Chapter 2: Hiding in Plain Sight

... Continues the Book of Valten:

After that, Val was debriefed not in isolation tanks but in large conference centers and amphitheaters. There were several high-profile suicides and disappearances among Old Continent governments.

His interrogators were officials with diverging and converging interests, not all of them Volods, and so locations changed for each occasion. Val’s lodgings changed, too. His protection agents possessed an almost maddening anticipation of calamity. His transfers were attended by large-scale drama, in which he was dressed tactically and in armor. In spite of the politics and cost, Val was not a public item, but rather a very secret one. He was referred to by a code that gave away nothing of his ancestry to those with no need to know. Upon introduction, the positioned and titled men summoned to question him were often taken aback by his youth.

The effort to seize Petronille was a debacle. Libing described the tragedy. The access code on the armories, cracked by a systems technician with a polyflex hand-held, failed to deactivate anti-personnel thermal bombs because the detonations had been reset to respond to motion. Likewise the castle proper. Essentially, the property went up in a series of explosions that melted whatever evidence remained and wiped out seventy-seven federal tactical agents and nineteen civilian advisors.

Libing performed a mental readjustment. Burgolt Manegold could have incinerated Petronille without killing agents. Instead, the bastard planted motion sensors deep within key locations, ensuring maximum casualties.

Val had anticipated his patriarch’s maneuver.

You grew up with this man, Libing thought. Horror mingled with an appropriate portion of gratitude. Val’s defection had pissed off the old man.

The Manegold business had been dealt a blow.

In the end, for it must end, Val was two years older, taciturn, a quiet, cooperative inhabitant of lonely and secret places, ready for the final cleansing. It was Libing who said that Val was trying, in his way, to get clean. An old policeman’s term: get clean, get right. Val understood. The last step was a new identity, freedom. Or death.

The Federal Authority and its clients knew that one day Val would become a dry well. There were meetings to find an appropriate course. The decision fell to the Prime Minister, though not, of course, officially. But whatever she wanted the Superintendent of the Federal Authority would do.

She had Libing to her hunting lodge in Kodopovec. She dismissed her aides. She settled Libing on a sun deck overlooking a lake upon which a dark rain fell.

She was nearly ancient, physically fragile but well coifed, venerable. When Libing told Val about the meeting, he said nothing of the Prime Minister; he just thought about her. His heart pounded then as it did in the Prime Minister’s presence. There was a faint odor that day on the sun deck of decaying flesh and wet soil. When, later, Libing replayed the meeting in Val’s private chamber, Val said, “I don’t want to be cremated, I want to be buried.” Libing knew why Val said that, the association, and he was used to it, there was no alarm. But he had not thought of death when he gazed nervously on the back of the Prime Minister’s wrinkled neck. He was thinking of his service to Volodya, and to this old woman, with a passion that dismayed him. His love for Val notwithstanding (for he loved Val on a number of levels for a several reasons), he would do and say only what was best for his country.

The Prime Minister crossed twig-like legs and said, “Tell me about him, tell me about this gypsy.”

The old bias. Every Volod knew by rote the grievance of the Volker invasion, though it had been accomplished and undone seven hundred years ago. The Volker who stayed had married into the Volod race. That was why they stayed. There were no pure Volker in Volodya after the pullout. The middle and lower class mixed-blood families had been absorbed so thoroughly their Volker ancestry could be (and was) suppressed. In the Goraneg, the mixed-blood families retained the identity of the aristocracy that had given them wealth and status. They were not overrun because they had assimilated Volod culture. They had gone native. Only in the last hundred years had the rich Goraneg families faced the lacerating vagaries of prejudice. The turn in Volod politics seemed, to Libing, economically motivated. It was of no particular interest to the uplanders unless they wanted to hold public office, attend a state-run university, or buy a house in Bhavaja. Gypsies, the Volods called the uplanders. There were other names.

Libing said, “Excellency, he knows what he was taught, and what he is taught he rejects in favor of the true order of things. When given a choice of one or the other, he is drawn to truth. He is very young and unfamiliar with compromise. One suspects he would not have survived much longer if an incident had not forced him to flee.”

The Prime Minister, when he had been silent a while, blinked and stroked her chin. “I am afraid you have lost me.”

Libing assumed, “Yes, it’s difficult to render an opinion of John without discussing his skill as a mindwalker. Forgive me, Excellency, but if we terminate him, let it be for those things he may have learned sharing a chamber with agents and officials in government. He is not one of them. He’s only a Manegold in name.”

“What if they gave him to us, Burgolt Manegold and his brood, what if they gave us this mindwalker to pass through our world on his way back to theirs, taking with him our secrets?”

“He will have to contact them.”

“Can’t he?”

“No, Excellency, not while he is in custody.”

“Has he shown eagerness to be out of custody?”

“No.”

“Do we have any idea, any idea whatsoever, where Burgolt Manegold might be?”

“We can be fairly sure Burgolt Manegold is not aboard a Holland-Tchey orbit ship and so, yes, Excellency, we can say we believe he is on the planet. We cannot, today, be more specific.”

“What are our options?”

“If we release John with a new identity, we can place positive control on his communications solution. We can monitor his activity. We will require check-ins. What we cannot do is prevent him from acquiring an illicit communications tool, although we will eventually detect possession and he can only use it once. A monumental expense will be incurred if we capsulize every person with whom he makes contact--”

She waved this away. In a discussion about national security, cost was not a concern.

Libing said, “And we cannot keep him alive.”

She turned her gray eyes his way.

Libing elaborated. “If the Manegolds learn his identity, they will have penetrated our only effective means of securing John’s life. While we conduct surveillance we will never be close enough. We will never be fast enough.”

The Prime Minister straightened her legs and stood. “Thank you, Agent Libing.”

Val asked Libing, later, why it was necessary to paint such a picture for the Prime Minister, an image of John vulnerable, reliant.

“It’s the truth.”

Following the Superintendent’s decision, Libing brought Val documents that assigned a birthday, educational history, and thumbprint to one Stephen Kessler, nineteen years old. The rules of release were explained and reviewed. Libing was being relocated. The agent could not follow Val, for his association with the project would compromise Val’s new identity. If all went well and the gods were kind, they would not meet again, Libing said. (In most of the lower lands, Volods were Reformist atheists. Through the years Val had spoken confidently and convincingly of the gods. Val’s precepts had rubbed off on the agent.) Libing said an account would be activated with some funds. Eventually, the government would cease to contribute to the account. Val must prepare for this, Libing warned. Val promised to be wise, to stay well.

“You don’t look excited but you don’t look scared, either,” Libing said. “Are you ready to go or not?”

“A child looks away to see what is out there, wondering how long until he is ready to run without a hand behind or above to help. A father looks away knowing that one day when he looks back the child will be gone. If I am not looking especially hard at the door, it is only so you will see my face and know I am grateful.”

Libing embraced him.

Released in Bhavaja, Volodya’s principal city, Val leased a flat near the Harespar University and told the building manager he was taking his entries the next day.

His forged school records had already been accepted by the private institution but he lacked a board score from an accredited secondary school. The FA was unwilling to fake one, since board scores were sacrosanct internationally and ultimately worth a fortune. This suited Val, for the FA had no idea how he would score if he took the test. The entries, offered in winter to applicants with adequate secondary education and enough money, were just as good. The FA paid his entries fee, and Val, remembering the throw a question here and there, scored higher than any Harespar applicant in the institution’s history. He won the coveted First Scholarship, full tuition, books, and fees, and enrolled as a mathematics major.

