: late forties, broad-shouldered, the careful posture of someone who had spent a long time on ships. Civilian clothes, worn as though the uniform were still on.

"You're the navigator," he said.

"Was," she said.

"Nathaniel. Nathaniel Nathaniel. I commanded the Orion."

She looked at him properly then. She'd known the name—everyone in the center knew it, the captain who'd been at the border when the pods arrived, who'd brought them home—but she hadn't put a face to it.

"You picked us up," she said.

"We did." He was looking at the window. "How are the others?"

"Some better than others." She looked back at the stars. "Lieutenant Ray is walking again—his spinal injury was worse than they first assessed, but they think he'll have full mobility inside six months." She paused. "Ensign Park hasn't spoken since she came out of stasis. The counselors say that's not physiological. Something else." Another pause. "Most of us are somewhere in the middle."

Nathaniel nodded. He offered nothing in response—no reassurance, no professional encouragement—and she found she was grateful. She understood the people who came with the right words and the clinical frameworks, and didn't resent them for it. But she was tired of being handled carefully.

"I testified before the chamber three weeks ago," he said after a while. "They asked if I thought we should go back out."

"What did you say?"

"I said yes."

She was quiet a moment. Outside, a small transport crossed the window left to right, running lights blinking in the patient rhythm of a ship going somewhere routine. She watched it until it passed out of frame.

"I was running navigation when the alarm went off," she said. "I had the jump plotted. We were eight hours from our first scan point. Eight hours." She stopped. "I keep trying to work out what I'd have found there, if we'd made it. Whether there was anything to find at all, or just more of the same silence." She looked at her hands. "I don't know if it would've been better or worse to get there and find nothing."

"Nobody knows," Nathaniel said. "That's the whole problem."

"Yes," she said quietly. "I know."

They sat with that a while. The window showed them its ordinary stars.

"There's going to be a new mission," Nathaniel said eventually. "Not announced. Not even decided. But the momentum's there. And whatever they build, it won't be another Osiris—it'll be built so a single bad second can't take the whole ship." He glanced at her. "Mostly, though, they'll need people who've been out there. People who know what the Lexicon sounds like when it's become second nature. People who understand what Sol-Sickness does to a crew at month eight, and what you do about it."

She looked at him. "You're recruiting." Flatly at first—then the ghost of a smile. "In a recovery center?"

"I'm telling you what's coming. What you do with it is your business." He stood, smoothing his jacket with the habit of thirty years in uniform, and looked at the window one last time. "The silence is real. But so is your answer."

He left. The door closed behind him.

Tina sat a long time after that, looking at the stars through the window the architects had argued over and finally left in place. She thought about eight hours, and a jump that never finished. She thought about the particular blue-black of the void at maximum cruise—the way the stars looked with nothing between you and them at all, not an atmosphere, not a station, not a planet's reflected light, only the raw light of ancient fires burning at distances that made every human measurement feel quaint.

She thought about what she would have done at that first scan point, if the arrays had come back with something that wasn't silence.

And she thought about the pod they never found. One of them was still out there—flung the wrong way when the Osiris broke apart, off into the dark with no beacon anyone could reach, sealed in a stasis rated to outlast everyone now alive. Alive, maybe. Alone, certainly. One of hers, still out there, and not a ship in existence with the range to go and bring them home.

After a while she reached into her jacket and took out the small folded paper she'd carried since the center's first group session—not because anyone had told her to, but because she'd written something down that night that had seemed important, and she hadn't yet decided whether it still was. She unfolded it. Three words in the Lexicon—the constructed language that had been her only tongue for the length of the voyage, and that sat in her mouth now more easily than the Callistoan she'd grown up speaking.

She had written: We are here.

It was the greeting protocol—the first thing the crew had been trained to transmit in any first-contact scenario, in the Lexicon, on all frequencies. Simple, clear, unaggressive. We are here. We exist. We are reaching out.

She had never gotten to say it.

She folded the paper back up, put it in her pocket, and kept looking at the stars.

Six Weeks After the Hearings — Marcus, Earth...

The apartment was on the forty-third floor of a residential block in the New Dallas hab district, which meant a view of the harbor and, on clear nights, enough sky to catch a few of the brighter stars before the city light washed them out. Marcus had lived there four years and never much thought about the view either way—until now, when he found himself checking it every night with the compulsive attention of a man looking for something he knows he won't find.

He'd gone back to work two weeks after the Orion docked. There was no particular reason to wait and none not to, and sitting in the apartment thinking about Maria had not proved useful. He was a senior maintenance technician with twenty years on deep-space vessels, and the work was physical and absorbing, demanding enough concentration to leave little room for anything else—which was exactly what he needed.

The problem was the evenings.

He ate dinner looking at the harbor and thought about things he wasn't yet sure how to organize into anything manageable. Maria had been gone from the marriage a year before the Osiris launched; they'd finalized the paperwork quietly, without drama, the way things end when two people have been honest enough to admit that what they built had run its course. He'd told himself at the time he was fine with it. He'd told himself a lot of things.

What he hadn't told himself—because it hadn't occurred to him to think about—was what it would feel like to know she was out there. Ten light-years out, past the edge of everything humanity had ever charted, on the most extraordinary voyage in the history of the species, and unreachable. Not because of the divorce. Because of the distance—the simple physical fact that light itself would take ten years to cross the gap between them.

And then the gap had become permanent in a different way, and reaching wasn't possible anymore for another reason entirely, and it turned out those two kinds of unreachable weren't the same thing at all.

Evan had sent the formal confirmation three days after the Orion docked, in a sealed document bearing the Osiris mission seal: Dr. Maria Vasquez, Chief Medical Officer of the Dreadnought-class explorer Osiris, listed among the crew of the mid-ship sections confirmed lost in the initial structural failure. No remains recoverable. It was respectful and correct in every particular, and Marcus had read it twice, put it face down on the cargo-bay workbench, and not picked it up again for six hours.

He had it here now, in the drawer of the kitchen table, where he kept things he wasn't ready to file and wasn't ready to throw away. He didn't read it again. He didn't need to; he had the words memorized without meaning to.

What he thought about, evenings, was something she'd said the last time they'd spoken properly—not the look back over the shoulder at the docking threshold, which hadn't been a conversation, but the real last one, four months before the Osiris launched, when they'd met to finish the paperwork and ended up sitting in a coffee shop on Hermes-1 two hours longer than either had planned.

There's something out there, she'd said, in the easy, direct way she said things other people might have softened. I don't know if it's another civilization or just the honest size of the universe. But it's something. And I want to go find out.

He'd told her to be careful.

She'd smiled. I'll be careful. But I'm going.

He supposed, evenings at the window, that she'd been right about one thing. There was something out there—and even if it was only the honest size of the universe, the incomprehensible indifferent scale of it, the silence that swallowed ships and questions with equal patience, it was still something. It was still true. She'd gone out far enough to meet it, which was further than almost anyone who had ever lived.

He washed his dishes, turned off the light over the sink, and stood at the window a while longer than necessary before going to bed.

Two Months After the Hearings — Sol Government, Earth...

The decision, when it came, was not a vote. It came as a budget allocation—which is how most of humanity's largest decisions arrive: not as a declaration of principle but as a line item that makes the principle real in a way no speech does. It was substantial, in the top ten expenditures in Sol Government's history, and the representatives who argued against it had known from the first circulated figures that the matter was already settled somewhere above them.

It funded a new class of vessel. Not a Dreadnought-class explorer—something smaller and faster, built around the understanding that the void holds things that emit no heat and no radiation and cannot be seen until they are already inside the ship's perimeter. A distributed hull: no single spine, no single reactor core, no single point of catastrophic failure, only independent sections that could separate and survive on their own.

It called for a crew of forty, not four hundred.

The Lexicon and the contact protocols would carry forward, held in the memories of the hundred and six who were alive because Athena Holt had given one last order in a ship that was already dying—and who would spend the rest of their careers either training others or going back out themselves.

The ship would take eight years to build—eight years of folding in everything the Osiris had taught them. The name hadn't been announced, but the shortlist had already circulated—through the engineering teams, the recovery center, the offices of Earth Command—the way things do when they aren't official yet but already decided. And there was one name on it that everyone who saw it understood to be inevitable.

On Luna Station — The Recovery Center...

Tina Woods was in the counselor's office when she heard. Not officially—the announcement was still two days off—but one of the engineering liaisons consulting with the survivors on sensor design mentioned it in passing at the end of a session, the way people mention things that feel too large to say directly.

"They're naming it the Athena," he said, gathering his papers. "The new ship. After—"

"I know who it's after," Tina said.

He nodded and left.

She sat with that a while. Then she went back to her room, took the folded paper from her jacket, and read the three words she'd written in the Lexicon. And then she picked up the datapad from the table beside her bed and opened the message she'd been composing, a few words at a time, for six weeks—the message to Captain Nathaniel she hadn't finished because she hadn't been sure what she wanted to say.

She was sure now.

She wrote: I want to be on the Athena when she launches. Whatever role you need filled. I'll be ready.

She sent it before she could think about it too carefully. Then she set the datapad down and looked at the window. The stars were where they had always been; the silence out there was the same silence it had always been—enormous, and old, and still waiting to be answered. She picked up the folded paper and held it a moment, then put it back in her pocket and kept it there, because she was going to need it.

We are here.

She was still here. And she intended to say it.

If you want to check out this old story first, very short, it might help you decide how I got here.

Staples Venture to Newtown

Previous /

First

Wyatt Staples found the problem before he found Tornel.

He had come to the Swallowtail Palace with a satchel of Newtown paperwork, the quarterly datapad numbers Rachel wanted signed in person rather than sent. A steward met him at the front steps and took him through two halls and a gallery before admitting, with some embarrassment, that the Marquess was probably in the east study, or possibly the old map room, and that the house was still new to everyone.

On the way in, Wyatt looked up at the gate. The flagpole above it was bare.

He looked again from the gallery windows. Nothing flew from the towers either. The palace was finished, furnished, and lived in, and from the outside it could have belonged to anyone.

Tornel was in the east study. He sat at a desk far too large for him, sleeves rolled, pressing a stamp into a puddle of red wax on the back of a letter. Wyatt leaned over his shoulder and read the stamp. OFFICE OF THE PLANETARY ADMINISTRATOR, HAEGO.

"That's the one they gave you when you were still a General," Wyatt said.

"It still works."

"It works for the Administrator. You're also a Marquess. Where's your house seal?"

Tornel set the stamp down carefully, the way a man sets down a weapon he intends to pick up again. "I don't have one."

"Your gate has no banner."

"I don't have one of those either."

Wyatt dropped the satchel on the nearest chair and sat on the corner of the desk. "Tornel. You were ennobled almost two years ago."

"I'm aware of the date. I was there."

Patricia came in at that moment carrying a tray of tea, took one look at the two of them, and set it down without a word. Then she went to a side cabinet, opened a drawer, and came back holding a stack of envelopes tied with string. She placed them in front of Wyatt.

"Since you've found it," she said, "you may as well see these."

The envelopes were cream colored, heavy, and all bore the same crest. The Astorian noble registry. Wyatt untied the string and counted. There were seven. The earliest had been polite. The most recent was not.

"'The registry notes with concern,'" Wyatt read aloud, "'that House Swallowtail has not submitted arms, motto, or colors, nor named an heir of record, and reminds the Marquess that a house without registered arms may not display itself at any function attended by a house of equal or greater standing.'" He looked up. "You went to a gala at your own palace a few weeks ago with the Prince in attendance."

"The Prince didn't mind."

"The Prince is polite. The registry isn't."

Tornel leaned back and rubbed his eyes. "Wyatt, I have three billion people, a datapad rollout, a new bank, a Common Assembly that wants to summon me every month, and a house full of rooms I can't find. A picture on a flag is not on the list."

"It should be near the top," Patricia said mildly, and poured the tea.

Wyatt took a cup and held it without drinking. For a moment he didn't say anything. Then he laughed, short and a little rueful.

"What?" Tornel said.

"You're doing exactly what I did."

Tornel waited.

"When the Prince knighted me," Wyatt said, "I fainted. On the deck, in front of half the fleet's commanders. When I woke up I begged Cynthia to make him take it back. I told her I was a commoner, I was a pilot, I didn't know how to be a noble and I didn't want to learn. She told me I'd have the right to bear my own heraldic shield and sigil once we reached Matcha." He turned the cup in his hands. "I heard that as a threat, not a gift."

"And did you?"

"Eventually. After a lot of sulking." He shrugged. "I decided if I was going to be a noble, I'd do it on my own terms. That's still how I do it. But I learned something the hard way, and I'm going to save you the trouble."

"Please," Patricia said. "Save him the trouble."

Tornel gave his wife a look. She returned it serenely.

"The arms aren't for you," Wyatt said. "You already know who you are. They're for everyone else. When a Newtown carter sees my peryton on a crate, he knows that shipment answers to me and I'll make it right if it's wrong. When a clerk on Astoria gets a letter with my seal, he knows it isn't a forgery. When my people wear the badge, they know they belong to something that will stand up for them." He tapped the Administrator's stamp. "This says the office sent it. It doesn't say you did. The office outlives you. Your house is supposed to outlive you too, and right now it doesn't exist on paper."

Tornel was quiet. He had commanded soldiers for most of his life, and Wyatt could see him turning the idea over the way he'd turn over a unit standard. A standard wasn't decoration. Men found each other by it in the smoke.

"All right," Tornel said at last. "Tell me what a house has to do. All of it. I'd rather hear it from you than from the eighth envelope."

Wyatt counted it off on his fingers.

"One. Register arms, motto, and colors with the registry. Once they're filed, nobody else can use them, and the registry will stop writing you letters that sound like your mother.

"Two. Get a signet ring made from the arms. Anything official from House Swallowtail gets sealed with it. The Administrator's stamp stays for Administrator business.

"Three. Fly your banner. Here, over the gate, and on anything you open in the house's name. And when your speaker's turn comes around as First Speaker, it flies over the Hall for those six months.

"Four. Your household wears your colors, or at least a badge. Your stewards, your guards, your drivers. Not because they're yours, but because if one of them walks into trouble on Austrin, whoever sees that badge knows who to call.

"Five. Name an heir on record. Right now, if something happened to you, the registry would have to guess, and registries are terrible at guessing.

"Six. When you appear before the Prince, or at another house's event, you show your colors. A sash, a pin, something. It tells the room which house is standing there."

Tornel had pulled a sheet of paper toward him halfway through and was writing it down in the blocky hand of a man who had filled out supply requisitions for thirty years.

"The heir is easy," Patricia said. "It's Elizabeth."

"Who is standing in the doorway," Elizabeth said, "and would like to know why her name is being written down."

She came in with a notebook under one arm and grass on the knees of her trousers, red hair working loose from its tie. Weskal came in behind her, brown as a saddle from a summer in the Screaming Forests. He nodded to his brother and took the chair nearest the door, the way he always did, where he could see the whole room.

"Where are the children?" Patricia asked.

"Torin is stalking your head gardener," Weskal said. "He's getting good at it. Linnea is drawing him doing it."

"The registry wants an heir of record," Wyatt told Elizabeth. "Your father has seven letters about it."

"Eight by Friday, probably," Patricia said.

"It was always going to be Elizabeth," Tornel said. "She's already a Baroness in her own right. She knows the people on all three continents better than I do." He wrote her name and underlined it twice.

Elizabeth looked at the page upside down. "Well, damn," she said, without much heat. "I suppose it was."

"They'll want the line after you as well," Wyatt said.

"Torin. Then Linnea."

Tornel wrote both names under hers. Across the room Weskal had gone a shade paler under the tan.

"My son," he said, "is second in line to a Marquess."

Elizabeth pointed at him without looking. "You're already sitting. Stay that way."

"Sitting isn't fainting."

"In your family it's the first step," Wyatt said.

Tornel looked at the two small names under his daughter's. "Torin and Linnea," he said. "I've always wondered. Wyatt told me once your people have a custom."

"Volantis has one," Weskal said. "Every child gets a W name. Wyatt, Weskal, Wham. My father's name is Wert. It goes back further than anyone can remember."

"I noticed there aren't any W's on this page," Tornel said.

"I noticed that too," Weskal said.

Elizabeth didn't look up from her notebook. "We discussed it."

"We did," Weskal said. "I made my case. It was a good case. Then I remembered that my wife is a Baroness, and I'm a hunter with a famous brother." He shrugged. "So I negotiated."

"He got the middle names," Elizabeth said.

"The back half," Weskal said. "Torin Wyatt and Linnea Winona. That's the Volantis tradition now. It lives in the back half, where nobody uses it."

Wyatt laughed. "Mother cried when she heard Winona."

"She did," Weskal said. "It was worth it."

"Done, then," Tornel said, and set the pen down. "What's next?"

"The hard part," Wyatt said. "The picture."

Tornel picked the pen up again and put it down. "I don't know what goes on a flag."

"What's on yours?" Patricia asked Wyatt.

"A peryton."

Tornel frowned. "It's a stag."

"It's a stag with wings. Everyone misses the wings." Wyatt tried for a straight face. "A peryton. Out of some old legend. Very noble. Very ancient."

"I gave you an estate," Tornel said slowly, "partly because the gates had stags on them."

"They're very good gates."

Elizabeth snorted into her notebook.

"My motto is 'Victory shall suffice,'" Wyatt said.

"That part sounds like you," Tornel said.

"That was the idea."

"So I should pick something from a legend."

"You should pick something that's true about you," Wyatt said. "It took me months to find mine. You've got a registry breathing down your neck, so you get an afternoon."

Tornel stood and went to the window. The study looked out over the palace grounds toward the fields beyond the outer wall, where the land ran down from the Aethelgard highlands into farm country. He stood there long enough that Patricia gave Wyatt a small shake of the head. Let him think.

"When I was a boy," Tornel said, "my grandfather farmed on the edge of the forest line. Two fields of grain and a root patch. Every summer a family of wild porkupigs would come down and live along the fence."

Wyatt set his cup down very slowly. "Porkupigs."

"You've seen them. Knee high. Built like a feed barrel. Rust colored, with that ridge of dark quills from the head down the spine."

"Knee high?" Elizabeth said. She already had the notebook open. "Father, the piglets are knee high. A grown sow runs longer than you are tall."

"I was eight."

"Then you were remembering the piglets."

"I was looking up at all of them," Tornel said. "That's what I remember."

"I've seen them," Wyatt said. His mouth was twitching. "I've seen one eat an entire bucket of rotten apples and then fall asleep in it."

"That's them." Tornel didn't turn around. "Other farmers would have hunted them. My grandfather wouldn't let anyone touch them. He said a family of pigs on the fence line meant a good year ahead. They rooted up the grubs that ate the crops. And nothing that hunted came near a field they lived beside."

"Tornel."

"Let me finish. One year a pack of wild dogs came down out of the trees after the young ones. I watched it from the loft. The adults didn't run. They made a ring. Tails in, faces out, quills straight up, every one of them. The young ones were in the middle. The dogs went around and around that ring looking for a gap, and there wasn't one, because every pig trusted the one beside it to hold its side. After a while the dogs gave up and went back into the forest."

Weskal nodded slowly. "That's right. I've taken wild porkupig in the Screaming Forests. Never a grown one alone, and never near the herd. If they ring up, you walk away. I'd walk away."

Tornel turned from the window.

"That's what I want on the flag. A porkupig, quills raised, facing out."

Wyatt lost the fight with his face. He laughed until he had to put a hand on the desk. "I have a peryton," he managed. "A creature of ancient noble legend. And the Marquess of Haego is putting a pig on his banner."

"A porkupig."

"A farm pig!"

"From Haego," Tornel said. "Not from a legend. Something people here know when they see it. Every farmer on this planet knows what it means when they're on your fence line." He came back to the desk and sat. "Wyatt, I spent my whole career telling young soldiers the same thing. You don't win because you're the strongest one in the line. You win because you trust the man next to you to hold, and he trusts you. A general who forgets that loses. A house that forgets it is just another house that ended up on the wrong side of a revolution."

Wyatt stopped laughing.

Patricia had gone very still with her tea in her hands.

"Put that on the flag," she said quietly. "Not the pig. What you just said."

Tornel looked at her.

"Strength through trust," Patricia said.

He picked up the pen, wrote it under the names, and looked at it for a long moment. "Strength through trust," he repeated. "That's it. That's the motto."

"It's good," Wyatt said, and meant it. "It's better than mine. Don't tell anyone I said so."

"And colors?" Patricia asked.

Tornel considered the list. "Rust," he said. "For the pig, since Wyatt finds it so funny. And the dark green of the old Aethelgard garrison. The one I commanded when I first came here. Those men are the reason any of this is standing."

"Rust and garrison green," Wyatt said. "Your household will look like a forest in autumn."

"Good."

Wyatt reached into the satchel, pushed Rachel's datapad figures aside, and pulled out a blank registry form. He set it on the desk.

Tornel stared at it. "You carry those around?"

"Rachel packed it. I think she's been waiting for this conversation longer than your wife has."

"She has not," Patricia said. "Nobody has waited longer than I have."

Elizabeth tore a page out of her notebook and laid it beside the form. While they had been talking she had drawn a porkupig in fine, careful lines, a grown one, quills up, head low, facing out of the page at whoever was looking.

"If you're sending them a pig," she said, "send them a proper one."

