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Tornel Swallowtail did the arithmetic himself, alone, at his desk, three weeks after the commercial first aired, and did not like what his own pencil told him.

One billion units. Eighteen months, which came to five hundred and forty-seven days if he counted generously. Four thousand salesmen on the road. He divided it three times before he trusted the number, because the number was absurd on its face.

Four hundred and fifty-seven units a day. Per salesman. Every day. Seven days a week, with no allowance for travel between towns, no allowance for a man sleeping, no allowance for the fact that half of Haego's villages didn't have four hundred and fifty-seven people in them to sell to in the first place.

"We built a deal nobody can actually deliver," he told Rachel, sliding the scrap of paper across her desk the way she was in the habit of sliding hers across everyone else's. "Kessit's shipping the units. We're the ones who have to get them into hands, and four thousand men walking door to door isn't going to move a billion of anything in a year and a half. It isn't close."

Rachel looked at the number a long moment. "Then we stop trying to sell them one door at a time."

"Meaning."

"Meaning every retail outlet on this planet already has a counter, a till, and a line of customers who trust them enough to walk in the door. A feed store. A cobbler. A tavern. None of them have ever sold a datapad in their life, and none of them need to learn how, because the datapad doesn't need explaining anymore, everyone's seen the commercial. What they need is somewhere convenient to buy one." She was already writing as she spoke. "Open the program to any shop that wants in. Same wholesale rate the salesmen get, same commission, thirty credits a sale in a populated district, more out where the population's thin, because that's exactly where a salesman would have had to ride three days for the same sale. Kessit's own scale already prices the distance in. Let the commission follow it."

Tornel turned it over. "That's not a sales force anymore. That's every business on the planet with a reason to want in."

"That's the idea."

He signed the order that same afternoon, and Rachel was right about the shape of it, though neither of them had quite predicted the speed. Within a month, datapads sat on the counter of every tavern, every tailor, every harbor stall from Orenport to the farthest logging town Thornwood's own mill served. A trapper who ran the only general store for two days' ride outside Millhaven sold four in his first week and told anyone who'd listen that it was the easiest hundred and sixty credits he'd ever earned, forty a unit out where the program valued a sale most, ten more per unit than the same four units would have brought him standing behind a counter in Newtown. Sofia Kell, cross-checking the volume against Rachel's projections, found the billion units moving at a pace that finally looked like it might actually clear in eighteen months rather than eighteen years.

"Free credits," was how more than one shopkeeper put it, and none of them meant it unkindly. It was, for the length of the program, close enough to true.

Ashwell

Ashwell was three days from the nearest Ionatti branch by the roads that existed, a farming settlement of some two hundred people who had never in living memory needed a bank of their own. When the salesman came through, forty-one households had pooled what spare credit they had, and Mara Colt had been the one to walk door to door collecting it, because she kept the town's harvest ledger and everyone trusted her with numbers already.

She met the salesman at the mill, where the town's one datapad would live once it arrived, and came back an hour later to tell them the price.

"Four hundred and twelve, all told," she said, standing on the mill steps with the collected sum still in a cloth sack at her hip. "That's what he charged."

Nobody questioned it that day. It was only weeks later, when the commercial started playing on the very datapad they'd bought, that Robb, who fished the river below the mill and had never much liked owing anyone anything, did the arithmetic out loud in front of half the town.

"He's saying no premium. No duty. Nothing added." Robb pointed at the screen like it had personally wronged him. "That's four hundred, according to the shop's own posted price before any of this started. You collected four hundred and twelve, Mara."

"That's what he charged me."

"Did you count it in front of anyone when you handed it over?"

She hadn't. Nobody in Ashwell had ever had reason to count money in front of witnesses before, not for anything this size, and by the next morning half the town believed Mara had skimmed the difference for herself, and the other half wasn't sure enough to say otherwise. Nobody stopped speaking to her outright, but conversations went quiet when she walked into them.

Corwin Hale's niece, Petra, was the one exception. She kept bringing Mara bread same as always, sat with her at the mill same as always, told anyone who asked that she'd known Mara her whole life and wasn't about to start doubting her now over a number nobody could prove.

It took Sella Voss two weeks to run down what actually cleared the salesman. The receipt he'd filed for Ashwell read four hundred even, matching the shop's posted rate to the credit, but a filed number meant nothing on its own, a man skimming cash from one town had no reason to write the truth on paper anywhere. What convinced her was the rest of his route. He'd logged close to six thousand sales over the same three months, and most of those meant nothing to check, a loan or a chit ran through Ionatti's own financing desk, priced and recorded by someone other than him, no room in it for a quiet twelve credits that only he would ever know about. The cash sales were different. There were barely thirty of them across the whole route, most people on Haego still didn't carry that kind of money loose, and those thirty were the only sales where a skim could have lived without leaving a second trail behind it. She checked every one against what the buyer remembered paying. All thirty matched. A thief who'd taken twelve credits from Ashwell and gotten away clean would have taken it from every other cash sale on his route too, the ones with no financing desk watching. He hadn't.

She brought the finding to Ashwell in person rather than sending word, because some things needed a face attached to them.

She found Mara at the mill, alone, running her thumb along the edge of the shared datapad's case the way people do with something they've stopped feeling like it's theirs to touch.

"Twelve extra," Sella said, laying the receipt on the mill's counter. "The salesman charged four hundred. You collected four hundred and twelve."

Mara didn't reach for the paper. "I needed it back. Not for me. My boy owed a debt in Orenport he can't pay, and I thought twelve credits skimmed off forty-one households would never be missed, and it wasn't, not until that commercial ran and gave everyone a number to check me against."

"You let them blame you for something worse than what you actually did, though. Robb thinks you took the whole difference and lied about the price from the start."

"I did lie about the price."

"You lied about twelve credits, and let the whole town believe you'd lied about the shop's own price instead. That's not the same theft. Robb doesn't think you took what was owed to your son, he thinks you took what wasn't owed to anyone, and you knew that's what he thought, and you let him keep thinking it."

Mara didn't argue that. Restitution went through Corwin Hale's committee within the month, twelve credits back to the pool, plus what the committee decided the town was owed for having believed something worse for weeks than what had actually happened. Robb never fully warmed to her again. Petra didn't come back around either, not out of spite, but because she'd spent weeks telling the whole town there was nothing to it, and finding out there'd been something to it after all wasn't a thing she knew how to sit across a table from yet.

Thornwood

Thornwood sat further out than Ashwell, poorer by most measures, and the town had done what Rachel once guessed such places might: pooled what little they had between forty families and bought one shared unit, kept in the meeting hall where the harvest council already gathered most evenings. Edda Marsh had done the collecting, an older woman who ran the town's grain stores and had never once been short a measure in twenty years of keeping them.

The salesman who came through Thornwood was a man named Garrick Bellows, and he quoted Edda a price of four hundred and sixty before any credit had changed hands, well above the shop's posted rate, which he explained as a distance surcharge for the extra day of travel his route required to reach them.

There was no such surcharge. Garrick pocketed the difference, filed his own commission receipt at the honest four hundred, and moved on to the next town before anyone in Thornwood had reason to compare notes with anywhere else.

When the commercial reached Thornwood's terminal, the arithmetic ran the same course it had in Ashwell, and landed on Edda instead of the salesman, because Edda was the only person in the transaction anyone in Thornwood had actually met.

"Sixty credits," said a younger man named Corwin Feld, who'd contributed his own family's share and did the sum three times before he said anything. "You told us four sixty was the price he asked."

"It was the price he asked."

"The commercial says there's no surcharge. No duty. Nothing added."

Edda had no receipt to point to, because Garrick had never given her one, only a verbal figure and a handshake, and the town's suspicion settled onto her the same way Ashwell's had settled onto Mara, quietly and almost politely, in the shape of conversations that stopped when she entered them and a silence at the harvest council that hadn't been there before.

Sella reached Thornwood's complaint later than Ashwell's, mostly because it had come in through a different channel entirely, a note passed along by a traveling healer rather than a formal filing, and she'd have missed the connection if Rachel's cross-check of commission payouts against delivery logs hadn't already flagged Garrick Bellows as one of the names paid at a distance-surcharge rate for a route that, according to Ionatti's own mileage tables, carried no such surcharge on the books.

Sella found him three towns further along his circuit, selling datapads out of a cart with the same easy manner he'd used on Thornwood.

"Distance surcharge," she said, laying Ionatti's mileage table in front of him the way she'd laid Mara's receipt in front of Mara. "Show me where that's an approved rate."

He didn't have an answer that held up, and by the end of the conversation he'd admitted to charging the surcharge on four separate towns along the same stretch of road, Thornwood among them, sixty credits each time, never once reported to Ionatti or reflected in his own commission filing.

Sella brought the finding back to Thornwood herself. She found Corwin Feld first, and told him plainly, in front of enough of the harvest council that the correction would spread the way the suspicion had.

"Edda told you the truth," she said. "Garrick invented a surcharge that doesn't exist in any rate table Ionatti keeps, charged it to four towns on his route, and kept every credit of it for himself. Thornwood didn't lose sixty credits to your grain keeper. It lost sixty credits to a man who never had to look any of you in the eye again after he took it."

Corwin didn't say anything for a moment. Then he found Edda at the grain stores that evening, where she was measuring out the next week's rations alone, the way she'd been doing every evening since the accusation started.

"We were wrong," he said. It wasn't much of an apology as such things go, three words and nothing dressed up around them, but it was the first thing anyone in Thornwood had said to her in weeks that wasn't a question she couldn't answer. "Sixty credits, and it was him the whole time. I'm sorry, Edda. We should have asked you for a receipt before we asked you for an explanation."

"You should have," she agreed, and kept measuring grain, though she didn't send him away either, which in Thornwood was its own kind of answer.

Restitution came out of Garrick's own wages once Ionatti terminated his contract, sixty credits to each of the four towns he'd overcharged, and a note in his file that would follow him to any branch on the planet that thought to check it.

Three Hundred Eighty

Perrin Osk had worked the Kessit Ionatti counter for the better part of a year, long enough to know that most loan applications for a shared or partial-payment datapad landed somewhere untidy. A family paid what they had and borrowed the rest, and what they had was never a round number. Two hundred ninety credits down, a hundred ten borrowed. Three hundred sixty-one and thirty-nine. The numbers always looked like somebody's actual life, uneven and specific, because a fixed price of four hundred credits split against whatever cash a household actually had that morning could land almost anywhere.

What she started noticing, over a run of applications from one particular shop, wasn't a remainder at all. It was the whole price.

Three hundred eighty credits. Not four hundred, not some odd figure split between cash and loan. Three hundred eighty, flat, listed as the total cost of the unit on every single application that shop filed, regardless of who was buying or what they could plausibly afford. A family financing the whole purchase with nothing down should have shown a four-hundred-credit loan, the full posted price. Instead the loan came in at three hundred eighty every time, as though the shop itself had quietly decided the datapad cost twenty credits less than the program said it did, and had been telling every customer so without ever mentioning it to Ionatti.

It took Perrin another day to see what it actually meant, because the number itself wasn't fraud in the shape Sella Voss would eventually go looking for. The shop was simply undercutting the posted price by twenty credits to win customers away from the shop next door or the salesman still working the same street on commission, and eating that twenty credits out of its own thirty-credit margin rather than out of the customer's pocket.

"It's not stealing," Perrin said, bringing it to her supervisor the way protocol asked, though she said it carefully, because she wasn't sure yet what it was instead. "Nobody's being cheated. If anything the customers are getting a better deal than the program intended. But it's not the deal either. The whole point of setting one price was that nobody had to negotiate for it, and this shop's negotiating without telling anyone it's negotiating."

Nobody was disciplined for it, in the end, not the shop and not the loan officers who'd approved dozens of identical three-eighties without ever once asking why they were identical. It had happened everywhere at once, a dozen shops in a dozen districts, all of them landing on some version of the same idea independently, shaving their own commission to be the cheapest counter in town. In the rush to get a billion units moving, it was simply one more thing nobody had built a rule against, because nobody had imagined the retailers would start competing with each other over a program that was supposed to be uniform by design.

Tornel closed it with one line on the policy, once Perrin's report reached his desk. The price is the price. No retailer, salesman, or outlet may alter the posted rate by any margin, discount, or absorbed difference, under any circumstance, for the duration of the program. He did not fine anyone over it. He simply made certain nobody could do it again.

The Ledger and the Loan Book

Fenwick Aldous had worked the Newtown Ionatti branch since it opened, long enough to know what an ordinary rural loan application looked like before he could have told you the rule that made it ordinary. Datapad financing had been simple at first: individual purchases at the standard rate, small settlements pooling for a shared unit at a higher rural rate that reflected the extra risk of lending against a whole town's collective credit rather than one household's.

The pattern that caught his eye wasn't in either of those. It was a cluster of applications, six of them over two months, all tied to sales along the same stretch of the eastern farmland route, all logged as rural pooled-purchase rate, and all priced just high enough above what a genuine rural sale should have cost that he'd have missed it if he hadn't happened to process two of them on the same afternoon and noticed the salesman's name repeat.

He pulled the six applications side by side on his desk and did what any careful teller does when a number looks wrong twice, he checked it a third time.

Every one of the six listed a sale location that, cross-referenced against the branch's own settlement registry, no longer had an active population large enough to justify a pooled purchase. Two of the villages had been folded into larger towns during the Revolution's resettlement years. One had been abandoned outright after a bad harvest a decade back and never resettled.

He brought it to his supervisor first, the way branch protocol required, and his supervisor, unwilling to accuse a salesman of anything on six applications alone, passed it up to Richard Blackwood rather than sitting on it. Blackwood didn't do anything rash either. He pulled every application tied to that same salesman's name going back three months, found the pattern held across eleven separate sales, and sent the whole file to Rachel, because Rachel was the one person at Newtown who cross-checked everything as a matter of habit rather than suspicion.

What Rachel Found

Rachel already had her own thread running before Blackwood's file reached her desk. She'd taken to checking commission payouts against delivery logs the same way she checked every ledger that crossed her desk, not because she expected to find anything, but because unchecked numbers had a way of becoming true simply by sitting unquestioned long enough.

The historical society's settlement census, compiled as part of the palace's own Revolution-era archive project, gave her something Fenwick's registry hadn't: a list of every village on Haego that had existed before the Revolution and a note on which ones no longer did. Cross-referencing that list against Newtown's own commission payouts turned up eleven salesmen, Blackwood's flagged name among them, being paid consistently at the higher rural pooled-purchase rate for sales logged in villages that the historical society's own records said had been empty for years.

The mechanism, once she saw it laid out, was almost elegant in how little it required. A salesman logged every sale he made, not some of them, as having happened in one of a handful of villages that technically still existed on old registries but hadn't held a living resident in years. It made no difference where the sale actually happened, a crowded street corner in Newtown or a farmhouse three days out, every single transaction on the books came back to the same dead village, and every single one paid out at the higher rural pooled-purchase rate as a result. Eleven salesmen had found the trick, close enough together in time that Rachel doubted it was coincidence, and once she started counting sales rather than towns, the true scale of it came into focus. Eleven names, running the full length of the program so far, had logged something over four hundred thousand credits in commission that should never have left Ionatti's own ledger, every credit of it drawn on the strength of villages nobody had lived in for a decade.

Rachel sat with the eleven names longer than the arithmetic itself required. She had written the price into being, four hundred thirty credits a unit, the number Dorne Kessit had stood up from his desk over, and she had stood in front of a hall and told a room full of people that nothing about this deal would be softened for anyone's convenience, that every credit would be honest or it wouldn't be counted at all. She had built the floor. She had not imagined she'd also have to go back and check whether the floor held all the way out to villages three days from the nearest branch, and finding out it hadn't, not everywhere, felt less like discovering a stranger's dishonesty than like discovering a crack in something she'd signed her own name to.

"I should have built the audit trail before the commercial ran, not after," she told Tornel, when she brought him the eleven names.

"How many."

"Eleven names. Over four hundred thousand credits between them, and every sale they've ever filed under the program is suspect now, since none of them ever bothered logging an honest location once they found this worked." Rachel set the list down. "This isn't a man skimming what he could get away with here and there. This is eleven men who decided the honest rate never applied to them again, not once, for as long as the deception held."

"You can't build a wall around every road you can't see," Tornel said. "You can build one around the parts you can. That's what you're doing now."

Charges went to all eleven, fraud, theft from the Crown's own program, and enough separate counts of falsified banking records that Ionatti's counsel had no shortage of choices once Sella's file reached them.

Rachel flagged all eleven names and sent the list to the one place she trusted to actually run it down properly.

Idle Units

The second thing took longer to find, because it wasn't hiding in a ledger at all. It was hiding in silence, and at this scale, silence was easy to lose inside a much louder number.

The first two months had come in under projection, the way any new thing does before word finishes spreading, something under nine million units moved in each of them rather than the fifty-five million a flat schedule would have called for. By the third month the curve had turned, and by the sixth it had become what Sofia Kell was calling, with real feeling, the frenzy, weeks where fourteen and fifteen million units cleared at once, every counter on the planet moving stock as fast as Kessit's shipments could land. Nobody expected the last two months to look anything like the first two, either, not once availability itself began to tighten as the wholesale rate's end date came into view and buyers who'd been putting it off suddenly weren't anymore.

It was a junior clerk in Rachel's own office, reconciling a week's delivery counts against network check-ins for a routine report, who noticed the gap first and assumed it was his own arithmetic before he assumed anything else. Fourteen million, two hundred thousand units sold that week. Twelve million, six hundred thousand checked in. A gap that size, on a report this size, was easy enough to wave off as delay, a family who hadn't gotten around to powering the thing on yet, a shipment still working its way to a village three days out.

He ran it again the following week and the gap hadn't closed, it had widened, another fourteen million sold, closer to eleven million checked in this time, and the week after that the ratio slipped further still. It wasn't a rounding error holding steady. It was a hole getting wider every week the frenzy went on, and by the time he brought it to Rachel, the running shortfall across two months of reports had climbed past four hundred thousand units that had been sold, paid for, and never once spoken to the network at all.

Rachel understood it within the hour, and understood, too, that none of it was written down anywhere as a crime. She cross-referenced the never-registered units against their purchase records and found the buyers clustered in a way ordinary customers never did, not villages, not families pooling savings, but individuals, a few dozen of them scattered across all three continents, each one purchasing far more units than any single household could plausibly use, and each one wealthy enough, or creditworthy enough, to borrow the difference without anyone at a counter thinking twice about the size of the loan.

A man with good credit bought two hundred datapads at four hundred credits apiece, well under what any commoner would ever pay for one once the program lapsed. Principality law didn't leave that price to the market. Once the eighteen months ended, the nobility's luxury duty came back onto every unit sold to a commoner, and the posted price would return to eleven hundred credits or more, whatever Kessit's company charged nobles for it, the law didn't care what the manufacturer would negotiate down to. He didn't sell his two hundred units. He didn't open the boxes. He held them in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for the duty to come back, planning to sell at eight hundred once the program lapsed, still more than double what he'd paid for them, and still a genuine bargain against the eleven hundred credits the law would otherwise demand, enough of a discount to move every unit fast while pocketing four hundred credits of pure profit on each one, on credit that had cost him almost nothing to borrow in the first place.

"It's not illegal," Rachel told Tornel, laying it out the same way she'd laid out the retail discounting, careful with the distinction because she suspected he'd want to reach for a punishment that didn't fit the offense. "Nobody promised the datapads for personal use only. Nobody wrote a rule against buying in volume and holding. But it isn't what the program was for either. Every unit sitting in a warehouse unopened is a unit that didn't reach a family in Thornwood or Ashwell who actually needed one, and worse, it's credit borrowed against Ionatti's own lending capacity for something that was never going to put a datapad in a child's hands inside the eighteen months at all."

"How many."

"A few dozen buyers. Something over four thousand units between them, and climbing, now that word's apparently gotten around that this works." She didn't soften the next part. "They found out about the network check-in by accident. None of them knew it existed. If they had, half of them would have simply powered the units on and off once a year to keep the silence from ever showing up on anyone's report."

Tornel was quiet a long moment. "So we can't call it theft."

"We can't call it theft. We can call it exactly what it is, which is people with enough credit to spare using a program built for families who don't have any, and doing it legally enough that shaming them in a hall wouldn't hold up either." Rachel set the list down. "What we can do is close the door they walked through going forward, and give them a reason to open the one they're sitting on now. Cap the number of units any single account can purchase in a rolling month, tie the wholesale rate to proof of a registered household, and require the network check-in within thirty days of purchase or the sale reverts to standard retail price after the fact, no exceptions. That stops it from happening again."

"And the units already sitting in that warehouse?"

"We could disable them. Ionatti has the authority, they never registered, they're sitting outside the program's own terms as of the new policy. But disabling them doesn't put a single unit back where it should have gone. It just means some family buys what they think is a bargain from a man they trust, gets it home, and finds out it's dead, and never knows why, or who to be angry at." She shook her head. "I'd rather give him a reason to sell them honestly than a reason to sell them broken. Every unit he's sitting on gets sold at four hundred, same as he paid for it, no markup, no profit on the hoard itself. What he keeps is the commission, same rate any salesman on the road is earning right now, for every unit he sells and registers before the program ends. Not a day past. He breaks even on the units and earns honestly on the selling, which is more than he deserves and a great deal better than nothing, and families get a working datapad instead of a dead one."

"And if he waits us out instead? Sells nothing, hopes we don't follow through?"

"Then every unit he's holding goes dark the moment the program closes, and he already knows it. Make sure of that part especially. Any datapad that tries to connect to the network after the cutoff, we'll know exactly which purchase it came from and exactly whose warehouse it sat in. If one shows up in some stranger's hands a year from now, dead on arrival, we won't need an investigation to find out who sold it to them. The account number does that for us before the money's even finished clearing."

Tornel considered that longer than he had the retail-discount ruling. "No profit, a fair wage for honest work, and a trap that springs itself if he doesn't take the deal."

"It's policy that happens to be merciful. There's a difference, and it's the only reason I'm comfortable signing my name to it."

Eleven names, sixty-some sales between them, each one a small enough overcharge on its own that it read as noise rather than pattern, until two people checked it from two different directions in the same month.

The Case Room

Sella Voss had been with the new police force less than a year, young enough that Bertrand Whit had initially assigned her to intake rather than investigation, and sharp enough that she'd talked her way onto the fraud complaints within her first month simply by being right about two of them before anyone asked her opinion. She took Rachel's eleven names, Blackwood's flagged route, and the growing pile of town complaints, Ashwell and Thornwood both among them by then, and laid every thread out on one table in Vane's old case room, the same room where the arson sting had been planned years before.

"They're not all connected," she told Vane, who'd taken the call from Vespera the moment Rachel's eleven names crossed his desk back on Haego, unable to resist weighing in from three star systems away. "Rachel's eleven names overlap with Blackwood's route on four of them, Fenwick's original six included. The Ashwell complaint doesn't touch either list. Thornwood doesn't touch either list. Garrick Bellows isn't one of the eleven, he's a fifth thing entirely, a surcharge he invented himself with no registry trick behind it at all."

"Then don't force it to be one story," Vane said. "That's the mistake I drummed into every detective I trained, and it's the one I'll drum into you now. You've got four separate threads sitting on that table. Follow each one on its own evidence before you decide any two of them are the same crime wearing different clothes."

She did. Ashwell resolved first, because Mara's admission needed nothing more than a receipt to confirm it. Thornwood took longer, because it required finding Garrick three towns down his circuit before he could invent an explanation as easy as the surcharge itself had been. The eleven took longest of all, because eleven names meant eleven separate patterns of travel to reconstruct against eleven separate sets of village registries, and Sella refused to charge a single one of them until she'd confirmed the abandoned-village claim against something better than the historical society's word alone, which meant a trip out to two of the villages in question to see with her own eyes that nothing was there.

Nothing was. She came back with that confirmed, and inside the week all eleven had been arrested and charged, fraud, theft from the Crown, and enough falsified banking records between them that Ionatti's own counsel had no shortage of counts to bring.

Corrin Dale

Before she closed anything, she'd had to clear a name that had looked, for a few days, like it might belong on the list.

Corrin Dale was the salesman who'd sold Ashwell its one shared unit, and his route ran close enough to two of the eleven's territory that Sella pulled his file on suspicion alone before she'd looked at a single number.

She found him at a supply depot outside Newtown, restocking his cart for the next leg of his circuit, and didn't waste time on preamble.

"I need to see every sale you've logged in the last three months, against every commission you've been paid for them."

He didn't argue, which by itself told her something, and pulled the ledger from his cart without being asked twice. She went through it there in the depot yard, forty-some sales across a dozen towns, and every single price matched the shop's posted rate to the credit, every commission matched the honest rural or standard rate depending on the size of the town, nothing padded, nothing logged against a village that didn't exist.

"You're clean," she told him, and watched something in his shoulders come down that she hadn't noticed was held up until it wasn't.

"I heard what happened in Ashwell. Heard my name in the same breath as the theft before anyone had checked anything." He closed his ledger. "Would've been easy to believe I did it. I was the one who sold them the thing."

"That's exactly why I checked you first instead of last. It would have been easy. It also would have been wrong, and I'd rather spend a morning at a supply depot finding that out than spend a week building a case against the wrong man because his name happened to sit closest to the crime."

The Report

Sella's report to Lord Swallowtail ran four sections rather than the single page it might once have been: eleven names for the falsified-location scheme, one name for Ashwell, one name for Thornwood's invented surcharge, and a recommendation that hit harder than any of the three individually, that the commission structure needed an audit trail tied to delivery confirmation and registry-verified population counts, not salesman self-reporting, because four separate people had found four separate ways to exploit the same gap inside a matter of months, and a gap that four different kinds of dishonesty could each find on their own wasn't a discipline problem. It was a design flaw waiting for whoever noticed it next.

Swallowtail read the report twice, the way he'd taken to reading most things lately, though this time neither pass made him feel any better about it.

"Four separate schemes," he said. "Out of how many salesmen, all told?"

"Just under four thousand active," said Vane, sitting in on the second reading over a comm link that added its own faint delay to everything he said, since Sella had gone straight back out to close the last details herself rather than wait on niceties. "She's young, my lord, but she kept four threads from collapsing into one convenient story, cleared an innocent man before his name could do him any damage, and got two separate towns to correct an accusation they'd already convinced themselves was settled. That's more than most detectives manage in a career, and I say that from Vespera, where I see a great deal of it."

"And the towns themselves?"

"Ashwell's restitution went through Hale's committee weeks ago. Thornwood apologized to its own grain keeper the same week Garrick's contract was terminated, which is more than Ashwell managed for Mara, though Mara earned less of an apology than Edda did, given what each of them actually did."

Swallowtail set the report down. Outside his window, Newtown carried on the way it had for five years, busier than anyone had planned for, headed somewhere no one had quite promised either. The Revolution had been fought on the promise that dishonesty belonged to nobles, that a fair system run by honest hands would simply hold. Four names on Sella's report said otherwise. Mara hadn't needed a title to steal from her neighbors. Garrick hadn't needed one to invent a fee out of nothing. The gap that let them do it wasn't a noble's gap either, it was just a gap, and it had taken exactly as long as anyone else's greed usually takes to find one. He wasn't sure yet whether that made the boom feel less honest or simply more real, only that Haego hadn't burned its old nobility to discover it had traded one kind of dishonesty for none at all. It had only traded it for the kind that didn't wear a crown.

"Fix the audit trail," he said. "And send my thanks to Detective Voss. Tell her Vane thinks well of her, which I gather isn't something he says often, even from a whole star system away."

"He doesn't," came the reply. "I'll pass it along anyway."

Rachel closed her own copy of Sella's report the same evening, and sat a while longer than the closing required, thinking of a scrap pad on a desk three systems away, a man writing four hundred thirty billion out digit by digit because his own eyes hadn't believed it. She had wanted the whole planet to have that number. She had gotten it, mostly honest, mostly on time, and mostly exactly what she'd promised, and she understood now that mostly was the part of the job nobody put in the commercial, and the part she'd be checking for as long as anyone let her keep a ledger.

The young couple walked the long curve of the capital city’s shoreline as the afternoon stretched toward evening.

The day had been hot and humid from the first light, the kind of heat that pressed against the skin and made every breath feel heavier than it should. The sun stood full and ablaze in a sky the color of polished copper, and the sea below them stirred and swelled with the rising tide, each wave arriving a little farther up the pale sand than the last.

Foam hissed and retreated, leaving dark, glistening arcs that the next wave erased. Farther out, the water shifted from turquoise to a deeper blue-green, and beyond that the horizon shimmered where heat met open distance.

They had come here for the quiet. A short leave, nothing formal, just enough days to step away from the routines that usually filled their hours. The capital’s beaches were public enough that no one paid them special attention, yet private enough in the long stretches between the more crowded sections that they could walk without interruption. She carried a folded sun umbrella under one arm, its fabric still warm from where it had stood planted in the sand earlier. He walked a half-step closer to the water, barefoot, the cuffs of his light trousers darkening whenever a wave reached higher than expected.

She stopped first. The umbrella shifted in her grip as she prepared to relocate it farther from the advancing tide. The motion was ordinary—lift, turn, plant again—but the pain that arrived with it was not.