He did well at Harespar. He avoided the vertigo suffered on the outskirts of Ulka because he was working with a much stronger mental shield. Even when he limited his senses, he was all right. His experience with the FA had taught him the uses of interaction. He fit in. The accent of the uplands was gone. He knew how to dress. His hair was clipped at the nape of his neck. He smelled usually of soap but nothing else. His coursework was impeccable, his grasp of theory advanced, and his scores flawless. He stayed out of study groups, a decision he later regretted, and only joined committees when required by his scholarship. After devising an encryption program for one of his professors, he enrolled in a campus computer workshop. The workshop provided a certificate in computer programming. The certificate allowed him to intern off-campus in the summer. He found that he liked the machines better after spending time away from Petronille and stuck with it. He wrote anti-virus software programs. The company profited quite a bit, though Val never saw the money.

He kept up the habit of exercise but did not participate in sports. He missed Libing. He missed the warmth of that liaison, their shared purpose. Younger minds were erratic, relationships unstable. Most of the time, Val was lonely.

He earned his undergraduate degree in two and a half years. Began turning down, per FA directive, offers outside Volodya to pursue post-graduate work tuition-free. He was charmed by a profitable think-tank in the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa, widely considered the most revered post-graduate program in mathematics and mathematical theory in the world. He was offered positions in Aiglentina, Brenna, and Prokopia contingent upon completing, also free of charge, post-graduate degrees in their institutions. His Harespar professors assured him he had grown beyond them. They made recommendations and wrote letters and pressed, wrote letters and pressed, until Val left the Harespar. He left, too, the suburb of Harespreen, which had been his home while he attended the university.

He leased a flat downtown in the remnants of a neighborhood near the waterfront. Industry had driven away those who could afford to leave. Those who remained were wearied, stubborn, or both. Val’s special account, rarely touched while he attended school, was by no means low but he trusted Libing’s advice. He meant to get a job. He applied at a placement agency.

To his surprise he was inundated with calls from information services and similar disciplines. He withdrew his name from the placement agency, turning to GateKeeper Global for postings. He did not want to be in demand. He was wary of attention and omitted, therefore, the degree and programming license from his resume. His options dwindled to short order cook, delivery driver, and cleaner.

He decided to do all three, at least for a little while. He thought about the horses of Petronille, and driving the big ATTs. Certainly, he could drive a business economy rig or spoon soup into disposable containers. He was about twenty-two, on his way to an interview-- he supposed the job entailed emptying wastebaskets and scrubbing toilets. His mind was fuzzy under the mental shield, the way it usually operated. A woman strolled from a rotating glass door, strolled right in front of him, trailing a scent so remarkably similar to roses that he did not immediately remember where he was. Val angled his head to look after her, let down the shield around his faculties the way an animal in the wild, sensing something interesting, threw wide its senses. In the ensuing bombardment (he was, after all, on a busy city street), he lost her. The bombardment was like facing a glaring light when one’s eyes had adjusted to darkness. The attendant energy of people and machinery, diaphanous and glassy or ashen and billowy, fluttered and surged together, burning behind his eyes. He winced and recoiled. The deluge was in its way quite painful. He supposed the woman he had seen had been blond but he was not sure. He muted the noise with its sea-boom beating inside his ears, and isolated a single note of the woman’s inner voice, his memory of it, before all others voices attacked. He tasted it now, this note of hers. She was lonely, whoever she was, yet not merely lonely. Her life compressed loneliness, dressed it up, and served it like the main course of a banquet. There was art in it, complexity, and there was sadness. The note, he felt, was his song. She had played his song.

He turned to the door she had come through and went inside. He stood on worn but glossy tiles and looked across a large lobby to a logo that announced the Bhavaja International Children’s Health Center. He turned to an information kiosk that protected a bank of elevators, a reception area, and a small café. A woman in a lavender silk jacket asked, after looking twice at him, if she could help.

“Do you have jobs here?” Val asked.

The woman had been smiling. She was paid to. Presently, her expression aligned with her smile, a somewhat pleasant effect, and she directed Val to the human resource floor.

Val met a good-natured recruiter at the elevator. He completed an application, and, at the last moment, included his degree. The recruiter matched him in a number of positions Val thought were suffocating and unchallenging. She had, too, a position as an information specialist to Dr. Leuonic Sandor. The recruiter confided that Dr. Sandor, who oversaw the research divisions, had lost three information specialists in three seasons. She recommended the other positions only, she added, because Val seemed nice.

Val chose Dr. Sandor. The doctor dealt exclusively with terminal illness. The hospital served children. Val’s official workstation was an office outside the doctor’s suite but since the doctor spent most of his time in the fifth floor laboratories and on the ninth and tenth floor patient wards, Val worked in those areas as well. Val’s life took shape. He cloaked himself in purpose, which was not to say he had none while he worked with Caspar Libing. That mission had been about peeling away layers, and, to some extent, deconstruction. The hospital was about dancing with the gods, intimacy with life at a depth Val only imagined, and the serene and perfect message, This is why you were born.

Five years later, when he knew he was going to die, he wept. If his life had ended in Ulka, he would not have mourned deeply. Life came, and went, he believed then. Appetite, and the petty things others did to satisfy themselves, those things Val knew. Ignorance, that too. Life was surrender, the letting go to one thing or another, and to death. But long before he was sentenced to die, he learned that he was wrong. In Bhavaja, Val touched the light that ran through everything. He learned to give life.

One day, Val went to the bedside of a patient moments before visited by Dr. Sandor. Val was only waiting to catch Dr. Sandor at the end of rounds, as they had agreed this worked better than Dr. Sandor stopping his work to travel to the research offices. Sometimes, the doctor wished to have his teaching rounds recorded, stored. Val facilitated this. Dr. Sandor’s research assistants, colleagues, and residents were a few steps ahead. Val, always silent, moved to the child’s bed. The boy, reduced by disease and experimental therapies, blinked at him above a breathing tube. The boy appeared to be struggling, though the machines with their beeping and printouts did not agree. Val touched the boy’s little hand. Easy, easy, he thought. Breathe slower, slower. You’re all right.

The boy tilted his tiny skull and batted his bruised eyes as though in acknowledgment.

Val looked at the boy’s nameplate.

The next day he saw in Dr. Sandor’s notes the boy’s condition had improved. Respiratory assistance was discontinued. Val went upstairs, and then waited while the boy’s parents read stories. Finally, the parents went away for lunch and Val approached the child.

The boy’s eyes lit up. “Are you real?” he rasped. The boy could not have been more than eight or nine.

“I am very real,” Val said.

“Your skin lights up. Do it again.”

Perplexed, Val queried the boy’s mind. With his shield down, he saw the boy’s inner life lying close above the boy’s fragile shell, blurred and opaque. Val probed. And he found himself, or the memory of himself, as he had seemed to the boy when he transferred his energy through the boy’s skin. There had been a glimmer. Perhaps it was an effect of his abilities on the boy’s senses, like overload.

Val said, “I’m glad to,” and passed his fingertips over the boy’s arm. He pushed outward with his own inner life, observing distractedly the crystalline tendrils of his power moving through the boy. “Did you see it that time?”

“Oh wow,” the boy said.

Val said, “My pleasure.”

“You have a nosebleed.”

“Do I?” Val tapped his upper lip. A little blood had spilled from his nose. “So I do. It’s all right.” He nearly added, “We should probably not talk about this,” but he would never ask a child to keep a secret. Would hospital administration believe the fantastic tale of a child on medication?

No one did, ever.

He never counted the children because he did not want to claim them like ticks on a scorecard. Besides, he was skewing Dr. Sandor’s research, rendering the doctor’s data useless, and he could not fix that or stop what he was doing. The children he touched lived. It became an effort not to choose, but to allow himself to be chosen. He did not quite understand this, but he was confident he never looked at a child and turned away. He would bleed when he gave the boys and girls his power. When he tried to help two in the same day, and when he served them one day after another he had to leave the wards for a while. Also, he slept a little every night after he healed a child, two or three hours, and that needed getting used to. Occasionally, leaving a child’s bedside, he could walk around with his mental shield down and not sense anything. This scared him, even after several years, although he learned to expect it. Like the stit he used to drive directly into his veins, the ability to give life overwhelmed.

And love, love too proved electrifying.