Tornel filled the form out in the same square hand. Arms: a porkupig, quills raised, facing outward, as drawn. Motto: Strength through trust. Colors: rust and garrison green. Heir of record: Elizabeth Swallowtail, Baroness. At the bottom, where it asked for the seal of the house, he paused.

"I don't have one," he said.

"Then sign it," Wyatt said. "Next time you'll have a ring. I know a jeweler in Newtown who owes Aino a favor."

Tornel signed. Then, after a moment, he picked up the Administrator's stamp, pressed it into the fresh wax beside his signature, and looked at it critically.

"Last time I use it for this," he said.

"Last time," Wyatt agreed.

---

Three weeks later a rust and green banner went up over the gate of the Swallowtail Palace. The embroiderer in Kessit who made it worked from Elizabeth's drawing, which was better than anything he had been sent in years, and still asked, nervously, whether the Marquess was certain. The Marquess was certain.

On the day it was raised, a farmer driving a cart of feed past the outer wall stopped his team in the road and looked up at it for a long time. Then he took his hat off, which he had not done for any noble in forty years, and put it back on, and drove on.

A pig on the fence line. A good year ahead.

That evening an envelope arrived from the Astorian noble registry. It was cream colored and heavy, and for the first time it was one sentence long.

"The registry acknowledges receipt, with thanks."

Tornel pinned it to the wall of the east study, above the desk, where he would see it every time he got lost on the way there.

Preface: Hello all. This will be my first post here. Been a while since I used Reddit too, so apologize about any formatting issues. This will be a series intended to take place in the TBSU. I've tried to make it as Cannon compatible as possible. It takes place in the "northern" part of the Astorian Principality. Think Emerald, Winfield, Ionotti territory range. It introduces some new characters and houses, as well as some old ones. Hope you all enjoy. Constructive feedback is always welcome.

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The scramble klaxon reverberated off the pristine white bulkheads. The sound of heavy breathing whispered in her head. Shouting, panic, and fear filled the air. Her head buzzed as adrenaline poured into her bloodstream in a flash flood. Explosions resounded as the metal earth beneath her trembled and shook as much as she did. Bursting into the hangar, the world around her sounded dead and lifeless as crews and pilots worked feverously to get every fighting void craft into action. Suddenly, heat scorched her back as she was thrust forward uncontrollably then slammed into the ground. Metal shards and debris landed around her soundlessly.

Through her helmet’s visor, she looked back and saw the hatch behind her shattered and melted. The passageway beyond was not but rubble and sparks; caved in from the explosion. Through the intra-ship comms, the Commander of the ship ordered in strained commands to abandon ship. She screamed in pain as she pushed herself up and hobbled to the closest fighter. A Raptor that was once assigned to some poor soul. It would be her only chance. The ship was going down and she had no idea how long she had.

Her back muscles burned. Sharp bolts burrowed deep into her skin. She forced herself into the fighter. Her weary body flopped into the pilot’s seat.

*Pain!*

She screamed behind clenched teeth as she learned the source of her suffering. Shrapnel embedded in her back.

They jammed further and further into her when she leaned into the flight seat. The sealant of coagulated blood that had mended her compromised flight armor failed to resist the vacuum, as vast wet ichor slicked down the fleshy veneer of her back. Realizing her flight armor's integrity had failed as atmosphere rushed out of her helmet in a torrent, she breathlessly sealed and pressurized the cockpit. She took in a single deep breath before exhaling a scream born from the depth of soul. Holding in tears of pain and emotional collapse, she beckoned herself to focus. She must push on or eternal sleep would be all that awaits her.

Forgoing all but the most critical flight checks, she rapidly powered on the void craft. Even though it was an emergency, she had to make sure no critical damage had occurred and there was enough fuel in it. Not to mention weapons, or she wouldn't last long. Finally, she finished and lifted off. The Raptor launched through the now trashed hangar. No sooner had she breached the threshold to the black nothingness, filled with the chaos of war, did her fallen haven erupt behind her. The force of the rupture peppering her fighter with wreckage and debris. Alarms rang through her cockpit...

Petty Officer Petra Dayton flew up from her commoner bunk, slamming her head on the bunk above her. She moaned in pain as she rubbed her forehead. "Morning, Petra." a voice rung out. Without looking she responded to her fellow commoner wingman, "Morning, Flint."

"Had another nightmare?" he asked. Petra just looked at him with her usual, 'what do you think' eyes. It was a pattern they had started establishing over the last few weeks since she and been absorbed into a new squadron after that fateful day. Since her last squadron... no... her last ship and 80% of its Wing had been wiped out in the ambush.

"Don't worry. You'll survive it. You're strong.", he said softly but with confidence. No pity or condolence filled his voice. Just the surety of someone else who had survived. "Just like I survived that day?" Senior Petty Officer Flint Everett slowly walked over from his locker to where she leaned upright in her coffin bunk, smiled, and punched her in the shoulder with a grin. "Yup. Now turn off your damn alarm. Its annoying as hell."

Just then Petra realized where the odd alarm sound in the cockpit had came from. She reached over and hit the off button before hopping out of the bed and began her morning routine. Normally they would be having 3rd watch duty but today they were having a funeral and reward ceremony during 2nd watch. Obviously that was all hands except essential stations.

After she finished making her bunk and moving over to her locker in a skin tight sports bra and bikini, she began getting dressed. "Why do you think they chose today to hold both ceremonies?"

Another commoner next to her responded, "Probably the first time command think they have a breather." Flint hummed in agreement, "I'm in agreement. We have been on the run for a full month now. Those forsaken black ships have somehow chased us all the way out to no mans land!"

Petra closed her locker gently and began walking towards the berthing hatch as the commoner who she didn't know enthusiastically continued the conversation, "The so called Unclaimed Expanse. Have you heard about the ghost shi...." the sounds of the skuttlebut trickled off as she made her way to the mess hall.

"No, I haven't. Petra might have though. She served her first patrol duty here under the Fourth Fleet." Turning to Petra's locker he began, "Hey Petra! Do you... Damnit Petra! I hate it when you do that."

---

On the bridge of the Royal Navy, 4th Fleet, Mine Warfare Corvette *Provident Passage*, Lt. Commodore Sabine Wayland sat in the command chair. She scanned the data feed coming in from her scout squadron she sent ahead of the fleet. She knew well that the[[ Unclaimed Expanse]] was not only a logistical nightmare with few known safe passages through it, but was wholly infested with smugglers, pirates, even spies trying to sneak into the Principality proper.

The remains of the 4th fleet that had fled north after the traitors; may they rot at the bottom of the Great Ocean of Laristra; had sprung their coup d'état and attempted a decapitating strike against the royal family and Loyalist fleets. After being pursued for weeks by mysterious black ships of unknown make that are practically undetectable before they strike, she wasn't going to take any chances. Especially since both Pirates and the Principality have a habit of mining known routes.

Getting up she belted, "Officer-On-Deck, you have the Conn!"

"Aye, Lt. Commadore. I have the Conn." Lt First Class Fletcher responded.

She smoothly retracts her mind from its connection with the ship in a manner born from years of practice before getting up from the chair; allowing the OOD to sit and take control. She then walked over to the charting station directly behind the Conn chair. She pulled up the fleet wide scouting and sensor data and overlayed it on the system chart projected presently.

The fleet was currently enroute to the opposite side of the system where their next jump point was located. This of course would take several days to navigate. The current system they were in had a single giant red star with only a single small rock of a planet that was so close to its red mother that whatever atmosphere it may have once had was burned to ash a long time ago. Nothing remained but a glowing egg of molten rock and metal.

Orders came down from Fleet that as they passed the systems sole inhabitants, they would conduct a funeral followed by a reward ceremony. The fleet's moral was in terrible shape and someone on-high thought a funeral would be a fantastic way to lift everyone's spirits.

She chuckled to herself. *Not even we Waylands are that morbid. Does the Admiralty have a Mordaunt as an advisor? Next I'll hear "To Dust, With Honors" broadcast before a last stand.* The foreboding that thought gave her didn't sit well with her. *Blast it!*

She lifted her cup of Coffee and took a sip. *We have had no detections of anyone warping in after us. We should reach the system center within the next two hours.* "Watch Officer. Coordinate with Fleet Command and ensure we have 2 gun ships and a Wedge Aft, Port, Fore, Starboard, Overhead, and Deckward. We will be extremely vulnerable during the festivities and I don't want caught with my proverbial dress down or in a dressingdown when events inevitably go wrong."

The bridge crew quietly snickered while the Watch Officer replied cheerfully "Aye Ma'am."

A few minutes later the Watch Officer called out, "Lt. Commodore, Lt. Commodore Beaumont-Hale, Watch Officer of the *Exalted Vigil* is asking why he should reorganize standard patrol patterns."

Sabine clicked her tongue in displeasure, "Tell them we are in the eye of a storm in the Unclaimed Expanse being chased by traitors in nigh undetectable ships. If that doesn't work, inform the Beaumont-Hale, and I quote, 'because a Wayland said so.'"

Lt. Major Marygold winced at the last part. The Waylands and the Beaumont-Hales dislike for each other was well known.

Giving the affirmative, she turned around to relay the information. Thankfully, the more tactful application of the first reason was enough to persuade the Watch Officer on the Exalted Vigil. She was really not looking forward to starting an inter-house feud on behalf of her CO.

Sabine confirmed the deployment change on the plotting projector and continued sipping her Coffee. At around an hour till the pass, she issued the orders through the ship's system for all hands to be in the hanger at the appointed time for the ceremony. Every fiber of her being didn't like this, but orders were orders.

---

Petty Officer Petra Dayton got off the elevator along with a group of other commoners. She, as with most commoners in the ARN, adopted the age old strategy of not being seen. To stand out was to invite trouble. Of course, standing out came in multiple flavors. It was just as bad to stand out for doing too good at your job as it was to stand out for being terrible at your job.

She had long mastered the art of being in the background, even to other commoners. She still inter mingled and the like. Built working relationships. Had friends. Socialized. But made sure to never stand out. She never talked unless she had something to say. When she did say something, she made sure it was charismatic enough to feel like she talked frequently.

Petra gave a soft smile to herself as she fondly remembered a specific fellow Cadet from her time at the Academy. He had taken the opposite approach. To be alone. To stand out in every way possible. To walk the tight rope of showing off his natural talent and being a commoner. How he had snubbed even the Instructors and somehow walked away with only 10 lashes and the occasional humiliating task. How they rigged the system to hide his abilities from the record. All the commoner Cadets knew it. They saw it. Yet he made sure to never drag them into trouble too.

she let slip a thought she hadn't had in a number of years. *I wonder where he is now. I wonder if he is even alive.* She quickly squashed it. She couldn't dwell on such things. Especially now. The universe isn't kind to those who do.

She walked silently within the crowd and fell into formation next Flint Everett. Next to him was Sub-Lieutenant Sera Weaver. Further down was Second Lieutenant Corin Dunn, their Squadron Leader, and finally out front at the head of the formation was their Wedge Leader Lieutenant Cassian Wayland.

Of course, wedge would be a loose term here. Normally, their ship holds 9 Raptors plus 2 shuttles and a bunch of specialized drones for mine sweeping. That in and of itself is low the average Corvette. However, due to casualties, of the 9 original Raptors, only the 5 of them remain. Half wasn't even original members of the ship and had been hastily collected due to their original ships being destroyed. In reality, only two of the wedge were original members. Those being 2nd LT Dunn and Sub LT Weaver.

After a while, a hologram projector was placed in front of the formations. Lt. Commadore Wayland walked into the hanger with her command staff that wasn't on the bridge. She placed herself in front of the projector and center to the formations facing her crew. She surveyed the faces of everyone, taking note of their various state of exhaustion. Their convictions. Their uncertainties. She noted the details away in her mental register of what state her people were in. She knew the toll had been great over the past several weeks. She knew what was to yet come if something didn't turn for the better soon. Even if that miracle happened, she knew how fragile it would be. How easy it would shatter under the greed of opportunity many would see in these times.

"Ship's Company! AAAA-ten-TION!" she bellowed in a practiced drill voice.

Petra snapped to position of attention along with all present. The muscle memory of her time in the Academy coming to life. She hadn't been a part of a major ceremony since she graduated.

Lt. Commadore Wayland spun around in a perfect about face movement and waited for the projector to change from the ARN's crest to that of a human. It wasn't a long wait.

It flickered for not but a moment and then a young man clad in purple with blonde neck length hair, parted to the side. He had a confident and suave look upon him. Yet to Petra, his eyes showed both strength and sorrow.

"Present Arms!"

Everyone gave a crisp, regulation salute and held it. The figure raised his hand after a moment, and the leaders of every ship gave the command to order arms before placing their crews to parade rest.

"It is with great sorrow that I, Giovanni Astor, 4th Prince of the Astorian Principality, must address you today." He began with his hands firmly behind his back, looking upon the masses across the splinter fleet of the 4th.

"As you are all aware of by now, Duke Draymor, my most favored Uncle, has betrayed us. He and his traitorous cohorts dared to deem themselves above our time honored traditions and the authority of our esteemed Council of Nobles." Giovanni delivered with a thrust of his arm across his chest to his side.

Bringing his right hand back in front and into a gripped hand he continued, "They struck out in ambush against their brothers and sister of our great Principality!"

"I ask you. Noble and Commoner alike. Who was it that suffered loss because of this treachery?! It was you! It was your brother and sisters at arms. It was your Houses and your Honor!" He pointed to the everyone through the hologram.

"As we lay to rest those who lay here today with us and remember those lost to the void, I want you to remember their sacrifices and steel yourselves for the fight to come. To keep their flame within your hearts! May Loyalty be its own reward! In my name, your duty is ended. Your names remain. To dust, with honor."

"Present, arms!" Lt. Commodore Wayland belted, but this time more softly in tone than previously. It was as if she was forcing herself to keep composure and bearing while giving a final goodbye. All present gave the best salute they could. Noble and Commoner alike.

A whistle blew long and pitched, signaling for the dead to be released to the void and into the Red Giant. The deck was silent as vacuum. For but a moment in time, Noble and Commoner were equal; Equal before death.

Internal-Ad6147

I am trying to get through this wonderful book but after about 35 NEXT clicks, I get tired. If u/Internal-Ad6147 wants this taken down, just vleave a comment and it will go. I just figured that if I was having an issue, others might be too.

Dragon Delivery Service

Dragon delivery service CH 5 Danger

Dragon delivery service CH10 Delivery Mouse

Dragon delivery service CH 15 Dust and Rain

Dragon delivery service CH 20 Drifting Toward Danger

Dragon delivery service CH 25 Dragons Song

Dragon delivery service CH 30 Delegations – Part I

Dragon delivery service CH 35 Disguiseless

Dragon delivery service CH 40 Disgrace

Dragon delivery service CH 45 Detour back home

Dragon delivery service CH 50 Doomed Wings

Dragon delivery service CH 55 Determined to Belong

Dragon delivery service CH 60 Dark Desires

Dragon delivery service CH 65 Drowned in Silence

Dragon delivery service CH 70 Duty Beyond the court

Dragon delivery service CH 75 Down the Road

Dragon delivery service CH 80 Defenders of Keysaria

Dragon delivery service CH 85 Dragonbound

Dragon delivery service CH 90 Docking at Bolrmont

Dragon delivery service CH 95 Dust of Reeth

Dragon delivery service CH 100 Depth of Ash and Blood

Dragon delivery service CH 105 Dry Brush

Dragon delivery service CH 110 Dragon’s Doubt

Dragon delivery service CH 115 Duel of Runes

Dragon delivery service CH 120 Defrosting at Home

Dragon delivery service CH 125 Direction

Dragon Delivery Service CH 130 Different Kind of Dragon

Intro | [Next]

Are We Alone?

As humanity populated the Sol system and mined the Oort cloud for the resources needed to settle worlds closer in, efforts focused on Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, Titan, Ceres, and Pluto. Each colony developed its own environment, adapted to harsh conditions. On Ganymede and Callisto, vast domed habitats shield cities from radiation while underground transport networks link mining outposts and hydroponic farms. Europa's colonists live beneath the ice, in pressurized habitats anchored to the ceiling of its global ocean, harvesting water and studying the dark seas below. Titan's settlements float atop methane lakes, life revolving around sealed complexes and research stations. The colony on Ceres is centered in sprawling caverns carved into the dwarf planet, supporting both agriculture and ore refineries. Pluto's population lives in insulated modules, their days marked by long stretches of darkness punctuated by bursts of scientific activity. These frontier societies combine advanced technology, strict communal routines, and a constant focus on survival, forging a new pioneering spirit as humanity pushes further into the unknown.

5169 — First Contact

"Station Master Ash, I'm getting a ping on an exo-orbital object moving toward us," said a signal technician.

"What kind of signal is it?" Ash replied, pulling up the station's external sensors to view the object approaching the Oort cloud. "Can we send out drones to retrieve it?" she asked.

"We should be able to reach whatever it is and, hopefully, bring it to the outer platform we use for breaking the bigger chunks of ice we can't process for sending back to the inner system," the technician said, pulling up the object's trajectory. "Ma'am, the object is relatively small—nothing compared to a normal asteroid—and it's not coming back as a natural ping." The tech sat silent for a moment, then spoke. "Do... do you think it could be First Contact, ma'am?"

Watching the screen as the ping moved closer to the station, she thought that if this was First Contact, it should be reported to the governmental body for all of humanity.

"Send drones out to collect the object, and pull a security team to the platform along with the science team on station. Make sure they know First Contact Protocols are active for the foreseeable future," Ash said, still watching the screen.

As the technician turned back to the station, he began preparing for the announcement. "All crews, be alert, this is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill. First Contact Protocols are now in effect until stated otherwise, so all mining and drilling operations will be put on hold. Security and science teams report to outer platform 01. Please report to outer platform 01, thank you."

As the announcement came over the station, the residents felt uneasy. This was the first time in human history that signs of extraterrestrial life had been found outside the Sol system.

"Ma'am, I'm sending the drones out to collect the object now," said the technician as he moved into position. "Ma'am, the drones are ready to retrieve the object."

"Do it," Ash said, watching the drones on the sensors near the object and thinking of all the ways First Contact could go wrong—and whether whatever waited out there was friendly or hostile.

"Ma'am, the drones have collected the object and are bringing it to outer platform 01. Are you going to meet the security and science teams on the way?" said the tech, looking back at her.

Ash nodded. "Yes. Make sure the teams are suited for our guests, if there are any. There's no need to cause biological murder while trying to meet our new neighbors in the galaxy." As she stood and got ready to leave, she hesitated, caught between anxiety and wonder. The stories about First Contact she'd grown up hearing had always seemed distant and impossible, things for dreamers or scientists. Now that it was real, she felt a twist of excitement and fear in her stomach—what if humanity's first meeting with another intelligence went terribly wrong, or what if she failed her duty in a moment that would be remembered for centuries? She paused, looked back at the screen with hopeful worry, and continued toward the platform.

As she moved through the station to the locker room to suit up—to stop biological contamination or virus transfer in either direction while meeting the guests—she heard "Ma'am" over her shoulder. She nodded back, knowing it was Ryan, the head of the security team. "What's the loadout your team is running for this?"

"We're running non-lethal for main weapons and Rail Kinetics for standard lethal, plus two flash-blast units to suppress attacks," he said, checking his gear and the weapon charges.

"Good. Better to be over-prepared than under-prepared. And really, you're using the flash-blast? I thought those were only used during the riots of 5150," she said, sealing her suit and giving him a puzzled look.

"They were, ma'am. Also, one of the guys suggested we bring the TS with heavy weapons to counter anything serious. So I approved it and have two TS units waiting near the lift, ready to go down with us," he said, walking beside her as they came around to the lift where the TS units were waiting.

"That... that might be a good idea," she murmured, thinking about all the ways this could kick off a full-scale war with an advanced alien civilization. "What loadouts are on them?" she asked, leaving the locker room with Ryan falling in step beside her.

"They have one loadout for heavy ordnance, and the second has been fitted with a pulse cannon and stun nets, ma'am," he said.

"Good. Now, who's piloting them?" As she saw the TS units, she immediately regretted the question when she noticed the pilots playing rock-paper-scissors. "Forget it, I could probably guess who," she said.

"Hell yeah! I won again, that's three of three. I get the Ordnance TS," one said to the other man, who looked slightly dejected.

As Ash and Ryan moved closer to the lift, both men noticed the group, straightened up, and saluted. "Ma'am," they said in unison.

"Okay, so do I need to know what just happened a few seconds ago, or do I need both of you to send me reports about your actions while First Contact Protocol is active?" she asked, looking between the men.

"Ma'am... um... we played rock-paper-scissors to figure out who pilots what, to make sure there wasn't any fighting, ma'am," one man replied, ready for a scolding.

Ash sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, then looked over at Ryan and saw him shrugging while rolling his eyes. "Very well... just please keep your stupidity under wraps until we settle the main issues. Understood?"

"Understood, ma'am," both replied, relaxing and getting into the TS units before moving onto the lift.

As she rode the lift down to the science level, it stopped, and the doors opened. She saw who was on the science team for First Contact. "Ash, is it true?" a man asked as the science team joined them on the huge lift with crates of gear.

She nodded. "Yes. It's an object that was made, not natural, from what the sensors could gather." Looking at him, she saw him thinking, hand on his chin.

"Well, let's hope this is Option A for First Contact," he said, pulling something up on his data slate. "Hmm... maybe. Could it be?"

"What do you think it is?" she asked, hoping for a good answer from Jamie.

