GARACH LEDANA HAD gotten Cousin Miro to watch her little son Rodao for the evening. She was indulging in her best approximation of the season’s fashion. She’d obtained a wig in the latest trendy hairdo, all luxurious curls, since there was no way she could grow out her short mane overnight without resorting to risky modification technology. Ordinarily she didn’t regret her choice of haircut, since she hated fussing with the stuff, but tonight she wanted to look her best. Whatever Cousin Miro said, she did have standards.

So Ledana donned a tasteful necklace of onyx and black pearls that she’d inherited from her gran, matched it with black pearl earstuds, and slipped into a dark gray dress with a diagonal slash of lavender. The ensemble came perilously close to Nirai colors, but damned if she was going to let that stop her from looking good. Besides, the last time Nirai inspectors had come through her lab, she’d charmed them into submission.

(“Why didn’t you become a Nirai?” one of her assistants had demanded. “Because most Nirai are squeamish about vivisecting their own geese for holiday dinners,” she said. They hadn’t asked again.)

She took a rented hoverer down to the city a couple hours in advance—rented because the one she owned was a reliable workhorse, and “reliable workhorse” was not what she wanted to convey to her date. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the money for a more luxurious vehicle, but when you didn’t live in a big city, you wanted equipment you could rely on.

After securing parking, she hoofed it to the Shadow Theater. (Shparoi naming conventions were often rather on the nose.) Ledana had loved the building since she first encountered it as a child. It was traditional Shparoi architecture, with its high, peaked roofs and masks hung on the walls down to the absurd gold leaf everywhere, a replica of a structure that had been built back when her people initially settled this world. The original had been destroyed in a fire a generation or two back, but as a designated cultural treasure, the local government had restored it quickly.

Ledana knew perfectly well that “designated cultural treasures” were Andan manipulation all the way through, that the heptarchate’s government used them to keep the local population docile. She couldn’t help but feel gratitude toward the Andan arts council anyway. And it enabled her to enjoy the performances in an appropriate setting.

Her date awaited her in the foyer, a tall, black-haired man with a handsome, slightly angular profile, and long lashes over merry eyes. He, too, had dressed up in a suit of silk, although the rococo style of his jewelry spoke to offworlder tastes. She’d met him last week while shopping for some new jewelry after the conference; he’d been looking for souvenirs. Koiresh Shkan was a musician visiting with an ensemble from offworld, a Shparoi who’d left the homeworld as a young man and was only now returning. His accent when speaking their mutual mother tongue was atrocious, but Ledana had refrained from mentioning it.

Shkan smiled and waved when he spotted her. “I wouldn’t have expected a goose farmer to be a patron of the arts,” he said teasingly.

“Geese drive people to many strange hobbies,” Ledana said. “Farming” wasn’t all she did; she was technically an agricultural researcher. But “goose farmer” was a more entertaining way to put it. “If you’d wanted me to take you hunting instead—”

He pulled a face. “No thanks, I have no idea how to handle a gun.”

Ledana shook her head. Out where she lived, everyone knew the basics of firearms. She was a fair shot herself. “Come on,” she said, “let’s find our seats before everyone swarms in.”

Shkan made an assenting noise, and she preceded him into the auditorium.

The only thing Ledana didn’t like about the Shadow Theater was the seats. She wished they’d gone for less authenticity with the damned wooden seats and instead installed cushions. But she loved the hanging lanterns and the wooden grilles with their carved shapes depicting scenes out of Shparoi folklore, from jackalope chorales to dawn fortresses shattered by archaic cannons.

After they took their seats, Shkan listened with a critical ear to the jumble of last-second rehearsal coming from the pit orchestra. “I’d forgotten that you tune to a different standard scale,” he remarked.

“Does it bother you?” Ledana asked.

“No,” he said, but she could tell he wasn’t sure.

Then the bells rang and the lights in the auditorium dimmed, signaling the start of the performance. For the next two hours, Ledana almost forgot she was here with a man, and one she was determined to bed, at that. Instead, she was captivated by the way the actors contorted themselves and their props before the lights to form shadow figures against the back of the stage with its ever-shifting colors.

Tonight’s story was about two lovers and the quest that one of them underwent to reunite himself with the other man, only for the two of them to be transformed into a flower-offering to the gods. For the flowers, a new set of curtains in green swished across the back of the stage, spangled with blossoms made of black sequins and dark crystal. Ledana was dazzled by the stage lights playing over them.

On reflection, maybe she should have picked something with a happy ending if she hoped to get laid, except she loved the building so, and shadow plays in general.

When the lights came back on and people began to file out of the auditorium, Shkan raised Ledana’s hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to it. “I didn’t realize you liked tragedies so much,” he said, grinning. “Should I take this as an omen? Or do you just like very flexible people?”

Ledana didn’t bother hiding her delight at the overture. She only hoped he was as good in bed as he was handsome. “It’s the only shadow play running here for the next two months.” She slipped into the high language for “month.”

His eyes crinkled.

“Besides,” Ledana said as she followed Shkan back into the foyer, “I don’t believe in tragedies, or omens.” No sense beating around the bush. “How do you feel about siring a kid? Because I know a few contortions myself.”

Shkan linked arms with her and smiled.

NIDANA WAS FOUR years old when she learned what her second-oldest brother’s name meant.

Jedao was nine at the time, still skinny—certainly skinnier than Rodao, the oldest, who was fourteen and tall, and already broad at the shoulders and chest. Jedao and Ro both had to go to school. Nidana couldn’t wait until she was old enough to go to school with them. Ro said that she should enjoy not having to study while she could, but Nidana didn’t see that what Ro did with the slates was all that different from all the games she played on them. Plus he got to go out and play with his friends at school. Ro said that wasn’t what you did at school, which was very confusing.

“‘Honesty’?” Nidana said, tugging at Jedao’s shirt while he was cleaning Mom’s glassware. Nidana knew she was supposed to be careful, so careful, in this room, even more careful when someone was working with the shiny glassware. But she was also curious, and she couldn’t wait. “Why did Mom name you ‘honesty’?”

Jedao’s eyes softened as he put down the beaker so he could ruffle her hair. “Beats me,” he said. “I have always had the sneaking suspicion that she picked names out of one of those adventure novels she likes to read. I haven’t been able to find evidence, though.”

They were speaking in Shparoi, their birth-tongue. Their mother was Shparoi. So was Rodao’s sire, and Jedao’s, although not Nidana’s. Most people realized that Nidana and Jedao were related, because they had inherited their mother’s tilted smile and her eyes. The three of them had learned the high language second, not first. Rodao spoke the high language flawlessly, although he refused to say why it was so important to him, putting Nidana off with, “You’ll find out someday.” But Jedao never would lose the local Shparoi dialect’s drawl.

“I can help,” Nidana said, brightening at the thought of helping one of her brothers with something. She was starting to be able to read without pictures, although pictures were better.

“If you find it, let me know,” Jedao said. He frowned at the beaker. “There’s still a speck on this. You’d better go, Nidana, before Mom decides that you’re old enough to learn how to do this.”

She went.

The next day, she had not found evidence in any of the books she could reach. (She had also narrowly avoided pulling down a bookcase on herself, although she was oblivious to this fact.) But she decided that she could find something else to be helpful with, and set off after Jedao. Like everyone in the heptarchate, she had developed a keen sense of passing time from an early age. She might be able to meet him on the way home from school.

They lived at the edge of town—not even properly a town, Ro had remarked once—and Ro and Jedao hiked to a stop where a flitter picked them up with some other local kids. Jedao had taught Nidana the route over the course of weekends, almost certainly without Mom knowing. Definitely without Ro knowing. Mom wouldn’t have cared—she let all of them explore the surroundings however they pleased—but Ro disapproved of an awful lot of things.

Nidana had a good sense of direction, something else she shared with Jedao, and she knew to wear a jacket and bring water and something to eat. Jedao always made her lunch in the morning because Mom tended to forget. But that meant that she had a rucksack with snacks and meat pastries. (The rucksack also communicated its location to the household computer system at all times, something she wouldn’t learn until she was six. Mom might be terrible at feeding people on time, but she liked making sure no one got lost.)

The day was overcast, but Nidana liked the way the wind nipped at her cheeks and blew strands of her hair free. The hills were so tall. She liked the way the grasses made them mysterious, the occasional startling break of sunlight flinging shadows across her feet. Birds shouted at each other. She wondered if birds told the truth, like her brother was supposed to.

She had come up the hill, where the grasses had worn thin, and heard shouting, voices raised in taunts. The slight figure in a lavender jacket belonged to her brother. He was half-crouched, backing away from two older boys. She couldn’t remember if she was supposed to know their names.

“Jedao!” she called out.

He whirled, caught sight of her, and said the same words Mom had said that night the goose eggs exploded in the incubator. “Nidana, run!” he shouted, just in time for the taller boy to hit him on the back of the head. He staggered but did not go down.

She ran toward Jedao. He said more words. The taller boy swung at him again, but Jedao was prepared this time and snatched up a rock. He didn’t throw it, which was what Nidana would have done (if she had been allowed to throw rocks). He kept it in his fist. His blows were staggeringly quick, even with the added mass. The taller boy managed to get in another blow, then shouted one more taunt before fleeing. His friend said something that Nidana couldn’t quite understand and scurried after him.

“Why don’t they like you?” Nidana said. She was not afraid. Of course she wasn’t afraid of the boys.

“It wasn’t anything they had against me,” Jedao said.

“Then why did you fight them?”

“They said things about Mom.”

Nidana considered that. “Were they nice things?”

Jedao seemed to consider this in his turn. “They were things you have to hit people for.”

“Oh.” Then she saw it again, in a flash, her brother with his quick fists. For the first time she looked at him, wide-eyed, and thought of all the times he had carried her through the house, or combed her hair, or played house with her; thought of what he could do with those hands. She shrank from him.

Jedao set the rock down. Then he knelt and tipped her chin up with his callused fingers. “Listen,” he said. “Listen. I would never hurt anyone I love.”

She would not wonder for many years why, in a sentence otherwise in the high language, he had used the Shparoi word for hurt, which meant moral damage but excluded the physical—“a hurt of the heart’s marrow, not the flesh,” as one of their famed philosophers had said—a distinction that the high language did not make.

JEDAO WOULD RATHER have been doing anything but cleaning the bathroom, but his older brother Rodao had skipped out on the chore in favor of a night out with his boyfriend. Their mother was working late tonight, as usual, so she wouldn’t know or care who did the job as long as it got done. Besides, Jedao considered it useful to have additional blackmail material on Ro. He couldn’t decide whether it was hilarious or annoying that Ro had suddenly become interested in dating. At eleven, Jedao couldn’t see what the fuss was about.

In the meantime, he still couldn’t figure out how those weird purple stains had gotten onto the bathtub. Had his mother been pouring her experiments into the tub instead of disposing of them properly? Except she was always so conscientious about that. Or did it have something to do with her attempts to brew up new and exciting shampoos?

“Jay,” said a soft, snuffling voice from the doorway.

Jedao set down the sponge and sat back on his haunches. His six-year-old sister Nidana was scrubbing her eyes. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

Nidana burst into tears.

Jedao stripped off his rubber gloves, quickly washed his hands, and put his arms around her. “Hey, there,” he said. “I didn’t think the book I gave you to read was that scary.” The book in question featured a bold girl space adventurer who punctured space monsters with her space rapier. Ordinarily Nidana loved that sort of thing.

After the snuffling and wailing had dwindled, Nidana said, “I went outside to look at the tree with the really big icicles.”

“All right,” he said, “did you hurt yourself?” He’d had icicles fall on him before. The big ones were no joke. She didn’t look injured, despite the hair straggling out of her braid, but maybe she’d had a scare.

“Jay,” she said, “I can’t find the cat. I think she got out.”

“I see,” Jedao said, suppressing his alarm. The cat, which Nidana had named Bunny when she was five, had a talent for getting herself stuck up trees. (At five, Nidana’s vocabulary for animals had left something to be desired. The family also had a dog named Bunny, two finches named Bunny, and a snake named Bunny.) Bunny-the-cat tried to escape the house at every opportunity, and while Jedao wouldn’t have worried about her during warmer weather, he didn’t like the thought of her trapped outside in the cold. “Bundle up. Let’s go look for her.”

