By the Will of the Gods

By Charles Q. Choi

This story originally appeared in the January-February 2021 Analog.

13,300 words

The funeral began when the temple clock tolled at sunset, crimson and lavender and gold clouds against a violet sky. It was an artificial version of nightfall -- day changing to night on the video screens tiling the walls and ceiling of the giant cavern that cocooned the city of Nightingale.

At the funeral, the foretellers donned the swan feather cloaks and black robes of mourning. As they chanted, they danced in stately circles in the temple courtyard, swinging their arms out with wide sweeping motions like symbolic wings. A ritual performed in the hope that, in spite of what happened, Harrow's soul could find rest amongst the stars.

Harrow was killed by an invisible knife to his back. He was the last person in all the worlds who still cared whether I was dead or alive.

The funeral was small -- just the foretellers, and myself and the other wards of the temple, and a few old men I saw Harrow gripe and joke with over the years. I stood behind everyone else due to my cursed status. They likely only let me attend because they knew there was little chance they could keep me away.

If Harrow could have seen the funeral, he would have grumbled about the cut-rate rotgut the foretellers offered the gods in his name. Ornery fossil.

Harrow was the groundskeeper at the Temple of the Third Eye, the Church of Foresight's outpost in Nightingale. He had a habit of swatting me with a bamboo switch whenever I made a mistake. He disappeared for days on a time on mysterious errands. He taught me everything important I know and was the closest thing I had left to family.

My parents died in space. I was told a stray meteoroid destroyed their spaceship. At their funeral, they and the other victims didn't receive any ceremonies from foretellers to shepherd them to the afterlife. The way they died meant they, and I, were "starcrossed" -- struck down by divine wrath.

At the end of the funeral, the foretellers took prayers the other wards and I wrote and burned them in large bronze braziers to send them to the next world. As I watched the smoke rise and disappear, I thought about how nothing really tied me to Nightingale anymore. I could go to see what life was like elsewhere in the galaxy, where my people had encountered our distant kin. Perhaps the Duchy of Helium and its floating cities, or the giant moon Halidam-Sidereal and its dizzying menagerie of Chimerics. Worlds where I wasn't thought of as better off dead.

But too much about Harrow's death, and his life, remained a mystery to me. The police were so certain they had answers about Harrow's death that they had stopped bothering to look for any others, but all the questions I had left kept me up at night.

It would have been easy for me to do nothing about Harrow's death.

It would have been impossible for me to do nothing about Harrow's death.

A Wandering Star

My parents died when I was ten. The only thing I have left of them is their astromantic watch, a clockwork version of the worlds around our home star designed for the extraordinary task of helping one predict the future. It was the kind of gift any parent might wish for their child -- it suggested a future one could look forward to.

Closest to the watch's central gold disc, which symbolized our sun, circled a half-pearl, half-obsidian bead for tiny Scrithel. Past that, a blue-green turquoise for our homeworld Pell, and two ivory dots for its moons. After that, a black tourmaline for dark tarry Atred, a red banded agate for giant ringed Overest, gold-speckled lapis lazuli for stormy Procellous, and a grey moonstone for icy Requietory. Underneath all this spun gold clock hands resembling shafts of sunlight, with rings on the rim of the watch's dial marking away the moments, days, months and astrological houses.

Arcs of silver on the watch's face marked the orbits of the three dozen or so meteoroid swarms that regularly strike Pell. Outworlders call our homeworld Fallingstar for the many shooting stars that bombard it. Myths called them volleys of flaming arrows that gods launched at Pell as tests of their mettle, honing their skills to better combat the monsters of the dark. Rains of fire largely taken for granted on a world where I've never been.

I was told my parents were killed by a speck of rock too small to show on the astromantic watch. We lived in one of the few dozen spinworlds near Pell. My mother and father helped build glittering solar-powered orbital laser arrays that steered asteroids and propelled lightjammers across the void. Their passenger flight was destroyed on the way back from work, the spacecraft's countless pieces scattered throughout space. A hundred or so other people died also.

Afterward, I stayed at an orphanage the astronautics guilds set up. They sold nearly all my family's belongings. They used my inheritance funds to pay for my upbringing and lure in potential foster parents.

But no one came to adopt me. Nobody wanted to take a bandy-legged starcrossed boy into their homes to tempt fate. I became adrift and alone, a wandering star myself. Just another piece of debris from the aftermath of my parents’ deaths.

As the years passed, my inheritance dwindled away -- to pay for meals, for water, for a roof, for a bed, for clothes, for teachers, for doctors, for the air that we and everybody else breathed in the spinning hollowed-out asteroid where the orphanage was housed. Until I was adopted when I was 13 to begin my apprenticeship at a temple devoted to seeing the future.

Harrow was whom the temple sent to pick me up from the orphanage. He showed up in a faded jumpsuit I later found he wore all the time both on and off work, the long sleeves of which covered his old tattoos.

"You're Hap, right?" He eyed me up and down, unimpressed. "Look like any other dumb kid."

He looked at the bag I slung over my shoulder. "That all you have?"

He didn't say anything else to me for the rest of the journey sunward to the city of Nightingale, which lay buried within Scrithel.

All Those Other Worlds

Scrithel, the planet closest to our star, was our portal to other stars. Long ago, unknown parties converted Scrithel into a kind of giant machine called a Labyrinth, deep in the heart of which are gates leading to other worlds. The gates were an incredible discovery in and of themselves, but what lay beyond them was even more extraordinary.

Countless worlds across the galaxy are home to branches of the human family tree, with each lineage diverging from the others its own unique way. On one, everyone might be born with an identical twin; on another, everyone might be born immortal.

The innermost world of each star that hosts a branch of humanity was usually converted into a Labyrinth whose gates linked all these lineages together. Interstellar travelers and goods from dozens of worlds now regularly wend their way to us. Masked seers from Nocturne. Chrysaline missionaries in virtually perfect artificial bodies preaching Rebirth. Scantily clad photosynthetic Viridians. Channelers with electronic ghosts riding them from the Thanatocracy. Even anthrobots and much less humanoid machines from the mechanocracies.

The greatest mystery of the age is why humanity was scattered across the stars. But I generally don't give too much thought to all those other worlds, where life might have turned out different. I try not to. My lot was to come from a world falling stars hit far more than the others. Its nature left my parents dead and me alone to face all the perils that came my way. I didn't really get a chance to see visitors from other worlds anyhow when I got to Nightingale; my life was mostly spent within the temple.

Consecrated Dice

The temple was one of the first buildings constructed in Nightingale, using cedar and pine imported from Pell and stones quarried from asteroids and moons. Its gable roofs, angled to withstand rain and snow, are purely decorative in Nightingale, which sees neither rainstorms nor snowfall. Like all of Scrithel’s cities, Nightingale is located in a vast cavern called a Hollow to avoid the scorching-hot neverending day or freezing-cold everlasting night on the tidally locked planet’s surface, and has no weather to speak of. The creators of the Labyrinths covered the daysides of each of these mechanocosms with solar cells to generate an extraordinary amount of power for the kinesis and other exotic fields used to keep their gates stable. Nightingale and its sister cities siphon off a fraction of this electricity for life support.

The temple’s neighborhood is a bit rundown, even seedy these days, not a place where one would want to stay if one could help it. Still, many in Nightingale are devout, and the temple always has visitors.

The people of Pell are among the most superstitious folk to ever take to space. Every morning the foretellers don their feather cloaks, roll consecrated dice and inspect the flights of doves set loose from the temple roosts, all to consult the gods about the coming day. Templegoers ask foretellers for good and bad dates for weddings, funerals and travel, or lucky numbers for gambling and stockbroking. Supplicants come with sacrifices to appease the heavens, for charms to protect them from evil, for good fortune with money or their health, for pardoning of their sins.