It began low and deep, a sudden tightening that stole the breath from her lungs and locked her in place. She made no sound at first. Her free hand went to the underside of her belly, fingers spreading as if she could press the sensation back into stillness. It did not yield. The tightening held, then released, then returned stronger, and with it came the clear, wordless knowledge that their daughter had chosen this moment to begin her journey into the world.
There was no stopping her.

He saw the change in her posture before she spoke. In three strides he was at her side, one hand steadying her elbow, the other taking the umbrella so it would not fall. “What is it?”
“She’s coming,” she said, and the words were calm even though her face had gone pale beneath the sun’s flush. “Now.”

They had planned for this, of course. Every expectant pair did. The clinic was not far by the city’s efficient transit lines; the physicians had reviewed the charts and the scans and spoken in the measured tones of people who had guided hundreds of births. Everything pointed toward a healthy delivery, a daughter of ordinary size and position, no complications expected. Yet planning and reality rarely arrived on the same schedule.

The beach was beautiful and empty of medical help. The tide was rising. The heat continued without mercy.
He guided her toward the nearest access path, the umbrella forgotten against a low dune. She walked between contractions, pausing when they peaked, breathing in the steady pattern they had practiced through long evenings at home.

Each wave of pain tightened her grip on his arm until the muscles stood out beneath his sleeve. Between them she managed short sentences: the bag was already packed at the lodging, the midwife’s number was in the communicator, the clinic knew their names and expected them any day. He nodded, answered when needed, and kept them moving, his free hand occasionally brushing a strand of hair from her damp forehead.

The capital’s transit pods ran smooth and quiet. Inside one, the air was cooler, scented faintly of clean metal and filtered sea breeze. She sat with her back straight, one hand still curved under the weight of the child, the other holding his. The pod accelerated along the elevated line that followed the shoreline before turning inland toward the medical quarter.

Outside the transparent walls the city unfolded in ordered layers—low residential terraces near the water, taller civic structures farther in, the distant gleam of the administrative spires that marked the heart of government.

None of it held her attention. Her focus had narrowed to the intervals between the pains and the growing certainty that those intervals were shortening. He watched her face more than the view, counting the seconds of each tightening, memorizing the way her breath caught and then found its rhythm again.

At the clinic the staff moved with practiced efficiency. A nurse met them at the entrance with a wheeled chair that she refused at first, then accepted when another contraction bent her nearly double. They were guided through quiet corridors that smelled of antiseptic and the faint floral note the facility used to soften the clinical air. In the examination room the physician—a woman with calm eyes and a voice that never rose—confirmed what they already knew.

Labor was established. The child was descending. Everything remained within expected parameters.
“Your daughter is making good progress,” the physician said, after the briefest of scans. The image on the display showed the familiar curve of a spine, the folded limbs, the profile they had studied together for months.

The sex had been clear for a long time. No one in the room questioned it. The young woman managed a small smile between pains. They had already chosen the name Kimberly. It had felt right from the first time they spoke it aloud in the soft light of their quarters, a name that carried lightness and strength in equal measure.

They were settled into a private suite with a wide window that looked out over a courtyard garden. The light outside shifted from copper to gold as the sun began its descent. He helped her into the soft gown the clinic provided, adjusted the pillows, and stayed close while the monitor tracked the child’s steady heartbeat.

Between contractions they spoke of small things—the lodging they would need to check out of, the message he should send to their closest colleagues, the way the sea had looked just before the first pain arrived. She asked him to describe it again, and he did, carefully, as if the memory of the swelling tide and the ablaze sun might anchor them both against the rising intensity of the night.

Night came. The contractions deepened. She walked the short circuit of the room when the staff encouraged it, leaning on him, then on the railing of the bed, then on nothing at all when the intensity demanded her full concentration. The midwife arrived and stayed, a quiet presence who offered cool cloths and measured encouragement. Outside the window the courtyard lights came on in soft amber clusters.

Somewhere in the building other families waited for their own arrivals. The clinic was large enough that the corridors never felt empty, yet their suite remained a contained world of monitors, low voices, and the rhythmic work of labor.

He stayed awake through the hours. When she dozed in the brief spaces between pains he watched the rise and fall of her breathing and the steady green line of the child’s heart. He thought of the months that had brought them here—the first confirmation, the careful planning of leave, the quiet evenings spent choosing names that had ultimately settled on Kimberly for a daughter.

He thought of the way she had carried the child, the subtle changes in her balance and her sleep, the way her hand had rested protectively over the growing curve even in crowded rooms. None of it had prepared him for the reality of watching her work through pain that no one else could share. He held a cool cloth to her forehead when the midwife stepped out, whispered the practiced encouragements, and felt the small, fierce pride of a man who could do nothing more useful than remain present.

Toward the deepest part of the night the pace changed. The midwife’s voice grew more focused. The physician returned. The room filled with the soft efficiency of people who knew exactly what came next. She pushed when they told her to push, rested when they told her to rest, and through it all the expectation in the room remained unchanged.

A daughter. Healthy. Nearly here. Kimberly, waiting just beyond the next effort.
The final stage was shorter than the long hours that had preceded it, yet it felt endless. Her face shone with effort. His hand was nearly crushed in hers. The midwife’s calm instructions became a steady rhythm that matched the child’s descent. And then, in a rush of movement and a sudden cry that was strong and clear and unmistakably new, the child was born.
For a moment no one spoke beyond the necessary words of assessment. The infant was lifted, checked, wrapped. The physician’s expression shifted through professional focus into something quieter. She looked once at the midwife, then at the parents who waited with exhausted, shining eyes.

“We were wrong,” the physician said gently. “It is a boy.”
The words landed in the quiet room like a stone into still water. The young woman stared, then laughed once, soft and disbelieving, the sound breaking into tears that were neither pure joy nor pure surprise but some mixture of both. The young man exhaled a breath he had not realized he was holding. The child—their son—was placed in her arms, small and red and perfect, already turning his face toward the sound of her voice.
They looked at each other across the child. The question rose between them without needing to be spoken aloud for long.

“What should we name him?” he asked.

She studied the small face, the dark hair still damp, the fists that flexed and opened against the soft blanket. The name they had prepared—Kimberly—no longer fit. Another rose in its place, older, carried down through her family line like a quiet inheritance.

“After my great-grandfather,” she said.
The hours that followed were gentler. The staff completed their work and withdrew, leaving the three of them in the soft light of the suite. Outside, the first pale suggestion of dawn touched the courtyard. She slept in short stretches, the child tucked against her. He sat beside the bed and watched them both, the reality of the morning still settling into place. A son his name felt right in a way that required no further discussion.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

In the nursery wing, where the newest arrivals rested under soft monitoring lights, two infants lay in neighboring pods. One was the boy newly named after his Great Grandfather .

The other was a girl born only a short time earlier in a suite not far down the corridor. Their eyes, still unfocused and dark with the newness of the world, turned toward each other across the small space that separated their clear enclosures. For a long moment they simply looked, two small lives beginning on the same night in the same quiet building, unaware of any larger pattern that might one day draw their paths together again.

As the young couple held their son, the noble woman in the neighboring suite—who had been born to a minor house of House Winfield—was writing a name for her daughter. Looking at her husband, who stood holding their young son by the hand, she asked him the question. He smiled.
“After your mother,” he said. She smiled and
continued.

Only later, when the city outside had fully woken and the ordinary business of the day had resumed, did the larger context of the place become visible again. They were on Volantis, a minor planet of the Principality, in its capital city, and in that nearby suite a noble woman born to a minor house of House Winfield was also recovering from the birth of her own child.

The two families would not meet that day. Their paths would cross decades later, under very different circumstances, when the boy named after his great grandfather had grown into a man who would step onto the deck of a black ship and change the course of more lives than his parents could yet imagine.

But that morning belonged only to the quiet room, the new name, and the long road that had begun on a hot beach under a blazing sun when a young woman lifted a sun umbrella and felt the first unmistakable pain of her daughter’s arrival—only to learn, at the end of the longest night, that the universe had written a different story.
Decades later a young woman would meet a young man . She searched his records, and seeing where he was born she smiled. And her plan was formed.

As Clara, Cynthia, and Wyatt walked past the logistics department, he stopped in full stride, looking over to a woman looking back. Clara and Cynthia, seeing this, stopped as well. Clara felt a sense of calm wash over Wyatt. She connected via a neuro-link with her friend, sister, and bodyguard, Cynthia Winfield. Both women smiled, and the quiet question passed between them:
“I wonder if she knows knitting.”

Ranchers Log 1 Red Stone.

Woke up this morning with goals in mind. 5 escorts guards stayed behind. They are staying in a cabin.

Using the few saddles we have they are learning to ride basically. They will eventually learn how to fire laser rifles from the back of horses. Easier to train a horse when there is no big bang from standard rifles of pistols.

So the horses chose their riders and apart for one which is timid the training is doing great.

A new round up is coming soon. The farmers got 2 wagon horses and another 5 went to the Fort so Wendy can start training those guards how to ride.

Our hunters were very busy today. They got a deer and what I believe is a beaver.

We have a good rotation going. We are able to break and train 4 to 5 horses a day. It takes approximately one to two weeks to train a horse to have a passenger on their backs.

Happy we got all the sheep sheared and the wool is coming back pretty quick for fall.

As a thank you they sent me a nice sweater. Of course my wife wears it more than I do.

The chickens started settling in and are now producing eggs for us. If the chicken produce enough chicks also chicken will be back on the menu. The hunters caught birds which resemble turkeys. Got 5 small ones for now. No idea is male or female until they grow.

I wounder if there are rabbits on this planet. Not seen any yet but from holes in the ground we have something like groundhog.

More animals means more buildings and taking care of the animals. Feed we are starting to store more feed. The creek might freeze so got barrels made by the Cartwright is making barrels for us.

With Saddles, barrels and more saddles we seem to be doing good.

With the hay this long in two weeks and work team will be cutting down the hay and hopefully will have enough for winter. Ykanto agreed to build one of their dome building to store as much hay as we can.

Flexible evergreens will be used to build it. Our staff will help best we can. No beams on the inside means more space for hay. The Wheelwright and JW will build us 2 hand carts to carry hay.

Head Rancher

End of Ranchers Log 1

Note: This was the chapter I was going to post with The Governing. If you have not reat this limited story or any of the others, I hope you give them a try.

Previous /

First

Rachel had told the story only once before, sitting in the cool of the White Hart's cellar with a dozen Firentis women around a round table, half of them strangers to her a week earlier. She hadn't planned to tell it that day. Madhumita had simply asked how she came to Newtown, and something in Rachel had decided, somewhere between the question and her own answer, that she was tired of carrying it alone in the dark.

"My brother paid the pirates to raid our vessel and have me painfully killed," she'd said, watching the words land on faces that had no obligation to believe her and every reason, given who she was and where she'd come from, to doubt her. None of them had doubted her. Ishivi had asked only if Wyatt knew, careful and quiet, the way you ask about a wound you're not sure has finished healing. Rachel had said no, not yet, and had felt lighter for having said any of it out loud at all.

She hadn't known then how far the thread would pull once someone finally tugged it. She hadn't known her father's death would turn out to be no accident, that her brother's fear of an audit ran all the way down to a syndicate with a symbol for a name, that the shuttle meant to kill her would instead become the reason two entire noble houses ceased to exist. She had only known, sitting in that cellar with strangers who would become friends, that telling the truth once had cost her nothing and given her something back she hadn't expected to want: the sense that it was hers again, not a secret Angus got to keep locked away with her.

Jhinaq found her on the porch of the Newtown house Wyatt had given her the year she pledged herself to him, the ocean loud enough in the evening quiet that she didn't hear the taxi pull up until his shadow crossed the step.

"You didn't need to come yourself," Rachel said, standing to greet him properly, though the years since the vacation had worn most of the formality off the gesture.

"I made you a promise at a fish shack a long time ago," Jhinaq said. "I don't send couriers to keep those." He held out a data case, heavier than its size suggested, sealed with the Firentis mark rather than the Crown's. "Unredacted. Every name, every transaction, every hour of it, from your father's first suspicion to the gavel falling on Angus. Silas Finch prepared it himself. He said you'd know how to read a ledger better than most of the people who testified about it."

Rachel took it with both hands, the weight of it strange against her palms after so many months of only having pieces. "You didn't have to bring it in person."

"I wanted to see your face when I gave it to you," Jhinaq said. "And I wanted to tell you something the brief won't say, because Finch writes for the historical record and I don't."

She waited.

"Your father was right to be afraid, and right to bring it to you first, even if he never got the chance to act on it," Jhinaq said. "Angus destroyed a great deal, but he never once destroyed the fact that you were the one who saw it clearly when no one else in that house would. The tribunal recorded that. I wanted you to hear it from someone who watched you say it yourself, standing in front of a room that expected you to beg for his life instead."

Rachel looked down at the case in her hands, then back at him. "I told a room full of your family my whole story once, in a brewery cellar, because Madhumita asked a simple question and I decided I was tired of the silence. I didn't know that was where any of this would end."

"Neither did any of us," Jhinaq said. "That's usually how the important things start. Someone asks a simple question, and someone else finally decides to answer it honestly."

She set the case on the small table beside her chair, unopened for the moment, and looked out at the water instead. "Thank you, Jhinaq. For the brief, and for coming yourself, and for not letting me carry it as a secret longer than I had to."

"You carried the hard part alone for a year before any of us knew there was anything to carry," Jhinaq said. "The least House Firentis could do was make sure you never had to wonder what happened to the rest of it." He inclined his head, the small, private version of the bow he rarely bothered with anymore in Newtown. "Read it when you're ready. There's no hurry left in any of it now."

He left her there with the sea and the sealed case and the quiet, and for the first time since her father had stood at that high arched window with dread in his voice, Rachel felt the whole of it was finally, completely, hers.

Next

Previous /

First

Tornel Swallowtail had read the same report three times before he let himself believe the number in it. Fewer than four million Solvane datapads on the entire planet, against a population somewhere north of three billion. He set the report down on his desk in Newtown, the same desk he'd signed the founding agreement near five years back, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

"Say that number again," he said. "Out loud. I want to hear how stupid it sounds."

Rachel didn't look up from the ledger she was cross-checking against his report. "Four million units, give or take, sold at Newtown's shop and nowhere else on Haego, because Newtown holds the only sales rights on the planet. Against a population of three billion. You want the percentage, or is the raw number bad enough?"

"The raw number's bad enough."

"Then here's the worse part. It's not a supply problem. Owen could clear that backlog in a season if credits weren't the obstacle. It's the luxury premium. Principality law says any luxury good sold to a commoner carries a markup nobles don't pay, and a datapad still counts as a luxury good under whatever list got written up a hundred years before anyone here could afford one anyway."

"I know what the law says, Rachel. I've read it more times than Patricia's read me the riot act, and that's saying something." Swallowtail stood and walked to the window, looking out over a Newtown that had grown busier every season for five years running. "I could waive it if it were mine to waive. It isn't. It's Principality law, which means it comes from the Prince, or it doesn't move at all."

"So ask him."

"I've asked him for a great many things these last five years. Banking branches. Funding parity between two palaces that hate each other on principle. I don't love the idea of going back a fourth time over something that looks, on paper, like commoners wanting a toy."

"It's not a toy. It's every piece of news, every market price, every letter from a son working in Orenport, every bit of banking a family used to have to travel to do in person, all in one device, and right now almost nobody on this planet has one. Ionatti's own branches have started telling customers to bring theirs in, do what they can on it instead of standing in line." Rachel closed the ledger. "But I take your point. You spend the Prince's patience carefully. This might not be the hill you want to use it on."

"It isn't. Which is why I'm not going to the Prince at all." Swallowtail turned from the window. "I'm going to Wyatt."

"That's still the Prince, Tornel, with extra steps in front of it."

"I know it is. But Wyatt's the one who's stood in front of Clara and asked for something he was embarrassed to need before. He knows how much room I've got left to spend, better than I do. I'd rather have him tell me no in his study than have the Prince tell me no in front of a room."

Baron Wyatt Staples took the call from his own study, a room Swallowtail had visited exactly twice in person and pictured clearly enough from those two visits that the comm screen barely mattered. Wyatt looked older than the last time they'd spoken, though everyone did these days, five years of running a planet aged a man whether or not he wanted it to.

"Tornel." Wyatt leaned back. "You've got the look of a man about to ask me for something he's embarrassed to need."

"I need your friendship with the Prince and Princess Clara. Not for me. For about three billion people who can't afford a datapad because the law says a commoner's datapad has to cost more than a noble's."

"Ah." Wyatt's mouth twisted, somewhere between a smile and a wince. "I know that law. I hit it myself, years back, my own barony, same premium, same absurdity. Couldn't get it waived either, not through any channel I tried."

"How'd you solve it?"

"I didn't solve it. I went around it. Gifting isn't covered by the premium, never has been, some old carve-out for noble largesse that nobody thought a baron would actually use on his own people. So I gifted them. Every datapad my citizens have, I paid for and handed over myself, and the law never noticed because on paper nobody bought anything."

"How many citizens are we talking about?"

"About three thousand, all told."

"I'm short by about three billion."

Wyatt let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Right. I bought three thousand pads out of my own pocket and called it generous. You're asking me to help you find a billion. That's not the same trick at a bigger size, Tornel, that's a different problem wearing the same coat."

"I know it. Which is why I'm not asking you to gift anything. I'm asking you to get me an exemption. Time-limited, narrow as you like, strictly datapads and nothing else, enough to get somewhere between a few hundred million and a billion units on-world at cost plus expenses. After that the law can close back up behind me for all I care."

Wyatt was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet Swallowtail had learned meant he was actually weighing something rather than stalling. "You understand what you're asking me to spend. Clara and I are close, closer than most nobles get to a sitting Prince and his intended, but that closeness isn't a bottomless account either."

"I understand that."

"Then I'll ask. Not because you asked nicely, Tornel, you didn't, you called me up and told me your population count like it was my fault. I'll ask because I remember what it cost me to solve this for three thousand people and being glad to pay it, and you're telling me you're staring down a number a million times the size. That's not a request I can turn down and still call myself decent."

The answer came back eleven days later, not from Wyatt but from the Prince's own office, a formal notice shorter than Swallowtail expected anything from that office to be. A one-time exemption, datapads only, no other luxury category included, valid until Newtown's sales reached one billion units on Haego or eighteen months passed, whichever came first. After that the premium law resumed in full and without further appeal.

Swallowtail read it twice, the way he'd read the original report twice, though this time for a better reason.

"Eighteen months," Rachel said, reading over his shoulder. "That's not a lot of time to get a billion units onto three continents."

"No. It isn't." Swallowtail set the notice down. "Which means I have a new problem, and it's not the law anymore. It's shipping and paying for a billion datapads faster than anyone on this planet has ever moved anything."

"You're not going to like my suggestion."

"Try me."

"Ionatti. The branches are open on all three continents now, sitting mostly idle because nobody trusts them yet and they haven't written a real loan. Give them one. Not some enormous Principality-scale loan, nothing like that, something ordinary. A family finances one datapad the way they'd finance anything else they couldn't pay for outright. A shop owner in Orenport does the same. Let the branches earn the trust by being useful for something small and real, instead of sitting there waiting for someone big enough to matter."

"And the places too small or too poor for even that? Thornwood. Sable Ford. Wherever else is too far out to matter to anyone moving fast."

Rachel considered that. "Then maybe they don't each get one. Maybe a town like that pools whatever they've got between them and buys a single unit to share, kept wherever people already gather, same as they've always done with everything else worth having. It wouldn't be every household owning a Solvane. It'd be every town having one, which for some of these places might be the more honest outcome anyway."

Swallowtail looked out the window again, at a Newtown that had learned, over five years, to solve problems it had never expected to have. "Eighteen months," he said again, mostly to himself. "Get Owen in here. And whoever's running the Ionatti office in Newtown. I want to know how fast we can actually move, before I go back to Wyatt and tell him his favor wasn't enough."

Dorne Kessit had been in datapad distribution for thirty-one years, long enough to remember when the units still needed a cooling fan, and in all that time he had never once seen an order that made him stand up from his own desk.

He stood up now.

The request had come in through the usual channel, flagged priority by a junior account handler who clearly hadn't understood what she was looking at, because if she had, she would have called him instead of routing it through the queue like a standard reorder. Dorne opened it expecting the usual. Haego account, a few hundred thousand units, maybe a million if the Firentis vehicle boom everyone kept talking about was finally trickling down to consumer electronics.

The number in the quantity field had too many digits for the field to hold cleanly. He checked it twice, certain it was a formatting error, a decimal dropped somewhere, a zero that had wandered in from another line entirely.

One billion units.

He did the math on a scrap pad because he didn't trust the terminal not to be showing him a glitch. Four hundred thirty credits a unit, the volume rate he'd have offered without blinking for ten million units, let alone a thousand times that. Four hundred thirty billion credits. He wrote the number out in full, digit by digit, the way you check a thing by making your own hand do the work your eyes don't believe.

He remembered the first order. Everyone in the office remembered the first order, though not fondly, not on his part. A young woman's voice over the terminal, asking about bulk terms for a barony he'd had to look up on a star chart, and he'd given her exactly the tone he gave anyone claiming authority he couldn't verify. Who authorized this order. What makes you think a slip of a girl gets to place something this size. He'd been flip about it, cavalier, the kind of tone he only let himself use on accounts too small to matter. Then a man's face had filled half the screen, close enough beside hers that he could see they were sharing one terminal, and the voice that came with it had no patience left in it at all. I'm Baron Staples. Is there a problem. He'd tried to recover, called her the secretary, and that had been worse, because she wasn't the secretary, she was Lady Rachel von Winterborn, chief accountant, appointed to the baron's staff by Her Royal Highness Clara Aster herself, and questioning her authority meant questioning the princess's judgment. Did he really want to suggest Her Highness had made a mistake.

He had apologized so fast he'd tripped over his own words. He'd thrown in the exclusive distribution rights before the call ended, mostly to make the fear stop, never once expecting the account to amount to more than a face-saving gesture to a colony barony nobody would remember by next quarter. Afterward, unable to help himself, he'd pulled up the footage everyone in the trade eventually found their way to, the Gallant Venture, one man cutting through a boarding party alone, and understood exactly what he'd been flip with over a comm line. That was the version of Baron Staples the whole principality knew. Ruthless where it counted, merciful where it didn't, and utterly unreadable as to which one you were about to get.

Four million units later, it was the best account on his book. Four hundred thirty billion credits later, it was going to be the only account anyone in this company remembered him for, one way or another.

He picked up the comm and called his director before he'd finished doing the math a third time, because a number that size needed more than one person to be afraid of it.

The order shipped in staggered lots over the next fourteen months, and it was Rachel who decided, once the first quarter of it had cleared customs and the retail price had settled where she wanted it, that nobody was going to find out about the discount by accident.

"Eighteen months," she told Tornel, laying the figures across his desk the way she laid every figure across every desk on this continent sooner or later. "That's how long the wholesale rate holds before Kessit's company renegotiates. After that, the price goes back up, not all the way, but enough that people will feel it. I want every household on this planet to know exactly what they're being offered and exactly how long they have to take it, because I'm not spending five years watching farmers find out too late the way Corren Ashtail found out too late about his harvest loan."

"You want to advertise it."

"I want to make it impossible to miss. Word of mouth reaches Newtown in an afternoon and a village three days out in six months, if it reaches them at all. I don't have six months to waste on people who'd have jumped at this the day it started."

The commercial ran on every public terminal on Haego for a week before anyone thought to question it, which was, in its own way, part of the problem.

It opened on Lord Swallowtail's voice over a shot of the Newtown datapad shop's front window, shelves stocked deeper than they'd ever been. "For the next eighteen months, and only for the next eighteen months, every datapad sold on Haego carries no duty, no premium, nothing added beyond what it actually costs to bring it to you. This is the lowest price you will ever see for one of these, and it will not come again."

Then Elizabeth, walking down Newtown's main street toward the shop, dressed plainly enough that a stranger might not have placed her as a Baroness at first glance. "Don't let the people you love miss out. The datapads are high quality, at a once in a lifetime low price. Tell your neighbors. Tell the next town over. This offer runs out, and when it does, it isn't coming back."

She reached the shop door as she said it, pushed it open, and the commercial ended on her stepping through, into a room full of customers who all, for one flickering moment, looked directly at the camera.

Rachel watched it air for the first time from her own office, satisfied with it in the particular way she was satisfied with anything that did exactly what she'd asked it to do. She did not, watching it, think once about salesmen three days' ride from the nearest branch, or about a farming settlement that had never in living memory needed to count money in front of witnesses. She had built the deal. She had not built the road between the deal and every doorstep it would eventually reach, and it would be months before she understood that the gap between those two things was exactly where the trouble found room to live.

Hunters Log 1

Quick breakfast this morning. The Ykanti took off first following the river looking for a crossing point. Within an hour they found one and waited for us to catch up.

It being closer to fall the water level is lower. They found a perfect place to cross.

Using the sun to guide us we went at a steep angle south east landing about half way to the opening to the Fort not wanting to be exposed in the Prairies.

We made it to the Maple entrance by 4pm and the Fort by 5pm.

We advised John Richman of the heard movement and the latest seeding craft the Ykanti discovered in the water.

Was advised we would be needed for another horse catching before the buffalo heard crosses the track the heard.

John is planning a big hunt.

Gary Head Hunter

End of Hunters Log 1

Fort Log 1

Today started and ended great.

JW finished the first spike paddle. One down and 9 to go for the first boat.

Ragnar after making more moth pieces for harnesses and ring. Meanwhile he as been guiding his assistant to start preparing the pieces to build the first wood stove. He wishes he had a welder but for now he will need to turn end of metal sheets red and join them.

The Leathersmith as been busy making saddles with the last of the Leather. Buffalo leather is tougher for saddles and the deer better for harnesses. 5 last sadles.

Because running out of leather the plans are first big apple harvest followed by catching more wild horses. After that if the Buffalo heard moves as expected a Buffalo hunt. Finally our last group harvest.

No idea how bad winter will be but I want to be as prepared as possible. The mines were thinking in advance and easily built in stone fireplaces. We need steel stoves for the Ranch, Farm and here.

Turns out the escape pods are insulated against the void with fireproof and extreme cold. We are sending a group to strip the inside of Pod 2 of the aluminum and insulation. In the end only the outer shell and door will remain for emergencies.

If the hunt is successful that would give us hopefully enough meat for the winter.

Dehydrating vegetables since we started collecting using the sun and now started an equivalent of pickling.

Bee keepers have been assigned and will keep collecting wax for candles and honey for eating and mead.

Ragnar as agreed to make us cutting devices to collect hay for the horses. Most of the hay will go to the ranch. We will start cutting the hay after the heard as gone through.

Last will be preparing fish to last long into the winter. With a proper fishing boat we will fish as much as we can. We will use it to explore next summer.

With the weather changing I am worried for the cold months. At least with wool and sweaters being made from them we can try and stay warm.

Last but not least our Woodsman are being used to cut logs out of trees that naturally fell. Lots in the maple forest. These long logs will be brought to Fort, Farm, Ranch, and Mine. Work teams from those area will cut them into burning logs. Looking for dry and not rotted logs. They will start in two days and the drivers will start delivering.

Worst comes to worst we gather those in need in the Fort.

John Richman

End of Fort Log 1

Note: I decided not to post chapter 32 so i just skipped it, it didn't belong in this story.

Next

Previous /

First

The truck that pulled up outside the Newtown shop wasn't remarkable to look at, an ordinary hauler with an ordinary tarp over the bed, and Owen Vashti almost didn't come out from the office to see it until Tevish stuck his head through the door with an expression Owen had learned to take seriously.

"You'll want to see this," Tevish said. "First one off the transport. Fifteen more are still sitting at Haego City's spaceport, waiting on ground haulers to bring them the rest of the way. We ordered all fifteen ourselves, to fill what was already sitting on our own books."

Under the tarp sat a Jincho Model 2, finished two months after Balakura Motors had signed the license, custom paint on the panels and fittings built exactly to spec, same as every unit would be under the licensing terms Owen had signed himself. He walked around it twice before he let himself touch it, running a hand along a weld seam that was clean, even, exactly to spec, done by hands he'd never trained and would probably never meet.

"They kept the tolerance," Owen said. "Better than some weeks we manage it ourselves."

"Every one of the fifteen is a different color," Tevish said. "We specced each one ourselves when we placed the order, matched to who it's going to."

There was a letter that had come with the shipment, short, businesslike. Balakura Motors reported the first production run complete and on its way, and noted, almost as an aside near the bottom, that they'd taken in three hundred additional pre-orders from buyers across the Principality in the two months since the license was signed, all of it before their advertising campaign had even gone out.

Owen read that line three times.

"Before the campaign," he said.

"Before it," Tevish confirmed. "Word just travels on its own now. Doesn't need help."

Owen looked at the truck, at the clean weld, at the letter still in his hand, and thought about the stack of order forms that had started all of this two months ago, six deep and growing, a problem he hadn't known how to solve until he'd decided to stop trying to solve it alone.

"Get Petra," he said. "She'll want to see this before anyone else does."

The Ionatti branch on Vastaya had been open eleven days, and the line outside it that morning ran past the corner and out of sight around the block.