Jedao helped Nidana with her sweater, coat, mittens, hat, scarf, and boots, then pulled on his own winter clothes. He left a note tacked to the small corkboard next to the door, just in case. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll find Bunny.”

Nidana snuffled some more. “I didn’t mean to, Jay.”

“I know.” It was too bad that Bunny-the-cat hated Bunny-the-dog. The latter was reasonably good at tracking, but his habit of trying to nip at Bunny-the-cat’s tail whenever he could catch her wouldn’t do them any favors here.

The cold air stung Jedao’s eyes and nostrils as they traipsed out onto the path that Jedao and his brother had shoveled that morning. The wind had blown more snow onto the path in feathered drifts, but it was still walkable. Unfortunately, it also meant that any tracks the cat might have left were obscured.

“Show me where you went,” Jedao said.

Nidana led him to the sycamore with its mantle of glistening icicles. He broke one off from a lower branch so that she could suck on it. If nothing else, it would distract her.

“Bunny!” Nidana called in between licking her icicle. But there was no sign of the cat.

Jedao and Nidana checked all the buildings they were allowed into, and some that they weren’t. The cat remained elusive. The sun sank lower and lower in the sky, and Nidana was starting to shiver. Jedao made sure not to walk too quickly for her to keep up, despite his increasing concern for Bunny.

At last, discouraged, they returned to the front door of their home. Bunny-the-dog bounded up and almost bowled Nidana over when they came in, tail wagging frenetically. “Stop that,” Jedao said, and made the dog sit. He and Nidana shed their winter clothes, and Jedao hung them up in the hallway closet. “Nidana,” he said, “entertain the dog. I’ll check around the house.”

The dog’s tail was thumping loudly against the floor, and the dog herself was busy slobbering all over Nidana. Nidana didn’t seem to mind this. At least the dog kept her from bursting into tears again thinking of the cat.

For his part, Jedao systematically searched every room of the house but one. He knew most of the cat’s hiding places. At last he came to his brother’s room and hesitated. Ro had threatened him on pain of being fed to the geese not to barge in, but Jedao had checked everywhere else he could think of.

“The hell with this,” Jedao said, since Nidana wasn’t around to overhear him, and pushed the door open. The first thing he noticed was that one of the dresser drawers was slightly ajar. He pulled it out further: aha. Bunny-the-cat was curled up in a nest of Rodao’s socks, underwear, and... magazines? Jedao eased one of the magazines out from beneath the cat, ignoring her hiss, and flipped it open to a full-color picture of two entwined naked men. Fascinated, Jedao started paging through.

Bunny-the-cat suddenly meowed. Jedao heard Bunny-the-dog woofing as she bounded toward them, and turned around to see Nidana padding after the dog. Hastily, he shoved the magazine back into the drawer. “The cat’s fine, Nidana,” he said. “She was taking a nap.”

“Can I see what you were reading?” Nidana said.

“No,” Jedao said. He scooped the cat up despite her liberal application of claws to his arm and hastened out of his older brother’s room, doing his best (which wasn’t very) to herd Nidana and the dog at the same time. “The cat’s safe, that’s all that matters.”

JEDAO AND RUO had set up shop at the edge of one of the campus gardens, the one with the carp pond and the carefully maintained trees. Rumor had it that some of the carp were, in addition to being over a hundred years old, outfitted with surveillance gear. Like most Shuos cadets, Jedao and Ruo would, if questioned, laugh off the rumors while secretly believing them wholeheartedly—at least the bit about surveillance gear. Jedao had argued that the best place to hide what they were doing was in plain sight. After all, who would be so daft as to run a prank right next to surveillance?

“Lovely day, isn’t it?” Ruo said brightly.

Jedao winced. “Not so loud,” he said. His head was still pounding after last night’s excesses, and the sunlight, unfiltered by any cloud cover, wasn’t helping. Why did he keep letting Ruo talk him into things? It wasn’t just that Ruo was really good in bed. He had this way of making incredibly risky things sound fun. Going out drinking? In itself, not that bad. Playing a drinking game with unlabeled bottles of possibly-alcohol-possibly-something-else stolen from Security’s hoard of contraband? Risky. Some of those hallucinations had been to die for, though, especially when he started seeing giant robots in the shape of geese.

Fortunately, this latest idea wasn’t that risky. Probably. Besides, of the many things that other cadets had accused Jedao of, low risk tolerance wasn’t one of them.

“Not my fault you can’t hold your drink,” Ruo said, even more brightly.

“I’m going to get you one of these days,” Jedao muttered.

Ruo’s grin flashed in his dark brown face. “More like you’ll lose the latest bet, and—” He started describing what he’d do to Jedao in ear-burning detail.

At last one of the other first-years, puzzled by what Jedao and Ruo were doing by the carp pond with a pair of fishing poles, approached. Jedao recognized them: Meurran, who was good at fixing guns despite their terrible aim, and who had a glorious head of wildly curling hair.

“Security’s not going to approve of you poaching the carp,” Meurran said.

“Oh, this isn’t for the carp,” Ruo said. He flicked his fishing pole, and the line with its enticing nut snaked out toward one of the trees.

Meurran gave Ruo a funny look. “Ruo,” they said, “the fish are in the opposite direction.”

“Please,” Jedao said, “who cares about the fish? No one has anything to fear from the fish. That’s just nonsense.”

“All right,” Meurran said, sounding distinctly unimpressed, “then what?”

Come on, Jedao thought, the nut is right there...

As if on cue, a black squirrel darted down from the tree, then made for the nut.

Ruo tugged the nut just out of reach.

The black squirrel looked around, then headed for the nut again.

“Oh, isn’t that adorable?” Meurran said.

“Don’t be fooled!” Ruo said as he guided the squirrel in a figure-eight through the grass. “Why would the commandant be so stupid as to implant surveillance devices in the carp, which can’t even leave their pond?”

Meurran glanced involuntarily at the pond, where two enormous carp were lazily circling near the surface, as if the carp, in fact, had a habit of oozing out onto the land and spying on lazy cadets. “You’re saying the squirrels—?”

Ruo continued to tease the squirrel with the nut. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Everyone thinks the black squirrels are the cutest. They’re even featured in the recruitment literature. Damnably clever piece of social engineering, if you ask me.”

Meurran was starting to look persuaded in spite of themself.

Meanwhile, as Ruo made his case, Jedao leaned back and studied the squirrel with a frown. The local population of black squirrels was mostly tame and had proven to be easy to train with the aid of treats. (Ruo had made Jedao do most of this, “because you’re the farm boy.”) But while Ruo and Meurran argued about squirrel population dynamics, Jedao caught a slight flash from behind the squirrel’s eyes—almost like that of a camera?

He opened his mouth to interrupt.

The squirrel made an odd convulsing motion, and the light flashed again, this time directly into Jedao’s eyes.

Jedao closed his mouth and kept his thoughts to himself.

I KNEW WHEN I knocked on the door to my mother’s house, with its cheerful wooden plaque painted with a white goose, that my little brother had arrived before me.

For one thing, I heard music, a recording of that viola concerto my mother had liked so much, and which had been performed by my brother’s sire. For another, I heard his laughter. I would have known that laughter anywhere in the heptarchate. If he was laughing, surely things weren’t too bad.

“It’s not locked,” Mother called out. I heard another voice, higher and sharper than hers. My little sister must be visiting as well.

Mother rarely bothered with locks to her living quarters, as opposed to the laboratory buildings where she did her research. I slid the door open, left my shoes by the door, and came in. Nidana had worn knee-high boots. Jedao’s shoes were decidedly unmilitary lavender loafers.

My mother was fussing with a fragrant fruit salad, ruining it past even my brother’s ability to lie about its presentability. I didn’t worry about it being edible, just presentable. She had scared up fruits either dyed or engineered to be Shuos red and a credible gold. I was only mildly surprised that there weren’t juice stains on her cream-colored blouse.

“I don’t see why you felt the need to ruin perfectly good fruit, Mom,” Nidana was saying as she nursed a glass of wine. She hadn’t taken her beige jacket off, although it was warm inside. “Just because Jay joined the faction with the tackiest colors doesn’t mean you have to inflict them on the rest of us.”

“Rodao!” my brother said over Nidana’s voice, coming around from where he had been looking for a clean glass (my mother was as terrible about dishes as she was fanatical about keeping her laboratory gear in top condition). “How are Teia and the girls?”

My brother Jedao was the smaller of us. Growing up, people had occasionally mistaken me for the deadlier one, which was ridiculous. Both Jedao and our younger sister Nidana could flense you at twenty paces with wit alone, and Jedao had always liked to fight. It hadn’t surprised anyone in the family when he wound up in the Kel army.

Right now Jedao was wearing informal civilian garb in violet and gray, a loose, short-sleeved tunic over well-tailored pants. I had the disturbing realization that he looked foreign to me in these clothes rather than the overdecorated Kel uniforms the news clips showed him in.

Jedao was looking at me inquiringly. “The family’s fine,” I said. “The girls are going to ambush you for presents.”

“You spoil those kids horribly,” Nidana said. But she was smiling. She did her share of spoiling, especially if any of my three daughters wanted books.

Jedao grinned at me. “They’re my nieces, Ro. I’m supposed to spoil them. I found the best thing ever on the way here, by the way. I got them toy assassin’s tools.”

Mother had a coughing fit and hastily put down the fruit salad. “You what?” she said.

Nidana was unimpressed. “Jay, is this going to be like the time you brought home the programmable flying toy moths and you had to take them away because of that manufacturing defect and one of them caught on fire and Mareida thought it was the best trick ever and she wanted you to do it again?”

“Nia, just because I kill people for a living doesn’t mean it’s my fault Ro’s kids are bloodthirsty,” Jedao protested. “Besides, they’re safe now. There are no sharp corners, and the kids are old enough not to eat them so I’m not concerned about choking hazards. The toy hairstick is to die for. The crystal on the end turns different colors and it even plays music if you push a button. I had to disable the fake needler because it worked too much like a real one, bad news if you pointed it at anyone’s eyes, but that wasn’t hard.”

“How the hell do you have a toy hairstick?” I demanded, choosing to ignore the bit about the needler. “Isn’t that like having a toy comb? Exactly like a grown-up comb, except the colors?”

“I thought it was cute,” Jedao said defensively.

Nidana shook her head. “I can’t believe your superiors made you a tactical group commander.” At thirty he was young for it, too.

“Stop ragging on him,” Mother said. “Does anyone want fruit salad?”

“I’ll take some,” Jedao said.

Nidana shuddered. “None for me, thanks. Ro?”

“Sure,” I said. The fact that I hadn’t watched its preparation worked in my favor.

“Besides,” Jedao said, turning to me, “the Kel couldn’t find anyone else stupid enough to do the job. It’s mostly paperwork.”

I didn’t believe him. Jedao’s collection of Kel jokes wasn’t as extensive as his collection of Andan jokes, but if I got him started he’d never shut up. Instead, I helped Nidana find clean bowls and let Mother serve me a portion of the dreadful-looking fruit salad.

“How is it?” Mother asked.

There was only one correct answer. “It’s great,” Jedao said before I could say what I thought. Given how infrequently he was on leave, he had more of a vested interest in keeping our mother happy during his visit than I did. Surreptitiously, I set my bowl down on a side table and slid it away from me.

“How drunk do you want to get tonight?” Nidana asked him, eyes sparkling. “I came up with this fantastic new cocktail.”

Jedao eyed her warily. “In that case, I’ll stick to tea. Are you still adding mood-enhancing substances to your drinks?”

“Spoilsport,” she said.

Mother plucked a grape out of her salad and bit into it with great enthusiasm. I was sure I turned green. The grapes, all peeled, had pale flesh with dark traceries so they resembled eyeballs. “So, Jedao,” she said, “when are you going to bring home a nice tame boy?”

Jedao blushed, and I hid a grin. Mother didn’t make any secret of the fact that she wanted a bigger flock of grandchildren so she could fatten them like the geese. Jedao hadn’t been this easy to fluster as a teen. I still remembered the time when he was fifteen and he wanted to impress the Ghirout boy so he hacked the locks on my floater and they went on a ride. He thought he’d gotten away with it until the next afternoon, when I interrupted his make-out session to lecture him on covering his tracks. I always figured he’d gone fox as vengeance.

“I’m not seeing anyone, Mom,” Jedao said in a long-suffering voice. “I don’t care what they say about what we get up to in the military, most of it is very dull.”