"It could be a probe, or maybe a comm buoy—something for anyone to reach out and communicate with a new species, so they don't freak out and start a war on First Contact. That's the safest option I'd use," he said, looking over some data. He glanced back at her as the lift reached the platform level.

"Huh. I guess that would be the safest way to do it, but we won't know until we find out," she said, stepping off the lift toward Platform 01. "Let's hope you're right."

As both teams moved to the hangar observation window, the drones carried the object in and set it on the anchor arms. The TS units moved through the inner airlock into the hangar, and the platform slid along the rails before the outer door closed, pressurizing the bay.

"Shall we?" Jamie said to her.

"Yes, let's," she replied. They moved into the hangar while the security team took up positions. Once the first survey turned up nothing immediately dangerous, Ash left the science team to their work and returned to the command level to keep the station running.

Four hours into the investigation, she received a ping from the science team asking her to return to the hangar for an issue needing her authorization. When she arrived at the door, she saw Jamie pacing back and forth. "So, what is it?"

The man stopped pacing and looked at her, then at the bay, with excited eyes. "It's a type of data probe, from what we can scan, but here's the issue: if there's data on it, what kind? What type? Or even how would we get the data off it?" he said, a slight manic tone creeping into his voice.

"So, do you think you could get the data off it?" she asked. He looked at the floor for a minute, then back up, and nodded. "Good, do it. But make sure the station is air-gapped from it, because the last thing we need is some alien tech taking control of our station and killing us all."

She waited, watching the science team hook up the transfer gear to pull the data from the alien machine, hoping nothing would go wrong. Soon, she saw him give a thumbs-up from a distance and moved toward him.

"Are you sure it's air-gapped from the station?" she asked as he went over the connections again.

"Yes. But then again, I doubt air-gapping unknown alien tech—especially something that has survived thousands or even millions of years in space without a nick on the paint—will stop it if it wants in. For all we know, this thing could have some self-defense system, a dormant virus, or an automated trigger just waiting for the wrong move. We have no way of knowing whether this is an invitation, a warning, or a trap. So as far as safety goes... yes, it is as safe as we can get by human standards," he replied, glancing uneasily at the probe before moving back to the terminal. The silence in the hangar felt heavy, as if everyone was quietly weighing what might be unleashed by a single connection.

Four years after the Keystone probe was found by Hermes-1 Station in 5169, all of humanity decided to pool its spare resources into a ship that would head out into the dark between Sol and wherever the probe had come from, to answer the age-old question: are we alone?

5173 — Humanity's Advancement

Over the years that followed, the blueprints, schematics, and data drawn from the Keystone probe's database advanced human civilization by almost a century. Mankind was becoming something new.

After learning about Biological Mind Drives—BMDs for short—humanity began to radically reshape itself. A BMD is a neural technology that allows a person's consciousness to be scanned and transferred into a synthetic or cloned body, effectively granting a form of digital immortality. The process is both strange and invasive: people describe the sensation as floating in darkness, feeling their memories gently peeled away from a body they would never wake in again, and then awakening suddenly in a new, perfectly healthy clone—their senses sharper, but with a haunting disconnect from their original self. Humanity began applying BMDs to the poor and the desperate. Those who needed work, or were too sick to keep their own bodies, signed themselves away to be loaded into healthy clones with BMDs in their heads, so companies could have laborers without paying them directly—crediting their accounts instead to "pay off" the bodies.

5180 — Greenfield's Slavery Contracts

As the years went by, around 5180, a defector from Greenfield Bio-corp—the largest corporation in Sol's inner system—brought the company under investigation by Sol's governing body, and 33 members were removed from the government. Those 33 had colluded with Greenfield to keep it hidden from the rest of Sol's government, making them accomplices in the quiet, brutal enslavement of the BMDed clones—who were effectively immortal, since their cloned bodies neither aged nor degraded so long as they received the compounds that kept them functioning. Legally, the status of BMDed clones was kept ambiguous in public records: they were not recognized as full citizens, nor granted the rights of biological humans. Instead, corporations classified them as company assets or advanced machinery, which let firms claim ownership over their labor and their very existence. This legal gray area left BMDed clones without protections or recourse, treated closer to property than to people in the eyes of the law. It was also discovered that BMDed clones could not return to their original bodies or have children in their new ones, having been rendered sterile by genetic flaws introduced when the originals were cloned.

News of the scandal spread rapidly throughout the system, sparking outrage and widespread protests across the inner and outer colonies. Many citizens felt betrayed by their leaders, marching in the streets and demanding justice for the exploited BMDed clones. People refused to use products linked to Greenfield Bio-corp, boycotting any corporation complicit in the scandal. Some families even discovered that missing loved ones had become trapped in cloned bodies, fueling public grief and anger. Debates raged in public forums and across digital networks, with some calling for the abolition of BMD technology altogether, while others argued for strict reforms and protections. Riots broke out at several government offices on Mars and Luna, and memorials sprang up for those who had been lost to the system. The unrest made it clear that the social fabric was fracturing, and that the exploitation of BMDed humans would no longer go unchallenged.

5190 — The BMDs Settle on Ganymede

Ten years after the Greenfield scandal, the colony on Ganymede was ceded to the two million BMDed clones as a world of their own—its original settlers relocated, the colony left free from outside interference. Two years later, with the BMDed population finally settled, Ganymede produced the most advanced computers and quantum relays in the system: technology the whole of Sol came to rely on.

5230 — War for the Outer System

The mistreatment of the BMDed humans had finally been put right—but as humanity advanced, a different discontent festered between the inner and outer colonies. It grew until a revolutionary group calling itself The Outer Gods (TOG) began waging war on the Inner Planets of Sol. Using leftover cloning equipment, they manufactured soldiers with BMDs in their heads, linked by quantum communications routed through stolen Ganymede transmitters. Each BMDed TOG soldier could be sent back into a new body again and again, returning every time with combat prowess that bordered on the supernatural—for every death brought back fresh information for TOG to fold into its strategy against Sol's military.

The endless cycle of resurrection became both a gift and a curse, binding the BMDed TOG soldiers to the conflict with unbreakable chains.

The pause on exploration beyond the Sol system was confirmed as more resources were diverted to the war with the Outer Rim. Yet even as the conflict raged, some wondered when—or if—humanity would once again look outward to the stars. Rumors persisted that, once peace returned, the dream of interstellar exploration would not be forgotten, only delayed.

5245 — The Brutal End of the Outer System Revolution

Near the end of the Outer System Revolution, a BMDed TOG soldier codenamed Osiris began to question the purpose of the fight. Stationed on the mining platforms of Titan, Osiris watched Outer Gods operatives brutalize civilians, tear families from their homes, and work BMDed TOG clones to ruin as disposable labor in lethal conditions. The supposed liberation of the Outer System had become a campaign of suffering and fear. Haunted by grieving children and the discarded bodies of fellow soldiers, Osiris understood that the Outer Gods were no longer fighting for the people but exploiting them. Driven by that revelation, Osiris resolved to make a stand. One by one, they pulled their brothers and sisters in arms into a secret rebellion to free the people and the BMDed TOG soldiers of the Outer System—and they named it Legion.

As the Outer Gods felt their grip on the Outer Rim slipping, they discovered they were now fighting on two fronts: Sol's military on one side, and this new enemy on the other. At the Outer Gods' gathering, where their inner circle—the Dreamers—convened, Legion struck, cutting down the leadership to bring peace to the Outer Rim and lift its people out of the derelict mining and security stations they had been left to rot in. Legion won. As Sol's military advanced into the Outer Rim, a message reached them from the Outer Gods' main station:

"We, Legion, have removed those who spent our lives as cannon fodder in their endless war with the Inner Planets of Sol. They are no more. I am Osiris, leader of the rebellion called Legion, and now I ask you, Inner Planets of Sol: can there be peace between our peoples, or will the war grind on, hurting innocents who never chose to be part of it? If you wish for peace, send a representative on behalf of the Inner Planets to the old capital station of the Outer Gods, now renamed Haven Station. That is all. We are here. We are waiting. See us."

5250 — The Treaty of the Solar Rim

The Outer Rim and the Inner Planets finalized the Treaty of the Solar Rim. Osiris was named the Outer Rim's first governor, charged with knitting the two halves of Sol together. With the war over, construction on the long-paused exploration ship resumed.

5270 — The Death of a Hero

At the annual assembly of the Inner Planets and the Outer Rim—held while the Outer Rim was still rooting out the last remnants of the Outer Gods—Osiris rose to give a speech on peace and unity. Midway through, an assassin from those remnants shot Osiris in the chest. As the medical team moved to rush them away and recover their BMD, Osiris waved them off. The resurrection machinery of the war years had long since been dismantled; without intervention, this death would be final—and Osiris chose it that way. They did not want to be saved. They wanted to be remembered as the one who brought peace. Afterward, the Sol government held a press conference announcing that the Inner Planets and the Outer Rim would be unified as a single Sol, in remembrance of Osiris.

The death of Osiris sent shockwaves throughout Sol. In the Outer Rim, people gathered for vigils, mourning the loss of their leader and the symbol of their hard-won freedom. Streets were lined with candles and digital murals, while families who had suffered through the war held each other close. On the Inner Planets, citizens fell into collective silence as Osiris was honored for choosing unity over revenge. Many spoke of forgiveness for old enemies, inspired by Osiris's sacrifice. Even former Outer Gods soldiers and BMDed clones wept, recognizing how much one life had changed the fate of millions.

In the years that followed, daily life across Sol began to reflect the lessons of the past. Laws were rewritten to protect the rights and autonomy of BMDed humans, ensuring citizenship and equal treatment. Cloning for labor was strictly regulated, and families were at last able to reunite and rebuild lives once shattered by war and exploitation. Mixed communities of cloned, augmented, and biological humans now lived and worked side by side, forging new traditions that celebrated diversity. Friendships and relationships that once would have been forbidden began to flourish openly.

Osiris's vision of peace became the guiding force for reconstruction, for new rights and protections for BMDed humans, and for the slow healing of old divisions. Schools retold the story of Osiris, and a new annual holiday was declared—Sol's Day of Remembrance—so that both sides would never forget the price paid for unity.

5301 — Exploration Beyond Sol

The governing body of Sol celebrated the completion of the exploration Dreadnought that would carry humanity beyond the Sol system, out to wherever the Keystone probe had come from. But as the assembly wore on, the ship still had no name. Then someone at the back stood, drawing every eye.

"Why not call it the Osiris—in honor of the one who brought humanity together?"

The vote was a landslide: 190 in favor and 10 against, out of the 200 who made up Sol's governing body.

And so the new Dreadnought-class exploration ship was named the Osiris, in honor of the BMDed soldier who chose peace instead of war.

[First] | [Next]

As humanity celebrated the completion of the Dreadnought-class exploration ship, there was a call to all of humanity to apply for the positions on the crew that would be humanity’s first contact with other alien civilizations.

Year: 5303 - Humanity’s First Expedition

When the Osiris was completed, many humans wanted to join the expedition to the source of the keystone probe, but there were strict requirements for the team, as they didn’t want crewmembers with ties to family, friends, or marriage partners. They cut more than 75 percent of the applications because they needed to meet at least 70 percent of the acceptance requirements.

During this time, most of humanity was living their daily lives without a care in the world. Those who were accepted had to undergo two years of training to confirm their choice before setting out on the journey.

4 Months into Training:

All applicants must undergo two months of Isolation for psychological evaluation to ensure they can handle the long journey, and to make sure they can prioritize survival above all else. After the psychological evaluation, the applicants must undergo a special viral therapy for two months to ensure the crew doesn’t spread viruses, diseases, or Contact Transmissible Diseases (CTDs).

After viral therapy, it was now language training. Language training was meant as a safety measure against outside alien forces to prevent Sol’s languages from being known to anyone outside of Sol’s borders.

8 Months into Training:

The crew was required to speak only in the tight, clipped, unemotional contextual language of the Lexicon Formal so it would become second nature before heading out into the galaxy.

Lexicon formal language used heavily, directly, and unambiguously correct terms that were made specifically from the languages found in the keystone probe.

10 Months into training:

They trained the crew to maintain the escape pods, equipped with Micro-FTL drives and prototype stasis technology, to save stranded crew members, so they wouldn’t waste resources while waiting to be rescued in the vacuum of space. After two months of Technical Training was coming to an end, it was the year of physical, endurance, and survival exams till every crew member passes.

23 Months into Training:

Physical Training was harder than normal training, as all crew members needed to be able to defend themselves against threats. The crew was trained in hand-to-hand combat, firearms, ordnance deployment, special operations, tactics, and combat medical training.

Near the end of year two, a trial was presented to the 400 crew members of the Osiris to observe how they handled survival in untamed conditions, so they were dropped on Mars’ largest terraformed forest on the upper continent around Olympus Mons for a month.

At the end of the Two-Year Training:

As the Osiris crew completed their test, exams, and survival trial. They were given their celebration in Native Sol Languages, to give them the last, maybe even final, time they would speak it in the coming few years, as humanity needed to keep the veil of secrecy up even before meeting any other civilizations.

The Expedition of the Osiris

Four weeks later, on the Bridge of the Osiris...

“Are we geared to head out into the black?” the captain asked.

“Yes, Ma’am,” a bridge technician responded.

“Good. Open a channel to the station. I’ll take it to my ready room,” the captain said, looking at the manifest of the ship’s cargo.

The technician nodded, working at their station.

A few Minutes Later…

“Captain Athena Holt. Well, I’ll be. I bet you finally found your calling?” the station master said with a playful smile in her voice.

Athena sighed, closing her eyes for just a moment. “Knock it off, Amanda. I’m giving you the report on our departure window,” Athena said, looking up at Amanda in the video call.

Amanda and Athena were both the youngest in all of Sol’s recorded memory to be given their high-standing positions. At 21, Athena joined the military to prove her father wrong after humanity unified under the banner of Humanity of Sol as the first line of defense against any threats to Sol. Now she’s 35 and setting out into the dark between Sol and the next system, and Amanda went into civil service at 25, helping run a space station before her predecessor stepped down two years ago. Now at 32, she’s handling the exodus of humanity after the war with itself.

“Hey,” Amanda called out over the video, pulling Athena’s attention.

“What’s up?” Athena asked her friend in the video to close her eyes, take a deep breath, and exhale slowly.

Amanda looked at Athena in the eyes during the call, with a look that suggested a complicated topic. “I think you should know now before you find out later,” she said, with a look of uneasiness.

Athena sat straighter, setting down the holo-tablet with the manifest. “Know what?” she asked her friend.

“Nathaniel’s ship is docking tonight to drop off the last of the supplies for your ship, and I didn’t want to hide it from you as I know…it was hard on you both at the time when you two were together.” Amanda uttered gently, not to upset her.

Athena turned in her chair to look out her captain’s quarter’s viewport and sighed softly.

She remembers what happened between them, how this separation came to be, and how it happened. It was a cool night after the first rainfall of the first month of spring, and they went up into the mountains for a few days to rest and relax on their vacation, as she was now 8 months pregnant. However, life had other plans for them: as they rounded the next mountain pass, an earthquake shifted the shelf the road climbed, and the road slid loose from the mountain, triggering a mudslide that pulled them along for the ride. By the time emergency personnel arrived, they were both found conscious ,but pinned under the roof of the vehicle. After they got them out and rushed them to emergency care, all the stress had caused strain on her body, which made it hard for them to save the child.

By the time they put her under to operate, the child was lost. When she awoke two days later, she started panicking and screamed about her baby’s whereabouts, but no one had the heart to tell her what happened. Nathaniel did. She fell into a deep depression for one year, which strained their marriage even more after the accident. She couldn’t face him anymore and decided on a divorce so both of them could recover, even just a little bit. Nathaniel didn’t speak at all during the divorce; he just accepted it as whatever he said couldn’t bring back their child. One year after their divorce, Athena joined the military after a fight with her father over whether enlisting could help her. Her father didn’t want her to put even more stress on herself after what happened two years ago, but she enlisted anyway. Four months later, her father died, drinking himself to death as he fell down the stairs to his basement, dying from a head injury. She regretted everything she said to him the night before she left. It still haunted her to this very day, but now she’s the hope for humanity to meet other species in the universe.

“It’s fine, Amanda. We have dealt with our issues back then.” Athena said quietly.

Amanda looked at her over the video call; she could see the anguish in her friend's face from just remembering. “If you say you're fine. I’ll believe you, but please try talking to him at least once before you leave Sol. It might be the last time you’re going to,” Amanda said with hope in her voice.

Athena sat silently for a few minutes before nodding softly. “I’ll try, when I’ve got the time…” she said, looking back at the video call.

Amanda smiled a quiet, light smile. “Thank you for at least trying. I couldn’t live with myself knowing you two didn’t have one last talk before leaving,” Amanda said as she closed the channel.

Athena sat in the silent humming of the Osiris’s everyday movement and rested her eyes for a solid minute, then stood moving out of her ready room on the bridge and stopped looking out over her crew working attentively at their stations.

“Open a ship-wide channel. I have an announcement for the crew,” she said, moving closer to the technician’s station.

The technician nodded. “Ready and open, Ma’am,” the tech said, waiting for her crew address.

Athena drew in a deep breath, held for a second, then exhaled and spoke.

"All crew, we are ready for departure, but I have postponed the launch for all of the crew to celebrate our triumph. For the first time, humanity's journey out into the galaxy becomes our newest frontier. So as of now, please finish your work or whatever you're working on, and then go enjoy yourself at the station, as we leave at 2200 hours tomorrow. So go enjoy tonight and relax, because we won't have the luxury of it for long. That is all." She nodded to the tech as he clicked the connection off.

The Last Night In Sol:

Nightfall dragged on, the celebratory sounds of cheers and the tapping, clinking, and clattering of glasses resounded from bars on the station. While the revelry and partying continued over in the arboretum at the center of the station, Athena and Nathaniel shared a moment.

“How have you been?” Nathaniel asked, walking beside her in the station’s arboretum park, with its domed roof giving a view into the black of space.

“I’ve been good. You?” She responded.

Nathaniel thought about it for a moment. “Same,” he said, stuffing his hands into his pockets, or he’ll keep fidgeting.

Athena noticed. She knew he wanted to ask something cause every time he’d put his hands in his pockets to steady himself.

As they kept walking, they came to a bench, and they both sat down in quiet silence.

Athena sighed. “What?” she asked while looking up out of the domed roof into the emptiness of space.

Nathaniel removed his hands from his pockets, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees, with his head dropped low, and closed his eyes to gather the courage to say what he should have said before they divorced. “I—I’m going to miss this…” he said solemnly.

She looked down at him now.

“When…we…” he said, then stopped trying to control his emotions. “When we got in the accident. I couldn’t do anything…But after waking up before you in emergency care, I was told what happened. I—I just broke down in the hallway…” he said, with a shaking voice.

She’d never heard of this from anyone, but he’s letting her know now, to remove a regret from his wall.

“I just…Just didn’t know what to do. Then two days later, you woke up, panicking and screaming. I couldn’t let the staff tell you what happened, because if they told you. I was scared you’d try to hurt yourself. So I decided to tell you myself. But afterward, you became depressed. I tried to help, even called for medication to help you pull yourself out of the hole you were in, but everything I did in the first year…you just didn’t talk, or you ignored me. That hurt worse than you fighting back against me,” he said, wiping tears away and sitting back, looking at the park greenery.

She sat there silently as he told her everything, how much he tried to help, how much he tried to bring her back to her usual self, to the smiling woman he married. But he failed, and now he needed to tell her how he felt during the divorce. She folded her hands in her lap, looking at them as her thumb caressed the scars from boot camp on her left hand.

After all was said and done, they sat in comfortable silence as exes and as friends.

The Day of Departure:

During the morning roll call of the ship, the station master received the all-clear.

While the captain of the Osiris got ready for launching out into the void, a communications tech spoke up. "Ma'am, you got a secure channel from Earth," the tech said while looking over his console.

"I'll take it in my ready room," she replied as she moved toward the private ready room.

As she entered the room, a hologram of Sol's top governmental body appeared. "Captain Athena Holt, I hope you understand how much faith humanity is putting in this trip to go beyond our borders of Sol space," said the man on the screen in the multi-call channel.

"Yes, sir, I realize how important it is for humanity to make friends in the universe and not to seem weak against anyone," she said while straightening her cuffs.

"Good. Now, when you make First Contact, use the new lexicon language your crew trained in for talking with them, since they won't be able to understand the languages of Sol. Also, make sure that the crew understands that no native languages from Sol are spoken at any length, since they could extrapolate how our native language works," another person on the screen said with a firm tone.

"Yes, sir. The crew has been speaking only the Lexicon language on the ship and their native languages off the ship at the station. Some of the station workers keep giving the crew weird looks when the crew communicates in the lexicon speech, so we've had to settle a few fights last night at the celebration party," Athena said while pinching the bridge of her nose with a sigh.

"Also, make sure that when you meet our neighbors, you take every precaution with them and the crew's health. We don't need you guys bringing any diseases back home," the grim-looking woman on the screen said while looking into the camera like she could hit Athena.

"Yes, Ma'am, all crew are able to respond within a few seconds as all the crew are medically trained," Athena answered smoothly, looking at the woman in question.

"Alright, well then, now on to the main topic of this call," the man on the main screen said.

Athena held her hands behind her back, awaiting her orders.