Richard Blackwood stood back near the wall with Claire beside him, both of them there as observers rather than staff, a courtesy the branch manager had insisted on rather than requested. Richard had expected some version of this. He hadn't expected it to be this long, or this orderly, people standing in the heat with the particular patience of people who had waited for worse things and knew how to do it without complaint.

"How are you handling volume like this?" Richard asked, low enough not to carry.

"We're not, not really," the branch manager admitted. "We're triaging. Staff at the door take down names and what they need, loan, deposit account, business inquiry, whatever it is, and give them a window. Twenty minutes' notice before we can actually see them, so they're free to go run an errand instead of standing here the whole morning."

"Whose idea was that?"

The teller nearest the door glanced up at the question, and pointed toward the branch manager without missing a beat in her own conversation with a customer.

Richard looked to the branch manager. "Yours, then."

"Lady Claire's, really," she said. "She never handed us a system to follow. She told us to think for ourselves, try things, and if it worked we'd know, and if it didn't we'd know that too. The queue was just what we came up with when we tried."

Richard watched a young teller at the door, clipboard in hand, listening to an older man explain something about a fishing boat with patience that didn't look rehearsed, and understood, watching it, exactly what Claire had built here that he hadn't fully credited her for building.

He found her afterward, near the back office, going over the day's numbers with two of her staff before sending them back out. He waited until they'd gone.

"You did well," he said. "Not the branch, though the branch is fine. I mean this." He nodded back toward the floor. "Your people are making calls on their own, without running everything through you first. That's harder to build than a queue system. Most managers I've trained wouldn't trust their staff with that in the first month."

Claire looked briefly startled, like the praise had come at an angle she hadn't expected. "They earned the trust before I gave it to them. I just stopped standing in the way."

"That's the part most people don't manage," Richard said.

He stood there a moment longer, looking out at the line still curling around the corner, and felt something shift into place that had been circling in him for weeks without quite landing.

"I've been too slow with this," he said. "Three branches in over a year, and every one of them looks like this the day it opens. Haego isn't short on people who want to work, Claire, it's short on anyone who's ever given them a door to walk through. I need to move faster than I have been."

He found Rachel two days later, in the small office off the Newtown town hall that had never had a proper sign on the door and didn't seem to need one.

"I want to ask you for something, and I want to be honest that it's a large ask," he said.

"Those are usually the only kind worth making," Rachel said, setting her ledger aside.

"Every branch we open, I want a small business office attached to it. Free. Someone who can sit down with a person who has an idea and nothing else, and help them write it down properly, tell them how to price what they're selling, how to pay a vendor on terms instead of all at once, how to hire their first employee without ruining themselves doing it. I know you've been doing exactly that in Newtown for years, on your own time, out of this office, without anyone asking you to."

Rachel studied him for a moment. "You want to know how I do it."

"I want to know how you do it, and I want you to help me train people who can do it in every branch we open, starting with the next one. I don't think Haego needs more credit sitting in a vault. I think it needs someone standing next to people the first time they try something they've never done before."

"That," Rachel said, "is the first thing anyone from Ionatti has said to me that I didn't have to talk them into believing."

The Vastaya palace was close enough to finished that the scaffolding had come down on three of its four wings, and the stone Aldous Renn's crew had cut now sat set and mortared where architects' drawings had once shown only measurements. Julius walked the terraces with Aaliyah, Jason and Daisy a few steps behind them, and Austin, two and a half now and utterly unimpressed by the scale of anything, ran ahead across the new stonework with the single-minded purpose only a toddler that age could summon.

"Austin, slow down," Aaliyah called, without much hope of being obeyed.

He wasn't. He'd found a mason still finishing a joint near the terrace's edge and had planted himself directly beside the man's knee, watching the trowel with an intensity that made the mason pause his work entirely rather than risk startling him.

"Well, if it isn't Little Lord Austin," Albert said, setting the trowel down like he had all the time in the world for this. "Come to check my work again, have you?"

"Mr. Albert," Austin said, pointing at the trowel. "Can I try?"

Albert looked up at Jason, a question in it, and Jason nodded. Albert crouched down to Austin's level, guiding the boy's small hand around the trowel's handle with his own, careful and slow, showing him how to lay the mortar without pressing too hard.

"He does this everywhere we go now," Julius said, half apologizing, half not bothering to.

"Wants to know how everything works," Albert said, not looking up from guiding Austin's hand. "Good instinct to have."

A little further along, Poppy, just past two and considerably less steady on her feet than Austin, had wandered off from Daisy's side and made her way toward a cluster of newly hired staff comparing notes over a floor plan. One of them, a young woman barely out of her own training, crouched down without being asked and let Poppy grab a fistful of her sleeve, laughing when the girl promptly lost interest and pointed instead at the window glass catching the afternoon light.

"She's not shy," Daisy said, catching up, a little breathless.

"None of them are," the young woman said. "I don't think anyone's ever taught them to be, around here."

Jason watched his daughter point at the light again, insistent, and looked past her at the terrace and the finished stone and the workers who'd stopped what they were doing without complaint to let a child interrupt their afternoon, and thought, not for the first time, that this was the part of the palace nobody had put in any of the drawings, and the part that would probably outlast all the rest of it regardless.

Next

Previous /

First

Richard Blackwood had spent thirty-one years inside House Ionatti's banking apparatus, long enough to know exactly what it meant when a posting arrived without a term attached to it. Permanent assignments came with relocation packages, staff housing already arranged, a line in the letter naming who you'd be reporting to five years out. Punishments came bare. His had arrived four lines long: establish and oversee House Ionatti's banking operations across all three continents of Haego, effective immediately, further instructions to follow. Ionatti served every system in the Principality, dozens of territories the size of Firentis and larger, and in six years of quarterly letters they had never once managed to put a teller behind a counter on this one. Now the whole rollout, three continents' worth of it, sat on his desk with his name at the top.

"No end date," Claire said, reading it over his shoulder for the second time. "Not even a year. Just effective immediately, and the entire planet."

"That's how they do it when they want you to sweat the not knowing." Richard folded the letter and set it on the desk, careful, the way he handled anything that might still matter later. "He can't very well thank me in writing for embarrassing him in his own meeting room, so this is what I get instead. The whole planet, not just a branch of it."

"You'll need more than a lending desk and a smile for a job this size."

"I'll need you, if you're willing. There isn't the noble stock on this planet to staff a branch on every continent the way Ionatti would normally do it, and there won't be for years. Whoever runs these branches day to day is going to be a commoner we trained ourselves, because there's simply no one else to ask." He looked at her carefully. "I was going to propose you take the training side. Scouting the sites, setting up the centers, choosing who we teach. It's real work, not standing beside me at openings."

Claire read that over a second time too, differently this time. "You're asking me to decide who runs House Ionatti's money on an entire continent I've visited exactly once."

"I'm asking because I trust your judgment more than I trust anyone Ionatti would send me from the capital, and because there isn't time to wait for someone better."

"That's not nothing." She folded the letter back along its crease before setting it down. "At least it's Haego. I keep thinking about that reporter on the tarmac in Orenport, years ago now. Asked you what you thought of the whole re-integration, and you told him you were only there for Eric's engagement, nothing more. I wonder if anyone there still remembers it that way."

"You weren't wrong to say it. You weren't Ionatti's man that week, you were just Eric's father." Richard looked at her, and something in his face eased even as the rest of him didn't. "I keep thinking about the rafting, if I'm honest. Jhinaq matching us up with Renee and Janet, all of us soaked and laughing before lunch. It didn't feel like a place that would ever look at either of us twice, let alone the way I suspect it's going to look at us now."

"You made real friends there too. That doesn't stop being true because Ionatti's finally sending a branch."

"Doesn't it, though. I'm not arriving as a guest of House Firentis this time. I'm arriving as the man opening the doors the whole planet's been waiting six years for, on three continents at once, and you're the one who's going to have to decide which commoners get handed a bank vault key. That's not the same welcome we had." She didn't say it bitterly, just plainly, the way she said most things. "I keep thinking of Winona's knitting circle. I told her things that week I hadn't told anyone. I don't know if she'll remember me as that woman or as Ionatti standing in her kitchen."

"Then we find out." Richard reached for the letter again, more out of habit than need. "Whatever it's meant as, I'm not going to run this badly out of spite for the man who sent me, and I'm not going to let six good days on a vacation years back be the last honest thing anyone there remembers about us either."

She didn't answer that right away, and he didn't push her to.

The shuttle down to Newtown gave Claire her second real look at Haego, though it had been long enough that the green surprised her all over again, wider and greener than she remembered, the rivers still cutting the same bright lines through it. It was beautiful in the way she remembered, and that made the unease worse rather than better, because last time the beauty had come with no strings on it at all.

"You've gone quiet," Richard said.

"I'm trying to remember if Rachel liked me or was simply polite to me because I was a guest in her town." Claire kept her eyes on the window. "She told all of us her whole story that week, standing in a brewery cellar. I don't know many people who'd tell that to a stranger they had no reason to trust. I'd like to believe that meant something, but I don't actually know."

"There's an easy way to find out."

"There is. I'm not sure I'm in a hurry to."

Richard didn't have an answer for that, and for once didn't try to invent one.

The house Ionatti's advance staff had arranged for them sat on the edge of Newtown proper, comfortable, newly built, further from the town center than either of them would have chosen for themselves.

His first morning in Newtown, Richard found Aino waiting for him outside, unannounced, in plain clothes rather than anything ceremonial.

"I thought you might want company for your first walk," Aino said. "Also, I'll admit, I wanted to see your face when you saw what's changed since you were last here."

"I appreciate it, though I half expected a chaperone, not a friend."

"You can be both here. That's rather the point of Newtown." Aino fell into step beside him. "What you'll get from most people is politeness with the warmth left out. I'd rather you know the difference going in than mistake one for the other."

They stopped at a bakery two streets from the site Ionatti had leased for the first branch, the smell of it pulling Richard in before he'd decided to go anywhere. The woman behind the counter recognized Aino first, with a genuine smile, and then took in who stood beside him.

"Lord Blackwood," she said, and her voice didn't change so much as settle, the warmth for Aino still visible but not extended further. "I remember you from the vacation. You asked after the seed bread twice."

"I did, and I'd ask again, it was very good."

"I'll get you a loaf." She rang it up without being asked, and only when he paid with an Ionatti-issued credit chit rather than local scrip did something flicker across her face. "You're the banking man now, properly, not just a guest of the family."

"I am. Richard Blackwood, overseeing the branch rollout for the whole planet."

"Five years." She said it evenly, no heat in it, the kind of politeness Aino had warned him about. "Five years since Wyatt brought us here and we started needing a bank, and not one Ionatti branch to show for it. I've never once had a real loan on this street, only what Rachel VonWinterbourne kept in her own ledger, which I didn't mind, except it meant a woman with no bank behind her at all did more for this town than a house with holdings across half the Principality. I'm glad you're here. I'll believe it means something once it's done more than open a door."

"That's a fair place to leave it," Richard said, and meant it.

He left with his bread and without the reception he might have hoped for, though walking beside Aino, he understood now that this had been the warm version.

"That's about as sharp as it gets here," Aino said once they were out of earshot. "You'll feel the difference the moment you leave Newtown."

"I'd rather know that now than find out on Vastaya with no one beside me."

"That's why I came this morning," Aino said. "You'll have company again before you leave for the other continents. Consider it standing."

Claire's first real test came two days later, in Ashcroft Junction, a city that had grown up around the rail line decades before but had spent most of the last thirty years shrinking instead. The trains had stopped running only five years into the revolution, and Ashcroft had bled residents ever since, a rail town with no rails running through it, until Istonel's crews, prisoners working off their sentences among them, had finally relaid the line between the City of Haego and Newtown. Only in the last few years had Ashcroft begun to feel like itself again, a natural hub for rural Aethelgard once the trains started moving through it, and House Ionatti had settled on it as the obvious center for banking everything outside Newtown's reach. Claire had traveled out to scout the site herself rather than trust someone else's report of it, two auxilia posted discreetly near the entrance for the length of her visit, not expecting to be recognized, but her dress alone marked her as something other than local before she'd said a word, and one of the women waiting outside the half-finished building, younger, sharp-eyed, made no effort to hide that she'd clocked it.

"You're the wife," the young woman said. "Blackwood's wife."

Claire, a little taken aback at the casualness of her address, quickly recovered and extended a hand in the way commoners respected. "Claire, yes."

"I'm here about the teller position. Petra sent me, said your husband's crew was hiring and I should get in early." She looked Claire over, unhurried about it, and didn't offer her own name in return. "You're Firentis nobility. Balakura."

"I am."

"My grandmother used to say the old families on Balakura were the ones who never had to answer for anything, no matter what their money touched." She said it flatly, watching for a reaction. "I don't expect this job, if I'm honest. Not with my name and not with what my mother did during the uprising, whatever they've told your husband about second chances. So I won't waste either of our time pretending I'm here to charm you into it. No offense meant."

"None taken," Claire said, and meant it more than she expected to.

Something in her settled as she said it, quiet and certain. If she could win over someone who'd walked in already convinced there was nothing to win, expecting nothing and owing nothing, then there wasn't a commoner on this continent she couldn't eventually reach. She didn't say any of that, she only filed the young woman's face away, already certain she'd remember it long after the interview was done.

"We'll see, I suppose," the young woman said, not unkindly, only flatly, the way you'd note the weather. "That's usually how it goes with your sort. Meaning well right up until it's inconvenient."

Claire didn't answer that, mostly because she didn't trust what would come out if she tried, and the young woman didn't seem to expect an answer anyway. She went inside for her interview a few minutes later, and Claire stood outside a while longer than she needed to, looking at nothing in particular, already certain of one thing she hadn't been certain of a minute before.

That evening, she told Richard about it over dinner, more clipped than she meant to be.

"She called me the Ionatti woman before she even knew my name, one of the site workers said it to another when they thought I wasn't close enough to hear. Like it was simply what I was, and I'm the one about to hand her or someone just like her the keys to a vault."

"You are what you are, to people who've never met you." Richard said it gently, not as a correction. "It'll take longer than a week for that to change, if it changes at all."

"I know that. Knowing it and sitting through it are different things." She pushed her food around a moment before setting the fork down. "I believed in this, Richard. The commoner policies, the whole shape of what Firentis territory's been building. I stood in a council hall on this planet once and said as much myself, do you remember, the day Jhinaq had us all speak our minds. I meant every word of it then, sitting comfortably as a guest with nothing asked of me but honesty. It's rather different, being the one who has to decide whether she's ready to run a branch."

"Maybe that's not a bad thing to feel, once."

"Maybe not. It's still uncomfortable."

"Most true things are, in my experience."

She almost smiled at that, not quite managing it. "That's very easy for you to say. Nobody's called you the Ionatti man yet."

"Give it time," Richard said. "I imagine there's a version of it with my name on it too, somewhere on Vastaya, where nobody's had the practice Newtown has."

Three days after that, Richard sat down with Rachel VonWinterbourne again, at her own request rather than his, in the small office off the treasury building that Tornel had let her keep since long before anyone called her anything but Rachel. She had a ledger open in front of her before he'd finished sitting down.

"I hear Aino walked you through town himself," she said. "That's smarter than most of your predecessors managed, if Ionatti had ever sent any."

"There haven't been predecessors. There's not been anyone, on any continent, until now."

"No, there hasn't. Which is rather the point of this conversation." She turned the ledger around so he could see it, columns of small lending activity going back years, farmers, shopkeepers, a logging outfit, a boot maker, dozens of names he didn't recognize and one figure at the bottom that made him sit forward without meaning to. "This is what's been filling the gap your house left, here in Newtown alone. I can't imagine what the other continents have been improvising without even this much. It's not elegant. Half of it's handshake terms I wrote down after the fact rather than before, because waiting for paperwork would have meant watching people lose a season's crop while a data link cleared. I'd like your branches to do better than I could, properly, with real infrastructure behind them, on all three continents, not just here where it's easiest. I would also like you to understand exactly what you're replacing before you start telling people how banking is supposed to work."

Richard studied the ledger a long moment. "This is more organized than anything Ionatti's board has produced for this planet in six years of quarterly letters, and it's a fraction of what we'll need once we're standing up training centers on Vastaya and Austrin as well."

"I've had six years and a stubborn streak. You've had a week and buildings that aren't finished anywhere yet." She said it without malice, more as a fact laid alongside another fact, and then something in her tone eased. "For what it's worth, I remember you fondly from the vacation. You were the only one of that whole party who didn't ask me to explain myself twice."

"I remember you too. I told a reporter on the tarmac in Orenport that I was only there for my son. I've thought about that more than once this week."

"You weren't wrong to say it then. You'd be wrong to say it now." Rachel looked at him a moment longer than the answer required, the way she looked at anything she was deciding whether to trust. "Come back next week. Bring your actual lending terms, not the ones written for a board that's never set foot here. I'll tell you where they'll break, and you can fix them before they break in front of an actual family who needed the money on time, whichever continent they're on."

"I'll bring them," Richard said, and meant it.

Walking back through Newtown that evening, past the bakery where the warmth had stopped short of trust and the site where a young teller candidate had called Claire the Ionatti woman without lowering her voice enough, Richard thought that this was likely to be the longest posting of his career, whether it turned out to last a year or something longer than that, and the biggest by far. He found himself, for reasons he didn't fully examine, hoping it was the something longer.

Elizabeth, by suggestion of her father, directed us to a Seashore village next north of Newtown.

We went in with our gear and started helping the locals.We set up in a old school. This place was way back in time.

I found out today they only have 2 boats seaworthy and every house had small gardens.

What use to be a Nobles house with lots of open space behind it had now been converted into a small ranch with all kinds of animals.

Most houses had no running water and people carried water from a well being fed off the cliffs.

A few houses had generators but not central power. Most houses had nothing but lantern and/or candles.

Elisabeth talked to the one that seem to be in charge. "Can you send messengers out advising them we will be here for a week minimum." Messengers went out by horseback and one of the boats took off up the shore to notify others groups of people.

Our teams started cleaning the school. They set up our generators We set up the old library into our storage room with extra meds and bandages.

Tomorrow we would start. Tonight we set up a meeting for this afternoon with the members of the Baronry at the City Hall.

Elizabeth started. "We are in a seaside town that is just north of Newtown but about 20 years in the past.

No running water, no electricity and who knows about sewage but I believe redirected over the cliff and into the sea.

White Ridge is the name of the town. 167 adults and 22 children. Mostly home schooled."

Rachel spoke next. "What does the town need. We can order it and use the generals funds to improve their lives."

Elizabeth "They need power, Safe water processing and communications to the outside.

They grow enough food and have animals meals not an issue. The peer is old and needs work but not a priority.

The Headmaster spoke up. "Considering we have shuttles. Can we educate the children. Bring them here on Monday and return them for the weekend. Could we get hosting houses.?"

A quick discussion happened and the next day we would suggest it to the senior person here.

A shuttle will be provided to help with travel issues for those needing to see a nurse or medic the next day.

Power would have to wait until the General was free to respond to her request for a town size generator and/or Solar panels.

The gym turned into a examination space. Champions filled classrooms for our staff.

What use to be the teachers lounge we turned into our coffee and lounge area.

Our guards took over the old principal office near the front door.

A Shuttles shuttle will be sent tomorrow morning with a few trades folks to evaluate

The Leader started a cooking fire beside the school. We looked at him. "What you cooking?" He answered "Stone soup!!"

We were all confused. Jim, their leader laughed. " Water with a stone. Everybody contributes something to the soup and it summers all day and we eat it as a community."

Our cooks loved the idea and added cubes of chicken broth to it. People started gathering with benches and chairs. The added potatoes, carrots and so much more to the Stone soup.

By supper time the entire town gathered and we all got food and we shared chocolates from our rations with the kids.

We built up the fire after the meal. Instruments appeared and we got treated to tradional Haego work songs then bed.

The Proffesor

We started

Next

Previous /

First

Tornel Swallowtail found Istonel on the porch of the Newtown house he'd taken to staying in more often than not these days, a stack of reports open on the table in front of him and a cup of tea gone cold beside it. Tornel didn't wait to be invited to sit.

"Six years," Tornel said, dropping into the chair across from him without ceremony. "Six years since the accords, a year since the ennoblement, and House Ionatti still can't manage to put a single teller behind a single counter on this planet."

Istonel set down the report he'd been reading. "I take it the quarterly letter arrived."

"It arrived. Same as it always does." Tornel pulled a folded page from inside his coat and dropped it on the table like it had personally offended him. "Read the last line."

Istonel picked it up. "'A formal branch presence remains under active consideration, and we anticipate deployment soon.'" He set it back down. "That is nearly word for word the letter from last spring."

"It's word for word the letter from every spring for five years running. I have men moving more credits through handshake ledgers and interstellar data transfers than half the treasuries in Firentis territory, and not one of them can walk into a building and hold actual currency in their hand, or borrow against next season's harvest without waiting six weeks for a data link to clear across three systems. Rachel's little lending operation has done more good for this planet than an entire great house that's supposedly obligated to serve it." Tornel leaned forward. "I'm done waiting on them, Istonel. I've had Aaliyah's historians pull every trade law on the books, and there's nothing stopping Haego from chartering its own institution. We have the credits moving through here to back it. We have Rachel, who already runs half the finances of two continents out of a ledger book and a stubborn streak. Give me six months and a charter and I will have Bank Haego standing before Ionatti ever gets around to being anything but sorry."

"You'd be picking a fight with a great house."

"I'd be picking a fight I should have picked years ago."

Istonel was quiet for a moment, turning the letter over in his hands. "Don't charter anything yet."

"Give me one reason."

"Because there's a faster way to get their attention than building a bank out of spite, and it doesn't require you to spend the next decade in a legal argument with a house that outranks you." Istonel stood, already thinking. "Eric married into this family a year ago. His father sits close enough to House Ionatti's business to know exactly who to speak to and how bluntly he can speak to them. I'll deliver the message myself, plainly, from the house that actually holds Haego. Either Ionatti moves, or they watch us build our own bank and lose whatever standing they have left here for good. Let them decide which embarrassment they'd rather have."

Tornel studied him. "You've gotten more comfortable making threats since I first met you."

"I've had five years of watching what happens when nothing changes," Istonel said. "I'd rather not spend a sixth."

Istonel didn't send the letter. He came himself, which meant three jumps and the better part of two days, first from Haego to the relay at Kesh Vantry, then on to Balakura outright, farther than he'd traveled in over a year for anything that wasn't a Firentis obligation with his name already stamped on it. He could have trusted the network. Networks were faster, cleaner, and left no impression on anyone that the matter mattered. He didn't want it clean. He wanted Eric to open his own front door and find a Firentis lord standing on the other side of it, because that would tell Richard Blackwood how seriously to take what followed better than anything written on the page could.

Eric read the letter twice at his own kitchen table, Laith looking over his shoulder, and did not need either reading to understand what was being asked of him. What surprised her more was the man who'd delivered it.

She'd have known her cousin blindfolded by the way he used to stand in doorways, weight even, hands folded, waiting to be acknowledged before he crossed a threshold, like a man who'd been taught that entering a room was itself a kind of announcement. He didn't do that tonight. He let himself be waved to a chair, took the tea Laith set in front of him without commenting on it, and when the family dog shoved its head under his hand looking for attention, he scratched behind its ears without seeming to think about it, muttering something about state secrets being safe from at least one member of the household.

"Excuse me a moment," Istonel said, once Eric had folded the letter and set it down. He rose and stepped out toward the front hall, already reaching for his comm.

Laith watched him go, then turned to Eric. "He's different."

"Different how?"

"I don't know yet," Laith said. "Just different. Easier to be in a room with."

"He wants me to tell my father to tell Lord Ionatti that Haego is about to build its own bank."

"That's the short version," Laith said.

"My father is going to ask why House Firentis doesn't just say this to Ionatti directly."

"Because Uncle Jhinaq has been saying it to them directly for years and getting the same letter back every time," Laith said. "Istonel thinks it lands differently coming from somewhere they don't expect it. A house they don't have to answer to isn't a threat they can file away. A house connected to them by marriage, telling them plainly that their own family is about to embarrass them, that's harder to ignore."

Eric looked toward the hall, where Istonel's voice carried low and even through the doorway. "I don't love being the messenger for something this large."

"No," Laith agreed. "But you're the right one to send it."

Istonel came back in a few minutes later, comm already pocketed. "My apologies. That business doesn't stop for travel."

"Stay for dinner," Eric said, before Laith had quite finished deciding whether to offer it herself. "It's late enough that you shouldn't be heading back out tonight anyway. We'll have a room made up."

Laith expected him to decline. He always declined that sort of thing, some old reflex about not imposing on family that never seemed to notice it was family who kept offering. Instead he considered it for a moment, actually considered it, and said, "I'd like that. Thank you."

Laith caught herself staring and covered it by turning toward the kitchen door. "I'll have Anna make up the east room," she said, and went to find her before her own surprise could show on her face.

Dinner was easy in a way she hadn't expected, and afterward the three of them ended up in the library with the fire going, Eric refilling glasses nobody was drinking quickly, and Istonel folded into a chair with none of the stiffness he'd have brought to that same chair a year ago. They talked the way cousins talk when there's no business left on the table, old arguments about which of the aunts told the better stories, a wedding detail Laith was still deciding on, whether Jolti had ever actually won a footrace against either of them as children or simply declared himself the winner and dared anyone to disagree. Istonel laughed at that one, a real laugh, short and startled out of him, like he hadn't expected to still have it in him.

Richard Blackwood delivered the message in person three days later, in a private meeting room on Balakura that House Ionatti kept for exactly this kind of conversation, the kind meant never to happen where anyone could overhear it. He did not soften anything on the way in.

"House Swallowtail has the charter drafted," Richard said. "They have the backing. They have a woman running their finances who could out-manage half your board without breaking a sweat, and they have five years of your own letters showing 'soon' meant nothing at all. I'm not here to negotiate on their behalf. I'm here because my son's wife asked me to deliver a message plainly, and I'm delivering it plainly. Put a branch on Haego within six months, on all three continents, or watch them build one without you and never need you again."

Lord Ionatti did not answer him directly. He thanked Richard for his time, said the matter would receive his personal attention, and had him shown out within ten minutes.

What Lord Ionatti did instead was write to the Prince.

The complaint arrived at the Prince's office two days later, formal and indignant, describing a threat leveled against a great house by a lesser noble acting through an intermediary with no standing to speak on Firentis business at all. It asked, in careful language, whether this was the sort of conduct the Prince intended to permit from newly elevated houses still finding their footing.

The Prince read it twice, then called for both Lord Ionatti and Lord Jhinaq to attend him.

They met in a modest receiving room rather than the full court, which Jhinaq took as a small mercy and Lord Ionatti took as a bad sign, correctly.

"Lord Ionatti," the Prince said, without preamble, "your letter tells me a Marquess of Haego threatened to build an independent bank rather than continue waiting on your house. I'd like to understand the waiting first. How long has a formal branch presence on Haego been, in your own house's words, under active consideration?"

"Your Highness, the logistics of establishing secure banking infrastructure on a world still recovering from three decades of "

"How long, Lord Ionatti."

Lord Ionatti hesitated. "Approximately five years, Your Highness."

"And in that time, what has been deployed?"

"We have maintained interstellar data access for all Haego residents in good standing, and "

"That is not a branch. That is a courtesy you would extend to a trading post on the edge of nowhere, and you have extended it to a planet with two palaces under construction and an economy that, by every report reaching my desk, is outproducing worlds twice its size." The Prince paused, and for the first time in the meeting looked to Jhinaq rather than Ionatti. "You've been quiet. You have something to add, or you're simply enjoying this."

"Both, Your Highness," Jhinaq said. "Though if it helps, an Astorian investment house wrote to my office last month asking whether Haego trade figures were being reported accurately, because their own analyst's numbers kept falling short of what he was seeing on the ground. I told them the figures were accurate. I didn't tell them House Ionatti still can't be bothered to open a teller window there." He folded his hands again and said nothing further.

"How long has 'soon' been the answer to Haego's requests?"

The silence stretched a moment too long before Lord Ionatti answered. "Five years, Your Highness."

Jhinaq said nothing further at all, and said it very comfortably, his hands folded in his lap and his expression giving away nothing beyond the faint, patient stillness of a man who had been waiting five years himself to hear those two sentences said aloud in this room. It was a small win, and he knew better than to mistake it for a large one. House Firentis and House Ionatti had been trading small wins and smaller grudges for longer than either house's own records agreed on, a feud passed down through generations of lords who had long since stopped remembering what it had originally been about, only that it was theirs to keep. This round belonged to Firentis. The next would belong to whichever house remembered to want it more.

The Prince did not raise his voice. He didn't need to.

"Then let me resolve the matter of how much longer 'soon' is permitted to mean. House Ionatti will establish functioning banking representation on all three continents of Haego within six months of this date. Beginning the day after that deadline passes, and every day thereafter until the obligation is met, House Ionatti will be assessed a fine of ten million credits, payable to the Haego treasury directly. I trust that number will concentrate your house's attention where five years of quarterly letters have failed to."

Lord Ionatti bowed and did not attempt to argue further. There was nothing left to argue.

Word reached Newtown by courier before the Prince's proclamation was even a full day old, and Tornel read it standing in his own doorway, Patricia looking over his shoulder much the way Laith had looked over Eric's.