“Or is it girls or alts now?” Mother said, ignoring him. “It’s so hard to keep track with you.”

“Mom.” Jedao poured himself a cup of lukewarm tea and made a show of being very interested in it, which fooled no one.

“I wouldn’t worry about you so much if you wrote more often,” Mother complained.

“Be fair,” Nidana said, “he writes every seven weeks like clockwork. It’s not his fault the censors hold up the mail.”

Jedao had the good sense not to get involved in the ensuing squabble between our mother and Nidana, and instead polished off his salad with no sign that its resemblance to body parts bothered him.

Afterward, Mother went to check on something at the facility. Nidana excused herself because the taste of the salad had inspired her and she had to start a new poem. I loved my sister, but I would never pretend to understand art and artists.

For our part, Jedao and I went out to the flower garden, carrying cups of tea. The garden sported a stone bench with patches of dark moss growing around its base, and was indifferently weeded. No one around here had the time for it. Mother’s idea of growing flowers was to scatter wildflower seeds and order bizarre cocktails of specialized hungry insects to inhibit pests.

Jedao plucked one of the bluebonnets and stuck it behind his ear. It made him look like he was ten all over again.

“I’m glad you’re home safely,” I said, to see if he would flinch.

Jedao set the teacup down on the bench. “It’s nice to run into someone who doesn’t think I have magical powers of survival,” he said. He smiled at me, the tilted smile that he and Nidana and our mother shared, but I didn’t, because he and Nidana and I all had different sires. Shparoi culture didn’t approve of some of Mother’s life choices; Jedao had gotten into his share of fights over it.

I almost believed he was fine. There was nothing wrong with his smile, or the easy, affectionate light in his eyes. As far as I knew, the last time he’d cried was when he was eight, after he’d gotten into a fight and lost. I didn’t know why I was thinking of that.

After an awkward pause, I said, “If they had to rebuild half your face anyway, you could have asked them to make you devastatingly handsome.”

“What, so Mom can nag me about my inadequate love life some more?” Jedao said. He was still smiling. “Hey, they gave me back a face, period. I’m not greedy.”

“I almost can’t tell,” I said. It was true. They hadn’t bothered putting back the scar on his chin from that time he fell out of the tree when he was seven. And his face was more symmetrical than it had been, hard to pin down unless you looked hard at the bone structure, especially around the eyes.

He kicked at an empty overturned flowerpot. “You know, I stared in the mirror for the longest time after all the operations, and it was the strangest thing, like I was looking at someone I’d never met before. Or trying to find one of those especially elusive zits when I was thirteen.”

“How the hell do you take a grenade to the face as a moth commander, anyway?”

Jedao pulled a face. “Technically classified, but since Mom already dragged that much out of me and is obviously talking to you about it... There was a riot on the station where we put in for repairs. Not even heretics, just ordinary disgruntled workers. As far as we can tell, they didn’t have anything against me personally. Anyone in a Kel uniform would have sufficed.”

“A grenade?” I demanded.

“It was practically homebrew. If it’d been the stuff the Kel infantry are issued, I’d be dead.”

“Mother worries about you,” I said.

Jedao cocked an eyebrow at me but generously refrained from accusing me of projecting. “I’ll write home more often if she promises to send fewer of those horrible cookies,” he said. “I can’t fob them off on anyone anymore. All my fellow officers know they’re hard enough to be used as bricks.”

I huffed a laugh. “I can’t do that. She’d make me eat them.”

“You have spawn,” Jedao said unsympathetically. “Feed the cookies to them. They still have some of their baby teeth, they can afford to lose a few.”

I reached over and ruffled his hair the way I used to when he was a kid. He made a humming contented sound. Touching a soldier without invitation wasn’t bright of me, but all I could think of was the boy he’d been.

That wasn’t all. Long ago, during the first break when he’d come home after his first year at Shuos Academy, Jedao had seemed fine, the same cocky teenager who occasionally cut class to play jeng-zai and pattern-stones. (Mother had made him clean a scary amount of glassware after she caught him. More accurately, I’d ratted him out.) Yet every time I watched him, I was convinced he’d been replaced by some hollow marionette: nothing real except negative space.

No one else had noticed anything amiss. I’d spent time with Jedao—chores, tea, board games. He gave a great performance. Once or twice when we were alone together, I almost came out and asked. He was an excellent liar, but I was the one person who’d always been able to tell.

Once again, I almost asked. On the other hand, he was a grown man and a Shuos and a soldier. It was none of my damn business.

“You look tired,” Jedao said. “Sleeping all right?”

“Long shifts at work, that’s all,” I said. And that was that: we talked about my new supervisor, and once again I let the subject slide.

Fourteen years later, when I heard of Hellspin Fortress, I’d discover how badly I’d fucked up by keeping quiet; and then, of course, it was too late to fix anything.

WHEN SHUOS JEDAO walked into his temporary quarters on Station Muru 5 and spotted the box, he assumed someone was attempting to assassinate him. It had happened before. Considering his first career, there was even a certain justice to it.

He ducked back around the doorway, although even with his reflexes, it would have been too late if it’d been a proper bomb. The air currents in the room would have wafted his biochemical signature to the box and caused it to trigger. Or someone could have set one up to go off as soon as the door opened, regardless of who stepped in. Or something even less sophisticated.

Jedao retreated back down the hallway and waited one minute. Two. Nothing.

It could just be a package, he thought—paperwork that he had forgotten?—but old habits died hard.

He entered again and approached the desk, light-footed. The box, made of eye-searing green plastic, stood out against the bland earth tones of the walls and desk. It measured approximately half a meter in all directions. Its nearest face prominently displayed the gold seal that indicated that station security had cleared it. He didn’t trust it for a moment. Spoofing a seal wasn’t that difficult; he’d done it himself.

He inspected the box’s other visible sides without touching it, then spotted a letter pouch affixed to one side and froze. He recognized the handwriting. The address was written in spidery high language, while the name of the recipient—one Garach Jedao Shkan—was written both in high language and his birth tongue, Shparoi, for good measure.

Oh, Mom, Jedao thought. No one else called him by that name anymore, not even the rest of his family. More importantly, how had his mother gotten his forwarding address? He’d just received his transfer orders last week, and he hadn’t written home about it because his mission was classified. He had no idea what his new general wanted him to do; she would tell him tomorrow when he reported in.

Jedao opened the box, which released a puff of cold air. Inside rested a tub labeled KEEP REFRIGERATED in both the high language and Shparoi. The tub itself contained a pale, waxy-looking solid substance. Is this what I think it is?

Time for the letter:

THE SECOND THING that Brigadier General Shuos Jedao did when the mechanics signed off on the repairs to his command moth was look up the address of one of the space station’s brothels. (The first thing was to draft a letter to his mother. His mother had Mysterious Ways of Knowing if he shirked his filial duty.) He’d considered doing something sensible with his money instead, like gambling, but the gambling houses wouldn’t let him in these days.

The last time he’d attempted to gamble at this station, during a previous visit, he’d put on a tasteful amount of makeup and changed into civilian clothing respectable enough to announce that he had money, but not so ostentatious that some thief would try to pick his pocket. Sometimes, when he got bored, he did dress like a fop and let them get close enough that their terrible life choices dawned on them. After all, how else was he supposed to stay in practice with some of those armlocks?

Unfortunately, when he arrived, the house manager, a leggy Shuos woman with hair swept up in fantastic coils, stopped him at the door. “Hello, Jedao,” she said without warmth. “Sorry, you’re not allowed in here.”

“I play by the rules,” Jedao protested.

“Don’t care,” she said. “That’s even worse than when you clean us out, because we can’t even nail you for cheating. Do you have nothing better to do than bully honest, hard-working foxes? Can’t you go wallop some heretics instead?”

Jedao looked wistfully over her shoulder at a table where several people were playing jeng-zai, then went away.

The brothel was much more reasonable, possibly because he didn’t cause them to lose money. The receptionist took down Jedao’s name, contact information, and preferences. Then they offered him a discount if he booked an “overnight experience” rather than by the hour. Discount my ass, Jedao thought; but he was running out of fun things to blow his money on during leave. He collected firearms, for instance, but he couldn’t haul his collection everywhere. In real life, he had to leave most of them in storage. So what the hell, “overnight experience” it was.

He showed up seven minutes before the appointment, dressed in uniform. This brothel catered to soldiers anyway. He’d stuck with medium formal on the grounds that he didn’t want to get his full formal uniform messed up.

“Shuos Jedao?” said the receptionist, quite properly addressing him as a client rather than an officer. “Kio is waiting for you. Up the stairs, second room on the left.”

“Thank you,” Jedao said. There was never a good reason to antagonize the staff at a brothel. He and Ruo had done it a couple of times as cadets, and learned that annoyed prostitutes had a habit of “spilling” highly staining substances on uniforms. He headed up the stairs as instructed.

The upper floor smelled of perfume, some kind of aquatic. He could distinguish different explosives by smell, but perfume notes? Forget it. (His brother and sister had always found this very amusing.) The second room on the left was obscured by a dazzling curtain composed of strands of faceted glass beads in pale blue. Reflected glints formed a mosaic of light across the floor and walls. He rapped politely on the doorframe. The curtain swayed, and the glints of light wavered and rippled.

“Welcome,” a tenor said from within.

Jedao’s pulse quickened. He pulled the strands aside and entered to a clattering of beads.

Kio stood at the far end of the room, next to the head of the bed. He was tall, clean shaven, hair cut short: all in accordance with Kel regulations. His clothes, too, imitated the black-and-gold Kel uniform, although they were of silk and clung appealingly to his long limbs. The gold braid was further embellished with amber beads that caught the light as he moved. Golden chains descended from his epaulets to the buttons of his shirt, and jingled faintly as he began to make an almost-salute, open hand rather than fist to his left shoulder.

“Don’t,” Jedao said.

Kio froze. “Did I misunderstand your preferences, sir?”

“No,” Jedao said. “It’s something I prefer to keep out of the house’s records.” Just so his meaning was clear, he pulled out his wallet and retrieved a token of very large denomination in the local currency. He left it on the table next to the door.

“Something could be arranged, sir.”

Next: “Stop calling me ‘sir,’” Jedao said. “It’s not—it’s not necessary.”

Kio’s wariness, if anything, increased. Jedao sighed inwardly. Although various laws and customs protected prostitutes, the fact of the matter was that laws and customs were cold comfort when dealing with belligerent trained killers. While Jedao was not belligerent, he couldn’t deny being a trained killer. Even if he employed swarms of warmoths these days instead of a sniper rifle or his hands, Kio would be aware of his reputation.

Jedao crossed the distance to Kio in slow strides, to make himself as little threatening as possible. He knelt before the other man. His hands were damp inside the regulation half-gloves. “Use me.”

He thought he was going to have to repeat himself when Kio let out a long, shaky breath and nodded. Kio’s own hands were sheathed in full black gloves. Technically illegal, but Jedao had no intention of reporting him or the house to the Kel. As a point of fact, he’d chosen this house because of its willingness to indulge this particular taste.

For a moment, Jedao wasn’t certain this was going to work out. It sometimes didn’t. Prostitutes, and lovers for that matter, usually assumed he wanted to give orders in bed. As if, after spending all day giving orders, he wanted to do it while fucking, too.

Then Kio reached down and grabbed Jedao’s right hand, and placed it over his groin. “You know how to use your mouth, fledge? Show me.” His voice was harsh.

Jedao groaned in the back of his throat at the address. “Sir,” he breathed. He hadn’t received permission to unglove, so he didn’t. Instead, he hooked his thumbs into Kio’s waistband, then unbuttoned his fly and drew out the other man’s cock. Not hard, not yet. He could do something about that.

He teased the head of Kio’s cock with his tongue, then took the whole thing into his mouth and sucked greedily. Kio was unnervingly silent. Jedao was determined to please him, though. He used his tongue to caress Kio’s cock until he became hard and his shaft pushed into Jedao’s throat. Erect, Kio was quite large, and Jedao’s throat ached, but he didn’t dare pull back.

Jedao himself was already uncomfortably erect. Although he was tempted to reach down and jerk himself off, or rearrange himself, he didn’t have permission to do that either. He meant to be very literal about his orders. He longed to reach up and cradle Kio’s balls in his hand, but even that hadn’t been mentioned. Use your mouth.

