Something miraculous happened today.

I was in Herr Steiner’s waiting room, about to be admitted for my nine o’clock class, when Frau Steiner remarked that I should tend to my belongings. I had brought nothing with me and was confused until she pointed at a violin on the floor by my chair. It was a quality instrument in excellent condition, yet it was placed so carelessly, as if it was unwanted. Perhaps a spoiled pupil had discarded it in a fit of frustration. If I had an instrument of my own—which I couldn’t afford even working in Uncle Isaak’s shop six days a week—I would show it the respect it deserved. I picked it up—just to investigate—when Herr Steiner asked me in. He, too, assumed the instrument was mine, and I had no choice but to use it in class.

And this was when it happened. In all the months that Herr Steiner tutored me, I showed steady but slow progress. Today came a much-needed breakthrough. I only needed a glance at the notations to produce the right sequence. I didn’t have to supervise the position of my wrist; my fingers knew what to do. My mind was free—free to feel the music. Never in my life had I played so well. Even Herr Steiner noticed; if he was indulging me before, today, I became promising.

Oh, I wish I could keep the violin, but Torah prohibits taking a lost object. I left it where I found it, grateful for a glimpse of my true abilities.

…

September 21, 1937.

I have decided to stop letting my guilt impede my progress. How can one return lost property if there are no identifying traits, and no owner came forward to claim it? For months, I was just borrowing that violin; I never took it home, keeping it in Herr Steiner’s house. Never until today.

Herr Steiner has arranged for me to perform Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major for the opening of the biannual assembly of the Austrian Physical Society next month. I can do it, I know I can. I’m not the same boy who repeated the notes in his head and looked at his fingers when he played. I’m good, but only when I play that particular violin can I produce the right undercurrent of hope and elation. My technique is constant, but no other instrument makes my music as alive and vibrant as that violin.

My violin.

…

March 13, 1938.

Yesterday was my first solo performance at the Konzerthaus.

I can’t explain what happened. The programme was set, the public gathered to hear Mozart. Yet when I came on stage, I knew with unexplained certainty it wasn’t the 25th Symphony I was going to perform. I managed to warn the accompaniment I’d be playing Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns before an overwhelming force took over.

I played as I had never played before. As Death called forward the dead from their graves, and skeletons danced until dawn, new, genuine emotions seeped through the strings I triggered. Fear and excitement, disturbance and disbelief filled the familiar piece: I was scared for my life—shaken, terrified, shocked—and couldn’t believe it was happening. Death was closer than ever, looming but still distant and unreal until that final, inescapable touch.

I finished to a menacing silence, battered and bone-tired. Rationality came back to me, foretelling the end of my career. But as the light flooded the hall, I saw the pale uniform faces. Shaken, terrified, shocked.

Enigma—the papers called me. Emotions flowed from the instrument through young Joseph Neumann, they said. And they were right: I am a conduit, channelling something out of this world, possessed by someone more talented than I can ever be.

...

August 22, 1938.

I am convinced my violin is haunted. It isn’t me who plays it. The moment I touch it, I become someone else. And that person, whoever he was, is suffering.

Ever since my triumphant debut, I could only play heartbreaking parts. Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor or Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel was effortless. My music was poignant and celebrated. Press called me the Weeper; it said I gave the public the jolt it didn’t know it needed. Lulled by sixty years of peace, people grew used to the sense of safety. My renderings shook them out of their comfortable numbness. It brought them closer to death to remind them they were alive.

None of it was my intention. All I wanted was to play and play well. My violin made it possible, but it did not obey me. Any attempt to recreate joyous pieces left me on my own, my performance suddenly dry and emotionless. The tormented soul trapped in my instrument responded only to music that expressed his pain.

I have no choice but to play along.

…

November 11, 1938.

I’m going mad.

Two days ago, I woke in the middle of the night, compelled to pick up the violin. I’ve learned to succumb to such urges: if the ghost to whom I owed my success demanded to manifest, who was I to refuse my benefactor? I recognized the piece he wanted me to play: it was the obsessive repeat of In The Hall Of The Mountain King. As the maddening tempo rose, I found myself unable to stop. I played and played, compulsively and urgently, until Frau Auer came in to ask if I wasn’t ill. Seeing my struggles, she tried to tear the instrument from my hands. I pushed her away. The look on her face said it all: I was out of my mind.

But it wasn’t me who was so horror-stricken and frantic, it was the Weeper. His need to speak through me was pressing. He wasn’t just a lost soul trapped in a musical instrument—his emotions were too immediate for a captured memory. He was as real as I was. The violin was our synchronizing link, a bridge joining two contrasting worlds. On my side, my Vienna slept peacefully; across the barrier, his city was sucked into perilous riots. In the looping hypnotizing fragment, I heard shattering glass and cries for help. I heard an approaching war.

I played for two days straight. I was overpowered. Insignificant. Disposable. People gathered outside my window, drawn by this disarranged and chaotic rendering. I couldn’t stop playing until a doctor came to give me an injection.

I’m afraid I’m losing myself.

…

October 14, 1939.

After a well-received national tour, I think I finally understand the Weeper. He doesn’t just represent himself; he speaks for thousands of sufferers like him. I’ve felt his pain, I carried his fear of extermination. So many have been lost already, life slowly evaporating from the once-rich channel. Every time I pick up my violin—now scratched and worn-out despite my best care—I’m terrified to find I am left unaided. Talentless. But as the bow touches the strings, and the familiar presence takes over my performance, I’m ashamed of my selfishness.

Does the Weeper need me as much as I need him? Does he play in his world, broadcasting my emotions? Can my safe, predictable living be an anchor for his tormented reality? Can my music soothe his audience just like his performance disturbs mine?

…

July 5th, 1943.

My critics call the last three years of my career oversaturated. They say the emotions my music produces are an exaggeration. They can still feel them, I know they can, but they no longer recognize them as real. The emotions I relay are too extreme for our sheltered reality.

People no longer want to hear me play. I can’t blame them. No one wants to be near death for so long. This prolonged proximity is transformative: the fear and pain become numbness. Where hope used to be, only tired indifference remains. Instead of an opportunity to feel alive, my music brings desperation. My career is over unless I do something: put my violin aside, start anew, become conventional.

But I can’t abandon my alter ego. I can’t destroy the bridge. It isn’t my world who needs my music.

I come to Stadtpark after sunset to play to the night sky. The Weeper is only comfortable with minimalist composers these days. I play Satie.

I know how it could end. One day, I will touch the strings, and my counterpart won’t be there to take over, meaning the crunching machine of terror on the other side has won. But if I’m persistent, if my music in his world has any power, maybe we can pull through—together. And one day, I’ll feel my fingers playing Mozart again, celebrating liberation.

Before it happens, I let the slow, sad sounds of Gymnopédie No. 1 fill the summer sky.

They drifted in, tall and twitchy and unpredictable, sniffing the air, their eyes darting from tree to tree, fingers jerking as if in mental calculations. Dark figures against the thickening fog, they scrounged around, indifferent to anything but the disturbed harmonics and their own thirst for blither. People froze at their approach, afraid a sudden movement would draw their attention. I lowered my basket, watching six grey shadows blow past. Somebody risked sneaking into the manor to alert the foreman. The old man stood now on the threshold as if his presence could have prevented the silent ones from barging in. But they ignored the building and wandered deeper into the orchard.

It didn’t take long for their entourage to show up. Back at the gate, the first claw appeared, a large man with a mallet and an assortment of pliers under his belt. He looked bored, almost uninterested. He watched the silent ones with the serenity of a shepherd who knew nothing could threaten his herd. Another person joined him at the gate, a dark-skinned man dressed in the brown caftan of a crier. He pulled out a husker and shared it with the claw. In turns, the men dipped their fingers and dabbed their lips, talking amiably. Others would come soon, more claws and criers, but there was no rush yet: the silent ones were still roaming chaotically; it might take them hours to find the clog.

A silent one brushed past me, his eyes unfocused, concentrated on something behind the last line of apple trees. I tried to imagine what he looked like before he had been called. The skin on his cheeks, grey from blither, was still smooth, still unwrinkled around the sunken eyes. From knotted clusters of remaining hair, I could tell he used to be a redhead. The upper arms still had some muscle—a farmer boy, perhaps. The scars that ran from the corners of his lips down his neck gleamed with chilling rawness. A young man, not much older than Kylian was when I met him, silenced forever, cleansed to lucidity, attuned to follow the harmonics. He stopped abruptly, jerking to look at me as if guessing that I tried to peer behind his greyness to see the human he once was. Or sensing I was a blasphemer, a plotting heretic. I shuddered. I carried nothing but my clothes, my pockets empty, but didn’t the criers tell stories of even the teeth being removed? I held my breath, my spatial awareness sharpening to detect the slightest of motion: would the claw by the gate leap to do this one’s bidding? But the silent one turned away and walked on.

All around the orchard, people shifted, some creeping closer, compelled to keep the silent ones in sight despite the debilitating fear, others trying to put more distance between themselves and the eerie searchers. Two of the ghouls halted by a pear tree, inspecting a ladder. The picker, who got down in time but hadn’t managed to retreat to a safe distance, inched away from them, shaking. In the distance, another silent one was bent over a rake. I didn’t have rakes on my list. Scythes, shears, and axes all disappeared early on, but those were dangerous tools. And rakes? I wouldn’t be surprised, though: more and more inconspicuous objects had been removed lately.

A new claw had joined the pair by the gate, and the three of them stood idly, leaning against the iron fence, betting, no doubt, on which of the silent ones would home in on the clog first. They would find something, for they never left empty-handed. I risked a glance towards the tool shed, my pulse quickening. What if they found my cache? No individual part of Kylian’s invention had ever attracted their attention, and I kept the pieces spaced apart, but what if they stumbled upon them? What if the claws came to tear down the shed and put his foot wrong, and a loose stone in the foundation slipped out to expose one of the precious bundles? I almost wanted to see what would happen then. Would the silent ones change their tune, identify a new clog? Would the claws dismantle the manor looking for more, or would they leave it for the foreman to deal with? The shame of this visit would guarantee his wrath. Didn’t libraries burn at the hands of the librarians?