We've figured out how to blast off to orbit and colonize our planetary system, but we still cast lots to divine the will of the gods. Past techniques for predicting the future.

The Monkeyboy

The temple adopts orphans to help maintain it. Life there was a monotonous series of chores. Sweeping the flower and herb gardens clean. Draping necklaces of flowers on the gilt multi-armed statues of the gods. Arranging pyramids of fruit on the altars. Emptying incense ash from the censers. Polishing every ornately carved nook and cranny of the temple from top to bottom.

In addition to accepting orphans, the temple also takes in volunteers from devout families, or those wanting to seem devout. One of those seasonal wards was Chase, a scion of a clan that made a fortune off selling laser technology to outworlders. His family now wanted to seem pious, probably to set the stage for future public roles in politics. As such, we had to endure Chase during the summers.

It's wrong to call Chase a volunteer, because he clearly hated exile at the temple, but he never let that feeling cross his blandly attractive face in front of the foretellers. He didn't do any heavy lifting or dirty work, since he could always find a lackey to do it for him.

But Chase wasn't used to a life with limitations, with constant frustrations and disappointments, a life where he wasn't able to do whatever he wanted to do. With nothing to do, he got extremely bored. He decided to pass the time with cruelty, with me, the ugly little boy, as a favorite target.

I was good at climbing, so I was the one who usually clambered up the walls to replace and light the candles in the niches of each of the idols of the thousand sages. During those times, without fail, Chase would say, "Hey, look, it's Hap, the monkeyboy," and he and his gang of flunkies would start hooting and howling and laughing.

I'd stay quiet and keep a stoic face to not give them any ammunition. But they could tell they were getting to me by the way my cheeks reddened when he said, "Watch out for any shit he might throw at us!" By the way I tensed like a clenched fist when he said, "He's so ugly, the gods killed his parents out of mercy!"

I tried as often as possible to find respite by hiding on the temple roof, lying down looking up at the sky. It was an electronic illusion, of course, and occasionally it would run an ad or a message from state media. Still, I had never looked up at a real sky, so even a virtual one held an exotic appeal for me, and the sky was always perfect in Nightingale. It was a relief to lose myself in the drifting clouds above, if only for a little while.

I never responded to Chase and his gang. I never even bothered looking at them. I think that more than anything else spurred Chase to try and break me.

I wore my watch on me nearly all the time. One day, as the other wards and I were changing out of work clothes after a day of chores, Chase saw my watch and decided to have a little fun. Snatching it, he and his flunkies tossed it back and forth between them, keeping it away from me. Then it slipped from his fingers, clattering to pieces on the floor, my only keepsake from my parents shattered.

Chase just laughed. I launched myself right at him.

All summer, Chase had called me monkeyboy, which wasn't just unkind but wrong. It would likely be more proper to call me apeboy. The spliced chimp genes I inherited from my spacer parents gave me long arms and bow legs and a short height and a powerful grip, all useful for life in space. They're what made me good at climbing. They also made me stronger than I look, which is something Chase and his minions were surprised to learn.

Everything Tasted Bitter

After the foretellers broke up the fight, they dragged me into a storage room. One of the junior foretellers then punished me with a dozen lashes from a rattan cane. I knew a flogging was coming -- I'm pretty sure I broke Chase's nose, and I gave two of my other assailants black eyes. The beating seemed perfunctory -- the priest didn't really put his body into each strike, so for that I could be thankful. Each blow still felt like I got struck by a white-hot poker.

When it was over, they left, and I cradled my head in my arms, imagining my back blossoming red and yellow and pink like a sunset. After a while, Harrow entered with a jug of water and a cup. He poured some water in the cup and put the jug and the cup on the floor beside me.

"Supposed to take you to the nurse," he said. "But take your time."

I drained the cup and Harrow poured me some more water, and then he pulled a chair over for himself. This was the first time he had spoken directly with me since he picked me up from the orphanage.

As temple groundskeeper, Harrow typically assigned chores in the morning. But it often seemed as if he barely did anything most days except sit on a stoop and growl about the news of the day in clothes that smelled of booze. At times he vanished for hours or even days without anyone knowing where he went or what he was doing, the junior foretellers handing out chores in his stead without noting he was missing. When he did reappear, no questions were asked.

I guess Harrow had nothing better to do that afternoon but to talk with the starcrossed boy.

"They say you do what you're told. The tutors say you're bright. You're quiet, keep to yourself. Cause no trouble, generally speaking," Harrow said. "Why'd you do it?"

I kept my head bowed. Harrow grunted.

"The other boys say you attacked them," he said. "You're enhanced. They didn't really stand a chance. Didn't know you had a mean streak."

I snarled a scornful laugh. Harrow nodded.

"You're saying you didn't pick a fight with five boys," he said. "So what do you have to say for yourself?"

"What's the point?" I spat.

"Because I asked."

I let out a deep sigh.

"I don't look for trouble," I said, biting down on each word. "I do everything I can to avoid trouble. I can't help it when trouble finds me. When it does, I do my best to see it doesn't want to find me again."

Harrow crossed his arms.

"A lot of words from the quiet boy," he said, weary. "It might sound like a smart thing to say. It looks like a damn stupid way to act. Beating up a boy whose clan makes more money in a day than you or I will likely see in a hundred lifetimes, that's your way of staying out of trouble?"

Harrow cocked an eyebrow at me.

"The best way to solve a problem usually doesn't involve creating more, worse problems for yourself," he added. "You live in a temple devoted to seeing the future. You might think about learning how to plan ahead."

So I had to solve problems I didn't cause. Do everything right even though I was the victim, while those who were guilty had to do nothing.

"Always 'do the right thing?'" I asked. Everything tasted bitter.

Harrow leaned back in his chair, mulling what I said.

"I find it easier to avoid the question of what's right or wrong by not getting caught," he said after a pause.

I crossed my arms, sullen. "Thanks for the advice, but I can take care of myself," I said, my tone a little more defensive than I wanted.

He sighed and stood up. He then cocked an eyebrow. "The watch still appears to run fine, by the way -- it looks like only the case got damaged," he said, and the welts on my back seemed to throb a bit less. "I know people who can put it back together and double-check if its machinery needs any repair."

Turning to leave, Harrow stopped and looked at me from the corner of his eye.

"This fight looks good for no one, so the High Foreteller will likely try and make this all go away. In the meantime, try not to make any other poor life choices."

I looked him in the eye.

"Was getting gangland tattoos on your arms a wise life choice?"

Harrow barked a laugh.

"You're lucky summer is ending soon. You won't have to deal with Chase." He then gave me a mirthless little smile. "But you will have me to deal with."

Months of Hell

And so began months of hell. Most of it seemed like meaningless extra drudgery. Going on scavenger hunts where I had a day to find every picture of a lotus in the temple or some other nonsense. Asking me to close my eyes and recall as many details as possible about some random temple visitor who just passed by. It all seemed designed to earn a smack or two from Harrow's bamboo switch over trivial mistakes.

The worst of the extra duties were likely the ceremonial plays in which I had to perform during temple services. While the other wards chanted and shook rattles and banged on drums, I pranced around during little skits in front of the main hall portraying moments from the holy epics. Unforgettable roles included the Swamp Demon and the Brazen Strumpet.

Smearing on makeup and dressing in ridiculous costumes that smelled of years of sweat weren't enough, of course. No, I had to put on a good show as well. That meant hours of torture every day learning the tumbling and mock fights needed to make the shows exciting.