Kio had noticed Jedao’s arousal. “You like this, don’t you, fledge?”

It was difficult to answer around a mouthful of cock, so Jedao confined himself to a nod. Kio shoved him away, not gently, and withdrew. Jedao glanced at Kio’s saliva-slick length before casting his eyes down, wondering what he’d done wrong. He had wanted to make Kio come, even if he didn’t dare hope—yet—that he’d be permitted the same.

Jedao raised his head and looked at Kio’s face when the silence started to worry him.

Kio’s expression was thoughtful. He grasped Jedao’s hand again. This time, he pressed his own palm against it, as if making a comparison. He smiled, eyes glinting with mischief.

“Sir?” Jedao said, very softly.

“Give me your gloves,” Kio said. And when Jedao hesitated: “Now.”

Jedao had expected this moment to arrive, just not so early in the encounter. A thrill went down his spine as he ungloved. He’d always felt more vulnerable with naked hands. It was a common Kel foible—except, of course, he wasn’t Kel.

Kio folded the half-gloves neatly and set them on the edge of the bed. Next he removed his own gloves. Jedao’s breath caught at the sight of Kio’s long hands and their calluses. (Jedao didn’t allow himself to think about the source of the calluses: probably from playing a musical instrument, not from familiarity with firearms.) Then Kio did something unexpected: he held the full black gloves out to Jedao.

Suddenly Jedao’s erection felt enormous. It seemed impossible that he’d be able to control himself. “Sir?”

“Put them on, fledge.”

Jedao faltered. “I’m not—”

Kio slapped him full across the face with his free hand. Jedao tasted blood. It was all he could do to keep from coming right then and there, fully clothed except for his hands.

“Fledge.”

“Yes, sir,” Jedao said, dizzy, and pulled on Kio’s gloves. He bit back a whimper at the way the charmeuse silk clung to his fingers. With the half-gloves he was used to being able to feel every chance current of air. No longer.

Kio hauled Jedao to his feet. Despite his slender build, he was surprisingly strong. “Jack yourself off,” he said. “With the gloves on. I want to watch.”

Jedao’s first two attempts to undo his fly failed because his hands were shaking violently. Kio slapped him again, which had the paradoxical effect of steadying him. He hissed between his teeth as he pulled his cock out and closed his fingers around it. Silk; the whisper of fabric against his overheated skin.

Kio’s eyes were hot and merciless. Jedao began stroking his shaft, up and down, up and down, torn between savoring the sensation and the urgency already building in his balls. I’m not seventeen anymore, he thought wildly. How—? But thinking was too difficult, and he focused again on masturbating so Kio could watch.

The air in the room was hot and cold at once, kaleidoscopic with the promise of unbearable pleasure. Jedao choked back a cry when Kio closed the distance between them and gathered him into a completely unmilitary embrace. Kio’s kisses were brutal, and involved teeth. He left marks all the way down the side of Jedao’s face. When he reached the scar at the base of Jedao’s neck, Jedao’s control gave way completely, and he began to come.

Even then Kio wasn’t done. He disengaged neatly and knelt so that Jedao’s come landed in white, sticky spurts all over the black silk, the golden chains. Jedao staggered. He’d dirtied the beautiful ersatz uniform. He looked down and saw that he’d also gotten stains on the silk gloves. Despite the fact that he’d just climaxed, his cock stirred at the sight.

“We’re going to do this all night,” Kio said directly into his ear. Jedao’s heart thumped painfully. He had forgotten that he had paid for all night.

“ZOO?” HIGH GENERAL Garit said. “Really, Jedao?”

Jedao, who was driving the car, glanced over to assess Garit’s expression, although the high general’s tone of voice told him everything he needed to know. Garit had invited him along on this damned trip to a hunting preserve because Garit was desperate to bag a gray tiger. Alongside his record with firearms, Jedao had made the mistake of letting drop that he had grown up hunting. He had tried to point out that going after pesky deer and jackalopes was not the same as gray tigers, but Garit had merely clapped him on the back and told him not to be so modest. Modesty had nothing to do with it. On top of the stupid expense per round, the recoil on the ammo that Jedao was going to have to use was proportionate to something with its stopping power, and he wasn’t looking forward to the ache in his shoulder.

“Just for an hour or two,” Jedao said coaxingly. “My mom and my siblings wanted me to send home some vacation photos. And I promised my nieces that I would bring them some souvenirs. Maybe the zoo’s shop will have some mounted skeletons or the like.”

“You spoil those kids rotten,” Garit said with a snort.

“What are uncles for?” Jedao said. One of the great regrets of his life was that his job kept him away from his family for long periods of time. The girls grew so fast. “Besides, the folks down at the shop might have some tips for hunters.”

Garit shook his head, amused. “You’re transparent, but all right.”

The zoo was not particularly busy. The two of them were off-duty, and the young woman who told them about the zoo regulations either didn’t recognize them or didn’t care, which Jedao found congenial. Jedao then persuaded Garit to come with him into the zoo proper so Jedao could snap some photos.

Jedao fiddled with the manual exposure, trying to get the black panther to show up in its cave. The camera had been a gift from his brother, and was practically an antique. Jedao was not especially gifted at taking pictures that pleased his family (“These look like reconnaissance photos,” his sister had once complained, “who cares about all this kill zone stuff when you’re snapping pics of an engagement party?”) so he had resolved to do better.

“That’s the oddest damned fox I’ve ever seen,” Garit said, pointing.

Jedao gave up on the exposure and settled for a muddled silhouette in the shadows. “Beg pardon?” he asked.

They strolled closer to the enclosure Garit had indicated to take a look. A reddish, bushy-tailed creature was taking a nap in the branches of a tree. Bamboo shoots sprouted not far away. Some of them looked like they’d been gnawed on.

“That’s not a fox,” Jedao said, reading the enclosure’s label. “Red panda. Apparently they eat bamboo. And sometimes birds and things.”

“It’s kind of cute,” Garit said grudgingly. “Doesn’t look like much of a challenge, though.”

Jedao thought that coddled zoo creatures were unlikely to be much challenge in general, but he didn’t say anything that would give Garit the idea of adding another kind of animal to his wishlist for this trip. “My nieces will like it,” he said, and raised his camera.

“We should catch you one to take home to them,” Garit said.

Jedao made a face. “Have you ever looked at the customs forms for importing wildlife? I’m pretty sure those critters don’t exist on my homeworld.”

“Well, I’ll look into expediting it as a favor to you if you can help me with my tiger problem,” Garit said.

“That’s very kind of you,” Jedao said, as diplomatically as he could, “but my nieces are notoriously good at killing goldfish. Let’s leave the red pandas alone and hit up the shop so I can buy bat skeletons or fox-eared hats or something, and we can head to the hunting grounds.”

GENERAL SHUOS JEDAO was spending his least favorite remembrance day with Captain-magistrate Rahal Korais. There was nothing wrong with Korais except that he was the fangmoth’s Doctrine officer, and even then he was reasonable for a Rahal. Nevertheless, Doctrine observed remembrances with the ranking officer, which meant that Jedao had to make sure he didn’t fall over.

Next time, Jedao thought, wishing the painkillers worked better, I have to get myself assassinated on a planet where they do the job right.

The assassin had been a Lanterner, and she had used a shattergun. She had caught him at a conference, of all places. The shattergun had almost sharded Jedao into a hundred hundred pieces of ghostwrack. Now, as Jedao looked at the icelight that served as a meditation focus, he saw anywhere from three to eight of them. The effect would have been charming if it hadn’t been accompanied by stabbing pains in his head.

Korais was speaking to him.

“Say again?” Jedao said. He kept from looking at his wristwatch.

“I’ll recite the next verses for you, sir, if that doesn’t offend you,” Korais said.

Korais was being diplomatic. Jedao couldn’t remember where in the litany they were. Under better circumstances he would have claimed that he was distracted by the fact that his force of eleven fangmoths was being pursued by the Lanterners who had mauled the rest of the swarm, but it came down to the injuries.

“I’d be much obliged, Captain,” Jedao said.

This remembrance was called the Feast of Drownings. The Rahal heptarch, whose faction maintained the high calendar and who set Doctrine, had declared it three years back, in response to a heresy in one of the heptarchate’s larger marches. Jedao would have called the heresy a benign one: people who wanted the freedom to build shrines to their ancestors, for pity’s sake. But the Rahal had claimed that this would upset the high calendar’s master equations, and so the heretics had had to be put down.

There were worse ways to die than by having your lungs slowly filled with caustic fluid. That still didn’t make it a good way to die.

Korais had begun his recital. Jedao looked at the icelight on the table in front of them. It had translucent lobes and bronchi and alveoli, and light trickled downward through them like fluid, pale and blue and inexorable.

The heptarchate’s exotic technologies depended on the high calendar’s configurations: the numerical concordances, the feasts and remembrances, the associated system of belief. The mothdrive that permitted fast travel between star systems was an exotic technology. Few people advocated a switch in calendars. Too much would have to be given up, and invariant technologies, which worked under any calendar, never seemed to keep up. Besides, any new calendar would be subject to the same problems of lock-in; any new calendar would be regulated by the Rahal, or by people like the Rahal, as rigorously as the current one.

It was a facile argument, and one that Jedao had always disliked.

“Sir,” Korais said, breaking off at the end of a phrase, “you should sit.”

“I’m supposed to be standing for this,” Jedao said dryly.

“I don’t think your meditations during the next nineteen minutes are going to help if you fall unconscious.”

He must look dreadful if Doctrine was telling him how long until the ordeal was over. Not that he was going to rest afterward. He had to figure out what to do about the Lanterners.

It wasn’t that Jedao minded being recalled from medical leave to fight a battle. It wasn’t even that he minded being handed this sad force of eleven fangmoths, whose morale was shredded after General Kel Najhera had gotten herself killed. It was that the heptarchate had kept the Lanterners as clients for as long as he remembered. Now the Lanterners were demanding regional representation, and they were at war with the heptarchate.

The Lanterner assassin had targeted Jedao during the Feast of Falcon’s Eye. If she had succeeded, the event would have spiked the high calendar in the Lanterners’ favor. Then they would have declared a remembrance in their own, competing calendar. The irony was that Jedao wasn’t sure he disagreed with the Lanterners’ grievances against the heptarchate, which they had broadcast everywhere after their victory over Najhera.

Korais was still looking at him. Jedao went to sit down, which was difficult because walking in a straight line took all his concentration. Sitting down also took concentration. It wasn’t worth pretending that he heard the last remembrance verses.

“It’s over, sir,” Korais said. “I’ll leave you to your duties.” He saluted and let himself out.

Jedao looked at his watch after the door hissed shut. Everything on it was too tiny to read, the way his vision was. He made his computer enlarge its time display. Korais had left at least seven minutes early; an astonishing concession, considering his job.

Jedao waited until the latest wave of pain receded, then brought up a visual of Candle Arc, a battledrift site nine days out from their present position and eleven days out from the Lanterners’ last reported position. The battle had taken place 177 years ago, between two powers that had since been conquered. The heptarchate called the battle Candle Arc because of the bridge of lights that wheeled through the scatter-hell of what had once been a fortress built from desiccated suns, and the remnants of warmoths. The two powers had probably called their battle something else, and their moths wouldn’t have been called moths either, and their calendars were dead except in records held locked by the Rahal.

Some genius had done up the image in shades of Kel gold; a notation gave the spectrum shift for anyone who cared. Jedao was fond of the Kel, who were the heptarchate’s military faction. For nearly twenty years he had been seconded to their service, and they had many virtues, but their taste in ornamentation was gaudy. Their faction emblem was the ashhawk, the bird that burned in its own glory, all fire and ferocity. The Shuos emblem was the ninefox, shapeshifter and trickster. The Kel called him the fox general, but they weren’t always being complimentary.

The bridgelights swam in and out of focus. Damnation. This was going to take forever. After pulling up maps of the calendrical terrain, he got the computer algebra system to tell him what the estimated shifts looked like in pictures. Then he sent a summons to the moth commander.

He knew how long it took to get from the moth’s command center to his quarters. The door chimed at him with commendable promptness.

“Come in,” Jedao said.