He found Maria as he found the children, quite by accident and nearly at the same time. Her lotion and perfume were part of a custom line of scents called Zephyra, prepared exclusively for her by a spa in Karsbrasova Square. He asked once, casually, how much the custom treatment cost. Maria told him. The amount violated judgment. In truth, he could see his mother easily commissioning the services of such a place if she had wanted to. Like Maria, he had grown up wealthy.

It was Maria he saw leaving the hospital the day he found his third home. She was thirty-four, a bit of a survivor. In her short life she had tried on numerous lifestyles, relationships, and ideologies. Which was not to say she was flighty. On the contrary. Her will was very strong, and in spite of evidence to the contrary she was sturdy and courageous.

Annually, Dr. Sandor and staff were summoned to the administrative floor lugging volumes of printed data for the health inspector. These sessions consumed an hour, perhaps a bit more, but demanded a season of meticulous preparation. Val had introduced trending tools that streamlined the presentation. Although he was very new, Dr. Sandor insisted Val call up the charts and graphs if necessary and explain to the inspector how the data was prepared. Previously, the presentation consisted purely of text, which frustrated the inspector and lengthened the interview.

The conference room in which this difficult meeting took place was gorgeous with wood paneling and a cream carpet. An executive secretary rolled in café and tea. There were smiles all around, the staff anxious to please the inspector, who possessed the power to close most, if not all, of Dr. Sandor’s research.

Val noticed right away Maria’s perfume. She sat near the head of the conference table in a pants suit, wearing very little cosmetics, and small white earrings. A black blouse set off her pale complexion and fine, blond hair. The blouse was buttoned up tightly around the fragile stalk of her neck, almost too tightly, as though she wished to convey rigidity, invulnerability. She conversed with the quality and assurance people, or they spoke around her and every now and again she agreed with something. Val sensed she had already imposed her iron logic on the group. From her perspective, there was no need for talk. Her identification card said she was a hospital employee in the QA department. This explained why he had yet to meet her. Oddly enough, she worked on the same floor, but at the opposite end in a wing of sterile offices Dr. Sandor’s people had labeled the land of the enemy.

Maria rarely left her office.

Val stared. He was new to instant attraction and did not quite know what to do with himself. Maria told him, later, that his eyes had shifted to her and widened. She thought something awkward was occurring near her and turned away to see what it was. When her gaze returned to Val, she was unsettled. Clearly, the man was staring at her. At work this never happened. She revised her statement, admitting it never happened, period. She connected with men of course, but not this way. All sorts of things went through her mind.

Val replied, “I know.”

She was not conventionally pretty and reminded Val of no one he had ever seen before. Her eyes opened into a quiet but shifting mind and an inner life that contended with a myriad of issues. She came from the clan that owned the communications titan Northwestern Technologies. The Zakarij house had splintered but no ties were broken. Maria was independent but she lived on an endowment, not her salary working as a department analyst. Her place, for which she paid outright, was a penthouse in Temming Gardens. It was furnished sparely, and with a sense of incompleteness. She owned a luxury motor car but rarely used it. Her boyfriends tended to be younger men attracted to wealth and independence. She never really seemed to get excited. Val suspected that younger men perceived her as a challenge. Even without special faculties, it was possible to sense her aloneness. Val wanted to fill somehow the uninhabited space.

At the meeting’s conclusion, she stood up and gave him a full look. “Nice work, Mr. Kessler. Dr. Sandor is notoriously awkward with information systems. You have done his office and this hospital a great service. Where did you study?”

He told her.

“That’s impressive.” She thought, He is impressive. “With a mind trained at Harespar, what are your intentions?” She thought, You could be anything you wanted to be.

Dr. Sandor had gone. The inspector had been hustled away to a gourmet lunch with hospital executives. The QA people were also leaving. There was nothing interesting in Maria interrogating Dr. Sandor’s new hire. A few felt pity but no desire to rescue Val. One man, as he departed, said, wryly, “Good luck.”

“I have poor social skills,” Val said, when they were alone. “And I’m not sure I like being around people.”

Maria responded to this by flexing her intuition and gently folding her arms over her chest. He was on the verge of overwhelming her. “Recognition of limitations does not mean doors are permanently closed. For example, here you are.”

“They aren’t limitations,” he said. “They are my preferences.”

She thought, You’re like me but look at me. You don’t want to end up like me.

“Loneliness is an affliction,” she said, “not a life goal, and it’s generally”-- here she began very slowly to smile --“corrected by behavior modification medication, or sex.” At this, she grinned, which he would learn she did not often do. As he stayed with her thoughts, she rode his, though not in the same manner. She was interested. He had only to cross the line.

“It’s awkward here. Isn’t there a better place?”

“A better place for what?” Maria exclaimed.

“To talk.”

“Oh.”

He said, “I love the way you smell.”

It was summer. The evening shadows found them on her king-sized bed, as Maria took Val inside her. He was a virgin, which he would later confess. The sex, however, was not the sex of a beginner. She felt nothing unusual at first. He was constructed well (wide-shouldered, athletic, tall) to capture the feminine imagination and there was plenty to hold onto. Generally, if she knew her partner only a little, she let her mind wander. She only returned if he seemed to go too fast. Otherwise, the appeal and comfort of straight sex was like fine wine and full of its own flavor. After a while she noticed the electrical pulses along her skin and in her bones, the intensity of them. She fixed her eyes on the face of the man above her. His eyes were closed, his skin was damp and shiny. His expression was serene, yet almost immediately (under her scrutiny) his features tightened. Tension seized her belly, the result of deep and well-timed motion. She flattened her spine and licked her lips. He repeated the stroke, but did not go as deep. If he had, she would have climaxed and she knew it. But she did not want to climax. Her knees went up, gripping, sliding. She stared now, not believing what her senses were telling her. She wished for his mouth to brush hers. He did so, his tongue flicking inside exactly as she liked it. She wished for him to take her over to the other side before too much thinking spoiled the sex. He deepened his strokes, and that was when he left her, which was as it should be. After she orgasmed, he took care of himself, holding on, holding on, and then slipped to her side.

He never needed her to describe what she experienced. He experienced it with her.

She grasped his hand, held it up, and drew it across her tummy. “You could do that for a living, my friend, and retire in a year.”

Nothing he needed to hear, for he had heard it, when his inner life merged with hers and his mind went completely, blissfully white, yet it pleased him to know her words and her mind were in sync.

She got up to make drinks and wash up, and then they made love, and finally he let her sleep.

Every day after work for the first month he walked with her the five city blocks to the Gardens. They had sex and he rode the El trains to his flat by the waterfront. After a month, he went from work to his flat directly, showered and changed, and then called to see if Maria wanted him. Sometimes she said, Let’s talk. They did not talk much at her penthouse. They could not keep their bodies apart. Through the video they talked, using the hands-free. He watched her on the screen as she prepared salad, fish, a wine sauce. They talked about the way the world sometimes cycled from all right to awful. They talked about wormholes, why a superpower like the UKSB, the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa, and a matchbook country like Volodya were the only nations in the world that televised executions. They spoke of mathematical theory, the Holland-Tchey aliens and what the humanoid species might be doing in their high orbit spacecraft drifting silently through the night sky.

“They aren’t drifting, we are.” This was Maria’s correction, and Val laughed.

He had anticipated it. They constructed stories and, less frequently, poems.

The calls would last the evening. Sometimes he became aroused. Their conversations included remedy, which pleased them both and sharpened his hunger. Never would three days pass without a meeting. She made him warm in his skin, breathless sometimes, and when he thought of her he could not always think properly of anything else.

When he was with her, he took her to bed, and only when he knew he could not make love with her anymore did he leave. She liked to make them light meals. He picked at these dishes, having little need for food.

Her dreams drifted to him and they were like little hugs and kisses, the dessert of sex. He stayed at home when the long sleep was due. This she never learned. By the end of their time together, he could say that he kept from her nothing else.