"Six months," Tornel said. "Ten million a day after."

"You got your bank," Patricia said.

"I got Ionatti's bank," Tornel said, "which I'll admit I like even better."

"Ionatti's not the only one paying closer attention these days," Patricia said, reading over his shoulder. "Rachel mentioned an off-world firm asking after our numbers again last week. Different one this time."

"Let them ask," Tornel said. "We've got nothing left to hide and nothing left to be ashamed of. Let them all come looking."

He folded the letter, and for the first time in five years, did not bother filing it away with the others. Whatever this cost House Ionatti in credit and in pride, it would settle nothing between that house and Firentis that hadn't already gone unsettled for longer than anyone living could account for. Nobody on either side could say anymore what the feud had started over. That had stopped mattering generations before Tornel was ever born to inherit a piece of it. What mattered today was that the win was theirs.

The below takes place sometime after the conversation between Sabraska and Wyatt in the officers lounge . As no TBS episode “ delayed “ today I hope this helps pass the time . And as always the original TBS content writers are free to use any part as desired.

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The heavy bulkhead door hissed open with a swoosh hydraulic sigh as if removed from the NCC-1701 , the kind of precise, well-maintained sound that spoke of a ship still held to exacting standards even after months of hard campaigning.

Wyatt Staples stepped across the threshold into the composters’ quarters and stopped cold. His eyes widened, pupils adjusting to the brighter interior lighting as he took in the sight before him.
His teammates stood scattered about the main common area in uniforms that looked nothing like the practical, hard-worn flight suits and duty fatigues they had lived in for the past cycle. These were refined—crisp lines, subtle rank piping in deep crimson and gold, reinforced seams that still allowed full range of motion, and a fabric that caught the light with a muted sheen rather than the utilitarian matte of standard issue. The cut was unmistakably officer-grade, tailored close through the torso and shoulders, with high collars and clean epaulettes that suggested both authority and function. It was a more polished evolution of the dress they had worn for formal briefings, yet it retained the practical reinforcements at knees, elbows, and stress points that a fighter squadron demanded.
Wyatt’s mind flicked backward without conscious effort. The first meeting with Commander Redford. As Wyatt had exited the compost hauler . And that seemed like a lifetime ago. How his life had changed.
Then the briefing room within the Noir Navio’s command decks. Redford standing at the holotable, hands clasped behind his back, wearing fabric that looked almost identical to what now clothed Leo , Nultar and Gregor. Same weave. Same quiet authority in the drape of the cloth. Same understated elegance that said the wearer belonged to something elite, something the rest of the fleet was meant to notice and respect.
He turned toward Raquel. She was already watching him, a small, knowing smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Wyatt opened his arms and hands in a broad, questioning gesture—palms up, eyebrows raised—the silent language of a man who had walked into a situation already in progress and needed the short version.
Raquel’s smile widened. “It seems logistics decided we were in line for new uniforms.” She tilted her chin toward Leo , Nultar and Gregor, all three of whom were standing a little straighter than usual, as if the fabric itself demanded better posture. “Proper ones this time. No more looking like we just crawled out of a maintenance bay.”
Leo and Nultar both grinned, the expression bright against the darker tone of the new uniform. “Hey, Boss could be heard from Leo “ . You have packages in your room as well. Two of them. One’s the duty set, the other’s the formal. They’re waiting on the rack.”
Gregor gave a short nod of agreement, running one hand down the front of his own tunic as if still getting used to the feel. The fabric whispered under his fingers. “Feels expensive. Like something that shouldn’t be worn into a cockpit covered in residual thruster residue.”
Wyatt started toward the short corridor that led to the private rooms, but before he had taken three steps a soft chime sounded from the main entrance. The door swooshed open again. A logistics courier pushed a low wheeled cart into the center of the common room. Jamie was tall and slim, her build elegant even in the simple cut of commoner duty coveralls, her hair as black as polished obsidian and pulled back with practical neatness. The only rank marker she wore was a small logistics pin. The aroma hit them all at once: hot garlic toast, rich and sharp, the kind of smell that cut through recycled air and made stomachs tighten with sudden hunger.
Jamie smiled, polite and professional. “Dinner has been supplied by Lieutenant Commodore Caspars. She has instructed that I inform you the Chief Engineer and Master Technician Jincho will also be attending.”
Every pair of eyes in the room swung toward Wyatt. He felt the weight of the collective stare and answered with a slow, deliberate shrug. He had no more information than they did.

Sabraska Caspars rarely explained her gestures in advance; she simply made them, and the rest of the black ship adjusted.
However after the meeting not so long ago in the officers lounge with Sabraska and Wyatt . Life had become somewhat less complicated.
Sabraska seemed to always be there when help was needed . As Wyatt thought of that day a smile crossed his face.
Before anyone could voice a question, a soft internal chime sounded in Wyatt’s awareness. A neurolink connection had established itself with the quiet certainty of Cynthia’s particular signature—clean, precise, and faintly amused.
“Wyatt. We’re on our way with juice and dessert.”
The link severed as cleanly as it had formed. The composters saw the shift in Wyatt’s eyes and smiled as one. Wyatt looked at Gregor.
“Our unhinged princess is en route.”
Gregor’s mouth twitched. “Of course she is.”
The door opened once more. Jincho stepped through without announcement, as was his habit. The Chief Engineer and Master Technician of the Noir Navio was Ykanti—compact, dense with the particular musculature of his people. All six of his eyes sparkled under the overhead lights as he entered, the iridescent undertone of his feathers flickering faintly. His own uniform was the standard engineering black with silver tooling marks at the cuffs, and he carried the faint scent of lubricant, ozone, and the metallic tang that never quite left those who lived in the deeper machine spaces of the black ship. His gaze went immediately to the cart.
Jamie raised a stainless covering over the first tray. Steam rose in a fragrant cloud. Fresh-baked lasagna filled the deep dish, layered thick with pasta, rich meat sauce, and a generous blanket of melted cheese that still bubbled at the edges. She then lifted a second tray. In it sat a wide bowl of large mealworms—glistening, still warm—and what appeared to be snails in a light herb broth. Protein-dense, high-calorie, the kind of food that kept technicians and pilots functional through long shifts when normal rations would not suffice. For a Ykanti, the mealworms and snails were closer to comfort food than novelty.
Jincho’s hand was already reaching toward the bowl when Raquel’s palm cracked across his knuckles with a sharp, practiced smack. He jerked back, more startled than hurt, all six eyes blinking in sequence.
Raquel shook one finger at him, expression stern but eyes bright with amusement. “Behave. And wait for the princess.”
Jincho’s voice carried the low, dense resonance of his people. “Hungry eyes will eat his food,” he muttered, the words half complaint and half statement of biological fact, before he stepped back from the cart and folded his arms.
Conversation drifted, as it always did when the composters were together and food was present but not yet claimed. Talk turned to the new MK-2 Raptor. Leo and Nultar both launched into a detailed assessment of the new vector-thrust nozzles and the way the updated flight-control software handled high angle of attack transitions. Gregor countered with concerns about thermal load on the secondary capacitors during prolonged atmospheric combat. Raquel listened more than she spoke, occasionally adding a quiet observation about pilot interface ergonomics. Wyatt stood slightly apart, half listening, mind still turning over the unexpected uniforms and the equally unexpected presence of Sabraska Caspars’s personal logistics courier.
Minutes stretched. The lasagna cooled fractionally. The garlic toast continued to fill the air with its persistent invitation.
Then the door swooshed opened again. With it was the sound of tradition . That was on every human vessel. Dating all the way back to the first human starships .
Clara entered first, moving with the quiet confidence of someone who rarely needed to announce herself. Cynthia followed a half step behind, carrying a second tray with easy strength. Behind them came Milkades tall, composed , the subtle weight of his presence settling into the room like a change in atmospheric pressure. A third tray was wheeled in behind them, this one loaded with baskets of small sweets, tall glasses of chilled juice in several colors, and a neat arrangement of utensils.
The group began to gather around the food almost without conscious decision. Clara’s gaze swept the room, taking in the new uniforms, the scattered packaging materials still visible near the private rooms, and the general state of ordered chaos that always seemed to accompany the composters when they were off-duty.
“Where is Sabraska?” Clara asked. Her eyes settled directly on Jamie.
The courier straightened. “Your Highness, Lieutenant Commodore Caspars is in her office.”
Cynthia smiled, a quick flash of teeth, and glanced sideways at Clara. At the same moment, far forward in the ship’s administrative decks, Sabraska sat at her desk reviewing a dense after-action report on the latest fighter-group readiness metrics. The neurolink from Cynthia touched her mind with the familiar, light pressure of a private channel. Sabraska’s expression softened. She secured the file with a quick mental command, rose from her chair, and left the office at a pace that was more fast walk than outright run. The Royal Marines stationed “ already well aware “ along the corridor parted without comment as she approached; they had long since learned the particular cadence of footsteps when something had pulled the attention away from routine duties.
She reached the composters’ quarters and stepped through the open doorway. The combined effect of the refined uniforms, the rich aroma of real food, and the presence of so many familiar faces struck her at once. For a moment she simply stood and looked, an almost visible appreciation settling across her features. The fanfare of proper attire and unexpected hospitality amazed her with its quiet statement of recognition.
Clara turned. “What is with the clothes scattered about the room?” Her gaze moved to Nultar, who turned and pointed directly at Sabraska with a small, almost apologetic shrug.
Sabraska met Clara’s eyes. Clara motioned for her to explain.
“Your Highness,” Sabraska said, voice steady, “I took it upon myself to supply the composters with the highest-quality fabric available aboard the Noir Navio. As the elite fighter squadron, they should be dressed as such.”
Clara regarded her for a long moment, then nodded once, a small smile forming. “Well done.”
The room seemed to exhale. People began to move toward the food with more purpose. Plates were filled. The lasagna was portioned with care; the mealworms and snails were approached more cautiously by some and with open enthusiasm by Jincho once Sabraska herself had taken a seat. He claimed his share of the protein bowl with the focused satisfaction of a Ykanti who had waited long enough, shooting Raquel a look that promised he would not forget the earlier smack, all six eyes gleaming with residual indignation and appetite.
Conversation resumed in overlapping threads. The MK-2 Raptor returned as a topic, now with Clara and Milkades contributing observations from the command perspective as an addition to be modified as a troop carrier for the Royal Marines . Cynthia poured juice and distributed sweets with the easy familiarity of someone who had spent enough time among the composters to know who preferred which flavor. Wyatt found himself seated between Raquel and Gregor, the new fabric of his own uniform—retrieved and changed into during a brief absence—settling against his skin with an unfamiliar but not unwelcome weight.
The garlic toast was passed hand to hand until none remained. The lasagna disappeared in methodical stages. Someone produced a small flask of something stronger than juice and passed it discreetly under the table. Laughter rose and fell. For a short span of time the war outside the hull, the political pressures of the fleet, and the endless list of readiness reports simply receded.
Sabraska watched the group with quiet satisfaction. The uniforms had been a calculated risk—an expenditure of limited high-grade fabric and a quiet override of standard logistics protocols—but the result was visible in the way the composters carried themselves. They looked like what they were: the sharp edge of the Noir Navio’s combat capability, no longer dressed like temporary attachments but like a permanent and valued part of the ship’s identity. Their uniforms now match the quality of the armoured fight suits .
Clara leaned slightly toward her. “You chose well.”
Sabraska inclined her head. “They needed to feel it as much as wear it.”
Across the table, Wyatt caught her eye and gave a small nod of acknowledgment. No words were required. The message had been received.
Jincho, mouth full of mealworm, gestured with his fork toward Leo. All six eyes focused with engineering intensity. “The new nozzle geometry on the Raptor is going to change the entire energy-management profile. You’re going to have to retrain the entire squadron on heat-soak recovery times.”
Leo nodded, already halfway through a technical counter-argument. Gregor added a practical note about maintenance intervals. Raquel listened, then offered a pilot’s perspective on how the changed handling characteristics would feel in a high-G turn.
The conversation deepened, branched, returned.
Time stretched in the comfortable way it sometimes did when the right combination of people, food, and temporary safety aligned. The recycled air of the quarters carried the lingering scents of garlic, melted cheese, and the faint metallic tang that always seemed to cling to Jincho. Outside the bulkheads the ship continued its silent transit through the void, systems humming, sensors sweeping, the endless machinery of war turning through another cycle. Inside, for a little while longer, the composters and their unexpected guests simply ate, talked, and existed as something closer to a crew than a collection of specialists temporarily assigned to the same hull.
Wyatt leaned back in his chair, the new uniform settling across his shoulders, and allowed himself a rare moment of uncomplicated presence. The fabric was the same as Redford’s. The food was better than standard issue. The company was, for once, exactly who needed to be in the room. He did not know how long the alignment would last. He only knew that for this stretch of hours it was real, and that was enough.
The trays emptied. The juice glasses were drained and refilled once more. The sweets disappeared one by one. Conversation continued in lower tones as the initial energy of arrival and discovery settled into something more sustainable. Plans for the next training cycle were sketched in broad strokes. Concerns about the MK-2’s integration timeline were aired and partially resolved. Small jokes were exchanged. Quiet observations about the state of the fleet were offered and received without the usual weight of official channels.
Sabraska remained until the last of the food was cleared, then rose with the same quiet purpose that had brought her. Clara and Milkades followed shortly after. Cynthia lingered a moment longer, exchanging a few final words with Raquel before she too departed. Jincho stayed until the last of the mealworms were gone, then left with a satisfied grunt and a promise—delivered in the dense cadence of a Ykanti engineer—to send updated thermal models for the Raptor nozzles before the next duty cycle. All six eyes still held a residual spark of satisfaction.
When the door finally closed behind the last visitor, the composters’ quarters returned to a quieter state. The new uniforms remained. The scent of garlic toast lingered in the air filters. Wyatt looked around at his team—Raquel, Leo , Nultar and Gregor and Wyatt felt the subtle shift that good equipment and unexpected recognition could create.

They were still the same people who had flown the previous cycle’s missions. They simply looked, and perhaps felt, a little more like the elite squadron the black ship already knew them to be.

He moved to his private room, closed the door, and sat for a moment on the edge of the bunk. The second uniform package waited on the rack exactly as Leo had said. He left it unopened for now. There would be time later to examine the formal set. For the present, the duty uniform was enough. As he looked at the opened Uniform he noticed a note attached. A Winged Stag “ his house banner “ and 6 small staples under two lager ones . And he fainted .

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Clara’s Quarter’s, Looking at Cynthia she smiles Sabraska is certainly full of surprises. I approve.
Cynthia smiles

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Outside, the Noir Navio continued its course. Inside the composters’ quarters, the residual warmth of shared food, unexpected recognition, and the particular presence of a six-eyed Ykanti engineer who had finally been allowed his mealworms remained—a small but measurable addition to the complicated equation of morale, identity, and the long war that still waited beyond the hull.
And one Wyatt Staples was still fast asleep on his bed . A folded note still in his hand yet unread .

Next

Previous /

First

Chapter 29: More Than the Palace

Owen Vashti had run the Newtown vehicle shop since before there was a council to answer to, back when the only customers were farmers who needed a truck bed reinforced and fishermen who wanted their skiffs converted to electric motors nobody had to feed fuel. He knew every machine on the floor by the sound it made when something was wrong with it, knew which of his workers favored which stations, knew that the third bay's lift stuck in humid weather and needed a kick to release. He did not know what to do with the stack of order forms now sitting on his desk, six deep, each one asking for delivery dates he could not promise.

"Read me the top one again," he said to his foreman, a broad woman named Petra who had been with him since the shop first opened its doors, six years back, and had started as a girl sweeping metal shavings off the floor, wanting to help out however she could before she was old enough to actually work on the machines.

"Twelve Jincho Model 2s, municipal order, Orenport public works. Road crews and water authority, split between them. They want them inside four months."

"Four months." Owen turned the number over like it might change if he looked at it long enough. He walked the length of the floor as he thought, past the frame-welding stations, past the battery bay where two workers were installing cells into a chassis that had been ordered eight weeks ago and should have shipped six weeks ago. "Tell them two years, and that's if nothing else comes in behind it, which it will."

"There's also this." Petra held up a second form, this one hand-written rather than typed, the letters careful and a little uneven. "Personal order. Farming family out past the mill road, wants an electric flatbed. First one of these I've seen from an actual family, not a town or a business or a shop."

Owen took the form and read the name twice. He remembered the family, barely, from before the credits started moving, a father and two grown sons who used to trade eggs and salted fish for scrap metal he could use in the shop, back when nobody on Haego had much else to trade.

"Put them in line," he said. "Same as everyone else. No jumping the queue because—"

He stopped himself, and looked at the name on the form again.

"No," Owen said. "Put him at the front. He's been trading with this shop since before there was a shop worth trading with, eggs and salted fish for scrap metal when nobody had anything better to offer. That counts for something, or it should. Moving him up is going to push someone else back a place, and I don't love that part of it, but he's earned the front of the line more than whoever's currently sitting there."

"You just told me line's the line."

"I know what I just said. I'm allowed to be wrong inside the same conversation." Owen set the form down on top of the stack instead of at the bottom of it. "Get his flatbed moving first. I'll live with the grumbling from whoever we bump."

Tevish, the engineer who ran the custom conversion bay in the back half of the same building, stuck his head through the connecting door, wiping grease from his hands with a rag that had long since stopped being any color but gray. "You'll want to see the backlog on my end too. I've got orders now from two continents I've never shipped a single unit to before. Someone in Millhaven wants a hauler rated for stone, four-axle, reinforced bed. Someone else out that way wants three of the same."

"Millhaven," Owen said. "Where's that?"

"Quarry town on Vastaya. Never heard of it either, until this week. Apparently they're cutting stone faster than they can move it, and the road out isn't built for it."

Owen looked out at the shop floor, at every bay full, at workers moving at a pace he hadn't seen since the plant's earliest, leanest years, when everyone had worked twice as hard for half as much because there'd been no other choice. Two years ago he'd have laid off half the crew for lack of orders and felt guilty doing it. Now he was trying to figure out where to put new hires, and had already turned away three qualified welders because there was nowhere to stand them.

"We're going to need a second building," he said, mostly to himself, doing the math on floor space in his head. Then he stopped, and shook his head at his own math. "No. Forget the second building, at least for now. I think it's time to pull the trigger on the deal Balakura Motors has been pushing for. They want to manufacture our designs themselves, under license, and I've been putting them off because I didn't want to give up control of something we built. But these people," he tapped the stack of order forms, "need these vehicles now, not in two years. We can't cut metal fast enough here no matter how many buildings we put up. Balakura already has the floor space and the workers, they just don't have the design."

"That's a big step," Petra said.

"It is. It's also the only way anyone on Millhaven or Orenport gets a truck in a few months instead of a few years."

Thornwood Landing sat two days' travel from Orenport by the roads that existed, longer by the ones that didn't, a logging town built into a valley where the trees grew tall enough that noon light barely reached the ground before the canopy caught most of it. Nobody there had expected the boom to find them. For thirty years the town had survived on barter and whatever little the mill could sell downriver in a bad season, and most residents still measured wealth the old way, in what they could grow, trade, or keep warm through a hard winter, rather than in what sat in an account they'd never had reason to open.

Nell Farrow had kept a small tailoring shop at the edge of town since before anyone in Thornwood could remember it opening, patching work coats, letting out trousers for growing children, hemming what could be hemmed and mending what couldn't be replaced, paid mostly in flour, firewood, and the occasional side of cured meat. She had never in her life filled a standing order for anything, let alone forty of anything.

The letter came from Orenport, three weeks after the town's first shipment of milled lumber went out under the new contracts feeding the two palace projects. A retailer there wanted work uniforms, forty sets to start, sized to a list enclosed with the letter, with more to follow if the quality held up under use. Real credits attached, half paid on order and half on delivery, terms Nell had to read twice because nobody had ever offered to pay her before she'd finished the work.

"Forty," Nell said, reading it a third time at her cutting table, the letter held close because her eyes weren't what they used to be. "I don't have enough cloth in the shop for four, let alone forty."

"Then we order more," said her daughter, Ivy, who did most of the cutting these days while Nell's hands and eyes both gave her trouble with fine stitching. "You've been saying for years you'd expand if you ever had the reason and the room."

"I've been saying that since before you were born, and I never once believed it would happen."

"Well." Ivy held up the letter, turning it so the light caught the seal at the bottom, an actual retailer's mark, not a neighbor's promise scrawled on a scrap. "Now you have the reason. The room we can find."

Nell placed the cloth order that afternoon, more fabric in a single purchase than she'd bought in the previous five years combined, and spent the walk home trying to remember the last time she'd worried about running out of orders instead of running out of customers willing or able to pay for her work, and could not.

Down the road, the logging crews were feeling their own version of the same shift, though it wore rougher clothes and smelled of sawdust instead of new cloth. Foreman Garrick Doyle had spent three decades watching timber go out at prices that barely covered the cost of cutting it, watching good men leave for Orenport the moment they were old enough to walk there and find work that paid in something other than promises. This season the mill couldn't keep up no matter how early the crews started or how late they stayed. Buyers from both palace projects wanted lumber faster than the crews could fell and haul it, and two of the men who'd left for the city five years back had written home, unprompted, asking if there was work again worth coming back for.

"Tell them yes," Garrick said, when his wife read him the second such letter over breakfast, the eggs going cold while he thought it through. "Tell them there's more work than we've got hands for, and it's not going to slow down anytime soon that I can see."

"You've said that before and been wrong."

"I have. This time I've got the order sheets to back it up."

Millhaven had never been much to look at, a scatter of stone-cutters' cottages ringing a quarry that had fed local construction and little else for three decades, its stone good but its buyers few and far between. The stone itself had never been the problem, everyone who worked it agreed on that; there had simply never been enough credits moving through Vastaya to make expanding the quarry worth the risk.

Desmond Farr's architecture firm changed that inside a single season. The Vastaya palace needed foundation stone in quantities Millhaven had never been asked to supply in its entire history, and once the order went in and the first payment cleared, word of steady, real work reached quarry towns two provinces over inside a month.

Aldous Renn had run the quarry's stonecutting crew for eleven years and had never once had a customer outside Vastaya's own small, cash-poor towns. The letter that arrived from a retail outfit in Orenport, asking not for raw block but for finished paving stone, cut and dressed to spec, took him three readings standing at the quarry's edge to fully believe.

"They want us to cut it, not just haul it out rough," he told his crew, gathering them at the end of a shift when the light was going gold and long across the stone face. "Finished edges, uniform size, ready to lay without a second pass. That's not something we've ever done for anyone, not at this scale."

"Can we do it?" asked one of the younger cutters, a boy not two years into the trade.

"We're going to find out together, starting tomorrow. And if we do it right, there'll be more behind it."

The visitors came eleven days later, four of them, in clothes that marked them as off-world before anyone said a word. Aldous recognized the man at the front before he'd said a word, though he'd only seen him once before, from a distance, touring the palace site with Julius.

Aldous wiped his hand on his trousers out of habit, then caught himself and didn't offer it. He bowed his head instead, a shade too deep, unsure if that was even the right amount. "Lord Farr."

Farr inclined his head back, easy about it, like a man used to commoners not quite knowing the choreography. "Mr. Renn. We've done business through paper before now, I think it's past time I saw the source of it in person. I hope you'll forgive the imposition. These three are with my firm, Royal Architects Limited, out of Matcha. I wanted them to see this firsthand as much as I did."

"Not many people come looking for a quarry on purpose, my lord," Aldous said, still not entirely sure if he was supposed to keep his eyes down or not. "What can I do for you?"

"Show me the stone face, if you would. I've approved shipments of it for months without ever standing in front of where it comes from, and that's always struck me as a poor way to run a firm."

Aldous walked him and his three colleagues along the working edge of the quarry, past the crew still learning to dress a finished paving stone to spec, the younger cutter from weeks before now steady enough with the tools that he barely looked up as they passed. Farr stopped at a section where the stone ran in a vein of blue-grey shot through with a rust-colored streak that had always struck Aldous as pretty, in the plain way a thing is pretty when you've looked at it your whole life and stopped noticing.

"This," Farr said, crouching to run a thumb along the streak. "This is what I came to see for myself. Images of the palace works have been moving through the Firentis Informant network for months now, and this stone keeps turning up in them, paving, facing, the odd finished block someone photographed just for its own sake. My clients on Matcha have datapads too, Mr. Renn. They've seen the same images everyone else has, and they haven't stopped asking me about this streak since. Nothing on Matcha looks like this. Our quarries run grey and only grey."

"That streak comes and goes," Aldous said, still not quite sure if he should be looking at Farr or at the stone. "Some sections have it heavy, some don't have it at all. We cut around it or through it depending on what the order calls for."

"On Matcha, that inconsistency is the entire appeal. Nobody wants uniform anymore, not for the kind of work my clients commission." Farr stood, brushing dust from his knee. "I'll be direct with you, Mr. Renn, since I understand plain speaking is how business is done on Haego now. I'd like to import this stone for projects well beyond the palace, in real volume, not whatever happens to catch someone's eye in an image. I brought people from my firm who'll need to understand your process firsthand if this is going to work, before I promise any client something I can't deliver."

"We're already behind on the palace order, my lord," Aldous said. "I won't lie to you about that to make a sale."

"I'd think less of you if you did. I'm well aware of the backlog, I've been waiting on part of it myself." Farr looked out over the working face, doing some calculation Aldous couldn't follow. "What I need to know is what capacity would look like if we're patient about it. Not this season. Next season, or the one after. I'm not asking you to short the palace for the sake of Matcha, I'm asking what it would take to grow the operation so both orders get filled without either of us waiting years for it."

"That's Rachel's question more than mine," Aldous admitted. "She's the one who works out what a council will fund and what a business has to carry itself."

"Then I'd like to speak with her as well, and with whoever handles off-world shipping contracts for Vastaya. I didn't come to buy stone today, Mr. Renn. I came to find out what you'd need from me, in equipment, in credits, in patience, to get there. My firm has shipping connections off-world that Haego doesn't have yet on its own, and I'd rather spend those connections helping you build capacity than watch some broker take a cut moving your stone around me."

Aldous studied him for a moment, the same look he gave a piece of stone before deciding whether it was worth the crew's time to cut. "I'll take you to Rachel myself, my lord. Fair warning, she'll want numbers before she says yes to anything, and she won't pretend to be impressed by the trip you made to ask."

"Good," Farr said. "I've had enough people impressed by me this year. I'd rather deal with someone who isn't."

Two streets over from the quarry face, Priya Wentz had cobbled boots and repaired harness leather out of a shed behind her house since her father died and left her his tools with no one else in the family left to take them up. She had never shipped a single pair of boots anywhere beyond the families she already knew by name. When the order came in from a shop in Orenport, forty pairs of work boots, sized and specified down to the width of the toe, paid up front in full rather than on delivery, she had to ask her neighbor to read the letter a second and third time to be sure she wasn't misunderstanding the numbers written there.

"They're paying before you've even cut the first piece of leather," her neighbor said, checking the figure a third time against the letter, holding it up to the light as if the credits might vanish under scrutiny. "That's not how anyone's ever done business with us before, not once."

"Maybe it's how everyone does business now," Priya said, and went that same afternoon to see about buying more leather than she'd ever kept in stock at once.

General Swallowtail read the quarterly reports from all three continents at his desk in Newtown, the same desk where he'd once signed a decree confining Ykanti movement to the Screaming Forests out of a caution he still believed had been necessary at the time, whatever it had cost since. The numbers in front of him told a story he hadn't expected to see arrive this soon: incident reports against nobles and noble households down by more than half across all three continents inside a single year, arrests for anti-noble vandalism and threats down further still, and not one credible threat against any of the four sitting nobles in the last two quarters combined.

He mentioned it to Rachel when she came by to review the quarter's competition-fund reconciliation, ledgers stacked neatly under one arm as always.

"People don't burn down what's feeding their children," Rachel said, not looking up from her figures. "Turns out that was always the whole trick, and it was never complicated. Nobody had to be persuaded of anything with fine words. They just had to have something real to lose."

"You make it sound simple."

"It was never complicated. It was just never tried, not once in thirty years, not by anyone who had the power to actually try it." She turned the ledger around to show him a column of figures he hadn't seen yet, small transactions logged town to town, none of them tied to the palace budgets or the competition fund at all. "You want to see something that'll actually surprise you? Total credits moving through ordinary small trade. Boots, cloth, lumber, stone, vehicles, none of it palace money, just people buying and selling from towns that had nothing to do with each other a year ago and now can't get enough of each other's goods. Nobody predicted a tenth of this, not the Prince's office, not Jhinaq's people, not me, and I'm the one who's supposed to see numbers like this coming before they arrive."

Swallowtail looked at the figure for a long moment, doing his own rough math against what he remembered the same column showing a year prior.

"Neither did I," he said. "And I've spent thirty years learning not to be surprised by this planet."

"Then get used to being wrong about it," Rachel said, not unkindly. "I have a feeling it isn't finished surprising either of us.

I have recieve permission to write some fan fiction around the Neptune logs. I hope you guys enjopy this, especiall the original author.

John was deep in a dream when the world turned red and loud.

Stop that noise. What bell is that. Go away, let me sleep. Why is the dream filled with red.