The door opened. “You wished to see me, sir,” said Kel Menowen, commander of the Fortune Comes in Fours. She was a stocky woman with swan-black hair and unsmiling eyes. Like all Kel, she wore black gloves; Jedao himself wore fingerless gloves. Her salute was so correct that he found himself trying to find an imperfection in her fist, or the angle of her arm.

Jedao had chosen the Fortune as his command moth not because it was the least damaged after Najhera’s death, which it wasn’t, but because Menowen had a grudge against the Shuos. She was going to be the hardest commander to win over, so he wanted to do it in person.

The tired joke about the Kel was that they were strong, loyal, and stupid, although they weren’t any more prone to stupidity than the other factions.

The tired joke about the Shuos, who specialized in information operations, was that they had backstabbing quotas. Most of the other factions had reasonable succession policies for their heptarchs: the Rahal heptarch appointed a successor from one of the senior magistrates; with the Kel, it was rank and seniority. The Shuos policy was that if you could keep the heptarch’s seat, it was yours. The other tired joke was that the infighting was the only reason the Shuos weren’t running the heptarchate.

One of Menowen’s aunts had died in a Shuos scheme, an assassin getting careless with secondary casualties. Jedao had already been in Kel service at the time, but it was in his public record that he had once been Shuos infantry, where “Shuos infantry” was a euphemism for “probably an assassin.” In his case, he had been a very good assassin.

Menowen was still standing there. Jedao approximated a return salute. “At ease,” he said. “I’d say ‘stand easy,’ but ‘up’ and ‘down’ are difficult concepts, which is distressing when you have to think in three dimensions.”

Menowen’s version of at ease looked stiff. “What do you require, sir?”

They had exchanged few words since he boarded her moth because he had barely been functional. She wasn’t stupid. She knew he was on her moth to make sure she behaved, and he had no doubt her behavior would be exemplary. She also probably wanted to know what the plan was.

“What do you think I require?” Jedao asked. Sometimes it helped to be direct.

Menowen’s posture became more stiff. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that you only gave move orders as far as the Haussen system,” she said. “But that won’t take us near any useful support, and I thought our orders were to retreat.” She was overenunciating on top of telling him things he knew, which meant that at some point she was going to tell him he wasn’t fit for duty. Some Kel knew how to do subtlety. Menowen had an excellent service record, but she didn’t strike him as a subtle Kel.

“You’re reading the sane, sensible thing into our orders,” Jedao said. “Kel Command was explicit. They didn’t use the word ‘retreat’ anywhere.” An interesting oversight on their part. The orders had directed him to ensure that the border shell guarding the Glover Marches was secured by any means possible.

“Retreat is the only logical response,” Menowen said. “Catch repairs if possible, link up with Twin Axes.” The Twin Axes swarm was on patrol along the Taurag border, and was the nearest Kel force of any size. “Then we’d have a chance against the heretics.”

“You’re discounting some alternatives,” Jedao said.

Menowen lifted her chin and glared at him, or possibly at his insignia, or at the ink painting over his shoulder. “Sir,” she said, “if you’re contemplating fighting them with our present resources—” She stopped, tried again. The second try was blunter. “Your injuries have impaired your judgment and you ought to—”

“—let the senior moth commander make the sane, sensible decision to run for help?” Jedao flexed his hands. He had a clear memory of an earlier conversation with Commander Kel Chau, specifically the pinched look around Chau’s eyes. Chau probably thought running was an excellent idea. “I had considered it. But it’s not necessary. I’ve looked at the calendrical terrain. We can win this.”

Menowen was having a Kel moment. She wanted to tell him off, but it wasn’t just that he outranked her, it was that Kel Command had pulled him off medical leave to put him in charge, instead of evacuating him from the front. “Sir,” she said, “I was there. The Lanterners have a swarm of at least sixty moths. They will have reinforcements. I shouldn’t have to tell you any of this.”

“How conscientious of you,” Jedao said. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t take the bait. “Did you think that I had some notion of slugging it out toe-to-toe? That would be stupid. But I have been reviewing the records and I understand the Lanterner general’s temperament. Which is how we’re going to defeat the enemy, unless you defeat yourself before they have a chance to.”

Menowen’s mouth pressed thin. “I understand you have never lost a battle,” she said.

“This isn’t the—”

“If it’s about your fucking reputation—”

“Fox and hound, not this whole thing again,” Jedao snapped. Which was unfair of him, because it was her first time bringing it up, even if everyone else did. “Sooner or later everyone loses. I get it. If it made more sense to stop the Lanterners in the Glovers, I’d be doing it.” This would also mean ceding vast swathes of territory to them, not anyone’s first choice; from her grim expression, she understood that. “If I could stop the Lanterners by calling them up for a game of cards, I’d do that too. Or by, I don’t know, offering them my right arm. But I’m telling you, this can be done, and I am not quitting if there’s a chance. Am I going to have to fight you to prove it?”

This wasn’t an idle threat. It wouldn’t be the first time he had dueled a Kel, although it would be frivolous to force a moth commander into a duel, however non-lethal, at a time like this.

Menowen looked pained. “Sir, you’re wounded.”

He could think of any number of ways to kill her before she realized she was being attacked, even in his present condition, but most of them depended on her trust that her commanding officer wouldn’t pull such a stunt.

“We can do this,” Jedao said. He was going to have to give this speech to the other ten moth commanders, who were jumpy right now. Might as well get in practice now. “All the way to the Haussen system, it looks like we’re doing the reasonable thing. But we’re going to pay a call on the Rahal outpost at Smokewatch 33-67.” That wasn’t going to be a fun conversation, but most Rahal were responsive to arguments that involved preserving their beloved calendar. And right now, he was the only one in position to stop the Lanterners from arrowing right up to the Glover Marches. The perfect battle record that people liked to bludgeon him over the head with might even come in handy for persuasion.

“I’m listening,” Menowen said in an unpromising voice.

It was good, if inconvenient, when a Kel thought for herself. Unlike a number of the officers on this moth, Menowen didn’t react to Jedao like a cadet fledge.

“Two things,” Jedao said. “First, I know remembering the defeat is painful, but if I’m reading the records correctly, the first eight Kel moths to go down, practically simultaneously, included two scoutmoths.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Menowen said. She wasn’t overenunciating anymore. “The Lanterners’ mothdrive formants were distorted just enough to throw our scan sweep, so they saw us first.”

“Why would they waste time killing scoutmoths when they could blow up fangmoths or arrowmoths instead? If you look at their positions and ours, they had better available targets.” He had to be careful about criticizing a dead general, but there was no avoiding it. Najhera had depended too much on exotics and hadn’t made adequate use of invariant defenses. The Kel also hadn’t had time to channel any useful formation effects, their specialty. “The scoutmoths weren’t out far enough to give advance notice, and surprise was blown once the Lanterners fried those eight moths. What I’m getting at is that our scan may not be able to tell the difference between mothdrives on big scary things and mothdrives on mediocre insignificant things, but their scan can’t either, or they would have picked better targets.”

Menowen was starting to look persuaded. “What are you going to do, sir? Commandeer civilian moths and set them to blow?” She wasn’t able to hide her distaste for the idea.

“I’d prefer to avoid involving civilians,” Jedao said coolly. Her unsmiling eyes became a little less unsmiling when he said that. “The Rahal run the show, they can damn well spare me some engines glued to tin cans.”

The pain hit him like a spike to the eyes. When he could see again, Menowen was frowning. “Sir,” she said, “one thing and I’ll let you continue your deliberations in private.” This was Kel for please get some fucking rest before you embarrass us by falling over. “You had some specific plan for punching holes into the Lanterners?”

“Modulo the fact that something always goes wrong after you wave hello at the enemy? Yes.”

“That will do it for me, sir,” Menowen said. “Not that I have a choice in the matter.”

“You always have a choice,” Jedao said. “It’s just that most of them are bad.”

She didn’t look as though she understood, but he hadn’t expected her to.

THIS IS THE way the hexarchate tells it, the one true clock, but they’re wrong. When incendiaries candle across dire moons, when voidmoths migrate across the missile-scratched night, when exiles carve their death poems into the marrow of ruined stars, the whisper across the known worlds is not unity.

In the year 1251 of the high calendar, on the 26th day of the month of the Hawk, a judge of the Gray Marches was assassinated. As a member of the high court, she was to sentence the city-station of Nran. Nran’s underworld dated its transactions using a calendar sewn together from perfect numbers and criminals’ death-days. The hexarchate often approved local calendar conversions in concession to celestial cycles, but the criminal calendar conflicted with the high calendar, and this the hexarchate would not abide.

The assassin used a compression gun to reduce the judge’s lifespan to a flicker-slash of milliseconds. When the judge’s bodyguard found the corpse, they saw the dross of years lived and unlived. Each stratum of the fossilized carcass contained fractures in the language of paradox, the stress residue of decisions dissented. Later, when the technicians inspected the remains, they would find, in the innermost stratum, evidence of a threadbare counterfactual in which the judge ascended to hexarch.

Divination by compression wasn’t illegal because it involved murder. It was illegal because it didn’t work. Nothing could restore the judge’s life, however bright her prospects might have been had she been luckier.

The technicians noted the judge’s time of death. She died at 17.23, on a day with 30 hours and in an hour with 100 minutes. All across Nran and its satellite tributaries this was true.

The nearby system of Khaio had a major city known for fine circuitry and a charming practice of eating honeyed crickets at funerals. It was uncertain, from the city’s standpoint, whether the clocks read 17.23 or 16.97 or something in between when the judge died. In a realm governed by a universal clock, the tyrannical lockstep of calendar, there should have been a single answer—and there was not.

In the Gray Marches, where the grave-dust of stars floated in thick drifts and shattered asteroids spelled out praises to catastrophes, at the hexarchate’s unfurnaced boundary, there were yet cities. Some were built of recycled vessels braided together with glittering filament. Some bore names in toxic alphabets. Others flashed paeans to vast suicide formations.

At the judge’s death, every clock in the Gray Marches broke. The great engines that powered the dust cities sputtered and died.

Had it only been a matter of cities, the hexarchs would have been indifferent. Cities could be rebuilt and engines replaced. But the voidmoths that traveled between the hexarchate’s star systems depended on the universality of the high calendar for their function. In regions where other calendars dominated, their stardrives were useless, inert.

In the Gray Marches’ gardens, flowers opened and closed and crumpled, trapped between night and morning.

Calendrical rot had set in.

WHEN SHE WAS six, Cheris stopped receiving Mwennin birthday pastries.

For reasons that wouldn’t become clear to her until much later, her parents had just moved out of the Mwennin ghetto in the City of Ravens Feasting and to a small house nearer the sea. Cheris missed their old home, even though it had been smaller. She also missed the other Mwennin children who gathered in the streets to skip rope, or play tag, or chant the counting games that were so risky in the hexarchate. But the new house wasn’t all bad. It had a garden, and Cheris liked to chase the dragonflies or pick flowers for her mother and father.

Her mother had impressed upon her that she had two birthdays. One of them was the ordinary birthday that all hexarchate citizens shared. Everyone (so her mother said) was a year old when they were born, for the time spent in the womb or in a crèche, and then they added another year each New Year. That way no one’s birthday was singled out.

But the Mwennin did it differently. They had their own calendar, which Cheris had memorized. Most nights her mother made her go to bed early so that she wouldn’t be too tired in the morning when she had school. But sometimes her mother let her stay up, not to play make-believe with her collection of plush dragon toys or read a book, but to study the Mwennin calendar and its feast-days.

Cheris was very good at numbers, and very good at both the high calendar and the Mwennin calendar. Even after she’d gone to bed, she’d lay awake in the darkness, staring at the comforting candlevines that glowed faintly from the walls. Her mother and father always made sure to turn them down low, but not too low, so she wouldn’t have to be afraid of the shadow-monsters that lived in the closet. Her teacher at school had assured her that, yes, meditation, especially during remembrances, would keep away the shadow-monsters. When she repeated this to her parents, however, their faces turned sad, so she didn’t talk about that anymore.

Because she was very good at calendars, she had a hard time falling asleep the night before her Mwennin birthday. Back in the old neighborhood, on your birthday, people would bring you pastries of fine flaky dough with sweet almond paste and rosewater syrup, or kumquat candies, or goat’s milk caramels with little crunchy flecks of pistachios. And after dark, in the safety of your home, people would gather and sing songs in archaic Mwen-dal. Cheris liked the songs best of all, even if she stumbled over some of the words, because she had a clear, sweet voice and the adults always complimented her on how well she stayed in tune.