There were countless push ups, pull ups, sit ups, jumps, lunges, squats, handstands, somersaults, rolls, cartwheels and sprints. All that just to tire me out before I practiced routine after routine for the shows. Punches, kicks, joint locks, throws, elbow strikes, knee strikes, parries, dodges, grabs, holds, chokes, pins, reversals. Swinging at me with a stick, striking my hands and head over and over again. Pushing me back, pulling me forward, knocking me down.

Along with this came a seemingly endless litany of scolding and swatting with Harrow's bamboo switch. Keep your back straight. Chin up. Bend that front knee. No, bend it more. Eyes up. Jump higher. Lunge further. Squat in a wide stance. Lower. No, lower. Punch like you're striking through the target, not just at it. Don't hold your breath. Wait until I commit to move, otherwise I'll just track you. Stop flinching, you won't see the attack coming. How could you not see me telegraphing that blow? Either make sure you don't get struck or learn how to take a hit. Keep your chin up, I said.

A Coward

That went on for nine long months. Then summer returned, and so did Chase. I was mildly disappointed to see that his nose looked fine.

Chase's first day back, he and his friends coolly ignored me, but I knew that wasn't going to last. That night, as I walked toward the dorms, he and his friends came around, all swaggering and smiling, all with wooden staves in hand.

"Hey, monkeyboy," Chase said.

I was resigned to the fight. Chase probably wouldn't kill me, I reasoned; he might not be able to get away with it if he did. He probably wouldn't even cripple me; it'd raise too many questions. He'd probably be happy with him and his crew just beating the living daylights out of me. If I was lucky, they wouldn't beat me every night for the next few months.

"Just get on with it," I said.

The first swing from Chase was so telegraphed I thought it was a ruse. I dodged his staff without thinking, stepping back the instant he committed to the attack. He cursed and then wildly swung twice, which I avoided by ducking under each swing, instead of going backward. Chase then roared, charged and slashed down at my head, which I just sidestepped.

The sound of a shoe scraping the ground behind me led me to spin and drop into a fighting crouch. The assailant who tried sneaking up on me flinched and lifted his staff to swing. To stop his attack, I stepped close to him, grabbing the pole before it could come down on my head. I yanked on it in the hope of perhaps throwing him. Unexpectedly, his grip was so weak, I pulled the staff right out of his hands.

I turned to face my opponents, bringing up my staff. All of them stepped back except Chase. Snarling, Chase swung at me as hard as he could. I deflected the blow and held my staff at his throat, my body shaking with adrenaline.

As I gasped, my mind was honestly blank as to what to do next. During all my training with Harrow, I never managed to land a blow on him. I just stared as Chase, studying him. His face was contorted with anger, sure, but also confusion, and a little fear.

Any interest in fighting any further drained away from me as clarity hit. "This is stupid," I said, tossing the staff to the ground and walking away.

"You're a coward!" Chase shouted at my back, but he didn't matter.

Trying to Find Something in the Stars

My lessons with Harrow were still challenging, but I stopped resenting them. Harrow noticed, and while he never made anything easier for me, he explained what he was doing more, as often as not pointing out my mistakes as matters I could improve instead of just as personal failings.

Harrow started dispatching me on errands around Nightingale. He'd have me deliver or collect letters or packages around the city, and time me, and berate me if I came back late, and interrogate me as to which route I took, and chide me for the path I'd chosen when anyone with half a brain would have, say, picked the shortcut through the fish market. At times Harrow didn't know exactly where a person or location or item was, so I had to ask around, talk with all different sorts of folks, upright and unsavory, figure out who the best people to go to might be, and work out the right questions to pose and the most useful ways to ask them.

In this way I grew to learn the twisty alleys and secret thoroughfares and rickety footbridges of Nightingale, the rhythms and noises and melodies of the city at every time of day, the shops and denizens of its neighborhoods, the best places to get something you wanted, the worst places to wander alone. Away from the temple, I could even pass as relatively normal; walking down the street, no one would guess I was starcrossed, and that was a freedom I hadn't felt, a burden I didn't have to carry, for a long time.

On nights when Harrow was in an especially good mood, he would have me hitch a passenger carriage to one of the temple bicycles so I could pedal him to the night market. The temple subsidized air purifier stacks in its district because of the smoke from the incense and burned prayers that poured every day from it. Given this support, outdoor grills that could never open elsewhere in an enclosed city such as Nightingale could set up shop in our district.

Harrow would order us skewers of grilled meat at the stalls and get some cheap liquor for himself and then argue and laugh loudly with some other old men. Workers who finished late hours elsewhere in Nightingale would come to loosen up after a long night, eat noodles or buns, complain about the day they had and the day to come, grow increasingly inebriated, gamble over games, and shout at video screens when their favorite teams were winning or losing. Performers of all kinds would busk for money -- jugglers, minstrels, acrobats, poets, clowns, dancers, storytellers, contortionists, magicians, puppeteers, unicyclists, snake charmers, martial artists, sketch artists, fire breathers, sword swallowers and more -- and Harrow might give me a few coins to pay them. Street theaters would entice you into comedies or tragedies. Boxing clubs would invite onlookers to matches for cash prizes; I thought about taking part, but I didn't really feel like fighting outside of temple plays if I didn't have to. It was a kaleidoscope of humanity, rich and poor, dull and fascinating. It's where I felt of Nightingale as my home for the first time.

Harrow and I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning. He tended to get liquor on his clothes and act drunk but keep sober, but after a while he or I would get tired and call it a night. He would doze off in the back of the rickshaw as I pedaled, with the sounds and fumes of the market fading in the distance behind us.

Even after years of knowing him, there was still much Harrow kept secret from me. He never took me on any of his own errands, but in some of the lessons he gave hints. What kind of tells people gave when they were lying. How to spot if someone had a pistol on their person.

None of the other wards got this kind of training. I had no idea what it was all for, but I couldn't help but feel it was all leading up to something. But Harrow didn't feel like telling me about that other part of his life, so I didn't feel like asking. Maybe he'd tell me when I got older, or maybe he would never tell me. It didn't matter to me -- neither of us was the kind who liked talking much unless there was something important to say.

What I remember most about Harrow was not what he did or didn't say, but how he helped me pay to take the annual spacesuit certification tests so I could stay qualified in their use, just like I was when I lived with my parents in our spinworld. It wasn't a lot of money, but I had none. He didn't need to do it -- getting certified didn't help me serve any duties for the temple. I just missed space.

For my last test, he even came with me. I think he noticed I took the tests on the anniversary of my parents' deaths. After the test was over, he stayed with me in silence as I just stood on the surface of the planet for a time, staring up trying to find something in the stars.

Two weeks later, Harrow was dead.

Ribs and Vertebrae

The other wards and I knew something was wrong when no one came to us with any orders that autumn morning. Instead, the foretellers paced around murmuring in low urgent tones with one another, their raven feather cloaks rustling over their dun robes as we sat apprehensive in the temple's courtyard. Finally, one of the senior foretellers told us that Harrow had died, and that we could go to our rooms for the rest of the day, and that we should all say prayers for Harrow to help guide his way to the heavens.

I didn't stay in my room. When I heard police rapping on the temple doors to enter, I slunk out of the dorms and into the shadows, and it was easy to avoid the notice of the foretellers given how distracted they were. Long hours cleaning every inch of the place high and low taught me good nooks to hide in for spying, and I sat up in the eaves outside High Foreteller Vervaine's parlor to listen to what Detective Bellows had to say.

"We think it occurred not too late in the evening, Your Excellency," Bellows huffed. He was a meaty, bull-necked man, with the build of an athlete gone to fat. He chatted with Harrow every now and again in the night market, when he usually took a few free drinks from the vendors. I suspected Harrow let him win at dice.