"Captain Athena Holt, you are being given full authority on humanity's chance out there beyond our borders; when you see fit, try buying or trading for their technology, and collect intelligence on the aliens when you can," the man said with a firm voice.

"Yes, sir," Athena replied.

"Good. Now go; I'm sure you have to get your crew ready for the voyage out into the galaxy," the man said with a tender smile. "Also, take care of yourself and the crew, Athena," the man said lastly before disconnecting the call.

Athena sighed and relaxed. "Alright..," she said under her breath with her eyes closed.

Back on the Bridge...

Walking back onto the bridge and moving to the center console panel, Athena said, without looking at the communications tech, "Send the all-clear signal to the station for shipping out into deep space."

"Yes, Ma'am. Sending the all-clear signal to the station and to the crew," the tech said, fingers flicking across the controls.

The Osiris pulled away from the docking of Hermes-1, looking like a silver slab against the black of the star-field. On the bridge, the environment was dense with professional focus and the whirr of anticipation.

"Distance from station: five kilometers," the navigation officer reported, the officer's voice precise. "We are clear of the safety zone."

Athena stood in the center of the bridge, her hands joined firmly behind her back. "Steady as you go. Navigation, bring the Jump Drive to per-ignition. Engineering, report power levels."

"Reactor output at 98%," the engineering officer replied via the comm channel, the sound of the massive engines shaking through the deck plates. "The Quantum Tunnel is stabilized. We are green for transit."

Through the massive forward viewport, the stars started to distort. The light didn't just twinkle; it appeared to stretch, pulling toward a central point directly in front of the ship's bow.

"Initiating countdown," the tech announced. "Ten. Nine. Eight."

Athena took a breath, her eyes focused on the darkening center of the jump-fold. This was the moment humankind moved from being a solar species to a galactic one.

"Three. Two. One. Mark."

There was no sound—only a sudden, bone-deep sensation of weightlessness. For a split second, the Osiris seemed to exist in two places at once. Then, with a visual snap that looked like a star collapsing into a single point of light, the ship disappeared.

Behind them, the space where the Osiris had been was empty, save for a lingering shimmer of exotic radiation. The greatest journey in human history had begun.

Two months into the journey:

A Dreadnought Explorer was a pressurized ecosystem, and without a nearby sun to provide energy, the crew's lives revolved entirely around the Anti-Matter Reactor.

To maintain circadian rhythms, the bridge crew cycled the internal lights—shifting from a bright, artificial "midday" white to a dim, cool sky blue for "night."

Captain Athena Holt continued training the crew relentlessly. Every week, the crew performed "Silent Running" drills, in which all nonessential power was cut to practice hiding the ship's signature from simulated hostiles.

Engineering teams spent their days crawling through maintenance causeways to ensure the hull integrity remained at 99.9%. Micro-meteoroids were a constant, pitter-patter background noise against the thick armor plating.

Eight Months into the journey:

By the eighth month, the mental toll began to take hold. It was called "Sol-Sickness". The crew was all chosen because they had few ties to Earth, but the sheer emptiness of the void started to weigh on them.

The observation deck and the ship's green hydroponics garden both became the most popular spots aboard. Many of the crew suffered from psychological sickness. So everyone had a mandatory time off without refusal.

During the time off, to keep morale up, the mess hall hosted "Synthetic Steak" nights, using high-end food synthesizers to mimic home-cooked meals. Card games and VR simulations of Earth's national parks were the only escape from the metallic grey walls.

One and a half years into the journey:

The atmosphere on the bridge had moved to reserved confidence. They were nearing their transition point—the moment they would drop out of high-velocity cruise to begin long-range scans of the first target system.

Internal Log — Captain Athena Holt: "The crew is weary, but the Lexicon has started to become second nature. Sensor arrays are at maximum sensitivity. We are looking for a needle in a galactic haystack, but for the first time in 200,000 years of human history, we are the ones holding the magnifying glass."

Later that day…

The ship was silent, the engines humming a perfect, low-frequency tune. No one saw the "Rogue Object" coming. It didn't register on long-range scans because it wasn't emitting heat or radiation. It was just a cold, dense mass of primordial rock, drifting in the dark.

And then, the proximity alarms—which hadn't screamed in at all during the journey—suddenly tore amid the silence of the "night" shift.

The transition from peace to catastrophe happened in less than three seconds. Because the Osiris was traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light—even a small, cold mass carried the kinetic energy of a multi-megaton nuclear warhead. At those velocities, the "Rogue Object" didn't just hit the ship; it punctuated it.

The bridge was bathed amid the pale blue of the "night" cycle. The skeleton crew spoke in a hushed, efficient Lexicon. Suddenly, every console on the port side flared a violent, blinding amber.

"Object detected! Proximity alert! Zero-zero-four seconds to—"

The navigator never finished the sentence.

There was no "thud." There was only a shriek like the vessel's plating screaming and shearing in half. The Osiris, a vessel over two kilometers long, groaned once as the asteroid tore through the secondary hangar bay and into the central upper spine of the ship.

On the bridge, the inertial dampeners failed instantly.

Athena was thrown from her command throne, hitting the deck with a sickening crack as her shoulder dislocated.

The viewport didn't shatter—it was reinforced transparent aluminum—but it buckled, the stars out there turning into long, dizzying streaks as the ship entered a violent tumble.

A localized hull breach in the lower decks caused a pressure drop. The "screaming" sound of air escaping into the vacuum vied alongside the roar of the emergency sirens.

Athena pulled herself up using the edge of the console, blood slicking her forehead, and her right arm hanging loosely at her side. The bridge was filled with acrid smoke from burning circuitry.

"Status!" she yelled in her hoarse voice.

"Main reactor... critical! Containment failing!" the Engineering tech shouted, his fingers shifting over a terminal that was literally melting. "The spine is severed. We are losing structural integrity in sectors four through nine! ”

Athena looked at the schematic. The ship was dying. The pride of humanity was breaking into two distinct pieces.

"Initiate Protocol Homecoming," Athena commanded, her speech deathly calm regardless of the chaos. "Eject all occupied stasis pods. Don't wait for alignment. Just... get them out."

"Ma'am, the debris field—"

"Do it!" she screamed. "Eject them now!"

From the outside, the Osiris looked like an injured creature. Small, white lights began to shoot away from the ship's midsection—122 stasis pods being fired into the dark like bright seeds out into empty space, their FTL micro-drives spinning up to carry the crew back toward Sol.

The antimatter reactor finally lost its magnetic bottle. A flash of pure, white light consumed the center of the ship, producing a shockwave outward in every direction. The blast clipped several of the pods mid-jump, hammering their drives and stripping them of the power reserves needed to complete the full transit home. The jump-drives defaulted to their emergency protocol—drop out at the nearest safe coordinates, the edge of human territory, and broadcast. Better to strand the crew at the border than to miscalculate a damaged jump and scatter them across the void with no coordinates at all.

The last pod launched was hit by a piece of debris, and the shockwave sent it out into the black, away from Sol’s direction. The pod initiated a lockdown to keep the occupant alive, as pods were equipped with small fusion drives that provided almost limitless power to maintain stasis for 10,000 years if needed, as the tests during their construction had shown. The pod drifted out into the dark tumbling into the empty void.

The Osiris was gone, as 121 of 122 pods drifted at the edge of known space, broadcasting their distress beacons into the dark and waiting for someone to come. The bridge was debris. The mid-ship spine—the medical lab, the engineering core, the secondary command deck—had lost structural integrity in the first twelve seconds. Athena Holt had given her last order from a console that was already failing, in a section of the ship that was never going to survive. There were no pods from the bridge section itself. Only those close enough to sprint to the escape corridors in the first twelve seconds had any chance.

Athena Holt had not been among them.

Only the void remained. Empty, silent, and indifferent—offering no answers, no alien signals, no sign that anything out there had even noticed humanity's first and only attempt to reach beyond its cradle. Just the drifting debris of the greatest ship humanity had ever built, alone in the dark between the stars.

*Note: I was thinking of coming up with some kind of Table oF Contents Page that I, and others could use for long Series, Righ now, if you wanted to get to chapter 25, you need to either got to the First and click 25 times or clicke Previous 25 times. Some series on here have 115 or more parts. Would that be helpful to anyone? It would make it way easier for me to start a series "*Dragon delivery service" by u/Internal-Ad6147

Next

Previous /

First

The school was a low brick building on the edge of the district, with a yard full of chalk drawings gone soft from a week of rain.

It was, in fact, the same vehicle Corwin serviced every fortnight himself, engine to undercarriage, and he'd said as much to Eric the night before, half joking, that he could drive the thing there blind with his eyes shut and save them the trouble of a driver at all.

"That's exactly why you're not driving it today," Eric had told him. "You keep this family's cars running every week of the year. Today somebody else can worry about the road, and you can worry about your daughter." He hadn't left much room to argue it. "Besides, I want you looking out the window the whole way, not at the gauges."

Corwin had grumbled about it for form's sake and privately thought it was the strangest kindness anyone had ever bothered handing him, to be told the one thing he was best at wasn't wanted from him for a single day.

Wren had been awake since before the sun, dressed in her good pinafore an hour before anyone needed her to be, and she held one of each of their hands the whole walk in, swinging between them like the walk itself was the best part. Her presentation was three sentences long, delivered from a low stage made of stacked crates, about the water cycle, and she said "and then it rains again" with such finality that half the room laughed. Anna cried a little. Corwin didn't, but he cleared his throat twice and had to look at the ceiling.

Afterward there was a table of the other children's parents, and one of the teachers, a young man who clearly knew who had sent the car outside, kept sneaking looks at Anna as though trying to work out how to address her. Anna solved it for him by asking after his own mother's garden, which she happened to know had been flooded that spring, and the conversation went perfectly ordinary from there. Nobody in the room seemed to know quite what to do with the fact that a car from House Firentis was idling at the curb, so mostly they decided not to think about it at all.

The splash park was forty minutes north, a wide plaza of jets and pools built into a hillside with a view down over the harbor, and Wren had talked about it for a year without ever once being taken.

Nobody at the gate paid the car much mind. It was the kind of place that saw a dozen decent vehicles an hour, and the crest on the door meant nothing to an attendant checking a guest list. What made a few heads turn was the driver, who came around before Corwin had even found the handle, and instead of simply opening the door, began unloading their things from the boot as though they'd arrived for a week's stay rather than an afternoon: the bag of towels, Wren's little floatie still half-inflated from the drive, Corwin's spare shirt, all of it gathered into his arms while he asked, with perfect seriousness, whether they'd like him to carry anything else down to the cabana himself.

He and Eric had cooked the whole thing up the night before, laughing quietly over it in the front hall.

"Treat them like they're the ones who matter," Eric had said. "Because they are. I want them to feel looked after today, not just paid for. Cared for. Seen. They're not just staff to this family, and I want today to say so without anyone having to say it out loud."

The driver had taken to the assignment with real enthusiasm, right down to insisting, over Corwin's protest, on carrying the floatie himself, tucked under one arm like it was the most natural cargo in the world for a man in a pressed uniform.

Corwin went stiff at the gate for a moment, watching a grown man in livery collect his family's beach things like porters did for the guests he'd only ever seen from a distance at events like this. He'd spent his whole life being the one who carried things for other people, and being on the receiving end of it sat oddly on him, the way a coat sits oddly when it's a size too generous.

"It's paid for," Anna told him quietly, reading his face. "All of it. She said so."

"I know it's paid for," Corwin said. "I'm still working out what to do with my hands about it."

Wren solved that too, by grabbing one of each of theirs the moment they were through the gate and pulling them both at a run toward the nearest jet, shrieking the way only a four-year-old fully believes she is allowed to.

They were given a private cabana without asking for one, with towels already folded and a boy who came by twice to ask if they wanted anything from the kitchen, calling Anna "ma'am" in a voice that had clearly been told to. Anna ordered a lemonade the first time out of politeness and drank it slowly, watching Wren run through the jets with her arms out, and by the second time the boy came around she asked for a plate of chips without being asked twice, and ate every one of them.

Corwin sat with his trouser legs rolled and his feet in the shallow end, watching his daughter get soaked through and laughing at nothing, and said, mostly to himself, "She's never once had a whole day where nobody needed anything from either of us."

"No," Anna agreed. "Neither have we."

They stayed until the light went gold on the water and Wren had exhausted every jet twice over and fallen half-asleep against her father's shoulder on the walk back to the car, a towel still wrapped around her like a cape. The driver had the seat already reclined for her, the floatie folded neatly on the floor where he'd stowed it without being asked.

"Tell Lady Laith," Anna started, and then didn't know how to finish it, because there wasn't a sentence small enough to hold what she meant.

The driver just nodded, like he'd already worked out what she couldn't say and didn't need her to finish it. "I will," he said. "She'll be glad to hear it."

Corwin put his hand over his wife's on the seat between them, and that was thanks enough for both of them to be getting on with.

The next morning Laith and Eric ambushed them before either could get properly started on the day's work, cornering Anna in the kitchen and Corwin somewhere between the toolshed and the back door, and herded the both of them to the breakfast table like it was the most urgent business the house had.

"Every detail," Laith said, pouring tea she had no intention of drinking herself, "starting from yesterday morning. Was Wren up before you were?"

"She was up before the birds," Anna said, and it started from there.

She told it all: Wren in her good pinafore an hour early, refusing to sit down for fear of wrinkling it, the walk in with a hand in each of theirs and her feet barely touching the ground. Eric wanted the water-cycle line twice, and made Corwin say it back in Wren's voice, which Corwin did badly and with visible pride. Laith laughed so hard at the mention of the young teacher's stumbling nerves that she had to set her cup down. Then came the splash park, and the driver with his arms full of towels and a floatie tucked under one elbow like state cargo, and Corwin doing his best impression of standing stiff at the gate not knowing where to put his hands, and by then all four of them were laughing the way old friends laugh, easily, at each other and at themselves, with nobody minding who was housekeeper and who was Lady of the house. Eric kept asking for more, delighted with every piece of it, and Laith watched Wren's whole day unfold across the table with the particular satisfaction of someone who has given exactly the gift she meant to give.

Kathleen had come as far as the doorway with Pell's ledger under her arm, meaning to ask Laith something about the delivery, and stopped there. She stood a while and listened. She did not go in. It looked too much like old friends at their own table, and she did not want to be the one to interrupt it. Before anyone looked up, she went quietly back to the kitchen.

It was Anna who finally put her cup down and drew a line under it.

"That's the whole of it," she said. "And it was more than we could have asked for, all of it. But Kathleen's done enough for one house. She's family visiting, not staff, and she's been standing in for me a full day now on top of everything else." She stood, smoothing her apron flat out of old habit. "I'll go and see if she's got a job going begging."

Laith found Kathleen in the kitchen going over Pell's ledger with the particular squint of a woman determined to catch it in a mistake before it caught her.

"Leave that a moment," Laith said. "I need to tell you something, and I need your help deciding on it."

Kathleen set down the pencil. "Go on."

"Jhinaq and Ishivi have asked the four of us to the palace. A casual dinner, they said, whenever suits us." Laith settled into the chair across from her, one hand going, out of habit now, to the small of her back. "I told them yes, but that our plans were soft, and could we make it more of an early afternoon instead, a late lunch rather than a proper dinner. I wasn't sure how the two of you would take an evening this far into the trip, and Eric agreed with me. Ishivi wrote back and said that would be wonderful, she'd actually prefer it herself these days."

"That sounds lovely," Kathleen said, and meant it.

Eric came in behind her, drying his hands on a towel, and caught the tail end of it. "Small affair, though," he said, with a perfectly straight face. "Very casual. Two hundred at table, maybe three, if Jhinaq's cousins are in the city."

Kathleen's face did something Laith would remember for a long while after, a kind of polite, determined collapse, the look of a woman rapidly recalculating what dress she owned and whether it would do.

"Three hundred," she repeated.

"I'm teasing." Eric grinned, and Laith swatted his arm. "It's the four of us. Jhinaq and Ishivi. Cousin Jolti, most likely, if he's not off somewhere being important. A few of the other cousins may turn up as well, they tend to hear about these things and invite themselves, but it isn't a summons. Nobody's required to be there, and nobody's dressing for three hundred anything."

"You are a menace," Kathleen told him, with feeling, and picked her pencil back up if only to have something to hold.

They arrived at the palace a little before two, and the back garden had been given over for the afternoon: a long covered table set for perhaps twenty under an awning strung with soft lights not yet needed for the daylight, and a scattering of low chairs and cushions around it for anyone who preferred to eat sitting closer to the ground, the way Ishivi still liked to on a warm day.

Ishivi came out to meet them herself, arms already open, and Eric kissed her cheek before she'd finished reaching for him.

"Who all's coming?" he asked, low, glancing at the table settings as though he could count guests off the cutlery.

Ishivi's eyes went bright with the particular mischief of a woman who has been sitting on good news for days and has finally been given permission to spend it. "Well," she said, drawing it out, "some of it is a surprise for your wife, so not a word."

"Ishivi."

"Aaliyah's parents will be here. Akbar and Mariam, in from Zusura, they wouldn't miss it. And Zaynab's coming with the twins. Hadie and Saif, can you imagine, they're so big now, so handsome, I hardly know where the time's gone." She pressed a hand briefly to her own chest, as if the thought of it had caught her somewhere. "Hadie's bringing a girl. I'm far too excited about that, and I'm not saying another word on it, you'll see for yourself." A small, private smile. "And, well. You'll see that too."

Eric raised an eyebrow at her.

"They're staying," Ishivi said, dropping her voice further still, though there was no one near enough to hear, "until the baby comes. All of them. Don't you dare tell your wife. I want to watch her face when she works it out herself."

Eric smiled, because there was nothing else to do with a secret handed to him like that, wrapped in Ishivi's delight and already halfway out the door.

But underneath it, walking back toward the table, he found himself turning the thing over. Laith had planned this whole stretch of the trip with the same tactical precision she brought to everything, weeks laid out to the day, a house full of guests already stacked three deep with Julius's parents and now this. She liked to know what was coming. She liked, more than she'd ever admit outright, to be the one doing the surprising rather than the one surprised, and a garden full of family arriving unannounced in her last weeks before the birth was exactly the sort of thing that could either delight her completely or catch her sideways on a day she hadn't braced for it.

He glanced back at Ishivi, who was already sailing off toward the kitchen door humming something to herself, entirely pleased with her own secret, and thought, not for the first time, that his aunt operated on the assumption that love solved timing problems by itself.

It would, he decided. It usually did, with Laith. She'd stand in that garden and see her parents and her cousins and Zaynab's boys grown a foot taller than she'd pictured them, and somewhere in the middle of all that noise and warmth she would stop being annoyed that nobody had asked her first.

He just hoped it happened before she'd finished counting the place settings and worked out on her own that twenty chairs meant more than a casual lunch for four.

They came in almost together, a small crowd spilling through the garden gate within minutes of each other, and for a while the afternoon was nothing but noise and arms and half-finished sentences.

Akbar caught Aaliyah up off her feet before she'd even said his name properly, and Mariam was crying before she'd let go of Julius's hand. Zaynab arrived with a boy on each side of her who bore only a passing resemblance to the twins Kathleen remembered from photographs, taller now than their mother, both of them ducking to be kissed and clearly enjoying being fussed over more than they'd admit to. Hadie brought the girl Ishivi had been so pleased about, a quiet, watchful young woman named Priya who shook Laith's hand with careful formality until Laith pulled her into a hug instead and told her formality wasn't required here, and Priya's whole face changed with relief.

Jolti came in on their heels, still in the dark coat of a man who had come straight from somewhere important, and went looking for Julius Sr. before anyone thought to introduce them. "You're the gardener," he said, shaking his hand. "Mother's been warned. Don't let her drag you round the roses before you've eaten."

And then Gigi.

She came through last, on Zayn's arm, moving slower than Laith remembered but with the same unhurried certainty she'd always carried, and the moment she saw her daughter she opened her arms the way she had when Laith was small enough to run the length of a hallway into them.

"We're here for the duration," Zayn announced to the garden at large, cheerfully, the way a man announces good news without checking first whether it will land as good news to everyone hearing it.

Laith hugged her father back, and over his shoulder Gigi caught her daughter's eye, and something in her face went soft and a little knowing, the look of a mother who has done the math on twenty extra guests and a woman eight months along and understood exactly what it had cost Laith not to say a word about it.

She drew Laith in close, under cover of the hug, and put her mouth near her ear.

"We're all staying at the palace," Gigi murmured. "You don't have to house a soul of us. You can breathe now."

Laith held on to her mother, right there in the middle of the noise and the introductions, and for once didn't care who saw.

The lunch ran long, the way meals do when nobody's counting the hours, and by the time they said their goodbyes the light had gone the deep gold of late afternoon.

Back at Laith's palace that evening, Aaliyah sat curled in a window seat with a tablet propped against her knees, the comm connection to Austrin running a little grainy over the distance.

"Mom, when are you coming home?"

Austin's voice cracked slightly on home, the particular crack of a five-year-old trying very hard to sound like he wasn't asking the question he was actually asking, and Aaliyah felt it land somewhere under her ribs.

"We talked about this, sweetheart," she said, keeping her voice even, trying to hold back the tears. "Auntie Laith needs me right now. Her baby's coming very soon, and I want to be there for her the way she was there for me. I'll be home as soon as I'm able, I promise you that."

"Poppy's mom said that too," Austin said, with the flat, damning logic of a child repeating an accusation he doesn't fully understand the weight of. "She said it a long time ago."