One of the silent ones—my silent one, the redhead—changed his direction abruptly and hobbled towards the shed. I suppressed an urge to make a step to intercept him. If my theory was correct, I had to be as far from that shed as possible so as to not give him a clue. I forced a few deep breaths to calm down. Everyone in the orchard was on edge. Everyone was scared. I just had to be no more agitated than my fellow pickers. The silent one walked straight on, determined. He could still turn, distracted by a sharp movement. But the tool shed was a tempting object, large and obvious. It would not remain uninspected. My heart thundered in my ears.

If this silent one walked right in to find the device parts, wouldn’t it be proof in itself? Wouldn’t it mean their sense of harmonics was real? The components all came from sites of previous removals, which should have guaranteed their harmlessness, but in a pristine environment, these previously inoffensive objects could still disturb the harmonics enough for the silent ones to detect them. But such a sensitivity demonstration wouldn’t have been enough for Kylian. He wanted to see the harmonics, observe the effect the unclogging had on them.

I told people Kylian was my nephew, but we weren’t related. How else could we explain what a woman like me was doing in the company of a man half her age? We met in the enclave back when there was still an enclave, having been tenants to the same sessor. For months, I knew him as a quiet young man from upstairs, a student to a clockmaker, polite but untalkative, and I liked it about him. In other circumstances, I would have never befriended him. But the enclave yielded, and the Cleansing came to the sessor’s house. When the gaunt creatures swarmed in to probe the common room, I knew what to expect—I came from the deanage, I had pages and pages of my list already filled. But it was the first encounter for Kylian. I saw how his fists clenched when a silent one pressed his finger to the wall, indicating that the clog was behind it. I shot Kylian a warning look, urging him to remain sensible and not to interfere when the claw put his mallet through the planks. It must have seemed absurd to him, people destroying innocent property to prevent unseen harm. But our fear was real and unmissable, and Kylian controlled himself. The claws tore walls to get to the source of the clogging, which turned out to be a valve in the furnace. The removal left the house unheated and open to the elements in the middle of winter. That same night, huddled in blankets over a single candle, I showed Kylian my list.

The criers claimed the removal made the world better by letting the harmonics flow freely, but all I saw was comforts dismantled and appliances rendered useless. Old, forgotten dangers reared their lethal heads. I watched the world slip back into the Simple Ages.

In the early days of the Cleansing, some deans tried to question the choice of targets, the nature of clogging, the very existence of harmonics themselves. But the claws’ mallets smashed heads as easily as they smashed walls, and the questions ceased. The deanage closed before I could advance to a full dean, but I knew enough to separate facts from speculations. My list had facts. The first to be removed were the obvious weapons: the combustion arms, the large edges, the hunting gear. Next, the propulsion cars got targeted, trains and boats and wagons going out of operation. Then, the aiding mechanisms were broken: the cultivators, the washing machines, the cookers—things that saved time, that offered leisure. The criers announced these triumphs loudly, making a grand show of destroying the clogs, but I witnessed enough removals to notice omissions. Books were taken. Stationery disappeared from shops, first by direct unclogging, then—because the tradesmen were afraid to keep them in stock. Knowledge was more dangerous than swords and pistols. The dayschools closed. Fine surgeries shrank into spitals. The deans became farmers.

The removal kept people busy, one festering scratch—one persistent cough—away from perishing, chained to a single place and ignorant. Docile. This was the harmony they laboured to establish.

Did they do it on purpose? Who knew how the hazed minds of the silent ones worked? Maimed out of any kinship with humanity, they goaded each other, pursuing goals we couldn’t fathom. Did each receive instructions before the boiling blither ran down their throats to silence them forever? Did they submit willingly into the hands of their siblings for this culmination of relentless craving, an initiation terrible and inevitable and final? Who directed them—the claws? No, I had seen the claws’ eyes: they were terrified of the silent ones like everyone else. The criers? Criers knew nothing; their stories changed like the wind. Both claws and criers followed the silent ones because proximity offered an illusion of safety.

Perhaps there was no director. Perhaps the silent ones operated blindly, drunk on the elucidating liquid, mimicking each other without thought, following the scent of fear and chancing on random objects. This was my theory, a guess that Kylian did not favour. The removal raids were an act that required not just an audience but participants. The silent ones roamed in people’s homes while the owners were present. They took their time to pick their targets, reacting to the building stress, sensitive to the unease of those whose property they inspected. They chose what was the most precious, what would hurt the most. Harmonics, if there was such a thing, came from people, not objects.

I craned my neck to see the shed. The silent one, the redhead, stood staring at the wall. I knew that pose—the hunched shoulders, the body locked with tension—and if I recognized it, so would the claws. There were four of them now by the gate, and two more women criers, ready to let the world know about another victory against the clogging. They watched the other silent ones for now. The haggards still wandered about, their threadbare smocks flapping. Wasn’t it ironic how this lot could go barefooted even in the middle of Harshary, be it blizzard or rainstorm, and stay impervious to lung fever? Two figures lingered by a cart full of pears, examining its wheels. Would rubber become the next scarcity? Would we go back to the iron-bound wood? But the ghouls didn’t seem interested enough; the time for the rubber hadn’t come yet. They would walk on, and the moment the claws glanced towards the shed, they would see that the redhead had identified the clog. The silent ones needed no consensus, only certainty.

I wished I could leave my body behind and fly over to the shed to access the object the silent one had picked before the claws came to remove it. I wished I could pull out the precious bundles from between the cracks, and put together the device of Kylian’s design. Assemble the little crank that turned a tiny propeller, both leftovers from the decimated clockmaker's shop. Put it inside the glass case—the final, overdue piece—a segment of a broken syringe I picked up in the spital, after they carried away his body. Pour in the salty water, a bottle Kylian had brought from his ill-fated trip to the shore—four days on foot in drenching rain—which we reduced by boiling to a little vial full of minerals and mixed-in soot. Insert a gasket, a ring Kylian had carved out of his gumboots, and that I had to reshape, ineptly on my own, to fit the syringe. Attach the eyepiece, an old keepsake from the deanage. Press it against the supposed clog, turn the crank to stir the liquid, and try to see how the little black particles realigned, bending around the previously unperceivable lines.

Kylian showed me once, in an alehouse, back when the breweries still had enough crucial parts to run, and we had some energy left after a day’s work. He placed his glass in the middle of our table, and we stooped over to look at the tiny bubbles against the glare of the lamp above. They rushed up with a slight curve as if encountering an invisible obstacle. They went straight up when the glass stood on the edge of the table. Proof, Kylian said, that a harmonic ran down from the lamp. Or, I joked, that a harmonic stretched between our foreheads. We agreed on one thing: neither of those needed unclogging.

People at the gate began to stir. The claws straightened, patting their tool belts. The huskers disappeared in their owners’ pockets. Small items exchanged hands—the bets were settled. The wait was over. The claws went first, with criers on their heels, closing on the shed where the redhead stood in his pointing pose.

A tide of relief washed over the orchard: the clog was found and it wasn’t anybody’s teeth. I felt it too. I had no parts hidden in the foundation that faced this side of the orchard, and the silent one didn’t crouch. Whatever the clogging object was, it wasn’t one of mine. The shed was an old thing, an ordinary construction and nobody’s property; even the foreman didn’t rush to its defence. He left the manor now to watch the removal with the assembling crowd. I had to join it too; it would have been suspicious of me not to.

I found a spot that offered a good view of the silent one’s face. He stood still, pointing not with his finger but with the tip of his nose, a hunting dog more than a man. The weathered wood in front of him was the same colour as his shabby clothes. What did he see? What invisible tangles offended his senses? Would the removal improve the place or cripple it even further? Was desolation his ultimate goal?

The claw who came to the orchard first claimed the honour of unclogging. He walked up to the silent one slowly, his movements smooth and predictable, inspected the spot and pulled out his pliers in preparation. One of the criers crept in to join the pair, his brown back blocking my view. Necks stretched all around me. In another life, the crowd would have heaved and murmured; we remained silent. The claw huffed and grunted as he scraped the wood, prying something off. I could still see the silent one’s shoulders. They twitched at every screech and twisted, straining, and then dropped, and the claw lifted up his pliers. For a long moment, I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. The big man held the pliers high above his head as if in triumph, and the silent one stood next to him, relaxed, but I couldn’t tell what it was they had removed. Only with the first words of the crier, his voice booming in the crisp autumn air, did I recognize the object. A nail! An old rusty nail, was the thing that clogged the harmonics and threatened the normal functioning of the universe.

So many things had been removed since the beginning of the Cleansing. Blue flame burners, copper fittings and fine ironmongery. Yokes and pontils at the glass blower’s shop. Pumps that ran cold cabinets. Recipes for clean broths. Drawings that helped identify the right kind of moulds. Tubes and wands and needles strong enough to withstand boiling. And so many other items on my list, items that were only as precious as the lives they could have saved. And now—what?—a pointless, inconsequential nail?

I should have known. Everything of value was already taken. Loss spread far beyond direct removal. I ought to be angry, furious even, but I just felt tired. A nail! A thing as lethal in our times as the lung fever.

The crowd dispersed. A single claw and a crier lingered behind to follow the silent ones who drifted on, eventually finding their way out of the orchard. The rest left with the removed clog to see it publicly destroyed, hammered out of existence. The pickers returned to their baskets under the stern glare of the foreman.