She wanted so little, it was true. There was damage to the psyche, shadows and perhaps the hint of mental disorder. Once in a while, she was taken by morose thoughts, a swell of them. Bundled up in these periods were feelings of helplessness, and the desire to die. She supposed he would leave her one day, and considered ending her life shortly thereafter. He was only aware of these thoughts through his abilities. Except in general terms and as it related to others, they did not discuss suicide. In this matter, he was an inept guide. Certainly, he understood perfectly that he was what she wanted. If she had longed for more, if she had wanted him to love her in a different way, he would have given as she asked. When he asked himself if he wanted her with him in the future, he answered that he wanted what Maria wanted, and when her mind changed he would know it. There would be no distress, no hinting, no frustration. Her needs were open to him. In turn, he spoke openly when queried. Meant what he said. Knew that he was understood and appreciated. Sometimes with her private voice Maria wondered why a man of his years and assets chose a woman like her. He answered with his body. It pleased her, his response. It was good. He was happy, as he conveyed to Maria’s aunt, Western Technologies television journalist Rada Bronya.

Rada Bronya was something of a TV celebrity, more like a sister than an aunt really, and quite close to Maria in age. She phoned after Maria begged off a family celebration during the Independence holiday. It was autumn. Maria had gone backpacking with Val. The family was aggrieved.

Maria agreed to have her aunt for dinner. Rada, the youngest of four siblings, was married to a Prokopian nationalist novelist whose pleasant works of fiction sold globally. Their country home in Kodopovec was rather comfortable, but there were no children in it. Rada was infertile. Rada slept several days a hand in a flat in Uptown Bhavaja near her Western Technologies studio. She came alone to Maria’s penthouse.

Val had purchased a suit and had it tailored for the evening. Maria stipulated black, her favorite color. He rather liked the suit.

After waiting at the door for Rada’s elevator, Val put on his warmest smile and clasped the journalist’s little hand. Maria was in the back of the penthouse and missed her aunt’s arrival. Rada, a thin, hard-looking forty-something with a decisive face and piercing eyes, was taken aback by Val’s looks. She maintained a stoic façade, although she had dressed softly in a sleek top with a scooped neck and flowing slacks. Her earrings were diamonds with gold settings.

At his side, Rada surrendered her dinner gift, a rare white wine import, saying, “Kessler, Kessler. My, what a difficult time you must have had coming up, what with the terrible nature of children these days. Did they poke at you for your name?”

“Stephen Kessler’s plight is amusing only to adults,” Val answered, evenly.

He and Rada had just strolled into the sitting room with its wide, unimpeded view of Uptown Bhavaja. When it rained the distant lights were like baubles, emerald, ruby, and amber, twinkling and flowing against the velvet night. Rada stopped near the floor-to-ceiling window to scrutinize Val. He had responded at just the right pitch, yet he had intended for her to know that he found her question a bit cruel.

Maria entered the room making an “ah” sound, her arms wide. The women greeted with warmth.

“We’ll be ready in a short moment,” Maria announced, pulling apart. “Will you have a drink, Aunt Rada?”

Rada said she would. “What’s this about you and your young man hiking to the old cathedral?”

Maria stood at the bar, busy with glasses, the ice bowl, and decanter. “There is an old church of Our Lady in Seskia. Val is an Amarite. I’d never seen it and it’s not like you can drive there, you know. He took me to see the ruins, the ones dedicated to Affaraon. Historically, we Volods must have prayed to her, I don’t know, about a thousand years ago.”

“Of course we did but that’s done now.” Rada tilted her head apologetically. “Of course, I mean that figuratively. You couldn’t find an Amarite temple in southern Volodya today, I’m sure.”

“You can,” Val said, gesturing Rada to a chair. “I am her temple. I carry her temple inside, so it’s considered redundant these days to build more. The lives of her subjects celebrate the god every day.”

Rada looked at him curiously.

Maria said, over her shoulder, “He has the simplest concepts, Aunt Rada. You can talk to him anytime about religion, you won’t find him dull at all. Tell her the prayer, Stephen. Aunt Rada’s a journalist and her husband writes volumes of love stories. She adores his work, don’t you, Aunt Rada? Stephen, say it for her. It’s a beautiful prayer.”

Val said, “The prayer is ‘Through your grace, my Lady of the Blessed Waters, receive into the light an imperfect traveler. The end is only a beginning. By your grace all is made new. Amen.’ ” He added, softly, “It is a prayer for passing.”

“Who owns the copyright?” A faint and gentle chuckle. “Maria’s right, it’s adorable.” After she settled into an armchair, she opted to say more. “It’s quite powerful, actually. You Amarites tend to be passionate, as I remember, although I have never met a young one. Usually one turns from atheism later in life.”

Maria carried over a tray. “I haven’t converted, Auntie. Stephen’s goddess frowns on doing away with oneself and I simply cannot understand why a god should have an opinion about it one way or the other.”

Rada laughed but Val felt, not from Maria but within himself, a spike of pain. How could she talk this way?

He turned to her and took the tray. He said to Rada, “We didn’t intend to offend anyone by going away for the holiday.” He handed out drinks and sat on the sofa. Unconsciously, he and Maria had settled some distance apart. Rada was forced to turn her head, not much but enough, to look from one to the other. “We had not had time off together before.”

“You work at the hospital, Stephen.”

This was a statement but he nodded. “Yes, it’s very satisfying there.” He felt like he was being interviewed.

“What do you do?”

Maria rushed in. “He is a bit of a genius. He established a secure local area network in a research department and has archived everything. The head of that department is very much against technology except as it relates to laboratory specimens and tools he can use to test and treat his patients. Stephen has put everything in a searchable database that produces results with a simple query, as it should. You can’t imagine the work he’s saved us.”

“You must be very appreciative,” Rada said.

Maria looked at Val. Her responding thought caused him to blush. He sipped his drink, which did not help.

Rada frowned interrogatively. Her mind had picked up this strain: Maria’s smitten, but why is this fellow with her? She can’t be his type.

Val lowered his gaze.

When the silence had gone on an uncomfortable length, Rada cleared her throat. “My dear, not to change the subject, but I just did a piece on Donat Heach and I wondered if I could interest you in it.”

“On the telie?” wondered Maria.

Val stiffened, although no one noticed.

“Yes, they’re executing him tonight. They’ll put the features up front. You’re a subscriber, aren’t you?”

“No,” Maria said, frowning. “I really don’t think watching a man die is good for me.”

“Nor do I,” Val chimed in. “Good for me, I mean. Maria’s spoken for herself.”

“I thought everyone, especially men, watched the hangings.”

“Of humans?” Later, Val was not sure why he included this query. “How is it done? He’s dangled or dropped?”

“He and she. Women bring in higher ratings, incidentally. It’s a drop.”

“There’s that,” he murmured.

Maria, sensing something, slid up to Val on the sofa and abruptly took his hand.

Rada said, “It’s reality, I suppose. An indulgence. If you studied sociology, you would know society needs release from time to time. These barbaric displays are the antidote to civilization. Otherwise, the beast inside devours us. One day we are polite, restrained beings and the next we’re bludgeoning our neighbors.”

Val looked away. “I think I remember receiving that lesson when I was a child.”

Maria’s hand tightened. Her psyche communicated alarm. He was too intense.

Rada noticed as well. “I have set a program to record it, please, at home. I’ll watch when I return. I wouldn’t want to disrupt this evening. If you were going to watch it, that was different.”

“I’m not a subscriber, Auntie. If it’s important to you, we can watch your feature and switch off.”

Rada found that an excellent compromise.

Maria used her remote to signal a debit to her pay account and flicked on the wall. The screen was immediately busy with journalists, legal analysts, and political personalities chattering on a panel. These minds debated Heach’s case from the perspective of their disciplines. It was hours before Heach was to die. After a moment, the network presented a re-enactment using well-known television actors of Heach’s crime, the murder of his business partner. Maria muted the device.