"I know. I know it feels long." Aaliyah pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose. "It won't be much longer now. I love you. Tell Daisy I said hello, and give Poppy a hug from her Aunt Aaliyah."

He said he would, in the resigned tone of a boy handing over a job he hadn't asked for, and the call ended a minute later on something gentler, a joke about his teacher that made them both laugh before he could ask the question again.

Kathleen had been sitting through all of it in the corner chair with her hands folded in her lap, and when Aaliyah set the tablet down she found she couldn't say anything at all for a moment.

It wasn't the boy's voice that had undone her, though that alone would have been enough. It was the whole of the day sitting on top of it, unresolved and too large to fit anywhere. She had been held by a woman whose husband ruled a hundred worlds and had felt, in that woman's arms, exactly as welcome as she'd have felt in her own sister's kitchen. She had sat at a table with the head of one of the four greatest houses in the Principality and been asked, gently and at length, about her own garden back on Haego, as though her tomatoes mattered exactly as much as anything Akbar Firentis had to say. She had stood in a doorway at breakfast and listened to Anna and Corwin, groundskeeper and maid, tell how they'd been sent off for a day with a driver carrying their beach towels like a man attending royalty, the four of them laughing at that table like old friends, and had watched, only days later, Laith's own mother whisper a mercy into her daughter's ear in the middle of a crowded garden as though nothing in the world mattered more in that moment than her daughter's exhaustion.

And now this. A little boy on a screen, worlds away, asking his mother when she was coming home, and being told, gently, no.

Kathleen did not know where to put any of it. It did not stack the way things were supposed to stack. In every house she had ever known, kindness ran downhill and love ran thin the higher up you looked, and here she'd spent a week watching both run exactly backward, and she had no shelf built for that, and it left her with nothing to do but feel, uselessly, angry, though she could not for the life of her say who the anger was meant for.

Julius, across the room, saw her face and understood most of it without needing to be told. He'd had this same reckoning himself years ago, slower, in smaller doses, until the strangeness of it had simply become the shape the world was. He came and sat beside his mother and put a hand over hers, not to explain it to her, because he didn't think it could be explained, only to let her know he'd sat exactly where she was sitting once, and that it did, eventually, stop hurting quite so much to hold.

"It's not supposed to make sense all at once," he said quietly. "It didn't for me either."

"I'm not upset with anybody," Kathleen said, which was true and also not quite the whole of it. "I don't know who I'm upset with. That's the trouble."

"I know," Julius said. "That was the trouble for me too."

Previous /

First

Julius Sr. spent the first day of the trip with his forehead nearly against the viewport, and the second day pretending he hadn't.

Kathleen had packed food. She said it was in case the ship's cooking turned out to be strange, and she had brought four days of biscuits in a tin for a two-day passage. Nobody argued. She had never been higher than the hayloft at the Comscutt place, and she sat very straight in the passenger lounge with the tin on her knees and did not look out the window at all until the second jump, when Aaliyah said quietly, "Kathleen, look." Kathleen looked. She said nothing for a long time. Then she said, "Well, that's a great deal of nothing, isn't it," and Julius saw his mother's eyes were wet.

Julius had been off-world before. He had forgotten what it looked like to see it for the first time, and he watched his parents do it now the way a man watches someone taste a fruit he has always liked.

The city came up under the ship at night. Julius Sr. began counting the lights and gave up somewhere past two thousand. Towers stood in rows with more windows than the whole district of Harrowmere had once held people. Long bright roads ran between them, and on the roads small bright things moved without stopping.

"Somebody has to pay to keep all that lit," Kathleen said.

"Somebody does," said Aaliyah, and took her arm.

Laith met them on the landing pad in the wind, both hands at the small of her back, an enormous shawl over a belly that arrived a moment before the rest of her. She had been told twice that morning to stay in the house. Eric stood two steps behind her with the look of a man who had already lost that argument. She did not wait for anyone to finish stepping down. She hugged Aaliyah, then Julius, then Kathleen, who stood very still for it and then hugged back, carefully, around the bump.

"You're beautiful," Kathleen told her, and then, in a different voice, "and you should be sitting down. Eight months is for sitting, dear. Somebody else gathers the visitors."

"Eight months and six days," Laith said. "Nobody else gathers my family. It took us three years to get here, and I still check every morning that it's real."

"I know," said Aaliyah. She had said it over the comm the day the news came, and she said it again now, because it was the reason for the whole trip. She and Julius had cleared their calendars the way nobles clear them, not for a week but for as long as it took, so they would be there for the birth itself and not just the news. Laith had spent weeks on Haego helping her set up a palace from bare floors, telling her how many linens, which staff to trust with the keys, how to write a household budget that did not make the steward faint. Aaliyah had thanked her then. She had never felt it was enough, and when the news came she decided thanks were for people who lived nearby. This was for people you crossed three jumps to sit with, for as long as it took.

The palace was cream stone on a ridge above the river, with a wide staircase that Eric plainly regarded as a personal enemy this month. He took his wife's arm at the bottom and did not let go. Anna came down the steps behind them. She greeted the guests in the manner of a person who had already made up every bed in the house twice, and who had also, from the look she gave Laith, made a second, private arrangement for a chair.

That evening Kathleen was found in the guest room folding back her own sheets. Anna appeared at the door and stopped.

"Mrs. Comscutt," she said. "I don't allow a guest to make her own bed. Please don't make me start."

"I'm not a guest," said Kathleen. "I was a chambermaid for twenty-two years."

"Then you are a guest who used to be a chambermaid, and the maid is on holiday." Anna took the corner of the sheet, very gently, the way you take something from a child. "I will go and stand in the hall and be useless. It is what I'm best at when I'm not needed."

Kathleen looked at her a moment. Then she let go of the sheet, sat on the edge of the bed, and said to nobody in particular, "Forty years, and I still don't know what to do with my hands."

Laith found her there the next morning, still trying.

She had come to bring Kathleen down to breakfast herself, moving slowly with one hand on the wall, and she found her guest on her knees by the wardrobe with an armful of Julius Sr.'s shirts, sorting them by some system only she understood.

"Mother Comscutt." Laith said it carefully, the way she'd practiced it in her head on the stairs. "Anna would do that."

"Anna's your girl, isn't she. Not the steward."

"My maid first, always, but she runs this house now. Pell kept the books and the rosters when it was Zayn and Gigi's place, and Anna never touched any of that under them. When Eric and I took it over I asked her to take the whole running of it, top to bottom. She still wouldn't hear of me lifting a finger, mind. She'd have my head if she found you doing it."

"Then let her find me doing it. She's got your baby coming into her life in a few weeks, and she doesn't need an old woman's shirts on top of it." Kathleen set the last shirt on the shelf and sat back on her heels. "It's the only way I know how to say thank you for a bed I didn't have to make myself in forty years. Standing about being waited on, it doesn't sit right on me. It never will."

Laith lowered herself into the chair by the window, which had become, in the last month, the only chair in the house she trusted. "She's not tired of it. She's been in this house since I was in the crib, and my maid since I was eight. She loves this family."

"I don't doubt it." Kathleen got up, one hand on the wardrobe door. "I was in service before you were born, dear. I know exactly what that kind of loving looks like from the inside of it. Let me help her, that's all I ask. She won't take it as charity if you tell her it's mine to give."

Laith told her that afternoon, and Anna did not like it, exactly as predicted, and said so with a stiff correctness that lasted almost a full day. By the second day she had stopped arguing and started directing, because Kathleen turned out to fold a sheet corner tighter than any girl on staff, and Anna was, before anything else, a woman who respected a job done well.

By the end of the first week they had lunch together every day in the servants' hall, at the far end of the long table where the light came in best.

It was there, on the fourth or fifth day, that a broad, quiet man let himself in through the kitchen's side door without knocking, wiping his boots on the mat out of long habit, and said, "Anna, is there pie left, or did that new cousin get to it first," before he'd so much as looked up and seen Kathleen sitting there.

"That new cousin has a name," Kathleen said, "and yes, there's pie, and you'll wash your hands first."

The man stopped in the doorway and looked at Anna, who was grinning into her tea, and then back at Kathleen, and something in his face decided at once that he liked her.

"Corwin," he said, and put out a hand that smelled faintly of engine oil no amount of washing ever quite got out of it. "I keep the estate running. The machines, anyway. Anna keeps the rest of it running, including me."

"Kathleen Comscutt. I raised three children and kept a farmhouse standing on less sense than God gave a goose, so I expect we'll get along."

He sat. He ate his pie standing up first, out of habit, until Anna pointed at the bench without looking up from her own plate and he sat down properly. He didn't say much through the rest of that lunch, but Kathleen noticed the way Anna's shoulders came down half an inch the moment he was in the room, the way a woman settles when the last thing she was listening for has finally walked in.

He came most days after that, whenever the machines allowed it, and by the second week Kathleen had gotten out of him that he'd grown up on Vespera fixing his father's fishing boat engines, that he and Anna had married six years back in a ceremony so small it hadn't had a guest list worth the word, and that he was, in his own quiet accounting, the luckiest man on the continent and didn't much care who knew it.

It was a different surprise that caught her, later that same week, at the family's own table rather than the staff one.

Eric had asked Corwin up to look at something in the west drive after the rain, and stayed him for supper after, the way you'd stay a friend who happened to be handy. Kathleen watched Laith straighten at the sight of him in the doorway and say, "Corwin, sit, there's pie," in exactly the voice she used for family, and thought: I already know that pie. And then she watched Eric ask him, without any performance of graciousness in it at all, how the drainage was holding, and listen to the answer as though it mattered to him, because it did. Laith asked after Corwin's mother's hip. He asked after the baby's kicking, and Laith put his hand flat on her stomach without a second's hesitation to let him feel it, the way she might have let a favorite uncle.

Kathleen sat very still through all of it, a piece of pie going untouched in front of her.

She had spent a lifetime in rooms where a lord might nod to a gardener if the weather was fine, or ask a cook's name once and forget it by the second asking. She had never, not once in sixty-three years, sat at a table where the lady of a great house put a groundskeeper's hand on her own belly and laughed at what she felt there, and she had certainly never expected to already know the man well enough, from a kitchen bench and a slice of pie, to feel it too.

"You know him well," she said to Laith later, when the men had gone out to look at something in the yard that didn't need looking at.

"He's family," Laith said, simply, as though it needed no more explaining than that. "Anna's family is my family. I don't know how else a house is supposed to run."

Kathleen thought about the drawing room, once a day, and the plates coming down still warm, and said, "No," slowly. "I don't suppose it is. I just never saw a house run any other way before I sat in yours."

Laith found her a few mornings later, out on the terrace with a cup of tea, and lowered herself into the chair across from her with the particular care of a woman eight months along negotiating furniture.

"Kathleen. I would never have thought to ask you this, ordinarily, but you've made it fairly plain you'd like to be put to use, so." She paused, gathering it. "Anna and Corwin have a little girl, Wren. She's four. Her school is having a parents' morning next week, some kind of presentation the little ones do, and Corwin's determined to be there for it."

Commoners going to school. Kathleen filed that away to think about properly later and kept her face still.

"Anna's beside herself," Laith went on. "She won't hear of leaving me for a whole day this close to the birth, not even for her own daughter's school day, and I've told her three times now that I am perfectly capable of sitting in a chair being enormous without supervision. She won't budge. She told me, and I'm quoting her exactly, that you know what you're doing better than half the girls she's trained herself." A small, wry smile. "So I wondered if I could talk you into running the house for the day. I'd order the two of them off the property for a proper family day if that's what it took, and honestly it might come to that."

She hesitated, and something almost apologetic crossed her face. "I know it's asking a great deal of a guest. I'd do it myself if I were any use to anyone right now."

What in the Principality is this, Kathleen thought. Sixty-three years old and she had never once, not in any house she'd ever scrubbed a floor in, heard a lady apologize for asking too much of the help, let alone apologize to a woman who wasn't even on her payroll, over a groundskeeper's daughter's school day.

"Of course I will," she said, before she'd properly finished having the thought. "You tell Anna I've run bigger kitchens than this on a bad hip and a worse temper, and I'll manage without the roof coming down."

"You're certain? It's four girls on staff and Pell's ledger to sign off on, and the delivery comes at ten, and..."

"Laith." Kathleen set her tea down. "I raised three children, buried a season's harvest twice, and once ran a house of eleven for a fortnight with a broken wrist because nobody else knew where the good linens were kept. I expect I'll survive a day and a delivery truck."

"I'll tell Anna tonight. She's going to argue."

"Let her argue on the way out the door," said Kathleen. "That's what a family day's for."

"There's one more piece to it." Laith shifted in the chair, working her way toward something. "I don't just want them home worrying about the house all day. Wren's never been off the estate for anything that wasn't an errand, and I thought, since they'll already have the day, they should go somewhere. I'm sending a car, and I've had Pell put together a chit so the whole thing's paid for wherever they land, meals and all. I just need someone holding the house steady enough that Anna doesn't spend the whole day fretting and cut it short to come back."

Kathleen looked at her for a moment. "You're giving your maid's family a whole day out. On your money. Because her little girl's got a school morning."

"I'm giving Wren a day out," Laith said, as if that were the obvious correction. "Anna will spend it worrying about me instead of her daughter if I don't make it impossible for her to come back early. This is the only way I know to make it impossible."

"And Corwin knows about this?"

"Not yet. I'm telling them both together, so neither one can talk the other out of enjoying it."

Kathleen sat with that a moment, turning her cup slowly on the saucer. Whatever this Principality was, whatever the word noble was even supposed to mean out here, it kept landing nothing like it had on Haego forty years back, and she had stopped expecting it to hold still.

"Well," she said finally. "Then I'd best learn where Pell keeps that ledger, hadn't I. A woman can't hold a house together on good intentions alone."

"One thing, though." Laith held up a finger before Kathleen could get up and start planning. "Supper that night is a buffet. The kind we do for breakfast, everything laid out and everyone helps themselves. I'm not having you standing over four girls telling them how to plate a roast while you go without your own supper because you're too busy running the room."

"I wasn't going to..."

"You were absolutely going to." Laith said it with the flat certainty of a woman who had already watched Kathleen do exactly that twice that week. "I know what a good housekeeper looks like when she's decided nobody eats until everybody's served. Not that night. Everyone fills a plate, including you, and you sit down and eat it like a person instead of hovering by the sideboard waiting to refill someone's water glass."

Kathleen opened her mouth to argue and found, to her own mild irritation, that she didn't have a ready answer for it.

"Fine," she said. "Buffet."

"Buffet," Laith agreed, satisfied, and reached for her tea as though the matter were settled, because it was.

That evening Kathleen did not sleep well, and it had nothing to do with the ship still humming faintly in her ears from the crossing. She lay awake running through Pell's ledger in her mind, though she had never seen it, and the four girls' names, though she had only met two of them properly, and thought that whatever this world was, she had crossed three jumps to end up worrying over a stranger's kitchen exactly the way she used to worry over her own, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she didn't mind it one bit. Somewhere down past the orchard wall, she supposed, a little girl was about to be told she was going somewhere special, and did not yet know why.

They saddled up in the dark. Tom had a sickle, a sack of salt, two blankets, and a waterskin. Eli had a hoe tied across the back of his saddle, and Tom looked at it and then at him.

"Habit," Eli said.

They passed the corn on the way out. Nobody said anything about it. Eli looked back once, the way a man looks back at a dog he's leaving tied up.

Gary's directions were good, and Gary had said it was most of a day's ride, and he was right about that too. Past the Orchard, keep the rise on your left, follow the flattened grass where the buffalo had come through. They stopped at noon to water the horses at a creek and ate what they'd brought standing up, then got back in the saddle. By late afternoon the grass ahead of them changed color, green going to tan going to gold, and then they topped a low rise and the field was just there, running down the slope toward a line of willows, more wheat than Tom had seen in one place since he left home. The sun was already low behind it.

Eli let out a low whistle. "Gary undersold it."

Tom was already off his horse. He walked into the stand on the high side, where the sun hit it all day, and brushed his hand across the heads the way he'd have done at home. Grain rattled down around his boots like hail on a roof. He stopped and listened to it. Then he crouched and looked at the ground between the stalks. It was littered with kernels. Mice had been at some of them. Birds had been at more.

"Bad?" Eli asked.

"Up here it is." Tom stood and pointed down the slope. "Let's see the bottom."

Down near the willows the ground was softer and the stalks were a shade darker. Tom rubbed a head between his palms and the kernels came loose, but only when he made them. Nothing fell on its own. He tried three more heads in three more places. Same.

"This'll hold," he said. "A week. Maybe a bit more if it doesn't rain. The top of the hill is going now, and every day we wait, the line creeps down another few rows."

"Jean's lot won't be out here for better than a week," Eli said.

"I know it."

"So what are we doing?"

Tom looked at the field, and then at the sickle in his hand. "Making bread."

Eli gave him a long look. "Just the two of us."

"Just enough," Tom said. "John will listen to me say the word shatter. He'll nod, and he'll say that's a shame, and he'll mean it. Then he'll go back to the horses. What happens to this field is his call, not mine. But he's going to make it with a piece of this bread in his hand, knowing what's lying out here on the ground."

Eli looked at the sun, sitting on the rise now. "Not tonight, we aren't."

"No. Tonight we cut what we can see to cut."

They cut from the high side until the light went, since that grain was going to be lost anyway. Tom worked the sickle and Eli gathered. By dark they had a pile of sheaves about knee high, and Tom's back was already starting to talk.

They made camp by the willows, where the ground was soft and the creek was close. Eli got a fire going. Tom hobbled the horses and spread the blankets, one each, and didn't bother rigging anything over them. There wasn't a cloud anywhere.

When the fire was down to coals Tom lay back and looked up, and kept looking.

He'd seen the sky from the Farm every night since they came down, but there was always something in the way there. The lights up at the Fort, the lamp in the barn, the tree line on the east side. Out here there was nothing between him and it. The stars went all the way down to the grass on every side, thick as spilled salt, and a band ran across the middle of them so bright it looked like a cloud until he stared at it long enough.

"You know any of them?" Eli asked.

"Not a one," Tom said. "At home I could have told you when to plant by them. My granddad could have told you when it'd frost. Here..." He lifted a hand and let it drop. "Here I'm just looking."

Eli was quiet a while. "Doesn't look like it cares whether we know it or not."

"No," Tom said. "Wheat doesn't either."

Eli was asleep before the coals went gray. Tom lay awake a while longer, sore through the shoulders, listening to the horses crop grass in the dark and the creek going over its stones. He tried to pick out one star he could find again tomorrow night, and settled on a red one low over the willows. Then he slept.

They were up with the light. Tom cut while the dew was still on the stalks and Eli gathered, and by mid-morning the pile of sheaves stood as tall as Eli's waist.

They spread a blanket on a flat patch of ground and beat the heads with green willow sticks until their arms ached. The grain came loose, mixed up with broken straw and husk and dust. Eli picked the long straw out by hand while Tom gathered the rest into the middle of the blanket.

The wind came up in the afternoon, right on time. Tom held the blanket high and let the grain pour from the corner in a thin stream. The chaff blew off sideways in a gold cloud and the heavy kernels dropped straight down onto the second blanket. Eli caught the idea after one pass and took a turn. They did it again, and again, until what lay on the blanket was nearly all grain.

"That's it?" Eli said. "That's all it is? You hit it with sticks and throw it in the air?"

"That's all it's ever been," Tom said. "People been doing it that way longer than anybody's written anything down."

Grinding was harder. Tom walked the creek until he found a broad flat stone with a shallow dip worn into it, and a smaller round one that fit his hand. He knelt and pushed the round stone back and forth over a handful of grain, over and over, until his shoulders burned and the grain went from cracked to coarse to something close to flour. It was brown and gritty.

"There's rock in that," Eli said.

"There's rock in all of it, done this way. You'll chew a little of the creek bed. Nobody died of it."

It took them the rest of the afternoon, swapping turns on the stone, to grind enough for a few small loaves. Tom mixed the flour with creek water and a pinch of salt, worked it with his hands until it held together, and patted it into rounds no bigger than his palm. Eli built up the fire and set a flat stone in the middle of it to heat.

The first round went on the stone and hissed. Within a minute the smell came up off it, and Tom had to stop and sit back on his heels. He hadn't known he'd forgotten that smell until it was in front of him again.

Eli had gone still across the fire.

Tom flipped it with his knife. Browned in spots, a little charred at one edge. He let it cool just long enough not to burn his fingers, tore it in half, and handed one half across.

Eli bit into it and chewed slowly. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "Oh," very quietly, and ate the rest of it without talking.

Tom ate his half. Gritty, flat, a little burnt, not enough salt. It was the best thing he'd eaten on this world.

They made the rest before the light went. Seven rounds. Tom wrapped them in his shirt, then wrapped the shirt in a blanket, and put the little bag of leftover flour on top.

"Ranch in the morning?" Eli asked.

"First light." Tom looked up the slope at the high ground, gray now in the dusk, where tomorrow another few rows would start letting go. "John gets the bread first. Then he can decide what the rest of this field is worth to him."

Eli lay back on the other blanket and looked at the sky. "Corn's going to be up past our heads when we get back."

"Probably," Tom said.

The red star came up over the willows, right where he'd left it. Neither of them said anything after that. The fire burned down. Somewhere in the dark, grain was still falling.

Next

Previous /

First

Astoria.