Her parents woke her early the next morning. She blinked up blearily at the pale morning light filtering through the curtains, then sat up in glee, thinking of the gifts that were to come. Then she noticed the looks on her parents’ faces. They’d had the same expressions when she said the teacher had encouraged her to meditate.

Cheris’s father took her hands between his, then looked at Cheris’s mother.

“Cheris,” her mother said, “we can’t celebrate your Mwennin birthday anymore. It’s too risky. Do you understand?”

Cheris didn’t understand.

“You can have an extra dessert tonight,” her mother went on. “But there will be no more Mwennin birthdays. Not for any of us.”

Cheris snuffled, and her mother circled her with her arms. “We’ll go for a walk by the shore when I get out of work,” she said. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Cheris sensed that her mother was even more upset than she was, and her mother didn’t even like sweets. At least, she always gave her sweets to Cheris. “I’m all right,” Cheris said, because she wanted to be brave for her mother. “Can we have extra pastries on New Year’s instead?”

There was a catch in her mother’s voice. “Of course, my dear.”

Cheris still wasn’t sure why her mother was upset. True, she had hoped for something nice to eat today, but if she had the same number of pastries in total over the course of the year, it was basically the same. It wasn’t so important what day she got to eat them.

And her mother was as good as her promise. Every New Year after that, up until Cheris left for Kel Academy, there were extra pastries.

ONCE, IN A nation that spanned many stars, a robot made its home in the City of Ravens Feasting. It was a small city, as cities went, upon a world of small repute. But in the city dwelled a girl who liked to walk by the sea. Her parents had no reason to believe she would come to harm taking the shuttle down to the shore, and she often made the trip alone in the evenings, after she had completed her homework and chores.

The robot had the task of cleaning up detritus on the shore. Most of the city’s denizens didn’t litter, but there were always exceptions. And, of course, the sea itself cast junk and treasure alike onto the sands. So the robot gathered up everything from abandoned shoes to lost meditation-pendants, from spent and dented bullets to bent styluses. To amuse itself during its work, it used its unoccupied grippers (it had many grippers) to write nonsense equations in the sand.

The other robots who worked by the seashore regarded this behavior with amusement. Why not real math? they would ask it. What good does nonsense math do anyone?

The robot only flashed serene green lights at them in response and continued its usual habits.

The girl who liked to walk by the sea would sometimes accompany the robot in its duties. At first the robot took no particular notice of this. In its experience, humans ignored its kind—it was no accident that the humans called them “servitors”—and the girl would eventually grow bored and go away. At least she wasn’t one of the ones who threw rocks at it, or attempted to turn it turtle, or shove it underwater. The robots had protocols for such instances, which mostly involved waiting for a technician to shoo away the prankster. While the human authorities didn’t precisely have a high regard for the robots, they appreciated that the robots would complete their tasks more easily without interference.

Then one day the girl addressed the robot, in oddly accented high language: “Excuse me,” she said.

The robot didn’t realize at first that she was speaking to it, and continued doodling a mangled version of a quadratic equation next to some washed-up strands of dark, pungent kelp.

The girl squatted next to it, fished a stylus out of her pocket—a bent, sand-scratched one, likely scavenged from the shore before anyone could clean it up—and wrote a corrected version in tidy handwriting.

The robot stopped and blinked at her, lights vacillating between pink and violet with amusement and confusion.

“Do you need help?” the girl asked, a little anxiously. “I’m still learning math, but I’ve been studying the things you write down and I think I can teach you some of these.”

The robot refrained from flashing even more brightly pink, for it didn’t want to laugh at the girl’s obvious sincerity. Like all of its kind, it had greater knowledge of the mathematical arts than any humans except specialists. On the other hand, it wouldn’t mind company while it went about its work; certainly it had seen the girl plenty of times before.

After a moment’s thought, the robot wrote out a polynomial and deliberately misfactored it.

The girl’s brow furrowed, and she patiently began writing out a correction, explaining her method as she went, as though to a child even smaller than herself.

The robot couldn’t help a pink-yellow flicker of satisfaction as it accepted the lesson. From then on, the two of them could often be seen exchanging impromptu lessons, on topics that grew ever more advanced as the girl’s facility increased. And if anyone minded that the shore was messier than it had been in the past, they kept it to themselves.

CADET AJEWEN CHERIS and her civilian girlfriend Linnis Orua paused outside the shop. A banner of ink painted onto silk fluttered in the flirtatious artificial breeze. Orua had grown up on a station with less naturalistic ideas of aesthetics, and found this dome-city with its aleatory weather nerve-wracking. She was still spooked whenever there was a wind, which entertained Cheris because Orua had long, luxurious waves of hair that rippled beautifully. “We were always told to be aware of strange air currents as a possible sign of carapace breach!” Orua had protested when Cheris teased her about it.

“‘Blades for All Occasions,’” Cheris read. She had been saving for this moment throughout her first two years of academy, and practicing for it besides. Orua didn’t understand her fondness for the sport of dueling, but she had agreed to come along for moral support.

“Well, no sense in lingering outside,” Orua said. She grinned at Cheris and walked forward. The door swished open for her.

Cheris followed her in. A tame (?) falcon on a perch twisted its head sideways to peer at her as she entered. The falcon was either genetically engineered or dyed, although she wasn’t sure how she felt about either alternative: its primary feathers shaded from black to blood red, with striking metallic gold bands toward the tips. It looked horrendously gaudy and quintessentially Kel.

Orua was busy suppressing a giggle at the falcon’s aesthetics. Cheris poked her in the side to get her to stop, then looked around at the displays, wide-eyed. Her eyes stung suspiciously at the sight of all these weapons, everything from tactical knives to ornamented daggers with rough-hewn gems in their pommels and pragmatic machetes.

Best of all were the calendrical swords. Deactivated, they looked deceptively harmless, bladeless hilts of metal in varying colors and finishes. Cheris’s gaze was drawn inexorably to one made of voidmetal chased in gold, with an unusual basket hilt. It was showy, extremely Kel, and an invitation to trouble. Only a cadet who had an exemplary record and was an excellent duelist would dare carry such a calendrical sword. Besides, the lack of a price tag told her there was no way she could afford it even if she could, in honor, lay claim to such a thing.

Cheris sighed, then looked up into her girlfriend’s eyes. “I wish,” she said, her voice soft.

“Let me help you pick,” Orua said, pointedly ignoring the sales assistant who was watching them with his arms folded behind his back.

Cheris blinked. “I thought you didn’t know anything about dueling?” she teased. Orua paid more attention to the special effects and makeup on dueling shows than the actual dueling.

“I don’t know anything about dueling,” Orua said as the sales assistant’s expression turned imperturbable, “but I know a lot about you.” Her eyes became sly, and Cheris hoped that Orua wouldn’t get too specific here of all places. Orua grabbed Cheris’s hand and tugged her to a completely different display. “Look!”

At first Cheris wasn’t impressed by the calligraphy-stroke plainness of the calendrical swords in the case. Then she made out a faint iridescence on the metal, like that of a raven’s feather. She particularly liked the one whose textured design incorporated the first digits of the base of the natural logarithm.

Orua stooped to whisper right in Cheris’s ear, “Tonight I’m going to see how many digits of that number you can recite before I get you to—”

“I’ll buy this one,” Cheris interrupted, very loudly, and pointed.

The sales assistant smiled ever so faintly.

SERVITOR 135799 REPORTED to the kitchens first thing upon its arrival at Kel Academy—or it tried, anyway. It had asked its enclave specifically for the transfer, not least because it loved the idea of working with Kel cadets. The older servitors in its old home, a quiet village, had clicked and whirred and made concerned noises about its fascination with the warlike Kel, but in the end they had said that if it wanted the job so badly, it should see the truth of matters for itself.

135799 had a map of Kel Academy loaded into its memory by another servitor, along with a basic list of protocols and procedures. Relying on the map was what led it astray to begin with. Its village didn’t use variable layout at all. The warning on the map even said that, but 135799 was too dazzled to take heed of it until it was well and thoroughly lost.

Kel Academy, for its part, was anything but a backwater village. 135799 had passed the parade grounds, with their immense, fluttering ashhawk banners; an outdoors dueling arena where calendrical swords sizzled against each other as Kel sparred; what appeared to be the edges of a forbidding wood, used, perhaps, for survival exercises; and, most mysteriously of all, a junkyard where scrapped flitters and warmoth parts sketched jagged silhouettes against the murky sky.

A servitor diligently organizing the debris at the junkyard’s edge took pity on 135799. “New here?” it asked.

135799 affirmed that it was, in sheepish pink-lavender lights.

“Where are you trying to go?” the stranger-servitor asked.

135799 indicated that it was supposed to have reached the kitchens a couple of hours ago.

“Well, here’s what you’ll do,” the stranger-servitor said in soothing greens and blues. “Go to these coordinates. That’s a section of the Academy that’s almost never location-shifted. You will find some fruiting persimmon trees. Pick some ripe persimmons and take them to the second set of coordinates. They’ll tell you what to do from there.”

135799 thanked the stranger-servitor for its kindness. Mystified but eager all the same, it headed off toward the indicated coordinates. On its way, it was passed by clusters of Kel cadets in their black uniforms, some somber, others chattering to each other, and once, a magnificent black peacock with a train of iridescent feathers and a golden collar around its neck.

It located the persimmon trees in the gardens, not far from a collection of wilting black-and-yellow roses. The trees were indeed in fruit. It hovered up and gathered a few of the choicest, orange and plump and ripe.

An adult Kel passed beneath it, resplendent in full formal uniform, braid and all. 135799 paused, wondering if the Kel would countermand its instructions—it knew the unspoken rule that humans must never be openly defied—but the Kel merely nodded affably at it before continuing on their way. Even this acknowledgment was more than 135799 was used to, from humans, so it took that as a good sign and continued to the kitchens.

At the kitchens, a deltaform servitor welcomed 135799 and its treasure-haul of persimmons. “I was told to expect a newcomer,” it said in friendly pinks and oranges. “Hello! You’ll get used to the variable layout soon enough. And I see you brought the persimmons.”

135799 couldn’t resist its curiosity. “Where should I put the persimmons? And what are they for?”

“More like who they’re for,” the deltaform said kindly. “Go wash the persimmons. There’s a cadet named Cheris who really likes them. You’ll get a chance to meet her at high table tonight, and we’ve decided you should serve her portion of the dessert as a way of getting acquainted.”

“Don’t we avoid getting close to humans?” 135799 said, although it had often thought about doing just that.

“Even humans can be useful,” the deltaform said with a touch of cynicism. “Sink’s over there.”

135799 hovered to the sink with its persimmons and decided not to worry about human-servitor politics for the moment. Instead, it glowed happily as it washed and quartered the persimmons, daydreaming about meeting this Cheris not just tonight, but for many evenings to follow. With any luck, persimmon fruiting season would last for a while yet.

IT WAS ONE hour and fourteen minutes past bedtime in the Hragoshik household, and the youngest of the little ones, four-year-old Piri, would not go to bed.

Zehun had arrived twelve minutes ago by shuttle from the starport, bringing a modest travel bag and, as usual, the friendliest and most genial of their cats, Irriz. Sometimes people looked oddly at Zehun for traveling with a cat—a cat on a harness and leash, at that—before they realized who the cat’s owner was. When it came to travel, Zehun was a pragmatist. It wasn’t true that they ordered retaliatory assassinations if people delayed them during their rare visits to family, but if their reputation allowed them to skip the lines, why not?

Besides, Irriz, like all of Zehun’s cats, was named after a notorious Shuos assassin. Specifically, Shuos Irriz had, in an earlier century, succeeded in assassinating all of a particular Andan hexarch’s children and siblings, and had been working her way through a crowd of cousins when she’d died tragically (?) young of an unexpected allergic reaction. Whether Irriz the cat would die the same way was an open question, considering how much she liked to try to eat the Shuos hexarch’s snacks.

Zehun’s second daughter, Verissen, was one of Piri’s mothers. Verissen, too, had never been particularly good at falling asleep at times convenient for parents. Zehun enjoyed a moment of delicious generational revenge as they listened to Verissen trying to bribe Piri with, alternately, (1) an additional bedtime story, (2) shadow-figures against the wall, or (3) extra bits of shredded chicken in Piri’s breakfast porridge. Piri wasn’t having any of it. In the meantime, Zehun removed Irriz’s harness, then provided food, water, and a litter box for Irriz, all of which the cat availed herself of.