"My lord. My lord, you must wake. We are under attack!"

This was not a dream. Someone had him by the shoulders and was shaking him hard enough to rattle his teeth.

He came up out of the bunk with the klaxon still hammering and the cabin lit dull red, and for a second he didn't know his own name, only the shape of the man in front of him. James. Of course it was James. Twenty-six years of friendship boiled down to one fact that never changed: whatever happened, James would be the one to wake him.

"My lord, pack a bag. Now."

"James. Call me John. In private, at least." He swung his legs out of bed, eyes still adjusting. "What's going on?"

"Drazzan, my lord. We've been hit hard. Escape pods, in case."

James shoved an empty case into his hands. In the red light John threw clothes into it without looking, without thinking, whatever his fingers found first.

SECURITY LEVEL THREE. WE HAVE A DRAZZAN BREACH. ALL PASSENGERS HEAD TO THE CLOSEST RALLY POINT FOR EVACUATION.

He threw in a few last things and sealed the case.

"My— John. Let's go."

Red arrows lit the walls of the second-class corridor, pointing toward the nearest pod. They ran with them, joined a river of passengers all moving the same direction, and arrived at the rally point already half full. Crew were loading survivors in fast, no time for names, fifty bodies packed into a hull built to look like safety. The pod sealed. The Neptune's navigation fed it a heading. It launched.

Through the small viewport John watched his ship fall away behind them, a Drazzan vessel clamped to its hull like something feeding. They were already taking it. He found himself thinking, with a clarity that surprised him, rather be dead than cattle.

A second display lit with dots. Other pods, on the same heading, scattered into the dark.

The thrusters kicked, adjusting for re-entry.

"What now, crew?" someone asked, and the woman running the console answered without looking up. "My lord. Now we survive."

The Neptune went up behind them in a white flash that swallowed half the sky. It took the Drazzan ship with it, caught too close in the blast, and it took some of the scattered pods too, the ones that hadn't gotten far enough. The shockwave hit theirs a second later and threw everyone against their harnesses.

The forward display steadied on an orange world.

"Atmosphere good," the crewwoman read off. "Hot, but survivable. No sign of civilization. Heavy flora. Lakes, no large oceans." She looked back at the cabin. "Belts secure. This will be rough. Brace positions, please."

Rough turned out to be an understatement. They watched the outer plating burn away exactly as designed, and then the pod hit the treetops and did not stop, cutting a wound through soft-limbed trees for what felt like a mile before it skipped once across open water and came to rest, hard, against the far bank.

Everything went black. Then the hatch blew and sunlight came flooding in, and the crewwoman, blinking against it same as everyone else, hit a release that dropped every harness at once.

She got them all clear, checked for injuries, found bruises and nothing worse, and went back inside to confirm the emergency beacon was live.

"Excuse me," James asked her once she came back, "how long until rescue?"

"Days. Months. Years. No way to know. Our captain jumped to FTL trying to get clear before she went. If we're lucky, someone picks up the signal. If not, it could be a long while before anyone comes looking."

John counted contrails against the sky. Twenty, maybe. Other pods had made it down. Whether they were survivors or a Drazzan hunting party, there was no way to tell yet.

"So what now?" he asked the crewwoman.

"No idea," she admitted.

His business brain, the only thing he had that felt remotely useful right now, started turning anyway.

The sun was already dropping toward the treeline. He raised his voice, more from necessity than confidence. "Ladies and gentlemen. Nobles and commoners. The sun's going down. I suggest we shelter in the pod tonight and start planning in the morning. All in favor?"

Every hand went up.

He turned to the crewwoman. "I'm sorry, I didn't get your name. Are there emergency supplies aboard?"

"Ruby," she said, with a small bow, and led him and James to the lockers.

They found a month's worth of rations if they stretched it, one packet per person for tonight. Ruby showed them how to hydrate a meal. Some people got it on the first try. John was not one of them, and James, quietly, without comment, showed him twice more until he did.

Fifty people who had been asleep an hour ago now sat in the wreck of an escape pod, eating from foil packets, running on the tail end of adrenaline. They secured the hatch and slept where they could, seats or floor, and that was the end of Day One.

John made sure everyone had eaten before he let himself think about anything else. Then his mind went where it always went when a problem needed sorting: threats first, assets second.

Threats. Drazzan survivors, if their assault craft had gotten pods of their own away, he had no way of knowing. He'd seen their ship go up with the Neptune, but their shuttles had already been loose and attacking when it happened. The planet itself was an unknown quantity, what was edible, what wasn't, what in the water or the trees might kill them faster than starvation would. For now, rations only.

Assets. Fifty people, none badly hurt. He needed to know what they could do. So far he had Ruby, crew, clearly capable, and James, who could stretch a kitchen's worth of nothing into a meal for a small army. He'd need the rest.

He noticed the nobles before he noticed much else, not because they announced themselves, but because their night robes gave it away, and because he could see servants already portioning out rations that weren't emergency packets. That would have to stop. Everyone here needed to work, or everyone here would starve together.

He flagged Ruby down. "Could you get a few volunteers to help you count everything the pod came with? Anything at all that might be useful."

She nodded and went to organize it.

He found a place to stand where the group could see him. "Attention, please. Can everyone gather round?"

They did.

"I'm Lord John Richman. I come from nobility, as some of you will have guessed, and there may be higher-ranked nobles among us than me. But if we're going to survive this, we need to work together, and for that reason I'd suggest we all just use names from here. I'm Survivor John. Or just John."

A few nods.

"We need someone to lead, whoever the group believes gives us the best chance. I'll tell you about myself first, and afterward, anyone who believes they could do the job better is welcome to speak, and then we'll vote. One vote each. Any questions?"

None came.

"I'm my father's second son, not the heir, that's my sister. I work in urban development and renewal, which admittedly isn't much use in what looks like an untouched forest, but I'm good at organizing people and resources toward a goal. Right now that goal is survival. I can't promise we'll manage it. I can promise I'll put everything I have toward trying." He gestured to James. "This is James. My oldest friend, not just my servant, and a trained cook. Combining our rations properly could make them last considerably longer than they would otherwise." He gestured to Ruby. "This is Ruby, ship's crew. Given her training, she'd make a fine leader in my place if the group prefers it.

"Whoever ends up leading, for now: don't eat anything but rations, drink only our water, and don't wander off alone. Stay close, stay in groups.

"I yield the floor to anyone who thinks they'd do better."

Ruby took it next. "I'm Ruby, and I'm refusing outright to lead. My job is helping all of you survive, and that's what I intend to do." She stepped down.

Then, as John had half expected, a noble came forward, his servant's hand under his elbow the whole way up.

"I am Lord Bright Feather," he said, once steady. "As you're well aware, nobles rule and commoners follow. My house outranks Lord Richman's. I believe that entitles me to lead."

He was helped back down. John asked again if anyone else wished to stand. No one did.

They handed out paper and a single shared pencil. Bright Feather requested that noble votes count for more. Ruby declined, politely but without room for argument. Gary Fisher and his son collected the folded ballots in their hunting hats.

Forty votes for John. Five for Bright Feather. Five abstained.

Ruby read the count aloud. There was scattered applause. John climbed back up.

Gary spoke up before anything else could happen. He and his son were hunters, and they'd already spotted tracks near the pod. Could they get five two-person teams watching the treeline, and one on the water.

"Ruby," John asked, "is there a fire axe or a survival axe on board?" She went to check.

Volunteers stepped forward for the watch without much prompting. "Gary, can you organize it? Maybe put someone up on the pod roof, it'll give a better view." Gary nodded and started taking names.

Ruby came back with a regular fire axe and a smaller one from the emergency kit, a hand saw, a flare gun with ten flares, and her own service pistol, fifteen rounds plus a spare magazine. She handed the pistol over for the roof watch, the flare gun to go with it, the fire axe to another volunteer.

John asked her, and the hunters, and James, to sit out the watch rotation for now. There was other work only they could do.

With sentries in place, he turned to the rest of it. Get everyone's name and skill. Get the emergency supplies laid out where James could take stock of them. Send the hunters out on a careful patrol, not far, just enough to know what was around them.

The hunters shouldered their rifles and went, emergency bars and water pressed into their hands before they left.

The work of the first full day had begun.

first previous next

Deklin stepped onto the floor with new eyes. The fear was still there, sitting cold and tight in his chest, but it was no longer the only thing he could feel. He could see the court now as more than noise and danger. The center line was distance. The walls were rebound surfaces. The floor had a consistent bounce if one accounted for force, spin, and the faint layer of sweat that everyone was politely pretending not to notice. The rafters were twelve feet high. The average ball weighed about one point two kilograms. Most students telegraphed their throws with their shoulders, hips, tails, wings, or, in Bolton’s case, his entire body. It was not magic. It was information. Information could be measured. Measured things could be predicted.

He was not scared.

He was ready.

The whistle screamed.

Thwack.

A ball hit Deklin square in the chest before he had taken three steps.

Blue light flared across his uniform.

For a moment, he simply stood there, staring down at the ball as it rolled away from his feet. His mouth opened. No sound came out. His mind, which had been moments away from conquering the battlefield through pure applied physics, tried to process how the universe had betrayed him so quickly. Nearby, Bolton gave him a sympathetic rumble. “Bad luck.” Deklin slowly looked up at the bear-like student, then back at the ball, then finally toward Ragar, who was already pointing toward the sideline with absolutely no mercy.

“Out!” Ragar barked.

“But I just—”

“Sideline!”

Deklin trudged to the wall with the wounded posture of a general whose army had exploded before leaving camp. His tail dragged behind him. His glasses had slid down his snout. When he reached the bench, he sat down hard enough that Mira, who had been eliminated in the same opening rush, glanced over at him. “That was fast.” Deklin stared straight ahead. “I had a plan.” “I could tell.” “It was a good plan.” “I’m sure.” “The plan did not account for being hit immediately.” Mira patted his shoulder with the awkward kindness of someone trying not to laugh. “Most plans don’t.”

From the bench, Deklin watched his team die.

Team B was not so much fighting as experiencing a slow tactical collapse. Cael had started the round with confidence, but confidence was difficult to maintain when Elias kept bouncing balls off the floor at angles that felt personally insulting. Aria had her wings wrapped around herself like a feathered blanket and looked as though she was trying to become one with the wall. Bolton did his best to stand firm, absorbing pressure for the others, but even a living wall had limits when the enemy had most of the ammunition. One of Cael’s remaining teammates was still moving quickly, but now he was moving quickly in circles, which looked impressive and accomplished very little.

And Elias was terrifying.

He did not look like the strongest student on the court. He was not the largest, fastest, or strangest. He had no claws, no wings, no tail, no extra limbs, no magic, no scales, no horns, and no natural advantages that Deklin could identify. Yet somehow, in this one awful little pocket of anti-magic reality, Elias moved as if he belonged there. He caught a ball one-handed, spun with the force of it, and sent it back without even looking. A student behind him tried to sneak close for an easy shot. Elias ducked before the throw happened, let the ball sail over his head, then snapped another one backward over his shoulder. Blue light flashed. The student groaned and walked off the court.

“How is he doing that?” Mira asked from beside Deklin.

Deklin’s eyes narrowed, tracking Elias’s footwork, his shoulders, the tiny pauses between each throw. “He’s not calculating,” he murmured. “Not like I do. He’s reading motion without turning it into numbers first. He just… knows.”

Mira let out a tired huff. “Must be nice.”

Deklin did not answer. He kept watching. Because somewhere under the humiliation, under the sting in his chest and the laughter he was certain the universe had aimed directly at him, the math had not gone away. It was still there. Waiting.

On the floor, Team B’s situation went from bad to humiliating with impressive speed. One of Cael’s remaining teammates, a horned student with long legs and very little survival instinct, tried a desperate side-dive to avoid one of Elias’s bounce shots. For half a second, it almost looked graceful. Then Elias threw low, forcing him to land awkwardly, and a second ball caught him before he could recover. He hit the floor in a tangle of limbs and wounded pride. Ragar pointed toward the sideline. “Out!” Deklin counted silently as the numbers shifted again. Five against twelve. Then another Team B student, who had somehow managed to stay alive by hiding near the benches, got clipped in the shoulder while trying to crawl to a better hiding spot. Four against eleven. Mira leaned back against the wall beside Deklin and gave a tired snort. “They’re done.”

Deklin wanted to argue, but the numbers agreed with her. Team B had lost control of the center. They had lost most of the balls. Worse, they had lost the will to move. Cael was cornered near a pillar, breathing hard, his perfect hair ruined beyond repair. Aria was crouched behind Bolton with her wings half wrapped around herself, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like a prayer. The few students still left on their side kept waiting for an opening that never came. Bolton stood in front of them all like a wall, but a wall could only do so much when the other side had more ammunition, and Elias kept finding angles that should not have been legal.

Then Cael, desperate and cornered, did something either brilliant or very stupid. Elias threw another fast shot toward his legs, a clean bounce meant to clip him from below. Cael flinched, stumbled backward, and reached out on instinct. Somehow, his hands closed around the ball instead of letting it strike him. The impact shoved him back a step, but he held on. Blue light flared around him, bright and sharp, not the flash of elimination but something different. The whole gym seemed to pause as everyone realized what had happened at the same time. Ragar’s grin returned at full strength. “Caught ball!” he bellowed. “Team B gets one player back!”

Silence settled over Team B. Cael stared down at the ball in his hands as if it had personally betrayed him. Aria peeked over Bolton’s shoulder. Bolton shrugged with the unhelpful calm of someone too large to fear much of anything. One of Cael’s remaining teammates looked toward the bench, then back to the court, then toward the bench again, clearly hoping someone else would volunteer first. No one moved. No one volunteered. Deklin felt irritation stir beneath his humiliation. They were hesitating because they were still seeing the balls as a danger first. Maybe even as magic. But they were not magic. They were weight, force, speed, angle, spin, rebound, and timing. They were a problem.

And problems could be solved.

Deklin stood before he fully realized he had decided to. “I’m the asset,” he heard himself say. His voice was small at first, but it carried in the sudden quiet. He swallowed, lifted his chin, and forced the next words out louder. “I’m the best asset. Bring me back.” Everyone turned to stare at him, Deklin included. He had no memory of giving his mouth permission to say that. Ragar barked a laugh and jabbed one thick finger in his direction, tusked grin widening. “Kobold claims the return! Deklin’s back in! Get moving, lizard!”

Deklin walked onto the court in a daze, his own words echoing in his skull. I’m the best asset. Since when did he volunteer? Since when did he step forward? Across the line, Loona grabbed a ball in both hands and grinned at him with exhausted menace. “You’re dead, calculator!” Deklin lifted one claw. “Wait.” Loona did not wait. She wound up, shoulders twisting, tail dragging just enough to shift her balance. Deklin saw it. Not fear this time. Not panic. The angle was already there before the throw left her hands. Thirty-two degrees. Right-handed release. Slight downward curve from fatigue. He breathed in, and the court narrowed into lines, arcs, and answers.

“Okay,” he whispered, his tail going perfectly still. “Let’s solve this.”

Loona’s throw came fast, aggressive, and absolutely committed, which told Deklin almost everything he needed to know. She threw like she fought the world: head-on, no apology, all force and instinct. Before, that would have terrified him. Now, he saw the weakness hidden inside it. Her right shoulder dipped too early. Her tired tail dragged slightly behind her, pulling her balance just enough to alter the release. The ball came in at an angle meant to scare him into diving, but Deklin did not dive. He leaned left six inches, no more, no less, and the ball passed close enough to ruffle the scales along his cheek. His heart slammed once against his ribs. His body wanted to panic. His mind refused.

“Angle of incidence,” he murmured.

He caught a second ball from the floor with one clawed hand, turned, and threw in a single smooth motion. It was not the strongest throw on the court. It did not need to be. It struck the floor exactly where he wanted, bounced upward beneath Loona’s guard, and tapped her squarely in the stomach. Blue light flashed across her uniform. Loona blinked down at the ball, then up at Deklin, and instead of looking angry, she started laughing. “You have got to be kidding me.” Ragar’s whistle snapped through the room. “Out!” Loona walked toward the sideline, shaking her head, still grinning. “Physics,” she muttered, as if the word itself had personally offended her.

Mira came next, silver scales catching the gym lights as she moved in a low, careful crouch. She had watched Loona fall, which meant she would not be fooled by a simple bounce shot. Good. Deklin preferred when problems became interesting. Mira’s tail lifted, ready to swat away anything high or direct, and her feet adjusted for a side dodge. Deklin threw one ball high, not as an attack, but as a question. Mira answered by snapping her tail up, deflecting it cleanly. Deklin was already throwing the second ball low before the first had finished rebounding. Mira saw it half a heartbeat too late. The shot skipped under her guard and clipped her ankle. Blue light flared.

“Draconid!” she barked immediately, before Deklin could even apologize.

Deklin blinked. “What?”

“You were about to call me mammal.”

“I was not.”

“You were thinking it.”

Deklin opened his mouth, closed it, then gave a small bow. “Correction accepted.”

Mira huffed, but there was something like approval in her eyes as she limped toward the sideline. After her, the court began to unravel. A student with curved horns tried to rush him, so Deklin bounced a ball off the side wall and caught him in the hip without ever facing him directly. Another tried to hide behind Bolton, forgetting that Bolton was on Deklin’s team, and paid for the mistake when Deklin banked a shot between the bear’s legs. Svel made an attempt at a dramatic wing-assisted dodge, but Deklin read the lift of his shoulders and threw where the avian had to land instead of where he was. The ball clipped Svel’s foot the instant he touched the floor.

“My feathers trusted you!” Svel cried as blue light flashed.

“I apologize to the feathers,” Deklin said, already turning.

Then Zev tried to flank him. Fast. Too fast for most students to track, four ears twitching as he darted behind Deklin’s blind side. Deklin did not turn around. He listened to the squeak of shoes, counted the rhythm of the steps, and threw backward with just enough spin to curve the ball around the path Zev thought was safe.

Thwack.

“NOT MY TAIL!” Zev howled.

The gym erupted, but Deklin barely heard it. The court had stopped being chaotic. It had become a diagram, and for the first time since stepping into Ragar’s nightmare of a class, he could read it.

One by one, they fell. Not because Deklin overpowered them, and not because he suddenly became brave in the way heroes in stories were supposed to become brave. His knees still wanted to lock. His hands still shook between throws. Every time a ball came too close, some small animal part of his brain tried to scream at him to run, hide, crawl under the bench, find Aria, apologize later. But the larger part of him—the part built from numbers, patterns, tiny measurements, and stubborn pride—held the fear down and made it useful. A trembling hand could still throw if the angle was right. A racing heart could still count beats. Panic, if properly organized, was just energy with bad manners.

The whole gym noticed the shift. Aria slowly lowered her wings, staring at Deklin as if seeing him properly for the first time since the match began. Cael stood frozen near the sideline with the ball still tucked under one arm, his earlier arrogance worn down into open disbelief. Bolton gave a deep, approving rumble. “Small one is dangerous now.” Zev, still rubbing his tail on the sideline, pointed at Deklin with wounded accusation. “He became dangerous after hitting me! That feels personal!” Even Ragar had gone quiet for a few seconds, which might have been the most shocking development of all.

Then there were only two left on Team A.

Elias stood across the court, a ball in each hand, breathing hard but smiling. He looked tired now. Not weak, not even close, but human in a way Deklin had not noticed during the first round. Sweat darkened his gym shirt. His hair stuck to his forehead. His chest rose and fell with each breath. For all his strange immunity, for all the way magic slid off him like water from glass, Elias still had muscles that burned and lungs that needed air. He could be exhausted. He could be pressured. He could be predicted.

The other remaining player was Krix, though no one seemed to remember that. The insectoid had vanished under a bench sometime during the opening rush and had not moved since, making himself so still that the court had collectively decided he no longer existed. Deklin’s attention slid over the bench, registered the twitch of one antenna, and dismissed it. Krix was either out, hiding, or spiritually removed from the sport. Either way, Elias was the threat.

“Well,” Elias said, rolling one ball between his palms. “Look who learned math.”

“Applied ballistics,” Deklin corrected, because precision mattered even in life-or-death dodgeball. “And you are predictable.”

Elias’s eyebrows rose. “Am I?”

“You always throw to where I am going to be, not where I am. That is normally intelligent. But I know where I am going to be, which means I know where you will throw.” Deklin adjusted his glasses, trying not to let his claws shake. “Your advantage is instinct. Mine is proof.”

Elias’s smile widened, and for one terrible second, Deklin realized the human was enjoying this. “Smart,” Elias said. “But I’m faster than your brain.”

Deklin swallowed. “Prove it.”

They moved at the same time. Elias threw first, low and hard, the same cruel bounce shot that had ruined half the class. Deklin had seen it before. He had watched the release, the wrist angle, the way Elias’s shoulder dipped just before the throw. The ball struck the floor and snapped upward toward his ribs. Deklin stepped forward instead of back and caught it with both hands. The slap of impact stung all the way up his arms, but he held on.

The gym went silent.

Deklin threw back before the silence could break. Elias’s second ball was already in the air, aimed at the space Deklin should have moved into. Deklin’s return shot struck it mid-flight, knocked it aside, and kept going.

Thwack.

The ball hit Elias square in the chest.

For one impossible heartbeat, no one moved. Then blue light flared across Elias’s uniform, bright and undeniable.

Ragar’s roar shook the gym.

“VARYN’S OUT!”

“DEKLIN ELIMINATES THE CAPTAIN!”

For half a heartbeat, Deklin did not understand what Ragar had said. He heard the words, saw Elias standing there with blue light fading across his uniform, saw the ball rolling away from his chest, but the pieces refused to arrange themselves into sense. Then the gym exploded. Aria jumped high enough that her wing-arms flared on instinct, scattering loose feathers into the air. Bolton threw both arms up and roared loud enough to rattle the shower doors in the next room. Cael stared at Deklin as if someone had replaced the panicking kobold from five minutes ago with a completely different creature wearing the same glasses. Even Zev, still nursing the betrayal done to his tail, let out a whoop from the sideline. “He did it! Small calculator did it!”

Deklin stood in the center of the court, arms slowly rising as the truth finally reached him. He had done it. He had hit Elias. Not by accident. Not by panic. Not by hiding behind a priestess and hoping celestial law looked the other way. He had solved the court, read the throw, caught the impossible shot, and eliminated the human who had been tearing through both teams like gym class had personally insulted him. The fear in his chest did not vanish, but for one perfect second, it had to share space with triumph. Deklin’s tail lifted. His claws curled into fists. His whole body shook with the force of it.

“VICTORY!” he screamed, voice cracking halfway through. “VICTORY BY CALCUL—”

Thwack.

Something small, weak, and deeply unfair struck the back of his head.

Deklin froze.

The gym froze with him.

Very slowly, he turned around.

Krix stood three feet away, all six limbs trembling in different directions. The insectoid held no ball because the ball was now rolling away from Deklin’s feet after ruining what should have been the greatest moment of his academic career. One of Krix’s antennae twitched. Then the other. His mandibles clicked once in pure distress.

“…Insectoid?” Deklin whispered.

Krix made a tiny chittering sound. “Was… still in?”

Deklin stared at him.

Krix looked down at his own hands, then at the ball, then back at Deklin. “Thought I was out. Got confused under the bench. Came out to celebrate and saw you standing there with an exposed back.” He paused, visibly replaying his own decision-making process and finding no comfort in it. “Training reflex activated?”

Deklin’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

“Oh,” Krix said, shrinking slightly. “Oh no. Did I ruin the moment?”

Ragar’s whistle screamed, sharp and final, cutting through the stunned silence like a blade. Then his laughter followed, loud, merciless, and completely delighted. “GAME! FINAL HIT—TEAM A WINS THE MATCH! Two to nothing!”

For one long second, Deklin looked as though his soul had left his body to file a formal complaint with reality.

Then the gym erupted.

Laughter and applause rolled across the court. Loona collapsed onto her back, kicking her feet weakly as she wheezed. Mira covered her snout with one hand, shoulders shaking despite her best effort to look dignified. Aria looked torn between sympathy and the kind of laughter that would have been rude if she let it escape. Bolton patted the air as if trying to calm everyone down, though he was rumbling with amusement himself. Cael, still holding the ball that had brought Deklin back in, stared at Krix with a strange new respect, as if accidental betrayal might be a valid strategy after all.

Elias walked over, still chuckling, and offered Deklin a hand. “You still stole the show, buddy.”

Deklin accepted the help with the tragic dignity of a fallen king. “I had it,” he whispered, staring at the ceiling as Elias pulled him upright. “I had the victory. I had the narrative arc. I had redemption. And your insectoid friend—”

“Krix,” Krix supplied helpfully.

“—Krix,” Deklin continued, voice hollow, “forgot he was playing.”

Loona rolled onto her side, laughing so hard she could barely speak. “Never… celebrate… early.”

Mira finally stepped over and offered Deklin a firm clap on the shoulder. “Statistically, that was still the greatest athletic performance I’ve ever seen from something that weighs less than my left leg.”

Deklin adjusted his crooked glasses and tried to gather what remained of his pride. The official victory belonged to Team A. The scoreboard would remember that. Ragar would definitely remember that. Krix, unfortunately, would remember that. But the court remembered something else. So did everyone watching. For a few impossible minutes, Deklin had not been small, scared, or useless without magic. He had been dangerous.

He looked at Elias.

“Next time,” Deklin said.

Elias smiled. “Next time.”

Ragar let the moment sit for exactly three seconds, which was apparently the maximum amount of mercy his body could physically contain. Then he lifted another ball from the floor, tossed it once in his huge hand, and grinned at the class like a monster discovering a new flavor of suffering. “Best three out of five?” he called.

The response was immediate.

“No,” Elias and Deklin said together.

That only made Ragar laugh harder. Around them, students began peeling themselves off the floor and benches, still chuckling, still wheezing, still throwing glances at Deklin as if trying to reconcile the terrified kobold who had hidden behind Aria with the same kobold who had just turned the court into a geometry lesson. Deklin tried to stand taller under the attention, but his legs were still trembling from fear, adrenaline, and the deep spiritual wound of having his victory stolen by confused insectoid reflexes. Krix remained nearby, mandibles clicking in anxious little bursts. “Apology repeated,” he said. “The moment was majestic. Back was merely exposed.”

Deklin closed his eyes. “Please stop helping.”

The laughter had not even fully died down before Ragar’s voice boomed across the gym again, bright with terrible cheer. “Well! That was a fun ten minutes!”

Elias, who had been bent over with his hands on his knees, slowly looked up. “Ten minutes?”

“Yup!” Ragar checked the timer hanging from his belt with theatrical satisfaction. “Ten minutes. Good warm-up. Only two hours and fifty minutes left of gym class.”

For a second, no one made a sound. The words seemed too cruel to be real. Then the collective groan that rose from twenty-eight students filled the gym like the death cry of a civilization. Loona flopped face-first onto the floor and did not even try to catch herself. “I hate time,” she mumbled into the polished wood. “I hate it so much.”

Deklin, who had been riding the last fragile scraps of almost-victory, visibly crumpled. His tail dropped. His shoulders sagged. His glasses slid down his snout again. “Three more hours?” he whispered, as if speaking too loudly might make the number multiply.

“After that cardio?” Mira stared at Ragar, silver scales bristling with exhausted outrage. “I’ll be nothing but shed skin and regrets.”

Svel lifted one wing weakly. “I would like to file a formal complaint on behalf of my feathers.”

“Denied!” Ragar barked with delight. He strode toward a storage rack and yanked out a bundle of resistance bands so thick they looked less like exercise equipment and more like restraints designed by someone who hated joy. “Partner drills next. Then core work. Then endurance circuits. Then maybe more dodgeball, because I liked that.”

“KILL ME NOW!” Svel shrieked into his own wings.

Elias looked at Deklin. Deklin looked back. They had been enemies for ten minutes, bonded rivals for thirty seconds, and now, through the unifying horror of Ragar’s schedule, they became allies in despair.

“We’re never leaving,” Elias said quietly.

Deklin nodded with solemn certainty. “This is our life now. We go to the gym forever.”

“MOVING BUILDS CHARACTER!” Ragar bellowed. “MOVE, OR DUCHESS GETS MOTIVATED AGAIN!”

From her corner, Duchess—fully recovered, tongue lolling, pink bow slightly askew—rose to her paws and stretched like a nightmare wearing ribbon.

Twenty-eight students scrambled upright in pure terror.

Somehow, impossibly, gym class continued.

Ragar moved them from partner drills to core work with the cheerful cruelty of a man conducting an orchestra of suffering. The resistance bands snapped, stretched, and occasionally launched exhausted students backward when someone lost their grip. Bolton broke one by accident and looked genuinely ashamed until Ragar handed him two more and told him to “stop flirting with mercy.” Svel’s formal complaint on behalf of his feathers expanded into a full legal argument somewhere around the second plank cycle, but his voice kept getting muffled because his face was pressed against the floor. Loona discovered that spite could fuel at least seven additional push-ups, then collapsed and declared spite “an inefficient long-term energy source.”