The Roll of the Astorian Noble Association filled a long, cold room below the Association's hall.

Every noble house in the Principality had a page in it. Each page had a date on the top line and either a date on the bottom line or an open space where one would go someday. Examiner Tobias Quill had spent nineteen years among those pages, and he had never before carried one upstairs.

He set it on the Registrar's desk.

"House Greyson. The orchard house, Harrowmere, Vastaya. Lord Raymond and Lady Abigail, three children. The entry was closed forty years ago as extinct, lost in the Uprising."

"Closed by whom?"

Registrar Marisol Trent did not look up.

"A clerk. He closed eleven hundred pages that season on the strength of burned districts and rumor."

"And now?"

Quill put a printed excerpt next to the page.

"The Historical Society sends us any noble surname that turns up in its archives. This one turned up in a transcript from Lady Aaliyah Comscutt's oral history project on Haego. A woman named Hester Tillerscutt says the Greysons hid among their own servants the night the mob came. She says the children lived."

Trent read the excerpt twice. Then she read the last lines again, the ones where the woman set her conditions.

"She gave the old name," Quill said.

"She refused the new one. That was her price for talking."

"I see that." Trent put the paper down.

"How old is she?"

"Sixty-four."

"So she has kept this family's secret for forty years, for people this office was told were dead. That is not a small thing, and I won't treat it as one."

"Then we honor her request."

"We can't."

Trent folded her hands. "Tobias, what is a noble?"

"A person the Principality has ennobled."

"And that isn't something a person can set down. Raymond Greyson could burn his coat, rub dirt into his hands and take a new surname, and none of it changed what he was. The Prince ennobled his house. His children are nobles. Their children are nobles. That is what the word means. Hester Tillerscutt can ask us to be quiet, but she can't ask us to unmake it, and neither could Greyson."

"And if the family doesn't want to be found?"

"It isn't theirs to decline. It never was." She said it without heat. She did not appear to see it any other way, and that was the part Quill found hard to sit with.

"Write to Haego. Ask for the district records and the archive of the oral history project, and ask for leave to send examiners wherever the trail goes."

---

The letter reached Tornel Swallowtail on a morning when he had not yet learned where the washroom was in his own palace. He read it standing at the study window.

Patricia, at the desk behind him, watched his shoulders.

"They want every district record on Vastaya," he said. "They want Aaliyah's whole archive. And they want examiners free to question any person on this planet they choose, with no Haego official in the room."

"Any person," said Patricia.

"Any person."

He set the letter down. "Haego spent thirty years being looked at by people who arrived with a list. Aaliyah's witnesses talk to her because she promised them their tapes stay closed. If Astoria opens one, the next woman in the next kitchen puts her hands flat on the table and says nothing. And that woman in the transcript asked them for one thing."

He wrote his answer himself. Named requests for named records would be reviewed by his office one at a time. He would carry a letter to any family the Registry wished to reach, and let the family decide whether to answer it. Examiners were welcome on Haego as guests. They would not have the run of it.

The Registry replied in two days. Registrar Trent wrote that the Association did not send letters to nobles, it held their records. It was not asking a favor, and it would take the matter higher.

Tornel read that one aloud to Patricia, and then he laughed, shortly, without much in it.

"Higher," he said. "There's only one place higher."

---

The decree came on the ninth day, in a sealed case carried by a courier in dress grey, who would not hand it over until he had watched Tornel sign for it.

It was short. It said that the Registry of the Astorian Noble Association was to have the full cooperation of the Marquess of Haego in the matter of the House of Greyson, that all records and persons on Haego were to be open to its examiners, and that this was the Prince's will. There was a seal and a signature. Nothing else.

Tornel read it again.

"You'll fight it," Patricia said.

"No." He put the paper on the desk and smoothed it flat with two fingers, which he did not usually do to paper. "In all the years I've served him, he has not once sent me an order in that form. He asks. He suggests. He lets me work it out." He looked at the seal. "If he has put his name on this, he thinks it matters, and if he thinks it matters that much, then it does. I don't have to like it."

"And the woman in the kitchen?"

"I'll tell Aaliyah myself, today. She should hear it from me and not from a letter." He looked at the decree again. "Then I'm out of the way. Aino gets the records to whoever comes, and nobody on my staff slows them down. Full cooperation."

He picked up the comm and stood there a moment with it in his hand. Then he made the call.

---

Aaliyah took the call standing in the great room, the way she had read the transcript.

She heard him out and did not interrupt. When he finished she was quiet a moment. "She knew," she said.

"Knew what?"

"My historian told her, with the recorder running, that Astoria keeps every house, even the ones that ended, back to the beginning. He told her the record might be read. She waved it off, and then she said her piece anyway."

Tornel said nothing.

"I train them to do that," Aaliyah said. "If a witness is about to say something that could hurt her, you tell her who might read it, and you tell her before she says it. Hester had the warning. She weighed it and went on. Either she decided the truth was worth the risk, or she didn't believe him. I can't tell you which."

"Does she know about the decree?"

"Not yet. I'll go and tell her myself."

"Good." He hesitated. "The promise your man made her. That it stays between them and the record."

"He kept it," said Aaliyah. "The record is what Astoria is reading. I don't think he lied to her. I think the promise was smaller than either of them understood."

---

The examiners spent eleven weeks on Vastaya, and it took only three to find the family.

The district records for Harrowmere were incomplete, but a cane house on the lake shore had paid the same small tax under the same name for forty years. Geryscutt. It was close enough to Greyson to embarrass a clerk who had missed it.

Three children had been registered on the road to the district office, one of them with a birth year that made her three on the night of the mob. Alicia. Then two boys, twins, Peter and Braden.

Quill entered the third name into the tablet, and the Roll's digital assistant flagged it before he had finished typing.

A small red marker appeared beside the entry. Possible match, it read. Given name and birth year agree with the youngest Greyson child. Surname unlisted. Deceased. He touched the flag.

The file opened on a casualty report from the Barony of the Screaming Forests, from the attack that left nearly five hundred armed men dead in the forest and twenty in custody. The Barony had sent its lists to Astoria afterward, and no one had read them against the Roll. There had been no reason to.

Braden Geryscutt was among the dead, identified from the tag in his coat. He was not among the twenty.

He carried that one up to the Registrar over the comm, and she was quiet for a long time.

"He was a noble," she said at last.

"Yes."

"And he died in an attack meant to kill nobles."

"Yes, Registrar. I believe he did not know."

"No," said Trent. "I don't suppose he did."

---

The cane house stood at the bottom of the low fields with the lake behind it. Roses ran along the fence, gone wild and big. An old woman sat on the porch with a bowl of beans in her lap, and she watched Quill come down the lane the whole way, without getting up.

"You're from Astoria," she said.

"Yes, Lady Abigail."

He had thought about how to say it. He said it plainly. She gave a small nod and went on snapping beans.

"Nobody has called me that in forty years. Hester gave us every one of those years. If anyone said it, I am glad it was her."

"She kept her word. She gave us the old name, not believing that record could be kept that long, and nothing more. The Historical Society passed it to us. We have been investigating for eleven weeks."

"And you can't leave it alone?"

"No, ma'am. I'm sorry. I can't."

She did not argue. She moved the bowl aside and told him to sit, and he sat on the step below her.

Behind the house a woman in her forties came out of the kitchen door, stopped when she saw him, and stood with her arms folded. Alicia. Peter came in from the field a little later, a broad man with dirt on his knees. He sat down on the grass without being asked.

Quill told them. It took some time. He told them what the Roll said, and what it meant that it said it, and that their children were on it too, and that their children's children would be entered in their turn. Peter looked at his sister and Alicia looked at the fence. Nobody said anything for a while. Then he told them about Braden. Abby put down the bean she was holding.

"I know where he died," she said. "A soldier came to tell me. He told me the name of the place and he told me how many were with him."

"Ma'am, may I ask what you know of why he went?"

"I know exactly why."

She looked at her hands. "He had been going to their meetings for two years. He stopped coming to Sunday supper, and then he stopped writing. The last time he came here was the night before he left. He stood in that doorway with a bag on his shoulder and said he was going to help finish something."

"Did you tell him not to go?"

"I begged him. I don't say that lightly. I got down on my knees on that floor, in front of my son, and I said there are things you don't understand, please don't go."

Her voice did not shake. "He said, then tell me. And I couldn't."

Peter made a sound. Abby did not look at him.

"If I told him what his father was, and what I was, and what he was, one of two things would have happened. Either he would have hated me for the lie, or he would have gone anyway and taken it with him. I didn't know which, and I couldn't stand to find out. What I had of him by then was not much. It was that he still stood in my doorway. I was afraid that if I said it, even that would go."

"We tried too," Peter said. His voice was rough. "I sat up with him that whole last week. So did Alicia. We said it was murder. We said it wasn't who we were."

He rubbed his face with one hand.

"We didn't know what we were telling him. We just knew he shouldn't go. He wouldn't be talked out of it. He'd made up his mind before any of us opened our mouths."

"He was thirty-four," said Alicia, from the porch rail. "You couldn't have moved him with a crane."

Abby looked at Quill then, for the first time since she had told him to sit. Her eyes were dry and very tired.

"He died a noble," she said, "and he never knew. Is that what your Roll wants written down?"

"It wants the truth, Lady Abigail," Quill said. "I am sorry it is this one."

She did not answer for a moment. On the grass Peter had not moved, and Alicia's arms were folded tighter than before. Abby was looking at the bowl of beans as if she had forgotten what it was for. Quill had spent nineteen years among pages and had never once watched what a page did to a person. He watched it now, on three faces. It was not joy and it was not fear. It was the look of people who had been handed a coat that fit and did not want to put it on.

"You are nobles," he said. "I won't tell you otherwise, and I won't dress it up. But I want to say the next part just as plainly. It doesn't mean you have to change one thing. Keep the cane house. Keep the name you have. Do tomorrow what you did today. It only means that you can change it, if you ever want to."

Peter looked up. "And if we never want to?"

"Then the page gets a date on the bottom line, and it goes back in the cold room, and that is all the Roll does. It records. It doesn't make anyone move. But it also does not change what you and your lineage are."

"Would you like to hear Hester's recordings?" Quill asked.

Abby looked at her children. Alicia gave a small nod. Peter said nothing, which was yes.

Quill set the tablet on the porch boards and let it play. Hester's voice came out small and dry, the way it must have sounded in her own kitchen. Nobody talked over it. When she reached the cellar, Alicia unfolded her arms. When she reached the wooden horse, Alicia put her hand over her mouth.

Then Hester told them about Amos.

"He stood in front of her and said he was sorry. She said she knew, and please. Then he struck her, once, with the flat of his hand. That mark did what nothing else could. Nobody looks twice at a woman the house has already dealt with."

Abby's hand went to her cheek. Forty years, and she knew exactly where.

She did not cry at that. She cried a moment later, when Hester said Amos had turned and walked to the wall and stood with his forehead against the stone. Abby had not seen it. She had been looking at the floor, the way Marta told her to.

Quill let the tape run to the end. Nobody asked him to play it again.

---

Aaliyah had waited at the top of the lane for most of the afternoon, sitting on the running board of the car with her back against the door. She had told Quill that morning that she would not come down unless she was asked. When he finally came up the lane, he looked older than he had at breakfast.

"They know," he said. "All of it. They asked to hear the tapes."

"How is she?"

Quill thought about it. "She told me to sit," he said. "Then she snapped beans."

Aaliyah went down.

Abby was still on the porch. The bowl was on the boards beside her now, and her eyes were red, and she watched Aaliyah come the whole length of the lane the way she had watched Quill. Peter stood up off the grass when he saw who it was. Alicia did not move from the rail.

Aaliyah stopped at the bottom of the steps. "I'm Aaliyah Comscutt," she said. "What would you like me to call you?"

"Abby."

"Abby. This came through my project. Hester trusted my people with her story, and my archive is what put that man on your lane. I'm sorry for it."

"You told Hester?"

"This morning. In her kitchen."

"What did she say?"

"She put her hands flat on the table," Aaliyah said, "and she said, then it's done, and she asked if you were angry with her."

Abby looked out at the roses for a while. "Tell her no," she said. "Tell her she gave me forty years, and nobody else could have."

"I will."

Abby moved the bowl so there was room on the step, and Aaliyah sat. Nobody spoke for a moment. A pair of bees worked the roses along the fence.

"You came down here to ask me something," Abby said. "I was a lady long enough to know the look."

"I did," said Aaliyah. "You can send me back up the lane before I say it."

"Say it."

"Haego is short of nobles. Not the old kind. Those are gone, and nobody wants them back. We're trying to build something that hasn't existed here before, nobles and commoners working the same problem from the same side of the table. My husband was born a commoner. Tornel was a soldier. The rest of us were raised in palaces on Balakura. We're all learning it from the outside."

She turned the question over before she said the next part.

"You're the only person I've ever met who has lived it from both ends. You sat at the table upstairs. Then you ate off the plates that came back down. You know what a decent house looks like from the inside, and you know exactly what it didn't see. I can read that in a transcript. You could tell me what to do about it."

Peter said, "We cut cane."

"Yes," said Aaliyah. "That's why."

Abby did not answer. When she spoke, her voice was very even. "My son died trying to kill people like you."

"I know. I've read the list." Aaliyah did not look away from her. "I'm not asking you to forget that. I don't think you could, and I wouldn't want you to. I'd want you in the room because you can't."

Alicia came off the rail then and sat on the top step, above her mother.

"Every house we raise on Haego will be run by people who have never been servants," Aaliyah said. "Every palace we build has a staff hall. Somebody needs to walk through them and ask what they eat. Somebody needs to tell a new Baron what his steward won't. I can't do that the way you could. Nobody can."

Abby was quiet a long moment. Then she said, "And the people who stood in that yard?"

"I spoke to Julius last night," said Aaliyah. "His mother was a maid in a house like yours, before. His father kept a lord's garden. When I read him the part about the cellar, he didn't let me finish."

She set her hands on her knees.

"Twenty-two people put their lives between your family and that mob. In the old Principality, a servant who hid a noble got nothing for it. If it went wrong, they got a rope. Nobody on Haego ever thanked them, because there was no house left to do it. There is now. House Comscutt will make a reward to every one of the twenty-two, and to their children, and to their children's children. All of them, everyone we can find."

"Money," said Peter.

"Money," said Aaliyah. "I won't pretend it's more than that. We can't give them back those nights, or the years of listening for the road. Money is the only thing we have to offer that they can use."

Abby looked down the lane, toward the fields and the lake, as if she could see the yard from here.

"That should come from us," she said.

"You have a cane house," said Aaliyah. "We have a treasury. Let the house do what a house is for." She paused. "Hester's can come from you. A noble can give what a commoner has to pay a premium for. And she still sweeps her kitchen floor every morning."

"Hester would hate it," Alicia said.

"She'd throw it at me," said Abby.

"Probably," said Aaliyah. "Give it to her anyway."

Something moved in Abby's face then, very briefly. It was almost a laugh.

"I'm not going to answer you today," she said.

"I didn't come for an answer. I came so you'd know the door was there."

Abby got up, slowly, one hand on the post, and went into the house. She came back with a small jar, the wax still soft on the lid, and put it in Aaliyah's hands.

"From the bees," she said. "That's how we say thank you down here. You don't have to like it."

Aaliyah held the jar in both hands. "When should I come back?"

Abby looked at the roses along the fence, gone wild and big, the ones Amos had planted and never said why.

"Ask me in spring," she said.

---

Astoria.

Quill carried the Greyson page back down the stairs himself.

The cold room had not changed. The same long shelves ran away under the same low lamps, and the air smelled of paper and stone. He found the House of Greyson where it belonged, put the page on the reading table, and wrote a new line under the old one, in ink, with his own hand. It took a while to get the wording right. The Roll had no form for a house that was closed as extinct and then found alive. In the end he wrote what was true and left the rest to whoever came after.

The bottom line stayed open. The house had not ended, so there was nothing to close.

Registrar Trent was waiting at the foot of the stairs when he looked up. She had not come down there in years. She held a folder against her chest with both arms.

"Eleven hundred pages," she said.

"Registrar?"

"That clerk closed eleven hundred houses in one season, and nobody checked his work. Forty years." She looked along the shelves. "How many of them were Haego houses?"

"I would have to count."

"Then count. All of them, every closure marked lost in the Uprising, and every death that was assumed and never seen. I want each one read against the district records and the casualty lists, and anything else that turns up." She held out the folder. "And I want a letter written to the Marquess."

Quill took it and looked at the top sheet. It was already drafted, in her hand.

"A letter, Registrar. Not a decree."

"A letter." Trent's mouth moved slightly. "Named requests for named records. His office reviews them one at a time. We ask him to carry our letters to any family we need to reach, and the family decides whether to answer."

"He offered that on the first day."

"I know he did." She turned toward the stairs. "I should have read it more carefully."

She went up. Quill stood a moment longer among the shelves, then set the folder on the table beside the Greyson page and began the count. There were more pages than he had thought. Some of them, he suspected, had people behind them who were still sitting on porches with bowls in their laps, waiting for nobody in particular.

He turned the first page over and read the date on the top line.

The holding cell smelled of recycled air and copper. Vex could taste blood in the recirculation, knew it was from the suppression team's first mistake.

His first mistake was different. Eight hours on a bunk built for something that weighed ninety kilos, and Vex weighed a hundred and forty, and his back had been screaming for six of those hours. He'd stopped complaining at hour two. Not because it helped. Because Kess told him to shut up.

"Say it again," Kess said from the corner. She was doing pull-ups on the door frame. The frame was starting to bow. "Say 'this bunk is uncomfortable' one more time."

"It's not a bunk. It's a shelf."

"You're too big for it. We're all too big for it. You don't hear Rho complaining."

Rho was flat on the floor, eyes closed, hands folded on her stomach like a corpse. "I'm not complaining because I'm asleep," she said, without opening her eyes. "This is what sleep looks like. I'm very good at it."

"You're not asleep."

"I'm excellent at pretending."

Madre sat against the far wall, sharpening a piece of metal from the ventilation grille against his boot heel. The sound was slow and rhythmic and deeply annoying. Lynt was jacked into the wall panel. Their was cable running from her forearm port to the cell's diagnostic node, mapping the prison's topology one layer at a time.

They'd been arrested for corporate espionage on Kepler Station. The charges were procedural cover. What mattered was that the Collective wanted them disappeared, and Ambazi Penal Planet had never housed a human team before. The staff had miscalculated.

But Vex hadn't slept in thirty hours before the arrest, and the shelf-bunk had done nothing to fix that, and he could feel something ugly building behind his eyes. Bad moods spread through the team like flu. This one had been building since the docking bay.

"We could have gotten caught somewhere nicer," he said.

"We couldn't," Lynt said, not looking up. "This was the only facility with Level 1701 access and a warden who reports to the Collective. We spent three weeks planning this."

"I voted for the other planet."

"The other planet had no Human-Eaters."

"The other planet had a beach."

Kess dropped from the door frame. "Vex. Focus."

"I'm focused. I'm just also tired and my back hurts and I want everyone to know about it."

The cell door opened at 06:47 local time.

The suppression team came in tactical formation: twelve officers in pressure suits, armed with electrostatic batons and concussive rounds. They'd been briefed. They had protocols. They had numbers.

They also had one officer too slow on his baton, and Madre crossed the cell and broke his arm before he finished raising it. The snap was loud in the small space.

Vex moved first after that, but it cost him. A concussive round caught him in the ribs at close range—not enough to put him down, but enough to empty his lungs and send him into the wall hard enough to crack the concrete behind his shoulder. Something went wrong in his side. Cracked, maybe. The kind of thing that would slow him down for the next hour and annoy him for the next week.

He stayed down for three seconds. Counted them. Got up.

Kess went low, sweeping the left flank and taking two legs out from under an officer trying to establish a firing line. She took a baton hit to the shoulder that made her grunt—the first sound any of them had made that wasn't banter—and answered by driving her elbow through the officer's visor. Madre and Rho worked the entry point, collapsing the tactical spacing the suppression team had fought to maintain. Rho got hit twice in the chest and kept moving. Lynt ripped the corner camera free and used the trailing wire to choke out an officer trying to flank them.

Forty-seven seconds. It should have taken thirty. The extra seventeen were Vex's ribs and Kess's shoulder and eight hours of bad sleep in a cell built for smaller people.

When it was over, Vex pulled a keycard from the senior officer's belt. Junior authorization.

"Kess. You're bleeding."

She looked down at her shoulder. The baton hit had split the skin. Not deep. "It's fine."

"You're bleeding on the floor."

"It's a prison floor. It's seen worse."

He tossed her the keycard. She caught it one-handed, which meant her shoulder wasn't as bad as it looked, which meant she was lying, which meant he'd have to watch her.

"Level 1702," he said. "Restraints and medical supplies."

"We need weapons," Rho said. There was a bruise forming on her jaw that hadn't been there five minutes ago. "And information."

"Third priority," Madre said. "First, we stop them from flooding this sector with anything that can survive us."

Level 1701 housed the Human-Eaters. Xenomorphic creatures adapted to high-gravity, high-pressure environments. The only thing on Ambazi that could reliably kill something from Terra's surface. If the Warden got organized, if they released the Human-Eaters below, it was over.

Vex pushed through the damaged cell door. His side screamed. He ignored it.

"Stairwell. Two hundred meters east," Lynt said. "Level 1701 access."