Vervaine looked over some crime scene photos laid out on her desk. She had shed the intricately embroidered vermillion robes and peacock feather cloak and sacred jewelry of her station and switched to her less formal grey cassock. She was just past middle age, and tended to ask questions more than she provided answers.

She let out a deep breath. "He was found in front of an alley?"

"At an intersection on Catfish Way, yes, where we think he was ambushed from behind. He was on his way to see an acquaintance of his from one of the city maintenance crews."

Catfish Way was a narrow backstreet Harrow taught me about. It was a good, fast shortcut from our temple through Goldentown, a Deltan ghetto.

"Were there any witnesses?"

"Well, no, you're not going to get any witnesses from those people. And there was no video footage -- no surveillance cameras in that location, not in that part of Goldentown." The unspoken implication seemed to be that it was a waste to spend money on cameras there just to watch one starcrossed beat or stab another one.

The kingdom of the Golden Delta was said to be one of the most advanced ancient civilizations in the world, and one of the most decadent by those who hated it. A cosmic impact near its capital millennia ago scattered its people to the four winds, and since then all Deltans were seen as starcrossed like me, relegated to ghettoes at best, slave pens and mass graves at worst. Nowadays Deltans have won rights and protections, but many still live in slums like Goldentown working jobs that no one else wants.

"We do have the murder weapon," Bellows added. He snapped his fingers at a nearby officer, who brought over a clear plastic bag. Inside was what looked like a dull grey stone knife.

"The knife is made of pellucidium," Bellows said. "When the battery in the handle electrically charges the pellucidium, light warps around the knife. It becomes completely transparent to visible wavelengths of light. Nearly invisible in other wavelengths as well."

"A Pellucid Knife," Vervaine said, turning the blade around in her hands. I knew of such weapons, styled after the Pellucid Knife from the Deltan Song of the Silver Moon, used by the Blademaster of Eskers in her last, desperate strike against the Faceless King. It was one of the scenes I reenacted on the temple stage during the Deltan holiday of Sovenance.

"Definitely Deltan," Bellows said. "Harrow was stabbed with it a dozen times. You can see the chips and nicks on the blade where his killer hit ribs and vertebrae."

I suddenly recalled an afternoon spent outside the kitchen chopping up a shank of pygmy mammoth for an annual feast. The memories of the smell of the meat and the sound of the cleaver on the bone and the shock of each impact running up my arm led revulsion to rise up in me like a tide. Bellows was talking about how they had already rounded up two dozen Deltans from Goldentown as I scrambled down from the eaves as quickly and quietly as I could. I managed to make it out of the building before I vomited.

If Harrow Was There

Harrow's funeral was held as soon as possible after his death, as was custom. Beforehand, I overheard the foretellers saying they were going to pack up all his things. I snuck into his room to see it before everything there went away.

The room was unadorned and unsentimental, like him. Bare walls. A simple pallet for a bed.

I just felt dull and flat and grey. The room's emptiness reminded me of how I now had virtually nothing left from my parents. Harrow left practically nothing behind either. After everything they did for me, almost nothing of them remained. There was nothing I had that wouldn't one day get taken away from me. I had nothing.

The top of Harrow's dresser was strewn with data cartridges. Maintenance records for all of Nightingale. Astronomical charts, which were a surprise, because I didn't think Harrow was religious. News reports from over the past decade, which brought back a memory of my parents' names among the list of the dead from their spacecraft's destruction. A flask of spirits of far higher quality than whatever swill I usually saw him order. A tablet computer whose password protection I couldn't get past.

The contents of his desk gave me pause. Its drawers were filled with data cartridges of police reports, arrest records, criminal profiles, court documents, city surveillance camera footage and dossiers of people throughout Nightingale and the planetary system. There were also access cards to sites all across the city, including many secure facilities one would never think would let in a simple temple groundskeeper.

All this was proof that Harrow had a secret life as I had long suspected, but it didn't solve the mystery of what that secret life was. I came into his room looking for answers, but I found myself with more questions than I had before. What did he do on his mysterious errands? Did the foretellers know about what them? Did these secrets of his get him murdered? Why didn't he tell me anything about his other life?

Now I had reason to think there was more to Harrow's murder than met the eye, but I had no idea what I could do about it. I held my own once against some punk kid and his toadies in a fight, but that was a far cry from dealing with a murderer. Whatever secrets got Harrow killed might just as easily get a penniless 16-year-old killed as well.

A note stuck on the calendar above Harrow's desk said to meet Rusty. Harrow mentioned Rusty was a buddy he drank with from time to time. Rusty worked as a repairman for the city. He might have been the last man to see Harrow alive.

If Harrow was there, he would have told me looking into his death was the act of a fool. He would have struck me with a bamboo switch and scolded me for even thinking about it. He wouldn't have wanted me to investigate his murder because he would have wanted to keep me safe. Because he was my friend, the only friend I had.

But he wasn't there. So of course I set out to find Rusty.

Outside the Law

I rode the trolleys past the outskirts of Nightingale. I called the city maintenance department earlier asking for Rusty. They said I should see him round midnight at a docking bay currently closed for renovations.

I used one of Harrow’s access cards to slip past an airlock into the docking bay. Empty gantries there stood as tall as skyscrapers, skeletal towers of lattice metalwork that normally helped support rocketships after they landed. I recalled that I had sometimes entertained the notion of leaving Nightingale on one of those ships when I first got here; I was surprised to find I hadn’t had that thought in a while.

I walked down a long clear plastic inflatable tunnel that led to the giant chasm at the mouth of the docking bay. Rocketships dove into and flew out of Scrithel’s gates via shafts miles wide that reached from the surface straight to the gates at the center of the planet. At the heart of each gate was a wormhole that was smaller than a pinprick but as massive as an asteroid; the gates helped stabilize the wormholes, and briefly expanded their mouths to traversable sizes when commanded. Instead of keeping enormously dense and heavy wormholes near the surface of the planet and devoting vast amounts of energy to prevent them from plummeting downward, scientists believed the gates were kept near the heart of a Labyrinth where they would not fall any further.

At the end of the plastic tunnel was a transparent geodesic bubble clamped around the edge of the docking bay. I walked to the brink of the bay and took an involuntary breath at seeing what looked like nothing less than a bottomless pit. Suspended over the edge on the side of the shaft was a scaffold where Rusty sat.

Rusty was a thin man who dyed his greying hair bright red. The maintenance department told me he was updating a control junction for the rails that carried the rocketship gantries to and from the mouth of the docking bay. He was peering intently at a circuit board, soldering iron in hand. He jolted with alarm when he saw me.

“Who in the hells are you?”

I shouted down at him so he could hear me, a little louder than I would’ve liked. “I just wanted to ask you some questions about Harrow,” I said.

Rusty scowled, the surly expression of a man who constantly got interrupted.

"Don't I look like I have better things to do than to talk with some child?" he said, stressing the last word. He waved his soldering iron around and turned back to the control junction.

I felt like my life consisted of a series of irascible old men, which spurred a brief pang in my heart.

I took a deep breath. "I don't mean to cause you any trouble. But Harrow was my friend," I said. "He talked about you like you were his friend too. I thought you might be able to help me."

Rusty peered up at me, brows furrowed. "You're Harrow's starcrossed kid, aren't you?" He reflexively raised his hand to shield the side of his head, a gesture to ward off evil. "He mentioned you now and then. Not sure I can help. The police already came by. I told the detectives everything I know."

Seeing an opening, I knelt closer. "I was cleaning up after Harrow when I saw all these crime files he had. I don't know if they had anything to do with why he got killed. I was hoping that you might know why they were there."