I walked back to my tree. I would inspect the hole tomorrow, when nobody was around. I would put together the hard-won components: The ocular lens, the last surviving artefact from the destroyed deanage. The crankshaft with a rotor from a clockframe that outlived its makers. The rubber seal that left a gaping hole in the last good pair of Kylian’s galoshes. The bottle of sooty seawater from a lagoon too frigid and windy and remote. The glass cylinder of a syringe that had nothing to inject for years. Five stanzas of a ballad I was too worn out to recite. I would assemble the device and peer at the swimming black dots in the light of the rising sun. I would look for guides and obstacles that governed their movement. Not to find a reason, an explanation or a motive, for there might not be one. Not to see if the device worked, because I believed in Kylian even when I disagreed with him. But to glimpse the future. To look at the tiny liberated spot and imagine how the rest of the unclogged world would look to those who worked so hard to quiet it. To learn if there was anything in store for us beyond the silent harmony of ruins.

A few paces ahead, Lance kept crawling up the slope. Down on his elbows and knees, he inched forward, eyes on the ground beneath him. A torn piece of his breastplate left a plowed mark in his wake. He had cut himself badly in one gust, slicing through armour to open a gash across his chest. There was no blood—a fortunate effect. But Kay had been right, it was a bad idea to bring a plasma knife into the Open.

Kay fared the best of them all, her training showing. She waited out the squall sitting cross-legged on the ground. Her fingers danced on the aberrascope in an anchoring reflex, the trick I never mastered myself. She was shaking, and perspiration misted her brow, but at least she no longer tried to assault me.

“Damn planet,” Lance was muttering, making another fumbling lurch. “Damn, damn planet.”

All around us, the landscape breathed and bobbed in quiet waves. The endless carpet of violet grass-like growth undulated as if alive, extending stalks of flimsy feelers that reached for the pale yellow sky. Here and there, a white horn of a flower noiselessly unwrapped itself to ooze beads of sticky nectar. The air, saturated with familiar fragrances of sweet almond and lemongrass, felt crisp and invigorating. All around the valley, at disconcertingly regular intervals, dark branchless stubs blew flakes of fluff, and the breeze carried them up the slope towards the mountains. A light snow on a deceptively calm hillside. A silent picture in an audacious colour palette.

In the distance, on the wall of basalt columns, a walkable ledge was outlined in a purple line of vegetation. An almost straight line shooting up to the shelf. Three klicks to go, no more.

Lance was beginning to tire, his crawl faltering, until he lifted his right leg and couldn’t place it down. It hovered, trembling in the air as if there was suddenly no ground for it to land on. His back shook with tension. Behind him, Rust had lost his tussle with the prosthesis and just lay there, head turned away from the mechanic limb, spine arching around the egg in its cushioned case. The hauler began to sob.

“I can’t do it, Brook,” he managed between tearful groans, so out of place in this soundless valley. “Please! I can’t do it anymore.”

“Brook is dead,” Kay said in her new resigned, cold manner. “We left his body in the grove five klicks from here.” She stared at me with hatred, fingers on her instrument. Her fingernails were blue, the effect she had been fighting since leaving the camp.

I spoke to Rust, ignoring Kay’s drivel, “Hang on. The next normalcy tide is almost here.”

Yet I was succumbing to the effects myself. A draft of unease at first, then an insistent ripple of apprehension, and then the real punch of fear. I turned to look downhill: a searing wave rolled our way. The grass in its wake turned black, the marks of old bonfires leaking from the ground. It took all my willpower not to believe the illusion, to push away the stink of burning and stay put. Running would only make it permanent. I looked uphill, trying to moor myself to reality.

Up the slope, Lance staggered to his feet. He looked around in confusion as if seeing the place for the first time. He spotted Rust still laying on his back, and waddled to give him a hand.

It was harder and harder for me to focus. The tide had engulfed me. The smell of charred grass, the heat, the wisps of smoke were too real to dismiss. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a yellow flame flickering on the ground. My neck cramped in a weird angle, but I didn’t dare to turn and look. My crewmen startled me, appearing just a few strides away. I held up my hand to stop them from coming closer.

“Don’t waste time,” I rasped, smoke tickling my throat. “I’ll be fine. Go.”

“Let’s go,” Kay echoed, flashing past me without a glance. “We need to cross the valley before the next surge.”

“But the commander—” Lance began, looking at me.

“That’s not him.”

Lance and Rust exchanged a pitying look. Some effects lasted beyond the aberration storm.

“Go,” I repeated, adding an encouraging nod.

Moving my head triggered a coughing fit, and I bent over to ease the spasms. Heat struck my face. I shut my eyes, trying not to look at the cinders under my feet. The heat worsened; perhaps my trousers were already smouldering. I heard Rust adjust his backpack, the straps zapping through the plastic rings: he lingered, reluctant to leave me.

“I’ll catch up,” I wheezed. “Go.”

The rustling of the uniforms against the scorched foliage betrayed their slow departure. I clenched my jaw, trying to ignore the boiling in my boots. The flames weren’t there, in truth, but if I gave in, the burns would be real. My muscles cried from tension. I could do it, I could wait it out. It wasn’t that bad yet. Not as bad as in the grove. Another moment, and the squall would pass. But the moment stretched, and the agony stretched with it. Smoke filled my lungs, hot and abrasive. Damn effects: I’ll suffocate in the fresh air. I’ll drown on land, my immune system flooding my lungs with liquid. I made an effort to straighten, imagine the air I breathed as fresh. It worked for a second. I looked up. Three figures moved at a steady gait, trudging through the sea of eerie feelers that squirmed as if in agony. Another minute, and Kay would reach the base of the rocky ramp. I didn’t watch it happen: the curtain of shimmering heat shrouded my view.

The soles of my boots were catching flame. I could smell the hair on my calf starting to singe. My chest contracted in painful gasps. I tried panting. I tried leaning into the pain like Kay had taught us, but the stinging only got worse. And then, blissfully, the drift changed. I could breathe again—not full chest yet, but the air I sucked into my lungs no longer scorched my windpipe. Traces of aberration must still have been present, pressing on my skull. Unpleasant, but manageable.

I heaved myself up to assess the damage. My shins were red under my trousers but not yet blistered. A feeble stalk reached up to lick my skin, and I noticed it too late to pull away. Its touch was gentle, cooling, and I let it soothe away the ache. It could have been worse. I could have lost consciousness again. There was no excuse to linger: I had to catch up with my crew.

I found them taking a break, sitting on the wider stretch of the ledge with their backs to the basalt wall, having ascended no more than twenty metres. Whatever effects they suffered in the last gust, I saw no new injuries. Lance stared into the void, an exposed blood vessel inside his gash drumming a ragged rhythm. Rust sat with his mouth open, his lips caked with blood. Nobody had any water to spare. My own flask was empty after I had tried to waterboard myself in the damn grove.

“It’s not that bad this time,” I said, flexing my neck for an alleviating crack that didn’t come. “We should use this intermission to make progress.”

“Why do you care?” Kay threw at me angrily.

Rust glowered at her on my behalf. “Just—” he began but lost his indignation half-way, the rest of his phrase lifeless, “—enough already.”

Kay wasn’t as combative now as before. All she did was spit on the ground in detestation. The furry growth that covered the ledge sizzled on contact with her saliva. The planet recoiled from us, like we recoiled from aberrations.

“Let’s go,” I said and lumbered onward.

One by one, my crew scrambled to their feet to resume the ascent. We moved steadily up the natural steps, our boots sinking into the carpeted tiles of purple hexagons. Every rustle blared off the walls. This planet was so quiet. We had brought sounds to it, like we had brought normalcy. Grunts and curses and words cut through it, like the sprinklers cut through its unsettling medium. And just like the Open reacted to normalcy by cranking up the aberrations, the flora resisted the sounds, rising to stifle vibrations. It was losing. Where the carpet thinned out and the hair-like cover retreated to the cracks, loose pebbles creaked under our soles and rattled down the perilous drop. On some stretches, where the ledge shrank to a single column and we had to file along sideways, the tips of our armoured boots scraped the rock, making it scream. Many more grunts and curses to come before this was over.

“How much longer?” Rust asked, halting to mop his brow with the sleeve of his good arm. The backpack he was hauling swung dangerously over the precipice.

“Six, seven minutes,” Kay said, stroking the raised bands that forecasted the change in the prevailing field. She looked up. “And at least eight hundred metres.”

I followed her gaze to the grey shelf. She had chosen a good spot to deploy the egg: a platform wide enough to put the mooring in, with a solid shielding from one side to reflect the field and an excellent vantage point to cover at least fifty square kilometres. A new pocket of stable normalcy. A bubble our people could live in—if we could reach that shelf.

The next surge came unannounced, Kay’s prediction wrong this time. I looked over my shoulder, past Kay’s suddenly stiffened figure and saw Lance doubling over, gasping in pain. Blood seeped from the gash in his chest, the lucky cauterization reverted by some new effect that hit him. The terrace we stood on was too narrow for panicked trashing. Before Rust faced his own battle, he managed to reach out to Lance and prop him with his good shoulder. They stood now, supporting each other like two makeshift construction beams. Rust’s foot was an inch away from the drop.

Kay stood frozen, her skin ghost-white, lips bloodless. She stared at me, but her bulging eyes were glazed over. Arms pressed to her sides, she muttered something unintelligible. I called out her name, but her muttering only got louder. I called again to the same effect, but at least I understood what she was saying. That’s not Brook. Brook was dead. She was under the spell again.

“Kay,” I said. “Your anchor! Get a grip on yourself.”

One of her hands slipped to the aberrascope and found the tactile display.

“That’s right.” I watched her brow relax. “Now, turn around and guide Rust away from the precipice. Protect the cargo.”

The effects were getting to me now: I could sense the suffocating flood reaching me. But as I gritted my teeth, fighting the current, Kay seemed to regain control. She turned around, grabbed Rust’s robotic hand, and tugged him hard, away from the drop. The men slumped against the wall. I, too, fell to my knees. My fingers sank into the crack between the hexagons and felt embers. Real blisters formed on my palms. The only way to fight the effects was to hold on to what was real. Crushed stones, not red-hot coals. Before I shut my eyes, I saw Kay watching me with contempt.