“Let’s dine, then see where we are. I’m sure if we watch too much I’ll lose my appetite.”

Rada said, without seeming patronizing, “Dear, is there no unpleasantness in your life?”

Maria laughed, suddenly at ease. The joke was that Rada, growing up with Maria, knew the answer.

Val slipped his arm over Maria’s shoulder, something he never did unless they were alone. “How long have you interviewed the nation’s notorious criminals?”

“I’ve been at it seven years, more or less.”

“And before then, what did you do?”

“I investigated criminal cases for my predecessor.”

“I am interested in what you know about a family, the Manegolds, from Goraneg. Have you heard of them?”

“Well,” she sighed as they entered the dining room, “they killed themselves in an explosion in their castle some while ago when a task force tried to execute a search warrant. I think their story would be interesting if another family just like it hadn’t taken up in their place. The Goraneg is riddled with old clans, families still very much rooted in the last century. They believe in the old Volker way of life, aggressively acquiring what they want without so much as a by your leave. They hold to the old caste system and resisting government. They’re a lawless, dangerous sort, which is why Parliament enacted the segregation laws in the last century. To keep them out of public schools and public office. Very hard people, very difficult. I wouldn’t want to meet one of them on a dark street. What is your interest in Goraneg history?”

Maria slipped away to set up their dishes. “The segregation laws are what caused the trouble, Aunt Rada, not the other way around. You should read your history better.”

“My dear, the segregation laws keep them where they are and they keep you safe from them. Anyone with a family name on the segregation list has to register with the Authority before entering a restricted prefecture, how can that be bad for us? You haven’t any idea what we’re being protected from.”

Maria turned around with a platter of hot buttered bread and sighed heavily. “Treat someone like filth long enough and filth is what they become.”

Rada’s eyes widened. “Stephen, help me here.”

Val had turned them outside his mind and outside his hearing. He stood looking from one to the other, though, with an expression of intense distraction. “I’m sorry?”

“I said, help me! Maria’s sensitive nature has put her on the side of tearing down our segregation laws. Maria, I had no idea you were an anti.”

“Well, I am.” She went back for the salad.

Val followed her to the counter and put on pot gloves. “The laws are meaningless.” His voice, he noticed, was without emotion. In contrast, his inner life vibrated emotionally, though why that would be he was not immediately certain. He’d been on the fringe of similar debates at Harespar University. When people generalized, he tuned out. Ignorance was not something he usually indulged, nor did he expect the truth to make any difference to the extent that he was prepared to divulge it. He was just profoundly sorry he started the dialogue tonight. “They really don’t mean anything because the world below the Goraneg is, to the people living upland, full of the victims of an inferior race. There isn’t any interest in leaving the Goraneg except to make money. No, I’m sorry, I said that wrong. The laws are not meaningless. They show that the people of the lower lands are frightened of the Goranegi. That in and of itself serves some purpose. It makes the upland clan patriarchs feel powerful.”

Maria brushed by him as he brought grilled filets in wine sauce on a heated iron tray to the rack on the table. She made a sound of satisfaction deep in her throat. “To assimilate them into Volod culture, that is the answer but it can’t be conceived of while policy demonstrates they must stay there or society here as we know it will collapse in tatters. Stephen, since you know geography, what major city is closest to the Goraneg? Is it Skaja-Volz or Ulka?”

“It depends on what way you’re headed.”

“Well, say a child runs away and tries to get work in Ulka. What happens when she presents her papers for a municipal identification card?”

“She’s arrested and returned to the foothills,” he said. “Which she knows, so she doesn’t run away. Unless her life is in danger there’s nothing in the lower lands for a daughter of Goraneg.”

“How does that resolve the crisis up there? We’ve condemned generations of children to live one way, no matter what they think or who they are. What about exposure to new ideas, to progress, health programs, and advanced education?”

Val needed very badly for Maria to shut up.

Maria said, “Thank you, Stephen, for proving my point. Stephen and I discuss everything, Aunt Rada.”

“Not politics so much,” Val said, absently. “The Goranegi are not impoverished, Maria.”

“You’re a man and you don’t like politics either,” Rada exclaimed. “Maria, you must keep him. He seems delightful, just the right blend of this and not too much of that.”

Maria’s thought made Val blush again. Talk turned to the recently publicized prediction of a harsh winter.

When the evening ended, Val gave Rada a peck on the cheek. She squeezed his hand. He had recovered his equilibrium and wondered how she had gotten such hard hands-- he knew how she’d acquired her hard heart --and realized she liked to lift weights. Later, he and Maria had sex. When they finished Maria talked about Rada, and said she wished Rada would conceive soon, her aunt wanted a child so. Val said there was a shadow in her womb, said it before he realized he would. Maria paid the comment no particular attention, but named the condition, which had caused enlargement of Rada’s uterus and irregular menstrual cycles.

Val thought he could clear up the shadow, wondered if he should without discussing it with Maria or Rada. Then he wondered how he would do that, how he would discuss it, and gave up the idea.

In the center of Karsbrasova Square, surrounded by upscale shops, diplomatic missions, and the commerce of Volodya, towered a wonderful bit of architecture called the Needle. Inside its curving, climbing mass of steel and stone were museums, theaters, banks, government offices, boutiques, and art galleries. Three years after Val took his job at the children’s hospital, three years after he met Maria, at about 1000 hours in Y751 on a summer weekday, the bulwark and belly of the Needle detonated. The blast superheated its remaining support and sent the tower crashing. The detonation exploded the tower outward, which caused the Needle to fall instead of collapse. It was devastating. Nine uptown city blocks were affected. From Maria’s sitting room, the night after the explosion, Val and Maria saw ashen darkness vivdly, luridly streaked by the strobes of emergency vehicles. Of course the rest of the city, off the impaired grid, was without power. Maria wept inconsolably. Val, less frightened than she was, was still frightened enough. The depravity of the mind that conceived and executed the act, making the Needle betray its architectural design and tumble rather than collapse, was sickeningly familiar. As he had told Rada, “I think I remember receiving that lesson when I was a child.”

The subsequent investigation, joined by allied nations, determined only point laser weapons could cause such a powerful blast without Quiranium, and Quiranium would have been detected by building security systems. On GateKeeper Global, a group calling itself Holbek took responsibility. There was only one reference in archives compiled by ITAN, members of the Intercontinental Treaty of Allied Nations, to a terrorist group called Holbek. The group, which had until then no activity, was trained and funded in Moukib. The question loomed: why would West Ussurian terrorists attack Bhavaja. Within days, the task force encountered encrypted communication between Moukib and a company identified as a front for Burgolt Manegold.

Val was with Maria when the call came to his hand-held. He was given a word. The single-word message was a code. When he received it, according to his Federal Authority agreement, he had to head immediately to the street. Electricity was still spotty that night. Some regions, like downtown and the city center, where the hospitals were, had restored power. Uptown was a maw, a wound that bled darkness. Maria had taken to closing the blinds against the view.

He peered through the blinds. There was no traffic below. Still he had to do what he was told or face revocation of his immunity agreement.

He made some excuse about returning to the hospital and did as ordered, went to the street.

He was picked up in a government sedan, ferried to a government airstrip, and flown to Asthrinasipal, the principal city of Misenos and ITAN headquarters. Prime Minister Barta, who allowed him to live all those years ago, had passed away. The present Prime Minister of Volodya, Arpiar Hovsep, was a sixty-year-old former Special Security superintendent. He wanted Val hanged under a National Security provision called the Conspiracy and Abetting Act, which punished violators with execution. It did not matter that the investigators could not identify a single member of Holbek. It did not matter that the Manegolds had no contact whatsoever with Val.

In Asthrinasipal, Val was delivered to a holding cell beneath the ITAN building. He met one after another the members of the investigation team.

“You are the only thing in Volodya that connects Holbek and the Manegolds. Why would the Manegolds strike Volodya?”