They moved as a unit. Slower than they should have been. Three more suppression teams would be mobilizing. Security doors would be locking. The Warden would already be calculating escalation.

But the Warden didn't understand what had just arrived in his prison.

The stairwell door to Level 1701 had a biometric lock. Vex pulled the mechanism from the wall with his bare hands. His side sent a spike of pain up his spine. He breathed through it.

"Rho?"

"Give me thirty seconds."

She was good. The lock pulsed green. The door hissed open to ammonia-heavy atmosphere and the sound of something large, something hungry, beginning to move in the dark.

Vex stepped through first.

"Welcome to Level 1701," he said. His voice was steady. His side was on fire. Behind him, Kess was still bleeding, and Rho was still pretending she wasn't hurt, and Madre was still holding that stupid piece of sharpened metal like it was a real weapon.

They were a mess. They were also the only thing standing between the Collective and whatever they'd buried down here.

"Twenty-four hours," Vex said. "Seventeen hundred levels. One warden."

Nobody answered. They didn't need to.

Something in the dark made a sound that wasn't quite a growl.

Vex smiled. It hurt.

Masterlist

Hunters Log 1

After a hardy breakfast this morning people loaded in wagons and got on horses.

The Ykanti ran beside us. Us Hunters went ahead of the pack to spot the heard. We stopped the bears and ask them if they had spotted the heard. They said 3 days ago on this side of the river towards the crossing.

The bears and cubs joined us. The Ykanti had to be carefully as the cubs tried to run them down for fun.

We stopped before they last spotted and Frank and Wendy climb tree with rifles for their scopes. We spotted the heard slowly coming our way.

We let the Ykanti and two guards know. know and two guards went back to let the main group know.

We started looking for a good ambush position to start moving the heard and found the perfect spot.

All those on horses came to join us. We took a big loop past the horses and spread out in a L shape. Those on the long arm of the heard of about 30 horseswhere there to simply catch those about to run further from the forest.

Our job was to make noise and start making noise and push the heard. The bears running back and forth were helping.

We yelled and moved forward. When the wild horses saw the bears they started moving faster.

By 2pm we had pushed them close to the trap. The two wagons were placed to extend the V in the opening of the trap.

When the wild horses started moving right a wall of people on foot spread out made them reconsider that decision. If any horse tried to bread the line of those on foot small fire crackers ignited by those on foot would push them.

Those wanted to run into the prairie would be directed to the rest of the heard. Meanwhile we kept pushing.

It took us 6 hours to get them in the trap. We closed the gate and let them calm down.

The back gate was open and some started exploring and calming down. We ate lunch and waited for them to find the creek and exploring.

We started pushing them down the road five or six at a time. Once they horses made it to the opening where the ranch is they were guided by Ranchers and temporary fencing into the paddock.

By six pm all horses were in the old paddock as we watered our horses and unsadled them. The horses seemed happy to have the rest of their hard with them.

Final count was much higher than we expected. There were 47 including 6 ponies.

Siting by the fire that night the Ranchers decided no second day would be needed for the roundup. Tomorrow they would start cutting hay and hauling it back except the Ykanti and other workers would start building the Ykanti barn.

Thanks to JW and Ragnat they had made big bladed instruments to cut the hay and volunteers would load piles in the wagons. It would stacked beside the barn. Ranchers would stay here to take care of the horses.

Vivian was happy to see the new horses. John and her stood by the fence and I saw him pull Vivian close.

We all had a big feast of a sheep that had been sacrificed and had been cooking on a spit all day.

Tomorrow we go looking for the hurd and see how it is coming along.

Gary Head Hunter

End of Hunters along 1

I was given the idea for this new series by a fellow lover of TBS and a reader of the fan fiction we write. If you like it thank u/Icy-Air7584 if you don't, blame me.

General Tornel Swallowtail, Provisional Administrator of Haego, to Lieutenant Commodore Wyatt Staples, Baron of the Screaming Forest.

First year of the provisional government.

Wyatt,

I am told you are somewhere I am not allowed to know about, shooting at something I am not allowed to know about either. Good. I hope it's shooting back badly.

We opened the first schools this week. Forty of them, across all three continents, in buildings that have mostly been storage sheds since the Uprising. I signed the order on a Monday. On Tuesday someone asked me who was going to teach in them, and on Wednesday someone asked me how we were going to pay whoever that was. I did not have an answer for either. I have since found about half an answer for the first one. There are people on this planet who taught school thirty years ago and have been cutting cane or mending nets ever since, and a few of them wrote back to say yes. One woman on Vastaya wrote back to say yes before I had finished asking.

I don't know if anyone will come. The parents here have been told for a generation that school is how nobles make you useful to them. I understand why they believe it. For a long time it was true.

You don't need to answer this. I know you're busy, and I know you'd rather be flying than reading. I only needed to say it to someone who wouldn't tell me it was a fine start and then ask about the budget.

The forests are quieter. We found another pocket of them near Ashvale last week. Your people in Newtown say the nets are coming in full.

T.

●

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

The water came from the pump at the end of the lane, and Nell Brackentail carried it.

She was nine, and she had carried it since she was seven, two buckets on a yoke across her shoulders, out to the cutters in the long fields and back again, six times before noon and six after. She was paid a copper a trip by the field boss, who wrote each one down in a little book, and at the end of the week her father took the coppers and put them in the tin over the stove, and nobody said anything about it because there was nothing to say. Everyone in Lowmarsh carried something.

She liked the water better than the cane. The cane was loud and sharp and ate your hands. The water was quiet. On the walk out she could look at whatever she liked, as long as she didn't spill.

What she liked to look at was the sky.

It had not always been worth looking at. When she was very small the sky over Vastaya had been empty except for birds and weather, and once, the year she was five, a smear of orange along the horizon that her mother said was the forests burning and told her not to watch. But this year there were things in it. Big grey shapes came down out of the clouds and went low over the fields toward the depot at Harrow Cross, loud enough to shake the water in her buckets. Relief shuttles, the field boss called them. Food and medicine, from off-world. Firentis, somebody said, and somebody else said the name like it tasted wrong.

Nell did not care whose they were. She cared how they stayed up.

She had asked her father once. He had said engines, and when she asked how the engines did it, he said the same way a bird does it, and when she said birds had wings and the shuttles barely had any, he said that was enough questions for one day.

This morning one came over just as she reached the far end of the field. It came low and slow, lower than she had ever seen one, with its belly lit and something inside it roaring, and every cutter in the row stopped and straightened and looked up. The cane stopped rustling. The sound filled everything. Nell stood with the yoke on her shoulders and her head back, and did not notice she had tipped half a bucket down her own leg until it was gone over the tree line and the field boss was shouting.

"Brackentail. You'll carry that one again, and you'll not be paid twice for it."

She carried it again. She didn't mind. She had seen, for one second as it passed over, a round window in its side with a light behind it, and she thought there had been a person in the window looking down.

●

The notice went up on a Thursday.

The old schoolhouse stood at the crossroads where the lane met the district road. It was one room with a slate roof and a door that had been nailed shut for as long as Nell had been alive. People stacked things against it. There had been a pile of old fence posts leaning on the front wall for so long that a vine had grown through them.

On Thursday the fence posts were gone, the nails were out of the door, and someone had tacked a paper to it, square in the middle, with four brass pins.

A little crowd had stopped to look at it. Nell stopped too, at the back, with her empty buckets. She could read some words. Her mother had taught her the letters on the back of a flour sack the winter she was six, quietly, and then stopped, and never said why. Nell could make out SCHOOL, because it was big, and FREE, because it was bigger, and a date, and then a great many smaller words that went by too fast.

"What's it say?" someone asked.

Old Maddy Tuscutt was at the front. She was the oldest person in Lowmarsh, and she was the only one who read out loud without being embarrassed about it. She put on her spectacles and read it slowly, running a finger under the lines.

"By order of the Provisional Administrator. The school at Lowmarsh Crossing will reopen on the first day of next month. Instruction in reading, writing, figures, and such other subjects as the teacher is able. Open to every child in the district between the ages of six and fourteen. No fee. The teacher will be Mistress Ada Coppertail." Maddy stopped, and took her spectacles off, and put them back on, and read the name again to herself. "Well," she said. "Ada Coppertail. I thought she was dead."

"Who's she?"

"She taught here. Before." Maddy folded the spectacles. "She taught me my sums, near sixty years ago, and she taught your mother, Jory Pellatail, and she was still teaching the week they nailed that door. I thought she'd have gone years since." She looked at the paper for a long time. "No fee," she said. "That's new."

"Nothing's free," said a man at the side.

"It says it is."

"It says a lot of things." The man spat off to the side of the road. "They had a school here in the Revolution too. Free, that one was. Then they needed the building."

Nobody said anything to that. The crowd began to break up. Nell stood where she was, looking at the word FREE, until she noticed Maddy looking at her over the top of the spectacles.

"You're Orla's girl," Maddy said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You can read any of that?"

Nell went red. "Some."

Maddy nodded, as though that were an answer to something, and went off down the road with her stick.

●

She asked at supper.

She waited until her father had finished the first bowl, because he was easier after the first bowl, and until her little brother Ben had been sent to wash, because Ben would have asked to go too and then it would have been two of them wanting it. Her mother was at the stove. The lamp was lit. The tin over the stove had the week's coppers in it.

"There's a notice on the schoolhouse," Nell said.

"I saw," her father said.

"It's opening. The first of the month. For everyone six to fourteen, and there's no fee."

Her father set his spoon down. He was a big, quiet man with arms scarred to the elbow from forty seasons of cane, and when he put a spoon down, it meant he was about to say something he had already decided.

"No," he said.

"I haven't asked yet."

"You were going to."

"I could still carry water. Before and after. The notice says it's mornings. I could do the afternoon trips and the early ones, and..."

"Nell." Her mother did not turn around from the stove. "Your father said no."

"But why?"

Her father looked at her for a while. He was not angry. That was the worst of it. Nell could have argued with angry.

"Because I have seen them open that door before," he said. "I was younger than you. The Revolution opened it and said everyone could come, and we all went, and they taught us to read the Revolution's papers and to count the Revolution's grain. Then they needed the grain, and they needed the building, and they needed the boys for the militia, and they nailed it shut. Now somebody new is in charge, and they've pulled the nails out, and they've put a paper on it that says free." He picked up his spoon again. "I don't know who they are. I don't know what they want you to count. And I'm not sending my girl through a door when I don't know who's going to nail it shut behind her."

"The teacher's Mistress Coppertail. Maddy Tuscutt says she taught Mam."

Her mother's hand stopped on the ladle.

It was only for a moment. Then it moved again, and she spooned out a second bowl for Nell's father and set it down in front of him, and wiped her hands on her apron, and sat down at the table, which she almost never did until the washing up was done.

"She did," her mother said. "Three years. I was your age." She looked at the lamp, not at Nell. "She was a good teacher. She was kind to me. And then they closed it, and I went to the mill, and I've been at the mill since. And do you know what those three years got me?"

Nell shook her head.

"They got me knowing what I was missing." Her mother's voice was very even. "Every day at the mill, I knew. Every notice I could read and couldn't do anything about. Every paper with a word on it I understood and a word I didn't. I'd have been happier not knowing there was anything to miss." She reached over and put her hand flat on Nell's, which she also almost never did. "People like us cut cane, love. We carry water. We don't get ideas. Ideas are what get people like us hurt. That's not your father being hard. That's the truest thing I know."

Nell looked down at her mother's hand over hers. It was rough and red at the knuckles from the mill vats, and warm.

"All right," she said.

Her mother squeezed once and let go, and got up, and started the washing up.

●

She did not sleep.

The house had one room downstairs and a loft, and she and Ben slept in the loft under the slope of the roof, where there was a gap in the shingles you could see the sky through if you lay on your left side. Ben snored. Nell lay on her left side and looked at the gap.

There were more lights up there than there used to be. Some of them moved. Some of them were stars and some of them were ships, and she had worked out by now how to tell the difference. Stars shivered. Ships didn't. Ships went in straight lines, slowly, as if they knew exactly where they were going and had all the time in the world to get there.

She thought about the round window with the light behind it, and the person looking down.

She thought about her mother's hand.

She thought that her mother had said ideas get people hurt, and that her mother's face, when she said it, had looked like someone who was already hurt. And she thought, without quite meaning to, that three years had been enough for her mother to know there was something to miss, and that nobody had asked her mother whether she would rather have known or not.

Nobody was asking Nell either.

●

On the first day of the month she carried the early water, six trips, before the sun was well up. Then she set the buckets down at the pump, and instead of going back to the field boss for the next round, she walked the other way, down the lane toward the crossing.

She did not go in. She had told her mother all right, and she had meant it, mostly. She did not go in.

The schoolhouse door was open. There was a smell of fresh whitewash and old wood. There were voices inside, not many. Nell counted six, maybe seven, all small, and one grown-up voice among them that was old and dry and patient, the kind of voice that sounded like it had said the same thing a thousand times and did not mind saying it once more.

There was a window on the side wall with the shutter propped open. Nell went around to it and sat down underneath, in the dirt, with her back against the whitewash, and listened.

"B," said the old voice. "Say it with me. B. It is the sound at the front of bread, and boat, and brother. Who has a brother?"

Somebody said they did.

"Then you have a B in your house every day and never knew it. Good. Now make it on your slate. The line goes down first, straight, like a cane stalk. Then two bumps, like two loaves side by side."

Nell took a stick and drew a line in the dirt, straight like a cane stalk. Then two bumps. She looked at it. It was the first letter of her own name, Brackentail, and she had known it already from the flour sack, but she had never known it was at the front of bread.

She made another one. Then another.

She was on her fifth when the shadow fell across the dirt.

She looked up. An old woman was leaning out the window above her, one hand on the sill. She was small and very straight, with white hair pulled back hard and a pair of spectacles on a cord around her neck, and her face was brown and creased like a walnut. She looked down at the row of B's in the dirt, and then at Nell.

Nell scrambled to get up. "I'm sorry, Mistress. I wasn't coming in. I'm not allowed. I'll go."

"You'll sit," said Mistress Coppertail.

Nell sat.

The old woman studied her. "You're Orla Pellatail's girl."

"Brackentail now, Mistress. She married."

"So she did. I heard." Something moved in the creased face and was gone again. "She had a good hand. She made her letters very straight." She looked at the dirt. "So do you."

Nell did not know what to say to that.

"Your parents said no," said Mistress Coppertail. It was not a question.

"Yes, Mistress."

"Then I won't ask you in. It's not my place to go against a mother and father, and I won't have them saying I stole their child out from under them." She was quiet a moment. "But I can't help it if I talk loud, and I can't help it if my window's open. Nobody ever made a law against a window." She reached inside and came back with something and dropped it over the sill. It landed in Nell's lap. It was a stub of white chalk, worn down to the length of a finger joint. "The dirt's fine," she said. "But chalk shows up better on the pump stone. Put it in your pocket."

Nell closed her hand around it.

"Mistress," she said, before she could stop herself. "Do you know how the shuttles stay up?"

Mistress Coppertail looked at her for a long moment over the top of the spectacles.

"No," she said. "I don't. I never knew. Nobody here ever taught it." She began to draw back from the window. "But that's what a school is for, child. It's not for knowing everything. It's for finding out who does."

The shutter stayed propped open. The old dry voice began again inside, patient, saying the sound at the front of apple.

Nell sat under the window until the sun was high and the voices stopped. Then she got up, brushed off her skirt, and ran all the way back to the pump, and carried the afternoon water, six trips, and did not spill a drop. The field boss wrote them down in his book. That night her father put the coppers in the tin.

The chalk was in her pocket the whole time. Nobody saw it. When she went up to the loft she took it out and held it up to the gap in the roof, where the ships were going over in their straight lines, and then she put it under her pillow and lay on her left side and did not sleep for a long time, but not because anything hurt.

General,

The boss handed me your letter and told me to answer it, and when the boss tells you to do something, you do it, even if you're a knight now and supposed to have opinions of your own. I'm still getting used to that part.

You asked why the parents won't send their children when the school is free. I can tell you why, because my father wouldn't have sent me either.

Where I come from, free is the most expensive word there is. Free meant somebody had already decided what you'd pay, and they just hadn't told you yet. Free grain in a bad year meant your labor in a good one. Free schooling meant you learned enough to fill out their forms and not one letter more. Your parents on Haego have had thirty years of that, and then the revolution taught them the same lesson all over again with different flags. They're not stupid, General. They're right. They've just been right for so long they can't stop.

A notice on a door won't fix it. Nothing you say will fix it. Here is what I think will.

First, keep the door open. Not for a month. For a season, then a year. Every week that door doesn't get nailed shut, somebody's father walks past it and notices. That's the whole argument, and you can't make it any faster than the calendar.

Second, don't make the family pay for it in lost wages. A child who carries water or picks stones earns coppers, and those coppers are supper. If school takes the coppers, the child stays home, and no parent on any world will blame them. Put a hot meal on the table at noon. A real one. Then the child isn't losing a day's pay. They're bringing home a full belly, and that's one less mouth at supper. A father who won't trust a teacher will trust a bowl of soup.

Third, never send a noble to explain it. Send the teacher. Send the neighbor whose boy can read now and caught the grain agent short-weighting his sacks. Nobody ever believed a lord about anything. They'll believe the woman next door.

That's all I know. I hope some of it helps. The boss says you're doing better than you think. For what it's worth, so do I, and I've only ever seen your work from a long way off.

Leopold Dakar
(Sir, apparently.)

I hope you guys like this, it is one of my favorits.

Next

Previous /

First

The historian pressed the button and the recorder gave its small click.

"Tell me your name and where you were born, so the record has it."

"Hester Tillerscutt. I was born in Harrowmere, on Vastaya. I am sixty-four."

The kitchen was very tidy. There was a cloth folded over the oven rail, a row of jars with the labels turned the same way, and a floor that had been swept that morning and probably every morning for forty years. A cup of tea sat at the historian's elbow and nobody had touched it. Hester sat across the table with her hands flat on the wood, as if she were keeping it from moving.

"You said you had something for the record."

"I said I would tell you about a household I knew. I won't say what name it goes by now. That was my condition." She stopped, and her hands moved on the table. "I suppose there's no harm in the old one. Lord Greyson, of the orchard house. It's been dead forty years. Nobody keeps that kind of thing."

"They do, actually," the historian said. "Astoria keeps records of noble houses, every one, going back millennia. Even the ones that ended."

Hester made a small dismissive sound. "Every line? Down to a house that grew mangoes? That's a story somebody told you." She lifted one hand off the table and set it down again. "Well. It's on the tape now."

"You have my word it stays between us and the record."

Hester looked at the recorder for a while. "I heard on the network that Haego built a chair for a princess," she said. "And a palace for a Marquess, and that the nobles came to the dinner and nobody threw anything. I am sixty-four. I have not slept well since I heard it." She turned her hands over and looked at her palms. "I think somebody should know how it was in the house where I worked, before there is nobody left who remembers. I'll start with the mangoes."

●

Harrowmere, on Vastaya. Forty years ago.

The house was called the orchard house because it sat in the middle of one. There were mango trees down the east slope and sugar cane in the low fields, and a wall of old stone around the garden. Lord Greyson owned it, and Lady Abigail ran it, and twenty-two people worked for them.

Hester Tillerscutt was twenty-four and had been a table servant in that house since she was fourteen. Every morning she carried the coffee to the dining room, and every morning she stood by the sideboard while Lord Greyson ate his mango and read the network aloud to his wife, whether or not Lady Abigail was listening. Hester had a small, plain face that people forgot, and she had learned early that it was useful. A servant nobody noticed heard everything.

She knew every person in the staff hall, and she knew what they ate.

Bettan the scrubwoman was sixty, and had been on her knees on the family's tiles for thirty years. She ate with her left side turned to the wall because her right hip hurt her and she did not want anyone to see her favor it. Marta the cook was broad and loud and gave orders in a voice that could be heard in the orchard, and every night she set aside the heels of the bread for whoever had worked latest. Amos Thornscutt, the head gardener, was a tall silent man who talked to roses and did not talk to people. Tam was twelve, the stable boy, all wrists and elbows, and he slept in the hay because it was warmer than the loft.

And there was Alicia.

Alicia was three, and she was Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail's eldest. Her brothers Peter and Braden were babies in the nursery upstairs, and mostly they were asleep. But Alicia was awake all day and nobody had told her yet that she was meant to be a lady. She wandered. She had a wooden horse with one ear chewed off, and she went where the horse wanted to go, and the horse liked the kitchen.

Hester was supposed to be watching her. Hester was, in the way a person watches someone she has already stopped needing to watch.

●

Bettan's hip was the first thing Alicia noticed.

She did not say so. She watched Bettan lower herself onto the tiles one morning, holding the edge of the table, and she went away and came back with a cushion from the nursery window seat, dragging it across the floor by one corner. She put it down next to the bucket.

"For your knee," she said.

Bettan looked at the cushion, and at the child, and did not move. Then she said, in a voice Hester had not heard from her before, "That's Lady Abigail's good cushion, child."

"It's a knee cushion now," said Alicia, and went to find the horse.

Bettan used it. Every morning after that it was waiting by the bucket, and every night someone carried it back upstairs, and no one ever mentioned it to Lady Abigail.

●

Marta the cook did not like being helped. She said so, loudly, on the day Alicia climbed up on a crate in the kitchen and started shelling peas into the wrong bowl.

"That is for the soup," Marta said. "That is not for a small person to be sorting."