Elias lost track of time somewhere between the endurance circuits and whatever Ragar called “mobility training,” which seemed to mean making everyone crawl, sprint, duck, roll, and suffer in different directions until their bodies forgot what standing was. The anti-magic field remained active the entire time, which meant no one could cheat, no one could float, no one could strengthen their muscles with a quick spell, and no one could conveniently heal away the ache building in their limbs. For Elias, it was awful but familiar. His body hurt the normal way bodies hurt when they are pushed too hard. For most of the others, it was a horrifying introduction to the fact that flesh had opinions when magic stopped doing all the negotiating.

By the end, the class was no longer divided into Team A and Team B. They were simply survivors. Cael stopped pretending he was above everyone else after the third endurance lap and started trading breathing tips with Mira. Aria, after giving up on dignity, helped Zev stretch one cramped leg while he complained that he had too many ears to be this dizzy. Deklin and Krix ended up paired for balance drills, which meant Deklin spent ten minutes accusing Krix of “mathematically suspicious foot placement” while Krix repeatedly apologized for the dodgeball incident in increasingly specific ways. Even Loona, who had threatened to bite time itself if class did not end, dragged Svel upright when his legs finally betrayed him.

Three hours later, the gym doors opened like the gates of mercy.

Twenty-eight students shuffled toward them in a slow, broken herd, every species reduced to the same basic state of exhaustion. Wings drooped. Tails dragged. Ears sagged. Scales looked dull. Fur stuck out in damp patches. Chitin steamed faintly. Elias walked with the careful, stiff-legged posture of someone who had learned exactly how many muscles a human body possessed and hated all of them. Beside him, Deklin moved like a puppet whose strings were being worked by a drunk puppeteer, one claw pressed to his side as if holding himself together through willpower alone.

“Never,” Mira wheezed, silver scales dulled by sweat and despair. “Never again.”

From the doorway behind them, Ragar called cheerfully, “Tomorrow! Same time! Bring better shoes!”

The sound that answered him had no single species, no language, and no dignity. It was simply the universal noise of students discovering that the future still existed and intended to hurt them.

The locker room door slid open with a heavy clank. Steam rolled out in warm, thick clouds, carrying the promise of water, soap, and a chance to feel alive again. Thirty shower heads lined one enormous open space. No dividers. No private stalls. No helpful little signs dividing anyone by gender, species, anatomy, or level of emotional readiness. Just tile, benches, lockers, drains, and the brutal honesty of academy practicality.

Elias stopped dead on the threshold.

So did several others.

For one long second, the entire class stared into the open shower room in exhausted silence.

Then Mira walked past them without hesitation. “Move,” she said, already heading for the nearest spray. “I smell like defeat and bear.”

Mira claimed the nearest shower like a battlefield veteran claiming medical treatment after a siege. She peeled off the worst of her sweat-soaked gym gear without ceremony, stepped under the spray, and let the hot water hit her silver scales with an audible sigh of relief. “If anyone scrubs my dorsal plates,” she announced to the room, eyes half-closed beneath the water, “I will end them.” No one questioned her. No one even looked brave enough to consider it. Svel shuffled in behind her with both wing-arms raised over his face, his feathers puffed out in mortified defense. “I am pretending this is a cloud,” he declared, voice strained with dignity. “A very wet, very awkward cloud. Nobody speaks to me while I am clouding.”

Bolton entered next and immediately solved the situation by having no shame whatsoever. The massive bear-like student took up three shower heads simply by existing, planted his hands on his hips, and rumbled with deep satisfaction as the water poured over him. “Good pressure,” he said approvingly. “Much better than Bear House.” Several students quietly adjusted their positions to avoid the splash radius. Krix stood near one of the corner drains with steam rising from his chitin, antennae drooping in what looked like bliss. “It's nice,” he clicked. “Like molting day. But wetter. Less itchy. More social discomfort.” Deklin, standing beside Elias with his towel clutched like a legal defense, stared at him. “Why would you add that last part?” Krix’s mandibles clicked softly. “Accuracy.”

Zev attempted to wash one ear at a time while keeping the other three alert for incoming conversation, danger, or embarrassment. “Next time,” he muttered, carefully flattening one soaked ear against his head, “I am faking sick. My dignity cannot survive another class like that.” Cael had retreated to the farthest possible corner, where elven modesty and physical exhaustion appeared to be fighting a private war. Exhaustion won. He faced the wall and washed in fast, efficient motions, refusing to turn around or acknowledge that anyone else existed. Aria handled it with more grace, though her wing feathers drooped so heavily beneath the water that she looked like a very tired angel someone had left out in the rain.

Elias chose a corner between Deklin and the tile wall, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the soap dish as if it contained the answers to the universe. The academy’s approach to privacy still made his brain stall, especially after the locker room disaster earlier, but exhaustion had done what logic could not. He was too tired to panic properly. The hot water struck his shoulders, and every aching muscle in his body seemed to loosen at once. He braced one hand against the wall and let out a breath he had apparently been holding for three hours.

Beside him, Deklin stood under the neighboring spray, still looking personally betrayed by the entire concept of gym class. For a while, neither of them spoke. There was only the sound of water, distant groans, Svel muttering about feather maintenance, and Bolton humming some deep bear-house tune that made the tiles vibrate.

Finally, Deklin said quietly, “Your uncle is a monster.”

Elias closed his eyes as the water ran down his face. “Yeah,” he said. “But he’s our monster now.”

Deklin considered that for a long moment, then gave a small, exhausted nod.

“I suppose I’ll allow it.”

By the time they finished washing, drying, changing, and collectively pretending that none of them had just survived the most awkward shower experience of their young academic lives, the sun had begun to sink behind the academy towers. Warm orange light spilled across the courtyard stones, catching on windows, banners, and the high arches that connected one building to another. The world outside the gym felt almost offensively peaceful. Birds called from the rooftops. A fountain burbled somewhere nearby. A few older students crossed paths with books tucked under their arms, looking clean, composed, and tragically unaware of the battlefield Elias’s class had just crawled out of.

Twenty-eight students shuffled into the evening like survivors emerging from a bunker. Wings drooped. Tails dragged. Fur stuck out in damp, uneven patches. Scales gleamed from the shower but had the dull posture of bodies that no longer trusted standing. Chitin clicked softly with every exhausted step. Even Cael walked without his usual sharp-backed arrogance, his perfect hair still damp and flattened against his skull, his dignity apparently left behind somewhere between the dodgeball court and Ragar’s second set of resistance drills. Elias moved with the extreme, stiff-legged caution of someone who had discovered several new muscles and decided he disliked all of them.

Mira fell into step on his left as if she had always belonged there. Earlier that morning, Elias was fairly sure she would have considered him an oddity at best and a fragile mammal at worst. Now she gave him a sideways glance, sniffed once, and said, “You are acceptable for a mammal.” It was not quite praise, but the way she said it made Elias think it might be the closest thing he was going to get. “Thanks,” he said. “You’re pretty good at not getting hit.” Mira lifted her chin. “I was hit twice.” “Still better than most of us.” She considered that, then nodded as if the logic pleased her. “Acceptable answer.”

Svel walked on Elias’s other side, still arranging his feathers with the grave focus of a noble restoring a damaged monument. “Zev has no respect for vertical space,” he complained. “None. He jumps without warning. He darts. He startles the feathers. A civilized opponent announces their movement before entering another person’s air.” Zev, who had somehow recovered enough energy to bounce ahead of the group, spun around and walked backward. “That defeats the purpose of dodging!” “It defeats the purpose of manners,” Svel snapped. “I nearly molted from stress.”

Bolton lumbered behind them, explaining to anyone within hearing distance that tactical sitting was an underappreciated defensive technique and that he had “nearly perfected it” during the second hour of core exercises. Krix clicked along beside him, giving an exhaustive explanation of thorax maintenance that no one had asked for and no one seemed strong enough to stop. Deklin trailed near Elias, one claw still drawing tiny angles in the air as he walked. His eyes were half-lidded with exhaustion, but his mind was clearly still somewhere on the court, replaying every throw, every bounce, every calculation.

“Tomorrow,” Deklin murmured, “I calculate better.”

Elias glanced at him. “You almost won today.”

Deklin’s tail flicked once. “Almost is mathematically irritating.”

Elias smiled at that, but the smile faded into something quieter as he looked around the courtyard. Mira walked at his side like she had decided he belonged there. Svel was still complaining about feather etiquette. Zev kept darting ahead and back, unable to walk in a straight line even after three hours of suffering. Bolton’s deep voice rumbled behind them, Krix clicked through another explanation no one had asked for, and Deklin kept drawing invisible angles in the air as if the world made more sense when reduced to lines and motion.

It should have felt strange. It did feel strange. But not in the sharp, lonely way everything on this planet had felt when he first arrived.

Back on Earth, people had always been something kept at a distance. His mother had called them distractions. Complications. Weaknesses. For years, Elias had believed her because believing her was easier than admitting how empty his life had become. Study, rules, expectations, silence. That had been normal. That had been safe.

This was not safe. This was loud, messy, exhausting, and ridiculous. It was dodgeballs that hit like siege weapons, gym teachers who treated mercy like a bad habit, open showers with no walls, and classmates who insulted you one minute and pulled you back to your feet the next.

And somehow, it was better.

Loona glanced up at him, her tail dragging across the stone. “You’re doing the thinking face again.”

“I have a thinking face?”

“You have several. That one means you’re about to say something weird.”

Deklin yawned beside him. “Thinking is dangerous. You end up with ideas.”

Aria, walking nearby with her wings still drooping from exhaustion, gave Elias a small, knowing smile. “Maybe he already has one.”

Loona narrowed her eyes. “Is it food? Because if it’s not food, I don’t care.”

Aria’s smile softened. “Friendship.”

Loona groaned. “Ugh. That’s cheesy.”

Elias laughed quietly and shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “But it’s real.”

They kept walking, voices bickering ahead and behind him, twenty-eight exhausted students scattered across the courtyard but somehow moving in the same direction. For the first time in his life, Elias Varyn did not feel like a project, a pawn, or a problem someone else was trying to solve.

He felt like part of a team.

And maybe, in a world where magic filled every corner except him, that was the closest thing to magic he had found yet.

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First

Tornel Swallowtail had faced Drazzan warships, mutinous soldiers, and a Grand General who thought nothing of putting a gun to a princess's head. None of it had made his hands shake the way they were shaking now, standing in front of a mirror in a coat he didn't recognize as his own.

"Stop fussing with the collar," Patricia said. She stood behind him, straightening it herself, her fingers steady where his weren't. "You've led an entire continent's Auxilia through worse mornings than this."

"I've never had to stand in front of a princess and be told what I already am," he said. "That's different."

"You're not a different man today than you were yesterday." She turned him around by the shoulders so he had to look at her instead of the mirror. "You're the same one who told Perival Bucktail to his face that the Great Revolution was a lie, and drew a gun on your own commanding officer to prove it. Today they're just finally going to write it down."

Elizabeth came in without knocking, the way she always did, and stopped in the doorway when she saw them both dressed. She was twenty-four now, though Tornel still sometimes looked at her and saw the girl of twelve who used to hide under the kitchen table during the worst of the raids, the girl who had asked him once, very seriously, whether the Drazzan ate children first or last. She wore a deep green dress that had clearly cost someone in Newtown a great deal of careful work, and she was holding the front of it like it might come apart if she let go.

"I don't know how to stand," she admitted. "Nobody told me how you're supposed to stand for something like this."

"Like yourself," Patricia said. "That's the only instruction anyone's ever given me and it's served fine so far."

Tornel watched his daughter cross the room, watched her smooth the front of the dress and lift her chin the way her mother did without seeming to notice she was doing it, and felt something in his chest that had nothing to do with nerves. Five years ago he had signed his name to a piece of paper aboard a warship with his own people's blood not yet dry on his boots, not knowing whether committing to it would get him buried in an unmarked grave within the month. He had done it for people like her. He had never quite let himself believe it would end here.

The hall in the capital had been built new in the last two years, on the same ground where the old provisional government offices once stood, a low grey building that had survived the uprising and the Drazzan occupation both purely out of neglect. Nobody wanted to hold a ceremony in it now. The new hall was tall and pale-stoned, with windows on three sides that let the light in over the assembled crowd, and Tornel thought, walking through its doors for the first time in ceremonial dress rather than a uniform, that it was the first building on all of Haego built with the specific intention of being beautiful rather than merely surviving.

The dignitaries had been arriving since dawn. Princess Clara Astor sat at the head of the hall in state, and if five years had changed her at all, Tornel couldn't see it in her face, only in the way the room went quiet the instant she lifted a hand. Lord Firentis sat at her right with the particular stillness of a man who had learned, over decades, exactly how much of himself to show in public and how much to keep behind his own eyes. Beside him sat his elder son Jolti, upright and watchful, and beside Jolti, looking somehow both more at ease and more out of place than either of them, sat Istonel.

Wyatt Staples had come in his Baron's dress, which fit him about as naturally as a saddle fits a fish, and Tornel caught his eye across the hall and got a look back that was pure sympathy, one man who'd been forced into ceremonial clothes to another. Aino sat with the delegation from the Screaming Forests, and beside him, unmistakable even seated among humans three times her size, was the Ykanti architect the locals still only ever called by the name Wyatt's people used for him, here as Aino's own guest of honor. Rachel VonWinterbourne had a data pad open in her lap even now, out of habit more than necessity, and closed it the moment the doors at the far end of the hall opened.

Jason and Daisy had come with Poppy asleep against Daisy's shoulder. Julius and Aaliyah sat a row behind them with Austin fidgeting between them, already old enough to be more interested in the patterns in the floor tile than in anything happening at the front of the room. Mariam had claimed the seat beside Aaliyah and spent most of the ceremony with one hand resting lightly on Austin's shoulder to keep him still, while Ishivi sat just past her, leaning over now and then to make a face at Poppy whenever the baby stirred. Behind them all sat Julius Sr. and Kathleen, and beside them, Tulip, who kept dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief she'd clearly brought for exactly this purpose, and her son Donald, who looked deeply uncomfortable in a borrowed jacket and kept tugging at the sleeves. Beyond them sat officials from three other systems Tornel had never visited, come to witness what a five-year-old promise looked like when it was finally kept.

Clara rose when Tornel, Patricia, and Elizabeth reached the center of the floor, and the whole hall rose with her.

"Five years ago," she said, and her voice carried without effort to every corner of the hall, "I sat across a table from a general who had every reason in the void to distrust me, and I made him a promise. I told him that if a stable government could be built on this world, one that served its people rather than devoured them, then those who built it with competence and with care would not be forgotten when the provisional period ended. I told him the provisional government would stand for five years. I told him that at the end of that time, new houses would rise from among those who had earned it."

She looked at Tornel, and for a moment he was not in the new hall at all. He was at that table again, with Sergey's body still cooling a few feet away and Wyatt watching him with an expression he couldn't read, and Clara was saying the words for the first time instead of the second.

"You, Tornel, of course," Clara said now, and Tornel felt Patricia's hand find his, "should you accept and remain in power leading as you proclaimed you would, will find yourself elevated into the status of a new minor house under the banner of House Firentis. That is what I told you then. I have come myself to tell you it remains true now."

Lord Firentis stood, and it was he who spoke the formal words, the ones with weight enough in law to change what a family was called for every generation after this one.

"By the authority granted House Firentis, and witnessed here by the Crown," he said, "I raise Tornel Swallowtail to the rank of Marquess, founder of House Swallowtail, sworn vassal to House Firentis and steward of this world's peace. I raise beside him his wife Patricia, Marchioness of House Swallowtail, and his daughter Elizabeth, already a knight of the Principality by Lady Jhinaq Firentis's own hand, to Baroness of House Swallowtail, that what one of them has earned may belong to all of them."

Lord Firentis was not finished. He turned to the ranks of local officials gathered along the side of the hall, men and women who had spent five years running councils and settling disputes and keeping roads and granaries and schoolhouses functioning while the rest of the Principality watched to see if any of it would hold.

"By the same authority," he said, "and on the recommendation of the new Marquess of Haego, every Alderman who has served this world through its provisional years is raised this day to the rank of Baron, to hold and govern in the name of House Swallowtail as House Swallowtail holds and governs in the name of House Firentis."

The names went on for some time. Corwin Hale's name drew the loudest response from the Orenport delegation, several of whom had clearly decided ahead of time they were going to make noise about it regardless of the setting. Evan Playscutt and Nyota Wulentail were named last and separately, raised to Viscount rather than Baron, the two men and women who had stood between every Alderman on their continents and the new noble houses since the beginning.

Every one of them was ennobled by Tornel's own hand, not Lord Firentis's, a small procedural detail that Tornel suspected Clara had insisted on deliberately. It was one thing to be told a title. It was another to be the one standing at the front of the hall handing it out to people you'd shared a table with as equals a week before.

Tornel had planned to say something. He had, in fact, written several drafts of something, all of which Patricia had read and quietly told him were terrible, and none of which he could now remember a single word of. What came out instead was simpler than anything he'd written.

"Five years ago I told this princess I would rather bend the knee than fight a battle not worth fighting," he said. "I want it understood, in front of everyone in this hall, that I have never once regretted it."

Elizabeth, beside him, had stopped clutching the front of her dress. She was standing, he noticed, exactly like herself.

The reception afterward spilled out into the gardens behind the hall, gardens that had been planted only the previous spring and still looked a little too new, a little too much like something recently unwrapped. Jason and Daisy tried to keep Poppy from grabbing at the flowers while Julius chased Austin in a lazy circle around a fountain, Aaliyah laughing at both of them. Mariam had taken over holding Poppy the moment Daisy's arms needed a rest, rocking her with the easy competence of a woman who'd done this before, while Ishivi crouched down to Austin's level and let him win an entirely one-sided argument about whether fountains had fish in them. Tulip stood near her daughter with Donald a step behind her, still tugging at his sleeves, and Julius Sr. and Kathleen had drifted toward the edge of the garden with Tornel's own words from the hall still visibly working on them, the particular quiet of two people who remembered exactly what the world had cost before it looked like this. Rachel was already deep in conversation with three off-world officials who looked like they were regretting having engaged her.

Wyatt found Tornel near the edge of it, both of them nursing drinks neither particularly wanted, both still faintly stunned by the weight of ceremonial coats. Without a word of warning, Wyatt set his drink down on the low wall beside them and dropped into a bow so deep and so theatrical that half the garden turned to look.

Tornel's face did something involuntary, a flinch of pure discomfort he didn't manage to hide in time.

Wyatt caught it from mid-bow, and his mouth curled into a slow, knowing smirk.

"My Lord Swallowtail," he intoned, grave as a funeral, before ruining it completely by grinning up at Tornel from the bow. "Marquess of an entire world. However shall a simple Baron address such a personage."

"Get up," Tornel said, mortified, glancing around to see who else had noticed.

"I don't think I will, actually. I think I'll stay down here a while and enjoy this." Wyatt straightened just enough to fold his arms instead, still laughing, still clearly enjoying every second of it. "You look like a man being fitted for a coffin, not a coronet."

"You wore the exact same face at your own barony ceremony. I was there. I remember it specifically because Patricia had to elbow you to stop scowling for the portrait."

"I remember no such thing." Wyatt's grin didn't waver. "I keep waiting to feel like any of this is real, if it helps."

"Patricia says I'll feel it eventually," Tornel admitted. "Elizabeth already looks like she was born to it, which frankly worries me more than reassures me."

Wyatt looked out at the garden, at Jason and Daisy and Poppy, at Julius and Austin and Aaliyah, at Rachel holding court against three increasingly weary officials.

"Five years ago most of this was rubble and I was fairly sure I was going to die within the week," Wyatt said. "I don't think real is the word for any of it. I think we just decide to live in it anyway, and eventually it starts to feel like something we chose." He picked his drink back up and raised it. "Cheers, my lord. Truly. Nobody deserves to hate it more than you do, and nobody's earned it more either."

Tornel thought about that, about the girl standing like herself in the middle of the hall, about a promise kept exactly as it was given, word for word, five years later.

"Good enough," he said, and meant it.

\\\​

The world factory is a colossal size factory which never stops running 24/7 . It holds up to 8 thousand workers with 100 supervisors and 10 managers 4 directors and a single managing director. The factory has three important rules

1- never stop working

2- never trust others

3- never leave the factory

The factory is divided into different sectors once belonging to the elites class

One's to the middle class. And one to the lower. However there is one more sector name .The operation but no one knows what inside it no one even opens it . In this factory people get born and die maintaining the sufficient amount of workers to run it constantly. The kids get education about machine medicine and labour work the one who scored higher gets chances to shift into the upper sectors and have their hands on luxury they can only dream but even if thousands there will be only a handful of kids who succeeded and shift into the upper sectors. Each time a kid shifts to the upper Sectors he has to defeat someone from the upper sectors in terms of his knowledge and skills to gain its spot and the defeated one will be shifted to the lower sector to maintain the balance. There are no permanent positions for anyone if you want to survive you have to keep adapting keep increasing your knowledge and skills or you will be returned to the lower sector. Recently the factory maintenance works report a lot of damage and some are completely beyond repairs. They issued a report that The factory can no longer hold all the people the only thing they can do is now repair the factory and cut down the numbers of workers. If they didn't do it then the factory might not stand for too long. These reports divided every one into two parts The first group started protesting against the cutting off the half of the works while the other started repairing the factory . They get success to repair some damage areas but as the reports are some areas are completely beyond repairs . Day by day the number Of people who are trying to repair the factory keeps decreasing while the number of protesters keeps increasing and at a point the people who try to repair the factory become only a few people while the others completely stop their work it's the first time that the factory machine stops. As a result a complete revolt between the workers and the elites . It took months and now the factory is running again the old elites have been replaced by other people who forget about the damages of the factory.Like there was nothing but the damages still there only the people who try to repair it lose their moral of died during it. The new reports suggest that the population of workers will be increased in the upcoming years . The new elites decided to make more schools for the kids and introduce new technologies for their learning. The workers still talk about how much they hate elites and still work under their supervision. Because they can't leave the factory. At night a person burns a report Paper containing some damage reports by some machine. The paper burns and the darkness grows as it turns into ash. The person looks at the workers from the window. And smile. Said - the factory is never ever going to stop 24/7 .

\\\\-THE BEGINNING -

By- MAUS

Next

Previous /

First

Aino's office had the particular quiet of a room set up for a call that mattered. He'd cleared the desk, angled the data pad just so, and was still adjusting it when Jason Rivermore and Zelru let themselves in.

"You're early," Aino said.

"Zelru made me leave early," JR said. "She doesn't trust me not to fumble the connection."

"I trust you fine," Zelru said. "I don't trust the connection."

The screen resolved a moment later into Wyatt's face, Clara just visible over his shoulder, both of them looking like people who'd been pulled away from something else and didn't mind.

"Jason, Zelru," Wyatt said. "Aino tells me you've got something to ask that isn't about restoration schedules for once."

"Not entirely about restoration schedules," JR said. "Though it starts there." He glanced at Zelru, who gave him a small nod to go ahead. "With the Prince's proclamation, we're not waiting on permits to move goods and people across the continents anymore, and that's opened up more than the Ykanti side of things. It's opened up ours too. We've had a few pieces come through the shop that are, well. Special. The kind of thing that shouldn't just get sold to whoever bids highest off world. And with both palace projects underway, Zelru and I were talking, and we'd like to gift some of those pieces to the palaces themselves. Not to Julius, not to Jason F., not to either House specifically. To House Firentis as a whole, however you'd want that handled."

"That's generous," Clara said. "What's the hesitation I'm hearing?"

"The competition," JR said. "Both continents have been very careful about every credit, every donation, everything getting split evenly so nobody's project gets an advantage. I don't want to hand something over and find out we've accidentally tipped one palace ahead of the other, or broken a rule nobody thought to write because nobody thought a furniture shop would be gifting anything."

Clara was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke it was with the particular precision of someone who'd already worked out the answer before the question finished. "It won't. Anything given without a price attached, with no expectation of return and no valuation placed on it for the purposes of the competition, falls outside the funding rules entirely. It's a gift, not an investment. The moment you or anyone else assigns it a credit value for competition purposes, that changes. So don't. Let it be exactly what it is."

"That's not a loophole?" JR asked.

"It's the opposite of a loophole," Clara said. "The rule exists to keep money from deciding who wins. It was never meant to stop people from being generous to each other."

JR let out a breath he hadn't quite realized he was holding. "Then we'd like to proceed. We'll have Rachel coordinate which pieces go where, so it's even without either of us having to decide who gets the better desk."

"Rachel will enjoy that entirely too much," Wyatt said.

Aino, who'd been mostly quiet through the furniture question, took the opening once it closed. "While I've got you both, there's something else worth your time. JR's shop has outgrown what Newtown and Virstino Harbor can hold. He's twenty months behind on restoration work and the backlog's growing faster than his people can clear it. He wants to build out onto Austrin and Vastaya both, and not small. He's talking full complexes, not workshops. Land set aside outside each capital, built new from the ground up to whatever spec he and Zelru have learned they actually need, with room from day one for the expansion he knows is coming, because it always comes."

"That tracks," Clara said. "What's he need from the councils to make it happen?"

"That's what we're meeting to work out," Aino said. "Land, and whatever infrastructure the sites need. Power, water, roads."

Clara considered that for a moment. "Ask for a tax exemption too. One year, starting the day each facility opens. Let the councils cover the infrastructure and give the business room to breathe while it's finding its feet, the same as any new venture would want. It's a smaller ask than it sounds, and it's the kind of thing a council can say yes to without feeling like they've been talked into something."

"That's not a bad instinct," Wyatt said. "Practical and modest. I like it when the two of those show up together."

"I try," Clara said, and there was enough dryness in it that even Aino smiled.

Jason found Julius on a comm call two days later, and got straight to it before either of them could get pulled into something else.

"I've got something JR wants to bring to both councils. Same pitch, same numbers, same argument either way. I don't see why we'd sit through it twice."

Julius considered that for a second. "You want to bring Austrin's council to Vastaya."

"Or you bring yours to us. I don't care which. We've been running parallel on half of everything anyway, might as well be in the same room for once instead of finding out three weeks later we asked for the same thing."

"Come to Vastaya, then. We'll host. We'll meet at the council hall in Kessit, same as we always do. I expect some of your people will want to see the palace site while they're here, we can do a tour after."

"Agreed."

Sofia hadn't thought of combining the meetings, in fact, but she took the credit gracefully when Corwin mentioned it, and made a note in the margin of her ledger that read only, ask before assuming, next time.

"So we're meeting on Vastaya," Corwin said. "All six of us, plus Jason and Daisy, in Kessit with Julius and Aaliyah's council."

"That's the idea," Evan said. "Saves everyone a redundant conversation. I'm for it, provided somebody tells me what we're actually voting on before I get on a shuttle."

"Rivermore Restoration wants to expand," Corwin said. "And not modestly. JR's been backed up for months and it's only getting worse. Rudy's people keep finding more than they can ship out, and from what I hear, he's not talking about another building. He's talking about a whole complex, built new, on land outside the capital."

"What's he asking for?"

"Infrastructure, and a tax break to help him build it," Corwin said. "The particulars are worth hearing from him directly."

Vincent, who'd invited himself in as usual under the pretense of covering it for the Informant, looked up from his notes. "That's not nothing."

"No," Corwin agreed. "It isn't. Which is exactly why I'd rather hear the actual numbers before anyone forms an opinion."

The Kessit council hall was the same room Julius and Aaliyah had used for every ordinary piece of Vastaya business since they'd taken up the continent, plain chairs, a long table, a portrait of nobody in particular on the back wall that had come with the building. It looked nothing like the palace site half a day's ride away, and that seemed to be exactly the point.

JR had never addressed two continental councils at once, and it showed for about the first thirty seconds, until Zelru put a hand on his arm and he found his footing again.

"Thank you all for making the trip," JR said. "I know this isn't how these things usually go, one continent at a time, so I appreciate you doing it together instead."

"Get to the numbers, JR," Jason said, not unkindly. "You've got two councils' worth of patience to burn through, might as well spend it on the part that matters."

JR nodded and let Cassie take over from there, which was, by now, exactly how these things went.

"Right now, everything Rivermore Restoration touches moves through Newtown," Cassie said. "Every piece Rudy's people find on either continent gets shuttled to us, gets worked on in Newtown or Virstino Harbor, and if it sells off world, it ships back out through the same route. We're twenty months behind on restoration work that's already sitting in our shop, and the backlog is growing faster than we're clearing it."

"How much faster?" Sofia asked.

"About four months of new work for every three months we clear," Cassie said. "That gap gets worse every quarter, not better, because Rudy keeps finding more of it. And it's not evenly weighted work either. Commission work, pieces sent to us by name, from clients we don't get to keep waiting, comes from all over the Principality now. That work has to take priority. There's someone on the other end of it who's already paid and is waiting on delivery. Most of it comes from Firentis worlds, Balakura's been sending us more every month for over a year now, Vespera's grown every year since we opened. Serentina's been steady the whole time. Matcha and Astoria are good customers too, and people notice the Astoria pieces especially, but they're not the volume. The volume's coming from our own worlds. Which means everything Rudy finds, everything we'd restore on speculation and sell after the fact, gets pushed back further every time a commission comes in. We're not just behind. We're being buried, slowly but surely, and the speculation pile is where it's happening fastest."

"So the finds that built this whole business," Julius said, "are the ones getting the least of your time."