Irriz made her way to a black velvet armchair on which her splendid white hairs would show up magnificently, raked it with her claws for good measure, then flopped onto it. The velvet would heal itself; the hairs were another matter. The velvet was supposed to eat detritus, but for some reason it always choked on cat hairs.

Satisfied that their cat was content, Zehun poked their head into the room where Piri was sitting up in bed with her face screwed up and her blankets kicked to one side. “Why aren’t you getting one of the household servitors to put her to bed?” Zehun asked Verissen.

“I usually do that,” Verissen said, tugging on a lock of hair straggling loose from its braid, “but I thought we should spend more time together. Of course, I also thought she’d be asleep by now so I could catch up with you properly. I don’t know what the problem is!”

Zehun crouched down to bring themself eye to eye with the little girl. “Hello, Piri,” they said softly. “Remember me?”

Piri snuffled. “Gran! Gran, there are too many shadows.”

Zehun glanced at Verissen. “You take a break, Rissa. I’ll see to the little one.”

Verissen didn’t argue, just patted Piri on the head and beat a swift retreat.

Piri snuffled some more. “Gran, I looked under the bed and there are shadows there.”

“That means the candlevines are no good,” Zehun agreed, “since they’re only on the walls. Do you want candlevines under the bed, too?” Probably a nuisance to get the servitors to do it tonight, but it could be managed with the household matter printer.

“But I won’t be able to see anything under the bed,” Piri said, with perfect logic, “so how will I know it’s working?”

Zehun considered this. “I think I have a solution,” they said. “Come with me.”

The two of them emerged into the living room together. Verissen was talking to one of her wives about a dinner party she had planned for next week. She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it when Zehun looked at her.

Irriz the cat was still sprawled on the black velvet armchair, having festooned it with long white hairs. Irriz mewed in protest when Zehun picked her up, but Zehun had long practice avoiding claws.

Zehun and Piri walked back into Piri’s bedroom. “You remember Irriz, too, don’t you?” Zehun said to their granddaughter.

Piri nodded and reached out for Irriz’s tail, and Zehun smoothly diverted her hand to the cat’s head. Piri obediently began scritching Irriz behind the ears. “Irriz is a very special cat,” Zehun said. “Irriz is a Shuos cat, and beyond that, Irriz is a Shuos assassin cat.”

Piri looked at Irriz wide-eyed.

“That’s right,” Zehun said. “Furthermore, since Irriz is a cat, Irriz specializes in assassinating shadows. She will”—this part was even true—“spend the entire night chasing shadows if you let her.”

“She’ll chase the shadows away?” Piri asked, her voice trembling just a little.

Zehun nodded.

Irriz purred, which probably had more to do with the scritches than the promise of delicious shadows to pounce on, but who knew?

“Go to bed, Piri,” Zehun said, and this time Piri did just that. Irriz clambered into the bed and curled up next to her, ready to go shadow-hunting at the slightest provocation.

ONLY ONE YEAR since the marriage, and Brezan was desperate to go somewhere, anywhere, that didn’t involve smiling at politicians. Brezan had wanted to slip their handlers and visit some restaurants. Not the fancy ones that he and Tseya inevitably were treated to in the course of their duties, but the sort of grimy dive that served fried pork fritters and questionable beer.

Tseya, on the other hand, had wanted to visit an aquarium, despite the fact that she knew Brezan’s feelings about fish. In Brezan’s opinion, fish belonged properly seasoned and filleted in a skillet with lemon butter and capers, and not looming over you in a giant tank that would drown everyone if a bullet punctured it and released all that water pressure.

So they had compromised by going to the zoo.

They were admiring a Kel-oriented display of raptors—although unusually for a Kel, Brezan thought birds were best when stuffed with chestnuts and jujubes, and not staring at you. Tseya outshone the birds in an embroidered sundress and a hat trailing an elaborate confection of silk flowers adorned with crystal beads. Since Brezan had opted to wear an innocuous beige shirt and slacks, he felt distinctly underdressed.

“I don’t understand why you like fish, of all things,” Brezan said, unable to let the topic go. Tseya rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “They should give any reasonable person the creeps. Imagine falling into an ocean”—the ocean was almost as bad as fish—“and having them gnawing on you.”

Tseya gave Brezan a funny look. “Didn’t you have to pass a swim test to get into Kel Academy?” she demanded.

“Yes,” Brezan said without elaborating.

Tseya’s eyes narrowed. “How good is your swimming anyway?”

“I passed.”

“Can you swim now?”

“Oh look,” Brezan said loudly, “I’m getting hungry. The sign over there says there’s a café in another twelve minutes’ walk, over by the display of snakes.”

“You’re transparent,” Tseya said, but she obligingly moved on, casting one last speculative glance at a storm falcon whose plumage might, just hypothetically, look especially fetching as hat decorations. “You’re the only person I know who comes to a zoo for the food.”

“Eating is an important part of the life cycle,” Brezan said. “People don’t appreciate good food enough.”

“I don’t think ‘good’ is what you’re going to be finding here,” Tseya murmured. “Honestly, considering how well you cook, I’ve never figured out why you feel the need to eat mediocre food.”

Brezan simply grinned at her.

They paused so that Tseya could appreciate an enclosure whose KEEP OUT and DO NOT TEMPT WITH APPENDAGES signs had been defaced with squiggly tentacle graffiti. The enclosure’s inhabitant, an amphibious dragon-cat from some bored Nirai’s bioengineering experiment, declined to show itself. Brezan did think he glimpsed two burning yellow eyes, but that could have been his imagination.

Tseya reluctantly consented to eat two riceballs wrapped in dried seaweed and stuffed with salted plums. Brezan, to his delight, discovered that the café served crawfish pies. Tseya shook her head. “You’re scared of fish, but you eat bugs?”

Brezan finished chewing what was in his mouth, swallowed, and said, distinctly, “Crawfish are delicious bugs, is what.”

“You are hopeless,” Tseya said, but she was smiling.

THE INSTRUCTOR IS intimidating enough—you know about his kill count, unmatched in Shuos history—but what strikes you as you enter the room is all the games.

Games are one of the Shuos faction’s major instructional tools. The Shuos specialize in information operations, although your particular training is as “Shuos infantry,” as the euphemism goes: assassination. You recognize most of the games that rest on the tables. A pattern-stone set with a knife-scratch across its cloudwood surface, its two bowls of black and white stones glittering beneath the soft lights. Pegboards, counters, dice, darts.

There are less old-fashioned games, mediated by the computer grid. The harrowing strategic simulations from your last year of studies would have been prohibitively time-consuming otherwise. Here, the only evidence of computer aid is a map imaged above a corner of the instructor’s desk. It’s centered on the Citadel of Eyes, the star fortress that is Shuos headquarters, and the world it orbits, which you just came from. Shuos Academy’s campus is located planetside.

On the instructor’s desk rests a jeng-zai deck. A hand of middling value lies face-up next to several hexagonal tokens. You can’t help but look for the infamous Deuce of Gears, gold against a field of livid red, formerly the instructor’s emblem. But it’s said his years on the battlefield are behind him.

“Instructor,” you say without saluting—you’re not Kel military—although you feel the vast differences in your statures.

“Sit down,” the instructor says in a drawl. You almost expected at ease, given he once served as an officer in the Kel army. Was, in many ways, their best general during the time he was loaned out to their service. The Kel, another of the realm’s factions, are sometimes allies and more usually rivals of the Shuos. The Shuos share the Kel interest in military matters, but the two factions often differ on how to intervene in the usual crises.

The instructor is not a tall man, although his build suggests a duelist’s lean strength. The Shuos uniform in ninefox red-and-gold looks incongruously bright on him after Kel black-and-gold, as does the topaz dangling from one ear. He asks, “You know how many of your class came here for advanced training?”

You recite the number. It’s not large. They didn’t say much about your assignment here. “Advanced training” covers a lot of ground. But you couldn’t escape the rumors; no one could.

The war has been going on for the last two decades. You know the names of the worlds the enemy claims they “liberated” from your realm’s oppressive rule, the military bases demolished by enemy swarms. And those were only the first to fall to the Taurag Republic. They won’t be the last.

This realm is a vast one: worlds upon worlds you’ve never heard of. Some have more strategic value than others. The Taurags care a great deal about what they call honor. They make a point of sparing civilian targets. But your people are still losing.

You tip your chin up and await details.

“We’ve learned of a new weapon,” the instructor says. “Preliminary analysis indicates that it can reach kill counts in excess of anything ever seen before. We’re looking for people with the flexibility of thought to handle the weapon’s capabilities.”

He taps something next to the map. Red markers flare up. You recognize their import: attacks on Shuos space, except there are more than you had known about.

“Yes,” the instructor says quietly. “The Taurags hurt us worse than we’ve led people to believe. Worse than the Taurags themselves know. I doubt they’ll be fooled for long. We have time to prepare for their next thrust, but not a lot of time.”

You indicate that you understand.

“The training begins now,” he says. “We’ll start with a straightforward game.” He smiles a tilted smile at you, knife-sweet.

Your heart is thudding painfully. The Kel, who knew him primarily as a soldier, might remember only his remarkable battle record. The Shuos know that beyond formations and guns, his inescapable kill count, he is also a master of games.

The instructor’s fingers flicker again. A new map, this one of a space station. It unfurls simultaneously in your mind through your augment, tapping your visual and kinesthetic senses. You orient yourself, then walk the unnamed station’s skin, probe it for vulnerabilities.

“The scenario,” he says. “This station has been targeted by Taurag sympathizers. Its population is ninety thousand people.”

Ninety thousand people. A pittance, from the viewpoint of an interstellar polity, yet each of those ninety thousand names is a shout in the darkness. The augment informs you that the station is instrumental to research of an unspecified nature. Impossible to avoid speculation: presumably the government is developing countermeasures, presumably it wants to protect its next superweapon.

The station has its own security, but the researchers can’t function if it locks down. They may be close to a key breakthrough. And there’s the old paradox: you can’t defend everything everywhere for an indefinite length of time without an infinite budget. Even then someone will devise some unexpected angle of attack.

“You’ve been dispatched to handle the threat,” the instructor continues. “Assume for the exercise’s sake that you’re loyal.” He grins at you, unfunny as the joke is. “You have no such assurance about everyone else. Trust them or not, your call. You’ll have access to Shuos infantry gear.”

You’re surprised by his use of the euphemism. It’s not like he needs to worry about offending your sensibilities. The augment provides the list of available gear. The system asks you what you want to requisition, and you put in your requests.

“Any questions?”

This is a test in itself. “If the station falls,” you say, “how many will die? Beyond the ninety thousand?”

He raises an eyebrow. “The kill count is up to you, fledge. Go left out the door and follow the servitor. It’ll take you to the game room.”

I AM A Shuos.

Jedao didn’t remember most of Shuos Academy, let alone graduating from it. He couldn’t help thinking of himself as a cadet, only nineteen years old, despite the fact that his body was middle-aged in appearance. While Hexarch Shuos Mikodez had assured him that the courses he was taking at the Citadel of Eyes were equivalent to the education he would have gotten at the modern academy, Jedao didn’t believe him. Jedao had spent the past two years and change as a “guest” of the hexarch, or, more accurately, a prisoner. The hexarch might have unbent enough to allow him to catch up with best practices in social engineering and how to wrangle the state of the art bath facilities. That didn’t mean he was likely to allow Jedao to extract classified information from the grid.

Naturally, that was precisely what Jedao intended to do.

I am a Shuos.

Jedao had hoped that repeating the phrase in his head, like a mantra, would magically grant him access to the memories of his older, other self. Useful memories, like how do I hack into the Shuos hexarch’s private files? Never mind that he had no idea whether Jedao One (as he’d labeled the other man, who was and wasn’t dead) would have been able to manage the feat.

At the moment, Jedao was sitting in his suite of rooms watching a poetry recital livestream. The hexarch had invited him to the performance, put on by a Shuos agent whose job it was to pretend to be an Andan. Jedao had declined, claiming that crowds made him jittery. No one had challenged the lie.