When, after what seemed like hours of slow roasting, the surge ended and I came around, I was alone. My crew did the right thing leaving me behind. I looked up, picking out two green-clad figures among grey rock almost at the altitude of the shelf. One sat, sprawled, legs handing over the ledge, and the slender one stood further ahead, embracing a solitary column. Kay and Rust; the way Lance’s chest had bled, he wasn’t likely to reach that far. I looked down, dreading to find his body, but only the silent lake of lilac flora lulled at the foothills.

I checked the damage the last surge had caused. Both my hands were burned, fingers puffy and unbending. My face felt tender when I winced; I didn’t risk touching it. The uniform on the right side of my body, the side unprotected by the basalt wall, was stuck to my skin in wet patches. I did not want to see what was happening under the fabric. Some effects, if left unacknowledged, could be reverted in the next storm. Didn’t I recover fully after the grove? Flinching in pain, I struggled upright. Movement tore the skin under my trousers, and I bit down on a moan and tasted blood. It could have been worse. I could have rolled over the edge and smashed my skull. Eyes on the next hexagon, I pressed on with the climb.

Eventually, I found what was left of my crew. If Rust was still alive, he showed few signs of it. His prosthetic hand below the wrist was gone, the joint mechanism crushed, the protective plating shattered and the rods inside twisted. The flesh arm and both his legs were swollen into grotesque sausages. He wasn’t wearing his backpack. Even Kay had given up on him and taken over the cargo. I stepped around his bloated form to check on my tech.

The terrace she had climbed onto was a challenge to reach. From where I stopped to assess her state, Kay didn’t look more injured than before, but her eyes were shut. Slumped against the rock, she had wedged herself in the gap between the column and the wall, the precious backpack propped against her hip.

“You won,” she said, reacting to the sound of my shuffling footsteps. “You can have your stupid planet. You won.”

“We didn’t win yet,” I said. She looked unnaturally pale with sickly yellow around the eyes. Perhaps there were more effects plaguing her: something subtle, like iron leaving her bloodstream or her own body destroying her red blood cells. “Get up and finish the job.”

She chuckled weakly. “That’s what Brook would have said. You’re a good imitation.”

“I am not an imitation.”

“Of course you are. Everything in this hell is an effect.”

“You’re delirious if you insist I’m not real.”

Kay chuckled again. “Oh, you’re real. That’s the problem. The visions aren’t real, but the effects are.”

I looked down at the black stains on my uniform and coughed out a laugh. An effect, affected by effects. “Whose effect am I, then?”

“I don’t know. Brook’s?”

A fleeting breeze crept down from the mountains and brought a hint of relief to my burning cheeks.

“All right,” I said, straightening. I could not fight her effects for her. “You got me. I’m Brook’s body taken over by the planet. And it tells you to get up and deliver the cargo.”

Her face fell, as if my mock confirmation triggered an avalanche of desperation, and her body began shutting down.

“Kay!” I shouted, lunging forward. Even if I stretched, I could only reach her foot. “Don’t give up, Kay. Fight it!”

Her fingers crept to the aberrascope and found a prominent dip in the forecast. A sigh later, she opened her eyes.

“That’s better,” I said.

I, myself, didn’t feel too good. Something snapped in my chest, sending a stab of intense pain through my insides. A collapsed lung? I bent down, putting my wrists against my thighs to take pressure off my chest. All my blisters throbbed in unison, outlining the extent of the damage: perhaps a third of my body was burnt. I leaned against the terrace, wincing at the contact, and waited for the blur to clear.

Moaning, Kay extracted herself from the crevice. Her right arm hung helpless when she tried to adjust the backpack, centering the bulge of the egg between her shoulder blades.

“Fine,” she said with a tired sigh. “One last push.”

I tried following her, creeping forward with my sore shoulder dragging against the rock, but after just a few strides, I stumbled and sank to my knees. I tried grabbing a handhold, but my fingers scraped the wall in vain, leaving bits of skin on the smooth surface. The view before my eyes darkened, and for a while, I crawled, sightless. Kay moved faster than I could ever pull off in my in-and-out state: by the time I reached the platform, she had the mooring spread out, the adhesives already curing. The haphazard arrangement of the anchorage looked like a proper nest. Not long now. The last terrace was too high for me to step over. I fell forward and landed on my chest, kicking the air in a weak attempt to push myself further up. The effort cost me another blackout.

When the darkness before my eyes cleared at last, I found myself still on my belly, feet hanging from the ledge. I laboured to turn my head, looking for Kay. She sat not far from me, slouched against the wall. Alive still, and awake. Behind her, in the wreath of armoured rods and safety clips, lay a single white egg—the normalization capsule. The protective foil was removed, and a ghostly message across the shell blinked a single word: Initializing.

“How long?” I asked. Speaking dislodged a blockage in my chest. I coughed up something sticky, swallowed it, and felt better.

“Four minutes.”

I rolled onto my side. Four more minutes, and I could rest. Ignoring the protesting scream of my skin, I wedged an arm under my belly to lever myself up. Kay watched me struggle into a sitting position, a look of puzzlement and revulsion on her gaunt face.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” she said when I finally found a pose I could bear. “Why are you helping us?”

That again. “You know why. We need to find a way to coexist.”

My answer invoked a weary chuckle. “That’s what Brook would have said.” She shook her head slowly, wincing from the movement. “It shouldn’t surprise me. Aberrations materialize what we think.” Her accusations were getting old, but weren’t my flames equally bogus? “But I still don’t get why. Feeble as it is, everything on this planet wants to get rid of us, turning our own biology against us. Why suddenly cheer for us to succeed?”

I winced. What could another speech change? I tried anyway. “Because we’re not going anywhere. Yes, it was a mistake to come here, but what’s done is done. We can’t tame a place so alien, so we have to adapt, not escalate. The normalcy sprinklers were vital at first, but that solution can’t be permanent. They’re unreliable even inside the camp’s perimeter. The field ripples all over the place and leaks out into the Open. The refraction is too high. The bands are overlapping, making the storms unpredictable. And the egg is a good design. It will create a hard boundary. It will keep the two fields separate. We’ll be safe.”

“We’ll be safe,” Kay repeated as if arguing.

I stared at her. A shadow of a new emotion crossed her brow. Pity, not hatred.

“You’ll be locked here,” she said softly, “in concentrated normalcy. You’ll die.”

She was beyond reasoning with. But she would see. Any minute now, the capsule would activate, deploying a concentric series of fields. The outermost layer would act as an insulating membrane, impenetrable for mechanical waves. Everything inside—the foothills of these mountains, the valley, the camp—would be sterilized by normalcy. An area swept free of the planet’s impact. A piece of land carved out, its native ecosystem eradicated so humans could thrive. The innermost layer of the generated field would be the closest conditions to home. Kay would be able to think straight again. She would see that this was the only way.

She didn’t look good. Eyes fluttered under her ashen eyelids. The aberrascope, her lifeline to sanity, slid out of her rigid hand. Her lips were blue. Cyan on grey, another chromatic displacement so typical on this planet.

“Look,” those lips moved, “at the readouts.”

I could barely make out the words. Her claw of a hand nudged the instrument in my direction. The tactile display tilted, hard shadows outlining a prominent spike in the unfavourable field. This very minute, the aberration storm was raging. I felt fine.

“We need this,” I breathed out, having nothing better to say. Even if I wasn’t he who fell in that grove, we both would be better for it. We could finally rest.

I bent over to put my shoulder on the ground. I could still see the egg with its status message blinking. Any moment now, the fusion reactor inside the capsule would come to life. Normalcy would spread in one brutal, cleansing wave, its devastation too total for aberration-dependent biome to register. It would be quick. Not necessarily painless, but quick. And after that, all would be quiet again.

“Caleb,” Kurt boomed, waving at me from the sofa. “Come here!”

My misery was about to deepen. Yes, it was that time: the party crossed its apogee, the best snacks vanished, the conversation stalled, but it was hours before people switched to shots. The party needed a boost. And what better boost than Caleb’s little performance?

I downed my wine in a hurry. There was no avoiding it—Kurt had already told his little group about my talent. He shooed away a man with thick lensed glasses, and I obediently took his armchair.

Gail noticed the commotion her brother had created and squealed in excitement. “Everybody!” She gestured for the guests to gather around. “You’re about to witness an act of clairvoyance!”

I stopped wincing every time I heard the word. I despised the act, but a little practice wouldn’t hurt. If I resisted for too long, it could provoke an involuntary episode. I’d rather do it in a cosy armchair than behind the wheel.

“What’s it going to be?” I asked with a placid smile.

“Let’s find hidden treasure!” Gail said, sinking her fingers into Jared’s forearm. “It’s an old house. Who knows what’s behind the drywalls?”

“We just got everything fixed,” Jared protested.

“Can I talk to my great grandmother?” a woman with a high ponytail asked. She came over with Gail and had missed Kurt’s introduction.

“That’s unverifiable,” the man with the thick glasses said. There were always sceptics in the audience. “What did I have for breakfast this morning?”

“My clairvoyance has limits,” I said. “How about what you ate in this room?”

The sceptic winced. “That’s just observance. We need something you wouldn’t know.”

“Remember, it has to stay in the house,” Kurt said.

“Caleb hasn’t been upstairs yet,” Gail said. “What colour are the wall tiles in the master bathroom?”

“No,” the sceptic said. “Where’s proof he hasn’t been upstairs or seen pictures?” Was he cross with me for seizing his seat?

Jared grinned. “He hasn’t seen the old tiles. The tile setters couldn’t get behind the pipes—there are some fragments left behind the sink cabinet.” He turned to the sceptic. “Is that verifiable enough for you, Hank?”

The man crossed his arms. “Not if you’re in cahoots.”

“Oh, let him try,” an older woman with a whiskey glass said. The soft murmur of agreement rolled over the room.

“Do we have a challenge?” Kurt asked, scanning the crowd.

There were no objections. I had hoped they would come up with a task that didn’t involve other rooms, but I sat facing the stairs, the only access to that bathroom. It was doable.