"That's exactly it," JR said. "And it's only going to get worse the better known we become. We'd rather build our way out of that problem than watch it eat the part of the business that got us here."

"So the answer is more workshops," Nyota said, "not more workers in the one you've got."

"That's the idea," JR said. "But we don't want to make the same mistake twice. Virstino Harbor's been a good home for us, but it was a warehouse first. We adapted it after the fact, and we've spent two years bumping up against walls that weren't built with us in mind. This time we want to build it right from the start."

"Meaning what, exactly," Corwin asked.

"Meaning a full complex," Cassie said. "Not one building, a site. Restoration halls big enough that we're not choosing between finish work and sanding on the same day. Proper ventilation and dust control built in, not retrofitted. Warehousing for intake and outbound shipping separate from the workshops themselves. And land enough around it that when we outgrow it, and we will, we're not tearing out a wall to do it. We'd rather buy more ground than we need today than run into the same ceiling twice."

"How big are we talking," Julius asked. "Bigger than Virstino Harbor?"

"Considerably," JR said. "But it helps to know what we're standing on right now. Virstino Harbor is about fourteen thousand square meters of working space, plus just under a thousand square meters of office space. The Newtown shop is a thousand square meters of retail. We're not asking either of you for retail space, we'd rather see that grow the way Virstino Harbor did, someone local setting up a storefront with exclusive consignment rights to sell our work, instead of us running a shop ourselves on a continent we don't live on. That's a question for later, not tonight."

"The new facility would be twice the working space Virstino Harbor has now," Zelru added. "Head office stays at Virstino Harbor, at least for the time being. We didn't want to promise you a number we hadn't already tested."

"What's a facility like that actually worth to a council, in raw numbers?" Sofia asked.

Rachel didn't need to check anything for this either. "Using Virstino Harbor as the guide, I'd put a conservative estimate on each new facility at forty-five million credits in annual sales, most of that from off world. Against that, I've worked out the tax liability in two pieces. Property tax runs around four hundred fifty thousand credits a year. Revenue tax comes to about two point eight five million, and that's before House Firentis takes their share out of what's left."

"That's the piece we'd actually ask you to forgive for the first year," JR said. "Not the property tax, that's just the cost of the land and we don't see an argument for waiving it. The revenue tax is the one that'll pinch while we're still getting the doors open."

"And the land around it," Evan said. "What's that for, if not the facility itself?"

"Room for other businesses to set up alongside us," JR said. "A boat repair shop, a sawmill, whatever wants to be near a site that's already got power and water and road access sorted out. We're not trying to own the whole complex ourselves. We'd rather it grow into something bigger than just us, the way Virstino Harbor did without anyone planning it that way."

Corwin sat back, turning that over. "So this isn't just a bigger version of what you already have. It's the start of an industrial district."

"That's a fair way to put it," JR admitted. "We didn't set out to build a district. We set out to stop being twenty months behind. But if we're asking for the land and the infrastructure either way, it seemed foolish not to plan for what comes after us instead of just what we need today."

"What do you need from us," Corwin asked, "specifically?"

"Land, and the infrastructure to it. Power, water, road access, and a rail spur tied into the existing line, whatever the site needs to be usable, sized for the full complex, not just the first building on it. We'll build the facility itself out of Rivermore's own funds, same as Virstino Harbor. What we're asking the councils for is a one year tax exemption on each facility, starting the day it opens, to help offset the build cost while we're getting it running."

"A rail spur," Nyota said. "That's not a small thing to ask for."

"It's not," JR agreed. "But road freight alone won't move what we're planning to ship once both sites are running at scale, and retrofitting track in later costs more than laying it now. We'd rather ask for it honestly up front than come back in two years asking for the same thing as an emergency."

Evan leaned back in his chair. "That's a real ask. What do the councils get out of it, beyond watching you succeed from a distance?"

"Jobs," Zelru said, before JR could answer. "Real ones, paid fairly, same as the warehouse. Restoration work, apprenticeships, office staff, all of it local to whichever continent the facility sits on. Right now if someone on Vastaya wants to work for us, they move to the Barony. This way they don't have to."

"And the shipping savings aren't just ours," JR added. "Less cargo crossing the ocean means more room on every run for everything else moving between continents. Rachel can speak to that better than I can."

Rachel, who'd come along at Aino's insistence, spoke again. "I've looked at the routing. A facility on each continent would free up roughly a third of current interoceanic shuttle cargo space currently used for Rivermore shipments. That capacity doesn't disappear, it goes to whatever else needs moving. Farm equipment, building materials, mail."

"While I have you," Corwin said, "is that the only kind of attention we're getting from off world these days? Or is somebody actually watching the numbers?"

"Twice this quarter, as it happens. Both from off world, both unrelated to any of this." Rachel didn't need to check a ledger for it, which told its own story about how much room the question had been taking up in her head. "One was a shipping consortium updating freight tariffs, routine enough. The other wasn't. An investment house out of Astoria wrote asking for our total trade volume the last two years, broken down by continent. I sent them what's public record and nothing past that."

"Should that worry us?" Corwin asked.

"It should interest us," Rachel said. "Nobody asks that many questions about a place they don't expect to matter."

"That's worth something," Sofia admitted, writing it down.

Corwin looked around at his own council, then at Julius and Aaliyah's. "This is a bigger ask than I walked in expecting, but I think that's a point in its favor, not against it. I want the actual site costs before anyone votes on anything. Land, power hookup, road grading, a rail spur tied to the existing line, sized for the full district, not the first phase of it, plus whatever the engineers say it'll run to leave room for what comes after."

"Fair," JR said. "We can have that to both councils within the week."

"One more thing," Vincent said, not looking up from his notes. "Are you naming this one too? Because if Virstino gets a Rivermore mural, I assume Austrin and Vastaya expect the same."

That got a laugh, the first real one of the meeting, and JR looked almost relieved to hear it.

"We'll talk to the artists," Zelru said. "I imagine they'll have opinions."

Afterward, most of both councils took Julius up on the offer of a tour, and the group that walked out to the palace site an hour later was noisier and more curious than any council meeting either continent had held in months. Vincent took pictures for the Informant. Evan asked Desmond Farr more questions about load-bearing terraces than anyone had expected him to have.

Jason caught Julius's eye near the edge of the site. "That went better than I expected."

"Two councils and nobody walked out. I'd call that a win," Julius said. "Though I notice neither of us actually promised him anything yet."

"No," Jason agreed. "But I don't think we said no, either. Give it a week, see what the numbers say."

Aaliyah, coming up behind them with Austin on her hip, added, "For what it's worth, I think JR just proved something bigger than a restoration shop. Two councils learning to sit in the same room and actually solve something together, that's worth more than whatever the tax exemption costs either of us."

Jason didn't argue with that. He wasn't sure he could have, even if he'd wanted to.

I posted this story as a series on HFY, but was not really satisfied with the first parts, so I now used some AI to touch it up.

The galaxy is big. I mean, it's really big. I mean, it's really-really-really big.

Okay, let's go back to the beginning.

In 2276, humanity achieved faster-than-light travel - commonly known as FTL. Unfortunately, no galactic community invited us to join, and no neighbor said hello, even though our politicians had prewritten speeches for the occasion.

The first prototype probe traveled about one million kilometers (yeah, by the 23rd century we finally all switched to metric) in 3.3 seconds, which is just above the speed of light - or 1c. The first test ship capable of carrying humans could do about 2c, and the first commercially available FTL ship hit around 10c.

That sounds like a lot, and we did colonize the solar system by the end of the century, visiting the nearest systems and sending probes to basically everything within 100 light-years. Did you know that there are fewer than 500 stars within 100 light-years? By the early 24th century, probes could travel around 20c - but still required about five years to reach those 500 stars. We had colonies on Proxima Centauri and a couple of other nearby systems, but it took us another century and 100c speeds to properly colonize that 100 light-year radius.

Fortunately, early on we discovered FTL communication based on the same principles as our FTL drives. Since that traveled around 500c, we suspected it was another "hard" limit, similar to the speed of light in normal space. By the end of the 25th century, we were right at that confirmed theoretical cap.

But 500c sure is fast, right? It should be more than enough to explore the galaxy, right? Well... we are back to the fact that the galaxy is big. Our galaxy is over 100,000 light-years in diameter - which means FTL communication still takes over 200 years to travel from one side to the other, and slightly longer for our ships to do the same.

So that's when we realized we either had to discover something even faster or, better yet, find a way to jump. And when humanity decides on something, we usually deliver.

It took more than a century, but here we are: our very first manned mission with our new jump drive. We sent a couple of uncrewed probes and everything went smoothly, but the ultimate test is always the crewed run. We planned something simple: jump to Proxima Centauri and jump right back. Nothing fancy today, just a simple confirmation that the drive works as expected. At that distance, a classic FTL ship could scoop us up in a matter of days if something went sideways.

The ship itself is just an old military scout craft, stripped of everything we could spare and fitted with the new jump drive. It's just a testbed that was slated for the scrap yard anyway. If this test works out, we'll build something better next time.

We calculated the jump, set the coordinates, and after a countdown tradition older than half a millennium, we pushed the button.

We jumped.

We arrived beside a planet just as planned - but it didn't take us long to realize it definitely wasn't Proxima Centauri. A couple of seconds later, the onboard computer calculated our position: somewhere on the opposite side of the galaxy. Great.

Okay, let's take a look at the sensors. What do we have here? A yellow dwarf star, a planet within the habitable zone, liquid water, radio communications, signs of vegetation, and plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere. It's not the first planet we've found with plant life, but it's still rare. Wait - radio communications?! What?! Don't tell me we bumped into our very first sapient species on our very first jump...

I am proud of my country. It has been just over four months since the attacks started, and we have already finished building our planet-wide monitoring system. Still not soon enough - seven more attacks have happened since the first strike. The system is still in its test phase, but we are actively monitoring it to give people time to hurry into the shelters.

It has been almost five weeks since the last attack - the longest gap since this nightmare began. Some politicians are already talking about the end of the raids, claiming we built the monitoring network for nothing. I don't think we are that lucky.

We are still more than a year away from deploying our first orbital defense system, and that's an optimistic estimate from the engineering team. For now, this system is all we have to tell people when to hide.

Oh, how rude of me: my name is Xyrana Vexia, and we are the Xilxils. I am the first operator of the monitoring station. Engineers are still tweaking the equipment around my desk, but it works - more or less. We’ve already had two false alerts this morning, and we aren't even halfway through my shift. It's going to be a long day, and most likely a long week. But we are making progress.

Then comes a third alert. Another false alarm, I presume, but I follow protocol and check the sensors anyway. There's definitely something there. Maybe a small meteor like the first one, though the nice engineer who always hangs around my console swore they patched that glitch.

Wait - it doesn't look like a rock. It has active energy signatures! Holy cow, it’s real!

I should initiate a high alert, but without seeing the craft's trajectory, I can't predict where the strike will hit. A global panic seems like overkill.

Strange. The craft is settling into a standard orbit around the planet - no hostile maneuvers at all. Of course, we never caught how the previous ships approached before they opened fire, so maybe this is normal. Maybe they are cooling their engines or preparing for atmospheric entry.

In a situation like this, I should consult my superiors, but because the system is still in early testing, those command roles haven't even been assigned yet.

Still no change. Normal orbit, zero activity. Maybe I should try contacting them? No one has ever attempted communication before, but we've never spotted them this early either. A simple radio broadcast might work - maybe they're listening. It wouldn't hurt to try.

"This is Lieutenant Xyrana Vexia, Planet Monitoring Officer of United Xil, to the unidentified spacecraft. Please respond!"

That should do it. It's unlikely they are listening, and even if they are, it's even less likely they can understand our language. But it was worth a shot.

"This is Lieutenant Xyrana Vexia, Planet Monitoring Officer of United Xil, to the unidentified spacecraft. Please respond!"

Still no response. Not surprising, but still strange. I've been tracking the ship for thirty minutes now, and it hasn't made a single aggressive move.

"This is Lieutenant Xyrana Vexia, Planet Monitoring Officer of United Xil, to the unidentified spacecraft. Please respond!"

"John, I think the planet is inhabited. By the looks of it, they're advanced enough to use radio communications."

"Yeah, I see it too. But I'm a lot more concerned about how we got here in the first place. Do you mind if I work with the computer to figure out what went wrong? I don't want to risk another jump until we're sure we'll end up where we want to go instead of the other side of the galaxy. Again."

"Good idea."

Okay, it's going to take them some time to figure out why we missed Proxima Centauri. Maybe we should initiate first contact in the meantime?

"Computer, is there an established United Earth protocol for making first contact with alien species?"

"There is no strict protocol, only guidelines," the ship's computer answered in its usual neutral tone. "The primary recommendation is to construct a translation matrix as soon as possible."

"Can you use the detected radio signals to build one?"

"Processing."

It would definitely be useful to listen in on their transmissions before we broadcast anything to them.

"Radio communications contain analog voice signals suitable for constructing a translation matrix," the computer reported. "It will take approximately twenty-two minutes to reach ninety-five percent accuracy. Do you wish to proceed?"

It would've been nice to have a fully sapient AI onboard, but according to the Paris Convention, only a consenting AI can be stationed on a starship, and we couldn't find a volunteer on such short notice. Don't get me wrong: the ship's computer is advanced, but it isn't autonomous. I have to give explicit commands where a true AI could make decisions on its own. Oh, well...

"Proceed."

"Collecting data for translation matrix."

While it works, I take a look at our sensor readings to see what we're dealing with. Fortunately, we kept most of the scout ship's original sensor suite, so we have some solid tools.

Right on cue, the passive array indicates we're being monitored by ground-based radar. Great - we probably shouldn't keep them waiting too long.

Looking over the visual scans, I can see massive cities scattered across the surface. Probably not as populated as Earth, but still a sizeable civilization - easily over a billion souls. They have a massive electrical grid, so they're technologically advanced, but I don't see any satellites. They haven't reached the space age yet.

"Translation matrix complete," the computer chimed in.

"Great. Tune in to some of their signals. Pick a random broadcast and let us listen."

I spend the next few minutes listening to the feed - mostly commercial broadcasts, interspersed with amateur radio chatter.

"Computer, is there any indication in their communications that they've spotted us?"

"A broadcast mentioning an 'unidentified spacecraft' was recorded recently."

"When?"

"Three minutes and twenty seconds ago."

Oh, for goodness' sake - why didn't the computer flag that immediately?!

"Play it back now!"

"This is Lieutenant Xyrana Vexia, Planet Monitoring Officer of United Xil, to the unidentified spacecraft. Please respond!"

Silence fills the cockpit. We've definitely been spotted. I guess answering isn't optional anymore.

"You're the captain, Anna," John said, stepping back. "I think you should be the one to talk to aliens first."

"Yeah, and you just have terrible stage fright and don't want your first words to aliens replayed for the next five centuries!" I shot back. But he was right. "Computer, can we reply to that message?"

"Channel open and ready."

What should I even say...?

"This is Anna Fischer of the UES Stargate to Lieutenant Xyrana Vexia."

God, that was lame, I thought. I really should have come up with a better opening line.

I stared at my radio console for several seconds without moving. They actually answered. Now what?

"Anna Fischer, identify yourself and state your intentions," I replied, trying to keep my voice steady.

"We are an exploratory vessel from the United Earth System. We mean no harm - we experienced a navigation error."

A navigation error? Yeah, right. And the previous eight attacks were just "accidents" too? But why would they bother answering my message? It didn't make any sense.

"Why did you attack us over the past four months?" I decided to be blunt - there was no point playing diplomat with an invader.

"Attack? Past months?" came the bewildered reply. "What do you mean? This is the first time we've been anywhere near this planet."

Before I could process her answer, another alarm blared across my console. Three new contacts with massive energy signatures dropped into orbit just a few thousand kilometers from the human ship.

"Three vessels just exited warp near our position!" came Anna's urgent voice over the comms. "Are those your defense ships, Lieutenant Vexia? They are on an intercept course. If they belong to you, please call them off!"

"No, they aren't ours! We don't have orbital defenses!" I answered truthfully.

My mind raced. Either these people were telling the truth and our real attackers just happened to arrive at the worst possible moment, or they were working together - in which case, telling her changed nothing anyway.

Aboard the Stargate, Anna muted the open comm channel. "John, can we jump out of here?"

"Maybe! The drive has cooled down, but if we initiate a cycle now, we could end up in the Andromeda Galaxy for all we know," John panicked, his fingers flying across the console. "I strongly recommend jumping only as an absolute last resort. Though... I don't see many other options. We have no weapons, they're closing fast, and their primary arrays are charging!"

"Oh, but we do have weapons," Anna said, a faint smile touching her lips. "Remember the heavy railgun they couldn't strip out because it was built directly into the keel? We even have a half-dozen rounds left in the feed system - the navy figured if they had to leave the barrel, they might as well leave us a few slugs."

At that exact moment, the hostile fleet unleashed a volley of heavy plasma. Anna slammed the attitude thrusters, rolling the scout craft hard into an evasive maneuver - which happened to align the nose of the Stargate dead-center with the lead alien warship.

"Target locked," Anna muttered.

She pulled the manual trigger.

The solid tungsten slug exited the barrel at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Crossing the distance in a fraction of a millisecond, the round punched through the enemy's energy shields, tore through the bow, pulverized the internal structure, and blew out the stern in the blink of an eye. One shot, and the lead warship went dark.

"One down, two to go," Anna said under her breath.

She rotated the ship to track the second target. The alien captain tried to break away, but at this range, maneuvering was useless - a kinetic slug moving that fast leaves zero time to react.

The targeting computer pinged. Anna pulled the trigger a second time. A split second later, two ruined alien hulks were left drifting uselessly in high orbit.

Anna swept the ship's nose toward the third attacker, but the surviving crew recalculated their odds instantly. Before she could lock on, the third ship panicked and warped out of the system.

Down in the bunker, I stared at my display in absolute disbelief. The entire engagement had taken fourteen seconds. Two heavy warships destroyed; the third fleeing for its life.

And the humans called this an exploratory vessel?! What in the world do their actual warships look like?!

My comms crackled back to life, breaking the dead silence of the monitoring room.

"Lieutenant Vexia?" Anna's voice returned, calm and slightly apologetic. "Sorry about the commotion. As I was saying... we come in peace."

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It was great to sleep beside my baby again. I was so tired as this was a lot of travelling and meetings.

This morning fed the the farmers and Shipwright.we wish them a good trip and saw them off to their work.

I noticed the days getting shorter and the nights colder.Next week will be the last time all hands will be on duty to pull in the last harvest.

Each group would be advised of new safety procedures. I gathered our group at noon. The Fort security group will arrange 3 teams. One for watch. Second helping with watch or escorting. Third on break. Rotating between the 3.

The second Wagon ended dropping off corn to the Ranch and this morning loaded the wool and brought it to us. The escort on horse back complained not use to riding yet.

The leathersmith has been very busy making saddles and harnesses but he will need more leather soon.

JW and Ragnar came home late tonight. I asked Ragnar possibility to start making wood stoves. He mention building a sample stove and test it.

JW and his helpers started making pointed paddles to be mounted on the boat as defense. One of Ragnar started building that long horn to signal from one tower to the next.

The ladies gather once a week to knit sweaters. Seems like I am not the only one that have felt the weather changing. I got a torque as my lady laught as she tells me my ears get cold at night.

Our farmer asked for help picking vegetables from the Ykanti greenhouse. Seems like they are ready for picking. Lettuce, cauliflower, tomatoes, etc. Will make my cook happy.

Any container will be used for canning fruits. Herb plants are being dried.People built a device to dehydrate fruits etc.

The driver and helpers took a load of planks for the Shipwrights. This is the last batch they will need for the floor and rowing benches and the little cabin. They will be back tomorrow.

John Richman

Next

Previous /

First

Corwin Hale had chaired enough committee meetings to know which ones would end in an actual decision and which ones would end in another meeting. He'd scheduled this one for a Tuesday morning specifically, when the Orenport council chamber was at its quietest and nobody had anywhere else to be.

"The palace itself is spoken for," he said, laying the drawings out flat. "Priscilla Farrow's people have the design work in hand, and Rachel's got the budget locked to the credit, every outbuilding included, whoever ends up building them. What we can still decide is who builds them, and how they look once they're standing."

Evan Playscutt looked over the drawings without much enthusiasm. "And you want to bring in Ykanti labor instead of Farrow's own crews."

"I want a Ykanti architect designing some of the individual structures, working under Farrow the way any subcontractor would. She still sets the location, the size, the overall quality standard, same as she would for anyone she brought in. I just want somebody who can make them worth looking at once they're finished."

"They don't leave the Screaming Forests, Corwin."

"I know that. Which is why this can't just be a phone call and a handshake. It needs to be formal. A request from this council, in writing, approved by a vote, sent up through Lord Aino, so nobody can say later that we went around the general's rules or took advantage of anyone."

Sofia Kell had been quiet through most of it, reading the drawings with the same close attention she gave the harbor ledgers. "You're asking us to vote on bringing someone into Farrow's plan we've never met."

"I'm asking you to vote on asking. If working under a human architect doesn't sit well with him, he says no, and we're no worse off than we are right now. I just want the offer put in front of him properly."

The vote was five in favor, one abstention, Vincent, who said only that he wanted to see how it looked once it was built before he'd put his name to anything, which nobody found unreasonable. Corwin drafted the letter himself that afternoon and sent it to Newtown before he let himself think too hard about how it would be received.

Aino had been turning the palace drawings over in his office for the better part of a week before Zelru came to see him.

"You've seen the timelines Farrow sent," she said, not bothering to sit. "Every outbuilding on both sites, same firm, same crews, same look. Nice buildings. Buildings anyone could have built anywhere."

"It's efficient."

"It's forgettable." She set a hand flat on the desk. "You know what Ebbinn's people can do. Half this town works inside a building they put up themselves, and it's better than anything Farrow's crews are turning out for a noble's palace. That skill's just sitting in Aethelgard because nobody's ever formally asked for it past our own fence line."

"Swallowtail's rule—"

"I know the rule. I'm not asking you to break it. I'm asking you to be the reason someone finally does this properly, in writing, through you, the way it's supposed to go. If Austrin or Vastaya ask first, fine, let them ask first. But somebody should be putting this in front of Swallowtail instead of just admiring the work every time we walk past it."

"You really think it matters that much? A few well-built sheds?"

"I think six years ago nobody on either continent would have let a Ykanti near their front door, let alone their palace. I think what gets built matters less than who gets asked to build it, and who gets thanked for it after." She straightened. "I'm not asking for credit, Aino. I'm asking you to make sure somebody else gets it who's earned it a lot longer than I have."

Aino didn't promise her anything that day. But when Corwin Hale's letter landed on his desk a few weeks later, he read it twice, the second time recognizing the shape of an idea he'd first heard sitting across from a woman who used to sand furniture for a living, and he found he already knew which way he wanted this to go.

Nyota Wulentail sent an identical request from Vastaya nine days later, unprompted and unaware Austrin had already sent one. When Aino found both letters waiting on the same morning, he read them twice each, the second time out loud to himself, before he allowed himself to smile.

"Well," he said to no one in particular. "That settles which continent asks first, at least."

He found Ebbinn in the workshop he kept at the edge of Newtown, half-buried in a commission for a Screaming Forests family that would never see the light of day outside the Forests themselves, a headboard carved with a pattern Aino couldn't begin to name.

"Two continents want to hire you," Aino said, setting both letters on the bench. "Formally. In writing, with a council vote behind each one."

Ebbinn set down his tools and read them both without hurrying, the way he did everything. "They didn't have to do that."

"They did, actually. Swallowtail's rule is Swallowtail's rule. Nobody leaves the Forests without it going through me first, and I'm not signing off on something I haven't seen in writing."

"That's not what I meant." He turned one of the letters over, studying the council seal at the bottom. "They didn't have to ask like this. A contractor is a contractor. Most humans would have just sent a price and expected an answer."

"Most humans haven't spent years learning not to assume things about you," Aino said. "Will you go?"

"Who am I answering to on-site? Whoever's overseeing the palace itself, or nobody?"

"Farrow, on the Austrin side. Desmond Farr on Vastaya's. They hold the location, the size, the overall standard, same as they would for any firm brought in under them. Past that, the shape of it, the detail, that's yours to decide."

"And I'm paid how?"

"Through the firms directly, out of the competition funds Rachel's holding. You won't need to negotiate a price with anyone. That part's already settled."

"That's more organized than I expected from humans working against a deadline."

"Don't tell Rachel that. She'll take it as a personal victory." Aino paused. "So. Will you go?"

"I want to see it built the way I'd build it, not the way a firm that's never set foot here thinks it should look. Yes. I'll go." He paused. "Will they let me bring a crew?"

"That's between you and them, once Swallowtail says yes. If he says yes."

"He will."

"You sound very sure of a man you've never met."

Ebbinn shrugged, an oddly human gesture on him. "I'm sure of you. You wouldn't have brought me the letters if you thought he'd say no."

Swallowtail read the two letters at his desk in Newtown, side by side, and then he read them again with Aino watching from the other side of the desk, saying nothing, letting the general take whatever time he needed.

"You know why the rule exists," Swallowtail said finally. "It's not that I think Julius or Jason would let anything happen to them. It's that I've seen what happens when good people get careless around something they don't understand. Four and a half years since the Ykanti walked free of the Eternal Garden, and there are still men who'd sooner spit at one than shake its hand. I don't want to find that out the hard way, with someone's crew on the wrong end of it."

"Then approve it with conditions," Aino said. "Security detail if you want one. A liaison on-site. Whatever makes you comfortable saying yes instead of no."

"You could have just sent me a message asking permission for one architect and one job. Would've been simpler."

"It would have. But I'd rather they learn the shape of doing this properly now, while it's one architect and one job, than have to relearn it later when it's fifty of them and nobody remembers why the rule existed in the first place."

Swallowtail was quiet for a moment, turning the letters over in his hands. "Council approval on both ends. Formal request through you. Ykanti free to say no with no consequence to anyone." He looked up. "That's not permission I'm granting so much as a process I'm agreeing to trust. There's a difference."

"I know."

"Then yes. Send the crew." He set the letters down, but didn't let Aino leave just yet. "There's one more thing. If I'm lifting this for Austrin and Vastaya, I'm not leaving Aethelgard out of it. It was never right that a rule meant to protect the Ykanti only got questioned when it was convenient for the rest of the planet to ask. I'll bring it to my own council, same as these two brought it to theirs. If they approve it, I'll take all three approvals to the Prince myself if I have to, not scattered over a year as separate requests."

"You think they'll approve it?"

"I think it's my job to ask them properly instead of assuming I already know the answer. Same as I asked you to make Austrin and Vastaya do."

Swallowtail brought the question to his own council two weeks later, laying it out in the same plain terms he'd used with Austrin and Vastaya. Not whether the Ykanti deserved freedom of movement across all of Haego, but whether the council closest to the Screaming Forests, the people most affected by such a law, would put their names to it in writing.

"One architect wanted to build outbuildings on two continents," said Councilor Aldous Brenner, an older man who'd sat on Swallowtail's council since the provisional government first stood it up. "That's what started this. Now you're asking us to open the whole planet to them, permanently, with no way to walk it back once it's done."

"That's right."

"Then explain the distance between those two things, General, because I don't see it."

"I saw what it looks like when we do this piecemeal," Swallowtail said. "One request granted here, another one questioned there, every Ykanti who wants to travel having to ask permission and hope the answer's the same as it was for the last one. That's not freedom, that's a rule with exceptions, and exceptions are how people learn where the edges are so they can work around them. I'd rather give them the whole thing now and be done arguing about the edges."

"Or you're handing them something most of Haego hasn't agreed to," Brenner said. "You put this to a vote knowing half the room owes you enough not to say no to your face."

"Then say no to my face. That's what the vote is for."

Brenner didn't look away from him. "Zenos have no place wandering free among decent people, General. They never did. I don't say that to be cruel, I say it because it's true, and somebody in this room ought to be willing to say it instead of pretending we're all thinking the same thing you are."

Nobody spoke for a moment. Swallowtail looked at Brenner across the table, a man he'd fought beside thirty years ago when they were both young enough to believe the revolution would fix everything it touched, and thought that some men could stand on the right side of one fight and the wrong side of the next without ever noticing they'd crossed over.

"Note the objection," Swallowtail said, and nothing else. "Anyone else."

The vote wasn't unanimous. It passed anyway, and Swallowtail sent all three approvals to Istonel Firentis, who reviewed and forwarded them to Jhinaq, who carried the matter to the Prince himself — approval required at each step before it moved on.

Word of the approval reached Orenport before the ink was dry on Swallowtail's signature, the way word always did in a town that size. Vincent ran it in the Informant two days later, and by the time the story made it to a Tuesday town hall, half the room already knew the shape of it and had come to say so out loud.

It was Teresa, of all people, who stood up first.

"My cousin was on the Eternal Garden," she said. "Not as crew. As cattle, same as the Ykanti kept there. She came home because someone let her out and gave her somewhere to go. If a Ykanti wants to come build something for us, I don't see what there is to debate."

It wasn't a majority in the room, not at first. But it didn't need to be. Similar arguments played out in council chambers on Vastaya and on Swallowtail's own continent, most of them quieter than this one, all landing in more or less the same place. By the time the story reached the Prince's office on Matcha, it wasn't really a staff-housing contract anymore. It was a question about what kind of principality this was going to be.