Rusty squinted with surprise. "You mean you don't know what Harrow really did for the temple?" He noticed how baffled I was at his question.

Rusty sighed and relaxed. He gestured at me to come to him, and I gingerly clambered down. "Look, kid. People come to the Church with questions. Sometimes, with challenging questions, analyzing signs and portents isn't enough. So, in the past, temples would dispatch some of their guards to investigate. Knowing what's happened already can shed light on what might happen next.

"Whenever supplicants came to your temple for private divinations, Harrow would go out and run his errands for them," he said. "Errandeers like him have worked outside the law for the temples and templegoers for centuries when the police couldn't step in, or gave up, or never really bothered trying, or perhaps couldn't be trusted."

The world felt awhirl. A lot of the odd tasks Harrow had me perform began to make sense. Still, I had a hard time picturing him as some kind of strange cross between a warrior monk and private detective, or a holy knight and undercover spy. "Why didn't he tell me any of this?"

Rusty looked at me from the corner of his eye. "He said that errands like his were best handled with discretion. Ones that touch on secularity. Ones that might, say, hint at a lack of vision."

Understanding slowly dawned. Nowadays foretellers abstained from making any predictions concerning state matters, after centuries of bloody strife between church and state over the issue. And while many believed the Church of Foresight still helped guide the people in terms of what was godly and what was not, not that many currently thought it could actually see the future. However, those that did served as the bedrock of the faith, and anything suggesting to them that foretellers lacked foresight might prove scandalous at best, and heretical at worst.

What the errandeers did was a potentially dangerous kind of secret. That was likely why Harrow didn't let me in on it. But maybe he was preparing to -- maybe all those errands he had me run were a way of seeing if I could handle it.

"And you helped Harrow with his work?" I asked.

Rusty scoffed. "Well, you know Harrow -- for a supposed handyman, he didn't actually know much about maintenance. But I work as a technician across the city and even on the planet's surface to keep everything running like clockwork. He came to me when he needed help with anything mechanical, and I could also help him get records from the city databases sometimes. There was a group of specialists that Harrow and the handful of errandeers he oversaw consulted for their work. We're the real heroes of this world, not that anybody notices or gives us our due."

"So what did he want to meet with you about?"

He shrugged. "I told the police I didn't know, but I think he was going to ask me for some confidential files. He said he wanted to meet me at The Sleeping Dog after he ate dinner at the temple. I was scared I would be next after I found out what happened to him."

"Do you know what records he was after?"

"I'm not sure. You know Harrow -- he was the kind of man to ask for a lot but never tell very much. But I heard they found a Deltan knife in him?"

I bowed my head.

"Yes." I sighed. "I think I'll have go to the Deltans for answers."

Rusty made the gesture to ward off evil and his face flashed through a gamut of emotions -- shock, what looked like pride, wariness.

"Do you think that's a good idea? I don't think it is."

I stood up to leave.

"Good idea or not, it's what I'm going to do."

Rusty rested a hand on my elbow.

"If I can't stop you, take care," he said. "And if you find out anything, let me know. He was my friend too."

Oddling

In my second year of running errands around Nightingale, Harrow gave me a strange assignment. First he dispatched me to an herbalist's shop tucked at the end of a narrow lane. Past the stained-glass flower-shaped lanterns on either side of its door were shelves of glass jars crowded with a rainbow of colors, a host of mysterious scents, and what looked like collections of random garbage -- dried and pickled flowers, roots, fruits, seeds, leaves, bark, nuts and mushrooms; powdered spices and herbs; and vials of elixirs, tinctures, oils, infusions, juices, ointments and perfumes.

Behind the counter, stacking cubes, bars and sticks of soap, incense and candles, was a tidy man with a white frock coat and a trim beard. I handed the herbalist the ticket Harrow gave me. He nodded and plucked a thin clear vial from next to the honey, beeswax and royal jelly.

Next, I had to tag a motorcycle outside a nightclub with some of the solution from the vial, and Harrow wanted no one to see me doing so. Harrow often had me follow him from a distance and then quizzed me about what I watched him do, absentmindedly smacking me with a bamboo switch every time I got a detail wrong. After a while, he wanted me to trail him without him spotting me, which proved much harder. I learned how to quickly slip behind cover and keep track of him using reflective surfaces to avoid his line of sight, but he saw me practically every day and so could readily identify me.

Then it occurred to me that all those months of makeup and costumes might actually prove useful. The raiment used in the religious plays was too conspicuous for this purpose, but rooting around secondhand clothes donated to the temple turned up some garments I thought would work, and indeed, the first few times I tried this, I evaded Harrow's eye for a little while. Tagging the motorcycle proved much easier -- after monitoring the movements of people outside the nightclub until I spotted a hole in their rhythms, I managed to nonchalantly dab some of the solution on the vehicle with nobody else left the wiser.

The following morning, Harrow sent me to an exotic animal store to rent a pinnarept, a strange lizard-like bird with teeth in its thin feathered snout, little claws on the joints of its wings, and a long plumed tail. Pinnarepts were one of the thousands of bizarre kinds of creatures seen nowhere else except the world Bestiary, along with giant long-necked, long-tailed reptiles bigger than any other animals ever known to walk on land, and monstrous scaly predators armed with teeth larger than a hand. Riding back with the cage on the handlebars of a temple bicycle was a challenge, made only slightly easier with the hood kept over its eyes to keep it from panicking.

After I got back to the temple, Harrow fed the pinnarept a few of the dried crickets the store owner gave me and scratched it between its eyes, making it coo.

"What did you want this oddling for?" I asked, still a little sulky from the little scratches and bites the creature inflicted on me on the trip over.

Harrow grunted.

"You have the vial?"

I passed it over. He unscrewed its top and gave it to me to sniff.

"What do you smell?"

"Nothing."

He nodded.

"Insect pheromones. Humans can't smell this. Many birds can't, either. But this beast can."

Harrow fished a device out of his jumpsuit pocket and handed it to me as he opened the cage and had the pinnarept step onto the long leather gauntlet he wore on his other arm.

"That gadget is linked to the telemetry transmitter around this creature's ankle."

He took the vial back, gave the pinnarept a good whiff from it, and then he threw his arm in the air to launch the creature into the sky.

"Follow the pinnarept to follow the motorcycle. Don't let anyone see you."

I rode around Nightingale on a temple bicycle for the next three days, following the pinnarept by eye when I could, using the tracker when I couldn't. Each day I found the motorcycle fairly quickly and tailed it, keeping a safe distance, and after some time had passed, I'd take off one disguise to uncover the next one I wore under it. As far as I could tell, the rider never suspected he was being tracked as he made his way around the city.

All the places I went to those three days were Deltan -- casinos, banks, restaurants, bars, hotels, mortuaries, groceries, barbers, tenements, and even a mansion. The mansion I recognized by reputation as belonging to Palmer, the rumored head of organized crime in Nightingale.

The night after I talked with Rusty, I stood near the nightclub where I first tagged that motorcycle, leaning against a lamppost whose light had gone out. I didn't hear whomever came behind me when they struck the back of my head with a blackjack and knocked me out.

Regular People

I woke up woozy in the dark. My hands were tied behind me to some kind of metal pole. When my eyes adjusted, I could see with the help of light coming from under the door that I was in what appeared to be a utility closet.

After panicking a bit, I strained against my bindings, but their plastic just bit into my wrists. I tried slamming against the pole, but it was too anchored to the wall and ceiling to budge, and I winced when the giant lump on the back of my head where I got hit made contact with the wall. I stretched out my legs to kick at the closet shelves, but couldn't reach them. Then I noticed the broom leaning against the opposite wall.