“All right.”

I took my first deep breath.

The room sank into silence. The girl with the green drink stepped back to the window, and people dispersed. They walked backwards and spat wine into their glasses. Champagne bubbles dropped to the bottom, and steam swarmed back into coffee cups. The woman with the ponytail closed her teeth around half of a canapé and pulled out an intact one.

You see, the past wasn’t dead. It was alive, and it was happening—always, everywhere—and I could see it replay in reverse. I stayed still, a fleshless ghost among fleshless ghosts. The past unfolded before me, always silent, always unchangeable. I could do nothing but watch. Breathing helped control the pace.

The party people blurred out of the room, and it brightened. Shadows scurried around, accelerating until I saw nothing but streaks of sunlight on the rug. They appeared, shortened, turned, stretched, and faded away. The rug vanished. I took another deep breath, and the hardwood floor hid its gloss under a layer of dust and a web of scratches. All around me, piles of rubbish popped up and melted away. The white walls flickered to a faded wallpaper. Back by the stairs, the old brown carpet gained a large stain of white dust, and a moment later, a mountain of rubble materialized in its place. I held my breath, and the scene slowed down.

I had been able to see the past for as long as I could remember. Before I learned to control it, the history of any place leapt at me without warning, rewinding its episodes before my eyes. Classrooms filled with hospital beds, shops resurrected from ruins, motorways vanished among trees. A vivid imagination, my parents used to say until I learned not to mention it anymore. Even Kurt didn’t know. He thought staring into space and producing lucky guesses was my innocent quirk, but I’d rewinded past in so many places that nothing remained of my innocence.

I had seen everything over the years: violence, pain, and madness; blood and dead bodies and gut-wrenching gore. Every kink, every appalling and revolting act, I had witnessed it all. But I had seen joy and love and wonder too, and little pockets of quiet comfort that made life bearable. Nothing surprised me anymore.

I craned my neck to see the rubble better, fully aware I was craning my neck in the present. My audience would see it as a part of the performance. I walked to the stairs, careful not to bump into the furniture that remained in the present. That rubble was exactly what I was looking for—a pile of broken tiles. I breathed out and let go, and the elastic band that connected me to the present pulled me back with a snap.

Some might envy my ability to walk into any place and witness its past. But I wasn’t always in control. Spontaneous episodes were nauseatingly disorienting. A blink separated a bench in the park from a battlefield. Thrown into a random bubble of the past, with time ticking backwards, I had no lifeline, no countdown, no agency.

I turned around to face the crowd. Some people seemed impatient, others confused or already bored—it had taken me four minutes to reach back for the tiles. The girl with the green drink no longer looked miserable; she watched me with perplexed nervousness. She would call me a freak if she knew what happened during those four minutes of silence and deep breathing. Not everybody understood that everybody was a freak. Even saints had done something shameful or stupid or embarrassing in their life. Even Kurt. Gosh, I’d been to his bedroom. When you had watched the past in all its shades, you stopped judging people.

“They are pale green squares with little white flowers at the corners,” I said.

Gail pressed a palm to her mouth to stop a gasp.

“Is it true?” the woman with the ponytail demanded.

“Come and see,” Jared said.

Everybody followed him upstairs. Everybody except me and the green drink girl—only her drink was gone. She avoided me, her distant gaze piercing the sofa. Her ragged breathing betrayed discomfort. Perhaps even an innocent magic act was too much freakishness for her liking. A pity. She was cute.

“Unbelievable,” the whisky-drinking woman was saying, coming down the stairs. She was flushed. They all were.

“This could have been staged,” the sceptic grumbled.

The crowd returned, and I had to endure an inevitable Q&A session. I’d heard all their questions before, and I kept truthful answers to myself. Yes, I could have been a brilliant detective. Or a palaeontologist—except every field required hard evidence, not wild guesses. No, my job had nothing to do with this talent. I liked fixing electronics; it kept me in the present.

The performance was over. The party was no longer in danger: the alcohol saturation had reached optimum levels, and the crowd broke down into smaller self-entertaining groups. People forgot about me and the tiles. I was free to sneak out and go home.

I looked around in search of my jacket. The green drink girl stood by the stairs, hugging it.

“I think that’s mine,” I said, walking up to her. My heart ramped up.

“I know,” she said, smoothing a crease in a nervous gesture. We stood in the exact spot where the pile of broken tiles once was. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?”

She shrugged, her bony shoulder reaching up to a curtain of adorable black curls. “I don’t know. But we leave together. I’m Mia.”

“What?” Did this girl just invite me over?

She stepped towards the door. “This is when we leave.”

My head spun in confusion. “And what happens then, Mia?”

“I don’t know yet.” She turned to look back at the sofa. “But the next time we’re in that room, we’re holding hands.”

The airlock hissed, rousing us from slumber. Tohwalt put down the breaker he was mending to watch the suited figure step inside. Occasional visitors weren’t uncommon in the off-season: some people came to Atull to taste the surfer’s life without having to deal with the sand. A sightseer, perhaps, or a geologist who followed the five-star reviews to escape dry rations.

“Kewt,” Tohwalt shouted to the kitchen out of habit. “We’ve got a customer.”

Kewt sat up from the VR rig, disturbing the dozing keagon in his lap. Noll croaked, protesting at being lifted, but the boy scratched the feathery neck in just the right spot, and the keagon relaxed.

The usual choreography commenced. The boy scrambled to his feet and pulled up the hood. Swaying, he carried the groggy keagon to the nook between the bar shelves. Once on his perch, Noll shook himself awake, sending an emerald wave of stirring feathers along his long, supple body. In the front, Tohwalt swiped the tuner to change the music. We never liked the lulling voices or the off-beat rhythms, but that was what people expected to hear in a cliffside diner.

The visitor moved from the airlock into the suitroom and pulled off his helmet. He was an older man, his short hair almost completely grey, but fit and quick in his movements. He undressed with the methodical precision of a spacer, thumbing safety clasps into readiness, shelving pieces the right side up for quick access. His suit was old, the enamel on the shielding plates scraped down to the metal. Still surf-worthy, but from the man’s rigid posture, we could see he wasn’t a surfer. Rented gear, then, from a shop up in the port.

Kewt grabbed the apron and scowled at another frayed corner: Noll had been bored again, chewing on things without noticing. The keagon sat now in his attentive, almost avian pose: front legs hidden in feathers, head tilted so only one eye stared at the door. Finally, entertainment. Kewt threw the neck loop over his hood and hobbled to his hideout by the stove. Tohwalt already stood ready behind the counter.

The door creaked open, and the new man walked in. He ignored Tohwalt’s prominent shape and directed all his attention to the room itself. He gaped openly at the scrapped breakers on the walls like he wasn’t sure what those were. A clear view of the vertical drop behind the triple glass elicited an audible gasp as if he hadn’t seen the same vista on his way to the diner. He chuckled at the overturned supply rocket stages that served as tables. Even the sand on the floor amused him, as though the pea-sized glass spheres were an artistic choice instead of a pesky inevitability. We couldn’t get a grasp of the man. A first-time tourist would react like that, only less ostentatiously. Was he acting?

The man finally met Tohwalt’s eyes and smiled back. His face fell into the well-defined lines of someone who smiled easily and often. We noted the wide, sinewy neck and bulging chest muscles beneath the quality underlayer. A retired forcer? There was no need to get alarmed. We had had forcers dine here before.

“Welcome to the Puffin Nest,” Tohwalt said.

“Heya,” the customer said and looked up, searching the wall for writings. “Can I please see the menu?”

“There isn’t one. The meal is a burger with fries and a soda.” A typical first-timer interaction.

“A meal, then,” the man agreed, grinning.

In the kitchen, Kewt fired up the grill. Tohwalt bent down to grab a can of coke from the bottom shelf. Noll shifted imperceptibly on his roost.

“Lovely place,” the customer said, stealing a stool from the nearest table and settling at the counter as if it were a bar. “Is it always so quiet?”

“Only in the off-season,” Tohwalt said, passing him the drink. Whoever the man was, the conversation took a predictable route. “In four months, when the tide changes and the clouds rise up, this whole cliff will be swarmed with surfers. Everybody gets hungry. It will be pretty busy then.”

In the back, Kewt grabbed a pack of pre-cut fries and dumped them into the magfryer. Behind Tohwalt’s back, the keagon was moulding himself into a different pose, his movements too slow for the eye to notice. The customer turned the can in his hands as if trying to remember how to open it. Definitely a spacer.

“How long does the season last?” the man asked. A question common enough and delivered amicably, yet we spotted a tingle of falsehood in it.

“Two months, if you’re sensible,” Tohwalt said. “Some cranks squeeze out four. With the right gear, you can descend an additional half a kilo. That’s only if you’re not afraid of getting stuck down there and having to come back by rock climbing. And if you’re ready to sacrifice your breaker.” He jerked his chin at the scorched board in the corner he had been trying to resurrect.

The man raised his brows in mild surprise. “What happened?”

“The heat from friction,” Tohwalt said with a nonchalant shrug. “The clouds are dust—silica, mostly—hot already from all that atmospheric pressure. When you surf, your breaker coasts on what is essentially molten glass. Spray condenses into beads.” He pointed at the floor. “That’s not a decoration. This shit is everywhere. Gets carried in from the airlock.”

The man bent down to roll his guest slipper over the glass pearls. Noll watched him in a hunting stance: head down, back arched and feathers smoothed out, tail slightly raised for balance. In the kitchen, Kewt threw the protein on the grill and checked the bread box: the dough had defrosted and begun to rise.

“The galaxy is full of wonders,” the customer was saying, shaking his head in elated disbelief. “Who would have thought people would surf the upper layers of a gas giant for fun—”

“Waves and gravity are free energy,” Tohwalt pointed out. “People have been using them for entertainment for ages.”