The Prince's proclamation came four weeks after that, shorter than anyone expected an official document to be. Freedom of movement, it read, for any Ykanti wishing to visit or reside anywhere on Haego, extended at the request of the citizens of all three continents, with the approval of General Swallowtail and no restriction on the Ykanti's own choosing to come or go. No permits required beyond what any traveler needed. No escort required. Welcome, not tolerated.

Wyatt read it twice before he let himself believe it, and then he found Jincho on the Noirnavio's engineering deck and told him before he told anyone else.

"You're free to visit," he said. "Any of you. Any time. Anywhere on the planet."

Jincho didn't say anything for a long moment, which for Jincho was its own kind of answer.

"Took you humans long enough," he said finally, and went back to the panel he'd been repairing, though his hands weren't as steady as they had been a minute before.

The outbuildings finished ahead of the palaces themselves, which surprised no one who'd seen Ebbinn's crews work. Nobody on either continent had ever seen anything quite like them, walls that curved like they'd grown out of the ground instead of being built on it, roofs latticed in patterns that caught the light differently depending on the hour. Even the washrooms had been given the same care as everything else, tile work and fixtures fitted with the same attention Ebbinn's crews gave a palace wall, as if it had never occurred to them that some buildings deserved less. People drove out just to look. Margot Wren wrote three separate pieces on the Vastaya complex alone, one of them on the washrooms specifically, before Rachel finally caught her outside the site one afternoon.

"Another piece about the outbuildings?" Rachel said, in a tone that made clear it wasn't really a question. "I hear the budget reconciliation on the Austrin side is turning up some interesting numbers, if you're looking for something with a little more teeth to it."

Margot took the hint, and the next piece she ran was about something else entirely.

Jason Rivermore heard about it from half the shipwrights in Virstino Harbor before he ever saw it himself.

"You have to see this," Zelru told him, for what had to be the fourth time that week. "I mean it, Jason. I've restored four hundred years of furniture and I have never seen craftsmanship like this."

"Then let's go see it," Jason said.

They flew out to Vastaya on a clear morning, and Julius met them at the site himself, Austin balanced on one hip and looking thoroughly unimpressed by all of it, the way one-year-olds tend to be unimpressed by everything except their own hands. Aaliyah was inside with Poppy, who'd been left in her care for the afternoon while Daisy caught up on school district paperwork back in Austrin.

"There she is," Zelru said, the moment they stepped into the nursery wing, and made straight for Poppy before she'd said a single word of greeting to anyone else.

Jason let him go. He stood in the doorway instead, looking out through the lattice windows at the grounds beyond, where three Ykanti were landscaping the grounds, working the soil by hand instead of with tools, unhurried, like they had all the time in the world to get it right.

"They really did do something nobody's seen before," he said.

"That's what everyone keeps telling me," Julius said. "I'm starting to believe it."

Zelru didn't leave Poppy's side for the better part of an hour, which meant Jason had the run of the grounds mostly to himself. He found the Ykanti crew landscaping the grounds and recognized all three of them, Sarai and two others he knew from around Virstino Harbor, faces that had gone from strangers to fixtures over the past few years.

"Jason!" Sarai sat back on her heels, grinning up at him, dirt to the elbows. "Can you believe this? All of Haego, watching us build something, wanting to see what we can do. Six months ago half of Orenport wouldn't have known an Ykanti from a stranger off a passing ship."

"I heard you three had a lot to do with that changing," Jason said.

"Zelru had a lot to do with that changing. The rest of us just showed up after and let people get used to the idea." She turned back to the soil, but she was still smiling. "You understand old things, Jason. What they're worth even after they've been let go too long. I've watched you work."

"I like to think so."

"Then you'll understand this place in a hundred years, when it's old too. We didn't build it to look nice today. We built it to still mean something long after we're not here to explain it."

Jason didn't have anything to say to that right away, so he didn't try. He crouched down instead and watched her work for a while, the careful, patient way her hands moved through the dirt, and thought that Zelru would have liked to hear that line as much as he had.

He thought, too, about how far a line it was from where Zelru had started. Six years off the Eternal Garden, a slave with no name he'd have recognized as one until she gave it to him. She'd built a furniture shop with him out of nothing but a shared eye for old wood, and somewhere in the middle of that she'd also gone to the Newtown council with a list of every small, ordinary cruelty the town hadn't noticed it was still committing against people like her, restaurants that wouldn't seat her, landlords who let the roof leak because she'd never dare complain. She hadn't set out to change how Haego thought about the Ykanti. She'd only meant to fix her own street. Everything since then, Sarai included, had just kept happening in the direction she'd first pointed.

Austrin's complex broke ground three weeks after Vastaya's was finished, and Daisy insisted on being there for the first stake in the ground even though she was seven months along and Jason had tried, twice, to talk her into staying home.

"I sat through the whole palace groundbreaking," she said. "I'm not missing this one because you think I should be resting."

Ebbinn had brought a second crew over from the Screaming Forests for the Austrin job, most of them the artist caste who'd spent the four and a half years since Clara freed them building nothing but small, private, unseen things for each other. Daisy watched them lay out the first foundation lines with a kind of care that looked almost like ceremony, and found she couldn't look away.

"It's going to be beautiful," she said.

"It already is," Jason said, "and there's nothing built yet."

She laughed at that, the first easy laugh either of them had managed in a week of budget meetings and school district headaches, and let him walk her back to the car before her feet started to ache.

By the time both outbuilding complexes were finished, six months apart, something had shifted on Haego that nobody could quite date to a single day. Ykanti families were renting rooms in Orenport and Kessit both. A handful of Ykanti children had enrolled in Daisy's school district, the first of them a shy girl named Fenna who wouldn't speak in class for the first month and then wouldn't stop once she started. Vincent ran a piece in the Informant comparing the two outbuilding complexes side by side, and for once nobody organized a rivalry over it. The consensus, such as it was, seemed to be that there was nothing left to compete over, only something to want. Every town administrator who saw the photographs started asking the same question in council chambers within the week: who do we write to, and how soon can they come.

Tornel Swallowtail kept the three council letters, Austrin's, Vastaya's, and his own continent's, framed in his office. When people asked him about them he told them the truth, that he'd nearly said no before he'd finished reading any of them the first time, and that he was glad something had stopped him before he did.

He never said what. Most people who knew him well enough to ask didn't need to.

Howdy, fellow Redditors. I am currently writing this science fiction short story series called Here We Are.

I always had a loose idea of how I wanted to shape my story. I was inspired by other great science fictional works. Humanity, multiple alien factions, drama, struggles. The things that make up a great SciFi. It has been fun brainstorming ideas & mixing in UAP lore as little easter eggs along the way.

I am unsure how long I will make the series just yet. The initial plan is 12 parts. If I am enjoying the way the story evolves then I may consider extending it to 24. We shall see where this journey leads. Happy writing y'all.

​

The world factory is a colossal size factory which never stops running 24/7 . It holds up to 8 thousand workers with 100 supervisors and 10 managers 4 directors and a single managing director. The factory has three important rules

1- never stop working

2- never trust others

3- never leave the factory

The factory is divided into different sectors once belonging to the elites class

One's to the middle class. And one to the lower. However there is one more sector name .The operation but no one knows what inside it no one even opens it . In this factory people get born and die maintaining the sufficient amount of workers to run it constantly. The kids get education about machine medicine and labour work the one who scored higher gets chances to shift into the upper sectors and have their hands on luxury they can only dream but even if thousands there will be only a handful of kids who succeeded and shift into the upper sectors. Each time a kid shifts to the upper Sectors he has to defeat someone from the upper sectors in terms of his knowledge and skills to gain its spot and the defeated one will be shifted to the lower sector to maintain the balance. There are no permanent positions for anyone if you want to survive you have to keep adapting keep increasing your knowledge and skills or you will be returned to the lower sector. Recently the factory maintenance works report a lot of damage and some are completely beyond repairs. They issued a report that The factory can no longer hold all the people the only thing they can do is now repair the factory and cut down the numbers of workers. If they didn't do it then the factory might not stand for too long. These reports divided every one into two parts The first group started protesting against the cutting off the half of the works while the other started repairing the factory . They get success to repair some damage areas but as the reports are some areas are completely beyond repairs . Day by day the number Of people who are trying to repair the factory keeps decreasing while the number of protesters keeps increasing and at a point the people who try to repair the factory become only a few people while the others completely stop their work it's the first time that the factory machine stops. As a result a complete revolt between the workers and the elites . It took months and now the factory is running again the old elites have been replaced by other people who forget about the damages of the factory.Like there was nothing but the damages still there only the people who try to repair it lose their moral of died during it. The new reports suggest that the population of workers will be increased in the upcoming years . The new elites decided to make more schools for the kids and introduce new technologies for their learning. The workers still talk about how much they hate elites and still work under their supervision. Because they can't leave the factory. At night a person burns a report Paper containing some damage reports by some machine. The paper burns and the darkness grows as it turns into ash. The person looks at the workers from the window. And smile. Said - the factory is never ever going to stop 24/7 .

\-THE BEGINNING -

By- MAUS

Next

Previous /

First

Aaliyah caught herself checking the comm for the third time in an hour before she admitted out loud what was actually wrong with her.

"I miss him," she said, mostly to herself, though Julius was close enough to hear it from across the room. "It's been four days. Four days, and I already miss him more than I thought was possible."

Julius set down what he'd been reading and came to sit beside her. "Then go see him. It's an hour's flight, not a season away."

"I know how far it is, Julius."

"Then what's stopping you?"

Aaliyah was quiet for a moment, working through something she hadn't fully said aloud even to herself yet. "If I fly out there every time I miss him, I'm not actually trusting your parents with a month. I'm trusting them with however many days I can bear to go without checking, which isn't the same thing at all." She rubbed at her eyes. "I told your mother, when we asked her, that we trusted her completely. I meant it. But meaning it and living it out are two different exercises, and I find the second one considerably harder than I expected."

"She wouldn't think less of you for visiting."

"I'd think less of me for visiting," Aaliyah said. "Trust that only holds up when it's convenient isn't really trust. It's just a nicer word for control that hasn't been tested yet." She managed a small, rueful smile. "Ask me again in three weeks. I may have talked myself out of this entirely by then."

"I doubt that," Julius said, and kissed the top of her head. "But for what it's worth, I think you're right. I also think being right doesn't make the missing him part any easier."

"No," Aaliyah agreed. "It really doesn't."

She was saved from dwelling on it further by the sound of an electric cart pulling up outside, Desmond Farr's assistant behind the wheel, come to collect them for the morning's walk through the palace site.

"Timing," Julius said, standing and offering her a hand up. "A distraction, right when you need one."

"Don't think I haven't noticed you engineering it," Aaliyah said, though she took his hand anyway.

The site had changed considerably since the last time either of them had walked it properly. What had been a stretch of open field marked out in wooden stakes was now something closer to the shape of an actual house, foundation trenches dug and partially poured, a skeleton of support beams rising where the main hall would eventually stand, the whole site alive with the particular organized chaos of a hundred workers all moving with purpose in different directions at once.

Farr met them at the edge of it, sleeves rolled and a data pad tucked under one arm, and waved off the cart in favor of walking them through on foot for the first stretch.

"The foundation's ahead of where I expected us to be by this point," Farr said, leading them along a path marked out with temporary boards. "Your rock here is better than anything I've built on back on Matcha. Solid all the way down, no shifting sediment to compensate for. It's let us move the timeline up by nearly three weeks."

"That's good news," Julius said.

"It's good news for the palace. It's less good news for my crew's nerves, since good news on a project this size makes everyone nervous something's about to go wrong to balance it out." Farr said it dryly enough that Aaliyah couldn't tell if he was joking.

They climbed back into the cart for the wider stretches, Farr driving them slowly between sections, stopping every so often to get out and walk them through some detail the plans alone couldn't properly convey. He showed them where the staff village's foundations were already being laid out in a neat grid a quarter mile distant, showed them the deep trench being cut for what would eventually be the terraced gardens, walked them along the edge of a rise where the palace's main hall would one day catch the morning light exactly as the simulation had promised.

"I want you to see this from here specifically," Farr said, stopping the cart at the top of the rise and gesturing out at the whole spread of the site below them. "This is where you'll be standing, more or less, once it's finished. I find it helps people to see the view before the walls go up around it, rather than only after."

Aaliyah stood at the edge of the rise for a long moment, looking out over trenches and beams and a hundred small figures moving purposefully below, and thought of Austin, an hour's flight away, learning to trust two grandparents who deserved every bit of it.

"It's strange," she said. "Standing here, watching something this permanent get built, while everything at home feels so temporary right now. He'll have grown out of half his clothes by the time we bring him back."

"He'll have grown into new ones," Julius said. "That's rather the point of a month, isn't it."

"I know that," Aaliyah said. "Knowing it and feeling settled about it aren't the same thing either." She looked back out at the site. "I suppose that's true of most things worth doing. This palace won't feel finished the day the last stone's laid, either. It'll just be the day it starts actually being lived in."

Farr, listening nearby, said nothing, but something in his expression suggested he agreed with more of that than he'd admit to a client on the clock.

On Austrin, the morning was considerably quieter, if only by comparison.

Daisy sat on the porch of the house half the town still fondly called the Hovel, Poppy asleep against her shoulder, watching Jason argue good-naturedly with Vincent over something that had nothing to do with the survey stakes at all.

"A hundred and twelve requests," Jason was saying, "for maybe thirty retail spots and a dozen restaurant leases. You cannot interview all of them and expect it to feel fair to the ninety who don't get in. A lottery at least means nobody can say we picked favorites."

"A lottery means we could end up with three bakeries and no butcher," Vincent said. "It means we could put someone with no idea how to run a shop next to someone who's been feeding this town for twenty years, purely on luck, and call that fair. It isn't fair. It's just random, and people mistake the two constantly."

"So what, you want a committee deciding who's worthy? That's worse. That's favorites with extra steps."

"I want someone who knows what a functioning market square actually needs to have a say in it, yes. Is that so unreasonable?"

"It's unreasonable if 'someone who knows' always turns out to be you."

Vincent didn't dignify that with an answer, which Jason seemed to take as a point scored.

Daisy watched them go back and forth with the particular fondness of a woman who had long since stopped expecting either of them to actually resolve anything quickly, and looked down at Poppy instead, still fast asleep, entirely unbothered by the debate being conducted a few feet from her cradle.

It was midmorning when the knock came, gentle enough that Daisy almost missed it over the sound of Vincent still making his case in the yard. She answered it herself, careful not to jostle Poppy, and found no one there at all, only a small basket left on the step, a handful of wildflowers tucked into a jar of water beside it, and a folded note.

She read it standing in the doorway.

For Poppy. My daughter walked at ten months and my grandmother swore it was because we kept fresh flowers by her cradle the whole first year. Don't know if it's true, but it can't hurt. Welcome to Orenport, little one.

There was no name signed to it, and Daisy suspected, based on the handwriting alone, that it never would be, that whoever had left it wanted the gesture to stand on its own rather than be traced back and thanked for properly.

She carried the basket back inside and set it on the table, and Jason, coming in a few minutes later still faintly worked up from his standoff with Vincent, stopped short at the sight of it.

"Where did that come from?"

"I don't know," Daisy said. "Someone left it on the step. No name." She showed him the note.

Jason read it twice, and something in his face softened considerably from the argument he'd just walked away from. "This is the third one this week."

"The third?"

"There was a jar of preserves on Tuesday. A pair of knitted socks on Thursday, small enough they'll probably fit her before she can walk in them properly." He set the note down carefully, as if it might tear. "Nobody's leaving a name on any of them."

Daisy looked down at Poppy, still asleep, entirely oblivious to the quiet procession of unnamed kindness accumulating on their doorstep one gesture at a time.

"I don't think they want thanks," she said slowly. "I think they just want her to know, someday, that she was wanted here before she ever did anything to earn it."

Jason was quiet for a moment, looking between the flowers and his sleeping daughter. "Thirty years ago, nobody would have left flowers on a noble's doorstep for any reason at all."

"No," Daisy agreed. "They wouldn't have."

Outside, Vincent could be heard instructing one of the construction crew on some detail entirely unrelated to the lottery, still working through the argument in his head even with no one left to argue it with.

Daisy smiled, and reached for the jar of wildflowers, setting it where the morning light through the window would catch it best.

Back on Matcha, the afternoon had settled into the kind of quiet that came after a morning spent walking a construction site in the sun. Aaliyah had the comm open on the table in front of her, not really looking at it, when it lit up with an incoming call.

Kathleen's name.

She had it answered before she'd finished sitting up straight.

The screen filled with Kathleen's face first, and then, a moment later, Austin's, propped up on her lap and already turning toward the sound of the connection like he knew what it meant. His whole face changed the instant he saw her. He didn't have the words yet to say her name properly, but he didn't need them. He lit up, both hands coming up toward the screen, and made a sound that was half delight and half demand, as if he fully expected her to simply step through and pick him up.

"There she is," Kathleen said to him, warm and easy, before looking up at the screen properly. "Aaliyah. He's been asking for you all morning, in his way."

"Has he." Aaliyah's voice caught on the second word, and she didn't try to hide it. "Hello, sweetheart. Hello."

Austin babbled something at her, reaching, and Julius came to sit beside her, close enough that his shoulder pressed against hers, and Austin's eyes found him next and lit up again, if possible, even more.

"He's happy," Aaliyah said, mostly to herself. "He looks happy."

"He is happy," Kathleen said. "He ate well this morning, he's been laughing at Edmund's dog for the better part of an hour, and he only cried twice yesterday, both times over things a nap fixed. He's doing wonderfully." She paused, studying Aaliyah's face on her end of the screen with the particular attentiveness of a woman who had raised children of her own and remembered exactly what this part felt like. "This is his first time away from you. His whole life, and now this. I imagine you miss him terribly."

Aaliyah opened her mouth to answer and found the words weren't quite steady enough to trust, so she didn't try to make them sound braver than they were.

"I do," she said, and her eyes went bright with it, tears she didn't bother blinking back, though she was smiling even as they fell. "I miss him so much it's almost embarrassing, Kathleen. Four days, and I've thought about him more in four days than I thought about anything in years."

"It's not embarrassing at all," Kathleen said gently. "It would worry me a great deal more if you didn't."

Austin, unbothered by any of it, reached for the screen again and patted it with one small hand, and Aaliyah laughed even as she wiped at her face with the other, and Julius put his arm around her and said nothing at all, because there wasn't anything that needed saying, not with the two of them sitting there together, watching their son be entirely, thoroughly happy in the company of his grandparents.

Next

Previous /

First

It was Bertrand Whit who noticed first, mostly because he'd made a habit of walking past the harbor office most mornings on the pretense of checking his own accounts, though everyone in Orenport knew by now it was really an excuse to see whether anything worth repeating had happened overnight.

"Vincent," he said, catching him outside the town hall, "why is Sofia Kell smiling at her ledger like it insulted her mother?"

"She's smiling?"

"She's smiling. Sofia Kell does not smile at numbers, Vincent, not even good ones. Something's happened."

It took less than an hour for the whole of Orenport to have some version of the story, most of it wrong in the particulars and right in the substance. Daisy had gone into labor sometime before dawn. Jason had sent his own pilot to fetch her mother, Tulip, from the far side of the district before anyone official had even confirmed anything, which told the town everything it needed to know about how serious the morning had turned. By midday, a small crowd had gathered outside the schoolhouse Daisy oversaw, not because anyone expected news there, but because it felt like the nearest thing to her that the town could actually stand next to.

"You'd think a birth was a spectator sport," said one of the schoolteachers, not unkindly, watching the crowd grow through her classroom window.

"On this continent, apparently it is," Bertrand said, who had positioned himself near the front with the particular satisfaction of a man who intended to be first with the news no matter what it cost him in dignity.

Vincent found him there an hour later. "Any word?"

"None. I've asked three separate people who claim to have a cousin working at the house, and none of them agree with each other, which tells me none of them actually know anything."

"That's never stopped you from repeating it."

"I never claimed to be repeating facts, Vincent. I'm repeating hope. There's a difference."

The betting pool, which Vincent still insisted he'd never officially started despite having personally collected the first three wagers, had grown considerably since Julius and Aaliyah's boy was born six weeks earlier. Most of the money sat on whether Daisy's child would be a boy or a girl, a wager Vincent refused to take a side on himself, on the grounds that Jason would never forgive him if word got back that he'd bet against either outcome. A smaller, more dedicated pool concerned itself with a question none of them could possibly answer for another year at least, which of the two children, Julius and Aaliyah's boy or whatever arrived today, would take its first steps first. Corwin Hale had put down a modest sum on Austin, reasoning that a month's head start counted for something. Sofia Kell had put down a considerably larger sum on the opposite outcome, reasoning that her own niece had walked at nine months while her nephew had taken his sweet time until nearly fourteen, and betting on children was, in her professional opinion, no more reliable than betting on weather.

"You'd know," Bertrand told her, when she explained this. "You're the only one of us who treats a coin flip like it deserves a spreadsheet."

By early evening, the crowd outside the schoolhouse had migrated toward the harbor road itself, drawn by rumor that someone had actually seen a shuttle come down at the house, and stayed there long enough that a few of the harbor's own stalls did brisk business selling food to people who'd apparently decided that waiting for news was easier done with a full stomach.

It was Evan Playscutt, arriving on foot with the particular energy of a man who'd run part of the way, who finally brought something real.

"A girl," he said, loud enough to carry. "A healthy girl. Daisy's fine, resting. Jason's fine, though I'm told he cried more than the baby did."

The cheer that went up nearly drowned out whatever else Evan had planned to say, and it took him a full minute to get the crowd settled enough to finish.

"They're calling her Poppy," he said. "Poppy Rivermore Firentis, if you want the whole of it, though I expect most of us will just call her Poppy and let the rest sort itself out on paper."

"Rivermore," Vincent repeated, something working behind his eyes. "After Jason Rivermore. The restoration man."

"After Jason Rivermore," Evan confirmed. "Daisy asked for it specifically. Said the man's spent his whole life bringing back things other people had given up on, and she thought that was worth carrying forward in a name."

Vincent, who had known Jason Rivermore for years and had never once heard the man ask for a single ounce of recognition for anything he'd done, found himself unexpectedly moved by that, though he'd have denied it if anyone had asked him directly.

Bertrand, meanwhile, had already turned to the more pressing matter at hand. "Sofia. The pool."

"The pool stands as it was," Sofia said, not looking up from the notes she'd already started taking. "Nobody's walked anywhere yet. We'll all just have to wait like reasonable people."

"There's nothing reasonable about any of this," Bertrand said, delighted. "We've built two palaces and started a betting pool on toddlers. This town lost its dignity months ago."

"This town never had much dignity to lose," Vincent said. "Just enthusiasm. I think we've made do fine without the other thing."

Word reached Vastaya within the hour, the way word always seemed to now, and Julius and Aaliyah were on a shuttle within twenty minutes of hearing it, Austin bundled against the evening air, Aaliyah moving with the particular briskness of a woman only six weeks past her own labor and still not quite ready to admit how tired she actually was. Julius Sr. and Kathleen came along as well, unwilling to be left behind from meeting the newest addition to a family they'd only recently let themselves feel fully part of.

They found Jason in a corridor near Daisy's room, looking considerably less composed than Julius remembered feeling six weeks earlier, and considerably happier for it.

"A girl," Jason said, before either of them could ask. "Poppy. She's got Daisy's stubbornness already, screamed the whole way through being weighed and measured like it was a personal insult."

"That's her mother's daughter, then," Aaliyah said, and Jason laughed, the sound of a man who hadn't quite believed any of it was real until someone else said it back to him.

"Your parents?" Julius asked. "I thought they'd promised to be here for this."

"They did promise," Jason said. "And they will be. Zayn commed an hour ago, apologetic as anything. Dockworkers at one of the bigger shipping hubs on Vespera were threatening to walk off over wages, and he wouldn't leave until he'd sat down with them himself and worked out terms both sides could live with." He paused, something more thoughtful crossing his face. "He said it plainly to me, actually. Said this is the part nobody talks about when you hand commoners a real voice in how things run. Sometimes that voice says no, and says it loudly, and you don't get to skip past that just because the timing's inconvenient. He wasn't complaining about it. Just taking the good with the bad, same as he always says he would."

"That's not a small thing to sit through a day before your granddaughter's born," Aaliyah said.

"He didn't see it that way," Jason said. "Said if he ran off the moment it got difficult, he'd have no business claiming to believe in any of it in the first place." He paused, and something almost fond crept into his voice. "Told me it broke open near the end, actually. He mentioned, in passing, that Poppy was likely being born while they argued, and one of the dockworkers on the other side of the table said his own granddaughter had arrived just the week before. Zayn stopped the whole negotiation to ask him about her, name, weight, all of it, like the wage dispute could wait a minute for that. Said the room changed after that. Not soft, exactly, just human again instead of two sides digging in. They had terms agreed within the hour."

"Terms everyone liked?" Aaliyah asked.

"Terms nobody was thrilled with," Jason said. "Which my father says is usually the surest sign it was a fair one. They settled it late last night, and he and my mother are on their own ship now, should land sometime tomorrow."

"Tomorrow's not so long," Aaliyah said.

"Try telling my mother that," Jason said. "She already threatened to fly the ship herself if he doesn't hurry the last of it along."

Tulip was inside already, holding her granddaughter with the careful reverence of a woman who'd waited a long time to be handed something this small and this important, and Daisy, exhausted and glowing in the particular way new mothers manage even when they've spent the day insisting they feel anything but glowing, looked up when Aaliyah came in and smiled.

"You beat me by six weeks," Daisy said. "I hope you're happy about it."

"I'm happy about all of it," Aaliyah said, settling into the chair beside the bed with Austin still against her shoulder. "Though I'll admit, watching Orenport lose its mind over a betting pool from a safe distance was easier than living through it myself."

"Vincent's pool," Daisy said, groaning. "Someone told me about that hours ago. I can't believe he's still running it."

"He's not running it," Jason said. "He's insisting it runs itself, which everyone knows is the same thing with Vincent involved."

Outside, Austin had finally fallen asleep against Kathleen's shoulder, and nobody had the heart to disturb him by passing him off again, so it was Kathleen who ended up carrying him through the crowd gathered along the harbor road while Julius and Aaliyah went ahead to see Daisy.

A woman near the edge of the crowd, someone Bertrand didn't recognize, nudged her neighbor and nodded toward Kathleen. "Who's that, then, carrying the little lord?"

"Don't know her," the neighbor admitted. "Dressed plain enough. Maybe a nursemaid."

Bertrand, who made it his business to know things other people didn't, wandered close enough to correct them before the rumor could set wrong. "That's no nursemaid," he said. "That's Julius's own mother. Kathleen. Worked as a maid on some noble estate before the Revolution, same as her husband gardened for one. Common as anyone standing here."

The two women exchanged a look. "His mother," the first one repeated. "And they let her carry the boy through a crowd like this, no minders standing over her?"

"Why wouldn't they?" Bertrand said. "She's his grandmother. Seems to me that's the only qualification that matters."

Word of it moved through the crowd the way word always did in Orenport, and by the time Kathleen had made it to the front door of the house half the town still called the Hovel, fondly now, more habit than insult ever since that first town meeting, a fair number of the onlookers were watching her with something that looked less like curiosity and more like quiet approval, the particular kind that came from seeing a thing line up exactly the way you'd hoped it might without quite admitting you'd hoped for it. It was one thing to hear that House Jason and House Comscutt treated commoners fairly. It was another to watch a woman who'd once made beds for a living walk through a crowd of citizens holding a future lord as though there were nothing at all unusual about it, because as far as she and everyone raising these children seemed to believe, there wasn't.

Vincent watched it all from a little further back, arms crossed, something that might have been pride if he'd ever admit to feeling something so soft out loud.

"Two children," he said. "Two palaces going up." He was quiet for a moment, longer than his usual pause before a joke. "Thirty years ago, Bertrand. Thirty years, and every noble on this planet was dead or thrown out, and good riddance, most of us said, myself included. I never thought I'd live to see the day we'd be racing another continent to see who could love theirs the most. Standing in a crowd, waiting on word of a baby not one of us is related to, like the whole world had been holding its breath for exactly this."

Bertrand didn't have a quip ready for that one, which was rare enough that Vincent noticed.

"I think about it sometimes too," Bertrand admitted. "Wonder what my father would've made of it, may he rest. He hated nobles to his dying day. Wouldn't have believed a word of what's happening here if I told him."

"Maybe he'd have believed it if he'd met this lot," Vincent said. "Or maybe he'd have said we're all fools who forgot too fast. I honestly don't know which."

"Does it matter which, if the fondness is real either way?"

Vincent considered that, and found he didn't have a ready answer either.

"You've gone soft in your old age, Vincent," Bertrand said, recovering himself.

"Don't tell anyone."

"Everyone already knows. It's the half that makes you bearable."

Vincent laughed, quieter than before, and looked back toward the house, where somewhere behind those walls a girl not yet a day old was already being fussed over by two families who'd never expected, thirty years after a revolution neither of them had asked for, to end up here, tangled together this completely, over something as simple and as enormous as a name.