Regular people in my situation wouldn't be able to do much with a broom even if they could reach it with their feet. Clearly whoever tied me up was used to regular people, and not me.

I wear flip-flops all the time because my feet aren't normal. Conventional feet and legs are pretty useless in microgravity, so a lot of spacers are genetically modified to have feet more like our ape or monkey cousins. My feet aren't completely prehensile, but they are handlike enough to give me an edge in climbing, and in circumstances such as these.

Grabbing the broom with my feet, I used it to poke at the hitherto unreachable tool shelves. As quietly as I could, I knocked over an assortment of implements I couldn't quite identify in the dark. After what seemed like forever, I managed to drag a putty knife over to me, and used its sharp edges and corners to break my bindings.

Slowly turning the doorknob, I sighed with relief that whoever captured me was sloppy enough to not lock the closet, presumably because I was just some teenager whom they had already tied up. Putty knife in hand, I groggily snuck out into the hallway.

It looked as if I was in a mansion, sumptuously decorated with mahogany, walnut and teak furnishings that must have come at great expense from Pell. Creeping down the corridor, I noticed a bronze statue of the god Rynel, the Lord of All Directions, ensconced in a nook in the wall. He had six faces in addition to his six arms. The Deltan portrayal of the god.

Reaching a junction, I felt a breeze and saw the light of the late afternoon to my right. Slinking over to the exit, I stepped onto a veranda and gazed down over the railing. I had expected I was in a tenement somewhere in Goldentown.

The whole of Nightingale sprawled dizzyingly far below me. I was trapped in one of the jewel-like buildings known as the Baubles, the most expensive real estate in the city, which are suspended like chandelier ornaments from the top of the Hollow, resembling castles suspended in mid-air. Our closeness to the ceiling video screens made the virtual sky they displayed look strangely distorted.

Before I found out where I was, I had hoped to simply climb down a wall to make my escape, but there was no way that was happening here. I guessed my captors likely brought me up in an air taxi, and I doubted I could try to make my way into one of those cramped things without somebody noticing I was onboard.

I was completely out of my depth. The only chance I could think of for escape was to make my way to the top of the Bauble. There, I might smuggle myself into a rail car, or perhaps sneak onto the catwalks above the video screens I had heard maintenance workers used.

I tiptoed my way along the veranda trying to get a better idea of where I was when I stumbled onto the garden where Palmer was having a meal, surrounded by her heavily armed guards.

It’s Not Enough, Is It?

I froze, feeling quite stupid with the putty knife in my hand as the guards pivoted to train their submachine guns on me. I slowly let go of the tool and raised my hands.

Palmer gestured me over and resumed her meal, plucking shrimps from a large bowl, peeling them and discarding their shells into another bowl. She was dressed in a stylish black silk pantsuit as if she just came from a night on the town, which she might have -- the rumor was that she ran a nightclub, among other enterprises. She was green-eyed like most Deltans.

"Your name is Happenstance, right? Harrow's starcrossed protege. The one he had following us?"

I was surprised -- to find out that Palmer knew who I was, to hear that I was Harrow's protege, and to learn that she was aware I had followed them.

"You knew?"

Palmer shrugged.

"It was our idea. Harrow and mine. Practice, to see if you could trail them and if they could notice you trailing them."

She smirked. "We have sensors to detect tracking devices, and drones to spot other drones. We never thought to look out for a feathered reptile."

She shrugged, leaning back. "But we're trained to notice a tail. You were good; they didn't see you at all that time." She dipped a shrimp into a red and brown sauce with scallions and popped it into her mouth. "This time, not so much."

I sat in a chair her servants put in front of her table while a guard stood between me and her. She looked me over.

"You're the first starcrossed I've met who isn't Deltan; at least, the first that I know of," she said, eyeing me with mild curiosity. I wondered if she felt veiled resentment or resigned acceptance over how I could pass as not starcrossed. There were Deltans who tried passing, wearing contacts to hide green eyes; that didn't go well with other Deltans, or with those who weren't starcrossed who found out about such ruses. I didn't know how to respond; she didn't look concerned over whether I said anything or not.

She motioned to the bowls. "Shrimp? I'm not sure if you find them taboo or not. We don't. They're delicious." The invitation was cordial but her tone neutral.

"No, thank you."

A bit of silence followed as Palmer ate and I was too frightened to say anything. Once she finished, she soaked her hands in a bowl of lemon water and dried them on a towel a servant handed her. She then turned her attention to me, her face impassive.

"I don't think revenge is in the cards for you," she said.

I took a deep breath.

"I didn't come here for revenge. I don't think a Deltan killed Harrow."

"Oh?" Palmer said. "Interesting. Why do you say that?"

A number of sleepless nights' worth of thinking poured out from me.

"Three things. First, if the knife is invisible, why attack from behind?"

Palmer cocked an eyebrow, then shrugged.

"The knife is invisible. It doesn't make you invincible," she said. "If I had the choice of an opponent not seeing me coming versus not seeing my knife coming, I'd go for the former over the latter."

I nodded. "All right. Next, if Pellucid Knives are sacred and rare, why leave it behind at the scene of the crime, except to frame a Deltan?"

A mild look of annoyance flickered across Palmer's face. It occurred to me all of a sudden that it maybe wasn't the best idea to waste a crimelord's time.

"Maybe the murderer heard someone coming and fled in a panic. Is this all you've come with? A few weak suppositions?"

I gulped.

"Finally," I said. "In the Song of the Silver Moon, it's said the Pellucid Knife was used by the Blademaster of Eskers..."

Palmer grimaced and stood with a slow grace.

"Who attacked the Faceless King with the Strike Sinister, a left-handed stab. Yes, yes, myths, myths, myths," she said. "So what are you going to say? Harrow's killer was right-handed, and Deltans only use Pellucid Knives with their left hands?"

She stepped forward and flicked her right arm outward, her fingers stopping near my throat. I felt a pinprick on the side of my neck and saw a small drop of blood slide down the edge of an invisible blade.

"We use Pellucid Knives in either hand," she said, her voice casual.

I very cautiously tilted my head backward. I chose my next words with care.

"With respect, no, that's not what I had in mind. I wanted to point out that Pellucid Knives are customarily only given to Blademasters, correct? Those who can show a remarkable amount of control with a knife -- like you just did, ma'am."

Palmer nodded. She motioned to an underling for a towel to wipe her knife with. "And?"

"If that's true, why was the attack on Harrow so inept? I've butchered meat for the temple before. I know what a clumsy cut looks like. If you're attacking an old man caught from surprise from behind, why chip your knife repeatedly striking the spine and ribs?"

Palmer shrugged with a ghost of half a smile, tossing me the towel for my neck.

"Fair enough," she said, sliding her knife back into its wrist sheath. "So you didn't come seeking vengeance. Why did you look for us?"

I leaned forward in my chair.

"To ask for help to find Harrow's killer. And I thought since the Deltans were getting framed, you might want to help."

Palmer sat back down.

"What you say is true. I didn't order Harrow's death, and as far as I know, no Deltan was behind it. And yes, I did take issue with how my people were getting pinned for it. So we've looked into it."

I gripped the sides of the chair.

"Did you find anything?"

"More than the police bothered to. Not much more, though. Our bloodhounds found clothes used in the killing, the kind of disposable coveralls and gloves used in painting. An emptied wallet we presumed was Harrow's, too. Both were dropped in a barrel full of industrial-strength cleaning solution. No tracks from it that we could trace, and the solvent is easy to get commercially."

"How about the knife?"

"It's possible to buy Pellucid Knives sometimes, but the few instances we found were all handled online via anonymized purchases we couldn't trace."

I racked my brains for more.

"Camera footage?"