The man didn’t seem to hear him and went on with his gleeful musings. “—Jump off into the abyss from a cliff, hoping a board of plastic—or whatever it’s made of—”

“It’s layers of metal and heat-resistant polymer,” Tohwalt tried to interject again.

“—would keep them afloat. Bet their life on crazy skill.” The man took a deep, expressive breath. The permanent smile he wore felt out of place, unrelated to the conversation, as if he was giddy about something else entirely. “How do you master a sport when losing your footing means falling all the way down?”

He waited now for Tohwalt’s answer. A predictable misconception, and one that Tohwalt was usually happy to correct, but today, with this man, we had little appetite for sermons.

“You have retro rockets for backup,” Tohwalt said dryly. “And you won’t fall all the way down. There is an altitude where you begin to float. That’s how our islet works.”

“The islet, yes! Who would have thought people would set foot on a floating rock, a piece of a broken planetary ring or an asteroid or whatever it was before it deorbited—”

This time, Tohwalt made no attempt to clarify.

“—Put a permanent structure on it.” The man gestured at the room with a well-rehearsed swipe. “Build a diner on a cliff. A two-hour hike away from the nearest landing lot.”

He paused. We had a bad feeling about him. That mask of constant cheer was a wall we couldn’t peer over. A lot of practice must have gone into it to make it so efficient. Kewt flipped the sizzling protein and prepared to chop a tomato, the knife handle slippery in his grasp. Noll’s feathers started to puff.

“Living in such an isolated place,” the spacer continued, “nine out of twelve months almost completely deserted, must take a lot of dedication.” He squinted at Tohwalt. “Are you a passionate surfer yourself?”

“I surf a bit. Like I said, it gets busy once the clouds rise.”

The man stared, his smile bordering on a sneer, as if the answer didn’t satisfy him.

“It must get boring,” he said at last. “How long have you lived here?”

Tohwalt put his weight on the other foot, enduring the scrutiny. Did he know? Were we discovered? Noll morphed into a tight, nervous ball. Back in the kitchen, Kewt willed the bread to bake faster, but the crust needed a deeper shade of gold.

“Eleven years,” Tohwalt said. It was public record.

“Eleven years,” the man repeated. Was he trying to catch us in a lie? His sneer lingered a moment longer before thawing into an easy grin. “A lovely place to retire.”

He leaned back and made a point of staring out of the window. The faceted rock, its texture visible in clear weather, extended both up into the yellowish sky and down into the haze of the drop. The unbarred pathway that clung to the cliff face was but a flimsy ornament on the brutal expanse.

“A lovely, lovely place,” the man repeated.

Finally, the patina of falsehood gave way. We got a tinge of longing and the kind of weariness that comes from permanent frustration. Noll’s neck relaxed and began its journey up. Kewt shut off the grill and pulled the bun out of the bread box.

“No retirement for me yet, I’m afraid,” the man said, and a flash of default smile shut the door on us. Lifting a finger to point at the ceiling, he added, “True Dedication Blossoming still needs me to tie up a few loose ends. I’ll have to settle for a short leave and a five-star meal.”

We were right about him being a spacer, but what kind of starship was True Dedication Blossoming, a lawforce warship? Did it come here to seize us? Was this an indirect threat: don’t try anything; the assault unit is standing by?

The man gave Tohwalt’s stocky frame an appraising look. “Have you served yourself?”

What other confirmation did we need? Kewt palmed the bread knife, hovering over the bun. The keagon’s head tipped forward, the dark beak drawn like a dagger.

“No, sir,” Tohwalt said, his voice surprisingly steady. A forcer at the diner didn’t automatically mean he came here for us. It was too soon to call this a crisis. “Did my civic duty in sanitary service.” Another public record. “Nine months in the forests of Sinue, the rest in various mobile tidying teams.”

“Very commendable,” the man said. “People imagine we, the lawforce, do lots of flashy fighting, but in truth, most of the time, we do what you did—clean up. Let me tell you a story.”

He scooted closer, crossing his arms over the counter, his grin almost impish. An entertainment, sure, but one we could do without.

“Around a star far, far away,” he began, “on an ordinary planet, Coalition public funds kept disappearing: a library never built, welfare never distributed—that sort of thing. Turns out, there’s a dark habitat in orbit with some unregistered traffic. The Coalition sends a unit up there to investigate. What kind of establishment would you hide, right? It turns out, it’s a lab.”

Tohwalt’s shoulders tensed. The man knew. Noll let out a soft hiss. Kewt shook the fries out of the magfryer, his fingers trembling over the serving basket.

“Illegal lab,” the forcer went on. “Ugly, unethical setup. Cages and cages of lab animals. Human subjects. Unsanctioned clones: little kids grown in vats, brought up with minimal interaction, just to be experimented on. Room after room of weird equipment. So of course the personnel starts destroying evidence before the lawforce even docks: slaughters the living, crushes the machinery, takes the suicide pills. By the time the forcers come in, everything’s in shambles. What else is left if not mop up?”

This was a crisis all right. Whether suspicions or evidence had led the forcer to Atull, he was here for us. The keagon watched the room with one unblinking eye. Kewt hastily smeared onion jam over the bun. Tohwalt could do nothing but attentively tilt his head.

“So the lab’s gone,” the man continued. “The scene is documented, reports are submitted, your kind gets called in. The planet gets its library built and welfare distributed. End of story, right? Well, no. When forensics look into it, they discover that the facility was working on a quantum manipulation weapon.”

Tohwalt’s left eyelid twitched. A weapon? Perhaps the forcer came here blindly, following breadcrumbs he didn’t understand. Nothing was lost yet. In the back, Kewt plucked a fresh lettuce leaf from the planter pipe. In the nook, the keagon’s body strained from all that effort to remain motionless.

“The Coalition scientists spend years going through the retrieved debris,” the man went on, “combing through shreds of records. There’s not enough to reconstruct the research, but a recovered fragment of experiment protocols shows that the lab had a breakthrough with something called Spec-84.”

Kewt’s knife slipped off a pickle he was cutting and landed perilously close to his fingers. Tohwalt tilted his head to the other side, his neck betraying its tightness with a crack. Noll shivered, about to lose his cool. The forcer knew. The grin he wore was a gloat of victory. He had us cornered.

“I’m not saying the end justifies the means,” the man said, “but imagine if we had it. A tool to reach into the very fabric of the cosmos!”

He sighed and looked out of the window again. Noll used the moment to change his pose, darting to stand upright with the front talons extended. A lightning-quick move, but the blur of green feathers must have registered in the forcer’s peripheral vision. The man jerked his head to look at the shelves.

“Is that—” he asked, peering into the shadows, “—a live keagon?”

With his cover blown, Noll fluttered and let out an annoyed gronk. In the kitchen, Kewt began to hurriedly assemble the burger.

“A kea dragon!” the man said, grinning at Tohwalt, his tale forgotten. Now that he was sure he had us pinned, he could allow himself a detour. “I remember when they were rare. Such a successful crosspec: smart, curious, resourceful. I hear their natural urge to explore and manipulate makes them an excellent subject in behavioural studies. And I remember when they almost overran a planet. Cunning and fearless and unruly creatures. Good thing they have legs instead of wings. Aren’t keagons banned and considered pests on at least four worlds?”

“They aren’t banned on Atull,” Tohwalt said. “Nothing survives outside without a suit.” He turned to glare at the keagon, and Noll sat back down with a discontent croak. “Noll is my son’s pet.”

“Your son’s? So this is a family business?” The man craned his neck to look into the kitchen. Kewt tried to shrink to fit behind the exhaust hood. “Come out, boy!”

Tohwalt clenched his jaws. The forcer might think he had won, but there would be no easy capitulation. He would not bully us into a confession with veiled hints and suggestive stories. Noll bent into half a pretzel to ruffle an itchy feather. In the back, Kewt crowned the burger with the top bun, his fingers stiff. Normally, Tohwalt served the customers, but today, Kewt would have to do it himself.

“Don’t be shy,” the man boomed, rummaging in his underlayer’s pockets. “Come. I have something just for you.”

This was a game to him, but we could play games, too. All he had was talk, and we could handle talk. Kewt grabbed the self-heating plate and limped to the front, ducking when stepping over the threshold.

“Gosh, you’re tall,” the man said, his gaze slowly travelling up the boy’s gangly figure. “One might think you grew up in microgravity.” He let out a self-congratulatory chuckle.

“Give the boy a break,” Tohwalt said while Kewt habitually retreated deeper into his hood. “He’s as shy as one can get, and puberty hasn’t been too kind to him.”

He took the plate from Kewt and placed it before the forcer. The man barely even looked at it. He watched the boy with triumphant fascination. Kewt shoved his hands into his pockets, slouching.

“Didn’t mean to be unkind, kid,” the man said with genuine sympathy. “Teenagers are awkward. You’ll grow out of it, eventually. How old are you?”

“Thirteen, sir,” Kewt said, his voice husky. Noll stretched towards the boy, and Kewt allowed the keagon to climb onto his shoulder.

“Thirteen,” the man repeated slowly as if doing sums in his mind. “Let me have a good look at you.”

He glanced between him and his father. He would have a hard time finding similarities. Tohwalt was a bull of a man: compact and chiselled and sturdy. A fair-skinned ginger, to boot, with a full head of hair. Kewt could hide his bald scalp and his bronze scarred skin in the shadow of his hood, but that scrawny body betrayed itself from under any number of layers of baggy clothes.

“I’d never suspect you two are related. Are you adopted?” The forcer snickered unapologetically. “Your mother’s genes must be strong.”

“I never knew my mother,” the boy said. Noll settled around his neck like a boa scarf.

“We lost her in childbirth,” Tohwalt explained. Also public record, if only a little forged.

“Tragic,” the man said insincerely. “Ah, but I promised you something.”