Prime Minister Hovsep’s desire notwithstanding, Val assumed he had been brought to Asthrinasipal to assist the task force. He asked to look at the evidence. Val, reviewing the technical data, remembered how to be afraid. The flimsy algorithm guarding the encrypted transmission had begged to be decoded. Therefore, the link to the Manegolds was intended for discovery. And Holbek was the name of a brigade of horsemen used in Amorium to protect the high priestess called the Lady of the Blessed Waters. This meant nothing to many investigators, who were Reformist atheists, but to agents from the UKSB and Aiglentina the priestess in Amorium was the head of their religion. And to an Amarite polytheist, like Val, she was a demigod, directly under the goddess Affaraon, whom Amarites believed had created the universe.

The Manegolds might, therefore, name a terrorist group, if they had founded one, after warriors of the goddess.

The laser technology left no trace detectable by human technology. Obligingly, the Holland-Tchey aliens on their ship in high orbit confirmed the Needle bombs employed laser weapons. Val reviewed with his interrogators how his family purchased weapons, laser weapons included. This data was already part of the John Manegold file but the new investigators insisted he go over it again.

ITAN did not engage in torture and summary executions. Its agents thanked Val and released him. The Volod Federal Authority, without bothering much to take care, gave Val a coach ticket on a public air carrier and ordered him to return to Bhavaja. Val supposed the agents would follow him, monitor him, but then, in his mind, they always had. He flew home.

When he contacted Dr. Sandor, Val explained the Needle’s collapse had taken a close family friend and he was sorry to have disappeared four days. Inundated with tales of tragedy, Dr. Sandor overlooked the inconsistencies in Val’s story and allowed Val to return to work. Maria, who had kept her relationship with Val outside of work, proved more difficult.

She refused his calls from the airport. She blocked his personal line, once she saw he was trying to reach her. So he left the hospital early his first day back and walked alone the five blocks to the Gardens. The doorman greeted him, curiously, with a nod from behind the gilt glass doors. Val waited outside on the bench at the park fringe. He stared into the air, into uncertainty, his heart moving laboriously against his ribs.

He saw her first. When she glimpsed him getting to his feet in the walkway she burned with emotion. He knew right away the trouble. She had supposed he was leaving her. Then, she supposed, he changed his mind, called to patch things up. She believed this. And she wasn’t having any. Now that he had tried to leave her she supposed he would try again. She preferred to be done with it.

He gathered this from her mind, and reacted to it, his response automatic, unfiltered, and plain before her eyes.

“Ah, no, don’t do this,” he begged. “Don’t send me away. I have an explanation. I’ll tell you everything, I swear I will.”

She let him in. Her mind lurched between desperate hope to anguish. She resented his power to bring her to pain. She was wary of giving such power to others.

They were just outside her penthouse.

As she let them in, “I’m sorry, Stephen. You don’t know how familiar this is, how hopeless.”

“You have never had this before, what we have, ever.”

She strolled toward the sitting room, turned slowly, and gave him a cold look. “Things end. They always do. I’m willing to let it end.”

“So you can do away with yourself.” It was a fragment in her emotional mind, what he hurled at her. It would have been kinder to deal with it later.

“How dare you,” she replied. He was not welcome to assume she would do something like that because of him, though he was right.

He said, “I know everything about you.”

“Are you reading my mind?” Rhetoric, gibberish. She wasn’t able to deal with that.

“Are you reading mine?” he countered.

She huffed and padded into the kitchen. “What do you have to tell me, Stephen?”

“You have heard”-- he turned to follow, it was so natural, so like their routine, her moving toward the kitchen, him following --“on the satellite the government is blaming a group called Holbek for the Needle.” A spike of psychic distress at mention of the incident. “And this group is linked somehow to a family called the Manegolds.”

“An international criminal organization of some sort.” The connection was only recently made public. It was fresh to Maria. She was well versed on the important parts and capable of regurgitating the bites, which played on satellite and GateKeeper Global all day. “The Manegolds killed eighty people five years ago but they didn’t die as some supposed.”

“My name is John Manegold, John Valten Manegold.”

Maria had ducked beneath the counter for her steamer and her crock. She straightened with empty hands, looked across the island counter at him, voiceless.

Her mind, too, did not speak. It was empty air, shock. He felt sadness creep into him, a sensation like weakness. His legs began to feel numb.

He said, “I am not a fugitive or a criminal. Do you remember the first evening we spent with your aunt? You suggested a hypothetical involving a runaway child in Ulka. And I said it would never happen.”

“Unless her life was in danger.”

“Yes, exactly. My life was in danger. I was to be killed, in fact. It happened when I was about seventeen.”

Her fingers lifted over the counter and seized the edge, perhaps for support. “I don’t understand.”

“You do, you do understand. The Federal Authority didn’t send me back, they protected me. They gave me a new identity. They made me Stephen Kessler. I am John Manegold but I am also Stephen Kessler. The Manegolds have announced war with our government and I do not know why. Four days ago, the Federal Authority flew me to Misenos to meet with ITAN officials to discuss the Needle. I could not call you, Maria. It was not permitted. They were not accommodating, I am lucky I was allowed to return at all.” He sighed. “Is it too much? Should I go while you think? I will if you want but if I go, please realize you cannot talk about what I have said. Maybe I have already brought you too much interest, maybe not, but if you talk about this everyone will notice you and not everyone is nice in this world, Maria.”

“I don’t want you to go. I want you to stay right here. I want you to tell me everything.”

In her mind, he saw words and thoughts in sync. He wanted to hold her but he went away into the sitting room. His chest hurt and his bones trembled. She could have easily turned him out. She could have. His eyes were hot and unfocused, and he felt unbalanced. What if she did? But she did not.

He made some rules. She could not call him Val-- he told her he preferred to be called Val --on the telephone or on the vid or in any communication, wired or wireless. When they had sex, she could call him his heart name, his gift name but only then. They stayed in more often. They had no real friends anyway. Besides her mother, her aunt, and the office, no one called Maria. No one called Val.

The second Holbek attack damaged the federal courthouse in the city center. The third, in Kodopovec Prefecture, brought about curfews. Maria and Val, observing the first casualty estimate on satellite in their respective offices, were frozen silent. It was a hard day, evoking remembrance of the large section of uptown still uninhabitable. At the end of the day, Val went to his flat. Maria waited near the vid for his call. They talked softly, thinly.

-- Are you okay?

-- Yes, are you?

-- I’m not sure.

-- Neither am I.

They assumed their communication solutions were monitored directly now. Val went to the big bay window in the dark and stared out. Maria could not see him, because the cam was not on him. “I miss you,” he said.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“Watching my world drift away.”

“I’m holding onto you. You’re not drifting anywhere. I have my hand on yours.”

He blinked into the night at the blackened shapes of derelict apartment buildings and warehouses. Steel climbed overhead, the elevated train rails. Sometimes he welcomed their company in the dark.

Night rolled into morning, and the cold, changing light. Val abandoned GateKeeper, although he found it impossible to avoid stories coworkers told, an oil flow-station sabotaged in Sofiyko Prefecture, a military convoy attacked by rocket-powered grenades on Highway 41 in bucolic Kodopovec Prefecture, the bombing of a university auditorium in Ligia. The flow-station was close to Sofiyko’s principal city of Skaja-Volz, which suffered two explosions, one in its subtrain tunnels. ITAN had declared the violence the result of internal unrest involving fugitive Volod insurgents.

Val adjusted, as Maria said he would, to a world slipping dangerously out of focus. There were bombs found in Alstana Station. The federals diffused them. Floodlights winked over the wound that was once Karsbrasova Square. Roads were repaired around the leveled wasteland. At night the uptown skyline flickered in the old manner, except in the haphazard, non-geometrical pit where security lights crossed milky white beams.