"Now, it would be illegal for anyone except the authorities to have access to the city's surveillance network. But, if we did, I would say we couldn't see anyone following Harrow. He was very hard to tail." I nodded -- even when I was disguised, I could follow Harrow for only a few blocks at most before he caught on.

I slumped in my chair.

"Is there any way to know who might have killed him?" I asked. "Any enemies he might have had?"

Palmer sighed. "Harrow was... difficult. He was good at what he did, but he made a lot of enemies. Some of them very powerful individuals and groups. Including ones within the law."

I got up and started pacing.

"There has to be some way to narrow down the list. Anyone who he upset recently? Anyone who's threatened his life?"

Palmer shook her head.

"There's a lot of money flowing in from other worlds now for Pell's laser technology -- to help drive lightjammers, but also for more obvious uses in combat. If anyone receiving any of that outworlder money felt Harrow threatened that flow, any of them could have hired a professional. It's too difficult to say whom."

I thought about Chase, about his fortune and his spite. He and his flunkies hadn't bothered me again after our last fight, but he did look at me from the corner of his eyes with venom every now and then. He looked at Harrow the same way too, knowing the old man had taught me how to fight. Chase had left Nightingale at the end of the summer before Harrow died, but he could have always hired a hitman to do the dirty work for him, just like he did with everything else in his life. A long-dead hatred flared up white-hot inside me.

I thought about telling Palmer about Chase. But when I opened my mouth, the words curdled in my throat because of how ridiculous I realized they would have sounded. The idea that a spoiled brat like Chase would have had Harrow killed just to get back at me was absurd. It was a shot in the dark that stank of desperation, of trying to find anyone to blame instead of facing the fact that Harrow had too many enemies to count, any of whom might have done it.

"There has to be something we can do."

Palmer rose and walked over to me.

"You know why the Deltans consult dice, yes?"

I nodded. "You see the gods as shapechangers. As having many faces."

"Each kind of die reflects one of the gods, and each roll reflects which face of that god we will see that day," Palmer said. "But there are faces of the gods that we may never see, facets of the universe that may always remain hidden from us. We may never know the truth. There may never be a way of knowing the truth."

The unexpected glimmer of pity that crossed Palmer's face as she spoke made me turn away as my eyes grew wet. I walked to the railing to get some air.

I looked up at the sky. Beyond the video tiles and the crust of the planet I could imagine seeing the bright unblinking stars and the worlds in orbit around them. An extraordinary universe filled with seemingly endless possibilities.

"We're just one world among many, right?" I said. "You ever wonder what life might have been like if we were born on the other side of the gates? If we could see in the dark? Or were giants? Or had chameleon skin?"

"Where we were not starcrossed? If we didn't have to deal with the hardships that we've had to face?" Palmer said, hearing the questions I hadn't asked out loud. "Other lives we could have lived? Other people we could have been?"

She joined me at the railing. "There may be worlds where anything that could have happened did happen," she said. "But that doesn't change what happened to me in my life." She didn't quite answer my question.

She glanced over at me. "Harrow didn't like dwelling on the past. It's a good example to follow," Palmer said, looking into the distance. "Among the Deltans, falling stars aren't ill omens, but chances to reflect on moments that are bright and too brief. Think well of Harrow. Then let go."

I slumped my shoulders and looked down at Nightingale.

"It's beautiful," I said, and I meant it, even with all its flaws, its divides, its blood-stained alleys. It was a city inside a fragile bubble of air buried within a barren chunk of rock hellishly close to a star, built in defiance of a universe that did its best to destroy us. Harrow had helped make me helplessly fond of it.

She rested her elbows on the railing, leaning against it.

"We get looked down on all our lives because of some cosmic accident or another," she said. "Living up here, I thought it was a chance to look down on them instead."

"It's not enough, is it?" I said.

"No. No, it's not."

The Pendulum of a Clock

When I found a spare night, I went to see Rusty, who was working on the surface of the planet. As I rode one of the service elevators upward, I felt myself lighten as I left the confines of the web of pseudogravity spun by Nightingale's kinesis generators. After I reached the top floor, I plugged the suitcase I brought with me into the locker room's appareller. It automatically unpacked the spacesuit inside, helped me don it and checked my suit's connections and seals. After the airlock cycled, I then stepped out into the void.

After stumbling and falling down a bit in slow-motion in low gravity, crunching down onto the regolith and rocks on the planet's surface, years of childhood experience came back to me. The roughly mug-shaped thruster I carried in my hand helped me quickly zip across the planet's surface. When I rested it either in front or behind of my center of mass, the direction in which its nozzle thrusted and the path in which it would push me were clearly marked on my in-helmet display.

I made my way to the tower where Rusty was, part of a laser array hundreds of kilometers wide on the planet's nightside. The lasers helped push the microscopically thin sails of distant lightjammers through space and deflect meteoroids and asteroids into safer orbits. It was a quiet shift, and I found myself alone with Rusty, who sat high up on the tower hunched over with a laser torch, the light of heated metal flickering intermittently in the dark. I pinged Rusty, who raised his head and waved hello.

"You move in a suit pretty well!" Rusty said.

I shrugged, not that Rusty could see it.

"Guess all those emergency drills and games rocketing around afterschool as a kid paid off," I said.

Rusty set down his torch and leaned on a girder.

"So what brings you up? Friendly visit, I hope?"

"You asked for an update if I learned anything about Harrow's murder."

"Oh?"

"I ended up meeting the Deltans."

Rusty clicked his tongue.

"You're lucky you're still alive! Harrow would have had your hide if he was still around to hear you do something that foolish."

"It was a bad idea. But talking with them left me sure of what I thought before I even went to meet them. The Deltans didn't do it."

Rusty snorted in disbelief.

"Criminals said they didn't do it. That's new."

"Why did you kill Harrow, Rusty?"

Rusty sat stunned in silence for a moment.

"That's nonsense," he spat out. "That's preposterous."

"Harrow used to come to you to get city records. I'm guessing you're where he got his copies of city surveillance footage," I said. "Harrow was killed in a blind spot in the camera network. You'd know where to ambush him where no one would see."

Rusty sputtered.

"Anyone could have followed Harrow."

"He was notoriously hard to trail, and no one was seen following him in camera footage. But if his killer arranged to meet him at a specific time and place, if his killer knew where he was coming from and when he left and even what path he usually took, his killer could lie in wait until right after he passed and attack him from behind. Maybe you even tracked him using the camera network until he reached the blind spot to know when he might come your way."

Rusty's voice took on a wheedling tone over my helmet's radio. "Look, I know you're grieving, but try and think straight. Harrow had a lot of enemies with deep pockets. I know you don't want to hear this, but Harrow's killer was probably some random assassin. Let's just forget all this nonsense and try and move on."

I shook my head. "I thought about whether a hitman killed Harrow, about whether outworld money," or Chase, I thought to myself, "paid to have a knife plunged into his back. But the attack was ultimately a clumsy one. If someone hired an assassin for Harrow, why get an inept one?"

"These are all tall accusations coming from a little boy," Rusty said. "You'd slander my name with the police with that garbage? Are you trying to get me fired?"

"No. No police. Not yet. Just you and me. I just wanted to ask you myself."

Rusty sighed. "Wait a moment." He punched in a few commands on his wrist computer. My heart sank as I noticed that my link to the surface communication network got cut off.

"Electrical surges," Rusty said. "They can wreak all kinds of havoc on electronics. Cameras. Radios."

"You killed Harrow."

"It was his fault," Rusty said, irritated. "We had a good relationship, but then he started looking into things that were none of his business."

"Into your business," I guessed.