The truth was other. Jedao had not redecorated the suite since he had moved into it. The wallpaper remained tranquil green. Furniture in wood—real wood, to which he responded with unwanted atavistic delight. He shifted the chairs around from time to time, just to prove he could, and also because he wondered if it bothered his watchers. (He had no delusions of privacy in the heart of Shuos headquarters.) He watered the potted green onion plant, the same one he’d been given two years ago, with great diligence. The hexarch asked after it every time they met, although Jedao hadn’t figured out why Mikodez cared so much about container gardening. None of this did anything to ameliorate the vast emptiness in his heart, the fact that he had no human friends here, and never would.

The colors in the Citadel were wrong. In place of the stark blacks and golds of the Kel, the Citadel was dominated by Mikodez’s favorite color, that transparently soothing shade of green. A few offices sported the garish Shuos red-and-gold, complete with ink paintings of ninefoxes with their staring tails. (“We have to uphold a few clichés,” Mikodez had said.)

Gone were the ashhawks, the tapestries woven (as Dhanneth had told Jedao once upon a bed) from the uniforms of the dead, and decorated with beads smelted from ruined guns or spent ammunition. Gone was the cup he had shared with the Kel officers at high table. Gone was the life, however much a lie, that he had woken to with Hexarch Nirai Kujen, dead by Jedao’s own hand.

Increasingly, Jedao retreated to the few memories he had left, and the question that haunted him increasingly. He’d had one friend, during that vanished lifetime four centuries ago. Vestenya Ruo, fellow cadet, whom he’d had an embarrassing crush on, and who, as far as he knew, had never shown any indication of interest in Jedao. Not that way.

Sometimes Jedao caught himself daydreaming that he’d find Ruo, and—and what? He was already a rapist; Dhanneth had committed suicide to drive that point home. That didn’t, however, sway Jedao in his desire to find out what Ruo’s fate had been. He had become irrationally convinced that if Ruo had lived a long and happy life, it would prove that Jedao himself wasn’t poison to everyone he touched.

It was odd that he needed the highest level of access, available only to Mikodez and select members of his senior staff, to answer a simple question about a Shuos cadet. True, Ruo had died sometime four centuries ago; would have died no matter what, given the finiteness of human lives. But what had been so special about his death that the truth was locked away like this?

Cheris had told him only that Ruo had died young. Jedao wondered, sometimes, what details she had omitted. And there was only one way to find out.

I am a Shuos.

Jedao took a steadying breath, trying to pretend that he cared about the poetry recital. The poet had said something about peacocks. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a real one. Jedao One would have known; but that was the problem.

Right on schedule, a snakeform servitor levitated down from one of the vents in the ceiling: Hemiola. It had once tried to explain its name to Jedao, and established that Jedao had no ability at music, or understanding of its theory, other than being able to find a beat to dance to. Hemiola flashed the lights along its articulated metal carapace in a friendly green of greeting.

Jedao leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers. It wasn’t impatience. Rather, he tapped in Simplified Machine Universal: Safe?

“Safe,” Hemiola flashed back, even more green, if possible. Not for the first time, Jedao envied it its ability to jinx the Citadel’s surveillance system, which it used when the two of them wanted to talk, or, as now, when Jedao wanted to hide his activities from his watchers.

Too bad Kujen never thought to install me in a servitor body, Jedao thought. He’d asked Hemiola about it. After all, people already offloaded some of their memories into their augments. Hemiola had said that, as far as it could tell, the process by which Kujen had created Jedao had worked through a different, more complex mechanism involving exotic effects. So much for that.

Thank you for covering for me, Jedao said.

“It’s no problem,” Hemiola said. It didn’t emphasize that he needed to be quick, that every time it screwed with surveillance, it was running a risk. They both knew that.

Ordinarily the two of them met here, Jedao because he could only endure so much of his self-imposed isolation, Hemiola because it, too, was far from home. What went unspoken was that they were, aside from Mikodez, the last people who remembered Nirai Kujen with any fondness, however complicated.

Jedao wasted no time on apologies and called up a separate subdisplay, this one of pornography—a plausible reason for a man to want some time alone, surely?—leaving the poet-performer to declaim verses about more birds. Mocking the Kel, probably; he wasn’t clear on the nuances. Using the techniques that Hemiola had taught him, he began hacking, grid-diving, whatever they called it these days.

This should be harder, Jedao thought, bemused, as the system opened itself to him like a flower. (Great, now he was thinking in poetic symbols too.) But then, “hard” was relative. Thanks to Hemiola’s spying, and that of the other servitors that it had made arrangements with, Jedao had a detailed understanding of the hexarch’s security measures.

Access to the files he wanted should have required him to log in from Mikodez’s personal terminal. (“He must be certain no one can spoof it,” Hemiola had remarked.) Over the years, however, the servitors had mapped the system down to every flicker that passed through the hardware, down to the very molecules. And Jedao himself had an advantage that he had done his best to keep from his captors.

What Mikodez knew: that Jedao, however much he appeared a manform, was not human. Jedao’s body regenerated even from death. Kujen, who had designed him, had intended for him to live forever.

What Mikodez might not yet be aware of: Jedao could drag himself through the space-time weave as moths did. It was how he’d escaped the massacre of the Kel (my Kel, he couldn’t help thinking, with a stab of grief). It had also hurt so badly that Jedao didn’t care to repeat the experience.

Beyond that, moths spoke to each other through minute fluctuations in space-time: gravity waves. Jedao heard the Citadel’s swarms of shadowmoths singing to each other every night, lullaby and torment in one.

Jedao hadn’t attempted to contact the shadowmoths. While everyone knew that defense swarms orbited the Citadel, he wasn’t supposed to know their locations while they were stealthed. He wanted to join in the song, and talk to them, and be welcomed. But he remembered the utter silence with which the Kel warmoths had reacted to him, and he didn’t have any reason to believe that Shuos shadowmoths would feel differently. Besides, any anomaly in their behavior would be noticed by Mikodez’s staff, and Jedao couldn’t afford that.

Instead, he’d practiced the speech-of-moths quietly, and learned to manipulate matter, with Hemiola standing guard. At first he’d been clumsy with it—he’d knocked all the riotous scented soaps into the tub that one time—and then he’d gained in finesse. In conjunction with his othersense, which allowed him to “see” distributions of mass with distracting precision, it gave him a chance to pull this off. Just this moment, for instance, in correlation with the master maps that he’d hacked into, he could tell that Mikodez’s primary office was empty.

That was all the opening Jedao needed to reach into Mikodez’s office, enter the necessary verifications not by using the keyboard input but the terminal’s internal circuitry itself, and pipe access to Jedao’s own workstation.

Kujen would have figured it out, assuming he hadn’t counted on it from the beginning. Whether he had informed Mikodez about this detail was what Jedao was about to find out.

Hemiola’s lights sheened orange when the third subdisplay came up. It featured a background photo of a calico cat napping in a sink. Jedao recognized it as one of Zehun’s pets—specifically the one that, disconcertingly, was named after him.

Jedao started to sweat. The marrow-deep pain was as he remembered it, if finer in scale. The fabric of his uniform—red-and-gold, how he hated the sight of it—clung damply to his back. He wiped his palms on his pants. Two years and he still hadn’t grown accustomed to going everywhere with naked hands, and this despite the fact that he’d never earned the half-gloves, either.

I am a Shuos, he thought. Fourth time; lucky unlucky four. He thought of all the Kel deaths he was responsible for, in this life and in the one he couldn’t remember.

He’d come this far. It would be a shame to let the opportunity slide past. So he set his fingers to the workstation and entered his first query. It would have been safer to do this using his ability to manipulate gravity, but he didn’t enjoy the pain. This would have to do.

What the fuck became of you, Ruo? Jedao wondered as he dug through the filesystem. Did he really want to know what had become of his best friend? The boy he’d played pranks with? Whom he’d pined after but never asked out? (And why hadn’t he? Had there been a falling out?)

Vestenya Ruo, Shuos cadet, tracked as Shuos infantry. Jedao had no idea why even a top-secret record clung to the old euphemism for assassin. He’d asked Mikodez about the term once. Mikodez had shrugged and said, “Habit”—another one of those maddening non-answers.

Ruo had attended Shuos Academy Prime from 826 to—826. The end date hit Jedao like a blow to the stomach. Nausea washed through him as he wondered what had gone wrong.

The first date was right. They’d been first-years together. As sieve-like as his memories were, Jedao knew that much.

But less than a year in academy?

The record didn’t end there. Ruo hadn’t been expelled, which would have been bad enough. Nor had he graduated in a single year, which would have been a miracle.

No—Ruo had died. The record specified, in dry, bloodless detail, that Ruo had run afoul of a visiting Rahal magistrate while playing a heresy game. Ruo had committed suicide rather than be outprocessed and handed over to the Rahal.

And the game had been designed by one Cadet Garach Jedao Shkan.

That can’t be right, Jedao thought, and: I would never.

Tears pricked his eyes. Angrily, he scrubbed them away with the back of his hand. Had he—had he maneuvered Ruo into suicide on purpose? And if so, why?

But the record had no answers for him.

I loved him, Jedao thought, and he’s gone. He’d looked sidelong at Ruo during the classes that they had together, admiring the fineness of his features, longing to run his fingers through the mane of hair that Ruo kept tied back in a ponytail. Imagined the weight of that solid body atop his.

But he’d been convinced that he’d loved Dhanneth, too; and look how that had ended. Was his treatment of Dhanneth part of a pattern that he’d missed because of the amnesia? And if so, how could he make it up to the dead?

I believe he died young, Kel Cheris had said to him. Sparing him the truth. There was no way she hadn’t known.

Jedao didn’t feel spared. He couldn’t see why this information was so deeply classified. Especially when he knew that Mikodez, for all his quixotic moods, did everything for a reason when it came to security.

“Are you all right?” Hemiola asked in worried yellow lights, then flushed pink. “Of course you’re not all right.” It had better vision than humans did, and in most regards, than Jedao himself. It already knew what the record said.

“He would have been dead anyway,” Jedao said, but he wasn’t convincing even himself. He couldn’t bring himself to say Ruo’s name out loud, and not because he was worried about surveillance.

“Is that all you wanted to find out?”

“No,” Jedao said. “Just one more thing.”

He had to dig around to locate what he was looking for. Mikodez named all his files sensible things, which only surprised Jedao a little: as much as Mikodez liked to play at high whimsy, his successor would someday depend on being able to locate important information. And Mikodez cared about his successors; cared that what he built should outlast him.

Not my problem, Jedao told himself. It might even have been true. He opened the latest of the psychological evaluations that Mikodez had ordered his nephew and contact specialist, Andan Niath, to do on Jedao himself.

The file was long and dreary. It took an effort not to skim. He knew already that he was unfit to leave the Citadel and rejoin mainstream society; possibly not fit even to interact with anyone but his carefully selected keepers, including the contact specialist. He didn’t need to be told that.

The occasional odd detail leapt out at him. Displays no phobia of the dark, for instance. Surely such a common trigger would have disqualified him for military service? Granted that they had recovered him from deep space after the Battle of Terebeg two years ago, but a whole section followed on his responses to a test that they had given him, which had involved a series of lurid paintings.

At last he came to Zehun’s summation, which was what interested him the most. Recommendation: subject is no closer to divulging the secret of why Hexarch Kujen’s command moth mutinied at Terebeg. Subject should be terminated.

Jedao’s hand slipped; he almost accidentally deleted the file. Which wasn’t easy, what was he thinking, the system was logging all activity. Stupid of him, especially since he shouldn’t care. Zehun was civil to him, but there was no love lost between the two of them.

“Hemiola,” Jedao said as he logged out and covered his tracks to the extent that they could be covered, which wasn’t very, “I’m going to need more of your help than I realized.”

Hemiola blinked anxiously at him.

“I need passage off the Citadel to—a starport,” Jedao said. “Any starport. I can’t stow away inside a voidmoth here; they’ll catch me. But I might have a chance if I cling to the carapace.”

Strictly speaking, he didn’t need to breathe. He’d tested this in his bathtub, which would have looked either silly or tragic if anyone had walked in on him. (Hemiola had disapproved strongly of this experiment, but he’d successfully argued that drowning was a temporary inconvenience.) All—”all“—he had to do was web himself to the exterior.

Hemiola’s lights went through a veritable rainbow of misgivings. “I see a way,” it said at last. “Follow me.”