Nearly two years after the fall of the Needle, West Ussurian assault teams aided by ITAN soldiers raided an estate outside Moukib. It was spring in Bhavaja. The public statement admitted to seizure of two billion International Union Credits (IUCs) in bullion and diamonds, an arsenal of rifles and explosives, and the parts to build two laser point weapons large enough to penetrate an aircraft carrier. Twenty-three men and women were arrested.

Val’s sister was there among them.

Katherin Manegold and a small boy named Joseph, whom Katherin said was her brother, were flown by ITAN transport to a support facility. What became of his sister Katherin and the little boy Joseph, Val learned shortly after his hand-held chimed and the caller spoke the code word.

He was at work. He used his office terminal to call Maria’s line. “Hello, Miss Zakarij, this is Mr. Kessler in Dr. Sandor’s office. Your files will be delayed. Please accept my apology. We’ll do our best to send the upgraded data as soon as possible.” It was against the rules for him to say good-bye, to say anything. He was supposed to get up, walk briskly to the nearest exit, wait for the government sedan. In spite of protocol, he and Maria had worked out a script. The hospital knew nothing about their relationship. He knew when he called her line that she was there. She wouldn’t pick up when she saw his caller ID. She had her ways, her habits. She said she it was difficult to speak to him as though he were a stranger on the phone. But at work, regardless of appearances, they weren’t alone. Phone lines were recorded. She did not want her private life to become public. Nor did he. Of course the Federal Authority knew about them. Val thought, Screw it.

He wrote a note to Dr. Sandor’s electronic mail, stating he was going to the side of an ailing sister. Dr. Sandor would be put out, maybe furious. There was an audit due in thirty days. The doctor was anxious. Val added, “I’m very sorry but I’ll keep you informed.” The e-mail was his second violation.

He put on his jacket. It was windy in spring. The weather was fickle. In the Goraneg, if one complained about spring temperature swings, the old women of the hills would say, “This is Volodya,” and laugh.

He rode the elevator hoping to glimpse Maria and was rewarded. She had received his message, gone with haste to the lobby, probably through the stairway. She waited at the kiosk, her face thin and pale with anxiety. He tried to smile, tried not to let her see what her expression did to him. At least she didn’t approach, didn’t try to stop him.

He went to the street, turned south, always south, and walked. A sedan paced him, then slid over. The back door opened. Val recognized Caspar Libing, sighed, and joined Libing in the backseat.

Libing held out his hand, regarded him with thought. Val felt, suddenly, the eight years since his last meeting with Libing. He had been school-age. Now his features were heavier. He was taller. He no longer peered curiously at people on the street, at the sky, at everything.

He grasped Libing’s hand. “You told me I’d never see you again.”

Libing put his head back. “You don’t see me now. I am an illusion. Remember that. Have you ever wanted to travel to the UKSB?”

“No, never.”

“We’ll go by airjet. It’s a long flight.”

“Why must I go?”

“Ah. Your sister Katherin is there. The ITAN special attaché to the multinational task force, you’ll meet him, interesting fellow, asked the UKSB to sponsor a security site for her welfare.”

“The UKSB? Haven’t their military installations a tendency to collapse in non-existent rifts?”

“Yes, old business, nasty. Did you hear about it as a boy? Three bases just fell into the ground. They’ve had fourteen years to investigate and they’re still putting forth it was an earthquake. Yes, well, we know they were experimenting with prohibited technology.”

“And ITAN sends my sister there.”

“Let’s not forget the UKSB remains the world’s superpower. As to why you are here, Prime Minister Barta, you may recall, blacked out aspects of your capsule, the notation on your, eh, abilities.” Libing curled his fingers in a fist, rubbed his knee. “The capsule was opened by Prime Minister Hovsep. It was to be expected. There was reaction but you have survived it. In fact, you never knew how close you came to going under the wheels of the machine.”

“I am sure I could have gone on nicely not knowing at all.”

“The Security Council and the FA went to closed doors about you.”

“Did they.”

“The surveillance continues, they agreed to that. Prime Minister Hovsep yielded to the Special Security Superintendent. We’re better with you than without you.”

“I’ve agreed to the surveillance. I’m all right with it. Maria is …” Val lost the words. He wondered what he was going to say.

“Interesting choice in partners, the niece of a telecomm giant executive. You’ve told her?”

“I’m sleeping with her, of course I’ve told her. After you pulled me off the street in seven fifty-one and held me four days, what was I supposed to do? It was tell her or lose her.”

“She’s very tight-lipped, the private sort. As far as we can tell, she’s never slipped, not once.”

“You needn’t worry. I’ll know it if she does.”

“And do what?”

Val gazed out the window. The sedan with its sports vehicle escort had ramped onto the highway. The skyline had opened. They pulled away from the city. “Leave her, I suppose.” As though leaving Maria was possible.

“Yes, well, the ITAN fellow, Bromley is his name, reviewing your capsule suggested we allow a meeting with your sister Katherin.”

Val had worried it was something like this. “I don’t want to, if you’re interested. Tell me it will help.”

Libing offered a look of fellow feeling. “It will help. You’re one of us, so don’t go getting your head turned around. See what is going on with her. John, we know too little.”

“What about the boy?”

“The little boy? We think your father remarried.”

“Unbelievable.” But Val believed it.

Of course he did. And he thought how little he really knew about them, about Katherin, about his father. The bits and pieces he gathered up through childhood wouldn’t knit together in memory the same way, if he were exposed to those pieces today. “Sir,” he murmured, gazing toward the sky. Why did they call the man Sir? The title, like the aristocracy, was defunct. Modern Volodya held such remnants of upland history in contempt. Next to Libing in the racing car, Val shifted uncomfortably and stretched his neck. His mother, he reflected, had known her predecessor was killed and by whom, yet she had wanted Manegold, she had married him. Val tried to remember how long ago he knew the mothers of his half-brothers died at his father’s hands. He had always known, and so had his siblings. It was never concealed, was it? Val closed his eyes, exhaling. Business was discussed freely at Petronille. She never minded. What did his siblings discuss now, and where were they, who was alive, how had they survived?

The flight over the ocean was terribly long. Val was restless, could not settle in. Libing made conversation, or attempted to. Occasionally, Val was engaged. They were like colleagues rather than father and son. Val enjoyed Libing’s pleasure in the man that he had become.

The airjet landed after midnight. Bromley, with ITAN, the special attaché, shook his hand on the ramp into the security facility. Rayburn Finlay, the UKSB attorney general, Lee Kenelm with the UKSB department of homeland affairs, and Kier Tomalsi, head of the multinational task force, met Val in the carpeted vestibule. The ITAN official, looking at Val with interest, gave Val alarm. He wondered if he should say something to Libing but remembered Libing asking, “Have you ever wanted to travel to the UKSB?” Of course Libing knew. Why would the Federal Authority reassign Libing if not to ensure the inevitable overtures by politically minded entities were rebuffed?

He passed, presently, through a gauntlet of frontline task force agents. The hostility that dominated his last expense-paid excursion was replaced by something nebulous, anticipation, possibly excitement. The UKSB interagency communications director, a dour-faced man, called him John and offered to take him to his quarters.

The security facility was well lit with broad passages and spotlighted doorways. The place recalled a shopping mall. Val was escorted to his quarters, allowed to rest and shower, he supposed, so the ITAN scientists, whose presence he detected, could observe him. Energy fluctuations in the chamber indicated frequent bio scans. Libing was pissed when he told him, but Libing would not officially protest. A human capable to picking up active scans might be worth abducting and Libing was no fool.

There were several meetings to talk over interview strategy. Val was required to attend. He was less anxious during these sessions than at any other time, for the conference was charged with purpose. Only agents attended. Bromley and his group had better things to do. Val felt the energy of the agents, the rightness of it. He was questioned infrequently but always with respect. In the briefing rooms he was called John.