"I don't get paid anything like I deserve for all the work I do around Nightingale, and my bosses keep promoting their useless buddies over me," Rusty whined. "I don't get paid what I'm worth, so I have to find some way to make a little extra on the side. It's just a little fiddling here, a little tampering there."

"A few communications blackouts every now and again," I said. "Recordings get corrupted. Just accidents."

"Yeah, nothing big," Rusty said. "And for that, Harrow would've..."

"Cars get in crashes," I continued. "Spaceships explode."

Rusty shut up.

"Spaceships explode," I said. "A lot of those were accidents. But when Harrow looked at some, he found a pattern in how laser arrays were getting used at the same time. It looked like they were undergoing diagnostics. In reality, they were pointed somewhere else. And the result would be just another starcrossed spaceship collision with debris."

"You can't prove any of that," Rusty said awkwardly.

"I bet Harrow could have," I said. "He wasn't the kind of man who dwelled on the past, but he had years of news reports in his room. He wasn't a religious man, but he had astronomical charts, too. And like you said, he barely knew anything about repair work, but he was looking at tons of maintenance data. He examined the astronomical charts to figure out where spaceships and laser arrays were and meteoroid swarms weren't. Maintenance data to figure out when the laser arrays were supposedly on and off. News reports to figure out who important targets might have been. I bet he was going to prove you destroyed those spaceships if he had just a little more time, and you knew it."

"There wasn't a lot of time. He was going to be onto me," Rusty said. "I just lucked into a brief window in which his errandeers were on a mission away from Nightingale. When his backup was gone."

"So instead of killing from afar like you usually do, you rushed it. You invited him to a drink, and you stabbed him in the back." His ribs and spine hit hard enough to chip the knife.

"Look, it wasn't personal," Rusty said. "I feel terrible about it, just terrible. But it was either him or me. You understand. He would have understood. I didn't have any choice. It was his fault, really."

"Why did you kill my parents?" I finally shouted.

"...Ah, so that's what this is about," Rusty said. "That's why Harrow was digging around in the past, looking up some accident that happened years ago. He was doing it for you. It was you."

"Why?" I said, my voice hoarse, my suspicions confirmed.

"Look, I don't really remember much about it, but they weren't the targets. They were just unlucky. Collateral damage."

I was shaking -- I wasn't sure if it was with fear or rage. "A hundred dead? You killed a hundred people as collateral damage? Parents? Children?"

"Look, the job was to make it look like an accident, so I made it look like an accident," Rusty said defensively. "If I didn't kill those bystanders, whoever else would have gotten the job would have. It's just business."

Rusty actually laughed. "I've been keeping an eye on Harrow's errandeers after I killed him, terrified they might catch on. But they're all looking at his major longstanding enemies. Who would have thought I'd have to worry about the runt of the litter?"

Then he snarled, angry. "Gods, I try and be a hero, to make the city a better place everyday, and no one cares, but when Harrow tries to be a hero, he gets this worshipper following him around," he ranted. "It's just so pathetic. And manipulative. The temple adopts strays because it knows they'll be so grateful for even the hint of kindness that they'll make perfect new slaves, like mongrels begging for scraps at their masters' tables. A sad old man and his sad little boy."

Rusty stood up off the girder, hefted his laser torch, and began making his way down the tower toward me. "But I have work I have to get back to. It's just business that I'll have to kill you too, Hap."

When I first stumbled and fell on my way to see Rusty, I picked up a few pebbles off the ground. During my talk with Rusty, I had slowly overpressurized my handheld thruster. Pointing its nozzle at Rusty's face, I placed a stone over the nozzle and fired the thruster. It was a game I played with other kids called nozzlegunning, although we only pointed at inanimate targets, never each other.

The force of the thrust slammed me down onto ground, while the rock streaked up at Rusty, cracking his spacesuit's faceplate and knocking him back. Clawing at his head, Rusty tumbled off the tower, falling slowly in the weak gravity until his tether braked his descent. Rusty swung back and forth for a while like the pendulum of a clock, even after he stopped struggling.

It’s Time To Face What is to Be

I went back to the closest airlock to call the police from an emergency call box. After the police arrived on the surface, they cordoned off the area, sent rovers to scan the scene, and took me aside to get a brief statement from me. When they found out what little in the way of telecommunications and video surveillance there had been disrupted, they asked me pointedly what happened. When I suggested electrical surges as Rusty had said, they failed to find that answer satisfactory and took me in cuffs to back to Nightingale.

When detectives began interrogating me at the station, I suggested they should call the High Foreteller. That made them yell at me for a bit until they realized I wasn't going to say anything more. After a few hours, I guess they finally decided to make the call.

She clearly didn't look happy when she arrived, but after she asked what they knew and found out what little they had on me, she used her religious status as leverage, asking for privacy. They left us alone together in a tiny cell.

I sat, and she stayed quiet as I told her everything about what happened. How I listened in on her and Bellows. What I found when I was in Harrow's room. How I talked with Rusty. How I met with Palmer. How I figured out Rusty was the killer. What took place when I went to see Rusty.

This was the first time I ever spoke with the High Foreteller. I don't think she had ever really even looked at me until then. Her face stayed completely neutral during nearly everything I said, wavering only slightly when I told her the truth about what happened to Harrow.

After my confession, Vervaine spent a fair amount of time silent, thinking. She then asked, "What did you think was going to happen?"

I struggled to answer.

"I don't know what I was thinking beforehand."

Hearing the doubt in my voice, she locked eyes on me until I averted my gaze.

"After it was over, I thought I should feel good," I said, after a while. "But it didn't make me feel good. Or bad. Or much of anything." It didn't bring back the dead.

My eyes bore into the ground.

"And the fact that I feel nothing about it -- does that make me no better than him? What might I have done differently? When I went there, it seemed like anything could have happened, but looking back now, it seems like my future could have only unwound the way that it did. Like an arrow from a bow."

She contemplated what I said.

"Nature tells us that after cause follows effect, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We depend on such truths all throughout life, making sense of what happened before to predict what lies next," she said. "We come to believe that moral physics should exist as well. After crime should follow punishment; after injustice, justice. Perhaps divine retribution in this life or divine judgment in the next. A sense of fate."

I thought I knew where she was going. I couldn't stand it.

"Divination is just seeing pictures in the clouds," I said. "People seeing what they want to see." Then I remembered whom I was talking to and I shut up.

I didn't expect her to agree with me.

"Moral physics does seem a fiction, based on what life shows us," she said. "Good people often suffer, and bad people often thrive. The innocent get punished, while the guilty go free."

She brought her face to mine.

"Even if justice is just a story, it's one we can try and make real. A dream of a better future," she said. "At times the only way to predict the future sometimes is to shape it yourself."

It wasn't enough.

"Stories can be nonsense. Some of it dangerous nonsense. Some of it unacceptable nonsense," I said. "An accident of fate can damn a child for no reason at all other than some saying it is so. People can end up getting blamed for whatever happened to them even if they had nothing to do with it, as if they deserved it."

Vervaine looked away. For a moment, it seemed as though she looked guilty, or ashamed.

"It can prove unbelievably hard getting something that passes for justice in an unjust world," she said.

She folded her hands together. "It's not the time now to think about everything that might have been," she said, her voice cool. "It's time to face what is to be."

I found my heart sinking unexpectedly, and then coming to peace with its weight. Killers get what they deserve. Even killers of killers.

"So what's going to happen to me?"

"You?" She considered me for a moment. "Nothing."

"What?"

She studied my eyes.

"He got struck out in the open on the surface of the planet," she said. "A stray meteoroid, perhaps."

I looked at her for a long while. "Oh."

"By the will of the gods," she said.

I bowed my head. "By the will of the gods," I said.

© 2021 by Charles Q. Choi