His hand dived into his pocket and we tensed in anticipation. What would it be, an incapacitator? Noll sank his talons into Kewt’s collarbone, making the boy wince. Tohwalt eyed the nearest bottle. A good blow to the head could knock the forcer out. We could put him back into his suit. People tripped walking up that narrow pathway all the time. Surfers didn’t want a railing on it, and innocent tourists were the ones to suffer. But how long before someone else from True Dedication Blossoming came down to try again?

The man’s hand reappeared from his pocket, pulling out something long and lightweight. It came out in white, knotted strands, each node dragging the next until the entire foot-long structure was out. A fibreglass meshwork, or fragile thread woven into a net, hung from the man’s pinched fingers over the counter. What was it, a snare?

“Here,” the man said, offering it to Kewt. “Do you know what that is?”

“No.” It didn’t look dangerous.

“It’s a toy. A puzzle. Let me show you how it works.”

He shook the netting, trying to spread it out, turning it and pinching different knots. The structure was circular, or perhaps a cylinder, with a denser cluster at one side. In it, the forcer finally found the knot he was looking for. A quick twist, and the strands between the knots stiffened into rods, and the netting expanded into a dome of stretched diamonds. The man placed it carelessly on the counter. It stood on rigid points of bottom eyelets with the twisted knot on top. It looked like an overturned fruit bowl or a bizarre fishnet hat.

The forcer pointed at the top nodule. “There’s a button here that lets in a single photon. It encounters a beam-splitter and can travel into one of these tubes.” His finger touched one of the immediate rods, and it turned from translucent white to dull grey. The change of colour brought a tinge of familiarity. The man’s finger travelled to the next knot and lingered there. “It meets another splitter, and the laws of randomness decide where it goes next: left or right. Always down and never back where it came from.” He slipped down to the next crossing. “And then again and again all the way to the bottom.” As he moved, the impacted rods greyed out, and a zigzagging line of his progress remained visible. “Guessing which path the photon will actually take is about zero point one three percent. That’s the goal of the puzzle—to guess its path.” He tapped the top button, and a different zigzagging line lit up in blue. He frowned at the results. “See? I didn’t get it right. Here, you try.” He tapped the top button again to reset the game and pushed the dome towards Kewt.

Crisis or not, this thing looked interesting. The boy took an awkward lunge forward, but Tohwalt stepped in before him. He stooped to study the dome, deciding which of the twelve top-most rods to select. Noll slipped down to nestle in the apron pocket to have a better vantage point.

The forcer, almost losing interest in the entire affair, reached for his meal.

“The toy is actually based on some restored equipment from the lab,” he said, snatching a golden fry. “There were variations and variations of those things. Forensics were sure they were a part of the weapon, something working on the same principle as the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester.”

Tohwalt’s fingers froze above the first knot. “Is this a bomb?”

“No, no,” the forcer said, chuckling. “It’s just an idea that you could, with the right setup, know if a bomb is real or a dud—in half the time when you don’t blow yourself up, which is also a fifty-fifty chance.” He pointed at the net. “The scientists thought this must be some even cleverer setup to test things without direct access.” He shook his head, and his gaze landed on Kewt. “But I think they were wrong. I think Spec-84 wasn’t an object at all.”

The man surely knew more than we were comfortable with. But did he have enough evidence for a direct accusation? Tohwalt poked the toy, submitting his guess. The blue line flashed on the opposite side of the dome. Kewt hovered over Tohwalt, impatient to have a go, Noll’s green head poking out of his apron.

“I think,” the forcer went on, and we caught a twinkle of stale resentment—there and gone again in a flash, “all those poor clones weren’t just consumables to test the weapon on. They were the weapon. And those things—” He gestured at the toy without looking. “—were the measuring tape. It’s possible someone from cage number 84 could solve that puzzle.”

“You mean,” Tohwalt said without a flinch, “predict the future?”

“No, not to predict the future. Direct the photon. Decide which way it goes in the splitter. Keep up with the speed of light and manipulate superpositions.”

“Move matter, then?”

“Eventually, yes. Commanding elementary particles is a long way from moving objects. But it’s a crucial first step.”

Kewt used Tohwalt’s distraction to elbow his way to the net. While Noll squirmed under the cloth, trying to break free, the boy touched the rods in rapid succession. When he tested it, the grey and blue paths intersected, and one common rod glowed green.

“Too bad everyone in that lab died,” Tohwalt said, keeping his eyes on the forcer. The crisis was not yet a disaster.

“Well, maybe not everyone,” the forcer said, arching an eyebrow. “You see, there are a few discrepancies in the reports. Some records are missing, like which sanitary unit was assigned to deal with the lab. There are flight logs of trips the shuttle pilot doesn’t remember, and starliners leaving the system early and without passengers. It’s like someone has concealed their journey off the orbiter.”

The man was good. Tohwalt watched him, his chin inching closer to his chest. Kewt tried a different line and got another partial match at the very bottom: the photon, darting around all the wrong eyelets, ended its journey in the predicted knot. The keagon broke free, his talons scratching the counter, but the boy caught him before he reached the toy.

“You want to hear my theory?” the forcer said, lowering his voice. “I think someone in the cleanup team found a surviving clone. A little kid, hiding somewhere under the debris. Who wouldn’t rescue the poor thing? I would.” Would he, really, or was this a bluff? “I wouldn’t even report it, or it would go straight into another lab. No, I would smuggle it off. Maybe fabricate an adoption or fake a paternity test. Go somewhere quiet where nobody would bother us.”

He grinned again, triumphantly. Shamelessly.

“It wouldn’t mean the surviving clone was Spec-84,” Tohwalt said, ignoring the provocation.

“Oh, but it would. If anyone could survive the carnage, it would be the breakthrough specimen. I don’t know how he did it—maybe his powers blossomed under pressure, and he could arrange a micro-crack in the cage metal that would shatter on impact, or maybe a sympathetic staff member couldn’t bring himself to kill the miracle—but I can see Spec-84 survive. Maybe even rescue a friend, a cute pet rat from the neighbouring cage, or a keagon.” He didn’t even look at Noll stirring in Kewt’s hands. “Who better to find a perfect hiding place than a clever pest and a weaponized toddler? And if anyone could hack the bureaucratic encryption to forge records, it would be Spec-84.”

We marvelled at the man’s confidence. One didn’t have to hack anything if one was persuasive enough. Noll hissed, demanding freedom, and Kewt yielded, releasing the impatient keagon onto the counter.

“Interesting theory,” Tohwalt said grimly. There was little amusement in crises.

The forcer sighed, his smile slipping away, and a gash opened in his careful armour, revealing tiredness he had been nursing.

“Let’s make a deal, son,” he said, turning to Kewt, “You solve this thing, and nothing changes here, in this nice little diner, except your dad having to hire a new cook. What do you say?”

Kewt darted a scared look at Tohwalt.

“You’re joking, right?” Tohwalt said.

“No,” the forcer said with finality. “No more jokes.”

Tohwalt and Kewt exchanged glances. This was a full-blown disaster: denial or violence would only postpone the worst. Our best chance was to use the crack, however small, before the man wiped it out with his smiles.

“Play the game, boy.” The forcer gave the toy a little push. “Unless you prefer to do it the hard way, with the three of you in cages.”

We did not: dealing with one man was better than facing the entire True Dedication Blossoming.

“You’re wrong, you know,” Tohwalt said, stepping aside. “He can’t do it.”

“We’ll see.”

Tohwalt tried to pull the keagon out of Kewt’s way, but the sleek body slipped away and back onto the counter. The boy bent over the netting, perspiration misting his hooded brow. We concentrated, falling through the fissure and pulling on the available thread. The ghostly twine unspooled into a web of paths and nodules. We touched the knots, feeling the signals zipping around in a frenzy. So many to unravel. So many to tame. With an unsteady finger, Kewt marked out a meandering path. The blue line flashed, scoring him a single matching section.

“There’s a lie scale in the stats for this puzzle,” the man said wearily. “I’ll know if you try to lose on purpose.”

We peered deeper, focusing on the knots at the ends of the threads. Some swelled into megahubs of traffic, others were mere specks, barely visited. A step further, and the flocks of messengers bridged the chasms between the hubs. Deeper still, each courier broke into easy-to-nudge pinpricks. We began to work.

Kewt constructed a new grey path and the blue lightning crossed the dome in all the wrong places. Tohwalt bit his lip. Noll crept closer, his tail almost touching the forgotten meal.

“Try harder,” the man said. “Win and nobody else has to leave but you.”

We were out of practice, too comfortable in our triumvirate setup. We forgot what a mess a new mind was. The man was too old, too set in his ways, too sure of himself. Unlike the pilots or the clerks, he was too invested and determined to be persuaded to let go, to omit, to forget. Definitely too annoying to be assimilated.

Kewt picked a new route, his fingers trembling, and scored two matches. Snot stretched down from under his hood, and he sniffled. The forcer twitched, an emphatic flash crossing the oft-used pathways: failure, and helplessness, and anger at those who refused to believe him. And above it all—the fog of chronic exhaustion of keeping up the façade. This was our way in.

“I can’t do this,” Kewt pleaded, dragging the back of his palm under his nose. The motion triggered more tears, and he cowered in embarrassment.

“Stop it!” Tohwalt growled, reaching to protect the boy.

We tickled the opened-up knots. That mind was too stiff to change, but even stiff could settle.

“Whoever you think he is, whatever you want him to do—” Tohwalt began, but a lump in his throat cut his speech short.

We rode the words, aiming for an overworked juncture: he had been right. He, whom nobody on True Dedication Blossoming took seriously, who had to don the mask of a jester to keep his unhinged ideas, was right about everything: the nature of Spec-84, the surviving clone, the altered records. A cathartic wave washed the fringes of his mind. This was our chance, or we’d only have made things worse.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tohwalt said, finding his voice again. “Can’t you see? The boy can’t do it.”

Kewt mopped up his cheeks with both hands, and his hood slipped down. The dark scars that crossed his scalp looked like stripes on the hide of an animal. He stood there, a hunched, bawling creature. Noll cooed at him from the counter. We tickled a gateway, and the forcer looked down. That poor, poor thing. The circuit closed: he was right about everything, except one thing—whatever the breakthrough powers were, the boy no longer had them.