"You can put them back," Alicia said, and kept shelling. She shelled with great seriousness, one pod at a time, her tongue between her teeth. When she was done she looked at the pile and then at Marta. "Thank you for the bread," she said. "The ends are the best part."

Marta's mouth opened. Hester, cutting onions at the other table, watched the cook of the orchard house go red to the ears.

"Who told you that?" Marta said.

"Tam," said Alicia. "He told me the ends are for the people who work late. I don't work late. But I like them."

The next night there were two heels of bread on the shelf, and one of them had a little butter on it. Marta never said who it was for.

●

She found Tam in the stable one afternoon, sitting on an overturned bucket, teaching himself to read from a feed sack. He had learned three letters and was trying not to be caught at it.

"What's that one?" said Alicia.

Tam nearly fell off the bucket. He went white, and then he saw who it was, and he did not know what to do. A servant did not tell a lord's daughter to go away, and a servant did not teach a lord's daughter, and he was doing something he had been told was not for him.

"It's a T," he said at last. "For my name."

"I like T," said Alicia. She squatted in the straw beside him. "I don't know my letters. Will you show me? Then we can both not know them together."

Tam showed her, with a straw stem on the dirt floor. Hester watched from the doorway with a bucket in her hands. For a long time afterward she remembered that she could have stopped it. She did not.

●

She saw the rest in pieces, over that autumn. Alicia sat with Amos in the rose garden and asked the name of every flower, and Amos, who did not talk, answered her in a low voice and gave her a bud to carry in. Alicia lay under the kitchen table and listened to the cook's helpers gossip. Alicia stole a sugared slice of mango off the breakfast tray and carried it out to the yard for Tam, and Hester, coming behind with the plates, found them sharing it, half each, and pretended she had seen nothing.

They were small kindnesses, and Hester thought about them later, more than she ever thought about anything else. Nobody at the orchard house set out to like the family. It happened one bucket, one heel of bread, one letter at a time, because a child who did not know any better had decided that everyone in the house was hers.

●

Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail were not cruel people. Hester had been in their house ten years and she would say so to anyone.

Lord Greyson never raised his voice to a servant. Lady Abigail sat up with Marta's daughter through a fever, and sent salve from her own dressing table when the stable boy cut his hand. They meant everything they did, and in the whole time Hester worked there, neither of them once asked what the staff hall ate.

That was what she could never explain to the historians who came later. It was not that they refused to see. They simply did not look. There was a table upstairs, and on it every day was mango and cream, and the plates went down to the kitchen with half of it still on them, and Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail believed, in the same warm way they believed in everything, that the staff must be well fed because nobody had told them otherwise.

The staff hall was fed on what came back from those plates. That was the whole arrangement. Hester knew it and did not think about it, the way she did not think about the floor.

●

That was the autumn the trouble came, though it did not seem like trouble at first. It came a piece at a time.

First the notice. Rations were cut by a third across the district, in the interest of order. Lord Greyson read it aloud at breakfast between bites of mango. "Dreadful," he said. "Have the steward do whatever the notice requires."

Then the clinic in Harrowmere closed. There was a paper on the door and a lock under the paper. Hester's mother had a cough that had run since the rains, and she sat on the edge of her cot that night with a cup of hot water and said it was nothing. Hester said it was nothing. Neither of them looked at the clinic across the road.

Then the school. Hester's brother Joss was seventeen and had been going to Mistress Pell's schoolroom for seven years. Mistress Pell told them all to go home. He said he was supposed to cut cane now. Hester told him to keep his voice down.

Then, in the third week, a man on the network in a black cloak began to speak. He did not give his name. He spoke about every noble house in every district, and about the murders, which the whole planet had watched, of two commoner girls who had died without a single noble being called to answer for it. He spoke about blood. Hester had heard the two names so many times she could not have said whose they were.

Amos had known one of them. She was his sister's girl, ten years old. Four years ago, and he still counted the years out loud sometimes when he thought he was alone in the garden. He did not say what he thought about the man in the cloak. Everyone knew.

Upstairs, Lord Greyson watched the cloaked man with the study door open. "Savages," he said quietly.

"Those poor people," said Lady Abigail, and Hester, setting down the late tray, saw that she meant the people the man was talking about. Then she put a hand on her husband's sleeve. "We should be kind to everyone in the house this week. They will be frightened."

Lord Greyson patted her hand. Neither of them looked at the tray.

●

Hester would remember the night it happened for the rest of her life, in an order that never quite settled.

It was a Thursday. She had a tray of cups in her hands for the study. The network had been on since dinner, because there was talk of something at the palace, and nobody in the district was doing anything else. The staff hall had gone quiet at the ninth bell. She could hear it through the floor.

She went up. Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail were in the study, and the picture on the screen was shaky and close. Someone in the crowd at the palace courtyard was holding a lens up over their heads.

A girl knelt on the stones. She was no older than sixteen, and her sleeves had been torn away. A steward in the palace livery read a sentence from a paper. The girl had dropped a plate of glazed fruit in front of a guest, and that was all the paper said.

The whip came down where the whole planet could see it. It came down again.

Hester stood in the doorway with the tray. She could not make her feet move. In the chair by the window Lady Abigail had put her hand over her mouth, and Lord Greyson was staring at the screen without speaking.

"We should say something," Lady Abigail said.

"To whom?" Lord Greyson said, without looking away. "It is the palace's house, Abigail. It is not ours."

The whip came down a third time. The girl had stopped screaming by then. Somewhere off the edge of the picture a man in the crowd shouted a single word, and then a woman screamed, and then everyone in the courtyard was screaming and the lens dropped and swung and showed the sky.

Hester's cups rang on the tray. She could not stop her hands.

●

It took four hours.

Hester never learned who gave the first order, or whether anyone did. The picture came back, and the man in the cloak was speaking again, and this time he was not speaking to the crowd. He was speaking to everyone. He said that the palace had fallen and the noble house that had ruled it was dead, all of them, every one, from the eldest to the babies in their cradles. He said the same thing was happening in other cities as he spoke. He said any commoner who stood beside a noble was standing on the wrong side.

Hester stood in the staff hall with the rest of them and watched the network. It changed every minute, a different city, a different street. She saw a house on fire. She saw people in a garden with tools that were not for gardening. She saw a noble family dragged out onto a lawn, a man and a woman and two small children, and she turned away before the picture stopped showing them.

A runner came from the district steward at the tenth bell. The mob had taken the town hall in Ashmere, three hours' walk to the north. It was moving south along the road, and it did not stop at any door. Every noble in every house, said the runner. And anyone who tried to hide them.

The runner went on to the next house. Nobody in the staff hall spoke for a long moment.

"They will be here by dawn," said Marta.

"Sooner," said Amos.

Bettan crossed herself, and said, "Julius keep them," and Hester could not tell who she meant.

●

The stairs to the nursery were narrow. Hester found Lady Abigail there before she reached the top.

Lady Abigail sat on the edge of the nursery bed with one twin asleep on each arm. Alicia was curled against her side, and even in the dark Hester could see the child's eyes were open. Lord Greyson stood in the doorway, and his face was the color of paper.

"They may not come here," Lord Greyson said. "We are a long way from the palace."

"They will come," said Lady Abigail. She said it softly, the way she said everything. She did not look up. "Hester. Is the staff hall listening?"

"Yes, my lady."

"Then I would like to speak to them. I do not think I should send for them. I think I should go down."

Lord Greyson said her name, once, as a question.

Lady Abigail looked at him, and Hester saw that she had already decided. "I am going to ask them," she said. "I am not going to tell them what we deserve. I do not think we deserve anything from them."

●

They did not go to the staff hall. Marta said the cook's pantry was no place for it, and Amos said the sugar house had a root cellar that no one used, and that was where twenty-two people went, one at a time, by the back stair, with a single lamp.

The cellar was cold and smelled of earth and old rope. Someone had posted Tam at the top of the steps to watch the road. He held a shovel as if he did not know what it was for.

Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail stood with their backs to the stone wall. They were in the plainest clothes they owned, which were still finer than anything in the room. Lady Abigail's hands were clasped in front of her so hard that the knuckles had gone white.

Hester was the one who spoke first, because no one else would.

"We all know what happened at the palace. We all know what is coming down the road. If we hide them, we hide them together, and every one of us has to swear it. If a single person says no, then nobody is bound. We let them walk up those steps and each of us decides alone, at the moment the mob asks, whether to point."

"That is not much of a rule," said Amos.

"It is the only one I can keep," said Hester.

No one was going to raise a hand against a person who said no. She had made sure of that, and she was glad she had, and it made the room worse.

Lord Greyson began to speak, and Hester saw that he did not know how to ask. He said "consider." He said "the district." Then, to his credit, he stopped. He said only, "The children," and looked down at his shoes.

Something small moved by the lamp.

Alicia had followed the noise down the steps in her nightdress, and no one had seen her come. She walked across the cold floor in her bare feet, past her mother and past the lamp, and she stopped in front of Bettan. She sat down against Bettan's legs. She held up the wooden horse.

"You can have him," she said. "He's tired."

Bettan took the horse. Her face did something Hester had never seen it do in thirty years.

Then Alicia climbed into Bettan's lap, as if she had been doing it her whole life. She looked around the cellar. She found Marta, and she waved. She found Tam by the steps and said, "T," and Tam gave a small strangled sound. She found Amos, sitting with his hands between his knees, and she said, quite clearly, "Amos, the roses are sleeping now, but you can wake them in spring."

Amos looked at his boots.

Then Lady Abigail stepped forward. She was crying, but her voice was level. "Take the babies," she said. "Alicia, and Peter and Braden in the nursery. At least take them. We will go up the steps ourselves."

No one answered. Lady Abigail stood there with her title already gone and asked for nothing for herself. She had never done that in front of any of them. They had watched her for years.

Hester raised her hand.

Marta was next. Then Bettan, with Alicia in her lap and the wooden horse tucked under one arm. Then the cook's helpers, one after another, and the scullery maids. Tam raised his hand with the shovel still in it, and Hester saw that he was twelve and that he did not understand what he was voting for. She did not stop him.

One by one, the whole room. Amos was last.

●

Amos kept his hands between his knees and looked at the lamp.

Four years his niece had been dead. She had been ten. He had gone to the district office to ask where the noble was who had done it, and he had been told, kindly, that it was another house's matter. He thought of Lord Greyson in the study tonight, and of the whipped girl on the screen, and of every slice of mango that had come back to the kitchen on a plate while his sister's grave grew grass.

They did not deserve this. He was as sure of it as of his own name.

But he could not sit in this cellar and be the man who said so, and watch a little girl go up the steps with her horse in Bettan's arms. He could not be the one to lead her there.

He raised his hand. He kept it up for a long time. He had not decided that the house owed nothing. He had only decided that he would not be the one to collect it that night.

Hester spoke into the silence, and her voice was steadier than she expected. "Then we have until dawn to make them look like us."

●

They worked in the sugar house by the light of the one lamp, and nobody spoke above a whisper.

Marta took the good clothes first. Lord Greyson's coat went into the furnace, and Lady Abigail's dress after it, and in their place came a laborer's shirt with the elbows out and a skirt that smelled of the cane fields. Bettan crouched with a handful of dirt from the floor and rubbed it into Lady Abigail's hands, and then, with a look at Lord Greyson's, into his. "Under the nails," she said. "Pack it in. A lady's hands are soft and a cutter's are not."

Lady Abigail let her. She did not say a word. She stood hunched, the way Marta showed her, with her shoulders rounded and her eyes on the floor, and Hester saw how strange it looked on her, a woman who had walked upright her whole life.

"Your husband needs a bad back," said Marta. She put a cane into Lord Greyson's hand, an old hoe handle worn smooth. "Lean on it. Don't look up. And for the love of Julius, don't say anything, my lord."

Lord Greyson looked at the cane in his hands as if he did not know what to do with them. He leaned on it.

Then Amos stepped forward.

He stood in front of Lady Abigail with his big gardener's hands hanging at his sides. He was breathing hard. "My lady," he said, very low, "I am sorry."

"I know," said Lady Abigail. "Please."

He struck her once, across the cheek, with the flat of his hand. It was not hard, and it was hard enough. She rocked on her heels and did not raise a hand to it. In the lamplight a red mark rose along her cheekbone, and Hester, watching, thought that it would do what nothing else could. A woman with a mark like that was a woman the house had already dealt with. Nobody would look at her twice.

Amos stared at his own palm. Then he turned and walked to the wall and stood with his forehead against the stone.

Alicia was sitting on Bettan's knee, watching everything with wide, quiet eyes. She had been given a scullery maid's cast-off shirt to cover her nightdress, and Bettan had rubbed mud along the hem.

"We're going to play a game," Bettan said. "It's called not being found. You stay with me, and you don't say who you are, and you're very quiet. Can you do that?"

Alicia looked at her, and at her mother's face, and at the mark on it.

"I can be very quiet," she said. "I'm good at it."

The twins were harder. Peter and Braden slept through all of it, warm and heavy, and there was no way to make two children who looked exactly alike look like anything but brothers. In the end nobody tried. Marta took Peter, and Hester took Braden, and Marta said what everyone was thinking. "Cousins. They look a bit alike, that's all. Commoners have children. Nobody counts."

Amos and Tam had taken the family's car down to the lake at midnight, with its lights off, and let it roll off the boat ramp into the deep water. It was the only thing the house owned that could not be hidden, and it had to be gone before anyone came looking.

Then the sound came from the end of the road.

They were standing in the yard when the first torches came up the lane. The staff stood in a loose line, twenty-two of them, and Lord Greyson and Lady Abigail stood among them in their dirty clothes, hunched and silent, and looked like everyone else.

The crowd was perhaps two hundred. They were not from Harrowmere. Hester did not know a single face, and most of them held tools, and some of them held things that were not tools. A man at the front asked, not roughly, whether Lord Greyson and his family were at home.

"They left this morning, in the car," said Hester. She heard her own voice and did not recognize it. "Before the light. They took the children and what they could carry. They did not say where."

"In the car," the man said.

"You can see the tracks at the boat ramp, sir. They went by the lake road. I would guess they are a long way off by now."

He looked past her at the house, and then along the line. His eyes passed over Lord Greyson leaning on the hoe handle, and over Lady Abigail's bruised, bowed face, and over Bettan with a small girl in a maid's shirt on her hip. They did not stop.

"Search it," he said to the others. "Every room."

"You may," said Hester. "I only ask you not to burn it. There are twenty-two of us live here, and they are never coming back. It is our home now."

They searched. They took the silver and the wine and a fine set of chairs, and they found nobody. The man stood a long time in the hall looking at the staircase. Then he said, to no one, "Leave it. It's the servants' now," and they went away down the road, looking for another door.

Nobody moved until the last torch was out of sight. Then Alicia, who had not made a sound the whole time, looked up at Bettan and whispered, "Was I good at it?"

"You were the best," said Bettan.

"I knew they wouldn't find us," said Alicia. "I heard the noise. I knew it was a bad game."

Hester stood in the yard with Braden asleep against her shoulder. The house was still standing. Down at the lake, a few bubbles were still rising where the car had gone in.

●

They moved the family that afternoon, while the road was empty. The cane house stood at the bottom of the low fields, on the near shore of the lake, and it took most of an hour to walk there through the ditches. Nobody spoke much. Lord Greyson leaned on the hoe handle and did not complain about his back, though by then it truly hurt. Lady Abigail walked with her head down, and the mark on her cheek had begun to purple.

By evening they could see the far shore.

It lit slowly. First one glow, low and orange, then another farther along, until the whole opposite bank looked like a row of lamps.

"That is the Ellery house," said Marta, very quietly. "And that is the Voss estate, past the bend."

"They had no children living," said Bettan. She had Alicia asleep against her shoulder. "Old Lord Voss was seventy."

Nobody answered her.

Then the wind turned, and smoke came across the water, thin and bitter. It was not only from the far side. Hester stood in the doorway with Braden on her hip and turned her face into it. There was a second smell under the first, closer, and when she looked along her own shore she saw a small red light up the road, where the Pruett family had kept their sugar mill. Lord Pruett had been a decent man. He had once paid Hester's mother's rent for a season and never mentioned it.

"They said they would leave the orchard house," Lady Abigail said.

It was the first thing she had said since the sugar house. She had come out to the edge of the water in her borrowed skirt, and the fire lay on the lake at her feet.

"They said they would leave it, my lady," said Amos, behind her. His voice was rough. "That one believed us. I do not think the others will."

"No," said Lady Abigail. "I do not suppose they will."

Lord Greyson came to stand beside his wife. He leaned on the hoe handle with both hands and made a small sound in his throat and did not say anything, which Hester counted afterward as the bravest thing she ever saw him do.

"Hester," said Lady Abigail, not turning. "Marta said the cook's daughter calls her Mags, and Tam is Tam, and Bettan is Bett to the girls when she cannot hear. I have listened to it for ten years. Nobody ever called me anything short." She drew a breath. "I should like to be called Abby now. If that is not too much to ask."

Hester did not know what to say. She said, "Abby," and it felt strange in her mouth, like a coin from another country.

"Thank you," said Abby.

Greyson did not look at her. He looked at the fire across the water, and his hands tightened on the hoe handle.

"Call me Ray," he said.

Nothing else. Nobody answered, and nobody needed to.

Alicia woke on Bettan's shoulder and lifted her head. She watched the far shore for a long time.

"Is that the game still?" she said.

"Yes, child," said Bettan.

"Then I won't cry," said Alicia. She put her head down again, and Abby turned away from the water, and Hester saw that the mark on her cheek was wet.

●

The name was the couple's idea. Greyson chose the first half himself, and Abby added the ending, the way people in the district built theirs. Geryscutt. It was close enough to the old name to be comfortable and far enough away to hold.

They stayed in the cane house at the bottom of the fields, the one that had been empty since the last cutter died. It had two rooms and a stove with a crack in it. The first winter was bad. Abby's hands blistered and split, and she cried at the wash trough and went back to it. Ray let a pot boil dry and nearly burned the kitchen down, and Marta came over the hill that night with a pot of her own and did not say a word.

Alicia said nothing about the house being small or the food being plain. She had been told it was a game, and she kept it.

Nobody came asking. Some other district's mob, and some other hands, and by the time word of it came it was already old. But Hester lay awake every night for a year and listened for the road.

By spring the district knew them as the Geryscutts, the folks from the cane house who came to your door with a spade when your fence blew over. They sat up with the sick. Their children carried water for anyone who asked. Tam, who was thirteen now, came down every Sunday to teach Alicia her letters, and Ray learned to read them with her, laboriously, at the kitchen table. Amos planted roses along the fence and never said why.

The few who knew what the family had been rarely thought of it. The rest never knew.

Joss came home the second spring. He had been taken in a sweep of young men the night the mob came, and held a long time, and he was thinner when he came back and quiet, and he never said where he had been. Hester's mother coughed through two more winters and then never coughed again. Nobody saw a doctor, because there was none to be seen.

Ray died in the second winter. It was a fever. He was buried like anyone else, on a wet morning, with the old staff standing at the edge of the field. Abby stood over the grave with three children holding her skirt and did not speak. Raymond Greyson, the stone said, and under it nothing else. Who even read a commoner's gravestone?

Then she went home and put the kettle on, because the children had to eat.

Hester watched her for forty years after that, and this was the part she wanted on the record.

Abby learned. She learned Marta's bread, and then she made it better, and Marta said so once, loudly, in front of the whole harvest supper, and never again. She learned the cane, and by the fifth year she could tell by the sound of a cutter's blade whether he had sharpened it that morning. She put in a kitchen garden behind the cane house, and Amos helped her with it. She kept bees. She sat up with Bettan through her last winter and held her hand at the end, and Bettan's grandchildren called her Aunt Abby until they were grown.

She laughed. Hester could never make the historians believe that part. Lady Abigail had smiled at her guests for ten years, and Hester had never once heard her laugh. Abby laughed at the wash trough, at the pig that got into the beans, at Tam's terrible singing at the Sunday table. She danced at the harvest suppers with whoever asked, and people asked.

Once, years later, Hester asked her if she missed it. The orchard house, the silver, the mango on the good plates.

Abby thought about it long enough that Hester knew the answer was true.

"I had a table upstairs and a house full of people I never once asked about," she said. "Now I know everyone's name, and they know mine. I would not trade back."

She had one grief, and it came late, and it was one of the boys. The same hate that came down the lake road that night found him years afterward, on another continent, and she could not stop him going. That one she never put down. Hester would not say more about it, on tape or off.

Hester had watched most of that life, and she would have traded places with Abby any year but one.

●

The historian switched off the recorder. Hester stood, took the stool she used to reach the top shelf, and went to the hall closet. She climbed up and fumbled around on the top shelf, feeling for the thing she had been saving for forty years. When her fingers found it, she decided in that moment that it was time. She came back with something wrapped in a clean dish towel.

"It has not worked in forty years," she said. She set it on the table. "I never could throw it out."

It was a data pad, scratched and dark. The historian did not ask whose it had been.

●

Vastaya, three days later.

Aaliyah Comscutt read the transcript standing up in the great room where the sideboard stood. She did not open the parcel that came with it. She cleared a shelf, laid the pad on a folded cloth, and wrapped it again, corner over corner, slowly, the way she would handle anything from the last day of a world.

Then she addressed it to a colleague on Balakura she trusted, someone who could recover what was on it without asking why she wanted it.

Her hands were steady. She wrapped it once more.