They gave him satellite images of the Moukib site, thermals and sketches, an inventory of what was seized, image files of the living quarters. There were documents, manifests mainly, and some personal letters by Arnulf addressed to Katherin. Arnulf was married, Katherin single. The letters suggested intimacy. Val confirmed. He had grown up with knowledge of it. The relationship had not seemed unusual when he was younger. It just was.

The question was how did the Moukib seizure fit as a piece to the puzzle of Burgolt Manegold’s objective.

Val rested his power and his body. It was one time he welcomed the long sleep. He woke and ate a small meal. Food brought his faculties to the surface and made it difficult to dial back his sensory package. He prepared by going to the observation room outside the interview chamber and looking through the shielded glass at his sister.

This first step proved easy. She was dressed in custodial overalls. She wore no cosmetics. Her blond hair, still long, was banded into a lank tail. Aware that she would be interviewed, she sat deep in a plastic chair with hands flat on her knees. Her breathing was forced but even, and her mind was essentially blank. Val suspected she had been trained to face interrogation and wondered when his siblings were given this training. Capture had not been a concern when he was growing up. No one worried about the law.

She will hate me, he realized. I’ll have to face that. I changed everything.

He turned to Libing. “She is playing a nursery tune, like background noise, over and over in her head. There’s no contemplation of events, outcome, or who will walk through the door. My guess is she knows it will be me.”

“Are you ready?” Libing asked.

Val said, “Yes, how do I go in?”

The next part, too, was easier than he expected. He wondered, later, why he hardly thought of his brothers and his sister. Their absence in his everyday thoughts was the other end of a range, in which he was vividly and startlingly present in theirs. He did not understand until he sat with Katherin how desperately his brothers and father wanted to kill him. Certainly, he was no longer, to them, a threat. Their need to kill him burned inside their emotional lives, which required reparation.

These were the people who took down the Needle and sent surface-to-air missiles at military jets doing fly-overs in the Goraneg.

They will find me, he thought.

The world became unsettlingly small when he considered the hunt, like a sandbox in a town yard around which grown-ups chatted and drank lemon tea.

The higher-ups will miss their queue and something bad will happen while they chatter on and on, blissfully ignorant.

They would find him.

He had been hiding in plain sight, so some part of him had supposed only his family’s lack of effort accounted for the FA program’s success. In truth, the family had flexed a lot of muscle and spent a lot of money to find him. Their failure was due an overestimation of Val’s worth to the Federal Authority. They were looking for a government safe house, a high-security installation, a code name, as though Val had continued a pawn for the Federal Authority. If they had instead recognized what their well-bought information was telling them, they might have pieced together Val was a no-name man living a no-name life in a big city. Such an existence, while perfection to him, was anathema to them.

As for Katherin, she regarded him with wide-mouthed speculation the way a visitor might take in a curiosity at a zoo. A wry and perhaps bitter smile touched her lips. “I’m going to die before you,” she said. “You have to love it.”

He realized he did not care she was going to die. She was on track to be executed, yes, as soon as the task force finished with her. Val cared that she had come to this place, but she was not here alone. He was with her. The thousands who died when the Needle fell, they were present too.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said.

“You still believe that Amarite crap?” she countered, sassy. “The end is the beginning, all that? Well, you and Sir can take it to hell with you and burn it when you get there. I’ll be ashes, but you believe what you want. Make the world over in fire? Oh Val, you poor bastard. Do you think when the world is on fire anyone will give a shit about beginning again? Begin with what? There’s nothing left, baby brother, when there’s nothing left.”

Not with her mind, but with words she confessed. Val looked over his shoulder at the shielded window. Do you understand now? his expression asked.

He turned his head to look at her. “Where is Sir now?”

“Nowhere I’ll know. He wouldn’t trust any of us, after you, to protect him. He was in Saracisia last I knew. He likes the cold.”

“Where is Arnulf?”

“Fuck you,” she said.

“The little boy, who is his mother?”

From her mind, he got this, Who do you think? She said, “You wouldn’t know her. She’d spit in your face if she could. That’s who she is, someone who would spit in your face.”

The little boy was Katherin’s, and Arnulf was the boy’s father. The boy was, of course, innocent.

“What can I do for you, Kath?”

“Guess.”

“Will you let me touch you?”

“Yes, Val, reach over here. Come closer.”

“I’m going to, Kath. And after I do, I want you to tell me about the laser weapons, how you got them and why. I need to understand where they were going. I want you to tell me about the financing. How is the money getting into Sir’s hands? And how big is the network, now, Kath? I need to know that too.”

Her eyes insisted, Get as close as you wish. Meanwhile, her fingers tightened in her lap. Her teeth showed behind thinning lips.

He leaned in his chair, the plastic creaking. He reached over her knees, covered one of her raw-knuckled hands. She latched onto his forearm with fingernails sharp as penknives. She was not as strong as she imagined but she was strong enough. Her breath grew rough. If she wanted, she could catch his jugular with her teeth. He was cognizant of that. Her skin was growing cool and damp, pale. She considered the taste of his blood, the feeling of it on her tongue. He leaned closer, pushing with his mind as he locked his gaze on her.

Her inner life, he had seen, was flat, its discarnate tendrils at her side and on the ground like ethereal rope. There was unbearable density. It was opaque, curdling near her face, from which her stare sharpened.

He let his power burn upward through his center. The heat of it was akin to a blast furnace but he knew, despite the immediate discomfort, his flesh would contain it. His own inner life launched, a winged thing slipping its leash. It divided, as so often it would, from his body, widening as it mounted the air. He pushed harder. She must see it before she felt it. He must show her how to see it, the way the children that he healed saw. He smoothed carefully the ridges and gray smudges in her aura. He brushed her with his fire, felt the warmth take hold.

Her fingers loosened. Her eyes raised. Her lips parted.

“No, don’t let go,” he whispered.

She heeded him.

He took her, next, gently, into the tunnel, into darkness, to a bridge, the nature of which he did not guess, never had, and he stood with her, holding to her. The bridge went away, it always did. A field reached before them, soft and silent, unlike real fields, which were rough but alive. This was a construct, illusion. In the center of it was a girl, a child with silver hair.

Katherin gasped, the real Katherin, for in the illusion the child was suddenly before her, right in front of her. She looked up, the little girl, and in a moment was a tall, slender woman with black eyes and full red lips. Katherin gasped again, and Val let out a sigh of pleasure. Katherin heard him and echoed it. They were younger, suddenly, brother and sister, hand in hand in a silent field before a beautiful goddess.

“Hold me tighter,” Val said.

Katherin did.

The woman, the other, canted a face of galvanic loveliness. She seemed to be speaking, although Katherin could not hear her. Val spoke her words, whispered them into Katherin’s ear. They were private, these words. The speakers in the observation chamber caught none of them. Katherin began, inexplicably, to weep. Val slid his arms around her shoulders, eased her cheek against his neck. He felt, unexpectedly, his embrace deepen with emotion.

He folded his power within his flesh, paused to observe Katherin’s essence lifting about her, clean and clear, undulating, vital. Then he closed his eyes.

She sobbed, her torso nearly limp in his arms, “Is that god?”

“Yes.”

“You can speak to god?”

“Yes.”

“Have you always?”

He settled a strand of hair behind her ear. “Yes.”

“You left us, then, because you knew.”

“Love, you had all grown eager to shoot me. That’s why I left. But, yes, I felt the wrongness. I knew it for what it was.”

She straightened, smashing tears into her pale cheeks. “The dead, they pass. What did she mean by that?”

“We all pass. We are imperfect, we are only traveling. A gate opens at the end. The journey continues.”

“Even for me?”

“For all of us. You feel the wholeness of her now but her love for you was perfect before you looked on her face. She has always known you.”

“I could not bear it otherwise.”

He knew she meant the others, the ones she’d killed, not her imminent death. “We all bear it, Kath. Try not to be afraid.”

“You also,” she uttered, roughly. “Will you promise, my little one? When they find you, promise you won’t be afraid. They will want you to be. Disappoint them.”

-- Next Chapter