Some loose ends were too frayed to be tied up.

The man reached for the plate and bit into his burger. We nudged a speck, and the signal found a shortcut, bypassing the habitual channel of chronic anguish. With each motion of the man’s jaw, his face relaxed. The new flare persisted: even if it changed nothing in the end, he had been right. In an old, exhausted landscape, a satisfaction groove was forming.

“It’s a damn good burger,” he said. “Five stars, indeed.”

We retreated, letting the settling tangle go.

The crisis was over. After an awkward moment of indecision, Kewt hobbled back to the kitchen to drown his sniffles in the rumble of a dishwasher. Tohwalt stood about, ready to hold the fort if the conversation sparked back into life, but the man chewed in silence, completely engrossed in his food. Eventually, Tohwalt shuffled back to the corner and picked up his breaker. Only Noll kept the forcer company, watching the man with his head tilted, using one eye and then the other. The man didn’t stare back. He finished his meal, paid in Coalition credits, and stood up to leave.

“Your toy,” Tohwalt shouted after him when the man was at the door.

The man just waved his hand without looking back.

The keagon stretched up to stand tall and see the visitor off. When the airlock swallowed the man’s suited figure, Noll shook himself off and hopped to the toy. Careful in his aim, he pecked out a giant, regular rhombus: two diverging lines, taking their origin in the neighbouring rods at the top knot, turning inwards in the middle of the dome, and meeting at the same point down at the counter. It cost us little effort to persuade the beam-splitter to let the photon travel up. The keagon reached to poke the submit button, and all grey rods flickered to glow green, the photon bouncing in a loop. Noll croaked in content. Now, this was what we called proper entertainment.

When I barge in to take you, a length of rope coiled around my arm and a plasma knife in my pocket, you look up from the vegetable beds with such trust, my heart breaks. You feel safe in your backyard. Six years have passed since anyone in the colony last reminded you of your purpose. No one calls you Charger anymore. You’re Argy now, or simply, girl, because you don’t age. That’s how I call you—girl. Come with me, girl, and you come, without question. You beam that smile of yours, wipe the dirt off your hands, and follow me into the forest. It’s so easy, I almost blow it, but it’s dark, and you don’t see me weep.

Your cabin is the last in the clearing, and it’s dusk, so no one sees us go. I cut through the underbrush, pushing the giant fronds aside, and they swing behind me, showering you with dew. The ferns fare particularly well in this climate. Ferns and maple trees. There are thousands of new species here, branching from the most successful Lady Fern Spec A and Acer Spec C. Some are even edible—a complete terraforming success. This planet is ready. It’s you who holds the mission back.

We descend into the ravine. It’s not flooded this time of year, the soil viscous and black with organic matter. Your breath is hot on my back. You probably think this is a rescue trip, that someone got stuck in the mud, and that’s what the rope is for—to pull them out. It’s only when we leave the peat bank behind, and the path under our feet is solid once more, you start to ask questions. It’s what happened and where are we going at first, but then we pass a waymark stone, and you fall silent.

That’s when I have to grab you. You’re so light, I can lift you with one arm. Your skin is warm to touch, smooth, convincing. People didn’t like touching you back on the ship, but it’s different down here. You labour by their side, you share their food, you fall asleep from exhaustion—one of them in every way that matters—and they forget. I could forget too. But someone has to remember.

You put up a fight. You kick and scratch and bite, and it gives me no pleasure to hit you back. My cheeks are wet by the time our skirmish is over and your hands are secured. We sit slumped on the ground, panting. You shoot daggers at me, and it’s better this way. At least we’re honest. You no longer scream—you know it’s pointless so far from the settlement and in the forest so dense.

When your breath evens out, you don’t ask me why—you know why. You ask me why now. It probably seems so unfair. You worked so hard to earn your life. You thought you were in the clear. People stopped mentioning the mission before we even left the First Camp. It might look like the original plan was abandoned. Why only make way for others when we could stay, keep the planet to ourselves? What can I tell you that you don’t already know? We might not have much, but people back home have even less. So many sister missions have failed to tame their long-ago pre-seeded planets, while ours is clearly thriving. Who are we to decide who gets to live?

Except, that’s what I’m doing now—with you.

I want to reach out and wipe blood from your lip, but you might take it the wrong way. I don’t want to give you hope. This is what you were made for: to live long enough to see proof of success, to lend your metabolism and use biology to keep the Energy Cell X charged. You’re sturdier than you look but still frail enough to double as an indicator: if you survive, the rest will, too. It was cruel of people to let you think you might have a different fate. So instead of confusing you with my kindness, I clamber to my feet and tug on the rope for you to get up.

I’m afraid you will resist and I will have to drag you along, or carry you over my shoulder, but you surrender and plod obediently before me. The old road is overrun with creeping fern, but both moons are up, and the trees around us retain their tunneling formation, so I don’t need to stop to look for the waymarks as often. You make small talk like we’re in a harvesting tandem, the rope between us not a leash but a tether. Only your voice is quivering. You use my name a lot, as if this could soften me up. Maybe it does. I can’t look at you. Your posture is crooked, and one shoulder blade sticks out like a sprout of a wing. Who ever thought making you look like a teenager was a good idea? If this was meant as a test of devotion to the mission, it’s brutal. I push back, mortify whatever softness has taken root. The forest around us has blurred into a black curtain. You keep talking, trying to sound cheerful. Maybe you’re counting on me not being able to do it when we’re there. I’ve seen the charts, I know where to cut to get to the power cell, and I’m counting on it not being harder than butchering a lamb. Domestic Sheep Spec B, the most common source of protein for the settlers. I’ll have to do it. Nobody else will.

The larger of two moons sets by the time we reach the remnants of the midway post, and the glade is like a black blot. Little is left of the old lodge, just a ribcage of protruding brickwork. Perhaps even less is left of the chimney, and my effort is in vain, and I want this to be so, so I don’t have to do what I’ve set out to do. You pray for that, too, I know, and even though we’re aligned, I’m angry at you. I begrudge you your passion. You’re more alive in your final moments than I’ll ever be. I’m dead inside already.

We don’t have the time to camp, but we’re both worn out from wading through the bush, and I allow us a minute. I loosen your rope when we sit down. The warmth from your thigh against mine makes me shiver. You ask for water, and I give you my whole canteen. Your hand lingers on mine when you take the bottle, but I pretend I don’t understand what it is that you’re offering. There is nothing you can do to make me change my mind. You see that now. From up close, you can see the rot inside me, the dead meat in my chest, and you start to cry, wasting the newly gained water. I turn away. Please, you beg, and I don’t want to die, and believe me, if there was another way to complete the mission, I would have gladly used it. But some things are bigger than you and me.

You fight again, harder this time, meaner. I respect you for that. You fling water in my face and use your shoulder as a battering ram to topple me over, and you run while I scramble to my feet. I catch you easily enough. We roll in the wet thicket, elbows and knees banging, and there’s a moment when your quick breath hits my neck that I imagine a different tangle. If, like the others, I had allowed myself to indulge in a dream of domestic bliss, could I have done it with you? You’re not a child. I could have loved you in another life. I press you to the ground, feel your whole body scrunched under me, all fear and anger and pain. Don’t, Charger, I whisper, and you deflate, and I win.

We’re back on the old road, barely visible now in the low moonlight. Even without resisting, you manage to impede our journey. You hobble in my steps, the rope between us tight, stumbling on roots, dragging us off-course. When it changes nothing, the begging resumes. I don’t listen to words, letting the sound of your pleading fuse together, become a background. I cannot argue. Of course I don’t have the right to do this to you. Self-sacrifice is easy—it’s sacrificing others that is hard.

Something pale leaps out from behind the thicket at my next step. I tilt my head, and the white continues, left and right and up. Up, up—high up into the sky. It’s a never-ending column of brick and mortar. Half of the star-speckled black is blocked off by that thing. I’m momentarily overwhelmed, my mind refusing to comprehend the scale of the structure, and a surge of irrational fear makes me stagger. The unnatural, looming intruder is before me, a crime against this arboreal landscape. Tremble before me, the chimney says. Run. And the rope I hold almost slips out of my hands at your yank as you obey the imposing command. But I manage to control us both.

We are here. The lighthouse has not crumbled.

I have to carry you upstairs. You’re clawing at the walls on the ground floor—and hang like a rag by the time we reach the top platform. I’m surprised to see it clean of vegetation, but then I remember we’re sixty metres above the tree line. One million clay bricks. Eight years of labour. Fourteen dead. When did it stop being Mission Objective E and became the chimney? After rationing had been called off? After the first child was born? Sacrifices erased for simple comforts. Will one more death correct the score?

I put you down gently. You’re shivering, eyes on the magnetic lantern as if that is the weapon that will end you. I’m disappointed nothing has stopped me yet. I’ll have to go through with it now: butcher the girl, extract the energy cell, place it in its slot to power the beam that will signal the mission coordinators: come, we’re ready for you. But we are not ready, you and I.

You begin to sob. The words of solace I could offer Charger do not fit you. Destiny and fulfilment mean nothing to a girl with dirt under her nails. Shine a little light for us, girl, I don’t say. Your bound hands shield your sternum, guarding the thing the mission has forced on you: your fuel and your leech. The light it could emit, for you is darkness, and yet the sole spark you withhold will extinguish the mission.

Hush, Argy, I say, and your name cuts deeper than my knife ever could.

You are a test, I’m sure of it now. The test I don’t know the correct answer to. Did all those sister missions fail because the crew could not bring themselves to chop one of their own? Or did they fail precisely because someone took up the burden? What if sending the signal is not an invitation, but a warning? Don’t come: they slaughter innocents here.

You don’t look at me when I raise my knife, so you don’t watch me fail the mission. I have deadened myself for this, so now I can stand it.

Shine a little light, I say and cut the rope.